Speaker 0 | 00:01.020
however you want to do it sweet so well then we’re just gonna hit record okay welcome everyone back to dissecting popular it nerds we’re going we’re uh doing this off the hook today i’m uh bruised up i’m beat up i’ve got a torn let’s see hip i don’t really call it hip uh hip flexor my old hips you busted anyway so i’m a little beat up today but we’re talking with uh with chris perrin i’m hoping i pronounced your name your name correctly no i’m absolutely right um director of it at a1 freeman moving group so i would assume that you guys move stuff around but you know you tell me how um you
Speaker 1 | 00:48.637
tell me what you do on a daily basis what you guys do so a1 freeman is a agent of north american van lines and we have 14 locations in the United States. And we do moving and storage for residential corporations, sports teams, military.
Speaker 0 | 01:10.448
So the last year had to have been insanity.
Speaker 1 | 01:15.291
It was. I mean, it was lean for quite a while. But, you know, last fall, it opened up a little bit into winter. You know, people don’t. don’t stay still for very long.
Speaker 0 | 01:30.981
Yeah. I moved three times. I moved everything myself. I always do it the hard way. I don’t know why. And then when I speak with other people, cause I’m looking for free boxes, you know, so I go on a, like Craigslist or Facebook marketplace and like, you know, how do I get free boxes? Because someone else is always get trying to get rid of a bunch of cardboard. Absolutely. Yeah. So I ran into this one guy. So I moved from one house in Maine to another house in Maine. and split that stuff. And so now I’ve got like a smaller house in Connecticut, a smaller house in Maine. So I took one big house and divided it too. But when I went to go pick up the boxes, this guy was like, my moving experience has been a nightmare because it’s been hard to find people to work, I guess, for some of the moving companies. And then some stuff got outsourced and everything. Anyways, I’m assuming there’s been a little bit of a challenge with workforce management. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 02:22.650
labor has been a nightmare. I don’t understand why people don’t want to work.
Speaker 0 | 02:28.042
It’s like the common saying, I don’t care about the you’re on mute. Like everyone said, like the quote of last year was you’re on mute or something because everyone was using Zoom. But to me, it’s no one wants to work.
Speaker 1 | 02:40.393
Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 02:41.354
And I don’t know what that says about us.
Speaker 1 | 02:44.957
Well, I think that says a little bit about the people who don’t want to work. I don’t know about if that’s me and you.
Speaker 0 | 02:52.728
That says a lot about the people that do want to work, I guess. Absolutely. So the people that do want to work are good. We just can’t get the job done on time because we can’t find anyone to work with us to get the job done. So what does IT look like at a moving, you know, your end users have got to be a good mix of various different people. You must have like truck drivers and, you know, equipment going on there and then warehousing and stuff like that. So it’s got to be interesting.
Speaker 1 | 03:21.812
Absolutely. I don’t do a lot of IT for truck drivers. Mostly, I just hand them an email address and they usually do a lot of that stuff on their own. Most of the truck drivers, you’d be surprised. They’re pretty good with maintaining their own equipment, phones or tablets, whatever they’re using.
Speaker 0 | 03:42.203
Driving and using a tablet at the same time, of course. I have a lot of friends that are truck drivers. I would say if I had to pick… Of all my friends, the number one job, like the number one amount of jobs, can I speak today, English, is, yeah, I must have like six to eight friends that are all truck drivers. Because at one point or another, they’re doing some job and they just figured, oh, I can make more money driving a truck. So they drive a truck most of the time.
Speaker 1 | 04:09.868
Especially right now. I mean, we’re paying good money to get drivers in here because we need them.
Speaker 0 | 04:15.092
They do. They do well. They do pretty well. But yeah, no, they’ve all, they’ve all got their, their technology. I don’t know, ways, so to speak. Sure. But you have been at your company for almost two decades, which is amazing, amazing loyalty. And so that means if it’s 2002, wait, so you’ve been there since 2002. So I graduated college in. 2001 very late I should have graduated probably in 99 but anyways I graduated in 2001 and Probably got my first cell phone around maybe a year before then. So what was, so you’ve seen everything change. So you’ve been through quite a bit of change.
Speaker 1 | 05:05.610
Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 05:06.130
And you’ve probably been one of those guys that directed a lot of that change throughout the company. Can you, what are some of the, I guess, you know, because nowadays, you know, everyone hates change, but we have to be change agents because change has now become this just thing that. is normal, right? Change is normal now. We used to not change. It used to be, if it’s, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it, which you can’t really do in IT anymore.
Speaker 1 | 05:30.455
I don’t know. It didn’t work in IT.
Speaker 0 | 05:32.236
What are some of the most fondest memories of change that you’ve had over the years or the ones that stick in your, can you remember like a, a forklift or a technology lift that was quite memorable?
Speaker 1 | 05:44.623
I actually, uh, when I first started here, I remember coming into, uh, what I thought was going to be some, uh, a little bit of organized IT and it was nothing like that. We had 64K dedicated lines, 64K.
Speaker 0 | 06:03.939
Wait, modems or something? Or what were we doing? No,
Speaker 1 | 06:05.960
they were actually, they were dedicated topper lines from the phone company. But 64K, I just can’t imagine. I mean, there were modems faster than 64K in the
Speaker 0 | 06:19.549
2000s. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 | 06:22.167
And we basically had dedicated lines to North American van lines. That’s where the mainframe was that everybody connected to. Sporadic email. We had a domain, but not everybody had an email address.
Speaker 0 | 06:38.033
Mainframe?
Speaker 1 | 06:39.454
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 06:40.394
Just listening to that mainframe, it sounds like it should belong in an old 007 movie with tapes spinning around.
Speaker 1 | 06:50.499
Yes.
Speaker 0 | 06:50.959
You know what I mean? Like tape. Keep going. Okay, so 65. What did we do with these phone lines? What were you doing?
Speaker 1 | 07:00.163
So they were just the larger locations, our Houston location, our Dallas location, connected to our corporate headquarters in Oklahoma City. And we had one dedicated line to North American Van Lines that everybody used. So that was their connection to the outside. world there was i believe the larger locations had an internet you know connection also but it wasn’t it wasn’t what you would think of today no i remember dsl yes
Speaker 0 | 07:35.062
absolutely two jobs after college thinking this is like am i really going to pay this you know i had what was the free what was the free dial-up back in the day oh man what was it Why can’t I remember that? It’s killing me. Anywho, you could pay for AOL or you could get, you know, or you could do like the free, what, why can’t, it was like net, net zero, net zero. Net zero.
Speaker 1 | 08:01.258
Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 08:02.499
My net zero dial up was free. I was like, how am I going to go to pay 45 bucks for like DSL? It’s just crazy. But then when it’s so fast. Yes. For that. Okay. So. we had these unorganized copper lines communicating with a mainframe. I’m assuming pushing some sort of data or communicating, communication of some sort. What were we communicating?
Speaker 1 | 08:36.083
So what we were doing was.
Speaker 0 | 08:38.185
Back then it wasn’t like everything was done online. Yeah. You would send an email and communicate. Yeah. There’d be like different things that you do. you know, like a pizza place would, you know, place or something. I don’t know. But, you know, what would, you know, what did you do back then? It was more like a when it was kind of like a, like a, you know, barbaric when of sort.
Speaker 1 | 09:00.798
Yeah, it kind of was. And I mean, they were just looking at a green screen in the 2000s. I still can’t believe that they were still looking at green screen in 2000s and just letting the, the, the van line. know that, hey, we’re registering a move here from Houston, Texas to Los Angeles, California. We’re going to pick it up in this date range and we’re going to deliver in this date range.
Speaker 0 | 09:28.075
So keep it simple, stupid, probably a lot to be said about that. All right. So what do you do? So how do you fix broken or disorganization or what were some of the, I guess, was there ever a suggestion? Was there ever like, hey, Mr. CEO or whoever, was there ever a, hey, we could do this, you know? like a lot better or did, or was there like a, some kind of like sales guy that came in and someone made a shadow it decision and we did a forklift upgrade. Like how’d we progress from, you know, the dinosaur ages.
Speaker 1 | 09:56.503
So, no, there was, when I was hired, I was basically directed to take IT in a direction that is going to benefit the company.
Speaker 0 | 10:05.968
Okay. So, you know. So, you did what first?
Speaker 1 | 10:11.451
Probably what I did first was take one server and set up a domain.
Speaker 0 | 10:19.875
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 10:20.275
And get corporate email out there so we can communicate. Sounds sound like it. okay and then you had to teach people to use email well sometimes i still have to do that but okay all right so corporate email all right yeah so corporate email is probably the first thing make sure everybody has an email address and it’s not you know go blow at aol.com because um that’s probably one of my biggest pet peeves i run into companies still and they’re using att.net or aol and i’m like you know it’s it’s not that expensive to go register a domain you and get a personal email address that is basically free advertising for your coat. Like make sure everyone knows,
Speaker 0 | 11:05.381
but everyone knows cap angel at aol.com. That’s my dad’s email. If anyone wants to email my dad, he’s 85 and be like, Hey, I was listening to your son on the radio. It’s cap angel at aol.com. He’ll never get rid of it. Okay. So, all right. So corporate email. Yes.
Speaker 1 | 11:21.586
Number one.
Speaker 0 | 11:22.267
How did that make a difference? I’m just curious how that, was that something that you could even measure like any sort of gain or like what?
Speaker 1 | 11:29.292
It probably wasn’t noticeable at first.
Speaker 0 | 11:31.815
Uh,
Speaker 1 | 11:33.536
but eventually, you know, like I said, it’s free advertising. Um, you know, we, we don’t, if we had a website at that time, it was one page, um, and bland, nothing, you know, it was not much.
Speaker 0 | 11:47.067
But just here’s the thing. And maybe we might, I don’t know. I might be overlooking a major aspect here, but just the fact I was, I’m always really best in the morning around 5.30 after the first cup of coffee and I’m driving to the road and my mind is just kind of going off somewhere. And this thought came into my mind this morning, which was IT. IT directors, managers, IT professionals, whatever it is, know so much about business, yet we fail to practice speaking the language. Because I was a horrible language student. And this is where this thought came from. I was a horrible language student and I really want to learn to speak another language. But it doesn’t really… And I was good at the grammar though, right? There’s a difference between learning a language and learning the grammar, coding, whatever, right? And then actually practicing it and putting it into learning how to put things together and screw up. And you have to kind of screw that piece up. And I think there’s something to be said about a lot of IT guys that know a lot about business, but don’t practice speaking the language of business. And this might be something that… Just the fact that you said, hey, it’s free advertising, it sounds like a stupid thing, but just the fact that you were thinking that way and thinking advertising, not thinking, can you log in and use your password correctly and use your email? You weren’t coming from that direction. You were coming from the free advertising direction. So sometimes it’s a mindset. And not everyone’s thinking in that mindset. How are we thinking in the, you know? benefiting the company and making money and pushing the brand and that type of thing. Because that’s really what the foundation of IT should be doing.
Speaker 1 | 13:49.318
Absolutely. And I think that’s one thing I try to practice every day is when I go talk to upper management, it’s not about how can I make my IT better? It’s how can my IT make you better? How can the company benefit from what I want to do this year? Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 14:09.579
Everyone wants free advertising too, by the way.
Speaker 1 | 14:11.520
Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 14:12.981
Okay. So corporate email. We’re still on a mainframe. That doesn’t fix anything. How do we progress? How do we morph throughout time?
Speaker 1 | 14:22.809
So yeah, well, the mainframe type thing is literally out of my control as the director of IT here at A1 Freeman, because that’s what North American van lines, and they will eventually, over time, over the 20 years, change a little bit. But even though they change, it’s still,
Speaker 0 | 14:42.434
you’d be spot on. Right. You’ve got to learn to play and other people play nicely and other people’s sandboxes or.
Speaker 1 | 14:47.960
Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 14:49.001
So you’ve got to deal with a lot of times we’ve got to deal with whatever, you know? Yeah, I get you. The. still reminds me of Blackjack Pizza for some reason and the DOS-based system that they have. They had multiple locations and all linked together via this, just basically DOS. It was even an old version of DOS. It wasn’t even the most up-to-date version of DOS. But I was like, we can’t ever change this because everything’s on.
Speaker 1 | 15:20.203
Everything. Everything is great.
Speaker 0 | 15:22.225
Yeah, it’s on like a weird frame relay point-to-point. back to the corporate office and this is how we open our numbers every day and it works and we make pizzas and the the job itself is not that complicated so why would we invest why would we invest tons of money to just um forklift this dos system that helps us make pizzas so that was kind of like i guess that was the question and i would say that that this was years ago and i cannot imagine blackjack pizzas you know if I’m assuming you’re still in business, did not upgrade by now with all of the social media and couponing and various different benefits that you can get from, you know.
Speaker 1 | 16:06.039
Yeah, if they haven’t upgraded by now, they’re probably not in business.
Speaker 0 | 16:11.261
Okay, so, all right, so moving on. So corporate email, next biggest thing that comes to mind.
Speaker 1 | 16:16.823
The next biggest thing we probably did was I probably got some type of either. Yeah, I believe the first. Wide area network, I said it was probably with watch, I think they were watchdog firewalls.
Speaker 0 | 16:30.905
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 16:31.986
Watch guard, watch guard firewalls. That’s what they were. And so I would get an internet connection at each site, whether that’s DSL or cable or, you know, at some sites that have a lot more people like justify the cost of something more permanent, faster. For example, like a T1.
Speaker 0 | 16:53.555
1.54 T1 I thought you were going to say like 100 meg I thought you were going to say like 100 meg fiber or something you know I remember my first technology job after Starbucks right was for a Cisco startup company and we were selling dynamic allocation like dynamic T1’s right you know where it’s no longer a fractional T1 this is dynamic like when you hang up the phone and Like that bandwidth goes back to your network. So like when you’re not talking on the phone, like should have that bandwidth available. That was like the big selling point. Right.
Speaker 1 | 17:31.155
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 17:32.156
Yeah. And it’s a T one it’s. And I remember people asking like, I mean, Comcast just came out with this like six meg cable line and yours. T one that’s one dot five. We’re like, yeah, but it’s a T one. It’s dedicated. It’s dedicated.
Speaker 1 | 17:47.825
It’s 1.5. Both directions.
Speaker 0 | 17:50.107
yeah exactly uh anyways so that’s that’s funny because that was like a thing that was like a thing back in the day which was like the the battle between the t1s and the comcast of the world as they came up absolutely eventually it became uh comcast won the battle the t1s are still out there they’re still there absolutely they’re still out there and they’re in omaha they’re in you know south dakota and they’re still there fighting true you
Speaker 1 | 18:18.463
rural america still uses t1s yeah yeah for sure okay so when watch guard firewalls and and what did that yeah so each side had a watch guard firewall and now i am tying everybody back to me so i can have a networking between locations sounds like fun it
Speaker 0 | 18:36.157
absolutely was it was the the next step in the evolution did anyone notice did anyone notice it yet at what point did it to you where someone like wow did anyone ever just say wow like bris knocked it out of the park like seriously we’ve got this now did you have you ever been congratulated i’m still waiting on that i was still waiting like hey you know thanks for thanks for all this fast internet and like thanks for the things didn’t go down like hey this week nothing happened thank you you know like uh no but seriously like was anyone ever like hey oh absolutely you know the
Speaker 1 | 19:16.955
The lady that hired me, she is technology-based, even though she’s our accountant or, you know. CFO. CEO, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 19:28.639
Not CEO. It’s always good when the accountant and technologist get along. And there’s a lot to be said about that. And if they don’t, then that’s kind of like red flag number one. Like, is there a wall between accounting and IT department? If there is, then that’s a problem. Because when… accounting and IT are on the same page. Yes. That’s like a huge kind of, I’m always looking for, I don’t know, tips, best practices for. you know, IT leaders in general, one, speak the language of business, right? You said free advertising. Anytime you can put, I don’t know, free advertising or make more money or help the sales department or drive more revenue. I don’t know any of these things. Like, can you just, you know, well, why should we put in this new firewall? Because it’s going to drive more revenue. Well, how? Well, then you got to think of some reasons, but just because it’s going to drive more revenue because it’s just, it’s too complicated for you. You know, this is for the audience. You know what I mean? Trust me, it’s going. But anytime you can add those things in, great. And then the accountant is the one that’s really going to scrutinize it and like fire holes and everything. So if you get the accountant to sell the deal for you ahead of time, man, you’re way ahead of the game.
Speaker 1 | 20:44.972
Absolutely. And that’s where me and her, we were always on the same page, 90, 95% of the time, probably. And it really helps when I can go to her and say, we need to do this. can you help me sell it? The answer is always yes, I can help you sell that.
Speaker 0 | 21:05.450
Nice. And the word sell is used?
Speaker 1 | 21:09.353
Absolutely. I sell things to management. That’s how I look at it. I’m selling you a product that is going to do A, B, or C.
Speaker 0 | 21:22.404
I see everyone’s in the job of selling.
Speaker 1 | 21:24.906
Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 21:26.588
Everyone is selling something. I mean, everybody, I don’t care who you are. If you say I’m not selling something, you are, you’re just trying to sell me on the fact that you don’t sell anything. Absolutely. Can you think of a hard sell that you had to make that got approved?
Speaker 1 | 21:45.773
Oh man, spent a few of them.
Speaker 0 | 21:47.873
Or maybe didn’t get approved. I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 21:52.735
Hard sell. I remember Probably about five years ago when I wanted to, and this is fast forwarding a long ways, wanted to update our data center. And we were running on some servers that I built and there was nothing wrong with them. They were still running everything. Everything was running well.
Speaker 0 | 22:13.573
How many RUs is space in this data center?
Speaker 1 | 22:16.674
I’m in one rack and I’m probably using, today I’m probably using about three quarters of a rack.
Speaker 0 | 22:22.715
Okay. Okay, so we want to replace some blades or what? What are we doing? Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 22:27.790
so I want to take… I had basically a four-blade server that I had my VMs running on. And I told you this was a long time forward.
Speaker 0 | 22:39.619
It’s fairly advanced already.
Speaker 1 | 22:41.960
Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 22:42.961
We went from main to data center. Okay, VMs running five years ago. So this means you’re well ahead of the game. So, okay. Yes.
Speaker 1 | 22:52.220
So, and like I said, this is stuff I built. I had people come in and this is, you know, they’re not playing any means like technology that you wouldn’t see, you know, but a lot of times you get a salesperson coming in and if it’s not Cisco, HP or Dell, they’re like, Oh, this is like Frankenstein. You like put this together in your basement or something. And it was nothing like that. But if you’re not named brand, they think that, you know, they got to. they got a hard job of selling or maybe they don’t have a hard job of selling. But I wanted to, we partner with, and that’s really what makes my job easy is finding good partners. And I like to find good local partners. And I have a good local partner here in the Oklahoma City area. And they helped me with, you know, staying on top of things and monitoring all the equipment and all the sites. But I wanted to put in. Flash storage and Cisco servers and Cisco Nexus switches in the background to hook it all up. I’m talking, it was for us, for IT anyway, I think it was probably between $250,000 and $300,000 of equipment and setup.
Speaker 0 | 24:13.564
Right, right.
Speaker 1 | 24:14.965
So that was a hard sell. I remember this summer I did. proposed this it was months it took me an all summer to to get it sold and finally when they when they said yeah we can do that then the implementation and you know signing off on the project again and that was a whole nother step
Speaker 0 | 24:36.532
but i remember remember it taking a long time to get it sold what were the considering that people usually only remember about three points of anything What were, well, first of all, how many end users do you manage company-wide?
Speaker 1 | 24:56.772
I manage approximately 150 end users.
Speaker 0 | 25:00.099
Okay. So just trying to think of how I would break this down. You said 250,000? Yeah. So it’s only 1,600 per employee divided by 12 months is $138 a month for each employee. Can we not invest that to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and increase revenue? Again, increase revenue and speed things up. But what were the three major… Major… I mean, I guess what were some of the major kind of bullet points or selling points as to why? I’m assuming Flash Store, I’m assuming speed.
Speaker 1 | 25:37.357
Speed is going to be probably the biggest point that I’m selling at this point. Flash is going to improve productivity for your end users exponentially.
Speaker 0 | 25:48.501
Almost instantaneously, yeah.
Speaker 1 | 25:49.821
Absolutely. When you’re clicking on something, you’re going to notice that it’s faster.
Speaker 0 | 25:56.823
So $138 a month divided by… Well, let’s see. What did I say? 180. Let’s just round up and be conservative. 200 divided by four weeks is 50 bucks a week divided by 40 hours in the week, $1.25 an hour. So we need to save $1.25 an hour or something like that.
Speaker 1 | 26:22.492
And that’s when you think of it that way. I probably didn’t think of it exactly that way. But giving somebody a dollar 25 back every hour, that’s not out of the question doable when you, when you’re speeding things up,
Speaker 0 | 26:40.868
when you’re just sitting there.
Speaker 1 | 26:42.710
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 26:43.511
You know, literally just, and that’s only one year. I’m sure you had a five year,
Speaker 1 | 26:49.416
like five years.
Speaker 0 | 26:51.497
Yeah. You know what I mean? So now we can just divide that by five and really now it’s 25 cents an hour. Right. So. The, I’m a numbers guy. I like breaking it down into the ridiculous, the absolute ridiculous, like really, we can’t give someone a 25 cent hour raise to give them this much more. But would you rather have 25 cents out an hour raise? Or would you just rather when you click on something, it actually pulls up?
Speaker 1 | 27:17.223
Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 27:17.963
I would say, I would just rather my work be much easier, please.
Speaker 1 | 27:22.425
Well, that’s what I think that’s what your, your employer would want to say is, Hey, you know, what’s what do we get back from this investment? And my response was probably when they click on something, it’s going to happen. Right now they’re clicking on it. They’re waiting a few seconds. So that’s a few seconds every minute, every hour of eight hour day. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 27:46.439
And then with context switching and other things, you could really bring in psychologists and do a whole ROI on this. You could really get real crazy with it if you wanted. but I’m sure those studies have already been done. There’s some data scientist out there that someone’s paying some money to crunch all these numbers on right now. And Facebook has taken advantage of it and advertised to that person in those few seconds. We know when those, while they’re waiting for this, that we can feed them this advertisement to work for, to work for your competition. Okay. So what happened?
Speaker 1 | 28:17.744
So once we get that approved and get it rolled out, it actually, not only made things faster, it made my job easier because now everything is more manageable from, you know, remotely. I don’t have to go into the data center as much as I can just log in remotely, do all these things,
Speaker 0 | 28:37.522
restart servers,
Speaker 1 | 28:38.622
restart hardware. I say servers, I think VMs. But occasionally you’ve got to reboot a piece of hardware. And some of your old technology, that meant going to the data center and flipping the switch. And now it’s log into the data center and click a button and I can reboot the hardware.
Speaker 0 | 28:59.886
Okay. So logging in, clicking a button to reboot, not having to roll a truck, end users are working faster. What else?
Speaker 1 | 29:09.888
Uptime. That was probably.
Speaker 0 | 29:11.789
Did you have downtime? How much downtime did you guys have?
Speaker 1 | 29:16.330
Well, downtime. My downtime was probably measured in. connectivity 98% of the time. How many,
Speaker 0 | 29:25.421
and what kind of connectivity outages are you saying ISP outages?
Speaker 1 | 29:28.643
ISP outages. So AT&T Austin area, somebody cut the fiber.
Speaker 0 | 29:35.025
Right.
Speaker 1 | 29:36.086
So now what do you do?
Speaker 0 | 29:37.547
You call 1-800-GO-POUND-SAND. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 29:39.888
exactly.
Speaker 0 | 29:40.828
Call 1-800-AT&T option two, option three, option five, option six.
Speaker 1 | 29:45.850
And wait. And then you’ll get somebody from India.
Speaker 0 | 29:49.224
who you can barely understand and hopefully you can get your point across to your circuits down first of all are the is the is the router plugged in did you reboot it man yes doesn’t have power yes
Speaker 1 | 30:05.720
Oh, interesting.
Speaker 0 | 30:08.261
Okay, so ISP out of use. That’s really kind of here nor there. That’s like a, but I have a T1. Yeah. I have an SLA. I haven’t, we didn’t tell you that that SLA, remember that 99.9? I love that 99.9999% uptime because really what that means is every single customer this ISP has average downtime over a 12-month period, it’s always going to be 99.999. That’s just another numbers game. The only point of the SLA is to get someone to repair it fast. That’s the only point of it. Stop talking about uptime. Seriously, people, stop talking about uptime. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when you go down and how fast it gets turned back up and do you have redundancy. So anyways, your uptime, your downtime was solved. I’m thinking more along just in general. Are we able to take on more projects now? Are we able to move on to the next thing? I think the more people invest in technology, I think you would experience more exponential growth. So the more we kind of push the budget a little bit in technology, I think you would see some kind of measurable results from, again, we’re going to make more money.
Speaker 1 | 31:29.944
Yeah, when I look at it, if I could make, end user A better at his job, whether that’s speed and efficiency. That means I may not need user B.
Speaker 0 | 31:43.023
I’m wondering if I can invest in more technology.
Speaker 1 | 31:49.846
It isn’t always about hiring and firing people, but maybe you’re looking at, hey, we need to grow this so we can do more jobs. So there’s two ways of doing that. you can either hire people or get better at what you’re doing. So you can get more jobs.
Speaker 0 | 32:07.376
Yeah, that’s like the Netflix thing. Like, should we hire a bunch of software developers or should we just hire less people but pay them like five times as much and just take the people from, you know, whatever, the other companies?
Speaker 1 | 32:23.610
Yeah, they’re good.
Speaker 0 | 32:26.412
If I was to just say, hey, Chris, you got an extra million dollars this year budgeted for employees. Do we call them employees? Whatever. Yeah, I call them employees. Head count. The worst thing to call your employees. Head count. We gained a head count today. Okay, cool. I gave you a million dollars. Where would you hire people and what would you have them do?
Speaker 1 | 33:03.452
Today, I would probably either look at hiring a company or somebody whose expertise is in security. I think downtime in this day, in 2021, almost 2022, we’re measuring. people in, how much time are they getting pulled away from their work? Whether that’s Facebook, email, Twitter, any social media. And what does that do to our network when they’re on the type of software during the day? Email, you know, email is, I think, the worst, maybe the best communication tool of this century. It’s also worse for security. because there’s somebody pushing something in your inbox that you shouldn’t be clicking on.
Speaker 0 | 34:04.035
Yeah. I’m going back to the mail to be honest with you. I’m going back to mail. Like when I need to communicate with like it guys, it’s almost, it’s, it’s completely pointless and futile to try and use email to get them to click on something like even on my website, right? Like if it’s like, take this quiz, if there’s any buttons to click on, it’s, it’s really almost. completely futile to get some, I even get people that like enter in their email. That’s like, good try, like nice try at Gmail. You know what I mean? Like, like you must be crazy at gmail.com, you know, like, yeah. Um, so yeah, I’m going back to the mail when it comes to it, you guys, I’m going to send packages and yellow envelopes. Uh,
Speaker 1 | 34:49.399
yeah, I, I get the stuff in the mail all the time. It’s like, uh, you know,
Speaker 0 | 34:56.243
you’re free.
Speaker 1 | 34:57.624
whatever is inside.
Speaker 0 | 35:01.415
you know,
Speaker 1 | 35:01.715
Amazon, if you can have 15 minutes of your time. Oh,
Speaker 0 | 35:05.918
that’s good.
Speaker 1 | 35:07.139
That’s always what I’m getting now is that, you know, I think 10 years ago was coffee. I’ll buy you coffee. I’ll send you a $5 gift card to Starbucks. If you give me 15 minutes, now it’s up to $25 at Amazon.
Speaker 0 | 35:19.527
Let’s see. I have a really big Amazon bill. So, um, let’s see. Um, security vendors, telecom vendors, it vendors. My address is, 11 Mountain View Road, South Windsor, Connecticut. You can put Phil Howard attention, dissecting popular IT nerds. I am accepting Amazon gift cards for five minutes of your time.
Speaker 1 | 35:46.015
All right. You can be surprised. The next 30, like 15 of them.
Speaker 0 | 35:53.217
I see we have some mutual connections on LinkedIn. And I would like to talk to you about our new SD-WAN program. Everything about SD-WAN, but maybe I don’t. Okay, so you would hire more people for security. That’s great. That seems reasonable. That seems like that’s the answer you should have.
Speaker 1 | 36:20.900
I’ll take you to the real-world scenario. This summer. Security has become forefront for every director of IT, I believe, in the last 18 months. So this summer, actually, it was probably last winter, the subject got broached. And we’re like, how can we improve security-wise? And what can Chris do to improve us? By the way, I never get budget. How can you do this for the least amount of money?
Speaker 0 | 36:49.156
Yeah. Yeah. How can you do more with the same that we gave you already? Or how can you do more with less? Of course. Yes. But that’s how it begins.
Speaker 1 | 37:00.009
That that’s absolutely the whole point.
Speaker 0 | 37:02.372
Right. No one’s going to say, Hey, um, we want to throw a bunch of. new money. No one’s ever going to do that. That’s the point. That’s the point of selling IT. It has to be sold. Everything has to be sold.
Speaker 1 | 37:19.887
Yes. This summer, I started looking at actual contractors to help me with building up A1 Freeman’s security platforms. I’m not going to… They’re not paying you or me. So I’m not throwing any names out there, but we settled on one out of the three that I looked at. And
Speaker 0 | 37:43.725
I’ll take Amazon gift cards from them.
Speaker 1 | 37:46.127
Absolutely. Arctic Wolf.
Speaker 0 | 37:49.610
Arctic Wolf, 11 Mountain View Road, South Windsor, Connecticut. Anyways, go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 37:55.374
So we settled on them and I started rolling that out in October. And I just actually this week. But how I sold this project was we can either hire two dedicated security professionals at $125,000 to $150,000 per year.
Speaker 0 | 38:15.217
Right.
Speaker 1 | 38:16.398
Or we can hire one company at $75,000 a year that dedicates two people to us to maintain A1 Freeman’s security across the network, PCs, all of our internet-facing devices. And they’re going to monitor all that 100%, 24 hours a day, 365 days a week. And I’m going to be their first call, first email, or first text.
Speaker 0 | 38:43.310
Yeah. If something goes wrong. I’m a fan of that. I’m a fan of that for multiple reasons. And I think more security people out there should be a fan of this as well. Especially for a job that is a thankless, you can only fail at job. Yes,
Speaker 1 | 38:58.923
absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 39:00.084
Right? Because when nothing’s going wrong. Like, okay, cool. Yeah. When something goes wrong, it’s your fault. That’s it. Right. There’s no, like, there’s no kind of, that’s just how it is. So why get stuck, you know, handcuffed to this kind of like, you know, almost thankless security role, you know, when we should have these. I like the idea of a, of a. I guess if you’d want to call it contract here, MSP, security, MSP, you know, whatever we’re going to name these people. But they can be held accountable. Another company can be held accountable. They have to stay up to date. They can’t fall asleep at the wheel, so to speak. They can’t get complacent. They can’t be just the guy walking around in the company any day. And there’s something to be said about certain areas of the IT department that need to be outsourced. And then for all the guys that are going to yell and scream and say, oh, well, now my job is being replaced or, you know, for all those people that are going to get mad, that’s where, no, that’s why we need to learn to speak the language of business. That’s why the new IT director, the new IT leader, so to speak, is very well connected with the vision and alignment of the business, which is unique to every business.
Speaker 1 | 40:17.160
Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 40:17.701
You know, that’s why you have, that’s why you have a job where you’re at, right? It’s not to just be the… you know, implementer of, you know, tools, even though that is part of the job, it’s like picking the right tools, partnering with the right tools to ensure the vision of the company is achieved and competitors are laid to waste, I guess, kept by the wayside. Sure. Future pace, outpace, monopolize whatever we want to do.
Speaker 1 | 40:53.547
Right.
Speaker 0 | 40:54.928
I still haven’t figured out this meta thing or whatever the meta with Facebook. I love the, you know, the memes.
Speaker 1 | 41:01.630
I’m trying to think why are we rebranding Facebook to meta? And I want to say Facebook has always been the, you know, the older generation of users on Facebook. And I’m thinking there may be the rebranding trying to get it into more of the new generation.
Speaker 0 | 41:22.479
I see the crash coming. I could see a failure coming. I’d love to see what Gary Vee has to say about this. He’s good at predicting this type of stuff. He probably had something to say about this. Anyhow. Okay. So we hired the security staff. How would you measure success in that area?
Speaker 1 | 41:49.872
Well, I mean, it’s like you said. It’s kind of a thankless job because… Success is measured in lack of events. I mean, that’s how you measure security.
Speaker 0 | 42:02.786
Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1 | 42:03.747
If there’s no problems, then you’re probably being successful or you’re not monitoring it well enough and you’re not seeing. And I think that’s what it came down to for me was I can’t do my job and security and telecommunications manager and do it effectively. So my only choice was either to hire somebody, which was going to be expensive and hard at this point.
Speaker 0 | 42:32.497
And another person to manage. And you might make the right decision the first time. You might hire the wrong person. And then we’re going to the evolving door. And it takes eight months to a year to get someone up to speed with the change of security pace and all that. You can think about the reasons as to why not to do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 42:48.748
absolutely. So, you know, I… look at the companies and I look at how it’s going to be managed from my standpoint. And I have to pick the company that I can work with every day. And I think that is going to be either easily managed or not take as much of my time to manage. And that’s where we chose Arctic Wolf as a company because they basically manage it all except for when something does go wrong. And they’re saying, you know, we’re going to help you with that. We’re going to tell you exactly what to do, but we’re not going to do that. We’re not going to put fingers on keyboards, but we’re going to tell you how to do it.
Speaker 0 | 43:32.882
Yeah, vastly underrated aspect of vendors and partners, which is the vibe, the vibe that you have with their team. Absolutely. I did like this, you know, I’ve spoken with a lot of IT directors over the past two decades and I’ve done even specific. I guess you would say, I don’t call it a survey. I don’t know what I’d call it. But if I was to ask, and I’ve spoken about this before, if I was to boil down the top three to five challenges that every IT director has on the face of this earth, it’s only three to five. It’s not 20. It’s not 10. It’s not six. Five is even pushing it. The top… three to five we’ll say let’s see what the top i’ll give it to four if i had to think of the top four that come to mind one of them is legacy technology So silos, right? And people have all different names for it. Because I took all this like, you know, years of like recorded sessions and questions asked and everything. And I basically took it into a spreadsheet and divided all the words into like five columns, right? And so legacy technology is one of these problems. And it comes up, there’s many words for it. Silos, end of life, whatever it is, it all comes down to. legacy technology and managing these various different parts. That’s one. Get one is training and users. And that comes in numerous various different ways, whether it be, you know, the language of technology and training and users on the new CRM and getting buy-in and not getting, you know, a fallback. And that goes back to the AOL email, like you talked about, like we’re trying to teach them to not use the AOL email anymore, right? That’s a big struggle. The other one is… A decision direction overwhelm, just being not knowing like how to take decision in a direction. And it sounds like you have the leadership piece there done well, but you came into a, you know, years ago into a department that was just like a wild place. And like, you know, where do I begin? Like that, that’s the other one. And the fourth one is vendors, vendor communication. So it could be vendors that don’t respond. It could be it. I put in a ticket and it takes two days to a week to get a response. And I found all these different words for it. The vibe wasn’t there. And if they had good vendors, the word was like, they just like, they vibe with our IT department. When I call them or work with them, their guys and our guys, it’s like, we’re like the same people. Like we’re on the same team, so to speak. It’s not like, it’s not a different language. It’s not like. people pointing fingers and blame game. It’s not a person that sends a ticket to a tier two, to a tier three. And then finally I get to talk to the right person. It’s not calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAND, pressing one, two, three and getting, you know what I mean? And then speaking to someone that doesn’t understand or know that I know, or even understand that I know what an IP address is, for example, or a slash 28 or a slash 27. Like they already know that I know that language because we speak the same language. Sure. So that might’ve been a long winded.
Speaker 1 | 46:59.512
No, I would definitely agree with you on that. Vibing with your vendors or, you know, I would call building relationships with vendors where I know you, you know me, you know, the playground I play. And you know what products to offer me and when to offer them to make you successful and us successful, because that’s what it is. It’s a partnership between companies that both want to be successful.
Speaker 0 | 47:26.506
Yeah. And I think I’m trying to think of what the fifth one was. The fifth one might have had something to do around with like, you know, balancing a budget and dealing with, you know, like selling to upper management, like all those kind of like fall into a kind of like a fifth bucket as well. But when it comes to IT, that’s it. It’s five things. You do five, you know what I mean? You’ve got five major challenges to overcome and hopefully you don’t have all five. Hopefully you’ve got, you know, like two.
Speaker 1 | 47:49.215
Or if you do have all five, hopefully you don’t have to deal with them all at one time.
Speaker 0 | 47:54.797
Yeah, you can start knocking them out. you know um been an absolute pleasure uh having you on the show if yes sir is um is there anything that anything that you’re dying to that you were that came up while we were talking that you were dying to let out piece of advice anything is there something to be said with um there’s there’s something to be said about loyalty and being at the same company for so long or is there absolutely you know we can i can definitely uh say something to that find a company you like to work for
Speaker 1 | 48:24.774
Find a company that when you go into your boss’s office, it’s not a chore. You’re not going, you’re not browbeat 100% of the time. I’m not going to say you’re going to get browbeat some of the time, but, you know, enjoy talking to your management and your employees. Because if you’re not happy, you’re not willing to stay. You’re always looking for happiness in the world. That may not be what everybody’s looking for. But, yeah. Um, if you’re loyal to a company, I would say generally, you know, to a point they’re going to be loyal back to you.
Speaker 0 | 49:01.575
Well, when you’ve been at the same company for 20 years, that might say something more about you about, it might say more about attitude than anything. You know what I mean? Sometimes it’s about just being grateful for what you have. You know what I mean? Absolutely. To be around the people that you have, you know,
Speaker 1 | 49:17.640
uh, people look at it like, just like you did. You’re like, wow, almost two decades. You’ve been there because most, most people aren’t. had jobs two decades anymore. You’re lucky to be at a job for five years, let alone two or three.
Speaker 0 | 49:31.492
um before you’re moving on trying to find another another hill to climb or if that company is yeah some some companies just aren’t even in just change too fast and morph quickly merge merge with other people the there was another there was something else there to be said why can i not remember what it is the well anyways what else did you anything else any piece of advice for anyone out there listening uh if you want to be
Speaker 1 | 50:00.340
In technology or be a director of IT in technology, embrace change.
Speaker 0 | 50:06.605
Yeah, of course.
Speaker 1 | 50:08.567
It’s always going to be about change. And I still look at it two decades into this job, and I had previous jobs to that. But I’m always looking for the next thing to change to. I’m always on my desktops. I’m always on the leading edge of the operating system. I love Windows. Some people probably hate it. I love Windows. I’m already using Windows 11. I was using Windows 11 probably a year ago when it first came out and you could beta test it. So I’m always trying to embrace the change and try to find the next thing to change to.
Speaker 0 | 50:42.643
That’s going to get a lot of, that’s going to allow us to get a lot of viral activity on LinkedIn. If I just put up, I love Windows 11, we’re sure to get viral activity. I don’t understand how it works, but I put this post up on, LinkedIn that was like, you know, Windows XP or NT or version, whatever. I can’t remember what it was, like never forget. And it got like 43,000 views. How? I don’t know. Because someone behind the scenes, the live people at LinkedIn watching this actually promoted that post over others. I know they did it. But I love Windows 11. I was on it. That’s going to be the, why I love Windows 11. That will be the title of this podcast. absolutely nothing to do with what we talked about the majority of the time whatsoever. But everyone will listen to it and they’ll be like, what do you mean? I love Windows.
Speaker 1 | 51:34.864
There’s nothing about Windows 11, that whole conversation.
Speaker 0 | 51:40.847
Thank you very much for being on the show. Appreciate it. Thank you, Fred. It’s been great.
