I’m Adam Hayes. I’m joined to my left by my co-host, Bob Payton. Across from us today, we have our guest, Mike Seaman with Metric IT. Welcome to the show. Welcome. Thank you, guys. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. So how are things at Metric IT? What do you do there? Well, things are good this morning. It’s ironic you brought an IT guy with the company onto the show at this date. It’s July 19th at 10:16 a. m. Eastern Standard Time. We are in the middle of the largest IT outage in human history right now. Fueled by what piece of software was it? Well, there’s a software in the class of endpoint detection and response, which most people would probably understand it as a modern-day version of antivirus.

The software company by the name of CrowdStrike pushed out an update. It was a content update, something that’s supposed to be some information about what bad guys could be or look like to protect the machines against it. And there was something wrong with that content update and it has shut down systems across the world, airlines, banks, credit card processes. Does that mean everyone can go home early today? I don’t know. I don’t know if you go home early from a flight, especially if you’re connecting. But it’s a wake-up call to the industry of how fast it is moving. Yeah, sure. I don’t know if it’ll slow down, but it’s a wake-up call that there are so many interconnected things. I don’t believe in this industry anything is overly complicated.

Individual piece of it but the network itself or the but but when you add all the aggregates of everything that goes together it ends up being a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle so it ends up being a a complex uh thing that is being delivered and our society is if this happened 20 years ago well we were trying to get ahead we’re trying to use technology now as a human race we’re dependent on it yeah no no question right yeah we were talking about you know even airlines you know they still can do paper tickets etc kind of but not really right right those days are done right of you know the thing spitting out they can write on it with a pen yeah it just doesn’t happen so so tell us tell us about metric tell us about you tell us about metric tell us about you know the types of companies you like to work with and what you do and how you help them yeah so we’re in Indianapolis-based IT solution provider.

All right. And interestingly enough, for today this outage was related to cybersecurity. At this point, you have to have some type of cybersecurity posture, you know, along with your your traditional Okay, we’ve got hardware devices and their network together. But at the end of the day, depending on your industry and the industry we focus on is going to be the architects, engineers, and general contractor and subcontractor, your builders, right? They need these systems to do estimating, job costing, scheduling, project management, and field to office communications. This is how these companies leverage systems to get ahead. Right? So back in the day, I mean, you were saying you’re been in a project been in a job. I mean, you had five or six phones and an office like this fax machines, right?

I mean, pen, paper, right? Well, now, yeah, now you’re the technology’s handling that, right? So you have to understand what your business is trying to use these applications and the systems for, and then they’re of course this that industry requires every industry needs cyber security too, so so you’re doing all of that. We like to focus on businesses that uh are certainly headquartered in Indianapolis uh in surrounding areas and uh we’ve got just a really good tight uh net um integration and relationship with our customers uh because we’ve been with them a long time and um yeah i mean i think that’s you know that’s a good start, so for the uninitiated of i. t support in the IT world which i count myself as what, what do you focus on for them i mean is it um you know the managed service providing you know those kind of tickets tech stack analysis do you help in future i. t that kind of give us an idea yeah Yeah, that’s a great question. So take for example, today, this this outage, right? It’s one piece of software name happens to be CrowdStrike. Fortunately, for whatever reason, we as a company do not use CrowdStrike. So, everyone of our systems at every one of our customers still live and run is still up and running. They’re not part of the news. um so that’s why your phone’s not buzzing as we speak yeah that’s why we’re in this conversation right now with our blood pressure right normal limits right but but the reason i mention that is you get into all of those complexities i mean that’s just one piece of software right there’s a whole lot of other things but to answer your question bob it all starts with the consulting piece you’re running a business what type of business are you running what are your goals what are you trying to do are you trying to improve your operations if you’re wanting to improve our your operations you’re going to want to talk to us because we have the experience to set up and design the systems that are going to be necessary for you to achieve your goals okay once that piece is done then we you know as once you’re a customer we’ve gone through that process then Every year, we’re going to periodically align your systems with where they need to be in best practice operations.

Because the technology changes, right? Sure. It has a habit of falling out of alignment. You bought it in year one or day one, worked great. And somehow three years later, it’s just not the same. Well, there’s reasons for that. So we’re going to be looking at that every year and finding out where it’s not in alignment and straightening it out. Gotcha. The next piece is all of this software, whether it’s CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, whatever it takes. All right. And there’s probably, we probably use seven to 10 softwares across your systems. We’re managing all those software components, installing them, configuring them, keeping them updated and keeping those in alignment. And after that, then you’re looking at the traditional reactive support. You need help on site. Okay. We, you know, we’ve got boots on the ground.

We’re coming to get you. Gotcha. And our boots on the ground are, you know, they’re local boots on the ground. They’re the people you interact with in the community. Right. Okay. If we don’t need it, come on the ground. Well, you can call us, you know, we have an office and you can, you know, we can remote into your systems, handle it that way. Sure. Whatever it takes to get ahold of us. We’re there. Do the support and then whatever projects you have, that are changes to your infrastructure that you’re looking to upgrade, maybe implement a new technology. So depending on your business, you you would have a different strategy. Sure, right. You know, a construction company, again, is going to be focused on estimating job costing, scheduling, field office communication.

Manufacturing company which you know we have plenty of those also you’re talking about ERP systems inventory change control fun systems yeah you know you’ve got sales forces that you know operate a little bit differently um from a communication standpoint so um yeah small business so so if i’m a you know small construction company i got you know one guy uh one owner ten guys in the field floating around um a lot of things get done on paper still but all of a sudden you know i want to put iPads in the field with my employees I see that a lot where they kind of go from the paper work order system to something digital that’s where I You know, if I’m your client, you’re going to help me and guide me through that process.

Absolutely. What do I need to do? What do I need to look out for? Would you do a software selection process with them, like an evaluation process, like to uncover their needs for a particular line of business software and do a needs analysis with them to make sure it fits into the larger IT picture? Is that part of the scope of what you do? Yes, multiple times we’ve done that. And where you normally see that is because there’s. So many softwares. I mean, construction, I mean, we’ve been building, well, we didn’t do it, but the pyramids were built a long time ago. I’m sure they were accounting for us here. They weren’t using Jobber. So you look at, it’s the process, right?

And given that software is a lot more easy to develop now than it was 20 years ago, you have a lot of options. Where you will see this in the construction industry is that 10 users, contractors are using QuickBooks. Yes. Right. Always my favorite topic. So the QuickBooks is a great traditional accounting software. But there comes a point when your operation gets large enough that you require construction accounting software. Correct. Right. And that’s where, you know, we’ll step in and say, hey, listen, you might want to consider these types. Let’s do some demos. Take a look. All right. And see what’s going to be a better fit for you, because there are there are things that are specific to construction accounting that at a certain scale that enters in pretty quickly.

Actually, you know, it’s not you don’t have to wait to have 100 people. Right. You know, 10 is plenty. You bet that you want to start using these systems so that you have the efficiency and productivity that you’re expecting. And frankly, that your competitors have. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So. You know, in the AEC space, what do you see some of the, you know, opportunities and threats to that industry from an IT perspective right now or those industries? Yeah. Great question. You know, I have an affinity for the industry because I started out as a civil engineer from Purdue. Boiler up. Thank you. Yeah, with a construction emphasis. Right? And. Did you say boiler up? I did. Okay, good. It’s not chirp-chirp. It’s different.

So, if you look at how IT originated and who used it first, it was really the accounting systems way back in the 80s, the accountants, from a small business standpoint. The contractors were still putting nails in the walls. They were still hanging drywall. It didn’t stop the building process but as the world became more interconnected and information was needed to you know get to and fro much faster well the construction company had to start adopting the technology also but because of that because they were late adopters I feel and I see every day that they are underserved. Keep talking. Yeah. They are underserved. In what way? They’re underserved in the fact that there isn’t somebody out there that is just sitting down with them and advising them about what number one is possible, and where their risks are.

Okay. And then all of a sudden they get hacked. Right. All of a sudden emails are getting sent out. They can’t get into their systems. And then they’re. assuming the phones are working right they’re on their phones oh you know that message was for me that so you’re getting into reputation management yeah right getting into reputation management you’re getting into uh you know slowing the billing processes down um and frankly people just don’t come to work employee wise from an employee satisfaction they don’t come to work to have to um do anything other than what their job is right in the the big detour you have to take when when something goes wrong especially when it’s an attack when there’s a bad actor yeah and you know even this morning you know a lot of people look up to blue screens they sure do come into work i want to do my thing it’s friday gonna finish strong blue screen yeah and the west coast is barely even awake right now right there’s a lot of population out there yeah Yeah, absolutely. So let’s talk more specifically in general about the IT industry. Where do you see that going? I mean, clearly you’ve got an advancement of AI. And then just a real general misunderstanding of AI from a perspective of how it applies to the IT world. Let’s demystify that a little bit. What do you see? The Coming Wave, a book by, I’m not going to remember his name.

I think his first name might have been. Find it on Amazon. The Coming Wave. Ex-Google employee that was in the AI space. And he has his own AI company. He went over the history, the risks and all that type of stuff. My first comment is we are way ahead of from an AI standpoint of where we realize. I’ll give you an example. For the good, we’re looking at, take DNA, right? The double helix, ATGC, right? Millions of these combinations. Well, AI already developed an organism with maybe 50 or 60 of them. Just like that, right? Yeah. Humans have been on the earth for, I don’t know, tens of thousands of years and, you know, Jarvis or Skynet, whatever you want to call it. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

So that’s a great, you know, you might be able to cure disease. You know, we’ve got global population issues. We’ve got declining birth rates. You know, who’s going to take care of all these people and deal with the problems? You know, AI is going to figure out these things for us, which is a tremendous, wonderful thing. But then you’ve got the other side of it being weaponized. Right. Yeah. Right. And the weaponization is, you know, I found it interesting a couple of years ago. I don’t know if you heard these things, but some people are not wanting to use Chinese electronics. Sure. Right. I’m not going to use that app as developed in China. They’re spying on me. Right. I don’t know if they are. Maybe they are. Maybe they aren’t.

Right. But you can’t be sure they are and you can’t be sure they are not. That’s right. That’s right. But what I am sure of is that our government has made it illegal. For our companies such as Nvidia and Intel, Micron, you know, the chip manufacturers to sell and ship their high-end chips that are specifically used for AI to China. It’s illegal. Right. So that’s really what’s going on is that, you know, our governments know what’s on the line with this and have got to do everything, you know, they can to make sure that we are not behind on this endeavor. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So tell us about you. How’d you, how’d you come to found Metric IT? Why, why did you find it? I mean, you, you obviously have a degree in civil engineering.

So tell us about your journey. What, how’d this formulate? How’d this come together? Yeah. So I always knew as a young kid, I was going to, I was going to own a business because my, my parents did and my grandparents did. So, I felt just from a, from a family fitting in thing you know, I mean all of this stuff is emotionally driven when it’s all said and done with, right? But as we went through uh back in you know the mid-90s uh, you’re you’re on the cusp of of the internet bubble, right? I mean at the dot com, you’re really starting to get all this kind of stuff. And that was really when computers were starting to become networked on a small business level and I it just was a passion of mine; it always was even though I was you know degreed as a civil engineer from Purdue.

I was always playing around with the computers trying to make them better, and my first job I ended up taking care of the computer network um this was Y2K time, you know? Luckily a small company you know took a shot on me because I just wanted the job; they probably would have taken the janitor – just sit in that corner and watch the computers. Once I got into it, that was when you’re in the right spot and it’s the right groove, you just take off and you’re not really looking back. It was only a matter of time before I started my own practice in my mid-20s, which was 20 years ago or so. Time’s flown, hasn’t it?

IT has in from an industry standpoint the changes in the industry it’s it evolved right um you know it started with just machines and then they could talk a little and then they can talk to everybody and then their security like all these things have bolted on over time and i’m not really of the opinion that they’ve they’ve gotten any simpler right um they’ve become more available right for everybody yeah right the every the world um but there’s still that complexity piece and it seems that that kind of just just bit somebody uh some some team or employee at CrowdStrike right yeah and uh wouldn’t want to be that guy today yeah it’s uh it’s it’s a rough day uh for them so for I mean, using that as an example, I mean for a small business the things that are tools available to them now are just phenomenal, right?

There’s so many tools, but then you also then have the problem is there’s so many tools. And so, you know, let’s say over the next five to 10 years, what do you see kind of happening in the small business space? Just like you just described, right? We just kind of went through 20, 30 years of this thing where all of a sudden I can do QuickBooks on my cell phone. Yeah. As a small business owner, I can invoice you right now. Right. And it all works. So next five or ten years, what do you see that next wave maybe be in from a small business standpoint? Big corporate guys, that’s a whole different issue. But from a small business standpoint, is it going to get easier for a small business or actually more difficult just because of choices?

Yeah. I think the business climate is the same as it’s always been for a couple hundred years. Everybody’s in a race to figure it out. Whatever their industry is. You’re in a race to just have that you know differentiator competitive edge whatever it is as it relates to right now in the next five years and certainly by 10, it comes back to artificial intelligence. What’s going to happen is: where you store your data, artificial intelligence will be able to read it, come up with some conclusions, and then give you an answer and insights on that stuff. Okay. Right. So if you thought your data was important now, and you look at the concept of how ransomware works, ransomware is nothing more than you as an individual or a business owner or a shareholder, stockholder, doesn’t matter the size, you know, CDK.

They uh, they’re a global company. They run all the uh, uh inventory systems on uh, the car dealerships. Oh yeah, cyber attack a few weeks ago, right? Sure, 80 million dollar ransom. Obviously, the people that the bad actors know that CDK is going to pay the money or they hope they will. Right? So any small business owner says, ‘Well, I’m not CDK. I’m not you know anybody that hit the news.’ That’s true, but you think your data is important. And if you do, you attach a value to it, the fundamental concept of ransom, and that means you’re a target, right? So now if your data is already important to you, what do you think about having an additional data point or set of data that is the review and insights to that data?

Well, your data might have been silver but you know the insights on is gold right which means the ransom just went up so cyber security is not in my opinion going to be solved or going by the wayside it’s only going to get worse it’s going to be a continual cat and mouse game radar radar detector right yeah exactly oh that’s a good analogy yep yeah because i mean it’s not only just the business itself right we own businesses and i’ve got you know my data but i also have client data right i mean think about the impact you know construction company it’s not just their internal things they have they have tons of data on every client that they’ve ever touched right emails contacts financials invoices you know yeah imagine you build banks you probably have the Blueprints to the vault.

Do you think with the advancement and the ability to collect data and the instruments and tools that are collecting data and making analysis like AI with that data, do you see an evolution coming for the compression of storing data? Because if not, where do we continue to put storage units? That’s a great question. I would have to go, I haven’t thought of that, but what comes to my mind is this, is when the transistor was developed, there was a certain amount of transistors that would fit on a wafer, right? And over time, we have increased the density of transistors per unit wafer. I’ve got a cousin in upstate New York who is, you know, does very well with global founders and he’s got patents on doing that so I don’t know that it’s a room thing we’re just going to continue to innovate and iterate it forward there’s not going to be like this massive new new way to have massive compression I don’t think so um but I don’t know I mean

I can say this. Maybe AI will figure it out for us. There you go. Maybe AI will just clean our rooms, right? Well, AI will figure out how to reduce its own power consumption. Right. So that’s other issues. When you look at it, we’re talking about population demand, we’ve got power consumption issues, like how are we going to power all of this stuff? And these are all challenges that you either believe humanity is going to innovate and figure out or they’re not. I’m an optimist. We always seem to. I think they will. We’re pretty resilient as human beings. We’ve been around a while. We are as a human race, and I think we are as a country. Just switch gears a little bit. What do you like doing for fun?

Well, I like playing rock and roll music. You know, with Adam and and uh other folks over at the Rock Garage in Indianapolis, so uh the connection-yeah, yeah, that’s wonderful. I still like you know physically you know taking care of myself or torturing myself through triathlons and endurance events, you know uh sports, so I enjoy doing that. I love spending time with my family, yeah sure, um and if you can, you know If you’ve got a spare weekend and you want to get out to the racetrack and run the cars around, that’s always fun, too. You bet. I remember that conversation. Awesome. Well, appreciate you joining us today. My pleasure, guys. Very informative. Thank you. How do people get in touch with you? Yeah, so you can do it the old way and call us at 317-513-4161.

Talk to a live local Indianapolis. What about a homing pigeon? Will that work? We’ve got them all. We’ve got the coos and everything. Is it metricit. com? Yeah. If you go to www. metricit. com, you can reach us there as well. So if there’s one thing that you would want a small business owner to walk away with today, just in terms of IT, what would be the one thing you want them to kind of think about? I would want them to feel. I want them to have some curiosity and to have a belief and some confidence that it can be done. It can be done right. And you don’t have to worry about it. Right. You just have to talk to the right, you know, team, person, whatever. Sure. Potential partner.

Yeah. Yeah. There are, you know, this can be done and it is being done. Yeah. And there’s a lot of ways it’s not. But the average person, I think, because they’re underserved, right? Sure. After a day like today, who wants to talk about them? But the fact of the matter is, this is today, there is tomorrow, and there are good companies that are doing a great job with it. Maybe they’ll hire us to rebrand them, right? That’s right. Funny how that works. Awesome. I appreciate it, Mike, very much. Yeah, guys, thanks for having us. Always a pleasure. Thanks for being on. Awesome.