Speaker 0 | 00:09.568

Hopefully today I won’t screw up and scream at my kids at high decibels in the background with forgetting to hit mute. Everyone out there listening, you are listening to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today we have the doctor, the doctor on the show, Dr. Brayden Myers. We’re going to be talking about the ineffectiveness of vaccines. Just kidding. We’re not doing that. That’ll quickly get me shut down on LinkedIn if we talk about that. I’m not making any… Do not read into that. I’m not making any suggestions here whatsoever. Although I do have my third day of my NAD drip scheduled to go in at 5 o’clock today, if anyone knows about that. I don’t know if you do. Fairly life-altering. I found at least last couple of days. Anywho, let’s doctor, tell me you worked for Volvo corporate America for 10 years, six months. You’ve gone from like massive corporate world to more of a family owned. Do we call it logistics? Is logistics a fair statement for where you work? So let’s just talk about that. I don’t know if I’ve ever really talked. I don’t know if we beat up this subject a lot. Most people that know me know I came from. corporate america and then grew my beard like 12 inches long after that so what was it like the dynamic going from large to small definitely not today i mean it’s kind of a culture shock first month being here uh just getting used to the people i mean within

Speaker 1 | 01:40.621

about six weeks you know everyone in the entire company and coming from 120 000 person organization in 12 years uh including my internship as well i didn’t really know everyone there so you Definitely the biggest impact there was that. And then, you know, kind of just seeing where they were and starting from there to kind of decide what the strategy and the roadmap would be for the next few years.

Speaker 0 | 02:00.478

So you were at Volvo before. When I think Volvo, I think Volvo Penta engine that was in my dad’s center console boat. And then I think the trucks driving on the street, obviously, which you’d be more familiar with. You were project and process implementation manager. there now you’re just like full-blown director of information technology so so there did you have like a like a top tier like i’m making decisions but there’s kind of like this i don’t know just massive group of people that i’m working with and i know some people and now you’ve got how many end users do you have uh

Speaker 1 | 02:42.539

total probably around uh 2000 plus here okay and how big is the team

Speaker 0 | 02:49.084

your team. Let me take a guess. First of all, if I like, because I would say that you fall within mid market. So the whole reason for why dissecting popular it nerds exists is mid market it because you guys are really like superhuman. You’re not small business where small business is always like, wait, you know, what’s the biggest bang for my buck. Can I get for like, you know, this router that I bought at Kmart. And then, oh wait, Kmart doesn’t exist anymore. Sorry, Best Buy. I know,

Speaker 1 | 03:20.505

it just went out.

Speaker 0 | 03:21.845

Microcenter. Sorry, Martha Stewart. There’s that. And then there’s enterprise IT, which is just so big. And it’s just a different animal. It’s more of like we belong to this culture, so to speak, there. And then there’s mid-market IT, which is… I’m fighting for a seat at the table. I am fighting for more budgeted dollars. And if I’m doing my job right, IT is a business force multiplier and nothing can get done better without better technology. Everything gets done better with better technology. So you have a team of 2,000. If the numbers are right, based on the last two decades of working in this space, the ratio is about 1 to 100. So… but you’re at the 2000 mark. So you probably don’t have quite that ratio of staff. If you have a staff of 20 people, you’re doing really, really well. But I would imagine your staff is like 10 to 12.

Speaker 1 | 04:23.975

No, you’re correct. We have eight people. And then I also have some MSP partnerships regarding our network security and infrastructure management. All right.

Speaker 0 | 04:32.603

So we’ll count them. We’ll count how, so, so are they doing like help desk? Are they doing help desk stuff or anything or all right.

Speaker 1 | 04:38.888

They do my level three, level four, technical support.

Speaker 0 | 04:41.790

Okay. So thus the, the, purpose of this um of this show how do you get more how do you get as much done with as little as possible and of course logistics is very important in nowadays that have you what was covid like for you guys

Speaker 1 | 05:01.056

Yeah, it was kind of interesting. I actually, my first day of work for coming to Bowman was actually the very first day of lockdown in the U.S. So it was a different experience. I was going from about three years of remote work to 100% in office. They had no messaging programs. They had no remote work abilities. It was 100% you’re in. Our main flagship company is actually a transportation company where we own about 400 plus tractor trailers. And we actually own all of our assets, drive and so forth. During COVID, we had to be very flexible, implement technologies very quickly, efficiently, and at very little expense. So we rolled out Microsoft Teams. We rolled out technologies for video conferencing. We rolled out always-on VPNs to allow remote work. So it was a lot of fast-paced. We need to make the IT solutions bump up to 2022, 2021, and match where we need to be from COVID. Thinking back to that.

Speaker 0 | 05:57.832

and helping out other people listening, what was your single biggest frustration problem concern during that time?

Speaker 1 | 06:05.374

That’s a great question. I mean, I definitely think probably the first one was coming into a new team for me. So I was trying to get to know each other and learn each other’s habits and you learn my team. In the same time we were going into a pandemic, so really different environment. A lot of people don’t really realize it, you know, tractor trailer transportation logistics highlighted. super, I mean, like securely highlighted. We were at, even our company was featured at the White House. Like we had a lot of press. And so people looked at it, oh, they’re doing great during the pandemic. That was one of the toughest years ever. So it was a unique situation for us to find ways to save money with technology. And during that time, I was actually even able to get certain projects approved and put in place, you know, to customer support. I mean, something as simple as that, putting in a CRM solution to allow for real-time, streamlined communication to all of our customers. faster and with better actual communication. And we do that at a fraction of the cost.

Speaker 0 | 07:02.536

Okay, so yeah, there’s a lot of factors there. I forgot about the memes that were like, what drove your technology implementation? Like, you know, technology or COVID or, you know, it was like that was like the biggest driver of technology, which is sad but true. And also, you know, okay, I guess. Thank you, but no thank you. Why were you featured at the White House?

Speaker 1 | 07:33.079

Truck drivers in America. We actually were one of the fleets that we’re actually supporting. And we actually were lucky enough that our president for our company that’s retiring this year has actually become, he’s now transitioning to the president for TCA, which is Truck Carrier Association for America. So basically the largest. trucking organization of the country he’s my he’s retiring into that so a lot of it just happened to be coincidence but we also were featured with along the line transportation and the influence getting making sure goods are delivered to everyone during that time okay

Speaker 0 | 08:09.576

so for in in order for this to be helpful to people maybe we just talk about with how you think about things and how you break things down so okay first day of work pandemic everything gets shut down i’m gonna I’m in a logistics industry, which is going to get hit pretty heavy because transporting things during a pandemic is kind of ridiculously important. But we have to work. We have to like now, hey, teams, by the way, we need to implement this. We’ve got this. We’ve got that. I’m new to the company. That was my biggest struggle was how do I connect, discover, and respond with people while implementing change at the same time? going to affect all these people that i don’t know yet it’s kind of crazy exactly how what was your methodology or what did you sit down and think like when you went home at night and cried yourself to sleep or stayed up all night thinking about things what did you write down on a piece of paper how did you map it out like where did you start yeah

Speaker 1 | 09:08.295

i mean bigger thing for me is i go back to my educational background and i look i always look at a customer-centric purpose first and then i look at a stakeholder theory background so i always try to analyze people that are going to be affected by this change and actually understand how can I make this change in some form or fashion mutually beneficial to them. And then from there, starting with the customer and working my way backwards to find out if our goal is to, you know, give you something as simple as an ability to communicate without having to be face-to-face with someone, to discover all the solutions from there and work your way backwards with the technology. Don’t make the technology be the same. And I think that’s a lot of times what I’ve seen in the industry is people will come to look at problem solving and they’ll present. you know, 15 different systems, it’ll be great to do it. They don’t even fully understand.

Speaker 0 | 09:53.346

Please explain more. So not making the technology the solution, but reverse engineering it kind of starting from the back, like, like, let’s, let’s just walk through like a one of the examples.

Speaker 1 | 10:05.439

Yeah, yeah. I mean, even just keeping on the same subject with teams, I mean, the first question was, how do we get a way that we can call someone face to face without sitting in front of them? And how can we get away with messaging them back and forth and being more efficient with how we do it so you don’t have to walk from building to building and we can keep our office doors closed. So breaking down those business requirements one by one to get to a functional requirement that’s really be utilized. And that’s probably the most challenging piece is breaking those down individually. and then going out and really each of those individual functional requirements then defining okay now i have all these requirements what tools or technologies out there exist that can meet this need and so looking at not just this one time instance what’s this going to do but also two years five years so forth and one of those for us is you know to get away from desk phones because we want to save costs So, you know, looking at that software and ability, it’s also a fun value. So understanding everything all around.

Speaker 0 | 11:10.616

So explain deeper how you don’t make technology the solution, because clearly technology was the solution there. Are you just saying the methodology? No, no.

Speaker 1 | 11:21.243

So like if you come in and you immediately go, they say, I want a video competition program. And you immediately go, okay, well, I can give you either Teams, Zoom, WebEx, or Google Hangout. That’s the typical response that I’ve dealt with in the past. And a lot of times when you come in with that, you’re totally missing out on what are the underlying requirements. Maybe they don’t need any of the features that come with Zoom. Maybe they don’t need any of the features that come with WebEx. Maybe some of the features are only available in one.

Speaker 0 | 11:51.070

And maybe you miss some of the existing systems that are in place and implementation. And that’s how you end up with kind of like shadow IT decisions and other people making other things like that.

Speaker 1 | 12:03.335

That’s a big piece. Shadow IT is a great concept and a horrible concept. Because it does happen and it does take place. And there’s definitely a lot of those moments where we kind of unraveled the tree this past two years that I’ve been here.

Speaker 0 | 12:16.924

Okay, so let’s go to, did you say CRM or ERP system? What did we replace or implement?

Speaker 1 | 12:23.348

CRM. Okay. Yeah, we ended up implementing a CRM.

Speaker 0 | 12:26.491

Okay, so did you have one before?

Speaker 1 | 12:29.213

We did not.

Speaker 0 | 12:30.293

Really? What, did you have spreadsheets?

Speaker 1 | 12:33.283

Not even spreadsheets. 100% email. Only email communication.

Speaker 0 | 12:37.444

Email as a database.

Speaker 1 | 12:39.684

Even phone calls were documented in email.

Speaker 0 | 12:42.065

No way. With how many trucks?

Speaker 1 | 12:46.026

400 plus, but up to 500.

Speaker 0 | 12:47.346

How is that even possible?

Speaker 1 | 12:50.407

That was my exact wording.

Speaker 0 | 12:53.748

No, for real. How do you manage routes? How do you manage orders? Yeah. How do you… I have a… I have a… I happen to have a lot of, um, I happen to have a lot of Russian friends and for some reason they’re all truck drivers. And, um, I have got a couple of friends that are, that have, um, um, like dispatch companies, like smaller trucking companies and stuff like this. And they’re nowhere near the size of you. They might be like one warehouse, you know, things like this. And even they have a system. I just, I can’t imagine, you know, and I.

Speaker 1 | 13:29.657

System for dispatch and stuff, but not customer service as far as like. I have an issue. I need to know something. I need additional capacity for my lanes that you have with me. Those are the types of things we put in the CRM. Dispatch and order management, stuff like that. We use an NAS 400. We use a legacy system.

Speaker 0 | 13:48.627

Okay, okay. Okay, so reverse engineering. We start off with, okay, well, we’re not doing anything right now, so anything’s better. So in that case, how do you not make technology the solution there? How do you not make technology a solution when you have nothing?

Speaker 1 | 14:06.417

It’s funny, but the first discussion I had with the C-team and the CEO even was, it’s working fine today. Why do we need to change it?

Speaker 0 | 14:15.244

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Speaker 1 | 14:17.426

I said, well, I just pulled the stats. I said, you know, we’re getting over a half of million emails per year for customer service. I said, can you tell me which customer is your biggest hitter? Can you tell me which customer is the most inclined to ask questions that add no value. And you tell me which customers you want to get more lanes with or you want to expand and grow the business, but down the road, things of that nature. And we don’t have the data. So there’s no way to make intelligent decisions in the future based on what we’re collecting. And also too, I said, one of the things that was, you know, for me coming in from a more corporate structured environment to a newer family business was, okay, well, how does someone contact you? Do they have like a customer service at yourcompany.com? well if it’s this time of the day this day of the week and you’re this customer you’re going to use this email address but if it’s a weekend you’re going to use this one if it’s after 5 p.m use this one and i said wait a single customer can have multiple email addresses to email for support depending on the time of the day they said well not just that but also the location that customers in so they have a spot in the northeast or the midwest they’re going to have two separate type of email addresses and it’s just like we got to find a way so we started documenting out what are all the current profits steps that we do what do we do today and then analyzing all those processes to say what can we do to make this better and showing them you know we centralized all this to one single inbound communication exchange we could then know the the true uh you know breadth and depth of what we’re doing i said and then from there we can start to divvy it out to the correct resources for customer service for order planning for dispatchers you know whatever the question might be even down to the sales team getting them involved and we started documenting out all the features they wanted to see in something requirements and breaking those down to what do we want each other to be and then from there that actually took a list of crms from about 40 down to three so instead of starting with the crm level essentially choosing the wrong product off the bat we started at the requirements level to find everything we need and then look to see what solutions can meet that need

Speaker 0 | 16:32.963

It’s really awesome. I’m rarely, you know, I talk a lot, ironically. I’m rarely left, you know, speechless. And if I am left speechless, it’s because I’m really marinating and I’m taking a lot of notes. You know, that’s what I do on these calls, shows, calls. Originally, the show was going to be called Recorded Phone Calls. I was like, maybe that might get shut down. It’s possible. I want to ask you where you are now, how you measured success. And before I do that. Did this change the company’s vision or goals? What was the company’s vision? Is there a growth? Like, hey, we want to grow the business. We want to make money. What’s the company’s vision?

Speaker 1 | 17:32.963

Yeah, we actually, I mean, we actually just published our new vision statement. That was actually part of our strategy this year was to create a clear, concise, strategic vision that we wanted to communicate not only internally, but externally. And our company motto is that we always carry through. So that’s been our slogan for almost 70 years. you know, we carry through every day no matter what it is, no matter what the condition will be there. So a lot of it was focusing on not only improving our internal workforce, but improving our internal reception to our customer base. And part of that is to grow our different streams as far as, you know, short haul, long haul, regional, so forth, each of the different areas in which we participate in, getting those grown. And the best way we could do that was to actually improve different things we were doing. Customer service was a big one because we had, I mean, we took our half a million records that we were getting per year. And now we’re down to about 150,000 because we’re finding that we have a lot of things that were being answered by two or three different people. And sometimes with the same answer, different answers. So now by putting everything at once. And, you know,

Speaker 0 | 18:40.717

I would imagine those answers are, let me just take a guess. I would imagine a lot of those multiple emails are. And I’m only saying this because I just ordered a bunch of jujitsu mats and I used my friend’s trucking company to deliver these jujitsu mats and they had to be carried through multiple places from Ohio and dropped off. I would imagine, I don’t know if I’m right, I’m just guessing that a lot of these questions and emails that may have been eliminated, may, are, where’s my order? Yep.

Speaker 1 | 19:05.987

And we have an online order tracking solution. Like,

Speaker 0 | 19:11.711

where’s my order?

Speaker 1 | 19:12.191

It’s like macro.

Speaker 0 | 19:13.612

Think about how much labor and time. and productivity is saved just from eliminating where the heck’s my order.

Speaker 1 | 19:25.334

Or even just now we have a simplistic macro that if that question comes in, literally if it sees in the body of the chain of the text that came in, order and status in the same email, it will actually have the ability to autonomously respond and say, in order to check your order status, you can click this link and sign in with your company’s email address. Even just that alone. you’ve gotten rid of you know half of your inquiry and our next step and i talked about like that future evolution that scalability when you want to have that ability to grow beyond what you created that was one of the things we looked at in crm so we wanted something that had open apis we wanted the ability to throw it and part of that next evolution is we’re developing our own apis to integrate with our tms solution so that way if you actually ask for a specific order number status it can actually go right out to our system touch it and attach you along with the link for you to go watch it so you got your own developers doing that or are they outsourced yeah no no we have on our intramill we have our own object oriented programming team we also have as400 programmers

Speaker 0 | 20:33.042

your AS400s steal on-site or in the cloud?

Speaker 1 | 20:38.785

No. Steal and on-site?

Speaker 0 | 20:40.266

They have to be, right? Because no one knows how to do that yet, except I know a couple people that secretly do that. They specialize in AS400s, migrating AS400s to the cloud with redundancy. I mean, people that know it, know it. People that don’t know what we’re talking about, they just, you know, IBM. We love you. You made something that lasted forever. Like, I mean, you made, you did, you did the opposite of what every marketing department told you not to do, which is make something that breaks like an iPhone that I need to get every, I don’t know, 16 months. That’s a real another subject that’s for another show. The, um, this is how I, first of all, I applaud, I applaud the vision. I applaud the vision because every single company that has ever made customer service, the point, every company that has ever, ever made customer service, the main focus of their company, that’s the best sales strategy of all. It is the absolute best sales strategy of all. take care of your people. You always follow through, take care of your people, take care of your people, take care of people. That’s the best sales strategy. You don’t need to worry about like ramming things down people’s throat. You don’t need to worry about constantly getting in front of people, up in people’s grills and annoying them. You don’t have to do that. You just have to deliver really, really good customer service. So, so, so I applaud you on that. I’m wondering if your technology and organization and freeing up of time and measuring all of that drove clarifying the vision i would say that technology may have had a yeah yeah and i mean definitely for what’s coming in the next year technology

Speaker 1 | 22:42.536

you know i’m pushing efforts to communication driver workforce communication our technologies and our truck selves so i mean taking everything to the next level

Speaker 0 | 22:56.094

I had a really sad story happen, heard a really sad story the other day, and that was IT was brought to the forefront, brought to the table. IT was now sitting at the executive table. Changes were being made. Technology was being used to drive the business forward. And then some collapse happened internally at the company and older people came back into power and like, no, no, no, we’re going back to the way it ever was. And IT is now back into a regressive, I don’t know, sit in the server closet in the back room and please make sure,

Speaker 1 | 23:33.739

you know,

Speaker 0 | 23:37.500

answer the tickets. And I was like, that’s as bad as it can get. I couldn’t even think of it. Like I, sometimes you can’t think of the horror stories until they actually happen. What do you have to say? And then I spoke and then I spoke and then I had the most reviving conversation I’ve ever had in my life. I don’t even want to give this away, but it’s so good. I kind of, I can’t help it. And this guy said to me, he’s like, that’s, you know, what? He’s like, basically he’s saying what area of the business, name one area of the business that you can do better without technology. He’s like, just name one area. I just want to know one area of the business. Just name any area of the business that you can do better without technology. And I was like, oh, wow, it’s so refreshing. I don’t know where I’m going with that. I don’t know where I’m going with that. I guess I’m just asking for you. Could you give some advice to some people out there listening? Maybe coddle some of these people that are in a dead-end IT job. How do you deal with maybe stress and depression in IT? That’s it.

Speaker 1 | 24:44.685

I mean. To me, at the end of the day, it always comes down to how is business and IT aligned in your organization. That’s literally what my, even my dissertation focused 100% on business and IT alignment and how it actually, it is what ultimately impacts organizational optimization. It impacts the development of the organization, the strategy, the visions of the organization. If you don’t align the two, it becomes more of that stepchild. It becomes more of that, oh, it’s a service. You know, they’re just a function that we go to for support. You can actually make the most impactful changes when you include them at the table. And that’s where, for me, that’s why in time I’ve ever gotten to a point where I felt like I was getting static, where I needed to have some kind of my career if I didn’t, I was getting that alignment that I wanted to see. That’s when I started looking. I would always, you know, open. IT is a beautiful thing. It’s an open canvas, open world. So if you want to make a difference, if you’re in a place where you have the skills, biggest thing comes down, what’s your background and what certification do you have? So it’s for the day, a lot of times, that can be the differential factor that can get you to that next step.

Speaker 0 | 25:50.198

Interesting that you say that. You’ve got to listen to the last podcast, right? So where you have a 19-year-old that graduated high school, took a year off, right? And- sold him, sold his way into being IT director. Well, first of all, coming in as a spy. And then, you know, and then becoming full-fledged IT director. And then after the fact, going to school. And, you know, then after the fact, going to the school and getting all the degrees. So that was Malachi Salazar, by the way, which is the last episode. And… It’s interesting because I kind of, I don’t know if there’s like, I think some people naturally kind of understand how to sell. If they really understand how a business works and they really understand like how to sell themselves, maybe they came, maybe their, their job prior to IT was business management or customer service or some kind of, I don’t know, retail, you know, retail hell. where they just got business driven into them and processes and stuff like that, and they like IT, then they might understand how business and IT align and are able to sell themselves into that without any certifications, just straight raw skill. And then there’s people that have all the certifications in the world, yet they can’t speak with people, I don’t know, or they don’t understand how…

Speaker 1 | 27:31.006

maybe my teams have been on and i i’ve had the most intelligent people in the world they literally cannot hold a conversation with a normal conversation string but if you sit and talk to them technically you know beyond a doubt they are the smartest person in that room yeah i can never put you in front of a ceo and have you strategically discuss an ip issue it’s like no and i think a lot of that too for me is not only being conversational but years of experience years of time learning people and networking and getting that experience and that exposure that helps tremendously too with growing your abilities and your skill set because i think that a lot of times we don’t focus enough on the people side don’t focus enough on empathy people and discuss with them and i think that is a huge piece i mean one of the ways i was attracted to this position was they were looking very They didn’t want somebody just to sit at the strategy level and think of the new and the future and the direction. But they wanted somebody that was more than willing to get down and dirty and do whatever it took. And I have always said, no matter what role in IT I will ever be in in my career, I’m always a customer service agent. I am always helping somebody.

Speaker 0 | 28:45.321

Yeah. And I’ve had some people that were stuck in the kind of, I hate to make fun of engineers because my son-in-law is an engineer and he’s definitely like, he has that ability. to really really connect right and not go full tunnel vision and like you know filter out all other options other than the one that he can only you know or the one that a engineer can only see some people get this like tunnel vision you know an inability to like listen to what other people are saying it’s kind of just like in an ear and out the other ear like some people have that i don’t know what you call that some kind of like personality like it’s you know it’s like whatever that one of those personality traits are And, um, it can be learned. It’s just very difficult for certain people to like put themselves into, you really have to like get that like active listening or understand that, that, that concept of active listening and, and, uh, yeah, like you said, empathy, um, uh, you know, uh, empathy, I guess. Back to the, the business, the business and it alignment for companies that it, can you make a comp, can you. can you make a big change in a company where business and it don’t align? What would your, what would your advice be? Or would it be go look for a company where business and it align?

Speaker 1 | 30:08.357

That’s a good one.

Speaker 0 | 30:08.737

That’s a challenging one there. I’m just connecting the dots here, right? I’m trying to… Because I’m always trying to think like… I think going into technology is a good route nowadays. Back in the day, it wasn’t… Back in the day, it was like, hey, man, you know, we got this thing called the internet coming out. I was looking up old…

Speaker 1 | 30:32.955

Pause it.

Speaker 0 | 30:34.124

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was looking up some old George Bush videos the other day, trying to explain again to my son-in-law, who’s, he’s a foreigner. Let’s just say that. Abdelrahman, if you’re listening, I tried to, but I tried, I’m like, hey, you got to see these old George Bush videos, like, you know, like the old bloopers, you know, and like one was, you know, someone asked him, like, do you use the internet or do you know what Google is? And he’s like, yeah, I’ve used the Google a couple times, you know, to look up something on maps. And it just, it really dawned on me, like, how fresh the internet still is, how new it really is. Because this was like 97, I don’t know, not even, might have been 2000 something. Had to have been in the 2000s. I’m just trying to think, which is still scary to me. It’s just, or not scary, it’s just amazing.

Speaker 1 | 31:19.724

So-23 years and it’s only went this far and it’s still got so far to go. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 31:23.687

and we’re talking about these now like kind of in-depth philosophies of how to business and IT align. And- I don’t know. Let’s just hit on some of the, how do we make that alignment happen? Oh, no, I remember the question. Yeah, sorry. I already forgot my most advanced question, which is go look for another company or try to change the company that you’re in.

Speaker 1 | 31:49.699

No, I don’t. To me, if you’re happy with your position, happy with what you’re doing, what you do today, I don’t think it’s something where you go out and look for another company. I mean, I think you always want to keep your options open. You always want to be aware. But I think it’s something where you look and see there’s many times where I’ve been able to influence change, put a change through from an IT perspective that the business did not agree with. And then months later, they saw the impact and the benefit. And that opened up a different layer of trust and a different layer of communication down the road. And I’ve seen vice versa where the businesses had ideas and they said, no, we don’t want to do that technology. We think it’s going to be more beneficial if we keep it this way and go with this route. And we see that.

Speaker 0 | 32:29.520

Well, route one, let’s go with route one, because that’s where you actually didn’t make the change. You better be darn sure it’s going to be a good change for the company. So how do you have confidence? I know the answer and I just don’t want to give the answer.

Speaker 1 | 32:43.391

To me, it’s data driven.

Speaker 0 | 32:45.713

Thank you. It’s a numbers game.

Speaker 1 | 32:47.915

Data driven. Yeah, it’s a numbers game. And if you can quantitate what you’re trying to sell to them, even if they don’t believe it, because I will tell you, it was six months later and I still had upper management in some cases going. We still don’t think that this solution for the CRM is worth it.

Speaker 0 | 33:03.783

Oh, even where you’re at right now, where you’re at right now. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1 | 33:07.706

And then I went back to them and I said, first question I asked, you know, eight months ago, what is your number one customer as far as complaints, issues, concerns, things of the best? And they gave me company A. And then I pulled them up and I said, you’ll be shocked to find out they’re number seven. I said, this one’s the one that’s giving you the most. I said, you’re getting 500 messages a day. from this customer.

Speaker 0 | 33:28.020

And how big was that customer?

Speaker 1 | 33:30.402

Small, teeny. Oh!

Speaker 0 | 33:33.724

I have another company that has a whole philosophy of a current customer right now where they have the 80-20 philosophy. They want to give 80% of their time to their top 20% of their customers. And they don’t want to spend 80% of their time with the bottom 20% of them just wasting their time because they themselves are also disorganized, might not have a CRM, and they’re completely just wasting your time. So, okay. So you brought that point up. Continue.

Speaker 1 | 34:01.932

And then it came down to data. Yeah. I mean, it came down to the data. Cause after that we started showing here’s where we are. Now we can actually create a baseline. We can show you what you’re actually doing and then trending it month over month for the last six months, we can actually see we’re improving the amount of time it takes for the initial response to the customer, which. impact as far as number of issues we’re getting questions about formalized responses so like when you ask for let’s just say a status of an order it’s no longer one person saying it’s on the way it’s now a very structured response you know your order number blah blah blah blah is currently located at blah blah blah and then it has three bullet points there’s recap on location eta and ppa and they have that template that auto fills and all they do is put in the three values so literally taking and it also responds back with hello brady and says thanks you know Thanks, John. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Phillip for you.

Speaker 0 | 35:01.658

I was going to say, I thought everyone was Tom Brady. That would be great. I had a bunch of partners that used to join the Zoom call. Everything’s on Zoom and video now, but you used to join a conference call and it would be like, John has joined the call. It was always Tom Brady. Tom Brady has joined the call. Anyways, okay. Now you could probably say, well, here’s the data. Do you want me to turn it off? Do you want me to go back? We can always put it back.

Speaker 1 | 35:31.415

Yeah, you can always go backwards.

Speaker 0 | 35:32.976

Not really.

Speaker 1 | 35:33.536

And it was funny because one of the deciding factors was going to the floor level, to the operations level and asking all the individual CRMs, all the individual planners, would you prefer to stay with us and deal with what you’re dealing with or go back to email? And the expectation was it was going to be go back to email like we’re done with this. Every single person. Let’s move forward. Okay. And I think that also showed a good leadership on the business side, though, because literally we’re like, okay.

Speaker 0 | 36:05.337

They’re transparent. They’re fair. Yeah, transparent, fair, top-down, or bottom-up, or whatever we want to call it, servant leadership. Is there an impact from a CFO perspective? Like, has it been long enough yet where we can measure? Again, it’s a numbers game. Can we measure more productivity? Were we able to get rid of temporary staff? Or were we able to, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 | 36:34.234

Yeah, we can see. I think we’re seeing that because of the restructures we were doing. Now, those weren’t 100% directly related to that, but I don’t think it would have been possible without.

Speaker 0 | 36:45.037

It’s also hard during a pandemic. That was the thing you had going against you. You had that going against you. Was, you know, the… mixing bowl of the pandemic. Like it just screwed everything up. All line items are jacked up now on a piano. Labor hours are jacked.

Speaker 1 | 37:02.872

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 37:03.132

It’s a great example. Now for… whoever, like there’s going to be some guy out there that’s going to be like, thank you. Thank you very much, Phil Howard. And thank you. You know what I mean? Like, thank you, Brayden. And who is the winning CRM?

Speaker 1 | 37:28.011

That’s fine. We ended up, so you’re going to love this, but we ended up using Salesforce for the sales side.

Speaker 0 | 37:33.155

I knew it. And Salesforce doesn’t care. I think enough.

Speaker 1 | 37:36.937

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 37:38.959

What was the second one? Split. What was the second one?

Speaker 1 | 37:42.000

We ended up using Zendesk. All right. Beautiful. And it’s actually been fantastic. I mean, to be honest with the amount of open API connections that are available, that’s where I found the most. We’ve actually made optimizations since the beginning of it.

Speaker 0 | 37:56.188

I think Zendesk is, like, it’s easy enough to work with that, like, I could do it. And I’m just, like, I could do the changes in the API stuff. Like, it’s just time.

Speaker 1 | 38:08.355

It’s a startup. me that has one single ip person completely separate company and showed them in a half an hour how to use it and two weeks later he called me up and said hey foley has zendesk up and running now we have

Speaker 0 | 38:23.130

31 agents we’re using it for our entire ap and building process yeah i actually had a zendesk um i was building out a zendex zendesk option one time and then there for had another friend in jujitsu that was like look i’ve got us all set up already i’ll do it for you like you know so that’s kind of but i’m very familiar with it’s very very similar i don’t want to say it’s similar to salesforce i’m gonna get all mad it’s not similar at all at the end of the day it is when you function when you functionally look at the two they are similar let’s be real yeah yeah you can make it look similar you can you can do the drop downs you can do all of that um So yes, congratulations on doing something that is just a matter of time, had to be done, was way, way delayed anyways. There would be no, and in reality, there’s no way you could say we’re going to keep doing this on email.

Speaker 1 | 39:18.455

There’s just,

Speaker 0 | 39:20.416

it’s just not.

Speaker 1 | 39:21.257

But it also came down to, you know, when you have customer questions, you know, five, six years after orders are delivered about something. And then that CRM no longer works here. They’ve been gone for three years. So what do you do? Those are the kind of things that came up and with our setup, it’s indefinite retention with no data storage limits. So we can literally go back indefinitely and look at every ticket ever.

Speaker 0 | 39:48.780

I wonder if there’s a way to fix someone that has a really big problem with email. I could show this on video right now because we’re just recording audio and no one’s going to see my 69,376 unread emails. And my horrible not doing what I preach to everyone else, which is use email as a database. There’s got to be a way to… Can I do like a, you know how they call it, like an atomic wipe or whatever they call it, an email day where I’m just going to do like a zero day, like blow everything up and just delete all my emails. I wonder if there’s a way to migrate that all to a Zendesk.

Speaker 1 | 40:31.960

Emails I have?

Speaker 0 | 40:33.861

Can I migrate this to a Zendesk, you know, implement? There’s two philosophies. The person that tries to manage a zero inbox and the person that would never, ever do that. That’s me.

Speaker 1 | 40:44.627

I am the zero inbox. So literally I have one unread email from the time you and I started to now. And I literally have otherwise about 30 emails that are read, but they have tasks assigned to them and they’re linked to my planner.

Speaker 0 | 40:59.789

So what do you do with someone that’s a problem? What do you do with someone like me? What do I do? I gave up years ago. I said, this is never going to happen. I’ve got an attachment from 2015 that I need somewhere. What do I do?

Speaker 1 | 41:13.278

I have both fronts. And thanks. clue with the way if you’re not if you’re not strained with technology if you’re not bringing with capacity sizes and so forth it’s not too hard i mean because realistically now you get so many gigabytes or terabytes of data depending on what platform you’re using yeah and you can have like we have we use uh backify to be able to do 100 indefinite retention of office 365 so literally for us anything ever period that’s an office is retained somewhere right So it doesn’t matter to me if you have 150,000 emails or you have…

Speaker 0 | 41:49.344

I really do. I really do. I do. It was one of the reasons why I left Starbucks years ago was my boss made me manage a zero email inbox. Why did you leave the company? My boss made me leave nothing in my inbox every day, manage the task immediately. We would have meetings about, is this a 30 second task? Do it now. Is this a… I had all these like…

Speaker 1 | 42:17.917

Oh, yeah. Because I’ve dealt with it. And I think what you experience at once in your career, you’re like, no, I will never be a micromanager. I’m someone that is, I always tell my employees when I first meet them, 100% open, transparent, honest, candid communication. My door is open. You can always stop in. I’m not going to babysit. The job’s getting done. We’re good to go.

Speaker 0 | 42:38.848

I love you. I love you. Hire me for two hours a day. Okay. So nice. So good. This was very valuable. I would go on, but we would lose the value. We could continue to talk about multiple topics, but I think the whole idea of don’t make technology the solution and just the general like… like how you align business and IT. Of course, that has to be done. But I don’t know if we really answered the question. You answered the question, yes, you can change the company inside. But okay, so here’s a good one. When do you leave a job and go somewhere else? I probably shouldn’t, this is like, this is really, I’m just, I’m not asking you personally. I’m asking you, if someone asked you on your team, let’s say someone came up to you on your team and they said, hey, should I quit?

Speaker 1 | 43:39.480

you know what would your that’s what would you ask them what would you ask them my first question to them is why do you want to quit because i need to understand what’s the why what’s the driving factor you know because it’s either going to be one of my opinions one of three either a not making enough money b and they just don’t feel like they have anything to do or it’s really just looked out they’re like i’m just not aligned with the company’s values and mission it’s really just not my thing

Speaker 0 | 44:09.068

That would be boredom. I think that might be boredom. What if it’s work-life balance?

Speaker 1 | 44:13.671

And that happens. And if it’s work-life balance, it comes down to a financial option of seeing how do I balance out this workload better within our team internally first? You know, let me get some time to, you want to acknowledge that, you know, this is a real issue. Let me look at what can be done to help you out. Because your first goal could always be try and retain your staff. I mean, that’s always number one to me. If they’re on my staff, they’re meant to be on my staff. Meaning that they’re capable and they’re prepared. proficient and they’re a power performer so to me it’s like i never would want to lose somebody but i i mean i found myself even in working inside of baldo for 12 years I changed roles five times. And the reason I changed five times was because every time I got to work on board, my job was more monotonous.

Speaker 0 | 45:01.254

You know,

Speaker 1 | 45:01.574

the complex things. I mean, I was a mechanical engineer. I was an industrial software project manager. I went through a lot of different roles. Anytime I got to a point where I was like, this sounds bad, but my job is easier than it should be. Meaning that I can get through my day and I don’t feel like my creativity and my innovation skills are being used. That reflects. And you see that. You see it. And if you let it go too long, meaning you don’t have that self-awareness, that’s when you can really start to have bad. That’s when you get those things you were talking about earlier where you get somebody who becomes anxious, who doesn’t like their job, kind of becomes bitter even. And you don’t want that to happen. You don’t want someone to experience that.

Speaker 0 | 45:43.486

That’s why you’re in the perfect place right now. I was, I’ve worked both enterprise and startup. Startup was always the place or it was broken enterprise and, or broken market. And they’re like, we need you to revive this market. You know, like I worked for, and then my first job that I really loved outside of restaurants in college, because I worked in a lot of restaurants and Jim’s wings and places like that. Barnacle Billy’s. Um, what’s yeah. So, um, My first job that I loved so much was a call center of all places, which was like a cell phone, like quest wireless call center. Right. And I loved the safe department. They eventually moved me to the save department, which was like every angry customer was like, I’m canceling, you know, like I loved that. I don’t know why I just loved it. Like Phil, like, you know, I just loved the, like, you know, calm down. It’s going to be okay. Let me take care of you. And back then it was all like, yeah, it was all, it was all DOS based systems. So there’s like all F1, F2, F3, and these, you know.

Speaker 1 | 46:50.639

Volvo were literally pulling all of their mainframe solutions and moving to.NET, Java, whatever. And newer technology. And then I went back in time.

Speaker 0 | 47:00.122

Hey, there’s, wow. And when you take, it’s funny when you take someone that’s been on one of those systems for so long and now you give them like a mouse. Like, what do I do? I quit.

Speaker 1 | 47:16.938

Literally, it’s so, so true. Even, it’s funny, but with time, I know anyone can learn a technology no matter what their skill set. You give them the time and the training and the resources, they can learn it. I have people here who had no clue that video. chatting like this with you and I, even audio chatting existed outside of a phone. And that was a year, almost two years ago. Now in the office, you walk anywhere and say, Hey, can I team shoot fast? Oh yeah, sure. It’s literally a noun. It’s funny how it does take time to embrace change and cultural impacts like that. But once they, once you have that resource availability and provide those resources to your teams, like for me, even just the teams, I have 25 different training guides. that literally break apart how to use a GIF in a Microsoft team chat. Just that one function is its own training guide. And literally we broke out all these different functions and sent them out to the whole organization and did training classes about 12 times.

Speaker 0 | 48:16.343

That’s actually genius. I know it sounds, sometimes it’s the really small things, like how to engage end users. So I surveyed, before I did this podcast, I surveyed a ton of it directors so that I would know like, and the only question was, is when it comes to like this, what’s your single biggest frustration, problem or concern. And, uh, and then I was told by this other marketing guy, take all the answers, put them into a spreadsheet and then take all the common themes, take all the common themes and put them in, in, you know, in. not rows, I guess, columns, put them in columns. He’s like, and there’s only, and I’m forcing you to choose three to five columns. Like you can’t, like there’s never more than five, right? And he was right. He was right. He was absolutely right. The five, it actually was four, the four major problems that every IT guy deals with is training slash engagement of end users. Like that was one theme. The other theme was, basically, you know, vendors with poor support, like basically poor support. Like there was no vibe between your IT team and the vendor’s IT team. So there was no vibe there. Like the support was terrible.

Speaker 1 | 49:40.152

Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 49:40.713

The other one was… basically silos was tech like antiquated technology silos not like trying to unify or they were dealing with antiquated silos that were completely separated from the system and the fourth one was um decision direction overwhelm is there another one can you think of another one There was a fifth one that I, there was like an outlier and I was like, I don’t know if I should put that in or not, but there was kind of like this outlier, you know, it might’ve been like, you know, dealing with the budget or something like that. But those all seem to kind of fall into the decision direction, overwhelm kind of category.

Speaker 1 | 50:24.196

Yeah. I don’t think budgets usually too big of an issue even here. I’ve not really faced that struggle. I’ve been told that, but I’ve been told that by predecessors and also by employees of mine and stuff. But when I go through it, I’ve always found that if I can show a business case and have a true ROI on data, it’s never an issue.

Speaker 0 | 50:42.957

And that’s like direction or decision or, you know, taking, you know, there’s always, there’s something there.

Speaker 1 | 50:47.238

So the biggest thing is I think overall in general, just even accepting change. I think that is probably the biggest thing I deal with on a daily. Yeah. And something as simple as, Hey, I actually give you a super simple example. They had conferences when I got here and I was shocked when I walked in and I’m like, What do you do? Well, we meet in these rooms. Okay. You don’t have a TV or projector or screen. No. And I would just,

Speaker 0 | 51:18.907

Oh, you’re saying it was just a room.

Speaker 1 | 51:21.429

Literally. It’s just a room.

Speaker 0 | 51:22.690

Like not even like a throwing star polycom in the middle of the room.

Speaker 1 | 51:27.433

One of them had that, but not the others.

Speaker 0 | 51:30.055

And it was analog.

Speaker 1 | 51:30.915

Yeah. I was like, guys, two grand. I can put an 80 inch TV in here. I can put an adapter on the table that literally works with the PC behind the TV and connect your laptop and use the actual.

Speaker 0 | 51:45.381

I’ll even give you a dongle. I’ll give you a dongle. Exactly. They’re like, what the heck’s a dongle?

Speaker 1 | 51:51.904

It took a lot of effort. Just change the mind to think like we should do this. Now, it’s funny as you fast forward a year later, because that’s only been about a year and it’s a normality now. Like it’s a normal thing. Like they are in there every day. There’s multiple sessions. There’s multiple…

Speaker 0 | 52:06.593

They’re scheduling it via a calendar. Are they using a calendar invite?

Speaker 1 | 52:09.655

That wasn’t done before. It is done now. It took a while.

Speaker 0 | 52:14.457

But here’s the thing. Here’s the… How do you crack the code, so to speak? And I think your GIF image… Here’s a training on how to do something like this that really… It doesn’t… I don’t know if it adds value. It does add value from a human emotion, empathy type of thing, right? But here’s how to do something kind of fun on the new… This, appeal to people’s emotions and desires. Appeal to desires. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 52:43.074

And I think too, for me, the biggest thing was just getting them to even try it out. It was funny because the first few weeks, I kind of noticed it just sat there, powered off, not turned on. And then I started to see, you know, they would ask me something and I’d come in and show them how to do it. And then training and led to Dr. Dase and more stuff. And now there’s SOPs on the table and how to use it.

Speaker 0 | 53:05.161

I just had a vision I just had a vision of walking down the hallway although people are probably working remotely but do you still have a lot of people working inside internally? We never went remote cool so walk down the hallway with a blue cooler with a handle on it and wheels on it and why are you walking around with that cooler oh there’s burritos in here do you want one? and then give out a burrito for trying a you know, but we’re giving out burritos for trying this new thing out and giving your feedback. What? Just make sure they’re really good burritos.

Speaker 1 | 53:37.970

You know, Taco Bell, Taco Bell sells a 12 pack. I’m just saying. I don’t own a company. I just work in one. So, uh,

Speaker 0 | 53:48.658

uh, this, this has been, this has been a joy. This has been a joy. Um, thank you so much. Any, uh, final words, final thought, like, like, uh, Does Jerry Springer still exist? But if you had your final moment or final thought to give out to the audience there, what would it be?

Speaker 1 | 54:09.741

My kind of catchphrase is you can never stop learning. I always find that for me, you can reinvent something, you can simplify, you can update. And I think if you ever accept the fact that you know everything, you’re literally always supposed to keep going. learning something new. That’s what I’ve always done. And I found it to be very beneficial. And even just in the context of, hey, here’s something, you know, the metaverse coming out, learning everything about metaverse, learning everything about, you know, NFTs and how it’s going to affect real estate and so forth. Just that alone is just curiosity. But learning myself that it’s just, it’s another step in evolution of technology.

Speaker 0 | 54:47.895

Yes. Invest in yourself too. Because as much as you might think like investing in something crazy would be a waste of time. I invested in an ex Tony Robbins coach. He was Tony Robbins’number one sales guy for a long time. And Tony Robbins looked at him and he asked Tony for advice one day. And Tony looked at him in a weird… crazed state. Most people that don’t know, I guess Tony Robbins has kind of a crazy side. And he looked at him and he said, I think you should just give up on your dreams because you’re not working hard enough. Something like that. He told him, just give up on your life. Give up on your dreams. That’s where this podcast idea came from. He was the one that started it. He gave me this whole podcast idea. He’s like, Phil, you ran with it. And yeah, that was it. And that’s like kind of how this whole thing started. And I had invested in, you know, like, I don’t know, whatever, $200 in coaching a month, you know, for just like, you know, organizing my, like my, you know, life or consulting career, whatever it was. And that’s how, kind of how this podcast came out of that. And that just came from education. So. I enjoyed it. I mean,

Speaker 1 | 56:06.381

this is an excellent experience. Definitely something different, new. It’s really cool. And if anything, for me, it’s another way to network in the IT world and communicate with people.

Speaker 0 | 56:17.197

Absolutely. Dr. Myers, Dr. Braden Myers, thank you so much for being on the show.