Maximizing ROI by Being a Great Customer with David Meyer, VP of IT at Irrimax Corporation

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to David Meyer, VP of IT at Irrimax Corporation about how he maximizes his ROI by being a great customer. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:18) The theme I have today is a master class in maximizing ROI inside of IT with you, David. So where do we even start?

(David Meyer at 00:00:30) Well, I can start by introducing myself and telling you kind of about my history and my journey up to this point. First of all, thanks so much, Joel, for having me on your podcast today. I'm David Meyer, currently the VP of IT for Irrimax Corporation. I've been in IT for 30 years now. Irrimax is a medium-sized medical device company based in Atlanta. Our product is called Irrisept, which is a surgical irrigation product based on CHG, which is a chemical called chlorhexidine. Our goal is to improve patient outcomes in the surgery and wound care, and we do that by reducing SSI, which is surgical site infection. So if you go in for—I had my ACL done in my knee recently. I went in and had the procedure. Everything went great. I didn't have a surgical site infection afterwards, so then you can get right to the rehab and physical therapy. Big problem in medicine today is a surgical site infection where you have to go back and have a revision done. That's a pain for the patient. The physician and the hospital are actually on the hook for the cost of that now. And so what our product does is we reduce the occurrence of that surgical site infection. So it's a great step forward in irrigation, and we become the standard of care in that category. And it's really nice for me to work for a company that does good. Right? We, like I said, our goal is to improve patient outcomes in surgery, and we do that. And so very, very happy being at Irrimax and looking forward to telling you more about myself and more about our IT journey so far.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:23) Yeah. And I'm excited. I'm close to the medical field. My parents and brother are physicians, so I didn't go that route. I went with the computers, but I get to visit their practices. And it's great to see them helping people or people walk up to me and be like, your parents helped us or your brother helped us. And I was like, all right. That's great. You know? So I have—

(David Meyer at 00:02:46) You'll have to ask them if they know about Irrisept because depending on which part of the field they're in, they probably know about us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:53) Yeah. Well, so mom was the head of the ER in Largo, Florida for like 20 years. But for the past 15, she's opened a bariatrics, like weight loss hormone treatment facility. So she's out of like the emergency care. I'm sure if she was in the emergency care today, she would know about you guys. Right?

(David Meyer at 00:03:08) Exactly. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:13) Yeah. How did you get into that? Were you always into the medical technology, or were you just into technology and this came up?

(David Meyer at 00:03:20) Oh, no. So our CEO is named Mark Alvarez. He's a serial entrepreneur. He's done seven or eight companies like this one. I worked for him at the previous company, which was called BC Technical. They do service and support of the big CAT scan and MRI machines. They were based here in Salt Lake. So that's how I got to know Mark. That was a big success, buying that company. And he and I got the IT in order, and he got the company in order and sold that one on. And it was a big benefit to everybody. And then he moved on to purchase this company, Irrimax, and asked me if I wanted to join and go around again with him. And he's the best. So I was happy to do that. And, yeah, here we are now five years, six years later with Irrisept.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:16) Nice. Good culture. You like it?

(David Meyer at 00:04:19) Great culture. Yeah. We've been on a great growth trajectory since Mark took over the company six years ago. We were a couple million in revenue back then. We're up to about $100 million annual revenue today, which has been fun. As I said, I worked with Mark in the previous company, so I kind of knew how this was going to go. And I'm not at all surprised by our success. And, yeah, our culture is—Mark calls us the dream team because it's a lot of people that he's worked with over the years in all these previous companies. So he's gotten to know a lot of us really well through years and years of experience, and he's kind of handpicked us and put us together in this Irrimax company. And I'm so grateful and so fortunate for what we have. It's really awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:09) You know, I'm glad you bring that up because that's something that early on in your career is not talked a lot about. So I'll give you an example. Like, earlier in my career, I was looking at higher level positions, and they had bigger price tags. Like, I wanted that so bad. And it's like I had the technical skills to be able to perform, you know, up just to perform. And I was like, why am I not able to get that? And what I've come to realize 10, 15 years later is that all the relationships that you build and all of this trust and credibility that you build with working on projects and coming through with people, they start to collect, and the really good people start to collect and work on different projects together. And then you see things happen like, you know, OpenAI and Johnny Ive start something. It's like, no matter what, that's going to probably do pretty good. But having the value of having your sphere of competence around you of all—like, I know that's my tech guy. Like, when I do a project, that's the guy I trust. I don't ever have to think about it twice. Like, that's the person. When you have a Rolodex like that in multiple different areas, that's valuable. So even you. Right? Like, look down from your level. You've got somebody that manages different things that you're familiar with before. So pulling you in pulls in your network. And so I just didn't see that when I was younger, and I see it now.

(David Meyer at 00:06:33) It's so true. And I'm a walking example and beneficiary of Mark's Rolodex in that category. Right? Because like I said, he's been working with all of us in one way or another for a long time and, you know, handpicked this group to build the team at Irrimax, and it's been awesome. The other thing kind of to your point is you don't realize—so I grew up in New Jersey, and I moved to Utah a long time ago, and I had a bunch of friends that were out here before I moved here. And when I was thinking about moving to Utah, I asked them, you know, how do you like it out there? How is it? And they said, David, we never realized how miserable we were back there in New Jersey. Or, you know, nothing against New Jersey. I grew up there—

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:24) There's plenty against it. I have to say this because I grew up there.

(David Meyer at 00:07:28) But you don't realize it until you have perspective of something that's that much better. Right? And so I've worked for a lot of different companies in my career, and I'm a big optimist in general. So I try to put the positive spin on things as much as I can. But, boy, when you get to a place like this in a situation where everybody works together, there's no politics, there's no backstabbing, there's real accountability from the top down, so people have to deliver on their responsibilities. And, you know, if you've ever played team sports and been on a really strong team where everybody is on the same page and working towards the same goal, it's really special. And, but, again, if you've never been in that type of an environment, you don't know how good it can be, so you're willing to settle for less. And you just have to go through that and get that experience to get that perspective, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:25) So we got introduced from Robbie Morrison over at Velasio. Is that right?

(David Meyer at 00:08:30) Yes. Yep. They've been a great partner for us for a long time now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:33) And what did you do with them?

(David Meyer at 00:08:35) I'll go back to the previous company that I mentioned where I worked for Mark Alvarez starting about 10 years ago. When I joined that company, there was a massive train wreck of an ERP and CRM implementation happening. They were trying to use Microsoft Great Plains and Microsoft CRM Field Service together for a depot service of those large CAT scan and MRI machines. The root cause of the problem in that project, in my opinion—and I know you're a software developer, Joel, so don't take this the wrong way, but they had a software developer acting as project manager on that project. And when you say to a software developer, what do you think the problem is and what should we do to fix it? What do you think their answer is? Hey, let's develop some more custom code. And so one of my favorite sayings over a long time of doing this is, if the only tool you know how to use is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And so, you know, those systems were not working well together. There was too much custom development trying to happen in place of using the native capabilities that are built into the platforms, that are built into the systems. Transactions were failing. Valuations were way off. Inventory levels weren't accurate. That was causing terrible, terrible employee morale to the point where really good people were leaving the company because it was just so stressful, and, you know, you couldn't process a simple transaction through the system. So the first thing I did when Mark hired me there was to fire the incumbent partner and bring in Velasio. Mark had been looking for another partner already, so that was an easy decision for me. We had his full support in that. And Velasio, after some initial research, we mentioned another Rob, Robert Banowitz was the senior consultant that was working with us from Velasio. And he summed it up pretty simply and said, you guys have too much complexity in some areas of this system and not enough complexity in others. So we kind of went back to the drawing board a little bit. Velasio helped us fix those issues. A big part of that was changing the inventory valuation method and where the valuation was happening in GP versus CRM. And we really rescued the project. Once we got things running better, people stopped quitting the company. Life was much better for everybody. We went on to sell that company, which was a great benefit for everybody. And then Mark moved on to Irrimax, and he asked me to join Irrimax, which has been great for me. The first thing Mark and I did there was, again, bring in Velasio because we had such a great success with them at the previous company. And so, yeah, it's been a long ride and a great ride with them. And, you know, part of—I think part of why Mark, you know, we talk about the Rolodex and experience that he has with all of us and him being able to handpick the people he wants on the team. I think, you know, in a big way, the reason he picked me was the success we had at the previous company, which to me, a lot of that was down to Velasio helping us out. And, you know, the value of having a good partner is not just in the day-to-day of fixing the systems and that. It had a profound impact on my career actually. Right? Like, when you pick the wrong partner, it can be ugly, and then you go backwards. When you pick the right partner and things go well, you don't have a lot of miserable IT problems and issues that everyone's stressed out about. They made me look really good in that role, and now here we are again doing it again at Irrimax.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:01) That's amazing. So it's the Rolodex extended beyond just people. It goes into products, the tools that you use, and the vendors and the other brands that you work with.

(David Meyer at 00:13:13) For sure. Yeah. That is so true. I wish there was a better way to value that, like, with people. I mean, if I could just walk around with like my tool set and my relationships, but that's—you just got to get to know people. It's the human experience.

(David Meyer at 00:13:26) It's intangible. And, yeah, when we get deeper into ROI, I'll talk more about my views on tangible versus intangible, but you're right. Those relationships and, you know, trusting the people you work with and trusting the partners. And nobody's perfect. Right? I think Velasio makes mistakes. Their consultants have made mistakes in the past for me. They've had consultants leave in the middle of a critical part of the project. And, you know, in my role as an IT leader, it's not, to me, it's not about not making mistakes. It's more about what they do and how they react and fix when a mistake happens. And that's another thing that you don't get to know right away. Right? It's been 10 years now. And over that time, they've made a couple of mistakes. And every time, they do everything they can to make it right. The one example is with, you know, our ERP project. We implemented Microsoft BC Business Central to replace our QuickBooks system way back when I started here at Irrimax. And that project was going along great. We were on time, on budget. The user acceptance testing was going great. We were about two weeks, two to three weeks before the go-live date, and the primary senior consultant on our project left Velasio. It happens. They had a better opportunity somewhere else. I don't blame anybody for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:06) Wait. Velasio hires humans? And they do human things?

(David Meyer at 00:15:10) They do human things. They make mistakes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:15) Their interests change. They have families. Like, life—

(David Meyer at 00:15:17) The mistake of leaving Velasio to go somewhere else with this guy. And, you know, coincidentally enough, in a bad way, there was a big EDI part of that project—

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:31) What does that mean?

(David Meyer at 00:15:31) EDI, Electronic Data Interchange, with a company called TrueCommerce, where you, instead of sending a PO back and forth, you send an electronic record through EDI, Electronic Data Interchange. And so the big EDI part of the project, their lead consultant left at the same—like, two days later. So here I am two weeks before go-live of a huge major ERP project upgrade migration, and two of the key people left the project right at the worst time. And so I had one night, the night that the Velasio guy left, left our project, I was not getting a lot of sleep. The next day, the project manager told me they have another resource that's being added back into our project immediately. They've already done a bunch of knowledge transfer and handoff from the other guy that left, and the new consultant was actually better. He knew Great Plains better. He was able to understand our process and where we are at very quickly, and that didn't miss a beat in that project. And what is the point of this to me? It's that this partner, this professional services company, Velasio, has a deep bench of people. They have not just one or two really good consultants. They have a lot of really good consultants. And if something like this happens, they're able to fill in immediately and cause us to not miss a beat. So the EDI project, the salesperson became the consultant for us at the end of that, and luckily, she had been a consultant before, so that worked out okay too. But, yeah, what could have been a disaster, it just was like no big deal. Didn't miss a beat. So really, really happy, really impressed about that. That was another thing that, you know, built my relationship with them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:36) Yeah. I like what you mentioned. Maybe Josh can clip it out for a social media clip. But I like what you mentioned about mistakes. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:47) Because you see it a lot in security, CSOs. You see it. It's pretty easy to see it over there. There's one breach, and then they're fired. And it's like, okay, I get it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:57) I understand. But at the same time, they also built this incredible infrastructure, and it's not like if you're gonna get attacked, it's when. And then you've got all this knowledge being lost. And so I really like your perspective of focusing on how brands respond to problems versus just do they have a problem, because you're right. There's problems everywhere.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:18) I mean, Gmail is sometimes down. YouTube sometimes doesn't work. The biggest, most well-funded products and companies on the planet have issues. Issues are just a part of life.

(David Meyer at 00:18:30) They have outages. This stuff is very complicated, and it gets more complicated by the minute. So yeah, to me, I'm a little bit older. I've got a bunch of scar tissue. I've made mistakes myself. I've seen what you were just talking about where one mistake and that's three strikes and you're out. And whatever analogy you wanna use, cut off your nose to spite your face or throw out the baby with the bathwater. Nobody's perfect. So who knows? The next person that you get in to replace them could be worse. So yeah, I'm pretty easygoing and forgiving. And as long as they do what's right to fix the problem and learn from it and don't make that same mistake again. If you start seeing that pattern, it's a different conversation. But yeah, nobody's perfect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:26) No. I like the principal idea of having your set of principles and then holding people to those within the correct amount of margin.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:36) As we start to wrap up on this Veloxio part of the conversation, there's an article on the website about Irrimax and Veloxio.

(David Meyer at 00:19:45) That's actually video and a full-blown case study that we did with their marketing department. That was all about our journey with them. So yeah, when I started six years ago with Irrimax, we didn't have much IT. We had QuickBooks for accounting. We had Excel and Outlook-based processes. We had some paper-based stuff. We had one file server with a VPN, and so it was pretty remedial. And the good news is I was given a clean slate from there to build out towards what we have today. And so the big thing I was hearing was we hate the VPN. The users were trying to access the systems through the VPN, and that's always been problematic. Part of, I think, what drove all this big move to the cloud is people don't like using the VPN. It can be a real pain. And so very early on with the help of Veloxio, we made the decision that we are not gonna do any on-premise systems. And this was six years ago, so cloud was already obviously here in a big way. But that was a deliberate decision that we made, and that let us get rid of the VPN right away and just purely cloud-based systems. And Veloxio has been—one of their core messages to prospects and customers was helping on the digital journey. And a big part of the digital journey, I think, is migrating stuff to the cloud. So they've been at it for a long time. And with Microsoft and all the Microsoft products that we use, that they help us with, obviously, all of that stuff has been moving to the cloud for quite some time now. And so it was a big decision, but I think it was an easy, safe decision to say we're cloud only. Right? No more on-prem, not even an on-premise file server. We use a cloud-based file sharing system. So yeah, it's been all cloud from the beginning. And like I said, we had a clean slate to do that. So it's been great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:12) Yeah. That pull quote on the article on Veloxio's website from you where it's like, oh, I've done 10 projects with them across CRM, ERP, and they've had a 100% success rate on all projects. That's a powerful quote. When I see that, I'm like, that's why I like doing these interviews because you see that it's just text on a page. Right? It's like, I don't know David Meyer. But then you hear these interviews and you're like, oh, I know who this guy is. And then you can hear the whole story. I don't know. I like it.

(David Meyer at 00:22:39) Yeah. And don't take that for granted. Right? Because there's a bunch of statistics. The failure rate of these type of projects, I think it's like 50% or 48% of digital initiatives are successful according to Gartner. So how do you ensure that your IT initiative does what you think it's gonna do and you have a successful project? Right? I'm kind of leading you here with the question for the next topic if that's okay.

(David Meyer at 00:23:16) Yeah, we're kinda heading this way. Right? And so how do you make sure that—going back to my quote that I've done 10, now more, now it's 10, 12, or 14 successful projects with Veloxio—and why are they all successful when so many of these things fail? So for me, it starts with including the subject matter experts, the SMEs, from the very start of the project. Right? We need them to help us define and document the requirements, but also what does success look like from their perspective, from the end user perspective. What are the things that are gonna help them with their daily process and be helping and not hindering them in a new system that we're considering to roll out. Next is a what I call an iterative development cycle. So we wanna show our end users progress very frequently. For me, it's like weekly. We have a weekly call, which is a project update, but also a demo. So here's the type of things that we've developed in the past week and confirming this is what you said you wanted. Right?

(David Meyer at 00:24:37) In the past, a lot of us in IT have used the waterfall project methodology, where you go and spend a bunch of time collecting and documenting the requirements, and then you go off and do a bunch of development. And two months later, you come back and show them what you got. And by then, maybe the requirements have changed a little, or they see that and then they change their mind, or we didn't hear them correctly two months ago, and now it's late in the project. Right? We just burned two months, and we have to go backwards and reset. So we wanna have frequent checkpoints with the end users and do a lot of show and tell along the way. And Veloxio's been a huge help in that approach. This is also why I love the Microsoft CRM platform, configuration layer, so we can configure the product and not have to do a lot of custom development. We can configure it quickly and show the end user, this is what we heard you say. Is this what you meant? And when they actually see it on the screen and see the interface, it's a whole other layer of conversation and a whole other level of understanding between us and the end user. So we're able to model things quicker, and they can explain it if that's what they wanted. So yeah, the other thing we do is we do extensive pilots before going live. So once we get to the end of that iterative design cycle, we'll roll the system out to select users across the department that's getting the system and get more feedback from them actually using the system. What I've found a lot recently is the fine-tuning that we do in that phase is critical to providing the product that they'll actually wanna use. Right? It's that interface and the intuitive use of the system. If it's easy to use and easy to understand and not confusing and not buggy, they're gonna use it. They're gonna like it, and then you're gonna get to the user adoption. So that's really, again, the key to having a successful project, of getting the ROI that we talk about is getting that user adoption.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:02) Yeah. I think I wanna talk about that a little bit. So you kinda pulled it all together there right at the end. I was like, oh, okay. I see where he's going with this. Because they're talking about ROI and IT and maximizing value. And you pointed out something that I usually don't think about. Typically, when you have the ROI conversation, it's a very financial numbers conversation, but that's just surface level. What's driving that below is things like user adoption, and that's how you're preventing the failure rate or reducing the failure rate.

(David Meyer at 00:27:35) Got it. True. And if we go deeper into ROI, that's the reason we do all this stuff ultimately. And that's how we measure if a project is considered to be successful or not, is if you actually get the return on investment that you theorized that you're gonna get by doing this project. But how do we actually measure it? It's usually difficult, and it can be controversial. My view is there are two different types of ROI, and one of them is tangible, easy to measure. The other one is intangible, and you can talk about it and say take my word for it, but it's hard to put numbers to it. And so a couple of examples recently for me on that front are we have this thing called the MTR report at Irrimax. It's the monthly tracings report. So this is sales operations data that we get from 15 different distributors that we sell through. And a tangible benefit of this project was that before we were doing it manually, and our finance department was taking like 20 hours a month to manually pull the data together and normalize the data from all the different distributors and put it in a big Excel file and distribute it out to the sales folks. And so by automating that through Power BI, we save the finance department 20 hours a month. And again, that's tangible. That's very easy to calculate and for people to get their heads around. Call it $1,500 a month in payroll savings of the person that's actually doing the process to generate that report.

(David Meyer at 00:29:26) Intangible is to me where the bigger, more powerful benefits actually are. By putting that report into Power BI, for example, now we can slice and dice and analyze the data every which way. So the benefits—the intangible benefits to our executives and our sales leadership of, for example, seeing their top 10 improving customers versus their bottom 10 declining customers—is huge, actionable data that they can use to run the business that we weren't getting before. But how do you measure that? How do you say, well, that looking at the top 10 customers is worth a thousand dollars? There's no way to put an actual number on that. But to me, those are, again, the more powerful parts of the benefits and the ROI for these type of projects. So if we go a little further down that road too then, how do you communicate the ROI findings to the rest of the business? How do you get people to approve these projects when you're telling them I think we're gonna get this much ROI from it? And again, this communication and approval part of it, to me, comes down to tangible and intangible benefits. So for finance people, for example, it's very easy for them to understand the tangible side. Hey, we save 20 hours a month. It's this many dollars. Easy. You bring in sales and executive management to help confirm and communicate the intangible parts. And that way, everybody understands—if the tangible number doesn't get to the ROI, the cost of the project, finance is probably gonna be reluctant to get on board with that. But if we can talk about the intangible stuff and, hey, this is maybe indirectly gonna help us close 15% more business next year, and the CEO understands that, and the VP of sales understands that. And we can kinda build a coalition of people that agree that when you put the tangible and the intangible stuff together, it comes out way ahead in terms of the ROI. Then you start to get people on the same page, and then you get these projects approved. And then the challenge is going back and measuring it after the fact, which is another old topic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:05) Oh, yeah. It's even tough on our scale to do all of that. But I like that. I like the way you think about how the finance people are dealing with the tangible and the numbers and the hard data, and then the CEO and management is the better life, the vision of what we could do with this improvement to our life, that accounting no longer has to spend 20 hours a year doing this data entry, meaning we'll turn over less people and we'll be more profitable. And it's like, okay. Cool. Like, you can see—

(David Meyer at 00:32:41) Employee morale. I mean, employee morale is probably the ultimate example of an intangible benefit. If I go back to the earlier example at BC Tech when employee morale was so bad because these systems didn't work and they were driving everyone crazy that our good employees were leaving the company. What is the cost of that? Like, what does it cost to replace a high to mid-level manager that really knows the business that's doing a great job, but we drive them out of there because our systems don't work? It's—yeah. You don't want that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:15) No. You don't. You wanna be a good customer too. Right? As you're going—when you were talking about these projects, and we've talked so much about you working with Veloxio and how great they are. But I have found that as I've grown up in the business world that I have certain customers that I really like. They pay quickly. There's no—they're just like good customers. And then I noticed that that started affecting me when I buy a product. So now when I buy a product, I wanna be a good customer. I wanna come off as a good customer. And so that was like the strangest thing for me to experience. And so I was curious, how do you make sure that you're a good customer?

(David Meyer at 00:34:03) Yeah. That's a very big topic. It's near and dear to my heart in my 30 years of IT and the scar tissue that I have. And the second half of that, it's been more leadership role. It might be the most important lesson that I've learned that stuck with me is to be a good customer. And like I said, we've had a 10-year relationship with Veloxio, for example. I've tried to be a good customer for them for a long time, and I have been, and it's come back to me in multiples. Right? So what does it look like to be a good customer? Fair negotiations. I understand that they're in business to make money, and we want them to be a viable entity going forward. Not everyone takes that view into the negotiating table. People are there to grind every nickel out of the person that you're negotiating against. I used to do that, and then I didn't get great service in response to that, and I didn't get their attention when I really needed it the most. When someone left my project, I didn't get their next best person inserted directly into the project to keep things going. So yeah, number one is negotiate, but try and be fair. That may be controversial. I'm okay with that. This is my approach to it. It's maybe not for everybody, but fair negotiations is a part of it. No one is perfect. Mistakes happen. Right? We talked about that. I'm much more concerned about what they do to resolve any issues that happen. I'm trying not to get upset and jump up and down and scream and yell at their consultants when things go wrong. That can be bad morale for them. And then they don't wanna work with me.

(David Meyer at 00:36:02) They're like, man, that guy's a jerk. We would much rather work with someone else than him. I also try to give credit to their resources when things go well. And so, you know, after a successful project, I'll have a recap call and an email and just make sure to call out, you know, such and such consultant on this project did a great job. They're a big part of our success.

(David Meyer at 00:36:27) Thank you guys for giving us great resources and make sure that goes up the chain to their management so people are getting recognition for good work that they've done for us. What do we get in return? Right? What do we get in return for being a good customer? As we've talked about, we get access to their best resources.

(David Meyer at 00:36:48) This stuff is complicated, and there's a vast range of experience that consultants have. Velasio hires great people and great consultants, but everyone has a different level experience. So when I'm their best customer and they like working with me, I feel like I tend to get their better resources. Better response time, you know. If everyone's busy nowadays, if you have six things on your to-do list, your good customer that you like working for is probably gonna move to the top of the list of who gets responded to quicker. We've also had flexible billing terms.

(David Meyer at 00:37:31) So going back to the negotiation side of things, you know, we can negotiate 50% payment now and 50% later type thing. Just flexible billing terms. That always makes the accounting department happy. And so yeah, I'm in the office.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:49) Specific too. The accounting departments, we work with a lot of different brands, all different sizes, and every time there's, like, there's some, there's the ones that super care and there's no way the accounting will budge. And then there's some that are like, ah, we just throw it on this card and I'll deal with it later. Yeah. But I always tell people, look, you know what? I like what you said too because one of the things that was happening, I had salespeople before that were selling sponsorships for the podcast. I decided last year to take over. I had a mentor in business that was more successful than me, and I was explaining a bunch of details, and his answer to me was for me to take over sales. Turns out it was a really good move. But one of the things I found is that the salespeople, for whatever reason, they wouldn't do a deal with the person over email. They wouldn't do it. The customer wanted to do the deal over email, but they would always try to force them into a call. We gotta do a call. I gotta present at you. And they're like, no, just send me the deck and I just wanna look at it and then I'll let you know if I wanna do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:52) So we were losing a lot of business. And so when it happened to me, they're like, I wanna do it over email. I was like, okay, yeah, do it over email.

(David Meyer at 00:38:59) Take the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:00) Take the business. I was like, yeah, I'll take your money. Yes. Yeah. Yes.

(David Meyer at 00:39:03) You mean I don't have to do an extra call to get to the close of this deal?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:07) Okay. Yeah. Thank you.

(David Meyer at 00:39:09) No problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:10) Well, this was fantastic conversation, David. Thank you so much for doing it. Is there anything else that we wanna get out there to the world as we wrap up?

(David Meyer at 00:39:18) I think to sum things up from my side, you know, I've got two golden rules in this stuff. We've talked about a bunch of this stuff already, but I could spend a minute on my golden rules here to sum up. Number one is almost anything is possible in IT at this point. Is it worth it? Right? Are we gonna get ROI from a project? Or in my current environment of medical device, is it a regulatory requirement? So there are times that you'll have to do a project because it's regulatory required, and you could get shut down if you're not compliant. So, you know, there's zero ROI for that other than keeping yourself in business. It's a requirement to satisfy the FDA and not have them shut you down.

(David Meyer at 00:40:11) So almost anything's possible. Is it worth it? And then my other rule we've talked about a little bit is I call it the 80/20 rule, which is, you know, these platforms and systems that we have today, like Microsoft CRM, like a Salesforce, they're very configurable. So we can configure the system without getting into a lot of custom development, within reason, to meet most of the requirements that someone would have from a line of business. And what I've been doing for a long time now is trying to keep things in the configuration layer of the platform that we're using because then we don't have a lot of complicated, expensive custom development. I consider that technical debt. So, you know, when Microsoft pushes a patch down to the platform, maybe it breaks my custom code and then I have to go redo it. Maybe I'm on the hook to the developer at some level. So keeping it in the configuration layer for me is important. And the way that we do that is this 80/20 rule where, you know, I can get to 80% of the requirements that someone has in the configuration layer. Let's negotiate on that last 20%. Let's have them bend their business process a little bit so it fits into the platform without custom development. And then the whole project becomes much simpler, less complicated, less expensive. It gets delivered quicker. And, you know, I've had Mark's support for a long time on that, and all the people in the line of business here know it. So they're very open and ready to negotiate on how we implement stuff. But that's kind of my big picture of, you know, let's have ROI, make sure we get ROI, and then let's do the project in the most intelligent way that we can. And yeah, we've had a lot of success. Velasio has been great with those approaches to things.

(David Meyer at 00:42:27) The one last thing I'll say too about Velasio, and this kinda goes back to how do I pick a product or a partner to do a particular project? I want partners that have a long-term relationship, a long-term view of my relationship with them. And the big example for me of that is knowledge transfer. So, again, back to this configuration layer of things like Microsoft CRM, they're very willing to help me and train me and show me how to use those features that I don't know about yet and help my people too. Our system admin is learning this stuff now, Krista. And for them to do the knowledge transfer for myself on this platform, it's a short-term sacrifice for them. Right? Because that's billable hours that they could be billing me for their consultant to do the work, where if they teach me how to do it, they're gonna miss out on some of that. But that's why I still work with them after ten years. Right? Because they've always had a very long-term, mutually beneficial view of our relationship, and that to me is really important in how you pick a partner. So yeah, that's nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:37) Well, thank you for coming on today and sharing all of this. We've got a lot of good clips between the golden rules and the advice on how to be a good customer. You are a deep well of knowledge, David.

(David Meyer at 00:43:47) Thank you. It's all just a ton of experience and covered in scar tissue. That's the value of me is I've made a lot of mistakes and done this stuff wrong, and luckily I've learned from it. So try to leverage that where I can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:02) Yeah. And thanks for coming on and helping share it with the next generation and the other technology leaders that are listening. I'm sure it's helpful to many people out there. And we made a podcast. David, how do you feel?

(David Meyer at 00:44:12) I feel great. Joel, thanks again for having me on and for what you do. We love your podcast. Very happy I could add some content here for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:23) 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 would 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.