Tara, I know you talked about your kids and summer sports.
We talked a lot about baseball.
What are the summer sports that you're seeing
and watching and doing?
Oh, gosh.
Like my little one is soccer and golf through and through.
My older is more of like the sport of reading and learning
is kind of his thing.
But personally, I love to kayak because I got a kayak last year
and I enjoy being out in the water,
just hanging out, enjoying the sunshine.
So that's me.
I'm going to say, here, I felt like I've talked enough,
kind of adding on things that I was like, yeah, when you're
like, yeah, getting out in the sunshine,
I'm like, I have a paddle board.
You can tell them back in the lecture
that I have since last year.
But it's awesome if I get time.
But no, I agree.
Just going out baseball, spawn up until it gets hot and buggy.
And then you're like, you know what?
Having the windows open and listening to the birds
is beautiful, hiking, nor shore, any of those things.
But yeah, the bugs are in full bloom here in Minnesota.
I'm like, oh, yeah, it's happening.
Here are your bugs, Bray.
Yeah.
So Jason, when you're not teaching your kids
how to play baseball, what are things
that you like to do in the summer?
What is kind of your summer activity, your sport,
your thing that you like to go and do?
Yeah, I am an assistant scout master for the first BSA
girls' troupe in Hamlake, as well as a scout master
for the boys' troupe.
So I am a scout master or assistant scout master.
I never like to be the man.
I'm the guy who helps the man, right?
So or the person, excuse me.
But yeah, we're getting ready to go to summer camp.
My daughter is leaving next week.
I'm spending a day.
It's four hours each way driving her to camp.
She's going to live up in the woods for 10 weeks.
No plumbing, all the things.
So she's hardcore about it.
But I will be taking our troupe along with some other brave
leaders to summer camp.
I am an amateur blacksmith, so at some point
I'll get my forge fired up.
I have recently kind of focused on wellness.
So I am doing three days a week of just working out
with some local firefighters.
And they are humbling me because they're all older
and way better shape than I am.
So got some work to do there.
But yeah, a lot of what I do will be running kids around
and enjoying myself.
We throw tomahawks in the backyard.
We just, during COVID, I think one of the best things
in our neighborhood was we started refocusing
on being socially connected as a neighborhood.
So instead of running kids to sports,
so we'll have a version of the state fair where everybody
sets up a food option and a game in their front yard.
And then the neighborhood just gets together
and all the kids play.
And we do that.
So yeah, that's my summer in a nutshell,
is running kids around, learning how to use fire sharp sticks,
learning how to be leaders without realizing
that we're actually trying to teach them things that have
nothing to do with camping.
And yeah, sneak a little time into my forge if I have time.
Wow, you make me feel like I'm not doing anything.
I'm hyperactive.
If I'm not busy, it's a bad deal.
So I keep busy all the time.
Yeah.
Kyle, are you a busy person during the summer?
Or is it kind of?
Not by choice.
But by family requirement.
But yeah, I mean, but if I were to go like it's for the St.
Paul Saints, I would be my favorite place
to go watch baseball.
I enjoy that more than even the twins side of it.
It's just nice.
It's small.
It's more intimate, very casual.
I mean, most of the time, I couldn't even
tell you the score of any of the games.
I mean, it's like whatever.
So it's very relaxed.
I'm not as emotionally involved into the game.
So I tend to enjoy it more because it's just
the being outside in the atmosphere
and just walking in the ballpark and doing things.
So I don't know what it is.
I really like that.
It's just not even stressful getting in and out,
which is the other part that's really big for me.
Going down to Minneapolis is always a stressful event.
I mean, you sit in traffic there.
You sit in traffic.
It's like an hour or hour and a half of just commuting
in there side of it.
But the Saints, they're kind of in and out.
It's like it's just a pretty effortless and stuff.
So I just enjoy that.
So yeah, it's just nice to get outside and hike
and do the different outdoor activity sides of it.
Like to play.
We've been doing the pickle ball with the kids.
We've been doing the wiffle ball and all that stuff outside
just to kind of keep it going.
So all good.
Try to find a cabin, run someplace, some point here.
Do a quick getaway, get out on the lake, and do some fishing.
I suck at fishing.
I really don't like it.
But I think the kids all like it.
So got to do it.
For sure.
You mentioned that I was thinking bocce ball.
That's what our family likes to play.
We're big bocce ball, pink ball.
So that's always a good one at the beach.
I love the beach.
You've got to find a quiet one though.
You've got to find the secret local ones
where it's not really busy.
That's what I like during the summer.
I think we just go.
Area, those are the ones they actually shut down
because there's some kind of bacteria.
That's why it's quiet.
I don't know how she bloomed.
Climb in the caution.
Yeah, you was like, yeah, never mind that.
There's nobody here.
What's going on?
They don't know what they're talking about.
Oh, god.
It's fine.
We know.
Yeah.
That just went so positive here.
I was going to be like, we now know who's introverted
and who's extroverted is we got the full scope of like, yeah,
we'll be social versus the area.
I was like, yeah, it isn't quiet.
And I'm like, yes, we should definitely meet up and not
talk to each other at the quiet place.
At the quiet place.
Yeah.
You find a quiet beach.
That's usually all it is because man,
the beaches just get.
Acted this summer or something.
Oh my gosh.
Well, today on our tech for business podcast,
our listeners may have heard a new voice.
We've got.
Jason, our virtual CIO and expert in commercial workplaces,
joining Kelsey, Tara, myself and Kyle, our CEO and president.
I'm going to throw it to Jason first because I'm so curious how
you got into commercial work spaces,
how you woke up one morning and said I am going to be a champion
for designers, you know,
I asked myself that question very often and I love, you know,
it's to take it back a second.
You know, I, because it all relates weirdly to how I got into
technology in the first place, which was, you know,
I am a Gen Xer.
I just turned 47 years old just a couple of weeks ago.
And I got my start with technology before there was a Google or whatever.
I found the intersection of my own curiosity and learning how to
fight through and figure things out through using an old beige
computer my dad brought home because I wanted to entertain myself.
I wanted to access these games that had this interesting narrative
component to them.
And, you know, when I was reflecting on my career many,
many years later, I realized that a lot of what I was doing as a kid,
what was personally motivating to me still translates through to
helping designers in this unique setting tell their stories to engage
with clients because we don't want to hear about why you bought this
credenza, this chair, whatever concept is.
They want to understand how they're going to solve problems that
ultimately affect people's well-being and their ability to do their
best work.
You know, and I'm passionate about that.
I'm passionate about, you know, Blacksmithing even has some aspect in
this, one of my hobbies, which is I'm not necessarily the person
using the stuff that I'm making.
In fact, I've personally chosen not to sell anything I make.
I give it away because it's the labor of love and it's not about
monetizing it.
It's about expressing that sort of need to be creative and produce
useful things that help other people do things better.
And so I got into commercial workspace because I worked for Target
Corporation and I've always pursued being in my career.
I'm always interested in the next thing.
My wife considered, I have a revolving door of hobbies, which she
loves because my house is full of all the things that are associated
with my hobbies.
At one point I was doing woodturning and Blacksmithing and all this
other stuff, so you got to pick one.
You got to stop running out of space.
So, you know, it's a good and a bad thing, but ultimately I was a
generalist in the sense that I couldn't just pick one thing.
I really liked the focus on end user computing.
And at some point got myself promoted into a job where I was one
of two people who got called when the red phone went off, which met
somebody with a C in their title had a technology problem.
And so I had to have a combination of interpersonal skills, technical
knowledge, and a good network to get their problem solved because it
was kind of like wearing a red shirt in a Star Trek episode if you're a
geek.
It is potentially a job in which you can find yourself with a very
short career if it doesn't go well.
And but it also taught me a lot that these were very, very patient.
Explain what it is you're going to accomplish, how long it's going to
take, and then get it done.
Be brilliant, be brief, and then be gone, right?
It was one of the philosophies I learned working with that group.
And so anyway, they being Target, the backstory was Target was
actually originated by the Dayton, what was eventually called the
Dayton Hudson Corporation, and they had a little commercial
workspace company that was located in the Dayton's building in
Roseville.
And that company was still owned by Target in the early 2000s, and
they had their own standalone idea of a structure.
So I was hired to come in and bring that infrastructure into
Target's bigger technology practice.
And then about three months later, I got a call from the CFO
I'd worked for saying, hey, can you undo what you did?
We'd like to, we needed to modernize, right?
And so bringing us into Target worked, but Target is finding work
consuming a lot of the resources.
It's not a great fit for either of us.
Can you bring us back out?
So my first big project that really set me on the trajectory that
led me to where I am today was to extract this commercial workspace
services company's technology infrastructure from Target while
being accountable to Target's technology practices.
So we had to reduce what it cost in terms of complexity to
serve that business's needs and everything else.
So that very quickly helped me understand what were the needs
of my individual clients that worked in that business.
And interior designers were kind of foreign to me.
My wife is actually a textile apparel designer.
So I have some familiarity with the mindset that a designer,
especially a technical designer has.
It's not just producing the thing that looks a certain way,
textures or fabrics or whatever else it is.
It's understanding how do I make 10,000 of these things at a
certain price point at a certain level of quality and sell it in
a store.
And my mentor, being a CFO, helped me understand how to
translate these technology concepts into dollars and
cents business cases so that I could only go out into the world
and understand what are the tools that are going to give my team
an advantage over our competition.
What is it that's going to make them more satisfied with their
daily work?
Because it wasn't just about maximizing productivity.
It was about helping them unlock their creative potential to do
their best work.
I think I said that once before, because I think that actually
helped them as team members.
We're all in this together.
So how do I help my team members get their best work done?
Because I felt like it just made my job easier.
If I had people who were coming to me like, Jason, I have this
problem and I want to solve it, can you help?
Absolutely.
Let's set job title aside.
Let's all get in a room together and fix this.
So one of my designers came to me one day.
Well, let me back up just a step here.
The way that we specified furniture.
And I have to make a distinction between there is a whole
practice of architecture and design, which is the shell of
the building and the mechanical stuff.
And so the designers that I'm working with who are
presented to with this often, here is the visual style we're
looking for.
Here's the building shell that you're going to be putting this
stuff into.
Here's a whole set of rules around ADA compliance or LEED,
which is more environmental sustainability efforts.
And I need you to produce a solution that helps people do
their best work using products and services from the
manufacturers that you are partnered with as a dealership,
which I like to call a commercial workspace services
business.
And I'll talk about that as we move along here.
So anyway, designers, the people who put sort of the chairs
and the word they don't like to use anymore, the cubicle walls
and the flooring together, they were using AutoCAD and a symbol
of libraries that you would sort of drag and drop.
Here's a chair.
Here's a, and then they would have to go in and manually say,
here's a color.
Here's the chair legs, blah, blah, blah.
If you understand that a single office chair can have three
billion combinations of potential variables.
And that's one product, right?
That's one chair.
And you've got cubicle walls, tables.
Those tables have support framers, all this stuff.
There's a huge opportunity for technology to automate the work
that they're doing.
So instead of them being products or specification experts,
which they still have to be, a lot of the mechanics of how
they specify things can be simplified using something called
parametric specification technology.
So as what they have evolved into is a tool that allows them
to drag and drop in a 3D view, the products that are available
to them in these catalogs that manufacturers provide to the
dealership and the designer.
And right now the sort of one of the industry tools that is
fairly common is CET designer.
And 15 years ago, it wasn't a standard.
There were other tools that people were using.
And one of my designers came in and said, look, I think this
tool, because it allows us to do, as we specify the product,
it's creating the bill of materials, it's creating
installation plans, it's creating a rendering potentially.
If we can use this and figure out how to make the technology
functional, we can actually save a lot of time and do better
work.
I said, this is exactly what I'm looking for.
This is exactly the kind of thing that I am charged with
helping you with.
So I attached myself to the design community as a technology
advisor and resource, unofficially.
There was no title for this.
I felt this was something that even though it wasn't helping
my dealership make money, I was helping my dealership at the
time adopt this new tool.
I was helping other dealers in the steel case ecosystem adopt
this tool.
And ultimately I said, look, I don't even care what manufacturer
that these other dealerships that are doing this are aligned
with.
So I thought, well, I think the industry can come together to
adopt a tool that helps us all do work together.
We can all go back and it's sort of like the baseball analogy,
right?
You can have the playbook, but that doesn't mean you can all
execute it as well as we can.
So we're all just going to say, hey, we're going to sort of
converge the community, get this problem solved, get this
technology adopted and move forward.
And it was a mess.
When we first started this, it was, we were told we had to buy
$4,000 laptops.
Well, at the time, having worked at the time when I worked for
Target, I couldn't go out and buy whatever laptop I wanted.
I had to use what was on the shelf.
And I quickly realized I cannot optimize what's available to me
to fit this need.
And that was one of the impetuses for spending seven figures to
break this company's technology infrastructure apart from
trying.
It was my first big project, had two commas in it, which was a
big responsibility for a very wet behind the years, late 20
something technology person who'd really never worked at that
level.
But it was necessary because that's what my clients needed.
So it's like, we're going to figure this out.
So with a good mentor, we figured out how to get our
infrastructure separated, which allowed us to buy the right
laptops, which in this case, we're gaming laptops because we
couldn't spend $4,000 per designer to make this work.
We could spend around 1200.
So the journey was we helped a single dealership become
proficient and get this tool off the ground and make it part of
the daily business with a lot of support from other dealerships
from Steelcase, from other manufacturers.
We were able to very quickly make this a standard within that
community.
And very quickly it became, you know, there's now 15,000 people
in growing around the world using this specific tool, along
with a number of other tools.
But what I have found is even after 15 years, there are still
tremendous opportunities, not only to consider the basic
technology infrastructure that supports this business.
So when I talked about spending seven digits or seven figures
on a standalone technology solution, which was at the time
the very beginning of what we now call like a V block type
setup where we were buying storage and compute and memory
altogether.
We virtualized everything.
I had to run everything with a team of at the time, three people,
three texts plus me.
So four people, I guess, if I count myself as a person, which is
good to do for your mental health.
And we got it going.
So that really helped me understand that I had to get the
basics of IT management and understanding how to run a very
clean, very, very high functioning technology environment.
That was table stakes.
I had to get that done right first.
Then I got to work on the stuff that was really, that was, I
guess, changing the game.
It was a force multiplier.
It was doing things that nobody else was doing with technology
at that time.
Now, once we did something new and compelling, other people
would emulate that.
So it wasn't like we could just do something and then sit in
our laurels.
We had to continually be innovating and finding new applications.
And one of the things that I, towards the end of my career in a
dealership, decided to do was take the work my technology team
behind the scenes was doing and push it into the forefront of how
we shared a value proposition with our clients.
So I decided, how do I use what our tech team is doing?
Because we're solving business problems, right?
So for example, in downtown Minneapolis, real estate was
relatively expensive.
This is before the pandemic, before the whole equation about
how you design workspace changed, right?
So the goal was get as many people into as few square feet
as possible.
And in a dealer showroom space, meaning we have to show and tell
things that our clients haven't seen before because why would
they come work for us if we're not even eating our own dog food
as it were.
So we decided, hey, we need to make this space something that
can change frequently.
So I'm going to get away from doing structured cabling everywhere.
And I'm going to rely on a Wi-Fi connected environment that my
interior designers can use.
Now, a lot of people as general IT users can get away with
wireless, but an interior designer has a different use case.
It's like a marketing person.
They're pushing really big files, security, everything else.
So we went out and worked with HPE and I believe it was a rub at
the time.
Got to hope I got that right or they're going to, that's going to
have to get fixed in post.
Yeah, right.
Anyway, perfect.
We actually, one of my techs actually got to write a white paper
with HPE about how we were able to do this and then eliminates
something like $40,000 for the cabling, which allowed us to A,
tell a great story to our clients because I was able to bring in
the CTO, the CIOs and our customers and talk to them about how
we used our resources, both IT and internal design to solve our
bigger workspace issues that we were not just, in many cases,
the design of workspace was done almost in silos.
So the designer would sit down and say, here's how the furniture
goes in and then some random AV person would come in and say,
okay, here's how we're going to put the speakers in the ceiling
and the microphones and the screens and then IT would maybe
get 10 minutes of notification that they had to do a network
upgrade.
So it never was done sort of with a big picture in mind.
We weren't working together.
So what I pushed was collaboration, IT working, lockstep with
design as I had been advising them.
And so I was able to push my team as the infrastructure teams that
work into the forefront.
And that was helping us win new business.
And so if you want to know in a very long story, short version
of a very long story, I've just told that whole philosophy continues
to inform what I'm doing now to serve the greater commercial
workspace services industry.
So about four years ago, little over four years ago, I realized
I wanted to go farther.
I loved the idea that I was helping serve the business that I
really grew up in.
And I am tremendously grateful to this day for the mentorship
they provided me.
But I went and had a conversation with my boss and said, look, I
feel like I have opinions about leadership and about running a
company, but I've never done it.
I've never put stakes on the table and said, I'm going to go
gamble, frankly, my family's well-being and financial interests
by saying, I'm going to go into business for myself.
I had like a month of runway and said, I appreciate everything you
did.
I want to go out and do my own thing and start potentially
serving dealerships outside of this wonderful steel case
ecosystem.
I want to talk to other business leaders.
I want to try this.
And so I started my own company called Platt Anvil Consulting.
For two reasons, A, I needed a company name that nobody else had
used, and I had about three hours to register a DBA before I
jumped on an airplane after inkjet printing business cards to
start pitching to a bunch of dealer principals the following
Monday.
So I left my job on a Friday and started my consulting career on
a Monday.
So it was a very short amount of time.
And it was successful.
Really, I had a great start working with some new manufacturers.
COVID happened.
And if you were in business for a year and COVID happened, you
had to learn very quickly how to adapt and how to get back to
focusing on how am I personally going to survive in a business,
but B, how am I going to help serve my clients who are
financially constrained?
They don't want to take a lot of risks right now, where they're
dealing with, we don't even know what's coming next, but also
realizing that in this sort of environment of uncertainty, there
is tremendous opportunity to grow, to help those clients go
bigger.
And so that is where I started trying to figure out what was
I going to do next.
And in the same time period, we found there was a bit of a
stability negative happening, that the tools we were using
weren't performing as well as we expected.
We had changed the basic operating parameters in which we
designed the infrastructure to support all of these interior
designers and these other workers.
And all of a sudden, their primary business application wasn't
working well.
In fact, the joke was the blue spinning donut was on the screen
more often than the mouse cursor, which is a bad experience.
And one of my best friends in the world is a user experience
designer, so that ain't going to fly because she will shame me to
death.
So anyway, and so we started looking at what is going on and I
had a designer call me and she was in tears and she's like, I am
trying to go to my kid, there's a birthday party in my house for
my kid and I can't attend it because I can't do a rendering
job that is required for me to get this, this set of graphics
out for a Monday morning bid proposal to salespersons waiting
for.
And I did everything I could and I couldn't solve the problem.
And for me, it was a long moment.
I said, as an IT person, this person trusts me, she's come to
me with a problem and I don't have a solution.
So I'm going to dedicate myself irresponsibly in terms of my
own personal and professional finances and time to solving
this problem because there isn't a solution anywhere in the
industry to help this person.
So I set about developing a rendering offload solution using
primarily off the shelf components, free software tools,
whatever else it was, spent a lot more money than I like to
admit and a lot of important time because I was personally, I
was pissed.
I was pissed because it was something that I couldn't solve
so my ego was bruised and we don't like that.
But also because this whole industry that was relying on me,
I couldn't solve, you know, if I couldn't solve this problem,
I had no business considering myself an expert in this field.
So I went ahead and solve the problem and I developed a
rendering offload solution and technology, started selling it
and had a meeting with this crazy CEO who, you know, I was
trying to refer some business.
So I want to just to step back one more second before I tell this
part of the story, which is the reveal into why I'm, you know,
why am I talking to you guys?
Who are now my coworkers, which is great.
I lost my tangential, I just lost my train of thought here.
I was developing this solution to solve this workspace problem
for these interior designers.
And I've lost, again, I've lost my train of thought.
Darn it.
I had a great narrative going.
Yeah.
You know, you started moving into my question, which was like,
where did Kyle come from?
He just came out of the woodwork and said, hello, like,
he did.
He popped out and was like, this head gave me like, hey, what are
you doing?
No, so sorry.
Thank you for bringing me back on track.
And so I, one of the philosophies that I had as a consultant
was I cannot take any sort of income, any kind of money, any
course, any sort of consideration from anybody if I'm going to
refer them as a solution.
So that is a difficult thing to do when you're a consultant
because, you know, for me, part of what I developed was a way
to develop, we'll say passive revenue, meaning I would have
to go out, find a customer, write up a scope of work, do that
work, and then find another customer, right?
Or find another or find an engagement retainer, whatever
else it was, right?
Because I couldn't rely on this concept of referrals.
This is, when I went to Mexico for the first time, I noticed
that every time I took a taxi ride, there were like 47 slips
of paper that got handed out.
So whatever I was paying the cabbie was getting divvied up a
bunch of much people who were like, oh, I referred that business
to you and you get a taste, you get a taste, you get a taste.
So I'm guessing that my $7 cab ride or whatever the
paceless translation was became a $47 because all these people
had their hands out getting involved.
I said, that is, you know, naughty word.
That's bullshit.
Sorry.
I don't want to do business like that as a consultant.
You're paying me for untainted advice and what I think is the
best path forward for you.
And so I can't take that.
So anyway, I was trying to refer a client who I'm actually
going to see here for a chiropractic adjustment to somebody
and was told that the partner I'd been working with really
wasn't well suited for that.
They didn't really scale to solve that client's need.
And so CIT was mentioned because I had a working relationship
with somebody else who works at CIT, Mr. Scott Patsy, who had
been a VCIO for me when I was working at the dealership and had
to go out on medical for a back injury.
So anyway, set up this lunch.
I was going to meet with Ann Maurer and talk about this
opportunity and there's Kyle.
And so I started talking to Kyle about this crazy thing I was
doing with the rendering servers and how I was going to market
as a consultant.
And he had some great feedback.
He's like, dude, you are not designed to scale at all.
You're getting tripped up and you're trying to do all the
things and either A through, maybe it's not something that
you're well suited to do.
You've got this passion.
You've got these ideas.
You've got the solution, but you don't really have the framework
to support what you're doing.
And I think this is an opportunity for CIT to sort of go.
We have a very similar philosophy on customer service.
I actually had, I do work with a nonprofit.
I was on the board of directors for a nonprofit here in
Minneapolis called Free Geek Twin Cities who helps serve an
underserved population with access to technology for people
who just can't afford it.
So it's computers, it's laptops, it's tablets.
In some cases, I believe there's even some broadband grants,
but ultimately I actually came across, and they do a retro
computer refurbishment, which was my personal passion, as you
can see from the random old computer game sitting behind me.
Anyway, I found a computer from a little company called, it was
PC Express.
Right on, yeah.
And there was a weird, my wife told me as I'm leaving, she's
like, a lot of things happen in our life around the
IDS of March.
And here I am running into this computer that Kyle and a bunch
of folks at CIT had previously in their career worked on and
said, you know, I don't know, what are the chances the
universe just said, it's time for a pivot.
Here we go.
Kyle and I, I think had a lot of very common beliefs and
values.
And I loved hearing about what CIT was doing.
I love the fact that it's been around for 30 years, that our
office is this wonderful, terrible, like early 2000, like,
it's wonderful.
It's this great culture.
It's focused on people and providing great solutions.
And I said, this is perfect.
You know, it's a group of people who want to do the same
kinds of things that I've been trying to do for my clients.
And in some cases, succeeding and in some cases, failing
because I don't have the right infrastructure.
So Kyle and I went from talking about maybe working together
on a referral basis to what if I just came to work for you.
And he made the investment in buying my technology, buying
this, this rendering solution that I had developed to help
solve designers problems.
And to get back to did this thing actually work the very
first client, I actually sold it to them without permission
because I had a really good relationship with someone who
actually is also a mentor of mine and was a customer of mine,
which was Jim out in California.
I want to use his last name to protect the innocent.
But Jim was a client who I had had a very long standing
engagement with as a VCO slash technology advisor.
And I decided, look, I need to put this in front of a client.
And so I'm going to ship this out to Jim and send him an invoice
and say, we're going to drop this off.
And if it doesn't pay for itself, I'm buying it back.
But I need this to be something that you've actually invested
and put it in front of a designer and I'm sweating bullets
because this doesn't work.
I've wasted a lot of time and energy.
And she went into her application and had a group of like 12
images she was going to render.
And she clicked the button and like minutes later, first of all,
her laptop became available to her to keep working.
So she's like, wow, that's not normal.
This I can keep working while my renderings happen.
That's great.
So yes.
And then all of a sudden she's like, it's done.
That's no, no, no, no, no, no.
She went back and did it again.
And she turned on said, this changes the game.
I have to rethink how I'm doing my job because this is so
impactful.
So, you know, I'm internally doing a woohoo and jumping around
saying, you know, my wife's not going to divorce me now.
This whole thing was actually worthwhile pursuits.
Thank God.
And so anyway, I'm all over the place as far as this narrative
flow now, but the end game is I have the privilege of working
for CIT and being able to bring all the great things that CIT
is doing in terms of offering the ability to, to solve my
client's problems with their basic technology infrastructure.
You know, how do I, how do I get great support?
How do I get a great laptop that's patched, that's running?
Technology security is a huge focus.
I mean, understand that the industry that I'm supporting was
actively targeted by some of these hacking groups during
COVID.
You know, one of my biggest projects was to go out to
California and help a client who was fully ransomware while
Steelcase was simultaneously fully locked down because of
ransomware.
So, you know, dealing with vertical supply chain attacks and
all this stuff, you know, CIT has all these services.
And so I can go out now and offer all this great stuff to my
clients.
I can still advise them, but I can bring them into our
customer success team and say, hey, they can, we can help you
understand where to focus your initiatives, where to focus
your energies and your investments in technology and
actually do the things.
So instead of having to, and it's not a bad thing to rely on
referrals and partnerships, but I think for the, ensuring the
level of quality that I am personally committed to, this is
such a great fit because I believe in what CIT is doing.
I wouldn't have decided to become an employee again if I
didn't.
And this is great.
So this is where we are today is that I'm able to take the
solution that I developed.
We're currently in the process of refining it into a hosted
solution.
So I don't have to actually ship stuff to clients and have them
install it.
We are in the process right now today, even of getting that up
and running so we can start piloting that to some of our
clients and then also help them understand and assess their
technology readiness to either adopt these design tools to
understand where their risks lie as a dealership or as a
commercial workspace services provider.
Whether it's a manufacturer that wants to help understand how
are their dealerships in terms of technology readiness?
Are they doing the right things because, you know, they're
maybe Steelcase or maybe Herman Miller, maybe, you know, they
have their logo on the same door.
Are the dealerships and these service providers, do they have
the right tools and technology and maybe how do we help
support them get there?
So I am tremendously excited about what this means for the
industry that I've been supporting and very passionately
involved in.
And I'm going to shut up because I'm going to run out of words
here in a minute, which might be a miracle for those of you who
may have heard me speak before.
No, you're good.
This was, yeah, I was going to say that was an amazing narrative
overall of where you started, how you got there, where Kyle
randomly popped up and I wanted to, while we have Kyle on the
podcast to go, hey, do you have any kind of like wrap up your
view, anything that you're looking forward to?
And then of course, for anybody listening, we're going to have
Jason on more podcasts with more specific things.
So get ready because that was amazing.
We'll have you on again, but just to go around.
I was just shooting for at least barely adequate, but that
works out.
Thank you.
I do appreciate that.
No, I think obviously I was attracted to, I love Jason's
energy.
I think we're blessed to have him.
Jason's story with the designer side of it.
Again, he referenced the synergy and the core value sides.
And we talked a lot when we first met about values and where
we sit side with it.
And I'm very much in alignment in the same thought of, you
know, the people connection to the technology is important.
And the value of making sure that that technology works for
them is, you know, was, provide a lot of synergy together when
we were talking through that side of it and really just saw
the vision side of it saying, you know, here we got a tremendous
asset.
He's got tremendous insight and knowledge of the workings of
this industry and how it can go.
And when you couple that with the resources that allows us to
extend that to more and more organizations to get Jason in
there to help and then have a team behind him that can help
deliver those services and effectively get them out kind of
became our mission saying, you know, this makes a lot of
sense. We can really leverage and allow and give Jason those
extra resources and a team behind him to really, I think,
take this vision to its fullest extent of where it can go.
Because you can obviously pick up from Jason's passion.
He wants to see it working.
He has a lot of insight of how to make it a lot better.
And I think that the hosting of those things is just kind of
the tip of the iceberg side of it.
But we already have a hosting center.
We have a lot of those resources.
So it didn't take long for us to, again, get this already kind
of moving into another level for him and allowing him to get
out there and, you know, are super excited to see where we can
take this side.
But it's, I think, a fantastic solution.
I think we got a lot that we can help in this vertical side of
that.
Because, again, we want technology to be an asset.
We don't want it to be a cost center.
And we want to, you know, head off these risk sides of it,
these ransomware attacks that are just terrible, terrible things
for organization sides of that.
But fortunately, in many cases, are fully avoidable.
But we have to have an opportunity to assess and educate
and plan.
And that just, you know, just takes time to get in front of
people.
So.
I think you're personally, and it's, Kyle, I think that's
something that was really important about when we first started
talking was, I think you really personalized what technology
is for people.
And that gets to one of the core philosophies that is so
important to me, which is, you know, we speak almost Greek to
people.
I think we both grew up in a time period when we were almost,
and I hate to say, I'm gendering this because this is the way
the answer ran.
We were the guys behind the curtain that were doing all this
stuff that nobody understood.
And it was like owning a boat, right?
Business leaders were just pouring money into this hole in the
water and not having any accountability for where it was
going.
And we had to mature.
We had to become more diverse in terms of both the people and
the concepts we were working with in this industry.
And I think we've had to get past this idea that we are, we are
special and we deserve not to be held accountable because we're
technologists and nobody understands it.
No, no, no.
We need to work within the context of business like all the other
mature business practices, marketing, finance, accounting,
sales.
And I think it's an exciting time for us because it then allows
us to be objectively better at our jobs.
We can explain what we're doing and it just lets those bad ideas
kind of go away.
It's not worth the investment.
It's not, you know, let's focus on things that really impact
people's business and really help them understand, look,
technology does not have to be unapproachable.
It's a tool set that will become a force of multi-pilot.
It'll help people do that great work.
So, and I just love the fact that your basic, the tagline on the
website was just basically get technology out of your way.
Let's focus on people and what we do is the technology behind
the scenes.
Like great design.
This is where the synergy between interior designers and what I
like to do really comes together, which is we just have
different tool sets to do the same thing, which we're solving
business problems with the tools, the understandings that we
have.
And at the end of the day, that's what I think the synergy
that CIT and what was Platte and Pogonsalting when we came
together and said, look, we're going to do this, really means.
We're for the dealer communities, for the commercial workspace
services, whether you're a manufacturer, whether you're a
dealership slash consultant slash, whether you're an independent
rapper, independent designer who's out there trying to get their
shingle out there and try and do your own thing.
We're there to support you.
And I would love to work with you.
So, I guess it looks like we're about to wrap up this concept
this episode.
So, I will try and read off my email address, but I believe
somewhere in the notes you'll be able to find it.
So, please feel free to reach out.
My signature even has a calendar invitation or a calendar link
that you can use to schedule time with me, which is one of the
great features of the technology that we offer to you and
something that we can help you embrace even small changes like
that in your business that will just make those technology
expenses every month really perform for you.
So, thanks for letting me go on and on and on, Kyle.
And this marketing team that has done such a great job
supporting me, you know, being alone, Wolf for so long, I
have still had to adjust to working and playing ball with
others.
So, it's been a wonderful and I just, again, I'm thankful for
you for taking the time to let me talk a lot in this first
podcast episode.
I love it.
It's been so good.
I mean, I love having you on.
I feel like I have a million more questions.
So, we are definitely going to have a part two.
Thank you, Kyle and Jason for joining us today.
If you have a question, like I said, Jason said, we're going
to have information in the description.
You can always reach out to us at info at cIT-net.com or you
can head out to our website at cIT-net.com slash podcast and
we'll be back next week with an all new episode.
Thanks, everyone.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.