Speaker 0 | 00:05.537
Welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, talking with Sunny Singh. I’m assuming I pronounced that correct, right? You did,
Speaker 1 | 00:13.539
you did. Yo,
Speaker 0 | 00:14.259
wicked awesome guy, by the way, coming straight out of Dedham, Massachusetts. You know, don’t say anything wrong, we’ll hit you with the, I don’t know, soap bar and sock or something, you know? You running into any of those people over there?
Speaker 1 | 00:25.582
Who have been out the Boston accent there?
Speaker 0 | 00:27.463
Yo, I grew up in Worcester, dude. Uh, right now. I grew up in Worcester, which is like, yeah, I don’t know. Don’t you guys make fun of Worcester or something? Someone’s got to make fun of Worcester. And there’s got to be some Worcester jokes or something.
Speaker 1 | 00:37.447
Yeah, was it the Adam Sandler album? Oh,
Speaker 0 | 00:41.549
yeah.
Speaker 1 | 00:42.849
Welcome to Worcester. Dollar 45.
Speaker 0 | 00:46.051
Dollar 45, please. Hey, Father Michael. Oh, yes. You brought me back in time. So, you know, so, but anyways, you know. IT director, I don’t know how many, how’d you get started in IT by the way? Let’s just go there. You know, you’re in Boston. I don’t know what happened. What was it been 20 years ago or how long ago was it that you got into IT? Let’s see. I can maybe do a little bit of cyber stocking here. Technical analyst back in 2010. Let’s see. I mean, what’s your journey been like prior to back in the, did you ever have a BlackBerry?
Speaker 1 | 01:23.124
I did. Funny, funny story. Growing up, I was always a nerdy kid. I was always into gadgets. It started with calculators, TI-83, downloading the games onto the calculators, all that kind of stuff. It was kind of dumb, but started with that. Grew into a love for cell phones. I worked in sales in the telecom industry for a little bit.
Speaker 0 | 01:46.161
Where was that? Where was that?
Speaker 1 | 01:48.522
I was actually one of those mall rats.
Speaker 0 | 01:50.124
in the middle we would we’d be at the kiosks in the middle of the mall yeah oh yeah you guys are oh so you guys are hardcore you guys are the hard wars you were the one that you would like point at someone randomly like like 100 yards away like yeah you yeah you over here what do you got hey what kind of what kind of phone you got man what’s going on that’s 100 call that no what do you got there is that an iphone is that iphone 11 oh man let’s come on that’s gross dude fine you need like an iphone 13 come on just come over here what are you paying i go a little further back than that we were just nokia
Speaker 1 | 02:19.344
and like color screens had just come out. That was a big thing. But, you know, the greeting that, you know, we had a saying, you know, you don’t greet, you don’t eat, right? You don’t have enough money to go to food court. You don’t have any commissions to go to food court, get yourself a nice burger. You know, greet, you don’t eat. We did the finger, you know, you won’t see on the podcast, but, you know, one guy just put his finger very delicately, gentle, you know, this, excuse me. Yes, you. Yeah, yeah. One second, one second. We call it the finger, you know.
Speaker 0 | 02:52.166
One second, mess, please. One second. Okay. So my first, okay. This is going to be fun. I can already tell this is going to be fun because I had my first gig was, well, outside of retail. I was a Starbucks store manager and I was like, I can’t do this for the rest of my life. I just can’t do this. I’m going to be miserable. So I took a job at a Cisco startup and it was like hardcore business to business sales. And I’m, I remember like the first day I’m like, what did I get myself into? And I was like, well, I don’t know. But if I, if I don’t, if I don’t greet, my family’s not going to eat. So I learned right away, like how to sell this, like, you know, Cisco 2800 series. I add to small businesses and this whole package. We’re like, Hey, have you ever thought about accessing your files from home? They’re like, no, what’s that? It’s this crazy thing. It’s called a VPN. And, uh, and we’re like, Hey, are you backing up your files? What’s that? no you don’t what do you mean you don’t back up your files like well for only 400 a month we’re going to give you 256 megs or something 400 you know but like i really did i really i really kind of like cut my like i don’t know feed or whatever on really helping small businesses and because i came from running a small business and running a really uh like a coffee shop that was did like 1.2 million a year. Like I really knew PNLs and how to help small businesses use technologies to me. Like I was really passionate about it, but we had a guy on my team that was the cell phone kiosk guy in the store. And I loved it. And we used to laugh. We used to just talk so much, but you, he used to do the finger, but he would just point at someone like as far away as possible. Like you, you’d be like, what, what do you mean me? Yeah. You come, yeah. Come here, come here, come here, come here. And we’re like, you know, what kind of phone you got there? You know? And, uh, So tell me a crazy story. You must have a crazy story. You must have crazy people. They probably hired everyone that was willing to take the job. You must have some crazy stories. Let’s come on. Best story.
Speaker 1 | 04:47.960
Best story. It was my best sales story.
Speaker 0 | 04:50.402
I should start a podcast. I should start a podcast. That’s just crazy sales stories that no one would ever believe, you know, and it would be hilarious. It would put the wolf of wall street to shame. It would put that movie to shame. And I, I hate people that like are like scumbag, like, you know, just like, you know, I truly, I truly do believe that America was built upon like good commerce and good salespeople. And I also believe that every. 80% of all the salespeople in the world probably have ruined it for the rest of the people that actually are sales professionals and good high character people. But with that being said, I want to hear the craziest sales story.
Speaker 1 | 05:28.827
All right. I got one for you. This is a fun one. So we had this kid who, he made a lot of sales, but he was the guy who would say anything to close the deal. He would say anything, he would do anything, he would lie, just like everything.
Speaker 0 | 05:45.131
Oh, terrible. So
Speaker 1 | 05:46.308
So I was doing this back when I was doing cell phones. This was before global. This was before GSM. GSM had just come out. You use your cell phone in your state, right? And then there was like long distance. And then there was like out of network.
Speaker 0 | 06:02.761
Nights and weekends minutes. Nights and weekends. Three nights and weekends.
Speaker 1 | 06:07.004
I got minutes. I got to go. That was it. It wasn’t a national or even global thing. So to travel with your phone outside the country was like this big. thing that roaming was terrible oh it was oh it was it was the worst so we had this guy come up he he was he was traveling to the middle east and he’s talking to this guy he’s like you know i need this and that i need to be able to go to you know the middle east i’m going next week i need to you know do something i need to you know communicate oh no you’re all set bud you’re all set we got we got you 100 but that’s exactly what the guy said he comes up he pulls out the cheapest like crappiest phone. And he’s just like, oh yeah, this will do the thing. It’s actually free on promotion right now. It’ll work for you over in Egypt. I’m like, what? What? So this guy, man, the gears were turning because he knew when the guy was leaving, because he told him. And then he figured out through the conversation how long he’s going to be there. So already he knows by the time the guy gets back, return, he carries over. It’s out of his hands. He’s done. His commissions are locked. So this guy sells him his phone, leaves, takes off. Most people would never come back. They call the company like, hey, this guy sold me this, that, and everything, fix it. This guy comes back to the- Crazy guy.
Speaker 0 | 07:20.753
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 07:21.313
Who grew up in the streets,
Speaker 0 | 07:23.595
who grew up in the streets probably because I know some Egyptians and I know some other guys too. I have a lot of friends in the Middle East and they grew up in some areas where, no. Anyways, go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 07:34.004
The guy comes back and he’s like, you sold me this thing. What are you doing? What are you doing? And the guy was just like, oh, yeah, we’ll swap it out for another one. Something must have happened.
Speaker 0 | 07:42.290
And he keeps it going.
Speaker 1 | 07:44.040
And he had the guy coming back like two, three times. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. The worst. But I’ll tell you one thing though. I started in sales. That was my first sales gig. And I kind of like got a, you know, a hunger for it. You know, did a couple of internships, you know, got into software sales. That’s where I think cold calling B2B, just like bottom of the barrel. And that’s what kind of got me into tech. I remember I was at my internship. It was over in Waltham and I was on the sales side. And I was, you know, I would walk around talking. to some of the IT guys and I would almost notice they weren’t doing anything. They were just there hanging out, mildly working. I’m like,
Speaker 0 | 08:22.237
I wonder- No one knows who they are.
Speaker 1 | 08:24.478
No one. No one knows who they are. No one knows what they do. Yeah. I remember thinking, man, what are you guys doing all day? I wonder. This looks really interesting. Do they just help people when they call up and it’s a quick fix? I wonder. So I started paying a little bit more attention to them, talking to a few more people and found out that it’s not that- busy of a job and they make more money than we do. And it’s guaranteed. I’m like, oh man, I don’t have to dial out 70, 80 calls a day. And I still don’t get paid because it’s an internship. So it was nuts. It was nuts. So that kind of got me thinking. And then all of a sudden, I’ll be like, you know what? And at the time I was in college, finishing up my bachelor’s and I was like, yeah, I’m not really learning anything technical. I can’t take what I’m learning in the undergrad and apply it to the real world. I can’t really go into it. employer of the office and be like, I can do X, Y, and Z. It’s like, no, I can talk to you about ideas. I don’t know how to do a thing. I’m like, that’s a problem. So at that moment, I was like, all right, I’m going to trade school. Let’s figure this out. I went to trade school for computer networking, got my three certifications. And that kind of started my journey into IT. I took what I learned on the sales side, combined it with my love for gadgets and all things technical. And it turned out to be a pretty unique combination.
Speaker 2 | 09:37.082
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Speaker 0 | 10:28.717
it’s actually very Very, very key, because one of the themes that comes up on the show a lot is selling to the executive C-suite, selling the value of IT, being able to show technology as a business force multiplier. But not only that, knowing what you know, here’s the thing, that nothing in the company gets done without IT involved, right? IT touches everything. It touches everything. So why should the IT director, CTO, whoever it is, is IT director, IT manager? not have a seat at the executive round table? And why should the executive management not want the opinion of the IT director? Now, here’s the thing, the IT directors that don’t know how to sell, that don’t know how to talk to people, that struggle talking with end users and all this type of stuff, have to learn how to sell. You already had that.
Speaker 1 | 11:16.619
Yeah, that was definitely a leg up. And in early years, that was really the differentiator. I presented very well in front of an audience, in front of… decision makers in front of executive teams. That was weird for me where all my other colleagues were scared to death and had no idea how to engage in that space. So that was a big differentiator.
Speaker 0 | 11:39.517
So what’s the tips? Because in the last chapter or the middle chapter of my book, I did some basics on like, hey, just keep it simple, stupid when you’re presenting, what the costs are now, what the costs are after, what the return on investment is, the bullet points of the benefits that we’re going to get, we’re going to see increased. 10%, 11% increase, you know, efficiency here and there. Is there any, like, what are your tips to presenting when you go to the executives? Or is it meeting with them before finding out what their needs are? And then, you know, what’s kind of your sauce?
Speaker 1 | 12:09.551
That’s a great question. You got to do both. You got to get as much background information up front before that initial meeting. Ideally, my approach, like when I think of like, okay, what does a home run meeting look like? Like, what is the… pie in the sky, like the gold standard of an executive meeting, a presentation, a sales meeting, whatever you want to call it. To me, that’s me coming into that meeting, initially understanding at a very, very deep and simplistic level, the problem we’re trying to solve with the software, with this thing, with the service, whatever it is, and presenting it in a way that resonates with the executive team. So if you can speak to that problem, and that problem being the one that they are facing, the one that they are currently living through. and you can speak to the struggles of that and how this product, this service, whatever it is, can solve that, you’re already ahead of the game. You’re connecting those dots for them instead of presenting data in a way that anyone else can do. And they usually just read off a slide deck. It’s a canned PowerPoint. Maybe the company’s logo is there. It looks kind of nice, but it’s the same stuff. It’s just numbers and stuff. It’s all disconnected. But if you can weave those together in a very simplistic way and say, We understand the problem you’re facing. We see it a lot. It is this. We see a lot. We talk to people all day long that have this problem that don’t even know that this is the core of the problem. But we’ve put an exhaustive amount of research and time into solving this specific problem. And we have the ability. We’re the only one in the market that can bring that ability to you directly with that knowledge in hand. And we can customize the solution directly for you and to solve your immediate problem. If you can present it like that. Most CEOs are going to lean forward and be like, okay, tell me how, show me. I want to see. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 13:58.651
So it’s like the title of your presentation to your C-suite should be the number one problem X. And the solution to the number one problem, it’s almost like you can’t have too many things going on at one time. You want to simplify it. You got to drill down to one thing. And. What’s your level of communication look like with the C-suite or how would you suggest to our listeners or people that may have a little bit of a maybe disjointed or separated or even people that are, no, they’ve got a great relationship, but we just want more ideas. What’s the best way to uncover said problems and then provide solutions to them? Before I- When you’re all working in the same company, you know, when you’re all working in the same company. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 14:42.598
it’s a fantastic question. And this is like a case study that you could write another book on. How do you do this? This is a huge topic. It’s fantastic. I find that you’re always selling. ABC, always be closing. It’s just a matter of defining what are you closing. In the IT space, it’s not even about, at that level, it’s not even about the technology. It’s about the people. It’s about the business. It’s about the data, right? How can you, I think of it as like the, Company is a spreadsheet on the filter, right? The C-suite, a lot of the time will come to IT with a lot of raw data, a lot of raw requests. I need this to happen. I need that to happen. We need to get this going. We need to connect this and we need these reports out there. My first question to all that is why? Why do you want that? Explain to me what the problem, right? We put it in the framework of problem solution. What is the problem you’re experiencing? I will help you walk through this. And if you look at… Any sort of sales or problem-solving methodology out there, and a lot of these sales guys tap into this a lot, and I follow a lot of them on YouTube and socials. They’re very good at putting this sort of methodology into a framework and then teaching that. It’s fantastic. But if you put them into a problem-solution framework, it becomes very simple. You define the problem, and then you have a singular solution, or you have recommendations. Option one, two, or three, which one would you like to go with? Each one of them addressed.
Speaker 0 | 16:08.624
that’s what i say good better best never that i want this are you do you not we need to upgrade and migrate this i don’t know server to the cloud here’s option one here’s option two option three there one option that’s not on the table is not doing it yeah that
Speaker 1 | 16:24.248
option’s never on the table the option of doing nothing is is not an option right well sometimes it’s the best option it honestly it really depends what the initial ask is i’ve been in situations and Not just one company. Throughout my career, multiple places, it’s very common. The initial ask is just, it doesn’t make sense, technically. It’s just not a good choice.
Speaker 0 | 16:48.520
It’s like a make-believe solution. It’s like, I kind of see it as doing this, and this is what I want it to do.
Speaker 1 | 16:55.923
Yeah, it’s almost like a biased decision-making process. Like, oh, I want to save money, so we’re going to bring our server that’s in the cloud, we’re going to bring it back on time. We’re going to save some money on licensing, we’re going to increase control. It’s like,
Speaker 0 | 17:07.096
that’s a terrible idea. I just want to know code. So I just want to use email as our CRM. And can you just give me something? Can you give us like an AI? And what I want is an AI bot to search all my email for the customer information when I need it. And we’re just going to get rid of Salesforce. How about that?
Speaker 1 | 17:21.744
Yeah. Again, back to my original point. If you put that scenario into a problem solution framework, enforcing the person to identify the problem, or better yet, articulate the problem. It puts us as IT professionals in a much better position to succeed and to be able to solve the problem, not only from the business case, but also from the technical side.
Speaker 0 | 17:43.661
All right. I’m going to put you on the spot. I want, because I know what the problems, I’ve done enough of these interviews over the times that I know what IT directors problems are. Well, first of all, just hypothetically speaking, how many end users do you have? Or how many, what’s, how big, how big of an organization are we managing?
Speaker 1 | 18:00.633
Biggest or current?
Speaker 0 | 18:02.915
Whichever, pick one. I don’t care. Just give me a number.
Speaker 1 | 18:04.956
So the largest environment I’ve managed is about 1,200 end users.
Speaker 0 | 18:08.559
Okay. In that environment, you had 1,200 end users. Were you the top tier? Was there a CTO or were you IT director? What was your situation there?
Speaker 1 | 18:16.346
I was actually middle. I was middle of the ladder.
Speaker 0 | 18:20.850
Okay. So there was 1,200 people. My guess is you had a team of between 10 and 12 people on your IT team.
Speaker 1 | 18:29.217
Three.
Speaker 0 | 18:30.137
That’s a nightmare.
Speaker 1 | 18:31.599
It was actually not.
Speaker 0 | 18:32.700
it was actually very good and it was a fantastic i’ll tell you why it was a fantastic news case for efficiency well then i’m gonna love this i’m gonna absolutely love this and you’re gonna have i’m gonna have to like fend the and the recruiters off i mean what
Speaker 1 | 18:48.466
yeah but was it like a software dev team or was it like i mean we’re all these end users truck drivers or something i mean come on no no funny enough i mean they were all there it was that it was actually a school so they were all students okay okay
Speaker 0 | 19:02.120
Okay, let me ask you, before we get there, before we get there, let me ask you this. When it comes to your role as an IT director, what is your, when it comes to your role as an IT director, and I don’t know, in all the things that you have to manage, all the things you have to manage on a daily basis, what’s your biggest struggle, frustration, problem, or concern?
Speaker 1 | 19:22.461
You know, the day-to-day doesn’t really…
Speaker 0 | 19:24.752
The whole job. I don’t care if it’s stress level. I don’t care if it’s work-life balance. I don’t care if it’s like I’m unhealthy. I’ve got a pinched nerve in my neck. I don’t care what it is. What is your biggest struggle, frustration, problem, or concern? I want to know.
Speaker 1 | 19:36.670
First thing that comes to mind. For me, it’s turning it off. It’s a double-edged sword for me because what? Oh, yes. You’re going to sound a little arrogant, but what makes me so good at what I do is that I’m always thinking about the job. I’m thinking about the next thing, the previous thing, the thing that’s going on right now, how that thing is going to impact the next thing. And it’s just constant at all times of the day. I can’t shut that off. That’s just… That’s just how I’m wired. As I’ve progressed through my career, it comes at a sacrifice. You know, the kids, the family.
Speaker 0 | 20:15.212
I know the answer to that. I know the answer to that. It’s very profound too. Very profound.
Speaker 1 | 20:19.815
I’d be interested to hear that.
Speaker 0 | 20:21.356
It’s very profound because I learned it. And what I did was I decided I’m going to work from every… It depends on the job, right? Because you might not have this luxury. You may not be a work from home type of company. And I only had this luxury after I quit corporate America and ran my own company. But so when you’re an entrepreneur, it’s even worse, right? It’s even worse. It’s like you can never shut up. So if you’re kind of an overachiever type of person, which is what I’ve always been, my biggest problem is, yeah, I can’t shut it off. And people have always told me, Phil, slow down. Like the biggest thing is like slow down, slow down. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Calm down. The best thing I did was the best thing I did was leave. the country, go somewhere else for three months, take my whole family with me and work from home in a different time zone in an area where it’s a country that’s not so high paced as like America and surf, do jujitsu and kind of just still do your job, but don’t be so, I don’t know, rigid with your like, like, you know, crazy scheduling and everything. And what I found was that I kind of totally let go and I let some other people like kind of take over the spots that I might be like kind of overly like paranoid about, I guess, if that makes sense. And this was maybe, I don’t know. And what I found out was that nothing bad happened and more got done.
Speaker 1 | 21:51.757
Sounds like a,
Speaker 0 | 21:52.937
it’s weird.
Speaker 1 | 21:53.437
It sounds like a lesson in delegation almost.
Speaker 0 | 21:56.359
Yeah, it was delegation. But you know what else I noticed is that I noticed that a lot of my day is spent, your mind can kind of like, if you like. Like the, one of the worst things you can do is like, just like pull up email right away. Like, like it’s the first thing you do, you know what I mean? You constantly have the email box open and you’re like right-hand corner of your three screens. Cause I’ve got, I’m looking at three screens right now. And like, so we’ve got, what are, what are my tabs? You know, we’ve got calendar, whenever LinkedIn’s up, um, because we’re doing a podcast and then we’ve got. I’ve got, let’s see, WhatsApp for the, for the development team. We’ve got another email box open up. There’s like, you know, some other, you know, tabs, Excel spreadsheets, you know, all of these things kind of going on. And there’s this, this, what was the word for it? Context switching. What I found was that I got rid of a lot of the context switching because every time you’re, you’re, you’re being called in a different direction, it’s, um, it like takes you off tasks. So. What I did was just, and like, I think I read atomic habits and I just had, you know, six tasks that I needed to do every day. Just, just six tasks. That’s it. Write down six. They don’t get done. Then you move the two that didn’t get done in the next day and add another four tasks. And that’s it. I don’t know what happened, but I know that, guess what? The company didn’t blow up. I still had podcasts scheduled. I, you know, we, yeah, we delegated, we got a few more show hosts and I don’t know. I just, what I, what I realized was that. oh yeah you can do this you can you can relax you can spend time with your family you can have balance and it’s actually healthier and better for you i came back actually 12 pounds lighter way healthier blood blood work was way better uh blood pressure was down and the second i got back into america it was um weight went back up health issues creeped back in the same instant so i don’t know you tell me what’s your solution you know so
Speaker 1 | 23:40.518
No, I mean, I think that’s the journey, right? I think that’s really part of everyone’s individual journey to solve this problem for themselves. You know, I mean, you read any sort of self-help, any sort of business management, performance management, anything one goes on to, it all starts with exercise. Literally, everyone says the same thing. You do exercise, you exercise regularly, and you do that on the regular. It’s about consistency, not about length, right? Be consistent. So I started doing that and my back… my back problems gone. That was it. I had to fall because I was sitting for 10 plus years, eight hours a day. So back problems went away. All these other benefits, my energy level started going up, all these other things. And I was almost able to, just because of that, I was able to sort of rise above that cloud of fog and just kind of look down and be like, yeah, I’ll do that today. The other stuff, I don’t need to do today. I’ll do it tomorrow.
Speaker 0 | 24:40.518
Yeah, I’ve been progressively each year trying to take it to the next level. Jiu-jitsu changed a lot. A lot of people say jiu-jitsu ruined my life, but it was worth it. Jiu-jitsu helps a lot for me.
Speaker 1 | 24:51.223
Are you
Speaker 0 | 24:52.304
BJJ? Yeah, BJJ. It’s just very addictive. Very, very addictive. But as far as if you want to be in shape. It goes well. Extreme tough. Yeah, it’s like human chess is what we call it. Human chess. Yeah. If you’re not. If you’re not comfortable rolling around with sweaty men, though, and having sweat dripping your eyeballs and stuff like that, then…
Speaker 1 | 25:11.377
It is what it is. My brother-in-law is a black belt. Oh,
Speaker 0 | 25:15.742
nice. Locally where?
Speaker 1 | 25:18.305
He’s in Boston, actually. Boston proper. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 25:23.150
Who’s your brother?
Speaker 1 | 25:24.131
Who’s my brother? Mike Garcia.
Speaker 0 | 25:27.475
Okay. My coach must know him. My coach is Dan Simler, so he’s out of Worcester, but he probably definitely knows. They probably all know each other. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 25:35.037
he’s a little nuts with it. He rolls a Florian every now and then over in Brookline. He goes to City of Tongue. He’s gone to Thailand to train. It’s like craziness. I myself did martial arts for, I think, what, like 15 years, something like that when I was a kid. Started with Taekwondo with all the kids I started with. I did that for, I don’t know. 10 years, they crowd them for like four. I guess all about the martial arts I’ve done, I, you know, crowd them guys by far my favorite. All right.
Speaker 0 | 26:06.016
Yeah. A lot of people say that. Of course, the BJJ guys are all, we’re all going to be very, very biased and make fun of every other martial art other than our own. So that’s just how it is. And I’m sure you’ve had those conversations with your brother. Like, oh, okay. We’ll wipe the mat. We’ll wipe the mat with you crowd of guys. Come on, bring it into the studio. We’ll see what happens. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 26:26.668
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, if you, if you, if I lay down on the ground and let you get on top of me, sure.
Speaker 0 | 26:30.289
That’s wonderful. See, this is how it starts. This is how the conversation said, yeah. Okay. Whatever guy you’re bringing in, bringing your top, bringing your black belt, you know,
Speaker 1 | 26:41.152
You’re in the bar. You’re going to go ground in the bar. No, I don’t think so.
Speaker 0 | 26:44.813
Yeah. What do you mean? Why not? That’s great. Yeah. I had to hire a, I had to hire a coach. I had to hire a coach who’s a real doctor who graduated. I mean, I kind of went all out this year. I really was like, this is it. I’m not. And I paid so much money to hire this guy that there’s no turning back. And it is like everything that I have expected it to be so far from just like telling me what to eat, telling me when to eat it, telling me when to measure, telling me when to get on the scale. telling me what books to read, telling me what vitamins, just literally everything. And so, so far, it’s pretty amazing. I’m just good at taking orders when it comes to that type of stuff. So that’s what I needed. Well,
Speaker 1 | 27:29.703
it’s nice because you outsource the decision-making process, the thing of it that gives us probably the most pause. And it’s probably the most strenuous part of the whole process, not doing the thing. It’s planning it and actually getting up to do it. But if you have someone there being like, come on, get up. You’re like, okay, let’s go. What are we doing? I don’t know.
Speaker 0 | 27:48.436
Like every, every week it’s like a text message in the morning. Okay. Where are you at? Did you get on the scale yet? And then it’s like, and then there’s like this app that’s like, they’ve got the app dialed in. I mean, literally if you do a rep, like if you do 10 reps, it’s like do the 10 reps quick, hit this button. It starts counting down for like 60 seconds. Okay. Do the 10 reps of this. And then they literally go in and they look at what you did and they’re like, okay. So then your next workout, they’ve modified like literally the weights, the pounds, the reps, like it’s a different. everything all from…
Speaker 1 | 28:19.433
That’s technology, man.
Speaker 0 | 28:20.874
It’s pretty sweet. There still has to be a human. There still has to be an Austrian guy behind it. You got to program his accent into the app. You’re still talking with him. Let’s see. When are we meeting next? I got to find his… Okay, so that is the hardest thing. That’s very common. I’m actually, I didn’t think you were going to say that, but I think a lot of people are dying. Yeah, Clinton Devereaux, I think I’m pronouncing his last name right. He’s actually down the street from you in Cambridge. He’s one of my top engineers. He says sitting is the new smoking.
Speaker 1 | 29:04.896
A hundred percent is. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 29:06.356
I’m kind of laughing. You know, I’m just like, I just like, I was laughing when he said that. Yes. Stefan, by the way, Stefan is my coach is my one of them. One of them, not the doctor, but Stefan. But yeah, sitting is the new smoking. I just keep saying it’s such a great, such a great saving. Such a great saying. Clinton, we got to call you out again. I’m going to tag you in this episode, you know, sitting is the new smoking. And I don’t, and back problems is not how many. I’ve got a pinched nerve on C6, C7 right now that I’ve been dealing with for a long time. Yeah. And a lot of guys have different back problems and issues. And it’s almost like we need to have a coming together and some kind of separate program for IT directors. What are we going to call it? Squats and steak. That was, let’s see, that was… Squats. No, that’s a… That’s Mike Dolce’s book. Mike Dolce has a program called Squats and Steak. He’s the UFC.
Speaker 1 | 30:02.935
He’s been marketed quite well.
Speaker 0 | 30:04.756
Yeah, yeah. He’s the UFC diet coach. He was whatever our name is. Yeah, he was one of the UFC diet coaches. But we need squats and steak and steroids. And let’s see, what else can we add to this? Squats, steak, steroids, and IT. I think, you know, something like, cure your back now. But anyways, I’m going to have my doctor.
Speaker 1 | 30:24.406
I was just going to say, I don’t know about you, but I get really… odd when you see an IT professional that’s just physically impressive, just jacked in health, the full deal. It’s odd. I’m just trying to think back. Everyone I’ve met in space, none of them are of that athletic body type.
Speaker 0 | 30:46.402
We should change that.
Speaker 1 | 30:48.984
Exactly.
Speaker 0 | 30:50.425
Change is about to happen. I like this. Forget IT stuff and like, you know, and, and, and, uh, what, what were you talking about? You know, forget, you know, digital transformation. We want like, screw that body transformation. We’ll do digital transformation later on. Sorry, CEO. It’s a, that’s a real thing. So I, I could talk about this stuff all day long and the people obviously like health and wellness is like, what are the three things that people are always marketing like health, wealth and relationships? You know what I mean? So. I guess we can talk about that. IT ruins your health. It ruins your relationships. And there’s some money in it. But how can we? So what is the end game for IT guys? What’s the end game for IT guys? Yeah, I’m just going to set up a bunch of cell phone kiosks in the middle and make a bunch of people sell cell phones. And that’s right. What is it?
Speaker 1 | 31:37.956
I think with AI now, it’s really it’s over.
Speaker 0 | 31:41.519
It’s over. We’re done.
Speaker 1 | 31:43.220
No, I mean, a lot of things will be just like the toll booth workers in Fastlane. I think it’s the same thing. Technology is and always will be the ultimate disruptor. But I think it’s about looking beyond the immediate and looking beyond that into, well, it is going to take away a lot of remedial jobs. But be honest, we don’t really need people to answer emails anymore, right? I mean, we don’t need that.
Speaker 0 | 32:06.416
Tell me how we’re doing that. Can you please fix that problem for me? How are you doing that? So are you going to your end users? Hey, guys. Forget about email, just install, I don’t know, chat.o, something, whatever. What is it?
Speaker 1 | 32:18.885
So, I mean, a lot of these customer service platforms, I mean, they’re building out their own AI models based off of the popular ones from OpenAI, etc. You know, Copilot’s one of them from Microsoft. They’re embedding that into Windows. And, you know, the goal is going to be to increase productivity, to have sort of like a digital assistant that can keep you on track. It’s in the early stages now, but I can see where they’re going with it. Microsoft has already connected it to the entire Office platform. You get your Teams meetings transcribed. It summarizes the transcript. It pulls out action items, summaries. It’s like crazy. Now you think about that within a CRM system, talking about Salesforce. The sales cycle is sort of like a templatized engagement model for a company. And… If you refine that model, you can train an AI to simply pull out specific questions from a recorded sales call. I mean, that’s fantastic that you’re talking about deal velocity.
Speaker 0 | 33:24.124
So I’m going to turn it around. So I’m going to turn around to you. So let’s just use a typical sales cycle. I don’t know. Yeah. Telecom, maybe Microsoft licensing. Let’s use Microsoft licensing. since you mentioned Microsoft. So we know that Microsoft last March or whatever, jacked everyone’s bill up and said, you all have to go on a one-year agreement. There’s no more month-to-month. Otherwise, you’re going to pay 20% more. And if you don’t do this, you’re going to pay 40% more, whatever it is. So I’m a CSP sales rep number one. I don’t know. I work at CDW. And I’m sales rep number two. I work at Crane and whatever it is. And then the EA agreement, dude, whatever. Yeah. Are you telling me, you as an IT director, Would you respond to an AI bot? Hey, are you renewing your… You might not know, but like, hey, your renewal is coming up. Would you be interested in getting on a call and talking about just making sure you’re getting the best buy for your Microsoft licensing? Is that what you’re saying? Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 34:12.873
A lot of the time. I mean, a lot of this is already out and we’re not even aware of it, right? Because I mean, I’ve even seen conversational AI bots that do cold calls. They will literally have a voice and they’ll be interacting with the…
Speaker 0 | 34:26.354
Call her. And if it’s that new chat GPT chick. Yeah. That she’s better. That she’s better. Hey, honey. Nice shirt. Nice shirt.
Speaker 1 | 34:38.999
You joke, but we’re not far away from that, right?
Speaker 0 | 34:42.680
We’re not. I mean, I thought it was a game changer. I was like, guys, just forget about it. The population’s going down because every guy out there that’s sick of women, and this is not a chauvinistic podcast. It’s really not. But anyway. I was saying it to like my wife, my son. I was like, seriously, like, I was like, what? Some guys is going to program some robot someday. Just say, here’s the type of wife I want. I want her to say this, look like this. I want her to respond in this way. And I don’t want any problems. Can you just, I was like, so forget about it. The population is going down. So I told all my kids, like, just shut the computers off now. And please just, you know, from that standpoint, it’s kind of dangerous. So yeah. Would I rather get a cold call from make believe, you know, it’s mixed up, but it’s, I mean, it’s. kind of true.
Speaker 1 | 35:26.830
No, it really is. When you’re doing cold calling, it’s just really about overcoming that objection and getting to the next stage and the next stage and the next stage. It’s about forward momentum. And from what I’ve seen thus far, pretty damn good. And you think about, okay, what does it look like to, oh, they’re not going to be good as a human. I’m like, yeah, but they’re that good on day one. A human, you get them in the front door, it’s going to take him six months to get up to speed, to learn, to… develop those mannerisms or speech patterns, understand the product, the value, right? It’s going to take them time. The AI bot comes on online. You train it from your knowledge base, from your data, from your emails, whatever it is.
Speaker 0 | 36:08.659
Or your top salespeople.
Speaker 1 | 36:10.340
Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 36:10.980
yeah. Take your top sales calls.
Speaker 1 | 36:12.982
Yeah, no.
Speaker 0 | 36:13.942
My AI team, which I don’t really want anyone to know about, we’re thinking, screw this podcast. Maybe we should just quit and just start doing some AI stuff. No, but… Like Greg, the Frenchman, who was my director of like production team. Is he French by chance? Dude, he, he, so he, he took my voice, used AI to like match my voice almost perfectly and make me speak in French. You can find it on one of my posts, one of my posts. He like, he deep faked me as a French person.
Speaker 1 | 36:43.935
That’s crazy.
Speaker 0 | 36:44.855
And it sounds pretty darn close to me. Like someone that doesn’t know me, like my kids, they’re like, I don’t know, dad, that’s pretty good, you know, in French. So it could be any another other. any number of other languages is what you made me think about. So you really made me think now, you know, do I even need to do this podcast anymore? Like, can we just, this whole thing is fake, by the way, this isn’t even, this is all AI.
Speaker 1 | 37:02.742
It’s all AI, right? I wouldn’t be surprised. I’d be like, well, hey, it’s coming along the way, you know?
Speaker 0 | 37:09.144
I don’t know how much we’ve accomplished other than what we know is that, well, there’s the answer to not working so hard and not being so, you know, I don’t know, so involved. We’ve got the future, which is AI. Is there anything in that environment that, I mean, it’s all very exciting. Are you a glass half full or glass half empty? Like, is Terminator 2 really going to happen or whatever it is? Is Skynet going to take over?
Speaker 1 | 37:32.141
Man, you went right there with it. Ah, I’m a half empty kind of guy.
Speaker 0 | 37:36.744
Oh, Skynet’s real.
Speaker 1 | 37:38.245
Yeah. No, I mean, it’s that whole military model of the sword and the shield. If you’re not going to do it, someone else will. So everyone will inevitably develop this sort of… this technology, regardless of the implications, regardless of the morality of it or the ethics of it, they’re going to do it because humans are by nature selfish and it’s just what’s going to happen, right? Some people will do it out of evil means, other people will develop it out of, we’ll have to protect ourselves, right? Someone develops an AI, think about cybersecurity and AI driven malware. I mean, that’s pretty potent.
Speaker 0 | 38:15.429
Never gets tired. never gets tired doesn’t matter how many people you have you know working in a yeah doesn’t matter remember that remember when people used to mine uh gold in um world of warcraft and like there’s like people dying in basements and like you know of like screen burning or something there was like some i think there’s some kid in japan that died like mining gold for work oh yeah and they were selling and then they were selling the avatars or they’re selling the logins on ebay or something like that yep
Speaker 1 | 38:46.126
yeah i remember that my buddy was deep deep into wow for a while he actually stopped because he was like dude it’s like warping reality yeah he’s like there’s some ai bots to to to uh to mine gold for something stupid like that that’s crazy i mean it’s capitalism man yeah people want to buy it they don’t want to put in the work so they’ll buy it you know if they can i wonder you know how like we have the bitcoin mining machines that take so much compute power and you’re gonna spend all that money and we should be able to like make some kind of like weird
Speaker 0 | 39:15.698
AI bot worm or something that takes over compute powder or something like that to mine stuff. But anyways, there’s some software guy out there right now that’s going, I can tell by listening to Phil Howard, he knows nothing about money. I had this really high-end, crazy software guy one time. It was just way over my head, way over my head. There’s some people that are just super, super smart. He was one of them. It was way over my head.
Speaker 2 | 39:44.670
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Speaker 0 | 40:36.265
anywho you It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. What I want to say is give you the last word, actually, from an IT leadership standpoint. I think the most important thing is take care of yourself, take a breath, learn to sell to the C-suite. So I guess my point is we should have, I guess, reach out. I would like to ask everyone if you want help with these type of things. If you want help with, I don’t know, getting in shape, figuring out how to take a break, how do we take a breath? Because some people get stuck. What if you’re that IT guy stuck in an organization where they just work you to death and you’re the type of person that cares so much that you just will keep working to help everyone out? What do you do in that situation? Find another job, obviously, but in between now and finding another job, what do you do?
Speaker 1 | 41:21.787
I think it’s a multi-tier question, but initially I think of that Jordan Peterson. He says, learn how to become a monster, then learn how to control it. And I think that’s very… I think that’s a very simplistic and very articulate answer to that. And also getting back to your point.
Speaker 0 | 41:40.478
What does that mean in IT though? What does that mean in IT?
Speaker 1 | 41:42.900
I think it means, well, to me, it means taking control, being your own monster, taking control, you know, of your own career path, of your own time, right? Defining what success looks like and working towards that, not marching to someone else’s definition of it. And when you start really, when you really start doing that, I think things are going to Things are going to change. Opportunities are going to present themselves. Or you’re really going to start to see things in a different light and really evaluate your priorities. What is really important, right?
Speaker 0 | 42:12.483
We don’t talk about goal setting. I don’t think we’ve talked about goal setting in a while. And I’m a big fan of it. I coach my guys all the time to deal with goal setting and have a personal mission statement, personal vision statement, purpose in life. And what are you working to? And what do you really want?
Speaker 1 | 42:23.393
Super important. But a lot of people don’t do that. A lot of IT leaders don’t get to that point of it. And I think the human element of IT is really missed in the leadership and performance management part of it.
Speaker 0 | 42:35.616
And tying your job to your personal success as well. So what does success look like for you in life in general? And how is your, I guess, career or job helping you reach that level, not preventing you from getting there?
Speaker 1 | 42:49.872
You know, it’s funny you mentioned that. I also thought of those as two separate things, but you know, I never, just until you said that, I never really thought of them as interconnected.
Speaker 0 | 42:58.935
Because that’s how everyone thinks about it. Because everyone says when you go to work, here’s the stupidest saying that I always say, when you go to work, leave your personal life in the bag at the door. No one can leave their personal life in the bag at the door. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Everybody has a personal life. Everyone has feelings. Everyone has issues that they’re dealing with. Everyone has things that they’re not even telling you. That’s why it’s so important to connect, discover, and respond with your team. So how can they not be interconnected? At least if it’s an, even if it’s just a job and no one wants a job, everyone wants a career, but even if it is a job, then how is that job helping you step stone to where you want to get? And, and you’ve signed on the line to help someone do a certain thing. So you better do it your best and you better do it better than everyone else and put your whole heart into it. Even if it’s just. emptying the trash in the hallways, you might want to put a sticker on that with a smile face that says, you know, have a great day. You know, like you’re not emptying the trash. I am, you know what I mean? Like, and everyone loves you or, you know, whatever. And you’re trying to uplift other people or whatever it is that you’re doing, but yeah, they’re definitely connected. And that might be a problem that people don’t connect them.
Speaker 1 | 43:56.533
Yeah, no. And I think, I think that’s also that point of connecting them and clarifying and really making that exactly that I see that as a direct, you know, responsibility of of leadership, right? That’s what it is. Making sure your team is taken care of, whatever that means. It can mean personally, it can mean professionally.
Speaker 0 | 44:16.383
And no one’s saying you can’t change your role. So here’s what I noticed years ago, is I learned to connect the two. I think it was Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Workweek. Yeah, it was. Definitely. I read that. And I was getting up every day. I was in Virginia, Beltway of DC, Washington DC at the time. And I was getting up every day at maybe 5.30, taking a shower. whatever little get a cup of coffee get in the car drive and rush our traffic for an hour to get to the office at 6 30 to do rookie role play at seven o’clock right to then do run your run your morning meetings and then all the way up to standing meeting at 10 o’clock and then it was like you know out in the streets consulting cisco consulting whatever right then it was back to you Five after five o’clock, making sure all your sales reps hit five doors after five o’clock because all the gatekeepers aren’t around anymore. If you remember that old rule, right? Then it’s like everyone come back to the office, everyone enter everything into the SQL database, whatever that is, check all your reps out, leave, get home 7.30 at night, right? Was it fast paced? Was it a part in my life that I loved? Was I learning a lot of things? Was it like totally like crazy, like corporate whatever and all this like work hard, play hard type of mentality and everything? Yeah, it was that. And was I doing better than in the retail space? Absolutely. But it got to the point where I was saying, this is just not, you just, you can’t do this. Like, where do I want to go in life? And then, so I read the four hour work week and it was like, okay, I changed my job and I changed the way that my job looked at me internally. So I basically, I took an inside, I took more of a, like a channel manager role where you work with like other MSPs and vendors from a more consulting approach and you didn’t. It wasn’t just like, you know, direct sales reps running out into the field and trying to, you know, sell it, sell everybody, everything, you know what I mean? And it was a much more consulting, sit on the same side of the table as the, as the buyer approach. So that was the first change. And then it was like, okay, now go to my boss and say, well, you know, this drive into the office every day, that’s just absolutely ridiculous. Why do I need to do that? Like, that’s just a waste of time. Why don’t you just let me start working right away? And if I bring in these results and we do, and this is why I’m a big fan of management by business objectives for it directors and CTOs and everything, make connect your job to goals and business objectives that they want, but then allow that to give you freedom. So if I do this, this, and this, can I work from home a two, three days a week? Yeah. If you, if you hit those goals, yeah, no, you can do whatever the heck you want, man. Okay, cool. And then. you hit those goals and you know, you give them goals that, you know, you can hit to begin with. And then you’re saying, Hey, you know what? This is kind of stupid. I’m doing so good. Why don’t I just raise it up another notch and just never come into the office?
Speaker 1 | 46:52.954
It’s about, yeah. The closed loop there on goal setting and driving, driving change and really, you know, setting the bar, you know, if this, then that, yeah, that that’s fantastic.
Speaker 0 | 47:02.982
Or, you know, Hey, if we raise, if we raise production by this, can you give me this much more in budgeted dollars? Can I get an extra guy on my team? Can I get an extra, you know, can we do this? And then can we drive it even more? And can we do more and more and more? Now you said you had a really good team that you did a lot with three people. So I’m dying. I just remember now I’m dying. We’ll leave it on this. We’ll leave it in this. What the heck did you guys do where you could manage that many people with three people? It was a school. It was a school. So yeah,
Speaker 1 | 47:29.333
it was a school. Well, I mean, with a school, it’s a very wide application of IT services and technology. We have all the, you know, typical school these days. It was a professional school, so it was a graduate level. It wasn’t like kindergarten class. Yeah. So, I mean, you’re talking about classrooms that have state-of-the-art AV technology, basically server systems, all that kind of stuff, AV gear. Each room had its own network closet for the AV gear. You had a computer lab, you had computers all over the place. Entire staff had multiple programs that everyone uses for development. marketing for contact, CRM systems, etc. ERP system, all these things. There’s no easy answer. There’s no magic sauce. We all wore multiple hats. And we either had to become A players or that was it. There wasn’t a choice. We all had to band together to look at the workload and say, all right, who’s going to do what? We got to divide this up. We got to figure it out. It just so happened that all three of us were A players. I had the benefit of being mentored by an amazing person who really, really ingrained in me the values of customer service and really having a solution mindset. And we define the problem properly, the solution will follow. And that’s where my whole kind of outlook on problem solution comes from. That’s the genesis of the idea. You know, I had three, I think it was three.
Speaker 0 | 49:06.247
Define the problem based on the customer and the solution will become clearer, or at least we’ll know where to… Yeah. We’ll know what we’re solving at least.
Speaker 1 | 49:15.611
I’m going to take it one step further. Not only that, but look at the solution as a whole, holistically throughout the environment. Because it’s very easy to say, this is the issue, this is the problem, without having foresight into the downstream effects of the solution. So having a solution mindset, really perfect example. Like, yeah, we have this form and it gives us XYZ data, right? The data goes into a sheet and we’ve got the data and it’s fantastic. but it’s not formatted in a way that our ERP can adjust it, right? That’s not good because now we’re sacrificing the reportability, the visibility, the data-driven aspects of it. What is the benefit of having that? Oh, it’s huge. We definitely need that. Okay, so what do we do? We adjust. Having that solution mindset allowed us to tackle these problems at the root cause and really create whatever time we were spending on finding solutions to problems, we were solving problem from multiple areas.
Speaker 0 | 50:11.378
So I really took the time.
Speaker 1 | 50:14.079
It was all time, you know, doing the discovery thinking, really, really being patient with it. That’s what I, that’s what be my takeaway or my advice. I want to be patient in the discovery process because no matter how smart you are, the process, it requires respect.
Speaker 0 | 50:29.888
Slower is faster.
Speaker 1 | 50:31.288
Fast is slow, slow is smooth.
Speaker 0 | 50:33.529
That’s right. The, um, I’ve, I’ve learned that too many times, uh, the hard way. Yeah. And, uh, Yeah. Cheaper does not equal saving either. No,
Speaker 1 | 50:47.852
it doesn’t. We come across that all the time and it’s like, oh, we know it’s going to suck in the long run. It’s just, we need this now. It’s like, all right, you know about it. You’re telling me you know. I get it. We’ll just do it. But I’m going to still tell you. I told you so later.
Speaker 0 | 51:03.417
Oh, man. Man, Sonny, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Any final words of wisdom to the listeners out there?
Speaker 1 | 51:13.832
Oh, man. Ah, now you’re putting me on the spot. Now I’ve got to come up with something prolific.
Speaker 0 | 51:19.236
No, it doesn’t have to be prolific at all. It could just be like, I don’t know. It could be the finger. It could be like, hey, you, I’m talking to you. One second, please.
Speaker 1 | 51:28.083
One second.
Speaker 0 | 51:28.923
Don’t be that guy.
Speaker 1 | 51:31.726
Don’t be the guy in the kiosk.
Speaker 0 | 51:33.567
Don’t be the guy that sells international roaming that doesn’t even exist in the world. So, you know, that, oh no, that router, you just throw it on the plane. It’s going to come right into a Cairo airport. You know, it’s plug and play, bro. Plug and play. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 51:48.617
Yeah. It’s been a pleasure, Phil. Thank you.
Speaker 0 | 51:52.240
Yeah, man. Thank you so much.
