Telarus

New episodes launch next Wednesday, Jan 24, 2024. Today, we are revisiting the legendary CX Solution Architect Meagan Thai of Telarus. We discuss how Omni-channel is still so critical to understand, what some of the latest trends partners need to be aware of, and huge tips for more success when talking to customers to put yourself in their shoes! Can you believe that we're already at 100 episodes? While we go and ramp up and get ready for season three, we're gonna take you back, listen to some of the great moments in these past episodes. So stay tuned as we take you back to season one and two. (upbeat music) – Hey everybody, welcome back to a brand new episode today. We're talking about how to unleash CX excellence and journey into the omni-channel world. Today we have on the wonderful, the amazing, Meagan Thai also been called legendary, CX solution architect of Telarus Meagan thanks for coming on and doing this. – Thank you, Josh, good to be here. Does that mean I'm old? – No, no, no, ageless, ageless, timeless, whatever you wanna call it. Meagan I wanna kick this off first about you. I want everybody to get to know you, right? We always talk about what are people's journeys, how do they get into this? So let's hear your journey, what's been your path into this space? Did you always set out to do this? Did you stumble into this? Love to hear it. – Yeah, never would have imagined I'd be doing this decades ago. So yes, the legendary, I've been around it, been around for a few decades. I don't think people know this about me, but I have a degree in child development. So I used to work in that industry. Now some people will say, “Oh, it comes in handy for what you do these days.” But I was in that industry earlier on, my 20s, early 20s, and thought, you know what? The parents were kind of difficult to manage. The kids were great, but the parents not so much. I wanted to change and I got a break into sales from a family member, says, “You know, I think you'd be good. We'll come in, we'll train you on how to do this.” I'm thinking sales, what? Okay. So I went in, I was groomed, and back then it was a cable harnessing company. We started manufacturing cables and wire harnesses for Nortel, Meridian Systems, that kind of stuff. Little did I know that was going to be my path, right? So I got my first shot in sales doing that and I would do account management, direct selling, and didn't really enjoy direct selling so much. And then I got a taste for partner selling, what we call the channel today. But back then it was so new and this is probably in 2001. Back then it was called Alliance. It was an Alliance partner program. And no one knew what it was, including the team that was hired. But when I started getting a taste for, “Hey, how do you help partners sell this technology?” And it was T1s and DSL, right? Internet services back then. And I just enjoyed it because I loved working with partners hand in hand, and I can go to the partner and say, “Hey, where's this order?” Put pressure on them versus putting the pressure on me to get the order from the customer. But I really just enjoyed the relationship and the educating and just working side by side with the partner for the same goal. And the rest is history. So I've been doing that for, gosh, what 20 plus years now selling in the channel. – Love it, love it. Nortel, oh man, it sucks you in. It sucks you in whether you plan on it or not. – That's right. – So let's talk about, all right, here we are in 2023. We've had a lot of episodes where we talk about different segments of contact center and customer experience. We've talked workforce management. We've talked all these different things. What does omni-channel mean if we're just defining this here? In 2023, but also, why is it still so important? – Yeah, it absolutely is important. It's funny because, so when I started with Telarus about five years ago and back in 2018, we had to properly define what omni-channel meant. You know, it's a way to seamlessly move your customer interactions between different channels of communications, whether it's voice, SMS, chat, whatever, move them around seamlessly without losing contact with that customer. Hugely important, it still is today. But I remember back then, we would define it as, you know, what does it really mean to be omni-channel versus multi-channel? Today, I think it's a little bit different. It's starting to pivot. The omni-channel word is still out there and is still being used anonymously with CCAS or contact center. So I hear partners all the time, as soon as they start talking about contact center technology, they mention omni-channel. But what I think we need to realize, and it's really important is, and our vendors are starting to do this, whether they may not say channel anymore, it is still omni as far as the transactions go, but they're starting to say words like interactions and engagements, not so much channel. To me, I think, I agree with that. To me, it is still important to understand as a business, what different types of communication methods do you need to deliver to your customers, to the outside world? So again, I use the word channel still, right? But interaction and engagements, I think more defined what that means. So that's really important. Now, back then too, we were really, really focused more on the voice piece and being able to move voice to chat to SMS. Now we're starting to hear more about the digital interactions, digital channels, right? It's all about what can we do at the front door, whether it's a web chat or a chat bot, whether it's social media, it's texting, because that's how people communicate these days. Voice is still important. Josh, you and I worked a deal years ago where this customer was gonna cut out voice entirely and we thought, are you crazy? No, don't do that. Because they were having issues with that and the feedback from their customers were, we need someone to call and talk to live. So we still want that voice channel or that voice interaction. But what I'm starting to see as far as the speak goes or the language in our industry, is more about interactions and engagements and how do we capture that? How do we continue to move it from different channels or different interactions seamlessly? So that's still important. I honestly think it's super, super important now because think about how we communicate at a personal level. And that has continued to increase as far as the expectations, right? So as you and I are just regular customers, but we're dealing personally with one another or with our brands and services, I think it's even more important now to have omni-channel or omni-digital channels or digital interactions, because we're so used to having everything at our fingertips. And I think as regular consumers like you and I, the technology that's out there, we know it's improving over time, it's faster, it's more intelligent. We want answers now, we want it in real time, we want it fast, we don't have to talk to multiple people or have multiple interactions to get what we want, any of our issues resolved really. So I think that's what's driving it. And that's why it continues to be so much more important because we know technology is there, it's getting better in order to get us the information that we need and the answers and our issues resolved in real time, faster. – I mean, I think you bring up a great point too of, it's about what is changing, right? And I'm gonna jump now into a little bit about trends, things that you're seeing in there. And I think you bring up this thing of whether it's right or wrong to expect an answer right now, that's the precedent that's been set, that really great customer experience is something that can get me an answer quickly, right? Regardless of what the answer is, how it's handled, that's a different conversation, but there is that expectation. So I'm curious from your perspective, right? As we talk about trends and we jump into that, what do you see now, right? Is it us having to pull customers forward? Is it customers coming to us saying how I do this or just what are the trends that you're seeing overall? – Yeah, so I'm gonna get you the buzzwords in a minute now, we're gonna talk a little bit about that. Okay, but before that, as we're talking about trends and what I'm seeing too, and we keep saying CX, CX, right? Cause we've been talking about customer experience forever, but I want the audience to know that it's more than just CX now. It is about the X experience, but it's not just customer experience. It's in healthcare, you're looking at patient experience, PX, right? In the finance world with credit unions, they call their clients members, the member experience. And then what's even more important is we have to remember it's the internal experience as well. So you've got the employees, the agents. So all of these, right? EX, AX, PX, MX, all these Xs, it's all about the experience. So whether you're an outside client or you're an internal employee handling those interactions for the clients. So I think that's one thing we have to be aware of. And so I think that one of the trend is that CX, that acronym is still being used quite a bit, but it's expanded beyond that. Now the buzzwords though, the hottest and latest things are the trends are AI. AI, artificial intelligence, chat GPT, generative AI, all these buzzwords. So years ago, we were talking about AI, but we would always say, you know what? AI is pretty complex. So if you've got customers bringing up the term AI, just come to us, we'll talk to them. And that is still the message. It is still very complex. It has grown and improved and advanced. Now it's like AI on steroids. I don't know what it's gonna look like a few years from now because it's vastly changing. And of course there are people who are afraid of what AI can do, right? Is it secure? You know, within any new technology, you've got people who are looking to scam you so they can always use that technology to their advantage. So we still have to be careful of course, but it is amazing what it can do. So the trends that I'm seeing now, a few things, is using AI, generative AI to summarize things. So a lot of our vendors are coming out now and leveraging open AI or some other type of a chat GPT or any type of AI platform to enhance their own AI capabilities. And so one of three things I'm seeing as trends with this, one is summarizing meetings. You can take a whole hour meeting and put it now into one paragraph that tells you, oh, these were the key points we talked about. Here are the next steps. Done, right? Amazing. So I'm seeing that quite a bit as a trend from our vendors in the contact center space that's saying, hey, we offer this now. The other thing I see is conversational AI, right? So a lot of self-servicing, for me personally, I love this, as long as it works well, but being able to provide a voice interactive, or maybe it's a chat bot that's very interactive, right? So it's two ways. But the idea is the conversational AI is more of a speech recognizing, right? Maybe it can do some voice biometrics to authenticate a user. But that's what's starting. Remember we talked about that whole digital interaction or engagement is conversational AI is a huge piece of that at the front door. So it could be a virtual assistant, virtual agent, whatever they call it, but it's very interactive and it understands your speech and it could address a lot of the mundane questions, right? But I think what's key is if you go that conversational AI route, you still need to have some sort of escalation to a live agent. Because if it's not providing the service or resolving your customer's issues, you want to have that capability, right? The ability is to go to a live agent and get that result by human, still top priority. The other thing is agent assist. So we've seen that thrown around a little bit in a couple of different ways. But in this term here, what I'm thinking as far as the trend goes is we're seeing a lot of vendors now saying, “Hey, how do we make our agents' lives easier, “our employees?” And I do see it twofold. I see it benefiting the agent, but I also see it benefiting the client, right? Getting all that. – It all matters, yeah. – Totally. But the idea is, so now we're using AI on the backend, we're listening in on the conversation, we're pulling keywords. We know that Josh is asking for, what is the latest rate? Can I refi? And it's pulling up for me as an agent. Maybe it's a link to a knowledge base. Maybe it's a PDF or something on the backend where it's, here's the trigger words. And it's presenting me as the agent with information so that I can help address Josh the customer. Information at my fingertips, so I don't have to go hunting around and stumble around and not be able to resolve the issue and have the client call back, right? So we're doing everything in real time, allowing our agents to be more efficient, be able to resolve things quicker. And at the end of that all, guess what? Now we're using AI to summarize what happened with this interaction so that me as an agent, I don't have to spend time, my full two or three minutes typing up my rap code, right? Or my disposition positions, or what's the next steps? What do I have to do? It's doing all that for me. So now it's presenting, again, summarizing, hey, you had this 10 minute conversation with Josh, here's what was resolved, here's the next step, the ticket is still open or not, it's closed, bam, you're done, and it presents it there. Now I can archive that little tidbit and be done with it and move on to my next engagement. I mean, it's all doing this again, remember, in real time, quickly, efficiently, more accurately. But regardless, I think it's helping both the agent side and the client side. – Well, I think it's interesting, right? I mean, you bring up a point of, it makes the agent experience better, or the employee experience better. And if you think about two things that that might solve for a business, one, we're helping people potentially onboard their agents faster, more effectively, more structured, more repeatable. But sometimes the biggest pain point in a contact center is attrition. And if we can do two things, we can help people onboard employees faster, but we can also make the employees lives better, then we can help with the attrition side of it, right? So maybe we're killing kind of two birds with one stone here. And I think all of that ends up in a better customer experience. So I think you bring up some really solid points there. – Yeah, absolutely. – So if we think about it then, if we look forward here, we're gonna jump to the future right away. If you take all that into consideration then, what's your prediction on what's coming? What is the future in regards to the CX side of it? – So, and this is just based on what I hear from our customers, right? A lot of customers are looking for everything to be all in one. I think that the future is gonna be further blending of UCaaS and contact center. A lot of our opportunities are what we call an all in one solution. Customers are saying, I need both. They're either leading in with contact center, and then saying, oh, by the way, we have back office users, hundreds of them that we need to tie into, or it's the other way around. Usually we see it come in being pulled through the contact center discussion, right? InUCaaS So we're starting to see this in our industry, whether our vendors are acquiring or building their own platforms, right? So if they're leading withUCaaS they're acquiring or building their own contact center or vice versa, or they're partnering very well with those other platforms that we know will work seamlessly between the two. So I think that's still gonna continue. That whole mix of UC, CC, that whole gray area, it's all gonna become one. It's just gonna be communications platform, or maybe an employee efficiency platform, or however you wanna call it, but I think it's gonna be all in one. What I'm also seeing is more of that discussion with the CRM, right? So we're seeing some CRM players out there who says, hey, we can do voice too. Why don't you do it all in one platform? And in the back of our minds, we think, hold on, your core is CRM. It's not voice. But they're attempting to do this. So I hear, and I'm starting to see, maybe this is the future. It would be nice for me, because I'm lazy, would be nice to have everything there, my fingertips, right, too many applications. I want one single pane. I want my CRM. I want my UCaaS I want my CCAS. I want everything all together. My forecasting, everything. Quality management. I want everything in one platform. So I see that will be the trend of the future. And I think it can be. I think what we're seeing in the industry, too, with what our vendors are starting to do, their business decisions, I think, will just lead us there. I don't know. I could be totally wrong, but it's just what I'm hearing from customers' expectations. – Yeah, I mean, it's just a changing landscape, too. I mean, but did you ever think that Slack would be doing voice or Twilio would be getting into these different, you know, everybody's getting into something different. So yeah, it's just, the lines are blurring, for sure. – Very much. – So let's talk about, let's get into some data around some deals, right? I think the part of the huge thing that you can offer is you see so many things. You talk to so many customers. You talk to so many partners. So let's first talk about industries and verticals. What are you seeing or where are you being brought into where you feel like there's a big room for improvement of these verticals need to improve their experience? And then what are really some of the challenges in that? – Mm-hmm. So I can tell you that most of my opportunities, I still see a lot in the finance world, the FinTech, the credit unions with multiple branches, not so much like the big, big well-known banks, but again, the regional banks with multiple locations. I still see a lot of that. I see a lot of healthcare and healthcare, again, not necessarily the big giant hospitals. Sometimes those do pop up, but more of the behavioral, mental behavioral healthcare clinics, for example, or maybe a regional hospital with a bunch of different clinics around them, or it could be rehab facilities, assisted living, nursing homes, things like that. And I think the challenge is that they have theirs, a lot of times they're on antiquated legacy on-prem systems or they don't have the infrastructure. So oftentimes we hear about, there are concerns about how do we migrate over? We've been on this platform. We knew we need to get off of it, but our infrastructure may not support it. So we have some analog, whether it's devices, life safety lines and whatnot that we need to roll into this project. How do we manage that piece and make sure everything goes seamlessly? So that's one thing. The other vertical that I love to hear from is manufacturing. I do still see that time to time pop up and I get excited because I know I can help them. I know that they're completely antiquated. But when we deal with an environment like that, what typically happens is they'll tell me, our demographics, our employees have been here for decades and they want a hard phone and they will not deviate. So we can't talk about a chat bot. First of all, the demographics that we're also servicing want to make a phone call and they want a live answer. They're not gonna touch a chat bot or a web chat or a voice recognition, any of that. They're not gonna text, they want live phone calls. And I said, that's fine, that's great. We can still support that. So, but it's interesting that you hear this and you feel good because you know you can help them out because they don't understand what technologies are in place today. So it's always fun to talk about, you know, what's the art of possibility, but the minute you hear them say, no, no, no, we want live answer, we're old school, we just want it in the cloud now, then you start changing that discussion and listen to what they have to say and accommodate what they have to say. You know, you're gonna get them in a better spot with improved customer experience and play experience and whatnot, but just you don't have to give them all the bells and whistles. So those are the challenges, but we also hear oftentimes from education, from automotive, retail. So it's the same industries that we've seen from time to time, but I would say the majority of the industries I speak with now is financial and healthcare, and it's all about self-servicing. It's all about automation and self-servicing. – If I'm a partner and I'm listening to this, is there any customers, right? You know, I'm thinking about, I got my existing customers, I got my maybe net new ones that I wanna go after and I wanna probe. Is there any industry that you would recommend not chasing or are you always finding a way to be able to help in any of these verticals? What's your two cents there? – I think we're always finding a way. You know, I think in the past, when it came to hospitality, we were very limited, especially as far as UCaaS goes. I think with Context Center, it's a little bit, we've got platforms that are a little bit more robust that can support that, but from a UCaaS perspective, it was always, oh no, stay away from hospitality because we cannot integrate into the property management software. That's changed now though. We do have some solid vendors in our portfolio that can solve for that, so don't be afraid to come to us with any hospitality opportunities. What's interesting too is we're starting, I had a call just this morning about CRM. We have a customer who's going after CRM, so we get asked that more and more these days. How do we, we need a CRM solution? And it's typically standalone. Maybe it's for ticketing or maybe it's a true CRM. Sometimes I'll get asked, can it be part of the solution itself? That actually is challenging. Having a CRM built into a Context Center or a UCaaS solution, we might have two that can do that. So, and then as far as a standalone CRM, we might have some options there too, maybe a couple different options or ones that we can help custom build. So I would say no industry, no vertical is impossible for us to help, but I think it depends on the technology. So if they are asking for CRM, let's just become more cautious of it. Talk to us though. Like don't be afraid to come to us with any opportunity. Chances are we can help you in some way. – Awesome. All right, let's get into the nuts and bolts of a deal. So walk me through, I think what we like to dissect in this part is really hearing about, you know, we keep customer names and partner names out of it. We can talk about, hey, I was brought into this situation. What was the problem? How did the conversation go? And then ultimately what did we end up doing? – Okay, so by the time we are brought in, what we would love to see though from the partner at least is do you have any insight as to why we've been talking to them, right? There's a reason why, what's that compelling reason? Give me some information, whatever you have, whether it's use your account, a website, I love getting a website just so I can go and poke around and see what industry they're in. What does it feel like to go through that experience and try to contact them, right? And see maybe where some of the missteps are. So that at a very minimum. Oftentimes I'll get, by the time a partner comes to me, he says, hey, I've got a call center opportunity. That to me is always a, aha, call center. He said call center. So now I need to go through the discovery process and figure out, can we do this with UCaaS Is it just voice? Do we need to go full on contact center, right? Because they don't know. Sometimes when they hear call center from their customer, they get excited and they think, it's a contact center opportunity, it might not be. So we have to go through that discovery. So by the time it gets to me, usually we have some of the high level stuff taken care because I don't want to go into a discovery call blind. I want to know something, even if it's just a few sentences high level, what do they have in place today, right? So I can kind of set that stage for myself. So then I go in and I'll ask the questions. The way I like to ask the questions and uncover an opportunity is I use use cases. I don't get technical. I'd love to know what do they have in place today? I poked around on the website. So I have an idea of what that experience will be like from the outside in, but I also want to know what are they doing internally with one another? How are they collaborating? How are they communicating? And then we go through the use case and the flows and whatnot. And then they start to tell me about their pain points. So I can give you an example where things have changed a little bit. I'm working on a deal right now where we went through, and by the way, we had some really good information from the partner. I went around and poked on the website. It's very different industry. We did the discovery call and at the end of it, I told my partners, I said, you know what? It really sounds like all voice. I don't know if we have a context interplay here because they just want simple things from the voice side, but they're calling them agents. But it could just be like UCaaS on steroids or maybe a call center environment, right? Maybe you've got some queuing, maybe some skills based routing, but you don't need all the bells and whistles. And then we've been having multiple conversations with them, just a weekly touch base. And then on a second call, I think, we start to ask them about, hey, what do you think about maybe doing some more and some AI components where you're recording the calls today. That's not a big deal, but when you had to go back to the calls, would it be kind of cool to do some keyword searches? Would it be even cooler to take it a step further and do some analytics and AI in real time on the backend that can detect the sentiment of what your clients are going through? Because this customer had some sensitive conversations with their, it's an industry where it's just, it's sensitive to their clients that they're servicing. So they had to be careful with that, but we gave them kind of the art of possibility on, hey, wouldn't it be kind of cool to do this? How about some quality management? How about some deeper analytics? How about some even workforce management for scheduling? You're telling us you actually have 300 agents, they're all agents. That's the number of your employees. You're telling us everyone in your company functions like an agent. So my partners actually went on site and shadowed the different departments that they had on there and came back to me and said, Megan, they're all agents. We really need context. And I'm like, wow, this has completely changed from our first conversation. And because they were telling us one thing, but we kind of opened their eyes to what was possible. And they said, no, we totally can use this. So what's interesting about those guys too, is they are already on, I think they were on a cloud system that wasn't doing what they wanted it to do, which is also different, right? Usually they're coming from an on-prem and you're showing them the light with cloud, but they're moving from a cloud solution. So that was one that completely changed. And that was nice. So now we're opening that door to this whole conversation. We're gonna go back now on this next call and have another conversation and say, hold on, let's talk about your other users. You were telling us everyone's an agent. Are there other back office users that could benefit from a UCAT solution? Now, so we're kind of going backwards. It's so, it's interesting how it's evolving. The other one I wanted to talk about that took me by surprise was a credit union. They're on an on-prem and they were going through the regular spiel. I'm asking a bunch of questions. And it's always about, what is this experience from your clients? I always start with that, what are the use cases? How is this going? And as I'm asking them the questions, then they stop and they said, you know what? Actually, our clients are pretty happy with the way that we're servicing them today. It's our employees that are having the issues. So we had to stop and say, okay, hold on. And so they said, no, it's our employees. The system today, they can't communicate with one another. So they can't be efficient enough to handle our clients, but our clients are super happy. I said, oh, okay. So we completely, that was interesting. We would then change the conversation. We focused more on, okay, so how do your internal, what are the use cases there? How are they using the system today? Yep, I can see all the gaps, but at the end of the day, we're gonna get them a solution that is going to benefit both, right? Like you and I were saying, it's gonna help the customers, it's gonna help them or their members. So that's interesting. So just listen and see you as the conversation pivots. Just again, go through use cases and figure out where they need the help the most. – Great examples there. Before I get to this last question, you said something that I wanna call out that was important here, right? Presumably you're in a technical role, right? You have architect in your description, but you said something really key is that I don't wanna get into the weeds. I don't wanna get into the bits and bytes, right? Can you illuminate that a little bit for me, what you mean? – Yeah, yeah. So I think it's critical from the get-go to understand, to listen, what are your customers requiring? And I don't mean, and we can talk about integrations, right? At a high level, you talk to them about what systems are in place. Do they wanna integrate it? What does that integration look like? But again, from a use case perspective, not, okay, so on the backend, I've got this and that, and I gotta put this here. We will let the vendors do the heavy lifting. We know who plays well with who, who can integrate with what platforms, okay? So at a high level, we can figure that out. I don't go into the bits and bytes and talk about how things are architected necessarily, or how, you know, if you're gonna bring your own carrier, how is that gonna work on the backend? How are the two platforms going to play together? I know it can all work. So I don't go into the weeds with that or the details around that. I think it's absolutely critical, and I think that that's gonna be the segue to, you know, the next question you're gonna ask me, but I think it's absolutely critical to understand the use cases and how the customer needs this to work for them. And then you can let the vendors come in and do all the heavy lifting. That's their core. They're the experts with how it's gonna all mesh together and the details and the architecture behind it. We just have to know that it can be done. – Yeah, and let's not scare the customer off in the meantime. – Yeah, absolutely. – Great. All right, final thoughts here. So again, you know, there's partners listening to this. You've drawn out some really great points of kind of where it's at, where it's going, what trends, things to look for, what a deal looks like. Final question. Biggest tip you can give the partners around CX and how to continue having and developing that conversation? – Okay, yes. So we've said this, right? We say it doesn't have to be technical. You don't have to get into the weeds. The way I approach it, and this is how I would have a partner approach it because they do get intimidated. You know, Megan, I don't understand how they have the conversation. And I could say, you know what? Put yourself into the customer's shoes. So you're working with a business organization. They're your customer. Put yourself into their customer shoes. What does that look and feel like? And that's why I always go through use cases, right? I don't say, do you have a contact center? Do you need this? Do you need that? Start spewing out all this information on what the technologies can do. I say, Mr. Partner, just listen carefully to what your customer's pain points are because they have to solve for their customers' issues and pain points. They have to solve for their own internal issues and pain points, right? With their agents or employees. So I always say the easiest thing to do because that's how I do it, right? That's why I go to the website first and foremost to say, okay, I'm a customer. What does this look and feel like? Oh my gosh, I have no idea how I can, okay, so it's a voice call. That's fine, I can do that. But am I going to be put on hold forever? You know, just put themselves into the customer's customer shoes because we are all customers. We know what to expect from our own experiences when we work with our service brands. So I say do that first and foremost. And as they're having that business conversation with their own customers and they're trying to figure out what projects are you working on? How can I help you? Just listen to what they have to say. And then if they get on a discovery call with me, you know what I do? I just listen, I take a ton of notes. I'm telling you, they'll give me stuff that I don't understand what they're saying. And they'll just type it out the way it sounds. Oh, they're using this platform, okay. Oh, what do you use that for? Oh, okay, okay, got it. Just to put things in a layman's terms because that's all the customer's going to do is they're going to tell you, this is what we use, this is what we expect, it's not working this way and it would be great if we could have it this way. Now, if they start telling you, we don't know what we don't know, so we don't know what's possible, I can help with that conversation. Mr. Partner, you don't have to, you know the technology is there to say, oh, that's great, no, yeah, I think that'd be great. And let's have Megan or Jason or Mike or whomever help us with that conversation and give us some best practices and ideas. But that's all I can say is partners don't feel like you have to have a technical conversation, don't be afraid of it, put yourself into their customer's shoes and figure out what's going on and what you have to help solve for, that's all it is. Did I oversimplify that? Maybe. (laughs) – Easy, easy, good stuff. I think that's gold advice and everybody needs to take that and use that and then exactly that, right? I mean, you heard, you got to hear a glimpse of everything that you're able to help them with and I think everybody should absolutely pull you in for assistance. So, Megan, that wraps us up for today. Really appreciate you coming on. – Great, thank you. I'm glad to have this opportunity. Always good talking to you too, Josh. – Always. Okay, everybody that wraps us up, Megan Thai CX solution architect with the layers. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto SVP yourself, and here in this next level, please sit. (upbeat music) Next Level BizTech has been a production of Telarus Studio 19. Please visit Telarus.com for more information. (upbeat music)

Listen as we revisit this special episode where we talk with Telarus Co-Founder Patrick Oborn. We talk about his winding path to founding Telarus, then get into key strategies he has seen partners embody that truly 3x, 4x, or even 10x their sales and their business. You won't want to miss the first of many sales tips and strategies! Can you believe that we're already at 100 episodes? While we go and ramp up and get ready for season three, we're gonna take you back, listen to some of the great moments in these past episodes. So stay tuned as we take you back to season one and two. (upbeat music) Hey everybody, welcome. We are back here with a special episode with a special guest, long time listener, first time caller, really important person, chief product officer and co-founder of Telarus Patrick Oborn, PKO, welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Josh. Like you said, long time listener, love this podcast. It's amongst one of my favorites. I'm not saying that just because you're here right now, but because it's the literal truth. You do a very good job of bringing on people that can deliver information that helps people's businesses. So congratulations on a very successful podcast, my friend, season two, I believe. Pushing season three here real close and too many more successful seasons. I think if you continue to do the job you're doing, you're not only gonna keep growing this thing in terms of quality of content, but in terms of audience and everything else. So I'm star struck to be here with you and thanks for having me, Josh. – Love it, man. Thanks for giving me a job. This is gonna be fun. (laughing) – You kinda deserve it. – All right, we're talking, special episode here. We usually have these three part tracks where we talk about perspective on the technology, a supplier and then really get the partners purview on it. Today we're talking about how to 10X sales. We get a lot of these questions from partners, a lot of tips, a lot of tricks. I feel like we could pack this into 50 episodes, right? And who knows, we might. But today we're gonna boil it down from your perspective. We're gonna run through some of the normal stuff, but then we're gonna spice it up with some of your input, which I'd love because you've got so much passion and energy and good stuff to share in this. So as we always do, when we kick these off, let's talk about your background, your path to starting Telarus And I wanna hear anything good and anything bad and anything I don't already know. – Fantastic, well, when I was growing up as a teenager, my dad owned his own business. He was a part of a three-way partnership. It was called OTA Physical Therapy, Oborn Trackman Astin. They had 15 locations across Southern California and they had a really, really nice business. He later on in development of the business, he kind of got out of sorts with his partners and stuff. And basically he was telling me, “Patrick, whatever you do, don't start your own company. “It's a pain, it's a hassle, there's stress. “The employees are always the first to get paid. “The business owners always the last to get paid. “There's risk and God forbid, “something doesn't go right with your partners. “It's a total train wreck. “So just go to college, get a good job, “save up for retirement, live a good life.” That was his advice to me. So I did that thing. I went to college, I studied, I was a math and engineer geek. I had interned a few summers in my dad's physical therapy offices. So when I went to college, I kind of thought I was going pre-med or something like that, because both my parents are physical therapists. My wife is a physical therapist. So surrounded by physical therapy, rehab, hips, knee replacements. I thought maybe I'll be an orthopedic surgeon, I'll fix people up and then send them to physical therapy. So I want to be a orthopedic surgeon. But as I interned with my dad, I realized that people didn't want to pay their bills. They put me in the collections department. It was fantastic calling people, letting them know, “Hey, this is not covered by insurance. “You need to pay this.” And I was like, “I really want to go into an industry “where I can use my talents, “where I can guarantee I'm going to get paid.” Not necessarily a lot of guarantees in healthcare if you're going to do all this work and half the people are going to stiff you. So I went to my counselor at Brigham Young University where I did my undergraduate. And I said, “What's the major “that I can make the most money at, secure money, “where I can apply my talents like math, physics, “that kind of stuff?” And she said, “Chemical or electrical engineering?” And I said, “I am really bad at chemistry. “Let's do electrical engineering.” Not even really knowing what electrical engineering was. Long story short, I got a master's degree in computer chip design. So I went back to California where I'm from and I got a job at TRW Space and Defense, now Northrop Grumman, designing classified communication computer chips. Right? Sounds good. Now how the heck did we get into telecoms? Like we got to start closing the loop here pretty quick. Honestly, I was very disappointed when I came out of college and I learned how much money I was gonna make. Not that the starting salary was bad. It was decent, but the velocity at which I would grow my paycheck, right? Raises, promotions, was incredibly slow. And my manager sat me down one day. I said, “Patrick, you seem like you're a young man “full of ambition. “You need to lower and temper your expectations “a little bit and have patience. “Have patience. “You're gonna be the manager one day, “but man, you gotta, it might take 10 years.” And I'm like, “I don't have 10 years.” What are words that entrepreneurs don't want to hear? Slow down. But I did know as an entrepreneur just quite yet. And so in order to make more money, I did everything I could at work and I found that I was, I don't wanna do my own home, but I was pretty smart. I was top of my class. And it wasn't that I understood stuff more than other people. I just understood it at a faster velocity. Right, 100%. I just got it quick. So I got my work done in short order and one day I went to my boss and I said, “Hey boss, I don't have anything to do. “Like I've finished this project. “You gave me six months to do in four months.” So what did I do for there two months? And they said, “Well, we can't give you another project “just yet. “Just look busy.” (laughs) So during my look busy time, I started teaching myself how to code. Unfortunately, I opted to the math and physics routes of all the electives at BYU. I should have in retrospect done a lot more computer science, but I didn't. So I bought myself SQL for dummies, HTML for dummies. I read it, started throwing up some websites. And then as soon as I started throwing up websites, I started to get really interested in internet marketing. Like how do I get people to those websites? Once I get them, how do I convert them into customers? And so that's what I started to do. And I started a website called CheapRates.com. It's still there today, but we took it down. It's just too hard to maintain. But I realized that out of the airfare and the home security systems and the cellular and everything else that I sold, long distance, calling cards, callback, dial around, OnePlus, all of that stuff, toll free, it paid residual income. And so that's the first time that the telecom, the residual income light went off in my head. And I said, “Hold on a minute.” So I started to really focus all my efforts on driving traffic to those products. The company that captured my traffic and converted it into dollars for me, a couple months later, actually reached out to me and gave me an unsolicited offer to come and code their whole website. And I said, “Yes, under one condition.” And that is that I get to keep my agency. Do not make me walk away for my agency, or I'm not gonna take this job. And they said, “Fine, you can keep your agency that was earning some good money.” So I took the job. I started working at home way back in the 1990s, 1998. Started working at home and it was fantastic. I'll never forget the day where I told my parents I was gonna quit my job that I had spent six years studying for, got security clearances for, and I was gonna work for this internet company. – Yeah, what is this internet thing? – The interwebs, man, the interwebs. Yeah, it was a crazy time. So it was really early on. And the thing that captured my imagination was trying to find information that was floating out there and consolidate it into one place that people could access that. And that's really still the essence of Telarus that I'll talk a little more about. But compartmentalizing information, consolidating that information into one consumable place carried, and still does today, a ton of value. And so we did that and then they were really focused on residential. One day I raised my hand, I said, “Boss, this residential thing ain't gonna work out forever.” Reading the tea leaves doesn't take an expert to see that long distance is going to flat rate, or just you pay a fixed amount and you just get it as part of your wireless plans. And so I suggested to my boss one day, hey, why don't we open a commercial division where we can leverage all of these affiliate relationships we have out there to drive commercial telecom and internet leads as opposed to just residential. So yeah, so I have my background in residential. I built all their backend systems. I said, “Let's do this.” And my boss politely said, “That sounds like a great idea, but we're not doing that.” (laughs) – Oh. – And I said, “Okay.” I said, “But how about this? What if I start my own company and we build it up and we federate our two companies together and I'll be the business division of your company and you can maintain the residential division of your company.” And they said, “Fine, but don't expect us to invest any money in it. If you want to do this on your own dime, then let's go forward.” So my next call was to my best friend growing up, Adam Edwards, and I said, “Hey, Adam, I have a business opportunity for you, my friend. I think we can really make some inroads here.” And he said, “Really, what are we gonna do?” I said, “We're gonna sell commercial telecom and long distance.” – Yeah, there it is. – And he laughed because he was an auditor at KPMG and then later on a controller of a startup tech company. And he's like, “Commercial telecom? What the hell is that?” (laughs) I said, “Bro, it pays residual.” He said, “I'm in.” – Yes. – Done. – Solid matter. – So yeah, so we, my first, my second question to him was, how much money do you have in your savings account? Because we're gonna need it. – Any good pitch deals. – I've been saving up, you've been saving up. And he said, “I have 70 grand on my account.” And I said, “Dude, I have 60 grand on my account.” And we did the math and figured out what our burn rate was. If we could eliminate all of our expenses, we could survive 19 months and give it a go. So we started coding and working hard. Adam just was out, just trying to sell anything he could sell. And I was coding and trying to consolidate information so that I could have a system to plug into that network. Well, that system became Geoquote. That system became the Telarus Agent Back Office. That system became all of those things that we needed to work with that company. And so while we got started into an area that was really new to us, we really had a competitive advantage coming in. Because I knew that once we had the system built, it would instantly show up on thousands, upon thousands of websites on day one. – Where was that moment? Where was that moment in there? Was it that moment of when you realized, oh my gosh, we got something special here. What was that turning point for you? – It really came when they said no. And I saw it clear as day. It's like, I'm telling you, you're gonna be in a car accident. You need new tires. I'm telling you, it's gonna happen. And they're like, we don't believe you. And I'm like, all right, I'm not gonna be part of the accident. I'm gonna remove myself and build another vehicle that has those nice tires on it. So I knew that would be big. I knew that people would want more internet. And so people always ask me, what's the vision of a founder of a company? Well, really, in retrospect, the last 20 years, it looks like we made most of the right turns. We made most of the right choices. But in reality, we could really only see one or two year out. So we knew that at the time, A, people were gonna want more internet. B, they're gonna wanna know how much it costs. And C, they're gonna wanna know where it's available. Because even back then, the availability was much, much worse than it is now. You could be on one street and have a great internet. On the other street, you're on DSL and dial up. It was awful. And so figuring out those problems and figuring out how to consolidate that information in one place so that the people that worked with us could have a competitive advantage. They could be faster, they could be more knowledgeable, they could be more efficient in their sales motion. And consolidating that into one easy to use software platform. And so it's really funny if you look at the TSBs that are out there,Telarus is not started by people who are in the business who just morphed out and just kept growing it, right? We were from outside of the business coming into this space. And the things that really jumped off the page to us were all of the inefficiencies that existed. All the things that maybe if you grew up here, you just accept as normal because that's how they always are. We came in and those things stuck out to us like a sore thumb. It was like, okay, let me get this straight. You don't know what you're selling. You don't know where you're selling it. You don't know how much you're charging and you don't know how much commission you're gonna make on the backend. Like how does anybody function in this business? – And you're going, guys, I've figured this out. The answer is right here. We could do something great. – And so yeah, so we didn't come here for the technology. We came here for the opportunity to organize information. And that's what I think a lot of people don't see when they look at this channel itself. And especially when they look at Telarus I mean, your job Josh as a sales engineer is to organize information through experiences, through trainings, through interactions. And then take that information and to be able to push it back out into a very proprietary, very valuable information stream, very valuable advice. Say based on my experience, which is a lot. Based off my training, which is a lot. I mean, CISSP, AWS certified. I mean, you've gone through all those things, right? Plus you add on top of that the frosting, which is actual real world interactions with customers. The information that you have organized in your brain is really more important than anything that we could offer here at Telarus And so figuring out a way to compartmentalize and consolidate that information is really what we're here today. And this is an area that I think a lot of partners miss out on. I think that in this business, just like we kind of changed the paradigm a little bit, right from let's just get out there and hustle our network and just get them to order their stuff through us. That was version 1.0. Version 1.0 was a network marketing, let's be honest, right? Like it was order that, you know, CenturyLink circuit through me and I'll get paid and it'll be great. But they really weren't adding value at any stage of that interaction. – All right, we're gonna, I wanna come back to adding value. – Yes, sir. – I wanna start with motivation. – Yes. – So we're gonna get, I know you've got some really good unique strategies that we're gonna talk about of how to add value, how to 10 exit, all of those things. – Real fast, can I finish that story? – All right, go ahead. – So when I told my parents I was leaving, they mocked me. They thought it was a dumb decision, right? With, you know, kids, sometimes they've got these grandiose things. My parents didn't understand internet and they didn't understand residual income. They didn't understand any of those two things. So when I started working on it, my first check came from my first affiliate company. And my dad was like, wow, you've been working all of your free time, your total side hustle, all of it, on that damn computer he called it. Working on that damn computer all day. You're not coming down to eat with us. You're not hanging out with us. You're on that damn computer all the time. And I got a check in the mail. And my dad actually said, hey, Cheryl, come here. Patrick just got a check from his little internet business. – How much? – Patrick open it up. How much is it? $18 and 58 cents. He was like, wow. He goes, son, I knew you were smart, but this is like genius level. Do you spend all that time and effort? I said, but dad, it's gonna be $18 and 58 cents plus the commission I earned last month, plus the commercial I earned this month, plus the commission I'm gonna earn next month. He didn't understand that. He literally told me, you would have been better off to spend that time at McDonald's because you would have made 10 times more money. And so every time we had a Telarus partner summit back when he was alive, I would invite him. And every time when Adam started his big pitch and everyone's in the barroom, I would just whisper to him, McDonald's. And he knew what I was talking about. – That's all right. That's awesome. I've not heard that story. That's great. – That is the story. – All right. All right, well, while you're crushing it with motivation, I wanna keep on that theme. So you've had a lot of, I mean, besides obviously being part of founding this, driving it to what it is now, but you've had some great personal motivation, right? You're running 800 miles a day. All these awesome things that you've done, these 100 milers, but I'm just kinda curious for the partners. What are one to two, whatever lessons that you've learned personally, professionally, in all these crazy accomplishments that you have that are helpful, you think, to motivate the partners, to push it to the next level, to do the things that we're about to share secrets on with them? – I think one of the things that I suffered from, especially early on, was imposter syndrome. Adam and I showed up at Channel Partners Show. Our company was four or five years old. We had a brand new business model, which was really tool-based, online-based. It wasn't human network-based, so to speak. It wasn't multi-level market-based. It was based on a couple of key things, and people told us, “You're just gonna, you're gonna commoditize the market. You gotta sell our products on value.” And I'm like, “People don't really care what value your product is. They care what the capabilities are. They care what you're gonna charge. They're gonna care how you support it, how you install it.” That's what they're gonna care about. They're not gonna care about the quote-unquote value that you keep referencing. And so talking to a supplier, talking to a partner about a business they know a lot about, and kind of telling them they're not wrong, but maybe they're misinformed, or maybe they just don't see the vision, the total vision of what it could be, that was hard, because how do you build your credibility when you're new at something? And so that's something where we really struggled. And even today, sometimes, I get up on stage, and I have those doubts in the back of my mind, like imposter syndrome. You're getting up, you're talking about cloud, you're talking about security. Dude, you started creating a website that compared long distance minutes rates. How are you qualified to be here speaking? And the same thing with, you alluded to, the ultra endurance running. For a long time, I just tried it, thought it'd be a healthy habit, wanted to go see nature and everything else, and I was just happy to be there. I was happy to be back of the pack in the middle of the pack, and I didn't really see myself as an endurance athlete. I saw myself as a weekend warrior that's just out there trying to give it a go, right? And then I hired a coach two years ago. I said, “Look, Patrick, if you want to stay in the middle of the pack, that's great, but if you want to push the envelope a little bit and see what you're capable of before you're 80 years old, right, because you're not getting any younger, like take it serious.” And so I hired a coach, and he changed my diet around, he changed my workouts around, and it was a lot harder. It took a lot more discipline, but I started seeing actual results when I thought I plateaued, and so I busted through that plateau. Things started happening, and this year, right after partner summit, ironically, the day after partner summit, all those nights with no sleep and stuff, I went and I ran 100K Ultra, the Kachinomosa 100K, and I won, first place overall, not like first place age group. And I was like, and once that happened, every race I show up to, I think I look around, I go, “I'm gonna beat you, I'm gonna beat you, I should at least finish top five in this race.” I have that confidence now that I never had until I put in some work and I saw a little bit of success. And once that success hit, it's like putting the key in the door lock, and it just unlocked. And so same thing with business, and there wasn't that crystal clear moment in the tellerus, it was just a gradual, people started coming to us, they started asking us for more advice, asking us for more information, asking us for more tools. And the great thing about the residual business is it creates more money the month before than the month before. And so we had the luxury of having money to invest and figure out how to get better. And eventually, I call it, it's the very unsexy, planting a tree and growing it. And eventually, your tree's gonna be strong enough to support a hammock, to support some weight. You don't really know when that moment is until you actually tie the hammock up and test it out. And now I think tellerus really got to that point when we combined with your company, Carry Your Sales Josh, because we were kind of stuck, we were not stuck, but we were following that same online model for 12 years, 13, 14 years, right? And we were really missing out on the enterprise deals, we were missing out on the big lumen deals, we were missing out on the big contact center deals. And we realized, hey, if we're gonna play in this space, we either need to get better, or we need to go buy the talent that we need to plug those holes. And you guys just stuck out like a sore thumb. I mean, it was just like the obvious match. We were transactional and automated. You guys were not automated, you guys staffed and built for expertise in different areas. And we like, that's gonna be the perfect marriage. And so, but again, like I said, we see the road, it's like, there's a fog out there, right? We can see maybe 500 meters, a thousand meters at a time. We can't see 50 miles out. But I think as long as we know where we're going eventually, the exact tact we take, the exact road we take to get there is a little less relevant. I mean, it's very relevant and impactful now, but if you know where this train is headed, if you know you need to go west and you're headed east, like red flag, right? But if you are headed west and you're going northwest and you're gonna meander back to the west and you don't know exactly where the road goes, man, that's what you wanna be on. And so that's really what we've done. We get credit a lot for being visionaries and getting this company to where it is now. But in reality, it was take it one mile at a time and listen to your partners. Listen to the people that are on the front freaking lines of battle, right? And listen to them, listen to what their customers need, because at the end of the day, this whole industry exists to help the customers consume technology the way they want to consume it. So it's, so yeah, it's a long road. – Good stuff, I love that. Let's talk about the first step here. Let's baseline it, right? I mean, you think about who's listening to this potentially. This could be partners that have sold a specific technology in cloud, but maybe didn't venture into contact center or vice versa, or maybe somebody that is thinking about doing this that is at a current affiliate marketing company and going, wait a minute, I've got all these relationships, I could come do this, right? Step one, right? People understanding our world as it exists. Some people still don't even know that it exists. Some people think direct sales is the only way, or I go buy my gear from a certain gear company, and that's it, and that's the only way. So what, of the partners that you have seen, be very effective in communicating their value to a prospect. Let's say it's a new prospect. What's the, what is that pitch? What's the strategy? What have you seen really work well in that part of it? – I think that is a fantastic question. It's an area where everybody needs to figure out what their value is. And what I like to tell people, I said, look, you know that you're doing something right when the customer thinks of you as a part of their team, not a sales rep, right? Direct reps are out there all the time. You cannot have your customers pigeonhole you into that direct rep plug. Like that's not, that's not your hole. That's not what you do, right? You are a part of their team to advise. Now, how is, how is advising a thing? How can advising be valuable, especially to customers in many cases that don't think they need your advice, right? You have to make it crystal clear as an advisor that you are a technology broker. Ah, rewind. You are not a technology broker. Why'd I say that? Because most people like nod in their heads, right? Do, no, no, that's a no. You are not a technology broker. No, you are. You're a technology information broker, right? Because as you talked about on prior podcasts, especially insecurity cloud, IT managed services, where, why are our companies having a hard time staffing, right? Because these people are incredibly expensive. It doesn't make sense to have a credibly expensive person limited to just your company. They get bored. Like they're not, they're not exposed to all the technologies that they want to be exposed to. And ultimately, where do these people end up? They end up at our suppliers. They, the suppliers are, and our suppliers are multiplying and replenishing the earth, right? There's over 400 now and growing because there's more suppliers coming in on the consulting side. I mean, there's so many different areas of technology that require consultants. So that's where all the talent is. So, so how do customers match up all of the things they're working on with all of the talent that's out there, right? You need information, you need case studies, you need people who have, have maybe tried that consultant before and put in a review about that consultant. Kind of like, you know, any type of review board. You have to take all the information that's out there about the capabilities as a supplier, which are, are numerous, right? The quality of the suppliers that are numerous and work with somebody like Telarus, right? Where we vet each of these suppliers. We make sure that they are quality, right? You will never be embarrassed by putting one of these people in front of your customers, but also giving you the tools and information you need so that you can be that broker of information of who can do it, who can do it well, who can do it on time, who can do it on budget, right? And really help our customers augment because right now every customer, every business is a technology company, right? When you're battling for customers, when you're out there battling for market share, when you're out there sometimes battling for survival or battling the regulating authorities or battling whoever they're in battles, right? And you know by virtue of being the information broker, who can help them in which instance. So if a partner can communicate clearly enough to their customer, I am a technology information broker. I can give you, remember this pitch, I can give you information that you cannot find in Google. – I love it. – I can give you information that you cannot find in Forrester. I can give you information you cannot find in Gartner, right? That is why you need me, right? Because I will help you make the decisions that make sense for your business, to keep you in budget and help your projects progress, everything else. But more importantly, I can help you, Mr. Customer, be an all star because I'm on your team and you get credit for being my boss. I'm just funneling information to you. I'm funneling a list of suppliers that you need to talk to, the questions you need to ask them, the things that you need to vet your technology world. So each customer out there has so many projects, so many needs. Some of them are technological, some of them are human resource staffing and other resource related issues. Some of them are budget, some of them are legal, the customers out there, they face so many of those things. And so if a person can convince a customer, I need to be a part of your team because I bring information you cannot find anywhere else, that is the pitch. And I think a lot of people still get pigeonholed into the sales rep, pigeonholed into the, go get me a quote, right? These are things that Google, like there's plenty of technology out there that they can do some of these things. So I think that's where people miss. And combine that with the imposter syndrome and it's like, well, am I really a technology information? – That's crazy. – Like they don't believe it. They look in the mirror and tell yourself. – What's the worst thing that happens, right? If the worst thing that happens when you ask these is if you get a no, great. Let me move on and stop wasting time with a customer that I don't need to. You brought up a really good point. If you can get past the imposter syndrome thing, I looked back at three or four of the really large deals that we've done that have tibbered up and have grown and grown and grown. And we've sold multiple products to through one two man shop partners. They all started out as, yeah, I don't really think that we need you. We kind of manage all of this in house. I mean, you guys seem nice. I appreciate you being here, but we've really got this. You know, that kind of standoffish IT team. And we've taken those accounts and because of the partners willingness to do exactly what you just mentioned, sell more, sell more, sell more. And it was an eye opening moment for me that we had earlier this year. We were sitting down with an enterprise customer that we've been selling to this partner for three, four years. And it was a business review. He brought his whole team in. And this is the guy that's been there signing the contract, signing the LOAs that is the sole purchaser that we thought knew us, knew the partner really, really well. He was like, hey, I got just one quick question. How do you guys get paid? And we're going, you're asking, he's asking. – It's because you're doing consulting level work that people typically bill for. – Four years into the relationship. That tells me how much of a bang up job and how much value there is if we get it right and get the recipe communicated. So I love that. – Yeah, and there's a caveat to that too. There's coming in too hot. Coming in like, I know everything. I'm gonna help you, everything else. And you're telling someone that they need help that probably doesn't think they need help. So you have to temper it with, hey, let's start out small. Just like you said, I mean, that's the key. Start out small, find a beach head and expand from there. If you come in, spill in all the stuff that you can do, and I'm your security guy, and I'm your cloud guy, and I'm your everything guy, people are like, whoa, timeout. You just sold me some voice a couple years ago, and now all of a sudden, you're everything, technology. So people have to understand what that is, but if they can just start with the basic concept of technology information brokerage, I'm your conduit to people that can do certain things for you, they can do them well, because we have a collective experience that we're putting into our recommendation engine. – Yeah, and you've got a really good point. Play the long game. – Yes. – This is not a short term. These trees take time to grow. Play the long game, and I think you'll add a ton of value into that relationship. It will pan out, because to your point, we're in a weird economic time where these people are pressed, these customers are pressed to do more with the same or less resources, and we're seeing a lot of those conversations. We were already seeing them before this weird economic climate, because it was just hard to find people. Now, people are getting squeezed out at some of these companies, and so they have this tech that is sunken in. They may or may not be ready to buy new tech. They might, but they also just need help in maintaining and managing and building and best architecture, design, all of those things. We're seeing all those conversations right now. Yeah, it's a great point you bring up. – Yeah, and technology's a really interesting space, and it's really a space that's not so much driven by technology, ironically enough. It's driven by human resources, and as soon as people start to understand that, as soon as our partners start to understand that, it's how do you connect your customers with the resources that they need that they may not be able to maintain in-house anymore? That the days of having all your resources in-house, probably long gone. We're talking legal, we're talking accounting, we're talking everything except your core business now, almost needs to be out of house. – And you bring up, it's funny, you bring up resources. That's my next question. – Hey. – So, my next question is, again, this is about how to help people improve their close rate, and with that, obviously, we have to overcome difficult things and have conversations we might not be comfortable with. But I think sometimes, now that we've grown and scaled so much, there is a lot of resources here, right? We've got everything from engineering to advanced solutions to partner support, commission, all of this stuff. If you look again back at your snapshot of partners that are successful, is there an underutilized resource? Is it one resource? Is it a lot of resources? At Telarus what do you see partners that are underutilizing? If you could say, gosh, I wish you guys would just use this more. – So, I have a two-part answer to that question. First, I want to talk about just stuff that doesn't have anything to do with Telarus It's just the bedside manner of the partner and how they are communicating with the customer. So, when you go in and start to engage with a customer, you need to find a problem that they have that they don't know about. That's key number one. So, I talked to a partner the other day, and they had just signed, coincidentally, a large physical therapy firm. So, and this is how the conversation went. Mr. Customer, we need to talk about your unified communication platform. Mr. Customer said, no, we just have put in a new phone system and we're good and we've got 19 locations and I'm in constant contact with my IT guys. They give me the thumbs up. And most agents will be like, okay, well, I guess, let's talk about security. No, no, what the agent did very smartly, he texted their main number. Hey, is it okay if I come in tomorrow for an appointment? Do you have any open spots in the afternoon? And guess what happened? That text came back as undeliverables. – Wah, wah, wah. – Right? And so, he's like, look, your competitors can accept text appointments from their customers. You cannot. And the customer didn't believe that the agent. The customer's like, that's wrong. They've been telling me this works because he's the CEO, right? So, he's not necessarily the tech guy. I said, and the agent said, pull out your phone and text your biggest physical therapy location, your biggest office. Text them if you can come tomorrow for an appointment. And his bounced as well. And the CEO was like, pissed. He's like, and the agent said, congratulations, you can't communicate with over half of your potential patient, your customer base, right? So, it was, again, illustrating a problem they didn't know they have. And every company has one. Every company has one. You may call their call center and sit on hold for 10 minutes, right? That means they either have a workforce optimization problem, they have a queuing problem, they have something. Something is off, or they haven't put AI in front of it so they can eliminate 70% of the calls that could be self-serviced, right? So, there's always something there. So, if our agents can understand how to figure out what that problem is. Second thing is understanding the resources at Telarus because being part of being a technology information broker is understanding what problems could potentially exist over here and what solutions you can marry them up to and match them up to. So, understanding the different types of engineers that Telarus has that we can bring in, the different types of tools. Maybe you're not ready for an engineer yet, maybe you just wanna go through a quick security assessment, right? Just ask them a couple questions about their GDPR compliance or PCI. I was on the phone personally with a customer the other day who wanted to have a security conversation but the agent was definitely terrified. He's like, “I've never had a security conversation. “I'm suffering from imposter syndrome right now. “I would really appreciate it if you would just use the tool, “use the Telarus assessment tool “and guide the customer through it so I can hear, right? “And I can hear what it's like “and then I can do all the assessments on my own after that.” So, I said, “Fine, let's go.” And I started talking to the customer. Instantly the customer entered into a defensive posture. He thought I was like, “Why are you asking me all these questions?” I said, “Listen, listen, I'm your defense attorney. “I can't defend you, I can't help you.” Or like a doctor, “I can't help you “if you're not honest with your physical condition right now. “If you lie about symptoms or things that are going wrong, “I can't treat it and worse, “I may misdiagnose you with something “because you didn't give me all of the symptoms that you had.” So, I said, “Listen, in the spirit of just openness, “just be transparent. “This is not gonna go to your boss. “This is not gonna impact your job rating “or your pay or your promotion or anything like that. “Just be as honest as you can “and we're gonna give you an assessment “and you can choose which part of the assessment “you wanna run upstream “or which part you just wanna use your own, whatever.” So, we went through and I said, some of the questions like, “Do you have a sock and sim?” And he's like, “Uh, I know we need to do that. “And I'm trying to get one in by the end of the year. “Can we assist you?” He's like, “Yeah, that would be okay.” And then we got through another question. I'm like, “You are a medical facility. “Are you HIPAA compliant?” Because I think we are. I'm like, “Okay, well, let's put you.” I said, “You process credit cards and co-pays. “Are you PCI compliant?” Yeah, I don't know. Patrick, I'm the IT guy. Is PCI my job? So, it wasn't even a technology question. I was like, “Who's responsible for this type of question?” I said, “Yeah, you run the firewalls, you run the network.” That's the information that carries the credit card data. Yes, it's you. But don't worry, we have access to people that can come and help you get PCI compliance so that your job's not at risk. So, your company's not at risk for losing their PCI compliance and once you lose PCI compliance, guess what, buddy? No more credit cards for you. So, that could impact your business pretty big time that you can't collect credit cards at the point of when the patient's at. So, it was a combination of technology, knowing the things that I was gonna bring in, knowing the things that we could connect that customer to, but it was also understanding the mindset of the customer, right? It's not shoving all this stuff down your customer's throat. It's having honest conversations with them. It's simple things like building trust with them and getting them to open up to you. Because once they open up to you, then you can really do your job. Then you can really have the opportunity to connect them to the engineering and all the other resources that Telerus has to offer. And one of the biggest values that we have relationships with lots of suppliers, but it's not just the relationship itself, it's understanding the quality of that supplier, understanding how they perform in the real world, right? And that's information that your customers are never gonna know. Hey, they're never gonna find all the suppliers that are out there, because quite frankly, a lot of them come to us, Josh, because they're terrible at marketing. Their technology's awesome. Help me sell our own stuff, please. Their engineer is awesome, right? But they can't sell their own story. They can't, their website's awful, but man, their product is awesome. So that's really where we're coming in, but it all starts with the customer engagement, from the Challenger sales model. The customer engagement with the sales rep column is over 50% of the whole entire sales interaction satisfaction, right? So it's understanding what your customer's fears are, it's understanding how your customer's paid, understanding that the person you're talking to may not be the decision maker, but he may wanna raise from the decision maker, or it's understanding all of those politics and all the nuance in addition to the technology. And that's really where our industry, that's our whole job. Our whole job is to make people look good, make good decisions in a way that is so non-transactional. – You bring up a great point. I wanna throw two things in there. One, it's simple, and you wouldn't think that it would be so effective, but I love when we use, and partners use the word augment. Because all of the great deals, most of the things that we come into, people are, you know, it's a body language thing, people are, wait a minute, is this person trying to push me out, blah, blah, blah. Augment is a huge thing. You brought up another great point of where, make no assumptions when you go into this. I love your strategy on, and I've seen it be really effective on, figure out what their competitors are doing. Are you aware that you can't do this, and are you aware that your competitors are, right? Leverage that kind of intelligence. Coming in, cold calling them, emailing them with no unique information in the customer's eyes, they're hard to get and understand that value. No, but I have this value, I have all this great stuff I can tell you about. But you've gotta find that hook right at the beginning. I'm gonna throw out, and I really should get royalties on this book, but I don't, but it's such a great book, I still throw it out, and it's only like 15 bucks on Amazon. There's a great book out there called Power Questions by Andrew Sobol. It's a really simple read, big yellow cover, you can get it on Amazon. But I think what it does, it's a bunch of situations. And it comes from a guy with a financial analyst background. So you know, it's in a sales role, but it's not exactly our role, but the idea is the same. Don't just walk in with an agenda of what you think needs to happen. Because what the book talks about is it says, here's what happens in a scenario of this sales rep that walked in and said, “Hey, Mr. Customer, I'm real excited, I wanna talk to you about, you know, improving your customers that aren't paying by, you know, three to 15%, right? We're gonna help you recoup those costs in the, you know, in the physical therapy, right? When you're sending out those bills, but we're gonna help you get them paid.” Thinking that's the agenda that you wanna come in, you think that's what they're gonna go. Versus if you don't have that information, and if you come in and you say, “Hey, Mr. Customer, listen, I would love to talk to you about helping improve some of these, you know, three to 15%, I think we can get some of your pays down, some of your payers responding quicker.” But is that an area that you wanna cover? Is that the key initiatives that you got focused on? Or kind of given some of the changes that are happening right now, is there other things, other big business initiatives or technology initiatives that you need to solve? I just stop and listen. That was a huge eye-opening book. I love some of the things in that. It just helps us think differently. And I think you gave a great story of the examples of when partners do that. We see a lot of great things happen. And that's how you get in, and you three X, you five X that sale, because you find all these things that nobody knew were there and nobody knew you could help them with. – Yeah, especially now. I mean, a lot of the technology decisions aren't even made by the technology decision makers, right? They're made by other departments. They're made by the board of directors who said, we will be cybersecurity resilient. We will pass our audits. We will get our cyber insurance policy together so that the interests of the shareholders are protected. We didn't talk about carbon black. We didn't talk about technology. We just said the company needs to do these things. And so if you can get the people you're talking to to cough those up because you're asking those right questions, they got to figure out what are their initiatives. They got to figure out what do they want to be when they grow up. They got to figure out if they're in offensive or defensive mode right now due to the economy. Are they growing their number of locations? Are they just trying to hold on to the ones they have and really lower costs or just kind of weather the storm? Like you have to figure those things out in advance because, or at least ask those questions and find out what those things are because those will lead down into so many little technology conversations. But if you start with a technology conversation, there's a one in 10 chance that you're gonna be off. – Great stuff. All right. I don't think we have a crystal ball here anywhere that I can see, but if we look into Patrick's crystal ball, – Yes. – You gave a great point that I think it's hard to look out in the beginning, right? When you were building this thing out to look out really far. And given the rate of change and how crazy fast everything changes right now, I still, I certainly agree. It's hard to look out. But if you look out, let's say just look out a year, look out maybe two years max. What's your perspective on what the future looks like, the changes, the technology, anything strategy wise that you see anybody shifting that's gonna be more effective or different or just anything you wanna put out there to be aware of as we wrap this up? – Yeah, that's a great question. My simple answer is this. When you look out into the technology landscape and you figure all of the different things that your customers are gonna have to take into consideration, right? It's not just connectivity to the internet. It's not just how they're gonna communicate with their customers. It's not just how they're gonna advertise. It's not how they use social media. It's everything, right? And as Telarus grows, more and more of those people that are what we call the digital workspace, those digital workspace infrastructure providers, they're coming to us and saying, “Hey, you guys have built this phenomenal distribution system, sell my widgets.” And so widgets are we talking about? What more can be put in there? We have AI companies are great. They're like, “Hey, can we get in there and help you fast track some of those phone calls or scan through some of your files to pull out information faster, workflow or work process automation?” That is a huge one. People are coming in saying, “Hey, you need a call center in India or Philippines. We can connect you with that.” So there's BPO, there's point of sale. You're already talking to the company that runs millions of dollars of POS transactions. Why aren't you getting your 3% of that or whatever? So you're gonna see more and more technologies coming in here, which means you have to either A, become expert in more and more technologies, which is brain busting, right? A lot of people feel like they're maxed out as there is with one or two technology swim lanes. Or two, partner with the TSP that has the capability to not only go and vet those suppliers, but organize the information of their performance so that you can then be the technology information broker and take that information back to your customers. So there's almost no part of their digital workspace or digital workplace that you can't help them with. And so their needs are not only growing, but our capabilities are growing and they're growing fast. And so keeping up with that is hard. I mean, you look at the Telarus Supplier Management Department in and of itself. I mean, they've got divisions now. They've got people that specialize in certain providers and certain service categories. It's a lot. And then from my perspective on the product side, we're going through and we're creating SKUs. We're creating individual categories of every product, every product, even down to the OEM level of everything that we have access to. And Josh, it's tens of thousands of SKUs. And growing is probably gonna get into the hundreds of thousands of SKUs. And so how does a person keep track of that? You just have to partner with somebody like aTelarus that is dedicated to finding those relationships and really systematizing those in a way that you can easily pull information out and be the hero to your customer. There's no way on the planet your customers are gonna have access to all of the information that they're gonna need to figure out which POS goes to which network, goes to which SD-WAN, it goes to which firewall provider, which puts them in compliance with X number of compliance for North America, for their industry. And it's all a connected chain. And the chain is getting bigger, it's getting more complicated, but that creates opportunity for our partners to be more valuable. And so I see more providers, I see more providers in more areas, and I see more opportunities for us to, again, going back to the very first thing I said, to centralize all that information in one spot that customers can't get access to, but our partners can. – Beautiful stuff, okay. Patrick, I feel like– – Did I mention flying cars? I forgot to fly cars. – Yeah, I was coming, we're selling cars. Hey, I know we joke about that, but why not? We're selling charging stations, we can do that, we can get your pay on that. – Let's go. Oh my gosh, charging stations and video surveillance. – We're inking in there for sure. All right. – There's literally nothing we can't sell. As long as our partners focus on creating their own value in their customers' mind, if their customers are thinking that they are part of their technology team, that's your product. And companies like us will figure out what to put in store shelves, so we'll go out and work with our upstream providers and make sure that you have everything on that shelf that you need to service that customer. – Good stuff, okay. I'm questioned out, Patrick, man, I appreciate you coming on, I appreciate you doing this. Lots of good nuggets in there, lots of just motivation, inspiration, and then some strategies. So excited to do this, we will have to have you back on for more of these, I feel like we could talk for about three hours on this topic, but thanks again, man, appreciate you coming on. – And thanks for having a tremendous podcast, tremendously successful, interesting, and keep up the fantastic work, Josh. I love Next Level BizTech, you're doing an awesome job. – Appreciate it, kudos, man. All right, everybody, that wraps us up for this week. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of Sales Engineering, and this has been Next Level BizTech. Next Level BizTech has been a production of Telarus Studio 19. Please visit www.telarus.com for more information.

Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | Pandora | iHeartRadio | Email | Deezer | RSS | More Don't miss this historic episode featuring Jason Lowe, Telarus Solution Architect for Contact Center. Join in as he discusses a key contact center product some companies just can not do without, which is Work Force Management (WFM). He talks about why they need it, how to overcome objections, and most importantly, how to help your contact center customers see the ROI on it! Can you believe that we're already at 100 episodes? While we go and ramp up and get ready for season three, we're gonna take you back, listen to some of the great moments in these past episodes. So stay tuned as we take you back to season one and two. Everybody, welcome back. We are here to talk about contact center, workforce management, and we're gonna talk about why that is so important. But before we get to breaking that down, what it is, why it matters, why you care, I'd like to welcome in Mr. Jason Lowe, also goes by the name of J. Lowe, into the studio today. – Thank you for having me, Josh. Happy to be here. – So J. Lowe, I wanna talk about your background. Part of my favorite thing of doing this is really learning where everybody came from, right? Did you used to cut grass, then you decided you wanna get into tech? Where did you start? What's your background? How did you get here? And give us the story. – Man, so I've always been into technology. My parents got an Atari, which I loved, and then we got an Apple 2C computer, and they sent me to a computer camp and did all of these things. But when I, quite frankly, when I got to high school, and I didn't wanna go to my other classes, I would go and hang out in the computer lab. And the person that ran the computer lab was very nice, and knew that if I wasn't there helping her with the computer lab, that I would probably be at the 7-Eleven on the corner, or something like that. So she let me go ahead and spend as much time there, and so I got to spend time networking computers together, and setting up software, and then I got a job right out of high school doing the same stuff, and it eventually led to writing code, and doing some of the really super cool, crazy, techy things. But then I was tired of not having a degree, so I went back to school, got my bachelors, and ironically, right after I got my bachelors, and I'm looking around for a job, any job whatsoever, and I ran into this fine gentleman by the name of Darren Solomon, who at the time, was a recruiter for a little company called UCN. – Ah yes. – Yes, and he is now at Varen, by the way, but he and I bonded, and he tried to shoehorn me into three or four other different positions, and I finally got in as a technical trainer at UCN. And so that's how my technology, at least in the software as a service space career, kind of got started. But yeah, previously everything from writing code, to networking, and computer maintenance, to software installation, and stuff like that. – I love it too, because it all translates, right? I mean, I never thought when I was going to school that I would need to know what the OSI model was, and understanding all these different layers, but you have these core things that you have, that you're taught that it always kind of comes back to, regardless of if you, we talk about this, of the things that we went to school for, are we doing those now, right? That's a whole nother podcast on its own, but I think that core, that troubleshooting, plugging it together, right? You're starting to learn what you like, right? So it's been awesome to kind of see that progression, and then turned into in contact, and then I believe there's some product experience in there. So I think you've gotten a cool, rounded out experience in my mind of the background, now obviously specializing in the context in our side here as an architect. – Yeah, it's really funny how things turn out. Everything's so iterative, right? You build on top of things, and when I got to UCN, I was a technical trainer, and then I go walking into Scott Welch's office, Scott is now CEO of Europe for Five9, and I said, “I need a mentor,” and he said, “Okay, here, take a test,” and so he gave me an LMS personality profile. They said it was a 96% match for sales engineering, which I had never heard of before in my life. And so a year and a half later, I'm on the SE team, and I also played SE roles at Talk Desk, and things like that, but really the fun and interesting thing where things went a little crazy for me was I met the SKO with Nice in Vegas, outside by a campfire, having a drink with Kristin Emenecker, who is now the chief product officer, I believe, for Playbox, and we were sitting there ruminating about what we were doing in our different roles, and she said, “Man, I wish I could find someone “to take this product role,” and I was like, “Well, I'll do it,” and next thing I know, we're having a conversation, and a month later, I'm on the product team, and I'm managing the relationship with Varenth, and at the time in contact before the nice acquisition, and so that was kind of my first exposure to workforce management in the contact center from a product side of things. I'd done things previously, but that really opened my eyes as to how these tools work, and what they do, and the value they provide. – So you got to see a lot of progression there. I mean, UCN is turning to in-contact, and you got to see the Varen partnership, product side, engineering side, architecture, all of that, and seeing in-contact grow over the years. As you saw that, I wanna talk a little bit about, and weave this into the workforce management side, because we always talk about, from a discovery call perspective, we're looking to understand where the customer is, what do they need, do they need the full suite of everything, do they need just this little segment of tools that we're trying to augment, because maybe the customer already bought that, and the agent's trying to wedge in with some product or service. So first off, help us understand, for anybody that doesn't know WFM, and what this whole workforce management thing is, break that down for us. – So WFM is one of a set of tools that are collectively referred to as workforce experience management these days. It used to also previously be called workforce optimization. And WFM, in a nutshell, the Cliff Notes version, is a tool that in one side, you feed in a bunch of variables, and on the other side, it spits out a schedule for your agents. That's basically what it is. Now the variables that you feed in, are everything from, how many calls we've taken, what service levels we want for these calls, what shifts do they wanna work, what kind of calls can they handle, are we expecting increases or decreases based on seasonality, or on advertising spends, or these different things. It takes into account all of these different factors, before it spits out the schedule, that allows you to answer the number of calls that you're going to get in the service level window that you want, service level being answering within a certain interval, like we wanna get 80 to 85% of our calls answered within 30 seconds, or something like that. And so it takes all that in consideration, and then it just makes sure that you're optimizing the number of people that you need to have on the floor, answering phone calls at any given time. So really, it's the thing that optimizes things in both directions. One, let's optimize the customer's experience by making sure that an agent's there to answer the phone call, but let's also optimize the spend for the company by making sure that we're accomplishing this with the lowest number of actual agents or employees necessary to meet those levels. – Awesome, I wanna go back to maybe one of the first examples that you did with this, but maybe let's kick back even further of how do we know who needs this, right? I mean, do most customers know that they need it? Is it a certain size that you would always see of when it gets to the size, that's kind of when, and the spreadsheets thing doesn't work anymore, or steer us around that? – Great question. So I would say in most cases, when you're looking at somewhere north of 40 to 50 agents, you're probably going to benefit from something like this. Now there are other variabilities that kind of play into things like, do we have a follow the sun model? Do we have just one shift, eight to five Monday through Friday, and that's it? Do we have long calls? Do we have short calls? Are we doing outbound also? What are the types of media channels are we handling like chat, SMS, email, et cetera with our agents? Lots of different factors, but generally rule of thumb, if you have more than 40 to 50 agents, if you will, whatever you call those agents, that's generally the level that's kind of a rule of thumb. – Okay, so let's look back at, I wanna show a progression here as we build on this at the end, then versus now kind of thing. If you flash back to one of the first opportunities that you ever worked in as an engineer, where you went, hey, I need WFM, or we need to add WFM in here, walk us through what was that like and what was the product set then and how much value did it add? – At that time, it really was just the scheduling component, but then there were also some affiliated products that also further justified it. On the scheduling side of things, that was enough of a financial justification to make it happen. This was an instance where I think they were dealing with 75 agents, they were doing spreadsheets, they did have a day shift and a swing shift, and they wanted to be really particular about their schedule and they wanted to really make sure that they were hitting those service level goals. And so they were less concerned with providing the agent with a consistent eight to five Monday through Friday schedule, but let's make sure that we have the right staff scheduled wherever needed. And so you have two different extremes in using the tools. One is going to be flexibility in the agent schedule, the other is going to be let's be consistent for the agent and just provide them a day job type thing. So the more flexible you can be with a schedule for an agent and start and finish at a specific time, take breaks at specific time, then you're going to be able to customize things a little better to hit those service levels. And in this particular case, it really made sense because they were using Excel spreadsheets and they were just kind of going off of what they felt. But when we dove into things and really took a look at their call volume, imported it into a WFM tool, they could really see the flows, the ebbs and flows during the day and see that sometimes people were taking breaks or were scheduled to take breaks or lunches during some of these peak periods. That's why their service levels were going down and they probably knew it was happening, but they weren't recognizing it because they didn't really have it right in front of their face in the form of a good report. – So how do you pull that in to help the customer see that it's not just an added cost? How do you quantify that into ROI? What's the easiest top couple things to drill that down? – I would say just taking a look at the fact that the people in a contact center are the number one cost. There's no, I mean, no matter what technology you're going to buy, you're still the biggest expense is going to be who you're paying and how much. And anything you can do to optimize that level of personnel or staffing, or dare I say, minimize it to what is just necessary to hit the goals, you're going to save yourself money. How is that going to be? Well, you're always going to be over-staffing if you're not really analyzing and taking a look at what's going on with all of these different variables and making sure that you have people staffed at the right time, but also not there at the times when you don't need them. And so it really boils down to, okay, how many agents do you have? What's your labor expenditure? Why don't we take some of your call volumes, run a couple of simulated schedules and see what your labor costs would be if we were to do it through the WFM tool on this other side. – Love it, love it, that's good. How do you think, let's talk about pros and cons. Our job, right, as engineers and architects is to help the partner solve the customer's business problems. And surely we would love it if we can come in and we can sell them context center and the workforce suite and UC and security and all these things. But we're only able to do, A, what the budget allows and then, B, what they really need that they can identify that solves their problems at the current time. So where I'm going with this is we talk about a fully integrated suite or just these a la carte products that help somebody wedge in. How do you look at pros and cons there? What's my pro or con either way of saying, Mr. Customer, you should leave this older technology that you have because by the time we bolt on, it's gonna be X, Y, and Z. Or, no, you know what, wedge it in here. How do you go through that thought process? – Well, it's interesting, right? You have to take into consideration a lot of different things like the philosophy and the environment and the customer. And what I mean by that is, are they cutting edge technology adapters or are they someone that likes to hang on to their legacy stuff? How open are they to that conversation? There's always that burden of teaching people what this new technology can do. And I've given you this analogy, but I think it's a very pertinent one. I'm giving it up. I'm not turning in my man card. Not gonna do it, but I like this show called Downton Abbey, I just like it, okay? – Awesome. – And the very, very first episode ever, they're talking about how electricity is this really great new invention. And they're talking about how they're actually gonna pipe electricity into the kitchen. And one of the kitchen maids is really confused and can't understand why in the world you would pump electricity into a kitchen for crying out loud. That's because she didn't understand that electricity could drive mixers and refrigerators and all these different things. She had to be educated as to why this tool was going to make her life better and easier and more efficient. And sometimes in the sales process with a lot of these products, you go through that. So ROI is really important. On WFM, it's a little bit more tangible. On QM and some of these other ancillary products, it can be a little bit harder to prove, but it is provable. You just have to do the analysis. You just have to get into the numbers and figure it out. Now as it pertains to do we do it as an add-on, do we do it as a suite of products, again, that's kind of the philosophy of the customer. Do they want to write one check? Do they want to have one hand to shake, one throat to choke, whatever your favorite analogy is? Or are they okay with trying to go with different pieces and bringing together a suite of best of breed products? And there's really no right or wrong answer for everybody because everybody has a different use case that is going to be met by different product mixes. Oftentimes people just kind of go with their gut or they go with what their company philosophy is. – Fair, good point. Do you find though that with a product like this, are you getting them to consider things that they haven't thought of yet? You know, what percentage of customers do you think are considering these things, right? Or thinking about the agent and how long they're on and how much their costs are and all those things. Or are you finding that you're having to bring up in these discovery discussions? Hey, have you thought about this? Have you thought about the software to be able to do these things? – There's a lot of factors there. Sometimes they're familiar with the technology, but it hasn't been the right time yet to try and implement it. Sometimes it's complete discovery and education because they've been so stuck on older technology that they haven't even considered doing this yet. It really is fun to go through that process with customers from both perspectives, right? We now have employees that have used this in previous lives. We want to adopt this technology. We haven't been big enough to do it yet. Now we're big enough to do it. Or our executive team is really emphasizing the trend of now, which is the customer experience. Let's make sure we're differentiating ourselves by how well we're treating our customers. We have to do a better job of that. Let's make sure that we are incorporating these different tools that can make that better. And therefore by extension, make the customer experience better. And so, wow, it's a fascinating time to be in this space. Let's just put it that way. Because technology is always changing, as you know, Mr. Podcaster, in all of these different areas. And all of these different and exciting innovations are really bearing fruit at a lot of different levels. And there's always that bell curve, right? Of early adoption versus late adoption, et cetera. Contact centers run the gamut, just like everybody else. They all run the gamut. It's fun to go in and see what levers you can pull or push to educate them as to what can actually make things better for them. How, why, how it's gonna save them money. How it's going to improve their customer experience and make their lives better. – So that's perfect scenario. That's when it goes good, when we're able to discover, and we can pull out everything that they need. Let's say a partner's listening up to this point, they're ready to hang up off this podcast and go try what you said and put into play. I wanna talk about the bad things, right? Not to be a Debbie Downer, but what are the problems that you're gonna run into in a conversation that you see? You know, what is it that customers struggle with if they don't wanna adopt WFM, or they don't wanna move in that direction? Or just what are some of the challenges if a partner goes down and has this discovery and asks some of these questions on their own, what are they gonna run into that the customer might say, eh, I don't know? – Well, the number one thing that you're facing when you're in a situation like that is, you know, it's not necessarily the competitor which is another provider, it's, you know, no change, or not make any change at all. They just wanna go with the status quo. That's a tough one to fight, and really it comes down to education. And sometimes partners may, how can I put this the right way? They want to make sure that they're coming across the right way when they're talking to their customers about new technologies. They may not feel armed or educated, and that's where myself and my solution architect teammates really come into play here. We can be that person in your hip pocket or side by side with you on these phone calls to have those conversations, to do that education, to make sure that the customer realizes the benefit that these technologies could bring to them. It's the role we play here atTelarus We make everybody better, including our partners, by giving them greater resources to accomplish those very things. – Love it. All right, let's get through, we talked about an early example. Let's talk about a more recent example. We can leave customer name out of this, but what I'd love to hear about this is that, we always talk a lot about what the deal ends up closing at. Really wasn't always what it started as, whether that's because we ask a lot of questions naturally and we gotta understand what fits where, and APIs and integrations and all that good stuff. But maybe walk me through an example where you helped a partner, you got brought into this situation, I said, Jason, here's what it is. And by the time you got through your discovery process and all of that, it ended up being that they needed this. And let's hear kind of what that is, and then really what did it solve? – Great question. So I think doing discovery the right way leads to discussions about these newer technologies. And it can be something as simple as just asking a question about something that maybe they hadn't considered on purpose, or if they didn't have experience with it and listening to them go, what's that? How does that work? How's that gonna provide me a benefit? And then you get into a greater conversation of what it is that those tools can do. Really the discovery process is key. I think it's very, very, very key in making sure that you're leading the conversation the right way. Plus if you're doing it right, you could find opportunity a little bit later down the road to introduce some of those newer things. A recent use case would be actually, one that I'm thinking right now was they just were interested in updating their phone systems. They didn't have much of an IVR, but they had heard, and this was the term they used with me, they had heard of some of these newer technologies that maybe they wanted to figure out to use down the road. And so that led to a conversation of, okay, well let's talk about those newer technologies and these are what they can do and these are the ways that they can improve that customer experience. And it led to a lot of aha moments for the customer. It led to a lot of, oh, and you can do that now? Oh, I'd heard that that might be possible, but I didn't think that that was technology that we would be able to afford, let alone justify. And then when you get into the details of that and they realize that there are cost-effective ways to incorporate a lot of these newer technologies into their practice, it really made an impact. And what started out as just a, let's replace just our phone system and we're gonna do all of these things as futures. And later on it progressed into, okay, guess what? We're gonna add this piece and this piece and this piece with these two pieces being phase two, this piece being phase three. Ended up probably being about twice as big of a deal as it was originally. – Love it. Message here, bring in the team, we can help. – We do those things for you. – All right, so as we wrap this up, just one or two final things here. Obviously we're talking about resources, one of those phenomenal resources that partners have that they can lean on and bring in our team to help with. Is there anything that you would give a partner advice on if they're not comfortable cracking into this technology, right, aside from bringing us in? Anything else that you would recommend for them to do? Education, things like that for them to learn who are not comfortable in selling this? – Just ask the questions and ask the questions around how people are communicating. I think that's probably the biggest thing. How are your customers talking to you? How are you talking to your customers? Who are your customers? What is their experience like? Is there anything you want to do to improve that? What systems are you using now to facilitate those things that you're doing? Then you can ask questions that are a little bit standard, like what is your SLA? What is your service level? What is your CSAT score? All of these different things that maybe you dropped some acronyms or you mentioned some things that they hadn't quite considered. Your job really is not to dive into and ask all of the, at least maybe your job could be this if you wanted it to be, but you don't necessarily need to dive in and ask all the super technical questions. You just need to progress it to, let's have another conversation. Let's get to a point where we're talking to somebody that we can discuss these things in greater detail. Oh, by the way, I'm gonna call Jason and have Jason on the phone with me to go ahead and have that conversation. It's just ask questions. Try and learn a little bit more about what they like, what they don't like, what's keeping them up at night, what types of technologies have they heard about and they wanna consider and go from there. – Love it. Okay, final thoughts here. So in honor of Miss Cleo, if anybody knows what that is, those late night infomercials where she promises to tell your future. We've seen a lot of evolution to your point, right? We talk about that all the time on this podcast of technology, the rate of change is faster than anything we've ever seen. If you look out, I don't know, it's hard to look out even past 12 months right now, but if you look out 12 plus months, anything that you see changing dramatically in this space that you want partners to kind of be aware of and pay attention to? – Customer experience is going to be influenced by a lot more technology than just an ability to answer the phone. There are intelligent agents, there's AI everywhere doing all sorts of things in all the different places at once. Sam Nelson, one of the great people we work with here, Talaris just today, kicked off one of her minutes, or I can't remember the exact name. – Sam Snippets. – Sam Snippets, where she was talking about AI and the role that it plays in the contact center and in customer service and customer experience. That is very, very true. And it seems like every time we turn a corner and we're talking to a provider, they're taking AI and applying it to a different place in the contact center and in the customer experience that we hadn't thought of or considered before. And so that's all leading to the point where you just need to be comfortable with the fact that technology is going to continue to evolve, technology is going to continue to make things better, but the bottom line is that there will always be someone that wants to talk to a live person and that doesn't necessarily want to talk to a machine or doesn't want to try and serve themselves in certain ways. And so there will always be people that you can talk to that are contact center or customer experience centric. Another thing, if I may, take a few more moments here, is the merger of marketing and customer service, sales and customer service. Marketing, sales, customer service are all kind of becoming the same thing. And so the systems that are serving one of those can oftentimes be the systems that serve others. And we have in our stable providers here at Telarus some fantastic tools that can do great work in all of those different areas and integrate with the other tools in the areas as well. – Love it. Okay, Mr. Jason Lowe, thanks for coming into the studio with me today, man. – Thank you for having me. – Okay, that wraps us up. All right, everybody, we're out of here for today. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of Sales Engineering. This is Workforce Management with Mr. Jason Lowe, Solution Architect, Telarus Telarus

Listen to the powerhouse team of Brandon Ivey and Christoph Uhlig from Evok Technologies. They live and breathe cloud & security sales. Being uniquely positioned to understand what a customer is going through, they talk modernization, augmenting teams, and the struggles they help customers overcome. Can you believe that we're already at 100 episodes? While we go and ramp up and get ready for season three, we're gonna take you back, listen to some of the great moments in these past episodes. So stay tuned as we take you back to season one and two. – Hey everybody, welcome back. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto and this is the Next Level BizTech Podcast. So today we are actually wrapping up the first series in season two, and we're talking about managed services and how we're solving this tech talent issue that we've got going on with security and the broader technology landscape. So if you tuned in on the first episode, you heard Jason Stein, and he talked about what Telarus is doing overall from the practice and how we go to market and what we're seeing and the trends and things like that. And then we had one of our great suppliers on where Thrive came on and talked about all the things from a technical perspective, their products, where they're fitting, how they go to market with those, differentiators, all that good stuff. But today we get to hear from what I think is really critical. We get to hear from the partner's perspective. So we got some good friends of mine. We've been spending a lot of time together lately. We got Brandon Ivey and Christoph Uhlig from EVOK Technologies. Gents, Brandon, welcome. – Thanks for having us, Josh. It's really great to be here. – All right, so let's kick this off. Brandon, I'm gonna come to you first here. Part of my favorite story is how do you get started? Everybody has a different path. Some people super linear, some people do crazy windy stuff and end up in this world. I'm curious to hear how you guys get started in this. – Absolutely, so it's kind of interesting. I think Christoph and I both have similar backgrounds and kind of went through similar trials and tribulations, if you will, through our career path. We both started out in entry-level sales jobs coming out of college, worked up the corporate ladder, led sales teams, became directors or VPs and led overall go-to-market strategies and new logo acquisition sales. And interesting enough, neither one of us really wanted to be in management roles any longer. And we found ourselves starting at a cloud company on the same day in the same role. And what was interesting enough, at least from my perspective, is that we kind of hit it off from the get-go. I think Christoph may have had a difference of opinion, but he was like, “Hey, I want to be in line with that guy, he seems competitive.” And we fed off of that. And so what we did to begin with was we started interviewing all of the top reps at the organization, trying to figure out what was the secret sauce to be successful, right? In long story short, most of them didn't have a lot of positive feedback. It was, if you got lucky enough to be tagged to that right account that was growing, et cetera, et cetera, then you had some success. So we kind of stumbled and went through some different challenges the first few months at that cloud company. And then we realized we needed a force multiplier. And I had some little exposure to what the channel ecosystem was, more from a competitive standpoint, based on where I was when I was leading a sales team, there was a channel. And so we introduced that, we started working with some regional players, and we started integrating that into our go-to-market strategy. And effectively after six months at the cloud company, we took it to the executive team and the board and said, “Hey, I think this is what we need to do.” We partnered, Kristoff and I effectively partnered. We created our own business model within a business, if you will. And I think that's what's kind of allowed us to have the success that we're having coming up or at least kicking off this new venture two and a half years ago. – Love it. Kristoff, any interesting door-to-door experience? I mean, I'm a vacuum guy. I don't know if you guys have, you know, I always… – I think you know me too. I think we talked earlier and you teed that one right up. But no, like, just like Brandon, I think, you know, we were willing to do what we needed to, to learn the art of hard work and creativity. Yeah, we've both had plenty of door-to-door opportunities. To really grind, we've had some really unique creative opportunities in our career that took some critical thinking. But, you know, all of that led up to the fact that I think sales and just working with people was like really important to us. We wanted to help people solve problems. And, you know, I know we're gonna talk a little bit about our business in a bit, but I think being so integrated into sales gave us a unique perspective to help us be more effective for our customers today from a procurement and buying standpoint. I often say, I think the best defense lawyers once were prosecutors and vice versa, understanding, you know, the intricacies of the other side, you know, really, really well, allows us to, I think, serve our customers a lot more effectively. But yeah, I mean, to Brandon's point, when we got to this cloud provider, us realizing the power of the channel, and really what that force multiplier could do was, you know, a game changer. It was like an aha moment for me, for sure, because I had had zero exposure to the channel. And when we looked and we interviewed these, you know, previous sales reps for best practices and what's replicable and what can we do to be successful here, the reality was they weren't closing new logos. They weren't getting in front of new companies. And, you know, the channel gave Brandon and I that opportunity. – That company is a channel first company now, by the way. So clearly this strategy works. – I may be biased, but I think this is where the industry is going. It is funny though. I mean, it is funny as long as we've been doing this and as long as Telerus has been in existence, it's still fascinating to me how many people are just not familiar with the channel yet. And obviously we're all seeing the convergence of doing away with some of the direct sales and moving more headcount over to channel and supporting channel. But, you know, just when we think it's been in existence for a while, it's still, if you zoom out, it's still so early in some instances. – I think a lot of that's too with the, there's been a lot of focus on specific technologies over time. So just the simple fact that we're discussing, you know, MSP or MSSPs today, you know, that's kind of broadening out that scope, right? So, you know, I think it's only gonna get bigger and bigger like you mentioned. – All right, so we were talking about your business now. Tell everybody, fill us in, you guys have a cool go-to-market model and I love some of the focuses that you have on the technology side, but let everybody know what is Evoke? – Sure, well, first of all, Evoke stands for Enable, Validate, Optimize, Knowledge Transfer. And just like Chris just mentioned, essentially we wanted to take what we thought were how would a customer want to procure things? How would they want to run a process? How would they want to evaluate the market? How would they essentially want to ensure that they have a consistent buying experience that's productive and mitigates bad customer experiences coming out the backend? So we took those kind of four terms, if you will, layered that into what we thought would be the right customer engagement. We kind of trialed that, if you will, with a few anchor tenants, found out it was productive. And then we've replicated that now over the past three years. But, you know, who we are essentially, like Kristoff mentioned, we did a lot of time in sales. And the last thing we want to do is be a sales rep to our individual clients. We have really formed relationships with them now to be an extension of the team, to provide all that intellectual property to them that allows them to realize, oh, hey, there is a better way of doing this. Or potentially they're just getting exposure to a provider that they would have never even looked at because it's not in Gartner, or that doesn't come up on an SEO search, or whatever it might be. And I think that started to change that dynamic of like, oh, this is interesting, or this is advantage, or potentially this is just providing more value than what we were doing or how we were doing it in the past. So yeah, but we founded it three years ago. It's been going strong with groups like Telerus supporting us and enabling us. We've seen a lot of success and our clients have, you know, they're like, when can we be a reference? How can we help scale your business? What does this look like? And that's very rewarding. And it's something that, you know, most salespeople probably don't get to experience in that similar role, right? So yeah, it's been great. – Good point. So let's switch gears here. I wanna talk about, you know, firstChristoph how you learned about this technology, and then really maybe just let's weave that into the first deal. We're gonna get to a more recent deal as we move this on and kind of into the weeds and the intricacies of it. But talk to me about, you know, was it when you're at that cloud company, was it before that? I mean, what's your first exposure to this whole managed services landscape and talking about just that first deal? What was that like? – So I would say, you know, our experience working at hosting gave us immense insight into managed services in general and just understanding the criticality of what that offering ultimately does. You know, both from a provider perspective, but also more importantly from a customer's perspective. But, you know, back in, I don't know, call it 2012, 2011, 2012, you started seeing a massive shift from on-prem to the cloud, right? Like people realizing, hey, AWS is something. Azure is something. Private cloud and getting this out of our facility and into a data center that's redundant and supported. I mean, it's something we need to move towards, but not a lot of people knew how to do it. And, you know, we started meeting with just tons of customers that wanted help with that journey. They wanted ideas, they wanted a roadmap. They wanted to figure out how do we take this on-prem, you know, and move this into the cloud? And how can we, you know, get some of these mundane tasks of call it monitoring and patch management and antivirus and performing backups and the day-to-day care and feeding of the environment? How do we get this off our plate and free us up to focus on the core competencies of our business and, you know, what's really driving our company forward? And then secondly, how do we solve things like database management and database architecture and security services and some of the stuff that, frankly, they couldn't even find people, you know, to fill those roles. And so you have a system administrator that's potentially getting paid 100K a year, patching servers, you know, 75% of his time. And then the other 25% of his time moonlighting as like a security analyst or, you know, a database administrator, it just wasn't scalable. So I think when companies started realizing, hey, we need to get this stuff off-prem and we need to more importantly find a partner to co-manage this so we can create a RACI matrix that's clearly defined, hey, we want to continue to do these things at the application layer, but from the OS down, let's pass this off to a partner that we can depend on that can build a highly redundant, highly manageable, scalable infrastructure. And I think that's really when, you know, we first got exposure and it was just coming by the waves and it hasn't stopped today. By the way, companies are still, you know, we'll get into it, I'm sure a little bit later, but they're still looking for this more than ever. And then when I shift into kind of thinking about, you know, call it first deal, I won't probably get into the first deal, but I'll tell you about a deal that I think is super applicable to this conversation. So we're working, and this is, you know, as Evoke, this was post our days at hosting and we're working with a large university here in Colorado that, you know, unfortunately they were ransomware about four years ago. They ended up paying the ransom, you know, it was a really tough situation for them. And, you know, they looked at the problem and said, gosh, you know, we need to figure out a solution to help us, help make us more secure. And what they did, you know, for better or for worse, they started throwing technology at the problem. You know, they started looking at EDR solutions and ultimately they selected Carbon Black. They looked at, you know, different high profile security partners like Palo Alto, and they put, you know, architected their entire environment for Palo Alto. They incorporated, you know, email filtering. What they didn't really count on was the noise that all of those tools are gonna create. And those tools are great, they're great tools, but you can't solve issues necessarily just with tools. What you need is services, right? They had 2,500 endpoints. They had over 600 lab workstations across the university. They had over 200 VMs within their environment. And like I said, they were just getting noise, but really I think what they figured out after just, you know, years of trying to solve this with, you know, patching tools and technology into the problem, they realized we need a SIM, we need a security operations center that's staffed 24 seven that has multiple shifts. It's constantly looking at our logs, constantly looking at our alerts. And we need, you know, a true MDR solution. We need, and the R of that, you know, managed detection and response being the most critical aspect. We need a partner that can actually react on our behalf, can quarantine the environment, can be an extension of our team. By the way, I didn't mention it, but this university had one security officer. That's it. Yeah, nobody. So he's getting alert overload, alert fatigue. He hadn't looked at the alerts in, you know, over a year, just because it was just piling into his email. So for us to go out and really, you know, find a partner, help run a competitive process that, you know, not only did he get insight into what's available in the market, but, you know, by our process, I think he was able to make the right decision for his organization to really bring in a group that could act as an extension of his team and help deliver, you know, on his behalf. And I'll tell you, the other thing that I want to comment on is, you know, there's providers that exist out in the market today that have great technology. And they may struggle on services. They may be having service-related issues. And that technology is only as good as the services behind it. It doesn't matter if it's the best in the world, upper right corner of magic from a technology standpoint, unless the service and methodology and approach is sound, it really means nothing. – Yeah, you brought up a couple of good points in there. I want to go back to, I'm curious, you know, we always talk about, and I try to determine, are we in the middle of paradigm shifts? Did the paradigm shift already happen, right? In hindsight, we all, you know, we can see a little clearer when some of these things happen, you know, when the bull market started, when the bear market started, all of that. But if you think back to the hosting days and kind of that, let's call it a way, nine, 10, 11 timeframe. So you've got this, you know, AWS launching major product, right? Oh, six, oh, seven, kind of in that era, you've got the economic collapse of when people went, wait a minute, I used to buy all this stuff. I used to CapEx outlay it. Now I'm a little leery on that, you know, and, you know, there's the whole, when AWS comes out, now this is just for dev. It's never going to make it to prod. I mean, this is not the same uptime I can get in a data center. And don't get me wrong, there's places for gear in data center, I'm not disputing that. But I'm just kind of curious, is that, is that about that time where you really felt that wave of when things shifted and people started really taking this seriously and said, yeah, we got to look at this, we got to look at it. And it's just that inevitable wave that hasn't stopped. Did it start around that time as well for you? – I would say so, to a large extent, you know, back in those days, it's kind of like what security is today. People use these blanket terms security. And it's like, well, what does that actually mean? Like, let's unpack that. That's what, there's a ton of ways you can go about, you know, talking around security. And the same thing held true for cloud. I think back then they broadly said cloud. Of course, there's the concept of private cloud. There's on-prem, there's public cloud, meaning multi-tenant within a provider. And then there's true public cloud with the likes of Azure, AWS and Google. But I think a lot of people back then felt this unbelievable pressure to go to the hyperscalers, right? To go look at AWS, to go into Azure, because that was the flashy lights. Those were the things that were in the news. That was what the trades were saying that the next big wave is. And it's not wrong for certain applications. If you're, that's why startups are, were perfect for AWS and Azure and that, because they actually architected their applications in the hyperscaler cloud. And largely to a certain extent for the scalability of those. But, you know, what we saw was a mad rush to AWS and Azure and then a pullback, you know, back into, you know, private cloud and realizing like, look DevOps may not be for everybody. It may, you know, there's applications that are fairly predictable and have static workloads that still need, you know, a certain amount of, you know, managed services and support. But, you know, not everything needs, you know, there's not one size fits all for all of those environments. But I would say, you know, it was about that time, to your point that, you know, we really started having those conversations and seeing that shift. – Yeah. Good point. – I was going to say, yeah. I mean, I think economic pressure always plays a role in a lot of technology transformations across enterprises. I mean, even now we see large enterprises looking to go to more back to the old school approach of bare metal services, right? Like there's a lot of different use cases for that. I mean, I don't know if that'll be widely adopted, but there's supply chain issues and economic pressures. So, you know, those two things are driving a behavior, just like in cybersecurity, we have insurance policies and rates going up. It's driving a behavior. It's having specific impact. Back then it was co-location, half X expenses, transitioning to an OpEx, focusing on EBITDA, you know, all of those different things play into what enterprises make as decisions, right? And so I think as long as we're staying on top of those market trends and understanding what's taking place, not only in the technology spectrum, but holistically, you know, that helps ensure that customers make better decisions. – Yeah. Good point. So I want to talk about relationships. You know, as you look at this, right? All of our partners have started out in different places, in different skill sets, in different technologies. Some started in cloud and then went to network. Some started in network and then went into, you know, all the other things. So I'm always kind of curious. I mean, you guys kind of brought it up a little bit earlier, but maybe,Christoph I'm kind of curious about, you know, when you start having these strategic conversations, when the wall is down, right? When the customer really feels like you're an extension of their team, what does that do for the relationship with the customer when you're covering all these things? – So I think it's critical. And, you know, Brandon and I have been very passionate about this topic for a long time. You know, we truly believe that if you go solve the mission critical objectives for an organization, or you help solve, you know, a bridge towards securing applications, keeping applications available, helping with, you know, the great resignation is a real thing. People are leaving companies. People are having a hard time finding people. People are having a hard time keeping people. You go solve mission critical objectives for organizations, you get everything, right? Like the floodgates open, you gain their trust, you gain almost everything that you could possibly want out of that relationship. So, you know, we typically are passionate about wanting to focus on the cloud and security piece of the business as a primary objective. It's always something that, you know, we get into with customers is tell me about your team, tell me about your skillsets, tell me about, you know, what you guys are trying to accomplish, tell me about the gaps that you may have across your organization. And as we start to understand like, where is there pain coming from? Where are they looking to improve organizationally? And we can start helping to identify areas and unbelievable providers that can come in as an extension. It truly does help secure and build that relationship, but it's not a one deal close type of situation. But the reality for a lot of these companies is, you know, the days of going to like an IBM and expecting to get everything under one roof is dead. Like instead, you know, there's laser focused, really good providers that exist out in the market today that are really good at one or two things. And it's important for Brandon and I to know who those guys are. And being able to partner with a company like Telerus and you know, your great engineering team, it's just been hugely advantageous to us because we can get insight into, okay, what are these other hundred customers across the US experiencing from these providers? Have they been happy ending? Have they been happy stories? Have they been, you know, hey, they said all the right things at the beginning throughout the sales process, but then, you know, it was a disaster. You know, once we got into the door, that's hugely important for Brandon and I to know what we're getting our customers into. It's just like when I go, it's not a perfect analogy, but when I go car shopping, you know, every three, four years, it's unbelievable the technology that has changed, you know, and is available. I don't know. So I have to really just rely on the sales guy who's telling me that, and that's not necessarily fair. So to have a guy that's all they're doing is analyzing the industry and the market and ranking and scoring providers, it's super important for us to give that same insight to a CIO who also doesn't have the time over more than three or four or five years of analyzing. What's new? What's different? What should I be aware of? So yeah, relationships are huge, but most importantly, it's, you know, solving those mission critical issues, I think gains that trust immensely. – Good point. Brandon, I want to come back to you. I want to talk about challenges. You know, I think we're painting a really good picture here of there's a lot of value that we add, right? When we come in, when you guys come in, and you know, you're helping the CIO build something, build something, build something, and then this CIO might bounce and the company loses him, you know, you got great value in that from, you've helped him, you've helped establish yourself at the last company. Now he's leaning on you going, what's the new latest? What's the greatest tech that I should know? So certainly like these things take time to grow and to grow some of these relationships. I'm curious with what you've been through from a challenges perspective, what are the difficult parts of these conversations? – So we've gone through that. I'm sure, you know, most people have where the CIO or the executive IT person leaves, or you just end up having to get, go work with another individual. So potentially put in all that effort. You know, one thing that we've realized is you learn the most about an organization by running a process. And so that's probably the most challenging thing, especially if someone new steps in. So I'll take that as a secondary part of kind of like, what are the challenges that we see, right? So I think the biggest challenge, especially if you're focusing on mission critical workloads or whatever is probably the most pertinent or complex to the business, is actually establishing what do they have in place today? Usually it's a barrage of things over the last decade that maybe somebody's still just paying a bill, et cetera. So you have to establish that baseline, understand the expectations and needs of what's going forward and then being able to provide some thought leadership around all of that. You know, that's a very challenging process, right? And especially depending on if you have a non-technical executive, that can make it more challenging. If you have somebody who inherited just a number of different things, now you're picking through, you know, it's like, you know, you're just having to dive so deep into something that potentially they don't have access to, they don't have information from, and then it leans into the providers, right? So now where we have to take it a step farther and a lot of times those groups don't have, you know, run books set up, they don't have any kind of scripts put into place, they don't have any kind of, you know, diagrams or Visios or architecture references or security references, anything, right? It's just, essentially they were sold a product at some point, it's been potentially implemented, they're paying a bill and now it's, you know, it can be our job to figure out, well, we need to make sure that we check that box because you're either using it, not using it, or how is it applicable to the business, right? And that's where when you start trying to wrap that back into thought leadership and providing, okay, well, we need to go down that path of leaning on the different engineers across Telarus or the providers or whatever it may look like to come up with a holistic solution that actually solves everything that they have if they need it, in addition to what's needed or expected, and then providing like, well, maybe we can consolidate or rebind or evolve all of those things into the next level of, you know, where market trends are going or what's taking place in an overall environment. And that's by far the biggest challenge. And I mean, you know, I think everybody probably experiences that and, you know, that kind of leans back into the relationship piece that we just discussed where if you run that process with someone and you come out the backend where they're like, thank you, then you know you did your job, right? And you're probably gonna get another opportunity. And that's our whole objective is we wanna do our very best because then they're gonna give us that next opportunity. If we do that, we get the next project. We get the next opportunity. If they move to another business, we get a follow them there. And so that's been very rewarding from that perspective. – You know, it's funny. We talked in the beginning about this whole channel thing where we feel like we've been doing it a while, but you know, you bring up a good point that reminds me that I think the last people to really hear about and understand this channel are the customers. Well, they don't care, right? Why would they? But once they understand it, it's, wow, I didn't know this existed and this is amazing. Please help me. So it's been really cool to your point to see a lot of these go from, hey, I don't know who you are. I think I'm pretty cool working some of these, you know, these technologies myself. I don't really understand quite where you can help me. You know, are you a middleman? And when they take that to, you know, to your point, let us run a process. Let us help you with some of these mission critical workloads and applications, thinking through things that they hadn't thought through. There are sometimes those aha moments of you take it from, I didn't need you to, I can't live without you. Please look at this next project that we have coming in six months, 12 months. But, you know, I've seen three, four years out, some of these crazy things and that, that to your point, that's the aha moment. I think when you know that you're looped into that process, that's the click factor, but sometimes it takes time. And, you know, in these enterprise deals too, I think we talked about getting flat footed when some of these CIOs or whatever leave, it just underscores, geez, now I got to know procurement. Now I got to know tech. Now I got to know business leader. You just constantly trying to make sure that you know, all the right people in the account. And out of your point, it just takes time. – You summed up exactly what we just discussed, right? I mean, I think we have a very large client here in Denver. So I think eight or 9,000 employees and it was that exact same process, right? It was, you know, I don't really understand it or what it, you know, what value is this really going to bring in? Essentially, we just let us run our process. And if you see value at the end of it, fantastic. And if you don't, you know, we'll part ways. And- – I love the takeaway approach. That's like, it's one of my favorites. Cause it's just here, here it is. Look, we're so confident that this is going to work. It doesn't all go- – We've had other organizations, they realize how much time, effort, data, things that we bring to the table that they paid us for these engagements, right? So there is real value. There is, you know, a real model here. And I do think that the more that you run strategic processes and not just a, you know, a transactional, likeChristoph said, it's not just, you're not just going and selling something and then moving on to the next new logo, right? We're, we truly are getting entrenched into that organization and becoming an extension of their team. So- – So let's talk, Brandon, let's talk an example here. What I like to get into this part of it really is, let's talk about, you know, what kind of environment you walked into. And what I really liked to hear is, was it really what you were told it would be or what you thought it would be? When you really got into it, what did you find? What was the problem? What was the technology? And then ultimately what was the problem that you solved? How did you do it? What kind of tech did you put in? And you know, what was the outcome of all that? – Sure. Well, we can talk about, let's see, here's a good example. We talk about relationships, things of that nature. I had a really good friend who I went to CrossFit with. You know, he was in IT, never worked with him when he was in IT and I was on the sales side. When he landed as a COO at this new organization, you know, I reached out to him and said, “Hey, this is what I'm doing.” And he kind of had the same of their conversations. He's like, “You know, I've worked with guys like you before. “Or, you know, I've worked with a big bar “or something of that nature.” And I was like, “Let's just run a process. “Let's do some evaluations. “Let's see if it proves out value. “If it doesn't, you know, we'll go from there.” So he made an introduction to the director of IT who's essentially the person that I needed to work with. Once we got into it, he was very apprehensive as well. He was like, “Well, why do we need “to evaluate these things? “I already did this two years ago “and we found all these different problems, right?” And so, like Christoph mentioned earlier, we start at the cloud and cybersecurity. That's kind of where we start. This is where our focus is. First of all, the differentiates us in the market. Second of all, I don't think a lot of people are kind of leading with those conversations. And so he said, “That's fine. “Like, we could go through this exercise.” I mean, I think he thought he already had this buttoned up, right? So they were in Colo. They're a SaaS company. They've had outages. They had security vulnerabilities. They have a small IT team. They essentially have no care and feeding of that environment. Or if they do, they're focusing a big portion of their time during that time on it when they can't focus on growing the SaaS company, right? There's just a plethora of challenges that they were seeing. And then cost was a big factor. And essentially, because he went out to market and he doesn't know what fair market values are and a lot of the times when you get that first quote or depending on what provider you go to or what specifically if you didn't establish that baseline really well, like you can't just go get a snapshot of vCenter and take it out to market. That's not a good process, right? So once we kind of peeled back the onion and we understood all the different dynamics that go into it, you know, he said, “Okay, well, I think you can definitely drive this “to more of a private cloud environment. “They're more cost economic from that perspective “than go into a public cloud. “Plus you need an extension of your team “based on your team size and all these things.” And so we started extrapolating that and figuring out which workloads need to be highly available, have DR associated with them because of different compliance agreements and things that are in place. So they still kept something in Colo, actually. They have one or two racks now from what they currently had, but they moved the other 89 servers into a cloud environment and started leveraging a major service provider that's part of the Telarus ecosystem. They're a phenomenal group. We've had great success with them. And, you know, at the end of the day, it's very transformational from a couple things, at least from an executive perspective. Now they don't have reputation. Some of their clients are very large clients, you know, household names, if you will. So no more outages, right? They're highly available. It's transformed their reputation from that perspective. They've actually layered on that some of their talk tracks about how this technology enables their end clients, right? So they sell a SaaS platform. It's a POS. Their consumers are buying it. This is how you can scale. This is how we can make the overall buying experience for your clients better, right? So, you know, all of these things have truly transitioned their business from IT being a cost center to IT providing value to their overall organization and their inclines, right? So I would say that's where we get excited about transformational. Usually it's not flipping, you know, from one sin to a different sin. That's not usually a transformational change. It's how is it enabling or driving that business forward? And there's a lot of other use cases or applicable things that probably came out of that deal, but I would say that's a good high level.Christoph were you gonna mention something? – No, nothing other than, you know, I think that was a really good example of, you know, a small IT team that needed help, needed direction, needed Brandon's guidance. You know, they hadn't gone out to market and looked at this for years. And so, you know, having Brandon as an extension, I think it was eyeopening around what is evolved in the market, what's available to them. And yeah, it was just a really fun project to see and be a part of. – It is always interesting when you, you know, from an engineering perspective, we always go in and say, what do you need? What do you need it to do? What's the problem that it needs to solve? And then when we ask that question of, okay, but if you could do this, if you could evolve your application, if you could go do this, your competitors are doing this, if you could do something like that or, you know, have a leg up, would that be game changing for you? And I think you get them to think differently because sometimes they just think, I'm just never gonna get to that, or I don't know that it's possible. Or to your point, you know, we looked at it two years ago and it wasn't possible. How much changes in this industry in two years, right? With all of the tech and everything flooding into here. So yeah, I love hearing a good transformational story because yeah, you brought it up and you nailed it where IT's not a cost center, right? IT has the power to change the business and change the company. So awesome story. – Yeah. – All right,Christoph I need you to wrap us up, take us home, man. I want to hear, you know, if I'm a partner that's listening to this and maybe I haven't ventured as deep into cloud or into security, and we talked about kind of where you started, we talked about some of the difficulties that you guys have been through in these conversations, but maybe just talk to me about people that aren't comfortable with this or haven't stepped into it. What's your advice? What are you recommending in that, right? Because not just for now, but as this continues to evolve in the future. – Sure. Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think I'd take a step back and come to the realization that this isn't that complicated, right? Like don't get too caught up in the technology. Don't learn about every single EDR solution or every single cloud solution or every single infrastructure solution. Just have conversations with the business team and leaders within an organization. Get to know their team, get to know, I said this earlier, but I mean, I think it's a super important point. Get to know what are the skill sets? How big is the team? You know, where are the gaps that you have, whether it's infrastructure, security, network, you know, database, it doesn't matter. Just get to know like, where are the gaps? I mentioned it earlier, but this idea of the great resignation, this thing is real. Like people are struggling to find people. And do you know where most of these people are? They're at providers and they're at providers because they're super smart. Not that, you know, the people down in the trenches aren't, but they're really good, highly skilled professionals that want to work with hundreds of different customers and have unique challenges every single day to solve. They're not working for one company. And because those guys are typically getting kind of bored. And so get to know the company, get to know their challenges, understand, you know, what are they looking to accomplish? Where are they looking to go? What are their core competencies? And how can you bring solutions and ideas to the table that free them up to focus on those core competencies? You know, that's really it. Talk about the business. Get to know what their ideal outcomes are and generally positive, good opportunities of ways that you can assist, you know, come right out of that. And lastly, I'm preaching to the choir, but lean into Telarus, right? Like get to know the team, get to know the channel managers, get to know the engineering team. You know, we greatly appreciate the support that, you know, you folks have brought to us as an extension of our team. You know, we can't be experts on every single technology. We can't be experts on every single conversation. And just knowing that, you know, we can bounce ideas off you. You don't even have to be on every customer call or any customer calls for that matter. But just being a soundboard to us, as we work through just different, you know, talk tracks internally, you know, we just want to say, we're grateful to, you know, you and your team, Josh, you guys have been great. And yeah, that's my very basic advice for somebody to just dive in. – I love it. You brought up a good point. I was reading a stat last night that makes this a math problem, right? That the title of this podcast is how in the world are we going to ever solve for this whole talent shortage in tech and, you know, starting before the great resignation, now it's just gotten ultimately so much worse. But from a security perspective, right? We talk about the great security certification, the CISSP, of it gives us a great holistic view on how security impacts the business. It's not just technology. It focuses on all these different domains. There are roughly 90 to 100,000 certified CISSPs in the United States. And there are 20 to 30,000 job openings that require a CISSP. Now I'm not a math expert here, but to your point where that talent is, we know where that talent is, and it's at that supplier side. You guys are dead on. I think you guys are out there. You're crushing it, recognizing that this is where the talent is. And you guys have done a phenomenal job of mapping all that and appreciate the kind words. Just appreciate the opportunity to work with you guys. So no, it's been awesome and we're excited to continue with this go. So Christoph I appreciate you bringing us home and thanks so much for coming on today, man. – Josh, thanks for having us. We had a great time and look forward to doing this again in the future. – Brandon, you as well, appreciate you coming on. Thanks. I know you guys got a lot going on. So thanks again for spending time with me, man. – Hey, Josh. – Okay. All right, everybody, that wraps us up. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus and this is Next Level BizTech.

Can you believe we've made it to episode 100 already? Jump in with us as we wrap our series on Business Blueprints: Lessons from Leaders with Telarus Chief Commercial Officer, Richard Murray. We take some jumps back into Richard's career and history, along with where our paths first intersect. Richard gives some great advice about successes, struggles, hiring, dedication, and more. He covers all the great things anyone out there building a business will inevitably go through. Don't miss Episode 100 as we wrap up Season 2! Lupresto Telarus Hey, everybody. Welcome back. We are wrapping up our very special episodes here. This is actually episode 100. We've made it this far and we're still chugging along. Thanks for listening. Today on we've got Mr. Richard Murray, Chief Commercial Officer at Telarus Richard, welcome on, man. Thank you. I'm honored to be number 100. I feel special. Well, you better make it good then. No pressure. Okay. We always kick this off. We talk about backgrounds. So tell us, I've known you a long time, so I'm going to pretend that I don't know this, but for anybody that doesn't know your background, tell us where it all started. What's this? Is it a windy path? Is it a straight path? How did you get here? Pretty windy. Multiple different areas of ins and outs. I've been in the channel 21 years though, so I mean, I would say any introduction of my background needs to start with I married my high school sweetheart. We've been together 27 years and most of what I've been able to accomplish has been because she's been patient and believed in a lot of the weird things that we'll probably talk about today. From a career development and you know, just that path, I always thought I'd be an attorney like in high school. I did debate and you know, I just was always geared towards being an attorney. I worked for a law office to get through college and somewhere in there, I was, I ended up being their bookkeeper and office manager and I had to make the decision for their internet service and back then it was DSL, but that was my first exposure to this world. And so then when I saw a job posting for then US West to be a sales and marketing intern, it was my senior year of college and I applied. I mean, I was making seven and a quarter at the law office. Killing it. So just about anything would have been a raise. Got that job and so my job at US West, which became Quest while I was there, which is now Lumen, was to research, competitive research, which I didn't obviously know then, but would set me up perfectly for the channel multiple years later. I would get anytime US West would lose a deal to XO on PRIs, we would gather the pricing on that and we ended up actually using my data, my research to change the tariff in Utah for PRIs. Like back then it was $1,800 for a PRI. But probably the funnest part of that is I actually got to use my student ID. I would go into the public utilities commission and they would just let me right into the back room, open their file cabinets for all of the companies that were filing to start providing services that would be competitive to US West. And I wrote a, I would like open the folder, I would read about electric light wave level three and then I'd write a SWOT analysis on each one of them and I used it both for work and for my senior project. I picture you like, I picture this being very covert and like. Yeah, it was my student ID, not my employee ID that got me in there. Yeah, so I don't know that it was, you know, pushing the boundaries or anything, but it was definitely let's be a student here, not an employee. So, you know, just doing that research and analyzing all of the different companies, I think served me very well later on is as I got into the channel. Fast forwarding real quick, they got acquired and I just felt like I was, they just kept extending my position and I didn't really have a boss. I would go in every day, say hello to Joe Branch who still works for Telarus. She was at Carrier Sales that we'll get into. So I've known Joe for, you know, gosh, 20 plus years. Yeah, 27 years, 26. I'd say hi to Joe, check my email and go home. And I just found myself getting into bad habits. So I left, went and worked for a wireless ISP, which back then was like so unique. Line of sight internet. They had the 10 meg download hybrid modem, which was unreal. Unreal tech. They went bankrupt trying to build the DSL infrastructure. So I went to XO and was carrying a bag as a sales rep. And, you know, they were a good company for the time until they overextended and they got to where they had to declare bankruptcy. You know, for time's sake, I will only share that it became a pivotal moment for me because they told us to go present this financial debt to all of our customers around. This is why we're not going bankrupt. We have Carl Icahn as our backer. We're not going bankrupt. So I go and do that, that dog and pony show for the customers I was proposing. And then we declared bankruptcy. And I'm a 20 something year old kid, 24 or something like that, and had a CFO for a major company call me and tell me he's never going to buy for me ever again. Didn't matter where I went, question my integrity. I was like, all right, I am not cut up for this. I am not sales. And in the course of that bankruptcy, a ton of direct reps that I worked with that are now incredible partners in the community, you know, some of our top sales sales reps all left and became partners for, you know, in many cases for a company called Carrier Sales. And that's where you and I met much later, a decade later than that. And so Blake Darling, one of our top partners, he and I were the same hiring class at XO. I used to build his proposals because he was great at cold calling. I was not. And I would do the proposals and Excel work. He got me an interview. They didn't even look at my resume, sat down with Glad Hill and he said, you're hired. Sounds like Glido. And, you know, so I think, you know, making 40 grand a year, losing, you know, a good commission job, but it was steady. And then I just worked second jobs to hold it together there for a few years. So that's the core of the background. Love it. And that's where our path kind of came together was Glad Hill's startup was another company that I was there. And we were all maybe 10 or 15 employees altogether, shared office space. So walk us through then, take that back, away, you know, on how did we get to kind of where we're at now for anybody that doesn't know the history that transpired from then to 2023? Yeah. So I had, you know, I started as general manager, but it was, it was three employees when I joined. And so pretty quickly, I was able to, to get on a profit sharing agreement, which, you know, meant that, Hey, I might make an extra two grand. It was just so small at the time, but we kept building, kept growing. One of the, fast forward a little bit, one of the partners left, we had to spin out our century link business. I think it was still quest at the time I became part owner of that company and was running that while was general manager of the other side as we continue to grow. Now it's just the one partner. And he was investing in your company and the place you were working at and taking all the carrier sales profits to go fund that. Sorry about that. And so we were just really kind of floating. I mean, we were growing, but it was just sheer, you know, hard work, determination, 80 hour weeks kind of thing. I mean, I was doing everything from quoting to commissions. I was writing the checks, all of it. And so we were growing in spite of ourselves while he was funding over here. At the same time, I was on a profit sharing agreement, and I just kept saving that money. Had the opportunity to acquire a couple other little smaller companies that the founders of carrier sales didn't want to do. I took it to them first. They didn't want it. And so I figured out a way to do it. Over time, just got to where I was able to own a little bit more of the company. And then I got to a point where they kept telling me that, hey, you're going to own all of carrier sales. We know that this is yours. I mean, he got to where he was just looking at tax returns, right? It wasn't, he didn't even know the quarterly's. It was tax return time. He'd, oh, great. Thank you. And I just said, look, I'll give you a year's notice. I'm done just kind of treading water here. I want to grow. I want to do something. I'm still very young at that time. And I said, so I'll go take the CenturyLink business and go grow that. Honestly, in the back of my mind was maybe I'll take it to Telarus and go grow it there. But that woke him up to the fact that, okay, it was time. And so we came up with what was a fair price. And that was when I called you. You had left the sister company and were out doing tech support for something. Yeah. The biotech company down in Salt Lake. Yeah. And so, yeah, I gave you a call and convinced you to come over. I hope we'll get into that story a little bit later, but so I won't go too far into it. Let's get into it right now. Because the next part is about kind of insights for entrepreneurs and kind of looking beyond. I remember this phone call like it was yesterday. And I've told the story a number of times where, to your point, yes, I'd left the startup had kind of never really started up. And so I went and got what I thought was this awesome job at this biotech company down in Salt Lake. And I got this call. I think it had been all of three weeks. And I absolutely hated where I had gone and didn't realize I kind of loved what I did before getting into this telco and cloud and all of this stuff, all of this space. And I think you called me up and said, hey, you know, we should have talked more when you left. I got big plans. I'm going to buy the guy out, buy the old guy out, come back and, you know, be the first person I hire after this transaction. And I said, okay, and you may be an offer on the weekend. And I walked in the other place on a Monday and I think quit on the spot. And then we started Tuesday. That was 2013. That's how I remember the story at least. Hopefully that's Sacker, because I've told that story quite a few times. I have some fill ins that I thought about. You know, I remember having a number in mind, right, and going to you. I feel like it was 55K. I apologize for talking numbers, but I feel like it was 55 and you're like, oh, I need it to be 65. And I like, I remember, because it was just a different time. I remember going home and talking to my wife about, hey, I know we had planned on upgrading the minivan, but I got to get Josh here. That's going to take the 5K to get it done. I don't remember. I'm probably off on the numbers, but I remember some level of, it wasn't negotiation as much as it was just, okay, this is what I can do. And you're like, okay, I've got to pay the bills. And so we figured it out. I love it. We'll come back to that more. I want to talk about a lesson that this is about building relationships, right? The goal of this track, right, these special last three episodes as we get to episode 100 here is about helping our partners have some insight into things that they're going to go through, things that as they go to build their business, problems, successes, I think hearing from leadership at Telarus, I think this stuff is incredibly valuable. So I want to talk about cultivating relationships. You know, you've cultivated, obviously, a lot of relationships in the channel, you've been in the channel 20 plus years with the suppliers, with the partners. Can you share with us what I would call the R Murray philosophy on building and maintaining key relationships? The R Murray. Look, I'll start with acknowledging everybody's different in their approach. Mine, I think, is unique. And that's been helpful for me, for the company, I think, for, you know, extended to our advisors and partners. I think at its core is you have to care about other success. And so, you know, whether you're dealing with a partner in my specific role now, and for the last 20 years, I really do care that the suppliers I'm working with are successful as well. Yes, I want to win. I want to negotiate and do well, but I can't, you know, get a supplier to pay me 50%, knowing that it's going to bankrupt them or have an unprofitable channel. I care about them growing and succeeding. No, I don't, I don't carry a quota. I don't care about quotas anymore. But at the end of the day, if I've got a channel manager that I cared about, I'm going to do what I can to help them succeed. But you can't fake it. You can't fake that you care about somebody. You either do or you don't. And there are, look, there are suppliers over the years that I've not cared about. And I don't fake it either. So I do think you have to care. I think the other element of is just how you communicate with them. Because you care. And, you know, there's a supplier, I found this out, probably it had been around for a couple of years. There's a very prominent supplier that we do a lot with. And a lot of that, the core leadership from a decade to five years ago is all left. And they're all other companies now. And one of them told me that that internally, as a team, they had actually started using the phrase that you've been married. And I'm like, okay, I hope that's not awful. Please explain that to me. He said, no, basically, it's just it's a it was their shorthand for you've been politely told that you suck. And so my approach to build a relationship, especially with suppliers is, look, I sit on a lot of advisory councils. And I work really hard to be prepared for those. There's a reality I get dumber every day in terms of the delivery of a service. But we have an incredible team that lives and experiences that all the time. And so gather all of that information. And then I'm not going to go to an advisory council and not tell the truth. That doesn't help them get better. If I don't care about them, then I'm probably either not at the advisory council, or maybe I won't be as forthright. But if I care about the supplier, about the people there, I'm going to hammer them with details and data and go at it. But I'm going to do it in a nice polite way, because that's how I try to do it. That has legs. That gives them something they can take to their peers, their leadership, and go do something actionable with it. Yeah, no, it's good. All right, let's talk about insights, some insights for the partners out there, right? Obviously, the partners, they're entrepreneurs, they're out there thriving and growing. But you've got this diverse experience. What critical advice would you offer these partners that are out there? What do they need to succeed in today's market? A couple. I think one ties into the relationships, as well as just for our partners, is don't burn bridges, right? There are a lot of people out there that will burn a bridge. Let's say there's a channel manager that does you bad at supplier X, and you don't care about that supplier so much, so you just shout them down, or you do something that hurts the relationship. They're going to end up with another supplier. And if you've burnt that bridge, they're not going to help you there. I mean, that applies to hopefully the suppliers that are listening to this too, is my wife knows that in this world, you do not burn the bridges. Like, I'll tell her stories of somebody doing something stupid. She's like, they don't know the lesson, you don't burn bridges. This is a family, this is a tight community. Everybody knows everybody. So you've got to be cautious about that. I think beyond that, though, just in terms of thinking about your business, you've got to know what you're good at, what are you special at, and then bring in others to fill in the gaps. There's a reality of why I reached out to you. I knew I wasn't as technical as I was going to need to be for the new coming services. And so I brought in others. And I think, you know, many partners are world class at what they do. And I've seen many bring in teams around them, but others just stay, you know, this is what I do. And they don't bring in others or they're hesitant to even reach out to you and your team to help fill in their gaps. They just ignore and pretend that that side doesn't exist. And I don't think you can do that in this world. I think you've got to bring people in to help you do that. And look, sometimes that's hard. Sometimes that means you've got to have honest reflection and just be brutally honest with yourself around, “Yeah, I'm not very good at that.” Or, “Hey, I'm okay with a lot of things. I'm a good generalist, but I'm not exceptional at everything. And so, you know, where can I bring in exceptional people around me to move forward faster?” Yeah, it's a good point, too. And I think that's one of the biggest life lessons you've taught me along the way is, I know you're going to read something, I know somebody's going to say something, and you're going to hear something, and you're going to want to react this way. Don't. Just pause. It's okay to react. It's okay to have emotion. But to your point, this is a small community. Everybody needs everybody. That person tomorrow you might need to employ them. They might be your boss or somewhere in the middle of that. And you burn a bridge in this space. It's not great. And I think that is such a huge lesson for everybody to take note of. Whether that's customer impacting or supplier or whatever it is, I just huge double down on that lesson. I love that one. That's part of the armory approach, right? I don't think people understand. I think internally in my mind, like in here, I'm a raging lunatic sometimes. The emotion is there. I've just learned to shield it and harness it and bring it out in a more impactful way. Fair. Let's talk about vision. You've seen this industry evolve, and to your point, you've always been looking out here, right? When it might look like this right now, you're looking out here. If you look at that right now, what would you tell the partners? Maybe I'm a partner that's come in and maybe I've never sold any of this stuff before and I want to be a partner. Maybe I'm a partner that I've just been selling one thing and I'm listening to this podcast, kind of learning how to move into other technology areas. What future trends would you tell our partners to be aware of and then how do you feel we're helping them prepare for that? Well, first of all, I think as I looked at the list of all the different topics that you've covered, I mean, those are all the emerging technologies. First of all, just reflect on where this industry is awesome, number one. What other industry can you say started in, when I came in, it was long distance, and now we're talking about AI and everything in between. There's a reality if you're new to the market, you're new to the agency model and even tying it into our previous conversation. You can't do it all. You can't know every technology. Focus on what you're good at, which is in most cases, you're good at relationships, which then means bring in others to help have the technical conversations. Now, obviously, that's what Telarus is focused on doing. I think our entire conversation to partners has been, how do we help you grow your business? Over time, that has evolved on what that looks like. We've tried to bring in extra resources. In the early years, it was you just helping the guys that had only sold network, you would go out on appointments or jump on phone calls to, back then, it was like the early days of contact center. How do we help you have that conversation? So, if you're new there, we don't know what technology is going to be here in three years. In five years, that we're going to be able to sell. But I do know that we're heavily focused on continually staying in front of that, just like we were when we painted towards contact center. No one had a contact center channel when you came on. We built that together with NICE and then with Five9 and Genesis, they saw what was going, they came in. I think the same thing's happening with AI. Many of our suppliers are plugging AI into what they do. We're signing many AI suppliers, but we don't know what AI is going to be driving and what it's going to be capable of in two or three years. So, we have people that are focused on that and will continue to build around it. Good. All right. So, let's look back at your journey. What do you feel some of these pivotal moments or decisions that really shaped your path going from being an employee to a business owner and now chief commercial officer? Yeah, so many. I look back at that time or at my journey, I think back in some of the difficult times of Carousels. I can't tell you how many times I almost left. This is frustrating. We're not growing the way that I want. We're not keeping up with Intellis. All of these things, I'm not making enough money. I had a second job for the first decade of this. I was doing books for the law office that I talked about in the opening forever. And so, I chose to stay and to build something. That obviously was a pivotal or multiple pivotal times of making that choice. And that was just because I believed in what we were doing. I didn't like the results of where we were, but I believed in what the core was overall. And I think along the way, something that's been helpful for me that I've tried to talk to others about is whether it's your business or not, you're a leader or not, treat it like you are. Treat it like your business. And I think because I did, it made it so eventually. Took longer than I wanted it to. But I never treated that as an eight to five. And I think now as a larger employer, you have to be kind of careful. And I can't go tell my employees, “Hey, you need to put in 80 hours a week to do your job.” I can't do that. But in a podcast and with partners, I can say, “Look, if you're working for a partner, you're working for a company, your job is eight to five.” And I know you and I have talked about this. Your career is everything you do after. And most of anything good that I've ever accomplished for Carousel's, Telarus, has been after hours off to the site, whether it's me staying up all night, working weekends, building a new process, building a spreadsheet, building something that allowed us to move it forward. Those weren't done during the core times. And it was that extra sweat equity that helped propel me and others forward. I love it. Act like an owner. All right, let's talk about mentorship. One of the things that I think I've learned along the way has been how critical it's arguably one of the most rewarding, but it's arguably at the same token, one of the hardest things you ever do, which is I think the hiring process. So my question is a little bit about mentorship. I want to get into what do you find rewarding into that process, because I think our partners are going to go through this. We talk about some of them are solo preneuers that don't have a desire to hire, and they lean on us for a ton of resources, which we absolutely love. And then some say, “You know what? I want to bring one or two of those resources in-house.” So if we flash back, you and I had worked together in this in the beginning, but I was a recovering car mechanic that had stumbled into technology. You clearly saw something that maybe I didn't think that I didn't know I was capable of. So as you kind of reflect back on that, you had a vision that others maybe didn't have. So how do you look at that mentorship, picking talent? How do you advise on that? Oh, so many pieces of this. First of all, I would say I never set out to be a mentor. I don't view myself in that light. I don't feel like I'm so wise or so smart or I've accomplished anything that I'm in a position to tell people what to do or to help. But yet I've been sought out to tell people what to do and to help. And so I've tried to embrace it. I mean, there's an element of it where there's a big part of it. It's just me trying to give back. I've had great mentors. I've had people that have helped and embrace and teach me things. And I think you need multiple mentors in your life at different stages of where you are. And many of my early mentors, I would now consider more friends. It's not that I don't still learn from them, but the size of our company is now at the size of where they were. And so they're probably not teaching me company stuff as much. But gosh, I look at, from a pay it back standpoint, I consider Rick Deller a mentor. He may not know this, but I remember I felt like Carousel's was doing pretty good and Rick and I would help negotiate. We would work together to negotiate some of the contracts back then, particularly CenturyLink where Carousel's was very, very strong. And I remember kind of doing it, hey, what's next stage? What should I be doing? And he asked me, well, what's your revenue at? And I felt like, hey, we're doing good enough. I'm now confident enough. I'll tell you what it is. And I'm not positive on the number, but I believe it was 38 million. And he kind of, he didn't really do this, but as I reflect back, he kind of patted me on top of that. He said, that's cute. But I remember him telling me, remember, when you get to 50 million, then things start to change. And so get ready for this. You've got to start thinking about scale and all of these other things that start now. I mean, we're so many multiples past that. It's kind of funny to reflect back to that time. But, you know, anytime I could take the opportunity with a partner with somebody on a supplier and have future looking conversations, give them perspective that they don't have, then I'm happy to do it. In terms of identifying talent and then, you know, being a mentor in that. I'm a big believer in books as mentors in some cases, but I am also very cautious to not over index to any one book. There are, however, a couple that I think have been super impactful for me. One is a book that I have a case in my office called Love is the Killer app. And, you know, the core principle of that is just take care of others, even if that means introducing others together in a way that doesn't benefit you. And the universe has a way of taking care of you and all of that. And so I've always tried to live and follow that. First is a principle. Second is I actually never read his book. I still have it, but I remember his speech. And it's a gentleman by the name of Harvey McKay. Now, most people don't know who Harvey McKay is, but where he spoke was at the same place that Tony Robbins spoke. Like Tony Robbins was on stage, and then I think Harvey came on. It doesn't matter the order, but so he was a big deal at the time. And the only thing I remember from him was, was talking about how back, you know, he was older at the time. I don't even know if cell phones were that prominent. I mean, they were round, but not prominent. He would write hit if he saw something in somebody, a hotel clerk, a waitress, he would write his personal number on the back of his business card, hand it to him, say, if you're ever looking for a job, please give me a call. And the core of that is he was always looking for it in people. And I think, you know, to embarrass you a little bit, if I can, I just felt like there was that there was it. And, you know, to try to specify what it looks like, I think it comes in multiple forms. I mean, yes, you have to have capacity. There has to be the capacity to do good. But for me, it's drive. It's, you know, what I saw in you, what I've always seen in you is a desire to continue to learn, to challenge yourself, to never be, you know, okay with where I am today, it's where do I need to be in the future. And in some cases, that's meant not always, you know, awesome conversations between the two of us over the years, to say, what lack I, right. And I remember one in particular. I hope it's okay that I know. Oh, I know you're going. Sure. Bring it up. Well, maybe I do it. I remember one where it was kind of like, Hey, I want to do more. I want to make more money. And I can't remember what you asked for. I just remember you asked for something. I'm like, you're not quite ready for that. I believe it was, I'd like to take over the company when you're ready. And you were like, maybe not yet. I'm going to be around a little bit. But here's what I loved. I loved the question and the desire that was in there. You were treating it as your own. You wanted it to be your own. And the reality is we've all grown so much that we've actually, we're all, you and I are doing way more now and at a level now than what we ever thought of then, because we were a small company, right? But I do remember the question. What I more remember is thinking about my answer and what that almost challenging conversation brought us to was it helped me identify opportunities to put in your path to go help round you out. So I don't remember the exact timing, but somewhere along the way, we had the opportunity to acquire a small VAR. And this was when VARs were, we were still trying to figure out how VARs fit into the partner community, into the, why weren't they coming over the residual? And so we bought it and I basically handed you the business unit. And I said, okay, learn P&Ls, learn balance sheets, you deal with the drama, you get to make the overriding decisions. And we were just kind of the managing company for that bar. They were still running off on their own. But I've got to imagine you learned a thousand lessons. Tons. I don't know that I could even spelt P&L before that. But yeah, I think, you know, for partners that are listening, I just think it's, you're right, I think you painted a good picture, identify, and then give others an opportunity to figure out where they may not even know that they have skills yet. Well, I didn't, you know, I didn't know, first of all, I didn't know that I wasn't rounded out. So being self-aware is important. But, you know, you could have spun that one of two ways. You could have said, no, sorry, go away. Or you could have gone the way that you did, which is, hey, you know what? All right, cool. Let's help get you more rounded out on the business side. And yeah, I learned so much, so much in those years that now obviously that's benefited me to be able to help here at a much more dramatic scale. So I think it's made you a better boss. I mean, your team loves working for you. I think it gave you, you know, different perspectives that has benefited both of us. Love it. Awesome stuff. Let's talk about personal growth. Let's talk about development. So how do you, focuses for you of how you stay growing and innovative in your role, right? I mean, I feel like we're in an industry that is just innovating every hour, right? And we've got to stay in tune, is this next thing down the road, the next greatest thing, and we're just going to miss out if we don't get it. So help us understand how you stay innovative, how should partners stay innovative, and any thought leaders or anything, any resources that you want to throw out. Yeah, I mean, I think we covered a big part of it with mentors. I mean, there's a reality now that Telarus, at the size that we are, there's not many mentors in our industry that I can now go to and go say, help me. You know, there are mentors maybe outside of the industry, people that have done other large, you know, industries that have rolled up and things like that, that can give me perspective. But in the absence of that, I think that partners should be, I'm a big lover of podcasts, yours and others. Adam and I have both kind of fallen into a podcast called the founders podcast, that he and I will, you know, I will listen to usually on a weekend, I'll listen to three or four, like, you know, Saturday listening kind of thing. And then he and I, I'll tell him, hey, this was a great one, go listen to it, and then we'll compare notes. And so it's almost learning, you know, gosh, one of them like was Mark Twain. And what can you learn from Mark Twain's life that then and apply it and I promise you there is there's always applicability, you know, whether it's a Steve Jobs and all of those things. I think there are, whether it's books, podcasts, whatever, there's just information that if you're continually challenging yourself from outside, then working to apply it into our realm, which is super unique, what we do is super unique. My family still doesn't know. Nobody knows what we do. But there's applicability and all those other. Yeah, there's parallels, right? These guys are going to go through struggles of building things and how what what what are the nuggets that you can pull from that? So good, good stuff. All right, final couple thoughts here. I want to talk. Let's you know, you've obviously been critical, and I'm forever grateful of how you've helped shape my life. But you know, also our, our company and the channel if you if you fast forward 10 plus years, and then you snap back and look at, you know, what, what's the legacy that you want to say, I did that or I impacted this or I helped here? Is there anything that you want to call out? Oh, you know, my mind goes to Steve, I think is Steve Jobs quote, you can you can't connect the can't connect the dots forward, you know, connect the dots backwards. So it's it's hard to predict what I'll see in 10 years from from where the time I am now. But what I hope my you know, what I've left in this channel is, you know, I close partner summit every year, Adam, Adam opens, he does the big state of the business and everything and I close it. And for me, I'm not good at seeing things I don't believe in. I either don't say something or I I just it's just out there. It's got to be genuine for me. And so I hope that, you know, that my my messages of gratitude to the community as a whole gratitude to the partners, gratitude to suppliers and my message of and trying to create a community in the channel that to me, you know, this is a three legged stool, we absolutely need partners for us to succeed. But I believe that tell us and even our competitors play a role in their success. And then we need the suppliers there. And so, you know, I, I hope that, you know, our many of your listeners type a sales rep partners, they're wired and I love them for it. They're wired to think they are the reason they're successful. And they are. But it's all of us together that makes us more successful. I'm hyper competitive, I always want to win, but I don't want others to lose. I just want to be that much better. And, and so I hope as a, you know, as a channel, we we all drive more towards that. Well said. All right, final thoughts here. Let's talk about some advice for partners. So we've talked a lot about mentorship about business building and about hiring and, you know, strife and all of these things that happen. Take all that in consideration, as you've helped partners and all these different people shape their course in life, their trajectory, their business. Any final advice there for the audience for those partners that are listening or maybe even considering being partners? You know, a lot of partners will ask, Hey, what are the others doing to be successful? And I think it's the wrong question. I think, you know, if I look at myself and what I would tell partners to strive to do, you're most successful when you're 100% yourself. And, and what makes you unique and what you're what you're exceptional at. And I mean, I've already talked about bringing in others to fill in the gaps. But the more we water ourselves down by trying to do things that we're not special at, I think it slows down our speed. And, and it's you're going to ebb and flow, right? Comfort is in the middle. Comfort is just kind of floating along in the middle, but success is out on the edge. And so when we're on the edge, we're doing what we do uniquely. That that's, you know, a lesson I've had to learn over and over in my life, because you see a little success, you float in the middle, you float comfort for a little while. And then you kick yourself and you say, Oh, I want to go drive for something. Well, what's that next thing? And so, again, it takes being reflective on where you are, it takes being honest with yourself. Can I think there's an element you have to be honest with your inner circle about where you are with that as well. I mentioned my wife at the beginning of that there's times I've not been a great father and husband. You know, my I've told this story in other venues. I missed a good chunk of my son's baby food stage. And she was patient. I didn't even know I missed it until my third kid came along. And I kind of said to my wife, Hey, did Sam skip? I mean, he's six, five. He's a huge kid, right? Yeah. Did he skip straight from mushy food to solid? She's like, No, you just weren't here. Ouch. So balance is important, you say? Well, balance in time, right? There are times you've got to just roll up your sleeves and go be it. But what I learned over the years was to be more communicative with my wife around where I was at that stage. So for example, look, some of the hardest times in my career have been, I'm going to go acquire a company. I can't tell you how many times I put my house on the line to go get to where we are. And hey, this deal is going to take three months. It'll take me a month to negotiate it, get it done, another couple of months to get it going. And I would just tell her, I'm going to suck for a little while. And I'm sorry, but at least she knew what the path was and what the goal was and what, you know, the timeline on it. She knew I wasn't just purposefully being a jerk. It's good stuff. There's so many life lessons in here. I'm questioned out. Richard, thanks for all you've done, all you've done for me, all you've done for the community, the partners,Telarus and everybody, but especially thanks for coming on and helping us wrap up Episode 100. Excellent. Thank you. Happy to be here. All right, everybody, that wraps us up for today. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus Richard Murray, Chief Commercial Officer. Until next time, this has been Business Blueprints, Lessons for Leaders. Telarus

Tune in to another special episode as we just about wrap up Season 2. Today, we bring you a conversation with Adam Edwards, CEO of Telarus. We're here talking about Business Blueprints and sharing all kinds of lessons Adam has learned over the years in building the company with things like how to hire, how to focus on innovation, how to deal with conflict, the ups and downs of collaboration, and more! Don't miss this one! Lupresto Telarus Everybody, welcome to a special episode as we wrap up getting closer to episode 100 here. Today, as you can see, joined in the studio with Mr. Adam Edwards, CEO of Telarus Adam, thanks for coming up here, man. Thanks for having me, Josh. Adam, I know that, and everybody else knows CEO of Telarus for a long time, but tell us a little bit about, I'd love to hear everybody's journey. What led to that? How did Telarus come to start and kind of what did you do right before that? You bet. You know, our origin story, I think, is different than most. Patrick and I formed the company together. We had no background in telecom. In fact, I had even less background than he did. I came up in accounting. I just wanted a job. You know, when it came time to choose a major, I looked around. I actually asked an uncle, look, economics looks really good because it's the shortest major in business. And I'm also looking at accounting because a lot of those people get hired. He said, look, we hire six accountants for every one economist. And so that was my choice. That was my big epiphany of why I should be in accounting. And it was after years in accounting, after a couple of years in accounting, that Patrick came to me and said, hey, we should start a business. And I said, well, what are we going to do? You design chips. You're an electrical engineer. I'm an accountant. You know, what in the world we're going to do. And finally, he came up with the answer. It was telecom. And my response to him was absolutely not. I don't know anything about telecom. You're in MLM and I'm not a fan of being in MLM and good luck with that. And he came back said, no, no, actually, there is an opportunity to sell the enterprises, residual commission. And that's where he had me residual commission. That's why I got a hold. I didn't care what we were selling. It was going to pay on a recurring basis. So that's why I left accounting and started a business. Not that I didn't want to. I had always wanted to start a business, just didn't know what it would be. But I thought I was headed down the CFO track. That's where I thought my career would end up. And here we are. Love it. I know you love a spreadsheet. Okay. So this session is a little different. These three tracks are a little different. You know, usually we talk about somebody from Telarus. We talk about a supplier. And we talk about a partner. I want to do these last couple sessions different. I want to help our partners out there that are out there building business, that are entrepreneurs also. What are the lessons? What are the things that we've learned? What can they learn from you to help continue to grow their practice? So I'm going to start to go down some of these things about leadership and challenges and innovation and things like that. And I want to kick it off with leadership. So let's talk about the core principles that guide your leadership style. And then how have they influenced the company here at Telarus? You know, it's interesting. We went back years ago. We studied leadership as an organization. We were trying to develop leaders internally. And I've still got a slide on it. The number of qualities that different leaders have. And they're all over the place. You know, some there's a top five qualities of a great leader. The top 23, you know, Maxwell's got his and Drucker's got hit. And they're just all over the place. And you also find real differences in eras. You know, there used to be people chainsaw. Al Dunlap was absolutely brutal in terms of downsizing it. And Jack Welsh was just a blistering attack, you know, in the boardroom. Or with executives. And you know, and then you hear Steve Jobs, you know, how aggressive he was. But then you hear about the good ones, you know, about Schultz at Starbucks. And what it comes down to with the lens through which I look at each of these leadership dynamics is really culture. I'm a big proponent of cultural alignment, meaning the culture that the customer wants to experience, whatever they want to experience. That better be the culture of your company. So everyone has this ideal of, hey, a good culture looks like this. I think the right culture looks like this. And a right culture is different for different companies. An example, you know, BMW tends to value engineering. And so when they pay bonuses, the bonus is going to go to the best engineer, the most talented. It's they're not building a car. They're building the ultimate driving machine. So that culture is coming all the way from leadership through the, you know, the staff all the way to the customer and the product that they deliver, which is the ultimate driving machine. Whereas you look at Starbucks, it's a very different cultural experience. I mean, you give them a bonus and they're going to share it in their team. They're going to buy something together as a team. And that's what they're looking for at Starbucks is that's an experience. It's a it's a place to stop between work and home. It's a break and you're part of the community and you get your recycled cup, you know, and you're doing good. That's a very different culture. And so the culture inside Starbucks should be and is very different than it is at BMW. And when you look at the culture of Telarus, I think that leadership needs to align with what the customer wants and what is our customer want? Well, they want someone to advocate for them, someone to fight for them. They want someone to be straight up honest and transparent with them. They want someone who's looking out for their best interest. And so that's got to be our culture internally. We've got to be looking for their success. And so that that I think has has instructed a lot of the way that I think leaders should behave within our organization is it's really dictated by the culture and that then is dictated by our customer. Love it. Love it. Be empathetic understand what the customers want and I think it permeates all the way through great stuff. Let's talk about challenges. Talk about a major challenge that our companies faced how you navigated it kind of you know, what the process was going through it. A point, you know, there's always challenges. What's funny is when you look in hindsight, they all look like speed bumps. But when you come up on the other side of a challenge and face a challenge, it looks like, you know, this could be the end and you know those challenges beginning are are we going to make payroll? You know, are we by the way, we're not having those challenges, right? Everything's good. Everything's good. This is when I used to run down to the bank and try to deposit the checks faster than then payroll came up. I'll tell you one of the most significant I think that that we came up against as a company is, you know, looking out to the future. I don't think people saw the the change that was going to take place. You know, when we saw it six six plus years ago of this is a business of scale and you're going to scale or die. And what do you do about that? Well, we're already doing everything we could be reinvested every dollar we had back in the business. It was not a lifestyle business. And the question was how how do we get ahead of this because M&A is going to come and we're either going to be purchased or we're going to purchase. And of course, what we want is we want our great culture and the values we have and the vision we have to continue on. So we have to be the purchaser. So we went out and the way we approach that was number one study it out. Number two, look at the players and candidly we came back really disappointed. We looked at some different strategic opportunities. We looked at equity backers. We were really disappointed with what we found and decided to wrap it up. We stopped and decided we revisit it later. The problem was that inevitability was continuing to march toward us and what we would do. So carrier sales was a big part of that. We got together with carrier sales. I view that as a real catalyst toward getting us to where we are, you know, that depth of expertise that came in. And that was a very fortunate thing because we were on this path. We were not we were not getting the result we wanted and ultimately we did that that propelled us forward. We ultimately did find an equity partner to help us with M&A and here we are today. But you know, I think it's interesting. You just look at the speed of which we want to operate and then the speed of which the market takes right. And the buying cycle for customers. And it really is interesting when you zoom back of how early you have to start planning for things because how long some of these things take to develop and then you've got to time it with when it's right when it's when the market wants it when the market will bear it. Yeah, it's funny. Everyone assumes things happen so quickly. They really don't. They're setting up a long time in advance and you just got to be in tune with that somehow tune into, you know, what the trends are, what's taking place and get ready for it and place bets. Yeah, yeah, fair point. All right. Let's talk about innovation. So I think we're in a space where whether using Moore's law or whatever, we've talked about that a lot where everything out there technology wise is just innovating so fast and it's more or less gone in 18 months. It's obsolete. So how do you foster this culture of innovation and then really what do you feel the roles are that that plays for our just long term success? You know, I'll tell you my views on that have really changed. We consider one of our cultural pillars to be innovation and I think some of what we did early on really helped us get to where we are. But if I look back on some of it, a lot of it was wasted. A lot of it we put together these groups. We called idea groups. We said, hey, guys, the company is faced with this challenge. Every month we do this. The company is faced with this challenge and each of the groups would be together and we'd have one person from say marketing one from engineering one from support one from sales. We want a different groups together to get different backgrounds get some diversity to think through the solution and would say here's the problem come back with your solution. Well that the truth is part of the value was we're just trying to break down walls within the culture and get people to talk together. The secondary outcome was we want a great ideas to come forward and we did we got boatloads of ideas. What we found though is in getting those ideas. Well, we got a lot of ideas part of the challenges without further direction on how we implemented those they didn't become scalable. And what that means is we got some little you know areas of innovation and got some cool things happening but to really pull those things out in a business. You've got to be a little more directed and innovation is hard. The bigger the company gets the harder it is. In fact, there's an example. Samsung used to do this in I used to live in Korea and it's the society is very conformist when someone had an idea in the large organization. They would actually pull them out physically remove them from headquarters in Seoul and take them to a city down south where I used to live called Sue one and they would help them and incubate and get people around to help bring this idea to life because an organization longer the larger gets is looking for efficiencies. So you how do you balance those two? I mean innovation is about breaking. You know, it's about breaking process about breaking the norms. Whereas efficiency is how do we do the norms faster and cheaper and so to have those two things now as an organization when we look at innovation. We want those great ideas, but more important to me today is not the ideas. It's how do we execute on them? How do we put people around those great ideas to breathe life into them? And then how do we divorce ourselves from the past because we're so we have so much conviction about things we're doing today. It's very hard to let go of those and embrace the new and that takes a concerted effort. It's not just little groups of people coming up with ideas. It's the execution as an organization. You know, I don't think I understood scale, you know, five or seven years ago. I've really this has forced me to learn what it really takes to scale an organization, right? I envisioned a world where I was the only engineer. I didn't see us ever needing more than that, right? We would just happily grow organically little by little, but just like you've talked about some of these accelerators and some of these things that have created that. How do you help relate that to what partners are going to go through as they're building their business? Whether I'm a one-person shop, a solopreneur, I have a desire to keep that size, or maybe I want to grow to be a giant company. How do you help these ultra, super sharp, ready to grow, ready to sell, to do anything it takes to grow a business? How do you help them understand scale and the importance of scale as they go? Well, you know, I think you make a good point with your first part of it is some, if they're a soloist, they may be just fine the way they are, you know. Being a scaled business isn't for everybody. And that's one of the unique things about, I think, our community is we have so many successful people in so many different ways. I think what they've got to start with is, what do they really want? Are they being purposeful about what they want? If they want to be a soloist, because I've talked to many partners like this, of, “Hey, I like this as a lifestyle. I only want 10 customers, 10 very large customers. I focus on them. It gives me what I want.” Or, “Other people are motivated by, “Hey, I want a team of just five to 10 people, you know. That way I feel like we're a family. I feel good about this.” And there are other people that do want to scale, and they want to grow much larger, and they want to be acquisitive, and they want to do… So I think they've got to start with, you know, what they want. And if truly what they want is scale, then they can absolutely find it. And that's what I found. If they're going to be purposeful about it, then they'll find those answers. Because there are different answers for a soloist. You look at a soloist and some of the things they leverage. I mean, think about some of these soloists right now. Leveraging your team, walking into some of the biggest companies in the world, going in there, pitching a project, creating a solution, having project management on top of it. They're a soloist, and they're bringing down these absolute Goliath in terms of opportunity. And, you know, I think that business model is just fine. In fact, we'd love to see more of those. But in terms of scale, I think it's a subset of partners that are looking for that. And when they are looking for it, I think they will find it, and we'd be happy to share our lessons. But I'd say the biggest thing I've learned about scale is you've got to focus more on the process and the program. Then you do the individual circuit. Because it's so easy. I mean, you kind of look back longingly at the days where you could jump in and roll up your sleeve and fix everything. You know, you feel more control and you feel goodness at the end of the day, like I really got something done. But now you've got to accomplish that through other people. So how do I set those people up to get it right every time? And it's just a different mode of thinking that you've gone through, you know, as you've developed your team and grown it into the best engineering team in the world of, you know, here's these people that you're not on those calls anymore. You're not in those engagements, but you're watching them have a success because you've given them the tools and the process. And any of our partners can learn that. If the scale is really what they want, they can learn that. But I think you would agree. It's a little uncomfortable at first. Totally is. Totally is. You feel guilty. Like, oh my gosh, I should be doing this. I shouldn't make this person do it. But it really does come into the hiring process is so important. Finding great people. Protecting the culture, empowering people and going, oh, wow, they crushed that. Oh, they're really good. Okay, let me empower you some more. This is awesome. Awesome. I want to call back a little more advice. So we had we had Paul German on and I said, you know, what's the what's the one piece of advice you could give out to partners? You've you've you've birthed some of this cloud contact center space. You've seen a lot of things come and go. And his advice was, you know, I love partners get into something and they get super excited and they go sell this one thing and then they go here and they do this and they do this and they do this. So his ask, you know, obviously towards contact center was I just want to see him stay focused on this thing, right? Because they're entrepreneurs. They can do anything and they're sick. They're going to be successful at it inevitably. So what's your advice for partners that are out there trying to build a business? Is it something like that? Is it completely different? Not as much about scale, but just about building the business. Well, first of all, I'd say anyone who's been in the business for two years. Congratulations. I mean, you've beat the odds the fact that you're here and still in business. Most people don't we look at new partners who start up. They don't make it. Everybody overestimates the revenue cycle and they underestimate the costs and as a result, you know, the industry is littered with people who tried and failed to build these businesses. And I think it's easy for people to look from the sidelines and say I could have done that. I could have could you because we have a lot of examples of people who didn't. So first of all, congratulations to those people. The second thing I would say is to be deliberate. Just be deliberate. I did used to think that you should get very specific and very deep in a single technology. I don't believe that anymore. I do believe in the generalist by the way, I think both of those work. I think there's so much opportunity that both of those work for different elements, but I would say be deliberate. Pick a path and be deliberate. In fact, this is a great time of year end of year. If you're going to implement one thing in your business as a result of this podcast, I would say start an annual plan. Start an annual plan at the end of the year that says hey by next year, I will be doing this and I will be selling in these cat and I'm going to add one more cat. Whatever it is again being deliberate. I think an annual plan is a great physical manifestation of being deliberate because you're absolutely actually creating the planet and hopefully holding yourself accountable. Every month to am I getting closer? Did I break down those goals? Am I taking the right education course? My finding the right opportunities, hiring the right whatever it is on your path. So I get going back to the beginning. I wouldn't prescribe a specific path to any partner. I've met so many different personality types that are successful from the soloist. Solos can be a generalist. They can be specific to a vertical. They can be focused on a business size. They can be a larger company. We've seen a lot of scaled organizations. There's one one skill doors. I love talking to you right now because it's a company we've seen for 10 plus years is a great white whale that we're trying to you know, convince that look at this business model. It is great and they finally came around their leadership said we want 50% of our revenue to be coming from this model in you know, the next few years and they said do you think that's possible? I ran the numbers that given where your revenue is right now. It's going to take more than two years, but here's what we can do. And let's get to that goal. Let's get well, they're being deliberate and what's fun is have recurring conversations with them about what their goals are what they're achieving the progress. They're making and so it doesn't matter. They may have you know, 700 people on staff, but even if you're just one person on staff, you can go through the same motion and be incredibly successful by being deliberate. Love it. Let's talk about decision-making high stakes decision-making. So you mentioned in the beginning, right? We go through some of these sometimes it's every other day. There's a crisis or a critical situation when partners go through that too, right? And it feels like right in that moment. Oh my gosh, it's all over. I really can't screw this up. There's a lot of pressure here. What's your advice there on decision-making high stakes where you just you don't know everything? You know, one thing that's fun about looking back like I mentioned before looking back. They look more like speed bumps. You know, when you're starting out, you've got these two emotions. I love talking to brand new partners. They're I'm in it. I'm doing it. I'm going to make this happen. But they go through these emotions of euphoria and terror, you know, and they can be in the same minute, you know, there's no limits on me. Oh my goodness. How am I going to pay for groceries next week? You know, and they go through these these cycled emotions. But I think as time goes on and you gain this experience, you start to get a feel for what really is a crisis and what's not a crisis when we talk about high stakes. There are a lot of things out there that are high stakes, but maybe low probability. I think over time, what happened? You start getting a sense for okay, what is really, you know, let's hit the panic button. Now what you find is there aren't many things that are really hey hit the panic button. We've got to move now. There's some definitely some big moves and and and changes you got to make. I would say when when it comes to my decision, what I've learned over time is number one, I don't panic. I've seen enough experience enough things that I thought were, you know, industry ending company ending whatever it was that just aren't there's always recovery time. Well, another comforting thing to me is that even if you make the wrong decision, you can recover and that helped me a lot because one of the things I suffered from early on was analysis paralysis felt like I can't make a mistake can't do the wrong thing. People are depending on this. I can't get it wrong. What that causes a delay? It was more of a delay of a decision rather than making a great decision. And I think that the way I approach it now is gather as much information as you can and then decide, you know, where this fits in terms of priorities. Is this really critical? And then with that information can if I got 70% information, we're in a pretty good place to make a decision. We can make a good decision on 70% because again, leaning back to we can undo a bad decision. And so it's okay to go forward. So that's typically what I do is rely a lot on experience. Try to gather as much information as possible and with as much information as practically possible. Got to make the call. Let's talk about personal growth. So we've talked books. We've talked Rockefeller. We've talked podcast. We've talked all these things that are out there. What's your what's your recommendation for partners right to help them continue to grow and develop as a leader any specific resources or where would you where would you push people? Number one, I would say get just get curious. I mean, you got to get curious at whatever passion is that drives you. You know, it may be just your fear of losing. I think that's the passion that drives them when they're starting a business. It may be the desire to win. I just want to beat everybody and be number one. I think those are decent motivations. I think a more pure motivation is, you know, this more, you know, generative feeling of I want to learn. I want to grow. I want to produce something. I want to see what's around the corner and that curiosity I think causes more learning and growth and my advice would be look our brains are just lazy. That's just how it is. We've only got a limited amount of, you know, power going through our minds. And so it takes shortcuts. You don't think when you tie your shoe, I make the tree and make the whole the bunny goes around the tree in the hole. You don't think those thoughts anymore with like you did when you learn to tie your shoe. You just do it. You don't remember doing it because your brain is constantly taking shortcuts. And that's why it's so hard to innovate and it's so hard to to see new things is because our brains taking shortcuts. So I think learning is critical. So whatever curiosity takes you to then I think you then go down the road because that bombardment of new information is going to create insights. So some of the things that you know, I like to see our partners do is engage in the learning that we've provided. You know, the things that you've done, you know, listening to a podcast like this is going to I mean, geez that the insight they get from people around them who have seen different things. The fact that you can get a book for $20 on someone's life. Someone's worked for 70 years and they're going to distill it down in a couple hundred pages and sell it to you for $20. That's incredible. I mean the compression of information there of someone's life and they're going to hand their life's work to you for $20 is amazing. But if you can consume those things on a regular basis, I think it can feel like drudgery to some people, but if you're curious and excited about it by it, which I am and I know you are. That's why it's so fun to talk to you about these different top podcasts and different concepts. And I think that's what propels us forward is constantly bombarding our lazy minds with new ideas. I love it. There's just so much to learn and if we can we can grasp all the things. I'm a big fan early in life, made a lot of mistakes, didn't listen to anybody later in life, tried to read a lot, listen a lot, surround myself with good people and go, well, it seems to have worked for them or it seems to work for these guys that built companies for 100 years to your point. Why would I try to go recreate the wheel? Why not? To your point, there's just so much good advice out there and read those books and just look for that one or two little things that are going to help you that you're going to walk away with. Yeah, but I think most people go through that cycle. What you're talking about is, you know, you're as you were young, you know, didn't want to hear it. Doesn't matter. People could be giving you gold, you know, here's the map. Here's the way. Here's the it doesn't matter. You're not interested. So until someone turns on and does become interested, that's why it's so fun in this part of the community to watch people self-select, to watch them raise their hand, you know, and say, hey, I've been listening to your products. I've been, you know, talking, I've been trying this new concept. Will you help me on this new pitch I'm working on? To see those people step forward and say, I want to grow, I want to develop. Like those are the people who are going to take that advice. Those are going to run with it and make something of it. And that's a lot of fun. Yeah. Let's talk about industry trends. So there's a lot of trends happening right now. There's a lot of things out there. It seems like there's never a slow and growth of technology. What are the trends that are out there that you think will significantly impact this industry? And then how are we helping partners prepare for those? You know, I think we can look at it from from a product set. We look at it often for products of hey, we take from Telco and network and voice and now we're into security and here comes AI around the corner. I think it's bigger than that. The trend that we're seeing that is bigger than that is that distribution is broken. And whenever you see distribution get disrupted, massive change and massive opportunity takes place. So if you look at the internet, you know, that was a huge distribution model that shifted. And all of a sudden people went online and that became a distribution model where there was opportunity. There were winners and losers. Same thing happened with mobility when things went from just a computer to mobile. And distribution shifted as well. And once again, when it went to social, the way people get their news now, the way advertising takes place now, it's done through social. It's not necessarily done through the old news sites or wherever it was before. And the same thing is taking place in technology distribution. You know, when you look at legacy distribution, it's really logistics and you look at the people selling it and they represented a single brand or two or three. And now what you've got is this proliferation of technology. And so again, we go back and talk about the products. It's most fun to talk about AI. So let's talk about that one. Why not? So everyone, you know, just assumes, well, you know, it's just game over. I mean, open AI is now with Microsoft and Amazon's got their answer and you know, Google's got their answer and Salesforce says AI means this and you know, all these interpretations. Well, it's game over. Absolutely not. It's not game over because you had all these enterprises now. Well, but you got the substrate there. You've got the platform on what is going to be built on. You've got the engines. But then you've got all of these products that are going to be developed and going to be innovating. You're going to have a fragmented market out there with a lot of choice to be made and what businesses have that people don't recognize as risk. How this I know this is a cool thing, but how do I put my business at risk? How to put my career at risk making a decision on what's right for my business. So is all these new applications are going to come and by the way, price is going to change too. It's no longer to be based on seats can be based on workload or how much OpEx can I reduce based on using this AI and all the different changes? How do I navigate that? Well, portal doesn't necessarily get me there because I can't look into their eye and trust and say, hey, you've seen this before. You know how this goes in. Have you seen my situation before? Oh, okay. Yeah, it does look like them that engagement that our advisors have is not replicable today, nor do I think it will be in our lifetime. And so I think that just like it was in the old, I'm going to take it all the way back to, you know, long distance, the competitive telecom, long distance rates. The reason it was not searchable is because there's so many new companies popping up. There's so many different choices. It was fragmented when there was a fragmented market when there is risk involved in the decision, people are going to look to an advisor. And that is the greatest trend that I see for our partners for our industry and propelling us forward. So yeah, AI is the next big thing, you know, before, you know, we've already got generative AI. We've got, you know, voice got security. You got all the, they're all good products. They're going to sell, but the underlying trend that is taking place is that disruption to distribution. Yeah, great point too. And I think if you look back at when I talked to people about investing, right, people that are maybe worried about investing is now the right time. When do I hold? Oh, the market's a bear, the market's bull. You look back at some of those charts that are out there that say, here's the statistical percentage that the S&P has returned for the last hundred some years, right? And it's 10, 11, whatever percent. The reality is just it's always going to perform. And as long as you stay in it, and as long as you're willing to talk about these things and be invested in that market or invested in these products with the customers, they're always going to need help. And it's always going to get harder. And there's always going to be, to your point, a million options and people need help. That's right. Great point. All right, last couple questions on here. I would love to hear, you know, this is kind of a success and failure conversation. So maybe an experience about a perceived failure that ultimately led to success or just maybe some really important learning. You know, the one that stands out in my mind was, you know, 10 years ago, some people still talk about this. 10 years ago, we hired an individual in the organization, leadership position. Absolutely brilliant person. One of the smartest people I've ever worked with. By the way, the things that he said have come true. Like the things about this industry of how things would shape up, what it will look like were absolutely true because he came from a parallel industry. The challenge was the culture fit. The culture fit wasn't there. And the damage that caused the organization. The problem is, so failure number one, hiring the person in the door. So we do our culture interview, you know, we want to make sure the person fits the culture. Mistake number two, hanging on for too long. It'll get better. It'll get better. It'll improve. We'll figure it out. We'll teach. We'll buffer. We'll put people around. Hold on for too long. And what happened was it caused damage, visible damage to the organization. You can still look in our charts in our growth flat line during that time. And you can see why, you know, culture matters internally to our employees, externally to our suppliers, to our partners. It's felt by all of them. And so I did make the change. And what happened was I would tell you the reason I view as a positive now is we got religion. And we knew what it gave us was conviction, more conviction. The things we were doing before were right. The things that didn't show up on a spreadsheet, the things that didn't show up in a report, the way in which we behaved were right. And you can see that in the performance. I mean, it comes in the outcome. It's very hard to put your finger on it and say, oh, I put in two, you know, quantities of this and I got five quantities of that. It just doesn't turn out that way. But that was the learning. That was there. I would say the reconviction in our culture and how we go to market, how we show up. And when partners do say that's my favorite thing about our brand, when you talk to partners, they say, hey, I know they're in it for me. I know they got my best interest in mind. That matters and that's felt. Love it. All right. Final question. So let's say we look forward 10 years from now, 10 plus years, right? And it's been incredible to see what we're building here through your leadership, through the people that we've hired, through the culture, through all these things that we've talked about to enable the partners to be successful. But if you're 10 plus and we're looking back, what is the legacy or what is the impact that you want to say, I helped do that on this industry. I enabled X, whatever you want to put on it. Well, that's exactly it. You know, I hope that when my story is written, you know, it is that he helped grow the industry beyond what it was. Because I don't think things just show up by default. I don't think it's pre-written, you know, it's in the stars. I think we will it to happen. And I think we inherited something great that great people started and I think we're carrying it forward. And what I would love to look back on is to say, you know what? He helped grow the industry because it's not what the industry is today is not big enough for Telarus to thrive and do the things we want to do the scale we want to achieve. Bring on the talent we want to nurture the talent we have. We have to bring in more partners. We have to help our existing partners sell more. We have to convince customers that this is a normative behavior. And that's where I think we win is once a customer, once a CIO says, oh, that'd be malpractice for me to make a decision without talking to my advisor. That's crazy talk. You know, once we get to that state, then we will have arrived. But to get to that, there's still a lot of work to do with suppliers. Still a lot of partner growth has got to take place. And if I can take a play a role in that that's ultimately goodness for Telarus but it's goodness for the entire community. What we have to do is expand the industry. We have to make this mode of selling this this mode of technology acquisition to be the normative behavior. And that's still even though we believe it's superior, even though we see it and feel it every day, we have a lot of education to do. And that's what I see my role is doing because Telarus is going to thrive in that environment with the vision we have in that bigger environment. We're going to thrive, but a lot of other people are as well. And that's what I'm set on. Love it. Good stuff. That's it, man. I'm questioned out. I really appreciate you coming on. Appreciate you supporting us. Everything that you do to help grow the company, man. Thanks for thanks for being a part of this. Thanks for having me, Josh. Awesome. Okay, everybody that wraps us up. I'm your host, Josh, the Presto SVP of sales engineering at Telarus here with Adam Edwards CEO. This has been business blueprints lessons from leaders till next time.

Join us as we kick off this new series as we wrap up the season with Business Blueprints: Lessons from Leaders to give all our partners tips and tricks from our leadership team about all lessons learned when building. Today we're joined by Telarus Chief Revenue Officer, Dan Foster, as he dives into revenue strategies, growth, hiring, and more. You won't want to miss all the tips and tricks we get to glean from Dan with his years of experience in high-growth companies! Hey everybody, welcome back here. We're kicking off a special series of episodes. This one is titled “Business Blueprints Lessons from Leaders.” So who better to have on than our Chief Revenue Officer, Mr. Dan Foster. Foster, welcome, sir. Hey, Mr. Telarus thank you for having me. Good to see you. Good to see you too. I want to kick this thing off. I want to go into some backstories. You know I love winding paths. My favorite part of this is hearing everybody's journey. Yes, we know you as Chief Revenue Officer now, and maybe we can get a little later to what that means, but walk us through just your path. How did you get here? How did I get here? Well, well you can see I'm in my office, so it was pretty easy this morning. In fact, as a worldwide traveler, I guess I could give you a very circuitous route, but I'll start out with I'm in Japan. I graduated from college, and I've maxed out my credit cards. In fact, I'm hanging out with my girlfriend, now my wife. She was doing a semester abroad, and you know, I get in a job in investment banking, and you're supposed to wait for the entire summer, and you're supposed to maybe backpack around Europe. Well, I got to go get a job because credit cards are maxed. Mommy and daddy aren't paying any bills for me, so I actually go out and get a summer job. Well, that summer job lasted 10 years, and had a real fun time learning along the way. Started at, I was employee number three at a consulting firm, and one of the guys who started it eventually became Dean of the Harvard Business School. So we're growing internationally, competing in the likes of McKinsey and Bain. In fact, rating them for new hires, we knew we ranked when we got a cease and desist letter. So fast forward 10 years, and I'm sitting in India, while working on a joint venture, and I realized Josh at that point, it's going to be hard to have a family. If I'm living on flying so much that maybe I go by and go through the cul-de-sac, you can do the math there. But effectively what happened was I jumped off in Denver. I'm in Denver, and I go, we get a startup, some venture capitalists put me into, and we go public. It's in this whole internet economy, and they end up funding me to go run a little business and of all places, St. Louis. So we're seven months in St. Louis. We end up merging with a company that I think a lot of the channel people out there know called Megapath. At that point in time, we were $2.5 million in revenue. So we took Megapath, grew them from $2.5 million through organic growth, M&A, up to about a half a billion dollars. When I came in and out of that, but a funny little story is just to jump ahead, I'm then at another startup just a few years back, as you recall, and we sold it to Ericsson. And who of all people do I get to actually help me sell this idea of the channel into Ericsson because they just don't have the channel. They don't know of the channel. There's a whole backstory there. The Adam Edwards to come on and help me validate the channel. And we're going all the way to the group of… It's called the Technology Group within Ericsson. Eventually, we got to go to Boria and we convince him to go into the channel. Adam and I were actually quoted in a Wall Street Journal article about a week before I, oops, came here to work for Adam. So it was a little awkward Wall Street Journal featuring Adam and I. And the next thing you know, I'm over at our partner there. So that's how I got here. I love it. Just say I was quoted in Wall Street Journal once. Nobody needs to know where, how, why. Yeah, exactly. Mic drop. Yeah. So, you know, over the path, right, over the path, this journey, there's had to have been some pivotal moments. So help us understand, what are just a couple of these pivotal moments for you over the years? Two, yeah, pivotal moments in a career, a lot of them. But I'll try to boil it down. Probably maybe, you know, off the cuff here, probably one of the funnier pivotal moments was not your traditional one. It was my buddy, in fact, the guy I grew up across the river from is managing this band Fish. And we're out. In fact, they're growing. Nobody knew him at the time, you know, they had a small following mid 90s, late 90s. And we go out and check out a band, a band by the name of Dave Matthews. And nobody knew who they were. In fact, they hadn't signed a contract with Electra yet. And so I go home and I'm like, hey, John needs help managing. Fish is becoming a full time job. They've got a couple other acts that they may want to help manage. And my wife's like, are you kidding me? You think you're going to become a rock manager when, you know, we've got kids and all the rest going through. I was like, OK, so that's pivotal. Number one, pivotal moment. Number one, probably weren't expecting that, Josh. No, I did not. But no, but really, what it was is it was hanging around early on some of these academics that were focused on growth. Clay Christensen, a gentleman, read out of Salt Lake City, esteemed academic and life coach, even at the towards the end of his life. He wrote Innovators Dilemma, and we built a practice around that. Marco Ian C.D. A lot of the guys that Kim Clark, that that that whole group, it gave us this growth bug. Like I was focused on it. And, you know, we did a lot of operations, but it was really those really interesting seminars that we go to monthly that talked about these high performing businesses and the productivity that they were getting out of these businesses. You know, it's interesting. And, you know, I mean, I didn't set out to be a salesperson, but one of the guys I got to see talking a wine cave actually right up north of here in Napa Valley, Daniel Pink. He's now he's very well known author at this point. He wrote Drive, but he also wrote a book to sell as human. And it was interesting because here I was hanging out with these academics. But really, in fact, Pink talks about this in his book. There was none of these elite business schools were studying sales as a function. You know, you've got finance. You got I mean, I got to take accounting with this guy, Bob Kaplan, who's like the king of activity based costing. But nobody was focused on sales as a as a enabler in the business schools. And it was really folks like our tech advisors and folks out in the really street smarts doing it. So it was pretty exciting to be part of it. So I want to talk about, you know, I think the one thing I've always admired about you is just when I think I'm looking out far enough, you're going, no, no, no, no, no. Let's look a little bit further. Right. So you've always had this great visionary mindset. Walk me through what is your long term vision for driving revenue growth in our industry? Well, you know, it's interesting, Josh, is this is a five five point four trillion depends on who you want to talk to. But the ICT market is just massive. It's massive. But what's interesting is increasingly, in fact, as you know, our tech our tech advisory, our new tech trends report talks about this. Increasingly, customers are looking to a third party to really say, how should I go about this? How should I think about this digital transformation? So when I think about how we need to drive the business, it's really how do we make our tech advisors look smarter in front of their customers through enablement methods? A lot of the stuff that you do, Josh, and your teams and the whole business. But it's also really looking at that as a buyer journey to say, where are they going to be in five years? What are they going to be doing in five years? You know, interestingly enough, our our background and network really enabled us as the burgers to add fries and shakes. And now there's whole different meals that are being considered. Right. In fact, I love the you know, we've gone through the pivot, but I love the pivot stories of our tech advisors. And that's what you have to keep in mind. Think about Stuart Butterfield and what he did at Slack or, you know, we talked about Howard Schultz and Starbucks. You know, going from espresso machines, you know, selling machines to this in our technology advisors have done that pivot. They focused on, you know, they were selling some of them. You and I both know a few of them. They were selling circuits a few years ago and they pivoted to hit on that focus of the CEO challenge, revenue generation, productivity, brand experience. It's those things. Yeah. OK, so so you get to travel and talk to a lot of these partners or at the event, right? Whatever it might be. So you get to see, all right, here's what a successful partner looks like. Right. So taking a consideration, we've got this big audience of entrepreneurs. What do you think all of these guys and gals that have built their business? What are the top couple strategies that you believe were most successful, you know, while they've built businesses and you've built businesses? Is there some overlap there? Yeah, you know, it's one of one of the things I heard long ago was strategies what you don't do. And if you think about that, it's going to come down to this idea. In fact, I'm going to give you a little bit of a story. But so I'm sitting in London with this guy, Kim Clark, and you were in downtown London with this company, Unilever. Unilever makes tea, toothpaste, ice cream. They they own like Fendi, all these brands. In fact, it's much larger than Procter & Gamble. But we think about Unilever as this kind of small European company. And he's sitting there with this guy, basically the CEO of their personal products division. I got to spend a year in Paris, a little known fact, working underneath him as a consultant for their shampoo and deodorant. So I'm actually a shampoo, I used to be a shampoo expert. So anyways, here we are in London and Kim basically says to this guy, Perry, listen, with all you're trying to do, you need to go after two key principles, focus and discipline. And so, you know, it was this seminal moment where he realized they're trying to do too much and they wanted to look at their innovation portfolio, but he took that. And so here I am, we jump on a plane. In fact, you know, on that trip, I got to take the Concorde because I needed to be back in the States. And I'm literally the next week at Cummins Engine Company, great company out in Columbus, Indiana. And here Kim Clark is again, he's talking to Tim Salsa, the CEO. And he again talks about they're trying to do too much in this idea of focus and discipline. So why am I so so focused on so enamored with this? In fact, I'm going to bring in the great German-American architect, Mies van der Rohe, his design philosophy, less is more. And so Kim would recite that less is more. In fact, it goes back to this idea. I mean, Tim Ferriss in his four hour work week is simplifying the focus. And that's what I see with our technology advisors who are incredibly successful. They've designed a approach in their business that is sometimes bootstrapping their total risk takers, sometimes they're cowboys and cowgirls. But really what they've done is they've focused on a singular model and then they build that up as a base. Yeah, that makes sense. Good, good. Yeah. You know, we had a CEO on here of one of our major suppliers and I said, you've been instrumental in the contact center industry. What's the what's the good and the bad that you've seen our partners do that if you could change it, what would you? And that was exactly that. It was partners become really successful. They do this one thing and then they go, oh, my gosh, I could do all these things. And then they're not wrong. Right. They're entrepreneurs. They can get it done. They can figure it out. But when they focused it and narrow it back, they saw a massively, massively successful partner. So now couldn't. Yeah, less is more. Yeah. OK, let's let's talk about leadership here a little bit. Right. So I know you've you've been part in kind of building some large companies. If I remember right. Hiring to the tune of what was it? 80 80 salespeople a month. It's at one point. Yeah. Oh, so that's I mean, my team did that just to be clear. Like, can you imagine the interviewing that you would do? But we had we had eight talent acquisition people in my group. Well, HR working for my dear friend Linda. But yeah, crazy. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about building an innovation mindset. So is your is your hiring, is your bringing on leaders, is your as you're doing all of those things? Why is it so important to have an innovation mindset when we're talking about growth? Yeah. I mean, first off, it's so critical because our industry has never moved faster. And so you have to be you know, this idea of the pivot, whereas you've got to be focused in discipline. You also have to be looking around the corner. And so what I find is building a team of diverse things, like I look for when I'm building a team. And I think we're there today, Josh, I think about, you know, you, your colleagues, you know, the the broader team that we have here. It's first up hiring, to your point, hiring is the hardest thing you do. I think you know, you've shown a lot of leadership and really built a team. And I think you understand this, which is hiring is so critical because you're figuring out what chemicals to put into this to make this new compound called growth. And in doing that, you know, you've got to you got to set out some big hairy goals to say, you know, how do we own a sector or, you know, what are the three steps ahead that we need to be thinking for the partners to be successful in front of their customers? To do that, to do that, you need a diverse set of thinkers first off. So, you know, I mean, obviously with you, you know, I always make sure my team has smarter people than me. I'll take it. Let's go golden. Yeah, I make sure, you know, you're I take an IQ test, personality test. And I mean, it's not a high bar here. But so no, but I think diverse sets of thinking really bring to bear kind of that innovators mindset. It's good. All right, let's so so part of this part of the series is that I want partners to to hear and understand not just the good but the bad, the really hard stuff as well. So talk to me about the significant challenge that you faced at a previous company at this company anywhere. Right. From a revenue growth perspective and how you turned it into an opportunity. Hmm. I got like how long does this podcast go for? Like four hours, I got a few of them. I got a simple one. I got a simple one, which is so I come back. So I told you the story of Megapath up to a half a billion. We actually sell off a few of the assets I leave. Go do this Solar City Tesla energy thing and I come back. They bring me back. Board brings me back. I go as president and it was in a decline. So 10 percent revenue reduction. You know, importantly, I did a baseline when I got in and the customer sat and the employee sat wasn't good. OK, I wasn't good. I'll just leave you. I don't want to run numbers here, but it was not good. So I'm a month into the new gig and I take a call. Actually, I got a message. So I get the message and I call this guy Max. He's a New Yorker. I call him back and it's one of these hot ones. So as the president, you know, the escalations I'm going to get, as you can imagine, are not the ones who want to call up and say, hey, you guys are doing a great job. So he says, listen, after 11 people, 11 calls, you're the only one to call me back. So he says our culture is basically sideways. And he says, listen, I'm an investor. You hosed up one of these companies I'm with. You know, I forget what it was. We didn't do the install. But I really remember clearly what happened. He said, I want to take you on a cultural journey. I want you to meet with the CEO of a company that I help fund. And if it's OK, I'll meet out in Vegas maybe two, three weeks. You figure out what works. We're going to go to a company called Zappos. So I get to go out and meet Tony, Shane, his team. You know, it's the culture of the customer. And I realized at that point in time that with our sale, our employee engagement in the tank, our customer sat sat not in a great spot. It's even hard for me to say that customer satisfaction at a not a great level. We needed a new program. And so we did this whole best over easiest program. And I learned it from the actually the HR personnel at Zappos. I kept in touch with her for a bit. And we it worked. I mean, two years later, what we realize is by focusing on employee engagement, that means we had better tools so they could solve customer problems. In fact, in my staff calls, Josh, I haven't tortured us like this, but we would call into each of the groups. So imagine the accountability in your org. So when you call into billing, you call into support. And the first time it happened, we did it impromptu. So I didn't prep any of my folks. I said, hey, we're going to have it. We're going to go off script today, folks. We're going to call into a company called Megapath. And everybody was first off in their chairs and not excited by the result. Two years later, we grew that business 10 percent, quarter over quarter, almost diametrically opposed to when I got back there. Two years in, I had a great team. We ended up doing like first SD-WAN service provider with UCaaS as a bundle. It was fun. And we unfortunately, we ended up selling the business because we're having such a good time, but it was focus on employee engagement and really through tools that helped their customers. Love it. Good stuff. Let's talk a little bit about mentorship. So, you know, it's been it's been awesome to kind of be surrounded by you, right? From from how you've helped me grow personally, mentorship. But let's talk about, you know, as you've mentored others, how does that influence your approach, you know, as a chief revenue officer and maybe strategies for growth that we just might not realize? Hmm. Well, one is, you know, we talked about that earlier. We've got to be looking out around the corner to say what is 2x and 5x look like? And then helping, you know, the team look through and manage to a framework that gets you there. So what I had a, I had a CEO that I worked for for quite a long time and he taught me that idea of a framework. So we have the today, the objectives and key results framework works great, right? Gives you that ability to see out over a year. You then put it out two, three years. And what you can do is from a mentoring perspective is build frameworks and management systems that you, you know, as we think about five years out and Talaire is having, you know, taken over the free world, it's those frameworks that we are enabling through that mentorship. It's painting bold visions and building alignment around that. It's it's also, you know, not answering, but asking the questions and pushing guys like you to go out and kind of say, here are a couple options. And then it's finally what I like doing is it's never bringing, you know, teaching folks to bring resolution plans. There's a lot of issues in business really pushing your team to say, well, come to me with three, two options. Don't come to me with issues. Come to me with the issues, frame it in a way that you can then paint a picture of here's how we are going to affect change in a positive way. And it shows that you've thought it through. Love it. Love it. All right. Let's let's keep going on this change mindset. So if you look at, like you said, in the beginning, we're at a spot where it's just never changed, technologies never changed this fast. And I think we just, we always seem to say that I think the people before I said that people after and say that, but it really does. At least if we zoom out over the last 20 years, it's changing now faster than ever. So how do you stay ahead of the curve in that from a revenue generation, from a sales strategy perspective, do the basics come into play? Do you use some of these advanced tactics and strategies? What are your thoughts around that? Well, we can't give all of our secrets out, right? But like water it down a little bit. No, first off, the idea of how you execute is foundationally in the basics. You know, you learn fundamentals around follow up in the focus and you put in programs to go do this. Sure. The, the technology, you know, Moore's law is out the door, I think, right? You know better than I, but in digital transformation is coming. What's really interesting is where we are at, we're at a crossroads. We're enabling these technology advisors to compete against the global system integrators, you know, that what I know the team jokes about not having lost to Deloitte in, you know, a couple of years or something like that. The technology advisor is really what we're pushing to also stay up to what's the right word here, stay up to almost a new standard for themselves to say, how do I enable that digital transformation? The digit, think of it going from selling a network and you and I know a few of these partners selling a network or even selling circuits to now, not just selling contact center, but full on from website all the way through to support the digital transformation. And I love Diane Hinchcliffe, who, as you know, drove a lot of the thinking behind the technology report talks about this idea of DX digital experience. So when you think about the technology advisor pushing the CEO to think through the branding customer experience, it's now become more than ever a full digital experience. So what do we do? We've got to have a buyer journey for the technology advisor who needs to learn. Hey, it's not just fries with that burger, but what does it actually mean to have identity management or zero trust network access together with that network? So we've got a lot to deploy from a sales enablement perspective. And, you know, you guys do it every day, Josh. I mean, you see that it's critical to keep doing what we're doing around the sales enablement function for those technology advisors. Yeah, yeah, I think the you said it there a little bit. The hardest part about this is finding the opportunity to let your customers know all these things that you can do. Right. So there's strategies around QBRs and opportunities for that where it's less tactical and more strategic. But it's just such a different problem than it was years ago. Now, there's just so many things that you can sell to these end customers for the the advisors. It really opens up that door of, you know, I can do everything at this point. Yeah, right. That you need as a customer. If you're buying it, I can help you with that. That's right. That's right. But, you know, you've got to be careful, too, right? Like you've got to not come across as though you're trying to sell them a catalog. Yeah. Yeah, fair. Final couple thoughts here. So so if we look back, you know, we've had a lot of people who have been looking back as you kind of reflect a little bit, right, your career from a revenue perspective, revenue officer. What does what does true success mean to you? And how do you I guess how do you measure that? Well, you know, I'm a numbers guy, so we we measure it in numbers. And I love winning. But actually, you know, it was interesting. I'm going to I'm going to rely on Clayton Christensen again, who actually in the later part of his life wrote a book, How Will You Measure Your Life? And sure, I measure it as success. I measure it as really my ego is in seeing people be successful. Like it was so fun. I've got a guy who worked in L.A. In a past life we talked about, he had seven people and I knew the guy scaled. And three years later, I check in with him and he's got he's got 800 people working for him. So I love seeing those success stories. In fact, for me, success was a little different. I had a son diagnosed with autism and right around that same time, I had a new son born. I just lost my dad. And I'm in one of these amazing, amazing jobs, in fact, just scaling up. But I realized I needed to be around more. So that was an 80 hour a week across the peninsula. And I took a step back and I took I went back to a business that offered me a job so I could be local. And, you know, I mean, the the idea of time as a currency, I wouldn't have been able to coach my kids in soccer. And so when I sure I I had a heck of a time building a framework for go to market for that business, but it was hard to step away. But balance is key. That's what I've learned is the measure of success is back to that idea of how do you measure your life in the near term, I obviously measure, as you know, I measure every month, every every week. We know that meetings do you? I don't miss much on that front. It's my, you know, as you know, I trained as an engineer and a quantitative economics guy coming out of college. I left that in the box, mind you, coming out of college. I think the engineering degree never actually got cracked. But, you know, that's how I think about success. It's good. It's good balance. If I look back, you know, we're been doing a lot of episodes here, right, as we wrap up season two, doing a phenomenal job. Thanks. And as we look back, there are some key trends, right, from the leaders like yourself that we've chatted with balance is key. It doesn't matter if you can't keep it in balance. And I know there's those people that are like, oh, if you love what you do, you know, no, balance matters. You have to be purposeful about balance. So awesome call. That's right. Personal leverage. You know, I use that. I use that. I learned that more. I learned that later in life. Personal leverage, which is, you know, achieves balance. Yeah. Final final thoughts here. We're going to we're going to look out to the future a little bit. And I know, again, we've said it. We're probably a broken record about it just changes so fast. But any emerging trends, anything that you think that for the partners that are listening out there that you really want them to pay attention to? I mean, there's the obvious ones you like. I'm on stage pitching, AI and DX and cyber. But I want to go back to this idea that, you know, we we went out and interviewed 150 CXOs. So there are CIOs, chief digital officers, and increasingly they are buying through the channel. So when I look out, sure, there's lots of technology. You and we are going to be on top of the next one. But I think the most interesting trend is the fact that the affinity towards this channel is only accelerating. The propensity for success is really the CXOs. These are larger corporations, but importantly, those mid market have validated and are doing nothing other than running to our technology advisors for advice and to buy services. Yeah, yeah, it's it's such a it's a great point. And it's such a, you know, like like you mentioned earlier with the Erickson story, but if we just flash back and flash back and flash back further, how many conversations have we had to be in where we've had to convince people why the channel is important as a vendor, why you would want and now just that that rate of adoption of selling here versus trying to sell it direct as a vendor. I mean, I love obviously selfishly. We love that that trend, but it proves the value, proves the value in a customer's eyes. And there's so much more room. So much runway. I love it. Yeah. And there'll be some transactional stuff. Look, things are going to go through marketplaces, transactional. But that's why the complex sale starts with the technology advisor and teams like you. All right, Dan, I'm questioned out, man. I really appreciate you doing this with me, buddy. No, I love it. Thanks. And I love the new background there, too. That is looks like an anaconic chamber or something to that effect. No echoes in here, baby. Yeah. Well, all right. Hey, man, that wraps us up for today. Thanks, everybody. I'm your host, Josh Telarus SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus Dan Foster, chief revenue officer. This kicks us off with business lessons. Until next time.

Listen in as Dan and I venture down the path around SDWAN as it evolves into Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and we learn why the convergence is so important right now! Dan brings to the call some incredible sales strategies and discussion tips. Get ready because your customers as asking for it and if they haven't yet, they will. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode. Today we have on the topic, is the SASE revolution going to empower networks and secure the future? For that, we've got Mr. Dan Truong from AOS Consulting. Dan, welcome on, my friend. Thank you for having me. Dan, we're going to learn a little bit about who AOS here is in just a second, but I want to hear about you. You and I were sharing all kinds of cool background stories. Probably should have had the record on for those. But tell me a little bit about your background story. Where did you start out? How did you get into doing AOS? But has it been a direct path or just kind of a crazy winding path? Just like life, it's a crazy winding path for us here. So I originally wanted to be a lawyer. I then I was back then in probably mid 90s, 94, still going to school. I was working for a small law firm in San Diego as like a legal clerk, you know, typing up unlawful detainers and serving eviction notices at night to pay the rent. And one of those nights I was happened to be out happy with a friend that worked in the provisioning department of a long distance care in San Diego. And her boss, who's happened to be there, heard our conversations and heard that I was unhappy where I was at. And I don't think I want to be a lawyer because I thought I was going to provide justice, but really most of it's just negotiations. And so that was just not for me. The next day I received a call and she said, "Hey, we have a job opening for a, you know, provisioner in our department. Would you like to come and interview for it?" And I'm like, "Sure." And fast forward, you know, a couple of days later, I was working in the provisioning department at the small, you know, LD company. Fast forward another six months, I want to say, it was pretty quick. I replaced the manager as the provisioning manager. And so she went to pursue other opportunities and the CEO thought I was doing a good enough job to replace her. And I did. After that, I went to work like many of us, the C-LEC industry opened up in the late 90s, right? And I went to work as an SC, as a sales engineer for one of the C-LECs and then hopped on to another one. And before I knew it, I was offered a position to be a partner in one of the tech companies. And so I went ahead and took advantage of that to be a small partner in one of these small companies. And we ended up buying AOS consulting three days after I started at this other company. And my seat wasn't even warm yet, you know, coffee was still hot, you know. And we ended up purchasing AOS consulting three days later. So yeah. I love it. I love it. So there's some lessons I got out of that. One, alcohol brings us all together and gives us great opportunities because great conversations happen. But more importantly, no, you just outworked everybody and look where it's gotten you. I love that. I love that story. That's awesome for everybody to hear. Thank you. All right. So tell us then about for anybody that is not familiar with AOS, give us tell us about the company, kind of what some of your focus is on and go to market, all that good stuff. Okay. Well, the company was not started by us. As I mentioned, we acquired it in 2004. It started in 1998. And it was built as an AT&T agency. It was the second largest AT&T agency in the West. We cannot take credit for that. That was that all the credit needs to be given to the founder and his team. But unfortunately, for personal reasons, he put up for sale in 2004. And thus we went ahead and purchased it.

Do you want to learn about SASE, why it's important, and how SDWAN and Security are converging? Then tune in on this episode where we're joined by Mark Spiers of Cato and talk SASE and convergence. We talk about CATO's unique positioning, why the timing is perfect right now, how this helps understaffed IT teams, and more. Welcome back. We are here. We're talking SASE. We're talking the networks of the future, and we're on with a good long-term friend of mine. Long-time friend, Mark Spiers regional director at Cato. Spiers welcome on, my man. Thank you. Good to be here. Thanks for having me. So if you do not know this, Mark and I sold side by side for many years. We worked at a startup. We cut our teeth. We had to fulfill a lot of crazy promises. I think at some point we've even installed satellite dishes on top of hospitals in the middle of Michigan in winter and whatever it takes to help customers. So, man, we've had some good times together, man. We've sold a lot of stuff. We have indeed. We have indeed. Yeah, I mean, that was me coming into the industry. So we've been side by side since the beginning. I love it. Let's talk about your background a little bit. I love hearing about this. What is everybody's journey? How did you get into this space? Did it suck you in? Were you destined to do this? Where did you start? Yeah, you bet. So back in 2006, 2007, I was working in the financial services industry. It was right about then that the financial market started to crash. So I was a part of the very beginning of that. The bank that I was working for closed its doors abruptly. So I find myself without a job for the first time in my career. So fortunately, I was able to get on with another company pretty quickly. Within three, four months, that bank shut its doors. So I'm out of work again with a young family trying to figure out what's next. So I'm thinking to myself, I'm not going to do this again. I'm not going to go this route. Started looking into IT. And that's what took me to the little startup you just referenced. I was able to get on there. And that was the beginning of my career in tech. Was working side by side with you. And you played obviously a big part, not. And it was just trying to figure it out. It was just jumping in feet first and kind of figuring the industry out from the acronyms to the language to everything else. And that's where it started. Yeah, it's interesting. I think, you know, this industry is a testament to if you just have the right acumen and the right determination. I mean, it's a metaphor for anything in life. But neither you or I knew what anything from a PRI to telco to any of that stuff. And I think within months of each other, we both landed there. And I'd say we learned a lot in that time period. And we successfully sold tons of backup communications to people that now helps us in this space. So love the journey. Glad you were there. I remember scooting back from my cubicle and asking you, gosh, what's a PRI? I mean, it was that kind of stuff, right? You thankfully had some of that guidance for me. But we figured it out. And just kind of went. And I think we had a good five year run doing that and introduced both of us to a lot of what was to come. So I want to talk about Cato. You know, this is about, you know, empowering the networks and convergence and sassy and all of that good stuff. But, you know, I've always been a, you know, slo-mo Kramer fan. You know, understood him from the early Imperva days, WebOut Firewall, the Checkpoint days. And so I always loved what he's done. Tell us about what what's cooking at Cato. Where did it start and where is it now? Yeah, you bet. I remember it's funny. I remember years ago having a conversation with you about security and you mentioned the name slo-mo Kramer. And I'm like, who's you know, what's this guy all about?

Listen in today as we have Telarus West Engineer Brinton Gunderson in the studio to talk SDWAN and SASE. Brinton dives into how we see SASE and Security overall converging into the networks of the future. Not only will we get into the weeds on what's all in the tech stack of this offering, but we'll uncover some not-so-well-known information about a professional athlete we may have on staff. Don't miss this one! Everybody, welcome here to another special episode live in the studio with our guest who we'll get to in a second. But today we're going to talk about SASE Revolution. And if you don't know what that is, that's okay, because we've got somebody super smart here who's going to explain it to you. This is about the SASE Revolution and is that the future of how to empower networks and secure everything? So with that here today with us, we've got Mr. Brinton Gundersen engineer extraordinaire from Telarus here right in our backyard, man. Welcome. Hey, Josh, glad to be here. Thanks for having me in. This place is awesome. Fun stuff, huh? Let's jump in, man. First off, I want to hear about your backstory. For anybody that doesn't know you, how did you get into this space? Were you destined for tech? Did you used to wash boats or pump up basketballs for a living? What did you get here, man? You know, I knew you were going to ask that, so I've been thinking about how this all came about. But right after high school, I worked for a little company called AOL, and I was there right when they had the boom. So I think they hit just like 20 million users right at the time. It was AOL 7.0 or something. But it was a crazy time there because I had some friends that were literally retiring because of their options that they had been given over the last couple of years. And so they had millions of dollars of options. I was just in the call center for a couple of years, but that was my first get into technology. I wasn't fully set to be in tech yet, but that was my first job out of high school. After that, I had a job at a computer store. I needed some flexibility to travel. I was a professional athlete at the time. So we're coming back to that. Yep, well, eventually. But yeah, I needed something that was, you know, could work with my schedule. And I worked for a small computer store and built computers and did some system admin work and did managed IT for Dennis. And yeah, it was pretty chill. But then a few years later, my brother-in-law worked for a company, Echelon. And at Echelon, they had an opening for a sales position for PBX sales. And Scott Forbush was the hiring manager. And number 74, all great people from the channel, come from Integra. Go ahead. So, yeah, so I went in, I had an interview with Forbush, and you know, we're talking, and it must have gone well because at the end of the interview, he's like, "Okay, yeah, I think we can probably do something, but I've got a question for you. Do you remember me?" And I was like, "No, what do you mean? I was like, "No, I don't remember you." And he's like, "Well, you did a rollerblade competition at Play It Again Sports." So he was a manager at Play It Again Sports up across the Wasatch Front. And when I was 16, me and a couple of friends had like a crew of rollerbladers, and we put together a competition, and we held it in the parking lot of Play It Again Sports. So I must have done something okay then or during the interview. - Made an impact. - But he hired me, and it was awesome. But Rob Julian was my engineer back then, Forbush, and I'm sure I drove them crazy because I asked so many questions, just so many questions. I had to know how it worked, and I just loved it. - I love it. Okay, we're going to come back to this whole SASE thing in just a second because that's important, and it is the title of this track. But can you, I know everybody's dying to know,

Listen in today as we chat with Pierre Landrin of R.A.S. 3 Communications as we jump into the specialized world of hospitality. We uncover their unique set of requirements, financial modeling, and expectations around the integrations. We also get into some Sales 101 and 201 basics that will resonate across all areas of technology sales! Lupresto Hey, everybody. Welcome back. We are wrapping up a track today. We're talking hospitality, safety, and more. Really though, we're talking about how to revolutionize all the communications through the different integrations. Today on with us, we have got Pierre Landrin from RAS3 Communications. Pierre, welcome on, my friend. Thank you, Josh. How are you doing today? I can't complain. It's three and a half days from Friday, so it's wonderful. Who's counting? Nobody. Hey, I want to kick this off. I always like to get started. I want to hear everybody's background. Some people have had very direct paths. Some people have had crazy windy paths of how they get into this space. So just fill us in. How did you get into the role that you're in now? Where did it all start? Mine's a little crazy. I used to work for a school board in Florida, and I was in the purchasing department. And as a buyer, we would rotate categories. So every six months, 12 months, buyers would rotate. That just kept everybody fresh on different categories. And I landed in the technology category. And we were buying computers, laptops, servers and things. And T1 was the big thing back then. So, of course, that just told you my age. I'm old as hell. And so as well, I was in that category. I met the owner of RAS 3 Communications, Richard Shellow. He was in the hardware space at the time, and he was selling a lot of districts hardware. We became fast friends. Unfortunately, we couldn't hang out because I was a buyer, you know, conflict of interest. Fast forward, I moved to a different department for a promotion, and Richard Shellow and I continued our friendship. I stayed with the school board a good 20 years and then wanted to try something different. So I went into the insurance field. I went with property and casualty, homeowners, autos, and things of that nature. Richard and I stayed friends throughout the whole time. Richard and I used to hang out before children, and today we both have grown children in their 20s. So it's been a good venture. Richard had always asked, come work with me, come work with me, and I was always concerned. You have a brotherhood, and then once you start working for the brother, sometimes it doesn't work out. He said, nothing will ever happen. Nothing will ever destroy that brotherhood. Fast forward, I've been with Richard for seven years. Life's been really, really good. I get to work from home, which is something I never experienced throughout my other careers. So you work harder from home. You work more hours. A lot of people don't realize it, but emails come in. You said, let me just go answer this one. Let me go answer that one. Or it's 6 o'clock, and oh, I got a couple more things. I can knock them out. And here I am. I enjoy what I do. I go to IT expos to learn different technologies, what's available for our clients, our current clients, and potential clients. And a unique thing about RAS 3, Josh, is it's all referral based. So we grow organically, either by our current clients that need more stuff, or they refer us out. And obviously, those kind of referrals are gold. I love it. I love the background. I love the story. I love a good windy path. I think that's awesome. So kudos to you for jumping in and trying it out. Clearly, it's worked out. So good stuff. Absolutely. Absolutely. I have a ball. So fill us in a little bit now on who is RAS 3 now. You mentioned referrals. Obviously, that's a huge testament to the quality of the business that you're doing. But anything you're specializing in,

Listen today with Chris Burgy, Vice President of Corporate Development at Ooma as we talk about their specialized integrations. We talk about a common question, which is hospitality, and what their solution is along with all their other benefits for things like fax, alarms, fire panels, and more. We hear this request a ton from our partners, so don't miss out on what they have to offer as Chris uncovers it all today! Everybody, welcome back. Today we are talking about CX. We've got hospitality, safety and more. More importantly, though, we're talking about how to revolutionize communications through integrations. Today on with us, we have got Chris Burgy VP of Corporate Development from Ooma Chris, welcome on, my man. Josh, thanks for having me. Chris, I love to hear we were just joking about good windy paths into how you got to where you're at. So not Ooma yet. I want to hear about your path. My next question is going to be about Ooma but just tell us about your path, man. I mean, where did you start? How did you get here? Yeah, so I'm a bit of an odd journey and story. So I originally came out of corporate I.T., funny enough, and wound up working for what we would now term a SaaS company, but an ASP company, doing sales for a little bit, and then wound up co-owning a VARMSP with a partner. That's where I first got exposed to UC back in 2005. Old school network server engineer had a bunch of Juniper certifications, Cisco certifications, and then wound up going to work for a short-tell and completely different change of path for me. I went down the corporate development path, which is strategy, M&A. And so that ultimately led me toOoma I love the background, too. I think it's good foundationally, right? You know how the bits and bytes work, so you have such a different, maybe purview into this that I think others don't see that might step into that role. Really helpful. I mean, I've done personal installations of what's so funny. There's a major game company, and I designed the data center for them, and Los Angeles implemented all that on Juniper equipment. Totally hands-on in the VAR days, did a bunch of UC deployments with short-tell, and you never forget that. I still tinker around with stuff. Oh, yeah. We can't. We got to know how it works. We got to take it apart. Exactly. So if I think back, my first iterations of Ooma and what I think the general public might have known as Ooma is it started out as a residential VoIP product. So there might be some of our partners who still don't know how big and how commercialized Ooma is and the business offering. So help us understand Ooma of 5 to 10 years ago versus Ooma now. Yeah, and it's kind of spot on there. Most folks who recognize the brand still know us from the residential days, and believe it or not, that's still a growing business for us. And frequently we run into folks that, "Oh, I have a new Mattello in my house," or "My parents have a new Mattello," or "My aunt or uncle." But we recognize that there eventually would be a long-tail decline, obviously, in home phone service, and we had folks that were taking that little telo product into the micro S&B segments. So think about floor shop, automatic shop. And there's a bit of an aha moment for the company about 11 years ago. So we wound up building a UCaaS platform focused on S&B, and about five years ago, the focus shifted to the business portfolio, predominantly, and that's now the majority of our revenue, believe it or not. So a bit of a fascinating transition, but unique too, because we built hardware, which is really unusual for a SaaS company. And also coming from the consumer side, there's a lot of ethos for us around simplicity and deployment, simplicity and management that's necessary in the consumer market, but translates well, obviously, to the business space. Well, I think you learned a lot too.

Join us today as we discuss a commonly asked question – “Who has the best integrations into XYZ? Mike breaks down some game-changing integrations, five HUGE gold rushes to focus on, along with a ton of use cases, examples, and more as we dive into pots in a box, healthcare, hospitality, banking, and more! Hey, everybody, welcome back and good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. I'm your host today, Josh Lupresto We're talking about hospitality, safety and more specifically, though, we're diving in to integrations and how that really has helped revolutionize communication. So on back with us, we have got the world renowned CX solution architect, Mike Baillargeon Mikey, welcome on, man. Thank you. Hospitality safety, oh, my, is what we have today. Let's get into it, man. Listen, you know, you're a return guest on this show, so maybe give us a little bit of a refresher. How did you get started in this space? English major, substitute teacher, horrible experience, ran back crying to get a math minor in that order, and then moved up to Phoenix and actually worked at a call center, right? So I was the call center agent. This was my script, Josh, you ready? Six weeks, six weeks of training. Thank you for calling Cat Fancy magazine, credit card number, please. We represented about a thousand different magazines. We handle one percent of the U.S. mail every day, delivering magazines and receiving those little cards, memorable cards. You filled out, "Oh, I'll take a sample copy." And I decided that that was a pretty hard job, one. It was a pretty boring job. So then I, of course, gravitated towards I.T. with my vast I.T. experience reading Shakespeare and totally lied to get my job as an I.T. admin. First day I show up on the job, they're like, "Okay, well, you know, part of this job is layer one." I'm like, "Layer one? What is that cake? What is layer one?" I don't even know what that is, right? So he takes out a twenty five pair cable, right, splayed it out, and then like a punch tool ninja, he goes, "D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d." He shows me, "Okay. I'm like, "I don't know what you did. Is this important?" He's like, "Yeah. We got to teach you your color code, white blue, is like orange, is white green, is white brown, blah, blah, blah." blah, blah. At that moment, I had an epiphany that this part of the job was not for Mikey B. I'm not very handy person. You know, I'm really good at buying things at Ikea. And my wife is amazing at putting it together. That's, that's how our relationship works so well. So I had this epiphany. I'm like, huh, that's not for me. But I saw a terminal with some code and everything like that. And I said to the guy, you know, I had no idea this was part of the job. I'm actually colorblind. I'm having a really hard time distinguishing the colors. I'm not sure this is gonna work out. He's like, you're colorblind, Mike totally colorblind. I had no idea. He's like, do you see that terminal over there? I'm like, yeah, he's like, I don't like to mess with that. That's the whole program in the phone system. With a definitive G3R, you know, seven refrigerator cabinets. So I come in over the weekend, figure some out some stuff out, impress me on Monday, like, okay, so I figure some stuff out and rest is history. For those of you keeping score at home, I am not colorblind. I just I just know my limitations. Well, it's worked out. So kudos to you. You have harnessed your skills to the maximum. Love it. You know, the other thing I want to talk about is, is I think you've you've done a great job building up your personal brand, right? I remember when you were coming here, right? We got a lot of phone calls of Oh, my gosh, this guy's amazing. He's helped me so much. What a great hire. So you've done a great job, you know, building that personal brand. In all the partners that you've talked to,

Join in as we have Aaron Bock on from Opkalla as we discuss something that's a hot topic on everyone's mind. We dive into AWS, Azure, and private Cloud modernization. We cover technique after technique that works and helps you not only assist in these discussions but how to help IT and other decision-makers move the conversation forward. We even get into Azure, AI, CoPilot, and more! There are so many golden nuggets dropped here, you won't want to miss a minute! Hey, everybody. Welcome back. We are diving down on the cloud track. It's a reminder we're talking about the top three ways to help your customer modernize in cloud. Azure, Private Cloud, AWS, whatever it is. Today, we've got on Aaron Bock from Opkalla Aaron, welcome on, my man. Thanks for having me, Josh. Excited to be here again. Yes. Return. You look younger than the last time I talked to you, actually. If you stay until the end, everybody, I will reveal my secret at the end, not clickbait. Please do share. Hey, so I want to start with just a little bit of a refresher on, for anybody that hasn't seen the previous episode, your roles, your responsibilities, and introduce us to Opkalla. Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having me again on the show. Opkalla I'm a managing partner here. We're based in Charlotte, North Carolina. We are about four and a half years old, growing like crazy, happy to share that we were number 52 on the Inc. 5000 recently, number three fastest IT service company in the country. So lots of growth, and I think it's really because of what we do. We're trying to change the way the traditional VAR worked, where you pick a technology and that's your horse. We were very agnostic. We help customers advise them on solutions, advise them on the roadmap, help make their technology decision making better, more efficient, easy, and serve as a resource for lean IT teams, teams that know they need external help. And I think the market craves it, wants it, and it's a perfect time to be in the space because there's just so many different technologies. We'll talk about a lot of them today, and we've been having a lot of success. So it's just excited to be where we're at, excited to be in the market we're in, economy good or bad. It really doesn't matter because of how we approach the customer situation. I love it, and congrats. Those are not easy to achieve awards. So great stuff to hear. Congrats on the growth and keeping it going. Yeah, thank you. When we started in 2019, it was actually one of our goals. We would love to be on the Inc. 5000 one day. I've seen other successful companies do it, great people who have done it before me. Last year was actually the first year, or this past year was the first year we qualified from a financial perspective in the number of years we could give them. And when we got the reveal, it was super exciting. I actually was expecting way lower. So when I saw it, I was like, there must be a mistake here. But now, I mean, we've just had a lot of success, and our team is great here at Alcala. Everyone's bought in, and we've really never had anyone leave, and it's just been an awesome journey. Yeah, such a validation to the quality of the work that you do. Good stuff. So, all right, I want to kick this off with, if you had a chance to engage anyone alive, deceased, past, present, whatever, any pivotal tech leader, who would it be, and what is the question that you're going to ask them? That's a good question. I think this is probably a cliche answer, but Steve Jobs, I would probably ask him, like as a managing partner, and I guess functionally the CEO here, I would ask Steve Jobs about what was going through his mind when Apple, before Apple actually was good, or became what they are today. Because a lot of people maybe don't know, but Apple was not good when they started. They were actually kind of a laughingstock,

Don't miss this episode with Chaz Chalkey, VP of Strategic Partnerships at Dataprise as we talk about three key ways to help your customers modernize in Azure. Azure is a complex beast, but Dataprise can simplify the experience, help manage, help migrate, and all things in between. It doesn't matter if we're talking about infrastructure and database, or MDR and Security. Chaz has an answer. Listen in to how they help your customers. You might also hear how Chaz started his career as a Fish Monger! Yes, that's a thing! Welcome to the podcast that's designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus and this is Next Level BizTech. Hey everybody, welcome back. We're talking cloud today, but more importantly, we're talking about modernizing and some of the top three ways to help your customers do that in Azure. Today we're joined by Chaz Chalkley VP of Channel and Strategic Partnerships at Dataprise Chaz, welcome on man. Thank you. So to be here. So Chaz, we'd like to kick this off with some good ammo we could maybe use against you later. But now, look, I like to hear how people get started in this. Some people have had a very linear path, they knew what they wanted to do, and they set out and they did it. And other people in this industry just kind of sucked them in. So just tell us about you first. How did you get here? Where did you start and lay it out for us? Well, a bit of a windy path. You know, at the heart of it, I think I just like to fix things. And it was always just me and my mom growing up. So, you know, I wanted to make sure that I could help her and be self sufficient in my own life. So that was really important to me. So, you know, I started working my way through high school and college with general contractors. So, you know, carpentry, electrical, plumbing, all that sort of stuff, which has saved me a lot of dollars later in life, being a homeowner. And then, you know, over winter breaks, I would be a fishmonger. I don't know how that ties into fixing things, but it certainly paid well. So I was a fishmonger. What's a fishmonger? What does that mean? So like a retail seafood store. So all the all the wealthy people in Georgetown in DC would come to this particular shop to buy their fresh fish. So, you know, think big chunks of tuna and salmon and crab and lobster. So yeah, that was it was a fun experience. So that was more through high school. And then, you know, I went to college at James Madison University and studied integrated science and technology. So I figured it was probably time to start focusing on some technical stuff and things to do some career development. So I got an internship doing quality assurance work for an e commerce business management platform type of organization. And, you know, I remember being there and my laptop blue screen, and it started making this loud beeping noise. And the whole office is just staring at me. And finally, I, you know, turn the laptop over, pulled out the battery and it stopped obviously. But I got to watch the IT guys fix the computer turned out to be a hardware issue. But then I watched them kind of reload the OS and configure Active Directory. Well, I don't know if it was Active Directory back then maybe NT back office. So, you know, we're I got to see that and that really is what got me hooked in into technology. After college and after that, that that kind of quality assurance gig, me and another gentleman had a two person MSP slash ISP, based out of Northern Virginia and did that for about four years, paid myself a whopping 18 grand a year for those four years and turns out you can't live in Northern Virginia with an 18 grand salary. So I started looking around and found Dataprise in 2005, and came on board as a network engineer and a consultant and sys admin and been loving life ever since t...

Don't miss Koby Phillips, VP of Cloud at Telarus joining us as a return guest to the show. This time, we're diving into cloud modernization. Koby talks about some key strategies and secret sauce to leverage moving an opportunity from discovery to implementation to growth. It doesn't matter if your customer is cloud adverse or already in and wants to innovate further, we chat about multiple ways you can help! Hey, everybody. Welcome back. We've got a new track for you this week. We're back into Cloud, and today we are talking about something hot on everybody's mind, modernization. Specifically, they were talking about what are the three ways to help your customer modernize in Cloud, albeit Azure, Private Cloud, anything. Today, we've got on with us, Koby Phillips, VP of Cloud Practice at Telarus Koby welcome back on, man. Hey, Josh. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Koby before we dive into it, I know we had you on before, we heard the backstory. We're going to go into that just a little bit, but I'm going to try a new question out here. I want to know if you could spend an hour picking the brain, any influential tech leader living, deceased, who would you choose and what's the question that you want to ask them? It's a great question. It feels like one of those when we're traveling, we go to dinner just to get people talking type of question. I think a lot of people say Elon Musk right now and all of the things that he has. I'm going to go with Steve Jobs. It's just another obvious answer for all the great things he did. I believe he's been asked this a lot, but I still just want to hear it and see if there's anything different. But it was, how did he rebound from the failure that he personally had, right? When he lost control of his company and went and started off another competitive organization and to see how he would answer that. And what are the key things that he thinks that he'd learned from that experience? Because I think a lot of times we learn more from when we bottom out than when we're having success and to see how much of that fueled and what he did next. So that would be the question I'd ask him, just because I think that's one of the coolest things about his story is it wasn't just like a straight line of success or up and to the right. It was a lot of turmoil, a lot of conflict and things that he had to do to drive to be that successful. Historically, Winston Churchill is one of my favorite figures as well for similar reasons. Like he had some pretty epic fails and then came through in a big way whenever his country needed them the most. So I think that's another person I know is not a tech leader, but another person I'd love to have a conversation with. Awesome. Yeah, I got to sit down at an event once with Steve Wozniak. And you know, you've heard some of the answers and you know some of the things that they're talking about, but to be able to just sit there and ask and collect and listen and just soak it up and figure out how to apply it, I think those are two awesome choices. I think that'd be great. Yeah, what about you? I thought about this one, too, actually, and my I mean, you and I are pretty similar. My answer was Steve Jobs, because I just think that, you know, the way that he conducted himself, the way that he approached things, he's got a lot of great design things out there, simplicity, less is more. I think that product release from the iPhone from 2008 was one of just the most compelling, effective product releases ever. And it was it was so simple. So I just I know we've heard a lot of those things, too. And we've read a lot of those and we've seen people, you know, retweet him and talk about him. But just being able to be surrounded by somebody like that and what you could gleam out of their knowledge, just the way that they look at the world is just so different.

Listen in with our amazing partner, Andy Moules of Red Rose Technologies from the UK discuss Omni-Channel and CX in 2023. Andy dives into a very unique and valuable approach of how he journey maps with his customers. He drops countless valuable tips that help his customers down their CX journey you won't want to miss! Everybody, welcome in. Good morning. Today, we are wrapping up a CX track titled, "Unleashing CX Excellence and Journeying into the Omni-Channel World." Today, with us, we've got Mr. AndyMoules coming to us from the UK of Red Rose Technologies. Andy, welcome on, my man. Thank you very much. Pleasure to chat to you. Andy, so as we kick this off, I think everybody loves to hear about our guests' backgrounds. So walk us through a little bit about how did you get into this space? How did you set out to do what you're doing and building out Red Rose? Yes, I find it fascinating going and looking at what I've done before and where I started. And when we first started chatting about doing this podcast, I started looking back at when I first left college and I was fixing storage drives at the time. So my first foray into IT and technology is I was fixing little DAT drives and DLTs, as they're called at the time. So cartridges. And so that was my first first role. I've very much engineering and technical. And I think after about a year of that and seeing some of the sales guys flash their cars, I thought there's got to be a different side to explore within IT and technology. And so what started out as a very technical based role was taking me sort of from 360 and back now to kind of what I'm doing, loving doing the best, which is kind of supporting customers. So talk to me then about how did Red Rose come about? How did you transition others? All right. I'm an engineer. This is good, but I'm seeing other things happening over here. What did Red Rose come about? Yeah, so I spent most of my career within the channel, if I'm honest. I work for the UK here, distributors, I work for some vendors. And one of the probably most successful periods I had was when I was working with I was kind of working for Samsung at the time. My role then was kind of like a pre-sales channel account manager. And quite regularly, I would get resellers who would contact me and say, Andy, we've got this opportunity. Can you come out? Can you bring your Samsung demo kit? Come and see the customer. And I would go on a full PBX on the desk, plug in phones and just be in my element there. I've kind of almost run into the project sort of from start to finish, you know, coming up with that idea of listening to the clients and sort of just walking through. And when I made the decision, probably I think it's about three years ago, I wish track of time now has been so busy that I went outside and once I had Red Rose, it was I want to bring that back again. That was my period that I absolutely embraced and enjoyed the most. How can I get that back and do this in my own little way and in my personal touch? What is the I mean, just for you kind of starting this thing out from scratch, what's that journey been like? I mean, is it what you expected it to be? Is it harder? Is it easier? Is it somewhere in the middle? Help everybody understand that. It's been a very strange journey for me because I started right in the middle of Covid and I sort of think back to myself. If I was to start a business in normal time and in normal environments, starting a business without a black book of contacts or any old customers I can go and speak to, I could quite imagine I would be up and down the motorway driving to see everyone and anyone I could who could just talk to me about TIF and the contact centre, etc, etc. But so from that point of view, Covid being kind of in lockdown kind of kept my costs quite low to be, to be brutally honest with you, because everything was, you know,

Tune in today and catch the Chief Technology Officer, Brian Martin, of 8x8 as our special guest! Bryan talks about his history starting at 8x8 early on and the roles he's had at the company. Bryan gives killer tips around not only the 8x8 tech stack but more importantly some incredible tips for discovery meetings with customers and prospects and things people often overlook that help them close deal after deal! There are too many golden nuggets to list, so don't miss this one! Welcome to the podcast that's designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus and this is Next Level BizTech. Hey, everybody, welcome back to another series on CX. Today we're talking about how to unleash CX excellence, and we're journeying into the omnichannel world. Today, though, special guest, longtime Chief Technology Officer of 8x8,Bryan Martin.Bryan welcome. Josh, thanks. Great talking to you again. So,Bryan as we kind of kick this thing off, I always love to hear the origin story, everybody's personal journey. Tell us about, have you always been in technology? Did you start out washing cars and said I don't like that anymore? How did you get here? Yeah, no, I started out at Taco Bell to be perfectly transparent. But in college, I was torn between, I'd always done music through, you know, my high school years was in a rock band, was a classically trained guitarist, but loved engineering. My dad was a mechanical engineer and worked for IBM and could bring home IBM, you know, what was then not a PC, but on weekends, I got to play, you know, text-based Star Trek on that. But got to school in college and was overwhelmed by the musical talent around me. So I thought, I better keep my day job and get trained as an engineer. So, joined up here at 8x8, right out of school. First became CTO of the company back in 95 when we were a kind of vendor of these technologies to people like, you know, Lucent was our largest customer, British Telecom, a bunch of the service providers and equipment manufacturers. The dot com bust hit, Lucent went in one year from being our largest customer to our smallest customer. And I became CEO of the company as we tried to pivot into the service provider business and relaunch the company as a service provider in 2002. That's what we've been doing ever since. So that's the story. Love it. Love it. So I want to get into what your flavor and what you think CX is in 2023, but maybe just for anybody that is not familiar with 8x8, give us a real quick run of the land. Who are you? What's your focus and kind of what's going on over there? Yeah, so company is publicly traded. We're named after the basic building block of video compression. So we actually did video before voice. So it's 8 pixel by 8 pixel blocks that back in the day today, if we named ourselves to be 1x2 because the precision of video compression has come way down as compute power has gone way up. But, you know, 20 plus year provider of business unified communications. That's where we got our start. We started selling contact center in 2011. So we're now a 12 year veteran in the contact center space. We started in inbound voice. And that's still what we're known for in contact center. But I will tell you, 2015, we really started working on chat. And a couple years later, we started winning contact center deals against, you know, digital chat only vendors and specialists. But we've really filled in the whole spectrum. So reporting analytics, quality management, speech analytics, CPAS. We bought a little CPAS company in 2018, have integrated that into the platform. And we've also, you know, I think what's different about 8.8 is we embraced other workplace environments that end users want to work out of. So became a very large partner of Microsoft Teams. You know, I think we launched in 2020,

You won't want to miss this today as we have the legendary CX Solution Architect, Meagan Thai of Telarus on the call. We discuss how Omni-channel is still so critical to understand, what some of the latest trends partners need to be aware of, and huge tips for more success when talking to customers to put yourself in their shoes! Hey everybody, welcome back to a brand new episode. Today we're talking about how to unleash CX excellence and journey into the Omni-Channel world. Today we have on the wonderful, the amazing Meagan Thai also been called legendary CX solution architect of Telarus Meagan thanks for coming on and doing this. Thank you, Josh. Good to be here. Does that mean I'm old? No, no, no. Ageless, ageless, timeless, whatever you want to call it.Meagan I want to kick this off first about you. I want everybody to get to know you, right? We always talk about what are people's journeys, how do they get into this? So let's hear your journey. What's been your path into this space? Did you always set out to do this? Did you stumble into this? Love to hear it. Yeah, never would have imagined I'd be doing this decades ago. So yes, legendary. I've been around for a few decades. I don't think people know this about me, but I have a degree in child development. So I used to work in that industry. Now some people will say, Oh, it comes in handy for what you do these days. But I was in that industry earlier on, you know, my 20s, early 20s. And you know what, the parents were kind of difficult to manage, the kids were great, but the parents not so much. So I wanted to change and I got a break into sales from from a family member says, you know, I think you'd be good. We will come in, you know, come in, we'll train you on how to do this. I'm thinking sales. What? Okay. So I went in, I was groomed. And back then I it was a cable harnessing company restarted manufacturing cables and wire harnesses for nor tell meridian systems, that kind of stuff. Little did I know that was going to be my path, right? So that's I got my first shot in sales doing that. And I would do account management, direct selling and didn't really enjoy direct selling so much. And then I got a taste for partner selling what we call the channel today. But back then it was so new. And this is probably in 2001. Back then it was called alliance. It was an alliance partner program. And no one knew what it was, including the team that was hired. But when I started getting a taste for, hey, how do you help partners sell this technology? And it was T ones and DSL, right? Internet services back then. And I just enjoyed it because I loved working with partners, hand in hand. And I can go to the partners say, hey, where's this order? You know, where you put pressure on them versus putting the pressure on me to get the order from the customer. But I really just enjoyed the relationship and the educating and just working side by side with a partner for the same goal. And the rest is history. So I've been doing that for gosh, what 20 plus years now, selling in the channel. Love it. Love it. Nor tell man, see, it sucks in it sucks you whether you're playing on it or not. That's right. So so let's talk about our here we are in 2023. You know, we've had a lot of episodes where we talk about different segments of contact center and customer experience. We talked workforce management, we've talked all these different things. What is omni channel mean, if we're just defining this here in 2023? But also, you know, why is it still so important? Yeah, it absolutely is important. It's funny, because so when I started with till areas about five years ago, and back in 2018, we had to define we had to properly define what omni channel meant. You know, it's a way to seamlessly move your customer interactions between different channels of communications, whether it's voice, SMS, chat, whatever,

Listen in today with Christian O'Brien from Atlas IP. Christian dives into his unique back story and how he's gotten to his current role. We also dissect something that's a common denominator with most businesses, and that's licensing and Office 365. Christian talks about how he's successfully navigated these waters and just might share some pro tips about how to get current customers and prospects interested in your pitch! Welcome to the podcast that's designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech. Hey, everybody. Welcome back. On this week, we're talking about cloud. We're talking about specifically why licensing and security and infrastructure are also critical for Microsoft. Today, we've got the wonderful Christian O'Brien from Atlas IP. Christian, welcome on, my man. Hey, Josh. How's it going today? Better now that you're here. Let's kick this thing off, man. I think everybody wants to hear about your background. Tell us just a little bit about you. We're going to get to Atlas in a second, but tell us a little bit about your background. How did you get into tech? How did you get into sales? Any crazy winding path, or have you just always set out and fill us in? Yeah, sure. I can go way back. I actually am a big sports fan, so when I was in college, I actually wanted to be a sports broadcaster. Major was mass communications. Realized that's not the road I wanted to go. I did a business minor, realized that sales was for me a little bit loose. Started as a BDR at a small cybersecurity firm in Boston. Then I jumped to Fuse, which was Unified Communications Platform. Ended up in the channel where I met Atlas IP, a bunch of different other partners. Then when the 8x8 purchase of Fuse happened, Atlas IP reached out to me and said, "Hey, Christian, what do you think about becoming a partner?" I worked with these guys forever, know the industry, and thought about it, and then realized, "Hey, these guys bring a lot of value to their customers." Obviously, the commission is you can make as much as you want. There's a lot of freedom in it. You know what? I'm going to take a jump towards it. Here I am a year and a half in, and definitely a good decision. I love it. Now, I got to ask, I heard the accent there. Boston, and you got the sports background. You have a lot of sports options in Boston. What was your favorite? Oh, football for me. Football through high school. Didn't get the opportunity to play in college, but massive Pats fan. If you don't, I probably will say wicked at least twice during this podcast. Just for people who aren't used to it, it's going to happen. It's going to happen. I love it. All right. Now, tell us a little bit about then your role at Atlas, and really who Atlas IP is. Sure. I'm a technology advisor for Atlas IP. There's about 10 of us at the company run by Nick Prosser and Brian Robertson. They're the presidents. They started the company about 10, 12 years ago, I believe. Really focused in at the beginning on moving PBXs to the cloud. Since I've been on here a little bit before I even joined, they've decided to really dive into different technologies. Once you have a client selling UCaaS or CCaaS or something like that, there's a bunch of different opportunities that you can really provide them. For Microsoft, for example, who provides your Microsoft licensing for security? That's a whole other branch of revenue for us and just opportunities to talk to the customer. We've been really trying to be more open with the technologies that we're pitching to our clients and just basically listening for those trigger words into different technologies other than UCaaS but that's still pretty core competency over here. Awesome. I love it. Let's talk about that. You mentioned licensing.

Join today as we dive deep into the world of Microsoft with Sean Ferrel of Managed Solution. We talk licensing, Azure, desktop, Azure CoPilot, and more. Sean does a great job breaking down where partners can help, common misconceptions, and how some accounts just continue to grow with all the different products Microsoft has available and Managed Solution has expertise in! Josh Lupresto: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast that's designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is next level BizTech. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode. Today we're talking about cloud, we're talking about Microsoft. We're talking licensing, security, infrastructure. As much as we can possibly pack into 30 minutes to do this today though, we have on Sean Ferrell, founder and chairman of Managed Solution, who you may know in the Telarus portfolio. Sean, welcome on man. Sean Ferrel: Oh, Josh, thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. I'm excited to give any advice. I can Josh Lupresto: love it. Let's, let's talk about, let's talk about you first. I want to hear about your journey. Did you always start out in tech? How did you found this company? How did we get from, from nothing to to here. Sean Ferrel: God, 20 years. We'll just start there. It's, it's, I'm getting old. I wouldn't say the [00:01:00] company's getting old. I'm getting old. But I was, I came to San Diego and yeah, I love tech, but I actually love the business side of running a services organization first. So it was outta school. I mean, I started at, you know, grassroots, living in a dorm, to be honest. And so 20 years later I'll, I'll call it a lot of different evolutions of the company, you know, in, in short kind of hitch star wagon, as if you will. I had to look at what was happening in the world with, with the big guys, Microsoft, with what was happening with the consumer, with Amazon and what was happening with search with Google. And in the end, when it came to tech, we sort of said, we feel like Microsoft's doing a great job. So fast forward, you know, 2023, you know, we're what's called a highly specialized Microsoft partner. They kind of did away with this concept of gold and. You know, we have to carry thousands of certified people, or I should say certifications within engineering. And and it's been a fun journey. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, we're kind of tag lining this thing. Like we want technology to have a positive social impact. 'cause a lot of it doesn't. And so whatever that might be, [00:02:00] if it's gonna help a human being, you know, we're here to help him. Love it. Josh Lupresto: Love it. So, so break it down for, for, for anybody that is not familiar with Managed solution. Talk about what you're doing, what your focus is, and we'll get into to some of the weeds here in a minute. But, but break it down at a high level first. Sean Ferrel: Yeah. I mean, so there's, there, just think about it. Simply put, you've got two businesses within one organization or across the country. So we own a US based help desk, a true 24 hour a day. Level one, level two, level three, very technical help desk. We can work directly with suppliers or, or I guess manufacturers like Microsoft and Amazon and some of our partners. But it's, that's, that's one thing we do. And we do it for a lot of companies. Typically, you know, mid-market, a hundred employees and more. But we have a lot of s m B accounts that we deal with, and we do it within the channel. The other side of that is, you know, for better, you know, sake of consulting, we work with Microsoft directly, so there's 500,000 Microsoft partners in the world, Josh, and in that we're in the top 132 I think this year. So it's pretty [00:03:00] special. So you combine those two things and really, you know,

Today we jump deep into something everyone can relate to and that's Microsoft licensing. We are joined by Telarus Engineering expert, Mike Kowalski as we talk licensing, security and infrastructure, specifically around Microsoft. Mike lays out some great detail about how this all works, along with how you can help make your customers' lives significantly easier while uncovering their pain points! Josh Lupresto: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast that's designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, at Telarus, and this is next level BizTech. Hey everybody. Welcome to a new exciting track within cloud. Today we're talking about licensing. So more specifically, why are licensing, security, and infrastructure so critical for Microsoft and beyond? And on with us today, we have the wonderful Mr. Mike Kowalski, regional sales engineer, cloud specialist here at Telarus. Mike, thanks for thanks for coming on, man. Mike Kowalski: Absolutely, Josh. Thanks for having me. Josh Lupresto: Mike. So I, I wanna kick us off. You know obviously we know a little bit of your journey kind of as how you've got here. You've got a cool background in data center and cloud and, and, and, and all kinds of different things. But maybe just kick us off with some, some life lessons, some business lessons here. So, as you've kind of evolved, you've learned a lot of things throughout your career. Gimme just [00:01:00] one or two lessons you've learned along the way, like I said, business or technical that, that you've learned that would be helpful. Mike Kowalski: Really, I've been in this space for such a long time that I think the common thread is a lot of things used to be given away in technology, not thinking that they had much value. And what I've seen over time, and I, I think the story goes that Bill Gates wrote this operating system for a client and he went to sell it to 'em and they're like, ah, we don't want to just keep it. And, and thus Microsoft was born, right? Nobody saw the value in it. And those early systems that they shipped, Had a CD on it, you could install it on your computer, you can install it on your neighbor's computer. They just didn't see the value in the actual licensing component. They thought they would just be selling more hardware, I guess. More of a package. So through my career, I've seen businesses really try to streamline that monetization process from a business aspect. But I think also technically, They're trying to [00:02:00] create more options that better fit how each business utilizes licensing. So it gets a little convoluted, I think. We'll, we'll come across that a couple of times during this conversation, but I think in this day and age, it's still not set. Things are still changing, things are still evolving, and some people might think it's a good thing. Other, the other people who really have mastered the old program throw their hands up in the air, like, okay. I just got used to this. Now what's happening? So Josh Lupresto: yeah, good point. We were talking about this before, right? It, it changes fast. And that's, that's part of the value. And, and, and actually speaking of that, right? Speaking about value, just a level set, right? People that know, you know, that your, your role is, is your regional engineering, right? You're there in California, but you also have a, a, a cloud focus as well. Give us a background for anybody that has not met you, your evolving role and, and, and how you help partners do what you do. Mike Kowalski: Started in infrastructure, physical infrastructure. Customer owned computers, customer owned facilities. And that's evolved over time to obviously people pushing things [00:03:00] out into data centers and still owning their computers, and then even pushing that into customers owning their own equipment and then having so...

Tune in today with our special guest from Auckland, Giles Potter of Great Outcomes! Giles drops golden nugget after nugget as we tackle the argument of AI in the Contact Center and its role in Quality Assurance. You'll hear about Giles' path from the automotive sector to starting his own business to ultimately help customers improve their Customer Experience! There are tons of tips and lessons learned you won't want to miss. Josh Lupresto: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next level Biz Tech. Everybody. Welcome back to the final track. On this episode, we are talking about what everybody wants to hear about, of course, ai. More specifically, we are wrapping up the track titled, is AI better than a Human Being for Quality? In the contact center amongst the contact center agents. Nobody better than our farthest reaching guest ever on the podcast. Mr. Giles Potter from Great outcomes coming to us from New Zealand. Welcome on my man. Giles Potter: Thanks very much, Josh. It's great to be here. Coming in from Auckland today. Josh Lupresto: Love it. Thursday here. Friday there. It's still, it's always gonna get me. I think I bring that up every time we talk. Absolutely. Giles. So you know, we, you know, we know that you've got a [00:01:00] lot of expertise in Context Center. We could narrow this down into a lot of different things and we're gonna get to some good some good content here. And just a second aboutAIand CX and all that, I always like to start off with, How did you start out? Have you always been in contact center? Have you always been in tech? Did you wash dishes and say, I want to get into technology. Where did it start? How'd you get here? Giles Potter: Oh, no, I wasn't in tech at all. Not at all. I actually started in marketing as a, a young man in my early twenties. I wanted to be a marketing manager and, and one of my early jobs was every boy's dream working in a car manufacturer marketing finance agreements at, at car dealerships. So we used to go off and do exciting things in the weekend, like supporting the, the dealer racing teams at exciting race tracks around the country. So yeah, that was really fun. But it ultimately led to technology. Josh Lupresto: So how do you, how do you get the tra and I'm a car guy, so I, I, I mean, part of me wants to hear more about cars, but how do you make the transition from [00:02:00] the auto, the marketing world to firing up great outcomes, right? And doing what you've done to build the business up. Giles Potter: Yeah, look look at actually looking back, it was a pretty natural line, but it went from marketing car finance agreements to then saying, so hold it. There's a whole lot of customer service in marketing and and operations and fulfillment. If you're gonna sell lots of car finance, you're gonna actually service them as well. So, hey, you go and look after that big customer service operation as well as it. At, at the beginning. So at a point in my career, I swapped across to working for a. Finance company is part of a bank. And they said to me, oh, and by the way, look after the contact center as well, will you? And that was the first time I failed in life around like, oh my God, this is much harder than I thought. And I met failure. I'm flat in the face. Josh Lupresto: I love it. I love it. Now, now, how do you, how do you, if we, if we, if we flash back [00:03:00] a little bit here, right? Failure hits you in the face. Where's the, where does the inspiration in that come from? Right? Is it lessons learned? And you go, my gosh, I could do this, I could make it better. Where how do you get into the space? Giles Potter: Well, look, it's one of those situations where I. As a young man or or a young woman, you know,

Listen in today as we discuss the hot topic of AI, specifically AI in the Contact Center, and if it's better at Quality Assurance than a human. Ashish Nagar, CEO of Level AI, joins us today as we dive deep into their real-time QA offering and how it sits on top of other contact center offerings. We talk about Generative AI and how it solves some of the most common problems in the contact center and turns them into revenue-generating machines! Josh Lupresto: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next level Biz Tech. Hey everybody, welcome back. We got a fun episode for you today because it's never boring to come in and talk about AI. What better time than now, right? Listen, our topic today is we ask the question here, is AI better than human being for qa? Contact center agents. And if you don't know what QA is, I bet you can spell it. I promise it's not as scary as it might sound. We're gonna go over that today. But today from a guest perspective, we've got the CEO of Level AI on. We've got Ashish Nagar Ashish, welcome to the call. I man. Ashish Nagar: Thank you so much, Josh, for having me. Josh Lupresto: I'm, I'm excited. You, I feel like this could be a, you know, we're, we're, we're trying to make this a 30 minute podcast. I feel like you and I could talk about this for four hours, but they, they make me keep it down. So I'll, I'll do my [00:01:00] best to keep us reigned in, but excited to have you on, man. Excited to kick this off. Same here. Alright, so I want you to take us back a little bit here. We want to hear a little bit about your personal background, your unique story, and how you got in this space. Ashish Nagar: Yeah, so it's actually very interesting Josh, and thanks again for having me. So I have been working in the space of voice AI and N L P for almost the last 10 years now. So I, I was doing a startup which is kind of c you know, Siri early version of Siri, which we sold to Amazon Amazon's Alexa team. And was working as a product leader in Amazon's Alexa team for a few years when Alexa was growing up, was, was growing a lot. And the project which I was working on towards my last assistant at Alexa was making Alexa talk to any human for 20 minutes on any social topic. So imagine if you walk into a room and you find the one of those devices there and just like, Hey, how was the. How's the NCAA [00:02:00] tournament? Like how's March Madness? Mm-hmm. And anything which you can talk to a human being on and, and how can we make Alexa know about everything, have a free forming conversation and be engaging and all that stuff. And on that project I was working with research groups from around the world to make this happen, and then I realized all the challenges which are there in the space to make question answering work, better machines, to understand humans and so on. And then realized that Google, Amazon, Facebook, open AI are all working. For these mass solutions. Right? But nobody's working in the enterprise. Mm-hmm. Who make a world class solutions. And we saw that the technologies which were there before us were all very basic. And, and so that's how I got into. The enterprise AI space and what we first started doing, what our first product was actually a bot for frontline workers, like nurses, technicians retail sole workers. And when we showed it to all the customers, they were like, can you first [00:03:00] apply this in the contact center? That's where most of our problems are. That's where we are getting all of these voice calls and other thing. And our question was, but don't you have. Incumbent solutions there, you know? Yeah. I don't wanna take names, but you know, and all these existing solutions there. And they were like, yeah,

Interested to hear more about how AI and ChatGPT are being applied in the Contact Center? Then you won't want to miss this talk track. Listen in as we discuss with Telarus Contact Center Solution Architect Jason Lowe. Jason outlines key evolutions in the contact center technology space, the evolution of Artificial Intelligence and all the supporting tools, along with what happens to a business if they fail to adopt them. We might even hear about Jason Lowe's secret talents as a singer and DJ! Josh Lupresto: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, at Telarus, and this is next level Biz Tech. Hey everybody. Welcome back. Joined here with a special guest in the studio today, Mr. Jason Lowe joining us to talk about AI in the contact center. Is it better than a human or not? Jason Lowe, welcome back on man. Jason Lowe: Thank you for having me back. Josh Lupresto: Exciting stuff. And today we're talking about, you know, what's really front of mind. It's ai. It's the contact center. There's copilot, there's all these cool things that we're gonna get to, no spoiler alerts, but your role here at Telarus obviously is the solution architect over the CCAs practice. So we're gonna get some exciting point of views, I think from your perspective. Excited to do that today. Okay. Okay. So I assume that everybody watches every episode, but in the event that there is one person that maybe didn't [00:01:00] talk to us a little bit about, you know, How did you get started in your tech career? Have you always been in tech? How did you make it here? Jason Lowe: Well, when I was a kid, I really got in, this is when like personal com. I'm that old. Yes. Well, I, when I was a kid, personal computers were just starting to be a thing, and so I really got into them and got into doing all sorts of fun stuff Right out of high school, I went into a very technical type role and ended up progressing to a role where I wrote code for like a decade. And then I went through some educational changes to make myself a little more qualified to get into some better positions and progressed and finally got a role at what is now called NICE CX one. But when I joined the company, it was called U C N back in 2000. Yeah. So I was there for about a decade. I, you know, spent a little time at another company called talkdesk and, you know, another stop here, there until I finally came to flares. Josh Lupresto: I love it. So, so I want to hit you with a little bit of a curve ball here. [00:02:00] Oh, dears, flashback. Because I've also heard that you have been a dj, you have been in a band. One fill us in on that, but more importantly, why, why am I asking that? Because I think it relates anything that you've learned along that way that has helped you in this space. Jason Lowe: Okay. I came from a musical family, had a mom that was an opera singer, had a dad that was a guitarist songwriter. And so I just kind of, music has been a part of my life all my life. So when I was a kid, just moved to Utah, there was this dance club called the Ritz, and it was a big red bowling pin on State Street. It was right there. Yes. And it was a new wave dance club for 16 and older. And I happened to wander in when I was 16, and by the end of my. 16th year, I believe. I had gone up to the owner and said hey, when are you gonna let me dj? And he goes how about next week? Because someone had just quit. So I just became a DJ and I DJ'ed there for a number of years. My music career, I kind of, I had a song on the radio locally in Utah for like a year [00:03:00] but didn't really do anything more with it. Got back into other musical projects. And then back in 2009, 2010, With the adv, advent of Facebook, started doing some more DJing and now I DJ on a regular basis, so it's a lot of fun.

Today we're joined by Chris Keojampa from our partner FCS in Texas. Chris has a phenomenal background and not only discusses how they scrapped and started FCS, but dives into their strengths in retail, collaboration and we go through some key struggles he's been able to solve with retail & Microsoft. [00:00:00] Josh Lupresto: Welcome to the podcast. That is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales Engineering, Telarus, and this is next level Biz Tech. Hey everybody. Welcome back. We are wrapping up a track today an important track. We're talking about wifi, we're talking about Microsoft Teams operator connect all kinds of cool stuff about penetrating the retail market. And today we've got on with us, Chris Keojampa from FCS. Chris, welcome on. Chris Keojampa: Hey, thanks for having us, Josh. Hi. Josh Lupresto: So, so Chris, before we get this thing started and we start talking nerdy about teams and operator connect and wifi and all that fun stuff I just wanna hear your story. I, I would love to know and love to, to have the listeners here, how did you start out in this space? Did you, did you start out, you know, waiting tables and then wanting to get into technology? Was this your destiny from day one? Fill us in, man. Chris Keojampa: No. Funny story. I [00:01:00] mean, I, I, I'd bartended and waited tables throughout college, right? I graduated with a bachelor's degree in in biology and also a bachelor in business management. Still didn't know where I wanted to go from there, right? I just knew that I was a, a person that got along with all walks of life and just loved talking to people. And oddly enough, you know, everybody jokes around about, you know, Craigslist, right? But oddly enough, I found my first telecom job on Craigslist on a no platform. Yeah. Yeah. It was it was pretty funny. And I had interviewed with both C Von and Cogent cogent was the better option and the actually the one that gave me an opportunity to start an industry. I think I was born at a, a very good time, or, you know, in the eighties. Just cuz I got to see the paradigm shift from, you know, what technology looked like before it is today. You know, going from, you know, nobody really having, you know, mobile phones, you know, everybody thought pages were cool, right. To seeing how everything has evolved from. The old trends to how it's come [00:02:00] into the digital transformation age, and as it continues evolve and evolve. And I just took it from there, right? I, I knew I had to put my name on, you know, on the billboard and telecom and say, Hey, Chris Gil, job is here. But you know, things good things kept on coming along. Met my business partner Robert, probably about 13, 14 years ago. We the company's been in business for 10 and a half years now. And it was a time where it's very different from how most traditional, I'd say, trusted advisory firms start. They start their business today because it was a little harder back then. There weren't spiffs, there weren't anything of that sort to help you propel your company from a financial standpoint into. Yeah. You know, to, to stability in essence. Josh Lupresto: Yeah, you just had to grind it out in deals, right? Like, I mean, there's no escaping Chris Keojampa: that. Oh yeah. No, I mean, Robert and I have a great story. I mean, when we started, I went back to waiting tables, you know, moving back in with my parents. I mean, who wants to be that guy, 32 years old, you know, where you living based in my parents, I guess. Right? So I had to forego a lot of things for two [00:03:00] years, working 60 hours a day. Robert came from Oklahoma, had, you know, 60, $62 to his name in a black pack backpack, you know, knew that he wanted to do something different besides just, you know, working for. You know, a company so we can put our heads together.

Did you know you can help your customers can monetize their Wi-Fi? Listen in as we have Shawn Nace, Sales Engineering Manager of Telesystem, on with us to talk about a new product they have that allows just that. It works with just about any existing hardware they have, and it puts revenue back in the customer's pocket and in yours! You might also hear about some of their new IoT and security solutions too! https://youtu.be/aKz7logLQ7s Josh Lupresto: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast. That is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, Telarus, and this is next level Biz Tech. Everybody welcome back. Today we are talking about something different. We got secrets for you. More. More specifically, we've got the top three secrets to help you help the customers. Monetize their wifi platform and you're probably thinking, oh my gosh, I didn't even know I could sell wifi or, or, or venture down that road. I've never done that. Don't worry. We're gonna cover all that. We're gonna get into it. And today to tell us about some of these secrets here we've got Shawn Nace with us, and Shawn Nace is the sales engineering manager at Telesystem. Shawn, welcome on, man. Yeah thanks Shawn Nace: for having me. Josh Lupresto: So Shawn, first as we kick these things off, we'd like to hear about everybody's background. Everybody comes from all kinds of different places. Sometimes this industry sucks us in sometimes. We didn't know we were gonna end up here. Sometimes we wanted to be here [00:01:00] from the day one, and we just knew. So we'd love to hear just your personal background story. We know where you're at now cause we just, we just mentioned your title, but where did it start for you? Shawn Nace: Sure. Where did it start for me? So in college I studied business and yeah, I always. Had a fascination with technology. You know, always loved the newest gadgets and so forth. But I realized kind of late in my college career that I didn't wanna I didn't wanna work with numbers. I had a concentration in finance. I realized that it probably wasn't for me. So I ju I jumped on the opportunity to join a a C Life in Pennsylvania or outside of Philadelphia years ago, and kind of worked my way up through the ranks of support, eventually running a knock at a CLEC called line Systems. And then, Moved over to sales as I kind of just had had a, a real desire to get in front of customers and demo solutions like number one hosted PBX was new and you know, we all had to demo these cool little user interfaces. I was the kind of the only two guy for that. So sales ended doing was just a logical regression for me. I've loved it. So, Josh Lupresto: so fill us in a little bit about for anybody that doesn't know, [00:02:00] right? I mean, today we're gonna, we're gonna hone in a little bit on something key that Telesystems does. But, but first of all, just tell us a little bit about who Telesystems is, what you guys are, what's all in the portfolio, and, and kind of what the go to market motion is. Shawn Nace: Yeah, thanks. So we're a national voice and data provider a service provider that's been working with, we've been working with Polaris now I think for I think five or six years. A lot of people, you know, know us for having a really extensive portfolio, whether it's, you know, best in class switching solutions powered by Meta Switch or BroadSoft type two access with DDoS protection. More recently, where we're really getting a lot of traction is with things like cybersecurity, where our extensive managed wifi solution that includes a bit of iot little bit of iot offering on top of that. So We're definitely not your household name, but we're I'd say the best kept secret in telecom and we're the words, the word's getting out there. Josh Lupresto: Let's talk about that.

Listen as we talk with technology leader Sarah Freeman of Attollo Tech in Arizona. She talks about her complete flip from automotive to technology sales and where it accelerated from there. Through this segment, we'll get into wifi, analytics, and secrets to help customers also learn how to improve their business and monetize them as well! Later in the segments, we'll talk specifically about struggles through retail specifically. Josh Lupresto: [00:00:00] welcome to the podcast. That is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech. Hey everybody. Welcome back to a brand new chapter. We're talking about wifi, we're talking analytics, and the title of the track today is What Are the Top Three Secrets to Help Your Customers Monetize Your Wifi Platform. And hopefully by now listening to that, you're going. I can do what? And we're gonna break that down for you. So today we have got Sarah Freeman from Attollo, a tech partner of ours. Sarah, welcome on. Thank you, Josh. Sarah. So I, I, I got a lot of questions. I know we're gonna talk technology and all kinds of fun stuff but before, I would love to know everybody's path, how you get into this space. Was technology always your destiny? How did you get started? Did you do something completely different and stumble into it? How did it suck you in? Give us the breakdown. Sarah Freeman: [00:01:00] I was selling cars and I got sick of selling cars in my early twenties. I bought myself a gateway computer and I started looking for jobs on Monster and I actually had another job lined up and I thought, I'm just gonna go to the, this interview and check this place out. It sounds kind of cool. I know nothing about technology. I had just bought a gateway less than a month prior. And I got there and all the cars in the parking lot were cool. They had Corvettes and Porsches and you know, Mazdas and just all these really cool sports cars there. And you know, beavers, oh, what is this place? I walk inside, you hear everybody on the sales floor having fun. They had fun music playing on the overhead. And I looked around, I sat in the interview and I, the first thing I said to the, to the manager interviewing me was, I don't know what you guys do, but I wanna work here. And he got a kick out of that and that, that rolled me down the lines into working there. They were an HP reseller and I was hired to bring on the used Cisco networking product line. So I was [00:02:00] actually a hardware broker for the first 15 years of my career. Josh Lupresto: Got it. Beautiful. I love it. Nice cars. I would've gotten Sarah Freeman: it too. Yeah, right. It was nice cars and, and fun on the sales floor. Josh Lupresto: Yeah. All right, so, so tell us a little bit about a tolo tech. What does it mean? When did you start it? And, and, and what are some of your focuses? Sarah Freeman: Attollo means to Elevate or to Rise, and I chose that name. It is Latin partial to Latin, and I chose that name when I was running my multiple warehouses in the, in the hardware industry. I grew up and, and had my own businesses. I was running multiple warehouses. I was looking to add more to my portfolio, and at the same time I was feeling the pain of. Moving my own stack to the cloud. Which UCaaS provider do I choose? You know, the, the internet issues, all of the things that a small business has to go through to, to digitize, to move it to the next level. And it was painful. So I started looking at, you know, what can I add to my own portfolio in this process? And I read a Gartner report that said [00:03:00] everything as a service gets, makes 14% margins. Where here I was making a 4% net. Ah, and I thought, okay, we're, we're, we're doing a total pancake flip here and moving completely over onto the services side.

Buckle up as we go heavy into Containers and Advanced Cloud with Dan Beeler and Alex Hughes from Compunet. On today's track titled Three ways to help your customers modernize with Kubernetes, we uncover that it isn't always about the technology, it's about the Application and the business problems we're solving for. You'll hear how Dan never quite made it into Alice in Chains, but he got closer than you might know and somehow ended up in Biz Dev and Engineering. There's lots to unpack here and you won't want to miss a minute of it! Josh Lupresto (00:00): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales engineering, at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Everybody. Welcome back. We are here to wrap up one of our fun cloud tracks. We're talking about Kubernetes, we're talking about helping customers. And to do that, we had to bring on some really smart partners. Today we got our good friends at Compunet joining us, like to welcome 'em on. Dan Beeler. Welcome on, sir. Hi. Dan Beeler (02:08): Thank you. And where are those smart partners? Are they gonna show up soon? Josh Lupresto (02:11): Hey, hey, I'm, I'm, I'm looking right at 'em, man. I won't say, I won't say which ones they are. Alex Hughes, welcome on as well, my friend. Alex Hughes (02:18): Thanks for having me, Josh Lupresto (02:20): Guys. I, I always like to kick this off with learning a little bit about people that I know, but maybe you got some cool stuff in your background that we don't know. And I think it's, it's fun to see how people come into this space. Some people stumble in and this, this world sucks us in others you know, they, they've set out and went to school and this was their destiny. So, Dan, I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you first, tell me your story. Is it a straight and narrow path into tech? Is it windy? What is it? Dan Beeler (02:45): Oh, yeah. It's windy as I assume many people's are. But you know, I grew up in the Seattle, Washington area. Really thought I wanted to be a rockstar, like so many people around the area Did, you know, it's the, the kind of the, the you know, cradle of grunge, if you will. That did not happen. Come to find out I didn't have any musical talent. But my big claim to fame there is that I did go to school with Lane Staley of Alison Chains. He was just younger than me in high school. So that's, that's how far I made it in that that led to short career in construction. I really enjoyed construction, framing houses and, and other buildings. But what I realized real quickly with that was, is that winners were horrible . Dan Beeler (03:25): So that led me to try to find something that maybe a little bit more on the professional side. It led me into technology first in sales. Then from there finding that I kind of had a technical aptitude. So I started heading to kind of towards the pre-sales arena. And that ultimately led me into engineering kind of at the time when IP phone systems were starting to take off. And I really set my sights on Cisco, understanding Cisco IP telephony and, and the like, unified communications. When I came to Compunet, that was about 17 years ago when I came in as a route switch and voice engineer. And then from there moved into some some, some other things that we'll talk about, I'm sure here in a minute. Josh Lupresto (04:06): Love it. From Alison Chains to Cisco. All right, Alex top that man. What's your story? Alex Hughes (04:11): Oh, man, I don't have any claims of fame with any name dropping here. Mine my story's a little bit more direct into it. I, I kind of started in at a law firm actually thinking, Hey, maybe I'd be interested in going to law school. It was, you know, in school at the time, figured it was a good, good gig to kind of be at a help desk and kind of learn how a law firm works.

Listen in as we talk to Jeff Deverter, Chief Technology Evangelist about a new and evolving topic of Cloud, Containers, and Kubernetes. Jeff lays out his destiny and passion for technology growing up his entire life learning from his father who played a key role at IBM for 30+ years. He also gets into three key ways to talk about helping customers modernize regardless of where they are, on-prem, partial cloud, or even struggling with legacy app designs, you'll learn how Rackspace can help! Josh Lupresto (00:00): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, at Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode. Today we are Talking Cloud, and more importantly, we're talking about three ways that you can help your customer with Kubernetes. And you may not know what that is yet but we're gonna get into it and we're gonna break it down. And more importantly, we've got Jeff DeVerter, chief Technology Evangelist from Rackspace on with us today. Jeff, thanks for joining, man. Jeff DeVerter (02:12): Josh, I am honored to be here. Thanks so much for the invitation, Josh Lupresto (02:16): I always like to kick this off with a little bit of background for anybody that doesn't know you, maybe it's blackmail that we could use against you later, but something I, I, I love to just kind of hear how everybody got into this space. Some people knew they wanted to be in tech from day one. Last guy I just talked to was a boat mechanic and didn't love that. And, and here we are now. So, so fill us in for you. How did you get here? Jeff DeVerter (02:38): Well, then maybe this one will be a first for you if we're gonna go way, way back to the very beginning. So let's go back to high school. So I grew up in in a, in a family where, you know, the dad could still have one career for 40 something years. And he was an IBM-er through and through first job out of the Navy, IBM last, last thing he did before he retired, still working for I B M and had an amazing career. Did some incredible stuff. He started as the guy who would go in and fix the cooling systems for the big tape drive systems that was storage back in the, whenever that was early sixties. And and so, needless to say, technology was just a part, whatever it was, was part of my growing up. And, but I was also into music. Jeff DeVerter (03:25): And so as a, you know, a middle schooler, high schooler thinking, what do I do? Do I go get into computers? Do I do I do to do something in music? And so I was a senior in high school. We'd been moved down to Austin, Texas, and I go into, as a senior, whatever advanced placement computer science was in those days on a green screen. And I sit down in the fall and I think, can't stare at that screen for the rest of my life. That's green and that is boring. And so, so I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a run at this music thing. I had a smart guitar teacher. He said, Jeff, you should really think about the technical side of, of music cuz maybe you're not the best guitar player in the world, . So I went in to learn how to be an recording studio engineer and producer. Jeff DeVerter (04:05): That was, that was gonna be the job. And ended up down in Houston, Texas and intern at the studio grow, you know, kind of grow up inside of this studio get married along the way, end up buying this recording studio. And the first thing I do when I buy a recording studio is put in a computer network. Why not Harken back to my father who's still working for ibm, excuse me. And os two warp is around in these days. And so I put in this couple of computers and network, and I think networking sort of fun. I, I think I could do this sort of thing if I didn't ha have this other day job. So I go on and do music for a number of years.

Listen in today as we talk to Chad Mowery, Cloud Solution Architect at Telarus. Chad talks about some cutting-edge cloud services such as Kubernetes and a few ways it can help your customers modernize in cloud. You'll find a few helpful tips, some basics around containers, and great conversation starters to open this door with your customers. Josh Lupresto (00:00): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back. We are kicking off a new cloud track, and we're gonna get nerdy on you for a minute, but that's okay cuz we're gonna try to make it fun. The title of this week's track is what are the top three Ways Kubernetes can Help your Customers? And if you have no idea what Kubernetes is, that's okay. We brought the smart guy on today, Mr. Chad Mowery, cloud solution architect at Telarus to help us break it down. Chad, welcome on, man. Chad Mowery (02:16): Thanks, Josh. The pleasure is mine. Thanks so much for the invitation. Josh Lupresto (02:20): So, so Chad, before we get in and start talking about Kubernetes and containers and advanced cloud and all kinds of good stuff I want everybody to get to know you just a little bit. This is kind of my favorite part of the show is where we get to hear everybody's journey. Where did you come from? What did you do? Have you always been into tech? Did you start out you know, scrubbing concrete and cleaning floors? And then wanna get into this? Or give us your journey, man, how'd you get here? Chad Mowery (02:47): Wow, I don't know that we have time. Actually, I, I also wanted to back up and, and you, you mentioned at the beginning there that we were gonna get nerdy. So I I sometimes that's a compliment. Sometimes not so much. I'm pro I I choose to take it as a compliment though. My journey started. Yeah, I think cleaning bathrooms maybe, maybe maybe I should go back. So first, first computer I ever had was right out of high school, windows 95. So I've, I've loved technology computers ever since then. I remember as a teenager working for my uncles and they, they made jokes about being me being a car salesman. And it was funny because I, I would've been considered an introvert at the time, right? As a, as a teenager. I, I guess I, I probably really wasn't exactly, I don't know if closet extrovert is a real thing, but I don't know. Chad Mowery (03:50): It just just changed over time. I, it was probably eight years from when, and I distinctly remember that joke for some reason. It was probably eight years between when they made that joke and, and any, and, and later. And there I was working for them in their small autocare business as their service manager, service advisor. You know, I was handling all the, the customer experience, all the scheduling, you know, all the, all the selling of services et cetera. Also happened to be doing the it, I mean, it was a small shop, so they had one, one computer, and the database was like super tiny. But, you know, that's, that's kind of where it started. Actually backing up a little bit I guess to take a page out of Stein's book. I, I actually went to Bible college. Chad Mowery (04:38): So before I, I, I worked for my uncles just doing cleaning bathrooms for years while I was, while, while I was a teenager and then, and then going to college, and then went full-time after that. And, and before I went full-time for them as a service advisor, I had started going back to school after Bible college for my associate's degree in network administration. Because I had loved you know, as I mentioned earlier, I loved computers and technology, and so I wanted to, to do something there, I think. But working for them as a, as a service advisor and working with people, I realized that I, I just,

Don't miss this episode where we talk to Joe Mauk of C3 Technology Advisors about UC, Contact Center, MS Teams, and more on this episode titled: Direct Routing or Operator Connect with MS Teams - Which is better? Joe dives in about his history from a customer perspective along with his transition as the initial UC/CC Expert with C3 and crushing a huge deal only two weeks into his start! Josh Lupresto (00:00): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back. We've got another, uh, exciting wrap up on a chapter today. We're talking more Microsoft Teams direct routing operator connect, and, uh, whatever else Microsoft wants to come out with here by the time this podcast drops. So, uh, today we've got on the amazing Joe Mauk of C3 Technology Advisors to talk to us. Joe, thanks for coming on, man. Joe Mauk (02:10): Yeah, thanks for having me, Josh. Josh Lupresto (02:12): Joe, first step in this is, uh, we gotta hear your journey, man. Uh, we, we wanna know where did you start out? Have you always been in tech? Have you been in something crazy and got sucked into this space? Uh, tell us about your journey. Joe Mauk (02:25): Sure. Yeah, I mean, I probably took a little bit different over a route than most people do. Um, I actually went to college for, um, criminal justice. I was gonna be a state trooper, and as I was going to class, people started saying, Hey, you know, 40% of Michigan State troopers are ex-Marines. So I started thinking, I'm like, you know, I probably need that experience, but I am not a marine . So I took the Navy route. Uh, so I spent four years on the USS George Washington, which is an aircraft carrier, and, uh, worked in the weapons department. So I was in charge of, uh, keeping, uh, the ship secure and then also moving bombs and missiles from the magazines down below up to the, the hangar bay up, up, up top to, uh, give out to the squadron. So, uh, yeah, it was, it was actually, um, once I got out of the Navy, um, by my wife's stepdad, had all of these old, uh, 3-86X computers, , and I was messing around and, you know, upgrading from 4K of RAM to eight K of Ram and, and my mom of all people, she said, you know, why don't, why don't you do something with computers? Joe Mauk (03:34): Um, might be a little bit more safe than being a trooper. And, and I said, you know, you, you might be right. Uh, so that's how I got into it. Um, but the funny, you know, funny story that I'll share with you as far as when I was in the Navy, um, you know, we, we went everywhere in the Mediterranean area and, um, we stopped in Palma, Spain, which is an absolutely gorgeous island on the south side of, of Spain. And, you know, Navy guys, you spend 30 days on the ship, you finally hit land, what do you do? You go out and have some drinks. Yeah, around town. We're on the boardwalk and this beautiful beach, and we see this entourage walking towards us. I'm like, who, who is that? It was, it was actually Muhammad Ali. Josh Lupresto (04:15): Oh, get out. Joe Mauk (04:17): I got a picture with Muhammad Ali. Now going back to what I said, what a, what a Navy guys do when you hit, when you hit land, we can proceeded to go out and continue to party a little bit. And, uh, somewhere that evening, I lost the camera. So I did meet Muhammad Ali, I got a picture with Muhammad Ali. Um, but unfortunately I have no proof that I met Muhammad Ali in Palm of Spain. So Josh Lupresto (04:45): I don't know that anybody's gonna be able to dispute that. I love it. Joe Mauk (04:48): . No, no, probably not. Josh Lupresto (04:50): That's awesome. So, so tell us then about, uh, how, how does that transition and, and, and kind of how did you come into C3 and then really give us a little bi...

Long-time channel friend Shelby Cooper joins us today and talks about Microsoft Teams as we pick apart their deployment options. Do your customers want Direct Routing, or is Operator Connect the new direction they want to go? What are the differences, and where does Fusion have success. Listen in today to find out and learn even more about the ever-changing Microsoft Teams deployment options and how Fusion Connect keeps it simplified! Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back. Today, we are talking about something that comes up all the time, Microsoft Teams, but we're gonna dive in a little deeper. We're gonna talk about direct routing. We'll talk Operator Connect. Lots of good stuff to unpack here, but today I'd like to welcome on. Good man. Shelby Cooper, VP of Channel Sales from Fusion Connect. Shelby, welcome on. Shelby Cooper (00:36): Josh, what it is, brother . Sorry. Thanks for having me on, man. It it's fun to be on podcasts that you listen to. Josh Lupresto (00:44): I get invited to podcasts, and it's like I have to go do research and figure out who the heck that is and what they're talking about. But with dio, I'm like, oh, I mean, it's like getting invited to the Jay Leno show. It's a big deal for me. Josh Lupresto (00:57): His cars are way cooler than mine. I have one. He's got a lot. He's got a lot. Maybe I'll take it though. I'll take it. Uh, all right, man. Let's, let's kick this off with your personal background. Uh, this is my, one of my favorite parts of this show is being able to understand where everybody came from. Some people this industry sucked him in, as we know, some just destined to do this. So I would love to hear, uh, whatever kind of cool blackmail or anything interesting you have in your story. Uh, how'd you get here? Shelby Cooper (01:26): Uh, it, it's, uh, it's not blackmail cuz I wrote it in my bio. Uh, I'm just kidding. But, uh, look, I was, uh, a struggling college kid and like all struggling college kids, you have priorities. Mine was try to figure out how to get some beer money, . Um, I successfully found, uh, through the college job applications, I found an opportunity at a company called Confer Tech to be a nighttime phone operator. Um, little did I know it was for conference calls and it was in multiple languages, and my typing skills were not what it should have been. But I talked my land to the job, even though I only spoke one language and I spoke it. Okay, not even really well. Um, and after sitting there, you know, and looking out the window, I don't, I, people probably forget this, but when you are at a corporate office, the parking lots get segregated almost. Shelby Cooper (02:23): You know, not on purpose, but they just do. And it's like, there's some, usually some really nice cars in one, one part of the parking lot. And then there's the guys like me that were driving an old pickup and things like that in other parts of the parking lot, maybe some station wagons and minivans, things like that. But there was this one row of cars right out my window at the office, and it was all Mercedes and Beamers. And there were some high end things that I didn't even know how to pronounce at the time in that line. And I asked my, my director at the time, I said, who drives those cars and what do they do? And because I'm thinking in my head, I'm like, I'm changing my major. Like I gotta get into whatever that is because I don't see these kind of cars in most places. Shelby Cooper (03:07): Turns out they were the salespeople, . And so I integrated my way through coffee breaks and did lunchroom times and things like that, and figured out who the salespeople were,

Listen in today as Mikey B, Telarus CX Solution architect underscores all the differences of how your customers can procure Microsoft Teams, along with the value props of each. Not only will he address different customer environments and how to sell them, but we'll learn storytelling and hear how Mikey's early path to Shakespeare comes in handy! Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back to another episode. We are kicking off this track talking about Microsoft Teams, as if you haven't heard enough about Teams. You haven't because there's new stuff and we need to talk about what's important, why it matters, and no better to do that than bring on somebody. Really smart. Mike Baillargeon, Telarus solution architect. Mikey, welcome to the show. Mike Baillargeon (00:39): Thanks, Josh. Super happy to be here. Josh Lupresto (00:41): So the title of this track, Mike, is Microsoft Teams. Is it direct routing now? Is it Operator Connect? You know, we're gonna get into that now. How do we, how do we pick that? So, so I think as we go through this, we're gonna answer that for the partners and, and kind of walk them through that. And as we kick this off, what I wanna start with is I wanna start with you personally. I want to hear your background. Anybody that doesn't know you, I, I find that that's probably a really small list of people, but anybody that doesn't know you, help us understand where did you start? How did you get here? Have you always been on this path? Did you, did you get sucked into this world, like some have? Fill us in. Mike Baillargeon (01:20): , thank Josh. So I was an English major in college. I wanted to bring Shakespeare to the masses, , that was, that was my end goal. But a funny thing happened on the way to that path, and it was called being a substitute teacher for six months. And I gotta say, if you, if you're a parent out there with kids in school, those teachers worked so hard. And in the six months I was a substitute teacher, I decided maybe I should get a minor in engineering and math , because I, I, I could handle the English. I, I love the, the, the English language and reading and poetry and all that goes with it. But the teaching part's actually the hard part. So interesting. My wife and I, we, we were married and up here in New England, and we decided we wanted to leave the cold for the sun. Mike Baillargeon (02:14): So we moved to Phoenix, and we lived in Phoenix for about 20 years where we decided, you know, that cold might be okay. So we left the, the, the sun and moved back. And what happened was when we moved out there, like a lot of us, you know, right outta college, you just, you know, pick up, pick up the newspaper back then Josh, I'm a bit of an old guy. Yeah. Pre indeed. And there's this opportunity. Do you like to talk to people? You know, do you have good customer service skills? This job is few. I'm like, great. Sounds amazing. And they were paying like eight bucks an hour. I was like, this is awesome. So what that job was, by the way, was a call center rep at a thousand person B p o. Nice. The second hardest job in the world besides teaching is being a call center rep. . Mike Baillargeon (03:04): And I learned that pretty quickly. So while I was there, I made good friends with the IT team because I saw what they did. I'm like, okay, they're, they're walking around the building. They're, they're at these high level meetings that, you know, I want, that's where I wanna be. I wanna be where a sausage it made. So I, I, I started talking about, I'm like, what do you guys do? And what, what, what is this? They're like, oh yeah, we're with a telecom admin. We have an AT&T now, Avaya,

Listen in as we talk with Telarus Partner Thomas Hamilton of HamBTC about propane tanks, connected cows, air quality sensors, and more. Thomas talks about how he's shifted his focus to helping customers with their Mobility and IoT strategy. You'll hear about how he got his start door knocking in the Bronx to owning his own successful company brokering different technology solutions, and some things that he's learned along the way to polish his skills! Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Josh Lupresto (00:15): Hey everybody, welcome back. Today we are wrapping up the topic, interesting topic titled, what Do Propane Tanks, cows and Air Quality Sensors Have in Common? I just wanted to make this title as crazy as I possibly could for people to go, what in the world is that? I have to watch it. And what we got on with us, we got on with us the wonderful Thomas Hamilton of HamBTC to help us wrap up this one. Thomas, thanks for coming on, man. Thomas Hamilton (00:41): I truly appreciate you inviting me on. It's, it's a honor and I feel like a blessing to be here. Josh Lupresto (00:46): Oh, dang. Oh, hi. Geez. I can't let you down at this point. . All right, man. Let's, let's jump in here. You know, before we get started, we just talk about HamBTC. Let's, let's kick back to your background. I, I love asking people this because some people come from totally polar different spaces. Some people have always been in tech. I just love hearing everybody's path. So tell us about, how did you get here? Thomas Hamilton (01:11): I got to technology sales. So about 17 years ago I was looking for a new path something similar to sales. And I, funny enough, I, I answered a Craigslist ad looking for door to sell door salespeople, and it turned out to be a company that was had partnered with Verizon for a feed on the street program, b2b doing pot, selling pots, fs, dsl, doing the winbacks, things of that nature. And that's where I got my start knocking doors in, in, in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens in the Bronx going door to door. And, and I, that's always been where I've been accustomed. I'm, I'm a really good face-to-face person, so I, I just took off with it. And then somebody told me about the partner program, and when it was time, when it felt like it was time to jump ship, when it only took a summer to figure it was time to jump ship, I, I entered the partner program. I started interviewing some tsb and I found one that would worked for me. And I was with them for many years before I, I was again honored to find Talos. Josh Lupresto (02:21): Love it. All right. I want you to take me back fellow door to door, man. I, I, I feel like you learn if you do that one, you can do anything in life, but two, you learn so much. If you look back to knocking doors, right? Just out there in, in what's gotta be one of the toughest areas, what is the biggest thing, whether it be personal, professional, what did you learn, if you look back on that, that maybe you leveraged now or just kind of helped you along the way? Thomas Hamilton (02:50): I think, as you said, you know, door to door for a lot of people is very tough and very scary. Perseverance ingenuity figuring out where to be where to make your move. Knocking doors in Manhattan. , you gotta avoid security guards. You gotta know what door, what, what floors you can get to. If you got an appointment on the first floor, you make sure you get to the second floor. If you're on the 44th, make sure you do the 45th and the 43rd. Cuz you, now you got access. So all those type of things. And also being, you know, new Yorkers are notorious for being rude and, and not being friendly and talking. So you learn to, to charm the,

What do Propane tanks, cows, and air quality sensors have in common Listen in today with special CEO guest, Ken Mills of EpicIO. Ken talks backstory, but more importantly, the evolution of the company and how they're assembling and productizing some key IoT solutions that many businesses need and have life-saving potential. While the title may sound wild from agriculture and produce to medical and RSV season, those are all things your customers are asking for help with! Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Josh Lupresto (00:15): Everybody. Welcome back. We've got a wild episode for you today here. The title of this episode is What Do Propane Tanks, cows and Air Quality Sensors have in Common? And you're thinking that's, that's not CCaaS. That's not security. When the world are we gonna talk about today we're not gonna give it away, but we're gonna get to it cuz they're all important and it's technology and it's fun. So today I would like to welcome on back to the show as we did a fireside chat a while back. Ken Mills, CEO of EPIC iO. Ken, welcome on. Ken Mills (00:45): Thanks, Josh. You know, a long time listener, first time caller, , and with that title I I had to bring the shirt that I felt was appropriate. You know, I like big data and I cannot lie. So I think we'll get into a bunch of topics and should be fun. Thanks for having me. Josh Lupresto (01:00): Love it, man. Let's jump in. I, I want to hear your, your personal background story for anybody that that is not gonna go. And, and listen to our awesome fireside chat. I thought, thought we talked about some cool stuff, and we did the studio. Give 'em a little bit of a background. Just you personally, you know, how, how did you get into this? How has everything come together? Where did you start out and, and, and, you know, how did you get where you're at now? Ken Mills (01:20): Yeah, I think one of the most interesting aspects is my mom is the nerd of the family. You know, she read every manual still does you know, reads every blog, watch, every watches this, every Apple keynote you know, she is on top of what's going on. And I just kind of picked that up as a kid. And, you know, we were early in the bulletin board days you know, with 56 K modems when those were cool. Mm-Hmm. if they ever were I guess they were pre-work back then. And, you know, AOL chat rooms, which are, you know, the bane of our existence and all of those experience taught me about computers and, and got me hooked on, on the technology. And I just kind of grew up in, in that space of loving tech and, and loving to learn new things. Ken Mills (02:06): And I'm just a big nerd at heart. And so, you know, I jumped at a chance to join Cisco Technologies way back when after the.com bust when they were looking for a number of growth areas and non-traditional markets. So they started this what they called emerging technologies team, where we were out there looking for new adjacent businesses, either new customer segments, new technologies, new acquisitions, and we built a team to go build those, go-to markets and build those businesses where most of the people we talked to that we said we worked for Cisco, they'd be like, oh, I know the food company. Like no different Cisco you know, Cisco networking. And, and so, you know, we didn't have that brand power in these adjacent markets that we had in routing and switching at the time. And so it was fun. Ken Mills (02:49): I learned a lot about how to, you know, take technology from an idea into, you know, an actual market and, and grow it. And then I got to spend you know, I did that for almost nine years, and I got to spend almost seven years at e EMC Corporation,

Listen in today as we have a return guest and host of his own podcast Chris Whitaker, also VP of Mobility & IoT on the show. Chris goes on some key comparisons to battlefield strategies he leverages today with building out the practice. He talks about how we're tying all the solutions together, pulling us business drivers and ultimately solving that with sensors and ideas customers hadn't even thought of. There's so many great ideas, you don't want to miss out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5bclXrPYq4 Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Everybody. Welcome back to another episode. We got a crazy title for you today. The title of today's episode is What Do Propane Tanks, cows and Air Quality Sensors have in Common? And you're probably going, what? But anyway, we're gonna get to that. We're gonna answer this as we get going. Today we have the wonderful, the amazing VP of Mobility and IoT, Chris Whitaker from Telarus back on Chris. Welcome back, man. Chris Whitaker (00:42): Yeah, I am glad to be back. And like, you know, I say all the time, anytime you get like-minded people with similar goals together, amazing things happen. So here we are. I, I think we have similar goals, you know, we, we wanna win, you know? Josh Lupresto (00:55): I think so. I think so. I love it. All right, man. So listen, this is the part of the show where you get to take us back. Give us something in your background, some unique story. Maybe some people heard some things about you before. Tell us something we don't know. Chris Whitaker (01:11): Oh man. So there I was knee deep and in grenade pins. Mel, that's not a real story, . So the real story, you know, cause I've said this before or you've asked me that before. So I was like, actually, I really wanna share something different. And it occurred to me my 10 years in the Army, you know, you can talk about my background. That's a big part of my background and my influence in my life. But I was, what you call it, indirect fire infantrymen. You know, it's interesting. Even my first career had the word indirect in, and I just didn't know that was a precursor to my next career. So, as an indirect fire infantryman, my job was to be available when the frontline needed me. So the frontline, you know, if they had got in a bad spot, they will call in on the radio, Hey, you know, we call it Request for fire Mission. Chris Whitaker (01:58): Now sounds again very militant, I apologize. But, but regardless, you know, they needed some help. They were in a bad, bad spot. And they needed help. And what they would do is they would, they would give me their coordinates. They would tell me where they were. They'll tell me, tell me what's the nature of the problem they're having? You know, was it the enemy forces coming on them, or tanks coming on them, or, or you know a trench line in the open with enemy soldiers, whatnot. So they would tell us, Hey, here's where we are. Here's what we need. Here's what we're looking at. Here's what we're dealing with help. And we would take all that information and calculate and determine where we need to send these rounds, what type of rounds and how many rounds. So I, I love that story cause they just occurred to me. It's like, wow, that's kind of what I do today. You know, I take that call from the front line, they tell me where they are, they tell me what they need, what they think they need, what they're looking at. And then I get with my team, the mobility team, the sales engineering team, and we calculate, Hey, what's the best answer here? What should we send down range to solve for this problem? So hmm. That's a big part of who I am. And I I just love how they kind of relate. Josh Lupresto (03:06):

Listen to this special episode where we talk with Telarus Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Patrick Oborn. We talk about his winding path to founding Telarus, then get into key strategies he has seen partners embody that truly 3x, 4x, or even 10x their sales and their business. You won't want to miss the first of many sales tips and strategies! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxaNwkEOfD0 Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Hey everybody, welcome. We are back here with a special episode with a special guest, longtime listener, first time caller, really important person, Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Telarus, Patrick Oborn. PKO, welcome. Patrick Oborn (00:31): Thank you so much for having me, Josh. I, like you said, longtime listener, love, love this podcast. It's amongst one of my favorites. I'm not saying that just because you're here right now, but cuz it's a little truth. You, you do a very good job of bringing on people that can, that can deliver information that helps people's businesses. So, congratulations on a very successful podcast, my friend, season two, I believe, um, pushing season three here, real close and, uh, too many more successful seasons. I think if you continue to do the job you're doing, you're not only gonna keep growing this thing in terms of, of quality of content, but in terms of audience and everything else. So I'm starstruck to be here with you and thanks for having me, Josh. Josh Lupresto (01:08): Love it, man. Uh, thanks for giving me a job. This is gonna be fun. Patrick Oborn (01:12): , uh, you kind of deserve it. Josh Lupresto (01:15): All right, we're talking special episode here. Uh, you know, we usually have these three part tracks where we talk about, uh, you know, perspective on the technology a supplier, and then really get the partners purview on it. Today we're talking about how to 10 x sales. Um, we get a lot of these questions from partners, A lot of tips, a lot of tricks. I feel like we could pack this into 50 episodes, right? And who knows, we might. Uh, but today we're gonna boil it down from your perspective. We're gonna run through some of the normal stuff, but then we're gonna spice it up with, with some of your input, which I'd love, cuz you've got so much passion and energy and good stuff to share in this. So, as we always do, when we kick these off, let's talk about your background, your path to starting to Telarus. And I want to hear anything good and anything bad, and anything I don't already know. Patrick Oborn (01:59): Fantastic. Well, when I was growing up as a teenager, my dad owned his own business. He was a part of a three-way partnership. It was called OTA Physical Therapy, obo, TrackMan Aston. They had 15 locations across Southern California and they had a really, really nice business. Um, he later on in, in development of the business, he kind of got out of sorts with, uh, his partners and stuff, and basically was telling, telling me, Patrick, whatever you do, don't start your own company. It's a pain, it's a hassle. There's stress. The employees are always the first to get paid. The business owner's always the last to get paid. There's risk and, and you know, God forbid something doesn't go right with your partners, it's a, it's a total train wreck. So just go to college, get a good job, save up for retirement, live a good life. Patrick Oborn (02:41): That was his advice to me. So I I, I did that thing. I, I went to college. I studied, I was a math and engineer geek. Um, I had, I had interned a few summers in my dad's physical therapy offices. So when I went to college, I kind of thought I was going pre-med or something like that cuz both my parents are physical therapist. Um,

Listen in as we get deep in the weeds of Advanced Networking, SDWAN, SASE, and more with Daniel Beckworth of WhiteOak Solutions. Daniel has been deeply entrenched since the early days of SDWAN and we listen as he talks about the evolution of SDWAN, what to look for, how to avoid customer roadblocks, and most importantly, how to make your customer be the champion! Transcript of episode can be found below. Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back to another episode. Today we're talking about some good, super nerdy, but important stuff, . We're talking about software defined networking, advanced networking, SASE, lots of cool acronyms that we're gonna explain those in just a second. But first of all, I'd like to welcome on the good man, Daniel Beckworth of White Oak Solutions. Daniel, welcome on, man. Daniel Beckworth (00:39): What's up buddy? Love that intro in the music. I was impressed. Well done. Josh Lupresto (00:43): . Thanks, man. Let's see, we got, we got a lot to unpack here. So before we start breaking down acronyms, history trends, evolution deals, all that stuff, I want to hear about you. I, I wanna know we'd like to kick this off. How did you get started? Have you always been in, in, in this space, in the tech space? What did you do? Did you cut grass and saw yourself as a lawn care man? And then you've found tech, you know, what's the story, man, Daniel Beckworth (01:10): Man, cut grass. That actually, when I think we all go through those moments and working in it where you feel a little burnt out sometimes, you're frustrated with the state of your career. I think we can all admit we feel that, and I, I think it's healthy for all of us to have that job that we dream about whenever days are going really bad, and mine actually is cutting grass. So yes, there's something peaceful about that. Or just working at Home Depot. That's my other dream, right? just telling you get an aisle six would would be beautiful, but no, so have, obviously haven't always been in it. I actually had a weird start to my career. It's a weird transition, or it may seem that way. I, I started out in the ministry, spent time in seminary, and actually it's, it's got a strong crossover like Iverson, and there's some elements to it that I think are, are really, really helpful. Like just being naturally curious about learning. Then known it's been a trade that I've been able to apply to it, and I think it keeps you really relevant and helps you from being stagnant. And the other is that it really helped me early on in my my growth to prioritize human experience and relationships, which is really the cornerstone with what we do in, in information technology and how we build those true relationships with our end users. Josh Lupresto (02:26): So this is funny. You are, we, we started a trend. You there, there has now been two potential practicing theologians that have changed into tech. So whatever reason it, it, it's working. We'll take it. Lots of good background, lots of smart people coming into this space, so I'd love to hear it. I did not know that story. Awesome. Yeah. Daniel Beckworth (02:46): Yeah. Just blessings for everybody. , Josh Lupresto (02:50): . Daniel Beckworth (02:50): And then and then, you know, I jumped into it working with traditional VARs and system integrators that's very popular in my neck of the woods in, in Alabama. And so I, I cut my teeth in that space and and then I was able to transition over to the agency side of the house, and it's been a tremendous learning experience. Josh Lupresto (03:13): So, so tell us about the business. Tell us about White Oak. Who are you, what do you do?

Listen in today as we talk to Ryan Livesay, SVP of Solution Engineering at Arayaka. Ryan takes us on the journey as he went from aspiring goals of the PGA tour to the world of WAN and Advanced networking and to where he is now running Engineering for Aryaka globally. You'll learn exactly what SASE is as it relates to the convergence of Security and the WAN. Ryan breaks down some crucial examples and how to approach the customers while peeling back the onion of all Aryaka has to offer. There's so much packed into this episode, don't miss it! Transcript of episode can be found below. Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Hey everybody, welcome back. We're getting into some juicy stuff today. We are talking about SD-WAN Advanced Networking. We're talking about SASE, and if you don't know what that is don't worry, you're gonna learn. We're gonna talk about that in global backbones. So, today with us to kind of explain all of this, we've got the SVP of Solution Engineering from Aryaka, Ryan Livesay. Ryan, welcome. Ryan Livesay (00:38): Thanks for having me, Josh. Josh Lupresto (00:40): So I, I wanna hear some background here. Hopefully you got something I can use against you as a blackmail later on. But listen, I, when we get on this part of the show, some people have had direct journeys. They know exactly what they set out and how they wanna get there and how they wanna be. Other people come from fields that are completely unrelated. We love both sides of that story. So give us the journey. We now know your title at Aryaka, but how'd you get here? Ryan Livesay (01:04): Great question. So came outta school with a finance degree, finance and accounting. Small school. Went to work as a, as a beam counter. So literally, Archer, Daniels, Midland, 50,000 employees globally, worldwide. And, and I figured out pretty quick. Took me a couple years, but I figured out pretty quick. I don't know that I want to do this. And I was also a golfer in college, played four years football and golf, and, and so ended up small school D three. But nonetheless, I continued to get better and better and was hanging out with a tour player, and I decided to chase the dream. So I quit that bean counter job three years outta school, moved to Florida, passed the, the wife at that time of, what was it? Probably 5, 5, 6 years we dated. And, and she, we, we were getting married in, in six months. Ryan Livesay (01:47): I said, are you good with me quitting this job and moving to Florida and we'll just live down there and, and it's an hour, never kind of chase the dream deal. So she was supportive of it. We moved to Florida, did that for about a year and a half, and, and spent a heck of a lot more money than I made. She was working in the, in the office equipment business down there, slinging copiers. And we both wanted to be pharmaceutical reps. Went to a career fair, and they said either you go office equipment sales, or you go telecom sales. And lo and behold, I end up in the, in the wonderful world of Telecom in 2002 at Allegiance Telecom, and spent seven, eight years there with xo and then moved on to EarthLink for another seven years. And, and here I am at Aryaka today, four years later, heading their engineering group. So Josh Lupresto (02:27): I love it from the PGA tour to here, . That's awesome. Yep. . All right, man. Well, tell me a little bit about, for anybody that doesn't know walk me through who Aryaka is and, and, you know, we'll get into SASE in a second, but, but walk me through Aryaka, right? W where did it start and what is it now? Ryan Livesay (02:45): Yeah, EAs was founded in 2010, and back then the, the business, obviously that was kind of in the pre SD-WAN era.

You won't want to miss this episode on SDWAN and SASE! Listen in as we have Josh Haselhorst, an industry-leading SDWAN expert, and we talk about the importance of SDWAN and Global Backbones. Josh clues us in on how he made his way into the technology scene but also gives us a glimpse into the future with a new phrase, "Software Defined Everything", and AiOPS. There are so many great things, you'll have to listen twice! Transcript of episode can be found below. Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back. We're talking about SDWAN advanced networking, SASE global backbones, a whole bunch of stuff. You may know what that is, you may not. Either way, we have got the, the world renowned industry Best subject matter expert here. Josh Haselhorst Telarus sales engineer on Mr. Haselhorst. Welcome. Josh Haselhorst (00:39): Well, thank you, sir. I'm glad to be back. These are fun to do. Josh Lupresto (00:43): So before we get into this today, before we kick it off, I wanna remind everybody that we've got a lovely sponsor that is supporting us on this. Today's episode is sponsored by Aryaka, and if you don't know, they're a leading global provider of SDWAN and SASE Solutions. So if you're a business out there struggling, slow, unreliable networks, they're holding your company back you wanna consider Aryaka global managed network solution that they have that gives you agility, gives you speed, all the things that you need to compete in today's landscape. So, enough on that we'll come back to our sponsor later. I wanna kick it off with you. You know, it's been a little while since you've been on the show, Mr. Haselhorst. So I wanna talk about, remind everybody how you got started in the career. Anything different that we, that, you know, any secrets out there about how you kind of got to where you're at. Josh Haselhorst (01:30): You know, that's funny. I actually got a question from from one of our suppliers the other day, and he, he asked us kind of the same thing. Is he, what are the, what were the steps that it took to get, like your certification level and where you're at today and whatever. And it's, it, it's kind of a, I guess a, a long drawn out, funny story. I'll try to con collapse it. But, you know, people go, you know, get outta high school and you go to college and you go get your degree and then, you know, you maybe go get your bachelor's and then you go get your, your master's in, in a cybersecurity or computer sciences, or maybe go even crazy or get your pd PhD in computer sciences, right? Yeah. I didn't do any of that at all. Josh Haselhorst (02:04): I, I didn't know anything about tech, right? I, I, grad, I'm old, right? I'm, I'm 49 years older. I turned 50 in August, but I, I graduated high school, joined the Navy. Cuz I had literally no idea what else to do with my life. I knew I wanted to move out of the house. I knew I wanted to see the world, but I, you know, I joined the Navy and become a, a, a jet mechanic after years and years, right? When I got out of the Navy my parents lived in Colorado. I was at point MAU in, in, in California, right? Rough duty station, get up in the morning, surf every morning, right? , and then moved to Colorado because I couldn't afford to live in southern California, right? I think I made $1,300 a month, including hazardous duty pay. Josh Haselhorst (02:44): Yes. Yeah. So without four roommates, you can't live there, right? So went to Colorado and my, my stepdad taught me how to run heavy equipment at Denver International Airport. So I'm gonna be a heavy equipment operator. Well, it got cold in Denver, , and I didn't like that. So drove down to Arizona on my way.

Listen in as we talk Work Force Management (WFM). We define what that toolset is, what its value is, and how it's evolved. Frank Wassenbergh of Cloudlinx, an expert on WFM, joins the podcast as he talks about his customer tips and tricks. You might even hear about Frank's flowing blond locks! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObQ4-HL6QpU Transcript of episode can be found below. Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Le Presto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Good morning. Welcome back. We're talking about Contact Center, but more specifically, we're diving in deep to contact center today because we're talking about WFM, if you've heard about that before. Better known as Workforce Management. So we're gonna get into this a little bit with a foremost expert here, Frank Wassenbergh of Cloudlinx. Frank, welcome to the podcast, man. Thanks Frank Wassenbergh (00:38): For having me, Josh. I look forward to it. And I love the foremost expert title that I'll claim for the day. I love it. Josh Lupresto (00:44): Let 'em prove you wrong. I dare 'em. Frank Wassenbergh (00:48): . Josh Lupresto (00:49): So so, so Frank, I, I, I always like to kick these off. I, I just want to hear everybody's backstory. I, I think that they're, you know, some people have linear paths and I find that a lot of people have really windy, funny paths in life. We, we've talked to people on this show that, that have come from you know car lot auto attendance to you know, washing boats and everything in between and somehow ended up in this world. So I would love to kind of hear your story of just how did you get started? Frank Wassenbergh (01:17): So, you know, I mean, I, I went to school for basketball, really. I mean, I wanted to play basketball in college, right? And I kind of came outta college with no real direction on what I wanted to do in life. And I bumped into a woman in a parking lot on my way to a recruiter's office, literally going into the Long Island, into the recruiter's office to get a job interview. And I'd bump into this woman. She's like, well, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm gonna get a job interview. And she's like, we're hiring. Come work for me. And I started with a company right after that, like two days later with a company called Net 2000, terrible name. It was 1999, you know, and I was like, what are we gonna do next year? You know, it's just a terrible name. And it was my first taste of technology sales. Frank Wassenbergh (02:00): And for a long time I was in kind of that commoditized, PRI, MPLS. And I left there quickly and went to a company called bcm, BCM one now, and ran sales there for a long time. Kind of grew through the ranks, grew through the company, had a good long run there. But for the most part, it was mostly kind of master agency work. It was mostly PRI, sip, MPLS sort of work. And it was, you know, for the most part, a relatively straightforward sale. And one of our, my good clients when I left there, came to me and said to my two partners and came to us and said, we are really looking at a new contact center, and we want you guys to do it with us. We want you guys to help us find it. Frank Wassenbergh (02:48): We trust you tremendously, and we'd like you to help us find it. And we jumped into the, into the kind of the fray, doing an RFP for them and learned it with them. And just had this fantastic experience with contact center, because in our, in our last, in my last kind of, of the, you know, the path of that winding road, I was doing something that for the most part, two or three people would know we did in the organization. And we fell in love with this contact center space because the, the, the, the people we dealt with were the C-suite all the way down to the agents.

Listen in for an information-packed episode on the importance of Work Force Management in the Contact Center as we chat with Chuck Krogman, SVP of Global Sales from Playvox. They have a unique positioning in the market as they were born in the cloud, are very API friendly, and have a full suite of products. Don't miss it as Chuck makes it easy to understand how to turn every $1 dollar into $4! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWHotZZepIc Transcript of episode can be found below. Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Josh Lupresto (00:15): Everybody. Welcome back. Today we are talking about Contact Center, but more importantly, workforce management. So if you tuned in on the previous episode, you got to see the wonderful Jason Lowe talk about it. We were in the studio talking about the different aspects of, of really workforce management, laying it out, his approach to it, some of his experiences. Today we get to be joined by Chuck Krogman, who is SVP of Global Sales at Playvox, and we get to hear about Playvox's perspective and Chuck's journey. So, Chuck, thanks for agreeing to come on, man. Chuck Krogman (00:46): All right. Well, Josh pleasure to be here. And I already feel a little intimidated. I've known Jason Lowe, as we affectionately call him J-lowe for many, many years. And he's a, he is a tough act to follow. But appreciate you for, for the invite and participating today. Josh Lupresto (01:01): I have faith in you. I think it's gonna be great. Don't be scared. So, hey, Chuck, I, I want to hear first about just you, you know, before we get into Tech Stacks and WFM and all kinds of cool acronyms, just tell me about you. Give me your, your story, you know, your personal journey. Where did you start? How did you get here and, and, and, and how did you get to where you're at now? Chuck Krogman (01:23): Yeah. actually I, when I look and just kinda look at my own personal journey, it kind of just maps right along with a lot of the customers. From a, my entry and from a technology perspective, I, I kind of moved into the technology sector in, at a time installing, supporting and maintaining large, you know, premise based call centers for for Rockwell. And it kind of moved up through, I took a bit of a journey as probably many people in your studio audience can testify too. I was with 13 years with ShoreTel and Mitel when the whole voiceover ip IP telephony kind of took off and was hot and continued to progress, moved over to the cloud, was with some, some great c a s providers with both Five Nine and Talkdesk and and now here kind of more specialized in a really exciting and growing segment of the market in joining Playvox just a little over two years ago. So it's you know, it's been a, a nice, as I said earlier, I kind of made that move from premise into, into a uc solution, into backend to contact center. So it's been it's been a kind of fascinating, Josh Lupresto (02:37): I love it. I love that you rolled with the journey, right? I mean, you're, you're in a spot that stood and, and, and it was what it was for a while consistently, and then all kinds of crazy evolutions. So it's probably been fun to, to see all these different evolutions and who knows where it goes next. We'll, we'll get into some of that, I suppose. Chuck Krogman (02:52): Yeah, yeah. I, I will say you know, one of the gauges is it's really tough to get your wife and kids to, to really understand what you do. I think I've heard it simplified as much as, oh, my dad does something with phones. And I said, let's just stick with that, cuz and, and I also did see as my kids are growing up, you're, you're not really a popular career for bring your dad to school day. You know,

Don't miss today's episode featuring Jason Lowe, Telarus Solution Architect for Contact Center. Join in as he discusses a key contact center product some companies just can not do without, which is Work Force Management (WFM). He talks about why they need it, how to overcome objections, and most importantly, how to help your contact center customers see the ROI on it! Transcript of episode can be found below. Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back. We are here to talk about contact center workforce management, and we're gonna talk about why that is so important. But before we get to breaking that down, what it is, why it matters, why you care, I'd like to welcome in Mr. Jason Lowe also goes by the name of J Lo into the studio today. Jason Lowe (00:33): Thank you for having me, Josh. Happy to be here. Josh Lupresto (00:36): So J lo I want to talk about your background. Part of my favorite you know, thing of doing this is really learning where everybody came from, right? Did you used to cut grass and then you decided you want to get into tech? You know, where, where did you start? What's your background? How did you get here? And give us the story, Jason Lowe (00:53): Man. So I, I, I've always been into technology. My parents got an Atari, which I loved, and then we got an Apple to see computer, and they sent me to a computer camp and did all of these things. But when I, quite frankly, when I got to high school and I didn't want to go to my other classes, I would go and hang out in the computer lab. And the person that ran the computer lab was very nice and knew that if I wasn't there helping her with the computer lab, that I would probably be at, you know, the 7-Eleven on the corner or something like that. So she let me go ahead and, and spend as much time there. And so I got to spend time networking computers together and setting up software. And then I got a job right outta high school doing the same stuff, and it eventually led to writing code and doing some of the really super cool, crazy techy things. But then I was tired of not having a degree. So I went back to school, got my bachelor's, and ironically right after I got my bachelor's, I'm looking around for a job, any job whatsoever. Mm-Hmm. . And I ran into this fine gentleman by the name of Darren Solomon, who at the time was a recruiter for a little company called U C N. Ah, Josh Lupresto (02:07): Yes. Jason Lowe (02:07): Yes. And he is now at Verint, by the way. But he he and I bonded and he tried to shoehorn me into like three or four other different positions. And I finally got in as a technical trainer at U cn. And so that's how my technology, at least in the software as a service space career kind of got started. But yeah, previously everything from, you know, writing code to networking and computer maintenance to software installations. Josh Lupresto (02:34): I love it. I, I love it too, because it all translates, right? I mean, you know, I, I never thought when I was going to school that I would need to know what the OSI model was and understanding all these different layers, but, you know, you have these core things that you have that you're taught that it always kind of comes back to, regardless of if, if you, you know, we, we talk about this of the things that we went to school for, are we doing those now? Right. That's a whole nother podcast on its own. But I think that core you know, that troubleshooting, plugging it together, right? You just, you're starting to learn what you like, right? So it, it's been awesome to kind of see that progression and then, you know, turned into inContact and then there, I believe there's some product experience in there.

Did you know you can help your customers purchase, install, and monetize EV Charging stations on their property? You can do that and a whole lot more! Don't miss this episode where Stephanie Turzanski of Vinvu talks about how to unlock the sales process, and approach a technology segment that's projected to massively grow over the next 5-10 years. Transcript of episode can be found below. Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back. We are wrapping up our track on how to make huge profits from building ev charging stations. And I know if you've listened to other tracks, this is dramatically different than how we talk about cloud and containers and security. But it's new and exciting and, and there's a lot of stuff coming with this. So excited today to have on Stephanie Turzanski of VinVu. Stephanie, welcome on. Stephanie Turzanski (00:39): Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Josh Lupresto (00:43): So Steph, we always like to kick these off with your background. You know, it seems like in this industry, in our world, some people were set out to do this. Some people got sucked into this world, and I always just love hearing everybody's kind of windy story. How did you get in? How did you get to where you're at and, and who was VinVu? Stephanie Turzanski (01:00): So it was, it's a very interesting story. I actually owned a marketing firm for 12 years, and I met my business partner who owned a telecom firm. And through him I got to know the ins and outs of telecom and how it went, how it worked but there are a few things about it that I didn't really like. So we decided to create a model that was going to be way more transparent, letting our clients know who our master agent was, how to interact with them, and, you know, just kind of go through that process. During Covid, you know, we, we originally were just selling phones, internet, some cloud covid hits, and we wound up selling thermal scanners, and that led us into the whole IOT world. At the same time, the building in Miami collapsed. So it really made us look more into, okay, so what caused the building to collapse? Stephanie Turzanski (02:01): What kind of technologies could have been put into place? And through the help with Telarus, we were able to see this whole other world that wasn't just a phone system or internet or cloud. We were able to look into a world that had so many other facets that we were able to put into a building. So from there, we created this model that now does internet wi manage wifi throughout the entire building, having ubiquitous wifi security cameras and access control smart censoring through the IoT sensors through the different partners of Telarus, where we actually will go back to property and casualty insurance and see if we can either get discounts or rebates or lowering of the PNC because of mitigative risk. And then EV charging stations. So from that standpoint, we've created this model where we now can go to a developer, whether it's ground up or already existing and say, here's what we can do for your building. Stephanie Turzanski (03:01): Here's the money you can save, here's the money you can make from it. We're all leveraging technology. So I never knew anything about technology. I wasn't a a tech person, I was a marketing person. My job was to find out, well, how can I make this work and make it appealing? So I think that served me when we started our company and just creating this whole real estate model with the EV charging and the smart censoring and, and all those components have really been great for us. It's actually really exciting because, you know, we're not having to deal with the IT guy for anything,

Listen in today as we talk to Joel Urano, CEO of Modas Systems. Joel talks about an area you might not be thinking of at all, but you could be sitting on a gold mine. We talk about how to sell, build and manage EV Chargers for businesses! There's ROI, Modas manages the whole process and revenue share even back to the business. It's a no-brainer. Learn how to take advantage of this land grab before it's too late! Transcript of episode can be found below. Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back to a new episode, one that you have not heard before. Today we are talking about how to grab huge profits from building EV charging systems. And I know you're probably thinking what? That's not CCaaS, that's not mobility, you know, that, that's none of these other things that we've talked about before. So exciting to break into this topic here. You know, as we kicked it off of the previous segment with Jason Kaufman, but today we've got Joel Urano, CEO of Modas Systems. Joel, welcome on, man. Joel Urano (00:46): Thanks. Appreciate Josh. Thanks for having me on. Josh Lupresto (00:49): So, Joel for anybody that's not familiar with Modas, we're gonna get to that in a second, but I think the most important part of this show is hearing how the heck people got to where they are. So I want to hear your personal background. Did you start out selling beach towels and then stumbled into technology? What, what's the path for you? How did you get here? Joel Urano (01:08): Yeah, I I started my first company back in 2005 and actually I started the phone buyback, not the industry, but, you know, I started a phone buyback business back in 2005. And, you know, within 90 days we were moving about 30,000 handsets a month. It was just you couldn't get enough like the, the, the buyers wanted more than, you know, we could even find, you know, so there was no enterprises out there turned over that much. So, you know, kind of grew that business. And what got me to Modas was something that really is not that exciting, but it's a part of every business and it's Supreme Court rule that guess what? Now you gotta charge sales tax, ah, on stuff, right? And, and not just, I'm outta state. You don't have to do it. So you know, now if you're outta state seller, you gotta collect sales tax. Joel Urano (01:48): So, you know, we put together a platform that could assess sales tax on different types of products and solutions. And you know, we found that in the reseller side of the channel. They didn't know how to do that, right? And even a lot of technology buyers don't. So but what really got exciting is that we realized there were technology providers out there that wanted to get an agent channel but didn't wanna do direct billing cuz they didn't wanna deal with sales tax. So we kind of bridged that gap and looking forward to bringing new technologies to the Telarus family. Josh Lupresto (02:14): I love it. And, and, and let's, let's talk about Modas. I mean, I know the, the, the title of this track. We're gonna get into some nuts and bolts here about EV charging and building that out and profiting from that as a partner and all of that good stuff. But, but maybe before we, we branch off into that piece of what you do, give us a little bit of an overview for somebody who's never heard of Modas. What are, you know, overall vision of the company, A couple of the key things that you do and what are big focuses for you? Product or vision-wise? Joel Urano (02:43): Yeah, no, sure. So, you know, for us, you know, product-wise is, you know, we want to be the, the kind of catchall for, you know, the Telarus sales partner. You know, if it's there's a,

Did you ever think we'd go from selling long-distance to building out nationwide EV Chargers for businesses? Well, now we are. If you love technology and want to hear about some unique and huge projects up for a land grab, now is the time to tune in to hear Telarus' own Jason Kaufman, Mobility & IoT Specialists talk about some of the custom solutions we're designing and implementing to pave the way for the future of road travel, not to mention, they could put big $$$ back in your customer's pockets. Transcript of episode can be found below. Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Josh Lupresto (00:15): Everybody. Welcome back. We are on a new track here talking about something unique that you have not heard us talk about before. Title of today's track is how to grab huge profits from building EV charging stations. And I know you're thinking, wait a minute, I was expecting cloud or security or some of that. We're gonna hit you with all that stuff, of course. But this is a hot topic and so we wanted to bring it in. We've got some great data for you here. And today what we'd like to welcome in here is returning guest Jason Kaufman, our southeast sales engineer, but also our mobility and IoT specialist. Kaufman. Welcome on, man. Jason Kaufman (00:50): Hey, Josh. Thanks for having me. You know, third time's a charm, hoping to, you know, make this one worthwhile. Josh Lupresto (00:55): . Love it, man. Love it. Dude. Hey, let's, let's talk about your background. You know, give us something interesting about your background that we don't know kind of how you stepped into this space, right? We know now everybody knows you as your the, the regional engineer out there that crushes it in the southeast. You've, you've turned in, you've somehow moonlight and don't sleep and do mobility and IoT also. But, but give us a little bit of information on your backstory, right? How'd we get here? Jason Kaufman (01:21): Yeah. so my previous role at the, the end of my tenure there, I ran the operations for a desktop as a service micro organization where we ran UCaaS and c a, so the, the whole communication suite within a VDI environment yeah, Citrix and Azure. So I had a well-rounded cloud background. And then when I came over to Telarus, I kind of expanded on that, you know, talking about, you know, all the different types of infrastructure, past SaaS you know, serverless computing. And then one thing that came big was the, the data analytics and management, you know, data lake storage and all that stuff with BI tools. And I really liked how much insights you could get from multiple different areas of data. And that was always a problem previously was, you know, what, what actually business drivers can I get from this? Jason Kaufman (02:05): I have data here, data here, and, but I don't know how to consolidate it and actually get something out of it. So when IoT came up, you know, that was one thing that fit a, a need in the data space was how do I get data from something that's not necessarily smart? You know, we also have all those like smart devices, you know, the internet of things. How do we get, you know, something that's not natively software based to provide data to us that, that's actually insightful. So I really liked the IoT industry and, you know, started looking at the, the network design components of it, what data analytics you could get. And then my cousin actually talked me into getting a couple helium nodes to put at my house and my, my dad's house. So started messing with that, you know, registering sensors to it through app keys and, and device keys and all that stuff. And it was just a cool overarching thing that I really got interested in and started to you k...

Join us today as we talk Security, Managed Detection & Response, and most importantly, the Response! Nick Enger tells his story as he goes from working at the golf course, to internships, to starting out early with ATC when it got launched in the basement! Nick, now CTO, Evangelist, and Thought Leader drive home the importance of MDR, how it's sold, and how we can better add value to the customers. Transcript of episode can be found below. Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, Josh Lupresto (00:15): Everybody. Welcome back. We are back talking about the good, the fun, the dark world, potentially of security. But today what we're talking about is, is managed detection and response. So the critical thing, we talk a lot about it as MDR. And so today I wanna talk about the r I wanna talk about the response and why that's so important on with us today, we've got the wonderful, the amazing Nick Enger of ATC. Nick is a cto, he's an evangelist, he's a thought leader. But most importantly, he's a fantastic partner of ours. So Nick, want to welcome you on, man. Nick Enger (00:50): Hey, thanks for having me. This is exciting. Hey, you get a different voice when you do the podcast. I love it. Josh Lupresto (00:55): I know, man, I just turns it on. Nick Enger (00:59): . It's awesome. Happy to be here. This is this is exciting and this is a topic that is timely for all of us in the agent community. Josh Lupresto (01:07): So let's jump in. I wanna start off with hearing about where you came from. You know that some people have linear paths where they, they start out doing what they wanna be doing, and, and they, they just continue on that path. Some of this, it, this world sucks us in. And, and people start out completely unrelated to this at all, and then you can just never get out. But I would love to hear and, and have everybody else here. Where did you start? How did you get here? Nick Enger (01:30): Yeah, I, I have a rather unique story on how I landed where I am. So growing up, I, I, well, I reside outside of Cincinnati on the north side of Cincinnati, in the suburbs. Grew up a place called Westchester, Ohio. And I had worked at a country club growing up, and I worked there like 12 years old, 11 years old as a caddy, and kind of worked my way up through the, the heritage club life and, and kind of worked my way into doing the cart barn to bartending and working private parties. And I actually I ended up working there all the way through college. I, I decided to stay in Cincinnati and went to the University of Cincinnati and paid my way through school of working at this country club Heritage Club in Mason, Ohio. Well, one of the members of the country club happened to be David Goodwin with a company by the name of Advanced Technology Consulting. Nick Enger (02:28): And this is going back 18 years now. So 18 years ago they were working out of the basement of their house. And it was Dave and a guy that was supporting Dave's efforts. Again, working out of Dave's basement Clayton Connor, and I, I was I was 20 years old. I was going into my junior summer, actually, I was going into my, the summer before my senior year. And Dave approached me as I was working at the club, and I, one thing led to another, and I said, yeah, I'm looking for an internship if, you know anybody, just kind of, kind of threw it out there. Didn't know anything about what Dave did, but just seeing if he kind of expanding the network. Well, next thing I know, I'm, I'm interning in the basement of Dave's house, , learning about the technologies that, that they are consulting upon. Nick Enger (03:21): And at the time, I mean, we were 18 years ago, right? So we, we were talking more,

Listen in today as one of the top experts in the security industry, Elia Cohen, Cybersecurity Director at AT&T, weighs in. Elia discusses where he got his start and how he got an early interest in security. Also, Elia opens up about the amazing toolset AT&T Security has to offer with everything from MDR & Security Framework build-outs to prem and web application firewalls along with Compliance checks throughout. Prepare for a wealth of knowledge! Transcript of episode can be found below. Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back to another episode. We are on the security track, and today we're talking about the r and that R is the R in managed detection and response, or you might know of it as MDR. And today we got on a special guest, dear friend a, a peer in the space that's helped us be extremely successful in the security space. Mr. Elia Cohen, director over cybersecurity at AT&T. Elia, welcome on, man. Elia Cohen (00:44): Hey, thanks for having me, Josh. Really excited to be here and talk about this really popular solution out in the industry today. Josh Lupresto (00:52): I'm excited you know, for the sake of time, we could go on forever with all the great stuff that you guys have over there that I don't think a lot of people know about. But we'll dive into a little bit of that here as we get going. I, I wanna kick us off though first about you. You know, personally, we know right now you were the cybersecurity director at AT&T and we can talk about what that means in a second. But where did you start? What, what's your path? Has it always been tech? Has it always been security? Has it been something completely unrelated? Where did it begin and how did you get here? Elia Cohen (01:21): Yeah, I mean, so in terms of where, where I've come from and where I am now I think I kind of fell into this for the lack of a better term. a as a little kid, I always worked with my mom helped her with her small business selling our supplies, and we would go off and do trade shows and, and that's, I started doing sales at the age of probably about five in collaboration with her. A little bit of child labor there, but don't tell anybody . And so over, over the course of time, I eventually started to move into it. And when I was at the university getting my bachelor's, I started working for the IT team. And a lot of the cases that I had to work on were malware remediation. So a lot of, a lot of kids, a lot of students, a lot of faculty and staff would come in with their laptops compromised, and somebody had to go figure out what was on going on, eradicate it, protect their documents, and also tell 'em what not to do. And I won't get into what not to do here because Josh Lupresto (02:24): Family show, family show haha. Elia Cohen (02:26): Exactly. That, that that'll keep, keep PG. Yeah. But ultimately education is really where it, it helped people get to a better spot. And so as I did that, I started to move into I got my first job outta college for security company more on the engineering side, and eventually started to move back towards sales probably four or five years into that. And then I've been doing technical sales and cybersecurity sales ever since. And it's been probably a good 15 plus years now. Josh Lupresto (02:59): Love it. Love the journey. Talk to me about, you know, at t's a big name. You know, I, I, I don't think, and, and, you know, when we learned early on, I, I don't think we knew the depth of the practice as it has with security. And then it's certainly even expanded since we started. But we're gonna get into products here, some more depth in products in a little bit, but maybe gimme a little you know,

Listen today with JW Stanley of the Telarus Sales Engineering team as he kicks off our track around Security and MDR. He talks about why the Response portion of Managed Detection and Response is so crucial now, more than in the past. He drives home great discussions around alert fatigue, and how to draw out these types of projects so you can help customers solve known and unknown problems. Transcript of episode can be found below. Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Josh Lupresto (00:14): Everybody, welcome back to another episode. We are talking about a topic that is not new, but we're talking about an important area within security. So today we are talking about managed detection and response, but more importantly, the title is Why is the R in Managed Detection and Response. So, more importantly, the r why does that matter so much? So we're not gonna answer that now, but we're gonna get into that as we go. And hopefully answer that. For you throughout with us on today, we have a good man named JW Stanley, who is a C I S S P. We'll talk about what that is. Telarus Engineering extraordinaire Barbecue Pro. I dare you to challenge him all. Lots of good stuff. I could go on and on about you. JW. Thanks for coming on, man. JW Stanley (00:54): Thanks, Josh. Appreciate it. Josh Lupresto (00:56): Hey I like to hear people's paths in life. Sometimes this world of, of telecom and cloud and, and all these things suck you in and you just go, how did I get here? And others set out to do this. And so I would love to hear, how did you get here? What, what, what was your path? JW Stanley (01:14): Yeah, no. So that's an interesting story. So my undergrad studies is actually in marketing, the special events. I wanted to be an event organizer for something like the Olympics or like a music festival, something like that. However, as I was given my internship speech, the planes hit nine 11. I graduated that December. Struggled finding the job as industry was pretty much as a standstill, as you can imagine. And you know, I had I had a bunch of buddies that was going to law school, and I had a little bit of arrogance. I'm like, you know what, I'll do that too. And so, , I I got on at the I got on a local corporate law firm you know, just to kind of, you know, have it to where if I kind of thought, you know, if I had this on my resume, you know, this is gonna really help out for law school applications. JW Stanley (02:03): Such so, got on there, started working in IT department, because technology was always a hobby. As I fast forward from that you know, as I saw the, you know, the way that the attorneys worked and all that stuff, I'm like, I have absolutely no interest in law, you know, being an attorney at all. And I really enjoyed the technology aspect of it. So my boss at the time, he's the one that taught me networking encouraged me to go back to school. So went back to school, got my master's in telecom engineering with a minor network security, and you know, did that well, story doesn't stop there. You know, again, my focus was security. And so I had an interest in, you know, BEC going to law enforcement, you know, after graduate school and had applied and done all like the physical tests and everything I needed to do to become a a, a Tulsa police officer in the cyber crime unit. That was kind of like my goal. However, the mayor ended up cutting the budget mm-hmm. and such. So the, the academy that I was supposed to attend, the mayor ends up cutting the budget for that. And so, you know, I waited for a little bit and before the next academy came about I actually got offered a job at one of the local ISPs. And so started there and,