Speaker 0 | 00:09.622

All right, everybody, welcome back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we have Todd Allen on the show, Vice President of Information Technology at Buckingham Companies. Todd, welcome to the show, man.

Speaker 1 | 00:24.226

Good morning, Phil. Thank you.

Speaker 0 | 00:25.546

Yeah. So, hey, we’re just going to start this off just because… I really love reminiscing about old technology. So, and, you know, unless I’ve got a millennial on that’s going to tell me his first computer was, you know, XP and his first video game system was a Nintendo 64, which is coming up and is funny and almost laughable. What was your first computer, man?

Speaker 1 | 00:49.822

Well, mine was, my dad had bought one. This was sometime in the, I think, the mid 80s, early 80s. He had bought. a behemoth uh ibm knockoff that took you know kind of half his desk up at this old amber monitor that sat on top of it um he bought it for for a side business he was building and and you know ran like lotus notes on it it’s all dog bumps um yeah i ended up finding a flight simulator for it and um and used to play it quite a bit so

Speaker 0 | 01:21.396

So that, and if I remember correctly, it was, it was Chuck Yeager flight simulator, which I actually had to Google Chuck Yeager the other day. So I apologize for not knowing if that’s disrespectful to you because you fly too, right? Don’t you fly?

Speaker 1 | 01:36.026

I don’t fly as much as I used to, but, you know, it kind of sparked a love of flying that I later revisited when I was in my, like 1999. So, you know, young family and without learning how to fly and used to fly about 200, 250 hours a year. don’t fly like that anymore. But it was a lot of fun because it got me involved in kind of figuring out the whole roll 50 off thing, even though it was ugly graphics and kind of the… It was very complicated back then.

Speaker 0 | 02:04.384

I had a flight simulator too on my Apple II, Apple IIc, you know, multiple disks, multiple floppy disks to load. And I remember it was like, you know, like flying a real airplane. It wasn’t like, you know, fun. Like, uh… like Top Gun was on NES, you know, it was like, you had to like, you have to learn how to do everything. And I’m sitting here reading this huge, you know, manual, like, can I just like fly over here and see the mountain? So I would just crash into the mountains for fun. So, so great. Yeah. So how’d you get, you know, what was the deal? Like what kind of transitioned you? What got you, I guess, addicted to technology or kind of moved you forward? You know, what, what was the, what was the thing?

Speaker 1 | 02:46.416

Yeah, you know, I’ve always been somebody who has liked technology, not afraid of, you know, my dad always used to ask me, why don’t you right click here? And I’m like, I don’t know, just right click. He’s like, well, am I going to break something? So, you know, I’ve never really been afraid of kind of poking around or looking under the hood or taking something apart and trying to figure it out. I spent most of my early career as a real estate owner, operator, developer, kind of in a traditional environment. And after the Great Recession. connected with a company that was in the software business and they built uh they were the leading provider of telephony-based software services for the apartment industry and so really kind of got into more of a formal environment um really on the software side first building um mobile software and working with uh product managers and developers and then uh really landed in more of a formal it role um in my current role at buckingham companies and what do you think you

Speaker 0 | 03:45.616

And I, well, there’s two key pieces to that there. One is obviously you had some, some very important business experience prior to getting into technology, which is very, very helpful. Not only was it, not only have you experienced, you know, business failure, economic failure, downturn, whatever it is, you know, but, you know, so that’s really, really important, I guess. But what were the building blocks? Or how did you kind of start to put all the pieces together as far as technology goes? What would you say are the most important building blocks for, I don’t know, if you’re starting, they got you to where it was. Like, where did you fill in the pieces? What were the gaps? Do you remember any gaps that you had to fill in?

Speaker 1 | 04:28.158

Well, I think if I’m following you.

Speaker 0 | 04:33.141

In other words, you’re leaving real estate, you’re leaving real estate, you’re going into technology, right? There’s what were like maybe some of the. What was the biggest learning experience or do you remember learning and saying like, wow, that was something that I picked up? Or what were some of the biggest things that you picked up along the way?

Speaker 1 | 04:51.392

Yeah, so let me start with the software development world. There’s a lot of similarities in software development and building a house, for example, or an apartment community. I know it’s a crazy analogy, but when you look at waterfall or agile design methodologies that apply to the same types of thought processes to building, you run into some interesting parallels. So, you know, for me, it was kind of an odd moment of, okay, this is basic project management. There’s different ways of doing it. you kind of design it all out before you put the shovel in the ground or do you do kind of incremental pieces and then and then put it all together later um in in both cases you find out that um you know changing something midstream can be very expensive or very problematic depending on what commitments you’ve made previously so the planning process was something that was great for me to to kind of segue those same skill sets um just like in the real estate side i wasn’t the framer with a plumber. I wasn’t the expert, but I could work with those teams, interface those teams, and understand what those teams were doing or saying, or to learn if I was unclear. I did the same thing on the legal side when we were putting the business side together, the ownership entity or the structure, or just getting a sale. And then the same thing’s true in working with developers, or today in my role on our IT team. I’ve got folks that work for us on our team. They’re a lot smarter than I am, a lot more technical than I am. And I rely on their skill set and they help me understand where I’ve got gaps. And I use, you know, kind of my skill set to facilitate gaps that we have that helps us become more strategic or better project managers. Does that make sense?

Speaker 0 | 06:35.561

Yeah. So there’s a lot there that is very exciting to me, which is one, is it design first or shovel on the ground and build as you go? um that’s like chicken or egg man there’s no there’s no right answer um and let me just kind of you know pre-frame a little bit more where i’m going because i’ve heard a lot of technologies leaders say phil i don’t need strategy don’t come i don’t need strategy what i need is planning so i’m wondering if there’s like you know some you know like what’s the metaphor there right so is it design the whole thing out and you know like

Speaker 1 | 07:16.020

what’s your experience yeah i think i think from a software development um having kind of done it both ways i am way more um in favor of of an agile methodology not anyone in particular but but the idea of of having a master plan you know a big strategic plan and then um taking out pieces of that and building smaller incremental pieces testing it putting on the shelf, building the next piece. That allows you to iterate better or be more reactive. And sometimes you may wait for some code, but I think it allows you to be more flexible and you get less focused on what’s the final general release date and you get more stakeholder involvement across. I think from a software development, I would be generally in favor of an agile state methodology. For real estate, I think it’s somewhere in between. If you wait to design everything fully out, pick out every last detail and every last finish, you’re never going to start. But you still have to get the foundation designed so it can carry the load of the building. You have to be able to lay out the walls and any structural requirements so that it can hold the building. I mean, there’s things that you have to do first, but things that are later, like finishes, contain. It may affect your deal. Moving walls is a lot more expensive than changing a countertop. moving a kitchen around is a lot more expensive than taking account of that material. So I think in the real estate world, or if I use that parallel, you can create kind of a, if you will, a hybrid or an in-between phase to be able to do. Your point about planning versus strategy, I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. I think planning is part of your strategy. So you have to know what’s the direction we’re going. You have to be able to work. to be able to build buy-in with your team, whether that’s up or down or laterally throughout the organization. And you have to understand what the scope of that’s going to be. So you can plan all day long, but if you don’t have enough work, you can plan all day long. But if you don’t understand the scope of what you’re building, we’ve all had projects where we’ve, whether it’s a development, software development, or if it’s an IT project, where you don’t have buy-in or you don’t have the scope and you get the nefarious scope creep. Um, and those, those set you up for failure every time.

Speaker 0 | 09:41.531

So I believe-Give me an example of a scope creep. I need to hear, what do you mean by scope creep? I need to hear an example there. So I get it. Yeah. Give me like paint, like a, I don’t know if it’s a nightmare or whatever you want to call it, give me maybe it’s normal. Like every day, every day thing that something deals, you know, who’s, who’s dealing with this and where does that creep in?

Speaker 1 | 10:03.051

Yeah. So we want to replace the phone system. So we decided that we are going to go replace the phone system and it’s going to be an on-prem system and it’s going to have 25 feet. and it’s going to have direct extension dialing and, you know, marking and all the basic features and everything else. And you’d start to execute that and you go out and you get three or four bids and you start conversations with vendors and blah, blah, blah. And then all of a sudden somebody comes in and goes, but I want to be able to add VoIP phones to connect to that on-prem solution. Well, now you have a different problem to solve that will require, if you can do it, depending on what hardware you expect, you now have a different problem to solve is the interconnectivity from a remote site that somebody didn’t address or didn’t ask the right questions up front or just came up with an idea. That’s an example of scope creep. And if beyond that, somebody says, well, I still need fax. Nobody uses faxes anymore, but I need a fax.

Speaker 0 | 10:59.832

Excuse me, I have people with hundreds of faxes. They’re called government contractors. Government contractors. By the way.

Speaker 1 | 11:08.914

You look like you still use the faxes.

Speaker 0 | 11:10.575

The way that you just described, the way that you just described going about purchasing a new phone system is in my book, completely the wrong way to do it. But that’s just me because I’m very, obviously I’m very nerdy about telecom, right? But I like the fact that you’re giving me this, this idea of scope creep, because I’m now going to go use that in my messaging and say, avoid scope creep, avoid the months of talking with vendors, avoid. Anyways. But okay, great. So I get it. Perfect. And let me summarize what I’ve got here so far. So we’ve got an overhead plan. We’re going to plan out the plan to begin with. Then we’re going to break it down into micro steps so that we can be flexible along the way when that scope creep comes in because it’s inevitable because we don’t know what we don’t know. Awesome. So scope creep is another way of saying, scope creep is another way of, we don’t know what we don’t know and boom, it popped up.

Speaker 1 | 12:05.270

Yeah, it could also be… part of the discovery process and it can also be part of the process to incorporate new ideas. I mean, it’s really hard for me as somebody who likes to be very creative to say, nah, we’re not going to do that because we’re too far gone or we’ve already committed on this path. And that takes some, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 12:23.716

Just complete side note. What’s your idea? Yeah. Because I think one way to avoid a lot of scope creep, and I think there’s no way to avoid this, especially in the security world. the way technology is evolving so fast and then the number of vendors out there and the, the marketing noise and how do we differentiate between valid information and information? That’s just something that someone paid to have on the Gartner magic quadrant. What is your opinion on vendors and having good, because my opinion on vendors is you got to have partnerships. You have to have people that are bought in, in your company, not just a. not just a sales rep or talking with a sales rep that’s going to come in and make a one-time transaction. Maybe that’s a loaded question. It sounds a little loaded to me. But honestly, what’s your, what’s your experience with that? And are there, are there areas of technology that have better partnerships versus kind of that, you know, I’ve just got to buy this stuff. Like, I don’t know, my, my Dell equipment vendor or something.

Speaker 1 | 13:23.741

Yeah. So you’re, you’re, what I’m hearing is Is there a difference between like a transactional relationship or transactional perspective and a relationship perspective? Those are the two kind of magic words there.

Speaker 0 | 13:34.908

So how do you avoid that? I guess my thing is, is how do you know that you’re in that relationship that’s a partnership versus transactional?

Speaker 1 | 13:44.435

Yeah, there’s a couple of ways. So transactional does serve its purposes. It’s not an evil word. But, you know, I think when you come to those really hard deal terms or challenges. That’s where the relationship piece comes in, whether you need advice from a partner that you have built trust with, or you actually run into a difference of opinion. So I have a great partner, negotiated a deal recently. We’ve got some key dates in there. Those dates need to be adjusted. And that partner’s like, well, that’s cool. And that’s because we have built a great relationship and we’re doing things that in the short term we can do. maybe a challenging conversation or may not be in one side or the other’s best interest. But because of the trust that we’ve built, the commitment to working together in kind of that bigger picture, that decision was an easy conversation. It was upfront, it was transparent, and there was a resolution and we’ve moved on as opposed to getting lawyers involved. And so that’s to me the difference of the relationship piece. It’s not about price. I mean, it can be, but it’s not solely about price because that becomes very transactional. If you’re only doing business with me because you’re giving me the best price and all hell breaks loose, I’m going to go find somebody else. Right. And you’re going to say, this guy keeps beating me up on the price. And so I’m going to fire the customer and I’m going to go find somebody else. When the relationship piece comes into it. You know, price is important and price is a component of that. But when, you know, I had a painter bid our house the other day and, you know, he looked at it and he’s like, well, I’m gonna charge you for that. I’m gonna charge you for that. I’m gonna charge you for that. And had somebody else come in and bid it and goes, oh, I can fix that. That’s not a big deal. It’s all fucked up. We’ll make sure the windows replaced. This is the price I’m gonna give you. Let’s see a couple of things that need to be done. I’ll make sure it gets done because it’s more about the relationship.

Speaker 0 | 15:39.836

And that person, and then you want to pay that person. right someone that had to fix the dns uh i had a weird dns ssl certificate like mix match with you know like whatever it was the other day and my web designer couldn’t find it and he’s like we’ll talk to this guy and you know even though i’m talking with some guy over you know some weird you know like over over a zoom call like in russia i totally trust him because it came from a guy that i trust very much and he fixed the whole issue for me in like 30 minutes and i’m sitting there saying like hey, how do I pay you? He’s like, you don’t have to pay me. This is nothing. It took me two seconds. I’m like, no, no. I want to pay you. You just made my life so much easier. I could be sitting and checking all these web servers and Cloudflare and all this stuff for hours and you did it in 15 minutes. That’s worth something to me. Clearly, I’ve had my coffee this morning. It was a complete side note. Let’s wrap this back, pull this back in here. We were at Agile Methodology. Um, and then, you know, planning process and where’s the direction of the project going in and then getting buy-in from people. So that’s kind of like a big thing. And I know, um, maybe you can give me an example there of, of how you get buy-in or, or where you came into the organization and having to bring, bring about change. And, um, maybe give me an example there of, of getting buy-in and how do you do it?

Speaker 1 | 17:03.710

Um, sometimes not so good. Um, I think I’m by nature an impatient person. And so I process fast. I fail fast. It goes back to the whole agile and entrepreneurial mindset is if you’re going to try it, try it fast, fail quickly, limit your exposure, iterate and start all over. And not all parts of organizations or all people in those parts of the organization do so in the same way. So sometimes I struggle with the buy-in. because I’ve already sold myself and I already know it’s good. Even sometimes sitting down to memorialize and paper the deal terms or create the agenda and coordinate the meeting. And what I have found, particularly working for other people, is that’s so necessary. And because I move so fast, I can lose people worse, I think. I can sense the impression that I’m kind of bulldozing. And… and that alienates people and so people feel like oh he doesn’t care about my opinion or he doesn’t want my opinion which is totally not the truth i just i’ve done that on my own team um i’ve done that with with peers so so that kind of feedback has been great um to kind of figure out okay you know you’ve got to you’ve got to match the message to your audience and just because you think it can be done in 30 or 60 days or it could be done in 30 or 60 days doesn’t mean that it’s going to be that’s a realistic expectation or that other folks are not trying to have their own process. Let’s think of our own, you know, that they dialed through some major work.

Speaker 0 | 18:46.809

Explain the memorialized.

Speaker 1 | 18:50.151

Yeah, I think I tend to be very verbal, just in my personal nature. And so I would do better. I love what I call sender meetings. If you and I were in offices and down the hall, if we have something to talk about, I’d prefer. to not send you an email and I’d prefer not to pick up the telephone. I’d prefer just to walk down and go, Hey, Phil, uh, I got this happening. This is what I’m thinking. What do you think? And, you know, that’s not a hour long meeting on a calendar. A lot of times it’s me just walking up. And again, there’s people that don’t like that. Um, but I liked that, that personal interaction and the verbal interaction when I’m talking about memorializing, um, where, where that doesn’t work for people. Um, and when there are, you know, cross-departmental groups. for larger vested stakeholders, particularly when they go up the food chain and their schedules are a little different or you only have limited exposure memorializing the deal meaning create some type of project scope um create the the goal that you’re trying to achieve um give them a high level um um target of what the the metrics are in terms of this is this is what we think it’s going to cost um this is what we have budgeted you know it’s a net ad or it’s a you know we can all set some some dollars here or you know we totally you know missed it and and it’s we got to write a check but but but lay out the framework so that it’s starts the conversation, typically what will happen is even if the person receiving that write-up or that documentation totally disagrees with the premise, it will start the conversation and it will set what they recognize or don’t recognize as our pain points or challenges or problems to be set. And that’ll help you determine whether or not you do have to buy in and outline what you need to do in order to get the buy-in. And again, that can be a process that takes a week And that can be a process that takes years. As an example, we’re going through replacing a current help desk provider, which has been something that we have been talking about quite a while. And I have tried several different ways to have this conversation with senior level people and have recently kind of figured out some ways to do that. So I have real estate minded people who are looking at investment committee memos and head up. a peer of mine said, you know what, why don’t you try it as an investment committee memo? And so instead of taking a memo and sending it by email with all the documentation, we just set up a meeting. We created literally an investment committee memo for our project that brought our executive team together and presented it with a slideshow and a PowerPoint and walked them through it. And we had all the documentation on the table for them to address after. And that worked very well. We got farther with that hour-long meeting. and that style than we had in the past year and a half. And so we’re kind of at the late stages of following up to their Q&A. They provided a written response to us like they would do normally and said, here’s what we need you to go vet, or here’s where the budget needs to be adjusted, and come back to us when you have that information. So we’re in the process of doing that now, and I think there’s a high likelihood we’ll get the project approved.

Speaker 0 | 22:09.595

So… And let me just make sure I understand this correctly. So memorialized to you is find a way to document, which I hear a lot of IT directors have problems with documenting things for some reason. Find a way to like document, present, bring it to key stakeholders so that they can see the idea, put in their input, get their input put in there. And get agreement on what the pain points are and how that’s affecting the business.

Speaker 1 | 22:41.850

Correct. 100%.

Speaker 0 | 22:43.551

Okay. Beautiful. And just to put this in perspective for everyone out there listening, Todd has 350 endpoints out there. He gets about 250 tickets a month, manages 45 properties, and has like three people. You’re like a team of three people. Right.

Speaker 1 | 23:06.428

So this is classic.

Speaker 0 | 23:08.448

This is like, how do we do as much with as little possible? Because I mean, honestly, like 350 people coming to three people is, is a lot of is a lot of work that can be done. It’s a lot of work to be done on a daily basis. Let alone, you know, memorializing things and bringing, bringing plans to the table and creating, you know, positive change and measurable results and you know, CSAT scores and all that other stuff that we’ve talked about in the past.

Speaker 1 | 23:39.440

Correct. So,

Speaker 0 | 23:42.302

yeah, I think out of that whole conversation, the thing that I picked up the most, which is, you know, listening to people, not losing people. I think honestly, like what’s really key there that you didn’t say, it’s just something from someone from the outside watching is that you’ve been very transparent and… I guess, vulnerable with yourself. The fact that you can come on a show right now and say that I talk too fast, I lose people, that the fact that you’re able to be vulnerable is a sign of leadership, in my opinion.

Speaker 1 | 24:12.805

Well, I appreciate it.

Speaker 0 | 24:16.148

Do you think it’s a sign of leadership to be vulnerable with your people, to know your weaknesses and to admit them to your people?

Speaker 1 | 24:23.734

Yeah, and I think it’s part of any solid relationship. You know, I’ve been married for… My wife will get mad when she listens to this. I think we’re 21 or 22 years. August of 97, I know that. So I can do the math on a live call. Long time. And I think even if I use that, that could be a model of many business relationships. Obviously, there are things that you don’t want to model in a marriage compared to a business.

Speaker 0 | 24:54.338

Or model in a business relationship or vice versa. Correct. Yeah, gotcha.

Speaker 1 | 24:58.279

Absolutely. But. But, you know, I’m open with my wife and she is with me. We don’t keep secrets from each other. She tells me when I’m knucklehead and I screw up and I’ve got to acknowledge when I do that. So we have a very open and transparent relationship there. You know, I think that’s easier for some people than others. You know, but for me, it’s always been about highlighting where I need to improve and being able to hear it. I got some feedback the other day that I didn’t necessarily agree with. And I think was misconstrued, but it came from two people and they were two people important to me. And so I own how I presented myself or I presented that situation to those people. I think they got it wrong. They didn’t get what I was intending to do, but I own it, you know, and so.

Speaker 0 | 25:46.014

Perception is reality, right? It is. Perception is reality.

Speaker 1 | 25:48.736

It is. And I fail all the time. I have had some very acute failures in life. I’m really hard on myself but I think it comes from a spot where I just want to do better and I want to be successful and so my experience has been when my team knows that we’re on equal footing you know we may have different responsibilities or a different title but day one when I sat down with a team that I currently have I’ve said you got to treat me literally you have to treat me like you’re my wife you need to tell me when I’m being stupid you need to tell me when I have a terrible idea you need to throttle me back if I’m moving too fast. You need to speak up in a meeting if you feel like I’m making a bad decision. That’s okay. We just got to talk to each other decently. But that type of relationship, I think builds phenomenal teams. If you want to call it leadership, that’s great. But for me, it’s about building a team that will literally walk over fire together and perform together when things are really crazy. as we all kind of go through. Those teams are the ones because there’s no question going into it. Everybody’s like, we’re in and they go do their thing. And you may debrief afterwards, but it’s not about why am I doing this for this guy that I work for who I don’t really like, right? Or I don’t really…

Speaker 0 | 27:10.249

What is the key to that? Because you came in, I mean, there’s other people in these situations. They take a new job. They’ve got to come in there. they’re the IT director and there might be like a tier one, tier two, level one, level two system admin there that thought they deserved the next role or anything. But there’s people that come in every day and have to take over and be the leader in that position. Kind of what’s your general thought on, or when you come into a situation like that and you take over, what’s your first, what’s the best advice to other people out there doing that?

Speaker 1 | 27:42.718

Yeah. I mean, I think my, what I did in my current environment was, you know, first. decided do I have the right people and I took some time just to establish a relationship I didn’t come in and go you know I use this vendor over at this job and so I’m gonna wipe everything out that you all have done to put this vendor in almost none of that you know literally have come in and said well you know the network better you know the relationships better you have the institutional knowledge so tell me why it’s awesome and so just a lot of listening and a lot of learning and evaluating of the the people that I had um you know then the next thing that we did we kind of changed the way that we worked in the organization so it became more about okay guys you all are pretty solid um and you do a great job and you know what you’re talking about now i want to change you know what we’re doing in terms of communicating back to the rest of our stakeholders the rest of our um team that we support because that’s what we do our job is to support the rest of the organization so we need to be transparent and that That means it’s okay to say, we screwed up, dropped that ticket, too busy, whatever it may be, so that we can share with somebody that it’s not that you’re not important, it’s not that we’re not inept, it’s just that we either made a human mistake or we’ve just been slammed busy, and then communicate that. So here’s the reason that failed or you’re unhappy, acknowledge it and then communicate it, and then from there, just stay in touch. I’m still working on the ticket, I’m not done with it yet, still kind of working crazy. you know, or I’m struggling with other things.

Speaker 0 | 29:18.745

Yeah. Just, I mean, there’s two things there. One is, hey, guys, you’re good. Like letting them know, like, hey, you’re good. And two, Like, so it’s okay to communicate and it’s, and because you’re good, it’s okay to let you let people know, like, you know, when we screw up or wrong or whatever it is. So you’re backing up your team, you’re supporting them, you’re serving them. Um, and then it’s like, okay, well now let’s let everyone know how good we are. But at the same time, like, Hey, we got 350 people and there’s three of us. Do you know what I mean? Not everything is, not everything is going to be like, you know, perfect all the time. Um, so. Give me some more.

Speaker 1 | 30:00.635

Yeah. So I think the next thing that is really the incremental pain functions where nobody, like I’m okay with pain and I’m okay with coming in and turning the world upside down and then letting things settle. Most people are not. And there are some people who are the total opposite that don’t want any change. And so I think incremental change allows for buy-in. And if you start with the behavior side and… Those are the, in some ways, they’re bigger changes, but they’re easier to sell. It’s just you model the behavior and have them kind of follow the behavior. You always have to be prepared that if somebody is not going to be on board with what you’re doing and what the goals are, and they’re not bought into the goals, that you may have to make a change. But like in my case, I’ve been fortunate that, you know, the folks on our team have been wonderfully supportive of, oh, yeah, we’re in, let’s do it. So. I think, you know,

Speaker 0 | 30:58.155

and then after that might be also is like when we were talking the other day, you said something about modeling. You said modeling behavior with the worst case. I mean, worst case scenario. I mean, I don’t. What do you mean by that? And can you like I don’t remember really where we were going with that. But what do you mean by modeling behavior with in the worst case scenario? I’m assuming it’s in.

Speaker 1 | 31:18.037

Well, I mean, I think. Yeah. So when I mean modeling behavior, I mean, so we have a major failure on the network side. You know, we have a we have something terrible that happens. God forbid I’m at Touchstone Wood. We have we have an unauthorized penetration on our network and it doesn’t really matter why it happened. It’s just we’re not supposed to let that happen. By modeling that behavior, my team needs to see me say to a broader audience, the entire company, to key stakeholders, whomever. That happened. Here’s what happened. Here’s what we did to correct or what we’re doing to correct. Here’s when the kind of the postmortem will be expected. And in that postmortem, we will have a plan to prevent it from happening again. And as part of that, here’s what I’m doing to obviously make sure that internally we’ve addressed any open considerations. But it’s taking ownership of it and then again being transparent and communicating. That’s all I mean about modeling.

Speaker 0 | 32:20.542

You take responsibility for it. In other words, you are taking responsibility. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 32:23.203

when it fails, it’s on me, right? When it fails, it’s on me. And when we have great successes and when the team does a great job on customer satisfaction scores or the team’s really doing a great job with modeling new behavior, it’s not about, look at what I taught them. That’s a very negative way of approaching it. And I think people… run away from that. What happens is publicly, all the kudos goes to the team and that has to be public. The leadership will recognize that the department is performing and there will be some tie to the fact that a leader’s involvement on a performing team is tied to the leader. But the leader is not responsible for doing everything. And it is a privilege to lead a team, even through the difficult times, it’s always a privilege. And so… That whole mindset of servant leaders that means when things are great and there’s victories to be celebrated they get the spotlight when when things are falling apart and You know, maybe somebody gets their head on the top and block for it. That’s when you got to step up and say That’s me. That’s my team. That’s me. I did it.

Speaker 0 | 33:32.056

Yeah, it’s awesome. So I think that’s it It’s just a great takeaway for anyone out there when the team fails. It’s on me and when we win it’s it’s the team that did it That’s great Um, so talk to me a little bit about just, you know, growth in general, because I think in the mid market space, a lot of times we’ve got companies that are growing really, really fast. And that’s what you guys are experiencing right now. Um, how do you deal with fast growth or growing faster than you guys can handle sometimes?

Speaker 1 | 34:07.372

You know,

Speaker 0 | 34:08.093

uh, And have you even experienced it yet? So, you know, I don’t know. I’ve only failed every time. So we’ll find out Phil. Right. No.

Speaker 1 | 34:15.598

You know, I think that’s part of it. I think you, you know, when we talked about strategy, you know, if you sit down, we do our strategic planning in the fall of every year for the upcoming year. you know we lay out uh a number of like this year we had four strategic initiatives that we were we were going to undertake four large you know year-long type projects or or you know part year projects that were big initiatives and then we had like that we started with a list of 70 it projects you know and that’s all in addition to um keep our network stable keep our network secure and help desk performance which is our kind of our top two, three priorities above everything else. You need to put all that together. And then halfway through the year, because we are a very dynamic and entrepreneurial company, which I do love, we start a new line of business. And so there’s stuff that happens that is a total kind of a sidestep. And again, not inconsistent with our business plan or our growth, but it takes our strategy and it throws a little bit of a curve ball to it.

Speaker 0 | 35:19.885

So-Monkey wrench. There’s a monkey wrench in the-Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 35:24.847

And that’s all good. I mean, the- Our leadership is very entrepreneurial. Our leadership is very committed to being both very strategic but also very entrepreneurial. And sometimes those are in conflict. So kind of to answer your point, what we deal with or how we deal with it is some of it’s reactive. And from somebody like myself who likes to be more forward-thinking and more planning, small team, wide range of responsibilities, projects, normal work. we’re very reactionary. And so from a personal perspective, that’s always very, you know, tension. And when I get stressed out, I always go back to, I try to go back to be more strategic. How do you, how can you solve the problem without diving in and building a to-do list? How do you step out, take a breath, look at where the latest feast is, the latest monkey wrench, if you will, is fits into the bigger picture and then reassess strategy, you know? So, so, um, preventative maintenance kind of yeah yeah and then and then figure out does this change my kind of top priorities and if it does or or commitments that we have made to the broader organization then you go back to kind of the transparent transparency and communication so monkey rent curveball new project comes in from leadership they’ve all agreed that you know the existing plan is the plan um that’s cool then i go back and say okay we got x y and z ahead of this I’m going to shuffle things if that’s still the plan. Does this still fit in that priority? And that helps to vet that conversation. Sometimes it’s just get it all done, you know, which is more often the case. And then it’s up to us to figure out how to manage our time. But that’s still a strategic conversation. Then you get into the tactical. So if you want me to get more granular, kind of the way that we do that with our team is we have, you know, as small as we are, we have a lot of, of, of, of kind of, daily touch bases. When I was brand new, we did something very similar to the, in the agile development world, if we did a daily standup. So I’m learning new people, new processes, problems, you know, kind of trying to resolve very tactical and granular issues. And so we did a 15 to 30 minute standup every morning. I went over what we did yesterday, problems today, and what we’re going to try to accomplish tomorrow. And then just updated that. Not as a…

Speaker 0 | 37:53.456

Yeah, that’s just, that’s just a good point. And I’m just, I’ll ask the last question. You can use this as like, you know, the advice or if there’s any ideas, but is there any modeling around that? Is there any type of, you know, hey, guys, we’re just going to run this model. If we do this every day, every single day, every day, you know, we’ll be okay. Is there any type of advice like that to anyone else out there in an organization? Is there any, you know, certain things or? habits, I guess you could say, that if you do this and you do this well, whether it be one, two, or three things, that will eliminate a lot of problems and or stress if you can continue to do this on a daily basis.

Speaker 1 | 38:35.734

Yeah. So I have tried to, and my team has gotten much better about this, but the way I do it is I spend probably the first half an hour to hour of my day. I’m usually at my desk about seven because it’s quiet. I’m right there in the morning so I kind of know when I work. A lot of our folks work later which you know sometimes keeps me there a little bit later than I would like but my first hour of the day is a day where I clean up emails you know from you know yesterday that I didn’t get to or whatever and I don’t like its organization. I don’t keep a lot of stuff in my inbox. They either get filed or they get turned into a kind of a tab and and then I organize my to-do list and I am notorious about putting too much on the day. and then feeling stressed out that I didn’t get everything I wanted to accomplish. So I really have to be disciplined about, hey, that one task is a five-hour project. And so I just need one thing on my list today. And so I manage out my calendar, my emails, and my to-dos. Usually, this sounds a little bit neurotic, but somewhere around two weeks from my to-dos ahead. And my calendar is usually 30 days out. So I commute. So I know what my travel schedule is going to be. And again, it’s a very dynamic environment. But it helps me feel more calm going into the day. So what I’ve encouraged them is, particularly in a highly reactionary, crazy in terms of scope, entrepreneurial environment that is very leanly staffed, you’ve got to take time to be organized. It’s not about jumping in and getting on tickets or jumping in and solving yesterday’s problems that came in overnight. I mean, when there’s an emergency, you got to do it. But part of mental sanity in that environment and being as effective as you can is prioritizing, what do you have to accomplish today, tomorrow, and next week kind of approach. And then the other piece that I would say that we do very heavily when I can see the team starting to get stressed out. whether it’s in our individual one-on-ones, which we do typically bi-weekly, or we do a weekly kind of a meeting that each week of the month has a different approach. Sometimes it’s reviewing last month’s API. Sometimes it’s grooming our project list. Sometimes it’s updating status on where we are on some key projects. But we have that kind of laid out in our organization. What I will do is sit down and just say, okay, how are you hanging? You know, somebody does, I’m, I’m kind of stressed out. Then it’s, we go through, what do you have on your list? What do I have on your list? And let’s prioritize what your number one most important thing is. And that’s what, that’s, that’s what you’ve got to work on. When that’s done, go to number two. And, and sometimes we do that every day. If it’s really crazy, it’s coming in. What do you, what’s the most, what’s most important? What is, what are you getting from the organization or what do you see? And then it takes a lot of the stress off because I think. And I’m throwing a lot at you, but I think folks sometimes, myself included, become overwhelmed. And then you get stuck in that, I’ve got to do everything. I’ve got to do everything today to make everybody happy. And then you end up killing yourself. And again, I’m not the best at this because I still try to do too much. But the goal there is to break things into those bite-sized chunks. So it’s, again, very strategic. But then you get down and you become very tactical or granular in terms of solving the specific issues. Does that make sense?

Speaker 0 | 41:52.514

Does that make sense? No, it absolutely does. Very good planning. I mean, it sounds like a Franklin Covey course would fit in great there. It’s like we need, I’m sure there’s a gap to be filled. I’m sure there’s a gap to be filled there. Mid-market, IT director, consulting, planning, leadership guy. You know, there’s someone out there that does that. I know he does. So no, I think that’s, I think it’s put very, very well. And I think it just paints a really good picture of what, of the, of the space, you know, everything, the space that you guys work in and every day and what you do and trying to do more with less and trying to do more with less. And how can we eliminate, how can we eliminate tasks? How can we make our life easier? How can we free up time? Um, you know, the more we can free up time, the more that. um, we can get something off our plate, you know, great. And the more that we spend just like, you know, I have no time for that. You know, like I got to get back to my, you know, to do list. Um, there’s a fine, there’s a fine balance there.

Speaker 1 | 43:00.776

Um,

Speaker 0 | 43:02.117

so it’s, um, I’ll leave you with, so, so what’s your last, what’s your one piece of advice for, for it leaders out there? You have, you have a piece of advice for anyone listening?

Speaker 1 | 43:11.504

Oh, wow. Um,

Speaker 0 | 43:14.014

And it can be just the first thing that comes to mind, you know, cause a lot of times the first thing that comes to mind is, you know, that’s it.

Speaker 1 | 43:19.498

Yeah. I think, I think, um, where we have had successes, um, for me anyway, and again, it depends on your personality and how comfortable you are, but IT kind of has the impression of you and you get thrown into the corner closet or down by the data center and nobody ever goes there and IT never comes out. Um, and I, I support, I support that. you know, five operating businesses, our team supports five operating businesses. We have 130 people in our corporate office. I’m on all floors of the building. I’m in meetings from, you know, new development to property management to new investments, talking about new technology. And I love that. But I would suggest to somebody be as visible as possible, be as approachable as possible. The more people that you know, and they go, oh, that’s Todd from IT. opens up the door for them to come in and go hey i had a problem and wanted to see if we could kind of figure it out or can you be part of this meeting that’ll open up doors for you to be to be more involved as opposed to being um a group that has stuff just put on you um if you will and and where you are part of that process and and that dialogue is important So it’s more about being available and being visible and then performing.

Speaker 0 | 44:36.536

When I was in corporate America, I’m trying to think if I ever knew the IT director. I never did. I didn’t. I knew the CTO at one company, and that’s because it was a major, major, major SELEC, and we had a full eight-hour. outage. And I remember talking with him when I went to the NOC one day and asking him, what was that like? And he said, that was the worst day of my life. And he said, it was also the biggest learning. He said, it was also the biggest learning of my life. Other than that, every time I needed a new laptop or whatever it is, no face, no clue who it was. It was just the work prevention department. So,

Speaker 1 | 45:29.972

well, and I think, you know, IT is one of those departments that you don’t want to hear from. I think by the nature of what you do, when things break, you’ve got to call IT. And that process could be as pleasant as possible. That goes back to the customer service side of it. But IT really in any modern business, particularly in like a mid-market business, it touches every aspect, you know, and some of that has been an educational process for just having our leadership understand. Think about it for a minute, guys.

Speaker 0 | 45:59.969

It’s a business force multiplier. It is. It absolutely is. You know that. You’re in an entrepreneurial business. You’ve owned your own business. That’s what’s so exciting. We didn’t even talk about any of that. But you went from that to… Anyways.

Speaker 1 | 46:15.317

But yeah, when a resident does an internet search, they’re doing an internet search through a partner that IT has negotiated. And… installed on the property. When they use the door access to walk into their building, they’re using a system that we manage. All the way down to when you run an internet search or you log on to your property management system, you’re using services or hardware or phones that allow you to do your business. And although we do consume a lot of resources and we’re not a true or traditional revenue enhancement type organization in many cases. we are essential to the smooth operation of the business. And we do affect the ability to create revenue. We do enhance it in a lot of ways when you start to get into the nitty gritty. So looking at IT,

Speaker 0 | 47:08.590

you definitely affect a controllable, you definitely affect a labor line item on a P&L and people’s ability to do their job in an effective way and be able to get more work done in a faster amount of time,

Speaker 1 | 47:24.162

which is… Absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 47:25.684

can be incremental. Um, it has been a pleasure having you on the show and, um, all, all I can say is all my best to you managing a 350 endpoints with, um, three people, you know, maybe we can move that up to, I mean, I think we said like 3.5, um, because you’re worth, like, I think you’re like, you’re like the 0.5 on that list.

Speaker 1 | 47:47.352

Um, maybe we can move that up to,

Speaker 0 | 47:50.314

uh, maybe we can move that up to like four or five, uh, you know, we can, we can find a way to do that. in the future.

Speaker 1 | 47:56.237

We’re working on it.

Speaker 0 | 47:57.258

Yeah, man. All my best to you. Thank you so much. And anytime you’ve got this great story or a big win, let’s have you back on the show.

Speaker 1 | 48:05.268

I appreciate it. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me, Phil.