John Balsavage, President of A&I Solutions - Critical Network Performance Monitoring

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:04) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to John, the founder and president of A&I Solutions, and they discuss how site performance monitoring is critical in today's online-first environment, why it's important to celebrate the victories with your team, and how no form of marketing can come close to word-of-mouth referrals. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:33) Here we go.

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

(John at 00:00:45) One of the things within A&I, kind of an internal tagline for our people, is to have a team of good people empowered to build strong relationships and celebrate success. So, you know, the real philosophy for our customers is let's really build that strong relationship with the partners we will have and stuff like that. And if you have a strong relationship, everything else kind of becomes a little bit easier. You know what I mean? And you're working together smoother and stuff like that.

(John at 00:01:20) So I absolutely embrace that ideal. You know, we do it in a very intimate fashion on a one-on-one, and, you know, as we're a smaller company doing great stuff with bigger companies. And ideally, we're now trying to showcase that we can help out more and more people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:40) No, that's exciting. How did you get involved with A&I?

(John at 00:01:43) So original founder, owner, president of A&I Solutions. We started over 20 years ago. That all by myself blows my mind. I've been at this for 20 years. Originally, went to Georgia Tech, came out of Georgia Tech, and sold forklifts.

(John at 00:01:58) And I'm like, man, you know. And I go back to, I realized forklifts was not my future, and I missed the call. I missed the turn at the moment. I went back, got a master's in information systems, and that was just totally redirected into what I thought was the way of the future going forward, right? Doing much more interesting stuff. And my forte at the time was really all about the process. You know, how do you make a process easier, more streamlined, more efficient, something that you can make decisions for today versus six months from today?

(John at 00:02:35) We really started all around project management software, and it was just tracking stuff. What are people doing? You know, for a Fortune 500 company, they got thousands of people and thousands of projects and all this stuff. It was, to me, absolutely fascinating. Keeping track of it all. How do you automate some of it?

(John at 00:02:59) How do you improve the reporting and decision making? And it was really back then when we first got a partnership with a company at the time. It was called CA Technologies, and they've been acquired by Broadcom, and they do big enterprise software solutions for the federal government, the Fortune 10, the Fortune 50, you know, and stuff like that. And so being a partner with them, we built a really strong relationship with them that, at the time, you know, any customer that we were working on together, I mean, we were totally in sync.

(John at 00:03:33) There was nothing, you know, we wouldn't hide any information. You know, it was just very open, very straightforward. How do we best take care of the customer? And what happened with that is our relationship with them actually got stronger and stronger. So as we started off with just, say, one little solution, project management, right, which now everybody has to have, and then you kind of evolved it to, you know, server monitoring and network monitoring as a different solution.

(John at 00:04:03) Because at the time, Broadcom was like, if you're doing a good job over here, can you help us with customers that now have to use this solution? Can you bring on a team of people, experts, to really help us out? And so even though our partnership stayed within the Broadcom umbrella, they have enough different solutions where we're able to kind of expand what we're offering for our customers. That expansion also kind of helps to keep things always interesting and fresh for the people in the company and for myself, right? Because just like you went and evolved into several different things, we evolved into several different things, but quite honestly, they all tie to each other.

(John at 00:04:42) So whether it's monitoring, whether it's software development, improving that kind of life cycle, you know, whether it's security, right, which now has to be integrated with absolutely everything or it just doesn't work, that kind of expansion across everything allows you to get into much more big picture, big idea conversations, or you can really just kind of stay in the true nuts and bolts of, hey, we need to get this problem solved, and let's let's go. But it was, it goes back to the point of strong relationships.

(John at 00:05:23) So as we have this strong relationship with a partner, they wanted us to do more with them, and the things that we're doing with them just kind of grew and grew. And then as we were doing business with a customer, an individual customer, like we have one in central Pennsylvania where we just started off with, you know, just doing some service management, like help desk tickets and stuff like that. And they're like, you guys have helped us more in the last year than, you know, anybody else has in the last 10 years. Do you mind helping us over here with server monitoring or network monitoring or some security?

(John at 00:05:58) Right? So the relationship with that particular customer grew and grew based on trust. And man, I just think right off the bat, you hit such a key point that is critical in every aspect of the customers and partners and employees that we have. That strong relationship 360 is absolutely critical.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:23) Do you have one product that starts a relationship more than any other product?

(John at 00:06:29) So the interesting thing is monitoring. And it absolutely, at the end of the day, people need to make sure that either the application or the server or the cloud provider is up and available, right? So when you log in, you can actually log in and let it go, because if you can't log in, then somebody else, they're gonna go somewhere else right away.

(John at 00:06:55) And you see that whether it's the shopping cart to buy clothes, or it's your investment service, or your banking service. If it's not available, then people move on. And so what we find, especially in monitoring, and there's all kinds of different things to monitor, but if you just start with the very basics, then there's expansion into kind of doing more and getting more sophisticated, more intuitive, more predictable, and things like that where it gets kind of interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:31) So help, so monitoring is one of the ones that you get customers in monitoring and then you expand them into other services?

(John at 00:07:38) Yeah, absolutely. And so, like, a great example is you do application monitoring or server monitoring, right? Is that server available? Is that application available?

(John at 00:07:52) And what we're finding also, so let me step back, right? We talked about server monitoring, that's one kind. Then you get into application monitoring and also application performance management and stuff like that. How's that app running? How's your shopping cart running? You know, can you service it when others are crashing? So for example, the big thing is you got, like, Black Friday, the big retail day. You're either online and pumping out sales, or if you go down for one hour, you're losing out on millions of dollars.

(John at 00:08:43) Like I remember we had a time where one of the iPhone early releases, they came out and the big three carriers all went online to sell it at midnight, you know, when it comes alive. And only one out of the three carriers was able to process orders because everybody had the little spinning wheel or the site just crashed or something. And so we were actually credited for helping one of those carriers, the one carrier that was able to process orders. And his team actually got, like, four weeks of extra PTO because of how well they were able to do, and then how well they were able to do relative to their competition. And so that kind of story just excites me that we were able to help them in an extreme environment. And now, all of a sudden, when things are in this pandemic, everything's online.

(John at 00:09:24) Everything's online like never before. The greatest case I was actually just talking to somebody about was the grocery store. We're doing work with this one grocery store, and before the pandemic, 4% of their business was online. After the pandemic, like 60% of their business is online. It's just crazy, right?

(John at 00:09:44) So, and it's like, if you want to go buy carrots and the shopping cart either works or it doesn't work, because at that point, if the shopping cart works, they're gonna buy it. If the shopping cart doesn't work, if it crashes or something happens, then they'll go to the other grocery store and go buy the carrots elsewhere. And so the pandemic has absolutely forced so much more online than was ever there before. And so then as you evolve, all of a sudden you see there's so much more activity. And what does that activity really mean?

(John at 00:10:19) And you can almost see it most on your cell phone, is the network traffic. And so we talked about monitoring the application, but it's like monitoring the network traffic. How much is coming through? Is it a security issue where you got too much, somebody's trying to beat you up with a denial of service attack? Or is it just regular traffic that's trying to come in and do e-commerce shopping? And so, I will say one of the things was we talked about the monitoring and different aspects of monitoring.

(John at 00:10:51) All of a sudden you can start at one area, let's say it's server monitoring, then you get into application monitoring. Part of it could be actually network monitoring. And bringing that one, simplifying it, is actually what gets me excited. If you get a big customer, again, where they know they need these solutions, they need the help, it's gonna help them from a performance standpoint, it's gonna help them to make sure things are much more reliable, but it's also gonna help them from totally a security standpoint, right?

(John at 00:11:24) As you're watching that traffic coming in, trying to get into your house, making sure you've got the right traffic coming in versus something you don't want. But having the reliability and managing it all, and I'll go back to what I was saying, and then trying to make it easy, where you can actually show somebody something, hey, look what we did. We made your life a lot easier, made your network a lot more accessible to your customers. We also made it more secure for the people that you don't want accessing your network.

(John at 00:11:53) And we've made that happen in two weeks, three weeks, a month. It's not a six-month project. It's not a two-year project. It's not a big, we're interested in helping to make it happen and happen quickly. I love the pictures of that Staples Easy Button.

(John at 00:12:15) You know, it's just like go. And in the world of IT with a lot of these big consulting companies, they're not about to go. They want to give you the big manuals, and they want their consultant to stay there for the next five years and, because they got a P&L and all that kind of stuff. We just want to make sure that the software works, that you're really happy. And if we know that you're happy and it comes alive quick, then you'll come back and we'll be fine. And that's a big part of, you know, what we do and how we are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:47) Is the DX NetOps, is that your product for network monitoring?

(John at 00:12:52) It is. The DX NetOps by Broadcom is also a couple of different products kind of brought together. And the interesting thing is there's all kinds of network, different communications. If you want to go full nerd, right, there's, like, you know, different kinds of network packets from all these different solutions and different ways to slice it up. And what Broadcom really has done with the DX NetOps is to kind of bring it all together in one umbrella to make it easy to put together, easy to, you know, and intuitive to then understand the information.

(John at 00:13:28) And that really has kind of gone just unbelievable leaps and bounds over the last couple of years with that solution all by itself. The fun thing I will say about Broadcom, and Broadcom's a different kind of company. They're new to the software business from the last couple of years. And their philosophy is very much of let's put forth the best product possible. And I know for a fact they spend more on R&D than anybody will, you know, of their size or related to them.

(John at 00:14:04) But put the best product forward and the customers will embrace it, they'll use it more, and they'll have more customers purely by word of mouth than anything else they could do as if they had a massive sales team and stuff like that. They put the money back into the product more so than anybody else I've ever worked with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:25) So you have a number of different products and services, but is your sales team mostly focused on DX NetOps?

(John at 00:14:32) You know what? No. That's a great question. So as we go back, we have really significant and expert knowledge in a wide suite of solutions.

(John at 00:14:59) You know, and people definitely have a certain focus, whether it's application testing and those solutions. We definitely have some great experts in the security space, and there's a number of different products there. And, you know, even we gotta go back to the enterprise project management, right? So our account directors can talk at a high level across the suite of solutions. But I will say because they have done more in the enterprise monitoring space or what's called AIOps. I don't know why they call it that. Someone dreamed it up. But anyhow, I'll call it enterprise monitoring.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:27) It sounds good.

(John at 00:15:28) You know, so as they deal a lot with that, then they can talk to it very, very well. And then they always bring in, you know, one of our senior experts to help facilitate the deep dive questions that are necessary. But the beautiful thing about the account directors is they can talk to a wide range of solutions that kind of also help you to understand or say, if you just want this piece, this is how it fits in with everything else you got going on. And, oh, by the way, if you need something else, we can talk about those at any point in the cycle. So they really do have a good knowledge across a wide range of solutions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:15) In my research, I saw that, I like to know about the guests before I have them on, I saw you're the president, but I didn't understand or know that you're the founder, correct?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:24) Yeah. That's cool. All right, cool. So I love it when I get to talk to other entrepreneurs, right?

(John at 00:16:28) Come on. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:29) And so I've got some questions for you from the entrepreneurial perspective. So how does your lead generation and sales process work given your different products and services?

(John at 00:16:45) So this goes all back to the thing that you brought up first and foremost, is the strong relationship. So once we have a customer, the philosophy really is, and this is not new, the easiest customer is the one you already have. And, you know, so as we're working with the customer and we're building a strong relationship with them because they trust us, we've done a great job for them, they now trust us to do other things. So as they go from, say, server monitoring to network monitoring, say they want to talk about security, right? We have the experts that can come in and talk to those things. You know, people that have also worked with the Fortune 50 or the Fortune 200, you know, have great experience, tons of experience, and can kind of talk to them.

(John at 00:17:35) And also without pressure, right? We don't have sales quotas, so it's not critical that somebody buys on a Tuesday. Really, our goal is we just do consultative sales. We're going to inform you. Here's what we know. Tell us if this fits, if it doesn't fit, and then we'll go forward, or we'll tell you if it fits or if it doesn't fit. There might be some times where it's too big a solution, or you're trying to do something that's unique that this really doesn't do. We're not then going to force a round peg into a square hole. And that all by itself builds trust because we're not forced by deadlines or quotas or anything else like that. It's all about having that trusted relationship with the customer and going from there. And from that, we get great word of mouth, whether it's in the area or similar type companies and stuff like that.

(John at 00:18:37) We also do a really good job of working with the sales and marketing team at Broadcom as a partner. As we work with them, it goes back to our relationship with them is very strong, and we're also one of the few trusted partners that they turn to. So right now, we've got one of the top certifications. We're in this new program called the Expert Partner Advantage Program, where they have a handful of global service providers that they trust will go out and make their software products come alive.

(John at 00:19:22) And we do that. And we pride ourselves in being one of the top companies with one of the most certifications and just really to prove ourselves outwardly. But then when we get in there, we know we're going to get the job done, whatever it takes. And what that does is that builds that relationship, not only for today, but for the long term. And it's all about that long-term trust. At the end of the day, we will take care of y'all. And then I smile, right? And then they come back and they're like, here, I got another customer. They need your help. And oh, by the way, can you do it in two weeks? And they need you to start tomorrow. I'm like, really? Really? Okay, let's go. And I'll go back to, I love the way you started the whole conversation around strong relationships.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:10) Yeah. So how do you get the first relationships? Does Broadcom give you leads? So if I go to Broadcom trying to buy their product, you're listed as one of their people that I can buy it through?

(John at 00:20:20) Yeah, absolutely. And in certain cases, sometimes they have their own marketing company. People send in requests, and oftentimes they'll divert the request to us. Or people can come to us directly, for sure, right? We have our own sales at anisolutions.com to look at the various solutions. Go to our website and we talk about the various solutions and services that we offer. But more often than not, it really is somebody that has a need that all of a sudden became a little bit more urgent for whatever reason, and somebody else is pointing them to us saying, hey, I've got a problem. I've got to get it resolved today. Maybe a security issue. The network went down for 30 minutes and they lost a million dollars in sales. They need something fixed, or maybe it wasn't configured right. So we've got to bring in one of our experts to say, okay, make these four changes. More often than not, it's really that time where somebody needs some critical help and somebody says, go talk to ANI. They'll get you taken care of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:34) Those 10 years I was doing the app agency and that type of thing, that's what I sort of specialized in unintentionally. And so it goes to show you about talking about strong relationships, right? When an emergency happens or some big need occurs and arises, you don't necessarily go to Google to search. You go to the people you trust on the topic and you call them up and you talk it out with them, and then they'll point you in the direction because they eat, sleep, and breathe it, right? Typically. So I totally get that. It was just as you were talking, I was thinking about that. I was like, yeah, all the marketing in the world—you can do marketing and awareness, people know who you are, right, so you're a familiar brand. But those relationships and those emergencies are the things that have driven incredible amounts of business. Is 40% of your business referral business?

(John at 00:22:28) I would say it's probably closer to 70%. Yeah, it really has been, which is great, right? But absolutely to your point, if somebody has a critical need, we will pick up the phone and help them that day. And we think that that's just good karma, goodwill. They'll probably come back and do business with us nine times out of 10. If they don't, that's okay too, right? Because we've helped somebody that also probably got that phone call as well. Hey, do you have a friend that can help us out? They're like, yes, call ANI. So now we've taken care of a couple of people in that chain. But it's all goodwill.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:15) So you guys had mentioned in the notes here something about a Gartner report. Can you tell me about that?

(John at 00:23:23) Yeah, absolutely. So the beautiful thing, and this kind of goes back to Broadcom and them being a good partner, right? So we don't make the software. We sell the software and we service the software. We help to make sure that it works. It works for the customer situation, and it's really solid. Gartner is one of these services that goes out and evaluates the software that's out there for all the companies to look at and choose from and stuff like that. CIOs, IT professionals use it. So as Gartner goes out and rates DX NetOps, they see that one, for core functionality of what is it doing, it does a great job, and this is what it says. But then it also has the idea or it shows that the DX NetOps solution has a vision for the future. And nowadays, everybody is trying to get into, how do you do more and more automation? How do you take care of the data that you're getting from all these different sources, right? I'm monitoring my server, I'm monitoring the network, I'm monitoring my phones, I'm monitoring my video and audio because I'm doing more and more of these type recordings. I'm monitoring my applications. And within the Broadcom solutions, they have the idea of the data lake, right? How do you bring that together? And then how do you also then take that information to better predict when you might fail so we can avoid it?

(John at 00:25:06) And so if you can get into that failure avoidance and the predictability, which is beyond—right, so right off the bat, everything's manual. Alarms go off, things go down, you're losing money, right? That's terrible. You get into automation, which then says, hey, things went down, but I restarted it, and so I only lost a little bit of money, which still means I lost money. And then you get into predictability, which says if these three things happen, then something's going to go wrong. So with the predictability, you're like, well, I need to spin up another server. I need to spin up another load balancer for gateway or network monitoring and making sure everything's seamless. That really is the evolution. Now that part, I don't think is an easy button for day one or day five, but it's part of that future where you're really kind of thinking bigger about how do I make everything that I'm doing more manageable. So, for example, if you're working with Bank of America or Wells Fargo or Disney, where they're doing a ton of video streaming and stuff like that, everybody's dealing nowadays with so much data.

(John at 00:26:22) So much data is going over the network. It's sound, it's video, it's big data chunks, it's images, it's NFTs, it's whatever you can possibly think of. And now all of a sudden, it's on a complex network. Part of it's going to the cloud of Amazon, to the cloud of Microsoft, to the cloud of Google, or it could be in your own backyard because you've got three servers at the headquarters of Disney. Or what actually is really probably happening is they're using all four of them to some degree, and you're trying to manage it. And so how you're doing that today, there's a lot of different tools and a lot of different things going on. But with Broadcom, the idea is bring it all back into one single pane of glass, make it easy to see, and then make it so you can evolve it for predictability. And what this also does is it makes sure you don't have to have a team of 100 network engineers. Then maybe you can get by with 25 because you need more developers that are developing content for the end users that is glitz and glammy and helps them to grow and sell more. That's the beautiful thing as we go back to Gartner rating the Broadcom products, knowing that these are world-class solutions built to scale, built to be highly reliable for the federal government, the Fortune 500, but also making it accessible, say, to the Fortune 2000 or the Fortune 5000.

(John at 00:28:01) So as you got a company that's growing and you know you've got a lot going on and you need something that brings it all together, the Broadcom solutions can do that. And the DX NetOps is absolutely one of those that does it very cleanly, as well as anybody else that's out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:21) Yeah, it makes your job easy, right?

(John at 00:28:22) If you

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:22) have to sell and support something, you might as well sell and support the best possible product in the world.

(John at 00:28:28) And it actually works. And I've got a ton of customers. We've worked with over 500 customers, and they've—not all of them do DX NetOps, right? But it's worked, and they have it, and they've stuck with it. And now when they're with Broadcom, they can see that the future enhancement requests are coming in a little bit more frequently, right? The product stability and reliability is absolutely there. As again, we're working with a big retailer based out of Pennsylvania, and they attribute this solution to really be one of their foundational IT products to monitoring the network and really as it relates going back to the pandemic, that they've gotten more traffic, more activity, but has also had more reliability, more uptime, and lost fewer sales than ever before. And they're able to attribute it back to the NetOps suite of products.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:41) Are you currently remote or in office?

(John at 00:29:45) You know what? We are remote by design, and this is actually pre-pandemic. So when everything happened, everybody just closed their offices. We were already there. We're a company really focused on knowledge, skill, expertise rather than location. So we've got people really all over the country and all over the world. And as we bring in top talent that have tons of customer experience as well as product experience. So everybody's remote. And we've had a pretty clean and seamless transition into the post-pandemic world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:32) Yeah. It's crazy.

(John at 00:30:34) It is crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:35) I was just thinking for some reason, the thought just popped into my head, and we can cut whatever we want, especially maybe this because it might be divisive. But we're entrepreneurs, and so we cannot stick our head in the sand when it comes to things like federal mandates for vaccinations. We have to think about them to some degree, especially as the companies are growing. And the thought that just popped into my head was a new one. It's if I have employees that are foreign citizens, they're over here on either a work visa or they live in another country. How could one country mandate another country's citizen to get a vaccine? I wonder what the regulations—I don't think they've released anything yet, really. They've just kind of announced.

(John at 00:31:17) You know, this is interesting. We have employees in India and Israel. And first and foremost is we really kind of kept tabs on everybody. And so from a company perspective, with the pandemic, one of the things we really mandated is that people would come on on video, right, so you can see their facial expressions, so you can see when they smile, when their eyes light up, and stuff like that. We really think that's a key important ingredient in the company culture to try to be together because people by nature, I think, just want to be together. And then for us, we just want everybody to be safe. And so, like me, I'm fully vaccinated. I respect that there's some people that aren't. It's like one of our employees was pregnant, so there's still some times of uncertainty.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:11) But doctors say when they're pregnant not to do it. Yeah.

(John at 00:32:15) Well, yeah. And so people have to be able to make their own informed decisions. We really want to support them. But I also totally believe that as a world almost, people need to be vaccinated. And because I do know, and we have just started doing this, is we've started to kind of go visit some of our customers. Even the customers, for the most part, won't let you in their office. We don't have any offices because everybody's working remote. But we believe that there is a need for a personal touch, right, just to go say hi. And so we've done that a couple times over the past six months. And, you meet for lunch or you meet for a dinner or something casual. And, you know, it's interesting. I don't think we really have—we've talked about the need for vaccinations. I also have a very clear idea from my own team as to who's vaccinated, who's not. But it's not something that we've actually mandated. We're still a small company. Again, the vast majority of the people are working remote individually. Their team activity is really over video. So we haven't had that need. But I respect some of the other companies that are large, everybody's coming into the office or returning to the work environment. For example, I just flew home on Delta the other day. I would hope that everybody that is, you know, is vaccinated, right? That would reduce any of my chances of getting sick. But I don't know. Strange, strange topic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:01) It really is. Yeah. But it's coming up and people have to talk about it. It's just going to be a part of life more and more now. Employees are demanding that their employers take stance on political issues. It's something I just started thinking about recently, and wondering, I'm going to do a series of interviews with some different companies, figuring out how do they address that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:25) What does it actually look like in practice? So far, the feedback I've gotten is that it's less of like the company standing up and putting a press release out saying we support like this political initiative. And it's more of leaders coming together with their teams and regardless of what their perspectives are, just having discourse, talking it out and allowing each other to see each other's perspectives and share. And I think that clears the air when you do that. Because I can respect people that have different views than me. I do it all day, right?

(John at 00:35:00) You know, and I got to say, so we actually kind of embrace a culture of open communication. We do these almost like a daily water cooler. And we get into part of our, you know, just to talk. And then we definitely have monthly sessions on communication, right? Different people have different styles. Somebody's a little bit louder, somebody's a little softer. You know, how do you listen? How do you be heard?

(John at 00:35:34) How do you not be afraid to talk? You know, this kind of comes back to trying to empower people and getting them to put forth ideas and listening and trying things like that. But going back, my step on that was really back to the open communication. And as we do these water cooler times, it's also a good time to talk about other topics outside of IT and let everybody kind of say their peace, right?

(John at 00:36:08) Now you go back to, again, the vaccination. Right? I truly believe that everybody should be vaccinated, but I also understand that there's some edge cases where you might not be comfortable. You're like, okay, I need another six months of testing or whatever, right? You know, the FDA just finally approved it, I don't know, a couple weeks ago. That to me was a huge step, and that should have made more people open to getting things done, right? But back to your point is I'm all about just, you know, people being inclusive and understanding. And you get your job done, right? That's number one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:43) Yeah. And I actually think nobody disagrees on, I'll share this, it's going to sound weird. I think that nobody disagrees on that we need vaccinations, like as a people, right? As a human race, right? We need vaccinations, right? There is some things. It's similar to like the abortion conversation where it all boils down to severity or timeframe, right? Like everybody agrees killing babies is bad, right? It always comes down to just these really close details. And it's like the political sphere is literally split based off of like, what's a pregnancy? I don't know, thirty-six weeks or so. I could be wrong.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:30) But like, it comes down to this timeframe and same thing I believe with the vaccinations. It's not like that people say that we shouldn't have vaccinations. I think they're disagreeing on the gradient of severity. That's where people disagree. They'll say that it's not severe enough to warrant the vaccination. Cause I guarantee you if like smallpox and polio broke out, people would be standing in line for those vaccinations.

(John at 00:37:57) I mean, and that goes back to that's part of the, you know, early mandate is, you know, kids when you're three, you get a polio shot, you get a measles shot, and you're done with it, right? And so is this the same kind of thing? And what I guess what everybody's finding out is the answer is yes, right?

(John at 00:38:16) Now, you know, at what point do you do the vaccination, and how do you catch everybody up, and does everybody need to be caught up? And, you know, there's this whole, I think we got this whole time frame where the personal choice discussion is very, very relevant. You know, like, if you're a body, if you're a world-class athlete, right, do you, is that your, this goes back to severity, right? The chances of you catching it and dying from it are really, really, really tiny. But, you know, if you're older and got a few extra pounds and you smoke cigarettes or whatever those things are, then it goes up. And those people, right, they shouldn't be fighting it at all, no matter what political background or belief or anything else it is.

(John at 00:39:09) So that's why I say, and this kind of goes back to your point. I think we have this window where, you know, there's gonna be this, do I need to get it? I've already gotten sick. There's some open questions. But I think more like your polio and measles, at some point, everybody's gonna get stuck when they're born, you know, or after six months. And that might be a year or two away, but that's a whole other thing of what's going on today versus what's best for society long term. And the answer is you gotta get vaccinated, especially when they have all these mutations and variations. It's not going to go away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:50) Let's talk a little bit about culture. As we were talking about culture earlier, I made a quick note because you caused a story to pop up in my head.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:00) But yeah, so when we were talking about culture, I was thinking about this interview I did with this woman named Joyce Mullen. And she's at, she's like the president of a company called Insight. And I think they do everything from like digital strategy to focus on cloud, digital transformation, data transformation, things like that. And she had a bunch of great leadership advice on the episode. But the best advice that I remember from her was she had this concept called paint the bathrooms.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:28) And the context of that is early in her career, she was managing a manufacturing floor, right? And the advice that she had gotten was to literally paint those bathrooms that the environment was just a little bit nicer for her employees. The subtext is you do little things for your employees, keeps them happy, encouraged, engaged at work, right. So I was curious, you know, you're a leader, you're an entrepreneur, you're a business owner. What are the little things that you do for your employees at your company?

(John at 00:41:01) I try to do the little things. And really over the last couple of years, we've tried to make it less ad hoc and more of a program, right? Just simple things on recognizing birthdays and anniversaries, right? So we've got, we now have one in the group on a birthday will send out a little poem about this person, right? And so everybody laughs and everybody gets engaged. And it's a great way to not only recognize somebody on their birthday, right, and they get a gift card and stuff.

(John at 00:41:45) But it's, you know, it's getting the company kind of involved. You know, it's not like we all came together and sang happy birthday, but it's like people can kind of follow up on it and engage. I'm a flower guy, love flowers. And so occasionally like once a quarter just send everybody a flower or a plant or something. And then the other one that really is resonating more and more as people are doing more and more work is figuring out a way to celebrate success. For the sales team, it's always really easy because they get a sale and they won. Right? It's a win-loss kind of thing, and you can celebrate that. But it's how do you do it with the other people?

(John at 00:42:32) How do you do it with the consultants, the developers, the people that are in support, right? If you're in support, you more often hear about the bad than the good. So you got to go back to, you know, what is the good, right? Has your customer satisfaction rate over 90%? Yeah, that's great, right? Did somebody just give you an attaboy email? Like, oh my gosh, you just saved my day. You were able to solve the problem in an hour, not three days, right?

(John at 00:43:04) And so that is really a key aspect, is to make sure that you find something to celebrate with the people because everybody's working hard. There's absolutely no doubt. Love the team. There's no doubt that I love the people that we have, but just being able to recognize that they're out there doing a good job when you see it and celebrate it and also get the others to celebrate with you. It's not totally a one-on-one. I want everybody to know, man, she just did a great job and we got three more customers that are happier and we think this is just the start of things that are even going to get better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:50) How does that celebrate? At our company, the celebration often happens in Slack, like our office team channel. We'll celebrate little successes there. We come together quarterly and we'll have like a dinner or something like that. We'll fly everyone in and we'll celebrate there. What does celebration look like at your company?

(John at 00:44:08) You know, so you mentioned Slack. That's absolutely one of the vehicles for sales. We've actually got it integrated from Salesforce to Slack. So if somebody does a win, it sends up some balloons, yeah, and then we go. So the other areas are much more manual, but it really is kind of in that team set. It's in the open channel for everybody to then respond to with the expectation that everybody does respond.

(John at 00:44:37) And then we do weekly newsletters. So we also, again, back to the strong relationships, we like to celebrate our successes that we're doing, not only internal, but with our partner and the people that we're working with on a daily basis over there. And so that's more in the form of like a newsletter or an email to make sure we got proper recognition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:03) Excellent. Excellent. We've got like about four minutes here to wrap up because I want to be respectful of your hard stop at four. Is there anything that we didn't discuss that we want to? We definitely need to do a call to action to tell people to go to your website and learn more, but is there anything we didn't touch on that we need to get out there?

(John at 00:45:22) You know, so Kammy gave me three pages of notes. I'm not sure what. I think you've done a great job of guiding me through a lot of that. I will say we're just having a lot of fun. And I don't know what's going on right now, but I feel like we've had the best customers ever in fact of the people that we like to do work with. It's just made everything easier. And so the Broadcom partnership has literally been second to none for us in a way that they've supported us, technically with sales, with a good product. And then our team, you know, is, one, it's growing. But, two, the people within the team are also growing. People are taking on like more responsibility, doing more.

(John at 00:46:19) They're also coming up with more ideas, and I see more smiles than I've ever seen before. So, I mean, we absolutely love taking care of the customer. And, you know, again, I'll go back to your very first statement, resonates very strongly with us around strong relationships.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:37) So people that hear that, right, and they're attracted to that, maybe they were considering doing something with a Broadcom product and then they hear you talking about it and maybe they buy it through you. How would they go about doing that?

(John at 00:46:50) You know, so they would absolutely first go to our website, right, at anisolutions.com. And there's a link there for sales. And with that, you would get right into to me and my team. And you would find that we are unbelievably responsive to talk to you, have a conversation, and see how we can help. And do it with a smile.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:18) 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.