Speaker 0 | 00:09.586

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we have Nathan. I don’t want to butcher your last name. Jewett?

Speaker 1 | 00:18.292

Yes, Jewett.

Speaker 0 | 00:19.293

Perfect. I did it right. We have Nathan on the show. And honestly, I think we should just go back in time for a few minutes because we haven’t done this in a while. and it’s so much fun and I don’t ever get tired. I never get tired of talking about no hard drive days. That’s what you just said. We were talking about for the show and you were talking about, I was definitely around during the no hard drive period of time, which is somewhere between, yeah, punch cards. My brother was old enough to deal with punch cards, which doesn’t even seem, I don’t even think, can you even. call that a computer? Is it really a computer or is that more of like an advanced abacus?

Speaker 1 | 00:58.830

Technically, it would be a computer, but I don’t want to offend anyone. Please, please,

Speaker 0 | 01:03.953

please offend.

Speaker 1 | 01:05.734

I remember tape drives and Commodore VIC-20s and 64s and Apple IIe’s. And even before that, I worked on a, I was a 3M kid and I was lucky enough, my dad would bring home HP-85, which was a really early tape storage, you know, basic, basic. computer and we built my fifth grade science project was a led rs-232 serial connected light board that would we programmed machine code and literally ones and zeros and hexadecimal and things like that so you were like the cool like i don’t know if it was it cool back then i don’t know i was pretty nerdy and not in your these two boxes of five and a quarter inch floppy disks

Speaker 0 | 01:52.736

But I thought I had the hookup.

Speaker 1 | 01:54.236

Right. My dad worked at 3M, so I had the disc at hookup, right? So I felt pretty like I was hot stuff.

Speaker 0 | 02:02.479

Okay. Now, let’s go back to fifth grade for a second. So you have this like really amazing science project. What were the other science projects compared to yours? Do you remember?

Speaker 1 | 02:14.282

Geez, there was like the volcano that would.

Speaker 0 | 02:16.523

I was just going to say that.

Speaker 1 | 02:17.783

Hey,

Speaker 0 | 02:17.943

play.

Speaker 1 | 02:18.903

Oh, my. Jesse had a papier-mâché volcano that would kind of fizz over, you know, that kind of thing. Or different pH, you know, water kinds of experiments. Very basic, fifth and sixth grade. Those are basic years.

Speaker 0 | 02:31.267

And you had a, what did you have again?

Speaker 1 | 02:35.408

Well, we had an Apple IIe, or no, this one was driven by the Hewlett Packard 85 serial RS-232 connected. custom soldered led board not leds like we know now but single color radio shack leds soldered together oh you’re bringing that you would run that little line in lines of code and pac-man would play on the leds and

Speaker 0 | 03:01.242

things like that so it was pretty rudimentary what do we do with no um yeah but still that was an amazing like that project compared to the paper mache volcano right it was pretty hot it’s pretty hot for sure you

Speaker 1 | 03:16.164

And that grew forward into the BBS era then. That’s my obsession with Apple II was sort of the big deal at school.

Speaker 0 | 03:25.372

We can’t move on quite yet. I just need to know, tell me a little bit about your father. So was your father that helped you get into this? Because you said your father was CHP.

Speaker 1 | 03:32.357

My dad, he was at 3M.

Speaker 0 | 03:34.519

Okay.

Speaker 1 | 03:35.040

So they had access to different computer tools that they would bring home at times. And so I got to look over his shoulder working on some engineering work. He’s an electrical engineer at the time. And so I was very curious and excited about computers in general and just wanted more and more because it was just so exciting and new and creative and technical. And I just thought it was amazing technology. I mean, far beyond the calculator, right?

Speaker 0 | 04:01.950

It was so new.

Speaker 1 | 04:03.391

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 04:03.971

And I don’t, when I look at my nephews and my nieces and I see that they never grew up without a cell phone, not only that, a smartphone. I mean, to be honest. I don’t know. Will they ever be able to experience anything like that?

Speaker 1 | 04:20.785

I don’t know. Maybe certain game platforms are real innovative. It was such a world-changing moment, right? The Bill Gates and Steve Jobs saga and all those early days with Park, Xerox, and all that. I mean, it was such a birth of IBM. I mean, as far as in the PC space, right? Yeah. That was just a, I don’t know if you ever have another time like that.

Speaker 0 | 04:42.272

It’s pretty amazing.

Speaker 1 | 04:43.852

I don’t remember.

Speaker 0 | 04:45.953

It must have been seventh grade or sixth grade getting PC catalogs, magazines, and computers, and ordering parts. And we were comparing who had a tower and a half tower.

Speaker 1 | 04:58.658

Do you remember Heathkit? Did you ever hear of those? Uh-uh. They were like stereo components that my dad had that I remember frying his favorite amplifier because I was playing around with. you know, the wrong cables and wires, but they were, they were, you could solder together your own high test stereo equipment. And that kind of came in the late seventies. And that was a fun time too. Similar, similar line, but not quite as advanced as the computer stuff.

Speaker 0 | 05:24.599

The, but the concept of no hard drive, just the fact that there was no hard drive, what did you do? You carried around your box of discs.

Speaker 1 | 05:34.801

I remember, um, building code that had to run in Ram. and upgrading RAM from 64K, not Meg K, kilobytes to 128 and being like, wow, now I’ve got power, right? Now I can really throw in, and I was building code for Dungeons & Dragons type interaction, and you could shop for armor and do these different things. And it was all running in RAM, and then you would switch the five and a quarter inch disk. Literally while someone was dialed into the computer in real time like that.

Speaker 0 | 06:15.113

This is going over some people’s heads. It’s got to be. Yeah, the RAM upgrade. You mean we didn’t have to move stuff around anymore? Like auto-exec bat? I googled auto-exec bat the other day and a t-shirt came up. It was like an executive bat sitting behind a desk.

Speaker 1 | 06:33.618

That’s hilarious. These are the days of Apple logo and all that, where you could just make four next loops in basic and create graphics on the screen. But graphics were just a line that plotted, you know, on a certain.

Speaker 0 | 06:46.549

That was my computer class logo.

Speaker 1 | 06:48.931

There you go.

Speaker 0 | 06:49.391

We were like, can we hurry up and be done with logo so we can get on to, you know, Oregon Trail toward the end of the class.

Speaker 1 | 06:56.555

Right, right. I was the guy building Oregon Trail. No, kidding.

Speaker 0 | 07:02.631

Now it’s a little handheld. You buy a target for five.

Speaker 1 | 07:06.232

Now you buy a kit and you join your app development ecosystem and become a rock star in a few weeks.

Speaker 0 | 07:14.294

All right. So what’s this? Okay. So moving on. Yeah. Soldering, whatever, fifth grade science experiment to Apple IIe. And at what point did you kind of free yourself from looking over your father’s shoulder and you were kind of on your own?

Speaker 1 | 07:31.875

So that was the kind of thing, right? Then I remember the snowstorm when we went to Dayton’s, which was a store at Rosedale by St. Paul. It was a snowstorm. I remember it vividly because he charged this Apple IIe computer on his credit card. At the time, we weren’t made of money. And so he literally went out on a limb to buy this Apple IIe. And he always insisted on investing some sort of training or learning process coupled with a purchase like that. And so… what happened is I got really into the school program and then summer programs and special interest groups. There was a magazine, a periodical called computer user at the time in the cities. And there were BBS as bulletin board systems listed in there. So what I did is I went and found all the ones I could that were appealing to me. And I started connecting directly with the people that had founded those BBS is let’s go again.

Speaker 0 | 08:26.685

How?

Speaker 1 | 08:29.967

I picked up Computer User and I connected to their BBS with my Apple IIe. And I just reached out and said, I want to know how you do this. I want my own BBS. I want to do what you did. And there was Captain Apple and there was kind of like this underground pirate vibe. Not really anything illegal to my understanding, but just a renegade type culture. Kind of an underworld. of coders of programmers and i wanted to be part of that and most of them were seniors and juniors in high school or college kids and here i was in seventh grade nice so i played up and learned from those people and cloned some of the software approaches and built my own flavor of bbs software um back when the letters would just kind of go across the screen like war games do you remember the movie war games yep very basic stuff but um then i published my bbs and had subscription uh business started. Again, I was only 11, but people would connect and pay their $5 a month. And my dad put in a separate phone line and they would connect to my Dewey. And so my dad was out of the picture and I was independent at that point and up to no good in some ways as a seventh grader might be.

Speaker 0 | 09:40.264

Wait, wait, you were paying five, wait, people were paying you $5 a month?

Speaker 1 | 09:43.406

Yes. Yes, they were.

Speaker 0 | 09:44.767

How many people were paying you $5?

Speaker 1 | 09:46.108

Not many. I got to tell you, maybe 20 or 30.

Speaker 0 | 09:48.951

Still though.

Speaker 1 | 09:49.932

It wasn’t very big because we had no hard drives to circle back.

Speaker 0 | 09:53.775

You’re a seventh grader. You’re a seventh grader making residual income at $150.

Speaker 1 | 10:00.078

You may need to go back to that business model, maybe.

Speaker 0 | 10:03.520

Seriously, think about it. I mean, you’re trading at $5 a month.

Speaker 1 | 10:07.262

Yep. That was better than my paper route at the time. I wanted to be innovative and creative, and I wanted to learn the software language. It was exciting.

Speaker 0 | 10:16.983

Five bucks a month. That’s pretty cool for seventh grade. Pretty cool. That’s pretty darn cool. I mean, my first job was washing dishes. Me too.

Speaker 1 | 10:26.370

But so nerdy, though. It was not seen as cool then. I mean, it was pretty geeky.

Speaker 0 | 10:31.453

What was cool then? Let’s go back to seventh grade.

Speaker 1 | 10:33.475

I played hockey. I played drums. I was a hockey goalie. You know, heavy metal was cool then. Metallica was there and Iron Maiden and all that stuff. And that’s what was cool. Right. But science was also cool. You had the space shuttle thing going on and other kinds of things in the 80s.

Speaker 0 | 10:52.760

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The total side note, we were at my son’s baseball game a long time ago and my daughter was talking about something and like sewing. Like she’s talking about sewing. Like literally you had a sewing machine. And this other girl was like, what? Like, who are you? Is this like the 1980s? 1980s was like a long time ago to her.

Speaker 1 | 11:15.052

I know. I know. We’re old.

Speaker 0 | 11:19.256

All right. So moving on. What, uh, what’s kind of, what was this tradition? You know, so you’re now you’re like heading up like, you know, crazy software dev team type of thing, but like, how did you get for the other listeners out there and for other people that may not, maybe younger, they don’t have the experience of. the dawn of the computer and, you know, messaging boards and soldering stuff on, you know, they may have grown up with a smartphone. What do people do now? I mean, how did you get where you got? And did college have anything to do with it? Do you think certifications matter?

Speaker 1 | 11:53.737

I took the hard way and my path is not traditional, Phil. I largely self-taught and because I would go to college and I would attempt to, you know, comply with sort of an academic version of learning. I found that my learning style was very kinesthetic. I learned by doing and I learned more specifically, I want to learn things I’m motivated to learn and that I can apply practically to what I’m working on.

Speaker 0 | 12:20.760

Yeah, that’s me.

Speaker 1 | 12:21.801

Because I was building companies and I was doing state-of-the-art e-commerce work in the 90s and doing creative design work and flash animation and building Dreamweaver tools and all that kind of stuff back during the ecommerce.com days. I learned about databases and all those things. And because they didn’t teach those in school, they taught more archaic flavors of database. But they did not have the latest technology. You could get them in higher-end certifications, but you couldn’t apply that knowledge practically in an entrepreneurial context without a large capital available and a bigger team and all that kind of thing. So for me, it was finding technologies that I could apply a lot, like the LAMP stack is a great example. where you can get an Apache web server for low dollars or free in some places and start building your PHP or your Python code with a MySQL database instance, you can start building apps with that, right? So my spirit grew more along those lines. But during.com, I got enthused about ColdFusion and about active server pages and VBScript and SQL Server and then that transition through PHP. So I tell people, What do you want to learn? And there are free tools or inexpensive tools that you can start building your hello world. Are you familiar with that term?

Speaker 0 | 13:39.402

Nope.

Speaker 1 | 13:40.122

You build your hello world code. It’s your first piece of code on any platform. In fact, I got the opportunity to coach my son who’s now 23 in college, and he was building his C++ program for class. And he was confused about how the files all fit together. And I said, look, son, we need to build your hello world. And hello world just means… You build a piece of code that prints out hello world on the screen. That’s it. Now you’ve achieved coding, right? So it’s very basic. So I tell people find what you’re passionate about and then find the technologies that are inexpensive or free to help you start playing with that. And now you can do app. There are app kits and project platforms available. There are gaming platforms and ecosystems available that you can start coding in right away with very little training. And so because I learned by doing, Phil, I jump in that way. A lot of other folks want to go the more traditional route. In my experience, I would go through school and college and learn things, but it would be redundant and boring because, A, it was irrelevant to the way I was applying that knowledge, and B, I knew more, I had more practical experience than the instructors oftentimes. So by doing and by Google searching your code and learning from communities of people of like minds and like interests, you’re going to be ahead of the instructors.

Speaker 0 | 15:00.526

It’s always like that, I think. I think once you get out of college and you get in the real world, now you get your real-life experience.

Speaker 1 | 15:10.491

Right. And my story is one of real life experience first.

Speaker 0 | 15:15.573

Yeah. And I think, I think it might be true for a lot of us. I mean, mine was always working in, uh, you know, all my job experiences and everything is really what translated into what I ended up, what I ended up doing. So I went to college for, um, you know, creative writing and yes, I can write a pretty darn good email.

Speaker 1 | 15:33.060

Awesome.

Speaker 0 | 15:33.540

Some, some messed up and some, and some interesting it articles as well. Uh, but you know, all of my experience comes from, you know, when you got hands on out in the world, right? Right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 15:45.130

Yeah. Hard knocks,

Speaker 0 | 15:46.071

right?

Speaker 1 | 15:48.672

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 15:49.393

So that’s why I was asking why some people are so concerned about.

Speaker 1 | 15:55.197

They’re so valuable for those that can benefit from the academic learning style. I really admire that very much and envy it even. And again, my path was more of necessity and more of just my. the way my biology is. I needed to learn by doing to be motivated and excited. And that was what was meaningful and learning for me. And the way I learned about agile software development processes and methodologies, for example, was not because I set out to go get certified in agile. It was because I would build software and there was scope creep in that software back in the dot-com days. And there were literally millions of dollars on the table involved with projects for e-commerce projects. And scope was out of control. And we used to say things like, there’s a train out or the bridge is out ahead and management is telling us to drive the train faster and code faster and build in more features. And we’re saying, there’s a school bus of children across the tracks now, can we stop and scale our infrastructure, right? And build this more, you know, correctly, more traditionally sound and business. doesn’t work that way. Business wants it done now. There were stock prices to support. There were customers to sell to. You code and you code and you barely sleep. So that’s what I was doing during the dot-com period.

Speaker 0 | 17:18.017

Give me an example of a project. Yeah, what was like one of the biggest problems you had to solve here?

Speaker 1 | 17:21.780

Well, we were working with a project. It was an e-commerce project that had Lycos and University of Minnesota and Digital River integration. And overnight, there were four hours of product data loads. coming from Ingram Micro and really big computer parts distributors, just to full circle on computer parts, right? So we’re talking about 100,000 plus products, and we’re talking about 60,000 plus software titles that are all downloadable through this e-commerce structure. And the e-commerce architecture that I was part of inventing, I took a lot of pride in it, actually. Based on if you came from U of M, the store would take on a U of M facade or design, the UI. would look like U of M, but it would be loaded with our products and our e-commerce engine, right?

Speaker 0 | 18:10.167

Like a white label, kind of like a white label.

Speaker 1 | 18:11.649

Kind of like a white label for e-commerce back in the day before it was like Amazon was over there doing books and we were doing electronics. But it was kind of the same path of site development technology, right? So it’s just a classic. I was an internal employee in a company and there were consultants working with us and Project management was a nightmare trying to post-it notes all over ginormous whiteboards. And eight of us sitting in what felt like an airplane hangar in the middle of winter while these three companies merged. And it’s on our eight shoulders to bring this technology live so these sales folks can achieve their goals while we’re coding, trying to solve, basically breaking the rules in software. And I try and stay on the forefront of that kind of technology, Phil.

Speaker 0 | 19:02.539

Why did some companies survive, some die, you think, back in the day? Was it all just fear? I’m just asking from your perspective.

Speaker 1 | 19:10.986

You were in the traffic back then. I mean, in that particular organization, it was very much about the dog and pony show so that you could raise money, bringing together a three-way merger to try and build that ideal company and focusing, I guess, losing sight of why we’re in business. and losing sight of the key success criteria, the critical success factors. What is the key metric that we need to achieve and stay focused on and deliver and over deliver so that we can be a leader in business? I think too often it became about what we could show investors, what we could say our title was, what car we could drive, all that kind of stuff instead of really, and I think Amazon wins because they’ve got it.

Speaker 0 | 19:59.886

I was going to ask you why.

Speaker 1 | 20:01.487

Well, because they made it one click. Even back then, they made it one click checkout and everyone else was a follower. They made it super easy. They understood why they were doing it. They weren’t focused on the book, right? They were focused on making the customer experience easy because online was a new way to buy. So they held to that and stayed focused on that. And even today, it’s about how quick can I get checked out? And I prefer Amazon for my shopping. I don’t know about you, but if I can buy it through Amazon with Prime and know that I can rely on the delivery and the shopping experience is super easy and I could read those related items and those reviews. I mean, 20 years later, those are still market leading. Would you agree?

Speaker 0 | 20:43.987

I buy everything on Amazon.

Speaker 1 | 20:45.688

So I remember those. I mean,

Speaker 0 | 20:46.989

I don’t go to Sam’s Club anymore. Right. And just so you know, I have eight kids. Okay. So going to Sam’s Club was a big deal, is a big deal.

Speaker 1 | 20:58.257

You have an agile team.

Speaker 0 | 21:00.578

I know. Believe me. I try to get my kids into coding. A couple of my kids are. I’m like, hey, you know, start learning all this stuff that I never learned. Daddy. Uh, but, um, you know, come on, make me, you know, make some millions. Who’s it going to be? Who’s it going to be?

Speaker 1 | 21:14.505

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 21:15.886

Anyways, you know, I don’t buy toilet paper from Sam’s club anymore. Sam’s club got shut down and it was a whole, you know, like you had to reserve half your day on Sunday to go to the kind of bulk buying place. Don’t do any of that. Any toilet paper goes up on my doorstep.

Speaker 1 | 21:35.364

Sure. And the features that do that for you now, Phil, for me to get my Amazon video with one click and I don’t have to reenter my credit card. Those are the features to beat and that we were all chasing as techies back then. But to full circle it through the agile, just to finish that thought, we had scope that was changing faster than we could code. And this is still still an issue in software and web development today. And so what is now called agile was merely spiral versus waterfall. methodology and software development lifecycle. And so we designed ways to manage scope iteratively in a spiral instead of finish this, then do that, finish this in six months or a year out, you can change the scope. So we weren’t called agile then, but we were developing and changing the scope every six weeks or every month because we just had to try and keep up with the rapidly changing, you know, you have multi stakeholders, like a VP of marketing. a COO, a CEO, and they’re all, they have investors and customers, they all have competing objectives. How do we get them on the same page? And then how do we redefine and maintain sanity of a development team so that we can drive and get a success?

Speaker 0 | 22:49.880

Is that even possible? Because a lot of times I find the software developers, I’m completely stereotyping you and everyone that’s in the software development world right now, as these kind of like super smart, arrogant dudes that sit behind the scenes and really should be maybe more in charge than they are, but aren’t. I don’t know why. Kind of everything that you just described seems like we’ve got this, you know, like you said, executive, what’s the wrong, executive management team, board of directors, whatever it is, these different competing factors, right, that are driving the business, which is great. Why aren’t the software guys that as well? Or why aren’t they?

Speaker 1 | 23:37.049

Yeah, I think you’ll find in smaller businesses and startups, you really do have more of an embrace and you’ll have a founder that’s half of the company that is a tech person. In other organizations, you’ll have a leadership team that includes a CFO and a president and a CEO and maybe a marketing VP, maybe an HR person, people that are trusted leadership that don’t have an IT seat at that table of influence, right? And a lot of, you can tell when somebody is experienced with their, their trade, if they in it say, I would like a seat at the table for strategic decision-making, right? Cause that’s going to give me a hand in, in exactly what you’re saying there, Phil, can I have strategic influence over prioritization, over product definition, over research and development and those kinds of things. And then a large group like United healthcare, where I’m at now through Optum is they have product owners and product managers. And hundreds of people involved in product making decisions or product development decisions. So that the, the, the larger company structures have ways to achieve that. So it depends on the size of the organization and the size of the projects.

Speaker 0 | 24:46.453

I guess my question would be how you approach that,

Speaker 1 | 24:48.475

right?

Speaker 0 | 24:49.796

Would you think you have a problem as a company if you have it managers that are saying, can I have a seat at the table? Is that problem? Is that problematic? Like, should that even exist?

Speaker 1 | 25:00.158

I think it should be the norm. In other words,

Speaker 0 | 25:03.426

IT should not have to ask, can I have a seat at the table? In other words, we should be hiring for people that… We’re hiring for a seat at the table. And you have that mentality prior to a light going off in your head saying, I need a seat at the table. Sure. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 | 25:20.208

And there are IT managers or IT directors and leaders that have strategic value to offer. And there are those that are more maintainers or managers of people or technologies. I was one who wanted to be more of a visionary and more impactful and have more meaning in my work, more impact on the greater organization I was in at any given time. which is why entrepreneurship really makes sense for me, right? But you also need a CEO, a CFO, and a senior management team that embraces the need for leveraging IT as a strategic competitive advantage, right? So the more you have the type of business, even if it’s construction, like you or I have an affinity for, right? You still want to have an embracing of IT. the strategic value of IT as a competitive advantage. So if I can deploy more efficient IT in my construction business or in my service business,

Speaker 0 | 26:16.121

I mean, you might just be sharing CAD documents between 20 locations.

Speaker 1 | 26:19.523

Well, then you might be outperforming your competitors. You may lower costs. You may increase time to market. You may remove bidding complexity. You may make bids more accurate and more profitable. You may have less risk. You’re managing risk. through the impact that strategic IT decision-making can bring to the executive team. Whether or not you’ve got an IT executive, you can still get value from IT insight. That’s how I would word that.

Speaker 0 | 26:46.978

How do IT and sales work together? Because you mentioned VP of sales.

Speaker 1 | 26:50.580

Well, gee, I just am excited about CRM in general, Phil. That’s a lot of salespeople. And last year I was working with a company and there were, I suppose, 70 outside sales on the team. And… There was a culture that did not want to do CRM. And the thought was…

Speaker 0 | 27:08.535

Pause. There was a culture that did not want to do CRM. Are you saying old school salespeople that just want to like, you know, like, hey, just sell? And like, I’m going to forecast. Here’s the deal. Like, I’m not interested in this information.

Speaker 1 | 27:21.364

Right. And there’s a couple different sides of that that are at odds with each other. We want to be the best in the world. We want to sell the most. We want to deliver high value for customers. We want to remember every detail about the customer. But we don’t want to do this cumbersome hour or two of work a day as seen as a roadblock instead of an investment of time to be the best. Right. So I look at Salesforce and. Oh,

Speaker 0 | 27:41.598

that.

Speaker 1 | 27:42.298

So like that.

Speaker 0 | 27:43.699

Sell the data. Sell the entering the data. Sell the.

Speaker 1 | 27:47.422

Well, you know, I mean, I mean, you.

Speaker 0 | 27:49.543

Well, I do. I’ve been in both. I’ve been in both situations. Right. I’ve been in situations where the database is, is like a bunch of fake info. Oh, crap. Sure. I’ve been. So I’m like, why am I, why are you having me entering this information?

Speaker 1 | 28:02.136

Sure. You’ve got to obviously garbage in, garbage out, guy go. That’s a thing, right? So if you want to enter data that’s just from some generic list, say you’re going to sell using database. Let’s just say that’s the conversation. We want data going in that’s as clean as we can get it. So you would have a specialized role doing just the data cleansing and sourcing the data and cleaning it, doing kind of a preliminary validation of the data, and then entering it into your… I prefer Salesforce is where I’m at right now. I like the potential for where it can go with ERP and with other kinds of… What about email,

Speaker 0 | 28:35.067

Salesforce, and automation and all that stuff?

Speaker 1 | 28:37.669

Yeah, it’s all exciting stuff. I mean, you’ve got to bring the personalization together with the accountability that data tracking can provide and couple it with mobilized people on mobile devices and that are working, especially in this climate we’re in now, where people are working from anywhere. You want that all to come together so the customer can be handed off amongst internal… staff who are distributed, right? And they can not miss a beat in terms of what the customer interactions were, what the opportunities are, who needs what, when, how do we hand out data, right? And so I’m looking at how do I have an appointment booking system where if I take a call like we’re on, Phil, I want to be able to see that in Salesforce so that I can, you know, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, right? So I want to be able to see the analytics as well, right? And the value in business decision-making. is from business intelligence that comes from data-driven decision-making or business intelligence. So Salesforce or similar tools, they introduce the ability to leverage data analytics in your selling. Now that transforms marketing because we can sell to fewer prospects that are higher qualified, that have a higher profit per customer, per transaction, longer life a client. And so it all impacts and plays together. in this happy little sphere. It takes investment, it takes education, it takes understanding the best solutions, it takes customization, it takes money. But the end result is if you’re going to lead, you have to embrace using data in your selling.

Speaker 0 | 30:11.340

I have a CRM story. I have a COVID-19 CRM story.

Speaker 1 | 30:14.842

You hit me. Can’t wait.

Speaker 0 | 30:17.064

Yeah. So I have, I’ve had like, just, we’ve got our own CRM for, for Conversion Networks Services Group, the company I work at. We’ve got our own, right? And, but then as just an individual, I play around with CRMs myself. And I had… and I’ve gone down marketing black holes and, and taking Facebook advertising and Google advertising thinking I’m going to, you know, hit some kind of jackpot at some point with some kind of like crazy Google ad anyways. Um, and that’s really been like the black hole for me. When I say like the black hole, I have spent more money on learning marketing than the amount of money that I’ve made just, you know, doing what I normally do, which is voice data consulting. But so so During this COVID-19 pandemic, I had a friend call me and say, Hey, I’ve got this recruiting opportunity. He’s like, and I’m really good at finding the companies that need to recruit, but I’m horrible at finding the candidates. Can you help me? And I had another friend that was trying to push this new CRM for me. And what is it called? He white labels it, so I’m trying to remember what it is. So basically, it’s similar to Salesforce and a Keep or an Infusionsoft kind of mixed together, if that makes any sense to you.

Speaker 1 | 31:41.410

Sure. HubSpot, maybe. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 31:43.972

and so it automates. The leads come in. You’ve got all the various different reporting that you can do, database, collection. But what I liked is how it automates emails, automates text messaging, automates… And basically in a kind of appointment setting, it has like this really crazy, various different like engine that you can set up. So I was like, you know, whatever, like I’ll help you out. Like it’s a trial. Like, you know, let me see if I can help you out. If you know, I’ll throw a couple thousand dollars at some advertising for you, you know, and if it works out, you know, give me 20% on, you know, this month, it will be good. So I figured I’d help them out. Right. I throw up one Facebook ad and we got 700 leads in a month. And. But here’s the thing with the CRM. I dumped all the leads automated into this. All the leads that are coming in off Facebook, going to the CRM, this CRM can like, it’ll track your Facebook pixels. It’ll track your Google ads. It’ll track all of this stuff as the leads come in, takes all the data. What was really cool was, I was like, I don’t have time to do this. I’ve got my own work. So what I’m going to do is like, well, I was like, let’s just pinpoint the exact type of candidate which you want, which is. basically a teaching position. It’s like an overseas teaching position. You’d be great if you had a four-year degree at TESOL teaching English as a second language. Basically, nothing that I am at all, completely out of my wheelhouse, but I’ll do the advertising for you and send it into this CRM thing. These 700 leads came in. I set up the whole automation through the CRM, which would be, hey, thank you for applying. Your next step is to upload your resume here. Once you upload your resume, a screening representative will screen it, and then they’ll give you a call for your appointment. Please go to this calendar here and schedule your appointment. The whole thing completely automated all the way through, and I think I may have overloaded him. Anyways, short CRM story. But the data in and the automation of it blew me away. But here’s the thing. I don’t think I could have done that with the other piece of software. There was this one particular… And this is, I guess, the question to you is, a lot of times things look very similar. There’s a similar look and feel, but for some reason it doesn’t work.

Speaker 1 | 34:03.127

Sure.

Speaker 0 | 34:04.168

Like you said, like the one-click sell or whatever it is. It might be one little tiny thing. A lot of times it’s the little things that make a huge difference.

Speaker 1 | 34:15.032

And I think that has to do with who it’s designed for, Phil, and the why. You know, Simon Sinek, is it? Is it Sinek? I can’t remember how to pronounce his name. But the why is something he talks about a lot, which is the one click. Amazon knew why their customers were using it, and they knew that the real problem they needed to solve was to make it easy for a certain audience to make purchases online who preferred previously to buy in stores. So when you build a CRM tool, you have to know who you’re building it around. And a lot of software development, people build or coders develop for the sake of developing. to kind of build a name for themselves or to sell to themselves. And so knowing the why you’re developing or designing something is everything. For example, a project I’m working on that launches tonight is a site search project, and it’s designed for senior citizens, and so it has usability. It has… It knows what information it needs to show. It has speed and device and browser compatibility geared for that specific audience.

Speaker 0 | 35:16.918

Are you telling me it’s got AOL compatibility? No.

Speaker 1 | 35:19.920

What are you saying? I’m just saying that it’s designed with the end user in mind very tightly. It’s not developed by the standards of the development team. It’s developed using experts that are focused on data analytics and on usability. and not usability that you or I need, but usability of 70 and 80-year-olds who need their Medicare information clearly. And so when you design that way, the search tool you build is going to be better for the end user, not the way you or I would look at it. We would go, is this a Google or is this Bing? Is this Facebook? Our metric is different because of who we are and our ages and our background is a little more tech. But if you’re designing, my dad’s 80, my mom’s 77. They need to know how to use this. And my mom locks herself out of her iPhone pretty much monthly, sets it in some mode, like triple-clicks something on accident, or opens a link, doesn’t know how to open certain things just because she didn’t come out of the womb on a device like we did or like our kids do, right? So you have to go ahead. What was your question?

Speaker 0 | 36:25.621

I want to know some of the like what were some of the key factors because my dad’s 84 and my mom’s 79. And And yes, he called over all the time because he reset his password or something. And he has so many other passwords linked on his iPad that shut down ESPN and all kinds of new ones. Sure.

Speaker 1 | 36:42.652

I think for the kind of team that I’m involved with, or teams multiple, we have specialists that are schooled in data analytics and schooled in usability and usability compliance. So font size and zoom. Wow. key thing and width of screen and eyesight. Like even today, I was shown something and the font size was so small and they said through the Webex call, but you can see that, right? And I’m going, no, I’m 47 years old. And, you know, imagine my dad who’s 80, imagine how he may have to squint, right? So having people that are focused in on what the design of this tool, and I think Steve Jobs is, of course, one of my heroes in that way, where he really understood also. who he was building for and why. The why was about designing something special to end users. So I try and bring that spirit into what I do so that it has meaningful impact on the users and so they can have an experience that’s ubiquitous. They don’t feel like they’re using technology. They’re just getting at the information without a roadblock.

Speaker 0 | 37:50.490

Without thinking about it.

Speaker 1 | 37:51.830

Right. And so to me, that’s design. There’s design that is creative and fun and has all these… elaborate creative treatments, right? Great music. I’m a musician. I love that too. I love, you know, motion pictures and all that stuff. But when it comes to design, we want something, I think Facebook is also close to mastering a little bit noisy, a little bit of the wild west of social media in some ways these times. But when we can have an experience like Google, where we know what we’re after, we are in there to get that data and we get at it at the data we need without Google in our way. And to me, that’s meaningful IT or tech design. So when I can get at that information, I think Microsoft has also perfected it in their office tools. We want to send mail. We’re not thinking, oh, I’m in Outlook right now. We just say, okay, go to your calendar and do this and add me to this and insert a WebEx meeting. And, you know, let’s go to Word and I want to customize this ribbon. And I’m in Excel and Excel is a way of life for many of us in IT or in just office productivity, right? But we don’t think, I’m in Excel now, and this is this experience that’s in my way of doing my work. We think, okay, how do I insert this table? And we know what we want to do, and Excel is there to enable us. And with easy search tools inside Excel, or where now you can search, I want to find where this thing is, or how do I do this and customize it this way. And so it’s very much about enabling us without being in our way to produce the best work of our lives. And that’s how it should be. That to me is my idealistic vision.

Speaker 0 | 39:28.892

So you brought up a much more mind-blowing topic, which is do we get more work done now than we did 50 years ago, 200 years ago?

Speaker 1 | 39:43.282

I would say yes. What do you call work, I guess? I don’t know.

Speaker 0 | 39:47.245

I just know that to send a letter, you had to put it on like a horse and like ride it, you know, north. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 | 39:53.189

Now we’re Now we’re doing some of us hundreds of emails in a day, but for sure, tens, 50, maybe 50 emails.

Speaker 0 | 39:59.177

Think about it. You can broadcast to like, you know, people are saying like, you know, that’s like the other thing too, the COVID-19 thing, right? Like would this have really, would this lockdown have been able to happen if it happened back in 1950?

Speaker 1 | 40:11.388

I mean, it would have happened, but would we have all stayed working the way we do? There are many of us. I was just watching something about how, in fact, it was Bill Gates talking. Today I saw he was talking about how IT companies are actually very minimally impacted by COVID-19 process. And we’re actually, it’s going to help people embrace technology sooner and easier because they have to. And so in a lot of ways, technology is the one sector that’s…

Speaker 0 | 40:41.292

that’s uh largely unshaken because we’re already working remote we already have connectivity we have fiber optic many of us are high performance uh cable infect my life at all no i mean i mean it did from a standpoint of other people’s lives that are affected that it’s going to be a ripple effect like i from that standpoint but from i’m still sitting in the same office with multiple screens and a computer same microphone my kids uh you know they were homeschooled before so you

Speaker 1 | 41:11.076

It affected my grocery behavior. It affected how often I go. It affected less gas usage, and I can work in sweatpants and a casual shirt now. I mean, I take a shower before work now, and that’s a little more how it affects me. But in terms of workflow, we’re still, in fact, we didn’t, at Optum, we didn’t miss a blink. One day we were at an Eden Prairie working. The next day we’re in our homes, and the code didn’t, I mean, I bet we suffered a little bit in overall productivity because we’re all stressed. We’re all. a little bit worried about our loved ones. But I would say mostly like 90%, right? 95% even, I’d argue, we are achieving results, even though we’re working remote. And what I want to do, Phil, is help other people get that same experience, like in their small business, their little construction company, their big construction company. I want them to be able to know sort of intrinsically how to use IT and remote work technology and firewall technology and mobile device technology. so that they can more accountably do that same kind of data-driven work we were talking about with Salesforce or CRM discussion, bringing that into mobile workforces that are out in the field at construction sites, or having project management and estimator teams that are having to work from home all of a sudden, where the office or the business tooled up more for an office environment, not a remote workforce environment, which is a totally different network architecture, right?

Speaker 0 | 42:32.658

Yeah, there’s people that were… Yeah. There was, there was companies were hit hard. Certainly the cost center guys, certainly the IT guys that were stuck on a cost center with old 1970s PBXs and machines and old networking equipment or whatever it is, legacy, anything. They got hit hard.

Speaker 1 | 42:49.231

Sure. But I bet your cloud phone stuff, I bet you’re just like, Oh, we’re just connecting from home now. Blinkety blink. My extension’s live, right?

Speaker 0 | 42:56.517

It wasn’t any different.

Speaker 1 | 42:57.898

Right. And I really advocated for that kind of solution at a different company. I was working at last year. where it was about moving 230 users to voice over IP technology without a PBX. And it was a tough sell because of the culture. Well, it wasn’t really price. It was culture. It was we’re not committed to this folder. Well, it had to do with switches at multiple locations. And a managed service provider that’s selling this or that person a certain strategic path more than it had to do with what made a better solution because I believe that cloud phone. managed phone is just a better solution. It is now. Typically because you pick up your handset, you go plug in from home or I’m not even using a handset. I have a USB headset I’m on talking to you right now through my little laptop and zoomity zoom through zoom. We’re talking, right? Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 43:50.063

me too. And not only that, I mean, obviously there’s endless reasons, redundancy. You know, if you’ve got old PBXs with VPNs connecting site to site, you have weird extension dialing between sites. You’ve got to have people VPN and then remote users and soft phones are much more clunky. It can be.

Speaker 1 | 44:08.033

It can be. But in addition to that, the objections I heard were like, you know, but our connectivity isn’t the same as it would be here or we have to standardize this. Well, any of us that work from home have to have connectivity to stream Netflix. You need connectivity, right?

Speaker 0 | 44:24.458

Most people don’t have DSL anymore. I mean, let’s be honest.

Speaker 1 | 44:27.438

Right.

Speaker 0 | 44:27.718

Most people don’t have DSL.

Speaker 1 | 44:28.379

But decision makers at the leadership team level, Phil. are still thinking 20 years ago in many ways. And I think you can relate, right?

Speaker 0 | 44:35.963

I mean, I could go on all day long and I don’t want to be about… No,

Speaker 1 | 44:39.506

it’s not about bashing that, but it’s really about helping people that are looking at things 20 years ago and saying, hey, we’ll hold your hand and help you across this little bridge of understanding so that you can see how it’s really a cost savings because we haven’t even factored in productivity gain, work loss, waste, lack of reliability, work from home, all these other things. Where when you factor all that kind of a work style into it, into the equation, you all of a sudden go, wait a minute, why do we have these handsets and this old switching technology? I mean, you can pop up a new location anywhere in the world, literally. With cloud phone technology.

Speaker 0 | 45:16.358

I tell people all the time, Starbucks. Without a lease.

Speaker 1 | 45:18.920

Without a lease. Boom. I was talking to a guy in Croatia who’s a phone consultant for sales. And he’s a rock star. And you would have never known he was in Croatia. He said, I was in New Zealand before this. And I was over there in Brazil. And I was like, oh my gosh.

Speaker 0 | 45:35.269

I was in Cairo earlier this year, back in November. No one knew if I didn’t tell them.

Speaker 1 | 45:40.592

Right,

Speaker 0 | 45:40.972

right. And the internet there is not that great. And don’t get me wrong, I have no problem bashing the old PBX mentality at all. I just want to make this as much as possible.

Speaker 1 | 45:50.056

No, absolutely. And I don’t want to bash the people.

Speaker 0 | 45:53.257

I will make this a telecom show if you want me to. Well,

Speaker 1 | 45:55.258

but what we’re talking about is cloud technology, right? Yeah, exactly. And I was building a business continuity solution with Zerto. Have you heard of Zerto? Zerto is a cloud-to-cloud replication technology platform. And it’s very cool because we had 40-plus servers that we needed to replicate. And the business had ERP and Exchange. domain controllers and file servers and print servers and on and on for E-plus servers that are all virtual machines sitting on VMware. And the argument was, we need backup. And so a solution was presented by the managed service provider to backup that data using about a $30,000 tech stack, some server gear placed on a Comcast business line, which isn’t fast enough.

Speaker 0 | 46:40.766

Basically, an old school, an old school, the way we used to…

Speaker 1 | 46:43.628

An old school, it was really about data backup. And I introduced the concept of business continuity. And that was a new concept for the company. And what we talked, and it was my brother who’s an IBMer that gave me the name Zerto. And Zerto is a technology that at the block level of disk replicates virtual machines across a dedicated line between your primary location and a dedicated data center environment. And then so you deploy either in a public cloud. like an Amazon AWS or Google, or in our case, we deployed our own private cloud. So we had our own tech stack because we wanted that level of security. So we found a data center that had that merit that could give us the connectivity and the security we needed. And we housed our servers there and we used Zerto to replicate these machines. And the goal was in two hours or less, spin up all 40 servers in the event that the home office blew up by a tragedy. Or…

Speaker 0 | 47:39.846

Had to shut down because of a rebuilding as opposed to rebuilding and all kinds of other stuff.

Speaker 1 | 47:44.128

Right. So your data is always only, and we could go back eight seconds before a disaster fell and spin up the exchange server from there. So if you had a ransomware attack, you just spin up a new VAM and go do to do we have exchange, right? Or you would spin up your ERP from a different location. And yes, there are networking complexities, but we got it down to about an hour and a half for 40 servers accessible from another location in our testing. So that’s a project that I’m really proud of because it’s insulation against disaster. And so many small businesses aren’t thinking that way. They’re thinking, well, our data is backed up on a PC somewhere. And if their business blew up tomorrow or caught on fire or some other disaster, they would not be able to stay in business. And so for this company last year, the use case was if our ERP is down for a week, we’re out of business. Because it’s our point of sale. It’s our accounting.

Speaker 0 | 48:34.911

Any number of things.

Speaker 1 | 48:36.012

Any number of things. And their competitors are just right there, ready to pick up that business. So being able to stay live or get live within the same day or the next day was critical to being a leader in that space. So that was a really fun project that was challenging and was rewarding because Zerto is just amazing technology to work with. And you feel like you’re playing at a level when you’re using cloud-to-cloud replication technology. It’s not just data backup. You’re literally continuity of business, right? So you can function. You’re insulated from a lot of risk.

Speaker 0 | 49:08.141

I’m glad you said it. So, hey, if you had any one message to deliver out there, because, again, a lot of times I get, you know, you’ve got to have MBA, you’ve got to have certifications. Clearly not the case for you. But if you had any one message to deliver out there to other IT directors, up-and-comers out there, you know, what would that be? Any special knowledge? piece of info?

Speaker 1 | 49:32.190

You know, I’m really about passion and vision and about creating something special for end users. And I know that’s idealistic and maybe, you know, poetic or cheesy, maybe. Not really,

Speaker 0 | 49:47.538

because I think that’s the name of the game, you know?

Speaker 1 | 49:49.740

Well, I think one click by Amazon or an iPhone or the one button this or how ubiquitous Google is to use. I think these came from spirit in humans that could say, I want to design something special that users connect with and I want to change. It’s that why. It’s why am I building this tool? Why do I want to learn code? Why do I want to work at this company? Why do I want to build a search tool? I want to do it for some greater meaning. And not something just purely esoteric, but something that impacts lives in a very real and tangible way. So I want to help this small business compete with the big boys on a shoestring. Or I want to help seniors do this or help my mom be healthier or finding that real meaning of why you’re doing it. And then just going like mad to do that and not giving up no matter what. Don’t let anything stand in your way. Just go and you can do anything you want. Just have to believe you can.

Speaker 0 | 50:44.933

Said perfectly. Thank you, sir. Thank you for being on the show.

Speaker 1 | 50:47.987

Hey, thanks so much, Phil.