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417- You Can't Be Just a Nerd Anymore w/Josh Siddon

Phil Howard & Josh Siddon

417- You Can't Be Just a Nerd Anymore w/Josh Siddon

THE IT LEADERSHIP PODCAST
EPISODE 417

417- You Can't Be Just a Nerd Anymore w/Josh Siddon

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Josh Siddon

ON THIS EPISODE

Josh Siddon is VP of IT Architecture at MAA, one of the largest multifamily operators in the country, and the founder of ResiQ, a consultancy helping smaller operators navigate managed Wi-Fi, cloud migration, and PropTech vendor selection. His team is rolling out managed Wi-Fi across a 300-plus property portfolio, with per-unit VLAN isolation, 10-gig pipes, and contractors cutting cable through occupied brownfield buildings. The engineering is hard. What he argues is harder is the identity shift IT has to make alongside it.

Josh says you can't be just a nerd anymore. A resident's Wi-Fi connection isn't a ticket, it's an operations promise, which means IT now lives in the budget meeting, the project planning cycle, and the CEO's goal-setting conversation. He traces his own ability to make that shift back to a mentor who made him work a week in the hotel, food and beverage, finance, HR, and the buffet line before he was allowed to touch IT.

We get into how he's rolling the same playbook forward for the AI wave. Josh lived through RPA at a private-equity-backed retail chain, automating eighty percent of Tuesday-through-Thursday workload without cutting a job. He thinks AI is the same wave with fewer lines of code and the same trust-building work. His team at MAA integrates MCP and Copilot Studio into third-party systems to turn Copilot from a desktop tool into an enterprise platform, and he's a self-described Claude fan.

Josh's prediction for eighteen months from now: the conversation won't be about the technology. It'll be about former CIOs and CTOs running companies as CEOs.

Show Notes

Episode Show Notes

Navigate through key moments in this episode with timestamped highlights, from initial introductions to deep dives into real-world use cases and implementation strategies.

[00:00:00] Welcome and Josh's background in infrastructure architecture

[00:01:30] Managed Wi-Fi across 300+ multifamily properties

[00:03:00] Brownfield installs, site surveys, and contractor coordination

[00:05:00] VLAN isolation and how resident networks stay private

[00:08:00] Why managed Wi-Fi forces IT into operations

[00:09:30] You can't be just a nerd anymore

[00:11:30] The mentor who made him work the buffet line

[00:15:00] Rebuilding a retail help desk by rotating teams

[00:17:30] RPA, private equity, and automating 80% of the week

[00:19:00] AI is the same wave with fewer lines of code

[00:22:00] Human in the loop vs human on the loop

[00:24:00] Copilot, Copilot Studio, MCP, and Claude

[00:27:00] Self-guided apartment tours at two in the morning

[00:29:30] Coaching juniors into hallway conversations

[00:30:30] Nice leaders vs kind leaders

[00:31:30] Prediction: CIOs and CTOs becoming CEOs

[00:33:00] Why he started techscribe.org for smaller operators

[00:38:00] Closing and where to find Josh

KEY TAKEAWAYS

You can't be just a nerd anymore. People skills and business fluency are the job now.
Managed Wi-Fi turns IT into operations. A resident's connection is a promise, not a ticket.
AI is the RPA wave again. The trust-building work matters more than the tool.
417- You Can't Be Just a Nerd Anymore w/Josh Siddon

TRANSCRIPT

[00:09] HOST: All right, welcome back to you've Been Heard. Today we've got Josh Seiden who is helping transform it and the help desk from the strategic business partner or helping transform the help desk to a strategic business partner in small and midsize businesses. So, Josh, welcome to the podcast.

[00:33] JOSH: Glad to be here.

[00:36] HOST: So do me a favor, tell us a little about you and some of your experience and what's your area of expertise within it, because it's no longer I'm just the nerd and I know it all.

[00:47] JOSH: Absolutely. Yeah. So I've been in it almost 30 years. Quite a unique journey. I'm going to predate myself and building PCs from scratch for an organization. That's where I come cut my teeth. Graduated into networking and cybersecurity and database management. I really found a niche in infrastructure management and architecture design and have really spent the last decade or so working with organizations and digital transformation and moving people from on prem to the cloud and just maximizing the assets that they currently have available to them.

[01:24] HOST: It's been, as I interview, a lot of networking experience. And my notice some of the stuff that you're doing now, you're providing infrastructure for multifamily housing. And I was wondering about some of the challenges around that, because that sounds like a world of difference than providing networking infrastructure for an organization.

[01:47] JOSH: Yeah, absolutely. Because you're providing infrastructure to a person's home, it's very different and the responsibility there is very different than what I've been used to in the past. But the industry itself is seeing a lot of value in a product called Managed WI Fi. And so we're putting access points in units, we're putting switches, we're lighting up ports in units. That's the easy part. The hard part is getting that signal to the unit. If we're doing new builds, that's easy, right? The Sheetrock's not up, you can just pull the cable. But a majority of these properties that we're working on are brownfield. So we're having to go in and cut holes and pull cable and you're interrupting people's lives. And so it's how do you manage that? But at the same time do a good job and make sure that the infrastructure that's there is going to last and give them a good experience. So, yeah, it's been a challenge. But you know what, it's been one of my most favorite projects that I've worked on.

[02:42] HOST: So it's the facilities team that's helping cut the holes and pull the cable is that Part of your group or your organization or is it like a third party that you guys are contracting?

[02:54] JOSH: So we have partners and we've partnered with what we call a managed service. So there are boutique managed WI fi providers that specialize in the multifamily space. And we've partnered with some of those and they have their own contractors. So they will come on site with us. We will do a site survey. So we go through every idf, every mdf, we climb down in manholes. We're looking at every bit of infrastructure that's already in place on property so that we can one, maximize that if it can be used. But second, come out with a great design on what we want to do to get that infrastructure in place. Once the site survey is done, they go back and architect the design. They come back to my architect team and then we will a lot of redlining and moving things around and making sure that we're happy with it, because our organization is paying for that infrastructure up front. We're not financing it, so it's ours. It's just a value proposition for the property. You know, it just adds value there from a revenue perspective. But once that's done and we agree on design, the managed service provider goes to work. They hire their contractors. We have a plan. We meet every week with their project managers. And there's always something, for instance, drainage or irrigation that's normally not in a diagram map because somebody just dug a small trench and laid it down and covered it up. So you don't know it's there. So a lot of times we can hit that. And those are potholes that we're not prepared for. But yet we've learned how to overcome that and move forward. So it's, it's been real fun. And once that is done, we will come back as a property and res organization and we will verify that design that, that we all agreed on is in place, that they did what they promised. We will do our own testing, speed testing, signal testing, things of that nature. And we will go live, we will start enrolling our residents on that. It's a great experience because it's everybody, this is the worst example in the world, but it is the only example that explains managed WI fi end to end. And it's this. You can sit at the pool on your laptop and print a document to your printer and your unit. That's how managed WI fi works.

[05:04] HOST: So, okay, you know, I'm trying to wrap my head around exactly that kind of that design and what you're doing. And the Questions that I immediately have are like, so is each unit like its own little piece of the network firewalled off from the rest of them? And then. But if I can sit at the pool, connect to the WI fi and print to my apartment without having the VPN from the pool to my apartment, that kind of takes it a little outside of that. And then I also assume that like, you have a large pipe coming to the building and then you provide access to said large pipe to all of the units, right?

[05:46] JOSH: Yes. So there's some secret sauce in there.

[05:50] HOST: I don't want to put anybody's E work at risk.

[05:53] JOSH: So typically, depending on the size of the Property, it's a 10 gig or 5 gig pipe with a smaller redundant circuit. That's how we start. Yeah. And then basically what we're doing is we're using VLANS VLAN technology so that when you log into the WI FI system with your password, that is your network, nobody else is on that network. That traffic, nobody can see that traffic. It is completely isolated from every other network. So we've done some interesting things there with VLAN to make sure that the residence network is actually their network and that there's nobody else traversing that. So it's been real fun to do that part because that's really my favorite part of the whole infrastructure journey, is to architect those types of things.

[06:39] HOST: Okay. For me, just being a fellow geek or nerd or whatever term you want to use, I just saw that and thought, wow, that's interesting. And that's a different thing than a majority of us have to deal with. Let's step back a little bit back into the tagline that I stumbled all over in the introduction. So how are you helping the help desks that at the organizations that you've worked at turn into strategic business partners because they, yes, people see the value in a help desk. But now how do you make it so that the help desk levels up? Talk to me some about your experience in doing that and what you do.

[07:27] JOSH: If your Internet goes down and you're calling carriers yourself. That's not strategic. It we help teams centralize monitoring, proactive tickets and escalation across every location without capex. Less noise, more uptime, make it boring again, just go to you've been heard.com and answer the seven questions to simplify, streamline and save. So managed WI fi is a good example. Right. Especially in multifamily. That allows it to cross that bridge truly into operations. Because we're doing managed WI fi to give our residents A good experience. So at that point, that's really an operations task. That's their role, right? Is managing the residents and making sure the residents have what they need. But now they have to have it where in the past, at every organization in the past. We all know it. It was. You answered your ticket and everything was good, right? And we're seeing a shift. And that shift is it being more and more and more involved in the business and solutioning with the business and part of the budgeting process and the annual project management process. What are we going to do next year? And being more and more collaborative. And I think that is what's moving these teams forward, is that they're being more involved. But that's also a retooling that has had to happen in it, right? You can't be just a nerd anymore. You, you gotta have people skills, you gotta have business skills. You really have to no longer be just curious about the technology and new stuff that's coming out. You gotta be curious about what the business is doing and what is the business thinking so that you can go back and go, okay, well, the CEO wants to do this next year. Here's where we're at. If we get here, we can meet his goal and help the business do that in. In a more rapid fashion. So it's not technology, it's the people aspect of being a technologist. Right. And getting out of the office, walking the building, having open conversations with people, because they'll let you know, right? They'll go, oh, you're an IT guy. I've had this problem with this application for six months and nobody's been able to fix it. And come to find out nobody really knew about it. And that's a quick fix.

[09:42] HOST: Yeah. How often do we all get that one, you know, oh, hey, now that I see you, I've got all of this and yeah, well, why didn't you let us know? But it's so important, that personal connection, that making the connection, that just talking to people. There are so many of us that do want to, like, hide in our office or in our cubicle and ignore the rest of the world or there's times where we've got to get that deep into what we're thinking about to be able to find the solution or create the code or do those things. But in the interim, we definitely need to be there talking to the business, understanding the business. Because if you're not understanding the business and you're just providing that point solution, both you and the business are missing Out.

[10:34] JOSH: Yeah, absolutely. Yep. I agree.

[10:36] HOST: So what was your aha moment that helped you understand that? How did you go from working on the help desk or from that guy? Okay, make sure to put some jalapenos on that next pizza. How'd you go from that to walk in the halls willingly so that you could talk to people?

[10:54] JOSH: It goes back a long way. I say. I started 30 years ago at Building PCs, my very first IT job. That guy should have never given me the job. I was not qualified to even take a PC out of a box, much less be a network administrator. So it starts right there. So I got a great opportunity with a great mentor and a great leader. And part of, I guess the strategy of getting us to come up is we have every different area of the business for at least a week before we could do our IT job. And so I got to work in hotel, I got to work in food and beverage. I got to work in finance, hr, I got to serve on the buffet line. All of these things to understand the people that I was about to support. And you know what? I just gained a great appreciation for it day one. And I attribute that ability to meet people where they are and not be the techie nerd, but go, oh, I hear you. And you don't necessarily have to tell them what the solution is going to be. You just have to tell them, hey, I've got a solution. And that's been a real success for me.

[12:04] HOST: Yeah. I came from a customer service background somewhat too, ironically enough, in the hotel industry, and I always found that customer service was the differentiator. So I've always kind of brought that with me. But then for me, it was always the biggest question was, okay, tell me about what your goal is. I used to frame it in, well, why? But I've also met others in our industry who would say, well, why? And depending on how you ask that question, it can come across completely different. It's, well, why would you want to do that versus what's the goal? What are we really trying to do here? Because you're telling me that you need the spreadsheet to do this, and I'm just wondering if I might not have a better solution for you than a spreadsheet.

[12:56] JOSH: Right. Yeah. Especially today. Right. There's so many tools coming at us an hour.

[13:02] HOST: There's so many spreadsheets coming at us at 10,000 miles an hour.

[13:09] JOSH: It can be scary. So absolutely.

[13:12] HOST: Okay. So you. Luckily, somebody gave you the job, gave you the chance to wander the business and meet the different people did it start off that quickly and that easily for you? Because you were probably pigeonholed in a couple of other organizations of your help desk. Stay here, answer the phones.

[13:32] JOSH: Yeah, there's a couple of organizations. One, it was a retail chain that I worked for. I started work there really as the technical services director. Right. I rapidly rose through the ranks and was SVP CIO in probably four or five years. And this was an organization that was publicly traded, still mom and pop, still run that way, which is fine, very good family feel, but just did not understand the value of information technology and what it can do for them, especially in a retail event. And so their help desk was basically point of sale support. They had a legacy point of sale system and that's what this service desk did. And so one, we had to broaden their horizons and say, look, we got to support more than, than just this. There's, there's other issues. And so put together a program. Hey, team A, you're going to focus on password resets. Team B, we're going to focus on setting up users, yada, yada, yada. And you rotate those teams through that until everybody has learned the same skill set. And then you get a pretty well rounded team at that point. And then you can go to the business and say, hey, here are the improvements we've made. We're going to open this up a little bit. And now you can send these issues to this team as well and just it shows value and it builds trust.

[14:52] HOST: Yeah. And now you're coming to the business with solutions that they may not even have been asking for or aware that you could handle for them. So absolutely, yeah, you start bringing those kinds of things to the business, then they start to go, wait a minute, there's more here, right?

[15:11] JOSH: Yeah. Especially with legacy organizations. I've worked for three or four and they were, they were on deals. Right. So working with private equity, they, they buy a mom and pop business and they want to flip it. And so you really got to modernize and streamline that business. And we use an RPA because most of these guys are using legacy mainframes and it's literally just data entry. It's not, it's not rocket science. And going into these organizations and introducing rpa, which I can't imagine what we're going to be able to do with AI, but with RPA and automating this stuff, it wasn't to reduce the headcount. Right. It was to make that headcount more productive. And that's what we found was, hey, I can automate 80% of what you do Tuesday through Thursday so that you can go focus on your real job. And so being able to implement technology like that has really benefited me and my ability to integrate with the business and gain favor with leadership and that

[16:11] HOST: ability to do that and that mind shift. So how much did you struggle trying to introduce the RPA to those teams? How many of those teams that you've started working with and showing RPA to, how many of them had that fear? Because I think that is a perfect example of what we need to be doing with AI today is it's almost the exact same thing. The thing is that you just don't have to code as much with AI as you did with rpa.

[16:41] JOSH: Yeah, it is the exact same thing. We are right where we were back then with AI. Today I have a little different view on how to manage AI. But with RPA and how we gain trust with two things. One, we just showed them, hey, look what this thing can do. But two, once it's. It's hard for an IT person, even if they know the business, to build out a use case, it's extremely difficult. So you build out or you go out and search out partners, you can create a committee or a team, whatever of the business experts and then come to them with the technology that you have and show them the potential and then get their wheels turning. And then they give you their use cases and you can execute on them. So it builds trust because they feel like they're part of the process and they know on the front end that this is not an exercise to eliminate you, it's an exercise to make you more valuable to the organization because you can really do your job at that point. And so that's really worked out well from an AI perspective. There's a lot of talk about that is AI is going to. And we see these curves or these, I call them waves with the dot coms. And then the whole when automation started, right. It's these waves that we go through in IT and everybody.

[18:02] HOST: I'm imagining more of a tsunami. And right at the end of the wave,

[18:09] JOSH: sorry, please. There's always that fear is like, well, technology is going to replace me. And you know what? We haven't really done that yet. Everything that we've come out, even with AI, you got to have a human, you got to have somebody there. My take on AI is especially with agents and doing the agentic automation and those things, it's just going to be another mind shift in that we're going to be a human is still going to have to manage that agent, just like you would an employee. That agent has tasks they have to do, they have to meet certain goals, they have SLAs they have to meet, they have to do work. Correct. And so it's the same skill set as managing a person. When you come to managing the agent, it's just a little different in how you coach.

[18:54] HOST: Yeah. I heard an interesting distinction yesterday, and I still don't know if I fully groked it yet. And the difference between a human in the loop and. And a human on the loop. And it was more of trying to get AI deployments to where it wasn't a human in the loop who was stopping the whole process and reviewing everything, but it was more of a human on the loop watching the whole process and managing the exceptions. I believe that's what the individual who used those terms for me yesterday was pointing at. But then again, like I said, I. It's still, still waiting for it to fully process it between the years.

[19:41] JOSH: Yeah, I can agree with the chatbots that those are easy. Right. Because people think they're cool. That's easy to implement is when you get agentic is when people's. That fear comes even with senior leadership and when, hey, I can automate, blah, blah, blah, blah. And whoa, whoa, wait a minute. And so that's where that man in the middle comes from. You don't really need it. Right. However, that man in the middle offers security. It gives people some peace of mind. So I would see these, these processes with a man in the middle for a long time. And then finally, okay, this is, run its course, let's just turn it loose.

[20:15] HOST: Yeah. And well, that was kind of one of the other points that that was being made was so in all right, you've got the human doing the checking of the AI. Well, now, as you recognize what the human's doing to check the AI, now make another agent to take over that checking and that validation. So once both the original process and its output and then the validation from the secondary process and its output when they both meet, then move forward and turn it loose to your app, to your example.

[20:52] JOSH: Absolutely. Yeah.

[20:54] HOST: And keep hearing it. It's not that AI is going to take my job. If I refuse to use AI, somebody who uses AI is going to take my job. And I see that one being like the immediate outcomes or the immediate thing coming.

[21:12] JOSH: That's definitely a skill set. Yeah, People are going to have to take advantage. But the great thing about the AI training is there's so much input out there. And I mean, you just pick your poison and go. I mean, that's what we've done.

[21:26] HOST: So you actually make me think of another interview that I was having with a guest a couple weeks ago and they mentioned AI best practices. Where are you going currently to find and see and measure any of the things that you're trying to implement against the world and finding those best practices. Where you finding those. Where are you finding the trainings that you're talking about?

[21:50] JOSH: Yeah, so the training's easy, it's everywhere. Right. We are a Microsoft shop currently where I'm at. And Microsoft has been a great partner with us. We approach them way out ahead of this and we're talking with them and explaining them what we wanted to do as an organization, which is a little bit different than what some people are doing. And so it kind of sparked their interest and so they've become good partners and they've really helped us along the way. But we do attend a lot of Microsoft training. CoPilot Studio, Azure, DevOps, making sure that is integrated. We've taken full advantage of that. I'm a Claude fan, so I go to Claude and I've taken all of their certification that's online, it's free, it's great. But from guidelines or operating procedures, things like that from AI, I'm a member of several committees and those out of those committees we have actually developed AI guidelines for our industry. So the multifamily industry there, we've actually developed some guidelines and standards. They're very basic. Right. But it, for a company that's not prepared, has no idea where to start, it is somewhere to start. And then we have great partners with our cybersecurity team and my architecture team has worked with them hand in hand on our AI infrastructure. And then every time we tweak something, they test it. And so we're learning, right? And oh, we can't do that, or hey, that really didn't do what we wanted to do. Let's lock that down. So it's really trial and error, but there are a lot of good resources out there online. You just gotta go out there and look. I will say, believe it or not, Reddit, Reddit right now in the AI space is unbelievable. There a lot of people making a lot of good posts. It's not just junk, it's good posts and they genuinely want to help each other. It's really a community like it should be. And so we glean that quite often and we've been able to pull Ideas from there as well.

[23:55] HOST: So in the current environment, are you doing any customer or. Well, yeah. And whether it be internal or external customer facing AI things, are you researching or working on any of that? Is there anything like that you can talk to or about all of the above? Yeah.

[24:15] JOSH: So in multifamily, it's about sales, right? You got to get that lead, you got to grab them, you got to entice them to rent that unit. And there are some AI tools out there that we've demoed and, and, and play with that we're considering that kind of, kind of automates that for us. That whole process of taking the phone call, seeing who, who the phone call was, gathering the email address or a text number, and it kind of automates that for us and streamlines the process. It's been pretty, it's been pretty good. It's still in its infancy. Multifamily is not always the fastest to adopt new technology, but they're getting there and they definitely seen the value in AI right now. And then internally we're, like I said, we're a co pilot customer. So we're taking full advantage of Copilot and doing some other cool things that we can't talk about.

[25:09] HOST: But we're all in how much I've struggled with Copilot, I've struggled with the agency of Copilot. How much have you guys been able to increase that agency?

[25:22] JOSH: Quite a bit and we have found quite a few integrations that we can take advantage of. I think the value Copilot by itself is a great user tool, not an enterprise tool if it's by itself. But when you integrate MCP technology and you can have conversations with your third party systems, that's when it's about you.

[25:46] HOST: And see, like you mentioned being an Anthropic fan or a Claude fan, we found that Claude allows for much more agency. You can, once you set up those connections, you've got the ability to have more effect and reach and harvest the source that you're allowed to and then chew through all of that data and have it help you analyze craft dashboards, KPIs, search out information. I, like I said I tried with Copilot and then it's like, oh, I can't do this. But here, let me tell you how to do it in Microsoft Flow or let me tell you how to do it in Power Automate. And as I tried to follow those instructions that it was giving me, I just kept running into wall after wall after wall. But with Anthropic, I Can say, okay, go do this. It's done. I'm like, yeah.

[26:43] JOSH: And it's really, like I said, the bare bones copilot, it is what it is. It's more of a automation agent for your desktop than anything else. Right. It's when you take advantage of the Enterprise Edition and start integrating it with Copilot Studio and actually creating those connections with guardrails. I mean, we've gotten to the point in Copilot Studio where if I wanted to, I could just use the cloud LLM in my Copilot chat. And so when I'm asking questions, I'm actually asking Copilot questions. I mean cloud questions.

[27:17] HOST: Are you guys doing any voice with the. No, no voice aspects of it?

[27:22] JOSH: Yeah, not yet.

[27:24] HOST: And because I see trying to find the customers or to start harvesting the touch points from potential customers being a common thing across the industries. It doesn't matter whether you're in trucking like me or housing like you, or multifamily housing like you are, we're still trying to get those customers to the organizations and utilizing this kind of technology to help us during the off hours or during the busy hours when the number of staff that I have is fully engaged now being able to capture some of those touch points so that they can get back to those potentials.

[28:11] JOSH: Yeah. One of the values of multifamily is for after hours is self guided touring. And so going online, setting up a tour, it's fully integrated into the back end systems. You never really contact a human and it gives you code, the codes that you need to traverse the property, go to that unit that you wanted to see. So you do that 2 o' clock in the morning if you want to. Right, Yeah.

[28:31] HOST: I was going to say that's the perfect kind of time for these kinds of things because your audience, they more than likely they have an 8 to 5 job so they can't come in during those regular hours to go walk that tour. But if, if they've had a chance to sit down, have some wine and teas and get rid of their day, now they're in the mood to go look at. Okay, I want out of where I'm at. What's the next place look like? And if they can do that at 2 o' clock in the morning at their leisure.

[29:04] JOSH: Yeah.

[29:05] HOST: Pretty neat. Yeah, it is. I was laughing when you started talking about the chatbots and how easy they are because I've seen, I still struggle with certain chatbots, man. I go to a banking website and I want some help and it's got four questions that it can answer. And if it's outside of those four, it's got four questions it can answer. You need to ask me one of these four questions. And those ones are so frustrating today. Yeah. How do you keep from building something like that? How do you keep from starting with something like that?

[29:40] JOSH: So we have a lot of input from the business on, look, feel the way it works. And my organization is so focused on resident experience that I don't think they would let me produce something like that.

[29:55] HOST: Good.

[29:56] JOSH: I mean, we're not station yet. It's still pretty standard. Just receiving information. Right. Hey, and then name number, we'll call you back. Those types of things. And. But we're getting there. The tech is catching up enough in our industry so that we're going to be able to automate a lot and give our property teams a lot more time to do their job, and that's retain residents.

[30:19] HOST: Okay. We're trying to figure out some of the retention kinds of things and trying to figure out what are the precursors or the leading indicators for so that we can engage that retention before they've made the decision. That's going to be an interesting thing from your side of the world to try to figure those pieces out. Yeah. So talk to me a little more. I know one of the things that I was thinking that I wanted to ask you. Transforming that help desk again. And let's step back into that conversation for just a second because there's some of the juniors that join into our organizations that they're just not comfortable going out and engaging people and talking to them. How do you help them grow into being more comfortable in that hallway conversation or going out and finding that hallway conversation versus I'm just going to sit here inside of my cubicle.

[31:21] JOSH: Yeah.

[31:22] HOST: Have you worked with that or. Or do you try to filter them out in the interview process?

[31:26] JOSH: It is definitely very important. Interview process is making sure that they do have at least some people's skills. Right. Because they're going to be on the phone. They have to be able to manage that conversation. But you spend enough time with your team, who your key players are and who your high performers are, and that's. You start there and you start giving them opportunities. So if you have a meeting, let's say we have a presentation with the executive leadership team when we've got to present this new initiative that they asked us to bring them along, let them sit in the corner and take notes and hey, watch me make this presentation. Watch the interactions with the people look at how the conversations go and how that conversation flows through the room and take those notes. Let's meet after and let's talk about it. Let's talk about how those meetings work and what's going on in those meetings. Because having a conversation with an end user who has a password reset problem, it's a very different conversation. When you're talking to the CEO about the budget and you have to learn how to shift, right? You've got to learn how to shift your focus. And you're no longer talking techy, you're now, oh, I'm in the business world now. Now I've got to relate. Everything that's coming out of my mouth has to be business related, not it related. And just teaching them that skill set. I had an individual years ago. He was one of the brightest guys I ever had on my team. He had the worst people skills ever. And it was to the point where the general manager said, you got to fire that guy. He's just ticking everybody off. And so what we did was literally sat across the desk from each other and I picked up a phone and acted like I was calling him and he had to act like he was answering it. And we role played problems. And at the end of it, I would tell him, this is why people are getting upset. It's the way you responded. It was your tone, it was this, it was that. And the guy was like, never had an idea. Nobody ever told me that, you know what? And it worked out. He moved up in it. He became a good leader. And it was a great story. But it takes work like that sometimes as well.

[33:34] HOST: I've heard that as the difference in being nice and being kind. And being nice is the leader who is afraid to tell the employee those harsh truths. And being kind is being honest and telling them these things so that they can learn and overcome and grow through. And so, yeah, this is one of those times definitely to not be nice, but be kind, be honest. And it's a skill set for us to learn too, because we that honesty is always the best policy. The trick is in the delivery.

[34:19] JOSH: That's right.

[34:21] HOST: So, Josh, one of the questions that we love to ask on the podcast is make a prediction. Tell me what you think all it is going to be talking about in 18 months that we're not talking about today.

[34:36] JOSH: I don't think it's going to be technology. I think it's going to be, you've seen a shift. It is not at the back of the bus or at the front. You're going to see CEOs that were CIOs, you're going to see CEOs that were CTOs. And you're going to see these technology leaders driving business leadership in the future.

[34:56] HOST: I heard somebody else telling me they were making a prediction that it, the traditional IT is going to disappear. And not necessarily disappear, but we're going to get incorporated. We will be in every department, we will be on the floor. We are no longer going to be our own little group in the back. I see infrastructure still going to stay in their group because infrastructure is its own special beast. But when it comes to the rest of technology and what's going on, we're just going to be another piece. We're going to be like every keyboard. We're going to be like keyboards at every desk.

[35:33] JOSH: I agree 100%. It's going to go that direction.

[35:37] HOST: You got anything you want to promote, you want to tell us about or you want to share with the world and with the rest of the you've been heard audience?

[35:44] JOSH: Yeah. So in my travels in the last year or two, especially with managed WI fi, I've been able to talk to a lot of people and a lot of them were smaller to mid size multifamily owner operators and in talking with them, I don't know, it just, it really hit me that those organizations because they don't have fully funded IT staff, so a lot, almost all their IT is probably managed and third party and they really, when they engage providers to install manage WI fi, they don't have an advocate, they don't have an in house expert so to speak that can listen to what's being presented and actually tell that owner operator, yeah, this is a good idea or hey, this is a bad idea. It might sound good but let me tell you. And so I've really, I don't know, just found a desire to help organizations like that. And so I started the blog, it's become very popular. It's called Techscribe.org and we put information out there that's it's highly technical. However, it's written in a very easy to understand way and what I'm highlighting are what I'm learning, the positives and negatives of my journey with my organization and installing managed WI fi.

[37:10] HOST: So hold on one second, let's make sure that we get the that correctly because there's like three different ways they come to my head instantly on tech. So how are you spelling tech for

[37:21] JOSH: any Techscribe.org yeah, it is T E C H S C r I b

[37:26] HOST: e.org okay, that's what I thought. But I wanted to make sure it wasn't CK or just C or. And the reason I'm not spelling them out is so that we remain with T E C H S C r I b e.org and in all honesty, it's one of the things that we're trying to do with you've been hurt is to give that advocacy to have those people who've blazed the trails first to turn around and help the guy behind them or the person coming up or just so that like, if I have the challenge of trying to do that managed WI fi amongst hundreds of vehicles, maybe I can start to talk to you and reach out. Hey, I know a guy and some of the other people that we've met and talked to. I recently talking with somebody who's on that journey a little bit deeper into the AI journey than I think either of us are. His Mandate was produce 20 agents a year for the next couple of years into production. And he said, you know what? I've already found out and I've already got the philosophy knowing that two of three of these proofs of concepts will fail. So in other words, he needs to spin up 60 of those things, adding what's five a month to achieve the goals of ending up with 20 of them working at the end of the year. So we got people to talk to and part of the community and definitely hit up techscribe.org and come back to you've been heard and if you've enjoyed this podcast, please drop us a like make a comment wherever you're harvesting your podcast from and let us know how we're doing and and if what we can do better because we're always open for feedback and learning. Thank you very much, Josh. It's been great to talk to you today.

[39:20] JOSH: Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Yeah, thank you.

[00:09] HOST: All right, welcome back to you've Been Heard. Today we've got Josh Seiden who is helping transform it and the help desk from the strategic business partner or helping transform the help desk to a strategic business partner in small and midsize businesses. So, Josh, welcome to the podcast.

[00:33] JOSH: Glad to be here.

[00:36] HOST: So do me a favor, tell us a little about you and some of your experience and what's your area of expertise within it, because it's no longer I'm just the nerd and I know it all.

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