Speaker 0 | 00:06.537
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, Andy Knopf is on the show. CIO. We have a lot of IT directors, IT managers, not always CIOs. So you’re kind of a big deal. That’s pretty cool. And you do CIO stuff. And in your about section on your LinkedIn profile, you have extensive experience in modernizing infrastructure and transforming technology organizations. So that makes me want to ask, what’s the oldest box of junk you’ve ever had to, um, to forklift and what’s some of the oldest stuff that you’ve seen? Because I like going back in time and talking about old technology that we used to work on with tape backups and I don’t know, you know, things spinning around in the background, like from old, uh, um, you know, double Oh seven movies.
Speaker 1 | 00:57.244
I’ll give you a little bit of background. So the company that I’m with right now, I’m going to have my 34th anniversary here next month in May. So when I started, I got hired right out of school. I was 21. We had one office and 85 people, and now we’re 60 offices and 1,350 people. But when I started, I built my own computer and I had a 1200 baud modem and they were so impressed at work. because the fastest modem they had was a 300 baud modem so if that doesn’t date me i don’t know what does what what is a doth a baud wow
Speaker 0 | 01:43.172
i’m i’m actually excited this is the most this is the most excited i’ve been in a long time 33 years 11 months almost 34 years i mean there’s people out i mean I’m 48. So, I mean, I’m just trying to think what was going on. What was I doing 34 years ago? Okay. So you built a computer at, what were you doing before you built a computer at work?
Speaker 1 | 02:09.904
Well, this was at home. I had, I had done, I was, I was, when I was going to school, I was doing an internship and I had kind of messed around with their computer stuff. And I worked for one of the oldest companies in the state of Wisconsin and the company I’m working for right now, we were doing some of their, helping them, subcontracting them because my company actually, our founder helped build the Hoover Dam. So our company goes back 125 years, but I worked for a company that was 160 years old in Wisconsin. Mad luck. Yeah. So I was working at this company, I was digitizing their their maps because they did dams. So I digitized their maps. It was called WVIC. And I was doing a little bit of their computer work for them. So the vice president of that company was talking to the vice president of this company. They’re like, hey, we got this dude who’s really good at computers and we’re only an office of 12 people. We can’t afford to give him a full-time position. They just basically hired me on the spot. So cool.
Speaker 0 | 03:15.415
This is how it worked back in the day.
Speaker 1 | 03:17.896
Yeah, it’s how we’re back in the day. It was all relationship. Yeah. All relationship. They didn’t care about schooling, nothing else. They just wanted to, they needed an IT person. They didn’t really have an IT. So I was really the company’s first IT guy. So hi.
Speaker 0 | 03:32.224
You have a good Wisconsin accent. If I could do a good Wisconsin accent, I would do it back in the day. It’d be fun if we could do that. You guys have something you say up there. I’m trying to think. What do you say in Wisconsin? There’s something, I don’t know. Yeah. I just think of like, isn’t there like ice fishing and stuff? What goes on up there? Is that like the grumpy old men?
Speaker 1 | 03:53.177
Yeah, kind of grumpy old men. I mean, that’s more Minneapolis, you know, one day, you know.
Speaker 0 | 03:57.759
I don’t know geography. This is why you were taking paper maps and putting them into, you know, some kind of computer files back in the day. That was a whole thing. When I was at CSU, I remember I had a buddy. He was a geologist, but I think his job. or one of their jobs during college was just migrating maps to digital you know i don’t know what they were doing but how they were doing it back then probably archaic compared to now this is actually this is so fun so see this is how everyone pretty much got started into technology that’s of the age of i don’t know maybe 38 years or older because back in the day technology was like dude we got computers now we’re doing stuff Who knows? Right. It wasn’t like you, it wasn’t like, uh, it just wasn’t, I just, to me, it wasn’t really a thought like in high school. I didn’t really think about like, you know, computer was a career. I just didn’t think that I was thinking everyone thought like, you know, you, you become a doctor or a lawyer, uh, or engineer, or, um, I don’t know, you’re going to have to go do something.
Speaker 1 | 05:04.559
do something else well it was it was crazy because you know i came from a blue collar family and i i bought a commoner 64. you know when i was 12 years old i raised enough money you know because my my parents are really good you know like computers you know not a thing so i bought this how’d you raise the money first i got to know how you raised the money well okay so this is really a wisconsin thing so we had we had we we uh we grew ginseng so we had ginseng we had ginseng gardens was a very lucrative business. You could get $60, $70 a pound for ginseng. So when I was like seven years old, I started working in ginseng garden and pulling weeds in these ginseng gardens. And I actually made pretty decent money just pulling weeds and working for different people in different ginseng gardens. So when I was 12, a Commodore 64 was like 400 bucks back then. So I bought this and really got into it. And my dad just shook his head. He’s like, you buying a computer that was… him and my brother would always make, make fun of me and said, you know, this computer thing will never, ever pan out for you. And then, so he always tells a story now he’s like, you know, I, I said this to, to, you know, to Andy and I, you know, I apologize because you know, he really showed me.
Speaker 0 | 06:21.452
Wait, he was saying that to your brother. What was your brother’s name?
Speaker 1 | 06:24.553
Dan. Hey,
Speaker 0 | 06:25.633
Dan, you loser. Look what Andy became. See? yeah exactly so he tells the story i know he tells my wife he stole a couple times and she’s like yeah yeah i know you already told me that story already but oh that’s awesome but yeah they didn’t they didn’t have like you know you couldn’t go to school for what i’m doing you know back then i think you how you really have no advice to give you like look i was in the right place at the right time i’m the cio that’s how you become the cio okay yeah go back in time uh work in a ginseng garden make some computers at home That’s how you become the CEO. That’s the blueprint, everyone. That’s the blueprint,
Speaker 1 | 07:01.863
right. There’s only one person probably in the world that ever had that.
Speaker 0 | 07:07.645
Don’t leave your company for 34 years. Oh, man.
Speaker 2 | 07:13.847
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Speaker 0 | 09:38.915
yeah everything oh this is such this this almost should be like the quintessential uh transform transformative show over the years how it has changed over the years okay so They hired you. So what’d you come in day one and do? I want to know day one at,
Speaker 2 | 09:58.617
you know,
Speaker 0 | 10:00.958
I want to know what did you do? What’d you walk into?
Speaker 1 | 10:04.172
All right. So this is kind of wild. So I had a mechanical design degree because I was really good at drafting stuff. So really the first day I start working on some detailed plans on a post office. So this is day one. I do that. And they’re like, well, in your time, you can start looking at some of our computer stuff. And they had a computer room. There’s two. There’s two computers that both do drafting, a micro-tablet. What did you get hired for,
Speaker 0 | 10:31.910
though? Did you get hired for computers and drafting? Like, hey, we can’t do all computers. We can’t pay a guy just for computers because that’s not a real thing yet. So we got to do something else at the same time.
Speaker 1 | 10:41.175
Yeah. So, I mean, this company only had nine computers total. So there was only nine computers here. There was a room that had five computers in it that was the bulk of wherever. You went to the computer room and there was five PCs in there. And then there was four other. computers scattered throughout the company. We had an old IBM 36 for our accounting system with the green screens and everything. So they’re like, well, I don’t know how much computer stuff we need. So I started doing some drafting and did a little bit of drafting. And after the first week of doing a little bit of drafting, that was it. I doubled the amount of computers after the first month. I quadrupled the number of computers by the end of the summer. And it just went off from there. So when I see that,
Speaker 2 | 11:23.235
how’d you go at it?
Speaker 0 | 11:24.156
So this is just a lesson in asking for money for, to, to the board. Right. Cause I’m assuming you had to go ask for money. I’m sure these things weren’t cheap back then because remember when like a hard drive was like 500 bucks for like, you know, 20 K or something, who knows the, um, yeah. So what did you say we needed? Um, excuse me. Um, we need, um, 20 more computers to do what?
Speaker 1 | 11:46.105
Yeah. So, I mean, it was really, uh, uh, the vice president hired me was. pretty instrumental in having this vision. They just didn’t know how to execute it. So the money was there, but it wasn’t buying with everybody. So when I start, there’s still a lot of people on boards drafting. By the end of the summer, almost most of those boards went away, but the executive vice president at the time, this is famously what he came up to me and he’s like, so all this, what you’re doing right now, you’re replacing all these boards with CAD. you know, stations and they were $16,000 to do a cat station back then. These weren’t fancy. He’s like, I want you to stop buying computers. And I want you to go in a basement and bring those boards back up because cats, that’s a fad. That’s not going to last us here down the road. And I’m 21 years old. And I’m like, man, no, I, I had to apologize. I think you’re wrong. You know, I think cats here to stay and you’re definitely going to see some benefits of it. But he was serious that he did not want me to buy anymore. But Again, I’ve been very lucky, very fortunate. All my time here, I’ve been given a lot of, you know, just a lot of ability to do things. Like we moved everything to the cloud before anybody was moving everything to the cloud. I mean, we switched to voice over IP phones before anybody else did. And I mean, we did link, you know, which everything is Teams right now or Zoom. Oh,
Speaker 0 | 13:13.527
I remember link.
Speaker 1 | 13:14.607
Yeah. So we implemented link. back in the day, which turned into Skype, which turned into Teams. So we’ve always been a company at the forefront and I’ve always done this stuff before anybody else did. I mean, that’s how we, everything that we’ve done, it’s like, well, we’re going to get out there. We’re going to be the first. We’re going to get there before everybody else. And that’s really been the model ever since the first day I started. And once I had that ability and that trust to buy what we needed, And we always got that payback. You know, always got that payback.
Speaker 0 | 13:50.923
Who are you guys using for VoIP? RingCentral?
Speaker 1 | 13:53.785
No, we had bought into Avaya back in the day.
Speaker 0 | 13:58.369
Are you still on Avaya right now?
Speaker 1 | 14:00.090
No, no, no. We’re all teams now. Oh,
Speaker 0 | 14:02.612
good. Yay.
Speaker 1 | 14:04.093
No, back in 2000.
Speaker 0 | 14:06.835
This was back in 2000. IP office or some box of cards. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 14:10.277
Yeah. We went from an AT&T System 25. to the Avaya voice VoIP system.
Speaker 0 | 14:18.041
I’m a phone geek.
Speaker 1 | 14:19.302
Man, we had such problems. We actually, because Avaya was a company in England, so we had a guy fly over from England and stay with us for five weeks to try to get this thing. And we got to be really good friends. We were going out partying. This guy, man, he could drink and he was a good guy. That was the only good thing about that whole circumstance was he was really cool. But… the system was it was too early to even do they they had a ton of problems with their their um soft phones and stuff were like kind of quirky and yeah yeah they couldn’t compact the technology the voice couldn’t compact and then unpack correctly and it was just it was just a nightmare
Speaker 0 | 15:03.589
uh i love that you’re on teams i did i helped a bunch of people do teams migrations uh obviously during covid which was um like kind of like the quick press the teams button we need everyone’s got to be on teams and just start voice enabling things through microsoft and that’s not always the actually that’s just not the best way to do it there’s much smoother ways but back to um cad boards was there a learning curve was you were you train obviously training people how to use these were like we’re we’re architects or whatever we call people that use cad like annoyed. I mean, what was that like? That had to have been like an interesting moment for IT leadership to happen.
Speaker 1 | 15:42.700
Yeah. I mean, it was tough. Anybody coming out of college, engineers and stuff coming out of college, they didn’t know how to use it at all. What was happening is like the tech schools, the true CAD people, they’d come out of school and they knew AutoCAD and Bentley programs and what have you. So no engineers were doing… any, any CAD work at all. You know, you’re hiring drafters that actually knew this. So there’s a lot of younger people that were doing it. The, the people have been here a little bit longer. That was difficult. I mean, they had been on boards for 30 years, 35 years. And the last thing they want to do was have some, you know, kid come in and tell them now they got to start doing things on a computer because, you know, they were, they were drafting by hand all that time. And that was, that was painful. I mean, there was a couple of people that You’re getting closer to retirement, within five years of retirement, and now you’ve got to do something on a computer. And they’ve never touched a computer in their life. And now this kid is putting a computer in front of them and said, start drafting. And they’re like, mind blown. It’s a big change.
Speaker 0 | 16:46.710
That’s probably one of the toughest things that I think IT leadership has to deal with, which is teaching users, people with a soul, how to… Use technology. Do you think we’re going through another wave of that right now with AI and stuff? Do you think that there’s like this this other layer of people that use tech technology in the past? That’s gonna be lazy I’m worried myself that I’m lazy and I’m not going to like catch on to this new curve of AI and Applications and various different things that are being used right now.
Speaker 1 | 17:21.693
Yeah, I mean the AI thing is is really it’s completely different So my entire career Anything I’ve ever done with a computer, I equate it to being zero and one. All right. So zero and one, everything is predictable. You know, I do something, I get this response. If I’m working on a server, fix the server, then I get this response. AI is not predictable. You do something today, you ask it something, you get this answer. Three weeks down the road, you ask it the exact same thing and you get a completely different answer because it’s evolving. It’s learning. It’s changing. And it’s getting fueled by it. whatever’s getting updated. So everything that we’ve known forever is like, here’s the question and here’s the result. And then that’s the result. Now it’s something completely different and it’s changed. And even the people writing the AI engines, they can’t even explain why all this is changing. It’s self-learning. When that self-learning gets in there, it’s a whole different game. So really for me and in my whole career. I’ve never seen anything like what AI is, and it’s going fast. I just got back from a Gartner conference down in Miami, and the whole conference, every subject was AI. There was nothing else. Like cybersecurity, even though that’s a huge thing, it was all about AI. Nothing else matters. I’m like, how about what we’re doing with our IT people, and this, that, and the other? Nothing. all AI. And I’ve never seen anything like that. When you go to a conference, a CIO conference or IT conference, there’s always all these subjects. There’s always eight or nine things that you’re learning about. Now it is just AI. It is insane how focused everybody is on this technology and nobody wants to fall too far behind. They want to make sure that if this person is doing it, I better be doing the same thing as that person is otherwise I’m going to lose. I’m going to lose step and I have to make sure that I keep up with the Joneses. And before, it’s like going to the cloud or switching to Teams or switching to Zoom or whatever that technology is, getting a new CD burner. You can maybe wait on some of that, but this is so much different. Nobody wants to fall too far behind. Everybody wants to keep up with everybody else. So it’s a whole different vibe that’s going on now that has ever gone in our industry.
Speaker 0 | 19:45.670
So being someone that comes from a company that’s always been …
Speaker 1 | 19:49.617
fortunate enough to be kind of ahead of the curve and doing things before everybody else any advice or thoughts on on what to do there well i mean it’s tough because it’s a money pit hey i can be a money pit you and i don’t necessarily have the magic bullet But you have to, you know, you have to do some experiment. You really got to understand the underbelly, you know, look like the open AI stuff, the Microsoft things. I mean, I’ve looked at everything. You can do a lot of the stuff on your own and it doesn’t cost as much. You got to be careful because everybody’s selling this technology. So there’s a thousand people and they’re calling you every single day and they all got an answer. And it’s like, this is, you’re going to save so much time and money. You got to buy this. Be careful. be careful where you step because it’s like security was a couple of years ago. Everybody sold security. You couldn’t go anywhere without getting a phone call every single day about they were the best at selling security or they were the best at it. And truthfully speaking, there’s only really a handful of companies out there that really do a good job on security. If you told me right now to pick five companies on security, I’d have a hard time with it. There’s maybe only three that I could even recommend.
Speaker 0 | 21:04.090
let’s do it i want to know right now and whoever you are uh greg ledal the frenchman behind the scenes who is my producer uh let’s go after these security guys and get them to pay us money for for i don’t know giving them free advertising on the show let’s go top three what are they well
Speaker 1 | 21:22.622
microsoft i think by far has the best security well good we already got microsoft good so and you and using using sentinel i think it’s a no-brainer i’ve got no one people love them yeah No, just, just, just Sentinel. Sentinel one is different, but Sentinel one, Sentinel one’s a good company too. Just Azure Sentinel, I think is, is number one out there.
Speaker 0 | 21:44.863
Okay. What else?
Speaker 1 | 21:47.265
Well, I think, I think, you know, a little bit more expensive, but I mean, CrowdStrike, I mean, they, you know, they’re definitely have the track record out there. So they’re, they’re definitely out there. And I mean, that’s three,
Speaker 0 | 21:59.775
you got three. Is there more? Is there, you said there was only three.
Speaker 1 | 22:04.118
I think that was, you know, and they’re all kind of similar to Arctic Wolf, CrowdStrike, Sentinel-1. They’re all kind of in that same realm, you know. But I think Microsoft definitely distinguishes itself because, you know, when you’re buying the package, you buy like an E5 package, you get so much of that, you know, for free as part of that package. So it’s really hard to go to buy something else. It’s like going out, you buy the Porsche. and then you go out and you buy you get it you get a chevy cavalier you know along with it i’m like well i only need that porsche you know so why am i buying another car because i like the chevy cavalier guy that’s why we got to say that if you’re from massachusetts i would have a cavalier but yeah so i’m i’m a big i’m a big microsoft guy i’ve always been a big microsoft guy and i mean their their systems you know we’ve we’ve been lucky we haven’t had any ins you know any any problems but they they And it’s what’s nice as a CIO, a lot of times I’m not getting into the grind where I’m getting down and have to figure out all this stuff. I can go and see my dashboard and I know exactly what’s coming down the pipeline. I can see all the bad stuff that’s happening anytime. I mean, I can pull up right now and go, oh, yeah, okay, here’s Russia coming in. Here’s North Korea coming in. I mean, you see all that real time and I don’t need any extra training to see that stuff. And, you know, we got our gate up and hopefully we’re blocking it every single day.
Speaker 0 | 23:27.377
Microsoft Sentinel CrowdStrike. Okay. I’m giving you a fine. I’m giving you one more. If you really want, if you think there’s one, any other weird AI ones that are coming out, they’re going to make everyone’s life better.
Speaker 1 | 23:37.623
No, I mean, I mean, Microsoft starting to put some AI technology and it’s pretty, pretty fantastic, you know, so the adaptive learning inside Microsoft, you know, hopefully they’re going to stop that. So really nobody’s going to have to do anything.
Speaker 0 | 23:50.352
Is there any type of AI type of stuff that you guys have implemented that has been helpful beyond the, um, Hey, use chat GPT.
Speaker 1 | 23:56.876
Um, yeah, I do like, the Microsoft Copilot. We’re starting to use that quite a bit. I’ve been using it a lot. Every single day I’m using AI. So I’ve done some presentations already with it. I’ve done some Excel things with it. It’s getting better every single day. Outlook, I don’t use Outlook without doing AI. It helps me write all my emails, all my responses back. Preston Pyshkoff , MD, MPH Really? Dr. Justin Marchegiani Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So you get an email. Somebody asking for a meeting request, it’ll come in, it’ll automatically generate a meeting request, and then you can have like a draft email back. So it’s very powerful. In Word, I can’t write anything now without using AI. I mean, I just can’t. Everything I have is added. Description on LinkedIn, I had the basis for it. I had AI make it better.
Speaker 0 | 24:52.924
Hmm. Excellent. Oh, you mean the, uh, the about as chief information officer and it kind of has an extensive experience modernizing infrastructure and transforming technology organizations. He uses AI to write everything. He excels at building diverse.
Speaker 1 | 25:06.073
I mean, you know, anybody who knows me, I’m no, I’m no wordsmith, you know? So, I mean, for me, AI is, is, is really helped me out. So I, I can, I can sound a lot smarter, you know, I can do anything. But writing has never been really my forte.
Speaker 0 | 25:27.147
Team building. How many guys do you have on your team?
Speaker 1 | 25:30.249
We have 22 people right now.
Speaker 0 | 25:33.731
That is significant. That is significant. Again, the blueprint for becoming the CIO, having a great team, is being in the right place at the right time, going back in time, having spent money using ginseng, selling ginseng to buy your… first um vic 80 what was it what do you got commodore commodore 64 yeah commodore 64 um yes and then having 22 people on your team how what’s the what’s the is any any leadership tips you have for anyone out there or um i
Speaker 1 | 26:09.859
don’t know that’s a big team yeah no it’s a big team you know so i’m very proud of the fact that i’ve had people stick with me throughout my career So the first person I ever hired is still working for me. So he’s been 30, 32 years. He’s been working for me. And the interesting part about it is his son works in the department now too.
Speaker 0 | 26:32.143
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1 | 26:33.223
I mean, like it’s a no brainer. The dad has just been a rock of this company, you know, forever. And his son is, it’s just, it’s the same thing. I’m like, your kid wants to do this. He used to be on the work bench, you know, when he was. eight years old he’d come wait for his dad to get off of work and he’d be playing with computers and playing with hard drives and taking part on the back bench back in the day and i’m like someday that kid’s gonna want to be in it and sure you know we got him in the department um
Speaker 0 | 27:04.062
but you know the whole thing about being a great leader you just got the american dream just like sure that that’s like the old school american like you I thought we got away from that, but that’s still clearly very well alive there at your company. That’s just the old school American dream. I don’t know what you call that. Like the same, like go to the company, work. I’ve been there for 33 years. There’s only a few. I may have spoke with one other person that’s been at a company that long.
Speaker 1 | 27:34.462
Yeah. I mean, leadership is all about making sure that you’re taking care of your team. I mean, and I can teach anybody anything, but I can’t teach anybody to be a good person. You know, I can’t teach that, and I can’t teach communication to people. You either can communicate, and you’re either a good person or you’re not. And if you have a bad person who’s technically really smart, which I’ve had some of those people work for me, it makes it a whole lot worse. So I had some incredibly smart people that were just, and that. you just can’t have that. So I’ll take anybody over somebody just being mean or just can’t fit in with everybody else. Our group right now, and it’s taken years and years and years. That’s the hardest part of my job. Anything on the computer side, that’s always been the easiest. The hard part is making sure that you’re a good boss, that you listen, you’re compassionate, and that you have all that. And you look and you… You interject help when help is needed and you got to know when to back off. You know,
Speaker 0 | 28:44.325
give me a couple examples. Give me a couple examples of this because human psychology and human interworkings are, they’re just difficult, you know, like how do you know when to help in some situations? Maybe they’re helpful. I do think you can. I do think you can teach to communicate, by the way, you can teach, like ask probing questions, you know, show empathy. I’m saying you have to be an empathetic person like you’re saying deep down in your soul to begin with I get that But I think you can teach like young people like how to talk with people
Speaker 1 | 29:19.897
Yeah, I mean to yeah to a certain extent. Yeah, I agree with you I mean, but there’s just you can kind of you can kind of see really Actually within that just a couple, you know, like an hour or less with somebody you can kind of you can kind of tell what? You’re gonna have You know, I feel like I can, like, you can really tell. I’ve gotten really good at doing interviews now and talking to people and really know. within an hour if you know what that person is going to be like the rest of their career here i know that’s all there are some interview questions interview me i want to know let’s just do this i’ve never done this i want i want to know what an interview would be like would i get hired or not probably not you know a lot a lot of a lot of it’s just it’s just having to talk like we’re having to talk right now you know it
Speaker 0 | 30:03.097
really is it’s just getting down so we get nothing done with you there we’d be talking about old stuff maybe just talking too much you’re not not hired yeah but that
Speaker 1 | 30:11.232
That’s really what it’s about. Again, it’s how you communicate. It’s how you can, if you can’t even come up with something, if you can’t come up with a story, tell me about, you know, tell me about something that happened in your life. And then, you know, be able to tell that back to me. You know, and a lot of times interview questions, they don’t want to know, you know, being on the back. So you’ve been. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 30:31.209
Jason and Gil Patrick and I, we mix some oil and gasoline together on our bikes. This lady shortchanged us on a job we did. So we have. I poured this gasoline down on in front of her driveway around the house, lit that thing on fire, went about a foot in the air. We were really scared. We thought we were going to get arrested. So we rode our bikes off into the woods, bit our teeth all night long and thought we were going to get arrested and nothing ever happened. So there you go. Story.
Speaker 1 | 30:54.760
You know, it, it really, the two biggest questions is, I mean, you just try to figure out where their baseline is, you know, you know, what kind of, you know, what kind of hardware knowledge do they have? What kind of software knowledge do they have? I mean, just really basic things.
Speaker 0 | 31:08.072
Have you ever hired someone with little to no knowledge and trained them because they’re just such a good person?
Speaker 1 | 31:12.553
Yep.
Speaker 0 | 31:13.193
And did they end up doing well?
Speaker 1 | 31:14.633
Oh, yeah. Yeah, very much so. In fact, I typically only hire interns now. And interns will get done with school and then they come into the system. I don’t believe in putting in. I’ve had a lot of problems with putting in people at higher levels because it actually does not motivate the people who have been here for a while. So it’s a lot better just to put in. get interns and have them work through the system. You have everybody else in place that can help them grow and then hopefully get them into higher positions along the way. That’s probably the best advice I give to everybody. If you hire a lot of senior managers, if you do have help desk people or people have been here for a long time and they see you hire senior people, they’re like, well, what the hell? I just got knocked down a peg. Because now there’s a senior person here and that’s less of a chance for me to grow up through the system. So you give people the opportunity.
Speaker 0 | 32:12.190
And then the new guy, like they all hate him too. So they’re all throwing darts at him with their eyes too. So now even the new guy doesn’t even have a chance to do well either. I’ve been in that position before. I’ve been in a position where I’ve come into a place, moved to a new market. This is back when I did work in corporate America. Been given a big position and there was another person below that was like, what the hell? Why didn’t I get that position? And then, so now I’ve got, I mean, I did fine. I did okay. I did well, but it still was a very uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable for a while. And, you know, why didn’t someone else below get that? That’s a great philosophy. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 32:48.164
So what, so what I’ve found, and I don’t know if it’s the formula or not, but I haven’t lost anybody in the, like the last four years, which is really unusual to have keep people that long in it, you know, departments. But if you keep on doing this, it. it, you know, like I said, it does pay dividends. You’re giving people a chance and that’s how they grow. Most people want to stay at the same company, but if there’s no growth, there’s no chance of advancement, they’re going to go someplace else. It’s usually not because their boss sucks. And sometimes that is your boss sucks or you’re not getting paid enough. They want to be appreciated and they want to have a chance to grow and they want to get better and they want to stay in that company and they want to grow. I firmly believe that’s what most people want to do. Now there’s, there’s people out there just want to go for the money and everything else. But like the people that are here, they grow and it’s, it really is a, you know, it’s a family atmosphere. I come in here and, and I mean, it’s, it, it really is that, that family atmosphere and everybody appreciates that.
Speaker 0 | 33:50.907
Sounds like fun, man. You’re making me want to go work there, but I don’t, the problem is I don’t like work.
Speaker 1 | 33:56.932
That’s the problem.
Speaker 0 | 34:00.215
No. uh okay cool i need i we we must go we must go um um back in time again because i i i’m fascinated with the fact that you’ve been there for 33 years i need to know what was the biggest project you guys ever did what was the biggest forklift crazy insane it project you’ve ever done oh
Speaker 1 | 34:21.288
man i mean there’s there’s been so there’s been so many i mean when i came here there wasn’t even a network here you know I mean, there was, there was no, what were you guys doing?
Speaker 0 | 34:29.273
Were you cabling? Like, Hey, we’ve got to go buy these boxes of cable. Were you guys cabling yourselves or like, yeah,
Speaker 1 | 34:33.537
there were, there were, there was nothing here. So, I mean, it was sneaker net. You take floppy to floppy the first, the first network, because they didn’t want to spend more money on a network. We, we had, we started out with a serial parallel network. So you could send files back and forth on the serial network with a flat ribbon cable. And it was 38.4 K on a serial. If you went on a parallel port, you can get 115 K. And then they doubled it to 230K between computers. So, I mean, in 92…
Speaker 0 | 35:01.777
What were you sending? Like a document?
Speaker 1 | 35:03.918
Yeah, documents and CAD files.
Speaker 0 | 35:06.721
How long would a CAD file take over that? It would take forever.
Speaker 1 | 35:09.583
Yeah, it took a long time. But that’s what we did. And then in 92, I bought a Novell network. So we actually put in our first network and, you know, had a one gig drive. It was $7,000 for a one gig drive. And I bought this Novell network and… You know, just went, you know, just started adding more space to it. And it lasted a year.
Speaker 0 | 35:30.685
That must have been so exciting. That must have just been so fun. It sounds like a fun job.
Speaker 1 | 35:34.806
Yeah, it was crazy. I mean, everything I did, everything was new that we did, you know? So, I mean, you know, Novell networked and then Windows came around. So then we put an NT 3.5 network and did that. And then, you know, the internet just was starting. I mean, we had, I was the first one to have an email address at a company. So we had DaVinci email and. And, you know, we had, we had an email address and I mean, I got emails that go back to 97 that it’s in my outlook yet, you know, and then, you know, like I said, you had voice over IP phones and then, you know, going to the cloud, man, the cloud thing, that was probably the biggest project, you know, cause I mean, that was, that was monumental cause it’s been over, it’s been over 10 years. We decided as a company, we would move a hundred percent of our data to the cloud. And this is before anybody was really moving a lot of stuff to the cloud. And I mean, it was rough. You know, we were told it was going to work a whole lot better than what it was. And it was a company called Panzera. We’re still using them today. But, you know, after we bought it, there was hundreds of other companies that bought that same technology. You know, well, Meat and Hunt is doing it. You know, I think it’ll work for us. And a lot of people bought that technology. But it took a long time to get it figured out. And then a couple of years ago, you know, we were one of the same customers that… went over to the virtual desktop. So we’ve been doing virtual desktops for a lot of years right now. We still use a lot of virtual desktops. So they’re on AVD on the Microsoft platform. And that was a big project and that continues to be a big thing for us. When COVID hit, nobody could figure out all this stuff we’re doing, all this cloud stuff. They knew about it and it seemed like it made sense, but nobody really understood it completely. So COVID hits, you said… everybody home. And I said, we’re going to have on a Friday, we sent everybody home. It was like March 13th, whatever it was, 2000. Like two days later, on that Monday, we converted everybody over a weekend to cloud desktops. We did all of our engineering, all of our CAD systems over a weekend. That next Monday, everybody thought they’re watching Netflix and they were just going to wait for IT to catch up with what was going on. Two days, two days, we converted everybody and had everybody working. There was no downtime. And then within the first two weeks, our productivity went up. Well, productivity went up because nobody else had anything else to do. But we had the systems in place. After five weeks, productivity went up 8%. Our best year on record for a 125-year-old company, our best year ever was that COVID year. And yeah, people didn’t have expenses and everything else. But we had all that stuff in place. We were ready to go. We had that toolbox. We had everything in that toolbox, but not everybody was using everything in the toolbox. We had everything ready to go. I never thought it was going to be a pandemic, but we had it. We had it all. It was all ready to go. And then this happened. Then we had some things that happened. You remember the fires in California, we had an office almost burned down and people had to be at home. We had that. We had the hurricanes. It was a couple of years ago, we had hurricanes that didn’t. So we had small areas that we were able to test this and it worked out well, but we didn’t have that big global event happen. And that global event happened and boom, we had it all. We had it all. We had it nailed. We didn’t have to worry.
Speaker 0 | 39:00.899
Productivity went up. What happened after COVID? Did you guys go back to the office?
Speaker 1 | 39:04.960
No. And that’s kind of the problem. I mean, you know, it worked out so good when you worked at home. It was hard to get people back in the office. And we still struggle with that today. And a lot of people are struggling with that.
Speaker 0 | 39:18.266
But you don’t even worry about it is what I want to know. If your productivity went up, why bother?
Speaker 1 | 39:23.852
So there are fundamentally there’s there’s something about being around other people that you can’t do at home. Now, if you’re a senior person, 25, 30 years, and you’ve seen it, been there, done it, whatever, you know, you can maybe survive at home and you’d be fine. The problem is, is when a person’s here a year, two years, three years, whatever, they need other people around them and they need some senior people to help them. And you can’t do it over Teams or Zoom or whatever. You just can’t do that. You have to be able to communicate and talk to people. And they want to have that interaction. I mean, I got a group of people here and they interact. they need that interaction. And I think that developing, I don’t know, whatever, I don’t want to get too deep in developing mind, whatever like that, you need that interaction with people. And I just think that that’s very important. And if everybody’s just working at home, then who cares where you work? Who cares? And you’re just collecting a paycheck. And some people, and they’re cool with that, but man, it’s nice to come like today, came into work. and you’re going around and you’re talking to people that you wouldn’t have talked to on a zoom call but you can walk around and you can say hi find out some things hey what happened did you go on vacation what’d you do over spring break you know you’re not having those calls on teams and zoom you can only do that when you’re you’re just walking around and you can sit down and say hey jim how’s it going there hey jill what’s what’s happening let’s let’s have a conversation so i think i think that’s important and i to me it would really suck if everybody is just working at home because then it’s going to be like you ever see the movie ready player oh what was it what was the movie ready player one no really check check it out you gotta see this movie everybody is is in the in the headset and they’re just they’re in bedrooms and they’re at home and everybody their entire life is inside goggles and they don’t know anything else and it’s a it’s a super it’s a super good movie and I could see that happening at some point if, if we’re, and I’m like, man, this, this movie is kind of foreshadowing here. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think it’s a balance and I mean, I’m just, you know, I’m just as much to blame as anybody. It takes me 40, 45 minutes with traffic yet to work. And I’m like, man, it’s just nice to get out of bed and go down and start working and more productive working at home. But then, you know, what kind of, you know, what kind of, um, messages am I sending when I’m not here and when somebody needs something that they can just come to my office and talk. And it might not be about what’s happening in the world of computers and what’s breaking. Maybe it’s like, hey, I’m having some problems at home and something’s happening with my parents. I just need somebody to talk to. And they feel a lot more comfortable coming and sitting down and talking to me in person than they are going to do calling me up on Teams and saying, hey, I got this problem with my parents. So I think that’s…
Speaker 0 | 42:27.564
that’s important and and we’re gonna we’re gonna lose that if we’re not careful it’s true my ai team i was building a training program uh for the podcast and stuff and i have an ai team that’s in morocco and so i went over i saw i’d never been so i flew over and we built the training program over a two-week period like rented a villa it had like a pool outside it had you know like it was just The whole experience was amazing, but the whole, the whole interaction of, of sitting down and working together, just the firing ideas back and forth and editing things quickly and going through things like that was very powerful. And, and I can see how the, I can, it’s, it’s less not having that every day, which makes me want to, which I’m probably going to build, probably going to just build a bigger office there so that we can have all kinds of people collaborating. Just that collaborative kind of roundtable, roundtabling and stuff like that, at least was very, very effective from that standpoint. But yes, all the other things in general, too, just general human interaction and empathy for one another and really understanding that we’re all humans. Walking around with goggles on, sitting in our rooms in the Matrix.
Speaker 1 | 43:44.665
Yeah. Scary to think of that.
Speaker 2 | 43:48.928
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Speaker 0 | 46:09.080
I don’t really know where to go from here. I’m going to leave this up to you. What’s the transition? What’s the future look like? Oh, I know that’s better got idea so for someone that’s been at the same company for 34 years You probably have some sort of endgame, but what whatever what’s everyone else gonna do in the world that doesn’t have you know? Hasn’t been in the same company for 34 years. What’s that? What’s the endgame for? What do you do for your these people that are coming into IT now that didn’t have the advantage of you know? they just didn’t have that advantage of of You know picking ginseng and and working on a Commodore you know that that is just such an advantage. I don’t even know where to go from there, but what do those people do now that actually grew up with technology? What’s their end game? What do you see the future? What’s the future landscape of technology? Because it’s really weird to me that from the bad, let’s give it the seventies, maybe 69, I guess we landed a man on the moon back then. Um, if you believe that the, um, you know, so from the, you know, early seventies on so much has changed. What What’s going to happen now? What’s the end game for people? Is there a retirement plan? I don’t think people believe in social security anymore and 401k maybe. I don’t know. What do people do? What’s the end game for people?
Speaker 1 | 47:21.348
You mean like after they get done with their career or starting their career?
Speaker 0 | 47:24.810
Yeah. What do you think? Yeah. What is it? Is there a career anymore? Is it a life game? What is it? It’s kind of a deep question. What are you going to do?
Speaker 1 | 47:33.294
Man, you know, I still think…
Speaker 0 | 47:34.655
Is it the sun set?
Speaker 1 | 47:37.056
I still think it… It exists. And I actually think it depends on how you’re brought up, too. I mean, my dad was a truck driver. He got brought into a factory because he needed him to do things inside this factory. And he didn’t want to do it, but he got convinced to do it. And he ended up running this factory and had 1,800 people working for him. And he… barely finished high school. He was driving a gas truck across state lines in violation when he was 16 years old between Wisconsin and Minnesota. And I mean, this guy was in charge of running one of the biggest cheese packaging plants in the world. And he started off very humble beginnings. And I looked at that and I looked up to him. I’m like, man, that’s what I want to do. I want to be at one company my entire life. Like my dad was. That was my goal. I didn’t care about anything else. That’s what I wanted. I wanted to find a company that was going to be able to do that. And when I started at my company, I had three interviews. I had this interview, which was kind of in the bag, but I had these two other ones. And I got paid the least amount of money at this company. I started at this company making $9.09 an hour. And I had another company.
Speaker 0 | 49:00.506
It was almost 10 bucks though.
Speaker 1 | 49:01.647
That’s almost 10 bucks. I was like, I know nine. I don’t know. It almost sticks in my mind because it was $9 and 9 cents. But I had another company that was like 11 bucks and another one was 10.50. And I took this one. And, you know, I asked, I asked, I’m like, so what’s the highest position I can have in this company? Come on, let’s go. I didn’t have a four-year degree, I had a two-year degree. So what’s the highest position I could ever have in this company? And you’re like, well, you can be president of the company someday. I’m like, cool. All right. So that means that my ceiling is high. and i’m like okay we’re i know that we’re company or our employee owned you know can I be a stockholder by not having a four-year degree?” We were like, dad, will that preclude me from being a stockholder? They’re like, no, anybody can be a stockholder. Although at the time, it was pretty much all the four-year degree people that would have it. But they’re like, no, anybody can have that. I’m like, cool, that’s great. And then they’re like, you do your job and you can be here your entire career here. And I mean, that really convinced me. Because at that time I was looking at, I wanted to be part of something bigger. I didn’t just want to work for a company. I wanted to have some ownership. I wanted some stock in it. So if I worked really hard that I knew that I was working hard for myself, but I was also working hard for the company. And if I put a lot more into it, that I’m going to have that payoff. So now fast forward, here I am today. I’m CIO at a company. I’m the second largest owner in my company. So that. What I was told when I was 21 years old looking for a job, that’s still there today. And now my biggest thing that I do in my department, now how I’m successful in my department is that I have to make partners or make everybody stockholders and understand that ownership in this company makes sense. We’ve been around for 125 years. We’re going to be around for another 125 years. That thing that’s… was in place when I started is still here today. So I press upon people that everything that I did, you could do the exact same thing. And people, it takes a while. You got to get into the fabric of it. But that dream is still there. Especially in this company, that dream is still there. And I hope it’s still there, like I said, 125 years from now. So it still exists. That dream isn’t completely… you know, lost, I don’t think, although you turn on the news and you see a lot of bad things, there is still pockets of companies that operate that way. And you just have to find it. And you can’t necessarily chase the, you know, the pot of gold. You’re not going to make all your money overnight. There is no way that you can just go and be driving a Porsche, you know, and however, you know, a year after you’re working someplace, it just doesn’t exist.
Speaker 0 | 51:55.615
It just can’t live.
Speaker 1 | 51:57.164
Yeah, it’s hard work. It takes time. But eventually, if you’re working for the right company, it’s going to pay your dividends. But like you said, there’s a lot of people that don’t want to contribute to a 401k. They don’t want to contribute because it’s all down the road. So I think you still have to look at the long game. And it’s very, very difficult to look at the long game anymore because everything is so fast and it’s all instant gratification.
Speaker 0 | 52:26.592
You just said is actually really deep and I think could be analyzed on a very, on a very deep level as far as how companies should be structured. It’s actually very, very deep to you. You just said it because that’s just what you did, but it’s actually very, very deep. I really appreciate what you said. I think it’s quite mind blowing. It sounds simple. It sounds from your standpoint, it probably sounds simple, but it’s really not. I think it’s really good advice. uh i think it’s an excellent story i don’t really even want to add anything else onto that i think i think we have to stop the show here because it was that great and i just want to say thank you so much for being on dissecting popular id nerds that was outstanding cool yeah it’s awesome man
