407- The Day IT and OT Finally Talked w/Bill Markut

Mike Kelley: Hello everybody. Welcome to, you've been heard the, technology podcast. And today we've got Bill Markut. So, Bill, do me a favor and tell us a little about your journey and your story and how you've been heard.

Bill Markut: Well, I'm going on thirty six years in it, this spring. And, I graduated from Milwaukee school of Engineering with a degree in computer science and a degree in, industrial management. worked for twenty plus years in IT consulting in Wisconsin, moved to Tennessee about twelve years ago. And, basically I've worked in a software engineering role for almost entirely my entire career, especially on the Microsoft side. there were some years during the consulting area that during Y2K and that, that I basically picked up all kinds of technologies, Lotus and Lotus Notes and Domino and things like that, just to keep yourself employed.

Mike Kelley: But I remember that.

Bill Markut: Yeah. Fun times. for, about four years ago, I, was a senior engineer on, an mez project, here at, we, deployed a sci metal solution in our biggest plant in western Tennessee. And, afterwards, a president of the company asked me if I wanted to take over the development area of Granges. And, I've always purposely stayed out of management because, I really liked being hands on technical. I liked being able to solve problems and innovate new solutions and new technology and things like that. but I also realized that I'm in my fifties and I really didn't want to manage or train new managers. So I took the role and worked in that role for a couple of years. I had a really good development team about two years ago. there was some reorganization in our group and I was offered the opportunity to take the directorship role and I did. again, begrudgingly, didn't really want to move up into an area that I really didn't know a whole lot about, meaning cybersecurity and infrastructure and networking and things like that. but, being a lifelong learner and, I enjoyed the challenge and, I think I've prospered somewhat in this role. I think I'm doing alright. And,

Bill Markut: part of my mission, I think when I took the position from, the president of the company was, that I wanted to not only modernize our our platforms because as a manufacturing company, and I've seen this for thirty some years that we're always about twenty, twenty five years behind the, the technology curve. And I wanted to not only modernize our platforms, but I wanted to improve our business continuity and our business resilience because, we had a lot of single points of failure and things like that, that, obviously downtime is the evil topic in manufacturing. so I've got a five year technology roadmap now and I'm just pretty much starting at the beginning of that roadmap, this year. And,

Mike Kelley: So one of the things that, that many of our compatriots or peers struggle with is putting together that roadmap and presenting it to the executive leadership and, and getting some feedback. How much? How much did they just take? The roadmap that you presented, how much back and forth was there on the creation of that roadmap? Because that's definitely part of the times that they're listening to you.

Bill Markut: Yeah, there's been a lot of back and forth about the roadmap. not only between myself and my management team here in the Americas, but myself and, the global team located in Stockholm, Sweden. it has been basically just sustaining itself and basically been in a reactive mode for, just bought, bought this company out of bankruptcy from Noranda back in twenty sixteen. but even long before that happened, Noranda was more in a, a sustainability mode as far as it goes. It's just like, let's just make sure that we're open every day and, and that's it. that's why I have I, that's why I have two ERP systems, the newest of which is Ax two thousand and nine. so, the other one is a thirty five year old flat file system. So, when I come in and I say, oh, I want to, improve our RMS and standardize it across the board and bring in a new ERP project. And I want to bring in a new data architecture as a foundation. that's a lot of change. And, that's a lot of, there's a lot of discussion to be had there because there's so many different systems and the management team, I've got a great management team here in Americas that I work with. They're very cooperative. They're very supportive. but I still have to educate them a little bit. And whereas a lot of people will say, well, you should be doing ERP first. And I disagree with that notion. I feel like the problems and where we make the metal is out on the shop floor, and I want to kind of build up from that shop floor and basically build a data architecture and a and standardize our mess and then bring in an ERP. because I don't, I don't believe the ERP makes us any money. I think it just, it's just something out there that you have to have for compliance and for, a form of business continuity, right? You still have to have it.

Mike Kelley: But I was at a conference one time and somebody said, you can take and optimize your billing department and you can make them the best billing department you've ever had with the least number of people. How much did that bring to the bottom line? How much did that change the enterprise? I have to admit that I was really, energized when I saw your history and the fact that you've got that OT and the IT because I read the Phoenix project and the goal.

Bill Markut: Yeah.

Mike Kelley: And between those two, that whole methodology and that change changed from just the manufacturing piece of it through, DevOps that the Phoenix project talks about. I wondered how much of that kind of experience and how much of that you've gotten to see or that you're starting to influence and change.

Bill Markut: Yeah, that's been a big area. In fact, my, I mean, I've read the Phoenix and I've read the other couple books, associated with that. But, and my development manager actually made that a, an after hours project for my development team where they actually did a book club type thing on, on the Phoenix project. so, that, that is another one of the initiatives that when I decided I wanted to take this role is that we needed to establish credibility and collaboration with our operations folks because in the past we were very siloed. And part of that wasn't so much the technology part of it. It was more of the people, part of it. And, you had people on both sides that are, very protective of their areas. and I've been working, I, you know, it's a continuous improvement effort, right? but I'm continuing to work with our operations folks at our main plant and I've established a lot of headway with them, a lot of trust. And I mean, that's the big thing is to let them know that I'm not, I know it is known as the Department of No. And that was one of the first things that they brought up to me when I approached him about this. And I'm like, no, no, no. I says, my philosophy and my managers know this is that, we're not going to ever just say no. I said, we're always going to say no, but we can do this or no, but how about this? Or it's always going to be discussion because if it's a need, then we got to figure out a way to do it. Because I know as a software engineer, if I had a security or an infrastructure person telling me that, no, you can't have permission to do that, well, I'm going to figure out a way to hack my way into that. You know, so so we can either do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way. And I'd rather do it the easy way and talk to people and gain their trust so that we can not only work with each other and have it be a better environment, but we work for the same company, right? We both. Our goal is to push metal out the door as high quality and as fast as we can. And the IT strategy is we got to do it in a very secure way. And the OT strategy is we got to do it one hundred percent uptime and somewhere you got to collaborate between those two and and you're never going to have one hundred percent security. You got to be able to mitigate things that come up in incidents that come up, and you got to be able to respond quickly and detect them quickly. but from an operational standpoint, you're not going to ever have one hundred percent uptime because you're going to have to be able to patch some devices and you're going to have to do some kind of upgrading yourself. So, it's just a matter of coordinating that, that change management and just coordinating that culture that we're here to help.

Mike Kelley: So yeah. Oh man, I didn't even think about that aspect of the challenge. I was thinking about the operational technology and figuring how just typically it runs behind, unless you're in that billion dollar organization that is trying to produce things at the front side of this, there's a couple of them out there that are doing that kind of stuff, and that automation and the robotic and all of those things. But otherwise, if you're at a a company that's been established for a long time, it's hard to switch those out because this is truly changing the engine while the planes in flight.

Bill Markut: Yeah.

Mike Kelley: And so, what are some of the things that you think that, what's a myth that CIOs hold on to that you think we should let go of?

Bill Markut: I know one of the myths is that, technology is easy to implement and it's quick to implement. for instance, obviously in today's, market, one of the things that keeps coming up is, AI, right? everybody wants to do AI and, I have to kind of, that's where you have to start. That's where it really helps to have some credibility because you have to kind of rein them in a little bit because AI is not going to be the answer to your problems. Data is the answer to your problems. But if your data is garbage, your AI solution is probably going to reiterate and regurgitate that garbage. So, one of the myths I think is, is that, that we need to really take a step back. And if you haven't invested in it in a decade or two, it's really not realistic to think that you can implement AI solutions just out of the box into your environment.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. You mean if we haven't kept up with modern methodologies and technologies, we can't just leap to that.

Bill Markut: Yeah, yeah. I try to illustrate the fact that we have, you know, so many data silos, not only between OT and IT, but even between IT systems and between other OT systems. you have multiple sources of data and it's just like, nobody depending on who you talk to, whether it's a plant manager or, Automation person or somebody in the finance department at corporate. everybody's got their own view on what a metric is and what the data is telling them. And, there needs to be some kind of, refinement and, Construction of basically a data philosophy and data architecture. And that's kind of what we're doing with, unified namespace.

Mike Kelley: Okay. oh, all right. Now that finally lands in a, in a different light because I saw that on your. I was looking at your LinkedIn and going through that, and you mentioned the unified namespace, but now I'm assuming that unified namespace is the way that you're taking that the data from all of those different sources, all of those different endpoints, and finding what the commonality is and, and getting all of that into the same, data architecture so that you can ask the questions of multiple machines, even though those machines do different things, but they all turn on, turn off produce. I'm assuming it's something like that, am I? AM I in the right neighborhood?

Bill Markut: Yeah, you're in the right neighborhood. Major principle of our roadmap is, decoupling our major systems. so we want to eliminate as many of our point to point, integrations as possible because they're expensive to maintain. they're basically throw away if you happen to be standardizing your Ms. platform or bringing in a new ERP. so, we're looking at going to an event driven, data architecture and basically what that, what that entails is a publish, subscribe, type philosophy where, Ms. may or your o t sensors may publish a bunch of data out and that data is going to give you not only just the data value at that moment, but the context of that data value at that moment. So that's what it adds, that a normal data warehouse probably cannot illustrate as much as the the context of that data at that moment in time. And, I'm working with a group, a vendor from Ecto box. and they're, we're actually working a pilot project right now, on our quality initiatives. between our casting and our rolling lines and, the concept behind that is we'll get all the sensor data that we have, plus whatever we can get in the future. but also align that with what ERP says it has for that data for that coil and what mas says it has for that coil and be able to throw everything together. And, I guess for the lack of a better term, maybe like a lakehouse, where you can actually do drive analytics and you can have real time. One source of truth data. In front of the operator, at all times. so you're not, you're not now. Rolling a coil for an hour. and doing two or three passes and then realizing that. You've got defects that you've just wasted an hour's worth of production time and, Maybe twenty thousand pounds of material. so that's, the goal. And that's why we're trying to implement that data architecture in conjunction with standardizing EMS so we can get that, we can prove that concept and scale that out and then hook in the new ERP as a subscribe, mechanism and a publish mechanism. so ERP could publish to the UN's and everything else that needs to access that data will be able to subscribe to it. So based on the event. So it's, I'm still learning the process and the vendor that I'm working with at Ecto Box. They've done a really good job helping me out. And, we're, they're working with my development team right now and our data analyst and coming up with these pilot projects and, and establishing what we can do as far as, not only data quality, but, visibility and things like that.

Mike Kelley: Okay. Let me, let me change tax on you a little bit and dive into your recent history. if you could fix one big challenge in IT leadership tomorrow, what would that be?

Bill Markut: I think I'm kind of, I don't know if it's based on my education where I went to school. I went to Milwaukee School of Engineering, and it was a different type of, education that I think that a lot of people that I notice in it, management, they, they come more from an infrastructure background and, and everything is the infrastructure related. And for me, I think being in a role that I'm in right now, I spend as much, if not more time dealing with the people, and the culture than I do the technology. For me, the technology is fairly, I well, I'm going to say easy, but I know it's not easy, but, it's pretty straightforward, right? black or.

Mike Kelley: White, zero or one.

Bill Markut: Yeah. The, the people part of it though is something that I don't see, I've worked for some good IT managers and I've worked for a lot of really bad IT managers. And it's usually they're very short sighted, very, averse to changes, averse to losing control. and especially infrastructure folks, they, they seem to. I've known past managers that were very averse to cloud technology because they wanted to be able to see their servers in a data center. And I don't think, the old school IT management philosophy works today. I think you got to be able to, communicate with people. You got to be able to communicate with your management team. and you got to be able to, in my case, I got to be able to communicate with my board over in Sweden, which is a whole nother story because it's a different, it's a different culture. It's a different, way of doing things. There's other regions in our global company. We've got Europe and Asia. they do things a little bit differently than I do. and so everybody does their own thing. And I just, I don't think there's a lot of flexibility sometimes, not necessarily, but in other companies, when I was in consulting, it was very, very like, we've done it this way for thirty five years. And we're going to keep doing it this way. It's just like, well, I guess that's not going to. That's the antithesis of innovation, right?

Mike Kelley: So yeah. So how do you fix that? since you're now the director, you've got reports reporting up to you and some of them are responsible for that infrastructure. I'm sure that you're not handling all of the infrastructure and all of the OT and and the mess and the UN's. Yes, you're responsible for all of it, but you've got to rely on your team. So if you've got a team member that's doing this, how do you fix it?

Bill Markut: Well, fortunately when I took over, this group, we lost a few people, but, I considered that, addition by subtraction. I think I was able to rebuild my department and I've got an excellent team, albeit a very young and not real experienced team, but my managers are fairly new at managing, they're great technically and security wise, And then our younger staff level people, we're probably talking, with the exception of a couple that I have probably sixty some years experience with, most of them are probably less than five or six years experience in it. the way I handle that is, is that when I brought these people in, I didn't necessarily look for the smartest person. although that that's a perfect scenario because you like, like everybody else, I like to hire people smarter than me because again, coming from software, I don't know the first thing about networking and, system admin and stuff like that. but I'm looking for people that have initiative and I'm looking for people that are, looking to innovate and looking, to scale outward and modernize and, and actually move into the, you know, I'd like to say the twenty first century, but in some cases in manufacturing, you're looking to move into the twentieth century. But, it's just a mindset and a personality and a culture. And my group, they know that they can suggest anything to me. Now that doesn't automatically mean they have carte blanche on implementing whatever they want to implement. But my development manager's got a lot of leeway as far as how he architects solutions, my infrastructure manager is doing a terrific job trying to remediate a lot of old legacy platforms and legacy domains that we're trying to retire and, get rid of so that it improves our, cybersecurity posture. and thus far, I mean, even with the UN's, which is such a new concept, the data architecture, I mean, there's some resistance in the, in my development team. There's some resistance in my infrastructure team about it because nobody knows quite what the outcome of that's going to be. And everybody's kind of they're not against it, but they're just not sure they're for it. And again, I think it's that a little bit of lack of control or loss of control that sometimes scares people. but having said that, they're, they bring problems to me and they bring their opinions to me and, and we have good conversations, good discussions. Some of it I do make changes in my process. others, I just go, well, let's play this out a little bit longer and see how it goes. And that's where taking small steps and, pilot projects and things like that really come into play because you're not investing six months or twelve months of time into something and then just saying, oh, this doesn't work.

Mike Kelley: So yeah, scrap the whole thing. And then yeah, well, back to your coil example, to the hour of heavy work into it when there was a defect. That was when you have the context that the sensors already recognized.

Bill Markut: Right? Exactly. The faster you can detect a problem, the least expensive it's going to be for you. With the goal in mind that we want to get that forty thousand pound coil out the door and shipped to our customer as quickly as we can and make sure it's good quality. we still need to make sure that we're doing it in the most efficient and quality way. So.

Mike Kelley: So what part of your day to day brings you the most joy? What fires you up the most?

Bill Markut: I think I'm going to go back a couple months ago. I mentioned the pilot project we're doing for the UN's initiative. part of that was an event storm that, David Schultz, ran from. And, basically what that is coming from a software background again, is basically, it's kind of a discovery requirements definition, right? but the thing about it was we, and anybody that follows me on LinkedIn would probably saw pictures of this, at some point, but, we had, sheets of paper all the way down the hallway at our facility in Huntington. and basically what we were doing is documenting the process of casting our cast house. And it wasn't so much about documenting the process that was impressive or that got me going. It was the fact that we had electrical engineers there, we had process engineers there, we had mechanical engineers there, we had quality people there, we had it people there. I had, infrastructure there. I had software developers there, just seeing everybody like talking and to one another and having a conversation on, well, how does this work? And then the other side would answer the question, that was exciting to me because that was the first sign that I could see that it and OT were actually collaborating. And I think that was a big I'm not going to say that was the instigating factor that, has like got us over the hill, but it definitely was an exciting moment where, that's what we need to see moving forward for everything that we do, we need to be able to see that same conversation for any, we just got to remember that we're coming up with a common solution that we both like, not so much that it benefits one side or the other. It's that we're doing it for, for not doing it for it or doing it for OT.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. Breaking the silos and the organizational team. Everybody's a team member, all of us working towards the same goal versus it and operations and, and the electrical and the mechanical and the, the different groups everybody's.

Bill Markut: Yeah, exactly.

Mike Kelley: Finally. See the big picture.

Bill Markut: Yeah. And and and David made the comment that he goes, he goes, I was really impressed that everybody was talking to one another and he goes knocking those walls down that silo. And I'm like, I, to me, I, I'm like, it looked like we were taking a sledgehammer to those walls because it was just unbelievable how they were all like gathered around talking to one another and there was no defensive posturing or anything. They were actually engaged in talking about not only what was happening now, but what could happen in the future as far as what is the perfect scenario. And, we had a similar discussion like that regarding cybersecurity and it ot security. because that's something that we're working on as well outside of us, but, kind of related to us, but, the fact that we want to be able to lock down some of this OT hardware that scares OT because they need to be able to access those machines at two o'clock in the morning sometimes. yeah.

Mike Kelley: They want to roll over. Grab their tablet or whatever device they have and check these things.

Bill Markut: Right. And, as I said previously, I am not a no person. I'm a no, we can't open it up to everybody to log into, but maybe we can create these separate groups and isolate this and do whatever we need to do. That's where I rely on my tech teams a lot because I always constantly pushing, you know, telling them, push the envelope, what is the best possible scenario that we could do to make this secure and make it flexible without, putting us at increased risk? And, I said, if that fails, then we just back off a little bit and try something else. But we, we need to fail fast and, and just keep moving towards that initiative and don't take no, we can't do that as a, as a solution. That's not a solution.

Mike Kelley: Okay. So did you have any times in your career, thinking back, that point out that you think a little differently than those around you, that either within the IT world or just in the world at large? You know what? When did you realize that you were built a little differently?

Bill Markut: probably pretty early on in my career. I think that's why I went into consulting because, I came out of school and worked for Baxter Healthcare and Caremark, international. And, so I was in healthcare probably for the first six years of my career. And, that was not an industry I enjoyed working in. Yeah. I moved into consulting because I enjoyed, providing solutions and talking to the, the people that were having the problems. whereas in healthcare, I found out that a lot of it was being, told what the problem was, maybe third hand and coming up with a solution that, after working on it, you know, back in those days, everything seemed to take twelve months to do. you implement the solution and then you realize you really didn't make any effort or any improvement to the bottom line. you're talking about Ebit and stuff like that. quite often you actually didn't even make the person's job any easier. You made it more difficult. So, I enjoyed going into consulting. I was able to market myself, kind of establish my own, desires as to what kind of projects and what kind of, business sectors I worked in. and that's kind of where I developed the people first attitude and the fact that, again, the technology solutions, there's enough examples of good technology application out there in the world that there's usually something. Very seldom are you doing something totally brand new like earth shattering. that's going to be the first of its kind. for me, it's more important to find out exactly what the problem is and apply those principles to that user or that, or in my case, a work center, type problem. And I think, so I guess to answer your question, I guess really early in my career even going, at msoe, not, it's not like a liberal arts school, like a lot of my friends went to. my friends went to a liberal arts school. I was doing, heavy engineering classes my freshman year. And I'll be honest, I thought I was going to flunk out of there. But, you know, before I could graduate. But, I ended up graduating and, realized that engineers are a different personality, than, maybe accountants and stuff like that. And, you have to establish your ability to communicate with multiple types of people and multiple types of personalities and be able to not only communicate with them, but to actually hook up with them and connect with them, on a basis that might be different for various people in your own department even. and I think that's what's helped me today is that some people need a little bit more attention than others. Some people need a wake up call every once in a while. but everybody's different. You can't like, just have a magic wand and treat everybody the same.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. I, I hear something in you that I've found in myself too, which was, the need to understand why, because there's so many times that somebody would call me to their desk and say, okay, I need this. And they'd tell me how they want their Excel spreadsheet or they tell me how they want this thing done. And, and I watched so many people in it. Just hear that and go, okay, I can do that and run off and go. Heads down and go do it. Bring it back. And by the time they bring it back. It's already too late because the person has found a way to hack in and get around that security constraint. And, they've just figured out another way, but we never hit the target. And so I always stopped to, okay, what are you trying to do? What, what's the goal behind this spreadsheet? Because they talk to me in the language they know. Yeah. And, and you and I, we've learned through our education of all of these different things that sometimes we can provide the same solution through a completely different path.

Bill Markut: I totally agree. And one of the things that I kind of emphasize with my team, is, you can talk and you come up, you know, I know you have all these brilliant ideas to innovate and technical solutions for problems that you see yourself. But one of the key elements to being a manager, especially of a technical manager, is the ability to listen. And I said, because like you said, user comes up to somebody in my plants and say, hey, I need this spreadsheet to do this or I need a a new Excel spreadsheet to track this. And they put it together without even thinking about the technical debt that they. Here I am on one side of the department saying, we need to decrease our technical debt by ten or twenty percent every week. A couple hours every week, eliminate an access database, eliminate an Excel spreadsheet or something. And then I got another group within it. Or like you said, rogue, it, that creating new spreadsheets and it's just like, no, no, stop it. It's just like you're making things more difficult here. So, that's a problem. rogue. It has always been a problem and always will be. Yeah. But,

Mike Kelley: You got any common sayings or quotes that you tell the team all the time?

Bill Markut: Fail fast. Yeah.

Bill Markut: I'm not real big on expressions. I try to talk with them and I just had a summit a couple of weeks ago. I brought everybody in from, the other three sites into Franklin here. we're located in Franklin, the corporate offices in Franklin, Tennessee. And I brought everybody in from, my Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee plants. And we got around and we had some breakout sessions where I kind of mixed up the groups and got everybody talking to one another and, about basically kind of around talking around our roadmap for the next five years. and then we did some other non-technical things like a service project and, went to a predators hockey game and things like that. I just try to have a good team culture where everybody's comfortable with talking with one another and everybody. When I first moved into the development manager role, the infrastructure, the development and the plant teams were all very we talk about silos between IT and OT. Well, it was very siloed, development. Yeah. Development and infrastructure. And the plant teams really were very segregated out. There was not a whole lot of communication or working together whatsoever. and, since I've taken over as director now, well, I did work on trying to mitigate that a little bit when I was a development manager, but since I've taken over the director role, we're collaborating all together. We're, you know, one of my expressions is that we're for sites, but one.

Mike Kelley: Okay. No, I like that. So as as we head towards the end of end of this, we've got a big question for you and we want you to, we want to hear what your prediction is eighteen months from now. What will everyone in it be talking about? that everybody ignores today. So if I was to well, actually, I don't want to put words in your mouth. See if you can and make that prediction again in a little more succinct.

Bill Markut: Okay. I would say in eighteen months, IT executives are going to regret not looking at OT skill sets more closely. when hiring their IT support people. Okay.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. And, and I kind of heard that I was thinking and I was switching because of, like you said, transportation experience, lots of knowledge and experience there. So I'm thinking instead of OT, I'm just thinking operations and that one kind of carries across all industries that. Yeah. that the IT people need to understand the business.

Bill Markut: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I and that's definitely, I mean, that's one of the first things, in our onboarding is that, everybody has to do a plant tour. Everybody has to walk through and see what the processes are and see what happened from the, from the beginning when that, coil is casted all the way through to the fact where it gets to, the, the shipping docks, they need to be able to see what the processes are, need to look at the manufacturing recipe and the routing that it goes through. and obviously they're not going to pick all that up at once. I mean, it took me a couple years to understand the full scope of the business, but yeah, you have to as a, whether you're it or OT. Whatever. You have to understand the scope of the business and how the business works, what drives the business? and I think, maybe another aspect of that eighteen month question is the fact that, I think executives will see in eighteen months that it is not just a cost center, and it's not just something that keeps you going day to day that it should be driving the business. I mean, obviously, the sales people drive the business and the customers drive the business and all that. But but it needs to be able to drive the business because it can provide the technology and the solutions. But we but where we lack a lot of times is the communication to that of that. And proving that to the management team. And, and I think once you can do that, then I think that opens the door for, your increased Ebit and, A great end of the year. Bottom line.

Mike Kelley: So which is that's the goal. Yeah. Yup. back to all the way back to the Phoenix and Phoenix project and the goal. Yeah. so, so Bill, tell me a little about Bill outside of the office and, and you got anything that you want to promote, you want to bring up or highlight?

Bill Markut: I am going to be going to the private conference in Dallas in two or three weeks. That's, Walker Reynolds, conference where OTT vendors and, integrators come in and they don't just talk about theoretical solutions, they actually, execute those solutions. so I'm excited to, to see that, not that I'm going to be programming OTT solutions or anything, but it gives me the ability to talk intelligently to my OT folks and kind of say, hey, have you thought about this platform? Have you thought about this? so I'm going to be going there and then, I will be on a panel discussion in late April. MM. Dot zero southeast in Greenville, South Carolina. I'm going to be on a panel discussion, I think if I remember correctly talking about it ot convergence. So, that's a, that's a really good conference to go to if you've never been to it and you're interested in it ot type, industry four point oh topics. I'm outside of that. I try to keep a good work home life balance. And So I continue to, do things outside of work and disconnect from, my laptop as much as I can. So.

Mike Kelley: Nice. Yeah. It's important that we maintain that balance. I know when I was early in my career, working all the time at the expense of the family and everybody else was part of who I was. But now it's really important to be able to disconnect.

Bill Markut: Yeah. It is. You get burned out. It's really easy to get burned out. And fortunately or unfortunately, I'm old now, so I can kind of detect when I'm I feel in that way. Whereas twenty years ago I was really burned out and I didn't, I don't think I realized it for several months. And it, it basically made me change jobs and, wasn't happy with what I was doing. Wasn't sure why I was in it. And then I figured it out and, and, been prospering ever since.

Mike Kelley: So right on, truly appreciate your time this morning and, and today and thank you for joining us on you've been heard and we'll help you to get heard a little bit more, put you out there and, and everybody that's been listening, please, hit a like and let us know that you've seen us on whatever your podcast platform that you're finding us. And, thank you very much, Bill. You have a wonderful day.

Bill Markut: Well, thank you, Michael. This has been it's been great. thank you for having me. I only known your community for a little bit. but I'm liking what I see. And, I really like the fact that it's just, it people like me and not having to deal with all the vendors and everything that comes.