Speaker 0 | 00:09.865

I’ve already hit record on this so that people can feel that this is, you know, so it’s such a real conversation. So everyone out there listening, you are now you’re listening to dissecting popular it nerds. Today. We are talking with Joshua Milo’s not Milos. Um, although it is gyro or not hero. Um, you’re not, but.

Speaker 1 | 00:30.176

what you are.

Speaker 0 | 00:32.357

But what you are, however, is head of IT applications for Birkenstock of Americas. And I’m a big fan, man. I really am. I’ve been a fan of Birkenstock for a long time. I grew up, spent most of my summers on the beach. I have beat up, ruined, and done everything to Birkenstocks that I should have never done. And there’s probably a bunch of people that would roll your eyes at me at your company for not treating my cork right. and doing everything that I could do, like walking through saltwater with them and everything, you know, but I don’t care. I love them. I love the way they feel.

Speaker 1 | 01:06.802

Well, thanks for being a brand fan. I really appreciate it. Folks like you really are the people that make our product what it is.

Speaker 0 | 01:14.764

There’s a, what is it, the Bostonians or whatever, the ones that like go over the front, right? Yes. Okay. So yeah, we’re just going to talk shoes for a few seconds. I don’t care about IT and SAP and all this other stuff that we’re going to talk about. But you guys used to have this version of the Bostonians with a rubber sole where I could take the cork out, replace it, and put it back in. So I want you to deliver that feedback to whoever you need to do of how-I will take it.

Speaker 1 | 01:45.199

I will take it to product development. I will take it to product development tomorrow.

Speaker 0 | 01:48.701

And I think it’s because someone in marketing decided, well, We allowed him to replace the cork so he’s not buying any more new shoes and we just can’t do that. So get rid of that. But that was the pair that I still have that I thought, oh, I’ll just ruin these. I ruin every other shoe and I’ll just buy another pair. And now you don’t make them anymore. And I’ve literally been looking on whatever posh mark that my wife’s on for old versions of it. I can’t find it. So I still wear the old ones around that have… stain from painting the porch in them and you know i have like levels of birkenstocks i have levels you know there’s levels there’s the ruined pair that you can wear for work outside mowing the lawn and then there’s the pair that’s like you know pristine like no you can’t this is like you would actually wear that with like i don’t know if you wanted to look weird in a suit or something you know okay enough birkenstock talk it must be anyways uh do you love working there of course yes you’re on you’re recorded of course yeah

Speaker 1 | 02:48.536

No, the company is fantastic. Here in America, we have this really great leadership team. I’m happy to be part of the organization that is continuing to grow. We’re in this really interesting time right now. I’ll use the word interesting. With just the stay at home, COVID, retail has been beaten up hard. Parallel and footwear, respectfully. But I think we’ve been very… lucky Birkenstock. And there’s a couple other out there. But people want that comfort, that feeling of comfort, the health and the benefits that our product brings. And people love Birkenstocks. And people have found our company again after all these years. You have shoes that go by the wayside, but then you have Birkenstocks. That’s a brand that stayed the…

Speaker 0 | 03:46.240

If you’re aware, it goes all the way back, man. You have a history. I have a history with you guys. I really do. Does it help that you speak? Can you speak German, first of all? And would it help if you spoke German?

Speaker 1 | 03:59.785

I speak maybe two or three words of German. Don’t test me. But, you know, I’ve been very lucky. Our headquarters, of course, is in Germany, where all our work and stuff is to be made. And I’ve got a great team out there that I work with. both on the business and IT side that are very nice and indulge me in speaking English. Do you get to fly out there? Yeah, before all this stuff started, yeah, definitely out to Cologne where the head of offices, we work together on a number of initiatives, including SAP, which is also a German company.

Speaker 0 | 04:35.297

You can learn a language pretty quickly. I’m a terrible language person. It was the worst in school ever, and I found Pimsleur, and I’ve been trying to learn languages for a long time. And I found Pimsleur to be the best way to learn a language. And you can literally learn within like three months. It’s pretty amazing.

Speaker 1 | 04:49.920

Nice.

Speaker 0 | 04:50.500

If you want to just, you know, while you’re driving back and, you know, just download the Pimsleur app, throw up German, and you will, at least within a couple weeks, you’ll have some, you know, general conversation stuff. It’s actually really, really cool how it works. Okay, so SAP. um sap horror stories sap horror stories they are really unknown to man that never happens um everything goes as smooth as possible um transitioning things like this working in in your level of the industry it’s probably like the easiest job that there is in the world so i don’t know what we’re going to talk about um yeah but you’ve done it well you’ve done it and you’ve done it well so how um I don’t know. Let’s just, let’s just go back. How did you get into this? How did you get into this, this thing? And,

Speaker 1 | 05:41.926

uh, Yeah. So I would say, um, like, I love your show, by the way, I’ve been listening to it for the past year. And, um, I’d say like your, a lot of your other guests, I think the common thing is I was exposed to technology early on my dad. I live in the San Francisco area. My dad was very much involved in the technology industry, uh, brought home a TRS 80 trash 80. for us to play with. Now, I’m going to say, I actually had a good talk to my dad about this the other day, preparation for the interview. I said, okay, tell me about the Trash 80. I’m trying to remember the version and all the things that were included. And for those of you who are Trash 80 aficionados, this was not the original Trash 80. This was the Trash 80 Color Computer, which apparently the only thing shared that was common between the Color Computer version and the original Trash 80 was that little sticker that said TRS-80. Because it was a Tandy machine, apparently, with some other bells and whistles. But still the same things. The tape drive, my dad brought home one of the first modems, like a 300k BOD modem. No, 300k, no. It was like an A300 BOD modem for us to play with. He also, I think what Tandy Corporation, Radio Shack was really big on back then was… the magazines like the rainbow magazine that had the like stuff about hey this is a computer what it does but it also had programs that you could hand key into the the trs-80 and save into the the cassette tape drive and so i you know i would be spending you know that’s what i’m what okay so the cassette tape how is the cassette it was literally saving it on like was

Speaker 0 | 07:22.777

this just like a regular tape you could buy somewhere did you have a specific tape no no this was a cassette tape this was a cassette drive

Speaker 1 | 07:29.755

RCA jacks into the cassette drive.

Speaker 0 | 07:32.836

Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 07:32.957

I was seeing it the other day. Yeah, yeah. But it would, it just takes forever to load things and save things because you have to rewind it. You have to mark on the tape, okay, you have the little counter on the tape drive to say, okay, here’s where you’re at 0030. And then you would record your, you’d type your program in and you’d save it to the tape and it would, as it’s recording, that counter’s counting. And so on the back of the tape drive, kind of like a mixtape. You know, you’ve got your, okay, program number one is, you know, Frogger and Frogger is from 0, 0, 0 to, you know, 0, 300, for example. And so that was the old school way before we had the floppy disk, before all these other things came along. That’s crazy.

Speaker 0 | 08:17.663

I never had the tape. I mean, I know I remember tape drives, but I never had like throwing a Memorex, you know, tape. Like, could you just buy tape? Like…

Speaker 1 | 08:29.271

From my recollection now, this is again, this is six, seven, eight years old when my dad was doing this with me, but it was literally Memorex cassette tape that we used to throw in there.

Speaker 0 | 08:41.360

I’m doing a giveaway. I was on eBay the other day looking up old computers and trying to find ones that were in mint condition and working. I was going to do a dissecting popular IT nerds giveaway. We’ll give away an old, I don’t know. We’ll give away one of these computers in many condition working. I think it was just before. Yeah. I wish I had kept them all. I wish I had kept them all. They’re still selling. They’re not expensive. You can buy it for like a hundred bucks. Maybe that is a lot.

Speaker 1 | 09:07.905

So our trash 80 actually died. It caught on fire. My dad got a 64 KB memory upgrade that actually had a solder into the motherboard. And he admitted to me. years later. I think I might have not started it to actually correct the system. So my brother, my oldest of three, my brother was playing the Donkey Kong emulator and all of a sudden smoke’s coming out of the machine and it caught on fire. So my dad grabs it, runs out to the backyard, dumps a whole bunch of water on it and that was the end of that. From there we went to 286s and 386s and gray box machines after that.

Speaker 0 | 09:49.145

Donkey Kong killed the TRS-80 and died in Raging Inferno.

Speaker 1 | 09:53.726

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 09:55.387

still one of those family stories we talked about to this day so uh it would have been great to have your dad on the show at the same time that would have been great he didn’t really know what he was doing yeah yeah you know i’m sure um yeah he will love listening to this afterwards

Speaker 1 | 10:11.726

I was exposed to technology. And so I, you know, but I didn’t actually go in that direction originally. I wanted to be a, go in to work for state departments. I wanted to be involved in air and air relations. I went into a poli sci as a degree.

Speaker 0 | 10:29.836

Which is a totally useful major that everyone should spend their money on. I just make fun of poli sci people. I make fun of them because my wife was a poli sci major and I’m like, Hey, it’s working out well for you.

Speaker 1 | 10:41.966

Exactly. So I started going down that route and realized, oh, what I actually wanted to do wasn’t going to be able to be done with the policy. So I came home, started working into a semiconductor company as a customer service, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And still very good with computers. You know, the IT guys are coming through and I’m like 1920 at the time. Still a young guy, web behind the ears. they would like fix the computer and like the customer service agent come over and say, Hey Josh, this doesn’t quite work. Do you know anything about how to fix it? And so I would fix it even further.

Speaker 0 | 11:19.878

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 11:22.540

Yeah. Come on. So the it manager, uh, there decided, um, they were tired of me fixing stuff after their people came through and they hired me as a, as a business analyst. And after that I went, Hey, this isn’t too bad. Maybe I should actually stick to something I’m good at. Um, and so after that, that programming CS major, uh, went to, um, uh, computer, uh, computer college. Um, and, uh, from there,

Speaker 0 | 11:50.414

I guess my question is, was it fun?

Speaker 1 | 11:53.596

Um, yes. Yeah. I would say, you know, because at the time, yeah, fun, but work, but I think what was great about it at the time was I, um, I, I, I got a lot on the job training, uh, where You know, you sit in classrooms and you learn things is one thing, but when you’re sitting out there working with the business, working, uh, you know, when I was, you know, very young, you know, uh, business, getting your hands involved with things, working with other programmers, uh, many, many years more experienced than me. Um, I got to learn so much and actually I have to travel. I traveled, uh, everywhere from Austin to, uh, Singapore to Korea to Taiwan. Um, as part of, you know, I was like still 20, 21 at the time. Yeah. And got to see the world.

Speaker 0 | 12:41.282

I was just talking with, what’s wrong with me? I was just talking with Todd Shipway, who was kind of involved in building the early days of Facebook’s data center build out. And we were just talking about. Like you couldn’t build it, like you couldn’t build it fast enough in the absolute massive and like just the access points all around the world. And you just made me think of that. Like, what about, you know, what was technology like in Korea and Taiwan at the time? Did you think technology was kind of like at a level set for everyone across the world? Or have people always been catching up to the United States? Or did Europe? kind of surpass the United States when it comes to maybe infrastructure and ability to do things with less? Just made me think of that. Like what was technology like in Korea and across the world at the time? And would you say that it’s growing kind of exponentially equally across the world?

Speaker 1 | 13:44.582

No, you know, I think what was interesting at the time, like this was 97, 98. And so, yeah, this is, you know, Yahoo, this is pre… of course, pre-Facebook. Google was kind of this little like engineering shop that was kind of figuring things out at the time.

Speaker 0 | 14:04.656

Hotmail, AOL, Netscape,

Speaker 1 | 14:08.318

Netscape. Everybody’s got the AOL disks, Netscape. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 14:13.440

What was the free dial-up internet that everyone had? Was it Net Zero? Net Zero? Net Zero. Is that right? Yeah. I think so. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 14:19.862

it’s free. What are you talking about? Yeah. Yeah. So I would say in my experience, and at least in that time period, I felt that Korea and Singapore, especially that they were, were further ahead, um, at least in technology than, uh, the U S just from, yeah, I, you know, from, you know, and I was visiting, you know, the main cities of course. So, you know, I think it really depends ultimately, but, um, but from more established technology, you know, um, from like flying Singapore airlines, um, to staying in the hotels in downtown Korea. I felt that their technology was certainly a little bit further ahead. Now, of course, the U.S. took a huge jump. Once you know the Facebook’s in the gooey and the Google was especially a you know, hmm guru

Speaker 0 | 15:12.990

You know from 2009 software like maybe software perspective or coding perspective.

Speaker 1 | 15:17.654

Yeah, yeah coding from a software and

Speaker 0 | 15:20.317

Yeah, not from like a soldering transistors and no blowing up your computer in the backyard.

Speaker 1 | 15:26.022

Oh,

Speaker 0 | 15:26.742

yeah. Okay, gotcha So SAP why You said last time, I mean, really, like, it’s like the best. Like, why is SAP the right ERP system for everyone out there listening? Let’s start like a fight, you know? Like, why is it the best ERP system in your opinion?

Speaker 1 | 15:48.747

So that’s a good question.

Speaker 0 | 15:50.008

I’m not even getting paid by these guys. I got to go to some, you have some rep over there that are like, I don’t know, sponsor our show or something. Like, throw me 10.

Speaker 1 | 15:57.133

I’m sure we’ll work.

Speaker 0 | 15:57.933

Throw me like a couple of Chipotle burritos. Can I get a few burritos just for mentioning them? So why in saying that they’re the best and then having Birkenstock say that they’re the best? I mean, come on. Why is SAP the best?

Speaker 1 | 16:11.643

So I think, you know, there’s, I would say this, SAP has a lot of, I would say intellectual property, a lot of smarts when it comes to the, you know, they tout, you know, the best of the best companies run SAP. And I would say. When you look at SAP versus other systems, it comes down really, I think there’s a Coke versus Pepsi argument you can have. Do you want everything in one system, a hub and spoke model where you got SAP in the hub and you’ve got all these other systems, satellite systems connected to it via the spokes? Or you go distributed, the best of breed where everything is, it’s distributed across many, many different systems and everything’s in balance. And so back when I did my first project in 99, 2000, it was, you know, JD Edwards, Oracle, SAP. And then that was the argument still is, would you want to throw everything into one system, one vendor that can do everything for you? Or do you want to go best of breed and connect all these systems together? You know, I think what we call today microservice. And so I think SAP is the best of four to read. One, there is, I think, a very good argument to say. you know, the integration effort required, um, is less when you put your, you put all your eggs in the SAP basket, because in one system, you’ve got your planning, you’ve got your finances, you’ve got your inventory, you’ve got your order management system, everything in one system, and it can do it all. Um, you know, I think, yeah, there’ve been some negative press around, um, SAP failures, but when it’s done right, when it’s. built correctly, kind of like a Lego set. You build it scalable, man, that system will fly for you. But also, when you think about it, there’s this great ecosystem, especially in the pro footwear industry, I have to say, of other customers in the pro footwear industry than Nike, the Under Armour, the Columbia Sportswear, the Crocs. They’re all running SAP too. Yeah, we can collaborate with. And I’ve been lucky to be part of industry groups for Pearl Footwear where we reach out, we talk to each other all the time. Hey, how do you guys do things? And share and collaborate and not reinvent the wheel. And so I think there’s this great ecosystem of customers and collaboration that can support you in that journey to get to where you want to be.

Speaker 0 | 18:54.820

Any advice if you were building something from the ground up? Or maybe building something from the ground up would be step one or option two. It’s already built and we need to migrate to SAP off of it.

Speaker 1 | 19:08.691

Yeah. So I think the biggest thing, you know, I think SAP tests this is it’s a business transformation. I think some of the worst things you can do is try to stuff your, you know, air quotes, stuff your business processes into an SAP system. You have to actually look at it from the other direction. And that’s what I really tell us is that look at our business, best business practices. Look at how we recommend you do things in the system. Build in that direction. And I would say also build in a scalable manner. Don’t go big bang. Don’t try to do everything all at once. Do it in smaller chunks because it goes back to project management 101. You can’t always… If you try to do everything all at once, you can always sometimes get yourself into a pickle when it comes to either budget or resources of scope.

Speaker 0 | 20:07.510

Hmm. That really just, I don’t want to say that that’s mind blowing, but it kind of is mind blowing because it makes me think of some projects sometimes that are, you’re on a whiteboard and you’re drawing a line to this line to this process to this, this needs to move to here. Then we need to integrate this and integrate this. And this goes here, here, and here, where we could probably just go back with a red marker and this later, this later, this, this later, cross this out, cross this out, just do this first.

Speaker 1 | 20:37.710

Um, yes. Focus on what’s important and focus on what’s going to bring you the best ROI.

Speaker 0 | 20:43.253

So you got to kind of do this from a build something from the ground up, uh, when you guys were opening up a new market and kind of maybe just walk me through like, you know, your thought process on how you do that, where you start.

Speaker 1 | 20:58.199

Yeah. And so we were very lucky, uh, just this last year, um, I was hired to, um, build a team in the U S uh, to support North America. And, uh, our, our North America region was opening our, uh, a new channel out there in Canada. Uh, so this was Greenfield. This is, you know, they talk about Greenfield projects and then there’s no Greenfields, you know, we’re starting fresh, nothing there. We’re going to build, build ground up. Um, and we were lucky, uh, in that project, it was the greenest of Greenfield. There was no office, no team. no phone system, no internet, everything was going to be brand spanking new. And so on the business side, there were very,

Speaker 0 | 21:43.144

You say no office, there was a physical building there or were you building that?

Speaker 1 | 21:46.907

No, no, there was, we, they went out and clicked an office. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 21:51.110

So like a piece of grass, there was grass, we planted seed. We, you know, that does happen, but you know.

Speaker 1 | 21:58.896

Yeah. So we were, we were, yeah. So certainly. A brand new office, a brand new team was hired on the business side that was working with us. I needed to build a team. And so I think the first thing, you know, I was an army of one initially, but I needed to bring some good resources in. And so the first thing I did as an IT leader is to look where my needs are. And so I saw I needed three specific needs. And so I went out and started hiring for those. Um, but then, uh, secondly, you know, the projects had already started curiosity,

Speaker 0 | 22:35.824

just out of curiosity, you had three specific needs. Um, when you went out to hire for that, did you have people in mind already that you already knew or did you actually, you didn’t. So there was no like recruiter, there was no, like, I have to go find people or anything like that. You already knew who you were going to bring.

Speaker 1 | 22:51.090

Yeah. I, I, again, I guess I’ve been lucky enough to be just a part of the industry over the last 10 years.

Speaker 0 | 22:55.952

So you’re calling up saying, Hey man.

Speaker 1 | 22:59.098

I had a short list of people I needed. Yeah, you know, it’s a lot like, you know, when you’re building a franchise, are you going to go to the owner and say, hey, do you want to be in the playoffs year one? Or do you want to, you know, wait a couple of years before, you know, we get to the championship round? Because I can do either. We can build from ground up and be in the championship round two, three years from now. Or we want to be in the playoffs year one. And so I said, you know, hey, we needed good resources to start with. um and so i went out and so your answer was playoffs year one yeah yeah so the word i got was was we need playoffs year one and so i went out and hired four resources that i knew that would be successful uh out of the game cool cool yeah um so that was of course the first step uh we got a but the project was ongoing uh so you know we got a kind of speeding train headed towards uh the

Speaker 0 | 23:50.553

finish line in october of last year can i do you mind if i dig in a little bit there just because um It’s just making me think of some other own, let me just say personal problems that I have in my own life. How do you divide? How are you dividing a line and saying like, look, when you give directions, are you giving very specific directions? I mean, you’re saying like, look, this is what you are in charge of. Go make it happen. Are you micromanaging to a degree? Are you letting go or is there, or was everyone on the team wearing multiple hats, but they had kind of like a primary superpower, you know, how are you dividing?

Speaker 1 | 24:32.266

Yeah, great question. And so, um, I am definitely not someone who’s going to micromanage.

Speaker 0 | 24:38.448

Um, I, everyone likes you and that’s why you’re so easy to talk to. I mean,

Speaker 1 | 24:41.249

oh, thanks. Now, um, I, I’m a firm believer in giving guardrails, uh, giving direction, giving guardrails, but saying, um, to your point, this is your primary superpower. You are in charge of keeping an eye on customer service and sales. Go run with that. But you also get supply chain, by the way. You get the folks that do the purchasing. So go dig into that a little bit. I know you got the skills. Go make it happen. You know, things like that. Or, you know, hey, I know you’re going to, I know you are an expert in finance. Go work with them with that because that may be an area where I might not have the strongest skill set. And so I need somebody that’s maybe a little bit stronger. Or, hey, I need an infrastructure and integrations person. Go, I need to start worrying about and thinking about these things. And so I’m handing tasks out and I want folks to run with it. And then come back to me if there’s a problem. My job I see is kind of that, that guy that’s running, playing those, the field and laying down the blocks ahead of the, the guy that’s running my team.

Speaker 0 | 25:47.685

Gotcha. So people are coming back with, Hey, we need to build it this way.

Speaker 1 | 25:52.306

Yeah. Yeah. So, Hey, I see this issue. Hey, I’ve talked to customer service and they’re having issues with our websites, our B2B website. You know, let’s look at, let’s dig into that a little bit. Or, hey, I talked to the person that’s in charge of vendor compliance, and we’re looking at how do we get EDI spread across six different platforms? How do we make that better, as an example? I think those are things that we get in and dig in as a team or dig in individually and say, okay, so what have you seen? What do we know? There’s definitely some best practices out there on how to approach some of these things just because. you know, there’s a certain playbook you run with.

Speaker 0 | 26:34.555

And then how do you translate between you and the German mothership? So let’s just say you built out this new, complete new location, new team, bringing your own special people, build out the entire thing from the ground up. How does that mesh with, I don’t know, what’s going on over in Germany?

Speaker 1 | 26:55.644

Yeah. Yeah. And so we’ve been very lucky to have such a great leadership team. here in the US and also in Germany. And so it’s a matter of way. I see it especially because we’re a conglomerate. You know, we’re a Birkenstock group. There’s many different companies. And so there’s many different players wearing multiple hats. I see it in a way that they are kind of an internal AMS provider. You know, so there’s things I go to them and say, hey, I know you guys have expertise in XYZ. I need your assistance. You know, you guys manage the servers for our SAP system. That’s great. You know, let’s work together. And I’ll let you take that lead because that’s something that you guys have more experience in than maybe I know. In a bench strength on my side of the water, I don’t. But then on the other hand, I say, hey, I’ve got somebody that’s got expertise in finance. I see you guys maybe are looking for that resource. Why don’t I share my resource with you? So there’s a bit of give and take ultimately at the end of the day.

Speaker 0 | 28:02.319

What happens when someone like you just disappears off the face of the earth?

Speaker 1 | 28:07.322

My hope is if I ever disappear off the face of the earth, the rest of the team keeps running. You know, that’s ultimately as a leader, our jobs should be replaceable ultimately. You know, the ship should still be running. We still have to be heading in the right direction. You know, there may be some directional things, you know, that can… as a leader that we can add, but, but

Speaker 0 | 28:32.717

Would it be easy for someone to come into your position and look at it and be like, wow, dude, I like how he built this. I can see how he was a type of person. Like, would you say your DNA, like, is your DNA stamped on this?

Speaker 1 | 28:45.003

I hope so. You know, I’m always that, um, that pouts scalability, supportability.

Speaker 0 | 28:51.567

It happens every day. I mean, it’s gotta happen. It happens every day. People disappear. Yeah. I mean, no, but seriously, like I was talking to my sister the other day and, you know, this is just, you know, we’re dealing with my parents getting old and helping my dad with, you know, finances and stuff like that. And she’s like, Phil, I’ve never, you know, I’ve never had to deal with this stuff before because Carl, her husband, she’s like, he does all the finances and stuff. And I’m like, and it just left me thinking, you know, it left me even thinking about my own wife. That’s like, you know, like, yeah, like what would happen? Like I just disappeared. Would someone even know? Like, you know. how to perform the tax return or any other number of tasks. You know what I mean? So it’s cool.

Speaker 1 | 29:32.300

Yeah. Ultimately my, my hope is there’s a small, I mean, of course there’s a small amount of administrative things that maybe I manage, but my hope is my team can certainly carry on ultimately, you know, subsequently.

Speaker 0 | 29:45.386

I would hope as you know, like SAP director, creator, ninja, whatever you want to, whatever you want to call it. Um, It’s a very like, well, it’s gotta be very well organized. And I mean, it’s literally like, it’s, it’s how everything works. Right. It’s, it’s really like this, like super organization on, on, you know. steroids. So I would hope that it would be very clear and very, very easy to see. What is the most fun part of your job?

Speaker 1 | 30:24.170

Yeah, I always has been seeing something from inception to go live. So, you know, sitting there with somebody in the business and hearing their business problems and then seeing that become something. And it could be as simple as they say, hey, you know, Josh, maybe I didn’t even realize it. Sometimes it’s just sitting with somebody. And back in the old days when we could sit next to each other in the office and just talk or just look over somebody’s shoulder and they’re doing something on the system. They may do something and go, hey, wait a minute, that seems like an inefficient way of doing things. And then talking through it. And it could be simple as just a small change or it could be something like a systems implementation that you do in conjunction with. an SAP project where you add AR automation or AP automation or any number of different things that improve the business’s lives and see that go all the way to go live and see the business go, whoa, this is going to save me time. It’s going to save me money at the end of the day, save me resources. My resources can be focused on others more important.

Speaker 0 | 31:31.207

Do you have a days of the week divided up or you go out and have certain conversations with certain groups of people? Do you have your time blocked, kind of like a block and tackle, almost like a playbook where, you know, Monday’s defense, this day’s offense, this day’s, you know, whatever, special teams, and we’re kind of, you know, talking, questioning, revisiting. Do you have any sort of plan or, I mean, do you plan out your days like that?

Speaker 1 | 32:01.175

Sort of. I would say it’s actually, I look at my day and especially because of time zone differences, we’re nine hours away from Germany. My mornings are stuff related to my colleagues in Germany. And right now we’re running a very big SAP project, the next phase after what we did in Canada. Mid mornings are oftentimes meetings with the US colleagues, sometimes our Canadian colleagues. And then the afternoons is, generally I’m taking one-on-ones with my team members. or we have you know it status meetings or department meetings where we’re reviewing how things are going um you know and it’s i would say especially working from home it’s important to block your calendar uh for your own time too uh for projects for learning you know um we get in a situation where just always running running and i tell my team members that too you kind of like block your calendar to to either support yourself in learning or just to self-care Or just, just so you have less noise at the end of the day.

Speaker 0 | 33:05.392

What is, um, do you play any sports or anything or what, what does self-care look like for you?

Speaker 1 | 33:12.598

Yeah. I do a lot of walking and hiking. I used to run. Uh, I was, I, I loved, uh, running cross country, uh, distance running. Yeah. But I got old and my knees are not as great as the men, but yeah,

Speaker 0 | 33:27.070

I used to run. That’s I said the exact same thing. I used to run. I ran cross country in high school and I remember training for like a marathon and I was like got up I was like ran 16 miles one day and my knees were kind of beat up after it and I saw a guy flipping a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu sign on the corner of the street I was like I remember wrestling that was fun I went to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and I never ran if I run now it’s like you know three miles or two miles or something like that but I was like oh no running is over anyways yeah If people love running and love getting in that zone, you kind of get in that zone and that mindset.

Speaker 1 | 34:06.466

I do more hiking. I’ve got this great little county park, especially these days with COVID. It’s about two miles up the street from where we live and go up there on the weekends. It’s great. Nice,

Speaker 0 | 34:19.715

nice. What is… And I’ve been asking this a lot lately because I’m wondering if technology guys even have this in mind. But what’s the, you know, what’s the end game for you? And please don’t tell me it’s I’m going to cash out the 401k and be done. No, no, you know,

Speaker 1 | 34:40.469

yeah, you know, I think end game for me, ultimately, I don’t know if there’s an end game. I see it as a continued game, continued growth. That’s something that’s kind of like marked my career is just. always learning, always learning something new, always get into different industries, you know, learning ERP systems.

Speaker 0 | 34:59.022

Someone writes you a check for $25 million today. They hand it to you this moment, you get 25 million. What would you do?

Speaker 1 | 35:05.627

I would probably, I’m, I’m one of those guys that, you know, one of the few that actually go to work next day. I might take some more vacation time, but I’m not someone that would quit. I’m not someone who likes to sit down. I like being up and involved and working. Now, it may only take half a year off. It may take a really long vacation, for sure. But I’m someone that needs to learn.

Speaker 0 | 35:35.248

I think I would go back to school. I think I would go back to school. I don’t think I would. I know I would. Um, and that’s kind of like, because I’m kind of like always wanting to be in school now and constantly learning and studying. And I have much more appreciation for seeking of knowledge now than I did in the past. So now it’s, yeah, you know, um, but anyways, that’s, uh, uh, that’s cool. Um, but anyways, but it’s, it’s leadership growth in the IT field.

Speaker 1 | 36:05.620

Yeah. In business. I mean, ultimately, I mean, I love enterprise applications because it’s the cross section of it and technology and business. We have to be able to translate, uh, the business speak into ones and zeros, you know, and sometimes there’s a lot of ambiguity. So you got to pound at that ambiguity until you get to a one and a zero, uh, for the system to be able to even more mind blowing.

Speaker 0 | 36:28.526

Yeah. It’s even more mind blowing and kind of like the healthcare space too. Like what you said right now, because you see the business, you see the operations you can, you, I mean, you really can. positively affect the bottom line in a very big way through process like a really really big way um and i think that that’s i don’t know if our i don’t know if our it guys are given enough high fives unless you’re you know i don’t know um i don’t know elon musk or something i don’t know like you know how many it guys are high fives and be like look do you do you have um do you even mbo’s or anything like that do you like the idea of an mbo um

Speaker 1 | 37:07.594

So yeah, we use more goals and KPIs, but we certainly strive. I always work to have some type of goal process for our…

Speaker 0 | 37:19.481

Measurement of, look at how we affected the bottom line type of thing. Yeah. But I guess what I was saying is even in healthcare, it’s even crazier because now you’ve got technology and healthcare kind of merging together from the standpoint of data analytics and how you can take data. and use that in conjunction with science. And you’ve got guys that are like really, really good at, I don’t know, high levels of chemistry or whatever. And then also technology nerds at the same time. It’s pretty, people are way smarter than me. If you had one, you know, if you had one piece of advice for everyone out there, you know, just other guys in IT, other people listening, what would that be?

Speaker 1 | 37:57.586

Stay hungry, stay, you know, stay, be humble with the business, stay hungry, continue to learn. you know, the worst case you can be or do is to go to the business and, and let talk over them, learn from them, listen and be a advocate and consultant, uh, being a psychologist, let them talk to you about their issues because ultimately those things that they tell you, it may be small, but it can ultimately be something big for you to, to grow and build. It might be your next Elon Musk moment.

Speaker 0 | 38:32.257

Be people’s psychologist. I like it. go Birkenstocks. Everyone should own a pair of Birkenstocks. Birkenstocks are for it nerds if you don’t have one. Um, so I’ll, I’ll leave that. Maybe we should get a, maybe we should do a Birkenstock giveaway of something. I’ll think of that. We’ll think of it. Yeah. Alrighty, sir. Uh, great having you on the show. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 | 38:54.387

Thanks Phil. Appreciate it.