Speaker 0 | 00:09.806

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I am really working hard today to sound super excited because I’m on my third cup of coffee. And some of those days, you know, you just really got to work at that energy level. And so we’re going to fake it here until I make it energy wise. We have Robert Leap on the show today. IT manager at, do we say SY Partners or is it Cy Partners?

Speaker 1 | 00:34.264

That is correct. It’s SY.

Speaker 0 | 00:36.205

All right. So you very specifically mentioned, and we talked just briefly about this, but you specifically mentioned IT and the budget in your basically professional summary or profile. I mean, this is part of what you do is, and not only that, but you use words like precise documentation. And experienced in setting and meeting budgets, which is something that I don’t hear IT leadership talk too much about. I hear IT leadership complain more about that. I hear a lot of complaints about budgets. I hear a lot about, we need more money. We don’t have enough money. But at the end of the day, a budget’s important. We have to hit a budget or we have to ask for more money or whatever it is. But I just wanted to open it up and let you maybe give us a brief. Just kind of a briefing on what’s your philosophy around the budget and how we allocate money towards technology. Is there a philosophy there or is there a strategy or anything like that?

Speaker 1 | 01:38.253

I think there’s a strategy for sure. I mean, you know, your budget is basically an ongoing conversation between the finance department and the technology department. And our jobs, what we get our paychecks for and what we get this budget for is to provide service to an organization. And that service includes hardware, the laptop you get when you start. Sometimes it includes phones or iPads or supplies and mice, all the little minutia that adds up. But really what it’s going to come down to for the most part is, especially this day and age, is your software as a service, your subscriptions. That’ll be that Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office. And oftentimes for a lot of organizations, it’s going to be your AWS or your Google Cloud computer.

Speaker 0 | 02:33.119

So that’s actually a really good point that you brought that up. So we’ve got two types of costs, right? We have operating costs. We’ve got, well, I guess we got controllable costs and we’ve got operating costs. Controllable costs being, I don’t know, labor, maybe. Operating costs, meaning businesses, you know, costs that we have to… uh, that we have to eat up in order to do business, I guess rent, if there might be one, um, electricity, uh, you know,

Speaker 1 | 03:02.487

subscription, your WebEx.

Speaker 0 | 03:05.228

I like that. You said zoom. I don’t know if I liked that. You said WebEx, but I liked that. You said zoom. Um, because, well, there’s a good example because one is significantly, I would say cheaper than the other. Just your quick thoughts on zoom versus WebEx. And we’re not bashing Cisco or anyone else here. I’m just curious.

Speaker 1 | 03:25.733

You know, I have to remain fairly agnostic on this. You know, I work for a consultancy. We work with Fortune 500 companies. And we have to meet on their platform. If they’ve got WebEx rooms, then we need to be able to get into that. If they have Polycom, the big, you know, quarter million dollar Polycom rooms, we have to meet with that.

Speaker 0 | 03:48.279

Yeah, I work with both. I’m not saying I don’t. I’m in the same type of, I guess, I mean, we haven’t talked much about what we both do, but I have over 300 providers. Zoom’s one. WebEx is another one. And certainly you have people that, I don’t know, have turned up a whole Cisco call manager in their data center somewhere. So in that particular case, I guess I love Cisco and any SIP trunking that you may need at that case at that point in time, because you have a whole team of people to manage that thing. But anyways, that’s kind of off topic. So we’ve got controllable costs. From the software as a service standpoint, there’s this CapEx versus OpEx battle, right? So we’re quickly moving into an age where there’s much more OpEx than CapEx, so to speak. And I don’t… Correct. Back in the day, you used to be able to argue, well, I will host my exchange on site. Well, I think it’s less realistic now to say, I’m going to continue to host Exchange by myself. I think O365 or Google Docs or G Suite, sorry, G Suite, whatever we’re supposed to be saying now. is clearly an operational expense versus kind of a CapEx and depreciation equipment model. What’s your general thoughts on the CapEx versus OpEx modeling? Because that can make a big swing. That could be a big swing in line items on the budget.

Speaker 1 | 05:15.462

It is a huge swing, and it’s definitely illustrated year after year that it’s definitely becoming operating. Even if you don’t look at it as a software as a service, you know, I think that some of these subscription models and that’s basically where everybody’s going is your software is valid only as long as your key is valid. And that’s going to be annually. I don’t I think overall in our performance and the way we budget, it’s not going to matter. That CapEx thing has definitely taken some. some money out of our budget that we could, you know, duplicate over time. Even laptops. I mean, it depends on when your company started and where they drew the line on that. A lot of laptops aren’t $2,000 anymore. So that means that our laptops aren’t CapEx. Your iPad Pro isn’t CapEx anymore. So I don’t think that that’s a model necessarily that we have to adhere to. In fact, I think we kind of need to release that or we need to reevaluate We’re going to try a CapEx.

Speaker 0 | 06:28.206

Let’s say we’ve got other IT directors out there that would like to kick an old PBX to the curb. Maybe they’ve got an Avaya IP office, or they have an old…

Speaker 1 | 06:40.031

I have a 25-year-old PBX in my closet over here, so I know what you’re talking about.

Speaker 0 | 06:45.233

Great. Okay. We might have a short tail. We might have a mitel. Whatever it is, we’ve got this racked and stacked equipment that’s end-of-life, maybe. Could be a silo. I don’t know if I want to use that word, but put it this way. It’s paid for. And you have a PRI running into it, or you got some SIP trunking running into it. And to migrate to a user-based model could mean a significant uptick in monthly, not always. In some cases, it’s not because you’ve got people with ridiculous maintenance contracts and all kinds of other things. But for the most part, I would think your monthly cost is going to go up. How do you make that argument? How do you make that argument?

Speaker 1 | 07:25.314

how important is your phone and voice connectivity? How important is your fax? How important are your dial tone polycoms? I mean, there is a cost of doing business and you should, I would be proactive and let somebody know this year, next year, this is something we need to look at because the risk is far too great to the business.

Speaker 0 | 07:50.515

And if we’re to… if it is coming end of life anyways, the average cost per user to go to a CapEx model on those old phone systems is about $700 per user. So I’ve done the math. So even if you run it on like a five year depreciation model,

Speaker 1 | 08:06.864

if you’re going to try to, if you’re going to try to aggregate it, then you can totally get that on CapEx. If you’re going to go per user, you’re not going to get it on CapEx. So are you going to bundle this as an entire project, you know, a transition away from a, Are you going to narrow down your scope such that it doesn’t hit CapEx?

Speaker 0 | 08:30.298

I guess what I’m getting at is you can get creative, and it’s not even necessarily creative, but it’s kind of how you make that argument upper management. It’s kind of how we slice and dice the numbers.

Speaker 1 | 08:42.847

My approach is I would be very honest, very transparent. This is what it’s going to cost. This is why it has to be done, and this is our net benefit. You know, and at this day and age, I mean, especially with Zoom, like my conference rooms, I don’t need phones in my conference rooms anymore. Zoom has a dial number I can dial out from our room hardware. People at their desks, they’re not using phones anymore. We can get somebody a headset or, you know, we can get somebody a GHO. What is that going to be now? But there are Google numbers you can get. So you can get an assigned number to somebody and that can run to an application and match their phone’s actual identity.

Speaker 0 | 09:31.513

Yeah, I mean, a soft phone’s easy. Everyone’s got a soft phone.

Speaker 1 | 09:34.796

Absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 09:35.977

You don’t have to have a piece of equipment. And if they really, really want a piece of equipment and if you’ve got some of the people of the old school that need to have a handset with maybe even the shoulder thing because they don’t have a headset. Yeah. I mean, really, the handsets are, they all come in models or no-cap X models where it might be $4 or something like that. to have a handset on there and never have to worry about it again. So from that standpoint, it’s pretty easy. Do you have any examples of maybe a big overhaul project or anything you’ve done recently that we can speak about where you had to make a specific budgetary argument where there might have been a significant swing? Any good examples?

Speaker 1 | 10:26.551

I think with Microsoft Office 2016 going to bed in October, I mean, that’s a perfect discussion. We used to buy software. You could do software assurance, which was ridiculous. But now, you know, come October, we’re not really going to have an option to buy software. You are renting it on a monthly basis or an annual basis. And it is going to be more expensive. But it’s, you know, again, it is an absolute. business school you have to have excel you have to have word in business today if you’re collaborating with other agencies and to maintain that flexibility you need to have that and it’s it’s not it i don’t feel like it’s a thing that that our cfos and directors ctos can really say no to you know um There’s really your case is communication and collaboration is really the center of IT. You know, if you zoom out a bit, that’s what it’s been for the last 40 years is communication, collaboration.

Speaker 0 | 11:40.357

Which is how we do business.

Speaker 1 | 11:42.478

Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 11:44.800

I never understand that. And so the anomaly that I find a lot is when I look at the numbers, the… average, I would say, at least in the mid-market space, the average ratio of IT director, IT staff to end user is usually over one to a hundred. So for every hundred end users, there’s one IT staff member, which I don’t know how that makes you feel. And I’m not saying that it can’t be done because there’s many people that do it very, very well and are great at delegating and using tools and… automation and things like that to make their life easier. And not only that, to put the right tools in their end users’hands to do their jobs better. But do you think that IT, in general, and you’re in a consultancy, so I’m hoping you’re going to say yes, but in general, do you think IT is underfunded or technology is underfunded? And if you underfund your technology budget in your company or your business, that you’re risking going out of business?

Speaker 1 | 12:52.139

I would say yes. I think that we generally, I’m very fortunate, we’ve got a very robust staff here, but in general, the things that I see on, say, Mac admins or any of the message boards out there, the IT guys are spread so thin that the level of service they can provide is insufficient for business. I mean, my dad is ex-military. He’s a subcontractor now. He lost his laptop for a month once because there was some update that had to happen. A month, this man couldn’t do business, you know, for the last 20 years. If I can’t fix your computer in 10 minutes, we’re going to rebuild one and swap it out so that you’re functioning. A month? A month.

Speaker 0 | 13:38.116

That’s pretty insane.

Speaker 1 | 13:42.558

But, you know, U.S. government and subcontractors, so, you know, they’re okay with losing money. But I think…

Speaker 0 | 13:50.691

I worked in E for a long time and I saw money get thrown around, quite a bit of money thrown around.

Speaker 1 | 13:56.816

And it’s terrible. And, you know, that just, it makes people feel disempowered and not enabled. And really, as IT service professionals, that is our job is to enable and empower a workforce to get their job done. And, you know, one thing that people don’t look at when they look at, you know, you lose your laptop for a day or a week. is there’s this cascading effect. You know, you’re part of a team and that team can’t function fully if you’re disabled. And sometimes those teams include directors and principal levels and people who are really expensive. And so those dollars rack up against you really quick.

Speaker 0 | 14:40.548

Yeah, losing a cell phone for a day. I mean, we freak out when our battery runs, when our phone goes dead. let alone just lose a cell phone or have it locked down. How about security? You see all the security memes. you know, the, the, the number one security meme, you know, that goes around is, you know, uh, our security, it shows like a picture of like the security budget, like, you know, before, uh, before the ransomware attack. Right. And then it’s the security budget after, you know what I mean? Well, how hard, how hard is it, do you think for people to, to get money for security? Do we have any tips? Do we have any tricks? Can we do anything other than, you know, fear and doom and gloom and the insurance policy type of, you know, argument? How can we get more money?

Speaker 1 | 15:30.630

Again, honesty and transparency. If you do it after the fact, if you go buy a helmet after you have a bike accident.

Speaker 0 | 15:37.376

I like that. That’s a good metaphor.

Speaker 1 | 15:39.017

You know, it’s,

Speaker 0 | 15:39.838

it’s, it’s like a,

Speaker 1 | 15:40.658

and it is.

Speaker 0 | 15:42.620

Helmet after a bike accident.

Speaker 1 | 15:45.923

You know, I bought my first pair of knee pads. a day after I banged the hell out of my knee on rollerblades. And that stuck with me. I think also, contextually, if we’re going to look at this, moving to the subscription software and the software as a service, those things that are expensive and out of house, it is kind of a cop-out. There are a team of professionals that are managing this and supposed to be managing that security on multiple levels. And so part of your security money is that software subscription, is that subscription to your SIP provider or your dial tone provider. You know, in order to manage end-to-end security, you have to assure that everybody else is doing it. And that’s part of what that cost is. you know, with G Suite, with Office 365. If there’s a problem with the software, it gets updated and pushed to you. And they’re fairly consistent on that. You know, in a Mac environment, we’ve got Jamf to help us manage our patches, you know, and that’s what that subscription is paying for. So some of that money, that security money, we are spending. but we also do need to earmark specific money around education and awareness and penetration testing you know checking yourself out from inside and from out and this is where again the head count becomes an issue because if you’ve got one guy that’s taking care of 100 or 200 people then things are going to start falling through the cracks because you’re just running a guy thread bear or a girl where

Speaker 0 | 17:45.253

Is there anywhere you’ve seen over the years where IT could say, hey, if you give me this much money, I can help make more money? Is it IT’s job at all, other than the service center, other than the service department, other than making sure that we’re proactive and keep everything up and running and we make sure, you know, basically crap doesn’t happen? Is there anywhere in IT where you get involved, where you see, where you can see, hey, look, if we did this and this. we could increase productivity. We could make more money.

Speaker 1 | 18:20.706

Yes. I mean, it’s tough, but it can be done. I mean, the case for people getting laptops, say 20 years ago, how many people did you know have a laptop? 20 years ago?

Speaker 0 | 18:31.093

Well, it’s 2000. So let’s see, Y2K, where was that? It was pretty rare. Vermont in a cabin. It was snowing outside. Let’s see. I’m just trying to think of what I had back in, let’s see, I was still in college. So what did I have? An HP pavilion, like little, like kind of mini tower. And I was using dial-up, free dial-up, you know? I mean, laptop was unheard of, you know, laptop was a different thing.

Speaker 1 | 19:01.932

You know, I think at that time, only a third of my workforce had it. And, you know, there was a decision. There was a time at which… The processing power and the memory and the storage and the laptop started to catch up to what the desktops were providing. If you give somebody a laptop, you can squeeze a couple more hours out of each work. And so that is an increase in productivity. You can achieve a better life.

Speaker 0 | 19:29.531

Headcount. You mean the headcount. Stop referring to people as the headcount. That’s so… You can’t even put a button in it.

Speaker 1 | 19:38.661

But your employees basically, your employees have a greater flexibility. They can go home at five o’clock, have dinner with their kids, and then you can watch everybody come back up around eight o’clock, nine o’clock to get another hour or two in. You know, it. Um, instead of people staying in the office and pushing through till later, nine o’clock, we can have a life.

Speaker 0 | 19:59.991

Yeah. Well,

Speaker 1 | 20:00.531

I remember productivity without coming back.

Speaker 0 | 20:03.533

I can clearly remember going to my boss one day and saying, Hey, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to promise you 15% increase in sales. If you let me work from home, that’s all I want to do. I actually just want to work from home three days a week. I said, here’s what I’m gonna do. I’ll increase a 15% over over quota. This was like, like, you know, however many years ago when I was working for, I was doing like inside, I was doing inside sales for a telecom company, you know, selling integrated T1s and however long ago that was. And he was like, okay. He was like, I was like, just give me two weeks. I’ll just try it out. You know? And that was it. I never went back to the office again because that’s, you know, there’s two hours of drive time, whatever it was, some ridiculous, you know, rush hour traffic down in DC where I was at the time. Then senseless.

Speaker 1 | 20:48.650

meetings and water cooler talk and all this stuff so um you know and i know that’s not giving someone a laptop but it’s the same argument it’s the product it’s you know it’s very similar you know at what point was it that organizations started providing their users with mobile devices you know as far back as i remember like the blackberry 6710 is when that first started to create a hub of people were able to communicate they were in contact you their clients and with their vendors on a much more rapid scale than they are now. And there are unintended consequences there. And you’ve got the workaholics and you’ve got the people that aren’t making their life balance work.

Speaker 0 | 21:34.070

The Blackberry was probably one of my favorite phones. The whole, like all the series up until the world phone, then it kind of died off and everything. And then the iPhone came out and pretty much squashed the entire thing. There was no more Bez servers. Remember the chat you could chat with? I think the chat between staff members was probably one of the… It was just a great time. And the reason why I asked about the productivity is obviously IT and productivity really comes into play in manufacturing with production. Obviously, technology can really increase production there as well. In sales and marketing and… and other technology firms that are doing recruiting. Obviously, in recruiting firms, technology makes a huge difference. So it’s different for every industry. I just wanted to see your thought on it. I’ve been asking everyone this question lately. It’s just a fun question. For you, since you’ve been at your company now for 19 years, which is a long time, I want to ask you in your IT career in general, what year Did security paranoia set in? Do you remember a specific time where you’re like, crap, we need to be paranoid now?

Speaker 1 | 22:55.758

I’d say like 98, 99, even before I started here, I was working for a company that provided free online storage. Uh-huh.

Speaker 0 | 23:06.505

And after the first-Free online storage in 98, 99?

Speaker 1 | 23:11.408

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 23:12.089

How much storage did you get? Like 200K?

Speaker 1 | 23:17.059

I think five megs or something like that. It was a few floppy disks. And then what?

Speaker 0 | 23:22.400

Once you went for five megs, you paid, then you paid or something?

Speaker 1 | 23:25.821

Oh yeah, there were pay options, but nobody was doing that. And you could write a bot to create multiple accounts and aggregate your data. In fact, we had one outage and we were pretty sure somebody was creating a thesis about… backing up their university onto free online storage just to get at night and get these terrible floods of incoming data pretty fun but that you know that definitely brought security into the forefront like somebody is more or less inside at this point uh-huh and you can get their benefit you know um well then you just it changes your perspective you know um Fortunately, the servers went down. We could just hop all the front-end servers and everything was fine, but it was pretty drastic. Even after I started here, I’d say 2002, I think that’s when a lot of the email viruses started really taking off because people had full-time access to their email, not VPN access to their Exchange servers. So we started having Exchange servers out on the border. You know… At that time, HP was a massive client of ours, and they got hit by these viruses.

Speaker 0 | 24:48.922

Like the I love you virus. That was like 2000. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 24:51.466

that was it. The I love you.

Speaker 0 | 24:54.206

The I love you virus was 2000. That’s what, I mean, that’s pretty much what everyone’s like so far it’s been, well, you said 98, 99. So, so you’re now on record for being different. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 25:06.109

It was pretty much like that. Yeah. So, you know, our clients would get hit. Fortunately, we were a heavy Mac shop and I was really like, I wrote my router and firewall. I didn’t buy a Cisco or a Netgear or anything. I had a Linux server, two cards, and I wrote the routing and the firewalling in it so that I felt safe. Just because I was going to…

Speaker 0 | 25:35.659

Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 25:36.219

I was still going to 2,600 meetings at this time. Do you remember any of that?

Speaker 0 | 25:43.064

No, I don’t. Explain.

Speaker 1 | 25:44.866

You don’t remember 2,600, the hacker magazine?

Speaker 0 | 25:48.188

No, no. If you knew where I was back then, I was not a person of, let’s just say, motivation. I was not motivated from anything. So what happened for me, pretty much when I got married and my wife got pregnant and I had kids on the way, that’s when I quickly became very motivated, more so.

Speaker 1 | 26:15.007

Part of my goofing off was I was either in bands or I was hacking. So, you know, that was the, my two worlds.

Speaker 0 | 26:22.537

What’s really interesting. I was talking with my nephew yesterday, so he’s 18. Okay. And he was asking me, you know, like what I do. And I was explaining to him, you know, like wide area networks and this, that, and he’s like, Oh, he’s like, Oh, that’s interesting because I’ve been making money, you know, selling like, you know, VPN connections and a weird word. What’s wrong with me? Like, like Instagram account names, you know, I’ve been selling this and we, we got onto botnets and I was shocked at how he learned all this. I was like, I just got to ask you, I was like, how do you learn all this? Like, how do you learn about botnets and, and how do you learn about this? And this, he’s like, well, he’s playing Xbox. Is it because when you get good in a certain game room, you know, people get mad. So they start like, you know, they send these. botnets, you know, they start like attacking your home IP address or something to like shut your game down so that you can’t, you know, so that you lose. And he’s like, now, you know, so now like we’re buying like, you know, private server space to play in the game. And then we were talking about upload speeds to the cloud. And it’s just interesting to me that that’s how he, that’s how he learned. It wouldn’t be how we learn, it’s not how we learn technology. Right. Like he’s, he’s growing up in a completely different world. I mean, kind of similar, I mean, kind of the same, you know what I mean? But that was, it was just interesting to get his perspective as an 18 year old kid getting ready to get in and going to go to college for computer science.

Speaker 1 | 27:54.306

And they’ve only known distributed computing, you know, centralized computing is not something never had to deal with. You know, I remember like my first experience with bots was in the early nineties on IRC. And We’d have little gang wars and whatnot and try to flood people’s connections and take over modems. It was kind of a wild west, but apparently it’s still out there.

Speaker 0 | 28:20.320

It’s just in a different form, so to speak. So anyways, what was your first computer?

Speaker 1 | 28:32.407

I think it was a TRS-80. I had the auxiliary little cassette tape to store my… programs and a little 300-baud acoustic coupler modem. It’s fantastic.

Speaker 0 | 28:44.968

You could store stuff on tapes. I just find that interesting that we used to store stuff on tapes. I mean, I guess discs is still also kind of crazy, and then CD-ROM. We were storing stuff on tapes.

Speaker 1 | 28:56.131

Yeah, because that tape, if you accidentally put it in the tape player, it made horrible, horrible noises.

Speaker 0 | 29:01.912

I never experienced that.

Speaker 1 | 29:04.673

It was good times. It sounds a lot like an early modem handshake, but it could go on for however much data you had on the tape.

Speaker 0 | 29:15.683

So then let’s just go back to that time. So you got, did you have business experience before getting into IT or was it the other way around? Or is it I got into IT and I had to learn business?

Speaker 1 | 29:26.333

Got into IT, had to learn business.

Speaker 0 | 29:28.715

And do you remember? Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 29:29.255

I moved to San.

Speaker 0 | 29:30.396

Go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 29:31.718

I moved to San Francisco in 1996 and that was just as the first dot-com was taking off. I graduated from university with a degree in child development and came to San Francisco and none of that work was going to pay. I had a pretty lengthy history with computers by that point. Got myself an IT support job and then just build and read and build and read and take on tasks and over-promise and over-deliver.

Speaker 0 | 30:07.058

At what point did you have a significant business planning session? Do you remember your first major presentation or business argument? Was there any turning point or anything like that? A big learning experience?

Speaker 1 | 30:23.692

Yeah, I mean, I would say even it was a few years into working here, I was the only IT guy for a while. And then at some point, someone asked me for a budget. And I was like, I don’t know, 20% more than I spent this year.

Speaker 0 | 30:38.120

And what did they say?

Speaker 1 | 30:40.141

They laughed. But, you know, then it had me have conversations with, you know, project managers. And, you know, you know, directors across the organization, because you’ve got to figure out, well, are we going to grow? How many people are we going to have? And then with people, I need a laptop, and I need a phone and I need software. And so I start building this per user budget. And, you know, try to calculate the growth of the organization and include that. And again, not a cost center that is simply enabling somebody to come on board and productive and powerful.

Speaker 0 | 31:24.960

So that’s interesting. So you’ve got projected growth of the company. And so we’ll just throw a random number out. We plan on growing 10% this year. How much of that 10% does IT deserve? I mean, is that kind of part of the argument?

Speaker 1 | 31:43.032

In staffing or in cash?

Speaker 0 | 31:45.973

Yeah, I’m just, you know, like, I mean, I’m being obviously very, very basic here. Let’s say we’ve got a 10%, like, you know, to the bottom line, pure profit growth, right? Or let’s say, yeah, let’s say we are going to grow by 10% staff wise. Well, then you’ve just got your per user budget. But I just like that you broke it down as a per user budget. I guess, how do you do that? And then how do you ask for money?

Speaker 1 | 32:11.913

So the part of the finances that I look at, it’s not even a large scale P&L. It’s like, say you get hired and you got $100,000 this year for all your projects, all your hardware, all your software, education, whatever. And you’re looking at a 10% growth in that budget to verify that that is going to be enough money. You have to figure out, well, how many people are you bringing on this year? What does our projected projects look like with our clients? Are we getting more clients? Do we need more clients? Want more clients?

Speaker 0 | 32:54.009

Are you sitting down and having these conversations with a CTO?

Speaker 1 | 32:59.613

Sometimes a CTO,

Speaker 0 | 33:00.614

but mostly with people that are in the business business.

Speaker 1 | 33:06.939

You know, people who are… you know if it’s a sales organization you got to look at your director of sales and like well what are our goals and how are you going to meet that because um you’re going to require and i need to empower and equip that talent you know so you can work with your say your hr department they know how much someone’s going to get paid and i know how much it’s going to cost to give them all the tools they’re going to need and then that together becomes what you’re your higher number is and then your your you know ceo can look at that and like okay because i think it gives a more realistic number if you start if you start putting the cash in terms that they can they can understand like if you’re just putting together an it budget and you have these amorphous things hardware software subscription uh network and whatnot that’s it’s not attributed to anything that’s an it center But if you start breaking that out, like, well, I have these budgets, but from that, this is what all the Legos look like. You’re going to hire a person, say they’re going to get hired for $100,000. Well, they’re going to need a laptop. They need all of these pieces of software in order to function. That costs this much a month or this much a year. And so I would have… the bucket set up in a way that was more in line with the business need rather than my small IT view.

Speaker 0 | 34:43.091

I like it. It makes complete sense because from a marketing perspective, and we’re going to use marketing here because you’re marketing yourself, marketing sales and marketing yourself, selling IT, marketing IT, the anytime… Anyone that knows anything about marketing knows that segmentation is very important. You can’t just speak broad terms and expect everybody in every industry to grab on to that one message. Unless you’re Pepsi, unless you’ve got some crazy brand, but everyone knows we’re not trying to build a brand here. Anyone that wants to market very successfully knows they’ve got to segment and bucket things. So I think it makes a lot of sense. And I think you’ve got to segment and bucket and or bucket your IT budget. And when I say segment and bucket, like you said, segment it into the language that they understand, right? So if it’s new hires in HR, if it’s new hires in HR, the new hires would be a bucket. It’s not going to be O365 licensing and the VoIP licensing. And our licensing for Zoom, no, it could be new hire technology costs or, you know, or maybe it’s new hire support technology supporting their job. I don’t know, whatever we’re going to call it, but make that a bucket. And then maybe there’s, I don’t know, we have any other ideas for some great buckets or segmentation from the IT department?

Speaker 1 | 36:18.607

Sure. I mean. Take your Zoom room, the computers, the screens, the microphones, all of the stuff that goes into that, that’s kind of facilities and operations. So this part of the IT budget further enables operations and facilities to provide that service.

Speaker 0 | 36:36.740

Okay, yeah. Customer care, facilities, whatever, retention, whatever you want to call it, selling and collaboration and retention of customers and whatever, placing a number to that.

Speaker 1 | 36:48.944

And even acquisition of customers, those early meetings, if you can’t do them in person, you know, that face-to-face time has a distinct value.

Speaker 0 | 36:59.054

And then maybe there’s a bucket for efficiency as well. Maybe there’s like a, you know, I don’t know, some kind of being more efficient or what were you saying? Productivity, you know, increased productivity type of bucketing. So yes. And then obviously if the company is going to grow, your budget can’t stay stagnant or stay static and be the same. So I think you broke, I think that’s,

Speaker 1 | 37:21.215

and those things,

Speaker 0 | 37:21.815

I think it’s bold what you just said. I mean, that’s, that’s the best way that I’ve heard someone, you know, help break it down. We’ve been talking for, I mean, I’ve been talking all year with IT directors saying, you got to have conversations, you got to make sure that you’re talking with our facilities. You got to make sure that you’re talking with, you know, you know, bringing in. you know, finance, the finance team to be on the same page as you, that’s great. But how can we get even more granular or like you said, um, you know, very detailed, uh, very precise, you know, precise documentation and how do we put it in segmented and put it into buckets that they will understand? I think that’s, I think that’s gold.

Speaker 1 | 38:04.501

And I think in doing so you, you eliminate the perception, you know, there’s a, there’s a thoughtfulness and a consideration to that. kind of reduces that vision of IT as simply a cost center.

Speaker 0 | 38:20.329

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 38:21.570

Because you’re phrasing and presenting your budget requests and your budget demands at some point in actionable terms to the CFO and the CTO.

Speaker 0 | 38:39.988

Um, yeah. And if they see it as money spent to help and support them, uh, it’s just different. It’s just very different. Uh, the frame different, the, the way, the way that you accept it is, is completely different. It’s like when someone comes to you with some, I don’t know, I don’t know, new software is going to help make your life easier and do more, more work and be productive. Or is it just someone coming and saying like, Hey, I’m trying to like raise my hand and get in front of you type of thing. And can you help me type of deal? I just doesn’t work. It’s different. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 | 39:11.541

Is it going to retain customers? Is it going to retain employees?

Speaker 0 | 39:15.784

Is it IT coming whining to the table asking for more money? Is that it? Or is it IT coming to the table with a really well thought out, you know, speaking our language?

Speaker 1 | 39:31.394

You need a very good point of view in context.

Speaker 0 | 39:39.936

It’s excellent. I think we should stop there because the bucketing and the segmenting, that’s gold there. If you had any piece of advice, maybe around that. uh, to any it directors out there listening, maybe, maybe they’re stuck in a cost center. Uh, I mean, my, my initial thought that came to mind was, do we plan on growing as a company? That was my initial question that I would think would be a good question for, uh, an it, uh, director or manager to ask, uh, anyone, I think it’d be a good starter question, but any piece of advice or a question that you would, that you typically ask that gets people to, that raises eyebrows or open their eyes.

Speaker 1 | 40:20.092

No, I don’t think so. You know, I, I mean, I think by and large, it’s just maintaining alignment between what the IT department is doing and what the needs of the business are. You know, we, we need to adapt to the needs of the business and the needs of the business are going to change rapidly.

Speaker 0 | 40:38.000

Robert, it’s been excellent having you on the show. Thank you so much. Great.

Speaker 1 | 40:42.002

Thank you, sir. You have a great day.