Latest / You've Been Heard / 400- The Intern Who Saved $190K w/David Williams

Transcript

400- The Intern Who Saved $190K w/David Williams · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: All right, well, David, I'd like to welcome you to the you've been heard it leadership podcast. I'm Doug Kameen. It's a pleasure to have you on the show with us. Yeah, it's me here. So David, first off, tell us a little bit about yourself, where you work, what you do. We'd love to know your background here to start.
• 0:28
  Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. So currently I am the CIO at Butzel. We are a 170 year old law firm based out of Detroit, Michigan. So I've been here for about two years, but historically I've been in other verticals. I've been in financial slash, mortgage. I've been in automotive. I've been healthcare. So over 20 years now in it. But ironically I didn't actually start start in it. I didn't even go to school for it. I started as a mechanical engineer and due to a massive layoff, I transitioned, grew up with me to it.
• 1:02
  Speaker A: So you have a background in mechanical engineering?
• 1:05
  Speaker B: I do, and actually I am a printed circuit board designer as well. That's actually where my career started. I went from a bowling alley at 19 to working for an automotive supplier as an ECAD librarian and then a clean circuit work plan.
• 1:20
  Speaker A: Look, this is perhaps maybe in some ways an unsurprisingly Detroit story. Right? You went to work for an auto manufacturing company and so fashion, Right, Exactly.
• 1:29
  Speaker B: Yeah, I had an in. As is typical in the automotive industry, you don't just get it out of school, it's all about who you know. My brother in law worked there, got me the job. And then two and a half years later, almost three years later, they closed the entire facility and I was out of a job.
• 1:44
  Speaker A: That's. Which manufacturer was that? Back in the. That is.
• 1:47
  Speaker B: Yeah, it was Eaton.
• 1:48
  Speaker A: Okay, so tell us a little bit about your history. Let's expand on that a little bit. I should say you mentioned you've worked with Eaton in the past. You started mechanical engineering. At some point you get laid off, you make this transition into it. How did you see that transition coming? Like did it fall in your lap? Did you stumble into it? Were you like, you know what? I actually like computers. I'm going to do this. Tell us a little more about that so we can see. How did you make that pivot?
• 2:12
  Speaker B: Yeah, so I'll actually back up just a little bit. When I was 12, I was living with my grandparents at the time. They got us our first home computer, an old 486SX 25Mhz processor way back in the Day we got that home, I took that thing apart. I wanted to know how it worked. My grandmother got so pissed at me. I had this thing in pieces. I was just so curious of how this function. I'll be grounded for a month when she walked in and I had it in pieces, put it all back together. Once I got into that though, I started learning how to write bat scripts. I made like an ASCII menu for our DOS prompt to load into Windows and different applications. I was always fascinated by it. So I've always been like that computer guy to all my friends and everything. And while I was at Eaton doing my mechanical stuff and electrical stuff, they would always ask me to help them with computer issues. We had two IT people for 700 person company. So within our pod I was the go to it personal for all real issues. I just knew. So it fell in my lap when they closed everything down. One of the guys that also lost his job quickly got a job at a triple joint venture at an automotive supplier. Only 10 people. He's like, hey, we're just getting off the ground, but we need an IT guy. You want to pivot, you'll be an IT person. Like absolutely. Have to play with computers all day. I had no idea what I was actually getting into because my day one they're like, okay, we're launching three plants in six months and we need you to get all the infrastructure in order. Before, I'd never done anything like that before.
• 3:48
  Speaker A: So you're like, here's a stack of 3 1/2 inch disks that have Windows 3.1 on them. We need you to run around and stick all the disks in the drives. I think I'm maybe just a couple years behind you. So when I was getting started, we were at the tail end of things like, hey, we got Windows NT on this machine. We're gonna. Here's the disks to do the updates to NT 3.51 type of deal or NT 4. And. And I remember I was just Transitioning out, right. Y2K came through. So the you think about the technology and how it's changed and grown over so many years. Like there was that period where, where as personal computers became so prevalent, but everything still required you to largely manually touch every single computer to do every single thing. Yeah, change the setting on 50 computers. That meant that you as the person doing it was going to touch 50 things. And then the 2000s really saw that change of, I would call it like realistic automation.
• 4:48
  Speaker B: Like I had no exposure to Active Directory group policy at the time. Right. We were just launching Windows XP at the time. This was 20044 that I joined at HBPO, that was the joint venture Abidi that I joined. So I was, I had to learn all that stuff. Thankfully I did have, I'll call him a mentor who was part of a parent organizations who kind of took me under his wing and showed me the ropes. But I can only rely on him for so much. But I, I'm, I'm really grateful for that experience. I mean I was just thrown right to the walls immediately just as a, a bright eyed, bushy tailed 22 year old. And I was then responsible for all of infrastructure in North America. We spun up, we went from 10 people to 600 people in 18 months.
• 5:34
  Speaker A: Wow. For you this is an early IT job. So you ended up in a fairly significant role, but at a very early period in your career. Essentially you were at the right place at the right time and you had just, I would say just enough skills, but you had, you had the right skills to do the job at a minimum.
• 5:50
  Speaker B: So yeah, I mean I was dedicated to just learning constantly. I was constantly going on the Internet, teaching myself more. I had long 18 hour days. I just needed to make sure I, I felt comfortable in what I was getting thrown to. And like I mentioned my mentor, he was really available to me, showed me a lot of stuff they were doing and I'm a quick learner. If I'm dedicated to it and disciplined, I'll pick it up. I made a lot of mistakes along the way. Yep. Learned some things along the way for sure. But yeah, then I, I quickly transitioned into the leadership role about four years into that job where I started to have people reporting to me from Mexico and Canada.
• 6:28
  Speaker A: So just from listening to some of your history here, it sounds like I would say that it. Please correct me if my characterization is incorrect, but you ended up in leadership positions very early in your career. You started as a mechanical engineer. Things, things didn't work out because they shut that plant down. So then you pivoted and you pretty rapidly landed in positions of relative authority. I mean you weren't like the CIO or anything, but you were in charge of deploying all the stuff, these plants and setting up lots of stuff. And you were the lead person, which probably put you in a, in a place where you had staff and teams developing underneath you at a pretty young age. Is that fair?
• 7:06
  Speaker B: That's fair. I was 26 when I had three direct reports as we spun up our plants in the different. And these were 24, 7, 365 plants we were responsible for that. They're called JIT plants are just in time where you have basically five hours when you get an order from a customer to get that part on their line or otherwise you shut it down. So there's, it's their high pressure situations as well. You have to have backups and secondaries and tertiaries to make sure that you can continue moving, not shut down that plant. You get punished for like six grand a minute that you shut down the OLMS plant. But each one had their own IT person and I would get calls at 2, 3 in the morning for support because winds down the or spin up our backup processes, figure out what the production issue is. I was 26 when I was doing here.
• 7:55
  Speaker A: So the reason I was plumbing that out a little bit is just so being a leader at a younger age. I was also in a similar situation by the time I ended up in an IT consulting business. And so I, I had a whole team under me of like eight people or so by the time I was 26 or 27 as well. And I think back about, I, I, I, I like to joke about 47 year old me and 27 year old me would make very different decisions as leaders.
• 8:22
  Speaker B: Absolutely true.
• 8:24
  Speaker A: So I, I love talking to folks who've had leadership experience at, at at younger parts in their career. What did you learn now that's just so different? Like what would you I would say like oh, I go back and do everything different because you probably would when you're young. You're full of a lot of ideas and opportunities. But what were some of the biggest things that you like? Whoa. I made some mistakes. Like I yelled at that dude that could whatever and that was the wrong way to go. And I know now like how to manage people much better, how to manage their feelings and approaches much better. It's anything like that. What for you resonates.
• 9:02
  Speaker B: Most? IT leaders don't have an Internet problem. They have a management problem. Multiple locations, multiple providers, multiple bills, different contracts. We help IT leaders make Internet boring again by consolidating visibility, billing support and monitoring without changing providers or forcing upgrades. If nothing needs fixing, we'll tell you that's vendor neutral advisory. Just go to you've been heard.com and answer the seven questions to simplify, streamline and save. Two major things for me. One, at a young age I felt like I needed to be the one in control calling the shots. I needed to put the guardrails on, dictate how things are supposed to go because ultimately it was my responsibility. Now in my older years, I'm not about control, more about clarity and providing processes and guardrails. And the second thing is I thought I had to be the smartest one in the room. I had to know all this stuff, I had to know how everything worked. And I think Steve Jobs said it best where he said, I don't hire smart people to tell them what to do. I hire smart people for them to tell me what to do. I think that's a big myth that the senior IT leadership needs to be the most technological person in the room. They don't. They, they need to rely on people underneath them. People have great ideas, allow them to foster those ideas, innovate, grow, and then give them the opportunities to do so. Those are the two biggest things that stuck out to me from 26 year old Dave to 45 year old Dave.
• 10:33
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think about a lot of the same things. Like, particularly like the need to feel like the smartest person in the room. Like you feel like you got a lot to prove when you're young. And sometimes people validate that need. Like they come at you and they're like, well, what the hell are you? You're this young guy, you're talking to somebody who's like, and you're 27 and you're like, this is how this works. And they treat you like you have to prove to them. And so like some of the cycles here could feed into that as well. I, I think, I also think about some of the differences in the workplace over time, like the things that were acceptable in 1998 or 2002 or 2004 that are not acceptable in 2024, 2026. The hierarchy of management is like so different now than it was 20 years ago. And how you have to show up to motivate staff to get things done feels different than it did back then.
• 11:25
  Speaker B: I agree with that. And I've always said, and I learned this the hard way, leaders does not mean the title that you have. The title that you have and the position that you have does not make you a leader. It can make you a manager. There's a big difference that I had to learn between managing and leading. Leading is more about servant leadership. Fostering innovation, giving people opportunities to grow, providing just calm, presence, safety, trust. That's leading. And I've seen leaders even at the bottom rows of organization.
• 11:59
  Speaker A: Yeah, I, I like to, I sometimes joke about leading people. It's not, I did not invent this phrase, but leading from behind how do and managing up. So like I think about as a leader, my role is I don't just manage the people that are kind of like below me, if you will, in a, a hierarchy of the chain. But I also have to manage up too. What's that relationship look like? How am I interacting with them? How, how do we get them to buy in and understand what's going on for whatever initiative, whatever thing we're doing, whatever stuff. And it's hard because in the world that we live in is technology. The other people, I don't want to be like, oh, they're all rubes, they don't understand tech or anything else like that. But their, their job is not to understand the technology. Their job is to do some other job and your job is to understand the technology. So it oftentimes the tech component of it can be really complicated to understand. So I've also found the ability to describe the technical in non technical terms so that people feel comfortable, they don't feel, feel stupid when you tell them that that's really, really powerful when working. And that's something like over the years I feel like I've developed as a skill that becomes really valuable as a leader. So then you like, like you could be intimidating as a 40 plus year old IT leader to staff. But if they feel like they can sit down and chat with you and not feel like you're gonna like talk over their head, then they feel good about that.
• 13:21
  Speaker B: I agree. Yeah. And really talk about in terms of not the technology but more the purpose behind it, the outcome, the pain that we're trying to solve this the tech stuff can be taught. I've always told people when I hire in, I usually hire in only at first level. I don't typically bring in second and third levels from the outside. I like to promote from within because I can grow these people. But I look for drive and customer service skiller. Like I want you to be driven, I want you to be hungry and learn. I will invest in you in that and we could teach you all the technology stuff. You'll learn that a long way. But if you understand why we're doing what we're doing, the purpose, the solutions that we're trying to bring, the problems that we're trying to solve, get on board with that. You can learn technology. Secondary.
• 14:11
  Speaker A: So jump around a little bit here. Your current role, you mentioned you work for a law firm and you've been in other industries. What's different?
• 14:21
  Speaker B: Oh, what's different? Little offering. I wouldn't even say this is really different. But they had probably the most adverse to change I have ever been a part of. Yeah, real challenge, real challenge. Especially here we have people that have been here literally for 55 years and that whole mantra of you can't affect that. This is how we've always done things. You can't affect my day to day. It's, it was very prevalent when I came here and that was how the previous regime handled things. Hadn't updated anything over two years. They had servers all over the place and they had no idea what things that weren't even licensed. It was a mess. And it was all around, we can't affect change here. We can't affect how they're, they're doing your day to day. And I flipped that on a tetra completely. Now we are a very innovative company. We actually spun up a team called Knowledge Management Continuous Improvement where we meet every week. We are literally going throughout the entire firm processes, procedures and analyzing everything and seeing how can we make this better, how can we make this just a little bit better. We live by this mantra of this aggregation of margin and gain, just finding that next 1% continuously. But those add up over time. But I had to build trust and rapport with them and showing them how they can trust that change is a good thing. Change is inevitable. Right. And it, it started with going through the history of how the company has evolved over Even the last 20 years that you've been changing. Change is a good thing and we have to keep changing. Technology is changing at a rapid, rapid pace and if you don't adapt, you're going to die.
• 16:04
  Speaker A: So I'm glad you brought up the pace of technological change and what in the law industry in particular, right now you're facing. A lot of the AI changes are really having a particular impact. I mean, everybody makes big statements, AI this, AI everything. But there are certain industries that are particularly, at least in the current incarnation, the current setup, that are particularly being affected, like pro programming jobs are really being impacted. Paralegal work in the law space is like research and support staff organizations and those types of things. Those tools are tremendously useful to do and augment those roles and fundamentally reduce the need for headcount in certain instances. So like how are you seeing that impact and change the work that's happening in your space just being in the middle of an industry that is so clearly impacted by the current incarnation of those tools?
• 17:00
  Speaker B: Yeah, we've been having those discussions especially at our board level quite frequently because you're right, a lot of these AI tools and things are replacing what probably 75, 80% of like lower level associates and paralegals are doing on the day to day basis. But we're taking a slightly different approach to that, where our more senior attorneys who are not technologically advanced are focusing more on bringing the work in. So they're more almost like sale and side of things. CRM, business development, creating client relationships. And they're at the much higher rates, which often 7, $800 an hour. So instead of them doing the work, they defer that down to those that are technologically savvy and leveraging the tools, not replacing them. We kind of think that AI isn't going to replace them, but those that don't use AI effectively will be replaced. So we're really training up our paralegals, our associates, our legal assistants to leverage the tools. Now that does mean that they can take on more work. So inevitably it will reduce headcount overall. We don't need 40 legal assistants now. We can leverage AI and do it with about 20, 25. We have natural succession clients. I'm grateful that I'm at an organization that really thinks about its keeper first. If someone's job is threatening because of the technological tool, they will actually find other things for them to do. Until they're ready to move on or move out or retire, they're not going to be the ones to slash. Oh great, we just saved 20 people. We think about people's livelihoods first and foremost. We'll find other things for them to do. But we're also taking a very cautious approach. We have a very sophisticated cybersecurity practice that sees the dangers in AI. So they're very cautious about how they're
• 18:49
  Speaker A: leveraging it, cybersecurity as a legal practice,
• 18:55
  Speaker B: and they're dealing with it on the daily AI, deep fakes, breaches, et cetera. And they just want to make sure that we're not dipping our toe too much into the technology and putting ourselves at risk. So we do a very, very heavy vetting process. We actually have most generative AI blocked here through the browser. But there's still that shadow AI. I mean, people can do it at home. What are the personal PCs? But it's really about educating them. We're doing AI classes every month, we do power prompting every month, we do cybersecurity training every month. And people really appreciate that. We do trust them, but we believe in fully educating them. The benefits of it and the pitfalls of it. It's not a solution to everything, but it is a tool, and you need to know how to use it.
• 19:40
  Speaker A: Right. So where have you found those tools to be the most useful today?
• 19:45
  Speaker B: I would say the agentic AI stuff is really being the most useful for us. But one thing that we had to do, which most organizations don't know, is they just want to throw these agents on top of very unstructured data. And it's not very efficient. Like, you have to structure things appropriately for it to be smooth and effective. Thankfully, we did all that so we can. I mean, I have millions and millions of documents and case files in our document management system. And now we have an agentic AI that will crawl over that. You can ask it any question. Give me my brief. I file for the University of Michigan client in 1997, where this person is banned. In seconds, it'll come back and bring that to you. And then you can further have it build a new brief based on the arguments that you made on there. So our lawyers are finding that very helpful because they would spend hours trying to find things they don't ask. So the agentic stuff is really a huge efficiency pickup.
• 20:42
  Speaker A: Nice. So I'm going to pivot here. I'm going to go back to kind of like the personal side of things. You mentioned you started to tell a bit of a story about back in the day, the 486 at home, and you've expanded that. It's all this other stuff like that. So you were always interested in technology from the time when you were younger, going forward, at what point did you see technology as your field and, like, that you really wanted to be in? What prompted you to, like, feel that? Like, was there any pivotal moments where you're like, this thing happened or this stuff? And I was like, that's for me.
• 21:17
  Speaker B: Yeah, I totally. I was always the tech guy when I was at eating, even when I was at the bowling alley, I set up the bowling alley there. I was doing side work. I installed tanning beds that were technologically advanced. I never felt like I was working when I was working on new technology. And Celery once told me, I know it's a little cliche if you do something that you're passionate about, you never work a day in your life. Right. And find a way to get paid to do it. That always really stuck with me. So when that opportunity came up, saying, hey, you want to be our IT guy? You kidding me? You're going to pay me to just work on new technology and computers? Heck, yeah. Sign me up.
• 21:54
  Speaker A: The idea behind doing things that you Enjoy. And having that kind of blend in makes work not feel like such a burden. I'm one of those people, I think, just like you. It sounds like where the work that I do through the day, it seamlessly moves back and forth between the things that I do in my personal life because I don't feel burdened by it. I don't feel like I, when I step into the job that I have to be like, okay, stop personal life. Start work life. Everything must stop here. I must be like, zero distractions, focused on this. And there are some jobs that. That's not possible. You know, if I was going to be a police officer or something like that, obviously I can't just like, transition in and out of being that or working on an assembly line at a manufacturing plant or like being like a welder or something like that. But there are a ton of jobs that you can move in and out of it and being passionate about it is good. You can't float in and out of being a teacher, but you could love doing it and it doesn't feel so burdensome.
• 22:49
  Speaker B: Yeah, fully agree. It's a natural transition. I mean, the things that I do at work, I do at home, too. I'm constantly researching, I'm reading articles on new technology, I'm getting new ideas, and it's not really for work. It's for my own edification. I love to keep up on what's out there.
• 23:06
  Speaker A: Speaking of, at home is your home. So it's kind of like two answers for this with, like, tech folks. There's the tech folks that are like, tech enthusiasts. My house is like, fully automated. I could voice control it from like Paris if I was traveling and everything would turn on and off and it would look like home alone with like, the things that they. Or there's the people that are like. I have one device, it's a printer that checks in for ink, and I keep it next to it in case it does something I don't like and I have to, like, put a stop to it.
• 23:34
  Speaker B: Yeah, I definitely fall in the latter camp. I mean, I will admit I do have like a Amazon Echo dot where I have like on routines and stuff like that for like, smart lights and whatnot, but that's relatively recent. I'd rather live in the middle of nowhere in the woods of nature than technology.
• 23:53
  Speaker A: I, I have like, I, I follow a similar category. Like, I have some smart thermostats. There's no Siri or the Amazon Echoes.
• 24:02
  Speaker B: Yeah. I'm also responsible for all of our cybersecurity and I see how the dangers of the Iot world and things hitting compromised all the time. It's like I don't want any part of it, honestly. Don't trust it. Just don't trust it.
• 24:16
  Speaker A: I feel you there. So, like you mentioned this 486, I'm going to keep going back to this, but what was your first computer like? How did you get exposed to the technology? Well, I mean that.
• 24:26
  Speaker B: That was the first computer, the family one. But then I built. I built my Ollie when I was 15. So I started getting a job at Meijer and then Walmart and started to collect money and I, I built my own. I don't give the specs in that thing. I remember it had a 56k modem and I thought it was so cool. But that 56k motor started doing LAN parties around the country.
• 24:49
  Speaker A: Why?
• 24:49
  Speaker B: Games?
• 24:49
  Speaker A: What games are you doing? Land parties.
• 24:50
  Speaker B: Then we were doing deset3 and then unreal tournament. When that came out Unreal. Oh man, that was our jam. We would go probably once a quarter, twice a quarter to various houses. We'd have like 50, 60 people in the garage. But Lampard, it was awesome.
• 25:06
  Speaker A: Nice. Nice. Of course, yeah. You don't even need a computer. Well, our phones are fundamentally, you know, more powerful than any computer we had 20 years ago, but absolutely. But single device that you're holding the palm of your hand, you can do what we had to lug equipment back into somebody's physical proxy. You had to lug equipment into physical proximity with other people with equipment in order to make happen.
• 25:30
  Speaker B: Yep.
• 25:31
  Speaker A: So a couple of questions here on leadership and what your perception. So for you, what do you think are the key, like distillation elements, of being a good leader?
• 25:44
  Speaker B: Being a good leader really needs to focus on the growth with others that are in your charge. In my mom, I'd say the most proud moment I've ever had in my career as being a leader is when I took a chance on someone who was a cable technician. But he was very driven. Never been in MIT before. Brought him into my help desk. Eventually he woke up to be a sysadmin and I got him as high as I could within our organization. And he left. And three years later he texted me that thank you for the chance that you took on me and what you instilled in me and taught me, because now I'm director of it he was actually part of the state of Michigan director of it. That was just so impactful in my life as a leader that investing in people Pulling out of them what they don't believe about themselves, showing them the capabilities that they have. That was my pivotal moment for knowing what a leader should be is investing in your people and fostering their growth and giving them the opportunities.
• 26:47
  Speaker A: Nice. So it's a great story. I appreciate you sharing that. What advice would you give to people who are coming up in their leadership journey?
• 26:55
  Speaker B: Be quick to listen. Don't be quick to respond. You definitely want to listen to everyone in the room first because people actually have a lot to say, but you need to give them an environment to say it. Tell them that you want to hear their ideas. No idea is too stupid to hear. They have a lot to bring. There was actually a story I just read on LinkedIn from CISO who they were looking at at Enterprise, AI Revolutionary System or threat management that was going to be $200,000 and their intern said, did you ever consider this platform? It's open source, costs you 50 bucks a month. Monko does the same thing and the sales guy was like, oh well that's not enterprise ready. They did a POC side by side over fully expand and the open Source outperformed the $200,000 solution. But the CISO is like, I, you saved me like 190 grand a year. They took that, they bought into our security engineers. It's continuing to outperform, it's doing very well. Now that intern is a senior security engineer. You need to listen. You don't need to have all the answers because there's going to be answers to questions that you don't even know. And there are people that could be smarter than you or have experience that are younger than you, that you need to listen to your people and allow them to speak up, let everyone know that they have a voice.
• 28:17
  Speaker A: So I was just taking a peek at your LinkedIn profile, David, and you mentioned that you're a speaker. So tell me a little more about this.
• 28:26
  Speaker B: Yeah, so I've been on many panels over when I was in Mortgage, actually ICE Mortgage previously Ellie Mae had invited me several times to speak from a customer perspective and then just on a leadership perspective. Most recently, by the way, I was in the president's coffee. So I was a four time innovation award winner from ICE where he told him like a build type person, I would bring in our own developers in. We like to innovate, we like to do customizations. So I've won their award four times. So they brought me on several times to speak at their conference in front of very large crowds. And I'm looking to get back into doing that from a leadership perspective. I may be speaking at a couple of conferences this year, and one of our lawyers actually nominated me to do a TED Talk here.
• 29:11
  Speaker A: Wow. It's awesome.
• 29:12
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 29:14
  Speaker A: So now really wrapping up here. I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us here on the youe've Been Heard podcast. Yeah.
• 29:21
  Speaker B: Really appreciate the time, Doug. Great.
• 29:24
  Speaker A: All right. All right. Well, everyone, we will be back for next time for another episode of youf've Been Heard. Thank you, David. And thank you to all of our listeners, and we'll see you next time.