Welcome to Tectastic, where we navigate the intersection of technology and business, uncovering innovations that redefine our world. Greg, how are you? Hello. Good afternoon. You're currently the VP at western computer, what what role do you play in the industry? Yeah. So we are a systems integrator, but focused, business applications. Like ERP, accounting, inventory control, e commerce, all the back end office systems.
It's actually interesting that we're talking my company, Volley AI, works with a lot of solution systems integrators, because what we're trying to do is solve the the tech debt accumulation problem we have a we built out a platform that's really robust and, quite capable, but we built our first product on top of it, which is basically just a I think the easiest way to describe it is it your PR buddy or your code review, assistant that goes
through and looks at your overall architecture and makes for improving your patterns, like the things that you're doing in your pull request. That's cool. It makes me think of the quote a couple weeks ago from the NVIDIA CEO. I don't know if he saw it, but he said our job is to make the coding easy enough that anyone can do it that we don't need trained developers anymore, and I thought that was interesting. Yeah. So this is actually what I set out to do.
So I've been in AIML for, jeez, 20 years, at least, in one former another. Yeah. But chat, GPT, when it hit, was a big eye opener. We were doing predictive systems for, like, when's your package gonna arrive? That type of thing. But to all of a sudden, have this tool, anybody can be a programmer now. Right? Right. And that was the eye opener for me with chat is when it came out. I went, oh my god. This is actually that moment because now the computer's talking to me in the way that I understand.
I don't have to talk to it in a way that it understands. Yes. That opens up every door for automation, for doing all the fun stuff us wizards of the technology world, you know, that our keen knowledge that we Hammer. Now everybody's got access. That's what it thought. Yeah. We're not there yet. Right. And that big gap is what Valla actually set out to do. My original thing that I wrote a year ago was trying to fill that gap to say it's not actually true yet. You say you wanna build something.
You're, like, my the person I always use is my wife. Multiple advanced degrees, lots of professional certifications, all that kind of fun stuff. But when she gets hired by a company to take all that experience and knowledge and put it to practice, what does she end up doing? She ends up managing technology systems that don't do a very job solving the problem. Right. And she always needs IT tech support to make it do those things. Yes. So how do you fill that gap?
That's what I tried to build and ended up being that there's a lot of a lot of reasons why that doesn't work. There's a reason that SIs exist. Right. Right? And it's about that complexity of that ERP and that CMS and the the all the WMS and all the systems, right, that you've gotta be able to work in that space. I might be a little jaded, but sometimes I think technology just keeps repackaging itself into the latest solution.
So it was interesting to hear you say that we've had AINML for 20 years because we have. Yeah. For guys like us, we could use it, but it wasn't accessible to everybody else. And it still isn't, but I remember, you know, 15, 20 years ago, the big thing was workflow. Yeah. And you would go do a software demo, and everybody all the executives would be like, can I workflow that? Can I workflow that? Can I re and be sure you can workflow it all you want?
And then you get in the project, And, of course, the workflow wouldn't do it. You'd have to have a developer come in and extend the workflow. And the developer would be looking at me saying, don't I just write this the way you need it instead of using this workflow? You know, it's funny. The you're describing exactly how I think of it too.
I've gone full circle on the open source community and componentization of everything, but it goes back to, like, when I sit down and write something myself, I don't use any external packages. I never do. I hate them because I spend more time figuring out how to implement it with their little library than just sitting on a writing myself. Right. As we sort of building out this company and, like, looking at those similar problems, every time you use an off the shelf solution for something.
If it's your ERP or your CMS or whatever, you're pulling forward a bunch of past decisions that have been made. And a lot of those decisions were made to abstract away some concepts so that, like, theoretically, you could integrate with it. That's what most of solutions, systems integration solutions integration is is making folks talk to each other.
Yeah. And any conversation with external vendors or other software companies that you're trying to integrate with, the first few meetings are all agreeing on terminology. What is your depth of the word container, right? Is it a box or is it a shipping container? Cause it's different in in the Microsoft Dynamics software that we integrate all the time. They use that word container very directly. It could be in cardboard box, or it could be a pallet, or it could be anything.
It's just a word for them. But then sometimes if you tell a developer we need to do something with the container, they're thinking something entirely different K. Yeah. They're thinking about. Yeah. Right. Exactly. So all these meetings come down to let's agree on the terminology first, and then let's then let's go from there. Yeah. I gave a talk a long time ago on the definition of done. Because I think that's the first thing you have to define. Right?
When we say we're agreeing to deliver this thing, what are we delivering? Fully. Everybody's expectations put all on the table. We need to know the full definition of done. And people get angry with you when you try to start at that point because they're like, well, everybody knows what that means. Like, you and you just gave different definitions for what we say when we mean done. When I say done, I mean, it's fully test. It's fully deployed.
It's fully that customers can use it, then it's done. Right. And as a systems integrator in the ERP world, it's never done. You're constantly evolving that system. And we get customers, you know, we, we build the code, we build the system, we get them live. We do 2 weeks of training. The team thinks they're done. And then the accounting people say, oh, no. We're not done. We gotta close our 1st month and finalize that. Then we're done. And then we get backed operations well.
There's all these things you told us we're gonna be phase 2 that we couldn't get to in the implementation. Now we gotta do those, or we're not done. So we do and in our world, actually, it feels like we're never done. We're constantly optimizing these systems. But I I wonder, isn't that the business model, isn't that the whole point of being in that space? Is that there's always more automation that the company needs and wants. And that's a good thing. Yes. It is. It's a great thing.
Yeah. And, you know, we're looking for 10 to 5 teen year or longer relationships with our customers. And we have those. And we're there to advise them. We're there to guide them on, you know, what technology trends are coming out. So for example, a lot of them are coming to us right now and saying, hey. What's you know, how should I use this AI? And most of the times, well, you're not quite ready for it.
You're still figuring out this whole, like, cloud migration that you should have done 10 years ago. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. That's true. I I got to know that the SI space pretty well, you know, my last 15 years roles because it was kind of my secret weapon. I get pulled in by, like, a Nike to increase their rate of digital innovation And you have the same problems at every company.
If you're not Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, or a couple others, where all the best engineers are gonna be drawn boards. Yes. It is very difficult to get critical mass, and you have to have it. So you build up these big teams with, you know, maybe you've got 10% of just amazing people in your team, but that other 90% dragging on it and making it very difficult to proceed. So you've got the people You've got a cultural problem because you're not a digital first company.
You're, you know, you're you sell shoes, not technology. Right. And so I would bring in these hired guns that had critical mass. That's what the that that was a whole business, right? Right? You've gotten great people. So I'd bring them in and say, okay. We are going to migrate from on prem to in the cloud, we're gonna migrate from x to y because I'm trying to pay down this colossal amount of technical debt that's been built up over time.
And I know and you know that this is just the beginning of that process because that technical debt also stopped all the other things that the business wanted. You know, I'm in sales. I need to know whatever. I'm in marketing. I need to know something specific. I'm in inventory management. I need to have predictive, etcetera. Right? All those wants, they don't even ask anymore. And the instant you plug that bottleneck.
And all of a sudden, the technology unlocks opportunity within the business, which is the whole point of doing soft are. We're automating Yes. All these things. Yes. And automation is where it's at. I mean, that's where every company eats more of that if they're gonna survive. You either More automation faster. Yeah. It's it's it's automator die, really. I mean, that's what it comes down to. Years ago, I did a go live of a warehouse management system.
This is when I was still doing projects myself, and it was rough go live. Inventory wasn't correct. Long story short, we had to stop the go live, count the whole warehouse, we're there till 4 Hammer, back at 8 AM and everything works smoothly after that. And at the end of the 3 or 4 days on-site there, The owner of this manufacturing company asked to meet with us, call us on the carpet. And he said, in World War 2, we built the B-fifty 2 bomber with the big chief pencil and a pad of paper.
Why do we need all these computer systems? And I gotta give a CFO credit because with a straight face, he said, well, in 1985, you had 25 people in accounting, and now you have 5. Do you wanna go back and hire all those people? Well, here, I'll give the counterargument, though. How many software engineers do you have on the team now? Right. Yeah. He's got 4 IT guys. There there is a counterargument there. But we are getting more efficient over time. Absolutely true.
Yeah. And the the long arc of history, like, more automation, less and less human intervention, especially where we're not good. Like, accounting is it's not something that people wake up at night and go, oh, I can't wait to get pen and paper and figure out where the books have gone wrong. Like, nobody want, well, not nobody. There are some people like that. Christian. Very few people like this. Right? I have never worked with some of them, so I have to defend them. I I do too.
As I said, I was like, no, there's a lot of them. I'm not as many as it has been needed, but I think that we're actually It's very telling in the moment in time that we're in. I said that there's a a lack of critical mass in most companies to meet the needs of their technology wants and desires. That's been true for a while.
And for the first time, that barriers dropped to the floor with this, you know, set of generative AI tools that are coming into the world, The problem, though, is it's still that gap between what I have and what I desire, and I can't fill it without having some software development teams get involved to British. So you might have an AI tool that allows you to do, like, Hey. I can automatically generate a bunch of spreadsheets and all that. That's fun, but it doesn't connect into my ERP. Right.
But what we're seeing is that desired state coming, like, it's getting really high, really fast, but we still have this huge gap between how many soft engineers in the world are capable of building into those systems and the desires of the business and the people in the business to do something with it, but we're starting to also see price pressure on, that top line, like, hourly billable rate that SIS can charge is down, like, 20% in the last year.
Because there's this perception that, like, oh, no. I just have my own teams do it with this AI tool, which isn't there yet. Right. Oh, yeah. We tend to deal with companies in the small and mid market. So less than 500,000,000 revenue for the most part, let's say. So they don't have especially at the lower end of that, they don't have big IT teams. They depend on SIs for everything. Maybe they have a few guys in IT but we're seeing a number of challenges to that market.
One of them is, as they transition to the cloud, they need a different skill set from their IT team. Yeah. Big time. They have IT guys that are used to patching servers and interacting with SQL and stored procedures and stuff like that. And now it's like, you're gonna write code against an API, or, you know, it's entirely different skill set.
Yeah. So that's that's the major shift we're seeing as as these small to midsize businesses digitally transform into the cloud, they need a different, level of staffing internally. So part of a transition when you're coming in, you're doing these these and you're trying to help them modernize. Part of it is getting the staff that's there up to that skill level.
I imagine part of it's also like, no. We're gonna help you hire somebody that has the necessary knowledge because you've got too much resistance and not enough there there. Yeah. How do you engage with that, especially these SMBs, the small and medium businesses? We usually educate them upfront that it is gonna be at the leadership level. Hey, this is a different IT skill set. It's more business analyst and less hardware guy. And that's the way we explain it at the SMB level.
They need to be comfortable working with data and workflows and maybe a little bit of code here and there, they don't need to know anything about hardware anymore. They don't need to know how to patch a server. They don't need to know the firmware of their rate controller, which are old problems that we had, And so we explain it that way, and then we tell them, hey. If we can help you get your people up to speed, or we can help you find someone to augment them if necessary.
This is related because I wanted to touch on the people piece of it. Yeah. A lot of the people listening to this have their own startup. They might be early in their startup. That's generally common audience. Right?
And one of the hardest parts of any leader in their first company that running when you're the the buck stops your person trying to figure out how to get the most out of the team that you've got knowing full well that they are going to be missing a lot of the skills and experience necessary to effectively do the job that they're in today. Everybody in your startup is in the biggest role of their lives. This is the biggest opportunity they've takes full of overhead.
So you've gotta get the maximum amount of them and help them learn what they don't know fast. Like, speed is the only thing that Hammer. Right? Right. What advice do you give to people in that situation? I think as a manager, a couple things, you know, failure is okay. Failure without an explanation or any guidance that you may fail is is not okay. So make it a safe space for them. Provide them with the tools to ramp on things as much as you can.
But I think, generally, it's all about communication and saying, Hey, it's it's okay if you if you don't miss this deadline, but give me a few days notice ahead of time and let me know you might need some help. So what what you don't wanna hear is the engineer that goes heads down on an issue for 5 days and doesn't make any headway on it. Mhmm. You want them after one day to raise his hand and say, hey. I need some help here. Please please help.
Yeah. Working with younger engineers that's been the biggest thing I've seen them do is put heads down trying to solve something and not get anywhere on it. And then come to me 3, 5 days later and say, well, I wanted to bang my head up against this because I wanted to learn something new. And I wanted to expand my skill set in like, well, we could have gotten you some help after day 1, and you would have learned it and you still would have expanded your skill set.
Heads down at it for 5 days didn't help anybody. So the, the real time business data ones is really important on the start up too. Oh, yeah. I mean, profiles looking at going, yeah, that's a really important one too. A lot of people screw up with, like, OKRs and their KPIs and all that kind of stuff because they're focused on the wrong thing. So knowing what good data is to make good decisions is a difficult thing to do. It is. It's very hard to get to relevant data.
Yeah. You have any, like, high level guiding principles that help you determine if it is good data to guide you? We just went through as a company. And it was an intensive workshop at the leadership level Mhmm. To align on those and then come up with them and then come back a week or 2 later and challenge them again. And that's what works. And that's what worked for us. And again, make it safe, no judgment, brainstorm, agree on things, and then come back and tweak it again.
That's the best way that we found to align on OKRs and KPIs. The guidance I've I try to get people on this is very similar to that. Like, you're gonna make a mistake. Your measurements are supposed to be the, you know, you formed a hypothesis of your business, and you're gonna form an experiment that's gonna be your product or service that you're putting in market, the data you want back is confirmation of the success or failure of that experiment. That's what you need to know. Yep. Right?
So what does that look like in your specific case, well, it might be. I had a lot more customers today than I did yesterday. Maybe that's the data you needed. Right. Or might have a lot more engagement product I had, but it's going to be unique to you, more than likely. Your experiment is unique to you, but you're probably gonna have to change it if you change the Yeah. If you pivot or whatever, you know, that you're you're changing something, you probably got to change it.
So you can't be wholly grayish about your KPIs because in a good situation, you're learning and gonna learn that they were the wrong measurement. Yeah. It was a it was fun exercise for me because I have 20 years of tribal knowledge in this business. And then we had other people that didn't have tribal knowledge. But they Hammer different way of looking at things, and they had more experience with formal KPIs and OKRs. So to get those people in a room in a line was really the best way to do it.
That mixture of tribal knowledge with overall best practices really hit it for us. And that's that's exactly right. Combination of people that can challenge assumptions because maybe they're naive, and I I use that in a nice way. I don't mean, like, they're No. I mean, I getcha. Yeah. But mixing that with lots of an experience because the problem of experience is you're blind to different ways of looking at it. Yeah. And, yeah, that's a good mix.
So we're we're actually over the time we had allotted for recording, but I wanna give you a chance to say it, like, if you wanted to give the audience anything, to take away I know that I wanna send them to westerncomputer.com if they wanna find out more about, daily business operations, how to improve it, especially if they're a small to medium business with profoundly large technology offering? Yeah. So we're a, western computer. We've been doing this for 35 years.
We're a 100% Microsoft shop a systems integrator that focuses on delivering solid ERP solutions and CRM solutions for small and midsize businesses. And that is a big area that they all have a need and they often, don't recognize how many workarounds they've created for their workflow. Yeah. Put this data in this spreadsheet then go over here and send this email and then save this document to SharePoint. And and that's the first step of the process.
Yeah. Then send an email to Bob, and Bob will, like, transcribe it into something else. Yeah. Exactly. Well, Greg William, Western Computer. It was wonderful having you on. It's fantastic. Thank you for being here. Thanks, Christian. Nice to meet you today, and, and I enjoyed our podcast. And that's a wrap for this episode of Tectastic. Wanna thank you personally for joining us, and we'll see you next time. Until then, keep exploring, and stay curious. Thank you for listening.
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