387- Why IT Should Own Business Process Mapping

Phil Howard:  So makes everyone shiver. So Dan shivers. you have been at the same company for seventeen years. How's that?

Dan Chivers: Well, it's been great. obviously I'm still here,

Phil Howard: At least in post two thousand. So it was post. You've been there since past Y2K?

Dan Chivers: Yeah, for sure. Two thousand and eight is when I started. and rec has been an amazing, crazy, interesting place to work. we actually purify silicon, so we'll take a raw material. it's usually about ninety eight, ninety nine percent pure silicon, and we'll process it. break it down into a gas, add molecules to it to purify it, turn it into what's called silane for. And, that's the purest form of silicon. And then we would reconstitute it into a solid again. So back into silicon. And our products are, nine nines pure, five nines pure. so The five nines pure goes into solar panels. and then the nine nines goes into, like, electronic chips and Ram chips and things like that. So it's been super interesting. It's always fun in manufacturing to to see something get made, and then also the intensity of the technology used by the chemists and the mechanical engineers, it's just absolutely mind boggling that somebody was able to pull all of it together. So I've enjoyed it.

Phil Howard: To me it's amazing. Any company that has more than. Fifty employees I don't know why I drew the line at fifty. I mean, even thirty is difficult. The fact that there's companies that manufacture things and make things and all work together and and continue to do things is is amazing to me.

Dan Chivers: Yeah. Absolutely.

Phil Howard: when you think about just how hard it is to even run a podcast So I think and we're just a podcast. What about someone that actually makes something like silicone? it actually is quite amazing that humans can accomplish something in what would be a lifetime or two lifetimes. It amazes me what we do. Absolutely. The American dream. So here's the you're coming in a very special time where the the podcast is going through a change or morph. And that was we were dissecting popular IT nerds for a very long time because we figured years ago, let's just talk with people that make everything happen in the company. And, well, how should we name this show? Well, let's see, we're going to talk with these people that make it all happen. So there they were. IT nerds probably at some point. But they're popular because they can talk to people. So let's dissect them. And and people got the wrong idea. Like we're just going around like we're reporting on it, people and dissecting them when we're actually a lot more than that. So but here's what we found. Right after three hundred and eighty episodes and everyone that's, been past guests and have heard this recently, everything and every IT guy out there in the world listening right now if you listen. Here's what we figured out after talking with hundreds and hundreds of IT leaders. Surprise, surprise words in nothing gets done in any company without it touching it. Big surprise. Right? Yeah. And what we found is that after years of work in it and back in the day, it was printer cables and things like that, and then it became a real job. And we kind of crawled out of the server room where people used to slide pizzas under the door to us. And now we have an actual executive seat. We found that it's nice to have a seat at the executive round table, but how much nicer would it be to be heard? Any thoughts?

Dan Chivers: Absolutely, I mean, even some organizations still don't even have a seat at the table. But to be at the table, it's not enough, right? It needs to be. We need to be able to be heard because there's a lot of value that technology brings. And I think sometimes, companies, they'll see it as this group that just wants to be in the middle of everything, and that they want to try to take over and they want to change it and they just want to they just want to keep it their own, But the reality is if they run with it and they build whatever, then at some point they realize that it gets out of control. And technology wise, it's maybe not built in a way that's sustainable. that it's not able to grow or it's already growing the wrong way and it needs to be rooted out, restarted. So being heard like, well, we could raise our hands and say, this is a risk, we need to do this right? And then we can actually build on it and make it better. And it can it can benefit the company as opposed to, can you come fix it? I busted it,

Phil Howard: Well, you've had the. Benefit or you've had the benefit of being at the same company for the last seventeen years. So a lot has happened. I'm at seventeen years ago, minus I gotta do math twenty five minus seventeen. That's, I mean, it's almost two decades, right? What is that, two thousand? What did you say? You came there in two thousand and eight. So you couldn't even do that math? two thousand and eight, was the iPhone out yet?

Dan Chivers: Not quite.

Phil Howard: Yes, it was close. I mean, it was it was it were you guys doing. Did you have BlackBerry exchange servers or was there a Bez back then? Like, it was. So you have seen, One of the problems that was brought up, was brought up in the day is like sometimes it if we explain too much to technology and we have too much of maybe, they heard too much that they're thinking, now I know it, I know enough, I don't need to actually go to it for things. There's there's that issue as well. But being at the same company for seventeen years, where have you seen that it has been heard or not been heard and where has it, Benefited or not benefited the company?

Dan Chivers: So, I think that when I came in, we were actually building a ultimately a two billion dollar facility when we got finished. So it was like crazy people running around, contractors all over the place, So people were just installing stuff, and I didn't really necessarily see, like, this, this grand master plan. Right. Well, after the dust had settled and we had this new facility and we were making money, there was a lot of disjointed in systems and it was getting a real bad rap for, of course, not delivering for thirty five, forty five laptops a day, to contractors and making sure there's some form of secure. And I mean, it was madness, installing.

Phil Howard: What year was this? What year was that?

Dan Chivers: Two thousand and eight

Phil Howard: I think you made a good point. You made a good point when you said we didn't see the Grand Master plan. So that was like disconnect number one.

Dan Chivers: Yeah.

Phil Howard: So what was the grand master plan that you didn't know? I'm just curious.

Dan Chivers: Well, in a manufacturing facility, we and especially our manufacturing facility, we have a lot of, hazardous items, so if the process goes off the rails, it can be catastrophic, like Hazardous waste. And so this control system, of course, is very sensitive. and so we've been told at the beginning it's not involved. But this control system was new. They just come off of Provox, which is kind of like a mainframe. Super proprietary uses coax cable for communications. I mean, ancient and they were moving into a new system. It's a Yokogawa system, and it's using server based systems. It's using network gear, regular IT, network gear. And these controls guys, they don't know how to use it. So so really when I first came in the role was really business. You just need to make sure business can work. You got wireless? Whatever. but it always just kind of keeps morphing and it always keeps changing. the controls guys have what they want. They have this, this system, but now they want to get to it remotely, or they want to access it from their desk. Right. Or they want to access it from home. And they're like, hey, it you need to make this happen. We're like, well, how does this thing even work? So this master plan is, do I want it to be accessible, remotely. I've got a controls guy talking to me. But from a business standpoint, is anybody saying that's a bad idea? Time out. Right. so, this master plan is they knew that they wanted to build a facility and they knew they wanted to make silicon, and they did it. Right. The IT deliverable for that is like little. They just took whatever the contractor wanted, the IP spaces that they wanted. Then as we go to to backfill into that and try to connect them together and make them become more available, more secure, remotely accessible, we start running into landmines all over the place because they have shared IP spaces. People are controls. Guys are just plugging in PLC networks into a switch so they can backhaul it, and then all of a sudden their shared IPS and things start.

Phil Howard: Do they not know this problem or are they just thinking I can plug in here.

Dan Chivers: Well they're like why wouldn't it work? And they're right. It should technically work, right if you planned it well. so this master plan that I was talking about is we weren't building towards something. We were just surviving. We were just building the immediate requirement. So now back to your question. if you fast forward and you say, okay, let's say, we have a seat at the table and we're actually talking. Hey, we want to build this two billion dollar facility. Yeah. And what IT requirements do you see? And if we were able to at least be there, but second, be able to say here's the IP spaces we're going to use. Here's the firewall, the equipment. This is everything that we're going to use. And the reason why we're going to use it this way is because it's going to allow us to be flexible. We're going to be able to access it remotely. We're going to be able to, patch it. We're going to be able to, monitor it. We're going to be able to capture data. We're going to be able to move that data out of manufacturing and into business, and we're going to be able to consolidate it and create reporting that nobody even cared. it wasn't important. And even then, after building the facility.

Phil Howard: Or if they had known that and had listened before, would they have cared? Do you think?

Dan Chivers: That's a great question. Probably not.

Phil Howard: They wouldn't have cared about reporting. They wouldn't have cared about security.

Dan Chivers: Well, so some of the.

Phil Howard: You're saying the time was different. The time. The time was different.

Dan Chivers: Yeah, yeah. But some of the executives said after after a while, they said, we said we're going to make silicon. But we never really thought about how are we going to sell it, what package is it going to go into? Which is a little silly, right, to have gotten so far down the road, spent so much money and not be prepared for the full business line, the whole process,

Phil Howard: So that's one of the things that I think there's not this like us, we need to get rid of this kind of like us versus them like this. It versus a different it needs to be like one team, right? Yeah. And part of that is you recognizing that those were business decision problems. Whereas a lot of times when businesses are growing, it's kind of like. It's like, just go run. Like, just run and make it happen. When maybe some better business foresight would be a good thing, or allow for faster scaling or allow for, not a plateau years down the line. I don't know, but the fact that you just said all those things which were good business insights, and the fact that they came from it says something from a, from the standpoint of, good integrators in a, in a business. And every business needs a good integrator.

Dan Chivers: Yeah. Well, I think that's one of the benefits that it has is the visibility we have. We literally see all of it. Technically. We see the entire business. We see how salespeople sale things, right? How what systems they use.

Phil Howard: Please tell me a story about that, please.

Dan Chivers: Well, I.

Phil Howard: Mean, how can you sell? How can you more sell something or sell something? I know, well.

Dan Chivers: and in our market, the market that I'm in now, I mean, it's it's very niche, right? I mean, there's very small set of customers. And so, the requirement for a salesperson to have data available or be able to have like an online form to make these orders is, is not critical because there's not that much. They they make one sell and it's a million dollar contract. Millions and millions of dollars. Right. Okay. So the efficiency of a salesperson is not really important because it's so small that they can spend hours putting the order in or making one hundred phone calls. But the reality is, from an IT standpoint, we can say you are incredibly inefficient and we could improve.

Phil Howard: This.

Dan Chivers: If we were to do these five things right. And as you can.

Phil Howard: Imagine, Enlightening me about how this is everywhere. All right, so there's been many examples of where it has gotten into like an operational process and been able to fix something and been like, why are you doing it this way? That's kind of stupid. We could do it this way and be that more efficient and easy and flexible, But it needs to have a seat at that table and be listened to. Yes. So I guess the question is, it's not that it's not. It's not really like that anyone was doing anything wrong. It's not like you didn't say anything bad about the team or anything. What we're saying is, is I guess it's more about it here in this, in this particular situation. It is. What did you say or what what were you able to do to get them to listen? Did you have to prove something? Did you have to kind of like, fight a little bit and say, hey, let me show you. Or did you think about this? What was it? What was it that got them to eventually say? Okay.

Dan Chivers: Yeah, it was kind of a long road, but part of it is we had to first understand their process inside and out. And then once we understood that, it made it easier for us to be able to talk with them and help attach what we were talking about to what it is that they, understand. And second, we had to run a couple of models and then show them, and then they would pick it apart, which is fine, to get that feedback. but the hardest part that we had with that was trying to get around the fact that they don't like it to be different. And so they, they couldn't understand this need that they had to change it. It had to take the process of Nar becoming unavailable for them to recognize that something must happen. So they had to get into a pinch where they had to make a decision, and then it became a whole lot easier.

Phil Howard: So step one listen to people. Sure. Let's break this down to the triple. The triple. The three steps. Listen to people get in. Understand how they do their work. Listen to them. See what they do. Number two. I guess see where it can not be flexible and go wrong. And number three somehow have to show that to them. And in a perfect world, we would love. In a perfect world, it's like trying to tell people why we need to be more secure without having to first go through a ransomware attack.

Dan Chivers: Yeah, I mean, that's always the biggest hurdle is to get people to invest based on what you say the risk is before they feel the risk, see the risk.

Phil Howard: So is a great example. And I don't know if we changed the world by now. But let me ask you this was your team more open to it later on after that?

Dan Chivers: Yeah. I found that, the more that we're able to deliver positively, give them what they're looking for, the easier it is for the next round and the next round. And it's really just building confidence. if you're letting them down. And the challenge with that is if you're letting them down with their PCs being backed up or word not working, that translates into you're not competent to work which is totally different, right? Completely different skill sets, totally different people, different areas in it. But for the people, it's all the same, So we have to have good service, which of course is great. But that directly associates to your competency in being able to do some of these higher level tasks is what I've found.

Phil Howard: You had put that you built really good teams. So how do you find competent people or make incompetent people more competent?

Dan Chivers: our sites are in rural areas, small towns. And so it is difficult to find good people. So a lot of times what I look for when I'm hiring is somebody who has reasonable skills, but more importantly, has the ability to grow. And yes, that takes more time up front from me and from my people to train them and to help them. But ultimately, if you've got the right guy and they learn, you're going to have someone who's fantastic because first, they don't have a bunch of preconceived notions that they're trying to force down and redirect. Second, they're going to learn exactly what it is that you want them to learn and how to do it. So your processes and your procedures, they're going to fall right into that. But that can take up to a year, year and a half to get somebody where you want them to be.

Phil Howard: Any. tricks to the trade there or anything that you have found to make that easy. I don't think there is.

Dan Chivers: I think if you can find a maybe good sources. So one of our sites is in Butte, Montana, and there's actually a college there. And the people that they turn out of that college is they're great. If I hire anybody from there, it's going to work. It's going to be just fine. And there it program. They have one that's kind of network related, one that's, more server related. Right. Okay. That part doesn't matter to me because the people that come out of there, they can do whatever I need them to do and they do.

Phil Howard: Is there a specific aspect? Are they do they have higher energy? Do they have good attitudes? I mean, is it just like the what was it?

Dan Chivers: Yeah, that that's a great question. I think everybody in Butte though, they're just good people,

Phil Howard: I really liked that you put. in your LinkedIn profile. Planned work and unplanned work. So I put a bullet point on our on our talk today. but mostly dot dot dot. How to plan unplanned work. So how often does it get unplanned work and what do you do.

Dan Chivers: the reason why I put planned and unplanned work is because, we had a lot of struggles, like I said, in that early, early few phases and, of early years of work and, we could never get out from underneath this barrage of unplanned work. Right. Tickets, tickets, tickets, phone calls. But we knew that we could make some adjustments and these tickets could resolve. And so we started using my version of scrum. Right. So I took scrum methodology and I just kind of hacked on it a bit where I said, okay, this is what we're going to do. we're going to start planning our work that we know is going to fix stuff. So we keep a backlog of all the stuff that you see that's wrong. So you're not going to chase after this shiny object. We're going to just if you see something needs to get done, you just put it on the list, right?

Phil Howard: And we say, okay, we gotta break that down. First of all, what's wrong? You just said there was something wrong. We're not going to chase after. What would be. What would be? What would we chase after? That would be wrong.

Dan Chivers: Okay. Great question.

Phil Howard: We have all this stuff. We got to kind of rewind a little bit. We have this craziness, all these tickets coming in. I want you to start tracking it, but there's some stuff that you can't chase after. What would be an example of that?

Dan Chivers: Yeah. So in my example or in my thinking, if someone let's say we have a network guy, right? Network guy, of course, wants everything to go well. he gets a ticket, and in that ticket, he goes out to the lab. Because, you know those lab guys. So he goes out to the lab, and he recognizes that first he sees what their problem is, and he can fix it very quickly. Plugs in a cable, opens a port, whatever. So he does. Right. But then he's like, wow, this this switch isn't configured to the way that we planned, or it's a little bit off or it doesn't seem to be quite what we wanted it to be. So now he's decided he's going to spend the next day, two days, three days trying to fix this item. and let's say it does it does need to because maybe it's using Spanning Tree and we don't want to use Spanning tree. Or maybe it's not using Spanning tree. And we do want it to use Spanning tree.

Phil Howard: I get it I get it. It's like a shiny object ran down this one pathway when there's a thousand other things. And is this really our priority number one or our number one challenge? We just we just solved challenge number fifty three on the list of priorities.

Dan Chivers: Yeah. And so he's. Yeah. And so he's not wrong. he's just there and he's prioritizing his time. So what we're just saying is like fine, just fix it. So it's working. Put that on the list. Just put it on the list.

Phil Howard: Right okay. Like we fixed this or. But there's a problem because of this.

Dan Chivers: Yes, I see that we need to revisit this. So I put something in. But we need to revisit it because it is not according to the plan. And so we put on this backlog list and then we have a planning session. And in that planning session we say, okay, we're going to do a two week sprint and we're going to plan half of our time, twenty hours of our time. We're going to say is planned work, okay. And then the other twenty hours of our time is whatever comes through the queue, right? You work it. And then we're going to meet every day and we're going to talk about the planned work, and you're going to have the opportunity to say whether or not you've got any roadblocks with the tasks that you're doing. And one of those could be, I've got too much unplanned work. And the reason why that's important is because if they have a task that we feel is very important to get done, maybe we can shuffle some things around. Maybe we can take some of that unplanned work and push it to someone else, because maybe they're getting through their task quickly. But it's a way that we're able to shape and keep focus on the things that are going to improve us. And after about five, six months of that, our unplanned work started to dissolve because we were focusing on the things that we could fix. and so I've, I've really liked that. It also creates a lot of focus in my groups to know what they've got to do. they don't talk to some guy and gets reprioritized because he doesn't realize he has other tasks to do, So I like it.

Phil Howard: How did you guys decide? How do you get how do you guys decide the hierarchy of unplanned work? I'm assuming it can't be first come, first serve.

Dan Chivers: No, I mean it's regular I till style incident management, for the unplanned work. So we have a ticket system. We have priorities. We have teams. We have the first, tier one. Tier two. All that stuff runs the same. It's just it'll so all those you just run that that's unplanned work because it's coming in through these other channels. We still use our ticket system, but then we start to kind of separate or categorize it different as planned work. And then we run our backlog and stuff out of this segregated set of tasks. I don't know if that makes sense. It's probably getting a little hokey.

Phil Howard: No, no, no. It's fine. It's. Do you have any other technical leadership that's above you? No. Okay, so. And the reason why I ask is because there's this, like, crazy percentage from some report, whether it's accurate or not, is that ninety three or ninety four percent of IT leaders. Right. And this is where where we get like it's, have a seat at the executive round table. Right. ninety three to ninety four percent of them don't see their team as the the executive roundtable. They see their team as your team, your team that's doing the unplanned work, the planned work, the ticketing system, all the guys that you've hired, So there's this it leadership isolation effect where you're stuck in the middle between your team and the executive roundtable. But wait, is my team the executive roundtable, or is my team the help desk guys? so the question is. Is there this gap to be bridged or is there's more conversations to be had with the executive roundtable? Maybe your team, maybe not your team. that's helping deliver the vision of the business. faster. what is the business goal and what's the main challenge of the business? I'm assuming you might know what the main challenge of the IT department is right now. I'm just curious. Like, what's the main challenge of the IT department? What's the main challenge of the business, or are they one in the same?

Dan Chivers: Yeah, I think I think that's a good question. so my role right now is I'm responsible for all it. And then I report to the CFO and over the past, I would say seven years I've worked on my relationship with the executive group and with, those level three managers, just trying to raise the awareness and the criticality of it.

Phil Howard: Mhm.

Dan Chivers: I think that with our executive group, they still don't quite understand this value that it has to offer. and that's why I report to the CFO, but I think that maybe I'm getting to the point here, but, I think that my job is the middle. I have to work with all the executives and with the managers and department heads, and to understand what that need is from the company. You know, what is what is the plan? What's the goal? And from that, I develop what that means from an IT perspective. And then when I develop that, then I work with my team, to deliver that. But I think to your point, the way that I talk about it is there's still this degree of separation, between me and maybe the executive group. But at the same time, because of the work that I've done over the past several years, is they're pulling me. and I think that now we're actually getting to the table, we're, we've now made the step which is then to your point. Well, are you even being heard? I think reasonably way better than before but valued. I wouldn't say necessarily valued, appreciated. Sure. But like, no, I really want your input on this as opposed to you can listen in, you know what I mean. so I think that, really important for the business to weigh in, but I think sometimes businesses just don't understand what that actually means for them.

Phil Howard: So what can we do as IT leaders then to be more valuable in the business?

Dan Chivers: Well.

Phil Howard: And is that important?

Dan Chivers: I think it's critical to be valued in the business because, if you need something done, who are you going to talk to? The guys you don't care about? No, you're not going to talk to them, right? You're not going to talk to the people that you don't feel have anything to do with it. You're going to talk to your A game, people that are going to get it done. And so for a business to recognize that it is that a game player, to me that means you have to deliver that it's through experience. But to your point again earlier is do you do you have to have a ransomware event for you to be noticed? Because that's just a hard way to go. But that's really kind of people. if a CEO doesn't see value in it, they're going to have to learn it the hard way. If a CEO does value it, then maybe they learned it the hard way, or they recognized through whatever means that there's value there.

Phil Howard: And I always comes back to me thinking about like the CEOs of or other people, and I don't know where the real story was, but it's back in the day. We're at a we're at a big turning point right now in history. I think we are. Most people would say we are. With the advent of AI, at least there's a bubble, there's billions of dollars being invested and it's only producing a few billion. So there is some kind of bubble. There's a lot of hype going on. There's the snowflake guys and the data people and people showing up everywhere, and it's kind of this wildness. What's my point? My point is, is like, should it guys take more business classes or knowledge and, I don't know, be more involved in knowing EBITDA and gross margin and flow through profit. And how does this connect to the business and how can we use technology to deliver that?

Dan Chivers: Yeah, and I found that the more that I understand that kind of information, the more success I have as an IT leader, being able to get things done.

Phil Howard: Now from a scientific standpoint in dealing with labs and engineers, I don't know, we haven't had that conversation yet. We haven't bridged that gap yet. That's a whole nother thing. And how does it speak with a PhD? I just I know many of them, so. technology sees every aspect of the business. And. Yeah, we can help, bridge that gap. And I think technology leaders should know what the main challenges are of the business. So to your point, we're not fixing the wrong problems the right way. Yeah. In a fixing the server or the whatever, the switch that's connected with all these different, down the hall that connects all these other things, that really is not connected to the main challenge at the time of the business. And it may have actually just derailed us a little bit further. So, but it has been a, a very, fun conversation. If there was any one thing that you could deliver to the world of executives out there right now, and they would just hear it loud and clear, from it, what would that message be?

Dan Chivers: I think I would say that. executives should seriously consider that it should be responsible for like. Business process mapping. You know what I mean? That they should be heavily involved in what's happening with the process.

Phil Howard: Everyone that I've asked this question to like the majority, there's probably four themes, maybe three, but that's like the number one one so far.

Dan Chivers: Yeah, I believe it. Because if everybody understands their process and it's clear everybody agrees it can be incredibly successful because all they're doing is delivering that process. It's just buttons, you know what I mean?

Phil Howard: What they're really saying is, and what some of the other people have said to add to just to kind of add to this, to give you some context, because it may make you have even more of an aha moment. they've said we need to be involved in the process from the beginning. Yeah, because after you've made decisions, it's sometimes it's too late. We're brought in after the fact.

Dan Chivers: Absolutely. And kind of what I'm talking about though, is even down to the I'm a financial guy, I'm an AP clerk. And this is the process I follow for being an AP clerk. and what I've found is if the business doesn't have control over what that process is or hasn't decided or weighed in on, this is how we do it, then it can never be successful. just even from a I click here, I do this, I need to do this, I need to do this, and then I do this and I'm done. If we don't have that process nailed down, then you can't be successful because then when the next person comes in and they decide that they want to do it different, then there is really no process. It's really just somebody doing whatever they want. being involved in the process of anything at the beginning. Absolutely. Because we need to see what's coming. We need to provide a voice because that's very important. But then on top of that is how people do their work. It needs to be involved or have good visibility into that. And I've seen that it can do a good job of helping identify that process very specifically because of how we think. Does that make sense?

Phil Howard: Okay. It makes complete sense. So while salespeople without any processes you can help deliver and everyone knows it. Any sales, there is a sales process, and salespeople that don't follow a sales process are probably not that good, but they do have a process. Maybe they just haven't. Maybe it's just kind of this wild thing. But you can help distill that down into a process and systematize it, and that will make things more efficient.

Dan Chivers: Yep. Using common tools. Yeah.

Phil Howard: For the crazy, inefficient sales guys. Can you imagine sales efficiency and increasing sales efficiency? That's what it can do.

Dan Chivers: Absolutely.

Phil Howard: It's actually pretty amazing. I've seen it. I've seen real sales models that have been system ized. And you can just already see companies that grow and do not grow. I'm kind of a one of my favorite quotes was, whatever. His name was, the Shark Tank guy. Mark, that owns the Why can't I remember? Why can't I remember this guy's name? Anyways, he says sales fix all problems. Like sales fix all problems. Meaning more revenue, right? So why would you not want to have a system systematized? what about one business lesson that every emerging IT leader should know? Anything.

Dan Chivers: Yeah, I think that, making sure that, you learn and understand what people are saying. I've found that you kind of got to be humble and let them drive and ask the questions, and I've gotten a lot of good responses that way. So someone who's going to come in guns blazing, I'm going to tell you how it's going to be. It doesn't work. people shut down. they stop participating. and it just doesn't help. And so I think an emerging IT leader needs to be able to just listen and be able to understand what it is that people need and then be able to communicate back how that's going to happen. So and of course, keep on top of new technologies and all that kind of stuff. But that doesn't matter if you can't talk to people and help understand what they want and translate that to something that you can deliver.

Phil Howard: Dan Shivers. You've been heard.

Dan Chivers: Awesome. Thanks, man. You too. All right.

Phil Howard: Okay. Have a great day.