Ep.117 Inside the IoT Revolution Meet the Innovators Shaping Tomorrow's World! Pt. 3/3 with Thomas Hamilton and Phan Nueman

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Don’t miss the IoT Revolution as we meet the Innovators shaping tomorrow’s world with Thomas Hamilton and Phan Neuman of Smart City Tech Bridge. Thomas and Phan drop nugget after nugget as we talk about how they’ve taken so many IoT needs back to business conversations and are always uncovering additional product needs and solving more problems than expected. They share some killer strategies about uniquely positioning yourself by understanding what the different verticals need. You might even hear about how there is a black market for hospital beds and how they’ve solved that problem for customers experiencing theft!

Welcome to the podcast that’s designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, JoshLupresto SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus and this is Next Level BizTech.

Hey, everybody, welcome back here. We’re wrapping up this track. Reminder, it’s called Inside the IoT Revolution, Meeting the Innovators Shaping Tomorrow. Today on with us, we have got Mr. Thomas Hamilton andPhanNueman of Smart City Techbridge. Thomas, welcome on. Good to have you. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.Phan so excited to love a good combo here. Thomas, tell us a little bit about how did the origin for Smart City Techbridge come up? What do you guys do? How are you going to market?

Absolutely. Thank you for having us on. Smart City is the baby between hand BTC, which was my company and ProTech ProTech, sorry, MSP services, which wasPhan Newman’s company. Funny enough, we got together through a channel manager from Spectrum. He I needed help MSP for one of my clients who was a call center.

Russ Thompson put us together and we became friends maybe about five or six years ago. And we continue working projects together. And then we had a large opportunity with some municipalities doing a broadband project just last year. And we thought for simplicity purposes, let’s combine the two. Let’s combine the companies and make one and that became Smart City Techbridge. And today we we utilize business networking events, municipality networking events. We find opportunities just from showing up. We’vePhan went recently went to an RFP get together. What are you doing? You had to be there in person in order to respond to the RFP. And out of that, we got two, I think two new opportunities. Is that correct? That is correct. Yeah, we did get to new opportunities. But it was a small business symposium. So being part of this is just you have to actually show your face and be present and really get a chance to interact with some of the decision makers. So the way it will bring us together and we really got some really good deals, hopefully coming out of this. So we’re excited about it. Love it.Phan can you can you give us just a little bit of background? We’ve, we’re gonna make everybody go back and listen to the other episode that Thomas was on if they want to hear his background, background cliffhanger. So can you give us a little bit of backstory, just a 30 second overview, kind of on your background in the space? All right, so for me, I’m a geek. I’ve been a geek since I was little. So I’m into technology. I love tinkering. So, and the fact that I got into technology was more of a stumbling, you know, into it. And over the years, I’ve, I’ve been able to work with banking organization, MSP, IT services, all the way out to network security. And the 30 years I’ve been in technology, I’ve gone all the way up to in the cyberspace and architectural engineer as well. So there’s a lot of technology level that I have, but I also prefer to really be able to sit back and understand the business side of it. Because if you understand the business of high business functions, you can actually bring in the best technology to be able to run the operation. Love it. And yes, I might ask,Phan loves to tell the story to everybody.

What made you move to Charlotte? All right, so this is how it is. I lived in a place called Kings Mountain, right? So Kings Mountain is a very rural town. And there was no internet, there was only dialogue, if you remember it 36, 6, 5, 6, 56K. So I decided that, you know, I wanted to get to a place where technology could really help drive me and get me to that next level. I moved to Charlotte to get me a 1.54 megabit data through Roadrunner. I’m not sure if you remember Roadrunner, but you might be too young to remember Roadrunner. Oh, I remember. I remember. It’s the facial hair thing that gets the facial hair. Okay, so you look better than I do with the gray hair. But and then that’s what brought me into technology. Then I was excited to get that data speed. And then it took me to being able to learn, get, give me a huge knowledge base, you know, to be able to get into this field. And I’ve been here ever since. Love it. I love it. While we’re on you,Phan I’d like to I’d like to call out, I’d like to share lessons learned. Some people have learned lessons the hard way. Some people have had great mentors, anything in the last however many years, five, 10, 20, whatever, any great lessons learned that you want to share with the audience?

Yeah, one of the things that I really like is one of my mentors also mentioned this to me, but one thing I like is you really have to be honest in what you’re selling, right? And you have to be able to translate and tell the client how it affects the business. So it’s really good to get yourself immersed into the technology that you’re selling. You know, if you don’t, bring someone along. And don’t always be ready to say, I don’t know it, let me get you the information. Don’t pretend you know about it. And I think that’s one of the most critical thing a client will trust you more when they know you have their best interests at heart. So find a way to build that personal close relationship by being, you know, being honest and just being straightforward. If you don’t know it, you don’t know it. That’s how I feel about it. Sure. Mr. Hamilton, any great lessons learned, any massive mistakes you want to share with our broad public audience that you’ve learned and you won’t make a difference? Absolutely. And I think anybody in sales knows this one, even though I learned it early on and it continues. And it happens occasionally. We all drop the ball at some point, we all get caught up. And it’s that follow up. It’s just being able to follow up on an opportunity, following up with a customer wishing I told them I did this and I did that and finding out that they, oh, they just gave XYZ amount of money and I could have helped them. If I just asked, if I just knew to ask, and then lastly, I think what was really important, especially when you build a relationship with your customers, ask them for help. Hey, can you help? Can you help me out by exposing me to this department or that department? Or would you give this a try? Would you take a look at this vendor or that vendor or this? Try it out. Let me know what you think. And I found success in that.

Yeah, I like that. You know, it’s a, it’s a really good example. What’s the best time to get a referral right when the relationship is at the absolute most high? And I mean, that could be certainly that could be a referral to your point. We just closed this deal. We just solved this business problem. That could, you know, if this is a big company, that could be a referral inside of, hey, I know I helped you on this IoT. Or I know I helped you on this mobility or the security project. But I also do all these other things. I’ve got this technology ecosystem at my fingertips that you may or may not be aware of. Who else can I help in the way that we’ve helped you? I love that. You know, I can at least remember we were talking about my illustrious career as a vacuum salesman before we started recording. And I’ll tell you the best time that, you know, I got paid for those referrals that I brought into the sales meeting every Monday. And the best time to get them was when somebody bought this, this thousand, you know, thousands of dollars in vacuum and was looking for a discount on some of the other pieces of it. They’re happy to cough up all those referrals. So yes, just ask, right? What’s the worst, what’s the worst that’s going to happen in that?

Somebody else held up, say no. That’s it. You’re right. You just go on to the next one. All right. Let’s talk about let’s just go, you know, a little bit of an origin here. Maybe Thomas, talk us about talk to us about, you know, one of the first deals of the opportunities that you got engaged with in this space, right? When we’re talking about mobility IoT, and how did that kind of open your, your guys’s eyes here, whoever wants to chime in on that. It’s funny, it’s, we went in on, like I said, on a big broadband project, and just talking to the municipality and the leaders in there, in the community, we found out about other issues. We talked with, about IoT trailers from Epic IO.

And just kept having conversations and finding out that, oh, they’re really behind some things, and they were having water treatment issues. So we started having conversations about water treatments and, and doing sensors to monitor, monitor the quality of the water, the overflow, things of that nature, all the issues they were having. And then, the municipality, the merits brought us back to, well, our meters are really old, and we’re supposed to be replacing them. We’re looking at something,

which basically was traditional, and what we exposed to them was an opportunity for an IoT solution, using utilizing water meters, being able to, to track your, track your, check the meter, the water usage from your office. Because now, now, I think the situation was, they’d have to send somebody out. The meters were always inaccurate, the citizens were upset that it was inaccurate. They have since found out that there was theft, and there was corruption. And this solution would eliminate, virtually eliminate the majority, if not all of that. So that was our first opportunity, our first wade into it. And then kind of figuring out and learning that, hey, the water meter is attached to the cell phone towers, which can be put on top of, of a water tower and how all of that interconnects. Okay, so now we’re talking connectivity, we’re talking cyber security, and we’re talking increased productivity for the workers who don’t have to go around to the whole community and read the meters. And in addition to that, allowing for easier process for the office staff. I said a lot, but a lot happened from one solution. Oh, yeah. That’s a good, good example.Phan anything, any other opportunities you want to chime in on kind of some of the earlier things of where your eyes were really opened up to go, “Holy cow, people need help here.” Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we had one recent, not too long ago about asset tracking. You know, we had a company that came to us and said, “Hey, we really didn’t come to us.” It was more like we were working on another project. And then he was bringing up all these things, because he rents a lot of wheelchair and beds and things like that to a lot of hospitals. But oftentimes, they’ll have to go around the hospital and try to find where those devices are, where they are. If a wheelchair is missing, there’s nowhere of being able to track it and find out where it’s at. Or they’re just, you know, the time that it took to just go back and forth and have a user or a person go look for it was creating a lot of expense, of course, ours. So we looked at tagging all these wheelchairs so that when it uses Bluetooth low frequency to be able to track some of these devices or some of the other things, like the wheelchair, the bed itself, we can say, “Oh, we have bed number A, you know, 21 is located on this floor.” Right? And they can go directly and grab it and bring it up to another patient that needed it. So that alone was a big push for them to really get to understand that you can’t utilize IoT to do this work and not have to focus on hiring more and more people. So for him, he was able to reduce the amount of staff that he had. But at the same time, he was able to track things and also track the wheelchairs that are going to maintenance. So he did help him in that area as well. And I suppose that that’s probably a really great, I call that kind of a buying question, right, where somebody’s going, “Can you do this? Can you help me with this?” It’s clearly, you’ve been impacted, you’ve solved something difficult for them. And they’re coming back to you going, “Hey, what else?” And I do feel like that’s the, that is the inevitable. And we were just talking about that a second ago. That’s the inevitable, you know, utopia is when all of the customers know all the things that we can really help them with. And then when they learn it, it changes, you know, and we had more to it. But it’s a good, it’s a good example. Absolutely. They’ll start coming to you and asking you other questions. “Hey, what else can you do?” You know? Yeah, yeah. Thomas, any other thoughts on that or any other examples before we go to kind of trends and things like that? Yes, I was just going to add on to what fans said. The other other thought was there was also an issue with theft. So they have to replace that equipment. Now being able to track, “Oh, it’s it’s on 221 Third Street.” You know, that’s where our missing wheelchair is. Sitting out there or the beds. I found out from that opportunity that hospital beds go missing as well. And there’s a black market for it. So we really? Yes.

We’re always about helping partners uncover new tips and strategies and sales tactics. Black Market for Hospital Beds goes down as a new one for me. But listen, we’re trying to find ROI and these opportunities wherever we can. So I suppose that’s fair. I don’t know the cost on a hospital bed. But I can’t imagine it isn’t cheap. So I don’t recall, but it did come up in conversation. Oh, yeah, I mean, you look at especially with some of those things are equipped with now they’re plugging in, there’s all kinds of motors and sensors and you know, connectivity going to the bed itself. So I mean, whether it’s a, you know, the business case supplies, I suppose to anyone, whether it’s a hospital bed, a CPAP machine, a ventilator, none of that’s cheap. I suppose if we get this right, you find that ROI and one or two pieces of equipment if they leave per year. Great. What if I could not only alleviate that, but also this whole thing pays for itself. I just found the money for you. You’re a hero.

Absolutely.

Beautiful jinx. I love it. All right, we’re dialed in. Okay. Let’s talk about some trends here. I mean, you know, are we seeing it? Thomas, maybe kick us off with is it is it about the sensors to manage, you know, analog to digital to kind of manage and track where things are? Is there, you know, talk to me about trends and verticals. Let’s, let’s kick that off a little bit. What are you seeing?

Wow, I think the verticals are exposing themselves. Just that in the conversations that thatPhan and I having with with the IoT vendors, and then kind of solutions that we have from existing customers or existing companies that we work with or verticals we work with. Hospitality, we were just talking about the panic buttons and and then now we have solution providers who can reduce the water consumption and you know in a hotel, you’re going to imagine that the water consumption is high. So to say be able to save money on that. That number can be extremely high. And again, we’re talking back on ROI, just safety and fire, smoke detection, perimeter. I actually just had a conversation last month we were on with our construction team and and I’m just somebody who was representing municipality and he’s like, Oh, I got a property. It’s like 40 acres and I can’t be out there all the time. I don’t live out there. But I want to know if people on my property on my land. So the sensors can tell him when when somebody’s entered a perimeter and you tag that onto a camera, they can catch on who’s coming on their property and he can send the authorities out. I think there’s so much so much that so much that that that the possibilities are endless. Van, you want to add to it? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s not just in that side of it, but you know, like we looked at the construction, right? You know, on the construction team just being able to get an IoT camera system that will sit there and monitor what’s going on because you can’t be at a construction site 24 seven. So oftentimes we see a lot of theft that are happening. Vandalism, you know, and also missing equipment, right? That are happening on a regular basis. So I think was it epic IO, you know, we were working with and being able to put a trailer out there to continuously monitor, put a perimeter. If someone comes in, they know that someone is having approached the area of the construction. But at the same time, being able to track little devices like if someone has a $100,000 scanning equipment to be able to, you know, determine ground saturation or whatever it is, you want to be able to know that, hey, I can see it’s tracked here. So these are some of the things where IOT really benefits, but not only that, it also helps them to be able to look at the insurance factor of it. People never actually think about this. Every construction you’re building, you have to have insurance, right? But if you can prove that you have really good security to be able to track your devices, keep things going, if something happens, you will be able to pull up information and run it. Then your insurance being able to, the insurance for that site goes down significantly. Josh, one last thing, because it just recently came up and we all were floored because I had to act it out and we were at a networking event and we were talking to a municipality who dealt with transportation. Yeah. And Josh, have you ever heard when casinos where people lay down and pretend like they slipped and fell? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My back’s hurt just thinking about it. Unfortunately, apparently, it seems like people do that in front of rails.

The cars, they let themselves get hit so they can do the city. And so that’s where the conversation came up was, oh, yeah, we got to refresh our cameras. We got to put some new sensors on it because we need to see what happens so we can protect ourselves from fraud and liability.

And back to whatPhanPhan sparked me up when he said insurance and if you can decrease how many claims that come against your insurance with a simple technology, simple technology solution, sky’s the limit. Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love your angle on this. It’s such a different strategy, right? I mean, these, these advanced solutions require just such a different type of talk track. I, you know, I love being nerdy. I love getting into the weeds. We love flexing that knowledge. I think what you just find is, you know, you said earlier,Phan it just comes back to what’s the business problem we’re trying to solve. And, you know, we sometimes think that, well, surely everybody’s going to know these 400 options that are in our head and the 75 OEMs that each of those 400 options has. Yes, yes. And then the customers are going, I just need to make sure people don’t come into my perimeter. How do I do that? I googled and I’m not really sure who’s the best at it. Can you help me with that? And you’re going, oh my gosh, absolutely. You’ve been struggling with this for how long? It could save you a ton of money, headache, all of those things. And then I think what what naturally comes next is have you thought about this? Have you thought about this? Have you thought about this? And it’s there’s so much tech out there. It’s I love that conversation because you guys know this space really well. You know how to translate this, you know, business problem into a solve.

And one opportunities brings us into the door and then that own opportunity, that one conversation brings you to many conversations.

Yeah, it goes back to one of the things I was saying before, is you got to, you know, they have to trust you, right? They have to you have to be honest with whoever you’re dealing with. Because oftentimes when they feel good that you are, you know, you are for them, they will start going to you for almost everything. So, hey, you know about this. You know about this. What do I do about this? Yeah, I’ll never forget. I think you mentioned the honesty component earlier. I’ll never forget. Maybe this is just the the big E in me for the sales engineer part. But, you know, we had a customer that wanted to buy two massive projects at the same time. They wanted to rip out and rebuild the network and they wanted to implement a massive UC and contact center project and everybody was in the same building. And we sat there and looked at him and said, Look, I would love to cash this check for what this this would, you know, represent for us. But if we try to do both of these at the exact same time, you’re going to never want to work with us again. My suggestion is don’t buy the second thing yet. Let’s rebuild the network. Let’s get rid of the hub and spoke. Let’s decouple the MPLS. Let’s let each branch stand alone. Let’s get, you know, visibility and all those things to make sure that we’ve got a performant layer and the applications are happy. We can layer on whatever we want. Right. And I think when you when you come at it with that frame of mind, the customers are just so used to everybody going, I need you to buy this today. And a quarter and a quarter and a month. Come on. It’s a good time. It’s a good deal. So yeah, it’s a good. We don’t live that way. Yeah, we know longevity is key. Right. Okay, let’s talk about let’s dispel. Let’s do some myth busting here. So this all sounds rosy and great. I’m ready to sign up. I’m ready to buy. I’m, you know, salespeople were the easiest sold, right? What, you know, Graham Scott, when he talks about this talk track a little bit, has some great data and analytics around how many high percentage of customer implementations trying to do these things themselves. And how some of those fail, right? Because there’s so many different components of it, right? So obviously driving in need to have conversations like this. But Thomas, talk to me about any great misconceptions out there around these. Maybe what you’re seeing customers already assume good or bad. And kind of how we talked through that.

I think the thing I hear the most initially is the when you say IOT is loss of jobs. And I think that’s a common misconception. I do agree that there will be some jobs lost. But there will be some new jobs gained. And for some folks, there will be increased productivity, they can take on additional activities. Just in our water meter conversation.

Like I said, they had, if they need to check water meters, they have two guys who are devoted, they have to remove from their utilities team to devote to going around every community so that of course their water meters that are missed, their misreads and then I got to send that guy back. So if he’s working on a water main that’s that burst in the street and literally I saw that and while I was out there. He’s got to stop and go back and go read a water meter whereas while they’re having a major break because they had they have seven guys. So there’s seven guys have to do that. So, so, and then just reporting.

There’s just more information that comes in. So I think, like I said, first and foremost, the misconception is, is that loss of jobs and then fans saw somePhan and I talked about this as well. And it was a misconception. He’s he heard as well. Yeah, yeah. A lot of it is that most of the time people think is for, you know, all IOT is for large industries, right? You know, it’s not a problem. A small business and medium sized business. This doesn’t relate to me. This there’s no way I can benefit from it, but that’s actually wrong. Because, you know, when I try to explain people what is IOT things like thermostat, some that can monitor your thermostat. That’s IOT, you know, being able to tell your fridge or your ice maker that, hey, the temperature is low, right? You know, and it could create other issues. That’s an IOT device. So when you actually get a chance to educate small businesses, restaurants, you know, tell them, you know, just having a camera that can just monitor a perimeter, right? There’s not a lot of cost involved in that. And then you run into issue where they’re saying, well, I have this old technology. Can IOT help? There are ways that you can utilize some of the older technology to connect with the newer technology. That you can adapt it to be able to work together. So, but it’s all about really getting a chance to educate that, you know, that client. But, you know, make them aware, yeah, you don’t have to be a big organization to do it. But the biggest one is you can actually use IOT to improve your process. Because, you know, you think about someone who’s driving, you know, all the time, exactly the same way to get to that, to truck a certain amount of, let’s say, wood. After a while, you start realizing this process is not a problem. You start realizing that spending a lot of time using IOT devices tracking, spending a lot of time on this one particular road, when, you know, statistically, you can go through and look and see a going this route will save you 1520 minutes an hour. And you can use it to automate a lot of the things you do and build better process and reduce cost. Love it. Love it. All right, let’s get into the weeds. Let’s get nerdy here. Let’s talk about a deal. All right. So, fam, maybe you kick us off in this. So what, what I like, we talk about a lot on the show is things don’t always end up the way that they start in a good way, right? We tend to uncover a lot more. So walk me through an example. One, you got brought into one, what did they say the problem was? And two, what was the tech stack? And then ultimately, what did you end up putting in place? What was the solve and, you know, anything good that came out of that?

All right, so we had one where, you know, initially, it was they wanted a way to be able to protect the perimeter. This is a school, I’m not going to really say the name of the school, but they want to be able to protect the perimeter because students, yeah, students always have crazy things to do. Sometimes they’ll go certain places to try to do whatever it is that students do at that age. I’m sure we all were, you know, that is at one time. So we had other other things we were trying to cut class. So by the way we did it was being not just the perimeter was great. The perimeter was okay, but we were able to actually put in system that will track things like someone pulling the alarm, fires that are starting because they weren’t aware that we could actually track fires. So that was another one. Guns, which they weren’t even aware that you can track guns, you know, by utilizing some of these device, but at the same time, told them that, did you know that we can actually use this security system and integrate it into the, you know, cybersecurity side? So connecting things like the system into an active directory, right? So whenever you create one account, you can easily build a perimeter access all across the board of what that user have access to. So when they’re badging to the system, it will identify their face as they’re walking in. They may not even have to badge in. You could just look at your face, face recognition, and they can walk in. Some of these things that they weren’t aware of, but when we brought it up to the table, they got excited. Oh, what else can you do? And Thomas, you can add a little more to this because he’ll tell you some of the stuff that we saw. Yeah, I think Claro did that presentation and they did a great job and just having that conversation. I think we also talked about

when the drone came over, this was an example during the meeting, but it was a drone came over an institution and helped hack into the institution. But now you have perimeter security on the roof that can see a drone. Unfortunately,

bad actors are always thinking outside the box and they will come up with a new idea and we need to help our clients think of better ideas on how to solve those solutions. And so tying in the physical security with the cybersecurity at the community college was what made sense. And I had with my own clients, I had that same conversation about financial institutions and helping them out. Like, hey, did you guys think of that? Because they have, in a sense, they have more to lose because they have millions of dollars than they need to protect. Yeah, it’s a good example. I think the thing that we forget sometimes is the volume of conversations that we all have collectively and how much, you know, I was thinking about this the other day. I’ve gone, man, if I was a CIO right now, that is really hard because, you know, you’re asked to, you’re continually asked to do more with less. You’ve got tech thrown at you left and right. And how in the world would I understand all of this stuff if I was in that person’s shoes, right? And you look, some of your background is important in that. But, you know, you’re just a victim of recency bias at some point. And so how do you how do you pay attention to all those things? So I love, I love hearing about that. There was another great stat I heard to statistically, you know, bad actors, bad, bad guys from a hacking perspective, understand Western culture. And so most of those breaches and most of those attacks happen, not between the hours of 8am and 5pm Western Standard or Mountain Standard Time. They happen, you know, after hours when they know there are less people watching things or less people maintaining things. So great, great, great talk track, their great discovery. Love to hear some of those things that you guys are pointing out. Awesome.

Okay, let’s, as we get to the final couple of thoughts here, Thomas, you know, walk us through, if I’m a partner, and I’m listening to this, maybe I’ve sold CX before, maybe I’ve sold cloud infrastructure, and I haven’t, I haven’t had these conversations yet. Whatever you think the best strategy to approach that, the best power questions are to approach that. I’ll let you go first there to talk to the customers. So I think you start out by asking your customer, if you’ve already been, if you already established a relationship with them, you can ask general, you should be able to ask general questions to them if you if whatever project you did was successful. So I would take what vertical are they in? Are they financial vertical, then you know, they might have a physical security issue. They might want, I guess if you, especially if you did like their network, they might have a network that’s going to be a very, very successful.

You know, they need to keep their, their, their network room. Oh, so that’s an IoT sensor that there. If you do restaurants, that’s HVAC, that’s ovens, that’s that’s also the walk in freezer, they need to keep that at a certain temperature. You know, construction isPhan is said security trailers, asset tracking. So it all depends on what the vertical is and then you could come up, you can ask questions. If you do a little bit of homework, see what others have sold in that area. Check out some of the vendors that we have. They have their solutions, right smack dab one page of the website I can I can think of about three or four different vendors vendors that say exactly where they can help, and you just take that or what I’ve also done. Since I have relationships, like I have relationships with property managers and real estate companies as well. Say, hey, you have a vertical, a versatile vertical asset list or, or a PDF for that vertical, and I can go run it down and then I can start asking my customer casual question. Hey, you ever run into this, you ever find that to be an issue? They say yes, no, maybe, or they give me they go into, they just let it all out and say, yeah, I love it when they throw up. I love it. Yeah. Okay, that’s maybe something I can we can help with. And then, and then I think, in that respect, especially if you’ve never sold it before. And even though I, even though I’ve started selling it and I have a better track with it. I still fall back on one of the engineers, Jason Kaufman is my go to at at Telaris, when it comes to IoT and take it from there. It’s like, hey, let me get you on the phone with Jason Jason points us to the right vendor, whether that. I’ll let Josh name the names. That’s his job. Well, I mean, sometimes we just we know, sometimes we get a little bit of information and we can quickly make that and other times it’s let’s get on a call. Right. Love the Jason Kaufman shout out. I mean, that’s our, that’s where we spend the majority of our time from an engineering perspective is helping partners do discovery calls and just then, you know, let it all come out. Let’s find out what everybody’s really trying to do. So no, we just we appreciate you bringing us in. Kaufman will love the shout out for sure.Phan any power questions from your perspective, your view, how you uncover some of these anything different? Yeah, I think, you know, for me, a lot of it is just, you know, making sure that, you know, you understand different verticals of businesses, right? You know, if you’re walking with a transport, walking on transportation, you want to know what it is that they could, they would need, you know, as transportation. And if you’re walking in manufacturing, you want to know, you know, they’re probably likely going to get into a lot of automation, a lot of inventory, a lot of, you know, things that relates to automating that task. So you want to know a little bit about different area in the medical side. What is it that they need? You know, what is the most, what’s their pain points, you know, finding out what their pain points is. That’s what I try to do as I meet, you know, as I go through different verticals. Like, for example, I know CPA, if I walk into a CPA office, I know first thing I want to think about is security, right? I want to see if they have, you know, the best because they have a lot of PII data that they’re working with, right? I want to know there’s the firewall, you know, up to par. They’re able to, you know, monitor and encrypt the data and see what’s happening within the area. Medical, they have a compliance. So these are some of the things you want to think about, but not just let it be your leading point. Let it be that you have that knowledge base because so when they start talking and start bringing things up, you can fire up and say, “What about this? What do you guys do about this? What do you do about this?” When you ask those questions, they will give you, like Thomas said, they will just spill everything. It may take a couple of minutes the first time, but after that, they realize, “Oh, this guy actually knows what he’s talking about. This girl knows what he’s talking about. Let me see what else they got.” They’ll start giving it to you, but just educate yourself. Listen to this podcast with Josh. Josh has a, you have a lot of podcasts all about in different area and different vertical. How to get that knowledge base built in. Knowledge is power. That’s what I believe. I’m a nerd and I love what I do in technology, but I always believe the more you know, the better you are and the better you can present and the better you can teach. So be an educator. Very, very important to teach your clients so that they will know. Love it. Good stuff. Good stuff. All right, Thomas. Final question here. If you had your crystal ball and you could make a prediction, we’re talking mobility, we’re talking IoT, we’re talking innovation, we’re talking today, tomorrow.

Where does this go? Put us out 12 months, 24 months. Are you seeing different innovations? Are you seeing anything different business drivers that you want other partners to be aware of?

I see, I think what I see 12 months out, 24 months out is that as partners, we’re going to be more involved in more opportunities because as we grow and learn, we already have the connections. That’s why these vendors, suppliers let us in is because we have inside connections that they’re either if they have an outside sales team doesn’t have and if they don’t have a sales team, they definitely need us.

I see, I see us growing the space and creating new opportunities. One thing that I’ve learned from listening to a couple of suppliers, there are, so there are problems that they haven’t even developed solutions for yet. It’s still evolving. It’s an evolving industry. We’re going to come in as partners and say, “Hey, our client, our prospect has this issue. Is there a way you can solve for this problem?”

One or two or three of those vendors will say, “We’ll research it. We’ll do R&D and we’ll get it done.”

Love it. Love it.Phan final thoughts, your predictions, your crystal ball?

Yeah. I always believe that technology is a very evolving. Right now, I think the rate of technology changes what about 42% in how it is traveling at the speed of light probably faster than that right now. But what I’m seeing a lot is, IoT is big, but in that whole IoT sphere is what you see is AI. When you combine IoT with AI, that’s when you’re going to see a lot of things that are going to be automated. I see the future of driving vehicles, cars, are going to transition into that space where you’re seeing automation. But in order to have automation, you need IoT device to be able to get on the road to track cars. Cars need to be able to communicate with each other and be able to drive. So all this conversation and communication is going to require things like high-speed Internet. It’s going to require 4G, 5G, 6G of data that are coming around. So you need low latency travel that’s going to happen. There’s things like satellite communication, low orbit satellite communication is coming down. There’s going to be pretty prominent things that we’re doing. All of us are going to have a smartphone that connects to low orbit satellite. So technology, I’m excited about where it’s going. I wish I could live to be 100 so that I can see probably my live to be 100. So I can see all the best tech that are coming down the pipe so that I can be that 90 something year old with a cane and just saying, “Hey, beat me up, Scotty.” Yeah, I love it. I love it. There’s a super, super nerd alert. There’s some cool YouTube videos on some of the oldest videos ever recorded. And it isn’t all about necessarily technology, but just to see what these people’s frame of mind were. It’s really grainy video. At least there’s some audio there. But just to go back, these people that have lived 80, 90, 100 years, just empathetically trying to understand what they’ve seen. I think that I’m with you on that one. That stuff is just fascinating to me. It’s amazing.

Alright,Phan thank you so much for coming on. Loved having you on. Loved all the knowledge drops. Really appreciate everything you’re doing. And just again, thanks so much, man. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Hamilton, good as always to have you back. Thanks for bringing some knowledge and Smart City Tech Bridge. Go check them out. You guys are awesome, man. Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you, Josh. Thanks, Josh. All right. That wraps us up. And I would be a bad host if I didn’t remind everybody whether you’re listening on Apple Music, you’re listening on Spotify. Go out there. Go like, go subscribe. We’re dropping every Wednesday. You’re never going to miss any good content. That way, you’ll automatically get those notifications on your device. That wraps us up for this week. We have met the innovator shaping tomorrow inside the IoT revolution. I’m your host, JoshLupresto SVP of Sales Engineering. This is Next Level BizTech. Next Level BizTech has been a production of Telarus Studio 19. Please visit Telarus.com for more information.