Speaker 0 | 00:09.682

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And today we have York Hazet on the show. And he is the, I guess we’re just going to say like, you know, a pretty… kind of a big deal iti over at a schreiber and i shouldn’t be looking at your website right now i’m a little i’m quite hungry i haven’t eaten yet today so you know capers are looking fairly tasty to me your your beef base um you guys are the flavor experts am i understanding this correctly yeah

Speaker 1 | 00:49.247

yes we are thanks thanks for having me on uh philip yeah we are the uh purveyors of fine flavors is the official company motto. I’m surprised you actually like capers because most people don’t, so good for you.

Speaker 0 | 01:05.941

My mom made this lemon chicken piccata growing up twice a week. It was just one of those things my dad loved. Actually, she put capers on it all the time and I’ll be honest with you, I probably did scrape the capers off. It’s reminding me of that meal that I ate twice a week growing up all my life. Great, man. We’re going to bring some flavor to the IT leadership world today. Before we get there, I’d just like to ask everyone this question because this is just what I do, man. What was your first computer growing up? How did you get into technology?

Speaker 1 | 01:42.110

So I’m a… I’ve been doing this a long time, so I’m probably aging myself, but my first computer was an IBM PC Junior that my father had brought home from IBM. He was a long-time IBM veteran. I was about 16, and the thing didn’t even have a hard drive, but amazingly, it had a wireless keyboard. It used some sort of infrared TV controller-type technology, and it kind of worked and kind of didn’t, but I really enjoyed playing around with that. kind of piqued my interest in technology. I think that was my first real foray into that kind of, you know, world, which at the time to me seemed really fascinating.

Speaker 0 | 02:21.384

Well, it was a computer that I was jealous of when I used to go to Sears. And I remember walking through Sears and seeing it. And, you know, back then for us, it was like, well, what game? Well, for me, it was, I don’t know about everyone else. For me, it was what games can you play on it? How do I get this joystick? And I never had to. I never got the PC jr. My was a TI 99 was our first computer which was still cool Yeah, but what do you like what did you play any games on it? Do you have any games? What was it?

Speaker 1 | 02:53.917

Well, I had a TRS 80 which you know Effectively was referred to as the track 80 which was really my gaming machine if you want to call it and Of course all my games were on floppies But you know It’s funny that you mentioned that IBM was sold in Sears because at the time before that I think they even had you had to buy their stuff at IBM stores, so it was kind of like the first incarnation of the Apple store, minus the genius R. But I guess IBM realized that we need to spread our wings here and sell stuff in other stores as well. But we’re talking about the days when nobody owned a PC except for engineers, computer-type nerds, and people like that. So it wasn’t mainstream yet at all, and the internet really didn’t… The World Wide Web as we know it today didn’t even exist. It’s funny that you brought that up because I was just thinking about those days when you had to go to the store and buy software in a box and bring it home and then load it and wait and all that fun stuff.

Speaker 0 | 03:53.472

I remember some software being on a carousel. They would spin around the store. And I wanted… Well… I just remember a day seeing Rampage. Do you remember that game Rampage where you’d climb up the ramp and it was like smashing? Oh, yeah. I remember it. I remember that when that was available on the computer. And I just remember like, Dad, please, can we get this? No, no. It just didn’t happen. So what did you do on the PC Junior? And another side note, because I had a guy come in. I tested my water. Whatever. It was like the water test sales guy came to my house the other day. And… He used to work at GNC and he was maybe 27. I’m talking to him. I’m like, do you realize? I’m like, I’m old now because I’m talking about, I was alive when the internet was invented. I was like, do you? I was like, that’s just amazing. It’s unbelievable to me that you are alive and you never experienced non-cell phone usage, non-internet age. We were alive when the internet. did not exist. Like, like, like, like we used to use computers. Like, what do we use computers for? Like word processing? Like you, like we’d stick a disc in to boot it up. Then we stick a disc in for the word processor. And then we stick a disc in, uh, uh, to just save one paper, you know, and you’d have these, like all these discs stacked up with your like school papers on it. And then you didn’t need one anymore. So you’d put a little piece of tape over the thing so you could write. And yeah,

Speaker 1 | 05:27.923

I know you. You’re bringing back a lot of memories. I mean, I remember even, you know, Texas or no, who was it that Radio Shack had released the candies, you know, and they even had a cassette deck, you know, you would load your software or, you know, through a cassette tape, which to me was just, you know, like otherworldly, you know, it was like, what’s going on here, you know?

Speaker 0 | 05:50.572

Tape backup.

Speaker 1 | 05:52.473

Right.

Speaker 0 | 05:53.213

I went to a call center one time where I was doing like call center, like tapes. to save account for like quest wireless and, you know, helping people like, how do I program my name into my cell phone? Well, you’ve got to hit the, like, you know, the two button three times for C and the five button twice for K, you know, and next to us in the department over was the tip was like the, the Hewlett Packard, like tape backup support department, which was like huge. It was like, Oh, you know, like hundreds of people for like the HP tape backup, which. Yeah. does not exist anymore. Although I bet you people still have tape backups and people certainly still have Lotus notes as a subject for another time. Right. Um, so, so anyways, what did you do on this thing? How’d you grow? How’d you get into technology? It’s just, I could talk about this stuff all day for a thousand episodes. I’ll probably have to move on from the, uh, the, what was your first computer? Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 06:49.212

Um, well, you know, it’s funny, I’m going to nerd out on you here for a second, but my father had brought home this. program called Prancer, which basically stands for print, print enhancer. And it was an IBM program and it allowed you to actually on a dot matrix printer, you know, if you remember those, those old guys with the ribbon, the ribbon ink.

Speaker 0 | 07:09.825

All you have to do is go to any airport.

Speaker 1 | 07:11.986

Yeah, you know, yeah, exactly. They’re still using them amazingly. They’re reliable, but you know, they’re noisy as heck and they take forever. But anyway, I digress. So Prancer basically was a program that allowed you to create, you know, very elaborate. And again, we’re not talking fruit type font here, you know, basically like really cool print, you know, art on pieces of paper.

Speaker 0 | 07:35.199

So you could make like the big banner, like that you put outside the garage door that said like, welcome home. And it could have like a unicorn on it.

Speaker 1 | 07:44.703

Yes. And it was extremely pixelated. And by today’s standards, it was laughable. But back then it had a coolness factor, you know, like, wow, look at that. You know, the guy just did a whole banner.

Speaker 0 | 07:54.328

if you look really closely you can see tiny little letters in there you know we could rip the pieces of paper in half in the little circles yeah all right cool all right so keep going yeah yeah so i started playing around with that and then it made me you know my dad said hey you know you should try programming so i

Speaker 1 | 08:09.656

started messing around with basic which i think is what almost every programmer back then started with and logo was another one where you could have little lines go different directions and i just used to go like right turn 45 and go like 2000 you remember of course Yeah, you remember. Yeah. So you could do colors and all kinds of different things. And I mean, it was just something to play around with to see what you could do, you know, and what how far could you push the boundaries. And I think that’s really the essence of software development even today is like, how far can I push this? You know, how far can I get this? What can I get this thing to do for me? You know, and of course, you know, now we’re talking about AI. But back then it was like simple stuff. Like, how do I get this line to go from this side of the screen to this side of the screen? And, you know, and how do I how many pixels do I need? And. you know, what longitude and latitude do I need? And, you know, it was a lot of, you know, math and also just trying to figure things out and processing, you know, trial and error kind of thing, you know. But that’s what really kind of got me started, Philip. I mean, I was really like, you know, sort of engrossed in that. And I thought, man, this is really cool. And I think what set me apart from some of my peers was I could see the logical progression of this where it was headed. And I could say that, okay, this may look simplistic and silly right now, but… In five, 10 years, this could be really something to talk about. Word processing to me wasn’t even that impressive back then because I was like, okay, you can do the same thing on a typewriter, but what can you make a computer do that a typewriter can’t do? That’s when you start splitting the atom, so to speak.

Speaker 0 | 09:41.770

It’s still mind-boggling every time I think about it, every time I think about how far we came since electricity. and electricity alone. Electricity alone is still… unbelievable like someone was like hey how do i how do i extract a lightning bolt with a key and a kite and make it now go down wires that’s another one that we really we just can’t go down this we’ll keep we’ll go forever so kind of what was the jump like how did you um so like was it college was what was the first job in it kind of like let’s fast forward a little bit and kind of get to that right now well okay so i i basically when i went to college i started doing um you know you

Speaker 1 | 10:20.769

I initially went into computer science, which to me was not really, you know, okay, let me back up. So originally I went into aeronautical science thinking that maybe I wanted to get into aviation, but I got kind of bored with it because it was more, you know, physics, and it didn’t really have the panache that I thought it was going to have. So I switched over to computer science, and then computer science was more writing device drivers and operating systems and hardware abstraction layers and getting into the guts of… you know, assembly language and things like that. And that was a little bit too deep for me because, um, I realized that some of it was just probably beyond my understanding and required a level of dedication. And I don’t know if I had at the time, you know, and so I switched over to, uh, computer information systems or what they sometimes call management information systems, which is more business oriented computing. And that’s where I really found my, my neat, my niece. And I was like, wow, this is, this is what I like to do because now I’m solving business problems. And that’s what I was kind of. wanting to get into. I wanted to come in and solve business problems, you know, and help people to, you know, grow their business using software.

Speaker 0 | 11:25.690

And what was the, can you remember, like, what was one of those problems or can you think of a problem that was solved or like, what was that really kind of caught your attention? I’m just curious.

Speaker 1 | 11:36.678

Yeah. So my first job out of college was working for a company called Next. uh ncci national council for compensation insurance and basically they were their workers comp data data warehousing firm and i had been assigned to a project uh called retrospect retro rate we have a software called retro rate which does retrospective rating and i’m not going to bore you with all the details but basically it’s something that actuaries use to determine um you know insurance rates for different types of workers comp claims and it uses being counting Yeah, statistical manipulation.

Speaker 0 | 12:08.949

It’s your guys and the bean counting. Yeah. Okay, gotcha. How much should we pay?

Speaker 1 | 12:13.231

Yeah, exactly. You got it. So long story short, I had to sit with actuaries who are very intense mathematicians and take what they know and make the software do that. And that was quite a challenge for me because it was the first time I had to take a business problem and make the computer software do that problem for them. They didn’t have to do it by hand or manually. So that. That was a challenge, and I really enjoyed it because it really pushed me to my limits and said, okay, let me see if I can get the computer to do this. And I wrote the program in C++ at the time. But, you know, it was a challenge because we were dealing with rounding and mathematical, you know, equations that were very intense and quite a bit of data, which, you know, at the time databases were not as robust as they are today. So, you know, there was a lot of things involved in that. But it was pretty cool, though. I really enjoyed that. But that really was my first, I would want to say, success with writing software to solve business problems.

Speaker 0 | 13:13.800

I remember the first time I saw a C++ big, thick textbook. I can still remember where it was in college. And I was a creative writing major, so I looked at that and just was like, I’ll never do that. It’s like, how did I end up in technology? You know, everything that just… little bit about me that most people don’t know is everything that I ever said I would not do has happened to me. So just don’t ever look down upon anybody for anything or any reason. That’s, that’s the lesson in life because I have been blessed.

Speaker 1 | 13:48.492

It’s like that commercial on TV where the guy’s like, I’m never getting married. And then he’s like, I’m never having kids and I’m never having a second kid and I’m never moving to the suburbs.

Speaker 0 | 13:55.578

I have never seen that commercial, but that’s me. I’ve never seen that. I used to say like, I’m never getting married. I’m married. I’m never having kids. I have eight kids. I used to be like, cheerleaders are so cheesy. I’m married to the captain of the cheerleading team. Everything that I ever said. I’ll never be in sales. They’re such sales people. Everything that I ever said has happened to me. I’ll never go on a ketogenic diet.

Speaker 1 | 14:25.033

You can’t pick life, right?

Speaker 0 | 14:27.454

It’s like a blessing for me. It really is. Every time I look down, I’m like, be careful. And then something will happen to me like, Oh, I forgot to like, be careful about that one. Anyways, moving on. So we keep hinting at data, but I don’t know if we’re going to touch on data yet. So I don’t think we’re going there yet. I think what’s very, what’s really cool to me. Really fast forward, and this is important for people out there listening, other IT directors, system admins, because you said something that was pretty mind-blowing to me the other day. Maybe I’m over-embellishing this when I say mind-blowing, but it was bold, and I think it’s right, and I think it’s what everyone needs to do. And it’s when you go to… get a job in IT or what the mindset needs to be or setting the right expectations. I think it was pretty powerful that when you went to go get the job that, I don’t know if it was where you’re at now or what it was, but you basically said, if you’re looking to hire someone to babysit the systems, right? Versus modernize, don’t hire me.

Speaker 1 | 15:40.813

Right.

Speaker 0 | 15:41.853

And… I just think that’s so powerful because technology is a business force multiplier. And you were seeing that early on in your career as, you know, I really liked solving business problems. And we’ve got so many businesses out there that are treating IT still as kind of a cost center. So I’m just curious. I never asked you the other day when we were talking, when you said that, what did they say back?

Speaker 1 | 16:06.046

Well, I mean, it got me the job basically, because that’s what they were looking for. You know, they, they didn’t want to have a guy to come in and babysit and just do business as usual. They wanted somebody to help modernize and to be a, uh, you know, to help effectuate change, you know, and to bring about, you know, um, um, better ways of doing business and also modernizing in terms of, you know, keeping up with what’s going on with the business world today, which is evolving at a, at a torrid pace right now, you know? So, um, you know,

Speaker 0 | 16:34.533

I want to take one, you know, we don’t want to take one caper out of the jar to save money and sell more capers. You know what I mean? Like create better profit margins. We just want to sell more capers. Um, so when you come in and you look at a situation like that, um, kind of what’s the first, what’s your first step? And the reason why I’m asking that is for anyone out there that’s like, wow, I want to do that. Or like, I’m, I’m, I’m with you there. I want to step out of this, you know, constant or crap that I’m stuck in or I want to just do more. what’s your first kind of, I guess, what are the set of glasses that you’re looking through, the lenses that you’re looking through? How do you come in and kind of evaluate and do things?

Speaker 1 | 17:15.304

Well, you know, it kind of goes back to what you had said the other day about, you know, IT used to be viewed as the guy who basically works in the data center and they just, you know, shove food under the door and nobody, you know, doesn’t talk to anybody and doesn’t acknowledge anybody unless they send a ticket. You know, those days are gone. Obviously, we’re now in an era where IT… expected to be a leader for change and to bring about an active, to be an active participant at the table. So I always like to say, it used to be back in the days, let’s make a business plan and then let’s call the IT guy in. Now it’s changed. It’s, we need to make a business plan. Let’s get the IT guy in here. You know what I mean? There’s a slight nuance there. And what that means is, you know… companies are starting to realize that before they go into a new business model or change or any kind of change or whatever in their business model, they need to include technology at the table. They need to have a seat at the table, obviously. If they don’t, then they’re setting themselves up for problems later on down the road. But anyway, getting to your question, I think the first thing that an IT director needs to look at, or even any kind of IT leader is what, you know, today IT has been commoditized in a lot of areas. So you have now

Speaker 0 | 18:25.234

email as a service you’ve got uh unified communications as a service you have please don’t say that’s commoditized yeah i mean i get it you know they’re common and it’s commoditized but you still got to call 1-800-GO-POUND-SAND and yeah what i’m saying what i’m saying is my point is you don’t but anyways keep going what oh my point is like the the ucas because that’s what i do right like i do you guys yeah internet and my point is is like No, it doesn’t need to be. If it is being commoditized, then we’re losing out. We’re wasting time, right? Because you can’t just call up and order a circuit from Comcast. We can’t just call up and order this because at the end of the day, it’s going to get installed with someone that’s like a project manager that’s a butt in the seat. And then when they don’t respond to you, that affects your organization. So it is commoditized to a degree as far as pricing goes and historical pricing and data. And we’re going to get to that in a second. Right. We need partnerships and we need the right partners supporting us. That’s just me being hyperactive there. So, but keep going.

Speaker 1 | 19:27.616

Well, no, and, and, and again, what I was getting at, and you, you brought that out is that there are certain things that an IT director could get out of his IT stop that is not providing any value add by running that from within his stop. So. I’m not providing any value to my to any business that I work for by having my own Caliph any guy on staff having my own security guy on staff having my own exact,

Speaker 0 | 19:51.383

you know

Speaker 1 | 19:52.424

You know guy on staff, you know I need to move that out and have someone else do that who does it better and more efficiently and that’s what I meant You know because we we internally don’t you know, and again, I’m talking to you know and in the context of a medium small to medium-sized business, we don’t really have the you know, the money to have that kind of headcount to begin with anyway. So it makes sense to, first of all, move all that stuff off, off the plate. So you can concentrate on what’s really providing value as the business. And that is the core agencies and the, and things that the business needs to succeed and to move forward.

Speaker 0 | 20:28.389

So are you saying the first thing is, is get all the crap out that you don’t, shouldn’t be wasting time on? Are you saying that’s kind of like, like first thing, like, what do we wait? Where are we wasting time? And where do we not need to waste time?

Speaker 1 | 20:40.856

I mean, I don’t know if I call it crap, but I know what you mean. It’s like stuff that you don’t really want to deal with. Stuff you don’t want to deal with.

Speaker 0 | 20:47.180

Thank you for reminding me of that too, because I have, you know, language is so important and I have a few words in my language that I need to eliminate. And my wife always reminds me of that too. She’s like, stop using the word crap. I know what you meant,

Speaker 1 | 21:02.250

Philip. I know what you meant. You know, it’s, it’s these are things that are just fracked into the IT manager or director. It’s. These are things that are like, you know, I don’t want to deal with this. I don’t feel like I should have to deal with this. This is something that other people can do way better than I can do and who know how to do it in a way that’s good and meaningful, reliable, stable, secure for the organization. So why not pay them to do it?

Speaker 0 | 21:26.750

Yeah, and to just give proper, I need to make sure that, you know, the sliding the food under the door to the geeks in the server room, the first person to say that on my episode was Aaron Siemens. So. And his show is How to Get Ahead of Shadow IT, which is a great episode, by the way. But I just want to make sure I give credit where credit’s due because he’s the one that used that. He’s the one that used that analogy, and it’s such a good analogy of, like, you know, sliding food under the door to the geeks.

Speaker 1 | 21:51.766

Yeah, I like it. Tell him I’m going to borrow it.

Speaker 0 | 21:53.786

Yeah, I know. I mean, I’ve been using it since he brought that up. But that’s… Anyways, so, okay. So, get rid… And the reason why that’s important is because… You don’t have the luxury of like really being in this like crazy enterprise, multi-billion dollar, you know, IT department where we’ve got money to throw around everywhere. The mid-market kind of IT director space, IT leadership, IT manager, right? It’s all about how much can we get done with the least amount of kind of like budget dollars and then how can we leverage and drive the business forward and grow the business. So… What’s kind of like, you know, let’s just kind of go from there. Like, give me an example or something.

Speaker 1 | 22:40.776

Okay. So, you know, obviously when you look at an organization, you know, from top down, you know, you want to understand, first of all, what their pain points are, you know, where are they losing the most money or where are they missing out on opportunity? And any IT professional that can come in and see that, I think is a great asset to the organization because not only are you a tech guy, but now you’re saying, hey, I can see where there’s… spots here where perhaps there’s some low-hanging fruit, there’s some things that we can do to fix your problems quickly and get you on the right path, you know. So, you know, whether that means, you know, virtualizing your entire data center or going hybrid or full cloud or, you know, like, you know, moving email out of the data center and into the cloud and or getting into even more in-depth where you’re saying, hey, you guys are running on the wrong ERP, let’s get you on the one that’s right for you, you know, so that your business runs better. you know, or looking at your CRM and seeing whether it’s really tied closely into the way you do business or whether you’re trying to fit a square peg in a round hole here and using a product that’s expensive and isn’t really being fully utilized. Because that’s another thing. So if I see a lot of organizations that buy very expensive software and maybe they’re only using like 25, 30% of it, which is a tremendous waste of money, you know.

Speaker 0 | 23:55.924

Crazy overlap. Crazy overlap.

Speaker 1 | 24:00.726

That wasn’t good today. Or like you said, there could be two software packages. And they’re kind of almost doing the same thing. And they’re buying these, they’re paying licensing on this stuff every year. And it’s not cheap. You know, we’re talking a lot of money.

Speaker 0 | 24:11.531

Well, I can tell you anyone right now that has E3 or E5, 0365 licensing. And a separate… hosted provider and a separate file share type of chat inner office collaboration tool, right? Anyone that’s paying for O365 and not leveraging the teams and leveraging everything of that license, that’s just one example that I see on a daily basis. I’ve got some people that are like, hey, we’re trying to drive home teams. We want you to use teams. Why don’t you do this? I don’t know if you know this, but if you’ve got E5 licensing that you’re paying for, and then you’re paying another $25 or $30 per license for your hosted voice over IPC, here’s a little secret. I can show you how to only pay $4.95 for your hosted VoIP seat, and it’ll be fully integrated with a Microsoft Direct partner. There you go. And now you don’t have to have multiple chat platforms. You don’t have to have multiple. You can really bring it all in-house if you’re a Microsoft shop. Some people aren’t. Some people are like. you know some people are d-suite and that’s fine um but that’s just like one example obviously um you mentioned um you know erp crm the right stuff for you i guess how do you go about it you know because how are we collecting data and this is where we get in with data and data is so powerful and i don’t think people really understand data’s data’s as powerful as the computer being invented And right. I mean, it really gets that far because we’ve been collecting data for so long and a lot of people have data and now it’s about software sifting through data. Anyways, how do you go about data and collecting it and making a decision?

Speaker 1 | 25:58.820

Well, number one, I mean, I think it’s really important for any any company to try to integrate all their systems because systems that work in a vacuum and collect data that. sharing that data with other systems, I think to me is setting an organization up for a lot of problems and failures later on down the road because having clean data, number one, is so important. Data that’s accurate and that is correct, but not only that, but making sure that updates, for example, that infer like in a CRM are making their way down to the ERP and vice versa. That kind of communication really could be something that… every IT director puts their foot down on it says, look, I insist, we gotta have that integration, otherwise it’s just not gonna work for us, you know? And it’s gonna cause a lot of hassle because you’re gonna have a guy running a CRM report that goes, you know, daily sales history, or sales history, and then the other guy’s gonna run it out of ERP and his report’s gonna look a little different and then they’re gonna be like, well, why are they not matching up? And then you’ve got all these people scratching their heads and wondering, okay, which system is our system of record? You know, what’s the source of truth here, you know?

Speaker 0 | 27:08.052

And then on top of that, there’s a human factor as well.

Speaker 1 | 27:11.733

Yeah, exactly. You know, human factor.

Speaker 0 | 27:13.954

How are you entering the data? Are you just entering BS numbers? Are you just entering, I mean, it’s like, how often do people just enter something in to just get to the next screen?

Speaker 1 | 27:22.158

That’s a very valid point. You know, let’s say you have a required field and I’ve seen this happen, you know, where customer service contact centers, you know, they’ll just put some gobbledygook in that field just to get past that screen. And now you’ve got a field with gobbledygook in it on over 100. 250,000 records, you know.

Speaker 0 | 27:39.487

And then the question is, should we even have that field or should we force people to enter in the right information? Maybe it’s just get rid of that field. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 27:47.735

yeah, you know, that’s the thing I think that is really opening people’s eyes. And I think, you know, BI and data analytics is sort of putting the finger on the pulse of that where, you know, we need to understand. the data that we have, whether it’s useful or are we collecting superfluous information that is of no value to the organization. Or is there data we should be collecting that we’re not? And I think IT can help to spearhead that conversation and engage other departments to make sure that that’s happening. Because if that’s not, then you’re only hurting yourself as an organization because you’re not fully leveraging what you could potentially leverage and the data that you could be collecting. So you brought up a very good point, you know, about that. That’s really, I think, the crux of it in the very beginning. And then obviously you get into, you know, data classification and making sure that you have the right, that you have it secure and accessible to the correct people within the organization.

Speaker 0 | 28:48.854

Anyone that solves this, anyone that’s a real good, anyone that can solve this stuff is going to be worth, it’s just worth their weight in gold, you know? Yeah. I mean, in the… Like I was saying earlier, the metaphor for this, that the person that experiences this on a daily basis, every single day, every day, is all of us when we go to the hospital or we go to the doctor. Yeah. Because how often do you go to your doctor? Oh, now you’re going to go to the hospital and get an x-ray. You got to go get a blood test. You got to go. Then they got to enter all your information again. And then you got to go from the first floor to the second floor. They got to enter all your information again. And it’s different for people. Once they figure out how to communicate effectively in the healthcare world, that will be, that’s in, and it’s really getting in the way is obviously it’s ironically business gets in the way there because everyone wants to, everyone wants to sell their electronic medical record system and this isn’t going to talk with that. And then we’ve got to move databases, but, um, that’s just me having too much coffee this morning going off on a tangent. So last time we talked about, um, kind of just solving some general problems, whether it be, you know, swiping in and out type of stuff and standing tablets and solving for problems. And just give me some examples for other people listening here of like, maybe they haven’t, maybe they’re up and growing, maybe they’re young, maybe it was, how can some other other people listening to the show get involved with creating positive business change? Like what are some of the habits and some of the things that we can do?

Speaker 1 | 30:24.067

Well, Well, you know, for starters, I think that, you know, and again, I work for a manufacturing and distribution company right now. So we basically, you know, we manufacture spices and food bases, you know, soups and things. And we also have an independent distributor network. So anything that I do obviously focuses in around that. But, you know, to answer your question, this goes back to the pain points. You know, the first thing I asked, obviously, when I was here was. When I looked at our distributor model and I looked at their point of sale system, I said, what are your pain points there? And they’re like, well, they’re using these old laptops and they don’t really like them and we’d like to upgrade. And I’m thinking, okay, but what’s your goal? And they’re like, well, we want to get off the laptops. And I’m like, okay, that’s not really a goal. I’m like, what’s your goal? What are you trying to achieve here? And they’re like, well, we want our distributors to be able to sell faster and to be in and out of each.

Speaker 0 | 31:16.428

kitchen you know and food service kitchen within you know a fraction of what they spend time they spend now so hold on that’s natural to you so that’s coming natural to you but that might not come natural to some people so some people just don’t just take i guess the point is don’t just take orders right you’re you’re the guy you’re the technology guy you’re the one that knows better than everyone else you may not know the the business better than anyone else but that’s why you’re asking questions and that’s why you’re analyzing right It’s don’t just take orders and replace the laptops. Don’t do that. But anyway, so go on.

Speaker 1 | 31:51.556

So I’ve always said, you know, that being an IT guy is sometimes a lot of times like being a journalist. You need to get the real scoop. You need to dig. You can’t just take what the people tell you at face value. You need to go deeper and get the real story.

Speaker 0 | 32:03.826

And some people might be scared to do that because with that comes responsibility and now you’ve taken ownership for the change.

Speaker 1 | 32:11.251

Right. Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 0 | 32:14.577

if you had just replaced the laptops, you could have done that and gone right back to them slipping food underneath the door into the server closet and just gone and clocked in and clocked out. And you would have, like you said, that’s not why they wanted to hire you. Anyways, instead you had to take responsibility. So now any, any changes that you make, the results are now on you. So let’s talk. So what happened? So what happened? So we’re obviously we didn’t go laptops. We didn’t. So

Speaker 1 | 32:39.416

By capturing that information, by now understanding what the goal is, the business objective, so to speak, I now have something I can go to vendors with and say, this is what we’re trying to achieve. If you know a way in which we can do this in a very cost-effective manner, let’s talk. I hate to sound simplistic, but that’s really how the conversation starts. And then it gets, of course, into the granularity of what we need to do.

Speaker 0 | 33:05.316

I’m going to have to do a show of how we talk to vendors someday because that’s another one. Because how you start weeding out what vendors actually care and understand what you’re saying versus the vendors that are just going to give you some sort of like, you know,

Speaker 1 | 33:18.346

whatever. You and I both know most vendors start off with, this is what we have, this is what we can do for you, and you like it. And it’s like, you know.

Speaker 0 | 33:30.176

That’s a great idea. If you replace your entire ERP system, we can incorporate.

Speaker 1 | 33:34.279

Right. Yeah. Right. Now, now the worst part is when you come with what you want, you know, immediately they start thinking, you know, they see dollar signs. Oh, we’re going to, we’re going to customize the heck out of what we have, you know? And I’m, you know, that’s not the right answer either. So what you want to find is the vendor that most closely matches what you’re looking to do and can solve your business problem, you know, that can help you to, like you said, partner with you to get you where you want to be, you know?

Speaker 0 | 34:01.241

Yeah. And I think the answer to that is don’t go direct. My personal opinion is never go direct to the vendor. Go to someone that’s been in that space that understands that space very, very well. It’s been in that space for a long time.

Speaker 1 | 34:14.357

Yes, I totally agree. You know, having a consultant who’s vendor agnostic on your side is a big plus because now you have somebody who’s on your side and who’s looking out for you and who’s helping you to find the right vendor mix.

Speaker 0 | 34:29.638

I know that,

Speaker 1 | 34:30.238

but they’re a firewall for you because you don’t have to deal with all the phone calls and emails. You know as well as I do, once a vendor gets you as a potential hot lead, they’re going to just pound you with phone calls and emails and demos and, oh, we want to send our guys, fly them down there to see you and blah, blah, blah. You’re like, I don’t want to do that yet. We’re still in the preliminary stages here and we want to make sure you guys are even right before we talk to you kind of thing.

Speaker 0 | 34:55.726

You actually just explained my whole value. I’m actually really sure you’re the first person to ever really restate my value ad without even us even talking about it. You said vendor agnostic. I say carrier agnostic all the time.

Speaker 1 | 35:07.732

Yeah, that is a big value of ad today in today’s market because there are so many competitors out there. And you know, there are a lot of choices. There’s a lot of choices. Even for this point of sale thing, this project. I mean, I think I initially told you we had like 25, 30 people. 30 companies we were looking at, you know, and of course we, we narrowed down the list, you know, we, we shortlisted it quite quickly, but you know, it’s, it’s a lot of information to process and go through and it’s kind of like hiring a new hire, you know, you get a pile of resumes and you got to go through these resumes and you’re like, man, this is, this is killing me here.

Speaker 0 | 35:40.774

If you don’t have that gender agnostic guy and because he, some industries they don’t exist, right? Like, right. I don’t know if it exists in the POS. What I have found is that Typically, I save someone about five months of time. What I’m finding is that five to six people are involved on every decision-making process. You’ve got your teams. In my business, it might be the head of the call center. He or she wants to see certain wallboards and get certain reports. So you’ve got that person involved. And then you’ve got another person involved. So you’ve got all these different people involved in the process. It takes, I would say… like a lot of times for people like up to eight months. Right. And if you’ve got that person that has the knowledge already, it eliminates five months of that, of sifting, meeting with vendors and, you know,

Speaker 1 | 36:34.040

absolutely. It’s a huge help.

Speaker 0 | 36:37.042

Anyways. So let’s go back to what we were doing, what we were doing, you know, the replacing the laptops.

Speaker 1 | 36:45.347

Right. Yeah. So basically, you know, we settled on a, on a tablet based system. that has an Android application that is very tightly integrated with our ERP, which is something they’ve never had here before. And, you know, obviously having a tablet also offers up, you know, a plethora of other options such as, you know, having a GPS or a route book for the delivery guys, you know, having, you know, some sort of infrared or extranet, I should say that they can go to download sales materials, promotionals, you know, look at training videos, you know, you just. keeping these guys on their toes about what, what are, what we’re trying to promote and get out, get the word out, you know, and it, you know, they can, you know, they can, they can make in contact it or inventory or whomever, if they need support, it opens up a whole bunch of new things that they can do now that they couldn’t do so easily before.

Speaker 0 | 37:41.148

So what were some of the metrics or what were some of the things that The bullet points, I guess. Give me bullet points. What did we not have before that we have now? And what were, like, oh, I never thought of that. Like, wow, that would be great. You know, like, what were some of the things that the key stakeholders said that you made suggestions and, like, what were some of the things?

Speaker 1 | 38:03.765

Well, you know, the laptop-based system was very antiquated. And of course, it, you know, it required them to be online to transmit their orders for the day. Being that they’re driving around and a lot of these guys didn’t have MiFi or any kind of jetpack or whatever.

Speaker 0 | 38:19.928

USB wireless card.

Speaker 1 | 38:23.990

Yeah, they weren’t connected. So all day they’re going around ringing up orders and invoicing customers and what have you. And then at the end of the day, they’re transmitting everything up to us and then we import it into our ERP. But that was a very kludgy, cumbersome system because obviously sometimes things would not… you know they wouldn’t import there were the errors double double entry not definitely not real time it wasn’t real time yeah inventory and consistencies you know and you know we would spend sometimes hours sorting through you know all kinds of um you know data import errors and trying to figure out what happened it’s just a lot of work for everybody and it didn’t really uh help them much and of course they in the field they were using you know that we were laughing about it before but they use these little portable dot matrix printers with the three-ply paper, you know, so that the customer gets one and they get one and then they mail one, you know, snail mail and the other one in, you know, with the signature on it. So it’s a very old way of doing business. It works. I’m not gonna say it didn’t work, it worked, but there was no room for expansion or growth, and competition could easily come along and outdo that. And it just wasn’t a very smooth way to handle transactions, it wasn’t wowing the customer, because I’m a big wow the customer kind of guy, I’m all about customer experience. So bringing in these tablet-based systems was… Kind of almost like an enlightenment for them because now they could capture electronic signatures. They could do, you know, they could do swipe payments on site. They could, you know, contact people very easily. Whether it be the regional general manager or customer service, they can chat with them. They could do video conferences. Just, they could never do before, you know.

Speaker 0 | 40:12.118

What were you doing video conferencing for?

Speaker 1 | 40:14.821

Well, not really like video. I meant like Skype or something. You could, yeah. Yeah, if they wanted to. A lot of them don’t do it. But, you know, like if they wanted to have a presentation, let’s say, to a chef in a food service kitchen, let’s say, in a hotel. They could have the regional general manager on the tablet, and then they’re talking next to him, you know, and they’re both doing their little sales pitch, you know.

Speaker 0 | 40:38.188

Our beef base. Did I tell you about our beef, our new beef base that’s grass-fed? Yeah. Anyways.

Speaker 1 | 40:46.896

Um,

Speaker 0 | 40:47.596

that’s awesome. So yeah, obviously a huge, um, a huge difference. Um, here’s the tough question, uh, training everyone on that and getting end user buy-in. Um, were you like prior? So I guess my question is there’s, there’s two ways to do your end user training and that is to get cheerleaders and everyone bought into it before you ever do it and make it their, make it their idea to begin with. Like we got it. We, we actually got everything that we wanted. Um, so how did it, you know, how did that work? Like when, when it comes to end users and communication with everyone, um, how’d you roll this out?

Speaker 1 | 41:23.359

Well, that’s a great question, Philip. Um, you know, there’s a little bit of strategy involved there. And what I basically did, number one is, um, you know, I chose to pilot these with what I want to say are very favorable, very technology savvy purveyors, distributors. These were guys that were very open arms about it, you know, and, you know, I didn’t pick like the most. cantankerous guy we have who’s been working for the company for 30 years and who doesn’t want to you know deal with the technology at all and have him start using it you know that’s that’s a bad move get a bunch of people on your side first yeah yeah get people on your side because they will then you know champion it to other people in in the distributor network they’ll say hey you know we started using these tablets and they’re really great you know you guys need to get on these things because we’re we’re We’re crushing it now. We’re doing more deliveries than we ever did per day. We’re like the UPS guy. We’re in and out.

Speaker 0 | 42:19.326

This is interesting because this is a very interesting dynamic too because this is more like a channel sales, channel distribution model. Correct. These are not employees, right? Right.

Speaker 1 | 42:31.294

These are independent distributors. That could go wherever they want. Most of them work out of major NFL cities. or smaller towns and cities, but they have their own business that they run, and we basically provide them product on consignment, which they then sell and get a commission on based on what they sell. So it can be very lucrative for some of these guys, because a lot of them are former chefs, and they know how to walk the walk and talk the talk, and they can go and walk into any kitchen and talk the talk with the chef there and get them to see the value of what Friber brings to the table. That’s awesome.

Speaker 0 | 43:08.391

That’s like… Like the past nurse that’s now a pharmaceutical rep.

Speaker 1 | 43:14.116

Hey, you got it. You nailed it. Yep.

Speaker 0 | 43:16.878

All right, cool. Okay, so you picked your best guys. And then so how’d the rest of the rollout go? And then what did some of the key stakeholders say? Kind of like just, you know, paint a picture.

Speaker 1 | 43:29.147

Well, you know, obviously, you know, as you know, most IT guys are not usually good at it. explaining things sometimes. Like, you’ll ask them what time it is, and they’ll tell you how to make a watch, you know? It’s like, you know, you… And then what I do is I… Yeah, exactly. They give you more information than you wanted. So what I did is we have a corporate trainer, you know, and he also handles all of our sales training as well. But I engaged her and basically said, look, we need to build a training curriculum that is user-friendly, number one. And number two, that… you feel you could go around and show these guys how to do in a very effective way. So by using her knowledge and her training abilities and getting her involved, I think was a big help because that basically allows us to… get training that is meaningful out to our distributors, you know, not something that, not some PDF manual that an IT guy wrote that makes no sense to them, you know?

Speaker 0 | 44:36.673

So you asked for help.

Speaker 1 | 44:38.294

Yeah, basically. Yep. Yep. Because training is, training is, is, you know, a tricky beast. You know, people always think, oh yeah, just throw a trainer in there and problem solved, you know, but no, it’s not that easy. You know, training. There are nuances to training, and as you know, there are good trainers and bad trainers. And, you know, you want somebody that obviously understands their audience and knows how to convey information in a very effective way. And it’s important to have a trainer that…

Speaker 0 | 45:02.383

You’ve got different users. I mean, you’ve got… Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 45:04.043

you’ve got different personalities. Like I mentioned before, you know, you’ve got some guys who are, like, are ready for this with open arms, and you’ve got other guys who are like, I want my laptop, give me back my laptop.

Speaker 0 | 45:15.267

And telecom on a daily basis. You’ve got… a millennial that says, why do I need to sit in on this stupid, you know, just send me like the cheat sheet. Like, I mean, it’s a soft phone. Like how hard is it? I download the app. Oh, I mean, and then you’ve got, you know, some, you know, maybe you’ve gotten a guy that’s been the head of the law firm for whatever. And he wants his line, line one, line two, line three button on his old Nortel phone. And what do you mean? What do you mean? There’s no, you know, line anymore. You know what I mean? Like, you know, I mean, that’s the person that you need to literally, you know, he’s kind of important. You got to stand over his shoulder. Here’s how you transfer a call. Here’s how you put, you know, um, you know,

Speaker 1 | 45:58.202

that’s it. I still remember. I still remember when Microsoft office introduced the, the, the tab on top, smart or fast tab, whatever they call it. I don’t know which version it was, but man, did that create waves throughout the country because people were so used to going into the office menu and finding what they want very quickly. And now everything was changed. and people just freaked out. They just went nuts. You would think something so innocuous like that would not really affect users, but it did. There were some users who were visibly upset by that.

Speaker 0 | 46:33.880

This reminded me of that Saturday Night Live skit where they were making fun of the Microsoft paperclip guy.

Speaker 1 | 46:39.601

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 46:40.942

That was hilarious.

Speaker 1 | 46:42.942

I think you’re trying to do XYZ. Can I help you? You’re like…

Speaker 0 | 46:46.964

turn this guy off man that was so funny or with a dog they also had a dog too one of the funniest skits ever so okay so man last question what’s any piece of advice out there for um i don’t know any other it directors listening is there any any tips that you have the other word by the way the other the other vocabulary word other than crap that i need to eliminate from my vocabulary is i It’s tricks. I say tips or tricks and they say, well, I’m not trying to trick them. And I don’t mean like trick and I’m not running any tricks. I’m just, you know, I mean, oh, you’re right. Just eliminate that word.

Speaker 1 | 47:22.273

Right.

Speaker 0 | 47:22.973

So tips, best practices, like anything that you do that you just kind of do naturally that might be like, I don’t know, a secret tactic.

Speaker 1 | 47:32.159

Yeah. Well, I wouldn’t call it a secret, but I mean, I see a lot of guys who don’t do it. I think they need to talk to their. you know, a superior who, whether it be a C-level exec or whomever, or vice president, and they would need to tell them, I need to seat at the table when projects are being, you know, initially thought about, you know, I, I don’t, I don’t want to be called in when the business decision has already been made, you know, and I think. Hey,

Speaker 0 | 48:00.938

we just purchased a, we just purchased a new CRM. Can you go implement it, please?

Speaker 1 | 48:06.219

Right. Yeah. That’s just, that’s. That’s so bad on so many levels, I can’t even tell you because, you know, it’s just, first of all, it demotivates a lot of IT professionals because they feel like they were not even part of the decision. Therefore, their opinion doesn’t really matter, you know, and nothing could be more wrong than that. But I think they really need a seat at the table when these business ideas are being thrown around because they might even be able to, you know, add to that and say, look, you know, have you thought about this or have you thought about that? You know, there are different. avenues or different ways to do things. With technology today, as you know, there’s a lot of options. That’s really my advice I give to a lot of IT leaders that if you’re not sitting at the… If you don’t have a seat at the table where decisions are being made about the future of the company, then you probably are being sidelined by a lot of what’s going on and you’re probably having projects forced down on you that you may not even be… you may not even be able to do successfully because you weren’t even involved in the decision process.

Speaker 0 | 49:11.571

I ran this survey. I ran this survey on Facebook of all places. And I ran the survey to IT directors within 200 to 1,000 employee companies, right? The question that I asked was, what best describes your decision-making process within the companies? A, legacy break-fix mindset, right? Yeah. B, stakeholders make product decisions and hand off to IT for execution. Right. Let’s see. C was, IT makes purchasing decisions based on appropriate budget. And D was, advanced purchasing policy. using proof of concept in financial with, you know, financial and legal stability. Like, you know, right. Right. So like, like probably like all the arrogant guys answered like D, which is really not many. Right. Right. I was shocked at how many people selected B stakeholders make decisions and hand off for execution.

Speaker 1 | 50:16.664

It’s a big problem. It’s a big, big problem. And there’s like,

Speaker 0 | 50:20.306

we need to send out psychologists for those people. Yeah. Those IT guys, they must be depressed. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 50:26.264

and there’s also a corollary to that. There’s a flip side to that. I’ve seen some organizations where they can’t make a decision, so IT just goes out and gets something that they think the company wants without really sitting down and understanding the business problem, figuring out the how before the what. Oh,

Speaker 0 | 50:43.799

that’s another thing. That’s a whole nother, you know, how many I can probably,

Speaker 1 | 50:47.220

I’m going to say the what before the how, you know, figure out what we’re going to do before we do figure out how we’re going to do it before the chick,

Speaker 0 | 50:52.862

whatever it is, how many guys make decisions without taking their end users into consideration or even asking end users. Well,

Speaker 1 | 50:58.584

this is usually a disaster. You end up with the, you know, you gave me what I asked for, but not what I wanted syndrome. You know, the business is like, okay, great, but this doesn’t really help, you know? And then you got, you got. You got what I call the software syndrome where you got 25% usage of the software and the rest of it just sits there and lies dormant. You know, not a good situation.

Speaker 0 | 51:22.271

There’s a revolution going on now. You know, it will not be televised. It’ll be on this show. Yeah. So, hey.

Speaker 1 | 51:32.693

There’s a famous Aldous Huxley quote. The technology progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. Which is kind of a fatalistic view, if you think about it. No, it’s not. No, it’s not. He had a point. He had a point, and that is, you know, that technology, and this is my quote. I came up with this one, I think, and I don’t remember seeing it anywhere. But, you know, technology is like fire. You can either, you know, burn yourself and your business to the ground if you don’t know what you’re doing, or you can leverage it to, you know, achieve your wildest business goals, you know. It’s a matter of how you approach it.

Speaker 0 | 52:11.408

A little pet peeve with when I email people and it’s just almost like worthless to me now, right? Like why should I even email someone about like, you know, if I don’t really, really know them, there’s no point in me emailing you, right? So I get all, don’t spit, you know, I get, I probably, you know, I connect with people on LinkedIn. They say, you know, I’d love to connect with you, you know, but not if you’re going to spam me endlessly. I’m like. I get like one out of a hundred. I’ll say like, not, but not if you’re going to spam me endlessly. I’m like, okay. Right. It’s funny. As I said to a guy the other day, I said, well, can I send you a pair of socks? Is that spam? Yeah. And, but, but the point is, is right. Like email has, and that’s the example of technology that’s gone for email is just the worst way to tell anyone about a product or service nowadays. Right. You have a better chance of sending them something in the mail. And back in the day, it used to be junk mail. It used to be just like junk mail, junk mail, junk mail. But now it’s like, it has gone backwards. It literally is. It has absolutely gone backwards. I have a better chance.

Speaker 1 | 53:13.436

Well, email filters have gotten much more sophisticated now too. They can tell whether it’s an advertisement or a sales pitch and they’ll just throw it into a, you know, a junk mail folder.

Speaker 0 | 53:23.201

Well, true. But I’m just, you know, for the guy that’s trying to sell you the square peg in the round hole, like of the 300. Yeah. wants to fly in from our side of, you know, like what you basically just said, right? Like that guy will get through, um, but he should not be using email. He should not send you a,

Speaker 1 | 53:39.846

no, I agree. I agree with you.

Speaker 0 | 53:42.127

Um, this has been a, a fun conversation. Um, uh, a lot of fun. I’ve, I’m fully cat.

Speaker 1 | 53:50.109

Yeah. I enjoyed it too. Uh,

Speaker 0 | 53:52.010

so, so you have provided some value information, some valuable information and I have blabbed a little bit. Um, so thank you very much. being on the show, man. And, uh, the next, next great win or, or business, you know, just please like share the stories, share the success stories, uh, so I can have you back on the show.

Speaker 1 | 54:09.698

Absolutely. Philip, it was a great pleasure and an honor to be on. And I enjoyed our discussion a great deal. We, we, uh, you know, it’s always great to talk to a colleague and their ideas and learn about things and got some, even got some great anecdotes and quotes out of it. So it’s always fun.

Speaker 0 | 54:26.069

Awesome, man. Have a great day.

Speaker 1 | 54:27.802

You too. Take care.