Panda Award Show

keywords

self-discovery, technology, career journey, customer interaction, internal IT, business ownership, lifelong learning
summary

In this conversation, Ben Climer and Abhi Saini explore Abhi's journey through the tech industry, from his early fascination with technology to his experiences in various roles, including customer service, internal IT, and ultimately becoming a business owner. They discuss the importance of self-discovery, learning from mistakes, and the value of understanding client needs in the tech field. Abhi emphasizes the significance of lifelong learning and the need to adapt to the ever-changing landscape of technology.
takeaways

  • Self-discovery is crucial for career advancement.
  • Early experiences in technology shape future interests.
  • Customer interaction skills are essential in tech roles.
  • Mistakes in early jobs provide valuable learning opportunities.
  • Transitioning to internal IT offers new challenges and responsibilities.
  • Understanding client needs is key to success in tech.
  • Lifelong learning is necessary in the ever-evolving tech landscape.
  • Taking risks and failing faster can lead to growth.
  • Building trust with clients and colleagues is vital.
  • Embracing one's unique skill set can lead to business success.

Sound Bites
  • "This is why you're such a nerd."
  • "I was still arrogant, naive."
Chapters

00:00
Introduction to Self-Discovery
04:29
The Journey into IT Careers
10:51
Customer Interactions and Learning
16:26
Internship and Real-World Applications
21:12
Navigating Early Career Challenges
24:47
Streamlining Processes for Efficiency
27:59
Exploring Opportunities in Managed Services
31:16
The Shift from Education to Business IT
36:47
Navigating the IT Landscape
41:44
Challenges in Internal IT
44:26
Understanding Communication Styles
47:47
The Importance of Lifelong Learning
52:22
Taking the Leap into Entrepreneurship

Creators and Guests

Host
Abhi Saini
Abhi Saini is the Founder and President of Bearium Networks, leveraging his IT experience to deliver managed services, cybersecurity solutions, and strategic technology planning. He’s passionate about helping organizations optimize their IT infrastructure to drive growth and security.
Host
Ben Climer
Ben Climer is a Lead Automation Specialist at Rewst, where he helps MSPs build and optimize workflows that save time and create ROI.

What is Panda Award Show?

Join Abhi and Ben as they explore career paths, mistakes, and lessons learned in the IT industry.

Ben Climer (00:01)
Hey, welcome back to the Panda Awards show. My name is Ben. I'm joined here by Abhi and good man. How about yourself?

Abhi Saini (00:07)
Hey, how are ya?

pretty good, pretty good. Excited for us to record this next episode.

Ben Climer (00:14)
Yeah, we're going to be talking about something you're the expert on. Yourself. Said either you or if you have a therapist, maybe they might be maybe your wife will put her at a raking. Do you think you know yourself better than your wife does or?

Abhi Saini (00:19)
I can only hope so.

You know, we met a little later in my life, so she's missing out on some core details here and there.

Ben Climer (00:37)
Okay,

so she's gonna get filled in on this podcast today.

Abhi Saini (00:39)
Yeah, exactly. She's gonna be like,

so this is why you're such a nerd. Okay.

Ben Climer (00:44)
Yeah, and I think, know, just kind of draw back the reason, you know, one of things that we wanted to do early on, it's weird talking about ourselves, but we're also asking other people to do it. So we thought it was appropriate to go ahead and put ourselves out there in the way that we're asking other people to do so.

Abhi Saini (00:55)
Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. It's, I think it kind of centers around a lot of what we're talking about on this podcast is, you know, trying to position yourself so that you can further your own career. You can't ask something of your boss that you might not understand yourself or, know, when you're working with a client or a customer, you need to be able to put yourselves in their shoes in order to get the job done. Or just ask the right questions.

Ben Climer (01:25)
Yeah.

Well, let's dig in here. So what was kind of your spark around tech or, maybe just a little bit about your childhood and then kind of how you found tech in the in your world.

Abhi Saini (01:40)
Yeah, yeah, so it was the day I was born. I came out with a keyboard.

Ben Climer (01:45)
Was it an IBM mechanical keyboard or type in a model M or?

Abhi Saini (01:50)
You know, I still

have that on my wishlist. It's the old IBM proper spring loaded keyboard. ⁓ the name. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, one day. No, so for me, you know, I've had a few sparks in my life that kind of made me gravitate towards technology. I don't think there was ever one in the beginning that I can put a really strong memory on. You know, I have core memories of

Ben Climer (01:55)
Those go for a lot of money.

Abhi Saini (02:17)
hearing a dial-up modem, trying to figure out, we're using the AOL CD this month, the Bell South CD the next month, the EarthLink CD the next month, right? Yeah, we did, one time, right? And I still have insane nostalgia for a lot of stuff that we grew up with that made our careers happen. But I think the really big thing, in elementary school,

Ben Climer (02:27)
Did you get on net zero?

Abhi Saini (02:43)
There was some stuff, we just worked with technology. I knew how to operate the tech. The projectors were just coming out into classrooms. The TVs were starting to become flat screens, this and that, right? There were some changes in elementary school. But I think the number one biggest thing was in middle school. Then it was seventh grade. And I ended up going to this technology middle school.

called Don Estridge High Tech Middle School. It's in South Florida. Named after Don Estridge, the father of the modern PC. So pretty cool. old. was... IBM actually gave their old foundry... not foundry... they had a tech campus in Boca Raton, Florida and they donated it to the school district and turned... they turned it into a middle school. So kind of cool.

Ben Climer (03:35)
That's cool.

Abhi Saini (03:35)
⁓

But yeah, so back then, they stuck us all into this class. They stuck us into like how to use Office. And myself along with like three or four other kids were just like, we already know how to use Office. Like we're nerds, come on. Like we used Office in sixth grade. We don't need to learn how to use it in seventh grade. And so somehow we actually convinced the teacher like we're

We're way beyond this. We're showing them how to do stuff. We're showing them that we do actually have the knowledge of how to use PowerPoint, Word, Excel. Because we're just kind of tinkering intuitive kids at the time, right? Kids are kind of sponges. And...

Ben Climer (04:11)
Now,

Abhi Saini (04:12)
So, so we convinced the teachers in the school to let us do something more technical. And their solution was to start a PC support class that was typically only in the high school level, where you have an actual like teacher classroom thing. but what they ended up doing with us is they, they put us with the sys admin that was at the school and they

they essentially got tickets throughout the day and we did those tickets. That's how we learned. like in, in seventh grade, was imaging computers with Altares. I was connecting printers and you know, like I learned how to install toner. learned the entire process of how a printer works, learning how to net install network printers on a pretty decently sized, Active Directory domain.

And we were fixing hardware, like at some point we're like, oh, these computers need upgraded. Okay, well here's a stack of RAM or like a almost crate, not a container of RAM, I forget what they call, right? We have like 50 RAM sticks in one box. And we just, went around to classroom to classroom and after hours or during breaks and we installed RAM. It simple stuff, right?

And it's, it's really interesting looking back on that because I made a lot of friends at that school. A lot of friends that are also.

pretty nerdy in their own ways. and you know, I think I'm one of the few people that actually went into an IT career. Everyone else went into something else tech related, whether it be, like computer science, computer engineering, you know, all kinds of different things. a few became doctors. I think one of them is actually a, a very well known pediatric cardiologist in

a certain part of the country. ⁓ Yeah, great, like there were some smart kids I was working with. But yeah, that was kind of the big thing that pushed me into tech. And I continued doing that in high school, in like an actual PC support academy course. I got my A plus certification in 11th grade and just kind of continued doing tech.

Ben Climer (06:08)
It's quite the pivot.

Abhi Saini (06:31)
It just seemed like lot of fun, but...

It wasn't originally intended to be my career. I wanted to go into computer engineering, but that was difficult.

Ben Climer (06:43)
And

what did you want to do in computer engineering? What did you picture that job being like when you were thinking about it?

Abhi Saini (06:50)
I wanted to design and work on circuit boards. I wanted to not necessarily program the system that's using, but when a new device comes out, you gotta create a circuit board and you gotta figure out all the pathways. I wanted to do that. I thought that was really cool.

Ben Climer (07:10)
Yeah.

Abhi Saini (07:11)
Like I learned to solder when I was like 10 years old. You know, I wanted to, I thought it was cool, like awesome. But that never, that never came to fruition. Apparently calculus and me don't go along.

Ben Climer (07:24)
so we've gone through middle school, we have our A plus. How did you enter the job market? What did that look like?

Abhi Saini (07:31)
So originally, you know, the A-plus exam, I got it just because it was part of the coursework. I wasn't expecting it to do anything with it. And that was in 11th grade. I first used that certification three or four years later.

I just wanted a part-time job. I knew I was good at technology, so I was like, well, I live pretty close to a Best Buy. Maybe I can just work for Geek Squad. It seemed cool. It seemed like the right thing to do or the right choice. And so I applied for a job. I got an interview. I went to the interview. Forgot my wallet at home. Luckily, I didn't need it.

Ben Climer (08:01)
Yeah.

Abhi Saini (08:11)
And they saw on my resume, the interviewer, that I had an A plus certification. And they're like, you have an A plus certification. That's awesome. Like, you'll be a great fit here. And the rest of the interview was nothing to do with technology. It was just chatting and talking about what I like to do and just getting a vibe for myself, I guess. Now as someone who is on hiring committees and has worked in

interviewing people, I knew exactly that was just like, for this job level, A +, we can already know this person has the general knowledge we need. Now let's just see if they're a good fit. And it, I got the job, I was not a good fit, but I got the job.

Ben Climer (08:54)
How old would you say the person interviewing you was? Were they similar age? Were they a lot older?

Abhi Saini (09:00)
They were a manager for the store probably in their... I mean, back then I was a 19 year old kid so that guy looked 4 year old at the time but he was probably in his late 30s. Pretty close to the age we are now.

Ben Climer (09:12)
Gotcha.

Okay. Yeah.

And so that was the store manager would actually interview and pick the geek squad employees as well. wasn't like its own thing necessarily.

Abhi Saini (09:28)
Yeah.

Yeah. I think at the time, I don't know if they've changed and this was quite a while ago. but there was no Geek Squad manager. The store manager oversaw Geek Squad and then Geek Squad had a team lead or a service lead of some kind. and so we did an interview with that because that service lead didn't have any hiring authority within the corporate structure. So it fell onto management.

But it was an interesting job. learned a lot. Tech-wise, I didn't learn too much, but what I did learn was how to interact with people. Because customers are coming in, working in a city that's known to have kind of strong-willed people. And it was a lot of learning how to deal with that struggle or that difficult part. Someone comes in, they...

expect their system to work, they expect you to know everything about their computer, this is the first time you're hearing about it, you don't know what's going on yet, but you say it all with a smile and you work and you talk, you have a conversation, you learn about the system and there you go, you're able to fix the computer or take it in and ship it off to the next technician that has more knowledge than you.

Ben Climer (10:36)
Yeah, where would that handoff normally be? you guys kind of just like was is it an amount of time? Is it a certain issue type or when did you guys hand off to the depot at that time?

Abhi Saini (10:49)
At Geek Squad, it was based on the work that was necessary. So we didn't do any hardware repairs in the store. The store only prefer software things. So we can run an antivirus, can run backups, reinstall your OS, install some applications, things like that. anything hardware, unless it's installing a device you purchased in the store.

we shipped off to a depot.

we had, we had like memory and fans and the simple stuff in stock as far as I remember. and if we determined that the Ram was bad, either by running mem test or swapping the Ram and it fixes all the problems, we would tell them, Hey, your memory's bad. and we wouldn't like say you can buy it. We'd be like, you need this. You know, it's X amount of monies,

Ben Climer (11:20)
Yeah.

Abhi Saini (11:39)
Usually we'd call them up, be like, it's going to cost you this amount to fix, so and so, and they'll be like, okay, yeah, that's fine, or no, nevermind. And then if they say yes, you fix the computer, you install a new memory, the new components. If they say no, you return it back to the way you found it and give it to outtake, whatever the opposite of intake would be.

Ben Climer (11:58)
Sure.

it sounds like you're dealing with a lot of virus removal and a lot of, like you said, a lot of software based stuff. were people generally okay to deal with? something that I learned early in my career is you have to separate someone's anger towards the

problem versus their anger towards you? Did you have a lot of those along the way?

Abhi Saini (12:20)
a lot of angry customers, especially when they're, let's say they're sold a new computer and then they install an application wrong, it bricks the computer essentially, they're not, they don't realize or understand that it's their fault and you can't tell them it's their fault. So they come back two days after buying a new computer and they're complaining that it's slow or this or that.

And there was tons of reason as to why it's slow either. did, they installed an application that they shouldn't have. They were sold like a, I think at the time, at that time we were on, it was before Core I, think, the core processors, I it was like Core 2 Duo or something, you know, they were sold a Pentium or a Celeron instead of needing a 2 Quad or whatever it was.

Ben Climer (12:59)
Nah.

Abhi Saini (13:05)
You know, that type of stuff. that also, was like learning to how to talk to people to understand what they need because they have no idea about technology. That's your job as the expert. You need to translate their desires into what is the best solution for them. And that includes not under serving them and giving them like at this point, giving them an I three when they need an I seven, but also don't give them an I nine because

Ben Climer (13:16)
Yeah.

Abhi Saini (13:31)
no one besides gaming and specific people need that, right? Like bring them down to what's a good fit for them. And going back to what you actually asked me, that was kind of the difficulty. It was as a pretty young, pretty arrogant kid, being able to talk to customers that were not having a good day and

trying to be nice to them. And if I often made jokes or cracked, it was kind of a wisecrack. And those jokes don't translate very well.

Ben Climer (14:05)
Yeah. And I guess

is Geek Squad giving you like a script for any of this? Like this is how we want you to talk to the customer or did they just interact when there was a problem? Yeah.

Abhi Saini (14:12)
No, no, I don't remember any of that.

Yeah, I had no recollection of being told what to do. It was just like, take it in, fill out the form that has like their name, their password. Back then it was like, what's your password? Write it down on this piece of paper, right? And we'll type it up into the system. Which again, like even nowadays, I think that's still gonna happen if you're dealing with a residential customer, like you're gonna, they're gonna have to give you their password

I mean, it was like filling out that form and taking down the problem, like writing down what their experience is, what the symptoms are. And then we'll take that and say, okay, we'll diagnose it and figure it out.

Ben Climer (14:50)
Yeah. you were, we're going to get squad a bit and maybe you weren't the best fit. Did you leave that job on your own? Did they say it was time to part ways?

Abhi Saini (15:00)
No, I did not.

I did not leave that job on my own. I don't remember why. I may have technically left it on my own. Something went wrong. Either I did something wrong or I got in trouble for doing something mundane. I don't really know, but after around six months I left and I got a job at a competing retail organization.

HH Greg.

Ben Climer (15:25)
I haven't heard that name in a second.

Abhi Saini (15:27)
Yeah, yeah, right. ⁓

Ben Climer (15:29)
Did they have

their version of Geek Squad or are you doing more of a sales position there?

Abhi Saini (15:35)
I entered the job and sales. It was like electronic sales. So we spent a few weeks learning about fridges and appliances, but also TVs and computers and cameras and all that. And as someone that was into computers, I was terrible at selling you a fridge. But let me tell you, I could sell you a laptop. I know exactly which one you need. And actually all of my coworkers handed those laptops.

people than me, which I loved. What I didn't realize is that a computer has like a two dollar margin, whereas a fridge has a like 50 % margin. I made no money. I made absolutely no money working there, but it was it was my first foray into sales and I it was fun.

Ben Climer (16:10)
Wow.

Abhi Saini (16:21)
I was still arrogant, was still naive, I was still not someone that should be in sales. But I did learn a lot of how to talk to people and to learn what they need so you can position them into the right spot. But I was terrible at upselling warranties. Not, you know.

Ben Climer (16:38)
Hehehe.

I'm sure you don't want the additional year warranty even though the manufacturer includes a year.

Abhi Saini (16:46)
on an HDMI cable too.

Ben Climer (16:48)
Yeah, how about a $18 warranty for this $20 HDMI cable?

Abhi Saini (16:54)
Oh no, we sold like $120 HDMI cables. Yeah, they were... We did. They were gold plated, oxygen infused. They had ruby red slippers. I mean, they were the bee's knees of cables.

Ben Climer (16:58)
Did you have the monster cables? You had the monster cables.

yeah. I take it you didn't stay at HH Greg forever. What did that look like?

Abhi Saini (17:16)
I think that was five.

So I think actually before I had my job at Geek Squad, because that was my first like real tech job, where I was doing tech work, right? Before that, when I was living on campus at Florida Atlantic University, I got a job at Living Room Theaters. was, Living Room Theaters is still around. They're a movie theater restaurant combination kind of company with, yeah.

Ben Climer (17:24)
Yeah.

you say a restaurant?

Abhi Saini (17:43)
Yeah, so they have a restaurant in the front of the building and movie theater in the back. ⁓ And they primarily show independent and foreign films, not feature films that you typically find at your general stores.

Ben Climer (17:48)
Okay.

Abhi Saini (17:59)
they just built this building on campus and this company was gonna run it at night. During the day, it was used for the theater department and the film department. The theaters were classrooms.

And then at night it was run as a movie theater in a restaurant. But in the beginning I was helping them with their projectors and their sound systems and all the technology that goes into operating a movie theater in general. And we had five or six theaters. forget exactly how many, but it was really cool to do that.

And eventually I left that because I wasn't living on campus and I didn't have a car. ⁓ And then that's when Best Buy was closer. And then when I left Best Buy, I went to HH Gregg. I also got fired from there. And I didn't have a job for a few months. And then I got a call from a friend of mine, a mentor really. He's like, hey, do you want an internship? I was like, sure. Yeah, what is it?

Ben Climer (18:36)
Sure.

Abhi Saini (18:54)
And that's when I ended up working for the school district of Palm Beach County in a temporary capacity. And that was a lot of fun. That's when I first really learned what systems administration was actually about in a proper environment where, you know, I had a manager and a team lead and a team and everything that goes into that.

Ben Climer (19:17)
Yeah,

what did that interview look like?

Abhi Saini (19:19)
It didn't. The guy already knew who I was. So that... I don't remember that interview at all because it was friendly. It was very friendly. But I think it mostly centered around, you know, what do you know, what do you like, what do do. My task for that internship... And this is why the interview didn't really matter so much.

Ben Climer (19:21)
OK, I just said, yeah, you're vouched for it. You're good.

Abhi Saini (19:39)
It was to work on, we had two things. One was to work on application packages for scripting and application, sorry, application packages for our RMM that we were using, which was Land Desk, before Avanti bought it. And yeah, I don't know why everyone hates.

land desk that I talked to, but I love it. It was just like, as a kid, I think I was like, this is great. And now I think as a seasoned professional, I'm like, I don't know, but I haven't used it in decades.

And then the other task, which was probably the bulk of my internship, was cataloging our entire inventory of computers for the entire school district in order to submit it for a grant to get a one-to-one ratio of computers for the school district for students. So I had to catalog 75-ish thousand computers.

Ben Climer (20:33)
Wow.

Abhi Saini (20:35)
Yeah, and we had 200-ish thousand students. I think it was like 180 at the time, 180,000 students. We currently had 75,000 computers. And the goal was to get a grant to enable the purchase of the extra like 100,000 computers we needed.

Ben Climer (20:55)
Now, did these have barcode asset tags or anything like that, or was this all manual there?

Abhi Saini (21:02)
Everything was barcoded, but everything was also attached to Active Directory. The only thing is that it was, from my understanding, I never could get access to like, be able to run everything at once. It was like, I had to go to each school and look at their directory tree and...

Ben Climer (21:06)
I see.

Ugh.

Abhi Saini (21:22)
go to whatever OU I knew that it was in, because it was organized very well. It was like, here's the teachers, here's the staff, here's the faculty, the staff, the students, right? And so I had to go to every single school and look at every single OU and extract the computers from that OU.

it was cool to be able to see like, to be part of a project to, you know, acquire a hundred thousand computers or whatever it was, being part of that data acquisition to, or the data gathering to side of it, figuring it out and being able to submit that to my bosses.

Ben Climer (21:56)
was that kind of your sole task there, like when the audit was done, were you done or what did that turn into?

Abhi Saini (22:02)
Kind of,

yeah. So that was because it was an internship, like I had a few things. was a few times I did create application installation packages for Landesk. Pretty much everything was Dell, but we may have had like four or five generations of Dell's because if you're installing computers every year, you're not replacing them every year, right? So your firmware might be different. Your BIOS chip are different.

certain drivers might be different. And at the time, we still had Windows XP, we still had Vista, we still had 7, all running concurrently. applications couldn't just be installed on a whim.

Ben Climer (22:40)
there.

Abhi Saini (22:40)
after that like task was done and this was timed where it was like September through December My internship was over that department because I was working at like the headquarters of the school district they didn't have a position open for me

because I was already in the system as a school district employee, I had an easier time applying for jobs at schools to become the school sysadmin. And that was the leap to start doing sysadmin work.

so I got a job working at an elementary school I worked there for six months because it was the second half of the year and I switched to a different school after that so I started in December finished in like June or July

and moved to a different school for July to that school year. But it was cool. I got to learn a lot about managing your own tech stack. And this is one thing I loved about my journey, is I was slowly just doing more and more and more, these little tiny incremental steps. ⁓ now I'm having to manage just a few hundred computers instead of 50,000 computers.

Ben Climer (23:38)
Yeah.

Abhi Saini (23:47)
I remember one fun thing I did was it was a mail merge. The simplest thing in the world.

It was just, we had to print awards for fifth grade because they were graduating, right? This was a fun thing to do, a nice thing to do for the kids. And someone was like, okay, we'll type up all the awards. I was like, what do you mean you're going to type them up? Like, no. And so I just, because I was like the liaison between different departments, I was able to go to the student.

the person who was in charge of attendance, they'd be like, hey, I need a record of all of the students in fifth grade. And they could give me a CSV of all the students in fifth grade. And it shows me their name and their teacher. So was like, great. And then I can do a fill-in, find and replace for the teacher names to be proper teacher names instead of just like last name only. I can do a case replacement on all the student names because the

whole list was full of caps only And I was able to generate like 150 awards in an hour of dealing with people and coordinating that versus, you know, a week of manual entry or having every make their own, right?

Ben Climer (25:00)
Yeah.

I wonder if there's schools still doing that today, like manually typing them out.

Abhi Saini (25:03)
Here's the order.

I think a lot of it's more automated because that district moved to become a Google Apps pilot project And now they're a Google workspace for education environment fully.

Ben Climer (25:16)
Yeah.

do you move around positions there or do you have this role for a bit and then you decide it's time for something new?

Abhi Saini (25:29)
I was at one school for six months and I was at another school for one year. I was fast paced. I wanted to do things more. In four years, I had six jobs. I wanted to do more. I wanted something more technical.

Ben Climer (25:38)
Yeah.

Abhi Saini (25:46)
I was actually applying to higher jobs in the school district, but I was never getting them. I was getting really frustrated with why I wasn't getting them. And I had friends going for the same position because you end up being friends with other technicians in the schools. And they always got them and they were always older than me. So was like, I guess I'm just too young. I should go do something else. I don't know if that was true, but that's what I saw. And so.

I ended up applying for a job with Comcast, AT &T, and other telcos. I ended up getting a job with AT &T I noticed in an email that the guy's signature said he's the recruiter for Florida. Not South Florida where I was living. All of Florida.

I was like, hmm. So I just emailed, they're like, Hey, do you do all of Florida? Like are there any positions open in Orlando? And he's like, yeah, there are. Do you want it? I was like, yes.

I don't know. At the time, I really don't know why. I think I just wanted to move to where I could do some more fun stuff. I had a friend that lived up here. I'm in Orlando now. And he was doing cool things and I wasn't doing anything fun in South Florida. So I think I just was gravitated towards wanting to do something more entertaining.

did six weeks of training here in Orlando, ended up getting the job. It was like, think at week six, you have to take a test. If you fail the test, you get fired. If you pass the test, you move on to weeks seven, eight, and nine of training. I don't remember, but I do know for a fact if you fail the exam, you were let go.

Ben Climer (27:20)
What are you doing there? Are you in the call center? Are you installing service

Abhi Saini (27:24)
Yeah, was,

I was a wire technician. So I was installing service in residential and some businesses, we would, we would take the circuit from the start, which was the AT &T side, make sure it's wired from the main.

in the cross box, so going from like the primary trunk for AT &T's network down to the individual wires for an entire neighborhood. Take the circuit from there up, it might be up like a telephone pole, put a ladder up a telephone pole, bring the wire down to the house, put in a box on the side of the house for the demark, and then run the inside wire to install the cable to wherever the customer wants.

within reason.

Ben Climer (28:07)
And was that DSL at that time or had they transitioned to fiber?

Abhi Saini (28:15)
It was VDSL and we had fiber. our region or our service area within our like central Florida region didn't have fiber, new construction had it. They were typically only giving it to like the higher techs. I was like a level one wire tech.

level two and three people, they were able to do fiber. And I left AT &T the month I was supposed to be trained on fiber termination.

Ben Climer (28:39)
did you already have something lined up or you're just like, I, I'm not going to climb ladders anymore.

Abhi Saini (28:43)
I

Well, a little bit of both, right? I had a work order with AT &T at a site, and it turns out it was next door to an MSP, a managed service provider. I didn't know what an MSP was, I didn't know the term, but it just said they did technology. And so I walked in the door after I finished my work order.

I was just like, hey, I do technology. What do you guys do? They're like, we're not really hiring right now, but we'll take your resume. Had a short conversation with the VP of the company. It was a small, small company. So there's only two or three people in the building. like a week or two goes by and

Ben Climer (29:13)
haha

Abhi Saini (29:29)
They had to let go of somebody. And then they called me up hey, you know, we need someone to this position. Are you available? And I was like, I can start in like two weeks because I currently have a job. Something went down at AT &T and I was going to get in trouble. And I told my boss at the time, was like, hey, it was not my fault. Okay. And he agreed.

And then something else happened. was like, that is my fault. I messed up. I'm sorry. I would never want to do that. It was, I like completely did a job wrong. so I was like, Hey, instead of writing me up, what if I just quit? He's like,

All right.

I was like I already have a position like available. I was planning on telling you about it This is just a coincidence and maybe that's why I didn't do well in that work order for that service order because I I May have had other things in my mind And again, I was still young. I was a young kid, right?

I did not know what I was doing in my life. But this small MSP took a risk on me. They brought me on. And I stayed there for a couple of years. I learned a lot.

Ben Climer (30:37)
now what did that onboarding process look like? Were you just like cast out into the fire? Did they let you shadow anybody? Was there any documentation at all?

Abhi Saini (30:48)
Back then? Nothing. I'm not gonna throw them under the bus. At the same time, they don't exist anymore.

At the time there wasn't too much documentation. We didn't have ITGlu when I started. I we used ITGlu like six months later. Started with it. But my first thing was to work with a...

Ben Climer (31:02)
Yeah.

Abhi Saini (31:07)
with work with one client I was dedicated to that client for a certain period of time.

And that was how I learned

how to deal with people that are using technology for business rather than for education. And so was a lot of that. ⁓ But it was a lot of not knowing what's there and just figuring it out. documentation is really hard, especially when...

Ben Climer (31:22)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Abhi Saini (31:32)
At the time you didn't have good documentation tools. It was just, here's a notebook. Here's a, you know, a PDF or...

Ben Climer (31:38)
Yeah,

if I had to guess, you probably had some credentials documented, maybe some IPs or like servers, but you probably didn't have actual processes documented if I had to guess or very rare if they were.

Abhi Saini (31:51)
Yeah. Yep. Exactly.

Yeah. And, they know, I think a lot of this happens a lot at some MSPs. It's even password managers at the time were kind of new. They weren't that popular. So what do do when you don't have a password manager?

same password.

Literally, we have like one password for every client. And they changed that eventually. But in the beginning, it was like, this is not. It also didn't seem bad. It was just like, OK, yeah, that makes sense. You we don't have any other way to do it. Just like back in the day, right, the first ever password, it wasn't really a password. was just how do I make sure no one touches my stuff?

Ben Climer (32:13)
Yeah.

so you're transitioning from education and retail, what immediately stood out about working with businesses versus the general public and education

Abhi Saini (32:44)
you know, in education, one thing that, especially at the elementary school level, it's kind of just like herding sheep, sometimes like herding cats, right? You're a lot of the job is psychological in nature. It's dealing with little tiny humans whereas on the business side.

It is like, I need this to work, because if I don't have it working, I'm not making money, and if I'm not making money, I'm losing money. You're like, shit, okay. I need to...

Ben Climer (33:16)
Ha

Abhi Saini (33:18)
I this is really important like this the CEO of this company is demanding that something's working It's like okay. It knew as a younger kid to you're kind of scared of that. You're like, okay. Yeah Let me let me help you. Let me figure it out Let me try to understand what's going on and you will do whatever it takes to To get the job done because you don't really have any other choice

Ben Climer (33:40)
Now, as you're navigating this, can you think back and remember any mistakes you made early on? Like did you delete someone's contacts or anything like that as you were learning?

Abhi Saini (33:53)
So many mistakes.

Things like not screwing in a VGA cable. You know, those things are loose. Also why I hate HDMI. DisplayPort all day, baby. not anymore, right? USB-C better now. anyways. ⁓

Ben Climer (34:06)
Ha

Abhi Saini (34:10)
You didn't back up this person's desktop before you restart, reset their computer. cool. the one big mistake I made at one point, I, this was, this was after I was working at MSP when I went internal for a while. I was, I was changing a domain for emails or like a sub department.

and somehow I deleted their mailbox and then I deleted the backup.

Ben Climer (34:36)
Oof.

Abhi Saini (34:41)
And so I literally had to go to this employee and I like, I screwed up. All your emails are gone. Like everything's gone. Luckily they didn't really care because they didn't work in the email that much. They were doing other things.

Ben Climer (34:41)
You

be

relieving, honestly. if, if you want to do inbox zero the IT guy deleted my email. So if you want anything done, you better email me again, cause I'm not going to get to it.

Abhi Saini (35:03)
you

Yeah, I mean, luckily it wasn't the person that was working there for like seven years, right? It was the employee there for just one or two years. But it was, it was stupid things like that. It was not doing the right thing because you just didn't have the experience or understanding of what the right thing actually is. And like you said, not having those processes in place

Ben Climer (35:14)
Yeah.

Abhi Saini (35:29)
It's way too easy to make a mistake.

Ben Climer (35:30)
you brought or they brought a documentation system in house. Did people actually use it? Be honest. Were people making processes in it or what?

Abhi Saini (35:40)
yeah, no,

we used it, but at the same time there were only two of us. So, I mean, there was the owner of the company, but he wasn't in ITQL all that much. It was just me and the VP of the company. So yeah, we were using it because we're the ones that wanted it.

Ben Climer (35:55)
Yeah.

How did you guys prioritize that when you were early on, like figuring out what you wanted to document? Was it just you'd run across something or was there a specific effort to document certain things?

Abhi Saini (36:08)
this was a while back. I'm trying to remember, but I think it was a lot of just as it comes up, document it. Like, you know, when we do this cleanup on this client or yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Toyota would be so proud.

Ben Climer (36:19)
just-in-time documentation. I've heard it referred to as before.

Ha ha

ha ha ha.

Very cool. So we're at the MSP. You know, we made a couple of mistakes, but we're coming along. We were starting to document things. What else did you get kind of out of this MSP life? Did you have different titles or roles? Did you wear different hats along the way?

Abhi Saini (36:43)
No, I was there for just two years. At the beginning, I don't think I even had a role. I think when I asked for a role, my boss was like, what do you want? I was like, I need a title. He's like, what do you want it to be? You tell me. And I think I made myself like a chief technology officer, which very much was not.

Ben Climer (37:00)
man, yeah, I think I Feel like that's something that can just possibly happen in the MSP world as sometimes there's some title bloat

Abhi Saini (37:01)
I was IT technician number one.

Yeah,

yeah. Even today, right? Like, I don't know what to call myself. Just the guy that helps with computers. Yeah, so I didn't have a lot of different positions. I was only there for two years. It was a small company. At some point I was in charge of like one kid. I say kid, he was like four years younger than me.

Ben Climer (37:18)
Check signer. ⁓

Abhi Saini (37:32)
there wasn't a lot of like leadership per se. we have a job to do. was at the time, like most MSPs even today were very reactive versus proactive. And so we weren't, we weren't doing planning. Um, VCIOs weren't the thing. Like that term hadn't been coined yet. Um, and if it had, was like in some niche market that no one talks about or no one knows exists. Cause it's like.

Ben Climer (37:44)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Abhi Saini (37:59)
super niche. So yeah, we were just doing the thing that most IT companies did. You have a problem, we fix it.

close the ticket. Move on to the next ticket. That's about it. One thing I did like when I was centered at that client of ours, a few days a week, it was being able to just walk around and talk to people and you know, drive by, administrating. And so then you notice people are like, you need a new mouse because I noticed that it's falling apart

you keep clicking down at the task bar, alt tab exists. Time to teach people, alt tab what that it's like that XKCD comic, you know, you're just the 10,000 people learn something new every day. And if you do 10,000 people every day, you will never teach in all of humanity because there's more than 10,000 people born every day or some bizarre thing like that.

That might be off by a magnitude of order, or an order of magnitude, but I'll do the math later.

Ben Climer (38:52)
He

Do feel like you picked up different technical skills or you know? Did you kind of get to two years? Were you at a burnout point or you just ready for the next move or did something come do you?

Abhi Saini (39:06)
I did learn a lot. It was, you I learned, I learned Sonic wall and I learned unify and I learned, Sophos and I learned, you know, Microsoft and Google and windows and Mac and this and that, right? Every, the one thing I loved about MSP life is that you have access to so much stuff. it is.

the entirety of every technology in existence all at once. And you have to know all of it. I learned a lot about like being able to pick up

knowledge really quickly in order to solve a problem because you're not going to know everything that comes through the door. You're gonna have to figure it out. And that was... I've always wanted to figure it out. I was always a like a go-getter or whatever you want to call it. But you've... was never in a position where it was like truly figure it out or we don't make money.

Ben Climer (40:06)
Right.

Abhi Saini (40:07)
That's

a whole nother ball game.

Ben Climer (40:09)
you pick up those skills Are you kind of burn out at that point or how does that transition happen?

Abhi Saini (40:15)
⁓

I wouldn't say I was burned out necessarily just wanted something different and I was applying for other jobs

Turns out I ended up becoming internal IT for a small business. I ended up becoming their director of technology. And that was the... ended up becoming the last job that I ever had.

⁓

Ben Climer (40:37)
Yeah.

When you go internal IT, how has that transitioned from managing a bunch of different companies to one? Do you enjoy getting to focus in a little bit more on one company? Did you get bored?

Abhi Saini (40:49)
Yes. ⁓

Ben Climer (40:52)
Ha ha ha.

Abhi Saini (40:53)
one thing I loved really well is like having control over the entire environment. It's like, I, I'm the one that was in charge of what we needed and what we could do. like, okay, you have.

Ben Climer (40:57)
Yeah.

Abhi Saini (41:05)
We had a Sophos. Great. Sophos, I like Sophos. Ended up switching to a different vendor because I think it just wanted something different. There was a good reason at the time. But it's like, okay, well, I get to choose what vendor and I get to choose what we're gonna do because I'm the one in charge of the environment. I'm not listening to...

someone else necessarily. Like my expertise was given to the CEO or the owner of the company and be like, Hey, this is what we need. And they're like, okay, you've made your case. Let's do it.

Ben Climer (41:32)
And what did that

approval process look like? So when I was an internal, for example, we kind of did a comparison. was like, Hey, here's the alternatives. Here's the one that I recommend. And here's why was there something dissimilar to that there, or did they kind of take your recommendation at face value?

Abhi Saini (41:50)
It was both. So I myself picked three to five vendors that I can hear about, learn about, figure it out, peer reviews, white papers, demo the product, all that stuff, come up with the reasoning behind it. I would make that into a report and be like, recommend we do this because of what I've just figured out. And they'd be like, okay, cool.

You know, because I've already done the work. They're not going to do the work because they have no reason to. I'm the person that dealing with the tech.

as a small business, you have...

an approval process, but at the same time you kind of don't. It's kind of wishy-washy because you've gained the trust of the person that is in charge. And so the owner of the company, if you can gain their trust, they're going to trust that you made the right decision and aren't trying to screw them over.

Ben Climer (42:40)
Did you have any big challenges while you're internal IT or did you feel pretty comfortable in that role?

Abhi Saini (42:46)
I felt comfortable. I also felt overwhelmed because I, I went from just technology to technology plus budgeting and forecasting and, everything, everything to do with the entire IT department. And, you know, I suffice to say I was, I liked it enough, you know, like

They're like, you need to make an IT budget so we know what we're spending and you can tell us what it is. And I wasn't the one controlling the budget, but I was like, this is what we should have. And they use that to influence the spend of the company.

Ben Climer (43:21)
Yeah

Abhi Saini (43:22)
But I was like, okay, let me make a really pretty spreadsheet. And I made a very pretty spreadsheet and they liked it. And I was like, great. And it used this for the next 10 years.

Ben Climer (43:29)
And, and

I feel like that's something that is overlooked when, you know, as this admin or someone looks at those it manager, it director jobs is a lot of times you may be doing stuff. That's not just turning the riches, you're setting the budget and it, in a lot of ways, it's a lot of office politics, depending on the office and

Abhi Saini (43:48)
Man, it's...

Yeah,

yeah, and you know this kind of dives into my current role too. So I was at this internal job for seven years. The longest job I've ever had.

So it's kind of fortuitous, if that's the right word.

that the last W2 employment that I've ever had, so far at least, hopefully ever, is also the longest relationship I've ever had in a professional setting.

Ben Climer (44:06)
Yeah.

Abhi Saini (44:18)
I was still an arrogant ass. I did not get along with the CEO of the company,

Ben Climer (44:20)
Hahaha.

Abhi Saini (44:27)
and it was literally like, you aren't, you aren't very nice. You aren't doing good things. You aren't this and that. Like you should, we don't appreciate the way that you're handling these things.

and I, that happened to me quite a number of times. There have been a number of instances in my life where I wanted something and I couldn't get it because the person that controlled that didn't like me or I was mean in a sense or something, right? I rubbed some of the wrong way. and so I, I quickly learned now being internal,

I learned to read body language and read the room better and understand the nuances of human nature to become a better, nicer, more empathetic person. And I've always been a nice guy, but at the same time, like I was a smart kid. I was a wise ass, a smart wise ass.

Ben Climer (45:26)
it and

if I may ask there's probably someone out there listening that was or is still that person you know they're very smart and intelligent but for some reason people don't like them sometimes how did you kind of figure out you know how you needed to change your communication style and things like that to

you know, mesh better in those situations.

Abhi Saini (45:57)
I mean, I think one of the most...

One of the biggest things that helped me was being put in my place by people in power. It was, you know, having a crush on a girl and her mom saying, you're a dick.

It's humbling in a way, you know, it really tells you like it puts you in your It makes you understand what matters to to get the thing you need And

Because that happened, I learned more and more how to understand what people want and put myself in their shoes to understand what they're asking from their perspective. They don't care that I'm cracking the joke. It's that I'm cracking the joke at the wrong time. Or when...

they say something's not working and I was like, it's no problem, you I can fix that. No, it's, it is a really big problem because from their perspective, it is a work stoppage, right? Or it is, it is the one thing that is stopping them from finishing a project, whatever it might be, right? It's, it's like, it's like if you run out of toilet paper when you're in the bathroom, it's really frustrating.

You don't, it might not be the end of the world, but when that happens, you're like, it's really difficult to get through that situation.

Ben Climer (47:20)
Yeah, like

wish I would have stored the extra rolls there. Now I'm in the situation.

Abhi Saini (47:24)
Yeah.

And half the time, you know, it's your fault. You already noticed that you were running low on rolls. You could have put them in there. You chose not to.

Ben Climer (47:32)
Yep.

You didn't have N plus one toilet paper and now you're in a crappy situation.

Abhi Saini (47:37)
always have n plus one always

Ben Climer (47:44)
You

Abhi Saini (47:44)
But yeah, it was things like that. It was just putting the other person's mindset in perspective. So that way you can just truly understand why the mundane problem is a really big deal.

keyboard shortcuts and how to do macros and fun things as a kid, I figured everybody would know them. Because as a kid, you learn how to tell time who can't read a clock. You learn how to do math, who doesn't know how to do multiplication? You're like, everyone knows this. And then as I matured and as I learned, I realized that those are not normal skills that everyone has.

And if you're in a position today where you know that you're freaking smart and by all means own that, if you're smart, you don't have to humble yourself all the time. Be the smart person. But you have to understand that not everybody is smart in the same way that you are. know, you and I, Ben, like we have really different skill sets.

Like you can walk circles around me when it comes to automation. Right. But I think I would probably better, I'm probably better at running a business than you are today. That doesn't mean that either of us are incapable of doing each other's tasks. It's just, we haven't learned that skill yet. And that's the one thing that I constantly had to learn. was that.

my skill set was something that other people didn't have and I don't have theirs and that's the whole reason that this company has 20 different jobs.

Ben Climer (49:30)
I've heard it described as there are certain things that the nature and nurture of your life have led you to be more naturally adept at. know, IT for us, for example. It doesn't mean that you can't learn something else, but there will be skills in your life that are easier to pick up than others. Whereas, you know, that CFO you're working with

finances may come super simple to them and they can get to eight out of 10 in a month or three months and to get to that level it might take you years for example and sometimes if there's a lot of choices in front of you it's finding out what you know what thrives you what excites you and gets you from one to ten faster

Abhi Saini (50:15)
Absolutely. Yeah, and that's that's something that I love about Technology and that's something that I love about my position today as the owner of an IT service company the owner of MSP it's knowing that Like I'm damn good at technology. I know I am other people have told me I am I've proven myself. I don't need to continuously

tell myself I'm not worthy, right? The imposter syndrome isn't real. It's not real. It's not real. And if you realize that...

Even even today like as the owner of a company as someone that is really good at technology I'm the first person tell you I don't know anything. I do not know what I'm doing and I never will because The bar keeps changing right the the next the goalpost keeps moving. I think one thing that I've always had a problem with is

having too many interests, right? I love math, I love science, love literature, I love movies, I love art, but how do you take all of those interests and drive them into something that actually makes you a functioning member of society? And for me, it's been kind of owning a small business. I get my...

I get to wet my beak with marketing and creativity and designing artwork or designing my LinkedIn banner. I get to dive into accounting and finance and math. And yeah, I'm not very good at it, but...

If I reach out to an expert to help set me up for success, I can then take what they've implemented and just carry it forward and understand and learn what they did.

relating

it back to like internal IT, it was very similar to how at an MSP, know, people, there's a, if you look at like on Reddit, our MSP versus our sysadmin, they hate each other. Don't understand why as someone that's been in both positions multiple times, right? Not just what I'm currently doing. it's the same thing. It's the same bloody thing

you have your company, which is your team, you have your clients, which are other departments that you don't deal with.

In the end, they're kind of all the same thing.

in the same regard, you have to understand what every client does

you have to learn how different departments work. In this case, how different companies work, how an accounting company is different than an architectural firm, which is different than a medical office, which is different than this and that. In the same way, how in a

Internal how HR has different needs than accounting which has different needs than marketing

But if you take a step back from being too close to it, you can really see how there's so many similarities, no matter what style company or what industry you're in. Business is business. Money is money. Tech is tech. How you do tiny little things might be different, but in the end, my dollar is the same as your dollar.

Ben Climer (53:26)
yeah.

If someone is out there working for someone and they're ready to get out on their own, how did you know? How did you know it's time? I know you had dreams and aspirations for awhile, but when did you decide now's the time for me to go out on my own?

Abhi Saini (53:44)
you know, I've always had the ambitions even as a young kid, I wanted to start a business. My current company is like my third or fourth that I've started. but the catalyst really was that if you are, I see this on Reddit a lot. It's like, I, I don't have anything to do. spend half of my day staring out the window.

what a lot of people don't realize. And if you do have, if you do find yourself having a lot of spare time, that's something I found, is that I just felt like I had too much time on my hands. Never stop refining the process. Never stop documenting the tech

You know, if you buy a computer today, maybe start planning for replacing it in five years, because you know you're going to have to, you may as well plan for it.

And the same way for yourself. You know that skills changed. You have been doing tech for two minutes or for 20 years. You have seen, and actually I take that back. Even if you've been doing tech for two minutes and you are a fresh 18 year old grad right at the high school and you don't want to go to college and you want to go into technology, guess what? The technology you see today wasn't there when you were five years old. TikTok was not there 10 years ago. Right? And you might be really comfortable with the technology you see today.

but you didn't know what the hell it was when you started out in life. And the same goes for your tech career. If you've been in this industry for 20, 30 years, the technology that you saw when you started, especially 30 years ago from today, you you were dealing with a Y2K bug. The technology that we deal with in the beginning changes so rapidly that nobody should be able to say like, I don't feel like there's anything I need to learn or I feel like I know enough about this.

Ben Climer (55:33)
Yeah, technology is truly this ever learning career. If it's something that you're not in, but want to be, you don't stop learning in technology. It's always something new.

Abhi Saini (55:35)
you

Right. Absolutely. And that is, I think one of the most important things you can do is be a lifelong learner. And if you're not a lifelong learner, I honestly would probably say reconsider your career or reconsider the thing that you think you're not a lifelong learner. Cause if you say you don't like school,

That's one thing. If you say you don't like learning, that's one thing. But why then do you have a home lab and are you tinkering and trying to figure out how to do weird things in Linux? Turns out you're learning, you know?

Ben Climer (56:22)
Yeah. Yeah, I think it's

there are people that don't like formalized learning or school that are in IT. Yeah.

Abhi Saini (56:30)
I didn't. Yeah, I didn't.

I'm the kid who was president of the engineering club. I was leading the science team and I was two steps away from not graduating high school.

Because, like, think about that. I was the smart kid. I knew what to do. I was leading an educational club. And yet, my grades didn't reflect my knowledge. Because I hated the formalized education. Loved learning. Love education. Hated school. At the same time, loved school. Loved the environment. Loved the idea of it. But I wasn't good at it.

Ben Climer (56:45)
Ha ha ha.

Abhi Saini (57:11)
And I think now it's, have to understand your strengths and your weaknesses and that if you are put into a bucket, understand that bucket doesn't have to define you. You just have to know how to work within that ecosystem, within that environment. So that way, once you're, once you get out of the bucket, you can flourish and

if you like how things work.

and you like tinkering or you like doing fun things, technology might be a great place for you to be. Because it's a lot of just figuring out how things are working and tinkering and you know, you just have to do the thing to see what happens.

Ben Climer (57:50)
I

love it. You gotta find the cause and effect. If we bring this back all the way to the beginning and you're talking to your 18 year old self, what's one thing that you tell yourself at 18?

Abhi Saini (58:03)
the truth the real thing the real thing that I would actually okay okay that's different than the actual thing I would tell myself I was 18 it's no don't erase the hard drive that has your Bitcoin wallet

Ben Climer (58:06)
the tip to better themselves, yeah.

Invest in Bitcoin.

Hahaha.

Abhi Saini (58:20)
Bro, I would not be here today.

it would probably be to...

to screw up faster.

take the risk, fail harder and faster Because I wanted to start my company 10 years ago. No, sorry. I wanted to start my company 15 years ago. I didn't, you know, I could be 15 years into marketing into my company and MSP now versus a year.

do I regret my path? No. And do I understand that everything I've learned on my journey has brought me to where I am today? Yes. But at the same time...

I truly believe that if I just told myself when I was younger to go about figuring out what you want to do faster, stop just toying with the idea. Don't be scared. Just go for it. Take the leap.

and you will still learn valuable lessons that will help you in life. They might be different lessons, but in the end, you're probably going to learn most of the same stuff you did that I have in my real journey.

Ben Climer (59:42)
I love it. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. And, you know, I know we're looking forward to interviewing some people and, know, we'll have my episode. We'll see about that guy. He's a little shady, but I think we have some good episodes going up and we'll see everyone next week.

Abhi Saini (59:53)
I'm excited to interview you.

Yeah, appreciate you all. Thanks again. See you soon.

Ben Climer (1:00:07)
See you guys.