 Live from the JSA Podcast Studio, presenting Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Buddy, welcome to Data Movers. I'm your host, Jamie Scott-Akataya, CEO and founder of JSA, along with my fabulous co-host, top B2B social media influencer, Mr. Evan Cristal. Hey Evan. How are you? Welcome to Data Movers, where we sit down with the most influential men and women in the new world of data centers and telecom, enabling this transition to a new normal. Jamie, you're in the LA area. Did you see the news? Disneyland is reopening. I am so excited. Obviously- Did you get your mouse ears? Are you gonna be first in line? I just have them portable. I put my hands on top of my head and there's my mouse ears. But obviously having a 10 month old baby girl, I'm like, can't wait until, well, I finally have an excuse, my husband and I. She's not gonna remember anything, by the way. So she's gonna have no recollection of the experiments, but I am actually looking forward to getting back to a theme part now that I've been vaccinated and having some normal experiences again. And speaking of theme parks and Orlando, our next guest I think is from that area, right? Tampa. Yes, let's get right to it. Today we welcome Mr. Brad Foster, partner of Cloud Advisory at Nathan Way. Welcome Brad. Hi, thanks guys. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks Brad. Good to see you, meet you for the first time. So tell me, you're in Tampa. My good old buddy Tom Brady is also there. Do you guys have beer together? Do you kind of catch up with him at all around the Tampa area? For sure, actually a little known fact, I'll let you guys in a secret. So my wife is Brazilian and that's what brought them down. Her, she's best buds with Gisele and she talked with the Brady family and to coming down, playing some football in the Tampa area, so we get to get championship. I just relocated from Chicago where the bears were not so hot recently, but yeah, Tom and Gell came down, got us a championship, no problem. All right, well I'm in Boston so I'm not happy about the situation at all, but what I am interested to learn about is you and your team and what you've been up to during the pandemic. Have you had to shift or reposition yourselves at all and give us a background on how you help enterprises today? Yeah, I think, I mean, obviously I'll move to a work from home model and some of those things. So nothing out of the ordinary in terms of the things we've had to deal with how do you keep the culture alive and vibrant and virtual happy hours and things like that. But I think, and then just helping our customers change some of their journey has been interesting. I'll give two or three examples of things that have been fun to do. One, our healthcare space is one of our top areas helping some companies go to telemedicine. So I mean, they had to make a flip too, virtually and we're a large partnerships with Google and obviously have Google Meet and other things and within a couple of months we're able to help integrate virtual conferencing into, so Epic is kind of a very well-known system that all, CERNER and Epic, most all hospitals use for all the patient information. And so we integrated just point and click where a physician could be within the system. They're in all the time taking the notes about you and the visit and open a virtual meeting with Google with their patient, multiple, the patient and the patient's caregiver, whatever it may be. So rolling something like that out real time for actually the state of, this is some press release information recently with the state of Rhode Island and recently state of Wisconsin, things like virtual career centers. So obviously unemployment is massive, people are trying to get back to work but they couldn't go to career centers they would normally go to to get help and placement and services. So we rolled out that in Rhode Island that went live recently and then we're doing the same for Wisconsin hopefully some more states where those services are all virtual like virtual career fairs and things. And then the most the fund, the biggest one which we all can relate to is we help the DMV implement capabilities to renew licenses and other things 100% online. So imagine not having to go to a DMV anymore and just submit photos and other things online your documentation as long as you're not checking the box that you're a felony or a felon or something like that. They send you your information in the mail and so that was another fun one that just kind of they had to do because people, they were losing revenue because people just couldn't go to the office to renew and other things like that. So it's been fun to see some of those things come to the market and come fast. Yeah and even non-pandemic times every minute you spend waiting in that DMV line you're thinking this definitely can be done better like what are we thinking? This is archaic. Yeah. So it's amazing what an amazing world that we live in as a person who's born and raised in Rhode Island with my family still there. These are remarkable things that projects that you're deploying really helping families. So I really salute you especially during these times. Seems like everyone today is also talking about AI and machine learning. There's a lot of interest there of course and I know you oversee these portions of this portion of Mavenweave's business. When do you think these technologies can really help enterprises? Are there any instances that come to mind? Are they too far out? Are they happening now? What type of applications are really meaningful to you? Yeah. They're legitimate uses of it now that are helping businesses. I think in the whole height curve moment you're crossing the chasm and all those references that it was super hyped up four or five years ago and people thought it's gonna save the world and it's push button easy and they started to realize it's not that easy and you have somebody that's running a manufacturing plant and maybe the line goes down twice a year for two different complete reasons and they think you can predict when it's gonna go down next. They don't realize that if it doesn't occur that frequently then you can't predict something. It was very hard. So people just weren't educated about how AI can be applicable and what you need to make it successful. I think people have kind of come back down to reality now and are more pragmatically understanding that combination of data and situations that you need to make it useful and we are seeing now success, especially in areas of prediction, forecasting or downtime we mentioned, theme park operators and ride downtime or for large package distribution companies that we work with where we're helping them forecast the demand through all of their network of facilities and it's very important for them to understand or you have Amazon one and two day delivery and they really wanna know exactly when things are arriving and they have mountains of data and they have real useful ways in which they can apply it. So we've started to find things that are really helping companies move the needle and then the other thing that has really been a trend for us is it's about enablement. Most companies want to maintain that secret sauce and house because it is a little bit of a black box and their predictions and other things are differentiated IP. If they can deliver the package faster because that IP of AI is helping them, that's money in their pockets and that's differentiation. And so it's also we've been helping enable them to do the AI. They don't understand some of the cloud platforms, how does stand up these sandboxes easily control them, put sensitive data there so they can use that. And so a lot of what we've been doing recently that's been very successful is helping them stand up the platform, train them on it and scale their organization so that we can kind of let them, you can take the training wheels off so to speak and they can really start scaling that into more use cases in the organization. So that's been fun to really kind of help them on that journey as well. That's fantastic, I love to hear those stories in particular the healthcare IT initiatives. I was a HIMS social media ambassador for a couple of years and it was amazing to see even pre-pandemic how healthcare is really lagging in digital cloud adoption and this push we all saw from less than 1% utilization to like 30% utilization of telehealth and telemedicine in a matter of months. For companies that are still lagging and shifting to the cloud and to all the benefits therein, what are some of the best practices? What kind of advice do you give companies who may be looking? Yeah, I mean I think as we all know there are people who like to lead the charge and don't mind being there, realizing they're gonna make some mistakes and spend a little bit more money to do it than if you wait and it's already been solved but when you wait you also don't have the advantage. Sometimes the first movers capture the market and set the tone and capture the customer base and et cetera. For those companies that maybe are struggling or still skeptical about going there which I think is dwindling down. I think people have come to a bit of a conclusion that we're going to the cloud. It's not as much about the education convincing them anymore that it's secure and it's easier to manage than their data centers. I think now what they're struggling with is the how? Like how do I get there? I have this 50 year old legacy environment of all this stuff and it's just mesmerizing to understand all the dependencies and they just end up in gridlock. Oh, I will move this, wait a minute, that's connected to that and then that's connected to that and then they can somewhat end up in this gridlock of just getting started and becomes overwhelming. So I think one of the things, a couple of things we focus on to remove that friction is A, they have to have some executive buy-in and in making that move and setting the tone at the business and IT level that they are going to be a company that is going to be leading the charge and digital and we see that somewhere enterprises such as financial services, asset management companies when they're talking to new clients, the clients are looking at tech. You'd think it's not just about how much money you're gonna make me for this billion dollar fund, it's tell me what technology you're using underneath, what AI do you have? Are you running on the mainframe still? Well, if not, I'm gonna go with the company that's not on the mainframe. So tech for these companies from a leadership perspective is becoming an important component of their plan and it has to be leadership driven. And the second is, you really try to, we haven't, that's why I'm leading cloud advisory now is the focus on that journey. We call it, you're not going to go to cloud overnight. It's going to be a multi-year journey. You're going to be in this hybrid state. You're gonna have some things that you'll remain on-prem for a while. Mainframes, big Oracle installs that are integrated. Those are gonna take time to unwind. So let's create the roadmap of some simple wins, some value you can get, new things that you're doing. Don't do those on-prem, do those on cloud. So we're really sitting down and helping them create like a pragmatic journey there. And that's helping organizations quite a bit and kind of calming down and seeing some light in a path to getting there. Yeah, I love that. The pragmatic multi-year hybrid journey where you're roadmaping those wins. I think that's really critical to think about that. You can't just swipe a credit card and have all these services arrive at your doorstep like, ding, like Jeannie just spotted and- And the hyperscalers- Hey, I do that all the time. Come on, Jeannie. I like your Jeannie bottle and wonder. Easy banging out code on the weekends. You didn't know that like that. And I think the hyperscalers too. And we are great partners with them, but at the same time, right? Their motivation is they want your business. They want you on the cloud as fast as possible. And so they wanna make it seem easy and everything else. They want the wave of consumption to start and the meter to start ringing. And so I think our job is helping, educating our clients on the reality is that, yes, there's some stuff that can go there easy and yes, you should start using it. You shouldn't be managing your data center anymore. But there are some things that aren't that easy and it takes some more time and we have options to help them through that as well. And what are the things that aren't so easy about moving to the cloud? I think there's two things that come to mind is the main, not necessarily challenges, but things you have to just make sure you plan correctly for or you'll find yourself stumbling and you won't be efficient or effective or you'll have some risk. And this has happened to a lot of clients out there where your data gets exposed or somebody hacks their servers and Bitcoin mines on their cloud servers is the operational aspect of it. Some people, I think when they were early just thought of cloud that move things there and great, it's simple. And they have a thousand person running an on-prem data center operation, taking tickets and monitoring things and keeping firewalls up to date, all this stuff. And then they would put five people on the cloud services team and think, oh, great. And all of a sudden they would have this massive demand because you don't have to wait on servers and everything else. And the business teams, IT teams start building applications and data lakes. And then you ended up with this team that's just completely overwhelmed and the CSOs getting nervous and the heads of infrastructure and other people are just, oh my gosh, and they'll just like time out, time out, stop everybody stop what you're doing. We have to invest more in our operations and our foundation to make sure data isn't leaked and the wrong people have access to things and people are not coding things in a manner that's creating risk, et cetera. So it's really about making sure you have that right sized operations team that is also implementing those operations as the need is there for the types of workloads that are there. You don't need to spend two years building the perfect bulletproof foundation and finally let your organization start using cloud. That's completely the wrong way to tackle it. But you also campaign the other spectrum of let the wild west happen and then you wake up and you have all sorts of things that are risk of risk to organization and very difficult to rain back in into common patterns and other things. So I think making sure you have that under control in the right balances key. And the second thing is just acknowledging the legacy stuff that can't go to cloud and having a plan to again pragmatically attack that mainframe, for example, that people would have been off the mainframe. It was that easy. People would have been off the mainframe 10 years ago. So it's not that easy and you can't just have a salesperson come in and pitch you that, hey, in 12 months you'll be off your mainframe and let's move it to cloud. That's not realistic, but they do need to get off the mainframe. There are major pressures coming with workforce retirement and the vendors jacking up prices and other things that they have to get off. And so I think just acknowledging how you manage the stuff that can't go to cloud right now over the next five years and how you have kind of a slower modernization journey to address that at the same time it is key. Yeah, companies are trying to move from information to, you know, insight and how do you help them in that journey and what are the struggles in trying to get their hands around big data to the enterprise? Yeah, I think the companies are doing it well and see success have moved towards an agile method of delivering insights to the organization and I'll call it product driven and agile. And when I say agile and product driven it's not that you have a 15 minute daily stand up at 9 a.m. and meet and talk about stuff. It's the concept that a business person owns the outcome. They're the product manager and they have something they're trying to improve and achieve and they feel data and insights are a part of them, you know, achieving that objective going back to a ride downtime scenario. Hey, I as an organization lose money when a ride goes down, people don't go through a gift shop and the customer satisfaction goes down and all these things happen. How would I possibly understand, pull data to understand when I could prevent that? I could do per friend of maintenance and then that's a real outcome to the organization. And so when companies are aligning to an outcome and they put a business person in control of leaving the charge and equip it kind of with this cross functional team to then execute, they see those outcomes much more effectively. And it goes all the way to the deployment into the day-to-day operations, to the screens. We always say that sometimes they'll lose the battle in the last 18 inches, which is the distance between your nose and the screen that they don't focus on well, how is the person going to be alerted that they need to do something or what's the dashboard? Is the dashboard they're using really useful or is it not useful or is this supposed to be a new mobile app that a consumer can interact with data and see all sorts of things about their appliances and whatever it may be. So we really focus on that end, making sure literally they get the end to end value throughout that entire process versus, companies are changing, in the past they would just spend two years building these behemoth data platforms. I'd go, let me go put all the enterprise data in a data warehouse and then IT would give you some reports. They would be very little collaboration with the business people and the business people like this isn't really what I need. They would ask for something new. It would take three months for IT to give them a new updated report and that just, they were wasting millions and tens of millions of dollars building these data platforms that the business just never used to the extent that they needed. So this kind of product-centric agile approach we've seen has really delivered the value to the organization. And then over time, you just find yourself after you've done 10 of those with kind of a data warehouse with multiple data sets in it that people can then reuse for other purposes but that's how we're seeing success. Yeah, we see that a lot so much from a data-driven marketing perspective, you know, just because it's a data stream doesn't make it useful and has to be in line with business objectives. So completely understand your point there. And now I'd love to transition this and really talk about you as a person about your career as we always do here on data movers. Tell us a bit about your journey to Mavenway. How did you become one of the top partners at this fast growing company? And I just want to even take a second to say, you know, Mavenway just recently got acquired by Atos in 2019, also won three times in a row, most recently this past 2020 year, the Google Cloud North America Service Partners of the Year Award, like big, big news here in Google Cloud World. So tell us, how did you become partner? What was the path like? Yeah. So I actually started my career as an Anderson Consulting, so if you want to date myself, that before it was Accenture is when I started there, I went deep into tech at the time, I'm an engineering major from U of I, Champagne, and really kind of got my foundational there, left there and was the first employee at a start called Fathom Solutions, and it was when the telecom deregulated and there I really cut my teeth on LAR, growing into management positions, understanding how to run large scale programs, $200 million programs with Fortune 500 and those types of things. And then we were acquired by Cognizant, so I just then saw the boom of all the offshore things happen and cut my teeth on global delivery models and that actually took a break at that point in time, started a home renovation business in Chicago and which was a fun part of my life. And believe it or not has served me well when I came back into consulting, just when you're dealing with homeowners and budgets and timelines and expectations, I mean, all those things just sharpen your skills when you're in any client service industry, right? And so as the odds would have it, I was, met my now wife in Brazil and I was traveling there and the founders of Mavenwave who were also the founders of the previous company Fathom Solutions, we always kept in touch, they're close personal friends and they kind of started throwing me a couple of projects like, hey, we know your construction thing's going great. Would you wanna, there's a project with the Chicago Cubs and I'm a huge Cubs fan, like would you wanna work on this for three months? I'm like, oh, you know what? Yeah, I wanna do that and do some consulting there. And then one of the projects I was in Brazil and like, hey, there's this cloud thing. Would you wanna work on that? It's kind of this little, this migration thing going on. I was like, that's interesting. And so I've worked on that and it was really my first introduction to cloud and we were moving a bunch of data from on-prem to virtual machines and other applications in the cloud was very early, this was going on to Google, very, very early Google days when they had very few products there and I remember, met the client a couple of times with a lot of virtual meetings and then I was executing data migrations from a balcony in Brazil, looking at the ocean and before you would have to be plugged into somebody's network in their office or in their data center or whatever. And just my mind's like, this just seems like where the world would want to go. Who wouldn't want to have the flexibility to use technology in a way that doesn't confine you to walls and other things. And so they'd always said, there's an open door. If you ever wanna come back and work with us, I'll let us know. And so my wife and I decided we're gonna engage and marry and say we're gonna go back to Chicago versus live in Brazil. Yeah, I said, hey, I wanna join forces with you guys again. So that was, I think maybe it was only about 20 or 30 people at that point in time. And from there, we really was literally grassroots, ground up, just hand-to-hand combat, building our Google channel, working with clients. We've done work in AWS and Azure as well, but it was a lot of energy and effort in those cloud days like tire kickers, education, POCs. You really just had to do anything and everything you could to learn what you could about cloud, where this was going, make some mistakes. And we were lucky enough, I think to be early in that journey, especially with Google as a go-to-market partner. And as a small company, everybody would take a meeting with Google. Nobody would take a meeting with Mavenwave. Who's Mavenwave? But any Fortune 500 company wanted the Google magic. And so our go-to-market strategy was, let's just get really good at Google technology. They love our consulting capabilities. They didn't really have and still didn't have a large professional services organization. So let's bring our balance of consulting, know how with the technology skills and certifications. And so that just proved to be an amazing partnership that we just leveraged and in both sides, really grew and learned from the partnership. And that's, I think, why we're a partner a year or three times in a year. I think you'll still today, we have more specializations on Google than any company in the world. Your center's Deloitte, we have more than them. And so we really just kind of grew that through the years and to where we're hundreds of people and now acquired by ATOS. So it's been a very fun journey. That is, yeah, eight or nine years. That's quite a good run in the technology world. So well done. And so looking forward, tell us what you're excited about at MavenWave and a little bit about your relationship with ATOS who we in the industry know is this just gigantic IT technology and services company, maybe less known in the US, but how do you collaborate within that organization? Yeah, I mean, some things I'm excited about continuing to grow our AWS and Azure relationships. We'd already had a plan as MavenWave to we were finally getting to the size where you could start getting into those channels in the same manner and scale that we had invested in Google. ATOS brings, they have a very strong Microsoft partnership worldwide. So we get some major acceleration into the channel there and then our combined, we already done quite a lot of work in AWS and that with ATOS capabilities. So I'm really excited about where we're gonna go with the continued Google success as well as continued success in the other channels. And then you're spot on that, ATOS is more of a household name in Europe and wanting to grow their presence in North America, hence why they want to acquire companies like MavenWave to really try to accelerate that growth and that household name recognition. I think the thing that's very complimentary about ATOS's fundamental skills and ours is that they were more traditional data center, networking, security, large scale managed services. We were more tip of the spear digital transformation, cloud and we were looking going, wow, if I have to build a large scale managed service operation globally to capture this managing cloud environments for Fortune 1000 companies, that's a lot of energy, that's a lot of investments and by the time we build that, we'll miss the market. And so we're looking and we didn't, we're growing our infrastructure organization but same thing, you're like, wow, this market is here. And so, and they were looking the same, like they know they had to do something to accelerate their front end digital transformation consulting type in cloud capabilities. So it was a very complimentary match in terms of our teams coming together. So I think what we're seeing is we can bring so much more to the table for our clients and a true end-to-end story that isn't false anymore. If we were trying to tell, oh, well, we sure we have 300 people that run a managed service globally for you, like, no, we don't. I mean, it's just really hard for a client to believe that. And then same thing, it was hard for a client to believe them on the tip of the spear innovation. So now when our collective teams sit down with clients and talk about what we can do, it's really fun to see that we don't want to be scared of having any conversation that journey to cloud I'm talking about, where we want to talk about, let's move this stuff to cloud, it's easy or let's build new, cool things. Like, hey, maybe we'll wave all day long. Ooh, you need to do something like manage Oracle or a mainframe. ATOS is coming in and they're core teams. We're standing up co-located facilities that are cross-connected to the hyperscalers. You have one millisecond. It's basically, for all intents and purposes, inside Google and Amazon and Azure data centers. So now your mainframe runs at the same speed with cloud as it runs talking to other mainframe applications. They're able to do things like that, reduce the friction, allow clients to go on this journey and bring major firepower to like the infrastructure move and kind of legacy move, as well as we have major capabilities for that modernization. They have IP and other things that accelerate things like converting cobalt to Java and kind of getting the applications modernized. So that combination of skills with them, I think it's allowed us to be very creative with customers on listening to them and trying to find something that matches what they need to do versus just here's our widget, here's our methodology, like go, go, go. And if you don't like to do it that way, then we don't wanna listen to you. So that's been a very exciting part about the merger. Yeah, it sounds so complimentary with skill sets and reach and capabilities. And again, it always just boils down to good people attracting good people. And certainly, personally, that's true with our MavenWave family. We also know that you, you, Brad, also manage large teams. What makes an ideal team member for technology and consultant firm like MavenWave? What advice do you have for folks who really wanna launch a career in the industry? Yeah, I mean, my advice, and this is what we tell our team members and these are our fundamental hiring values, I actually have nothing to do with cloud or technology specifically because that's all going to change over our careers if you stay in technology. So we boil it down to some other fundamentals, first being critical thinking and problem solving capability. If you're, can you just fundamentally understand a problem, break it down and solve it with whatever methods, tools, and oftentimes you have to define those methods and tools because we're doing things for the first time. The second is then the aptitude and design hunger to learn. This stuff is constantly changing. It's almost exhausting sometimes how fast this tech is coming into market. You're trying to keep up with all of the hundreds of Google and Azure and AWS products and what they can do. I mean, you have to enjoy being in that environment and grabbing on those things and but also being able to pick them up quickly and apply them. And then the third is really communication and relationship skills. I mean, I tell my team all the time, we're not in a technology business, we're in a relationship business. We're any services company, you're providing a service and they're hiring you because they trust you as people to get the job done for them. The technology works. I mean, it's working and it's moving in a pace that's faster than people can even consume it and need value out of it. So it really comes down to the people getting the job done and communicating well with the client and gelling well with the clients and forming like that optimal team that then works well together. So it's really become good at being a part of a team, being a part of a client, communicating well and interacting if you're really strong at those three things, you're generally gonna be a very successful person and I think any job that you have but definitely a successful consultant. Yeah, no, those are awesome. Those three tips, absolutely what we look for when hiring our next JSA and what we wanna teach our kids, really, they're just the roadmap to success for any person trying to develop themselves. So Evan and I love this next sort of section of data movers, we call it rapid fire where we just kind of shout a few phrases and we like to hear the first thing that comes to mind our rapid fire fun facts about Mr. Brad Foster. So are you ready? Sure, let's do it. All right, first, talking Chicago, everyone loves to talk Chicago and culinary bliss. Top restaurant recommendations in Chicago. That's like a such a tough one as you know because you have so many good spots to eat and there's new ones popping up all the time. One that kind of comes to mind that my wife and I happen to be going back to as a Momotaro, it's a sushi spot that said in the booming kind of West Loop area, which now is just so many great restaurants popping up and it's kind of the hotspot of Chicago. So we just kind of find ourselves in a groove there, there's some amazing sashimi and other things that they were doing there. So that's one that popped to mind that I've probably been to 10 times over the past, you know, three or four years at least. So I'll go with that one, although there are endless other options, as you guys know in Chicago for great food. Yeah, sushi's always good for me. I'm such a Japanese cuisine fan. Yeah, I'm actually eating sushi now. You just can't, you can't, I'm kind of turning my head, you can't see. Go off camera, have chopsticks, slide around. Yeah, exactly. It's good, that's good to sneak in because it's like small bites, you can just pop one. I'm like, you can't eat a burger on camera, that doesn't work. I have, I've done that, it worked fine. Evan, you want to take the next one? I know this is your favorite sport to watch live. And I think I know the answer, but I'll let you go ahead. That one for me is ice hockey. I just think. Worst sport to watch live, absolutely the worst. You can't follow the puck, you can't follow the puck is. Yeah, I still can't for some reason, but yeah, for me, the energy, like the impact, like the speed, I think people don't realize like how fast those guys move on ice. And I grew up playing all sports and I'm a huge sports fan, so I like to watch them all. So it's a tough question to answer, but they all have different aspects. Baseball as being a big scubs fan, it's like a big party in the stadium. So I was really watching it, but also it's three hours of drinking and eating with your friends. It's like an outdoor bar. So that experience is when we have an annual Cubs outing will hopefully, I don't know if this year will start again. Obviously we had to cancel last year, but that's anybody who's been to Wrigley knows that that's a pretty amazing experience overall as well. Makes me miss it. All right, so any languages you speak besides English? Any words that would come out of your mouth in the Wrigley's field? Seeing a pulse of a lapote gaze. Oh, Portuguese, beautiful. Well, it makes sense with your beautiful Brazilian way. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I figured I'd better learn that or else all my family in Brazil is going to be saying all sorts of things. And I'm not gonna know, are they talking about me? What are they saying? So I better get sharp with my Portuguese so I can really be a part of the family down there and interact with them. And I think the next question is pretty obvious. Favorite place to travel? I think we know that too. Yeah, that's definitely one of the top ones. And I found myself going down there and I went down a couple of times and met my wife and what's going back. We recently bought a house there that we'll stay in when we go down to visit family and then try our hand at the Airbnb thing a little bit here. But I would also say it's any beach location. I'm big on water, scuba diving, surfing, even swimming pools, I love water and then I'll sense boating. And so I'm lucky enough to be lots of, yeah, lots of beautiful beaches in the world of my life. So that's definitely, and Brazil has a ton of them. Yeah. Water just makes you happy. When you can look out and see an ocean, it's people, you guys, them around. Brings calmness. So, okay, number one piece of parenting advice. I would say consistency and persistence pays off. I think anyone who's, so I have step-sons who are now 21 and 24 but I've known them since, been part of my life since they were eight and 11 and now I'm also have a five-year-old daughter. And you're going through, we all kind of half make it up while we're doing it anyway or I don't know if I'm doing the right thing or not. I'm just gonna do what I think's right and you don't quite know if all those messages and lessons and things you're telling them are going to sink in or not. It seems like they're not, especially in teenage years, like these are the knuckleheads, they're not listening to anything I say, but then now that they've gotten to the age of their app, you kind of realize like, wow, and they've told me specifically, hey, thank you so much for you and mom like being hard on us and doing those things. We know we were difficult and we didn't wanna listen to you at the time, but now they're saying those things to their friends and they're acting that way. And so it's all that persistence and the consistency of messaging where you're like, oh, okay, thank God. Like it worked to some extent at least, but you have to have faith because I don't know if you guys have kids, but in the moment, you're just like, I don't know if this is the other they're gonna ever turn this off. Yeah, my parents didn't go, I just don't wanna have them hate my guts. If I achieve that, I will be consider myself as successful. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The other last question we have is kind of back to your career, eight, almost nine years. What's your favorite memory or moment from those nine years? Yeah, so I'll put one in from the, going back to the Cubs out and outing and we actually had a leadership meeting right before this and we asked a bunch of people about some questions and one was like, what would you do if you had a magic wand and change it maybe way or what would you do? It's a surprising amount of the 20 main leaders in our company. Several were talking about, oh, bring the Cubs game back this year or whatever. And so, hey, it's just our whole company gets together. We come on first Fridays and then in the one in August, usually we do a Cubs outings. It's kind of various events on the first Friday of every month. And so one year, a few years ago, this is probably now six or seven years ago. It was probably I was in the company one or two years. I've been kind of known as the person in the company that kind of livens some stuff up or quarterly meetings or whatever. I started adding some funny things to it. And now that it's really taken off in our company meetings or a blast and just hilarious, the creativity and skills people have outside of consulting. People come in and do full on singing things. So one of the years I, and I started the recognition program where we do things that take away awards. And so we're going to the Cubs game. I dressed up as Harry Carey in the office and we're like, okay, time for recognition. So I had my Budweiser and my Harry Carey outfit and I was doing the whole stick, my best impression of Harry Carey and giving out the recognition and all that. And they're like, everybody enjoy the game. See you guys at the stadium. And so people are like, no, no, you can't change. You have to go is Harry Carey. Like you go, go. And I'm like, okay, whatever, fine. I'll go to the game. And basically every year I end up on the Jumbotron because obviously, and people are taking pictures with me in the stadium and the whole company's taking pictures. Like everybody just got so into it and loved it. And so the next year everybody's like, is Harry coming? Harry has to come. So now it's been an annual thing. And to top it all off, there's a place called Deuces and Diamonds that has kind of a pool in outdoors. It's like a four foot wide by 12 foot long, like two little pools in this outdoor patio. And so as I was going to go change clothes and normal clothes as after the game, we were there for a couple of hours. I'm like, okay, I can go change normal clothes. I was walking, they had these little stairs that go up and walking across and the whole bar started chanting, Harry, Harry. And I paused and I looked at the water and I was just like, you know what, screw it. And I just did a full on belly flop into the pool and our whole company has it on video. Harry, Harry, Harry, Harry, Harry, Harry. And so that was the first year and then it became this legend of, hey, is Harry showing up? Is Harry doing belly flop? And so it's been a yearly thing that everybody expects Harry, Harry to show up and assuming we're going to do some diamonds like the belly flop is gonna happen. And then I took it a whole nother level and I Googled two years ago, Google had one of their conferences in Chicago and Navy Pier, one of their Google summits. And I was speaking on the five barriers to moving data to the cloud and how to overcome them with the guy who worked for me that headed our data practice. And it was a big Navy Pier, Chicago theme. And I called him up that morning. I said, Todd, I don't know, I've spoken at multiple of these things now. I'm tired of hearing myself talk about data or AI or cloud. We're gonna liven this up. I said, I'm going as Harry, Carrie, you know the content, you do the slides. I'm just gonna try to add some humor to this to liven up these conferences or whatever. And he's like, okay. And I'm like, this is either gonna be disastrous and crash and burn or maybe it'll go up well. And I had, so I brought in a cooler, Budweiser's and we're up on stage and I'm just, we're going back and forth and it ended up working out very well and people at the conference like, thank God, thanks for the break and the monotony of these conferences. And we actually ended up getting two or three decent sized client deals out of that. So the Harry, Carrie, thank you. Did you jump off Navy Pier though? That's the question. Yeah, I didn't. I did sing the seventh inning stretch in the middle of the presentation. It was the seventh slide stretch. When we got to the seventh slide, I did a full on musical number. That's awesome. Well, I look forward to, I always love confining business and alcohol. It's just a great combination. Well, look, it was really great chatting with you and learning about your mission and congratulations on all the success. And look forward to grabbing a couple of mojitos on the beach, whether it's Tampa or LA or Rio. So we'll have to just find the place. Where are you guys located? I forgot to ask. I'm actually right on the beach, so. Oh, nice. And I live in Jamie's garden. I live in Sheddon, Jamie's garden, but it's been great. And I'd appreciate her having me. Or at least allowing you to be there, kind of unknowingly. This was so much fun. Thank you so much, Brad. What amazing insight and tips for us. And guys, if you've enjoyed this data movers podcast, be sure to check us out. jsa.net slash podcast for upcoming data movers episodes that drop every other week on Wednesdays. Also, check us out on Twitter at Jay Scottow at Evan Christel. And as always, happy networking.