 Live from the JSA Podcast Studio, presenting Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Welcome to our new podcast series, Data Movers. I'm your host, Jamie Scott-Okitaya, founder and CEO of JSA. And along with me, my co-host, my colleague in craziness, top B2B social influencer, Evan Christel. Hey everyone, we're still at home. Thanks, welcome to Data Movers, where we sit down with some of the most influential folks in today's leading telecom and data center world, supporting the network infrastructure requirements of this new normal. Jamie, speaking of new normal, now that we have a vaccine on the horizon, what are you thinking in terms of you and your team? Are you gonna go back to some sort of office environment? Well, I think it's a sense of hope, this 90-year-old woman getting the very first vaccination. There's definite hope on the horizon that we're gonna go back to some new normalcy, but JSA, we've always been virtual. For the past, we're gonna celebrate 16 years, actually January 1. So 16 years, we've been virtual and we're all about that with the right people, you can absolutely successfully work from home and giving the right hires and the right tools and technologies that it's actually potentially even more rewarding and satisfying to do so. So we're that model anyway, but what about you? Are you anxious to get back into any form of onsite action? Technically, I was intrigued by the Hawaiian offer to pay for your airfare if you fly there to work remotely. So maybe I'll consider my moving the underground bunker to Hawaii, but let's see how that plays out. I imagine you can't dig too deep into that island soil, though, right? So your bunker would be like- The bunker will be on the beach, but let's stop, maybe stop fantasizing here and get on with our guest. Yes, and it's a fabulous, fabulous guest, which I'm really excited to introduce you guys to. Today, we are welcoming David Johnson. He is, of course, the president of ComStar Technologies. David, welcome to our show. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Just a great, interesting show. You guys are running here, so I'm excited to be here. Excited to have you, David. So tell me, you're in the Philadelphia area. Most important questions first, where's the best place to find a chili-feast philly cheesesteak in the Philadelphia area? That's like a tongue twister. Yeah, that's an interesting question for me. I actually started before I worked at ComStar, I worked at a place making cheesesteaks. So my answer is going to be biased, and it's a place that not many people have heard of. It's called the Pepper Mill in Westchester. So if you're really looking for the best place to get a cheesesteak in the Philadelphia region, I would say Pepper Mill is the number one. I am Googling it right now, so I'm going to add it to my visits when I'm next in the Philly area. But more about you. You've been at ComStar Technologies for almost two decades. Tell us about that career path that's quite impressive these days. I've never actually heard somebody say it in those terms before. Two decades makes me kind of reevaluate my entire life right now. But yeah, two decades, I guess. So as I mentioned, you know, oddly enough, I worked at a cheesesteak place before I came to the Pepper Mill and I actually worked with a high school friend at the cheesesteak place called the Pepper Mill. And while I was there, he came in and said, hey, there's this company I work for. It's a technology company. We're really small right now. There were seven employees. We have a ton of work happening. We're growing quite a bit. I think you'd like working here. So I left the line cook career path that I was on and I moved over to ComStar as a cabling technician. So my first job, you know, kind of official career path job was a cabling technician at ComStar. So, you know, we would go into construction sites and install test category six, category five back then, category six cables. So that's really what kind of brought me into this field. I was pretty terrible at it, honestly, I don't know why they asked me to work at ComStar. The cheesesteak or the cabling or both? Really good at making cheesesteaks. Okay, let's just clarify. No, but I was not a great cabling technician. I really had no craftsmanship. I never, I barely knew how to use a drill, but I was in a pretty good learning environment with a lot of really supportive people and a really good team. So that's kind of where the journey began. And the thing I liked about what I was doing, you know, there was challenges to it. I was learning all the time and it kept evolving. We would go, the size of the jobs would get bigger. The types of technologies we were involved with would change. And that's just the way that I am. I'd like to continuously learn. And that position really provided me that opportunity. So I moved from, or not moved from, but you know, when you're an eight person company, everybody does everything. I mean, I would be in the field and then I would come back and manage the warehouse at night, clean everything up, organize it. And then I kind of moved a little bit more into the business side, but I was still in the field quite a bit. So that, I don't remember the timeline there, but let's just call it 2005, 2006. I got involved a little bit more in the client meetings, quoting projects, designing projects. And again, we were small. So it was, you know, there was probably three or four of us on the cabling side of the business. And we did everything. You know, I would quote a project, order the materials for the project. I would go and finish the data room a lot of times, like build out the data room. And then I would invoice the project. So I literally saw the entire cycle of a client experience and internally, operationally, how these things work. So over time we kept growing and that allowed us to, and at the same time, we were growing on the telephony side of the business. So, you know, I was kind of growing the cabling, what we ended up on the infrastructure side. And the founder of the business was growing the telephony side. And we had a, we never talked about it, but we had a little competition going on to see who could kind of leapfrog each other. So they were both growing really well, which allowed us to add additional resources. And, you know, again, I'm not exactly sure of the timeline because I didn't write my autobiography yet, but around, let's say 2010, it really kind of, to find the scale that we were looking for, I thought it was important to step out of the field operations, move into more of a business role where, you know, I was doing a lot more client requirement meetings, designing projects and moving us into audio visual building security at the same time. Around, right around that same time, maybe a year later or so, on the telephony side, they were evolving from a premised telephony company to a hosted telephony company. So the business was evolving internally in the two different kind of departments or divisions that we had. So, you know, that journey kind of led us to 2015, 2016. And that's when the owner who had been in telephony since he was 19 years old was ready to move on and do some other things. So at that point, I took over a COO role and started running the operations of the business and he moved a little more out of the business, still was involved from a strategic, envision type of role, but he wasn't involved in the day-to-day as much. So probably two years after that, he moved on. We were acquired by a wonderful, great partner, private equity company called Winkove. Kevin Flounder's moved down to Charleston, South Carolina and I took over as president of the business in, I think, 2018. So it's been about 18 to 24 months where I've been president of the company. Now involved more in the strategy and vision and direction of the business that we're going. And I imagine that that beautiful path and all the experience that you've received and put into action over the years has really provided you the fodder to become a better leader in the organization. Where do you see the organization heading in the future? Yeah, we were definitely on a path of growth and growth for us isn't, there's a revenue element to that certainly, but growth for us is really operational maturity and opportunity for the employees that work here. And I think that's what's, one of the things when I talk about the path that I was on from a career perspective, I had direct line of sight into the growth of the business and the benefits that I had from that, but more importantly, there was a lot of potential for growth for me from a career perspective. So I liked where I was working, I like the people I worked with and I had opportunity for growth. And that's really what we're trying to emulate for all the employees at ComStar. So our growth mindset is really about operational maturity, creating opportunity for the employees inside of the company and the results of that are going to be revenue growth and we have an overlapped acquisition strategy that we're looking to, we have been implementing, but really takes to the next level over the next 12 months. That's tremendous. So you've seen a lot of changes over those years. What are some of the most significant changes you've seen in the data center space and related industries? Yeah, that is, in every field, I'm sure there's significant change, but in the technology field that we're in, I think that's probably been some of the most abrupt. When you look at the telephony side of our business, really, the years 1980 to 2010, let's round up a little bit, there was no telephony expert, except for a vendor like us. Everybody had to use a vendor like us to help them buy the solutions that they needed. Now it's everywhere. Like every day you probably see some sort of unified communication as a service advertisement or something like that. So the big evolution I think has been, went from like hardware focus to limited knowledge, to software focus, to an abundance of knowledge, infinite options. And so I think that's been kind of the biggest evolution in that industry that I've seen, is really it moving from hardware to software, but elements of it being commoditized and elements of it being specialized all at the same time. And going from that hardware to software, what do you see on the horizon regarding the technology growth that you're currently involved in? So I think what, and this kind of gets into the further evolution that we've seen happening. So there's been a, the word convergence was really, really popular, we'll call it 10 years ago. And really that meant from a hardware standpoint and some software in the background, everything was kind of converging into the network. Everything was kind of becoming data. Cameras were becoming data, telephony was becoming data. Everything was kind of converging into the IT space. So I think we're at that point where that convergence has happened on the hardware side, clearly. I think what's next is it's going to happen on the application side. So you see the way that there's these silos that are the boundaries of those silos are starting to come down. So you have your unified communication as a service platform, whatever it is, Teams eight by eight, any number of things. You have your CRM let's say. I think what we're going to start seeing is not just linking those two things together, but those two things literally overlapping. So they're one in the same, whether you acquire them, you have two different bills maybe, that's fine. But really, you're going to see a true integration at the application layer where it's not just that they talk to each other, they literally exist as one from the end user experience. I think that's really what we're at the forefront of right now. You've been successful in that. So what's your philosophy? What can you share on how to build an amazing client relationship over time? Yeah, as I kind of talked about that journey and as I was thinking about that journey, kind of reflecting on it, for whatever reason, premonition, luck, just an eight kind of thought, really early on, again, for whatever reason, I kind of pictured myself as an employee of our clients. And when I was barely in the office, I was almost out in the field, I was probably out in the field 80% of the time. So it was really easy to kind of see it that way. But that really put me at a perspective where I am our client's employee, or at the time I was our client's employee. And that didn't just mean that I was there to do what they told me to do, but I was actually there to advise them and say, I see what you're trying to do or what you're asking me to do, but what's the ultimate objective? I think that's the key is really becoming an employee of your clients and really advising them on whatever it is that nobody knows better than us how to align their business objectives with technology solutions. That's really what we're experts at. So once you kind of consider yourself an employee of this client or potential client, it becomes a lot easier to merge those two things together. So that's, I would say really put yourself not just in your client shoes, but like you literally work there. Yeah, well said, well said. We certainly try to do that here at JSA and this digital transformation has enabled that too. So it's funny how what you're doing every day has really emboldened other business models as well to be their client's employee and partner. Now to get to that rapid fire section, which I love, this is where we just throw out a few phrases and questions for you and you can just tell us the first thing that pops to your mind, pops into your mind. Yeah. So, okay, David, do you have any pets? Yeah, I have a dog named Clark. Oh, Clark, love it. How many cups of coffee do you have each day? One like clockwork, 120 ounce coffee in the morning. You need to up your game here, come on, this is a coffee world. I'm one of those people that I could drink coffee at nine o'clock at night and go to sleep. So, I don't know. I love it. When we already know this one, your first job. Well, was it your first job, Cheese Dates or? No, no, that was probably my fifth job or so, let's say. My first job was, this is kind of a weird one. I would go on, when there were bad snow storms, I wouldn't use the snow in Philadelphia, which it doesn't do too often anymore, but when there were bad snow storms, I would go on an oil truck and deliver oil to people's houses. And I was only 14 or 15, 14, 15, I wasn't driving or anything, but I was actually the guy that would take the hose and lug it through the snow into the people's houses and connect it up to their tank. So, that was technically my first job, but it was only when there was bad snow storms. Wow, kids these days have it easy, at least my kids do. And your favorite dessert? Oh man, I guess cheesecake, seldomly cheesecake? Yeah, nice, nice. And your most used emoji? No emojis. Come on, you gotta get with the program here. Not and get on Twitter, those are the two directives. As a kind of inside joke inside my family, because I'm a technology guy, but there's millennials and things like that. I'll actually type out the emoji, so I'll write smiley face, wine glass, confetti, or something like that, just to. I like it. I know, I refuse to say venti when I go to Starbucks. I'm like, no, I am, I know it's small, medium, large. I'm not gonna let them market me and change my diction. Yeah, I hear you. Stick to your conviction. I know to do that. And so in closing, I just wanna say, it's been such an honor, David, to have you here. Your leadership over at Comstar has been extraordinary. We are so proud to see you make those headlines that you've been making, and your whole company just coming together, and especially during this crazy COVID world, really making a difference and keeping those clients connected and running so efficiently, thanks to your guidance. Yeah, I appreciate it. We have a great team over here. I mean, just to deal with the things that we've had to deal with, we were not a remote working company. We made that transition in real time to have a team that's capable culturally to handle something like that is pretty incredible. So it's really been a great team effort. Well, congratulations. And as soon as the pandemic's over, we're looking forward to coming down to Philly and having a cheese steak and some cheesecake. So the worst possible meal you could eat on the planet. But we're going to do it and we look forward to it. We'll do it live. We'll video it. We could have a taste. See if I'm right about what is the best Philadelphia cheese steak. I know, because I have old school fellow friends who are like, there's a bridge. You go under the bridge and there's your cheese steak, like classic Philly cheese steak guy. And so... Yeah. What is the name of that? I've been there, actually. I can't remember the name, but I'll tell you. Yeah, neither. I'll get back to you on that one, but we have to taste test because people are passionate about this. Yeah, you'll see. I'm definitely right on this one. And if you guys enjoyed today's Data Movers podcast, be sure to check out jfa.net slash podcast for upcoming Data Movers episodes. We release every other week on Wednesday morning. So please go ahead and check out the entire series. And in two weeks time, we will be releasing a new episode. That's January 13th. Oh my God, January 13th. That's hard to imagine, but thank God this year is gonna be behind us. So additionally, follow us on Twitter at Jay Scotto and Evan Kerstel and tweet us your favorite emoji and we'll catch you there. Yeah, absolutely. And everybody keep safe. Happy, happy new year. Happy holidays and happy networking.