Speaker 0 | 00:09.626

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, I am speaking with Taylor Cain for the very first time. IT manager, IT director, CTO, CIO. We were talking moments before the show on whether titles really matter, but I guess officially. You are your IT manager at, is it Diagraph? Am I pronouncing that correctly?

Speaker 1 | 00:36.632

Yeah, yeah, Diagraph. That’s just like the major brand within the division in which I have, which I’m over IT for.

Speaker 0 | 00:45.859

What are you making sure, when you say I keep the, you know, I’m making sure things work for end users, what are we producing? What are we producing over there that makes money for the company?

Speaker 1 | 00:57.847

Yeah, so… So… For the most part, we produce industrial inkjet printers, which sounds really lame. But it’s like a printer that sits on a production line, and it fits out onto either the product or the packaging. It fits out something, right? So like a barcode.

Speaker 0 | 01:25.595

Labels, barcodes. Stuff that’s important to make sure that things get where they’re going. I work, I have a lot of kind of logistic colleagues and stuff. And it’s always about why is the VPN connection to Azure or Amazon down and the printer in this location isn’t printing this. So, yeah, very important. But the you. I had some very, very awesome, funny answers to questions that I ask everyone that’s on the show. And that is, what was your first computer? And you said it was a 4846 beige masterpiece, which is great. You had 100 more than me. I had a 386. Well, actually, I had an Apple IIc prior, like probably when there was a Texas Instruments before that. But I mean, just about everyone. that is over the age of, I’m hoping 30, probably knows what a 486 is or has dealt with one in some way. But even cooler was you saying that you and your father went to an auction and bought a truckload full of Pentiums. So please, can you just take us back in time and let me know, I don’t know, what was your first video game you played on that 486 or, you know, talk to me.

Speaker 1 | 02:43.786

Yeah. Yeah. So. on that 486 i think um i think they got wolfenstein yeah i did yeah i got i got wolfenstein on that hat boy private it was like you know that processor was cooking playing wolfenstein you know that was that was difficult um yeah but besides that you know just you know silly games like solitary and things like that but yeah um like you said we uh you know my my dad um worked at as a hospital administrator and he was aware of some i.t auctions and um they they would you know auction off all of their equipment and then give the proceeds to charity which i thought that was kind of cool um and so they you know my my dad just you know went to a uh an auction and picked up literally a truckload i think it was like 11 pcs and you know just the you know, crap. Um, but you know, they weren’t, they weren’t like, they weren’t as bad as you would think. I think one of the,

Speaker 0 | 03:52.222

it’s almost like down a car. I mean, I love this idea. This is almost like, I wonder if these it auctions, they must obviously still exist. I mean, I had a friend, I’m around a friend down in like Maryland by on old computers and like putting them on a container ship and shipping them overseas to like, you know, right. But, uh, this sounds actually like a fun new reality show, like it auction guys.

Speaker 1 | 04:15.068

let’s let’s just over and see how see what kind of stuff we get did you take it was like were you like parting those out and making one big computer or like one good one oh yes absolutely that’s exactly what i did um so we we we brought him in and you know we put we got the first truckload and then and then at the very next talk then it’s like six months later i was like dad just get like get an even bigger truckload and so he you know he brought home like i think it was at he you know, 18 computers. I mean, there’s a ton of computers. And so, yeah, what we do is we part them out and then we’d build the, we, we’d add all the Ram, you know, to, you know, beef up all the Ram.

Speaker 0 | 04:55.665

no more auto exec bat memory like my engine to make wolfenstein work yeah yeah no at that point you know these are pinium these are pinium ones like

Speaker 1 | 05:06.572

132 megahertz 166 megahertz you know uh some of them had mmx technology yeah and one might have even had a network card i wonder that so that that’s the thing so that was the first time that i was exposed to networking so we we brought a couple of these computers home and one of the games that we were playing at the time was warcraft 2. yep uh blizzard warcraft 2. and so we literally like i figured out like how to and again like the online forums like the internet was like almost non-existent at this point right i mean messaging boards yeah it was it was insanely just simplistic i mean at that point and um So you just kind of had to figure things out.

Speaker 0 | 05:54.390

I just, I know I’m old because I’m, you know, like, like when we were kids, it was like, I remember like, you know, when the microwave was invented or when the TV came out, let’s be honest, my mom was like, I remember when the TV came out. That’s crazy. That’s like saying, I remember electricity. And now I know I’m old because I’m sure I remember when there was no internet, you know, kids.

Speaker 1 | 06:16.569

I remember AOL 3.0. Yes.

Speaker 0 | 06:20.272

And what was that? Net zero. It was free. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 06:22.953

net zero. Yeah, actually, my first internet experience was with a service called Orion, and it was all text-based. It was a terminal-based internet, and holy cow, you know, that was crazy. But anyway.

Speaker 0 | 06:40.043

Do you remember booting Windows? Do you remember having to boot Windows? Yeah. Like.exe? Like, you just started at a DOS prompt. You booted it. Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 | 06:50.009

Yeah, win.exe, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 06:52.190

And you did other things in DOS. Like, you actually did stuff in DOS.

Speaker 1 | 06:59.576

CD, backslash.

Speaker 0 | 07:01.658

Exactly, you know? People don’t get it, you know? What are all these F1, F2, F3 keys for? Many things. Anyways. Okay, so anyways, back to truckload of Pentiums. I need to know what happened.

Speaker 1 | 07:17.331

Oh, yeah, so over networking. So I just figured out like, Hey, I can pick up a parallel cable, plug it into the parallel port on the other computer, right? Two different computers. And you could actually play Warcraft 2 1v1, right? That was freaking amazing. That was like mind boggling. We just thought we were like the coolest people on the planet. We were like multiplayer gaming with computers, you know?

Speaker 0 | 07:45.767

Like work. I’m just like, how did you set that up? Was there… Because I’m just trying to remember the old, because yeah, the Warcraft was like on CD ROMs. You’d load whatever it was. And I remember playing that. And what was the other one? Star. The other one was like the Starcraft. Yeah. They were so awesome. And I remember playing them, but you know, people don’t get it nowadays because people host them in servers and like you’re playing Warcraft like globally, you know, or any of these games globally. Right. Oh. Once you plug them together, what do you do? Go to like settings or something?

Speaker 1 | 08:19.651

Yeah, you go to multiplayer and then you like configure your multiplayer settings. And you’d have to like say, hey, this is using LPT port or whatever it is. LPT1, LPT2. And sometimes you’d have to like mess with like the baud rate and stuff, you know, all that stuff. And then if you did it all right, like you matched it all. it would work and it was like, Oh, communication established. And, you know, and then you, then you play against each other. So anyway, that was, that was kind of a, that was pretty cool.

Speaker 0 | 08:53.424

I think I tell this story too often, but I worked for quest wireless, like out of college and it was my first job that was like over $10 an hour. And I thought it was amazing. And because I liked dealing with all the angry customers that wanted to cancel their cell phone service, they moved me up to premier. So I got into premier accounts and premier accounts was like anyone with 50 cell phones or more. And it was 12 of us sitting in a room with like an OC 12 coming in, which was like huge back then. Oh yeah. No firewalls, nothing that, but we had like 12 computers on networks. We would play whole games of civilization in one day, you know, starting out from like caveman days to all the way. Yeah. That was great. That was amazing. Anyways.

Speaker 1 | 09:34.993

Yeah. Well, we just, you know, we, I moved on from there and we moved to like, I remember playing doom. So we actually, it was like Quake or was it DoomerQuake? I can’t remember which one. It might have been both, but we actually at some point established like an actual local area network, you know, where we had like an old hub, you know, 10 base B hub. And, you know, we connected the computers and we just thought that was like, well, I have friends over and I had, I had land, land parties before, before people even knew what land parties were, you know, there’s like, what’s the, what’s the land parties, local area network.

Speaker 0 | 10:14.189

That’s awesome. That’s real nerdy. I love it.

Speaker 1 | 10:17.011

Yeah. Yeah. It was fun. It was fun. I, I kind of wanted to start like a little bit of a trend in my high school. Like once I started doing land parties, I’ve always felt nerds come over and then like. Other people started doing LAN parties, and, you know, we just became a that was a thing when I was in high school. I don’t know if that’s a thing anymore, but when I was in high school, you know, toward the last couple years, especially the last couple years of high school, LAN parties. I mean, like, nerds, we order pizza. It’s a Friday night, you know, a Saturday night, whatever, and we’re playing Counter-Strike. You know, we’re playing StarCraft, you know, and we’re just doing it through the wee hours of the morning until we can’t.

Speaker 0 | 10:56.903

play anymore and then we fall asleep you know real quality that’s quality time i missed out on that i missed out on that the best i had was my friend i went to boarding school so my friend i drilled a hole in the wall and put a network cable through he’s like let’s drill a hole and we can peel back the like the rubber on the bottom of the wall and put a whole network he’s you need a network card though i was like what so what’s a network card like uh um That, that’s a great story. That really is. You actually, you just, you froze me for a moment. If you’re, I’m almost, I’m actually almost speechless. That is so great. So I asked you, I’m gonna ask you again.

Speaker 1 | 11:44.156

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 11:44.816

For the, the youth nowadays that didn’t experience. Cause that really is a nostalgic. It’s hard to describe how awesome that was. It’s something we take advantage. It’s something we take for granted now, like gaming, this stuff. It’s just, it’s very, it’s just a common, it’s, it’s seeing that whole thing come about like video games in general. Like, can you imagine like, like no video games? Like there was like, like pong, like I had pong, like, like legit pong, like knobs, like for them. AV switch or what was that switch at the back of the TV that you had to connect? I’m trying to remember it. You literally had to have like a Phillips head screwdriver and connect metal, that, that RV switch or whatever that switch was. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 12:28.189

I know what you’re talking about. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 12:30.070

Anyways. Um, people just don’t understand that, which brings me to this question, which is, do you have any advice for the youth now? Like youth, young people right now, growing up in technology today? Um, I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen an earthquake hit in DC when I was living down in DC. That rarely happens, right? It was like an earthquake and you go to make a phone call, nothing works because the cell phone towers are literally flooded with calls and they can’t handle the volume. So now all of a sudden people are like, oh my God, what do I do? I don’t have a phone. Or we leave home and it’s like, where are you at right now? where are my kids where is this you can tell where they’re at because they’re on a phone we’re tracking them i don’t know if you’re following my stream of crazy consciousness here but back in the day no you just left and we’re like oh i don’t know you’ll be back sometime you didn’t worry about like where someone was because it was normal to leave and not be attached at the hip to them so what is your advice to the youth growing up in technology now that are maybe handicapped or been spoon-fed oh yeah well nowadays you know the the um you know that this the discord you

Speaker 1 | 13:41.527

You know, the ability to communicate wirelessly and remotely is so much better that it almost made LAN parties irrelevant, right? They’re definitely irrelevant now. Yeah, it’s kind of sad. Well, I mean, I still hear about it every once in a while. I still hear of, like, you know, guys coming together or some nerds or whatever getting together and, you know, doing a LAN party. It’s just so much more rare now.

Speaker 0 | 14:10.450

Here’s what I… Here’s the version of it now. I do a lot of jujitsu. Jujitsu is like anyone that knows Brazilian jujitsu knows. I always tell people, get into it, get into it, get into it. You’ll lose 50 pounds in the first two months. I have guys come and I have guys lose 100 pounds. It’s the best form of exercise. It’s totally addictive. It’s human chess, blah, blah, blah. People are like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then eventually, hey, I tried jujitsu. I’m totally addicted now. But there’s a whole range of people in jujitsu from 16-year-olds all the way up. to you know 67 year old guys so i see i interact with the millennials let’s just say yeah i interact with them and i saw a post in our in our facebook group that was like we finally i finally got together with my um whatever game they play with my team i finally got together my team he flew in from san francisco he flew in from here he flew in from here and like they all met like in person for the first time but they had been playing this like one video game as a team for like you know years. Yeah. That’s similar to the kind of, that’s like the modern day LAN party. Like we finally got together in person.

Speaker 1 | 15:12.823

Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, I would, I would tell the youth, uh, don’t shy away from that because the thing is, um, it’s, it’s, it’s just not the same. I’m sorry. It’s not, I don’t think ever will be, um, as you know, being person, you know, being in person with somebody and, uh, getting to like, you know, people look on their face, you know. I mean, sitting across from them and just high-fiving each other and stuff, it’s just fun. And you’re staying up, eating pizza and drinking soda and stuff. That’s fun stuff. I don’t care who you are. And I think the youth are kind of missing out on that a little bit because everything’s remote. And I think hopefully we start to solve this whole pandemic thing and that becomes… uh something hopefully of the past or um because right now we feel like you know we’re all suspicious of each other almost it’s it’s really kind of unhealthy in a lot of ways right um because we’re like did you have toved i don’t know who’s got toved maybe i have toved you know it’s uh it creates uh

Speaker 0 | 16:24.320

My sister is the most suspicious person of all. She’s a nurse. She’s an RN. She’s like so suspicious. She’s like the family, like you better wear a mask. And like, and she comes to the house and she’s wearing a mask and like everywhere. Right. And like the other day, I was like, we’re wearing masks now inside. And the irony is that she’s the only one that got COVID. She was like, why me? I’ve been so cautious. You know, I’ve been this, I’ve been that. She didn’t feel anything. She got COVID. She didn’t feel a thing.

Speaker 1 | 16:54.072

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 16:55.132

No, nothing. Didn’t lose taste, smell, nothing like double tested, tested multiple times. They’re like, no, you absolutely have it.

Speaker 1 | 17:03.959

Yeah. Yeah. It varies so much. And it’s a person.

Speaker 0 | 17:07.641

Super spreader.

Speaker 1 | 17:09.242

Uh,

Speaker 0 | 17:11.764

no, anyways, so suspicious, funny because, uh, yeah, I did a podcast the other day with, um, uh, with, with Mike and anyways, he was saying, he was saying, you know, I teach suspicion. I teach suspicion. I’m teaching people to be suspicious from a certain aspect. But anyways, you said the youth should embrace technology, but make sure you rule it and not the other way around. So how do you rule technology?

Speaker 1 | 17:39.994

Well, first of all, you make it work for you, right? Like technology should be, you should be the master, you know, and you need to rule it. supposed to be ruling you and i think we all kind of instinctively know what i’m talking about when when we say we’re technology ruling us right like we know we know what that looks like that looks like that looks like shadow it that looks like hey we’re going to a new crm here you go yeah and also and on a personal level it also means like addiction to our phones addiction to social media right well we are literally being ruled by our technology instead of the other way around. It’s true. And so, we need to start looking at technology as something that we use as tools to accomplish what we wanna accomplish, right?

Speaker 0 | 18:46.218

It’s hard to separate tools from desire. Yeah. And, and like you said, addiction, I think I have a cure for it. Um, travel overseas and have someone drop you out of a helicopter and a parachute in the middle of like some land somewhere. And, yeah, I only say that because I traveled to, uh, I traveled to Egypt last year and I didn’t do like the normal thing. Like people would do like, you know, go to the pyramids and stay in a five-star hotel or anything like that. Because I know I have a couple of friends over there and I stay with my friend. And he teaches Arabic via Zoom, right? And I’m trying to learn another language. It’s just one of those things I’ve always wanted to do. And anywho, I went to go visit him. I figured, hey, I’ll go visit him. You know, this is cool. I had no idea where I was going. This was like buy a plane ticket, get on the plane, go somewhere. Like I know my Arabic teacher because I’ve been taking Arabic for the last, you know, two years with him. So I know him well, but I’ve never visited him in person. I’ve never even literally seen him in person. So I’m going to go visit. And I’m not kidding. He lives in a small, rural, the level of poverty is such a level of poverty that I have never seen in my life. Yeah. And. I’m like, this is, this is unbelievable. Like you are making a living via zoom in this middle of like just the poorest place I have ever seen. It’s it’s, it was shocking to me. And I quickly realized that there was no, like, you know, there was, I actually had so much fun and felt so at home visiting him because he was like so welcoming and brought me into his house. And Mike just did some. Other cultures, the level of a guest, when you go to visit, the level of a guest is like you do everything for them. You would never leave them paid for anything. Like, you know, you’re always like delivering food. I’m like, stop, this is crazy. It’s like too much. And, but there was, it was a complete freedom from like the social media aspect or kind of completely take you out of your normal aspect or normal culture or whatever it was. Very life altering. very life altering, but technology was absolutely involved. There was definitely getting a SIM card and putting it in my phone. And there was definitely communicating and doing my everyday business. My business didn’t skip a beat as far as remote work goes. Business did not skip a beat. There’s still internet. It might be internet like in experience in some weird town in South Dakota in the middle of nowhere, but there is still internet enough to have. Zoom still works. Email still works. Skype would still work, you know? Anyways, that’s my only piece about the addiction thing.

Speaker 1 | 21:32.834

Yeah, that’s interesting.

Speaker 0 | 21:34.495

Travel somewhere crazy, go to Russia, go to like, you know, go to some place that you would never imagine yourself going. I don’t know.

Speaker 1 | 21:40.460

Yeah. That’s just going to help you. That kind of thing is going to help you in so many ways, not just with regards to your dependency on technology, but just helping you give it a different perspective. Right.

Speaker 0 | 21:53.331

And it’s like on human beings.

Speaker 1 | 21:56.153

Yeah. Yeah. You see things just so differently when you get out. so and that’s something i i um i had the chance to to do so i actually uh served a two-year mission for my church um and i was uh down in mexico for for two years they literally dropped me in the middle of a small town in mexico and they said hey go do your thing and um and i didn’t know any spanish you know and you have to know spanish in order to communicate basic things yeah yeah So, so I had to learn Spanish. I’m bilingual now. Um, that’s great. But you know, it definitely was a, uh, an eyeopening experience, like getting out, like you said, just getting out there, getting a different perspective on the world and, you know, not, not taking things for granted as much.

Speaker 0 | 22:49.929

Um, I did happen to go see the pyramids and various different other things there, but he asked me one day, it was, uh, I was with my, my I was sitting around this big gathering of food, family around, kids everywhere, brothers, sisters. They all live in the same kind of building, all very close, very family-oriented. And a guy sitting next to me, he’s like, what was the best part so far? What was the best part? What’s the best part that you’ve seen so far? Asking me, so far in your visit, what is it? I was like, it’s this. It’s this right here, man. It’s literally this right here. It’s seeing your family. You don’t understand what it’s like where I’m from. Like, yeah, I’m not saying it’s like that for everybody. I’m not. But for the majority, I would say of America, like you don’t see your family every day. You don’t sit down and have every single meal with them. You’re not completely intertwined with them and their kids and all running around. And, you know, I was like, honestly, it’s this right here. This is the most impactful thing that I’m seeing, how you treat me, how your family’s together. This has nothing to do with IT, I understand. But it did to an extent because I was using Google Translate a lot. And we’re going back and forth from that standpoint it is. But, um, yeah, you know, and they’re just kind of like, wow. Like I’m kind of surprised. Cause you know, for them that’s like standard. Um, it’s hard to move from that to something very quite hilarious. Um, but I asked you what your biggest learning moment was and this is near and dear to me because I’ve been in telecom for two decades. And you said implementing the wrong phone system, your customer service people will never forgive you. I got to ask what happened. Because that could be the most painful thing ever from porting numbers to auto attendance to outfit transfer to how do I, what happened to my KPIs or my reports? And I’m trying to think of numerous things that could have been like literally like you just wanting to stab yourself.

Speaker 1 | 24:52.905

Yeah. Yeah, all of those things. Everything you just mentioned.

Speaker 0 | 24:57.006

Why was the phone rebooting?

Speaker 1 | 24:59.610

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 0 | 25:01.372

Why does it say no network available? What do you mean? Let’s cat and dive.

Speaker 1 | 25:07.328

You know, I’m pretty sure that every IT guy or gal that I’ve ever met, we just don’t like telecom. I’m telling you, there’s something about telecom that is just the bane of our existence.

Speaker 0 | 25:27.604

I absolutely love it.

Speaker 1 | 25:29.706

It’s just necessary evil where you hate it, but you’re like, we need to have phones.

Speaker 0 | 25:36.852

You know, I take an advertisement break. Let me see. There are everyone out there listening to dissecting popular IT nerds. If you’re an IT guy and you hate telecom, I will do all of it for you for free. I will take all of that off your hands. I’ll charge of you for it. And while you’re at it, could you please go to iTunes and give us an honest review? I’m supposed to do this. I have like a podcast, like consultant now is what do you mean you don’t ask people to give you reviews? I’m like, I don’t know. You have to do that. Okay. So everyone listening, please. It’s iTunes. You might, you might not be an iPhone guy. So I don’t know. Just figure out a way to go to iTunes, search for dissecting popular itiners. You got to scroll all the way to the bottom. You got to give me an honest review, actually listen to a show and hit, I don’t know, whatever your one to five star review and give me an honest review. I’d love to know. Okay. So every it guy hates telecom and we don’t do video. this is just like an audio server but if people could see you of grabbing your head earlier you know like like you know body i’m going to just describe yes he has hand over face and you know biting fingers anyways what happened i gotta hear this story the

Speaker 1 | 26:48.222

question is what did not happen that’s the question now let’s from the top down what was the what was the first card to begin with was it cut here’s here’s where it started here’s a here’s where the problem started the problem started with my hatred of telecom and and

Speaker 0 | 27:03.752

You didn’t embrace it.

Speaker 1 | 27:05.894

No, yeah, see, that’s the problem. Like, it started out with that. That was the issue. And it’s, like, years of, like, having to deal with, you know, telecom companies. And I don’t know what it is. It’s almost like the telecom companies are colluding together to, like, all provide terrible service. Yes,

Speaker 0 | 27:23.609

absolutely. They’re like,

Speaker 1 | 27:24.950

hey, I know. If they can get away with providing horrible service, then I can get away with providing horrible service.

Speaker 0 | 27:31.396

I tell this story all the time. I left, I was at an ISP doing fixed wireless. It was one of my favorite jobs ever, right? A fixed wireless startup. And I had a partner, kind of like a strategic partner, but that long story short, that company got sold and liquidated and it was great, but we grew the company and then they sold and bye-bye. Phil Howard’s got to get a new job. So one of my strategic partners referred me to a company called Broadview, which got purchased by Windstream. And he said, we need a really good guy. We need someone that can support us because of all the reasons that you’re saying right now, we need you over there, Phil, we need you. I’m going to get you a job over here. So I’m like, okay. I walk into the interview and the VP, Donna Wank, lover, lover, Donna. Thank you. She said to me, Phil, I don’t even know why this interview is even necessary. She’s like, cause so many people have called and said that I need to hire you. So I guess I kind of feel like you need to interview me. I laughed. And I said, okay. Um, I don’t know. Why should I come to work here? And she’s like, because we suck less. Like fully honest, you know, like really, really honest from the telecom. Yeah. I was like,

Speaker 1 | 28:43.279

okay. We suck less than the other guys.

Speaker 0 | 28:47.962

You probably kill me for saying this live. She’s like, and if you ever say it, I’ll deny it. She’ll probably like kill me when she hears this. I will not tell her.

Speaker 1 | 28:54.025

I wonder if that’s their customer service slogan. We suck less. Hey, every day, all y’all who are working customer service, just remember, we suck less. When you’re on the phone with that customer, just remember that.

Speaker 0 | 29:08.012

Sometimes brutal honesty, it really bonds you. It really shows that you can trust the person. Really, what she was saying is, look, I’m going to be a good boss. You can trust me. I’ll take care of you. You know what I mean? And she did. She really did. But the funny thing is, yeah, if you ask all of America. The statistics show that 33% of America says that telecom has the worst customer service of any industry. Yeah. Not inkjet printers, you know, no telecom. Not that I’m saying inkjet printers have anything to do with bad customer service. I really don’t know. You guys probably have the best in the industry. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying telecom out of any industry, car, automotive, you name it, corn buying. Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, begin.

Speaker 1 | 29:55.763

Yeah. Yes. So I’m kind of curious what that number is for IT leaders. Like if it’s even lower. Oh,

Speaker 0 | 30:05.983

you mean telecom sport?

Speaker 1 | 30:07.343

Yeah, like their opinion of telecom.

Speaker 0 | 30:10.865

Get out. Every time a telecom guy calls them.

Speaker 1 | 30:15.028

Yeah, so anyway.

Speaker 0 | 30:17.009

I call it 1-800-GO-POUND-SAND. I said, are you calling it 1-800-GO-POUND-SAND? Does your IT team jive well with the knock at XYZ Telecom Company? You know, I could just go on all day and ask some questions. I could probably spell out step-by-step exactly what went wrong with your thing. You had a bunch of guys come in in suits and ties. They made a great presentation. They told you all the bells and whistles. They made you fill all of the like filled all of the gotchas that you needed. They probably talked about Frost and Sullivan. Maybe they talked about Gartner Magic Quadrant and how this, that and EBITDA and where we sit. Great product shows. Great. Here’s the one thing they never cover. The one thing they will never tell you is how backed up their operations department is. So. So then you’re like, okay, great. Crosses all the dots, get the paperwork signed. Maybe we forget to talk about chronic outage addendums and SLAs. I don’t know, probably a few other things. How the porting is going to go. What’s the next steps? Setting great expectations. You get handed off to a project manager. That project manager is a butt in the seat. They get paid an hourly rate. Nothing against them, but they clock in and clock out and their schedules are backed up. Backed up. They’ve got multiple installs to do. There is no time in between one call to a cutover to the next cutover to deal with you and any of your problems or little issues that went wrong. You know why? Because they’re on the next call, screwing up the next order or forgetting to dot T’s or cross I’s or there’s a DID they got missed on the install. So now you’re trying to bird dog a very complicated install and there’s no one to get back to you because they get paid hourly rates. They clock in and clock out and they’re vastly overloaded. And the way that these companies work is… The sales departments, a lot of the money goes into sales and not as much money in operations. I’m not saying that’s with everybody. I mean, I’m not saying that there’s not a solution to that. There is. But I can imagine cut over a day. I have seen nasty cutovers where a lot of problems have gone wrong and executives are like, switch us back. But there’s no going back because that would be a snapback and we can’t snap back the ported numbers. And anyways, and then there’s maybe. If there’s one thing that went wrong, if there’s an API that doesn’t work, or there’s a little issue or an annoying thing that soft phone weird glitch or something like that, you may have to live with that forever. But you don’t know you have to live with it forever because in the IT director’s mind, you’re like, this is a simple fix. Why can’t you make this work? But somehow in the ether of the telecom world, there’s no way to fix simple sometimes.

Speaker 1 | 32:52.961

Yeah. That’s pretty close.

Speaker 0 | 32:55.799

What did I forget?

Speaker 1 | 32:56.439

That’s pretty close. Yeah, I mean, you got some big ones. I would say, okay, so with us, we were, okay, so we had already moved to a cloud PBX, right? So like, you know, we don’t have the phone system on premise.

Speaker 0 | 33:18.616

We call that, just so you know, we call that a hot cut. Plugging from cloud to cloud is a hot cut because you can’t have two phone systems at one time in that scenario.

Speaker 1 | 33:29.537

Right. Good. So, yeah, we were going through a hot cut, basically. And, you know, if I had to nail down the biggest problems. Okay, so, you know, the fact that I didn’t like telecom, I had a disdain for it, I think was an issue. Because what happened is that I… outsource as much as possible because I hate it so much. So what do you do when you hate it so much? You outsource it. So I found a company that is local. I’m in the St. Louis area and I won’t mention them. I’m not going to completely ruin them. But the point is… I had a local IT firm, services firm, and they helped me using our requirements to come up with a good solution that they were comfortable with and that they had done before, supposedly. And they were going to basically act as a middleman to help implement this new cloud PBX system.

Speaker 0 | 34:44.785

Well known or not well known?

Speaker 1 | 34:46.978

Um, I would say not well known. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 34:51.084

Cause there’s only like, you know, 700 of them.

Speaker 1 | 34:53.428

Yeah, I know. I know.

Speaker 0 | 34:55.782

Every guy that’s like, hey, I got a good idea. Now that we’re done networking or having a LAN party during our LAN party. So while we’re having our LAN party, you know, I got a great idea. Let’s start a VoIP company. We just turn up a couple of these Pentiums in the garage that we got from this other thing. I mean, really, you don’t need much to run VoIP. You know what I mean? We’ll do a lease pass call router. I got this guy that I met at a conference. We’re good to go. It was boom.

Speaker 1 | 35:23.302

As long as we get 99% of the time.

Speaker 0 | 35:25.623

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 35:27.365

Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it’s, yeah. So we had,

Speaker 0 | 35:30.788

um, I’m not saying, you know, we had,

Speaker 1 | 35:31.829

we had a sales engineer, um, that was working with us. And I think that was one of the big problems. I mean, me, like the sales engineer, like that’s just a critical role, you know, it’s so critical because that’s the person who, um, is supposed to put through the fluff. Like if they’re a good one, they’re supposed to cut through the sales puffery and all that crap.

Speaker 0 | 35:59.742

I put it this way. They’re the guy that basically prevents the sales rep from over-exaggerating and selling stuff that doesn’t exist.

Speaker 1 | 36:09.349

Yes, exactly.

Speaker 0 | 36:10.350

And they’re supposed to say,

Speaker 1 | 36:11.371

no, we can’t really do that.

Speaker 0 | 36:12.912

No, we can’t do that.

Speaker 1 | 36:14.933

Right. Preventing the sales person from saying yes to literally every question. Yeah. Right.

Speaker 0 | 36:21.518

I exist. Anyways.

Speaker 1 | 36:26.441

Yeah. And that was a situation where our sales, what we were getting picked was a solution to all of our problems. And they kept using the phrase seamless integration. Oh,

Speaker 0 | 36:41.910

great.

Speaker 1 | 36:45.251

So I will never trust frankly, anyone, if I, if I, it’s almost like a trigger word for me now, I hear like seamless integration and I’m like, bull crap, you know, like, like show me, show me the, you know, show me the money, so to speak,

Speaker 0 | 37:02.387

like show me full black eye cut over.

Speaker 1 | 37:05.188

Yes. Yes. Seamless integration. And because what they were referring to was, um, you know, how well we integrate with, uh, they integrated with office 365 and Skype services, right? Skype. at the time because we had made a crazy move to start using Skype PBX services. And they picked this whole thing like, hey, we’re going to use Skype PBX services. It’s going to save you a bunch of money because if you just do the add-ons, some international add-ons, it’s going to be cheaper than these other solutions out there. And it’s going to give you full integration to like that and all the other services. And it’s just going to be one happy… perfectly, you know,

Speaker 0 | 37:49.378

for business integration integration, it was, it was much prior to teams, all this stuff. Gotcha.

Speaker 1 | 37:56.061

Correct. Yeah. Before the team switched over. And so, um, so yeah, it was, it was pitched as this, you know, seamless integrated, um, call center that was going to just work perfectly with our Skype and everything was going to be, uh, you know, utopia and, and the sales engineer, the sales engineer really, um, was I would say mostly responsible for kind of creating that utopia. Like the person who’s supposed to be cutting through and saying, okay, let’s actually look at what this really is going to look like.

Speaker 0 | 38:28.358

What kind of switches do you have in place? What kind of like support process?

Speaker 1 | 38:32.661

Yeah. And it gets, you know, with cloud PBX, it does get kind of complicated because you, there are a lot of little things that normally, you know, with on-prem stuff you don’t think about. But with the Skype TVX stuff, you have to fine-tune firewalls. You have to fine-tune QoS. You have to look at the hops. You have to look at where is this traffic going to? I mean, we didn’t have…

Speaker 0 | 38:59.614

Did they not do a POC?

Speaker 1 | 39:01.834

They did. They did, and frankly, it turned out fine, which was kind of weird because when we actually implemented the system, uh the performance was not even close right um weird yeah yeah it just it just didn’t it just didn’t work out i mean it it it worked out i mean we finally were able to fine-tune everything like close go live you know we were able to fine-tune it and get it to i would call a minimally acceptable state okay uh where it’s just like this is just barely good enough not to rip the entire thing out.

Speaker 0 | 39:44.699

But you’re walking down the hall and everyone’s staring at you. Like you’re walking through the gauntlet. You’re just walking with it. Like, is there a backdoor to this place?

Speaker 1 | 39:52.806

Yeah. Yeah. I got lots of glares. I had one of the customer service people. used the word, I used the phrase, this new system disgusts me.

Speaker 0 | 40:04.850

Oh, God.

Speaker 1 | 40:07.832

I don’t even know what the, I don’t want to respond to that. I don’t even know, like, you know, it literally disgusted her, like, this new system. I know. So, you know, anyway, there were a lot of problems, but the sales engineering from the get-go was off, right? And so then that trickled into… you know, the project management that we had a lot of issues with. And, you know, I am an attentive like stakeholder, like I’m an attentive, you know, like customer, so to speak. I’m not one of those IT guys that’s just like,

Speaker 0 | 40:45.017

you know, oh, yeah, I’m just going to be an issue, you know, end user support. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 40:48.340

absolutely. Absolutely. And we, I feel like, you know, me and my team went like above and beyond. what I think a normal IT department would do. I mean, we sat down one-on-one with people and we had multiple trainings and train-the-trainer programs and we bought pizza for the customer service. I mean, we just went over and over. It’s like we went above and beyond what I think was normal. And I was very attentive to the project manager. I was on the project manager all the time and At the end of the day, just the end result, the end product was anything but seamless integration. It was a hard, arduous, difficult, clunky integration between these different services that did not work well and was fragile. I mean, any little thing would break it. And it ended up being… We were sold one thing, which was an in-window Skype Silverlight tool that was going to be a part of Skype. And what we actually got was a web-based phone system. It was literally based in HTML5 and was experimental. And I mean, holy cow. The list goes on and on. But the whole thing ended up being a cluster.

Speaker 0 | 42:23.058

So the old provider actually was better. Why did we do it? Was there money savings? What was it?

Speaker 1 | 42:29.820

We did it because the old provider was just a really, really terrible partner. They were constantly charging us for things that they couldn’t charge us for, for being us to death. The reliability, I would say, was okay. from a usability, they were fine. It was a much simpler system than the one we had before. The issue was that we did have downtime and when we did have downtime, it would be like an entire day. Just horrible. Just SLA destroying stuff. And then of course they wouldn’t uphold their SLAs. and they would deny our, you know, corrective actions and stuff like that. I mean, the list was just, I mean, there’s definitely reason to move away from them. It just was, you know, what we moved to, obviously, ended up, it was kinda, it’s funny, we traded one, we traded, it was a huge trade-off. What we ended up trading was, like, we avoided the major down times, but we traded the major down times for a whole bunch of small, annoyances and inconveniences that actually do add up to like a disruption you know yeah oh yeah and it which is which is really annoying because it’s actually harder to do you get to qualify an SLA related event right because from their perspective they’re saying well you know we didn’t time exactly yeah there wasn’t an outage and so you’re fine and it’s like yeah but this yeah But the call forwarding button doesn’t work.

Speaker 0 | 44:24.439

Well, it’s not an outage. We consider an outage as defined in six pages of terms and conditions. An outage is defined as 30 minutes or more of complete downtime within a 30-day period. Blah, Exactly. And SLAs, if anyone knows anything about SLA, the 99 and the five nines uptime, know that’s measured across the United States, across all customers, across entire downtime. So it’s like, of course it’s five nines. Anyone can make five nines happen. Right. That’s just it. Thank you for sharing. Yep. There’s a, one of the things that’s important, I think it’s, I think it’s something that a lot of it directors, it managers, CTOs, everyone deals with is the landscape of technology is changing so fast and migrating so fast that it’s hard to know. And even in, especially in telecom with companies getting bought in the marketplace in general, it’s hard to know whose operations department is backed up. It’s hard to know who’s getting ready to sell. It’s hard. It’s definitely easy to see who’s buying all the companies, but for all those companies that are buying a ton of companies, how are they integrating all those networks in which VoIP, you know, it might have a name stamped on it. It might be, I’m buying, you know, Harbucks, but what, you know, what version am I buying? Am I buying the version of the company that you bought last month? Or is it this other company that you’ve always been, or is it the enterprise version? What, and, you know, and then. how’s your operations department going to jive with my IT department? And when I say jive, it’s important because I find that you’ll find some people that love a particular company and you’ll find some people that love another particular company and hate the opposite of the two companies. And it really has to do with their specific culture of end users and how the IT department can interact with the support process. And is their technical support actually technical or are they just… butts in the seat that escalate a ticket to the one or two guys that still know what they’re doing that may quit any day. And then, you know, what happens when John, who’s the only guy that understands the specific API and the code that was written to work for our company is no longer there anymore. That happens a lot. Um, you have a weird story. you have some kind of thing where we built a custom API for, they’re like, oh yeah, we’ll bring in our custom dev team. Okay, that’s great. And then you call support and you’re like, hey, oh, actually there’s a note in the system. We have really no idea how to support this. You got to talk with Steve. That type of stuff goes on as well. Anyways, I’m only saying that because I’ve been doing this for a long time and I feel the pain for you guys. And I do this all day, every day. So it’s… It’s important to kind of know the ebb and flow of the market and really kind of the reality of the situation, the truth of it, you know, and it’s not seamless. We all, you know, there’s so many jokes. There’s so many jokes. I mean, the seamless, you know.

Speaker 1 | 47:24.734

Some of them not appropriate.

Speaker 0 | 47:25.655

Cutting edge, bleeding. Yeah, exactly. You know, yeah. And, you know, yeah. There’s a new cutting edge GUI and single pane of glass. And, you know, all this stuff is, you know.

Speaker 1 | 47:37.765

Catch phrases.

Speaker 0 | 47:38.946

How about just, you know, it works. You know, I love the simple things, you know. I saw this IT guy’s headline once, and he’s like, I get the job done. It’s perfect. I was like, it’s perfect, man. Yeah. So, great stories, man. It was a lot of fun hearing those stories. I do want to ask you one more thing.

Speaker 1 | 48:05.997

Okay.

Speaker 0 | 48:07.137

What’s, um… What’s the end game for IT guys now? It’s changed so much. It used to be, you know, I interviewed Aaron Siemens once, and he said, well, IT is no longer, we can’t just sit in the server closet and have people shove pizzas under the door anymore, right? Yep. Like there’s… Hot pockets, yeah,

Speaker 1 | 48:33.053

under the door.

Speaker 0 | 48:37.197

You know, it’s… it’s we really have to get involved in the business and really you know drive the business forward um do you have any like last piece of advice or anything there like how do you get budgeted dollars like how do you how do you argue for it and and i guess get what you want and look good you

Speaker 1 | 48:55.611

know i we could dedicate a whole um a whole podcast series happy to do it happy to do it please yeah i uh

Speaker 0 | 49:03.674

I’m always fast forward to do it. And a lot of times I don’t always get a very specific answer.

Speaker 1 | 49:07.735

I can tell. Yeah. That’s been my whole career, honestly. I have almost specialized in reshaping companies’expectations of IT. And that really is the root. It’s a cultural thing. It comes from the top. A lot of culture, I think, comes from the top. But how does this company, VYT, and every time I’ve stepped into a role, what I found is we’re the guys who replace their mouse battery and make their emails working. Right. And, you know, that’s, well, that’s, you know, that’s important. I mean, you know, people’s, you know, equipment needs to work and all that. And it’s all good. It’s so, it’s such a primitive form of IT. I think IT, I mean, encompasses technology in general. And how incredibly important is technology in general in this day and age? And how, I mean, what’s the potential? for technology to improve a company and to improve its operations, to improve its bottom line, to improve culture, to improve collaboration. Right. I mean, it’s, it’s incredible. There’s so much.

Speaker 0 | 50:42.520

Abilities to deliver products, abilities to deliver product to market. Sears failed. Toys R Us is gone. Sears is gone.

Speaker 1 | 50:52.867

Yeah. I’ve tried to do that everywhere I go. And you know, it’s funny, like it goes back pretty far for me. It goes back to picking my degree in college and college. Okay. I’m, I’m, you know, an IT guy. I’m going to go get a degree in computer information systems or whatever. Right. And I decided, you know, no, I’m like, I want to, I really want to lead organizations and, and, and if somebody once told me that, you know, accounting and finance is the language of business, right. Yep. And so I’m like, okay, if I’m going to be working with businesses and trying to improve IT everywhere I go, like I need to get a business degree. So I majored in business, you know, and had to take all those painful econ classes and it’s still difficult. But anyway, it kind of set the tone for me.

Speaker 0 | 51:50.386

That makes managing your P&L pretty easy. Yeah. It makes managing your budget pretty easy.

Speaker 1 | 51:55.450

Yeah, it came, it came, the fact is it came a lot more naturally for me than I think a lot of my predecessors that held, you know, the positions that I, that I held and got these companies, I think because.

Speaker 0 | 52:07.678

It also allows you to sell yours. It also allows you to sell IT easier.

Speaker 1 | 52:12.462

Absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 52:12.922

You can say, I can show you this aspect and this aspect. I mean, what do you measure? Right. And what are the, you know, what are the. You know, what’s the data, you know, that you’re presenting to get done? You know, you can speak in the aspect of, you know, profitability or, you know, from an OpEx or a CapEx perspective.

Speaker 1 | 52:33.710

Right. I think I think everybody is selling something. Right. So it’s like if we’re in IT and I can’t I can’t effectively sell why it is that we need a new ERP system. That’s a problem. Right. And it’s going to probably be years. Yeah. Well, it’s going to lead to years of kind of mediocrity, you know, within, um, within it and within the business. Um, anyway, I could talk forever about ERP. Um, but yeah, so going back to your thing, um, you know, I, uh, I have, I’ve taken a very progressive view of it and I’ve tried to, um, essentially convert my IT people into business analysts. And some of my colleagues disagree with maybe the way that I do certain things.

Speaker 0 | 53:38.586

Why, like what do they disagree with?

Speaker 1 | 53:41.248

I think it’s just kind of the older school mentality of just wanting to maintain control. So I’m a big believer in outsourcing. Outsourcing the technical aspects that don’t necessarily directly derive value for the business.

Speaker 0 | 54:00.433

Some of the most successful guys I’ve had on this show and known in general, most of them say that.

Speaker 1 | 54:06.955

Yeah. And at the end of the day, we need the service to work. But how much value is it really adding to the business to have? my guy or my gal working on the server saturday at

Speaker 0 | 54:20.607

7 p.m if you have more control if you can maintain control and you have more control more flexibility and more scalability why would you not do it and not only that you have less um i guess i guess you could say it’s a point of failure but in reality it’s it’s maybe more of a flexible less less of a point of failure because you don’t have one person attached to it or two people attached to it

Speaker 1 | 54:45.014

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 54:45.494

Numerous options.

Speaker 1 | 54:46.716

And, you know, that was a major project that I went through. The company I’m at now, Diagraph, was basically creating the… It took me two years to… to finally get the justification and the approval and the implementation of taking all of our infrastructure and moving it to a third party. And one of the first things that they asked for when I built this, I did a whole full five-year financial analysis. And that’s the thing. Even if as an IT person, you’re not really strong with the finances, then that is why it’s critical that you have a really good relationship with… your controller or your finance people, right? You have to have a good relationship.

Speaker 0 | 55:33.467

That’s a huge theme. That’s a huge theme because, yeah, but not only that, at the end of the day, you’re not going to be coming out of nowhere with something presenting it and they’re sitting at the table and you’ve never talked with them. You don’t even know them. You start poking holes. They’ll start poking holes in everything. If you go to them and you say, hey, I would like your expert advice on something because clearly you’re the smartest guy in this organization. Um, do you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 | 55:59.615

Right.

Speaker 0 | 55:59.835

Hey, can you help me bang out some numbers for this? I really love that you say converting it people into business out analysis, because we’re not saying you have to cut the staff and cut people out. We’re saying you have more staff that’s business analysts. That means you’re going to be more successful as a business.

Speaker 1 | 56:17.187

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 56:18.407

As opposed to a cost center and just a guy, uh, take it. Yes.

Speaker 1 | 56:22.450

Yes. And that that’s exactly how I pitched it. Um, because the first thing they asked me was Okay, cool. So you’re, you’re going to be able to save X number of hours and you’re going to accept this, that you’re an outsource that that’s great. That means we, you can, we can let her a couple of your people go. We can let, we can let it, we can let a couple of your people go. That’s great. And I’m like, no, you’re not letting my people go. And I was like, and here’s why, here’s, here’s why it’s, here’s why, um, it’s because the value is not simply just moving, uh, you know, but moving a cost center to outsourcing it and having it be more efficient it’s it’s bringing up these my people’s time to focus on things that actually do derive drive value for the business drive uh and i gave them examples i gave them i had heart i concrete examples i said listen we have um we have these 12 projects that will directly impact the business and They have been sitting on our backlog for 18 months, right? And they’re going to continue to sit on that backlog unless we outsource this infrastructure, right? Things like, you know, generating reports and new reports and ways of viewing data in ways that our managers have never seen before, you know? And giving them like an analysis and insight into all this data. Every company has this treasure trove of data, and the vast majority of it just goes unused and untapped and unanalyzed.

Speaker 0 | 58:03.157

I wish you could analyze my data. I have a treasure trove of data that’s just sitting on all kinds of hard drives and stuff. Who knows what I could do with my data?

Speaker 1 | 58:11.120

Yeah, I think everybody does.

Speaker 0 | 58:12.521

I could just transcribe all these shows and do something with it. Yeah. We’re definitely having you back on the show. We have to talk about this. Trevor. treasure troves of IT data, but we’re going to replace it with something. I think maybe we should just have a huge LAN party. It’ll be a LAN party. Let’s have a LAN party.

Speaker 1 | 58:42.581

That’s all they are nowadays, just LAN parties.

Speaker 0 | 58:46.645

We need some real nerdy, addictive IT game that teaches people… uh when i every now and then i’ll get like i’ll have some nostalgia and i’ll i’ll download like a nes rom you know like a nes oh yeah yeah like a nes simulator and i’ll just be like great download every game that ever was you know like you know and i’ll find these like crazy games in japanese that and i found this one game where it’s like it was just you know a button b button and all it was was a bunch of like businessmen sitting around a uh like a boardroom table with with uh um you know making decisions like that was the game i had no idea what it was that is hilarious oh it was like just a weird game we need like a we need a game that’s like a wan party that teaches it guys um the language of business and uh i don’t know converting them into business analysts i don’t know i’m gonna have to think about that one is something where it’s like no you failed back to the server closet sure

Speaker 1 | 59:51.694

They give you like a path you can choose. It’s like, do you A, like spend the entire weekend, like upgrading the hard drives on your, you know, HP, you know, ProLiant server or B, you know, generate that report that the CEO has been asking for over the last year.

Speaker 0 | 60:09.647

Yes. Or it’s the last day of the month. And you’re contemplating cutting over to this VoIP provider. And you’re not quite sure because you haven’t done 100% of your due diligence. You’re 99% of the way there. And the sales rep calls you and says, I’ll give you three months free. It’s the last day of the month and we need to close this deal. Do you sign the paperwork or do you tell him to go pound sand and know that there will always be a deal there?

Speaker 1 | 60:35.469

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 0 | 60:36.829

You know how many people have told me that? Nope. We’re going to, we’re going to, uh, we’re going to Cox for our phone system. What? Like, what do you mean? Sorry, Cox. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 60:46.722

You know, it’s funny. Like now that you, now that you mentioned that, like if you were to ask me, what’s the one thing I learned from that whole telecom fiasco, it would be, it would be, uh, even if you’re like, you think you’re doing your due diligence, like you, like, and you’re getting information from a sales engineer or from people from a company, like, Like, expect that stuff. Like, trust, but verify. Like, show me the money. Like, no, I want to see this. Like, and show me the moving parts and really, like, dive into it. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 61:18.906

you have to prove it. I make people prove it. And then the other thing is, is I know, you know, it’s kind of funny when people ask for references. I was like, stop. Please stop. No phone company is ever going to give you a bad reference. Would they really give you a reference where the customer is going to say? They always tell you, hold on, let me get some. Guess what they’re doing during those few days while they’re digging up your references? Calling customers to ask them if you can use them as a reference.

Speaker 1 | 61:47.442

And you please that they were not terrible.

Speaker 0 | 61:49.903

Yes, yes. And they’re telling them we’re not terrible. And by the way, we’ll plug your business and we’ll do this for you and that for you. I’ve seen it. I’ll tell you, okay, last, this is hopefully people listen to this whole show. It’s very entertaining. I think they will. Although I do think highly of this conversation. Um, I had a customer at an old, so I worked at this startup and there’s, I don’t know, it was just like, kind of like a, it was like an architectural design firm, right? All working on Macs was all Macs, but it was like Macs back in the day. It was like, you know, early 2000, right? Early 2000. It was back in the day when, you know, there’s just how many applications worked across platforms back then. Right, right. How many of the like, you know, whatever the apps that came in this telecom product would work on a Mac? None, none, right? And I can’t remember what they were sold, but it was, I was at a startup company running a sales team back then. And the sales team was business to business, like literally going door to door. And it was like a managed service provider and we were helping people consolidate. basically manage services, right? Consolidate various different telecom bills. And we came across this person that had been sold by someone at my company prior to me coming in. And man, did I get like an earful. It was like, yeah, come on in and sit down, you know? And I was like, okay, like what’s going on here? And it was just over and over. And I was like, I am so sorry. I was like, I do not know why they sold you that, you know, and I’m sitting there completely off guard. like writing this person off, right? Like, how do I get out of here? Like, I can’t, you know, what am I gonna do? I’ll, like, I’ll, I’ll make sure that people call you, blah, blah, blah, take notes, all that stuff. Right. I’m not kidding you. A month later, I went on our website and there was a video testimonial from this lady, like a video testimonial of like, how good that like, how, you know, this was my very first. like job and technology out of working for Starbucks. I went from Starbucks to this Cisco startup, right? It was like, you know, like really like just so green, like so not, you know, I came from a company where it was like, you would never swear, like, you know, HR would call you and like this person didn’t feel like you, you know, treated them with respect and dignity to like crazy Cisco startup telecom company. You know, it was just like, it was, it was anyways, very different. But I was shocked. And what I found out obviously was that someone took my notes or whatever and went to this person. Obviously they complained to grab them, but completely like you just never really know, you know, that’s what I’m saying about the references because this was like the worst horror story ever to all of a sudden I’m like, how are they giving a video testimonial of how great it was, you know, and from start to finish, I’m like, who called them and who paid them? Like, that’s just another example of like, you know. ethics and I’m like, what? You know, it was just against everything. I just, I didn’t get it. So, um,

Speaker 1 | 65:00.766

anyway, somebody got some, somebody got some, uh, front row tickets at a bulls game or something.

Speaker 0 | 65:05.549

People know that I’m like a no nonsense, very frank, tell it how it is, but that’s, you know, it was, uh, look, it wasn’t bulls. It wasn’t just front row tickets. It was more than that. I don’t know, but it was definitely more than that. I was probably like, we’ll give you service forever. And, uh, you know, any who. It has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. I’m definitely having you back on to talk about Trevor Treasure. I can’t even say that. Treasure Troves of IT data and projects getting done to drive the business and freeing up people and not. treating it as a cost center because um if we can nail that one it really is going to be very helpful to other people so thank you so much absolutely thanks for having me