Speaker 0 | 00:07.320
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, Paul Yader, I’m assuming I pronounced that correct.
Speaker 1 | 00:14.825
You got it, yep.
Speaker 0 | 00:16.366
Awesome. And CIO. And this is a new one, this is a special one. And head of HR at 84 Lumber. So that’s cool. I do need lumber, by the way. I’m assuming, is this a traditional lumber yard? Are we- Traditional lumber yard,
Speaker 1 | 00:35.348
right? Building material supplier. Yep. Whatever you need. Anything from doors, windows trimmed, dimensional lumber, OSB, drywall, roofing supply. Whatever you need, we got it. Come see us.
Speaker 0 | 00:45.958
Is this wholesale or stores or what are we doing? Can I just walk in?
Speaker 1 | 00:49.441
I mean, we do have a DIY and walk in. We’re a B2B, so we do large builders and national builders and regional builders and contractors, things like that. But we will absolutely- you know you can come to the store near you and pick up whatever you need our guys will take care of you so how many stores we have 310 in 37 states i think oh that’s not a very big network at all i mean that’s about 7 000 associates across the country right now it’s actually pretty sweet um you’re not doing like an erp migration or any type of new nightmare thing are you not right now we’re working on some ai code modernization of our point of sale but we’re early innings of that game just uh just pilot a couple of things in uh in a couple of stores but uh not particularly that crazy yet.
Speaker 0 | 01:29.637
That’s good. I only ask because I hear of all these ERP nightmares that just popped into my head when I hear 310 stores and I think of employees and I think of, I don’t know, just all the moving parts and I would never want to be involved. A guy on the show years ago said, you know, there’s two things that you have after ERP or there’s only one thing that happens after your ERP migration. He’s like, you either have a job or you do not. So.
Speaker 1 | 01:56.264
Yeah, we’ve got a custom-developed point-of-sale solution that the company runs on that’s been developed over about the last 30 years. So it’s a pretty phenomenal piece of customized software. It actually runs on C-Basic and on a Unix platform, so it is some pretty old stuff. But it does what we need it to do, and we’ve customized it, and we’ve got a great team that really has put blood, sweat, and tears into it from a development perspective. So we’re pretty fortunate to be able to control our own destiny to a degree and not be at the…
Speaker 0 | 02:22.038
Can a new guy coming into IT nowadays that…
Speaker 1 | 02:25.064
know the old stuff they can learn the old stuff they don’t typically know it because where did you go learn you know nobody’s teaching it anymore anywhere right so if it’s the young person that just came out of wherever they will they learn it i guess my question is i’m just curious will they learn it i so with the promise of hey we’re converting this thing to python or something new they will learn to figure out how to okay so i got to learn the old stuff to convert it to the new stuff typically and we’re working on that translation right now right we’re working on that magic ai box that will you know insert code here magic happens and out comes new, you know, Python code that runs on Unix in the same way that it runs today. So,
Speaker 0 | 02:57.995
so it is, it can happen.
Speaker 1 | 03:00.137
We believe it can happen. And we are down a road that we have done it on a couple of key programs. So we believe now we’ve got 500 more to go. So it’s early innings, like I said, but we do believe it’s possible. Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 03:11.845
There’s a, there’s a bunch of AI, there’s a bunch of AI people out there that get really excited about this stuff and love it. So that’s good. The speaking of old stuff, Let’s go back in time. IBM consultant in 1995. I graduated high school in 1995. What were we consulting on back then?
Speaker 1 | 03:32.734
Just for fun. Early innings of the SAP wave. So I was one of the, you know, the early, mid to late 90s, I was in the early innings of the SAP wave. So I came in as an SAP guy, did no SAP, learned the consulting gig. I was there when Lou was, you know, teaching elephants to dance and all that stuff, right? IBM was transitioning from a… hardware to a services company and i was in the services division it was actually ibm issc ibm services before it became ibm global services so um and was i went to the sap partner academy up in walton massachusetts for six weeks and learned obop and learned to do configuration of sap so it was the early innings of the sap days for ibm and working on they were internally implementing it so at one point um ibm was the largest customer of sap as well in addition to selling the services and the implementation consulting services
Speaker 0 | 04:18.860
Oh, Wolfham, a bunch of wicked mothers up there.
Speaker 1 | 04:21.521
There you go.
Speaker 0 | 04:22.722
A bunch of wicked, stupid mothers. I went to high school in Lowell.
Speaker 1 | 04:26.905
Oh, there you go.
Speaker 0 | 04:27.445
I remember my buddy ordered a pizza one time, and he said, can you make sure to bring change for a $1,000 bill, like joking around. The guy’s like, yeah, right, you wicked, stupid mother. Still got the pizza. So. I’m just, what was the consulting gig like back then? Like, what did you do? What would you do? Go in and ask people like, Hey, by the way, what are you doing for this? And how are you doing this? And can we help you? I mean,
Speaker 1 | 04:48.736
so it was early days, early days of the road war, right? So it was packed a bag on Sunday night and come back on Friday afternoon and hit the reset button. But, you know, it was really, okay, what are we doing from an ERP perspective? It was process work. So, okay, how do we do finance? How do we do inventory? How do we do supply chain today? How do we set up and convert to SAP? What business process changes do we have to do? So there was, you know, it was classic consulting, understanding current state, you know.
Speaker 0 | 05:13.712
Who do you meet with? How do you explain this? Waterfall.
Speaker 2 | 05:17.274
How did you, who did you,
Speaker 0 | 05:18.594
who do you meet with and how did you explain this? And were they even curious? And the reason why I ask is it’s so important on this show to translate technology to business and create this, I guess, you know, technology as a business force multiplier. So a lot of times. us technology people have to translate these technology terms and workings for the C-suite or people sitting around the executive round table. And that’s kind of one of the themes of the show is how does, how do you go from server room to boardroom, right? And how do you translate that for other executives? So how were you doing that back then? I’m not assuming, I’m assuming you didn’t just meet with someone that, oh yeah, we know about all this stuff and yeah, tell me some more. Or did you, did you have to sell as I guess my question?
Speaker 1 | 06:02.817
Yes and yes. I mean, so Back in those days, I mean, it was certainly large scale transformational projects that were going on. So everybody was taking folks out of the business full time, putting them on their SAP project team. And, you know, there was a finance team and a supply chain team and a materials management team and a sales distribution team and a cost forecasting team. And all those people probably put them in a room together and said, OK, we’re going to go redesign our business processes. And at that point, it was, hey, look, this is the way SAP does it. You need to change your business process to SAP. That was the beauty of the. erp back in the days was we’re going to get everybody on a single platform have visibility to what’s happening across the entire enterprise hence the enterprise resource planning platform and you know back then it was so disconnected that we had a finance system and we had a sales system and we had a crm and we had all these things that were disparate and there weren’t data warehouses back then so nobody had visibility to all of it somebody ran a bunch of reports and might have been able to plug it all together in excel so you were really looking for that how do i create you know things like material, you know, common item master and a common chart of accounts for finance and, you know, just, just things like a common pricing system were, you know, I’ll say.
Speaker 0 | 07:07.393
This was like low hanging fruit. This was like a dream come true back then. Sure.
Speaker 1 | 07:11.376
I mean, yeah. 20, 30 years later, it feels like, you know, okay, that what we, people weren’t doing that in 1995. No, they weren’t right. That was the, and that’s why there was a lot of failed SAP projects because it wasn’t easy back then. Right. Cause They got into a lot of customizations and people wanted to make sure that they could still do it the way that they want. And then you sort of got into the, well, if I’m really going to buy into this ERP vision of where we’re headed, we’ve got to be able to change our business. We think this is the package. And, you know, I don’t know, you could go quote the SAP stat. At one point they had, you know, 450 of the top five Fortune 500 companies were running SAP or something crazy like that. Right. I mean, so, you know, people were thinking boards were saying, hey, look, we think this is the right platform. Other folks have. I’ve picked this. Why aren’t we doing this? And how do we get there? But it was not. I mean, they were 18 month to two year projects. They were not in the days of agile and sprints and epics and things like that, where you show it to them. It was the classic, okay, we’re going to go away for X number of months and sit in a conference room and design it, right? Then we’re going to go build it. Then we’re going to test it. Then we’re going to implement it. Then we’re going to go live and we’ve got a whole change management training component of this thing that we’ve got to go do. So it was, you know, your long-term. heavy investment, significant dollars, significant people commitments. So yeah, it was no easy task and there was a lot going on back in those days.
Speaker 0 | 08:29.076
And what was the ROI like after these projects though?
Speaker 1 | 08:32.957
Yeah. I mean, so a lot of it, if you had, depending on where you came from, right? So if you had come up with, we’ve grown through acquisition and one level is running on one system, one level is running on another and we don’t have visibility to it. So it was tough to do things like production planning or… How much inventory do I need? And they were in disparate systems. So if you think about what life was like whenever I had five to 10 disparate business units that were all on some different platform that nobody had visibility to, nobody really knew what was going on. And the sales folks didn’t have visibility into what the inventory levels were. You couldn’t make a production plan based on what forecast or inventory needs you thought you had based on the sales demand. There were challenging business problems that were being solved by it. So- Yes, if you could get to the promised land, there was definitely benefits to be had. But it was no easy task to get from where you were to where you wanted to be, for sure.
Speaker 0 | 09:24.749
What was the WAN like back then?
Speaker 1 | 09:27.109
Well, I mean, it was client-server stuff, right? I mean, it was the old classic. I had a three-tiered architecture and that kind of stuff. I mean, it was back in those days, right? An app server and a… you know database server and uh and all you know if a client front end and you know it wasn’t web based or any of that kind of stuff back in those days right there was no like if you had multiple locations how do we communicate between them yeah they were all probably had a some kind of wan back to a centralized server somewhere but you know it was client you know very
Speaker 0 | 09:54.438
different very risky file yeah dial up i’m just wondering if i had like you know did they have a frame relay yet
Speaker 1 | 10:02.705
We have stuff like that. They did, and there was some modem stuff, right? All that kind of stuff back in the day, right?
Speaker 0 | 10:08.811
I should go back and rewrite my telecom history section. I need to do better on telecom history.
Speaker 2 | 10:15.997
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Speaker 0 | 11:59.324
why is my internet connection down?
Speaker 2 | 12:01.125
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Speaker 1 | 12:54.097
So these were big bang implementations, right? It was, okay, we’re going to go to all locations in one day. I’m going to go spend 18 months building it, and then we’re going to turn on 310 locations tomorrow, right? I think we learned that’s probably a recipe for disaster, right? Like, how do I get the proof of concepts? How do I get the pilot? People aren’t good at sitting in a room and telling you what they do and how it works. They’re good at seeing it, visualizing it. So give me something small. Do it in small chunks. How do I not make it some big monolithic thing that nobody’s got the patience to wait for? So I think what we’ve gotten better at is, you know, carve it up into manageable chunks, look for early wins, find success, get people involved, but show it to them. Don’t create a list of, you know, 100 enhancements that we need. They’re never going to use until they actually use it. You know, I think we’ve gotten better at some of that kind of stuff, right? I think we’ve gotten better at the code has gotten better where it’s not. So more configuration, more customization are available. That’s more standard then. Hey, look, there’s one way to do it. You’ve got to accept this way or the highway. I think we’ve gotten…
Speaker 0 | 13:52.709
You can do it. There’s a lot of low code, no code now that you can kind of like, yeah. Sure. I love that you said the big bang. I just, we’re putting together a, I don’t know how many of the shows you’ve listened to. I do not expect you to have listened to all 300 episodes of Dice, I could grab the right teeners. But we are skimming. We are using AI to scrape all the episodes. And Greg, the Frenchman, my producer behind the scenes and team with Adam, from the uk i have a bunch of like expats that are my producers um living in much better areas than i am uh but anyway they um are building a urban dictionary of it terms for id directors big big bang has got to go in there uh
Speaker 1 | 14:35.545
term used for i don’t know like you have to create the bingo cards for that right so they take it to the meeting and when somebody says it you just gotta say ah there you go
Speaker 0 | 14:43.611
Some of the other terms that have come up, let’s see, on the last episode, we had soap and sock for like, and we had another episode where you had, let’s see, hurting cats. That’s pretty normal. It’s like a term for end users, hurting cats. But there’s a lot. I mean, it was like pages and pages. We’re going to turn this into a book. It’s going to be. There you go. It’d be very. A board game. Very entertaining. Very entertaining.
Speaker 1 | 15:08.411
Sure. So,
Speaker 0 | 15:09.632
okay. What was, I don’t know. How’d you get stuck in this whole thing? I don’t want to say stuck, but most people that are a CIO or have been around that were in the nineties, like they didn’t, they didn’t grow up thinking I’m when I grow up, I’m going to be in a CIO because the term didn’t exist really. Did CIO even exist back then? I mean, maybe,
Speaker 1 | 15:26.622
I don’t probably, I don’t know. I mean, it was back in those days, right? I mean, I don’t even know that anybody thought about information systems or, you know, no, I mean, then it was certainly if it was the, the IT functions were probably buried under finance for sure.
Speaker 0 | 15:39.086
I mean, you were a poli sci, you had a poli sci degree. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 15:41.907
I mean, liberal arts degree. I mean, I have poli-sci and policy and management studies, which is poli-sci, ethics, and creative writing.
Speaker 0 | 15:50.435
I mean,
Speaker 1 | 15:51.195
so I’m a critical thinker. I learned to analyze those types of skills, communication skills. So first job out of college was actually at a bank. I did 401k plan administration and thought I wanted to get into consulting, but I had the job in January of my senior year and said, I’m going to take the bird in hand versus the two in the bush. Then about a year and a half into that, I got a call from IBM. Hey, we’re starting up this consulting division. It’s SAP. And sort of fell into it.
Speaker 0 | 16:14.442
So happy. I mean, really, I mean,
Speaker 1 | 16:17.024
IBM had a phenomenal training program. And I went to consulting workshops. I went to negotiation skills. I went to SAP. So they really taught me and I learned it. And there was a great training program where they took internal consultants and put them on internal SAP projects because they were implementing it. So I got some real no kidding school of hard knocks experience in implementing SAP internally at IBM. And then they turned me loose to.
Speaker 0 | 16:36.375
external consultants so um how much cooler is that though how much cooler is it you got a better education getting paid you got paid for a better education than you paid for an education if that makes sense it happened to me because my first job out of you know again creative writing degree i paid for that the um my first job out of college well my first real well actually it was working at fazoli’s which was fast casual italian and do you want breadsticks with that and then i worked my way up in the world of starbucks but Starbucks at the time was like trading ridiculous there. It was at like one of the higher points of the Starbucks, you know, trajectory. They threw all kinds of money at us for management training and yeah, leadership training and learning how to read PNLs and business analysts and this type of stuff. It was great. It was a better education than if I had gone on a small business course at whatever, you know.
Speaker 1 | 17:26.357
You know, I would say the one thing in my career too, I’ve been very fortunate. There’s lots of great mentors, right? People that took me under their wing. taught me i learned from i could ask questions too um and i had an early i can still remember i was the green bean consultant at ibm and there was the you know 20 something year grizzled consultant from digital equipment i mean he was a deck guy and he taught me all the things that i needed to know about clients and how to do this and you know things like hey look you’ll get your hertz gold card so you don’t have to wait in line whenever you’re you know getting the rental car and things like that right simple things like how to fill out an expense report i’m like what do you mean expense report like what is this um so no just and then Along the way, just working for some great people, working on some great teams. These SAP projects were big deals. And a lot of the key projects, one of the things in IT is you’re working a lot across business. You’ve said it a couple of times, but you’ve got to be able to speak business speak. I’m not a technologist for technology. I’m not a bright, shiny object kind of guy. It’s got to solve real, no kidding business problems. As a CIO, I say things like, I don’t want to do IT to you or for you. I want to do IT with you. It’s got to be a partnership. If you were… doing it for someone, you’re just in their way. I don’t know. We’re waiting for those it guys to go upgrade this thing or do this thing. If it’s true partnership and you are, you know, this, this project is one of the top five priorities on the business radar. That’s how you set up for success. And that’s the kind of things it’s gotta be. It’s gotta be a partnership. It’s gotta be a relationship. You’ve gotta have real, no kidding commitment. And you gotta be able to reach across the aisle and say, Hey, look, here’s what we did, right. Here’s what we’re doing wrong. Here’s what we need. Here’s where we’re at. You know,
Speaker 0 | 18:55.092
that might be the quote of the show. I don’t do it to you or for you. I do it for you. um with you with you with you that was a fake yeah see fairly profound yet simple and i’m sure a lot of people would agree with that how the heck are you head of hr at the same time did we just did someone just realize like hey who needs hr let’s just give it to let’s just give it to it let’s see it and i hr come on that can be handled by ai bots or something like that how’d you end up with that so so i report to the chief operating officer and uh
Speaker 1 | 19:27.222
So about a year and a half into this IT journey, I came in. What’s my mission here at 84 Lumber? It was IT transformation. Come in, assess, where are we? What’s going on? Understand. I say, God gave me two ears and one mouth. I like to use them in that ratio. So go listen, go see stores, go talk to people, go figure out what’s happening. What do they need? Where can we help? Find some early wins. So about a year and a half into that, chief operating officer says, hey, you’re doing a pretty good job over there. We just lost the head of HR. I’m not sure what we’re going to do there. I could see the stress that was putting on him. I’m like. So somewhere between I volunteered and I was asked, depending on whose story you believe, I said, you know what? Hey, look, our people are our most important asset. We want to become more modern, more contemporary on the HR side. Would you take a look at it? Would you be willing to try this thing? And I raised my hand and said, hey, look, I’ll take this thing because it’s something that we need, something that we want to do. And let’s become more contemporary, more modern. And so how does that happen? I mean, I think what I would tell you is I’ve got really great teams on both sides. You know, you’ve got to have great people that you work with and that are on the team on the IT side that lets you take on something like HR. And then you’ve got to have good, real, no kidding, HR professionals on the HR side that, you know, keep us where we need to be from a people perspective, a talent management perspective, a recruiting perspective, an HR operations perspective. You know, and then it’s really just getting them what they need, right? I would tell you, you know, pick good teams, pick good people, get them the resources that they need, get the barriers out of the way and let them do what they need to do and help people be successful every day, right? Help our- Actually,
Speaker 0 | 20:49.841
it makes no sense. It makes a lot of sense on a lot of levels.
Speaker 1 | 20:52.407
It’s really two service organizations, right? You are serving the internal customers of this company, the 7,000 people that are helping our customers every day. How do you give them the technology that they need? How do you get the right people in the right jobs that they need? How do you get them the training that they need? Get them the benefits that they need. Get them the HR processes that they need and get things out of the way and help them be successful and help it be easy to do what they need to do.
Speaker 0 | 21:12.843
A lot of requests, a lot of Mac requests come from HR anyways and go directly to IT. So there you go. I just cut the… I don’t know, just shortened that distance or whatever. It makes sense on a lot of levels. But even crazier is I would imagine HR has to have a lot of empathy and understanding. Is this my correct understanding of this or not? All I remember, I can only think of HR in my old companies in the past. Like you went to HR when you had a complaint or something like that. So do you have to deal with any of that?
Speaker 1 | 21:41.335
Yeah, I mean, we’re dealing with employee relations every day, right? There are people that need something and we’re here to help them and help our managers navigate the situation. Help. employees navigate the situation you know whatever the situation might be who yeah it could be anything right 7 000 people somebody needs some help somewhere every day and how do we help them get what they need get pointing the right direction whether that’s you know how do i find a doctor i don’t know understand my hours on my paycheck uh you know hey i want to refer somebody to work here whatever that might be right i got a manager that needs to help coach somebody up or put somebody you know get somebody in in some other situation or recruiting you know how do i find we’ve got hires and needs and what how do we find the right person for this role those types of things so yeah somebody’s helping somebody get something done on the hr side every day in this place let’s talk about recruiting for a second because there’s we have this debate a lot do um certifications matter in
Speaker 0 | 22:32.416
it and then you have a lot of people complaining on the security front uh you know people applying for security jobs and uh you need you know you’ve seen a job whatever advert i don’t even know why that term came to my mind, but it did. You see something online, you know, Hey, we’re going to apply for this job. You need so many years of experience. You need this, this, and this. And people get really frustrated because they may have a lot of security experience and they may be the right person fit for the job, but they don’t fit all these different requirements and everything. So I would imagine you as CIO can understand that. But then also as head of HR have to hire people. So I’m always under the opinion that if you really want a job, you should go fight for it and find the person that’s hiring or find the person that you would be working for, reach out to them, connect with them, see if you can help them in any way, offer to work for free, do something like that and get your job that way. But you were speaking with someone that actually has to hire people and do that. So how do we deal with that conundrum of, well, we got to put out a meets expectations or qualifications or this, that, and everything else, but we may miss people that are good fits.
Speaker 1 | 23:40.400
Yeah. I mean, I would tell you, I think we think about things a little differently here. I mean, we would tell you. you know, let me take the technology piece for a side. Let me talk about general stores. And then, you know, 95% of our store leadership team started out as a manager trainee. That’s our entry-level position. We would tell you, you don’t need to know anything about construction or how to swing a hammer. We will teach you this industry, teach you this profession, teach you how to do what you need to do. We’ve got an onsite training facility that’s booked 50 out of 52 weeks a year. We put several thousand folks through that. We’ve got an LL learning management solution that we put even more thousands of hours on, you know, very structured, very process oriented. And then we take all that and map it with on-the-job training and teaching you, you know, phenomenal people that understand this industry and are willing to teach people and figure out how to do this. So, you know, that’s what I would say separates 84 Lumber, if I take us generically from anywhere else, I think. you know, fitting our culture is probably number one. So, you know, let me, that’s the store side. That’s the, how do we hire, you know, several thousand folks every year to get into this. And it’s about the opportunity, right? We believe that if we can find smart people, put them in the right place and teach them this industry, and they’re willing to work hard, you know, low ego, not worried about killing whoever, just willing to come in, roll up the sleeves, get her done kind of place. We can teach you this industry and you can be highly successful. We’ve got folks that, you know, come in as our entry level and could be managing their own store in three years. But it’s got to be a person that’s willing to bet on themselves, willing to work hard, committed, willing to learn, humble enough to figure out they need to learn, ask lots of questions and really commit to it. So that’s what I think separates 84 Lumber from other places that I’ve been is, we’ll teach you this thing and we can make you successful if you’re willing to bet on yourself and work hard. Now those first two years are going to be tough. You’re going to do things from working with customers, learning how to do takeoffs, learning the construction industry, learning all the products and materials and vendors that we have. And you may have to load trucks and unload trucks. You might be loaded windows. You might have to go to a job site. I mean, there’s tons of different things. You’re going to learn a lot, but it’s going to be not necessarily easy work those first couple of years, right? You’re going to learn how to run a P&L. You’re going to learn how to drive sales. You’re going to learn how to run operations, how to manage inventory, all those kinds of things.
Speaker 0 | 25:47.357
Cost of goods sold. Cap ex, op ex, flow through profit.
Speaker 1 | 25:52.832
Yeah. I would tell you, if you called one of my store managers today, they probably know what their monthly network charge is for that store per month. That’s how well they know their P&L.
Speaker 0 | 26:00.918
Well, here’s what I can tell you right now. You have a store 36 miles from my house. No, 36 minutes from my house. I’m reading the Google reviews right now. My experience was very pleasant. There you go. The new store manager, Michael, helped me immensely to answer. all my millions of questions. He was very kind and knowledgeable. We’ll definitely use this company in the future. So shout out to Michael, Plainville, Connecticut.
Speaker 1 | 26:26.416
There you go.
Speaker 0 | 26:27.397
That was a producer stock. Yeah. Hey, Mike. Good job. Let’s see. What else do we have in here? Anyone else? Beginning the search from my pre-hung entry door with side lights, we decided to think outside the box store. After visiting the Too Big, we went to 84 Lumber. What do you think they said?
Speaker 2 | 26:46.898
Michael answered our questions honestly and knowledgeably.
Speaker 0 | 26:49.320
There is limited samples. Wait a second. There’s more from this on Michael, especially in glass. Found similar issues in box store, especially in classic connection. I expect it will be a cost prohibitive option. I don’t know. We’re getting prices, but whatever. Five-star review, Michael again. Michael, you’re all over your reviews here. This is good. Shop during my year.
Speaker 1 | 27:09.558
I would say this. Coming from outside the industry, it’s a pretty complex industry. People think, oh, it’s… It’s two by fours in dimensional lumber. How complicated could it be, man? It’s a whole lot more complicated than you might think. I mean, product knowledge is one of the, if you think about the two things that our new hires say that are the biggest kill to climb is product knowledge is one because there’s so many different products. How do I sell them? Where are they used? You’ve got all the different species of lumber and building code issues and those kind of things that make it complex. And then systems is the other one. But I would argue people always say learning systems is a challenge because if you don’t know how to find something or where to search for it, it takes a lot to learn. Products and systems, right?
Speaker 0 | 27:44.227
Yes. Last review, great customer service and true American values. Awesome. You guys are awesome.
Speaker 1 | 27:50.293
Thanks for sharing this. I’m going to reach out to Michael as soon as we’re done here.
Speaker 0 | 27:53.536
We’re like, hey, guess what? I was on a podcast today. This crazy bearded dude was calling you out, reading your reviews. No, it’s awesome. So. Uh, so again, how’d you get started in this whole thing anyway? So we never kind of got to that. We got to the IBM thing, but like, what was your first computer? How would you play around with like, how’d this, I mean,
Speaker 1 | 28:12.553
I was, I’m going to date myself here now, but I was a TSA radio shack guy back in the high school days. Right. So there’s a, and I was back when you didn’t have a monitor. Well, there was ones in school that were plugged into the monitor, but the one at home was the, you know, hook it up to the TV, be it the cable switching box and, you know, all that kind of stuff. Right. So, you know, I think my first program that I wrote was, you know, make a snowman do something or whatever. Right. But that was that whole wave. And then went into consulting piece. And the road warrior sounded really cool when I was 20-something and traveling on somebody else’s expense account and learning a ton, but just got tired of that and said, look, I want to get off the road. I wanted to work my way back to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was home for me. So I worked my way back to Pittsburgh. I wanted to get my MBA. I thought about going to business school right out of college and decided I got some good advice from a mentor there and said, hey, why don’t you get some work experience? first, you might get somebody to pay for it. And both of those were true. I think I got more out of it after having worked for a while. So ended up at Heinz, which was an SAP customer. Spent some time there. Got my MBA while I was there. Learned a ton. Helped them roll out SAP as their finished goods inventory management solution. Got into the data warehousing and business analytics side of it. Did a lot of different stuff.
Speaker 0 | 29:17.760
Then along came the- As in the ketchup?
Speaker 1 | 29:20.083
Ketchup. 57 varieties.
Speaker 0 | 29:22.065
Is that your favorite ketchup?
Speaker 1 | 29:23.606
definitely my favorite ketchup my wife was that down at someplace the other day and they had hunts ketchup on the on the uh thing and she’s like what’s this place man we’re in pittsburgh like who’s doing this um so yeah heinz ketchup is still the uh the flavor of choice for the it’s always thinking why have they not made the big ketchup packet yet because whenever i go to like whatever like any place and you get heinz ketchup and if it’s a ketchup packet it’s like these little packets got open like five six of them why can’t they just make one big ketchup packet i just figured like that would be
Speaker 0 | 29:51.766
That’d be like the thing. Let’s just get the big packet. No, not the little thing.
Speaker 1 | 29:55.187
Yeah. Come on. Nah,
Speaker 0 | 29:57.108
nah. It always like, it always blows up on me or something and makes a mess. No, just make one big packet. That’s like four packets in one. That’s my advice to Heinz. Maybe we can get that out to them.
Speaker 1 | 30:09.053
There you go. Uh,
Speaker 0 | 30:10.553
what’s the game for ID?
Speaker 1 | 30:12.214
Go ahead. Game for IT. I’m sorry. Then the Dick’s sporting goods thing came up. So, uh, you know, hair on fire there. That I was there when we were growing like crazy. We were building it to last. Um, really fun. I mean, it’s great people. Great, great fun. You know, we’re about a hundred.
Speaker 0 | 30:24.981
Another dictionary term, hair on fire. We need to get hair on fire. How would you describe it? If you saw hair on fire as it relates to IT, how would you define that?
Speaker 1 | 30:34.068
Yeah. Just running around like crazy and more, more to be done that can ever be done. You know, why aren’t we doing that yet? Where are we at with that? Okay. What do we do? We’re rolling this out doing that. I mean, we were open 50 stores, you know, whatever, just multiple distribution centers, you know, all that kind of crazy stuff. A real supply chain journey at that point. built a great team, worked with great people, lots of great mentors there, just a lot of fun, great leaders, really connected to it. I mean, they care about sports and passionate and it was a lot of fun. And I became the number two guy in IT there and wasn’t sure when my boss was going to hit the lottery or sail off on the sunset. So I got the calls all the time. How about Texas? How about California? How about here, there? And I’m like, nah, I’m a Pittsburgh guy. I don’t really think so. And one day I got the call about, hey, how about Pittsburgh? It’s got specialty retail and and cpg manufacturing and it was general nutrition centers and it was a cio gig and took that on did that for about three and a half almost four years um leading an it function there it transformation and enjoyed my time there go ahead so what would your advice be to um and
Speaker 0 | 31:34.284
gnc um should we um i was gonna say should we take steroids My answer would be yes, I think we should in our older ages. I do think we should take anabolic steroids. That has nothing to do with GNC, but you would go get your ancillary products there as well.
Speaker 1 | 31:50.382
I would say there is a play for supplements. I was a believer before and I’m a believer after. There is a role for supplements, whether that’s everybody needs a multivitamin, everybody needs to take fish oil, everybody needs a probiotic, everybody needs some kind of protein probably to keep yourself healthy. Yes, I would still say I’m a believer in the things of GA. There you go.
Speaker 0 | 32:07.709
I have this new amazing doctor. um, he recommended, I get this, um, reverse heart disease now book. I’m only sharing this with us because again, um, Oh, Clinton, uh, Clinton from air spring. He said that, um, sitting is the new smoking. And, uh, I, I just such a great, it is, you know, it really is. And as it people, I have, I have, um, I have the neck book. So we deal with like neck issues. If you don’t have good posture, unless you’re like a Walker and you’re walking around there, you probably are maybe. But, um, a lot of us end up
Speaker 1 | 32:38.586
sitting a lot of us end up sitting a lot just for the neck bad for the back i would agree yeah and then there’s the health piece but um you said just since you brought up vitamins coq10 i guess yep good for all that good right like big heart if you so if you want a podcast right you’re a podcast guy peter atia the drive would be the podcast i would recommend for you or for the folks and buck joffrey from sapio so those are some new longevity podcasts that are on my uh Okay,
Speaker 0 | 33:08.822
repeat that one more time. What are those both again?
Speaker 1 | 33:11.443
Sapio, Buck Joffrey.
Speaker 0 | 33:13.605
I don’t know how you spell that. How would I even Google that?
Speaker 1 | 33:16.346
S-A-P-I-O. Just go to Apple or Google Play and do Sapio. Yep, gotcha. And then Peter Attia, his book is Outlive, and his podcast is The Drive. His is a bit more technical and a bit deeper, but he’s a smart, smart guy with great, great. They both have good guests, and I would say it’s longevity and wellness and health. related podcasts. So if you’re looking for something to do on your, when you get up and go do your two mile walk at lunchtime tomorrow, you can listen to those podcasts.
Speaker 0 | 33:44.011
Sitting is the new smoking. So we got to throw that. We got to add some of that. We’re going to add some of that in here for, for us, it folk, because if you don’t die in your job in Pittsburgh, which Pittsburgh is a very interesting city, by the way, I do like, I happen to like Pittsburgh, um, had a good pizza there one time, but, um, You guys have that big medical building, medical school or something there too, right?
Speaker 1 | 34:08.010
UPMC, which is affiliated with University of Pittsburgh. Yep. And then Highmark is here as well. So you’ve got sort of the Allegheny Health Network as well. So there’s two big healthcare for sure.
Speaker 0 | 34:17.298
When I think of Pittsburgh, I think of like… bare knuckle boxing and stuff, you know, and like, it’s kind of like.
Speaker 1 | 34:23.615
Really made some transformation. I would say there’s still that blue collar, hard work ethic commitment. There’s still that here from the old Rust Belt days, but has really transformed itself into technology, healthcare, higher ed, you know, there’s still some manufacturing around. Oh,
Speaker 0 | 34:39.648
great city.
Speaker 1 | 34:40.128
But in things like lumber and building materials are here as well, but a cool city, good people, you know, good Midwestern. Yeah. I’d say it’s got the benefits of the. fast-paced northeastern culture but of some of the benefits of the midwestern you know good people well hey how’s it slow down yeah yeah it does begin to slow down it’s not a bunch of wicked stupid mothers out there you know that’s right from waltham you know and denim denim guy you know i’m from massachusetts i’m allowed to goodwill hunting i’m from worcester i’m from worcester okay not from southie no
Speaker 0 | 35:10.098
no no what’s do we have yeah it really it’s really interesting because you can travel all throughout massachusetts and either hit the accent or not you know what i mean at
Speaker 2 | 35:18.764
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Speaker 0 | 37:34.328
and we’ll get right on it for you.
Speaker 2 | 37:35.888
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Speaker 0 | 37:38.330
So you’ve made a lot of good career jumps. What is your suggestion to anyone out there listening that’s trying to grow in the world of IT? Because I think a lot of times you can be making poor decisions, but maybe you made good career jumps because you had good opportunities because you did things right in your current role, right? So I don’t know, what would your, you’re as a mentor, what would your three big points be? Your three biggest points. Do IT with you? I mean, I don’t know. What is it?
Speaker 1 | 38:02.343
I mean, I think that’s why I think, you know, what are people looking for? People are looking for folks who can solve problems, be a problem solver, raise your hand, take on that big role, get on that key project, find the right, you know, you’re going to know what the big project is, what’s going on. You know, I think communication and the soft skills are key and important as well. You’ve got to be able to communicate. You can be the best. There’s a role for the best program or the best network guy. Don’t get me wrong. Like we, you need those as well. But if you really want to get to a leadership level, it’s learn the business, understand the business, learn how to solve business problems with technology. That’s what I would tell you differentiates you, which means communication skills. That means the ability to solve problems, the ability to look at here’s the problem, here’s the solutions, here’s the pros and cons of those three solutions, and really be able to sell your ideas to other folks from a communication and style perspective. Right.
Speaker 0 | 38:54.332
What would you say to somebody? What would you say to somebody? That may be, have been in the server room for a long time and might not have the communication soft skills or may just be intimidated by that type of thing. Is there any, any courses, ideas, things we can do? Is it just get out of your comfort zone and deal with it and get comfortable being uncomfortable and fail forward? I mean, did you learn that along the way? Was it the IBM thing? Did you just kind of always have it naturally or what was it? Because I know I didn’t. Here I am running a podcast somehow now.
Speaker 1 | 39:23.017
Yeah, right. I mean, I think it is get out there, communicate, right? I mean, I would say cross the aisle. If you’re an infrastructure guy, you said guy in the server room, right? Talk to the apps guys, right? Get on that app side of the house as well and be able to understand what are they doing? Why are they trying to do it? How does what I do in the server room impact that, right? Like, don’t just be the, look, I got the operating system. I did, you know, I ran stats on the database. I understand what’s going on. I know what’s happening, right? Understand how you fit into the bigger picture and what that means. Ask questions. Learn. Right. Learn the business. Right. Go sign up for the trade rag. Read what’s going on in the business. What does interest rates, how do interest rates impact your industry? What does that mean to you? Right. Do you understand what your servers are running? Who uses the stuff that you’re building every day? Right. And how does it impact them? What are they doing with it? And start to get into the, okay, I’m really good at what I do. And how does it fit? How does it fit into the broader organization? What does it impact? What does it mean? Hey, if this thing goes down, what happens, right? Like, okay, somebody’s got, you know, you hopefully you understand what, where you fit on the recovery and disaster recovery matrix and all those kinds of things. But what does it really mean to the business and how does it fit and who’s using it and what are they doing with it and some of those kinds of things. And then the application side of it. And then how are they serving our customers, right? Start from the customer and work your way back to this server and how does it impact our end customer and where are the steps and stages along the way that helps you understand that. and figure that out and start to talk about that talk to your talk to your peers about it talk to your manager about it talk to other folks about it go to the lunch and learns right if you’ve got that where the business folks are talking about what’s going on right ask questions those kind of things is what i would tell you that sounds like great great advice the
Speaker 0 | 41:04.054
trade rag it’s trade rag it’s good um but also baby steps it sounds like it sounds like you know communicate with the people inside your department like just yeah like inside your department to begin with i mean in your case it’s like go communicate with HR. And then when they quit, you got a new job also. I mean, you know, cause you’re very wide.
Speaker 1 | 41:26.563
The real guidance that people have given me and I would give people is you’re in charge of your career, right? Have the conversation, have the developmental conversation with your manager, right? What do you want to be? What else can you do? What can you take on? You know, what developmental opportunities are out there for you, right? If you make your boss look good and you solve problems, people are going to recognize you. People are going to figure you out, right? That’s good. There’s, I mean, right. How many problems you have to solve in a day, right? Somebody’s got some kind of problem. And if you’re the guy that everybody comes to to solve problems, you’re that you’re going to be the powerful guy. You’re going to be the important guy. You’re going to be the guy that gets opportunities, right? What’s the saying, right? Do you want to get something done? Give it to the business guy in the room, right? So those kinds of things happen. Those are real, but, and be patient would be another thing. It doesn’t happen overnight. Right. I think what, you know, not to be the old guy, right. But I think people want this instant gratification right now. I think you’ve got to figure out What does that plan look like? What does that developmental roadmap look like? What’s my responsibility? What do I have to do? You’re not checking box to get the next promotion. You’re trying to figure out how you grow and develop as a person, as an employee, as a, and it’s gotta be things that you’re passionate about, right? If you can link passion with the job that you’re doing, right, that’s the ultimate holy grail, right? That’s something, if you, you know, do something that you love and that you’re passionate about, I think, you know, you’ll never work a day in your life, right? That’s easy to say. It’s hard to do, but. Right. What am I?
Speaker 0 | 42:43.264
We have a lot of jobs that we need to do. Like, I mean, a lot of times we do jobs that pay the bills to like if it pays a lot of money. You know what I mean? It might not be like the most glory job in the world, but if it pays a ton of money, I mean. Sure. I mean, Jeff Bezos was selling was selling books online and, you know, getting made fun of out of his garage for a while. I guess you could say he loved it. And now at the end of the day, he’s basically a very big merchant. I’m sure he’s pretty happy.
Speaker 1 | 43:10.028
Absolutely. But I mean, I think, what am I passionate about? I’m passionate about helping people, right? Finding ways to have technology, help people do their job better, be more. And you can say, that’s be more productive. That’s leverage technology. That’s serve your customer better. That’s lower cost. All those things are true, but I’m not here to say, well, do I think AI is going to change the world? I do think AI has the huge potential to change the world, but I am not a bright, shiny object guy. Like what are the use cases? Where does it make sense? How are we going to apply it? Right? Is it scary? Do we need to do it? Do we need to put guardrails up? Sure. right? Is it going to take over the world tomorrow? No. Right. But you know, I think if you find ways to help people do what they do better, they adopt technology, right? Change management is not easy, right? People do the same thing over and over every day that that’s called a habit, right? How do you change that habit? It takes time. It takes commitment. It takes understanding. It takes communication. It takes knowledge. Um, you dig what’s in it for me, right?
Speaker 0 | 44:01.351
You did say you did have a piece of advice there that someone else that another mentor gave you that I think was very, very valuable and just things that I’ve been thinking about as you’ve talking which is you’re very balanced um so like you didn’t just kind of do all your schooling at once you kind of step toed up here and then made this jump and then when did you get your mba by the way
Speaker 1 | 44:19.004
I did. I got my MBA in IT and strategy. So I did get the depth.
Speaker 0 | 44:22.105
So you ended up getting, but you didn’t end up going in right away. Like where I’ve seen some people go all the way, get their PhD right away. And then they’ve done years and years and years and years of schooling and nothing against someone that has a PhD, because that’s very difficult. You know, I’m not, nothing is, but then there’s a certain level of expectation was like, well, I have a PhD. I should come right into the job market at this level. And that’s not actually realistic because you don’t have any real life experience. I don’t. care if you have a PhD or not. That’s what I would be thinking as a business owner. I do care that you have a PhD because it shows that you’re dedicated, you’re smart, you’re a hard worker and everything. But I also need to now test you in real life scenarios, real life scenarios. I can’t just, you know, you’re not just all of a sudden the CIO because you have a PhD, because there’s all these things that you had to learn along the way. And like you said, hair on fire and numerous other terms that we should have that you had to go through and learn and experience to get that level. So. What I would like to know is, did you have to sell yourself from VP of IT to CIO, or did someone already come knocking on the door and say, we need a CIO, and we think you’d be a good fit for it?
Speaker 1 | 45:27.176
I think you had to have the chops and the experience and the resume and the skill set and exactly what you described. It says, look, here’s the things that I’ve done that prove I’m ready. And then you needed somebody willing to bet on you. You needed somebody willing to say, okay, we think this is the opportunity. I don’t need a sitting CIO. I want somebody that I think is ready to be the next. great cio and we’re going to take a chance on them right what what are the moving parts for that what are the kind of um like what would you say like well-rounded parts like what would you say hey you need to know some of this you need to know some of this and some of this and then you know yeah i mean i think it’s you got to be able to talk about you know so let’s go through a couple right you’ve got to be able to say here are the transformational projects that i’ve led here’s the success here’s what we’ve delivered on so that would be one i think it’s here’s how I built out an organization. So I understand what a world-class organization looks like. I understand what the metrics to run that and operate that look like. I understand, I’ll use the term financial stewardship, right? So somebody is going to grace me with a pretty large, probably operational budget, a pretty large capital budget, and probably a pretty big team and a lot of resources. Do you know how to manage those three things very successfully? I think then it is, can you sit at an executive table and… represent and run an IT function very well, but speak business speak and understand what the business is looking like. I mean, I was fortunate enough that at GNC, whenever we were doing some key strategic changes, I was selected to transform our customer loyalty program, right? So we relaunched the gold card and I was partnered with the marketing person. I was the person at the executive table that was responsible for designing that, building that and relaunching that thing. Now there was certainly a technological component of it. And there was a very close partnership. with the CRM team and the loyalty team and all those kinds of things and the store operations team. But you’ve got to be able to sit at the table and say, okay, I represent my function, but I’m also a business leader. I think that’s what makes a really successful CIO. And it’s about how do we leverage technology to drive the business, whether that’s growth, operational efficiency, supply chain excellence, whatever the business strategies are, here’s how that IT fits in into that piece and component.
Speaker 0 | 47:33.707
Paul? been a absolute pleasure having you on the show um it’s uh i mean a wealth of knowledge a wealth of knowledge a lot to um i guess decompress from and there’s a lot that people are going to be able to take away from this so um i’m thanking you for all the people out there listening and please shout out to michael got it we got you know shout out to michael um thank you so much for being on dissecting popular it nerds appreciate the time thank you i enjoyed it it was fun
