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431- IT Is Your Revenue Protector w/ Kevin Neureuter · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: After talking with IT leaders, I've come to discover one thing. And it's the same thing, you know, it's the same thing everyone else knows, whether they want to admit it out loud or not. Nothing gets done in any company without it touching it. Nothing. But here's the thing. When everything's on fire, when nothing's working, when the ransomware hits, when the whole business grinds to a halt, it is completely indispensable. You're the most valuable asset in the company. But when everything's running like a well oiled Tesla, you're a line item, a cost center on a spreadsheet. You've done the work, you've built the career, you've earned your seat at the executive roundtable. But having a seat at the table is one thing. How much nicer would it be to actually be heard? This is. You've been heard.
• 1:03
  Speaker B: Hey folks, this is Michael Moore and I'm here with Kevin Neueider, director of IT for demarco Group. Welcome to the program, Kevin.
• 1:11
  Speaker C: Thank you.
• 1:12
  Speaker B: So it's interesting. I was looking over stuff and everything like that and then I saw that you are part of this DeMarco group. Can you tell me a little bit about the demarco Group and what they do?
• 1:24
  Speaker C: Yeah, the demarco Group is a company in Rochester. They actually have like four or five different companies, Rochester, New York. And they do real estate, construction, they own admar, which does equipment rental and they also do property management as well.
• 1:42
  Speaker B: The whole host of things.
• 1:43
  Speaker C: Oh yeah.
• 1:45
  Speaker B: That has to make for an interesting IT director position there. There's a lot of stuff that you're going to have to control and kind of in and out different hats multiple days. Right?
• 1:57
  Speaker C: Yeah. It's one of those things where it's difficult to not be reactive, but you should always be proactive instead of reactive
• 2:04
  Speaker B: when you're in it 100%. Let's talk a little bit more about that. If you're going to be in a spot where you have to keep switching on which hat you're hitting, hey, I'm going to go with these people this time. How do you handle that? How do you work through the reactive and turn it into proactive?
• 2:26
  Speaker C: It's pretty difficult and sometimes it could be kind of frustrating, especially in family run businesses where like if the family calls, you got to go do this thing. Right. But I find that setting aside time on your calendar specifically is one of those things that. It's funny how many people don't use their calendar in places like this, but for me it's like I live by my calendar. So I'll have time blocked off. I even have every week on a Friday at 3:30, I have a time blocked off for a weekly reflection so I can reflect on how I've done in the past week. And then kind of. It's kind of like doing a journal, right? And you're saying, here's how I did it in the last week, here's what I can do better next week.
• 3:12
  Speaker B: I like that idea. They actually, in many books in business and such, they actually promote that time to sit there and reflect because it allows you to kind of clear out what you've done and then look towards what needs to be done. Nice. Well, tell us a little bit about yourself first and then we can get into a little bit of what you do. So how'd you get into it?
• 3:39
  Speaker C: There's a lot of guys who wanted to do it since they were young or they, they played around with this stuff when they were younger. I fell into it. So I was always into gaming, right. And I was always taught by my dad about certain things about it. But by the time I got into it, I didn't know any of that stuff anymore from back in the 90s. So I started in supply chain and I was that for 17 years. But in 2011, the company that I was working for was federal contractor, small one. The program manager and the vice president both passed away in the same year. And that left us without any leadership. And I was the youngest person there. So they were like, hey, guess what? You're the youngest one here have the computers. I was like, okie dokie. And so I ended up finding out that everything was pirated and they were running on old XP systems and stuff like that. So I ended up doing a complete tech refresh, got a new server. They had this really old Red Hat server. No ui, no nothing. And they were actually running the network off of old coax with the BNC connectors. So I did a complete tech refresh not knowing anything, right? I was green. And on top of that they're like, hey, we need a new database. They were using Dbase 3. And they're like, the government suggested maybe we use this access thing. I was like, I don't know what access is. So I went back, I was like, oh man. In high school I took Visual Basic in SQL and that's what I need to do to code things in here. But I had to do a computer complete refresher. So I relearned Visual Basic for applications and SQL all within the space of like six weeks.
• 5:28
  Speaker B: You factored in there?
• 5:29
  Speaker C: I did, man, it was a crash course. My mom's a software engineer and so I leaned on her pretty heavily for it.
• 5:35
  Speaker B: It's amazing how many stories I hear of people in it that land in it without trying. They just get thrown into it. Hey, you're the IT guy now go ahead and do that. All right. Yeah, I mean, I think that ends up always being a case for a good amount of people that, that were in it. They either just kind of got there. Right, Right. But what doesn't get said is what you said, which is the amount of work it takes to once you get there, to really get on top of it. Right. Not just to understand it, but to actually make move forward and push to get better and stay in it. I mean, that's one of the things I think maybe we can chat about a little bit is how do you stay in it? Right. Because it is a moving target.
• 6:34
  Speaker A: Most IT leaders don't need more technology, they need less noise. Over the years, infrastructure quietly gets complicated. Multiple locations, multiple Internet providers, different contracts, separate bills and reactive support. Nobody plans it that way. It just happens. What we do is vendor neutral advisory. That means we don't sell platforms or force change. We start with low friction areas. Internet telecom, Microsoft licensing. Places where complexity builds quietly and can usually be cleaned up without disruption or, or capex. Sometimes we find savings, sometimes we find nothing. Either way the outcome is the same. More clarity, less distraction and it that's boring in the best way possible. If you want a second set of eyes from people who sit on the buying side of enterprise infrastructure every day, just go to you've beenherd.com and answer the questions to simplify, streamline and save.
• 7:29
  Speaker C: Yeah, it's one of those things where if you don't stay on top of it, you get left behind. But I wasn't actually planning on staying in it when that company lost the contract and another one won it, I was like, well crap, I need to go maybe be find a different job. And I was looking supply chain. And I was like, all right, my title is supply chain manager. But I never went to school, I never went to college. And so I come out of there not knowing anything. So I was like, well, I guess I better go get a degree. So I went to a community college for business administration with a concentration in supply chain management. And then that took a long time from 2018 to 2024. Cause I was doing it part time. And then I went into Syracuse University. Where I'll be graduating at the end of this year with a bachelor's in Business Management.
• 8:19
  Speaker B: By the way, let me. Let me pause you there. I'm slightly jealous that you were able to go to Syracuse University. Many people might not know this, but I grew up in North Syracuse. That's good. So you took it on your own to go through and get yourself a business degree nonetheless. Right. Which I think is a really, really good move. My degree is a business degree. It's Management Information Systems, which was in the business school. I actually started in computer science and then I switched to business. And I'm glad I did because I think as we're going to hear from you, there's probably a lot of stuff you learned in business school that still hold up to today.
• 8:58
  Speaker C: Oh, a hundred percent. And even learning from my experience in supply chain that held up to today, you wouldn't think to yourself, well, supply chain translates into it. But it's really helped me when that other contractor won that contract. I was working as a supply chain manager still for that one. And then they were looking for an IT guy. And the program manager's like, hey, you know, got an IT guy over here. Right? So then I became corporate IT instead of just for the program, became the IT manager there and still doing the supply chain stuff and the IT management and completely refreshed their stack down at headquarters in Reston, Virginia. And then I ended up leaving there to go into the public sector. I was like, okay, this is cool. I want to go to the public sector. Right. I ended up becoming director of IT for Orleans county up here, and I was that for a couple of years. That was such a cool experience, and I learned a ton and enough to know I didn't want to be in the public sector anymore.
• 10:01
  Speaker B: I was gonna say, I mean, it had to be an amazing experience, but also one you probably don't want to relive.
• 10:06
  Speaker C: So, yeah, I don't want to relive that. And so I was like, I want to get back in the private sector. And I landed at demarco. When I was at the county, they didn't have an inventory, so I spent like six months putting together an inventory of their stuff. Very complete. It was awesome. That comes from my supply chain experience. They didn't have a true IT budget. The one that I came into there was just. It wasn't great. The guy before me was retired in place, so he didn't really keep up on it. So my business experience comes into there with putting together the budget, and I Put together a very good budget that ended up, I shared it with other department heads who were newer and started to kind of mentor them, right. And say, here's what you need to do for this budget stuff. Because they were thrown into it. Like everybody's thrown into it. So I took my accounting and finance classes and put those to use. Right. And when you're in these positions as a director or a CIO or a vp, you're not doing IT stuff. You're running your own mini business. Right. Your IT department is your own mini business. And it has to align with the organization's goals. And IT people a lot of times struggle with aligning the department to the business goals because they're like, cool, new technology, let's do this, let's spend all this money. And sometimes it's not about spending the money on the new technology, it's about what will make this work for the organization. What does the organization need to sell more? What does the organization need to manage their properties better? Right. It's not about, let me refresh the server stack, let me refresh the network, it's about what can I do to help the owners meet the goals for their organization.
• 12:05
  Speaker B: You hit a major point that actually super relevant today, right? Because we've got new shiny tech, you know? Right. We've got AI and IT keeps growing and getting bigger. And then the question that you pose is, great, we got new shiny tech, but how do we put it to use in the business? Right. And I feel like a lot of organizations are leaning on it to figure it out. Right. And I think that a lot of people are going to hear this and immediately go, you're yes, you're right. How do I take new shiny tech like AI, right. And marry it to the business goals and the business objectives and the mission of the business and then how do I make it work from a monetary standpoint with the budget? Right. You're hitting on an old concept that is just continues to prove that it's such a relevant concept.
• 12:59
  Speaker C: Yeah. And I think a big aspect of that is I'm a huge proponent for compliance. I know that that's a dirty word to a lot of people. They're like, oh, it's unneeded work. But honestly, one of my truest beliefs is if you are doing the work the right way, if you're following best practice, the compliance aspect comes easy. And in this case, I ended up getting the ISO20000 certification for Centuria and CMMI level 3 for services. So this was to run the service Desk. And I've brought that through. I've brought decision analysis, resolution matrix and project documents and all of the stuff that I Learned from the ISO20000 that I thought initially like, well, this is bogus. This is a whole crap ton of work that I've got to put together here. But then I was like, this just makes so much sense. And once you start doing it, the processes go faster, they make things more efficient, and then you can lean back and say, okay, this is why I made that decision. Right? And it all ties into the business. And in this case with the AI, gather your requirements. That's step one. Gather the requirements of what does the business need and then say, well, AI can meet this or maybe it can, right? At either way, you need to come up with a plan for how it's going to be treated. Otherwise you get shadow AI and everybody's going to have it. You can't just say, you know what? No AI, because then people are going to pull out their phone and use Gemini. Right.
• 14:36
  Speaker B: The funny part about AI is that it's essentially shadow anyway, right? So governance and compliance are huge in trying to reign it back in, Right. I mean, AI is meant to allow anybody to generate and create what they want, and that means anybody in the company. So now you don't have to wait for it. They know from business standpoint what they want. They talk to their chosen AI and the AI goes, yeah, here you go. Right. But the question that you we pose, it's all shadow AI, right? And there should be oversight, there should be compliance, and there should be governance over all of it. Not to slow it down, but to put the guardrails up that need to be up and allow it to allow people to continue creating, but continue creating with oversight and making sure that they're creating the right way and not jeopardizing any of the processes and items and stuff in the company that would jeopardize
• 15:39
  Speaker C: the company at all.
• 15:40
  Speaker B: So, yeah, I completely agree with you here. This is such a big part of it. Let me ask you a question. When it comes to your role, right, which is the leadership role, as you mentioned, the further that you get away from the IT stuff, right. As you progress through leadership, right. You're more hands off than hands on. Well, what part of your role, since you started very hands on, do you really like? A lot. Right. But because it sounds like you started lighting up when we started talking about compliance and stuff. Right. So tell me a little bit about the roles and stuff like that. That really gets you going.
• 16:20
  Speaker C: Yeah. I gotta be honest, I love the sheets man, spreadsheets. I nerd out over em and it's great. Like Excel is so powerful and you could do so much with it. So when you say get further away from the IT aspect, when we get into these leadership positions, you're a hundred percent right. So you have to have your outlet somewhere, right? One of the things that I always ask people that work for me or that I go to hire is if they have a home lab. Because having a homeland means that you're putting in the time outside of the organization to stay sharp and to stay learning. I've got a full server rack in the basement, of course I run my own business on the side. I, I have a small managed services company and that's another thing, I've been running that since 2014 and you just built that up and you're always learning, you never know everything. And I can use my business acumen from my side business in the role that I'm in right now as a director of it. When an MSP is telling me hey, I've got this and like I could tell if they're blowing smoke because I've been there, right? I can tell, like I know who you're working with. You're like, oh, I got this from Ingrid Micro and here's this. I was like, well guess what, I use them too. So I'm familiar with what you're doing here, right? But it's getting into the spreadsheets, the budgets, laying everything out, organizing it, the compliance aspect of it, the ISO20000, I lean heavily on that and I love it. Getting processes and in place because small companies and even mid sized organizations that are run like small companies don't have processes, they want processes, they just don't know how to get them. And that's what the frameworks are there for. You get the ITIL framework, you get the ISO20000 framework. They're there for a reason. So when you pick a tool like an itsm, you're doing your ticketing system, you're doing your rmf, all this other shenanigans, make sure that you're following one of the frameworks. The ITEL framework is going to make your job easier. It's going to make it so that you could present reports to executives in a way that makes sense. And then you can actually take these metrics and improve the processes. It's a circular thing, right? You put the process into place so that you can then improve the process, find more efficiencies and that's how you run in a successful business and a successful department.
• 18:56
  Speaker B: I think that's great. And I think that bringing up MSP is really interesting because the managed services pace, it really teaches you about outcomes, right? Because if you're not providing outcomes for your clients. Right. You're not going to have any more clients. Right. I mean, that's pretty much how it works in managed services. Right. So I really feel like you can draw a little piece of that, that outcome based stuff. How do you work with your team to create outcomes in the space for internal. Right. It.
• 19:31
  Speaker C: Right.
• 19:32
  Speaker B: How do you translate that?
• 19:35
  Speaker C: So I am a student of a few different people who I'm sure you know about is David Green from Hobby Lobby, the CEO, Dave Ramsey, the owner of Ramsey Enterprises. And obviously I spent a lot of time learning from leadership there. It's all about a vision and a goal. If you want outcomes, you have to have a vision. And you need to portray that vision to the people that are working for you. And they need to buy in. If they don't buy in, you don't have movement, you don't have outcomes. At the county, when I started there, coming in from the private sector, selling to the public sector, I come into there and it's like, great, I'm here at the public sector now. The legislature is like, we want some of your private sector stuff into here. The people who work for the public sector don't want to do that. They're there for a reason. And so when I start to bring in these private sector things like frameworks and compliance, they're like, well, we don't want to do this, but eventually if you lay out your vision, get one of those giant whiteboards and just draw over it, right? Get excited about it, get the buy in from your people, they'll get excited about it and then they'll start to drive towards your vision. And the outcomes come from your people buying into your vision. If you go into a department, you try to lead it, you go into any business, you try to leave it without a vision, you're spinning the tires, you got nowhere to go, right?
• 21:07
  Speaker B: I think that's fair. It's a great way to kind of look at it. It's interesting to me when we start talking about your beginnings, right. Of where you got dropped into it, had to by yourself, learn it. You had to become very technical very quickly, right? And then we started talking a little bit more and we learned that you have had to. You're like, well, I'm going to keep that going. I'm going to continue being technical with your home lab, but then I'm also going to make sure that I work on my leadership skills and hone those with compliance and I'm going to learn these frameworks. On top of that, I learned you're a business owner. Right. For a managed services, by the way, which is a very difficult thing to do. I mean, I have three plus years in managed services experience. Right. And so I'm well aware of the challenges of the managed services face. It's a highly competitive industry, it is tough and it's very, very unforgiving of mistakes.
• 22:10
  Speaker C: Right.
• 22:11
  Speaker B: Anybody that goes into an MSP to work, Right. And you see that on their resume, you should really, if they toughed it out for a few years, that person is gold. So having a managed services is as your side gig is amazing that you have that. So let's talk a little bit about when you made the jump from just being the technical person. Right. To someone that is thinking like a business owner.
• 22:42
  Speaker C: Yeah. I think when you learn that you don't know everything is when you come to terms with that. Right. I started my business, I was green. So remember I took over the it in 2011. I started my business in 2014. That was not long enough for me to know what I was doing. Right. I had to screw up a lot of things before I could actually go forward. I've completely ruined some video cards for customers. But the trick is the customer service. You build it on relationships. Like I said, the MSP space is pretty unforgiving. Right. And I know that as somebody who not only is an MSP, but I manage MSPs from Demarco Group. We have one there. And then I lean on relationships. I lean on partnerships. One of the things I learned from my supply chain days, your vendors are not somebody that you're like, go do this for me now. And that's it. Right. It's a partnership. So you build it like a partnership. If I'm dealing with an msp, even if I fire them, I fired an MSP from Centurion when it took over the IT for corporate HQ There I was like, okay, well I could do this internally and they're not really keeping up anyways. So I fire the msp, but then I get other ones that are selling me my Sophos gear and I form a relationship with that bar who is also an msp. If I ever need to lean on them, I could. And being an MSP isn't always about give me fully managed. Sometimes you want to Co manage, right. Sometimes you're just there to help somebody and that's where the relationship and the partnership comes in and this is where the business ties in with the tech aspect.
• 24:36
  Speaker B: I think that was a great answer. I think you're right. Relationships are such a huge part of it, whether they be internal relationships, whether they be partner external relationships and they're such a big part of getting stuff done. And I've, through my career I know I've counted on relationships to help me out some tough spots and sometimes you're like, well, I don't know where to go with this and let me source the environment. It's nice actually that you've been heard as such a good actually spot for these types of relationships because you can have your like minded folks that you're able to source from and be like, hey, I'm running into this problem, help me. So it's actually really nice and it's actually good to do things like this. We're just chat it out and go, oh yeah, no, I've been there, I see it.
• 25:23
  Speaker C: Yeah, I'm a huge fan of the model here, right. Where we've got the community to do this with and leaning on the relationships aspect of it. I was on a fireside chat before the national association of Counties as myself and a rep from Spectrum and we were talking about the partnership and moving from Capex to OPEX and stuff like that and getting really in depth, but it was really just a couple of dudes talking, right? And I find these relationships in some of the weirdest places. I play a text based browser game that I used to play in the early 2000s called Kings of Chaos, right. And one of my buddies on there is an IT guy, he's from South Africa, he lives up in Ireland now and him and I shoot stuff back and forth. What are you doing in your home lab? What are you doing in yours? And then, oh, hey, I'm having this problem at work. Have you ever seen this? Right, Lean on the relationships. It's not only from communities, it's not only from going to conferences, which another great place to get relationships, but you can build them in your gaming community and we bounce things back and forth.
• 26:30
  Speaker B: It's so many good ways to do that. How do you work and speak with the owners, right, of the marker group, right? That's who you interface with. How do you work with them and help them understand the IT challenges and really get them to understand what your needs are and how you can be more proactive and not reactive?
• 26:52
  Speaker C: A fine Balance between sales and customer service in being genuine. Right. So at the Marco Group, like, I want them to succeed. So if I want them to succeed, I have to go in and not be a salesy guy. I can't be a pushover either. Right. But you also can't rail against things. And you have to be like, you know what, I get it, DeMarcus, this is your organization. I'm going to present you the options you choose. Yep. Right. I'm doing all the hard work to get these options put together on a decision analysis, resolution matrix that I got from the ISO20000. Put the whole thing together, bring it up to them and say, here's the information, there's highlights. Here's my synopsis for what I would recommend. They're all weighted. If you don't like the weights, we could change them. You choose, it's their organization. So as long as it's not something security related, they lean on us for the security. Right. They lean on us like, hey, I don't ever want to end up in the papers.
• 28:00
  Speaker B: What do you think is one important idea you wish that every executive would understand about modern it?
• 28:09
  Speaker C: Oh, the main thing is we are not a cost center. We are revenue protectors. Every executive everywhere sees it as a cost center. Even if they're somebody who is technologically savvy and they want their company to go forward and use the new technology like AI, like the cloud. Right. They still look at you like, oh, you're asking for all this money. Where is my value coming from? So you can't say, okay, business development is going out making you money. Your operations guys are making you money because they're working on the project. It is not ever going to make you money. We are going to protect your revenue because if you don't invest in this stuff, it's going to come back and bite you later tenfold.
• 28:58
  Speaker B: I think this is a good way of looking at that. Revenue protectors really is a good way to think of it. Not all IT departments are going to be revenue protectors. It's the good ones. Let's get into our segment of it. What it's going to look like 18 months from now. Right. So if we're looking 18 months ahead, and I'm going to keep this one general because I want you to just comment on whatever you think. You can go over a bunch of different tangents. I'd like to see what does the future look like in it 18 months from now?
• 29:33
  Speaker C: It's going to be messy. And that's. That's okay. And I say that because it needs to be aware of the political landscape, the world landscape, and what's going on in the world. Right? So they need to be aware of the AI. They need to be aware of the stock of all of the threats that are out there. And because of the volatility of the world, it is about to become extremely hard. Because working in the public sector, I have some very good insight into the real threats that are out there. So these are coming. They're in our systems, and we just need to be prepared for the cleanup. And I say that because, like, yeah, it's great to have the tools to protect against things, but there's always going to be a smarter person out there than us, right? There is always going to be a better tool. And the way that AI is used, we can use it as defenders, but we have guardrails. The bad guys don't have guardrails. They don't have the moral compass to stop at a certain thing. Right. They're going to outmaneuver us. So we need to just be ready to clean up and make sure. And this is gonna be so cliche. Make sure that you have your backups and your disaster recovery plans, because you're gonna need them.
• 31:04
  Speaker B: Yeah, it. It is tough. And we do keep seeing it out there. It keeps getting harder and harder. The mere fact that a while back, people were like, I just need antivirus. And now people are like, you don't have EDR and SIM and MDR set up and you don't have an ITDR and. And all that's not being protected by a 24.7sock and I could keep going, but the mere fact that someone's looks at you and goes, you don't have all these things. And it's almost as commonplace as asking for antivirus. It shows you what landscape we're in.
• 31:37
  Speaker C: Right? Yeah. Let's look at 10 years ago when we were telling people that free antivirus was okay on your personal computer. Right? Now there's no way, like, I would never tell a customer, you know what? Go get this. At Free Antivirus, I'm gonna be like, absolutely nothing.
• 31:55
  Speaker B: Think about it this way, right? What's the major security that's out right now? It's called Zero Trust. I mean, that moniker didn't come out for that is a hundred percent. What they're doing is not trusting anything. I really hope that's how people should be looking at everything now. Really, Honestly, they should be zero trusting everything. So with all the stuff that's out right now. Everything you look at should be hold on, I have to verify you. I don't trust you.
• 32:23
  Speaker C: It's a trick because you have to be aware and you have to be respectful of where the world is and who is out there that's smarter than you, that's stronger than you, that doesn't have these guardrails. You have to respect them but you can't be afraid because if you're afraid then you are paralyzed and if you can't pivot then it's just going to get worse. And if you're in a leadership position you cannot be paralyzed. You have to be able to pivot.
• 32:57
  Speaker B: Great words Kevin. Thank you so much for being on the program. I appreciate it. Folks, this is Michael Moore. I've been here with Kevin Neuer, the director of IT for the demarco Group. Really appreciate you having you on here and really hoping to have another conversation.
• 33:13
  Speaker C: Sam.