You’ve Always Done It a Certain Way, Well, the World’s Changing with Dan Weiss

Hello, everybody loved to see you here again today on the Dare To Lead podcast. And I am so lucky today. I have Dan Weiss here with me and Dan has a unique relationship to me. Do you want to guess what it is? Well, I’m going to tell you it is that he and I both have offices in a shared work space in the tiny town of Farmington, Missouri. You probably never heard of it, but it is about an hour and a half south of St. Louis, Missouri. So, I asked him if I could interview him, cause you might see like behind him, he’s got quite a lot of stuff going on. And Dan has been working virtually as an employee, as a contractor. He has worked with VAs. He’s got quite a wide variety of knowledge and experience in this arena. So that’s why I asked to interview Dan. So, tell us a little bit more about you and what you do now.

Well, I am an IT consultant, as you mentioned. And I’ve been just on and off for 30 years and as technology has improved, the job has become more and more virtual. During my 11 years with IBM, I never actually had an office in any location. I was constantly at client locations and everything we did was virtual there. Sometimes my team was even virtual across the country or even across the world. And certainly all the internal functions like HR and all that kind of stuff was all virtual as well. So, I’ve been working in a virtual world for a long time. As you mentioned, we’re about an hour and a half South of St. Louis, which is a big city in the area. And my employer saw early on that me driving an hour and a half each direction really didn’t serve a purpose. Hence, I’m in the shared space that you discussed, down here in beautiful Farmington, which is about 10 minutes from my home. So, a much better commute!

That is a much better commute. As listeners know, I live an hour from here, I live in a town called Black, but this is where I come to do my grocery shopping, have lunch with girlfriends and things like that. That’s why when I saw shared workspace here, I jumped on it. And Dan, you’re the one that’s here the majority of the time. So, you work in the shared space basically full time. And are you an employee at this point?

Well I’m an employee, the contracting company that I worked for. And then in turn, I get contracted out to other contracting companies and sometimes there’s even a couple more generations in there where I have clients that have clients and so on. I work virtually for them. And the nice thing about it is they can be anywhere and my services are at the same high level. One of my clients is in Chesterfield. One of my clients is in Alton, which is a small picturesque town just over into Illinois where there’s antique shops and whatnot. And in turn, another client is in St. Louis and I’ve also had a client that was in Florida. And the end result of that is I get to stay here. Whereas with IBM I was what they called a road warrior, where you would get on a plane every week and fly around. And certainly in today’s COVID-19 world, that’s just impractical, if not impossible.

You mentioned the fact that I’m in the shared space the most amount of time. That’s actually one of the things I like about this shared space is a lot of people are working from home as they say, and for discipline reasons and also for a sense of the day going by. Cause it gets a little timeless this time. I enjoy the fact that I get up, I leave the house and I actually come to a workspace and this is my workspace. And you can see the 3D printer in the back printing something related to one of my projects. And most of the stuff is virtual in the computer space, but I have to get up. I have to get dressed. I don’t go to work in my pajamas. And that’s important for me is to have that. Whereas IBM, sometimes I didn’t work from home and, I personally liked the differentiation of going from one location to another.

Yeah. And, so not only do you sound like you feel more productive when you go to the shared workspace and you like getting out of your pajamas, but you don’t have to get dressed up. And you guys, I know, cause I’ve seen him today and he gets to see me when I come in here in anything from pajamas. Do you see me? I think you didn’t see me at the time I came in my pajamas this winter. And whatever version of a Tiara I have on that day. So, Dan has actually seen me in more like full attire of pajamas than anyone other than my husband.

What the virtual-ness, I’m not even sure that’s a word, works very well in this because I’m connected on only by zoom meetings, which a lot of people are, but from back of time and in IBM in the early 2000’s when messaging apps first became part of it, we were actively using those to not only stay connected, which is important in a virtual organization, but to leverage the combined knowledge of ourselves. So, a common tactic we used in meetings is we’d have our laptops connected to the internet and we’d have the instant messenger going on and maybe you’re presenting or you’re in a meeting. And the customer asks you a question you don’t know the answer to, but a member of your team does, your virtual assistant in that case, then you would type quick message to them.

And they’d come back with an answer and you’d seem just that much more knowledgeable. This kind of backfired on me one time in the middle of a presentation. I had my back to the screen looking at my audience and somebody said something cool Just happened. I’m like, huh, because yeah, down at the bottom of the screen, well at this point, this version of MSN Messenger awhile ago, but it’s the one person sign on a name was cool, Venkat Swami. And that had popped up to say he had come online. And then I talked a little bit on our group mind and actually made the client happy to know that you’re not only getting me in any given situation, but they’re getting the larger organization. And that’s where the virtual nature of this really helps. I had a case today where I was having some computer issues with the computer at another physical location. I virtually contacted the person. They said, okay, I’ll go over and reboot your machine. And that’s all my problem. And it’s nice to know that you have those people wherever they might be around the world.

Yeah, absolutely. So, Dan, how has COVID impacted your job, your business? Has it impacted it at all? And if so, how?

Well, it hasn’t impacted my ability to do my business, thankfully, because I work with things that live in the digital world. So, they’re very easy to move back and forth. I’m also doing some practical things like the 3D printing and those I have to physically mail or UPS or FedEx or whatever. And they tend not to get where they’re going very quickly anymore. It was a little bit more of an impact, but from the virtual standpoint, it hasn’t, and as people are working in home locations, it’s not changed anything for me because I was already remote. They’re remote too, but they’re just remote in a different location. Business-wise everything is slowing down, the jobs report or the GDP report showed that.

I saw that come out today. That was pretty shocking.

Yeah. But I also had some projects that were already in motion, already budgeted and what-not. So, they continue to go along. And in fact, one of them deals with the agriculture industry and people still gotta plant corn.

I also feel like while there are areas that are slowing down, just like you said with agriculture that still has to keep going, do you think that there are areas that could be increasing their need for people like you?

Companies are exploring virtual workers in a way that they never have before. My niece is an international marketing person for a company in the Atlanta area. And they’ve decided that they’re not coming back into the office until sometime after Christmas with the exception when they need to physically need you like, shipping internationally. They happen to be a toy company. Things like that. When I was with IBM, I couldn’t even convince companies to use chat apps because they’re like, well, no, somebody can get up and walk to the other building. I think people were learning a whole new thing about remote working and how it is real work. Sometimes people think, Oh, you’re working from home. You’re not really working. Well, no, you really are working. You’re just working in a different setting. And in some respects I have less interruptions here.

People just coming over and talking or whatever, but to be honest, it’s a little lonely working by myself in an office here. And video conferencing like this helps. I was doing video conferencing back when it wasn’t necessarily disease induced or epidemic induced. Sometimes I would do virtual conferencing with customers with the technology that existed at the time. Simply to put off travel and the cost associated with that. So, there was a lot for that. And as a whole, our country is much better geared for this than it has been at any time. We do have Amazon to get supplies around. We do have UPS, FedEx, DHL, the USPS. All these great ways of getting things reliably from one place to another. And we have a very robust internet to get digital information and more of what we have can be digitally shared.

And you don’t send somebody a document in a physical form, you send them a PDF. For the part I’m making, when I get the design done, I am just going to digitally send the part and somebody is going to print it with a 3D printer in the office, unless there’s a need to share something physical. So much more can be done digitally, which makes the whole virtual world approach much more viable. But what you have to do is you have to have people that think in terms of that, some managers do what we call management by walking around, which they have to go and see what their employees are doing. You know, you gotta sit in this cube cause that’s closer to my office and going through that in my computer. And then you have other managers that are like, okay, I can see the work’s getting done and you know, that’s it. But communication becomes really important because if you’re not seeing that person, you’re not casually sharing information. Sometimes you have to be much more proactive about sharing information or just checking in, one of the people that I’m responsible for currently, I just send them a message saying, Hey, how’s it going? He’ll sometimes say, Hey, do you know anything about this technology or that? And then, we gripe at each other about things for a little bit.

Oh wow. Tons of great information that you just shared with us. So, let me just recap a couple of things. Number one, you’re saying that there were people before COVID, that could have already gone virtual, but for whatever reason were choosing not to. And if they’re like me, it was a lot because I’m not a techie kind of person and any kind of new tech I had to learn. I really didn’t want to, if I didn’t have to. Second, if they like managing by walking around, if they’re walking around at their own house and none of their employees are there, that’s not a really good way to manage. So, do you have any suggestions and tips for people who do have virtual teams on how to better manage?

Sure. Again, having some sort of regular contact, you might have office meetings anyway, a particular team that I’m on has two meetings a week that are just to go over to the status of projects. Before I would do things like hold a weekly team meeting, just to kind of keep people chatting a little bit. What’s new, what’s interesting, but also a lot of it was instant messaging or using, kind of the equivalent of the tools that we’re using now just to kind of keep in touch at a social level. But project management is a whole other area and how you measure milestones and whatnot, but communication is really that important thing. And so one of the things is in my field, a lot of people have their stuff on their computer and if it’s on their computer, nobody can see it. But if you have it stored in a commonplace, I think, come in and take a look at what you’re doing and the progress you’re making and also say, Hey, are you having some kind of problem with this or something? So, those I think are important things.

So, this common place that you’re talking about for people to put things, do you, because you come at this from a totally different point of view with your background, your IT background, being an employee. You’ve been in this virtual space for a lot longer than most people have been even before there were really good tools to do so. Do you have any recommendations on the best tools to use now for people with virtual teams? For example, they can share those documents rather than just having another computer or any other tools that you recommend, like project management tools.

Yeah. One of the things that people are probably most familiar with is Google Docs, which is the idea that we all have our documents up there and we can all get a sense of it. Say for instance, we were working on a website for a client, or we were working on a new graphic promotion and advertising or something. If we have the different ideas and the storyboards and whatnot and Google Docs, people can look at those and reference them. And, if I update one of those, you might get a notification depending on how things are set up, the changes have been made. You can see this stuff. You don’t have to have somebody come into your office and put something down on your desk, or it used to be come in with their laptop and show you a PowerPoint or something like this.

So that shares it. If you have more consistent information, you’re trying to share the Wiki format like Wikipedia, but you can set up your own wikis that have information like, if I need to take a vacation day, here’s what I have to do to sign up for vacation day. Or if I need to order a piece of equipment, this is the approval process I go through and whatnot. And by having all those documents online and easy to find that’s important, you’ve got that common area. So, there has to be a place to put things. And there’s a lot of things for that. Dropbox is one of them. Google Docs is another one, OneDrive from Microsoft. Then you’ve got the ones who’ve introduced some kind of organization. Like SharePoint from Microsoft. Another tool people use is something called Slack and Microsoft Teams are ways of having that instant messaging and instant notification, but also including the document part of it.

I think that’s a good communication tool. You still need what we call in the business, a repository, but some people would call it library or just a website, a static information that you need to know, what days are paintings, when are the holidays coming up or, you know, this opposite end is happening. Everybody needs to know about. So there’s a combination of things. And IBM at the time I was there, it was called W3. And, it had everything you needed to have, except that you couldn’t find any of it. They had far and away the worst search mechanism at the time. I even brought it up at a corporate event, which got rousing cheers, and some off the record feedback that it was not appreciated that I pointed that out. But yeah, that’s a real problem.

Now, Google has made such strides in all of these products, but too often, and this is a real problem in a virtual environment to more often a business’s knowledge, whether it’s a new business or an old business is stuck up here. And that’s only shareable by us being together on something like this. And it’s subject to the faulty memories that I’ve exhibited so far. So it’s really important to commit ideas to a shared place where people can access them from share them. You know, setting this up, you use the scheduling app to schedule at the time. If we had just done that back and forth by emails that could have been lost. The scheduling app was a better choice.

Yeah. I’ll tell you right now, we’re going back and forth via emails on that is a nightmare. Do you, one of the tools that we use periodically, if there’s a lot of people that we want to get scheduled is Doodle. Have you ever used that?

No, I have not. Yeah. Usually I’m scheduling big groups. Yeah.

Okay. Well it’s a free one. You can use the schedule multiple groups. So, that’s a lot of great information. Thank you so much for sharing that. And you mentioned Slack. Do you like Slack? Do you use Slack?

I like Slack. I have clients that use Slack. It so happens, one consulting company I doing a lot of work for is very Microsoft centric, which is fine. So, we use teams and Microsoft Teams has the nice advantage of being able to do audio if you want it to on the fly. And I’ve done that before with people or share screens. And that way it’s tied up with the chat application and you’ve got, I find chat applications good. Because you can sometimes go back through that chat, scroll and use that as a way of storing information. But again, the problem is I can see that in there, it’s better to keep it someplace else. So personally, I use Microsoft OneNote to collect information. And I can sync that across multiple machines. So, I have information here and when I would travel to the office an hour and a half away, a lot, I need information.

And that way it would be easy to share it. And I keep things in there that are relevant to projects. So, if a customer goes quiet for six months, because they’re doing something else and come back and said, great, we want you to pick that up. We’ve got new budget, do this. I can go back there, quickly pull up the notes that tell me how I access their system and what information I have. And we keep passwords securely elsewhere. But you know, just general information that I need. It’s like, okay. Yeah, I remember this project because a lot going on. And if you’re a virtual assistant probably split across a bunch of things. So keeping notes is important. It can’t all be post it notes of which I have a lot, too!

I used to have so many post it notes. It was like a decoration on my wall. Now I don’t do that. I have everything on my computer, so I don’t lose as much anymore. I still, every once in a while I’ll lose stuff. But having the search feature really helps a lot. So, have you used anything like Asana or Trello or any of those has project management tools?

No. We use something called JIRA. And that’s ticket based and we use an agile methodology. In the past I’ve used tools like Microsoft Project to do critical path analysis and for charts and the whole nine yards, I been a lot more involved in the design of the project plan. And then at IBM they specifically had a role for the project manager, not being also the technical lead so that they managed all the contractual things. So, this job, I’m doing a little bit more wearing multiple hats. I’m doing more of the project management. But you really do need to manage your product and not project and not just cause that’s how you get wonderful overruns and incomplete projects.

Oh yeah. Well, you are obviously really on top of the IT world and what’s happening. And I mean, I gotta tell you how impressed I am when I knocked on your door today and you had that 3D printer running and I love that. You’ve got it running right now. So, I have a question for you, which is, I want you to give me your prediction on what you think is going to happen going forward with virtual work. Are we going to go back to the way things were? Are we gonna go stay the way things are? Is there going to be some hybrid?

I will preface this by saying, I have developed an astonishing ability to be wrong about the prediction for the future. I can understand how we got where we got. I just, my predictions based on that, you know, I remember being in college in 1984, and Apple heavy design contest and like what’s the computer of the future going to be. And everybody wanted to put in voice recognition. Then I worked with voice recognition at the time and I’m like, nah, that’s not going to happen. We’re getting closer to that now, realistically, it didn’t happen. Then I also thought there was no way we could get full motion video off of the CD and we all have DVDs and we’ve actually gone beyond that. So, all that being said, I predict a hybrid and primarily for two reasons, there certainly are jobs that you still have to be at a given place to do.

And a lot of those jobs is because whatever you interact with is at that place. So, you’re in retail. You have to be where the customers are. You’re in manufacturing. That machine is bigger than you are. You know, you have to be where it is. A lot of jobs don’t involve being at a particular place. The office is there to have a convenient place to congregate if you will. But even before a lot of people go into these open space ideas that you just came in and you sat down at your desk, it wasn’t your desk per se. So, I would guess that the retail office space industry is gonna take a hit out of it.

I hear what you’re saying. There are some businesses that really do. You have to go there. There have to be employees that are there, but the ones that don’t have to be?

Well, and then you’re going to get a certain amount of management that’s going to say, well, we’ve always done it this way. And, we’ve got a 10-year lease on this building. We’re going to use it like any blank. At my graduation from university and from college, the speaker was a person minding the immigration Marie Hopper, who is very famous. Not only because she was the highest ranking woman in the military at the time and oldest when she retired as a rear Admiral, but she was responsible for a lot of what computer science is today. And in fact, she is the one who is credited with coining the term of bugging a program because she literally pulled a dead moth out of one of the earliest generation computers.

I love that story. I didn’t know that.

Yes. She’s a very fascinating woman and responsible for the primary business computing language for the first several decades, computers called cobalt. In fact, her nickname was grandma cobalt, but anyway, she started off our college graduation speech by saying, I promise you here now, if any of you say, but we’ve always done it that way. I will come and haunt you for 24 hours. She famous for having a clock that ran counter-clockwise, even though our time, that’s it. And a kind of class are generally not found in the military. And she was, but that stuck in the mud, we’ve always done it this way has been a real problem. And sometimes change comes out of events like this, where things have to change or something changes. The music industry got radically changed when the MP3 format became available and the record industry wasn’t ready for it.

And the film industry wasn’t ready for digital photography taking off the way it is and Kodak a monolithic company, a monster of a company, which is basically all but gone now because the film industry disappeared and they weren’t ready to go to the next step. So, I think those companies that are going to drag their employees into a location, especially when the economy catches back up with itself, if we get back to the kind of record unemployment we had at one point, the easy differentiation is going to be okay. You want me to come? I’ll use my niece in the example, you want me to come to a job in Buckhead, which is the big area. But that’s an hour drive in traffic. Whereas this employer says I can stay home and work from home? Sorry you lose. So, I think that that is going to curve.

But what I think is missing is people like yourself that are training people how to do this because it’s not an empty skillset. It’s not like, Oh, you working from home. It’s the same as working in the office. It’s not for good and for bad. And people have to have some infrastructure and have to have a good camera and a microphone. My brother who now formerly worked out in a lot of locations, but now is doing much more from home. He had a laptop that frankly just couldn’t keep up anymore. He’d say, Dan, I can’t do these video conferences. I keep cutting out. Everyone’s complaining. I’m like, yeah, it’s not a virus. You just got an old computer, you have to get a new computer. We got a new webcam. Now he got it. I’m like, okay, now you’re getting shine on you. Your lighting is bad. Okay. Yeah, I’ve got to get this set up, you know, and I don’t say we’re all gonna have ring lights, but, we’re going to start to learn what the difference is of this.

A lot of people have ring lights, you just came in my video studio here and you’re like, Oh, you have a nice ring light.

Yes. You ever well that’s because I have a friend in Thailand and we were doing a lot of video conferencing and her lighting was not optimized.

Yeah. And I actually just bought one for my home, too. A smaller one. And just so you know, I normally use like Dell has been my computer of favor for a long time. I don’t change computers very often because as I said, I’m kind of phobic about technology I am using right here, a Microsoft surface. And I really love it super easy to use. A lot easier than most laptops I’ve ever used. And of course it also becomes, a pad, which I just love it. I think it’s awesome. So, this could be made into a Microsoft commercial!

It’s funny when I was with IBM for the first six, seven years. At least I was in the Microsoft technology group within IBM. And you want to talk about being the redheaded stepchild, but I got to really work with a lot of really interesting stuff. And I started out in punch cards if people remember what those are. So, I hit pretty much every technology in the history of computing and actually some stuff that predates cards or computers as we know it. So, I I’m very agnostic towards everything. Hey, if it works, these are tools just like a carpenter or a plumber. Like you said, these are the tools of my trade and I use them on my desk. You can’t see it. Cause I already have you. I also have tablets and phones because I do mobile work for customers developing mobile apps. I have a laptop. You can just see the corner of over here that not only do I use for testing, but I play games on.

And you have a chair that looks like it’s out of a sports car.

Yes, actually, there’s a reason why. This is what’s called a gaming chair. I had what would be considered a normal office chair. And, after the second one broke, I’m like this isn’t working. So, there’s two advantages of this one, is it gives me full support only up to my head and a nice neck pillow here. And this is not good. You got to think about your work environment, but this also fully reclines down to a 180. The only problem I found is that the average gamer, apparently doesn’t really quite as much as I do so was insufficient. So, I bought a seat pad, but other than that, it does very, very well. And I find it better. And part of this was because another work friend of mine had gotten one for birthday.

And I thought, you know, that makes a lot more sense than the chairs that I had been in. So, for that virtual environment, since you will spend a lot of time in front of the computer, have a good chair, but also have good lighting. Don’t just rely on your screen. And also because if you’re doing conferences and what you can’t see is off here, I’ve actually got a very high powered LED light to give me some nice light and what color your light you have is how attentive you are and get out and get some sunshine too, because if we’re inside all the time, we’re not getting dirty.

Right. And do you have blue blockers in your glasses?

No. My nature is I lose glasses, so I have an entire basket off screen here. Dollar tree glasses. And a lot of people were affected by the blue, after hours. My answer to that, my work life balance as a virtual person is I have no technology at home, no computers, cable. I don’t have anything. I go home and I become not any technology, but separated from technology, if you will. So ,the 3D printer is yours as opposed to being at home. I do crafts and stuff like that at home. It’s just that for me is a thing. It’s a lot of people in my industry are like, wow, did you see this cool new technology? I just read this and I’ve got a computer room in my house.

I’m like, I do that all day long. There is more of me than that. And that’s the thing about the virtual assistant at the time, again, with IBM, we called it the new normal, the idea that you might have a call at 3:00 AM because your client was on the other side of the world. And the counterpoint to the new normal is yes, you need to be responsive at different times. I have morning clients and evening clients, I prefer evening clients because I’m not a morning person, but, you’ve got to have a separation between work and non-work and if you’re just purely virtual, you find it creeping into every minute of your day. Some people find it creeping in via their phone. Sometimes you put either computer and whatnot. So I recommend as a virtual person to have that work life. And that’s again, why I like driving into this location because I come in, I’m at work. I leave. I’m not at work. And for me that’s important.

Good recommendations. I love all of those. Thank you for sharing those. So, because the podcast is called Dare To Leap, I would love your suggestions for anybody that is thinking about, either it can be somebody who is a manager and is thinking about it, or a business owner thinking about allowing his employees or independent contractors to remain virtual or someone who’s thinking about going virtual themselves. But, they’re a little hesitant like you were saying – but that’s not how we’ve already always done it. So ,what would be your suggestion on how to help them to dare to leap into this new environment?

If you’re a manager? The most important thing I would say is know and be clear about your metrics. If you have an expectation that a worker is going to do X, make it very clear to them. You expect them to complete X and have a way of measuring that they completed X sometimes a problem with the management by walking around and you walk around and the person looks really busy. You see that comically in many movies, the manager will tell the office door everybody’s and then the door shuts, and everybody turns on TV sets and boots off. And if the manager doesn’t have a way of knowing we’ve actually achieved this, then that’s really important for a person looking to go virtual that hasn’t gone virtual before. Again, the metric helps, some people say I worked with deadlines, so know what your deadline is.

But the other thing is to understand that a certain amount of self-discipline comes with that. Whereas you are sitting in front of your screen watching a YouTube video of whatever. And there’s so much on there in the middle of the day in an office where somebody’s gonna walk by and see you watching that video might keep you from doing that. On the other hand, if you’re like, I am just not getting anything done, I just could put my head down for five minutes. Some people would retreat to the restroom or something like that. Now you can say, all right, I’ll put my head down for 15 minutes or an hour. And then I will extend out my day. One of the ways people have these metrics is they say, we expect you to be online by this time and expect you to be online, at least until this time.

So that we know we can get ahold of you, but more developed ones might say, if I need you, I’ll text you. And then have a reasonable expectation of how fast you’re going to respond. A company really has gotta consider that right now. It’s a safety issue to have people in one location. It’s also an infrastructure issue if you’re not having to pay for an office, maybe that saves you money, especially in a startup situation. Maybe that allows you instead to grow your operation because you could say, well, I’d hire more people because there’s business out there. We’ll say, and mortgage refinancing just as an example, but I’ve run out of desks. I can’t fit any more people in here. Well, you go virtual, you can fit more people and you don’t have to get a bigger office.

Oh yeah. I love that. So, Dan, in wrapping up, is there anything that I haven’t thought to ask you that you want to be sure to share?

No, you’ve been really wonderful. I would also say that one of the nice things about the virtual assistant idea is that, and this fits in with the whole gig economy. If you’ve got an idea to start something new, as a matter of fact, I’m in the process of doing that with something to do with injection molding, with making pieces, which I’ve got nothing fun to show you, but that’s part of the reason I’m 3D printing. With the virtual, you can say, okay, I need a person who does this, but I can’t go full time, but maybe I can hire them for this many hours. We can do this. Or the person I really need is in Florida or the person I really need is in Hawaii. But they can do it virtually because they can send it to me electronically. You have an opportunity to build something here that perhaps didn’t really exist before, because that was not how people were thinking and now they are.

Yeah. So, I don’t know what that injection thing is. You talked about what is that.

Injection molding? Okay. So, a lot of the plastic things we have from plastic drink cups to parts of the chair that I’m sitting in to whatever the way they do it is they actually have a mold. That’s the shape of whatever the piece is. Then they force hot plastic into that. So, like plastic knife, forks, spoons are done by this method. In the case around your monitor is done that way. If you buy a fan, the plastic on that, it’s all done the same way. It forces this plastic. And because it’s forced in hot, it cools very quickly and they pop it out and they make the next one. Well, the machines and necessarily involved in that, a lot of this is made overseas because of the labor costs. But a lot of people don’t know how to go from I’ve got an idea for a piece, but just a widget, but I made 10,000. And is there a thousand of these cars I can sell them? How do I do that? And we’re looking to consult and help people do that.

Awesome. Well, if somebody wanted to get a hold of you, now, you feel free to say, yeah, I don’t want anybody getting ahold of me, but if somebody was like, Oh, this guy is so interesting. I would love to talk to him about injection molding or 3D printing or IT work or anything else. What’s the best way for them to get ahold of you.

My email would be the best way of doing that.

Okay. And you want to share that now? Or I can have it as a link on our show notes.

It’s probably easier if you have it as a link in the notes, because it’s one of those long ones. And so you try to go in from what the guy is saying and you repeat it and it’s just easier if it’s there and you can cut and paste.

Okay. I’ll have it on there. And I don’t know if the time comes that you have a website that you want to share with people for anything that you’re sharing or anything like that. I’ll share that in the show notes too. Thank you so much for being on here with me today. I really appreciate it. You have a tons of knowledge and experience, and I appreciate your willingness to share it with our listeners.

Very happy. I think this is the way the world is going. Just how quickly we will get there remains a mystery to me. Well, most people, when people make interesting choices!

I will tell you that I happen to agree with your idea of what we’re going to be doing in the future. That’s exactly where I think we’re headed to. And I’m quite excited about it myself. So, you know, I always love the idea of people getting to choose what they prefer. And they prefer to work in an office all the time. Great. If they prefer to work virtually all the time, great. If they want to do a little bit of each, why not? And I think that’s where that employee satisfaction that you were talking about really is gonna make that big difference going forward. So, I’m in total agreement with you.

And I think it’s going to be good for business because it’s going to give them an opportunity to get better people that aren’t necessarily geographically located where they are.

Oh yeah. Totally agree with you. Yes. Well, Dan, thank you so much.

I am enjoying it, it was a pleasure to be part of this.

Bye, Dan.

Bye.

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Outro