396- Building IT From Scratch in a PE-Backed Startup w/Dana Kline

396-Dana Kline
Host: Phil Howard
Guest: Craig Gehrke
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Phil Howard: Dana Kline, everybody, welcome back So Dana, why don't you introduce yourself? You introduce yourself and we'll go from there.
Dana Kline: All right. I'm Dana Kline, I'm the chief information officer and vice president of information technology for Cordia. We are a three and a half year old district energy company that owns District Energy and microgrid assets that are much older than three and a half years old. Some of our assets were built in the late eighteen hundreds, actually, with steam systems. I've been doing IT work for thirty-five years, and I can't see myself retiring anytime soon. I'm really enjoying it.
Phil Howard: Awesome. Many people say that, and they wouldn't have the answer if they wanted to retire anyways, they wouldn't know what to do. So I guess that's okay. So you have some silos that pre-date nineteen hundred. What's the oldest piece of infrastructure that you guys have? Are we even allowed to say, is that top secret?
Dana Kline: No, no, I mean, so we have two steam systems so one is in San Francisco. It was built in the late eighteen hundreds, first started, and then went from coal to oil fired boilers to now natural gas boilers. And we have a plan to phase those out and replace them with electric boilers powered by renewable electricity. But that has been providing steam heat for downtown buildings for a very, very long time. And then we have a similar system in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, same thing. Steam heat that's transitioned over the years and is now run by natural gas boilers.
Phil Howard: Let's reverse backwards. First of all, the company's fascinating. Just the idea of kind of the energy, maybe just even though this is an IT podcast, maybe just explain a little bit about how you guys are delivering energy. And I found it to be very fascinating. Or a good model. Yeah. It's just a good business model.
Dana Kline: It is a good business model. So, and that's why the business has been around in some communities for a very long time, and we're much bigger. District energy in Europe. I think, where maybe things are more done for more community good than community greed. But in the United States, they have these systems all over the place. But if you think about heating buildings, sixty percent of the energy used for buildings is to heat or to cool them. And if you have a way to heat or cool them more effectively, than you can lower your cost. And in some way, you might say that a building that needs to heat their building with steam, which is a very efficient way to do it, might have a boiler in their basement. Right? Traditionally. Well, if I've got a bunch of buildings together, why not have a central plant with a set of boilers that feeds multiple buildings and then those buildings can use that extra space for retail space or residential or parking or whatever they need, and not have to have boilers in their building. And then each building doesn't also have to plan for max capacity because your max capacity plus one, right, for redundancy. But they can plan for a plant that has a capacity to support all of them because they're not all full at the same time necessarily. Can you do the same thing on the cooling side with chilled water to those buildings in city like Phoenix, Arizona, where it gets really, really hot, one hundred and twenty in the summer? There's a lot of cooling capacity needed. If every building had coolers and evaporative cooling on the roof, then who would have rooftop pools, right? We'd have room for restaurants on the lower level. And so again, we have a you create a centralized or multiple centralized facilities making chilled water and push it around pipes in the city. And it becomes a very efficient way to get your cooling needs met.
Phil Howard: Energy as a service, like a no CapEx model where you don't have to buy these big machines and, I don't know, depreciated over five or twenty years or I don't even know what the depreciation is.
Dana Kline: It's a long time because we do contracts that are twenty, thirty, forty years depending on the investment we make to do something for a set of buildings.
Phil Howard: Yes. So that's the bridge to the IT leadership discussion, which is. How does it fit into this. And I guess what your growing up story in IT, how did you get to here and how did you get to IT Leadership. And how do we bridge that gap into the C-suite. Maybe just give me a short story and then we can tie in. How does it fit into a energy as a managed service?
Dana Kline: Great. I started my career with Procter and Gamble in their manufacturing businesses. And while I learned all this great stuff about software programming in college, they're like, nah, we just want you to apply use of IT to help manufacturing be more effective and efficient. From the back office to the plant control systems that needed to run. And that's what I started on and quickly became a young manager in that space and then grew from there. And I went through different manufacturing companies, whether it be automotive. I went through mining, and then aerospace, defense, weapons manufacturing and spaces. Again, it's just applied use of IT to help these industrial businesses. It's a different kind of IT skill set, much more leveraged on back office support, lowering costs, being very lean, and in being an enabler. But at that same time, nobody ever like cuts IT spending or spends less the next year, right? Everybody's continued to get more technology in their business. Right? More technology enabled in their function, no matter which function it was. And so it continued to grow and develop. And I kind of grew along that path with that.
Phil Howard: So I think there's a lot of people that might huff and puff or groan hearing that, saying that, well, what are you talking about? I'm being asked to cut costs and cut back budget every year. And I'm being told that it is a cost center. What do you have to say to that?
Dana Kline: I'm trying to remember a time in my career when my budget was cut. And I've been asked to maybe reduce a head here or there, but I mean, really, it's not, it might have been a little fat or there was a merger or something that we had to do something. So I've never come out and said, well, you share your budgets here and next year you're three percent less. I've never had it happen.
Phil Howard: Well, three percent is a big number. I would love to hear that. Every year it grows by three percent. Anyone? I'm sure there's people out there would love three percent. And so I think you have a level of experience that a lot of other people may not have had. The benefits to have been involved in, which is you've had a lot of kind of understanding and involvement in private equity and investment. And I think just kind of understanding private equity wants and needs. Would a discussion around that, and maybe you just give me a few bullet points here, could really benefit our listeners as to how to speak to the C-suite in a way that they're really going to not understand. It's not understand, but really you're going to gain a lot of buy in by speaking in this way versus glazing them over with IP addressing and different types of routers and switches and cloud discussions and whatnot.
Dana Kline: Yeah. Certainly private equity isn't driven so much by quarter by quarter results. Right. Where the public companies have to constantly make sure that the stock price and the return that they told the street is what they told it to get right. And no surprises up or down. Right. But with private equity, it tends to be more of an annual sort of role where you do report monthly to our private equity board, but it doesn't affect numbers every quarter where we're maybe doing something to try get to a number. At least that's the way I feel. The key that I found to talk to the rest of the C-suite and the board is to dial it down to just a few key metrics. When I started this particular role, we had two metrics. IT risk, which was a combination of some cybersecurity risks behind the scenes that I put together and drove it to one number. And the other number was customer service, Net Promoter Score, which is a very simple score, but when I inherited sort of a bunch of assets whose IT support was nascent or vacant a lot, and so there was lots of shadow IT or do it yourself. And they were used to like not calling IT because it didn't answer. And so those are the two metrics we started with to try to change. And then it just became talking in terms of this was what our internal customers think of us. Now here's our new score. And when we got to a high positive number we were comfortable with, we kind of just said we don't need to keep measuring this and moved on to some other things, but keep it simple. Two metrics I use for the first two years.
Phil Howard: Okay, so how do we measure the risk?
Dana Kline: So I measured the risk by a combination of tech debt. The vulnerability management assessment like how vulnerable we are with terms of lack of patching or that percent, the email phishing scores of very traditional score, and the fourth one was compliance to a framework that we could demonstrate and gave them some weight and added it up to a single number of IT.
Phil Howard: That's great. Is there any measurement there around customer acquisition or it helping acquire more customers for less? I'm just thinking because I would imagine it could help there, especially if they're happier.
Dana Kline: Yeah. In this space of the industrial IT kind of support, right, where you're enabling energy centers, you're enabling manufacturing. You don't touch the end customer a lot with your IT. And so if it's enabling a sales function or manufacturing function do something better or an operations function deliver it better. That's great. And so I don't know that we have have tied anything like IT cost to the customer in that space. We mostly focus on percent of revenue kind of numbers of IT spend, just to make sure we're sort of benchmarking and not overdoing it, not spending like an insurance company might that has a lot of customer facing IT elements. Right.
Phil Howard: Okay. So how does it interact with salespeople either your own business, your own salespeople. And then there's the other outside of the company salespeople.
Dana Kline: So we have two kinds of business development groups and different ways we grow. We can either grow by adding on a building or a customer to an existing district energy system. So we'd say in downtown Phoenix, where we have three plants making chilled water, and there's a new building going to go up. We want to get a contract with that building to get onto our chilled water supply, instead of making our own chilled water as an option. Right. That is interacting with, you get to interact with the developers, the building owners, the there's a whole group of people you got to know before you even break ground, you have to have conversations with them. And so we enabled people to connect with those through traditional Salesforce type of CRM tools. They know who those customers are there. They get notifications and whatever their process is to know, hey, new buildings are going to go up over in this area and we need to be able to support that, right? The other way that we grow is by building a new energy plant or a new district energy plant, and those are you don't build a lot of those, right. How many is going to build a new one? And where they usually get built is in a public private partnership, usually with some sort of university and higher learning. And so we recently won a contract with Baylor University to be their developer. And we went through a process to be qualified and to spend some money to show that we could do this and initial design and pick our partners to help us build this energy center. And we won that process. And now we move forward to build that central utility plant for the Baylor University to replace the one that they have. So that's the second way we grow. And to do to that piece, is you have to know who needs a new plant, and then you have to sell them on it. Right. And so those tools are different. We're talking very much marketing tools and videos and whiteboarding exercises and things that we can do that's a little different. And then the third way we grow is through acquisition. Someone has a district energy center. Maybe it's on an existing college campus or hospital campus or downtown area, and they're tired of maintaining those systems or there was systems are due for capital upgrades, and they don't want to make the investment in it. We can buy those. Maybe slightly distressed assets that have value, put some capital into them and sign everybody up to contract. Those are three ways we grow and those helping the salespeople is really about giving them the CRM tools that they need, the analytics they need on how much it costs us to make chilled water or steam compared the customers, and support a very mobile workforce. You might be traveling around the country doing that as well.
Phil Howard: I think you enable your salespeople more than you think. I think you probably could sit down and they should sit down and whiteboard with you, because I think you could probably give a lot of very helpful information. I had this thing I wanted to call a one eleven and it because you've done one eleven before. This is like a new term. What's a one eleven in IT? It's when you come into an organization and you're the only IT guy and you grow to a eleven partners on the IT team that provide amazing service, whatever you want to call it. I'm sure you have some vision or some maybe some keywords that you guys use on your team, but how do you pull off a one eleven? How do you come in as the only guy and grow to a team of eleven. Get the budget that you need. How do you do that.
Dana Kline: Yeah that's a great question. Lots of consultants. Right. But when I started with Cordia, I was the only IT person, and I had the private equity partners who acquired our business. They sort of had a notion of what the IT budget would look like and what the IT team would look like. They show that with to me during the interview process. Here's what we think notionally. And I asked some questions I might chuckle at. You're not really going to get a system administrator for sixty five thousand dollars a year. So let's talk about the numbers being better. The numbers going to be higher. We have those conversations. But they start with some notion of what you need and the rest is going to be spent on outsourced services. So, for me, it was I quickly went to my well of people I know that I have worked with in the past that I would like to bring along and work with me. And reached out to those folks and see if I could bring them along with me or if they knew somebody, really worked into my network and say, who can I get that I trust and I know can move the needle. And I brought in a couple people that I thought could move the needle and hired a few more off resumes, and just started to build the team a little bit, start with the leadership layer below me, sort of senior manager, director level and then bringing on partners.
Phil Howard: Like ballpark figures. You mentioned system admin and kind of chuckled at sixty five thousand. I mean, I know there's different pay rates But, what do you think is the going rate for like various different roles? Can we just run down that real quick just for the maybe the benefit of other people and listeners out there?
Dana Kline: I'll say on my team, in terms of the eleven people that report up to me now, I would say that the low nineties is probably like the least amount of income we're talking about. And you're bringing a team of leaders in and highly technical functional people in and then using outsourced services to do the commodity work. Right. You're paying those folks in the six figures, low one, twenty one thirties, and then it goes up from there. But you're not bringing in bodies. You're not bringing in level one techs, you're bringing in the level three techs, you're bringing in the leaders that know how to manage a service. And then you're getting your work done through outsourced services so that your team doesn't need to grow to thirty or forty. You don't need your own help desk. Plenty of people do that for you at a cheaper rate than you can do internally for a company our size.
Phil Howard: I gotta ask you, What's the low hanging fruit that you would say you should outsource? Tier one, tier two, tier three help desk? Or I mean, is it like, what I mean? Is it like.
Dana Kline: Help desk, PCs, network management? Those are the things that I would outsource.
Phil Howard: Even firewall management.
Dana Kline: Even firewall management.
Phil Howard: Okay. Security.
Dana Kline: You can for a period of time and do some aspects of security. So we outsource our SOC because I don't have a twenty four over seven team, but I have a senior cybersecurity director who makes sure that the compliance documents are complete, right. The framework is adhered to that the wonky things we encounter in false positives are reviewed and addressed, and these that we have a cyber security incident response plan, those sorts of details. So we have a couple people on the team who are looking at top level things who are saying, this is what I expect the firewall to be able to do, and maybe reviewing the configuration. But at the end of the day, when we get a new firewall, it's the person is putting it together as an outsourced resource.
Phil Howard: Okay. Two ways we can go here I think I want to go first to you have a I really want to know your trust but verify way your vendor scorecard. You have this like weekly vendor scorecard I think you said weekly last time. So I want to go there first. And then if I forget, which I don't think I will, I want to go back to how you make everyone an owner on your team. But this idea of rating your vendors so that they are earning their paycheck every month, not just coming in doing really, really good day one. But, twenty four months from now, they're there's still the same people earning their paycheck. And it's not a revolving door of like our customer account manager. Or if they do revolve because the average lifespan of, I would say customer account manager or any type of high level person at most vendors is anywhere from three to eight months. So obviously there's going to be changing inside your vendors. So how do you ensure that they continue to deliver on the promise?
Dana Kline: Yeah, this has really been key to our success is making sure that we're managing our outsource vendors effectively. So I tell the story of, we have NetSuite as our ERP system, and we have signed up for Oracle Advanced Customer Support Service from them for a certain number of hours of support each month that you get. And we measured them across categories and the categories vary. But essentially it's like, are you are you reporting the status. So we asked you to on the frequency we asked you to do it. Are you managing the priorities that we have in front of you for addressing issues. Are you solving tickets? Are you doing a good job with that? Right. Are you responsive to urgent issues that we have?
Phil Howard: And how do you rate these? Is this like a green, red, blue, yellow or is this like a eighty percent of the time exactly.
Dana Kline: That it is either it is either failing, needs improvement or meets the expectations just.
Phil Howard: And as far as response time to you response time. What is a what is a needs expectations and meets expectations.
Dana Kline: And some of it some of it may be contractually in the agreement and.
Phil Howard: SLA.
Dana Kline: Maybe. Yeah. An SLA that's typically if their response is four hours and we're not getting four hour response, we're going to make note of that right. And so that's typically what we would go. And we also measure them on how well they adhere because they service our employees as if they are employees. Right. And so we also measure them like their behaviors. Do they follow our customer belief or they communicate in a way that is our communication belief in the company. Are they accountable in a way that we expect people to be accountable? And so, and we'll hold them accountable on that as well. And so we started grading them. And you get your scores. And we want everybody to be sort of this close to nine range out of ten. And we saw performance of like for several weeks and to the point we're getting twos and threes on the scorecard for this vendor. And so, we went to them and said, this is the scorecard and you let them see it every week. They can see it. See the web score. But we like. If you haven't looked, here's the scorecard. Can we get the people you took off our team back because you moved people off, so that we can get our team back and begin to get results again. And they literally gave us back our account manager and some people. And the results went up. And then when I met with the Oracle service VP, like, nobody ever measure us like this. And I said, well, we do, and we're going to keep doing it. And so every vendor's scorecard is slightly different depending on what we're getting from them. But we're measuring five to ten data points every week with that.
Phil Howard: Can you automate this somehow or is someone actually physically going in and doing it? Because I would imagine some things you'd have to
Dana Kline: We're basically asking the manager or our technical lead who has that primary relationship with the vendor to update scorecard weekly. That's the expectation. It is manual, but it's also like how do you automate measuring that the application service provider is using the hours that you booked for them effectively. Right. And reporting that, hey, we got four hours left. What do you want to do with this or there, because you lose the hours you didn't use. Right. Or whatever that is. And so I think it is very manual and we and we put a lot of time into it.
Phil Howard: Yeah.
Dana Kline: How do I manage the rest?
Phil Howard: Yeah. And on each scorecard. Because I would love to make a vendor scorecard. What are the top five or how many data points are on the scorecard anyways? Is it more than ten or more than or is it five? I mean, what are kind of the key ones?
Dana Kline: So I'll just read down a few. But we're for our vendor that supports our ERP environment. We measure them on whether or not they give us the weekly status report that they're required to give us, how well they manage the hours that we have with them. Right. Priority management. Ticket review like we do a weekly ticket review with. What's the quality of that review? Ticket performance, overall responsiveness to urgent issues and then how they perform against our core beliefs of our company. And then everything else for them is specific projects, if they have a project that we're doing with them, it's a separate statement of work. That project will also have its own scorecard on how well they are delivering against that project.
Phil Howard: Great. This is awesome. How do you rate accountability?
Dana Kline: Accountability might be we say it's I take ownership and initiative to address problems that I see. Right. And so if you see owned and solving problems, and not just like waiting to be told to do something.
Phil Howard: Proactive.
Dana Kline: If you're willing, if you're willing to get out of your lane to fix something, that's accountability, right? And then we give them a one five or a ten. That's the scoring. So we get separation. You pass fail or needs improvement,
Phil Howard: One five ten pretty much.
Dana Kline: Yeah. One five ten. And then.
Phil Howard: Yeah.
Dana Kline: It's green, yellow red and On the scorecard. It's even color coded, right? And it's different for the infrastructure folks. I mean you're looking at, like how are they effectively quoting us new, hardware quotes on a reasonable time frame? We talked before about you asked for some quotes for some firewalls.
Phil Howard: What's a good time frame? What's a good time frame for you? Because I definitely have a good time. I think.
Dana Kline: It varies. But it's like it's sort of like within the commitment. You said, when will you have this quote from me by did you meet that commitment? Right.
Phil Howard: Okay.
Dana Kline: That's really we don't try to say it has to be within a certain number of days, but like, what's the commitment that you have with them? And so if they said, we'll get you all quotes within one week, are you getting quotes within one week?
Phil Howard: Okay.
Dana Kline: But we look at ticket. Performance, active projects.
Phil Howard: For example, if I ask for a quote from lumen, I ask for a quote from Comcast. I ask for a quote from AT&T. I ask for a quote from, air spring Command link Global Telecom, China Telecom. Let's go down the list. And I want to be like, you brought the quote to me and the circuits already almost installed with this other provider. So and I can tell you who's going to show up and get a quote back in two days. And another person that's going to take two weeks. And just based on the swapping around of infrastructure and special teams. And I've definitely been in the place before, I was like, can we just get the old, project manager back? Why did you have to decide and change your entire company infrastructure?
Dana Kline: And we're simple, right? I want to buy ten laptops, to handle growth or to do a refresh or something. And I, asked for a quote for ten laptops. I expect to get that pretty quick. That's a very easy thing to get, right.
Phil Howard: Yep.
Dana Kline: And I'm also going to check your on price too. And I'm going to ask two other vendors to give me the same quote. And I'll get that back. And if you give me a quote quickly and it's also a good price, I'll be like, if you're constantly if you're my incumbent provider of my help desk and network services and you're the highest price for the PCs, I'm going to be like, what's going on here? Shouldn't you be the lowest price.
Phil Howard: Access to, like benchmark level pricing as well? Because I mean, that type of stuff does exist. You can.
Dana Kline: Yeah, yeah. I do and and so but just we challenge them and I think it's just like we're I think you're challenging the vendors too. It's not just you don't always go to the same vendor for everything. It's like, I'm not going to buy all my PCs from you if I every time I get a quote, it's not the same price or, you're getting beat by other people forever. When you bring on these teams and you have an infrastructure team who's supporting you and doing your help desk and doing your network monitoring, and you want to go, hey, I need to go, refresh a network cabinet in this other plant and you go to call on them. You've already working with their A-Team sometimes, and you're going to go to the B or the C team to go get this other project done. And you're going to start stretching those companies because not everybody has massive amounts of bench depth. Right. And so we'll bring on another partner and say, this is the partner we're going to use for some project work to go do some technology refresh in the sites, because we're going to get there a team to go do that work. And so we'll spread that work around. And then we have another vendor that we may need to start measuring on a weekly basis. Or maybe it's just more of an interim, do the project and go away.
Phil Howard: So what would be your measurements there What are your measurements there when it comes to network?
Dana Kline: In terms of measuring those elements, we're not going to measure the vendor on that. We're going to measure the score and report that score back instead. So, we're asking them to do the commodity stuff. But when it gets into, how well are they managing our DMZ? We own that a little bit more. Right. We've asked them to set it up, monitor it. But, when it comes to changes, we're deeply involved in those changes. And we put through our change control process that they have to sit through and test before and after. So it's just not a specific scorecard item that we have. It's more general that it would be wrapped up into performance and project work and tickets and and measurement there.
Phil Howard: I'm thinking measuring round trip packet speeds and.
Dana Kline: Yeah.
Phil Howard: Jitter and latency and.
Dana Kline: An interesting with this business where we have all these energy centers around the country and they're connected and we have we're only three and a half years old. So when we put in a new ERP system and a new hris system and new tools, they're all in the cloud, right? I don't have, this on prem system somewhere that you are going to connect back to. So we do not have SD-Wan. We do not have a lot of point to point. The only time we have point to point is when we're connecting, you know, one chiller plant to another chiller plant in the same city so that they can, work together off one control room. Right.
Phil Howard: I was just remembering a time where there was a spectrum network.
Dana Kline: Right. You connect all these up and have your own and manage it?
Phil Howard: Yeah. And there was, like, some really bad latency issues.
Dana Kline: Definitely simplified right now. With everything with so much of the apps in the cloud and, the Microsoft three hundred sixty five and the OneDrive and all these things that you have It's just that you just have a solid internet connection for those locations to connect in, to do their remote work and access it. And, there's no corporate data center, to go to there's no, it's to manage.
Phil Howard: There's still an end user on a device somewhere, So moving on. Same thing. Yet now it's real life people and the vibe of your team. And last time you talked about making everyone an owner and, focusing on engagement and solicitation and giving workers a voice and enhancing financial literacy and growing your people up, so to speak, and aligning business outcomes with employee growth. How do you. All that stuff is very, very important. And I think that might overwhelm some other leaders. How do you organize all that and manage it? The important vibe stuff.
Dana Kline: Yeah. So you also have to take into account that we're all remote now, right? Post Covid world, we all work remote. My entire team is spread across the country, just like our systems are across the country. So we start our staff meetings that involve the whole team. The first thing we talk about is who has demonstrated one of our seven beliefs and what they do. And we talk about people on the team. And it's not me recognizing, a team member. It's team members recognizing each other.
Phil Howard: The one starting with core values from the team, not you.
Dana Kline: Right.
Phil Howard: What's the core what's the core value there.
Dana Kline: Or it's customers that treat our customers with as we say, I view all customers as partners and I serve them with pride, excellence and a service mentality. So we have a phrase that goes to each one for our culture, and we'll go through that. How did they do that? And if it's, talking about, value, it's I live with a business development and growth mindset to create value for Cordia and our customers. So who's creating value? Who's? Go out and getting a quote that's fifteen thousand dollars cheaper on some hardware and saving a company money, and doing the extra element. So we do recognize those. And we even recognize our partners that are doing work for us. And so we'll go back and tell them, hey, by the way, we recognize somebody on your team who did this thing that aligns with our communications belief or accountability belief. And we recognize them, the same way.
Phil Howard: So even a vendor can create value for your company and be bought into your core values by providing value. Get it?
Dana Kline: Yeah, absolutely.
Phil Howard: I was just wondering, like, is there like a Family at work type of thing or like, is there like a value.
Dana Kline: It's part of our communication belief to collaborate in a way that builds team collaboration. And, it's communicating in a way that's respectful and open and honest. There's a element of building your team and having people want to work together and, especially in this remote place that we're at. And then we leverage, the tools to do that. But culture is huge. And, when people don't align with the culture, it becomes very obvious. So if you're recognizing these behaviors, right, these experiences that people have that I had an experience that was demonstrated value or a customer belief or whatever it is, and somebody does something that is counter to what we think our values are. Our beliefs are, we can go, hey, that's that's not our communication belief. That didn't feel respectful. Right. And we can talk about it and say it would be better if we said it this way. Or that's not our accountability belief to just let that thing, That ball on the ground, right. It's like picking up things in the cracks, right? Or when people say, hey, that's not my responsibility. I'm like, and we're the IT team, and we got to flow to the work. So get out of your swim lane and help. Right. And that's we can challenge people. So not only does it give us a way to recognize people, but it also gives us a way to say, that's not the experience I want from you with that behavior.
Phil Howard: We kind of want I think that's full circle. Back to the beginning when we were talking about accountability or. Yeah, yeah, going above and beyond. And that's really your coaching and support. And the actually you said last time you said well-being. It's almost like the well-being of your team. It's almost like that's like the this value that should be up there. Yeah. Respecting and supporting and understanding and coaching the entire well-being of our team and culture and environment. Yeah. How do you encourage people to have those, I guess, tough conversations do you have talks with that with the other team, or is that all from you or I mean, from a growth perspective, do people feel like I have an avenue to grow here?
Dana Kline: Well, in terms of tough conversations, we ask people to talk to each other, if they escalate it up and say, have you said this to that person? And here it might, I might coach them on some words to use to say back, but we encourage people to go back to the individual and say that didn't feel respectful or I don't think this was accountable for you to do this and leave it to me or whatever that is. Right. But give them some coaching to do that. And if necessary, then we have the management conversations and then we've moved people out of our organization who consistently can't align and who demonstrate that they do not give us an experience that aligns with our beliefs. Right. We've just moved them out of the organization and, bring bringing people who do, whether that be vendors or employees. That's, I think it's an important thing. You have to be comfortable moving people out of your organization who don't fit your culture.
Phil Howard: Yes. Super awesome. And, well, hopefully you don't have that happen too often, but.
Dana Kline: It does happen. But you gotta do it when it happens, because otherwise everybody else is not going to go, wait a second. I'm doing the culture thing. I'm doing the beliefs. I'm doing the the good behaviors. I'm giving the great experiences to customers. Why is this person who might be not doing it right, who might be really smart technically, but is a jerk to work with, right. And if that's the case, it's like, no, that just doesn't fit for us.
Phil Howard: It can poison the. Have you ever had someone poisoned the waterhole and have everything implode and lose in a good. Have you ever lost a good employee because you kept a bad employee too long?
Dana Kline: I've lost some people. And it wasn't because I didn't want to get rid of the bad employee. I think I was more like handheld or handcuffed
Phil Howard: When I, left the corporate world years ago and did consulting for years, after two years, I was looking at everything and I was like, oh, this is great. And I myself have many personal coaches as well. And, I just ended up firing a lot of customers. Let's just put it that way. I fired all the customers that I really didn't like and didn't want. They were making my life miserable and life got a lot better. Okay, so the last point, we'll end on this because I think you have bridged the gap in the gap that we have bridged is the heroic effort of salespeople, which you said last time. But how do we bridge the gap? How do we get rid of this us versus them mentality, which often exists in the sales world. In the IT world, there's this kind of like, ah, I hate salespeople. And then the salespeople are like, are it guys are the hardest guys to like, talk with. And there's kind of this like us versus them mentality. I think you've already bridged the gap. I could answer the question myself, but, I think I could answer the question for you as you, which is, well, do they meet our values and are they delivering and understanding our values before they even talk to me? But I'll let you maybe speak a little bit to that.
Dana Kline: I think that's well said. And one of the things we always talk about when people come and ask for new tools, sales team, always ask for a lot of new tools that they think will help them, plan customers. And we certainly want to grow our business. And if that helps, great. You got to be able to afford those tools. And so I usually come back and say, what problem are you trying to solve? Right. Quit telling me what tool you need. Tell me what problem you're trying to solve. And when we can go back and have the conversation around what problem we're trying to solve, then we can arrive together at a solution that we can. And that's really been the key. It's having the relationship to be able to ask. That way I can, I get it. You want this widget, but what problem does it solve? And then you start external vendors.
Phil Howard: How about external vendors contacting you? How do you deal with them?
Dana Kline: Well, I mean, I think it's a mix. But, I'm looking for, a vendor that wants to work for me as if they're an employee. Right? And so again, it's like, if they're coming out with, I got a great new product that solves a problem, I think. Do I have this problem? Do I have this problem today? Do I have a problem where I need a different sock than I have. Nope. Well, I'm not going to keep talking to stock, right? I know this is not a problem I have. So I try to manage it in a polite way, and, I try to work with my peer group and my professional organization that I have and say, who are the partners I should be talking to? And work more from that short list. And, by the way, at the end of every year, we do an annual partnership recognition where we recognize the best partner in our application space and our infrastructure space, cybersecurity, etc., and then won overall. And there's a lot of vendors and so we'll recognize. But, that's also the time when I can also go and say, here's what we're going to do for the next year. Here's our priorities and tell them, like I tell all the vendors one meeting. But I do that. And then, what happens, I think, is I create some FOMO. The vendors who did not win want to win next year. And so they're like, we're going to be the best application support vendor or the best infrastructure support vendor, whatever that is. And we've seen, people make, a really strong effort to sort of win that award. And so I think because they're being recognized, because they're being measured, that's how we bridge the gap.
Phil Howard: You're so awesome. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. Any last, final words of wisdom or anything like that before we go?
Dana Kline: I have given you all my wisdom. But enjoy your time, enjoy your people, and, just try to have fun at work.
Phil Howard: Awesome. Thank you.