Speaker 0 | 00:09.603

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we are talking with Dan White. Not Danny, we don’t go by that anymore. And we’re doing this off the cuff today. I’m just, I’m hitting record. Usually I do interviews before I do these podcasts, but I just, I don’t know, I have a feeling today. Um, Dan is it director at, um, TVS supply, correct? Correct. Am I getting this right? Okay. Uh, something with, uh, yeah, you do something important over there. We don’t hide you in the basement anymore. And, uh, I don’t know, maybe just kind of give me a brief rundown. We’re talking about the history. We’re talking about how it’s grown up by the way, where, you know, a little bit grows up now, but anyways, give me just kind of a brief rundown of what you do first.

Speaker 1 | 00:54.946

Yeah. So I’ve, uh, taken off the tent pole hat, crawled out of the basement. worked my way up to be IT director these days.

Speaker 0 | 01:05.954

I kind of imagine that like when you say you crawled up out of the basement, that can have kind of a horrific type of, that’s my idea in my head is, you know, we’ve kind of come out of the cave. But yeah, keep going.

Speaker 1 | 01:19.887

Well, I was just laughing because it’s true. I remember early days is like, you know, in help desk, right? Nobody wanted to really see you. You’re just the guy downstairs. And unless something’s broken, they don’t want to talk to you.

Speaker 0 | 01:34.049

Just fix my crap, please. Hurry up.

Speaker 1 | 01:36.250

Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 01:36.651

pretty much. I threw my laptop in a fit of rage. And I don’t know. It just kind of broke.

Speaker 1 | 01:44.676

I love it because you get those ones that are like, I don’t know. I was at the airport and I only dropped it about a foot. And somehow it broke the screen. You know, the keyboard exploded.

Speaker 0 | 01:56.564

I’ve told this story before, but I had like my very first day on the job at this company called Airband, which was a fixed wireless microwave company. And they gave me this brand new laptop. I was like wicked nervous. It was my very first day on the job. And it was kind of one of those jobs that you took. And then when you walked in, you’re like, wait a second, what did I get myself into? Because there’s kind of like some disgruntled people. And the guy that had the job before me handed me his laptop. He said, hey, don’t worry, you’ll do fine here. So cool. I walked out into the parking lot and I dropped the laptop right on the corner, like perfectly right on the corner of fall right down. Boom. Just like split open right in the parking lot. Very first day I was like, Oh no. And he had made a point of telling me like, dude, they just gave me a new laptop by the way. So you’re going to like this. It was great. It was a think bag. I don’t know how long ago it was. And I was like, you got to be kidding me. Very first day I picked it up, snapped it back together, kept it for another three years. I was just not going to sign up for the department that day. Anyways, that was a side note. Keep going. We’re going to get to what you do at some point.

Speaker 1 | 03:03.754

Yeah, it’s amazing.

Speaker 0 | 03:06.456

I did not turn anything. I was like, I cannot do this the very first day.

Speaker 1 | 03:11.560

You’re like, I’ll get some duct tape. This thing’s going to work one way or another.

Speaker 0 | 03:15.162

But, you know, eventually what happened was, I think I ended up actually really, really liking that job and loved point to point. this is supposed to be about you, by the way, not me, but I ended up really, really liking that job. And I got to the point where I felt like I could just say, you know what, I need a new laptop. I don’t know what happened to this thing, but we need a new one, snap to it. Okay. Anyways. This is cool.

Speaker 1 | 03:37.618

We’re going to flip it around. This podcast is strictly about you, Phil.

Speaker 0 | 03:41.941

No, no. Please, please, please go on, go on, go on. So we crawled up out of the basement. We got somewhere to where you’re at today and explain what it is that you do now.

Speaker 1 | 03:52.456

All right. So director of IT at TBS Plexing Solutions. It’s really 3TL, third-party logistics, and that’s what we do. Okay. Take and move.

Speaker 0 | 04:05.663

Cool. So we were talking, one of the anomalies that I’m finding nowadays is that most IT directors, IT leaders, CTOs, whoever you, let’s keep security out of it. That’s like really like in its infancy stage. But most of you guys. have not or if I ask you like who are your mentors who are your big mentors or who are kind of these people that have kind of like grows you up along the way and I would say 99% of you have no answer for that and I and again it goes back to you crawled up out of the basement so who was going to mentor those people anyways you kind of just had fun figuring it out or doing what you do and now all of a sudden you’re important And it’s now actually cool to be in IT. But maybe kind of give me a, give me a kind of a, like, you know, how did you learn things the hard way? And there’s no mentors around. So what did you do? Can you remember your big problems or can you remember like your, you know, your life issues that you ran into and how you dealt with them?

Speaker 1 | 05:10.387

Sure. For me, you know, I went through school to start with, you know, I always wanted to get an IT and computers. It was always fun at home, right? As you grow up. Yeah. I was lucky enough to have an instructor who came from an ISP. So the first courses I took were Cisco courses back when, I don’t know, 2000 something or other. But, man, she was always happy and excited. It made you excited. And it felt cool. You know, you weren’t sitting in there and it was a monotone person talking to you and just getting through the curriculum. And I think that a lot of that was, you know, she came from the real world, not just books, right? So that got me excited and ready to go. And then I get in the real world. And the first real problem I had was coming out of school, I used a hyper terminal way back when. I’m old as dirt here. And that’s what you learned on. So I go into the real world and they set me up with Putty and I don’t know anything about Putty. First time using it. And I’m working on this router, edge router, SD router. No big deal.

Speaker 0 | 06:17.461

Yeah. How many customers on that? Now here comes the thing. Because I’m in your name. I’m in internet, you know, 99%, 99.999% uptime, which basically means all of our customers spread out across the entire user base that we have will experience, you know, some sort of minutes of downtime a year. It’s really kind of a joke. But really what that means is that there’s some dude working on an edge router and he shuts everyone down. And then now we do. Yeah. So keep going. I can see where this is going. All right.

Speaker 1 | 06:49.848

So beautiful. This is before the days where everything was locked down. Right. This is how it is. Not, you know, reloaded.

Speaker 0 | 06:57.994

Yeah, no.

Speaker 1 | 06:58.334

So in hyperterminal, you know, you right-click, copy something, right? That’s how you do it. So I’m looking at an interface. I’m going to copy a different interface, put it in Notepad, tweak it, and then paste it back in, right? So keep in mind I’m in PuTTY. So, yeah, I highlight and right-click, and what do you think happens?

Speaker 0 | 07:21.023

Do you?

Speaker 1 | 07:21.283

I overwrite everything on that other interface.

Speaker 0 | 07:26.993

Yeah. Blip. Yeah. Yeah. Nice.

Speaker 1 | 07:29.915

Yeah. That’s a little bit of an outage.

Speaker 0 | 07:32.356

And there was no one there. Hey, by the way, don’t do this.

Speaker 1 | 07:36.417

Yeah. Yeah. No, no explanations. Here’s the stuff. Go at it. You should be fine.

Speaker 0 | 07:41.780

Drinking from the fire hose. Like it.

Speaker 1 | 07:43.900

Absolutely. But you know, the beauty of those scenarios, you know, besides the fact that your heart stops immediately, now you have to fix it. There’s nobody there, right?

Speaker 0 | 07:55.950

Yeah, you got to fix it fast too.

Speaker 1 | 07:57.991

Yeah. So while that can be tough, it’s a good learning experience at the same time. You get creative and you get fast quick. And you remember, man, I remember those kind of mistakes. So further in my career, even 10 years later, I’m like, oh yeah, don’t do that.

Speaker 0 | 08:18.742

It really is so true when people say fail forward, because if you think back, um over your biggest learning experiences they’re almost they’re all almost always deal with adversity oh absolutely um i mean it really is it’s about it’s it’s almost always you’re you’ve been in a situation that’s really stressful you don’t want to do it um but you forced yourself to do it anyways type of thing or you know or you just you really had to kind of you know push through it i think that’s why there’s a lot of sports analogies and all this type of stuff because No one really likes to exercise or get a leg broken or something like that.

Speaker 1 | 09:00.018

The reason I like networking or I went that route at the beginning is I got further into it, and the community was so good. So, yeah, you drink from the fire hose, but there’s a lot of people, usually outside of your own company, just all over the world that you can communicate with, talk to, and they help build you up and help drive you forward. I’m sure that’s in other industries too, but for me, it was pretty amazing that way.

Speaker 0 | 09:22.585

Hey, just curious. So what happened when you took everything down? No, really. I mean, was there really no one there? I mean, this is an ISP. I mean, or was it an ISP at the time? Or what, I mean, what were you, were you working for an ISP?

Speaker 1 | 09:36.757

No, no, no, no. It was just an edge router.

Speaker 0 | 09:38.979

Okay. Okay.

Speaker 1 | 09:40.560

I took down a whole site. It’s all good.

Speaker 0 | 09:43.803

Okay. I just, I mixed up the ISP, which was your instructors.

Speaker 1 | 09:46.806

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 09:47.106

So in this gig,

Speaker 1 | 09:48.887

we handled all the edge routers. Normally you can have the ISP do it or you can do it. We never had one. But yeah, there was nobody around. Nobody to ask. I got you I always see things on the up and up I was like hey that five minute blip that was me how many people did it affect? just curious it was only like 200 laughter

Speaker 0 | 10:24.870

Which brings me to maybe that’s kind of like a nice lead-in. How many end users do you manage right now?

Speaker 1 | 10:29.872

It’s funny you ask that. And this one is only about 1,000 for our particular division.

Speaker 0 | 10:39.476

Now, maybe what you, what I’m finding is the current ratio today, which I think this is like the secret revolution that’s going to happen. What I’m finding is that most IT directors manage on a ratio of end users of about one to a hundred or a little bit more. So do you have a team of people? So if you’re a thousand, if my ratio is correct, you have somewhere between three and five people.

Speaker 1 | 11:07.690

Um, actually.

Speaker 0 | 11:09.731

And it depends on, it depends on software development. It depends on.

Speaker 1 | 11:13.193

Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of factors in there. There’s a, in my group, the whole accounting, you know, helped us. So it’s helped us through the engineers. It was about 16.

Speaker 0 | 11:21.534

Wow. See, there you go. Doing it right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 11:24.054

I’ve learned a lot through my career. I can’t say I’m always doing it right, but you know, start from your mistake.

Speaker 0 | 11:31.156

So you have 16 people supporting about a thousand. What’s you know, it just leaves me, what’s your, say your single biggest, and if you can’t answer any of this stuff due to some kind of a, I don’t know, a disclosure form or a company, whatever, just say next question. But what’s your, what would you say your team’s, your, Or it could be a past struggle that’s no longer a struggle. What’s your single biggest struggle, frustration, concern, or things that you would say you run into on a daily basis or weekly, monthly?

Speaker 1 | 12:03.775

Honestly, it’s not so bad these days. People take vacations. Things run relatively smooth.

Speaker 0 | 12:09.699

Nice.

Speaker 1 | 12:11.941

In the past, it was your typical kind of for the team, not for the company, but the team, dumpster fire. A leader had stepped out, right? So there’s a gap, which kind of left him in a lull. So it kind of got to that point. It happens in a lot of different companies offline, right? You just get to that point where people have a thousand hours of vacation, things in place that are always breaking.

Speaker 0 | 12:40.362

And what do you do to prevent that? Systems, proper, like using technology correctly, obviously. But I like the dumpster fire. I haven’t… I haven’t heard that one yet. That’s great.

Speaker 1 | 12:51.908

Yeah, I know. In my career, I’ve dealt with a lot of those. Senior network engineer, I did a lot on the side, or during building data centers and whatnot. How do you eat an elephant one bite at a time, right?

Speaker 0 | 13:08.862

Definitely was that one plenty of times. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 13:11.263

Yeah, but it’s so true. But yeah, I came in and said, hey, look, my goal is… Real simple. My goal is for you guys to take vacations. That’s really the banner we’re running under.

Speaker 0 | 13:26.316

It’s a great banner. Yeah. We work to live, right? We don’t live to work.

Speaker 1 | 13:33.301

Absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 13:34.522

Right. And it shouldn’t be, you know, I’m not saying there’s not crazy people out there that really could care less about having any other life other than, like you said, but they might be the guys that are still slipping food under the door to the, you know, into the server room. and that’s fine. That was, I think it was Aaron. Aaron Siemens gave me that one. He’s like, yeah, you know, we should slip food under the door to us. Anyways, it’s fine that there’s those guys.

Speaker 1 | 14:01.537

I like that.

Speaker 0 | 14:03.738

The majority, I don’t think, should be like that. We should be, you know, coming in, doing our work, you know, going home at three o’clock if we need to and taking vacations.

Speaker 1 | 14:15.922

It’s easy to get that way, right? And it’s not that the technology is terrible. It’s just, you know, if there’s not somebody out front really fighting for the team, it can get that way, right? Because there’s that gap between your real technical guys and then your C-level execs, right?

Speaker 0 | 14:36.490

Okay. Talk to me about the C-level execs a little bit.

Speaker 1 | 14:40.372

Well, I mean, let’s face it. What do they care about, right? care about roi they care about customer uptime as long as it equals money somewhere along the lines because you know and i’m not making saying that’s bad that’s their job right so how do you translate This really cool, awesome technical device that we need because we like it makes life easier. It’s strictly for management, right? I say management as in instead of we’re automating everything in IT, right? So instead of ACI and you name it, right?

Speaker 0 | 15:18.869

I like where you’re going with this. Keep going.

Speaker 1 | 15:21.250

Yeah. So on the surface, that makes IT’s life easier. On the surface. Yeah. How do you translate that to a guy that’s a C-level exec that he’s really concerned about ROI and things that impact him right now?

Speaker 0 | 15:35.175

Yeah, please go, because this is the key. This is the question that everyone wants to answer. In other words, what you’re saying is, give me more money to make my life easier so I don’t have to work as hard.

Speaker 1 | 15:49.360

Yeah, basically.

Speaker 0 | 15:50.380

That’s basically what you’re saying. And you’re saying… How can I ask you for this money when they’re going to ask you, well, how does it make us money and or save us money?

Speaker 1 | 16:00.545

Absolutely. So along the way, you know, when you make that transition from being a tech guy, right, or focused on a project in front of you, it’s now the guy in a board meeting doing PowerPoint and glitter, as I call it, or Pixie Dust, you know, name your term for it. without saying, hey, I want you to make my life easier and give me a lot of money. So you get good at making those translations, you know, finding key points. You didn’t want to, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 16:33.530

Let’s do an example.

Speaker 1 | 16:34.431

Make my life easier, right? But you have these three other projects you want to do. I’ll free up four guys’time to do that.

Speaker 0 | 16:43.377

You start building that ROI in those little pieces, right? Let’s kind of like metaphorically whiteboard this real quick. Yeah. Give me a hard example. Give me something that most IT guys would have a hard time selling to executive management because it seems like this is just going to be a cost that we need to, you know. We need a half a million dollars for this. I don’t know. Just give me a good example.

Speaker 1 | 17:07.348

All right. I’ll go back a little further, not with this gig, but a different gig. We had a software platform, right? Typical thing. A little older. It worked. Right? That’s the air quotes here. It worked.

Speaker 0 | 17:22.632

Yeah. If it ain’t broken.

Speaker 1 | 17:25.473

Yeah, it was hell behind the scenes. Right? So how do you pitch that?

Speaker 0 | 17:30.355

Because, hey,

Speaker 1 | 17:31.475

I want a million and a half dollars to replace it. It’s going to take me a year. But it worked for you.

Speaker 0 | 17:38.309

1.5 million. It takes a year to roll out. Are you telling me?

Speaker 1 | 17:42.930

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 17:43.791

Okay. One year to roll out. What was the old software platform? What was it sitting on? Was it a CRM? I mean, what are we talking about here? What was it?

Speaker 1 | 17:53.615

Yeah. ERP, right? Those are always hard to replace.

Speaker 0 | 17:57.076

Oh, fun. Okay. Yeah. So yeah. Old ERP system. Yeah. And why were we, I guess, why were we wanting to replace it? This is the big question.

Speaker 1 | 18:07.681

for you i want to know why you wanted to replace it ah yeah there’s many reasons but from the i would call it a you know again you gotta just keep me out of trouble here this this is not my current gig this is the previous one yes um burning platform which is part of part of my pitch going forward it was a burning platform it was old platform vendor support was not good right so you’re doing your best behind the scenes to keep it running. And we’re not just talking about hardware. We’re talking about, you name it, SQL, programming in the application. Couldn’t do upgrades, right? It’s kind of a typical scenario because it’s been bastardized so much through the years that you couldn’t upgrade it if you wanted to.

Speaker 0 | 18:55.164

So weird data problems, upgrades.

Speaker 1 | 19:01.689

You’ve never heard of this before, right?

Speaker 0 | 19:04.491

No. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Keep going. Yeah. Now let me ask you this though. And this is just, do you think a lot of it directors or, and I’m not, do you think it’s the 80, 20 rule? Do you think 80% of it directors are just butts in the seat and wouldn’t want to do it out of laziness and, or it just would mean too much work. And, you know, there’s always that 80, 20 rule, right? You’ve got. You’ve got 20% of the cream that rises to the top, and then you’ve got another 80% of IT directors that are fine just showing up and managing the old crap. Would you say that that’s a potentially true statement and that a lot of people wouldn’t even want to take on this project?

Speaker 1 | 19:47.064

It’s risky, right? Because when you take on a project like that, you’re sticking your neck out there, right? So it goes, well, great. If it doesn’t, it’s probably your job, right?

Speaker 0 | 19:59.629

Yep. Okay. But hey, you know, if you’re not willing to take risks, right, then you’re never going to be able to, you’ll never shine either. But you’ll just be the dude, you’ll just be the dude in the server closet, we’re sleeping, we’re slipping food under the door, and you may be okay with that. But anyways, all right. So vendor support wasn’t good. Just curious. Like, you make a phone call, and they tell you, hold on, we’ll open up a ticket. Who will open up a ticket to maybe get it to John that knows what he’s talking about, and that’ll take a couple weeks, or what?

Speaker 1 | 20:35.402

Oh, yeah, yeah. You’d open a call, you’d wait, and then, oh, well, the person that coded that is no longer here. You know, you’re this weird fork in the branch. All those kind of typical things that they’ll tell you. So we’ll have to charge you more money and look deeper into it, come back with a patch that generally doesn’t work.

Speaker 0 | 21:00.389

Okay. All right, cool. Classic. Okay, so anyways, so you’ve got this. As far as now, okay, so that’s what you see on your end. Poor vendor support, data upgrades. It’s a total pain. Every time you have to deal with it, it’s just like, It’s like pouring lemon juice or salt on a paper cut. And what does the rest of the people in your company think? Is it just business as usual, or are they also annoyed and complaining, or do they come in and it’s pretty much transparent, and they’re like, hey, man, it’s not that bad.

Speaker 1 | 21:37.579

It’s the other thing you come across, and it’s amazing. I forget the term. It’s the dead body on the floor, right? It’s shocking maybe the first day. you know, after a few weeks, just kind of step over it and move on. You don’t even notice it.

Speaker 0 | 21:53.609

Wait, you’ve had experience with that?

Speaker 1 | 21:56.011

No, I’m just saying it’s kind of the analogy we use. Maybe, you know, you’ve seen some of these server rooms, right? Underneath that floor, there’s probably some tech guy under there somewhere.

Speaker 0 | 22:08.417

Yeah, no, I have pictures with them. You see that a lot in nonprofits, people that just don’t have money or they keep coming up with excuses to not. use money to put into IT. So I’ve had servers with, you know, no cover on the outside with literally, you know, cobwebs on the inside and a fan, an external fan plugged into a power strip blowing on the server. And if that went down, they would lose their entire customer database. And, you know, like, and there’s no way to, you know, there’s certain things that were burned onto the, I can’t remember what it was. It was like they had some kind of like a serial number that was burned under the processor. So it couldn’t be migrated, you know, something weird like that. So it was just like, well, we’re just going to, you know, just ignore the problem. But, you know, you just can’t ignore it. It’s sitting there. There’s a fan blowing on it. And you lose that. You lose everything. Anyways, so yes, that was the dead body on the floor that I thought that came to mind.

Speaker 1 | 23:13.617

Yeah. Just to go off on a side tangent, yeah, I remember doing a data center where there was a cable-drawn hub, and I was looking at the screen, and I did the calculation based on the days. I’m like, wow, man, this thing has been up and running for 14 years. I just got to this place. They brought me in to take a look at stuff to do an upgrade. I was like, do not turn that off, ever. It will not come back. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 23:42.724

exactly. Yeah. That’s exactly what this was. This was, to be honest with you, I think this might’ve been, it might’ve been older than me. I was in there for a PBX, like a PBX refurbished. The PBX actually was, I couldn’t determine whether it was older than me or not. It was like off by, I was off by like a month. It was like an old, you know, it was like an old Meridian that was manufactured in 19. They started. manufacturing in 1975 and I was born in 76. So, you know, I was like, well, it could be older than me, but they might’ve gotten it in 77. Anyways, that was, you know, and then I’m looking at this, that server with the fan pointing on it, you know, so it could have been much older than even, even what you were talking about, but the whole place was littered with hubs, like something like 20, 24, you know, hubs and switches and bottlenecks. And it was a nightmare, but anyways. Again,

Speaker 1 | 24:38.742

it’s about me. Do you judge people based on that?

Speaker 0 | 24:43.887

I judge IT guys. I do judge IT guys based on it. And I had a hard time. I definitely do judge them. And I judge them as kind of like, are you a pushover? Or did you not have the ability to? you know, stand up for what is right. So I think this, this person, um, I think he was kind of just like, you know, like, oh, you know, don’t try to tell them to spend money on this and don’t try to tell them, you know, because they’re just going to say no. And, you know, the very first meeting with operations was, you know, if you tell, you know, if you tell us to recable the facility, you know, you can just stop right there. You know, it was a kind of like that type of. You know what I mean? It was like, and I was like, oh crap. Cause the first thing that was, that I was going to tell them they needed to do is recable.

Speaker 1 | 25:35.452

You know what I mean?

Speaker 0 | 25:39.296

So in the back of my head, how am I going to do this argument? You know? So again, it was back to, it was like, how are you going to bring this to the board? Right. So I did reframe it.

Speaker 1 | 25:47.863

Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 25:48.604

exactly. So I went, you know, I had to go crunch the numbers and look at, you know, they’re spending, you know, something like 60,000. The total IT budget was like $84,000 for this kind of like one piece a year. But something like 60% of that was spent on break-fix. The 25 hubs. The 25 hubs. The 25.

Speaker 1 | 26:12.024

You do the research, man. You can find the ROI.

Speaker 0 | 26:14.326

Yeah, so long story short. Yeah, so long story short, after I presented to the board, you know, which definitely had. re-cabling the facility, home runs all the way back to a server closet that was air conditioned, you know, not three different closets with other people that store their stuff in there and walk around and kick something. At the end of the day, the board, like one guy raised his hand, like this older gentleman, and I only say older because I know he really didn’t have any clue, like what I was talking about. And I’m not saying that old people don’t have any clue about technology, but he was like, seriously, like 82 and just didn’t know. At the end of the day, he said, he said, I just have one question for you. Why would we not do this question? You know, and it was just about bringing it all together and saying like, guys, like this is, you know, ticking time bomb. You’re wasting money here. You’re wasting money here. And all the money that you’re wasting, like, you know, it would pay for everything, honestly, in 13 months. And that was a real steep, that was a real fast ROI. Sometimes it’s like, you know, five years. Anyways. Okay, so we got dead bodies on the floor. We’ve got an old ERP system. Vendor support’s terrible. That’s wasting your time. You’re wasting time on weird, probably, like, you know, SQL data mismatches and crap, and there’s no way to upgrade something. And what if your business… Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 27:36.364

integration errors, you name it.

Speaker 0 | 27:38.425

Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. And they’re used to stepping over the body on the floor. So what happens? Like, you start putting together the numbers? Like, what’s going on?

Speaker 1 | 27:49.676

Yeah, so in those situations, I’ll put the numbers together on the IT portion, but then I’ll start sitting with operations or, in this case, finance teams, right? Start asking those questions. Start trying to map out some of their processes. And during that process walk, as I call it, you start finding those, well, and then I export it into an Excel and, you know, a few hours of manual work. you start finding all those little manual pieces those workarounds that have been there for years that nobody notices because it’s it’s always been and you’re like yeah how much time do you spend on that and you start taking those notes you know adding that up hearing that for dry and hey you know what would make this better those kind of typical questions you know what’s your pain point

Speaker 0 | 28:44.492

I can see it now. Be careful. When you go in to speak with Dan, you’re not really interviewing to make the company better. You’re really interviewing for your job.

Speaker 1 | 28:54.694

Yeah. There’s a whole slew of crap out there that drives me nuts. Like, so hang in fruit. Just, I don’t know.

Speaker 0 | 29:09.879

Anyway.

Speaker 1 | 29:10.199

Yeah, I’m keeping on the up and up. So just.

Speaker 0 | 29:15.177

So you basically found a bunch of time people were wasting. How would you like it if you didn’t have to export that into Excel? And really what you’re doing is you’re being a good salesperson as much as people hate certain types of salespeople. And the reason why I think people hate salespeople is because they don’t do this. They’re just trying to sell a square peg into a round hole. And they’re not willing to do the needs assessment and the deep dive and the true consulting, the true kind of, I guess you could say, like assistant type of buyer type of thing. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 29:50.665

because at the end of the day, I find in these scenarios, you’re not pitching an IT project. You know, in this scenario, I’m pitching a finance project, right?

Speaker 0 | 30:02.482

Yeah, you’re flipping it. You’re speaking in their language.

Speaker 1 | 30:05.863

Yeah. It’s hard to learn. It takes time to get there, but eventually you do. You have no choice. I never go for the $1.5 million either. I’ll partner with the director of finance or the CFO. I said, hey, here’s what I found. I’d like to take this to the next step, maybe do a POC, do some vendor discovery. You got somebody that could partner with you. And all I’m asking is for a little time and we’ll go through it and come back to you.

Speaker 0 | 30:43.066

Now you’re saying this to the CFO? Yep.

Speaker 1 | 30:48.329

Because I knew if I just walked in and said, give me $1.5 million, we’ll replace it. Probably not going to get real far, right?

Speaker 0 | 30:57.086

Dude, that’s genius. That is genius. Do you have someone that can partner with me? Yeah. I mean, I have all this. This is great, man. No, honestly, that’s a great tactic. I have not heard anyone say that yet. I mean, obviously, I’ve heard of going to the CFO, obviously, speaking in their language, obviously, ROI, obviously, always do a POC and make people prove it. But never have I had someone say… Hey CFO, throw me someone that can partner with me, essentially to make you look good or to make your job better or to help you save more money. Is that essential, right? Okay, so keep going. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 31:38.236

because through the process, right, being a director, you learn a lot about finance, you have to be right, you’re managing some budgets, all that good stuff. I’m still never going to speak it as well as somebody that reads it every day, right? So getting that partner, not only that, they’re going to… be deeper in the process and help me find even better roi so you know we spent time we went through the typical find the top three vendors we liked got down to a poc how much time did that take uh all said and done we spent probably about three months okay just research alone yeah research and getting the poc going okay

Speaker 0 | 32:25.554

How many people? Was it you and one other guy, or how many people were involved in that?

Speaker 1 | 32:29.615

You know, where you kind of pull somebody in for a little bit, let them go back to their normal job. Yep. Right. Because you’re trying to do it on the down low, if you will, right? It’s not a large project, nothing crazy. Just discovery. That’s what I love, discovery.

Speaker 0 | 32:48.904

Yes.

Speaker 1 | 32:49.584

And, you know, and that finance partner you have is getting more and more energized, right? Now they’re starting to see, yeah, man, that body is in the floor. And yeah, it stinks.

Speaker 0 | 32:59.367

Yeah. And you’re bringing them, you’re making them, you’re shining them up too. You’re making them, you’re raising them up.

Speaker 1 | 33:05.612

Absolutely. Because at the end of the day, I’m not looking to be the knight on the white horse and all that crap. Right. Because I know if we get it replaced, one, it helps the company. Two, it helps keep my guys from, you know, killing themselves. Right. You’re looking for that win-win. If it goes well,

Speaker 0 | 33:24.446

I keep my job. Okay, so fast forward. You guys eliminated vendors. You found a guy that seemed to fit all the pieces correctly. He probably did whatever APIs that you needed with systems, would be able to do the data translation or do the data move.

Speaker 1 | 33:42.031

Oh, you got it. Yeah, we went through all of that. Remember the key of your POC, right? Our POC costs a little bit of money. They do, right?

Speaker 0 | 33:53.867

Paid POC, okay.

Speaker 1 | 33:55.547

Yep.

Speaker 0 | 33:56.467

How much did you guys pay?

Speaker 1 | 34:00.128

Because of the degree that we wanted to go to.

Speaker 0 | 34:03.289

As a software developer? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 | 34:05.290

Yeah, part of the technical fee. We were about $25,000.

Speaker 0 | 34:09.471

That’s pretty big.

Speaker 1 | 34:10.111

And negotiated with the vendor, of course, that $25,000 gets rolled in the overall. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 34:15.593

of course. Yeah, because you’re just going to… Yeah, and it’s only if you fire them and say, you guys really blew it. Yeah, gotcha.

Speaker 1 | 34:22.994

Yeah, so now you’ve got some skin in the game. Not a whole lot, but some. You’ve got your POC, so you’ve proved it out. You know, you’ve got your ROI. And then when you take it forward again to the CFO for that $1.5 million, you’ve got one of his own preaching about it. I’m preaching about it. The ROI was there. The ROI was there.

Speaker 0 | 34:48.294

Yeah, he’s your insider. He’s your inside source. He’s the guy that’s basically selling it for you. You’re just kind of like, hey, you know, yeah, this is great.

Speaker 1 | 34:56.638

Yeah, and he’s selling it to his colleagues too,

Speaker 0 | 34:59.499

right? Yeah, yeah, gotcha.

Speaker 1 | 35:01.904

Yeah, so we ended up with, I think it was not too far from here, about 14 months ROI on it completely. All said and done, we got sign off on it, rolled forward, ended up being a successful project. I’d be lying to you if I said the project was flawless. I don’t think that ever exists.

Speaker 0 | 35:23.617

Technology never is. I always tell people technology is seamless. And whatever we do will be seamless. There will never be a mistake and it’ll be absolutely perfect. All your dreams will come true. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 35:35.194

And what’s the, we can do anything with enough time and money.

Speaker 0 | 35:47.537

I learned that fast when I came from coffee to technology, I went from Starbucks to technology and I, my, my, my, my first. boss, so to speak, this guy named Jonas Frugier, who pulled me aside and was like, Phil, I don’t know if you knew this, but technology is not perfect.

Speaker 1 | 36:09.966

Because I’m used to like,

Speaker 0 | 36:14.049

no, every coffee must be perfect. Everyone must have their latte at 145 degrees. And if they ask for extra hot, it must be 165 with four and a half pumps of sugar-free vanilla. What are you talking about? It can’t be perfect.

Speaker 1 | 36:28.837

We’re plugging Starbucks here. Wow. I’m plugging too. So when I was a senior network engineer and I was traveling the globe, I did global travel. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 36:38.881

they should be paying for all this. Go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 36:42.923

The only, one of the things I could always find is, I’m in like Japan. I find a Starbucks. Absolutely. They have different stuff, but they always have a caramel macchiato. I don’t know why. It’s an unhealthy addiction to Starbucks for a few years.

Speaker 0 | 36:59.345

It’s unhealthy in many ways. It’s unhealthy financially, and it’s just absolutely horribly unhealthy for you. It really is. Do you know what their highest calorie drink is? Last I checked.

Speaker 1 | 37:11.469

I know.

Speaker 0 | 37:12.389

Last I checked, a venti white mocha. It’s like 900 calories.

Speaker 1 | 37:16.930

East.

Speaker 0 | 37:21.820

900 calories in one drink. Wow.

Speaker 1 | 37:25.341

Don’t get me wrong. I still drink a lot of coffee. I’ve just gone to just plain Jane coffee.

Speaker 0 | 37:29.902

Yeah. Mine’s black cold brew. I drink black cold brew. I’m high. I’m very, I’m very high right now. I’ll be honest with you. My friend and I joke around like you want to get high, which basically means let’s go get coffee.

Speaker 1 | 37:41.485

Um, yeah. So if you want to be an engineer, you need to be okay with losing sleep and drinking a lot of coffee.

Speaker 0 | 37:50.624

Um, okay. So I don’t know where we were going with that. Oh, converse.

Speaker 1 | 37:55.185

I have no idea,

Speaker 0 | 37:55.946

but it’s kind of something about being unhealthy. And I thank Starbucks for making us unhealthy and robbing us blind. Uh, because no one ever thought,

Speaker 1 | 38:04.249

well, we’re partying yet.

Speaker 0 | 38:05.570

It’s called five bucks. It’s really five bucks. We used to joke around, you know, it’s not even five bucks anymore. It’s more like six bucks. Um, but yeah, I mean, I had people that easily spent $600 a month. They didn’t, they didn’t know. I just, yeah. calculated it you know because if you go in once or twice a day and then your wife goes in once or twice a day and then you got a couple kids you buy a frappuccino every now and then it’s uh usually six hundred dollars a month i think mine’s like 300 um and i’m very well aware of it uh it’s crazy um

Speaker 1 | 38:36.267

yeah anyway that’s fine man kids kids kids will do it too i don’t know if you got kids still but i do i have eight kids simpler simpler life man i went from a gig doing you 3,000 sites, 60 different times, yada,

Speaker 0 | 38:56.540

yada, yada. Now, yeah, simpler life. Yeah, I mean, that’s why I started working. Years ago, I decided I read the 4-Hour Workweek. Yeah. And I was just like, you know, I wasn’t going to go start my online internet, you know, business and do all that type of stuff. But the one thing that I got out of the book was, you know, just ask your boss if you can work from home. and say, I’ll just do it as a trial period. We’ll do a POC. Okay. We’ll do a POC work from home. And what I will promise you is that I will produce 15% higher results, whatever those were. If you let me work from home, you know, we’ll just try it for two weeks. And of course I had all kinds of things sandbagged and ready to go aside. And, you know, but I did, I way over produced working from home because I wasn’t in pointless standing meetings. I wasn’t in water cooler talks. I wasn’t in, you know, all these different things. That was the one thing I took away from it, which eventually led to me starting my own thing and my own, you know, kind of going out on my own. Yeah, but I have eight kids.

Speaker 1 | 39:57.539

I think we’re interviewing you, so what’s your opinion on work from home versus maybe?

Speaker 0 | 40:08.146

I think it depends on, I think it depends on the company, but I think that, you know, I mean, obviously if you have a customer service driven company, like, um, well, it depends if it’s a call center, you can absolutely work from home. I totally, um, I think it also depends on the people. And as long as you are, I’m big into kind of security and measuring and, um, um, expect what you expect type of thing. You know what I mean? Trust but verify. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I think the more you measure, and I don’t want to call it micromanaging, but the more that you measure and run reports and stuff and you keep everybody on the same playing field, you know, like we used to do a lot, I used to be in charge of security and asset protection as well. And, you know, we put in security cameras and we start doing random till audits and counts and we’d start, you know, people like, oh, why are you so, you know, why do you not trust us? Why do you? And we’re like, it’s not that. We do it for everybody equally across the board.

Speaker 1 | 41:05.454

And that’s the key,

Speaker 0 | 41:07.134

right? Yeah. As long as you keep it fair and you treat everybody the same and what I guaranteed any manager, and I can still do this today in any small businesses, I’ll guarantee any of you a 3% increase in revenue. As long as you just start measuring and you start treating everybody the same, you, I guarantee you a three, but that’s 3% guarantee, a guarantee. I mean, a lot of times we saw 10, 15%. So I do think.

Speaker 1 | 41:31.164

Meaningful data though, right? Meaningful data.

Speaker 0 | 41:34.270

If you have to be on-site because of some physical requirement, you have to be on-site. If you don’t have to be on-site, then I think a lot of people can work better from home. I know your office is going to be better at home if you work from home. I know that you’re going to be happier, you know, working from home. As long as you don’t, you know, take advantage and you’re that type of person that can be kind of self-driven, I guess, you know what I mean? And there’s something to be said about it. 80-20, if there’s like a team kind of atmosphere and coming into the office and being part of the team and all that is great. But, you know, I do a ton via Zoom. I used to, all my sales meetings and, or I guess you would call it a consulting agreements used to always be getting on a plane, flying, meeting face to face. And to be honest with you, I get more done via Zoom now and it saves other people’s times and they don’t feel obligated to, you know. do all this extra stuff. And, you know, especially for people like yourself, where you need to, you need to get work done and you need to get back to the drawing board. And for me, it’s more important to get back to family and getting back to, you know, working to live, not, you know, not living to work. It’s more important for you to get back to what you want to do than for me to take you out to some baseball game. And, and, you know, then we’re going out.

Speaker 1 | 42:50.406

to you know some you know i don’t take people out to bars and do stuff like that i just i don’t do all that actually no we i mean here we we run with that kind of family first attitude i mean we we split it up very much team team oriented so definitely like the team together but at the same time you know work from home too because yeah don’t worry there’s days when i’m like thank god it’s monday you know some there’s days i’m just like it’s so glad it’s monday just get me out of here where can i go yeah Yeah, but like if you’ve got a guy that half his day is going to be on a call in meetings, and not face-to-face, but just calls, why go into the office to sit there and be on a phone?

Speaker 0 | 43:29.131

Look what we’re doing right here.

Speaker 1 | 43:30.011

Or a video conference. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a waste.

Speaker 0 | 43:33.653

Yeah, it’s true. Yeah. So that’s kind of a trust factor, I guess. But I think, yeah, a lot of jobs can be done like that. And then there’s days where I just, you know, I kind of wish I was back at the coffee shop just being the local psychologist for everybody.

Speaker 1 | 43:51.650

people freaking out over, you know,

Speaker 0 | 43:53.951

you knew,

Speaker 1 | 43:54.371

I mean, you’re out of pumpkin spice.

Speaker 0 | 43:57.091

Yeah. Or it wasn’t like, Hey, Hey, you’re out of jail. Awesome. And then, um, Oh, you’re, you’re no longer married to this person, but you’re married to this other person. And now it’s like, I mean, you literally see everything you see. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 | 44:09.175

There is a parallel between that and like a help desk guy. Like if you talk to a guy starting his IT career out and he’s going, you know, maybe upstairs or. or somewhere to meet somebody to pick something,

Speaker 0 | 44:25.282

you hear some amazing stories. Some of them you wish you didn’t. Starbucks has this thing called Connect, Discover, Respond. And, you know, they had all these little, like, acronyms and stuff, you know, to help you remember, you know, maintain and enhance people’s self-esteem, like star skills, whatever it was, you know. But, yeah, that’s what we do. Connect, Discover, Respond as, you know, system help desk guys, whatever it is. Yeah, absolutely, you’re going to learn all that stuff. not to mention stuff that you see people do on the internet which hopefully people aren’t that dumb anymore but oh back in the day they were but yeah i just remember working for a call center yeah i worked for a call center there was no firewall there was nothing we all had our computers networked we used to play like networked games of a whole game of civilization in one day like all in the call center together working together it was awesome That is awesome. You just can’t do that now, right? Like no one’s smart enough in your organization. Well, actually you could because everything’s in the cloud now. All right. I think this was an absolute outstanding show. Here’s one thing I want to ask you. Sure. Last question, and I usually ask a lot of people this. If there was one piece of advice, since we don’t have any mentors out there, if there was one piece of advice or anything you had to send out there to the other people in your situation or people growing up in, as system admins right now, or looking to grow and get into a leadership position and not just be the guy that we slip a tray of food under the server room door to. What would that piece of advice be?

Speaker 1 | 45:53.549

You know, never stop reading. Never stop reaching out to people out there, be it LinkedIn, be it Twitter, be it whatever source, you know, back overflow, right? There’s usually somebody out. that’s in your same situation. And maybe they’ve hit different problems and found answers to those. Yeah, networking. It seems like such a lame answer, but it’s so true.

Speaker 0 | 46:21.397

Well, I think, you know, every now and then I have, through my fits of high caffeination, I have these ideas that pop into my head that I think are amazing, and then I go by the domain name. Like I had this one. like I’ve got all these crazy domain names of like, it was just like an idea. I was like, I gotta see if that domain’s available. It’s available. And then it’s just one of these things that becomes a renewal every year. Um, like I had in like, like need to believe.com. I had need to believe.com. That one’s still sitting there. Um, cause I thought that I was going to, you know, anyways. Um, people that have worked with me in the past. No, I used to make, uh, people that were having a down day and that didn’t look right, or they didn’t think they could do it. I used to make them stand on a piece of paper and yell, I believe at the top of their lungs. Uh, there’s a lot of people that, that are listening to the show that will remember those, me forcing them to yell, I believe. Uh, but one of them was the, uh, partnership method and partnership method.com. Um, and you said it, um, you really basically hit on it perfectly. which is the need to partner with people. You can’t do it all on your own. And the whole idea of this partnering with the, or going to the CFO and saying, hey, can you get someone who can help me throw on this project? That is, it’s so, you know, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen What About Bob, but he’s like, it’s so simple.

Speaker 1 | 47:42.763

Oh yeah.

Speaker 0 | 47:43.503

It’s so simple, you know? But that’s basically what it is. So anyways, man. Stay humble and keep it on the up and up, man.

Speaker 1 | 47:50.127

If I don’t know, I’ll tell you.

Speaker 0 | 47:58.084

Because if I hide it, how am I ever going to learn the engine? Well, yeah, and then it’ll backfire and you’ll just look like a… Yeah. That’s the fastest way to get fired.

Speaker 1 | 48:05.689

Yeah, or you just smuck in the basement now.

Speaker 0 | 48:08.711

Yeah, exactly. And they’re like, all right, we need… Yeah. Rainbows and unicorns, huh?

Speaker 1 | 48:13.314

You’re going to sell me that flux capacitor,

Speaker 0 | 48:21.079

are you? It has been a great conversation, man. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Speaker 1 | 48:24.490

All right. Hey, I appreciate it.