Speaker 0 | 00:02.984
If I say, is IT governance a common term to you?
Speaker 1 | 00:09.029
Just in the periphery, right? So I’m not one of those IT directors that’s out at a bunch of conferences and I’m familiar with IT governance, but no, the short answer.
Speaker 0 | 00:19.958
The only reason why is because in reality, it’s kind of like a broad term that IT leadership revolves around.
Speaker 1 | 00:27.725
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 00:28.425
And when we look at IT leader… podcasts in the mid market space i’m like the only one yeah so it’s kind of like no there is like there’s like you know technology podcasts or stuff like that but when we go to like seo and it’s like what do we attach ourselves to and i think when i and i was doing a lot of research the other day and it governance is what kind of a lot of the stuff falls underneath right it’s like Well, you know, it’s, it’s like ITIL frameworks, management frameworks, and a lot of stuff, you know, DevOps type of stuff. Like, like if I was to ask you, how would you categorize, or if you were searching for you or you were searching for this topic and you were searching for things, what would you search for? I want to hear from other Drew Griffins on a podcast about IT leadership.
Speaker 1 | 01:28.359
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 01:28.740
want to learn and I want to get connected with other guys like him. Would you even search for it?
Speaker 1 | 01:34.901
That’s an interesting question. There’s so much variation with IT leadership. You know, the consultant that’s out there setting up small and mid-sized businesses one after the other has quite a bit different job than a enterprise level CIO. You know, obviously certain contracts and systems.
Speaker 0 | 01:57.216
are the same you just scale them up but i think the functions are quite a bit different uh that’s your space i mean just so here’s here’s the deal right so our show is obsessive about focusing on i.t leadership and the i.t leaders that deal with between 200 to 2 000 upwards of 10 000 end users you have to you have to wear multiple hats you have to juggle multiple things And you have to put out numerous fires and you have to get a lot done with a little and you have to overcome mindsets of IT as a cost center. And really, it’s a business force multiplier. And we unify and do all these things and be organized and do a lot with a little. And we have a lot of common themes. I’m just kind of asking you for my own benefit, trying to figure out where what are the things? Where do you hang out on the Internet? What do you Google? where you, you know what I mean? We’re just trying to, we’re trying to figure that out as a company because we’ve just been putting out content, content, content, and people love it. And we, we exist on LinkedIn and all that type of stuff. And then when we start actually looking at our authority score from a, from a organic search engine optimization standpoint, we’re 17, which is not, it’s not like bad. It’s, it’s, it’s more than average. It’s nothing to write home about, but we want to move the bar on that. and we want to be purposeful in how we’re, I guess, keywording and doing things.
Speaker 1 | 03:30.983
I see. I see. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 03:32.584
And so I want to make sure that we, I’m just curious as to what would those topics be? What would those keywords be? I mean, me, it’s like, it’s like IT leadership. It’s, I don’t know, business, you know, we’re thinking like, oh, IT is a business force multiplier. People don’t search that. So like, what is it? You know what I mean? Like, what are you guys, you know, is it, you know, consolidating and migrating things to the cloud? It’s like, you know, consolidating systems. Like, what is it that determines and makes you a separation in like separates you into a unique group of elite IT leaders? I’m just wondering what that is.
Speaker 1 | 04:14.969
Yeah, I mean, for me, it’s. We’re unique. IT leaders are unique in that we’re one of the fields that requires continuous education. There is no stop to the re-education that you have to do. We also have to have the skill set to take complex technical ideas and make those ideas understandable to C-suites and overcome language barriers with near-shore, offshore consulting. I think you’re the… I view IT leaders like the head of an armory for a kingdom or a shipyard for a fishery. We get marching orders, right, from a… let’s say you’ve got a king right you could build this guy a long bow and you can do amazing things with a log but it’s a huge technological Revolution and then that person can either do nothing with it or like Great Britain did they can conquer the known world um so I I think it’s really hard to encapsulate because there’s so much variation Looking at your website, you talked about if you’re the CEO, why wouldn’t you want somebody in the room that understands all aspects of the business? And that’s really where we’re at here at NPL is it used to be when I was coming up, sales and marketing was the path to the C-suite. You had the customer relations, you understood the pricing and the different aspects of the business. Now, CIOs. or the quickest path to CEO. We have the client relationships. We deal with client and vendor expectations, B2B data exchange, new technologies. Obviously, if you wanted to get traction, you would put out stuff like creating custom data sets for your private AI. There’s just so much variation. I find it difficult to encapsulate what an IT director does because I just think there’s so many different levels of it. Does that make sense?
Speaker 0 | 06:28.182
Yes. Everyone out there listening, we are speaking with Drew Griffin, National Director of IT at MPL Dedicated. And we’re having a soft start here today because I’m trying to wrap my brain around this. And I want all of our listeners to help me, please help you. And we’re trying to define what is the mid-market IT leader hero that is… making the digital transformation happen, the technology revolution, as you said, the knights in shining armor, which I like. I really like that metaphor, the knights in shining armor fighting these bloodied battles with all kinds of chinks and dents in their armor, maybe a lost limb here and there over the years. That’s true. we can really go deep with this we can really go deep with this uh with this metaphor you know with a lot of you know you know gristled i don’t know you know hardened times what is that definition how do we find those people how do we define them and it does not you would think that it would exist in the seo world you think google would have this one like on smackdown but they don’t And if you start doing the research, you’re going to find what’s interesting. And I think you hit the nail on the head is you’re going to find a lot of sales and marketing terminology. You’re going to find a lot of Gartner magic quadrant terminology, but I think you nailed it with sales and marketing has to go through the CIO now to get to the C-suite. And although I did just run into, I did just run into a guy that. had the C-suite hand down a technology decision that they had to implement, which is kind of how we don’t want to be running IT because IT should be the executive round table and IT should know best and be respected from the standpoint of how are all these things going to integrate into all of our systems? Because we may have 80 to 120 on average, various different applications that we manage. So it’s a very, I think you nailed it with the… The CIO is taking over the C-suite because nothing gets done in a company without IT touching it in some way, shape, form, or fashion. Right. So anyways, I’m searching and I’m trying to find this thing. And maybe it comes up as like IT governance or some of these other terms that we’ve made up to kind of encapsulate some way of describing the various different aspects and departments of what we do as IT leaders. But I’m open up. I’m open to anything. If you were to, I’m curious, if you were to divide, let’s say you were to give out the award. Let’s say you were to give out the Drew Griffin Award, which actually has a very nice ring to it, by the way, the Drew Griffin Award, IT Award. Thank you.
Speaker 1 | 09:30.040
Yeah. I like that.
Speaker 0 | 09:31.541
I really do. I think it has a nice ring to it. It’s better than the Phil Howard Awards. The Drew Griffin Awards, it sounds legit. What would you divide? Again, I’m making this stuff up at the top of my head. So we have completely unprepared for this. folks. And that’s how this is supposed to be because IT is basically a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a never ending set of requests and fires that we put out. And hopefully we’re trying to unify and be efficient anyways, but it’s inevitable thing. If you were to divide IT leadership into three, four, maybe five subsets. Right. IT leader is really good at these three things or these four things, you know, like communication, training and users. I don’t know. Getting rid of disparate. I don’t even know if that’s the right word. IT silos and, you know, upgrading for the digital revolution decision direction. What would those categories be in your mind?
Speaker 1 | 10:28.601
Yeah. You know, I think you have to be creative and entrepreneurial. First off. In most companies, I believe somebody comes up with an idea, and that idea cannot be executed until it goes through the IT director. In our case, you know, we started out with one warehouse 10 years ago, writing post-it notes on pallets with Sharpies. We had 400% growth in six years. You know, we built them a free system on WSS 3.0 SharePoint. And… grew to an eight network national delivery platform so that’s an example of you know entrepreneurship and creativity the c-suite wanted to grow they didn’t quite have the tools to do it they had the vision and the cash and the infrastructure but they needed somebody to execute that plan so first two again would be creativity and entrepreneurship The second one, I think, is continuing education, or third one. You have to always be re-educating yourself on new technologies. I’d say you have to be measured. You can’t be a fanboy implementing every new thing that comes along. And finally, I’d say you can’t be a hoarder. Many, many higher-ups in IT hoard tasks, technologies, and skill sets, and it just leads to… institutional stagnation. You’ve got to delegate, you’ve got to be a developer of people and bring up everybody around you.
Speaker 0 | 12:07.963
This is what I take out of that. And I think it’s amazing. So creative and entrepreneurial, like a business minded business, mobile technology person, something surrounding business, entrepreneurial, creative, curious.
Speaker 1 | 12:22.947
Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 12:24.528
Which probably means also flexible, not rigid because technology, I mean, technology changes every 10 years or so a little bit. It’s a little slow, but changes every now and then. Sarcasm is a behavioral derailer, by the way. But I think you might have to have a little bit of that in IT.
Speaker 1 | 12:45.113
Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 12:46.733
You said measured and balanced and always be learning. You have to be knowledgeable. You know, and I’m thinking of values here. I’m thinking of like value sets because I’ve been doing goal planning and having my team write down like what are their top values and stuff. And I think knowledgeable is one of them. And what really is knowledgeable? It’s, it’s well, yeah, I know how to code back from the 1970s, right? That’s, that’s knowledge. But like you said, being knowledgeable as a whole value set or a whole set of values means that you’re never, you’re never not learning or you’re never done learning. until we hit the grave. Then we have some AI bot that’s copied us or something. Who knows what it’s going to look like?
Speaker 1 | 13:31.540
Right, it’s a constant tightrope, isn’t it? You’ve got to have some core technologies on older, cheaper products and hardware. And you’ve got to have some modern, cutting-edge stuff. And that balance, I think, is a big component of what makes an IT director.
Speaker 0 | 13:52.317
um valuable so and then you so then don’t be a hoarder which was a better way of saying be a teacher and developer um develop your people or don’t be selfish I guess um don’t be um yeah yeah there’s this kind of like this idea of of uh if I teach a bunch of people that they might leave me and then I won’t have a team anymore or
Speaker 1 | 14:20.597
i don’t know there’s like all kinds of negatives that happens for sure you know i’ve lost my last seven uh entry-level folks you train them up and they can leave for for three times the salary but i think the the risk is worth it um you’ll get a couple that’ll stay and you build up a really strong uh team with a lot of loyalty between you um yeah yeah That hoarding thing is very interesting. Right when I started out in IT, I was working for a company that no longer exists called GIAC Computers. And I was implementing firmware updates for year 2K, right?
Speaker 0 | 14:59.238
They built an Ethernet.
Speaker 1 | 15:01.617
Yeah, I know. I’m showing my age.
Speaker 0 | 15:03.198
Never gets old, even though it did.
Speaker 1 | 15:06.780
So they spent $80,000, $100,000 developing a program to track all the computers. And you could have walked out of the door and picked up a copy of What’s Up Gold for 500 seats for $1,000 at that time. So that was really my first experience watching this tremendous waste as people tried to… keep their job security at the expense of the company right they wanted to develop this product that made them powerful in the company it made their jobs more secure but it was at a pretty large cost to the organization um so i tried very hard to learn from that lesson and um digging on just just maybe for um i remember what’s up gold i remember what’s up gold as a
Speaker 0 | 16:00.217
add-on feature when i worked at an isp years ago which got bought out by a company that everyone loves called winstream right what’s so funny i don’t understand um i love you love you no comment love you winstream we gotta you gotta give them a hard time every now and then you know what i mean because like with isps it’s kind of like well Why do we love you? Why should we like you? Oh, you should like us because we suck less. You know, like that’s just like an unfortunate reality. And there’s ways around that that I would love to enlighten anyone on. But I remember, yeah, like What’s Up Gold was like an upgrade. Like you could pay a monthly fee for that. Can you delve in a little bit as to what was the waste of money there?
Speaker 1 | 16:55.350
Right.
Speaker 0 | 16:55.951
Maybe there’s someone that doesn’t quite understand like. What is a waste of money? How can I recognize it and not do it?
Speaker 1 | 17:05.353
Right. Yeah. So this is well before Agile, right? So you would map out what you wanted to happen. So they mapped out, we’ve got year 2K approaching. We need a log, every PC in the company. We need to know what BIOS version is on the PC. And we want some stats on the PC. So they sat down and said, okay, how do we do this? Let’s write a piece of software to collect all this information. Now, I don’t know if they spent the time to go out and see if there was an existing market product that would do that. There were several. I think they were aware of it. And I think what a lot of people do is they are worried about their career, right? They are like a lawyer on retainer who can sometimes be… forced to manufacture or justify their existence. So they wrote this program that did what a current program in the market did for a very low price, and they spent $80,000 to $100,000 doing it. So pretty obvious waste. When you’re a kid running around putting disks in computers and upgrading the firmware, you have no say in that. So it was just interesting to watch. because that money was coming out of my potential raises.
Speaker 0 | 18:32.603
How do you think it could have been avoided?
Speaker 1 | 18:35.084
So at the time, early 20s, I really don’t think anything in my life experience at that time would have allowed me to get in there. IT was in Atlanta and I was in Tampa to really execute a change. Five, 10 years later, I would have had the… sort of the presence of mind, maybe the self-confidence to go in there and fight. I did put up a small fight, but they shot me down a couple of times and it wasn’t worth risking my job.
Speaker 0 | 19:03.336
I guess my point is, is not you necessarily, but what should have, what should they have done in hindsight right now? Should someone have looked at that and been like, guys, we don’t need this and we can just do this.
Speaker 1 | 19:17.040
Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think. You need to work collaboratively. I think the C-suite should have had an idea of what the IT department was doing and vice versa. And somebody in the C-suite should have had the knowledge to question the expense. At that time, most CEOs could barely turn on a computer. So I think it’s cross-functional teams is a great hedge against waste. And then I think variety in teams is a good hedge against waste. empowering staff to raise concerns. A lot of that stuff has gone away over the years, you know, with stand-ups now and Agile and Kanban. infrastructure is now so commonplace to prevent that sort of waste. So I think you just have to do those things. You have to have the meetings within reason and give people a voice.
Speaker 0 | 20:13.603
I’m not a big certification guy. I am a big experience guy. So if the certifications mean experience applied, for example, I think having a very strong bench depending on what, you know, like when I pick or I look at vendors and I look at it from a longevity standpoint and, you know, also a cashflow positive or, you know, financial standing standpoint, there’s numerous ways that you can kind of like evaluate, you know, a vendor, right? But to me, it’s, there may be like little niche things that stand out that would be you know why this is so important so i do think to get to the the certification piece for example let’s say you had a very strong bench of ordinate certified network technicians and they all hold the highest level of certification in a rigorously tested very busy environment where they’ve seen many many many many many many many many, many, many scenarios, right? And deal with updates and bugs and all kinds of stuff like that. That to me says experience and knowledge, and it’s backed up by a bench of certified guys, right? But if you just have a certification, it doesn’t really mean anything. So with that being said, if there was a certification. that you know they have that certification, it means something, what would be that one of the most valuable certifications you can get? And the reason why I’m asking this is because I’m starting to think that an agile cert of some sort is pretty darn valuable.
Speaker 1 | 22:19.817
That would be my pick because it’s a process certification. So number one, I agree with you about the value of certifications. When you get one, it does one thing. It proves to the hirer that you’ve got the stamina to stick with something and learn new things. By the time you’re done, sometimes the certification’s technical accuracy is already expired. As you already mentioned, you need that experience to go with it. So the reason I like Agile certifications is they’re very process-based. And you can apply that process to a lot of different things. Whereas some of the more focused or technically specific certifications, they’re just not as applicable to different scenarios.
Speaker 0 | 23:08.684
I’m trying to drill down a little bit more on what are these categories that we’re going to put under a leader. And I’m thinking we’ve got business, creative, entrepreneurial, like you said. We’ve got knowledgeable, measured. I mean, always be learning, right?
Speaker 1 | 23:23.072
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 23:23.712
We’ve got you’re the teacher, the developer. that that falls under a leadership quality because you’re developing your people does agile flow underneath business or is this a communications category or is this a execution
Speaker 1 | 23:44.286
operations category where does that what does that fall underneath i think of it mostly under execution you know Big part of Agile is knowledge collection. And then, of course, you have to execute.
Speaker 0 | 24:05.149
How about KPIs and stuff? Does that fall underneath there? Like reporting, KPIs, execution, actually delivering results, results-driven. Maybe it’s results-driven. Maybe it falls underneath the results-driven type of thing.
Speaker 1 | 24:18.195
I think that’s accurate, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 24:21.536
So meaning… We deliver the numbers and I’m a huge fan of IT leaders that are willing to basically put themselves on the line and deliver results and attach numbers to it. How many guys want to come into work and just keep the lights blinking and not be under pressure to deliver?
Speaker 1 | 24:50.500
Right. Yeah. love the pressure i love it and i hate it but i i agree with you you want somebody that is
Speaker 0 | 25:00.644
highly motivated to to make everybody better it’s why i love startup culture yeah it’s like kind of like you go to bed like thinking about it wake up thinking about it and you’re like really exhausted and there’s days you want to kind of just give up yeah and then you go to bed you get some sleep and you wake up the next day and you’re already reinvigorated again but if you wake up every day just to go into the bureaucracy right i’m just like you know flipping knobs and turning switches and some people love that some people just i just love my job so much it’s um i was speaking with my son-in-law the other day who’s a mechanical engineer at abb and he says we have engineers there that have been here for like you know 40 years or something crazy like that and i just ask them like how do you come into work every day and the guys are just like i love my job right Maybe it’s because they’re building and they’re engineers and they have to build something new every day. But there’s some kind of something new, you know, for them at least.
Speaker 1 | 25:59.604
Well, they get that dopamine hit. They get to accomplish something and they get to stand back and look at their work. I did that. You and I can spend years working on a project and have very little visible payoff. The numbers are there. You know, in some ways, IT directors are a bit like cops. If we’re doing everything right, we’re almost invisible, right? The margins when they come are the result of everybody’s hard work collectively. And when things go wrong, they can go really wrong. If a sales VP makes a mistake, they lose a customer that’s 10% of the business, you’ve lost 10% of your business. An IT director makes a mistake that brings the company down for eight days. You’re putting everybody you work with potentially out of a job. You’re, you know. Not to put too fine a point on it, but like you said, it can be very nerve wracking. You make a mistake, you can bring the whole company down. And there are very few places in a corporation where one person can do that. So I would say I would add responsibility to our list.
Speaker 0 | 27:12.494
Responsibility.
Speaker 1 | 27:13.835
You need to lay awake at night thinking about what could go wrong.
Speaker 0 | 27:21.260
you’d have many sleepless nights and constantly be living in fear um no yeah yeah uh everyone’s thinking like i don’t know about this job now um but
Speaker 1 | 27:38.231
the payoffs are pretty cool you know like i get to do um some out of the box stuff you know right now i’m looking at the salaries of manufacturing workers in china rise and the salaries of manufacturing workers in Mexico and Vietnam staying low. And so we’ve got this national distribution network. So as the IT director, I can think about that stuff. We can bring it up in the meetings and say, hey, let’s start looking at routes out of Mexico. If wages continue to rise in China, manufacturing is going to move south of the border. COVID was a great example where… we realized, do we really want to be this dependent on cross-sea intermodal transportation for toilet papers and conductor chips or circuit boards? So as the, you know, you get to do some interesting things as an IT director and get to do some strategic planning that you might not be able to do in other areas. So there are benefits. There are lots of sleepless nights as we well know, but there’s some pretty cool things as well.
Speaker 0 | 28:48.476
How do you take decision direction with the numerous things and many moving projects and shiny object syndrome? And there’s just so many things that you could implement on a daily basis, all the way down to the minute minutia of having a app or plugin or API do some very simple task, which sometimes we over technology. we over apologize whatever that term is how do you yeah how do you take decision direction and delegate how do you decide what not to do i guess how do you taste yeah
Speaker 1 | 29:36.293
yeah i require a lot of collaboration on that you know we tend to want the world we tend to be attracted to the shiny new technologies i’ve got a very strong lead developer who is always focused on getting to market on minimum viable so so that helps tamp down my urges you know if i release a product i want it to be i want it to be perfect So I think it’s important to have a collaborative team where you’re willing to have people repoint you sometimes and vice versa. Personally, that’s what I need. I need somebody who’s minimum viable focused, who will balance out the things that I want to implement.
Speaker 0 | 30:22.130
Maybe just describe that minimal viable focus for me, because I have my ideas and it could be different from what you are, what you say. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 30:33.650
Real world example is we’re rebuilding our, you know, so we built this national delivery platform. Our bread and butter for that was marketing them. You know, we’ve got this huge swath of, you know, 300 plus marketers and we’re a key component to getting products to market.
Speaker 0 | 30:53.556
What are they?
Speaker 1 | 30:55.396
So it can be everything from opening new stores. getting traction in new stores, financial seminars, coupons, credit cards. Our president is formerly a member of the largest check production company in the country. So we do a lot of invisible stuff, very important part of the supply chain.
Speaker 0 | 31:24.531
When you say that, are you saying like producing paper checks?
Speaker 1 | 31:28.413
Paper checks, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 31:30.418
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 31:31.158
Industry that was once quite large and shrank, right?
Speaker 0 | 31:36.042
Got into-When’s the last time you wrote a check? I’m trying to think. Right.
Speaker 1 | 31:38.725
Long, long time ago. Yeah. And so then we got into mail, built this big network. And now is when the explosion of creativity can happen. We can get into any business. We can do pharma. We can do auto parts, fast track manufacturing, basically anything that’s out there. So- We’re redesigning a freight management system and I want to put everything in it. I want it to be perfect when I roll it out. And that is not the way to do things properly nowadays, in my opinion. But I struggle to tamp down.
Speaker 0 | 32:13.655
Please do tell. So what is it? Engages? Like, guys, keep it simple, stupid, and then bolt on additional products? What is it?
Speaker 1 | 32:21.639
Please tell me. Yeah, it is keep it simple, stupid. It’s agile. Sort of the arrogance. that that you would have to say I’ve got this perfect product in my mind and I’m going to release it is is full floor and we all struggle with it and that’s why I love I love the agile process this is gold yeah we we bring in production operational teams I’ve got this idea that I think is brilliant and they say oh that’s that’s great but we don’t need it we don’t use it or um They’ll have a suggestion that nobody else thought of and will implement it early. You know, the big danger is painting yourself in a corner. Now you’ve got to redo all this work. So the latest example, I think, was I wanted to look in the signal R and sockets to have all of our warehousing equipment have persistent connections. constant instantaneous updates and the lead developer said it’s great i’m super excited to work on that um but let’s get this working base system out first um so um when
Speaker 0 | 33:43.242
all things i think you need a balanced team and i think you have to listen to people it’s such golden advice it really is what are some of the things that you wanted really badly that they said we don’t need So an example, any example, I mean, it’s just like, yeah. And I’m selfishly asking you, I’m selfishly asking you because we’re, we’re, we’re doing a huge forklift on the website, right. Building a community. Yeah. And I’m just going to put it out there right now for everyone listening. Right. When it comes to communities that you’re involved in local, whatever, CIO chapter, IT expo, whatever it is, CISO partners.com. whatever it is. First of all, when it comes to those groups that you’re part of, what do you really want to have in them? Is it just collaboration with peers? What is it? I want to know. And then I also want to know when it comes to those types of groups, what is the single biggest frustration problem or concern that you deal with those groups so that we can not do that?
Speaker 1 | 34:50.503
Oh, we can start with that one.
Speaker 0 | 34:52.444
Right. Let’s do it.
Speaker 1 | 34:54.046
When we do, you know, UAT or user testing on a new module that’s rolled out. The two big mistakes we see, we bring in people that are too high up. So you’ll have, say, an owner, a president, or a couple of VPs on a call, and then a group of operational staff. What happens is the operational staff never speak up or rarely speak up, and the owners, leaders make the decisions. We get to market, and then the folks in the warehouse are going, why on earth is it put together this way? So. that’s one of my big pet peeves is not getting people from all strata into testing because you really get good advice and i think you have to like we said earlier at the start of this conversation about that what’s up gold situation you have to put folks like a forklift driver in a in a forum where they feel empowered to speak up and totally empowered and encouraged to do so Otherwise, you get sort of a top-down product. That’s my biggest pet peeve. And there’s all kinds of famous examples of that. I think at one point there was a cell carrier that was trying to implement push-to-talk, and they had meetings and meetings and meetings and decided they couldn’t do it. And one of the tier one tech guys overheard the problem and said, oh, yeah, we can do that, after maybe a half million dollars had been spent. So it’s very important, I think, to bring in. people from every strata of the company and let them participate and roll out.
Speaker 0 | 36:36.704
Okay. So I’ve got five categories that we are going to rate IT leaders on, and we’re going to build the, I say we start out the 2025 IT leadership awards in the mid-market space in logistics, construction, manufacturing, biopharmaceuticals. I don’t know. We’ll throw two more left. And you have helped me come up with those categories. And we’re going to have to then break down what are the bullet points and how do we rate people in these various different categories. And the five categories are, which I think are brilliant. So thank you for helping me come up with this. And it’s all you. But they all make sense. Okay. So number one, business. It’s just business. So creative entrepreneurial spirit. Right. So, so that was number one, creative and entrepreneurial spirit. Do you have any passion around, um, the, the business aspect, right? Like, so if you’re in IT and you don’t care about how IT applies to the business, um, or you don’t have business sense or business understanding that would lower your, that would lower you in that category.
Speaker 1 | 37:51.184
Sure. Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 37:52.024
Uh, number two would be the value of knowledge, right? So Again, are you always learning? What is your actual level of knowledge to begin with? Are you a complete imposter faking it until you make it and could care less anyways? And you’re just gonna still just lean on your staff below you to make you look good. That’s certainly happened to many people. Third category I have is teacher trainer. Teacher, developer, trainer. And think about how often we have to not only train our people in… bring them up, right. To hopefully be better than ourselves, but also our end users. Yeah. Customers. That’s probably one of the biggest complaints I get from ID people is like, it’s just training my people. It’s just training the end users, especially in a, I would imagine in a legit, I do a lot in logistics, a lot in construction. A lot in manufacturing. We all know that those end users a lot of times might have bigger fingers and thumbs than everybody else and want to take that iPad and throw it like a Frisbee. So there’s the training of the end users. Results driven, category four. Actually being able to deliver results and numbers. In fifth category in the 2025. mid-market IT leadership awards that we will be giving out and somehow rating people on is communication and collaboration. How well do you communicate? How well do you collaborate? Even, I mean, internally, externally, all of that stuff, because with a lack of communication and collaboration, our marriages are terrible. Let’s see what else. That’s like the, what are the two things that like break down a marriage, right? Like it’s like, collab it’s like communication and money or something like that um But yeah, like it’ll stop you from, yeah, I guess doing a lot of work that you probably didn’t need to, because we didn’t even need to do it that way to begin with. And if you had communicated over at Nextel or whatever it was, we would have had the, with Nextel, we would have had the push to talk in like two days versus failing on it miserably.
Speaker 1 | 40:11.458
Yep. Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 40:13.298
That’s all right.
Speaker 1 | 40:13.699
Those categories.
Speaker 0 | 40:15.259
It’s good, right? I think we can do that. If you give out some more, and then we got to just figure out all this, we got to figure out all the subcategories like business. Do you know terms like EBITDA? I don’t know. gross margin non-controllable costs flow through profit you know right well do you know cfo do you talk with the cfo you know and then that goes into communication collaboration how do you how do you how do you communicate with the c-suite on a regular basis do you have a seat at the executive round table do they even know who you are do they care you know like all these things come into uh uh into it do you care what the numbers are do you know how your systems um deliver better results for sales and marketing i don’t know
Speaker 1 | 40:54.698
Right. And that can be very hard, especially in an organization where the numbers aren’t aren’t shared a lot. You know, I’ve been in both. I’m sure you have as well. Sometimes profit loss is is discussed every week. Sometimes it’s taboo to even bring it up. So it’s.
Speaker 0 | 41:13.594
Yeah. Depending on if it’s going to create a, you know, a ripple throughout the company or something like that.
Speaker 1 | 41:20.700
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 41:21.260
But. But if Tommy boy just sold 20,000 brake pads or whatever, we want to know that.
Speaker 1 | 41:27.337
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 41:29.558
Yeah. Teacher trainer. It’s just, it’s, it’s great. I wouldn’t even, how do you do that? Teach us something. Share. Let’s, this is the teaching moment of the show. So teach us something, teach someone something out there. I don’t know what it is. Is it a piece of agile? Is it a little trick that you’ve been doing over the years? Is it, I don’t know how you break down. talk someone off a cliff when it’s a really stressful moment. Yeah. What is it?
Speaker 1 | 41:57.436
I think one thing that I’ve been trying to do recently in the last three years is the best idea, splitting hairs down to the best idea doesn’t always have to be implemented. It does not always have to be a plus, plus, plus. If new developer Tony has an idea that is fractionally less productive in your eyes than experienced developer Andy, sometimes go with Tony’s idea. Give them that confidence, you know, bring them up. The payout from that person feeling included and valued far outweighs the fractional difference between their two ideas. So for me, you know, when you try to develop people, um that’s something i really really try to focus on is is making sure that people feel um valued and that’s that yeah super awesome super awesome it also makes you feel good as
Speaker 0 | 43:06.794
a leader you feel better about yourself kind of coming back full circle uh back to the beginning uh knight in shining armor not really shining armor uh it’s um yeah all beat up it’s got horns sweaty yeah you know it’s like that like the the monty python thing you know where like you know there’s he’s just standing with like just a human torso left it’s all uh tarnished you know it’s like you know um what yeah kind of like you know what is the um What’s the end game? I felt like you kind of alluded to it a little bit at the beginning, which was like, yeah, we’re just going to outsource everything and become an MSP or something. But what’s the, do you have any ideas that we could collaborate on and we could communicate to other elite IT leaders in the mid-market space post 2025 awards that. would allow us to be more free and have more time and not go to bed every night, paranoid and sleepless that I don’t know that breakdown. What’s the end game. Any ideas?
Speaker 1 | 44:29.975
I, I don’t have, I don’t have many there. I think, I think that obsession is what, in a lot of ways is what makes a good IT leader. There’s a lot of responsibility. I would never let myself get comfortable. You know, like I said, you drop the ball, the whole company can be out of business. You know, people’s kids get pulled out of school. It’s terrifying.
Speaker 0 | 44:54.267
No, I’m saying more like, you know. 20 years from now.
Speaker 1 | 44:58.078
Oh, I see. I see.
Speaker 0 | 44:59.098
What are you going to do 20 years from now? I don’t know. No, you know, yes, of course. You’re like, there’s, we’re no longer on sticky notes. Okay. We went from sticky notes to, which I posted note to logistics to automated champion. Right. Post it note to whatever, which I think is great. What, what, what are you going to do? What’s the, what, what is it going to do after AI takes over and how just human people. that are, I don’t know, maybe guiding the AI bots to do something due to, I don’t know, creative entrepreneurial spirit in the IT world? Sure.
Speaker 1 | 45:38.821
Yeah. I noticed on your bio and on almost every guest that comes on your show, they talk about the ability to communicate and make complex ideas understandable. I think we’re going to be using a lot of prompts. building a lot of programs with AI. And I’m hopefully going to be doing that from a permaculture farm in South Carolina.
Speaker 0 | 46:02.592
Oh, I like that.
Speaker 1 | 46:03.773
Yeah. Yeah. Two days a week.
Speaker 0 | 46:07.556
What’s your diet consist of?
Speaker 1 | 46:09.838
Lots of red meat. I’m trying.
Speaker 0 | 46:15.262
I was carnivore for like a good two years.
Speaker 1 | 46:17.583
Oh, yeah. Yeah. How did that treat you?
Speaker 0 | 46:21.218
um my last cholesterol was that like I don’t know 375. cool okay that’s uh that’s I mean a carnivore guys would say congratulations you know good for you uh um but I wasn’t but I was doing it more for like joint health and weight loss um kind of like hardcore you know kind of like ketosis type of thing it gets didn’t happen weight loss and i did i did have i did lose some inflammatory type of stuff um but then just from saying why am i trying to constantly reinvent the wheel and do all this research which is probably everybody on the face of the earth which is why you’re constantly bombarded with health wealth and relationships right those are like the three things that they’re going to hit you with on social media if i turn on social media right now it’s going to be like you This diet and that diet and this recipe and that recipe. And it’s going to be, you know, I don’t know, numerous other things. And this PT exercise for my shoulder and this one for my hips. And because you do jujitsu and I do jujitsu. So we have many of an itis. We have itises. And so I just said, no, why am I? If I’m the expert in my field in certain things, and I expect people to come to the expert for certain areas, why am I pretending to be the expert in something that I’m not? And so I just found the best doctor and hired him for quite a bit of money. And he made me promise him, he made me promise him that I would allow him to control every aspect of my life. And within six weeks, I’m down 25 pounds. I don’t know what my blood work is yet. We’re going to have to find out in a couple of weeks here.
Speaker 1 | 48:17.940
Oh, that’s fantastic.
Speaker 0 | 48:19.741
But it is regimented. But you know what it is? It’s exactly what we’re talking about. He has an amazing system and process. It’s agile. He has an amazing system and processes in place and executing on various different levels at various different times. And it’s… probably the most keep it simple stupid turnkey plan ever right and it’s absolutely genius it’s so yeah same thing for six days a week six days a week i just wake up eat the same thing every day it’s very simple it’s the same meal four times a day for six days yeah and on the seventh day i eat a meal of whatever i want and then i do a carb load before bed you And it’s amazing because it’s all sweet potatoes and I love sweet potatoes, but you could do rice. You could do regular potatoes. You just sit there and eat a bunch of hash Browns with ketchup on top. If you want, if you like hash Browns, actually I do. I’ve done that. I love it. And I’m shocked at the results. Absolutely shocked.
Speaker 1 | 49:25.722
It’s amazing.
Speaker 0 | 49:26.562
Who would know who would know that hiring an expert, you know, would work, you know? So there you go. You’re doing the minimum viable thing.
Speaker 1 | 49:33.484
You’ve lost weight. You look around. There are not a lot of people that are hefty over 85.
Speaker 0 | 49:38.890
There’s no way that I thought ever that I would ever, ever, ever, ever see 172, let alone be in the 160s when I was walking around at 205 last year at one point.
Speaker 1 | 49:52.837
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 49:53.297
No way. I was like, oh, I’ll throw this crazy goal at him and see what, you know, see what he says. Okay. You’re like. full confidence like absolutely and maybe we should add ability to follow process to our it list it it’s yeah well um we’ve got communication collaboration and we’ve got results driven so i’m assuming that process we’ve got knowledge teacher trainer business where’s process going to show up is it it’s not communication results driven is that probably results driven yeah Um, I mean, you have process, knowledge, knowledgeable, the idea of being knowledgeable. No, that’s not really, I mean, you’re knowledgeable of process, business process. We got business process there. Um, I mean, we could add a sixth category, but I think, I think it needs to fall underneath one of those. Um,
Speaker 1 | 50:53.426
yeah, business,
Speaker 0 | 50:55.787
business. Okay. Process. systems and process systems and yeah um yeah because what business does well it doesn’t have system and process in place i don’t know uh so it has been an absolute pleasure having
Speaker 1 | 51:13.447
you on dissecting popular it nerds any final words of wisdom i really enjoyed it uh thank you so much phil it’s been a great experience um no get out there and do it um I don’t have tons of words of wisdom other than give it your best shot.
Speaker 0 | 51:34.510
Everyone, Drew Griffin, National IT. And I mean, Director of IT at National Parcel Logistics. You can find him on LinkedIn. You can find him on our show page as well. There will be a link to his profile. I’m sure you wouldn’t mind if anyone had any questions or needed to reach out to you for any advice or thoughts.
Speaker 1 | 51:55.455
Absolutely. thank you so much thank you phil really appreciate it have a great day
