Phil Howard: So Doug and I had a really interesting conversation offline that we wanted to continue today and that was it kind of started off with and first of all I’d love to hear your story about how you got involved in all of this.

Doug Saunders: No problem and I’d love to first hear how you got involved in IT and then we’re going to move into what has really changed in this environment over the years and what have you seen as of recently because I think there’s the same old narrative that plays over and over and over again in IT which is we earn our seat at the executive roundtable maybe we learn to speak the language of business but then we have to continue to re-earn that seat which we like to call the loneliest seat at the C-suite. In the executive C-suite room, the loneliest seat is typically the CTO because they’re the only ones that understand the language they’re speaking. But there tends to be a really big shift as of recent with the onslaught of AI and probably some changes in the economy as well. And I just felt like you had some really, really good input on that the other day. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. But before we even get there, there was a time, there was a time not too long ago when we used punch cards to communicate and we used floppy disks. So how did you get started in this? What’s your story? Tell us your story.

Doug Saunders: Oh, gosh. Yeah. So I think we mentioned when we met, I have a master’s in Russian history, political science. So you can see how I went right into IT right after school. So I spent some time working with the government, spent some time overseas. About all I could really talk about that is I did a lot of Apple import exports, and I’ll put the quotes around that and let you figure it out from there. And spend some time in Moscow and over in Germany. And I quickly realized this is not a long-term solution for me and went really back to what I did when I grew up, which was working on golf courses. So I got involved in golf course design at just an early age, just working on crews, and then started building and designing golf courses for a couple years while I tried to figure it out. So there’s an IT component to that, right? A lot of project management, CAD at the time in the mid-90s. Then I met the CIO of Republic Service or Industries at the time. And he’s like, look, we need smart people that can communicate and that can build relationships and that can learn. And would you like to come join the IT team? And so I jumped right in and started learning. And so it’s a kind of a not the traditional path to the IT world or especially in IT leadership. But I quickly learned, quickly understood that my communication skill, my ability to just really learn the business would have some value. And as time has gone on and I’ve got into more leadership roles, the political, the history background, the understanding complex relationships, complex problems, whether they’re political problems, historical problems, right? They’re very parallel to what we deal in business, right? There’s a lot of politics too that go on in companies. So navigating all that, trying to get technology through to the business, meaning here I have this idea, will you accept it? Getting them to buy into it is really critical. And I think that my experiences when I was younger and that background have really helped me do that. So again, not the traditional route, but certainly an interesting one.

Phil Howard: And now I know what sparked my subconscious post on LinkedIn this morning, which is your history degree. And the truth is, if we look at all of the shows and we look at all the people that are in senior-level IT positions, I would say, I think it’s very safe to say, I’m going to just really lowball this at 60%, that 60% of them have no degree whatsoever even close to technology. And most of the people that are in C-level IT leadership roles now are, it wasn’t even possible to have a degree back then. I guess you could have, we have a lot of people that had degrees in like electrical engineering or something like that. That makes sense. But a lot of people, a lot of history degrees, music people. I think we’ve even had one that was at the cafeteria and got into IT because he was talking to people and moved his way up into the help desk. And then he became like the CTO, no joke, cafeteria worker. So I think it is the norm, actually. And I don’t, and there’s probably something to be said for that because now it’s, it’s these, it’s kind of a jack of all trades role where you really got to communicate across all departments. So it’s not surprising. And it’s pretty darn cool at the same time. And I don’t know, I grew up, my friend’s dad was the president of the golf club growing up. And his first job was shooting skunks on the golf course at night with a 410 shotgun and driving around and manually moving hoses around. And when I would get out of work at the Bull and Claw, the Fry Chef, I’d go over and ride around on the golf course with him because it was a really, really cool job. So that’s, you just reminded me of a really fine memory.

Doug Saunders: Oh. Ladies and gentlemen, IT leaders, before we move ahead, this podcast is not just a stream. It’s a stage and if you are an IT leader with something to say we want to hear it join us live interact with the host and guest and if you’ve got the insight and courage to step up we promote you to the mic apply now at popularitnerds.com slash waitlist if you have what it takes join our growing network of other 160 senior IT leaders where real voices shape real conversations.

Phil Howard: So back to the beginning the times are changing are they I don’t know is it the same old story again just a different narrative and a different pace and we’ve technology has always been changing fast because it wasn’t that long ago when we didn’t even have the internet and now everyone’s really paranoid because AI is really it’s almost like it’s on steroids now now it’s the next wave of insane technical growth. And what does that mean for IT leaders or IT leadership in general?

Doug Saunders: Yeah, I think the, I guess from my perspective, my C07 really changed a lot. It really hyper accelerated the consumerization of IT. So everybody, it used to be like if you’re, you know, I’m pretty old, So I can remember the mid 90s, right? You go to work and that may be the only access to a computer you might have or the Internet. People were starting to buy, you know, home PCs and, you know, the old prodigy and AOL dial ups for becoming more prevalent. But, you know, the way you worked at the office was very unique. Now we find that the now we’re doing online banking and we’re looking at social media and we’re having all these things that people are very used to. Even my 80-year-old parents or iPad it up and, you know, understand technology. Like my grandfather, say in the mid-80s, you know, technology was just something very foreign to him. So I think what we’ve seen is this acceleration of I want to have the experience and live my, and work as how I live my life. So they want easy to use apps. We don’t want, like I think the old green screens where you hit, I want to hit F24 to do this and F11 to do this. That quickly became something you couldn’t live with inside of IT. So it’s just been this hyper acceleration. I think that expectation has then fueled the successful leaders in IT that I know, that I’m around, have gone from being pure technology focused to pure business focused. I spend more time working with our sales teams and how we’re handling price or wise volume down with our operational leaders to how we can drive efficiencies and distribution, etc. Than I do worrying about what cloud stack I’m using or security thing. Not that I don’t worry about those things, but I have really smart people and really smart partners that can say, listen to my ideas and what the business is saying and turn that into, you know, into a strategic platform or value creation that really makes a difference in the business.

Phil Howard: There’s an interesting story. I mean, my wife is an IT. So I hear we she’s a manager over an SAP product. And so I hear a lot of cool things from her and obviously a lot of colleagues. But there was a company that was really talking about this great value they’re driving for their company because they’re going to use AI in the help desk software. And I’m thinking, okay, if I went to a CEO and said, I had this great idea around that, that we’re going to maybe lose an agent. Okay, that’s nice. But why is that important to the business? It’s not. They don’t care. What the business really cares about is, especially in a private equity world where I’ve past five years is we want to sell this company in five to nine years. How are you creating value at that sale? If the multiple, let’s say, is seven times EBITDA and you can add technology to make it eight, nine, ten times EBITDA, you’re driving a lot of value. That’s the goal. So how do you bring value to the owners for a sale, for an exit, and also just to build a great company? So I think That’s been the other shift is great technology departments and leaders are really hyper focused on business value. How do I affect top bottom line? Or if there’s some sort of compliance nature, like if you’re in health care, HIPAA, whatever, those sorts of things versus I’m sitting across a wall creating really cool tech ideas and then trying to throw them over the wall and make them stick. You have to have been yourself in the business, right? I think that’s kind of the key.

Phil Howard: Let’s break down that EBITDA thing real quick because that’s let’s so bullet point number one Greg that we want to we want to make like we want to make these like little playbooks from now and we want to take the show to the next level and really put out action steps that IT leaders can take and really kind of bring it all together into this co-op of co-op of awesomeness I don’t know what we want to call that we’re we probably need to put a vote out for what we should call this thing, the dictionary terms of something or I don’t know. What questions can we ask around EBITDA and driving business value? If you know you’re at a company that’s kind of going towards an M&A type of situation, which there was never a company, there’s never been one company that I worked at that I did not leave that company because it either got bought, sold, or went bankrupt. It’s basically that right now the industry is a, the reality of it, at least in the tech world, is a mix of mergers, acquisitions, and bankruptcies. And a lot of times it was always a pre-packaged bankruptcy that was then flipped around to like, now grid freed up all this cash flow and we were able to re-inject it into the network and it’s awesome. So what questions can IT directors to increase their executive presence and actually understand it? Because they have to be able to understand it to ask the question to begin with. Should they be asking C-level executives and directors to further their career around EBITDA, I guess? And it could be departmental questions. It could be like, hey, sales, what can I do to help you drive value? Where does that come into play with the IT directors? Because the turning into, as you said, a top-down business leader role versus a keeping the blinky lights on cost center?

Doug Saunders: Yeah, it’s a great question. I took some time. My interest in the business back at my Republic Services days, the Republic Services started as Republic Industries that I mentioned right after I got out of the golf course design world was, how does the business work? And what is the driving the KPIs for business? So how are we measuring this? And publicly traded companies, maybe, again, I haven’t been in that world since about 17, 18, but EPS earnings per share and the quarterly earnings calls and those types of things, right? So those are a little bit different metrics. In my world, it’s more EBITDA because it’s private equity. And that’s just kind of how you measure the company. So what are the factors within that company that really drive that EBITDA? You know, and in my world, it’s obviously you’re trying to increase the revenue, right? That’s pretty simple. Like, how do I increase revenue? So how am I working with sales to, and there’s different ways to increase revenue, and especially organic, right? So what I mean by that is price, volume or net new customer, right? Really those three things. So how do I help, how do I find new help, the sales find new customers? What’s the marketing arm? What are we doing from a strategic standpoint to understand how we’re attracting customers to our product or service? How do I help analyze price? Are we profitable at a customer level, at a stop level? How do we get that metric, right? These are all things that you can do to really understand how the business works. And then obviously on the bottom line side, so how do I shrink cost? So if I’m creating technology that makes us more efficient, I’m not even talking about losing people. But there are things you can do to make sure that the money that we invest creates a shrinkage in cost through efficiency. And so if I’m growing the top line and I’m shrinking the bottom line, that EBITDA number grows. And so I think you start with the department you run, right? So in IT, typically, I mean, unless you’re selling a product and some CTOs might have these products they sell, which may be different. But in typical enterprise IT departments, you know, with the CIO, it’s a pure cost center. So you can shrink that number if you, and that will help the EBITDA of the company, right? So that’s just that. Understand your budget, understand what costs are made up. What do we spend in SaaS? What do we spend in labor? What’s our T&E budget? What’s capitalized? What’s a one-time cost? Because that doesn’t affect EBITDA. So when I go and invest in a new product, say I’m building a new AI automation. Well, that’s a one-time cost. Let’s say it’s $500,000. Well, we can write that. We can put that below the line or capitalize it depending on what it is. And it doesn’t affect EBITDA. And so those are all things that you have to understand as a tech leader. That’s just within your department. And I think understanding that first and really deep diving, understanding your cost structure, where you can be more efficient in your own, buys confidence from the senior leadership team that this team is really hyper-focused on driving value for our company because they’re managing their department well and they’re understanding the investments they make and how they affect the rest of the organization. Then you can branch out and start tackling, okay, how do I help sales? How do I help operations, et cetera? But understand your department, manage it well, and communicate that cost structure up. Because I’ll tell you right now, they don’t understand it in most cases unless you’re already doing that.

Phil Howard: Side question. CapEx versus no CapEx. And cloud versus no cloud. What would you say the majority of CFOs prefer? A five-year depreciation of costs on some sort of technology? And would IT, or IT, on the flip side, are IT directors having an easier time selling if they’re just robbing tier to PayPal? And what I mean by that is we could take controllable costs for, say, internet, telecom, whatever, Microsoft, Adobe, DocuSign, all of these monthly recurring costs, save money, cut costs in those areas, take that work, that revenue that was being spent from a controllable cost standpoint and reinvest it into a no CapEx firewall upgrade. And we’re not changing any of our monthly recurring costs. And it’s allowing us to do an upgrade without having them to go to executive management and say, I need a half a million dollars to upgrade to Fortinet. Is that a bad? To me, it sounds like a bad idea, but it’s a good idea for IT to get what they want if they’re not getting budget approved. But if they’re really smart, they’ll go to the CFO and say, hey, look, I could just cut some costs here, reorganize some costs and get what I want. But the right thing to do is for us to depreciate these firewalls over five years or something like that. I’m just curious. And then there’s this kind of other flip side of, well, if I do a recurring revenue model, then I might get this hybrid support from, say, other providers are going to provide this kind of hybrid level support and extra layer of security. And I won’t have to pay licensing fees because they’re taking care of the, I don’t know, four to manage your licensing fees. And so this just an example. Do you follow me?

Doug Saunders: Yeah, no, yeah. No, it’s a great question. And a lot of departments have to do that because there’s not this understanding or trust or they don’t understand where this… So I’m just throwing it. $10 million for spending on IT, whatever it is. They don’t know how it’s broken down. There’s no visibility. What does this mean? And so a lot of this… I don’t know how it’s broken down. Anybody, right? So anybody outside of IT is probably not And some, listen, I’ve taken over IT departments. I said, let’s, you know, brought in that leadership team within IT. I said, let’s go through the budget and understand what it is. And they’re like, we don’t know. Right? I mean, we don’t know. I’m saying, I don’t know. Everybody?

Phil Howard: I mean, like.

Doug Saunders: Pretty much. Yeah. So the company I just took over, I said, let’s go through the budget. So the first thing is transparency within the department. So let’s share with every employee what the budget, not people’s salaries, but maybe a total labor number, right? But we’re not, you know, so what are we spending on? How do we break it down? Right. And so a lot of times within IT, what you have to do if you if you have a leadership team that has no visibility, no trust, what does IT do? We don’t understand the value is do exactly what you said. So I’m going to keep my spend at 10 million and I might save money over here to pay for something else. So I’m just kind of it’s a very government centric idea, right? Where the federal government, I have 100 million dollars to spend. And by goodness, if we’ve only we don’t leave the spend. That’s it. If we just repave that stream, if we don’t repave the same stream that we repave every single year, even though it’s a land, no, we will lose that money.

Phil Howard: Yeah. So we’re right. So.

Doug Saunders: Yeah, a lot of departments will say, oh, gosh, if we cut 10% out of our budget, our budget next year is just going to be 10% less, right? I can’t reinvest it. But what you have to do, and let’s use your example. We need a new firewall, new Fortinet. My whole thing is, here’s our security posture. Here’s the risks. Here’s the threats. Maybe we did some pin tests, bone tests, right? We need to upgrade. Or this is our exposure. So I want the CFO to give me a get out of jail free card and basically say, if you don’t want us to spend this money, then here is the risk. And so if we get a, you know, some penetration and now all of a sudden our financials are a customer data all over the Internet. I want you to stand in front of the board or the cybersecurity and tell them that we couldn’t invest this money. Not what this is not. And that’s a real conversation that you have to have. Now, you have to be truthful. You can’t just make up the risk. You have to really show that. And nine times out of 10, if not 90 times out of 100, you’re going to get that extra spend, especially in those areas. So I think that it is a delicate situation. But again, it’s back to communication skills, relationship building, trust and transparency. And if you have it, these conversations get a lot easier.

Phil Howard: I want to know, let’s make a list of the top 10 key. It doesn’t have to be 10. Let’s just make a list right now of the top KPIs that any IT director should be tracking to make them a big deal in front of the C-suite. So if you’re looking for KPIs within IT. General KPIs across, you know, mid-market to Fortune 500 growth-oriented companies, Obviously, you know, we’ve got healthcare and we’ve got different verticals. In general, what are the most important KPIs we should be tracking?

Doug Saunders: Yeah, I think that, you know, first and foremost, and you’re talking IT-centric. You’re not talking across the business in general, right? Or are you?

Phil Howard: Let’s say across the business, but affected by IT, that IT should know about them and IT can affect them. So IT should be speaking to them and, I guess, affecting, affecting, effecting these KPIs.

Doug Saunders: Yeah. So in my world, just example, so we’re in a production distribution, right? So we’re doing like, you know, a revenue per ton or production per ton, right? Things like that around that. So you’ve got to understand, and let’s just start with the business KPIs, and they’re all different all over to your point. You know, a hospital is going to be very different, say, because you have a lot of free services, you give away a lot of services where we are not. Like, I’m not giving away free ice, right? So you really need to understand those business KPIs, right? Because what you do can have such a huge impact in them. And so, like for us, our labor hours per ton, right? So when I reduce, when I create solutions, or I say I, when the IT team creates solutions to help reduce this, you know, because if we’re trying to lower that, right? You know, we want a lower labor, you know, cost per ton. Great, right? How do you affect that within IT? So it could be solutions like our IoT, you know, some of our AI stuff that really drove that. And so I think that’s… So it’s labor per X, labor per… It’s late. So you’re really driving down late. It depends on the, you know, again, it’s every… In our scenario, it’s labor, right? It’s production around, you know, how, what our production costs are. That’s electricity. That could be the water, obviously, all those things that go into, you know, because obviously, if you’re in Indio, California, trying to keep a freezer at 28 degrees, energy is a big deal. And so it, you know, so is water. Obviously, making all this ice. Distribution, trucks, insurance, gas, right? How is what you’re doing helping create those metrics, grow, shrink, whatever the right thing is, right? I think, and then, so that’s one thing. So that’s just really how you’re affecting.

Phil Howard: Maybe we should rephrase this to, maybe it’s a question and we just want to help, maybe it’s a top 10 question list or it’s a top question list that we ask, maybe the first step one, maybe it’s like the top three steps to become a business kind of a big deal guy as an IT director inside the company. And maybe the first question is you go to the CFO and the CEO and you say, hey, in your opinion, what are the most top five important KPIs that you absolutely obsess over before you go to bed in that?

Doug Saunders: Yep, absolutely. The second thing is KPIs are great, but how does the business work? Like in my case, you know, my first month was spent in ice factories and in distribution centers, right?

Phil Howard: And we do have to pause for a second. Pause for one second because I totally forgot how awesome your business is. You’re the Iceman. We should actually call you the Iceman. So it’s Doug the Iceman Saunders. There you go. Guys, everybody, Doug is responsible for delivering all of your ice that you must go to when you, I don’t know, overextend an armbar after jiu-jitsu and you go to 7-Eleven and buy a bath. That ice came from Doug’s company. So we’re going to put a company on that. Ice baby.

Doug Saunders: Yes, we need some ice baby for sure. So, even though I just got done selling something. The irony. In sales. We are all in sales. You’ve got to sell yourself that you are a business leader. Okay. So what are the top KPIs? And what are the questions? What are the great questions that we can ask people to make us a better business leader? What are the top KPIs that you obsess over every night, Mr. CFO, Mr. CEO? And then let’s keep going.

Phil Howard: So we had labor, which labor in most organizations is the biggest controllable cost, meaning it’s the easiest thing to control. If we cut heads, if we don’t need to have people coming and work overtime because we were not efficient through technology, then that costs the company a lot of money. A lot more than technology does because if you’ve got 20 people working at, I don’t know, 50 bucks an hour, that’s definitely a lot more than 50 of your applications that you have on a metaphorical spreadsheet somewhere with all kinds of different contract end dates that no one knows and have no clue what how that to on your budget.

Doug Saunders: I would add, know your top five costs, right? What are the biggest top five costs at an aggregate level in the company? Like ours might be fuel, insurance, trucks, right? You know, labor, right? So those types of things. So you do need to know that. I think that if you back up a step, it’s great to know the KPIs, but how are those KPI or how are those numbers generated? So have you spent time in the production? Do you know how the business works? Because understanding KPIs without understanding how the business works is kind of useless, right? I mean, you get a general idea and you can kind of fake your way through it, but you got to understand from A to Z how that business works to really understand how those KPIs are affected by what you may be doing in IT or any other department.

Phil Howard: Really exciting. Next section, top five or 10. We can go however many want everyone anyone in the chat here you can add in things business terminology that IT directors might not know that they really should know for example EBITDA

Doug Saunders: Yeah EBITDA well even an EPS right depending on if you’re publicly traded or or not and then I think you have to understand again it’s kind of you know if you’re in health care or whatever you need to understand all the compliance issues, the HIPAAs, the right, all these compliance things. We deal with OSHA, we deal with ammonia, we deal with drivers. So all the DOT. And I think getting people and keeping people safe and in companies is a big deal. So understand the safety culture, the safety metrics, the safety terminology, I think is is is really important. And then your sales or marketing organization, what are they? What is it that they’re using from a lingo standpoint we you know we talk about bag size for example 20 pound bags and 24 pound bags and five pound bags and you get to Canada and it turns into that metric system thing right and so you you get and then how’s that bag made from a supply chain right all of these things are really important and it matters to the sales team so what is the sales team using to sell what are these what understand your products obviously but how are they marketed like what what how are we differentiating right and so i think that’s kind of another key area.

Phil Howard: You blew my mind last time we’re gonna have to we’re gonna have to we can talk about this all day long and i think that i think that there would be a way to draw some of these things out if we’re being really honest with ourselves when we talk business in the company And if we’re really honest with ourselves, how much do we really know bag size and how people are talking? And sales guys like to say, I don’t know, dog and pony show and show up to, I mean, just like all kinds of different things. Transitioning to real business problems solved with AI. And we’ll start off this one with how could we use AI or to maybe draw out some of these business issues and KPIs and not having any clue about the budget and all this stuff maybe we start with can we start with a little small trick of the trade or I don’t know a well prompt engineered thing that would help us draw out some of these business terms that are significant within our business and maybe how people talk within our own company. I don’t know. But we’re transitioning to problem solved with AI.

Doug Saunders: Well, yeah. And I think let’s caveat that by saying let’s problem solve, not just with AI, but AI is certainly something you can use. And I am a big believer in, again, back to my, I’m using AI to really revolutionize the help desk. Like what value is that? Right. I don’t know. And maybe in some organizations is maybe I’m a managed service provider and it is huge, right? It may be if I’m not, if I’m, you know, if I’m selling ice, it’s not that big a deal. So I think it’s what problems are you solving? If you’re solving your own problems in IT, great. That’s wonderful, but that’s not going to buy you a whole lot of value, you know, across the leadership team. So I think you really, again, you get back to how does the business operate? Can you notice where there’s opportunity. And, you know, I think there’s things that we’ve done at Arctic, for example, automated a lot of ordering, right? Not just voice, not just online, but with the customer portals and all of this stuff, leveraging AI to really, you know, cut our 4,000, 400,000 calls a year where an agent had to take a message. You know, you go from 50 agents to 10 and you make the customer experience better that’s solving a problem that brings value to the EBITDA to the bottom line because I’m a lot more efficient but it also creates a better customer experience now I have a lot of different ways.

Phil Howard: Like let’s hit on that use case can we talk about that use case because people really want to hear use cases they want to hear yeah where AI really happened they don’t want to hear like like you said earlier where where someone’s trying to sell me something I don’t even need and that’s just happening people are like these guys are showing up they’re selling me some AI thing it’s completely irrelevant to anything that we even need, but they’re excited about it. But let’s talk about some real use cases.

Doug Saunders: Yeah. So I think the one I just mentioned, so we’ve, we’ve used some, some AI in the customer care space where we have an amazing customer care director. Her name is Alison Denham from Scotland, lives in Toronto. Super, super nice and very smart woman who was really struggling because the IT team, you know, previous to the one we have now, was just saying, okay, here’s a IVR, take the calls, staff up, we’re going to have a third party, take all these overflow calls for these old, very costly endeavor, as you can imagine. I took a look at that. I’m like, if they’re calling up and all they want to know is, hey, two things, where’s my ice? In the sense of delivery, and I want to order ICE, why does that person need to talk to an agent? Not to disparage our fine agents, but there’s no real reason to do that. So again, we created some AI agents that could just do, this is the simple kind of AI, right, where you could just prompt through and order ICE, well, you don’t have to talk to anybody. Kiss methodology, kiss methodology. Just simple. I mean, that’s not even hard. Two, in the sense that we had some more difficult interactions where a large pharmacy that we serve, you know, across a pretty big footprint, we had to log into their portal using credentials, download this massive Excel form, handkey that into a CRM, create the orders, right? Email them back. We automated all that through AI processes, right? So it learned and it changes, right? So you had to use this machine learning component, too, that it can learn over time. Some of that, even though we could we track the errors, right, where we said, OK, here’s where it’s erroring out. Let’s fix it. Let’s let it learn. So now it’s continuously learning. And now we can go to other customers and do the same similar thing. So this was a huge lift that we were able to accomplish to really alleviate some of this manual work and tedious, frustrating work for some of our agents. And we don’t miss orders anymore. We’ve gone out in the mobile app and the web space and created AI tools that you can interact with us. Even these big Canadian companies say, hey, what’s the score of the Leafs game? Well, they lost to my Florida Panthers. They’re eliminated, right? So it just has this conversation because you want to make it fun and friendly, right? And conversational. And so we’ve done a lot of that as well. But that particular endeavor was, you know, in like half a year saved almost a million dollars. And over, I think, a full year run rate, it’s closer to two million dollars in savings, not to mention the customer value that we created.

Phil Howard: Can you describe it? Because Bob, one of our one of our esteemed ambassadors in the digital transformation leader workspace community, He asked the question is, you know, sometimes people have this like thing about AI. No, we’ve got to have a live person always answer the phone. It’s got to be. And what I’ve noticed is I’ve I mean, I’ve had some AI agents that we’ve tested lately that are that are actually hilarious and actually better than a human being from my standpoint that are really, really good. And when it’s a simple, simple task, like you said, it can be done. So what does it look like for you guys? What does it sound like? What is the feel? What’s the use case? Can you just give me kind of a brief description of what the end product has been? And I’m sure it’s still iterating and getting better.

Doug Saunders: And so, I mean, we’re on a Salesforce platform, right? And so if you’ve looked at the AgentForce platform, it’s pretty robust, right? And you can create a lot of really personal interactions, fairly new. They’re actually coming up to something this fall that’s even more amazing. And I think that was kind of the, because we used that as a CRM, because that’s really, we went to their voice platform from another competitive platform, and now it’s this tightly integrated system. And so really it’s, I can call up and I can just say, hey, I’d like to order ice. I don’t know that you really know you’re talking to, in my opinion, that you’re really talking to an agent or not. Although we tell you it’s AI, right? We’re pretty, we disclose that. And I think, but it’s a pretty unique experience in the sense that it it it creates a lot less frustration because people are used calling we were very difficult to do business with and long hold times right waiting around just to order ice it’s pretty frustrating and so now there’s no hold time there’s multiple ways you can interact so if I choose to interact with the mobile app I get the same experience it may be more voice I mean you know I’m typing on the on the mobile app versus speaking but it’s still the same experience it’s the same on the web. We created this new web portal, customer portal. People can log in, look at their orders online. They can pay their bill. They can do all those things that you can do on a customer. We didn’t have that before. But again, the same kind of AI help. And then you have this intermediate layer beyond the Glen Glacier, which is what we branded on the website, that will, okay, I need to pay an invoice or I have a question about an invoice and it can act in a more sophisticated way. And maybe it does need to get to an AR specialist eventually, but at least it actually triage some of these things thoughtfully, quickly, and efficiently versus I’m just sitting on hold forever. And I think that’s what we were trying to solve is one, we wanted to reduce our contact center costs, but we also needed to and wanted to improve the experience. And yes, there are still, we have agents still, you can call if you just are insistent to talk to somebody on the phone, you can do that. But we also very much market to our customers, this other ability to with us just to give people choices. We didn’t want to dictate. You had to call. You had to sit on hold. There’s nothing worse than calling an airline when you want to change a flight and sit there for an hour and a half. Then you change your flight versus I can do it on my app, right? Or I can do it through a text interaction through their AI agents. We just wanted to offer the same experience because nobody else in our industry is really doing that, right? That’s the other thing is how do we differentiate ourselves from the competition?

Phil Howard: That’s awesome. I was trying to change my background to a Glenn Glacier background as we were stretching, but I can’t do it. My internet cut out as I was trying to do it. Okay, what about the whole spreadsheet and complicated workflow process and all of that insanity? That had to have just been a nice headache that just has disappeared now. You just fixed the glitch. You just fixed it.

Doug Saunders: I mean, you just have two, three, four dedicated agents, especially in a busy season in the summer. All they’re doing is downloading it all day long. I’m downloading Excel files and I’m keying them into a CRM. Right? People don’t want to do that. I mean, it was probably temp labor in the summer, right? But I mean, still, that’s just not a fun thing to do. And so part of it’s just the work is so horrible, right? And I think the other thing is that the customers really, okay, you get notification. It almost creates like a case, right? So they actually, oh, we’ve got the order. Oh, here’s where the order is scheduled to be delivered. They get that type of information back, whereas before they may or may not ever have known, right? And so we’ve kind of enhanced the service offering to include more capability by just automating it and creating just a better, again, a better experience for the customer.

Phil Howard: Super awesome we did have a couple more things we’ve been talking so long because it’s just so exciting and I don’t know I drank my third cup of coffee right before this thing talent development we just just without even any transition there’s this buzz going around that you know C-level directors are not getting paid the same anymore it’s hard to get a job it’s hard to find talent always it’s always hard to find talent and and we were we were to talk about talent development for a second and is there just any just real something that’s we can give back that’s like this is what you do to keep good talent or find good talent or get out and go somewhere better

Doug Saunders: Yeah I kind of a philosophy that one of the CEOs that I’ve worked for a gentleman Pete Laporte has really helped me. So you know my background, and I’m not one that has been classically trained to be open. And let me tell you all the secrets, right? In fact, the opposite. And so what I’ve kind of learned is that you need to build, it’s really around three things. It’s trust. Are you saying you used to be a Russian spy?

Phil Howard: Nietzsche. I think we have our cyber villain, everybody.

Doug Saunders: No, no. Yes. This is great. So, but basically, I think that building relationships, not only with the business and, you know, your peers, but within the IT team is extremely critical. And what I mean by trust is not that. A couple of things. One is if I tell you I’m going to do something or vice versa, I trust that you are going to do that. Two, I trust that you have the capability to do it. So if I’m not going to ask you to go build an airplane, if you don’t know how to build an airplane. And so I need to trust that if you’re telling me you’re going to do something, you also have the capability. So I think there’s a lot of trust that goes on there. Second is transparency. So I mentioned earlier, I share the budget with all our employees. Like I issue a DAC every month that has, you know, our org chart, our, you know, any changes that have gone in that org chart. It has our budget, our metrics, where we are, over budget, under budget, et cetera. What are the key drivers to that? The normal statistics around, you know, IT operations, services, network up, down, you know, anything going on in a data center. And then some of our, I run our strategic PMO for the entire company. So we list all the projects, what everything that’s going on. We invite these people to a meeting and go over with them every two weeks. So we’re very transparent with what’s going on. We don’t hide anything. You know, my wife who run is an SAP manager has no idea what her cost structure is because nobody shares that with her. Like she, you can’t even ask the question, which is just absurd to me. Like what’s, what’s the SAP budget? What’s our labor budget? We don’t know. You’re a manager in a company and you’re trying to be a good steward. And you don’t know those things. Transparency is a big deal. And so our leadership team is that way with us. Now, obviously there’s things like if someone was trying to buy our company at some point, you’re not just gonna share that with the world. But for the most part, anything that can be released, you’re going to share. And I think collaboration. So I can’t be a bulldozer and just bulldoze my way and tell people how to do things and say, this is my idea and we’re gonna do it this way because I know what’s about. No, I’ve got a lot of people down to our, people that work in just our admin service desk that have ideas that we’ve implemented that weren’t mine. But because we collaborate, they come out of the IT department together. And so I think that collaboration is key. Then from there, I think you build that on your team. And then you say that the biggest thing around this development piece is ask the question, what do people want to do? So I’ve had managers and directors that are managers that were ready to be directors. I had no role for them. I found them a role outside my company because I want them to grow and I want them to like, I don’t want to lose them. But my whole point is I’d rather you go somewhere else and be a director because you’re capable of it and have your career blossom. It’s kind of like of a head coach in football that has great offensive coordinators or whatever coaches you want them to go be head coaches.

Phil Howard: Yeah. Otherwise life just kind of sucks. Yeah. Like, how do you want to be like that anyways? You want to just live in this kind of like, like, it’s not like everything revolves around, I’m sorry, ice, but it kind of does. But if anybody, you know what I mean? You’re going to edit that out. No, but I get it now. These are all… These are all well-known business terms. Deep down in everyone’s heart, no one’s going to say we don’t want to collaborate. Greg and I were on a collaboration call with the team earlier this morning. I want to know what my team members want to do. I want to have as much transparency as much. He probably knows people. I’m probably too transparent. He probably knows too much. You know, like when I get up in the morning. Now, how do you collaborate effectively? Like, how do you, you know, because like trust is one thing you said, like, you’ve got to kind of like, you’re, you’re saying I’m giving trust, right? You got to kind of give trust to get trust. It’s, you know, like one of those things, you know, and trust is a whole nother thing. But the collaboration, how do we collaborate effectively where we know because people are going to have all kinds of ideas and throw all kinds of stuff out. So we’re collaborating. We’re collaborating. I got all kinds of ideas going on. Do we have a do we have a collaboration board? Do we have a Kanban board? Do we have something up in Trello? Do we just have a market board? Is it email system? What is collaboration? What’s good collaboration look like?

Doug Saunders: That’s great. That’s a great question. And agree, but it’s funny, not before I answer that, it’s funny that you say it. Yes, these are all well-known things. Go into any IT department and I have a lot of peers and see if all this is going on. And a lot of times it’s not. And so if it’s going on in your organization, kudos to you because you’ve got, in my opinion, a very healthy organization. I’ve been in, I’ve been in, you know, Unhealthily transparent, no. But I’ve been in organizations where that doesn’t exist, right? And it’s miserable. Is everyone’s drinkers or? Well, not even that. It’s just that it’s just the separate agendas. No one’s aligned. And so I think from a collaboration standpoint, from my perspective is the transparency comes first because I think we all have to, because what are we collaborating on, right, is the key. So the transparency is what is the philosophy of the organization? What are the strategic objectives of the organization? Let’s collaborate on that, number one, because let’s not, again, I don’t want to go collaborate on a AI solution for a help desk. I want to collaborate on how do we drive down distribution costs, right? And then that is ideas. So we’re virtual. We have no corporate office. We have no place to go. We are 100% virtual. The CEO’s in Carolina. I’m in Florida. There’s nothing, right? So we have to meet like this. There’s nothing but those ice being shipped all over the world. That’s what’s so amazing about this company. So anyone that says you can’t have a manufacturing retail company that delivers ice all over the North American continent on flat earth. You like how I said that in there? We’ll see what people say. We’ll try to, what is it? What do you mean flat earth? Is Phil a flat earth? I don’t know. Anyways, ICE, where does it come from? How does it get distributed everywhere? Are you telling me there’s not a way? How do the distribution facilities work and everyone’s working from home?

Phil Howard: Well, so we’re talking. You say not every day, but.

Doug Saunders: Yeah, right. Obviously, I have a production and distribution staff that’s on site, but from a HR, accounting, again, there’s no back office function that’s going to a central location, say in Philly or Charlotte or Jacksonville. We’re all over the place. So it makes collaboration a little tricky. And so it’s a commitment to have meetings. And I think, again, it comes from transparency. So if these are the business problems that we’re trying to solve, right, then how do we solve them? And that’s what it’s about. So we can collaborate on a lot of things, but if we don’t have the ability to understand what’s important, kind of useless.

Phil Howard: I get it. So we at least we know what we’re first of all, what are we collaborating on? What are the strategic objectives? What are we trying to and guys? Okay, so now I just want to know how you guys do it. How do you?

Doug Saunders: Yeah. So we’re really forced to do it kind of this way. So obviously, and we use a lot of third party. So we have our really our devs and DevOps is through a third party. And so there is just constant meetings with those teams. And there’s a very strong governance over this, number one, right? So we have a PMO. Here’s the strategic projects. Here’s the business projects. Here’s the IT projects. And we have the ability then to now let’s, collaborate on those projects. We have backlogs. We have all the standard things you would see in agile development. As we release on Salesforce, it’s in our driver handhelds, it’s in whatever it might be. Integration, analytics platforms, all of those things. And so with the governance, with the ability to meet and talk about specific problems, it’s all virtual, right? It’s a very fascinating way to get things done. I’ve never really done it until this company. And I’ve always been a little hesitant about it because I’m a kind of old school. I love the water cooler stand in the office type thing. But we don’t have that. And so it’s a different effort and you got to make it work.

Phil Howard: What’s your tech stack? What do you guys use to do it? I just need to know. I need to know. There’s a thousand of them out there. What do you guys do? Zoom, Teams, what?

Doug Saunders: We’re a Microsoft shop. So we use Teams. And that’s really, but we use the, you know, Azure DevOps is probably our backend where we keep, you know, code repository to, you know, our project management side to our, you know, backlogs to, you know, all of the diagrams, right? So that’s really where the main collaboration space is because it’s more geared towards development. And then, but Teams is really kind of the backbone for communication.

Phil Howard: That’s right kanban boards lists anything like that

Doug Saunders: Yeah to some degree we try to keep it really simple we’re smart like I mentioned I think in our pre-call 10 10 people right internally that’s it and but we we do have have those you know those boards kind of built you know it you know with the third party I mean it’s it’s kind of I love working that way because I can really say okay third party, this is what we’re trying to accomplish. You guys got to figure it out and you got to deliver because it’s more like scope of work type items. Yeah. Right. And, and so, you know, we’ll have requirement sessions. We’ll have, you know, users, you know, we’ll build out when we build up the user stories and talk about process, we’re doing all those things, but it’s, it’s really up to the third party to kind of, you know, move that along and efficiently with some oversight from us so we have a PMO manager right where she will watch progress and we have status calls but the back-end dev stuff I love not having to deal with that daily right I just have to worry about a product being delivered versus actually building one

Phil Howard: Gotcha okay last thing biggest most important kind of the theme of this whole thing you mentioned being really passionate about kind of like the I guess what we would call like the main pillar there’s probably we could probably come up with three pillars or five pillars or like this but one of the main pillars maybe we call it the foundation of any great IT there being value creation. And I’d love for you to give us something really mind-blowing and life-altering around that.

Doug Saunders: Sure. I think that we’ve talked a little bit at this high level, but you have to move away from being tech-centric, tech-acronym-centric, and really focus on how to solve problems for the business. If you want to build trust with the business, learn it, understand how they measure it, and then how IT can affect it. And that’s really the name of the game. And there’s, to me, too many people or too many departments, not all, and there’s some that are great out there, don’t get me wrong. The ones that are disjointed are kind of working off in silos. And I think that day is gone where we sit in IT back in the 90s, early 2000s, you sit in IT, you kind of get stuff going over the fence from the business, You work on it and the waterfall method and a year later, you’re chunking it back. Okay, we’re good. And that’s it. That doesn’t really work. It’s not effective anymore. And IT, I think, in my opinion, is the biggest driver to company success. It really can create a lot of value. And as I mentioned before, our equity sponsors, they’re really looking at IT to say, okay, if we’re selling it six and seven times EBITDA, how do I drive that number up? And I think it’s really important that the solutions that we create in IT, along with our business teams, it’s not just IT doing it, it’s a partnership, are really creating not only top bottom line stuff that we call it, but are differentiating from our competition and creating value at company exit.

Phil Howard: I’m working on this kind of like mad, we shouldn’t call it mad. Greg, you’re supposed to catch me there. I used the word mad. Beautiful, positive. Know like this prompt engineered single pane of glass we should use some sales terms a single pane of glass GUI we should say GUI if we want to use technical terms that no one’s going to understand how about this one page of amazingness where we’ve got various different prompts AI, bots, whatever we want to call it, that might dip into a single source of truth for your company. But I think we could kind of create a framework for IT leadership to have a value, create this value. Okay. And it might be a mind map. It might be some way that we can start. But I think if IT is able to grab information from every different department and there’s not a single department in the company that does not get touched by IT, that IT does not affect. Because if we know and this is to your point about value creation if we know what sales number one KPIs are trying to drive and how they’re doing and where their single biggest frustrations problems concerns are we know the same the marketing we know the same with operations and we know the same with what the C keep what the top keep the KPIs of the CFO is keeping up at night and the top KPIs that the CEO is is keeping him up at night if we can kind of take all of those and draw them on a mind map and drill down and maybe find a way to collect them and use AI to analyze all them then maybe now if IT is the last slide in the deck at the company meeting which it typically is and might actually get skipped over how do we take the this is a serious thing that came up in a round table is like sometimes IT is we just always happen to be the last slide in the deck at the company meeting and you know we worked really hard getting zero trust certified and it was just like a golf clap it was just like no one understood how important that or how difficult that was and half the time we don’t even get to the IT slide anyways so if IT is going to be the last slide why not make it the biggest bang like just everyone’s waiting for like what are they going to come up with this week what are they going to do this week because it has been drawing out all these KPIs from these different departments. And if you go last, then you have, you know what, guys, I saw this. I saw what a sales is doing. I saw what this is doing. Well, this is what IT is going to do for you. And I think that we can really make all of your jobs easier and kind of blow it out of the water. But I think we could make a framework that would really, really be nice for high level value creation, how a senior level IT director really brings value and creates value within the company that equals actual dollar figures.

Doug Saunders: That idea is spot on. So my whole thing is what you just described is why do I need applications anymore? So if I think about it, maybe a little bit off what you’re saying, but the whole thing here is what we’re testing is two things. One, I need to enter a new customer into Salesforce. Why am I going into Salesforce? Why can’t AI just come up with a prompt? It takes it and it inserts it. Why can’t I ask what are my most profitable customers? It can send me that. I don’t need to go to Power BI anymore. Why can’t… So our whole… It’s great when the CEO or the CFO wants to look at a dashboard as a whole. And let’s just look at labor hour and some labor optimization, whether it’s production distribution. But if I’m a line, a plant manager in Fremont, California, what line has the most labor? Do you know how much stuff in BI I’ve got to download and filter? Why can’t I type that in? It just tells me. Right? And that’s the kind of thing that we’re working on. And not only that, how to navigate the company. Hey, I got a contract review. Who do I contact? Right? All of these things that really you need to turn. That would help us. Right? Like I just, you just, you just like it. That’s the future. Now we’re working. You got to have your data right. You got some data governance, right? You got to be careful of. There’s people that quit. Yeah, there’s people that quit and change and there’s updates and all that type of stuff. I don’t want to know like type in what’s Doug’s salary and it shouldn’t return it. That’s the biggest care problem. That’s the biggest problem. So it’s got to be kind of role-based what you can see. So I’m a plant manager. I can only see what I would normally see. So there’s some complication to it. But I think as we get more sophisticated, you know, those are the things you want to do. And so I think you have to like ideas like that and ideas like the automation and ideas like the IoT sensors, which we really talk about, will get your slides to the front. Right. But if I mean, nothing. Or make great people to the end. If you listen to this entire podcast today, all the way to one hour and six minutes, you will hear about, what do we say? IoT sensors that tell you how many bags are left in the 7-Eleven in South Windsor on the corner of Main Street and Elm. And there’s only two bags gone. So we don’t need to go refill that today. We can actually push that order and not waste all that gas. Am I just saying this correctly? I’m trying to read. Okay. But you’re getting your slide to the front. So like when I present, like I’m in every board meeting now, I presented every board meeting and I’m talking in terms of how IoT sensors or automation is affecting EBITDA. I’m partnering with the business and talking about this. And I think you have to be a little bit, look, I love zero trucks and I love security and I have a whole cyber thing I talked to the board about, but you’re right. They’re going to gloss over. But when you you need to find what it is within your company that’s going to move the needle partner with somebody within the company and and and bring that forward and i think that’s really the key to all this

Phil Howard: Yes and they don’t have to gloss over anymore with cyber security if you come to the cyber security villain event because they’re going to be looking forward to hear how Vanilla Ice penetrated the company this week. That’s right. But it has been an absolute pleasure having you on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Any final words of wisdom or anything to the people out there, IT leaders that are in a good place, in a bad place, in a transition place, whatever it is? What is it?

Doug Saunders: Differentiate. Be different. Don’t be, you know, My background is coming from a different space. I’ve always tried to be different. I’ve always tried to focus on the business, not IT. And that’s kind of served well for me. But I will say this. If you are in transition and you’re thinking and there’s anything I can do to help, reach out. I’m more than happy to help. I have a pretty big network. I know a lot of folks. Perhaps I can help and always willing to do so. I’m on LinkedIn. Doug Saunders, look me up. Happy to help.

Phil Howard: Your link is going to be on the webpage after the episode as well. Certainly you’re in the, the, the community as well. You should, you should be able to communicate with some people. We’d love to have you to the other part of the community. We’d love to have you as an ambassador. And, what do we call it? Mentor as well, because you like to do a lot of mentoring and most people don’t like to do, mentoring. A lot of people like to talk with people on their same level. But you do a lot of mentoring down, down South. So I thank you for that. Thank you for giving back. Thank you for your service. And we appreciate it.

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