Speaker 0 | 00:01.024
today on dissecting popular it nerds talking with adam noise husband father it professional and doesn’t get much realer than uh you know fixing a printer before um moments before uh jumping on the on the um you know podcast and what i would like to know is how and this doesn’t happen anymore well and i guess no no absolutely it does happen now what i want to know is how it happened back in the day that you recognized IT could actually be a career in eighth grade. How did you, what happened back then in eighth grade by the time, can we go back in time, by the way, what year was it?
Speaker 1 | 00:42.563
Yeah, so go back to the Wayback Machine. This was 1997. So I’m going into my eighth grade year in 1997, and I took a…
Speaker 0 | 00:54.531
I graduated high school, so if that, I graduated high school in 95, so that dates me, so you’re a young, you’re a… You’re a youth. But anyways, go ahead. So we knew. Go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 01:06.885
Rolled in a quote unquote web design class. Some out there in the audience would remember GeoCities.
Speaker 0 | 01:15.052
There we go.
Speaker 1 | 01:15.972
So this was a GeoCities web design class. And make a long story short, the teacher at the time recognized that I was getting all my work done early and helping the other students. So, unbeknownst to me, she went to the principal and said, hey, this dude is getting it. I would like to have him be an aid for me spring semester. Principal agreed, gave me an A for spring semester, and I was like a teaching assistant in eighth grade.
Speaker 0 | 01:45.885
For free?
Speaker 1 | 01:46.745
For free.
Speaker 0 | 01:47.786
Oh, there we go. There we go. The first time you were used as an aid person.
Speaker 1 | 01:54.729
Never stopped since.
Speaker 0 | 01:57.791
I realized. I realized that this could be a career when I, when I got used for the first time and didn’t get paid for it. I knew that that was my calling.
Speaker 1 | 02:06.351
Yes. Volunteerism from here on out.
Speaker 0 | 02:10.152
That’s right. Oh, that’s awesome. Um, what led you to, well, I don’t know, talk to me about web design or something like that, because we’re, we have our woes right now. I had to fire my whole web design team this morning. True story. True story at 1115. Sorry. We’re not going, whatever. I’m not going to reveal yet, but we have a backup plan. Cause you always gotta have a backup plan. You gotta have redundancy. You gotta have redundancy. You gotta be ready to go right away. Flip the switch. Anyways, plan two. But anyways, tell me, talk to me. How was that teacher’s assistance thing? Were you better?
Speaker 1 | 02:49.956
Yeah. Yeah. So it was, it was awesome. You know, I got the, I got to be a customer service. you know support staff for that that class um i got to help a variety of people in i mean this was early on in computers so a lot of people didn’t have computers at home this was their first their first glimpse into any type of technology like that so it was fun and
Speaker 0 | 03:11.941
i realized that i picked it up pretty quickly and uh it actually does sound like kind of fun like what kind of coding weird what kind of web design were we
Speaker 1 | 03:19.644
building and it was it was absolutely no design it was find the template that you think is cool plop some pictures and some text in there and you’ve got yourself a web page they had that back then they did yeah what
Speaker 0 | 03:35.148
was it called again because i don’t remember that geo cities geo cities we’re going to look up a picture of this geos is okay so then trajectory forward what happened trajectory forward uh rolling into high school the whole
Speaker 1 | 03:49.316
you know, high school experience. And then, okay, you got to start visiting colleges. During that time, it was pretty much known that if you didn’t go to college and get a degree, you weren’t going to make any money.
Speaker 0 | 04:03.820
You’d be a loser. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 04:05.760
Yeah. I would, I would just be a loser.
Speaker 0 | 04:07.661
That’s exactly how I thought about it. And then I realized, and now I’m telling my son, you know, start working with us.
Speaker 1 | 04:13.202
Yeah. I’m, I’m the exact opposite now being out exposed to the trades, but anyhow. There was a local private university in town and I enrolled there and that actually spurred my first job within IT with local family. I had a company in town. So it all kind of started to mesh and it’s all built on relationships.
Speaker 0 | 04:38.215
Yes, relationships. relationships, relationships, relationships, relationships. Tell me a little bit about where you are right now. What is the feel? What is the vibe? What is the IT vibe internally at the company? Loving IT as a business force multiplier, treating you like a cost center. What’s the vibe?
Speaker 1 | 04:57.697
They recognize me as a leadership partner within the business. They’ve had some bad experience with IT staff in the past, just not passing muster, not being what they need to be.
Speaker 0 | 05:11.068
What is that in your opinion?
Speaker 1 | 05:14.091
Not to be a cost center, to be a helpful asset in growing the business. I’ve run into it countless times where… People want to either, you know, they want to grow the business somehow, whether that’s real estate, expanding offices or purchasing new companies, whatever. IT is always an afterthought. And I have punched through that stigma and really forced myself into the conversation because there’s so much cost savings and so much better innovation if you’re in those early conversations.
Speaker 0 | 05:49.487
Yes.
Speaker 1 | 05:50.428
So that’s where I’m at. I mean, I sit at the leadership table here. And I’m doing a little bit of everything at the moment, but I am here to manage the IT portion, which is the front office, but also the systems integration out in our production floor. So we’ve got a lot of heavy machinery out there that is connected, internet of things type machinery, and I’m marrying those two together.
Speaker 0 | 06:23.071
Wouldn’t it be great if we just had… I asked you what your IT dream super tool is, and I know what the answer is, but I kind of feel like I wish I could just push a button and unify all applications across the world with just like a button push. That would be my dream super tool. Whole unification upon one button pressing all in one application that’s not called Salesforce. That’s right. That would be, I’m not even bashing Salesforce. We can call it Salesforce. That’s okay. If you want to call it Salesforce, if you can do that, that’d be great. Like, please do it. But it’s probably going to be Microsoft in the end. No, you said unwavering patience would be your dream super tool, which I think would be anyone’s. I think that would be like the dream super tool for any human being alive on the face of this planet. But how does that apply to IT? Why is patience so important?
Speaker 1 | 07:17.169
Because small team like I have been. Most of my career, one to one to three to five people, you wear a lot of hats and you get pulled in 10,000 directions every day. And some days are better than others, but you just have to have that patience and know that, OK, you’re going to you’re going to you’re going to pivot 10 times today. Don’t don’t lose it.
Speaker 0 | 07:46.801
How do you deal with that? Because I have people right now. I have people right now that I talk off a cliff on a daily basis. I have people that I text and I just say, Hey man, what’s going on? Just, you know, wanted to, you know, whatever. I just want to know I noticed this and whatever it is. And they, they’ll, they’ll say back to me, thanks. I really needed that today.
Speaker 1 | 08:08.387
I just try to be a real person. I’m not a magician. I don’t know absolutely everything within technology, very far from it. I try to be personable. I try to. you know if it’s if it’s my co-workers here you know feeling the room out i will use some probably some misguided humor along the way uh but uh i really just try to be real and then when i when i leave the office i do something non-technical whether it’s you know sitting at one of my kids baseball practices i just that’s my me time is sitting outside in the quiet so that’s i i unplug
Speaker 0 | 08:45.992
Yeah, I do have a dream of being living off the grid. I do have that dream. It would be nice. Some people get it.
Speaker 1 | 08:52.013
That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 08:53.734
I just got to, I guess I just take that jump. I just got to do it. Just got to, you know, fearless. There is a storm of technology change, a storm. It’s just, it’s only going to get worse and worse. Maybe Bitcoin, maybe Bitcoin will fix it all. It’s just getting worse and worse. And someone said, made a comment the other day about, you know, the number of. AI salespeople showing up in their LinkedIn inbox. And I kind of laughed. I kind of chuckled. I was like, there’s no AI salespeople in my inbox. Like, what do you mean? What are all these AI products anyways that people are selling? And then it’s like, I shouldn’t have said it because all of a sudden now there’s a storm of AI people in my, of AI people in my LinkedIn inbox and a new, a new surge of, I think. AI recruiters. I don’t even think they’re real people. I think they might be fake. I don’t even know, which is why, you know, LinkedIn has to have a verification profile now, but any who navigating the technology change in this world, we have to kind of like. play a balance and almost it’s almost like less is more you know um especially with the ai uh i don’t know what we want to call this it’s almost like a scourge a scourge of things uh
Speaker 1 | 10:11.406
any thoughts there yes i i really try to leverage you know technology with real world our ceo mentioned in in a meeting earlier this week that Technology is not going to solve our problems. It’s not going to make the parts that we make. It’s a tool that we use to make those parts. We’re still interacting with customers. We’re still navigating the production streams, the issues that come up during production. We got to get out of that mindset that technology is going to save the world, because if not, it’s going to do the opposite.
Speaker 0 | 10:49.176
Love it. I love it.
Speaker 1 | 10:52.277
So you got to keep that in front of your mind because you’ll ask anybody that I’ve known in the last five years and back, I’m the most anti-technology IT professional you’ll probably ever meet.
Speaker 0 | 11:06.444
How can we meet? So I think this is great. First of all, that’s the quote for the show. Greg, the Frenchman, my right-hand technology guy who I want to take the advice here, please. Please take this advice. Technology is not going to solve all our problems at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. It is not. However, because what do we do? We build relationships. We talk with people. What is it at the end of the day? What does the IT person really need to do? They’re the person that knows technology, but they need to build the relationships and through the building of relationships and empathy and helping people do their jobs better, they need to speak with people, to show people. how, I guess, to make their jobs easier, right? But technology is not, is literally the technology is not going to solve the IT guy’s problem. The IT guy’s problem is probably building relationships with people, most likely. And like you said, the business problem is like, what’s the guy that owns the, whatever, the shark tank dude that owns the basketball team? What’s wrong with me? Mark, whatever, Cuban or whatever? Cuban, yeah. Yeah, what does he say? He says, sales fix all problems. What is sales? Good relationships with people and your customers. Really? Like building good relationships. It solves all problems. So technology is not going to solve our problems. Communication with people and building relationships is. So how can we use technology to build better relationships? That’s my question to you.
Speaker 1 | 12:33.747
It’s just getting out there and showing how to use that technology to make their lives, their job. I don’t want to say easier, but more efficient, turn out a better product. It’s just. communicate better yeah yeah i i said before they’re all they’re all tools in your in your toolbox that you can you can be better and there is a fine line there where you need to back off the technology quit throwing technology at problems and get right down to the actual issue can
Speaker 0 | 13:08.549
you give me an example of that because i can think of a few but i’d love to hear it from you the really the communication of data um
Speaker 1 | 13:17.861
We have a lot of production data floating around this facility, and everybody wants the data right now, but they want it in paper form or they want it in a spreadsheet form. Let’s just get that data out and live out in the production floor up on a big screen. It’s live. Nobody’s touching it. Nobody’s printing off other versions of those Excel spreadsheets. So that’s one way to use technology to better just to get the data out there more readily available.
Speaker 0 | 13:47.549
yeah i like it we don’t need to build uh three different uh apis to build five different forms in um excel and then well this guy uses google docs so we gotta use whatever google spreadsheets and uh can we spit it out over here in this other one too send it over to power bi and
Speaker 1 | 14:04.142
then um yeah throw it up on a flat screen and it’s creating the awareness that the data needs to create yep and then everybody’s got the same information at the same point in time No discrepancies, no questions, and people can just do their job.
Speaker 0 | 14:21.982
I had it come up the other day where I was like, well, we’ll just build a hook to do that. I was like, why? Because it’s going to take you a certain amount of time to build that, code that, whatever, whether it’s no code, low code, whatever. It’s going to take you time to build that little link between these applications. And what is it really doing? What is it really doing? It was like this complex. We have issues with, inside here, we have issues with coordinating recording calls and recording podcasts and coordinating guests all together and this mix of all the IT directors’busy schedules and the host’s schedules and the hosts that are IT directors at the same time. How do we make it all match up together well? Well, we can build this and we can do this and we can bring all these things together. And then we’ll take their calendar link and this calendar link, and then we’ll put it into this new calendar. And then we’ll all link it with, um, you know, this, and it’s like this kind of like web of everything. And I said like, why don’t we just throw all the people that are willing to be on the show over to our human being and they call them and manually schedule it. It’ll be more personal. We’ll actually talk with a person and it won’t be this weird thing that we’ve got to like kind of all build together and like mash together. And it’ll probably won’t work. perfect and it’ll be a little buggy anyways exactly that’s where uh technology is not going to solve the problems an actual human being physically calling and speaking to someone can actually do something better there scheduling standpoint i think is that kind of getting the the message across of what we’re doing and what we’re doing that’s exactly how
Speaker 1 | 15:56.152
it worked me getting on this show you know one of your partners reached out to me and wanted to chat
Speaker 0 | 16:03.398
sure yeah the godfather of my children the god you mean yeah yeah justin justin just i if i die he takes over as as dad he takes over his dad and if he dies i take over his dad i think unless unless he’s taking me out of the will or something yes uh yes that is exactly what happened and then another one of my guys who like is a new a new kid that joined on the team, I think reached out to you. And then you were like, well, I was talking with Justin back in the day. And then Justin was like, oh yeah, Adam. And then I go and I get on my, my cell phone. I’m like, oh yeah, we had a mix. We did have a missed meeting before in different text messages. And here we are.
Speaker 1 | 16:40.886
So the stars aligned.
Speaker 0 | 16:43.487
Really cool. What’s a lot, what’s the growth, what’s the growth model for IT professionals? I’m just curious for you, like what’s the, what’s the end game for you? Is it, is it. work my way up in corporate America? Is it save money? Is it, no, I’m going to go off the grid someday. And I just like, you know, I’m going to be a lumberjack somewhere. I don’t know. Is it, I want to start a consulting business. I’ve just been throwing this, this has been kind of the theme this morning with some of the other people that I’ve been talking with. I spoke with Brian Gillette this morning. Who’s a, he’s like a, an MSP like sales trainer. And I’m just trying to I want to know what the end game is. I want to give back somehow. What’s the end game for IT consultants?
Speaker 1 | 17:29.832
I’ve asked those questions about myself. I’ve considered starting my own consulting, small media business consulting firm. I’ve worked for large corporations, small mom and pops. And what I’m struggling to break through now just in my own persona is surround yourself with people smarter than you. I’ve always been one of the sole IT people, so nobody knows what I know about technology or a lot of it. But here, where I’m presently at, we’re building a team. So I need to get around that stigma of, okay, you need to find a guy that’s strong in networking, strong in database, scripting, whatever that may be. Lose some of that control. I took that to our CEO. I had a conversation. He’s like, that’s where I’m at. I’ve surrounded myself with people smarter than me. And that’s where we’re growing. That’s the place we are. That’s where I am. And he’s a lot younger than me, to be honest with you. And he’s killing it. So that’s where I see we need to break down the silos. We need to keep relationships. Again, that’s another reason I’m on this show right now, because Justin reached out to me years ago and stars never aligned at that point. But, you know,
Speaker 0 | 18:56.451
I love that you said years ago. I love that we’ve been around that long now that we can actually say years.
Speaker 1 | 19:01.834
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 19:03.115
And I’ve realigned my and re edited the mission statement this week. And maybe you can help because I think it all lines up with what we’re trying to do here. And we’re doing this big forklift website upgrade. As you know, we fired the developers this morning and we’re getting some new ones. But it’s to be the number one IT leadership podcast in coveted community of IT elite. Because when you get to the top, it gets lonely at the top. And how do you know, like you said, who to surround yourself with and where, how do we find these groups? And I mean, obviously there’s a lot of different ways we can go out and go to IT Expo and we can, we can do that like that. But. What we’re looking to do is elite community, coveted community of ILEA, and to put IT leaders first by seeking to understand them and the customers they serve, and to always be curious. And to lead with empathy and excellence and polished execution. So, and always be dissecting IT and empowering leaders and driving success. So we want you, we want you, Adam, we want you part of the IT elite. We want you to connect and we want to all really create this kind of peer to peer community. And we’re hoping that by third quarter, fourth quarter, we’ll have all of the, you know, the. we’re going to do some more live calls. We’re going to have like, you know, whatever live Thursdays or something like that. We want to teach, we want to have a, you know, a good, we’re, we’re, we’re really struggling on how we want to do the forum. Should we just do like a private, you know, a Reddit forum because it, you know, SEO is so well, like why build our own forum on the backend? Because who wants to join another forum? But if it’s in Reddit, it seems more like maybe, I don’t know. So we’re just throwing that out there for anyone listening. If you’ve got any ideas, you want to volunteer in any way, that’s, um, that’s, That’s the premise of all of this that we’re doing. And we need a way to get all of these 300 IT leaders that have been on this podcast and we need to find a way to all get together. And I don’t know, maybe we should just, I like the idea of just renting like, you know, 20 villas on the beach and the Mediterranean. And, you know, let’s just take a week off and I’ll fly out there and get together. But maybe that’s too much. Maybe that’s too grandios at the beginning. We’ll start smaller.
Speaker 1 | 21:15.628
That sounds like something to shoot for anyhow.
Speaker 0 | 21:18.670
Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 21:19.631
yeah.
Speaker 0 | 21:21.473
Sign me up. So how do you balance? You know, how do you balance between IT? I have a trouble finding balance. I have a trouble finding balance between being a father of eight and having two grandchildren and being married and all these other things going on at the same time and doing this insanity that we do on a daily basis. How do you find balance?
Speaker 1 | 21:43.072
So I’m fortunate enough to work for an organization that appreciates the balance. They recognize that we are here eight to ten hours a day. That leaves a lot of hours outside of this facility to do other things. If you’re thinking about work 24-7, you’re not giving emphasis on the rest of your life. And throughout my short to moderate career, I’ve realized that And I’ve read several articles and quotes that as an employee, you could be replaced within days or weeks. As a husband or a father, you can never be replaced.
Speaker 0 | 22:24.889
You make me cry. And,
Speaker 1 | 22:25.689
you know, things throughout my life that I’ve experienced, just like they can replace me in a week or two, I can replace them in a week or two. But I can’t replace my kids. I can’t replace going on vacation with my family.
Speaker 0 | 22:41.592
because you you you never know when you don’t get that again i can i can work the rest of my life doing something but i can’t i can’t be a dad to three little leaguers that’s true it’s true i do a lot of traveling with my family it’s one of the reasons why i left corporate america years ago and and did this thing so that i can i can be home more often although uh as of recently is eating up a lot of my time and i find balance to be the When you’re really passionate about something, that can be one of your biggest demises at the same time.
Speaker 1 | 23:14.970
Yep. I’ve always felt that in IT, you’re always on call. And to a certain extent, yes. But the ability to say no is very powerful.
Speaker 0 | 23:25.815
Yes. I think that’s the best thing to leave this off, to end the show on. One of the best pieces of advice, unless you have something else that you want to teach us, it’s just some amazing teaching moment.
Speaker 1 | 23:37.232
No, that’s just,
Speaker 0 | 23:39.213
I mean, everything’s important. Saying no, you can’t replace. You can replace a server. You can replace a server. You can do a forklift upgrade, right? You can, you know, yes, like you said, most employees are replaceable and most companies are replaceable and there’s people ghosting people on a daily basis. Adam Noyes, thank you so much for being on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Been a long time coming and it’s been a pleasure and thank you for doing what you do.
Speaker 1 | 24:11.834
Pleasure’s all mine. Thanks for your time, Phil. And we’ll talk to you soon.
