Speaker 0 | 00:06.778

All right. Well, welcome to another Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we’ve got Brandon Patton. Brandon has 19 years of experience being a director of IT. Well, moved into director of IT like three months ago, I believe. But you’ve been in the industry for 19 plus years and you’re working for IT innovation. So, Brandon, tell us a little about yourself.

Speaker 1 | 00:31.712

So just to do a quick correction, it’s actually going to be 16 years because I know my boss is going to be listening to this to make sure that I’m not lying on anything there. Exactly. So I’m the IT director for engineering innovation. We’re basically an automation equipment company. We basically deal within the logistics and USPS, UPS, different markets there as far as handling industrial automation tasks. for sorting of packages, letters, and flat-based mail. So I’ve been the IT director, as Mike said here, for about four months. And I’ve moved up throughout the company. So the company is going on 18 years old. I’ve been there for 16. So as I like the joke, and my boss is listening to this, I’m number eight in line to the throne. He hates that joke, so that’s why I’ll keep telling it even onto a podcast. I started out with customer support. So… I started with the company and the customer support department, answering the phones, taking care of the ticketing system. But I’ve always had a strong drive, even through college, even through high school, working within the IT realm, working with computers, working with networking. And organically started to move up through in the company through demonstrating wanting to take a willingness. to work with all the equipment and gear that EI has to eventually become an IT manager. I did that for 10 years to where I am today as the IT director in all things IT for engineering innovation.

Speaker 0 | 02:10.805

So we’ll get to some of that experience and some of those things that you went through along the way. But what was the first computer? Where did you start off? What were you playing with? Was it a console like for me, you know, like Atari and a couple of those things were some of the very. first things that I got to play with. What about you?

Speaker 1 | 02:30.273

Very first thing for me would have been the original Nintendo, an NES. Probably got that when I was five and of course just fell in love with it. The first computer that I ever had, my father picked up a Gateway computer, so the Gateway 2000s. And one of the they were huge, made a ton of noise. You know, you were rocking out with that and you know eight meg of memory that was running through there running windows 95 up to 98 ah the good old days yeah um one of the first people on the uh the neighborhood that had the internet uh and just kind of took a swing from there and learned as much as i could it was a fascinating time you know when the internet was new and fresh and young and wonderful uh

Speaker 0 | 03:15.390

before it’s gone into this the mailings of the aol cds you had your you had the dial-up modem yep

Speaker 1 | 03:24.336

And having the AOL desk, you know, they worked great as cup coasters. So, you know, we always had a handful around the house to take care of the furniture. It, you know, it was an awesome experience, you know, starting to go from that line of analog over to, you know, growing up within the digital age and seeing that transformation that would occur. You know, especially, you know, starting to see the birth of online gaming, seeing network. systems really start to take off. I remember back in, you know, in high school having, you know, the very first LAN party for multiplayer games, which was a completely new experience for, and of course you brought all your boat anchors, you know, your big giant gateway computers and e-machines and everything else to your friend’s house got, you know, it took about three hours to set up for about an hour worth of playing. And then you take it all back down and, you know, shovel it back into the car back home. So. It definitely wasn’t a lightning experience. And, you know, it just, it’s amazing to see after so many years, things have changed from what they were in the nineties up to today, you know, how the technology has progressed.

Speaker 0 | 04:26.859

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s just, and the last like what, well, since 2007, for sure, things have taken a radical change, but in the last 10 years and things are, well, hell the last two years. Last year and a half with all of the things, everything’s a buzz now with the AI and all of that stuff. And I have yet to really see that take off, except like the video editing and some of the chat bots and stuff like that. But, but. That’s just me over in the trucking world and paying attention to my little corner. So, you know, when we were talking about this beforehand, we started talking some about the building the relationships with management owners, the owners. Talk some about your experiences there. You know, being eighth in line for the throne, then that means that you’re pretty close or you know them and you’ve interacted with them. You’ve spent time with them. So,

Speaker 1 | 05:31.179

yeah, I mean, one of the biggest things is, you know, starting out in I.T., you know, you you try to keep your ear to the ground. You try to see what the community is doing. You try to see what your industry is doing. And I don’t want to say that you mirror it or copy it or anything, but you’re learning as you go. You know how how yeah, how companies, you know, attack problems, how their I.T. teams attack problems. And one of the things that, you know, I’m. I see even nowadays is there tends to be a battle, you know, and I’m not going to say for every company is like this way, but there tends to be a battle between, you know, management of a company and the IT team, especially when it comes to security and protection, because most IT people would say, all right, well, you give me a couple million dollars, I will make sure that this place is secure as Fort Knox. And of course, they’re going to go to management and management’s going, well, no. And it, you know, we don’t have i don’t want to hold over there exactly you know and it kind of creates this animosity that you hear a lot especially on communities where you know they’re they’re dealing with network switches that are being duct taped you know they’re they’re patching cables with you know super glue effectively just to try and keep the systems running and you know i i don’t think i’ve got a foolproof method but There are certain things that I’ve done within this company, especially with my management team, knowing them for as long as I have, to try and foster a better relationship between the IT team and the C-level in working towards the common goal. Because at the end of the day, all of us are there to get the same thing accomplished. You want to make sure that you’re bringing value to your customers that they in turn pay for. That’s going to make sure to keep the lights on and make sure that you still got food on the table at the end of the day. And if you don’t have the teams working. in synergy with each other on getting this accomplished, you’re just going to spin the wheels until nothing happens. And one of the best ways that I found to do this is you kind of have to have a level of transparency, a level of respect to the point that you have to take a step back and understand what you’re bringing to the company. You want to make sure that when you’re looking at solutions, when you’re looking at hardware, whether it’s hardware or software, when you’re going to your business owner and saying, look, we need this, you need to also be sitting in his shoes as far as how to view that. Because you may know the technical information without a doubt. You can get from A to B to C. But a lot of times within management, they’ve got so many different things that are going on, so many different cost centers that they’re trying to keep track of, that there needs to be a level of urgency and there needs to be a level of transparency in what you’re providing. If you’re constantly in the habit of telling them, hey, we need the Cadillac version of everything because it’s the Cadillac version. It’s what all the big boys are using. It’s time true tested. They’re just going to see you as just a walking dollar sign every time you come into the office, and they’re going to try and shoot you out of there as soon as possible. On the flip side, if you’re always trying to go with the bottom barrel, the Ford Pinto version of all the networking gear and hardware gear that’s going to be out there. You know, they’re going to start second questioning, you know, are you just trying to get by, you know, with a bare base minimum and this is going to cause us problems down the road? Or, you know, what are you doing here effectively trying to keep us safe and protected?

Speaker 0 | 09:06.088

You know, the Pinto analogy brings up something else for me in the thoughts that, you know, most often they all want the Pinto costs, but they don’t. don’t want the experience of being in driving the pinto when it gets rear-ended um yes and so you know they in my experience a lot of people and a lot of the owners and c-suite don’t understand the difference or the reason for going more towards the cadillac over the pinto until they’ve had some of those experiences until they’ve seen why you the cheapest solution isn’t always the best. Or a good enough solution can cause problems later.

Speaker 2 | 09:55.884

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Speaker 0 | 12:15.509

I want to flip the table on you a little bit or flip the perspective on you a little bit. Since you’ve been leading the team about this, how do you deal with the team members who come to you saying, no, we’ve got to have the IBM version or the Cisco version or the, you know, we’ve got to have this solution because it’s the best. And when… when they’ve got those blinders on of, you know, we’ve got to achieve this goal and, and management’s just being stupid. They don’t understand that all I’m trying to do is take care of them. Um, how do you deal with that?

Speaker 1 | 12:54.782

The way I would normally deal with that. And I’ve had to come up a few times, uh, especially with, uh, I’ll, I’ll pick on our development team to some degree there, um, is you have to look at it from a good, better, best. ratio when you’re looking at different solutions that they’re wanting to do. If I’ve got a developer that says, look, we have to use an Oracle database, the first question I’m going to ask is, well, why? If the answer is, well, because it’s Oracle, that’s usually not going to fly enough to have an effective cost analysis or risk analysis, even an ROI on what having an Oracle database is going to do for the company. You know, as… My boss, the CEO, likes to joke around is, don’t come to me wanting the network switch and wanting the latest version because it’s blue. You have to have something objective that you’re trying to achieve and reasons behind of why you’re picking that particular solution. It could be strictly based on cost. It could be strictly based on feature set. It could be strictly based upon how well it’s going to look in the next five years within the company rack. but you have to have an objective analysis and you know for some team members you kind of got to lead them along a little bit because they’re not running you know unfortunately they’re not running into the same circle that you are as far as trying to keep track of all the business dealings that are growing within the company so you don’t want to sit there and you know offend them and say well you guys just don’t know what you know you’re talking about with the company and you know we know what’s best you know i try to avoid whenever possible the godlike it powers that come with you know being the IT director. But at the same time, you want to make sure that you’re at least keeping a receptive ear because… You only know what you know and you don’t know what you don’t know. You know, I know it’s a cliche saying, but, you know, there’s a lot of times my development team will come to me with an awesome idea that I never even dreamed of considering. I don’t jump on it right away. I research it. You know, I ping them with questions. I reach out to my community members, you know, to kind of get a feel for, you know, hey, is this completely off the wall? Because this looks like this may be a really good fit. Then you bring all of that information to the table and you. You know, you go to your management team and you’re keeping regular communication with them. The biggest thing that I can stress, you know, if you’re struggling working with your management team is keep them in the loop. Make sure the last thing you do is surprise them, whether or not it’s the fact of bringing in new equipment or the cost of said new equipment. Because nobody likes getting surprised with a bill saying, oh, yeah, by the way, you know, next week I’m going to be ordering a sand. Hey, it’s one hundred twenty thousand dollars. That’s usually a quick way to, you know. get you kicked out of the table.

Speaker 0 | 15:39.800

Yeah, and projects shut down.

Speaker 1 | 15:42.522

Exactly. So you kind of have to use teamwork and you have to use wisdom effectively when you’re working with different team members, when they’re suggesting different things. They pretty much get the core value of what they’re trying to do. If they’re writing code that only talks to an Oracle database and you get, and I’m making up numbers, but you get a quote for an Oracle database that’s going to fit their description and we’re talking, $150,000. And of course I’m making numbers up. Yeah. Because then the question,

Speaker 0 | 16:11.994

the- For Oracle.

Speaker 1 | 16:13.756

Right. Right. But in this particular case, I’ve got this number now. Now I have to go back and say, all right, well, what’s the cost in development hours and time estimates to basically rewrite this application that could support a Microsoft SQL database and see basically from that ROI, what’s going to have the biggest- breadth of support, whether from a company standpoint, from a customer standpoint, to make those decisions at the very high level to where the company could see objectively, okay, look, we could save them a lot of time, but it’s going to cost us a lot of money to go with Oracle, or we can devote the time now and have the solution that is better obtainable from a customer standpoint and a company standpoint at the end of the day. And I use that rule set when it comes with everything in the IT realm within the company. You know, everything from MFA down to email service, everything that, you know, is always on the table. And I always try to have a two-way street between my users and, you know, the IT team to make sure they know we’re listening. You know, we’re not high on the mountain just making commands and, you know, watching you guys squirm down in the trenches. You know, we’re all in this together to make this company successful and make sure that, you know, we go home at the end of the week with a paycheck.

Speaker 0 | 17:30.011

Right. And so, you know, I’m hearing you say it, but not saying it. directly one of the other things so like you were talking about the um oracle database and and all of the different valuations between it and or evaluating it between or between it and microsoft and then trying to come up with you know the whys for these pieces um and you’ve talked some around the but the other part of this is what’s the goal for the business how well erect you mean their goal because they could care less whether it’s oracle or microsoft now they may pay attention when it comes to the cost of a line item but they’re looking at okay how well is this how quickly is this going to give me the answers that i need how easy is it for me to ask the questions i need of the database of the application of the source system how well in your case how well is it or how many pieces of mail is this going to sort in per second exactly

Speaker 1 | 18:33.727

And, you know, that’s a good point. And, you know, I feel bad not mentioning it is it’s it’s something that, you know, especially in an IT role, you know, especially in an IT director role, you know, so we’ve talked about, you know, working with your users and your teams as far as, you know, coming to a determination of what’s what’s going to work for them. But also, you know, you got to flip the other side of the coin, like you said, where you got to look at it from a business side, you know, is the business going to be able to have this that they’re going to be able to sell it? Is the business going to have this where they’re going to be able to support it? They’re going to be able to market it. Is it going to be something, and you got to put on a customer hat. Is this something that most customers and their IT teams, some of them may be mom and pop houses that are running some of the equipment that we have to all the way to the big boys that have multi-site and multi-state warehouses that they have running million dollar machines that are running in the background that have full IT teams. You know, what’s going to be easier for them? to support, maintain, and to help us troubleshoot over the phone. Because if we started selling software that was in a completely different language than what our target market is, that adds a high level of troubleshooting difficulty that’s going to be there for not only for our support team, but also for the customer support team that can’t even read the error logs. So it’s constantly a tightrope walk as far as trying to make sure that you’re taking care of what your team needs. you know, what the internal side of the company needs at the same time, looking at it from the business development perspective of making sure that, you know, we can execute and have a very prosperous opportunity with whatever solution that we’re trying to do with our customers and overall partners that we work with.

Speaker 0 | 20:17.644

Thinking about this, thinking about the MFA that you brought up a little bit ago, knowing a little bit about the fact that you guys are dealing with mail. So you’re dealing with federal government or your customers. are dealing with the federal government and wondering about the level of direction or push from the customers that you guys are working with and the federal requirements that they may be under and thus you may be under. One of the people or one of the companies I was working with recently was doing warehousing and they had Northrop Grumman in there. And because Northrop Grumman was contracting to them, then suddenly the IT infrastructure had to meet these much higher standards, you know, the NIST 180 standards versus what we needed to as a trucking company. And so the changes there and trying to convince that. But I was, I’m just wondering, because if you’re dealing with USPS or your customers are dealing with USPS. There’s got to be some of that that’s filtering all the way to you guys.

Speaker 1 | 21:29.574

It is. And, you know, I think we’ve handled it fairly well. I’ll pat myself on the back in regards to this. I know it was a struggle at the very beginning. But, you know, we do have certain customers that have much higher compliance needs than some of our other customers do. So you kind of got to play a little bit of hot potato when it comes to, you know, changing strategies or. making explicit strategies. So you’re dealing with different customers and their needs for it. You know, I’ve got one customer that’s, you know, multi-state, multi-site, you know, and they’ve got a large number of our equipment that are spread out, you know, all across the country with this. And they’re held to a very high compliance standard. And those compliance standards make it back to us in the form of compliance, you know, audits. that I have to do right now about every two years to fill out and make sure that from a company standpoint that we’ve got all of our documentation in order, that we are performing the best level from everything from SIG to NIST standards to make sure that we’re demonstrating to them who they are under their own compliance standards that have been there for multiple vendors and multiple partners that they work with, that we’re a player that can enter the ballgame at that rate and make sure that we’re just not a fly-by-night company that, you know, it’s one master password that controls all of our computers and, you know, we share everything left and right and, you know, MFA, what’s that? So it does make things a little bit of a headache. I’m not saying it’s a bad headache by any stretch because, you know, it’s a growth opportunity is the way I look at it, is, you know, when you have a new customer that comes in and says, okay, look, we need, you know, you to be held at this compliance standard, you know, that… we have two opportunities there. The first opportunity is to say, well, we don’t want to do the work. So no, we don’t want your business, which you don’t want. You want business. You want to grow. So your next opportunity says, okay, well, let’s look at what the compliance measures are and let’s see what we can meet. Let’s see what we can do. And now you’ve got your stretch goal, you know, to get the company. And by the end of the day, you know, when all is said and done, you’re sitting in a much better place than you were. six to 12 months ago, as far as compliance is concerned. And now you’ve developed all of the processes and procedures that’s going to help you down the road to get bigger and bigger customers. You know, so you can actually tout out there, you know, hey, we’ve got this ISO standard, you know, SOC 2, everything else under the sun as far as compliance that to where now you’ve opened up this sea of opportunity with the really big players that are out there to do business with you.

Speaker 0 | 24:11.747

So, you know, we were talking a little bit before we started the recordings. that tightrope walk between the usability and security, but also talk to me a little more about all of these different machines that you guys create and put into the customer locations and managing those. If you’re managing your devices in somebody else’s network, that right there, I mean, they either have to give you permission to come in all the time whenever you need to, or you’ve got to contact them so that you can provide support. And some of this is that tightrope walk, but it’s also right in the middle of all of this compliance that we just talked about too.

Speaker 1 | 25:00.897

Yeah, it comes a lot down to… You know, documentation, documentation, documentation, because, you know, we try to have a very I’m struggling to find the word for it, but we try to accommodate for different customers is the way to phrase that, you know, because some customers, you know, they’re completely fine. And it’s, you know, it’s a secure medium to use a remote software such as, you know, TeamViewer or Splashtop for the support team to come into and help them troubleshoot at a moment’s notice. or help fix things that we’ve discovered, you know, through the QA process, you know, that need to be taken care of before they even know that there’s a problem. I mean, that’s where we excel at. And then you have other customers that, you know, they want to be notified every time that you’re communicating in, which slows down, you know, the support process. But at the same time, it gives them the sense of security, knowing that they have control over who’s coming in and out. And then you have other customers that require a VPN, you know. And each of our support team members have a specific username and password that they use to log into that specific customer’s VPN network to access the machines. And all of this is all through the process of documenting everything, whether it’s a site-to-site VPN, where to communicate, who to contact, when access needs to be given. And, you know, we kind of run the ball from there. When it comes to the equipment that is on site, a lot of our machines, they’re machine controllers. So they’re robotic controllers, effectively, the way to think of it. So, you know, we still use standardized desktops, you know, Dell Optiplexes, you know, some Lenovo’s that go out there that are running Windows operating systems, but they’re running primarily our central controllers. You know, the controller software that’s talking to all the control boards that are down the machine, running the conveyors, running the applicators, you know. getting the information from the scales as they’re processing the pieces that are down from there. And one of the things that we try to maintain is at the end of the day, the customer owns the machine. They own the PCs. But it’s a shared responsibility between us and them to maintain security. If a customer was to take one of our machines, plug it straight into a Comcast router, and there’s no router that sits in between it, you’re probably going to be in not for the best of times, you know? But if you have a customer that puts us on their network, but segments us, so they put us on a separate VLAN, you know, all of our equipment, especially at a site, has a site router that’s provided through us to help control from fireballs and making sure, you know, nothing bad goes out, nothing bad comes in. You know, you start to maintain this level of security, you know, and making sure that that equipment has a very low attack service, but it’s still functional enough to where if an operator or a manager needs to get on there and submit paperwork. to the post office electronically, you know, they’re not going to be met with a ton of heartache, you know, just trying to run, launch a web browser, you know, to get to the USPS website that spent their information. At the same time, you know, we have to be very mindful of the software and the way we roll out software to these machines because they’re machine controllers, you know, there are specific drivers, there’s specific networking that needs to be configured on these machines to where You know, if you just get into the habit of pushing the very first Windows update as soon as Microsoft releases it to the machine, you may have a bad time with, you know, whether or not suddenly you’ve caused an issue that now the controllers don’t talk. The camera is unable to talk. A driver update got pushed that has done something to networking. So you need a bit of a stopgap to where our QA team is able to, you know, test updates as they’re released. You know, make sure that… Major functionality isn’t broken and then have a mechanism to push that software out to machines, which we do have a software product called Caste through Quest, which I’ll go ahead and plug here because they’ve been phenomenal for us. That allows us to install a small agent on all of those machines, you know, out there in the field. And from a centralized console, our support team is able to inventory that machine to see what software is on there. They’re able to get alerts.

Speaker 0 | 29:17.224

How many different versions of the machines or how many makes and models are out there? How many different versions of firmware, software, hardware, all of that that you’re having to maintain and manage? And as new devices come out, are you guys improve on your system? Um, cause these things probably are not cheap and they’re probably not something that you swap out every couple of years. Maybe, maybe you swap out the PC that’s controlling it, but you probably don’t swap out the main sorter and that piece very often at all.

Speaker 1 | 29:55.466

No. And I mean, I’m, you know, I’ll tout, you know, we’ve, we’ve made things about as reliable and we’re always striving to make them more reliable. But you are correct. You know, PCs are one of the common things that does get swapped out because, you know, you have requirements from the OS, you have requirements from, you know, the software that’s running on there to where they need, you know, more resources effectively. And, you know, if you can’t easily upgrade that with, you know, a memory upgrade, you know, that requires swapping things out, especially, you know, most lifetimes of a desktop computer, you know, and to keep costs down, you know, we look at desktop computers versus industrial PCs. They’re trying to look at the bottom line for our customers as far as what they’re using. Those desktop computers, on average, six years of a lifespan before you’re really wanting to look out the cycle amount before you start having problems such as the power supply, motherboard, and other things that make things very tricky to try and replace. And looking at this from an MSP perspective, which we are kind of playing the role of here, is we have to have software. you know, that basically phones home to give us a glance of what’s going out there in the field. Because when you’re dealing with hundreds of PC devices that are constantly being utilized throughout the day, you need to make sure you’re keeping your finger on the pulse of what’s going on there. Because some of your customers aren’t keeping as good a track as you may be of what’s going on. You know, is a hard drive filling up and they’re in the middle of a mailing and they don’t realize they’ve got, you know, a couple of megs of available free space. And before you know it, everything crashes. And they’re generating phone calls and then you’re spending, you know, half hour to 45 minutes trying to work with them to clear data off that hard drive. Or, you know, you turn on smart reporting tools with a hard drive to try and get notifications. If you’ve got a hard drive that’s out there that’s starting to fail and try and get it corrected as soon as possible before it starts to affect them in a mailing. Because some of these mailers have very tight deadlines. You know, mail comes in at, you know, 8 a.m. They got to have a, you know. out the door, on the truck, ready for postal by three o’clock in the afternoon. And they’ve got a very tight window, depending on their volume for that day to get that done. So, you know, when a machine is down, it’s a mission critical process to try and get them up as soon as possible, because when the machine is not running, our customers are losing money. So it all plays into there as far as us trying to be able to monitor and assist wherever we can, but also to educate our customers. on the best practices of keeping their equipment safe and working with customers that may want to do some extra security to those machine controllers, you know, try and put them on a domain network, you know, install antivirus solutions, which, you know, it can be done. But we’ve seen in previous that there’s issues that come from there. You know, you add things to a domain. It affects the username and passwords, you know, that are used with some of the software titles and machine controller software that’s running on there that could impact your ability to run the machine. You install antivirus on there, it could affect the OCR software that is trying to run that takes up an enormous amount of memory in order to store all of the information that the OCRs are hitting. You know, we’re talking, you know, several pieces a second that are trying to run across that machine that could be slowed up with an antivirus solution that’s running on there. So a lot of it, it comes down to… an open conversation between us and the customer to make sure that expectations are met and make sure, you know, they understand we’re trying to keep them secure at the same time. We’re listening to them on ways that we could do better.

Speaker 0 | 33:31.966

So random thought from Mike here. Hey, I’m thinking about these sorting machines that you’ve gotten. And the thing that comes to mind is that that guy smoking the cigarette in the middle of the machine from men in black. And, you know, the guy with like eight arms and he’s just like, Suddenly stops. So you got any support stories about what it’s been like or one of those times where it was just like, oh my God, you guys sorted a slice of pizza? You got any stories like that? Any of those times that you can talk about?

Speaker 1 | 34:07.620

The two I could think of, one was internal and one was external. So the internal time is, you know, these are sorting machines. So you have a conveyor and you have… basically flippers that run across the top that help the sort packages from you know left to right down a conveyor and you know in the process of troubleshooting machine that was on site we had a technician that was there that set their computer their laptop on top of the conveyor system and then walked around the back of the machine and was and was taking different readings and inadvertently triggered the machine to turn on which all of a sudden now his laptop is moving down the machine to where the flippers were they came around and batted his computer off to the side and it landed onto the ground and i’ll never forget because he walked into the office and he showed me the evidence of the aftermath of what had occurred and the story was just so ridiculous of how it happened it was like a bad three stooges episode of him trying to chase after the computer to get it from falling to the ground and and basically denting a whole corner of the computer and it wouldn’t power on right and it it was definitely a laughable situation but it definitely you know one of those what did we learn moments for the technician um the other the other time that i can just hear you saying that to him would

Speaker 0 | 35:31.702

did we learn?

Speaker 1 | 35:32.983

How many kids do you have? I have two beautiful daughters and they definitely keep me on my toes just as much as my users do, for sure.

Speaker 0 | 35:42.550

Have you been able to ask them that question yet?

Speaker 1 | 35:46.994

The eldest, yes, on multiple occasions, which of course she’s 13 now, so she just rolls her eyes and goes, ah, dad. And that’s about as far as my teaching opportunity goes in this case. The five-year-old just kind of looks at me blank, and I realize it’s still going to be several years before I can have that phrase and it means something. The other situation was external, and it was a customer that we had that a lot of these machines, you know, they’re running on electronic motors, but they also use pneumatics, you know, to raise different sort bins up and down onto the machine to help sort mail. So they have to have an air compressor plugged into the machine. And one of the things that we recommended early on is, you know, you need to make sure that you have clean air. You know, you need to make sure that you have dry, clean air. And in the process of them switching out things, they went ahead and plugged in a new compressor directly into the machine without any cleaning filters or dryers that were involved into it. And they had built up, because they had used this air compressor throughout the shop for different uses, whether it was an air gun or… any other tool that they had laying around, they developed a slug of water in the airline. And when they connected it into the machine and started the machine processing, that slug of water found its way home into the manifold of one of our applicators, which is highly pneumatic, which basically sprayed water all inside the manifold, the vacuum tubes, and all the electronics that were inside there, which… When you have a mix of some oil and you have a mix of water inside, you know, a strictly air pneumatic system, it gets very expensive to fix that sort of situation. So from a battle story, that was a fun one to troubleshoot and, you know, get the customer to tell us the whole story, you know, before we were able to see some of the photo evidence as they were starting to tear things apart of what exactly happened. So, you know, I feel bad for the customer at the same time. It’s a fun story to tell because you just kind of sit there when you get done with the phone call and you just shake your head and go, ah. another day in support. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 37:51.945

Just like, so what about any of the, uh, super long, long sessions trying to figure something out?

Speaker 1 | 38:00.190

I want to say, I want to say that the closest to that is, you know, when want to cry was real big, you know, trying to, trying to,

Speaker 0 | 38:12.159

trying to just laughing. Cause it, I’m hearing you go, I want to cry.

Speaker 1 | 38:16.342

Yes. And that joke was made several times through there. I will assure you on that. Is, you know, trying to figure out, you know, the full scope of the vulnerability and then pull in the reports, pull in the development team and have an all hands on deck, you know, for that 48 hour period to put heads together to say, okay, what do we need to do? How fast do we need to do it? And how fast do we need to push it out? And, you know, I say it was a blazing triumph. for our team, you know, to be able to see all the pieces come together. Everybody was respecting all sides of the table to make sure everybody understood what the issues were, you know, what the different teams were going to be working on, the timetables were, you know, charted up, and we were able to get that patched within a weekend. And it was there before most of our customers were even emailing in saying, hey, is this a problem? Like, nope, we already took care of you. You’re all set to go. Keep processing mail. Keep making money. So that was probably the most difficult one, especially since information, you know, kind of got pieced mailed out there. You know, you were hearing one thing one minute, you were hearing another thing another minute. Oh, maybe the vulnerability is also here. If we need to make sure that we patch this. Oh, this software has this. So it is constantly trying to get, you know, all the information in one place, which comes down to you got to make sure you’ve got good documentation, you know, already established within your company to make sure that everybody is on the same page, literally. And what you’re working on, make sure all the stakeholders are aware of what’s going on to where there’s no surprises. And, you know, you hit the big giant red button to push it out and do your, you know, verification checks to make sure the problem is actually taken care of.

Speaker 0 | 40:06.085

Yeah. I was going to say a great way of circling right back into what we were talking about right before the deviation of, you know, having to make sure of all of the different components and all of the different things that are going to be affected by the update and by the changes that are being made to remove that vulnerability. You know, you were talking about the scanners, the pneumatic arms, the sensors, the conveyors, all of those different things. Um, and just making sure that all of that stays functional when pushing that out. Um, and across many different versions.

Speaker 1 | 40:46.044

Yes.

Speaker 0 | 40:47.065

So heck of a group of challenges to, to deal with. And of course, under pressure.

Speaker 1 | 40:53.769

Yeah. Fix it now. The clock is ticking. So it definitely keeps us on our toes. It’s, but I, I could say again, you know, working with this team, working with this company, and I realize this is a plug and being biased, but I wholeheartedly stand behind it. It’s been a pleasure to come to work every day, because the way that we look at things is we’re puzzle solvers. You wake up in the morning and go, okay, what fun, exciting, and incredibly tear-jerking challenge and puzzle is going to be sent my way for us to fix. And you get into this mode where you start to enjoy it. You start to where… So even if you feel like the sky is falling, it’s like, give me one more minute and I will have the sky blue again. We’ll have this solved. And I work with a team that has that same mindset in all that they do. So it’s exciting to come to work and it’s exciting being the IT guy to help come up with the IT solutions to help them meet. You know, I’ve got somebody else that’s got another puzzle that they’ve been struggling with for a week to be able to come, you know, as the superhero. With the cape and everything, they come in with an IT solution that could solve their problem. So it does make things fun. And yeah, I love it.

Speaker 0 | 42:13.800

How do you gather those puzzles? How do you find out about the puzzles that somebody in accounting is dealing with? Because you’re so used to dealing with the machines and making sure that the ops tech is up and running and functioning for your customers. What about the internal? customers? And how do you gather those puzzles? How do you stay aware of them?

Speaker 1 | 42:40.539

So it goes back to what I was saying in the very beginning is you learn to keep your ear low to the ground. You want to make sure that you’re not just locked away into an office. You’re not closing down chat and email the whole time and just focusing on your one task. You want to be able to get up and ping. You’re different team members. You know, you’re not going to walk around every day and talk to every single person. But you want to get into a habit to where you, you know, you start to talk with people. You see, you know, how is their day going? You know, anything that you’re struggling with, you know, hey, or you start noticing that, you know, you’ve got a production guy that is just hunched over a machine. He’s shaking his head and, you know, he’s bashing his wrench against the table. You know, you stop and talk to him. Say, hey, everything going all right? Anything I can help with? Hey. Can I take a look at that with you? And you start to foster this relationship with your employees to where they see you as someone that they can, even if it’s outside of your wheelhouse, that if they’re struggling with something, you want to be someone to see as a team player. You want to be able to be seen as someone, he can’t fix this problem, but I just need to vent. I need somebody to talk to about this issue. And by doing this. You create this foster, you know, you’re fostering this trust. You’re creating this environment of openness that occurs within the company to where you start to hear some of the gripes that they have with different software. You start to hear, oh, Kelly in accounting is, you know, constantly having this issue every time they open up Outlook. And I hear her complaining all the time. You start to get that information fed back to you to where you can go to Kelly and say, hey, you know, Jen was telling me that you were having this issue. you know, what’s going on? What can I help with? You know, because you want to be there for your team and you want to make sure that, you know, you’re not just being locked away and unattainable, you know, the closed door policy you want to try to avoid. And that’s kind of my best mechanism. And of course, you know, you want to have, you know, monthly chats, which thankfully we have a monthly all company meeting, you know, and each of the managers and directors, you know, go up to the front to basically, you know, give everybody a rundown of what’s going on. you know, with their specific teams for that month. And I always use that opportunity to tell people, hey. The IT email isn’t just for problems. You know, if you see something that you saw was really cool, you see something that somebody else was doing and you thought it’d be really cool if we did, send it to us. You know, bring the information to us and let’s have a conversation about it and see if there’s actually some benefit for both sides of the table of what’s going on. That’s kind of the way that I’ve been running it for 10 plus years now. And I feel it’s worked very, very well. I still have some people, especially the newcomers that are scared of IT because we kind of have that presence about us that IT is the godlike power that’s sitting there that can make your life miserable, have it to where you have to enter your password every time you want to open your calculator on your machine.

Speaker 0 | 45:45.330

Or dock.

Speaker 1 | 45:46.830

Or dock.

Speaker 0 | 45:49.471

All right, you know who he is.

Speaker 1 | 45:51.432

Yes. Go ahead. But that’s what we try to foster is we try to make sure that. people understand we’re here to help. We’re here to provide solutions to make, sometimes it’s not going to make your life exactly perfect, exactly easy, but all of our solutions are made and designed to where we can still maintain security while making you as efficient as possible to where when you’re getting prompted to do something by IT, it makes sense why IT is prompting you to do it versus just arbitrary rules. So, that’s been the mechanism, and I can safely say that at least once a day, I’m talking to somebody new across the company. And, you know, I’m pinging them and just saying, hey, you know, haven’t spoken in a while, how are things going? And just keep it on the habit of making sure, you know, to maintain the visibility that IT is there.

Speaker 0 | 46:46.895

So, since you’ve been with this organization for as long as you have, how large was it when you got there? How large is it today? Headcount.

Speaker 1 | 46:56.318

I believe when I got there within the first year, we were, and of course my boss is going to listen to this and yell at me later. I think we were 12 to 15 people strong. Okay. And as of today, we are 73 people strong.

Speaker 0 | 47:12.391

How big is your team?

Speaker 1 | 47:14.713

My team is made up of myself and two other minions. They’re listening, so I’m going to call them minions.

Speaker 0 | 47:22.960

Well, just give them some bananas and they’ll be okay.

Speaker 1 | 47:25.650

Exactly. So,

Speaker 0 | 47:28.532

yeah, and that’s actually a pretty good ratio. That’s 1 to 25, which is better than a lot of organizations, and it’s 1 IT to 50 plus, 50 to 75 even. So, okay. Tell me about some of the other challenges that you guys face and any other fun things that you want to share with the audience, with your fellow nerds out there that are listening to us. What’s something unique about what you do that is inside of your industry alone? Because like, you know, I dealt with trucks and I thought, what kind of technology can be on a truck or at a trucking company? And man, they kept me on that bleeding edge, surprisingly. But talk to me about yours.

Speaker 1 | 48:16.987

I think the one thing I’d like to express to the audience is, you know. And one of the things, I don’t know if we do it as unique. I hope it’s not unique. That’s my true hope. I hope other IT people are doing this. But it goes back to that tightrope walk that I was talking about earlier. And in this case, it’s the tightrope walk of security and usability. You know, in the industry, at least in our industry, I’ve seen firsthand situations to where. You know, you’re talking to the CFO, the CTO, and the CIO with a different organization. And they’re talking about all these amazing things that they would like to accomplish. And you’re there and you know you’re supporting them. And then you get on, you know, the DevOps team or the InfoSec team that comes in. And, you know, clearly the C-levels outrank them. I mean, they’re… They have ownership of the company. But to see, you know, kind of the fear and intimidation that comes up because the InfoSec team will come up and basically say, no, we’re not going to allow you to do that. And to watch, you know, the C-levels basically go, oh, okay, I guess we’re not doing that. You know, it’s something that I’ve seen firsthand. And it is something that we try to avoid is, and I keep joking about it, is the godlike IT. In that specific scenario, and like I said, I’ve seen it firsthand many times with different organizations, is you have an organization that’s not on the same page. You have an organization, and whether or not you want to blame the C-levels or the InfoSec levels is subjective. You have a situation where… You have this disjoint in trying to accomplish a goal. You know, you come up with a great idea. It’s immediately smacked down and it’s smacked down for possibly no other reason than, well, that’s our policy and that’s the way we’ve always done things, which I feel is the worst answer you could ever give to anyone. It’s just the way we’ve done things. And this is the way we’re going to continue to do it. That does not allow any room for growth and improvement. And one of the things. to talk about is, you know, when it comes to my users, you know, you want to make sure that you’re walking that tightrope line. Because, you know, from an IT perspective, you want everything as locked down as possible. And there are some organizations that do that. Their IT team locks it down 100%. You know, if a user needs to install anything on their computer, it requires a phone call and a physical presence of an IT administrator. They come up behind and punch in the admin password to get them to install, you know, anything that they need on the computer, even Windows updates. And of course, you know, there’s new solutions such as PAM and everything else out there that can help alleviate from that concern. But you need to come up with solutions that you’re sitting on both sides of the aisle, you know, looking at it through the scope of IT. OK, what can I do to protect the company and what does this protection do to the end user? And one of my what. What I love about this is one of my IT minions actually sits as the end user when it comes to these discussions that I have within the team of when we’re going to do new solutions. And she kind of acts as the liaison of what we’re trying to do because me and me and the other guy may be sitting there going, this is fantastic. This is going to save us so much money. This is going to protect us a thousand ways from one. The ROI looks amazing. And then she’ll raise her hand and go, yeah, we can’t use this. And then we go into a discussion of all the different ways that this would cause untold amount of time and effort from our end users and the culture that we have within the company to try and implement it. So now you’re back to the drawing board going, OK, well, based on this information, what other solutions that are out there that are going to make sure that we maintain the security and compliance that we need? At the same time, it’s not going to cause our users to pull their hair out. Because when you develop a situation to where your end users are pulling their hair out. you know, from what IT is mandating from on high of the mountain is you start to deal a lot more with shadow IT. You start to deal with.

Speaker 0 | 52:32.091

I was going to go with that. I was going to point out it’s just going to foster shadow IT.

Speaker 1 | 52:36.595

Yep. And you deal with angst effectively every time IT is in the room. And when you start segmenting and siloing your teams because of animosity that is occurring from there. Oh. Here comes the IT guys. I really don’t want to be a part of this project anymore. I don’t want them part of this project because they’re just going to make things difficult. They’re going to make it to where instead of this being a three-week project, it’s now a 12-week project. When you start to foster that sort of environment, everything slows to a crawl. Everything slows to where now the times of emailing between project members and IT get slowed down because that animosity is there. It’s not prime and center to their focus. You have situations where, you know, they will try to do things again with shadow IT to try and get the project done without IT being involved into it. And shadow IT creates such a heartache with every industry because now it’s outside of your control. You can’t vouch for the data. And when that starts to run rampant, the only lever that IT has to pull at that point is lockdown. Well, now you’re in this endless spiraling cycle of the more you lock down, the more people try to bypass to where at some point you’ll implode. And you don’t want that. You want to maintain that trust. You want to maintain that respect and understanding to make sure that when IT walks into the room, everybody goes, oh, OK, IT’s here. Well, this might not be so bad. We might be able to get this done fairly quickly because, you know, Brandon’s here. You know, somebody else is here to make sure that we can get this taken care of. And, you know, they’re not going to make our lives absolutely miserable. They may have us do a few things, but it’s not the end, you know, end of the world every time, you know, I come into a room.

Speaker 2 | 54:28.579

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Speaker 0 | 56:48.303

You know, I’ve really appreciated our discussion today and the topics and everything else. Talk to me a little bit about your life outside of the office. You got anything you want to promote? You got anything that you, side projects, you help build a website, you support this. Or that, or, you know, obviously you said you have two beautiful daughters that you’re, I’m sure, being a chauffeur for at least the 13-year-old running around and making sure she’s getting to where she needs to be. What do you got going on outside of the office?

Speaker 1 | 57:25.784

Well, I mean, just as… We are humans. We are humans. I mean, to put it in the context, it’s been kind of a wild ride the last couple of years for me, you know. The company is stationed out of Lafayette, Indiana, which is where I went out of high school. I studied at Purdue University, and it kind of was a whirlwind from there. May 10th, I graduated. May 17th, I married my high school sweetheart. June 2nd, I got the job at EII. And June 10th, I moved into a house. So I kind of got all the life milestones out of the way within a one-month period, which certainly made a wild ride for sure. you know, worked with the company up until about three years ago when I finally got tired of Indiana weather. I got tired of the cold and the snow. And, you know, right about the time that, you know, COVID was starting to come in and a lot of people were already working remote. I mean, I was working remote from the office, even though I was 10 minutes from the office, you know, just working from home that whole time to where, you know, my boss knew that Florida was a goal for me, you know, because I just love the weather. I love everything that you can do down here. So three years ago, I made the suggestion to him that, hey, what do you think about me just going remote full time? And he supported it 100%. So we loaded up the U-Haul and we’ve been living in Florida for three years so far. It’s 80 degrees and sunny right now, and I cannot complain one bit about it. It is absolutely gorgeous and have loved the ride ever since there. It does make some unique challenges being remote. because now I have to have my two minions be more of the hands-on people that are going on. But between all of the communication strategies we have, whether it’s Zoom, RingCentral, you know, we do use Atlassian for Confluence and Jira as far as keeping documentation and tasks brought together. I feel it’s worked really well. And I think they would agree with that assessment on here. I don’t think they’d call me a liar in that particular case. Hey,

Speaker 0 | 59:26.535

you got promoted in the last four months.

Speaker 1 | 59:29.136

and got promoted within four months. Supposedly I’m doing something right. You know, even do it being remote from the office. I do fly up about once a quarter just to harass everyone. So there is a little bit of level of, crap. Brandon’s here. Everybody looked busy.

Speaker 2 | 59:43.186

Um,

Speaker 1 | 59:44.447

that’s better. So you get,

Speaker 0 | 59:45.728

Oh,

Speaker 1 | 59:49.671

but it keeps everybody on their toes, which is the goal. But I mean, I love, I love being in it, you know, I love that, you know, the IT community has so many different communities, whether that’s Spiceworks, whether that’s, you know, Microsoft communities, whether that’s VMware communities, everything that’s out there. And for most of them, you know, you do get the trolls, but for most of them, you have people that have been in those shoes. They’ve been in that situation where they worked with that particular puzzle and they’re able to jump into your question and say, hey. Did you check this? Did you make sure you got this one checkbox on this setting turned on? And something you were pouring over for two weeks, you put the checkmark in and just everything starts to work. And you go, oh, thank God for the community, you know? So it’s an amazing experience, you know, meeting people at conferences, meeting people, you know, within the postal industry and IT industry, you know, from all walks of life and getting to learn what their experience are, setting up those contacts. Because. If you’re a lone gun IT running, you know, running with a business and you have nobody else to fall on, you got a tough, you got a tough gig, you know, seek help. You know, there, there are so many different avenues. Yes. Be able to ask for help. I know ego runs rampant a lot in our industry. And if you want to be successful, if you want to be able to work with management and you want to. get to the point to where you’re waking up in the morning and you’re excited about going to work, you got to drop the ego and be prepared to work with people and work on the compromise and work on the level of respect to make sure that you know the insides and outs before you start saying things.

Speaker 0 | 61:36.995

Yeah, for sure. And you know what? That’s just good life advice too, because those are all, I mean, that’s just personal relationships and working with people. If you can ask for help, And you can provide help, then it just helps. It just helps. I don’t know.

Speaker 1 | 61:58.626

One of the earliest life lessons my boss taught me is, and it’s a lesson that I tell everyone that I encounter, is if you don’t know the answer to something, tell me you don’t know the answer. And I take it one step further is. I’ll be open up front and say, I don’t know the answer to this, but I know where to look to get you the answer. You know, you want to make sure that, you know, it’s just, hey, never say it’s not my job. And then just walk out of the room. Say, hey, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer, but you asked me and I know where to go to get that answer. So give me an hour. Give me a day and come back with an answer. Even in, you know, that even goes to where. If you think you know the answer, but you’re not sure, never make it up on the spot. Don’t come off half-cocked. You want to go back and say, hey, I’m not sure. I think it’s this, but before I give you a full answer, give me about an hour to double-check myself. The amount of respect you get from management when they recognize, hey, okay, he’s working on this. He’s got a rough idea. they could square that off of their mind and start moving on to the next task where you’re, you’re doing the research for it versus I don’t know. And I don’t know where you can go have fun, Godspeed. And then you walk out of the room because now you’re not helping. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 63:24.070

So for sure. Well, thank you very much, Brandon. It’s been a, like I said, an enjoyable discussion. And if you’ve enjoyed this discussion, please hit like and share and, and leave us a comment, whatever. location that you’re grabbing the podcast from we definitely enjoy that feedback and can use that so let us know in the apple store or wherever and thanks again