Speaker 0 | 00:00.140
uh in a state of boxes i’m in a state of um complete disarray my uh my washer and dryer right now if you i don’t know if you can hear it in the background but they’re being replaced my dogs are going crazy awesome but not this has been nothing but a show that’s a technical term actually yeah loving
Speaker 1 | 00:20.974
this already yeah yeah and so uh so kind of like my life uh yeah um let’s see Except much milder. I have been in back-to-back things today. I don’t even know what we had on the agenda. Are we recording a podcast? Because I’m totally cool with that, too. I’m already recording.
Speaker 0 | 00:44.930
I have absolutely no idea. All I know is that I was supposed to sit down and have a conversation with you. I have no problems doing a podcast with you. I don’t really know.
Speaker 1 | 00:54.293
We’re including all of this.
Speaker 0 | 00:56.614
Oh, crap. Hello. So, Hussein told me I needed to get hooked up with you. This would be my, I had two conversations with Hussein and now it’s one with you. So whatever you want to do, I can roll with it.
Speaker 1 | 01:09.685
Sweet. Let’s just get the juices flowing then. I could look at the quiz results from you and get all kinds of things, but what people have been asking for lately, it’s kind of like this blend of things, right? The AI hype cycle, has anyone actually implemented AI or generative AI that’s not just, I don’t know, OCR or something that’s just being disguised as generative AI for 15 years? Is there an actual AI use case looking for it? Does anyone have it?
Speaker 0 | 01:50.408
So I do have a use case for it. So. Let me take a step back. Cozzini is the nation’s largest knife sharpening rental firm. Awesome. We service about 105,000 customers. So what does that mean? It means that when you walk into your taqueria up the street and you look at the knives on the wall, they’re probably mine. If you looked at the largest grocery stores, the knives on the wall are probably mine.
Speaker 1 | 02:14.957
Side note, side note, side note. First of all, I come from, like most IT directors, a dropout of numerous things and I fell into IT somehow, right? So me, restaurants, right? Creative writing major was pre-med, decided I did not have the, I don’t know, motivation to go through inorganic chemistry in college and go through the years of, even though everyone in my family is a doctor. So dropped out, became creative writing major, and then took the first job out of college, which was Fazoli’s Fast Casual.
Speaker 0 | 02:49.605
I know that place.
Speaker 1 | 02:50.866
Yeah, there’s not many left, but if there is. No, there’s not. You’re you’re you want breadsticks with that? You know,
Speaker 0 | 02:56.557
that was just you guys wandering around with breadsticks all day long. That was awesome.
Speaker 1 | 02:59.919
That was it. Can I get some of that garlic butter on the side, please? Preferably in a bowl. Yeah. Meanwhile, in the back as assistant manager, we’re drinking it. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 03:13.246
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 03:14.247
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 03:15.467
Let me let me let me take it.
Speaker 1 | 03:17.088
No, no. Hold on. Knife sharpening. I saw the knife sharpeners come by and sharpen the knife guys. You get the knife guy. You’re the knife guy. So I’m very funny with the knife guy. Love the knife guy. So I asked the knife guy, hey, man, you know, I want a pizza cutter for home. I don’t want this weak pizza cutter that I get from Albertsons or whatever it was, right? These things fall apart. Give me the PA. So he got me the pizza cutter. I’ve had it to this day. Might be 25 years old, but how the heck do you sharpen a massive restaurant style pizza cutter?
Speaker 0 | 03:45.898
Well, there’s three different styles of pizza cutter. So this should give you an idea of where I stand in the grand scheme of things. You’ve got your roller, which is your traditional one. Then you’ve got your rocker, which looks like a machete. And then there’s also a different style of rocker. So this is actually a really good place for us to start to talk about the AI portion of Cozzini. Because you know what? This is actually a really good segment into this. So we know as an organization that Pizza Shop. who’s going to be using a pizza roller or a pizza rocker. So I call them rocker and rollers. We know that those locations should be able to take an extra service. And not only do we do knife service, but we also rent can openers.
Speaker 1 | 04:36.926
Or pizza cutter consulting.
Speaker 0 | 04:39.467
Well, you know what? That would be great. As you can see right here, I tried to do pizza cutter consulting at one point in time. So I’m at nine and a half fingers. But
Speaker 1 | 04:50.568
um so you know we’re gonna offend somebody there you know that’s not funny
Speaker 0 | 04:54.574
Okay, well, then cut that out. So the idea behind AI in my business is to take a look at our existing customer base. And where we’re applying AI in my business is actually pretty interesting. So when we talk about a pizza shop, a pizza shop is going to use a roller or it’s going to use a rocker. There are two different styles of knife. Now, we would expect them to. not be making their own sauce. We expect them to buy it from Hunt’s or from some other large manufacturer, some other like pizza sauce, not necessarily the ingredients to put into it, but they’re large industrial cans and we would expect them to want to use a large industrial can opener, plain and simple to the point. So we can look at our existing customer base and we can say, we know that you use rockers or rollers and you don’t have a can opener in it. The AI… identifies that for us i mean obviously you and i just using logic can figure that out is that really generative is that really generative yeah yeah though or is it like well but hold on a second because let’s talk about the next part of this which is going to be so yeah so that was that was it cuts much deeper oh dude i hate you um but it what it then led us into so now now that we have a working model because the model predicted this for us we knew we as humans knew that this is exactly what we expected to see. What we then did, we said, okay, let’s look across other segments of our business. So let’s take a look at maybe deli shops. Deli shops would be a good place to start. So we know that deli shops use a certain style of knife. They use like three or four different styles of knives. Now we also do, we service slicer blades. So those big Hobart machines that are you see in the back of a slicer.
Speaker 1 | 06:46.505
Very dangerous.
Speaker 0 | 06:47.718
Very, very dangerous. But the idea is that the AI would then take a look at the style of knife being used and would make recommendations to my selling team to say, we expect to see this in the restaurant.
Speaker 1 | 07:01.709
Yes.
Speaker 0 | 07:02.790
Okay. So the generative portion of this started off with the rockers and rollers, and then it moved into the, hey, let’s look at everything else. So now we’ve identified six key factors for my customer base. as to where we need to be and what style of knife they’re using.
Speaker 1 | 07:20.488
So it did this on its own or did you have to say, we had,
Speaker 0 | 07:23.670
we had, we had to give it a little bit of guidance up front. So we, we had, we had to skew the data. We, we, I’m not going to lie. We had to skew the data a little bit, but what happened was after we taught it what to look for, it then started to take on a mind of its own. I mean, it really did. And so as we have continued to allow it to learn. we’ve realized that we need to give it additional information. So now we’re doing Google scrapes to pull in additional piece of information into our database so that that way we can further refine what the AI is telling us to go ahead and do. Now, I can’t tell you what those six parameters are right now, but I can say that what we have found is that we’ve got about a 70% accuracy rate right now on our second generation of this AI.
Speaker 1 | 08:13.697
Preston Pysh, I’m starving.
Speaker 0 | 08:15.258
Oh my God, I’ve got to tell you that this thing has literally cut the industry to the bone. See, I’m going to turn this back on you. Now, this is only our second generation of this darn thing. Don’t make me stab you with a knife. So what this has actually started to prove out within my organization is that AI is a really great place for us to start to predict things. So right now we’re using AI just to predict for my selling team to go in and do additional upselling. So my sales team comes out, makes the initial sale. They stop by six months later, hey, how are you doing? Hey, I noticed that you’re a pizza shop. You should be using the can opener. What do you think? Can we sign you up for one or things like that? But what it’s actually pointed out to the organization on a much larger scale is it’s pointed out the fact that AI can be used to do all kinds of things. So for instance, Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could predict a customer leaving, a customer churning? Could you be able to identify the key factors that would allow you to identify that? Now, the restaurant industry as a whole is very, very unstable, as we just talked about with your first place, Fazley’s or whatever it was called.
Speaker 1 | 09:34.419
Well, Fazley’s.
Speaker 0 | 09:35.520
Fazley’s, thank you. They didn’t last very long in the Midwest, which is where I am. When I take drives around, I do see them every once in a while, but the restaurant industry as a whole is very unstable. You have a new restaurant being opened and three months later they’re closed. And it’s just because what a restaurant owner thinks the area wants may not be exactly what they want. But if you were to look at key factors like payment history, and you were to look at the market segment, and you were to look at within maybe a five mile radius of the location, how many other… of those restaurants that style of restaurant are there that can be used to help to predict whether or not a customer is going to churn we have all kinds of data points so my my organization is super super super tech heavy super tech heavy um i know that your users uh your people wouldn’t be able necessarily to see the the tech stack that i’ll show you in a second here but the idea is is very simple for us we’re a sas company and because we’re a sas company we’re able to take all of our
Speaker 1 | 10:39.025
dissimilar data sources and we’re able to dump them into a centralized we don’t have it you don’t have sharing enabled but that’s okay i’ll do that but no keep going it’s an audio podcast so hold on you did something that was very very um you did it without even well you did knowingly but you kind of did it without knowing what you were doing which is very important for i.t leadership as a whole which is take ownership In IT being a transformational experience for business, which is it’s basically what you did was say McDonald’s isn’t a company about hamburgers. It’s a real estate company. And you’re like, we’re not a knife sharpening company. We’re a SaaS company. We’ve done 300 some odd episodes. No one’s ever done that. No one’s ever said we’re a knife. No, we’re not knife sharpening. Get out of here. No, we’re a SaaS company.
Speaker 0 | 11:42.019
If you were to ask me what Cuisinny actually does, yeah, we sharpen knives, we deliver knives. We’re actually a delivery service. That’s really all that we are. So the knife sharpening is the easy part. It’s getting the proper items to the customer on a weekly, bi-weekly, or every four-week basis. And how do you do that? Well,
Speaker 1 | 12:00.674
logistics is crazy in the food industry. It’s just,
Speaker 0 | 12:04.597
you’re only doing knives.
Speaker 1 | 12:06.379
You’re only doing knives. You’re not even doing, well, you’re doing. can openers and other stuff.
Speaker 0 | 12:09.901
We’re doing a bunch of things. But if you if you think about it, how can you do that? Well, you need to have the right solutions in place. And at Cozzini, in the last seven years since my tenure started, we’ve gone from a gut driven organization to being a data driven organization. And, you know, this is not the first time I’ve had to do this. I’ve done this a number of times in the past, with a number of different organizations. But making that change, making that transition from being gut driven to being data driven means that you’re going to win the bite. You’re going to win the fight every time, every single time. Because, you know, my gut says that I’m really hungry right now for tacos. But if I look at the time right now, the taco shop that’s up the street here isn’t open yet. So now I’m going to go and maybe I’ll get maybe I’ll get a burger from McDonald’s. We just talked about and I’m going to go to McDonald’s. I’m going to be very upset because I wanted tacos now.
Speaker 1 | 13:02.158
Or it’s 10 o’clock and they’re not serving Big Macs yet.
Speaker 0 | 13:05.301
that always made me upset dude you’re killing me here you’re at the opposite direction they went the opposite direction they went like breakfast all day long i don’t want you’re absolutely killing me but you’re right i mean cozini does knives but on the i.t side of things we are a sas company and the reason that we moved that i moved us to sas was so that i could take dissimilar data sources pump them into one big data warehouse or data lake depending upon what where what organization you’re working with and then to force the organization to start to make data-driven decisions based off of all of these dissimilar data sources so when we talk about the overall infrastructure within it at cozini yeah the the we’re in we’re in entra i mean we’re in reserve shop we’re in entra in tune the whole nine yards the infrastructure side is easy if you can if you can do the infrastructure side great good job but when you look at the overall organization you have to understand what the basis is of the organization and once you understand what the organization does then you can start to insert yourself into the organization to say does it make sense to i don’t know move us to a sas solution do we want to know the number of knives sharpened per hour do we want to know what operator shop and sharpen those knives i mean and the only way you’re going to get to that particular place is if you’re willing to invest the time and energy and to do that whole cheerleader thing where you where you are trying to be a transformational leader and you’ve got to get everybody onto the same page and the only way you’re going to do that is to learn the business to sit down and talk to people. And then once you’ve learned the business and sat down and talk to people, then you start talking about how do we make that change? And that took seven years for us to do.
Speaker 1 | 14:50.692
Okay. Here’s the, here’s the big question of the day. How do you build confidence in it, or how do you gain confidence as an, uh, it leader and not remain. stuck in the cost center, IT as a transformational shop? Did you just walk into it and happen to choose right?
Speaker 0 | 15:20.861
No.
Speaker 1 | 15:21.522
Is there a way that you can sell yourself and sell? How do you do that?
Speaker 0 | 15:26.646
So let me just say this. If you are talking about IT as a cost center, at every organization I’ve been a part of, we are the most expensive cost center. And there is very little that I have to prove in ROI. But I’m Kozini’s first director of IT. I’ve had to carve everything out myself. But how do you do this? Yeah, I can see the look on your face. So how do you do this? Well, I walked into what is technically known as a shit show. There was a lot of problems. Yes, I know. I know. You’re going to have to bleep that out. You’re going to do a lot of bleeping because I don’t really have a filter.
Speaker 1 | 16:05.471
We’re going to have some R2D2 sound or something.
Speaker 0 | 16:10.581
Oh,
Speaker 1 | 16:11.862
no, we’ll have a, we’ll have a shilling, like some kind of pizza cutting sound. Greg, we need a cutter sound.
Speaker 0 | 16:19.949
Can you see what’s on my shoulder?
Speaker 1 | 16:21.230
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 0 | 16:24.973
But so how do you do this?
Speaker 1 | 16:26.494
A true embodiment, a true embodiment.
Speaker 0 | 16:32.840
But let’s, let’s, let’s just talk about this. So it’s the relationships that you build within the organization. How do you. proved your worth to the organization. You don’t make massive changes up front. You make small, incremental changes. You go for the low-hanging fruit. Yeah, I know. You go for the low-hanging fruit. And as you start to tackle the low-hanging fruit, that builds confidence within the organization that things are headed the right direction. Once things are headed in the right direction-Case study,
Speaker 1 | 17:00.157
please. Case study. How’d you do it?
Speaker 0 | 17:02.358
Okay. So our ERP says-Oh,
Speaker 1 | 17:04.159
by the way, first of all, it’s probably important that everybody out there- We are speaking with Brian, is it McCart? Yeah, McCart. Ah, I see.
Speaker 0 | 17:13.490
Brian
Speaker 1 | 17:14.070
McCart. Brian McCart. And Brian McCart, Director of Information Technology. We already talked about Cozzini. It’s a staff’s company, okay? It’s a staff’s company. And we’re saying that to protect all of the other knife sharpeners from you guys cutting them out of the business. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 17:30.455
Oh, Brian, I hate you. This is really great. So how do I prove it? I mean, how do I do this? So. when I joined the organization, our ERP had 3,600 break-fixes.
Speaker 1 | 17:41.781
You said low-hanging fruit. You said low-hanging fruit. ERP is not where you start.
Speaker 0 | 17:47.786
Oh, ERP is exactly where I started because there were so many problems.
Speaker 1 | 17:53.170
Low-hanging fruit on a massive tree. Well,
Speaker 0 | 17:57.974
let’s hold on a second. Let’s peel this back. So there were three separate consulting firms working in the ERP all at the same time. And there was no coordination among the three of them. So at the end of the day, it took me like a month to figure this out. At the end of that month, all three were fired. And we replaced them with one organization that can handle all the work at once. So I went from that 3,600 break fixes per hour down to about three per hour.
Speaker 1 | 18:26.175
Do you have a great ERP consultant to recommend here? Let’s throw a shout out and then I’m going to bleep them out until they pay me money.
Speaker 0 | 18:34.480
Okay. So. We use a product called NetSuite. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it’s Oracle’s largest, yeah, their largest growth.
Speaker 1 | 18:42.112
Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 18:43.693
we’ve been with NetSuite for about 12 years. Our partner with NetSuite is a company called ERP Gurus and they’re out of Canada. They are without a doubt, one of the best organizations that I’ve ever been a part of.
Speaker 1 | 18:56.720
Please send me your guy.
Speaker 0 | 18:58.361
I will send you my guy.
Speaker 1 | 18:59.602
I want your guy. We’re talking with ERP Gurus. We gotta get him on the show. We gotta get your guy on the show.
Speaker 0 | 19:05.277
I can put probably about 15 people from the organization on the show because everybody there knows our business. You know, when we talk about learning the business, they took the time to learn the business. They understand the ins and outs of knife sharpening. Have any of them been down here to do knife sharpening? Hell no. But they understand the zeros and ones. And it’s understanding the zeros and ones. And then the relationships that they’ve built within my organization, not only with me, but with the other people I work with. So. When you talk about building confidence, the way that you build confidence in IT is fix stuff. I actually filtered myself there because the second word was not stuff. It was something else that started with us. But how do you build confidence in IT? You fix things and you fix it right the first time. If you fix it wrong and they come back to you a second time, the organization will lose confidence in you, period. And as Hussein will tell you, one of the things that I… actively do within my organization is I actively hide my team. You’ll know my people. You’ll know everybody on my team. If you know my name within the organization, that means something has really gone wrong. Super, super wrong.
Speaker 1 | 20:24.249
I hide too. I don’t like to put it. I don’t have a really profile picture. I don’t do a lot of that stuff on LinkedIn. I kind of hide. I want to do a great reveal someday. we’re gonna do a great reveal we’re gonna start doing live shows no we are we’re gonna start doing some like live presentations and live things and then we’ll be live but it won’t be recorded it won’t be recorded you’ll have to you will have to like you have to stay in the passcode you’ll have to enter the passcode we both have a have a face for radio i mean that’s that’s the thing right there so if
Speaker 0 | 20:50.527
you want me to come on i’ll be wearing one of those goofy masks but you know building confidence in i.t is a really hard thing to do if you don’t take the time to get to understand what the problems are So you have to be willing as a director, as a manager, as a vice president, walking into a new organization, you have to be willing to sit down and not only talk to your counterparts, but talk to the foot soldiers, talk to the people doing the work. What are the problems you are dealing with on a daily basis? Because you know what? If you don’t know the problems that you’re dealing with on a daily basis and you start to put out edicts, you’re going to fail and you’re not going to build the confidence within the organization. I can tell you right now that if you want me to get somebody on the phone on this call right now, give me about three minutes and I can probably have a driver. I could probably have a manager. I could probably have an operations guy on this call like that. Guys, I have a question. Come on this call. And they would drop everything and come running. Yeah. I mean, it’s super important that you build that confidence. And then once you start talking the same language, yes, I may have to adjust my tech speak down and I may have to talk layman’s terms. But at the end of the day, If I can translate what the business needs into IT needs, it’s going to be a win-win for everybody. And taking the solutions that we had in place, Excel, God forbid, a notebook, which we had in our customer service team. Look in the notebook and see if it’s this customer, do this. If it’s this customer, do this. And God forbid that notebook gets lost. It’s the taking all of those little pieces of information, that tribal knowledge that just isn’t there. and not only documenting it, but then trying to put systems in place to help you so that that way you don’t have to worry about churn. You don’t have to worry about anything. So when I come and I talk to you, when I show up on site, I want to talk about the Chicago Bears. I want to talk about baseball. I want to talk about yay much. And I’m like holding two fingers very close to each other about IT and tech stuff. Because my expectation is that I have such a great relationship with you, that you’re not going to have a problem coming to me on the phone and saying, Yeah, you know what I screwed up, I threw my my company cell phone against the wall. It’s like in 50 pieces, or, you know, the script that was supposed to execute to do this, it executed, but it missed this, this and this. And as I always say, whatever my group does, if we fail to gather information, and you fail as a result of it, it is not your failure. It is my failure. Your success is your success. Even if I give you all the tools, but it’s your success.
Speaker 1 | 23:42.472
Can we circle back to the AI thing and can we tell someone to do something with AI that like they’re in any industry in the mid-market space and mid-market IT leadership? Is there any like, hey, do this with AI? and this will make your i don’t know what is it is is there any kind of like basically we’re talking about here is really kind of what to do with your data data integrity and how to leverage that data with ai to improve uh business process and grow sales basically so essentially essentially what you did was grow sales and give sales people um like the you know like the glenn gary glenn ross leads right and um let’s i mean so this is them you know why you know why do we even need them anymore now let’s take it a step further and be like hey we don’t even need you we’re just gonna have uh you know samantha ai samantha call all of the customers and she’s not even a real person she’s just gonna be like hey we noticed this and blah blah talking to the microphone
Speaker 0 | 24:49.610
you could have to do that but so this is a services organization but my men my career my career has been actually in manufacturing so i put together what i’ve started off my career as a developer and one of the very first things i put together was uh it wasn’t really an ai so much as it was evaluating production of metal parts and it it looked at 46 parameters every time that a part was made and then would look back at a half a billion data points Yes, a half a billion data points to see if there was something in that that could identify a problem with this part. So is there something I can say for every industry? No, I can’t. I wish there was. I think that the best thing for anybody in any industry to do is to look at their processes and say, where in the world could I possibly use some kind of AI? I can tell you this. Cozzini would not have been able to use a commercial off the shelf. AI product. We tried. We tried it a couple of times and it didn’t work.
Speaker 1 | 25:55.784
So this is like the AI hype cycle, kind of, right? The AI hype, right? So how do you even navigate that? Where are you at on that?
Speaker 0 | 26:05.888
So we did try a couple of commercial products, cats products. They didn’t suit our needs. And I made the decision. I said, I’m going to put aside this size of a budget. just to have my data science team give it a shot on their own. So we went ahead and we used Python and we wrote this thing out. We used a model that actually one of my interns had just learned in at school.
Speaker 1 | 26:33.408
Did you use AI to help code?
Speaker 0 | 26:36.130
No, we didn’t. Okay. And that was something that came up much later on in the conversation. Should we have used AI? So ERP gurus. has tried to use AI to do coding. I know they have. I’ve tried using AI for coding. Basic coding is good, but getting the overall picture kind of requires a human to take a look at it. I really do think that coding as an industry will be dead in the next five years. You’re not going to have somebody who’s going to be writing code. You’re going to be having a machine do it. The only people that are going to be doing code writing are going to be the guys who are actually writing the machine code for the AI. But even that, I could only imagine having an AI write AI code at some point in time. But I think that coding overall in the next five years is going to be done.
Speaker 1 | 27:25.553
Great. Love that prediction. Sorry, guys. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 27:29.054
That’s a whole industry. And I’m sorry to everybody who’s a coder. I mean, I started off my career as a coder, but I could absolutely see it happening.
Speaker 1 | 27:36.317
So you could teach me how to code without code.
Speaker 0 | 27:39.919
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 27:40.859
I like it. How can I build? That’s dangerous.
Speaker 0 | 27:46.166
I mean, it could be if you don’t have guardrails. So I mean, that’s the important thing is that every business needs to have a business owner and guardrails around what you want to get. If I were to take the latest AI that we’re looking to build, which would be the churning, the customer loss one, and just kind of let that thing go awry, I bet you it would predict maybe 30% churn, but we need to have guardrails set up around it. I can’t just… act on something without really investigating it and looking at it. Because as I said, I mean, the restaurant industry is very, very volatile. So because it’s so volatile, what one customer’s payment history, if I only look at payment history and I applied into somebody else, somebody else may be super profitable. They’re just forgetting to pay bills. Whereas this guy could really be struggling and is struggling to not only pay the knife bill, but I mean, the food bill, the restaurant, everything else. So I mean, there’s a whole slew of things that we have to look at. We have to look at the interactions between our drivers and our customers. So we ask our customers on a kind of a random basis, how are we doing? When our drivers go to collect a signature for a delivery, it’ll pop up saying, hey, how do you like our driver today? Or are our knives sharp? Yes or no? I mean, it’s a one to 10 thing. And so that allows you to generate a score. And once you have a score, you can then go ahead and start to look at the scoring overall for an individual customer. We are just now in the process of starting to collect that information. But in collecting that information will allow us to look historically back and say, we started off with all 10s and now we’re slowly trailing off or we’re slowly trailing up.
Speaker 1 | 29:32.220
How do you create a, what do we want to call these CSAT scores or something? What do we want to call them?
Speaker 0 | 29:37.943
You know what? I know there’s a technical term for it, but I just work in IT, but my sales team. my, my vice president of sales, it was very interested in looking at this stuff.
Speaker 1 | 29:47.852
And I want to ask you, how do we create, like, how do we create the right scoring methodology? Right. Like what questions do we ask? Like this type of thing. I want to ask that, but we’ll, we’re moving on. We’re moving on because I’ve got, I’ve got some deeper questions. I want to ask you what keeps you up at night?
Speaker 0 | 30:03.470
Uh, right now, um, I’m scheduled for surgery on my ankle next week. So the pain in my ankle, but from an it viewpoint, because I know that, I know that’s where you really wanted to go.
Speaker 1 | 30:13.239
No, but that is important. No, no, but it could be important because sometimes we’re not balanced in our life. So it is a fair question. It is a fair question that like, how do we create balance in our life? Um, so, but we’re not going to go there. What keeps you up night from it?
Speaker 0 | 30:27.151
So actually from it viewpoint, it’s actually not. IT. It’s not the typical stuff that keeps an IT manager up or IT director up. It’s going to be, if I lose this person tomorrow, if they win the lottery, what kind of knowledge am I losing? So it’s the knowledge loss. And it’s not only on my team, because my team is amazing. They’re really, really, really great guys. They’re great people. But it’s that driver, the driver that walks into those restaurants, the guy who knows the password for the back. door or it’s the guy who is driving a vehicle, is a little tired and suddenly starts to swerve off the road or those types of things. When I say that IT is all about relationships, it really is in my case, all about the relationships. What else keeps me up at night? This turn thing, the loss of customers, that always keeps me up at night. I work in IT.
Speaker 1 | 31:25.512
The one I’m getting out of this is that you have real ownership in the business.
Speaker 0 | 31:32.235
Yeah. Yeah. IT at Cozzini has ownership. We’ve tripled in size since I joined the organization. And so knowing the people, getting to know the people is key to establishing relationships. I don’t really have a lot of things that keep me up at night from an IT viewpoint. Maybe I… The last time that I had a major project, maybe we were five weeks behind schedule. But when we started to do an investigation as to why we were five weeks behind schedule, there were things beyond our control within it. And I had already padded our schedule so that-Security issues?
Speaker 1 | 32:12.852
You’re not worried about security or something?
Speaker 0 | 32:16.293
Be a security a little bit, but not as much as I think most other people. I mean, let’s be realistic. Cozzini sharpens knives. Did anybody die? If somebody gets a hold of my data, is anybody going to die? No. But from an IT viewpoint for security and cybersecurity, we use two-factor. We use a whole bunch of other tools. I do a lot of penetration testing. I do automated penetration testing. I have government-required audits. They don’t scare me anymore. They scared me maybe five years ago, but not anymore.
Speaker 1 | 32:56.666
If you were in a room of your peers, all other people, you have various different levels of R2D2 tattoos. You all understand each other. You all speak the same language. You can have sophisticated, high-level conversations.
Speaker 0 | 33:26.610
what would you talk about so i would be talking about what are the latest tools that we are finding to be the most effective for automation and it’s not only automation of individual jobs but also automation of etl tools or as I’m looking at my stack and I’m thinking about all the things that I’ve struggled with in the last year, I’m looking at automation. I’m looking to see ETL and maybe even a combination of ETL and AI, a combination there. That would be a really incredibly powerful tool if somebody were to be able to build that out. You can build out ETL tools all day long, Boomi, WorkAuto. you can build ETL, even 5G, which is lifts and shifts. But if you were to take the data or the sources and be able to take AI and tell the AI, I want you to learn how to, I don’t know, give me all the renditions of Susan and then have that tell the ETL tool. to look for all these renditions of Susan and to maybe modify all the data around that. This is, this is just me thinking off the top of my head, but you know, we, we do have. We are incredibly blessed that we have all these great tools that are coming out right now in terms of AI and ETL and all these other SaaS services that are coming out. And to be able to take all these different SaaS services and to really make a web of them and to then start to really go ahead and say, this is what we use here and this is how we use it. And then to sit down with somebody else at the other side of the table and say. this is as i said we we’re uh netsuite but maybe somebody else is using epicor and maybe there’s a challenge that the epicor guy has that the netsuite that i don’t that i have or that i had at one point in time and this is how we solve it and we we can’t always base all of our answers based on gardner we can’t do it based off the consultants we can’t do it all based on that and that’s where we have these user groups out there but sitting in a room with a bunch of people, what are you using for your telecoms? What are you using for your data warehouse? What are you using for your data lake? And then beyond that, as we start to kind of peel back the onion of what are you using, we then start to talk about you brought up security. What are you doing to ensure that your data is secure? What are you doing to ensure your data is secure? what consulting firms are using. There are a million firms out there. It took me a long time to find ERP gurus, just as an example. It took me a really long time to find them. But what are the places that we can go where we can have those conversations? And those are the tough conversations to have. Those are the hard conversations to have with anybody, be it the CEO of my organization, be it with a room full of tech people.
Speaker 1 | 36:55.216
Preston Pyshkoff Mm. So I’ve gotten in a room with a bunch of us because we’re up to, I don’t know, 320 plus. And I asked everyone, you know, what’s the problem with the Gartner breakout groups? Or what’s the good, the positives and negatives of the Nor-Xs of the world? And I consolidated all of the stuff. And… what they said was a lot of times vendor disguised conversations or vendors wasting a lot of time or a bunch of tools and data that i don’t need access to because i already know how to use google and search reddit and find things other ways because i just don’t need that i don’t need another library of stuff we have something called the internet um
Speaker 0 | 37:50.424
they served a purpose five years ago yeah they served the purpose
Speaker 1 | 37:54.322
ego driven conversations, battles of the egos and or not enough high level sophisticated discussions because they sent someone else in place of me. So I’m sitting in a room and there’s not enough time for us to really talk together. And then it wasn’t, it wasn’t time sensitive. So it was like, I had to go here at this time and this place, and there just wasn’t enough relevance of people like us. um, talking together. So I’ve got some exciting news for everyone out there listening. We’ve been working very, very hard on this and I would love your opinions on it. And, uh, if you want to get, because it’s going to be built by you guys, that’s the only way it’s going to be done. And when I asked everyone what it would be, it was eliminate all those annoying things, time problems, sales, no vendors, um, not another, you know, the Gartner. overpaid thing, even though there’s, I mean, because some people pay like $125,000 to get sanity checks from a consultant at Gartner. I mean, I mean, that’s important. I mean, and if your company is going to pay for it, okay. And some people won’t make a decision unless, unless it’s in the Gartner magic quadrant, which we all know is a pay to play model, but there’s legit people in it. And Gartner does some things that they’ve, they’ve been getting smarter, probably using AI to do it because they do the AI hype cycle. where are you at on the AI hype cycle? And I was like, wow, they nailed it there. They nailed it. Absolutely nailed it. I was like, how have they gotten so real all of a sudden? Must be using AI. And then attaching a human to it. So here’s the idea, guys. The idea is a group highly curated of mid-market IT leaders, digital transformation leaders that are all on the same level that can have sophisticated level conversations, but everyone is required to give presentations. Everyone is required to give feedback on each other’s presentations, have discussions around those presentations. So, and have round table discussions around those. That’s one thing. Next thing is ability to ask a anonymous question to the group. And then another, you know, breakout group where we can have high level discussions on anything like what you just said was, was just brilliant, you know, automation tools, you know, ETL plus AI and whatever, you know, putting that together. And. really providing kind of like a, you know, and then no one gets in, you know, highly like, you know, you can’t get through to see the, you can’t get behind the curtain. However, we allow people to talk about vendors behind their backs and rate them. And then if vendors so choose, they may sponsor a section, but they can’t get in. They can’t get it. And they can, they can only provide demo videos, information and highly curated high level. um contacts within their company and a special gift something special i don’t know uh erp gurus erp gurus you get you get you get in you get something special with erp gurus that you don’t get anywhere else because you’ve come in through the digital transformation leaders um community and i’ve taken all the values of 320 podcasts i’m just curious if any of these ring true with you um Number one value, and there’s no particular order, but intellectual curiosity and diversity of thought, professional advancement, pursuit of excellence, continuous improvement, knowledge sharing, and documentation. Documentation comes up. You mentioned that a couple times on the show. Very important to document. Embracing different viewpoints. Because one of the fears is, well, if we’ve all got R2D2 tattoos, we might all have the same viewpoints. And how do we embrace? diversity of thought. We may just be just repeating the same thing, which I don’t think is, if you have different industries, I don’t think it’s possible. I think there’s going to be different solutions from different-Of every solution.
Speaker 0 | 42:07.833
But the thing about that is that diversity is what makes us great in IT. Having new people come into an organization with a fresh set of eyes and say, this is what we did at the last place. Maybe we can tweak it a little bit to do it this way. Now, one of the things that I struggle with- i mean just overall i struggle with when i go to these user groups is that they’re always always always sponsored by somebody and i find that in a lot of cases the sponsor then steers that organization for a month or two and if we’re truly going to have a user group where they’re the sponsors are not allowed to come in the events are not allowed to come in and we can have a conversation that’s awesome absolutely awesome that would be spectacular now we’re
Speaker 1 | 42:53.178
we’re going to sponsor it. Everybody’s going to sponsor it themselves. We’re just going to bring them together. It’s going to be, you know, it’s going to be us. It’s going to be built by us. It’s got to be for us by us. Um, I just, uh, after talking with 320 of you and doing multiple a lot more than three 20, uh, you know what I mean? There’s, um, what do you think about these values? I put them up on the screen and not everyone can read them right now. Maybe I’ll put a screenshot up for the, um, I’m just, you know, first thoughts.
Speaker 0 | 43:22.150
i don’t know if you can see my screen but oh i can see your screen i’m loving what i’m seeing on the screen here actually um but the one that i think belongs at the very top is that uh personal balance and under that needs to be the ownership those those two things for me strike home very very hard um but i love everything that you throw up on the screen here the curiosity and the diversity of thought you know you if you are in the same industry for 25 30 years I’m in IT, but I’ve worked at, I don’t know, conservatively, probably six or seven different organizations and was a consultant at a number of places. The diversity of thought and taking what we see in one organization and not necessarily saying, this is how we did it here, but take the thought that was there. If it’s not proprietary, there’s nothing related to it. Just to be able to take that thought. As I mentioned, IT, the infrastructure side is easy. You can do that all day long.
Speaker 1 | 44:20.990
oh boy there’s even more on this holy smokes dude you’ve really thought this through we have been working on this for years and this is just the hint everybody there is something very big coming out very very big i don’t want to like i don’t want to over hype it i really really don’t but the the stuff that the initial response that i’ve been getting from some of you is i’m ready to quit everything and go all in on this I’m ready to quit. I mean, the podcast is going to be so.
Speaker 0 | 44:57.270
I know people can’t see me, but I’m as close to my screen as I can get because I’m on a tiny little screen. Holy smokes. You have really thought this through. Congratulations.
Speaker 1 | 45:07.179
It’s not me. It’s all you guys. I started by making this podcast. This podcast has been a labor of love. I’m probably $450,000 in debt with this thing. If I really looked at that, I am working to pay for this. You know what I mean? And it’s because I really wanted. You guys are the ones I want to work with. And it hasn’t hit me until now. It has not hit me until we’ve really been crunching all the data. And, you know, for years, people have been talking about, well, why don’t we do like a breakout group or a Slack group or whatever? And I’m like, yeah, there’s a ton of Slack groups. And I was going to join another Slack group. And we’ve been curating and curating and curating and asking and asking and asking. And I think we’re finally hitting the nerve. And I think this is going to be something very special. I think there’s going to be something very special that could change the face of, we’d like to say change the face of IT, but at least change lives. And one of the things that has come up on the show that no one’s been able to answer, no one’s been able to answer, and that’s what is the end game. And I don’t know if it’s a fear. Maybe I’m just asking to be vulnerable for a few seconds here.
Speaker 0 | 46:11.850
Do,
Speaker 1 | 46:13.672
is there a worry of stagnation or career stagnation? Because everyone in IT. Most of us that are at this level right now that are in this secret group that don’t even know where we know we’re in the secret group, but no one really does. Right. It’s like it’s just it’s this group. And we all if I went and I had to guess, I would say most of I would say 95 percent of everyone that’s been on the show. They did not go to college for being in IT. It was not a thing back in the day. A lot of us were. college dropouts or we went to the army or we were in the marines and then we figured out it while we were over there and we got a job when we came back or we were in business or we were in something else and we ended up you know where i was going to be an engineer and then no i ended up in it so there is no there was no there was no career path there was no one-size-fits-all answer but there was definitely some themes and i think Due to that, that means we’re writing the story. And there is no, everyone in the West is like, well, you go to college and then you get a job and then you pay your 401k and then you retire on an island, which is not really true. They put you in, you end up by the time you think you’re going to retire, you’re already all busted, your knees replaced, your hip, in my case, maybe you’re going to get a hip replacement. You get dementia and then you’re on hospice. That’s the true story. No one tells you that. By the time you retire, we have an opportunity to write the end game, but no one knows what it is. So,
Speaker 0 | 48:01.507
you know, I am terrified of stagnation, absolutely terrified of it. I’ve been doing this IT thing for 25 years. What I find is that when I get bored is… in a job is that’s the time I need to find something else to move on to. I need to find new challenges because I could sit in my ivory tower all day long. By the way, I don’t sit in ivory tower. I sit on the eighth floor in a small, tiny cube or tiny office, but I could sit and just collect a paycheck and let things just kind of guide themselves. But that’s not who I am. And if you want to be a leader, you’ve got to be willing to stick yourself out there. And yeah, you’re right. college I went to college to run manufacturing facilities I just happened to have a computer since I was eight wrote my first program at nine I’ve been doing it for a long time I grew up in the age of internet’s just coming out do I have the certifications I absolutely do because at one point in time I thought it was really important to get certifications as a as the director now no I don’t I don’t need certifications do my guys need them yeah maybe Maybe some cybersecurity stuff, maybe some firewall stuff.
Speaker 1 | 49:14.063
Yeah, I got the job because I had a degree, but did I use it? Maybe to write emails, maybe to write emails.
Speaker 0 | 49:20.705
And so if you saw me writing emails, yeah, you’d wonder if I even graduated from eighth grade.
Speaker 1 | 49:27.568
So one of the secrets of this group, and you tell me if this is going to be good, is going to be peer-led presentations and creation of IP. So one of the things that I realized is that why not give IT leadership a platform to create intellectual property, spread that property amongst themselves, curate it, make it better, produce it for them. And we provide this, you know, hub of of career advancement, changing the face of IT. Some people call it personal brand, building a personal brand. Some people call it finding their voice, but then allowing that to be, I don’t know, hopefully monetized somehow and have kind of like an, you know, a share in that so that people have a non-fear of stagnation and a constant renewal and encouragement amongst each other.
Speaker 0 | 50:24.556
So it’s the passion that we need to as an organization, as a group, as directors. We all have to have passion in our role. And every single person that I’ve heard come onto your podcast, and I’ve been listening to this for a long time, has had the passion. You can’t train passion into somebody, but you can lose passion when you start to get stagnant. And the idea that you’ve got here is amazing. I love the idea.
Speaker 1 | 50:53.980
i love the idea of your live feed and having a bunch of people sit there and talk i i think you need to record it because you know people like me because i don’t record it and like i made it yeah yeah you have an ongoing stream that’s private and everyone can access you know like that type of thing you know but yeah but
Speaker 0 | 51:12.089
but you know you can train people to do the it work but you can’t train passion you can’t train energy and you’re right we do get stagnant we for sure do and if you look at my if you look at my LinkedIn profile, you’re going to see I took two years off to be a consultant between manufacturing. Oh, look at that. He’s bringing it up right now on the screen. Preston Pyshko,
Speaker 1 | 51:32.639
CFO Alphabet and Google We’re on screen. Jim Collison,
Speaker 0 | 51:35.680
CEO Alphabet and Google But if you look at my resume, you can see I worked for 18 years for one organization. And then I took off about a year and a half and was a consultant so that I could recharge, re-energize. And when I was a consultant, And that particular process was, I was traveling an awful lot. I was seeing a lot of organizations. I was doing a lot of training. You can’t see me on the podcast, but I’m waving my hands around and waving my arms around. The energy that I got from that has then built into the energy I now exude. So
Speaker 1 | 52:13.393
I think about this because I’m going to ask you offline and no one can hear your answer. I don’t want people to know the answer because this is kind of like the surprise and delight people. I would love to know. and you think about this, don’t answer now. What’s the one presentation that you could give or you would love to hear from your peers that all have R2-D2 tattoos? Or they might have the Klingon tattoo. Okay, so everybody, until next time on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we’re going to leave you with that. Everyone have a great day. And seriously, awesome. So awesome. And we’re going to cut here.
