Speaker 0 | 00:07.026
Welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. This is the first podcast that I’m doing in the new studio. I’m hoping it’s not echoing too much in the background. Maybe I need, I might need to soundproof this a little more. We are talking with Chachi Gallo and we have, he was never ever in his entire life ever run into any Happy Days references. which is a surprise which is surprising i’m very excited to have you on the show with generac did i pronounce that right i hope i’m doing that right i only know that because i’m a customer i am a customer of yours you guys are the ones that i pull my which i should have maybe i should have one buried in the ground but i do have to pull it out of my garage and start up the generator to keep my refrigerator going and uh i don’t know heating in hvac in the winter times here in connecticut so welcome to the show, sir. Thank you so much for being on. You have a very fun history that goes back to at least 2001. I would assume that you remember Y2K of some sorts. Any fond memories that come back? How did you get into this wildness? I don’t know. What was your first computer? And I don’t know, what do you play around with as a kid, you know, other than maybe fireworks and stuff?
Speaker 1 | 01:20.021
Yeah, so I didn’t really get into computers until probably late 90s, early 2000s. At least ones that, you know, like I own myself. All the way back to high school, there was some form of computing that I was interested in. We had a local high school here that did it. It was a trade school called Milwaukee Tech that it was a trade school. So you pick like plumbing, electrical, something along those sides. They had a class called print. So it was the only class that had computers. So I was excited to get involved in those, but it was very focused on like laying out magazine ads and those kinds of things or magazine articles.
Speaker 0 | 01:52.225
Marketing type, get out the scissors. Were we still getting out scissors and glue sticks back then?
Speaker 1 | 01:56.740
Sure, sure was because it was just transitioning from that into the computer. So it was a it was a good, you know, introduction to that.
Speaker 0 | 02:03.081
That’s amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 02:04.122
it was. And it was amazing what they did at the time. And to think now, like people physically did that work that’s now been completely replaced by computers. It’s just it’s astonishing.
Speaker 0 | 02:14.145
In our lifetime. Yeah. Like less than a century ago.
Speaker 1 | 02:18.046
Yeah. I mean, I didn’t I didn’t have the Internet when I was younger. It wasn’t, you know, a thing in high school that didn’t come until later on. So. It was pretty interesting. And then early in my career, I had a quality assurance job at a metal stamping company. And within that company, I was the go-to person when the IT help desk was closed because it was a smaller company. So, we only had IT help desk for like two days a week. So, everybody would come to me and I became friends with that IT help desk person who worked at Milwaukee PC, which is a localized company here, kind of like computer parts company focused on, you know, building out PCs. And he… One day he knew how much I was into computers and how basically how quick I was in learning it. He literally showed up at my door with a computer and said, I’m going to show you how to build this thing. We’re going to play games together. And it was just love for technology ever since. I built my gaming PC. I built websites to support gaming, my love of gaming and gaming glands and those kind of things. And it just kind of expanded from there.
Speaker 0 | 03:16.901
And it was so to me, it seems like it was more fun back then. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t married and had a bunch of kids and I had time to do that type of stuff. But I don’t know. Let’s just go back to the games. What were we playing back then?
Speaker 1 | 03:29.376
I couldn’t agree with you more. I think it was more fun. And I think it’s because just like anything, like even with a car, cars were easier to change the oil and do the things on your car back then. It was more enjoyable when you could do everything and repair on your own. Couldn’t agree more with that statement. But yeah, back then it was all about half-life and early. or early days of Counter-Strike when I started. Even was in a clan, played in some leagues, was all about first-person shooters back then. And even to this day, I still hop on the Xbox or the PC and play some of the newer games that are out and those kind of things. But that was my go-to game back then. The Half-Life, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, early days of World of Warcraft. Those were my games.
Speaker 0 | 04:12.497
Oh, man, you’re younger than me. Yeah, I was like… heroes quest 8-bit graphics on a 386 and like let’s see ultima 8 that was like i was really mad because there was kids that could run that game and my 386 couldn’t run that yeah and it was i got i got into some some games before that but those are the ones that like yeah i got nostalgia like nostalgia like like if you have kids you’re like hey let’s get this like uh See this thing? This is like all the tower. This is a PhD and we used to like, you know, upgrade RAM and stuff. And here’s like, this is called a CD-ROM. And this is like. And no, it’s not the cup holder for, you know, it’s not the coffee holder that some of the end users would like. Hey, my cup holder’s not working. I’ve heard that. Well,
Speaker 1 | 05:00.592
even now, I gave my godson’s a controller for their iPad. So they had a game controller to play their games. And they never used it. They’re so used to touch controls now that they don’t even like using controllers. You know, these are like the eight-year-olds that are growing up. I think there’s going to be a day where controllers aren’t even used or mouse and keyboards. It’s all touch interface or…
Speaker 0 | 05:20.489
virtual reality interface for the environment yeah when we flew to so the whole family we flew to morocco and i knew it’s going to be like a long trip on the plane i’m like okay and i’ve got seven of the eight kids went with us right so because one of them’s married and out of the house so i’m like okay get ready seven kids on the plane what do we do and i was like oh emulators let’s get on amazon and let’s get oh it’s only 20 bucks for an nes handheld game boy lookalike with 500 games loaded on it or whatever i was like give me five of those two of those three of those yeah and uh yeah i think maybe i was more excited about like some of these like emulators and that and then you can actually get a pretty good emulator for like 100 bucks to a little run like all 16 and it looks like a like a game boy almost yeah yeah and you could run like original mortal combat and street fighter and stuff like that and yeah And I get excited about it. And then I really quickly realized that I don’t have, I don’t have a lot of time for this, even though I would love it. So, but for the plane flights, I’m going to, I splurge on that.
Speaker 1 | 06:23.705
I’ll tell you, Phil, I’m the worst. I buy, I buy all the stuff. I get the headsets, you know, I got a quest, I got a valve index. I’ve got a steam deck. I buy all that stuff with this, these intentions of, Oh, I’m going to use this thing and it’s going to be great. And it’s portable and I can play all the time. And I just, I mean, I don’t have the time and it’s just sad.
Speaker 0 | 06:40.714
It’s like the old IBM keyboards to the clicky, the clicky keyboards. You know, that’s why I think the gaming keyboards are so. popular because you got to have that like click you got to have that like you know like this little flat thin thing that doesn’t make the click doesn’t just doesn’t do it for me so okay really cool i’m a huge fan of trade schools i think that that’s the way i think maybe because there’s such a shortage of me being able to find good electricians and plumbers and everything and then when you find a really good one you’re like oh yeah i’ve got a fleet of eight vans and everything and they’re like this entrepreneur that’s like doing really well and he’s a plumber or he’s an electrician or he’s whatever so what else was going on that trade school back then just as a you know again take you back in time and nostalgia i mean do you not work on cars or anything and change headers and do you know head gaskets and all that type of stuff or anything like that so yeah when i mean when i was younger i was i was changing my own oil and you know alternator and all that good stuff um oh the alternator the alternator yeah
Speaker 1 | 07:36.740
i’ve always been able to kind of do my own things there but that’s just my My mindset has always been, how does this thing work and can I do it myself kind of thing? And that’s why I’m in IT. That’s all you do all day is how does this thing work and how do I make something work better or how do I get data from A to B? It’s like that skill set is needed. So to me, the trades are where it’s at. It’s that figure it out on your own, improvise in the moment, be a quick thinker, judge things quickly. You have to do that in that skill set, whether you’re making a cabinet.
Speaker 0 | 08:06.749
putting in plumbing doing electrical work or working on i.t equipment to me that’s just fun too to me that’s just more like hands-on fun like living life versus this kind of like other kind of alternate like stress world of career and everything which i guess that’s where i’m at running this podcast with entrepreneurship and i guess we have to be very curious and creative in that standpoint so yeah absolutely like even nowadays like a lot of the the
Speaker 1 | 08:29.558
younger generation isn’t interested in the trades but i think they most people just like i would regret not getting involved in those trades when you start to own a home, because then you wish you could do it all because you start seeing what it costs, what they make, you know, how hard it is to get done. And some of it’s so simple that you wish you, you know, you would have paid attention when you were younger. And a lot of that, you don’t learn until you get a home.
Speaker 0 | 08:49.004
The art of drywall. That’s an art form. It really is mudding and taping, mudding and taping. That’s an art form. And then yes, plumbing fittings and all of this. So what does this all have to do with IT? Um, anyways, you know, fast forward to whatever, how big is your team?
Speaker 1 | 09:04.249
My team currently globally, when you include all of our mergers and acquisitions and what they refer to as the dotted line reporting structure, it can fall anywhere between 60 to 70 employees. My direct reports are for fortified managers of those independent teams.
Speaker 0 | 09:20.097
So on the show, the theme, what we’ve noticed is that, and you tell me if these numbers are right, on average, the average end user to IT support staff ratio is about 1 to 100. If you’re doing… If you have one to less than that, that’s good. You’ve got, I guess, IT heavy organization. If you’ve got more than that, then either you’re very, very efficient or working in an organization that isn’t IT heavy, or you’re in an organization that IT is a severe cost center. Would you say that that statement is accurate? And I don’t know, thoughts on that?
Speaker 1 | 09:51.855
I think one to 100, I think every IT leader in the world would love that number to match. I don’t think that’s the truth. I think a lot of it is closer to like two to 400 for everyone. And again, it really depends on what you’re judging as the IT resource. If you’re, you know, cause you’ve got so many layers, right? You’ve got your help desk resource versus your application resource versus your server resource and all that. So I think it’s, I think it’s rare to find somebody that’s that equal of a ratio. I see it more between one to 200 to 400 employees being serviced.
Speaker 0 | 10:21.518
And there’s a lot to do. And there’s a lot of moving parts every day. And if I go read the Reddit forums, you’ll see people that are like, there’s just so much and we’re expected to know a lot and all these type of things. So how do you manage that? How do you manage these things and these moving parts in the time?
Speaker 1 | 10:35.082
Yeah. So managing it is, you know, I’ll be honest, it’s tough because in our organization, we deal not only with our internal customers, we have our external customers, but also we deal with a lot of M&As and managing their resources within those M&As that may not be integrated into systems or platforms that we have in place. So we try. really to focus on our operating model and standardizing processes, procedures, information to make it easy to manage those resources. And then we deal in a world where there’s always exceptions. So you try to handle the majority of what you can with 80% with the standards and procedures, and then the 20% you have to figure out as you go. Things are going to come up, small mergers and acquisitions come into play where we may buy a software company or a company that makes a specific product or part that we want to integrate into our ecosystem. And then we have to handle those as they come up and determine the path to get them the most productive or the ability to share information with us.
Speaker 0 | 11:34.239
Painful, painful, painful. Their ERP is this, our ERP is this. Can we either work together and do some kind of low code, no code, duct tape them together and make it work until we can somehow do all this merging of data and all this type of stuff?
Speaker 1 | 11:48.208
Yeah, that’s exactly it. Literally what I deal with was just on a call today. It’s almost identical to what you just said.
Speaker 0 | 11:54.693
You can almost pick these painful processes. Like you can look at like when there was like a big, you know, announcement or like a public relations announcement in the industry. I don’t know, maybe like a VMware purchase by Broadcom or something like that. You can almost pick the customer service pains for them ahead of time. You can be like, ready for this ride guys.
Speaker 2 | 12:16.868
At Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never-ending. From unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It’s like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try once patients even on the best of days. So whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office support team and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime.
Speaker 0 | 13:08.536
So you mentioned you mentioned being very guarding, which I think this is maybe one of the kindest, most high character things I’ve heard. You’ve been very guarding of your people’s time and defending your people’s time. What did you and that was just us chatting like, you know, last week or whatever. Yeah. What do you mean by that? And how do you do that?
Speaker 1 | 13:26.961
Yeah. So the the number one thing when I came into Generac was the pattern I noticed was IT was that dumping ground that everything that that people didn’t want to either deal with or couldn’t really understand. They just. they said, oh, that’s an IT problem, you know, and that could have been technology, compliance, whatever it was, it just, it fell on IT. And I came in from an understanding of what it really takes to run an IT staff and what is needed of them. And the number one thing is understanding what’s coming into the team and managing their time because their time is the most important thing. They have a finite amount of time every week to dedicate to different projects or requests. So I came in and told them, I’m your, I’m your shield, not your sword. I’m here to defend your time. And so I gave them what I like to say is I gave them the power of no. And so they were allowed to tell users, no, we can’t do that right now, but let’s figure out a path to get to a yes.
Speaker 0 | 14:16.852
Can you give me an example of a no? Can you give me an example of a request that would get a no? It doesn’t have to be specific. It could be completely fictitious. I’m just saying I want I would love for everyone out there listening. It’s OK to tell people no. And here’s the things that you say no to. And that could just be because, hey, this is what’s on our roadmap right now. That’s not. So this is a no. But. What are these type of requests that I’m just curious what kind of crazy requests that these end users are making? We should have like a database of crazy requests and users make.
Speaker 1 | 14:44.883
Yeah, well, it’s and it’s tough to define that. Right. Because I can’t I can’t say the request is ever crazy because it may be a great idea, but it’s so impactful to the organization that you just can’t you just can’t do that. For example,
Speaker 0 | 14:57.128
you make a time suck like it might have a big time suck.
Speaker 1 | 15:00.049
It could have a huge time suck. It could complete a complete. change of the standardization of like a supply chain software, for example, may come in at one a new new software, which is this is a constant pattern, you get a new leader in a new group that’s used to a software platform, and they want to change immediately when they come into an organization without learning about anything that’s currently in place and how they can utilize that. So I really try to encourage any leader outside of it to consider focusing on the process that’s that’s going on in the organization and the tool set we currently have and how they can take advantage of that. Instead of immediately coming in and saying it has to be something different. Their name and make that thing happen. And that’s not the way you should do that with IT.
Speaker 0 | 15:40.066
I like that. And I expand some more on people trying to make their name because they want to make a change. And we come in, we see a big change or something. I mean, this is, this almost sounds like, you know what this sounds like? It sounds like. Does IT always have a seat at the executive round table in larger organizations? Maybe not, because there may be a lot of disparate moving parts. And like you say, if you’re in a company with a lot of mergers and acquisitions, which I’ve seen, I’ve seen Vonage, for example, purchase like seven or eight companies. And you’re like, well, which version of Vonage are we on? Are we on the old, this old Broadsoft company that you guys bought? Or is it this broad voice company that you bought or whatever it is? And I’m just thinking of different names that they did. And there was like a massive, you know. Probably six, seven different through mergers and acquisitions. You got seven different softwares and VoIP products and people like Vonage is terrible. I don’t know. My version of Vonage is awesome. But which one are you on? So I guess my question is, is how do we get IT at the executive roundtable in that situation and make friends with new leaders that are coming in and cooperate and work together to make everyone win and look good? If it’s about looking good, but it’s really about the company being more efficient and people doing their job better. Hopefully technology is a business force multiplier.
Speaker 1 | 16:50.378
Yeah, well- The number one thing to me is that the top of the org chart, the CEO has to have an understanding that they support there being one leader focused on the technology of the organization. That’s the most important step. If you don’t have that, I don’t see that being successful in any way. So that’s number one. Once you get that sign off, then it’s about partnering with each of those groups and developing an operational model to show how you support each of those business unit organizations within the company. And. helping them guide them on the technology, that it’s not them coming to you with the technology and the roadmap, that IT is coming to them with the technology and roadmap to align to the requirements or the services they’re trying to provide. You should always be developing your plans to show the delivery of the service, not the delivery of the technology, because most end users just care about what service is being delivered, right? They want to know that they can get to their email, that they can get to their data, that they can get to the BI report. They don’t really care that it’s Tableau delivering the BI report or it’s Power BI delivering the BI report. They just want to know what services are going to be available when. So a lot of our planning and technology is focused on that. This is the service we’re delivering at this time based on the requirements that we’ve agreed upon with your business unit to deliver that final product.
Speaker 0 | 18:10.590
How do you go about figuring that out?
Speaker 1 | 18:12.491
I try to focus on partners that can become champions for us. So I even I even. encourage my team, work with the most difficult users. Don’t pick out the people that are super nice with you or super agreeable with you. I want the 5% who complain all the time, who are always saying there’s a problem. Because if I can get them on my side, everyone else is going to be a piece of cake. So I’ll do things like I developed an advanced platform committee where I invited the most difficult users to, to basically, lack of a better term. a complaint session. Tell me all your issues. Tell me what problems you had with IT. Tell me what you didn’t like about a product or a project. And let’s see how we can make that better in the future. I may not be able to fix what happened in the past, but now I’m involving you to fix with the future. And what I’ve actually found was those people that used to be our complainers then become the champions within their group. And they’re able to talk to why IT couldn’t do something or why IT needs to do it in a certain way.
Speaker 0 | 19:10.501
I love it. It’s an IT festivus. Yes. That’s beautiful. And okay, so I guess what’s the hardest part about that? Probably not the technology. It’s probably the people. No,
Speaker 1 | 19:24.896
yeah. I always say that technology is easy. It’s the people. That’s hard, right? It’s the culture. It’s that no matter how many sessions you have, how many discussions you can have with an end user, sometimes you’re never going to make people 100% happy. And you’ve got to live in that area of 80% is final. Like that’s the finished product. You’re never going to get to 100% because the 20% is opinion based. It’s not about facts. It’s not about data. It’s about what they feel, how they interact with it. how they use it you know some you could have the best designer in the world on an apple product and people are still buying android it’s because they don’t like the look of a iphone or they don’t like that you know it’s the same for everybody there’s just some things you’re never going to satisfy so you have to live in that 80 world not not the 20 of opinion and i found that out early in my career doing web design that no matter how many discussions i have with people what i thought they wanted it to look like or what i thought we agreed upon when they actually saw it in the flesh or in the final design They just didn’t like it. And that’s when I said, I don’t know if I can live in that world of picking up colors or fonts or looks of web pages, because people are always going to go to opinion versus functionality.
Speaker 0 | 20:32.918
That is so true. It has been very, very difficult for us to find our next gen web dev team. And the back end seems to be easy for some reason. Oh, yeah. All the back end of the web just seems to be easy. And that should be the most complicated. This is a great metaphor, actually. This is actually pretty mind-blowing now that I’m thinking about it. Why is the most complicated backend piece with all the AI and moving parts and all the soft, all the coding and all that stuff behind the scenes easy, but finding the web developer for the front page is almost impossible?
Speaker 1 | 21:07.135
Yeah, there’s actually, there’s something that, there’s a phrase that they call it, it’s the bike shed theory.
Speaker 0 | 21:13.719
There was a college- Did you say bike shed?
Speaker 1 | 21:16.140
Bike shed theory. I was actually just going to- search it quick because I forgot the college that it was for, but it’ll be one of the first one here, I’m sure.
Speaker 0 | 21:24.745
Bike shed theory.
Speaker 1 | 21:26.006
Yeah, the law of triviality is what it comes down to. But there was a university that was redesigning their campus. And they had a sizable committee focused on the redesign of the campus that would give their opinions on different things. And everybody had an opinion on the bike shed because everybody understood the bike shed. They knew what it was for. They knew what they needed. So in the translate that to the IT world, our biggest frustrations within IT, because I support the help desk they report up through me for Generac, is our conference rooms and like printers, for example, locations of printers or conference room technologies, how they look or interact or what’s the default camera view when people are in a conference room and the virtual person joins on the other end, because everybody deals with that every day and they have an understanding of that technology. So they’re willing to give their opinion. They’re willing to share what they don’t like about it. It’s just the psychology of people. That’s where empathy being a key characteristic for IT people is important. Even if it’s not the way that you feel about a problem, you don’t think it’s important. It’s important to put yourself in their shoes on why it’s important.
Speaker 0 | 22:33.315
This is mind blowing. This is mind blowing. So if you want to be successful in IT, you want to be successful in IT, make sure the conference room and printers are in order. You can be a total idiot. You can know. nothing about anything else. Forget ERP. That could be a dumpster fire going on. All the disparate things could be completely screwed up and not working together. Competition could be smoking you from an operations standpoint. But if the printers are where they want them to be. And when I get on a conference call, there’s no confusing. I don’t understand why this doesn’t work like Zoom. And I don’t understand why Zoom doesn’t work like Teams. And well, what happened to Cisco WebEx? I mean, that was the thing I used to click on when I had next to my VPN button. If I can do that, I’ll be successful in IT.
Speaker 1 | 23:20.433
Absolutely. Because that’s like, you know, the number one things we deal with in IT. Constantly all these million dollar enterprise architecture decisions I make all the time that nobody second guesses. But the minute I start talking about what’s going to happen with the camera in the conference room, I’ve got 100 emails escalated to me about things they don’t like. It’s just mind blowing to me. You know, it’s like if you can get an organ, especially in a larger organization, get a person that’s dedicated to just the conference room technologies. Because those become the most important thing every on-site conference that’s going on, the big global strategy session, all those kind of things. Those are the most frustrating things to manage, not the enterprise architecture.
Speaker 0 | 24:02.630
Mind-blowing. Yeah, you’re just glazing people over and snowing them in with like, you know, ERP discussions and stuff like this. And they’re like, dude, what would be great, though, is if this conference could start correctly so that we could talk about this. And let me tell you, I didn’t have the little tablet where I just hit start. And for some reason, we had to like use a keyboard or something. I don’t know. Amazing. That’s actually pretty mind-blowing. How have we never talked about bike shed theory and conference room versus printers? And that’s all we need to do to be successful in here. That’s why so many IT directors used to work in the cafeteria and now they’re the CTO because they’re like, yeah, I can fix the printer. Yeah. What’s up? Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 24:42.342
And it’s really all those, all those people that also like early in my career, I was the guy that was like, give me anything. Give me any of the problems with IT. That’s what I’ll focus on. And so every, every IT guy was like, well, here, take the printers here, take the backup jobs here, take the monitoring. hurting because once you got good at that stuff everybody in it was your friend and you could just work your way up through the organization so i was like even i do a lot of mentoring of like local talents and things like that in the area and everybody is like oh how do i get into devops how do i get into cyber because they want that cool
Speaker 0 | 25:13.862
thing with it and i said the number one way to get on those teams is to join a help desk because that’s where the the it teams are pulled from no one knows this and this is where we may be about to i’m hoping we’re about to flood the space but i i’ve have people and maybe you can talk to me about what you volunteer in the community i want to hear about that in depth because this just happened this week actually i did an orientation on friday and I don’t know what led me to do this. It’s maybe my, my love for wanting to like, you know, just everyone was excited and give people a chance, but I hired 12 interns. So they all started Monday and I’m going through like four hour trainings. Like every day I have, I put a training program together, like learn basic networking, learn, learn what we’re doing. We’re trying to learn about what we’re doing on the podcast here. I want, I want you to spread the word. We want to get out. We want to grow this like network and this, this network of, of mid-market it direct. protectors and and and security people and help desk people and we want to have like all these different things going on we want to kind of we want to just see how much we can really grow this entire um community and let’s just see what we can do and so people have been you know i’ve got help desk guys i’ve got guys that had you know just whatever i just got my cyber security certificate and i’ve got other people and phil i was thinking about doing this what should i do that i was like that might be a waste of time maybe go this way instead and go get a job over here so there’s people asking me for advice all the time. So I was like, okay, look, you want in, like everyone will do this internship. We’re going to build this thing. What would your advice be to them? If they’re either their help desk or like my advice, when someone says, I just got this security certificate and I felt like I kind of got drawn in or like, you know, tricked into like signing up for this security certification. And I finished that class and it was kind of a joke. And now they want me to take another one. They want me to go get this other certification. Like, where do I go? What do I do? Like, how do I get into this field? And my My answer normally is you don’t need all these certifications as much as you should just maybe go get a job and start getting the experience. And like, here’s some of the fields that it’s easier to just go get an entry level job in than this other one. Like you could go get all these certifications in security, right? And never get a job in security. But if you want to go get a job selling security services at a security application company, there’s probably like 50 of them out there right now that would just be like, yes, please come. Anyone, anyone and everyone, you’re welcome. Please cold call. Like, I don’t know. So what’s your advice in the space there to the youth? And I guess to even my team that just started on Monday, that we have four-hour calls talking about networking and what’s this and what’s that. And what do you mean? What’s MPLS? Well, it’s this kind of older technology, but it’s not really old because there’s major carrier backbones on MPLS. But as far as on that VPN, no, you don’t want to do that. Anyways, sorry. I just blabbed for a minute. Opening it to you. I’m opening this up to you to, to.
Speaker 1 | 27:57.158
to advice to the community and first of all how do you get involved and how do you give back yeah so so first of all there’s there’s two major things i’m involved with not only with generic but out of personal passion number one is generic um like every large organization across the world started a d and i initiative and started building these these bergs within their or ergs within their companies of um to kind of promote diversity within within the company and i’m the chair of the hispanic latino burg at generac and that’s because my wife is hispanic and And my family’s Hispanic now, so I just love their culture and working within the community of that. So that’s number one. And in line with that is another organization where I serve on the board called IC Stars. Right now they have locations in Illinois, Milwaukee, and Kansas City. And what that organization does is it’s called InterCity Computer Stars. Great. And what they do is they are there to help people. with non-traditional backgrounds in education, because I myself do not have a college education. I’m a high school equivalent diploma background. All self-taught, all through taking positions, learning about environments and doing things on my own. And when I heard about this organization that took people with non-traditional backgrounds and got them jobs in introductory positions within IT, whether it’s DevOps, project management, cybersecurity, whatever it is. through organizations within the community, I latched on. And I started by doing what they had with mock interviews, where you did virtual interviews with what they call their cohort or students within the program. And I met somebody there that blew me away, and we connected actually on gaming. That’s what actually our conversation started with, because I explained that I love the gamers because those are the people that can stare at a character for eight hours and just develop that character and rank them up or get them to… the piece of equipment they want and it’s just mundane over and over tasks which honestly is where you start in it you do over and over checking alerts doing backup reports checking um incidents and and cyber threats and and running reports on those so that organization when i met that individual brought him in for a tour Long story short, by the end of the tour, he had brought his boss with him and they asked me to be on the chair of the organization. I ended up hiring that individual on the help desk. They got involved with a project with Cyber and they were blown away by him after being involved with that project that they moved him over to Cyber. And now he’s running our global platform for that particular product. And that was all through a help desk position and being involved in that organization. So to me, getting involved in the community is not only about networking, because as much as I love working for Generac, I could. There could be another opportunity where I meet somebody else that I could end up, you know, working at a different organization. But it also is about meeting that talent and showing them how cool it is to be a Generac or giving them advice on how to get involved in IT, which nobody was there for me to give me that advice. I had to figure it out on my own. So, again, number one tip for me is don’t look for a cybersecurity internship because a lot of times those get filtered out looking for the background or even the. The certification, at least an entry level certification, which if you’re an intern to me, you shouldn’t have to have any background to be an intern because that’s the point of an internship. But don’t don’t look past those help desk positions because you deal with every aspect of the organization. And if you’re helping the CEO with something and you’re helping the cyber team with something and you’re helping another individual with something, when a position comes up and you apply for that, they all go, oh, yeah, I remember so and so. They were on the help desk and they were so nice and they helped me with my printer.
Speaker 0 | 31:32.530
or my conference room exactly no you’ve got a you’ve got a he gets it he gets it exactly he fixed my printer jam yeah which is ironically what office space was kind of about when they were beating up the printer and see you all later i’ll never forget that okay so man that actually brought up a couple things one you mentioned networking and period when i mean networking i don’t mean like um cat five cat six right right right punch down that network engineering but network networking with people networking with people but before we get there i see stars what do they start off with let’s say the person comes in and they’re like and you’re like okay um what’s your general knowledge of excel powerpoint things like that and they’re like not so much where where do you start or where where do people start and if you were to say my son for example i threw him in the internship program he’s 17 and what advice would i give him I would like to know like what, what general advice, my general thoughts would be like, take a general networking class, like maybe start off with networking and routers. And I don’t know, but maybe that’s the wrong advice. Where would you tell them to start?
Speaker 1 | 32:40.340
Yeah, I will be, that’s a bias for me. Right. And I, and from just what the statements you’ve made since I, since I met you, Phil, I think it’s a bias for you. Cause you probably have a network engineering background,
Speaker 0 | 32:49.926
right? No, I have creative writing. Oh,
Speaker 1 | 32:51.907
you do. Oh, I thought maybe you had a network engineering background.
Speaker 0 | 32:54.508
No, no, no, no. I’m a creative writer. So me. not having a crazy like next level star trek level of of networking i’m thinking to myself i think it would be very helpful i wish i had started out with that i would replace things but i’m thinking back when i think back like yeah should i have taken that um i don’t know some class that i already forgot it was so worthless and i should have taken you know some kind of networking class or like some of these things i kind of just have like you know gained like over time you know but there’s some more advanced you know, routing protocols and stuff that, you know, I know I defer to my smarter colleagues in these cases, let’s just put it that way. Right. So, so that’s why I’m asking you, like, what do you think would be most beneficial?
Speaker 1 | 33:41.338
Yeah. So I have a bias because network engineering is my background and I feel like network engineering, I think network engineering and help desk are a lot of the same. The reason being that in both aspects, you get involved with every layer of technology. Network engineering, you have to understand how applications database works, how the data flow is, the routing protocols. So to me, the basics of network, absolutely. If you can take a class, if you can watch YouTube videos on basics of networking, there’s some free MIT classes around networking. There’s so much information out there to get the basis of networking, which are going to help you not only in the physical space of networking, but also all the public clouds of networking, which become important that networking is across the board. The beauty of my role in the organization is we help everyone as our customer, even within IT. Every individual IT team has to work with my team in order to get access to things through the network or through the server infrastructure or the public cloud infrastructure. So networking is a good place to start. That’s usually my advice. But even when people get involved with ICSTARS, the beauty of that program is that they’re not just teaching the technical basics within that program. They’re teaching things on how to talk to executives, how to present your idea, how to communicate change in an organization, how to talk in front of a crowd. All of those skill sets that a lot of smart technical people don’t come in to from college in an internship to start their career. That’s why I love organizations like this. because they bring them in with all of that charisma and empathy and sense of urgency when dealing with projects that most people don’t come in in internships. They understand the basics of the technology, but they get so nervous talking to an individual to even help them that it takes more time to develop that skill set than it does the technical skill set. So I’d rather then come in not being afraid to stand in front of 10 people and train them on a platform or train an employer orientation. on some platform within Generac than somebody that comes in with the highest certification from AWS or Azure if they can’t talk to one person one-on-one.
Speaker 0 | 35:48.905
Yes, so empathy is a harder thing to teach. Tech can be learned.
Speaker 1 | 35:53.467
Correct.
Speaker 0 | 35:54.148
Yes, which goes back to tech is easy. People are hard.
Speaker 1 | 35:57.689
It’s kind of like- I’d rather have somebody with a major in psychology and a minor in computer science, to be honest with you. Well,
Speaker 0 | 36:04.812
that’s me. Well, that’s me, okay? So now- Whether people say I’m insane or not, that’s probably, we’d have to ask my kids that. So can you do us a favor? And I would love to put this in the show notes of the show. Even if it takes you 10, 15 minutes, can you put together just a quick, maybe top five YouTube videos that you can watch if you have empathy and you have the ability to talk to people, watch these videos, or here’s where to start. If you would, the basics of networking or whatever it is. And, you know, and I don’t know, I mentioned like Fortinet guru the other day. my son was like, I went right to Fortinet guru right away. And I was like, and then I hit stop on Fortinet guru right away. And I was like, this one’s above my head. So it would be great to give back a cheat sheet. Let’s put together a little cheat sheet and Greg, the Frenchman behind the scenes production of, of a dissecting popular IT nerds. Can we put together like a nice little, I don’t know, what do we call it? Like marketing slick. What’s the technical term back in the day when you were gluing and cutting and pasting and stuff, what’d we call it back in the day? I don’t know, whatever it is. Can we put together a nice little, uh, I don’t know, dissecting popular IT nerds. slash Chachi. Can we put together a Chachi’s handout, please? Because that would be really cool. So, but all we need from you is where to get started. And they might not have access to IC Stars because they’re not in Kansas City, which is where my in-laws are from. So I guess they’re Chiefs fans. I grew up in Massachusetts, so I have to be a Pats fan.
Speaker 1 | 37:29.611
Yeah, I mean, IC Stars is one of many. I’m sure there’s local organizations in every major city that do something similar, even within- even within our community, it’s multiple organizations that we work with. That’s just the one I happen to be on the board of and have had the most success with.
Speaker 2 | 37:46.722
At Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating. than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never ending from unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It’s like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try one’s patience even on the best of days. So whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office support team and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is None of this will ever cost you a dime.
Speaker 0 | 38:38.720
We’re going to call this Chachi’s alter your life now list. Start here. A, B, C, D. Alter your life today. All you got to do is make the decision to take action. But people don’t know where to begin. And it’s funny how many people that I run into and they can show me how to change all kinds of settings on Instagram and all kinds of crazy things and why it’s not communicating properly with Facebook or all these other, you know. just applications, which they don’t even maybe have the concept of maybe an application that’s just like, you know, it’s a button on the phone. But if I asked them to put together a PowerPoint presentation and do some basic math on an Excel spreadsheet, they’d have no clue how to do that, which is mind blowing to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 39:18.950
it’s pretty scary. But you’re seeing the hint that they had that skill set. They’re just not applying it correctly.
Speaker 0 | 39:25.796
Yeah, they have the ability. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 39:28.178
One of the major questions I asked the technical people that I interviewed for my team, is what do you do after work to keep up with technology? And what I’m looking for, my hope, is that their answer is, oh, I’m ruining my iPhone. I’m playing with a Raspberry Pi. I’m setting up my own web pages or something that shows me they have a personal passion for the technology and they love trying to figure things out. If I don’t see that, that usually doesn’t get me excited about the individual because then to them, it’s just a job. It’s not a passion. And my team is built. of nothing but people that are passionate about technology that are always showing me the new thing always talking about what they’re working at on at home they’re automating their house how they’re
Speaker 0 | 40:11.788
um putting up a lighting system in their garage whatever that thing is that’s what okay so this this is good we’re gonna apply we’re gonna use my family as the guinea pigs okay and i’ve been thinking about this too because a lot of even my kids are like dad how can even my like my daughter that she’s uh she’s 12 or 13 she’s like dad i want to get involved how do i do this so i was like okay so we’re gonna push you as the the young female entrepreneur or i don’t know what we’re gonna do but yeah i’ll give you some tasks to do let’s do it but this is good so i should say here’s what i want to do i want you to use chachi’s alter your life now list You’re going to go through all these YouTube videos. You’re going to watch them all. And then I want you to set up an in-house network. I want you to learn how to control, I don’t know, some kind of wireless security. I want you to put a content filter out there. I want you to shut down all your brothers and sisters, Facebook and YouTube viewing process and make sure that the oven turns on automatically at five o’clock before we get home for the pizzas.
Speaker 1 | 41:01.739
There you go. That to me would blow me away, especially in the world of manufacturing. I mean, we are… Our company grew from somebody that had to figure everything out and build a product and make it a business. And that is ingrained in our culture that every situation we come across, we’re trying to figure something out. It’s a new M&A. It’s a new way of thinking for a product. How are we going to integrate it? We’re constantly living in that world of how do we make something that may not even exist out there work within our environment? So I’m looking for individuals that can, you know, we don’t have it. There’s nothing on the market. Can you grab some components and a raspberry pie and throw it on the manufacturing line to gather some images and get them up in the cloud? We’re constantly working on things like that to develop those products and then try to align with something that’s already in the industry.
Speaker 0 | 41:50.661
Can you do that? Can you spark curiosity and growth to people? Can that be grown? Can you teach people curiosity? Can you teach people self-starting? Can you teach people to get to break out of that? I don’t know. It’s almost like a mentality sometimes.
Speaker 1 | 42:05.947
I don’t know if it can be taught. but it can be encouraged. And some people that don’t know they had it may get that spark and then be able to move from that. And really that’s, you know, depends on what you’re dealing with. I mean, a lot of the, you know, the empathy talk and things we were talking about is around people’s personality and how they think. So you’ve got to understand that personality. And we’ve done things even at the organization, like disc assessments and CliftonStrengths and those kinds of things, which can really help you explain how people tick. And there’s certain individuals that don’t like attention. They don’t want to be celebrated in front of the crowd and given awards. And there’s others where if they get the opportunity and you give them an award, that is what sparks their interest to continue and look at new ways of doing things. And other people just like being told one-on-one in your conversations, they’re doing a great job and don’t want all the attention that everybody else gets. So I don’t know if it can be taught. It just may need to be a different way of encouraging them to get the same end result.
Speaker 0 | 43:01.438
Yep. First Break All the Rules. Great book. Great book. goes through that initial, those initial assessments where you sit down with your people and you ask them, like, how do you like to receive feedback? How do you, you know, this, that, all those types of things. Very, very important. Yes. And, uh, I, I forget a lot of these things sometimes, and you go back into this, you know, I don’t know, revert, revert, revert, you know, uh, format the hard drive, start over again. Okay. I want the list. I’m actually really excited about this. Keep this in mind. I am going to be giving this to, um, at least a 13 year old or above, which I don’t think that that matters. I think they’re probably smarter from the technology level and all that stuff. I think they can do this. So we’re going to use my family as the first Guinea pigs on this one. And we’re going to put it out on.
Speaker 1 | 43:42.551
Yeah. I don’t, I don’t know if I have a default list that I go to with everything, but I’ll definitely share.
Speaker 0 | 43:47.072
No, I just need like top five or something. What you think, what you think would be very helpful, kind of spark the spark, the interest. And then, you know, we’ll have a question. We’ll have some questions about where do I go from here? Well, I don’t know. You tell me, you know what I mean? That’s what we’re going to say. Like, cause if we need curiosity and growth and we need them to do that and be the self stars, okay, where do you think this can take you from here? We’d love to know your answers. Please share them. You can find us, uh, our, our show page on LinkedIn and you can go to the website, popular it.net. And we would love to hear your feedback on that. Thank you so much for being on the show. Uh, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Any final words of wisdom? No,
Speaker 1 | 44:22.976
man, just, I mean, like most people will tell you, follow your passion. If you’re not passionate about it, you’re not going to be happy with the choices you make. So if IT is your passion, there’s so many avenues to get there. Just follow your passion.
Speaker 0 | 44:33.799
Yeah. And even you can take something that’s boring and you can actually make it, you can actually inject passion into, into something boring. I was thinking about the other day, like, let’s say your job was to put out trash cans and empty the trash in a hallway in a massive organization, you know, you could put a sign on the trash can. That’s like, I don’t know. You know, it was interesting. There’s a whole psychological study done on this where they put the like, thank you, have a nice day sign on the trash cans and people started throwing trash in the trash cans. Yeah. Well, you could take that to the crazy next level. You know what I mean? And again,
Speaker 1 | 45:02.992
I think it has to do with personality that those people like that recognition. They like the thank you. They like to know that somebody’s giving them praise for doing something and others are like, you know, I don’t need your thank you. I’m not picking that up. So it would be interesting to see what their personality assessments were.
Speaker 0 | 45:18.136
Yeah, but you could, I mean, no matter what your job is, you could inject some sort of creativity and insanity into it that would make, that could change people’s lives. You know what I mean? Absolutely. You know, like there’s. the trash man that everyone loves and he changes his lives that’s why i used to love put i’m the head janitor you know and uh there’s like i think stephen covey or someone put did the study on it where they said like we’re not gonna why were we why would we let someone else tell the janitors what chemicals to use who knows the best chemicals to use themselves the janitors do so why don’t we put them in charge i mean then like then there’s this like you know life altering change within the the world of custodians at that organization or something you know and it was just like
Speaker 1 | 45:52.984
something that you noticed and it was like that’s an easy answer that sense of ownership you give them the responsibility to to make the decisions that make their job easier to manage they’re going to be happier i mean that’s that’s what i try to do every day with my team is give them the responsibility to make those decisions that you know just the old adage of don’t come to me with your problem come to me with this what your what you’ve thought up are your solutions and then we’ll decide together to me that’s what’s the most important i don’t i don’t ever like like telling my team what the answer is i like them coming to me with with options
Speaker 0 | 46:21.840
no more training wheels today we’re taking them off and shoving you down the hill all right thank you again thank you so much for being on dice yeah thanks
