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394- The Three Things That Make IT Leaders Heard w/Shane Petty · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: Everyone out there listening. We're talking with Shane Petty, chief transformational officer, and I mean good with delivering change with numbers so that we can prove it. So it's great to be in charge of technology, I guess, and play with stuff and have curiosity and be in charge of like the department that. Which is not a separate department. It's actually part of the company that touches everything and nothing gets done without it. But how do we get people to communicate better? How do we get people to listen to us and understand what's going on? I mean, what's the issue going on right now with. I mean, this is common. This is common with any deployment. It's something's new. We have to change our ways. No one likes change, but it should be for the better. And if we can implement change in good habits, which is what we're trying to do with technology, then maybe we can scale the business and get more done. So what are we dealing with? That's just the norm. That's always difficult.
• 0:58
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 0:58
  Speaker A: Because it's one of the hardest things. If I asked every IT director, what are the four most. Or what is the single biggest challenge? Only four things come up. And one of them is always training and getting end users to adopt new technology.
• 1:10
  Speaker B: Absolutely. This particular. We're going through a new software implementation. We were actually on a training here earlier. So my question was, like, within the software, it lets you ask the question very simply and it basically just leads them through the questions. If they come across an issue, they just simply take a picture of it and then write what the issue is. Right. And continue going. And then that issue then creates a work order to fix it. Yeah, they, they kind of wanted that. And I'm like, well, why do you need that?
• 1:43
  Speaker A: Because it's the way it's always been done.
• 1:45
  Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:46
  Speaker A: This sounds like a great AI use case, to be honest with you, and I'm not. So what do we do? It's a good thing. Like, so how do we deal with these things when they're at. I asked someone once, like, well, how are you going to deal with. It was a big phone system upgrade and it was. We're going from hard phones to soft phones, which is basically like we're taking away the paper. Right. Like, there's no longer going to be a piece of plastic sitting on the desk with buttons. And I would say 80 to 85% of it directors that do that type of movement allow some sort of, like, hybrid. Then there's the more like emotional intelligence approach or soft approach. But what's the argument there. Like guys like realist. It's like, it's like electronic medical records. I'm sure there's a thousand doctors like, no, we're not going away from charts. No, we have to have charts and stickers and colored stickers. And that's just how.
• 2:32
  Speaker B: No. So it's not realistic. The approach that I took and I, and I've seen it done both ways. I usually lean towards meeting halfway, if you will, but sometimes you just have to say, hey, we're not going to offer this anymore. And when we did one replacement, we allowed the users to go look at archival data for an old system that we took offline, if you will. Right. Then we found out almost two years later that they were still using the system to put data into, which then pushed our being able to completely pull that thing offline forever out. Seven additional years in this instance. What I did was I just said, hey, let's review the checklist after the holidays. Maybe we can shorten that, make it a little bit more efficient if possible. Because there is an argument to be made that the mechanics surely don't want to go through 200 checkboxes to get this thing done.
• 3:29
  Speaker A: Yeah, there's got to be like a recording or. And there, then on top of that, there's got to be a way to. I mean there's got to be a way that's like, even the software proves that it's a better, like automatic follow ups, ensuring that things that are wrong get fixed, making sure that there's a fail safe for people that don't want to purposely make it look like the new system's worse. All these different types of things. And there's got to be a, like, okay, well how can we give you both, like you said, like, what's it missing? So I guess the question is how do you get hurt in a situation like that? Yeah.
• 4:02
  Speaker B: Here's something that this been mulling around for the past few months. Really, really thinking about. With the change in things that are going on, this software rollout, some other changes that are going on is that the junction of leadership, business processes and sops and also employees. And that would be retention, growth, job satisfaction, et cetera. Right. And I've been trying to come up with, I mean, every time I turn around I see these three kind of key factors popping up and what I.
• 4:39
  Speaker A: Retention. Say those again. Retention.
• 4:40
  Speaker B: So leadership.
• 4:42
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 4:42
  Speaker B: Business process modeling and SOPs. So understanding what your business processes are.
• 4:48
  Speaker A: Right.
• 4:49
  Speaker B: And then employees. How are we retaining employees? How are we training employees? What kind of employee satisfaction do they have?
• 4:58
  Speaker A: Correct.
• 4:59
  Speaker B: So I keep finding myself at the junction of these three kind of concepts. Right. Because if you don't have business processes in place. Right. Wrong or indifferent. Right. Whether it's the index card or salesforce or whatever the process may be. Right. If people don't understand what that process currently is, what is the as is state of that process?
• 5:24
  Speaker A: Yeah. And what. Not only that, but like what's your leadership? Is it just random yelling?
• 5:29
  Speaker B: Yes. So even the leadership doesn't quite understand how things get done. So then the employees are, are left to their own. And so like you said, maybe they get yelled at. So what kind of employee satisfaction and retention are you going to have?
• 5:44
  Speaker A: They don't know how to be successful. No. So they don't know. Yeah. It's like frustrating and okay. Yeah. This place is like they don't know anything. It's a mess over here by. So why is this so key? Because it's a, it's coming from technology leadership. Right. And how would a technology leader have the visibility into something like this? And it's because you sit at this like nexus point or whatever we want to call it the center point. All three of these things kind of converging leadership process. Scopes of work, SOPs, scope of process or operating procedures. Oh yeah. Thank you, thank you. Standard operating procedures. So it has the ability to significantly upgrade, affect SOPs. Right. And leadership and. Or see and advise leadership. Coach up to leadership that hey, what's the process?
• 6:35
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 6:41
  Speaker A: If your Internet goes down and you're calling carriers yourself, that's not strategic. IT we help teams centralize monitoring proactive tickets and escalation across every location without CapEx. Less noise, more uptime, make it boring again. Just go to you've been heard.com and answer the seven questions to simplify, streamline and save and you have complete visibility into happier ticked off employees. Probably more ticked off employees than not because ticked off employees are going to be entering more tickets and just acting all frustrated.
• 7:13
  Speaker B: Absolutely. I've struggled with this for over 20 years with the leadership piece, getting leaders to understand. So in the early 2000s I was mapping out some processes for a defense contractor that I was working for and I went down to the. So we were a manufacturing facility that then installed these parts onto aircraft and I went and told them what they thought was going on, wasn't actually going on. This was an SAP driven just in time kind of model that they had and come to find out it was being run off of an Excel spreadsheet by one single employee in the shop. And they were working around SAP. And I told them this and they. They just did not believe me. And I said, look, what were you saying?
• 8:00
  Speaker A: Here's the question is, what were you seeing in SAP?
• 8:03
  Speaker B: Well, they were going back and they were backfilling SAP with the data that SAP needed off of the Excel spreadsheet. Once the parts came in, they weren't actually using SAP to get the parts ordered. That would come in just. Or manufactured, rather, in the shop.
• 8:18
  Speaker A: This is shockingly. We were literally talking about this this morning. Literally. My team and I were talking about this this morning about like. And without revealing. I know exactly what to ask here. It's gonna sound stupid, then I'm gonna ask this question, but why were they using the spreadsheet system?
• 8:33
  Speaker B: Wasn't working for them. They couldn't navigate it. It took so much longer then to get things done. Kind of going back to your index card, right? Salesforce versus index card right now.
• 8:45
  Speaker A: Right. But SAP existed for a reason, of course. It's the database. It's like the heart of everything. But it's kind of like a messy broken. We just never spent the time to really, I don't know, optimize it and clean it up and make it the way it is. So what was the solution API from the spreadsheet into SAP? That would have been my solution. Let them keep the spreadsheet, just plug it in.
• 9:11
  Speaker B: The whole point of I was really frustrated and I said, just give me 10 minutes, will you? Walk down from the third floor to the first floor to the shop with me and let me show you what is actually going on. So this goes back to my leadership, right? This is. The leadership doesn't understand how things are actually being done. They didn't want to believe me. And so finally he came down and he saw what I was talking about. And Emily says, oh, I'm just a young. This is. I've been there for like less than a year at this point. And I'm bringing the IT director of the whole enterprise facility there down to the first floor to look at the shop. And he finally did. And he pushed up the chain and said, hey, we got some problems. And what I was actually doing was trying to almost do impossible, integrate Microsoft PLANNER with SAP, not Planner Project. Sorry. And there were like three consultants in the entire world that actually did that kind of work with SAP and Microsoft Project, but all of our government programs were being built on Microsoft Project, so they needed it to integrate with SAP so they could talk to One another.
• 10:21
  Speaker A: That's how that the final solution was.
• 10:24
  Speaker B: They brought in a consultant for SAP. They didn't have a good scope of work defined because again, they, the leadership didn't understand what they were trying to accomplish with this. It was across departments. It went from program management, engineering, Aero, IT shop, manufacturing, installer that were on the floor during the install. So there were multifaceted types of folks that had to be involved across the board.
• 10:53
  Speaker A: That had to have been a pretty advanced spreadsheet.
• 10:55
  Speaker B: It was a pretty advanced spreadsheet, yeah. It was very interesting to see how it was actually being done.
• 11:02
  Speaker A: I've seen people build an entire CRM in just an Excel. So were you able to eventually delete that spreadsheet and move it over to SAP somehow, or was it.
• 11:09
  Speaker B: Well, what happened was our company, our business unit got acquired by another company and I know our team succinctly got dismantled and thrown into other areas of.
• 11:21
  Speaker A: The ether, and that's how silos exist. Okay, so if you had to teach a new tech leader your playbook for creating business outcomes, positive KPIs, whatever you want to call it, what would the three steps be? I kind of like these three foundational things, though. It's like understanding leadership, employee retention, and process. I mean, it's like people process. Someone else said it before, people process. I don't know. There's gotta be like another. There's gotta be a third P there.
• 11:52
  Speaker B: People, processes and leadership. I don't know.
• 11:53
  Speaker A: Yeah, Mary, but what would your three steps be?
• 11:56
  Speaker B: I think in my early career, I, I would have loved to have leadership slash mentorship that really emphasized networking, communicating outside just the four walls of the company. Right. I think that's critical. I've recently started doing a lot more of that lately, and those types of relationships have helped tremendously with some of these, several of these enterprise projects just by connections. But I don't think that's taught. I think fundamentally, I know we're talking about what, what should somebody do? Right.
• 12:33
  Speaker A: I would say, so let's break that down then. Let's break down what networking means, because it sounds like some people like, oh, yeah, just like connect with people and talk with people and find people that can help you and you can help them. And that sounds like a simple concept, but it must be, not that.
• 12:48
  Speaker B: I think it's involving yourself in chambers of situations where you're surrounded by like, there's a couple of different ones in my area here, and I specifically chose those that were more kind of privately held companies. We have a lot of government and manufacturing here. But I purposely chose some of the other chambers just to be involved in kind of privately held companies, which is what I'm part of as well. And then those people that have, they have a lot of it kind of breakfast where people come in and do different trainings and so forth like that. It gets me in the mix of people that are having similar situations that I'm having to deal with as well. I would say the networking in not necessarily comfortable. Not. I'm not a. Personally, I'm not a programmer. But don't go to places where it's just the same people all the time. Like have a variety to like I, I'm part of a group that's got people in the banking industry, they're in the recruiting industry, they're in different industries. Obviously we're in the energy sector where I'm at. But those, those kind of help you get out of the box of thinking.
• 14:01
  Speaker A: You don't know what you don't know with other options.
• 14:03
  Speaker B: Yes, exactly. Exactly.
• 14:06
  Speaker A: When you have just kind of like a pity party with a bunch of other people and sit around and like talk the same thing or even if you're excited just, even if it's just like a bunch of gamers talking around about and this, it's not like we're like really moving outside of the box much at all.
• 14:17
  Speaker B: Right. And so some of those connections have really helped with putting me in touch with other contractors and such that can help me get things done. And then also we really hope to.
• 14:28
  Speaker A: Be doing that with our community as well, by the way. So like the community of CTOs and CEOs inside the community that work within different areas of logistics and manufacturing and healthcare and various different things people work with. I mean it's good to have people that are in your same industry because you both know the same type of like industry softwares. Right. And someone might have a. Well, we migrated off that as 400 and this is how we did it. You know what I mean? So that's nice too. But it's also nice to have a different perspective from say security or something like that, or different ways of doing things.
• 14:58
  Speaker B: Yeah. So kind of a mix. And I hope I wasn't implying that you should just get away from everybody that's like yourself because it has been helpful. There's bankers, there's banking industry that have the CTOs in those industries and they've done similar kind of migrations that I was having to deal with.
• 15:14
  Speaker A: Asking questions, I think like kind of across the board A lot of. A lot of CTOs and CIOs do not actually have a circle of colleagues that are like them. I actually find that when we've actually talked to a lot of people, we find that the role is actually quite lonely at the top, where you're the only one kind of sitting between the C suite and your old IT team. And people actually want to be able to get together with other CTOs and CEOs and have those sophisticated conversations and actually speak the language of IT, which they are constantly really needing to translate. And when they do speak that language at the CD suite, no one understands them. And they're likely to speak please in EBITDA and actual value numbers rather than, I don't know, hyperscalers and IP addressing and various different things like that. What's interesting is that there's companies that are very, very big that somehow still move on and remain successful and continue to do it, but have highly problematic political internal struggles and are constantly changing over things. You happen to have worked at one of them. I happen to have worked at one of them also. And mine was a company that acquired my old company. Yours was Level three, which was me. I mean, these are like, historically, like, we have a big network. We invented the Internet. This is where the Internet came from. So, like, we will always be in business. But one of the most problematic companies for me to work with is Lumen right now, which used to be like Level three. Three. And I'm just like, lumen, if you're listening out there, please get your crap together. As far as like leadership and how you guys communicate internally amongst each other or I mean, it's. We call them like the necessary evil and like the usual suspects and stuff like this. And I'm not speaking to just Lumen. I'm speaking to all of the usual suspects right now. But what is it with those type of companies that can't get kind of like leadership straightened out or get this like, kind of like. And I don't know if you noticed that when you were working there, because it was a long time ago.
• 17:05
  Speaker B: So it was actually. It was actually L3 Communications that acquired.
• 17:09
  Speaker A: I wasn't level three. Okay, so L3. So that you don't really know then. Okay. Huh.
• 17:13
  Speaker B: Still dysfunctional, like you're describing. Nonetheless.
• 17:16
  Speaker A: Okay. Everyone's had that. They've worked at a larger kind of company before. And you're like, there's just this kind of weird, kind of mushy in the middle kind of weird management structure or something. And it's like there's no top down visionary or anything like that. And I don't know if that's. I think that to me that would be maybe where it goes wrong.
• 17:37
  Speaker B: Do you find that the size of the company determines the dysfunction or do you think that it just happens across the board?
• 17:45
  Speaker A: I think it's leadership. I think you might get people that like work you like. I don't know what it would be like to work for Elon Musk. Okay. I don't know what it was like we all kind of see when he took over Twitter. Whether it was like the massive layoffs and stuff like that, I don't know. I'm a fan of Bezos from a leadership standpoint. I'm a fan of like organization and I. But I would imagine that there's clear top down objectives and challenges and goals and things that need to be met or those companies wouldn't move forward at the scale that they do. And then I think there's other companies that kind of just sit dormant for a long time. So I think a large company is difficult to be nimble and move fast. Right. Like they're talking about any type of growth or profitability is measured in fractions of a percent. It's not like you're going to see a 20% growth or something like that. So it's very harder to move fast when you're a large company and every decision has to be made well, because any bad decisions or derailers could really screw things up.
• 18:51
  Speaker B: Did you find that there was a method or a process where you could make recommendations for improvements in that process or will the just this is what it is do it question?
• 19:05
  Speaker A: I think the people that move the bar on numbers definitely were heard more. And I mean you have the normal stuff like the HR recruitment stuff and like you have like hotlines to complain and things like this. I'm just trying to think like what, like what was in place to make the difference there?
• 19:24
  Speaker B: Because change management, that's kind of, I mean the model was super new, but it's relatively new.
• 19:30
  Speaker A: To me it was more the companies that were broken that mattered because the companies that were doing really, really well. I think every company that I worked with, like I, I did well at every company and the ones that were larger enterprise companies with a lot of process in place. I personally didn't enjoy working at as much because there wasn't a lot to create change with. But you knew what you needed to do and you had to be very, very competitive to stand out from the rest. Now at another company that I was brought into that were startups. I've worked at a couple startups as well. It was like so much easier to make like big, massive change. It's like the IT guy that's coming in very new and you've got. Everything's old and you're like, yes. Like, you can like immediately make like massive differences and people are like, wow, where'd this guy come from? Like, and you just replaced the guy that had been there for like 35 years and retired. He had the keys to the castle. It was like those type of companies you could make a big difference on. Like where you come in and you look at things and you're like, this is just so stupid. Like, how, like, how did they exist like this for this long? So then you're usually in those situations. Hopefully you've been hired by someone that wants you to come in and make change. And I use always tell people this when they ask me advice on like, where should I go next or what job should I take. And like, just like, to me, one of the main reasons why I was successful in my corporate career was because I was always very strategic on the next job that I took. I didn't just take a job because I was going to get paid. So many people do that. They take a job. I need a job, I need to get paid. And you end up in a situation where you replaced a guy that was in a dead end situation and now you're just the next dead end guy. You're the next guy in the same dead end and you might last for a couple years or a year and a half in the same dead end. Stupid. Like, you have to be like, careful. Like, so I would pick jobs where I knew someone referred me in. I knew the boss, I knew who the boss was. I was interviewing my boss when I was in the interview and I knew that they would support me so that when you go into a place that's broken, at least you have the new boss and you have the new boss's boss. The whole, whole line, the whole, from the top down, from the VP to your boss to this. They're all new and they all have been brought in to like make a big difference. So I knew that when I came in, I said, look, just. I remember the best boss, one of the best bosses I ever had. Donna Wank. I talk about you all the time on the show. She's like, whatever you need, Phil. Like, whatever you need. So I was in D.C. at the time and we were responsible for like building up this like fiber network and like growing the network and all this stuff and helping whatever, essentially selling Internet. Okay. And I was like, okay, so this guy needs 500 megs of fiber. This guy needs 100 megs of fiber. And we'd send it over to the quote desk and they'd throw something back over the fence. And it was like $2,000 a month for 100 meg fiber. And I'm like, you're. You're kidding me, right? Like you're joking. Like, no. They're like, oh, that's what it is. That's everyone. You're not. You're gonna have a hard time finding any better. And I'm like, give me 15 minutes. Like, I'd like to see you try. And I'm like, in the meantime, I'm like emailing like Donna, my boss, who was like, phil, whatever you need. I'm like, this is absolutely ridiculous. I don't know. I. Obviously no one was you. Your market was tanking because they're. I don't know where they're buying their wholesale from. I don't know where they're getting their last mile and where they're getting their wholesale, but this is absolutely ridiculous. 15 minutes go to all my connections. Hey, you have any backhaul here? Do you have any. This here? What do you have there? Quick, give me some wholesale pricing on this.
• 23:03
  Speaker B: This is.
• 23:04
  Speaker A: I had three prices back, all within like probably a half an hour, all from wholesale providers. Send it over to the quote desk. And they're like, where'd you get this? Like, we easily, like we turned the market around and like grew up like 300% in like 18 months. Because it was like, I don't know, it's like, I don't know if that answers your question. I'm just.
• 23:24
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, you made a few phone calls, right? And that's kind of my experience has been the people like you mentioned you. You got referred or you knew the people it did. It hasn't in my career hasn't mattered. If it was a family owned business fortune, you know, 500, it mattered. The, the manager that I was reporting to and then the higher ups. And then also there was a plan. There was some sort of leadership that gave a damn and they had a plan and a strategy that I could get behind. And looking back, some of those years were just some of the funnest times in my life as in my career, because we had the freedom to be creative, to get outside, not even think about a box, just do stuff right.
• 24:18
  Speaker A: You gotta fight for like what's. When everything's like a wet, well oiled machine and you can see that it's a good process. Now you're just kind of like this like manager that has to execute. Yes. And that wasn't ever very, like, exciting for me. I would do well, but I would do well by fine tuning that system.
• 24:36
  Speaker B: Right.
• 24:36
  Speaker A: Or like taking it to the next level or finding the like gaps that were there. Now what's worries me more and which fascinates me is what you said at the beginning, which was the leadership, the process and the people. If that's not all working and you don't have the flexibility or the ear of upper management, what I want to know is how do you get it and how do you make meaningful change in a difficult situation? And me, I was the type of person that was like, just be careful, like where you end up. But now that we're a podcast, that's about IT leadership and IT leadership getting heard and IT leadership having more than just a seat at the executive roundtable, not being the department of IT, the separate entity, but the actual heart and soul of the business, that nothing gets done without it touching it. I think IT leaders are in a significant position because they see every department in the company and they can essentially ask for help from other departments and they can aid in other departments and they also have an ability to coach up to actual executive leadership the problems with their leadership. But if the leadership doesn't want to hear it and the leadership's problematic to begin with, now you've got an X. And then if there's no processes in place and you've got to put the processes in place and you've got to coach up to leadership. Hey, this is the process. What's your biggest challenge? What are you trying to accomplish? Okay, I see this process being helpful to that. What do you think? Can we brainstorm this? But if you don't have that ear, then it becomes very difficult. And that's the goal of this show, is to fix those broken cultures with it. Yeah. And help the IT directors that are broken and don't have those leadership experiences and don't realize that this is a responsibility for you now and going into the future and with AI and all these other things. And the it is not just the guy that hides in the server room anymore.
• 26:28
  Speaker B: I've been getting quite an education over the past two years, Phil, on this very topic of how do you navigate when you may not have a grand vision cast, you may not have a grand Strategy cast. And I personally have had to really dig deep and kind of change myself. Right. Like, I realize the only thing that I can really maintain control of, right, Is myself and how I react. Right? How, how am I developing? Am I growing? And then also while I'm growing, how do I react to situations? Right?
• 27:05
  Speaker A: It's not even react. I mean, it is react. I know what you're saying, but how there's the old are you reacting or are you responding? Correct, right. I took the wrong medication. I had a reaction to the medication.
• 27:18
  Speaker B: Right?
• 27:19
  Speaker A: And then you go to the doctor and the doctor's like, well, we need to get the right response or we need to change something to get the right response. And we need to be non reactor, non reactive. We need to be responsive. I guess.
• 27:31
  Speaker B: I like that. I'm writing that down.
• 27:34
  Speaker A: I mean, this is classic. It's like the salesperson that comes to you and they just hear all of your reactions is not very helpful to you. They just sell you something based on emotion, but the salesperson hears your what's going on and they help you respond to the problem at hand. Right. The challenges in the response of him. That's an actual solution representative. That's what a real salesperson is. That's not like a charlatan, which is, unfortunately, we end up with a lot of this. AI will fix your blah, blah, blah.
• 28:05
  Speaker B: I like that a lot. So my response, what I've had to do here lately is figure out ways where I can get wins and influence the leadership. And it hasn't been easy, but there's different personalities that I'm dealing with, not a whole lot of vision. And so I have to figure out ways creatively to get wins. Like this software that we're implementing right now. I know it's going to be beneficial for the company, for the employees. The, the, the employee retention is going to be increased because systems are going to be much, much better. But right now it's getting it implemented. And that's where I have to do a better job of kind of pulling the team together from the different department heads.
• 28:53
  Speaker A: What's the thing with oil and gas? And, and to begin with, would you say you're in oil and gas?
• 28:58
  Speaker B: Correct. Midstream is the term, because we haul it off of the lease site. Okay.
• 29:03
  Speaker A: So I don't want to be like stereotypical, but I'm going to be. It just seems like an older industry in the Midwest that's very good old boys.
• 29:13
  Speaker B: It is.
• 29:14
  Speaker A: So for the sake of the good old boys, we need to like keep this alive. And it's like so. And it also seems very, I mean, I'm assuming it works very much. My assumption would be that there's a lot of margin involved. Like everything is tight, margins tight. Right. And like every year it's like, should we do the pre buy or should we do the non pre buy? Because we're talking about a market that fluctuates a lot.
• 29:38
  Speaker B: So that commodity, we have a commodity that we can't control the price.
• 29:42
  Speaker A: Right. So I would assume that that mentality rolls down to every department. So it's like automatically you're a cost center. So that's an interesting problem for it to solve. Like how do you create differentiation in a field that's so commoditized? You gotta find some like serious ways of being more efficient. I would think it's very efficiency driven.
• 30:06
  Speaker B: So I think I mentioned to you before that we had a 30 year old ERP system that was custom programmed and did not get replaced until February of 2021.
• 30:19
  Speaker A: Right.
• 30:20
  Speaker B: So that was a huge project that I took on and was able to show $350,000 a year in cost savings just because we didn't need a couple of programmers. It what I had to. Okay, so let me, let me pause for a second and jump back. So we discovered, myself, another colleague, that there were less than 12 people in the United States that would continue to support the programming of this erp. So we kind of forced leadership to make a decision, right? Do you want your business to cease to operate potentially, or shall we go ahead and come up with a solution when they pick door number two? Right. Come up with a solution, Right. Okay. So now I have a project. So what I did was I went out and did the process modeling for the entire company as best I could, right. To show them pictures when I came back, stacks of paper, how we were doing things, how it took the drivers, once they delivered a load, 15 minutes to wait for the comms to connect, if they even connected out in the oil patch. All of these things. Right. To just describe what was really going on and how I was going to improve it. Right. The cost savings were going to be, to your point, cost center. Yes. And at the time it was actually pretty good oil prices. We were doing well. So it was a time to go ahead and make these moves.
• 31:48
  Speaker A: Right.
• 31:49
  Speaker B: And we went ahead and techified all the trucks with Android tablets and modern dispatching software, comms, cameras and such to help reduce any kind of litigation. So I specifically put forth everything that I suggested that we do there was at least one big cost savings or reason why we should do it, to avoid any kind of litigation or costs in the future. Right, Right. Because our margins are tight. And so once I was able to do that, actually the first thing I did was our driver hiring process that was taking over three weeks for us to hire a driver. And I put in a SaaS program that basically we were able to hire a driver in less than three days.
• 32:36
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 32:37
  Speaker B: So that was the win right there that I was able to show early on. And then I went to work doing the whole process model. Right. Came back to leadership, showed them what was truly going on. Because here again, this is back to leadership. Do they know what's going on? Because we can't have a process that they don't even know what's going on. So they didn't know what was truly going on out in the field. They didn't really know understand what the processes were at the time or what the processes could be.
• 33:05
  Speaker A: Right.
• 33:05
  Speaker B: We were having employee retention problems. We had some drivers that just stuck. Have just been with us for 20 plus years. Right. But there was also a turnover that prohibited us from growing the company because without drivers, we can't grow the company.
• 33:21
  Speaker A: Right.
• 33:22
  Speaker B: So I, I keep coming back again to those kind of three fundamental pieces of, yeah, I have to become a better leader. Right. I have to change. I have to know how to give better responses so that I can bring the departments together so that we can work together as a team. Because my opinion is that it is becoming less and less of a center, secluded group. Right. Like you mentioned, you're not just the guys in the server room. We're in servers and, you know, network stuff. We're, we're. These folks now are people that, that are coming up, have information technology skills, whether it be in Salesforce or other things like that, in other realms. Marketing, sales, where these folks that are entering the market have quote, unquote, what we would call IT characteristics. Right. But now that they're embedded in these other departments as well.
• 34:16
  Speaker A: Well, well, what's cool about where you're at is that it's, it's like baby steps to efficiency. It's like, how efficient can we be? Right?
• 34:27
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 34:27
  Speaker A: And it's like, how boring can we make it? I'm on to this new subject. Like now let's make it boring again. Like, how boring can it be? Like, hey, nothing broke today. Like, why do we need the IT guy? Yes, that's exactly why. Is exactly why you need him. Right? How efficient? How efficient Be so in, in a industry where you have to, where every, like everything counts. Right. If you can get that nailed, then it's like you're the model. Yeah. You yourself are the model. Right. And anywhere else is going to be easy. Any other company that's like crazy inefficient, but money is just like kind of rolling through the door and they're just like wasting money here and there. That's, you're going to be able to like kill it. So it's actually like, it's a perfect. I mean that's really from like that standpoint. Unless there's like, hey, we're going to use, you know, we're going to start delivering oil via drones and we're going to, there's all these other crazy creative ideas that technology can implement and we don't even need drivers anymore because we've got Tesla trucks driving around or something crazy like that. So like your summary on LinkedIn, because you're very, very specific with the numbers that you have delivered, which is no surprise being in the industry that you're in. At what point in your career did you stop being just technical and start thinking with a business mindset or did you always have it from the beginning? And I started being the opposite, actually.
• 35:54
  Speaker B: So my degree is not in information technology. It's actually in journalism and environmental studies with a minor in geology. So I was a business major in college. I started out, I got my first D in accounting and I said, that's enough for me. I can't do this and be more so. So my first gig actually was one of two internships that I had while I was in college. They hired me prior to graduation. Full time health education company. I got hired as an editor and then the Internet hit start seeing WWToyota.com and I told these guys, I, I went to the leaders because I had access to the leadership actually and to the founder of the company. And I said, hey, it would be worthwhile to spend a couple hundred bucks and go ahead and get your domain names to preserve regardless of what happens. But if this thing takes off, you're a catalog company. You have the potential to save millions in print printing catalogs, they like that idea.
• 36:48
  Speaker A: That's pretty forward thinking.
• 36:50
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 36:51
  Speaker A: So hearing a massive bubble, I want to know what you have to say about AI now, but we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll take that one next. Go, keep going.
• 36:58
  Speaker B: One of my colleagues and I, there was a book that came out. It was Amazon versus Barnes and Noble who's gonna win. So we sat at the roundtable. He was kind of one of my first mentors. He was an older guy, about 25 years older than me. And we talked about that just over lunches and stuff. Where's this going? And then I eventually built the first website for that company to help them kind of see the vision that it could do for the products. So that kind of was my whole business thought process of how can I be creative use technology.
• 37:29
  Speaker A: Absolutely.
• 37:30
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 37:30
  Speaker A: Okay, so now I really want to know. Yeah, 18 months from now. Because here's what happens. You get fired today and your severance package is a million dollars. You have to invest it in AI based on where you think it's going to be successful 18 months from now. Where do you invest it?
• 37:48
  Speaker B: Yeah, here's what I would do. I've looked at this from a technology standpoint of what group of companies uses the most bandwidth on the Internet. What's the service that uses the most bandwidth? That's what I went and looked at first.
• 38:02
  Speaker A: Media or something. I don't know though.
• 38:04
  Speaker B: Streaming video. About 75% of the Internet is streaming video. To be able to have the, the server farms and stuff to do that, they have to continually improve those capabilities, which is probably, I think, in a four to six year cycle to do server improvements and stuff for speed and all that jazz. Right. Capability. You got the hot.
• 38:31
  Speaker A: We actually talked about this on a show like 150 episodes ago. Really hacked about how could we get around this efficiency. Because it's not just bandwidth, it's cooling, it's rendering time. It's like it's all kinds of things.
• 38:44
  Speaker B: Yeah. So five years ago, I started looking into some decentralized software. It's actually a cryptocurrency that they use a decentralized software platform to stream video, to do AI renderings, to do all these things. And they actually use, if you run the software on even an older server, whatnot, at your house. It uses the, the Internet, the idle time and the processing power of that, that computer.
• 39:16
  Speaker A: It's like a blockchain type of theta.
• 39:19
  Speaker B: And there's other that are out there, but there's a theta token and a T fuel token and you can run what's called an edge server. So I think in 18 months, if anybody from Amazon, Netflix, Paramount, any of those streaming services are listening out there, I would do that. And I would do with the million bucks Phil is I would invest in those companies knowing that they're going to start having some substantial cost savings on how they can compete. And they're. Those are the ones that are going to really start dominating the market. Because right now, as far as I know, they're all kind of doing the same thing. Right. But no one's really got a strategic advantage on that. Cost of server farms, bandwidth, all that jazz.
• 39:59
  Speaker A: I've got to find this old episode. I'll think of it in a second. Long story short, a lot of the rendering was being done on basically private container ships and where they could move the container ship to an area where you could generate a lot of power, either via wind or solar power. It was basically wind generation. So move the container ships to. Because to render, say a Hollywood movie, I guess it takes weeks or something. I don't really know what the time is. The rendering of these high definition films and everything takes so much time anyway, so it doesn't even matter. So put all the servers on a container ship, have that container ship rendering off network or something through some. In an area where you can generate more power. And in different sections of this like physical blockchain as they're being moved like across the ocean.
• 40:50
  Speaker B: It was.
• 40:50
  Speaker A: This is insane. So there's going to be. Power is going to be an issue. Power is going to be an issue.
• 40:57
  Speaker B: So what if you got paid. If you put a server up, you got paid for the use of your server when it was idle.
• 41:06
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean that's the.
• 41:08
  Speaker B: It's just a software. So you could even potentially on some of these, I mean, phones is probably a stretch, but still the speeds are getting pretty significant now on these cell phones.
• 41:20
  Speaker A: Then you're going to do is run into. And this has kind of happened with COVID as well, right. Then you're going to run into all the ISPs and stuff and be like, well, these guys are using up. I mean, they're all over subscribing their networks. They're all over subscribing. I worked in it. I worked in wholesale isp. I don't know, I've seen the NOC where it's like we sold everybody one gig, right? Like this is the Comcast joke, right? It's like, hey, upgrade to one gig for like less, right? So now you've got, let's say a hundred people. Well, just say 10 people with all one gig. So 10 gigs in a neighborhood. But they're only delivering one gig to the neighborhood. Yeah, no one really understands the that, Right. It's over subscribed and they're sitting in the nock watching the leg. Okay, so it peaked over at 3 o', clock, no one's going to notice, like, or if they do complain, like, oh, it's gonna, yeah, it's like, so now if everyone actually does that, got neighborhoods, nobody's gonna notice. It's gonna like fix itself. It's like someone's gonna be like, oh, we're gonna start charging more for Internet.
• 42:15
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 42:16
  Speaker A: And then the guy that's running his, like, there's gonna be something we'll. It's like during COVID all of a sudden everyone's working from home. And now the, like the home networks becoming very, very problematic. And that was like a big topic when we were talking about on the show at the time is like, well, how do I deal with these people that are now working from home and they've got routers and then security and there's Internet issues and access to the cloud. So it's like, how do we access the cloud in an efficient manner for everyone that's working from home or in various different areas without latency issues and things like this? Now all of a sudden the cable providers and stuff that oversubscribed over subscribed networks and everything, now all of a sudden they have an issue because everyone's working from home.
• 42:57
  Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah.
• 43:00
  Speaker A: All right, so last question. What's the one thing you want C level executives to understand and hear loud and clear? Why do you want them to hear loud and clear? You know, from IT leadership or about.
• 43:11
  Speaker B: It, from leadership to IT direction, vision. Where are we going? How can I help you get there? Like, part of the struggle that I have is that there's not a lot of here's our one year plan, here's our much less a three year plan. Right. What are the expectations? What are we expecting to do? Because for me, man, my creative juices get going when they say, well, we only have this amount of money and we need to do this, or hey, what are you seeing that could be improved? Like, I think with that kind of communication, vision and expectations. Because then I have the ability to speak into those things and say, hey, well what about this? Or hey, what about that? If I don't have that opportunity to do that, well, then I'm just the robot making sure that people are getting their monthly cyber security training and whatever.
• 44:15
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's so important because then you can help keep the company on track and keep technology on track. When you don't have that. And this is just my own experience. When you don't have that, your technology department and your IT Department will be doing things that I don't want to say is wasting time, but it's contrary or on a different path other than where we're trying to go. It's kind of like this. It might contribute somewhat, but it's not contributing to the number one thing. It's kind of like this, like side thing. It's like our goal is to sell more widgets. What's the number one project that it is working on right now? The upgrade to the H Vac AI gui because someone asked for it or because it's a problem or we're trying to lower tickets on this other aspect of something.
• 45:11
  Speaker B: Why? Where are my KPIs? How many tickets we close in a certain time period? And patch management on computers, Is that enough to draw resources? I mean, we've got it covered.
• 45:24
  Speaker A: But is that it might be a signal that. It's at least a signal that depending on what those KPIs are, it's at least a signal to where is IT spending their time?
• 45:37
  Speaker B: Correct. And.
• 45:38
  Speaker A: And if they don't know where to spend their time. To your point, are we in IT leadership or are we just the department of it?
• 45:46
  Speaker B: Correct.
• 45:47
  Speaker A: And so here's. Okay, so let's just brainstorm right now. What are the top three questions we can ask our C level executives? Then we're going to flip the script now. Right? So now we know that. Hi, Mr. CEO. Listening to this show, if you are, we want you to share your vision and goals for the year with the IT department. Not only that, we want them at the table and we want their input on that. Okay, if they don't do that and they're not doing that, how can we force that? As IT leaders, what are the three questions we can ask our C level management, AKA president, CEO, owner? You go first. What question do we ask?
• 46:26
  Speaker B: How can IT help enable the business to become more profitable in this time of cost cutting?
• 46:34
  Speaker A: Okay, now I'm going to go. Maybe we'll come up with more than three. What keeps you up at night about the business? Like, what's the number one thing in the business that's keeping you up at night?
• 46:45
  Speaker B: That's a good one.
• 46:46
  Speaker A: If you can fix that problem. Oh, he's going to love you.
• 46:49
  Speaker B: Correct.
• 46:49
  Speaker A: All right, go.
• 46:51
  Speaker B: What are the top three priorities you have for business improvements in the coming 12 months?
• 46:58
  Speaker A: This one? Never really. A lot of people don't have the answer for this one. I'm afraid to ask this one. I don't know if I want to ask this one. What do you envision the end game being for this company? What's the end game?
• 47:07
  Speaker B: Oh, that's powerful. Yeah.
• 47:10
  Speaker A: Want to sell in five years? Okay, then you have easily. You have a follow up question. What needs to be done in order for us to sell?
• 47:16
  Speaker B: You've got some zingers, Phil. You've got some serious. Because you've been doing this a while.
• 47:21
  Speaker A: I'm just thinking of like, where can it really make a difference? Right? Like, what's the vision for the company? Like, if we don't know that, do people not know that? It's kind of like even in our IT department, do we have a vision? Do we have a living, breathing mission statement for the IT department? I made that mistake. I used to have it all the time. And then I sat in. I don't know if you know who Alex Hormozi is if you don't but him up.
• 47:43
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah, I know.
• 47:44
  Speaker A: Okay. So I saw him in Vegas get an event. Like, I actually went to a special business round table with a bunch of other medium to small business owners and the one of the things, there was many things that I took away from the event was, do you guys have three? He basically said like a ways of being or living, breathing, like values. You shouldn't have more than three values. I. We had like 12. We had like 12 on the website, like curiosity, having an attitude of like. It was like all these things that were on that we had because they were just things that we pulled from the show over years that we know is important to different IT departments. So it was really important. He's like, but do you have three that are like living and breathing, that any member on your team at any time, they're thinking about those three and they're coaching each other and they're saying, hey, this is in alignment with this. And one of ours is communication. Because we have so many different. We've kind of grown as this podcast and we've got all these different islands. We've got like people recruiting for the podcast. We've got production, we've got media. So like my number one goal is like, no, I just want to make sure that I'm touching base with everybody every single day so that people aren't like. Because people are just kind of like, they'll start doing what they think they should do. But is it in alignment with what we're actually trying to get to, which is to get IT leaders heard and grow their executive presence and do it two times a day and get to two podcasts, a Day. Does everyone know that's what we're attempting and trying to do and that we're trying to get the audience? And then because someone else could be thinking, well, we need to. They, like, we might have this complete. Someone would do complete other side project. Like, yeah, we do social media and share more on YouTube. I mean, that. That could be like a complete side thing. Right, but what does that have to do with getting to two podcasts a day?
• 49:35
  Speaker B: Yeah. I don't know.
• 49:37
  Speaker A: Should that be, like, the number one thing? It's like. Like, we were all over the place and then someone's like, whoa, yeah, we're gonna build this community and we're gonna do these other little training events in the community and train on AI and stuff. Don't you think IT guys have enough AI crap right now? You know, I mean, like, don't. What does that have to do with getting to two podcasts a day and getting it leaders heard and respected in the space? That's what happens when you don't communicate and people don't have the vision and they don't always. Yeah, we're fixing the HVA. We're fixing. We got 20 tickets on the men's hand dryer in the bathroom. So we're putting in a new AI system to fix all the hand dryers faster. And it's gonna be a great KPI, no doubt. So I think a lot of us, I just know that I would say of the 380 shows, plus of the people that we've had on the show, I don't think people have three living, breathing values. They might have it somewhere. Is it on a poster in the room? Do we talk about it? Is it breathing? Is it all of this?
• 50:34
  Speaker B: I don't think it is.
• 50:36
  Speaker A: So, yeah, our other one is like, an attitude of, like, positive, like, greatness, and the other one is, like, competitive, like, greatness for, like, the right reasons. But the thing is, the number one thing that we really need is, is, like, communication. And it just. It flows down through all kinds of different things. Like, why are we adding this new app? It flows through everything. So, you know, CEOs, like, we can force that. Like, if we don't have great leaders or we don't have leaders that it might be for whatever reason it might be, who knows? They're stressed out, they're tired. There's all kinds of different things. There's nothing stopping us from being better leaders and making great leaders out of our already existing leaders.
• 51:17
  Speaker B: 100%. And that's where I. I Said react. And whenever you said, what is our response?
• 51:22
  Speaker A: What's my respond? Yes, respond versus react.
• 51:26
  Speaker B: I think that's critical.
• 51:30
  Speaker A: Is there any universal best practices that you think are actually damaging or is there anything that everyone assumes and that's like a stupid thing. Wow.
• 51:41
  Speaker B: You seem to anyone in, in any kind of like construct or just like.
• 51:47
  Speaker A: I'm trying to think of one the other day that came up that was good. It was like, there's no bad team members, there's only bad leaders. Oh no, there's some great leaders, but there's some bad team members that screw it up and you gotta like get rid of them. And I think the point was, is that like, well, a good leader would get rid of the bad team members. Right. But it's like there's certain things that people say all the time that are. Or there's some things that every IT leader would agree with. But are there any that most IT leaders would strongly disagree with? Like, for example, I think most IT leaders would agree that two factor authentication is pretty darn important. It's like something that irks you that you see in it. Like, why do people keep talking about this? Like, no.
• 52:26
  Speaker B: So I think personally that if trained and mentored appropriately for person's personality or whatnot, you know, let's take out all the factors. People can grow as leaders. I don't think that it's just limited. I think everyone has the capability to improve, to grow, to lead. And even if you're not in a quote unquote leader with a leadership title, you can, like you mentioned, you can impact those folks and influence them to them, they themselves become better, better leaders.
• 53:02
  Speaker A: Right? Yeah.
• 53:04
  Speaker B: So I think people just checking out, in other words, I think people who just check out and go, oh, I'm not a leader, I, I just do what I'm told. I think that's going to be a severe hindrance to humans going forward.
• 53:17
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's like selfish, lazy mentality. Everyone should share. We should be sharing. We should be knowledgeable and be sharing our knowledge.
• 53:25
  Speaker B: Absolutely. And I think we can all encourage other people. It's not this. We're not fixed with limited resources. There are, there's abundance out there. There's enough to go around for everyone. Right. And I think we get caught in these little competition at our companies and little petty things that are. People are doing stuff and it's like, man, for me, I want to work somebody into replacing me.
• 53:49
  Speaker A: It's, it's interesting because I thought about there's a lady that helps take Care of my dad. Awesome. Really awesome. Very, very empathetic. Very kind. Like, goes above and beyond. Like, absolutely should be the person that's, like, in charge of, like, the staff and stuff. Absolutely. Under no circumstances will she ever take that position. Like, don't even think about asking me to be, like, the team lead or like, like, absolutely not. But she does it without having to have the title, which probably not even annoying. She influences the other staff around her. She provides the feedback to upper management. She encourages people by asking questions without knowing that she's doing it, so.
• 54:44
  Speaker B: And she knows the processes around her job and those probably above her too. Right. Which goes to my three kind of leadership processes and SOPs and employee growth.
• 54:58
  Speaker A: That's actually the most foundational thing right from the beginning of the episode. Let's end with that. Because that actually blew my mind. And because it is those three things. It really is. If we have bad leadership, we probably won't have process. If we have really, really good process and a bad leader comes in, probably the company will still move on. The company will be okay. Right. But if he doesn't enforce that process and lets things start to slip. Right. And not follow the model, so to speak, and lets people not follow the sop, like, okay, good night. And then. Oh, and then turnover. People like consistency. People like to know predictability. People don't want to come into work and they don't know what's going to happen every day. They don't know what's next. They don't know this. And that's just really, really important. I think it's very, very difficult in a company that's somewhere in the middle and changing, because I've experienced it myself a lot. When we first started, easy, when we got in the middle where we were growing and there's a lot of changes, it was like, dude, what are we today? Like, what's the name? What's the website today? What, like, really what's going on? It becomes a mess. And it's like, we've really been focusing very, very hard on this year on, like, just solidify the brand, solidify the process, unify these 50,000 apps that we've got. That's very, very important. And I think that's what you said. There is. It is at the center of all of that. That's really it, where it is at the center because it can be the integrator, the cog of the leadership wheel. It can say no to a new SOP and say, this is not in alignment with the other SOPs. Literally SAP S. Not SOP but SAP and can see. And then it has visibility into the entire company and all those departments. Those three. That's. It's like the little wheel where you have like the three things and the overlap and like it's in the middle. That's. That's you. What are you going to call it?
• 57:01
  Speaker B: I've been.
• 57:01
  Speaker A: We're going to call that in the. Shane, what are we going to call that? The SP SOP System. We need to come up with some idea.
• 57:07
  Speaker B: I don't know, there's. There's some little framework name you make up an acronym failure.
• 57:12
  Speaker A: You got it. Three rocks. The three. We need to come up with like the three.
• 57:16
  Speaker B: The Texas three Step.
• 57:18
  Speaker A: I don't. It's like applies to everywhere and then we got to figure out what something. But those. That's like where do you begin with that? So you need again starts with it asking leadership, what's your vision? What's your this, what's your that. Then the correct processes can be in place and then we can also. Because it needs to communicate with the end users as well and find out whether it's an actual realistic SOP because we're going to have someone with a spreadsheet sitting in a spreadsheet and then someone's going to be manually entering all that info into SAP. So it's. If there was a way to. Yeah, it's those three things that it can really affect and then it's just going to become like, okay, well where do we start? Start with leadership, then align with the people and then put the processes in place that make sense to simplify the whole thing. With technology, do we just solve all the world's problems? I hope so.
• 58:11
  Speaker B: You, you summarize that very concisely.
• 58:15
  Speaker A: You gave it at the very beginning of the show. So Ashe, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Any final words of wisdom?
• 58:22
  Speaker B: Oh man, I appreciate just that one little tidbit of how we respond instead of react. I think that if people don't take anything else out of our conversation here, just the way that we respond and I think that's we can create trouble for ourselves or we can create calm waters for ourselves.
• 58:42
  Speaker A: So I got that from an old school Texan years ago and his name is Zig Ziglar. Oh, Zig Love Zig from years ago. He was talking about you have to respond versus react, man.
• 58:54
  Speaker B: He's got timeless wisdom.
• 58:56
  Speaker A: See you at the top. Yeah, see at the top. Shane Petty. You've been heard, Phil, thank you all right?
• 59:05
  Speaker B: Thanks.
• 59:05
  Speaker A: Take care.
• 59:06
  Speaker B: All right.