Jay: Welcome everybody to the IT Director’s Podcast, powered by Clear Winds. We are so glad to come to you today. We got our guy Matt Morris from Kappler. How are you doing today, Matt? 

Matt: Good, thank you. Thank you guys for having me.

Jay: It’s so awesome to have you in the studio today. Michael and I are super pumped about talking to you today. Let’s kick the show off. Tell us a little bit about your role at Kappler and your background there. 

Matt: So I’ve worked at Kepler for about 10 years handling pretty much anything infrastructure-wise, licensing, purchasing, anything of that nature. It all falls in my court. I always joke if it plugs in, it comes to me.

I’ve worked with anything from networking to servers to printers—which everybody loves printers—and pretty much anything that just drops in. 

Jay: So basically, you’re responsible for everything in terms of technology. 

Matt: Every day. 

Jay: Every day. So every day’s a new adventure with you, right?

Matt: Never dull. Never dull. 

Jay: Never dull. We’re going to kick off. We got some questions that Michael came up with, and he’s worked with you, Michael. How long have you worked with Matt? 

Michael: We were just talking about that, almost six years. So in COVID, it started off when I started off my sales journey here at Clear Winds. I sent you an email—

Matt: Cold call email.

Michael: Which resulted in a shrimp poboy that I will never forget.

Matt: Shout out to Papa Dubi’s in Albertville.

Michael: I think that not only started the process of doing a lot of projects together but also friendship along the way. 

Jay: That’s awesome. So, how do you decrease downtime and response time in your organization, Matt? 

Matt: We can set up alerts on everything these days, which is great, but it kind of gets lost in the noise of everything else. If you start getting 50 email alerts about problems, you tend to start ignoring ’em.

You guys might think I’m crazy. I think the best thing is to educate users. Teach them what to look for. Teach them to understand that if this email looks suspicious, don’t click on it. Just don’t. 

Michael: But they’re so shiny sometimes. 

Matt: You know, that $50 Amazon card is a good deal!

Jay: Or the ladies selling the piano. We got a lot of those that circulated for about a year. She’s trying to sell the baby grand. 

Matt: Oh, wow. That’s a new one. I hadn’t seen that one yet.

That’s the biggest thing, I think, for me—and it’s not easy, but it’s educating the users on what to expect and what to look for. We’ve got 170-ish employees, and I’d rather spend five minutes coming over there to look at it than five days fixing something that didn’t need to be broken.

Michael: Even taking a step back, when we’re talking downtime, what does downtime mean? 

Matt: For me, any loss of productivity time. We’re a manufacturing company, and so anything that prohibits our employees from being able to do their jobs is considered downtime to me. 

Michael: You got any stories that come to mind?

Matt: I think one of the most recent ones was when we were making some firewall changes testing in prod. It was not my side that was testing in prod; it was another vendor, and they accidentally moved the entire configuration off the VPN we were using. It took us down. So, trying to find out what happened. That prevented everyone from operating.

Michael: How many people walked to your office that day? 

Matt: I shut my door once or twice. 

That’s the benefit of having a ticketing system and getting users to use that ticketing system. We can track all this information and make sure we’re able to see trends and items that are coming up too frequently and try to resolve ’em.

Jay: You know, Matt, you said something really important there. Ticketing system, Michael. And the user is actually using the ticketing system. Being a former IT director myself, that was always such a huge task because people wanted to call Jay directly.

They wanna call Matt. “Hey Matt, I can’t do X, Y, Z.” Did you put a ticket in? Educating users to put the tickets in so you can track it, right? 

Matt: Absolutely. 

Jay: And you can meet your SLAs that you have and your KPIs and all that kind of stuff.

Matt: Then when I have to report on it to our board, I can show what we saw and what we fixed. 

Jay: It’s funny because users just do not like putting tickets in. 

Matt: No, they do not. 

Jay: There’s a facet of them that will never do it. So it’s pretty interesting you say that.

Matt: I’ll get calls, and if it’s an internal call, I’m probably gonna pick it up. I don’t want anybody to suffer waiting for me to get something done. But the first thing I always say is, “Did you put it in a ticket?” If there’s not a ticket, we’re not working on it. We can’t fix it if we don’t know about it. 

Michael: I feel like I’m talking from the standpoint of, I might be part of the problem. So me being the one that’s—

Matt: The guy we always talk about.

Michael: I feel like I’m the problem in that situation.

Jay: But you just want help, Michael, right? 

Michael: Trying to figure out what’s going on. Might shoot a text, might send a picture, a screenshot of what’s not working, and hey, just send a ticket.

Matt: Yeah, but see, we make it so easy. If you’re going to email me, you can email the help desk, and it’ll log the ticket for you.

Jay: That’s a great segue. So what do you guys use in terms of tools, like your ticketing system and the monitoring tools that y’all use? 

Matt: So we use ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus. It’s been a great one. We actually have six different instances that run internally. Anything from preventative maintenance, schedules, and things of that sort to troubleshooting tickets. Okay. We have one for our facilities team, and we have one for our main-plant mechanic team. We even have one for our engineering team. 

Jay: So you have different help desks within your help desk, which is great. 

Matt: Yeah. Unfortunately, I have to control all those, but it’s a good thing to have for tracking purposes and being able to say, “Hey, here are the trends we see.” We need to dig a little deeper to find out why this keeps happening and resolve the root of the issue, not just fix it when it happens. 

Jay: Do you guys have a great knowledge base that you’ve built within your ticketing system that enables end-users to solve some of their own problems?

Matt: To a degree, yes. A lot of the things we hold within the department because it’s confidential or it’s just information we don’t want to get out. But we do have some generic kind of, “Hey, here’s how you can fix that yourself.”

Then it’s not a burden on us to have to go do it, which is kind of nice. But we primarily have built it for internal use for the department itself. That way we are able to control anything that comes in, and if it’s just an oddball that we saw this one time, it may never happen again, or it may happen six months from now.

I’m not gonna remember six months from now. So, let’s go ahead and document it, put it in there, and then we can reference it. It’s a huge help to have that.

Michael: I’m kind of curious to hear, how has that evolved over time? 

Matt: The hard part is knowing which ones are still applicable and which ones aren’t. So, on a yearly basis, I kind of have the team go through and verify the information is still there. When I first got there, I think there were three knowledge base articles. Now we’re up to over 400. Okay. Oh wow. Because we run every system for the company. Whether it’s our ERP system, anything on connecting to the network, or anything that they touch, it falls into our lap. So we don’t understand the operational side of how things work, but we still have to support the operational users. Being able to have that reference material to go back to and go, “Okay, this is how we fixed this the last time.” “This was an anomaly. Let’s keep that.” Sometimes it may be six months, maybe yearly, that we have to do this. Well, I sleep and I forget a lot, so it’s easier to just go back and say, “Okay, I know we did that before. Let’s refer back to that.”

Jay: What does your staff look like, Matt? You know, as you were talking, I was thinking about that. What does your IT staff look like that reports directly to you that helps all your end users? 

Matt: We have a total of three people on the team. We have myself—I’ve been there about 10 years or a little over 10 years now. We have Anthony, who’s been there for 30 years. Anthony is our data guru and report specialist. I joke he knows where all the skeletons are hidden because he’s been there for so long. He is an invaluable asset to the team just because of his knowledge of the company and the operations and what we had and what we’ve gone to get to where we are now. I couldn’t do it without him a lot of the days. It’s great to be able to put a fence around him and say, “Anthony, this is what you focus on. You don’t have to focus on anything else. Build the data, build the reports, and handle that portion of it.”

Then we have another guy named Jonathan. He’s kind of a hybrid between the two of us. He does a lot of the report writing and validation of the data. But he also does a lot on the infrastructure side as well.

Michael: How do three people support an environment with 170 users for a company that has an international reach?

Matt: A lot of cross-training. That’s the benefit. Like today, I am able to be out of the office, and I don’t have to worry. If it’s an emergency and they can’t figure it out, they’ll call. But if not, they’ll handle it. It’s nice to be able to have that kind of a working team and to not have to stress over, “Oh man, I can’t take vacation time.” “I can’t do this.” 

Just being able to understand that what we do is important. You know, I mean, you’re an IT director; you know how it is. We’re just a cost center. We spend money. We don’t make money.

But being able to keep the company operational, moving, and getting product out the door and getting the money for it and keeping that cycle going is what justifies what we go through. It kind of helps just keep it on pace for everything. 

Michael: So, I’m not on the IT director side, but I kind of have the strategy mindset, and so when I look at this— 

Matt: You got that marketing mind.

Michael: I even try to think of it along the lines of your planning, your structure, your systems, and your processes. So, what all is involved? It’s a proactive measure to help you guys decrease downtime. 

Matt: So I schedule maintenance periods periodically just to kind of look and see what is available out there for updates and things of that sort—system reboots, system monitor checks, and just trying to make sure everything stays clean. We have a ton of alerts set up, so if there’s anything that’s abnormal or memory spikes or anything that holds for a while, then we get alerted to those and kind of go look at ’em before they become a problem.

But you know, again, I go back to the users. If something doesn’t work within two milliseconds of what they think it should, they’re gonna let you know. So having them know what to look for and training them to kind of go, “Hey, this looks weird to me.” It has helped me more than anything else.

Michael: I’m kind of curious; I just gotta ask, what’s been your most outrageous request from a user? 

Matt: I think one of the craziest ones had a user who kept complaining her monitor kept flickering. Okay, that’s an easy fix. Let’s look at it. I walk up there, and it’s working just fine.

Of course, she wasn’t there for me to ask, you know, “What’s going on?” So I let it sit there for a couple days. She calls me, “You ever gonna fix this thing?” And I’m like, “I looked at it; it’s fine.” “Well, it’s doing it again.” So I walk up, go to her desk, and I’m sitting there until it does this, because I don’t see it.

I sat there for 15 minutes, and nothing happened. I was about to give up when all of a sudden it started flickering. She’s like, “See? See?” I looked down, and she was wiggling her foot, and she was kicking the cable. So, that was one of those simple fixes. You tighten the cable a little bit, and we were good to go on that one.

Michael: I go back to the users just because I feel like you guys are doing a good job on the training side. I remember a point when I was having fun by replying to the spammers who try to get you on a campaign or whatever. I feel like I am the outsider from that standpoint. 

Matt: Well now we try to prevent you from getting those emails so that way you can’t do that. We try to head that off before it gets to you. Because you cause us more headaches than help.

Jay: We talked a little bit off air about how Clear Winds has helped redesign your data center infrastructure. So what tools has Clear Winds brought in in terms of data center overhaul, and what have you installed to help with all this?

Matt: Accounting’s gonna kill me when they hear this one. So we’ve actually done an entire data center refresh. When I got to Kappler, we had older equipment to start with. It was not a priority for them. So I had been saying, “Hey guys, we need to plan for this. We need to go ahead and start building a budget for this and things.”

Then one Sunday afternoon, I just happened to stop in the office real quick, and our HR director was there, and she’s like, “Nothing seems to be working.” And I’m like, “That’s strange,” and started looking at it. The entire data center had crashed. 

Jay: Oh wow. 

Matt: Thank God for Clear Winds. I called Michael Gray, and he got on the phone, and we spent eight hours that Sunday fixing it.

I wrote up an entire incident report, took it before the board, and said, “Calculate how much this would’ve cost the company for us to be down.”

Jay: Yes, yes, definitely. 

Matt: I said, “This is not just because I wanna spend the money; it’s because we need to make this investment.” So shortly after that, we did an entire data center refresh from the servers to our new SAN, to new switches, to all new hardware throughout, and all new fiber throughout campus.

We have five buildings on campus. All new switches throughout campus, all new APs, and a wireless system put in. We’ve done the four and a half miles of cabling in our new building that we built. 

Michael: We got our steps in. 

Matt: Yes, we did. There was a lot of cable in that building.

We’ve also done AV projects together. We built that training center. We’ve done so many different projects together. It’s crazy.

Michael: Hardware – 

Matt: All kinds of hardware. I’ve utilized the purchasing power that they have with Dell and HP and a couple of other companies to get bigger discounts than I can get going Dell Direct. It’s kind of frustrating. I’m like, “We’re not a big fish, but we spend money with you.” But it’s been nice to be able to go, “Hey, gimme a quote for these.” And they’re able to use their purchasing power with that.

We did a 365 conversion.

Jay: Which made your life a lot easier. 

Matt: Oh my gosh, man. We were on Exchange 2010. On-prem.

Jay: Look, nobody wants to manage Exchange on-prem. Nobody.

Matt: It was a headache. So yeah, it’s safe to say we’ve done a few projects together. We’ve done a lot of different things together.

Michael: What does it look like going back to that strategy mindset? Do you plan out those refreshes, or what does that look like? 

Matt: I try to do about a five- to seven-year cycle. 

Jay: That’s good. 

Matt: If it’s computers or things of that sort, I try to do three to five. We don’t have many power users, so it is not a have-to case. Most of the stuff that we buy, we don’t buy the low end. We don’t buy the real high end. We kind of buy the middle ground. So that it can last a little bit longer. We also get the Dell three-year ProSupport.

Jay: That’s perfect. 

Matt: Within the first three years, that’s gonna break anyways. So we can get that replaced and fixed. I try to keep it on about a five- to seven-year cycle on the higher-end equipment, the servers and things of that sort.

Jay: What did you guys go with, Matt, in terms of your data center? Did you do a hyper-converged system? What did y’all use? 

Matt: We are running VMware there, which I personally love. But, as we were discussing, the Broadcom licensing has not been a good venture for us as consumers.

Jay: But you know, VMware is the best hypervisor, right? Michael and I hadn’t talked about this, but I know from a sales perspective it’s hard for him because customers have it, and you can’t just rip and replace it. 

Matt: No. You cannot. 

Jay: It’s the best. It really is. 

Matt: Oh, it is. I’ve worked with it for almost 20 years, and I love it. It’s kind of one of those things where I don’t wanna let it go.

Jay: I think they’re doing some changes down the line. We’ll talk about maybe another episode. Do y’all use a hyperconverged system, or is it just like a blade chassis or servers?

Matt: Servers with the Blade. 

Jay: What kind of SAN? 

Matt: We went with the PowerEdge 580. I believe it is the one we have. We bought the capacity for what we needed right now, but with the expandability for the future. That way we’re not having to go out and buy a whole new one. We’ve been very pleased with that one. 

Jay: That’s fantastic. I know it made your life a lot easier not having to worry about old rack servers. 

Matt: Oh, and the one we had before, you could only set up in two-terabyte chunks. So trying to get anything to just go seamlessly across the whole thing was impossible. There were a lot of shell games trying to figure it out. We got this size over here we can work with; put that over there. Or we gotta move it over here so that we can put that one. Now it’s all together, and we don’t have to worry about that part, which is great. 

Jay: You know what AI tools, or if you’re using AI tools at all, what do you guys use right now? 

Matt: Really, we have kind of shied away from it. I’ve done several use case studies on it, and we haven’t found anything that benefits the company as a whole. We’ve tested, you know, Copilot; we’ve tested ChatGPT. Things of that sort—outside of rewriting some emails and kind of structuring a few items that way, we haven’t found a use case that actually benefits us. Enough to make the investment, let’s put it that way. I don’t have to be an adopter of new technologies. Let it get a couple years under its belt; let it all kinda shake loose a little bit and get a refined product. 

Michael: Give it an opportunity to see if the robots are gonna take over the world.

Matt: That’s the other thing. I don’t wanna invest in that yet. 

Jay: Well, you know, people don’t realize, but like in VMware, you’ve been using AI for like 15 years. That’s how it moves. Servers all over the place, not knowing where they are. 

Matt: You know, a lot of what they call AI now, really, it’s just advanced analytics. It’s learning, and it’s able to disseminate the information and kind of dissect it down to different sectors. It’s not really doing much else with it. So we’re seeing this huge influx of capital going into this. It makes me a little nervous not knowing what the payout’s gonna be.

What’s the ROI going to end up being on these multi-billion dollar data centers? They’re not getting what they thought they would out of it. 

Jay: Yeah. Really, it’s just data analytics and driving that data and getting quicker response time. 

Michael: I think that’s the other part that we were trying to focus on and kind of learn from what you guys are doing: what does it look like to increase response time?

So we’re wanting to learn how to, and even sharing with some listeners, like, how have you decreased downtime? The other aspect of increasing response time—now some are using AI for those types of things. What do you guys do? What’s that journey been like for you?

Matt: Like I said, we’re kinda the holdout still on that portion of it. I’m old school. I like my hands on the keyboard. I like to know what’s going on. I like to get in there and work with it and kind of be able to look and see and say, “Okay, this is what we’re noticing.”

I don’t necessarily like to rely on tools to tell me what I can see, probably quicker and better personally. Because I’m in those systems every day. I don’t have to wait for a report to pop up to go “Here, here’s what you need to worry about.” 

Jay: We talk about security a lot, right? That’s probably one of the biggest things.

Matt: The top concern. You got a hundred-something employees. You’re focusing on payroll, your ERP, and the production side. Downtime is tied to money. What tools are you using in terms of security for your infrastructure? And then also your email—phishing, spamming, all that kind of stuff. 

Matt: So we recently converted over to Check Point. The harmony solution. We have really enjoyed that solution.

Jay: Are you denying all the users their request to allow their email through?

Matt: Yeah, you don’t need that. Get outta here! 

Jay: I like how Check Point lets you say, “Hey, I want to get this email from Michael,” or “No, we don’t!” 

Matt: Nope. I blocked him already! Tanner’s come through, and Stan’s come through. 

Michael: Listen! Listen!

Matt: We converted from Forcepoint. Which was a great solution, but they were kind of sunsetting the email portion of it. And that was not gonna help me out much. So, I reached out to Michael and these guys over here, and we actually had a couple of meetings with Check Point, and we signed it with Harmony and the Browse portion of it.

We actually have a Check Point firewall now, and having that information all in a single pane of glass is really helpful. I can log in, and I can bounce between multiple systems to see what’s going on without trying to log into nine different systems to get the same information.

Jay: I think that’s what I always struggle with, and I’ve listened to you talk, Matt; I think you’re the same way. There are so many tools out there, and there are so many platforms. Especially AI, right? There’s so much stuff that can help us, but also I don’t need to log into 15 different systems to tell me the same thing. So, I used a lot of AI for scripting and for some small automation. But really, when you say “AI,” you’re really just writing scripts. Using the AI engine to generate the script. But really you’re writing an old script.

Matt: The problem is you still gotta validate it.

Jay: Correct. 

Matt: You still gotta make sure you wrote it correctly. I mean, it does save time, but you gotta test it.

Jay: My son uses AI when he orders stuff off my Alexa, and Amazon packages come up at the house. So, I had to turn that feature off. 

Matt: Swap his credit card out.

Jay: Yeah, correct. 

I mean, narrowing down the tools. It sounds like Michael and Clear Winds have been great helping you narrow that down so you’re not just bombarded with all these different platforms. 

Matt: Exactly. I’ve relied on Clear Winds pretty heavily on a lot of information bases.

I’m like, “Okay, what do you guys see? What are the trends that you guys are noticing? What’s coming down the pipe that might be beneficial?” I’d love to go out and buy a bunch of different things, but, again, we don’t get to make the money. So it’s, it’s one of those things of, how can I make the best investment for the company?

It’s not just for the IT department; it actually is for the whole company. And so being able to lean into these guys and go, “I need expertise.” You know? I know enough to be dangerous. I need someone who knows what they’re doing. 

Jay: Yeah, they’re product experts, right. And guys like you and us, we know what we know. But we don’t do that on a large scale.

Matt: Every day. 

Jay: Every day, right? So we isolate certain things. That’s where it’s so important to have a local partner. Not a vendor, but a partner. You can call Michael on a Sunday afternoon. He answered.

Michael: Well, I think that’s the big thing with what we’re doing. Our whole job is to make sure you guys are successful. It’s building partnerships along the way, and that’s the purpose behind that.

Matt: That’s really what it’s felt like. It’s not a business transaction. I mean, yeah, it’s mutually beneficial. They’re making money, and I’m getting the services, but it’s not transactional. 

Jay: It’s a partnership. You’re gaining value and peace of mind. That’s what I always looked for in our partnerships. I can buy servers from anyone. But just listening to Michael and you talk, it’s been really interesting because, from my point of view, that’s what a true partnership looks like.

I think that’s probably why I wanted to have you on today. To talk about your experience and your knowledge in the field. Obviously you do a lot of vast stuff. You’re doing everything from desktops to the firewall, and there’s a lot in between there. A lot of people don’t know that.

Michael: And from your seat from handling so much. For our listeners, we’ll have people in different stages of their careers. What kind of advice would you give for those stepping into those leadership roles or those who might already be there, but they’re trying to navigate these challenges of how to decrease downtime and increase response time?

Matt: Eat the elephant one bite at a time. Don’t try to do it all at one time. Plan it out. Make sure the items you’re purchasing or the items you’re looking at are gonna integrate and work with the systems you have. Build from there because if you buy something and it doesn’t work with your systems you’ve got now, you just wasted a ton of money. 

Jay: And resources and time.

Matt: Resources and time and effort. Mm-hmm. Just make sure you’re purposeful in making your decisions. Don’t just say, “Hey, this is the newest thing; let’s go buy it.” No, this has been around for 10 years. I know it works. Let’s buy that. Don’t be in a hurry.

This world changes every day, and it’s tough to keep up with those trends and those changes and everything that happens. But just being able to say, “Okay, here’s what I know. Here’s what I need to know, and I’m not gonna worry about that over there because it’s not gonna impact me right now.”

I think that idea, “Don’t be in a hurry,” That goes far beyond an IT standpoint. That’s life advice right there. 

Matt: We have our urgencies, and we gotta make sure we answer those when the call comes. Yeah. But even then it’s “Okay, let’s go with what we know. Here’s what we don’t know, and here’s what we gotta figure out to marry those two.” 

Jay: Well, you guys both remember probably five years ago: Cloud. I mean every lunch and learn, every event I went to was cloud, cloud, cloud. So let’s fast forward five years, right? CrowdStrike happened. Amazon was down two weeks ago for, like, a whole week. Microsoft RA was down. Everybody wants to move their stuff to the cloud; the cloud don’t work. I really listened to what you said, and you talked about how you have a lot of stuff on-prem. I had a hybrid system. I had on-prem and I had a cloud offering. I told our payroll, “We ran payroll for 4,000 users.” I mean, if 4,000 people don’t get paid on Christmas, I’m gonna be in trouble. You know what I mean? So, when that CrowdStrike happened, we ran payroll and paid people.

We had platforms that were in the cloud that didn’t work, and they were some of our accounting systems, but they were cloud-based because they used the Amazon Cloud. My point is, to your point, don’t be in a hurry. Be methodical and just kind of go as you learn.

I like being on the cutting edge of things, but in your role, you can’t really be on the bleeding edge. The bleeding edge cut you out.

Matt: That’s right. I think that’s one of the biggest things. We run a hybrid cloud system too. So, we have a lot of stuff on-prem, but any of the business-critical items, like our ERP system—we can’t function without an ERP system. It runs the entire company. Basically a collection of all our information that everybody needs access to—cutting software, things of that sort. All those are business critical. I have those stored in the cloud, and with that cloud vendor, I have certain guarantees with backups, restorations, and things of that sort. That’s why I made that decision to split and go, “They have much better equipment. They got multimillion dollar infrastructures; they got better security.”

I think this one vendor has 15 data centers. So, I’m in one location, but I’m backed up to another location. So if something happens there, I can spin up in a matter of seconds. It’s all VMware based. I can communicate, and I can share a service in between the two of us. There are a lot of advantages to having that model, and like I said, it’s all backed up. And it is business critical. We live in tornado alley; this is not unknown here. So we are able to still access the systems through VPN externally without having to worry about total catastrophic loss of facilities and all our servers and everything else. Everything else is still backed up and operational somewhere else. 

Jay: So did any large events lead to any of that, like Icemageddon? 

Matt: I was actually living in Birmingham when that happened. Actually, that was one project I forgot we worked on together. We actually have a BCDR with you guys. It’s one of those things that if your data’s gone, you’re gone. I mean, the whole company is gone, and we’ll be celebrating 50 years as a company next year. 

Jay: Which is incredible.

Matt: This is amazing for a small company. It’s 50 years of history. 50 years of information. If that’s lost, man, I’d feel horrible about it. Not just because it was my job, but just because of the history and the aspects of everything that’s happened to get us to where we are now.

Michael: I know we talked a little bit about what you’re doing, but we didn’t even really talk about who Kappler is. Like, what’s your high-level pitch of who Kappler is?

Matt: Well, as I just said, uh, next April 1st, it’ll be 50 years we’ve been in business. We are a manufacturing company. We have a very small niche group of what we do. We actually manufacture hazmat suits and chemical protective clothing and apparel. We are a global company, as Michael said. We actually do international work with international entities, whether it’s governments or things of that sort. 

If somebody’s in one of our suits, it’s a bad day. It’s not something you just wanna put on and walk around in. It’s not fun; I’ve done it. I’ve sat in meetings in warm suits just to test them out. 

Jay: Hey, look for our listeners and viewers—that must have been a big suit, man. I mean, how tall are you? 

Matt: Like 6’6”

Jay: That was what, 4X?

Matt: Yeah, it was 4X. 

Jay: I like it. I like it. 

Matt: Hey, we actually made a 7X suit one time. The guy’s nickname was Tiny. 7X looked like a circus tent. I mean, it was huge. 

Jay: Think about that; you guys make hazmat suits for big, huge disasters, and we’re talking about disaster recovery. It’s kind of funny that it goes hand-in-hand.

Michael: Tell me, what movie was it in again that they used your suits? 

Matt: Arrival. The one with Amy Adams and Forest Whitaker, I think. It’s actually been in multiple. We put together a whole slideshow about it once. I’ll be watching TV, like true crime or something like, “Hey, that’s ours!” So it’s always interesting to see. But it’s like, oh man, that’s a bad day for somebody. 

Jay: But it’s really neat to see what you do in terms of being an IT director translate into real life.

Matt: Well, and that’s the importance, I think, of my role and the IT team’s role. If we don’t do our jobs, our people can’t do their jobs. 

Michael: That’s what matters, man.

Matt: If they can’t do their jobs, then somebody out there in the world gets hurt. I’ve got friends, close personal friends, that wear our gear. I don’t wanna have to deal with that. I don’t wanna deal with somebody getting hurt because we didn’t do our job. I know it kind of sounds cliche, but I take my job that seriously. It’s making sure that “Hey, you guys can do what you have to do and not wait on us.”

Michael: I think that’s probably why Clear Winds has meshed well with you guys. That’s our mission. Our mission is enabling our partners to focus on their own mission. So that’s what we do. That’s why we do it. 

Jay: Well, look, this has been a fantastic episode. I mean, we could sit here and talk for hours. 

Matt: I think we could.

Jay: Just your knowledge—I think the listeners and viewers are gonna love some of the points that you’ve brought up and some of the topics you’ve talked about and the vast array of things you have to deal with.

I think a lot of IT directors are gonna resonate with it. When we first started out in technology, 30 years ago for me, you had a network team, and you had a network admin. All they did was create users. 

Matt: It was siloed.

Jay: You had a firewall team, you had a cabling guy, and you had a workstation. Now it seems like everyone does everything again. 

Matt: You have to. That’s part of making the investment in your teams. You can’t be siloed anymore.

Jay: Technology’s changed so much that you gotta be able to be multifaceted in every area.

Matt: Absolutely. 

Jay: So I think our listeners are gonna love hearing from Matt. We’re just glad you came on the show, brother. 

Matt: Well, thank you guys for having me. I appreciate it. Really do. 

Michael: Absolutely. Any chance I get to talk about Kappler, I’m happy to do it.

Jay: Michael and I are just excited to have you on the show, and thanks for being part of Clear Wind’s family and trusting us in partnership with you.

Matt: It’s been a great partnership.

Jay: If Mike don’t take care of you, just come see me.

Michael: Hey, I’m taking care of this man. 

Matt: He takes good care of me. 

Michael: He’s got direct access to some shrimp poboys.

Matt: I can call Will and be like, “Hey, Will, cut him off.”

Michael: We definitely appreciate it.

Jay: Man, this has been an awesome show. Thanks so much for coming on.

Matt: Yeah, thank you guys. 

Jay: This is Michael and Jay, and we’re signing off from The IT Director’s Podcast with Clear Winds, and thanks for tuning into us today.