Latest / You've Been Heard / 445- How CIOs Build Teams That Scale w/Brian Laird

Transcript

445- How CIOs Build Teams That Scale w/Brian Laird · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: If you're looking to come up, I would tell you to stop worrying about the technology and figure out why does the business care? That's the biggest, number one thing that I learned coming up was I used to think if I could get them this shiny thing or whatever, they would love it. And I realized nobody cared. They just wanted to do their job and do it without any problems. If you can really set aside, it doesn't matter whether it's Node or Typescript or Java or C Sharp, nobody cares the language that what they care about is what the value is that you bring to the business. And so if you can really work on understanding how your business works or a business works and why and how does it fit into that, how you can bring value that makes you extremely valuable in how they think about it and having a seat at the table and all of those sort of things that people talk about. If you can show that you're bringing value to the business, that's what they care about. That's what CEOs going to care about, what board's going to care about. Whoever your leadership structure looks like, they're going to care. Are you bringing value? And can you prove that you're bringing value?
• 1:10
  Speaker B: 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.
• 2:04
  Speaker C: Welcome back everyone to today's episode of you've Been Heard. The platform for IT Leaders. I'm your host, Doug Kameen and today I am talking with Brian Laird, the CIO of Baylor Group. Welcome to the show, Brian.
• 2:19
  Speaker A: Hey, nice to meet you. Thank you.
• 2:21
  Speaker C: So before we got started here, I want to talk about you and your history and where you've been and stuff like that. Specifically, I'd love to plumb that out A little bit. Because I know it's not your current job, but your past. I think your immediate past job was the one that covered the COVID period and how kind of crazy it was for us and some of the things that were happening. So, like, I worked for a county at that time. There was kind of wild things happening. But for you, you had a different experience because you're working for this company that had employees all over the country.
• 2:46
  Speaker A: Yeah, we were a continuing education company. We had. Our customer service agents were literally spread all over the country. And so we had to quickly find ways. And they were in some remote places. So how do we get them Internet access and allow them to work from home when they may not even have Internet at their house? Which was a little sort of strange to start to think about in today's day and age, but it was true. And so we had to go out and like I was saying before, we. We actually had folks in line at Verizon stores buying hotspots and walking up going, I'll buy however many hotspots you have left. Well, we can only give out three or five at a time. And they were trying to.
• 3:24
  Speaker C: Yeah, that's in to go buy some more. Exactly.
• 3:27
  Speaker A: Or think go back and send in other people.
• 3:29
  Speaker C: And they needed the Groucho Marx glasses.
• 3:32
  Speaker A: Exactly.
• 3:33
  Speaker B: Right.
• 3:33
  Speaker C: A little red. I have three more. Right.
• 3:35
  Speaker A: Put a hat on, nobody will ever recognize you. So it was nuts. And then we're shipping these things out. And as I was saying to you in the beginning, we had one of our members, one of our. The presidents of one of our organizations had said, we really need to start planning. And we were at an exec retreat in Austin, and I thought, ah, that no, we're like, no way. I readily admit I was wrong. Like, we did not understand what was about to come. And he was right to force us to do the planning and get into it. And thankfully, we pivoted thousands of employees. We went work from home in under a week. And successfully, we kept going. And it was a difficult time. Like everybody else, we all had these really unique sort of situations that you find yourself in. And when you don't have, like when you can just go and just do the best you can with what you have available to you. It's rewarding to kind of see those things happen and watch a whole company pivot. And so many like that. And there are others that struggle to do the same sort of thing. I had friends who were sitting around doing nothing for weeks. Cause they couldn't pivot that Quickly. So it was a really weird time.
• 4:40
  Speaker C: Yeah. Oh, for sure. I know the accounting side. Like, in my particular case, I had a setup that adapted well to the type of remote work that we did, because we did send everyone home. We had, like, you know, accounting, you can't. Like, the jail can't operate without people in. Right. So there were certain things where we had people in and we figured out ways to make it work. But even within my peer group, like, I remember hearing stories later about other counties just, I've been upstate New York and other counties here in upstate New York, they'd be like, oh, let me tell you about the heroics of my team working that weekend to build computers of laptops and find the tools and that type of stuff. And, like, that wasn't my experience in our particular case, because we happen to have a setup that pivoted nicely into that particular thing. I don't want to say for a second that we planned for that, because that was not in the plan. Right. It was. Nobody had that on the plan. That was not on the bingo card. Like, hey, let's set this up so in case a pandemic happens. Like, we're all correct. But it just so happened that the thing that we chose worked well in that scenario. And I think it was a really great story, like, hearing what you're sharing, like, about resiliency and even you're sharing, like, you've had these experiences where you had pure IT director CIOs and stuff like that that are like, we're just kind of dead in the water for, like, two weeks until we figure out what we're going to do. And, like. And, you know, you, on the other hand, had the foresight of another leader who helped you plan a little bit, at least get started, and he did. And then you had a plan to scramble against, which is awesome.
• 6:07
  Speaker A: Yeah. And it's great when you see every. There's no when all the quote unquote politics in the boardroom and all that stuff goes away. And all of a sudden you're like, we're going to operate this business the best we can in what we have right now. And you see everybody just jump in. And that teamwork was honestly super rewarding. We all came out better as a team because we had jumped in and nobody was yelling at each other. It is what it is. Right. And so it was not about politics. It was about how do we get this job done? How do we keep the company functional and floating and really care for our employees and get them in A place that makes sense for them based on what their role is and what we can do for them. That part was really rewarding to see everybody come together.
• 6:50
  Speaker C: Yeah. And it's not always true that companies have a certain level of empathy towards the staff and the way they're doing things like that. So I'm glad you share that. Like we're here to care and we're taking the experiences of what our employees are seeing is like a paramount concern of how we're doing this. I think it's really important. Yeah. So Scott, to jump forward here, that was the last job. What are you doing today? You've been there a couple years, almost three years at Baylor. So tell us a little bit about what, what's Baylor, what's your day job? You know what the day of the life look like? I should say.
• 7:28
  Speaker B: If your Internet goes down and you're calling carriers yourself, that's not strategic. It we help teams centralize monitoring proactive tickets and escalation across every location without capex. Less noise, more uptime, make it boring again. Just go to you've been heard.com and answer the seven questions to simplify, streamline
• 7:48
  Speaker A: and save day in the life. So Baylor is a group of construction companies primarily formed around agricultural businesses. The original company that was started in 1965 I think it is FBI buildings. They do post frame construction. So imagine those big barns that you see and we're in nine states so all over kind of the Midwest. So that's the original kind of founding company. And through that Ed Baylor Sr. And then his kids and really Ed Baylor Jr. Who really took over and really started growing the business, has been growing it and they launch more businesses. They're very entrepreneurial, very innovative in how they think about things. And they got into doing steel based frame buildings through Besco. We've got protein and beef barns out in Nebraska. We've got layered egg facilities through Summit. And so all of these companies are either GCS or design and construct FBI buildings is unique because we are soup to nuts. So we design, build it and construct it. So it's our teams that are constructing it. And so that brings about some really interesting challenges. We also have our own trust plants. So we're building our own trusses and so we have a supply chain. So there's manufacturing in there, there's supply chain and then there's what I'm going to call generically the standard GC work of larger business. So from a day to day standpoint what we are doing is really modernizing the tools, they had a sales process that used a old Excel macro based Excel book that they would sort of pass around. It's been around for 20 plus years. So we're taking that out of Excel and turning that into a web application. We are looking at how to use AI to really help our teams do better, have better quality, make better decisions. So we're doing a lot of AI work, we're doing a lot of custom development work to really streamline how our business operates. And the goal being to really reduce overhead. And we're not using AI or even these tools to replace people. We're really hoping that we can scale. So our mantra really has been, can we scale? So can the same person support a higher amount of revenue coming through the business without adding another headcount? So the challenge I put in front of my team all the time is, hey, if I added a hundred million dollars to the bottom line, what would that look like and how can we do it without ever scaling and not adding a person? Nothing else. That's fair. But it's also unfair because in that process, you're going to have licenses, you're going to have laptops, you're going to have more security, you got more things that you have to deal with. But if you think about that mindset, about what tools help us scale, what processes help us scale, what things can we do so that the number of people required can either stay the same. Right. Or it's okay, great, I added a hundred million dollars worth of business. I only added one person where five years ago I would have had to add five people to that. That's that mindset that we're trying to go for. And so really trying to lead Baylor through a digital transformation systematically just kind of going process by process and looking at how we can take down some of the silos that are there and help that really just data to flow, but also make better decisions and have a streamlined system that makes sense.
• 11:18
  Speaker C: Yeah, so it's cool, like some vertical integration going on here where you're not just doing the end results, but you're building some of the component pieces. You obviously in my head, I think about, I don't know if you've saw the movie Austin Powers. Yeah, it's like, yeah, you remember there's the scene where number two is explaining to Dr. Evil how Virtucon has been expanded in while he was absent. And at one point he's like, we have a factory that makes models of miniature factories for our displays. So yeah, you talk about, I think One thing I want to focus on is you brought up also that it's a family business. So you got second or third generation of the family in charge here. And it's funny. So I'm a certified corporate director. And one of the things I was just last year I was at the National Associate of Corporate Directors Directorship conference and there was a whole track on family businesses and stuff like that. And one of the presentations talked extensively about how hard it is to see a business transition from the first generation to the second generation is pretty hard. But like the second generation on is like the, the numbers get incredible. So that's a real testament to a strong business that can go on. But I think from our perspective, from an IT leadership perspective, you're coming in here with a little bit different background of some of the other folks. I just wrapped up a role at a mental health nonprofit and I worked at a county government for years, stuff like that. But family business is different. I would call it like different politics. And I think in the past you've worked at other places that aren't family businesses. So can you tell us a little bit about what is different about how you navigate your day to day with those types of dynamics? And I don't mean it in a negative way, just it's doing all, you
• 12:50
  Speaker A: know, there's a difference. It is entirely different. This is my second family owned business. The other one was first generation.
• 12:56
  Speaker C: Okay.
• 12:57
  Speaker A: And that was just different. And second generation wasn't going to be there for 20, 20 more years. So it was really him. As an entrepreneur, I would say this one's really unique in the sense that when I came in they were transitioning from second into third generation. And so I came into the tail end of that sort of transition and working through what that looks like. Having been in private equity for so many years, this is entirely different because private equity is go, go, go, decide. I mean they are velocity and I mean no disrespect to my private equity friends, but if you hadn't done something in the last week, they were questioning you. Right. And this is a completely different mindset. Decisions are made differently. In some cases they're faster, but in some cases they're like, in some areas they're more risk adverse. In other areas they are actually a lot more open. What's really impressive around Baylor is they don't carry much debt. So when I came in from a private equity wondering what their leverage rate is, I'm asking all these PE shop sort of things and like it's zero yeah, they're like, we have none of that. And I'm like, what? Like, wow. So you. They're making decisions differently and that's a positive, like that's a good thing. When we started looking at some of these AI projects that we wanted to accomplish, I, I gotta tell you, like, I went into the CEO and said, this is what I think and here's the roi and this is how I'm thinking about it. He's like, yeah, great, let's go.
• 14:21
  Speaker C: I love it.
• 14:22
  Speaker A: Now he's holding me accountable to that. But I didn't have to do a board presentation. I like we don't operate on PowerPoint. My last company, on average I'd have 10 decks that I was working on at any given time between board updates and updates to this group. And we were just doing PowerPoint all the time. I do one every whatever few weeks, a month. Like it's. We're having a lot more relational conversations around what does this look like, how do we get there? Now they're metric based, which I love. They love data so they want to be working inside from a data perspective. So it is totally different in how they think about that. And their responsibility is to kind of the family, but it's also to grow the business. They care about the employees. They care about growing the employees. I love this story. One of the folks that works for me had used to do mto, which is you read the blueprints and you build a bill of materials. That's what material take off. I don't know why they call it that, but so they do the bill of materials. Well, he wanted to change so he came over to it, didn't know anything about it. They supported him for six or nine months. They said, go try it, see if you like it. He's turned into awesome. He's turned into a network engineer, he's gotten certified, he loves his job. Like, I couldn't be happier. And that would not have happened in many of my other businesses that I've worked in because they would go, well, you don't have the skill set. We're going to hire somebody that has a skill set. We got to go, go, go. And they had the long term view of, hey, this guy's been here for 15 years, he's done a great job for it. We're going to help him do this career transition and this, that kind of care and concern that I think at least so far in this family home business has been the huge difference maker. And the difference between that and some pe Shops that I've been in.
• 16:10
  Speaker C: Yeah. And I think that aligns with a lot of the biggest things that I had heard about since of the presentations and other stuff. I've never worked in a family business myself. Right. But I think the biggest risk in a family business is fundamentally the family because like whether or not it's the mode in which they want to run the business and it's the tone they want to set. So it sounds like where you're at, the tone they want to set is we're here to invest in the long term. We have a long term horizon that's going to pay us the longer term dividends that we really want to see in the context of what the business can do and the performance of that business. And you get some family owned businesses that they just, they want to kind of operate PE style, if you will. You know, go, go, go, like, show me the metrics. Do this. We need this. I want this now. I need this stuff. But I think it's more common in the family side business to see that more where you're at, where you've got people that are taking longer term. Horizon looks at things and thinking of it that way, which is really great.
• 17:05
  Speaker A: Yeah, it is. The other thing they've done really good is they've defined what it looks like to be an involved family member and an uninvolved family member. So because that's where I've seen other folks I've talked to, it's the uninvolved family member who gets a vote on whether or not you do something. And all of a sudden you're like, wait a minute, that person doesn't know the first thing about what's happening in the business, but they just voted and they're protecting their profit or their growth or whatever. They're not thinking about what the business really needs. And so I think this family has done a really good job of defining what an uninvolved person looks like and where their role begins and ends and then what an evolved person looks like and where their role begins and ends. And that's actually really healthy because I think that takes a lot of the sort of the, if you will, some of those odder family politics out of it. I think the other thing that's been really, if you really look at the history of this company, they're entrepreneurial, but they had the right leader at the right time for the right size of the business. And so Ed Baylor Sr. Got it to a certain place. And then when Ed Baylor Jr. Took over and bought his brothers out. He got it to a certain place. But he, if you sit and sit with him, he'll, he's like, this size is way past what I think I could have handled. And so now the CEO is like, he understands how to operate at that larger scale size. And that's important because so many small businesses, they get to a certain size and all of a sudden what worked for you at 20 million does not work for you at 150 or 200 or 400 million. And that leadership style and how you have to navigate all of that, especially when you got seven operating businesses and you're still trying to grow and do more businesses, that's hard. And so that takes a different style of leadership than say a one business sort of thing. Like your brother in law doing pest control is going to look and feel differently than somebody trying to do seven businesses ranging from schools to layered egg facilities. Those are different.
• 19:07
  Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. And so what you shared reminds me. There's one of my colleagues in the mental health professions here or social services professions in the Rochester area. You see, the leaders have seasons and knowing when your season is in or out is. It's actually a critical component of leadership. So like if you occupy the top seat, like knowing that it's like I've taken it this far. But the skills that got us to here are not the skills we need to get to there. And I can be comfortable, I find another seat somewhere else here. And letting the right person take over, that's a really critical skill. And I'm going to relate this right back now. Instead of us talking about these other people and their leadership, I'm going to talk about our leadership in the IT space. And I think that's important for us as IT leaders to understand how to relinquish control, how to relinquish authority and set things up to build those teams that can be really effective. So like for you, you see here, I'm going to bring it right back down to us. How do you build your teams to know that type of stuff to set it up so they could be high performing, they could be trusted to do the things you want them to do and stuff like that. Like what skills do you bring into the table? There's.
• 20:18
  Speaker A: Well, I'll say every organization is different. And so when you come into an organization, you have to stop and assess and go, what is this organization about? I always talk about the rhythm of the business because each business is different. So in commercial construction, especially in agricultural, there's a lot Less things happening in the wintertime for obvious reasons, especially in Midwest. And so you the rhythm of that business and what are the high points where like everything has to be working no matter like it's gotta be on.
• 20:47
  Speaker C: Right.
• 20:48
  Speaker A: And there's a rhythm to that and then really understanding what the purpose of it is. So if I look at Calibri where I was before 80, about 80% of business went through the E commerce system. So when E commerce was down that was a like oh, that's a big deal, right. We were, I think we estimated at one point we were losing on average about a million an hour for E commerce to be down. So I think as you start to think about how do you make a high performing team, you gotta understand what the purpose of it is. And so the purpose of it at Baylor is different than at Kleibri and is different than at insert other companies I've worked at. They are different and so what matters and when does it matter? Right. So because the rhythm of business is really important. I think the other piece that I look for is I always, whenever I'm looking to look at teams and how many seats on the bus do I have? Who sits in those seats, what makes sense. I'm always looking for something. I didn't know how to articulate it before but it's a book called Extreme Ownership by Jocko Wilnick Leif Babin. Excellent book. It gave me the verbiage, the thought mindset that I needed to have and it really is extreme ownership. I was looking for type A overachievers who would own their stuff. But I didn't understand really that Extreme ownership is. I'm going to go get it done, I'm going to make mistakes, but I'm going to raise my hand when I make mistakes. I'm going to do those sort of things. That's what I'm looking for in people and then figuring out where do they belong in the organization, what's best suited for them. Not everybody should be a developer, not everybody should be a network engineer. Like what do you need? So again, what's the vision of it? What is the purpose there? And then how does that fit into like who do you have and how do you fit those in and really getting clear about what the role is and what the vision of it is and what we're about delivering I think is where we start as leaders to build high performing teams. When they know where they're headed, where they know why they're valued, we value them, we actually show them that we Value them and give them a chance to go and really point them in the right direction. And I think that's the foundational layer of building high performing teams.
• 23:02
  Speaker C: Teams, yeah. So I think about one thing, I think about with everything you just shared is the idea of, well, I'll relate it to one point you brought up, which is that extreme ownership is not just saying you're responsible, but I'm responsible to raise my hand if I make a mistake too. And what's required in there is psychological safety of the staff that like, if I make a mistake I feel safe enough to acknowledge it, that mistake is not somehow detrimental to me. So like, and there's obviously a nuance to that. If you make up, quote, egregious. If you make an egregious error of something you absolutely should have known something about, we probably have to have a conversation. But if you make an innocent error, hey, I thought it was going to work this way, but it didn't work out as well as I had hoped. Right. Any of those types of things or the unexpected happened and we didn't plan for it as well as we thought we could. That's a learning experience. But feeling psychologically safe to raise your hand and say that is a really critical component of the leadership style that you have to bring. Make that like that whole thing function as a cycle.
• 24:06
  Speaker A: And they have to know you're not going to throw them under the bus publicly. Like, they got to know that there may be a one off conversation like, well, what happened? Well, this is what happened. But they got to know you're going to go stand in front of the team or stand in front of the bus and take it and not go sit there and throw them under the bus. The hard part about that is they also have to know that when they do something really well and it goes really well, well that you're going to not take credit for that. So you and your leadership role needs to literally balance the, oh, look at what so and so did. How awesome is that? And pump them up. And then when something bad happens, you're like, ah, sorry, my fault. Our team, like, you don't throw anybody under the bus. That's a hard leadership style to do. But that gives you, you're 100% right. You have to give them the safety to know that you're going to take care of them and that they have a safe place to make a mistake.
• 24:57
  Speaker C: Yeah. And it's hard, I think about my time as a leader where I do exactly what you're sharing. I Take the arrows if they're coming our way. But I'm going to highlight you if things are great and there's a risk for us as a leader because you get other leaders who don't follow the same philosophies because they don't understand what you're doing. So it's hard because you have to give up to be a truly great leader. It is my opinion, I guess I'll say this, my opinion is that you have to be a truly great leader. You have to be willing to give up the spotlight yourself at the risk of people, others in your organization not recognizing that that's what you're doing. Correct? Yes.
• 25:40
  Speaker A: Well, you're 100% right. Some people say servant leadership. I am trying to serve my people, but I'm also trying to serve my customer. And so what that looks like and how you balance that is really difficult.
• 25:54
  Speaker C: So shift here for a minute and talk a little bit just about your history. So tell us a little about your job history, about your most recent role, your one kind of a couple years ago where you're in covet but like where'd you get started and, and how did you come up in the ranks of IT leadership?
• 26:10
  Speaker A: I got a job when I was in college working at Amoco before it became BP and I didn't know what I wanted to be. I thought I was going to be an aerospace engineer but nobody explained to me that aerospace engineering was math 10 hours a day and I'm horrible at math. So I went to go find another career and I got this internship doing tech support at Amoco and met their, I think their cio. I think he was VP of it. I don't remember what his title was but was just in awe. And I want to be that someday in the future. And so I that really sort of became my career goal was I wanted to be CIO or cto and what I thought was going to be great was to really have well rounded. So I did tech support, network racked and stack stuff. I had a Nobel certification at one point. Emeco actually had one of the largest Nobel networks back then. I did security, firewalls, all that kind of stuff. Then I went into application development which is what I really wanted to be doing. Got into enterprise architecture. And so through the years just sort of grew and found my way to a place. I had my own consulting firm for about right around 10 years, 11 years. We went through the dot com bust in 2008 and my brother and I started the company together and we started three months before 9 11. So yay for us. Way to go. And then 2008 hit and he had left the business by that point. And I had plan A through F, maybe G H. And within three weeks just door closed, door closed, door closed, door closed. I mean it was. It was crazy. And so somewhere in there I decided to go back. As we joked about going back to the dark side and becoming a corporate employee again. Got to go to a company called Apollo Global. And through that we had universities all over the world and then got brought into Apollo Education Group which owned them. And they were the parent company over University of Phoenix and Apollo Global and a bunch of other companies too and was running development for all of those companies. It was a really interesting time. It was a really difficult time. Apollo hadn't been bought yet and hadn't gone back. A private equity firm bought them. So it was a difficult time. And keeping the politics out for half a second. University of Phoenix was the biggest for profit university. And so when the Department of Ed wanted to make an example, they would tip typically come to us, or at least that was our perception and feeling and we would get. And then they would go around to the other universities and go see, this is what we did then we'll do the same thing to you if you don't do this right, whatever insert this thing was. So we had a lot of that, or at least that was our perception and our feeling at the time. And so highly regulatory. A lot of deadlines, a lot of things that you had to kind of take care of. But through that process really grew and was managing a large team all dispersed all over the world. That was the other crazy part of that sort of job. Had a great awesome couple of bosses in there. Was really blessed to have some just great bosses that mentored me and taught me a lot of things. I just didn't understand. I was good on the technical side. I did not understand the business side. And that was really. I spent probably 10 years there really from a business acumen standpoint growing and how to be better at that. And that got me to wear. Got into Cleavery in just at 2020. Literally started January of 2020. Covid hit in March, April of that timeframe and went through that whole process and then found Baylor and Baylor's been great. It was a much smaller size. So I think we've got about under 20 people right now. We have a lot of employees, but many of them are our crew teams that are out in the field. So they don't have Laptops and they don't have a lot of devices. So while we have more employees, we don't necessarily always have more laptops and stuff to take care of. But they're a growing business, which is exciting. Growing through acquisition, growing through starting new businesses. So that part's really neat and it's an exciting part of Baylor and what they're doing.
• 30:21
  Speaker C: So if you're going through acquisitions with them, that means usually there's. There's work for you to integrate stuff together, new businesses in and stuff like that. Like, at this point, you have playbook for this. Like, how do you approach that? When they come in and they say, hey, we're getting this other firm over here, it's got 50 people.
• 30:36
  Speaker A: Cleavery we did. They said their goal was, I think like three a year. We were averaging like six or seven a year. So we did, I think, 18 integrations. So I got a playbook from that. A lot of it is really, it in the construction industry is a lot easier, right? We'll figure out how many laptops, what do they have, how are we going to put them into the ERP system? It's those sort of very standard type stuff. I've gone through the M and A process, so understand how to find the things that maybe somebody isn't telling you. When I was at Apollo, we had some pretty interesting situations of people who were juicing their P and L who weren't. It looked really nice and shiny over here, but when you talk to the IT guy, you got the real story and you're feeding back, hey, you should go ask about that number. Because that's really not. We had one guy that hadn't bought a. He literally had 386 and 46 machines on their desk as their desktops. And he said, well, when you buy, you can upgrade the computers for us. And like, he hadn't bought a new computer in 20 years. So, like, he hadn't done anything. So when you find those sort of things, you have to deal with that. And so from an M and A standpoint, just how do you assess what it is? What are the risks? I think that's one of the big things us as CIOs have to look at is what's the risk by acquiring this company? Is there a reputational risk? Is there a security risk? How do we get control of that? If somebody got the keys to the kingdom and all of a sudden they're going to be mad that it got acquired and do something bad? So you have to think through all of those sort of unfortunate situations. But you have to think through those. And for me, those are the things that I think our job is for CIOs to go through from an M and a standpoint. And then just how quickly can you convert?
• 32:18
  Speaker C: Awesome. So let's shift now again. It's now about a shift to fun stuff. So when you were growing up, were you into computer stuff? Were you always the computer kid? Were you not? And then you came into it in college, like, what was your first experience with the computer?
• 32:32
  Speaker A: Okay, so at the risk of super dating myself, my dad had a heath Katzina thing with the old 8 inch floppies. And so he thought he was big, really cool when he got the little cassette things to do backups on. So I was not the nerdy kid like that. I normally did not want to be doing that, except my dad had found this thing called the Y Wing Fighter, which was this little ASCII sort of fighter thing that just you shot things as it came along. It was really the most generic computer program in the world. And I loved it. And I was starting to learn basic. Never thought about going into computers. And my dad sent me to college and he showed up. I can't remember. It was right. I think it was second semester freshman year with his old compact suitcase computer. Do you remember these things?
• 33:25
  Speaker C: I don't know.
• 33:25
  Speaker A: Not trying to date you.
• 33:26
  Speaker C: My dad worked for IBM too. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So at one point in the 80s, like, he was like, oh, he brought this like PC home. I think it was like the portable PC. So it's like. So it's literally a suitcase and it had this like orange screen on one side. That's what I had.
• 33:42
  Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. I fold down the keyboard and people were trying to write papers. And so I had this old dot matrix printer and. And I had this key, this old compact thing. And I remember kind of having this crisis and one of my buddies in. In the frat house showed up and said, have you ever thought about computers? And I went, no. And he was like. And so he really walked me through. And he's like, do you like to see the results of what you create? I'm like, yeah. He goes, do you want to see this?
• 34:08
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 34:08
  Speaker A: He goes, you're not going to get that doing aerospace engineering. Because I thought aerospace. Like I said, it was either. I didn't realize it was math. I thought it was draw cool planes or like, I was thinking I get to draw a Corvette. And I had no idea what I was doing. But he showed me And I got into it. And it's one of those things I try to tell younger generations of as they're going through, trying to figure out what they want to do. Find the thing that you love. I still love programming. I still love computers. I still love my job. I mean, I love working with people. I love that more. I didn't know that at the time, but I love computers. And so I've enjoyed learning and growing, and I feel uniquely, weirdly old. But also I got to see what the PC did in the 80s and going into the 90s and how that really changed. And I think AI is in the same. Is going to have the same inflection point for different reasons, but I think it's going to cause us to do a lot of different things. And so I feel blessed, honestly, to be in that place where I can see three of those sort of big pivot points through our lifetime. I think that's really neat.
• 35:17
  Speaker C: So that's a good. A good pivot here. Over to AI stuff, you mentioned it early on when we were talking about your work at Baylor here and how you're using AI, And I think you had also shared a story about. I think this wasn't unique to Baylor, but if we scale the company, how do we do it with what we have? And I think you mentioned AI is one of the pieces that you would really look to leverage today in that. So where are you looking for that and where are you looking to use it and how are you using it?
• 35:44
  Speaker A: Yeah. So we put together a kind of, what I called three pillars of our AI strategy. Pillar number one is AI assisted development. And we're big fans of Claude. It's been really good for us. It's like having a bunch of junior engineers running around. It's not perfect, it makes mistakes. But the power of what you can do if you actually understand how to use it well, is amazing. And we've got certain projects that would have taken us. We. We all kind of sat down and we're talking about it and we're building these engineering rules. And Claude built this entire process to show this engineering rule and how everything is interdependent. It did it in under a week. I mean, it was fully functional within a couple of days, but we were tweaking it. If we had done that on our own, and I think we have some awesome engineers, we all agreed two, three months it would have taken us that long to build something like that. And it was just. Claude could lay the code down faster. So that's our first pillar is just AI assisted development. Second pillar is what we're calling department copilots. Right now. It's really hard in the systems that we have to expose the data that you might want to learn something, grow, ask questions. And so we had started a year or so ago on a data warehouse project, we scrapped that and because what we realized was we're using Microsoft Copilot. We can plug the data into Copilot, it's using Claude or ChatGPT LLM behind the scenes but literally we're exposing the data and letting you go ask questions and you can go do real time. So we've got MCP servers connected to procore and to Acumatica and to our SQL servers for our internal apps and we're able to now just let you ask questions and I don't need to go spend six more months building out data warehouse and syncing. CLAUDE is unbelievably good at doing that very thing for you. So these department level agents are going to give you the data that you need, do that well and then give it to you. And one of our presidents said, he's like, I'm in procore every morning. Great. Now we can start to give you what you need inside of your email or however you want to consume it. And that's giving you the exact data you need so you can actually go on and do your day and you're not clicking around finding all the information. The AI has done it for you. So we're calling those department copilots. And then the last one is these purpose built copilots that are very specific to a job function that is impactful. So we started with our first version which was really just a how to for sales team. For our sales folks that are out in the field, you could just ask IT questions. And it was really easy. Just it was indexing SharePoint, it was nothing, but it was again just sort of introducing it. And then the next piece was start checking my estimates. So you build a building estimate. We now the AI has all this historical data and it can check your estimate against what we typically do. And it's hey, your margin's a little low, your number of crew hours is 20% lower than what the average this size building would normally be. Are you sure this is right? Like there's certain things that are just binary operations. Like you were supposed to turn this flag on but you have this other thing marked. Was that right? But it's really the analysis against the historical data that's really powerful to say. Are you sure? Like, this doesn't look right. And it's both low and high. Right? If you can sell the building and we can still make our margins, you don't need all these crew hours. And so we're able to use that. So that's our next step. And then the following step after that is we'll let the AI make the changes for you. So we wanted to go through this very methodical, purposeful introduction of AI, get to a place that we can trust the AI that is doing the right things. And now the sales guy can say, oh, fix that. Yeah, okay, turn that on and off. Or oh, you're right. Like maybe I missed something. And you can go pretty deep into it and ask it a lot of questions and it'll start to give you rational reasons for how I came up with it. So that's what we're doing there. And then I'd mentioned MTO before. So what we're working on right now is to look at our building. So when you build your bills of material, when you make that or did you miss anything? So we're going to go ask you, like again, I'm not trying to oversimplify it, but do you have four walls to your building? Are you supposed to have four walls to your building? Hey, I don't see the fourth wall. Like, hey, your roof is this, but you forgot this. And what we want to do is, and what we started working on right now is reading the contract. So and if the salesperson hand writes on the contract, like move the window over two feet, we want to make sure that we've properly accounted for that. If the contract said 26 gauge steel, but they want 29 gauge steel, great. So assuming the salesperson compensated for that, we want the AI to read the contract. Look at what the MTO person built. Do they all line up? Did you order black gutter? But you meant white. Did you order the right gauge steel? All of those sort of things. And then mathematically, same thing. We have all this historical data, so can we look at it and go, hey, wait a minute, you're missing half the backer boards or you're missing the footers that we. All of those different things. And thinking about that. So we're really using the AI first to help improve the quality of what we're doing. That actually directly lines up with the customer, directly lines up with profitability and warranty work and everything else. But then also looking at how can we start having the AI make those changes for you and catch them. We want the Human in the middle. Because there are going to be certain things that the engineering team is going to define that you've got to follow. And so they may say, hey, wait a minute, that seems like more than what you need. We need the human to say, no, no, no, that's correct. Do that. You can fix this. Don't fix this. So we really want to get to a place that we're doing these sort of things. And that's our third pillar is really these very focused AIs that are going to help you think about that. We started looking at, thinking on the art of the possible of. Can we start looking at loads as they go out on the flatbeds to say, hey, that's for Project 1234. Do they have all the right things on that flatbed? Is that what we said it was
• 42:02
  Speaker C: going to look like?
• 42:03
  Speaker A: So we're thinking about how can the AI help us build with Shagon on each truckload? Can AI help us think about, like, how do we structure these sort of things? Can we scan that and do some real time visual stuff and go, hold on, you forgot a whole palette that you can fit on there. All of those sort of things. So we're thinking about how we can improve the quality and streamline that through the using AI to streamline that through.
• 42:29
  Speaker C: Gretzon and I appreciate you sharing coming up on the end of our episode here, but before we go, I want to make sure that we ask you to share your leadership insights. And I'll give you a couple of different things to talk against here, okay? One is, what advice do you have for your fellow CIOs? And then the other is, what advice do you have for people that are coming up? And like the junior folks, the people coming up in the ranks and trying to look ahead, they look to you and they say, hey, what do I do to get your job? Get your job eventually.
• 43:01
  Speaker A: Well, I'll say this for the people coming up. You don't have to be the same leaders, even your mentor, so your leadership style can be different. I don't know you well, but I'm sure if you and I sat down, there's a lot of things you're gonna be saying. There's gonna be a lot of things that we might be doing differently, and that's okay. So embrace the fact that leaders are different and accept that my leadership style is. And I was trying to say that before I do a couple of things. I try to be very clear, very straightforward and very simple. I give everyone a vision for what we're doing so clear goals, clear direction as we go through that. And then I give them the ability to make decisions. So I have, and this works in it, I have four decision criteria. I give everybody. It's on time, delivery, on budget, quality software and how we treat people. If you can prove to me that you made a decision based off of one of those four criteria, I will 100% support you, even if I 100% disagree with you. But if you can prove to me that you made a decision based off of that, I'm on board. I will stand in front and take all the arrows and everything else if you can show me that you did that. And those aren't in any particular order other than just how I memorized them. And so that leadership, how you think about that is really important and how you think about those decision criteria. So the first time that one of your folks doesn't release the software on time because it was lacked quality, how do you react to that? And if you go over and ask the questions and seek to understand. Okay, tell me why you didn't release. Boss, I'm telling you it was horrible. This wasn't working. This wasn't working. It was going to be worse. Okay. It's happened to me multiple times where somebody didn't release software and I was hopping mad because I had promised everybody and their mother that we were going to release it. But the reality was they were right. They made the right choice and I had to go and I had to trust my leaders. So trusting them to make the right decision and they proved without a doubt that they had followed those four decision criterias. And how we treat people, I can't maximize the importance of that so much. I have so many stories where just treating the people the right way will make all the difference for the world. I have been blessed. I have multiple people who've worked for me for multiple companies because I treated them the right way. And that's one of those signs that you know that you're doing a good job because you have people who are like, I'll come work for you, absolutely. They'll take your phone call like they been there. So we love working together. And part of it is because they know my decision criteria and they know how to think. So a lot of other folks that I interact with that are in this seat is, are you being clear and are you living to those values? Have really a vision of where you're taking the IT organization that you're communicating out and in and that you're sticking to that and that you're going to go where you're headed and why you're headed there. So that's what I would say to my fellow CIOs and CTOs out there. If you're looking to come up, I would tell you to stop worrying about the technology and figure out, why does the business care? That's the biggest, number one thing that I learned coming up was I used to think if I could get them this shiny thing or whatever, they would love it. And I realized nobody cared. They just wanted to do their job and do it without any problems. And so if I came with something new, why does that matter to them? And really, it's value. Can you bring value in your role as an IT organization? What value you bring to the business? And so if you can really set aside, it doesn't matter whether it's Node or Typescript or Java or C Sharp. Nobody cares the language. What they care about is what the value is that you bring to the business. And so if you can really work on understanding how your business works or a business works and why and how does it fit into that, how you can bring value that makes you extremely valuable in how they think about it and having a seat at the table and all of those sort of things that people talk about. If you can show that you're bringing value to the business, that's what they care about, that's what the CEO's gonna care about, what's board's gonna care about. Whoever your leadership structure looks like, they're gonna care. Are you bringing value? And can you prove that you're bringing value?
• 47:05
  Speaker C: That's some great insight, Brian. I appreciate you sharing with us. So thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.
• 47:12
  Speaker A: Wow, this has been great. Thank you so much for having me.
• 47:15
  Speaker C: That's a wrap on today's episode of you've Been Heard, the platform for IT Leaders. I'm Doug Kameen and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode.