The biggest thing that we try to impart on the teams is a better sense of ownership.

People want that from their career, right?

They want to feel like, I made this thing happen.

Every week I will get an email.

It's a client who proactively reaches out to say that somebody somewhere at softwareone has done something amazing for them and helped them overcome a really big challenge.

When you look at how that employee did that, they did not do it by following a checklist.

And the way that they engage the customer is by always asking why our teams went the extra mile for them.

I would rather we did that every single day and we took those risks and we just delivered the best outcome possible because that's what customers want from us.

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Welcome back to Lead the Team with number one bestselling author and in demand corporate trainer Ben Fanning.

On this podcast, the world's most innovative senior leaders share their top success strategies to motivate your direct reports, cultivate your top leaders and accelerate your career.

Let's get started.

Here's Ben.

Welcome back to Lee the team, the podcast where we dive deep with the leaders inspiring the future of business.

And today we are joined by a true force in the tech world.

Someone who's not only climbed a corporate ladder, but actually built a few rungs along the way and you'll see what I mean.

Today he started in Inside Sales and rose to become a top performer across North America, earning recognition as a quote next gen channel leader and now as co president of North America for Software One.

He's leading the charge in strategic growth and customer excellence.

If you haven't heard of SoftwareOne, well you should.

They analyze over 22 million devices daily, giving them unique insights into software trends.

And they have a massive presence with over 9,000 employees and operations in 90 countries from Ireland to London and now conquering the Big Apple.

Please welcome the one and only Shane Cronin.

Welcome.

Thank you, Ben.

So great to be here.

Thanks for joining us.

Your journey is incredibly inspiring and let's rewind it a Bit Take us back to your early days at SoftwareOne.

In fact, maybe day one.

What was it like starting in inside sales, and what have been some of the key lessons you learned that propelled you forward?

Oh, well.

Well, first of all, thanks for having me.

I've been listening to your podcast and it's just.

It's so great that you reached out.

I was super thrilled.

So I.

Thank you very much.

Yeah.

So looking back, I mean, it was funny.

I was.

I was thinking about this because I was asked to do another podcast for our learning and development team about two weeks ago.

The questions were about some of the jobs I had in.

I was like a delivery guy in high school and I worked in Ireland's version of Blockbuster.

I had learned nothing, learned literally nothing during that time.

And the first realization.

But you saw some good movies.

Probably all we did was watch movies and eat popcorn, literally.

Favorite.

So what is the Irish blockbuster name?

It was called Extravision.

Extravision.

It did last a lot longer than Blockbuster, but that was mainly due to Netflix.

We didn't have very good broadband.

So Netflix was a little slow getting to Ireland.

So Extravision, they could ride the wave.

A little longer and favor.

From that time period.

From that time period.

Oh, my.

I don't even know.

I think I remember there was somebody who worked with us and she was obsessed with Shrek and like, there was like a giant TV's everywhere.

And I must have seen Shrek six times a shift.

So you multiply that by a year.

It was.

It was crazy.

I could quote every line from that, all the songs.

So that's all I can remember.

And that is a Scottish accent from Shrek, not an Irish accent.

That's right.

A lot of people do get it wrong.

So my first career, let's say, was definitely the inside sales role in.

In London, to be transparent, I had no idea who SoftwareOne was.

I didn't even know a SoftwareOne that I was applying for.

Some recruitment company reached out.

They asked me to do an assessment day.

My girlfriend, now wife, at the time was already in London and I thought, I just.

I just want a job, right?

I just want to get to London and be with my girlfriend.

So going into the first day, I was obviously excited, but generally I still think that I had this view of sales being, well, the cliches, right?

Use car salesman.

You come up with all these tips and tricks to convince somebody that they're going to give you money.

And I remember the initial days, there was a small team, maybe 20 people, and there was two leaders running the org.

And then there was a couple of, I would say, really high performers.

And then there was kind of like a lot of new people.

And I remember it was a very startup feel.

There was a.

There was an Xbox, There was a pool table.

The clock would strike five, and myself, my fellow newbies, and a lot of the team would be sitting down playing FIFA.

It's a soccer game for those that don't know.

And you have these.

These.

Right, the leaders.

And you'd have these high performers sit at their desk.

And I always thought, I wonder what they're working on, right?

Like, I wonder how much work you really have.

And it wasn't until I started going into the field.

And I remember sitting with customers who these really big problems and challenges they were trying to solve for or they were trying to get to a certain goal that they had, whether it be revenue generating or cost savings.

And I remember multiple points in those meetings almost feeling the anxiety that they're now bringing up something that is a challenge, something that we have to solve for, and do we have the answer to that?

And I just remember every time these guys were just knocking it out of the park.

And I remember saying to them, well, what.

How did you know that?

Right?

Like, when they brought that up, how did you know that?

You had the numbers to hand, you had references, you had stories.

You could put them in touch with other people.

You knew the ins and out of the market dynamics.

And one of them literally said, oh, when you were playing FIFA, I was prepping for this meeting.

And it was a funny comment.

I was a kid.

I didn't take insult to it, but it really sort of kind of stuck with me, was like, these were not people who are showing up to customers to get them to buy something.

They were showing up to our clients to help them solve a problem.

And it took a lot of work and a lot of discipline and a lot of sacrifice to be able to do that.

And I think to this day, when I think about great leaders, I still think back to then.

A lot of them went on to set up our NORAM business and our Australian offices and do other amazing things.

But it was that customer obsession that just stayed with me the whole time.

So I think that's what that's been.

The thing I've gotten the most juice.

Out of, I would say customer obsession.

And I experienced this through a lot of levels.

One is about engagement in your workday as an individual.

Like, are we playing FIFA?

And like, the new playing FIFA might be playing Facebook or it might be Scrolling.

It could be a lot of things that we distract ourselves with and to know that hey, there are people out there and the road to success is not paved with scrolling social media necessarily.

It's through thinking at a higher level, being focused, being obsessed with solving our customers problems and finding the joy in that.

And then the other piece I'm experiencing is, hey, how do we get our teams to do that?

Like you and your thousands of team members, how are you thinking about that today?

Because you can't say, hey, you have to stop playing FIFA.

You have to, you have to invite them to make that choice for themselves to stop playing FIFA and get on, get on this customer obsession.

How are you thinking about it?

How does that scale?

It's, it's probably one of the most difficult things to do.

So.

Yeah, that's why we have, we're trying to figure this out.

Yeah.

Really 350 episodes.

We're trying to figure it out.

Still.

You're still going.

I think that the, have you ever read the, the book the Linchpin by Seth Gordon?

Oh, I, I love that book.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And maybe tell everybody like what is a linchpin in this?

Yeah, I think that was cool.

It was.

I remember getting promoted to my first leader position.

Right.

So you had a small team in New York and somehow stumbled across it.

I think he was on Tim Ferriss podcast or something.

And I remember, I remember the idea that everything that we've set up has kind of been, has kind of been industrial to an extent.

Right.

We think about people in work almost as fulfilling a task.

And that's kind of how the education system is set up.

That's how a lot of businesses are set up.

You hire people to contribute one piece of a bigger, of a bigger sort of objective.

And the idea behind the book obviously was the fact that through technology, organizational shifts, market trends, we move beyond that.

And what we really need are people who are able to actually solve interesting problems for us.

We don't need people anymore.

Right.

We like even now.

Right.

That book is 10 years ago, maybe more.

And if you look at how you could use Copilot, Gemini chatgpt.

Right.

You don't even have to write your own emails anymore.

Right.

So what are you doing with the time that you have left over where you can out task all of the stuff?

And I think for us the biggest thing that we tried to impart on the teams, which is really, it's really difficult, is a better sense of ownership.

Because if the teams work in an environment where they feel like they are empowered to make decisions and to deliver on outcomes for their customers, then they will do it.

People want that from their career.

Right?

They want a sense of ownership, they want a sense of empowerment.

They want to feel like, I made this thing happen, happen.

And at SoftwareOne in particular, we, we invest a lot of money in learning and development and we have a learning and development team.

They will do workshops and a lot of it is around building high performance teams and trying to create a leadership style or structure within the business that creates an environment that allows people to do that work, obviously aligned to our shared values and our organizations.

But that's the thing.

And, and for us, I would say it works, but I don't think it works completely at scale.

So every week I will get an email where it's a client who proactively reaches out to say that somebody somewhere at softwareone has done something amazing for them and helped them overcome a really big challenge.

And when you look at how that employee did that, they did not do it by following a checklist or a framework that I've established or anyone else has established for them.

It cared and they thought, how can I do this?

They collaborated and they made it happen.

And I think we, we get that recognition too through the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

We've got a 95% of our customers recommend us, so clearly we do it well.

Something's working, Something's working.

It's just, I think the, we have to, it's always a challenge to continue, one, to maintain it and two, to accelerate it and have it more broadly across the business.

So when's the time?

So could you give us an example of that?

Of when?

I mean, because who doesn't, by the way, who doesn't want that?

Right?

A customer reaching out and sharing something like that.

Can you walk us through one that was particularly memorable?

Yeah.

So we have one, I can't say names, but there's, there's one customer who Fortune 50 organization.

And what SoftwareOne does primarily for this company is that they've got basically an issue whereby they are trying to remove their technical debt in order to invest more in cloud, AI technologies and etc.

But the thing that's kind of hurting them is the amount of resources that they have to do that and obviously the expertise in house to know how to build the right roadmap, have adoption and change management and then really set, pick the right set of technologies to get there.

SoftwareOne's current, let's say, scope of work with this company is more around how do we maintain compliance within their, their IT infrastructure, mitigate risk, reduce costs.

And we had a team member who is in our services or so not a seller.

And all they really know is that how do I maintain compliance, remove risk, et cetera, et cetera.

And the way that they engage the customer is by leading with inquiry and always asking why?

So they would always ask why, why are you doing that?

So you said 30 savings this year, but like, surely you want to save that for a reason.

Is it because you've just promised it to Wall street or are you planning on using that money for something else?

And what happened through doing all of that is they discovered there was a much, much bigger challenge that that company was facing and that we had all this data that was commercially driven.

We were looking at it purely from the perspective of you bought this much, you're using this much.

But the way they needed to look at it is, oh, wait, the things you're using, how are they being used?

Why are they being used by the employees and even how often?

And then not only that, what would it, what would it look like to actually then migrate those workloads to the cloud to then achieve the goals that they had?

And his employee took that data back, they brought in a different services team, didn't even charge the customer, and basically built this framework for the customer where they recommended, here are the workloads that you could go look at, here are the challenges face the resources you need and the long term cost of getting there.

And the customer literally was like, we've been trying to figure this out for six months and they never even directed that employee to do it, they just did it.

And for me, it'd be great to say, oh well, you had, you took up more resources.

That wasn't in scope, but that's one of our most strategic customers because our teams went the extra mile for them.

And I would rather we did that every single day.

And we took those risks and we didn't always consider what the, how does that work for our margins or the amount of hours that are being booked.

And we just deliver the best outcome possible because that's what customers want from us.

So that's probably the best example I could think about.

Well, that right there is one of the reasons I love doing this show because it's, it's a real call to action to rethink how we're leading people, what's the culture and what are the parameters and what are we charging our teams to actually go do?

And it ties beautifully back to the linchpin.

Because, like, you're not just like you.

You had a job description for this person, but they didn't say, hey, my, my responsibilities end, you know, with this job description beginning in sure.

And they understood it.

Hey, this is an important customer.

We need to find ways to continue to add value.

And darn it, I, I have the power to go make this happen.

And I, I got, when I worked for my other, I worked for Honeywell, a lot of other organizations, I do not think I had that, that mindset.

Yeah.

And I want, but I wanted it or I felt like I did, but it's just such a big thing.

And I'm curious, from your standpoint, is it more nature?

Like, hey, we're hiring people who tend to push the envelope a little bit and they understand these things, or is it more of a nurture situation where, hey, when you get in here on our company@software1, this is who you become?

We're, we're not restricted in this way.

I think it's nurture.

The reason I think it's nurture is that you do see a correlation between the leaders who have certain philosophies in how you serve a customer and how their people show up.

And I think that that tells me that the, the guidelines or the restrictions or the frameworks that we build around our, our teams does have a material impact on how they then show up.

So I think a lot of it is certainly around nurture.

It's how we, we create those environments for them to do their best work.

And we are, we're.

I think there's that Brene Brown quote, like, clear as kind.

Right.

We're super clear with them on what they can do, what they can do, where those, where those sort of walls exist around them.

And then we give them the freedom to make that decision and learn from that failure.

For sure.

There is definitely an element of recruitment.

I mean, even the best teams who do this, we certainly recruit people and just their mindset is very task driven.

They want to be given a list of things to do and it's just never gonna, they're never gonna do those, those extra things.

Right.

They're never going to think, how can I be better today?

How can I show up better for this customer?

Doesn't mean that the work that they do is bad.

It just doesn't mean that they necessarily operate in that sort of mindset where they're, they're thinking to themselves, how do I, how do I make this happen?

But I think it's more nurture.

Based on what we've seen.

But I mean, what have you seen?

Do you do.

Have you seen the same?

Well, I think it's a combination based on what I'm seeing.

It's way easier if they show up that way.

Yeah, but it is really hard.

You gotta be like a.

You have to have a sixth sense about somebody.

It's hard to read it on paper or one of the things I think a lot of leaders, perhaps.

I'm curious from your standpoint, you may get that call on the golf court.

You may, you may be golfing with somebody or you may be at a conference and someone says, hey Shane, if you ever get to hire Janet Smith over here, you get, you take that chance.

Like if you ever get a chance, like she's the one and I.

And some.

Maybe Janet's up, maybe you don't even have a role for.

But you're highly trusted colleagues that if you ever get a chance, you, you hire this person.

And it's amazing sometimes I think how those, those kinds of bets pay off.

Absolutely.

You know.

Yeah, but thinking about looking at your LinkedIn profile, it's so unusual to see someone's inside sales and now you're like the top executive.

How.

Why in the world did you stay with one company?

Because you in, in tech, you could have jumped, you probably could have grown.

You might have been able to get to the C suite faster.

I mean, maybe, I don't know.

But speculating because tech can work that way right.

Where you're jumping up and.

But, but you chose to stay with the same organization.

What was the secret there for that whole ride that you've been on?

I think a lot of it is.

I mean, I don't want to pretend like it's all luck.

Right.

That I had no part in working hard or having a real interest in this organization doing well.

I think I was very inspired by our founder.

He had a clear vision of what he wanted Software one to be.

And I think that drove me.

But I think the.

Honestly, the main thing is that the people I work with are amazing and there's been a lot of people who've come and gone in that time, but I have never had a moment that's offer one where I felt like I wasn't supported, where I felt like I was alone or I was problem solving all by myself.

I think that we created a really good culture, particularly in North America, where people can be vulnerable and you can speak plain language.

Right.

We don't have overly corporate speak.

We can show up to a Call and just call something a disaster.

If it's a disaster, I can say, I have no idea what I'm going to do about this and be okay with saying that and having the right people around you who will help navigate those situations.

And that for me is so much right.

It's.

It's so important that you show up, really, and you're actually excited to get on that call and speak to that person because you're like, we can figure that out.

We've got this.

So honestly, that.

That is the main thing.

The people and the folks that we brought in and hired in the environment that we created is so collaborative.

It's so.

It's so focused on doing what's right for the customer and not.

There's not a lot of ego that I think it's just an easy place to be here and I think there's a good sense of where we want to go next that is quite motivating.

So I think all those things come together.

That just keeps me here.

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Can you tell us about a moment where you were close to jumping ship?

You're like, I've had it.

Or it could be I had it moment, or it could have been, hey, Shane, you're doing a great job.

Why don't you come do it for us?

The grass is greener over here.

And what.

How did you think through it?

So I did leave at one point for a very short period of time.

It was maybe three weeks.

So that's something that doesn't like, is.

It a vacation or did you actually leave?

No, I.

So it was a time.

It was a time where I think in that moment, it wasn't really anything going on with Software one.

It was just I.

I felt like I wanted to start something new and I wanted to work for a different organization.

And it was only a couple weeks.

So I'm not going to say the other company because it's not actually a fair reflection of them.

It was like three or four weeks.

And it was three or four weeks and actually had vacation planned.

I went to Italy for two weeks.

So, like Literally like I barely was there.

And while I was away I think that it was one of those moments where I quickly regretted it.

Even in the three weeks I really started to feel like I missed a lot of the people that I worked with and I knew that there was a lot of work that we were.

That we were focused on at SoftwareOne in terms of like transforming the business from what was a traditional reseller at the time into a services organization.

And I think it was maybe somewhat of an emotional decision at the time.

I just felt like, oh, it's been six or seven years, I need something new.

And I luckily got a phone call like five weeks later and it was, it was my boss at the time just asking me to come back and we had a good conversation about maybe taking on some more responsibility and really accelerating some of the service lines that we had.

And I came back.

But I honestly, nothing really at the time was driving me away.

But I was that obviously it was more than close because I left.

So.

Yeah, well, sometimes you got to go test the waters a little bit and just see it sound like you didn't test it that long other than maybe testing some gelato on your vacation in Italy.

Yeah.

I can tell you I remember day one at the other company and just knowing it wasn't for me and what it was was it just for me was a place that was over engineered for sales.

I think that there was a lot of.

There was a lot of top down scripting and.

And this is what you say when and for me going back to the linchpin and everything that sort of inspired me and, and gets me excited is this idea of like creating an environment where people can take more risks.

I feel like, oh, I don't want to lead a team like that or I don't want to be in a team like that.

That feels very sort of boring.

Right.

It doesn't give me a lot of freedom to do my best work and again didn't see it through very long.

But the first three or four weeks that certainly was.

Was the experience that I had or.

That comes to mind for me on that is courage.

When you knew it wasn't right.

Being able to take action versus man I just left.

Right.

I need to.

But if you know it's not the right thing, having the courage to step in and say all right, I gotta make it right and be back over there.

Luckily I did.

When you left, it sounds like too you did a good job of not burning bridges with the original company if they're willing to Even call you back and ask you to come back.

Yeah, well, I think that that comes back to the culture that we have.

Right.

We can all be honest with each other and for sure if there's things that are frustrating with you.

I think we build so much, we build so much psychological safety that, that I think that there's a great degree of somewhat allowance there to be somewhat open and transparent.

So when you are and you leave and you give feedback, nobody's insulted.

What is that unexpected twist or failure in your career and how did it lead to your success or growth on down the road?

I think the, I don't know about, I don't know about failure, but I would say the last maybe six months was certainly the most challenging.

So we went through a pretty substantial reorg.

It's nothing at all crazy but we, we went through exponential growth throughout the years and how we were serving our customers was a bit disjointed.

We had some of our best sellers who were servicing 40 customers and they would have a 200 user company in Iowa and then they would have a 250,000 employee company.

And the way they were managing those is very different and it's the services that align and the capabilities that we have are very different.

So we went through the exercise of doing what most organizations would do, which is having a clear go to market for our customer segment, for segmenting our customers and then aligning the right resources to the right segment to make sure that we were addressing appropriate challenges of that market.

So I would say it was challenging.

It was a lot of change.

Right.

A lot of employees had to go through, through new rounds of looking for which role applies to them.

And we obviously had some turnover and attrition.

And I think throughout that it was really challenging in that there's obviously ripple effects that you don't expect.

So there's a lot of, I would say tackling and blocking and trying a lot lot to gain some short term incrementals while you sustain the business for the long term.

Where I would say it set us up now is I think there's a great, there's a much better feeling of security and how we're showing up for our customers.

I think the acceleration now that we see by which we are getting, we look at all the statistics of our customer engagement, we look at the different various aspects of our pipeline that our services that is growing Expo is growing much faster than it did previously shows that we've done the right thing.

But man, that was a hard six months.

That was an emotional six months that was hard to get through.

I think what's part of it for leaders and to note that how you handle change, like hey, we handle the change of the reorg, but there's going to be something else.

And I think a lot of organizations are going through that.

They're going through growth.

And I think about the impact of AI and how it's changing workflow so much.

I mean, are you guys, I'm curious, I mean you're big on trends obviously.

What are some of the key trends that you can share with us that you're gleaning from these 22 million devices daily that you're getting stuff from?

Yeah, well, I think the, the biggest thing for us right now is that we're seeing AI is certainly the, the buzzword.

Right.

And it's something that I think is, is coming up a lot in our day to day interaction.

But when we look at what our, what our, what our customers are doing, there's still a great degree of focus on effectively two things right there.

There's, there's a, there's a challenge to innovate and innovate aggressively.

There is top down pressure from board members, CEOs that the way to transform and increase revenues is to buy, buy having a ability to leverage AI or leverage cloud capabilities.

But what we're actually seeing is there's a great degree of obstacles in getting there.

And the primary things is this around cost, resources and technical debt.

So the complexity of moving some legacy workloads to the cloud to then use cloud technologies is really difficult.

Most organizations I think we, we don't see doing this very well.

Right.

There is not a, there's not there.

We believe in this flywheel concept which is, is what our business effectively does.

So software one, if I boil it down into two things is we have a ITAM business that helps reduce cost and complexity and reduce risk.

But the whole idea is we use those funds to then fuel innovation on the other side because we have technical expertise to help organizations leverage AI.

We try to find the savings over here and then use the savings on the other side to drive innovation.

And I would, I would say in the majority of our engagements there is a gross understatement of the degree of technical debt that those companies have or the wastage in spend that they have.

So we still see these trends across the board.

Huge cloud wastage, huge costs going out where they're investing in certain technologies, it's not being used or use its full capabilities.

But then at the same time, while they're trying to fix that.

They're also trying to then leverage AI.

And then on the AI front we, the number one thing we still see is data.

So yes, organizations are rolling out co pilots and an OpenAI and we're doing cool things with email and PowerPoint and Excel and visualization and all this stuff.

But true AI are building AI capabilities that then extends to their customer base is still very heavily reliant on data.

And most organizations are not, they're not at a maturity with regards to their data management and governance that they are ready for AI.

So a lot of pressure with a lot of work to do to get to those results.

Yeah.

So many opportunities.

I love that.

What are the trends?

Well, everyone knows what's important.

Like the priority is important.

We need to be in the cloud.

We need to be able to leverage these tools.

And what you're saying is you guys are in the trenches and you're like no, no, the priority really before, like you can't even get to that level appropriately unless you check these boxes.

Yeah.

Like if you're feeding your AI tools a bunch of bad data.

Yeah.

That models that can't even understand, you're going to get all kinds of.

It's hard to make decisions on that.

Yeah, totally.

So I'm curious from your standpoint and I like to ask this question about three success strategies that every employee needs to be thinking about today.

But also I'm gonna, I wanna ask you that.

But also I'm curious if you look down the road and maybe these are embedded in the questions for today in terms of what they need to focus on.

But I suspect there are skills that, that they need to have today.

But also from the trends that, that you're revealing and studying, there might be some that are going to be more important five, ten years down the road.

Yeah.

So.

So with regards to where we, where I think our, our teams need to be, need to be focused is fundamentally all the, the research that we do, everything does not indicate that in the medium term these problems are going to go away for our customers.

There's a lot of marketing out there with regards to cloud adoption and the acceleration of cloud adoption.

But even the best customers who are in cloud feel like it's all a waste.

Let me rephrase that.

It's not all a waste, but they are wasting a significant amount of spend in there.

I think, I think we did a study last year and 82% of CIOs had basically said that managing spend is a top challenge and that's both in the cloud and on premise.

And then 86% of companies said that they were not ready to integrate AI into their current organization.

That's a high percentage.

So most of that is not going.

To go, especially when the employees are all using it for personal reasons already.

Yeah, exactly.

And you think like, I mean we, most of the organizations we work with don't even have the right governance and policies to prevent sensitive data from just being uploaded, chat, GPT to write an email.

So those challenges are not going to go away and they're not going to go any anytime soon.

And so the, the first thing I think we need our, our teams to really understand is who are the people that we serve.

And in that we need to understand what is it that they are trying to achieve.

Fundamentally.

Right.

There is an outcome to everything that we are doing that is what we are there to solve for.

Yep.

And then I think what's really clear is that we need to be obsessed about understanding to a great degree what are the capabilities that we have that are going to help them solve those problems.

So for sure there's capabilities around AI and I think understanding what are the most common customer challenges in leveraging AI is critical to ensuring that we are at the forefront of doing that.

And it's not going to be something that goes away.

It's not a buzzword.

It will continue to be there.

Beyond that, I think that there is a huge trend of what we're seeing of organizations struggling to navigate complexity.

So we exist in an environment where we are strategically aligned with AWS, with Microsoft, Google ServiceNow, you name it.

We feel our customers pain, which is that they will dictate where the market goes and it is our responsibility to help the customer actually navigate those changes.

We cannot control what Microsoft does tomorrow at all.

We can influence certain aspects of it maybe, but we are not going to be the ones to dictate what happens.

And that's how our customers feel.

And I think for our teams to really show up to understand who are the people we serve and how do we actually help them overcome their challenges and hit their goals.

We need to be deeply in tune with what is happening across the market with those ISVs.

What is the key priorities that they're driving and how is that going to impact our customers and then bringing that reality to our customer to mitigate as much complexity as possible.

So that's kind of where we see ourselves well positioned in the market and what we need to be empowering our teams to be able to do.

Yeah, I love that there's a listening element to that, an awareness of where everything's going, being able to talk to your customers.

And you all are sort of in the middle of this rapidly shifting world of what the customers need.

And then all the tools like you mentioned, Microsoft and all other aws, all these other different tools out there that exist and you all are in the middle making magic with it and you've got to bring that awareness.

It seems like there's a lot of going back to your FIFA example.

You may have to shut off FIFA for the equivalent a while and really invest in that listening part to be customer obsessed to understand the value so you can be that linchpin.

Yeah, that's exactly it.

Shane, this has been a lot of fun today.

Congrats on what it sounds like.

It's been a wild ride.

What's your parting thought for our listeners today?

A parting thought?

I think if anyone hasn't read the Linchpin, you should go read it.

First of all, it's a fantastic book.

And then I think there's actually one thing that we, we didn't discuss, but there's a more recent book that sort of talks about the idea that the, our ability to basically serve someone else is an incredibly strong motivator.

And I think sometimes as organizations we lose sight of who we are serving and then what is the impact that it has.

And there's a fantastic book that came out last year called Unreasonable Hospitality.

I'm not sure.

Have you read it by chance?

I have not, but I.

It's been recommended and it sounds like you're recommending it.

It's super good.

But the consistent theme through that is effectively how are we showing up as an organization through the lens of the restaurant business.

But how are we showing up to actually deliver extraordinary experiences for our customers?

And I think if that's the lens that we have, the growth will take care of itself.

So that's the parting piece.

Read those two books because they're absolutely amazing.

And if you haven't heard of SoftwareOne, look us up because we're a very, very great, We're a fantastic organization and I think sometimes our branding lets us down.

Nobody knows about us.

So I think it's happening right now.

Re listen to this interview at least.

There you go.

Listen to his FIFA story and if you see him out there, do not challenge him because at the time he was playing a lot of FIFA.

I'm assuming you don't play much anymore.

How about a two year old?

A two year old?

Okay, give me a little.

He'll be shifting to Mario Kart before long.

Yeah, I know, right?

Or the kid's old enough nostalgic.

I like it.

All right, talk to you later.

Saying thanks, my man.

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