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337 - How your IT strategies are suffocating growth by Sarfraz Shaikh · You've Been Heard

• 0:02
  Speaker A: Welcome back to today's episode of Dissecting popular IT Nerds. I'm your host Doug Kameen and today I'm talking with Sarfraz Shaikh, director of information technology at One Mesa. Welcome to the show, Safraz.
• 0:14
  Speaker B: Thank you, Doug, appreciate it.
• 0:16
  Speaker A: So before we got on the show here, we were talking a little bit about the complexity of the business that you're in. You're in a mid sized business. But One Mesa is not just one business. It's like four businesses put together and you're running the tech for all of them all across the way here. You tell us a little bit about that.
• 0:35
  Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So I director of it at one Mesa and been here for about 14 years now in a host counting when you're having so much fun, time flies. My responsibilities span hardware, software, cybersecurity business and IT alignment, vendor partnerships. I've got a huge portfolio and the that's the beauty of as the company is growing from a small business to a mid sized business. We have four unique brands. We've got Mesa Products which is a manufacturing company. We play in the oil and gas market. So we manufacture ground bed designs that go into the ground to protect the assets. Assets could be the pipelines, above ground storage tanks, things like that. Then we've got MESA Services which is the engineering, technical surveys, heavy construction work that is headquartered in Claire, Michigan. And Mesa Products is headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We also own Bass Engineering, that's headquartered in Longview, Texas. That's our usual construction, hdd, drilling installation services, technical services, arm. And then finally we have Hanson Drilling which is headquartered in Seattle washing and that's our water well drilling operation. So yes, four unique business units, different headquarters. Never a dull moment for us.
• 2:11
  Speaker A: Yeah. So we were talking, you know, going back to the things we talked about before we jumped on the recording, the recorded part of our podcast here. But you've, you know, so it's a business that's got four different, you know, four different subsidiary companies. They're spread across the country geographically. There's a lot of your coordinate a lot of stuff here to pull all these together. But this business has also been growing and in seeing where as a business moves from a small business to the mid market, midsize business, larger midsize business, there's a lot of change that occurs and a lot of new things that you got to focus on about how you, how you approach those, you know, the work that you do as an IT leader in that space, you want to plumb that out a little more and maybe share some details with the listeners about that.
• 2:56
  Speaker B: Yeah. So we being in the oil and gas market, you've always got to be aware of the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities, the threats and all that stuff, right? So as we continue to look at where we are in the industry, be it climate change, we are also trying to diversify into different markets and hence we are in water well drilling. Back to the IT management piece. Right. So let's define the landscape. Evolution is happening at breakneck speed, right? Every day we hear of new technologies reshaping industries, we talk about AI, user experience interactions. Apple recently had their Glow Time event. I always get amazed like every year we get a new device and I think what else can we add to it? Is it going to be new colors? Is it going to be probably your standard faster processor, more megapixel camera? Then they surprise you with these small things. I learned about these features called generative emojis where you can type out how you're feeling and it'll generate an emoji. So evolution again is happening so fast. There's rise in digital interactions. The pandemic kind of reset the clock for us. Remote work is now digital for us. As a small business and especially on the field services, we had to kind of realign everything. When we were going through that process, all of a sudden everyone was coming to an office and now we're not. However, us being part of that critical infrastructure group, we never stopped. It was always field folks were going, project managers had to communicate and all of a sudden we adopted teams, in fact, as our collaboration tool. I was trying so hard to push teams for almost like six, eight months. And when then Covid became the thing, we adopted teams in like a week or so.
• 5:16
  Speaker A: Suddenly, suddenly that was too short, man.
• 5:17
  Speaker B: Everybody thought it absolutely. So as, all right, and then we talk about increasing cyber threats. You look at 2024, it's already setting new records in ransomware attacks, largest data breaches, right? What was that? National public data, 2.7 billion records, Ticketmaster, 500 plus million records, regulatory changes. Now the government is trying to come in and try to dictate the use of AI. Talk about hipaa, talk about the GDPR in Europe, the CCPA in California. So when all of this is happening for us as a small business and now a mid size, we constantly have to take into account that landscape that is changing. In the past we, you know, they thought before I joined the company it was like, who would be interested in this small mid sized business called mesa? What would they get by attacking mesa.
• 6:26
  Speaker A: Right.
• 6:27
  Speaker B: Kind of. That was the mentality.
• 6:28
  Speaker A: But as security through obscurity.
• 6:31
  Speaker B: Right, you know, exactly right. As we have continued to grow, we have realized now we throw a lot of technology when it comes to cybersecurity. So it is very important for a mid sized business like us to have that strategic agility. You know, as I was mentioning earlier, Doug, it has always been known as that department of no, right? No, you can't reuse the password. No, you can't install Spotify on your machine. No, you can download that app. Right, you can. So we've been that we've been looked up as gatekeepers. However, with how technology has embedded and bled itself in all aspects of our life of business operations, we are now a department of enablers. If we cannot guide and enable and make it happen, then the growth of the business is stunted. We are IT as a whole now has a seat at the table. We are in that room with the decision makers making sure that, or at least I speak for my company. We have been very cognizant on what role does it play. So for us as we continue to grow, it's a very busy desk. It's a very agile environment that we constantly have to see. Yes, we had this application which was homegrown and it worked great for us, but now it's not scalable. Now it's not. The data integrity is not there. Now we've got to look for SaaS applications or something, you know, more like an ERP system, whatever it may be.
• 8:18
  Speaker C: Hey guys, this is Phil Howard, founder of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I just want to take a few minutes to address something. It has become fairly apparent, sure, all of you will agree over the years that slow vendor response, vendor response times, vendors in general. The average is mediocre. Support is mediocre. Mediocrity is the name of the game. Not only is this a risk to your network security because I've seen vendors on numerous occasions share sensitive information, but there's also a direct correlation to your budget and your company's bottom line, not to mention the sales reps that are trying to sell you and your CEO and your CFO on a daily basis. That causes a whole nother realm of problems that we don't have time to address. Our back office program at Dissecting Popular IT nerds, we've put together specifically for IT leadership and it's on a mission to eliminate this mediocrity. And the best part is that we're doing this in a way that will not cost your IT department a dime. So if you'd like us to help you out, get better pricing, better support, and jump on pressing issues in minutes, not days, then contact us now so we can get on a call with you and conduct a value discovery session where we find out what you have, why you have it and where you want to go, and how we can improve your your life, your IT department and your company's bottom line. What you're going to end up with is number one, just faster support from partners who care about your organization's uptime and bottom line. And because you're going to be able to access our 1.2 billion in combined buying power, you'll be able to benefit significantly from historical data. And on top of that, you'll also benefit from the skills of hundreds of on demand experts that we have working behind the scenes that are all attached to our back office support program. So if you'd like again, none of this is ever going to cost you a dime. At the very least, it's going to open your eyes to what's possible. Let our back office team provide you the high touch solutions and support that your IT team deserves so that you can stop calling 1-800-Gold-POUND SAN for support. Now if you're wondering what does this apply to, this applies to your ISPs, your telecom providers, all your application providers, whether you're a Microsoft Shop or a Google shop, what you might be paying for aws, even Azure Co location space, any of those vendors that you're paying a monthly bill to, we can help you with.
• 11:01
  Speaker B: Hey it's Greg the Frenchman secretly managing the podcast behind the curtain to request a one on one call. Contact us@internetopularit.net and remember, it will never cost you a dime.
• 11:14
  Speaker A: I love the S4 hundreds by the way. Just so we're clear. Like they're really great. So you know I just thinking about what you mentioned here. When it comes to the growth of Department of no to the seat at the table and stuff like that and I think about the journey that companies often make as they grow from a small organization to a mid market or larger organization. And to me one of the things that I see you talk about the Department of no and I think some of that is because the way that it is typically built in a smaller organization is in service to everything else. And what I mean by that in a generalized sense is the other departments run the day and then they show up and they tell the IT people what they've decided. Hey the finance team looked at, we evaluated a new ERP system and here's what we picked. Can you please implement this? And you know, so they show up after the fact, after the work has been done, and then they ask the IT people to largely carry it forward. But as your organization grows and you hit that, that kind of like middle size where you now have the capacity to support internal IT in a team that's more robust and has multiple, multiple avenues and tools just to bring, you know, to bring expertise to bear on the projects that are there. I found, and I've enabled the journey, and I think this is aligning with what you're describing, the journey, where they, the organizations move from. Why is it in the middle, sitting at that table? And it's because when it is brought in first, the outcomes are oftentimes better. And you have a setup where that's one of those key journeys that an organization makes as they move to the mid market is flipping from that place where it gets told what to do to where it starts being the catalyst and the driver. Because everything you touch now has some IT component. There is almost no project you can bring up that doesn't have an IT component. You want to build a building. Oops, you need it. You need to outfit a truck. Oops, you need it. You want to stand up a new employee, chances are they need some IT with that and all these other things like that. So I just, I'm thinking about that and how IT aligns with what you just said about that growth. And, you know, I'm sure that's part of what you've been seeing at Mesa. You've been there, you know, been there 14 years. So that's. That's like, that's a big change.
• 13:45
  Speaker B: Absolutely. And I think you had it right there, Doug, where, you know, we've been. I've been in that room where Sales attended a trade conference and they were approached by a CRM company and. True story. And then they take them out to a fancy dinner, and the next thing you know, the head of that specific group signs a contract and then he comes to it and says, hey, Frost, by the way, we just signed a contract with this software company. Need you to see, you know, take over and deploy this.
• 14:23
  Speaker A: Please make this happen. Thank you. Please.
• 14:25
  Speaker B: And thank you. Absolutely. And we used to be that company where it was so difficult, where we would find after the fact. But as we continue to grow cybersecurity insurance, we've been early adopters of cybersecurity insurance. And when that came in that actually helped us kind of create that vision, gave us these guardrails that hey, first of the, a few things that you need to be aware of is any technology that you bring into your environment needs to be vetted, needs to be known by it. Also I want to highlight an initiative that we ourselves got engaged in. This kind of goes back to before my time. Mesa has been a three time winner of the national Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award. So it is a US Department of Commerce initiative and it's run by nist, National Institute of Standards and Technology. So we use their framework across the board to run the company. So the Baldrige program has seven different categories and you know, they start with leadership, customer focus, creating a great place to work. And then it also talks about strategic planning. And then you've got to measure. You can have all these great plans and vision statements, principles and all that. But if you're not measuring, you do not know what is changing. You do not know if you're headed to your destination. So we've adopted the Malcolm Baldridge criteria. I think 2006 Doug is when we won the first award and then we won it again in 2012 and the third time we won it in 2020. So we've been and we again Mesa Products is ISO 9001:2015 certified. The manufacturing side, right. So we've always been a process driven company. If we're doing certain things, you better have a good reason on why you're moving things and realigning tables or building a new building, what's the purpose. So we've been a very process driven company. Combine that with the Malcolm Baldrige criteria. That has helped us hone how we operate as a business. And that program has really helped scale to as we have grown through what we call opportunistic growth. It might have been these folks we have acquired would have been a contractor for us that we constantly used for drilling operations or technical services or whatever they might be. And then we found a good fit, they were ready to sell and we just went in and we acquired. Our New Jersey office on the Northeast is one of those. Bass Engineering in Texas is one of those. Hanson Drilling in Pacific Northwest is one of those. So our growth has been where we find a like minded partner who we work with. So there is a easy integration of cultures and then you know, technologies could be very different. And then we take on that role of okay, you're using a different ERP system or you have a different email solution. So as we continue to grow, we have Started to standardize it. We have started to push out the messaging that hey, no more wild west, where hey, I like the software, I've used it now. Everything gets funneled through it, we vet it and we're pretty structured in our town halls. We are constantly checking the pulse of the employees and hey, what's working Is the solution a good solution. In fact, recently we use a tool called Concur for expense management, you know, credit card expense reconciliation. And during the town halls we started hearing that, hey, the multifactor authentication, you know, that's the key thing that it talks about for cybersecurity, for safety, make sure that the person who is entering is you and not somebody else. Right. So MFA helps with that. But that was causing a lot of heartburn for our field employees because they're out in the heat, they're out in the cold, they're out in the rains, they've got this equipment on them, safety goggles, hard hats, gloves, you name it, right? So for them to authenticate and punch in the numbers or biometrics is kind of out of the picture because they've got gloves on and if they remove something, they're out of compliance. So we had all these little challenges that we had to navigate yet be able to provide that great place to work where people, employees are not happy with the tools, it's not working, or too many guardrails, too much red tape. Then you start getting these workarounds like I'm not going to enter my time or I'm not going to submit my thing, I'm going to give it to my supervisor and then my supervisor is going to enter the time. Right. So we've got to be careful. We are the kind of company, the leadership, I should say that we talk to our employees, we listen to them. And like I do many site visits as part of my IT engagement. Whenever we're deploying any software, we go out there, talk to the end users, look at their touch points and see if this is going to be good solution. Which brings me back to MESA Products. Doug is a very controlled environment. It's like an assembly line operation. So high speed Internet is there, right? So it's more controlled. MESA Services, these guys are technical folks. They have these survey technicians who are walking a latitude longitude, a pipeline for miles. These guys did not have the high speed Internet connection. So it's a very different environment. So is basically meet those different needs.
• 21:02
  Speaker A: You know, you're very different, like very different IT profiles for different staff and having to bring all those together under one roof, you know, it represents its own challenge there, for sure.
• 21:13
  Speaker B: Absolutely. So for us, what might be great, you know, we might look at, you know, sitting in the office and come up with a plan. Yes, we're going to do MFA or we are going to deploy this. It might work great for Mesa Products, but it might not. So I strongly believe that we as leaders, and we do a fantastic job here, all of the leaders, not just it, hr, safety, finance, accounting, all those leaders, we do go out there, talk to our end users, our employees, especially in the field, and get that intelligence from them on what works and whatnot. And that growth, it's just been just a fun time learning, going on this journey and learning and failing many times just to come back and say, I thought this was it and you start from scratch again. It's been exciting.
• 22:09
  Speaker A: Yeah. So I'm going to just turn the conversation a bit to the specifics of leadership. You know, a leadership podcast. And one of the things that our listeners love to hear about is what are the values? The. Maybe I'll even frame up a couple questions here. Number one, the values that you find have been most effective as a leader. You've got a long tenure at one place, which gives you a pretty, you know, an interesting experience in that space. But also not just the values that you see, but what has been, what's been the most effective tools for leadership that you've had exercise so far.
• 22:44
  Speaker B: Great question. Yeah, very. I would say be uncomfortable, embrace curiosity. My dad always used to say if you, you know, it's good to be at a point where you're comfortable, but if you settle down there and you won't grow as a person, as an individual, in a professional, personal, whatever it might be. So try to put your into a space where of course, you know, you need to enjoy it, but you are. Be curious, take risks. Right. Keep learning, exploring. You don't need to have it all figured out. Right. Growth comes from trying, from falling and trying again. You know, take those bold moves. What has been really fulfilling for me has been as part of this mid sized organization, some of the decisions, some of the decisions could be like picking a software or defining a process. You know, it could be as simple as a ticketing process. Send this to her or you have a teams channel. Some of these things, in the grand scheme of things, they might seem trivial, but how, what kind of impact, a positive impact, sometimes negative impact that you have been able to make a difference, hopefully in a good way. One example comes to mind is we as a Company used to have hundreds of printers in a building, right. And it was just sort of, hey, a new person is joining or this printer broke down. You know, you're getting a new printer and it was it's responsibility. When it did not work, you know, we got a ticket, my printer is not working. So we started looking, I started looking at the tickets and I said, wow, we are not qualified to fix printers. You know, we don't know how to change the glass or the rollers or things like that.
• 24:49
  Speaker A: Right.
• 24:51
  Speaker B: So our response was typically, all right, let's get a new device and move on.
• 24:57
  Speaker A: Replace that thing, Right?
• 24:59
  Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, then I started thinking, well, we're growing too fast. We cannot support this. So of course, so you have the managed print services where you have a device that's sitting in the hallway and everybody prints. So I kind of floated that idea. And Doug, I mean, I was a target for a lot of people. He was like, he's taking away our printers.
• 25:23
  Speaker A: I take away my printers, man, that's like the worst. I've been through that. I've been through that up and down. People are like an IT guy taking away my printers and stuff like that. I'm like, really? Every one of you in an office needs your own individual printer. You know, what, what confidential information are you printing that you need one in your office to print it.
• 25:39
  Speaker B: Exactly. So I had to be creative. So let me share this with you. So when I first joined mesa, I also, I headed their marketing and communications team. So I had a little bit of hat, you know, kind of had a pull around that and how to market it to, to the, to the base. And, you know, so for them, they're thinking, like you said, you're taking over my printer. Now I've got to stand up, go down there and there's a long queue of 10 people waiting in line to print. And you know, I thought this through. I had researched enough to where IT said, you know, and I knew, yeah, it doesn't work like that. It just kind of flows, right? It just has a method to the madness. And of course, these are all authenticated until you release your print. When you talk about confidentiality, you know, for us in it, CIA is important. Confidentiality, integrity, availability, right? So we have to have all of that telling you it was a rough patch for the IT group where, when we started to take away the spreader. Now in hindsight, I think that's the best thing that happened because our print footprint has considerably reduced because people now, yeah, I don't need to print because they really don't need to print it. They were just printing because it was, it was just a spin off their chair. And they get a print, they scratch it and they toss it out in the shred bin. Right. So it is always take those bold risks is what I was trying to kind of come back to. Right. What has helped me really see this through and what, yeah, I was thinking.
• 27:23
  Speaker A: What, you know, when you and I wrote down a note here on my, my notepad here when you said that the bold and I align that to, I would call it the right decisiveness. So you know, as a leader it's important to be, to have decisiveness, but it's important to have that be the appropriate decisiveness. Like you don't want to be, you know, so, you know, just rush headlong into things without thinking about them. But you also don't want to spend your time deliberating so long that everybody's like, what is going on? Come on man, like Fisher Cup 8 here, you know, and, and you, you need to find that, that balance as a leader so that people respect, have respect for the fact that like, hey, I know that the thoughts of the decisions that have been made were considered, but also are going to be impactful because I know that that's what, you know, this individual has done. It's like when you mentioned bold to me, like that's what came to mind about how, how is a leader like one of those qualities that's really important to be an effective leader in the IT space?
• 28:26
  Speaker B: Absolutely. Now I think you hit a good point for us. Getting a buy in is very critical because if you do not have a buy in from your end user group, then you create shadow it, right? Then you start to create workarounds and you don't want that because then you're trying to tackle that problem. So we've always favored where any project that's going to impact a major group of people, what we do is we usually create a project charter, get those stakeholders involved, get their feedback. What are those pain points, what's the outcome that they're looking for and how we're going to navigate that, what the user, the UAT phase is going to look like, things like that. So it's very critical for the success for any deployment.
• 29:19
  Speaker A: So turning again to your history, your personal history, and you touched on this and I really want to have listeners hear a little bit more about this because you didn't come from, you didn't come in. It alluded to this, you started as the marketing guy or one of a marketing person and you know. So can you tell us a little bit about your history, what your career history and where you started? Because you didn't, you didn't start in it, but you've ended in it and you've become a leader in that space.
• 29:48
  Speaker B: Yeah. So yeah, when I first joined Mesa, you know, the headquarters of MESA are in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So when I moved to Tulsa, my wife is from TOF and that's the reason I ended up in Tulsa.
• 30:03
  Speaker A: The age old story. You followed a girl.
• 30:05
  Speaker B: That's right. I went to school in Oklahoma City and my education is in communications marketing and also in it. I got my master's in information technology. So I had kind of. It was a weird mix, but I enjoyed it. So when I first joined MESA was more marketing, communications, internal communications. The company was growing. We were again, it was kind of the wild west. We needed to streamline operations and have that brand identity, the brand positioning, if you will. We were known as MESA Products because that's where the company started. But we had these different arms engineering, MESA Services, we had the construction arm. But everything was put under this bucket of MESA products. So we needed strategy around it. And I was brought in to help guide that part of it, be IT marketing, like print marketing, social media, digital marketing. And we are big on trade shows. So when we attend these industry trade shows, we wanted to make sure it was four different companies and not just MESA Products. We are. Mesa Products is one of the companies. So that's where I started. And then the transition I would say to IT was where we really did not have a defined IT department as such. We had team members and it was sort of. We walked up to anybody and we said, hey, I need this. And somebody took care of it.
• 31:52
  Speaker A: Classic small company. IT maybe had a couple of staff people. There wasn't really an overarching organizational structure. There was no VP of IT or a CIO or anybody else. Might have been like a sys admin and that, you know, the person who. The person who can reset passwords and sets up computers and.
• 32:11
  Speaker B: Absolutely, we had one of those. We had developers, actually. I remember back in the day where our MESA Products employees, assembly line workers would walk up to the developer team and say, hey, by the way, can you make that font bigger or can you remove this from the dropdown? And I would just sit down and you know, just kind of just think this through. Wow. I mean any other developer for him it was like, yeah, sure, why not? Right? That's an Easy. That's his job security. But there was no controls in place. So as we continue to grow and going through the Baldrige program, the initiative, you know, with my marketing background, I already had visibility on how the organization operated. So when an opportunity did come to kind of lead, I shouldn't say lead to be part of that team, I took that on. Right. I started to step up and solve problems. All right. I always had that in me. Where, okay, what are we trying to solve? Is typically my. The first question I ask whenever, whenever their project is, we get a project charter. What are we? What's the end goal you're trying to do? We can. And then you start to dissect it. I say, you know, the transition of being a leader often feels more like a journey. Doug. Right. Rather than a single defining moment where, oh, froz, now you're the director of it. So when I started taking initiative, people started noticing. Yeah. People started gaining trust. People began coming to me, hey, Frost helped me solve this. So kind of unofficially, we started to say, hey, we need to have a very structured organization. Then we had an IT department, and now I have a full staff, tier one through, you know, senior admin systems, admin network, admin. We've got a full blown IT group. But my journey has been not at like a single moment, but it's been a combination of experience, experiences of responsibilities and self awareness, if you will. Right. You take initiative, you gain trust, and then you empower others. So as I have grown as a leader, you know, I've realized being a leader is not about controlling, you know, the outcomes, but enabling others to succeed. Right. Providing them.
• 34:55
  Speaker A: It's influence, not control. Right?
• 34:58
  Speaker B: Absolutely. And I'm so, so proud of the, of our environment, of our culture at Mesa because we recently signed up with a company called Genesis Works, where we are mentoring these high school kids from diverse backgrounds, low income. And we have. In fact, I said, hey, I'd take on a, you know, high school student full time. When I say full time, you know, she goes to. She goes to her classes, but she spends every day she comes in from a certain time, you know, 9 to 2 or 9 to 10 or something like 9 to 12 or something like that. And she has had experience on setting up profiles, you know, getting fingers wet in Active Directory, opening up a laptop and installing a motherboard, replacing a hard drive. And I see her journey. We started this earlier this semester, this school semester, and she's having so much fun. And I'm really excited that we took the initiative to bring this intern on. And, you know, she had. I remember when I first went and spoke to the school, the high school group when they had that opening ceremony and she had come up to me and she had said something like, oh, I've written this program as part of my project. And then I looked at it and it was pretty nice. It was neat. But for her to come in and see. And she was kind of recruited. She was selected through a process that Genesis work does. And to see her now grow into being able to do things that she had talked about during my conversation with her is just so fulfilling and continue to mentor. And then as growing as a leader, you kind of shift that focus being from doing that actual work. Right. So I've been. I've folded, you know, rolled up my sleeves and we've dug in the ground and six computers and pulled cables. You've given that stuff to the company. And now I've shifted to managing, you know, that IT business alignment, if you will. So it's more business continuity.
• 37:30
  Speaker A: Yeah. Nice. So I'm going to turn our conversation again here and just kind of we'll explore a little bit about you more on a personal level. Just so you know, one of those things we discuss I call fun conversations, fun questions or things to explore. So when you were a kid, how did you get into computers and technology? I mean, I know you started with marketing, which is marketing and technology. When you were in college, when you were a kid, like, were you a computer guy? Were you video game kid? Were you none of those things? You're like, no, I was like, football king, didn't want anything to do with technology. And then I fell into it when I got older. People love to know. I know our listeners love to know a little bit more about how people got to where they are. How did you land in technology?
• 38:12
  Speaker B: Yeah, no, I'll tell you, I was not a computer kid at all. I was more a little bit of an artsy kid going in, growing up in, you know, in high school, I used to. And let me share this. So I was born in India.
• 38:29
  Speaker A: Okay. Yep.
• 38:30
  Speaker B: Yeah. So growing up, I remember I used to be pretty active in the radio business. I was, you know, we had our high school thing going on. And then I ended up becoming a host, sort of a dj, if you will, on a radio station in India. And I used to take in calls and, you know, play these songs. So I always had that flair of music, if you will. And then when I moved to the United States to go to school, to college, I ended up In a band, you know, so it was. It was just. I was never like a computer guy or did not. Did not have that sort of a thing in me. But I was more artsy. Ended up, you know, used to sing and play the guitar part of the band. And I remember, I think my first something silly. And this might sound in hindsight, I am telling you, Doug, it seems so long ago. I'm trying to date myself. But when I was in India, you know, email, I'm not talking. This is in late. Well early 2000s, so emails. And I was applying for school here, and every time we used to send an. I used to send an email to a university to, you know, to apply for higher education. And I used to wait for it. Used to cost. It used to cost. When I convert the money, it used to cost like $0.50 to send an email.
• 40:11
  Speaker A: You have to go to an Internet cafe or something in India to go. You'd cite it, buy computer time, send all this stuff.
• 40:17
  Speaker B: Absolutely. And so you used to send it and then anytime you received a reply, I knew the cafe guy, he used to call and say, hey, you got an email. And it was that. And now I hide away from email, right? I'm like, block. What a journey. So back to where we started. Not a computer IT guide to begin with, but more artsy, more music. But then I started to transition in more towards IT during my master's program. Was always intrigued by computers and what all they could do. So it was sort of, I should say, not a defined purpose shift. But as you look at it, and it's like, hey, that is interesting. Let's look at that. And yeah, that has been my journey.
• 41:18
  Speaker A: Nice. So are you like, you into like sci fi and other stuff like that? You know, like I always ask, you know, like, it's a lot of tech folks, you know, sci fi geeks, and they love different things, you know, Star Trek, Star wars, all those things.
• 41:32
  Speaker B: I am not that person. No.
• 41:35
  Speaker A: See. Okay. Yeah. So you're carving a different path here for the IT leadership. And that is awesome. So I'm loving it. I'm loving it. Thank you. Now, the band you're in, I want to ask, what kind of music was it?
• 41:51
  Speaker B: Yeah, so I started off with. So these are original songs. So I used to write, I would call, you know, something like what would hear John Mayer kind of style stuff, you know, so more acoustic, just kind of. But then life happened, you know, I started doing that, kind of did a few road shows locally. In fact, I Remember late to 2010 or somewhere around that we had. I wrote an original song, it was written in Hindi, which is an Indian language. We ended up shooting a music video for that in Oklahoma City. And it was about, you know, the political, geopolitical situation. Whatever was happening back then, wars and hunger and climate change, was just kind of grew up in a very educational environment. Like my mom is a retired teacher, dad used to be in, in the education department as well. So kind of grew up around that. Always had that flair for, wouldn't call poetry as such, but you know, some rhyming, some, you know, just putting words together and making it work. So ended up writing that song and we recorded it. So it was more, again, more acoustic, original stuff. And, and now it's kind of faded away. Life happens. You got kids and then ransomware attacks come in. And.
• 43:32
  Speaker A: So one of the other questions that I often ask guests on our show is something about you that people may not know or would find surprising. But I've already got a. I'm going to latch right onto the fact that there's a, you have a music video of, you know, there's some cool acoustic music video that you put together, song you wrote and stuff like that. That is, that is, that is always a great, that's a great thing. I want to turn the conversation here to kind of our last. The last things I always talk about as we come to the end of our show is what things would you want to share for up and coming leaders? What, what advice would you have to give them and what things should they be focused on?
• 44:14
  Speaker B: Yeah, great question. Don't fear mistakes, right? Don't let that fear of failure stop you from pursuing what excites you. And it might be, whatever field it might be. And time is precious, so you've got a short time. Spend it wisely. Prioritize what truly matters to you over what's expected. Right? Prioritize relationships. Let's say invest time in meaningful relationships, be it family, be it friends, mentors. I think it's very important who you surround yourselves with, who's your mentor, because you learn a lot. I mean, I talked about our mentorship program and I feel I learn every single day something from engaging with these up and coming folks, right? Be it social media or be it just what's the thing? What's the thing happening? I have a 13 year old. I learned something from him every single day. Oh, this happened at school. So prioritize your relationship and take care of your health because I'll tell you, in our world, especially it, Doug there's never a dull moment. You solve something else, something else comes up. There's never a destination. Goalpost keeps changing. And as you do that, take care of your health, you know, physical, mental health, that should be non negotiable. And last but not the least, celebrate that journey again. Success isn't, you know, or you feel like, okay, I have, I've accomplished. It's not a destination. It's that small wins that lessens that come along the way. Enjoy them.
• 46:09
  Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks. That's some great advice. Safraz, thank you so much for investing your time with us in the podcast today.
• 46:18
  Speaker B: Appreciate it. Thank you, Doug.
• 46:20
  Speaker A: That's a wrap on today's episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I'm Doug Kameen and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode.