Speaker 0 | 00:09.646

All right, welcome everybody back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And today we have with us Ryan Holland. He is, I mean, manager of global IT. I like global because I like anytime we can somewhat leave the United States, which is nice. So, Ryan, welcome to the show, man. Thank you so much. Yeah. So you’re kind of, you know, leadership role over at Pivot International. Why don’t you just give us a little background on what you guys do, how many users you manage, what the general, you know, daily, you know, daily workload is.

Speaker 1 | 00:44.163

Sure. So we are a contract engineering design and manufacturing firm. We’re based here in the Kansas City metro area. So our corporate headquarters are. We have locations a few here, Omaha, Taiwan and the Philippines. with some remote locations in like the UK and China. We build, we do everything from, I tell people, everything from a napkin design all the way through full scale production of any electronic product. So we do a lot of medical devices, consumer devices, things like that. And now,

Speaker 0 | 01:19.477

and what’s cool is you just got, we were, we were scheduled to do this show, I don’t know, like a couple of months ago or something, but you had to get on a plane. and go to the Philippines and you just got back from there. So just, you know, what was that like? What’s it like managing a global network? And, you know, just maybe some of the, what would you say the biggest challenge, the biggest challenges for you?

Speaker 1 | 01:40.643

Time zones.

Speaker 0 | 01:42.984

Great. What about language?

Speaker 1 | 01:45.045

Language isn’t so bad. We, well, the Philippines speak, most Filipinos speak very good English. It’s, I think, taught in schools. So When you’re actually over there, most everything’s in English. There’s a little bit of tagalog, but everything’s in English. And so it’s pretty easy to work with them. And I think that’s the reason why my company, the company here, decided originally 40 years ago to start manufacturing in the Philippines is because you can get technical expertise who speak pretty good, pretty well, speak English pretty well. And you don’t have that language barrier is bad. There’s still obviously some language barriers. There’s a few things where you have to kind of say it three or four or five times. But it’s not so bad. I mean, really the biggest issue is distance and time zones. Once a week, I kind of do office hours where I’m up late my time here. So I can at least talk to them, have a monthly meeting with the staff, that kind of thing.

Speaker 0 | 02:37.689

Gotcha. And we’re going to dive in a little bit deeper on that in a second here. Now, I understand that one of the other challenges could be, I don’t know, customs and immigration, I hear?

Speaker 1 | 02:47.457

Yeah. So I had ships. you know for us a large amount of networking equipment over there for this trip and The equipment arrived just fine in Taiwan But the Philippines a guy caught up in customs and is actually sitting there today So

Speaker 0 | 03:04.735

I returned home a few weeks ago and the items are still sitting in customs So we’re gonna read up one of these days now These are like firewalls that were meant to be like deployed over there or come over here How how’d that how was that working?

Speaker 1 | 03:17.719

Yeah items are supposed to be deployed over there We do a lot of importing into the Philippines. The problem is that this isn’t manufacturable goods. This is end-user goods. So the customs had a bit of an issue with that. So it’s just paperwork and they’re getting it figured out now.

Speaker 0 | 03:33.585

I’m sure that was a fun conversation. Yes. So how’d this whole journey start with you? I’m always fascinated with how people got into technologies. For some, it’s, you know, I grew up on a farm. For other people, it’s… I know my father brought home a computer and we were soldering transistors onto a board. You know, what’s that? What’s the story for you?

Speaker 1 | 03:56.674

Well, I’m not that far. We weren’t soldering transistors, but my parents did bring home a computer and it was an Apple 2E. I believe what the story is, is I guess back, my parents had some money in a bank and they gave them the option of either taking the interest or, hey, you can have an Apple 2E computer. I weighed about 500 pounds for what is basically a monitor and a little CPU. I remember my brother, who’s actually 16 years older than I am. I remember him. He loved it because he could play Dr. J versus Larry Bird on it.

Speaker 0 | 04:32.615

That was a pretty advanced game, probably.

Speaker 1 | 04:36.257

I had a one-button joystick on it.

Speaker 0 | 04:39.560

Yeah, I had that. I mean, I had the square joystick. I had an Apple PC. I think the orange button was either on top or on the upper right, depending on which model joystick you had.

Speaker 1 | 04:52.754

Yeah, so he, they had that for, we had that, that was kind of the family computer, really, what we used it for, right? They, you play games on it, it was really what all there was for it.

Speaker 0 | 05:02.418

Oregon Trail. Yeah, Oregon Trail. Some people did some coding and some, like, really kind of low, am I allowed to say ghetto? Is that inappropriate? I don’t know, just, you know, like, kind of role-playing games. I remember there was this, like, weird, like, silver bullet, like. game some kind of werewolf game that we played in like fourth grade so anyways am i allowed to how old are you am i allowed to ask i’m 35 oh so you’re much younger than me so i’m more in your brother’s age probably we had we had you know we had in school we had um we had apples

Speaker 1 | 05:36.837

we had uh you know to start off with kind of the same apple 2 series and then eventually max yeah we so we played number crunchers uh number munchers i’m sorry oregon trail uh where in the world is carmen san diego stuff like that so you know, that sort of thing. And then that evolved into my mom got a Tandy laptop, which could only store its memory on cassette tapes. And so she had a little audio cassette tape recorder that you plug in. And you know, when you wanted to save something, you had to hit record and then hit save on the unit. And then it would, you know, and if the battery ever died, then you lose everything. So that was always kind of fun. So I played with basic on that. So that’s probably my first kind of foray into programming some on there. So then from there, I just always had, uh, always been kind of the, uh, computer person.

Speaker 0 | 06:24.552

Awesome. I’ve got another secret millennial CTO interview that’s coming up soon. And I asked him, you know, what was your first computer? He’s like, oh, it was so old. You know, it was like windows XP. Oh God. What was your first video game? He was like, uh, golden eye.

Speaker 1 | 06:42.062

Oh my God. No, no, no. Yeah. The first windows box I had, we had a windows, um, for work groups, three, one, one. Um, I think it was a Packard Bell that had a CD-ROM drive on it. It was the first CD-ROM drive that we had. It was pretty cool. You could put like Encarta on there, which was really, really awesome.

Speaker 0 | 06:59.208

CD-ROM was a big deal. And I remember how expensive it was to get a CD-ROM. And then eventually someone had like a CD burner. And that was just even more insane. And I just remember it was always those kids that I was a little bit jealous of. Like their parents buy them everything.

Speaker 1 | 07:17.581

Yeah. We got… We got a CD burner, I don’t know, I think it was in high school, and I was the guy everybody wanted to, you know, hey, can you burn me a mix CD? Can you go on Napster and grab me some songs and put them on a CD for us? Sure, here you go. So that was kind of, you know.

Speaker 0 | 07:33.983

All right, so what was the big stepping stone for you? Did you go to school for this stuff? I mean, did you go to college and do computer science, or what was the deal?

Speaker 1 | 07:44.110

Well, I went to college for actually electrical engineering, electrical and computer engineering. Um, I’ve, I was even before that I was really heavily into computers in high school. Um, I had to take a typing class and instead of doing that, we kind of formed a, uh, kind of a computer repair club. I know that sounds super nerdy,

Speaker 0 | 08:05.310

but, uh,

Speaker 1 | 08:07.832

so instead of doing that, I kind of quote unquote tested out of typing class. And The school that we had had a bunch of old equipment in the back room. And so a few of the other people who were kind of advanced, we went back there and we’d sort through stuff and find five and a quarter floppies and all kinds of other stuff. So we spent the entire time kind of sorting through and seeing what stuff was useful and stuff like that.

Speaker 0 | 08:31.912

It was literally like Revenge of the Nerds. Yeah. Kind of like the movie where they build stuff that’s really nerdy and cool.

Speaker 1 | 08:38.895

Yeah. And so I was in that. I sold computers at… at uh i was at circuit city um so i did that for you they’re still around right uh only website i think for real uh i remember when they started to go out of business uh yeah it was sad but uh you know so i was involved i mean i’ve been involved in technology the entire time i was fortunate enough to my parents you know they bought me a computer and we had the internet i remember we got aol on Whatever year it was, it was like Super Bowl Sunday. We signed up for AOL and did that. And then I was one of the first people on my block to have cable internet, which was amazing, you know, because you do everything.

Speaker 0 | 09:20.332

That actually is, that is pretty insane. We didn’t, my neighborhood where I live right now, we never got cable. To this day, satellite dish. And only last year did we run, we’re the only, we’re one of two municipalities in all of Time Warner Telecom. Charter, Spectrum, all the mergers together, right? I guess we should call them Spectrum now. We are one of only two municipalities that have an entire fiber ring. So we actually have a multi-gig fiber ring in town, which is really awesome. So we went from DSL to multi-gig fiber.

Speaker 1 | 09:52.017

Wow, that’s a fun step up.

Speaker 0 | 09:54.444

Yeah. So whenever you call in, I’m like, look, you have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m not going to reset my cable modem. I have a Nokia. You have no clue what that means. You need to transfer me through three different departments until I get the right person. So anyways, moving on, what was your first real kind of like IT leadership or IT job or networking job? Like, what was it? How’d you fall into that?

Speaker 1 | 10:19.670

So actually, I worked for a local city government. city of New Selma here in the Kansas City area. I was going to go to school and instead of graduating early, I decided to go to, we had a pre-engineering program at one of the local, it’s a technology academy here. And so I went and did that all day long. So the morning I did pre-engineering, the afternoon I did network, like networking, network plus certification, that kind of stuff. And so as part of that, we did a little bit of a job share thing with the city, with the engineering department. and I actually ended up getting a job with him as an intern. Well, after about a year working with the engineering department, then I had talked to the IT department about something, mentioned how much of a geek I was, showed them my Dell Axiom X5 Palm Pilot that I carried with me, because, again, I’m a nerd. Sweet. And the CTO was like, you’re working for us now. And so I got pulled over into the IT department, hung around there for a while, and then eventually… A friend of mine, he actually was leading, he was the communication systems administrator. So phones, antivirus, remote access, email, administrator. He left, trained me how to do his job, and then I took over full-time, was hired on full-time to do that job. So that was my first full-time kind of IT job.

Speaker 0 | 11:42.537

Now, there’s some interesting insights there, actually, when you think about it, because it’s, you really never… I don’t know. I have found very few people that have ever ended up in a situation or, or career or life situation, wherever it is, that’s been really fully planned. And you kind of fall into these, you know, you kind of fall in like no one, I was a creative writing major in college. I mean, creative writing. Wow. No one would have ever told me I would end up, you know, here. And I had started out pre-med even, you know, like as a chemistry major. So look, and then now this is kind of where I’m at. So I think there’s some interesting insight there as to why, you know, just for other listeners out there, why do you think, what’s the success factor? Is it, I love what I do, I’m passionate about what I do, and on top of that, I’ve, you know, I’ve studied hard or worked hard? I mean, what do you think all those things were that kind of like fed, to me, that’s what it sounds like.

Speaker 1 | 12:41.759

Yeah, I mean, I’d say definitely passion plays into it. I mean, you know, people, you hear everybody talk about, you know, do what you love, and then you never have to work a day in your life. kind of thing. I mean, it’s, it’s, you know, having hobbies, turning your hobbies kind of into your main business. Uh, you know, you, you, you kind of obsess over something. If you figure it out and become the best at it, and then that helps you even get a job that’s maybe not related to it, but people, a lot of times see that kind of passion and then, um, you’ll kind of see that, you know, you, you do know your stuff, but at the same time, also being able to explain that particular passion to a lay person will say, so, um, you know, Good communication skills, the ability to talk to a manager and suggest something, come up with a new direction and not be afraid to share those ideas. Well,

Speaker 0 | 13:32.289

let’s transition into that because really what happened was is your love for technology and kind of where you ended up and your passion for it, you know, got you where you are. But then there’s always going to be the challenging situations. There’s going to be the things that throw you outside of your comfort zone. And you’re going to have that turning point in your career where you either accept that and step outside of your comfort zone or you do not. So what would you say that is for you? What was that really uncomfortable situation where you’re like, this is very challenging for me and I need to push myself through this and find a solution for it?

Speaker 1 | 14:13.970

Finishing college. I was working. Working full-time in the IT industry. And then I went for my engineering degree. I wasn’t a great student. And so getting through college was tough, but it was kind of one of those things where you just have to buckle down, get it done. And then it’s behind me and it’s now something in my back pocket that I can use in the future. That was a big thing. And then,

Speaker 0 | 14:35.013

you know-So I was pushing through, grinding through. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 14:37.613

kind of grinding through, getting it done. It sucks. It’s not fun, but just getting it done is,

Speaker 0 | 14:41.054

you know-I find that a lot. A lot of people quit before it’s too… A lot of times, you know, you hear these people that have like overnight success and really what it is, there’s no such thing as an overnight success. It’s just all of a sudden, all of that hard work and everything culminated kind of all at once. And the people that don’t push through kind of like through that top 1% or really find a kind of push through to the top might not ever see it.

Speaker 1 | 15:06.067

very rare people who you know things drop in their lap you know i think like if you ever follow gary vanderchuk he talks about a lot of that oh you just grind grind grind grind grind keep going keep going keep going and eventually it’ll pay off um obviously be smart about that because if you’re you know if you’re grinding at something that’s not going to go anywhere you know be be okay with changing positions but you know don’t try you know try to complete what you finish before you move on to something else um you know that always seems to be a big

Speaker 0 | 15:36.103

And that grinding for something for no reason really, I think it comes down to, do you believe in what you’re doing and do you really like what you’re doing? So interesting, because I thought you were going to say something along the lines of, you know, dealing with cranky end users that are hard to influence and are very stubborn. That’s really what I was expecting you to say. So, but maybe that comes easy for you and that doesn’t come easy for everyone else. So let’s just go there. Relationships with C-levels, relationships with key stakeholders. and users, what’s your theory there? Or what are your tips and tricks around influencing the organization and the culture and bringing everyone together? Well,

Speaker 1 | 16:16.735

I think it starts kind of with respecting everybody in the food chain, whether it’s the shipping clerk that comes and asks you for a question over the third or fourth time in a day, you know, being patient with them, understanding that everybody, you know, has been steeped in the particular thing, because I’m not the expert at everything. There are a lot of things I don’t know. And that person could maybe teach me something. So kind of going into it with a servant mindset and a bit of humility, no matter what, if you have that mindset with the lowliest person and the CEO of the company, you know, they’re going to see that and they’re going to, and then they understand when you say something, it truly means that like, if you say, well, this is actually a problem, we need to fix it. They know that you’re not just bluffing, that you need to actually, you need to actually do it. So I think, you know, they hear. That’ll bubble up that you’ve treated people with respect, that you’ve sat there for the third or fourth hour trying to explain to somebody how to do this particular thing in Excel or whatever it happens to be. Just kind of always doing that, treating everybody with that kind of level of respect, I think. Right. It helps.

Speaker 0 | 17:22.821

So check platinum rule versus golden rule, right? Treat everyone the way that they want to be treated versus treat everyone the way that you want to be treated. Yeah. Let’s look at a couple. Let’s look at a real life. example, because I know that you’ve, when you came in, you’ve brought eight locations together, hardware, VPNs, you know, sharing resources and these challenges and really dealing with kind of like your network. What was that network challenge and how did you make that, you know, let’s kind of just go through that, that use case study, I guess.

Speaker 1 | 17:52.762

Sure. When I took over, actually, I came on board of the company as a project manager and engineering project manager. I saw a need with the company. We were, we felt like we were being underserved by the… but the company that was, uh, um, that was servicing us for an IT perspective. So I took over to kind of help bridge that gap. Um,

Speaker 0 | 18:10.830

And is this like an outsourced, is this like an outsourced MSP type of thing? So, okay, gotcha. So you had an outsourced MSP and you guys were saying, well, maybe we can take this in house.

Speaker 1 | 18:19.374

Yeah. So I, I, after working with them for a while, I saw the deficiency, it really wasn’t with them necessarily. It was the fact that we were an enterprise treating it like a small business. You know, we can’t go. you can’t outsource this to a person because it’s so complex and so much interdependencies. So then I wrote up a proposal, took it to my boss, who was the director of engineering. He bought into the idea. And then I took that to the CEO and the CFO and we kind of proposed this half-time IT, half-time project management, which then turned into a full-time role. And part of that was, you know, I talked with the CEO and CFO, all these people and said, what is it you want from IT and the company? And the biggest thing was we want to be able to work with the people in the Philippines, the Taiwan’s seamlessly. And bringing that about was like, OK, well, we need to interconnect these locations. I mean, you know, we could have done the whole, well, we’re going to take everything we have, throw it away by all common hardware. But that’s very expensive and really time consuming. So instead, we’ve kind of merged everybody together. We’ve got the slow kind of walk process where we’re bringing everybody together. We’re finding the most. you know, the highest, um,

Speaker 0 | 19:30.283

biggest bang for your buck micro steps, uh, baby step along the way, but make sure that each step is the first is kind of like the highest on the hierarchy of needs, I guess.

Speaker 1 | 19:42.146

Exactly. Kind of like a Pareto chart where you’ve got the, this is going to give us the biggest bang for our buck, but also then driving towards a, you know, a centralized it department. You would have in a normal large company, right? If you have a centralized it department and everything interconnected, you have common hardware, common software. Well, I’m not going to go into too much detail on that, but, um, drive towards that but not necessarily say you know i need a million dollars

Speaker 0 | 20:02.298

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s just not, the answer is no. Right. It’s like, you know, it’s not like the first date you don’t ask her to marry you. Yes. Well, yeah, maybe you do, but the, what was the first kind of major change in impact? What was the application or what was it? What was the first change? What was the first thing you guys, hey, look, here’s the first, the biggest. You know, the biggest thing on the top of the pile, let’s fix this with this. What was it?

Speaker 1 | 20:34.083

It was actually bringing in new servers to our corporate headquarters here. When I took over two and a half, three years ago, we were 100% server 2003. And the servers were aged, physical, had a lot of problems. So I recommended bringing in, you know, and this was a big ask, right? It was a hundred and something thousand dollars. And we hadn’t spent, I think I looked back at it and we hadn’t spent, you know, we had. In the last 10 years, we had spent just shy of $100,000 total in IT, including computers and stuff like that.

Speaker 0 | 21:06.015

So how do you make the sale? Well, how do you make the sales? That’s what’s important because a lot of people don’t know how to make the sale. They don’t know how to sell the ROI. And I can’t tell you how many places I’ve gone into where they say, don’t you dare tell us that we need to recable the entire facility. Because, you know, if you tell us that, like, you might as well walk out the door. And then when we go through and we say, hey, well, look, you wasted $80,000 last year on break fix because you got 23. different switches and hubs everywhere and points of failure. And if we just do this, then you’re going to eliminate 80,000. Oh, well, why didn’t we do this like five years ago?

Speaker 1 | 21:39.430

Yeah. And the biggest thing I have picked up when talking to a CEO and CFO is obviously it’s the business case. It’s not necessarily the dollar amount, it’s the business case, right? Okay. What can our company do now with this that we couldn’t do before? Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 21:53.401

People spend money on tons of stuff. If you just show them that spending that money is going to help them make more money. Well,

Speaker 1 | 21:59.018

yeah. And then the fact that time, and I keep, I keep reiterating the fact that time is also money. Like, you know, if I’m doing something, it’s going to cost the company X number of dollars. If you do something like if we have a large meeting and it’s pointless, that costs the company, you know, thousands of dollars because.

Speaker 0 | 22:12.627

And why is that? Most people don’t know that. Most people don’t understand that like a company’s largest controllable cost for most companies is labor. Yeah. Yeah. What you pay people, if they’re sitting around doing stupid stuff or wasting time. or taking 15 steps to do something that takes one step.

Speaker 1 | 22:30.906

Yep. And that’s kind of driving me. That’s what we, I tell them that. So it’s like, if we waste time sitting here every weekend, we’re having to reboot these machines. We have to go in and do this. So we’re going to have to pull all these drives. Or instead of that, we can bring in new servers. We can do a nice cutover. We can minimize downtime. And then we have all these new features. And we had a large, we had a couple of large business applications that were eight to 10 years behind on updates. And they were to the point where, okay, well, it’s no longer supported. You can’t get any help. So if it goes down, I’m like, well, I’m going to spend three or four or five days trying to fix it.

Speaker 0 | 23:03.787

So how do you present the numbers? I guess let’s cut right to the chase. How did you present the numbers? And was it like an aha moment, like a wow moment? Or was it like, oh, they’re okay numbers and we should probably do it. What was it? How do you do it? Well,

Speaker 1 | 23:16.576

I gave them some options, right? I gave them options.

Speaker 0 | 23:19.358

It’s a yes and yes.

Speaker 1 | 23:21.820

Yes, exactly. So you don’t give them one option. because one option can be rejected.

Speaker 0 | 23:25.922

You give them an option of yes and no, give them an option of yes and yes and yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 23:30.284

I mean, and truly you, and to sell it, one of those options can be staying where we are, but then you have to justify what those costs are going to be. You know, down times and it costs us X dollars per hour. You know, if we, if I have to call in a squad of, of outside administrators to come in and help us, you know, unscrew up an active directory issue, that’s going to cost us this much money. Right. We can go with the cheap option of just buying a new server and upgrading one application. But here’s the limitations where you’re not going to be able to go. If we go to the premium option, we bring in new servers, we bring in virtualization. It allows us to do this, and we don’t have to spend money in the next three years on this project. And we can accomplish this and these future projects that we can see happening.

Speaker 0 | 24:10.467

Did you show hard numbers like, hey, this is what I project us being able to save on or be more productive or anything like that? Did you use special ROI charts or anything like that?

Speaker 1 | 24:19.593

I just gave them numbers. hours, like this would be what, you know, what my hours would be doing this, this would be what it would be cost. This is about around about what it costs to bring in a network engineer or a Windows server engineer for these sort of things versus here’s the upfront cost is what’s going to cost you. You know, we’ve negotiated this, this number, this is a quote from a vendor with services in it. So this is it. You’re not going to be, I’m not going to come and ask you to spend more money on this later on. And the projection is this will get us by. three years with storage and three years with servers. And then, you know, all the things that we can do with it.

Speaker 0 | 24:54.275

I just had a great idea. I think we should do like an it shark tank. I just, I don’t know why I’ve just, this is, I was just imagining like, you know, going in, it’s kind of like shark tank, you know, like, cause they know the numbers, they know what the business can produce. And. You know, they, they, they understand what you’re presenting to them. It’s not like as long as you’re smart with it.

Speaker 1 | 25:13.483

And you’re speaking their language. I think they respect the fact that you’re talking at their, you know, you’re not, you’re not talking it to them. You’re talking business to them and they’re like, Oh yeah, he knows what he’s talking about. Or he’s, he’s bringing us something that’s he’s thinking in our language, which is, you know, they appreciate it.

Speaker 0 | 25:29.254

Yeah. So, okay. So what was the result? So what happened?

Speaker 1 | 25:32.504

They approved the expenditure. We brought in…

Speaker 0 | 25:35.086

Platinum? Did we get…

Speaker 1 | 25:36.547

We got the platinum option, yep. And I think that was a very good decision because here we are three years later and we haven’t had to incur any new… We’ve incurred a small amount of hardware expenses because we’ve actually completed all the projects we had on our docket and added more. And so I’m able to now… I had some engineers come to me and say, we need some build service. We need some CPU cycles so I can… throw some software builds at it and let it run without it taking up my laptop. And I said, 15 minutes later, here you go. Here’s some servers. And they’re like, what? I’m like, yeah, easy.

Speaker 0 | 26:10.015

So it was like a virtualized.

Speaker 1 | 26:12.097

Oh, yeah. So now we have a two-host virtual system out here that by most people’s standards is paltry. But for us, it’s stepping into the future.

Speaker 0 | 26:22.045

What did you say? 2003 server or whatever?

Speaker 1 | 26:24.487

Yeah, it was 2003. We have two VMware hosts running. They’re all 2016. Windows 2016 server, you know, and I think I’ve got 18 to 20 VMs running on those two hosts right now.

Speaker 0 | 26:37.091

So then you are also able to eliminate a certain amount of outsourced type of IT. Yes. So kind of like when you look at it, you know, three years later, was there a wash on price? Did you make money? Did you guys increase efficiencies? Like looking back on it, what do people say?

Speaker 1 | 26:51.420

I mean, I think from a cost perspective, like actual dollars to donuts, I don’t think it’s saved us any money. But I think we’re able to do so much more than we could before. So I think it’s, again, that’s another tip I have. It’s not just selling cost, right? You can’t, IT is not cost. You’re going to also have to sell what you can do with it. And because of that, we’re able to take on all these new projects and these new expansions and stuff without there being any barriers.

Speaker 0 | 27:16.031

Or affecting the culture or there being a cultural mismatch or there being another company that pays someone more money. So you’re not as high on their list of… priorities or anything like that.

Speaker 1 | 27:28.257

Well, and one thing I’ve figured out the most is, I mean, the biggest problem is you’re not going to be able to get the same person every time you pick up the phone to call them. So if you’ve got, you know, something that’s pretty cut and dry, like, oh, I have Excel problems. That’s one thing. But we have our own internal MRP system that we use for managing all of the manufacturing and buying stuff. Well, even if I pick up the phone and I call that, that vendor that has that particular application, they don’t know our setup and our processes. So then, you know, you’re wasting all this time and money. trying to explain to somebody to get an answer versus having that knowledge in term.

Speaker 0 | 27:58.877

Yeah. So I wrote down when we first spoke, I wrote down some notes and in quotes, I put process first system second, and I’ll just let you talk. I’ll let you talk about that because I believe that’s really, I mean, it’s, it’s obviously very, it’s, it’s mind blowing and other people are gonna be like, well, yeah, duh, but I’ll let you speak to process for a system. Second.

Speaker 1 | 28:23.316

Sure. I think what led into that particular conversation was some of the experiences that I’ve had. In a lot of places, people go out and they find a tool. And whether that tool is a purchase requisition system or a PLM, like a product lifecycle management, some sort of system. They find a tool, hey, that’s going to be a really cool tool, and they buy it. And then they kind of shoehorn it into the system instead of actually sitting down and going, well, how do we want our processes to work? So, for example. and this is going to get kind of into the technical nerdiness of a manufacturing and design company. So we have a, you know, engineering processes and design processes. And one of those is we have an engineering change requests and engineering change orders. So if say we have a product and I want to change the color of the LEDs in that product, I need to submit an ECO engineering change request and then an engineering change order to then, you know, modify that particular part to change the colors of the LEDs. Right. That’s just.

Speaker 0 | 29:19.376

good process to keep everything we call that a macd we call that a macd in my thing move okay delete and we yeah we get mac attacks every now and then people have got your tax anyways and so so this is and this is important because because this goes through supply chain right you know say i have

Speaker 1 | 29:35.185

300 000 red leds already in stock well that’s a dumb decision to change up the blue because i have all the stock i have to throw away right so there’s decisions that are far reaching well those those weren’t thought through when the the tool came with a particular set of steps and we implemented those. Well, now looking at it and how complex our system is, we need to start doing these things. And so what spawned this was I had a customer, I had an internal person come to me and say, I want to add these new fields to this particular tool. And I’m like, what are you trying to do here? And so I kind of dug into the basics of it. And it turns out. It’s not the tool that needs to be changed. It’s the process. The process needs to be whiteboarded. So we sat down in three meetings and whiteboarded out this entire process from left to right and found out, actually, there’s a lot of things that we need to add to this to do this. And there’s a lot of people who aren’t being involved in these decisions that end up saving the company a ton of money because instead of these snap decisions being made, oh, we need to change that particular item and change it to a different resistor. Well, then we have all this orphan stock that sits in a warehouse somewhere. that we have to do something with it. We paid for it. So there’s these decisions that need to be, key people need to be brought into the process. So it was a, you know, it started to be, hey, can we modify the tool? And it turned out we actually rerouted the whole process from scratch.

Speaker 0 | 30:48.324

Wow. And I can’t, I mean, how often does someone make a mistake like that when they go to purchase software? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 | 30:53.806

All the time.

Speaker 0 | 30:54.667

It’s insane, you know. It’s the cart before the horse, horse before the cart, whatever, you know. That’s basically the analogy is how many times does someone just get sold on something versus really sitting down, digging in, whatever, surveying, gathering data. It’s really where data comes. And that’s why data is such a mind-blowing, where data and AI is really going to affect the future right now for the people that are very involved in it. But for the companies that aren’t involved and don’t understand how much can actually be done in that area from a technology standpoint. from leveraging technology as a business force multiplier. There’s so much to be done there. It’s pretty mind-blowing. So let’s give a, you want to summarize that basically process for a system second. In other words, sit down with your people, ask them how they do their job, dig in, whiteboard things, really kind of get ingrained before you just sit arrogantly at the top of the technology empire and make a decision.

Speaker 1 | 31:55.866

Yeah. And I will be the first to say that it’s not easy to do. It’s very time consuming. It’s kind of humbling because you have to sit down with, you know, most IT people don’t care about how supply chain works. I don’t care how parts get bought. That’s not my problem. And, you know, you don’t need to become an expert on it, but it’s nice to sit down with the people that do it day to day. And it’s kind of a twofold thing. You learn a little bit and they feel like they’re being heard. And that’s huge for people because they’ll come to you with suggestions. They’ll come to you and they’ll give you a little grace when there’s issues. And so it kind of helps build that relationship. And, you know, then you can, like I said, you can draw all this out and figure it out and then select the proper tool. I mean, one of the things that I’m running into now is I feel like we have a couple of key business applications that are redundant that we could probably get rid of one of them if we changed our process a little bit. So that’s something we’re exploring in the future for some cost savings.

Speaker 0 | 32:43.679

And is that just because most of those applications have a big overlap and there might be a minor overlap, minor non-overlap that you need the other application for?

Speaker 1 | 32:51.644

Well, yeah, when they were purchased, they didn’t have those. overlapping app items or they were purchased for a specific reason like this is the you know the database software for Solidworks and that’s that’s what it is. Well, it actually also does this this this this well Our other tool does this this this this hmm in my industry?

Speaker 0 | 33:10.837

That’s hey, we’ve got we’ve got ring central for our phone service and we’ve got 0365 teams for a chat and our file sharing, but RingCentral also provides Glip, which is like the same thing, and they also have chat, and you’ve got this huge overlap. You could probably very easily integrate, either just go all Teams or go all RingCentral one way or the other.

Speaker 1 | 33:35.450

And that’s exactly us. We’re Mitel and Office 365, which both offer a lot of the same features. So it’s tricky also when you’re trying to train users, right? I’ve got a chat window in this application and a chat window in this application. Which one am I supposed to use?

Speaker 0 | 33:49.894

We told you, no, ignore that one. And then people use what they use for just because they’re humans. They’re going to use whatever they’re used to or whatever makes easier sense, whatever. Anyways. Okay, really cool. And what would you say is the best way or how do you do it? How do you sit down with people? How do you have these meetings or dig in deep? Do you have any type of, I guess. process or system yourself for continually building relationships and being the servant IT leader that you are?

Speaker 1 | 34:25.127

Well, you know, first I try to talk to people with questions. I, you know, I do get busy and I do sometimes get snappy at people. So I won’t admit that as well, because I’m in the middle of something and I don’t have time for questions, but, you know, listening to people, answering the questions, giving them a full answer, making sure they actually kind of understand what you’re trying to tell them. That initial relationship building is really important. And then at the same time, you know, In this particular example about the engineering process, I talked to the people and they said, well, who would you bring to this meeting? Oh, I’d bring so-and-so. Okay. I scheduled the meeting. I brought everybody into the room. I kind of kicked it off. It was a little uncomfortable because I’m not as familiar with their processes. So I kind of let them talk through how they do things. I let the other team talk about how they do things. I jump up on the whiteboard. kind of just do a technical diagram. I’m left-handed, so I hate writing on whiteboards, but because I like, you know, I’ll wipe off the, but, you know, getting up there and just kind of taking notes and showing people what it looks like.

Speaker 0 | 35:22.752

I never thought of that. Wow, that’s cool. So left-handed whiteboard people.

Speaker 1 | 35:29.096

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 35:30.577

That’s like a blog.

Speaker 1 | 35:31.217

That’s like a blog. There’s like a, there’s a store in San Francisco that’s all left-handed and people are like, well, why are you left-handed?

Speaker 0 | 35:36.420

The Simpsons,

Speaker 1 | 35:37.281

lefties. Exactly. Why do you need a left-handed spiral notebook? Well, because then the spiral’s on the other side.

Speaker 0 | 35:43.283

And why do you exist? I exist because I talk to the people so the engineers don’t have to. Exactly. Okay, so you whiteboard stuff, take it down, and then come up with some ideas to spit out a better process or use technology to make it better.

Speaker 1 | 35:58.850

Yeah, I mean, so in this case, we’re looking at modifying the process. So put together kind of the whiteboard. We handed it off to another group.

Speaker 0 | 36:08.962

To simplify it, just for people out there listening, like to simplify this for someone that may have never actually sat down and done like a group meeting and led a meeting, because that might be stepping out of comfort zone for some people. It might be stressful. It might be, you know, look, I don’t leave meetings with groups of people. Like I’m in IT, like I take tickets and fix, you know what I mean? Like there’s just, honestly, there’s going to be people out there that just aren’t used to doing this. So to be real granular with it, is it a setting out an email first? Is it? walking by people’s desks and saying, Hey, I was thinking of doing this. Or I mean, how do you organize these meetings?

Speaker 1 | 36:43.280

Don’t be afraid to go and actually talk to the person, right? Go to the person’s desk and see how they’re doing things. And then, yeah, just say, Hey, would you like to have a meeting about this? Or Hey, would you like to sit down and talk about this? And you know, can I bring so-and-so and can I bring these people in and kind of just telling people what you’re going to do before you do it. And then that way they’re not surprised when they walk into the room. And then trying to set everybody at ease, just saying, hey guys, this is real casual. We’re just going to try to whiteboard this particular process. And then being diligent about capturing actions. I mean, that’s something I’m terrible at is I have to tell myself, okay, this is the end of the meeting. I try to sit down and I try to make a list of the actions and I tell them at the end of the meeting.

Speaker 0 | 37:25.165

Why do IT directors not want to capture notes and stuff? What is it with that?

Speaker 1 | 37:29.588

Because I think we just like to do things.

Speaker 0 | 37:32.290

Like just fix it. Like, Hey, we’re just going to fix the problem. Like even if we’re going down the wrong road, like.

Speaker 1 | 37:36.311

Exactly. I think that’s what it is. I, you know, early on I had to, I read David Allen’s getting things done and I had to do that because I would try to store it all in my head and then I’d forget it three quarters of it and make everybody mad. So, you know, at the end of the thing, taking down the actions, having those listed out email, you know, don’t be afraid to kind of summarize the meeting at the end. So that way everybody’s on the same page. Cause you know, I could think of something different than the other person.

Speaker 0 | 38:01.686

Ask for help, have someone, you know, whatever it is, take notes, snap a picture of the whiteboard, and then we’ll review at the end. Okay, awesome. And then creatively, I guess it’s creatively come up with solutions. There’s nothing we can really do there. You just got to be smart enough to come up with that solution, that technology-minded solution, be bold enough, and then take it to the key stakeholders, etc.

Speaker 1 | 38:27.053

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, and you… go out and reach out to people. I mean, you know, people don’t like talking to some people, but sometimes it’s helpful to talk to a vendor at a particular company that you deal with and see how, how they’ve had experience in the past. They might try to sell you something or they may actually give you a little bit of insight, you know,

Speaker 0 | 38:43.679

They may try to, so that’s me by the way. Don’t be, don’t be afraid to talk to me. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 38:49.582

I mean, there are some vendors that will just want to sell you something. And there are a lot of vendors that will give you, you know, a lot of 10 cents worth of advice for free, right? They’ll give you. They’ll be happy to engage with you. They’ll be happy to answer your questions about the products or give you some suggestions. And don’t be afraid to go out and ask the, you know.

Speaker 0 | 39:08.090

My philosophy in general is, A, I left the corporate world years ago because I wanted to be able to offer every single solution that’s available out there. I didn’t want to be stuck with one solution. And I believe that you’re only as good as your partnerships, right? And also, at the end of the day, what’s the number one thing that saves any company from going out of business? It’s. someone going out and selling something. So you’re really in the business of helping people sell things more effectively anyways, or engineer a better part or whatever it is, like all really there. But it comes down to, I think, partnerships. And the partnerships that you have with your vendors is very, very important because if you don’t have that partnership there, then you’ve just got a sales rep that’s a revolving door that’s gone after eight months. Or you’ve got an account manager that’s a butt in the seat that gets paid X dollars an hour and is gone after three to eight months. So you’ve got to have those, I guess, partnerships is what I would say is a really good methodology around forging partnerships with your vendors, which is really a business partnership. It’s not a buying and selling agreement. If it’s all contractual, I don’t believe in contractual agreements, even though contracts are involved so that everything, everyone’s clear on what they’re getting and we’re setting the right expectations. But at the end of the day, it’s got to be a partnership where the vendor cares about your success. And you care about the vendor’s success as well. So, you know. Well,

Speaker 1 | 40:31.910

and that’s the partnership part of it, right? I mean, it’s not, you know, anybody can go on Amazon and buy a Switch, but if you need help with that particular thing, it’s always nice to have a resource. That’s how I, when I kind of catalog my vendors that I use, you know, I kind of see what’s their willingness to help me out, to give me advice. You know, obviously, if I need to pay them for their time, I’ll pay them for their time, but, you know, what do I get for that? Am I getting a can’t answer for an hour’s worth of work, or are these guys coming out here? Like, I’ve got a cabling contract. that I don’t know how they stay in business because he does so much work and so much extra stuff and doesn’t charge me one cent extra. But now I use him for every single solitary cabling job I have because I can trust them. He says it’s going to cost me this, it’s going to cost me that, and that’s it.

Speaker 0 | 41:15.411

And I wonder what the key piece is there. Is it because I still run into a lot of IT directors that still look at… a vendor relationships as a, I’m going to beat up a sales rep type of thing. I’m going to go out and do all the research on my own and I’m going to like Google and get on Reddit and look at things like this. Um, I wonder what like really the key learning is there. I think it’s probably more of an education piece on my part and on other vendors parts to let them know that there is a, a, a carrier provider vendor agnostic option, believe it or not. I guess you’d call it consulting, but that’s kind of a very broad, um, broad term, but, um, So anyways, I don’t know what the learning is there. I guess there is good people out there. It’s the top one or 5% that actually care about your success.

Speaker 1 | 42:01.192

Well, and it’s all about finding them too and then utilizing them when you need them. Like I have an example now where I’ve got a vendor that I use for all kinds of random things. I mean, he helped us come on move and they did all kinds of stuff like that. I have a very odd manufacturing related networking issue that I was like, I need help. Can you help me right now? And he would, yeah, sure. Here’s your engineer. He’ll bill me for it. But- he was able to drop everything and get the engineer and get him, and get him calling my guy, uh, location and got it taken care of. And that’s the stuff that I really appreciate is when I say I need something, they do, they get it done and they don’t drop the ball on those things. And that becomes, you know, I’ll use them for everything.

Speaker 0 | 42:35.833

You mentioned Amazon, which is interesting and Amazon. And then even, um, Microsoft, Oh, three 65 migrations. A lot of people just go buy the licenses and they don’t realize that they just buy the licenses from a, like a really good migration shop that won’t chart. Well, actually, charge them less than if they went and bought the licenses from Microsoft and help them do the entire migration and then give them, you know, like tier one or tier three, whatever you call it, support, which you wouldn’t normally get from Microsoft unless you’re a really big shop.

Speaker 1 | 43:04.689

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 43:05.889

So, excellent talk today. What, if you had one piece of advice to growing system admins, other IT directors, people that might be in a stressful situation or wanting to grow? I mean, what’s your one piece of advice?

Speaker 1 | 43:24.490

Don’t be afraid to learn new things. And that’s not just, just not technical reasons, but like also, you know, going and sitting down and talking to the person who does finance and the person who does this. Don’t be afraid to learn that stuff. Yeah, it may not be something that you’re going to ever have a career about, but it may help you solve a problem for them in the future. And then, you know, again, I think treating everybody with that kind of same respect level is paramount because that gets you a lot further than you think.

Speaker 0 | 43:51.850

Absolutely. Well, Ryan, man, been great having you on the show today. I really appreciate it. Hope to have you back on the show again in the future. The next time you have a, you know, I don’t know the next biggest thing that you do. I want to know about, and I want to have you on the show for it.

Speaker 1 | 44:07.639

Sounds good.

Speaker 0 | 44:08.559

Thank you, sir. Have a great day.

Speaker 1 | 44:09.920

Thanks a lot.