Dan Slusarchuk brings his expertise to us on IT issues

Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. Honestly, I got into technology later in life. I came back from a deployment. I was a medic, combat medic, and I knew that wasn't going to be the path moving forward. So I looked around and found my father-in-law was messing around with computers. Back in the day, it was white box, white labeling computers. And me and him would mess around and build these workstations for his company. That kind of started the idea. And then I got a job with a consulting firm and realized that it's a pretty good business, IT. And it was after that, I started a few other companies, but ultimately started Standards IT in 2012 after another deployment. And once I kicked that off, my partner, Ryan Tissran, joined me in... 2014 and we've been doing pretty good ever since, at least in that respect.

And I would say the why that I do technology is honestly, I like being at the table and talking strategy and figuring out how to improve business processes, how to automate things. I'm more of a business-minded individual, I think, maybe because I got into tech later in life, not necessarily in like the traditional way through gaming or, or something like that. But so I really enjoy the, the business aspect of what technology does, how it can be a game changer in the business. And I like being a part of those conversations. They're very interesting to me.

You know, leadership, I think, is kind of like taking it on the chin until you get it right. I think technology is quite similar. Yeah,

Yeah, and that's somewhat, in my opinion, a size, an ability to be disrupted, pay attention to disrupting. Elements in Your Own Market Space and Pivot. I mean, the title of one of the books I read about IBM, kind of forecasting the cloud, is called Who Said Elephants Can't Dance? Yeah. I think it's pretty relevant. I mean, if you look at IBM, a bit of an elephant, right? And it turns out that Microsoft and Amazon and Google were a little bit more nimble. when it came to adopting those cloud methodologies and things that IBM had been talking about for a while. So that was interesting that they got somewhat overtaken in that arena. I haven't seen the latest market share numbers. I know IBM is still big in certain circles, but I mean, the Department of Defense is moving a lot of stuff to Azure and they're adopting a lot of the 365 environment.

to me is somewhat of an indicator of who's a market leader, not necessarily Gartner's magic quadrant, but who's got enough of the technology to make it happen. So, yeah, I was kind of surprised that IBM got surpassed in that something that they kind of forecasted themselves.

Yeah, we do some work for a little bit of government work, mainly some of the Oklahoma tribes. We do a lot in health care, a little bit in the financial sector. I think one of the things that provides a lot of value. As a consulting firm, we get to see all those different industries and we get to get focused on those industries, but then bring some of that information to a dealership is unique. I mean, everybody needs to be able to do accounting and everybody needs to be able to do certain business functions. So automation and technology. Makes a lot of that easier, but some industries are leading other industries and it's nice to bring those successes to maybe an industry like dealerships that might not be adopting or adapting as quickly. And through technology, we can drive some of that because everybody respects value and the bottom line. And if we can affect that through technology, it gets noticed.

And it gets a lot of excitement, brings people over, and it changes the culture, really. It's always a culture question when we start messing with companies' data, how it's captured, how it's consumed. What does your executive dashboard look like versus somebody else's executive dashboard? And is it moving the needle where you think it should be moved? Hitting your growth numbers that you think you should have. Do you own as much market share as you think is appropriate? What's in your way? How do you take all of that, I guess, internal knowledge of 20,30,40 years of experience and mitigate that with data and then do it with technology? Those are tough questions. I think firms like ours can help bring up. thought-provoking questions to figure those out and then to address those challenges. Because, you know, as you get larger, it's harder to adjust. And so sometimes it helps to have that second look.

Or maybe some folks that have visibility into a lot of different industries take a look and then provide some insight and help you get it over the goal line.

Absolutely. It's huge. You get a lot of visibility when you try to take. something that maybe notoriously was being able to be accomplished several ways. Let's say there wasn't a formalized process. Once you take that and you put it into software, it's usually pretty rigid. But what that will yield is something that you can articulate, something you can measure, something you can repeat, and something you can forecast. So I think it is valuable to take that business process and try to automate it if you can for those other benefits. Just the ability not to have to enter data in twice can be super valuable. It reduces the amount of data entry errors. It reduces the amount of time it takes to do something. On the reverse, educating folks on what's available. You might come up with the best report in the world, but if people don't know it exists or how to read it, it might be meaningless to them.

So that's another part of what we can help with or what we try to help with is talking about what data means, starting with, let's say, a data dictionary. We see this a lot in healthcare. a case or an encounter or an event. A lot of people have different names for when you go visit a healthcare facility and insurance companies have different names for it. Providers have different names for it. One of the things that's very interesting to me is the vast difference in physicians that do the same procedure, but have different costs. So somebody may like two by two gauze. Somebody else might like four by four gauze. They're doing the same procedure. Is there an opportunity to have a kit for that procedure? Anyways, there's a lot related to data, process improvement. And then once you start capturing that information, trying to figure out what's valuable. Because there is a lot of data to look at.

So this is where I think data science comes into play, different algorithms, different ways to bring in industry expertise to help make sense of the data so it's meaningful. And so that way it moves whatever needle you're trying to move. You want better patient outcomes. You want less staff infection. You want more patients walking through the door. You want more referrals. Do you want to sell more cranes? Do you want more repeat crane customers? What exactly is it that you're trying to do? And how do we get that information that supports that? And how is it going to affect all the people that are in the chain that need to move that needle? Not just the person at the top reading the report or looking at the dashboard, but how are we going to affect the future? What do we need to do tomorrow? How is this data going to affect what we do tomorrow to change that report at the end of the day?

Yes, and I think an interesting benefit from a firm like mine is that we are not in the sales department. We're not in the procurement department. We're not in the rentals department. We typically will look at these challenges holistically and cross departments. We thankfully don't have the political barriers. that some other organizations have. And that's where the culture comes into play. You have to respect the culture, how the company has achieved what it has achieved thus far, and then determine what part of that is worth changing to help it grow. And because there's some things that should stay and are good tenants of a good organization, but some things... Decision-making in a silo is something that needs to be addressed if technology is going to provide a large impact on what you're doing.

And that's because in the case of we're going to buy a piece of equipment, that information could very well be valuable to a lot of different departments over the life cycle of that machine. It could let you know. From an accounting standpoint, how much did you pay for it during these market conditions? It could tell you stuff related to if you were ever going to rent that machine out or sell that machine after it's been rented or buy that machine back or service that machine or buy parts for that customer for that machine. The information that's captured could be very valuable to a lot of different departments. You're able to cross the departmental divide. And a lot of times that is just an ego or this is my arena. I've got it. I don't need technology to break down those barriers. You could be missing opportunities.

Another interesting thing that happens being a consultant, we, a lot of times we'll do assessments and we, during assessments, we'll do a lot of interviews because like you said, A lot of the value resides in the employee's knowledge. And we will do a lot of interviews because that is super valuable when we do assessments to understand where the business is at, how it accomplishes its mission currently, and where we think there might be opportunities. Most of the time, we get everything we need from the employee's own perspectives and comments. It's just because we, as that outside entity, are presenting it in a more formalized process and with seemingly no stake in the company game, we're received in a different light. That information that somebody may have been saying for years is now gold just because I regurgitated it in the right meeting to the right people.

So yeah, definitely an interesting scenario related to consulting is most of the information we find related to your current state is within the organization. So there's a lot of untapped treasure that resides in the lower ranks, and we value that tremendously. But that is an interesting scenario, and that's mainly more of a cultural thing, I think. But also, it could be a personality thing or something. It could just be a personnel issue, so to speak.

because

The final thing I'll add is the life cycle. I think it's important to think about a technology life cycle. We've merged analytics and infrastructure together because of the life cycle and because of the way people look at it. Infrastructure, let's say you have a server, you've got wireless, you've got a phone system, you've got computers. They are a cost. You got to buy them. You got to put them out. You got to maintain those. You got to replace them when they are obsolete. So that's typically looked at as a straight cost, cost of doing business. And so we've merged analytics, the fancy grow the organization, become more efficient money-making technology with the cost technology because they have to kind of work together. As a consulting firm, we've put those two together.

Organizations don't typically put those two things together, but we have done it in an effort to validate when it's expensive, offset the costs, and make sure that just because you're killing it in analytics and growing your organization doesn't mean everything else around you isn't crumbling. Don't ever want to forget about the foundation, the stuff that is not super interesting, the stuff that has to happen in order to have a good technology. It has to sit on a functioning, up-to-date, secure server. It has to be delivered to those mobile devices securely. But none of that gets any positive attention because it's very expensive and you're hedging your bet against risks that you don't understand. So we've put the two together to make it more palatable. So just from a lifecycle standpoint, you can't ever get to fancy dashboards and applications unless you understand the foundation it needs to run on and the risks associated with that.