Derek Cwik - Director of Integrations at Americaneagle.com

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Derek, the Director of Integrations at americaneagle.com, and we discuss how powerful marketing can cause people to pick the wrong solution to their problem, the ideal relationship between an e-commerce platform and the sales team, and how communication is the key in life and in business. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) We're just going to hang out and talk. Is that cool with you? Yeah. Awesome. Are you still in Chicago right now or no?

(Derek at 00:00:45) I am, and I'm in our offices. We're just outside O'Hare Airport. So if you're familiar with the area, Rivers Casino is like a mile up the road from us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) Oh yeah, I've been out to Chicago a lot. I think I went about five, six times last year. A lot of great people out there, a lot of great events.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:00) Yeah.

(Derek at 00:01:00) Yeah. My kids right now are a bit upset with winter. Got a lot of cold weather and no snow, and they just don't get it. Like, why can't we have snow with this cold weather? You know, if we can't have fun outside, then it's no fun at all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:16) You can't even drive them up to Canada because the borders are kind of locked down.

(Derek at 00:01:21) Right, yeah. So yeah, it's been fun. I've been here my whole life. So I'm born and raised. In fact, I grew up about five minutes from where I work, and I now live five minutes from where I work. So it's I just can't get out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:37) I live like twenty minutes from where I was born and grew up.

(Derek at 00:01:42) Okay, yeah. My community in school, a lot of us, we had a mass exodus when we went to college, right? And then we all came back, and most of us lived in the city, including myself. I lived up in Wrigleyville for about five years, actually just before I took this job. And the suburbs drew me back, so I moved up to Evanston with my wife—back then was fiancée. And that is a great little town, but it's a terrible commute to get anywhere from there. And then we said, we need to find a house, start planning for kids and family and the whole shebang. And we moved back to our hometown. So yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:20) Can you imagine being locked in like this without technology?

(Derek at 00:02:25) My gosh. You know, so when I was thinking about stuff, you know, how I got to where I am today, you know, I don't know what that moment was, but there are like, you know, it's Christmas time right now. One of my first most vivid memories of Christmas was getting a Nintendo. And I just, and that was like the only gift I got, right? I mean, that's all my parents could afford. It was a huge gift, and I just went bananas for it. And then as I progressed through life, my first computer was a Tandy 1000. And I was, you're just, I was just like doing typing and, you know, nothing cool. So maybe Pong and some basic games, but nothing fancy. And it was so enthralling just to be in there and learning DOS. I don't know what it was. But I built, I printed out some of these business cards. It was called D&D's Landscaping. So it was a little side job. I printed on this old-fashioned printer, and we just cut them out. Made D's on the perimeter as Derek and Dave. Dave was my neighbor. And used a lot of that money then to get my next batch of toys. I got a radio-controlled car. It was called Tyco Bandit, which looks a lot like a GMC Cyclone. After you shave down the back little wing on it and peel off all the neon graphics it had, I spray-painted it matte black. Later in life, I got a GMC Typhoon as one of my toys. It's a SUV, all-wheel drive, very fast, very fun truck. But I think it goes back to that buying that little RC car. And anyway, I started a business with a couple of high school friends doing servers and networking, which turned into we became their computer guys for websites. We competed against these guys, americaneagle.com. One of our big wins was American Eagle Insurance. So when we beat out American Eagle on that, this is in the late nineties at this point, the dot-com boom, we were enthralled because, you know, here were three little guys in high school beating out like the big behemoth in the area. Anyway, number of years later, I'm looking for a job in the burbs because I'm not living out here, and I see American Eagle's hiring, and I threw in my resume.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:38) All right, so I've got a question. So you built a company, and then you sold it to American Eagle?

(Derek at 00:04:43) No, I didn't sell it. So we, this was in high school we built this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:47) Okay.

(Derek at 00:04:47) Chris, Sean, and myself started out in hardware side. It turned into the web. Sean and I really thought the web was the future, and we were going off to U of I, Champaign-Urbana, for computer science. We were rooming together. And we had a great time down there, and it just became hard to study and run a business. Chris maintained the business. It's still in operation today. He focused on networking. He's all about the hardware side of the business. So after college, I went into consulting for a long bit. I got out of that. I just, I wanted to get back into maybe less travel and something close to home. And that's how I found americaneagle.com. And I said, funny, you know, you guys were in my backyard this whole time. I competed with you guys back when I was in high school. I'd love to come make you guys some money. And that was twelve years ago. I've been here a long time, and I love it. It's a great company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:39) The executive team there, what was like your first initial interactions? Did you take them out to lunch and have this conversation, or how did it...

(Derek at 00:05:47) Oh no. So Ryan, the CTO, he got my resume, and you know, he just knew right away the name, and he remembered it as a competitor. And he just said, I got to bring him in and have an interview. I got to talk you through our company, who we are, what we're doing now, because it was very different. This was nearly ten years later, right? So in terms of time frames, '95 to '99 is when we started that business here in Park Ridge. It wasn't till 2008 that I started with americaneagle.com. So they had grown a lot. I mean, we were a three-man shop back then. They probably were twelve, fifteen people at that time. But their story is almost the same as mine, right? Where they started in the networking space. The Big Ten Conference was one of their first customers that said, hey, can you also build us a website? And we said, sure. You know, you never said no, right? And then they grew into the web, but they were able to scale bigger, faster, and were focused on that. I got tied up with school.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:52) And what's like the primary line of business today?

(Derek at 00:06:56) We do everything. So, you know, it's web design and development is our subtext. But besides, I mean, that's how we started. Now we're doing a lot with mobile, with transit, right? So we've got a product that, right now there's a big launch in Memphis, the MATA system, MATA, where we did the POS system, all the bus barcode scanners, all the orchestration of these systems, and including with the big money machines. So with the card fares. So it's just all over: B2B, B2C, associations, government. When I started, maybe here's a good little story. When I started in 2008, I came on board to do development. I mean, that was my, I love developing. I love getting my hands dirty with new technology, especially when code is involved. And when you started here at that time, you typically work on the smaller projects or even just tickets to fix stuff. And I would just pound those out real fast. I mean, it was just easy-peasy. And I'm like, what's the next challenge? What's the next challenge? And then I got put in e-commerce because that was like the big hot division here at American Eagle at that time. Sports was also another big division. But as I was getting my first product in commerce, along came the White House, the whitehouse.gov. It was actually President Obama's digital team said, you know, we are going to need a new website, and it's got to be live by February 2009 when I'm getting sworn in under oath. That business didn't close till October, November 2008. We had fifty-four, I think it's fifty-four business days to get the whitehouse.gov relaunched on an entirely new platform with all of their content, with all of this stuff, right? It was a monumental project. And I just remember thinking, if we can do this, you know, the world is our oyster. Like, who else is doing this kind of stuff? And we did it. We had Google engineers involved because when it launched, there was the largest streaming, a.k.a. town hall at the time. I mean, the highest traffic site was that launch of the whitehouse.gov in 2009. And we did it, right? And it goes back to, you know, our roots in hardware and technology and just throwing everything we got at it to make it a success, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:28) That's pretty cool. So I never thought about that. Like, when a new president comes in, you know, who's the contact that like updates the DNS records, you know? Is that, you just get control of the domain, so you're responsible for everything?

(Derek at 00:09:46) Yes, there's a lot of people involved. There's a, and I'm sure there's a lot more now. We're no longer maintaining the whitehouse.gov. I should say that. That did transition off of us. But yeah, it was a lot of orchestration between our tech teams, our developers, Google engineers, and their technical teams.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:06) That's pretty cool. I got to interview Anish Chopra, who was the CTO under the Obama administration.

(Derek at 00:10:14) Okay. So I'm sure Ryan McArthur, our CTO, knows him, right? Yeah. Yeah, with that timing. We won that business because we told the story that, you know, we really weren't doing government sites. And a government site at that time wasn't just about news and content. It was about engagement. And that was a big push with Obama. He wanted engagement, right? To listen to his audience, the people. And so we said, listen, we can do all these sports sites. We were doing NHL, NFL teams at that time, pro teams before the leagues took them in-house. And we said, listen, if we can have all of this real-time dynamic data, all this high video and high imagery going on with the sports teams, there's no reason we can't do the White House. It's just a little bit different context, right? Government versus sports, but the interaction is the same. We were also PCI Level One certified. We were number seven or eight in the world to get that compliance level for hosting. So that experience in sports, that experience in certifications in networking landed us the job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:31) Oh yeah, because like AWS wasn't a popular thing in...

(Derek at 00:11:34) Oh no, no. Yeah, yeah. No. I mean, there weren't platforms. I mean, we didn't have platforms back then, right? WordPress wasn't a thing. You know, it's just everything was emerging, right? CMS systems, e-commerce systems, they were just emerging. The only real big thing I think that was around that was modern was Salesforce, right? They were cutting edge, and I don't think anybody really even knew how cutting edge it was at that time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:58) Benioff did.

(Derek at 00:12:00) He did, yeah. Oh yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:02) Harris and Parker Harris did. Those guys are, man, their culture. I've heard so many people describe them. They're like, they're like an events company masquerading as a technology company. Their culture there is just, it's infectious. It's so cool.

(Derek at 00:12:15) Yeah. And you know, we as a digital agency, people are blown away that our average tenure is about five years, right, across our employees. We've got dozens of people that have been here over 10, many over 20, right? I myself will be 13 in June, and it's because of the culture, right? I can go knock on our owners, Mike and Tony's, door any day of the week and vet or tell them what they're doing right and tell them what they're doing wrong, and they listen. And if you make a good point, they give you enough leash to try things out and experiment. So a lot of our growth has been because of that, right? We've never had tunnel vision on an industry. We've never had tunnel vision on a platform or a product. We like to try new things, see if we can make it a success. And if we do, that's when they really, we turn on the investment into that. We build the team around it of ninjas. We get marketing, the partnerships, everybody involved to make it a success. And so when you look at our portfolio of platforms, you'll see we're at the top of all of them in terms of partnership, client recognition, things like that. And it just, you know, other digital agencies are sort of a flash in the pan. They sell a really great story, but they don't have the experience, and they certainly don't have the purview that we have. I think that's our key differentiator and why I love working here. Sounds like a "We Work" ad right now, but it's just a breath of fresh air every day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:52) What does your day look like?

(Derek at 00:13:54) Oh boy, it's busy. I'd love to show you my whiteboard here, but I can't. We're under NDA. But boy, on average workday. So I, I guess a little bit about my history here. When I started, I was in development, right? Got into e-commerce. Loved it. Especially doing a lot of the front end to back office integrations. So acronyms are like my world, right? CRM, ERP, AMS, so on and so forth. And I've always had a tendency or a draw to data because to me, that was the fuel that made your business go. And it was very clear that companies that invested in their data, content being a component of data, right, but their data in general, tended to succeed more so than those that were focusing on, again, one-time or flash-in-the-pan type engagement, right? It's the ones that really did the hard work and put it in upfront that saw the fruits bear later on. So with that said, I was doing a lot of this integration work, and I said, guys, we need an integration team here. We need a team dedicated to integrating between systems, system-to-system, point-to-point, and eventually larger. They gave me a little bit of string, and we grew a team, right? And then I started supporting sales because, you know, I wanted, on the development side, I was getting frustrated that things weren't sold right, right? So the sales rep was just trying to win the deal. I've come to appreciate sales in a whole new light as I've become more involved there. Where it's a hard job, and you're competing against a lot of noise in the market, a lot of promises, again, from other businesses and agencies who are young or even maybe very developed. They just, they're hungry to win the deal as well. And I was always, I mean, I was raised on being honest and doing the right thing and making it right, another core value that we have. And I wanted things sold right, and I came to realize that selling it right and executing are two different things. You have to set the right expectation upfront, focus on the outcome of what you're going to deliver, and really how you get there, they don't care about. I was always particularly focused on the how we got there. Come to find out that as long as we get to that outcome, they're happy. So anyway, I got involved in more of this solution engineering role where I'm pulling together, I've got this big toolbox of partners. I mean, we literally have hundreds of partners in various acronym systems. And we can orchestrate, you know, pick this, pick that, pick that, to put together a solution that makes sense for those requirements. So my day-to-day, I'm like a doctor.

(Derek at 00:16:49)
And your question is, what do I do day to day? I just have patients coming in every day, right? And my job is to listen. My first job is to listen, understand, and then it's to diagnose.

(Derek at 00:17:01)
I've gotta evaluate what the problem is and what we can do to help them out. And then, of course, what's the action plan to execute? How do we solve for it? And I mean, it sounds easy, but technology is making things very, very challenging because there's a lot of up and comers. As you know, Jamstack is hot, headless is hot. There's a lot of hot things that really aren't always a good solution for everybody, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:28)
That's how it goes, though, man. Welcome to marketing. We got some buzzwords going on.

(Derek at 00:17:32)
Yeah, the Kool-Aid is strong and very tasty. So I have to combat a lot of that and almost help people understand that, yeah, you're hearing about this great stuff, but, you know, if you have a cough and you start reading online, you might think, I've got pneumonia. I've got pneumonia symptoms. You got COVID.

(Derek at 00:17:54)
No, you've got a cough. You've got COVID. Yeah, no. You've got a cough. You know, don't panic. Don't worry. Don't start buying this and solutioning that and getting in the hot new whatever to fix it. You know, talk to someone who can really help you out. And that's what we want to do. We want to put people in the right vehicle to see them grow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:15)
Yeah. The way we got connected was through Yoav from Oro. And you were talking earlier about the emerging technologies in the early 2000s, right? Because we kind of saw all the platforms. And so when I saw that the founder, like, that he did Magento, right, I was like, yes, this is awesome. This is gonna be so cool. And so I was talking with him about, you know, how that whole project went because they're one of the largest names in the platform space for the ecommerce type stuff back in the day when it was exploding. I think they sold to Adobe. There was a couple acquisitions, but I was talking with him a little bit about the evolution of the ecommerce market. And I was just curious, like, what your thoughts of Oro were and how did you meet them?

(Derek at 00:19:06)
So we're a partner of Oro. And our history has been fun. So if we were to back up our clock as well, again, I said there weren't platforms back then. We created a content management system which we refer to as iDev. That sprung into iDev Commerce, a commerce plugin for that CMS. It's based on .NET technologies. We were losing deals. You know, Yoav has always talked about deals you lost and how you learned from that. We would lose deals, and the feedback we'd get is, you know, you guys, we love the client sites you've produced, but your software seems proprietary. And we've gotta buy something off the shelf.

(Derek at 00:19:49)
And this is when things are starting to merge with content and commerce, right? Platforms were coming around, Magento being one of them. And so we said, you know, we do great work. We're great artists. And it doesn't really matter what our canvas is or whether we use a crayon or a pencil or whatever. Let's start getting involved with other tools. So that's how we evolved into other CMS systems and other commerce systems. We tended to focus on the .NET stack because that's where our roots were, and we had a large team that was very fluent in that language. And the LAMP stack or PHP side was less prevalent here. That has since altered or shifted quite a bit.

(Derek at 00:20:33)
We built a whole practice around that side of the house, including getting on board with Magento when Magento 2 came about. We were so late for the Magento 1 train when Yoav was in charge that we felt like we couldn't really disrupt the other SIs in that space. Anyway, a lot of SaaS systems started emerging. Shopify, BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, aka Demandware. Partnered with all those, grew that team as well. And I was at a conference for Acumatica, an ERP, SaaS-based, last year? Last year? Early this year? Well, I don't know. Time's flying.

(Derek at 00:21:15)
And I'm there, and we're there with BigCommerce, and BigCommerce says, hey, I want you to talk to somebody. And I was introduced to Modi from OroCommerce. And I'd been following Yoav and Oro for quite a while, and I'd talked to a lot of folks in the industry about, you know, when are they gonna just blossom and bloom and become what I think they might become. And here I was getting introduced to Modi, first person, and we shook hands. We had a very candid conversation. And immediately, as he's talking about their company's values, about their vision, I said, we've gotta figure out a partnership and get this ball rolling and start getting some customers your way. You know, when they go through a demo, they're showing the product out of the box, the raw product. And I love that as an SI to see the real deal. Like, what are we starting with?

(Derek at 00:22:08)
You know, what is the value that this platform provides at the start, not how are we gonna end? A lot of platforms demo with the end result. Well, here's a great client, and they don't tell you about all the sweat equity and dollars that went into making that, right? So it's a great company in terms of their core values and how they invest in their people. And I think as a product, boy, it's a very powerful B2B application. And they were built around that concept of B2B, which a lot of these other platforms, they're trying to get into B2B, but they're more B2C focused, right? They're just not a good fit. So it's a great tool in my toolbox. It's another tool to get the right customer set up for success.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:53)
Do you ever get to hang out with Yoav?

(Derek at 00:22:55)
I have not yet. And hopefully, in better times, we will. We're also partners with his Akeneo, right? That's their PIM product. Again, going back to vision, as we've been these last couple years, a big challenge in my life has been a lot of these manufacturers and distributors who have come to us and said, hey, we want to modernize. And you've probably heard another buzzword, digital transformation. Digital maturity, right? When you start peeling back all the layers to get to transformation, you're gonna always come back to one common denominator, and that's data. It always comes back to data. Customer data, product data, order data, engagement data, content, right? A lot of data. And to become successful, you gotta orchestrate all that.

(Derek at 00:23:40)
So when we were getting into a lot more of these B2B engagements, the first thing we observed was the product data really stunk. The data these B2B manufacturers had or distributors had, you can think of it's like DOS to what Windows is, right? They're in the DOS world of data where modern applications are in Windows. It's that bad. All caps, you know, limited to 12 characters, right? It's not rich data. Where in the B2C world, they're in the Windows world. They're modern. They're beautiful, 360 rotations. I mean, it's all formatted and categorized. It's beautiful.

(Derek at 00:24:25)
And why aren't B2B distributors doing this? Well, they're missing a piece. One is that they've got this ERP. They've been running their business on this thing for decades, right? And it's been working well for them in the offline world, taking a phone, fax, or email, right, to place the order. The rep knows the products, or they've printed a catalog. They've got all that. They're missing a PIM. So we actually started saying as we were trying to sell into the space, if we're gonna sell to B2B merchant, we need to sell a PIM with it.

(Derek at 00:24:58)
Or at least the concept of you guys need to mature your data to have a successful storefront. Again, we always come back to we're measured on success. If we can't make that business more money, they're not going to reinvest with us. So finding the right solution and getting them to believe in it is my job, and that's the hardest part. So PIM is a key component of that. We do a lot of great work with Akeneo and other PIMs, and I think it's going to really help fast track those transformations, that maturity, because it's the right tool to get you to that long-term success. You don't just need a storefront. That's the misnomer. That's an eventual outcome or output of the process, which involves enriching your data, building a team around it, and really thinking of your storefront as another sales rep, a rep that's on 24/7/365, right?

(Derek at 00:25:57)
She's always listening, always taking orders, always being asked questions, right? Search is hugely important. The youth now is growing up with, you know, information at their fingertips, and they expect things now, right? It shouldn't be hard. It should be frictionless. And to do that in the B2B world and make it relevant with your pricing, your data, your everything, you know me as a customer, show me, that's a job. It's a hard job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:27)
Yeah, it's reminding me a lot of how local community banks are trying to keep up with the major banks with the technology experience, and then these solution providers come out to help these. Because, like, a local community bank is not gonna have a team of 50 software developers, right, to maintain and produce all their products. And it's a very specialized field. So then they come out and that boots up a whole segment of the market. But it sounds like in the B2B, there's some older systems in that B2B space that you were discussing, and now you guys are helping revolutionize and modernize them, right?

(Derek at 00:27:06)
That's the intent. Yeah. That's the goal. I mean, we've done it. And I think it goes back to we don't just talk the talk, but we walk the walk. We've got a lot of success stories and customers that stick with us. I mean, I think that's our biggest testament. If they're sticking with us more than a year or two years, but like five or 10, we're doing something right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:25)
Yeah. I heard you guys are doing a podcast studio there. Is that so you can—

(Derek at 00:27:29)
Yeah. We were hoping to have it ready for today. It is not, so I'm in my office. And we are building a podcast studio. One of our, we brought on board Lino Tadros. He's our regional director for Microsoft. Very, very astute guy. His world is AI and ML. That's not my world. I dabble in it because of, again, that data aspect. But he can really walk the walk and talk the talk on that front. We also have an educational component of the business that we started this year. It's called Eagle Academy.

(Derek at 00:28:01)
So we're trying to, you know, share our knowledge and the wherewithal on the different products and platforms that we service with the world. Forums are great. Communities are awesome. But at the end of the day, you do need some instruction from people who are doing this every day, right? As much as I love reading developer docs and doing self-paced learning, you never get that perspective of, well, here are some things that you just gotta be watching out for, right? Because you don't get that real-world aspect. It's how schools teach theory, not necessary application all the time, right? You need to have both components to really have a comprehensive understanding of how to do things right or with the tools you're given.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:51)
So will it be, like, it's a podcast where you'll talk about this stuff, but you're also, Eagle Academy is going to have instructor-led courses type deal?

(Derek at 00:29:02)
So when we bought the building we're in now, right outside of O'Hare Airport, big part of the hunt for the building was having a lot of meeting spaces and large meeting spaces. So we've got the facilities already set up for that, in-person education if people want to come in and do that. I know this wasn't the year for that. But then the studio is separate, which will just be focused on talk tracks, much like you guys do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:29)
Yeah. Well, you can, you know, take those same rooms and just stream the events.

(Derek at 00:29:35)
You can. I don't know. This thing was supposed to be done a while ago, so they must be putting some fancy stuff in there. It's sound, I mean, we're right next to expressway, which there's a lot of background noise coming off the street. So I'm guessing they're doing some fancy stuff in there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:50)
Nice. Are you excited about the future of technology, self-driving cars, things like that?

(Derek at 00:29:55)
Oh yeah. I mean, I'm excited and scared. I think like everybody, you know, it's almost like the acronym as it goes, with great power comes great control. As we enable machines or autonomy to start taking over, we're really putting a lot of trust into those systems. And as you talk to, if you were to talk to Lino, he'd start talking about models behind that and how we, you know, think about trust in AI. You know, I look at my kids, and I think about how different their childhood has been than mine. I'm trying to keep it regular with, you know, get outside, get outdoors, be a kid, go scrape your knees. But, you know, they know gestures. They, I mean, we just actually happened to have my kids' grandparents gifted my eldest daughter this little camera, right?

(Derek at 00:30:46)
A little toy camera, but she can do her own little recording, and she set up a green sheet behind it. She's running her own little mini podcast right now out of that camera, right? Her little show. And she's seven. And, you know, when I was seven, I was, I think, getting excited about getting a Nintendo, right? So to me, I mean, what she's doing is so far more advanced than what I was doing, and it's just gonna keep accelerating, right? It's not slowing down. And that's, I mean, that's exciting. But then again, I love to change my own oil, which my wife thinks is crazy. But I like getting my hands dirty and turning wrenches and, I don't know, just the smell of it. And, you know, I don't know. So, yeah, I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:31)
Yeah, I'm a big outdoors person. I love hiking. We go constantly on little weekend trips and stuff to be outdoors, you know. Because when I think that my age range, you know, I know people that are, I have a sister who's three years younger than me and a brother who's three years older. So I've got a nice spectrum through, you know, being raised and seeing their friends and all of that. And it feels like my generation was one of the last generations being locked outside having to drink from a hose.

(Derek at 00:32:03)
Yeah. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:04)
Because then all of a sudden, like, fear took over. And if I talked to, you know, my younger sister's friends, none of their parents would even let them outside, right? So it's like, okay, within that three-year gap, you know, there was a culture shift, at least in America. And I thought that was fascinating. I was thinking about how to raise my kids with technology, right? Because I'm so into technology growing up. I spent so much time with it. But, you know, we didn't have it when I was, like, super, super young. We got it, like, when I was a little bit older. Like, I was, like, eight or nine when we got our first computer. My dad started teaching me how to do stuff on it. And that's why I have the memories of, like, being outside and doing that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:50)
And I think it's important to, like, I was trying to find the analogy, like, how to connect it with something that we've all already experienced. And one of the things I came up with is junk food, right? So, like, there was a time when we didn't really have junk food, right? And then we got junk food, and it's now readily available. It's always around us if you want it. It's always there. And some people can control themselves and some people can't. And some parents teach their kids to control themselves and some parents don't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:21) And I think it'll be similar with technology. It's like, yeah, there's a time and a place for this. But if you go 100% into it, like anything, if you become unbalanced, you can do it even with being healthy. You go too crazy on that. But I think it's just putting more of a premium on parents, you know, raising their kids at a time when parents were usually both having full-time jobs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:46) So this one of the interesting positives out of the negative pandemic situation is the forced recombination of the family. Right? Everyone being grouped together.

(Derek at 00:33:58) You're together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm in the same camp as you, 100%.

(Derek at 00:34:05) My wife actually does this outdoor group that we just gotta keep the kids, I think, healthy, everything in moderation—screen time, tech time, outdoor time, snack time. It just, yeah, everything in moderation. And there are a lot of external pressures, that marketing, all that noise, whether it's the news, social channels, whatever, even person to person interaction. Right? And you've gotta be able to moderate what you hear and realize that they're just trying to take a little bit more of your time and catch your attention, and that you don't always have to give that up. You own that time. That's the one currency that is yours to always dish out. So, yeah, I fear for my—I mean, I fear for my girls, I think, more than my son. My son, he's a lot like me. So I see a lot of him in me, I guess.

(Derek at 00:35:10) And so with my girls, though, I never had sisters growing up. And so having daughters to me is just—they're exciting but scary all at once.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:19) Oh, yeah. There is a—did you see that documentary The Social Dilemma?

(Derek at 00:35:23) Oh, yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:24) Isn't it—wasn't it crazy about how they described the currency of females versus males and how the social media aspect of how they can connect and talk about each other is fueling teen girl depression. I mean, I was blown away by that. I was like, because I have no clue because I'm a guy. Right? And so I'm focused on things mostly as a macro for my experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:51) And so to see that documentary was very informative, especially having a daughter. You know?

(Derek at 00:35:59) And my wife's a high school health teacher and actually she was doing remote teaching since becoming a mother. So to her this COVID thing is just the norm, you know. She's always been doing remote since nine years ago. But she early on in our time together just opened my eyes up to some of the advantages I have as being a male, right, and certainly growing, going through junior high and high school was a very different experience for me than it was for her because of gender. And, you know, as she shared all this stuff with me, it's almost like I'd rather not know. I know. It is—it can be overwhelming and scary.

(Derek at 00:36:45) But we'll, you know, we'll get them through it. We're aware. And then, you know, I think that's key. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:52) I think it's important to talk about stuff that we feel nervous to talk about. Right? Because we're all kind of connected and it's weird that I feel nervous sometimes to talk about gender differences, although they absolutely exist. But I think it is important to have open discussion with people that have the same thoughts and different thoughts because the foundation of us as a country, as a people, and our freedom is the ability to discuss things openly. The moment a topic becomes undiscussable, we're in danger. Right?

(Derek at 00:37:20) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:31) Marriage in professional space with your kids everywhere. You gotta be able to discuss.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:36) So how do you—how do you take that? Let's talk about communication. So you understand this concept. You know, you're running this technology org at this company and have this experience. You have a team. You have direct reports. How do you groom them or prepare them for their next step in their career?

(Derek at 00:37:58) So that academy is extended to internal employees. You know, previous to that, we had formal training, and we've got lots types of employees. Right? I'll tend to focus on developers because, you know, that's my core. But we've got a huge partnerships team, a huge marketing team, sales team, a strategy team, which covers, touches a lot of things, and certainly the technology team or development team. So, you know, it's funny as an organization—we don't, on my business card, I don't have a title. Our owners, sure, they're the CEO and president, but they're essentially titleists. We don't run on titles here. There is hierarchy. You do report to someone, right? But we like to think—I mean when I started here the motto was, if you couldn't figure it out in five minutes, send an email. Send a blast. Someone will have the answer.

(Derek at 00:38:50) There's no reason to spend an hour trying to find it. It's likely that someone else has it. You just don't know yet. So, and that worked. When I started here, we were about 100 people.

(Derek at 00:39:02) Now we're 550 some odd people. And a lot of systems have come about since then. We've got our own intranet. We use Confluence quite a bit and Jira, right, for a lot of internal project management, but also for our client project management, task tracking. But that same rule applies, but we just broadcast it on Teams now, right, where if you can't figure it out, ask. Someone can help you. And for a while, the internet helped. You know, there's a lot of community forums and this and that. But here at Americaneagle, we just have such a deep bench, and great minds that have been here such a long time that the answer is almost always right there. That said, as an employee, you can go where you wanna go here.

(Derek at 00:39:47) So we've had people that maybe start as a front-end developer, and then they, you know, they're just not happy there after three, four years, and they move into project management or they move into account management or they move into marketing. Right? If you don't feel you're producing value with where you're at, you can just ask, and you will get put in a place that you can help provide more value. So Jerry, our—he oversees our partnerships team. I think he's done every single job here.

(Derek at 00:40:17) I joke that he was born in the server room. I used to say I've been here a Jerry half-life because last year was my eleventh year here. He was here twenty-two years. So this is his twenty-third year. And everybody knows Jerry, and Jerry really depends on everyone here to help make his team a success. Right? It's just a very collaborative, helpful environment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:41) So I'm curious. Like, so you've got your team. I'm specifically talking about your five or so direct reports. And you've got a lot of knowledge about how life works and communication and professional experience. What do you do to help them specifically? Do you have a book club? Do you meet with them? Like, how do you grow them?

(Derek at 00:41:08) Yeah. So a lot of it is just candid conversation. So it'll start with—again, going back to what does my day look like. Well, my day is a lot of meetings that are scheduled for sales, internal and otherwise, a lot of emails that come in that I've gotta filter, like everybody else. But it'll often be a little—it'll start as a small question of, how do I, or do you know the best way to, or I have someone who's asking this.

(Derek at 00:41:35) And it'll turn into, well, here are some things that you wanna explore. I'll just share some links, maybe some Confluence docs, maybe some client success stories. They'll go off and learn a little bit, and they'll come back and say, hey. Can we just put together thirty minutes, an hour of your time to help me learn a little bit more? That's not even direct reports. That's just in general. In the direct report world, we have a weekly meeting. It's actually—it was this morning. You know, it's the first one in a while that I have not attended. But we have a weekly meeting, one hour, where we talk about—it's talk about what happened in the past week, what's upcoming, and just what's cool.

(Derek at 00:42:10) What have we heard in the market that maybe we should keep a pulse on? And we share all this, document all it, and again, it often turns into a talking track on somebody's issue, somebody's new idea, somebody's something. And, eventually, it becomes something that we elevate up the chain to our leadership, Mike and Tony or Ryan on, hey, guys. This is something we should probably explore. And then it goes back into that. We'll build a little core group, we call a team of ninjas, to get in there, prototype, get our hands dirty, understand, validate that it's a tool that we should add in our toolbox.

(Derek at 00:42:47) And then Jerry's team comes in, the partnership side, and he hits that hard and starts growing that out. You know, our best partners, like Oro, are really our best partners because of how well we communicate at all levels. We have executive alignment. We have sales alignment. We have implementation team alignment from both sides of the house.

(Derek at 00:43:10) So when a customer presents an issue to us, we can work with that partner team to make sure it's done right and effectively. And, again, if we don't have the answer, a partner doesn't have it, we've got this unique ability to ask the other members who are working in other spaces, like, what's your take on this? And having that difference in perspective is really powerful because they're solving for problems that are just masquerading in a different form for them. It's the same problem, but it just presents a little bit differently. So they've already got the solve.

(Derek at 00:43:46) They just gotta share it with us. We just have to align on what the little difference is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:50) So when you're having these candid conversations and helping these people work through life, right, as a leader, because they're leading at 500 plus employees. Your direct reports are leading teams. And so if you're pouring into these people and helping them grow, how do you keep yourself full? How do you keep yourself engaged? How do you keep yourself inspired and motivated?

(Derek at 00:44:15) So one of my fears as I was moving up the ladder was that I would lose touch with how I got to where I am today. Again, that fire, that passion of development, solving problems with code. And I thought, man, if I'm in too much of a sales role, I'll never see code again. And so I've made it an objective of mine that I keep learning and educating in areas that I'm not fluent in. There's a lot going on with Azure and AWS right now that I've only scratched the surface on, and it keeps me busy.

(Derek at 00:44:51) It keeps my wheels turning. The little, you know, fifteen minutes here, an hour there that I can put towards it during a given week, but it keeps the staleness of everything away. So I'm challenging myself, and then I'm also depending on my team to help educate me because some of them are doing that as well or are fluent there, and they're helping me. It doesn't matter how we report. We're all equal in that we're learning together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:19) Nice. Yeah. And so what's the theme right now? What are you learning for 2020 as a leader?

(Derek at 00:45:27) Oh, boy. Um, I don't wanna give it all away because it's some of the secret sauce in what we're developing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:32) That's how people love you.

(Derek at 00:45:34) Yeah. So, um, here's—so I'm very bullish on a couple things. I'm bullish on B2B, first and foremost. And when I say B2B, I mean not just having a storefront, but really helping your business move to a position where your online storefront is your best sales rep that's not competing with your traditional sales reps. They're supporting it.

(Derek at 00:46:02) Platforms like Oro line up well with that. Right? So we've got several wins under our belt with them. Just launched a site last week with them. We just closed some new business with them yesterday. It's happening with Oro for sure. So I'm very bullish on that particular platform. Headless is another area that I think we're gonna tackle a little bit with more precision than we are—sort of the shotgun approach that is happening right now with the marketing world of it's king. It's a really good tool for very particular cases, in my opinion, and we wanna make sure that that is targeted and addressed.

(Derek at 00:46:44) And also JAMstack. Again, looking at how it sort of parallels with headless. Developers nowadays aren't learning necessarily how I learned development and coding, and they're not learning the languages or technologies that I learned way back in the day. I grew up in VBScript, Classic ASP, ASP.NET. I remember when Microsoft came to U of I, and they handed out this pamphlet that said, "Drive the .NET generation." I mean, I can still envision this little pamphlet.

(Derek at 00:47:16) It's orange, and I was like, yes. Yes. Wanna drive it. And Microsoft is doing incredible things with .NET right now with .NET Core, certainly on the performance side, but also then cross-platform support. But I also feel that's awesome, but there's this whole new wave of talent coming that is really well suited for the JAMstack side of the house.

(Derek at 00:47:44) And so I think we also have to go where the developers are going, right, as a business because they're eventually gonna get into organizations and start bringing that perspective of, hey, guys. What are we doing with this old tech? We need to modernize. So if we're all saying the same thing, we're gonna be well positioned. So along those lines, what are we doing?

(Derek at 00:48:05) We've got some really cool stuff coming out with those three concepts—headless, B2B, and JAMstack—maybe sort of put together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:17) Nice. Like, as a people leader, what are you learning?

(Derek at 00:48:20) Well, I have to remind myself, and I do have to be more humble. Humility is a virtue that I really aspire to be stronger in. I have to remind myself that, man, I know a lot about a lot of things, but, man, I still don't know a lot about those things. There are definitely things to be learned. And so listen—again, listening to the feet on the street.

(Derek at 00:48:45) Mentioned way back at the start of this, as a developer, I was always sort of struggling with how sales sold stuff. And now that I'm also on the sales side a lot, I've gotta remind myself that there's a developer on the other end that is going to be receiving what I'm selling. And I've gotta remind myself that I need to help them out to understand what this is, why it was sold, and this is how we're gonna get through it, do this together. So I guess just being mindful of the little guy. They've got a small voice, but that voice is really very loud and impactful if you'd be quiet for a minute and listen to it. It's how really the world works.

(Derek at 00:49:27) I mean, there's a lot of little people doing a lot of great things that become something very powerful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:34) Yep. It's like all the little ants building the colony.

(Derek at 00:49:37) Yeah. Yeah. It certainly is. It's—you can really stray from that, especially when momentum hits and, you know, excitement builds and you can forget those beginnings, respectful of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:52) Yeah. No. This is good, man. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Derek at 00:49:56) Awesome. I hope to do some more of these.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:00) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.