Today on our Tech for Business podcast, we're joined again by Jason, our virtual CIO and
Kyle, our president and CEO.
This is part two to our commercial workspace discussion.
Previously we talked to Jason about his journey into the industry, Vlad Anvil, Kyle kind of
coming out of the woodwork and joining CIT with us.
So instead of an icebreaker, I just wanted to do a little check-in and kind of see how
you're doing, Jason, a couple months down the road, how things are going at CIT for
you.
I love it.
I am every day humbled by the cool people I work with, having a team that is as passionate
about doing the kind of work that we're all doing here and that I get to bring it to this
industry that I've worked in for a long time.
This, we're coming into a very big month.
There are a number of tools that we use to support visual design in an industry, but
the folks at Configura put on a very large user conference that has really become a place
for the community at large to gather and share ideas and we're going to be sponsoring and
participating in that event.
I'm giving some one-hour presentations to kind of help dealer designers understand how
to work with and sort of rebuild a relationship if they don't have a functional one with IT
and how to use these tools effectively and kind of speak our language to empower them
long-term.
And as part of that, something that again is very near and dear to me is to see me holding
a pen up here.
We are doing a targeted giveaway.
We want to make sure that we are really, genuinely, this is something that I built during my
plan to end build time that was really kind of a love letter to designers that was an
affordable, super fast, something that was designed to look good in their showroom and
function well.
We're going to give it away at the conference to a designer, not a vendor, not a software
developer, not another person.
This is something for designers to really show our appreciation for the support you've
given CIT and me as we begin this venture is supporting you.
So we're also going to be sharing free access to our rendering accelerator solution.
That's something that CIT invested in and we have scaled to provide as a service to
our clients.
I'm super excited.
There's no obligation to put a credit card in to use it.
I just want people to really see and experience how this solution that was built to solve
a problem a very designer called me crying one night and I wanted to solve.
I want to share this with them and honestly, hopefully they will see the value in it and
perhaps decide to do business with us.
But I'm super excited about this conference, about sharing and really getting out there
and sharing what CIT is and what we're doing.
Being around for 30 years as a tech company in this space is certainly not common and
I think they're going to, I hope they will be happy that we're there working with them
going forward.
For sure.
Yes.
And for those who are just listening and not watching, I do have to say that this computer
looks beautiful.
I wasn't sure what it was going to look like, but Jason working with designers, he built
this for a designer.
It looks amazing.
So great job on that.
Steve Jobs would be proud enough.
Yes.
I may cite Steve Jobs on my LinkedIn profile, but I don't pretend to be anywhere near him.
Steve Jobs was brilliant at taking a great idea that maybe wasn't well technically implemented
or explained from an end user experience perspective and did just that.
So I appreciate that point of view and I do model out a bit.
But yeah, the story here, just to give a little backstory, if you are watching and I'm doing
a little theater of the mind here, I'm going to cheat and say, just Google the word fractal
north.
So the computer case I chose, so we are up in the frigid Midwestern, the Northern Hemisphere
where we get really cold winter.
So it is a snow white computer case with a wood hardwood front on it that was designed
in Sweden.
And the conference that we're attending was actually, it is a Swedish software company.
So I felt, A, this looks really good going with the short aesthetic that people who use
this technology tend to be designers, but also there's some nods to both our climate
and being in the Midwest and in Minnesota, our Swedish heritage as well as the partners
that we're working with overseas on the solution.
So yeah.
And it's powerful inside.
It is.
Yeah, it was designed not just to do everything they need to do today, but everything they
need to do for at least the next three years, including run, twin motion, do 4k renderings.
You know, they, if they can dream it, they can really do it with this computer.
So it was designed to empower them.
Ideally, you know, my philosophies get tech out of their way and be an invisible partner.
And this is exactly, this is a manifestation of that philosophy.
So I love it.
I love it.
And you know, talking about this computer and just in general, you touched a little
bit on those specific challenges that designers are facing and kind of in the curious, like
I said, this is part two of our episode with commercial workspaces.
I'm curious as to what challenges designers are facing today.
And you can, you know, talk kind of broadly or a little bit more specifically about how
you're approaching those challenges and solving those challenges.
Yeah.
And, you know, I have the great fortune of having both a good friend and an industry
peer who has a great podcast in which she reviews challenges designers are facing on
a regular basis.
So the design pop podcast free plug Alexandra, who's also been great at helping me connect
with some of our dealership friends.
But it is there are a number of issues that designers face and they're probably laughing
at me because, you know, I would say number one is they have, they never have enough time.
And so when I tend to focus on solutioning, it is how do I save them time or make them
time or make them things are doing more efficient.
There's a ton of stress in this industry.
There is one of the biggest pivots in the last 10 years post COVID even we'll say is
the way people work changed fundamentally.
We read all the articles to ad nauseam, you know, the return work concept drives me a
little bit crazy because I didn't stop working.
Mostly you didn't stop working.
We just did it in a different place.
And so the workplace and workspace has just changed and they've had to really figure
out how to address that using the traditional skills methods and best practices they had
learned originally and also develop new intellectual property and ideas and concepts as they're
going.
And in many cases, they're doing more with less.
It's just in people have a greater demand for visual artifacts that help them make those
those decisions about what they're buying and to be comfortable through the buying process
and the ideation process.
What is it that you're proposing for my workspace?
How does it look?
And is there a way I can share in advance some of what you're proposing with my end users,
some of that's using just visual renderings that are static or 360 year renderings you
can look at on a large screen or even virtual reality, augmented reality experiences.
How do we embrace all of these technologies and and non technologies really just the soft
experience of all of this stuff is ultimately about helping people make decisions to ultimately
do business with that dealership so that they have income that can go into paying those
designers, keep doing what they love to do.
So it's helping dealers remain or become a remain financially solvent.
There's some very challenging times.
The basic demands you'll be high underneath the hood even below where the designers live
is the basic infrastructure that they live on and the new sort of expanded obligations
that these dealerships have to some of their clients to be more transparent about how they're
managing those it assets, the security that they're using, you know, that they have cyber
insurance that all the things they need to have so that it is a partner to them is being
transparent and balancing that with the need to be innovative.
You know, the for example, a lot of our designers out there need to have or have needed to have
local admin rights on their computers to use the mix of tools they have.
I'm not calling out anyone partner a lot of different partners that required it at some
point in time.
And a lot of them have done a good job of trying to very slowly get there.
They have parties that have to balance too.
But one thing I found and I love working with with Nate here at CIT.
There's a new product that we're often called Threat Locker, which the what I heard about
it and he said, it allows you to have admin rights essentially at an application level,
but not across the entire computer.
Somebody's running out, which eliminates a lot of those security risks.
And I just explained that terribly.
He's probably falling over to chairing up here.
The concept is I can reduce the risk factor that a designer presents.
And this for the designer's point of view means it's less risky for them just to do
day to day work.
They're not intentionally going out and doing things that are risky.
They're trying to do their jobs.
Our job is to protect them in a way that it is not creepy and weird and overbearing.
Like, hey, why don't you need to click this button and call me to fix it?
It's just it's a great solution that I believe has a great user experience concept tie to
it that allows them to do their work while we do our job to secure them behind the scenes.
So again, that's the but yeah, they're they're dealing with an environment where our our industry
is under attack.
You know, a steel case was attacked.
You read that in the news.
I'm not scooping anybody vertical spy chain attack that went, you know, jumping industries
from the medical industry where they were being attacked during covid and the healthcare
industry over to two manufacturing partners, supply chain partners, etc.
And other manufacturers have been targeted the same way.
So really helping them do what they need to do and be innovative with new tools and new
technologies that weren't really prolific and in use three or four years ago and continue
to do work faster and at a higher level of quality than ever before.
So yeah, no challenges at all.
Everything is going great.
And honestly, and balancing work life, I think if I'm going to go down another rabbit hole
here, you know, covid taught us all a little bit, or at least those of us who had the opportunity
to potentially stay home, maybe spending a little more time with our families and, you
know, look at the reasons we get up and work and stress and do all the things.
And how can we as technologists empower them to maintain that balance?
Well still, when they're at work, they can work as fast as they need to.
But when they're often unplugged, they can step back, you know, the renderings can run
the background and not interrupt everything they're doing and not be failing.
They can go attend their kids birthday party.
You know, and that's a very fulfilling part of what I get to do, because frankly, I get
to do that those things.
I get to spend time with my kids.
I get to be a Boy Scout or Scouts BSA leader for both girls and boys.
And like this weekend, go out in the woods and live under a tarp in the rain and do those
kind of things with my family because I find those things interesting and exciting.
And I want to allow other people to do the same with their families.
So long answer, short question.
I love it.
You did kind of touch a little bit on that security and I was going to mention when this
podcast comes out, we're right on the cusp of the Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
And there'll be a lot of information coming out about, you know, what you can do.
And is there anything, you know, designers day to day or the technology that they're
using or the products that they're creating, are there any, does that change your approach
to cybersecurity with commercial workspaces?
Or is it just kind of the same across the board?
And I don't know, maybe Kyle can kind of chime in on this as well.
Yeah, I can, I can lead in all adjacent rabbit.
But it's a general approach.
It's all about risk mitigation side of it.
So the approach side on cybersecurity, at least from our perspective side of it, and
it's been something that's been spoken of quite frequently now is the preventative side
of the cybersecurity and dealing with tools.
Jason mentioned Threat Locker, that's one of them.
One of these tools that you can put in, do a level of automation, apply a framework to
these things that all reduce the level of risk that an organization has to greatly reduce
the likelihood of a security incident and hopefully never a breach.
You know, as those things evolve through there, it's a very good investment to make and it's
just a level of automation.
And it's something we do with our managed services where the synergy with Jason and the
customers that he serves in this vertical side of it, that's where there's a ton of
synergy because it brings in a level of automation and a framework that can be applied and allow
them, as Jason mentioned, to do their job without having to go deep into learning all
these things, the other sides of it, to be able to come alongside, apply the framework,
give them, you know, access to experts like Nate, who we mentioned in those sides that
if there is a question or a concern, you have experts you can bring in that specialize in
these areas to answer the question and you keep servicing your customers and doing what
you do well.
And that's where a lot of the synergy comes in.
Jason, anything you want to add to that?
Well, I'd say this actually plays very close to one of the philosophies that I've always
brought to this business, which is if I'm being a good consultant, I'm working my way
out of a job.
And the very first job I want to work myself out of with most of my clients is as a consultant,
is I don't want to be trying to figure out how we can avoid you getting blown up effectively
by a cyber hacker, terrorist, whatever you want to call them, right?
I would rather you be able to focus on and I could focus on helping you do new innovative
things because to me, the future of a commercial workspace dealership as they call themselves
traditionally, and I think that's sort of an antiquated term because it implies you
just sell furniture to markup.
And what these businesses do is much bigger than that.
They are about sort of experimenting with and understanding workspace concepts that empower
people to do their best work in a variety of businesses and applications.
And no part of that is, is my email secure?
It shouldn't be, right?
Should I be worried about those things?
Like when I'm driving my car, my wife just bought a brand new car.
Like I was trying to live on my 2015 Ford F-150 pickup truck forever and it finally died
and I had to buy not one, but two new cars in a week.
And what was jarring to me is I got in the car and it's got all these crazy reminders
and things that keep me from doing dumb things I probably could have done on my older car.
But I realized it's allowing me to focus on, it's taking care of some of the automation
around me while I'm able to focus on driving and being safer in the vehicle.
And I think that has a parallel to what we're dealing with here, which is there are a lot
of new things that are demanding the time and attention of our designers, of the business
leaders to support them.
I mean, I want people to understand that I have very much hyper focused on supporting
designers because of the role and the importance that they play across the business process
of delivering what clients need from these businesses.
But the table sakes for doing this, I had to be a great technologist, not understand
how to apply technology across the board to be an IT director, to be a CIO, to be all
those things.
That was table sakes to doing the innovation stuff.
And to me, if I could say that's a great and important job, but it's not core to those
businesses.
Like they're not in the business of selling technology, right?
They're in the business of selling workspace concepts.
So if I can get that out of their way and that includes their cybersecurity practice,
the thing about cybersecurity is in many cases, if you're going to get cyber insurance, for
example, you have to go through an audit of some sort and demonstrate that you're doing
things to prevent getting hacked or attacked and generally being efficient with your resources.
So the act of getting just cyber insurance, this kind of hyper focus on that one thing
for a minute often requires you to do a lot of things upstream as well.
And I would say in many cases, the same applies for me working with designers.
I may go into a dealership saying, I want to help you innovate and get, have a great
design experience.
But what I realize is they don't have the underlying network discipline.
They don't have a good place to store files.
They have a lot of other deficiencies that we have to correct first because I need to
get the day to day IT sort of operational stuff off of their plate so we can focus on
innovation because to me, helping them deliver their own solving their own business problems
can translate into value for their customers because they're expected to be tip of the
spear to be learning and experimenting on themselves with workspace concepts, including
some technology applications.
But those technology applications require everything out of the hood be running smoothly
and perfectly and safely.
And that's all part of having a great cybersecurity strategy, about having a great IT operations
and management strategy, whether it is something that is run by an internal resource, an IT
director, manager, CIO, or an external third party, like something we could do for one
of our customers, or a hybrid approach.
In many cases, I will supplement, even if a client has a managed service provider like
we are, I can still connect to that client say, hey, I'm going to provide accountability
and a separation of duties between them and you so that you have an agnostic person who
is looking at what you're doing and providing a different viewpoints that is necessarily
driven by trying to sell you stuff is driven by you getting the right things and having
the right outcomes.
So I can focus on delivering business value.
Certainly we'd love it if you'd work with us and with CIT, but that's not the end game.
Because to be honest, I think that's how you win trust.
I've learned that in this industry, that you build trust by being there to help solve
problems and then down the road, if it turns into other business, great.
If you build it, they will come.
So do business ethically, do business well, help clients do the right things to protect
them from some of these threats.
I hire a designer because I don't know how to do this stuff.
They are wizards.
They have the, it was kind of like sometimes IT people are people who don't work in this
trade.
We have all this crazy knowledge that other people don't understand and I depend on that
expertise.
And so if I can empower them and get, avoid them having a bad cybersecurity incident,
you know, I think it all, it all ties together in some way.
That was a really long answer.
The cliche about, I'm going to ask a tech guy, what time is it going to tell me how
to build the watch, in this case, anyway.
Oh man, I love it.
So we talked a little bit about challenges.
We talked a little bit about just day to day and cybersecurity.
I'm interested in sort of what you see coming down the pipeline, like what is the future
of this commercial workspace?
We're talking five, 10 years from now.
Where do you see things going?
Yeah.
Oh, I have, I have a couple of opinions here and I think a couple of things.
Well, so I'm going to say AI because everybody says AI and the cloud and I dash something.
No, and I think this is the thing.
People are, are sometimes scared of what AI could bring.
We deal with chairs that from a configuration standpoint can have a billion variables, one
chair.
There may be hundreds of thousands of components in a build that all have a million variables
associated with them.
What AI can help and empower designers to do over time is limit, like as, as AI learns,
learn to sort of limit the choices and curate what they're seeing so those designers can
do their best work.
And I think AI driven decision making to be, to help be a better consultant, which is what
I believe designers, I think their titles may actually change over time, much like a
systems engineer or sales consultant in, in, you know, in our business work, that role
is going to change and has been changing for a long time.
And I think AI can help them by really empowering them to, to make those choices more quickly
and give better qualified recommendations.
The scary part, you know, so I'm going to use the, I was having a conversation about
something and all of a sudden up on my phone pops an ad for that thing.
Now, I never typed in anything about this, but I know that phone is listening, right?
So just to show my parents, but the funny thing is, I, there are such deep sort of profiles
on all of us that exist.
And one thing I think that while it sounds a little bit big brotherish, if we can utilize
that for good, right?
So I understand if I know I'm going to be presenting to somebody and I have some idea
what they like from a textural standpoint, from a color standpoint, you know, the, the
Facebooks, the Metas, the Googles of the world have been creating these giant kind of weird
profiles about all of us.
What if we could use some of that information to help drive what we're showing to people
to again, make sure that we're really giving them a custom experience.
I mean, use the bad for good, if you will, right?
So I think using data that's available to help drive better recommendations to people
is one big change.
I think this industry is also supported by a lot.
Well, do things.
Consolidation is happening.
If you've watched, again, the dealerships of traditional your, a lot of them are family
owned.
There were smaller businesses, you know, they're gobbling each other up right now.
There was a huge consolidation between Herman Miller and Noel that is now Miller Noel.
There continues to be purchases of small independent manufacturers by larger manufacturers.
Smaller dealers are getting gobbled up by bigger dealerships as maybe, you know, members
of the family are retiring and they aren't really sure what they're going to do.
And those manufacturers want to retain market share in certain areas.
They're providing a solidation.
That is leading to a more larger scale clients in terms of what the dealerships that we work
with potentially are and a greater demand in terms of that technology, complication
of what I'm looking for here, the sophistication, the ability to work at enterprise level, not
just a small business level.
So I think that's a positive thing.
I think be able to take enterprise thinking and bring it down to scale where we can use
it both at small and large manufacturing dealerships is a good thing for the industry.
And I think it will continue to drive, I don't think many traditional, what I would, I hate
to call them sort of the old school way of doing technology where technology almost holds
the business kind of hostage.
They're not going to share information with you.
They're doing things their way.
You know, IT, the budget is sort of a whole that you just pour money into kind of like
owning a boat on the water and you get to enjoy once in a while.
It's not going to be that way for long.
Just the demand for accountability will change that.
And I really think that is going to be to the benefit of everyone who works in this industry.
Better tools, better process, better security.
I do think the industry has a lot of sort of software companies and partnerships have
grown up out of necessity, right?
Kind of in the same way that small businesses, maybe they've sort of found a little tiny
niche or specialty that they focus on.
And what I find is that a lot of data format, like the data that flows through this industry
sometimes ends up in weird proprietary formats that doesn't really follow what, say, if you
worked with an architecture and design firm and they work in Reddit, for example, we ultimately
require that you also change that file and change those, you know, we're not dealing
in common file formats or single source of information.
And I think as this industry grows, as dealerships themselves and manufacturers become more sophisticated,
they will demand that we think differently about how that data moves, that instead of
a designer creating a PDF artifact or pricing based on catalog data that's out of date because
somebody didn't run updates, that simply will no longer exist.
We'll treat the specification for space and the pricing more like a code repository where
it's a flow of information that draws from other sources in real time.
And we can kind of keep track of that.
So because I think that'll give the customers a better experience, I think it'll help those
dealerships and all their partners from end to end in the supply chain do a better job
managing the products and services to ensure a great experience for that end customer.
I think that's all part of what's going to come.
I think the industry has generally been underserved because it has a very, very limited investment
in technology as a percentage of revenue typically.
I mean, it's usually less than 1% of a dealership revenue is invested in technology.
And that's on the very bottom of the scale.
If you look at construction industry, 3%, if you look at healthcare or technology, it's
as much as 10%.
So I think overall business will demand some changes and that's a positive thing because
there's so much that we can do with just a little bit more kind of money resource, mind
share and again, getting the legacy thinking out of our way so we can really innovate and
really do crazy good things with visualization and fulfillment and just making sure that
our clients, we're empowering them to do better work by doing the same for ourselves.
So to me, these designers and these businesses will become centers of innovation and those
that don't will probably become purchased.
They'll get bought up by other dealerships, businesses, whatever else it is.
But I don't say that disparagingly.
I just think it's time.
The way, yeah.
And I'm super excited to support them because I think it's the people I know who've really
been in this industry that are looking to do great things all feel the same way that
it's time for us to grow up and realize the potential that this industry has to help shape
the future of work for everybody.
I'm going to trademark next to that.
I'm going to tagline somewhere.
Yeah, I'll put a little thing.
After I say we're trying to work and then cross my eyes.
Yes, for sure.
Oh man.
There's so many things I wish I could just deep dive into that you said and might have
to be for another podcast in the future.
You know, I have a lot of words.
Don't worry.
I can just keep tapping the keg right here.
Are you sure?
I love it.
My head is pretty big.
I'm going to put your quote up for time.
Yeah, I think you got at least another half hour of Jason.
Oh, well, in that case, hang on.
I should speed up so I can fit 45 minutes into a half an hour of time.
Now we'll do it in part three, I think.
Yeah, for sure.
For sure.
I love it.
Well, thank you.
Thank you so much, Jason and Kyle for joining us today.
Jason, can you remind us?
I know that this is coming out right before October and you're going to a conference.
Can you remind us a little bit about that conference?
Yes.
Give a little plug.
That's right.
It is the CET experience in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona at the Fairmont Princess Hotel in
Scottsdale.
So, it is, again, it is a place for us to gather as an industry in many ways.
There are different conferences.
One is called Neoconish Cago that if you're in the industry you're familiar with.
This is very much focused on designers, interior designers, and one specific tool they use,
CET designer, but really in many ways it's for us to get together and talk about industry
problems and how to solve them.
And again, I'm both honored and excited to get to go and talk to designers.
I've missed it.
I've missed being in person because obviously the pandemic has changed a lot of the ways
that we travel and out of necessity and out of learning.
We've experimented with virtual conferences and such, but there really is nothing like
just getting together, shaking hands, learning together, probably being too tired by the
time my presentation rolls around on Wednesday, but that's okay.
And yeah, so I'll be out there the eighth through the 11th or so.
And if you're in the Phoenix market and you're a dealership and would like me to stop by
and visit you, I've set aside some time to do just that.
So, I'm super excited to be out there.
I'm hoping they'll record one of the sessions so I can perhaps post it up here on our social
media site if you want to hear me talking about my recommendations for dealerships in
a 45 minute dealer friendly technology discussion.
And yeah, I'm again, I'm both honored and excited and there's a really great giveaway
and I just, I may even sign the inside of it to fully lean into the Steve Jobs wannabe.
Yeah, this is no Apple one, but certainly it'll have something fun inside.
I love it.
Yeah, for sure.
That's so great.
And if you're listening to this and it's past our October, I will make sure in the description
to have our commercial workspace website that you can head out to and learn a little bit
more about Jason and what he's offering.
So, thank you again.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please like, subscribe.
If you have a question or topic you would like to discuss, reach out to us at info at
cat-net.com or head out to our website cat-net.com slash podcast and we'll be back next week
with an all new episode.
Thank you.
Bye, everybody.