Aaron Bock: Welcome to the IT Matters podcast hosted by
Opkalla. We're an IT advisory firm that makes technology easy
for your business. Our vendor neutral technology advisors work
directly with your team to assess technology needs and
procure the best IT solutions for your organization. On this
podcast, expect high level expertise from our hosts, plus
experience driven perspective from the leading experts on
topics like AI, cybersecurity industry focused IT solutions,
strategy and more. Now let's get into today's discussion on what
matters in it.
Keith Hawkey: Welcome to the IT Matters podcast hosted by
Opkalla. At Opkalla, we help IT teams understand the busy
marketplace of technology strategy and services with a
data driven approach. On this podcast, we invite technology
leaders to discuss challenges facing the modern IT department.
And my name is Keith Hawkey, Technology Advisor with Opkalla,
and I'm joined by my colleague and esteemed technology advisor,
Michael Coloma, during this episode, we sit down with John
Sotello, the CIO of Cloyes Gear and Products whose career defies
convention, starting in sales and rising into IT leadership.
We'll explore the pivotal moments and decisions and
mindset shifts to help bridge the gap between business
outcomes and technology execution. And we'll also unpack
the future of IT infrastructure and operations, including how AI
and data are poised to transform the automotive industry. He
shares his bold vision for innovation, along with some
personal projects, like a VIN based initiative that could
reshape how we understand vehicle data. John Sotello,
welcome to the IT Matters podcast.
John Sotello: Thank you, Keith, thank you. Michael, appreciate
Keith Hawkey: But before we begin, I'd like to play a little
game. We're going to play a game of two truths and a lie. It
focused. And Michael, you can play too. So I'll say these
it.
three things that have happened in it recently, and you guys can
Michael Coloma: Love to have you.
try to guess where which one is the lie? Are we ready? Ready?
Let's go. All right. So at CES 2025
a Japanese company unveiled a robotic cat named nicojita Fufu
designed to cool down hot beverages by blowing air in
human like intervals. So that is option number one. Number two.
Researchers developed an AI interface that assists with
individuals with speech disabilities in delivering
timely jokes during conversations, enhancing their
social interactions. Number three, a startup introduced a
smart toaster that analyzes facial expressions each morning
to determine your mood and adjust the toast crispiness
level accordingly.
John Sotello: Those are unique. Yeah. Thank you. Clearly, I
should have gone to CES this year,
Michael Coloma: John, give me your thoughts first and then,
I'm a little hard on the on the cat thing. I'm gonna go false on
the cat thing. But again, could be totally wrong, because the
way we're taking technology and AI is defying some things that
you and I didn't think were happened. I'm gonna go truth on
the AI speech disability, because I think that would be a
really good tool for people that kind of have struggles in that
arena, and also, not just speech impediments, but also social
anxiety, with talking with folks and breaking the ice. And I can
totally see a smart toaster in terms of, how do I predict your
mood? Do I give you another cup of coffee? Do you do the cold
brew today because it looks like you need one? So I'm going to go
and then I'll make my give us your yes first, and then I'll
one false, two, true, three, true. Cat for 500 Yeah, for 500
Keith Hawkey: There we go. I got you down for 500 John, what
about you? Michael?
Michael Coloma: I'm gonna go the other way here. I'm gonna say
that the cat, beverage cooling item is true. I'm gonna say that
the tool to help people with speech impediments and the
ability to help them communicate is true as well, but I'm going
to say that the majority of people may shift their breakfast
tendency. So I think the demand for a toaster might be a little
less. So I think over catering to to more of the masses, as
cool as a cat beverage cooler would be. I think there's less
people in demand for a toaster. So that is my guess. I think
first two are true, and the third one is the lie, all right.
Keith Hawkey: And Michael, you were right. Oh, man,
Michael Coloma: no insider knowledge, by the way. I want to
make my guess.
make very clear, that's right, that's right.
Keith Hawkey: the nikujita Fufu robotic cat was indeed showcased
at CES 2025
Keith Hawkey: Ability to engage in humorous conversations.
However, there's no mood detecting toaster. No such
device has been introduced that I know of, at least it's coming,
and I'd like to figure out how I could be a part of that data
transition. It's coming, how you can monetize with some levity
here. Let's get started. John, can you tell us a little bit
about your role as CIO of Cloyes, and what do you guys do
at Cloyes? What's the high level here?
John Sotello: Sure. So CIO, fancy title for making sure that
technology complements the business and keeps us driving.
So that includes the not so fun stuff, like making sure our
distributions stay up from an internet perspective, making
sure that Microsoft 365 works and everyone's favorite fun
tool, which is ERP up and running. But also we get to
dabble in some of the things that help drive business right
so connecting transactions from our customers into our internal
systems, managing some of the data lakes and some of the
dashboards that we really put some effort into over the last
year, and providing insights to our internal teams to help drive
business decisions. But more importantly, I think we've kind
of become a little bit of the glue that binds when things come
in. From a technology perspective. For example, our
operations team is looking at a transportation management
system. We're kind of that gap between, hey, operationally,
here's how it works technically, here's how we integrate it. And
similar story to things like, hey, the scan guns aren't
working. What can we do to go look at them? And you know, some
of those things are easy fixes, and some of them turn out to be
that break fix that you should have found out about two years
ago, if you will, also on the forefront of some of our
acquisitions and integrations that we've done over the last
couple of years.
Unknown: of
Keith Hawkey: Awesome. Yeah. Thank you for that. Michael, I
think this is the first time that you've joined the IT
Matters podcast. Am I right?
Michael Coloma: That is correct.
Keith Hawkey: Can you tell us a little bit about your role at
Opkalla? What do you do?
Michael Coloma: Yeah. So very similar to your role, I work
with our customers to obviously help their team procure
solutions that are going to optimize, make their
organizations way more efficient, help keep them on the
forefront of an ever changing world when it comes to it, and
helping them transition from this mindset of it always being
a cost center, to how Do we integrate and find solutions
that will help drive revenue, make the business more efficient
and really improve the overall health of the organization, from
a infrastructure standpoint, a security standpoint, and making
all their employees lives a lot better. So I know it's a fancy
way of saying that these are all solutions that I think will help
drive business in the right direction for a lot of our
customers. And so the unique thing for for me and my role is
I get to work alongside people like John. John is who I met
through a family friend. And again, the way that our paths
have aligned has obviously been really unique and and I would
say it's been such a refreshing pleasure to work with somebody
who has taken a new approach to a traditional CIO role. And I'll
let John kind of highlight a little bit more of that. But you
know John, I'd love to hear more of your background on how you
ended up in this leadership role, and talk about your career
path as it's advanced to where it is today.
Keith Hawkey: I have heard, I've met IT leaders that used to be
commercial fishermen. I've met IT leaders that came from all
walks of life, all parts of the world. I have never met an IT
leader that came from sales. So that is a first. I can't wait to
hear about that story. Tell us a little bit about how you move
from sales over to it, and who did you have to woo very
carefully,
John Sotello: and it's a long story. Thank you for the kind
words, Michael. I appreciate it to step on something and go back
to I missed cloys. Think of Cloyes as critical parts to an
engine, so timing chains, gears and parts. We also acquired a
company called rotomaster out of Canada that supplies turbos. And
if you're following the auto industry right now, a lot of V
sixes are moving more to the turbo side of the house. And
then we also acquired a company out of den that allows for
timing tensioners and other front of engine parts. Is the
best way to put it. So we're in that critical path to what's in
the mechanical side of the space. And with vehicles in
operation getting older, obviously, we become a little
bit more critical to what's going on with the car. My world,
my journey, my destiny, however you want to put it, has been a
has been an interesting one. I actually started off in sort of
sales cashier land at Toys R Us in 1997 and sold video games in
what was called our zone at that time. And decided, Hey, let's go
to college. And I lasted for like, a semester and decided
this is not going to work for me. And I spent about a year
remodeling Toys R USS in the Dallas Fort Worth area. And
decided, Hey, maybe I should go back to school, right? Let's go
try this again. And spent my college career basically issuing
parts at an aviation company on Love Field, working second and
third shift, arguably one of the coolest jobs ever had, because I
could sell what they call VIP aircraft, which you haven't
seen, is one of the coolest things ever. And I had a friend
through my wife, that said, Hey, you should come work the help
desk or the knock at a credit card processor. And I think I
pushed back for four or five months. And mind you, I was
commuting 110
came a month later for that same person, saying, I think I found
the perfect job for you, and it's the job I have today, and
it's all because I just took a random call from her and just
talked and just like a normal person, right? And, you know, I
went through four or five weeks of interviews and ended up
accepting the role for Cloyes as a CIO. And it for me, it was a,
I hate to say cheesy, but it was a dream for me, because my goal
was to hit CIO by the time I was 40, and when I got this job, my
daughter's like, oh my gosh, Dad, you made it. You made it.
My wife too. And I'm like, Yeah, but I was three years late,
neither here nor there. But that's to be long winded. That's
the short and the run of it. It's a long story.
Keith Hawkey: If anybody wants to know more, I'm curious, what
were some of the solutions that you were selling back at that
three letter reseller? Great question. What was it in vogue
at the time?
John Sotello: So this was, you had a lot of VMware. You still
had a lot of on premise data center stuff going on. I think
one of the coolest projects I got to be a part of was a
healthcare company. And got to know the person that continues
to lead that company that day. And we did a full blown solution
for them for private internal cloud, complete with a colo we
helped them spec out a co location here in Plano, so soup
to nuts, space, floor, power, and they even helped some with
some of the staffing and consulting as well. So it was a
really, really cool project to be a part of. So it was a Cisco
solution at the time, UCS, with EMC in the background, anything
you could talk technically, right? I mean, that was a cool
thing. We had nine reps at the time in the office, and I had
been working with a lot of these folks for years because they
were, you know, other companies that I done business with. And
so it was like working a little bit with, like your with your
family. And so I held the record for the most visits in a given
week with customers, and I think it was like 18, just because I
got.
Drug along to all the meetings, which I'm very thankful for,
because that experience is something you just can't live
again. Kudos to that.
Keith Hawkey: That's That's amazing, John, I'm curious. So
you've done a lot of work, you know, particularly in the
cybersecurity area, with Cloyes. In your career, what are
cybersecurity has always been an important topic, but in your
tenure, what are some of the things that IT leaders typically
overlook when it comes to assessing risk and attaching
value to cybersecurity investments and the overall
posture like, what are you you interchange with CIOs and CISOs
that are having to develop these plans for the company. What are
some of the things that you find that are easily overlooked?
John Sotello: Sure, believe it or not, sometimes it's little
things. Sometimes it's not going through and looking at an
account that hasn't been activated. Sometimes it's not
double checking who your admins are on system a system B, pick
your one that aligns to your organization, and in other
cases, it's not taking a hard, hard look at what your risks are
as an organization. And it's not just, do I have the appropriate
next generation firewall in front of our systems? Are we in
the right public cloud? It's not things like that. It's like,
what is your business continuity plan? What happens when the
lights go out? What happens if we get hit with the inevitable
ransomware attack, those are things that you can prepare for,
and so that when you do hit the heat of the moment, you can
react accordingly to maintain the continuity of your
organization. But also, no one wants to be on the news right
now, especially in cyber and no one wants to end up on some, you
know, dark web portal where your information is getting pushed
out there. So really, it's not necessarily looking at it
technically. Sometimes it's looking about it. How do we make
sure that we continue to make money as an organization and
aligning not only your solution but your mindset with the two?
Because in some cases, some of the things we do don't really
cost anything. You know, in a previous life, we use the term,
use what you have and when you have a lot of the technologies
that Microsoft gives you, or even if you subscribe to the
things that a Meraki or Apollo gets you, sometimes we don't use
that even 80% of that solution. So before we go back to our
internal executive teams and finance teams and ask, Hey, we
need a product X, we really need to make sure we're consuming as
much of the existing baseline that we already have. The last
thing anyone wants to do is to go buy a product, half deploy
it, and then it becomes the entryway for an issue, whether
that's a continuity issue or cyber event.
Unknown: Yeah,
Michael Coloma: Yeah, makes perfect sense, John, and so I'm
glad you brought this up, right? Because one of the things that
we hear a lot from our customers is, when evaluating a
cybersecurity solution, a lot of times what comes up is, if it's
sometimes the mentality of its if it's not broke, don't fix it,
right? Or, hey, you know, I'm not too worried about this area
within our business, right, because we haven't had any
issues here. Or, Hey, we just haven't really run into this
instance that would provoke us to look at a solution or a tool
that would shore up our security measures. So what are some of
the things that you look at for cloys, when you look at, how do
you stay on the forefront, or, I guess, at the forefront, of the
cybersecurity space, right? Like, how do you predict? Well,
hey, this is something we should look at. If it's not currently
an issue, how do you be more proactive versus reactive when
it comes to the cybersecurity space?
John Sotello: Great question. You do the best you can.
Honestly, regardless of how much you try and stay ahead of it,
you're always gonna be a little bit behind. And no one likes to
hear that. It's moving too fast for you to be 100% secure,
right? The industry will give you good news. There are good
things that you subscribe to. LinkedIn is a powerful tool, not
just for, you know, connecting, networking, finding your next
job, if that's your thing. I see a lot of good information that
gets shared out there from the cyberspace. There's a morning
newsletter that comes out every day. There's websites like dark
web, bleeping computer things like that. That'll give you good
insight. Now, that insight sometimes is what the pain of
somebody else already feeling right? Someone's already bit it.
So now you're out there, we've used those tools to mitigate
issues proactively for our side of the house, I hate to say one
person's issue becomes our positive change. We work with a
group and subscribe to a group called automotive information
sharing, and so we get a daily report out that says, here's
what's going on in the automotive industry. We have a
really good partner that we work with in our MSP land right now
that we get good insight from them and what's going on in the
market. And you know, how do we protect our tools? How do we
protect our base? And I'll tell you, one of the greatest things
I think we have going for us right now is security in our
world, a top down thing. It's not just me preaching it. Our
CEO preaches it too. Is something we talk about every
town hall. We have a we have something that goes up in every
town hall about why it's important to watch what you
click on, and you know why we do what we do to protect the
organization, because that's what matters most. So I think
one of the other things that we do proactively is we talk to our
employees about security. You.
We have security as a mandate for training, and we grade you
on it, and we make sure that we're watching it. So we have a
group in an it that is assigned different organ, different
organizations in our company, in different locations, that
watches how many points you get on score, so that we can keep
track of how are you doing from a cyber posture perspective. But
all of those things are proactively helping prevent what
could happen. The tools are great, but we've got to start
also making sure that we're minding our employees as well.
Keith Hawkey: John, what are some of the unique cybersecurity
challenges that are facing the automotive industry?
John Sotello: Oh, man, it depends on where you want to
start. If you want to start at the car, you've got the
connected car and everything associated with it. You've got,
still, you got the old school OBD two port. They've done a lot
of work on what is the Secure Access Gateway and things like
that. You've got a lot of aftermarket tools and things
like that to give you access to a car where you can reprogram
it. There's been a ton of advance in terms of, you know,
at the car technology and cybersecurity that can be done.
But when you start getting into service providers and things
like that. We have information, right? We have data on cars. You
have data, you know, consumers, whatever. So data becomes the
real big one, right? And I don't know if you follow some of this
stuff, but there's been some big OEMs say, well, the data is
ours. You're on the road. Well, data is the new goal, and it's
consumer information. It could be location information, I
think, as we continue to see the next decade as the connected car
evolves, as infotainments evolve. I mean, if you look at I
have a 2019 truck, right? And my infotainment is about a six by
six screen that I hardly pay attention to, because it's,
well, it's old. It doesn't look that cool. You get into
something right now, like a 25 GMC, and it's like you're in
your home entertainment system. All of those things connect back
to something, whether that's in the car outside the car, and
they coexist in the background, along with the same things that
drive critical components, like your ados, which helps drive
safety, your can modules drive some of your braking systems. I
jokingly said this on a call recently. It's like a rolling
data center right now with a vehicle, in terms of not only
what happens with Compute and Storage for everyone's fun
things on premise data centers, but also what happens with the
data and the cyber side, data is king. I know that our vehicles
are taking all they're gathering all kinds of data on the
drivers. And I don't know how much cloise is involved in this.
It's probably more of a manufacturer, but I always
wonder where that data is going. We, fortunately are not on that
component. We're more on the mechanical repair side, right in
terms of what we do. If you look at where these things are, it's
your sensors, right? So if you look on the front of a bumper,
it's a little circle dot that helps drive how far you can get
to a car. Or if you're in assisted cruise control, you
know, how far does it start? You know, a lot of it's going to go
to your OEMs. A lot of it's going to go to on starts going
back to GM, stuff like that. Mileage may vary, and I think
it's one of the things, as we get through, you know, 2025,
2030,
and we start talking about personal information, CCPA and
all these different privacy acts, I think we're going to
start to see, hopefully, some legislation around how that
looks and how we handle it, how we manage it. There's tons of
good information that you can glean off this stuff, right? And
I think you mentioned one of my personal pet projects I want to
do is around bins. But there's a ton of like, proactive
information that you can use with the data that comes off
this car. But as everyone knows, there's always going to be a
person, an entity, whatever, that doesn't want to use it for
the greater good, but instead wants to use it to do something
nefarious, or whatever you want to call it.
Michael Coloma: You said something that talked about like
the future of the the auto industry, and it just really
kind of made me want to throw this question at you, is you've
heard all the emphasis, and whether it's through the the
manufacturers themselves, or government legislation about
electric vehicles in the future, of what that looks like. So one
of the things you just mentioned was all this data that's being
consumed, right? So where do you think Cloyes fits into this in
the next 510, 15 years, as it relates to the automotive
industry, specifically around the the the electric vehicle
standpoint, because what you shared earlier about cloyds and
how they work on a lot of these traditional fossil fuel burning
engines, right? What does that look like for cloys? And it's
just something you brought up that I wanted to ask about,
because GMC has, for example, put an emphasis that by 2035 or
whatever they're going to have. The majority of their vehicle
offerings are all going to be electric, right? So I just want
to get your perspective on that. Since you mentioned the data
standpoint, what the future of the automotive industry looks
like,
John Sotello: Absolutely so for Cloyes, more More to come on
that one, I think that's something that's actively
underway in terms of, you know, how the organization handles
some of those different parts and the evolution that, you
know, I think the most important thing to look at is, when you
look at ice or internal combustible engines, they've got
a long way to go. We can flip the switch and say, Hey, Ev,
mandate, 2030, you know, state a that's great. But, you know,
we're still selling ice up until that point. And the runway, I
think, for you.
Evolution for what's coming. You're going to see still a
combination of reducing your traditional v8 motors down to
your v6 with the Turbo, which is good for us, right in terms of
turbo, but EV, full EV, there's still components that kind of
are complementary to what we do in the background. But I'm
really anxious to see what happens with hybrid. If you guys
look back to what you know, Toyota took on a lot of heat
years ago because they wouldn't put a full blown EV strategy
out. They postured a little bit and said, Hey, let's see what
happens. And their gamble paid off, because hybrid is one of
the better ones out there right now. Don't get me wrong, what
Tesla does and what BYD is doing great strides, but I think
hybrid strikes that nice balance between what is a full EV and
that whole I'm going to run out of charge mentality versus, I
want to go full bore, you know, gas. Give me my super unleaded.
Let me see how fast this thing can go. It's going to be right
down the middle. And, you know, for me personally, not not
associating with anything business wise, but I think
there's going to be a right down the middle approach. And you
can, you can read about. It's nothing that I'm going to say
that's not already out there. Most people, if we're going to
go Eevee, will always have an ice vehicle in their driveway.
It's like a comfort level, right? What do they call it
range anxiety, in terms of making sure, you know, I can go
on a road trip from, you know, Plano, Texas to Gulf Shores
Alabama, of all places. And if I take my Ice Vehicle, I got two
stops, but if I took a full blown EV, I'm probably talking
four or five. So I think it's going to be somewhere in
between, is my guess.
Keith Hawkey: I just picked up on what ice meant, internal
combustion engine. Okay, gotcha. Okay. I was like, Ice Vehicle,
Ice Vehicle. I haven't heard of an Ice Vehicle yet by now.
John Sotello: Well, now, now I'll throw another one. Vio,
Keith Hawkey: vio, I don't know
John Sotello: vehicle and operation, so you'll hear it
like, hey, what's the average age of a vio vehicle and
operation? It's about 12.5 years. I think is the last
metrics I saw on that. So it identifies what the what the
existing car park looks like.
Keith Hawkey: Ah, okay, I see.
John Sotello: And your car park will vary by country too, as you
go across, right? So our car park here is going to look a lot
different than what say in France,
Keith Hawkey: speaking of other initialisms, VIN numbers, yes,
you've managed to find time and turn a pet project, hopefully
into into a reality here, and this is a great example to all
of our listeners and all the IT leaders Listening of those pet
projects that you have that you think could work with the
organization, but you're too caught up in the weeds, you're
too dug down and then trick the trenches. John has a success
story here. Have to do with the data around v i n numbers. V i n
is vehicle identification number, I'm pretty sure, right?
John Sotello: Yep, you got it.
Keith Hawkey: They get that one correct. Okay, share a little
bit about your your VIN number project.
John Sotello: Yeah. So when last year, we hired a new SVP of
marketing and product, right? And he and I got on this data
conversation one day, I'm like, Oh, great. This is fantastic.
Let's go and I still have the original video I shot to him.
And it was like, hey, if we take a VIN from our website, here's
the possibilities endless. So if you talk about a VIN for a
second to everyone else, it's like, a cool it's like, you
know, 18 characters, whatever, but it tells and if you go back
to the people that car chase like old vehicles and stuff like
that, and they're like, Hey, that's a blue car VA motor like
it used to tell those stories a lot better, probably, than what
they do today. But VINs have evolved so much. And I think
this comes from me being in collision too long and paying
way too much. As we move from collision to mechanical, they
tell a story about what the vehicle is. But if you break it
down, you get down into what's called your make model trim,
which Keith, if you see it somewhere, it'll say Y, m, t,
and it took me a bit to figure out, what does all that mean.
But as we've evolved the vehicle, and we've gone from
hey, here's a Toyota, just regular Toyota truck now to
here's a Toyota Tacoma Limited model with a TRD badge, all that
stuff now rolls up into event, and it tells you, you know, the
engine, what trim it had on it, you know, all these different
safety components that may be on the vehicle, right? Well, then
you take that and you can go to Toyota's website, or whoever,
and you can figure out, hey, this is a 2025 Toyota Tacoma.
Here's your maintenance schedule, right? Oh, and by the
way, you're at 25,000 miles. You really should have changed your
cabin filter, right? So it's telling you all these things.
Oh, and by the way, NHS says you have a recall. You need to go
get that taken care of. So if you take this idea that, then
you can figure out how to self serve, to support your your
vehicle in the long term. But if you're, you know, if you're
looking at from a service provider, I'm coming in, I'm
going to get my car worked on, whatever the case may be, it's
the same thing. Hey, you're at 50,000 you know, when you get
your oil change and the person comes up, hey, it's time for the
$60 air filter. You could have already answered that question
and stopped off and saved half the money. But I think that
power, that I've been and how you can bring it in and help
complement, call it, add on feature sets, and helping make
the consumer make better decisions about what they do
with their car is for the better. And if you look at it in
terms of like the fleets and things like that, we're talking
money when you're paying attention to your maintenance
schedules and not.
Just the one that says on your top left your windshield, it's
time to change your oil, but we still have to grease bearings.
We still have to change spark plugs. You still have to change
things in an EV like the list is limited, just sometimes we don't
always remember that the owner's manual is sitting on the right
side of your glove box, and you don't think about it. And
wouldn't it be nice if it was just a push notification to your
phone says, Hey, your car says it needs to go to discount tire,
because that really not cool thing called TPMS just said you
need to go to, you know, Discount Tire because you're,
you know, five pounds under pressure. So I think the VIN
piece outside of just what you know, we did internally in in
talks of, how can we take you to help structure, into getting
deeper into providing mechanical feedback, but taking outside of
that and just going to the everyday consumer is incredibly,
or could be incredibly powerful.
Michael Coloma: So John, you had mentioned that your background
is being non traditional, with the in the sense of having a
sales background, right? And as I mentioned earlier on when we
were discussing this, is it has normally always been a cost
center, 100% for most organizations, where they just
look at it as you're just a line item that literally just takes
away from our net profits. And so, can you share an example of
something in your either your current role or in a previous
role, where you have been in a position of leadership, made a
recommendation for a solution or a product that has positively
impacted the rest of the organization from a revenue
standpoint and really helped to change the way that it leaders
are viewed in the overall portion of the organization to
more of a an assistant or support model of generating
revenue for a company.
John Sotello: I'll give you a couple one as of late. Look,
there's nothing cool. And I tell this internally, there's nothing
cool, fancy or game changing about EDI, which is a
transmission of data from customer into a partner, right?
And that is something that drives every facet of our
business. And so we kicked off an EDI project probably about
February, just kicking the tires around to see what we could do
with it. We've now morphed it into something where we update
the business on it every week, where we're at what we're doing
with it. How we're going to move from, you know, a manual system
to more of an automation system for certain parts of it. How can
we board customers faster? Because the faster you can board
your customers, the faster they're placing orders, right?
So your ROI hits up quicker, and then, honestly, it's just
providing information and feedback as you go along, in
terms of, Hey, we gotta, we gotta reach out from, you know,
five customers. Which one of these do you want to prioritize?
And it's having that, that conversation back and forth with
your sales and operations leaders that really helps one
you as an IT person to better learn the business and what's
coming in there. Here's your pipelines and forecasts and see
what's coming to help drive revenue in the company. But also
your kind of information sharing with the other side too. We
historically, kind of get viewed as a black box, right? Partially
because we use buzzwords and three letter words like, you
know, sand and RAM. But, you know, giving folks a little bit
of a non it feedback of, hey, we need contact information with
demographics, et cetera. This is why, because it drives into a
four week timeline on our side. And here's where you slot in. I
think giving that feedback without being we chatted
earlier, the perception of just opening a ticket goes a long
ways right. And in a previous life, we were built on inbound
volume, so the more vehicles we service, the more capacity we
had to have. On the other side, the challenge is the first two
or three times when people are like, hey, we need you to go
increase capacity, and then you show up with a bill of $250,000
and you get the shock and awe. No one talks to you for about a
week. That's a thing, by the way, and until you can create
that value engine that says, hey, we've done some analysis.
And for every, you know, 100 vehicles you add, here's what we
need to do to keep up with you and finding ways to, kind of, I
say, Insert, but insert your way into conversations when we're
about to go talk to, you know, big customers, and not just
going into, oh, we just don't have enough capacity. We can't
do that. We can't we as IT folks can't just take that approach
anymore. We have to be able to come back with factual numbers
that resonate with people. Hey, we've got 1000 vehicles a month
coming inbound. Great. What's the mix of the car park? Is it
going to be domestic? Is it going to be European, like
individually? Which OEM is it going to be? Because it matters
downstream to here. And when people start taking in that
volume and really understanding what it means to get to the
capacity and the pieces and parts to it, you don't become
just a cost center anymore. You become a key to go score the
business, because as soon as someone scores that business,
regardless, same with EDI and some of the other things, you
become the long pole because we're longer in the supply
chain. In terms of, I need to go buy capacity. And Michael, you
know, is better than me. It could take 30 days. It could
take 60 days, depending on what you're sourcing from and where
you're sourcing from. If people aren't aware of that before they
Cycle. We become the, I hate to say it roadblock, but we become
Keith Hawkey: Yeah, words of the wise. John Sotello, it has been
go start a sale.
the person that helped, didn't make the sale, right? It's all
very intricate and interconnected, but I'll tell
you, you've got, from my perspective, and it's, it's been
a hard road. I'll speak for myself, too. It has not, not
been easy. Hence the and here and here and great, but you got
to be willing to take your lump sometimes. And you know, I think
I mentioned this to a friend of mine, sometimes you gotta be
willing and okay, just to figure out that today you're just gonna
clean the bathroom. And I mean that as a as a kind of a
a pleasure having you on the IT Matters podcast. You know, your
descriptor of you may just be working on setting up accounts
today, because that's what needs to be done. And that's okay.
You're still adding some type of value, but you've almost still
gotta earn that keep right? It's like in sales, you can, you can
go out and fish for new customers all day long, but you
still got to maintain your internal base at the same time.
last message really stuck out to me. I typically ask kind of a
parting statement or parting message to deliver, like,
imagine you were delivering the keynote at the 2025 Ford CIO
Summit. And one thing that really stuck out is, like you
said, you know, some days you just have to clean the bathroom,
simple things, yep. And metaphorically in the CIOs role,
I think that's that's incredibly applicable and a lot of times
overlooked with the rule, some days it's not fun, but you take
the days that are not as fun for that day that you get a big win,
and remember the big wins. It takes a lot of small wins to get
to a big win, and unfortunately, it doesn't take a whole lot to
lose that big win too. So we've got to be mindful as we maintain
the easy things, right? And keep the hygiene going. John, how can
our listeners get a hold of you?
John Sotello: I'm on LinkedIn. Hit me up. On LinkedIn. I'm
pretty active out there. I've kind of avoided most other
social media channels at this point. I don't know, I guess. I
guess that whole lot concept of getting too old for Facebook is
coming along, but I'm always on LinkedIn. Hit me up. I'm glad to
communicate I hit me on instant messenger within there, happy to
provide any feedback. Do a quick call, whatever it takes. Thank
you so much.
Keith Hawkey: We'll include your LinkedIn profile account in the
show notes. And again, thanks for joining the podcast. It's
been incredibly insightful. Thank you, Michael, for CO
hosting, and we will catch you next time.
John Sotello: Guys appreciate it.
Michael Coloma: Thank you, John,
Aaron Bock: thank you for listening, and we appreciate you
tuning into the IT Matters podcast for support assessing
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advisors at opkalla.com
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