Speaker 0 | 00:09.548

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today we have Greg Fitzgerald on the show, aka the red-headed stepchild. Welcome to the show. IT manager at InsideSource, which is a really, actually you guys are kind of like a high-paced. It’s a really cool company. I mean, you sell furniture, right? But it’s not like, you know, the George Washington sale, although you might have a George Washington sale day, but you sell office furniture to businesses, correct?

Speaker 1 | 00:40.797

Correct. We sell to very large corporations and small. We sell to any corporate entity, whether it be, we’ve done sheriff’s offices, we’ve done schools, we’ve done school offices. district offices. We’ve done attorney’s offices. We have very large customers, such as Facebook. We do a lot of their furniture, their new buildings as they open up.

Speaker 0 | 01:13.751

That’s cool. Facebook. So what do we get? So that means that Zuckerberg could be sitting in one of your chairs.

Speaker 1 | 01:19.133

Absolutely. He does.

Speaker 0 | 01:20.554

Think about that. That’s a big responsibility there.

Speaker 1 | 01:24.135

It is. It is. All the way from Zuckerberg, all the way down.

Speaker 0 | 01:28.737

Is there anywhere you guys don’t sell? I mean, are you selling pretty much like North America or what’s your…

Speaker 1 | 01:33.418

We actually sell all over Europe. We’ve sold to GoPro in Europe. Oh, nice. So we have a European office and they handle most of Europe. And we have an office in New York that handles, also helps with the European market.

Speaker 0 | 01:54.084

So really cool. So to say the least, you probably have some sort of a sales staff. You’ve got people selling.

Speaker 1 | 02:02.248

We have a lot, yes. We have probably

Speaker 0 | 02:05.870

125. Because salespeople and IT directors get along really, really well when their cell phones stop working or a computer just breaks out of nowhere and all of a sudden I need a new computer. That’s why you are the redheaded stepchild.

Speaker 1 | 02:23.480

Yeah, for the most part. I call it the redheaded stepchild. I call IT redheaded stepchild because we spend money. We do not necessarily directly make money. Yes, we make money in the fact that we keep salespeople running. We keep our account coordinators, which is basically sales support. We keep our PMs up and running. We keep our designers up and running and updated and those. So in reality… We don’t make money directly, but indirectly we do help the company make money.

Speaker 0 | 02:59.818

You guys do a ton. And I think you guys are growing fast. And give me an idea of kind of just how many end users that you are in charge of on a daily basis, because I think that tells a pretty good story.

Speaker 1 | 03:16.505

When I started with the company about six years ago, we were about 85 employees. Now we are 362 employees with 10 locations. So we have grown and we only had three locations when I started six years ago.

Speaker 0 | 03:37.244

And IT staff,

Speaker 1 | 03:39.345

how large? IT staff, we are a staff of four and we just hired an IT director. So basically right now, four and a half because he’d only been here a week. But we are a staff of four.

Speaker 0 | 03:54.597

So that’s, let’s see, I’m going to do some basic. Can we say 350 end users? Is that about right? Yep. 350 divided by four.

Speaker 1 | 04:02.843

It’s about 80-something employees.

Speaker 0 | 04:04.944

Per one person?

Speaker 1 | 04:06.245

Yes.

Speaker 0 | 04:08.687

What’s your strategy there, or how do you guys deal with that? In other words, what are all the, kind of give me just like a general idea, like what is the help desk like? What’s your typical daily tickets? I just want to, you know, how do you support that many people and build a culture at the same time? Or what is the it culture there?

Speaker 1 | 04:26.840

It’s very difficult. Um, but what we do is we all cover each other. So if one guy’s out, that’s okay. The other three pickups slack on a daily basis. I can average anywhere between 150 and 250 tickets a day. And that’s, and what kind of,

Speaker 0 | 04:46.477

I’m just like, what’s the average? What would you say is like the, the, The biggest, the biggest, what’s the ticket, the ticket bottleneck right now?

Speaker 1 | 04:55.573

Really the ticket bottleneck is we get a lot of frivolous tickets is best way I can describe it. Simple, all my mouse doesn’t work. An archon, did you change the batteries? Oh, no. Okay, they changed the batteries and mouse works. Those are the type of things that really kind of can bog us down because we’ll ask a question and they don’t respond for 15, 20 minutes. So we move on to a new ticket and then they come back. So it’s kind of one of those that we try to hit the easy ones first because they’re easy. Let’s get the easy ones and then we move on. I get phone calls more than I do tickets. Uh, my cue is usually the level three, four type level. I think it’s guys can’t handle it. I get them. So my tickets grow when they can’t handle something. Um,

Speaker 0 | 05:44.404

what’s your coaching too? So, so you have a, you know, you gotta have a small team, so you’ve got to be providing some coaching to your guys, coaching to a, how do you speak to end users? How do you talk with them? Kind of like what’s your, you know, your culture, like your culture of response to them. How do you coach? those that are below you to deal with the preventing the battery in the mouse or do we have any any like tricks of the trade or ways of reducing ticket uh i don’t know what you call it like you know ticket strain if that makes sense or how are you coaching your guys a lot of times i do i i i tell them look if you have two

Speaker 1 | 06:24.106

people from the same department go to the manager and say hey we’re getting a lot of tickets uh about batteries and mice. Is there a way we can keep extras in your department or something to show them, hey, here’s how you do it. Or what I also tell them is to show them. Show them how to change the battery. Show them, say, hey, when this red light comes on, you need to change your battery. The other way we do it is we try to do a knowledge base on our ticketing system. So we type in Somebody says, oh, the mouse doesn’t work. We type in user change batteries, whatever, and we put it in the knowledge base. So the user can search the knowledge base and say, oh, my mouse doesn’t work. Let me try changing the batteries beforehand. And some users…

Speaker 0 | 07:14.431

What’s the knowledge base like? How do they know that it even exists?

Speaker 1 | 07:17.753

It’s on the homepage for the ticketing system. So when the ticket homepage comes up, it has open a ticket, it has knowledge base, and it has your history. So any history of the history of all the user tickets that were opened by that user is in their history.

Speaker 0 | 07:33.121

So they can be mouse battery changes is probably sets off a red flag.

Speaker 1 | 07:37.722

Exactly. So it’s kind of one of those things that, and we’ll walk around and we’ll show, you know, we’ll show people how to change the batteries. We’ll show people how to, you know, you know, pull out their USB, the USB dongle for the mouse and plug it back in. Sometimes, sometimes windows just, forgets it and you plug it back in oh it works okay good and walk by i get a lot of shirt tugs that way um as i call shirt tugs when i’m walking downstairs by somebody’s desk they’ll say hey greg i have a problem um i’ve had other people call those drive-bys yeah uh yeah um because i’ve had a couple people kind of tug my shirt when i’m talking to somebody um just kind of let me know that they have a problem um managers executives don’t in general don’t usually open tickets. They’ll call me or they’ll call my next in line, my IT coordinator to solve their problem. We have the ability to remote to everybody’s laptop that has a laptop here in the company. We can remote to it, whether it be in New York, UK, Connecticut, here in California, Seattle, wherever the office is, we can remote in 24 hours a day. So we have that luxury of basically saying, okay, I’m going to remove your mouse, I’m going to add it back in. So we just remove it out of Program Manager and remove it out. And it works. Nine times out of ten, it’s going to work. Sometimes with Logitech, we’ve had some issues, as other people out there have had, called crosstalk. And it crosstalks and the mouse stops, or it’s very slow, or it’s very jumpy. Um, usually we swap it out with like a Microsoft, um, if there’s too many people around them, those are little tricks that you learn as you go through, as you go through your day. Yeah. You know, you learn those things. Um, I have, uh, I have about 28 years experience in it. So the guys will come to me, Hey, I’ve got, I’ve got this problem. Here’s how you, here’s how you, let me ask you, what have you done to solve it? Um, I always ask them first before I. before I direct them in a different way to solve the problem. Because I want them to learn how to do the troubleshooting that’s forgotten. It’s a forgotten art to be able to troubleshoot and figure it out for yourself.

Speaker 0 | 10:08.883

Do you think there’s a certain culture or personality type that an IT manager, IT director, system admin can be labeled to? Just curious. Is there a real stereotype of the IT guy? And I’m just asking that because what, you know, if you’re running into that, how are we, I was doing this, I guess, like, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie, What About Bob? Have you ever seen that movie? It’s kind of like, you know, it’s just funny at the end because he’s like, oh, some free associations, a dog, a log, you know, and I was doing, so I was thinking about this morning. I was like, oh, I’m just going to do some, some free associations with, you know, around. uh, it directors and just like my thoughts on it. And it was, you know, widgetized self actualizing graphical user interface that is easy to use and self trains. Um, you know, and then I started thinking like, what could we, what kind of things could we coach around it, which is like, you know, be authentic, be involved, be knowledgeable. And I’m thinking that as the opposite of the guy that’s hiding in the server closet, you know, with like the lights dimmed down, like people are sliding under the door to him. You know what I mean? Um, so what are there as you grow fast and your, your end users are growing fast, what, what would you say the culture of it is in your company? Um, how we’re talking with end users, how are we influencing end users? How are we communicating with them and kind of creating those bonds?

Speaker 1 | 11:44.905

I T I teach my guys even first, when I first bring them in, uh, there’s two statements I make to them the first day they walk in the door. One, I will never ask you to do something that I am not willing to do or have done before, or have not done before. The second statement is never talk down to an end user because that they already feel, they already have that feeling of, oh, this is a dumb question. Right. And in reality, there is no dumb question in IT. It’s just a question you don’t know.

Speaker 0 | 12:17.962

Do you have software developers? Because they talk down to people, by the way.

Speaker 1 | 12:21.023

Of course they do. Of course they do because they’re the guys in the back corner with the lights off, with their headphones on, and their screens bright so they can be left alone. I used to work for a developer company, so I’m very familiar with those guys. The lights were off, they had ping pong tables, they had beanbags, they had big screens for movies and sports, and a lot of them were European, so they were watching soccer. So yeah, I’m very familiar with that entity of what sometimes we get roped into as an IT person. Oh, he’s just the guy in the server room. The guys out here, we walk the floor quite a bit. Kind of first few weeks they’re here, I have them walk the floor. So people get to know them. They talk to people. My IT coordinator is a very quiet guy, doesn’t talk very much. And I had him do the same thing. him go down to for two weeks just walk the floor talk to people uh because you have to talk to people um he likes to be he likes to be the guy in the in the server closet not really talking to anybody but i get after him and say no you have to go down and and talk to people um so it’s it’s a different i could i don’t think i could find a stereotype because it’s it used to be the nerd you know the guy with the glasses the nerdy looking guy with the tape in the middle of his glasses, holding his glasses together was the, was the IT nerd. Oh God, that’s, there’s the IT guy. Um, I watched a, I used to watch a show and I’m sure you’re pretty familiar with it called IT crowd. Um, and that holds a lot of the one guy in there, um, the software, uh, support guy, you know, glasses, uh, talks really fast, talks in code that most people, it goes right over their head. Uh, when they start getting glazy eyed, um, you know, you’re talking over them. That’s what I try to avoid because we have a lot of young people here. And although they’re young, they are not necessarily as techie.

Speaker 0 | 14:30.321

Oh, they might be though. So that brings up another question is, what do you do about the end users that might actually be smarter or actually pretty smart to be dangerous, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1 | 14:39.605

And that’s the one thing too. And that’s the other pitfall that you have with IT is, is… Some people have a little bit of information and those are the dangerous ones because what they do is they try to fix it. And they try to fix what’s going on and they just sometimes can make it worse. Other times they fix their own problems and we don’t even hear from them. So it’s a kind of a double-edged sword. I like them, but also they can be a little bit difficult in my day-to-day work because they create more problems for me or they fix it. So it’s kind of the fence. You’re either on one side or the other. And everything is a little bit different. They try to fix everything. If they can’t fix it, they call us. But by the time they come to us, it’s really a problem. And then we have to really develop a solution for the difficulty. Or it takes us twice as long because we have to go all the way back out and fix what they did and then try to fix it.

Speaker 0 | 15:41.526

What do you think is the biggest… I would say like… time waster or thing that’s really, I guess, breaking up system admins or IT managers days? What’s the worst thing that’s killing you guys right now? And that’s like it could be in general across the board. You know what I mean? It could be like any company. If you were asked, like we surveyed 200 IT directors and we found that this is what kills their time and breaks up their day the most.

Speaker 1 | 16:16.726

For us, especially, probably, and a lot of companies I’ve spoken to, other IT managers, and they have the same problem, is phishing. People out there nowadays are making millions off of phishing emails. And phishing emails are basically disguising themselves as the CEO, asking them to wire transfer $1.5 billion to a customer. And this is the customer we need you to transfer because we need furniture from.

Speaker 0 | 16:44.582

And they basically say, I’m Greg from InsideSource, but they spell InsideSource like S-U-R-C-E dot com or dot org or something like that. Correct. Buy that domain and then send you an email after they’ve researched you on Facebook.

Speaker 1 | 16:58.835

Correct. Okay. And they know the CEO’s name.

Speaker 0 | 17:03.238

What have you guys seen? Like what kind of phishing emails have you seen?

Speaker 1 | 17:06.702

We’ve had ones that the most common one now recently is… where they’ll ask for three gift cards from Amazon in the $2,000 increment. It’ll be from, it could be from somebody who’s out at a meeting and somebody gets it and says, oh, I got to get these, I got to go down and get these cards or I got to order these cards because this VP has requested it for their salespeople. Not realizing that if you take a second to look at the return email or you look at… the spelling of the email and you look at it a little bit closer, it’s either incorrect spelling or the verbiage is incorrect because it’s not part of the English language. It’s amazing. We’ve had some from, we’ve had phishing from Nigeria. We’ve had phishing from the UK. We’ve had phishing from Russia. We’ve had phishing from all over the world. Um, and we’ve had some people click on it and actually go get the, go get the, the. gift cards because it’s come from the CEO or it’s come the VP of sales or it’s come from somebody in an executive position and they feel the need to do it because it came from them.

Speaker 0 | 18:23.565

So what’s the coaching look like or what are we doing? What’s the preventative measures, I guess?

Speaker 1 | 18:27.907

For a lot of ours are, we use a company called Mobi4, which will send out phishing emails on a schedule and they have training videos. And we point those people who we have proof that they recorded or added their data or whatever it is to these training videos. And we also show them with basically a snipped copy of the email. Hey, look, just so you know, this return email address obviously is not our CEO’s email. It’s pretty obvious. So what you can also do is run your mouse over it and it will tell you the return email. verify that it’s his before you do it. We’ve had people click on them on their cell phones and actually have text message conversations with who they think is the CEO, but isn’t. And then they’ll send email, they’ll send text messages. Oh, I need a gift card. You know, I need you to do me a favor. I’m in a meeting. Can you send me two gift cards? And we have some people in the field that all they have is phones and they don’t really pay attention. They’re texting back because they’re thinking it’s the CEO. So- A lot of that is training. It’s like, look, you know the CEO is not going to send you a text message asking you to do this. Exactly. You understand he’s not going to send you that kind of email. Or that kind of text message.

Speaker 0 | 19:49.942

That’s like me trying to tell my dad, hey, Microsoft’s calling me again, telling me that, you know, I need, you know, Microsoft support’s calling me. And it’s like, you know, no, Microsoft will never call you.

Speaker 1 | 20:00.225

Exactly. It’s those kinds of things. And not everybody understands that because they have a lot of times, we have a lot of designers and a lot of sales support that this is really their first job. They’ve gotten out of college and they’ve come to work for us. And so they don’t understand a lot of that stuff. Um, because when they’re at home, oh, it’s junk mail. Uh, cause we know a C the person’s name isn’t going to send me any, anything because I don’t work for them. Those kinds of things. Um, a lot of it is, and we’ve got users are getting better. Um, we’ve had executives click on it inadvertently, um, cause they thought it was a legal document they were waiting for. Um, but then that we’ve tried to give a little echo a little bit further and show them and teach them, Hey, I understand you’re waiting for this, but there are certain things that you need to look for. As an executive, you need to lead the charge in understanding what to look for. And we’ll go through some one-on-ones, either myself or I’ll have, I have a project manager, and she sets up some things with consultants that we have that come in and help us out with that. Because we can’t always have the time. So we do lunch and learns. We do… I’ve just started using a company called Darktrace. They’re great. They can monitor our network and try to kill the phishing attacks prior to them even either coming in or even going out. If somebody accidentally clicks on it and there’s too much traffic that it sees as, wait a minute, this is not normal traffic. I’m going to put a stop to it until my admin says it’s okay and then sends me a notification that it stopped it. So it’s, it’s, there’s a lot of tools out there, but the first and foremost is the person six, basically what I say, three feet between the keyboard and the chair. It’s that person right there. That’s your first line of defense is teaching them to do that.

Speaker 0 | 22:06.242

Yep. The, I want to switch just because I’m thinking about this and it’s been a theme that’s been kind of reverberating through the shows lately. And that is mentors. Do you have any mentors or do you have anyone that if you think back, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be IT, it could be anyone because it’s just important how people affect our lives. I’m just curious, are there any great mentors that you have had in your life and why were they great?

Speaker 1 | 22:38.294

I have. I’ve had good bosses, I’ve had bad bosses, I’ve had horrible bosses. I’ve had a couple really incredible bosses who took the time to either take me under their wing and show me how to be that leader that you want to be. Also to teach you the old skills. And I’m sure you can understand when I say that, the old skills of troubleshooting. Looking at a problem, analyzing the problem. Square one, where do you start at? Talking to people, talking to executives. Talking to executives is very difficult for beginning IT people because they feel nervous when they’re around. If you had to go talk to Mark Zuckerberg, would you feel nervous? Or would you just feel confident in what you were doing and could explain? to him basically what the problem was. And that’s, that’s where I, that’s kind of what I use. I have no problem. Well,

Speaker 0 | 23:51.420

if you had a problem, if you were going to talk to Mark Zuckerberg because of a problem that happened,

Speaker 1 | 23:56.821

right?

Speaker 0 | 23:57.361

Why were these million accounts like,

Speaker 1 | 24:01.942

but I mean, I use him as an example, but what I’m saying is if you’re going to a CEO or a VP of a company, you, you have to be confident in what you’re doing. And I’ve talked to my share and I still talk to my share. My CEO here sometimes will come at my desk and chit chat with me. You have to have that ability and confident. And I try to instill that in my guy and in my guys here, especially is when you talk, when, when the CEO comes to you, talk confidently to him, don’t be afraid of him. He wears, he wears pants the same way we do one leg at a time. He gets up in the morning, he has his coffee just like we do. You talk to him. just as you would be talking to me. or you talk to him just as you would be talking to, and I have a lot of young guys, as your mom and dad. You have that respect. You don’t talk down. You can joke with him.

Speaker 0 | 24:57.825

Don’t go there, man.

Speaker 1 | 24:59.065

Yeah, but you can joke with him. There’s a point where the joke…

Speaker 0 | 25:03.366

I mean, don’t go there with the kid and the parents and talk to the parents with respect.

Speaker 1 | 25:07.507

Exactly. That doesn’t happen much anymore. But nowadays, especially, CEOs want that. They want to come down and talk to the people out here. You know, my CEO will come upstairs sometimes and just walk the space and talk to people, say hi to people and all of that. His door is open. You can walk in and talk to him at any time.

Speaker 0 | 25:28.862

Well, today, in order to be successful in this world, it is absolutely a team effort and everyone must be working together in a coordinated fashion towards, you know, like one vision or goal or whatever. So however, you know, speaking to these people. showing that you understand that they’re trying to achieve a goal and that you can speak to them about how your what you’re doing is a piece to that and how maybe you can creatively add on to that piece as well to help drive that goal even further is how you speak to them confidently.

Speaker 1 | 25:59.465

Well and a lot of small companies, small businesses like this, the CEO is not a technology driven guy. He is out to sell his product. That’s what makes him his money. That’s right.

Speaker 0 | 26:17.685

Sell furniture and sell it.

Speaker 1 | 26:18.786

That’s right.

Speaker 0 | 26:19.987

Move a lot of it.

Speaker 1 | 26:21.428

And so in his vision, that’s where he comes to us and says, look, I want to streamline this process. Or I want to add technology to our portfolio to sell to our customers. How can I do that? And that’s a big deal for small IT departments. We use a lot of video conferencing. We have gone, in the last two years, we have gone from probably two or three rooms of video conferencing, like the boardroom and all that, to every room having video conferencing. We have touchscreens. We have cameras all over the place. We have speakers and mics all over the place. We have… All kinds of stuff. We’ve had to set up special network setups for our video conferencing. For those who understand it, QoS. We put a separate VLAN in just for video conferencing because it takes a lot of backend overhead to run some of that stuff, especially when you have seven, eight meetings going on at the same time.

Speaker 0 | 27:34.702

Absolutely. Especially if those eight meetings are happening all over in various different parts of the world.

Speaker 1 | 27:39.644

That’s right. I’ve had,

Speaker 0 | 27:41.505

let’s see, India, the UK, Canada, and the United States all need to be on the same conference call, all need to be drawing with dongles on the screen and having them collaborate and be able to collaborate and draw all at the same time in real time.

Speaker 1 | 27:56.151

Yep. When we have an all-hands meeting, not everybody comes to the corporate office. Right. Our all hands meeting has music, PowerPoints, microphones, everything else. And that falls under us. And that is a big deal. That is when you have employees coming in, you want to have a good meeting. You don’t want to have any glitches. You try to test as much as you possibly can. And, and when you have other people kind of butting in and saying, oh, I need him up front now. No, I told, I scheduled 10 minutes prior to him going up front. to set up his lapel mic, set up the mic to make sure there’s no feedback, set up the system, make sure the system’s running right before he even walks up.

Speaker 0 | 28:40.145

So you’re the AV guy too.

Speaker 1 | 28:41.326

I’m the AV guy too. So yeah, me personally, I wear about seven hats on a given day. So as a manager, you have to be able to do that. I would never expect my guys to do that.

Speaker 0 | 28:58.333

Last question. What do you think about… staying ahead of the curve for the future? How are you future-proofing? How are you kind of forward-thinking versus just giving your network what it needs at the moment? Because a lot of times, obviously, what kills a lot of companies is fast growth. Obviously, that can hurt IT departments, especially when someone’s growing really fast. How are you guys future… What’s your future vision for the network? And how do you… How do you confidently forecast kind of what the network’s going to need and then communicate that?

Speaker 1 | 29:35.873

A lot of that comes down to when the executive team meets and they say, this is where we want to go in two years. This is where we want to go in five years. I have, then I get that, that, that list or that vision of what they want. And I sit down and I look at it. Okay. Does this mean we’re going to open two more locations? If it means two more locations, then the size of the location will determine what we put in. And we have our, of course, a cookie cutter, basically a cookie cutter network that basically a space, but you know, that only has 10 people gets this, a space that has 50 people gets this. a space that has 100 people, of course, you’re going to get this. And you’re going to have this. You’re going to, you know, the number of switches, the number of connections, number of access points, things like that. We have those in a spreadsheet that IT has that says, if they decide to merge a company, this is the process we go through. It all comes down to processes that can expand as we grow. The process stays the same. We just expand the scope.

Speaker 0 | 30:49.558

Do you have any massive server loads or CRMs or anything like that? Or is the majority of the stuff in the cloud using 365 and things like that? So is there not like a big resources load or gap there? I mean, I guess I’m thinking, how would you forecast different resources and stuff like that?

Speaker 1 | 31:04.130

Most of our stuff now, we do have some on-prem storage that is being rolled to the cloud, probably starting next year. It’s one of our big initiatives for next year is to move to the cloud more. But we already have Office 365 on the cloud. So our Exchange is already on the cloud. I don’t have to have it on-prem. Our AD, we have a server in each location, and that’s part of that cookie cutter. It has a domain controller with it there. We have backup AD in the cloud. So there’s all kinds of those things. Yes, we are kind of a hybrid at the moment. Eventually, we will probably be about 80% in the cloud. We still kind of have to have on-site either servers to do standard, simple stuff, print serving, DHCP, DNS, all of the processes or the services-related opportunities. File storage is probably going to be cloud for the most part. IT probably will not put their stuff in the cloud. We have an on-prem server that’s just strictly IT only, that has applications and utilities that we use and things like that that are faster to get. Even if the network’s down, we can still get to them. I have two Mophie cell phone routers. So if we ever lost something, at least IT would have access to still have stuff. I usually carry one with me. back and forth to my house. And then I have one in our AV pack that we carry with us. So we try to do our best in supporting the executives’initiatives moving forward for two to five, between two and five years. And that’s really all we can do is once we get that vision, then we kind of have, is our cookie cutter going to fit? into the scope of what they’ve come up with. If it doesn’t, we have to adjust. Okay, we have to add this, we have to add this. No acquisition of a company ever is the same because they have their own stuff. How do we integrate their stuff into our stuff? How do they integrate their CRM, which is on-prem, to the cloud version that we have? That’s where a lot of that comes in. We all have to work together and we all have a team of different people that handle different things. I have a software guy. I have a hardware guy that handles all the hardware. I have a laptop guy. We standardized on Lenovo. Standardization is important because then we don’t have to support 50 different types of laptops or desktops or monitors or whatever. We have set monitors for each department and that helps us out too. to expand because then we they can get up from one desk and move to another plug in and they’re good to go but generally the policies general policies that are in place policies procedures things like that kind of keep us together and keep us moving forward what’s your what’s your one piece of this what’s your one piece of advice to other

Speaker 0 | 34:30.518

people out there in the field in it of you know what would your main piece of advice be to you know to them, you know, on how to be in IT and still have a life at the same time?

Speaker 1 | 34:44.191

That’s a hard question. Because when I started in IT, you didn’t have a life. You were the low man on the totem pole. So sometimes you pull all-nighters. Understand that all-nighters are part of it. But my biggest thing is, when you go home, you’re always going to have most IT people carry laptops with them home. When you are at home, Don’t log in unless you absolutely have to spend time with your family. Um, I have regrets that I didn’t get to spend that much time because I was so busy with work and I’m busy here. Um, but as a single guy now, I can do whatever I want to. I’m not going, you know, I don’t have anybody at home, but yeah, take that time for your family because it’s important. de-stress. If you can do things outside of work that, you enjoy doing, do it. Don’t let IT control everything you do.

Speaker 0 | 35:44.455

I think that goes in general too. I think that’s just in general with anyone at work.

Speaker 1 | 35:48.457

At IT especially, because we sometimes have to work till midnight because we’ve got a deadline of Monday morning, we have to be up and running. So sometimes we have deadlines that we have to meet and we do have to work weekends, but try not to work. my guys too much, too many weekends at all in a month, one, two at the max. And I try to reschedule and I try to schedule it out. So they don’t, because you know, they have a life too.

Speaker 0 | 36:17.265

I mean, me personally, I like just beating up other people in the morning early. That’s how I, and getting, and vice versa, getting beat up myself.

Speaker 1 | 36:26.631

Yeah. Early morning and then get it out of the way. And then I’ll be right. Or a salesman. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 36:31.775

man. Well, Hey, Thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it. I look forward to seeing your guys’success in the future. Obviously, anyone that needs office furniture, you know, inside source. I mean, if you guys are providing furniture for Facebook and everyone else, you should be for the entire, you know, any business in the US. So excited to be working with you guys in the future. And thank you for being on the show, Greg.

Speaker 1 | 36:53.250

Thank you. Appreciate your time.