Dissecting Popular IT Nerds

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322- Trevor StClair on IT Leadership and MSP

Dissecting Popular IT Nerds
Dissecting Popular IT Nerds
322- Trevor StClair on IT Leadership and MSP
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Trevor StClair

Trevor StClair serves as the Information Technology Manager at Improve Health Clinics, PLLC, overseeing technology operations across multiple locations in the eastern United States. With experience in healthcare, agriculture, telecom, and MSPs, Trevor brings a diverse background to his current role. He is passionate about effective leadership, continuous learning, and balancing technical expertise with personal interests like flying and event organization.

Trevor St. Clair on IT Leadership and MSP

How can IT leaders effectively manage teams and drive innovation in healthcare settings? In this episode, Trevor St. Clair, IT Manager at Improve Health Clinics, shares his journey through various IT roles and industries. Trevor offers insights on leadership, the challenges of working in MSPs, and the importance of trust and empathy in managing tech teams. He also discusses his unique experiences as a pilot and event organizer, highlighting the diverse skills IT leaders bring to their roles.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of their employers, affiliates, organizations, or any other entities. The content provided is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. The podcast hosts and producers are not responsible for any actions taken based on the discussions in the episodes. We encourage listeners to consult with a professional or conduct their own research before making any decisions based on the content of this podcast

Trevor St. Clair on IT Leadership and Healthcare Technology

3 Key Takeaways

  • Trust team members until they give you a reason not to, empowering them to take on responsibilities
  • Learn from past experiences, especially what not to do, to become a better leader
  • Be proactive in planning and avoid falling prey to marketing hype in IT decision-making

Episode Show Notes

01:43 – Trevor’s experience with podcasting during COVID

10:06 – Discussion on healthcare IT and regulatory challenges

15:18 – Trevor’s experience with MSPs and challenges in the industry

21:30 – Trevor’s approach to leadership and managing teams

27:12 – Trevor’s unconventional path into IT

29:00 – Trevor’s experience as a pilot and overcoming fears

34:51 – Trevor’s side projects: writing a book and event production

36:51 – Advice for aspiring IT leaders

Transcript

Trevor StClair

Speaker 0 | 00:02.060

they’re about uh you know 40 45 minutes it depends on you know just where the conversation goes and stuff like that sure no worries okay so the way that i’m gonna start this is uh i i create a pause for a second to give them a place to snip the audio and then we get right into it so here we go welcome back everyone to dissecting popular it nerds you I’m your host, Doug Kameen, and today I’m talking with Trevor St. Clair, IT Director at Improve Health Clinics, LLC. Welcome to the show, Trevor.

Speaker 1 | 00:38.349

How’s it going, Douglas?

Speaker 0 | 00:40.251

I’m doing great. I’m doing great. How about you? How are you doing today?

Speaker 1 | 00:43.253

Just another day in paradise. Happy to be here. Happy to be here.

Speaker 0 | 00:46.915

So before we got on the show here, we were talking about podcasts. And you two have tried your hand at a podcast in the past. hasn’t this day and age i mean hasn’t everybody played around social media just let’s just see what happens that type of thing and like most everybody else you know we fail because we’re we’re tech people this is what we you know we we love to try things and not you know maybe we’re not always successful at what we try but but we give it we give it our you know the college try if you will um or the non-college try depending on where you’re coming from uh but i think the tell tell Sorry, I just want to ask, tell me a little more about what was your podcast that you were trying to do? You said it was a COVID thing, right? You were like, we’re in COVID. We’re like, we’re going to do this, right?

Speaker 1 | 01:43.147

Yeah, it was in COVID. We were going to do this. And we called it the Tech Trenches. The idea was kind of sort of similar to this one, but it was more like come in and give your horror stories what went wrong. You know, oh, God, we were building this data center. And. Something horrible went wrong. The ceiling collapsed on us and we were all panicking in an earthquake. You know, tell the funny stories that we all, you know, the type three funds stuff that we all, you know, we all kind of spout off in interviews and kind of brag about later. But they suck in the moment. Yeah, that was kind of the idea. And we did four of those. Two of them we couldn’t post because they just kind of spiraled down the wrong hole. And. Well, it was a fun conversation. He’s like, we’re not going to put that on the internet. It’s going to delete. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 02:35.996

What was your favorite story from this? Like, I mean, so we’re talking about IT disaster story. So what was what was the best one?

Speaker 1 | 02:43.400

It wasn’t really like a like a tech disaster. This was more of a personnel disaster and who we were working for as the client. The client no longer exists. And they were a lawyer firm. They were the. The head partner kind of ran everybody off. I don’t know how you take over a successful firm with 30 lawyers, and then within two years, everybody leaves and kind of collapses. That’s the kind of guy he was, if you’re getting what I’m putting down, because he is a lawyer, and I don’t want anything bad to happen to me. But he came down and did his thing and grilled me and three other techs in a conference room, like, deposition style, for three hours on why his server wasn’t working. He’s like… Like, at the end of the day, it’s like, bro, you’re running an SBS 2008 or 2011 spec for five people in an office of 60. Like, that’s why. That’s why it’s down. You cheaped out. Like, I can say that now. I didn’t say that at 23 years old. So 10 years later, I can say that.

Speaker 0 | 03:49.755

Now, did you send him a bill for your time during that three-hour meeting? Because I would have. Oh, yeah,

Speaker 1 | 03:54.098

he was billed the entire time. He was billed. 10 hours total for all the texts that were there.

Speaker 0 | 03:59.401

Yep.

Speaker 1 | 03:59.901

Which is really funny.

Speaker 0 | 04:01.222

That’s the spirit. That’s how it should roll. So before, you know, I’m currently a CITO, you know, an IT director like you, but I also had a stint, a 10-year stint in IT consulting. And, yeah, sometimes the stories you get out of the IT consulting space are, ah, they’re great. You know, there was the time I. uh i and i’ve told this story on the podcast before but uh i had a client was a manufacturing customer and their server room in this you know 130 year old building was just literally the room they put some fish was like a 1980s server room you know they threw some glass panels in in the there and there was like a wooden door on each side and they threw an air conditioner and mini split on the wall and that was the server room and um They had racks of servers and all the cables went in the back. And there was an AS400 and an expansion chassis and this spaghetti mess of cables. I have to go replace a server. So this is not, you know, I’ve done it before and had to do what I had to do. I had to walk on the cables. Well, I walk on the cables and sure enough, like it pulls like one cable pulls another cable because of the rubber on the sheets and yanks on this other thing. And it draws out the power plug for the expansion chassis of the AS400 that runs their core business system. So the AS400 manager comes barreling into this. server open he’s like what do you guys do to be at the uh the network administrator and we’re like we didn’t do anything like we don’t know what’s going on and we look at what had happened was the plug had come out of the power plug enough to disconnect it but not enough to fall to the ground so like when you looked you’re like it looks fine like what’s going on he’s like there’s something wrong with the experience like it’s you know poking away at his screen trying to figure out what’s going on what he can’t access And yeah, so that is my best IT horror story.

Speaker 1 | 06:02.638

I’ve been there, done that. I mean, I’m getting into the healthcare realm just on the IT, or just on the client side. So they had to have, after you get a certain size, you have to have an outside audit come in every so often. It’s kind of dictated by state and all your regulations. There’s a lot of regulatory spaghetti that goes on there. Yeah. This was a previous organization that I worked for like in 2014. And when the auditor came in, our CEO came in and goes, you’re our enemy. Like, bro, these guys are trying to keep us from paying $2,000 a medical record for during a breach. And you’re paying them to be here and you’re calling them an enemy. We have 10 million records. Do the math. That’s not going to be a fun day for us. And we’re a nonprofit. This is not going to go well.

Speaker 0 | 06:54.552

That’s the best. You get a good violation of a health record violation with HIPAA and stuff. It’s by the record. Oh, man. We could spend our whole time here revisiting our consulting days and funny stories we have.

Speaker 1 | 07:14.125

I don’t want to do that.

Speaker 0 | 07:16.246

I know. That’s why I don’t miss consulting. It’s funny. When I was in consulting, I was like, oh, man, this is the best. Of course, like… In certain ways, IT consulting is, I’ll say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it’s like a young person’s game. When I was like 25 or 27, I was like, yeah, I’m going to hustle. This is great. I’m going to work on five customers a day and drive between their offices. And then at night, I’ll update the servers on this thing. And that was great when I was 27. But a 45-year-old me, that’s not how I want to spend my time. my day i’d rather you know i i love the more strategy work and the oh yeah you know just like getting to plan stuff on a more holistic basis and and think more strategically well even on the personal side like you wake up one day and just get curious like on a sunday or something to go on indeed or linkedin or whatever you start seeing what everybody else is paying for like

Speaker 1 | 08:12.991

in-house it’s like oh i can be a network engineer for this manufacturing warehouse over here and make ten thousand dollars more and i own the network and i’m just then that and i go home and i don’t have to work at night yeah that kind of changes perspective when you start barreling out but you can do you do get to meet a lot of people and do a lot of networking in the consulting world uh so you consulting msp you know tomato

Speaker 0 | 08:39.593

tomato yeah yeah yeah i was in that business as the msp like wave was taking over you know i was i was at the bridge between the two so i was just before it when we were still doing things like like block time of contracts and that type of stuff was the norm. And then MSPs were coming up in like the, you know, the mid to late 2000s and it’s kind of taken over the market there.

Speaker 1 | 09:03.852

Yeah. My, my MSP time was 20. Yeah. I went event space, healthcare, telecom, MSP, agriculture, back to healthcare. So it, I only spent. I spent a year at an MSP and that was enough. I never want to go back. From what I’ve heard, they’re all that horrible. They’ll all sell you out.

Speaker 0 | 09:32.646

MSPs are a challenge from a work environment. Just speaking to this from a leadership perspective, an MSP from a business leadership perspective, prior to the MSP revolution, if you will, the way the business model was set up, it looked a lot like an accounting firm. or, you know, a law office, you know, we showed up. You had time, whether it was prepaid time, like on a retainer or billed by the hour. You know, we showed up for an hour. We billed an hour for our time and our work and that type of stuff. So between the work of getting that done, you know, I might bill 60% of my time in a week. You know, 60% was like a high billing percentage. But the way a managed service provider is typically configured is like your expectation of a staff person from a billing perspective is. 85, you know, 90, like, like a 40 hour week, you’re expected to be billable for like 3738 hours of that week in a lot of those environments. And there’s certain tools, you know, the ideas, the tools set you up to be able to do that and stuff, but it, it’s it can grind people out pretty fast. You know, so it feels I don’t want to be like, Oh, it’s totally a different business than when I was there, you know, like, you know, next thing you know, it’s all I’m going to tell those kids to get off my lawn out front too.

Speaker 1 | 10:52.252

But what I worked for was what I would call a bad MSP. You know, there’s tech companies that suck and it’s tech companies that suck less. There’s no good tech company. I worked for one that sucked. It was basically a conglomerate of failed MSPs that had been bought out by a parent company. But they kept all the managers that ran their businesses into the ground. So it was just repeatedly running. They would buy these offices, bring them on. So they basically would buy the cash flow, then run the business into the ground again. And then they would just buy the next one. And then they would run them into the ground again. So they’d make all the clients mad. They wouldn’t renew. So yeah, the takeover, they would come in. They’d hire all the staff. They would run out the contracts. They would aggressively persuade the clients to sign a three-year deal with them. And because no staffing changes had been taking place yet, these clients felt okay coming on board. Well, and they, so they made a switch because of the same service manager, same techs. And in my area, uh, the successful MSPs operate just like the accounting firm. Like, like you said, uh, they, they built, they build their hours and it, you get set people. You have a set account manager, you have a set engineer and you have a set tech. It’s the same three people all the time. Well, these guys come in, they keep that for the first year on board everybody. Then they make all their staffing changes. They lay people off. you know thin the herd and then they just tank the service because someone’s used to picking up the phone and calling saying well you know call me calling you don’t for whatever they kind of spin out they’re like okay now i’m now i’m calling a help desk and a knock and these guys can’t do anything because they’re they’re level one techs fresh out of college making twelve dollars an hour we’re not talking about the creme de la creme here uh unfortunately which is also saying something about my alma mater because they were hiring straight out of the program I graduated from. So that’s another layer, but they were always hiring the, what I would call the bottom of the barrel folks. Like when I went through the program, we know that the joke was don’t go to work for them because they ruined your career. Like you don’t last.

Speaker 0 | 13:09.742

Yeah. And it’s the MSP market. It’s so bifurcated where there are really. There’s certainly excellent businesses in that market. I don’t want to paint with a single brush to say every MSP is bad because they’re not. There’s organizations that run great businesses. They run tight ships and good operations. But the business model also can lend itself to a situation like what you’ve described, where there’s an encouragement to sign up for contracts and then to cut the staff afterwards and really just kind of take the service in the name of profits. And that can be a real challenge. to navigate through and operate inside of. And it can be, even for early career folks, it can be somewhat career limiting too.

Speaker 1 | 13:54.378

Oh, for sure. The good example, I gave a bad example, I’ll give a good example. A buddy of mine has ran an MSP for like the last seven years. And when I say top notch, I mean top notch. This guy’s, this is my former boss from my second job out of school. And we’ve just maintained. Contact because we just kind of got off on the right foot and we just gelled and I mean we slept on our floor And our offices when we rebuilt their data center and like we we kind of went through the trenches together Yeah, and I was just right there with him He built an MSP that’s focusing on healthcare clients locally. So he takes on the small doctor’s offices the dentist offices the small independent nursing homes and he is only he only takes on what he can take on and he trains his new techs up from you know tier one all the way to engineer and he’s got it set down to where he can do it in eight months so he can take someone fresh out of school who’s completely i i don’t want to say everybody that comes out of college is incompetent but they’re but the people that are going to come in and work for

Speaker 0 | 15:04.372

10 12 an hour are not exactly high high the highest caliber yeah it it has a hands-on component to it that it’s very difficult to get the experience to walk into and know how to do right but he can take them

Speaker 1 | 15:18.572

from zero to hero in eight months and within that year they’re making seventy thousand dollars and they’re running clients so they’re making seventy thousand base plus their um whatever billing bonus structure they got out i think he’s i think they’re i think he does ten and seven uh ten percent bonus uh at the end of the year on the contracts that you serviced and you get a seven percent bonus of all the hours you build wow so you could actually make a lot of money if you’re really good but he also has a client retention bonus so if you have so It’s residual if that makes any sort of sense so you get them so the longer a client stays on with you as Your engineer or your tech or whatever? You get paid more so there’s an incentive there to keep them happy so which honestly in that kind of world It really makes sense, and he’s kind of popped off with that. I mean he’s got he’s doing like he said 1.2 million in revenue with four techs mm-hmm And so it’s just, it’s just him and four other guys.

Speaker 0 | 16:19.052

That’s a great business.

Speaker 1 | 16:20.273

Yeah. And he’s, he’s, I think that that structure that he’s got set up and I think he’s at the perfect size where if he goes any bigger, he will have to corporatize and he’ll lose that personal touch. So I think there is a, I think that’s the limit. He might be able to push two, 3 million in revenue, but he’s going to have to hire more staff. And once you get past five staff, you need to hire a manager because you can only effectively manage five people at a time. Yeah. well effectively manage and train so you’ll have to hire somebody else and make sure they’re that quality which it then you start having a dilution so i think he’s kind of at the max he can take on but still you know he’s still a millionaire he’s a millionaire helping tech help helping got helping doctors and patients and training techs he’s turning out guys that are the work for him for two three years and they’ll go off and you know you 180 190 000 jobs at amazon like we’re talking zero to hero yeah he’s like the guy who invented the pet rock he made a million dollars movie references so

Speaker 0 | 17:32.666

so so and that’s great to be honest you touched on something i i had to make my joke to start but the the part the part where you mentioned about moving on to other organizations and stuff like that like that’s that’s one of those big things of leadership like you know and i want to make sure we talk about you and your leadership but i just wanted to highlight that component of what you mentioned about him is is his his i’m presuming he’s willing to be like no my job is to grow people to a certain point and then at some point they’re going to move on and that’s okay you know like like it’s cool you know they spent time with me we had a good relationship And now look, look what they’ve got to do. Like they get to go from where they were making with me and make twice as much working for AWS or, you know, Microsoft or whatever the case may be.

Speaker 1 | 18:20.115

Yeah, he throws going away parties.

Speaker 0 | 18:24.717

So I want to make sure we spent a long time talking about MSPs and consulting and all that other stuff like that. I want to make sure to bring this back for our listeners to where, you know, to you and your leadership and where you’re going and that type of stuff and hear a little bit about you. So. Tell us a little bit about your, you work for Improved Health Clinics. Can you tell us a little bit about what is Improved Health Clinics and where are you based out of, like maybe the geography?

Speaker 1 | 18:49.607

I’ll say what I’m allowed to say. Yeah, absolutely. Because I’ve been instructed to not go too in because they’re like, yes, go affect the greater good, but leave us out of it.

Speaker 0 | 19:03.873

Share the details that are appropriate.

Speaker 1 | 19:06.014

It is a private health care clinic associated with a. with a large fortune 500 company with uh locations from uh washington dc throughout the entire uh eastern coast mississippi ohio river valley and uh the great plains and our headquarters isn’t tall so we don’t go east west the rockies basically okay that’s cool so all right so so you’ve got you’ve got offices you’re taking care of in in facilities from you know a pretty wide geography essentially from from

Speaker 0 | 19:37.728

right you know the midwest to the east coast and uh you’re you’re based in tulsa you’re in indiana i think you said yeah so you you got you’re moving around a lot to take care to do this work

Speaker 1 | 19:51.922

I got a lot of miles on a couple of cars.

Speaker 0 | 19:55.462

And now you have staff, too, and stuff like that. What’s your team look like?

Speaker 1 | 20:00.984

It kind of filters. Just because of the fluctuations, we kind of have to stick with contracts. So, right, unfortunately, our latest batch has just ended, and I’m back down to a solo team.

Speaker 0 | 20:11.707

Okay, so.

Speaker 1 | 20:15.048

It pitches and goes. It kind of goes with the weather. So as we roll into winter, there won’t really be any. what i would call real activity like there’s not basically moving into maintenance mode and then spring will pop off again because we a lot of my work is going to be outside so winter in you know west virginia the mountains back in a holler is not exactly enjoyable to be pulling cable or supervising you know diggers or any type of you know ground laying work to or go pull cable

Speaker 0 | 20:51.762

in a building they just got structured or just got uh framed you know things like that yeah so it tells a little bit about your you alluded to your history i mean you mentioned if you know for those who’ve been listening uh this far in the podcast i know you mentioned you’ve been at uh an msp you’ve been in community the communications business you were in an agriculture business and that type of stuff and you’ve been in a couple stints in health care so uh What kind of leadership have you had? Tell us about your leadership experience in those spaces and what you had to do to be a good leader.

Speaker 1 | 21:30.673

Like my personal leadership experience or my experience with my bosses?

Speaker 0 | 21:34.216

Yeah, all of the above. Because, you know, this is a great point. Leading is not just leading for the people who are beneath you. But oftentimes, and I say this in IT a lot, is that in IT, we have to manage up as well. You know, you got to manage the expectations. You got to manage the folks that are up there. You got you end up you end up, you know, and I don’t mean this in a demeaning way, but you manage your bosses. You know,

Speaker 1 | 21:59.257

if if they’re willing to let you do that. Sure. Most of my the way I operate today is based on a bunch of lessons that I’ve learned throughout the past 10 years that are mainly filled with what not to do. Like, this is how you don’t treat people. This is because you felt bad when you were being treated this way. So you don’t. do that that type of stuff yeah it’s like oh you can save a lot of money if you’re just proactive in like you’re like in proactive planning and you don’t just knee-jerk everything or you don’t fall prey to marketing like uh a former uh my four of my last employer the one i had before i got my current gig they switched to crowd strike last year because somebody came in and bought him dinner and said some Fancy words. That was all it took.

Speaker 0 | 22:52.763

I was like, at first they had some challenges recently.

Speaker 1 | 22:57.505

Oh, they don’t, they didn’t need it. They didn’t need to spend that money. When I left there, they were set up to, they were automated completely. But that, that’s been my experience. It’s mainly, okay, this felt like crap when I was treated this way. And so I need to not treat people that way. So basically my, I operate by, oh. Now I have to put it in words. Trust people until they give you a reason not to trust them, essentially. So I’m hiring you to do this job or I’m giving you this responsibility. I want you to do this and I’m going to help you do this. Or if I take on an intern, okay, I’m going to figure out what you know and find out what you don’t know. And I’m going to do that really quickly by putting you in a situation that you’re not comfortable with and I’m doing that intentionally. Because I want to see how you handle yourself. And then if you drop the ball, I will help you. If you persevere through, that’s great. But there’s still something you did wrong. It just kind of is what it is. It’s more of testing people to figure out where their strengths are, what their weaknesses and what their goals are. So you just kind of got to identify that and charge for it. It’s basically being a good person, in my opinion. It’s about how you want to be treated.

Speaker 0 | 24:14.645

Uh-huh. Now I’m thinking about, you just mentioned about, you know, what are your, your past places? You know, they, things were set up, you left, you left things set up well, and they didn’t, you know, you, you’re like, they didn’t need some of the things that they bought, but, you know, they were, they were swayed and they did this stuff. And to me, that’s a, that’s one of those like leadership lessons that I ended up sharing with folks that I talked to a lot, where After you leave a job, you have to just become comfortable with the fact that the people just they they make decisions that you don’t have control over anymore.

Speaker 1 | 24:52.409

It’s not my responsibility anymore. I left them the book on how things were set intentionally set up and the plan going forward. Can’t leave a horse to water. You can lead a horse to water. You can’t make him drink.

Speaker 0 | 25:03.599

Yeah. Yeah. Like I was, you know, it was for many years as a county CIO. And in one of the when I left, you know, I did the same thing. It was like this 20 page book of like, here’s important stuff you need to know and details and just like strategy things about how to use interface with these people. Here’s people, you know, these these ones are the more challenging folks in the environment and stuff. And, you know. When my successor wouldn’t take the advice that I had given from the lessons that I had learned, then I watched him either relearn them or stumble. You know, I’m like, why didn’t you take my advice? But I have to remind myself that, first of all, they have to learn their own lessons. And secondly, you’re not in charge. So they get to make the mistakes. They get to choose. And that choosing includes choosing to make a mistake.

Speaker 1 | 25:57.034

Sometimes you just got to sit back and go and laugh. Like, cause that’s all you can really do. It’s probably the bad way to look at it, but that’s like, why did you guys do that? I, I, I left you instructions, but okay. It’s not my, that if I don’t laugh, I’m going to cry. It’s like, it’s one of those places where you just, I put so many, so much blood, sweat and tears and pride into that. And, you know, like, like I said, sleeping in an office floor because I was there till three, four in the morning, ripping something apart. running new cable, setting something else up, you know, making user accommodations, whatever. And then it just gets turned around and falls apart. It’s like, oh, come on, man. If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.

Speaker 0 | 26:40.438

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, I hear you. So just a little more. We spent quite a bit of time talking about, like, job work and history on MSPs and IT consulting and stuff like that. But we do like to. make sure we take a few minutes to talk a little bit about i’ll call it more light-hearted stuff too uh additional light-hearted stuff so what uh what is your first experience like what got you into technology what brought you what you know what was maybe your first computer you know your first thing you know did you have you know i i

Speaker 1 | 27:12.287

took a very unconventional path um i went to college for it because i needed a bachelor’s degree to become an officer in the air force mm-hmm Obviously, that didn’t happen, but that was the intention. I was going to join the Air Force. I wanted to be a pilot. I needed a bachelor’s degree to get an OCS. I didn’t have the grades or activities in high school because, well, let’s be honest, I was an irresponsible 18-year-old and teenager because I cared more about girls and money and cars than I did about grades. So I was not going to get into the Air Force Academy. So the other option was to go through… OCS after, you know, get a commission after I get my bachelor’s degree or go through ROTC. So that was, you know, I’m going to school, I’m going to join ROTC. And then the ROTC air wing gets completely removed from the university I was at and I was five hours away. And then when I graduate, Obama was president and he was doing his officer’s cut. So there was an officer freeze. So there was nobody getting any commissions in 2013. And the only way in was through the academy. Okay. Tried four more times. And even though I had the scores. And now I’m too old.

Speaker 0 | 28:31.246

I could revive a meme. Thanks, Obama.

Speaker 1 | 28:33.907

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 28:36.988

It is what it is. It is. Hey, it led you to where you’re at today. Which is still success. It just was not the one you thought you were going down the path of originally.

Speaker 1 | 28:45.912

No, and I can still fly airplanes.

Speaker 0 | 28:48.613

Oh. So. No. So that was going to be another question of mine was, was tell us something that we wouldn’t otherwise know about you. So that’s, that’s one thing. Not that you could have others, but you say you’re a pilot.

Speaker 1 | 29:00.939

I am scared death of heights and I am scared to death of stalls. Like, uh, I don’t know if any, if you’ve, uh, flown in a small puddle jumper, like a, like a PA 28, one 30 or a, yeah. Pizza, a Cherokee Piper. Yeah. There’s small, small four-seater airplane only has 140 horsepower. You’re only going 120 mile an hour. It’s a very slow plane. It can fly down to, with full flaps, you can get it down to about 45 knots before the stall. Now, it’s hard to get there, and you’re in a leaf stall, but it won’t break. Once you get it to break, you’re sitting at, I know nobody can see this, but you’re sitting at about a 60-degree angle in your seat. You’re looking at the sky, and the nose just drops, and it’s a hard drop. It’s like, boom. It’s just instantaneous, or almost instantaneous. And you get… light in your seat and you have to let go of the controls to get because you want that downward speed to get airspeed back so you can recover. So it’s very nerve wracking for me to do.

Speaker 0 | 30:04.987

So my question is, why do you do it?

Speaker 1 | 30:07.048

Because flying is awesome, man.

Speaker 0 | 30:10.649

No, no, I meant the stall. I meant the stall. Like you could fly around without stalling.

Speaker 1 | 30:15.730

You have to do it for proficiency. Okay. So you have, if you want to maintain your airman, your airman proficiency, you have to fly so much every 90 days. And then every two years you have to go in for an airman, what’s called an airman review, or I don’t know what you call it. Our flight school calls it airman review. That’s the program. So it’s basically you go up for two hours to flight instructor and you go through all the maneuvers that you’re certified in to make sure you can still do them. If you don’t do them, you have to have remedial training in them, which is just, one, it’s to make sure that you’re not going to kill yourself and other people. So it’s very good. And the flight reviews are very necessary because you’re doing something that is highly dangerous. Like, let’s be real here. Like, flying an airplane is really dangerous.

Speaker 0 | 30:59.536

Oh, yeah. They’re pretty dangerous.

Speaker 1 | 31:01.116

If you screw up, you might not walk away from this. So it’s best to have practiced the emergency scenarios and prepare for them, but make sure they never happen. So, like, when you’re flying, you have a defined minimum maneuvering speed. So the Piper Cherokee, 70 knots. You do not get this plane slower than 70 knots. It does not go below that. If it goes below that, you’re… whatever you’re doing is canceled you need to hit the throttle and level wings level and go because you’re you’re too slow so that’s that’s one way of doing it there’s other defined maneuvers like you don’t bank past certain certain degree like you don’t go past 30 degrees you can go to 45 degrees but you’re getting dangerous there stick to 30 degrees ideally you stick to three degrees if you’re flying a uh instrument flight path uh standard rate turns all that good stuff but

Speaker 0 | 31:51.214

I’m learning a lot of interesting stuff here. Thanks for sharing. So now, are you in the service at all at this point? Like Civil Air Patrol or anything? This is all just because you love flying.

Speaker 1 | 32:07.862

I paid for it. There’s a flight school a mile away from me. And it was, oh, I could wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning and go do this for two hours, go take a lesson, and then be at work in time.

Speaker 0 | 32:19.969

Nice.

Speaker 1 | 32:20.569

Okay. Yeah, I’m sold.

Speaker 0 | 32:22.226

Let’s do it. So, so there, that was obviously, that’s a very super interesting thing that people would know about you. So your pilot and, and, uh, you know, with a lot of regular training and, and, and experience, anything else that, uh, somebody wouldn’t expect from you?

Speaker 1 | 32:39.258

Oh, I’m not experienced. I only have, I only have 50 hours. I’m not, I can’t afford to fly anymore. It is so expensive. Uh, fuel’s $10 a gallon for a play for, uh, uh, GA fuel.

Speaker 0 | 32:51.766

And it’s like leaded fuel too,

Speaker 1 | 32:53.868

right? 100 octane, low lead. It’s $10 a gallon. The Cherokees burn 10 gallons an hour. So it’s $100 an hour before you even rent the plane. So you’re going to go fly for an hour. Boom, there’s $100. So then you have to have an extra 30 minutes on hand just in case. So boom, there’s $150.

Speaker 0 | 33:14.905

I had a friend who, he was a pilot. He was a commercial pilot, but he would fly small aircraft around and stuff like that. This is like 20, 20 plus years ago. And they play for what he called my girlfriend at the time. He’s like, oh, look, I’ll take you flying. So we go, we rent like a, you know, Piper, you know, Piper Cub or Cherokee or whatever. And, you know, fly from where I live in upstate New York down to central Pennsylvania, down to Scranton. So and and we went and we so we landed at the airport and we go get dinner. He’s like, oh, yeah, it’s the hundred dollar hamburger run. Yes.

Speaker 1 | 33:47.684

Now it’s now it’s a three hundred dollar hamburger. That’s right.

Speaker 0 | 33:49.405

Apparently.

Speaker 1 | 33:51.526

Yeah, there’s a restaurant at the end of a runway in Missouri. Oh, God. Lambert’s. I think it’s Lambert’s. The place that throws the rolls. That’s all I remember. They provide preferential service to pilots. Like, if you call, if you land at the airstrip, they will send a shuttle to get you. They will drive you into the restaurant, and you won’t have to wait. They will walk you past everybody. No wait. Immediate seating. Like, I don’t know why, but I thought that was fancy. The place is always… packed so it’s just a unique little thing the other the other unique thing that i’m into that nobody would really know uh i just i’m i’m writing a book and i’m i just started an event production company oh okay so those two things that i haven’t really put out in the world yet but those two are i have events scheduled for the rest of the year to test test a few things out and we’ve got a bunch of plans for next year that’s not going to make any money i’m just doing it because it’s fun

Speaker 0 | 34:50.258

What kind of events?

Speaker 1 | 34:51.900

Gaming events. So tabletop games. Oh, nice. So Warhammer, D&D, things like that.

Speaker 0 | 34:57.609

Okay.

Speaker 1 | 35:00.022

there’s nothing here locally and all the game stores in town kind of suck and fight each other so we figured it’s time to give this place uh the events it deserves nice that’s cool so so you got your hands on a lot of different things just kind of always doing something can’t sit still also on

Speaker 0 | 35:18.950

top of that i’m working on my sizzle so that’s going to be a lot of fun got the book got the book you know for those At home on the listing, I should say, not at home. But those listening in, he shows I’m looking at the CISA book. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 35:36.494

the ISACA book was a lot of fun reading. It’s really fun reading. You should read.

Speaker 0 | 35:41.397

Yeah, I have.

Speaker 1 | 35:42.658

It’s the driest thing I’ve ever read.

Speaker 0 | 35:44.199

Yeah, for my CISSP, whichever one you use to describe it. But like that book was like 1100 pages.

Speaker 1 | 35:54.325

I couldn’t do it. Yeah, I did an audio book and I paid the $1,000 for the video class. And then I drilled all the questions in the book. And it was just like, I couldn’t have sat through and read that. I couldn’t have. I’ve got the CCIE book over here, too. And I can’t. I got working through Narbix handbook. And some of the stuff is just so dry, I can’t do more than 10 pages at a time. So. It is.

Speaker 0 | 36:26.111

We’re coming up. We’re kind of coming up close to time here. So before we before we break, I want to make sure to ask you for for our listeners. Can you share what we talked about lessons in leadership that you’ve learned before? But what advice would you give to people, particularly folks that are coming up in I.T. leadership or even other I.T. leaders? Like what what what would you give them as advice?

Speaker 1 | 36:51.802

The best piece of advice I ever got that I don’t think anybody gets, pick the advice you listen to. Because not all advice you get is good or honest. Not everybody has your best interest at heart. Let’s be real here. There’s salespeople out there that will tell you anything and everything. Hey, you do this, this will get you this. It might not necessarily be true. Someone could be a boss. Hey, if you do this in your life, this won’t this will work out like no, that’s just make your own path. The best way forward is to find somebody who’s doing what you want to do and ask them how they got there. And then you don’t use that as word. That’s that’s not set in stone. Just use that as a guide because your path will be different.

Speaker 0 | 37:44.932

Thanks. Thanks. Trevor. Thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.

Speaker 1 | 37:50.276

No worries. It’s been a pleasure, Doug.

Speaker 0 | 37:52.818

That’s a wrap on today’s episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m Doug Kameen, and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode. And we’re done.

Speaker 1 | 38:04.906

Sorry, I used your full name at the beginning. I just kind of, I panicked. I was like, oh, shit.

Speaker 0 | 38:09.329

Oh, no, I’m Douglas Doug. To be honest, I actually write my name as Douglas, but people call me Doug. I got you. Yeah, then I get to be fussy with them. It’s like my they-them pronoun. I get to be like, it’s written as Douglas.

Speaker 1 | 38:28.490

You can really mess with people then.

Speaker 0 | 38:32.413

So, as I mentioned before, I take this, I package it up. It’s a little bit of time between now and when the production team gets through the process. It’s an audio podcast, so let’s just extract the audio. um we put it on linkedin uh there’s so when your your episode comes up they create some nice graphics they they tag you know your if um i noticed on linkedin your business um probably because you mentioned about how they kind of be on a little bit of the download um there’s no business page for that or whatever but they’ll tag you and some other stuff in there and just help you know you can use it to promote whatever you would like um you know i usually promote it too we’ll talk a little bit about what we you know what we talked about share with my uh my network as well um but uh yeah it’s uh do you have any any follow-up questions for me or anything here at the end yeah why was it so short well we we’ve talked for 40 minutes right we started like 3

Speaker 1 | 39:29.301

3 10 to 350 so it could honestly be longer yeah the stuff you guys put out is good it could be it could be longer and it would still retain good good uh listenership In my opinion, you can ignore me. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m not a podcaster and I sure as hell don’t have a successful one. So don’t listen to me.

Speaker 0 | 39:49.627

To be honest, I just I just a host. Fair enough. I’m a CIO and I was like I a while ago, a year ago, like Phil was like. I had been interviewed on the podcast, but I was through the conversation at the time. He was he was like, I’d like to find another host. And I’m like,

Speaker 1 | 40:12.962

I volunteer his tribute.

Speaker 0 | 40:13.963

That’s right. That’s right. Please, please send me through. And, you know, so here I am. But it’s, you know, it’s funny. Like I for me, I generally just, you know, things get scheduled. Like I’ve heard who did you work with? Greg or one of the other guys from the team, the recruitment team. But. But it doesn’t matter specifically. There’s a handful of them. But yeah, like, you know, they they find folks. They talk to folks. You know, there’s like we started more recently, like a survey thing that you filled out as well. And and then, yeah, I show up for the interview.

Speaker 1 | 40:47.778

Gabriel is the one that came to me first initially. And then I don’t remember. I think it might have been Phil with the initial interview or whatever you guys call that.

Speaker 0 | 40:58.423

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 40:59.403

The feeling out.

Speaker 0 | 41:01.344

Yeah, the survey thing that we put together just kind of like getting the background on you and stuff like that. But yeah, so yeah, the other thing that happens, I think there’s what they call the backend program. So Greg or one of the guys will probably reach out to you about that just to make you aware. Phil is attached to a business. I think it’s called AppDirect, and I’ve used them. It’s up to you. It’s not just an option out there for you. But, you know, that’s how business works, man.

Speaker 1 | 41:28.234

I don’t know what I don’t know, and I’m willing to learn. So I’ll see what they offer and if it’s something I can use.

Speaker 0 | 41:34.718

But, but yeah, otherwise, yeah, this podcast has been around about eight years. It’s a nine going on nine years now. So I think we just crossed 300 episodes. So it’s a lot of folks out there and it sounds like you’ve actually, you listened to it. So I appreciate you appreciate the listenership as well.

Speaker 1 | 41:49.629

Yeah. I listened to a couple after they, after y’all reached out and I’m like, okay, I’m going to start, I’m going to put this in the repertoire. So it pops up every time you guys post.

Speaker 0 | 41:57.814

Okay. Awesome. Yeah. It’s a, Yeah, in a couple of categories, it’s like a top 10. It moves in and out of the top 10 of a couple of different categories like IT leadership podcasts or something like that.

Speaker 1 | 42:12.006

I wonder if it counts for CPEs.

Speaker 0 | 42:15.909

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 42:17.429

I bet you could make an argument with ISC Squared.

Speaker 0 | 42:19.571

I bet you could. Yeah, we probably could. But you got interviewed and you discussed tech leadership.

Speaker 1 | 42:27.315

Darknet Diaries counts. If you listen to Darknet Diaries, apparently one episode counts as one hour CPE or CPU, whatever they call it. Yeah. I forget.

Speaker 0 | 42:41.741

All right. All right. Well, Trevor, hey, it’s been fun talking to you. I appreciate it. Not only appreciate the conversation, it’s been fun. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 42:47.763

Anytime, Doug. I’m always happy to talk.

Speaker 0 | 42:49.844

Yeah. I will send you a connection on LinkedIn as well. So I’d love to stay connected with you there, too. Not a problem.

Speaker 1 | 42:55.887

I’ll accept it when it comes in. Thanks, man.

Speaker 0 | 42:57.387

All right. All right, take care.

Speaker 1 | 42:59.011

Have a good one.

Speaker 0 | 42:59.873

Bye-bye.

322- Trevor StClair on IT Leadership and MSP

Trevor StClair

Speaker 0 | 00:02.060

they’re about uh you know 40 45 minutes it depends on you know just where the conversation goes and stuff like that sure no worries okay so the way that i’m gonna start this is uh i i create a pause for a second to give them a place to snip the audio and then we get right into it so here we go welcome back everyone to dissecting popular it nerds you I’m your host, Doug Kameen, and today I’m talking with Trevor St. Clair, IT Director at Improve Health Clinics, LLC. Welcome to the show, Trevor.

Speaker 1 | 00:38.349

How’s it going, Douglas?

Speaker 0 | 00:40.251

I’m doing great. I’m doing great. How about you? How are you doing today?

Speaker 1 | 00:43.253

Just another day in paradise. Happy to be here. Happy to be here.

Speaker 0 | 00:46.915

So before we got on the show here, we were talking about podcasts. And you two have tried your hand at a podcast in the past. hasn’t this day and age i mean hasn’t everybody played around social media just let’s just see what happens that type of thing and like most everybody else you know we fail because we’re we’re tech people this is what we you know we we love to try things and not you know maybe we’re not always successful at what we try but but we give it we give it our you know the college try if you will um or the non-college try depending on where you’re coming from uh but i think the tell tell Sorry, I just want to ask, tell me a little more about what was your podcast that you were trying to do? You said it was a COVID thing, right? You were like, we’re in COVID. We’re like, we’re going to do this, right?

Speaker 1 | 01:43.147

Yeah, it was in COVID. We were going to do this. And we called it the Tech Trenches. The idea was kind of sort of similar to this one, but it was more like come in and give your horror stories what went wrong. You know, oh, God, we were building this data center. And. Something horrible went wrong. The ceiling collapsed on us and we were all panicking in an earthquake. You know, tell the funny stories that we all, you know, the type three funds stuff that we all, you know, we all kind of spout off in interviews and kind of brag about later. But they suck in the moment. Yeah, that was kind of the idea. And we did four of those. Two of them we couldn’t post because they just kind of spiraled down the wrong hole. And. Well, it was a fun conversation. He’s like, we’re not going to put that on the internet. It’s going to delete. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 02:35.996

What was your favorite story from this? Like, I mean, so we’re talking about IT disaster story. So what was what was the best one?

Speaker 1 | 02:43.400

It wasn’t really like a like a tech disaster. This was more of a personnel disaster and who we were working for as the client. The client no longer exists. And they were a lawyer firm. They were the. The head partner kind of ran everybody off. I don’t know how you take over a successful firm with 30 lawyers, and then within two years, everybody leaves and kind of collapses. That’s the kind of guy he was, if you’re getting what I’m putting down, because he is a lawyer, and I don’t want anything bad to happen to me. But he came down and did his thing and grilled me and three other techs in a conference room, like, deposition style, for three hours on why his server wasn’t working. He’s like… Like, at the end of the day, it’s like, bro, you’re running an SBS 2008 or 2011 spec for five people in an office of 60. Like, that’s why. That’s why it’s down. You cheaped out. Like, I can say that now. I didn’t say that at 23 years old. So 10 years later, I can say that.

Speaker 0 | 03:49.755

Now, did you send him a bill for your time during that three-hour meeting? Because I would have. Oh, yeah,

Speaker 1 | 03:54.098

he was billed the entire time. He was billed. 10 hours total for all the texts that were there.

Speaker 0 | 03:59.401

Yep.

Speaker 1 | 03:59.901

Which is really funny.

Speaker 0 | 04:01.222

That’s the spirit. That’s how it should roll. So before, you know, I’m currently a CITO, you know, an IT director like you, but I also had a stint, a 10-year stint in IT consulting. And, yeah, sometimes the stories you get out of the IT consulting space are, ah, they’re great. You know, there was the time I. uh i and i’ve told this story on the podcast before but uh i had a client was a manufacturing customer and their server room in this you know 130 year old building was just literally the room they put some fish was like a 1980s server room you know they threw some glass panels in in the there and there was like a wooden door on each side and they threw an air conditioner and mini split on the wall and that was the server room and um They had racks of servers and all the cables went in the back. And there was an AS400 and an expansion chassis and this spaghetti mess of cables. I have to go replace a server. So this is not, you know, I’ve done it before and had to do what I had to do. I had to walk on the cables. Well, I walk on the cables and sure enough, like it pulls like one cable pulls another cable because of the rubber on the sheets and yanks on this other thing. And it draws out the power plug for the expansion chassis of the AS400 that runs their core business system. So the AS400 manager comes barreling into this. server open he’s like what do you guys do to be at the uh the network administrator and we’re like we didn’t do anything like we don’t know what’s going on and we look at what had happened was the plug had come out of the power plug enough to disconnect it but not enough to fall to the ground so like when you looked you’re like it looks fine like what’s going on he’s like there’s something wrong with the experience like it’s you know poking away at his screen trying to figure out what’s going on what he can’t access And yeah, so that is my best IT horror story.

Speaker 1 | 06:02.638

I’ve been there, done that. I mean, I’m getting into the healthcare realm just on the IT, or just on the client side. So they had to have, after you get a certain size, you have to have an outside audit come in every so often. It’s kind of dictated by state and all your regulations. There’s a lot of regulatory spaghetti that goes on there. Yeah. This was a previous organization that I worked for like in 2014. And when the auditor came in, our CEO came in and goes, you’re our enemy. Like, bro, these guys are trying to keep us from paying $2,000 a medical record for during a breach. And you’re paying them to be here and you’re calling them an enemy. We have 10 million records. Do the math. That’s not going to be a fun day for us. And we’re a nonprofit. This is not going to go well.

Speaker 0 | 06:54.552

That’s the best. You get a good violation of a health record violation with HIPAA and stuff. It’s by the record. Oh, man. We could spend our whole time here revisiting our consulting days and funny stories we have.

Speaker 1 | 07:14.125

I don’t want to do that.

Speaker 0 | 07:16.246

I know. That’s why I don’t miss consulting. It’s funny. When I was in consulting, I was like, oh, man, this is the best. Of course, like… In certain ways, IT consulting is, I’ll say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it’s like a young person’s game. When I was like 25 or 27, I was like, yeah, I’m going to hustle. This is great. I’m going to work on five customers a day and drive between their offices. And then at night, I’ll update the servers on this thing. And that was great when I was 27. But a 45-year-old me, that’s not how I want to spend my time. my day i’d rather you know i i love the more strategy work and the oh yeah you know just like getting to plan stuff on a more holistic basis and and think more strategically well even on the personal side like you wake up one day and just get curious like on a sunday or something to go on indeed or linkedin or whatever you start seeing what everybody else is paying for like

Speaker 1 | 08:12.991

in-house it’s like oh i can be a network engineer for this manufacturing warehouse over here and make ten thousand dollars more and i own the network and i’m just then that and i go home and i don’t have to work at night yeah that kind of changes perspective when you start barreling out but you can do you do get to meet a lot of people and do a lot of networking in the consulting world uh so you consulting msp you know tomato

Speaker 0 | 08:39.593

tomato yeah yeah yeah i was in that business as the msp like wave was taking over you know i was i was at the bridge between the two so i was just before it when we were still doing things like like block time of contracts and that type of stuff was the norm. And then MSPs were coming up in like the, you know, the mid to late 2000s and it’s kind of taken over the market there.

Speaker 1 | 09:03.852

Yeah. My, my MSP time was 20. Yeah. I went event space, healthcare, telecom, MSP, agriculture, back to healthcare. So it, I only spent. I spent a year at an MSP and that was enough. I never want to go back. From what I’ve heard, they’re all that horrible. They’ll all sell you out.

Speaker 0 | 09:32.646

MSPs are a challenge from a work environment. Just speaking to this from a leadership perspective, an MSP from a business leadership perspective, prior to the MSP revolution, if you will, the way the business model was set up, it looked a lot like an accounting firm. or, you know, a law office, you know, we showed up. You had time, whether it was prepaid time, like on a retainer or billed by the hour. You know, we showed up for an hour. We billed an hour for our time and our work and that type of stuff. So between the work of getting that done, you know, I might bill 60% of my time in a week. You know, 60% was like a high billing percentage. But the way a managed service provider is typically configured is like your expectation of a staff person from a billing perspective is. 85, you know, 90, like, like a 40 hour week, you’re expected to be billable for like 3738 hours of that week in a lot of those environments. And there’s certain tools, you know, the ideas, the tools set you up to be able to do that and stuff, but it, it’s it can grind people out pretty fast. You know, so it feels I don’t want to be like, Oh, it’s totally a different business than when I was there, you know, like, you know, next thing you know, it’s all I’m going to tell those kids to get off my lawn out front too.

Speaker 1 | 10:52.252

But what I worked for was what I would call a bad MSP. You know, there’s tech companies that suck and it’s tech companies that suck less. There’s no good tech company. I worked for one that sucked. It was basically a conglomerate of failed MSPs that had been bought out by a parent company. But they kept all the managers that ran their businesses into the ground. So it was just repeatedly running. They would buy these offices, bring them on. So they basically would buy the cash flow, then run the business into the ground again. And then they would just buy the next one. And then they would run them into the ground again. So they’d make all the clients mad. They wouldn’t renew. So yeah, the takeover, they would come in. They’d hire all the staff. They would run out the contracts. They would aggressively persuade the clients to sign a three-year deal with them. And because no staffing changes had been taking place yet, these clients felt okay coming on board. Well, and they, so they made a switch because of the same service manager, same techs. And in my area, uh, the successful MSPs operate just like the accounting firm. Like, like you said, uh, they, they built, they build their hours and it, you get set people. You have a set account manager, you have a set engineer and you have a set tech. It’s the same three people all the time. Well, these guys come in, they keep that for the first year on board everybody. Then they make all their staffing changes. They lay people off. you know thin the herd and then they just tank the service because someone’s used to picking up the phone and calling saying well you know call me calling you don’t for whatever they kind of spin out they’re like okay now i’m now i’m calling a help desk and a knock and these guys can’t do anything because they’re they’re level one techs fresh out of college making twelve dollars an hour we’re not talking about the creme de la creme here uh unfortunately which is also saying something about my alma mater because they were hiring straight out of the program I graduated from. So that’s another layer, but they were always hiring the, what I would call the bottom of the barrel folks. Like when I went through the program, we know that the joke was don’t go to work for them because they ruined your career. Like you don’t last.

Speaker 0 | 13:09.742

Yeah. And it’s the MSP market. It’s so bifurcated where there are really. There’s certainly excellent businesses in that market. I don’t want to paint with a single brush to say every MSP is bad because they’re not. There’s organizations that run great businesses. They run tight ships and good operations. But the business model also can lend itself to a situation like what you’ve described, where there’s an encouragement to sign up for contracts and then to cut the staff afterwards and really just kind of take the service in the name of profits. And that can be a real challenge. to navigate through and operate inside of. And it can be, even for early career folks, it can be somewhat career limiting too.

Speaker 1 | 13:54.378

Oh, for sure. The good example, I gave a bad example, I’ll give a good example. A buddy of mine has ran an MSP for like the last seven years. And when I say top notch, I mean top notch. This guy’s, this is my former boss from my second job out of school. And we’ve just maintained. Contact because we just kind of got off on the right foot and we just gelled and I mean we slept on our floor And our offices when we rebuilt their data center and like we we kind of went through the trenches together Yeah, and I was just right there with him He built an MSP that’s focusing on healthcare clients locally. So he takes on the small doctor’s offices the dentist offices the small independent nursing homes and he is only he only takes on what he can take on and he trains his new techs up from you know tier one all the way to engineer and he’s got it set down to where he can do it in eight months so he can take someone fresh out of school who’s completely i i don’t want to say everybody that comes out of college is incompetent but they’re but the people that are going to come in and work for

Speaker 0 | 15:04.372

10 12 an hour are not exactly high high the highest caliber yeah it it has a hands-on component to it that it’s very difficult to get the experience to walk into and know how to do right but he can take them

Speaker 1 | 15:18.572

from zero to hero in eight months and within that year they’re making seventy thousand dollars and they’re running clients so they’re making seventy thousand base plus their um whatever billing bonus structure they got out i think he’s i think they’re i think he does ten and seven uh ten percent bonus uh at the end of the year on the contracts that you serviced and you get a seven percent bonus of all the hours you build wow so you could actually make a lot of money if you’re really good but he also has a client retention bonus so if you have so It’s residual if that makes any sort of sense so you get them so the longer a client stays on with you as Your engineer or your tech or whatever? You get paid more so there’s an incentive there to keep them happy so which honestly in that kind of world It really makes sense, and he’s kind of popped off with that. I mean he’s got he’s doing like he said 1.2 million in revenue with four techs mm-hmm And so it’s just, it’s just him and four other guys.

Speaker 0 | 16:19.052

That’s a great business.

Speaker 1 | 16:20.273

Yeah. And he’s, he’s, I think that that structure that he’s got set up and I think he’s at the perfect size where if he goes any bigger, he will have to corporatize and he’ll lose that personal touch. So I think there is a, I think that’s the limit. He might be able to push two, 3 million in revenue, but he’s going to have to hire more staff. And once you get past five staff, you need to hire a manager because you can only effectively manage five people at a time. Yeah. well effectively manage and train so you’ll have to hire somebody else and make sure they’re that quality which it then you start having a dilution so i think he’s kind of at the max he can take on but still you know he’s still a millionaire he’s a millionaire helping tech help helping got helping doctors and patients and training techs he’s turning out guys that are the work for him for two three years and they’ll go off and you know you 180 190 000 jobs at amazon like we’re talking zero to hero yeah he’s like the guy who invented the pet rock he made a million dollars movie references so

Speaker 0 | 17:32.666

so so and that’s great to be honest you touched on something i i had to make my joke to start but the the part the part where you mentioned about moving on to other organizations and stuff like that like that’s that’s one of those big things of leadership like you know and i want to make sure we talk about you and your leadership but i just wanted to highlight that component of what you mentioned about him is is his his i’m presuming he’s willing to be like no my job is to grow people to a certain point and then at some point they’re going to move on and that’s okay you know like like it’s cool you know they spent time with me we had a good relationship And now look, look what they’ve got to do. Like they get to go from where they were making with me and make twice as much working for AWS or, you know, Microsoft or whatever the case may be.

Speaker 1 | 18:20.115

Yeah, he throws going away parties.

Speaker 0 | 18:24.717

So I want to make sure we spent a long time talking about MSPs and consulting and all that other stuff like that. I want to make sure to bring this back for our listeners to where, you know, to you and your leadership and where you’re going and that type of stuff and hear a little bit about you. So. Tell us a little bit about your, you work for Improved Health Clinics. Can you tell us a little bit about what is Improved Health Clinics and where are you based out of, like maybe the geography?

Speaker 1 | 18:49.607

I’ll say what I’m allowed to say. Yeah, absolutely. Because I’ve been instructed to not go too in because they’re like, yes, go affect the greater good, but leave us out of it.

Speaker 0 | 19:03.873

Share the details that are appropriate.

Speaker 1 | 19:06.014

It is a private health care clinic associated with a. with a large fortune 500 company with uh locations from uh washington dc throughout the entire uh eastern coast mississippi ohio river valley and uh the great plains and our headquarters isn’t tall so we don’t go east west the rockies basically okay that’s cool so all right so so you’ve got you’ve got offices you’re taking care of in in facilities from you know a pretty wide geography essentially from from

Speaker 0 | 19:37.728

right you know the midwest to the east coast and uh you’re you’re based in tulsa you’re in indiana i think you said yeah so you you got you’re moving around a lot to take care to do this work

Speaker 1 | 19:51.922

I got a lot of miles on a couple of cars.

Speaker 0 | 19:55.462

And now you have staff, too, and stuff like that. What’s your team look like?

Speaker 1 | 20:00.984

It kind of filters. Just because of the fluctuations, we kind of have to stick with contracts. So, right, unfortunately, our latest batch has just ended, and I’m back down to a solo team.

Speaker 0 | 20:11.707

Okay, so.

Speaker 1 | 20:15.048

It pitches and goes. It kind of goes with the weather. So as we roll into winter, there won’t really be any. what i would call real activity like there’s not basically moving into maintenance mode and then spring will pop off again because we a lot of my work is going to be outside so winter in you know west virginia the mountains back in a holler is not exactly enjoyable to be pulling cable or supervising you know diggers or any type of you know ground laying work to or go pull cable

Speaker 0 | 20:51.762

in a building they just got structured or just got uh framed you know things like that yeah so it tells a little bit about your you alluded to your history i mean you mentioned if you know for those who’ve been listening uh this far in the podcast i know you mentioned you’ve been at uh an msp you’ve been in community the communications business you were in an agriculture business and that type of stuff and you’ve been in a couple stints in health care so uh What kind of leadership have you had? Tell us about your leadership experience in those spaces and what you had to do to be a good leader.

Speaker 1 | 21:30.673

Like my personal leadership experience or my experience with my bosses?

Speaker 0 | 21:34.216

Yeah, all of the above. Because, you know, this is a great point. Leading is not just leading for the people who are beneath you. But oftentimes, and I say this in IT a lot, is that in IT, we have to manage up as well. You know, you got to manage the expectations. You got to manage the folks that are up there. You got you end up you end up, you know, and I don’t mean this in a demeaning way, but you manage your bosses. You know,

Speaker 1 | 21:59.257

if if they’re willing to let you do that. Sure. Most of my the way I operate today is based on a bunch of lessons that I’ve learned throughout the past 10 years that are mainly filled with what not to do. Like, this is how you don’t treat people. This is because you felt bad when you were being treated this way. So you don’t. do that that type of stuff yeah it’s like oh you can save a lot of money if you’re just proactive in like you’re like in proactive planning and you don’t just knee-jerk everything or you don’t fall prey to marketing like uh a former uh my four of my last employer the one i had before i got my current gig they switched to crowd strike last year because somebody came in and bought him dinner and said some Fancy words. That was all it took.

Speaker 0 | 22:52.763

I was like, at first they had some challenges recently.

Speaker 1 | 22:57.505

Oh, they don’t, they didn’t need it. They didn’t need to spend that money. When I left there, they were set up to, they were automated completely. But that, that’s been my experience. It’s mainly, okay, this felt like crap when I was treated this way. And so I need to not treat people that way. So basically my, I operate by, oh. Now I have to put it in words. Trust people until they give you a reason not to trust them, essentially. So I’m hiring you to do this job or I’m giving you this responsibility. I want you to do this and I’m going to help you do this. Or if I take on an intern, okay, I’m going to figure out what you know and find out what you don’t know. And I’m going to do that really quickly by putting you in a situation that you’re not comfortable with and I’m doing that intentionally. Because I want to see how you handle yourself. And then if you drop the ball, I will help you. If you persevere through, that’s great. But there’s still something you did wrong. It just kind of is what it is. It’s more of testing people to figure out where their strengths are, what their weaknesses and what their goals are. So you just kind of got to identify that and charge for it. It’s basically being a good person, in my opinion. It’s about how you want to be treated.

Speaker 0 | 24:14.645

Uh-huh. Now I’m thinking about, you just mentioned about, you know, what are your, your past places? You know, they, things were set up, you left, you left things set up well, and they didn’t, you know, you, you’re like, they didn’t need some of the things that they bought, but, you know, they were, they were swayed and they did this stuff. And to me, that’s a, that’s one of those like leadership lessons that I ended up sharing with folks that I talked to a lot, where After you leave a job, you have to just become comfortable with the fact that the people just they they make decisions that you don’t have control over anymore.

Speaker 1 | 24:52.409

It’s not my responsibility anymore. I left them the book on how things were set intentionally set up and the plan going forward. Can’t leave a horse to water. You can lead a horse to water. You can’t make him drink.

Speaker 0 | 25:03.599

Yeah. Yeah. Like I was, you know, it was for many years as a county CIO. And in one of the when I left, you know, I did the same thing. It was like this 20 page book of like, here’s important stuff you need to know and details and just like strategy things about how to use interface with these people. Here’s people, you know, these these ones are the more challenging folks in the environment and stuff. And, you know. When my successor wouldn’t take the advice that I had given from the lessons that I had learned, then I watched him either relearn them or stumble. You know, I’m like, why didn’t you take my advice? But I have to remind myself that, first of all, they have to learn their own lessons. And secondly, you’re not in charge. So they get to make the mistakes. They get to choose. And that choosing includes choosing to make a mistake.

Speaker 1 | 25:57.034

Sometimes you just got to sit back and go and laugh. Like, cause that’s all you can really do. It’s probably the bad way to look at it, but that’s like, why did you guys do that? I, I, I left you instructions, but okay. It’s not my, that if I don’t laugh, I’m going to cry. It’s like, it’s one of those places where you just, I put so many, so much blood, sweat and tears and pride into that. And, you know, like, like I said, sleeping in an office floor because I was there till three, four in the morning, ripping something apart. running new cable, setting something else up, you know, making user accommodations, whatever. And then it just gets turned around and falls apart. It’s like, oh, come on, man. If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.

Speaker 0 | 26:40.438

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, I hear you. So just a little more. We spent quite a bit of time talking about, like, job work and history on MSPs and IT consulting and stuff like that. But we do like to. make sure we take a few minutes to talk a little bit about i’ll call it more light-hearted stuff too uh additional light-hearted stuff so what uh what is your first experience like what got you into technology what brought you what you know what was maybe your first computer you know your first thing you know did you have you know i i

Speaker 1 | 27:12.287

took a very unconventional path um i went to college for it because i needed a bachelor’s degree to become an officer in the air force mm-hmm Obviously, that didn’t happen, but that was the intention. I was going to join the Air Force. I wanted to be a pilot. I needed a bachelor’s degree to get an OCS. I didn’t have the grades or activities in high school because, well, let’s be honest, I was an irresponsible 18-year-old and teenager because I cared more about girls and money and cars than I did about grades. So I was not going to get into the Air Force Academy. So the other option was to go through… OCS after, you know, get a commission after I get my bachelor’s degree or go through ROTC. So that was, you know, I’m going to school, I’m going to join ROTC. And then the ROTC air wing gets completely removed from the university I was at and I was five hours away. And then when I graduate, Obama was president and he was doing his officer’s cut. So there was an officer freeze. So there was nobody getting any commissions in 2013. And the only way in was through the academy. Okay. Tried four more times. And even though I had the scores. And now I’m too old.

Speaker 0 | 28:31.246

I could revive a meme. Thanks, Obama.

Speaker 1 | 28:33.907

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 28:36.988

It is what it is. It is. Hey, it led you to where you’re at today. Which is still success. It just was not the one you thought you were going down the path of originally.

Speaker 1 | 28:45.912

No, and I can still fly airplanes.

Speaker 0 | 28:48.613

Oh. So. No. So that was going to be another question of mine was, was tell us something that we wouldn’t otherwise know about you. So that’s, that’s one thing. Not that you could have others, but you say you’re a pilot.

Speaker 1 | 29:00.939

I am scared death of heights and I am scared to death of stalls. Like, uh, I don’t know if any, if you’ve, uh, flown in a small puddle jumper, like a, like a PA 28, one 30 or a, yeah. Pizza, a Cherokee Piper. Yeah. There’s small, small four-seater airplane only has 140 horsepower. You’re only going 120 mile an hour. It’s a very slow plane. It can fly down to, with full flaps, you can get it down to about 45 knots before the stall. Now, it’s hard to get there, and you’re in a leaf stall, but it won’t break. Once you get it to break, you’re sitting at, I know nobody can see this, but you’re sitting at about a 60-degree angle in your seat. You’re looking at the sky, and the nose just drops, and it’s a hard drop. It’s like, boom. It’s just instantaneous, or almost instantaneous. And you get… light in your seat and you have to let go of the controls to get because you want that downward speed to get airspeed back so you can recover. So it’s very nerve wracking for me to do.

Speaker 0 | 30:04.987

So my question is, why do you do it?

Speaker 1 | 30:07.048

Because flying is awesome, man.

Speaker 0 | 30:10.649

No, no, I meant the stall. I meant the stall. Like you could fly around without stalling.

Speaker 1 | 30:15.730

You have to do it for proficiency. Okay. So you have, if you want to maintain your airman, your airman proficiency, you have to fly so much every 90 days. And then every two years you have to go in for an airman, what’s called an airman review, or I don’t know what you call it. Our flight school calls it airman review. That’s the program. So it’s basically you go up for two hours to flight instructor and you go through all the maneuvers that you’re certified in to make sure you can still do them. If you don’t do them, you have to have remedial training in them, which is just, one, it’s to make sure that you’re not going to kill yourself and other people. So it’s very good. And the flight reviews are very necessary because you’re doing something that is highly dangerous. Like, let’s be real here. Like, flying an airplane is really dangerous.

Speaker 0 | 30:59.536

Oh, yeah. They’re pretty dangerous.

Speaker 1 | 31:01.116

If you screw up, you might not walk away from this. So it’s best to have practiced the emergency scenarios and prepare for them, but make sure they never happen. So, like, when you’re flying, you have a defined minimum maneuvering speed. So the Piper Cherokee, 70 knots. You do not get this plane slower than 70 knots. It does not go below that. If it goes below that, you’re… whatever you’re doing is canceled you need to hit the throttle and level wings level and go because you’re you’re too slow so that’s that’s one way of doing it there’s other defined maneuvers like you don’t bank past certain certain degree like you don’t go past 30 degrees you can go to 45 degrees but you’re getting dangerous there stick to 30 degrees ideally you stick to three degrees if you’re flying a uh instrument flight path uh standard rate turns all that good stuff but

Speaker 0 | 31:51.214

I’m learning a lot of interesting stuff here. Thanks for sharing. So now, are you in the service at all at this point? Like Civil Air Patrol or anything? This is all just because you love flying.

Speaker 1 | 32:07.862

I paid for it. There’s a flight school a mile away from me. And it was, oh, I could wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning and go do this for two hours, go take a lesson, and then be at work in time.

Speaker 0 | 32:19.969

Nice.

Speaker 1 | 32:20.569

Okay. Yeah, I’m sold.

Speaker 0 | 32:22.226

Let’s do it. So, so there, that was obviously, that’s a very super interesting thing that people would know about you. So your pilot and, and, uh, you know, with a lot of regular training and, and, and experience, anything else that, uh, somebody wouldn’t expect from you?

Speaker 1 | 32:39.258

Oh, I’m not experienced. I only have, I only have 50 hours. I’m not, I can’t afford to fly anymore. It is so expensive. Uh, fuel’s $10 a gallon for a play for, uh, uh, GA fuel.

Speaker 0 | 32:51.766

And it’s like leaded fuel too,

Speaker 1 | 32:53.868

right? 100 octane, low lead. It’s $10 a gallon. The Cherokees burn 10 gallons an hour. So it’s $100 an hour before you even rent the plane. So you’re going to go fly for an hour. Boom, there’s $100. So then you have to have an extra 30 minutes on hand just in case. So boom, there’s $150.

Speaker 0 | 33:14.905

I had a friend who, he was a pilot. He was a commercial pilot, but he would fly small aircraft around and stuff like that. This is like 20, 20 plus years ago. And they play for what he called my girlfriend at the time. He’s like, oh, look, I’ll take you flying. So we go, we rent like a, you know, Piper, you know, Piper Cub or Cherokee or whatever. And, you know, fly from where I live in upstate New York down to central Pennsylvania, down to Scranton. So and and we went and we so we landed at the airport and we go get dinner. He’s like, oh, yeah, it’s the hundred dollar hamburger run. Yes.

Speaker 1 | 33:47.684

Now it’s now it’s a three hundred dollar hamburger. That’s right.

Speaker 0 | 33:49.405

Apparently.

Speaker 1 | 33:51.526

Yeah, there’s a restaurant at the end of a runway in Missouri. Oh, God. Lambert’s. I think it’s Lambert’s. The place that throws the rolls. That’s all I remember. They provide preferential service to pilots. Like, if you call, if you land at the airstrip, they will send a shuttle to get you. They will drive you into the restaurant, and you won’t have to wait. They will walk you past everybody. No wait. Immediate seating. Like, I don’t know why, but I thought that was fancy. The place is always… packed so it’s just a unique little thing the other the other unique thing that i’m into that nobody would really know uh i just i’m i’m writing a book and i’m i just started an event production company oh okay so those two things that i haven’t really put out in the world yet but those two are i have events scheduled for the rest of the year to test test a few things out and we’ve got a bunch of plans for next year that’s not going to make any money i’m just doing it because it’s fun

Speaker 0 | 34:50.258

What kind of events?

Speaker 1 | 34:51.900

Gaming events. So tabletop games. Oh, nice. So Warhammer, D&D, things like that.

Speaker 0 | 34:57.609

Okay.

Speaker 1 | 35:00.022

there’s nothing here locally and all the game stores in town kind of suck and fight each other so we figured it’s time to give this place uh the events it deserves nice that’s cool so so you got your hands on a lot of different things just kind of always doing something can’t sit still also on

Speaker 0 | 35:18.950

top of that i’m working on my sizzle so that’s going to be a lot of fun got the book got the book you know for those At home on the listing, I should say, not at home. But those listening in, he shows I’m looking at the CISA book. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 35:36.494

the ISACA book was a lot of fun reading. It’s really fun reading. You should read.

Speaker 0 | 35:41.397

Yeah, I have.

Speaker 1 | 35:42.658

It’s the driest thing I’ve ever read.

Speaker 0 | 35:44.199

Yeah, for my CISSP, whichever one you use to describe it. But like that book was like 1100 pages.

Speaker 1 | 35:54.325

I couldn’t do it. Yeah, I did an audio book and I paid the $1,000 for the video class. And then I drilled all the questions in the book. And it was just like, I couldn’t have sat through and read that. I couldn’t have. I’ve got the CCIE book over here, too. And I can’t. I got working through Narbix handbook. And some of the stuff is just so dry, I can’t do more than 10 pages at a time. So. It is.

Speaker 0 | 36:26.111

We’re coming up. We’re kind of coming up close to time here. So before we before we break, I want to make sure to ask you for for our listeners. Can you share what we talked about lessons in leadership that you’ve learned before? But what advice would you give to people, particularly folks that are coming up in I.T. leadership or even other I.T. leaders? Like what what what would you give them as advice?

Speaker 1 | 36:51.802

The best piece of advice I ever got that I don’t think anybody gets, pick the advice you listen to. Because not all advice you get is good or honest. Not everybody has your best interest at heart. Let’s be real here. There’s salespeople out there that will tell you anything and everything. Hey, you do this, this will get you this. It might not necessarily be true. Someone could be a boss. Hey, if you do this in your life, this won’t this will work out like no, that’s just make your own path. The best way forward is to find somebody who’s doing what you want to do and ask them how they got there. And then you don’t use that as word. That’s that’s not set in stone. Just use that as a guide because your path will be different.

Speaker 0 | 37:44.932

Thanks. Thanks. Trevor. Thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.

Speaker 1 | 37:50.276

No worries. It’s been a pleasure, Doug.

Speaker 0 | 37:52.818

That’s a wrap on today’s episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m Doug Kameen, and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode. And we’re done.

Speaker 1 | 38:04.906

Sorry, I used your full name at the beginning. I just kind of, I panicked. I was like, oh, shit.

Speaker 0 | 38:09.329

Oh, no, I’m Douglas Doug. To be honest, I actually write my name as Douglas, but people call me Doug. I got you. Yeah, then I get to be fussy with them. It’s like my they-them pronoun. I get to be like, it’s written as Douglas.

Speaker 1 | 38:28.490

You can really mess with people then.

Speaker 0 | 38:32.413

So, as I mentioned before, I take this, I package it up. It’s a little bit of time between now and when the production team gets through the process. It’s an audio podcast, so let’s just extract the audio. um we put it on linkedin uh there’s so when your your episode comes up they create some nice graphics they they tag you know your if um i noticed on linkedin your business um probably because you mentioned about how they kind of be on a little bit of the download um there’s no business page for that or whatever but they’ll tag you and some other stuff in there and just help you know you can use it to promote whatever you would like um you know i usually promote it too we’ll talk a little bit about what we you know what we talked about share with my uh my network as well um but uh yeah it’s uh do you have any any follow-up questions for me or anything here at the end yeah why was it so short well we we’ve talked for 40 minutes right we started like 3

Speaker 1 | 39:29.301

3 10 to 350 so it could honestly be longer yeah the stuff you guys put out is good it could be it could be longer and it would still retain good good uh listenership In my opinion, you can ignore me. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m not a podcaster and I sure as hell don’t have a successful one. So don’t listen to me.

Speaker 0 | 39:49.627

To be honest, I just I just a host. Fair enough. I’m a CIO and I was like I a while ago, a year ago, like Phil was like. I had been interviewed on the podcast, but I was through the conversation at the time. He was he was like, I’d like to find another host. And I’m like,

Speaker 1 | 40:12.962

I volunteer his tribute.

Speaker 0 | 40:13.963

That’s right. That’s right. Please, please send me through. And, you know, so here I am. But it’s, you know, it’s funny. Like I for me, I generally just, you know, things get scheduled. Like I’ve heard who did you work with? Greg or one of the other guys from the team, the recruitment team. But. But it doesn’t matter specifically. There’s a handful of them. But yeah, like, you know, they they find folks. They talk to folks. You know, there’s like we started more recently, like a survey thing that you filled out as well. And and then, yeah, I show up for the interview.

Speaker 1 | 40:47.778

Gabriel is the one that came to me first initially. And then I don’t remember. I think it might have been Phil with the initial interview or whatever you guys call that.

Speaker 0 | 40:58.423

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 40:59.403

The feeling out.

Speaker 0 | 41:01.344

Yeah, the survey thing that we put together just kind of like getting the background on you and stuff like that. But yeah, so yeah, the other thing that happens, I think there’s what they call the backend program. So Greg or one of the guys will probably reach out to you about that just to make you aware. Phil is attached to a business. I think it’s called AppDirect, and I’ve used them. It’s up to you. It’s not just an option out there for you. But, you know, that’s how business works, man.

Speaker 1 | 41:28.234

I don’t know what I don’t know, and I’m willing to learn. So I’ll see what they offer and if it’s something I can use.

Speaker 0 | 41:34.718

But, but yeah, otherwise, yeah, this podcast has been around about eight years. It’s a nine going on nine years now. So I think we just crossed 300 episodes. So it’s a lot of folks out there and it sounds like you’ve actually, you listened to it. So I appreciate you appreciate the listenership as well.

Speaker 1 | 41:49.629

Yeah. I listened to a couple after they, after y’all reached out and I’m like, okay, I’m going to start, I’m going to put this in the repertoire. So it pops up every time you guys post.

Speaker 0 | 41:57.814

Okay. Awesome. Yeah. It’s a, Yeah, in a couple of categories, it’s like a top 10. It moves in and out of the top 10 of a couple of different categories like IT leadership podcasts or something like that.

Speaker 1 | 42:12.006

I wonder if it counts for CPEs.

Speaker 0 | 42:15.909

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 42:17.429

I bet you could make an argument with ISC Squared.

Speaker 0 | 42:19.571

I bet you could. Yeah, we probably could. But you got interviewed and you discussed tech leadership.

Speaker 1 | 42:27.315

Darknet Diaries counts. If you listen to Darknet Diaries, apparently one episode counts as one hour CPE or CPU, whatever they call it. Yeah. I forget.

Speaker 0 | 42:41.741

All right. All right. Well, Trevor, hey, it’s been fun talking to you. I appreciate it. Not only appreciate the conversation, it’s been fun. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 42:47.763

Anytime, Doug. I’m always happy to talk.

Speaker 0 | 42:49.844

Yeah. I will send you a connection on LinkedIn as well. So I’d love to stay connected with you there, too. Not a problem.

Speaker 1 | 42:55.887

I’ll accept it when it comes in. Thanks, man.

Speaker 0 | 42:57.387

All right. All right, take care.

Speaker 1 | 42:59.011

Have a good one.

Speaker 0 | 42:59.873

Bye-bye.

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