Speaker 0 | 00:09.645

All right. Welcome everybody back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we’ve got Chris Myers on the show. I’m very happy to have you on the show because you have quite the pedigree. I haven’t used that word ever yet, just so you know. I’ve never used that. word, IT pedigree. You’re the first person that I’m using this on. And I would say probably one of the most well-rounded business-focused IT leaders that I’ve seen, at least in your space. And I want to… Thank you. Yeah, I don’t want to beat you up too much here, but let’s just kind of start off with… I think we should just start off with the biggest… of all, which is we spoke recently and one of the things that you said was, don’t worry about getting shot down. And I think that’s so important. We’ll foreshadow that. Don’t worry about getting shot down. Don’t worry about getting fired down and being in the line of fire, which I think could be hard for a lot of… I don’t know, a lot of IT guys that might not be used to being out in the kind of forceful, strong executive world. Before we get there, before we get there, tell me how you got into this whole world to begin with. What was, I don’t know, let’s go back. Let’s do the, what was your first computer? What was your first technology?

Speaker 1 | 01:39.780

So I had a Trash 80, TRS 80. We lived very close to where I live now on the sticks, Minnesota, Western Minnesota, suburbs of… Minneapolis, lived on a farm and my dad came home with the Trash 80 and, you know, it had two big five and a half, five and a quarter inch floppies and, you know, one had the program, the other one had the data and, you know, being in the country, not a ton to do, you know, having this piece of electronic gadgetry. uh i got some books and and programmed some games and it was cool you know and they were stupid little i don’t even remember what they were but they were it was it was a great tool to learn on the schools all had you know apples but but this was this had the dos you know uh

Speaker 0 | 02:39.336

os and and how many people how many people in your town growing up like what was the population oh i mean we lived in the country i i mean it had to be you know with

Speaker 1 | 02:50.304

probably three maybe 400 in the town of watertown okay it was i thought you’re gonna say 3 000 i thought i don’t know no my time was 3

Speaker 0 | 02:59.826

000 we had no gas station we had no gas which is ridiculous uh you probably did not have a gas station if you only had 300 you had to drive somewhere if you did we did we did have it we had a little main street yeah that’s cool i really lived in the sticks then um but you know similar for me too i mean ours was a texas instrument it was like cartridges like how can a computer run on atari cartridges so and i was definitely not smart enough to look up how to program games i was asking my brother who really was more of a computer nerd that went to uh he actually went to harvard and bill gates was in his class oh my gosh yeah so i was always bugging my brother come on make me a game make me a game like i thought he was gonna you know like pop out you know pac-man or something like in an hour i had

Speaker 1 | 03:47.916

I have to tell you, I had a roommate one time and I was going to college, I was going to community college and I lived off campus in an apartment and I roomed with this guy. And he worked for a company, a local company that made, you know, small transistor transformers. And they did some work with Next, which was Steve Jobs’s, you know, old company. And he was in a meeting one time with Jobs. And his story was, and so a lot of the folklore about Jobs and how persistent he was about quality of things.

Speaker 0 | 04:25.732

And the markers.

Speaker 1 | 04:26.572

And the markers. Yeah. He came in guns blazing one time because the monitors had beads on them. You could see where the bead, where the front of the monitor connected to the back. And he could see the bead and he was flipping out. And he’s like, I’ve never, you know, he’s like, I don’t know how you could have fixed it, but it was pretty intense. And I thought that was a great story. I mean.

Speaker 0 | 05:03.578

I wonder what he meant by flipping out.

Speaker 1 | 05:07.019

He wasn’t happy. I think he had a certain vision in mind for how the next computer should look, and it didn’t have a bead on it with the monitor. So I thought I’d throw that in there.

Speaker 0 | 05:23.504

So what happened next after, you know, well, first of all, TRS-8, I just got to ask you, did you know he was coming home with that?

Speaker 1 | 05:30.458

Yeah, I actually went to pick it up with him. It was in some guy’s basement. He bought it from some guy that was selling these things. And yeah, I picked it up. We brought it home and it was cool.

Speaker 0 | 05:46.109

It was all in one, like monitor, keyboard with two massive five and a quarter floppy disks, right?

Speaker 1 | 05:53.534

Yep.

Speaker 0 | 05:56.636

Yeah. I don’t think people realize how… much fun it was to get a new piece of technology. Nowadays, like the new iPhone comes out and everyone’s like, oh, we got to wait in line and do all this craziness or something like, or whatever, whatever, you know, ridiculousness. Right. But it just wasn’t like going to a computer store back then.

Speaker 1 | 06:16.133

No, no, totally.

Speaker 0 | 06:17.973

It’s not the same. People don’t understand. I mean, people do understand you and I, people like me, people like you and I understand, but my kids will never know. They’ll never know what it was like to go to Sears and rent a VHS tape.

Speaker 1 | 06:35.620

Laser disc.

Speaker 0 | 06:36.861

It was beta. Actually, the very first movie that we ever rented, I remember my dad got a Betamax VCR. Can you call it a VCR? It was Betamax. I don’t know. Anyways, it was a Betamax. And we went to Sears to rent Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. So weird. I’ll just never forget that. How can you never forget that? I remember the microwave.

Speaker 1 | 06:57.369

I love that.

Speaker 0 | 06:58.754

It was just weird, you know, thinking about it, thinking about how far we’ve come, it still blows my mind. I still talk about this almost every show. It never gets old. To me, it never gets old.

Speaker 1 | 07:08.962

What’s amazing to me is that the children these days, that how young they are, you know, two years old, they understand if they take their finger and they swipe on a screen, it will move.

Speaker 0 | 07:25.015

Have you ever seen a kid like swipe on an old television? Yeah. Like my little kids swiped on an old television. Like, what are you doing? That’s not going to work. Like a two-year-old swiping on an old, like, no, you don’t understand. That’s grandpa’s monitor. He has windows. He has windows 95. Okay. And just so you know, the, the, the, the trash 80 that I’m looking at. has a radio shack has radio shack on the screen right now yep yeah check you know how they died murray used to go down aisles of like transistors like radio check you not walk out of that store with something in your hand there’s yeah all kind of something you’ve had bags plastic bags with little transistors and all kinds of crazy crap that you go fix something with now it just happened now um okay so fast forward how’d you end up where you are Like, did you say I was going to be in computer? I was going to be like a nerd? No. Like what happened?

Speaker 1 | 08:26.975

No, I was going to be a rock star. I went to Berkeley College of Music right the day after I graduated from high school.

Speaker 0 | 08:32.356

I got in. My dad wouldn’t let me go. He was like, you know, my son’s not going to be a musician. I was like, I got it. Keep going. Go.

Speaker 1 | 08:42.139

So I went and never finished, came home and then kind of punted and said, well. There was a lot of kids out there that had a lot more talent than I did. And, you know, people like John Mayer and Steve Vai and all those guitar players. Yeah. And then just kind of flopped around, went to community college a little bit and decided, well, you know, accounting seems like a pretty decent, you know, respectable career. Why don’t I just be an accountant? I went to school and I started, you know, studying accounting and I got some jobs and then I quit school and then I got into accounting a little bit. and I worked for a couple of guys that own some ProVision eyewear stores. And they said, you know, you’re doing all our books, but it’d be great if you could hook all our computers together. We had stores in Montana and Minnesota and all over the place. And they said, we’d love if you could automate. Can you automate any of this? And I’m like, yeah, I’d love to. So I automated their finance and accounting.

Speaker 0 | 09:43.318

Why did they ask you to do that though?

Speaker 1 | 09:46.440

Just for the…

Speaker 0 | 09:48.222

They must have known.

Speaker 1 | 09:49.043

To engineer the process. It was very cumbersome in the way that they were collecting their data out of those systems. And so I was able to get into the systems and just suck out all of the retail.

Speaker 0 | 10:03.489

sales and and financial data and put it all together for them and they thought it was great let me ask you a question let me how did they know this is tough for me because i’m like the delegation king but i’m not the delegation king there’s areas where i really hold on to things very tightly but there could be a real there’s let’s just let’s just say there’s a mess in my life in a particular area you Right. And it would be great to have it all automated and all brought together and all cleaned up. Right. And I’ll put into some in all the data to come into these various different data points. And for me to be able to say, hey, I need this. I need this. I need this. How do they know to trust you to do that? Or how just because you’re the accountant, obviously, and you had your fingers on it. But did you know where to begin? Were they very specific with what they asked you? Or did they just say, hey, can you help us do this? And then you got real creative with it. And it was like kind of completely thrown on you.

Speaker 1 | 10:57.833

You know, I think it’s kind of like a lot of things that happen in the IT world. You’re able to do something and show somebody that you can get some data or you can accomplish some task for them a little bit easier than they were doing it. And then their head kind of, you know, they kind of look at you like a dog looks at something it doesn’t really understand. And they go, oh, maybe you could do something else, you know, and then they throw more at you and they throw more at you. before you know it, you’re tying all these systems together and you’re automating things.

Speaker 0 | 11:31.252

How’d we do the WAN back then? Did you connect all the stores and were we downloading numbers at the end of the day?

Speaker 1 | 11:36.976

No, it was all like dial in and grab the numbers and hang up. And it was a mess.

Speaker 0 | 11:44.181

Were you guys doing that at the end of the day, like dial up getting the reports and stuff? Because I worked for Starbucks for a period of my lifetime and we still had modems.

Speaker 1 | 11:52.526

Yeah, this was, I think we did this like weekly. It was so long ago.

Speaker 0 | 11:58.758

But it was still, but the point is though, it was still way better than what they were doing.

Speaker 1 | 12:03.460

Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was way better. And then I, uh, I got a call from a company that said, Hey, you know, you’re, you’re doing computer stuff. And, and I don’t remember if I, I must have applied there or something.

Speaker 0 | 12:19.946

Can I point out one more thing here? Let me just point out one more thing. You got a call from a company. They knew you did computer stuff, but just for everyone listening, right? Everyone that’s our age or in the ballpark of our age is going to understand what I’m going with. Right. But it’s not like they just searched you on LinkedIn and gave you a call.

Speaker 1 | 12:37.577

No, no.

Speaker 0 | 12:38.918

How did people do this back then? Right. People, you had to be known. You can’t just fake it. Somebody.

Speaker 1 | 12:43.700

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 12:44.260

You can’t be like a fake. What do we say? Like, you know, you can’t be like a, what are these leaders? Thought leader. You can’t be like a thought leader and someone just calls you. Like. Like, no, like you are trusted. We knew that you made this crazy accounting thing work, which is, I believe, still how it works to this day. I still believe it works that way. I believe in that whole system. But anyways,

Speaker 1 | 13:05.573

keep going. So anyways, so I jumped ship and I went to this company called BIS and they sold accounting systems and they needed somebody to learn SQL to be able to install them. So they said, can you learn SQL? because they had to have somebody certified. So a Solomon for accounting system, they had to have somebody certified in SQL to be able to, to put them out there and install it. So I went and I went down that road and I didn’t have the certification and another company called me. And so they were, they were pillaging, you know, this, this other company and they said, you should, you should come and work for us. And I remember during my interview, I’m sitting in Fridays. I’m interviewing with the two principals of this other company. And they point blank asked me, do you play video games? And I didn’t know what to say. And I’m like, well, you know, I have, but not really. You know, I’m trying to be professional. And I go, well, we shut it down at four o’clock every day and we play Quake. We have Quake servers and we play against other people. And I’m like, okay.

Speaker 0 | 14:18.430

You’re like,

Speaker 1 | 14:18.790

this is a different culture. Did you say you’re hiring? So I jumped ship to that consulting company, got my MCDBA, my MCSE, and was able to install these accounting systems all over. And then from there went off on my own. I did some consulting because they were pretty big. They got swallowed up by a very large consultancy. I don’t want to name any names, but they were pretty large. One of the big accounting firms. And I just didn’t like where it was going.

Speaker 0 | 14:57.130

That’s a story though. Yeah. That’s a story with a lot of things. So, okay.

Speaker 1 | 15:02.249

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, $165 an hour and people were having me come out and install their equipment.

Speaker 0 | 15:09.755

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 15:10.636

Yeah, this is great. So, I consulted on my own and also taught in Minnesota School of Business. They went out of business a couple of years ago, several years ago. And then from there, got a call from a recruiter to do a contract job at a trucking company. And ended up there for 17 years. So that’s where I became director over there.

Speaker 0 | 15:40.847

You mentioned something.

Speaker 1 | 15:42.788

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 15:44.049

Which was keeping things up and running is easy. I got to take it. I got to fix the hand dryer in the men’s room. Some guy said that to me. It was so funny. I can’t remember.

Speaker 1 | 15:53.556

You’re expected to fix everything if you’re at IT. People’s cars and…

Speaker 0 | 15:57.840

Yeah. I was like, is technology valued in your company? He’s like, well, considering I got asked to fix the hand dryers in the men’s room the other day, I can’t remember who it was. I got to give him a shout out. I’ll search that and find out who it was. It was just so funny. You said keeping things up and running is easy, but influencing others is, I don’t know. You tell me.

Speaker 1 | 16:20.282

Influencing others, I mean, it’s hard. Yeah, it’s a hard nut to crack. You have to gain trust, I think. And I think the way that you gain trust is that you build redundant systems. People that don’t do this, what we do for a living, they rely on us. They rely on these tools, and they’re our customers. And they need those tools every day when they go into work. They need monitors and keyboards and databases and telecom. all the apps that we use. And if they’re not available to them, they’re going to be sitting around. They can’t. So you build that trust. I think you do that first and then you can help them to do, you know, bigger and better things.

Speaker 0 | 17:16.184

That makes sense. I guess I’m trying to get more at the business-focused IT leader. So once you build that trust, at what point… Are you making suggestions or do you even care or do you think the average IT director is so involved in the business they’re making suggestions that help drive revenue?

Speaker 1 | 17:38.079

You know, some are and some aren’t. When you get into a very large company, you’re so siloed that I think it’s hard. But when you’re in smaller companies, you know, and I’ve been in some half a billion dollar companies and the company I’m with now is much smaller. It’s… I think that’s the size of company, you know, 200 million plus or even smaller, where you can really make a dent. Because we talked about this before. IT, we get to talk to everybody. Everybody comes to us. We talk to HR. We talk to accounting. We talk to ops. We talk to production. We talk to all these people. We get an insight into their world and their problems, and then cross-departmentally, we see where the issues are. And so I think there’s a lot of opportunity for IT leaders to add value to business.

Speaker 0 | 18:42.624

I think if the IT guy was also the coffee shop, he would be like the local psychologist. It’s really amazing. It’s really amazing. I mean, really, when you watch someone, I was almost embarrassed the other day because I was doing a screen share and, you know, people can see how you use a computer, right? Like rather than just, you know, going to the website or something, like I was like Googling the website, pulling it up, finding the link, then clicking on it, you know, for something that was like, you know, it’s just amazing when you watch people, how they. how they use a computer, it says a lot about who they are. Maybe that’s too, I don’t know if that’s too simple or too deep. It’s either really deep or it’s too, or I’m just a simpleton, one or the other. But, you know, you mentioned developing reporting solutions, right? And I think reporting data, well, basically we’re talking data here, but being able to develop reporting and provide data to executive management, leadership, people making serious decisions in the company can be really I mean, it can be business altering if you can take data and really correlate it and provide it that way. Is there any, you got any examples of some time where you’ve done that and people would just be like, holy crap, where’d you get this?

Speaker 1 | 20:12.574

Yeah. You know, we produced at Cook, we produced a lot of reports. There was a lot of analytics, which was, it was great. It was, it was a lot of fun to do that because they, they wanted to dive in deep on every aspect. of the company. I mean, they’re a trucking company. They took product from point A to point B. They wanted to know everything about where they picked it up, what time, how long did it take, what route did the driver take, where did he fill up with gas? I mean, there were so many different aspects of data that we pulled. But for anybody that listens to this, that’s… an executive, here is a mistake that I saw over and over again, that I hope that they heed this warning and they don’t make the same mistake. You can’t move the goal line. You can, but you have to really understand the consequences of moving the goal line when you’re talking about data. So we produce reports and we get the results and we’d show it to people and people. people would interpret it differently. They would say, well, I see this as a great route. We should try to find other customers on this route. And other people would look at it and say, it’s a terrible route. We’re going to lose money. We should not put our trucks on this route. So sometimes they would move the goalpost and they would change how we’re calculating those analytics. And when you do that, then you don’t have any history. You don’t have any historical evidence as to did it really make sense to take these routes or not. And so that’s one piece of advice that I would try and adhere to is. Figure out what your metrics are. Figure out what you want to measure and measure them, but be very cognizant that if you change those measurements, you’re going to lose historical data.

Speaker 0 | 22:34.467

It’s like you’re starting all over again.

Speaker 1 | 22:36.348

You’re starting all over again. That was one of the biggest things that I saw.

Speaker 0 | 22:44.653

I’ll be honest. I’m taking notes. Yeah, because that could really affect years. I mean, that could be like, that could really affect years and years, like starting all over again.

Speaker 1 | 23:00.367

On a lighter side of that, you know, you have reports and there’s reports that would come out at all hours of the day. And we had one particular very important report that would come out very early in the morning at 5.30, 6 in the morning. And the owner of the company, and for whatever reason, we developed it. And… They had used my account and my name, you know, it went out. It didn’t go out under some reporting name. It went out under my name.

Speaker 0 | 23:30.303

The Chris Meyer report.

Speaker 1 | 23:33.005

And the owner of the company came up to me one time, I’ll never forget this, and he said, yeah, he goes, I get those reports you send every morning. Thanks so much for doing that.

Speaker 0 | 23:45.255

That’s like a hack. This is like a life hack. By the way, when you make this report, name it after yourself. because you can never do anything ever again.

Speaker 1 | 23:53.001

That’s what I do. I get up every morning and I run your report. Every morning I get up, four o’clock, I compile all the data by hand and then I rush it over.

Speaker 0 | 24:03.565

It was great. To be honest with you though, that is a great idea. Have a report named after yourself. Make sure the best report, the most important one, the one that people use. every day make sure that friggin report has your name on it wow that’s funny that i mean really though make sure the airport that’s like a i mean really um and then just hopefully it’s very useful and there’s not like yeah i’m really like you know like trending down i hate that guy um uh wow let’s see this look at our we’re kind of coming just coming up with stuff left and right here so Um, okay. So that would be how you be, how do you become more valuable? But, uh, what did you mean by don’t, don’t worry about getting shot down?

Speaker 1 | 25:00.944

Yeah, you know, we talked about this, you know, how do you make inroads into the rest of the company? I mean, you see all these things going on and you have some ideas of how things could be improved across the organization. And, you know, sometimes I think you have to go out on a limb. And I was thinking about this question, actually. And it was kind of interesting because a lot of times you may bring something up, it may be in a meeting and you may plant the seed. You say, hey, wouldn’t it be great if all of our PLM documents were accessible in the ERP system or something like that? And you might get shot down. You might have people that will say, wow, Chris, that’s really a terrible idea. I don’t know why you would, you know, why would we even use this? But then, and my wife does this to me all the time, but then you start to think about it and you’re like, got to give it some time, I think, to kind of lament. And they may come back and they go, what do you mean? You know, can we really do that? And so you planted the seed and you might get shot down. But if you come back, you know, weeks later or a month later or could be even longer, they may say, yeah, you know, maybe we do need that.

Speaker 0 | 26:27.880

You might want to throw a whole handful of seeds out there too. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 26:31.502

sure.

Speaker 0 | 26:32.203

A whole handful of bad seeds with one really good seed is the one that you really want. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 26:37.947

Yeah, no, that’s a great idea. My wife does that to me all the time. She plants these seeds. She’s like, wow, you should really go, you know, the garage is kind of a mess. You should really, you know, pick that up. And I’m like, no, that’s a stupid idea. I don’t want to do that. And you start to think about it and you’re like, boy, it really is kind of a mess. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 26:57.552

There’s three things I want from you. I want a million dollar home. I want a new car and I want the garage to be cleaned. Like, well, I’ll do number three. I just made up some like ridiculous requests just to get you to do the one she wants. Um, but I was, you’re just, I’m sorry, but my mind just went to all the things that my wife does and how it’s the complete opposite. I’ll just be honest with you. You really just shut me down. You shut me down entirely because with my wife, I have eight kids for anyone that doesn’t know that out there. So the, and I’m a delegator, I’m like the king delegator. They do everything. I will, like, if it’s just me, I’m left home by myself. Like they’ll be doing the dishes. They’ll be doing the vacuuming. They’ll be doing, you know, I’ll be like, Hey, what about this? you know, it’ll be like, it’s just like the king delegator. And it’s almost like oppression, you know, it’s like, it’s like the tyrant has taken over, you know,

Speaker 1 | 27:56.996

their jobs get handed down to like, the oldest one has a job. And then and then when another one gets old enough, you can say, guess what, you get to do this job now.

Speaker 0 | 28:06.540

Yeah, I try to get them to train. I try to get them like, hey, look, you need to learn how to delegate yourself, how to become a trainer, how to be effective with your younger brothers and sisters. They don’t listen. I was like, they’re not going to respect you like you respect me. You’re the brother. You’re like an equal, almost like an equal to them, almost like you’re older. But it’s not like me. So it’s different for you. You have to be their friend in order to get them to do it. I don’t know. bribery or something. I don’t know what it is. Try anyways, you know? So I don’t know. It’s an insane, it’s kind of an insane asylum. It’s just, uh, when I think about it, it’s a lot of times I was talking about this the other day with, with a guy, John Sandy, who’s another it director about how a lot of times are very effective at work. But when we come home, that all goes out the window and it’s like, kind of like more of this emotional mess of things that are going on. But the reason why you got me off on this tangent is because you’re you’re you made the example of your wife, you know, uh, asking you to clean the garage and the garage is like, like a thing for me, you know what I mean? But she’ll be out there cleaning it and then she’ll be doing the dishes and then she’ll be doing this. And there’ll be like a bunch of kids just running around, trashing everything like right after she does. I’m like, what are you doing? Like delegate your mother, you know, and she’ll just be like the mom that’s just come, you know, exhaustion. Stop doing this. You’ve got like a whole, like, like a, you know, like a, like what are the, chain gang of like chain gang of kids like please get them doing this work for you anyways moms are you know but at least in you know the uh what they do is at least what my wife does is a feat of amazement um they’re pretty they’re pretty amazing aren’t they they they really are and my

Speaker 1 | 29:54.407

wife wasn’t a mom uh You know, when we had our first child, I have four. I have two with a previous wife and two with my current wife. And she wasn’t a mom until, you know, we had Carson. And then she became this mom. And you see that. And it’s a pretty amazing thing. So, yeah. And, you know, for all the moms out there, I mean, they just, yeah, they’re pretty amazing. And for any mom that holds a career and is a mom, doubly, you know. Well, kudos to them.

Speaker 0 | 30:28.375

Yeah, yeah. Really tough, really tough. It has been a pleasure having you on the show. I want to give you the final word here, which just reminded me of Jerry Springer for some reason. I don’t know why that popped into my head. I don’t know. Or he used to have like the final, like he would have some kind of like virtuous final speech, which is completely laughable. So really not. the opposite of him, but if you had any one piece of advice for aspiring IT leadership or, you know, just in general, you know, what would that be?

Speaker 1 | 31:07.986

Yeah. I mean, I’ve got a couple of things that I could, I could spew out. What I’ve learned over the years is when I first got into a leadership role, I was, I could be kind of a tyrant a little bit. you know, why didn’t you get this done? What’s going on? I think the important lesson I learned was that you’ve got people working for you and they’ve got all sorts of things going on in their life. You probably don’t know half of them and some of them are good and some of them aren’t so good. So sometimes you cut people a little bit of slack, you know, and try to figure out what makes people tick and inspire them. You know, I learned a long time ago when I lived on the farm. When you want a coward to do something, you can take a bucket of feed and lead it around, or you can take a two-by-four and try to beat it into submission. It doesn’t work. Beat anything into submission. Lead it. Lead by example.

Speaker 0 | 32:07.641

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 | 32:08.341

Lead it around. And then the other piece of advice that I would give is I got one time we all did Myers-Briggs personality tests. Yeah. And we all sat. the directors in the company all sat with a psychologist and they went over their test. And when he got to me, he went over the test and he said, don’t be worried. You’re, you’re worried about, you know, I was a database programmer when I started and he said, leave it alone. You’ve got people to do that. Focus on being a leader and focus on inspiring people. He goes, don’t worry. You know, if, if you know, the company goes out of business and you’re out of a job, there’ll be another director of IT or VP of IT job. Worry about, you know, inspiring these people and leading them and making sure that, you know, you’re providing value to the business.

Speaker 0 | 33:06.792

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 33:07.772

And I think that that was great advice, you know, for anybody who’s currently become an IT director or is going to.

Speaker 0 | 33:18.070

It’s very hard when you get into the, when you’re not the boss, it’s easy to say like, oh, I could do it better. Then when you are the boss, you’re like, oh my gosh, this is a totally different world.

Speaker 1 | 33:34.334

When you’ve done it, you know, you have that job and you’ve handed it off to somebody. I came in, you know, is a database, a database programmer. And then you hand that off. And, and yeah, that’s. That’s hard, but at some point you have to make that transition to, to a leadership role.

Speaker 0 | 33:50.244

Thank you for being vulnerable. And, uh, you know, you really have to kind of, you really do have to be a good listener. You have to be very patient. You really have to take that extra amount of time, especially when you’re trying to run a million miles a minute. My, my same psychological, uh, uh, feedback that everyone gave me was just slow down, slow down. I still hear it to this day. It’s like, It’s kind of like, that’s why I really liked the book, First Break All the Rules, and then Focus on Your Strengths, because you know what? I will never slow down. It’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen as much as I’ve tried.

Speaker 1 | 34:26.595

In this day and age, no question.

Speaker 0 | 34:29.338

Well, thank you, sir. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you. And we look forward to having you on again in the future. Thank you.