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dnsUNFILTERED: Tom Sweet, Industrial Refrigeration Pros
In this episode, Mikey interviews Tom Sweet, CIO of Industrial Refrigeration Pros. They discuss the complexities of managing technology in a rapidly growing company, the importance of cultural change management, and the future of AI in the industrial refrigeration sector. Tom shares insights on cybersecurity challenges, vendor selection, and the significance of building a cross-functional IT team. Learn more about how DNSFilter prevented a phishing attack before damage could be done at IR Pros.
[00:00:00] Mikey Pruitt: Welcome everyone to another episode of dnsUNFILTERED. Today I am joined by Tom Sweet, the CIO of Refrigeration Pros. Let me let me ask you first, Tom.
[00:00:11] Tom Sweet: Sure.
[00:00:12] Mikey Pruitt: What do you guys do?
[00:00:14] Tom Sweet: So Industrial Refrigeration Pros, designs, bills and services, industrial refrigeration systems. So if you have a warehouse or a food processing plant or a meat packing facility, we would either design those systems for you or build them if it's new construction and we service them.
So very similar to if you have any air conditioner at your home, you may have someone come out to service it. What We work with is very large scale systems for warehouses 35,000 square feet more.
[00:00:43] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. I wanted then, that's the point I wanted to get across. Like the industrial in your company name is legitimate.
These are very large installations that you guys are working on.
[00:00:51] Tom Sweet: Yeah. We have a sister company called Climate Pros that is more for a Whole Foods or a Kroger or commercial facilities. So where specifically. Industrial and there's different regulations ammonia or CO2 based refrigerants as opposed to Freon.
A lot of people are familiar with Freon 'cause they have that in their refrigerator with their house or their air conditioning. Oh yeah.
[00:01:12] Mikey Pruitt: I'm sure everyone. I'm sure everyone's heard a little bit about the Freon at their house. Their AC guy's I could do the R 47 or whatever they are.
It's but so yeah. That's cool. So you are the chief information Officer, and I'm curious, like how did you grow into that role?
[00:01:29] Tom Sweet: It's interesting story. I graduated with civil engineering as my background. I did that for six years and then in the late nineties in Massachusetts, there was a great demand for people and what they call high tech.
Now we call it, but back then it was called high tech and I made a career jump from civil engineering into. It working for NEC Computer Systems Division and I've mostly worked in the product space and for companies that developed software. I worked for Microsoft for a bit. I worked for a company that did like an AutoCAD for mineral mining and geology and then, and wound up at Gene Financial left there when I was VP of Cloud.
So cloud engineering reported to me and then I had the opportunity to keep moving up and I had relationships built in the DFW area. There was an individual who interviewed for the role. That I have now. He didn't want that role. It would maybe a little too hands-on for him. 'Cause this is in many ways a startup.
We're pe backed but we're many ways a startup. And I interviewed for the role and on a Saturday morning at a Starbucks and had an offer half hour later. So it was a really a. Interesting. Interesting approach to getting into this, the C.
[00:02:32] Mikey Pruitt: Exactly. And actually, I'm curious, who do we talk to rename it back to high tech?
That sounds way cooler.
[00:02:39] Tom Sweet: Yeah. I don't know. It changed somewhere along the way. I don't know.
[00:02:43] Mikey Pruitt: Industrial Refrigeration Pros, you guys are really a, you're not a conglomerate, but you've made a lot of acquisitions over the past, like that's the Yeah, we
[00:02:52] Tom Sweet: bought eight, so yeah, I came in the CFO and I were the third and fourth employee, and we came in after the first two acquisitions.
So there, the CEO. He bought one company, he brought in a VP of HR and then they bought a second company. I, me and the CFO were third and fourth and so we bought eight companies so far, and we're still looking to acquire the right companies to, to help our business grow and make one better company out of a number of smaller ones.
[00:03:20] Mikey Pruitt: So that. Let's talk about that one company strategy. Because I'm sure everyone has like a unique technology stack, maybe even their marketing teams, how software they use and different from, other sales organizations from other sides. So how are you like mish mashing all this stuff together?
And that's kinda your job, right?
[00:03:39] Tom Sweet: It is. There's a lot of organizational change management involved and the tech part is really easy. None of them were on Microsoft, right? So we migrated their tenants into our tenant or migrated their Google workspace or whatever systems and we migrated the ERP into a single ERP.
But a lot of it is cultural change and how you. Because in many ways we're not buying software applications. We're buying service organizations. We're not really buying people, but we're buying service organizations and you have to maintain those people. They just can't all quit because all of a sudden they don't like how it's no longer a family business.
And so there's just a lot of that and trying to pick your battles and when you're coming from. In GM Financial, which is 11,000 or 13,000 people, there are policies in place 'cause they're in many ways GM's a defense contractor. They have Soine Oxley, they have Graham Leach Bailey.
They have all these different requirements and regulatory laws. They must, meat and then. When you're a much smaller IT organization, you're really starting it from scratch. You can't do all of that. But what can you do? How do you move forward? What do you have budget for and how do you make change and deliver business value as quickly as possible without driving everyone away?
Without having people quit? Because now they just can't deal with it because not only is there. Change management from it. There's change management from hr, 'cause people's benefits are changing or their policies are changing. There's change management from accounting because maybe there's a different account accounting approach.
And each company had their own approach. And so now there's a different safety program and you have to have ladder training and you have to have all these OSHA trainings that maybe these companies didn't do. So there's a lot of that and it is just one piece of it. And so trying to work with the other business leaders and figure out how far we can push and how quickly we can push without.
I'm getting too much pushback, if that makes sense.
[00:05:31] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, totally. I, and I love the way you phrased that you are not really in the tech management space, you're in the culture management or maybe like a shift in culture. How does that. Work out most of the time.
[00:05:44] Tom Sweet: So I wanted to clarify. I definitely am technical and a lot of the aspects of my role are quite technical.
However, that's not the challenge, right? So there is a significant portion, which is cybersecurity and technical leadership. But that's easy to do, however, is the people challenges of the harder part and trying to work with and understand. It is trying to seek to understand and sometimes you still have to say no, but nonetheless,
[00:06:15] Mikey Pruitt: sometimes you still have to say no.
That's part of being a leader, Tom. Yeah, that's actually really interesting because the technology, like you say, is easy. And we, I talk with a lot of managed service providers and they, a lot of them focus heavily on their tech stack, but it's about. The people and how you service your customers.
And in your case, the employees, the perhaps new employees of IR pros are your kind of customers. So how do you bring them into the fold? Do you like, is it like a Thor's hammer approach or is it more gradual, gentle, perhaps?
[00:06:48] Tom Sweet: It's been, that's an interesting point. And so we've always tried to handle it with kid gloves and like I've told the CEO and COO for our next acquisition.
I'm ripping the bandaid off a bit more and it's, sometimes it's just better to go full on because if I've, we try to incrementally pull the bandaid off bit by bit and all the stuff has to happen anyway. You might as well just. Go for broke right from the beginning and hey, you know what, this is the way it's gonna be and do it all at once, yeah. Wiping the computers and wiping their phones and re-enrolling them. You wipe someone's phone and they, yeah. Really upset. But it's a company phone. We paying the bills, so yes, it has to be enrolled and we have to manage it, and it's a liability for us. So we're gonna have to do it the way we need to do.
It.
[00:07:39] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. I love that. It's like you, the tech has gotta happen, so sorry, I know this is gonna be hard. I'm gonna rip this bandaid off, but you're there as people to, coach them along. That could be like the kid glove part, like the people part.
[00:07:52] Tom Sweet: We explain a lot of stories.
We have. Different tools for threat cloud. So we know other people in the industry who are in our space, who are getting hacked and getting compromised, and some of our major vendors who are quite large have been hit by ransomware in 2024. Therefore, we have stories to show, Hey, this is really, all these different companies have been compromised and we haven't.
And so these are the why the steps, why we're doing the steps we take, or we need to have cyber security insurance and just you can't buy a new race car and drive it on a racetrack and then think your car insurance company's gonna cover you if you crash it, the same type of thing.
Just because you have cyber insurance doesn't mean that you can act with negligence and then expect them to cover you and so that's, those are the kind of analogies we give them, or the analogy of, Hey look, you can't use your personal Dropbox account. We always did. I'm like, what if accountant used a personal bank account?
To hold your paycheck and they just had a spreadsheet somewhere that kept track of it. Would you be comfortable with that? No. Or would you expect the HR department to keep your social security number and healthcare problems with privacy? Oh yeah, of course. I'm like what if they didn't? You'd be upset.
So the same types of rules apply in other aspects and try to use those analogies the best I can, but. A lot of these people have always only worked for family businesses or only worked for small companies. The people we hire who come from larger companies, it's all second nature to them because they, yeah, everywhere.
[00:09:20] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. That's really good to hear that you guys are you're there for the soft landing, but the bandaid comes off today. Speaking of technology, and I'm not very familiar with the industrial refriger refrigeration space, and I imagine most of our audience isn't either.
It seems it's relatively niche. You gotta I would imagine that it's, pervasive in all of our lives, but we don't really see it. But I'm curious, what type of technology are you guys anticipating on the horizon that's gonna be like coming up for your industry?
[00:09:47] Tom Sweet: Good question. 'cause we're not a manufacturer, right?
So we just install and build it. But we're not manufacturing the compressors. Just no different than the air condition at your home. That comes from Carrier or one of those companies, and then the people who install it have different vendors. And we wanna see more and more AI for efficiency of systems and monitoring.
And so for warehouses, there's gonna be more AI used for monitoring and, reducing electricity costs as we go forward. And for the technicians, the people we hire in the trades, they're gonna have to know more and more technologies. No different than a service technician for your automobile. Years ago it used to be mostly a mechanical job but now service technicians have to connect the car to the computer and now analyze it and run electrical checks and the people we hire who are. Turning the wrenches for us. There's more and more requirements for them to be technology savvy.
We have, everyone has an iPhone, everyone has an iPad. There's information that they have to enter, there's pictures they have to take with the technology. And it's not just about a phone call. It's about using a technology, using potentially Microsoft copilot to search on SharePoint, using SharePoint agents to then pull data back from our SharePoint sites.
And learning and having that business intelligence available and that, that's a stretch, but that's coming.
[00:11:09] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. So actually I did want to chat with you about data management and how that works. But first you mentioned a very term that's in the news AI these days. Sure. And I, I've, I do a lot of AI stuff here for my job, which is mostly marketing type of activities.
But you are in the, in this space where some of the promised. AI future that, AI can predict using weather patterns and electricity usage and all this stuff and formulate a plan. Yeah. That will save you real hard dollars. Do you really see that happening? 'cause I read about it, but I haven't seen anybody say, yes, we saved $20 million last year on because of ai, blah, blah, blah.
I
[00:11:51] Tom Sweet: haven't seen that yet. What I see is a lot of. Use of AI toolings to accelerate the job. That most people do. And from the talks I've had in the DFW area, the common theme is AI won't take your job, it'll take the job of people who aren't using ai. And so we use a lot of it for web content marketing, for web creation, for copywriting, for even generating PowerShell code Python, different tooling that it accelerates at that really well.
We're starting it with for example, with. With a copilot in Microsoft Teams in SharePoint, I can go type, tell me a list of all our tax IDs for all our companies and they'll search and find and spit that answer right out. So instead of me spending 10 minutes trying to find a tax ID of some company that I need it for, who knows what.
It'll spit that number out for me and I'll find it. So it really enhances that search capability. So now if we take that and then put, SharePoint agents for each SharePoint site then now we have a tool that everyone can use. And I think the SharePoint agents are only 200 for SharePoint site.
Now. We have over 200 sites. We're gonna have to pick and choose which ones we, we gotta consolidate some here. It just can't be SharePoint sprawl or every SharePoint. Psych. It's a two
[00:13:05] Mikey Pruitt: SharePoint sprawl. I feel like that's a term that's on LinkedIn right now somewhere.
[00:13:10] Tom Sweet: Yes. So we gotta work to, to, we've got all these companies into SharePoint now.
We gotta get them to think about working as one company, migrating that data, getting it into single place, and then we can really turn to AI loose on it. But yeah, there's lot, lots of good stuff happening. And I was, even last year I was at an event, I'm like, do we have to talk about ai? I'm so sick hearing it but now that I'm actually getting some real success out of it I love it.
[00:13:38] Mikey Pruitt: So that's interesting. You are, so you have brought on eight companies, put them under this umbrella. And each one I assume has a SharePoint side or some type of knowledge base of their. Company, company brain is somewhere are, what are you saying that you ingest their company brain and then you can put an AI layer on top of that to search?
[00:13:58] Tom Sweet: No. So we probably have over 200 SharePoint sites. Each fi, each the find like the accounting team has different SharePoint sites for each one of the partner company operating companies and then all, every SharePoint team. Excuse me. Every Microsoft team is also a SharePoint site, so that's where you get these, this sprawl.
But if I can take some of the major sites and combine them into one for most of their main data, not the niche ones, but the main data, now we have a single site, then I can apply agents to that. I can apply agents to every single site. But we practice principle of least privilege. So not everyone has access to everyone's site.
And so therefore we wanna try to migrate it a bit to, make it so it's more usable down the road. The first step is getting them into SharePoint, which is a little challenge 'cause they're all used to the Z drive, the X Drive or whatever they call it. It's no, it's no longer a drive letter.
What do I do? I'm like, the date is here. It's just not called X. It's the same thing.
[00:14:55] Mikey Pruitt: It's the same kind of, but
[00:14:57] Tom Sweet: you can get to, yeah, you can get to it from your phone now.
[00:15:00] Mikey Pruitt: Oh
[00:15:01] Tom Sweet: yeah.
[00:15:01] Mikey Pruitt: Some pluses and some minuses with ai. I and you guys are collecting a lot of data, like you mentioned your technicians are like having to take pictures to document, I assume.
Their repairs and their installations. Is all of that stored in some, like Microsoft tooling or is there other stuff involved?
[00:15:16] Tom Sweet: No, it's mostly Microsoft. It just makes it easy for us, easy to maintain, easy to search, right? We have backups three times a day. We, if we can get everyone on the same system with Microsoft teams and their phones are all Intune enrolled and so therefore they have SharePoint on their phone.
When they have Microsoft OneDrive on their phone, they outlook on their phone, all that stuff. They take a picture of their receipt, it can get mailed in, right? It's all just trying to get everyone understanding the ecosystem, right? Have.
[00:15:43] Mikey Pruitt: So that kind leads us into the cybersecurity aspect of your job. So you've got all this data flowing around.
You've got people coming into the company. Some are new to this kind of corporate strategy, corporate stance on their devices, their peripherals. Making sure that everyone is, marching to the same beat. What are some of the challenges you've seen in the cyberspace?
[00:16:05] Tom Sweet: That's about half of my job, right? It's 75%.
[00:16:10] Mikey Pruitt: Let's just admit it.
[00:16:11] Tom Sweet: Yeah. A third of my job half of my job is ciso. Half of my job is CIO and a third half is CTO. But that's three halves.
[00:16:21] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, that's, Hey, 150%. I love it.
[00:16:25] Tom Sweet: But when you look right, a lot of these companies, some of them had.
The office admin was Microsoft Global admin for the Microsoft tenant. And there's no so you're taking companies who didn't have any cybersecurity posture, right? And you're increasing their Microsoft secure score by 400%. And so to do that, you're implementing cybersecurity training and awareness and efficient simulations.
MFA and using tools like DNS filter for filtering sites, and you're using tools like auto Elevate to remove admin rights and conditional access rules and blocking risky sign in and attack surface reduction. And there's layer upon layer and as a really defense in depth kind upon fails then.
Then there's other. Other controls in place. And so like that example, we talked about where someone did a fish did get through, but another control DNS filter had blocked the link, so therefore we weren't compromised. And every week you're looking at huge companies that are being. So it's really big cybersecurity teams of a hundred plus people.
And so even with them and all the policies and controls they have in place, they still compromised. So for smaller companies like us, we have to do everything we can and it's a nonstop but there's a lot to it. It's layer upon layer, and it requires your team to be actively engaged in understanding the ecosystem.
And not everyone has that ability but we've had it locked down. Really well and that angers people. It's done for the right reasons.
[00:17:59] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, so if you didn't catch that, I buried the lead here. Tom and Industrial Refrigeration Pros is a happy DNS filter customer and we are really glad to have you.
One of our favorite to chat with Tom mentioned that they had an event where one of their layers of security didn't catch something and DNS filter did. And I'm curious like That's great. Kudos DNS filter. We're doing our job properly. I'm curious like, what do you look for in vendors when you're going out into the cyber world, because there are so many and there are some that overlap, some that don't, some that are missing a feature that you really need. How are you evaluating what to pick?
[00:18:33] Tom Sweet: Okay. That's a good question. So there's a couple things and. There's a tool I'm not gonna mention, which is a secret one that we use, but I went to an event on a Tuesday and I bought it on a Friday.
So in DFW and probably other cities, there's different events and they're sponsored by, security vendors or other people in the IT space. And there was a product that was on display and it was presented and I'm like, this is gonna work for me. It definitely will. And that was a Tuesday and I bought it on a Friday.
And that's how impressed I was with it. So it's word of mouth and interaction with vendors. It's also interaction of the community, right? Because I'm active in the DFW community with other people in the security and IT space. And I'll talk to them about what they use what the successes they've had, and also Reddit.
Reddit has some really unfiltered comment. Comment, especially the few with the subreddits, and you have to have some thick skin if you're gonna partake in them and ask questions. 'cause if they don't like you they'll tell you're stupid. But nonetheless, it's, you can get some really good feedback from what companies are using and how that works from people who aren't really contractually obligated to keep them off.
Shut this. Like they should be, yeah, probably are, but they're anonymous and they'll say whatever and so there's always some great feedback there too.
[00:19:49] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, agree. Reddit is a wealth of information. They have a knack for not telling you're stupid, but making you feel it in your core that you're an idiot.
[00:19:58] Tom Sweet: I think Haven't told someone told me I should be fired.
[00:20:01] Mikey Pruitt: Once the what what subreddits do you hang out in? Cis admin. What do you go to
[00:20:08] Tom Sweet: Admin Intune. There's the firewall ones. I'm not gonna mention the firewall ones but we, there's subreddits of firewalls. There's other ones that Office 365 and such.
[00:20:18] Mikey Pruitt: So when you guys have a large operation, you, I think you have a relatively small team, but you do very big things. I'm curious of what type of impact that has on the environment around you. Do you guys look into environmental impact for anything?
[00:20:35] Tom Sweet: I mean that, that's normally would be the owners of the facilities that that a contract does.
But when you look at a cloud first and a mobile first approach, it does reduce, the cost of people driving to work or they gained work from anywhere. I only flew twice last year for work and. For, having eight offices around the country. We have everything automated.
We have a, an a really strong approach with Microsoft teams and team video and mobile devices and get all the phones under a single system now with teams phones. And we just try to make it so you don't have to go into the office. Now we do have people who must go into the office.
'cause that's where the tools are, that's where the parts are. Yeah. But we hire a lot of remote people and the salespeople are always traveling.
[00:21:24] Mikey Pruitt: So let's talk about those remote people in remote offices for a minute. You're the CIO but you're not a team of one. You have a lot of people that are doing the day-to-day work.
I've seen you get your hands dirty. Actually, Tom suggested some updates to the DNS filter documentation recently, which we greatly appreciate. But I'm curious, like, how do you. Build your IT team.
[00:21:47] Tom Sweet: We're, again, we're really small, right? There's a 500 person company and my team is quite small, but we, and my team is all remote.
Now I do have someone in California near a few of our offices. But the nature of how we've created this is hiring people who are willing to do more than one thing. We pretty much do everything from wiring the offices if they need. If we have a whole lot of wire, we could probably outsource that but if we have to run a couple cables, we'll do that.
We'll do firewalls, we do security cameras access management, mail. ERP everything. Wow. So yeah, you
[00:22:22] Mikey Pruitt: guys really do it all. You do the hardware, the software, the structured wiring. You might as well go fix some pumps every now and then. It sounds like you guys almost do everything.
Yeah,
[00:22:30] Tom Sweet: we pretty much do. If the phones, the teams phones and it just makes it simpler. 'Cause we can go, when you have a lightweight change management process. It's pretty simple for us to onboard a vendor. The same person can go add the DNS entries and then test it and deploy it, as opposed to in the past where I've worked with, three weeks later, another team will get the DNS value and then they'll reject it because there's a question they have and they'll put it back in the queue and so with a small team and a team that's willing to learn and wants to learn and willing to do more than one task, is the ability to be really cross-functional and go super fast.
And that's been really helpful for us. I know when you look on Reddit, people are like, I only wanna do firewall. And they wanted me to do network. I don't do network, I only do firewall. Whereas, you know that the people I hire are really willing to learn from me and to be able to set themselves up for the future by being cross-functional.
Because then as the IT market tightens up which you've seen 150,000 jobs gone in 2024, whatever that number is. People who can do more than one thing can do six or seven different tasks. They're gonna be more valuable, right? If someone can do firewalls and in 365 and Intune. And understands the basics of under, you know how sentinel works, right?
That person's more valuable than someone that only does firewalls, because then that person can only work at a huge company that has enough firewalls to justify a single role. So
[00:23:54] Mikey Pruitt: yeah. So you're really looking for the generalists. And I think I've seen this, with the, again, the AI buzzword with ai, like most generalists can specialize because temporarily specialize in the thing that needs to be done now. Because they have, the world's knowledge, a search index better than. Like on top of Google, give me the answers to the questions and the generalist can now specialize.
Are you seeing that with your team?
[00:24:23] Tom Sweet: Yeah, look at what Sam Altman just said last week is that I think, and I don't have the exact numbers but open AI is like the number 75th best programmer in the world, and by the end of 2025, it'll be the best programmer. And so even for some of the stuff I'm doing with some new projects that are coming down I'm not a Python programmer at all.
I'm typing it in chat, GBT, and it's coming back and I'm running it and it's giving me a bug. And I'm saying, this is the bug I get and the code you just gave me, can you fix it? Oh, course, sorry. And it gives you a better code. It works. And again, I'm not a python. I know C Sharp, I know some of the languages and want to learn Python.
Never did. 'cause I was always too busy. But now I'm writing some Python code with the assistance of ai. And so how does that affect everyone? I can. Show the accounting team how RPA works Robotic Process Automation and say, look it, you can get copilot in robotic process automation and have it help.
You said it can't do this work for you. We, we're not really staffed for that, but we can teach you how to use it and then you can take that tool and then build upon it. And I think that's where we're gonna see a lot of back office jobs. Change is, again, you won't be replaced by ai. You will replace people who aren't using ai.
And so how do you use AI to, to benefit yourself and then get, do you do a better job?
[00:25:43] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah I've had that almost exact word for word experience where I wanted to build something and I asked chat GBT to, walk me through it in Python and the code. If someone that knows what they're doing, were to look at, we be like, this is terrible, but.
It did work and I'm not like, releasing it to the world and it's not exposed to the internet. The safeguards are in place and I'm like, this is amazing. Like I can be so much, I can be augmented by ai. And it sounds like you and your team
Are using that tool set.
I keep
[00:26:13] Tom Sweet: pushing him to do it. I'm like, put it in chat, GPT. Yeah. Figure out why, and take, use that advantage because we're writing a lot of automation. We're doing, we have a lot of scripts that run and that's why we've been able to stay lean and that's really helped us from a business perspective.
'cause I don't have to go to, defend a huge team to my CEO about, if things get tough. Or I guess we'll lose people. No, we're running super lean and yeah, I could use a lot more people, but I can get it done with what I have and how do we use AI more efficiently to get done, to get more stuff done.
So
[00:26:49] Mikey Pruitt: yeah, I ran into a we're recording this shortly after the Super Bowl and I ran into a Patriots fan over the weekend, last weekend. And, somebody's you guys are cheaters, blah, blah, blah. And he says, if you're not getting caught cheating, you're not trying hard enough. I was like, wow.
Because AI feels like a cheat code, like we shouldn't be, have all this power. The generalist can now be pretty potent. What do you think? So considering your clients are the employees of IR pros. Yeah. W what do you think their interface is with your team? Are you having a very easy communication between you and them, like when they need, help with their computer or have a question about Yeah.
I, the
[00:27:32] Tom Sweet: people who work with me, I have a little bit more that manner than I do.
[00:27:38] Mikey Pruitt: You're the bandaid, ripper, offerer guy. We know.
[00:27:40] Tom Sweet: Yeah. I, it is trying to get obviously put, have people put tickets in and stuff and. But yeah, I have a team that works for me that, that does a great job at that. I sometimes I have other things I'm, that I'm responsible for.
I, I report directly to the CEO. I have dotted line to the board of directors. I.
They again, it is also explaining to the end users why we do what we do, right? Yeah. Because we rolled out DNS filter on mobile devices last week, and so now, we have some pretty aggressive rules around, country domains and vanity domains that, that may be a lot of companies don't have.
We're pretty flexible on the categories, like we allow social media, we allow shopping but we've. We blocked a lot of these vanity domains I don't know, dot apartments or whatever, all these.rodeo. Yeah, the.rodeo is one of them. And so yeah, there's a rodeo in Fort Worth. But, and so we just trying to work with them on that and on understanding you.
They lose their phone, things like that, right? Those are the things that we have to deal with. And, but they don't want the, we have some pretty tight compliance rules if the computer gets outta compliance and they, we have to work with them on that to bring it back in, and it can take a half hour or so for that process to sync and they can get frustrated.
But generally, so I have. Yeah, it works. I
[00:29:02] Mikey Pruitt: have a few radio domains and I What is, are you telling me that no one at IR Pros can get to my website?
[00:29:10] Tom Sweet: They can't
[00:29:10] Mikey Pruitt: On their work device. They
[00:29:12] Tom Sweet: can't, but we'll whitelist it. I have no problem whitelisting it. It's just All right. I'll send
[00:29:19] Mikey Pruitt: you the domains just in case someone wants to buy something.
Who knows
[00:29:22] Tom Sweet: it's 500 or something of them and who knows who's managing them when you, if you have a problem with a.com domain. And one day there was 660,000 different.com domains registered on the day I looked. And so if you have a problem with one 'cause you get a Phish attack, you can report it to Network Solutions or GoDaddy or whoever manages that domain.
It probably be handled. I got a dot TX domain from someone because I went to an event, I didn't even pay for it, right? I went to an event and I got a tx donator got a free. There's just one person managing that. And so a lot of these smaller ones, I don't know what the, how they manage their abuse and I know like the.zip domains have been problematic.
There's been some of them that have been really problematic and maybe this is a battle I'm gonna lose because we have someone being like, someone had to get to a ST domain. That is. An island off the coast of Africa or doctor's offices are using md, which is a country of Moldova.
That's not really a country we do business with. Why would we have that? But now doctors are using it 'cause it's also MD for medical doctor so I'm probably gonna have to reevaluate this in the near future, but,
[00:30:39] Mikey Pruitt: so do you block a lot of two questions?
[00:30:43] Tom Sweet: Yeah.
[00:30:43] Mikey Pruitt: Do you block a lot of country code tds via DNS filter?
[00:30:47] Tom Sweet: Yes. About 150 on.
[00:30:49] Mikey Pruitt: Okay. Do you also use firewall for that too? Or just, DNS filter or both?
[00:30:53] Tom Sweet: We have firewalls too, but we have so many remote people. And it doesn't really matter. So that's where DNS filter comes in with the agent.
[00:31:00] Mikey Pruitt: Love that. Also, I own, I live in South Carolina. And the there's a.
A country in the Indian Ocean called the Seychelles. And their TD is sc, which is a very expensive TLD to purchase. Yeah. But I, I bought one for my sister. She's I wanna get something SC for South Carolina. Yeah. And I was like, this thing's like a hundred dollars, which is a lot. She's is that a lot?
I'm like, yes. That's a lot for a domain. So blocking country code level TLDs via DNS filter, because there's a big remote team. They're on mobile devices, they're on laptops, they're all over the country. Yeah, that's a really good strategy and something we don't really see that often because of what you mentioned, where you can clash with things that people are trying to access, like doctors using md, me using scs,
[00:31:49] Tom Sweet: but it's just,
[00:31:50] Mikey Pruitt: but it's a process and that's, and you have to interact with your employee base to, get all that straightened out. Like your universal allow list is gonna grow. And then you're gonna have to maintain that and readdress things as they, fall off or come on and,
[00:32:05] Tom Sweet: yep.
[00:32:06] Mikey Pruitt: You are like, yeah.
Adding, adding technical debt. Love it. Thanks.
[00:32:11] Tom Sweet: No, it's not that bad. Really. It's, if they really need it, they can. I know that as marketing teams continue down this path, we're gonna see more and more challenges in this area.
[00:32:23] Mikey Pruitt: Absolutely. And I was gonna ask you about the.zip too. So that's own that TLD is by Google who maintains it or runs it or whatever.
And that is. Pretty nefarious usage and potentially for a dot Zito man. Have you ever seen one of those come through?
[00:32:39] Tom Sweet: I have not, but when I was reading an article, I think on bleeping computer or one of those security focused websites it mentioned them. Oh, shoot.
What else is happening here? So then I pulled the list off of Wikipedia. Oh my God. Look at this.
[00:32:52] Mikey Pruitt: It just continued to grow. Yeah. They, vanity TODs is a whole nother can of worms. Yeah. So I'm curious, so a lot of people in the IT space when I, they're just getting started. They are, fresh outta school, they're looking to get maybe certifications or go to college.
What would you say to someone, what would you recommend, advice that you could give someone that is just starting out in their career to get to a place where you are?
[00:33:19] Tom Sweet: They have to really want it. And then like my son, he's in his, for his master's right now in computer science and throughout his bachelor's he was a little frustrated because he was in it because he has a love for the craft and a lot of the students just didn't have it.
They are parents wanted to go for computer science to get a good job, but they didn't really have. Any enjoyment for the subject. And so you have to really make sure you wanna do it. And you also have to look at where it's gonna go with as AI changes. One role I think is very stable is the role of refrigeration technician Yes.
People to turn wrenches and the refrigeration technician role is something that you would go to a trade school. Four to learn that. And it's not easily replaced by AI 'cause someone told us to turn the wrenches and understand what's happening. So I think the trades all over are seeing a little bit of resurgence because the need for skilled people to do those jobs is still there.
But other, haven't really. Gone down that path as of late. And so there's opportunity there. But for roles in it it's making sure you really. Love the craft, and you have to get out and network and build relationships with people and reach out to different leaders in your community and ask them for coffee.
There's always someone trying to sell me something every day, but there are very few, if any, reach out to me for advice on their career. And people at this level often will be very receptive to a younger person really in his or her career and giving advice. And the other thing you can do is there are many IT events that are.
Only accept the people at the director level or more. But that doesn't mean you can't volunteer to work at their sign in booths and say, Hey, you know what? I know I don't qualify for the event. I'm not a director, but I'll help you sign in people. To the event, right? And set the table up and put, put the supplies away at the end of the night and then you're still meeting people and engaging them.
So those are different things you can do. And then again, getting in the community in different ways. Even if you take a course on from meetup.com and you go to a yoga meetup or a I'll say basket weaving but there are a number of different events and you can still engage and meet people and someone's oh yeah, my brother-in-law needs someone just like you.
He's VP of data at this company and, I'll put in contact. So it's just building a relationship out. That's how I get this role through a relationship. And the person who could have had the role, didn't want it, it wasn't the right fit for him, but he knew me and recommended me.
So
[00:35:50] Mikey Pruitt: the, so you mentioned like passion. I'm thinking like the test would be when you are. Because if you're in it, you're thinking about going into it, you're probably the nerdish person in your family. So when your cousin, your mom, your whoever, asks you a technical question, how do you respond?
Are you eager to give them a pleasant, helpful answer? Or are you turned off by oh, you don't know how to do this? That could be a good litmus test to see if you're suited for the job or not.
[00:36:20] Tom Sweet: Yeah. Another one that, that I think has been good is anyone who has a home lab has always worked out, no matter how nonsensical that home Lab's activities were.
And I've had some people who had all these things that copied this and did like why it's does nothing but nonetheless, they set it up with VMware and they did this, and I'm like, okay, they can figure this out. And yeah, they have the right tinkering ability. Yeah, so that's another thing that I've always looked for is people who have that have always done well.
[00:36:51] Mikey Pruitt: I love that is such great advice. So you've got, are you the type of person who has a home lab volunteer for events that you're not qualified to attend, but the people you want to meet are there.
And then getting involved in some type of community, even like a yoga class, perhaps there's a VP of engineering somewhere in there and spread your wings, I think is the
[00:37:15] Tom Sweet: yeah.
And then is reaching out to people. Cold calling or cold emailing and asking for advice. It's basically three sentences. I noticed you've done a great career, you had a great career and great career trajectory and I'm at a very early stage. Would you be willing to meet for coffee for half hour and give me some advice?
And they know you're not gonna try to sell 'em because you know you're not in that particular position. And they're always on guard for that. But they still want to get out and. Give back. There's a lot of people in that at a stage in their career where they do wanna give back and wanna give back to someone who's actually interested in learning.
So
[00:37:51] Mikey Pruitt: yeah, absolutely. If you reach out to someone on LinkedIn without a sales pitch, then you're like standing out like a sore thumb because every LinkedIn message, like 99% of them are like, Hey, buy my thing. Have you heard about this? Yeah.
[00:38:07] Tom Sweet: Yeah. If you reach and if you reach out without saying anything, they're gonna suspect the sales pitch is coming next tomorrow.
You have to say bye. Yeah.
[00:38:14] Mikey Pruitt: Surprise people on LinkedIn and don't try to sell 'em anything. They'll be astonished. Yeah. Tom, anything, any last words from you?
[00:38:23] Tom Sweet: No I think it's been great and we've had a we love the product and it's been quite helpful for us and we just wanna keep using it and we're happy to have it on our phones now and we'll see how that goes.
We'll, yeah, and if vanity domains, I have to unblock one this week.
[00:38:40] Mikey Pruitt: When do zip finally becomes real, a real thing. Yeah. And actually the the documentation that Tom made a suggestion that we improve was our mobile deployment docs because he was dealing with that last week. So thank you again for that, Tom.
And thank you for joining me and just being one of our favorite customers.