Speaker 0 | 00:09.606
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we have Matt McNair on the line. Pretty amazing stories here. First of all, 26 years at the same company, but prior to, prior to professional boat builder, which is really cool and near and dear to my heart, honestly, because… And we were talking about doctors and lawyers earlier and completely stereotyping them as tightwads and unable to spend money, which is completely okay. We can do that on this show because I run the show and I come from a family full of doctors and it’s totally true. I grew up spending all my time in Maine with my father, who is a doctor and has a 42-foot tiara, and he’s also a captain. So he has the double whammy for you. So he’s got a boat business and he’s a doctor. So that’s a double whammy, isn’t it?
Speaker 1 | 00:59.996
Yeah. No kidding.
Speaker 0 | 01:01.937
We’ve got to convince him to spend money on his boat. And he also uses it as a business. But a little side note, all the pictures that you ever saw taken of George Bush, both 41 and 43, I believe, were taken from my dad’s boat in Kennebunkport, Maine. So yeah, the Navy SEALs used to come dive underneath his boat. And then the press secretary would jump on and be like, okay, when the president goes out fishing, you got to follow him. Matt, you started off boat building. Let’s just kind of retell that story a little bit real quick. Like how you started. Well,
Speaker 1 | 01:29.428
just getting to the process of, you know, working with my father and his business, building boats and scrap, doing repairs. And also on the off season when he didn’t have any work for the boats, we would be building houses, doing remodels and things like that. It’s very rewarding work, very difficult work and difficult work to find the right work so that you would actually feel good about what you’re doing. And it just got to the point in my life where I wasn’t really finding the work that I wanted to do. I love working with wood. I love. you know building things and creating things but you know i just got the point i just i needed to change my career and i was thinking of getting into specifically at the school for audio and music and again that probably wasn’t the best decision there’s
Speaker 0 | 02:11.087
not a lot of work out there for that i went for creative writing so there you go you know
Speaker 1 | 02:17.132
We go, we try to go after our heart, you know, you try to find something where you’re, you’re going to fulfill yourself in one way, shape or form. And I’m still a musician. I still do audio and I actually do some work in audio, audio area. That process kind of brought me into the technical area where I really liked computers. I’ve always been kind of a computer geek. Started out with a CSR, SR11, Commodore 64, went through maybe three or four different versions of the Apple two plus. Typical starting off and just going, what the hell can I do with this stuff? And then during that time, you know, working really hard, building things. And I met a woman who worked here at the business and working now at Threshold Enterprises. Met her through friends. Became a very good friend of hers for many years. After several years, we decided to become more than just friends and decided to live together. And at the time, she was the shipping and pulling supervisor for Threshold Enterprises. And she decided at some point that she needed some help. She was having difficulty hanging on to people. We had some challenges as far as… getting things shipped out the door. They’re working with the UPS at the time. And at the time, the closest hub, UPS hub, was in Sacramento. So we would have to ship things out to Sacramento as opposed to having UPS pick up our material. They actually couldn’t bring a large enough truck to pick up our material, which was kind of a challenge. So what I did is I helped her set up what we called the hub, shipping things out from an LTL to the hub. And that turned out to be very successful. And during that process, I helped her set up… an actual packing and shipping system for thresholds managing all of the packages that they were shipping out and i figured you know i just do that for a couple of weeks and then i just i found that there were issues other issues other opportunities that thresholds up to including their inventory control which they actually didn’t have much of at the time they knew they needed things when the inventory went negative that was kind of how they were managing things back in the day so then i started getting involved with their technical aspects as far as how they’re keeping track of inventory at the time we were using a what was like we call a mini computer it was a mainframe 150 megabyte hard drive with uh 24 mux connections terminals it was usable we had to back it up about once every six hours just in case it would crash and it did crash occasionally so i got very familiar with that system how are you backing it up oh just the tape We literally back up the entire image of the hard drive to a tape. It was called HMS Sparkle, which is the name of the operating system. I think it was also used by a record purchase system from a lumber company, I think, that was using it for their inventory and accounting. And from that point, it just kind of spawned into me being involved with setting up our first network. learning how to deal with, at the time, Windows NT, which was new to me. I was more of a Mac guy at the time.
Speaker 0 | 05:06.241
So rewind to buying a used server, HMS Sparkle.
Speaker 1 | 05:10.943
Yep, HMS Sparkle, the operating system. I’m not really familiar with the hardware. It was a mini computer, and I got intimately involved with that and figuring out how to get that to function. And then at that point in time, it came to the point where we realized that it was about 2000 when… you know everybody’s you know freaking out about you know is it y2k compliant and we decided to take one of their test systems okay we had three systems all together a mark five mark six and our 12. he took the mark five and said okay what happens when we roll this to 2000 it’s gonna happen and it broke we went to the person who was supporting us at the time and he said yeah there’s probably not much you can do so this is like a real y2k failure story oh yeah big time Luckily, we did it before we went there, you know.
Speaker 0 | 06:00.264
First YKK failure story that we’ve recorded here. Here’s the thing. This is like more like a show about appreciation for IT directors really appreciating their job and loving it. Because you came from the like hardcore breathing in fiberglass fumes to, I mean, really kind of like almost the dream IT job, which is like solving problems, you know, like on a daily basis. And really kind of. build it. I mean, you’re like the whole lifeline now kind of like of building this network and everything. The changes have got to be so drastic over 26 years. I mean, what does the network look like now?
Speaker 1 | 06:37.683
Not just technology. I mean, our company literally came from the garage and it’s gone through so many different changes in just how our industry has been driving us and the people that have been involved with it. And there’s no two days of the same. It’s always different. It’s constantly changing, which I love. And… there’s constantly challenges and I’m constantly fixing things because you know with business and I’m just being driven as hard as it is and this is we’re talking about you know it’s a physical materials we can apply material for sports natural planetary as the two brands we manufacture we also distribute about 400 other companies products so that industry right now is just exploding because you know people don’t want to have to go to the doctor because they realize it’s going to cost them an arm and a leg almost literally they want to be healthy And they’re looking for alternatives. They’re looking for ways of keeping themselves healthy. And that industry has been driving our business like crazy. Biggest problem right now we have is keeping it on the shelf. That’s our problem. And to do that, we have to be agile and we have to be able to change our business very quickly at a moment’s notice. And to do that technically for my job is a big challenge. Constantly upgrading, constantly keeping things moving, keeping the infrastructure in place. Again, it’s like every day is going to be different. Yeah, like you say. I do have a dream job. I have the best job as far as I’m concerned in the world. But I can probably say to anybody else, if they want to get involved with this business, find a company that is floating. And you’ll never be bored, I’m saying. It’ll always be something different.
Speaker 0 | 08:02.931
Find a company with a hungry crowd, basically. Yeah. Here’s a question. So how do you manage kind of a higher return on investment then? So how do you find these problems and solve them? Are you waiting for something to blow up? Are we doing some kind of data analysis?
Speaker 1 | 08:16.719
in the modern day world now how are we doing that well right now it’s mostly yeah there’s a lot of analysis involved with figuring out you know where we’re going to be going a lot of that has to do with the business itself my department is really geared towards being customer service oriented the users quote unquote are what really drive what we do and that’s including all the way up to the enc level so you have your ceo cfo driving the company towards a certain direction And that pretty much dictates, how do we support that? How do we create an environment so that the company can be agile? And when we need to make decisions that will change the company, what type of environment can we build to allow us to do that? So that’s constantly driving what we’re doing. And that’s, for instance, our whole infrastructure in the past three years has gone from, I would say, crumbling to close to state-of-the-art, where… We have very few places where we have a technology that’s older than maybe two years. And we’re constantly trying to get that gap to be smaller. So we’re pushing the business and the technology that we’re using to be as close to, if not right at the cutting edge. You know, up to including no use to replace their entire telecom system. Completely replaced that, completely replaced all of the hardware in our campus here in Scotts Valley. last year. So we have all of our switches and all of our communications are at least less than a year old right now. The next step for us is moving our entire data center to a colo, moving it to INAP. It’s coming out of the closet, as we say, it’s kind of a joke. Our data center is in the closet and it’s going to be coming out soon. The idea is that so that we have the three things that drive my direction more than anything else is disaster recovery, business continuity, and availability. Making sure that we are meeting those requirements every day. And that will drive everything that we do as far as supporting the infrastructure, software we’re using, and the three to five year, where are we going to be in three to five years? And always looking at that and saying, how do we get to that point? and how do we see that you know and how do we drive the business to continue to grow this is the thing that drives what i see does basically that’s the record including things like bringing on an msp we realized that we just couldn’t really staff up and really meet the requirements so we partnered with the company to support our infrastructure and actually be the first tier help desk and as things come across that are higher priority things we need boots on the ground that’s where you know my guys get involved and actually start doing something otherwise we’re focusing on much higher level aspects of the business as opposed to you know break fix replacing t-boards mice what have you that’s just like very low priority to are we going to go to 3cl are we going to move from a distribution center to something else how do we do that what technology do we need those are the things that really as you say are driving what we do in itunes in our competition as well There’s all sorts of external things that we have to take in consideration. One of the things that we really like about the business that makes the business really great is that the health industry outside of medical, you’re talking about health, activity, vitamins, good foods, organics, and things like that. We all partner together. We do have competition, but we partner with our competition. We actually distribute our competition because it’s important that as a business that we stay innovative and that we allow other companies to be disruptive. That’s important because that’s going to change the industry. It’s going to make things better, but it’s also going to mean that you’re going to have to change things quickly to be competitive and to stay within the industry. And that’s what’s driving our business. And if the business needs to go that direction, that’s where I’d be.
Speaker 0 | 12:01.205
Just out of curiosity, what do you guys do exactly? Are you helping people white label or mix or make their own products as well? Or is there anything in particular that’s growing really fast that you see?
Speaker 1 | 12:10.432
We don’t do a lot of make-order products. Most of it is driven by… certain requirements, if you go to our website, SourceNationals.com, kind of gives you an idea of the wide swipe of different types of products, everything from prenatal, just to your vitamin A, your vitamin B+, vitamin D, things like that. And then we have the number one immune system product in the world right now, which is the Source Nationals Wellness. Won the video award for 14 years in a row. It’s products like that, we’re branding ourselves. people when they go to look at the shelf that they’re going to see that maybe our product’s a little bit more expensive than some other people’s products, but they recognize the brand. Our customers tell us a lot that they see our brand and they will actually choose it over another, even though it might be slightly more expensive because they know they can rely on it. They know that it does do what it does, and it does have what’s in it. A lot of things like that with the business that look at that come up where it’s interesting that one of our biggest disruptors child there is dr oz all he has to do is mention one thing that people have heard of before and now we have to start making it things like that that drive us in those kinds of directions so what we do is we manufacture two different brands of course natural and planetary those are our you know our foundation our our bread and butter so to speak those are the ones that really help us make the money but what also gets us into people’s course is that we distribute all the other rounds as well so if you want Now Foods, if you want, Natural, if you want, CoinLab or Nature’s Way or any of the other good manufactured products, you can get it from us. We distribute it to you. And in some cases, depending on whether you’re in the middle of the country or on the outskirts, we can get it to you within at least 48 hours. And we’re B2B. You don’t do the mass market, but we do support our customers. If you buy our product and you have issues with it or you have questions, we do support it in a way that says, you know, we want to support you. It’s not just us. And again, it’s kind of like. Like IT, the company drives us, but the company is driven by what people want, what people need.
Speaker 0 | 14:13.105
What’s your kind of like visionary type of conversations look like with the board? Is it people in a room talking to each other? Is it you on a weekly basis talking to C-level executives and saying, hey, you know, what about this? What’s the relationship there that’s beyond the replacing keyboards and mice?
Speaker 1 | 14:33.531
It’s kind of interesting. is in that we are still a single owner proprietorship. We have a board of directors and it’s the owner. We have a CEO that’s separate from the owner. Try to have an arm’s length relationship with the C-level and more let the CEO and the CFO drive the company. But the owner is a visionary. I would say at the genius level and capable of understanding and seeing a lot of the detail about the company. So a lot of the direction that we get, we do get from him. The main thing is that between the C-levels and the E’s, that they do meet three times a week, they have a list of priorities. We have basically a gatekeeping committee where when somebody says, hey, we want to do this, it goes through a whole process of what’s the ROI, what’s the actual investment, what’s the risk? If we do it, what will happen? If we don’t, what will happen? That kind of thing. We go through that process. That will and does constantly change our priorities as far as what we’re focusing on and what the company’s focusing on. do you take this vision and then apply cutting edge technology to it how do you apply technology to this it depends on what it is everything from like for instance being able to deal with some of the newer requirements we have with the fda and how we test and how we are regulated realizing that we didn’t necessarily have the right equipment you know we still want equipment available that does that and you go through kind of a high level requirement process like i mentioned when we were chatting before we ring multiple people in, in different areas, and look at the high-level requirements and say, does it meet it? If it does meet it, then again, what’s the initial resource investment? Not as much money, but what is it going to take to get it to work? And then what’s that going to look like? And then how long can we sustain that? And will we have to sustain that? And those are the things that are going to make the decision on what type of technology we use and who we’re going to go with, what type of support we’re going to get. And then at the end of the day… when you’re looking at your options, then you say, okay, what’s our investment? And you say, if this investment is made, what’s our return? And at that point in time, that’s pretty much where the decision gets made. And it’s not made, you know, it’s not made in a vacuum. It’s made by a group of people that actually have a vested interest in the process. And that works most of the time. Sometimes it doesn’t. There’s always personalities and there’s always people have their gut feelings and sometimes those get involved, but. Really, the bottom line for me is kind of encouraging a certain level of conflict is always a good thing. Avoiding the conflict is not really what you want to do because you’re not necessarily going to end up with the result you want. Because if you have conflict and you know that there’s going to be some edginess to it, that there’s going to be some, you know, a little bit of a point, then you know that you’re really in the right place. Because, you know, if there’s no conflict, somebody’s not bringing something to the table. And that to me is, that’s the thing where most of the time I get involved because it’s gotten to the point where. There needs to be some type of, I guess we’d say, not so much a conflict resolution, but visibility. Why is there a conflict? Let’s look at the data. Let’s look at the information that we have. Look at who we’re talking to. That’s usually when I have to get involved. But most of the time, it’s like I’m taking direction pretty much from that group. You know, I do what they want me to do. They’re the ones concerned with the industry. They’re the ones that have the experience about how do we get the product to the end user? And how do we get it to the way that’s going to help us not only sustain, itself, but it’s sustaining them. That’s our job. It’s going to keep us in business. And if that’s the technology we’re going to use, then that’s what we use. And I’m kind of agnostic when it comes to what the solution is as to is it the right solution. That’s really the most important thing for me.
Speaker 0 | 18:10.252
Man, this has been a great conversation, completely eye-opening. If you had one piece of advice or anything out there that we haven’t covered or one final message or anything like that, the listeners, just so you know, are mostly kind of like mid-market IT leadership. Do you have any piece of advice or anything for anyone out there listening?
Speaker 1 | 18:25.789
I think the best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten from anybody is don’t become good at something you don’t like to do. I really like doing what I’m doing right now and I enjoy it and it makes my life a good thing as opposed to just the job. My hobby is my job, you know, it’s what I love to do. And what I don’t want to do is something that I don’t like to do. And if you learn how to do something, make sure it’s what you really want to do because, you know, that’s what’s going to happen. I see it a lot where people get kind of stuck into a rut and it’s because they don’t like what you’re doing. That really sucks.
Speaker 0 | 18:56.684
True. That would suck. Man, deep thoughts. So, hey, thank you so much for being on the show, man. I look forward to seeing you guys continue to grow. And I want to know what the next big problem is that you guys solve.
Speaker 1 | 19:10.348
Our biggest problem right now is staying in stock. That’s really it.
Speaker 0 | 19:14.829
They say the biggest business problem is growing too fast.
Speaker 1 | 19:17.110
That’s it. All right. Thanks, Bill. Thanks for
