Speaker 0 | 00:07.240
All right, welcome everyone back to dissecting popular IT nerds today Ari Harrison director of IT at BAMCO Welcome to the show pleasure to have you on. Thank you, sir. I have been perusing is that the right word? I’m doing this today. Yeah, I’m on my I’m on my second cup of coffee and it’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon, so I’m behind by about 10 cups. We’ll get there soon. You went to the University of Colorado Boulder. I went to CSU, so of course we’re sworn enemies. Oh, no. If I had known that before you came on the show, then I probably would have denied you. But, you know, what are we going to do? There you are. So you’re probably smarter than me, because it’s harder to get into that school than it is to CSU. We’ll give you that, okay? Sure. The one thing I did notice that you’ve talked about recently is Microsoft’s decision to uncouple teams. And Microsoft really, they make licensing probably the easiest thing in the world. There’s never any complications there. There’s never any confusion. We all know how you should buy Microsoft. So anyways, let’s just start with that because I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on that, what that means to everyone that… maybe switched over or didn’t last minute or is totally prepared for COVID. It was just the first thing that came to mind when I saw you mention Teams. And I’m a fan. I am a fan of global domination by Microsoft. I do believe that they will continue to dominate. They may even get into the, oh, I don’t know, vaccination space somehow in the future. That might happen too. So anyways, thoughts?
Speaker 1 | 01:44.948
Yeah. I mean, every admin knows and uses Microsoft, right? And they allow you to… through a simple purchase, basically cover all of your IT needs 80% of the way,
Speaker 0 | 01:58.014
right? Are you paid by them? Are you paid by them?
Speaker 1 | 02:01.657
Absolutely not.
Speaker 0 | 02:03.018
No, we pay. Trust me, we pay.
Speaker 1 | 02:05.761
We pay.
Speaker 0 | 02:06.181
Okay, go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 02:08.063
The issue is they’re so inflexible. Their licensing model is… I joke you need a doctorate to understand it. And then once you get your doctorate at Microsoft… They change everything up. They change the names, the SKUs, the packaging. Yeah, it’s really difficult to navigate what packages you need, how much you should be spending. And now just decoupling another product makes it even more difficult to navigate.
Speaker 0 | 02:34.329
I have a secret pro bono guy that works behind the scenes in our secret behind the scenes department at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. His name is Steve Leach. And we like to… he is an x-badged microsoft guy that’s how we like to refer to him but blue badge yeah yeah he’s he’s the guy that um yeah he’s the guy that just like whenever anyone’s confused by all this stuff we just bring him in and he’ll talk to you for an hour about microsoft licensing and everyone will glaze over and he’ll be really excited and thinks this is the awesomest thing in the world but at least you’ll leave with knowing how to buy all this junk and then not junk it’s definitely not junk but i remember um i guess teams is kind of like the redheaded stepchild of microsoft you But during COVID, we had a lot of people that had to last minute jump to Teams. And a lot of people made the wrong decision. And it was like, well, let’s just voice enable Teams. That’s just what you do. You just start paying $12 to get voice licensing for Teams. And then you pay another $12 for international licensing. And then, oh, wait a second. We need to buy this phone system SKU for another $8 because we’re not on E5 yet.
Speaker 1 | 03:40.979
Don’t forget the conference bridging.
Speaker 0 | 03:43.439
Oh, yes. Oh,
Speaker 1 | 03:44.900
I forgot. Another add-on. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 03:46.060
Because we’re on Business 365, so we got to do it a different way there. So, yeah, you know, depending on how that is. So now, I think I had one university that when I asked them, they’re like, yeah, we just voice enabled Teams for 60,000 users. I was like, what? How did that go? And it was at least, you know, the local calling in the phone system. So that’s at least 20 bucks times 60,000. And I was like. That was the wrong decision. And be quiet. We’re going to sweep that under the rug. Don’t tell anybody and move on. Yeah. So anywho, what does the new change mean? Maybe explain it briefly, give a little bit of education to the listeners out there. What does this mean? Why is this such a big deal? And it doesn’t really matter because it’s going to change anyway six months from now or next March.
Speaker 1 | 04:32.535
Yeah. So Microsoft got hit with an antitrust suit in Europe. And as a result of this antitrust suit, they decided that they’re going to… uncoupled teams from their microsoft 365 packaging um what this means is that the standalone product is going to end up being i believe 525 per user per month um so pretty substantial hit um Yeah. And it’s just another thing for admins to administer on Microsoft.
Speaker 0 | 05:04.733
Well, okay. So maybe educate some other people because antitrust suit, what were the details around that? What does that mean? Is that like anti-monopolization? I mean, what does it mean?
Speaker 1 | 05:16.980
I think that the case was saying that they were forcing people into their solutions through bundling and preferential treatment, which we all know Microsoft would never do. No.
Speaker 0 | 05:28.387
No, no, no, no one’s ever thrown pie in Bill Gates face.
Speaker 1 | 05:33.509
My new favorite that they’ve done, I don’t know if you’ve seen this in Outlook, they’ve changed your default browser to open up into edge, regardless of what your default browser is set on your system. If you’re using Outlook, any link you click by default will open an edge unless you go into those advanced settings and change it back. So.
Speaker 0 | 05:52.579
they shouldn’t do see stuff like that someone had an idea there and microsoft inside the company itself is a very interesting company i don’t know if you know much about the the internal um i want to call it politics more campus it’s more like a campus type feel do you know anyone that works in microsoft it’s a very interesting company it’s pretty cool actually i’ve worked with them a ton and bamco actually does a ton of work with them okay so that should have been shot down someone should have been smart enough on whatever little inter teams on whatever internal team should have been like, you know, this is kind of an, you know, do you like when annoying stuff like that happens and you have to figure out where the setting is? It’s like, I shut off all of the, I don’t know. I don’t want my, my apps in the background using up internet on my iPhone or something like that. And you know, then I go to need the app all of a sudden and I was like, no, you can’t use it because you shut off the data and I got to click through the settings. Like there’s some things that are just kind of annoying. Someone should have checked out. They should have, every company should have an annoying scale. Will this annoy our users? And it should be a yes or a no. And if the answer is yes, don’t do it.
Speaker 1 | 06:57.233
Or consider heavily the impact.
Speaker 0 | 06:59.715
Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 07:00.815
that’s an annoying justification, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 07:02.796
Yeah, you’ve already got the whole world, so you shouldn’t do things that are annoying to people. But this antitrust thing, I kind of like that. So what you’re telling me is that we can just buy teams for six bucks?
Speaker 1 | 07:16.564
Yeah, as a standalone, exactly. And it all goes back to COVID, like you said. They were giving away all of these teams’ exploratory licenses for free. They got the whole enterprise world addicted to the solution. And now they’ve just that.
Speaker 0 | 07:32.959
I love how you said addicted. That might not be the correct word, but forced into using it.
Speaker 1 | 07:39.002
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 07:39.762
Figuring it out.
Speaker 1 | 07:41.563
When you’re in that ecosystem, it’s tough to branch out and use other solutions, right? Everything’s built in. SharePoint’s built in. Power BI, everything’s built into the solution. So to decouple just that and to say, hey, now you need to pay for this, it’s an interesting move.
Speaker 0 | 08:00.231
So, well, they got forced to. So they didn’t choose to do it because if they chose to do it, then it might be different. Kind of like we’re going to a 12-month model now. You’ve got to renew for one year or we’re going to charge you an additional 20%. So it’s just such an amazing company. When I really think about it, Because we think back in time, I don’t know how old you are. If you want to share, go ahead. 35. 35? Yeah. Okay. So that’s, I’m 47. So that’s old enough, I guess, to kind of remember back when they weren’t a monopoly and this type of thing didn’t exist. It’s pretty crazy. Everyone in the world pretty much uses Microsoft. If not, if not touches it in one way, shape, form, or fashion.
Speaker 1 | 08:44.684
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 08:45.525
At least word. For sure. It’s just amazing that that, that just blows my mind. It blows my mind. So, you know, we want more. It’s not enough. It’s not enough. We need to take, we need to take over telecom too, um, which they’re, they do, uh, which you, I don’t, I wouldn’t say they’re a telecom company, nor should they be however they are. So how did you, uh, so talk to me a little bit. How big is your team? How many, uh, how many it folks, what’s it like over there?
Speaker 1 | 09:16.259
So we have a large development presence in India in a city called Dharadun which is in northern India with over 100 developers who work on our unified back end which is our platform for our b2b and b2c stores. BAMCO does promotional products and awards programs for companies that want stores web stores that are built into their websites basically. And the unified backend team handles all of that. So large presence in Northern India. We have six people on our help desk. And then we have our larger IT team from our parent company. We are a fully owned subsidiary of Superior Group of Companies. which is a NASDAQ-traded corporation where we have dozens of folks on the IT team.
Speaker 2 | 10:09.347
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Speaker 0 | 12:29.468
So you are in a larger, a larger IT decision, decision-making matrix of sorts. How do you get anything done that you want?
Speaker 1 | 12:42.818
So I think process is key. When I first got to Bamco, Every single contract, every single service was getting sent over to me. And I quickly realized if we didn’t have a process for security review, financial review, IT review, nothing was ever going to get done. Certainly, it wasn’t going to get done the right way. Similarly, with our help desk, if I hand over something that doesn’t have a well-documented process, we wouldn’t be able to help our users. And so we really worked on our process. And then from that, from our process, we started to work on how do we automate these things? How do we bring in Intune and Autopilot has been a huge project that we’ve been working on to automate our deployments, our third party application patching, our Windows patching, all these things that we can automate. But first we had to decide what was worthy of a process. How do we document this process? Do we need to put in services in order to get these processes under control? So that’s been a lot of my focus.
Speaker 0 | 13:53.030
Just out of curiosity, do you guys use, are you guys an enterprise level client with Microsoft? The
Speaker 1 | 14:00.355
SGC is, yes. Bento is not.
Speaker 0 | 14:03.256
And the reason why I was asking this is because you said everything was, let’s just kind of rewind. First of all, what did that do for you, putting those processes in place?
Speaker 1 | 14:12.926
and how were you able to measure it so i when i when i was onboarded i noticed that there was a ton of um friction in our onboarding process and i really believe like if you have a good employee experience you have a good customer experience so that was something that i wanted to address off the bat um and so auto what autopilot and intune really allowed us to do um because bamco is a fully remote company was send a laptop to someone send them a welcome email and have them working on day one which sounds simple but i’ll tell you it was a really really it was a sticking point and something that they were really upset with the previous provider about so okay um i started using an msp or something to do that before or yeah they were correct they were using an msp who was who was just imaging the computers and sending them And what ended up happening was, you know, it’d take a month to get a laptop provisioned because… Oh, my. Oh.
Speaker 0 | 15:10.027
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 15:10.968
And then similarly, what Intune has allowed us to do is if there’s any issue with the computer, we can send a remote wipe, we can reimage it remotely, rather than having someone be offline for days, overnighting it to some, you know, to one of our facilities to take a look at, and then overnighting it back. So there were…
Speaker 0 | 15:29.445
Can we just complain about MSPs for a second? Can we just take a little side topic? Can we just complain about… I don’t…
Speaker 1 | 15:34.766
Listen, I come from the world of MSP, so I sympathize for them.
Speaker 0 | 15:38.987
No, I do. But what I don’t understand is why couldn’t they do that? Why did they not see that? So I think there’s good MSPs, obviously. There’s, you know, it’s kind of like the 80… It’s the 80-20 rule, right? Yeah. And so a couple of them are like, shame on you guys for not picking them to the curb faster, right? which they brought you in. So we can’t blame that on you. We can say congratulations to whoever brought you in, right. Or whoever, whatever happened. Right. And so my question is it’s the, the MSP is kind of getting this, uh, the way that we, I think one guy described it with when I, my, my son did a lawn mowing, um, like letter that he sent out to everyone in the, in the neighborhood because he wanted to mow people’s lawns. And it was like, you’re already paying someone to mow your lawn. I’m not asking you to buy anything you don’t already buy. I’m just asking you to just get me to do it, right? And then I remember the comments from everyone when we did this little post online years ago. One guy’s comment was like, the 100th cut will be as good as the first cut. Meaning, do they earn their paycheck every single month or do they get into this kind of like, hey, we’re just getting checked from these guys and we’re not really earning our… there’s no vibe with the team anymore there’s no vibe between the msp and your internal team and it’s kind of just this like company that just becomes this like robotic thing to turn some a months for a compu that’s just ridiculous i always say hours not days but that’s um days not not months weeks yeah okay um so i guess my question is how did it get that bad i think it was
Speaker 1 | 17:13.337
allowed to get that bad. I think that MSPs are trying to templatize what they’re doing to all of their clients. And sometimes that just does not work.
Speaker 0 | 17:21.960
Yeah. Like menu of services, like check off your equipment, give us an inventory. We’ll charge you $9 for a laptop. We’ll charge you this for that. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 17:32.405
Yeah. So we’re a thousand person international company. The way that they were servicing us just was not working for the business.
Speaker 0 | 17:41.869
You have to ship laptops to India?
Speaker 1 | 17:44.210
So India is an interesting one. They’re actually buckling down on technology imports. So things are very difficult there. That’s a whole other discussion.
Speaker 0 | 17:54.475
Well, no, we do run into that a lot too. When you’re managing an international network, firewalls, for example. How do we get the firewall shipped from, I don’t know, Texas to Chile? Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 18:07.361
And there’s all sorts of local rules that apply to firewalls and security protocol. It’s definitely a consideration.
Speaker 0 | 18:14.107
We have Jim, John, and Sarah each carry on a firewall and get on the plane.
Speaker 1 | 18:21.213
I’m serious. No, I hear you all the time.
Speaker 0 | 18:24.937
Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, anywho. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 18:29.601
Just to take a step back, when I got there, I think it was really important to… take a look strategically, what are the business needs and what are the solutions that we can put in place to solve these needs? And that was a glaring issue, onboarding and offboarding, glaring issue that we had to tackle. So we worked with our partners and we actually got a ton of funding from Microsoft to play into. Yeah. So the money’s out there to do this stuff. The resources are out there. You just have to be your own advocate. I think they gave us like $30,000 towards this project.
Speaker 0 | 19:01.243
Nice. How do you get that done?
Speaker 1 | 19:03.825
I think a lot of it was angling as a remote first company, perfect Intune, you know, perfect. So Intune was our perfect solution. It really was. And being able to demonstrate that value to them, I think was,
Speaker 2 | 19:18.791
you know,
Speaker 1 | 19:19.871
invaluable.
Speaker 0 | 19:20.872
So they’re like, we’ll credit you 30,000 or something like that.
Speaker 1 | 19:24.053
Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 19:26.054
So the moral of the story there is guys, always ask for more from the salespeople.
Speaker 1 | 19:31.656
Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 19:32.396
pretty much. pretty much what it is. There’s a lot of money out there in the budget. There’s a lot of this, it’s the end of the quarter and we’ve got this leftover and we want to give you this. And of all the companies that has a lot, Microsoft is, you just have to find the right internal team, which back to kind of that internal culture. Cause I have a very close friend that works at Microsoft and he got hired at Microsoft. And when they placed him in the company, they placed him in the wrong role that he got hired for. He literally got to the company. This isn’t what I was hired for. And they’re like, oh, sorry. Here’s what we want you to do. We want you to kind of just feel your way around the company, get to know everybody. Just take as long as you want. I think he took a year meeting with people on teams and getting to know people and finally finding the right team that he wanted to be on. And then he got placed.
Speaker 1 | 20:16.707
Wow.
Speaker 0 | 20:17.348
But when he got placed, he definitely, you know, works. But it’s that big of a company. I mean, it’s a massive, massive, massive, you know, corporate company where. They want the right people in the right seats on the bus. So if you got on the bus in the wrong seat, they’re like, like find their, at least find the right seat. Like it was so hard to get the job to begin with. There went, went through so much, you know, screening and interviews and everything that once you get there, they want you in the right spot, which is cool. I don’t know how this correlates to whatever, but it shows that they, you can find, I guess my point is, is you can find the right people inside at Microsoft. And if there’s money available to make the fit, work and to make you guys a good case study. You guys were a great case study.
Speaker 1 | 21:03.203
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s sort of been emblematic of the way that we’ve worked with Microsoft. You got to sort of get in there, find the right people, work with the right people, make your business case to them, be visible to them. Otherwise, you’re going to be stuck with horrible support, pre-sales engineering. You got to sort of be your own advocate. with a company that large.
Speaker 0 | 21:30.671
For the listeners out there listening to, and I guess for the benefit of them growing their careers and stuff, I put out a meme like a couple of weeks ago on LinkedIn that I found funny, which was, you know, new IT director coming in, looking at old IT directors roadmap. And it was basically- I saw that.
Speaker 1 | 21:51.268
It was funny.
Speaker 0 | 21:52.168
You know what I mean? It’s just like tumbleweeds blowing down the street. So to segue, I guess, is that a lot of people running i mean a lot of people are commenting been there before done that and people didn’t even people that didn’t comment sent me comments as well or do comment other people comment when they see something but don’t want to put it out publicly what’s any uh tips or tricks of the trade on kind of like where to begin because you said processes were very important do you have kind of like an entry-level process like okay let’s go meet everybody let’s talk with everyone. Let’s see what everyone’s concerns are. Let’s see what everyone hates, what everyone loves. Do you have any type of a process or way of going about that methodology? Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 22:33.019
So, I mean, I would say I was really lucky because at BAMCorp president is extremely, extremely supportive. We have one-on-ones every week where we’re talking about business needs. We’re talking about existing services, certainly doing that service discovery, figuring out what we actually had. That was huge for me. As far as processes go, my favorite saying is, don’t let perfect get in the way of good. So we just started working on things. We just started building out a knowledge base. I started figuring out what people were doing by building the knowledge base out. We started building our deployments. We started just working on different projects where I felt that there was a need. And then also through one-on-ones with the president, discovered where… IT can impact growth and revenue. And a lot of my projects have been around procurement processes, specifically around SaaS, SaaS sprawl. Huge problem in most businesses. And so I built an entire process for review, for approvals, all of that around SaaS procurement.
Speaker 0 | 23:46.312
Yes. I’m trying to remember who I was speaking with that said the average company has anywhere between 80 to 130. applications which i found to be mind-blowing i didn’t think it was that high we’re at 108 as of yesterday i read it yeah yeah so uh yeah managing all of this it can’t really be shouldn’t be um
Speaker 1 | 24:10.040
the metaphorical spreadsheet with contact numbers and it can’t be expiration dates it just can’t be when you’re talking about security you know the types of audits that you want from your vendors when you’re talking about your finance team’s preferences for payment. I mean, there are so many variables when you start getting into the procuring process that you need a system to fail.
Speaker 0 | 24:34.940
How many shadow IT applications did you find?
Speaker 1 | 24:38.663
Oh, man. So we’re a Google Workspace shop. So it’s pretty simple to just sign up with that Google SSL. And, you know, some of it wasn’t even… shadow IT per se. It was just, oh, that team’s using this tool for outreach while this team’s using that tool. And that’s just the way it’s been. Or it’s that way because of a merger acquisition that was done. So yeah, it never ends, really never ends.
Speaker 0 | 25:08.545
Well, excellent. Is there ever a moment where you feel, well, you mentioned automation, so maybe, how much can you really automate? Is there ever a point where you feel like, well, I can at least put one leg up on the desk and sit back for a second and take a breather? Is there like a sine curve to this or something?
Speaker 1 | 25:32.715
I mean… My feeling is that if we can automate it, we should be automating it, especially if you have a team like ours. Like our help desk team is only a few people, right? So we do what we can. There’s never a lack of work. Like we’re always running at full steam ahead, whether it’s working on automation and processes. Strategically, that’s where we want to be or we’re responding to putting out fires. I think that’s just like the name of the game in IT. Unfortunately, you know. whatever’s burning down gets our attention. And sometimes that strategic outlook gets put on the back burner. But I mean, yeah, we, we do the best we can with the tools we have. And I think having good automation tools, really, really important.
Speaker 0 | 26:18.096
Favorite top three vendors. Ooh, first ones that come to mind. Can’t use Microsoft.
Speaker 1 | 26:24.977
Can’t use Google, huh?
Speaker 0 | 26:26.138
Can I, because we already know that you’re a Google shop and a Microsoft shop. So that’s kind of. Sure.
Speaker 1 | 26:30.779
So lately I’ve been loving loom. Loom is an asynchronous communication tool. It allows you to do tutorials and walkthroughs. And it’s great for us because we have that whole development team in India. So being able to have that asynchronous communication that works with our existing tool set, awesome.
Speaker 0 | 26:49.561
So any kind of APIs with them or something? I mean, I know Loom. Loom’s been around for a long time.
Speaker 1 | 26:54.985
Yeah, yeah. So Loom’s a great tool for us specifically. And no, they just, they… They like we’re Slack shops. So Slack’s my number two. Their integration with Slack’s really tight.
Speaker 0 | 27:05.890
Nice. Didn’t think you were going to say these two. Okay. You got a third one. You can pick security. You can pick a security product. You can pick, I mean, anything that comes to mind. I mean, security’s got it. I mean, that’s just a vast array of, the first thing that came to my mind was like algae in the ocean, you know, like just so much stuff out there. Like what do you watch? What do you do?
Speaker 1 | 27:29.848
I mean, I could give you my least favorite. Very, very quick.
Speaker 0 | 27:32.550
Oh, let’s do that. Can we do that? Least favorite.
Speaker 1 | 27:35.552
Oh, man. Like when my wife asks me what I want to eat for dinner, I always know what I don’t want to eat for dinner. I’ll go with Ninja One for my third. I love them. I love working with them. And I love the tool. Very familiar with all the key RMM players out there. And Ninja One has really allowed us to automate a ton.
Speaker 0 | 27:59.504
integrate a ton um i love the tool set deployments are so simple i need to i i ask this because i’m just i’m going to start doing that i need to start doing this all the time and doug and all my other hosts if you listen to the show and and greg the frenchman behind the scene who’s my um basically head of production we need to make asking the top three vendors like a number one thing because maybe someday they’ll pay us you know That would be good. We also need really good. I was thinking like a tank top that says hot nerd on the front. Maybe we should use you guys for that. We need some like giveaways, t-shirt giveaways or something.
Speaker 1 | 28:37.557
We can talk about that. We can make it happen.
Speaker 0 | 28:39.078
I’m sure. I’m sure. Okay. How? 35 years old. 35 years old. Let’s see. We have to do two. What year are we in? 2023. So you were prior to Y2K.
Speaker 1 | 28:53.085
I’ve been in this business.
Speaker 2 | 28:54.106
24.
Speaker 1 | 28:54.866
I’ve been in this business since I was 12. So going to Comdex DS every year, I was, I was literally born into the business. So yeah, but you can talk about it.
Speaker 0 | 29:04.053
If I asked you what your first computer is,
Speaker 1 | 29:05.534
it’s not going to be a 486.
Speaker 0 | 29:07.535
Yeah. Yes, exactly. 486. See, I had a 386. That was like my third computer or something. So yeah, 46 was cool. It had enough memory to run Ultima eight or something like that. Um, let’s see what I bring me back in time. Like what, what were you doing on this 48, 48?
Speaker 1 | 29:25.924
or blah blah blah 486 did we have internet yep did you have internet playing doom low speed internet um very you know not the internet minesweeper yeah first email 56k modem yeah what was your first email provider
Speaker 0 | 29:42.395
AOL see remember we used to throw the discs like frisbees you’d get it every month oh boy wow not at all it just everyone had multiple AOL packets with those discs on okay so
Speaker 1 | 29:55.164
I remember when we could first burn discs. That was a huge deal.
Speaker 0 | 30:00.149
Yes. burning a dvd was an even bigger thing or dual display people used to have that whole server looking almost like a full server box where you could burn like all at once yes yeah
Speaker 1 | 30:12.737
46d slow internet um i don’t know where we go from there how did you get into this thing this technology thing it wasn’t really a thing back then i guess it kind of was so yeah my dad um is an electrical engineer uh several dozen patents with bell labs So it really was, yeah, really was born into this, started working for system integrator when I was literally 12 or 13, uh, building computers, uh, with all my friends, uh, while, while everyone else was flipping burgers, we were putting together computers.
Speaker 0 | 30:47.036
That’s actually fun. I was flipping burgers and doing the computers on the back for paying money to do that.
Speaker 2 | 30:52.961
The what?
Speaker 0 | 30:53.922
What do you mean system integrator? Because that’s such a broad term nowadays. What does that mean back? System integrator today is a lot different than system integrator back then when you were 12. So I want to know what systems you were integrating.
Speaker 1 | 31:04.707
Yeah. I mean, it was, we were working for IT consulting company, eventually turned into an MSP like the rest of them. Eventually in high school, I started going to clients, installing computers, working a little bit on servers, you know, home lab with my own server, went to college. go buffs, graduated, and then started working for NSP on the help desk.
Speaker 0 | 31:29.519
I had net zero when I was at CSU. That was my internet provider. Net zero, CSU, no. I think maybe my senior year, I wrote one paper where I had to cite the internet. Maybe. The rest of that was bibliographies that were all card catalogs and libraries and the Dewey Decimal System. To get older. I don’t think people… If I ask my kids how to use a card catalog at the library, I don’t know what they would… I don’t even know if that even exists. It must still exist. They must still have the big card catalog.
Speaker 1 | 32:04.271
Check it out on ChatGPT and get an answer for you.
Speaker 0 | 32:07.632
True. True.
Speaker 1 | 32:08.853
I don’t think the Dewey Decimal system exists anymore. Or if there’s an updated system, if it does, though.
Speaker 0 | 32:15.436
Yes. It’s a good question. We should ask that one.
Speaker 2 | 32:19.578
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Speaker 0 | 34:39.636
Do you subscribe to any conspiracy theories?
Speaker 1 | 34:41.997
I’m not a big conspiracy theory guy.
Speaker 0 | 34:46.240
So we landed on the moon, 100%, guaranteed. Definitely walked on the moon.
Speaker 1 | 34:50.342
I think we walked on the moon.
Speaker 0 | 34:52.123
That’s crazy. Have you looked at the moon lately? It’s 220,000 miles away. I was the guy that was like, no, anyone that ever says that is an absolute idiot. You’re totally crazy for… thinking that we never walked on the moon. And then for some reason, one day I was like, people really think that I was like, I, you know, I should give, I should be a little bit more open-minded. I should at least give it, you know, the benefit of the doubt. I went down the, uh, I went down that dark hole. And if you read like the, if you read like some real books on it, you, the more you’ll be like, no, absolutely no way. No,
Speaker 2 | 35:27.907
no way at all. It’s the, I just,
Speaker 0 | 35:31.330
I honestly feel like if you put a gun to my head right now and I’d be like, oh, I really don’t want to sleep.
Speaker 1 | 35:35.994
I really don’t want to hear you’re saying no.
Speaker 0 | 35:38.295
I’m saying no. I’m saying no, we didn’t. And I think one of and there’s some simple arguments. And then there’s like the real complicated arguments where you talk about like, you know, what type of rocket fuel and the cooling powers and like the one million pounds or tons of lift that was capable. And then you start talking about latency and phone calls to the moon to a little umbrella that sits on the moon and test runs and like chances of survival and like. all the things that are absolutely insane compute power 1969 no compute power that much um and then why have we never gone back i just i don’t i feel like we should have colonies on the moon like walking around we should have like we should definitely have like some kind of test station and like you know um you know and why all the like why is every picture taken of the earth uh not a picture of the earth it’s a digital you know nasa like this is what it would look like So a lot of different things. And not just the old school stuff like, oh, the shadow and the flag.
Speaker 1 | 36:39.020
The flag, yeah, the flag.
Speaker 0 | 36:40.401
No, no, no. I’m talking about the capsule detaching and reentering the Earth’s atmosphere at 33,000 feet per second. That’s the speed they say it was entering at. 33,000 feet per second. I don’t know however many times faster that is in the fastest plane that’s made by man right now, but it’s a lot faster. It’s like… nine football fields per second or something insane might even be a hundred. No, I think it’s 109 football fields per second. Is that right? 33,000, whatever, whatever that math is. Um, so yes, um, that’s one that I, I, and everyone laughs at me. I’ve had a few guys that I was going to have on the show from NASA. And they’re like, I am not an apologist. I will not be on your show.
Speaker 1 | 37:21.428
I don’t know. I’m just, I’m not, um, I’m not naturally very like skeptical of things like that, especially. No,
Speaker 0 | 37:27.292
neither am I. I was being open branded. I just, and when you study the math and everything and you start, you start to look at it, it’s just like a little side hobby of mine. It’s really just, um, it’s just something that I don’t know, triggered me all of a sudden. I don’t know how I got into it because I used to think it was crazy. And I used to laugh at the dumb and dumber where he’d be like, we landed on the moon. So, um, so I just have to put that out there. So everyone will get angry and maybe just maybe some, maybe there’ll be a real like physicist out there that doesn’t believe we landed on the moon and can, um, wants to be on the show. That’d be great.
Speaker 1 | 38:00.150
In the comment section,
Speaker 0 | 38:01.731
right? Or there’s a whistleblower. Any whistleblowers out there, let me know. And then Phil disappears off the face of the earth. I’m not suicidal, so if I disappear, everyone can question that.
Speaker 1 | 38:11.915
Oh, man.
Speaker 0 | 38:12.695
What’s the endgame for IT people? What’s the sense there’s… Well, first of all, do you have mentors and everything? Because IT leadership, IT in general, has been something that has… It’s new. It’s somewhat… Technology really isn’t that old. um, you know, because 1969, we didn’t have, we definitely didn’t have, we landed on the moon, but we didn’t have internet really. We might’ve had ARPANET. I think we had ARPANET for a year, maybe two years into ARPANET. So what is the, what do you foresee the future? What do you see happening in the future? I mean, what’s the, what’s the end game for an IT director? Do you retire in Costa Rica? Do you just keep going?
Speaker 1 | 38:52.233
Far, far away from broadband.
Speaker 0 | 38:54.574
Yeah. Yeah. What is it? You know, like, yeah. Are you, yeah. Are you in a, what do they call those? A ute? Is it a ute? Is that right? What are those like styrofoam things and off the grid, you know, completely living off the grid? A ute.
Speaker 1 | 39:04.778
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 39:05.558
Thank you. I’m like a ute. I hope I didn’t trigger anyone there. What do you mean? It’s a ute. Yeah. What, what’s the end game?
Speaker 1 | 39:14.482
I mean, it’s a big question, right? I think, so I came from an MSP and I sort of proved to myself that I could do the MSP thing and I loved working for the MSP. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 39:26.363
and they used you as child labor, so that was good for them.
Speaker 1 | 39:29.925
Exactly.
Speaker 0 | 39:30.545
12 years old, they’re like, these kids know more about computers than all the other guys. They’re like,
Speaker 1 | 39:34.347
his hands are so dexterous. They continue to get all those mother-of-pearl gloves.
Speaker 0 | 39:38.890
He loves doing this. It’s like, let the kid play. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 39:44.413
destroying hardware was always fun too. I mean, I think I’m in a really good place right now. I sort of did the MSP thing. I had the clients complaining to me all the time. And now I sort of feel like I’m finding my groove internally. When I set policies, there’s no one from in a business coming back. giving me pushback on them. I think what you said about mentoring and having a mentor, yes, I have a mentor. I think it’s really important. My mentor sort of echoed this advice when I was at the crossroad in my career. Basically, what happened was we sold the MSP and I was presented with the decision to join the MSP that we sold to or to pursue this other opportunity as an IT director. And I sort of said, hey, you know, I’ve done the MSP thing. I can always go back into that world. The door is always opened. Let me see what it’s like in the world of internal IT. It’s definitely been different. Definitely a change, but I think it’s all been for the positive.
Speaker 0 | 40:48.769
Yeah, why not have something be more rewarding? Why not have, like you said, when you make a roadmap or make policies, that policy is in alignment with everybody?
Speaker 1 | 41:00.235
Yeah. Because if you didn’t, I couldn’t. Yeah, I really get the alignment from executives, and we’re able to drive change in a way we could just never do it through our QBRs with our clients as an MSP.
Speaker 0 | 41:12.577
You can’t do it because there’s going to be just the nature of the model itself is going to be misalignment because there’s not a one size fits all unless they’re able to say, let’s make. policies and procedures that are directly in alignment with your company. But I think that’s hard to do as an MSP because they themselves have to automate. They themselves have to be more nimble unless they really want to charge a lot more. And then the question is going to be like, well, do we want to be charged a lot more by an MSP or do we want to bring an internal guy in that can run the whole program for us? And the same thing happened to me. I was in the MSP small business world and I had a… personal mentor that said well who do you really like working with and i was like well i started thinking of all the people that i had a lot of fun with and they were all like it directors and teams and helped us teams at mid-market companies that were like you know i don’t know 200 to 10,000 end users or something like that because they know what an ip address is and there’s like a whole goal and something to achieve and move something forward versus you know menu of services and kind of one size fits all and you, you know, that type of thing.
Speaker 1 | 42:26.264
I mean, here’s the thing I’ll say. The, the experience that the MST brought to me was, it was incredible. You learn through a fire hose. You see so many different environments, right?
Speaker 0 | 42:35.710
Yeah. You learn, you learn who you love working with, who you don’t like working with.
Speaker 1 | 42:39.793
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 42:40.333
You learn, you learn what teams jive and what teams don’t jive. Yeah. You learn all of it. You get a very broad yet, which you need, which you need if you’re going to go to that.
Speaker 1 | 42:49.199
Exactly. But now being able to sort of back up and look at things strategically, it’s been great. Really, it’s been great. And my mentor was instrumental. My mentor is a serial entrepreneur who’s extremely successful, multiple exits to companies like Salesforce, Procter & Gamble. I mean, really successful guy. And he’s like, listen, even if you’re leaving money on the table here, you got to see what you can do. I mean, He’s like, I talk to people every day working at Facebook and Google who are going to startups with a lot bigger stakes. And I always tell them to go explore and see what it’s like out there with a startup or a different opportunity. Those opportunities that you had are still going to be there when you’re done. So I’m really glad I made the jump.
Speaker 0 | 43:38.376
Nice. And if you’re happy and somewhat free, there’s no amount of money you can really buy that. Honestly, if someone came to you today and said, Phil, we need you to come in. Phil, we need you to come in and take over this role. We’re going to give you $10 million a year. The answer 100% absolutely without a doubt would be no.
Speaker 1 | 43:56.907
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 43:57.467
10 million a year. 20 million a year. 100 million a year. I don’t care. 1 billion a year, I might think about that.
Speaker 1 | 44:02.951
We’re talking about it.
Speaker 0 | 44:04.772
1 billion a year. I’m like, well, maybe we can sacrifice for a little while. How long do I have to sign on for? No, but it’s really once you get to a certain point, there’s not. you know the is there anything that you’re really passionate about that would be very helpful to some of the listeners maybe some of the feedback you’ve had from mentors in the past things that were very unique to you or something that you know would be very valuable to share that
Speaker 1 | 44:30.630
isn’t just white noise i mean i’ll i’ll tell you my outlook on technology and i think it’s simple but it’s something that gets missed a lot my outlook is that we should use technology to make people’s lives simpler to make their jobs simpler I think a lot of people in IT get stuck in making things more complicated, actually. So my whole outlook is use technology and use it to make your life simpler and better.
Speaker 0 | 44:58.495
Yes. Yes. I mean, that’s pretty much like what… Apple claims to do, correct? Yeah. Like one button. I remember when I first saw the iPhone, I was like, one button? I was like, how? That doesn’t make any sense to me. I remember just thinking, like, no way. Because I had a Blackberry.
Speaker 1 | 45:16.312
People are always like, it doesn’t have a keyboard. What are they thinking?
Speaker 0 | 45:19.494
I had a Blackberry. Actually, I had two Blackberries.
Speaker 1 | 45:21.736
I had a Windows phone, actually, so.
Speaker 0 | 45:23.697
Okay, yeah. I was like, no buttons? Like, no physical buttons? I remember just like, nah, no way. These Blackberries. Blackberries are going to smoke them.
Speaker 1 | 45:35.169
I was at CES with my dad and he called me over and showed me the keynote and was like, what do you think? And I’m like, come on, this is nothing.
Speaker 0 | 45:46.419
I got my hard bulletproof plastic BlackBerry on the belt.
Speaker 1 | 45:51.143
20 years later.
Speaker 0 | 45:53.325
Yeah, yeah. And there was another IT manager that he didn’t have the… best he didn’t have the best choice of language he’s a guy you’re an eye douche now he’s like he’s going on one of those guys uh never i wonder if he has an iphone now um so yes uh this has been a pleasure having you on the show um i don’t know any final thoughts words of wisdom thanks for having me i think it was a lot of fun really great excellent sir and uh well thank you for being on dissecting popular itiners and uh please um you know, follow, get anyone out there listening, please refer our show to people. We’ve grown, we’ve had significant growth over the last year. We went from ranked 24th to 11th. Anyone out there share the show with, with all the listeners and you know, loom slack or a ninja was a ninja one.
Speaker 1 | 46:48.446
Ninja one.
Speaker 0 | 46:48.906
Yeah. We will accept your donations for spots to advertise on the show.
