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444 - The Leadership Shift That Makes IT Scale w/Demetrios Xarhoulakos · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: And I remember going to my IT director at the time and saying, should we pick up these tickets? Keep in mind, there's a 400 person, it's a 24 hour service desk, local help desk, workplace team. But I'm seeing them come in, I'm not seeing them being picked up and I'm like, should I just pick these tickets up and do them? And he said something to me that really kind of hit home and it was a bit of a shift in mindset for me was he said, you can, but be careful what you wish for because if you do, those people will come to you forever and ever. Instead is train the people that are underneath you, train the local workplace team on how to pick up these tickets, train the service desk, the L1, L2 teams, on how they can pick up some of the easy, quick wins, and then train the local teams and work with them and be a support for them and guide them and train them. That really kind of like was an eye opening moment for me going into board of management.
• 1:06
  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.
• 2:00
  Speaker C: All right, well, it's great to have you back for another episode of you've been Heard, the show dedicated to the IT executives currently steering their organizations and the aspiring tech talent preparing for their own seat at the leadership table. With us today is Demetrios are Hukulos, a seasoned IT executive with a rich history of guiding complex technical transformations and steering enterprise infrastructure. What really stands out in Demetrios's leadership philosophy is his sharp focus on operational excellence, vendor alignment, and building resilient systems that actually scale with business growth. He's an executive who knows how to navigate technical trenches while keeping clear line of sight on the high level organizational strategy. Demetrios, you've managed to transition from building technical frameworks to driving corporate culture flawlessly. We'd like to hear how you did it. Can you kick things off by introducing yourself and sharing your path to the executive table?
• 3:01
  Speaker A: Sure, yeah. Demetrios Sarlakos. I currently work at Desimone Consulting Engineering, so I probably have a bit of a unique a story compared to some of your other panelists. So I started in the architecture and engineering field, and desimone is within the architecture and engineering field as well. And so early 90s, not to date myself too much. I was like a CAD designer. So computer Aided design is a means of delivering construction documents. And so I grew expertise in that field for years, and I did that. And I always was the person in the office who was the most technical, the go to person for technical questions about the software we were using. I liked to figure out how things worked. I ended up kind of would also answer IT questions too. Right. IT kind of evolved from there. Right. So I did that for years and I was always kind of that position. And then early 2000s were a major architecture firm in New York City reached out to me and they were looking for somebody. Basically it was an IT help desk position, but focused on the CAD side of things. Right. So instead of me doing drawings and construction drawings all the time, I would be the help desk for the people doing the CAD drawings every day. And the thought of that was my first instinct was, oh, I didn't know this was a thing. Sign me up, I would love to do that. Right. So because it was something I was doing already and now it was something I could just do full time. The challenge I had at that time was billable work versus being doing helping people and things. That was a challenge. So that was kind of the start of my transition. And I did that for a few years. And then I started about 10 years ago now. I started at this company called Mott McDonald and they had brought me in as an IT manager with a focus on that CAD kind of world. And that was my kind of first foray into management. Right. And more strategy and more strategic thinking and the more diverse IT world. Right. I had exposure to that at the firm in New York as well too, because I would work hand in hand with help desk people. Right. So a common thing that we would face is somebody's having trouble with their computer. And it could be the software, it could be the hardware, it could be a number of different things, and we would work closely together with the help desk people to kind of determine what the kind of root cause of some of those problems were. And so when I transitioned to mDonald, those were. They kind of brought me in for that expertise. And it was a 400 person IT company and that was the first time I made it part of a big company and a big IT team. And it was a bit overwhelming at first knowing who to talk to, where to go, where to turn. And kind of an eye opening moment for me about a month into my position there, I see these tickets coming in regarding CAD and things that I have solved over the years. Hundreds of times I could do it in my sleep. And I remember going to my IT director at the time and saying, should we pick up these tickets? Keep in mind, there's a 400 person, it's 24 hour service desk, local help desk, workplace team. But I'm seeing them come in, I'm not seeing them being picked up. And I'm like, should I just pick these tickets up and do them? And he said something to me that really kind of hit home and it was a bit of a shift in mindset for me, was he said, you can, but be careful what you wish for, because if you do, those people will come to you forever and ever. Instead is train the people that are underneath you, train the local workplace team on how to pick up these tickets, train the people, the service desk, the L1, L2 teams, on how they can pick up some of the easy, quick wins and then train the local teams and work with them and be a support for them and guide them and train them. That really kind of like was an eye opening moment for me going into more of management.
• 7:05
  Speaker C: Yeah. And actually I think that's out of all of the interviews I've done. You're the first person that has verbalized that. Well, in that sense of. It's so much. We have that analogy so much like with the help desk, when the help desk teaches somebody how to fix something and instead of just saying, here, move out of my way, then that user learns how to do this. But now you're talking at it at a different kind of level. And I've never heard anybody else verbalize it like that. And so I think that that's a key point for any of our listeners right now who are trying to make changes in the ranks and move up the ranks, help teach those to do that for you instead of taking it all on yourself. Because in doing that, you teach them, they become more valuable and you begin to lead, which is where we left off. You starting in the management. Keep going.
• 8:02
  Speaker B: Most IT leaders don't have an Internet problem. They have a management problem. Multiple locations, multiple providers, multiple multiple bills, different contracts. We help IT leaders make Internet boring again by consolidating visibility, billing support and monitoring without changing providers or forcing upgrades. If nothing needs fixing, we'll tell you that's vendor neutral advisory. Just go to you've been heard.com and answer the seven questions to simplify, streamline and save.
• 8:30
  Speaker A: So that really kind of was eye opening for me that when he told me that. And that's the approach I took going forward in that position. When I needed to be technical, I needed to step in. I did. I still enjoy getting my hands dirty. So there I managed a global applications team. So at first I was managing the kind of the CAD support team. It was about a 10 person team strategically positioned globally with a number of challenges that comes with one being time zones. So I was working from home long before COVID even happened. Just because of that nature of it. I would be on phone calls with my team in Singapore and India and 11 o', clock, 12 o' clock at night. And so that evolved into more broader application support teams. So the Microsoft Team was underperforming at the time they moved that team it was again about a team of 20 people, level three, level four team that was managing the Microsoft the full Microsoft tenant. And then at that point I had it grown to about 4050 person team covering all applications throughout the company. So everything from the CAD design software applications to things the Microsoft side and everything in between. So this was strictly applications. We worked closely with obviously with infrastructure. We worked closely with them. We were when I first started there we were all of our data was on prem in data center. We were in data centers in the US in the UK and Singapore, Australia and we shifted to cloud. So we moved about while I Was there about 75% of our data from on prem to cloud. So our focus was on all of our on prem license servers for all of our applications and moving that to cloud based licensing, license management, data management, cloud, all based licensing. So that was Azure cloud was removed to. So we work very closely obviously with the infrastructure team in that process.
• 10:21
  Speaker C: If you don't mind me asking, what time period are we in now? Are we in 2010?
• 10:27
  Speaker A: Mid to late 2010s? Yep.
• 10:29
  Speaker C: Okay.
• 10:29
  Speaker A: Just pre Covid. Yeah. When we did the Azure migration.
• 10:33
  Speaker C: Okay.
• 10:34
  Speaker A: Covid happened of course and a challenge for everybody. I think the big challenge was ensuring people were able to work from Home connect from home as much as possible. My big focus at the time was license management and ensuring that they were able to connect through VPN or whichever mechanism we were using at the time, I don't remember. But being able to connect and pull the license and software and keep working, that was a big challenge. Working. We're obviously working really closely with vendors through that process.
• 11:02
  Speaker C: Can I deviate for a second again in the questions? Because I'm not sure how many people I've talked to that were running something like that during COVID Were there any challenges to providing that service internationally during that time? Because I know that I only had to deal with domestic. And one of the things that surprised me was how many of the people that put up their hand and said, I don't even have Internet service at home, let alone my own computer, which was surprising. But internationally, what did you run into? What was different about this in an international scope?
• 11:38
  Speaker A: Certainly the Internet was an issue there. A lot of people internationally lived in very remote places, so they commuted to an office that had good infrastructure and high speed Internet. But back at home it was a challenge. They were dealing with 5 megabit download speeds or less. Right. And in the architecture and engineering field, we're dealing with massive large 3D models. It could be anywhere at the time. Average file size 5 to 10 terabytes going up to gigabytes. Sorry, 5 to 10 gigabytes going up to 20, 30 gigabytes easily. And then constantly. And so they're all cloud based. Right. So constantly pull. Drawing down that Data over a 5 megabit Internet connection was definitely a challenge. So that was a challenge. We had to make some arrangements for no special cases for people to be in office. And we'd work locally with the team, make safety requirements. We work closely with HR and everybody to kind of make accommodations for people where they had to be in office. We had people also, speaking of COVID who only wanted to be in office. They made a big stink. They said they can't work from home. It wasn't even a case of Internet or anything like that is they just wanted to be in office. And so I had two people on my team specifically that really kind of wanted to do that. And again, we kind of worked locally with the team to be able to make those accommodations. But yeah, the Internet was one big thing for sure, working with our vendors as well. So vendor management is a big thing that I do and I still do to this day. In this field we work with a lot of different software and vendors and so coordinating with them we had just transitioned a year or two prior to that our licensing to the cloud. And so that presented some issues with the time zones and people logging in at different time zones and things like that. But yeah, for sure the Internet was an issue.
• 13:31
  Speaker C: And so with the international and the time zone differences, that also changed the approach to the data centers too, I'm sure because like one of the advantages of cloud and is the ability to spin up resources and spin down resources, follow the sun. And since you've got people that are following the sun the whole time. Oh man, your resources.
• 13:55
  Speaker A: Yeah, constantly. Yeah. So in that transition to Azure, we were working with a vendor building VMS on Azure to help accommodate that. The workspace is one that comes to mind that we were, we were using where you could literally spin up and spin down machines. And so that would help with the follow the sun mentality for the licensing. And again we had to, obviously we had struck with our vendors and end user license agreements to ensure that this was compliant. But we built a system within Azure and the license server. So that way if somebody kind of working in shifts, right. So somebody was working for eight hours, they'd hold a license and then they'd sign off and the next person would coming online in Singapore or India, wherever it was, would be able to pull a license. And then when they overlapped it sometimes became an issue. So we had to put some measures in place to allow for that buffer. But yeah, the license management across times is always kind of. It was more of a challenge when it was on prem where in that scenario where there was a bit of crossover, where there was times where we were double dipping with the licensing, which wasn't an issue from end user license compliance, but it was more of a cost issue where our vendor would come to say, hey you're, you need a 150. Right. And they'll be like, why are they saying that we need this so many licenses? Then we look and we, we, we see that there's the double dip there because of the time zone crossover.
• 15:16
  Speaker C: Yeah. And interesting. So, and for me I'm recognizing right away that you're using device cals instead of people cals or user cals. Because then with the user cal it's one per person, doesn't matter what time zone or when they're using it, but the device one you can share between two people. So yeah, that one depending. And I never thought about it following the sun like that or moving from data center to data center and depending
• 15:41
  Speaker A: on the license agreement too. Right. So, yeah, if it was named user licensing. Right. That presented much more of a challenge to be able to do that. But if with. With a shared network license, that was easier to do.
• 15:54
  Speaker C: Yeah. Then, you know. Well, that one right there. So I if worth its weight in gold. If you don't understand what we're talking about and you're dealing with things like that, you need to understand what we just talked about.
• 16:05
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
• 16:06
  Speaker C: All right. You brought up that point of, hey, teach the staff how, or teach the other guys how to support this. What are some of the other executive leadership things that you've learned and how you've learned to lead the team versus be the hero.
• 16:22
  Speaker A: Yeah. So just going back to, like, kind of my story, I guess. I think that'll lead to it. So I, I postmodern McDonald's late 2023, 2024, his company, decent Mullen, reached out to me, and they had a gap in leadership around technology. And the unique thing about architecture and engineering companies when it comes to technology leadership, a lot of times, I mean, it's probably not just in architecture and engineering, but a lot of times the most technical person, the most productive, most technical person, when there's a management opportunity, like, oh, let's make this person the manager, because they're really technical and they're really productive in what they do, that doesn't always translate to the best manager. And I don't know if I had experience like that very early in my career where I became like a CAD manager. Right. And it didn't quite, like, work out for me. Well, in that sense. Cause I was still just very, very technical and that stuff, like through Montdal. And I kind of transitioned more to the management, the strategy side of it, rather than the technical side of it. And so the gap at the Simone was, yes, leadership, yes. Understanding the technology and the uniqueness of the technology in the CAD world and how that correlates with the needs of the company. And so a lot of times, the architecture firm I worked with in early 2000s, their IT director was a licensed architect. Right. So it's about knowing the business, understanding the business, understanding the needs of the business. And so they had reached out to me late 2023, early 2024, and I ended up starting here. I reminded myself of the architect that was the IT director at that architecture firm, where it's like, yeah, while I don't have the traditional IT background, I lean on my team for a lot of that. I've got a guy who's. Who's an Expert in infrastructure. We've got a security expert, right. I've got the help desk guys. Right. So we've got our kind of our well rounded team. And my focus is managing them, putting them in the right place to succeed and then also aligning with the C suite, aligning with what they need, where the direction of the business is going and how do we kind of help them, how do we help them get there? One of the things that the big focus this company with now is growth. You touched on that in the intro. And we're growing in two ways. One, through organic growth, big projects. We do high rise buildings, structural engineering for high rise buildings, 50, 60 story buildings, residential, commercial. And so there's been a lot of growth in that field and then mergers and acquisitions. So we do a lot of M and A work. So we're partnering with and acquiring smaller engineering companies. And the idea is to build a bit of a more diverse portfolio within the business. And then so for us it's how do you tackle that? Right? So anytime there's an M and A, there's an integration. We're doing one right now. We have to integrate them. And so that presents a challenge. So, so it's aligning what we do with the business with what their strategic goals are, whether it's M and A, whether it's organic growth, keeping up with the technology in the specific space and then and building out that team, partnering with other technical. So there's people here that do what I used to do in that kind of CAD support role. And so I love talking to them because I could, I talked their language, right? And one guy kind of was a bit inspired when he first met me. He's like, you used to do this, right? And now you're the director of it. And so in this field it's very common transition to kind of transition from that project delivery work into more of a technical kind of role, if that's the direction you want to head. So those are some of the things I really focused on around the kind of the management and the leadership.
• 20:16
  Speaker C: Right. Did you run into any of those other moments that just really stuck with you, like the one that you shared at the beginning of teach them versus do you want the only person that supports it?
• 20:28
  Speaker A: So for sure, for sure. So when I first started here, and it's probably still a thing people, there's a lot of silos, right? So we have the traditional IT team, we have the CAD BIM team. We also have a bit of an R and D team which is some Software developers. Right. And everybody's kind of working in silos a bit. And when I was early on here, I overheard one of the guys in the team saying, oh, we've got this ticket with this CAD software. Somebody's saying, it's really slow. We need to go and repair the computer. We need to go reinstall the application. We need to do these things. And so. And kind of a light bulb came off to me. I was like, hey, has anybody checked with the CAD team to see what they're doing? Like, is it the hardware, is it the computer, or is it the software? Is it how they're using their software? Do they need more training? So connecting those pieces, those dots, those silos, tearing down the silos and connecting
• 21:23
  Speaker C: the people talking to each other, getting
• 21:25
  Speaker A: them talking to each other, getting the help desk guy, talking to the CAD guys, to the software developer guys. Right. Like, and it's tearing down those silos, and we're getting there for sure. I meet regularly with the CAD team. Just first thing this morning, it was over by our. The IT area, talking about an issue that came up. And so that's what we want. Right? More communication. So I think for me, early on here, that was probably that the big one is tearing down the silos and get people talking to each other.
• 21:50
  Speaker C: So that's a unique one, usually, because I'm used to hearing about those silos within the business and then trying to break down those silos amongst. Because then you got 10 different chiefs, and they're the only ones that are important or their job and their challenges are the only things that are important to them. But then you've got to balance that for the whole business. But to walk into an organization where the silos are in the IT or the overall group. Yeah. So you guys, as the engineering firm, you're just building all the plans and doing that piece. How much of the actual build are you guys involved in? Or do you guys just hand it off and then a construction company comes and takes it?
• 22:34
  Speaker A: Yeah. So there's a good point just on the technology side, to touch on your question. So we usually would partner with our clients. A lot of times are architects. Right. So architects get hired to design a tall building. They begin to design, they engage with a different engineer, like a mechanical engineer, a structural engineer, plumbing engineer. Right. So a structural engineer will work with the architect to design that building. Some engineering companies will go through the entire process of designing and then building as well, where we design. And during a build phase, we're more of a consultant Right. So as it's being built, if something's not right with the drawings, we're coordinating the contractors on that build. According to the architect. According to the contractors. So we're in it until the building is built, for sure. It's just a matter of we're more heavy in during the design side of it.
• 23:28
  Speaker C: And so still international or are you just domestic now?
• 23:32
  Speaker A: Global. We have offices. Okay, yeah, we have offices in 12 countries, but projects.
• 23:38
  Speaker C: Yeah, when you said decimal and I wasn't sure whether it had shrunk down or was still global.
• 23:43
  Speaker A: So, yeah, we're global and growing. So with construction, we deal with a lot of technology on that side. Right. So, yeah, drones and cameras and all different things.
• 23:54
  Speaker C: And so managing that using software, the 3D renderings, the. I've had the chance to talk to a few of the people in your industry, usually at a smaller scale, but having a little bit wider breadth of responsibilities. And so, yeah, there's a whole different world to that side of this. So tell me a little more about the vendor management and those pieces. Like my team, we've got some challenges when dealing with third parties, and especially when we bring in a third party to augment the team in any given way. There's a lot of times where the team is frustrated because they feel like they have to go clean up after the third party. Are you guys doing anything when you're talking vendor management, are you dealing with that or are you just dealing with optimizing things like the Microsoft licensing at a global scale and making sure to really optimize your spend?
• 24:50
  Speaker A: It's a little bit of both, for sure. Yeah. I mean, obviously, spend management is a key thing that we do. That's one of the reasons they brought me in for that, for sure. I report to the cfo. So on the vendor management side, my approach really is building relationships with them and really partnering with them to ensure we're getting the most value out of our investment. Right. And whether that's through the license optimization, whether that's through getting the right training for the people using the software and really working with them to get the most out of it. I give you a good example. Working with a software vendor recently, and we had to purchase some additional licensing. And they had mentioned during that procurement that they are offering some training, two hours of training, because we purchased those licenses. And so I reached out to the team that requested it, and they had mentioned they were interested, let's send them what was available. And then the vendor had said, yeah, actually, you guys had it you have about 12 hours of unused training that you hadn't done before from your previous procurement software. And so that's the kind of thing there. Right. It's like understanding what we have, what we're getting with our contracts. Right. Understanding what is the full value we're getting. If we're just buying a piece of software and handing it off to people and say, hey, go do this thing, go build this building with the software, are we really getting the right value out of it? Hey, maybe if there's an expert, there's somebody we hired who's an expert in the software, maybe, but a lot of times not. Right? So building those relationships, understanding the value of it. Of course, yeah. The license optimization part of it is huge. And vendors don't like hearing that stuff for sure. They just want to sell us more. And so I was finding that balance and working with them to do that. Yeah. So we have a number of 100 plus vendors that I work with currently in my current position. There's more. When I was at mom McDonald and I do a quarterly review of each. So the big ones. So for the million dollars plus tracks, we'll do a quarterly review. That review will have a grade. And that grading is based on license optimization, based on training, it's based on engagement, it's based on roi. And that's my approach.
• 27:05
  Speaker C: Wow. Okay. No, that's a wonderful bit of experience for us to learn from too, because I'm so used to the flip of that where the vendor comes in with their quarterly business review and they tell us how we're doing as a customer versus us, talking to them and telling them how they're doing as a vendor.
• 27:22
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
• 27:23
  Speaker C: I've always taken a stance, or not always. I've learned to take a stance of just being forthright and very honest and sometimes brutally honest. But it's all in the delivery.
• 27:35
  Speaker A: On how you had a software vendor, we were doing a big three year, $20 million contract. We were doing a three year renewal. And when in our first meeting they came to me and said, here's your projected usage over the next three years. I said, what? You're giving me my projected usage? No. Right. So I'll tell you what our projected usage is. And all they did was they did a straight line horizontal usage report. Right. I'm like, you're not factoring any of our actual business needs. And so, yeah, of course they try that. Of course they do that. Here's your quarterly. With our major vendors, I do that approach. I do the flip side. Of it. And it's more, it's not something I show them. It's more like I show my C suite that they see that what, how they're performing.
• 28:29
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 28:29
  Speaker A: So I take that with me to my meetings with course.
• 28:32
  Speaker C: Yeah. They can plan it out. And you're not beholden to them because I switched organizations a couple of years ago and one of the vendors that we were working with or that they had been working with, already had contracts with came in and we're talking about that and oh, here's your projected, you know, user growth over the next three years. And we're like, guys, we're in the middle of a recession right now. Things are not going well. Transportation is like down.
• 28:58
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 28:59
  Speaker C: We're not seeing that. We're not hiring new employees. As a matter of fact, we're about to cut a bunch of employees.
• 29:06
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's a challenge finding that balance of dealing with the sales stuff. Right. But understanding what you, you really need,
• 29:13
  Speaker C: it's also a challenge on that of finding the balance between them trying to find the intersection of value and us trying to find the intersection of value. Because there's a lot of times where they come in, so what are your plans for the year? And they just try to find, yeah, tell me, I'll find some way where I can intersect with it versus better.
• 29:34
  Speaker A: Tell me they want to see my room.
• 29:36
  Speaker C: I'm just like, no, no, I want to know what value you can bring or where do you guys really do well? And then I'll see whether that fits into my plans versus where you can see, oh, I can get you licenses for that. I can get you licenses for this. All right. What about the building of the teams, huh? What other things do you do to help build the high trust teams you mentioned making sure that you've got the team and finding the opportunities for them. So when you found somebody or you've identified somebody who's not firing on all cylinders or is not living to the potential that you believe that they have, how do you help find what's the right place for them, even if that place is at another opportunity?
• 30:23
  Speaker A: Yeah. Right. Team management is certainly a passion of mine as well. Again, evolving from the strictly technical role to the management role. Right. This is a newer kind of newer. The 10 year, last 1012 years.
• 30:35
  Speaker C: Right.
• 30:35
  Speaker A: Where it's really become more of a focus and my strategy and my management skills in improving that and building teams. So to give an example of what I did when I first started at the Simone is one of the hardest things to do when you're coming into a position like this is evaluate the current team. Right? There's a reason why you were brought in. And one of the things you need to do is do that full evaluation down to each individual on how they're performing individually and how the team is performing overall. And there was one specific person that had already been coming to PIP prior to my training, and they had mentioned it to me early on, even during the interview process. And I said, I'm happy to kind of take that challenge on. I embrace working with people who have struggled in the past. Maybe they weren't inspired, Maybe they didn't have the right tools, the support, whatever that is. And so there was two people that kind of fit in that boat when I first started here. And so the approach I took with them was meeting one to one, of course, but really kind of trying understand what makes them tick, what really makes them get up in a day and want to come to work. I like posing a question to them. If you had an unlimited budget, what would you do to improve our digital landscape here? What would you do with an unlimited budget? A lot of times, some of the answers I get, they're actually something that is reasonable. And so if I get deer in the headlights, blank stares, like, okay, right. Like, tell me what really inspires you? And so anyway, I determined kind of through those conversations what would be the best fit for what they wanted, but also what we needed to do and what we needed to accomplish with one person. It worked out. He kind of really found his niche, and he's. That kind of fits in that very, very technical kind of role. And he likes tapping at the keyboard all day long, and that's what he likes to do. And kind of head down, and that's okay, right? You need those kind of people. And so the other person really struggled. I don't think he'd been here a long time. He really struggled with kind of finding that right place. And a couple conversations, I was like, is this really what you want? Is this really what you enjoy doing? And unfortunately, he did not work out the other person. But we tried, right? And so that's kind of my approach. Like, as a team, we have a mission that aligns with the business and the strategy of the business. And then I work with everybody individually for them to meet their goals and then align that with the team strategy and the business strategy as well. We make hires when we need to. We let people go when we need to, which is the last, absolute, of course, last resort. We do training everybody in the team is required to do some form of training every couple months or so. And we regularly have training sessions on a number of topics. Kind of the team that I've got at the moment beach have a good skill set individually. The one guy actually has infrastructure, another guy's security. Right. But we're a bit of a lean team and you have to be somewhat well rounded. You have to be able to pick up something when it's thrown at you and no one else is around to help and you're kind of thrown at you. And so we do that by sharing, kind of sharing knowledge and doing training sessions and things like that.
• 33:47
  Speaker C: Talk to me about some of the lessons you learned and the struggles, because you mentioned you've had to let people go in the past. So I know that the first couple of people I had to let go, I really struggled with those. But then for me, the experience of letting them find new opportunities and bringing somebody else in, once I was able to look at it, in hindsight, once that was all said and done, the person that came in afterwards was such a gift that I started to kick myself going, why didn't I do this sooner? Why didn't I help them? Because I've also had some of those people come back to me too, those ones that I've helped guide towards another opportunity, going, hey, man, I hated doing this, but. But I ended up here and life is great. So what experiences did you have along those lines?
• 34:38
  Speaker A: Like, when that happens, I cannot sleep at night. It's still hard for me. The most recent experience with the general, the example I gave. So again, it definitely was not the right, like, because we're a lean team and you could be working on a project, right? Delivering some new pieces or infrastructure or something. What a security project, some security initiative we're doing. But the next thing you're doing 10 tickets, right? Like, it's like we're all kind of chipping in. I did two tickets the other day, right? So he struggled at that. He had a very kind of niche skill set that he did, and there were times where we struggled with that as well. And so he really struggled with that. Kind of, you would say, I don't want to do tickets, I don't want to do tickets. And so anyway, after that happened, a couple months later, couple months later, somebody here in the office who I know was very close with him, I asked them if they had spoken to them and if they were doing okay and things like that. And they mentioned that, yes, he's found a new position. Making more money. And his first comment was, he's happy. He doesn't have to do any tickets. And I think for him, it was probably what he needed. Right. The friend who was still here said the same thing. It's like it's exactly what they needed.
• 35:47
  Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. It's one of those challenges and then realizing sometimes that it's okay because, yeah, it sounds like you take it very personal and you can't help somebody to succeed, but sometimes that's just the way it is, unfortunately.
• 36:03
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
• 36:05
  Speaker C: So, all right. We can't get any or through any conversation without bringing it up. How's it being layered into your organization? How are. What are you guys dealing with that topic that shall not be mentioned. And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I see it on your face.
• 36:22
  Speaker A: I know what you're talking about. So one of the things that we've tackled recently is the governance around it. So is it's being done, it's being used, people are jumping in, they're doing it. My CEO's in my ear, what are we doing about this? What are we building? What are we going to do? I want a full LLM, because you heard it on some podcast. So. And my CFO is telling me, no, we can't afford it. Right. And I was always the person that was pushing the buttons. Right. So I want to enable four people. Right. But my thing is, I want to do it in a managed way. Right. Not just Wild West. Right. And for sure, Wild west is happening. Right? People using all the different services out there without any kind of oversight over it. So we've made some investment in some of the more common AI tools out there. We've got enterprise accounts with them. So we're telling people, look, we made the investment, we've got the tools. And this is kind of from the C suite coming down, what they're asking, it's like they ask, is I want to put this in the hands of people and I want to see what they can build. And I think what we're seeing is people that you least expected are some of the most common users. So we invested in some seeds, we've made it available. We've got a policy document that is required to sign by everybody now, especially if you're going to be using any of it. That policy document essentially says, if you're going to use something, these are the tools that we have that we own under our tenant, and this is what you're authorized to use. If. If you're on a decent Amount piece of equipment. Yeah. If you're at home, you do whatever you want. But if you're on a decent amount of piece of equipment, if you're on a decent amount of laptop, iPad, phone, whatever, you need to be signed in with your sso, MFA and all these things. So within our tenant and kind of in a protected way as much as.
• 38:17
  Speaker C: Yeah, I was. I'm wondering. So did you already have the dlp? Well, you guys have a lot of intellectual property in those designs and everything else. You probably already had your DLP solid prior to this.
• 38:31
  Speaker A: We did, but AI throws a monkey wrench into it, right? So the moment. The moment somebody uploads a set of drawings into one of those platforms, that protection is gone. And so that's the approach. So if somebody is planning something nefarious in that building, a set of those construction drawings is highly valuable, Right. So there's a number of security risks there. Of course, the data protection that we want to have for our data, people's Social Security numbers and banking information and all these things. And so that was the approach we're taking now, I would say compared to probably some of the other people you're talking to, I think we're in our infancy with this, right? We're just trying to kind of get our head around it, putting in the tools of people. I'll give you one example of something somebody built. We had this massive spreadsheet, so structural engineering, right? So structural engineering does a lot of heavy math, algebra, calculus, like really, really heavy math. And we've got these spreadsheets that do a lot of that heavy math lifting for you, right? And this one particular one, that's a load, basically a load calculation spreadsheet. It's been around for about 25 years or something like that. And it's constantly breaking. And when it breaks, everybody looks to see who's going to fix it. Everybody throws their guns in the air, right? And so somebody's built a app, essentially an app to replace that spreadsheet, right? So it's like you put in the inputs, the parameters of it. You can either link it to your floor plan, right? It ties back to your floor plan and the load. You put in the height of the floors and the column, the size of the columns and things, and it outputs out your calculations. And that's really critical for a project delivery. Obviously from a project delivery standpoint, kind of doing a QA on the drawings, but also from a liability standpoint, once the project is completed, we could show that we did the calculations or done anything. So that's the kind of example of what we're doing now is how do we take workflows and processes that have been embedded in our culture for years and years and years that have never really been rethought of thought the approach on how to do it. And could some of these tools help us maybe kind of get there? And so that's kind of we're putting in the hands of people, see what they do. And the person who did that, by the way, it was not the first kind of, not the top of the list of people. You're not the most technical person necessarily, you know, anymore. But it's just like with plain language, you and Vibe coding, you could do
• 40:53
  Speaker C: some interesting things, some amazing stuff.
• 40:55
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 40:56
  Speaker C: And it's great when you get a chance. Like you mentioned earlier, it's the way we've always done it, or the other one that I hear a lot is if it's not broke, don't fix it. And for me, if it's the way we've always done it, should we still be doing it that way? And if it's not broke, let's break it and make it better. And these LLMs give us a whole new world or a whole new perspective on some of these things. It's a perfect chance to just try some of this, hopefully in isolation versus by coding in production or on the production system.
• 41:30
  Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah.
• 41:31
  Speaker C: Definitely. Something you got to watch out for.
• 41:33
  Speaker A: So from an IT standpoint, right, that's the challenge for us now. It's like, okay, they're building these things. Where does it exist, who's managing it, who's supporting it, what's the infrastructure behind it? Right. You're just Vibe coding. You're just going to build it on your desktop, right? Yes, yes. So that's a challenge to go software development for three years, especially internal software development. Hey, if you build it, you better be prepared to support it. Or does.
• 42:07
  Speaker C: I'm going to catch you kind of flat footed with a question we like to ask our guests. Unless you've been listening to us. And that is what's something that you predict that we'll be talking about in 18 months that we're not talking about today, or make a prediction about 18 months from now? A year and a half.
• 42:24
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's an interesting one. So I think going back to kind of just our recent conversation, IT support, in the kind of traditional way that we think about it, I think is going away. I think of it more becoming instead of a IT support team, maybe IT'S an automation support team. Right. One of the things we're doing is kind of automating a lot of our everyday tickets. Right. Password resets and mfa. Like a lot of that triage and a lot of our ITIL processes, we're doing as much as we can to automate. So the idea is to free up the teams for a lot of the tasks that they spend so much time on day to day to better enable the business and what they're building and what they're automating. So to the point you were saying before about, okay, yeah, where does it exist? Who supports it? Right. So if I could free up the team from doing 100 tickets and taking a day, let's say it's 100 tickets a day and I could chop that in half and automate half of those, then the fear with any new technology is, oh, people are going to lose their jobs. I don't go by that at all. I. My mindset is I want to automate these tickets and then free you up to go do bigger and better things. So if we have people building things in the business but they don't understand technically how it all is going to work and the infrastructure side of it, that's what I need you to do. Because you understand that. Right? So that's where I feel like it's in 18 months we'll be doing more of that. Right. Like it is shifting more away from kind of traditional support, like to reactive support, more to enablement with the business, working with them to do that. And the examples of working with the team. Right. And like working hand in hand with them, understanding their need. Right. And then working with them to kind of facilitate a lot of the things they're seeing. What can we do to do that? So for me, that's first thing that comes to mind.
• 44:22
  Speaker C: Yeah, those will be some interesting discussions and I hope to see that how on target you are. Well, it's been a great conversation, Demetrios. It's gone by quickly. I don't know if hopefully we apply. As for you, as it for me. Hey, so is at the end of the day when you've secured the environment and empowered people, is there any other final message that you want our listeners at you've been heard.com or the you've been heard community to hear or to share?
• 44:53
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think wherever you are now in the path that you're on, you never know where you're going to be. I mean, again, 30 years ago when I was doing CAD drawings on a dos computer, by the way, I think I would be the director of it, a big engineering firm. So I think stick with your passions and follow what you really are passionate about, and that will kind of lead you to happiness, I think. And that's kind of what, for me, I've always done that, being that person in the office, the most technical person, the go to person. I loved it. I enjoy being that person. And so that kind of led me to this path.
• 45:28
  Speaker C: Yeah. Well, thank you again. Thank you very much for your time and your expertise and sharing all of that with us.
• 45:34
  Speaker A: Yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks, Sam.