Kyle McKenna, Manager Enterprise Technology at Cars.com - Building IT From the Ground Up

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today we're talking to Kyle, the manager of enterprise technology at Cars.com. And we discuss what it's been like for Kyle building the IT department from the ground up, how he's utilized JumpCloud to manage the ever-growing amount of laptops and desktops at the organization, and the value of adding a personal touch to online communication. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Kyle at 00:00:35) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:36) This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Kyle at 00:00:47) After college, I wasn't 100% sure what I wanted to do. I did kind of the early track of doing the community college jam for a couple of years and then go to a state school for a couple of years after I was a little bit more decided on what I wanted to do. So after college, I got sucked into Apple retail. Not to say that Apple retail is a bad place to work or anything, but I did pretty much everything you could do at an Apple store except for management track stuff. That was just something I wasn't interested in. But Apple was a really fun place to work and made some awesome connections there. But I still had a passion for video production. And as you're probably familiar with, like, video and audio production, like, the professional world, it's really hard to find a stable job in that industry. But I leveraged my tech skills and my video production skills, and I worked at a very large post-production house and production house in Chicago for about four years where I was an in-house engineer. So I oversaw all the Mac setups there. And then anytime there was a TV commercial shoot, you know, some really small budgets, some really big budget, I'd be on set either as a technical resource on the bigger budget shoots, and I could be doing something like operating camera on the lower budget shoots. So I did that for about four years and then got bored and moved to the suburbs and decided I didn't want to make that commute anymore to downtown Chicago. So I found a job at this company called Dealer Inspire where I have been for the past two and a half years or so. Dealer Inspire, you know, we make websites for auto dealers. And Dealer Inspire was acquired by Cars.com a year before I was hired there. And kind of from there, I don't want to say the rest is history, but I now oversee all of IT support for the entire organization, Cars.com and Dealer Inspire. So it's been a challenging road to get where I am today, but it's been a fun ride for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:27) That's really cool. So would you say you're more classically trained in video production or in IT operations?

(Kyle at 00:03:36) I've definitely made a career pivot to not doing video production stuff anymore. It's a lot of long, long days with that kind of stuff, and I pretty quickly learned that I actually did not want to do it. So for anybody out there listening that is wanting to get into video production, I'm not saying it's not for you, but definitely, you know, find an internship somewhere where you can actually be on-site and see, make sure that that is something that you want to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:05) Yeah. That's something that I've thought about a lot, is that there's absolutely career paths out there to make a career out of creative pursuits, like video production or audio production, and stuff in general. Creative stuff, you can absolutely make a career out of it if you really, really actually love the craft itself, and not necessarily the content you're making. Because there's always work in boring creative stuff.

(Kyle at 00:04:38) Yep. I'm going to bite my tongue on that one, but yes, you are right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:43) And but that's the thing. Like, if you do really truly love the craft itself, you can absolutely find a really fulfilling career and job. And there's always opportunities where you can get really lucky and be working on something that the content's super fun and the process is super fun. But yeah, that's something that I've thought about a lot in my career, and I got lucky finding this podcast that I actually thoroughly enjoy and was able to use my production skills on.

(Kyle at 00:05:17) Yeah. No, that's awesome that you were able to find that. And, yeah, you know, there's definitely a big difference between being the kid in grade school and middle school that has a video camera that knows how to use iMovie and actually taking those skills and putting them up on a professional level to help with making TV commercials or commercials for the web.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:44) I'm curious. When you joined Dealer Inspire, what was the size of the company about?

(Kyle at 00:05:50) So when I joined Dealer Inspire in 2019, March 2019, they had about 600 or so employees, if I remember correctly. And they have just been in a constant state of growth ever since then, which, you know, is a great problem to have. So, yeah, I'll leave it at that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:13) Yeah. That's crazy. What was, what would you say was some of the biggest challenges that you personally came up against with that scaling?

(Kyle at 00:06:22) So when I was hired, they actually did not have an IT person, let alone an IT department.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:31) At 600?

(Kyle at 00:06:33) At 600. It's kind of one of those, they grew from, and if my CEO ever listens to this, I'm probably botching the numbers, but they grew from in 2016 from about 50 or so employees to about 600 employees in a few years. And sometimes those back-end support roles kind of get left in the dust or forgotten about when it comes to growing a company when you're focused on other facets of the job. But the company started as a digital marketing company called Launch Digital Marketing. And from there, one of the clients that they had was a dealership down the street, and they made the dealership website. And, I mean, I can say the rest is history for that one. So the marketing company is still alive and well, but Dealer Inspire is now the crown jewel, if you will. And now we're, I want to say we're a little over 800 employees now. So we've added about another 200 employees in the last two and a half years since I started. But coming into a company that didn't have an IT person and my background at the post-production house that I worked at, we definitely had some control over the computers and I had some ideas, but we didn't have a ticketing system or anything like that in my last job. So I kind of came in, I don't want to say flying blind, but I also kind of had full control to do support however I wanted to do support. There wasn't some person that was like, hey, welcome to the IT department, only IT person, here's how we do things kind of thing. It was kind of like, hey, you're here, can you do all this stuff for us now? So, yeah, I guess one of the reasons that drew me to the organization was they were all Macs. And for the most part, Dealer Inspire is still all Macs. There's like 1% Windows machines and 3% Linux machines, but it's still mostly an all-Mac organization. Just with there not being an IT presence, it was pretty much, you know, someone from a department in the company would go out to the Apple Store and buy computers and have them ready for that next week's new batch of hires. So that was a huge challenge for me and my team that we accomplished in the last year, was to get everything managed, which we utilized JumpCloud for that after doing research on a couple different vendors. And we had some other problems and things going on that, you know, it seemed that one-stop shop JumpCloud could solve all those issues for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:40) That's really cool. Yeah. That's actually how we got connected because a little while ago, we had Greg Keller, the CTO of JumpCloud, on the podcast. But can you tell me a little bit more about what your relationship was like with JumpCloud?

(Kyle at 00:09:54) Yeah. As far as why we went with JumpCloud, they are kind of an all-in-one, like, directory-as-a-service solution. Because it was about a year ago, we were kind of shopping different vendors for things like SSO, cloud directory, device management type stuff, and we kind of wanted all that in one place, ideally. But we were doing our homework, and JumpCloud at the time definitely had a decent amount of device management things, but definitely not to the extent that some other MDM services like Jamf have. But one thing that we noticed during our, I guess, free trial period with them is that they were really keen to listen and add features and listen to customer feedback at a pace that I don't think I'd ever seen before while we were evaluating them. So we determined that they were the right choice for us. And I think it was last fall, we kind of started the process to get about a thousand people to install these clients on their Mac computers. And there's a very small percentage of people out there in the world that get excited about software. So it was hard for me to get a company excited to install software that they had no idea what it was going to do, if you will. So for about a week and a half straight, every day, I held these JumpCloud install webinars where I would get people to register for them, and I would kind of walk them through the install process. Because, overall, it's pretty easy to install it on the computer. We just didn't have a means of installing it for them, like, under the hood, if that makes sense. So I held these webinars to help people get things installed and also, you know, hang back for anybody who is having issues getting it installed. And then from there, it was a matter of doing tedious cross-checking on employee lists and stuff to make sure everybody had it installed. But kind of from there, after we got the client installed, I worked with some folks at JumpCloud to help me with the binding procedure because it's kind of a, for anybody that has their devices in their organization bound to a user's identity, you know that there's a process to install the client, and then there's another process to actually bind it to either their active directory account or, in this case, their JumpCloud account. So I work with folks at JumpCloud to help us with that step because on the Macs, there is a, like, account takeover process where you need to figure out what the name of the home folder is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:11) Oh, yeah. Yeah.

(Kyle at 00:13:12) In our environment, I'd probably say 80 to 85% of our Macs have a first name, last name home folder convention. But, you know, a lot of the developer types out there or just other people that know what they're doing, you know, would change their computer names to just be their first name or their dog's name or something like that. And we obviously didn't want to bind a new account that they had to use and kind of start fresh. We wanted this to be as non-intrusive as possible. So JumpCloud offered this account takeover process where we just have to fill their home folder field on their user profile and then do a couple other things, and then it's good. But they were actually able to script it out for us, which was nice. So we did those in batches of 20 to 30 a day for about nine weeks until we got to 100%. So that was fun because the other challenge is a lot of the employees didn't know what their, quote, SSO passwords were, because in an unmanaged world, you could just make your computer the space bar five times if you wanted to. So for people's computer passwords to be changed to what their SSO passwords were was challenging because we definitely had to do some troubleshooting getting some locked-out users back into their computers. But now that we've been fully using them for a while, we are still really enjoying our relationship with JumpCloud.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:01) Nice. So you have a team now, correct? You're not the only IT guy anymore?

(Kyle at 00:15:07) Yeah. So Cars.com had their own IT department. We had some personnel changes back in 2020 right after COVID hit, and they lost some good folks. So in the fall last year, we decided to kind of combine forces. So as far as my team that supports an organization of 1,600, it's myself and three others.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:34) Okay. Cool. Yeah. That's, I mean, wow. That still sounds like a lot for that amount of people. I was going to say that sounds insane if it was just you.

(Kyle at 00:15:43) Yeah. No, I've, we've got my team of three people and then we have some other engineers that were huge help in getting all that up and running as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:53) Awesome. Yeah. I've been there actually with installing on lots of computers that you can't just push it out to. A while ago, I worked at a college where, between semesters, we had to update all of the computers in multiple computer labs. And there's a list of different programs that all needed updates. And it all had to happen manually. So that was just grind labor of a team of five people just going through, sitting at each computer for 15 minutes a pop, getting all the downloads going. And then you go back and check through and find all the ones that failed and redo those until you're finally done. And it's like, man, yeah, that's, I feel a little envious that you're able to instruct people to do it rather than do it manually. But also, so are you able to now, now that you have JumpCloud on all these computers, are you able to push out updates yourself and not have to worry about that?

(Kyle at 00:16:57) As far as granular control over OS updates, that is a feature that we are not able to do in JumpCloud. But, apparently, having more granular control over operating system versions is something that's on the roadmap for Q3, Q4, at least according to their most recent webinar that they had put on. So, yeah, we can block people from updating to the latest and greatest Apple OS and Windows OS. But right now, we don't have ways of forcing people to be on a minimum OS, if that makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:34) Right. Right.

(Kyle at 00:17:35) And there's, you know, there's a lot of people in the organization that are big tech enthusiasts and always want to be on the latest and greatest. And then there's people on the opposite end of the spectrum that we ran into that were still running Sierra, which was 10.12, which, you know, hasn't been getting security updates for two years now. So there were fun problems that we ran into with getting JumpCloud installed on all the computers with some people saying, oh, it doesn't want to install. Well, okay. You're running Sierra. Let's get that operating system updated first.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:10) Yeah. I don't know. I think I actually fall a little bit into the bucket of the people you don't like. I'm always afraid that it's going to break some of my audio programs and stuff.

(Kyle at 00:18:21) Yeah. You probably have several pieces of hardware plugged into your computer right now, and that talks to the specific versions of Pro Tools or something like that on your computer. And, yeah, I totally get that being frozen in time when everything works. You're just, you know, going to leave things how they are kind of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:40) Just happy it works.

(Kyle at 00:18:42) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:44) I do definitely want to get those security updates, which I haven't been getting for a little while. But I actually, one thing I wanted to ask you about was, so a little while ago, we had on this guy Syed from a company called Brinca, and they're in the cybersecurity space. And their company is actually really cool. It's like this platform that just gives you a 360-degree view of your strengths and weaknesses in terms of cybersecurity and all the information that you need to act on that and be a more secure company. But the one thing he was talking about a lot was how it's really challenging to build a one-size-fits-all solution to really anything. And so when you're making these decisions that affect the user experience for 1,600 employees, I'm just curious, how do you go about getting feedback from the employees and trying to make everyone happy with their computer situation?

(Kyle at 00:19:46) That is a very good question. When it comes to rolling out new enterprise tools or security things, we definitely do a test with a small subset of users just to see what that experience looks like. And now that we have JumpCloud, we are able to push out software under the hood very easily and very quickly. I mean, I can deploy a new piece of software to 1,600 machines in a matter of seconds, granted if they're online.

(Kyle at 00:20:18) And once we build that command out in JumpCloud, but it's the end user experience that I'm always concerned with because, you know, even if I can push it out and it gets 95% installed on their machine, but it requires the user to log in to something or click here then here, then now it becomes a project for our team to babysit that process and make sure that it's properly installed on all the computers. Communication is pretty key in staying in touch with your end users. I hate to—I don't want to say I hate to say this, but we use Slack and we use email. And I'm pretty vocal in our company announcements channels and doing simple things like using emojis and GIFs. People really relate to that.

(Kyle at 00:21:19) And as reverse engineering as that is possible, like, you know, you need to install this extremely important tool that's required kind of a messaging, throw a GIF in there, and all of a sudden, a huge chunk of the population actually pays attention to the post, and you get much higher feedback, participation, if you will. So being able to make things as easy as possible for your end users and also being able to relate or talk to them more. I'd say Cars and Dealer Inspire as a whole, on average, is probably on the younger side of things. So they probably like the GIFs and emojis and things like that a little bit more than maybe some other organizations do. But, you know, I think when most people think of an IT department, you know, one of the things that comes to mind is the classic IT Crowd, where, you know, they're sitting in a basement with no windows, and they just kind of sit there and they tell people to reboot their computers.

(Kyle at 00:22:31) But I kind of like being the opposite of that. I—our offices are optionally open right now, and people are going in. But I kind of like being the mayor, spokesperson of the company and being out in the street and shaking people's hands and kissing babies and stuff like that. So that way, you know, when it comes time for me to ask people to do something for me, they'll remember at one time that I shook their hand and kissed their baby, and they'll be like, oh, yeah. That Kyle guy, he was pretty cool.

(Kyle at 00:23:07) I'll do this for him. Yeah. Or something like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:11) That's awesome, man. And I feel like that's such a good, actionable kind of answer for operating in the remote world. Like, it's not always that complicated. Just throw in some GIFs. Throw in some emojis.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:24) People like it. That actually kind of makes me think of something I do at our company. Weekly we give a production update of all the stuff we made and all the stuff that went out that week because we do a lot here. And I always go out of my way to, you know, take a shot of espresso before the meeting starts, be really excited, and kind of try to get everyone jacked up for the production team because that—I mean, it makes our salespeople feel better about what they're selling. They're excited about it. It makes our production team feel recognized and like they're having a good time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:01) And, yeah, it's just important to kind of give that human touch to everything you do, especially when it's coming through via a Slack message and you hear that shing. You're like, oh, man. What is that? What do I have to look at right now? Oh, oh, it's a funny GIF.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:18) Nice. Thanks, IT guy.

(Kyle at 00:24:21) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:24) I want to ask, before we wrap up, I want to ask just a couple kind of leadership questions. So you said you lead a small team of three people there. And I think a lot of time on the podcast, we tend to kind of focus more on the leadership style and lessons around leading larger teams. But I think there's probably a lot higher quantity of managers out there that are leading smaller teams. So I'd love to get into that a little bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:55) How do you describe your personal approach to leadership at your company?

(Kyle at 00:25:00) I like my team because this is how I learned along my way at the organization. And I like my team to learn the hard way or getting thrown in the fire, if you will. I feel like learning from experience is the best way to learn. I mean, my mom would probably tell you that's how I learned things growing up. It's like, you know, see, you don't light leaves on fire inside of a jar and expect to still be able to hold on to it kind of a thing without gloves on or something.

(Kyle at 00:25:38) But it's like I learned the hard way a lot. There's a huge story behind that, by the way. But that's kind of how I learned growing up, and I've kind of applied that to my—I still, that is how I learn to this day, where it's like, I've definitely, in my past, pushed out a piece of software to half the org that they got presented with a pop-up that I had no idea they were going to get that pop-up. And now I have 300 people pinging me on Slack saying, what the heck is this? So we've all had our "oh, crap" moments.

(Kyle at 00:26:15) And I do feel like that is the best way to learn is to just do it. And most things out there in the world, you can fix, or you can reverse. You can kind of hit that Command Z key and reverse what you just did. But I think our team—we actually just added the third person a couple of months ago. So it was only just me and two other people, but we're a little close family and, you know, we leverage our communication tools to ask for help when we need it.

(Kyle at 00:26:52) But I really just encourage them to just, when they see something come into our ticket queue, to just grab that ticket and try to figure it out. You know? And if you need help, then just ask for it. And that helps build confidence in them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:09) That's awesome. I wholeheartedly agree with that. I mean, when I started hosting the podcast, we were originally planning on I was going to cohost for a while with the other host. Like, we'd both be on, and he kind of helped me out. And then one week, he was just like, hey, you want to do all five episodes this week? Just try it. I was like, oh, oh, okay. Here we go. And, I mean, that's just my most recent, but I'm with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:35) All of my training has been just on the job. But so we don't have to get fully into the jar with the leaves story, but can I take a guess about that?

(Kyle at 00:27:46) All right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:47) So I'm—

(Kyle at 00:27:48) Go ahead.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:48) The picture that popped into my head was you went outside, got some kindling together, put together a really, really nice flammable jar of stuff, and you're holding it and you light it on fire, and it starts going, and man, that is just fun for a couple seconds. And then as soon as it hurts your hand, you drop it and the glass explodes. Maybe some glass cut you and, or maybe, the fire spread and you burned a bunch of stuff that you didn't mean to. But those are my two kind of options of where it went in my head. Were either of those it or both?

(Kyle at 00:28:25) You almost nailed it. I mean, I was in fifth grade at the time or something. I can't quite remember the exact age, but my parents' house backed up to this massive park, and there was a baseball field right by it. And there was a baseball game going on at the time. We had this short picket fence, and it was the fall.

(Kyle at 00:28:45) And I was cramming some leaves in a jar, and I had one of those long Bic lighters, you know. So I'm like, oh, this looks like fun. I was a terrible kid growing up. And so I was trying to light these leaves on fire in this jar because I wanted to see what happened. And I very vividly remember an old lady who was spectating the baseball game coming up to the fence. And she's like, are you sure you're supposed to be doing that? And I very confidently said back, oh, yeah. Absolutely. This is—

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:15) What I'm supposed to be—

(Kyle at 00:29:19) Doing. So as long as you—this applies to everyday life. As long as you just talk confidently in what you're doing, people will believe you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:26) Another good leadership lesson. Yes.

(Kyle at 00:29:28) Yeah. So so, anyway, I light these leaves on fire in the jar, and I'm kind of in awe watching them. And at some point, the jar gets too hot, and I drop the jar. And that corner of my parents' yard where the fence was was kind of like one of those things that created a wind tunnel. So it was just a pile of leaves right there.

(Kyle at 00:29:49) And short story long, the entire fence caught on fire. The entire—we're talking 75 feet of fence. And the baseball game stopped, and people are grabbing rakes and everything they can out of my parents' shed, and they're trying to put out the fire. And the fire department came. It was a good time.

(Kyle at 00:30:12) I think I used that story about a thousand times during English essay assignment stories.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:19) That's your getting into college essay.

(Kyle at 00:30:22) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:23) You burned down the fence.

(Kyle at 00:30:26) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:28) Oh, man. That's good. I'm glad I pried a little bit there. All right. So I just got a couple more questions for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:38) What are you learning right now at work? What's challenging you?

(Kyle at 00:30:42) What's challenging us right now is we're very thankful that our organization is kind of listening to employee feedback for if they want to be in office or not. And for the most part, people just don't want to come back in the office. And the organization is totally respecting that, which is awesome. But IT in a remote environment is especially challenging. And when it comes to when you hire at a rate that we do, every single week, somebody on my team has to make the drive into the office and ship out anywhere from two to 16 computers.

(Kyle at 00:31:21) And I run an onboarding presentation every single Monday morning for that week's new hires, whether it's Cars.com or Dealer Inspire. We're all in the same Zoom meeting. And I go over things like helping people reset their passwords and giving them an overview of our core software and tips and tricks to get the most out of Google Calendar and stuff. And that's definitely a little bit more challenging in a remote environment because normally, when you're sitting around one conference room table, you can physically see the people that are struggling trying to figure out a 10-character password that doesn't include their first name in it kind of a thing. So, and I, you know, I like to be the hands-on person that's like, okay, we're not moving on to the next slide until everybody's giving me a thumbs up that they reset their password kind of a thing.

(Kyle at 00:32:07) So I definitely miss the being in office aspect part of onboarding new hires because I feel like they also will get it a little bit more in person. We, when we ship out computers, we want them to be as ready to go as possible for people. And that also helps minimize the amount of times people may install malware on the machine too. Yeah.

(Kyle at 00:32:42) So having the essentials on the computer ready to go. Slack, as you may or may not know, is kind of a—for those people who are not familiar with Slack or are the first time logging into it, it's a little complicated. You've got to do this dance to get into Slack, and trying to walk people through logging into Slack for the first time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:01) Oh, yeah. It's different than every other—

(Kyle at 00:33:04) Yeah. It doesn't really have a straight up just log in button on there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:08) Yeah.

(Kyle at 00:33:09) You've got to go back and forth between the browser and Slack a couple of times. So we've started to just log in to Slack for people now. So on the onboarding call, I can just say, like, look at that little rainbow icon on your dock and click on it. This is Slack. This is this.

(Kyle at 00:33:25) This is that. So, um, I guess the challenge is just, you know, catering to so many people's different learning styles and whatnot because, you know, you've probably heard this saying, but it is much easier to teach people tech skills or technology things than it is to teach somebody to have a good personality, if you will. So Cars.com doesn't hire people based off of their tech skills for the most part unless the position specifically requires it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:00) Yeah. Yeah.

(Kyle at 00:34:01) So needless to say, our team deals with all different aspects of technical learning curves, if you will. So there's definitely some employees that need more hand-holding than others, and some of those things in person would just be so much easier than normal. And something I always encourage my team to do is, you know, rather than troubleshooting an issue with somebody through 18 back and forths on an email, just shoot them a Zoom link, hop on a call, and you solve the issue in 40 seconds rather than a week of back and forth on email.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:41) Yeah.

(Kyle at 00:34:41) So being, just having more of a physical presence is something that I always push with my team, especially in a remote environment, if that makes sense. So, yeah, I guess the challenge is just supporting 1,600 people and making sure that they are happy with their technology setup.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:05) That's awesome. Well, before we wrap up, it sounds like you guys are hiring a lot. I want to give you a nice little plug for Dealer Inspire and Cars.com. What are you hiring for? Who are you looking for?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:18) What are you looking for?

(Kyle at 00:35:18) We've got all sorts of positions open at Cars.com and Dealer Inspire. Lots of project manager and developer type roles. So all different facets of things that you may have a skill set in. It's not—Cars.com is not just a massive room full of nerds coding to make a website. We definitely have a lot of those people. We also have a lot of salespeople and whatnot that help keep our business going. So it's—there's positions of all different shapes and sizes open at Cars.com and Dealer Inspire. And it's—both organizations as we grow closer and closer together to kind of act as one organization, we still operate pretty independently.

(Kyle at 00:36:10) Definitely slightly different cultures, but both organizations are—since I've kind of worked for both of them, if you will—have both been really rewarding to work for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:24) 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.