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467- Show Me the Riser Room w/Zack Miller · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: When you press Enter on your keyboard, this is the same thing as you pressing the gas on your car driving out of the driveway. You got potholes everywhere. You got intersections shut down, things clog up. Eventually the system collapses. That is tech debt. The technology is easy. It's all bound by what do you want to pay for and what is possible. Getting people to believe you, getting people to give you their money, that's the hard part, right? That's. That's where the rubber meets the road. I can win a technologist over, but if I don't win his boss or the CEO over, you're screwed.
• 0:47
  Speaker B: Ladies and gentlemen, Zach Miller. You have quite a nice little pedigree here when it comes to guess it and board of directors in leadership and how you've kind of progressed throughout your career, which has a significant amount of leadership and I would say influence. But why don't we just. Just go back in time and how'd you, how'd you get here to begin with? And I mean, like, what'd you play with in sixth grade? What. You know, how did you actually get into technology and then actually do it for a living? Because no one ever actually just goes to school for this type of thing. Some people are like, oh, I went for computer science, but that doesn't really translate. Or I was an engineer, but I was really, really good with computers and then just kind of went from there.
• 1:34
  Speaker A: Yeah. So it did start when I was young. I was 13. My dad worked at Convergence and he would tinker with computers at the kitchen table. And I was like, that looks cool. So I spent most of my childhood trying to fix the neighbor's things that found my way into getting a job at Cisco, just doing smart hands work. A girlfriend's father was a director there, and I was graduating high school, and he was like, hey, I could hook you up with a job.
• 2:06
  Speaker B: Seems like a reasonable company to work for.
• 2:07
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, and I was a smart hands. And for a while I was like, hey, I want to be the smart person on the other side of the phone. So, got my CCNA, found my way through a couple of MSPs, settled in the biotech and life science industry, and then a client stole me.
• 2:26
  Speaker B: And.
• 2:27
  Speaker A: And through that kind of first internal tenure, I kind of grew my passion for the industry.
• 2:35
  Speaker B: And what, what was it that. What was the passion aspect? Or what, when you finally got stolen by someone else, was it because you were kind of freed up to think and you didn't? I don't know, you might have had more, I don't know, more freedom to think and act in a way that would be more meaningful, or what was it?
• 2:55
  Speaker A: Well, so technology's always been a passion, and I bring it home. I'm tinkering at home just as much as I'm tinkering at work. And so when I was consulting, it really felt like an extension of just living. And I had a company willing to fund my certifications, put me in front of new clients, put me out there in front of new projects, and that was very invigorating. That came just second nature for me. It was seeing the patient impact. It was sitting in a conference room as a consultant with this big client that we had talking about this revolutionary biologic that they were going to give to cancer patients. Right then and there, I was like, oh, my God, my keyboard strokes can help them. And that remains true to this day. I mean, every time I get on a plane to go to a site across the world, every time I hop on a call at 3 o' clock in the morning or 3 o' clock in the afternoon, that's the first thing is like, I'm thinking about there's some patient that will ultimately receive help because of what I'm doing right now.
• 4:00
  Speaker B: Love that. Which makes me want to ask, where do you think you can make. Where do you think you can make the big difference, the biggest difference right now? I mean, it could be, hey, it's where I'm at right now. But in general, have you had a chance to see more global healthcare operations and have an idea of where we need to impact the world more?
• 4:22
  Speaker A: Good question.
• 4:23
  Speaker B: I only say that because I'm sitting in Morocco right now. Okay, So I have. I'm sitting in Morocco right now. I fell in love with this place. I moved here, I don't know, three or four years ago. I have two houses. I have a house on the east coast and have a house in Morocco. And you just see, when you travel globally, you just see the difference in technology. You see the United States has great infrastructure, I guess, or they overpaid for infrastructure, so that means they don't have to be as efficient in other areas. Okay. And then you see, you know, the health care system, what it, what it is in the United States, and you see it in other countries as well, and you see positives and negatives of both. But in Morocco, for example, you see a lot of things where you'd be like, wow, an ERP would just really blow this place up. It would be really great. Inefficient you see a lot of things like that. I. I've been in quite a few of the hospitals here, good ones and bad ones. So that's just what I was thinking when you mentioned that. And how can technology make a difference in. In healthcare? I think it can both hinder and it can both hinder healthcare and it can also. The opposite of hindrance.
• 5:31
  Speaker A: Yeah. So I'm healthcare adjacent. I did a number of EPIC implementations in my consulting. Time enough to know like, hey, I like the biotechnology and pharmaceutical world which brings its own unique challenges that I'll speak to. But for, for me at Catalan, I will say and I think this extends across every manufacturing focused company. Two and a half years ago I was on a major incident and our network lead at the time now manager kind of shouted hey, we don't build networks to support emergency services and as such we shouldn't run emergency call dependencies through our network. Dedicated network should be brought in. So you're thinking about, you know, fire system, security system, stuff like that. And right then and there I was, I asked myself, I'm like well, why not? We're a global manufacturing company. We're shipping product across the world. We are part of a critical supply chain. We produce raw reagents as well as finished product. Shouldn't we? And so I think many IT leaders are asking them theirselves the same questions. This isn't, this is an SD WAN anymore. This is network access control. This is dependable wireless that needs to be as dependable as wired and as redundant as just N plus one. Right.
• 7:03
  Speaker B: Maybe faster.
• 7:04
  Speaker A: Correct. Yeah.
• 7:06
  Speaker B: And so used to lose their minds and be like, yeah, fixed wireless is faster than fiber. Yeah.
• 7:12
  Speaker A: And everybody wants to stick an ethernet port on the side of a Rockwell relic. Right. So I think that's really like where help the industry the most right now. It's like bring it back to the basics. The network needs focus. Right.
• 7:28
  Speaker B: Okay. Love it. Okay, so biggest network build out you've done? I don't know. Let's just tell a network story.
• 7:34
  Speaker A: Data center So I did an architectural design and 50% implementation for a data center of 70 racks. They all had tours. So I did the layer 3 Broadway architecture and half the implementation there. But I think in terms of like geo sprawl dependency and just size, it's where I'm at today. This organization has not only. We're in four regions with over 60 sites. Yeah. The stacks are big. Some, some sites have 68 IDFs and they'll have type one cabling all the way up to 50 gig DAC back modes. Right. And so, so yeah, where I'm at today, do you have to get around
• 8:22
  Speaker B: the Chinese firewall at all?
• 8:24
  Speaker A: I do, yeah. We have two sites in China. Mainland. It's. Well, well, describe getting around it. Right.
• 8:32
  Speaker B: I just remember. Okay, so here's what I remember. Back in the day, another company that might rhyme with Nabisco, you might have worked with them in the past, bought a company of ours. But I remember it was, you know, dang it. How come every time Chinese congress goes into power, whatever their name is, like, all my VPNs shut down? And I know they're sniffing packets and I know this and that. And we. So we know that it's just like, what are they sniffing? And we want to make sure, like, is this okay? And how do we get it so that our VPNs don't get shut down when we have, you know, I don't know, manufacturing in mainland China, that goes to Hong Kong, that goes to, I think Thailand. And there were some other things as well. So it was. That was the scenario. How do we just. How do we just not have our network shut down so that manufacturing in America can go.
• 9:24
  Speaker A: I'm going through this problem as we speak.
• 9:27
  Speaker B: Wonderful, wonderful.
• 9:28
  Speaker A: We. So when. When I started here, I know the
• 9:34
  Speaker B: secrets, by the way. I just can't diverge it.
• 9:36
  Speaker A: It was centered around. It was centered around replacing a global MPLS and mixture of DMVP and MPLS with an SD WAN service. And I have done an SD WAN implementation about the size of our company. Just, you know, these are retail shops, not big manufacturing facilities. So this is a bit deeper. And so towards the beginning of last year, Lumen, our MPLS provider was like, hey, we're decomming services and all of a pack in april. Here's your four month.
• 10:12
  Speaker B: Sounds class. Sounds typical. That's like at&t. Hey, by the way, on the 31st of this month, all pot signs are just. We're just going to not do it anymore. So have fun.
• 10:22
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 10:23
  Speaker B: Or we're going to charge you $170 per line and for every fax that you send, 50 bucks.
• 10:29
  Speaker A: Yeah, you got it. So. So, so we're like, well, I guess the priority of sites have changed a bit. We're doing them first. And here we are on the other side where you. We're on, you know, they. It. It might remind you of a town in California in terms of the service that we're using. And we lose 10%. We lose 10% of data just 10% packet loss on the hour.
• 10:56
  Speaker B: Blip.
• 10:58
  Speaker A: And. And if you want to fix this, our dual BIA connections at each site need to be upgraded to premium DIA connections or $24,000 a month. In addition.
• 11:08
  Speaker B: I was just going to take a guess. Why did you steal that from me? I was going to say 20,000, but it was actually more than that.
• 11:13
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I love that.
• 11:14
  Speaker B: I love that guessing. I love when we go the price out my circuit in the Philippines game. Price out my redundant. My path. Redundant carrier, redundant CEO, whatever they call it over there. Redundant circuit in the Philippines.
• 11:30
  Speaker A: Yeah, well. And then at that point the conversation immediately leaves me. I'm like, well, this is now a procurement legal discussion, right? You know, you go to a group vice president, you tell them what's going on. Like, hey, are you like, this is more or less feels like extortion.
• 11:48
  Speaker B: So anywho, now it's illegal. Now we're at legal. Got $24,000 per, I don't know gig. And what happened? I'm just curious.
• 11:57
  Speaker A: Yeah, you paid it.
• 11:58
  Speaker B: We paid it.
• 12:00
  Speaker A: Well, we essentially. No, we. I immediately bought one and then just routed everything through. Just created a hop. Right. Routed everything to that one. And the, the sites are stable, but obviously they're limited by that one connection.
• 12:17
  Speaker B: Oh, this is like. This is like recent.
• 12:20
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, man.
• 12:21
  Speaker B: Oh, dang. So, so lumen really illuminated. Really, really did a little.
• 12:25
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, so they eliminated. Like I said, they eliminated. They gave us four months. April 20. 24 or four months. 25. Four months, yeah.
• 12:35
  Speaker B: Wow. They're like, you know, they're like 90 to 120 days. You can get any circuit.
• 12:39
  Speaker A: And it was. And without the premium service, it's been running fin. China did a big firewall update and ever since that update in like August of last year, voila. Wow.
• 12:51
  Speaker B: This is like. I've never had this much of an in depth conversation around the Chinese firewall. I'm so happy to be talking with you right now. Most people, we just kind of like just talk about it a little bit. Like this is like a real life scenario. I love it. This is about as real as that other one.
• 13:04
  Speaker A: You know, I'm not sharing anything that isn't public or atypical, but you know, it's just, it's. Yeah.
• 13:11
  Speaker B: Manufacturing in China go hand in hand. Okay. The Chinese firewall. This is a, this is a. Yeah, this is like typical. This is like, you know, if it's just not everyone that's on this show happens to be in manufacturing. And I have manufacturing And I wouldn't
• 13:23
  Speaker A: be, I wouldn't be surprised to see some, some things come out of the greater, greater EMA region. Right? I mean, NIS 2 compliance is a real thing that, that RC so is helping us contend with.
• 13:35
  Speaker B: You're bringing something special to the show. I don't know what it is that you're bringing that's special to the show. I need to get in closer to the microphone for this one. You need to promise the audience something. This is like my new question. If you were to get up on, I don't know, TED Talk or something like that, and you had to promise the audience one thing that they're going to walk away with today, that you've learned through your career as a technology network aficionado leader, what would that one thing that you could just really teach and be passionate about and Talk for like 30 minutes and people could ask all kinds of questions and you would just be like, oh, yeah, you do it this way. You do it this way and just fire off. What's that one thing that, that people would really walk away with?
• 14:17
  Speaker A: That's a tough question to answer. I would say understanding the fundamentals of enterprise technology or the foundationals, rather the stuff that you need in place to build every other piece of technology, the plumbing. That's something I have spent my entire career talking to C suite boards, receptionists, IT people, making sure they all understand the same thing without using the same words.
• 14:49
  Speaker B: Okay, and why would that be so important to the receptionist, for example?
• 14:55
  Speaker A: Shared goal. Right, Shared goal. You know, the receptionist's job is just as important as Bonnie and finance. Right. If the, you know, Dan.
• 15:07
  Speaker B: No, but let's. Is it. I'm just going to play. I'm just gonna play, you know, whatever they call it, devil's advocate here. Is it really? Because isn't there going to be someone's job that's replaced with AI, or are you just being very empathetic at the moment?
• 15:18
  Speaker A: Who do you want to answer the door when the FDA shows up?
• 15:22
  Speaker B: It's a good question. It might be AI.
• 15:26
  Speaker A: Do you want somebody trained for it or do you not want somebody trained for it? And so when Dan is in the back and you get a shipment of minus 80 stuff sitting on the back dock and nobody's bringing it in, guess what? It's your job now. Same style of thinking. I think if you're there to work for a company and they clearly state their mission and vision, you're all part of it.
• 15:50
  Speaker B: Okay. And now you come in and you bring these fundamentals and you translate them into all different languages that people can understand. Literally. Literally. Probably Mandarin at some point. What are those fundamentals that are so important that you've seen so many people get wrong? Or you're just like, what the heck are you guys doing when you walk into a place? Do you see that a lot?
• 16:13
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
• 16:15
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 16:17
  Speaker A: And it's 95% of the time at the network.
• 16:22
  Speaker B: Okay, that's. I love this. Please. I love the network.
• 16:26
  Speaker A: I spend so much of my time surrounded by and not by choice. I built my career on VMware engineering and Azure engineering. I've done 11 data centers in my career where I've gone from literally nothing but dirt in the ground to fully functional GMP data center. Yeah, you walk in the environment, you're like, I don't know how this works. That's always you when you, when you show run and you're like what, you know that, that, that's this, this start.
• 17:02
  Speaker B: Is there, is there like a, like a, a Zach, a Zach Miller framework? That actually sounds so good. Zach Miller. It sounds like, you know, who was that famous skiller skier guy? Was it, you know, whatever. The Miller, like whatever skiing thing. Someone's gon be really mad that I didn't get this. Anyways, the. No, but the Zach Miller framework, it's. It just has a really nice ring to it. What's the Zach Miller framework? Top five things, top three things. What is it?
• 17:27
  Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, go into a new environment. Show me the riser room. Where does it come in? Right.
• 17:33
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 17:33
  Speaker A: Where did it come in?
• 17:35
  Speaker B: First problems that you would see there. First problems you would see there.
• 17:39
  Speaker A: No ups. Single WAN aggregate environment. Right.
• 17:45
  Speaker B: Okay. So let's go through the checklist. Okay, so the first one, show me the riser. All right. First red flags that you see. I love this actually. Okay. Okay.
• 17:53
  Speaker A: They're all there. Right. Because you spend so much time engineering at the data center, you forget there is always a north point, especially in shared communities. You know, these big, big community buildings that have multi tenancies. Show me the riser room. Where am I actually getting a handoff from?
• 18:14
  Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. And then you're going to see. Okay. There's no, I'm just going to paint maybe a nightmare that you may have seen. Okay. There's no ups. So there's not, there's none of that. The handoff is coming from maybe a hole drilled in a, in a piece of plywood from somewhere else maybe.
• 18:30
  Speaker A: No, often what I see is some 15 year old Cisco Wan aggregation switch that Branches off, core services to each tenant. Right. So if you have like a frontier service being delivered on top of AT&T, they're just shipping it off Wan Switch. Right. And so that, that makes your challenge even harder because you need that ISP now to conform to your, your edge standards. That's, that's a fun challenge, right now if you're fortunate, if you're fortunate and you don't have to deal with something like that and you can get truly dia. True dia, then super cool.
• 19:10
  Speaker B: You meaning not like a weird like subnet or something that they deliver? What do you mean?
• 19:15
  Speaker A: Yeah, some community based WAN switch or some sort of piece of equipment that's out of your control. It's in this Internet service.
• 19:24
  Speaker B: Okay, okay, yeah, I got you. I see what you're saying.
• 19:26
  Speaker A: So you're, you're bringing in your rad, you're bringing in your ADVA for your. My dedicated services.
• 19:31
  Speaker B: Super cool.
• 19:32
  Speaker A: I know this. I'm getting, I'm getting service from the road.
• 19:36
  Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I was assuming dedicated fiber for someone of your stature.
• 19:40
  Speaker A: And this. Well, yeah, I've bought dedicated fiber. One of my first jobs in downtown Durham. And that's how I received it. I was like, show me the riser room. And they handed me an ADVA in suite in our data center. I traced the cable down to a riser room. Boom, I'm plugged into an aggregation switch.
• 20:02
  Speaker B: That's not a guy that I would think like. And now where's my secondary fiber? And it better be coming in from the north because this one's. And then Elon Musk is on the roof, so he's coming in tertiary.
• 20:13
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 20:14
  Speaker B: I better have a Dragon wave point to point microwave shooting 20 miles away at the American tower rental unit that I have.
• 20:24
  Speaker A: I got microwave. I got microwave in my environment right now. Once you go back backwards, the conversation is repetitive. You know this, right? Like what's, what do you want to pay for? Right? What level of redundancy do you want? What do you want capacity wise at the edge? Whose firewall are you going to use? Things like that. And then you get into the core operations. If it's somewhere that's a data center, then you take your network engineer hat off, put your platform engineering hat on.
• 20:56
  Speaker B: If you're in a data center, it's a blend of whatever you want. Pretty much, yeah.
• 21:01
  Speaker A: And that's what I loved, right. I got a job at Cisco Systems, but a couple years later I'm on major incidents for Exchange 2007 failures and other Active Directory craziness and other Dynamics 365 crap. And I quickly gravitated more towards the platform sys admin way of living only
• 21:24
  Speaker B: to get pulled back. It's not fun and enjoyable. It's not depressing. You know what I mean? It's not like you can go to work and not want to kill yourself. Is how I, how I envisioned it. I've never worked it but I talk with people, you know and for some reason the data center people are always really happy people. I just find the data guys that are building out networks they just seem very high energy, very very, you know, passionate. And then there's, there's people that are just kind of like, I don't know, not happy and they're not the data center guys. I won't mention anyone. Definitely not software developers.
• 21:54
  Speaker A: Yeah man. The software devs get it I think the hardest. I think at times they get it the hardest.
• 22:02
  Speaker B: Well now they're really getting it because now their job's completely eliminated.
• 22:06
  Speaker A: Right.
• 22:06
  Speaker B: We don't need them. We're just going to vibe code everything. Well I hope my software dev guys
• 22:10
  Speaker A: are listening to that. Right. What are you like conceptual understanding is the conceptual success or contextual success rather. Right. Like yeah, I could vibe code but if I don't understand how to run a full stack operation that's just gonna die one day.
• 22:33
  Speaker B: Yeah. Or let alone plan something out and the architecture of how everything is gonna work and where you're pulling data from
• 22:41
  Speaker A: and I mean full stack engineer with a healthy AI token budget is something to be feared. Right. That's a powerful person.
• 22:51
  Speaker B: Don't you think we should be hosting our own non tokenization. What do we call them? Our own GPTs or something like that? Have you done that?
• 22:58
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's Neo Clouds. Right. That's a big thing. They started with giving you private ecosystem and now they're starting to move to all inclusive models.
• 23:09
  Speaker B: Something's going to happen because someone's going to flip a switch someday and be like hey, we're going to charge for tokens now? Or we're not gonna, you know, we're gonna charge for stupid. We're gonna charge for stupid. That's probably what's gonna happen. Yeah, we've got completely off track. I just wanna get back to this centralized theme of like what are the. Okay, we, we didn't even get past point one. So now I'm just remembering I'm coming back all the way back now. So point was show me the riser room. There's all kinds of problems there. I think we've. I think we've hit that one. So assuming you fix said problems or you negotiate kind of around the problems the best that you. They wouldn't even touch on the security pieces of that because isn't like the security, it's kind of like the foundation of security a little bit.
• 23:48
  Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. That's why I always start the conversation there. Because then it becomes just rinse and repeat. Right. We're talking about the same things in some capacity, just different complexity, different scale. What's the physical security of your rise room? What is it of your data center? Your exterior doors? You're this, that and another. What's the, what's the environmentals of the rise room? What is in your data center, your network closets, so on and so forth. And so there is this. Yes. Very standard framework. If you're troubleshooting, you call it oci. If you're consulting, pick, pick it. Pick whatever scoping methodology you want to say you use. Right. And then the harder part is getting people to believe you. Right.
• 24:31
  Speaker B: Okay, so this is. Yeah, keep going, keep going.
• 24:34
  Speaker A: Yeah. The technology is easy. It's all bound by what do you want to pay for and what is possible. Getting people to believe you, Getting people to give you their money. That's the hard part. Right. That's. That's where the rubber meets the road. I can win a technologist over, but if I don't win his boss or the CEO over, you're screwed. Right. Same situation when you're working internal.
• 24:58
  Speaker B: So this show sits between mid Market to Fortune 5000 CTO Leader to Enterprise specialist like yourself, Enterprise network specialist. You get kind of this living in a. And you've worked for msps and stuff, so you kind of understand the whole gamut of like, oh, we support businesses too. Oh, I am the business to this enterprise aspect, which is you. Actually, I think you're in one of the funnest spaces. My wife who's teaching my kids might be mad at that one. What is there to teach from a. Getting them to give you money and say yes. What's the. I guess the talent trick is it just like, look, here's roi. Faster, better, more redundant. Downtime equals no production. It equals lost labor hours. Here's all of our outages and here's what it will be. And there's an roi. And it's very clear because network is clear and it's cut and dry and it's like, you know, but sometimes you get apples and oranges, you get MPLs to, I don't know, some Velo, some VeloCloud SD WAN overlay thing. That's different.
• 26:18
  Speaker A: Yeah, you know, I went we to our. So I'm not a specialist anymore. Definitely my background and I'll remain dangerously technical, I'll say. But I have very smart engineers and architects. Thankfully that, that, that do laps around a lot of people. But if I'm, if I'm talking to the C suite or, or, or even my boss's peers, the first kind of meat to oh my God, we need to invest millions of dollars in our network. Why? And there was a lot of colorful language before that. I'm paraphrasing in a very nice way. But when you look at big network investments, they're often associated with big projects and they're a small line item somewhere. Nobody thinks about the refresh of a network at a big facility. Bring in a seven figure dollar tag and so.
• 27:16
  Speaker B: Or they just, you could have just left that. They just don't think about it.
• 27:19
  Speaker A: Correct.
• 27:19
  Speaker B: They just say, hey, what do you. Don't we just order this stuff and they plug it in.
• 27:22
  Speaker A: It's the plumbing, right. Just work.
• 27:25
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 27:26
  Speaker A: And so what, what I, where I start is, hey, Phil, you're the CEO of a company. Ask me why you need to spend a million dollars network. When you press enter on your keyboard, this is the same thing as you pressing the gas on your car driving out of the driveway. I was like, you now have sent data somewhere. You are the data. And to get somewhere you need to travel through your internal network. So these are your neighborhood roads and your streets that you take to, to get to your grocery stores. I was like, there's junction points in your network distribution layer and routing. These are your stop lights, right. And in a lot of cases you need to ride the highway. So you need to run on a fiber backbone that connects your buildings together,
• 28:10
  Speaker B: AKA from Hong Kong to California.
• 28:13
  Speaker A: Well, this is Internet. This is Internet, right? And so, and then when you need to send that data far away, you need to, you need to get into a plane if you're the data set, right. So you're going to go to an airport. So this is the edge of your network. This is your Internet service provider. This is your core routers for your site. Do you want to fly commercial or do you want to fly private? Right. Flying commercials, just straight DIA to your firewalls. Flying private to your SD WAN services. And so I try to put them in visual aid. Right. I, I establish that baseline. Now I say, okay, now envision doing all that again. But over 15 years, 2,000 people have moved into your neighborhood because you have a bunch of apartments. Now. These are your virtualization. Your VMware hosts your apartments that are running workload. These are now people. You got potholes everywhere. You got intersections shut down. Things clogged up. Eventually the system collapses. That is tech debt. So give them that visual aid. Let them visualize it in a way. They felt pain. Then it's easy to understand.
• 29:27
  Speaker B: We. We played a little. I played a little game earlier today that was like. I say it in tech speak. You say it in, like, in, like, whatever, you know, executives speak. And it was like, we've got all this technical debt. Now. You've got to explain that to, like, the executive. And it's like jargon. Good one. It's like, how do I explain that we need to fix this tech debt piece? What does it mean? Well, it means, like you said, I loved the potholes. I really, really liked that. Yeah. It also means that, like, Sally, on her way to work, gets a flat tire. And she's just, you know, she just. And she's driving, whatever, a 19. She's driving a Saturn from 1999 or something, and she can't get to work in time, so she can't do her job. And she's so pissed off she's driving this old Saturn. Anyways.
• 30:19
  Speaker A: Well, it's funny, I guess the car manufacturers as well, because I'll say, hey, well, if you get. Because. Something I have to explain a lot is why you can't cross manufacturers, especially with wireless Cisco, Ruber ruckus. If they start overlapping, they're bickering, they're fighting. It's chaos. And so I'm like, yeah, imagine being in a car, showing up at a light, and they're like, hey, you drive a Ford. You can't. You can't use this intersection. You gotta go somewhere else. The.
• 30:46
  Speaker B: That's actually really good. What other ones we got? What other.
• 30:49
  Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's so easy to, like, you know, you. You could talk.
• 30:54
  Speaker B: Does it really get it? Are they like, all right, what you. What are we really talking about?
• 30:59
  Speaker A: You see this, I'm sure, a lot where there's that click, it's in the eyes. You can see it where they're like, oh, that's all you're looking for. You're looking for that click.
• 31:11
  Speaker B: But why do we need to spend $7 million? That's what it costs.
• 31:18
  Speaker A: So once the click happens, like, okay, I understand the importance of this. I understand why you're Doing it, right? What do we get? What's the business value?
• 31:28
  Speaker B: What if we don't do it?
• 31:29
  Speaker A: Yeah. So the cost of inaction is an unplanned outage, which would cost us, which will cost you. This is where you come in, right? This is where I pull them into my world. I was like, I need your help telling me the cost per hour, the EBITDA per hour, the EBITDA per day. And then I can tell you, here is the cost of your risk. And if you have an unplanned outage, I can't give you an RPO or an rto. But if you have a plan. Yeah, right. So that's the other half, right. You get them to understand and then you hook them in. You're like, this is a two way street. I need to understand.
• 32:07
  Speaker B: You know what you could do is how about this? Look, just give me your cell phone and I'll shut down your computer for a day and just tell me how, how much that screws up your life. And that's just you.
• 32:17
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 32:18
  Speaker B: This is. What do you, how do you feel when your email's down? Has your email ever gone down?
• 32:24
  Speaker A: No.
• 32:25
  Speaker B: What would that do to you? I actually like this. Let's put some. But this is all like fear. Like, this is all fear, uncertainty and desire. Like, but it's real. We've had, I've had a, a company that didn't really have that many, that many users, maybe 700 to 1500 users. But I know that when their phones went down, they lost $40,000 every like 30 minutes. What's 40 grand every 30 minutes just for the phones being down?
• 32:53
  Speaker A: So that's kind of, you know, you know, where the, the conversation gets a little bit more complex, Phil. And where, where I've, where it's struggling is trying to explain the demand of like AI networking. Not just networking to run AI, but what AI is doing to the network. And it's creating this almost constant streaming effect.
• 33:21
  Speaker B: Yeah, it absolutely is. And it's like, hey, we need to upgrade laptops. Like, why are. I mean, there's just not enough ram. Like, what are you doing while I'm running this. This agent and this agent and this agent.
• 33:33
  Speaker A: Yeah. So going from a 10 gig network to a 10 gig network isn't as easy anymore. Now it's like, okay, I need to figure out like different distribution internally.
• 33:44
  Speaker B: Are you, have you noticed that though? What kind of AI usage have you guys noticed on your network?
• 33:49
  Speaker A: Yeah, we've seen a solid 15% baseline increase. Across every. Shut up. Just from Copilot, yo. Now.
• 34:02
  Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you.
• 34:05
  Speaker A: Our digital transformation team has done an incredible job backing us into Copilot because they have good data behind it, and we've been operating in the Microsoft ecosystem with good structure, good tagging. So, like, Copilot's actually useful for us.
• 34:21
  Speaker B: It's like
• 34:24
  Speaker A: AI is really what it is.
• 34:26
  Speaker B: 15% increase, though.
• 34:29
  Speaker A: Yeah. You can pull a global report and you can see like, that's actually like. Over the last 18 months, our baseline has steadily grown and our user base hasn't really. I mean, it's done a little bit of this.
• 34:42
  Speaker B: What has that. Yeah. I wonder what the correlation. What's. Has there been a correlation to productivity, though?
• 34:48
  Speaker A: I think computer users are better computer users. I think they're. They're testing the limits as well. I think there's a lot of people just seeing like, oh, I wonder what it can do.
• 34:58
  Speaker B: I think everyone's on the same level, though, at the same time.
• 35:00
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it's an interesting little time.
• 35:07
  Speaker B: I mean, I know that we make changes, but I think we know what we're doing. So I can't imagine what it'd be like in an organization with thousands of people that kind of maybe don't. And then there's people that don't know what they're doing. I mean, I can screw around my home computer and have a bunch of config changes made just by using, like, Claude desktop if I'm screwing around.
• 35:25
  Speaker A: Yeah, we don't have that concern. We have a pretty well moderated lockdown. There's good guardrails. So again, our DTA team has done a phenomenal job, kind of putting cattle in a position to succeed. And we've even launched our own qai. So in our world, running deviations is a thing everybody's familiar with. You write a standard operating procedure, you go against it. There's a process called a deviation. Depending on the deviation, the CEOs on
• 35:57
  Speaker B: your ass, or you get a demerit, or you get a demerit from the. Either way, Zach Miller demerit, Zach Miller demerit.
• 36:06
  Speaker A: Or either way, it's a ton of paperwork. It's a ton of paperwork, really. And so what QAI does is it uses our agent, Tick development, rlm, all of our data, to quite literally cut the time by 60%. It's pretty significant.
• 36:24
  Speaker B: So I'm still blown away at the 15%. I don't know why I never thought of the correlation with bandwidth. Why? It's just so Simple. Which is again to your point. This is exactly. Brings us all the way back to the beginning. Let me see the riser room. I mean literally, it's right back to the beginning of the network. Literally. It proves the point right there how important it is. And how often do people just kind of let the network as the redheaded stepchild. That's kind of just like ah, you know, it's a contract's coming. Oh, we missed it. It renewed for another like three years or with Lumen and you know XYZ Windstream and you know telecom. What was it? The what. What's the Irish telecom one? Why can't this Volt. Volt or something. Why can't I remember them off the. Some. Some Interesting.
• 37:11
  Speaker A: I. I only know from seeing Volt signs in Ireland, but I've never done any work. Well, I've done one office in Ireland in Dublin, but British Telecom for us, it's Colt Colts.
• 37:25
  Speaker B: That's what it was. Colts. Bold area Colts. Okay. Okay. Beautiful. The. I'm still shocked at the 15. I'm just like, how do you guys. What do you do? I mean, did you have. Did you just. Were you way over?
• 37:40
  Speaker A: It was gradual. It was. It was gradual. It wasn't a. Like, hey, we woke up one day and our networks. It was just.
• 37:46
  Speaker B: Yeah. You must see some weird spikes though from monitoring and like, I'm just wondering. I just really want to see this now. How many people? Like, how many? How about this? Just. Let's just say you're a local isp even running to the neighborhood. Let's just say you're running a local neighborhood. You know, you're like a comcast in the neighborhood loop. You've got the Comcast loop in the neighborhood. I mean they're already over subscribed to begin with, so they sell everyone a gig. They only run a gig to the neighborhood anyways. But everyone's been sold a gig. But it's like up to a gig now. Everyone's using AI. And it was the same thing after Covid. All of a sudden it was like, hey, we got to think about this, guys. Everyone's working from home now. We're massively over scrapped. There's not enough bandwidth running in the neighborhoods. They must have seen some interesting things.
• 38:31
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's all really depends on where the data resides. And so since Copilot and our data is in the Microsoft ecosystem, it's right next to each other. And so it's more of a streaming service effect. So we now have a couple hundred Devices that are simulating streaming service traffics because they're just banging away at a prompt. Right. But they're not really uploading or downloading a ton.
• 38:58
  Speaker B: True. Yeah. Yes. Getting out of, getting out of hand here thinking that it's going to be like this, you know.
• 39:04
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's fine. It's, it's, it's statistics. These things are. Yeah. It brings us back to the network. Right.
• 39:11
  Speaker B: We did have some bullet points to briefly talk about.
• 39:14
  Speaker A: Run them.
• 39:15
  Speaker B: Let's see. Global Infrastructure and Life Sciences. Is there, Is there. We kind of talked about that. You're saving lives. Okay, like Global Infrastructure, you're saving lives. That's great. Or we're touching lives. But is there a difference between Global Infrastructure and Life Sciences and other global infrastructure compliance sets?
• 39:33
  Speaker A: Right. Yeah. I mean, you know, you know, government focus entities, at least US government have FedRamp to deal with. That's not something we really deal with. We deal with the FDA though and the dea. Right. Because we have controlled substance that we make. So those are the two big three letter agencies we deal with. Our primary compliance set is 21 CFR 210 and 211. Or as people call in the industry, the GXPs. Okay. For good something practice. For us it's manufacturing. So good manufacturing practices.
• 40:08
  Speaker B: Gotcha. So everyone's got their red tape. It doesn't sound like yours is as, as bad, but it's still. How often do you guys do audits and have audits come back like you gotta fix this, fix that, fix this.
• 40:22
  Speaker A: That's BAU constant all the time.
• 40:25
  Speaker B: Okay. Okay.
• 40:27
  Speaker A: That is business as usual is getting audit observations and remediating.
• 40:31
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 40:31
  Speaker A: But that's, that's nothing, that's nothing to slight Catalan. Catalan is actually one of the best quality driven organizations I've ever worked for. It's just the nature of the beast. Right. Clients are auditing you, the industry's auditing you.
• 40:45
  Speaker B: Any best practices there? Best practices or things that you've seen that would be useful to people?
• 40:51
  Speaker A: Yeah. Involve IT before you source your lab systems. Definitely your lab systems. Right. Involve it before you source because you'll find yourself in unavoidable observations in the future.
• 41:07
  Speaker B: And why do you say that? Are you saying that because very sophisticated, intelligent people that have PhDs in front of their names or after their names tend to make decisions without it involved. Just hysterical.
• 41:19
  Speaker A: Yes, Engineers, but more, more so they need to purchase niche computerized systems that don't care about the broader IT industry. That's more of the problem. So you need to kind of help them out from the beginning.
• 41:35
  Speaker B: Gotcha. So help you fix broken that gets delivered broken.
• 41:38
  Speaker A: Basically make sure as it's coming in, it comes in in a compliant way. So when you have your next real FDA audit, because you're about to launch a product, you're not getting dinged on that. You could read on the FDA's website, the two most common citable offenses is some computer system validation violation or bottle labeling or what? Bottle labeling.
• 42:01
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 42:02
  Speaker A: You mislabeled a bottle.
• 42:05
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 42:06
  Speaker A: Those are the two most common sites.
• 42:09
  Speaker B: Who's catching the missed bottle? Okay, I just, I, I get it. They're just checking IT bottles and. Okay, so you're gonna make friends, basically. Make friends. I mean, do you have like some kind of like little email thing? How do you, how do you let all these, how do you let all these lab lab people know this stuff? You know, like, hey guys, by the way, if you ever need some help from me before you order that, you know, give me a call. Like. Yeah. How do you cross communicate in such a large organization or a large enterprise organization?
• 42:35
  Speaker A: Well, yeah, smaller. Smaller organizations, yes. You know, you're kind of running that, that four front of that committee where it's two, three, 400 people. Right. You're. You're very.
• 42:45
  Speaker B: Policies and procedures, I guess. Yeah, yeah.
• 42:48
  Speaker A: For global. Right. Especially in a corporate role. I'm working with the procurement team and they are working with the broader procurement people at the sites and they are essentially cascading a standard.
• 42:59
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 43:00
  Speaker A: So cyber has standards, infrastructure has standards, digital transformation that you have to meet these standard criteria before you can source. So that's where we, where we hit it.
• 43:11
  Speaker B: Moving between IT leadership and the CEO seat. What does that like, do you put on a different jacket or like you just start speaking differently or we just all need to talk the same.
• 43:25
  Speaker A: Are you asking if I was the CEO?
• 43:27
  Speaker B: I have a bullet point here that says moving between IT leadership and the CEO seat. Have you ever been the CEO or been in the leadership seat but also been on the. I know you've been on the IT leadership piece. Right. So the question is how. How do you. I think we kind of talked about that briefly, which is you need to use a lot of metaphors and stories. But what. I guess, what does the CEO know that the IT leader doesn't know?
• 43:48
  Speaker A: Honestly, this was the hardest thing for me when I ran my consulting firm.
• 43:51
  Speaker B: There we go.
• 43:52
  Speaker A: Selling.
• 43:53
  Speaker B: Okay, love it selling.
• 43:56
  Speaker A: Just straight up, you know, you, you would.
• 43:59
  Speaker B: I know. Why? I'm just saying why to you.
• 44:02
  Speaker A: I am A technologist. If the, if you have a problem and you're already talking to me about it, I don't need to sell you now. I just need to talk about your problem and you'll trust me.
• 44:14
  Speaker B: Okay?
• 44:17
  Speaker A: But going out and selling my business, selling my product is such.
• 44:22
  Speaker B: AKA yourself.
• 44:25
  Speaker A: Sure. It's such a harder thing to do when you depend on it.
• 44:31
  Speaker B: That's everybody. Let me, Let me just change your. Maybe I can just change your ways. Because I've had people where I've said this before and they've said, phil, you know, to this day I still remember this and changed my life because I had. I started at a Cisco startup and I left working at Starbucks and I was creative writing major. So I like, you know, I was a store manager at Starbucks. Like, you know, what's the like, end goal there? Like, you become district manager. And even if I was the best store manager, like 400 people apply for the district manager job and then they layer it down to four people, and then those people compete, you know, like in a death match to get the district manager role to get what, $60,000 a year, like for the glory job. So, no, screw that. So I got hired by the Cisco startup and it was like hardcore B2B sales. But I had kind of like a, like a little inkling in the back of my head that would be good at it because we sold a bunch of coffee machines one time and I like rented a bunch of Tony Robbins CDs and Zig Ziglar Secrets, closing the sale so we could sell a bunch of coffee Mach. But I remember I the like, I was like, okay, I gotta go out and like, I gotta talk to strangers, like 50 people and push this product. But. And I eventually, after like just forcing myself to do it, really, really learned how to talk to people and like uncover people's needs. And my nickname became Fill the Need because it's really just about uncovering people's problems and then filling the need, right? And that's really what your job is as a salesperson. It's kind of like a doctor. And people have this idea of the salesperson, this guy, I gotta go out and like force him to like, convinced him into buying this thing that he doesn't need or something. And that's like, couldn't be any further from the truth, right? But I remember like hearing someone say once, and this is a famous line, I don't know who said it originally, but nothing gets done until someone makes a sale. Like, nothing gets. Nothing happens until someone makes a Sale and that the order can't be placed. Like, people can't get a job. People can't start working. It's literally what, like, America was like, was built upon. Like, the sewing machine was smashed by a mob in the Boston Marketplace because, oh, the sewing machine's gonna put everyone out of work. You know, it's like, kind of like you, hey, you know, I mean, it had to be, like, sold. Someone had to, like, pick this thing. I'm like, no, you guys, crazy. It's going to help, like, make things faster, better, shorter, like, whatever. So it is very, very hard, and it's very, very challenging. And it challenges your own. Like, you really have to, like, get out of your comfort zone and really, like, you know, believe in what you're doing and really find people to go. And really go find people to help. And I think a lot of people get that wrong. Yeah, it is one of the most difficult things.
• 46:55
  Speaker A: If I did my company over again, I would have found a sales leader. I think that would have changed the course of my future. But it. Between that and then having to execute, I had one other partner who was very silent. He was like, I just want to do tech. I gave him a CTO title just. But he was like, through and through technician.
• 47:18
  Speaker B: Well, you think the thing to do is go get a hardcore sales job first and do good at it. And then when you're good, and then when you go follow another company that actually has a market model that's like, really, really good. Like, Xerox had it back in the day. It was like the gears of selling or something like that. You know what I mean? And then it was, you know, whatever. You know, I think, like, if people are asking, like, hey, where should I go get a job? Like, I don't go to ring central. Because ring central, you know, they're like calling you every other hour, you know,
• 47:44
  Speaker A: or Zoom or something like that. I'm just a technologist, though. Like, that's where I. I just love to be. I love to be at that.
• 47:51
  Speaker B: You just did it. You sold yourself. This whole episode, it's just, you know, it was like. Like, you could go in, right? So, like, so you could go in. You could be like, hey, look, this is what we used to say. It's crazy. Hey, look, I. I work for Cisco and Microsoft. We're running some infrastructure in the neighborhood, could affect the business. It could. If you let me run this infrastructure into your buildings. Right? I just need to speak to your IT guys. Who is he? Could you just go grab it for me. Thanks. You know what I mean? And I was like, hey, you know, like, what do you got going on here? You got fiber in here? Are you like sticking a pencil in the back of the router box, resetting that? Do you linksys up in the ceiling behind the ball? Like, what are you doing? How much are you paying for this? How much are you paying for that? Like, seriously. Okay, like, you know, you and John and Mary, like, you know, we're just like three people away from running like this fiber loop into your building. And like, you're stuck on this crap right here. Like, and we're, I think back in the day it was again, we'll give you VPN and off site backup and we'll do this, this, this and this. Like, you know, and it was just about like uncovering people's like pains and needs and showing them a better way to do something faster, faster, better, shorter, cheaper or something like that. You know what I mean? Yeah. Isn't that what your CEO wants? Don't you have to sell the CEO anyways on the plan and then you have to tell them about like the stoplights and driving through the potholes and all that type of thing. You got really good.
• 49:12
  Speaker A: Not so much anymore. Now it is just making sure there is a clear business value statement to everything that that's asked for. Right. Or beyond the understanding phase. We're in I, the trust phase. I have a really good boss. There you go. So, so yeah, no, I think just a segue into one of your questions. What do most CIOs get wrong that you think is obvious?
• 49:40
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 49:42
  Speaker A: This isn't the case at my current job, but I've seen this issue at other jobs not aligning with the cfo. Yes.
• 49:50
  Speaker B: Literally just came up today.
• 49:53
  Speaker A: Yep. I've seen it a couple of times. And I'm like, you know, you, you, because often in the, in the biotech industry, smaller companies, the head of it or the CIO will roll up to the CFO.
• 50:04
  Speaker B: Yes, 100%. You literally nailed it.
• 50:09
  Speaker A: And, and, and they will just get into these bludgeon matches. Right. And I'm like, you know who's gonna win here? The man who finds all of our in for that matter, or whatever. Right.
• 50:22
  Speaker B: Like, I'm gonna pull, I, I, I'm pulling it up. Okay. I'm pulling it up. I'm literally what we talked about later today. Oh, remember we had, we talked about like the, hey, I say something in tech, you say it in business speak, which is basically sales. Right? Like data platform. If I say data platform, you say in business speak, find out what the customers want faster. If I say cloud migration, you say pay for what we use, not for what we might need. Automation, the same work with fewer hours. Tech debt. This is the one I could that I was stumped with that you had a better answer for old systems we pay extra to keep alive. It's like who wins? Who can say in less words and make a way to upgrade the network.
• 51:02
  Speaker A: I like that game.
• 51:03
  Speaker B: Upgrade the network, stop losing sales. When systems go down. We can, you know, like this is the game. Right? Like that's like, that's the thing. So but we had the suggestion was like what can IT leaders do? What can IT leaders do to make their job easier? Right. And literally what was what it was on the show earlier today was talk to the CFO first. That's it. It was just like talk to the CFO first. Hey, I got a problem. Here's what I'm looking at. This cost, this what's causes.
• 51:41
  Speaker A: Can we.
• 51:41
  Speaker B: Like you're like the numbers guy. Like I know you know all this stuff really well. Like every ask that has to be asked in dollars if the c. If the CFO backs you, like you're pretty much game.
• 51:52
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yep. I have a lot of conversations with CFOs for like early and growth stage biotechs and I always tell them, I'm like, how much you want to spend on it in the next three years? What number comes to mind?
• 52:11
  Speaker B: Don't even know.
• 52:12
  Speaker A: They ask. He asks the rest of the organization the same question. What is your 3 year long range plan? Right. So how much money do you want to spend on the business for that matter, in the next three years? He's got an idea. She's got an idea. Whomever.
• 52:31
  Speaker B: Where do you get this idea from? Just.
• 52:36
  Speaker A: Yeah, Well, I mean in my experience most of these companies are funded through some series, they're publicly traded or they have an outlook, they've got a cash,
• 52:44
  Speaker B: there's like a menu or what do I say? A recipe. There's a recipe.
• 52:47
  Speaker A: Yeah. Any, any funded company has a cash Runway, right? And so your CFO is going to be focused on preserving that cash Runway, full stop. Okay, so how much money do you want to spend on it the next three years? Right. So it's a simple question to start with and then you start backing into, okay, here are the things you can afford, right? You may want your cool shiny databricks sitting in Microsoft Azure with some cool snowflake and Informatica integrations. To create these super pretty power bi reports, can you afford not only to manage and implement them, can you afford to exit them as well?
• 53:22
  Speaker B: It actually probably takes a little bit of pressure off too, because when you have that conversation with the CFO to begin with now, you know, kind of like what the. It's not the guardrails like the sandbox that you're playing in. Right. So it's like we can't really afford this, but we can afford this and we're just going to be lean and mean and run with this.
• 53:41
  Speaker A: Yeah, you don't have to start with the Ferrari. Sometimes it's okay to go with the Corolla, right?
• 53:47
  Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, we used a free CRM for like ever until today. We're almost done with our HubSpot migration.
• 53:57
  Speaker A: I work for a company that ran on Action Pack licensing on their data center until Microsoft audited them and then they just paid the fee and it was cheaper than the alternate.
• 54:07
  Speaker B: Isn't that weird how some people do that? Ah, we'll just pay the fine if it comes up and if we don't get fined, then, you know. Well, that was, that was a beautiful. What other my questions that you love, that I know you have a list of that just like pop out at you that you'd love to answer. I'd much rather just you ask the questions and answer them too. And it's just a lot of fun. It's easier for me.
• 54:27
  Speaker A: Yeah, just going off your list. Being a good student. What's one less thing every emerging IT leader should know? Contact switching is a skill, not something to avoid.
• 54:40
  Speaker B: Oh, so it's like Adderall.
• 54:43
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 54:45
  Speaker B: It's so messed up.
• 54:47
  Speaker A: I've befuddled many, many of my bosses because they're very. They're often like ERP or app focused people. I could talk to business in most cases, but I could also talk with tech. And so you have to know how to contact switch in a moment's notice. The faster you can dislodge from one to the next, the quicker to a light switch you can get.
• 55:13
  Speaker B: Okay, but when you're all by yourself, don't context switch like stay focused? Is that what you're saying?
• 55:19
  Speaker A: No, no, no, no. It's just I think there's. In my. Through my career I've seen a lot of like you do, like strength finders. Some implementer for Myers Briggs will speak about this. Some HR leaders will speak about this, about how distracting and disruptive context switching is. Valid statement. But more and more organizations are matricized you will be forced to contact switch. And so I think the more you hone that in as a skill rather than avoid it like a plague, the more happier you are, in my opinion.
• 56:00
  Speaker B: Yeah, you just brought me back to corporate America so hardcore with all that stuff like you really did. And you know, and like in a big massive thick book that was, you know, your, that you go through, that's all the different sections where you meet meets expectations or exceed expectations. And you know, and I just remember sarcasm was a behavioral derailer. So that was under meets expectations. And I remember going through an entire study of like, well, what if we take half these mid mid middle managers and we have them work at home to do this type of work and we'll leave the rest in their current environment the way they are. And what we realized is that every time they were interrupted, it took five to seven minutes off of the. It took them five to seven minutes to refocus again and said task that they were doing. So there was, it was basically like a context switching test. This is in the IT world. I mean but you guys, I mean like literally the world's technology. That's all it is. It's like, hey, can you fix this? Can you do this? Can you do that? How many things can you do at once?
• 57:04
  Speaker A: This is a real skill though, Phil, that you can take home. So for a lot of my career I've worked remotely or hybrid. My wife has worked the last eight years of her career remote. And so contact switching becomes important because instead of driving home and decompressing, I have to walk down the stairs and decompress because what I don't want to do is spend the next two hours bitching about my job. So this skill of contact switching, I can shut off the work thoughts by the time I get to the bottom of the stairs and enjoy my evening with my wife.
• 57:40
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty much going to shut the door of this closet my way out on my way out.
• 57:47
  Speaker A: That's something I struggled with a lot earlier in my career where I was adamantly resisting the thought of. I was so silo minded, I was like, no, I'm a VMware engineer. That's all I do. And, but I also was a manager with direct reports and I had budget responsibilities. Like I had to figure this out. I had to figure like how to be in between both.
• 58:05
  Speaker B: What was there. Did you figure anything out or are you just saying that, hey, it's okay to just don't believe all the crap they say about context switching?
• 58:13
  Speaker A: Yeah, I found a way that works for me now. I don't believe it's multitask tasking. I don't, I don't do that well, so I don't do it.
• 58:19
  Speaker B: But I think it's prioritization, really. It's like, like probably one of the best things. Atom. First of all, atomic habits is great.
• 58:25
  Speaker A: I love atomic habit. All about building systems, baby.
• 58:28
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, like, I actually got the little notebook or all that crap that came with it, and the only, the best suggestion that came from that, and I can't remember was it, who was the guy? Maybe it was Carnegie or someone. I can't remember what it was. But there's like a lot of different ways to use that notebook, right? And one of them is just write down a to do list of six things. That's. It can't be more than six every single day. And if you don't get through all six, then you either don't need that other one on the to do list next day or you move it to the to do list the next day. That's it. Everyone has six to do things. Six things to do for the day. That's it. I don't need to go quadrant I don't need to go a 1, 2, 3, Stephen Covey 3, 4, 5 box in this quadrant that and have this crazy long list and all this other stuff, which I used to do. But you know, what's interesting is you said, I think one of the things that solved my problems because I came from being a general manager to go into that sales job and general manager was just a nightmare. It was like, you know, staff of 33 people. It was, you know, ordering and receiving and like just moving parts and hiring people and training and like all gold standard checklists. And it's just like insanity, right? You know, doing reviews and just, you know, and just training and it was just, ah. And then I went to this sales job which is like really, really stressful, or what you would think is really stressful, really, really pushed you beyond your comfort zone because you got to learn to talk to every single person. They're all complete strangers. They're all going to kick you in the teeth. You'll be spitting out Chiclets every day, whatever it is, is what the people you used to say. You really got to learn to really help people. And people can. People are natural human lie detectors. So like that those. If you can really, really help people and you can really, really be a human being and connect with another person as a partner, then you're gonna be successful. But you've got to get outside of that. Like, I'm so scared, right? And you got like, you know, it's like every, it's like every second of the day you're like getting up on stage in front of a billion people and they're all staring at you and it's like, and they're like, what the hell do you want? And so, but the point was that from an organization standpoint, had a very, very strict model. It was like, you do this, you go from this stage to this stage to this stage and you qualify someone by asking a bunch of questions and finding out where their problems and their pains are, right? And then you verify is that really, really a true pain? And then there any other other pains, right? And then can you fill the need of that pain with any XYZ product of whatever it is? Which is one of the reasons why I eventually really loved consulting because it's basically glorified sales. But you're not stuck with one product that you have to sell. You have the whole world. You have the whole world of products and you can actually. And if, then if you're really, really good at doing a needs assessment and analysis and everything and really finding out where someone's real pain is and helping them learn something about their pain that they don't even know. I have cancer. I didn't know I had cancer in that area. I didn't even know that that was bad to have, you know, a single threaded fiber coming in through there where it's in like an area wetland zone where it's going to go out or I don't know, but there's a model to that process. And I find that if it's very, very organized and you love systems and atomic habits and that type of stuff, then you can be very highly successful. It's just you've got to have systems and processes in place and whatever scopes of work and SOPs and I'm going to ITIL and all this other stuff.
• 1:01:53
  Speaker A: You're an MSP guy, so you know, EOS. EOS has been attached to my blood and through my career somewhere or another. And I think it's a great way to start your organization and any team.
• 1:02:06
  Speaker B: Final question. You get to pick the final question. What is it? And the final question could be like, Phil, you asked the final question too. It's up to you. It's completely up to you. This has been, this has been, this
• 1:02:15
  Speaker A: has been more fun for me. Last year Dealer's choice.
• 1:02:19
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 1:02:20
  Speaker A: What you choose.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker B: All right, we're hitting you with a wild card then. What do you know today? What advice would you give your younger self 10 years ago? I don't know, like when did you start? What advice do you know, and you have now that you would have given your younger self years ago? So you didn't like screw up in all kinds of things or would have made your life better for all those people that are in that zone right now that you are in. There's something that you know now that you wish you knew back then. What advice would you have given your younger self?
• 1:02:51
  Speaker A: Me specifically? I would remind myself that anger is a 6 second chemical reaction. Shut up before you speak.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker B: Oh, man, so true. It's so true for all you fathers out there and mothers and sons and daughters and other human beings and. And road rage guy that's in jail now. Yeah, Think about it. Think about it. You could have just sat down. Now you're dealing with something for the rest of your life.
• 1:03:23
  Speaker A: Yep. Yeah. So many of my challenges were either heightened or created because I acted out of what I thought was passion but was actually anger.
• 1:03:36
  Speaker B: Yeah. And you backed it up with all kinds of logic. Famous sales thing, right? People make decisions based on emotions and they back it up based on logic. Yeah, but people are always willing to make a new decision based on a new set of information. They'll never go back on their decision. You're not going to get a human being to change their decision, but you can get them to make a new decision on a new set of information.
• 1:04:04
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good one.
• 1:04:05
  Speaker B: It's. I think that was a. That was a zig ziglar thing too. I don't know what that has to do with like, but basically has to do with. Yeah, to your point of the anger thing, there's a reason why there's a timer time delay on emails. I ran out of six seconds. Reply. No, no, no, no. I used to have. I used to have someone that would, like, my emails would go to them first as a filter. You know, they'd be like, no, no, no. Like, no, no, you're not sending that. Should I send this? No, don't do that, man. Zach Miller, it has been a pleasure. You've been heard the. This is great, man. It was a lot of fun.