Doug Camin: Welcome back to today’s episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m your host, Doug Camin. And today I’m talking with Tom Shock, the Director of Information Technology at Shepherd Electric Supply. Welcome to the show, Tom.

Tom Shock: Thank you for having me.

Doug Camin: So, Tom, funny, before we start, one of the questions I always ask our guests is “Hey, have you been on this before?” and you’re like, “I’ve actually been on this podcast before,” so you’re coming back. You’re circling back on us here. But it’s in part because we’re having a different interview today than we did before. So you are a guest here on the show. I think maybe around a year ago, maybe a little over a year ago. And you talked with one of my co-hosts, Mike Kelly, and that conversation was very focused on cybersecurity and the nature of what it takes to stand up cybersecurity in a small medium business environment, if I recall.

Tom Shock: Yeah. That’s correct.

Doug Camin: But today we’re going to call this – we’ve started to kind of roll this out – but we’ll call this the Dissecting Popular IT Nerds Leadership Series interviews. That’s where I landed. Today we’re here to talk a little about leadership and background and that type of stuff. So different interview than before. But it’s great to have you back on the show and have the chance to talk to you.

Tom Shock: Yeah. I’m truly looking forward to it.

Doug Camin: So, Tom, just to kind of kick off here. You’ve been at Shepherd Electric Supply for a number of years. I think I get the benefit of cheating with LinkedIn, but a little over six years it looks like. And so that’s a place – one of the things that I always love asking folks who have had a fairly long tenure, more than like two or three years at a place, is by that point, I think about career paths. And I personally think of your career, anybody’s career as having like – to borrow the Taylor Swift eras – of like three to five years. So each era, you come in, you probably have some goals, you set them out maybe in three, four, maybe five years at most. You’ve really achieved some of those. And you have to decide, you come to an inflection point: do I leave, do I stay, do I go on, is there new projects to work on? What is the next three to five year cycle look like? So I’m just curious, from you, from a leadership perspective, how has that looked for you and how do you approach those types of inflection points? And maybe do you see the same ones?

Tom Shock: Yeah, no. And your model is very well with my history. So this is my third IT leadership position in the last fifteen years. And they didn’t all change up exactly at five years. But it was in that ballpark. And I think your summary is pretty accurate. You kind of show up and my niche is mid-market companies often privately owned. Although Shepherd no longer is. That really are looking to kind of reinvest in IT, maybe do some modernization. So yeah, you kind of show up and you spend the first six to eight weeks kind of evaluating what’s in place here and what needs to change. And then you put some goals together and yeah, after three or four years, you’re kind of at a point where, hey, I’ve accomplished what I set out to accomplish. What do I do next? I think the difference that I’ve experienced at Shepherd is they’ve grown significantly since I’ve been here. When I arrived in 2019, there were about $250 million in revenue. And this year we’ll come in over $500 million. So it’s – and it’s a very mature industry, wholesale distribution of electrical components. I mean, Shepherd is literally 1892 was our founding date. So we’re 130+ years old there. So that kind of growth in a mature industry is interesting. It makes for a continual challenge, whereas if they had been maybe pretty steady sales, maybe it would be time to – hey, what’s my next challenge?

Doug Camin: Have you read it as somebody who’s – there are a lot of long tenured people here. We have a person on my team who just had his 28-year anniversary, and he’s younger than I am. So I mean, he’s been here since right out of college. But there are other people who truly are 40+ years with the company. And it’s interesting, if you look at our total employee base, it’s very much a barbell. We have a lot of people who are like five to seven years, kind of attributable to that growth, right? You don’t go from $250 million to $500 million without hiring a bunch of people. And then we have this kind of middle part where there aren’t a lot of people in the 10-year or 15-year range. And then we got a bunch of people who have been here for the bulk of their career. So it’s interesting how that kind of shakes out.

Doug Camin: Yeah. So how – I think that prompts a really interesting question I have about leadership in that space. So how do you adjust and manage your leadership, whether it’s leadership for your team or being a leader to the organization through the IT space to those different constituencies of people. I mean, you’ve been there six years and you’re talking to somebody who’s been there 28, 40 years. Not to say like, oh, they’re going to show up and be like, “I know better” or anything else like that. But I think it involves some nuance there and making sure you’re respectful.

Tom Shock: Yeah. So I think that’s where the intersection of corporate culture and leadership is really important. Shepherd has always had – not that it just was a good fit with my personal leadership style – their kind of overarching guide star is serve the customer. It’s a very relationship driven sale in the electrical distribution industry. The company is very much relationship oriented. And so once I kind of settled into that, it just makes things easy because to your point, when you’re working with someone who’s been here for much longer, we can always both fall back on that. What decision or what path forward is going to best serve our customer. And that almost always leads to a jointly acceptable decision.

Doug Camin: Yeah. And I was thinking about my experience at where I currently work. My boss is the CEO and she’s been with our company like 28 years. Our CFO has been there 27 years. I’ve been there three, coming up on three shortly. And we have kind of a similar distribution where once a company’s become longstanding, you end up having a handful of folks that have been there for a long time. And then usually there’s some sort of churn at the front end. So you usually have a chunk of folks that are all in their relatively early periods of their time with the company. One to three years type of deal or zero to five years. And then you have that distribution elsewhere. Some companies do, some companies don’t. But a lot of companies oftentimes that have been around for a long time have a handful of people that have been there since the company started or forever, if you will, if the company is too old for them to be there for that long.

Tom Shock: Yeah. Yeah. And Shepherd, very much that’s true for us as well.

Doug Camin: Just so we’re clear for the listeners, there is no one who is there from 1892.

Tom Shock: Still around 1892. No, no. Nobody here for that long. The people who’ve been here for a long time, they do like to say that the company was founded in the same year that GE was founded. So that’s interesting.

Doug Camin: So looking back at your history, you mentioned you’ve been – this is your third stint, if you will, as a director of IT. What do you think you’ve learned as you’ve moved through each opportunity that you’ve had? Because each one, every time you have an experience, you learn something different from it and you use it to grow. What do you think were the biggest takeaways that you got at each of your stints that you were at prior to being here?

Tom Shock: Yeah. So I think, at least from my leadership experience, it’s when you step into the slot, it’s evaluating the team and the company and identifying, hey, what do they really need me to do? Because in that mid market, it’s very much a player-coach type role. And so in my first IT leadership position, it was very much application focused. This is going back to 2012, and cybersecurity was just wasn’t a thing. And then kind of 2015, 2017, that organization really needed an infrastructure overhaul. Server switches, VMware, Wi-Fi firewalls – they just were underinvested and just needed everything to be refreshed. And so that’s what I focused on. And then when I arrived at Shepherd, they really had the application component well in hand. They had – there were two people here who both were deep double digits. They weren’t quite at 20 years, but they were like one was at 16, one was at 18. And they had implemented the ERP that was currently in place. So there just wasn’t a lot of things that weren’t getting done and done well in that area. So as an IT leader, it’s kind of like, okay, well, what needs to improve? And for Shepherd, that was very much cybersecurity. And so that’s where I spent the bulk of my time for the first probably 18 months, 24 months, just getting them to a place where we were secure enough. And then it’s really kind of continuing – as with everyone else, it’s like an arms race, right? It never ends. And I’ve been able to kind of shift back a little bit more and focus just on infrastructure as a whole and some applications. We’ve done some AI applications in the last year, which has been really interesting. That’s kind of like a Wild West out there.

Doug Camin: Nice. So at each time you’ve moved, what would you say was your biggest – I know you mentioned about cybersecurity and the transition from there – from a leadership perspective itself, like the qualities of leadership that you grew into. What was your biggest thing that you took away? And maybe I’ll even share a little story from my own background. So for many years I was in municipal IT. I started in the private sector, actually, I started in a public school district in IT, moved to the private sector, did IT consulting, and then I moved into municipal. I was a county CIO for many years. And then I moved to an adjacent county after being heavily recruited to go there, only to find that the experience – I was brought in as a fix-it person for that county – only to find that the politics of the environment were very poor and the tolerance for like essentially political warfare and whatever was much different than the environment I came from. And so I departed after a short period of time. But I still felt I learned a lot from that experience, even though it was largely a negative one. For me, my time at the prior county was excellent. I had no specific reason to leave other than I was like, well, I’ve been here almost eight years, and I felt like the next opportunity was to grow somewhere else. But that experience, even though I was there a year and it didn’t really work out very well. And I don’t feel that it was a negative experience overall. But in the long run, it was a positive experience because it led to what I was doing now, led to new opportunities, led me to rethink how I approach some of my career pathing as well. I was like, whoa, maybe I’m not looking inside the same market. Maybe I should broaden my horizons and that type of stuff. So I’m just curious for you, how some of those steps, experiences that you’ve had that might share in that or different lessons that you learned along the way.

Tom Shock: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think you’re right. Just in general, you always learn a tremendous amount more on the IT side when things don’t go well. I mean, anybody who installs something and it goes smooth, you’re like, well, that was easy. It’s when things go south that you’re like, oh, now I really understand how this thing works because I had to tear it apart down to the studs. So I think the change up is typically driven a bit from the top, from the ownership. Because these privately owned, family owned, typically mid-market companies – that is sometimes it’s second generation, third generation. There’s just tons of nuance and dynamic and complexity there that just isn’t really present with a kind of – I’ll use the word boring, but a corporate structure where everyone’s invested, but no one is truly – their name isn’t on the front of the building kind of thing. When you step into that, you really – I found kind of going in with a certain amount of flexibility and as you kind of described, hey, what’s the nature of conversation and decision making in this organization. Are they – is it a collaborative process? Is it someone tells you what to do and you do it? And then as someone new being hired because you’re bringing a certain expertise that perhaps either wasn’t there or they didn’t like the answers they were getting. You got to figure out how do you provide that expertise in a way that it’s going to be productive in your current environment. And that may not be the same recipe that’s worked for you in the past.

Doug Camin: So you mentioned that you’ve had to come in and – by the time you got there – especially if you consider yourself specialist in mid-market IT and particularly rebuilding organizations that may have either – I don’t want to always describe it as like everybody failed before you got there. But maybe they just didn’t choose to invest in IT up to that point. Then they’re like, well, wait a minute. That’s now a strategic imperative. But we got a problem here. And we need to find somebody who’s really going to be focused on that. How do you find the team to meet those needs?

Tom Shock: So I mean, that’s the benefit of getting to be old, right? You’ve got a whole long career of people to kind of tap if you need their expertise. And so sometimes it’s a function of you arrive at a new place and you reach back earlier in your career and find the right resource and ask them what they’re looking for, a new opportunity, and you bring them over. That’s one way to do it. I mean, there’s also, I think, a lot of value in offering the people who have been there and maybe not – it wasn’t their only responsibility. A lot of times, these smaller mid-market companies, it kind of grows to the point where this person was like the customer service manager, but they also were doing most of the IT work except for the server stuff. And that fell to somebody else. And these companies kind of grow to a point where they’re like, hey, we need a legitimate kind of career leader to guide this function and kind of consolidate everything and just make it as tightly run as, say, the accounting function. And there’s utility in exploring that and just talking to the people who have been doing the work and just understanding, what’s your true interest? If you could do this all day long, would you want to? Or you really want to get this off your plate? And you get honest answers to those questions and then that helps you guide how you kind of build what you need to build to make it a professional area.

Doug Camin: Going back before you were a leader, though, you did some other things. When did you feel that you made that transition from being a team member to a leader? Like, a lot of times, people can put their finger on that time. They’re like, “I was in this meeting and” or maybe not the specific meeting, but like, “I was in this job and this big project came up and I was like, I got to step up. And I know I have the confidence and comfort to do it.” How did you recognize that? Or do you even remember or kind of have your finger on that?

Tom Shock: Yeah, I think that desire started pretty early. Whether it be like just in kind of teenage jobs, being like, lead this or head whatever. I think just the opportunity just to kind of watch an operation and say, I have ideas on how this can be more efficient or more fair or just generally better. And then as you kind of move through your career, there are opportunities maybe just to lead a project. And there’s nobody on the project but you, but you get some autonomy there and you get to choose kind of how you tackle it. And the lessons that you learn and the experience that you gain just prepares you to kind of step into that more formal leadership role. I do subscribe to the belief that regardless of how gifted people are, there’s a certain amount of luck in any person’s career. And I was at an age, not quite 40 when I was sitting in a seat – I forget what my title was, but it wasn’t – I wasn’t leading the IT department, but the CIO of the department moved on. And so that company was kind of at an inflection point. They could either go outside and try to find somebody or they could promote from within. And got an opportunity to run that department. And that was – I was there for five years in that capacity. And that was my first IT leadership role.

Doug Camin: Nice, nice. Yeah. It’s a great opportunity. For me when I was way back in the day – so my first leadership role came to me. It totally fell in my lap in my twenties. I was in IT service like corporate IT. I worked for this dairy company and then I had left and gone to an IT consulting firm and I was just a systems engineer doing consulting work. But within like four weeks of me starting, the guy who was the director of technical services just – I recall them being like, we can’t find him and we can’t – he’s not reachable. And he kind of got like he weirded out and just vanished. Like it wasn’t that they fired him. It wasn’t that he just ghosted.

Tom Shock: Back in the day when you could do that.

Doug Camin: Yeah. This is like 2005 or 2004. And this dude just like ghosts, and they’re like, guess you’re in charge now. For the next three years, I was in charge. I was like, alright. But 26-year-old me was not as good, not as solid of a manager as 46-year-old me is.

Tom Shock: Yeah. Yeah.

Doug Camin: So I’m thinking back about other things. So how did you get into technology? Or were you a technology person? When I was a kid, I did computer stuff. My parents, it was always kind of assumed I would end up in the computer business or the technology business in some way. But was that you? Was it something else? Were you going to be the next rock star or are you going to be a doctor? What’s the story?

Tom Shock: So I very much like a student of business, but not technical technology oriented. My grandfather was – he worked at a textile mill, but he invested in the stock market. So he always kind of shared those insights and just kind of how that ownership arrangement existed. So I feel like just growing up, I really had desire to be a CEO of a company, right? As like a little kid. Not at all technologically oriented, not particularly into video games. I can clearly remember coming out of college, this was the early nineties, and my roommate talking about the internet, and he explained to me and me saying, I don’t think there’s much to that. So definitely not very in touch with trends and what was going to be important. But as I started out in my career, just got the first job out of school in like a purchasing logistics type role, it became clear that technology was where the change was going to happen. That was going to be the transformational functional department for the foreseeable future. And so the company where I was working, this is like again like mid-nineties now, they replaced their kind of home grown multi-system solution with SAP. And as many of those projects went, it did not go well. So anyone who could walk, talk and chew gum got pulled into the project team to try to right this ship. And I just found it to be a really good fit from like the functional part of it. And SAP is very much a – it’s kind of an old school ERP. This is R3. So I’m not in touch with their current AI driven solution, but it’s very process driven, which was a good fit for me. And so next thing I knew, I was kind of deep into the functional support of major ERP. And that was around your age, like mid twenties. And it just kind of transformed into an opportunity to get deeper and deeper into technology, both on the infrastructure side and the data center side. And then I did a little bit of development. So it really was my entree that business first and then technology second was really kind of the whole story of my career.

Doug Camin: Nice. So when you were a kid, what was your first experience with technology or computers or something like that?

Tom Shock: You know, I remember it being terribly frustrating. My brother, my older brother was very much a technologist and he had like a TRS-80. And I was going to type my – I was in high school maybe. Yeah, early high school type of paper on it. And I just remember it like it was not a fluid process. And my whole takeaway is, why can’t this stuff just work? I couldn’t do what I want it to do without having to really put a lot of effort or energy into it. So you’re saying you wanted a Mac is what you really needed, right?

Doug Camin: Yeah, I wanted a Mac, but in 1986. So a little bit ahead of the curve there. And so I just find it frustrating. And when I was in school, I gravitated more toward the financial side. And that’s where when I went back to school for an MBA, I focused on finance just because it was – it didn’t have all the variability of technology that I felt made it challenging. But that choice has been helpful as well, because in two of my roles, I’ve reported to the CFO as the leader of IT. So I’m super familiar with what he thinks about day to day and his kind of vocabulary and vernacular. So we have a shorthand that I can kind of present technological choices, decisions in a way that he’s like, okay, I get this. I can provide my input, guidance, or if I need to make a call, I can do it. But that’s been really helpful just that background.

Doug Camin: Well so what did you do on this TRS-80 to do. I mean other than frustratingly try to match the keys because it was like it had like a cassette tape where you wrote to the cassette tape and then wrote back as I’m sure it had like nothing from a random RAM perspective. And it just was like, kludgy. I was like, this is awful. And like, getting it to print was like a small effort. You know what I mean? I was like, this is – anyway I just – really coming away from it. My takeaway was I want to spend as little time with that kind of environment as humanly possible. And that was probably early high school. So if I was 15, by the time I was 25, I’m now I’m back in IT. But on the functional side of SAP.

Doug Camin: Yeah. Yeah. I remember I had a TI-99/4A, which you could get a whole assembly for it, but it also would hook to your TV and so that it had a cartridge for games and stuff on the side, but it also had a – you could put a cassette recorder and record stuff to tape. And I remember programming in Logo in after school programs. So I was a kid, it was mid-1980s. So still like seven, eight, nine years old. And Logo was like this basic – it was essentially a basic programming language, like literally basic programming, the basic language. And it was like, so you would program this turtle to go around, so you’d have to program it like, “forward two, left, one, forward.” So you can get it to do stuff. So I taught you the basic concepts of how to write a program in the language that goes with it. And so yeah. So in the eighties, TRS-80s, you used one, but it was – we’ll call it a humbling experience.

Tom Shock: Yeah, absolutely.

Doug Camin: So keeping on the trajectory here of the questions that we ask our guests when we want to go a little more about their history and stuff like that. Tell us something about your background or your history that people may not know or expect of you. Like, “I was the world karate champion at 1992” or something like that.

Tom Shock: I was not. I just – okay. I was going to say I’m not going to compete with that. No, no, no, I’m not that. I’m just saying I was used as an example of something you might have been. Somebody is like, “Oh, I was the world karate champion.” And you’re like, “What is up with that? That’s crazy.” I mean, it’s going to be pretty pedestrian. So I’m a dad of three girls. Oldest 22, 20 and 17. So that is – we’re kind of coming out of the window where there’s a lot to do there. Two of my daughters are at school. They’re home now. But at school in the fall. But yeah, I mean, I am very much a generalist back at home as well. A little bit of home improvement, quite a bit of cleaning. I feel like it’s very much a domestic life when I’m not here at work. I really endeavor not to do much technologically at home. Like, I don’t deal with any of the whole entertainment subscription cable stuff. I’ve kind of been like Busman’s Holiday, right? I’m like, I don’t know anything about that. I don’t – I’m a password. You got to talk to my wife. She handles all that stuff.

Doug Camin: So is there some non-technical thing that you’re really good at or you love to do or anything else like that? What’s the background hobby here?

Tom Shock: So I am good at home improvement. Like, it takes me a long time. But when I’m done – not too long ago, I redid the framing for a door that led out to our porch. And I mean it, I can do a good job, but I am just inherently slower than if I hire someone to do it. Oh, for sure. But the benefit is that – we’ve been in this home for going on 10 years now. So it’s one of those things where it’s not terribly different from work. Right? You start to disassemble something so you can reassemble it to be better. And when you do that, you kind of understand. All right. Well, I have a better – a pretty good idea of what – how this is constructed and what it’s made of. And there’s a – I find that fulfilling to have that kind of granular knowledge both at work and at home.

Doug Camin: Yeah. Yeah. I share an affinity for taking stuff apart or building things and stuff like that. Like I have a number of home improvement projects kind of always in process. I just a couple, just a couple of weeks ago, I was painting my – my house is mostly brick, but I have one part of it that’s got siding on it and so I’m like, oh, that needs to be painted. So like, here I am up on the roof painting the siding and getting the things done that need to get done.

Tom Shock: Yeah.

Doug Camin: So, Tom, I’d love to talk a little bit with you about the qualities that you think make a good leader in the IT space or just in a general sense, and how people can develop those skills and what things help you develop those skills?

Tom Shock: Yeah. So one of my earliest memories, or an epiphany is probably a little bit too strong of a word. But just appreciating the consistency that a leader brings to every day and the importance that that has for the team that worked for that leader. Because I can remember as a younger employee, you have sometimes very few interactions with an executive leader and whether it’s just walking down the hall and saying hello or if that person kind of gives you a gruff response or something less than engaging you as a young employee kind of can read a lot into that, that really there’s nothing in there except for that executive leader was thinking about something else. But it’s just having an appreciation for that as you move about the office space, that hey, when you interact with people because of the role that you’re in, they’re going to ascribe a lot more value to that interaction than perhaps you do. So be present. And engaging it doesn’t mean you have to stop and talk to everybody about their dog. But just appreciate that day in, day out, it provides a stability and a level of comfort to the organization as a whole that, hey, this place is being run by people who, for lack of a better word, have their stuff together.

Doug Camin: Yeah. Yeah. I absolutely – as you move up the ladder in an organization, especially if the organization is larger, where you become – my organization has about 500 employees and I do not know all the 500 employees that work there. Many of them don’t work in the same location. They work in other cities. So I will only interact with them at periodic places, or they might only see me as a figure and say like an all staff meeting where I’m giving a presentation or something like that. And from my perspective, I get up and put my pants on one leg at a time, just like everyone else. And I’m not saying they somehow don’t think I don’t put my pants on one leg at a time, just like everyone else. But everything that comes out of my mouth, they’re like, “Did you hear what Doug said?” They’re like, “Oh, Doug, talk to me the other day. And he was like, totally not in a good place.” Like all of a sudden it means this big thing and you’re like, dude, I just wasn’t – right, right, right. But it’s one of the key aspects of leadership is that your presence is a real – has a real impact on the people around you. When the organization and they try to take cues from how you – even the things you don’t say to them. They’re like, “Well, you didn’t say hello today. Is there something wrong?” You’re like, dude, I just was busy. But as the leader, it’s also inherent on us to understand that that dynamic happens and that that setup is important for us as leaders to recognize and lean into how we show up and the presence we have.

Tom Shock: Yeah. And it’s particularly important when there’s when times aren’t great. So the first leadership role I had was with a company that eventually went out of business. So there were definitely windows of time there where everyone was like, how are we doing right now? And if you walk around looking like, yeah, payroll might not clear this – that’s that’s pretty evident. And it’s not terribly productive. I mean, I’m not saying you want to sugarcoat the message because everyone deserves to have some transparency as to the nature of the organization. But again, if you’ve got a plan and you feel like, hey, this is the best plan we can put together and we’re going to execute on it then. Have confidence in that. And try to project that because it makes a difference.

Doug Camin: Yeah for sure. So actually I’m glad you brought that up about you. So you went through the experience of business that wound out. You were in leadership in a business that had to wind down. So tell me a little more about how that – how do you have to show up as a leader and what was the important parts for you? Because as a leader, you still have the same uncertainty that everybody else does. I’m sure you’re like, okay, I’m gonna lose my job at the end of this.

Tom Shock: So I think shifting into a focus of, hey, it’s important to me that my team finds a step and gets that and has a pathway out. Putting energy into that to me was, in some ways it felt empowering. Like we can’t save this ship, but I can make sure that everybody on my team gets on a lifeboat. And that’s – meaning that was fulfilling in a time when really it just felt like a huge failure. Right. You never want to be in a position of leadership when a company goes out of business. And that’s not exactly – doesn’t have success written all over it. But so that was important. And I found that valuable. And just the company handled it – I mean, there’s always opportunities for improvement, but generally speaking, they were pretty forthcoming. So that it wasn’t a shock. There was a wind down period where we literally were in Chapter 11 and there was an outside entity that comes in and they become in charge of the checkbook. And it’s – it’s not – I wouldn’t want to do it again. But very informative of you really get a sense of, oh, this is how that works. And now I understand much better than I did before kind of thing.

Doug Camin: As I say, like yeah, I don’t – I wouldn’t relish going through the experience, but I absolutely would be like, wow, there’s a ton that I just now know about. Yeah, I remember that with my wife sometimes. So she’s a public school administrator. She was a teacher. And now she’s moved into administration. And as the principal, she’s – something might come up where she’ll share just kind of generically a story like, okay, we have to take this – there’s been a behavior incident that has to result in us having some disciplinary stuff that we have to get a lawyer involved with. And she’s like, okay, I don’t like this. And the first time through, it’s very – it’s stressful and it’s challenging. But after you’ve gone through it once, even if you don’t want to go through it again, like the experience of learning it is so valuable to understand that process and have that – like, okay, I know if this happens, I’m not afraid of this the next time it comes up or I just have lessons that I was able to take and apply to other stuff because I know what the end game looks like.

Tom Shock: Yep. Yeah. And there’s – I mean, just like there’s quite a few people in the IT world that probably have the opportunity to spend something up from nothing. And that’s not a terribly uncommon history. Hey, we built this company for whatever. And I got – but to do the wind down, I mean, we were a $150 million organization, so it wasn’t a nothing entity. We had a presence in three states. And you gotta plan for each locations decommission and hand off and that kind of the ISP hand off date kind of the last day. That place is going to have connectivity and you kind of work backwards from there. And I mean, it’s it’s a learning experience. And again, I’m not – not thrilled. Wouldn’t want to do it again necessarily. But it’s helpful to have an appreciation for how that.

Doug Camin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was just thinking about one of the things we talked about earlier in our discussion was, I call it like the three to five year window of experience. And I also work in the mid market space, similar to you, I would consider myself to be a mid market expert in a lot of ways. The one thing I think about, about other guests that I’ve interviewed on the podcast, though, is that I talk and I think you talk as well, is like three to five year windows. But I think about some of the people I’ve interviewed that are in private equity space and leadership and private equity, and they would be like three to five years. That’s like an eternity, right? They’d be like, we’re supposed to show up and make experience happen or make change happen in like 12 to 18 months. And 18 months is like the outside. You know, the pressure that they face is pretty immense in that private equity space for essentially results driven stuff. So I think about the benefits of having the longer horizons in a – I’ll call it a slower moving family business, but one that’s taking a longer view. Your company that you’re at has been around since 1892. So they’re not like, “Oh my God, we have to do this in six months.” If it takes 12, it takes 12, like we’ve been around long enough. We can survive that.

Tom Shock: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I certainly just as a professional, you get phone calls and I’ve had conversations with the private equity firm that’s buying up roofing companies on the East Coast and looking for someone to come in and bring them all onto the same platform and standardize everything. Get it all tied up. And to your point, do all that in 18 months. And the hesitation I always have there is, what is the customer experience going to be like while that business is running? Right, because the planes are still flying, you’re changing out the upholstery. You’re reconfiguring the seats, whatever. But you’re in the air while you’re doing it. And those customers like they don’t really care whether you’re owned by private equity or by the Jones family. They’re looking to get the roof put on professionally and safely and all that. And so I kind of shudder to imagine what it’s going to look like in this next 10 year horizon, because that is absolutely the trend. For these mid-market companies, they’re probably in a lot of cases, there is not a next generation who wants to take them over. And so the natural logical step is to sell that asset, and it’s purchased by a private equity company. And I just feel like that’s going to be really prevalent. But I don’t know what the kind of overall outcome is going to be for the world at large, if you will.

Doug Camin: You know, it’s funny, I just saw in the Wall Street Journal maybe, I don’t know, six, eight weeks ago because my brother-in-law owns a pest control business, and he’s bought it a few years ago and my father-in-law. So his father had been in a pest control business and started up a small one. So there’s like a little history there. But so I sent this article to him because it struck me about how I think it was. The headline was something to the effect of “the hottest job for the hottest job is going to work at your parents business now.” And how like in the current environment, suddenly those jobs that didn’t look very attractive, these pedestrian but workaday businesses. “Hey, our job is to produce these plastic parts that feed this thing.” And it turns out that it’s like it’s like $30 million business, perfectly acceptable business is going to pay somebody’s paycheck, right? But it’s not glamorous. It’s not over. So what happens is you, in the last maybe 15 or 20 years, you would get a successful business, like the one that you’re in, the children of the owners would be like, “No, I’m going to go and get this business is going to pay me to get this fancy great education and go do this other thing.” And all of a sudden now the current environment is sort of circling back a little bit to at least some more of those folks coming back and saying like, “Hey, you know what? Maybe selling electrical equipment wasn’t actually the worst thing in the world.” And so I’d be interested to see, just based on what you said, like, you’re right, there has been that trend over the last many years that that next generation hasn’t materialized behind the current one. There’s a lot of roll up in private equity. Will that continue or will that sort of diminish a little bit as well?

Tom Shock: Yeah. Agreed. I mean, that’s – if you knew the answer to that question, right?

Doug Camin: Yeah. So anyways, coming up to the end of the podcast here, Tom and I always love to ask our guests right at the end. What lessons would you give to somebody who’s coming up in leadership and is looking for their either their first leadership roles or is early on and what advice would you give them?

Tom Shock: So I do enjoy that mid market space because it allows me to do kind of be like a lead from the front type environment. And I totally recognize that if I took a leadership role in a much larger organization, my opportunities to touch technology would be pretty minimal. You’re going to be way more strategy, decision making meetings. But in the space that I’m in – we’re like about 400 employees, $500 million in revenue. So it’s a nice balance. I find that leading from the front to be, for me, a very effective style, kind of modeling. “Hey, here’s how I want our interactions with our customers.” The people who work at this organization who need some assistance on the IT front. How about to go down? I want them to walk away from that feeling good. And kind of the antithesis of the Saturday Night Live Jimmy Fallon skit, “Move. And does it for him.” I mean, that’s kind of the antithesis of what we’re shooting for. And so the opportunity to do that, it’s just it’s a continual learning experience because you learn from the people who are experts in sales and finance and operations. And as a student of business, I just always find that to be interesting. And I find it fulfilling to be able to kind of take a headache out of their life or make things a little faster, a little easier, by either fixing something that’s broken or bringing something that’s an improvement to what they had been doing in the past.

Doug Camin: Thanks. Alright. Well, Tom, thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.

Tom Shock: Absolutely. It was a true pleasure. I really appreciate it.

Doug Camin: Yeah, well, that’s a wrap on today’s episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m Doug Camin, and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode.