Speaker 0 | 00:01.160
Welcome back to today’s episode of Dissecting popular IT nerds. I’m your host Doug Kameen, and today I’m talking with Eric Helbinger, IT manager of Business systems and data at Rick’s Industries. Welcome to the show, Eric, hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. glad to be here. So so Eric, you’re coming to us, you’re coming to us from from California. Uh, so you’re a West Coast guy. Uh, can you tell us a little bit about, well, let’s start by Rick’s industries and what you do there. Like, what’s the story there?
Speaker 1 | 00:37.292
Yeah, so Rick’s Industries is, God, what are they now? The company themselves have been in business since 1878. So they’ve been around the block a few times. Sorry, I had to look at my little placard, that said, when the year was found. I drew a blank there for a second. But yeah, so they’ve been in business since 1878, making compressors. They make compressors for pretty much any industrial area. So they make compressors from the size of a basketball, all the way up to ones that need to be taken out on semi-truck, on the flatbed of a semi-truck, and put assembled, say, on an aircraft carrier to lift up planes on an aircraft carrier. So we’re in all facets of industrial manufacturing. Industrial industry are any, I’m sorry, in all, in all facets of industrial. Uh, for that we’re. You’re not going to find us in in sears, you’re not going to find us, you know, in general places, um, but you know, if you’re. If you’re a company who needs a compressor for a specific need, uh, you’re going to come to Rick’s. Um, you know, my prior boss used to say, we, we’re kind of like the John Deere of air compressors, right? We’re not the cheapest. We’re not… We’re definitely not the cheapest, but we’re going to make what you need. We’re going to get you what you need, and we’re going to be reliable, and we’re going to stand behind our product. It’s great. It’s a family-run company, small business, roughly about 200 employees in the company. I think we finally just broke 200 this year. So I’ve been there now, going on 11 years, and have seen the company grow from, you know, a small. You know, sub $50 million company to getting close to $100 million company now. So it’s been, it’s been an exciting time to, to be with the company as they grow.
Speaker 0 | 02:34.977
Well, that’s pretty awesome. So there are two things I would bet you, what I want to talk about, your history there, cause you’ve been there a long time. You mentioned Sears, you’re not going to fight if it’s Sears, but nobody’s going to fight a sears nowadays anyways, right? Like, the last one closed, right? The last one, I think they finally closed their last like retail store. So, um, but you, you mentioned you’ve been at Rick’s for 11 years and. I have the benefit of being able to cheat with your LinkedIn profile. here, the podcast. So I’m looking, and this is where you ascended from being in the staff ranks to being in management and leadership ranks, right?
Speaker 1 | 03:08.411
Yeah, yeah, that’s correct. So, yeah, I’m a software developer by trade, right? I love getting my hands dirty. I love making something out of nothing, coming up with an idea and building that out. And so, you know. Try to keep this story short, but I was software developing for a project management company in the Bay area for about a year and a half. And started to see the writing on the wall. So I was like, when’s the best time to look for a job? is when you’ve got a
job. So it was kind of flowed to the market. And out of the blue, this company in Benicia, California, which I had never even heard of, Benicia. Until they reached out to me, reached out to me and said, hey, they’re looking for a software developer. Do you want to? Apply. I said, Sure, great, so I went for the interview and things went well. Um, and I was their first on-staff developer, um, in the company, and, you know, just kind of started to grow with the company. And as my boss, started to ascend the ranks. That was kind of when I just decided that. The only way I’m going to get better and the only way I’m going to start to improve my life and kind of get to where I want to be. Is if I shoot my shot. So when he got promoted from director of it to CIO at the company, I just came up to him and I said, Do we have somebody to fill your role? Because in my head, when he got up to that C-suite level, there was a void in it. leadership. And so I was like, if you don’t have somebody in mind, or you don’t really have an idea of who you want to fill this role, I’d like to, you know, I’d like to be considered for. And so three or four weeks went by and I was like, well, maybe they don’t feel they don’t need this rule or whatever. And my boss came to me and he said. Put a job description in front of me. I was like, holy crap, this is incredible. And so it was an IT supervisor.
Speaker 0 | 05:08.298
All you had to do was ask, right?
Speaker 1 | 05:09.958
Exactly. If you don’t ask, you’re never going to get it type of deal. So he put an IT supervisor role in front of me and said, what I want you to do is go to this AMA training in San Francisco to kind of get some leadership training, because I’d never been in a leadership role before. It was a two-day. Intensive kind of how to deal with difficult people, how to deal with situations. And I feel it gave me kind of the building blocks to kind of learn how to deal with difficult situations. Because when you’re put into a situation as a brand new leader, you don’t necessarily have the skill set. You don’t know how to react. You don’t know how to listen to people, necessarily. Some people, natural born leaders, and they ascend to that. Most people, I would say, don’t have that skill set. So I sat in this two-day course. A couple weeks later, promoted to supervisor. Started to really find my groove there, right? Really started to enjoy kind of this leadership and mentoring role. And, you know, then fast forward, a couple years later, they promoted me to IT manager. And again, same thing, just kind of doing what I do and kind of leading the team. In the process of… Being promoted to manager, I brought on four new people to my team, had to let a few people go due to performance issues. Or not just the wrong fit, you know, kind of par for the course with management. But if anybody ever says firing is easy, you got to cut them loose. Because to me, and anybody I’ve ever talked to, has had to let people go. And you probably know this, Doug, it’s the worst day in your life.
Speaker 0 | 06:51.536
Yeah, going through. So I think it’s been a long time since I’ve had to let somebody go. I mean, I’ve been participants in situations where people have had to let go. But I have had the fortune of, it’s been a number of years since I’ve had somebody on the team that I’ve had to truly been. like, nope, not working out. You got to go. But it is very tough.
Speaker 1 | 07:15.170
So, yeah. So, long story short, you know, or I guess long story long in this case, you know, Ben Duin was really the IT manager in the company for and oversaw hardware, software, kind of. Of oversaw the entire department for about four years. The CIO, my original boss, he is lucky enough to have retired. And so when that retirement happened, they brought in a brand new CIO. And after sitting down and talking with my new CIO, he basically came and said to me, look, you’re good on the software side of the house. You understand data, you understand software. Hardware is not my jam. I’ll do it, but it’s not my jam. So, he said, what I want to do is I want to move you over to systems and data. And we want to promote our security guy into the manager of infrastructure because he’s the hardware guy. He can run circles around me in hardware, which is why I hired him. So that puts me now in my current spot, where it’s software and data. So I deal with our ERP system. I deal with the databases. I deal with. Any, any moving pieces for software in the company? Um, and anything that has to it has to really deal, deal around data, so data warehousing, um, and things of that nature. And I, I really kind of rediscovered a joy, if you will. Uh, in in the job with this new role of being able to put my focus where I want it to be. And that’s, you know, in the software side of the house, that’s pretty cool. So
Speaker 0 | 08:50.200
this will be topical for me, just because in my job, we’re implementing. A new ERP system? We’re implementing that suite and going through the whole, you know, the whole shooting batch. Like, so ERP, the CRM sides, the workforce management, payroll, you know all of it. Um, and you mentioned I thought about this because you mentioned ERP, and uh, like, so so what have you been doing, or how? How? You know? How have you been like when you’ve gone through some of those implementations? Because they’re tough? Like, I was talking to a friend of mine. Like, for an IT manager or a CIO or somebody else, an ERP implementation is literally the hardest single implementation you could do. Because it touches everyone. Everyone’s always pissed off about it. Nobody’s ever satisfied with the product that you get. And you end up usually having to drag people over the finish line to get it completed.
Speaker 1 | 09:36.151
100%. So we actually did our ERP system almost five years ago. So is it okay to swear on the podcast?
Speaker 0 | 09:48.877
Sure. You can a little bit just want to make sure before I start, like, Yeah, that’s fine, we could do that. We, our listeners, the listeners of this podcast, can handle you swearing a little bit, okay, I just want to make sure it wasn’t like a G-rated podcast or anything. So we’re all good.
Speaker 1 | 10:05.189
So we had the xxxx perfect storm for our… So, of course, think back to five years ago, March 2020.
Speaker 0 | 10:14.833
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 10:15.613
Go to lockdown. We are two months into our ERP rollout. And we are a mom and pop company. We have never worked from home before in our life. We had three people who had a VPN login. Myself, my boss, and our network administrator. March 20th comes around, we get the order, everybody go home. Literally, we are dealing with people working from home for the first time, people trying to connect to a VPN for the first time, People trying to figure out how to deal with their kids and family, People on teams meetings all day long, and we’re trying to roll out an ERP system because we were five months from go-live. They wanted to do it in nine months. We did it in 10. And we did it all remotely.
Speaker 0 | 11:05.931
Is it okay to ask what ERP you’re doing?
Speaker 1 | 11:10.535
Yeah, it’s Infor Cloud Suite Industrial.
Speaker 0 | 11:13.697
Oh, yeah, the specialist vertical ERP.
Speaker 1 | 11:16.299
Yeah. So, needless to say, we did it. We’re still, five years later, feeling the effects of that rollout. But had we have pumped the brakes on it, we would probably be restarted. We probably would have had to restart. Two years ago from the beginning and revisit everything. And who knows? We’d still probably be in the rollout. So it still gives me nightmares. It keeps me up at night. And, to your point, yeah, everybody’s affected by it. Everybody’s pissed off about one thing or another. It doesn’t do certain things. I still question some of the logic behind the CSI side of the House and why they did what they did. We’re cloud-based, so we don’t have control over really anything, which good and bad. We were on-Prem before, but now we’re cloud-based. At this point, we’re getting there, but it’s definitely one of the hardest software implementations I’ve ever been through.
Speaker 0 | 12:21.669
Yeah, even at Bide, as I mentioned, we’re rolling out kind of at Netsuite and everything. ERP. And one of the things that we’re like, like, bringing together all the coordination is real challenge. And and like, Um, and it’s it exacerbated in our organization because my organization is where we specialize in. Um, social services work mostly in the mental health space. So there’s a high level of of empathy and accommodation, of like, Hey, we’re, you know, how are we feeling about this? What do we do it? Which way when you get down to, like the brass? Tacks of implementing a tool could be really difficult to overcome. Because there’s a natural tendency in the organization to want to be like, oh, they’re feeling stressed about the thing that’s happening to them. But for these ERP implementations, every time you accommodate that, it’s a delay. If you want to stick to your plan and you don’t want to pay for two systems, if you want to get off of
the old one and get out of its expenses and all this other stuff like that, you have to ultimately figure out how to move your teams into a place where they have to. I would say, just accept the inevitable, because that’s not, you know, the goal isn’t to be mean, but you’re doing a hard thing. You know, we picked a hard thing to do, and hard things are if they. If it wasn’t hard, it would be easy. So, like, hard things often are somewhat stressful. They have challenging moments. They have challenging times. They have times where we’re like, oh, my God, why did we even pick this darn thing?
Speaker 1 | 13:51.433
Yeah. And you, actually, you actually brought up something that, you know, I hear all the time. Is the you know, this is hard. This is hard. Um, I don’t know about you, But one of the things we, I still hear five years later is why don’t we, why don’t we do, can we just go back to our old ERP system? Can we just go back? Um, and we’re like, no, we’re five years in. We did this for a reason. This is why we’re here. Put your big boy pants on. It’s work. Work is supposed to be hard. It’s not, if it was easy, it wouldn’t be work.
Speaker 0 | 14:23.425
Right.
Speaker 1 | 14:24.666
And I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this Doug. But one thing we I experience all the time is people getting people to change, fundamentally change and think about how they’re doing their job. That, I think, is the hardest part of a new ERP system. You bring it in and you’ve got finally the opportunity to think about how you do your job. Can you do your job more effectively? And I’d say 90% of the employees that we have at our company at Ricks, they might be looking at this and say, I don’t want to, this is how I’ve done it. I just want to do it this way. So I want the system to work like I’ve always done it. Instead of. Wait a minute, if we think outside the box and rethink this process in its entirety, we might be able to get more efficient. By using the tool the way it was designed, instead of trying to shoehorn the way we’ve done it into the system.
Speaker 0 | 15:21.552
Yeah. And so this is the second time I’ve been through an ERP implementation, although this one is particularly challenging for my organization and myself as a leader. The prior one was back when I was a county CIO. And we implemented a vertical ERP called Munis. So it’s all municipal-based type of accounting and payroll and those types of things. And at the county, when I was the CIO of that county, I was CIO of two different counties over the years. So that one, I was CiO there for a long time, like eight years. And that implementation went fairly well. It had its challenges. People were frustrated at various times or whatever. About the product and the tools. This isn’t as good as this, or whatever the case may be. We had very few sacred things in the mix. We were like, oh, we’re moving from a homegrown, home-built AS400 application to an off-the-shelf commercial system. Things are going to be different. We need to adhere to how they do it and not just say, just like you said, I’ve done it this way. I want the system to mimic that, but do it electronically. And as a result, we ended up with a ton of efficiency gains. We had things like paper processes. You had to print out a PO. You had to wait
for the PO to print, then print it, then attach your supporting documentation and staple it. Then there was a cover sheet, and then you had to send it down to the clerk of the legislator’s office. And we wiped away all that, took it all electronic. And so there was a ton of efficiency gains. But it always wasn’t distributed evenly. Like, maybe our old payroll system wasn’t as good as our new payroll. The old payroll system is better than the new payroll system that’s baked into it. But at least it was all integrated. On the other hand, the other county I worked at for a shorter period of time, a number of years before I got there, they had done an implementation of PeopleSoft. And now that county was about 2,000 employees. And that’s about the smallest enterprise size you can be. Warrant the expense and the support needed to keep a peoplesoft implementation going. And in PeopleSoft, you often have to have, you need to be able to support programmers, too. Like, PeopleSoft is kind of like a blank box, you know, like it’s like a box filled with parts. You have to have people to assemble it and build all the integrations between the various things and customize it to suit your needs. So they had hired these teams to come in and program it. But you could see a really distinct outcome based on which teams were working with which groups. So there was like one team was very determined to the consulting team was like, no, you will have a new system. So don’t replicate your old processes into that system. Do you know, here’s? Here’s how we’ll evaluate it. And then the other team was very much like, just gave in when they were told, like, oh, here’s, here’s the seven steps that we do it. Please replicate this in PeopleSoft. And so half of their ERP ran, it still to this day does, just terribly. It runs terribly because they have all these processes that adding the pieces in electronically actually made it harder. It made the execution more difficult and kludgy for them. So going back to what you had mentioned before, the point of having a real mindset when you come in that things are different, But even sometimes steps back. May seem different if you’re gaining overall, which is actually a thing we’re running into in my current implementation, where we have like a NetSuite. Netsuite’s payroll system is not that great. It does the job, but it’s not fancy. And so we are encountering a scenario where the team is like, well, this product is not awesome. They’re right. The product isn’t very awesome. The payroll side. But it’s because it’s a bolt-on to their ERP. Their ERP is good. And the benefit of seeing the whole system integrated over time is where that value is going to start accruing. But you have to get through the difficult part and the teams have to accept that there’s a larger goal at play.
Speaker 1 | 19:41.711
Absolutely. Yeah. And that, you know, that’s definitely one of the, I would say, is. The hardest part is convincing the people who don’t understand the inner workings of this, right? That it’s going to be better in the long run. I will say that my former boss did tell me that one of the ERP upgrades they tried to do almost bankrupted the company. They implemented it. They didn’t implement it right. And they actually, after I want to say two or three months of using it, had to say, we can’t use this anymore. Because if we keep using this, we’re not going to be in business anymore. So they actually rolled back an ERP implementation because after Go live, it wasn’t doing what it needed to do. And it was going to cost too much. So the fact that we did this at nine months during COVID. Completely remote is a testament, I would say, to the employees. But yeah, they’re still griping and xxx and moaning. But it’s not like our old system. It’s not as fast. There’s this, there’s that. It’s web-based. There’s a lot of moving parts. There’s things
that happen. It’s not on-Prem anymore. We don’t have direct access to our printers anymore. It’s going to be a little bit slower. But you can get to it from home. You can get to it from anywhere.
Speaker 0 | 21:01.793
You’ve built flexibility in exchange for… You know, as some, you know, I would say a small to moderate decrease in, in, um, responsiveness. Exactly. So I appreciate you sharing your background about how you became, you know how you’ve moved up into management. And like, I think it’s a great story to share where you’re. Just like, basically, you asked, you know, you said, Hey, you know what, I, I could do this and I want to do it. Um, and and you, you know, that that kind of won the day for you, um. But going back in time, like your, you know, your college days, or before that, or whatever the case may be like, did you always set out? Like, if I asked you if I came to you at like, I don’t know? 16, 18, you’re, you know, I would say, early college days, I don’t, you know. Were you like, I’m gonna be a programmer for the rest of my life? Are you gonna be like, I’m gonna work in it? Or whatever? The case may be like, what would you? What was your goal, honestly?
Speaker 1 | 21:50.810
Uh, so out of high school, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. Um, you know, I was, I was young, I was enjoying life. Um, I knew I wanted to get into business and do something in business related. So straight out of high school, uh, went to University of Arizona, um, and started the business program there. Um, I’ll put it nicely, Arizona and myself, as much as I love the school, we had a difference in how they wanted to proceed. I didn’t want to learn. They wanted me to learn. So, um, so it took a, took a small hiatus there for a little bit and started. Kind of getting into, um, just kind of working full-time college. I was actually again, I’m gonna date myself here multiple times. Um, I was working at Radio Shack. Um, yeah, nice, nice to sell it selling, selling little conductors and batteries, and trying to sell cell phones where we could. Um, and got, you know, paid my bills in college, um, and then, you know, fast forward, I, I started doing customer support for… Sears When they were selling computers, um, their computers. Sears surfaces again. Exactly? why? is it the same podcast? Sears has surfaced twice? Um, so I started doing the customer support for their PC subdivision, so after the techs had troubleshot something. If your Packard bell, your compact. If it needed somebody to come out on site and actually do the work, we were the person, we were, the people you talked to. Oh yeah, okay. Um, and again, it was. It was a job, it paid the bills. It got… Done what I needed, done. But again, I still really didn’t know the direction I wanted. So I started talking to some people in the PC support division. I was like, this is actually really cool, what you guys are doing here. You’re looking at this, you’re hearing some problems, you’re starting to diagnose problems, you’re doing this, you’re doing that, you’re fixing, you’re actually fixing somebody, you’re making somebody happy. You’re not just a whipping boy. For Why isn’t my tech out here? This is great. So again, we’ll fast forward through all the funds. I’ll fast forward a little bit of time, moved into that department, where I started doing hardware support. And this is kind of where I started to realize that I really like computers. I had never, really, really worked with computers. I was not a gamer growing up as a kid. Very much. I played a few computer games here and there, but I wasn’t a hardcore gamer. I didn’t. Really, and I’m still not into the video game scene or anything like that. I’m more of a just just a computer guy, but really, really found a love for fixing
computers. And then, you know, I was like, I’ve got this really ancient Packard Belt computer that needs to be upgraded. Started talking to the guys I work with and they’re like, Yeah, why don’t we go to the shop and buy all the components and build a computer? I’m like …, I’ve never built a computer, I’m sorry. So go acquire all the components, go home, go back to my apartment and built the computer for the first time. And that was, I think, really, what sparked my love for computers was just getting to build this thing with my hands from the ground up, exactly the specs I wanted. I wanted to. And that was just kind of like, oh. Great, I really, really, really like this, this is fun, this is what I call fun. So started doing that and I was like, Okay, this is, this is good. But I don’t really want to do tech support for end users my entire life. So a buddy of mine was working for another company, um, making some software, and he was doing quality control testing for them. And again, I’m like, Hmm, I never done this before. Let me see what we can do here. So shoot my shot, my shot there and applied for the position and got hired on as a QC engineer. Well, you know, quality control for software testing.
Speaker 0 | 25:51.661
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 25:52.021
And I think that’s really what sparked my love for software. Because that was really the first time I really, really dove into software. Really started to discover, hey, if you make a couple tweaks to something, you can actually understand why it broke. Or, you can actually dive into the code with the developers and say, when I do X, Y, and Z. It’s breaking right here. And to see them kind of look through their code and go, oh yeah, this is what caused it, hit a few keystrokes, push a few buttons, and say, okay, it’s ready to test again. That really, really got me excited about software. So, of course, during this time, I still hadn’t gone back to school. And we’ll fast forward to early 2000s, when the dot-bomb era hit and all these companies started to downsize. Now, I’m sure some of our listeners don’t know the dot-bomb era, so I won’t go into it.
Speaker 0 | 26:41.558
But we’re going to assume that they all know exactly what we’re talking about.
Speaker 1 | 26:46.100
Exactly. So this was the very first time I’d ever been laid off at a company. They downsized Iowa’s collateral damage with the downsizing. And because I was, you know, one of many people who got laid off during this time. And I didn’t have a degree, this was kind of what got me back into school, was I really like IT. I really like software. I’m really, really excited about this, but I don’t have a degree. So nobody’s going to hire me. I’m a non-degree person, whereas there’s a hundred people with college degrees who have been doing the same thing I’m doing. So that got me back into doing, you know, got me back into my education. And then we’ll just kind of fast forward through that. I was working on odd jobs here and there while I was attending school and started working for, started working for a company.
Speaker 0 | 27:39.126
Um, that made fax software, they were, if they were one of the original e-fax companies. Okay, did you say Cofax? uh, e-fax, e-fax, e-fax? Okay, yeah. E-fax company called Uh, company called right fax. I remember I had right fax equipment and software. I, you know, that was, uh, that was one of the so, when I was working at the county, we had a right fax server. I think it was fantastic, it was a it was a cool piece of software to be able to aggregate the… Yeah, the faxing boards, you know, basically I was able to get rid of like a dozen or more, two dozen fax lines spread throughout with a corresponding telephone charge. You know, hey, 20 bucks a month for this, 20 times 12. Consolidate that into a bank in the core of our network, with like, four lines instead. So you can take that cost and like, instead of, you know, 600 a month, we suddenly were only spending like 80.
Speaker 1 | 28:33.970
Exactly. Actually, I got way ahead of myself. RightFax was actually before the QC job. The RightFax position actually was what got me into software as I’m rethinking this all. I was doing tech support for them, for their enterprise division, and I got a phone call at 4 a.m. Because I was on call. I had to be in the office at 5.30. I’m like, this is ridiculous, man. I don’t want to be on call 24-7 waking up. All the hours of the morning. So that was actually what pushed me into software, to the QC role that I got.
Speaker 0 | 29:11.356
That’s cool.
Speaker 1 | 29:12.017
So yeah, so I’m back in school. I’m doing odd jobs here and there. I’m working for some really cool companies, having a good old time making some education software, and really, really just finding my love for software at this point. And so that, you know, at that point, I was like, this is, I’m invested now, software is where it’s at. And, you know, I’m not, I’ve… I won’t say I’m the greatest developer, but I’m a solid developer, and I still love getting my hands dirty and really talking. shop. Through my years, I’d say I’m a jack-of-all-masters of nothing.
Speaker 0 | 29:47.683
That’s many of us right here. That’s the story of the bid market, man. You’re not a specialist in much of anything, unless it’s…
Speaker 1 | 29:54.306
Exactly.
Speaker 0 | 29:56.428
So we’re coming up towards the end of the podcast here. A couple more things I always want to make sure to ask or cover with our guests. So one more humorous side here. You tell us something that somebody wouldn’t expect or doesn’t, you know, a non-tech thing somebody wouldn’t expect or know about you. I usually, I always share an example of myself. I have a couple that I know. So, like, I once djed a wedding.
Speaker 1 | 30:22.057
Impressive. Not many, I mean, people who know me know this, but, you know, not many people would guess this. I used to be really into backpacking and outdoors. I still love the outdoors. I still love getting outside. But, you know, I did. I was lucky enough to backpack. The Grand Canyon one time. Oh,
Speaker 0 | 30:40.050
that’s cool.
Speaker 1 | 30:41.009
We were going to do rim to rim to Rim one weekend, but it was 100 degrees at the base of the canyon that weekend. It was a crazy heat wave. So our second day was going to be a 40-mile trek. If we did that, and we just looked at each other and said, it’s not worth it.
Speaker 0 | 30:56.715
Hard pass.
Speaker 1 | 30:59.196
We just stayed local and had a great time. To this day, probably one of the best trips I’ve been on for a hiking trip. Um, so yeah, that’s, that’s fun. Um, and then, you know, my wife and I, we love to travel. So, uh, we like to travel to a different, we try to pick somewhere new every single year that we’ve never been to. Um, and usually it’s an international trip that we go on. At least we go on one international trip a year and several trips throughout. So, um, like to travel.
Speaker 0 | 31:28.976
Oh, that’s fun. That’s cool. Nice. Thanks for sharing. So the last thing I always ask our guests is about advice. So, you know, this podcast is about leadership. And your leadership journey. I appreciate you sharing your background and how you came to be an IT leader. And it’s the stories we just shared about, like implementations of tools and software, and ERPs in particular. But if you’re talking to somebody who is coming up in the market, you know, they’re early in their career, What advice would you want to give to them?
Speaker 1 | 31:56.888
So that the best advice I could say is one, trust your gut. You know, if you’re getting into this leadership role, trust your gut. If you think, if you feel that it’s the right decision, trust it. Don’t try to doubt yourself. If you have any doubts, it’s not the right decision. The other thing I really, really can’t stress enough is put people in positions to do the work. Who know more about it than you. You’re not going to know everything, right? Having people around you who are smarter than you in a particular area will make you, as a leader, be able to lead. You’re not in the weeds, having to do the work for them. That is key. You don’t need to do everything. You don’t need to have your hands in everything. Right. Keep being, keep being able to trust the employees that you have below you to do the job and do the job right. So that you can focus on leading the company. That is a huge asset. And I don’t know, I don’t think enough people understand that. I can say I didn’t understand that when I first got into leadership. I thought I had
to do everything. I had to know everything. And my days were. Long, you know, long stressful days. I was jumping around, I never. I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off all day long. Until I started to realize that I need to let them do the work, I need to check in on them from time to time, make sure it’s getting done. But I need to have that trust, and I need to know that they know more about this than I do. That’s awesome. Yeah, I haven’t, it’s a lot of folks think that, like I want to be.
Speaker 0 | 33:36.044
I wouldn’t be knowledgeable enough to be a BS meter, but not so knowledgeable that, like, I could do the work. I don’t need to know how to do it anymore. You know, like in that and not not from like exactly what you said. It’s not from a perspective of like, I’m above the work or anything else like that. But, like, I can’t possibly know everything. So, so, but there’s always going to be people who know more than I do. And you have that faith. But I want to know, I want to know just enough, that if you’re, if you’re, you know, you’ve tried to snow me. I know what’s going on.
Speaker 1 | 34:01.958
Exactly. Exactly. How do you be able to sniff the BS out?
Speaker 0 | 34:05.436
That’s right. That’s right. So, Eric, thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.
Speaker 1 | 34:11.300
Absolutely, Doug. It’s been a pleasure. I had a great conversation. Love Talking shop. If you can, call us, talk and shop. But it was fun to know that we’re not alone in our ERP transition, either.
Speaker 0 | 34:22.147
For sure. For sure. So that’s a wrap on today’s episode of dissecting popular it Nerds. I’m Doug Kavine, and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode.
