{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi","title":"Episode 028: Twenty Years of IT. One Deliberate Step Backward with Chris Farr","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3421,"description":"Episode SummaryMost people spend their careers chasing the seat at the table. Chris Farr had it. Vice President of Technology at a credit union in southwest Georgia, twenty years building his expertise from the ground floor up through the era of mainframes and dumb terminals, through the rollout of online banking when half the membership still preferred the phone teller, through compliance frameworks and security protocols that come with the weight of managing other people's money. He earned that seat. And then he walked away from it.Not because of a crisis. Not because he got pushed out. Because he looked at the landscape, saw that the MSP world would let him do more for more people, and decided that the discomfort of starting over at the bottom of a new learning curve was worth more than the comfort of staying at the top of one he had already conquered. That decision cost him his confidence for a stretch. It cost him long nights on weekends relearning things he thought he already knew. It humbled him in rooms where he had expected to be the expert, and dropped him back into the experience of being a green technician figuring out systems he had never seen before.Almost a decade later, Chris is VP of Operations at Envision, one of the most trusted MSPs in the southeast, serving clients across multiple industries as a true technology partner rather than a vendor. He is also a published author, with a book called Built in the Trenches, and someone who has become increasingly focused on cybersecurity education for small businesses who wrongly assume they are too small to be a target.This is not a comeback story. It is something rarer. It is the story of a man who chose voluntary discomfort at the peak of his career because he knew comfort was the enemy of growth. This episode is for any leader who has been quietly wondering whether the seat they are sitting in is still the right one.In This Episode, You'll Discover:What VP of Technology at a credit union actually...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/gNw9v9uoz_x3O-ngDs21_G9zKGvHmk8OzrCthvwHN-M/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9hZTVk/MGMyOGM3NTU5NDYw/MTJmM2NmYmMyNDY4/NDc4Ni5qcGVn.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}