Speaker 0 | 00:02.584
Welcome back to today’s episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m your host, Doug Kameen, and today I’m talking with Sarfraz Shaikh, Director of Information Technology at OneMesa. Welcome to the show, Sarfraz.

Speaker 1 | 00:14.969
Thank you, Doug. Appreciate it.

Speaker 0 | 00:17.110
So before we got on the show here, we were talking a little bit about the complexity of the business that you’re in. You’re in a mid-sized business, but OneMesa is not just one business. It’s like four businesses put together. And you’re running the tech for all of them all across the way here. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Speaker 1 | 00:36.456
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m director of IT at OneMesa and been here for about 14 years now. Who’s counting when they’re having so much fun? Time flies. My responsibilities span hardware, software, cybersecurity. business and IT alignment, vendor partnerships. So I’ve got a huge portfolio. And that’s the beauty of as the company is growing from a small business to a mid-sized business. We have four unique brands. We’ve got Mesa Products, which is a manufacturing company. We play in the oil and gas market. So we manufacture groundbed designs that go into the ground to protect the assets. Assets could be the pipelines. above ground storage tanks, things like that. Then we’ve got Mesa Services, which is the engineering, technical surveys, heavy construction work. That is headquartered in Clare, Michigan, and Mesa Products is headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We also own Bass Engineering, that’s headquartered in Longview, Texas. That’s our usual construction, HDD drilling. installation services technical services arm and then finally we have hansen drilling which is headquartered in seattle washington and that’s our water well drilling operation so yes uh four unique business units uh different headquarters um

Speaker 0 | 02:09.815
never a dull moment for us so we were talking you know going back to the things we talked about before we jumped on the recording recorded part of our podcast here but So it’s a business that’s got four different subsidiary companies that are spread across the country geographically. There’s a lot of your coordinate, a lot of stuff here to pull all these together. But this business has also been growing and seeing where as a business moves from a small business to the mid-market, mid-sized business, larger mid-sized business. There’s a lot of change that occurs and a lot of new things that you got to focus on about how you approach those. The work that you do as an IT leader in that space, you want to plumb that out a little more and maybe share some details with the listeners about that?

Speaker 1 | 02:56.527
Yeah. So we being in the oil and gas market, you’ve always got to be aware of the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities, the threats and all that stuff. So as we continue to look at where we are in the industry, be it climate change. We are also trying to diversify into different markets, and hence we are in water well drilling. Back to the IT management piece, right? So let’s define the landscape. Evolution is happening at breakneck speed, right? Every day we hear of new technologies, reshaping industries. We talk about AI, user experience interactions. Apple recently had their Glowtime event. And, you know, I always get amazed. Like every year we get a new device. And I think, what else can we add to it? Is it going to be new colors? Is it going to be probably your standard faster processor, more megapixel camera? And then it always, they surprise you with these small things. I learned about these features called generative emojis, right? Yeah. where you can type out how you’re feeling and it’ll generate an emoji. So evolution, again, is happening so fast. There’s a rise in digital interactions. The pandemic kind of reset the clock for us. Remote work is now digital. For us as a small business, and especially on the field services, we had to… kind of realign everything when we were going through that process. All of a sudden, everyone was coming to an office and now we’re not. However, us being part of that critical infrastructure group, we never stopped. It was always, you know, field folks were going, project managers had to communicate. And all of a sudden, we adopted Teams, in fact, as our collaboration tool. I was trying so hard to push teams for almost like six, eight months. And when then COVID became the thing, we adopted teams in like a week or so.

Speaker 0 | 05:16.928
Suddenly that was du jour, man. Everybody’s on it.

Speaker 1 | 05:19.702
Absolutely. So as I write and then we talk about increasing cyber threats. You look at 2024, it’s already setting new records in ransomware attacks, largest data breaches. Right. What was that? National public data, 2.7 billion records. Ticketmaster, 500 plus, I mean, a million records, regulatory changes. Now the government is trying to come in and try to dictate the use of AI. Talk about HIPAA, talk about the GDPR in Europe, the CCPA in California. So when all of this is happening for us as a small business and now a midsize, we constantly have to take into account that landscape that is changing. In the past, they thought before I joined the company, it was like, who would be interested in this small, mid-sized business called Mesa? What would they get by attacking Mesa? That was the mentality.

Speaker 0 | 06:30.234
Security through obscurity, right?

Speaker 1 | 06:32.275
Exactly. As we have continued to grow, we have realized now we throw a lot of technology when it comes to cybersecurity. Security. Security. It is very important for a midsize business like us to have that strategic agility. You know, as I was mentioning earlier, Doug, IT has always been known as that department of no, right? No, you can’t reuse a password. No, you can’t install Spotify on your machine. No, you can’t download that app, right? So we’ve been looked up as gatekeepers. However, with… how technology has embedded and bled itself in all aspects of our life, of business operations. We are now a department of enablers. If we cannot guide and enable and make it happen, then the growth of the business is stunted. So we are IT as a whole now has a seat at the table. We are in that room with the decision makers making sure that, or at least I speak for my company. We have been very cognizant on what role does IT play. So for us, as we continue to grow, it’s a very busy desk. It’s a very agile environment that we constantly have to see, yes, we had this application, which was homegrown, and it worked great for us. But now it’s not scalable. Now it’s not the data integrity is not there. Now we’ve got to look for SaaS applications or something, you know, more like an ERP system, whatever it may be.

Speaker 0 | 08:18.638
I love the S400s, by the way, just so we’re clear, like, they’re really great. So, you know, I just thinking about what you mentioned here, when it comes to the growth of Department of Know, to the seat at the table and stuff like that, and I think about the journey that companies often make. as they grow from a small organization to a mid-market or larger organization. And to me, one of the things that I see, you talk about the Department of Know, and I think some of that is because the way that IT is typically built in a smaller organization is in service to everything else. And what I mean by that in a generalized sense is the other departments run the day, and then they show up and they tell the IT people what they’ve decided. hey, the finance team looked at, we evaluated a new ERP system, and here’s what we picked. Can you please implement this? And so they show up after the fact, after the work has been done, and then they ask the IT people to largely carry it forward. But as your organization grows and you hit that middle size where you now have the capacity to support internal IT in a team that’s more robust and has… multiple uh multiple avenues and tools just to bring uh you know to bring expertise to bear on on the projects that are there i’ve found and i’ve enabled the journey uh and i think this is aligning with what you’re describing the journey where they the the organizations move from why is it in the middle sitting at that table and it’s because when it is brought in first um the outcomes are oftentimes better And you have a setup where. That’s one of those key journeys that an organization makes as they move to the mid-market is flipping from the place where IT gets told what to do to where IT starts being the catalyst and the driver. Because everything you touch now has some IT component. There is almost no project you can bring up that doesn’t have an IT component. You want to build a building? Oops, you need IT. You need to outfoot a truck? Oops, you need IT. You want to stand up a new employee? Chances are they need some IT with that and all these other things like that. So I just… I’m thinking about that and how it aligns with what you just said about that growth. And, you know, I’m sure that’s part of what you’ve been seeing at Mesa. You’ve been there, you know, it’s been 14 years. So that’s that’s like that’s a big change.

Speaker 1 | 10:49.245
Absolutely. And I think you had it right there, Doug, where, you know, we’ve been I’ve been in that room where sales attended a trade conference and they were approached by a CRM company. And a true story. And then. They take them out to a fancy dinner. And the next thing you know, the head of that specific group signs a contract. And then he comes to IT and says, hey, Fraz, by the way, we just signed a contract with this software company. I need you to take over and deploy this.

Speaker 0 | 11:27.571
Please make this happen. Thank you. Please and thank you.

Speaker 1 | 11:29.413
Please make this happen. Absolutely. And we used to do that company where it was so difficult where we would find after the fact. But as we continue to grow, you know, cybersecurity insurance, we’ve been early adopters of cybersecurity insurance. And when that came in, that actually helped us kind of create that vision, gave us these guardrails that, hey, first of all, you know, a few things that you need to be aware of is any technology that. you bring into your environment needs to be vetted, needs to be known by IT. And also, I want to highlight an initiative that we ourselves got engaged in. And this kind of goes back to before my time. Mesa has been a three-time winner of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. So it is a U.S. Department of Commerce initiative, and it’s run by NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology. So we use their framework across the board to run the company. So the Baldrige program has seven different categories. And, you know, they start with leadership, customer focus, creating a great place to work. And then it also talks about strategic planning. And then you’ve got to measure. You can have all these great plans and vision statements, principles, and all that. But if you’re not measuring, you do not know what is changing. You do not know if you’re headed to your destination. So we’ve adopted the Malcolm Baldrige criteria. I think 2006, Doug, is when we won the first award. And then we won it again in 2012. And the third time we won it in 2020. So we’ve been, and again, Mesa Products is ISO 9001, 2015 certified, the manufacturing side. Right. So we’ve always been a process driven company. If we’re doing certain things, you better have a good reason on why you’re moving things. And we… realigning tables or building a new building? What’s the purpose? So we’ve been a very process driven company. Combine that with the Malcolm Baldrige criterias, that has helped us hone how we operate as a business. And that program has really helped scale. scale to as we have grown through what we call opportunistic growth. You know, it might have been these folks we have acquired would have been a contractor for us that we constantly used for drilling operations or technical services or whatever they might be. And then we found a good fit. They were ready to sell. And we just went in and we acquired. Our New Jersey office on the Northeast is one of those. Bass Engineering in Texas is one of those. Hanson Drilling in Pacific Northwest is one of those. So our growth has been where we find a like-minded partner who we work with. So there is a easy integration of cultures. And then, you know, technologies could be very different. And then we take on that role of, okay— You’re using a different ERP system or you have a different email solution. So as we continue to grow, we have started to standardize it. We have started to push out the messaging that, hey, no more Wild West where, hey, I like the software. I’ve used it. Everything gets funneled through IT. We vet it and we’re pretty structured in our town halls. We will. we are constantly checking the pulse of the employees and, hey, what’s working? Is the solution a good solution? In fact, recently, we use a tool called Concur for expense management, you know, credit card expense reconciliation. And during the town halls, we started hearing that, hey, the multi-factor authentication, you know, that’s the key thing that IT talks about for cybersecurity, for safety. You make sure that the… The person who is entering is you and not somebody else, right? So MFA helps with that. But that was causing a lot of heartburn for our field employees because they’re out in the heat, they’re out in the cold, they’re out in the rains. They’ve got this equipment on them, safety goggles, hard hats, gloves, you name it, right? So for them to authenticate and punch in. The numbers or biometrics is kind of out of the picture because they’ve got gloves on and if they remove something, they’re out of compliance. So we had all these little challenges that we had to navigate, yet be able to provide that great place to work where people or employees are not happy with the tools. It’s not working or too many guardrails, too much red tape. Then you start getting these workarounds. Like, I’m not going to enter my time or I’m not going to submit my thing. I’m going to give it to my supervisor and then my supervisor is going to enter the time. Right. So we’ve got to be careful. We are the kind of a company, the leadership, I should say, that we talk to our employees. We listen to them. And like I do many site visits as part of my IT engagement. Whenever we’re deploying any software, we go out there, talk to the end users. Look at their touch points and see if this is going to be a good solution, which brings me back to Mesa products. Doug is a very controlled environment. It’s like an assembly line operation. So high speed Internet is there. Right. So it’s more controlled. Mesa services. These guys are technical folks. They they have the survey technicians who are walking a latitude, longitude pipeline for miles. These guys. did not have the high-speed internet connection. So it’s a very different environment. So is Bass Engine.

Speaker 0 | 18:05.809
Beat those different needs, you know, very different, like, very different IT profiles for different staff and having to bring all those together under one roof, you know, represents its own challenge there for sure.

Speaker 1 | 18:17.154
Absolutely. So for us, what might be great, you know, we might look at, you know, sitting in the office and come up with a plan. Yes, we’re going to do MFA or we’re going to, deploy this. It might work great for Mesa products, but it might not. So I strongly believe that we as leaders, and we do a fantastic job here, all of the leaders, not just IT, HR, safety, finance, accounting, all those leaders, we do go out there, talk to our end users, our employees, especially in the field, and get that intelligence from them on what works and what not. And that growth. It’s just been just a fun time learning, going on this journey and learning and failing many times just to come back and say, oh, you know, I thought this was this was it. And you start from from scratch again. It’s been exciting.

Speaker 0 | 19:13.752
Yeah. So I’m going to just turn the conversation a bit to the specifics of leadership. You know, we’re a leadership podcast, and one of the things that our listeners love to hear about is what are the values? Maybe I’ll even frame up a couple of questions here. Number one, the values that you find have been most effective as a leader. You’ve got a long tenure at one place, which gives you an interesting experience in that space. But also, not just the values that you see, but what’s been the most effective? tools for leadership that you’ve had to exercise so far?

Speaker 1 | 19:48.587
Great question. Yeah, very. I would say, be uncomfortable, embrace curiosity. My dad always used to say, it’s good to be at a point where you’re comfortable, but if you settle down there, and then you won’t grow as a person, as an individual and a professional, personal. whatever it might be. So try to put yourself into a space where, of course, you need to enjoy it. But be curious, take risks, keep learning, exploring. You don’t need to have it all figured out. Growth comes from trying, from falling and trying again. Take those bold moves. What has been really fulfilling for me has been as part of this midsize organization, some of the decisions. Some of the decisions could be like picking a software or defining a process. It could be as simple as a ticketing process, send this to here, or you have a Teams channel. Some of these things in the grand scheme of things, they might seem trivial, but how… what kind of impact, a positive impact, sometimes negative impact, that you have been able to make a difference, hopefully in a good way. One example comes to mind is we as a company used to have hundreds of printers in a building, right? And it was just sort of, hey, a new person is joining or this printer broke down, you know, you’re getting a new printer. And it was IT’s responsibility when it did not work. You know, we got a ticket, my printer is not working. So we started looking, I started looking at the tickets. And I said, wow, we are not qualified to fix printers. You know, we don’t know how to change the glass or the rollers or anything like that, right? So our response was typically, all right, let’s get a new device and move on.

Speaker 0 | 22:01.721
Replace that thing, right?

Speaker 1 | 22:02.801
Replace that, absolutely. So. And, you know, then I start thinking, well, we’re growing too fast. We cannot support this. So, of course, you have the managed print services where you have a device that’s sitting in the hallway and everybody prints. So I kind of floated that idea. And, Doug, I mean. I was a target for a lot of people. It was like, he’s taking away our printers.

Speaker 0 | 22:27.738
I take away my printers, man. That’s like the worst. I’ve been through that. I’ve been through that. Up and down. People are like, oh, you’re a freaking IT guy taking away my printers and stuff like that. I’m like, really? Like, what do you in an office need your own individual printer? You know, what confidential information are you printing that you need one in your office to print it?

Speaker 1 | 22:43.626
Exactly. So I had to be creative. So let me share this with you. So when I first joined Mesa, I headed their marketing and communications team. So I had a little bit of had, you know, kind of had to pull around that and how to market it to the base. And, you know, so for them, they’re thinking, like you said, you’re taking over my printer. Now I’ve got to stand up, go down there. And there’s a long queue of 10 people waiting in line to print. And, you know, I thought this through. I had researched enough to where it said, you know, what I knew. Yeah, it doesn’t work like that. It just doesn’t. kind of flows, right? It just has a method to the madness. And of course, these are all authenticated until you release your print when you talk about confidentiality. You know, for us in IT, CIA is important, confidentiality, integrity, availability, right? So we have to have all of that. Telling you, it was a rough patch for the IT group where when we started to take away the spreader. Now, in hindsight… I think that’s the best thing that happened because our print footprint has considerably reduced. Because people now, yeah, I don’t need to print. Because there was no need to print it. They were just printing because it was just a spin of their chair and they get a print. They scratch it and they toss it out in the shred bin. So it is always take those bold risks is what I was trying to kind of come back to, right? What has helped me really see this through? And

Speaker 0 | 24:26.329
I was thinking, you know, when you and I wrote down a note here on my notepad here, when you said that the bold and I align that to I would call it the the right decisiveness. So, you know, as a leader, it’s important to be to have. decisiveness but it’s important to have that be the the appropriate decisiveness like you don’t want to be uh um you know so you just rush headlong into things without thinking about them but you also don’t want to spend your time deliberating so long that everybody’s like what is going on come on man like fisher cut bait here you know and and you you need to find that that balance as a leader so that people respect have respect for the fact that like hey i know that the thoughts of the decisions that have been made were considered, but also are going to be impactful, because I know that that’s what this individual has done. So when you mentioned bold to me, that’s what came to mind about how is a leader one of those qualities that’s really important to be an effective leader in the IT space?

Speaker 1 | 25:30.309
Absolutely. I think you hit a good point. For us, getting a buy-in is very critical, because if you do not have a buy-in from your end user group, then you create shadow IT. Then you start to create workarounds. And you don’t want that because then you’re trying to tackle that problem. So we’ve always favored where any project that’s going to impact a major group of people, what we do is we usually create a project charter, get those stakeholders involved, get their feedback. What are those pain points? What’s the outcome that they’re looking for and how? We’re going to navigate that, what the user, the UAT phase is going to look like, things like that. So it’s very critical for the success for any deployment.

Speaker 0 | 26:23.099
So turning again to your history, your personal history, and you touched on this, and I really want to have listeners hear a little bit more about this, because you didn’t come in IT. You just alluded to this. You started as… the marketing guy or one of a marketing person and you know so can you tell us a little bit about your history well your career history and where you started because you did you didn’t start in it but you’ve edited it and you’ve become a leader in that space yeah um so yeah when i first joined mesa um you

Speaker 1 | 26:57.238
know uh the the headquarters of mesa are in tulsa oklahoma so when i moved to tulsa my wife is from tulsa and that’s the reason i ended up in tulsa the age-old story fall to that’s right I went to school in Oklahoma City. My education is in communications marketing and also in IT. I got my master’s in information technology. So I had kind of, it was a weird mix, but I enjoyed it. So when I first joined, Mesa was more marketing communications, internal communications. The company was growing. We were, again, it was kind of the Wild West. We were… We needed to streamline operations and have that brand identity, the brand positioning, if you will. We were known as Mesa Products because that’s where the company started. But we had these different arms, you know, engineering Mesa services. We had the construction arm. But everything was put under this bucket of Mesa products. So we needed strategy around it. And I was brought in to help guide Mesa. uh the uh that part of it be it marketing like print uh marketing um social media digital marketing and we are big on trade shows uh so when we attend these industry trade shows uh you know it would just we wanted to make sure it was four different companies and not just uh mesa products we are mesa products is one of the companies so that’s where i started and then the transition I would say, you know, to IT was where we really did not have a defined IT department as such. We had team members and it was sort of, you know, we walked up to anybody and we said, hey, I need this. And somebody took care of it.

Speaker 0 | 28:56.083
Classic, classic small company IT. You had a couple, maybe had a couple of staff people. There was really an overarching organizational structure. There was no, you know. VP of IT or a CIO or anybody else. It might have been like a sysadmin and the person who can reset passwords and sets up computers. And that’s it.

Speaker 1 | 29:15.330
Absolutely. We had one of those. We had developers. I remember back in the day where our Mesa products employees, assembly line workers, would walk up to the developer team and say, hey, by the way, can you make that font bigger? Or can you remove this from the dropdown? And I would just sit down and, you know, just kind of just think this through. Wow. I mean, and, you know, the developer for him was like, yeah, sure. Why not? That’s an easy, that’s his job security, but there was no controls in place. So as we continue to grow and going through the Baldrige program, the initiative, with my marketing background, I already had visibility on how the organization operated. So when an opportunity did come to kind of lead, I shouldn’t say lead, to be part of that team, I took that on. Right. I started to step up and solve problems. I always had that in me where, okay, what are we trying to solve is typically the first question I ask whenever the project is, we get a project charter. What’s the end goal you’re trying to do? And then you start to dissect it. I say the transition of being a leader. often feels more like a journey, right? Rather than a single defining moment where, oh, Fraz, now you’re the director of IT. So when I started taking initiative, people started noticing. People started gaining trust. People began coming to me, hey, Fraz helped me solve this. So kind of unofficially, we started to say, hey, we need to have a very structured organization. Then we had the IT department. And now I have a full staff tier one through, you know, senior admin, systems admin, network admin. You’ve got a full-blown IT group. But my journey has been not like a single moment, but it’s been a combination of experiences, of responsibilities, and self-awareness, if you will, right? You take initiative, you gain trust, and then you empower others. So as I have grown as a leader, I’ve realized being a leader is not about controlling the outcomes, but enabling others to succeed. It’s influence,

Speaker 0 | 32:00.580
not control, right?

Speaker 1 | 32:02.341
Absolutely. And I’m so proud of our environment, of our culture at Mesa, because we recently signed up with a company called Genesis Works, where we are mentoring these high school kids from diverse backgrounds, low income. And we have, in fact, I said, hey, I’d take on a high school student full time. When I say full time, she goes to her classes. But. She spends every day, she comes in from a certain time, you know, 9 to 2 or 9 to 10 or something like 9 to 12 or something like that. And she has had experience on setting up profiles, you know, getting fingers with an active directory, opening up a laptop and installing a motherboard, replacing a hard drive. And I see her journey. We started this earlier this semester, this school semester, and she’s having so much fun. And I’m really excited that we took the initiative to bring this intern on. And, you know, she had I remember when I first went and spoke to the school, the high school group, when they had that opening ceremony. And she had come up to me and she had said something like, oh, I’ve written this program as part of my project. And then I looked at it and it was pretty nice. It was neat. But for her to come in and see, and she was kind of recruited. She was selected through a process that Genesis Works does. And to see her now grow into being able to do things. things that she had talked about during my conversation with her is just so fulfilling. And, you know, continue to mentor. And then as growing as a leader, you kind of shift that focus being from doing that actually actual work, right? So I’ve been, I’ve folded, you know, rolled up my sleeves and we’ve dug in the ground and fixed computers and pulled cables. You’ve given that stuff. to the company. And now I’ve shifted to managing, you know, that IT business alignment, if you will. So it’s more…

Speaker 0 | 34:33.034
business continuity yeah nice nice so i’m going to turn our conversation again here and just kind of we’ll explore a little bit about you more on a personal level just so you know one of those things we just uh i call fun conversations fun questions or things to explore so when you were a kid you know how did you get into computers and technology i mean i know you started with marketing but you’re marketing and technology when you were in college when you were a kid like were you a computer guy were you you you know video game kid were you none of those things you’re like no i was like i was like football king didn’t want anything to do with technology and then i fell into it when i got older you know like people love to know you know i know our listeners love to know a little bit more about how people got to where they are like how did you land in technology yeah

Speaker 1 | 35:16.850
no i’ll tell you i was not a computer kid at all um i was um were a little bit of uh um an artsy kid going in uh growing up in uh you know in high school I used to, and let me share this. So I was born in India.

Speaker 0 | 35:33.495
Okay.

Speaker 1 | 35:34.015
Yeah. Yeah. So growing up, I remember I used to be pretty active in the radio business. I was, you know, we had our high school thing going on. And then I ended up becoming a host, sort of a DJ, if you will, on a radio station in India. And I used to take in calls and play these songs. So I always had that flair of… music, if you will. And then when I moved to the United States to go to school, to college, I ended up in a band, you know, so it was just, I was never like a computer guy or did not have that sort of a thing in me, but I was more artsy, ended up, you know, I used to sing and play the guitar. part of the band uh and and i remember i think uh my first uh something silly and this might sound in hindsight i am telling you doug it seems so long ago i’m gonna date myself but when i was in india um you know email uh i’m talking this is in um late uh well early 2000s uh so emails uh and i was applying for for school here uh And every time we used to send an I used to send an email to a university to apply for higher education. And I used to wait for it used to cost it used to cost when I convert the money, it used to cost like 50 cents to send an email.

Speaker 0 | 37:14.838
You have to go to like an Internet cafe or something. You know, you cite it by computer time, send all this stuff.

Speaker 1 | 37:21.602
Absolutely. And so he used to send it. And then anytime you received a reply, I knew the cafe guy, he used to call and say, hey, you got an email. And it was that. And now I hide away from email, right? I’m like blocked. What a journey. So back to where we started. Not a computer IT guy to begin with, but more artsy, more music. But then I started to transition in more towards IT during my master’s program. I was always intrigued by computers and what all they could do. So it was sort of, I should say, not a defined purpose shift, but… as you look at it and it’s like, hey, that is interesting. Let’s look at that. Yeah, that has been my journey.

Speaker 0 | 38:21.524
Nice. So, are you into sci-fi and other stuff like that? I always ask. A lot of tech folks are sci-fi geeks and they love different things. Star Trek, Star Wars, all those things.

Speaker 1 | 38:36.776
I am not that person, no.

Speaker 0 | 38:39.158
I see. Okay, yeah. So, you’re carving a different path here. for the IT leadership. And that is awesome. I’m loving it. I’m loving it. Thank you. So now the band you’re in, I want to ask what kind of music was it?

Speaker 1 | 38:55.751
Yeah. So I started off with, so these are original songs. So I used to write, I would call, you know, something like what we’d hear, John Mayer. kind of style stuff you know so more acoustic uh uh just kind of but then life happened you know i started doing that kind of did a few uh road shows locally uh in fact uh i remember uh uh late to 2010 or somewhere around that we had uh i wrote an original song it was written in hindi which is an indian language uh We ended up shooting a music video for that in Oklahoma City, and it was about you know, the political, geopolitical situation, whatever was happening back then, wars and hunger and climate change. So I was just kind of grew up in a very educational environment, like my mom is a retired teacher, dad used to be in the education department as well. So kind of grew up around that, always had that flair for it. I wouldn’t call it poetry as such, but, you know, some rhyming, some, you know, just putting words together and then making it work. So I ended up writing that song and we recorded it. So it was more, again, more acoustic, original stuff. And now it’s kind of faded away. Life happens. You got kids and then ransomware attacks come in and you forget it.

Speaker 0 | 40:36.943
So it. One of the other questions that I often ask guests on our show is something about you that people may not know or would find surprising. But I’m going to latch right on to the fact that you have a music video. There’s some cool acoustic music video that you put together, a song you wrote, and stuff like that. That’s a great thing. I want to turn the conversation here to the last things I always talk about as we come to the end of our show. What things would you want to share for up-and-coming leaders? What advice would you have to give them, and what things should they be focused on?

Speaker 1 | 41:18.029
Yeah, great question. Don’t fear mistakes, right? Don’t let that fear of failure stop you from pursuing what excites you. And it might be whatever feel it might be. And time is precious. So, you know, you’ve got a short time. Spend it wisely. Prioritize what truly matters to you over what’s expected. Right. Prioritize relationships. I’d say invest time in in meaningful relationships, be it family, be it friends, mentors. I think it’s very important who you surround yourselves with. Who’s your mentor? Because you learn a lot. I mean. I talked about our mentorship program and I feel I learn every single day something from engaging with these up and coming folks. Right. Be it social media or be it just what’s what’s what’s the thing? What’s the thing happening? I have a 13 year old. I heard I learned something from him every single day. It’s like, oh, this this happened at school or so. Prioritize your relationship and take care of your health. Because I’ll tell you, in our world, especially IT, Doug, there’s never a dull moment, right? You solve something else, something else comes up. There’s never a destination. Goalpost keeps changing. And as you do that, take care of your health, you know, physical, mental health. That should be non-negotiable. And last but not the least, celebrate that journey. Again, success isn’t, you know, you feel like, okay, I have. accomplished. It’s not a destination. It’s that small wins, that lessons that come along the way. Enjoy them.

Speaker 0 | 43:13.087
Awesome. Thanks. That’s some great advice. So, Fraz, thank you so much for investing your time with us in the podcast today.

Speaker 1 | 43:22.071
Appreciate it. Thank you, Doug.

Speaker 0 | 43:24.932
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.