Frank DeGeorge - CTO at Impact Networking

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. I'm curious to know how many of you have a leadership pipeline. We know that great leaders grow companies because we talk to them here on the show every day. But what are you doing to create great leaders within yours? If you're a CTO, it is 100% your responsibility to grow and improve your people beyond just their coding abilities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) We've built a tool that improves your people in their craft and in leadership. Visit leaderbits.io to learn more. Today, we are talking to Frank DeGeorge, the CTO of Impact Networking, and we discuss providing support to your first-time leaders, solving business challenges by partnering with the customer, and leveraging targets to get everyone pushing in the same direction. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:50) This is the Modern CTO podcast. So one of my favorite things about you is the type of CTO that you are. So it's not just straight engineering right up through individual contributor, team lead, CTO. You've done strategic stuff, business stuff. And I'm really curious to hear your story about how you professionally got—looks like you've been at your company for a while.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:01:24) Sure. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:24) Over 10 years, 12 years. Tell me a little bit about your story growing up through your current company.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:01:32) Okay. Yeah. So I've been with Impact—it'll be 13 years this summer. So definitely, you know, looking back, a long time. I started with them right out of college, and so I had a degree that, at the time, was pretty much a management information systems degree.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:01:50) And, you know, didn't want to do just typical IT help desk stuff. So I was looking for something unique and new and came to Impact. We were a much smaller company then. We were probably 45 employees, maybe $15 million, and today we're 600 employees, about $130 million this year. So much different company. But I think the biggest thing that I saw was the vision and, more or less, the opportunity to grow with a new part of their business, which would eventually be called Strategic Services, and implementing software. The software's focused around document management at the time and capture, document capture.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:02:34) And it was a newer division, and I saw an opportunity to take a risk at the time, graduating from college. Didn't have a lot of responsibility, honestly. Right? So if I was going to try something new, I could always revert back to a comfort zone that I was very comfortable with, which was traditional IT. But I kind of fell in love with Impact and the culture and their vision for opportunity. And, you know, I think we both took advantage of it as far as Impact and myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:02) So good culture. What type of things do you guys value there?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:03:08) You know, from Frank Coco, who's our CEO, on down, culture and the employees really come first. They—and the majority of the owners who started Impact from scratch—they kind of built it upon what they didn't want the company to do or become based on their experience. And so they focused on that, and they figured if we can make employees happy and they want to come to work every day and they're passionate about what they do and they care about what they do, then that'll spill over into good calls, good customer service. And it seems to be working. We have very, very high customer retention rate. We have very low turnover of our employees, and we value culture first and foremost within the organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:55) Nice. And, clearly, that's very important, especially when going through the growth you went through from 45 to 600. I talk with people every day that experience that type of hyper growth, and the recurring conversation when I ask them what their takeaways are from that—they're like, scaling culture.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:04:11) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:12) In every department. When it's tight and you've got, you know, 10, 50 people, you can access the CEO. You can watch how they walk through the room and show up to work, and that spreads throughout. But when you get to that, like, 100 mark, it becomes really difficult, and you rely on your leaders, you know, to have the behaviors that you desire for them to spread throughout the organization.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:04:36) Yeah. You know, we obviously try and keep a close eye on that. And so there's a number of other partners within the organization now that have to kind of, you know, carry that torch. But to this day, our CEO's office—his door is wide open. Any employee, from administration to warehouse, can walk in and have a conversation with them.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:04:59) You never want to lose that connection. Having, I don't know, 18 locations, we still have to make sure that culture carries through to each of those locations. And so we have a big promote-from-within type of culture. We want, especially on—well, not even that. I mean, our sales teams to the people in our admin, to our warehouse, to everything. We try and find people who are really excelling and are doing things, you know, the Impact way, and those are people that get promoted and start—carry on the culture with their own teams.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:34) And that makes sense too. Because if you have a good culture, right, and you're growing your people and you're teaching them to grow and improve themselves, and you are always taking people in from the outside, you're eliminating the opportunities for those people that are growing themselves to rise up, right, to see the future for themselves. So I really like that because it's how we run our tribe over here. That's why I like it.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:05:58) Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's—I think we have a really good set of employees at Impact. And I think the biggest thing that when managers and hiring managers interview is they look to make sure that there's a cultural fit, that that person will fit within the organization. We have no problem hiring entry-level people and working with them to develop their personal and professional skills.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:06:24) But we want to make sure that they're as passionate as we are about the things that we're doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:29) And that's that famous chart, right, where they map out how much skill you have and how much of a culture fit you are, and it says—

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:06:36) Right. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:36) They're high skill and high culture fit, that's great. If they're low skill and low culture fit, no. You can definitely teach skill, but weeding out behavior is so difficult. You have to change the entire environment. It's actually very difficult to adjust behavior.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:06:55) Yeah. I would agree with that. And we do a lot of things as a company to have common goals to get behavior all going towards the same direction. So we have, you know, over the course of the last six years, we actually have targets that if we hit those targets, then any employee who's been with the organization a year or more at that point, we actually do all-inclusive trips to Mexico. And so—

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:07:17) You get, you know, people from finance and admin and warehouse and sales and service and help desk and support, all working towards a common goal that's very visible and very much broadcasted daily, holding people accountable. And the people who aren't part of that, I would say, it's very easy to see who those people are. And it's not really an issue because I think the culture now kind of, you know, I don't want to say self-manages, but helps us achieve that common goal. So when you have hundreds of people all rooting towards what that could be and the amount of fun that we could have, that's exciting stuff. And that's just—we've hit it five years in a row.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:05) Nice. It's like autonomous leadership. Right?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:08:08) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:10) I heard somebody say that. We had, you know, Dailymotion. They're like a video company. They actually came out—I didn't know this, but they came out, like, right around the time YouTube did. They've always been like a competitor with YouTube. But their CTO is named Guillaume, and he's, like, fantastic. Right? And he was sharing some of his management leadership ideas, and he had this one, and he said, "Autonomous leadership." And since the moment I heard him say that, like, we made clips of it. I wrote like an article about it because it just—it sounds like the next wave buzzword. Right?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:08:43) Yeah. Yeah. You know, I guess—I think it makes sense, you know, and I'm—you know, as far as the teams that I have, we try and have the leaders work with their teams. And, you know, like I said, once that—based on how visible that goal is and who's working towards it, everyone's doing their part. And the company doesn't function without any of our employees. They're all here for a reason. And so we want to make sure that everyone gets a reward when the company does well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:14) I love it. We have our Metrics That Matter over here, and we track them. Right now, we do this thing because we only have about 11 people, nine in the office. We all have metrics that we own. So, like, one person's in charge of every metric, even if it touches multiple teams. Like, one person owns the metric. And then on Fridays, we do a 90-second lightning round where each person who owns the metric stands up. They get 90 seconds to say how they grew personally, how they grew professionally, and how they're doing on their metrics. And so that's, like, the requirements to work here. Every week, you have to do something to grow personally. You have to grow professionally, and you have to hit your metrics—give an update on metrics. And we started that and it's been awesome.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:09:53) Yeah. You know, I kind of look back at just my own path as far as getting from entry-level to where I'm at today. And, you know, I wouldn't say it's as formal as what you have there, which sounds really, uh, really well organized and holds people accountable. But, you know, we grew fast. We had the right people. We developed the right people, and those people develop people, and we all hold each other accountable through that. And so I've had, you know, multiple different positions as we've gone through over the last 13 years. But none of those would happen without, you know, other people taking their roles seriously and, you know, without taking advantage of the opportunities that we mutually had together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:36) And that's the beautiful thing about a culture is it decides what's right for itself, and then that breeds creativity. And then people start sharing about what came out of their culture and, like, how it happened, and then other companies can try and see if it fits with them. And it's, I don't know, it's a whole new—as I'm, you know, getting into my 30s, I'm 31 now, so, like, as I'm getting in my 30s, it's like a whole new world from being quiet, introverted engineer, writing code, and caring about the speed of everything, to figuring out that it's about people and business only exists because of people. Like, everything we do is just to drive humans and—you can't exist in the market without being useful to someone.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:11:19) Yeah. And, you know, obviously, we wouldn't grow, you know, roughly 25, 26% on average year over year without adapting our business model. And I think that's even part of our culture—is constantly adapting what we bring to market, how we bring it to market, and the people we need in order to execute on that go-to-market strategy. And so that's getting faster for sure. You know, if I look at what we were doing when I started, you know, five years after that, five years after that, and almost five years after that, we are doing things today that, you know, I wouldn't even have dreamt about.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:11:56) And those are just, you know, more or less a starting point. We're constantly going to adapt how we go to market, and a culture's got to breed some of that creativity. It's also got to breed the leaders it takes to bring these new business offerings to the market and to be able to hit customers' expectations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:15) Let's talk about it. You as leader—I don't know which came first. You being booked on the show or you providing a quote?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:12:21) About the same time, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:24) Was it about the same time? Yeah. Did you know that you're going in the book too, or did you not know about that?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:12:28) No. I did not know about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:29) Okay. So we've—over the course of this time, we've gotten so many quotes for our newsletters and for the different things that we use them for. And finally, we said, "Oh, I've got these books on my desk at work, like, 365 Days of Motivational Quotes or whatever. It's like, let's do one for technology leaders, and we'll do a quote every day." Okay. And we'll, you know, make it look like the memes where it's, like, cool design quotes. Oh, sure. And we'll put that up into a book and distribute it on Amazon and just send it out to past guests. We do stuff like that all the time, like, in gift bags or whatever. And, yeah. So we came up with that idea, and I was, like, so excited about it.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:13:09) Yeah. That sounds great. I'll definitely have to get one. But as far as the quote, you know, I think that stands—you know, obviously, I passionately believe it. You have to be inspired by the person who's going to lead you, and, you know, be somewhat of an inspiration to the people you're leading, but also be inspired by the people that work with you and for you as well. Because it's up to them to, you know, bring everything together.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:13:41) And so we can have these great ideas, but unless they're passionate and inspired and like to do what they're doing and want to do it for the organization and the company, then it doesn't matter. But if they're having fun and doing all that other stuff and it all comes together, that is really what excites me—is watching those employees be proud of their work. And, you know, it's part of Impact's culture. The owners and leaders that lead this company, I believe, are an inspiration to all employees.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:13) Yeah. I like you even more now that we're talking. So let's take it back. Let's bring some—let's talk a little bit of tech and then a little bit of leadership. Because leadership's on my mind, I'm going to start with that.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:14:24) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:25) Let's take it back to you got young Frank. Right?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:14:30) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:31) He just got into this position, and he's fixing to go from working on a team to having responsibility of other people to grow them, that first-time leader transition.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:14:44) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:45) Everybody has a story. What is your takeaway from that experience?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:14:51) You know, I think looking back, I'd like to think I was smarter than I was. But, honestly, I think there's some amount of luck in there as far as finding Impact. And, you know, what drew me to Impact—and even though we were, again, we were a much smaller company and, you know, we had aspirations, but, you know, or at the time, they had aspirations. But I had no idea that it would turn out to be one of the best decisions I've made, really, in my adult life. And, you know, besides marrying my wife and my kids and all that stuff, you know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:26) All that stuff.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:15:27) Yeah. I'll put that little asterisk there. But, you know, it was an opportunity that, like I said, it was something that I felt comfortable taking. It was, you know, relatively low risk at the time. You know, I didn't have kids. I wasn't responsible for anyone really but myself as far as getting into the marketplace, getting to work, getting a job. And, you know, so there's a certain amount of luck to it that I found them, but I saw an opportunity. And I wanted to give anything, you know. And now looking at resumes, I see a bunch of people who switch jobs every year or two years or three years, and that's fine. That's not for everybody. For me, I wanted to give my first thing five years at least because I felt like I couldn't learn something new, even a year or two at a young graduate age without really giving it, you know, years of my life and trying to make that work.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:16:16) So that was my first goal was to just make it through the first five years. And then, getting into that point is really when the economy started to struggle a little bit through '09 and '10 and '11. And that was my first time to be a manager was around that time. So it was a challenging market. Impact wasn't immune to some of those challenges, but we emerged from that a really strong, a really focused company. Since that point going forward, we've looked nowhere but up as far as the opportunities and what we can accomplish.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:52) Alright. I want to dig a little deeper.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:16:54) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:55) Because we get messy on the show. Human-wise, like, you became leader of a team.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:17:05) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:06) And this is a recurring topic I ask about: first-time leaders. Okay. And there's always issues. Like, there's always a lesson, a takeaway, whether it's listening or understanding people or whatever. There's something in your mind, like, some—you don't have to share the exact story. Okay? First, I'm just saying that. All I want is the theme or the takeaway of what your big lesson was being a leader for the first time.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:17:38) You can't always expect things to get done the way that you did them. You can maybe expect similar results, but I got into a lot of—I don't want to say issues, but, you know, challenges—trying to say this is the way we're going to do it. This is not what needs to be done. This is the way I've done it. It works. Just do it. And so the biggest thing is learning, you know, obviously, how to delegate and how to let go of certain things that just aren't meaningful enough to matter when you're getting the same result out of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:03) Yes. That is what I'm talking about. Right? That is hard. That is, like, real when people are like—our audience is, you know, CTOs, engineers, people trying to level up in their career, trying to grow. And they're in their jobs right now and listening to this on their commutes or at work, and they're, like, experiencing the rawness of, like, having to, you know, deal with issues for the first time. Right? Everything from people having, you know, personal issues that are affecting their performance to metrics. Like, one of the ones that I always like is, I was super metric-driven. Like, yeah. I was always about, like, oh, did you hit that? Did you hit that? Like, what—Right. Why isn't it? Then I realized it's a human writing the code. And sometimes the human has problems, and sometimes they're not related at all to the work.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:18:54) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:54) And so you've got to go coach up the human side of things in order for the rest of the pipeline to produce correctly.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:19:01) Yeah. So, and I think, obviously, every person's different. And I have a few different groups that ultimately now report out to me. And some of them are very sales client-facing and they're responsible for quotas. Some of them are project managers. Some of them are developers. Some of them are systems integrators. Some of them are managers. Some of them are directors. And so you get a really unique set of personalities when you go from, you know, a sales-focused team to a development-focused team and trying to bridge that gap and making sure everyone's working nicely together. So I would agree. And, you know, there's probably employees that'll listen to this eventually, and they're laughing at probably some of the stories that we could probably get ahold of when we were first getting started that understand where that's coming from. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:48) Oh, it's so difficult. Sales makes all the money, but product makes the product. And it's like this two-tower thing, and you have to bridge it. Meanwhile, you're dealing with not only are you dealing with two different ideas in the business that are both very important. Right? They need each other. But you're dealing with typically people who are near opposite in personality. And so now you have to appease both groups and communicate between both of them to keep everything running smoothly, but that's how you get paid as a leader.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:20:20) Yeah. You know, and honestly, you know, we're fortunate to have the culture that we do. And I, you know, I've—you know, we're all part of that culture and we all have to work towards it. But we don't have a lot of the issues and the boundaries and red tape and politics and—that's part of making impact. I believe what makes Impact what it is today is, you know, a lot of companies, there would be, you know, huge borders between sales and operations and, you know, development and tech support and all that. But here, we're all—you know, we're all in this together and there's all common goals and, you know, I can't stress that enough. We're really fortunate to have the culture that we do that we spend as much time and energy focusing on it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:05) I love it. I love it. Because that's what works. That sort of, like, integrated pod style is really useful. Okay. So now you're going from running a team. Yeah. Your first team, you got through it. You learned how to delegate. You learned that you can't be too specific about it, and you have to convince people and, you know, get their buy-in. And now you're going to your first time running teams of teams. So now you're interacting with leaders directly. What's your takeaway from that one?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:21:34) You know, you try and not have them repeat the same mistakes, but, obviously, people are going to go through, you know, their own learning cycle. So, I mean, the same thing. Right? They're going to want to do things, what's made them successful, and how to rinse and repeat that. But, you know, I think everyone goes through those same sort of challenges as first-time managers. And most of the people that we promoted, you know, are first-time managers. So you've got to spend some time with them, and they need to learn to let go, and they need to understand it. You don't want to be the one—I told you so—so you've got to watch that a little bit. But, you know, you just have to work with them to make sure that they know that they can lean on you when they need support. They know to ask for it when they need support. They know to delegate to you when necessary and not try and be that complete shield of, you know, whatever it is that is either a challenge or an issue or a customer issue or too much, you know, workload or need to add people or interview, whatever it is. They have to know that they can lean on you to help alleviate some of that stress and, you know, obviously, vice versa.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:40) So important thing that I like that you said, but I want to highlight it a little bit, is in that second role of you running team leads, first, when you went into team lead, it was you learning that. But now that you were leading other team leads, it was you coaching those people through it, which is a different skill.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:22:59) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's another learning. Definitely takes some time. And, you know, you've got to again, not be in a position where you're trying to just tell them what to do, but, you know, you've got to let them make mistakes and then kind of peel back the onion a little bit, figure out what caused it, and try and find ways that they can work through that the next time without maybe getting somebody else involved.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:23) It's so much like having kids. It's scary.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:23:26) I wouldn't tell them that, but I might tell my kids.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:29) I wouldn't—that's not professional advice from us. But I will tell you this, like, it's really interesting because you could sit there and tell them it's hot all day, but they're going to touch it. Like—

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:23:40) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:40) And then they know it's hot. You know?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:23:42) Yeah. And it—yeah. And there's certain situations where you, you know, like, okay. Well, maybe you could have brought that one to me a little sooner than maybe you did, but, you know, obviously, they have to learn how to handle, again, whatever challenges those are that are coming through. And there's going to be new sets of challenges all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:01) One of my favorite pieces of leadership advice from past guests was creating an environment where it's safe for them to make those mistakes.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:24:11) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:11) And I thought that was really cool because you can't just tell them what to do. You can't just feed them the answers. But the thing you can control as a leader is that they're in an environment where it's safe to fail.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:24:22) Yeah. And, you know, I think you can't be afraid to make mistakes, and you've got to be willing to—I don't want to say take those risks, but to be able, you know, push the envelope because that's how a company like Impact gets to stay on the edge and bring new products and services to market. We were perfectly comfortable where we were, but no one likes being comfortable. At least not at—

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:45) No. That's not my vibe, man.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:24:47) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:47) It's like if you're comfortable, something's wrong. You're not growing right now. You're either growing or you're dying. Like, I don't like that comfort zone.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:24:55) Yeah. And if you ask our owner, Frank, as far as why he keeps doing what he does with Impact is, you know, he wants the employees to be successful. And the only way to keep making employees successful and keep having them grow, personally and professionally is to keep Impact growing. And so we can keep, you know, creating new leaders, getting into new different products and services, and, you know, keep that cycle going. And if we weren't a growing company, you know, some of the stuff that we've hired on and interviewed on and said that, you know, there was opportunity—just take my example from entry-level college to where I'm at today. If Impact wasn't a growing company, you know, that opportunity is a lot smaller for me and a lot smaller for everybody else. So that's also part of it, and we have to get people out of their comfort zones on a regular basis.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:47) Let's talk about that, about you going to CTO. Right? Because there was 45 people there when you started. Right? And you have a culture of growing, so you're on a good team. You had a good growing company. Why did Frank make it to CTO? What was different about you? Like, what qualities would the other Frank, your CEO, say that you possess that got you to where you are today?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:26:16) Yeah. So, you know, I obviously ask myself that question a lot as far as, am I fulfilling the role the way that, you know, I envisioned it and also the way Impact envisioned it. You know, there's a lot of people that I worked with at the time when I started that are now in other leadership positions. You know, Doug Gamache, who's our CIO, he started two or three years before me. There's people in sales that are now GMs and also partners within the company that have gotten promoted into the ranks. So, you know, honestly, I think we found our niches as far as what we were going to be successful at. But it's, you know, what really—what I kind of brought it to Frank, our owner, as far as the creation of this position and what we needed. One, we needed to be able to launch new products and services and do that pretty effectively. And so we had to address a lot of our own challenges as we're a fast-growing company. We're not immune to the same challenges that we help our customers with. So we had business processes and side processes and, you name it, and stuff that just had to be focused on in order to facilitate Impact's growth. And so me and our CIO work closely hand in hand, and we kind of divvy up responsibilities. Obviously, there's some overlap, but to keep Impact growing. And that was really my pitch was, one, Impact should be its own best case study for the product and services that we're offering. And there's obviously room for improvement because there has to be. When you go from, you know, X to where we are today in three years, which is double size of the company, you know, stuff is going to start to show some stress cracks. And we want to make sure that we got ahead of that and allowed us to keep the company growing and maximizing our employee talent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:09) Nice. I like it. And so you were innovative in the sense that you identified this need and proposed this role as the solution to it.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:28:17) Yeah. And, you know, it's—I'm in a unique spot because I'm responsible for a lot of customer-facing activities, which is really fun and, obviously, different types of challenges and customer use cases that come to light. But now, you know, I would say Impact is probably our most complicated customer, and, you know, we're fast-growing. We have a lot of business offerings that we offer. Some of them work nice and relate to one another, and some are unique types of offerings. For example, our managed marketing services is a unique offering where we'll do brand strategy and marketing and a whole bunch of services around that for our organization. So the same team that has to, you know, process those types of contracts is the same team that has to process our managed IT and our digital transformation contract as well with our customers. So we bring up a full set of challenges to the table every day that we want to address and make it easier for our employees to do, to really do their work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:19) I like you mentioned that word, digital transformation, because I thought it was over. Like, because it was in the—it was such a buzzword for so long. Like, alright. It's over. But then I'm talking to people who are professionals working at this higher level, doing these larger contracts, getting companies off of mainframe, still, like—this is not over. It, in fact, is, like, just maybe in, like, 30 to 40% of it. Like, it's still going. It's like, I don't even think it's hit its peak, this digital transformation thing.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:29:52) Yeah, I would completely agree with you. You know, the buzzword got really popular and probably overused. We're using it because it sums up nicely the set of services that Impact offers. And so we're putting a full kind of marketing effort around that right now because everything from our managed IT services to our business process services to our document management services to managing print and documents to our managed marketing services.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:30:22) No matter what, we're either helping companies operationally or with their customer experience, and those two things play nicely within the digital transformation kind of mindset. And the dollars are staggering based on the reports I've read. You know, $2 trillion globally being invested into digital transformation. So obviously, North America has their large share of that. And even in our markets of that subset, we think it's a really good time to be having those products and services and helping companies with it.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:30:56) In a small and midsize market, you know, they really can't do it on their own. They need a partner. They need a product and services. They need expertise to help them walk through whatever that digital transformation life cycle is for that company. And that's really what Impact has expertise in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:14) Nice. I'm actually going around the world and giving this talk about what I've learned speaking with the greatest technology leaders on Earth. And that's really exciting too, from going out from a microphone to talking to thousands of people. And so one of the conferences accepted the talk, and then they're like, oh, we're super excited to have you, but we want you to do an entirely different talk.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:31:36) I'm like—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:37) And I'm like, okay. What do you want the talk to be? And they said, oh, well, it's about digital transformation and how to accelerate the growth of your company. And I'm like, why did you accept my talk? It's about creating better leaders.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:51) But then I sat down and I, you know, took a look at, you know, could I somehow tie people and leadership back to digital transformation? I was like, yeah. Okay. Cool. Because I just pick different stories from different interviews and things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:07) So ultimately, here's the title: Four Habits of Digital Transformation Titans.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:32:15) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:16) That sounds pretty good. Right?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:32:18) I'm interested.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:19) Right? And it's, "Learn how these industry titans navigate the digital transformation landscape in this engaging high-energy talk," and then goes on so forth. Actionable steps to implement today, navigating the jagged path of acceleration and transformation, and a clear path to thrive in an ever-changing ecosystem. So they accepted that. And so now I have to—

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:32:43) Now you have to create it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:45) Yeah. Any ideas?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:32:48) Yeah. Actually. We actually, you know, we have a huge event that we're putting on, and we did the inaugural event last year called Impact Optimize. And if you go to impactoptimize.com, you'll see what the event is this year. But it's digital transformation for growing companies, and it's a full day talk track, you know, conference with a lot of breakout sessions about how to actually, you know, get your arms around it.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:33:17) So actually, our keynote speaker is Robert Herjavec, so from Shark Tank. And so obviously, very prevalent in the security space, which is a huge part of an overall strategy for digital transformation. But we also have another keynote, Mike Jones, who is president of banking operations at CIT, about his own company's digital transformation and investments and how that paid off. And then we created, you know, somewhere around 30 or 40 breakout sessions around how the SMB market can grasp hold of a few different strategies to take back with them. And so we really want this event to be something that people take action items back with them, not just educational, which it will be, but to figure out, okay, how do I get started and how do I actually do this?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:34:06) Because I read about it. I don't know where to start. And you have to be able to take something back with us. So that's one of our main goals and that's one of the things that we're really looking forward to this year. We're looking to get about a thousand people at the event. So it's gonna be a pretty sizable event.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:22) When is that?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:34:23) August 8th. And I believe that our marketing people have created a special code for anyone on the Modern CTO podcast. So if you look to register, use a Modern CTO code with a discount, and there is some kind of discount rate. So, but overall, you know, going back to your topic—

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:49) Give me some help for this talk. I'll be in Miami.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:34:52) You know, I think one of the biggest things is the company has to have a culture that is willing to adapt, because we can build all the cool technology and implement the right software and all that stuff that, you know, the best of breed. If the company doesn't want to adapt, it's not gonna adapt. And it doesn't matter what we do to help them with it. They have to have a culture of wanting to change the way they do business, wanting to adapt, wanting to modernize. And so if you get culture from, you know, ownership and C-level down to the organization that want to adapt, then that's when these things become really successful.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:35:29) And if I look at Impact in our own digital transformation cycle that we go through and we continually go through, at first we had to get people educated about what it was and how to implement these technologies in Impact, and we've been doing it within Impact for, you know, really the last ten or twelve years. But it's accelerated because now people know what we can do. They've read the case studies from our customers. They've seen examples within Impact of what we're able to optimize and automate. And so now we have the entire organization coming to my team asking for help in these processes and reducing these manual steps and redundant activities and wasteful spreadsheets and wasted emails and so on and so forth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:14) So you have the case studies on your website?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:36:17) We have some on our website, and we're putting more on our website. And most of them, we kind of control a little bit to talk to someone first to get an understanding of what makes sense because you can check a whole bunch of stuff on a website. But without having a conversation with somebody, it's hard to understand what really they're looking for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:39) Oh, cool. So for me, what I'm looking for is I would just like to read two of them before I go up and stand in front of an audience and be like, this company is great.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:36:47) For sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:48) Yeah. Just because it's interesting. I went, you know, two and a half years ago, I knew nobody, maybe the five closest people to me and that was it. And then when we started this blog and the podcast and the book and everything now, it's like I know thousands of people. And I talked to—yeah. I did 500 interviews last year. Right?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:37:04) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:04) And so, you know, there's always, I always like the person. I like the company. But then before I started—when I started thinking about when advertisers approach us, right, when they started to approach us, oh, we do this payroll or whatever. I was like, you know, I don't know. Because if it was Intercom and they wanted me to do some chat thing, I'd be like, cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:24) Because I use their product every day. And it's like, if it was AWS, I'm like, yeah, I get it. Or Heroku. Right? But because I know it. I know it's good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:32) But then for everybody else, when I'm not in industry, I'm just like, oh, let's look at some case studies so then I can be a fan because I don't have anybody that I talk about in the marketing digital transformation world.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:37:47) Right. Yeah. You know, we've done some variation of, you know, even before it's called digital transformation, you know, again, really since I started at Impact. And we kind of focus on either making a process operational, excellent as far as reducing redundant steps and stuff like that, but also if we can improve that customer experience. And the best is when you hit both those buckets within the same strategy or the same iteration of the project to address both those buckets.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:38:20) But we're looking at, you know, all that stuff at Impact is how do we make it easier for customers to do business with us, and how do we fulfill those requests as quickly as possible?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:33) That's exciting. And it takes a lot of listening to do that. Right?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:38:37) Yeah. Listening from employees, listening to customers, thinking, you know, what are people not telling me so we can think of something new that makes it easier for everybody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:46) Yeah. I got an outreach from the show. This one guy in the UK, he said he's asking me, he's like, I'm gonna go interview for the CTO position that I really want. And I looked at the product, and I have all these ideas, and I want to go share it with them. And I said, well, have you considered—I didn't tell him what to do because that doesn't work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:05) I said, have you considered just asking them what they're looking for? Right? Because, I mean, that's a novel idea. That's something different. Because when you go up there, you're just gonna imagine that they have all the problems that you see in the product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:20) And, you know, I don't know, but you don't go to your neighbor's house, knock on the door, and then tell them everything that's wrong.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:39:26) Right. You did. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:27) And then want to stay for a while. And so I was like, why don't you just ask them, you know, what they want? And he was like, oh, that's really good. I was like, cool. I was like, awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:37) So then he went and he did it. Right? And then he came back and he's like, oh, I have a second interview. And I'm apparently the last three in the running. And they want me to present what I believe their biggest challenges are to the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:50) I said, great. You already have the answers. He goes, what do you mean? I go, well, when you had your first interview, you asked them what they were looking for. He's like, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:57) And he's like, oh, because I was gonna tell them about using their tech stack like this or doing this or maybe switching to this language. I was like, no. No. No. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:04) I was like—

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:40:05) They gave you the answers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:06) They gave you the answers in the first interview. The test is, if you go put on a slide and present those are the biggest challenges. He goes, well, without all my ideas to have them, you know, to improve, and he had this one that was actually pretty good. It was like, oh, let's streamline the onboarding process since they want to double the customer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:23) And they told me that it was slow. I was like, perfect. So put that in the business challenges, but also put it in areas of opportunity, you know. And then he went on to ask about the first hundred days and stuff like that. But I felt pretty good giving that advice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:39) I always like to cross-check what I'm saying with people. So what do you—was that okay, good, bad?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:40:45) No, I think you're spot on. You know, when we meet with customers, you know, a lot of times, they're not sure, you know, how—especially around the business process stuff, what that means to them. Around our IT services, there's a little bit of a more defined scope around how to manage that, and we do things, obviously, I think unique and more customized.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:41:10) But specifically around our security practice, our managed security practice, and around our business process teams, there's a lot of unknown about what that means to that organization. So, yeah, absolutely. You start by having conversations about, you know, what are some of the challenges? What are you trying to accomplish as an organization? Are you trying to grow?

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:41:29) Are you trying to, you know, streamline some back-end processes and really get into the weeds around that? But you want to start with high-level challenges, high-level business goals, and then, you know, we have a suite of services offering that you have to try and connect to help solve those business challenges. And it doesn't take, you know, a vendor. It doesn't take a product. It doesn't take any of that.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:41:54) It takes really a partner who's gonna be with them long term, because there is no magic rip the band-aid off and everything's solved. You gotta step into it. You gotta have a strategy, and you gotta more, you know, more importantly align with what those business objectives are and lay that out. And in most cases, we're laying out a three-, four-, five-year roadmap for that company and working them through and walking them through each step of that along the way amongst all things digital transformation. So everything from securing the network to managing their documents electronically, to optimizing business processes, to replacing their ERP system, to building an app for their customers to use, to marketing it, and tying that all together into some kind of business strategy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:35) I love it. I like what you guys do. You cover a wide range of services, which is really useful. Right? So they don't have to go run around everywhere and find vendors and validate vendors in every area.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:42:47) And that's usually what we're up against is, one, they're not doing any of this today or at least most of it, or the areas they are doing it, they have four or five vendors. And like I said, it's not a product, not a vendor relationship. We look to build that partnership with that organization. And they have to have the trust in us and, honestly, vice versa because if we're working with them on their network and security and their ERP system and business processes. Obviously, customer responsiveness and support has to be the best in the business because we have to be able to respond, you know, really to any of those issues or challenges that may arise, because we're running that business with them. And the last place we want to be is not having the support we need in order to address an issue regardless of how small it is because it could affect two or three different parts of that organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:42) I like it. I like it a lot. As we wrap up here, I would like to know, what are you most excited about right now? What's getting you up out of bed? Like, what are you super pumped about at work?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:53) I will say at work because we know the kids are probably getting you up out of bed.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:43:56) Right? Yeah. The fact that it's not negative 25 outside. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:00) Yes. Okay.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:44:01) No. You know, there's a lot. We've launched and are launching new products and services and growing those and building teams out of those. That's really exciting. But, honestly, my focus is on this Impact Optimize event and making sure that we have the right content, we have the right people, we have the right takeaways, and that that event's successful because it really is going to be impressive as far as the lineup and having Robert Herjavec there, obviously, big name.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:44:31) Huge expectations on our part to deliver a world-class event that educates our customers and, in some cases, not our customers—get them exposed to Impact—but ultimately put some definition around what digital transformation is and means to their business. If we can do that to a thousand people, five, six hundred, seven hundred companies, to me, that's successful. And that's what we're shooting towards this year, so in August. So it's a lot of work, but that's probably—it's been taking up most of my time and a lot of my efforts. And obviously, I'm passionate and excited about it.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:45:06) Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:08) I love that. I'm excited. Maybe I'll come up.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:45:10) Come on down.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:11) Yeah. I know. We're up in Arizona. So I'm gonna—yeah. I know that I'm out there. I'm out in Chicago twice this year.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:45:19) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:19) I know it's like I think it's like April, May, or April and June or something. But I might be out there. I mean, you've kind of sold me on the Impact Day.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:45:28) Well, if you're in April, we may be in Mexico, so we might just miss each other. But let me know the dates, and we'll be sure to get you out to some of our offices and maybe a Blackhawks game if they're still playing in April. We'll see what happens.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:40) That's right. You're going to Mexico. Why? Because you hit your goals.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:45:43) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:45) Frank, this has been fantastic. I really enjoyed hanging out and talking about technology and leadership. You're awesome, man.

(Frank DeGeorge at 00:45:50) Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks for the opportunity to speak on your show.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:02) Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then CC me, [email protected]—if you CC me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout-out on the podcast, whichever you prefer. We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes, and I need your help in order to do this.