Speaker 0 | 00:03.920
I forgot how awesome your workspace is.
Speaker 1 | 00:07.941
Oh, thanks. I added a pile of shelves behind me just for you. I did it this morning.
Speaker 0 | 00:13.823
It’s pretty awesome.
Speaker 1 | 00:15.523
Yeah, it gives it a little bit less of a bomb shelter look.
Speaker 0 | 00:18.804
The bomb shelter is great. Everyone out there listening to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds today, we are talking with Andy Ivey, clearly in the bomb shelter.
Speaker 1 | 00:29.468
Yes, the Central Texas bomb shelter here in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 0 | 00:34.212
Where is the middle of nowhere again?
Speaker 1 | 00:35.813
I am in Hamilton, which is two hours west of Austin. Even goat capital of Texas.
Speaker 0 | 00:43.459
Yeah. I’m like the taco capital. Isn’t Austin the taco capital of the world?
Speaker 1 | 00:47.423
It’s the barbecue capital.
Speaker 0 | 00:49.224
Yo.
Speaker 1 | 00:50.245
You got to eat your way through Austin, man.
Speaker 0 | 00:52.327
What am I? I’m in Connecticut. Oh, we have, we have, um, we got the pizza capital of the world.
Speaker 1 | 00:56.551
Oh yeah.
Speaker 0 | 00:57.936
We had New Haven.
Speaker 1 | 00:58.456
You could go over to the Worcester-style pizza, right, where they burn it?
Speaker 0 | 01:02.939
Yep, they’ve got that. And then we have the whatever. Well, no, Worcester’s Worcester Mass guy. That’s up north. That’s not Connecticut. That’s Massachusetts.
Speaker 1 | 01:11.885
Yes. We’re blending. Like the same area.
Speaker 0 | 01:13.906
Connecticut’s often missed.
Speaker 1 | 01:15.808
To a guy from Texas, it’s all lumped in to like it’s cold in the winter.
Speaker 0 | 01:21.391
Yeah. I have a buddy who moved out of Massachusetts. He moved out of Worcester. And I sent him a picture of the snow one year and he was down in Florida and he said, Phil, if you ever send me a picture of snow again, I am blocking you and we will we will no longer speak.
Speaker 1 | 01:42.012
Yeah, I’m not a snow guy. I’ll visit it on vacation, but that’s more to make my wife happy. You know, she requires a couple of vacations a year somewhere.
Speaker 0 | 01:54.244
Okay. So let’s talk about work-life balance and IT. That’s what’s more important anyways. First of all, since this is an audio show, I have to describe the background. So camouflage, nothing at all like your professional picture on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1 | 02:11.551
I was in town this morning, so this is my go-to-town outfit.
Speaker 0 | 02:17.634
Couch, flat screen TV. let’s see speed limit signs it looks like you have you have insulated your barn with spray foam from a canister maybe not done professionally maybe you did it yourself but you ordered it from like hvacsupply.com or something like that yeah it was done by a couple of good old boys in a truck and they were the lowest bidder this was a fabrication uh room that’s not i have a barn just so you know i have a similar I have a similar situation out back, which I should do a tour of someday. We should do video tours. We’re going to start doing live Thursdays, by the way. We need to do this live. No one sees the beard.
Speaker 1 | 02:56.129
Oh, yeah. They need to appreciate the beard.
Speaker 0 | 02:57.751
No one sees the beard recorded. It’s very hard to get a picture of me. I need to start building this up like it’s going to be this big reveal or something. There’s not many pictures of me that you’ll find on the internet. Phil Howard in his wheelhouse. I got to talk some Texas stuff. I don’t even know if that’s accurate. Is that even accurate?
Speaker 1 | 03:16.967
It feels close. Yeah. They need to see your beard flowing. They need the movement. That’s why video is so important.
Speaker 0 | 03:25.373
We’re going to do live Thursdays, but this has been an audio podcast. I would describe some more of your foam, foam insulated, which is great. I did foam insulation. The lowest bidder to me was, how did I, how did I, how did I advertise this guy on a neighborhood app or whatever that is? What’s that neighborhood app, the green one or something? It’s like,
Speaker 1 | 03:47.890
yeah, you got to stay off of there, man.
Speaker 0 | 03:49.932
Yeah. So I advertised, I was like, I love writing headlines for fun. And it was, um, what was the headline? It was like unlicensed, uninsured, get the job done. You know, like, you know how you always see people that are like licensed, insured. And I had a marketing guy one time. He’s like, look, if you put anything up there, that’s like, someone after your headline says, well, I would hope so, then it shouldn’t be your motto. You know, like great customer service. I would hope so. Or licensed and insured. I would hope so. So I just flipped the script because the guy that did my foam insulation, which is probably similar, like you said, good old boys, um, was, was unlicensed and uninsured. And I ordered the foam insulation in like the five gallon cans or whatever from, you know, HVA supply or whatever it is that I can get cheap. Because if you actually pay the foam guys. It’s actually quite expensive.
Speaker 1 | 04:41.044
Yeah, and I’m a paperwork minimalist, so I appreciate hiring a guy that just gets the job done.
Speaker 0 | 04:46.806
So what do you do? What are we talking about, by the way? What do you want to talk about?
Speaker 1 | 04:49.847
Dude, I’ll talk about anything. I think we talked a little bit about AI, but it was more because I’m not into it.
Speaker 0 | 04:56.069
Yeah, I’m making fun of a lot of generative AI stuff nowadays. A lot of people want to speak generative AI, and it’s kind of this. i don’t know could get flaky and not provide like a lot of value and if we’re going to talk ai then i want to see real use cases i want to see a real use case um and most of the use cases i’ve seen where ai is actually very useful is in telecom and contact centers of of all things where you can actually have like live agent assist and you know actually pulling documents from you know what would be good ai would be good for a um an end user document library for an it guy that doesn’t want to doesn’t want to keep up to date maybe with his his um i don’t know resource guide that you want end users to use and then maybe it’s like someone enters a ticket and ai tells them to go check the resource library but says don’t worry about it that is exactly what we built oh
Speaker 1 | 05:51.485
let’s go go because i was trying to what’s the use case that actually matters and i was like hey let’s do a chat bot uh no one will use it so that was great because Why stress your team out and say, hey, not only do I want you to build something, but it needs to be successful. No, just, hey, man, go build a chatbot. That way we can have experience with these new tools in Azure. We’re an Azure shop. And I don’t care if anyone ever uses it. The pressure’s off. Just go build it. And they did and dumped all of our knowledge base, our HR documents are in there. So, like, if you want to know, is it legal for me to work from my rack with my company laptop? Turns out no, but the little chat, we drop a little chat on your desktop so you can talk to our forgetter name, Alexa or something. You can go ask Alexa, hey, can I take my company laptop to Iraq? It turns out no, you can’t. And then we have avoided the ticket. Not bad.
Speaker 0 | 06:48.004
But you said no one uses it.
Speaker 1 | 06:50.026
Well, it doesn’t matter if they use it. Not a requirement. I just needed to build it so I could tell the business when they come and say, Andy, do you have experience with AI? I’m like, yeah, man, we built something. Come check it out. And sure enough, when we built that, the business is like, hey, man, can we dump all of our marketing documents in here and query them the same way? So now we dump all the marketing documents into there and you ask it, hey, what projects has Andy Ivey worked on? And it gives you the list. It says, and hey, what’s Andy Ivey’s education? And they can just copy and paste that into proposals.
Speaker 0 | 07:23.744
Well, now that you’ve linked AI to it, it’s literally everything. Your name should be attached to everything.
Speaker 1 | 07:29.967
I should put it in there like that.
Speaker 0 | 07:31.789
It should. This document brought to you by AI bot, Andy Ivey.
Speaker 1 | 07:36.331
Yes, the initials Matt.
Speaker 0 | 07:37.272
Attribute me. Attribute.
Speaker 1 | 07:40.654
The initials Matt. But yeah, I don’t take AI super seriously because I also feel like I’m developing Microsoft Excel. when Microsoft Excel is about to be released to market, right? Like imagine you’re building your own spreadsheet tool and Microsoft is building one too. Like I don’t want to, I can’t compete with someone like that. They’re going to build something for my industry that’s going to be awesome. And I just need to be patient enough to wait for it.
Speaker 0 | 08:08.652
How patient?
Speaker 1 | 08:10.412
Well, patient enough to not feel like a laggard, but I don’t want to be the guy leading my industry. Because that is a terrible place to be. It is very expensive, very time consuming. There’s other things I need to focus on.
Speaker 0 | 08:26.159
Let’s use Dissecting Popular IT Nerds as a selfish, me getting some free consulting from you selfishly. What should we be focusing on?
Speaker 1 | 08:37.123
Okay, white glove support for your users. Why have we forgotten about this? Because everybody’s outsourced their help desk. We don’t do that. If you look at like our… Our model for our IT shop here at Corolla, we’re a Gartner client, so we have Gartner, you know, always telling us what everybody’s doing that’s so great. And one of the things we do that is super unique is we do not outsource our service desk. Our service desk is the most important thing that my IT department does, and we have no SLAs. So your laptop being down, every minute your laptop is down, all of our… All of our staff are consultants. They’re all engineers. They’re all licensed professional engineers. A minute of their downtime is lost money that is super easy to quantify. So why have an SLA? What are you going to do? Three-day downtime for a laptop? That’s super common. We don’t have that. We’re going to get you a laptop today. And if I have to counter to counter it to an airport because you live somewhere weird, we’re going to go to an airport and counter to counter a freshly imaged laptop to you. Because downtime is not acceptable at all. So our users are super happy. It’s like Chick-fil-A, you know, customer service.
Speaker 0 | 09:50.092
I wrote an article on Chick-fil-A a while ago. It’s on LinkedIn somewhere still. I hope I didn’t delete it. Yeah, there is something really amazing about the Chick-fil-A, you know, my pleasure thing. It’s very simple. They’re unhealthy. It’s not good for you. No. It’s still fried chicken.
Speaker 1 | 10:05.572
Yes. Terrible for you.
Speaker 0 | 10:07.954
But the whole image, the whole, you would think that someone else could just copy that and it would work, but it doesn’t. No. No one seems to just say.
Speaker 1 | 10:17.962
Popeye’s chicken is not able to provide you with a happy experience, even though they can cook chicken pretty good.
Speaker 0 | 10:24.607
Popeye’s is great. It is great. I’ve had actually inconsistent and inconsistent Popeye’s experience in Lemonster, Massachusetts. lemon stay guys the plastic capital of the world it’s also where they have the um for anyone out there that’s interested in interesting facts the cannoli festival so if you like cannolis that’s where you go yeah yeah it’s not like so um okay so you work with engineers yeah i would say that many i.t folk find that to be problematic and one of the things that i’ve been running into specifically in even in texas to pigeonhole you guys as a maybe lackluster IT state. I’ve been running into, and that’s completely not true. I have no statistics on that whatsoever. What do you do when executive management or the majority of your team is the smartest people in the room? So we have a few industries like that. Doctors.
Speaker 1 | 11:31.375
Yes.
Speaker 0 | 11:32.075
Lawyers.
Speaker 1 | 11:33.016
Yes.
Speaker 0 | 11:34.576
Engineers. It’s pretty much the top three. Pretty much the top three. You either went to school for becoming an engineer, and if you dropped out, you became a lawyer. That’s what my dad did. He went to school for engineering, dropped out, went to medical school. And then you get the other people that are lawyers, and then I think the doctors probably make fun of the lawyers, even though they all go play golf together. This is full of stereotypes today. I love this.
Speaker 1 | 11:57.429
Stereotypes. Make you feel warm. Yeah. Like you’ve got everything figured out.
Speaker 0 | 12:03.224
Yeah. How do you deal with that mentality of they’re the smartest people in the room? So how do you get them to trust you is what I want to know. So trust is a big issue in IT, and it’s a big issue in getting a seat at the executive roundtable. It’s a big issue. And I’ve brought this project to our roundtable. Maybe there’s a bunch of engineers sitting at it, and they’re just, yeah, man, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know if I believe you there because I’m smarter than you.
Speaker 1 | 12:27.200
Yes, they are extremely intelligent. And if they could be bothered to do IT work. they could do it better than you is the stereotype, right? Yeah. And it’s true enough, that feeling. So my default answer is yes, always. I don’t care how asinine the request is. I’m going to at least make an honest effort to say yes.
Speaker 0 | 12:50.518
I need you to open up all security barriers so that I can do whatever the heck I want on my laptop.
Speaker 1 | 12:55.082
Yeah, I need to find out a little bit more like what you want to do. But security is a fun area where in the last… three or four years every company that used to be a free-for-all and let everybody do whatever they want have so many stories in their industry of that going sideways that it’s true that’s an easy conversation because you can point to hey our competitor did that and they were offline for two weeks because somebody clicked on a pop-up that they shouldn’t have and let the fake microsoft tech support guy come in and remote into their laptop that’s one of my favorites but i’m sure it never did yeah but i’m an engineer i would never do that uh yes they do that they do that all the time because i have proof of it uh i have proof when they click this and um our tools catch it thankfully and are like hey someone’s trying to remote into this system let’s not relax i had my son-in-law on right now because he has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and he works at abb and
Speaker 0 | 13:50.775
i kind of Offline, he jokes me about how he got caught the first month or so by the whatever, no before, whatever, who knows what they’re using, like whatever they’re using. And who cares? I’m an engineer. No, but for real, how do you gain? So what do you do then? You just say yes. You just say yes.
Speaker 1 | 14:09.207
Try to say yes. I try. I try my best. I make an honest and making an honest attempt is I think people are going to gloss over me saying that like it’s not meaningful. I genuinely mean changing your mindset to. actually really trying to make it happen for them, even though, you know, it’s a bad idea. And I don’t think people appreciate that, that like, Hey man, I I’m not just throwing words at you. You just told me you wanted to open up a firewall for this port, for this app that you built in a, you know, in your free time. And we don’t know what it did. I want to find a way to make this happen. And it’s not going to be a blanket. Yes. It’s going to be in that scenario. hey man can i have a guy poke around this app can we put it in a dmz or something can we put it on a standalone machine and just see what happens uh put it in a sandbox and see what happens you know we pay for sandbox service for that reason um go put an app in there and click on it and see what happens um see what ports it actually opens and see what data it actually sends. And you can do that very quickly as well. If you work in a huge company where someone giving you an app that they built this weekend is going to take you a month to review, you have a serious problem in your cybersecurity department. That needs to be like a few hour task. Like you need to get back to them within a couple of days with an answer. And if you can’t, you need to go figure out what’s wrong because something isn’t working. They’re going to go around you because you suck so bad at your job.
Speaker 0 | 15:39.522
Oh, so it could just be that you actually do suck and they shouldn’t trust you.
Speaker 1 | 15:43.064
If you’re a very large company, at least my experience working in Fortune 500s, you probably are so bureaucratic that you’re unable to provide a good user experience. It’s not even possible. You’re so process bound.
Speaker 0 | 16:00.056
How many IT people out there are imposters?
Speaker 1 | 16:06.781
Any sort of, well. probably the majority of middle and senior management at any company of any size. Plus probably a lot of your project managers, a good chunk of your cybersecurity stuff, guys who don’t actually turn a wrench, that’s a real common problem. And we don’t turn wrenches, but you know, you know, sysadmin engineer types. Outside of that, I think you get a lot of people who use the bureaucracy to justify their 40 hour week.
Speaker 0 | 16:36.201
Interesting.
Speaker 1 | 16:38.466
How many PMs do you know that just create charts? They’re not doing the work, but they spend 40 hours a week creating charts, summarizing other people’s work. My PMs, dude, there is no fluff. At the end of the week, I get like a sentence on what each project’s doing and a general feel for like, is it on fire or not? And they can cover 10 times as many projects. How many times have you planned a project and spent cycles planning for the wheels to come off in the first week? Just stop doing it. Just start doing stuff, even if you do something wrong. Like, just act. Maybe don’t plan. Just go do some work. And if you wasted a week, I bet you’re still further ahead than if you spent a week sitting around with a Gantt chart. Or you love Agile, great. That’ll lead you down a bad path just as easily. You can do your Kanban board, it will kill you as fast as a Gantt chart. I do love a good Kanban board though.
Speaker 0 | 17:37.507
Talk to me more. I want to hear more. So this is very real to me right now because you’re like, oh, we need, you know, of all the things we should do, of all the certifications out there, we need none of them. We need none of them. Maybe Agile. And you’re saying…
Speaker 1 | 17:49.810
I have 19 IT certifications. I love them all. I have a safe, scaled Agile framework. The most important one is CISSP. Because CISSP is the only one that I can go win work for my employer with. I can go to a client, tell them I have a CISSP. They then listen to me because of that. And I win work and my competitors don’t. My A+, Network+, Security+. Let’s go in line.
Speaker 0 | 18:17.900
Let’s go in line. Top five. Top five.
Speaker 1 | 18:19.961
Yeah, definitely CISSP. I think if you’re a Microsoft shop or whatever your technology is, that technology. If you’re a ServiceNow guy, you would do ServiceNow. Although I’m not. I would advise you not to. We’re a Microsoft shop, so I would go down, man, get all the Microsoft paper you can get. And it’s not going to solve any problems. I love everything from CompTIA because it’s vendor neutral. And so you aren’t tied to the Microsoft universe, although I love Microsoft. I’ve built a career off of them. But to know what’s going on in a generally vendor agnostic way, why not get the A plus? The network plus is a legit cert. Dude, figuring out IP addressing is not like a small thing to learn. If you understand IP addressing, dude, you’re way ahead of the average guy. And then to go do your security plus where at least you know the lingo, at least you know the words and you have a dictionary that you can go use to find the right product or the right person. You at least know what exists. So if you’re a security guy who’s just out there learning on your own, you’re probably going to be successful if you’re smart. But you can go. Take a few weeks out of your time, go read this book and take this test, and you’ll at least understand the breadth of the industry. And you could have holes where you don’t know a tool exists, but these certs can go fill those gaps for you.
Speaker 0 | 19:44.132
Where does Agile fit into this?
Speaker 1 | 19:46.534
Well, what’s your project management methodology? You can be Prince, which I don’t think anyone uses outside of the UK.
Speaker 0 | 19:56.901
What should it be?
Speaker 1 | 19:59.062
I like to have a nice little Kanban board and I like to keep everything in the backlog that we know we need to do. And then have another little vertical that shows me everything that’s being worked on. Have another vertical where you put stuff that’s on fire so it’s in its own place. And then you have a vertical. The most important one is the stuff you’ve done. Why is that the most important one? Because what do we do a terrible job of? We do a terrible job of telling anyone about our successes. And so if you’re an employee in IT, you get to the end of your review where they’re supposedly going to base your bonus and salary increase off of that end of your review. You need to have a list of all the things you’ve accomplished that year. Do you keep a list? Because if you don’t, do you really take your career seriously? Do you really want to advance? And same with a project. Like, how many projects, like, practically delete finished tasks if they never occurred? And I’m like, we should be celebrating these. We should be looking at them. We should, every day, you should go look at that list and be like, dang, man, look how far we’ve come. Otherwise, you’re just going to focus on what’s left to do and get defeated, get beat down. So look, your audience is mid-sized companies, right? So most of us probably don’t have such a complex project as like when I worked at PepsiCo and I think we were in like 165 countries or something insane. And you’re trying to navigate that. Okay, man, maybe I need a team of project managers. But I bet you most of your listeners. If they went down the PMI, PMP route, have way too burdensome of a project management methodology in place.
Speaker 0 | 21:45.115
Okay. So how do we unburden? This is the key. This is the key to mid-market IT, unburdening.
Speaker 1 | 21:52.520
Yeah, who’s going to take the risk?
Speaker 0 | 21:54.362
Throwing stuff away. Just screw it. Just start doing plug and plug. Plug some crap in.
Speaker 1 | 22:00.286
What’s the worst that can happen, man? You’re not going to take the whole place down. Come on, buddy. You built it better than that. You have a smarter team than that. You’re not going to willy-nilly do stuff. But I think you need to have somebody that’s willing to take a risk. And the best thing a leader can do is when something goes wrong, to react appropriately. Because what normally happens is… Johnny over there tried something. Maybe he broke the rules, didn’t follow change management. I’m a believer in change management. I think that’s a great safety for everybody. He went and just he unplugged something and plug something in thinking it would be better. And he took something down. How do you respond to that? And what message do you send to everybody else about your appetite for risk? Because if you’re telling everyone that we can never try anything different, because when Paul went and and moved that cable without approval. But when he moved that cable, we hung them up in the hallway. Then I think you send a message that, hey man, none of us here are ever going to be able to be in a position to, as you said, throw it all away and try to simplify. You should be actively trying to make your environment simpler, less problematic. Like, why not? Like, I’m sure every rule has a reason, has a story behind it, but maybe every rule you enact, you have a rule that you take two away.
Speaker 0 | 23:30.151
So I’m not a political guy at all. I’m just, and I never knew what like go Brandon meant. I had no clue. I had no clue what any of that stuff meant. But this sounds like a saying that we should have like protect Paul, protect Paul or something. Cause Paul unplugged. Paul implicated we’re going to come back to that we need a saying we need like an IT saying that we’re going to somebody listening can come up with how do we protect Paul Paul needs to know not to do that again but Paul yeah like a like a go Paul it’s like a dual meaning it’s like go Paul protect Paul it’s like Paul don’t be an idiot but also don’t throw them don’t hang them up in the the before we get to that though you said we do a terrible job of fill in the blank you like celebrating success? What is it? Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 24:18.774
we do a terrible job of celebrating success, of even remembering our success. So just write it down. That’s the simplest thing you can do to save yourself, to save your team. As a leader, you should be writing stuff down. What did we do right? I do a poor job of this too, where I’m like, man, what did we do this week? And the reality is I bet in a week, everybody listening, your teams have done amazing stuff this week. You need to create a mechanism where that gets bubbled up and recorded. And I don’t know if that’s every team lead keeps a list, but like, why aren’t you celebrating your success? I guarantee you someone’s put out a huge fire and every week and every shop there is. And hopefully the users didn’t know about it, which is even a bigger win. The.
Speaker 0 | 25:07.988
It’s a big mental mindset thing. We haven’t talked a lot about mental mindset on this show. Really haven’t. I know it exists. I know it’s a problem. Health is another one.
Speaker 1 | 25:19.337
Oh, yeah. Especially after the lockdown.
Speaker 0 | 25:23.321
I got to get my rubber band out. I got to be working on my carpal tunnel and all my other problems that I have from sitting at this stupid desk for years. And I’m someone that actually should be in shape and kind of am, I guess. Uh, we’re mental mindset. So I’ve talked people off a cliff at least two or three times this week already. And it happens every week. And I’m, that’s why I kind of, I like last week and my memes have been short. I do have a really great meme that we need to put out today. The have been short this week has been so busy myself, but when it comes to talking people off the cliff, I really love like Edison quotes and he had one that was um it was like something like like how many people would have been successful if they just hadn’t given up or you know something like that like these type of mental mindset things but which reminds me of this one because people give up a lot of times or they get down they’re not focusing on the successes they’re just constantly focusing on the endless workload because it is kind of like the mail it isn’t what I mean it’s kind of like the mail because what happens when everyone takes a vacation or, or the holiday comes up the holiday time of the year, right. Or whatever, any holiday, any break, anything that’s like a, I don’t know, national holiday or something. Right. What does the mailman get? He gets double the mail the next day. So, and the mail will never stop. It’s never going to stop. There’s always going to be more mail. So how do you? stop yourself from going postal for a lack of a better words or terms you know what i mean in it because it’s pretty much a thankless job at the end of the day when it comes to hey thanks for keeping all the systems up and running and yeah putting that fire out without any end users knowing right or and then msp world deals with the same too right because eventually like a small business owner is gonna be like hey why do we need to pay this msp anymore like everything’s working i don’t understand like all the systems work why are we paying this guy’s bill you know so Um, we don’t focus on the successes and when these really bad downers happen or our mind starts to take over and I’m a big fan of quit your stinking thinking and you really have to watch your, like the thoughts that you put into your mind. And it’s like when you’re in the shower or something or driving down the street and you’re having that like fictional argument with somebody that is not even a real argument, but you’re like, you know, this is what I would say to him too, if this ever happened, you know, It’s, I guess the point is, is you’ve been here before, you’ve been successful, you’ve overcome, you’ve delivered results that are measurable and great and ROI. And you’ve, you’ve done these projects before. You just need to be able to remind yourself, you’ve been here before, you’ve been in this situation before, and you’ve come out triumphant and look at where you are now. Like you said, we’ve made a big jump.
Speaker 1 | 28:35.784
Absolutely. Phil, if you spent your week talking people off a cliff, then you’re an actual leader. Because you know, when you lead a group, you don’t get to actually do any real work. You don’t get to control your week. What am I going to do this week? I don’t know. It’s wild,
Speaker 0 | 28:52.837
man.
Speaker 1 | 28:53.158
It’s wild. Why would I ever plan my day, man? My day is going to plan me. The role of a leader is to block and tackle for your people. That is it. You have nothing else that you need to do. You block and tackle for them. So you take a bullet for them. And then most importantly, you don’t ever tell them you took a bullet for them. And that’s where leaders mess up is because they get shot by the board and then they go bleeding down to their number two’s room, his office or her. Yeah. And you’re like, I just took a bullet for Paul. And you’re no, the point was for you to shut up and take a bullet for Paul in silence. Now you’re stressing Paul out, you know? So part of that is starts at the top, I guess.
Speaker 0 | 29:38.810
So it gets really lonely at the top. This is a common theme.
Speaker 1 | 29:41.672
Burden of leadership is what the military calls it.
Speaker 0 | 29:47.216
And everyone looking up the leaders like, you know, if I was in there, I’d be doing better. And then you get into leadership and you’re like, oh my gosh.
Speaker 1 | 29:54.901
Yeah, this sucks.
Speaker 0 | 29:56.042
The burden, it is so stressful. Everyone judging me. Every bit of my weaknesses are fully on. Pulling on the teaser. Yeah. Everyone hates you or love doesn’t really love you or they hate you, but they want stuff from you. And yeah, it’s like all your weaknesses are fully magnified to the 100th X. Um, but then you kind of like get through that psychological pain and problems and, and then you, you, you learn by failure and then, yeah, it’s, it. And then you, then the burden comes down and you realize it at that point. I don’t know if that makes any sense. What I just said.
Speaker 1 | 30:37.563
It was good words.
Speaker 0 | 30:41.126
The, uh, where, Oh, back to, back to protect Paul. So one of the themes that comes up a lot, and this is where we’re, we’re building the community and I’m thinking of investing a lot of money into it. Why for you guys, um, maybe some vendors will pay us some money and we’ll sell it someday for something. I don’t know. Definitely not the data. The data will be completely private. everything will be safe. No, but really in, in honesty, a community for all of the IT leadership, that’s, it’s lonely at the top, right? Because you can’t go to executive management because they’re the ones that are like, why, why did this happen? And you know, like you just can’t, you know, you’re the leader, right? And the, the, why do I always hear you’ve got to protect your people? i understand grow your people develop your people but why are i.t guys leaders cto cios vps of it directors of the network whatever we want to all these titles that give each other um digital transformation um maven uh there’s why does the theme protect our people come up a lot. What is there to protect?
Speaker 1 | 32:05.893
Yeah, I think it’s because we’re a utility. And I know that we don’t like to say that we’re supposed to like talk about how business aligned we are. And the great example of that is there’s no greater lie than the CIO that tells you about some business unit that they gave him to run. That’s like a real business unit that makes, that has P and L and, and profits. And he’s really a business leader now. or she is and they’re contributing they never are when you dig into what they do it’s like they added some other mundane back office operational thing to their list but i would argue that probably your lawyers your risk team probably feels the same way your accounting team your hr team anybody who’s who’s a back office traditional operations team probably feels like you’re in protection mode because everything being perfect is the default. And you know that everything being perfect is the pinnacle. That means everything is like you or like everybody on your team is just hitting home runs every time up to the plate. But to the business, everything just working is the baseline. And I think, I don’t know if that can be fixed. And not only do I not think it can be fixed, I’m super worried about people that tell you it can be because in my 20 whatever years doing this, They’ve always been proven to be liars.
Speaker 0 | 33:34.326
Well, because it’s impossible.
Speaker 1 | 33:38.008
It’s my guess. Duh.
Speaker 0 | 33:39.809
I mean, you basically kind of just lined it up. It’s like, yeah, absolutely. We can circumvent the speed of light. Absolutely. We can do it.
Speaker 1 | 33:49.294
Yeah. Don’t worry about it. Just put it. We’ll outsource it. All our problems will be solved.
Speaker 0 | 33:53.637
Done.
Speaker 1 | 33:54.377
Yeah. Move it to the cloud. Now everybody’s moving back out of the cloud. This really does come full circle.
Speaker 0 | 34:02.841
It does, right? Because I have to send you something in the mail in order for you to open it. I definitely can’t email you something.
Speaker 1 | 34:07.943
Right.
Speaker 0 | 34:08.263
If I email you something, it’s coming from, because I haven’t migrated to Microsoft yet, which anyone out there listening that’s part of dissecting popular IT nerds, if you want to take on this project, pro bono. And you want to be like the guy that migrated Phil and his team of 14 people to Microsoft so he didn’t have to. It’s open for, it’s open for, um, I don’t know, um, a, at least, at least three burritos from Chipotle. Nice. Um, no, it’s probably a lot more. And there’s like a bunch of salespeople are going to show up and trying to get me on, get on the podcast.
Speaker 1 | 34:45.237
Well, the burritos are getting smaller. Twitter told me that the burritos are getting smaller at Chipotle.
Speaker 0 | 34:50.081
You got to hack the system. You got to hack the system a little bit. You got to know to like, there’s certain ways to hack the Chipotle burrito, which I think is. asking for things that make the wrap break on purpose so that they’ll double wrap it for you at no cost let’s see there’s probably there’s some there’s some other hacks i can’t remember what it was it’s like that guy that figured out the the um like get free burgers at mcdonald’s thing like if they remove the whatever the the patty or something and add this on the yeah and the kiosk is there yeah you have access to all that now yeah like someone figured out like there was like a loophole in that and got like a bunch of stuff and like i think like a dollar back and change or something yeah there’s there’s a there’s a chipotle loophole i’m sure there is well probably i don’t live i don’t live somewhere where there is such a thing So you’re in Texas. That’s a joke down there. Chipotle is like a,
Speaker 1 | 35:42.334
there’s only, there’s only 8,000 people in my entire County. I could eventually drive to a free bird. So if you’re ever down here and you want a burrito, that’s where you go. Free birds. They respect you enough to have sauce. It’ll actually, that’s actually spicy, you know, cause Chipotle calls their one thing spicy and it’s not, it’s just, I’m sorry.
Speaker 0 | 36:06.327
Oh. big city burrito call out in uh fort collins colorado by the way best burrito place i ever had potato burrito was awesome went to csu uh i love this quote i think this is going to have to be it the biggest lie is that we are a business leader we are really a utility we
Speaker 1 | 36:26.362
need something to sit on that the um what’s wrong with that we get paid pretty well to do this Hopefully. Well,
Speaker 0 | 36:34.044
because you’re ruining the entire, like, you’re ruining the entire basis of my show, which is crawl out of the server room and we’re a business force multiplier and we’re not a, you know, IT is no longer a cost center and we’re a business force multiplier. So I can’t really run with that because, I mean, I can, you know what I mean? But it’s like, let’s face it, a utility. I mean.
Speaker 1 | 36:58.383
You have to figure out. You can figure out a way, and I actively work on this, to understand how every dollar invested in IT turns into $2 for the business. So when we buy a set of software, I know who uses it, I know what projects it’s used on, and I know how much profit we made on those projects. And so I don’t disagree with you. I just, I think there’s nothing wrong with running a server farm really well and having laptops that image quickly. And those kind of things, like, maybe it’s not sexy, but man, I was a network guy. Like I’ve done the least sexy things you do in IT. It’s pretty sexy to me,
Speaker 0 | 37:33.909
honestly, if it’s like if it’s a Bitcoin farm or something like that. I think that could be pretty sexy.
Speaker 1 | 37:38.910
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 37:40.150
Andrew Tate would make that sexy somehow.
Speaker 1 | 37:43.131
Yeah. Well, you’ve seen they’re starting to build these in rural communities and they’ve ticked off all the folks that live around them. And they’re starting to claim that they have like health problems from living next to these farms with the running fans. Really? Yeah. That’s a thing. So they’re building these farms out in the middle of nowhere because they can. They can get electricity pretty cheap out there. And the people that live near these Bitcoin farms are claiming or AI farms, whatever, you know, who cares what the compute is, are claiming that the running fans is diminishing their quality of life. It’s a real thing.
Speaker 0 | 38:21.974
I didn’t know. So there you go. I’m very ignorant. Very ignorant. I only know I only know this. And. uh when i leave at the end of the day that my eight kids and a hectic life outside of this and um yes which is which is very very very um you know you’re poor in that sense it’s
Speaker 1 | 38:45.012
making its way into popular culture so uh cj box who writes books in fact he’s got a show they did turned his books into a show on something netflix or something um he writes about a game warden really good books they’re you mystery thriller kind of suspenseful things. And he always gets involved in, he almost, almost dies every, every novel. He’s a game warden, but someone’s always trying to kill him for some reason. And his last book was up in Montana or Wyoming. They built all these Bitcoin farms because it’s cold so they could cool them easier. And, you know, they’re out, they’re just these structures built in these rural areas. Same, same idea is already in a fictional book, already out there in popular culture.
Speaker 0 | 39:25.803
It’s awesome. I’m more fascinated by this turning every dollar into $2 and how you do that and prove it.
Speaker 1 | 39:33.660
Yeah, it takes a, it, you know, when we were all fascinated with chargebacks, every IT department’s been fascinated with chargebacks. This idea that when the business makes a request to me, I can use funny money internally to the company to charge them for that service. And you’re just moving your own company’s money around, which is super inefficient. And that’s why I think no one really does it or very few people do it. but it’s also a lot of paperwork so i’m not saying that i can prove with like real good strong concrete numbers when i buy a seat of a bentley product that that is used to design a water treatment plant for this specific customer and i know that we made you know whatever dollars on that but i do know my business well enough to know that when i procure them a seat of bentley that that cad designer when they design that treatment plant that i understand all the way to specifically which client that guy’s working on and we’re 1500 employees so i don’t know all 1500 people but i understand that relationship and how i can connect someone coming to me for an out of budget expense for a very expensive software license or a server or whatever it is you know we do gis stuff which is a bunch of expensive compute it hits you out of budget cycle and i’m like well at least i understand this 20 grand i’m spending out of cycle is going to this specific client and it is a very profitable client that’s why i’m not i’m going to say yes we’re in a normal traditional it department in my past I would say no, because I only saw the cost. I didn’t understand the business value of saying yes.
Speaker 0 | 41:18.700
What’s your teaching moment? I want something. Can we teach something there? I want to teach the listeners or somebody something that you do that might be unique, that’s different on how to track things like this, something that might be along the lines of just get out and do it and start plugging things in. But, but, and then, and then. via all this work and doing of things, we’re celebrating the success that happened just via doing stuff. So like, how are you mapping this out and proving these things?
Speaker 1 | 41:47.456
Yeah. So the first thing I did was try to do it myself, which proved to be very difficult. And I hired someone to do it for me. And yeah, you’re like, oh, I don’t have money for headcount. This is where it’s interesting. I hired someone away from a competitor who was doing the very same financial accounting for an IT department. So you love, who doesn’t enjoy?
Speaker 0 | 42:08.798
hamstringing a competitor by taking away one of their key employees that’s one of the funnest things you can do as a leader is go here’s the thing though that’s back to you not being a utility so for us all this stuff like i love that you say hey we’re just a utility but maybe the key to being an actual business leader is embracing the fact that you’re a utility because you just said i’m a utility but what you just did was a real guerrilla warfare business tactic you
Speaker 1 | 42:38.470
Dude, I am here to eat my competitors’lunch. My business’s competitors are my competitors. And you can’t hide yourself in a back room. You are part of the business, even though what you provide them maybe isn’t very sexy. But I hired a financial person that knew how this all worked in my industry. I’m in architecture, engineering, construction services. It’s a very unique industry. So you really, it’s… it’s hard to hire even it people outside of this industry because all of our apps are unique it’s just weird place and so they already knew how we worked and then i could feed them my desires to be like hey when someone comes to us with an out of band request can you ask them to pay for the year one out of a project and then we get the project number or they say no but we at least learn what the project is so if i go to my board and say hey man i’m a hundred grand out of out of spec on budget, but here’s the five projects that came to me with out of band requests. And here’s the dollar amount that we were able to be a part of. We won $20 million of work. I spent 200 grand in IT because that was required for us to win this 20 million. And guess what? No one’s upset that I’m 200 grand over budget at that point. Usually I’m not, usually I can make it up because I’m financing is something that you got to be on top of, but The rare times that you can’t, you have a great story and everyone’s happy. Imagine that. You go and tell someone you’re 200 grand over budget and they’re happy. Why? Because they know that they won $20 million worth of work.
Speaker 0 | 44:15.502
We spent money to make money. We spent money. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 44:18.224
I got it. I’m like, hey, man, you know we didn’t know about this when we budgeted last year. Now, if you can make that up and go tell the same story, but say, hey, I found cuts and I absorbed the 200 grand, which is like nine times out of 10, I can find it somewhere. It may hurt. but I can find it. Man, do you win some people over?
Speaker 0 | 44:38.176
Let’s break this down. Give me, um, well, first of all, it all started with, um, coaching your competition. How did you approach that one?
Speaker 1 | 44:50.781
Uh, so you have to hire one person from there and you network your way in. So you gotta, you gotta find someone in your team. I’ve got 47 it people that work for me. So you find somebody that knows somebody over at that. other firm. Usually they came over through some relationship. They knew somebody through the engineering side of the business, but you end up with someone who has some sort of networking connection to one of your competitors.
Speaker 0 | 45:15.234
Directly on your team or somewhere in the company?
Speaker 1 | 45:17.656
Yeah, either one. You just pull that thread. Say, hey, do you know anybody over there that’s looking to jump? And if you… If you’re a big enough department to maybe pull this off where you’re going to hire five or ten from somewhere, you could afford that first person you hire to not be an all-star. You could take a risk and say, hey, I don’t even know if this person I’m pulling over is any good. But then once they’re there, you say, hey, man, who were the killers over there? Like, who were the ones that made your life easy? And then you pull all the best people over because all of us have a competitor who’s on fire. All of us have a competitor whose culture is so toxic. All you have to do, you don’t even have to give them a raise. You just go say, hey, man, how would you like to come work for somewhere where we actually treat you like a human being? You can actually focus on delivering quality services, and we care about the quality of the services. And we’re going to treat you like a real person. How would you like to come work here instead of getting yelled at or whatever, you know, working somewhere where they’re currently outsourcing you to, you know, you’re having to train some guy that’s going to take your job away from you. Like if you run a IT department that actually treats people like a decent human being wants to be treated, you can eat everybody else’s lunch because most places don’t do that.
Speaker 0 | 46:33.329
This is so just one of the best episodes ever. Thank you. I really love this. And we might have to do a two part series. The first series is going to be the first part is going to be. Let’s embrace the fact that IT is utility. And then it’s IT needs to go to war. IT needs to go to war.
Speaker 1 | 46:58.440
We need to go to war.
Speaker 0 | 47:00.481
We’re coming into war today. If you come into work every day with that, you know.
Speaker 1 | 47:04.123
When you hire a guy from your competitor, your business leaders love that. They think that’s awesome because they do the same thing, right? You’re hiring engineers away from other engineering firms. They’re trying to hire your guys away.
Speaker 0 | 47:16.250
So awesome.
Speaker 1 | 47:17.270
And for you to be like, dude, I got that warrior mindset too. And we’re going to wear our company polos. We’re going to get on an airplane and we’re going to go do some business.
Speaker 0 | 47:27.898
Everybody has someone that is on fire. It’s just, man.
Speaker 1 | 47:31.759
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 47:32.259
Great. Just, it’s just awesome. The, are you saying everyone, every company has competition that is on fire is what you’re saying?
Speaker 1 | 47:41.562
Yeah. Like they were bought by a private equity firm. Yeah. They’re that key. Key signal on who was just bought by a private equity firm.
Speaker 0 | 47:49.085
I don’t understand the financing guy though. So you hired an it person that was good at financing.
Speaker 1 | 47:53.749
Like the purchasing person within an it department killer. Absolutely awesome. Yeah. And maybe some people listening don’t aren’t big enough to have a, but they paid for themselves. So I’m like,
Speaker 0 | 48:05.957
hire me. I’ll do it.
Speaker 1 | 48:07.078
I’m good at that. Yeah. They paid for themselves because it was me doing it and I have some finance training, but I’m like super busy. So to have someone that can do it full time, found enough savings to where they’re like, Hey, I just paid my salary.
Speaker 0 | 48:20.670
I actually just did that. I actually just did that, but I did it kind of inadvertently because I have another colleague that’s really good. And she called me, she said, Hey, do you have problems with this? And this, she’s like, well, this person doesn’t work at this place anymore. And they were in charge of like all of the finance and everything like this. And like, do you want to like team up and like hire this person? And I was like, that’s freaking awesome.
Speaker 1 | 48:43.059
Cool.
Speaker 0 | 48:44.440
And, uh, yeah, cause there’s only certain finance when it comes to finance and stuff. And if you’re in a very niche industry or you’re in a weird, like, you know, it’s kind of like, I don’t know, trying to find someone that knows how to build podcast websites. And that’s just one of the things that I’m dealing with right now. You know, it’s like, it’s just like how many web designers are out there. Right. And then how many web designers are in technology and then how many web designers are in technology websites. And then. and then podcasting and then know all the plugins and stuff like that. It just, it gets niche, niche. It gets, starts to get more niche down. So it’s brilliant advice. It’s brilliant advice. Really is. It has been an absolute pleasure. This time has gone by absolutely ridiculously fast. And there’s so many other things that I would love to talk about. Like I don’t know, recent cybersecurity events tied to Russia that we could talk about. We still got a few more minutes. What do we got? Let’s end with Russia.
Speaker 1 | 49:48.549
Look, this is great. I’m a fan of Russia.
Speaker 0 | 49:51.089
Do I be a fan of Russia?
Speaker 1 | 49:53.010
It doesn’t matter, bro. None of this matters. It’s all a game. I’m convinced. It’s all a game.
Speaker 0 | 49:58.271
It’s definitely a game.
Speaker 1 | 49:59.852
If you don’t think we’re being played, you’re being played the hardest. So when you read an article.
Speaker 0 | 50:04.873
You got to get in a bunker. You got to have a bunker. You got to have a spray foam. That’s how you play the game.
Speaker 1 | 50:09.094
One EMP-proof vehicle. So I should be okay. If you read any article about a cyber attack, the headline always says Russia attacks. U.S. water system or something like that. And you go read the article specifically looking for how did they tie this to Russia? And it’s always paper thin. It’s always this analyst, according to an unnamed source, believes that they saw the traffic originate in Russia. It’s always the thinnest strand. And Russia was just put in there to get clicks in the headline.
Speaker 0 | 50:40.582
Sure.
Speaker 1 | 50:41.982
It’s wild, man.
Speaker 0 | 50:43.022
That’s why we’re talking about Russia right now, so that more people listen to this episode because I can pull Russia up.
Speaker 1 | 50:47.504
You just put Russian in the title.
Speaker 0 | 50:49.304
Just Texas, Russia, and IT is a utility bot. Done.
Speaker 1 | 50:55.647
Yeah. Russia’s AI outsourcing. Yes, do all of it.
Speaker 0 | 51:00.909
Russia’s generative AI spy from
Speaker 1 | 51:05.231
Texas. But can’t write a podcast website. Come on. How come it can hack a utility from across the globe with no proof, but it can’t write a podcast website for you?
Speaker 0 | 51:17.664
Oh, it’s beautiful. Any final words of wisdom, a final teaching moment, any thought to your IT leadership colleagues? I really, by the way, I really loved the, we talk a lot about how certifications don’t matter, but you’ve shot down absolutely every premise of my entire, you’ve killed it all. Absolutely not. I’m totally proud of all my, of all my certifications, CISSP, Microsoft, ServiceNow. No, which is another topic is why would you not? I want to know why you said no. CompTIA, Network Plus. Network Plus, you’re right about the IP addresses.
Speaker 1 | 51:55.925
Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 51:56.405
it’s tough. IP addressing. I mean, it’s like, that’s why it’s easy for me to differentiate myself from others amongst IT people just because I can say, why you, Phil? I know what an IP address is.
Speaker 1 | 52:15.584
Yeah, I know what subnet. I know how to subnet.
Speaker 0 | 52:18.445
Isn’t that sad?
Speaker 1 | 52:19.646
Yeah, that’s rare. I think I’ve forgotten because I’m a CIO and CIOs don’t know anything.
Speaker 0 | 52:26.710
We don’t. How many salespeople attempt to call you on a daily basis on LinkedIn?
Speaker 1 | 52:30.332
Oh, it’s insane, but I block all of them and I don’t have voicemail.
Speaker 0 | 52:33.473
How many of them know what an IP address is? Static IP.
Speaker 1 | 52:36.215
Oh, probably none. No way. No way. Not even something as simple as a static IP. How would they know? No, they probably wouldn’t understand that. Um, I would say that, uh, while I’m pretty, pretty high on certifications, I don’t think degrees matter.
Speaker 0 | 52:53.596
I don’t either. That’s why we talk about it all the time.
Speaker 1 | 52:56.337
It’s like a waste of four years of your life. It’s a cultural thing. You’re just checking a box.
Speaker 0 | 53:00.559
My dad’s a MD surgeon. Um, he’s 89 now, so he’s not doing surgery anymore. Although I’m sure he probably still could take out a kidney. Um, yeah, he didn’t, he didn’t graduate college. He went straight to medical school, got in early.
Speaker 1 | 53:16.368
Nice.
Speaker 0 | 53:17.028
That’s different though. That’s not the same thing. In IT, if I had to hire somebody, do I want to hire the person that has all the experience, that hacked a bank when he was 15, that knows everything like the back of his hand, or someone with just kind of like a degree and I guess some certifications, I’d much rather have the guy with experience, if that’s what you’re saying.
Speaker 1 | 53:38.460
I want the guy that likes it.
Speaker 0 | 53:40.481
Yes.
Speaker 1 | 53:41.741
Like actually enjoy IT. If you don’t enjoy IT and you’re just here for the money, then… That’s not going to work.
Speaker 0 | 53:47.084
You want the guy that’s remembers his, enjoys his successes and remembers his successes and has a proper mental mindset.
Speaker 1 | 53:54.846
Yeah. But you can help them if they don’t, you can get them there. You can coach them up.
Speaker 0 | 54:01.028
How do we do that? Last piece,
Speaker 1 | 54:02.768
last piece. You love on them. You treat them like a human. You, and you, you make sure they know what tools are available. Outlook has amazing tools. Teams has amazing tools for allowing you to be left alone. so you don’t get constant pop-ups, so you don’t get calls at nine o’clock at night, unless it’s from a certain part of your list, or they call twice, a starred contact. You have these tools available, and it’s your job as a leader, I think, to tell your team they exist, and then to show them that you use them, and they should use them to unplug, go have a whiskey and a cigar, and enjoy your time with your family. we’re playing i’m like i’m like well over 22 years without a drink so i wouldn’t i would i would subtract the whiskey thing you can have a cigar with me the um huge huge huge reducer of stress to sit there for an hour and a half smoke a cigar and
Speaker 0 | 54:55.861
just stare at the fire is what they call it you’re supposed to stare at the fire and that’s physically rest i love it staring at the fire me sometimes it’s if it’s if it’s surfing and the surf’s up which should be actually today or tomorrow sitting out in the waves and getting
Speaker 1 | 55:10.402
pounded or almost good exercise sometimes yeah i love jujitsu there’s something about blue belt gracie jujitsu i lost tore both retinas doing that so i don’t do it anymore i run out what did someone someone not cut their nails and stick their fingers in your no it was just from uh from from getting hit i also did muay thai so probably oh wow i love it yeah guys it’s awesome i i used to just say i’m sorry i gotta go i’m going to roll around with sweaty guys today yeah Yeah, go hug on a guy and a guy. And the best thing is I’m a total pacifist. Like to fight me in the street, you would have to almost kill me before I would respond. But I would go to jujitsu and beat other people up. It’s awesome.
Speaker 0 | 55:53.970
Oh, my gosh, Andy Ivey. Thank you so much for being on. Thank you, sir. Super awesome. And we’re going to invite you back because it’s just too much fun.
Speaker 1 | 56:00.475
Please. Enjoyed it. See it.
Speaker 0 | 56:02.277
Thank you.
Speaker 1 | 56:03.238
Bye.
Speaker 0 | 56:07.301
Oh. Josh, you’d think I’d be able to hit stop.
