Speaker 0 | 00:00.180
We went from 325 employees to over 500 employees during COVID.
Speaker 1 | 00:06.282
Hadn’t been fun.
Speaker 0 | 00:08.023
Yeah. We also grew in revenue from about 350 million to almost 700 million.
Speaker 1 | 00:24.870
So everyone out there listening, we’re doing this off the cuff. podcast today. This is my first time ever speaking with John. So John, thank you for taking time to speak with me here. I have way too many computer screens up at the moment, but just why don’t you just take a second, just introduce yourself and tell me what you do for a living.
Speaker 0 | 00:49.097
Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. My name is John Gillespie. I’m the director of IT here at Megacorp Logistics. down in Wilmington, North Carolina. I kind of run the IT department for our third-party logistics firm.
Speaker 1 | 01:05.122
Which is cool. I like, do you golf?
Speaker 0 | 01:09.283
I do.
Speaker 1 | 01:10.023
You have to golf if you live in North Carolina. I have a feeling that you pretty much have to golf. Our headquarters is down there, at least one of my partner company’s headquarters is down there, Converge Network Services Group, which we’ve merged with AppSmart recently. But regardless, every time I go down there, it’s always… putting competitions and golf tournaments and i’m like it is sticky down here but um i like to surf too and i heard there’s some good surfing somewhere around there yeah it’s not bad uh we have a couple breaks over at uh right school beach here in town sound
Speaker 0 | 01:43.935
like you know what you’re talking about yeah yeah i surf as well yeah i recently moved back here from hawaii oh my gosh all right so what do you
Speaker 1 | 01:55.580
All right. So forget it. What’s how many? Well, what’s your what’s your favorite board? What do you surf right now? How old are you? How much do you weigh? What’s your height? We need to get all this stuff out in the open, you know?
Speaker 0 | 02:09.990
Right. No, it is helpful, especially now with all the volume calculators out there. So, yeah, I’m 37. I’m six, two and about 202 pounds.
Speaker 1 | 02:18.336
Oh, wow. You must be a long time.
Speaker 0 | 02:21.298
I do have. with my little four-year-old son we’ve got like an eight-foot wave storm foamy long board that’s super fun to play with on summer waves around here but i actually have a pisalian for like a little grobbler beautiful and then i and then i ride the slater design cymatic as
Speaker 1 | 02:38.532
a 510 it’s a super fun board wow you’re good you’re good you’re getting out you’re 200 you’re six two over 200 pounds getting up on a five six anyone out there that surfs i mean or five ten sorry Any, you know, my son surfs these little wafers too. And I’m like, no, I can’t do that. I got to maybe, is it too late for me in life? You know, I’m, I can get down, I can get up on this. Like, I think it’s a, I think it’s a six, eight, but to me, that’s about like as short as I can get. And I only really started surfing like two or three years ago. Um,
Speaker 0 | 03:13.285
if you, if you like that size, the like, um, channel islands, they’re middling, they make really fun, like six, eight, six, 10. I’m going to single thinner with trailers that kind of gets you between the short board or the long board, but still has like the rails on them just allow for really great flow. If you find any waves or some push, you know, otherwise like, you know, kind of like a go-to beginner intermediate, like without being too advanced is that a Hayden shapes the crypto crypto. I don’t know if you’ve ever written that. Yep.
Speaker 1 | 03:41.638
Nope. Son has one. He just actually, he just sold that. He just sold that for his pie.
Speaker 0 | 03:46.561
So yeah. Well, John, John Florence made the pie. That was super popular. but piezo does a pretty good job um kind of getting the foam right there on your chest for paddling and then once you’re up um the rails pinch toward the tails that actually allows you to do this and stuff so yeah i my i actually have the piezo that i have is a fire wire um so i use it when i kite board or whenever we do like just some fun play around towing sessions like behind the boat so
Speaker 1 | 04:14.780
Never thought this would happen. This is totally unplanned. This is so awesome. And without completely isolating all nerds and other IT people that might drive Harleys or do other gaming, some other kind of thing, it’s important. It’s important for numerous reasons because it shows that IT people are real people, have lives, and they do things outside of work for fun to, I don’t know, blow off steam or anything like that. What else do you do other than
Speaker 0 | 04:42.652
don’t tell me you do jujitsu also because that would just be like that would really make my day i wish but i am not uh jack freestone and i i’m not as flexible as to get into uh yeah i gotcha
Speaker 1 | 04:59.879
So, but talk to me about importance of, uh, let’s just talk work-life balance here for a second. How often, well, are you a little, did you ever grow out of surfing or get sick of surfing when you’ve done it so much? Have you had your ups and downs in the surfing world? And now that you’re in North Carolina, do you miss Hawaii? And is it kind of depressing to not, maybe not have as much surfing or a regular break all the time?
Speaker 0 | 05:21.994
And you’re going to compete with Oprah on these feelings. Um, but yeah, all of those things are real actual. stuff right so um surfing was a major priority before i got married and like had kids especially being here in north carolina um you know unfortunately you maybe only get 30 good surf days a year um so you kind of have to like win the stars align right when it’s like nor’easter hurricane season you you use your feet there to get off work and go in hawaii it was much easier because hawaii gets probably like 300 good surfing days a year but unfortunately um hawaii has like a million people on a while um so i found myself having to be strategic there as well to pick like the abstract like bank holidays like columbus day my favorite day to go up on north shore and you’ll be able to surf like veldy land with like how many people would be out on there on an off day still 100 day no no you just you when you live there you just learn where to go and then you play like the negative social media games so this is for everybody in your podcast to learn yes lies of uh of it yes like if you live in the hawaiian islands or if you love being around them you actually choose to not tag where you are or tag tag the wrong place instead yeah so tag where you’re not people exactly right so that way they think that that’s the spot to go to so hundreds of people go there where the other breaks are still hidden um so it’s not bad i mean hawaii just gets crowded in the winter time um you know north shore that seven mile miracle like this has filled up any event everybody wants to be somebody so from sunset beach down to haleva like all those spots will fill but before before thanksgiving it’s actually not that bad to be up there and like october late october still get some good early swells and then now so it’s why they even moved the wsl you know their championship tour competition events like pipe got moved at the beginning of the year into january february um because this time of year this february into march all the sand’s been pulled off the reef just due to winter storm beatings coming out of the out of alaska um so you can find more breaks to get exposed and then if you can find weekdays like if you can get out on president’s day or like martin luther king day when everybody else is like still got real jobs and stuff you uh You can find some hidden gems.
Speaker 1 | 07:52.476
It’s, um, this is a perfect example of how surfers are for anyone that doesn’t understand this kind of lifestyle, how in depth, how in depth we can get and how in depth people are even way beyond me. And, um, yes, I don’t know what else to say about that. If you had to describe surfing lifestyle and compare it, well, we won’t go there. Cause we, we could, I know that I could talk about this for a very long time. Oh, one other thing, best surfing destination or holiday that you’ve ever taken or vacation you’ve ever taken outside of Hawaii. This is so not an IT show. Let go. But it is IT. What we’re saying is, is like, if you haven’t surfed before, you know, it’s never too late. Uh,
Speaker 0 | 08:40.691
I really liked, um, a break near Pavone’s in Costa Rica. Uh, um. K59 in El Salvador was really fun. It’s not the main break. It’s like a resort bay a little bit north. And then being right here in North Carolina, like a pretty affordable hopper flight with a lot of available breaks is getting over to like Rincon outside of like Aguadilla in Puerto Rico between Marias and domes and stuff there. It’s nice, you know, being just, you know, US territory.
Speaker 1 | 09:13.195
Being close by it’s a very you say that like you might have been locked up in jail before trying to serve for No,
Speaker 0 | 09:17.758
it’s just I had ability right? Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 09:22.882
Yeah, I got you. Oh, you can’t take yeah What does this have to say with IT work-life balance and well, so you got married children not as much surfing anymore IT job, what do you have to say about work-life balance in IT?
Speaker 0 | 09:42.179
Uh, definitely it’s it.
Speaker 1 | 09:43.760
And to give a picture and to paint a picture for us, to be fair, how many end users do you manage? Uh,
Speaker 0 | 09:50.766
22 in total, I think between the nine from our dev side and the other 13 between help desk. And then. um network voice and this cloud infrastructure services so your total employees is less than 30 um yeah yeah we we are about 555 employees as a company um wait how many 500 500 plus
Speaker 1 | 10:15.839
500 plus yep okay so 500 plus end users and your team is how big
Speaker 0 | 10:20.202
30 a little less 30 yeah 22 so that’s really good so it is you’re sitting
Speaker 1 | 10:29.081
It sounds like maybe you’re at a company that appreciates technology.
Speaker 0 | 10:33.824
We are incredibly technology focused. 24-7 of our operations either touch email phones or some parts of our transfer management system that we have built in-house up in our Azure cloud space. So we luckily have a lot of investment from our owner to the rest of the executive level down. uh to realize that the biggest disruptor we can do during this you know supply chain chaos that’s either here in the united states or globally is a big investment in digital space to find the right efficiencies but also increase um productivity and accountability in managing our customers and carriers not just data information but the loads to the pickups the drop spots and everything so um It’s nice. There’s a lot of disruption going on in this space right now, and we’re trying to be part of that.
Speaker 1 | 11:28.745
So how long have you been at the current company?
Speaker 0 | 11:34.010
It’ll be two years here in March.
Speaker 1 | 11:36.812
So you can…
Speaker 0 | 11:37.213
I actually worked with this…
Speaker 1 | 11:38.294
Go ahead.
Speaker 0 | 11:39.695
Oh, I used to work with this company actually back in 2012, 2014 as well. Okay. Before my wife and I got married and we decided to sell everything and get some cases, moved to Hawaii, just one-way ticket sale.
Speaker 1 | 11:50.905
That sounds amazing.
Speaker 0 | 11:53.606
Yeah. While you’re young, before you have kids and own a house, so it’s a little less risky.
Speaker 1 | 12:00.151
Okay, so two years, you came in right at COVID. Did you come in because of COVID, or did you just come in because it happened?
Speaker 0 | 12:07.156
So, I maintained my friendships with a lot of coworkers from here when I left and moved to Hawaii. In fact, at the company at that time, he threw us. Like quite a few of us were getting married around the same time. So we had a big engagement party. And then it also kind of lined up. We had a little just company soiree before moving. So everybody’s really happy with us, you know, kind of, you know, taking the leap of faith to, you know, go to Hawaii and just try things out, you know, beginning of our marriage. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 12:42.201
So kind of a key, but kind of a key point there was maintaining relationships. I’m trying to, I’m trying to, I’m trying to pull like important things out. That have helped people that have helped people along, you know, I maintained relationships and friendships. Thus, there was job openings in the future. Some people don’t do that. Well,
Speaker 0 | 13:02.061
because with work, you know, work in this IT space is like an incredible. collective bargaining journey, right? I like that. We all have to be comfortable in realizing that any tool that we implement today or any change we make today, we’re most likely going to life cycle that out in like three to five years, right? So, you know,
Speaker 1 | 13:22.476
I’d say at least three now. Do you think it’s shortened? Do you think that gap is shortened? It used to be five. I think it’s more like three now. And some people are pushing two.
Speaker 0 | 13:31.563
With the adoption of so many. cloud-based applications, it gets a little easier to get plug and play to actually get that shorter runway down. There’s still some kind of core commodity infrastructure items that like you try to depreciate and hold on to for a little bit longer from, you know, the actual physical hardware stuff, whether it’s like, you know, switches in the racks in your buildings, you know, you know, choice of like ISP in those physical locations and even getting down to hardware, like actually people use to do their job endpoint wise. But, you know, the stuff that’s less physical, less touch, less capitalized asset, like software licensing, cloud-based applications. As long as you can maintain that master data record and actually kind of own your data piece and own your identity piece, it does get a little easier that that three-year runway is probably true. Because the only reason that the industry has made those choices is for that flexibility, right? So almost, you know, Make us millennials and people behind the scenes here be comfortable with radical change like often hurting less because you’re that was quite judgmental What do I do myself?
Speaker 1 | 14:42.890
So well, first of all so many things came to mind just why just so you know we Everyone out there listening and I’m only telling you this now because there had to have been an you know There was an excuse as to why I missed the last call I do have to be honest with you. I was driving to the beach to go surfing. Remember how you said like, you know, around here, there’s only so many days a year, right? And we had just had the snowstorm and there are six foot waves rolling in on this like Ogunquit, Maine, Rivermouth. And I’m in, you know, I’m surfing in Maine. So we’re, it’s kind of cold. I mean, I don’t know if you ever surfed in California, that’s probably colder, but I would say it’s 35 degrees. And I don’t know how often you surf in a six mil wetsuit, but it’s
Speaker 0 | 15:24.856
a little restrictive to give it up or i i’ve given that lifestyle but i had a 5-4 built-in hoodie the name of the suit but it was built out of um like half moon bay and like that at california so it was the same style suit the same people would ride it out there at mavericks but i always felt like i was just surfing with like yoda on my back because it’s like you can like paddling it just wears you down like your stretches in there so the pop-up is slower so i just imagined luke and empire with yoda boots and boots and gloves and right yeah it’s never last that’s another thing people don’t realize like for some reason boots you take them on and off and like the only last like 10 times for the gear is like a yearly thing but you know it’s cheaper than skiing that’s true i actually just got back snowboarding skiing with my kids in wintergreen virginia for valentine’s day nice i would do you
Speaker 1 | 16:19.480
I would do skiing with my kids, but I have eight kids. So I did the calculation on that and I was like, nah, surfboards are cheaper. And winter wetsuits are, believe it or not, cheaper.
Speaker 0 | 16:30.364
We have so many children. My wife is one of seven, so she comes from a very big family too. Nice.
Speaker 1 | 16:36.087
What’s it like when you guys all get together? Do they all like each other still?
Speaker 0 | 16:39.348
They all have different personalities. They all love each other. Yeah, there’s definitely the like comes and goes. I feel like most family gatherings become fire hazards in my house because now that we’re all getting older and we have kids, like it’s compounded to be like in the third.
Speaker 1 | 16:54.655
Well, you already heard the fire alarm going off in my house. Oh, wait, no, that was the previous call. That was my previous call right before this. The fire. I’ve had the fire alarm go off on at least three or four podcasts. It’s yeah, it’s usually like a it’s a grilled cheese that got burnt and I moved in COVID. I moved to all kinds of houses during COVID. It was kind of crazy. So now I’m, my podcast studio is really like the third bedroom is like a bedroom that was off the kitchen. That was like an in-law type room or something like that. So really only, I don’t know, 15 feet away is a bunch of kids screaming right now. I know, I know someone’s going to hear him in the background at some point. So, um,
Speaker 0 | 17:41.911
that is the work-life balance though. Right. So, I mean,
Speaker 1 | 17:44.832
Well, for me, yes. Yeah. Go ahead. Are you working from home? Do you work from home?
Speaker 0 | 17:50.756
We do. We offer a flexible work environment. So today I’m in the office. But yeah, I work from home or in the office. So does most of my team. The only people team that are kind of required in the office is like the help desk service staff to be able to do setups and moves. the work-life balance through surfing as an amateur meteorologist, choices to have been having kids, but then we chose to move back from Hawaii, North Carolina, because we had kids in Hawaii, but it’s very far away from our family from North Carolina. We wanted them to know their cousins. So then being back here, instead of us continuing to work remote with the companies we were with in Hawaii, that were just more, you know, global operations and they were flexible, Just the investment in the community became important.
Speaker 1 | 18:39.374
Yes.
Speaker 0 | 18:40.155
You know, I was running into so many people in the town here we moved back to at dinner or at the beach or out on the boat. And then I would hear some of their IT challenges that they were with, especially here where I’m back at at Megacorp. I like it. It just made it easy to engage back with our CFO, but with him a few times over several months to talk about what it would be to change the IT department and to come into a role. And then, yeah, I accepted the job offer to come back here in like early, mid-February of 2020. And then, yeah, then.
Speaker 1 | 19:14.612
This is awesome for numerous reasons, because I must. My assumption here is you avoided all. This has nothing to do with recruiting or finding a job. It has more to do with digging and asking questions. what are current IT challenges, and then inserting yourself into the solution as a great hire.
Speaker 0 | 19:41.984
That’s right. Yeah, there was, since it was more of a personal relationship with previous employment, the conversations became more around… Just listening to the problems they had at hand and then asking more.
Speaker 1 | 19:55.768
I guess my point is, is it doesn’t need to be, it doesn’t necessarily need to be personal. It is personal, but I guess my point is, is what, what I want to ask you is, A, what were the challenges that people were experiencing at that time? And what kind of questions could other IT professionals or other people that may want to make a career change or make a career jump or grow? What should they be doing? Should they be going to a recruiter and providing their resume? Or should they be going to companies that they cherry picking companies that they actually really would want to work at where they would want to work at and asking specific pointed questions that would help them provide solutions and actually grow a company?
Speaker 0 | 20:42.556
Yeah, I think that there is an opportunity both ways. And I don’t mean that just to like not pick one, because if you know specific companies and you have the ability to network. and you have relationships with either employees there or through friends or family neighbors of employees there the conversation becomes much more organic to you know where they can be just forthcoming with those specific questions or challenges and then when you start talking through it like they immediately trust your feedback on it because they know you’re not just trying to sell them something or not trying to answer the question during like a new hire first time ever meeting you interview process but with recruiters There’s a lot of value recruiters that are very seasoned in their roles. They know how to connect the dots more from like an emotional intelligence and empathy standpoint with their pre-screening questions to then figure out that next culture fit that you might not actually been given an opportunity. So I like my wife as a recruiter for PPD Thermo Fisher piece. And she’s much better. at understanding people than I am. I tell her I take care of robots and she takes care of people. You know, IT, like essentially like we’re supporting servers and cloud platforms. They don’t have feelings. It’s just the people around them have the feelings. But for her, in her recruiting role, she has to connect a lot of dots that you might not see in a resume or you might not see in future hiring manager conversations. That to me is invaluable, right? I mean, it’s kind of why those roles are there and why some specific questions have been made. You know, there’s, I think, work rules. There’s some people from like Google, they wrote that book. And it’s big and has a lot of different sections, but there are some benefits out of that book talking about better hiring, better recruiting, better interviewing practices.
Speaker 1 | 22:37.670
Work rules.
Speaker 0 | 22:39.631
Work rules. Yep. Have you read that one?
Speaker 1 | 22:43.373
No. But I worked for a large corporate conglomerate back in the day called Starbucks and had to do a lot of recruiting and management training. And we were big into kind of like behavioral interviewing. So really getting people to paint a picture, really like describe a situation and bring in names and stuff so that we knew that what they were telling us was not just snowing us with an answer, you know, that you would get specific examples of.
Speaker 0 | 23:13.302
how they performed under specific situations and stuff like that yeah remember who it was if it was microsoft or google or from that book but remember there was yeah recruiters are a first of all highly
Speaker 1 | 23:28.546
valuable from at least high level recruiters as well if they’re hiring for c level or high level management directors and above because a they can bring you people from your competition not that it’s always about cutthroat competition but They do do that and do it very, very well sometimes. Take a top performer from one company and place them in another company. And if we’re going to talk Google and Facebook and Netflix and all that stuff, then we know that happens. But yes. But what I’m thinking of is, let’s say someone’s not making any. Well, first of all, is the IT field, from what I understand right now, there’s a lot of job openings.
Speaker 0 | 24:08.745
There is.
Speaker 1 | 24:09.545
Okay. So. How does it feel to be wanted?
Speaker 0 | 24:15.499
It’s great. I mean, it’s, you know, from if anybody is trying to get a job out there right now, I mean, you can ask for significant salary raises and be taken seriously. Most of these companies, I mean, it’s no better time right now in the recruiters market versus the company market to kind of come in the door with your asks. Some of the hard part, too, is making sure that people. are telling the truth on their resume and they have a measure of success behind them that you know. will be valuable to you know what they’re taking over within your organization um you know and that i think that kind of comes just through reference checks and you know more than one interview session and then you know it’s kind of validating you
Speaker 1 | 25:08.957
know how they work with these tool sets or run these projects and done these things so i want to know what you’ve done in two years in the logistics field considering it’s an absolute insane um you insane field right now and you mentioned a lot of cloud stuff i don’t know i think you said something about amazon or azure or something but uh whatever that cloud stuff is out there is there what what kind of what kind of changes have you guys had to make do you know what the impact was numbers that type of thing we
Speaker 0 | 25:37.155
do we are um we are crazy this is going to be the only time during this that you I brag on the company, not from an ego standpoint, but just by the impact of digital transformation.
Speaker 1 | 25:47.422
Sweet.
Speaker 0 | 25:47.742
Do it. So, you know, for the last like 10, 20 years, right? Any Gartner conference you go to anywhere out there, there’s always this push for digital transformation, digital transformation, what it’s going to be, blah, blah, blah. There’s no better catalyst than COVID. And then no second better catalyst in this like supply chain transformation or transportation industry than the desire to like grab market share when the whole world was like. struggling in shipping. So here at Megacorp, we went from 325 employees to over 500 employees during COVID. We also grew in revenue from about 350 million to almost 700 million. So almost doubled in revenue.
Speaker 1 | 26:35.405
15% head, at least, I don’t know if LinkedIn has this number, right? But it says 15% head count. We’re going to fix this term. Everyone’s using headcount. Human capital. Let’s say human capital. Total W-2 growth, 15% in 2.6 years.
Speaker 0 | 26:55.013
That’s right.
Speaker 1 | 26:55.433
That’s nice.
Speaker 0 | 26:56.614
It’s been pretty crazy. But even this year, I think we’ve already hired 50 people just in the first two months of this year. So we’re over 550 people. And that’s not due to… some crazy drastic force that like accepted the world, especially in the United States, where we’re kind of the North American territory covered from Canada, US, Mexico. But the desire for just shipping time increases, the access to trucks, the access to for customers to be able to have the specific picks and drops and locations, just market share by volume has expanded. And you can see that with the more the people that are public. And so they have to do like SEC filings. So like CH Robinson, and And then the bigger companies in our space like TQL, Total Quality Logistics out of our area, even their numbers. So we’re just trying to keep up with that market. But through it, if we’re going through this growth, where we’re almost doubling in revenue, and then adding on at this point, more than 200 employees since the beginning of COVID through it, we couldn’t rely on traditional IT software and hardware infrastructure. So we looked at it. through the whole IT portfolio and stack and we changed probably 75% of our systems to try to find efficiency. Meaning we… Wow. Yeah. So we life-cycled out all desktops for laptops so people could work from home, but then come back into the office. Anybody that wasn’t direct in sales, we tried to find if we can move into the soft phone versus hard phone. Our main transfer management system application last august we migrated completely up to azure away from on-prem you know traditional servers you know sql backend storage and rnf sans we moved that up to the azure space to allow very quick point and click flexibility we did a huge investment information security we brought in a lot more defense in depth to try to like um cover all of our lucky kill chain stack also so we could start adhering to the government’s cmmc certification standards uh Yeah, we swing all of our Active Directory up to the Azure. We moved away from file shares to SharePoint. One drive in order to get people flexible. So no data was local here on-prem.
Speaker 1 | 29:22.173
Are you hiring for your team? Are you hiring for information technology? For IT. Okay, because you did something right. Because I’m looking at the total PyGraph dispersion, right? And I always love when I see that. A, well, first of all, 44% of your total headcount, again, human capital, is 44% sales. But what I love is that… The majority of your growth is in operations. 88% in one year of your growth was in operations department, meaning you’re hiring people to support customers and making sure things go smoothly, I guess just from a very simplistic standpoint. I don’t know if that sounds accurate to you. And you did such a good job at digital transformation. The information technology department’s the only one that’s down. You’re the only one that’s down in headcount. I guess you guys just did a really good job making robots.
Speaker 0 | 30:26.209
Well, we have a lot of managed services partners. Okay. So, you know, we made sure that when we brought on like a whole bunch of new ISP vendors and then network managed vendors, you know, we partnered with, you know, those outside providers to augment our help desk staff. And we did the same within development. So, you know, we can hire very key roles that provide a lot of. business value i.e like i.t translation to like business outcome results yep and and because we are not a technology company but we’re a company that uses technology and we have a heavy technology adoption we want to lead with our technology forward it’s adamant that we understand business processes and we do better process mapping to make the tools effective but then also to make sure that customer carrier contacts have that correct they’re getting good data out of our tools but end users are able to use the tools to do the work as a human but again the tools of the robot support an industry that runs 24 7. so um yeah we our investments were in cloud-based platforms um you know in data migrations in our erp system migration for larger financial systems but then also heavily invested within business partner organizations or managed service partnerships with us methods yeah
Speaker 1 | 31:46.582
You sound fairly empathetic, you know, for someone that, that shot himself down and said he works with machines, you sound fairly empathetic and pretty human centric. That’s a compliment.
Speaker 0 | 32:00.848
Yeah. I appreciate that. Um,
Speaker 1 | 32:04.169
and I’m just hoping that we didn’t lose anyone with all that surfing talk at the beginning because, because the last five minutes have been outstanding. So. podcast you know as well hopefully they understood you know how value because you just pretty much sold the digital transformation argument like across the board without any fear of it was a lot of times back in the day it was like why are we moving to the cloud that’s replacing our jobs and that type of thing and it’s gonna i’ve heard people say before you know the it the old it manager the old it guy is is not going to be needed anymore and he’s going to get completely replaced with managed service providers and From listening to you, I would completely disagree because there has to be a strategy and a vision for the IT department. Maybe some areas of IT will become obsolete or not needed for, maybe you won’t need an employee, so to speak, or a headcount for a certain aspect of IT. But what’s your thoughts on that?
Speaker 0 | 33:10.872
Internally, I have tried to create. you know different slides communications executives for the last couple years about commoditized it versus business value driven it um and not in a way like i’m not a big fan of outsourcing for outsourcing’s sake um i also don’t think that everything in it can like lose the human like element because the only reason that we moved from paper and pencil to do the work and started making things in the computer was for data accuracy, was for efficiencies and realizing that this is also going to have a cost with it, but it’s going to allow us to scale, it’s going to allow us to have historicals, we can get a lot of analytics. So, you know, the last three companies I’ve been with in previous discussions with like leadership, excuse me, outside of the IT space, it really just comes down to that who, why, what, when, where, for any approval conversations or any next steps. on funding choice of projects digital transformation conversation within it right so the short answer is people processes and things so the who is what do you need who are these people you need in the organization the human capital standpoint people standpoint to do the job effective for that specific business and there’s no single one fits all that you can just have a blank physio chart in that organization can directly swing from you know healthcare to to banking, to government, to transportation. You have to understand that business and where the alignment needs to come to make sure you’re staffing key roles correctly in order to support. to your point before, operations for that efficiency gain output, which is the maintaining the relationships with those customers as you get them through sales, but then also maintaining sales so that they feel empowered and confident to then go find that next customer. And when they shake hands and they get signatures, they get contracts, we can deliver. And then there’s also just the trust in the industry from our branding and marketing standpoint. If we were to release information, we go public and there’s financials. or, you know, just interactions of bigger companies for how many employees we have versus that consistency and outcomes so that it can be supported. The reliance on IT systems is a requirement. So, you know, they there’s a certain level of professionalism that I think the world requires these days whenever they put their trust and faith into a company that has a lot of IT systems behind it. And the best things we can do in the stewards of our positions at this time, you know. in some leadership within IT is to connect those dots and protect the company, protect the people, protect those families, you know, by, you know, investing in security solutions, investing in high availability solutions, whether that’s cloud or on-prem, investing in that stability, looking for things that are like truly scalable. You know, they’re not, you know, just one-off things you pick up from a Best Buy shelf. You know, you spend the time to do the necessary RFP work to find those solutions. And then behind it. You can’t put all your eggs in one basket of a managed service partner and outsource. You still want somebody to understand that platform, understand that vendor, understand that vision with the strategy internally to help with that translation, with that partner, with those services teams to make it scalable. Because, you know, there’s a lot of big players in IT space now. I mean, Amazon took over in that cloud computing. Microsoft has its space. Google has its space. you know dell acquired emc um there’s a lot of variety and there’s a lot of options out there what’s hard is unless you have the expertise and the right people on your team it’s noisy and and it takes a lot to figure out the right tool the right options the right process change within that tool set without having the right people behind it so and i the
Speaker 1 | 37:18.886
how I guess how do you when you say the right people what do you mean specifically in other words when you when you go to evaluate and it could be however you want to break this down it could be a what were the challenges when you came in and did you know if you had the right people or not and how do the right people make it less noisy because they have experience or they know they have a pulse in the marketplace they know the marketplace they know the everything that you just mentioned What is it?
Speaker 0 | 37:49.919
The Megacorp actually, before I came on, partnered with a consulting company and they started an internal org change even before I started. Once I came on, we took time to meet with the business to figure out what were the biggest IT challenges they had in the previous kind of administration, for lack of better words. For us to then decide how much we wanted to be inflexible between headcount, either adding new positions back. Or making sure contracts were correct with these managed service partners or development shops. Now, the people aspect of it, you know.
Speaker 1 | 38:26.881
First question, was the consulting company, in your opinion, accurate or a little bit off, needed to be changed? Or no, it was like, no way we’re doing this.
Speaker 0 | 38:41.011
I, like most people in IT. And very okay being only right 50% of the time. We’re honest with ourselves. Every project that we attempt, we have a 50-50 shot. This is going to work out well.
Speaker 1 | 38:55.467
Well, for you guys, it seems to be working out like at least 90. You’re batting like 99. You’re like a telecom SLA. You’re like 99.
Speaker 0 | 39:04.655
I wish that was true. Instead, it’s more, it’s just getting comfortable with failing fast and failing forward. So you just. you try to limit risk and then provide always an abc option so that you know there’s there’s no big failures that provide big big big f like outcomes where there’s negativity behind it um for it right so you know it’s just break
Speaker 1 | 39:26.768
it fast break it yeah gotcha but so but still though that was a nice political way of getting around that consulting question so you were like hey 50 50 they could be right like let’s flip a coin and like see if like they did they made the right decisions or like, Hey, we’ll run with this for a little bit and slowly make changes. Or, you know, was there some political gaming around this? I’m just trying to get an idea because a lot of people deal with. They still deal with IT as a cost center. They still deal with trying to convince upper management that, you know, there’s, they might not even know how to have those conversations or how to deal with those challenges, right? They might have shadow IT coming in and destroying their lives. So that’s kind of why I’m asking is like how, how you dealt with this particular situation coming in and having taken over from an old regime. And there’s kind of this quasi consulting solution bandaid to the old regime. I’m just curious how you kind of said, kind of came in and took inventory and, you know, you know what I mean? And kind of took on this new role or you probably had an idea before you got on because you were having those conversations on the beach with whoever. But yeah,
Speaker 0 | 40:41.813
so I politically, if you step into these kind of director manager roles, even if it’s midsize companies or even some mid management, the best thing you can do at first is to just listen. Even if you have a gut feeling that you need to pivot or something, that’s a change. You haven’t earned that yet, so it’s too early to play certain chips. So you have to just listen and let it ride. So yeah, when I came in, I spent time with that consulting company, even spent time with a lot of the previous people that were around here just to kind of understand maybe some of the travel knowledge of what led to specific decisions behind it, even if the outcomes weren’t. you know, weren’t good at that time, you know, it still might have been the right play with the limited information back in the day. So unfortunately, the slow roll it, but behind the scenes was massive data gathering, right? So you never want to bring data to a knife fight, but if you’re going to step into any type of leadership role, you better be able to count your beans, right? So in IT world, so we all have to. We all have to play within certain rules. And so, unfortunately, you know, we have, you know, if you’re going to prioritize and execute and be accountable within the IT space, you got to understand your budget, either what their real spend was and where it’s going and always maintain that. You got to make sure you have an understanding of the IT portfolio and its alignment to the job descriptions of current people and roles. And then you also have to be able to understand the specific diagrams and processes that are around, like, your business continuity functions. meaning your priority systems that if there was an outage or there was a problem, what are the rule of the road to get it back up? What was the cause to it? And then how to maintain it? Because if you can balance out, you know, your cost, and then you can balance out the core business foundational IT pieces, you get more time and flexibility then to understand the coach up to coach out or manage up and manage out around the people to the roles. And then you’re no longer focused on, do I have, do I have to make Joe? Joe Smith or John Smith fit in this role? Or is this role what’s required for the business? So now who is the right person, whether it’s internal or external, and how do I fit that? But then if the person internally can provide value in other areas, that just becomes the dog and pony show to explain that to the executives of why we’re so different ways in IT organization. You know, the IT has had some challenges across all industries because that to your point earlier, things only last three years. And when tools only last three years or apps only last three years, you also have this challenge of adopting specific processes for longer. And obviously, you can make configuration changes and make tools aligned to the processes. But if you really want to drink the Kool-Aid, like within a Lean Six Sigma world or around Agile, you’ve got to get comfortable with, you know, small failures and the ability to change fast and to your point, to break in and fix it fast. But make the pain to the business not, they don’t feel it, right? It’s more behind the scenes. It’s in your sandbox environments, in your QA environments. It’s in your small fusion teams and your test dev cycles.
Speaker 1 | 44:03.040
It sounds like you’re drinking the Kool-Aid and making your own flavor too.
Speaker 0 | 44:06.683
It does. I mean,
Speaker 1 | 44:08.424
this is, no, no, this is great. The, you mentioned, well, so cost, core, time and flexibility. Sounds like an acronym we could make up. cct cctf the don’t bring data to a knife fight don’t bring i don’t think don’t bring data to a guy that dropped in on you in the waves and now you’re fighting in the waves either so that’s not gonna work you know that’s true i mean four percent of the time that people drop in on you you get away with it that’s like no um especially when you travel if you go to like somebody else’s break and you don’t know the pecking order there It is weird like that. That’s the one thing that I don’t like about surfing, I’ll be honest with you. There’s a lot of weird cultural things. It’s a little weird. Yeah. When you’re new to surfing, it’s just about having fun, which is how it should be, I think. But then when you get, like, real hardcore and you get different groups and you find out, oh, there’s this group here and there’s this little gang here. And then, like, these guys kind of own this area of the beach and don’t show up without, like, you know. Anyways,
Speaker 0 | 45:13.926
that’s… It is. Yeah, I saw… I’ve had to be more diverse, flexible in like sporting stuff. So, you know, I’ll choose to surf when only when it’s warm, like I used to have the a hundred degree rules. So the water in the air had to both add up to a hundred. Now I have it as like a one 20 degree. So both have to add to one 20. So, you know, I just live in the three, two wetsuit, nothing thicker.
Speaker 1 | 45:36.641
So 60 plus seven, right. That’s 130. That’s just trying to think that wouldn’t work in Maine. Maine gets hot. It was 72. We had 72 degree water last year. So. You’d have 70 plus 90 pretty easily. RFP work you mentioned. What’s your philosophy on your RFP work? Are RFPs a way to prevent vendors, get the right vendors? Can they be flexible? Is that just a fancy term for, hey, we’re trying to outline what we want and need? Is it a way to say, hey, put the people and the end users first, not the technology? Is it a, you know, what’s your philosophy on RFP work?
Speaker 0 | 46:16.652
mine is the three little bears so one crazy one two three little bears yeah is this a real thing is this a real thing or did you make this up i i don’t i think it’s a real thing um i just call it three little bears because i have little kids and i choose children metaphors these days three
Speaker 1 | 46:35.961
little bears to rfp this is a great i hope my My just my little note for my back office team that’s going to be listening to this podcast, hopefully not at 2x speed and be, you know, translating this and pulling out show notes. There is so much in this. Please get it right. The three little bears of our of the RFP process, whatever you want to call it. I don’t even know where you’re going with this, but it sounds great.
Speaker 0 | 47:01.626
I hope it I hope it works out for you. So why I call the three little bears is, you know, over the years for. proposing projects to get executive funding at various organizations, I found that if you go into the room knowing that you want them to make a decision, you have to take the approach that Costco does versus like Walmart or Amazon and you limit the decisions down, right? So it’s much easier to walk into Costco and say, I want to get a new washer dryer today. And they only have a couple to choose from, right? Or if you go down the aisle, they only have a couple to choose from for like those things. But then you’re comfortable making that choice because Costco has already decided that these are the best. quality for you to pick from, right? So I’m kind of mixing analogies. So what I like to do in my RFPs is everything is always to solve a business problem. So you start with that kind of first problem statement. What is the issue today that we’re trying to solve? And you meet with all the sales directors, the operational directors, managers, and you figure out their core piece first. What is the business trying to solve? You then translate that to an internal quantified matrix from an IT standpoint. What are the top nine or 10 things? You need to go heat map with these new IT vendors, which ones, green, yellow, red. If you’ve got multiple green, multiple yellows, multiple reds, and then you create a scoring around it. So green being a three, yellow being a two, red being a one in that matrix. And you compare your top like five or six options. Once you get down to those final three, you take those three to the executives, not just one. And you say, OK, this is what we did. We looked at all of them. Here were all the questions we asked the business. Here was how we scored it based on the business and the reviews. And here’s our top three options. And the reason I call it like one too hot, one too cold, or one just right, because you never know the business’s appetite. Will they make the decision because it’s too expensive? And when they look at the value of it and its impact in the operations of sales, you know, maybe not getting the one that’s the most expensive, best of both, will have the right outcome. Or they look at the one that’s too cheapest and they’re like, there’s too much risk. If we pick one of those top three that cost X. because it is super important. And then you kind of have that one that always usually comes at the top that’s right in the middle. It’s not too hot, not too cold, and kind of fits the business’s approach the right way. And it checks enough boxes that now you can use this kind of very basic version of RFP to set specific goals within the scope to prevent scope creep, but then also set an outcome that hopefully can be measured within the implementation of the choice of that project. Right. So when you get down to it, be like, OK, look, we’re not trying to rechange everything in the world. We’re not going to solve 100 problems, just going to solve these select few problems. And then you guys at executives, you can hold me accountable and our department accountable because here’s the dates for it. Here’s the cost for it. And here’s the things we agreed on. in the outcome better be fixed or better be changed. So it’s that the three things, three little bears. Love it.
Speaker 1 | 49:57.765
The, how do you manage your time? You mentioned not putting all your eggs in one basket. You mentioned the three little bears, challenges, politics, 75% of your stack technology stack was changed in two years. You’re married. You have kids. I’m assuming you served a couple days. What is your biggest life hack to time management?
Speaker 0 | 50:35.372
Trust. That would be it.
Speaker 1 | 50:39.434
Delegation. AKA delegation. Okay.
Speaker 0 | 50:44.395
Go right. No, it can go far, right? So because to me, it’s like a two-way street. Like I like, there’s a couple of people on my team that they, that we’ll go offshore fishing together. You know, we’ll grab the middle of the day when it’s 70 degrees outside and we’ll go play golf together. You know, a few of them are very aware, you know, consciously from previous. you know days and just the discussions of things that matter with us in life you know they they know that i surf or kiteboard or go out and go with kids and you know i know they love playing halo um so we we’re just honest with each other where we’ve got to get time back so if they know that you know i’ve got things teed up on my plate that are more important real life wise at that time you know whether it’s spending time with my kids because it’s you know my daughter’s on the swim team this year my son’s like playing baseball, just changing my work schedule to still be there present with specific scheduled phone calls, emails and stuff tethered to our company issued phones. But then making up for that time with the hours throughout the week and then vice versa to them. If they’re getting married or they’re going on vacations, we cover them as well. So it’s kind of that, if we’re going to function correctly as a team, the benefit is for the team’s benefit. and you kind of we all drink the kool-aid together right so i make it a priority to travel and to surf or kiteboard or play golf or spend time with my kids i make sure that they do the same things like i don’t expect anybody to be a one-man show for it to bottleneck at them and to work 68 hours a week if that happens um i try to go to bat with them with the executives to realize like you know they’re going over above and beyond like this is We should look at this as a performance situation to make sure they get specific bonuses so we recognize it. But also, this is not an expectation. Let’s move it forward and try to rebalance the work, whether we have to hire positions or we change the requirements based on where we’re at within the industry today to move through it. And then here, culture-wise, I mean, I play golf with our CFO. I play golf with the company owner and the sales directors and other vendors. You know, we all understand that to our knowledge, this is the only life that we get and we have. And if it is important for us to create that impact on people in our lives and on the family and friends, that we have to make time for it. And then I just always want them to be honest, just like I’m honest with it when it gets to the point that we aren’t in the work-life balance is unbalanced. And what do we need to change? Is this a people? processor tool problem right so um for us to get that lighted in the tunnel now we’re lucky that this company being you know still kind of like in a sense family owned in a smaller c-suite structure um in very much that cheers and mentality where everybody knows each other’s name yep we can have more candid conversations and we understand that people investment it’s a little less bureaucratic um but It’s still important. I don’t think anybody really gets out of this life unscathed. Nobody’s without direct or indirect tragedies, especially during COVID. I think out of this, we’re going to have to take a longer look at mental health practices and what that outcome is to make sure we open up doors for insider occupations to help people transition back to the new normal.
Speaker 1 | 54:28.054
What made you think of that? What made you bring that up after all this, the mental health thing? It just seems out of place, but not out of place. It doesn’t seem out of place, but it’s out of place. Like we were talking about, you know, it’s just interesting that you brought that up. So you brought that up for some reason. Have you noticed mental health issues within the company or just in general?
Speaker 0 | 54:51.660
I think in the IT space, across industries, especially in mine here, you know, it takes a lot to change the amount of systems we changed in two years.
Speaker 1 | 55:04.150
Yes. Okay. Now I get it. I get it. Enough. In other words, I’ve had IT guys that were called me like literally crying, crying. And I’m not saying that grown men don’t cry because they do. But they were crying over IT stuff because. I’m living in my, my, my two bedroom apartment and all the computers are getting shipped here. And I’ve got boxes stacked up in my, my dining room. And like, I’ve become the it department, my house has become the it department and everyone’s working from home and all this pressure and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m not getting paid anymore. So if that’s, if that’s what you’re talking about, then yeah. Okay. Enough said, I get it. That’s crazy.
Speaker 0 | 55:46.195
Yes,
Speaker 1 | 55:47.035
please.
Speaker 0 | 55:49.015
Um, I mean, there. There’s always pressures, right, in order to perform because we’re being paid to work. We’re not being paid to play. I wish I got paid to surf or play golf all day, but I’m not pro in those sports. So they’re hobbies. So those hobbies are more for me to attempt to stay more in physically fit shape or also to have mental health repeat. Yeah. Yep. In Hawaii, I would go kiteboarding with the guys at IBM. Right. So, you know, it’s pretty popular in California, especially in Silicon Valley area. And then surfing, you know, everybody in Hawaii is probably surfing. You know, somebody that surfs, anybody, everybody up there. You know, I go scuba diving with people here from work too. And then obviously golf, you know, golf is such a great networking business tool because you can make a lot of deals in the course. It’s a long time period and a lot of conversations can be had. But it also does allow you to get, you know, some vitamin D being outside and, you know, stretch your muscles, which is a huge benefit.
Speaker 1 | 56:46.971
Well said. Well said the most, one of the most well said it sales, non in sales, not in sales comments. The last question, you know, and I asked this a lot, but I want to know, I really want to know from you, if you’ve thought about this or if it’s the typical answer, I mean, typical, like Ride my 401k, make some investments and cash out eventually someday. And with the way that technology is changing so much and the world is insane right now, what is the end game for you?
Speaker 0 | 57:30.116
That’s a great question. It’s definitely,
Speaker 1 | 57:34.748
it doesn’t exist. I have yet to find someone in it. That’s like, I’m, you know, I’m, I got a bunch of Bitcoin on the side and I’m making some real estate investments and I’m going to stop. And I’ve got this own MSP, like dream, like, you know, app that we’re going to launch. And, uh, and then I’m going to be like, see you later guys.
Speaker 0 | 57:54.554
You know, like, um, this is going to be, I hope this doesn’t negate everything that I said. previously on oh i hope it does i really hope it does it’s like i listened to this for no reason what a load of crap the three bears the three bears yeah right basically get find
Speaker 1 | 58:14.747
10 vendors and cut down to three okay go um so uh a wise man once told me that
Speaker 0 | 58:27.060
When you die, your tombstone will not say director of IT, launcher of MSP, blah, blah, blah. Very sick people. That would be funny. That would be funny.
Speaker 1 | 58:37.027
IT director. Yes.
Speaker 0 | 58:41.050
Think about in our industry.
Speaker 1 | 58:42.851
Digital transformation madman. Okay. I like it.
Speaker 0 | 58:48.095
The only people that are going to have that type of notoriety or infamy or just. benefits of fame like post-death are going to be like in the steve jobs bill gates whatever i forgot about the rest of us he made a one button phone it’s ironic because he was making fun of you know pepsi and coca-cola you make sugar water like okay yes yes i enjoy those doc those documentaries i can’t remember who the actor was in one but he described when he had his conversation with Wozniak, you know, in the movie, I don’t know how it is in the book, I haven’t read it. But he was like, you know, I built the Apple II, what did you do? And he was like, I played the orchestra, right? He’s like, because you guys were the strings, you know, there was other departments that were the percussion, you had the brass and you had the woodwinds. But then he, as Steve Jobs, played the orchestra, right? The connecting of it. Nice. Shumi has always kind of like resonated, because the same thing you said for the other greats across industries, you know, Tom Brady and the QB roll out that cap in capacity, right? Michael Jordan and his change. He did it at the Bulls.
Speaker 1 | 59:59.071
It’s incredibly-What we value as- crazy important or famous or whatever it is might be actually worthless in the long that’s right what of time and and that in the true heroes might be completely nameless people that we don’t even ever meet or know yet it could be some dude in a village somewhere that you know i don’t know we
Speaker 0 | 60:22.881
all have some equidice you know yeah because like you and i could probably both have another hour conversation about people we’ve met in our life that have created an impact but might remember their names or remember the feelings and then they they move on with their life and you move on with it but you just know that it was like a core memory and core moment that had an impact so with that is like you know from from my side you know my um you know after losses and family and then changing of jobs and then you know getting married and having kids the importance factor kind of pivoted to more of like you know for honest ourselves like when we do pass it’s going to be that like you know beloved father you know brother, son, husband, those factors. Yeah. So anyone care?
Speaker 1 | 61:08.585
Like, will anyone care?
Speaker 0 | 61:10.286
Yeah. And so for that side, from an IT standpoint, career wise, where I see like a trajectory is more of like the journey, I haven’t really set up goals for jobs or directions or pays or roles as it is. I’ve been very fortunate that I found certain successes and projects. And then I’ve also you know found relationships with the networking through companies and then i found something that i’m okay i don’t want to say i’m good at but you know being able obviously to make a living and support my family and hopefully provide a good impact to them so i
Speaker 1 | 61:45.242
just want to you know keep doing this as long as somebody will will have me and then yeah i don’t think that shot down i i don’t think that did anything of unwinding everything that you said at the being at the beginning of the show at all whatsoever it’s just that That’s kind of why I always ask about time management. That’s why I always, that’s why I started with work-life balance and surfing because personally me, my goal has always been to work to live, not live to work. Right. And I’d like to work a lot less if I don’t have to and spend time on things that are valuable to me. And that, and ironically, I surfed all last year. So what happened last year was my, my mom had like terminal dementia. Like it was the last year of her life. So I sold my house and moved a mile down the street so that I could take care of her. And it just so happened that the house I bought a mile down the street was four minutes from the ocean. So it was at least surf every day. And as I’m watching, like you said, you watch the. Wind direction swell coming in is there a nor’easter is there a half tail end of the hurricane season whatever it is and just like you know I’m leaving. I don’t know what’s going on right now But I’m canceling all meetings, and I’m just gonna go out and do that and I surfed for the every time there was waves I surfed and I had there was like you know There’s people that have video cameras streaming on the beach, and you can just kind of see like okay. Yeah, no those The waves are real. It’s not, you know, that looks good. Leave now. Like, quick, like, text my son. Like, hurry up, put your white suit on. Like, anyways, he was homeschooling at the time. Text my wife, did he get his work done? Like, hurry up, jump in the car. You know, that type of thing. Hurry up, strap the boards on. Make sure there’s two straps. And then, ironically, at the end of the year, I kind of burnt myself out with the surfing thing. I was like, it was great. It was fun, but it’s still just surfing at the end of the day. You’ll probably hate me for that.
Speaker 0 | 63:54.549
No, no. I mean, I’ve, I’ve burned myself out to just because I set expectations too high. Like I expected, I expected to get a lot better when I was in Hawaii. Cause I was like, I’m removing all the obstacles that prevent me from excelling at this now. Right. Cause like I’ve accessed more waves, the water’s warmer, you know, just anything that I can say that it’s holding me back, whether it’s a thick wetsuit or just conditions problem. But then. to your point the work-life balance side of it like i don’t have the availability that the people that are pro to surf all year round you know i have to make it work within yeah you know you know other obligations whether it’s you know work and family yeah that’s like my journey to black belt in jiu jitsu like the real hardcore black belts are training drilling all day long i just don’t have that just can’t do that no and then if you if you like on my side i realized that i wasn’t enjoying it And I was having negative feelings because I was causing myself to be negative, just expectations or, you know, feeling. or feeling guilty. Like if I was paddling out and my wife is like sitting on the beach with like our six month old. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 65:05.788
Walking or you’re wasting time. I should be doing this right now instead. And you’re like, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 65:10.150
Yeah. Yeah. Um, but then, I mean, you know, she had a talk with me. She was like, no, she’s like, I want you happy and healthy. And she’s like, and I don’t mind being on a beach in Hawaii with her six month old, like, you know, like twist my wrist. It’s just a horrible life. Um, and then.
Speaker 1 | 65:28.138
And there’s a question in your head. There’s a, there’s a, there’s a voice in your head.
Speaker 0 | 65:32.540
There is. Um, and then it just, you know, as long as it’s not interfering with my ability to, you know, do the job that’s required. And for me to be an active, engaging, you know, parent and a participator, like in our marriage and relationship that it’s not like taking away from that time of it where it becomes like negative, you know, you just kind of get comfortable with it, even in the short term as a win, you know, like. We just got back from winter green taking like our six year old and four year old skiing and snowboarding. And, you know, I only got like half of one day to myself to actually, you know, go down some down some of the blocks with my buddy. And, you know, it was to me like that was even the treat because watching the little ones actually start excelling and getting better at making on the mountain and going off the lift. Like that’s the next generational impact. And it’s for inside of your family that’s going to make all future trips that much easier that they’re like. if I can get them to drink this Kool-Aid right now and get into some of the sports, if I want to do this into my 40s, into the 50s, it’s going to be much easier for them to be a participator coming along with it and vice versa. And the same thing with surfing and kiteboarding and all that. Like my daughter at six, like she was, you know, borderline breaking, like butterfly records, like in her age group here. And people were like, you know, and she’s never been in swim lessons. And I was like, well, it helps like her growing up in Hawaii before we moved back. Because I was, you know, the semi reckless parent, probably on some, you know, foreign, you know, Japanese Instagram pages. Because when she was like one or two, you know, I was taking her out in the summertime, like past like Shark’s Cove and some of like the deeper water where I was going free diving. And she would just float there with me. But then I got her wearing on her mask and then she would try to come down. you know and actually swim and snorkel at like three four years old so just getting her exposed to the water went like far away so you know for me it was very easy to feel the life changing and the lack of my own skill set and age energy and time to be in the surfing the kiteboarding and stuff but now with the kids getting them exposed to it is like a reinvigorating amount of energy and also making sure that my work Job wise doesn’t interfere with those things that are important You know is also like important you have to sacrifice other things like I’ve never watched like Ozark And I don’t we don’t have a cable right while we ever like some streaming services So unfortunately there’s less time and those set of leisure activities, but you don’t have
Speaker 1 | 68:11.214
I don’t own a TV I threw it away like eight years ago. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 68:14.995
and you have eight kids right which is yeah,
Speaker 1 | 68:16.996
it was Yeah, yeah, it’s they read they read i mean we have devices obviously but you know and you have to kind of watch that you have to watch the device time or whatever but they’re all um yeah i just have a button on my cell phone so i can just shut it off you know and really dad can you turn my device you know can you turn whatever back on but the yeah i got rid of the tv i never thought i’d actually kill the tv i always thought about it you know but then i did and it took a while for them so it was like a month of mutiny but then They started reading and it’s louder and it’s tempting sometimes to just want to have a device to turn on so that the house goes quiet, you know, cause it’s easy to do, but it’s not the right thing. In my personal opinion, the, maybe we could, maybe we should probably team up and just start like a life coaching. You know, there’s every other life coach out there. Like I always wonder that life coaching stuff, like you’re going to coach me on life. Like, I don’t know what, you know, there could be like an it life coaching, work-life balance, you know? Look, the moral of the story is take up scuba diving, surfing, maybe golf. It sounds cliche. And kiteboarding, I haven’t done that yet. My brother-in-law, he used to be a professional windsurfer. Now, once the kites came out, he just threw the windsurfers away pretty much and only does his kite.
Speaker 0 | 69:41.322
It’s fun. The barrier of entry of kiteboarding is easier than surfing. It’s only about like a thousand bucks to like get gear, but you only need probably like eight hours of flying the kite before you’re able to do like 90% of whatever you want to do. Yeah. Because like the variables change with surfing. to your point before when you made the statement like you have to watch the tides the wind which is the swell direction is it nor’easter versus paddling right pat on at the right time it’s it’s a lot of variables yeah where with kite boarding as long as you have like wind within the range of like the flying the kite um the rest is now up to you you get to pick which type of board you want to ride whether it’s a foil twin tip or a single board um and then you also pick like how far you want to go like do you actually just do you want to get into jumping Are you fine with what they call like mowing the lawn, just going back and forth? Or do you want to do downwinders to where you’re like exploring whole sections of beach with like a buddy? So you’re like parking cars at different locations and going the 10, 15 miles and just kind of like cruising on it. So, you know, it’s like personal sailboats, right?
Speaker 1 | 70:44.483
I think you sold me. I think you sold me. Just get into kite sales and we’ll get, you know, done.
Speaker 0 | 70:51.968
That’s really cool.
Speaker 1 | 70:52.848
Turn up a website, you know, Kiting Fright. IT directors like, you know, exit,
Speaker 0 | 70:59.291
you know,
Speaker 1 | 71:00.392
the IT exit, exit here. IT directors exit here for, you know, whatever passion. We’ve done this an hour and 20 minutes. I want to thank you very much. I think this was absolutely outstanding. I thoroughly enjoyed it myself. And I would imagine everyone else would find this very fulfilling or really hate us for having such an awesome side life, I guess.
Speaker 0 | 71:26.298
I hope they don’t hate it and I hope they kind of appreciate the candidness of like the new world of the new life balance and the new work environment COVID post COVID into whatever hobbies that they enjoy and to be creative with. So it didn’t have to be surfing and kiteboarding.
Speaker 1 | 71:42.051
But if anyone wanted to, yeah, if anyone wanted to reach out to John and Gillespie, how, what’s the best way for them to reach out to you, whether that be for, I don’t know, advice or anything.
Speaker 0 | 71:57.126
Uh, probably my LinkedIn page, um, would be a good first start. All right. You guys give out like company information if you would like phone numbers. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 72:05.909
no, no, whatever. I mean, uh, just John Gillespie, G I L L E S P I E. And, uh, his, uh, what we’ll do is we’ll put your LinkedIn, um, uh, link on the episode webpage as well, if you’re okay with that. All right. And thank you very much for being on dissecting popular IT nerds. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. If you like this or any other episode, make sure you rate it and share it with one of your friends. And remember, when it comes to IT, you always need to be dissecting, analyzing, and improving.
