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452 -Make IT A Business Partner w/Jim Harden · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: I learned a lot from some really good mentors. I've learned even more from bad leaders that I've had in the past. So as you're getting frustrated and you're saying like, I can't believe that they're doing this, or you start feeling anger or you start, I'm going to rage, quit or I'm going to rage, apply for jobs on LinkedIn after a bad interaction. Take that as a learning moment. And because when you land in your next spot, you can emulate great leaders, it's more important to not do the bad habits that you've been exposed to in the past. That's the biggest piece of advice I would give to any young leader in IT these days. There's so many people out there that are managing it that don't know or haven't been in the trenches and haven't had that experience. It's terrible and it creates a lot of frustration. But use that as something like that's going to make me a better leader in the future. It's like I know what not to do just as much as I know what to do.
• 1:08
  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?
• 1:59
  Speaker A: This is.
• 2:00
  Speaker B: You've been heard. Everyone out there listening. We're speaking with Jim Harden, CIO at Singleton Schreiber. Give me just kind of a little bit background man, like, so what do you guys do? How do you get started? What was your first computer? How'd you get into this wildness?
• 2:15
  Speaker A: Yeah, I mean like my journey into it started back in my military career, believe it or not. So it's started off as a enlisted guy going through bootcamp, became a tactical data networks guy, building tactical networks out of commodity type gear out in the deserts. Right. And that was kind of my forte into really what led into more of corporate it. Coming out of the Marine Corps, transitioning into a corporate job. I ended up working for eds, which was. They were at the time building nmci. It was the largest privatized government networker contract at the time. So privatizing the entire data systems for the Navy and the Marine Corps. So it was a really interesting brush coming from a couple of guys setting up tactical data networks in a field to a user base of a million plus they at the. On the corporate side. And then, then from there I had a lot of really great mentors coming through the military and everything else that encouraged me to continue my leadership journey and really ended up starting to get more interested in the leadership side of things than the engineering side of things. And although I cut my chops as an engineer and kept my skills up to snuff, really moving into leadership and mentoring people from my side was much more appealing to me. And the legal industry is something that I never dreamed I would be a part of at some point. Like, it's not one of those industries that you, you know, if you're going to be a lawyer, great. From the IT side of things, it really is just like, hey, what's. Like I said, it's kind of. It's a little bit of an industry that time had forgotten.
• 3:55
  Speaker B: Yeah. Well, first of all, the amount of people that are in IT leadership now that were in the military, I mean, It's a good 20% of the people that have been on the show. So I don't know what that is. I don't know if it's the discipline. I don't know if it's the calm under fire. I don't know if it's the. I can take a thousand things and, and still like. And projects and crap thrown at me and still be calm and deal with that and still lead through that. Maybe it's that I wasn't a Marine or I wasn't in the military or anything, but I know that there's like a test that someone takes it somehow and they're like, okay, like, you're really dumb, so you're gonna peel potatoes and we need potato peelers. That's kind of like the joke, right? And like, how did you end up there?
• 4:35
  Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, it. So when you kind of go through the recruiting process, you take that. It's called the ASVAB test. You take that and that. That really kind of gives you what your competencies are. And then based on what the military or whatever that branch needs at that time is what they start plugging holes for. They have a whole planning process of we're losing six of these guys, five of these guys we need to recruit to have these particular spots filled. Right. And initially I did not get in as what I wanted for the field data technicians because actually there's a lot of requirements and one of them is you have to pass a colorblindness test. I failed that. I had to get waivers.
• 5:11
  Speaker B: I had to like every guy, 50% dies or something. Failed that. Yeah, yeah, well, and then so then
• 5:16
  Speaker A: my option was like, hey, if you're not going to do data, we're going to put you as a weapons instructor because you can see black and white on the targets, right? So I ended up training as a small arms instructor while I was waiting for my waivers and stuff to clear to become a field data technician, which ultimately it did. So sweet.
• 5:34
  Speaker B: I really love one of these subjects that we're supposed to talk about today, which is building an IT culture that thinks outside the box. And it's so important, I think, in any small IT department because each little IT department's kind of like their own business or their own entrepreneurial kind of thing that needs to figure out how we don't speak in ways that are just like super technology and glaze people over and that we don't just show up and do a job every day. Because with the way the technology changes so fast, you just can't do that anymore. You can't just be like, I'm the network admin and I'm going to only do this forever. And I don't know if that's what you meant by when we talked about thinking outside of the box. But how do you get in technical, maybe engineering minded technology person that has blinders on that only sees things. Maybe one way to think outside the box. Most IoT 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 capex. Sometimes we find savings, sometimes we find nothing. Either way the outcome is the same. More clarity, less, 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.
• 7:30
  Speaker A: Yeah. I mean it's by nature for it, right. That we spent so much time trying to be inside box and work within parameters. When you come to compliance and certain things where it's like, it's very black and white. Right. And that's where I think that anytime you're sitting within some type of framework or certifications or things like that, again, they're, they're very kind of like they're almost to the point where they're restricting. Having the ability to use the creative side of your brain is not always something that's been well received in it.
• 8:03
  Speaker B: Right.
• 8:03
  Speaker A: Because it's, those are the types of things that hey, well we're going to try this just to make it work. And you may end up taking yourself out of compliance or the million things you haven't considered.
• 8:12
  Speaker B: Right.
• 8:13
  Speaker A: And I think that when we think outside the box as far as large scale solutions, it's about how it can be a business partner rather than a cost center with the business. Right. So most of the time it has a budget, you're spending our money, you're keeping us compliant, all these things. Whereas like more of the out of the box thinking these days is how can I provide value to operations, how can I provide value to marketing, how can I provide those types of things as it. When we're supposed to be fitting or coloring within, inside the lines, so to speak. Right. So it really takes a company or a firm that is progressively thinking enough to allow you to have that seat at that table. Because again, like this podcast here, that's why it's sparked my interest. You've been heard, there's been so many times within my career where not only did worry not heard, but didn't want to be heard from. So now I feel like with the deep ties to everything that we're putting out as platforms, whether it's AI, whether it's newer case management systems or things like that, the business wants to hear from us and hear our thoughts and hear creative ways to actually make a problem go away. Right. And it's been a balance because again, you always have to operate within their compliance and things like that. In the legal industry there's not a whole lot of gray area. It is or it isn't. So we have to still be mindful of what we do, but we also have to not just fit inside a framework all the time.
• 9:42
  Speaker B: Any tricks to getting the staff to kind of open up or think outside the box or maybe connect with lawyers who might not be the easiest people to approach or might be a bit intimidating from time to time or expect things done in a certain way. This is me completely stereotyping them. I don't know.
• 10:01
  Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, so lawyers are always looking for creative ways to bring information and cases to court, right? So they're looking for things that, again, the letter of the law is black and white and there's no coloring outside the lines. But there's ways that to go about things. And I think a lot of it has to do with the kind of culture you create too, because you had mentioned it. How do you do that from a culture standpoint? And a lot of it is just how you approach making sure that your team is heard and that their ideas are not. Just because you sit in this role doesn't mean that you can't come with a great idea on how to solve a problem, even if it's a very, very complex problem, because you might ignite a spark that lights a fire and we're able to get go off to the races. So a really good example is just coming back to kind of AI. Everybody wants to bolt on AI component to where they're individual legal tool, right? So you end up with this entire stack of AI tools, whether you want to pay for them or not, because they're all put together as part of your package now. It's all included in your licensing and everything else. Everybody wants their own flavor. And there's all the buzzwords Claude. And then one lawyer hears it and then it go spreads like wildfire. So what we've done is we kind of approach it as our creative solution to the AI problem in legal tech has been we are going to invest in one tool and then we're going to work with workflows and integrations within the tool that actually gives people what they're looking for with the added capability of having the wrapper of the context through like Copilot or something. Basically, we're a big Microsoft shop, right? So people want to use Claude, they want to use westlaw, they want to use everlaw, they want to use all these other things. What we want to do is we want to not shy them away and saying, no, you can't use that stuff because we have embedded it. It's going to take us six months, whatever it is, we're going to create agents within Copilot that are going to actually perform these workflows that you're looking for that not only gives you the information you're looking for through those platforms. But we're also going to have Copilot look at contextually. You sent an email to so and so about this. You had a meeting about this three months ago. So it's more of a force multiplier than it is additional.
• 12:14
  Speaker B: Okay, so number one, it sounds like the end users, the customers that you serve, the lawyers a are a bit savvy or I guess are they using AI more as a glorified Google for research. So I guess my first question would be is do you have any kind of AI steering committee and broken down that yet like do people have a way of being educated on AI?
• 12:38
  Speaker A: Yeah. So we've put as much into training and education as we have the actual platforms because that was something that we baked in initially. So we not necessarily an AI steering committee, but we do have a tech committee that we come together and we talk about these tools quite a bit. And rather than somebody coming telling us like, hey this tool is great, I heard it from this guy, can we implement it? Then we take that step back and say, okay, what's the problem we're trying to solve for? Right? Because a lot of these things are waiting for problems to solve that we don't currently have yet. Right? So we don't want to fall behind but at the same time we don't want to throw a bunch of stuff out there where we're managing and having to look at compliance on all these different tools. Right? So really it was kind of the spark of like, hey, well how can we make this as simple as possible? Because there are a lot of lawyers that have an appetite for the technology and want to use the latest and greatest tech and everything else. There's also a handful of lawyers that are just as comfortable with a legal pad and a pen. They don't want to use all this high speed technology and everything else too. So how can we best deploy our tools for the much broader user base? So like at a minimum these guys are using, they're living in the Microsoft world because that's how they get their email, that's how they live in Word, putting together docs and things like that. So the best thing we said, okay, well how can we integrate all this stuff that into Copilot? Because if we can give them one tool that can do all these other things rather than a bunch of individual tools where you have to remember to go to this to do that or vice versa, that was kind of the strategy. It just really is what's the minimum Entry point that we can get into maximizing the value of these tools because again, when it comes back to an ROI discussion, the lawyer that wants to use the legal pad and the pen, we want him to use the tools to realize our ROI on this stuff. So we have to make it as seamless and as simple as possible for them to actually use it than to try to remember where they have to go or oh, I even forgot this tool existed. Right. Come back to the same place, find your agent and go. That's our philosophy.
• 14:43
  Speaker B: We could talk about this all day. Okay, so now what about the security guardrails? What about the data dips? And I mean there's just so much for it to just kind of worry about, I guess, or be concerned about. How do you deal with that?
• 14:58
  Speaker A: So that's really the philosophy. And the way that we're doing things is really because of that right to set up the guardrails where we have the control of whatever these workflows and agents are doing within our Microsoft environment that are all bound by the same privacy policy that we have with Microsoft versus waiting. Somebody will go out and dump something in a Web version of ChatGPT. And now all of a sudden we've got anything from client data to any type of like trade secrets or anything else which has happened. Not necessarily our firm, but we, we've seen reports of other law firms putting stuff into chat GPT to analyze and to create documents and they're not using an enterprise product, they're using oh, I didn't check the box to say don't learn off of my input. And I don't think that.
• 15:47
  Speaker B: I wonder if that even matters. Do you guys know if that even matters technically? Because I think you can still search every public chat gbt even if they didn't click learn off my knowledge, I think it's still possible to search those strands.
• 15:57
  Speaker A: It was for a while. I don't know if it still is, but I remember making pretty big news and I thought they made some changes, but I'm not sure. Yeah, but keeping it within our walled garden, right With Microsoft, if we're providing agents for this stuff, we know it's not because we've looked very closely at the agreements. Our in house counsel has checked stuff to make sure that we're not feeding what we shouldn't and basically anything that we're filtering through an agent that we build within copilot, whether it's making a call out to another tool or to a AI sub process or anything else like that, it's bound by that same privacy policy as Microsoft. And we vetted that and we've been able to test it and know for sure that's the case. Anything else, any new tool that comes out there and people just start using it, it's the wild West.
• 16:43
  Speaker B: What's your prediction 18 months from now? What do you think everyone's going to be talking about that they're not talking about today?
• 16:49
  Speaker A: What happened to AI Honestly, I mean all these things that they've promised, I mean there's been so much on that was made of this stuff about how again it's going to replace people. It's going to automate your mundane day to day tasks and be again it's kind of a force mo multiplier rather than adding additional headcount and the knowledge of people that have been in the industry for a long time. I mean you can't train an AI model to have 20 years of legal experience. They'll tell you like, hey, well this thing's constantly training, it's going to know it. But I mean there's a seasoned trial lawyer who's been in the courtroom for 20 plus years. It's like you're not going to be able to replace anything like that. An experienced paralegal that knows exactly how to work with their attorney. From just a cultural and a communication standpoint, AI is the big shiny thing. But the bubble's going to burst and the people aren't realizing the revenue coming from it that they thought they were going to.
• 17:42
  Speaker B: Tokenization is going to be an important one to weigh out. I mean there's so much to kind of break down there.
• 17:49
  Speaker A: I say this a lot to some of the folks around. It's kind of like when you go buy a car and you pick what engine you want in it. You want the six cylinder or do you want the upgraded V8 or do you want. I think it's going to be that where like you said the tokenization is you're going to pick your platform and then you're going to pick your engine. Like it's not a this or that or all in or all in. Because I'm starting to see the way the Microsoft is, is marketing Copilot and the way that they're building it out going forward. It's. They've integrated cowork with Claude where you again, tokenization there it's not, you're not dealing directly with Claude, you're dealing with Claude within copilot. Same with OpenAI and all these other
• 18:25
  Speaker B: things that actually scares me that Part. And the reason why that scares me is because it happened to us. So we were using Claude and whatever, Open Claw or whatever. Right. Not to be confused with like, Claude, and built out like a pretty big model based on that. And then literally overnight, it was just sunk because Claude shut down the Open Claw, like tokenization, whatever it was. I can't remember what it was. Greg would know and be able to speak to it a lot more than me. But literally overnight it was like, well, that sucks. It's like an entire production, all of production was like, just shut down, like, literally overnight. And it was like, okay, we've got to now, okay, we got to take five steps back, break this, break that, and then rebuild this and go back to this way. That scares me. And it. It was bad for us. But we're a team of what, 10? What about a company with 2,000 end users or a million or something? That's just like. It would be like. It'd just be bad.
• 19:24
  Speaker A: It'd be.
• 19:25
  Speaker B: It could be really bad.
• 19:26
  Speaker A: That's why we're more investing into the workflows than the tools. Because if we get too heavy into a particular tool, like you said, focus
• 19:36
  Speaker B: on the instructions, focus on the skill sets. Focus on the skills, the instructions, how you build it out. Yeah. And then if you can share models, like if we can build the agent and then have that agent pick the model that you want to run off on any given day in a secure, single source of truth that does not access the outside world through a wholesale type of piece.
• 19:59
  Speaker A: Right. Yeah, that's exactly what Microsoft's doing in their model. I mean, if you look at how their copilot config is and some of their AI sub processors that you can add to your Microsoft tenant. If you look at like the researcher agent within Microsoft, you can select I want chat GPT or I want to Claude this version or whatever it is, you can select that. But most of them are defaulted to auto, where it's like, hey, well, I'm going to understand what the request is first. Right. And they're going to pick that apart and figure out what's the best model for them to use. It might be the copilot model. It might be OpenAI, it might be Claude. So Microsoft's doing that. And I think that's going to be the future of this stuff is like
• 20:38
  Speaker B: you said, it's really like, of their empire, the world. Okay, we have something to talk about, which is no seat at the table to driving strategy, because the stats out there are that 93% of it. Leadership does not think of their team as executive management or the round table. They think of their team as the help desk. They think of their team. This is my team. These are my guys. Like, this isn't that I got promoted. These are still my guys. So I don't know if that has any fits into, like, no seat at the table to driving strategy, but what do you mean by that?
• 21:10
  Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, where I came from previously was very much like you just said, like, hey, out of sight, out of mind. Just fix things when they're broken. And we had great ideas and we had great people and we had great minds in those seats, but just no platform and no voice to express it. And when you get into a situation where it's very kind of closed off at the top and there's just not a lot of communication back and forth, you're flying blind. And a lot of decisions are made on systems and everything else at an operations level. Not having that seat at the table, which is, again, valuable as a business partner rather than just being a utility or a cost center. Right. And as much as we try to raise our hands and say, hey, we've got some really great ideas on how we can do stuff here, it was always just falling on deaf ears. Right. And I don't know how you break through in those types of scenarios other than move to someplace that's going to actually listen to what you have to say. Right. Because you could do it till you're blue in the face and you just build a level of frustration where it's, I want to have some creative input on this stuff and figure out how we're going to move forward. But you got operations and bean counters that are making decisions at the top based on, oh, well, we signed this bad contract or this, then we get pigeonholed and we can't do anything about it. Right. So really, my move to Singleton Schreiber was along the lines of the conversations I had with everybody there, from our managing partners to our executive team. They were very much saying, we want to hear what you have to say. We want you to drive the ship, which is you always take it with a grain of salt, because that's what I was told previously, too. Right. And we never got there. So coming in, it's been a breath of fresh air and really just being able to kind of temper, like, I had all these things, all these great ideas, and I had this great plan that I put together and everything else, too. Well, now you're stepping into some place it's brand new. You got to temper a little bit of those expectations. Say, okay, well there's a lot like, what don't I know? And as you're taking that information in, then you're starting to develop your longer term plan.
• 23:16
  Speaker B: Just a little bit of background though. Just a little bit of background. You just started a fairly large law firm as their first ever cio, correct?
• 23:25
  Speaker A: Yeah. And the firm I was at previously was the first time I was actually with a law firm directly and I was at director level there. So I again, I never thought I would be into the legal industry, but I worked for a company where I had a compliance and security became a big thing. And I worked directly with their legal teams quite a bit and I found it both interesting and fascinating. So I said, well, shoot, I had a really good time working with those teams. Why not try for a law firm, right? And I'll tell you right now, defense law firm versus plaintiff law firm, they're completely different worlds. So they're almost a different industry really. You deal a lot with the same tools, but it's just the cultures, the attitudes, the leadership and the direction that you go in those different sides of the aisle. It's crazy how different they are.
• 24:17
  Speaker B: And some industries are definitely easier than others. Some industries are more prone to it as a cost center. However, I do think this is never supposed to be about like it versus, like the C suite or the C suite versus it. It's supposed to both. That's the whole point of view been heard. It's supposed to be like, hey, we hear you C Suite or we hear you executive management. And like you hear us. We're all like, like together trying to bring the business forward to what the ultimate goal is. And a lot of the problems that it deal with is a breakdown or a lot of the complaints that it have is a breakdown of that. And so if you hear someone that has like, we have 30 projects, we could never possibly like finish them. It's because there's no strategic seat at the table. There's no strategy. It's like, well, how does this project fit into here? How does this fit in? How is this actually going to drive revenue? Or have. Back to your point about ROI earlier, is it even worth doing this AI project if there's no RI on it? We could just hire five more data analysts or whatever, three more humans that could actually do it physically better, faster and more personable. So if that makes any sense, that stream of consciousness.
• 25:31
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And, and I'll tell you, I mean I have definitely have that seat at the table. I have the voice. I mean, my executive team at the firm and the partnership are huge. They couldn't be any more supportive of what we're doing because they know that we're there to help and partner with them rather than to be dictators driving solutions down people's throats. We want to make sure we're listening and we're coming with solutions rather than just products to.
• 26:00
  Speaker B: Oh, whoever that is. I would like to give them a high five and a standing ovation. I would love to have them on the show and actually have them say why we are a pro technology, like whatever it is. And it would be like sitting in like an Amazon meeting with Jeff Bezos and he's not a proponent of it as a business force multiplier. That'd be a complete joke. And if you had to put it in like one sentence or something, like, what did they say they wanted from it? Or the relationship around this leadership kind of like structure and everything.
• 26:27
  Speaker A: I mean, I could sum it down one word, and it's strategy. Because again, there wasn't a whole lot of strategy. And the strategy was probably being driven by more operational and everything else where I think there was a realization that everybody's asking for these new tools. And again, the technology in the legal industry has literally exploded. Again, there hasn't been a lot of like, forward thinking or a lot of the tools are built on prem old legacy relational databases. It's just very, very old school. Right. So now all the forward thinking and seeing, and plus the growth of the firm too, that's the other thing too, is that the growth also pushes forward the hunger to innovate and how we do things better. Because as we're doing more business and we're opening more offices, I mean, we can only throw so many people at that right before it becomes an issue.
• 27:16
  Speaker B: So when they say strategy or when you say strategy, but we want it to help us do X so that we can deliver Y as a business. I'm assuming it's something like that.
• 27:27
  Speaker A: Yeah. We're paying $1.3 million a year for a case management system because like they're best in breed or something like that. Like, hey, is that the right decision? There's new things on the horizon. We keep hearing about AI. What's our AI strategy? Everything is, what's our growth strategy? What's our onboarding and offboarding strategy? What's our AI strategy? Everything needed to come down and we needed to make strategic decisions and actually build out Two three year plans for our strategies because again, it's kind of just growing, growing, growing. And unless you strategize, it's going to eat you up. And my first year here, front of mind when I first came in here was what strategy do we have? And then as the firm grew it, it was more instead of piecemeal, like, how can we put in enterprise solutions and things that are scalable and build to growth as a platform and a solution rather than, oh crap, we just acquired some business in another state, now we need to turn everything and ramp up and add more stuff. Right. We just want to scale up. We don't want to necessarily just keep throwing money reaction.
• 28:34
  Speaker B: So respond to it versus reacting to things that just kind of blow up. And the old break fix mentality.
• 28:41
  Speaker A: Hourly break fix. Yeah, yeah. And again, strategy being important is we've opened up a handful of new offices around the country and it's. We've gone from deploying those things in days to deploying them in hours. With infrastructure as a service, with outsourcing certain things that you. So again, our strategy before, put a bunch of people on a plane, order a bunch of gear, get down there on the ground, put it all together, everything else. Now with the miracle that is infrastructure as a service, we build this stuff out, we drop ship it there, we have a contractor show up, rack and stack, and we're off to the races.
• 29:13
  Speaker B: So when it comes to dealing with the plethora of vendors, CSPs, VARs, technology solution distributors, all of these people and the new influx of AI stuff that's out there, what is your single biggest frustration, problem or concern as it pertains to that model of, I guess, selling.
• 29:41
  Speaker A: I think a lot of it is there aren't very many vendors that I've seen out there that can be, they try to be a Swiss army knife and do a little bit of everything and it's always that inch deep, mile wide. And I'm okay with a vendor that does one or two things really, really well. I don't need you as a vendor to do everything like give me what your best business model is. What is it that you're known for? And we just had a meeting with a big national hardware vendor last week and they showed us a slide about how we've acquired all these companies and we do all these things right. Our conversation with them is like, look, we're focused on getting this part right with you guys and then we can have discussions on the other parts, but we don't want to sit here and about how this can be an all encompassing solution. Like show us first and then we'll have additional conversations because we've got a vendor for this or that or everything else and we've got two years left on our agreement. Right. So I'm happy to come back to the table and talk to you about it, but let's get something in place first. And don't pitch me the entire playbook, right? Give me one running play and one passing play that that's going to hit every single time and then we can start talking about expansion from there. I think that's the biggest thing is that it's a great idea to have that one vendor that takes care of all these different things. But it's like how good are they at each one of those things? Right? That where you really have a need. I'm okay with having two or three or even four really good vendors that do one or two things. Great.
• 31:06
  Speaker B: I can tell you that to do like a really good telecom project. If an it. I was doing it by himself and if he was like evaluating all these vendors and he went to that guy, in reality it could be a nine month project and there's no way that someone can just add that on and that they know about everything to do with every POTS line in just porting numbers and operations departments on that day and just every possible thing that could go wrong with a large group of end users. And I'm just trying to think of the snapbacks and just like how you map out auto attendance and IVRs and now point solutions with skills based routing and all these different things. And then on top of it it's like how many people actually have any type of legal experience with FCC rules and regulations and what's allowed. And most people don't know that like a 99.999% SLA is kind of a joke because it's a geographical downtime over thousands and thousands of customers. So any company with a thousand customers are going to have a 99.99% sleep. Like so there's like a lot of these kind of like dumb things. Yeah. To your point, you can't be everything to everyone.
• 32:16
  Speaker A: Thus what I don't want my circuit provider trying to sell me Microsoft licensing and security services. Like I don't want that but, but they try to all the time. But I mean I don't want them managing my Sentinel instance and my Microsoft tenant. If you want, you want an edge firewall, fine. But I'm not going to wrap up all that spend with Azure and Microsoft 365 and all that stuff to like Spectrum. I'm not going to do it.
• 32:39
  Speaker B: There's no way that they're going to be really, really good cloud desktop designers.
• 32:45
  Speaker A: Right?
• 32:45
  Speaker B: Or some real niche, like real niche kind of healthcare, Azure, cloud desktop design. And then it's just like you need the ex submarine navy guy that works over at whatever Microsoft company now that's really, really good at that. I just, there's so many submarines guys, I don't know why submarine navy guys that are good with desktop design in Microsoft, but for some reason I know two of them. It just seems like you're also a submarine guy that was underwater for this many months. I just like must go hand in hand with like, you know, fires and subs underwater and stuff. So. But the other thing that you kind of said is that whole Swiss army knife approach. I just kind of wanted to dig in a little bit more because what that tells me is that they care more about getting paid in any way possible than they care about delivering you a specific solution for a unique company with a unique group of end users. And to me, that vibe is not the vibe that's going to vibe well with my IT department. I don't know if you agree with that or if you've got any deep thoughts on that, but that's from when you said Swiss army knife approach. I just heard, dude, we just want to sell as much as possible and hit quota and appease investors. And like that's what my job is. And what I've heard from other guys is they say, well, we just do all the research ourselves now and then we go to the CSP and just say, hey, sell us this stuff. And to me that's like a unwarranted gift to them.
• 34:16
  Speaker A: Yeah, I. And they're, don't get me wrong, I mean, the Swiss army knife can be useful in certain scenarios, right? And there might be customers that are well positioned because obviously if they're selling it and they're making money off of it, there's somebody out there that's willing to buy it. When it comes to more enterprise and holding vendors accountable for things, we can't have a single account executive that we reach out to when we have a cyber security problem versus laptops didn't show up at a particular office. Like that's just not weird. Right? And when I make that phone call, I want to talk to the CEO of our cybersecurity company to say we've got a major problem. I don't Want to call account executive for a Dell or a CDW or something like that and say, hey, we have a cybersecurity issue, run it up to the chain to whoever it needs to go to.
• 35:04
  Speaker B: Right?
• 35:04
  Speaker A: Like I need help and I need it now, so let's figure it out. So that's where having the compartmentalized pieces of that and it helps with the accountability as well. So. And then there's inevitably you're going to change vendors for things when they're underperforming or everything else. What if one piece of this is not working out right? You have to pick apart the whole thing. You have to have a new agreement, new contracts and hey, if my hardware isn't working out cool, there's five other places I can go that do hardware and I know that they do hardware right now. If it comes up to a solution that we don't know anything about, like hey, we're kind of dabbling into this. We don't have the in house expertise for any of this stuff. We have those people that we can go to also. And we work with a boutique firm here for cybersecurity that's based in San Diego and everything else. And they're really great at telling us what they're good at, but they're also really good at telling us what they're not good at. And when we call them and we say, hey, let me bounce this off of you, hey, I got somebody else, let me put you in touch with them. Rather than saying like, hey, we got this project quick, let's go hire a guy and make it happen for him like that. That never works out. I've been in that situation a handful of times. It has never worked out well for us one time.
• 36:11
  Speaker B: So please give me an example real quick. Gotta know that example. Just like a real quick. This never worked out and this is how we did it.
• 36:19
  Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. We had a firm that was acting as our CSP for a lot of our Microsoft licensing. And then this is still back. We had some stuff on prem, this was years and years ago. But we said hey, we need to build out a new intranet within SharePoint. We have to integrate it into ServiceNow and we have all these like things that we want to do and they're cool. Yeah, we can totally do that. Nowhere on their website did they say that they were any in any type of software development they sold SharePoint licenses, they didn't build SharePoint sites. Right. And these are very complex things. So it's hey, well we got a guy and it was a sub. Of a subcontractor or something along those lines. And, I mean, I can't remember. I think we're about $40,000 into it. When we said, no, we're done. We went out and found, like, the premier SharePoint developer that we knew of in our area. And we ended up. Not only did we end up eating the 40k, we only ended up paying them, I think marginally more to actually get it done right the first time. But it had to be scrapped completely. So it was a waste of money, it was a waste of time, was a waste, waste of resources, and it actually put a strain on our relationship with that vendor to say, you told us you could do this. What the hell happened? Right. So I'm more willing to take the advice of a vendor that says, like, hey, we don't do that, but let me put you in touch with somebody that does. Tell me what you're not good at. I know what you're. You are good at. Tell me what you're not good at and how we might be able to get put in touch with somebody that can help us out.
• 37:42
  Speaker B: Average IT project cost overrun 27%.
• 37:47
  Speaker A: Well, I'll tell you what. What?
• 37:48
  Speaker B: Oh, no.
• 37:49
  Speaker A: No.
• 37:49
  Speaker B: One in six projects become a Black Swan with 200% overruns.
• 37:52
  Speaker A: I'll tell you what. Having a good project manager is worth every penny that you pay when you find somebody that's good. Because that's one of the additions we added, added to our team here recently is that we had a ton of projects. We had a ton of stuff to do. We had a ton of talent. We had engineers, we had vendors, we had everybody else. Having that project manager to avoid any type of scope creeper overrun has been incredible for us. And you look at some of the costs of sometimes a PM or something like that, and you kind of go, oh, this person's too expensive. You almost can't afford not to have them when you're doing a lot of projects.
• 38:25
  Speaker B: More IT guys need to say exactly that, and they need to say that to executive management because. And this is the way I think we should say it. And this is all. Man, I'm so glad you said that. And one of the biggest underestimated investments in business is just paying a lot of money for the right person. Yeah. Because that one person could, like, just skyrocket, like production and streamline like XYZ and bring the company to the next level. It's like the Netflix story, right? What did they do? Rather than hire like 300 developers, they just went and cherry picked and, like guerrilla recruited like the absolute best dev guys in the world. And they're like, we'll pay you 10 million a year. Like, they're getting like 500,000 a year. Whatever, we'll pay you 10 million. You know, I mean, it was like, let's get 10 of the absolute best ninjas in the world rather than hire like 300 people and end up with a bunch of broken code.
• 39:26
  Speaker A: Or.
• 39:26
  Speaker B: This is my understanding of that story. Someone else probably knows better. Last question. Yep. You go back in time, you have one piece of advice to give your younger, more ignorant self. What would that piece of advice be?
• 39:40
  Speaker A: So I learned a lot from some really good mentors. I've learned even more from bad leaders that I've had in the past. So as you're getting frustrated and you're saying, like, I can't believe that they're doing this, or you start feeling anger or you start, I'm gonna rage, Quinn, or I'm gonna rage. Apply for jobs on LinkedIn after a bad interaction. Take that as a learning moment. And because when you land in your next spot, you can emulate great leaders, it's more important to not do the bad habits that you've been exposed to in the past. That's the biggest piece of advice I would give to any young leader in it these days. There's so many people out there that are managing it that don't know or haven't been in the trenches and haven't had that experience. It's terrible and it creates a lot of frustration. But use that as something like, that's going to make me a better leader in the future. It's just like, I know what not to do just as much as I know what to do.
• 40:39
  Speaker B: It's a really humbling kind of question. And it's like, when you think of the worst experience you've ever had from a boss, what experience and memory came to mind? And we will start with that. Don't do that to other people. It's like, I can think of a few.
• 41:00
  Speaker A: And it's, you know what? In the journey of leadership, you gotta go through those things. I mean, that's the thing is like, nobody that's ever mentored me or anybody that I've looked up to as a leader has ever said, like, it's been such an easy path to get there. And I just grew as a leader. Like, you have to walk on the coals to understand that they're hot. Right.
• 41:17
  Speaker B: And so many cry myself to sleep nights. Back in the day, I think it was more the retail, I think it was more the retail restaurant days.
• 41:23
  Speaker A: And if you don't go through that, like if I never went through any of that, I would never be here, right? So that's the way I have to look at it.
• 41:29
  Speaker B: The VP of Starbucks at the time who became the VP of like whatever coffee and tea somebody, he gave me a book, first break, all the rules wrote in the front of the book. He said, phil, do this. And in the book there's an exercise where you take your whole. And I've talked about this on episodes before, you take all of your team, whatever it is, employee group, whatever it is, put them in a room, lock them in a room, put one person in charge and have them all go around the room and there's like a series of questions that they ask that the leader asks about you. It's completely like, I'll never know who said it. I'll never know.
• 41:59
  Speaker A: Whatever.
• 42:00
  Speaker B: It's like all feedback, it's like, what do you do good, what do you do bad? What do we need them to stop doing? What was this? All that, right? And then that one leader in the room takes all of that information and types it up in an anonymous like report and delivers that to you. That's a humbling experience, but you have to be willing to do that. And I think a lot of people might not be willing to do that.
• 42:21
  Speaker A: Humbleness is one of the main leadership traits that a lot of people don't realize. And every single one of my one on ones with everybody on my team as what can I do better for you? What am I missing the mark on what would make me a better leader for you? I ask those questions at every single one on one that I do because you have to maintain that humility and that vulnerability. Otherwise when you're in the C suite, you're not looking at any more promotions. So your growth has to be within yourself and within the way that you lead. That's how you have to take it.
• 42:51
  Speaker B: So yes, been an absolute pleasure having you on the show and thank you for your time and you've been heard.
• 42:59
  Speaker A: I appreciate it. Thanks for hearing me.