376- Grant Walsh

Phil Howard Welcome, everyone. Back to dissecting popular it. Nerds. with Grant Walsh on the show kind of a big deal. You know I really like your your quote. You know, a good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit. You know, maybe we should start there. Just give me you know who you are, what you do, and how are we going to get out of the executive round seat rather than into the executive round seat? Ooh.

Grant Walsh That is a deep place to start. Uh, but, yeah. Uh, Grant Walsh, I’m director of it for a company here in Charlotte, North Carolina. I oversee everything on the infrastructure, operations and security side. I’ve been in the IT space for twenty some odd years now. primarily in the leadership. I’ve been blessed to be in the leadership side. But to your point, once you’re in it, you’re in it. unless you’ve been in as long as I have. So. Yeah, it’s it’s I kind of like it. I don’t have a it’s one of my my joys. I really like working with people. and in the technology space, as you know, you either like working with people or you don’t. And there’s two different areas for you to be in it. So. No, I’ve been blessed. And, In a good spot to be, over the last twenty some odd years.

Phil Howard Here in North Carolina. I’ve been there many a times because my old partnership companies that I was a partner in before we sold was called Converged Network Services Group. We were in North Carolina. And so with North Carolina comes one thing. And that would be what’s your handicap?

Grant Walsh Ooh. See, see, my typical background’s a golf background. So it doesn’t show up on this one. But I am a handicap right now is like a twelve something right now.

Phil Howard I would say above, I don’t even know what the handicap averages that’s got to be way above average. Twelve twelve is reasonable. I mean that’s yeah, it’s reasonable. I mean that’s I was I was a twelve in high school. I’m probably like a twenty four right now or whatever the max is. What’s the max thirty six. I don’t even know. I don’t even remember.

Grant Walsh No, there is no Max. I mean, I think the average golfer, I think I’ve seen it pop up stats lately. The average golfer in the United States won’t break one hundred. So if you’re breaking one hundred, you’re good. If you break ninety, you’re better. And if you’re breaking eighty, you’re pretty good. Now, we don’t compare ourselves to the tour players because those are the one percent of the one percent. So, but for all of us average hacks, yeah, I feel like I got some friends that are better. So I go out there, I’m like, I think I’m good. And I play with them like, well, I’m not that good.

Phil Howard So there, we have some like we have like a couple professional golfers, like in the, in our field, of course, you know, they’re usually vendors, usually vendors because that’s all they’re doing all day is playing golf all day. Yeah. My problem is I took up jiu jitsu. So that was, uh, the golf kind of dissipated years ago. Although I should pull the old I should pull the mizunos out. Just pull the mizunos out. What’s your favorite club?

Grant Walsh I have a hodgepodge. I’m a Callaway irons guy, but I’m a tailor made when it comes to the hybrids and the driver stuff. But I love my vokey wedges, so I got a little mixed bag.

Phil Howard You’d get along great with my father. The doctor. So, see, this is this is how. This is how you become an IT leader. This is. There’s a lot more to this than you’d think. You know what I mean? we could probably do a whole show on the metaphor of golf to IT leadership and how you communicate with people and the rules. the unwritten rules and the politeness and, not walking over someone’s lie. And there’s probably a lot of things that let’s just do it. We haven’t done this. Let’s do a golf metaphor like, so let’s take your number one. It rule or way of being. What is one of the most important ways of being. And we’re going to do this as the golf metaphor part of the show. And you must take you must take your number one way of being as an IT leader. And compare that to a rule in golf, unwritten or written, whether it be a gentlemanly rule, whether it be a Caddyshack reference, whether it be I don’t care. Okay.

Grant Walsh Yeah. I mean, I think there is, it’s more of an unwritten rule in golf, But, there’s kind of, some of the things I’d lean to is more of a servant attitude, dear leader. Right. Serving your team, trying to help your team in golf. Like, let’s say you’re teeing off a lot of times, some folks you play with, you hit yours or they hit theirs. It’s fine. And they walk back to the cart, I hit mine, I’m up there by myself. There’s nobody there trying to help me make sure I see where the ball goes. Because sometimes some of those shots do go off course and you can’t see it having an extra set of eyes. We’re playing together, I watched yours. Why don’t you stay there and watch mine?

Phil Howard And I never slice. So now we can add in the Caddyshack reference as well for all you young youngsters out there.

Grant Walsh Exactly. Okay, there’s there’s the there is a lot like I truly look at golf to learn a lot about people in general. I talked to a lot of vendors, a lot of partners, even colleagues. I can learn a lot about you, personality wise on the golf course that I can’t learn in the office. You’re a different person on the course. How can I trust you? Are you personable enough? I want to deal with you on a regular basis. Do I feel like if I had a relationship with a as a partner? Is this someone I could call and talk to? Or someone that’s going to annoy the heck out of me? Or do you have anger management issues? What’s the situation like? Can you hold your own? It comes to drinking beer and playing. Like I learned a lot about people on the golf course.

Phil Howard Anger management. If you don’t play golf, you’re not going to enjoy this episode. I go out. You gotta. It’s everything you just said is so true. We’ve never done this before. Why have we not done this? Yes. Anger management issues. If a golf club flies into into the pond somewhere. Yes. Um, yes. It’s so true. And you’ll learn a lot about someone’s family too, as well. If they come from a family of golfers. We gotta do another one. Well, let’s first of all, let’s we first have to solidify this, this first point, which is, do you care enough about the other team members, whether they are above you, below you, parallel to you, whatever. Do you care enough about them to stick around for a few extra minutes to make sure that everything goes right for them? Or are you like, hey, I used you for what I need you for? And like, let’s get in the car and move on to the next thing. Now there is something to be said about the people that are behind you on the golf course as well, because it could be a very busy day. It could be a very busy day. And you can’t be the guys that play the five hour round of golf. No, and not let people play through. So there is a certain amount of, hey, we need to We need to pick up and get going here. Uh, we don’t we can’t take all day to play a round of golf. So there’s another metaphor there that we could speak to that’s probably could be aligned with the business. And are we behind? Are we ahead? Yes. Yeah. But if you stick around and helped watch that person that you know is going to slice most of the time, then you would help pick up the speed of the round by sticking around. So sometimes rushing ahead right is not necessarily faster. Sometimes slower is faster.

Grant Walsh It’s very selfish to rush ahead, but also if you do have an errant shot, if I have a good relationship with you, you get the you get the courtesy of hey, drop us here by me. I’m in the middle of the fairway. Drop with me. Let’s keep going. Let’s do this together. Let’s have a let’s go out there and have a good time. I’m not a tour player. I’m not a tournament guy. We’re here to have a good time. Don’t go looking. I mean, it’s the Pro V1 and you want to go find. Let’s go find it. I’ll give you five minutes. Let’s get that out of the woods. Let’s keep going.

Phil Howard Yeah. You may have just saved anger management guy.

Grant Walsh Right? One hundred percent.

Phil Howard You don’t even know if he’s. You don’t even know if he has anger management problems yet. Because you’re. Because you’re so fun to play with.

Grant Walsh If you go out there and you’re yelling and screaming and you’re mad and you’re playing with me, I’m like, we’re doing something wrong. We’re out there to have a good time. We’re not there to make it that serious. It’s about, again, relationship wise. And you help me, I help you. I’ll even help you read your putts. We’ll work together. Together. We’re a team on this. Even if we’re competing, we’re still a team.

Phil Howard Further. Farther together. Exactly.

Phil Howard Where else can we go with this? So what does that have to say? What’s your why?

Grant Walsh My why? Um, I really for me when I in leadership wise wise why is to see people develop. That’s always been why I like leadership so much. Because to the point of the quote you mentioned earlier, you’re going to take a lot of the blame and the flak as a leader. You just are. And if you if you pass it on to your team, You’re not going to they’re not going to follow you or want to go in the direction you want to go with. But for me, that’s something as a leadership over the over the time I’ve been able to be a leader is to really help, mentor and help people grow and to even follow up with them later. Hey, how’s it going? You know, we’re connected on LinkedIn or just see them get promoted and watch their leadership path grow on their own, or even just their technical skill sets grow and see them become things. That is the why. Like it’s so awesome to look back and say, oh, I helped that person. I got to be one part of their journey. That’s cool to see them grow and just see people become more than they. They probably thought they could, because somebody actually invested in them and tried to make them better, uh, helped them grow along the way because it is really even even for me. I look back and then think about the people I worked with that helped me get to where I needed to get to today, and not that I took little pieces on. So it’s that’s the why for me, as far as leadership wise. I mean, yes, sometimes the money’s good. Yes, sometimes the perks are good. But the people are like, why is my why?

Phil Howard Yeah. Otherwise it would be just about the money and we’d all be miserable. We were talking about how do you get out of the seat of the executive round table? but in reality, how do we get into the seat at the executive round table and keep that seat? Because I have been looking at a lot of statistics lately, and ninety three percent of CTOs still think their team is the IT help desk. They don’t think of their team as the executives or the C-level level executives sitting around them at the round table. That’s pretty mind blowing. That means that they have not made the transition in. They don’t see their team as the C levels. And one of the I don’t know if I call it complaints, I’m just using that because it’s the word that comes to my mind right now is that it’s kind of invisible, or we don’t get the respect that we need, or we get the respect when things are going wrong or there’s been a cyber attack or something. All of a sudden we’re like everyone’s most important person. But when everything’s running, we’re a cost center. And it might have something to do with that. Ninety three percent of the people thinking of their team still as the IT help desk. What I’m saying is, is you get to see the executive roundtable. Are you really sitting in that seat? And maybe you got there because you had a few couple wins, but what are you doing every single day to re-earn that seat? And I think a lot of us get into this position like, oh, I’m a CTO, I’ve got tenure. And that is not true, right?

Grant Walsh Yeah, There’s different parts of it that drive value, right? I think a lot of people hang up on the service desk and on the infrastructure side, cyber security. There’s to your point, and a lot of what people mention, there isn’t a lot of glory on that side of the house because I’ve always told the team that I’ve had teams along the way where the roads and bridges, folks, we take care of the roads and bridges. We work at night when nobody cares until there’s a giant pothole or a bridge goes out. That’s just the way it is. There’s, you know, it’s our job as leaders to drive the kind of, you know, the congratulations and the fame to internally to that team. but at the leadership level, your job is to work with your colleagues, whether it be at the director level, the C level, whatever the case may be to understand their challenges and how it, as a resource or commodity can solve those challenges to drive value to our customers. outside of infrastructure, obviously the applications team, the CRM teams, all those teams have that front facing, hey, they have direct impact to what they’re doing to support their customers. There’s those pieces and that’s sometimes those easier for them to tie what they do day to day to that value, that drive to the business. But um, other areas are a little tougher. But I agree, I think at the, at the leadership level, your team that supports you to help support that business is different. But my colleagues are my fellow directors, you know, the executives, as we work together to, you know, increase, you know, increase EBITDA or drive revenue, drive down cost. It is a cost center. How do I lower the cost in my infrastructure team in general? Like, hey guys, what can we do to lower the cost of data centers or cloud consumption, whatever the case may be? Those, while they’re not, you know, beautiful things that we can do. The company just loves it. It’s a line on the on the PNL. Hey, we’ve lowered costs this year. We brought this down. We, you know, we’ve helped impact EBITDA directly. So that’s my job to make sure we correlate what the business is trying to do to what my team is doing. So it’s it’s definitely a challenge, but there is a lot of value. I think it has changed. I think it was always just there for the tech stuff. But the good leaders and the I think the folks who really succeed are the ones who take the time to understand what your to your point, their co, their executive team is trying to do at the business level. How can we impact that? What value can we add there. What’s the new technology that. I hate to say AI but we’ll say the AI buzzword. But you know, how can we leverage that more? How can we get that into the tools they’re using because their customers are asking for it? So there’s a lot of things we can do that we’re expected to do. And we have to be kind of proactive, listen, come up with solutions or come up with opportunities, and some of that stuff will come up in the business. I think, to your point, you know, earlier with the Gen Z, Gen Y, Gen Alpha, beta, the new, you know, the new generations are out there. They’re bringing a lot of technology to us because they’re just pushing the envelope a lot more than they used to. So there’s a lot more opportunities there for us to adapt to it and not be the old stingy it of, no, we want to be the know it. We want to be the it. Hey, that’s a good idea. How can we do that in a manner that’s secure but also adds value? So that’s where I again, if you’re doing it right at the executive level, you do a couple of those. You do build trust with your colleagues at the executive level. And now they start coming to you. You’re not just the you’re not just there to slam the hammer down and say, no, that’s not secure or no, we’re not going to do that. It’s how are we going to make this work to drive value?

Phil Howard There’s so much there. First of all, you said EBITDA and out of three hundred and sixty shows, you might have been one out of three person that brought up EBITDA before I did. So that’s great. what are the most important KPIs that IT directors could use make up? I’m a fan of an IT director making up completely making up his own termed KPI. The Walsh KPI, the Walsh effect. Number two, the grant effect or the GW. the GW effect or the Walsh KPI. And finally, How do we not become the Department of No

Grant Walsh So I think it’s. Well, it starts with leadership. Has to have that cultural shift change because I feel like the no is antiquated. It’s kind of the old school way of doing things. And if your leadership is kind of entrenched in the old way of doing things, then that no is going to happen. So it starts with leadership. Like if I have if I run around saying no to everything and everything gets escalated to me, it’s no, we’re not going to do that. No, we’re not going to put this in. No, we’re not going to allow that. And the team starts doing that as well. And it starts with you to drive that cultural shift. So what we’ve always done on my teams isn’t no, it’s I want this okay. Well I can’t allow that. What we can do is we can work with this or, you know, this. Is that what you’re asking? Puts us in a weird security position and exposes us in ways we don’t want that. But we can’t do X, Y, and Z. We can work together. It’s not a no. It’s a different way of doing things. So it’s in ways that it’s, you know, something that doesn’t put us in a security risk position, isn’t going to blow the bank roll. We budgeted for it. We plan for it. Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s plan it out.

Phil Howard We do. can you give me an example? We need real life example here. Let’s if you can think of one.

Grant Walsh I think the the easy one up front. Okay. I want to use ChatGPT as an organization, I want to I want to use that. Okay. Well, what are you using it for? Well, I, I want to throw this these documents or I want to ask it questions around our, you know, our workload or whatever the case may be that a brand is using. Okay. Well, we don’t want to throw that out to a public tool like that and just start uploading the data. Well, we do have on the back end we have copilot. It’s in our own little area. It’s secure. It’s controlled. We can do that. How about we do that? Well, what if I want to do x, y and Z? Okay, well where’s copilot? Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, here’s how we do that. Here’s how we secure that. Here’s how we.

Phil Howard This is awesome.

Grant Walsh Yeah, but even why.

Phil Howard Did you tell us we had this? Yeah.

Grant Walsh And here’s where we’re going with it. You know, we’re going to lock down some of our data in the back end so that you, you know, you can search whatever you want to search. If you want to find your SharePoint files, you want to find your emails easier. That’s all coming. Here’s the roadmap for us to get there. But don’t use ChatGPT because it does take the stuff you’re trying to do and exposes it to everybody. And if you want that to happen, we’re all on the same page. So it’s more explaining the why to them, why we’re not doing this, but also giving them another option to get where they want to get to anyway.

Phil Howard What I see you doing is using ChatGPT. What I cannot have you doing is using ChatGPT. And the reason why is you’re exposing our data to the public. What I need you to do is use copilot. And the reason why is it’s freaking awesome.

Grant Walsh You know, I want to add this to to because they’re. So this came I worked in retail a long time ago, and there was just like, the overcoming the no. From a customer the feel felt found method. I know how you I know how you feel. Other customers have felt the same way until they found out. We do that all the time. That’s a great way. Hey, I know how you feel about ChatGPT. Other brands and employees felt the same way until they found out about copilot. Oh, I like copilot.

Phil Howard I remember the feel felt, found. I couldn’t feel it I don’t know, I never felt it I love, I love overcoming objections though I love it, I love. No, no. You have to embrace the no. So we went from the Department of No to you are the Department of embracing the no. And uh, when I went through when I quit Starbucks years ago and went to a Cisco startup and it was a total churn and burn and I had to survive and make it, which I did. They taught us Ac-ac agree, confirm, isolate, answer, close a c a I c, which is how you overcome any objection. So which is like okay, agree. Oh you want to use ChatGPT I get it. It’s awesome. So how can we even do it with this one. Agree. What did I just say AC Oh, confirmed. So what I’m understanding here. Let me just make sure I understand you correctly is that you need you want to use some sort of, uh, kind of open AI tool to be able to correlate data with whatever. Agree, confirm, isolate. Am I understanding you correctly? Yes. That’s it. Now we need to isolate it. Is that it? Is that is that the only thing you’re coming to me with today? Well, actually we need to replace the CRM as well. Okay. So let me make sure I understand. So you want to come you want to use open AI and you also want to replace this year we’re not going to use that. We’re going to just keep it with ChatGPT. So we’ve isolated answer. Well I’m sorry we can’t do that. However, we do have a great option, which is Microsoft. We already pay for it. It’s included. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this. Have you seen this before? Take a look. Are we answering this? Yes. Will that take care of what you want to do? Wow, this is awesome. I’m using it. Great. Then that settles that. You must now tie this down. That settles that. And you agree that we’re not using open AI. We’re going to use Microsoft instead. Yeah. This is great. Awesome. We have now a c I a seed that when I was in a position I felt the same way as you before. Yeah.

Grant Walsh I’ll think about that.

Phil Howard If I was that Microsoft works just as well, if not better.

Grant Walsh Yeah, but if you take if that’s one thing to change to from the it front end like these are your customers like you. Like that’s something we teach all the time to our teams. Like these are our customers like treat them as customers. If they’re customers, you’ve got to have empathy. You’ve got to take the time to understand what they’re trying to do. What are they going for? These are not we. We make it. I don’t say a curse word like the dollar jar thing, but we don’t like to call them users. Users has a derogatory hey, I’m up on this tower of it. Looking down at my users know you’re all customers. How do we support our customers so that that feel felt found? The other method.

Phil Howard The engineers call them and losers, not users.

Grant Walsh And that comes through. That comes through your emails, that comes through your chat messages. They don’t come through.

Phil Howard Mhm. So and so we went through that really quickly. But the truth is is really digging in more might when you when you’re agreeing and getting to confirming what the actual issue is that they want, you really kind of have to dig in there. You really have to say, well why like you were saying like, why do you want to use ChatGPT, right? Might there be any other thing that you would want to use it for? Well, I kind of like it better than Google. Okay. What else? What else? Like, can you give me five other reasons? Keep going. Let’s go. Let’s keep going. Are you sure there’s not any other reason why you might want to use this tool? And you’re not tempted, are you? Are you tempted at all to use this tool on the side as kind of this other shadow it thing? Do you know what shadow it means? Yeah.

Grant Walsh It lurks in the shadows.

Phil Howard This is. Okay, so we’ve overcome the objections you must overcome. You must embrace the no. Embrace the no. Overcome objections. What’s the, um. What’s the Walsh KPI? Let’s just. If you don’t have it, let’s just make one up right now. What are the top five most important things that an IT department should be tracking to impact EBITDA?

Grant Walsh Oof! I think it’s it’s a small but unwritten thing. Is the is the employee retention. What’s my turnover look like from the IT group? Because every time I go to hire somebody there’s a retrain factor. There’s a reset of the salary. There’s all kinds of stuff I can just keep people in, keep them happy, train them up, keep them going. That impacts EBITDA continues. It’s if I have to go out and hire, it’s gonna cost me more to rehire somebody. Let’s just keep the people we have happy. They’ll actually generate more in terms of customer service because they’re happy. And that’s that’s a trackable, uh, impact to EBITDA because I don’t have to keep hiring people every six months. You know.

Phil Howard There’s definitely some numbers and statistics there. We should use ChatGPT for that. I mean, no, we should just maybe grok. Everyone’s telling me grok. It’s a different flavor every day. Honestly, one’s better the next day. One’s better the other day, I was a big fan of Claude for a while. Okay. Employee retention number one on the Walsh KPI.

Grant Walsh Yes.

Phil Howard There’s no R in your name, but we’re going to figure out retention. There’s not a single letter in retention. Oh, but Happy’s in there. Happy is in there. So that’s the last letter. Happy. Okay, um, what’s the next KPI?

Grant Walsh Oh, now I gotta think about that. I was thinking about the. I was thinking one KPI. Now I have four or five. We got happiness, which is retention. I think s could be shadow it or the reduction of shadow it, because there’s all that extra spin which is not being brought in as the you know, you can’t leverage, uh, enterprises scale when we have shadow it, we can bring that in and actually lower costs there.

Phil Howard Explain that again a little bit more deeply. Why is shadow it an important. How do we first of all how do we measure it.

Grant Walsh Right. Yeah. It’s for for us for the organization that I’m at, we do a lot of acquisitions. We have a lot of small companies we buy, and there’s a lot of different contracts and solutions that have been bought over the years. So we’re trying to get our arm around there and just doing discovery. So but if you have a company of twenty five, thirty employees buying the software, they’re not paying what a company is paying with two thousand employees or four thousand employees. So getting our arms around that spin and some of it, it’s not malicious. It’s just stuff they went and did on their own because they thought they were helping. But we can leverage enterprises of, you know, scale to get those lower prices and ensure that the stuff you’re putting in these tools are secure and they’re with best practices.

Phil Howard It’s a significant problem that a lot of people don’t like to talk about that often because it might unleash, like the Kraken of vendors, to come call you and show up in your inbox with an Amazon gift card. how often do you audit all of this stuff? What’s your best? I know how I do it, but what’s your best way of auditing the one hundred? And how many end users do you guys have?

Grant Walsh Uh, about.

Phil Howard I mean, how many customers do you have? How many customers do you have?

Grant Walsh About two thousand five hundred.

Phil Howard Okay. So I’m guessing you’re anywhere between eighty to one hundred and twenty applications, at least.

Grant Walsh Yeah. Yeah.

Phil Howard Isn’t that wild? Isn’t that wild? That’s wild. And most of you out there, just like the ninety three percent that are not sitting in their executive seat. It’s the truth. It’s the frank truth. I love you all. It’s the truth. probably have a metaphorical Excel spreadsheet of a bunch of applications sitting on it with, various different contract end dates and costs. And, I know that they just auto renew. I know they do, because I know there’s it’s an impossibility to stay on top of all that, plus juggle everything, plus employee retention and all that. So shadow it. It’s a great thing. How do you do it?

Grant Walsh Yeah, I mean we so when we find them we try to pull them into we have a trusted advisor partner that we’ve purchased a lot of our solutions through. We continue to add and add more to it. That way I have somebody else to monitor the actual contracts and renewals, so I’m not getting caught last minute with some of those things, that we sit down with on a quarterly basis, say, hey, here’s we got coming up next quarter or the next six months that are coming up for renewal. What are the options there for that type of thing? but internally, you know, when we now we’ve got a better process than we acquire brands to go through. Understand. What do they bring in, what do they have, where are they? What are the alignments to what we already have? Can we bring some of that stuff under our contracts? And then getting a list to your point, onto a spreadsheet somewhere of what’s out there that’s being paid for somewhere else so we can track it. And then when it does, you know, cancel, we can move it into our contract. So, it’s a lot of work. we don’t have. We don’t have currently we don’t have an IT like procurement team. So it all falls on us individually. So myself and some of the other directors and our team to manage all that, but the stuff that we do purchase in-house does go through our partners. So we our partner manages a lot of that for us.

Phil Howard Beautiful. That’s kind of the answer. I was hoping for the because we like to say that our back end department is so vendor neutral that if we were any more vendor neutral, we’d be beige.

Grant Walsh Yeah.

Phil Howard So the Walsh KPI retention shadow it. We got we have to have another one.

Grant Walsh Oh, man. there’s nothing with W that’s going to be that’s wealth. Oh, yeah, that is true. That’s true.

Phil Howard How do you measure its impact on EBITDA or the business?

Grant Walsh Yeah, I think that’s that that could be driven to how are we lowering how are we how are we viewing lowering our cost per user year over year. Because you know again we’re big on M&A. You continue to add user count. So it’s hard to keep up keep overall costs down because you keep adding more but.

Phil Howard Easy cost per user. We could talk all day long about probably wealth is cost per user on how you lower a cost per user. Do you have any data? I’m just curious on what the average cost per user is. I’m not saying at your company, but just in general across manufacturing.

Grant Walsh I’m hiring sales rep versus an employee on the factory floor. There’s different tools to go along with it, whether it be hardware or software licensing.

Phil Howard What is the average cost per user, you think? Across, I don’t know, manufacturing or logistics or something? I mean.

Grant Walsh I wouldn’t even know because it’s like, I don’t even know. I mean, it’s there’s.

Phil Howard It’s pretty significant.

Grant Walsh Yeah. It is.

Phil Howard Anyways, find out what your cost per user is and then see how to lower it while also making them more productive. Right.

Grant Walsh Yeah, one hundred percent one hundred percent.

Phil Howard Everyone’s on E5. Like why?

Grant Walsh Yeah. Why?

Phil Howard okay. So we’ve got wealth, we have retention, we’ve got shadow it, we have a and l left. The Walsh KPI.

Grant Walsh Golly a and we have a and which one?

Phil Howard L yeah. It doesn’t have to match. We’ll figure it out some way.

Grant Walsh Yeah, yeah.

Phil Howard We just need another important number from you. What’s the next number? Important number. And I’ll make it fit. What’s really important. Another measurement.

Grant Walsh I think part of it is our customers happy. So there’s an appreciation piece here.

Phil Howard Hear how external customers is this external customers or end users? Yeah.

Grant Walsh I mean in well, our internal customers, are they happy with the support they’re getting? Are they satisfied with the support, the timing of support? Are they getting the answers they need. Are they getting is it an actually value add to them day to day. And a lot of that’s from surveys, a lot of that’s from back down to the basic ticketing. But you know is there value add from it day to day like day to day. Keep the lights on stuff. Are we still adding value or is.

Phil Howard What do we call that? Why can’t I not remember that actual measurement in the industry? What do we normally call that or use that. Like if we send out a survey and what do we call that I can’t remember.

Grant Walsh is that not the NPS score, is it?

Phil Howard well, we had retention and happiness, so I don’t know if we can really use that again. We’ve had retention shadow it. We’ve got wealth. We’ve got I mean. I guess it could be. How what about external customers? Yeah.

Grant Walsh Good.

Phil Howard Because how does it affect.

Grant Walsh Yeah I think a lot of external customers nowadays, like depending if you’re a service organization, how are you leveraging technology to make their experience better with your organization? Right. So even that we have to be involved in whether that be how, you know, is if we’re sending something out to somebody’s house, are they getting a text with a pop up of that part to technicians face and who they’re, who they are and when they’ll be there and they can track them and all that fun stuff, that’s an experience for the external customer. So we have a direct impact on something like that. Um, and that’s technology we have to be can’t be sitting on waiting and say, oh, company XYZ over there is doing it. We should do it too. We got to be out in the forefront to improving that customer experience.

Phil Howard do you guys use any tools right now to measure any of that or or or do people does marketing come to you or anyone come to you and say, hey, how do we figure this out?

Grant Walsh We are. We are growing so fast that we’re still in that maturity process. Our whole IT org as a whole is pretty new. The last two years.

Phil Howard What’s most exciting about your current roadmap or how do you guys how do you future. I hate the word future proof. If I hear it again I’m going to lose my mind. But how do you how do you future proof?

Grant Walsh Yeah. I mean, for us it’s kind of a technology transformation not to be used buzzwords, but really we we are taking our company that’s been around twenty some odd years. So a lot of the technology, even at the, you know, the ERP levels really kind of still on prem, still old, you know, how do we transform that and make that more, uh, not as rigid and not as clunky, you know, do we invest heavily on prem? Do we look at a SaaS solution? and again, we have at the organization. Now we have one hundred and five different companies that we are a part of organization and trying to everybody’s got their own way of doing things and trying to bring that into one ERP. So it’s a challenge. But that’s exciting, too, from an IT standpoint, because you get to change the way you can move from we’ve always done it that way to what should we do going forward? And we’ve got a we’re putting a plan together here in the next, you know, twelve to eighteen months that really will start changing things dramatically, which again, will drive up cost savings for EBITDA long term, because it does put us in a little more scalable solution that not having to invest so heavily in CapEx, not having to invest so heavily on on prem resources, I don’t need people I have it’s cheaper for doctor, all kinds of fun stuff there. Uh, and then you start tying in with the same path where we’re trying to, you know, transform our ERP. We’re also trying to mature and grow the whole data warehousing data lake and leveraging AI there to better report better information, to allow our business executives to be able to make informed decisions more readily, that they can play with copilot and ask it questions and let the tools generate the information so they can make those decisions on where to go. So a lot of exciting stuff over the next, you know, twelve, eighteen, twenty four months and where we’re going.

Phil Howard One of the biggest problems that comes up a lot, it comes up in the community, it comes up on the show, and that is the full adoption of new technology. So a lot of times we implement a new technology, we get the basic part of the ERP implemented. And then and it might be because expectations are not set appropriately with executive management. Or there’s a lot of pressure from executive management to bang in a new ERP for example. Come on slam this. And we need it done in three months. and it’s unrealistic. but we get it done and then it’s really at probably a thirty percent Actually implemented ERP system. And then there’s all these bolt ons and other custom things that need to be done. And then they never get done. So we take it. Let’s take it full circle. Back to the golf analogy again. We got to take it all the way back to golf. It’s like you got your lesson in golf. Like let’s go get out there and go. And everyone knows that to get good at golf, you need many, many, many, many moons, many moons. You’ve got to play twice a week at minimum. That’s at least eight hours of your life right there. You got to go to the driving range in between.

Grant Walsh Mhm.

Phil Howard Um, so what’s the balance there. How how do you have you, have you noticed that though. Do you, do you agree that that is a problem of fully implementing it or completely using one technology. You alluded to it at the beginning with the we’re not going to use ChatGPT. You know, we’ve got copilot, we’ve got copilot aka a section of Microsoft. Well, we’re not fully utilizing Microsoft to its extent that we could be using it and taking full advantage of all of our licensing or however that is, and Microsoft’s a whole nother do a whole show on Microsoft and Microsoft SKUs and yep. And making the right by there. But anything to say there?

Grant Walsh Yeah. I mean, I think we’ve seen it again when you go through and why we’re, we’re at the point we’re at where our ERP transformation too is. We’ve seen it where we’ve grown so fast and thrown so much at our current ERP that it’s starting to kind of bog down and get kind of clunky because we’ve tried to go so fast. It’s just acquire throw them in their choir, throw them in there, and not taking the time to make sure it’s scalable. It was never built to handle what it was where we’re at today. So now we’re taking the opportunity to say, well, we can go different options. You can always do that trifecta. We can do it. You know it’s right. We can do it fast. We can do it cheap. Which one? Which two do you want? You know it can. It can be right and right and fast and won’t be cheap. You know, we gotta. But most executives understand that, like we can do, we can make it as fast as you want to go. It’s just not going to be cheap or it may not be right. One of the two.

Phil Howard So biggest one of the biggest learnings I’ve learned over the past. I used to just do like, technology consulting. It was easy. Not easy. But I mean, it was easy from the standpoint. It’s like it was easy because I knew it. I knew it very, very well. And I’ve got tons and years and years of experience. Right. What I did not have experience doing was growing a podcast, growing my own marketing department, understanding production, just growing a podcast. I never the podcast was just like a little hobby on the side. It’s not a hobby now. Now it’s like we’ve got all these people and we’ve got all kinds of applications and we move from one. It’s just it’s I was talking about it the other day with somebody about just the number of steps that are involved in like certain things. Some people think, like you just. Whatever, dude. It’s easy. You jump on zoom, you hit record and like, you know, throw it up to the web. No, it’s it’s not. It’s really not like that anymore. What I noticed my biggest learning was. Do not pay the middle price. Mhm. Never go. Never go. Like if there’s like if there’s like bronze silver gold packaging or platinum bronze silver gold platinum. Never go or gold. Either go bronze or go platinum. This is what I’ve noticed. Either go like down and dirty, cheap, get the job done. Like that’s it. Like we’re going. We’re ripping like, lean and mean. Down and dirty. Get the job done quick. Done. Save money. Whatever. Never go silver, right. Because it never gets done what you need it to do fully. And it doesn’t really make the impact that you need it to make. And you will find yourself. Here’s my example. I’m just going to just fed my soul to the world here. Web design. There is no. It’s either we go on Fiverr, find a web designer, your website gets done, it’s up and running. It gets the job done. Or sixty to one hundred thousand dollars for expert.

Grant Walsh Yeah.

Phil Howard I was like, nah, I can’t I can’t pay sixty thousand dollars for a website. I cannot do that. But what I’ve been doing for the last two years is paying the silver price and getting crap. Yep. No uniformity. No. Just go to my website right now. Everyone can make fun of it. Clown it. It’s terrible. It’s. It doesn’t flow right. It’s like I don’t really understand. What do you do? What don’t you do? And so I made the jump and I hired. And this is a secret. I can’t reveal it yet, but I hired probably the best branding expert that’s on the face of this earth right now. And it is a very, very, very, very expensive price tag. And he did literally research for weeks on end. And what he came back to me was like, everyone on my team was just like, I think they fell out of their seat. I think they’re just like, this is so clear. It’s so simple. It all makes sense. He absolutely nailed it. And every it if you’re not when you see this, what we come up with. If you’re not like if you don’t cry, if you don’t like, if this does not hit you emotionally, if this does not hit you emotionally as an IT leader, I, um, I’m quitting. And when I told my branding expert this guy who I’m very, very close relationship with, he said, Phil, if you quit, I will hunt you down and I will cut off your kneecaps. That’s how that’s how impactful he thought. What we’re doing for you IT leaders is out there that play golf in North Carolina. You have it. You have it in a you have a pretty pretty pretty muggy down there. How do you deal with all that heat? It’s nice though.

Grant Walsh I’m in Florida.

Phil Howard Usually, of course, someone found a way to call me even though I shut my cell phone off. I had some weird message. That’s like, you can call me ever if you want to on this soft phone. They figured it out. I need to be impossible to get Ahold of. I need to figure that out. What you should be. I heard this other. This is a small piece of advice. Make it easy for everyone to like. See you and see your communications. Everything. But make it almost impossible for them to actually get Ahold of you.

Grant Walsh One hundred percent. Yes.

Phil Howard It. Guys.

Grant Walsh Yes.

Phil Howard Uh. The. Commodore sixty four was your first computer? Yeah, I know this. I could have guessed it because almost everyone says Commodore sixty four. But what impact did it have on your life? We’re ending with the beginning.

Grant Walsh Yeah, taking it back. The Commodore sixty four. Man, I remember getting that as a wee lad. my older brother and I sitting there, uh, with that, we had. No, we had no storage. So it was when it was on, it was on. So it was like. And I remember we had a book full of games and you had to type them all out. Go to bed. I want to play Russian roulette. Type all the lines of code run and you play it. And if you shut it down, you got to do it all again tomorrow. But I thought it was so cool. I was so I was young. I’m six seven maybe, but it was the coolest thing ever. Sit there and type all this out and it just worked. And that’s kind of just it lit the flame for technology, and I’ve been that way ever since. And that led me down the path of, you know, getting our first computer, actual second computer, I guess in ninety six when the internet hit, and then playing games, and then working at RadioShack for a long time and doing all that fun stuff. And just here I am today.

Phil Howard Yeah. RadioShack. RadioShack. That was one of my most viral LinkedIn posts, is I was I went out to breakfast at all day breakfast in Biddeford, Maine with my daughter when I was visiting my my father and. There’s an abandoned radio shack next door. And it had been abandoned forever. Like no one had moved into that space. And I just remember my daughter being like, dad, what’s that? I took a picture of it, put it on LinkedIn. I said, hey, my daughter just asked me, what’s this? Yeah, I just got everybody. Oh my gosh, you know, the youth these days, what they missed.

Grant Walsh It’s so good. It was such a good.

Phil Howard They did. They missed. They missed the dawn of technology. Like we were like we’re old now because now we’re like, I remember when the model T came out, it was like my father, you know, like I remember like I remember when the the first hard drive, we had no memory.

Grant Walsh No I remember. PCs, 3G. I remember 3G hit the first time, then 4G hit. I remember satellite dishes hitting I remember. I remember the oh.

Phil Howard Man, I don’t even know the iPhone. I don’t even know the story. The iPhone, BlackBerry, BlackBerry. No way. I will never get rid of my BlackBerry. No. And I just remember like one of my team members, employees, customers, whatever you want to call them at the time was like, no, Phil, man, you don’t understand, dude. This thing like on my run, it just syncs with this. It does that. It’s my phone. I’m like, no way am I getting rid of my BlackBerry. What do you mean, no keyboard? Or, like. Like, yeah, I was wrong. I was wrong.

Grant Walsh Come a long way.

Phil Howard So been a pleasure having you on the show. Any final words of wisdom for the for the for the people out there? Words of encouragement during the time of the, I don’t know, soon to be dark and gloomy economy and layoffs and hard to get it jobs. Give me give us some. Give us something positive.

Grant Walsh It’ll always get better. Don’t watch the news.

Phil Howard Time heals all wounds. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. and we look forward to hearing you from the future. There’s going to be all kinds of infographics and Carousels and all kinds of things that we’re going to stamp your name on as a co-author. That comes out of the show, so everyone look forward to that.

Grant Walsh Should be good. This is fun.

Phil Howard All right, man. Have a great day.

Grant Walsh You too, man. Thanks.