Speaker 0 | 00:09.602

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today we have with us Matthew Parks. And Matthew is basically the big man on campus when it comes to managing IT at Pace Center for Girls. And, you know… I mean, let’s just be honest, right? I mean, you keep everything running over there. So we had a really interesting conversation on the phone briefly, and I just kind of want to start off with this. Because I haven’t talked about COVID too much because I think everyone does that. It’s easy to talk about COVID and everyone’s all these emails I get in my inbox every day are like, are you prepared for this, that, and everything? It’s almost like Y2K, except it’s real. You mentioned COVID being like the tech linchpin and in kind of like this digital divide. And I just wanted to let you maybe expand on what you meant by that. And maybe it has something to do with, you know, all the memes that we see as COVID being the driver of technology when really it should be you.

Speaker 1 | 01:21.357

Thank you very much, Philip. So the first thing I’ll say about that is that. I was asked to speak at a couple of conferences because, you know, we really, we had a pretty smooth transition into the COVID from the staff side because we had already moved a lot of our premises to the cloud. A lot of that is predicated on the fact that we are a nonprofit and, you know, it’s more advantageous financially for us to have cloud premises as opposed to standing on boxes of iron.

Speaker 0 | 01:51.909

If you don’t mind me interrupting. Because you said it, not, you know, when an IT guy says it or someone inside the organization says it, it’s true, right? When someone else tells you that it’s advantageous to move to the cloud and it’s cheaper and more affordable, etc., then it might not be true. But why was it true for you guys specifically? I mean, you just mentioned a few things like, you know, servers, maybe, I don’t know, maybe power or stuff like that. But why was it financially beneficial for you?

Speaker 1 | 02:20.259

Well, I’ll tell you. And again, let me… Let me back up a bit and explain it. I’m old school. I’ve been in this game since 1995, and I used to build my own servers back in the day. We’ll build servers for customers as well as part of an assembly tech and those type of things. So when the cloud first started to raise its head, and again, the cloud’s been around since 1969, right? I get that. But once we started to use cloud computing, which again… being in the game as long as I have, you know, working on mainframes, it looked very familiar. It’s distributed computing, right? And what we did is being able to, I wasn’t necessarily on board because there are a lot of things that you do have to give up. Anything you do, there are concessions, right? So you give up some control because you don’t have control over that premise itself. You don’t have the ability to physically touch it, upgrade it, migrate. So you don’t have that. So you have to give a lot of that control over. But what I will tell you is that… One of the savings that you realize is that you control it, right? So you have less people that have to manage that piece of iron to make sure that it has the proper cooling, that it has the proper electrical pull, draw, that it has all of its updates. Just as an example, from a management perspective, you no longer have to do that. We looked at it as a control premise, like, man, I’m giving up control to someone. But on the other side, now I look at it as that, you know, that’s one less, you know, update that I have to configure. And the one less period of downtime that I have to incur on my organization and production time that I can actually, that I don’t have to have a person scheduled to do that. You know, and I don’t have to send out that email saying, hey, we’re going to be down from X to Z on these days because we need to do this maintenance. So there are a lot of people out there. There are a lot of other things that come into it from a scheduled maintenance perspective that you realize once you’re in it. So there’s that. Number two, a wise person told me, a friend of mine over at another technology organization, as we were starting our journey into the whole Microsoft Office 365 Azure world, they told me, they said, one thing you need to realize is that once you go into the cloud, There’s no way to come back into a physical premise. And when he said that, I looked at him and I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, the reason is that you cannot afford the, number one, the cost savings that you occur from. Look at OneDrive, for example. You have everyone, and you know this, we had H drives or whatever people call them in your organization where everyone had their own little home drive, right? And they would store things too, which was convenient for IT in case a computer went down or something that they had a place online on a server somewhere. Well, with Office 365, you now gained a terabyte per person in your organization. of online storage that’s available anywhere. So if you draw that out and think about what that would take for you to build yourself, meaning that you’d have to have some type of secure VPN or some type of premise that allows you to have accessibility for everyone in your organization to your internal servers to be able to access that stuff anywhere they had the opportunity to do so, including mobile devices, which aren’t inherently made to connect to those type of… for premises, right? All that work is done for you through a simple premise of, yes, I’ll take the OneDrive for business, right? And the cost per gig, if you will, which we still use cost per gig, is you can’t fathom the difference in cost per gigabyte of space that you get in that virtual premise or in that cloud business that you do in hardware. So that was what he was explaining to me is for you to be able to build out the capacity that you are taking on inside of someone else’s data center, you won’t be able to replicate it. And he was right when he told me that. And so those are some of the savings that we’ve actualized is that you do get so much more and so much more of a rich experience than you would if you were to simply.

Speaker 0 | 06:57.039

simply um try to build it out yourself and i promise i promise everyone listening that this is uh this is not being sponsored uh i did not pay you to say this is

Speaker 1 | 07:19.027

the is the is the scalability right so the ability for me to go in And, for example, going back to COVID. So the first, let’s see, the second week of March is pretty much when the world started to slow down on its axis and we all started to spin a little slower. Right. And we had to come to the realization, you know, here in Florida, where I am located, there was, and it’s particularly in Jacksonville, we’re the first city to actually shut down in Florida. And that is what… It prompted a lot of other cities to shut down. You know, we don’t have as big a name, but we do have the largest population, right? So once that started to happen, people started to see that, you know, we started to have questions. You know, what do we do about school? What do we do about work? So as far as the work part, I was on vacation. The day that we came, I was driving back home the day that the announcement was made that we were shutting down because of COVID. The night before, we were in Orlando on vacation. And we had just made the decision that, hey, we’re going to go to, there was a Orlando Magics game that was scheduled for that night, the night before. And we went on to buy tickets and the tickets were not available. And we turned on the television. And that’s how we learned, you know, that the NBA, which a lot of kudos goes to Adam Silva for being able to make that decision. to stand out there because again, he was the person who started the entire shutdown in the U.S. It has nothing to do with party officials and that type of thing, political parties, president, governor, mayor. It was Adam Silver, the NBA, who made a decision to shut down his league. And once he did that, there was a cascading effect across all of business. So he is the person who did that. And he should be remembered for that. And right or wrong, he should be remembered for that. So in any case, we’re driving home and there are… The traffic’s terrible. We turn on the radio and we’re listening to, we’re finally in an area where we can hear the local radio here in town. And they always talk about the shutdown. And my wife turns on her phone and she starts to pull down the video for one of the news stations as we start to get closer to town and we start to see the press conference. And again, you go back and you’re like, wow. school’s going to be shut down, you know? So my organization sent out a memo or sent out an email notification said, Hey, we’re going to have a meeting on. I believe you’re ready to get settled. We come in, we have a meeting on Tuesday with the senior leadership. And the first question was, you know, okay, Matthew, what do we do from the technology perspective? And I said, well, we’ve already deployed teams. And for us, we had just deployed teams in December. We had finished deploying in December. We had cut over from our Skype for business over to Teams.

Speaker 0 | 10:24.028

Man,

Speaker 1 | 10:24.368

talk about time. We already had that in place. Yeah. And here’s the thing. I had to do it earlier in the year, but I had some obstacles in play, let’s say. So, yeah, we had just made the migration. And I told my CEO and executive leadership team that our easiest thing was we already have teams. It allows us to communicate. It allows us to we can call each other internally. So, we basically we’ve already moved to it. We’ve set up the information on it. So that was what the next week was, was me messaging, re-messaging to everyone, because even though we had moved to teams, we, the adoption number wasn’t quite there when the entire organization would be able to just spontaneously jump out and do this. Right. And who’s your CEO?

Speaker 0 | 11:15.897

Who’s your CEO?

Speaker 1 | 11:17.998

Mary Marks.

Speaker 0 | 11:19.643

Yeah. We got to give her a shout out.

Speaker 1 | 11:20.523

Marks is our CEO. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 11:21.644

We got to give her a shout out. Really, we’re giving you a shout out. This is like the show. I’m already thinking like, this is the show for CEOs. Who cares about my team leaders anymore? You just did the job for everybody. This is the podcast for your CEO to listen to. Send and let them listen. Yeah. There’s no more worrying. We don’t need to talk about selling executive management and getting a seat at the roundtable anymore. Just take this show and let them listen to it and your job’s done for you.

Speaker 1 | 11:54.378

Matthew already did it for you. I appreciate that. You know, I really have to give some credit to what you having said to our executive leadership team. They’ve been wonderful through this. They’ve really supported technology, you know, starting with our chief business officer, Teresa Giles, who is my direct boss. And her team, Jetska over at the COO, who is in charge of the people side of the house, Teddy Thompson, who is our chief administrative officer, they’ve really been supportive. And it really, you know, it started with Teresa wanting to bring technology or bring a nonprofit, bring technology into a nonprofit space and really do it like a corporation. And that was her vision. And once, you know. she started to build that team. I was fortunate enough to be a part of that team and that’s how we got here. And Mary did give her that ability to stretch. She basically said, yes, let’s go ahead and do this. It wasn’t easy, you know, because again, you’re having to change a lot of mindsets, but she was able to, uh, uh, allow, she gave her the room to do that, to do the experiment. And, uh, here we are. Talk to me.

Speaker 0 | 13:03.081

What is, what was the. I don’t know if I want to say toxic, but what was the, let’s just say old school legacy. Legacy is better. What was the legacy mindset?

Speaker 1 | 13:19.350

So when I arrived, we had, we were only, I guess, fully were 18, 17, 18 locations. Each location had its own network and they weren’t interconnected. It’s the main network. There was no real main network, if you will. We had no, the phone system, the same. We were, you know, calling long distance to each other. We had no single file repository, really. There was one, but it was all of the, the majority of the hardware. I’ll say that way. I say probably close to 90% of the hardware was donated hardware. And it was failing. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 14:00.996

Classic, classic non-cloud. Classic non-cloud. You know, like the metal shell on the outside of a server. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 14:09.942

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 14:10.822

You know, fans.

Speaker 1 | 14:12.343

That main storage repository that we write, dude, that is not in, it’s sitting on a table. Yeah. Our main repository of storage repository, that server itself was old. It was an old store from somewhere else. And what’s funny about it is that, you know, interactive login is. When you press OK and it has the name of the company and their policies, that’s an interactive login. It’s something you set up in the group policy of the server, you know, basically to get people to acknowledge, hey, by signing on, you agree to these terms. The interactive login on that computer was from the old place it was donated from, just to tell you, you know, what we’re dealing with.

Speaker 0 | 14:57.631

I have run into a nonprofit where the motherboard had like some kind of license soldered onto it. So it was an impossibility to like migrate it because it had like physical, I don’t even know how to describe it. It was sold.

Speaker 1 | 15:15.455

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 15:15.936

Have you ever seen that physical, physical things soldered so that you couldn’t like, I don’t know, it was just some weird operating old anyways, fan pointing at it. Open box, like really ridiculous stuff. Keep going.

Speaker 1 | 15:30.717

Yeah. And it was, you know, it was, it was like that. So, you know, morale was low view of technology was poor and part of it, you know, was it was experiential, right? Their experience with technology was bad here. Therefore technology itself was bad. So, and anytime you, and there was a lot of stop start where people had come in and try to do certain things and it didn’t, didn’t work out. So then that became another pile of things that you had to overcome or challenge that you had to try to, you know, do your job. And so the technology basically was a hindrance to the productivity than it was actually a benefit or an improvement of the productivity.

Speaker 0 | 16:17.629

So a lot of people look at this situation, just so I run into this and I’ve run into this myself, and a lot of people will look at this situation and be like, yeah, so what? That’s easy. Like anyone could fix that. What’s the hard sale? Like it’s so obvious. But unless you’re in that really kind of entrenched, like you said, low morale, low.

Speaker 1 | 16:36.879

Well, it is and it isn’t.

Speaker 0 | 16:38.860

Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 16:39.960

Well, it is and it isn’t. And reason that, yeah, it seemed it’s easy on paper to fix it. But, you know, there’s there’s trust issues. Number one, because, you know, they simultaneously people trust. The technology, the way it works, the way it does, and also understand that it’s failing. It’s almost like an abusive relationship, if you will, that the person that you’re dependent on also is not dependable. And you see that in kind of a codependent relationship. And that’s kind of where it was here, where my first two weeks here, I actually, I didn’t get my computer as an IT guy. For the first week and a half, two weeks, I was here. And then when I got it, it was a computer that I actually had to configure. And then I had to fix every other day, you know. And again, it’s about investment. And so, you know, once, you know, we, the turning point for us, because we, you know, again, I was part of a plan that was set forth by predecessors and by really by contractors. and predecessors and Teresa Giles who came in and they said, we need to do something about this. Because again, if you look at it, like you said, from the outside and say, well, yeah, you’ve got 18 different centers around the state of Florida and you need to interconnect those to each other. You need to have a system that allows you to easily communicate with one another. All of those things are no-brainer as common sense they are. They are unless you don’t have the money to do so. That’s the other part of it. It’s easy, but it’s not free.

Speaker 0 | 18:26.490

Let’s talk about the money, I guess. Let’s talk about the money, but I also want to put this in the back of your head. How has this technology helped? If you’re talking about abusive relationships and codependency and wrapping that in with technology, there is a deeper…

Speaker 1 | 18:47.024

Abusive relationships, just to be sure.

Speaker 0 | 18:49.425

What did you say?

Speaker 1 | 18:51.367

to not to diminish abusive relationships. I just want to make sure I’m clear, but that was the most immediate thing that I could, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 18:57.849

Well, just the fact that you’re saying that tells me that the technology change within your organization itself has had an impact on the actual vision of the organization. Not from a monetary standpoint, not from a,

Speaker 1 | 19:14.036

I want to know how technology has helped increase.

Speaker 0 | 19:20.719

What’s the word add value to people’s daily lives?

Speaker 1 | 19:24.801

I’ll tell you this. Number one, people can come in and do their jobs without having to worry about whether they trust the technology enough that they can come in and do their jobs without thinking about having, how am I going to accomplish this goal? That’s one of the number one pieces that we have that we, that technology is properly deployed. It has actually allowed them to. be able to flourish that way. Number two, it’s one less thing they had to worry about. Is my computer going to turn on? Or if it is, can I get to my email today? Am I going to be able to receive the phone calls I need today? So when you take away a lot of those things, because again, for me, my vision of technology, the pinnacle of technology to me, and this may sound silly to some, but my pinnacle of technology is the television, because there are very few things about the television that confuses people. but it’s a very high tech device in heaven and have gotten very high tech over time. Person walks in, they grab a remote, they press the on button, it turns the thing on. The man and the woman on the inside that box will talk and you can make them talk louder or you can make them talk softer or mute them completely, turn, change the channel to a different man or woman in the box.

Speaker 0 | 20:50.780

You’d think.

Speaker 1 | 20:51.420

You can find those type of things and… All of this is happening at 60 hertz a second in front of your eyes being transmitted through space and underground through copper into your home.

Speaker 0 | 21:09.169

Or glass.

Speaker 1 | 21:11.851

Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 21:12.371

or glass. I’m going to disagree just because my 85-year-old father, first of all, picked up a telephone last night, which all he has to do is pick up and make a call or receive a call and call me.

Speaker 1 | 21:24.882

have me help him turn on the television i will and again we there’s a thing with us in technology where we do that where we do over complicate things now i have had issues with that um myself in my own history my own family where that’s happened where i have you know sibling or whatever may call and say i’m having trouble and it turns out using the wrong remote because yeah what it was but you Or it’s the Apple TV connected to this with the box.

Speaker 0 | 21:57.359

And back in the day, it was the audiovisual cables and the baby Macs and the Vs, you know, whatever.

Speaker 1 | 22:04.962

But it is a case where we get to, you know, we do have a tendency from time to time by adding features, but forgetting that there are humans that are going to operate it. But for the most part, the television is the… Most simple technology, because again, you didn’t hand that remote to a baby, and within minutes, they figure out how to turn it on. They figure out how to change the channel, right? And most cases, when I used to do field service support for like AOL and those type of things, what was the question that you always ask? Is there a kid in the house? Because it didn’t have that innate fear that pressing the wrong button was going to cause something catastrophic to happen, which is what a lot of the jam up in technology. adoption is right is that um my mom got our first microwave we didn’t use it for six months because he was afraid of the health things and all of the other pieces that would affect by the microwave yeah yeah so don’t

Speaker 0 | 23:03.162

ever look directly into those type of ways don’t look directly well don’t stand too close to it and make you sterile those type of things yeah i ran someone the other day that says i hope you’re not using a microwave his i have a friend that’s an engineer mechanical engineer over here in the united states he’s from yemen And his dad’s calling him like, you’re not using a microwave, are you? It’s just crazy. That’s a funny question. There might be some truth to it. I really don’t know. That’s not my field. Okay, so the money.

Speaker 1 | 23:32.807

Right.

Speaker 0 | 23:33.828

Well, first of all, I guess before we move on, I was getting at how we’ve changed people’s lives. In other words, technology in a hospital, for example, can be a make or break for life and death. technology in your organization could be a make or break for, I’m assuming, girls’lives.

Speaker 1 | 23:52.426

That’s true. That’s absolutely, that’s an honest assessment, yes. And now, because technology is in place, proper technology, not technology for technology’s sake, but purposed technology is in place, and it is, well, it is supported, well supported, that now people can just go and do their jobs as opposed to having to um uh having to work the computer per se they just go in and it’s an ambient technology and that’s always for me i guess is what i’m getting to is that’s the goal is that where we are now we’re in a we’re in a um we’re in a world where technology is ambient and we have to be able to um jump to that stream and jump out of the stream at will because these computers themselves you Everything that we’re dealing with now of consequence is some type of computer, whether it be, you know, that smartwatch that you have on, whether it be the car that you drive. Most cars now, you know, they’re using Ethernet cable in them now. As opposed to the wiring harnesses that I used to work on.

Speaker 0 | 25:00.115

That’s crazy. I never thought about that.

Speaker 1 | 25:04.019

Yeah, I mean, the reason is because they’re becoming more computers. Think about it. You have Apple Play, Apple Car, and you have the Android Auto by Apple Play. And by going into your car, you plug in your computer, your phone, into… another computer through a USB interface or through wireless or whatever and the two talk to each other. And if, depending on the car, if it’s a Tesla or certain models of Cadillac or other GM cars or even others now, if you go into your phone and you put into that computer the destination and you interface with your car’s computer, it will drive to the destination for you.

Speaker 0 | 25:49.737

Unbelievable. We just need automatic updates for the cars. I need some automatic updates. I don’t have to drive my car into the, uh, that should be, I’m sure it does happen on many. Um,

Speaker 1 | 26:01.555

so going back to how does help people is that again, you, number one, you take that burden off of the people having to understand technology because that’s not their job. So having people that know that part of it and can, and can, um, uh, set that in a, put that into motion where that is no longer an issue for them, number one. Number two, making it reliable and trustworthy where it’s no longer a gamble that I’m rolling the dice every time I try to use it. Putting it into action where when I turn on the computer, my expectation is that it works. And so the anomaly is that it doesn’t. Flipping that on its head gave people the confidence that they can just go and do their job with this. And now it becomes a conduit for them to do their job, a way for them to increase their productivity. And then as you continue to progress and stack technology on top of that, then you find other ways to pull out their creativity and or productivity. That’s kind of where it goes through. So how it’s benefited us as an organization, for example, is that it’s given us the ability to… It’s given us the ability to be more nimble. But having those tools at our disposal, technology at our disposal, for example, as a nonprofit, we raise money, right? That’s one of our primary goals so that we can then take that money and then output it into the curls in some way, shape, or form. Well, the ability for us to be more efficient and effective at doing that is enhanced by technology, right? The ability for us to… monitor and manage how well we’re doing that or not. We can monitor and manage that through technology. The ability for us to forecast, you can do that through technology. So there’s a through line there between, okay, now I’ve gotten everybody here where technology is no longer a burden. And oh, now they see that it’s actually a tool. Now they see that it’s actually a benefit. And as you start to step up that pyramid, you get to a point where people are able to look at this technology and ask, what else can this do for me? As opposed to, oh my God, it’s down again.

Speaker 0 | 28:35.392

This, you’re very motivating.

Speaker 1 | 28:37.133

Sorry if I’m going on too many tangents here.

Speaker 0 | 28:39.815

No, no, you might be one of the most motivational IT guys I’ve ever talked to. I think you should be the next motivational IT speaker, if that exists. And later, I’m taking pages of notes. I’ve taken the most notes here. I’ve taken a long time. Okay, so let me ask you this. What happens if someone doesn’t pivot or what has happened to the people that did not pivot? Those are your words, not mine. When COVID-19 hit, what’s the catastrophic, that’s my word, catastrophic results?

Speaker 1 | 29:16.243

I’ll tell you, people go out of business. And I mean, this is a Darwinian thing, right? If you either evolve or die and you look at businesses out there, small businesses that were able to pivot. to some type of internet premise because again let’s look at what was going on you were asked to if you could stay home and if you could as a business owner not open and if in here under threat of losing your power or where they threatened to cut your power initially if you if they found that you’re in violation of this mandate to try to slow the spread of this virus And so now as a small business owner, what do I do? You know, you look at is, okay, let’s look at the businesses that did survive and some that actually thrived. And what did they do? They were able to pivot to a premise, the internet, that allowed them to still interface with customers, right? They were still able to sell their wares, their merchandise, whether it be food or clothing. And they just had to adapt. that premise to them. So whether that was shipping or if it was delivery, they had to then move into those realms. Yeah, they may still have laid off a few people, but they were actually able to repurpose people into different jobs as well, meaning they were able to keep people employed. So that’s where the difference between not being able to understand the Again, that taking it from being a burden to being a tool, to being a benefit, how you can see that this is where you’re going to have to land at some point. You know, we look at restaurants being a big example that we talked about previously, right? Where if I had a restaurant and you take two restaurants next to each other and one, both of them are asked to close. And you have the one restaurant who, you know, stands up their web page and they turn on online. ordering and even let’s say that they or or we can say and or they move on to you utilize someone else’s infrastructure that’s already built such as grubhub or doordash to accomplish that goal right and if you’re able to do that then you’re able to stay in business you’re able to keep money coming in and at some point you also open yourself up to a brand new audience of people people that may not have heard of you. You have accessibility and food is a little different because it still breaks down to kind of local, right? Whereas if you had, let’s say a uniform service, well, I have a family member with a uniform service. And in that uniform service, if they’re online, then yes, they can continue to take orders as opposed to people coming into the threshold of the door. They can actually now move to sending them to the website. The website, they can perform the order there, make the purchase, and then through whatever back channels they have set up, they can then ship those wares or deliver those wares to those people or even have curbside set up for them to make sure. But beyond the local service, now… If I am a nurse, for example, because of uniform service, you can get scrubs for it, right? And I need, you know, scrubs, you know, uniforms for work. And I go online and I see this site. I don’t really know that they’re in Jacksonville, Florida, and I may be in Arizona, Mesa. But I can then place that same order. And in a matter of days, I can have that equipment shipped to me or the clothing shipped to me. So that. business has not only been able to survive and possibly thrive, but they’re able actually to increase their footprint beyond their own borders of their city or their own local community, which gives them more resilience in case something else happens in their community. At least, you know, if COVID gets worse here and I have less people purchasing things for, you know, job related or whatever, they have other communities that can support them. And you saw this happen from… around the country where people were sending monies to organizations that they’ve never visited. Bookstores, restaurants, bars, entertainment venues to at least keep the lights on so that they can survive through this new normal, as everyone likes to call it. That is where the benefit of technology lives.

Speaker 0 | 34:15.689

Yeah. there’s so many, again, just so many avenues. Anytime I’m on a new diet, I’m always on, you know, Yelp, like searching, like what restaurants can provide this, you know, like if I’m on a keto diet, like what restaurants can provide, you know, burgers, no bun with, you know, whatever, like, you know, I’m like looking like within a certain radius. And if you weren’t on there, if you weren’t on there, but you provide that access, you’re not getting my business. Just because I don’t know. You know, there’s probably some even more outbound marketing methodologies that could, that could even be utilized even more. Because I’m sure they’re all pixeling me. They’re pixeling my, you know, oh, I looked at a keto recipe on Facebook. So a local restaurant should be using that pixel and should be sending me some sort of ad. You know, we can get real in-depth with that. And whether that’s censoring or not, or whether they should be allowed to have access to that information, I’ve fully provided it to them. Outstanding. What about, we talked about scalability earlier.

Speaker 1 | 35:24.184

Right.

Speaker 0 | 35:24.625

You mentioned… that you went from 500 to 2,500 end users almost overnight.

Speaker 1 | 35:32.847

Yes.

Speaker 0 | 35:33.287

What was that like?

Speaker 1 | 35:35.468

Well, I mean, that speaks to, again, that cloud premise. In our local community, our local schools, they had gone to Teams to continue teaching because, for example, Teams has an education component called Assignment where it’s built in. Now, it has its four goals, it has its issues, but it was there. And so we looked at it and decided that we could actually provide education to the girls through our online component of Teams. And which was a, which just so happens, our school district was doing the same thing, which kind of validated where we were with this, but we did it, you know, in a statewide capacity. So. Again, just thinking about having to procure that much space that you’re growing by an order of five overnight to provide not 500 people, communication capabilities, bandwidth, that type of thing. Now you’ve got to do that for 500 people all at home. And even if you think about it from a scalability base that I have, you know, 21 locations where those people are located. Okay. So that means we have to just worry about those 21 locations. No, no, no, no, no. Now I’ve got to worry about, you know, 2,500 different locations that we’ve got to worry about where each one of them has their own unique technology challenges per se and work through those pieces. But we were able, just by running a script and by fortune of having those accounts that we just had in the student accounts, which we had not used, of, you know, working out the naming convention and setting up a script in PowerShell and being able to, my network administrator, my system administrator was able to stand that up. And it literally took about a weekend to get the rest of them. And the only reason it took that long was we did a couple of tests. We basically did a location, a list that was the length of an entire location just to see. what a batch would look like. And once we did that, we just let it loose. And once that was successful, we let it loose and it created those accounts overnight. And so now we, and I mean, you were able to do that. And again, and that’s not to say you can’t do that in brick and mortar. You could, but again, you have space concerns that you have to worry about all of a sudden, right? You have, you may need another server to be able to support that because of licensing and licensing is different when it comes to the scale. And if we needed to buy more, there’s the immediacy of being able to purchase it and have it as opposed to purchase it, wait for it to ship, receive it, configure it, build it, and then stand it up, right? So those are all steps that you shortcut because you’re in this cloud premise that, yes, for the most part, there are some exceptions on the server side of the cloud. But again… most things, I still shortcut at least some of those steps by having a cloud premise as opposed to having it in a piece of iron.

Speaker 0 | 39:04.882

Awesome.

Speaker 1 | 39:05.762

So that’s cost savings too because again, I have staff that now, as opposed to that they run, test, and configure a script to make sure it is correct and then they… automate that script out to accomplish this goal versus the other side where we have to do all of those things plus stand up the other accounts manually or through a script sorry go ahead no

Speaker 0 | 39:36.332

i was going to ask you as kind of a closing here what would be what’s your one piece of advice to IT directors out there working in a similar space like you. I would call it, you know, mid-market. You know, it’s not enterprise. You’re not lost in the bureaucracy. although it might be a similar piece of advice for the same bureaucracy. But the IT director that’s got a smaller team, maybe five, six people, and dealing with the same issues that you’re dealing with, maybe dealing with legacy technology, maybe lost, maybe didn’t upgrade to Teams a month before the whole country shut down. But what would your piece of advice be to them?

Speaker 1 | 40:23.087

Well, I’d say the first piece of advice is that you need to engage your senior leadership. That’s the first piece is you have to get them on board with your, with the, well, I guess, let me step back. The first piece of advice is to have a vision of what this could look like and make sure that it’s a well founded vision that, you know, that is vetted. Number two, be able to articulate that vision to your senior leadership so that they can then support you through this. Because with the, Without their support, you’re going to have a lot of problems without their buy-in at the top and their push at the top to the rest of the organization that, yes, this is indeed the direction we’re going to take. My biggest piece, and this is a real big piece, particularly with small teams for efficiency’s sake and others, is you need to flatten your support. And what I mean by that is you need to look at what you’re supporting. and go with whatever you deem and can afford it best in breed and support only those things. Meaning, one of the biggest problems that you see from a support perspective is having too much diversity of devices. So, if I have a, like right now, prior to that, we have Surfaces now as our Surface laptop. That is our standard computer for all of our… Sure. staff. If we look at phones, all of our phones are iPhones. Having that standard there allows, number one, it allows you to develop your team to be experts on those devices because conceivably you’ll see the same issues come up with those same devices. Those idiosyncrasies will probably be the same and carry with you others. Number two, it allows for peer support, meaning that a staff member may be able to support another staff member because they have the same device and may have a higher level of technical acumen. Right. Number three, it makes it easier to automate. So if I need to push out updates or if I have. something that needs improvement, I have a single platform that I’m working to support that will allow me to more easily integrate that as opposed to having to figure out, okay, we have 25 of this type of machine, 30 of this type of machine, 40 of this type of machine, and now I’ve got to create images for all those. It becomes a management problem the more diversity you have in those places. And again, Being a black guy in technology, I can tell you that I’m all about diversity, except when it comes to devices. So that’s where I draw the line at diversity. I want to make sure that the devices themselves, whatever that may be, is that you need to make sure that they were standing before this. We were a Dell house where we had pretty much a Dell 15. Inspiron 15 was pretty much our main workhorse. And. That standardization allowed the tickets to come down for one because we’re all working on the same device. If we had a problem with one and that problem trended, we could actually get ahead of it because we say, okay, we’ve seen about five or six of these do this. Let’s start to be more proactive on the other side. You know, maybe hard drives failing, right? Maybe it was a case and we had that happen with a particular model of an all-in-one that we had as our desktop standard. where we had a hard drive fail. Then a couple of weeks later, we had another hard drive fail. But the third one, that’s a trend. And so what did we do? We were able to proactively buy a bunch of hard drives from an opposite competitor and then replace those hard drives. And now we don’t have any more problems with that machine. At least that problem. See what I mean? If you have too much diversity, then it can kind of add static to that stream. And you’re not able to as easily pick out those type of trends, particularly in a small house. I really recommend that is is reducing that diversity. inside of the hardware and OS for that matter. So those are some of the biggest pieces there. And number five, make sure, as my older brother who’s a barber says, you have to make sure you keep your razor sharp. Don’t be afraid to, you know, look out for those new trends, but not for… but also be wary of that technology for technology’s sake. Because all of us have a graveyard or a museum, depending on your perspective of technology, that we thought was going to be the next thing that turned out to be a paperweight that sits on your desk and looks nice and people ask you about it as a conversation piece, but it doesn’t really do much for you beyond that.

Speaker 0 | 45:46.137

Google Glass. I remember being at a jiu-jitsu tournament one time and one of my teammates was like, hey, can you, he went to the ref, he’s like, can you put on my Google Glasses so the match would be recorded? I just… That lasted for a couple months. It might come back. You never know. Maybe it’ll make a comeback.

Speaker 1 | 46:03.586

Yeah, and that’s the thing. I mean, you just have to vet it and make sure. And you don’t have to jump on the first piece that comes out. You know, sometimes, you know, it’s that. But, you know, again, for me, that diversity is a big one. And I’ll wrap that conversation. I keep going back to it because it’s a big piece. But you have a go-to restaurant that really has this huge menu. items right you’re overwhelmed and and you’re you’re overwhelmed but the kitchen is also overwhelmed because now you know they have to buy all of these products for all of these ingredients and they have to be able to cook all of these different and

Speaker 0 | 46:42.225

it becomes a mess well you’re talking to a guy that came from restaurant management and would never go back to a restaurant right really it’s i mean i imagine i have a background in restaurant also Can you imagine running a Chili’s? Like, kill me.

Speaker 1 | 46:54.993

I could. Yeah, I worked in a Chili’s once or twice, and I can understand there was a schizophrenic kitchen. Because, you know, some of them had to be a steakhouse. Some of them had to be a wing place, right? So there’s that.

Speaker 0 | 47:09.445

You know what place worked the best? Teriyaki walk. Teriyaki walk. Three things on the menu. Chicken bowl, teriyaki steak bowl, vegetarian bowl. You know, $7.99, lying out the door all day long, multimillionaire, Mr. Shin, Fort Collins, Colorado,

Speaker 1 | 47:29.392

done. And that’s the thing. When you look at having that restaurant experience, which I do also, you can go into a place, look at their menu, and you can tell pretty much what ingredients they’re ordering. Because you see it throughout the menu. But it gives them a chance to really do a great job on those few things as opposed to trying to do a good job on a lot of things. and that’s where I tell people that that is where the biggest cost benefit come from is cutting down your menu because it a offers your users less choice which seems like a bad thing but it also gives them more freedom because now they have they don’t have to think as much about what they’re doing which device and all this they just go when they can go do it but your staff can now also operate at Michigan star level, right? At Michigan star level, because they have a few ingredients that all they can do is, and they now have the ability to experiment with those same ingredients and see how else they can squeeze that next star out of the environment. So I really am a big fan of reducing the menu, making it as simple as possible, good ingredients and making some great dishes as opposed to making a lot of good dishes.

Speaker 0 | 48:48.663

Totally agree, man. Couldn’t agree more. It has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. This is absolutely the podcast for the CEO to listen to. I look forward to seeing your growth and having you back on again in the future, especially if you have any great ideas.

Speaker 1 | 49:03.212

Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 49:04.293

man. Appreciate it.