Speaker 0 | 00:09.588

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today we have Dustin Moore on the show. We have literally talked for probably five seconds. I don’t even know you, but, you know, this is, I’m, again, I’m going on the, I’m just trying to do this from now on and hit record without adding. all these extra meetings to my daily schedule, which I’m hoping you will appreciate, which is, you know, people trying to get more stuff done in less time, if that makes sense to you.

Speaker 1 | 00:38.009

Yeah, absolutely. I think, uh, and you know, a lot of times the first take you get, you get some of your best brilliance anyways, right? Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 00:44.212

It’s just, you know, it’s more real and people see how, I guess, more smart or less smart I am. However, however they judge that one. Okay. One thing you said to me that was, why don’t you just give me a brief rundown anyways, like. What do you do? What’s your title? Not that I care about titles whatsoever, but shoot.

Speaker 1 | 01:04.141

Yeah, sure. So I’m a little bit of a weird IT guy. My undergrad is in music. I have my MBA, so I’m really interested in business, sales and marketing and things like that. But I’m currently in an IT manager role. And within the company I work for, I kind of move around from department to department. either restructuring or applying certain types of business practices within the department. And basically just trying to add efficiencies and effectiveness to them so that the company as a whole profits more from each area. So this is my fourth or fifth position in about four years. And I’ve worked in marketing and in sales and I do a lot of data analytics. Even now, data kind of drives my day-to-day. So even from an IT standpoint, data is extremely important to me because it helps us to gain efficiencies as a team and as a group within a company.

Speaker 0 | 02:09.831

And now this is the, honestly, this is the perfect convergence for me, which is sales and marketing and IT all in one. Because where I came from in the past, usually IT and sales kind of butted heads, both from an external perspective and an internal. bureaucracy perspective, but here you are sales and marketing. I mean, as you can say, you know, born into sales and marketing and, and you are the, you know, kind of the IT director here. What now the premise of this show in general, it kind of, when it started out and kind of how it grew was, you know, eliminating the cost center mindset as IT and using IT as a technology force, you know, multiplier to drive sales and to drive money to the bottom line. So how do you, and of course you’re going to understand that if you’re a sales and marketing guy, how do you do that internally where you’re at right now? Or how do you take data or how are you collecting data and making the correct correlations to transform an IT department?

Speaker 1 | 03:12.011

Right. So, so really that comes down, down to just a couple of things from, from a sales standpoint and really a marketing standpoint. I guess really you need to start at the marketing part, right? Because the marketing world has… really advanced and has created this tool set, right? And well, really, it’s been created for the marketing world with Google and Bing and Amazon.

Speaker 0 | 03:36.642

Just real quick, let’s just kind of brief over some of those tool sets. I mean, are we talking like Google Analytics? Are we talking Facebook advertising? Are we talking, yeah, you know, Amazon and zip code analytics? and doing some kind of split testing and taking that data and making changes and all that type of stuff.

Speaker 1 | 03:54.087

Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly it. So Google has come along and kind of revolutionized how we digest data. And marketing really took that on in the beginning as soon as they could with Google Analytics and Google AdWords and Search Console, just being able to combine those three really powerful tools and being able to… And even from that standpoint, Google Tag Manager really giving all the power to marketing departments to digest data and then to turn it right around and apply it into their situations. So that really boosted the marketing world exponentially over the past 10 years. And really, technology is not necessarily a complete advantage for companies anymore from a business standpoint. But that was the first time that marketing was able to… apply massive advantages to companies. you know, if they adopted it early. And even now the, the adoption process of digital marketing is still, um, pretty weak compared to overall strategy. It takes,

Speaker 0 | 05:00.242

it does, it takes nerds to digest it, but it takes nerds that, um, actually, you know, um, can talk to people and understand marketing and want to kind of make that translation. So.

Speaker 1 | 05:10.546

Yeah, exactly. And there’s this expectation though, like for the company I work for, there’s this expectation that marketing needs to be on the front lines of everything that’s coming out. So everybody in the marketing department is really challenged to be on the front line of technology and at least to evaluate it to see if it applies to the business process here.

Speaker 0 | 05:30.582

And that’s tough. Honestly, it’s very tough because there is a lot of… on my list today and I was getting ready to fire and cancel like a bunch of appointments before, right before we got on the call. Cause I was like, is this just shiny object syndrome? Is this just another marketing? Is this just another marketing thing that I could, you know, go down the rabbit hole and spend a month developing some kind of thing that, uh, you know, you, you kind of, I think from a sales and marketing perspective, you kind of ask, have to ask the question, what’s the fastest path to. the money.

Speaker 1 | 06:05.786

Right. The ROI aspect.

Speaker 0 | 06:07.627

Yeah. You know what I mean? Like what’s the most direct path to drive money to the bottom line. And we got to pick, you know, like three, we can’t pick, or even one, we got to pick kind of like one funnel or one channel we can’t, or two channels, we can’t have, you know, 15 different channels and funnels into the business.

Speaker 1 | 06:25.934

Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s, that’s the difficult part. That’s where really marketing intuition still, still reigns supreme. uh, in that, in that industry. So, um,

Speaker 0 | 06:36.523

you know, like that. So, but really, I mean, is it intuition or is it data?

Speaker 1 | 06:40.946

So, so it’s both and right, because the fact is you can, and well, and I should say it, you have to know what, what is good data and what’s just lazy data, right? So, uh, especially from Google, they make all data look good and that they, they make all data points important, but really there’s, there are certain KPIs or key performance indicators that, that. you want to focus on to make sure that your ROI is truly there. Because if you, you know, like CPC or PPC advertising in itself, you know, if you look how Google proclaims importance over KPIs, it’s how many impressions did you get? How many clicks did you get? And I’m like, I don’t really care. I’ll take 10 impressions if they all convert versus 100 impressions that don’t convert, right? Like…

Speaker 0 | 07:28.386

It depends on the segmentation of the market. What segment of the market is seeing your ad or what segment is seeing this and who’s clicking or is it just another marketing guy just seeing what kind of ad you wrote?

Speaker 1 | 07:43.837

Yeah, exactly. And I think making sure that whatever you’re doing from a marketing standpoint, making sure that it’s meeting the goals of the business, right? And your goals are going to be a little bit different than someone else’s. And your market and your use case for those platforms are going to be different as well. So it is important to make sure you have really well-defined goals and then apply the marketing strategies to those goals. That’s a big deal. But the truth of it is now all of that can be data-driven. And the intuition of the marketer comes in to where you understand those rabbit holes and understanding… sooner than later, which ones to not go down, being able to digest the data and interpret it in a way that you see the signs early on, that that’s not the direction we need to go before we start spending more money there. So because you kind of have to test everything to really get an understanding and know if it’s going to work for your use case. And so the sooner you know it’s not, the sooner you can hop off of it, get to the next thing, because honestly, there’s too much to get to anyway. So whoever gets through the most, the earliest, you know, typically gains the advantage. But that’s kind of the marketing world in general. And then when you step over into the sales world, and there is a transitioning happening now, finally, but typically the sales world is so far behind.

Speaker 0 | 09:04.045

I don’t know what you meant by that, but we’ll keep going.

Speaker 1 | 09:06.626

Yeah. So, I mean, the sales world is so far behind from a technology standpoint, right? And there are companies out there who are trying to change this. And this is where the whole concept of inbound marketing came from, because marketing got so fed up that they were like, There is market and sales potential out there, and we’re just going to force it on the sales team. That’s what inbound marketing is. So we have guys internally who all they do is take calls. They do no cold calling at all because the marketing has taken such good advantage of the tools out there that they are literally forcing the potential in every market within the US to where even if the sales team wanted to be in that, they can’t be because… because the sales are coming in because of how well the marketing has been doing.

Speaker 0 | 09:54.158

Well, that’s like a dream. That’s like a dream kind of dream.

Speaker 1 | 09:57.920

Yeah. Companies that really understand that the potential there can really gain an advantage. So we’ve been able to do that. And I’ve been able to do that multiple times just in my career. But I think at this point, the sales teams are…

Speaker 0 | 10:15.652

Let me ask you this though. Are you guys B2B or are you more B2C? We’re talking locks, putters, kilns, edgers. I mean, are you more retail? You know what I mean? Because it does make a difference industry to industry.

Speaker 1 | 10:26.614

Yeah, so we are actually both and.

Speaker 0 | 10:29.635

Let me ask you this as an IT director, just as an example. You see an ad for telecom consulting guy. I mean, like, are you more apt to actually click and go order your telecom and consulting and stuff like that from an ad? Or are you more apt to use a channel of… you know, professional advisors and people that you know in the industry.

Speaker 1 | 10:50.444

Oh, dude, I’m networking all day. Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 10:53.325

So from that perspective, that’s old school sales. From that perspective, that’s sales. But if it’s log splitters, you’re probably Googling it.

Speaker 1 | 11:01.108

Yeah, all day. So it depends.

Speaker 0 | 11:03.569

You know, it really depends. I’m not going to trust my global MPLS backbone based on a Google. Maybe my research would start there.

Speaker 1 | 11:14.674

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 11:15.234

Maybe. But that’s kind of like the, I guess, the, I don’t know, the opposite or the, you know, it’s just a different balance. I guess it depends on the industry.

Speaker 1 | 11:26.499

Yeah, that’s a really good point too. Even, you know, honestly, from a marketing standpoint, you know, marketers don’t typically run ads for themselves. You know, they get their gigs typically by networking because there’s only a handful of marketers that can even compete from a Google AdWords or from a display market standpoint. because you’ve got to have a massive budget to do that. And so most marketing agencies today are growing by word of mouth and by their successes. And that’s a really good point. I’m not necessarily going to reach out to telecom anything or any kind of service-based thing like that just on a whim off a display marketing campaign. So that is a good point that that old school sales piece is still there. But I… I do think that can be enhanced from a digital standpoint, especially if it, if it can be driven by, uh, by data and by touch points and the sales team really, um, being able to harness the power of, of the data that they have available to them.

Speaker 0 | 12:27.251

I think in that case, it becomes more of a pushing, you know, I don’t know, genuine knowledge based piece to articles, you know, content type of marketing, you know, content marketing in that world, I guess is very, very important. And I’m not talking the content marketing that’s, you know, the same white paper that everyone has disseminated via Magic Quadrant. I mean, I’m not talking that. I’m talking things like this podcast right here. Yeah. You know, I mean, something that’s like more real where people can kind of digest it and say, okay, that applies to me very specifically. But from a marketing standpoint, it has to be segmented. I think we need to segment more and more and more nowadays and get very niched down. For example, I know that I serve mid-market IT directors and people like yourself that serve anywhere from 200 to 1,000 end users because I know that you guys have to do a lot with very little. I know that you have a classroom full of 100 people. I don’t know. I mean, how many end users do you have?

Speaker 1 | 13:32.033

Roughly 800 globally.

Speaker 0 | 13:34.303

And how big is your team? Like people that you have, like, you know, help desk team, people supporting those end users.

Speaker 1 | 13:39.305

Yeah. So here in the, here in the U S we’ve got, there’s eight of us. And then we have a European group as well that has about eight as well. So 16 total for the globe.

Speaker 0 | 13:49.789

Okay. So you’re like a good, it’s like for, you know, what? One to 50 ratio. That’s pretty good.

Speaker 1 | 13:55.292

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 13:55.492

But you got a lot of, unless it’s software development, you’ve got other guys doing coding and stuff like that, that would never talk to people.

Speaker 1 | 14:00.954

Yeah. And there’s about, there’s a. there’s about three or four on the call center side and the rest are developer programmers. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 14:06.336

So, okay. So yeah, it’s like going to class in college with 200 people in class and how is the teacher going to talk to each individual student personally? Um, they’re really not unless that person raises their hand and goes up and, and, and take someone out of line. And then that creates all kinds of other problems in the it world. But anyways, the point is, is I know that that’s what this podcast serves. It serves those people.

Speaker 1 | 14:31.379

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 0 | 14:32.541

It’s not this kind of wide, broad, again, you know, hey, you know, we’re serving all these people at once. You just can’t do that anymore.

Speaker 1 | 14:39.932

Right. And kind of the way I always look at that is, you know, over the customer journey, the one key point that matters is that you are empathetically connecting with the customer at all points. Because if empathy ever drops from the conversation or from the approach, then it’s just another sales pitch. It has no difference and has no care for the customer themselves. And I think empathy in itself… can only be applied by having a certain level of knowledge of the customer. And this is where data really comes into play in the sales team. This is really one of my primary focuses now as IT manager because I get to take a team and really push them to support sales. And like you said, there’s always this disconnect between really what’s happening on the sales side and maybe even the marketing side at times and the IT department from development.

Speaker 0 | 15:36.544

and programming so and that might be because sales guys are like the ultimate um shadow it perpetrators uh yeah they’re all the the like the top sales guy is probably the most arrogant guy in the company right i like i can do whatever i want i don’t care i broke my computer give me a new one and then the id azure who the heck’s this guy yeah yeah exactly so they don’t have any empathetic connection with him anymore because he’s you know even though they should, because he’s writing everyone’s pay. I’m writing your paycheck, so get me a new computer. You know, so yeah, like, how do you make that connection?

Speaker 1 | 16:14.477

Right. And you kind of see like the, you know, the emergence of Salesforce. I mean, this is really how they got their start. I mean, our goal right now as a team is to give all the data of a customer to the sales team. I mean, just ask. fast and as efficient as they can get it, right? And to do it in such a way that really they don’t feel the burden of the data because it can… Some customers, there’s so much there, it can be overwhelming. But to give it to them in a way that they can digest it and as soon as they start having a conversation with the customer, they really have an understanding if that customer is in our system and if they’ve gone through some of the programmatic marketing… applications we’ve put them through and where have they been on the website? Really, what are their interests? And they’re able to start the conversation now at the point of, okay, I see that you kind of understand who we are. Now let me learn why you need to know more about us. Let’s find out. We kind of constantly say we sell dreams. We don’t sell products. We sell dreams. And with our products, people are able to make their dreams come true. They start businesses. They literally build their homes with them. They do all kinds of cool stuff like that. But giving all the data to the salespeople enables them to have really kind of a higher power of empathy to drive at the customer, right?

Speaker 0 | 17:43.011

So how do you make that? I got to ask you, how do you make that translation from Salesforce that can be used so wrong in so many companies? Yep. that can just be the annoying database, how do you make that translation to providing real data? Because that there is the key, because I can’t tell you how many Salesforce accounts that I have had in the past with numerous different companies. And it was just, I think you hit on it earlier, you know, the place where you enter in, you know, invaluable, unvaluable, non-valuable data.

Speaker 1 | 18:26.877

Right. And so, and we don’t use any of those platforms. I’ll tell you that from, we have developed our own order management, account management, CRM type platform that we’re always expanding and building. So it’s internally fed. And one of the nice things was before I came to IT, I spent quite a bit of time in sales as an account manager, as a sales rep, and also as a guy who just wanted to push data everywhere to everybody at all times. So I, you know, I actually took on a… a BI tool that I kind of started developing myself because I couldn’t get the sales data fast enough. So finally, they just gave me the connection to all the databases I wanted. And I just put all the data where I wanted it and modeled it how I wanted it to be modeled. And then I would apply some principles to that data. So from that standpoint, I was actually seeing the data that we have available to us while at the same time having the conversation with the customers. And typically, this is something that… that’s missed is that, you know, IT comes along and says, we have all this data, we have all this data, we have all this data. And the salesman is like, that doesn’t help me at all. But there’s never a conversation between the two. And so… Being able to sit down and actually make the sales and have the conversation with the customers and kind of develop my own sales process. And when I developed it, I made sure we could imitate it over and over and over again and pass it on, right? And so building these sales processes and applying data to the processes, I found out which pieces of data are the most important. And then since we have our own internal… a platform that we develop in-house, I could tell them what data I need to wear, and they were able to apply it in. And I could tell them which data I needed to be able to manipulate as a salesman, which data points did I really need to care about as far as from a harvesting standpoint every time I talked to the customer. And we’ve got it all the way to the point now. I mean, we can do a quote for literally any of our products with… all the data points that I need to service the customer with. And I can have that done with anything in about three minutes, depending on the conversation I have with the customer. So now my tool set doesn’t hinder me. Having all the data at my fingertips, that doesn’t hinder me anymore. Now I can just naturally have a conversation with the customer and all of my tools come with me in that conversation. And so we got kind of We kind of built it now that the process that happens within the tool set is the natural process that happens in the conversation with the customer. So now we’ve taken all the hindrances away. We’ve given all the, I guess, the pertinent data that you need to really have these conversations with the customer at the salesman’s fingertips. Now all they have to do is take care of the customer. And so they get to really be salesman and sell. from that standpoint. So that was kind of the connection we’ve made. And we’re doing more and more of that from every aspect. But as an IT department, we’re really trying to drive that while also balancing security and legacy equipment and all that stuff. We still deal with every piece of that. But from a sales standpoint, we have focused heavily on enabling our sales team.

Speaker 0 | 21:52.796

That’s pretty amazing. There’s two things that just make me excited. Just two questions I got to ask, but one is, has this been a significant baby step process over the last, I don’t know, two to five years? Or was there a significant implementation that you made at any given time that made a significant difference? And the questions go on and on and on. Yeah. Have you tracked business growth? And can you say, here’s when we implemented this, and here’s where we can see how this affected the sales staff. And here’s the feedback we grabbed from the sales reps, and how do we communicate with them? And do we use, I don’t know, what’s wrong with me, survey our people and ask them, and how do I sit down and have conversations with them and roundtables and all that? I mean, there’s so many questions here.

Speaker 1 | 22:49.452

Yeah, so I can kind of give you some insight into the process we use from a development standpoint, which I think is really helpful in understanding how we roll this process out. So my primary role, and I’m not a coder, I’m not a developer. You don’t want me doing that. I can read most stuff, but as far as making things happen, I struggle there. But my primary goal is to actually go, and I sit down with… all of our departments on a regular basis. I actually take a walk through our front office every morning because I look at all the departments as my customers. And if you were able to literally have a face-to-face with all of your customers every day, would you not do that? Because I feel like when I do that, it helps them to realize, okay, they’re here for us. They’re in the building. I mean, we have a cave of an IT room, right? We are really in the middle of the… the building, no sunlight, where the server room is and all that fun stuff. So, so.

Speaker 0 | 23:48.581

Sweet. Do people ever slip food under the door to you?

Speaker 1 | 23:52.723

No, which they would. But yeah, so, you know, so, so I make sure I’m out there and in front of people and being able to, to kind of just have general conversations with the different management of the different departments and stuff. And, and that, that really helps. But Then I sit down with all of them and I say, okay, what’s going on? And we do customer interviews, if you will, with every department within the company on a regular basis. And we build out scopes and SOWs, just like if you were an IT company who’s trying to get work from other companies. That’s how we function now. And so we get the scope, we get the statement of works, and we build out all of that stuff. And I build out even like a UI proposal. proposals and things like that so that they can get an idea of really what we’re able to do. And then I come back to my team and I’m like that conversation piece between the two. And I say, this is really what they want. And if we do this, this is really going to help them. And so I’m able to temper the expectations on the client side, while at the same time, helping them to understand what is actually possible with our scenario. And so… We’ve made a lot of headway just that way. And when I hand that to our team, our internal development team, they love it. They’re like, I know exactly what to do and how to do it. I don’t even, I don’t have to think through any of the processes here because I see exactly what you’re wanting and I know how to implement that. And so over the past year, we have had so many big successes that, I mean, my guys are hungry for. They want to take on more projects because, I mean… They’re kind of rolling in success at this point, which is where you want to be, right? You don’t want to have a bunch of failures. So from an implementation standpoint, we kind of look at a full project, and then we break it down into sections. We figure out which sections are reliant on other sections, which sections can be developed at the same time. And we kind of roll those together, and we put a plan together. Some people probably use Gantt. A lot of people call, you know. This would be like maybe part of the agile methodology or DevOps. And there’s all these names for it. But the fact is like we’re such a small shop. We can’t really be any of that truly. So we apply principles from each one that really allow us to be better as a team, as a whole, without getting caught up in the methodology. So we apply where it makes sense to apply.

Speaker 0 | 26:25.361

In other words, make it happen. Yeah. Make something happen. Yeah. Like ultimately what’s the ultimate goal of the business and that’s, you know, to make money and we’re not going to make money if we don’t have, you know, happy people excited, wanting to be able to make money in the easiest way, you know, and helping other people make money because no one’s going to, you know, I know any sales guy is not going to go sell at any organization. It’s hard to sell.

Speaker 1 | 26:46.852

Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Speaker 0 | 26:48.853

You know what I mean? So you’re really helping everyone be happy.

Speaker 1 | 26:51.794

Yeah. And, and being able, you know, having that process to be able to roll things out quickly is, is important because that’s. you see ROI faster when you can develop faster. Right. So, so then, uh, once we kind of finished those pieces, typically there’s a little cleanup and whatnot, but, but we are able to say, all right, this is kind of when we completed this, this, these are the efficiencies we’ve gained. And we kind of do that analysis. But so, you know, you asked kind of, how are you able to see that from a, from a sales standpoint? And, and really, uh, I mean, last year we hit our biggest year ever. Um, and so, and, uh, or sorry, year before last, we had our biggest year ever. Last year, we were right just a tick under it. And we’ve made a few modifications. We’ve built new manufacturing facilities. We’ve kind of been limited from that standpoint. So now we really are pushing hard to, again, have another record year. So when we can go back and just basically identify certain things that have helped boost us along the way. So you absolutely can’t see that as long as you track all this stuff. I mean, it’s… You just have to do a little bit of due diligence just to apply that tracking.

Speaker 0 | 28:03.199

Most IT directors, IT leaders, managers, CTOs, CIOs that I talk with, very strangely do not have mentors. I would say about 90% of them, at least the people that I’ve asked so far, like, who’s your biggest mentor? Can you think of someone in your life that really made a difference, that really taught you something? And most of them say no. And I think that’s due to the nature of technology and the nature of the job they’ve been. I would, if I had to guess, I would say that you have had mentors and you have had people. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 28:36.760

absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 28:37.581

And that’s because, and I always say that because, you know, you’ve, you kind of like started the conversation off like, Phil, I’m really not an IT technology guy. I’m more of a sales and marketing guy. But clearly you are an IT guy. It’s just, you kind of, you’re like, you’re like one of those few that are like. like both like kind of maybe right and left brain type of thing from marketing and IT world. So… I don’t know many IT guys that have, I mean, many sales guys, sorry, sales and marketing guys that haven’t had numerous, numerous mentors that made a difference in their life. And I’m asking you, who is that person?

Speaker 1 | 29:08.680

Sure. So I’ve had, I would say I’ve had quite a few. So the first thing, most people who say they haven’t had a mentor, especially I would say in the IT world is, it’s not really true. Usually YouTube has been their mentor, but like, like there’s something,

Speaker 0 | 29:21.991

there’s something out there. So you’re saying a soulless bot. Okay.

Speaker 1 | 29:26.014

Maybe, maybe whatever it takes, right? Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 29:29.381

But I wouldn’t say soulless. They would say, what do you mean? Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 29:33.624

Some kind of nearly living bot. So I think that for me, it’s not really been one person. It’s a conglomeration, but it has nothing to do with IT. It has nothing to do with sales. It has nothing to do with marketing. The greatest thing that people in front of me and with me have ever given me is… is really how to assess situations is a key point. And then also how to be a life learner. Those are the primary two. And I’ve been fortunate enough to be around a lot of people who are really good at both of those things. And I think people who are willing to understand that you do not know everything are the people who are going to have the most success. When I sit down to tackle anything, first thing I do is figure is try to figure out what do I not know in other words someone that’s so

Speaker 0 | 30:31.617

I guess the word’s kind of arrogant or they feel that they’re they have reached their pinnacle of learning and have reached such a high level of success that they’re almost their mind has shut down and they’ve been closed-minded to other solutions yeah they’ve they’ve arrived you know and that’s that that’s the biggest success suck out there you’re not gonna make anywhere out

Speaker 1 | 30:52.896

If you ever think you’ve arrived, you have officially failed. And I think that’s one of the greatest things that people have given me. I know in the sales department here, we had a guy named Dave Mann, who was the sales manager. And I kind of worked under him for a while. But he had been here for 30 years. I mean, everybody in the industry knows this man. And just sitting down with him, we never had sales conversations. We had conversations about how are you going to improve today? How are you going to learn to care for others today? How are you going to serve others well today? It has nothing to do with sales necessarily, but it has everything to do that affects really your whole life. And if you apply those base principles across your life, then you are probably going to do better in the sales world. You’re probably going to do better in the marketing world. Like that’s, that’s really the only reason why I’ve had any success in the IT world, because I, I do not consider myself complete. I need to learn more. I need to continue to grow. So, and, and I, I have this, I don’t know, I have, I have this leaning towards, I really like to teach people. That’s one thing I love to do, but I want to make people better. That’s, I love it. Um, when I’m able to do something that enables the success of others. Right. So, so, so how can I remove roadblocks? How can I? um, make sure that, uh, everybody has all the tools that they need. Like, like those are kind of some of the things that I think about a lot. Um,

Speaker 0 | 32:26.653

well, you love to teach people that want to be taught. I would assume. Uh,

Speaker 1 | 32:31.897

yeah,

Speaker 0 | 32:32.398

I would assume you love to be taught. I would say, go have a bunch of kids and then you’ll really hate to teach people. Um,

Speaker 1 | 32:39.764

so that’s not, that’s not entirely true. So like I said, my undergrad is in music and I have always, uh, since, uh, early on in college, I’ve always taught music lessons. Um, and you know, I’ve had, um, all ticks, autistic seven-year-olds that I’ve, that I’ve, I’ve worked with who, um, have always had difficulty with learning, but was able to approach them in such a way that they absolutely fell in love with music. They, they weren’t, they, you know, I’ve had adults who, um, who were in their seventies and eighties, you know, who really are kind of done learning in a lot of senses, but, but they, um, looked for this desirable thing and so i think you can always find something that people desire and right and we can engage them like a giant within like like tony robbins would say yeah not to be you know um

Speaker 0 | 33:31.853

cliche or anything but the the i’ll never forget there’s certain things that people say to you over time you know if i asked you hey you know what did your last wednesday look like it’s probably a blur I mean, unless something really striking happened while I got struck by lightning, you know, unless something really happened crazy that day, you don’t remember. But we remember these, these bits and pieces that, that, um, you know, that of people that really had an effect on our lives. And I can remember. um, this guy, Harry Colleges over at Starbucks, like who was our VP or, you know, or market or, you know, managing whoever it was like the market director or something, you know, a long time ago at Starbucks years ago. And I just remember he was in my store at one time and he just said, uh, you know, the biggest factor he was talking about, you know, when we hire people, like what, what should be some of the biggest things that we look for when we hire people? And he, he just said coachability. He said anyone that’s an uncoachable or, and he might’ve been talking about, you know, having coaching conversations with people and giving feedback or, you know, whatever it was. I can’t remember. All I remember is that he said, you know, his biggest kind of thing that he wants in people is coachability. Anyone that can take feedback and learn from that and not kind of close down and give excuses and take it personal, you know, like any, anyone that can take coachability is, is, is someone that can grow.

Speaker 1 | 34:50.535

That’s right.

Speaker 0 | 34:51.455

You would take coachability over anything else.

Speaker 1 | 34:54.168

Yeah. And I think, I think coachability then translates into a potential unmet and, and you don’t, you never want to work with someone who has kind of met all their potential, at least exudes that because then you’re, you’re just in trouble at that point, right? Like you’re, you can’t get anywhere else. You can’t get past where they are. Um, and I, and I think that’s critical. Um, so, and I think this is a, I think this is a lifelong thing. I don’t, you know, I, maybe there’s a mentality shift. I mean, I’m still fairly young. I’m only 36, but maybe there’s a mentality shift at some point that will try to creep into my life when I’m 50 or maybe when I’m 60. And I’m not saying all older guys like this, but as we gain experience in the world, I am curious as to if there is this, or there will be this time in my life where I’m like, I’m just, I’m kind of tired of learning new things. I’m kind of tired of experiencing this stuff. I always have that curiosity because I can’t imagine it. Because it is so, it’s so exciting to learn new things and to take on new adventures that why in the world would I shut that off?

Speaker 0 | 36:00.328

That’s like stopping living. That’s like the farce of retirement.

Speaker 1 | 36:04.730

Right.

Speaker 0 | 36:05.911

You know, I mean, like, because I’ve seen people, I just, I’m thinking of particular people in my mind right now, but it makes me sad. But, you know, I’ve seen people turn other people down and get frustrated with. people because it takes them away from i just want to sink in my chair in front of the football game and go brain dead right right and then and that’s helpful to anybody you can see the frustration and kind of the anger and the tiredness and the impatience and these things that kind of come out of that you know i mean whereas you know, like, hey, we can kind of renew ourselves and continue to renew ourselves and have a purpose.

Speaker 1 | 36:55.126

Right. I think, you know, kind of applying that to the IT world, you know, if you ever get to that point in the IT world, you’re about to get lost. I mean, with how fast everything changes, if you’re not willing to at least kind of stay in the game from the standpoint of learning,

Speaker 0 | 37:10.240

just knowing. Don’t worry, Universal will take care of you. move you out anyways or down. Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of like, it’s kind of like we moved you down into the basement.

Speaker 1 | 37:22.609

Right. Right. I mean, so I have a really good stapler. I have a really good friend who’s coming up on retirement age and he, uh, he develops in cobalt. And, uh, and I, and I always asked him, I was like, are you ever going to learn another language and try to do something else? He’s like, no, the insurance, you know, and the insurance industry is stuck in this language. So I’ve got a, I’ve got a job for life. Like he, he has, no desire to learn anything else in his industry. He does other things, but like, that’s okay. I mean, he told him like, he’d be a nightmare to manage from that standpoint.

Speaker 0 | 37:53.612

But maybe, you know, but that’s okay. Like some people, you know, uh, work to live. Like I, I’ve been, you know, some of these themes that come up in the show is like, you know, like, Hey, we work to live. We don’t like live to work. You know,

Speaker 1 | 38:05.222

like,

Speaker 0 | 38:05.402

Hey, it’s okay. You know, I’m okay coming in and taking orders and doing my thing and punching in and punching out and going home. And, uh, you know, whatever, you don’t know, flying drones or whatever the heck it is I want to do at home. You know what I mean? Some people are okay with that. And, you know, I guess, you know, we need people to execute as well. It would just be nice if they also said, you know, Hey, we might want to upgrade systems here.

Speaker 1 | 38:28.777

Right.

Speaker 0 | 38:29.679

Right. Uh, but yeah, so, wow. Hey, uh, so, okay. So 36, I’m glad that you said that that is young. Uh, I’m 43. I try to think of that as I’m getting old. I’m, you know, I’m, I should be reminded of the grave.

Speaker 1 | 38:47.494

Um, you get to some point you’re like, man, half my life’s over. What was that?

Speaker 0 | 38:51.498

Uh, yeah. I mean, like, you know, it’s been freaking long so far. Um, and now, um, What was your first computer? How did you get started in technology? It’s just fun. I just want to know.

Speaker 1 | 39:02.727

Oh, gosh. So I’m from

Speaker 0 | 39:04.628

Podunk. Six years difference, you know.

Speaker 1 | 39:06.289

Yeah. So I’m from Podunk, Nowhereville, Mississippi. And my first computerized anything was a Nokia brick phone in 2002, I think is when I first got that thing. And I really, as far as…

Speaker 0 | 39:22.060

That was the first electronic anything?

Speaker 1 | 39:24.602

That I kind of owned, right. Because I grew up… and backwoods man we were we were barefoot and you know uh shooting squirrels out of trees man like it was hey i was shooting squirrels out of trees here yeah my town where i’m looking i’m looking out the window right now and there’s only uh 1300 families in my town exactly yeah exactly exactly um i mean i don’t know if i can hear the banjo playing in the back east you know what i mean it’s more that’s right but uh so so i mean that was kind of the first real kind of tech thing that i that i own outside of lightning like and stuff like that.

Speaker 0 | 39:56.920

Okay, so you had an NU.

Speaker 1 | 39:58.061

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that, you know, that didn’t mean much. So, and then I don’t think I owned my first computer until I was probably, I don’t know, 22, something like that.

Speaker 0 | 40:10.512

Didn’t really have a-Was it dial-up back then or did we have something better than dial-up?

Speaker 1 | 40:13.475

Okay, so I didn’t have my first internet connection that I paid for until well out of college.

Speaker 0 | 40:19.040

Oh yeah. We had like, what did we have back then? What was the free net zero?

Speaker 1 | 40:22.961

Net zero. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 40:24.202

Was it net zero? Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 40:25.102

Everyone had that. Yeah, that’s right.

Speaker 0 | 40:26.343

Net zero is free and I don’t have to pay $10. I don’t have to pay $10.

Speaker 1 | 40:31.465

I really took advantage of like the college system and all that stuff. I always used all of their stuff. I never had my own. Cause they were like, Oh, we’ve got to enable technology. So they just gave you everything. You know, you could get on a computer wherever you want. The music program I was in. for all of our labs, they installed, I don’t know if you remember those multicolored Mac or Apple desktops that they released. They were like pink and red and blue and man, they were ugly.

Speaker 0 | 40:59.220

Those little cubes, like the kind of cubes that people turn into fish tanks now?

Speaker 1 | 41:02.982

Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 0 | 41:04.143

that’s right. Yeah, yeah. It was like a weird, rounded edge, ugly.

Speaker 1 | 41:09.467

Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 41:10.547

really terrible. I saw someone turn that into a fish tank the other day. I was on Craigslist and they’re still trying it and no one would buy it. And I think they were trying to give it away for free. Someone still doesn’t.

Speaker 1 | 41:20.353

That’s so funny.

Speaker 0 | 41:21.093

It wasn’t that bad of an idea to hollow it out. But anyways, and it has been a pleasure. So is there any one best practice or piece of advice that you would send out to mid-market IT directors managing old falling apart silos and just sitting debunked in the… corner and not caring. I mean, I don’t know. Is there any one piece of advice or anything that you would send out there to anyone listening or a best practice or something that you’ve kind of like, Hey, you know what? If I was to write a book or a little short five page white paper, it would be about this one tactic. Is there anything like that, that you have to give out?

Speaker 1 | 42:06.008

Uh, you know, from an IT standpoint, um, so I’ll kind of give you two, I’ll give you one that’s not functional, uh, and completion on its own, but one that is. So the first thing is to listen. uh listen and then and then serve based on what you heard um don’t don’t don’t rush into assumptions uh from an it standpoint i think that’s one of the biggest pitfalls uh okay so we forgot repeat so we forgot listen and repeat back so

Speaker 0 | 42:31.182

it’s not like oh yeah i got it i got it don’t worry yeah did you hear me did you understand like this is what i heard you say right yeah you said okay yeah so listen acknowledge and repeat back and then serve that purpose.

Speaker 1 | 42:47.837

Yeah. So that would kind of be the one like maybe philosophical type approach. But then from a functional standpoint, one thing that I’ve learned and I’ve dealt with directly and it’s kind of impacted me is to make sure you understand the technology you need for the business process you’re trying to apply it to. So make sure you match up the right technology to what it’s needed for. I think that’s one of the hardest things to do at times. I think we struggle with that at times. But don’t lock yourself into certain technologies. Allow yourself to become more technology agnostic when it comes to applying. uh solutions to to user needs or business purpose and needs um i i know the more we do that the more success we’ve had in other words you don’t have to be a cisco shop you don’t have to be a cisco shop this doesn’t get flagged i hope i’m not i’m not trying to flag myself here right right like cease and desist letters you know no there’s nothing wrong with cisco right

Speaker 0 | 43:58.542

right let me make that very clear it’s great you just don’t have to be a cisco shop or Or you could, or it is a potential that maybe you do want to be a Cisco shop. It’s just, you don’t, you’re not going to pigeonhole yourself. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 44:10.913

maybe not everything works that way. I got one really funny story for you before we kind of jump off here. But so our marketing department, we’re moving to a cloud-based platform that’s on Linux. So we had the idea to spin up a Linux server. But then we thought, you know what? Really, if we just had an Apple Mini in here, it would be, that could serve as kind of the server we need and it could be easily duplicated and all this stuff.

Speaker 0 | 44:36.089

It’s really like an iPhone 4. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 44:38.390

exactly. We need this Apple thing in here. And so we named that. Everybody agreed that was the best solution. This is a Microsoft shop all day, but everybody agreed that that was the best approach. But they did name it Hoth, which is the frozen planet in Star Wars, because it was officially a cold day in hell in our IT department when we got there. I got that Mac mini in here. So just being willing to approach it that way, I think,

Speaker 0 | 45:04.083

is extremely important. I’ve got some derogatory terms that I have heard from many IT guys about people that use Macs and I for years and what they call them. And it’s basically I and then fill in the blank.

Speaker 1 | 45:18.588

That’s right. You got, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 45:22.349

And, uh… Anyways, that would be like a list of memes. And I think that could be like a viral post. Let me write that down.

Speaker 1 | 45:30.852

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 45:31.632

I fill in the blank.

Speaker 1 | 45:32.813

That’s right.

Speaker 0 | 45:33.773

Okay. I’m not starting that. It has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Speaker 1 | 45:43.036

Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure as well. Thanks for having me.