Speaker 0 | 00:09.623

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today is a special day for me. My daughter is off to her second day of driver’s education here in Massachusetts. My wife is taking the kids out the door right now to go pick them up. So if you hear kids screaming in the background, which if you listen really carefully. from time to time you may hear them, but today is a special day because Massachusetts is the hardest state, I guess, in the union. I don’t even know if that’s correct, but I guess it’s the hardest state to get a license in. She must go for eight hours a day for a week just to prepare to get her permit. Whereas if you’re in New Hampshire, you do not even have to go get a permit. You just get in a car with someone that has a license. But with that being said, welcome. Jeff Bonet to the show who also has a 16 year old daughter. That’s why I am, I am rambling on about this because he can feel for me. He is information technology. Yes. You know, and I don’t know, we might get some flack for this, but Jeff, you are information technology manager at Warren distribution. You guys manufacture lubrication.

Speaker 1 | 01:21.536

That is correct.

Speaker 0 | 01:24.597

I’m sure there are plenty of HR inappropriate jokes that go around your organization about lubrication that we will not get into on this show. That’s a good idea. We got to do something to get people to listen here. Right. Anyways, I’ve never said it outright. I’ve always kind of beat around the bush a little bit. But I want to say that I think… Not that I think, I know that one of the hardest jobs for IT managers, IT directors, people in the mid-market space where, I don’t know, we might not want to give someone a title of CTO yet, I don’t know what it is, but IT manager, IT director, one of your hardest jobs is selling to upper management. And do you think that that’s because we’re in the mid-market space and we have a budget for IT? as opposed to small business or maybe enterprise? What is it? Why is selling to upper management the hardest job that you have to do?

Speaker 1 | 02:29.590

I would say it’s the hardest job I have to do, especially, like you said, in the mid-market range. If we’re big enough that we have a need for a significant amount of IT, but not so big that we need that tiered management up there. So my department reports to the head of finance, the CFO, and then from there to the operations officer. So there’s no, then there’s a director below that that’s right above me. So when we’re trying to sell this, we’ve got to sell it in a way that they understand that, yes, I’m asking for money for something that isn’t going to make you money, but it is going to make you more productive. Or it’s going to increase your uptime at your plant and keep your distribution centers running. and keep those trucks flowing and keep those lines producing.

Speaker 0 | 03:20.611

Well, it may make you money if you’ve got a backlog and you can’t get product out the door fast enough.

Speaker 1 | 03:25.035

Well, yeah, exactly. Yeah, and that is very true if that is the case. And a significant amount of downtime can do that. Downtime can be very detrimental for distribution because a lot of the trucking companies start fining you if you make their trucks sit there too long. So it’s very important that stuff is running all the time.

Speaker 0 | 03:46.112

I interviewed this gentleman, Michael McClure, the other day and how he grew up in technology. And he said, I was put into the IT department or made into the IT department when someone asked, why is there no problems going on in this particular building in IT that he managed? And oftentimes, the irony is there’s nothing going on. There’s nothing wrong. We should cut the IT budget. Nothing’s going on. Nothing’s going wrong.

Speaker 1 | 04:15.492

You know what I mean?

Speaker 0 | 04:17.192

That’s correct. That’s exactly what you want. In that case, maybe we should pump some more money into IT and see what the results are. But let’s just kind of, I can read the, after interviewing so many IT directors over the years now, I can really read the mid-market space. And the whole point of this show is to kind of create this revolution of the… IT is not a cost center. IT is a business force multiplier. And I know before we talked on the show, I was saying that the average ratio of IT staff member to end user is always 100 to 1. One IT personnel to 100 end users. And honestly, it’s usually more. And I’m not saying that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but what I’m saying is you guys are performing small miracles to provide the end users the ability to do their job well, all the tools that they need. So I wanted to ask you maybe what was the last project that you saw a significant need for that needed to be sold? to upper management?

Speaker 1 | 05:30.538

That would be our infrastructure, upgrading our infrastructure. We, when I came in…

Speaker 0 | 05:37.481

And when you say infrastructure, that’s a big word. Are we talking internal switches?

Speaker 1 | 05:40.802

It is a big,

Speaker 0 | 05:42.043

okay. Giggy switches, what are we doing?

Speaker 1 | 05:44.424

I’m talking everything from my edge to all of my internals and then my data centers. So we had, I mean, before I’d gotten there, it was a… Yeah. throw money at managed services, let them deal with it.

Speaker 0 | 05:59.669

And then ignore it. What did you have for it? What were you managing? What was being outsourced at managed services?

Speaker 1 | 06:04.951

Everything. Our firewalls, switching access points, our endpoint protection, our storage, our servers. Help desk? Directory. Help desk was not. That was the only thing that wasn’t. But our help desk, they felt crippled because they couldn’t do anything.

Speaker 0 | 06:24.017

I would almost have it the opposite way. You would almost think that help desk would be the first thing that you would outsource and then you would switch everything else around, you know, you know, the help desk should be like, okay, go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 06:35.006

Anyways. Yeah. The way that it was that way. I don’t know why it was that way, but we came in, we were looking at that and we’re like, my God, you guys are spending so much money on very, very old technology. That’s not being managed because you know, nobody’s paying attention to the managed service provider. So we went through and we.

Speaker 0 | 06:52.180

So the managed. Just to be clear, the managed service provider was not managing.

Speaker 1 | 07:02.142

That is correct. And that’s the thing is like whenever you bring it, managed service providers can be extremely helpful, but you have to have somebody managing that organization.

Speaker 0 | 07:11.707

That relationship.

Speaker 1 | 07:12.387

Or your organization.

Speaker 0 | 07:13.588

Making sure that they don’t just sit stale. They don’t sit stale. They don’t sit back on their laurels. They don’t become a butt in the seat collecting money. There has to be someone there that really can do the checks and balances and understand that, you know, Hey, they are indeed doing a good job or no, they’re just kind of, you know, sending us a bill every month.

Speaker 1 | 07:31.958

Right. And so when we came in, we kind of reviewed everything and went, look, we gotta, we gotta dig out of this and we’ve got to go ahead and we’ve gotta, we gotta bring it in house. So we’re going to hire a high level engineer to come in. He’s going to help us manage it. We’re going to replace everything. And it took a lot of selling. I had to provide them, um, a pretty expensive return on investment for that. Very well detailed out to show them why this was going to be the way to go. And, you know, it ended up being a ton of savings. We saved almost a million dollars a year on our budget. If we were paying these man of service guys just an exorbitant amount of money, it would kind of really do nothing. And when we bought it all in-house, we put it all under one unified solution. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say vendors or not. on your show.

Speaker 0 | 08:21.489

Absolutely.

Speaker 1 | 08:21.749

Go ahead. All right. We unified everything under Fortinet from our firewalls, which is at this point, yeah, 100% Fortinet through the whole thing. And then we went Dell and Dell EMC for network and storage. Great.

Speaker 0 | 08:38.819

Sounds like a good idea to me. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 08:41.460

Yeah. It’s worked fantastically, but it took a lot of selling. I had to go in front of all of the C-level officers

Speaker 0 | 08:48.897

multiple times to get them to understand that yes bringing this in-house and yes the place in this is going to make things better and it did i mean we they were where they were going down one plant would go down once a week because you know server would crash or something would go down can we just just i’m gonna just try i’m gonna ping someone over at fortinet you know maybe they’ll be a sponsor maybe they’ll be a sponsor you know but uh so let’s just hit on a couple bullet points for fortinet real quick yeah and this is i’m being completely honest this is uh, you know, not a buy, you know, we’re not trying to be biased here at all, but you know, you chose them, you chose them for a reason. What were, if you had to pick the top three hot buttons, you know, for their direct sales reps that are out there, whatever, knocking on doors and calling you, what’s, um, what were some of the, honestly, from your perspective, what were the three best benefits and helpful bullet points that, you know, uh, yeah,

Speaker 1 | 09:38.671

sure. Uh, I think one is as I had, um, you know, you could You can look at it either way. I had one hand to hold or one throat to choke. When something went sideways or if I needed something, I had one person, one organization I reached out to for everything. And that’s really important when you’re a top of my size. Because if I’ve got one vendor to call and I can call them about 60% of my products, that gives me a little bit of reassurance, a little comfort. And so that was important. The other part is…

Speaker 0 | 10:11.765

That’s oddly familiar to what I do. Go ahead. Okay, so keep going. So that’s a key point though. I think that’s a key point though because that’s a partnership. That’s a relationship.

Speaker 1 | 10:23.791

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 0 | 10:24.211

It’s not a product. What you just said is not a product. What you said is a relationship. You said nothing about blinky lights. You said nothing about warranties. You said nothing about cost. You said nothing about, I don’t know, application stacking or bandwidth aggregation. You said nothing about any of that. You said one hand to hold, one throat to choke. That’s what you said. That’s a relationship.

Speaker 1 | 10:54.283

Yeah, but that’s the thing. especially when you’re talking about your core infrastructure, what keeps your business alive, the nervous system of your organization, is you can’t go with the guy that, just because their company is a Fortune 100 company and they’ve got the best convention, you’ve got to pick somebody that you can talk to locally, hopefully, that you can talk to, that can provide you with a significant amount of products. and provide you with expertise in those.

Speaker 0 | 11:24.635

I love it when other people say it and I don’t say it. Because when you say it, it’s true. When I say it, it’s suspect, you know what I mean? Right. So, yeah, because how often are people being, you know, thrown the Gartner magic quadrant, which is, I mean, I should be careful too. It is kind of a pay-to-play model. And a lot of these other, you know, whatever, Frost and Sullivan, XYZ, that doesn’t matter. What matters is the right. product that’s the right fit for your company and your unique group of end users and their needs exactly that’s what’s important um okay so bullet point one um what was uh you know what’s kind of like you know what were some of the other benefits maybe what’s the second best thing what like if you thought if you woke up in the middle and i mean i’m so happy i have i can do this what is it

Speaker 1 | 12:16.203

would probably be that i can log into one of my data center firewalls And I can access every firewall, switch, AP, and then endpoint protection agent on every device in that one place.

Speaker 0 | 12:33.880

Can you make one security change? Can you make one change to blanket your entire organization?

Speaker 1 | 12:38.824

Yes. I can make one change that propagates through all nine locations that we have if I wanted to.

Speaker 0 | 12:45.114

And that’s huge. I hear a lot of people say that. I don’t have to log into individual devices. I don’t have to log into individual routers. And if you’ve got multiple locations, even just, you know, and that’s just really speaking very vaguely cloud security, right? A cloud security, you know, infrastructure. Like what’s one of the biggest benefits? Well, I can log into one GUI and I can make a change across my entire organization.

Speaker 1 | 13:10.729

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 13:11.954

Uh, is there anything other, any other crazy things that you do that are benefits like backhauling traffic out of one area or anything like that? You know, is there any kind of like network topography, um, I want to call it, uh, that would be, you know, that you changed that really made a difference.

Speaker 1 | 13:27.838

You know, I would have to say that, that we were able to get coordinate kind of with their firewalls. They offer a version of SD-WAN.

Speaker 0 | 13:35.600

Yep. I call it SD-WAN light, but go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 13:38.761

Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. Uh, but. I can tell you that was a game changer for my company because a lot of our sites have, they’re out in areas where you may have one carrier that gives you a 400 mega bandwidth. And the next best thing you can get is a

Speaker 0 | 13:56.948

DSL. Yeah. All right.

Speaker 1 | 13:57.708

So you’re aggregating.

Speaker 0 | 14:01.390

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 14:02.050

Yep. So we send our, the, the small light graphic over that five Meg and all our heavy traffic over the big. And if, you know, we happen to have to bounce around. Nobody really notices anymore. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 14:17.735

And God forbid the, the main, the main circuit goes down. You can shut down all your applications and just run your, your main applications, your kind of mission critical applications on that DSL temporarily.

Speaker 1 | 14:30.419

Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 14:33.560

Exactly. I don’t do a lot of like kind of, I do a lot of SD when in conjunction with Fortinet. but as I, you know, I do a lot of SD-WAN and then we, we layer in the Fortinet on top of it, or we do like a password hybrid, but is there, um, the, you know, for the SD-WAN light section, does it allow you to have up to four connections? Can you have four connections or just two?

Speaker 1 | 14:58.796

just do um okay and really that it just that was fine for us because there isn’t a location well i guess our corporate office we could probably get four different people like to have like a tertiary yeah like for some people they want to have a tertiary like a 4g sitting idol type of thing you know and and honestly i’m just happy i have a secondary at a lot of my sites yeah okay so

Speaker 0 | 15:26.704

All right. So we kind of hit on the, the, the people that will point that you look, do you save a million dollars a year in, um, operating expenses? That’s a big number, but what was the CapEx on all this about, you know what I mean? If you can’t give out the number fine, but I mean, what was like, what was the sell? What was the, what was the, I went in here with this price tag and what was the sell?

Speaker 1 | 15:46.554

Um, it was, it was getting close to that, that million dollar mark when you’re talking about every, yeah. I mean, it was almost a one for one. Um, We didn’t break even obviously on that first year, but year two and year three, we made our money back.

Speaker 0 | 16:03.129

Any CFO should buy into that. Any 12-month payback model should be an unknown break. Okay.

Speaker 1 | 16:09.655

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 16:11.016

Okay, so you knew you had that. But now let me ask you this. So we could fire these MSPs that were overcharging them, but did that free up cash flow for your budget anywhere else?

Speaker 1 | 16:21.225

No.

Speaker 0 | 16:24.204

In other words, did you make sure to cover up, did you make sure to like, you know, well, we saved some money here, so I’m going to use it here.

Speaker 1 | 16:30.608

So when we budgeted for that, we, you know, we did that. I, you know, I hope my CFO doesn’t listen to this, but I always, I always add in.

Speaker 0 | 16:38.994

I’m connecting with him right now. I’m connecting with him on LinkedIn. I’m sending him to this right now. No, no. We, you know,

Speaker 1 | 16:50.562

right. I add into my budget thing. that may not be directly related to the project I’m working on, but are things that we are going to need to be able to continue moving IT ahead.

Speaker 0 | 17:01.547

Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 17:01.667

we rob people to pay them.

Speaker 0 | 17:02.507

So, you know, that happens all the time.

Speaker 1 | 17:04.668

Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, that’s just how it works. We can tell the organization we’re going to save them, you know, $100,000 a year, but that doesn’t mean we get $100,000 a year back. That means you save the organization $100,000 a year. Thank you for your service. Now do it for people.

Speaker 0 | 17:23.580

uh well honestly all the time i run into people that have um legacy systems to put it lightly legacy phone systems and they’re paid for they’re they’re like they still have a heartbeat and you know they’re running off a pri for 300 bucks a month or whatever it is and then right They’re like, we got to get rid of this thing. It’s a nightmare. And, you know, every time a phone breaks, I’ve got to order it on eBay. And I’ve got to, you know, the phone vendor is like, you know, Chuck down the street who’s 74 and really kind of retired. And then, you know, that’s what they’re operating on. But when you go to look at the upgrade to RingCentral or whoever it is, it’s, you know, you’re going from 300 bucks a month to 2,000 a month. And now it’s, you know, like, how do you make that argument? Well, then we take in, well, we’re paying this much on whatever, WebEx, and we’re paying this much here. Oh, wait a second. That 100 meg circuit we’re paying $1,900 a month for, and now we can get it for $800. Well, let’s take the $1,000 from that circuit and move it over here to the phone system thing, and let’s lump it all together, and we’ll call this the voice and data bucket. The voice and data budgetary bucket. And this is what we’re paying now, and this is what’s going to be on the upgrade, and it’s all the same price, and we’re good. Does that make sense? Okay. So there’s some of that going on. And I think we see that in state and local politics as well. Right. You’re wondering, like, why are they repaving that road? The road’s fine.

Speaker 1 | 19:01.253

Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That’s something we’re actually dealing with right now. Our phone system went out of support about a year ago, which means if one of our phone cards in one of our very old system breaks. then I’ve got to go on eBay, find one, find a contract or fly them out to that site, have them replace it, fly them back. So I’m in the process of trying to sell my organization on moving to a RingCentral or a few cloud-based solution where then…

Speaker 0 | 19:34.117

We didn’t ring this, by the way. I really did not set this up.

Speaker 1 | 19:37.178

When you brought that up, I was like, man, are you guys looking at my… Did you guys look at my budget for next year?

Speaker 0 | 19:41.661

Look, my nickname, my other name is the most bearded man in telecom, just so you know. I don’t know if you knew that. No, for real. I’m not the second most bearded man in telecom because I hired a guy with, he has a, he has a 13 inch beard. So I’m the second most bearded man in telecom. Oh, well, anyways. So, so yeah, so that, I mean, that’s what we do. That’s the general, but let me ask you this. So why was that a hard sale then? Was it, was it the putting together the PowerPoint presentation? Was it the ROI? Um, was it their pushback at the beginning? Was it a general like, Hey, you know, you’re coming in here and don’t make too many changes too fast. Or we like these guys. Well, or was it, was it end user pushback? I mean, what was it like, where was the, where were the, the, um, I guess what was the tough part?

Speaker 1 | 20:33.014

So the tough part is, is they, if they don’t see a break, they don’t, then it doesn’t break. So why do we,

Speaker 0 | 20:42.500

if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Speaker 1 | 20:44.702

Exactly. So why do you want to spend a bunch of money to replace the phone system that’s worked for 25 years? And you know, the answer is, is because of tech debt. I mean, eventually it’s going to break. And when it does, it’s not going to break a little, it’s going to break a lot. And now you’re going to be like.

Speaker 0 | 21:04.415

Can I take a couple of guesses? Let’s just see how good I could possibly be. Okay. So did you say it’s over 20 years old?

Speaker 1 | 21:13.903

Over 20 years old. Yep.

Speaker 0 | 21:16.385

Is it over 30 years old?

Speaker 1 | 21:18.847

I don’t think it’s over 30 years old.

Speaker 0 | 21:20.268

All right. So that’s 2000. VoIP was coming out back then, but we did have dial up and email. Let’s see. That was like 2000. Just so you know, the last couple of shows I’ve been asking people, when did paranoia set in? They all say 2000 with like the, I love you virus. That’s when paranoia is right. Okay. Um, I’m assuming you have line appearances on the phones, like line one, line two, line three, little buttons that light up.

Speaker 1 | 21:44.614

We do.

Speaker 0 | 21:45.314

Do people ever age and say, Hey Johnny, pick up line two for people. Are we doing that? Do you have an overhead paging system?

Speaker 1 | 21:51.499

But we do at our plants and distribution centers. Okay. I have an overhead paging system.

Speaker 0 | 21:57.214

Are you VPNing between sites? Do extension dialing or no? People are dialing 10-digit dials.

Speaker 1 | 22:03.037

Nope. We’ve got a four-digit dial, and it’s a VPN connection between the phone system.

Speaker 0 | 22:11.462

This is tough. I’m guessing it’s either a Nortel slash Meridian. Is it a basic? I’m guessing Nortel, Meridian, Avaya, or… Man, I don’t know. There’s so many options. Let’s go. There is. Is it like a weird name? Is it a weird name that I want to know?

Speaker 1 | 22:35.020

You would know the name. When I found out who he had, I didn’t even realize they did phone systems. Ooh.

Speaker 0 | 22:41.802

NEC?

Speaker 1 | 22:43.743

Mm-mm. Dang. Nope.

Speaker 0 | 22:46.223

Rumpelstiltskin’s up. Toshiba. Toshiba?

Speaker 1 | 22:49.504

Oh,

Speaker 0 | 22:49.624

okay.

Speaker 1 | 22:50.104

Toshiba.

Speaker 0 | 22:51.024

Toshiba’s great. Do you like the kind of dark gray plastic? uh, kind of rectangular looking phones. Uh, actually that was a, that phone system is actually a pretty solid, it’s a pretty solid old phone system. It’s like a diesel Mercedes. It’s like a diesel Mercedes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 23:06.449

We’ve had it for 25 years. It’s still run. Uh, yeah,

Speaker 0 | 23:11.270

I’ve got some people that’ll buy, I got some, I have some equipment guys that’ll buy that off you when you’re, when you’re done with it and they’ll sell it. They’ll sell all your parts on eBay to the other guy.

Speaker 1 | 23:21.553

Well, that works for me because, uh, I would be more than happy to get rid of it.

Speaker 0 | 23:26.835

Okay. The problem is the Toshiba is sitting in an office with another like, you know, like leather chair and like a phone that’s been sitting there forever that the person knows how to use. And now you’ve got to teach them, uh, look, you’re not going to have a line, one line, two line, three button. Um,

Speaker 1 | 23:41.303

right.

Speaker 0 | 23:43.284

That’s always the, there are options though out there to continue to do that. All right. So anyways, not talk about phones and not make this about me. Um, we’re selling, we’re selling, um again what was the hardest um if it’s okay so if it ain’t broke don’t fix it but what were the how did you translate into cfo language how do you translate it to cfo language and how do you get them on the same page so

Speaker 1 | 24:12.031

in this one when i showed him it wasn’t i mean it was it was there was savings so there was some money being brought back in uh there was going to be a lot of money coming out up front for travel and training and everything else but the way that i uh was able to kind of help get everybody on board is i talked to my accounts payable department and had them give me every phone bill that we get for a month and it was uh close to 1100 pages of phone bills oh that’s fine and just i mean we’re talking three four five carriers per location a couple you know

Speaker 0 | 24:52.587

Just so you know, I’m still back on the, like I, we can, we can continue to talk to phone stuff. That’s fine. But I’m still back. I’m still back on the, on the equipment, the, the, the Fortinet upgrade.

Speaker 1 | 25:02.852

Oh, the Fortinet stuff. Okay. So. Really, the big way for me to translate that was I had to show them what it cost when our system went down and plant and how much that cost them.

Speaker 0 | 25:16.164

Okay. How often was it going down?

Speaker 1 | 25:19.925

Well, we’re probably getting calls for plants going down probably three to four times a week, which is not good. I mean, you’d have a plant set down. Yeah. And it was just, oh, I mean, well, because we had, you know, a mix of Cisco, Netgear, something somebody bought at Walmart, something else somebody picked up at, you know what I mean? And it was a mixed mash and it just didn’t communicate well. I have no idea. It’s so infuriating.

Speaker 0 | 25:53.407

I went into a zoo one time. They had 25 points of failure. They had sub, they had hubs. They had hubs, switches. They had some guy track down why there was an outage here, and we went to Target, and we bought a Linksys router or whatever it was, Best Buy, Sears, back in whenever they bought the Linksys router, sitting up above the ceiling tiles just to marry a couple cords together. And the first thing that the COO said was, don’t tell us we need to recable this facility. or I will kick you out right now. And the first thing, and the first thing, the first thing I was getting ready to tell him was, of course, we need to recable this facility.

Speaker 1 | 26:43.856

Right.

Speaker 0 | 26:45.756

So it’s like, I was like, okay, I’ll go back and make this argument first. But what I did was probably similar to what you did was I went back, looked at how many times it went down, right. Looked at how much, and this was an MSP one too. So that’s interesting. I looked at how much money was spent on break fixed to the MSP.

Speaker 1 | 27:02.423

Right.

Speaker 0 | 27:05.129

And it was like 80 grand, 80 grand on break fix. And it was 42,000 to recable the facility. So after I got done making the argument, instead of saying, don’t tell us we need to recable, he said, why wouldn’t we do this? I was like, I don’t know, probably because you’ve been telling the old IT director for the last 10 years, don’t ever talk about recabling the facility. And he was too scared to make the argument or he didn’t know how to sell to upper management or he was too afraid. It wasn’t in his vocabulary. So, okay. So how many, so it was going down how many times a week? Plants going down twice a week?

Speaker 1 | 27:39.716

Yeah, at least, I mean, it was pretty close to twice a week per facility.

Speaker 0 | 27:43.038

And what did that do? Did that mean you couldn’t download information, print barcodes, print stickers? What did it mean?

Speaker 1 | 27:50.724

That means that we couldn’t load trucks because we didn’t know what product to put in the truck. So they would just sit there idly. We had a forklift driver sitting on forklift waiting. for the network to come back up so they could start moving stuff. They couldn’t do quality checks at line. So if they can’t do quality checks, that’s a line down because it has to, they can’t have some product that will help verify.

Speaker 0 | 28:12.528

How long would an outage be? So when an outage would happen, would it be like, let’s call the MSP and open up a ticket?

Speaker 1 | 28:19.191

And that’s usually what it was. It was open up a ticket, give them 15 minutes to figure it out, and then start escalating as quickly as possible.

Speaker 0 | 28:27.554

And they’ve got like a button, a seat over there saying. Hold on, let me reboot the router.

Speaker 1 | 28:33.161

Yep, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 0 | 28:34.582

Everything’s back up now. Here’s your bill.

Speaker 1 | 28:38.384

Yep, basically. That was it. And that was the whole thing over and over and over.

Speaker 0 | 28:44.048

That’s amazing.

Speaker 1 | 28:44.908

It was painful, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 28:46.749

That is amazing. I can safely say, without a doubt, that one of the best decisions they did was hire you and say yes to the Fortinet upgrade.

Speaker 1 | 28:59.816

I, you know, I’m going to have to agree with you at least on the Fortinet upgrade.

Speaker 0 | 29:05.600

Did you, were you able to measure productivity after the fact?

Speaker 1 | 29:10.784

So we, um, you know, I didn’t, and I, I could have, uh, we just didn’t because it wasn’t a necessity anymore. Um, the big thing was,

Speaker 0 | 29:19.970

we’re so happy now. Gotcha.

Speaker 1 | 29:22.032

Everything worked. So nobody, since everything works, nobody cared anymore. Um, They didn’t care that they sent the money. They didn’t care that anything else. They were just happy that everything worked perfectly, that they weren’t going down. I mean, they started building things around with their process to compensate for outages. So they could now take that time that they were stepping to that downtime that isn’t happening anymore and actually…

Speaker 0 | 29:49.666

If you could go back, it would be great. If you have that, and I’m not telling you to do this because… You know, I’m sure you’d rather be on the beach or teaching your 16 year old daughter how to drive or whatever it is, you know, telling her not to. Well, mine, it’s like, no, do not dye your hair for the fifth time, please, in a week. Uh, the, I mean, it would be a great case study. It really would be cool. I mean, I have had some people that have measured the productivity and shown 70, 120% productivity gain from things like this. Wow. And when you take that, when you measure that, what that means in dollars and cents, that’s really, it’s, it’s, these are the stories that we need to tell to paint the picture of it as a business force multiplier, not a service center cost center. um, you know, uh, a dude that’s a butt in the seat type of thing. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 | 30:43.010

Right. Right.

Speaker 0 | 30:44.191

So yeah, that’s a great story. So now it’s, um, just, uh, did you get any type of, um, like did anyone notice sometimes when I, sometimes when things just work all the time, people don’t notice.

Speaker 1 | 30:57.202

Um, it’s funny. Uh, they, they did notice, but not in the way that I was hoping, you know, Of course, you have that dream that after you do that and everything works, that when you walk into the facility that you did that at, you know, they’re carrying you around on their shoulders. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 31:13.267

it’s like they’re like cheering on you in IT.

Speaker 1 | 31:17.771

Right. But instead, now they’re going, hey, this other thing isn’t a problem anymore. So now we’re seeing this other thing over here that’s a big problem.

Speaker 0 | 31:26.898

It accentuated something. That’s mind blowing. That’s mind blowing. It is because it’s not just a. it’s like an exponential game. And it’s like uncovering things that we didn’t know were a problem before that now are.

Speaker 1 | 31:45.291

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Huh.

Speaker 0 | 31:51.814

Now people are probably mad. They’re like, man, we really enjoyed waiting for the network to come back up. Thanks.

Speaker 1 | 31:59.098

Back into my extra coffee time,

Speaker 0 | 32:00.859

right? I know. Back then we used to be like, network’s down. time and a half time and a half you became the enemy i did yeah i’m not saying that you have i’m not saying that you have workers at all that would that would milk the clock no one has that no nobody has that no that doesn’t exist yeah uh let’s just um what’s your number one product you I mean, do you guys, what do you guys do? That’s, um, like, what do you guys do? That’s like a separation in the, you know, we might as well plug you while we’re here. You’re in Omaha, Nebraska. My wife is from Omaha, Nebraska. You know, we’ve got Warren Buffett there. I mean, you know, what else can we do? You know, he drives every day to McDonald’s and gets his, whatever is egg McMuffin. It’s just crazy. So, um, I can’t tell you our customers because, you know,

Speaker 1 | 32:52.752

I didn’t put the NDA with you. Well, this is public. Yes. But we manufacture oil for other companies. Gotcha. So when you go to the store and you’re at…

Speaker 0 | 33:08.887

Buying a brand name or a shop. Fine.

Speaker 1 | 33:10.328

90% of the time, I would say you’re probably buying us.

Speaker 0 | 33:15.651

Gotcha. Where are we shipping oil in from? Is that how it works?

Speaker 1 | 33:20.313

Well, I mean, we manufacture it locally. So we buy our base oil and things like that from… I don’t know exactly where. I know we buy them from all over the country. Ours is already, it’s base oil. We take it and blend it with additives, things like that, that make it all of those different types of lubricants, transmission fluid, diesel fluid, motor oil.

Speaker 0 | 33:46.971

I’m assuming my snowmobile, I’m looking at your line right now, like a picture from LinkedIn. I can’t read what’s on the bottom, but it looks like what I dump into my snowmobile.

Speaker 1 | 33:59.718

Yes, we do that.

Speaker 0 | 34:00.858

An ICA workstation in the background without a flat screen. It must be a poster. That must be a poster. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 34:11.421

Yeah, we, apparently they had just gotten rid of TwinX and like standalone terminals a few years before I got it.

Speaker 0 | 34:19.463

Well, it’s hard when you’re in manufacturing because you probably have, I mean, do you have a software development team or do you have anyone that’s like dealing with any of that type of stuff?

Speaker 1 | 34:27.425

We do actually. We have a development team of five people. We work on the same IBM. Well, I recently upgraded the IBM hardware. That was a nightmare.

Speaker 0 | 34:40.671

Was it an AS400?

Speaker 1 | 34:42.832

We went from an AS400 to a Power 7, and we just upgraded to a Power 9, and then IBM 7.3.

Speaker 0 | 34:51.697

Those AS400s. Day to the yard. It says a lot about IBM. It really does. Because those AS400s and how strong they are and how well they made them, that IBM AS400, those upgrades, that’s a big deal for people in manufacturing migrating from that. And I actually have one vendor. that specializes in migrating AS400s to the cloud. Because it’s not like something that you just go buy like, you know, a space, you know, like a server in the cloud and you just migrate your AS400 to, you just don’t do that. For anyone that has them and knows how manufacturing works and that type of stuff. So it takes, for most people, it’s actually an unknown. It’s kind of like a, we don’t know what we’re going to do. What do we do? And you’ve got to find a new way. Yeah. Kind of what you guys. Well,

Speaker 1 | 35:48.007

yeah, we, we, I mean, we were still using the same IBM systems. We’re just on new hardware, but I, uh, I now officially know how to make that migration and do it fairly successfully. Uh, so again, I mean, it was, but it was, it was quite the feat. I mean, we’re basically telling the company, look, you’re going to have to add an extra holiday into your annual rotation. because you’ve got at least eight to 16 hours of solid downtime where you have no system, nothing. You don’t have any of your, you don’t have any way to handle your payment transactions. You don’t have any way to handle your accounting, your manufacturing, your forecasting, shipping, any of it. It was because it’s all right there living on that IBM and we had to set it completely down and then rebuild it on a new one.

Speaker 0 | 36:35.286

That’s really cool.

Speaker 1 | 36:36.956

Yeah, it was probably one of the cooler things that I’ve gotten to be involved in is doing that because it was so very much outside my realm. In 15 years of doing IT work, I don’t think I’ve ever, ever had to do anything that even remotely came close to dealing with an IBM.

Speaker 0 | 36:50.607

I mean, that’s like going into the ring for like the championship fight.

Speaker 1 | 36:54.310

Right.

Speaker 0 | 36:56.031

You know what I mean? Like there’s a lot on the line. Yeah. And everyone’s watching. Everyone’s watching. You could get knocked out.

Speaker 1 | 37:06.400

Yes, that is very, very true.

Speaker 0 | 37:08.461

This is a show.

Speaker 1 | 37:09.041

It was a regular email.

Speaker 0 | 37:12.282

Yeah. Right?

Speaker 1 | 37:12.662

I like it.

Speaker 0 | 37:14.923

Outstanding. So, I mean, I think this has all been great. If you, just out of curiosity, how did you get started in IT? What was your first computer? You know, take me, let’s go back in time for a second.

Speaker 1 | 37:27.268

Sure. So, my very first computer was an Apple TV that my mom had bought me at a garage sale.

Speaker 0 | 37:34.331

Awesome.

Speaker 1 | 37:35.371

It had… It had one floppy disk game on it, and it was Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a text-based adventure. And that’s when I got started. I just kept playing with that thing every day, trying to find new ways to do different things.

Speaker 0 | 37:53.165

Any floppy drives? Did you have the dual floppy drives stacked underneath the monitor or on the side?

Speaker 1 | 37:57.489

Yeah, it was just the one on the side, just the one there. It was a great green screen machine. That’s kind of where I started out.

Speaker 0 | 38:13.390

And from there, I just kind of kept saying, yeah. You got to keep going. I was talking with, again, I was speaking on this on a previous show. I was talking with my nephew and I had no clue he was into computer science. I didn’t know, you know, for all I know, he could have been, you know, going to college, getting ready to go to college for anything. And he started talking about botnets. How do you know about that? You’re like 18. You’re not even in college. Like, how do you know all this? He’s like, oh, you know, we’re playing Xbox and we’re in a game room and we’re like very competitive and we’re like highly ranked. And, you know, our competitors like we’ll send out, you know, they’ll set up all these botnets to like, you know, shut down our game room. So, you know, when we start doing good so that, you know, let’s start sending packets to my IP address to shut me down. I’m like, wow. It’s like, I guess that’s how you learn. How do you learn? Yeah. It’s a different, it’s the same, it’s like the same, but different. It’s the same, but different. Like they don’t understand like, no, a world without the internet, which is mind boggling.

Speaker 1 | 39:09.337

No, they would not.

Speaker 0 | 39:10.218

I cannot get, I cannot, I’ll never get tired of talking about Apple IIe’s, Apple IIc’s, Commodores. I just won’t ever get tired of talking about, remember the day when we used to go out to the movies and then the VCR was invented. I’m like an old man now. From my parents, it was like, remember when the car was invented? Remember electricity? Now it’s like, remember when the VCR and the microwave came out? So, Jeff, been a pleasure having you on the show, man. If you had any, you know, words of wisdom, pieces of advice for other IT directors out there, is there any, you know, big struggles or patients or days of patience or anything like that that you had to overcome that would be helpful to other people listening?

Speaker 1 | 39:53.560

There is. And there’s one thing that I’ve learned in IT management that I feel like has been the biggest thing that’s probably helped me be successful is that IT management is 50% being a salesperson and 50% being a technology person. That’s it.

Speaker 0 | 40:10.889

I love that you said that. Because there’s a lot of negativity out there about sales people in general. And everyone is in sales. It’s just the manipulators and liars really shouldn’t be called sales people. That’s all.

Speaker 1 | 40:25.443

Exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 40:28.406

You have a wonderful afternoon.

Speaker 1 | 40:30.728

Thank you, sir. It was appreciated being on your show. Thank you very much.