385- Why Bad Teams Aren't Always Bad Managers w/Chris Pacifico

Phil Howard: Let's jump right into this, everyone. I'm so excited to have you on the show today, and welcome to the show. Director of IT, infrastructure strategist. Cutting through the noise. to build systems. I would love to know what that noise is. And I love talking about cutting through the noise. systems that actually work in teams that perform, which is really what we're trying to do anyways. Right? And, I had a great podcast with, Dana the other day who is actually in the chat right now. but Chris, please introduce yourself. tell me how you got into it, whether it be your first computer, and then we'll jump right into why a bad attitude can sink any team.

Chris Pacifico: Sure, Yeah. So my name is Chris Pacifico. I've been in it for a better part of way. More years than I'd like to admit. probably. I've been doing this for about thirty odd years. whenever we do new hire orientations. The joke is always I got into it because of lack of dating in high school. not necessarily by choice, but hey, what are you going to do? it was something that interested me, because it was something that was always different, especially at the time. It was it was back in the days of, Tandy color computers, back in the early, early days, pre windows stuff. And it was something was always different. And that's just something just it just pulled me to that because having that same thing over and over and over, it wasn't my cup of tea, but with computers it was always something different. So that's how I got into it.

Phil Howard: It was, I feel for my children. I don't know if you have any children, but I feel for all of them that they didn't get to experience the fun time of when to load windows or, or CD, black backslash or autoexec.bat and all these different things to move memory around and their great memories. I remember trying to get Ultima three to run on my three eighty six and it was it took took actually had to find someone smarter than me. It was Andrew. Paul. He actually became a he became a Navy Seal. So how did it build from there? So Tandy Radio Shack, battery club, Radio Shack was fun. How do you how do you grow up?

Chris Pacifico: my dad was in the military, so I was moving every three years of my life. So, it's kind of. That was the other thing that kind of pulled me to the computer was being able to keep track of friends and things like that, through, the bulletin board systems and, modems and things like that. so, it just it grew from there. I graduated from high school. I always had a pretty good head on my shoulders. Just, mom always said I was smart, but mom say you're smart, but, I decided not to go to college after after high school and went to a technical school for programming. then back in, this was like COBOL, six, JCL, that kind of thing. way back in the day. and, that was something that very quickly I'm like, yeah, I can't do this. Because for me, it was like, a computer program didn't run. And, three o'clock in the morning, you sit upright in bed and go, oh, it's a semicolon. I got to get in. You're banging away at a keyboard again, and next thing you're forty five minutes late for work. So, that kind of transitioned into the hardware end of it because I like taking things apart. So, then that led to infrastructure and that just kind of segued into security. So.

Phil Howard: I wonder who has more fun, the security guys or the data center guys. I think I my guess would be the data center guys have a lot more fun, but the security guys have more meaning in life. Yeah. And then the coders are just, I don't know, lobotomized or something. I have a lot of friends that are coders, so I can say that I'm allowed to say that, they're surfers, though, so they have. That's where they get their meaning in life. so. Yeah. So what what what drew you to the network side? Just power and chords and compute power.

Chris Pacifico: I would say I think it was the network side was always something I, know, back in the early adoption of Cisco and things like that, I, was the one that cut my nose off to spite my face. And it was like, I'm not doing anything with Cisco. And, ten years later, it was like, I should have done something with Cisco because there was a learning curve to catch back up. but I think it was, not so much of a desire to get into the network stuff, but because I like the security stuff so much, it was kind of a necessity, if you will.

Phil Howard: It's okay. You can still not you can still not get into Cisco if you don't want, even though. Yeah, even though I, do work closely with them. Yeah. They, Okay. So the I was having some deep thoughts today about leadership and we're, getting ready to rebrand the, the show and it's going to be a big reveal and it's going to be very, very exciting. I think it's going to be actually pretty deep and meaningful for it. Leadership, if that's possible. Like pretty deep. And the premise is we get to a certain point in our career. And I think at this point in the world, everyone, whether they want to admit it or not, knows that technology is a business force multiplier. And in the back of their head, they know that nothing gets done in the company without it. And they probably, even though we might have nightmares about a ransomware attack or something like that and have sleepless nights around that, they have sleepless nights of what if the IT guy actually quits? Can I just get someone to replace him? Unless they're really that clueless of how important the IT department is. and if you have a really good team, then that shouldn't. If you're running your company well, it shouldn't matter. But what's the point of all this? It's great to get to a certain point in your career where you have a seat at the executive round table, where everyone realizes it is a business force multiplier, but how much greater is it to be heard and understood? So is there anything out there? And we still have to get to bad attitudes on the team and team leadership, but is there anything out there that if you wanted to say to the world, I just want executive management to understand this about it, I really want you to hear this and understand this and digest it. What would it be?

Chris Pacifico: Oh, how long is the show? so the.

Phil Howard: We can go all day. We can take this as long as we want.

Chris Pacifico: I honestly, I think the biggest thing is, it revolves around security. And that seems to be the thing that that's been for me, the the most recent issue, if you will, is, Budgeting and things like that. And I get it. it's, the company it's not a not for profit. They need profit and things like that. but understanding that, the things that, it asks for isn't just about toys. And if somebody sits down and says, hey, I need one point five billion dollars, that's my budget. Why? Because, okay, I get it, don't give me the one point five billion dollars. But if I can sit down and show you a solid use case for it, don't dismiss that. don't dismiss the what the IT guy is saying. You hired them for a reason. you hired him for his expertise. Trust him. If you're willing to pay him the dollars and willing to put a team under him, listen to what he has to say. Don't be as quick to dismiss that. Oh, that that doesn't really happen or. Oh, that that's not for us. I worked for a company where, they had an employee who would complain every month about security training and would complain if he had to change his password or or things like that. And his his response was, we don't build jet engines. We don't build jet airplanes. Nobody's going to hack us. We make corrugated board. We make cardboard boxes. Okay. Three weeks later, there was a ransomware attack, and you're like, it doesn't matter. So you'd kind of. That would be my thing. I would wish for executive level management to actually hear that. What it is we're trying to say, and a have an actual conversation about it and don't, do the I'm going to nod my head and then as you walk away, dismiss what you say.

Phil Howard: Do you think it's just a lack of. I haven't felt the pain enough yet for it to happen? It's kind of like I'm just going to keep eating the way that I eat until I have a heart attack. And then when I have a heart attack, I'm going to start eating healthy.

Chris Pacifico: I think so I think that's part of it, because I think every company is guilty of or every company that does that is guilty of not listening. when there is an attack or there isn't some sort of an event, then they're all ears and, all the money flows in. And I think anybody who's in security kind of has that. Okay, I'm going to take advantage of this now because we're very closely removed to this event. We fixed it and we've moved on and we've fixed it. And now we're going to take advantage of the fact that they're willing to throw money at me. And the further you get away from that event, the less likely they are to give you that money has been my experience. they don't. They forget, and I think sometimes that lack of thought or that lack of being able to keep that memory in there is is a detriment, and it's sometimes feeling that pain point is what it takes. so yeah, I do think that's part of it.

Phil Howard: Or they've been sold so much fear, uncertainty and desire that it's just become an numb to them. Maybe we need to find a way to sell security as this will help us drive revenue. Now you can tell all your customers that, hey, we're secure. You should use us. your data is safe with us. Although it seems like every other day I get an email from some application that says your data and password was leaked in a whatever, you know what I mean? And you're like, oh, maybe I'll go to oh gosh, what was my password? Yeah, let me go to my password vault. And you're like, oh, it was them. Great. okay, so maybe what are some things we could do? Just like, what are some things we could do to, I guess, get them to, listen more other than be on this podcast and then we feed them this podcast. Maybe that's the answer. What are some, horror stories? Let's tell some horror stories then of, I don't know, any ransomware attacks that you've been involved in come in after the fact or helped people not bleed revenue slowly due to ransomware attack.

Chris Pacifico: Yeah. So I've been I've been involved in a couple, we had, one of the companies I worked for, they had a lot of sister companies. They were the umbrella for, probably I think it was thirty. Thirty odd companies. one of them got ransomware. and it was because they had an RDP server sitting on the public web. they had an IT guy, and I, really have to quote that I'm not not the big air quotes guy, but he was the IT guy. found out, where it was, shut the server down. this was a company that, they actually had a private jet. So, a couple of my team jumps on the jet, so you feel like you're, part of Delta squad. We're going out to do this, And, in the process of flying out there, he put another RDP server back out on a public site, and they came right back in the same door. And I'm like, what are you even doing here? So that was it for me. That was a very big selling point to to the executive team going, hey, this is why we need things like training. This is why we need things like, passwords. This is why we need things like single point, single seat administration. This is why we need to not have an ecosystem that's spread all over the world so that I can see things a lot clearer and, kind of start justifying some of the tools that we were asking for. So for me, that was a big, I guess.

Phil Howard: Single seat, administration that's the first time that's been mentioned on this show at least. I mean, I do have an ongoing list of acronyms, and we have the it it leadership, Urban Dictionary, we're herding cats made it into that one, which is good. So, thus why should someone be. Let's describe to executive management. Single seat administration. Go. We should have these, like, I'm just I'm winging it today. Just so you know, if you can't.

Chris Pacifico: No. No worries, no worries. I like winging it. So, for me, single point, single seat administration. It's where I can log into a thing and I can see the bulk of my, world, if you will, and it's, Yeah. And it's, is there a utopia?

Phil Howard: Makes sense.

Chris Pacifico: To me. Yeah. It's there's no one tool to rule them all kind of thing. But if I had the less number of windows I have to open up to see everything I need to see, the better it is.

Phil Howard: It's like, how long can we go without saying single pane of glass as we should have another dictionary book of, things like, things that salespeople say, dog and pony show. Single pane of glass. okay. I guess my point of asking the question is, it seems crazy to me that why would you not have that? It's kind of like, are you telling me that you have multiple tenants for Microsoft? And maybe we even have Google in there, slipped in, mixed in the mix as well. It's more something we don't have.

Chris Pacifico: Yeah. No no no. Yeah. No.

Phil Howard: Tell me it's not that okay okay. Good.

Chris Pacifico: I've worked with companies where they, things like, your network, monitoring tools versus your, three hundred sixty five monitoring tools versus, all the different, tools and things like that that you use. Being able to log into a single one and go, hey, here's, all my stuff.

Phil Howard: Single sign on all your apps. being able to access most of them, as. Okay, Let's just talk about, tech that works. You're talking about teams that thrive. Let's maybe we'll maybe we'll go to the teams first. let's say you're in your organization as far as as building a roadmap and everything like that. How do you what's your methodology for where you start, how you go about it? Is it start with the people? Is it first learn the the layout of the land. What is it?

Chris Pacifico: That's. Honestly, it really, really depends on where I'm going into. I've kind of had both, I've gone into scenarios where there's already an existing team. and I've never been of the mindset in a leadership role where you're going to go, well, someone else built this team. It's not my team. I'm just going to start cutting heads. That makes no sense, because, right out of the gate, you're just building no trust. so go in and look at the lay of the land, and then observe the team, see how the team reacts with what they've got going. look at what their pain points are because I think throughout everybody's leadership, career, there's, nine million different things you can look at, books and podcasts and articles and things like that. And you can get, a million different, ideas of what leadership should be and what a good leader is. And, Jocko Willink was one that I looked at or listened to at one point, and he made a statement, and it was one of those statements where it was, yeah, no, wait, what? where there's no bad teams, there's only bad managers. And I was like, that's a bunch of crap. Wait. That is oh is that no, I. And that was one that kind of sticks with me because it's like, sure, there's bad leaders. Absolutely. And a bad leader will make a good team turn bad quick.

Phil Howard: So say that again. So what did he so what did he say.

Chris Pacifico: Is his philosophy is there's no bad teams, only bad managers, And I don't necessarily subscribe to that because you can have you can be the best manager in the world and you can have a team of, let's say five, just go to a small team and you've got four guys that are willing to bust their hump, and you've got that one guy that you're no matter what. It's just he is that bad apple that's going to quickly take a good team down. And that has nothing to do with the management at that point, your leadership, I mean, you've done everything you can as a good leader. You've got four people to prove it, but you've got that one guy

Phil Howard: I think. Jocko would say, then it's your responsibility as the leader to, cut out the cancer.

Chris Pacifico: Yep. Absolutely.

Phil Howard: I think that's basically what he's saying. and I'm a fan of him for his Brazilian jiu jitsu guys that are made in, like, northern Maine. Yeah, that you have to pay like, five hundred dollars for whatever it is.

Chris Pacifico: But they're nice guys. Yeah.

Phil Howard: Okay, so. What do you do when that happens? How do you know if the the bad attitude has, seeped too much into the team? And what do you do to make up for it once you've cut it? Let's say you've cut out the cancer, but there's still. You're worried that it might grow. There might be some leftover, some leftover parts of this bad attitude that have affected other parts of the body, so to speak. What do you do to fix that?

Chris Pacifico: so far, knock on wood, I have not had that. I've had it. Where? After you cut the cancer out, you sit back and you deal with the aftermath, the initial, wait, he is willing to fire somebody because, good people, especially in, like, times like now where, the economy is a little tough and things like that, people go, oh, crap, they just fired somebody. Are they going to fire me too? And it's reassuring them, for me, it's I've always lived everything I've done, whether it's it whether it's, through my personal life. Praise correct praise. Right. tell them what they're doing right, then explain to them what's wrong and then go back, end on something positive. And I found that if I've treated the team well up to this point. There's really very little to correct. and it's like, hey, this is what was going on. This is what's happened. And we move on. I don't I've never replaced anybody out of the gate. when I've had to cut somebody loose, I've never just instantly replaced them. And, you kind of work with the team and level, set everything, level set the expectations and get get the ship righted, if you will, and then bring somebody back onto the team to, fill that slot.

Phil Howard: I had a very interesting thing happen to me one time. I came into a place that was very antiquated. Let me just paint a picture for you. They had one hundred and forty end users. I was doing some consulting for a nonprofit, because my brother sat on their board and he asked me to help them. So I went in and I was like, okay, yeah, cool. Let's do it. I came in and there was like, we have one hundred and forty end users. I was like, cool. What's your, security posture? And there's Like. I was like, I was like. And he was like, we have a fractional T1. And I was like, oh. And we have like, long story short, here, at the end of the day, it was like twenty eight, thirty six different points of failure. ten, one hundred switches, ten one hundred switches, endless loops. Loops. Like, just like weird loops. Like just being created. it was like something broke here. So we went to Kmart when they were still open. And the Linksys routers sitting in the ceiling above the tiles. And I mean, it was that bad. I mean, it was so bad. The I think I have a picture of the server somewhere, which was like no case with like a little fan pointing at it on the floor. And, it's so I was like, you know, what's your security, Phil, I told you like we have a T1. Like, even if someone wanted to, like, penetrate us, they would have to deal with less than one Meg. it was like. It was like. Like there's. That's our security posture. And so it became very, very clear very quickly. And they spent like eighty thousand dollars a year on Break fix. And it was like band aid approach. It was like everything. It was like a it was like a perfect storm. It was literally the perfect storm. And the attitude was, and like, I got down to it, it was like very clear like that, like the path forward was like crystal clear. And. He looked me right in the eyes. And like Phil, before you speak, do not tell me that we need to re cable this entire facility. And in my head, I was like, you need to dual drop and dual drop. You know, cat six back. Whenever it was, it was a cat. Six had like just been, I was like, we were a step up of Cat five. And in my head I was like, I was like, you need a dual drop cat six. And he was like, don't tell me we're going to be capable, because I can tell you right away operations is not going to happen. They're not going to listen. The board's not the board's not going to have it. The executive management, blah, blah, blah. it was like immediately all negative, negative, negative, negative, negative. And uh, so I was like, okay, this is not going to work. I'm going to have to present to the board around this guy somehow because he's just the IT guy there. I'm not saying he's just the IT guy, but he was like just the IT guy there. So I went and I found like some cables. I had him get a quote. I was like, hey, it's a nonprofit. Can you like kind of, you know, give a discount. We'll, we'll put your name in the paper, something like this and did like a return on investment. It ended up being like sixty thousand dollars to re-enable the place, but they were wasting eighty thousand dollars a year on break fix. That should be like simple math. That's like first grade math. And then it was like, okay, we got to bring in fiber, but they've got a trench a hundred yards and we've got a splice down the street and all these different things. And the phone system was, like, what was it, a North Star or were those North Star ones? It was like a Nortel BCM. I can't remember what it was, but it was basically three microwave ovens in the wall that were big, that needed to go. People couldn't program, voice. It was literally every aspect of the entire, every single aspect. It was like, the server room was really just a closet with a mop bucket. And I was like, let's move this upstairs where there's air conditioning and and, at the end of the day, we got to the presentation in front of the board, and it was literally like, it should have been like out of a Caddyshack or something, like an old brown room with, like, a boardroom table and old people sitting around it. And at the end, it was like old Man Marley was like, Phil, I only have one question for you after I was it was like simple numbers. It was like number slide number. Slide was like what you paid last year, what you're going to pay this year. The problem, the solution. It was like the simplest like, he's like, well, I only have one question for you. I felt like I was talking to like, like an older Warren Buffett or like some sidekick of Warren Buffett. He was like. And my question is, why would we not do this? I was like, you said it. I was like, yeah, I had to wait for you to say it. I was like, if I said it, you'd be skeptical. But if you say it, it's true. There's absolutely no reason why you would not do this. That was it. And then that IT guy. But here's the okay, so long story short, here's what's weird. That really happened, right? Because you're talking about coming in and cutting out the old people. So that guy like just like gone with the wind, right. Like this IT guy. Right. Redid everything, and his counterpart that was below him stepped into his role. And I think just literally hid in the server closet and is to there there to this day. No, I think they have continued to not progress. And the one thing that could not be done was the server with the fan on it. And the reason why is it was so old, it had some kind of like soldered thing onto the mother, like onto the like the chip, like some motherboard or something. It had like some physical piece of the equipment that was preventing data from being migrated. Like, I don't know if you can think of that. You've been around you've been around longer than me. But it was like something that was like, no, it's impossible to migrate this. And all of the customer data lives on there. And I was just like, well, I'm not doing that, that I've done it. I'm goodbye.

Chris Pacifico: That's I've only I've seen like the keys, like the USB key or the USB, fobs that need to be in servers and you know, to for activation keys and licenses and things like that. But I've never seen anything soldered to a board. That's nuts.

Phil Howard: Yeah. It was like, you can't move this because yeah, some odd, some crazy thing. we have some good comments here from Dana. Removing the underperformer or poor behavior employee demonstrates to the others a standard of performance and or professionalism that is expected on the team. Usually the others on the team are glad to see the change. Yes, like if you have no standards, it's like what do you stand for if you don't have any values or standards, your team. So the okay, so so then how do we build the good team and how do we build tech that works. What does that mean tech that works to you. Explain that to me.

Chris Pacifico: The where I'm at right now is a really good example. And I went in there young team. and the skill sets are everything from I've, I used to be an inventory clerk and now I'm an it to I think their, their their highest level guy is he knows their network and he knows some networking stuff, but he would be a junior network guy. So I went in there and there's a it's a this is a six man team. So um, for me going in there and like I said.

Phil Howard: How many end users how many end users was six people? Seven fifty oh, okay. You're right at the cusp. What we found, and I only say that because we've surveyed like a lot of people that have on this podcast. And what we find is that the average ratio of end user to it employee is about one hundred to one. Yep.

Chris Pacifico: Yep. That's that's honestly that's the that's about the thumbnail that I've always used is about one hundred to one.

Phil Howard: You're going to get another one. So so you're due for a new one. For another one.

Chris Pacifico: I'm that close. It's the first about the first month, I spent getting my arms wrapped around their environment, which was very similar to what you said, not quite as bad as, ten, one hundred switches and things like that. But there was a lot of consumer grade, equipment in there for, like, APS and, and, eBay bought, switches and things like that. But I'm like, okay, cool. you don't want to go in and start changing the world. things like, security training was non-existent. things like that. They're, focused on what the business model is, which it's centered around HIPAA and stuff like that. So, we worked with these guys and I looked at them and it's like, okay, so these guys don't know me. And it was a very eclectic team that wasn't a team. It was six individuals doing six individual things. So trying to find that that rallying cause it's like, what's this one thing that that we can all get behind. So it took a hot minute, but what it ended up being, ironically, was, a core value for me, and it is that it's we help customers, and the customer does not necessarily have to be an outside entity that pays you. It's this company, all the people outside of it. They're the customers. Help the customer. And at first it was like, you know, I got a lot of pushback. Well, you know, end users are dumb. Well, okay. Irrelevant. it's that may be true, and I think everybody in it has said end users, and they've yeah, it's been a lot of disdain when they say it and it's a thing, But I started giving them examples for them that were relevant to them as to why these questions from the end users were important and why they need to be treated as customers. And when I started individualizing the examples, then all of a sudden it was like, oh, one guy was having problems with, he was going through a divorce. And I said, how would you feel if you called your lawyer? And he was supposed to get back with you on this issue, that that may or may not cost you a lot of money in alimony or child support, or you may have to give up the house. And he didn't get back to you for a week. Well, I wouldn't like that. That's a big issue for you. For me? It makes no difference because I don't live in your house. Well, yeah, I said, look at it that way. It's a big issue. That's their house, and that kind of thing. And when they when you started giving them examples that they could actually, they could understand, the team started growing and it was like, oh, and you start showing them things that teach them, don't tell them.

Phil Howard: Give me another example. I gotta hear some of these examples of why we should care about end users.

Chris Pacifico: One of the sorry, I was going to say, I feel that.

Phil Howard: When I talk to the engineers, the engineers are like the losers. Yeah. And pretty much.

Chris Pacifico: Replace end user and try again.

Phil Howard: you're an end user to an engineer.

Chris Pacifico: In fact, that is a fact. I've talked to a few of those.

Phil Howard: Where's my laptop?

Chris Pacifico: Yeah. He's dumb. So. But obviously one of them was, His wife was pregnant. And I said, you get a call. Your wife, your wife had went into labor, and, they had to redirect her to a different hospital. So you're trying to find what hospital? You're going to get mad if you don't get that answer quick, right? Yeah. I said you got a sales guy who's got a big giant deal on the line. He needs, his email fixed so he can get to the email. That's huge for him. That's his baby. He goes. I never thought about it that way. It's like, there you go. Or, honestly, biggest project. This is one of the biggest projects they had to do. And I got pushback from everybody on the team, I need you to clean up Active Directory, and anybody who's been in it and walked into a different company has had to deal with at some point. Active directory is a gigantic, just absolute disaster. And, so I said we need to clean up Active Directory. Well, why? Well, because when you clean it up and you go through all the reasons, it works better, you can see things better and the whole time, blah, blah, blah. I'm like seven hundred and fifty users. You divide this out, the team, you're good to go. no time at all. So it took him. Took him a week and a half. And afterwards they started doing things like go into teams and look at the org chart, and they can see who's manager is who. You know John Doe over here, his manager is Jane Doe. And I can get Ahold of him through. All this stuff is great. We have all this data at our hands. I'm like.

Phil Howard: How did you guys clean it up? How did you guys clean it up? I gotta know.

Chris Pacifico: Honestly, that was a it was a heavy lift and shift. It was one on one took. Got a list from, HR. Who's the real people that are still here? Who are the people that are not here? and got all their information from HR and literally went through the Active Directory. I cleaned it out, simple stuff like, users that haven't logged in in thirty days, computers haven't logged in in thirty days, you know, disabled those, you know, deactivated those, got rid of all those kind of accounts and sifted out all the service accounts and things like that, and then divided up the actual users and off they went. They one by one, they they just cleaned them up.

Phil Howard: Was there any savings there?

Chris Pacifico: in the end, yes, because for them they have to contact people a lot and a lot of people are not in office. So having to reach out and contact these people, it's a time savings for them. Yes.

Phil Howard: Um.

Chris Pacifico: So honestly, ticket times for for was a good example. You know, ticket time was usually a day and a half. Two days to close. Now they've got it in less than a couple hours.

Phil Howard: Okay. So. They were all kind of like a baseball team at the beginning. It's like baseball's like a team sport played by individuals. That's what you had. That's what you had at the beginning. Now you have more of a football team.

Chris Pacifico: Uh, closer to rugby, but. Yeah.

Phil Howard: So what? okay. So that's like. Okay, so systems at work, what else? What was the next thing?

Chris Pacifico: Oh, yeah. Sorry. It's been a long day.

Phil Howard: I mean, cleaning up Active Directory. Look, technology that works. When I hear that saying, this is what I. This is what I think. I think, who cares about all the shiny bells and whistles that people are trying to sell me every day? I understand that AI is important, and everyone thinks it's this new thing that's going to take over and everything, but I want to deliver something that helps us do our job better or helps other people. The rehab medical accomplished their mission. Not just do something just because, not just forklift or like, if we're going to move to the cloud, why are we moving to the cloud? If we're going to do this, why are we doing it? That's what I think. When you say technology that works like don't do something just because.

Chris Pacifico: Correct. And the one of the biggest things that we as a, team did, it was this was a I called this a team building exercise. There's a lot of tools that it guys, use because we try stuff, whether, ChatGPT first comes out or, this new little widget that Microsoft created or a thing, a bell that that Google has and, and stuff like that. And we try it and it works and that's good. And you throw it away or whatever. And hey, this is amazing. one of the great examples for me personally was Microsoft to do. I was notorious for, you and I have a conversation. You say, hey, Chris, give me a call next week and let me know what, who your top pick six is going to be in the next sports book. Sure. No problem. And I'll remember that. No problem. And two days later, I go, who did I have to call? And it never would remember all of a sudden, bring in Microsoft to do. Now I've got this thing that I can put my to do lists on and it's, on my phone. It's on my computer. They sync together. so it made it great for me, right. Never forget off we go now. And after that, I stopped missing deadlines. I stopped forgetting things, stuff like that. I stopped having nine thousand post-it notes when I got to to rehab. There was a lot of people and post-it notes everywhere and things like that. And you start, for me, kind of walk around to the different groups and see what they're doing. You know, what they're working. What kind of technology can I help you implement? That was huge for a lot of the different groups in there. I showed them Microsoft to do, and they were like, wait, I can actually use that and go between my team? Yeah, show them how to do it. And all of a sudden it's like, whoa, this is amazing. And that for them was it was a time savings. It was it eliminated the need for a lot of these, these one off meetings that they were having. so just that simple free tool worked great. and it was it's things like that. It's showing users ways to, to make better use of their time, be more efficient, be more productive. And it's, they don't know what they don't know. So you can't expect a user to, to call you up and say, hey, I know Excel has this thing that I can do. And they don't know that. But if you look at what they do and you watch what they do and you observe their job and you go, hey, you do this a lot. Power automate is huge. I showed one of the groups how to power automate email flow. And it it separates it. It sends it out to where it needs to go. So as opposed to one email hitting thirteen people's mailboxes and then it gets divvied up, now it gets divvied up through flow, and it's eliminated the amount of emails in their mailbox that they have to sift through. And it makes them more productive. So it's just simple things like that. I mean, it doesn't even have to be anything, you know, monumental, just little things like that. For me. It's making the technology work for you, but helping the users in a way that they might not know that they need help.

Phil Howard: You're making me even more of a Microsoft fanboy than I am already. What? What else? More Microsoft, more Microsoft. What do we have next?

Chris Pacifico: I can't say that I drank the Microsoft Kool-Aid. But the last ignite I went to, I started looking at all their tools. And I was talking to one of the guys there, and he started showing me some stuff. And you go, oh, that is so cool. And, then all of a sudden, yeah, I'm like, oh, I just drank the Kool-Aid. Dang. So yeah, there's a lot of the tools.

Phil Howard: I need a guy for all of our, stuff. Because the one thing we've got all kinds of like, reports all over the place for the podcast, and we want to really kind of grow it from we want like social media reports and then we want, oh, what happened on LinkedIn here and there and who did this and what reps did that. We all want it on one single pane of glass. Yeah. The. So our little podcast is going to migrate to E5 licensing soon. so yeah. And probably hopefully delete a bunch of other senseless stuff that we're paying for and don't need now, right now Microsoft to do have never would have never thought of that. Yeah.

Chris Pacifico: And honestly, my wife even uses it and she hates technology.

Phil Howard: Oh, man. This is, I wonder how my kids can do this. How else? What else can I do? How can we benefit Phil today? as far as technology being a business growth, a business force multiplier and getting away from the the dreaded cost center pigeonholing of it. Any any tips or any ideas there or you've stuck in the same place. Many people are still trying to fight the cost center mentality when we've got, Jeff Bezos out there that, was a super nerd in his house for a while, and now he's like this alpha male guy. and that should be enough. That should be enough of convincing people that technology is a business force multiplier. Do not see him like, what I mean? It's like, what do we. what is it? do you struggle with the same thing everyone else does, the cost center thing and getting an extra one or two percent. And I know Dana has some comments on that one, but which is.

Chris Pacifico: No, I honestly, I do struggle with that one, but I struggle because it's a dichotomy for me. The company I came from, they were a unicorn, they had an IT department that, let's face it, most IT departments, their money sucks, right? We spend money, but we don't make money. and they were unique in that their IT department actually made money. they, they had an arm that, that actually brought money in. So it was fantastic. then you move over to company, like rehab. they're they're the driving force behind them or they're, they're claiming this business is that they leverage technology. So mobility devices that they get out to the people that need it, they can get it out in, one third the time of, of any of their competitors. But they do that by leveraging technology. It's fantastic. Right?

Phil Howard: Okay.

Chris Pacifico: The dichotomy is, that I don't subscribe to bleeding edge technology, but cutting edge technology, especially where you're at, let's do this. And the struggles that I have is getting management to see that, because their status quo right now and they unfortunately like to listen to the buzzwords, AI, we need to leverage AI. Cool. Next thing they're throwing AI at everything. And I'm like, time out. You're throwing AI everything. But, guardrails, keeping data protected, blah, blah, blah, all the security buzzwords there and, well, why do we have to do that? Okay. Cool. This is why it's. You can't. Ready. Fire! Aim! so I do have those challenges where they don't necessarily want to spend the money, where they need to spend the money, but they want to use the tool. It's like you can't have the shiny tool and not have the the protective gear to use said shiny tool.

Phil Howard: We want to deliver wheelchairs faster. And we want to sell more wheelchairs. Yep. Yeah, we want to sell more wheelchairs faster. And we want to deliver them faster than anyone else. There's got to be a technology that the. There's got to be a department that you sit down with, that you put, Hey, start using Microsoft Notepad and look, look how much faster you're going to sell these wheelchairs. You're not going to forget that one guy. no. But in all seriousness, I. believe that there's some IT guys out there, just due to their level of curiosity and understanding of technology that could, step in and really help marketing and sales do a better job.

Chris Pacifico: Yeah, I totally agree. If as long as I think I would agree with the caveat that as long as they're willing to listen because it's that, bring a horse to water, don't can't make a drink kind of thing, you can show somebody the greatest thing in the world, but if they're not willing to listen to it. You're kind of,

Phil Howard: Do you guys have a call center?

Chris Pacifico: Yes.

Phil Howard: How many people sit in the call center? Actually I'm on. You know, I just I clicked contact on your website right now. There's a guy with a headset on, so I know you have a contact center.

Chris Pacifico: We have a call center. We've got about, there's about thirty people on the call center.

Phil Howard: So I'm on your website right now. do you guys close at the end of day?

Chris Pacifico: Yes.

Phil Howard: We're going to make your company money right now live on this podcast. We're gonna do it right now. Do people ever want to buy wheelchairs after hours? How do they do that?

Chris Pacifico: They actually know, because everything is through Medicare, wholesale insurance and things like that. Correct. So they the our patients, they're all it's all done through insurance and things like that. I can tell you that to kind of backtrack for one second when you were talking about finding a way to for it to become less of a call center. one of the biggest challenges is that you have is, the paperwork that has to be filled out to, get a chair, to get any kind of a mobility device. and you have to fill out the paperwork and it gets submitted to the government or gets submitted to insurance. They deny it. Off you go. it's like building a house. You got your inspector. Inspector inspects it, and then he says, nope, you have to fix this. So paperwork gets sent back. Then we fill it out again. Get sent back out. So leveraging AI, I can have this paperwork. AI looks at it and says, hey, there's a ninety eight percent probability that the way you have this filled out, it's going to go through no problem. Or it comes back and says there's an eighty percent chance. So you go, oh crap. And then it'll go, these are the sections that are causing you challenges.

Phil Howard: Who's filling out the paperwork? The customer or the sales rep for the customer or something like this. Or what's the scenario?

Chris Pacifico: Usually fills out the paperwork based off of what a physician tells them. And, after evaluating the customers. It's a big, lengthy process, but there's there's all the paperwork that needs to be filled out. And if where it gets, gets a little sketchy is if, I'm finding a mobility device for you and yours requires, a specific type of, seat with a specific type of device that to control it. It's not just a standard wheelchair. And I go, okay, cool. You got this, this, this, and this is why you need it. The. But your condition isn't conducive to needing that seat. But the physician is saying that you are. So the AI will look at it and go, hey, this this condition he's got, they don't allow this seat. This needs to change. And then you can go, hey, physician, is this what you meant? You know, like, oh crap, that's not it. They can change what they got to change. So, that's a that's a massively oversimplified example. But that's, the way that we're, using AI to to expedite the approval process so that when it gets to Medicare Medicaid, there's less likely that they're going to push it back.

Phil Howard: Yeah. I was thinking an agent like an AI automated agent of some sort that's asking the questions like, what's your name? What's this? Type this in or scan this sheet and we'll fill it all in for you. And then yeah, there's got to be some serious time savings there. Yeah.

Chris Pacifico: And that honestly, we're in the process of implementing that with our current, phone, company, but it's because of the amount of PII that gets attached to that. there's, a lot of things that have to be put in place first. if the recordings, if the calls, because the calls are recorded where the, where the recordings reside and, all the, rules and regulations behind all that. So it is that's an in-process piece for sure, so that all the they can get the customer taken care of or the patient taken care of quicker, getting them to the right department, whether it's, I need technical support or I need a a new chair or I need a new evaluation. those kind of things. So AI is being leveraged in that regard, but it's getting that set up. and that's something that we're just now getting started with. But yeah, that's another cost savings.

Phil Howard: Yeah I'm an ex telecom guy, so I work with a lot of the content. I understand the even HIPAA compliant data centers and stuff like that. And back in the day it used to just be like, nope, we can't have voicemail to email. That's HIPAA compliance, violation or something. We're well beyond voicemail to email now. It's like a whole nother, just a whole nother thing. outstanding. So regardless, there's ways that it can get involved to help increase sales or customer acquisition, I guess. Approval. And that would. Yeah, AI, I can see definitely being a help there. Any like how are you guys doing that building your own agents or do you guys plan on doing that? I'm just curious That's actually leveraging a vendor to build it.

Chris Pacifico: Yeah, we've got a third party company. And then with our own it's internal. It's, you know, building our own AI center in Azure.

Phil Howard: Okay. Super cool. that is what I have for you today, other than I'm leaving up to last word to you, and maybe we can go back. Let's just come full circle back to the beginning. If there was something that you would want the executive roundtable to hear loud and clear. And really embrace, what would that be? Other than the secure other than. Hey, guys, we could get hacked and would take the entire company down. We would no longer be the fastest wheelchair delivery company. We would be the slowest. Okay. And, yeah, we'd be done. So other than the company going completely out of business, and I don't think you're taking this seriously enough, what's, the other message?

Chris Pacifico: I honestly, I think not. It's. I wish that more executive companies, mine included, would not look at it as the redheaded stepchild. We're not the little gnomes sitting under the stairs, running around with, a turkey leg in her hand, kind of, grunting and groaning and it's, and it's it's kind of how a lot of them it's like we're it we're just like, you know, you know little gremlins. it's we had a, I had a conversation with in our last executive meeting about, sending my guys to conferences. throughout the course of my career, I've gone to things like Blackhat and Ignite and, and, big events like that. And, some companies view the one I'm currently at views them as those are places where people go to play around. No. You guys want to be on the cutting edge of technology. That's where we go to learn about it before it becomes mainstream. Let me send them, give me the budget for that, and give me the budget to to keep my guys just as much in the know as you want your sales guys. That would be the biggest thing I'd want my executive team to hear.

Phil Howard: All right. One suggestion. Just an idea. Sure. What about, business education for it?

Chris Pacifico: Oh.

Phil Howard: and I'm thinking that is because one of the biggest kind of reasons why guys are still hiding out the red headed gnome with a turkey leg under the. The reason why is because I don't know how many of your team members, if you asked them, what is EBITDA stand for and what's gross margin and or any of these things, would they be able to answer that question?

Chris Pacifico: That's, for as long as I've been putting thought to to how to make my team better, that is something that has never crossed my mind. And that is that's a fantastic example. Fantastic idea.

Phil Howard: It fell upon me by mistake because I was the creative writing loser that worked at Starbucks when I got out of college, and that was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because when. How long ago was that? Two thousand. Two thousand. Two thousand and one. So two thousand and one. So twenty four years ago, when they were like the heyday and it still smelled like coffee when you went in there and it wasn't like just a glorified McDonald's and it was still Starbucks and it was everyone knew everyone's name and everything in the town. It was super awesome. They sent the store managers and the assistant store managers to Franklin Covey classes to business classes. They taught us how to read a PNL, what flow through profit was gross margin. All of these different things. Yes. To to Dana's point, soft skills and the I think what you referred to as the, sandwich technique earlier, which is start with praise, then deliver the then deliver the feedback and then end with praise. There's some other bad words that we use to describe that sandwich as well. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. Well, the what wine explaining and coaching and meets expectations and gold standards and I'll never forget Howard Schultz saying something. What was it. it's like whatever seek, discover, respond or something like that. Why? What's wrong with me? Why am I forgetting this anyways? the business aspect of it, when I left and I got recruited by a Cisco startup, and that's how I got into technology, I was in, like, people were like, telling me, don't go. It's like a fishing net approach. They're just like grabbing everyone. It's a it's a churn and burn, Cisco. It's like they're gonna hire all these people and like, only like five percent of them make it. That was correct. But I was one of the five percent that made it. And the reason why was when I looked at all the new hires in that room, and a lot of them were out of college and I was not. I had been out of college for, I don't know, four years, and I had had some business experience, and I had all that training from running a one point two million dollar coffee shop and training people and firing people and, and doing counts at the end of the night and managing, whatever gross margin, cost of goods and controllable costs and non-controllable costs and, CapEx, opex, all that type of stuff. I was able actually to speak with business owners in a way that they understood. And then I could say to them, do you know what a VPN is? And they're like, no. Well, here's this. Let me ask you this. Would it be beneficial for you to be at home and be able to access your computer from home? you're like, yeah, that'd be awesome. Like, okay, do you have a lot of files that are very important? Have you ever lost them? Like, yeah. Have you ever thought of backing up your files off site? And they're like, you can do that. You know, it's like, but then you can say, like, what would that cost you? What would it cost you to be able to do this? And then you can start putting things together, because now I know you look at a PNL every month, and I know you have a certain amount of flow through, and I know that you're managing these different things in labor, and I know that your average hourly rate is probably seventeen fifty an hour. And if you could shave back this, then, look, all of this will be delivered to you on a silver platter by a Cisco two thousand eight hundred series. I add that we're going to bolt to your wall in the back of your room and deliver a T1 to it with two blackberries and a bed server and all this other stuff. You know what I was like? Oh, that sounds great. anyways, the point is, is the more that technology guys can link and speak the language of business, I think, that education would be like the Bezos link. That's like the nerd that took technology and started using technology to do things faster and more efficient and everything. And I think that, that's kind of like the goal is like, how do we educate? How do we, it's not like us versus them. It's like, how do we bridge the gap? How do we get the business knowledge on the IT side, and how do we get the IT side knowledge to the to the C-suite? And if they don't want to get it, then then move aside because it's going to take over because we're going to have both the business knowledge and the technology knowledge. Yeah. so yeah, we want to go to Blackhat and can you give us some? And the reason why you should send us to Blackhat is because they're going to do your teaches business at the same time. Maybe that's how we sell the black hat thing.

Chris Pacifico: Yeah. That's actually that's a that's a really good idea. It's like got my brain going now.

Phil Howard: So the more that our if we do have guys that are gnomes. If said gnome all of a sudden is like, hey, Mr. Sea level. there's all this other thing today. What's really keeping you up at night? What's your biggest, single, biggest problem, frustration or concern? It's like, well, it's, I don't know. It's the, the stupid paperwork that they make us apply for the the wheelchair. Oh, yeah. Well, hey, I saw this the other day, and we can we can knock that out for you now. I love you. You make sense? Yeah. You're talking business. it's been a pleasure having you on the show and the the. I guess the the last thing is we got to get away from the gnome to get away from the gnome thing. My father in law's, worked at ConAgra, and that is a massive, massive, massive company. And he's like, we used to look at the IT guys. We used to be like, don't get on the elevator with him alone. Like, we're not there anymore. He's like, we used to have these big ledgers we'd have to fill in by hand. And I remember, like, all of a sudden we got a computer and it was like when it. When it worked, we'd have to call this like it guy. And I felt like he came out of, like, a cave or something, and we'd be like, don't get on the elevator alone with him. No, those days are gone. True, true. All right. okay. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. This is a lot of fun.

Chris Pacifico: I have absolutely enjoyed this immensely. I've been looking forward to this. It's been fantastic.