Speaker 0 | 00:09.527

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we have James Ordinans on the phone, senior. And when I say senior, I mean, that’s kind of a big deal. Senior Information Technology Manager at Hydrite. Welcome to the show, James. And before you get into, you know… What was your first computer if you ever even had a computer? I was going through some old IT memes today and one came up was 33%. Don’t ask me how they come up with one third, but 33% of IT managers are viewed as order takers, meaning you just take orders. I don’t know how I feel about that because I’m here to start the revolution of IT or continue the revolution as we see it of IT as a business force multiplier and a essential piece to the business. So I’m just going to let you speak to that for a second. Are you an order taker?

Speaker 1 | 01:09.852

Yeah, great. Great question. And thanks for having me. The short answer is I think that’s what we’ve been for a long time and we’re trying to grow out of it, right? So we had previously worked for Caterpillar. big yellow machines and that big holes in the ground type of thing. And we spent a lot of time at Caterpillar trying to come around to the idea that, yes, we’re not just order takers. This is not a McDonald’s. You don’t come to the window and tell us what you want and we deliver it. And really trying to be a consultant and a consultative approach with the business to come and say, what’s the best solution, not what’s the solution you’re requesting. And that’s not to say that the business doesn’t come up with some really good solutions. They definitely do. But I think even the smartest, you know, finance and purchasing resources tell you they are not technology experts most of the time. And so what they’re really, you know, what we find is what people are really looking for is a solution, not necessarily a tool. So they want the function, but not necessarily specific to, you know, we need to use this or use that.

Speaker 0 | 02:14.496

Can we expand on that? Because that’s the word solution, I think, is a very… It can be deep. I think there’s a lot to that there because I’ve heard multiple IT leaders, and I say leaders, people that are in a fast-growing company that is publicly traded or growing, growing really, really fast, hundreds of end users a year, a location, maybe a new location every quarter, this type of thing. And I’ve heard IT managers say, I’m looking for a solution. And I don’t know if that word, do you think that word is going to ring true with a lot of other IT directors, IT managers, CTOs out there?

Speaker 1 | 03:00.264

Well, I hope it does. I mean, the way I think about it is in terms of solutions, right? So if I’m a business user and my job is I need to run this organization and I need to make money for whatever it is that I’m doing, whether it’s services or manufacturing or whatever. Really what… I think we should be focused on is solutions. So 90% of what we do, I would say on a day-to-day from a business interaction perspective is just asking the question, what problems do you have? And how do you get past the problem? You find solutions. And so that doesn’t necessarily mean that if I say, well, my problem is connectivity, that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to one particular thing. It could be a suite of things. It could be many tools. But the goal is… how do we solve the problems so that the business can do their job better? I think one of the things I find and we find within the IT organization is sometimes we lose sight of the fact that in most cases, IT is a service center, they’re a cost center, right? So we’re there to help business make money, however it is that they do that. And we, in some cases, depending on your industry, IT might be the product, but in mine, IT is not the product. So we need to help support the product with whatever those solutions are.

Speaker 0 | 04:17.652

Now, you mentioned to me earlier that you don’t really come from a really nerdy, high-tech, I don’t know what you want to call it, physics, super nerd background. You know, what was, how’d you get started in tech? How’d you end up in technology? And would you say that that’s a benefit because you see things in a different light? You know, how’d you get into this world?

Speaker 1 | 04:43.783

Yeah, that’s a great question. So, yeah. It was a hobby by trade, so I would say I got started at it really early. My first PC I ever used was a Packard Bell, if you can remember that far back. And my buddy and I, I can remember tearing the wrapping paper at Christmas trying to look at the big box and what was on the side of it. And it was a Packard Bell machine, which at the time we had no idea what that meant. And as I started to dive into it, I found that I really enjoyed the usability and kind of the functionality that computers brought. And I really liked building them. So I spent a lot of time, you know, school and college age, putting machines together, do different things and helping people with their computers and things like that. But what I really didn’t like all the time was coding. And so I never got deep into the technical side of coding, but I did like technology and all the things that it had to offer. And so my background is more in business. I have an MBA from Marquette, and I think it is an asset to be able to go into an organization to understand how the business is run. And then how technology can be used as a solution outside of, you know, just kind of the deep technical piece. There’s always a place for that. And we have a lot of really skilled people here at Hydrate. And we had a lot of skilled people at all of my positions that I’ve had that are a lot smarter than I’ll ever be when it comes to how do you actually build a solution. My background is how do you apply the solution to make the most sense? So to answer your question, yes, I think it’s an asset. And I think there’s, I know I’m self-aware enough to know I will never be as smart as a lot of the developers we have here.

Speaker 0 | 06:33.353

Okay, so developing aside, let’s just talk business for a second, because I had a thought that popped into my head last night, and I have a lot of these. I use my notes on my… my iPhone and it’s like really, really like this endless stream of consciousness. Kind of like some people might have like a notebook on the side of their bed. Sure. And one of the thoughts that came into my mind last night was thinking about kind of how I got where I was in the business background that I had. And I think maybe, and you tell me if this is true or not, I think a lot of people want to act business smart. And I think they want to talk about EBITDA. And I think they want to… a talk about all these things and ROI and use all these fancy terms and everything. But I wonder if they really kind of understand how to read a P&L and how something really does bring money to the bottom line. And I like to talk much more in common sense terms. I don’t want to talk about EBITDA. Okay, so we can look at a company and we can see EBITDA and we can… try to make a judgment on should I invest in that company and how good are they doing and how are we affecting that? But I think from our standpoint, someone working inside the company, I think we need to think a lot more simpler. And I’m only saying this for maybe some of the IT directors out there that don’t have a business background like you that might need that or might be having trouble convincing executive management and getting out of the order-taking pigeonholed box. When I think of business, I like to think in simple terms like, how is this going to affect labor? How is this going to affect cost of goods? How is this going to affect our controllable costs? And how is that going to flow through to the bottom line and can I measure it? And how can I explain that in a way, in a very simplistic way that our CFO and CEO is going to be like, hey, this guy knows what he’s talking about. He’s not just trying to fake it until he makes it.

Speaker 1 | 08:42.555

Yeah, it’s a really good point. And I would say, so when I was at Caterpillar, we spent a pretty significant amount of time, myself and a colleague, putting together a program exactly like you’re talking about. So we found a need within IT, and this was general, not specific to developers, that there really wasn’t a lot of business acumen. And sometimes that’s okay because you’re being asked to do a specific task. And… and maybe it’s not as important as others. But in most cases, I think we find that people and staff definitely want to be connected to their work in some meaningful way, right? So they want to say, hey, look, I create a thing, I develop a thing, you know, I do a task, and it causes this on the back end from a business perspective. And so we spent a pretty good amount of time developing kind of a business 101 type of training that we made the entire IT department go through. So it was essentially, what is a cost of goods? sold why do inventory turns actually matter for you and when you you know do something if i work on for instance like an analytics team you know when i create these analytics for this department how does it directly impact these measures which would kind of matter to us and i think Kind of to your point, what it did or what we found is that it really was able to connect the staff with, hey, this is why my work that I’m doing is really meaningful outside of me just walking to their desk and saying, hey, you’re doing a great job.

Speaker 0 | 10:06.352

So I’m really interested in this business training that you put together, to be honest with you. Did you put it together on PowerPoint slides? Was it a recorded presentation? Was it a half hour thing? Was it a week long event? I mean, what was it? you know, what’d you do? How’d you do this?

Speaker 1 | 10:24.461

Yeah. So we, we did a couple hour exercise, um, with, that was meant for it. So it was meant to be at a high level. Uh, we actually engaged the finance department, finance and accounting to help us with all of the terms that maybe we needed some refreshers on. Uh, and the gist was, yeah, take us through, you know, what, what you guys look at and how we impact it. And so I would encourage, um, any IT department that feel like maybe you have a business acumen shortage or, or, uh, an opportunity to improve some of that. that you do the same and go through that exercise because we found it to be extremely valuable for a lot.

Speaker 0 | 10:57.493

What you said there is key because I’ve heard this before. I’ve heard other people say, actually, you’re the second person that said this. I engaged the finance department and I brought them in kind of like this team because now you’ve got, and when you do engage the finance department, now you don’t have someone that’s trying to, I guess, block and tackle you. Do you know what I mean? Now you have a team player. that’s uh and you’re showing like hey look we we’re interested in these terms we want to expand this um do you still have that training like put together just out of curiosity you have that saved away somewhere i’m sure i do i mean this is um you know this might be something you want to develop into you know we might want to develop this into a nice little white paper article or something like that because i think it seems like something that could be very very useful if not um you know turned over again and just an idea um but yeah so So you would, how would you, would you encourage other IT departments to do that? I mean, we’re, you know.

Speaker 1 | 11:54.927

Yeah, absolutely. I think two things it does for you. One thing is it lends credibility, right? So it’s one thing for an IT department to come to you and say, Hey, this is what you need to care about. And this is why it’s another thing when you have finance or accounting and they’re lending their credibility to the idea that, Hey, yes, you should care about these things. And this is how we measure it and why it’s important. People tend to believe the finance and accounting guys better because everything they do is system of record and everything IT does breaks. So we get a lot of credibility with engaging other departments, especially the finance group. And in all honesty, each company is going to be a little bit different for how they do their measures. So obviously, things like inventory turns and cost of goods sold, SD&A are going to be the same. But whether you’re measuring… return on invested capital versus operating income versus EBITDA or whatever your measure is on how you’re evaluating your financial performance. The finance group is going to be able to tell you that and tell you what are the factors that goes into that. Now, some people will be more interested than others, but either way, I think good information for folks to understand as they keep delivering on what we do.

Speaker 0 | 13:09.301

So we’ve got all these complicated terms that sound like just make people kind of go dull in the head, finance terms. How, once we know these terms and we can speak real fancy with these terms, how do we affect them in a keep it simple, stupid way?

Speaker 1 | 13:28.346

Right, right. And I think that the terms are less important than what they mean. So the focus is on the meaning. And I think what we found to be successful, or what I found to be successful a lot of times, is focusing on what the IT folks will care about. A lot of times what… staff cares about is, hey, I want to do a thing or I have a project that would improve X, and how do I get funding for that thing? How do I allow leadership to understand why it’s important? And so we try to present it in such a way where you say, hey, look, a lot of the folks that are holding the purse strings care about some of these measures and some of these terms. So you need to understand them at a high level. But really, the reason you need to understand them is to help yourself. Because a lot of times, if you’re… staff or even if you’re mid-level management you may not have your own budget to work with where you get to make those decisions you might have to go ask for money for projects for initiatives for programs whatever it might be and these are good ways for folks to understand hey look if I want to get this thing done then I need to approach it in a way that my leadership will understand and and doing it that way there’s always going to be room for you know project charters and six-packs and business benefit and you need to be able to or we we kind of preach that you need to be able to speak it in not only the technology terms, but also in the business terms.

Speaker 0 | 14:50.245

It just made me think of where we waste a lot of money. Go to the marketing department. Let’s attack marketing. Let’s attack them. You know, they waste money on this and they waste money on that. How much return did we get on the baseball event? How many customers did we get out of that? And how much money did we spend on that? And how much money did we spend on XYZ Expo? How many deals did we get out of that one? I just see that. I see money. I see money get spent on all kinds of insane things. And I think we could use that as leverage for IT to say, hey, look. look, look at how much money you spent on this. And if you gave me that money, then maybe I could get you some actually hard, some hard dollars on a return on that. And IT will know that by speaking with various different departments and creating, I’m not saying to create a war with marketing. I’m really not. That’s probably like the worst thing you could go do. But to understand where money is spent, maybe make friends with all these departments and show that like, hey, if you know, maybe we should throw a little bit of marketing dollars over here because we’ll, you know, you’ll get what we. I’ll get what I want, but then we’ll also leverage that into a way where we can bring more money to the bottom line.

Speaker 1 | 15:56.624

Yeah, exactly. And we both know, and anybody listening to this should know, you know, more than anybody, there’s not unlimited funds, right? So as we prioritize what those things are, exactly like you’re saying, how do we make it easy for the people that are making the decisions to make that decision and say, yeah, you can spend a thousand here, you can spend a thousand there, but guess what? The thousand here for us is going to get you a heck of a lot more bang for the buck. And that’s what we’re trying to prove. promote is that mindset of yes it’s fun to go do things and we absolutely need development and delivery and that’s always our focus within the IT department but there’s another aspect in there that’s really important to understand related to how we communicate that value that we’re bringing there and and a lot of times that requires some development not a lot of folks come in automatically because I love technology now I understand how to communicate why it’s important so it’s an interesting exercise folks and we we find it to be pretty valuable okay so you do you have a communication training also good question short answer is no we do not have a communication training so a lot of times it’s it’s been see to the pants right oh so it’s you know we have tools and templates like anything you know if it’s Six Sigma or you know lean or whatever whatever mechanism that organizations use as far as their standard communication but there is there’s a lack of communicated communication training in that regard as well. So yeah, we’re giving them maybe three quarters or half of the tools that they need. And the other half is to kind of go figure it out, but that may be an opportunity for us as well.

Speaker 0 | 17:29.765

Yeah. Those tools can be overwhelming, all the different certifications and everything like that. You know, what, what are you getting at in general? Like when, when we go to communicate something, let’s look at it this way. Where does it go wrong? Where do you see a lot of people going wrong and making the mistake in their communications?

Speaker 1 | 17:47.134

Um, Yeah, good question. So the biggest thing I see is they never ask for what it is they want, especially with IT folks in general. And this is a vast generalization. You know, we tend to, or depending on your role, you can be kind of behind the desk and I don’t really, you know, don’t really engage and I kind of type on my computer all day. Or, you know, you can be kind of, I work with the business directly and I go out and I’m a very engaging person. And depending on your role, A lot of times what I find is as IT in general, you come to a meeting and you know what you want to ask for, but you’re never willing to ask for that. I went through that a lot early in my career as well, where it’s like, hey, I thought I presented this great case and you could just understand what I’m asking for versus flatly saying to somebody, hey, look, this is what I want and this is why. I think that’s a big gap we find quite a bit now that I try to coach. I know I try to coach a lot on that.

Speaker 0 | 18:44.690

So you’re saying people come to a meeting. They present all the problems, they present all the issues that they’re dealing with, and then they just expect people to know what the solution is back to solution again.

Speaker 1 | 18:54.046

Uh, yeah, kind of, or they’ve, or, you know, the other thing we find is, Hey, I presented you with these problems and here’s one of five solutions. And the reality is, is we don’t need five solutions. We need one solution. So tell me what the one is that we’re going to go do. And then I’ll make the decision on, on, you know, whether or not we’re going to go spend the money to do it. And so I think sometimes I think, you know, the confidence things, sometimes it’s a communication thing, but the reality is a lot of IT professionals are the expert in whatever their given field is, whether it’s networking or development or whatever. So be the expert. Come in and say, this is why we need to do it this way. And if there’s questions, absolutely open to the conversation. But I try to preach to my teams a lot, we hire you for the expertise. So come in and be the expert and show us why we need to do it and what we need to do.

Speaker 0 | 19:42.526

So Fear of rejection, maybe.

Speaker 1 | 19:45.269

Maybe.

Speaker 0 | 19:46.691

Fear of public speaking. I mean, are these real reasons? I’m just asking. Do you think these are real reasons? Like fear of asking? Like just ask? And here’s what I want. here’s why I think we should do it. And here’s the numbers. Here’s what it costs. And here’s what I think we can, here’s our return on investment and what I think I can get. I mean, that’s not, it’s not complicated math, but what is hard to do is to throw yourself out there and to get out of the, I guess, to push yourself past the comfort zone, I guess, get out of your comfort zone, do something that you may have never done before. Do you think that that will is what might be holding people back?

Speaker 1 | 20:28.610

Yeah, a hundred percent. And I mean, you know, outside of a couple of folks that I’ve ever met, you included, um, you know, not a lot have probably have a really good, strong sales background, right? So they don’t know what that means to go, to go sell your idea, sell yourself. And it brings us back to it, but it brings us back to our original, the original question, um, you know, related to, related to, uh, Oh. Now I’m blanking on the original question. I had a really great point in my mind and now I’m forgetting.

Speaker 0 | 20:54.600

So I’m messing up your podcast. No, it just must not be that great. That’s all. Get ready to fail and fall on your face. I can remember I had two kids at the time and I was doing really, really well in the retail world as a store manager. And I just didn’t want to make $40,000 a year for the rest of my life. So I decided… you know, I guess I need to get into sales and this Cisco startup hired me. And I can remember, you know, like they’re like, you got to go out and hit 55 doors a day and you got to get past these gatekeepers and get ready to get kicked in the tees and rejected and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, I’ve got to go do this. It’s my first day. And so I picked like my wife’s OBGYN. I’m like, I’m like the first door I’m going to hit is a place that I know with people that I know. And, you know, I’m just going to pick something like easy and then I’m going to go down, you know, whatever it was. It was like small business, business to business sales. And yeah, I was terrified. I was like clammy hands, walking in, stuttering, didn’t know what I was doing. I felt like I was having an anxiety attack. And I just, I mean, I like totally just sounded probably like the stupidest person ever. And like it. as fast as I could get out of that place, I ran there. Yeah. And I came to the point and I was like, I stood outside and I was like, look, here’s the deal. Like you quit your job. You know what I mean? Like your family’s on the line here. So like you’re going to either like force yourself through this like fear of rejection and you’re going to force yourself to like either get good at this and like keep failing forward. And I had all these, you know, I had all my mentors and everything telling me fail, force. just keep doing it. Everyone starts off this way, tongue tied, you know, scared. Everyone starts off that way. And I just kept forcing myself and forcing myself, forcing myself. And now I probably don’t even, I didn’t think twice about it now. So now these things are like second nature and I’m expecting, you know, like, ah, IT guys, you got to go ask for what you want, you know, get in there and, you know, present this, this and this. And it’s easy. It’s not easy.

Speaker 1 | 23:06.267

No, no, no. It’s definitely, it’s definitely not easy. And I think the point that came back to me from before. before was I think it relates back to the earlier conversation we were having on order taking, right? So if you think about it, if I’m an early career IT person and I’m just coming in and I’m a technical resource, where am I usually starting? It’s usually going to be in the help desk or I’m going to be an analyst or I’m going to be somewhere on that line. And historically those positions and even above those positions have been like you’re talking about order takers. Is this the right thing? Probably not, but that’s kind of the reality. And so if you’re used to every time someone comes and asks you, you’re like, okay, I’m excuse for something, it’s just like, yes, when can I do it? Yes, when can I do it? That kind of thing. Then you’re used to saying yes, but you’re not used to hearing yes, right? So you need to kind of change that mindset a little bit and be willing to ask for those things too. So I get it. And you’re right. It’s definitely not easy. It’s just something that we all try to work better on.

Speaker 0 | 24:02.056

Or get used to hearing no, I guess.

Speaker 1 | 24:04.096

Yeah, that’s the alternative.

Speaker 0 | 24:05.717

I guess the best thing is to hear no. And I used to… I mean, I went all the way up to become, you know, like at the time it became like the top rep in Denver. I went from like bottom to the top. Right. And got really into, I think, I think what it was, was that I knew, I knew kind of the business acumen standpoint. So I knew when I spoke with, with business owners, I knew how to really, really help them. I really did know what affected their bottom line. And when you know how to help. other people make money, when you know how to help other people just in general, like, you know, make their business better and make their life better, they’ll listen to you. Well, you have to ask the right questions. You have to ask your end users, you know, what’s, you know, what’s your single biggest frustration problem or whatever with IT and the department, and then you need to fill that need.

Speaker 1 | 25:00.490

Well, you’re 100% correct. I got my experience. You got yours on the street a little bit. I got my experience. I did consulting for four years early on in my career and it was the same idea. It’s coming in and understanding what are the pain points and what are the issues. But your point about when you can understand how a business makes money and how you can help enable that, they will tell you anything you want to know. That’s an open door to a conversation at that point when you can demonstrate that this is how I know I can help you. to make money. And that’s where I think in larger organizations, we sometimes lose that focus, but it’s still as important as any other.

Speaker 0 | 25:39.208

I can pretty much break it down to like a three-step process. And this is what I used to tell people all the time. I used to tell them, get people smiling. That’s like a famous Zig Ziglar quote. Get them smiling. In other words, talk to people. You know what I mean? Like get to know them, like build rapport, like get them smiling because if someone smiles, their entire… um, their entire, entire body language, like everything changes. Cause like you got them, you got them to smile. You said something that made their day better. Like, you know, we’re human beings. Right. And then ask five damn good questions. That’s the second piece. Ask five really good, deep probing questions that show them you understand what you’re talking about. You care about what they need to get done. Right. And then You offer a time to, you know, follow up with a solution and see if they like, again, back to that word, the solution to their problem. And if you can solve that problem, then you’ve just made their life better.

Speaker 1 | 26:38.777

Right. And then they keep coming back.

Speaker 0 | 26:40.498

It’s not about some kind of secret, you know, psychological. It’s really not that deep. It’s not this. It’s really about helping people. And it’s not some psychological mind, mind warping game we’re trying to play here.

Speaker 1 | 26:54.362

No, I agree. And to be fair, it’s really not even unique to IT in the sense of, you know, there’s solutions all over the place that, you know, maybe an HR solution or something else, right? But the reality is we have the ability in IT with the way that business works today and the way that it’s going, we have the ability to deliver on the majority of those solutions or solve the majority of those problems with a technological solution.

Speaker 0 | 27:22.597

But we need to know. um, how the business operates, we need to know what affects the business and we need to know what our executive management cares about. And that comes back to the business acumen. And if we know that, then we can ask the right questions and fill the gaps with our own IT knowledge.

Speaker 1 | 27:38.049

You got it.

Speaker 0 | 27:39.049

You know, I’m just asking, this is not, I’m not trying to put you on the spot here or anything. I am. Would you be willing to kind of maybe take whatever that past knowledge is or dig up some stuff and we put together like a real short, you know. business acumen white paper or a little, you know, if you’ve already, if you’ve already got it done and it would be easy to reproduce, then I think that would be very useful to the listeners out there and to put kind of like in the forum, so to speak.

Speaker 1 | 28:07.557

Yeah, I can, I can see what I can dig up. It’s probably in PowerPoint right now, but turn that into a white paper. Uh, wouldn’t be overly difficult. So I definitely take a look.

Speaker 0 | 28:15.799

Keep it in PowerPoint. We’ll just do another, we’ll, we’ll do a zoom webinar and, uh, you know, we’ll go over it and we’ll charge everyone a thousand bucks to join. and we’ll be good.

Speaker 1 | 28:25.424

Sounds fair to me.

Speaker 0 | 28:28.287

No, no, no. Man, it’s been super awesome having you on the show. If you had one piece of advice or anything to send, encouraging piece of advice or whatever it is to send out there to the listeners, what would it be?

Speaker 1 | 28:43.002

Yeah, I think just the rehash of the conversation, right? So understanding what the business needs, understanding the wants and going and having those engaging conversations with your business partner to understand what they are. Don’t assume that we always have the right answers. Be, you know, be a listener and understanding, I think is the biggest thing. So there’s a million more things to go into that. But as a theme, that would be my general one.

Speaker 0 | 29:04.717

Be a nice guy and listen to people.

Speaker 1 | 29:06.658

Ask them what their problems are. Exactly. Like you said, it’s not super complicated.

Speaker 0 | 29:10.440

Yeah. Awesome, man. Thank you so much.