Speaker 0 | 00:09.662

I’m just hitting record now because when we miss conversations like this, it’s… No, I had no planning for anything. Every child of mine was a mistake. And I tell all of my kids that they were a mistake. And I tell my kids that, yes, I have favorites. And usually it goes along the lines of today, you’re my favorite seven-year-old. And I have twins. So it doesn’t, it kind of backfires with them. So I say, you’re my favorite, you know, eight-year-old boy because the twins are, you know, it’s a boy and a girl twin. What do they call it? No,

Speaker 1 | 00:46.375

no, it’s good to be specific. And it’s good to demoralize them like that. Never let them, never let them grow beyond like, you’re my favorite today. But what have you done for me lately?

Speaker 0 | 00:57.861

First of all, everyone out there that’s listening to the show today, we’re talking with Jeff Richardson. I’ll let you introduce yourself. What do you do? You’re sitting with a newborn baby. How old?

Speaker 1 | 01:07.930

So Ben here is about 22 days old.

Speaker 0 | 01:11.533

Wow. Congratulations, man. Now I know why. Over the three weeks. Now I know why you ignored all of my posts and emails and any requests for anything, because that’s just what happens, you know?

Speaker 1 | 01:23.532

I would read them at like four o’clock in the morning delirious. And then I’d be like, Oh, I really want to respond to Phil and like talk to him soon. And then, you know, I’d wake up and it would be like four days later. I would come, I would come back into consciousness.

Speaker 0 | 01:36.642

Wait, so what is this? We were talking about some sort of scale is, wait, is this the, is this the first child or second or third or what, what are we on here?

Speaker 1 | 01:44.469

This is, this is our second child. Yeah. So, so my, my point was that I know you have quite a few more children than we do. You have eight children.

Speaker 0 | 01:53.016

Even my closest friend, one of my closest friends the other day was like, what? I thought you had nine. I was like, no.

Speaker 1 | 01:58.758

At that point, I mean, at that point, they become kind of rounding errors. Yeah. But you would, you would mention that, you know, you’re, you’re allowed now for the kids to watch the other kids. And my point was that your horizontal scaling worked way better than our attempt at linear scaling. So we’ve got to,

Speaker 0 | 02:13.684

like,

Speaker 1 | 02:14.485

we’ve got to cluster up here because what we’re doing definitely needs better industrial scale.

Speaker 0 | 02:19.887

Yeah. Like when you’re a new parent. I would say even at two people, everyone’s reading that book. That’s like what to expect when you’re expecting, I think every mom has it. I’m sure, I’m sure maybe your wife or whoever has had that book or someone’s seen it or something.

Speaker 1 | 02:32.282

We have three or four copies of that book.

Speaker 0 | 02:33.963

Yeah, exactly. I love it. I love it. So anyways, this will apply to any IT directors out there that have kids, but yeah, I threw that away a long time ago. And you listen to all the advice that other people have, or you look at what other people, how their lives are, and you start to compare and what have you been through. And everyone tells you when you get to three kids, well, now you’re outnumbered. That did not apply to me. Three kids was really not any more difficult than, this is awesome, three kids was not any more difficult than two kids. Um, the number for me, that was the hardest when we talk about scale and maybe we can talk about this as like, you know, some sort of like, maybe we can, we can, we can make the metaphor into some sort of like, you know, architectural network architecture metaphor, but for, or, or maybe an IT team, maybe this is more like an IT team. Like four was the hardest number for me. Four was the hardest number. And then there’s like a sine curve. And then after that I had twins. So my wife and I had you know, we tried to like plan any of this, like let’s have five kids. I always wanted to have five kids. I don’t know why five was number. It was just five was the number. I think that I knew like a C level exec at Starbucks one time that had five. And that just seemed like a lot of kids and he was successful and he’s running around with five kids. And I don’t know.

Speaker 1 | 04:01.439

So you didn’t miss, you didn’t miss small here. I mean, you, you aim for five at eight.

Speaker 0 | 04:05.921

So. Yeah. So when we got typical,

Speaker 1 | 04:07.701

typical it project budget there. All right. I see where we’re going here.

Speaker 0 | 04:11.443

So three kids was like. Like, I don’t know what people are talking about. We’re outnumbered, like no problem. Like we’re still good, you know? They’re smaller. They’re smaller than me. This is terrible. Then I got to four kids and that was significantly more difficult. Four for whatever reason was significant.

Speaker 1 | 04:28.292

I feel like there is a metaphor there to managing IT teams though. Like if you’re a manager of like one to three people, in theory, you can keep track of all of them. And like, there’s a good management direct kind of approach to that.

Speaker 0 | 04:40.168

Or you don’t need to be organized or you can still be kind of like, you know, off the cuff, like just kind of flying by the seat of your pants. You get to talk.

Speaker 1 | 04:46.437

Very flat organization. Yeah. Limited plans.

Speaker 0 | 04:48.760

Stick together, like whatever it is. And, uh, But when I got to four, I don’t know what it was. It was just, it was very difficult. And then my wife’s like, well, don’t you always wanted to have five? I was like, I don’t know. Yeah. But, but like, who cares? Like four is great. Like, you know, like, no, we got four kids. This is good. Anyway, she got pregnant anyways and it was twins and it was twins. And at that point I was just like, okay, it’s, you know, we’re just going to be that family that has kids and has a lot of kids. And, uh, sick the twin from when we went from four to, to. twins, there was this just different, I don’t know. You just have to, you know, people are like, how do you do it? How do you live with eight kids? I don’t really have a choice. It’s just kind of like life, the human body will change to…

Speaker 1 | 05:40.864

You adapt it to your environment. Adapt,

Speaker 0 | 05:42.784

yeah, exactly. You just, whatever happens, it’s different. It’s different. I have eight kids and it seemed to be… maybe easier i think from the outside looking in people i always ask people does it does it look weird having like does it seem like you know like we have a lot of kids and they’re like yeah it seems very chaotic it seems like crazy because i remember going and visiting people you know that that would have like five kids and their house looked like a zoo i was like this is crazy like how many kids do you have you know like i couldn’t keep track and now i have eight so i know we have two kids in our house like a zoo so yeah i know it looks insane but um

Speaker 1 | 06:22.279

I guess you embrace it more, but at age 18, though, you’ve built in a management structure of children,

Speaker 0 | 06:27.522

right? It’s a failed management structure. Again,

Speaker 1 | 06:32.106

it’s a failed. Like most management structures. Okay, these are very good business parallels.

Speaker 0 | 06:37.790

It is. Okay, so what happens is whenever you move, so I’ve moved with the family from Colorado to D.C. to Massachusetts to Maine. I’ve done four major moves.

Speaker 1 | 06:50.418

Yep.

Speaker 0 | 06:50.763

When we moved from Colorado to DC, I had three kids. And then when we moved to Massachusetts, I had six kids. Whoa. We had eight. So every time you move, it’s like moving your business. Everything, you know, you got to move all kinds of stuff. Right. I mean,

Speaker 1 | 07:15.020

you’re talking industrial scale.

Speaker 0 | 07:16.982

Which is a good reason to be in the cloud. okay let’s argue let’s argue with the cloud because that makes that a lot easier um you’re going to change everything everything falls apart all your checklists all your marker boards how you clean the house everything just just kind of goes by the wayside for let’s see we moved in august and just yesterday i was putting together corrective action forms internal corrective action forms for my children and you And awards.

Speaker 1 | 07:49.344

Finally getting your TPS reports filed.

Speaker 0 | 07:51.745

Exactly. Awards. Let’s see. Award lists. Cleaning lists. Daily checklist. Nightly checklist. Midday lunch checklist.

Speaker 1 | 08:02.531

So you moved mid-COVID, right? August 2020?

Speaker 0 | 08:07.353

Yeah. Yeah, I did.

Speaker 1 | 08:09.795

Okay. And that took you that long? Wow. I couldn’t imagine moving that long.

Speaker 0 | 08:14.457

Well, the story of that… The story of that was my father, who’s 80. So my dad’s 84. He got cancer in January. It’s a crazy story. It’s not my, so my mother who has, my mother had dementia, really bad dementia. And she took a fall. And, you know, and like last year in like 2019, December. right like right before right before new year’s uh she took a fall and she had to go through she like crushed like three like a like a like c like c two threes i whatever it was some kind of like real serious oh man elderly you get these like you know your bones are like really brittle so there’s nothing they could do it was just like go to rehab learn to like but with dementia when you when you put someone in a rehab facility it gets really bad for them like they get very lost so anyway she came back um and literally the day she got back in january my father was swatting like the like the dog they have a very bad like they’ve always had a dog but when you get a dog when you’re older you might not be as energetic to train the dog and so they’re very untrained dog that jumps on the table eats all the food everything so there’s this big yellow lab running around the house you jumps up on the table, takes my dad’s peanut butter muffin. He eats a cinnamon raisin. Thomas’English muffin toasted with peanut butter on top. He’s done that forever. You know how you have these things?

Speaker 1 | 10:01.020

Is this your dad or the dog?

Speaker 0 | 10:02.321

This is my dad.

Speaker 1 | 10:03.381

He gets that breakfast.

Speaker 0 | 10:05.522

He goes to put the muffin down on the table. Dog jumps on the table and eats it. He’s like, God damn it, Rosie. What are you doing? The dog’s name is Rosie. You can hear that as I’m sitting in the living room with my mother right after she got out of rehab and she’s back. hear that. So he goes, he makes another muffin and comes back and puts that on the table. And no kidding. Of course, the dog jumps up again to eat the muffin. And I just hear him yell. And then I hear like a huge, like a huge thud. And, uh, I hear nothing. And then I see the dog eating the muffin and I’m like that fall, that better not been my dad. So this is my COVID story for anyone who wants to hear this. I guess this is turning into Phil Howard’s COVID story, but we’ll, we’ll get to, we’ll get to something important in a second, but I come around the corner. I see my 84 year old father at the time. Now he’s 85. He went to like, basically like swat the dog or something like that. You know, like hit the dog or something, you know, like, you know, like, why are you doing that? Get off the table, take the dog. Like does like a juke, like a, like a football, like the juke, like. leaps out of the way and my dad trips and falls, hits his head on the brick corner of the brick fireplace. Right on the corner. The worst part you could hit your head on. And I come around the corner and I see my dad knocked out on the floor and just blood pouring out of his head. And I’m like,

Speaker 1 | 11:42.356

what a nightmare.

Speaker 0 | 11:43.513

Yeah. I’m like, oh my gosh. Right. He knocked himself out like a UFC fighter. My dad’s a huge UFC fan. He loves these. Okay. Are we watching the fights tonight? Are we watching the fights tonight? And as I come around the corner, he’s just coming out of unconsciousness, like knocked himself out. And he starts to come to him and he calls me PJ. He’s like, PJ, PJ, help me. I’m like, oh my gosh. I call 911. My brother’s the fire chief in town. And he’s like a real high strung, like, like stereotypical, like, you know, fire chief type guy. Next thing you know, fire department’s here. So the day after my mother gets out of rehab, my dad goes into the hospital. They do a CT scan and everything. They’re like, doc, you’re okay. He’s a retired doctor. You’re okay. We’re going to stitch you up. The problem is we found a huge lump in your neck. So from the fall, they do a CT scan to check his neck, check everything. They find this massive cancer growth in his neck. Goes and gets that tested. Doctor says, it’s really weird. You have this very odd form of cancer that’s like 99.99% curable. We just got to send you into radiation. Okay, I’m going to send you into radiation. Well, right as they’re sending him into radiation, the whole COVID thing comes down, right? And like, what’s the worst thing that you can have? What’s the worst thing that you can have while the COVID breakout is happening? Cancer. And what’s the second worst thing that you could have? Having to go in for chemo and radiation during cancer. So I’m taking him in for chemo and radiation during like, from like March to June. And during that time,

Speaker 1 | 13:23.657

I can’t imagine any more stress.

Speaker 0 | 13:25.358

It was just, you know, it was just wild, you know, it was just like, give up on everything. I was like, that’s why my, you know, like my podcast, like I wasn’t doing many podcasts then if any at all or any of that stuff. And so. He has two houses. He has this massive, he had this massive house and retired doctor, you know, like in, he’s like the stereotypical doctor, you know, golfed Wednesday and Friday. You know, he’s got this house in new England with like 14 acres of lawns that he mows himself, right. Cause he’d never pay anyone, you know, the doctor paying someone to mow his lawns. That’s like, you know, doctors are cheap.

Speaker 1 | 14:03.394

That’s very, very new England doctor. I like that.

Speaker 0 | 14:06.095

You know, so here he is with four. Like a John, like, you know, this massive John Deere tractor, like, you know, and then like all these Kubotas, he’s got a front end loader. He’s got, he’s driving these things at like 84. And now there’s no way I’m like, dad, this is ridiculous. You’re not going to do this. You’re recovering from cancer. You’ve gone through radiation. He lost like, you know, but when they do, when they do radiation on your throat, you lose all ability to pretty much swallow. So now he’s feeding himself through a tube. The stories go on and on. It’s great. It’s just insane. There was. There’s some crazy stories. But so anyways, I had to help him sell his house, move out of that house that my parents lived in forever for before since before I was born and move his house and move to me, move to his house in Maine, sell my house and move my eight kids to a new house in Maine. And it’s just now. you know, calming down. So whatever that metaphor is to IT management, I’m sure that that’s happened. I’m sure that there’s been plenty of people that moved or all of their end users went to remote locations. Whatever it is, that’s, you know, like, that’s what I dealt with. So then after all this, all the smoke cleared, now I’m just now putting up the checklist for the kids, you know, as opposed to just management by, um, you know, by, uh, by reaction versus management by responding. You know, a lot of times we manage by, by, uh, reacting to a situation like, Oh, a ticket came in. We gotta, we gotta take care of that ticket. Another ticket came in. Oh, this we’re constant break, fix, break, fix, break, fix. That’s what it’s like with a family of eight kids. No, it’s like, you’re going around pointing, like pick that up, pick this up, sweep that, sweep that. Did you make your bed? Did you do this? Did you do that? No, it never works. It’s an, it’ll be a constant, like you want to kill yourself. And, uh, so that’s why with eight kids, you got to have like checklists. You got to have correct. action forms. You got to sit down like the other day, you hit your brother. Do you know what I mean? And that’s not part of the value of this family. Let’s review the values of the family. Now, this is a, you know, you’re sitting down there where like, and you don’t want to have a record just because this does go on your family record. Let’s compare that to a police record as well. When you grow up and how you don’t want to have a police record. I’m not kidding.

Speaker 1 | 16:21.436

So you, you’ve, you’ve implemented now full HR, you’ve implemented a full project management system. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 16:27.187

you have to. So anyways, yeah, with like, you know, constant, I’m like, we are now officially running a media, like a, what is it? A meritocracy where we are now running a meritocracy. You will get a point for every time you do this. So many points will equal this. If you have more points than your other brother, you are better in my eyes.

Speaker 1 | 16:49.383

Now, did your bonuses pay out quarterly for this system? Or like, is this like a year true up? How did this work?

Speaker 0 | 16:55.307

Exactly. It’s still, again, we have to constantly review and go back because some things get stale and old and your old reward policy just starts to become not effective anymore. So I don’t know. Sometimes if it’s like an immediate payout, like sometimes with kids, you know, they want like immediate gratification sometimes depending on the age. So you’re kind of flowing back and forth between. Do I want to teach them patience or do I just want to feed them the Oreo cookie right now as their reward and they can trade in one point for an Oreo cookie?

Speaker 1 | 17:26.036

Or is the next 10 minutes of quiet more valuable than like in a year from now they understand patience.

Speaker 0 | 17:31.280

Your mother and I want to go out to dinner. So here’s the deal. Right now, if you do this, this, and this, I’m opening the Oreo cookie package. Everyone gets a cookie right away to begin. While you start doing the cleaning, you get one midway through cleaning and you get one at the end and your brother’s in charge of this. So anyways, that was a long. uh, winded story. Hopefully you guys out there enjoy this. Let’s talk about, uh, but let’s talk about you really, which is much more important. Um, and I can’t remember some, what some of the highlights were, we were talking about last time. Maybe, maybe you do remember, why don’t you give me what you do on a day job and keep in mind that people listening to the show, we’re trying to help them reach to this, you know, um, I guess you, I guess you could say it kind of like the super big, super big deal. level that you are.

Speaker 1 | 18:21.264

Yeah. So, um, I don’t remember anything Phil from the last time we spoke because since then, which was like five weeks ago, I’ve gotten like 30 hours of sleep in the last five weeks. So not, not a great spot for me,

Speaker 0 | 18:31.572

but you’re a CEO. I mean, you’re, you are a CIO, sorry, CIO. Um, uh, so that’s a good point. Like how do you manage life and have a life and still reach a C level director role at. Why don’t we just talk about how you got where you got to begin with?

Speaker 1 | 18:50.308

Yeah, sure. So that you are correct, my current role is the chief information officer of a division in a global life sciences company. So pretty big company, lots of technology, lots of people, lots of data, lots of infrastructure. So right up your wheelhouse. My path to get here has been, I will say, pretty non-traditional. but only because I embraced a lot of things that came up as, you know, the last 20 years moved through technology and data. I kind of embraced a lot of that and kind of got lucky by moving through a bunch of those technologies. So I started.

Speaker 0 | 19:31.403

So tip number one is you’ve got to get lucky or be blessed. You must be blessed somehow to have fallen into the right wheelhouse. Okay. That’s kind of hard to teach, but maybe

Speaker 1 | 19:41.928

I will say 90% of success in any of these positions is being in the right place at the right time or having the right conversation at the right time

Speaker 0 | 19:50.198

Maybe that just means networking and networking with more people and more things will fall into your, you know, they say there’s the old saying, the harder I work, the luckier I get. I don’t believe in luck to begin with, but there’s something to be said about that. So the more that I network, the more opportunities show up for me, maybe. I don’t know.

Speaker 1 | 20:06.744

I am a huge, I preach this to everyone that will listen. And anybody who takes what I say seriously, like a mentoring position, nothing replaces a good network. No amount of hard work will replace knowing the right. person at the right time. Like, absolutely not. So if you are a mid tier person, a young person, someone trying to grow through, you know, any kind of career trajectory, networking with the right people, right, making those connections, obviously, the last year has been insane, as far as like networking, but going to those, going to those networking events, right, talking to people, making friends with them on LinkedIn, right, being engaging. building up that social brand so people know your name, it’s invaluable as far as development and growth and getting those opportunities. Think about how people apply to jobs right now. I just changed careers four months ago. And I think to the job that I applied to, there was probably 500 applicants. How do you stand out in a universe of 500 applicants or 1,000 applicants?

Speaker 0 | 21:13.490

Did you go through a technical application process or was it someone that you knew that said, hey, you need to look at Jeff?

Speaker 1 | 21:18.842

I did not. So I had kind of like poked around and made myself known to a recruiter. And then they reached out back to me because they knew me from networking. And it just got lucky. I happened to know like a reasonably random person in the right spot. And they kind of pushed my name up to the right person. And then once they start talking to you, then you can stand on your laurels and say, I’ve done this great thing, or I’ve done that great thing. Or like, this is how I can transform your business, you know, digitally, whatever. There is no way you’re going to be able to stand out in a sea of 500 or a thousand applicants unless you know the right people. You know, most people I talk to now looking for jobs that are being successful have that in somewhere, right? They know that in the company referral, right? They know that executive. They know that person. I heard a story of one of my friends who went on a blitz campaign trying to apply for a pretty seasoned executive. technology job and was like mailing gift baskets to people that they knew so they could find their addresses and stuff. Right. And I mean, that stuff works. It sounds corny as heck, but it works.

Speaker 0 | 22:24.948

No. So here was my idea. So I have this like theory on how IT directors should go about applying for a job. And mine was, why don’t you sit down first and make a list of, I don’t know, the top 20, 30, maybe if you’re really a hundred companies that you want to work for. Like very specifically, like I would love to work for this company and just start going down the list and pick out. And I think, first of all, I think startups or mid-market companies are fun because you can grow them and everything. I mean, I guess you could say Microsoft, Google, Facebook. I want to work for these companies. Like some people have those type of companies in their list. I don’t think that that’s me. Me personally, I don’t know if that’s the type of company you should go for. I think 250 to 2,000 employees slash end users.

Speaker 1 | 23:12.665

Right. Getting into the Microsofts and Facebooks is a different game than getting into the 200 to 2,000 person company.

Speaker 0 | 23:19.031

To me, that’s boring. You know, like you’re not going to really make a big impact. I guess you could. I mean, I’m just saying it’s like if for the people listening to this show and my philosophy or idea that is untested yet. But I think a lot of recruiters that aren’t listening to the show would agree with it. I think make a list of the companies that you really, really don’t want. want to work for and then go after on LinkedIn, for example, go after the C levels and, you know, just find a way to get connected with them. Be like real honest. And like, I think your first question should be, Hey, if you don’t mind, can I ask your advice?

Speaker 1 | 23:59.156

Cause everyone that’s exactly right. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 24:02.618

And then I think your advice, your question should be is, Hey, when it comes to technology in your court and your current company, as it applies to you know, growing the business, whatever it is, right? What’s your single biggest, as a CEO, or what’s your single biggest frustration, problem, or concern with your current, your current technology stack, whatever, your current, I mean, you wouldn’t say that to a CEO, your current technology, period, end of story. And just see what he says. And then say, and then provide a solution to that. And then just say, hey, you know, because now, you know, and then just stay connected and keep providing, you know, some sort of valuable input. because then, I mean, I just think that that would position yourself so much better than him when he’s going to apply for a bunch of people or when he’s going to look for a role and tells HR, hey, we need this. I mean, there you are positioning yourself as someone that could actually provide revenue or grow the company.

Speaker 1 | 24:57.343

You’re providing a solution to a problem they might not fully understand yet. I mean, this is the Gary Vee approach, right, to networking and career growth. Is it? Do you follow Gary Vaynerchuk at all?

Speaker 0 | 25:07.091

I mean, I know who he is. Yeah, I know who Gary Vee is.

Speaker 1 | 25:11.514

I went way down the Gary Vee hole in 2020 just being locked in my house without a lot of content to watch. But he… He preaches this constantly. I mean, it works for him, it works for people he talks to, but it’s make those connections, right? Talk to them, get in the door with something that’s not like, give me a job, but like, here’s my idea. Here’s how I can help you. And then see where that goes and do that at some kind of scale where it’s not like, you know, one person, you do it for a dozen or two dozen or three dozen people. And then the goal is timing and luck. And then once you get past that, right, then you can show off your skills.

Speaker 0 | 25:45.164

Yeah, because the majority of these companies has this kind of like rolling, I don’t know what the average lifespan is of an IT director or CIO or whatever. It might be, you know, I would say for a majority.

Speaker 1 | 25:56.567

Hopefully, it’s a while.

Speaker 0 | 25:59.128

But for a lot of companies, they probably roll through a lot of guys. You know, they probably roll through guys. So if you’ve got 100 people out there or 300 or people, a company like we call that like the dream 100 list, right? Here’s my dream 100 companies that I want to work for. Out of 100 of those companies, someone’s hiring people every 36 months. There’s some sort of algorithm to how often companies are hiring. Now, one company might have a very entrenched guy. I mean, I ran into an IT director that had been in the company for 34 years. 34 years. How much has IT changed in 34 years?

Speaker 1 | 26:33.365

Well, I was in my last company for 16 years.

Speaker 0 | 26:35.447

So I feel-Think about what you saw over 16 years.

Speaker 1 | 26:40.750

Oh, God. It was unbelievable. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 26:43.872

Now, this guy was still on Lotus Notes, which is interesting.

Speaker 1 | 26:51.018

So maybe he’s not the great example to go look at. Once you get past luck there, you can say, look what I can do for you in this computer program that’s 26 years old.

Speaker 0 | 27:03.729

I have an idea that might be very beneficial to your company and provide.

Speaker 1 | 27:07.573

Have you heard of macros?

Speaker 0 | 27:15.024

Oh my gosh. So, okay. So point one, um, yeah, make yourself known, know the right people, you know, some sort of blitz campaign or like, I like the gift baskets. The gift basket is a great idea.

Speaker 1 | 27:29.774

It’s funny. I’m not sure if that worked. I don’t know, but I thought that was pretty funny. Pretty funny. But we’re back to mail mail.

Speaker 0 | 27:34.898

Have you ever noticed how communications go on this like kind of like sign curve, like, like email now that’s probably the worst way to try and get in touch with someone.

Speaker 1 | 27:43.380

Oh, I ignore almost all emails now. My means of communication at this point are sometimes LinkedIn messages, but yeah, physical mail now trumps everything.

Speaker 0 | 27:52.922

This might be bad to say this publicly, but I have 81,101 unread emails and I use email as a database.

Speaker 1 | 28:02.425

Yeah. I mean, I’m not, this is partially in jest, but partially not. But my inbox at my previous job was so bad that one of the great reliefs of changing jobs was just like, Oh God, the emails are gone.

Speaker 0 | 28:15.656

I could start afresh again. I’ve thought about doing a nuke, like an email nuke where you just like, just hit delete all. But I know that there’s email every now and then I’ll be like, oh, who was that person I spoke to? Like years ago.

Speaker 1 | 28:26.339

Well, the tech show, I don’t know if you follow other podcast stuff, but Reply All, which was a great technology-based podcast, which self-imploded a couple of weeks ago due to a bunch of like HR scandals.

Speaker 0 | 28:39.443

Really? What happened? I remember that.

Speaker 1 | 28:42.364

Yeah. So I love that podcast. A huge fan of the two guys that ran it, PJ and Alex. The show was great. Again, it was something I found at the beginning of 2020 and that helped me get through just like a good mental state because they’re so positive and so helpful. They had email forgiveness day as a concept where they would do this and they would forget. They would declare it publicly. They were enacting email forgiveness day and they would just erase everything in their inbox and use that as a starting fresh point.

Speaker 0 | 29:12.088

I could never do that. I’ve thought of it many times, many times, but I know that there’s like some weird contract or something that I saw. There’s something somewhere that I need at some point. And I search it. And I’m like, Oh, 2013, it pops up. And I’m like, okay.

Speaker 1 | 29:26.860

Yeah. But they were, um, they were looking into, uh, you know, Bon Appetit, the, the YouTube social media, like Bon Appetit series.

Speaker 0 | 29:35.306

No,

Speaker 1 | 29:36.848

it’s like a, it’s cooking. It’s like online cooking.

Speaker 0 | 29:39.830

I know the magazine and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 | 29:41.712

Oh, yeah. So they were looking into this as a research project into the toxic work culture there, because apparently it was like hugely like it was a very bad toxic work culture. I don’t know all the details, so I don’t want to like spread the wrong answer. But it was. you know, it was pretty bad. And they were doing like a four part expose on how bad the work culture was there. And they published the first episode of it, like kind of like as, you know, exposing how bad it was. And then all of the employees from the podcast basically came out and they were like, well, like maybe we shouldn’t throw stones. And people were like, well, what do you mean? And they were like, well, everything you just described is how working here is. And they got into like all of this, like it was really, really bad. And like, since the podcast is now over, they canceled. shut down immediately. Like they really got into it and it was pretty serious.

Speaker 0 | 30:25.788

Wow. This is like, this is why maybe this is another, this is a reason to not scale. It’s a reason to not grow as they start hiring people.

Speaker 1 | 30:36.251

Okay. Well, wait until your kids start filing HR complaints.

Speaker 0 | 30:39.792

Yeah, I know. I know that I need to, I have a, I have a, I have a solution for that too. Believe it or not. It’s called Job Corps. It’s called, I’m sending you to job core. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 | 30:56.939

So essentially involuntary termination. I got you. We’re following this analogy through.

Speaker 0 | 31:05.484

Oh, I didn’t know that about reply all. That’s too apart. You know, that’s, which brings me up to, we do need to, I do need to start some, a new, I was thinking of starting a new segment of the show called That’s a Stupid Thing. Because I have a friend that he actually went to go work for when I was at this Cisco startup. He ended up leaving and going to work for Microsoft. And I think he’s just, you know, it’s interesting when I talk with people that work at Microsoft, when you get into that company, it’s like almost impossible to get fired. Because it’s so big in the way that they communicate internal and put together these creative teams and everything. You can kind of flow from one. like one section of the company to the other like i’m just not feeling it in this part you know and they’re like well you should totally i’ve totally i have a lot of friends that work at microsoft and i follow their careers through and i can absolutely see that like in talking with them they’re like well i’m not really happy so i’m just gonna go do this for like two years in this team and i’m like how do you is that like a thing you can do you just network internally on teams and you just say hey you know i want to kind of like you know do this instead and like oh it sounds really cool you should talk with so-and-so they’ve got like a you know a think tank over here and thinking this is crazy. And I’m like, wait a second, how much do you get paid in stocks every quarter? And they tell me, and I’m like, how old are you? And he’s like, I’m 22. I’m like, what?

Speaker 1 | 32:21.322

I think that size company scale though, like that actually works. Like you need 5,020 person think tanks thinking stuff up so that somebody can go and then invent Azure, right. Or like invent like, you know, whatever next thing they’re going to go do.

Speaker 0 | 32:36.946

Yeah. Yeah. Like, like improve like whatever little aspect of this video. conferencing piece inside Teams.

Speaker 1 | 32:45.129

Somewhere there was a 20-person think tank that was like, you know what? Everybody hates Skype. How do we turn Skype into something better? Like, oh, well, okay, I see that there’s Slack. What if we just turn Skype into a better Slack? And now Teams has, what, like 195 million users?

Speaker 0 | 33:01.976

If I had to bet on any platform, it would be Teams right now. Like, if you told me, like, if there’s a gun to my head, the gun to your head questioning, I love this. I had a… a, um, what do we call this? Like a mentor, I guess, I guess like a mentor one time. And whenever I would have a hard time making a decision, you’d be like, Phil, there’s a gun to your head right now. You’ve got three seconds before I pull the trigger. Three, two, one. I’m like, okay, I’m going to do this. You know? Um, and like, if you had a gun to my head and I had to choose like which, who’s going to, who’s going to take over video conferencing and, and, you know, cloud communications, I would have to go with teams.

Speaker 1 | 33:36.327

You have to pick teams. This is the buy, sell, hold, right? Uh, do they have like stock market conversations? Yes. Yeah. I am firmly by, I don’t like it when Microsoft is able to leverage like their weight and put it against something like this and like all their creativity. It’s the office paradigm, right? Like they’ve perfectly put together the things you need to do, like with Excel and PowerPoint and Word, like just like that. It’s in teams, like it works, like it just works.

Speaker 0 | 34:06.034

Like I was a G Suite guy for a long time. And now I’m thinking like, oh crap, how do I migrate all of this stuff? The only thing that’s really annoying, here’s the really annoying thing, is when you use other applications, like G Suite and Google, the open source stuff, all that, it’s very, very easy for people to build APIs into Google.

Speaker 1 | 34:29.641

Because it’s all very open, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 34:31.502

Yeah, but not for Microsoft. So I’ll have like two or three applications. I’ll be one of them. That’s it. Today I’m doing it. migrating everything to Teams. And then there’ll be like three applications that I use and I’ll go to look for the API into Teams and there’s no calendar

Speaker 1 | 34:47.272

API. Right, because they’ve got to be certified in the ecosystem and you can’t have like one guy like Poland who makes a great app that becomes like a phenomenon. It’s got to get certified through some sort of…

Speaker 0 | 34:56.260

delivery system which i don’t know again like i need to get a job at microsoft and be like hey how do we solve this can we just talk about it and get pay me like half a million um just one of your stock options i’ll be fine so yeah it’s like the reverse um what was that arnold schwarzenegger movie with the um running man it’s like it’s like in real life running man doesn’t happen and in real life like the game show wins you know like in real life uh For the millennials out there, what’s the Mockingbird Hunger Games? In the real games, it’s just…

Speaker 1 | 35:33.896

Well, I think in Running Man, I think the game show was meant to win. They were all meant to actually not win there. So that also makes sense.

Speaker 0 | 35:40.760

Anyways. Yeah. So there’s my love-hate relationship with Microsoft.

Speaker 1 | 35:49.205

I love the idea, though, of a segment, something like that was a bad idea. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 35:53.588

it’s a stupid thing. So we would have these things. We would have something that would happen. You know, you’d have a meeting, you know, senseless meeting, stuff like this. And me and my friend would be like, that’s a stupid thing. And like, it would just, we just, it caught on, like this little catchphrase, like within the company and people would be like whispering, like, that’s a stupid thing. And so we just need stupid, we need to have like a segment, I think of, you know, like, that’s a stupid thing. There’s got to be a stupid thing, you know, that happened.

Speaker 1 | 36:19.114

That only works though, if like in six months or a year, you come back to those and then like, point out all the ones that you were completely wrong about? Like, oh, Zoom, like nobody’s going to want Zoom. And then that would cost $40 billion.

Speaker 0 | 36:30.979

Well, I was using Zoom before anyone even knew what Zoom was. And I was back when I was working in the corporate world still, like, you know, Zoom was providing their platform to everybody. So most people didn’t even know that their video conferencing platform was Zoom until Zoom, until COVID hit. And they’re like, oh, wait a second. Oh, AT&T’s video. Oh, that’s Zoom. Oh. Oh, uh, wind streams, video. Oh, that’s zoom. Oh, Oh, uh, ring central’s video platform. Oh, that’s zoom. And then, um, yeah, so there’s a lot of them. There’s a lot of those white labels out there.

Speaker 1 | 37:03.153

Right. So using that as an example, I would have said, huh, that’s a dumb idea. You would have been like, you’re a fool. And then we could come back now and you could be like, Oh God, look, look how right Phil was.

Speaker 0 | 37:13.177

True. Um,

Speaker 1 | 37:15.578

now on a recurring spot on this, on this bit in your show.

Speaker 0 | 37:19.916

Okay. Okay, good. So that, so then, well, so the first, so my first, my, my first, I don’t even know that I want to be, so this one would be a stupid thing, but this would be a prediction. My prediction would be that I should be careful because I, I, these, these, I have a very close relationship with both, both all of these vendors, Zoom, Microsoft and RingCentral, but I would be worried if I was Zoom and RingCentral about Teams. taking a very, very aggressive, aggressive run at putting them out of business.

Speaker 1 | 37:54.964

Yeah. You can generally count on Microsoft though, not doing an aggressive run because they always smashed into the European antitrust law. Right. So they always do, they do a just enough run where the competitors could never beat them, but the competitors exist forever.

Speaker 0 | 38:11.178

I hope so.

Speaker 1 | 38:11.759

Right. Like that’s, I don’t, Microsoft will never be so, so bold.

Speaker 0 | 38:17.976

What’s going to happen though, when people realize that they could just use some kind of like direct routing partner and pay 25 cents a DID and $20 per call channel and cut their entire communications bill by-Like their phone bill by,

Speaker 1 | 38:32.740

yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 0 | 38:34.840

What’s going to happen?

Speaker 1 | 38:36.341

How do we-Yeah, I mean, we’re doing that right now. Like we manage sites around the world and we’re doing exactly that. Like phone numbers are becoming Teams numbers and that’s it.

Speaker 0 | 38:43.362

Yeah, it’s a, so anyways. I don’t know where we’re going. We were going with how to get a good job as an IT director, how to also manage a bunch of kids during a…

Speaker 1 | 38:58.567

So I do like the idea of helping people, though, find that career mobility, especially now, because I feel like there’s like 14 months of people who are just pent up, frustrated in their jobs, maybe, and they want to do that, like, look for that move. Go reach out to people that you see on LinkedIn who are the bosses. of the people that the job that you want is. And just connect with them. Throw them a one-liner, right? Talk about anything they seem to be posting about, right? Do they post about like camping or whatever, or Peloton? And then just everybody wants, if they have a Peloton, they’ll talk about their Peloton. So go talk to them about Peloton and there’s like a 40% chance you’re going to find a best friend anyways.

Speaker 0 | 39:38.106

Or then go get a Peloton, join their same group and try to beat them in their like gamification mode or whatever it is.

Speaker 1 | 39:46.280

Yeah, I mean, that’s, that would, I don’t know how I would react to that. No,

Speaker 0 | 39:48.722

no, no. That’s a horrible idea. Don’t do that. See, that was a stupid thing. There we go. There’s a stupid thing. But the good thing would be send them a gift basket. I like that idea. Send them something.

Speaker 1 | 40:04.480

Send them something to stand out. That’s always like, it’s what vendors are doing now that we can’t have. I’ve noticed a lot. We can’t accept a lot of gifts at my job. But a lot of vendors are now like, instead of come to this, whatever, we’re going to have a networking event where there’s going to be some free beer. It’s like, I’ll just mail you a case of beer if you talk to me. Right. It’s. It’s borderline, you know, kind of illegal in most organizations, but like you got to stand out somehow. So as a person, my personal brand.

Speaker 0 | 40:33.495

I still haven’t, the pocket protectors just came in like last month and I’ve got to sit down and I’ve got to put all these packages together by hand. I’m sure there’s some guy out there that wants to do this for me. I’ve got pocket protectors, I’ve got nerd glasses, and then I’m asking all kinds of other vendors like, hey, do you want to put something in this gift package for IT directors and CIOs and CTOs that have been on my podcast? or people that I want to have on my podcast.

Speaker 1 | 40:55.971

Right, and it’s how they’re going to, it’s all branding. It’s like, you know, big company branding and personal branding.

Speaker 0 | 41:00.515

Yeah, so gift basket, great idea. Okay, what are we on to next? What’s the, let me ask you this. What has been your biggest learning moment in your career slash biggest, like, I just remember this day. I can remember this day and how horrible it was and how I came out of it. And I’m still here.

Speaker 1 | 41:25.110

I mean, that’s such a deep question. I wish I had more than five seconds to prepare for that. I will say kind of tying into your, you know, that’s a stupid idea versus like my sort of brainstorm. Like the sky opened up and I saw the light concept was like nine years ago, I was the largest single trash talker of like public cloud vendors, probably in North America.

Speaker 0 | 41:50.540

Sweet. Who was your most hated person?

Speaker 1 | 41:53.994

My most hated cloud vendor was absolutely Microsoft. I did not understand like the Azure concept. Like I was all about like, let’s go buy racks. Let’s buy more rails. Let’s buy bigger rails so we can put bigger, bigger servers in those rails. Like how much Silicon could I possibly hold on? Like, you know, some like quarter inch thick metal. And what I found, like we were working on these large scale data applications. Right. And I was like, you know, even then we were collecting data. from distributed around the world. So it’s essentially from the cloud. I was like, let’s bring it all on premise. We’re going to process all of it and just die hard. This is a stupid idea. It’s never going to work. And we did that for a while. And then there was this three-week period where every single day, every job we had failed for capacity reasons. And we went and bought a bunch of new hardware and threw it at it and tried to make this sort of Frankenstein cluster of capacity and nothing worked. And I remember this like so vividly, we took the workflow and the data and like, one of the guys that was on my team was like, well, let’s just try this out. And I was like, fine, like, you got to think of like, we have to be more creative than this. And I’ll never tell somebody, you know, not to be creative and go look for like a new alternative. I was just like firmly embedded in my stupid ideas. So we tested it out. We put like some information in the, it was like the first iteration of like a parallel data warehouse in the cloud. Like before, Before Databricks commercialized Spark, Microsoft had a couple offerings where it was like, I think they called it the PDD or something. It was the original Azure Data Warehouse, which became Synapse. We put this workload up there, whatever it was. And this thing that had failed for three weeks straight every single day was taking 16 hours. We ran it up there for like, it was like $55 for the day to run it. And it took like an hour. And that was it. And I was just like, oh, yeah, okay. I could see why this is going to work. Huh. The cost was like so true. It was like, like one 5,000th the cost of what we had just spent on hardware. So like, even like the capitalized cost of the hardware, like it dwarfed that.

Speaker 0 | 44:04.102

Do you think there’s still people with that mindset?

Speaker 1 | 44:08.545

Oh, I know there’s people with that mindset. I mean, I, I, I talk to those people now more than ever. Um, mainly it’s people now where they’re the entire industry is very stuck in that mindset. So. Again, I work in a global life sciences company. People putting healthcare data in the cloud is still very, very new. You learn that with pharmaceutical companies, the data behind that. Wherever there’s personal and very sensitive data, people are less apt to go put things in the cloud. What we’re seeing now as an industry overall is, one, it’s much, much more common for an adversary to attack your on-premise. infrastructure, gain access to it, and hold you at ransom. So in many cases, public cloud vendors are much safer than your on-premise infrastructure. And then the scale at which you process data for these things, like think about COVID vaccines, right? How many people they had to put in trials, get data on, how many data points there were, how you process that information. You can’t really do that on premise anymore in a data center. So you put that in there and you can process that much faster. Where before you might have six months to collect data on a trial and then six months to go process that data. Like think about how fast those COVID vaccines came out. Like they did the trial. You can’t speed up. the amount of time you need to put a shot in somebody’s arm and test what happened in the person’s body. But once they were done with that, they had the data analysis done in like 48 hours. Right. So again, it’s that public cloud scale of like massive, you know, compute clusters and Spark. So, but you still see lots of companies in that industry not wanting to embrace like a full cloud stack for sure.

Speaker 0 | 45:59.010

Where do you begin with those guys?

Speaker 1 | 46:02.613

Usually it’s…

Speaker 0 | 46:03.893

I used to be just like you. I used to be the biggest trash talker. And then this is what happened to me.

Speaker 1 | 46:09.737

You start with a story. Show them those little victories that you can get that are easy to roll out, easy to do. So a company like Snowflake is easy to use as a partner there because you can be like, you got all this data and you can’t access it. And you’ve got this archaic SQL system on premise that’s like… sort of spaghetti through a bunch of computers and servers and things, right? And it’s slow to back up and you’re not really sure if your business continuity plan even works. Like you don’t know the last time, but your backup offsite even ran successfully. And you dump that data into something like a Snowflake or like a Teradata or an Azure Synapse or whatever. And you’re like,

Speaker 0 | 46:46.626

well,

Speaker 1 | 46:47.547

now you know it’s backed up. Oh, and by the way, you can query those 6 billion records in like 14 seconds and scale that out like a bunch of other things. Or The other side of that is come at them from the exact opposite angle, which is, here are all the things that are already in the cloud that you don’t realize are in the cloud. And those are the things that work every day that you kind of don’t talk about. Have you ever noticed that now our intercompany communication, chat, message sharing, and video system works really well? Well, it’s because it’s in a tenant that’s in Azure that’s scaled across three different data centers in the eastern US.

Speaker 0 | 47:27.898

And the Microsoft network’s all right. It’s okay.

Speaker 1 | 47:31.841

I mean, again, like it pains me, but it works.

Speaker 0 | 47:36.265

Probably one of the biggest, you know, biggest, baddest, you know, as far from an, you know, built out infrastructure worldwide network. I mean, if you can piggyback off of that in any way, it’s probably going to save some significant cost for you.

Speaker 1 | 47:51.818

I think Amazon is still beating them in like… number of data centers and number of things that are plugged in inside those data centers, but it’s a very close race.

Speaker 0 | 48:07.888

So fascinating. I’m trying to think of what the summary is there.

Speaker 1 | 48:18.574

I mean, I guess if I had to summarize this conversation, which now looks like my child drawing on a treasure map. um, network, absolutely go network to go, you know, career advancement, full steam ahead and feel free if you’re listening to this still, and somehow you’ve made it this far into this, um, into this journey of conversation, feel free to go find me on LinkedIn. I’ll be the first person to start talking to you and connect you with other people in like various industries. I’m happy to do it. Love doing that for people. Um, but networking is key to that. Uh, and then, you know, Don’t feel bad about embracing the bad decisions and bad stances that you make and changing your mind about stuff. Certainly about technology. Like the next big thing is always going to be the thing that you look at now and say, my God, that’s stupid. Because I look back from even like two years ago now and I still don’t understand TikTok. Like I don’t get it, but it seems to be a big deal. So

Speaker 0 | 49:16.577

I know what it was. You have two things that you have one, you have like one aspect to yourself that saved you on that. And that was, I never turned down someone else’s creative potential or creative solution to a particular problem. But at the same time, you’re very stubborn and arrogant when it came to your trash talking of Azure or whatever it was. So it’s interesting because would you say that the majority of technology leaders have… a certain level of stubborn arrogance to them that I’m smarter than everybody else in this company. So it has to be this way. I would,

Speaker 1 | 50:02.763

I would, I would not say most of them. I would say like statistically, like the law, like large numbers there, like all of them with some kind of rounding error, like not being that way to some degree, you don’t get to that position unless you were like stubborn about the things you wanted to do and move those forward. It’s the, the really successful kind of people that become like absolute stars in the industry are the ones who can like, have that level of stubbornness and push forward an idea and then look at that idea and then change as well. Many of them today kind of do that. And then they get stuck on that one idea and they never pivot off of that. So a lot of times, like if you’re that level, like that manager, that analyst, that director level, like, you know exactly what I’m talking about, right? There is that, that it, you know, junior executive to executive, who’s like really stuck on whatever it is and like, won’t get off of it. And it was. massively successful and propelled them to where they are. But you know, over the next five years, they’ve got to either pivot or it’s going to be a problem for you. It’s kind of, it’s that, it’s that move lead or get out of the way mentality.

Speaker 0 | 51:11.158

So for people, so there’s a, so the a everybody’s stubborn and arrogant in the technology leadership and the technology industry. Everyone’s the smartest person in the room. Yet to grow in your career, we need to be able to maybe, I don’t want to say attack each other because that’s not really it. But if you wanted to go make a difference in another company, you could easily go to another company and say, hey, look, you’ve got all this on-premise stuff. It’s susceptible to ransomware attacks. there’s a way to scale faster, there’s a way to be more efficient and save money at the same time, and this is how you do it.

Speaker 1 | 51:58.068

Yeah, I mean, there’s two ways to really be successful in the technology industry. One is to absolutely bet on the next big thing and kind of be way too brash and way too arrogant, try to push that forward, or be like a good, soft skills person who can also balance technology and then just help challenge people and push them forward. I’ve been lucky. Like as I moved up in my career, my managers, my, you know, my directors that I’ve worked for, the vice presidents, the senior vice presidents, the CIOs that I’ve worked for have always been so open to that kind of like mentality that it’s, it’s let me grow into more success. So I’ve kind of, I got to ride in the wake of somebody who was already good at this, right. And who is that exception? Many, many times.

Speaker 0 | 52:43.888

So are you saying the good, and that exception was the good soft skills and challenging leadership?

Speaker 1 | 52:49.746

Um,

Speaker 0 | 52:50.766

or what’s the next big thing in your being a brash, like, no, this is what we need to do. Like jam it down. You’re saying like, almost like just champion this, this new thing.

Speaker 1 | 53:00.451

You’ve got it. You’ve got to be the champion of the, of the new thing. Yeah, for sure. Um, but you’ve got to do it in a way that has like those good skills. And again, like the last 15 years of that has been great. And like, even like, you know, now I get to see this in a new industry. There’s also those people that I get to work with now and move forward. So it’s, it’s great. If you can do that, you’ve got to look into that a little bit. or be that person that makes that change.

Speaker 0 | 53:26.058

So those are two things, but what are the top three things that you would use to prove that this is the right decision? What is it? Yeah. Is it money? Is it efficiency and production? What are the three things that they’re going to use to prove? to executive management?

Speaker 1 | 53:51.719

That you were the right decision to hire? Or that you made the right technology?

Speaker 0 | 53:55.661

It could be that you were the right decision to hire, but it could also be, I want to give people listening to the show, use these three things to prove your point. Either A, that you’re the right decision to hire, or this is the right decision and we’re going to approve this on the budget.

Speaker 1 | 54:10.347

Yeah, so the best way to measure that, and it’s really hard to measure in a technology standpoint. Because what you want to be able to prove is that I’m going to make your life easier. I’m going to solve these problems. And I’m going to make, I need, I will make your business problems go away with a solution that inevitably is invisible to you. Right? So how do you, how do you prove that what you’ve done was the best thing possible? When the best thing possible is almost always invisible, right? And it becomes, it blends into the background. So the. What you need to prove to those people is that you’re going to make their problems go away. And everyone’s got a list of five or 10 massive problems they can just list off that’s bothering them right now. I don’t have access to good data, or it’s inaccurate, or this is slow, or this thing keeps crashing, or we should be able to have better distributed call centers, or whatever it is, right? I’m going to solve that problem for you. is how they would measure that. And then once you are successful in that, you’ve got to go sell that to them and say, I solved it for you. And yes, it’s invisible now, but here’s why it was good. For the most part, like obviously cost is always important, right? Like everyone is worried about cost, but if you can solve the right business problems, cost becomes trivial because what you’re doing is essentially making up for whatever that cost with some kind of return.

Speaker 0 | 55:29.638

People pay anything for like… Yeah. More sales.

Speaker 1 | 55:36.174

More sales. I’m not sure that answers your question, but that was my immediate thought there.

Speaker 0 | 55:40.897

I’m kind of fascinated by this invisible thing, a solution that is invisible.

Speaker 1 | 55:46.821

Think about like how like a great tech, a great, right? So going back to like your history, right? A great phone system at a company, right? A great communication system at a company. Nobody wakes up every morning and like gets on the phone and starts talking to customers and clients and like does video calls all day. At the end of the day says, My God, Phil did such a great job setting up like a globally redundant communication network. That is so amazing that all of my calls were crystal clear. He is a great IT executive, right? They just, they end their day and they don’t even think about like that. That was good. Now, if their calls crashed all day, teams crashed 50 times, they couldn’t share their screen because there was like a tenant issue with capacity. End of the day, they’re just going to be swearing you up and down. Your success is that nobody knows you existed that day.

Speaker 0 | 56:32.220

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 56:33.520

Yeah. It’s sad. I mean, it’s a really sad universe to be in.

Speaker 0 | 56:36.401

It’s a sad thing for, for MSPs that are out there serving small business. It’s, it’s even sadder for them because the small, the small it guy in town that’s serving all the small businesses, he’s constantly has to, I tell them like, look, here’s what you need to do. Just go in and break some things so that they see that you’re worth paying for. Cause really. They pay for you to not have it. What they don’t realize is that they’re paying you so that they don’t ever have anything go wrong. But when nothing’s wrong, they start to say like, well, why am I paying this $1,500 or $2,000 a month to this IT guy? When I run this small business, I can just, everything seems to be fine. I’ll just fire him.

Speaker 1 | 57:16.768

Right. That’s the hallmark of a good executive, right? That’s one of the most important skills that you can have as a technology leader is showing the value of what you’re doing to the business. every week, every month, every quarter when nothing goes wrong, right? These are the things that we’re doing that are excellent. And you know, you have had seven months ago, you had 35 different days of phone outages. And over the last three months, we had zero. And you’ve got to constantly beat your own drum and like, talk about how good you’re doing at those things that they find invisible, right? If you’re an analytics leader, and your reporting system is always accurate, always up to date, always timely, and the reports are always insightful. After six months, everyone’s going to ask why you’re still employed. And it’s because you keep that working all the time, right? You’ve got to go sell that and say, this is why it’s good. It’s the same thing with like across any area of IT, whether it’s infrastructure and managed services or data and enterprise systems. Like once you become good at your job, your job is then to sell that you’re good at your job in addition to being good at it.

Speaker 0 | 58:23.517

Yeah, that’s great advice. It has been a super pleasure. Excellent pleasure talking with you. I did no commercial breaks. I don’t have any commercials, really. Maybe I’ll be so blessed to have commercials to this in the future, which no one would really like. But if you do like listening to this show, then please, again, the four major sources of marketing traffic in the world are Facebook, Amazon, Google, and… when it comes to podcasts, iTunes or whatever it is on Apple. So please Google Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And when you see the little iTunes or whatever it is for Apple, please click on it, scroll down, give us an honest review, you know, four stars, five stars, one star, if it was really that terrible and give us your comments. Really appreciate it. Jeff, thank you so much for being on the show.

Speaker 1 | 59:18.829

Phil, thank you very much. This was fantastic. Great conversation.