445- How CIOs Build Teams That Scale w/Brian Laird

Doug Camin: Welcome back, everyone to today's episode of You've Been Heard, the

platform for IT leaders. I'm your host, Doug Camin. And today I am talking with

Brian Laird, the CIO of Baylor Group. Welcome to the show, Brian.

Brian Laird: Hey, Nice to meet you. Thank you.

Doug Camin: Yeah. So, before we got started here, I want to talk about you and

your history and where you've been and stuff like that. Specifically, I'd love

to plumb that out a little bit because I know it's not your current job, but

your past, I think your immediate past job was the one that covered the Covid

period and how kind of crazy it was for us and some of the things that were

happening. So like, I work for a county at that time, there was kind of wild

things happening, but for you, you had a different experience because you were

working for this company that had employees all over the country.

Brian Laird: Yeah, we were a continuing education company. And we had our

customer service agents were literally spread all over the country. And so we

had to quickly find ways. And they were in some remote places. So how do we get

them internet access and allow them to work from home when they may not even

have internet at their house, which was a little sort of strange to start to

think about in today's day and age. But it was true. And so we had to go out.

And like I was saying before, we were actually had folks in line at Verizon

stores buying hot spots and, walking up going, I'll buy however many hot spots

you have left. Well, we can only give out three or five at a time. And, they

were trying to.

Doug Camin: Find a way to go buy some more.

Brian Laird: Exactly. Right. Go back and send in other people.

Doug Camin: And it was the they needed the Groucho Marx glasses.

Brian Laird: Exactly right. A little red.

Doug Camin: Can I have three more?

Brian Laird: Right. Put a hat on. Nobody will ever recognize you. so it was

nuts. And then we're shipping these things out. And, as I was saying to you in

the beginning, we, had, one of our members, one of our the presence of one of

our organizations had said, we really need to start planning. And we were at a

retreat in Austin. And I thought, ah, no, we're like, no way. I readily admit I

was wrong, like we did not understand what was about to come. And he was right

to force us to do the planning and get into it. And thankfully, we pivoted,

thousands of employees went work from home, in under a week and successfully we

kept going. And, it was a difficult time. Like everybody else, we all had these

really unique sort of situations that you find yourself in. and when you don't

have like, when you can just go and just do the best you can with what you have

available to you, it's rewarding to kind of see those things happen and watch a

whole company pivot. and so many like that. And there are others that struggled

to do the same sort of thing. I had friends who were sitting around doing

nothing for weeks because they couldn't pivot that quickly. So it was a really

weird time.

Doug Camin: Yeah. Oh for sure. I know the county side, like in my particular

case, I had a setup that, adapted well to the type of remote work that we did

because we did send everyone home. We had like, every county, you can't, like

the jail can't operate without people in it. Right? so there were certain things

where we had people in and we figured out ways to make it work. But, even within

my peer group, like I remember hearing stories later about other counties, just

I'm in upstate New York and other counties here in upstate New York. they'd be

like, oh! let me tell you about the heroics of my team, working that weekend to

build computers and laptops and find the tools and that type of stuff. And like,

that wasn't my experience in our particular case because we happen to have a

setup that pivoted nicely into that particular thing. I don't want to say for a

second that we planned for that because that was not in the plan. Right?

Brian Laird: It was nobody had that in the plan.

Doug Camin: That was not on the bingo card. Like, hey, let's set this up. So in

case a pandemic happens, like we're all correct. but it just so happened that

the thing that we chose worked well in that scenario. and, I think it was a

really great story, like hearing what you're sharing like about resiliency and

even you're sharing, like you've had these experiences where you had peer I.t

directors, CIOs and stuff like that that are like, we're just kind of dead in

the water for like two weeks until we figure out what we're going to do. and

like, and, you know, you, on the other hand, had the foresight of, another

leader who helped you plan a little bit, at least get started. And he did. And

then you had a, a plan to scramble against, which is awesome.

Brian Laird: Yeah, and it was great. When you see every. There's no pilot when

when all the quote unquote, politics in the boardroom and all that stuff goes

away and all of a sudden you're like, we're going to operate this business the

best we can in what we have right now. And you see everybody just jump in. And

that teamwork was honestly super rewarding. We all came out better as a team

because we had jumped in and nobody was yelling at each other. It is what it is,

right? And so it was not about politics. It was about how do we get this job

done? How do we keep the company functional and floating and really care for our

employees and get them in a place that makes sense for them based on what their

role is and what we can do for them? that part was really rewarding to see

everybody come together.

Doug Camin: Yeah. And it's not always true that companies have a certain level

of empathy towards the staff and the way they're doing things and stuff like

that. So I'm glad you share that. Like, we're here to care and we're taking the

experiences of what our employees are seeing is like a paramount concern of how

we're doing this. I think that's really important. Yeah. So it's good to jump

forward here. That was your last job. So what are you doing today? You've been

there a couple of years. It's almost three years at Baylor. So tell us a little

about what Baylor. What's your day job? What day of the life look like? I should

say.

Brian Laird: Day in the life. So Baylor is a group of construction companies,

primarily formed around, agricultural businesses. the original company that was

started in nineteen sixty five, I think it is, FBI buildings. They do, post

frame construction. So imagine those big barns that you see. and we're in nine

states. So, all over kind of the Midwest. So that's the original kind of

founding company. And through that editor, Baylor senior and then, his kids and

really at Baylor Junior who, really took over and really started growing the

business. has been growing it and they, launch more businesses. They're very

entrepreneurial, very innovative in how they think about things. And they got

into doing steel based, frame buildings through, Besco. we've got, protein and

beef barns out in Nebraska. we've got layered egg facilities through summit. And

so all of these companies are either GCS or design and construct. FBI buildings

is unique because we are soup to nuts. So we design, build it and construct it.

So it's our teams that are constructing it. And so that brings about some really

interesting challenges. We also have our own trust plants. So we're building our

own trusses. And so we have a supply chain. So whether it's manufacturing in

there, there's supply chain. And then there's what I'm going to call generically

the standard GC work of a larger business. so from a day to day standpoint, what

we are doing is really modernizing the tools, they had a sales process that used

a old Excel macro based, Excel book that they would sort of pass around. It's

been around for twenty plus years. so we're taking that out of Excel and turning

that into a web application. we are looking at how to use AI to really help our

teams do better, have better quality, make better decisions. so we're doing a

lot of AI work. We're doing a lot of custom development work to really

streamline how our business operates. And, the goal being to really reduce

overhead and we're not using AI or even these tools to replace people. We're

really hoping that we can scale. So our mantra really has been, can we scale? So

can the same person support a higher amount of revenue coming through the

business without adding another headcount? So the challenge I put in front of my

team all the time is, hey, if I had one hundred million dollars to the bottom

line, what would that look like? And how can we do it without ever scaling and

not adding a person? Nothing else. That's fair. But it's also unfair because, in

that process, you're going to have licenses, you're going to have laptops,

you're going to have more security, you got more things that you have to deal

with. But if you think about that mindset, about what tools help us scale, what

processes help us scale, what things can we do so that the number of people

required can either stay the same, right? Or it's okay, great. I added one

hundred million dollars worth of business. I only added one person where five

years ago I would have had to add five people to that. That's that mindset that

we're trying to go for. And so really trying to lead Baylor through a digital

transformation systematically just kind of going process by process and looking

at how we can take down some of the silos that are there and help that really

just data to flow, but also make better decisions and have a streamlined system

that makes sense.

Doug Camin: Mhm. Yeah. So it's cool. So some vertical integration going on here

where you're not just doing the end results, but you're building some of the

component pieces. humorously in my head, I think about if you saw the movie

Austin Powers. Yeah. Like, yeah, you remember there's the scene where, number

two is explaining to Doctor Evil how Virtucon has been expanded in while he was

absent. And at one point he's like, we have a factory that makes models of

miniature factories for our displays. so yeah, you talk about, I think one thing

I want to focus on is you brought up also, it's a family, business, so you've

got second, or third generation of the family in charge here. And, it's funny.

So I'm a certified corporate director. And, one of the things I was just last

year, I was at the National Association of Corporate Directors directorship

conference and there was a whole track on family businesses and stuff like that.

And one of the, presentations talked extensively about how hard it is to see a

business transition from the first generation. And second generation is pretty

hard. But like the second generation on is like the numbers get incredibly. So

that's a real testament to a strong business that can go on. But I think from

our perspective, from a leadership perspective, you're coming in here with a

little bit different background of some of the other folks. I just wrapped up a

role at, a mental health nonprofit, and I worked at a county government for

years and stuff like that. But a family business is different. I would call it

like different politics, and I think in the past, you've worked at other places

that aren't family businesses. So can you tell us a little bit about what is

different about how you navigate your day to day with those types of dynamics?

And I don't mean it in a negative way. Just it's.

Brian Laird: It's, there's a difference. Yeah. it is entirely different. this is

my second family owned business. The other one was first generation. okay. and

that was just different. And second generation wasn't going to be there for

twenty, twenty more years. So it was really him as an entrepreneur. I would say

this one's really unique in the sense that when I came in, they were

transitioning from second into third generation. and so I came in at the tail

end of that sort of transition and working through what that looks like. having

been in private equity for so many years, this is entirely different because

private equity is go, go, go decide. I mean, they are, velocity. And, I mean no

disrespect to my private equity friends, but if you hadn't done something in the

last week, they were questioning you. Right. and this is a completely different

mindset. decisions are made differently. in some cases they're faster, but in

some cases they're, like in some areas they're more risk averse. In other areas,

they are actually a lot more open. What's really impressive around Baylor is

they don't carry much debt. So when I came in from a private equity wondering

what their, leverage rate is, I'm asking all these PE shop sort of things and.

Doug Camin: Like, it's almost zero.

Brian Laird: Yeah, they're like, we have none of that. And I'm like, what? Like,

wow. so they're making decisions differently and that's a positive. Like that's

a good thing. when we started looking at some of these AI projects that we

wanted to accomplish, I gotta tell you, like I went into the CEO and said, this

is what I think, and here's the ROI and this is how I'm thinking about it. He's

like, well, great, let's go. I love it. Now he's holding me accountable to that.

But I didn't have to do a board presentation. I like we don't operate on

PowerPoint. my last company, on average, I'd have ten decks that I was working

on at any given time between board updates and, updates to this group. And we

were just doing, PowerPoint all the time. I do one every whatever few weeks a

month. Like it's, we're having a lot more relational conversations around, what

does this look like? How do we get there? Now they're metric based, which I

love. They love data, so they want to be working inside from a data perspective.

So it is totally different in how they think about that. And their

responsibility is to kind of the family, but it's also to grow the business.

They care about the employees. They care about growing the employees. I love

this story. One of the folks that works for me had, used to do MTO, which is,

you read the blueprints and you build a building materials. that's what material

take off. I don't know why they call it that, but so they do the bill of

materials. Well, he wanted to change. So he came over to it, didn't know

anything about it. They supported him for six or nine months. They said go try

it, see if you like it. He's turning to be awesome. He's turned into a network

engineer. He's gotten certified. He loves his job. Like I couldn't be happier.

And that would not have happened in many of my other businesses that I've worked

in, because they will go, well, you don't have the skill set. We're going to

hire somebody that has a skill set. We got to go, go, go. And they had the long

term view of, hey, this guy's been here for fifteen years. He's done a great job

for us. We're going to help him do this career transition and, this, that kind

of care and concern that I think, at least so far in this family owned business

has been the huge difference maker in the difference between that and some PE

shops that I've been in.

Doug Camin: Yeah. And I think that aligns with a lot of the biggest things that

I had heard about, some of the presentations and other stuff. I've never worked

in a family business myself, right. but I think the biggest risk in a family

business is, fundamentally the family, because like, whether or not it's the

mode in which they want to run the business. Yeah. And it's the tone they want

to set. So, it sounds like where you're at, the tone they want to set is we're

here to invest in the long term. We have a long term horizon that's going to pay

us the longer term dividends that we really want to see in the context of what

the business can do and the performance of that business. and, you get some

family owned businesses that they just, they want to kind of operate PE style,

if you will. Yeah. Go, go, go. Like, show me the metrics. Do this. We need this,

I want this now. I need this stuff. but I think it's more common in the family

side business to see that the more where you're at, where you've got people that

are taking longer term horizon looks at things and thinking of it that way,

which is really great.

Brian Laird: Yeah. It is. The other thing they've done really good is they've

defined what it looks like to be an involved family member and an uninvolved

family member. So because that's where I've seen, other folks I've talked to,

it's the uninvolved family member who gets a vote on whether or not you do

something and all of a sudden you're like, wait a minute, that person doesn't

know the first thing about what's happening in the business, but they just voted

and they're protecting their profit or their growth or whatever. They're not

thinking about what the business really needs. And so I think this family has

done a really good job of defining what an uninvolved person looks like and

where their role begins and ends. And then what an evolved person looks like and

where their role begins and ends. And that's actually really healthy. because I

think that takes a lot of the sort of the, if you will, some of those odder

family politics out of it. I think the other thing that's been really, if you

really look at the history of this company, they're entrepreneurial, but they

had the right leader at the right time for the right size of the business.

Doug Camin: Mhm.

Brian Laird: And so, at Baylor Senior got it to a certain place. And then when

Baylor Junior took over and bought his brothers out, he got it to a certain

place. But he. If you sit and sit with him, he'll he's like, this size is way

past what I think I could have handled. And so now the CEO is like, he

understands how to operate at that larger scale size. And that's important

because so many small businesses, they get to a certain size and all of a

sudden, what worked for you at twenty million does not work for you at one

hundred and fifty or two hundred or four hundred million. And that leadership

style and how you have to navigate all of that, especially when you got seven

operating businesses and you're still trying to grow and do more businesses.

that's hard. And so that takes a different style of leadership than, say, a one

business sort of thing. Like your brother in law doing pest control is, is going

to look and feel differently than somebody trying to do. Seven businesses,

ranging from schools to layered egg facilities. Those are different.

Doug Camin: Yeah. For sure. And so what you shared reminds me, there's a, one of

my colleagues in the mental health professions here, or social services

professions in the Rochester area. she said leaders have seasons. and knowing

when your season is in or out is it's actually a critical component of

leadership. So like if you occupy the top seat, like knowing that it's like,

I've taken it this far, but the skills that got us to here are not the skills we

need to get to there. and I can be comfortable, occupying another seat somewhere

else here and letting the right person take over. that's a really critical

skill. And I'm going to relate this right back. Now instead of us talking about

these other people and their leadership, I'm talking about our leadership in the

IT space. and I think that's important for us as IT leaders to understand how to

relinquish control, how to relinquish authority and, set things up to build

those teams that can be really effective. So like for you here, I'm going to

bring it right back down to us. how do you build your teams to know that type of

stuff, to set it up so they can be high performing, they can be trusted to do

the things you want them to do and stuff like that. Like what skills are you

bringing to the table there?

Brian Laird: well, I will say every organization is different. And so when you

come into an organization, you have to stop and assess and go, what is this

organization about? I always talk about the rhythm of the business. because each

business is different. So in commercial construction, especially in

agricultural, there's a lot less things happening in the winter time for obvious

reasons, especially in the Midwest. and so you, the rhythm of that business. And

what are the high points where like, everything has to be working no matter.

Like it's got to be on. Right? and then there's a rhythm to that. And then

really understanding what the purpose of it is. So if I look at Colibri, where I

was before eight, about eighty percent of business went through the e-commerce

system. So when e-commerce was down, that was a like, oh, that's a big deal,

right? We were, I think we estimated at one point we were losing on average

about a million an hour for e-commerce to be down. So I think as you start to

think about how do you make a high performing team? You got to understand what

the purpose of it is. And so the purpose of it at Baylor is different than a

Colibri. And it's different than at, insert. Other companies I've worked at,

they are different. And so what matters and when does it matter? Right. So

because the rhythm of business is really important, I think the other piece that

I look for is I always, whenever I'm looking to look at teams and how many seats

on the bus do I have? Who sits in those seats? What makes sense? I'm always

looking for something. I didn't know how to articulate it before, but, it's a

book called Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. Leif Babin excellent book. it

gave me the verbiage, the thought mindset that I needed to have. And it really

is extreme ownership. I was looking for type A overachievers who would own their

stuff. But I didn't understand really that extreme ownership is I'm going to go

get it done. I'm, going to make mistakes, but I'm going to raise my hand when I

make mistakes. I'm going to do those sort of things that's what I'm looking for

in people. And then figuring out where do they belong in the organization,

what's best suited for them. Not everybody should be a developer. Not everybody

should be a network engineer. Like, what do you need? So again, what's the

vision of it? what is the purpose there? and then how does that fit into like,

who do you have and how do you fit those in? and really getting clear about what

their role is and what the vision of it is and what we're about delivering, I

think, is where we start as leaders to build high performing teams where they

know where they're headed, where they know why they're valued. We value them. We

actually show them that we value them and give them a chance to go and really

point them in the right direction. and I think that's the foundational layer of,

building high performing teams.

Doug Camin: Yeah. So I think about one other thing I think about with everything

you just shared is the idea of, well, I'll relate it to one point you brought

up, which is the extreme ownership is not just saying you're responsible, but

I'm responsible to raise my hand if I make a mistake. Yes. Yeah. And, what

required in there is psychological safety. of the staff that like, if I make a

mistake, I feel safe enough to acknowledge it, that mistake is not somehow

detrimental to me. So like, and, there's obviously a nuance to that, if you make

an egregious, if you make an egregious error of something you absolutely should

have done something about, we probably have to have a conversation. But if you

make an innocent error, hey, I thought it was going to work this way, but it

didn't work out as well as I had hoped. Right. any of those types of things or

the unexpected happened and we didn't plan for it as well as we thought we

could. That's a learning experience. But feeling psychologically safe to raise

your hand and say that is a really critical component of the leadership style

that you have to bring to make that like that whole thing like function as a

cycle.

Brian Laird: and they have to know you're not going to throw them under the bus

publicly. Like they got to know that, there may be a one off conversation and

see, like, well, what happened? Well, this is what happened, but they got to

know you're going to go stand in front of the team and stand in front of the bus

and take it and not go sit there and just throw them under the bus. The hard

part about that is they also have to know that when they do something really

well, and it goes really well, that you're going to not take credit for that. So

you and your leadership role needs to literally balance the oh, look at what so

and so did. How awesome is that? and pump them up. And then when something bad

happens, you're like, ah, sorry, my fault, our team, like you don't throw

anybody under the bus. That's a hard leadership style to do, but that gives you

your one hundred percent right. you have to give them the safety to know that

you're going to take care of them and that they have a safe place to make a

mistake.

Doug Camin: Yeah. And it's hard. I think about, my time as a leader where I do

exactly what you're sharing. I take the arrows if they're coming our way. But

I'm going to highlight you if, things are great and, there's a risk for us as a

leader because you get other leaders who don't follow the same philosophies.

They don't understand what you're doing. so it's hard because you have to, give

up, to be a truly great leader. it is my opinion. I guess I'll say this, my

opinion is that you have to be a truly great leader. You have to be willing to

give up the spotlight yourself at the risk of people, others in your

organization, not recognizing that that's what you're doing. Correct?

Brian Laird: Yes. Well, you're one hundred percent right. Some people say

servant leadership. I am trying to serve my people, but I'm also trying to serve

my customer. And so what that looks like and how you balance that is really

difficult.

Doug Camin: Mhm. So shift here for a minute and talk a little bit just about

your history. So tell us a little about your job history. I mean, we've talked

about your most recent role, your one a couple of years ago where you were in

Covid, but like, where did you get started and how did you come up in the ranks

of IT leadership?

Brian Laird: so I got a job when I was in college working at Amoco before it

became BP. And, I didn't know what I wanted to be. I thought I was going to be

an aerospace engineer, but nobody explained to me that aerospace engineering was

math ten hours a day. And I'm horrible at math. so I went to go find another,

career. and I got this internship doing tech support at Amoco and met there. I

think their CIO, I think he was VP of it. I don't remember what his title was,

but I was just in awe. And I want to be that someday in the future. And so that

really sort of became my career goal was I wanted to be CIO or CTO. and what I

thought was going to be great was to really have well-rounded. So I did tech

support network, racked and stacked stuff. I had a Novell certification at one

point. Amoco actually had one of the largest Novell networks. back then I did

security firewalls, all that kind of stuff. Then I wanted an application

development, which is what I really wanted to be doing, got into enterprise

architecture. And so through the years just sort of grew and found my way to a

place. I had my own consulting firm for about right around ten years, eleven

years. We, went through the dot com bust in two thousand and eight. And my

brother and I started the company together and we started, three months before

nine eleven. So yay for us. Way to go. and then, two thousand and eight hit and,

he had left the business by that point. And I had plan A through f maybe g h.

And within three weeks just door closed, door closed, door closed, door closed.

I mean, it was, it was crazy. and so somewhere in there, I decided to go back,

as we joked about going back to the dark side and becoming a corporate employee

again. Got to go to a company called Apollo Global. And through that, we had

universities all over the world and then got brought into Apollo Education

Group, which owned them. And they were the parent company over University of

Phoenix and Apollo Global. I had a bunch of other companies too, and, was

running development for, all of those companies. it was a really interesting

time. It was a really difficult time. Apollo hadn't been bought yet and hadn't

gone back. a private equity firm bought them. So it was a difficult time. and

keeping the politics out for half a second. University of Phoenix was the

biggest for profit university. And so when the Department of Ed wanted to make

an example, they would typically come to us, or at least that was our perception

and feeling. And we would get and then they would go around to the other

universities and go, see, this is what we did to them. We'll do the same thing

to you if you don't do this right, whatever insert this thing was. So, we had a

lot of that, or at least that was our perception and our feeling at the time.

And so, highly regulatory, a lot of, deadlines, a lot of things that you had to

kind of take care of. but through that process really grew, and was managing a

large, team all dispersed all over the world. That was the other crazy part of

that sort of job. had a great, awesome couple of bosses in there. Was really

blessed to have some just great bosses that mentored me and taught me a lot of

things that I just didn't understand. I was good on the technical side. I did

not understand the business side. And that's really I spent probably ten years

there really from a business acumen standpoint, growing, and how to be better at

that. And that got me to, we got into Colibri and, just at twenty twenty,

literally started January of twenty twenty, Covid hit in March, April of that

time frame and went through that whole process. and then found, Baylor and

Baylor's been great. It was a much smaller, size. So I think we've got about,

under twenty people right now. we have a lot of employees, but many of them are

our crew teams that are out in the field. So they don't have laptops and, they

don't have a lot of devices. So while we have more employees, we don't

necessarily always have more, laptops and stuff to take care of. but there are

growing business, which is exciting, growing through acquisition, growing

through starting new businesses. So that part's really neat. And it's an

exciting part of Baylor and what they're doing.

Doug Camin: So if you're going through acquisitions with them, that means,

usually there's, always work for you to integrate stuff together and new

businesses in and stuff like that. Like at this point, do you have a playbook

for this? Like, how do you approach that when, they come in and they say, hey,

we're getting this other firm over here. It's got fifty people.

Brian Laird: Cleary we did. They said their goal was, I think like three a year.

We were averaging like six or seven a year. So we did, I think, eighteen

integrations. so I got a playbook from that. a lot of it is really, it in the

construction industry is a lot easier, right? figure out how many laptops, what

do they have? how are we going to put them into the ERP system? It's those sort

of, very standard type stuff. I've gone through the M&A process. So understand

how to find the things that maybe somebody isn't telling you. when I was at

Apollo, we had some pretty interesting situations of people who were juicing

their P and L who weren't, it looked really nice and shiny over here. But when

you talk to the IT guy, you got the real story and you're feeding back, hey, you

should go ask about that number because that's really not, we had one guy that

hadn't bought a, he literally had, three eighty six and forty six machines on

their desk, as their desktops. And he said, well, when you buy, you can upgrade

the, computers for us. And like he hadn't bought a new computer in twenty years.

So like he hadn't done anything. So when you find those sort of things, you have

to deal with that. And so from an M&A standpoint, just how do you assess what it

is? What are the risks that. I think that's one of the big things us as CIOs

have to look at is what's the risk by acquiring this company? Is there a

reputational risk? Is there a security risk? How do we get control of that? does

somebody got the keys to the kingdom and all of a sudden, they're going to be

mad that it got acquired and, do something bad. So you have to think through all

of those sort of unfortunate situations. But you have to think through those.

And for me, those are the things that I think our job is for CIOs to go through

from an M&A standpoint. And then just how quickly can you convert?

Doug Camin: Awesome. So let's shift now again, just now about a shift to fun

stuff. So when you were growing up, were you into computer stuff or were you

always the computer kid? Were you not? And then you came into it in college,

like, what was your first experience with the computer?

Brian Laird: Okay. So, at the risk of super dating myself, my dad had a Heathkit

zenith thing with the old eight inch floppies. And so, he thought he was big,

really cool when he got the little cassette things to do backups on. So, I was

not the nerdy kid like that I normally did not want to be doing that, except my

dad had found this thing called the Y-wing fighter, which was this little, Ascii

sort of, fighter thing that just you shot things as it came along. It was really

the most generic, computer program in the world. And I loved it. And I was

starting to learn basic never thought about going into computers. And my dad

sent me to college and he showed up, I can't remember. It was fresh. I think it

was second semester of freshman year with his old compact suitcase computer. Do

you remember this thing? I don't I'm not trying to date.

Doug Camin: You, my dad worked for IBM, too.

Brian Laird: Oh, okay.

Doug Camin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So at what point in the eighties, like, he was

like, oh, he brought this like PC home. I think it was like the portable PC. So

it's like it was literally a suitcase and it had this like four inch screen.

That's it. That's what I had. Yeah.

Brian Laird: Exactly. I fall down the keyboard and people were trying to write

papers. And so I had this old dot matrix printer and I had this key, this old

compact thing. And, I remember kind of having this crisis and one of my buddies

in the frat house showed up and said, have you ever thought about computers? And

I went, no. And he's like. And so he really walked me through it. And he's like,

do you like to see the results of what you create? I'm like, yeah. He goes, do

you want to see this? Yeah. He goes, you're not going to get that doing

aerospace engineering. Because I thought aerospace, I said it was either I

didn't realize it was math. I thought it was draw cool planes or like I was

thinking, I get to draw a Corvette and I had no idea what I was doing, but, he

showed me and I got into it, and it's one of those things I try to tell, younger

generations of, as they're going through trying to figure out what they want to

do, find the thing that you love. I still love programming. I still love

computers. I still love my job, I mean, I love working with people. I love that

more. I didn't know that at the time, but I love computers. And so I've enjoyed

learning and growing. And I feel uniquely, weirdly old, but also I got to see

what the PC did in the eighties and going into the nineties and how that really

changed. And I think AI is in the same is going to have the same inflection

point for different reasons, but I think it's going to cause us to do a lot of

different things. And so I feel blessed, honestly, to be in that place where I

can see three of those sort of big pivot points, through our lifetime. I think

that's really neat.

Doug Camin: Yeah. So that's a good a good pivot here over to AI stuff. You

mentioned it early on when we were talking about your work at, Baylor here and

how you're using AI. And I think you had also shared a story about, I think this

wasn't unique to Baylor, but, if we scaled the company, how do we do it with

what we have? And, I think you mentioned AI is one of the pieces that you would

really look to leverage today in that. So where are you looking for that? And

where are you looking to use it? And how are you using it?

Brian Laird: Yeah. So we put together a kind of what I call three pillars of our

AI strategy. Pillar number one is AI assisted development. and, we're big fans

of Claude. it's been really good for us. It's like having a bunch of junior

engineers running around. It's not perfect. It makes mistakes, but, the power of

what you can do if you actually understand how to use it well is amazing. and

we've got certain projects that would have taken us. we all kind of sat down and

was talking about it. And, we're building these engineering rules and Claude

built this entire process to show this engineering rule and how everything is

interdependent. It did it in under a week. I mean, it was fully functional

within a couple of days. But, we were tweaking it if we had done that on our

own. And I think we have some awesome engineers. We all agreed two, three months

it would have taken us that long to build something like that. And it was just

Claude could lay the code down faster. So that's, our first pillar is just AI

assisted development. Second pillar is what we're calling department Copilots.

Right now, it's really hard in the systems that we have to expose the data that

you might want to learn something, grow, ask questions. And so we had started a

year or so ago on a data warehouse project. We scrapped that. And because what

we realized was we're using Microsoft Copilot. We can plug the data into

copilot. It's using cloud or, ChatGPT, LLM behind the scenes. But literally

we're exposing the data and letting you go ask questions and you can go do real

time. so we've got MCP servers connected to Procore and to Acumatica and to our

SQL servers for, our internal apps. And we're able to now just let you ask

questions. And I don't need to go spend six more months building out data

warehouse, and syncing. Claude is unbelievably good at doing that very thing for

you. So these department level agents are going to give you the data that you

need. do that well and then give it to you. And, one of our presidents said he's

like, I'm in Procore every morning. Great. Now we can start to give you what you

need inside of your, email or however you want to consume it, and that's giving

you the exact data you need. So you can actually go on and do your day and

you're not clicking around finding all the information. The AI has done it for

you. so we're calling those department Copilots. And then the last one is these

purpose built Copilots, that are very specific to a job function that is

impactful. So we started with our first version, which was really just a how to

for sales team. for our sales folks that are out in the field, you could just

ask it questions. And it was really easy. Just, it was indexing SharePoint. It

was nothing, but it was again, just sort of introducing it. And then the next

piece was start checking my estimates. So you build a building estimate. We now

the AI has all this historical data, and it can check your estimate against what

we typically do. And it's, hey, your margins a little low. Your number of crew

hours is twenty percent lower than what the average this size building would

normally be. Are you sure this is right? Like there's certain things that are

just binary operations. Like you were supposed to turn this flag on, but you

have this other thing marked, Is that right? But it's really the analysis

against the historical data that's really powerful to say. Are you sure? Like

this doesn't look right. And it's both low and high, right? if you can sell the

building and we can still make our margins, you don't need all these crew hours.

and so we're able to use that. So that's our next step. And then the following

step after that is we'll let the AI make the changes for you. So we wanted to go

through this very methodical, purposeful introduction of AI. Get to a place that

we can trust the AI, that it's doing the right things. And now the sales guy can

say, oh, fix that. Yeah, okay, turn that on and off. Or, oh, you're right. Like

maybe I missed something and you can go pretty deep into it and ask it a lot of

questions, and it'll start to give you rational reasons for how it came up with

it. So that's what we're doing there. And then I mentioned MTO before. so what

we're working on right now is to look at our buildings. So when you build your

bills of material, when you make that or did you miss anything? So we're going

to go ask you like, again, I'm not trying to oversimplify it, but do you have

four walls to your building? Are you supposed to have four walls to your

building? Hey, I don't see the fourth wall. Like, hey, your roof is this, but

you forgot this. And what we want to do is and what we started working on right

now is reading the contract. So and if the salesperson handwrites on the

contract, like move the window over two feet, we want to make sure that we've

properly accounted for that. if the contract said twenty six gauge steel, but

they want twenty nine gauge steel. Great. So assuming the salesperson

compensated for that, we want the AI to read the contract, look at what the MTO

person built. Do they all line up? Did you order black, gutter, but you meant

white. Did you order the right gauge steel? All of those sort of things. And

then mathematically, the same thing. We have all this historical data. So can we

look at it and go, hey, wait a minute. you're missing half the backer boards or

you're missing the footers that we, all of those different things and thinking

about that. So we're really using the AI first to help improve the quality of

what we're doing. That actually directly lines up with the customer, directly

lines up with profitability and warranty work and everything else. But then also

looking at how can we start having the AI make those changes for you and catch

them? We want the human in the middle, because there are going to be certain

things that the engineering team is going to define, that you've got to follow.

And so they may say, hey, wait a minute, that seems like more than what you

need. We need the human to say no, no, no, that's correct. Do that. But you can

fix this. Don't fix this. So we really want to get to a place that we're doing

these sort of things. And that's our third pillar is really these very focused

eyes that are going to help you think about that. We started looking at

thinking, on the art of the possible of can we start looking at loads as they go

out on the flatbeds to say, hey, that's for project, one, two, three, four? Do

they have all the right things in the on that flatbed? Is that what we said it

was going to look like? So we're thinking about how can the AI help us build

what should go on each truckload? Can AI help us think about like, how do we

structure these sort of things? Can we scan that and do some real time visual

stuff and go, hold on, you forgot a whole palette, that you can fit on there,

all of those sort of things. So we're thinking about how we can improve the

quality and streamline that through the using AI to streamline that through.

Doug Camin: That's impressive. And I appreciate you sharing. coming up on the

end of our episode here. but before we go, I want to make sure that we ask you

to share your leadership insights. And I'll give you a couple of different

things to talk against here. Okay. One is what advice do you have for your

fellow CIOs? And then the other is, what advice do you have for people that are

coming up? And, like the junior folks, the people coming up in the ranks and

trying to look ahead, they look to you and they say, hey, what do I do to get

your shot, get your job eventually.

Brian Laird: well, I'll say this for the people coming up, you don't have to be

the same leaders, even your mentor. So your leadership style can be different. I

don't know you well, but I'm sure if you and I sat down, there's a lot of things

you're gonna be saying. There's gonna be a lot of things that we might be doing

differently, and that's okay. So embrace the fact that leaders are different and

accept that my leadership style is and I was trying to say that before, I do a

couple of things. I try to be very clear, very straightforward and very simple.

I'll give everyone a vision for what we're doing. So clear goals, clear

direction as we go through that. and then I give them the ability to make

decisions. So I have, and this works in it. I have four decision criteria. I

give everybody it's on time delivery on budget, quality software and how we

treat people. If you can prove to me that you made a decision based off of one

of those four criteria, I will one hundred percent support you, even if I one

hundred percent disagree with you. But if you can prove to me that you made a

decision based off of that, I'm on board. I will stand in front and take all the

arrows and everything else. If you can show me that you did that. and those

aren't in any particular order other than just how I memorized them. and so that

leadership, how you think about that is really important and how you think about

those decision criteria. So the first time that one of your folks doesn't

release the software on time because it was lack quality. How do you react to

that? And if you go over and ask the questions and seek to understand, okay,

tell me why you didn't release boss. I'm telling you, it was horrible. It this

wasn't working. This wasn't working. it was going to be worse. Okay? It's

happened to me multiple times where somebody didn't release software and I was

hopping mad because I had promised everybody and their mother that we were going

to release it. But the reality was they were right. They made the right choice,

and I had to go, and I had to trust my leaders. So trusting them to make the

right decision. And they proved without a doubt that they had followed those

four decision criterias. So and how we treat people, I can't maximize the

importance of that so much. I have so many stories where just treating the

people the right way will make all the difference for the world. I have been

blessed, I have multiple people who have worked for me for multiple companies

because I treated them the right way. And that's one of those signs that you

know that you're doing a good job because you have people are like, I'll come

work for you. Absolutely. They'll take your phone call like they been there. so

we love working together. And part of it is because they know my decision

criteria. They know how to think. So, a lot of other folks that I interact with

that are in this seat is, are you being clear and are you living to those

values? have really a vision of where you're taking the IT organization that

you're communicating out and in and that you're sticking to that and that you're

going to go, where you're headed and why you're headed there. So that's what I

would say to my fellow CIOs and CTOs out there. If you're looking to come up, I

would tell you to stop worrying about the technology and figure out why does the

business care? That's the biggest number one thing that I learned coming up was

I used to think if I could get them the shiny thing or whatever, they would love

it. And I realized nobody cared. They just wanted to do their job and do it

without any problems. And so if I came with something new, what why does that

matter to them? And really it's value, can you bring value in your role as an IT

organization, what value you bring to the business? And so if you can really set

aside, it doesn't matter whether it's node or TypeScript or Java or C sharp,

nobody cares the language that what they care about is what the value is that

you bring to the business. And so if you can really work on understanding how

your business works or a business works and why and how does it fit into that?

How you can bring value that makes you extremely valuable in how they think

about it and having a seat at the table and all of those sort of things that

people talk about. If you can show that you're bringing value to the business,

that's what they care about. That's what the CEO is going to care about. What's

boards going to care about whoever your leadership structure looks like, they're

going to care. Are you bringing value and can you prove that you're bringing

value?

Doug Camin: That's some great insight. Brian, I appreciate you sharing with us.

So thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.

Brian Laird: Wow. This has been great. Thank you so much for having me.

Doug Camin: That's a wrap on today's episode of, You've Been Heard the platform

for IT leaders. I'm Doug Camin, and we look forward to coming to you on our next

episode.