Streamlining File Transfer with Chris Spargen, Sr. Solutions Engineering Manager at Helpsystems

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:02) Hello, my friends. Today we're talking to Chris, Solutions Engineering Manager at HelpSystems. And we discuss how HelpSystems' Managed File Transfer platform enables organizations to easily and securely transfer files, tips for staying motivated professionally, and how to transfer culture into the remote environment as best as possible. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Chris at 00:00:32) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:45) So how did you get started in tech? Have you always been in managed file transfer?

(Chris at 00:00:50) I went to school for professional golf management, had my first—

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:58) Golf like the sport?

(Chris at 00:00:59) Golf like the sport, yep. And I had my first born in college and needed to adopt some responsibility to pay the bills and make sure he was taken care of. And so while I was still in school, I started working at Wells Fargo at the time. And I started as a teller, which was a good introduction to a professional environment and moved into kind of like a CSR they called it, or it's like a step up towards banker, but not quite full blown banker and loans and lending and all that good stuff. And after about another six months, I got into the personal banking side of things. And I really appreciate that experience because it laid a foundation for personal finance that I definitely didn't get from university.

(Chris at 00:01:48) Fast forward a little bit, and I got into the business banking side of things, and one of my clients one day just said, "Hey, you whip around on the computer pretty good. Are you interested in technology?" And so he told me a little bit about what he did. He was actually in the financial software industry, pretty large company in the financial sector. They've got a lot of niche financial applications that help with what I was in, which was check processing, which at the time, I was like, well, tech's not going anywhere.

(Chris at 00:02:21) I happened to be at that institution when some of the things that have come out in the news were going on and I felt a little convicted at my core and was like, this sounds like a great opportunity. I've done this for almost three years now, and it's time to move into something else. And so that opportunity was how I got started in tech. Spent a couple years in the—the way they oriented the team was technical support and professional services. You'd do both. You'd go out and implement on trips once or twice a month, you'd support the solution and build out what you were going to do when you went on trips. Usually there was a mock, is the solution fitting our needs, and then a live week where we'd go back out and make sure that everything was operating smoothly. Because at the end of the day, while it was checks and check processing, I mean, that's still payments and important backend processes. So I did that for a couple years. I enjoyed it.

(Chris at 00:03:24) It got me intrigued in tech. And then there happened to be an opening in my hometown for this company that I didn't know a whole lot about—managed file transfer. I had done some FTP command prompt stuff while I was working for that entity. And that's about the extent of my knowledge, right? I would say I knew how to use a fair bit of software, but a lot of solutions that are niche, you tend to—some people tend to memorize what that product does and then repeat, right? And when you work for a larger company, that can be a struggle to get outside of kind of your lane or what your team's lane is to push yourself. And I think some of that challenge is the way that extremely large companies function. And the other side of that is, I guess, probably my own lens changing over the last decade of working for more of a startup type company where, whether you want to or not, you're going to wear different hats, you're going to get exposure to some of those other things. And then I guess the beauty of that is you can pick and choose what it is that you want to put your energy into.

(Chris at 00:04:47) And so that was eight years ago and it's been a wild ride. So I started in technical support, helping customers ultimately remedy some of their solutions. That said, I was the twenty-third employee. So we had recently, like a year prior to me starting, we had hired someone to kind of focus on our professional services arm of the business. And we still had that person as well as our owner that were doing the majority of product demonstrations and proof of concept sessions with our prospective customers.

(Chris at 00:05:24) And so over the course of the last eight years, like our worst year of growth has been—well, it was COVID—year of twenty percent year-over-year growth, which is very respectable in that year. But every other year has been anywhere from 32 to 45% year-over-year growth in new revenue. And so, you know, some of those duties and responsibilities as we were maturing, we were adding more resources. I was grateful for the time of being stretched thin and having to wear different hats because it gave me a perspective of, how do I want to help customers? I could say being in maybe that teller role, that banker role instilled—one of the presidents of that time at Wells Fargo had made a comment to me. It stuck with me all these years. And it's at the end of the day, your customers are the ones paying your bills, right? So a very respectful approach and a customer first approach is necessary and the right way to conduct yourself. But it's also the way that you create value and I think establish a helpful and growth-oriented organization. So yeah, that's how I got my start in MFT.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:47) So I have a really basic understanding of managed file transfer. Can you just give me the overview of what problem does it solve for companies? Why are people seeking it out?

(Chris at 00:07:02) Absolutely. I think it's—I'd be remiss not to almost kind of give you a little bit of a historical rundown of how, you know, we'll get to what a modern day MFT platform looks like. But in essence, the problem that when these solutions started to come to market anywhere from fifteen to twenty years ago, the main problem that they were solving was a lot of existing—there wasn't really a platform that was a unified central point of access, of design, of auditing. It was mainly done through customized scripts and mature customers—they may have had a team of engineers working on that and tried to almost custom design a bit of their own MFT platform. But the main challenge you're faced with is you don't have great oversight and auditing when everything's homegrown.

(Chris at 00:08:03) And then it's also very expensive to maintain that, right? Developers—I mean, when I think to twenty years ago, I mean, I would have been thirteen years old. So I'm not entirely—I certainly don't have the same technical background that you do of growing up in the programming realm. But I know how much has changed in the last decade. And I have to imagine that back then, as these solutions came to light, developers and programmers needed to focus on maybe bigger and important tasks for the organization as wider IT adoption was occurring, right? And so a lot of these files that people invest the time and energy to create some of these homegrown scripts around, they are kind of your backbone of data flow through the organization, right? It's usually mission-critical data that's being transmitted, at least when you plan on using—say you're writing something in, I don't know, Python or you're writing shell scripts in Unix Linux systems, and you're scheduling the execution on a cron scheduler. So you're using some of the native tools, right, that the OS provides to you.

(Chris at 00:09:16) But how that scales over time, right, or as you need to pull a developer out into another project, are you going to hire a developer to pick up the reins of that? So that market problem was expensive, costly, not great oversight. And the first iterations of MFT solutions from what I've studied and knowing kind of where we got our start was, how do we make it so you don't have to be a programmer per se? Having programming experience will make your platform solution stronger, but how do we ultimately make it easy for a customer to bring a non-programming salary on or—where can we put that person's energy and instead have people who are solid technical resources, but maybe don't have that programming backdrop? Make it easy for them to understand and set up some of these basic things like sending a file on a weekly basis to a vendor for payroll information over the SFTP protocol.

(Chris at 00:10:24) That's a very basic use case of one of these MFT platforms. And especially in the early days, it was a lot of just designing those specific workflows that maybe didn't do a whole lot. Maybe it grabs from a NFS or a NAS device on that Linux operating system, grabs that file, moves it into the platform, and then sends it out the door over SFTP. Maybe it sends you an error—an error goes into an error routine, sends you an email notification letting you know your process has been broken. That's kind of like the core nuts and bolts that started some of these MFT platforms.

(Chris at 00:11:04) Now, if we're talking about typical client-server relationship side of the house, right? That would have kind of comprised the client side. And then the server side, people have leveraged—I mean, still to this day, sometimes we'll see prospective customers who are using like your native SSH daemon on a Linux or Unix system, and that's supporting their current inbound file transfers.

(Chris at 00:11:33) Often with that, you've got, again, not great visibility and auditing on that system tool. And then the other side of the coin I would say is, where are you storing your data then? You're either stopping that connection usually in the DMZ layer, or you're punching a hole in your firewall and allowing Internet traffic to connect into your internal network where your sensitive data is at. So that's kind of the server side and the client side of what problems existed and why I believe MFT solutions came to market. So we've explained kind of the market reason why you'd look at an MFT platform, right? Centralizing, making it easy to have a tool that handles a lot of your data transfers in and out. But I would be remiss not to explain, I guess, how these applications extend as they've evolved into their modern state. So instead of just file transfers specifically, there's a lot of neat things that these platforms do now. And they're often, for enterprise customers, kind of the backbone of centralized file or data movement with auditing and just a myriad of different protocols that they support and are therefore used for some deployments upwards of multiple millions of files per day that can be flagged, can be quarantined if we scan them and find out there's malicious content in them.

(Chris at 00:13:14) So far exceeds the initial scope of kind of scripting or receiving files using like a native SSH daemon. So with that said, just to kind of give you a couple workflow examples that would help your audience hopefully understand what do these MFT platforms do more succinctly. I'll give you two examples. So one simple one we'll go with is, let's say every hour throughout the day, Monday through Friday, I need to look for files in a particular folder. Let's say it's a network share location or an S3 bucket, a repository of some sort.

(Chris at 00:13:57) When a file becomes available in that, I need to invoke a process that will take that file, will PGP encrypt that file, will send that file out the door to my trading partner using, let's say, the SFTP protocol or the HTTPS protocol. Both of those are pretty common file transfer protocols that we see. Maybe it's REST as an extension of HTTPS. And then if I run into an issue, I'm going to notify my operations team that we've had an error encountered. And maybe I want to include the job log with that or the debug log of the error message that was encountered. Maybe that needs to go to a SIEM tool. Those are different ways that a customer could leverage the workflow of a modern MFT platform. But let's also then give you, on the flip side of that, if I have a trading partner—say I'm hosting an SFTP server, I'm hosting an HTTPS server through my MFT platform. A good modern MFT platform will have an enhanced reverse proxy that sits out in the DMZ so you don't have to punch a hole in your firewall. I'm grateful that both of our MFT platforms at HelpSystems offer that.

(Chris at 00:15:10) And so we can stop a connection in the DMZ and we leverage a communication channel from the internal network to the DMZ to effectively have like a control channel, data channel relationship where we stream that data internally, so we're never storing that data in the DMZ. And once that file has been uploaded to our SFTP or HTTPS server, we have automation built in that's event-driven automation. Say it's a PGP encrypted file from a bank. There's a lot of large banks that still do transmissions using encrypted layer communication layer as well as object layer. So file-oriented encryption as well as the communication channel kind of gives you the best of both worlds.

(Chris at 00:15:58) So I get that file, it's PGP encrypted and now I have a workflow that's going to automatically be invoked. It's going to decrypt that file. Let's say that file is in CSV format and I need to get that data inside to some of my backbone applications. Usually a customer would do something like decrypt that, write that file to the database, which we have through a number of ETL tasks or data translation tasks. So we could read that CSV file. We could insert contents of that CSV file or the whole CSV file into a backend database. We could take that CSV file and move it out to maybe a long-term storage repository. And we can send an email notification letting either the trading partner know or an internal party know that this process has been completed. We also could invoke another program or script if at that point, once it was in the database, maybe there's a stored procedure that needs to run to interface with, again, a backbone application. So that's just an example of some of the things that we could do.

(Chris at 00:17:08) If we ran into an error with that, we could catch that error and we could send an email notification, an SMS notification, we could open up a Zendesk ticket, a Jira ticket. That's some of the functionality that GoAnywhere MFT and Globalscape EFT offer to customers leveraging those platforms. So I just felt like it was good to give you some context of where it started in humble beginnings to how does it get to this kind of enterprise scale MFT platform. So hope that helps.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:43) Cool. So you actually joined HelpSystems through an acquisition. Is that correct?

(Chris at 00:17:48) That is correct, yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:50) Cool. So it was Linoma Software, that was the company before. What were you doing there, and what did HelpSystems bring to the table that you were excited about during the acquisition?

(Chris at 00:18:03) That was in—I got it actually right here—2016, June 2016. Like I said, we've been growing since I joined really like gangbusters, and we had just moved into a new building. We were really starting to, it felt like, catch stride. We had new employees that seemed like starting every other week. So just real vibrant and exciting atmosphere.

(Chris at 00:18:25) And, you know, anytime, like I said, I had left a bigger company primarily out of, I guess, just honestly boredom. You know, I had just gotten past a point of learning a bunch of new things, and then I get thrown into this world where, you know, I had a couple of anxiety attacks for the first time ever in my life in the first six months, because I just felt, you know, so out of my element and what I knew. And, you know, there was a lot of perseverance needed to get through that and a lot of longer hours. But, you know, once, I guess, everything by 2016 was gelling, it felt like we were in a good state. And then I hear we're getting acquired by our former owner. And, you know, his whole goal was when I designed this product, I really wanted to get to, at that point, I think it was $10 million in annual sales, and we were somewhere, oh gosh, we were somewhere around $5 or $6 million at that point. And, you know, we knew we had some international partners, but we didn't have the vast ecosystem that HelpSystems did.

(Chris at 00:19:31) And so, you know, it was awesome. I mean, HelpSystems came in and many people who are on our executive team today were in that very first meeting. The CEO at the time, Chris, and their CFO, Dan, came down and talked with all of us. And, you know, it was very personal. And, you know, we had a good feeling about things.

(Chris at 00:19:53) They explained why they wanted to acquire us. We were, you know, ultimately an up-and-coming contender in the enterprise managed file transfer space, and they had resources and wherewithal, knowledge, resources, all that good stuff that you need to, you know, as you're scaling quickly, make the right decisions that only continue that growth. And, you know, some of your smaller companies have trial and error to get to that point. And so I viewed, you know, there was obviously some initial reservation, like, you know, I think as normal when you get used to a smaller group. But, you know, we didn't even have 100 people dedicated to that product. Like, I was employee 23.

(Chris at 00:20:35) I think by 2016, we'd have been sitting somewhere around like 55 to 60 total people. And at this point, you know, in HelpSystems, we're over 200 people spread out throughout the world focused on our managed file transfer solutions. So, yeah, you know, what HelpSystems really gave us, I would say, was just a deeper bench, knowledge, and resources that, you know, helped us scale and grow and make the right decisions. You know, the marketing engine was phenomenal in that, I'm sure, you know, a fair bit of sales-qualified leads. You know, we're all using the internet nowadays to scope out what it is we're interested in. And so marketing is a huge asset. So, yeah, it's been a very positive journey. But at the time, sorry, I didn't answer your entire question there.

(Chris at 00:21:30) So I was still doing a little bit of professional services, on-site implementation here and there, and then technical support. When we were acquired, I was a senior support analyst. And again, small company, multiple hats. So even though I was primarily in support, we didn't have support services, you know, solutions engineering. It was kind of you're customer-facing and you're technical and you're gonna wear multiple hats.

(Chris at 00:21:58) So, but yeah, so at that point I was helping a little bit with, my manager at the time was also a developer for one of our other solutions that came with the acquisition, Linoma Software. And so I was helping a little bit on some management items or projects that he had for the team. And so it was shortly after the acquisition that I actually took the jump into leadership fully under HelpSystems. Nice. Like, a matter of two months.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:28) Wow. That's awesome. So what's your day-to-day like today?

(Chris at 00:22:33) A lot's changed over the years as HelpSystems has gotten bigger, as the MFT teams have, you know, gotten a little more focused in what their specific department does. I currently lead the solutions engineering department. So that would be, you know, some people may call it sales engineering or presales. My team members primarily, you know, partner with prospective customers. We try to demonstrate, you know, well, first elicit, you know, why are you on the market? What problems are you trying to solve? Where are your current pain points? And then demonstrate, you know, solutions to those pain points specifically. So once we do a demo, you know, if the prospective customer is interested, then we'll move from there into a proof of value series of sessions. So you may hear the term proof of concept.

(Chris at 00:23:28) We like to think of it as proof of value. You know, there's a linguistic implication to, you know, I like to challenge each of my team members. If you're working with someone who's experiencing X, Y, and Z pain points from their current platform they're on, you know, how do we prove value in them investing and making a switch to us? And so that's why we coined that term proof of value rather than proof of concept. But we also do webinars. We help marketing with blog posts. We often do technical updates or cadence calls. You may have heard the two terms, but really just, you know, checking in on customers, seeing how is the solution working for you, you know, any additional pain points that you have surfacing, and, you know, ultimately explaining what's new in the solution. You know, we are in the data security space and there's constantly, you know, security, I guess, vulnerabilities happening across, you know, just the industry as a whole. And, you know, like, I look at things like, uh, well, when I started in 2016, there was the infamous SSL version 3 POODLE vulnerability.

(Chris at 00:24:42) And, you know, any good MFT platform, you know, is gonna have that patched. And in our case, it's typically been within a week. We're pretty fast at getting security fixes out there. And so anytime, you know, that's a major one. You know, it's a good opportunity to drive home what's ultimately the goal of solutions engineering. And I think that's to be kind of a trusted advisor, if you will, to customers. That feeling of, you know, I've got another problem or I've got an initiative coming and I wanna reach out to my partner at HelpSystems because maybe they'll have an idea, you know, be it with our solution or, you know, a strategy they could implement that helps them ultimately solve that problem. And so we like to think of those tech updates as, you know, we need to point out small things like, oh, we hate that version you're on. You know, FYI, that library in there, it did have a vulnerability. We need to get you upgraded as soon as you can. And so, yeah, that's primarily what I focus on today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:47) So being on the sales side of things, what are some common objections you see come up in your sales process and how do you respond to those?

(Chris at 00:25:57) You know, on the heels of the comment about our year-over-year growth that we've had, you know, I consider myself very, very fortunate to have the sales leadership that I've grown to know over the last eight years in that, you know, we're very focused on, it's not a sales or, I've worked, I was at Wells Fargo, like I was telling you, kind of at the height of some of their salesy pushing, pushing, pushing, and it's always been extremely refreshing to me that, you know, we're having these awesome years of growth and we're not a hyper, you know, burnout sales culture at all. Our prior owner was very rooted in, you know, we're gonna find the right solutions to customers. We're gonna be prescriptive. He always wanted me, when I was leading support or services before, to just, you know, raise up technical knowledge in your group and be education first. Right?

(Chris at 00:26:57) And trust that that process is gonna lead to, you know, customers having faith in you. So to be honest, the usually the only objections really are probably just, you know, we can't get to, well, let's eventually talk about this MFT, this concept of an MFT maturity model, because they do a ton of things. And usually, like, if there was to be an objection, it would be, well, I can't, either I don't have budget or the resources to invest in getting to an enterprise-grade MFT, you know, posture out of the gate. Maybe I don't have the time to do the migration for that or, again, I don't have the budget to do that all at once. And so, but honestly, from a technical standpoint, it's very rare, and that might be hard to believe, but it's very rare that we don't do some, you know, exactly what the customer is looking for and more.

(Chris at 00:27:56) And, you know, if you had to liken this to a particular tool, it's like a Swiss Army knife of tools. And you've maybe heard the music use the term platform rather than application because, you know, it really is a bit of a, you know, we've got customers that have development teams oriented around the solution, you know, because they're transmitting well over a million files a day outbound and inbound, and they're constantly adding new partners or new business initiatives. And so it's a very flexible tool. And I think to that point, that helps, you know, beat back some of the typical objections of, well, it's great it can do X, Y, and Z, but we really need, you know, this one little bit. So thankfully, we don't have a whole lot of showstoppers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:46) That's awesome. So I feel like you're a great person to ask this question. Given our audience of tech leaders and CTOs, what are some things that the CTO of an organization can do to better support the sales team, especially selling like a highly technical product like you work on selling?

(Chris at 00:29:09) You know, as I think about just the landscape of security and all the tools and, thank, I mean, thankfully, all the processes that have, you know, been spinning up over the last decade as cybersecurity has continued to heat up in terms of, you know, importance, in terms of, you know, the amount of news and media coverage on cybersecurity hacks. Right? And so I think if I was in a CTO's shoes and I wanted to support the sales process, I'd really focus on having a scalable and well-documented process around legal, you know, type, legal and we'll just say security measures. Right? Anytime you get an extensive RFP or, you know, RFI or customer wants to understand your vulnerability mitigation process, like, if you're having to, you know, hop on a lot of those phone calls to discuss that and you don't have processes in place that make it easy for your sales organization, right, to use the tools you've made available to, you know, put customers or prospective customers' minds at ease, you're going to create a bit of a bottleneck over time.

(Chris at 00:30:26) And so I've been really pleased with how HelpSystems has added to this team. Again, things that change and evolve. In 2016, we didn't have a CISO. And, you know, we have an awesome CISO now. We've got a great legal team, you know, backing him and his team. So, yeah, at the end of the day, it's a problem we've been able to avoid, but I could see it being a problem or I've worked with customers where, you know, we're waiting three to four weeks. Sometimes they're frustrated because they just wanna get their team moving on the initiative, but they're waiting on, you know, their security or legal teams. So I would say getting those items in order, you know, I guess on both sides of the fence, leads to, you know, we're creatures of habit. We often take the path of least resistance. And so if that is a blocker for people, you know, I think eradicating some of those hurdles, you know, helps with uptick and, you know, your engagement. And then I guess from our side of the fence, from a sales organization's perspective, you know, you don't wanna discourage your folks that are helping, you know, drive the bottom line, I guess. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:43) Yeah. No. That's really useful advice. Thank you, man. So I wanna talk a little bit about earlier you mentioned, like, when you joined the company, when you left from the bigger company that you were kind of bored at, and you came and you really got to stretch your brain and have those high-anxiety moments that taught you a lot. What were some things that you struggled with early on and how did you get to overcome them?

(Chris at 00:32:14) Yeah, that's a really good question. So the main, I guess, after having a few more children with my wife, we had twins in 2016, and, you know, I think part of that is stress-induced for sure. You know, I think I was delving into technology that was completely foreign to me and there was a lot to it. You know, for instance, having brought almost like 30 people into the organization through support over the years, you know, I've been able to see, you know, what different people do that have success. And some of it is, you know, do you have prior programming experience? Because we have a workflow engine that, you know, isn't, it's not program, it's not a programming language. It's almost like a file transfer-specific programming tool though, where, you know, instead of, I mean, you can create like complex expressions through it. There's functions that you can leverage. But if you don't have any form of background in programming, like, that's a daunting thing to expect someone to pick up and learn. And so, but on top of that, you gotta know networks. You have to know we're a cross-platform solution. So Linux, UNIX, Windows, Solaris, IBM i or AS/400. That was actually the product that we were kind of bred out of and something that HelpSystems, you know, been celebrating 40 years in business, kind of started around as the AS/400.

(Chris at 00:33:46) So, you know, I think it was just, and then you're learning file transfer protocols on top of that. You're learning some of our ETL or extract, transform, and load type tasks that are parsing. So you have to understand different file formats and how protocols impact, you know, end-of-line characters. There's just a lot of technology that, you know, you kind of get thrust into and it's very much an ocean. And so what I've found over the years is you really have to find like, people come from different, you know, roles previously or different college experience. And usually there's a few things that they gravitate to. You've got to find those wins, you know, soon, and you got to try to get, you know, newer teammates who are building their confidence reps at those things to instill confidence. Right? And thankfully, the way our product is broke out, it's, you know, it is a modularized MFT platform. So you don't have to, again, purchase the whole thing.

(Chris at 00:34:47) You're gonna have, you know, say inbound transfers over SFTP or ad hoc transfers into, you know, an application kind of like Dropbox. We have a module like that. So some of those things that are easier for people to grasp onto, you know, you get that down and then you build your knowledge base from there. So that's why I was having some of that anxiousness as it was just a very big, and remember, again, I was the 23rd employee. We didn't exactly have the same structure that we got once we had more resources, you know, with HelpSystems backing and more best practices that they did, you know, to help people onboard quicker.

(Chris at 00:35:26) And so for me, getting through that process, it's a good thing I supposed to talk about in terms of, when I think about my prior roles and how willing I remember being to stay, you know, willingly after 5 p.m. You know, it was kind of a, I smile thinking back to, you know, 4:59, 5:00 rolls around, and that place was just loaded trying to get out of that building. The parking lot was jammed up. In retrospect, I should have just stayed a little later because then I wouldn't have had to deal with the parking lot issues. But when I joined Linoma Software, it was the first place I'd worked at where I was looking at the clock to figure out how much more I could tackle before the day, before, like, I needed to be out of there to, you know, be home with my wife or out with family or friends for whatever events were planned. And honestly, there was a period there where we were really growing.

(Chris at 00:36:29) We had a fair backlog of cases, and I just started waking up earlier and coming into work earlier, and that was when it was quiet and I was able to think more. And so, you know, I've read a number of different studies over the years that talk about the people who just incrementally do about 10% more. I've seen different figures, but the main takeaway is usually those people are the ones who then, you know, it's reciprocated and they're making either the promotions or getting a higher percent raise. Again, there's a lot of figures out there. But that concept, I think, really paid dividends and I've really kind of adopted that as a permanent working style.

(Chris at 00:37:18) I love my early mornings. When I had kids and had little rug rats running around as well, that's the only time I had peace and quiet, so it's helped to keep that. But yeah, that's how I got through it personally. And then the culture I was a part of as well had a very work hard, play hard mentality. We used to play foosball pre-COVID over breaks. Our prior owner, when we were renovating this new building, he had a badminton court set up on this old—there was this stage and kind of gymnasium layout, and while it was all being worked on by contractors like the whole building, we were playing badminton with some of the developers and some of the sales folks and just anyone who wanted to play in the company.

(Chris at 00:38:05) And so, you know, if you're taking an hour and a half lunch to go and do something like that, then to work a half an hour, hour earlier in the morning, no big deal. Right? But it just kind of—I feel that when an environment works that way instead of the rigid eight to five structure, people want to go above and beyond. And the more autonomy they feel, the more likely they are to, I think, do a better job and be engaged in their work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:32) Yeah. That's cool. I mean, it sounds like it was a really great in-office culture when you joined. And obviously everybody had to go remote in the past couple of years. How did you guys translate that culture to the remote environment?

(Chris at 00:38:49) Yeah, that's a very great question. And honestly, I've been looking for some podcasts on, you know, how do we—I don't know—it's like facial cues and body language and communication. It's been something that, you know, when we look at the time span of human beings on earth, we haven't operated in a situation where we're not face to face communicating for very long. I mean, like a sliver on the timescale. Right?

(Chris at 00:39:23) So I'm personally a little skeptical on how you can fully recreate some of the same benefits that you get of person to person communication. But at the same time, I live in Nebraska. I don't have to deal with the commuting traffic issues that some of my colleagues who had to drive maybe an hour and a half one way to get into the office in the Twin Cities where our headquarters are at, or, you know, if I'm out in LA and it's—I've had some colleagues in the past there talk about, it's almost faster to ride my bike or it is faster to ride my bike into the office than sit in, you know, three hours of rush hour traffic every day. And so when I think about the benefits, right, a holistic benefit to this remote structure, you know, you have to take that into consideration as well. How you replicate it, I mean, I think it's communication often.

(Chris at 00:40:25) It's, you know, keeping things lighthearted. I mean, there's not going to be a replacement for playing foosball together. Right? But you could do, you know, there's some online platforms that have spun up in light of COVID that give you a lot of different ideas for things you can do. At the end of the day, I think it depends on your team though, because, you know, if some of you like to game and some of you don't, or some of you are into sports, some of you aren't, you've got different ways that your team communicates well together. And so, you know, the main reason I have some skepticism, you could say, about how do we equally get that same level of camaraderie that exists in the office, is mainly rooted out of last year as things started to relax in certain areas of the country.

(Chris at 00:41:18) You know, I was able to get together with my team last year and every single one of my teammates said this has been the most beneficial time we've been together. And a fair bit of those teammates came in during COVID and we had never met person to person. So, you know, it's anecdotal, but that wasn't the only in-person meeting I had done last year. And, you know, I'd say I did six or seven and that was a resounding takeaway. And it's how I, I guess, the truth I took away from it was, you know, we've evolved to talk and communicate in person with one another and, you know, it's going to be difficult to make this something that you can easily replace over virtual.

(Chris at 00:42:06) Now we'll see what happens with the metaverse, but, you know, maybe we can tap into the same communication framework in our body. We'll see. There's a lot of smart people working on that. But, you know, I think at the end of the day, you got to look at the whole picture. Right? If there's a lot of benefits, if people are able to spend more time with their families—and I mean, often too, if they're not having to lose three hours in traffic, companies also see that as, you know, yeah, someone maybe wouldn't get in the office till 8:30 while they're commuting for an hour and a half in the morning, but now they're on at 8:00 and they get to actually catch their kids' practice or game by, you know, taking off at 4:30 or something like that.

(Chris at 00:42:55) You know, those benefits to me are better for each individual within the organization, and we have to take that into consideration. So I wish I had a better answer for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:08) No. I'm totally with you. I don't think there's a way to truly replicate the camaraderie side of the culture that you can get in person, but you can try. And the thing that I've heard over and over again from leaders is that you just have to be more intentional about setting aside the fun time because there's not just a badminton court readily available to go walk over to if you hear some people hooting and hollering. You have to be like, alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:44) Yeah. Every other week at 4 PM, we stop working on Friday and we get on a Zoom call with margaritas and chat about not work. And it's just about—since everybody just lives off of their calendar and goes meeting to meeting from their home office, you just have to put in their calendar, this is fun time with your coworkers to get to know them.

(Chris at 00:44:11) No. 100%. I think you're hitting that on the head. And, you know, as companies don't have to maybe spend the same amount of money on their buildings, if they've got a lot of buildings spread out and now we've consolidated some of that expense, you know, then I know one thing we've explored is, you know, is there a cadence that the team should get together? Right?

(Chris at 00:44:35) Do we have some budget now on the travel side of the house where our teams can get together a couple of times a year and make sure that they've got that in-person bonding? Right? But, yeah, what you said, that is something that we saw a lot of over the last year, you know, virtual meetings. We've got a policy of Flexible Fridays, which is really just a concept of, you know, you do your week of work and, you know, presuming you and your manager are in alignment, you know, most people maybe take an afternoon off on Friday. But you can, you know, we're a very flexible culture and, you know, that could be Thursday morning if, you know, you got to take your kid to a doctor's appointment, for instance, or a dentist appointment.

(Chris at 00:45:20) You know, maybe that's your Flexible Friday, your four hours that, you know, you're able to take off. And so that does present some challenges on the Friday one. We've gone with a Thirsty Thursday idea here that we run on a monthly basis for our solutions engineering department across the whole company, which honestly—we've acquired a fair bit of companies over the last few years—has just created a lot of, that creates a lot of opportunity to discuss, you know, and get to know people on a more personal level and not just business focused. So I absolutely agree with that. Have you ever heard of the game Mentimeter?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:01) I have not.

(Chris at 00:46:02) So it's a—and I'm sure there's other platforms out similar to it—but after some of our, you know, education sessions we'll have or company meetings, or you can even use it for a more fun setting like this where you can ask questions and then everyone, you know, assigns themselves a name in the beginning and the fastest to answer correctly builds their points and—

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:24) Oh, like that. Just a fun way. Yeah. Yep. Exactly.

(Chris at 00:46:29) So, you know, little things like that on a routine basis and being purposeful, I'd agree that's the best way I think that we navigate this now very virtual world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:42) Absolutely. So, I got one more leadership kind of focused question for you. What's something you're learning right now? Something that's challenging you in your day to day today?

(Chris at 00:46:56) Great question. I am a podcast junkie. So I feel like ever since getting into podcasts, as well as I consume a fair bit of audiobooks as well, kind of always learning about a number of different things. So if I had to tell you one, I think—so we've been very purposeful in our acquisitions over the last couple of years, and we've really built a compelling suite of solutions that is, you know, oriented at, I think, creating arguably the most compelling data security suite in the industry and our MFT platforms. So we've got two of the, you know, industry leading MFT platforms in Globalscape EFT and GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer.

(Chris at 00:47:47) And they are kind of like the glue, right, that holds and makes this whole vision come together. And so over the last, I'd say six to nine months, as we've seen some of these integrations start happening and come to life, some of my team members that come from different acquisitions are actively being involved in that. So what I'm learning is trying to balance, I think, the right balance of how much do I have them focus on creating these synergies between multiple solutions that create a suite of solutions versus, you know, making sure we're continuing to feed the primary business unit that they operate under. Because at the end of the day, you know, both of these teammates are extremely interested. They're engaged in this.

(Chris at 00:48:42) And I think that, you know, after managing people for, you know, going on five and a half years now, it's one of the keys to creating a cohesive team and a team that wants to work together and for you and not—I don't believe that managers should drop the hammer and tell people what to do. They should make a compelling case for why somebody, you know, may want to look into this, make sure they've got team member engagement and a desire to do it. Ideally, it's their idea, and I'm there to just be a coach. Right? I'm there to brainstorm on what is, you know, how does this impact our business for the better?

(Chris at 00:49:29) You know, when do we need to get this done? What do I need to do to help you carve out the time to make this happen? And, you know, I think when you have alignment like that, people can do extraordinary things. So that's, yeah, I mean, from a leadership perspective, you're always learning. But yeah, that's, to me, that's been one of the things—I guess it has been how I've operated for a number of years.

(Chris at 00:49:57) So I don't want to say it's like I'm learning that brand new, but it's an iterative process. Right? You get, I think, better over time in putting people on the right projects and again, making sure that they want to own it. And the more autonomy I think that you feel as a team member, you know, the better job you want to do. And, you know, that's been the formula for my success.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:25) Absolutely. So before we wrap up, I want to make sure we get a good shout out to HelpSystems. I know you've mentioned—

(Chris at 00:50:33) You have—

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:34) An awesome growth. If you're hiring, where can people reach out to you, or what do you want to plug at the end here?

(Chris at 00:50:43) Yeah. No. That's a phenomenal question. So, and I did a little bit of it back there just mentioning, you know, our current posture on data security. I mean, data is the new oil. Right? We hear that. I have been hearing that for years. And, you know, and it's not surprising if you watch, like, The Social Dilemma, for instance, and, you know, you understand what data—I guess the predictable aspects of human nature that many of our big tech companies have been able to, you know, leverage and, you know, for good and bad. Right?

(Chris at 00:51:22) I used to think it was just because these apps had my microphone on. And then when I heard Tristan Harris talk about the voodoo doll—right, it's even scarier that we're so predictable that it's not a microphone listening and then giving you ads. You're just that predictable. So, you know, data being the new oil, I think that what we have been lining up as an organization and in these acquisitions and finding solutions that complement one another and really create a compelling—I'm actually wearing one of my HelpSystems shirts here.

(Chris at 00:51:58) So it reads "Keep IT Simple." Nice. And we've got a, you know, a term of IT transformation is a journey, it's not a destination. And so our goal is to help customers build a better IT.

(Chris at 00:52:12) So when I think about HelpSystems and all of, you know, the solutions that we bring to the table in terms of data security, email security, you know, secure file transfer, digital rights management, you know, DLP as well, integration, there are a lot of different solutions that we have that work together to help, you know, fill in the bits of that journey. So no matter where a customer's at in this, you know, evolution of their, you know, data security posture, we'll call it, or journey, you know, we can fit in to a number of different areas along that spectrum. We've been in business for 40 years. We're not going anywhere. And I think that, you know, for me, my teammates are engaged in what they're doing.

(Chris at 00:53:01) They're excited. There's all sorts of new tech that we get exposure to. And kind of what I talked about when I was at a much larger company focused on my one little area and getting bored after about a year, I don't see that in HelpSystems. There's constantly new people you're meeting, different walks of life that they come from, and you learn and grow from that. But then the tech that they're bringing in as well just presents a never ending opportunity to learn and provides a ton of spontaneity in every day.

(Chris at 00:53:34) So, yeah, if you're interested in joining the HelpSystems team, helpsystems.com/careers, we've got a lot of openings. You know, we're growing fast and at scale. So look us up if you're interested.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:52) 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.