Ep. 36 - Managing IT for Growing Restaurant Chain Jim n' Nick's Barbecue, with Stephen Self

On this episode of the IT Matters Podcast, our hosts are joined by Stephen Self, Director of IT Infrastructure and Security at Jim n’ Nick’s Community Barbecue. Together, they discuss the IT challenges restaurant chains face, the growing role of AI in IT, lessons he’s learned in his IT career, and more.

Conversation Highlights:

0:00 Introducing Stephen Self, Director of IT Infrastructure and Security at Jim n’ Nick’s

[6:00] Stephen’s Journey in IT

[11:40] Managing IT in a Growing Restaurant Chain

[17:29] Lessons from IT Failures and Successes

[21:43] Role of AI in IT

[29:44] Future of IT Teams and AI Integration

Notable quotes:

“Chance favors the prepared.” - Stephen Self [17:29]

“If you’re in business, tech is a part of your business.” - Stephen Self [32:30]

Connect with Stephen Self:

 https://www.linkedin.com/in/wstephenself/

The IT Matters Podcast is about IT matters and matters pertaining to IT. It is produced by Opkalla, a technology advisory firm that helps their clients navigate the confusion in the technology marketplace and choose the solution that is right for their business.

Transcript

Aaron Bock  

Welcome to the IT Matters podcast hosted by Opkalla. We're an IT advisory firm that makes technology easy for your business. Our vendor neutral technology advisors work directly with your team to assess technology needs and procure the best IT solutions for your organization. On this podcast, expect high level expertise from our hosts, plus experience driven perspective from the leading experts on topics like AI, cyber security industry focused IT solutions, strategy and more. Now let's get into today's discussion on what matters in IT,

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Keith Hawkey  

and welcome to the IT Matters podcast hosted by Opkalla. At Opkalla, we help IT teams understand the busy marketplace of technology strategy and services with a data driven approach. On this podcast, we invite technology leaders to discuss the challenges facing the modern IT department. My name is Keith Hawkey, Technology Advisor with Opkalla. With Opkalla, we also have Michael Coloma, who is a Technology Advisor with Opkalla. And we are, in addition, joined by Stephen Self, the director of IT infrastructure and security for Jim and Nick's community barbecue. Stephen is responsible for everything that has to stay up, stay fast and stay secure, from networks to cloud platforms to disaster recovery, SaaS applications, you name it, across the growing restaurant footprint. What makes Stephen's journey especially interesting is he's lived the full of arc of it. He's built and run infrastructure at scale, led security and compliance efforts, even co founded a technology services company. Even co founded and operated a barbecue business himself. So he understands technology, not just as an operator, but as a business owner, who knows what downtime really cost. So today we're going to talk about running enterprise, enterprise grade it in the hospitality environment, building security with usability in mind and how Stephen considers himself taking the generalist path. So with that, welcome to the podcast, Stephen. How you doing today? I'm doing great.

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Stephen Self  

Thank you guys for having me on. It's kind of I sound kind of impressive, though, the way that you spun all that makes me but no, I'm happy to be here today and excited to talk to you guys absolutely.

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Keith Hawkey  

So as per usual, to start us off, we are going to play a little game called two truths and a lie. Stephen, you actually have an interesting career background. You've worked with some interesting companies. One of the ones that stuck, that stuck out was you actually ran it at the Hooters restaurant chain. Is that correct?

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Stephen Self  

Partially, I didn't run all of it, but yes, I was over infrastructure and cyber security for them for several years.

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Keith Hawkey  

So I actually have themed this two truths and a lie around Hooters history. So I'm interested to see how how knowledgeable everyone is. So I guess first, are there any questions? We all know how to play two truths and a lie. All right, so I'll make three statements. One of them is lie to our truths, and we'll see if we can guess which one is a lie. Are we ready? Ready? Okay, so first one, Hooters once had an airline called Hooters air, complete with flight attendants branded uniforms and routes across the US. The second statement, Hooters briefly tested a breakfast only restaurant called Morning hoots. And third, Hooters briefly explored launching a cruise ship called Hooters at sea, featuring unlimited wings and competitive eating tournaments. So I guess I'd like to start with, with Michael, you probably are a little less less familiar with the Hooters history.

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Michael Coloma  

My guess is the second one is the lie that I'm pretty sure I've seen, like pictures of the the Hooters plane. So I have a pretty good idea that I think that that's true, and the breakfast idea just doesn't align with kind of what their stance, or I guess, goals were as a restaurant chain. So my guess is number two is the lie. Yeah.

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Stephen Self  

All right, Stephen, so the airline was 100% that they dabbled in fast casual world, I know, with with hoots wings, kind of a fast casual type deal. So the breakfast thing is not too far off to me, but I could also with everything else. Tutors got into but there's line may have been discussed. That's a tough one. I want to say the three is the lie, okay? Steven vicious, even for them,

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Keith Hawkey  

Stephen with the background, you are correct. Hooters at sea never was a thing. So congratulations. They did briefly test out fast casual, casual breakfast only restaurant called Morning hoots. So with with that, to start us off, I guess first, Stephen, can you share a little bit about how you got into it? I know you. You've described yourself as taking the generalist path when it comes to your your technology journey. How did you find this passion? How did you find this this career?

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Stephen Self  

I've always been very tech savvy. You know, child of the late 80s, early 90s. So all the tech was happening as I was timing to get into it. I've always liked technology. I was always the kind of family that could program the VCR and do all those fun things. And then when the internet happened, I was also the guy that was burning mix tape CDs for lunch money and fun stuff like that, you know, and just kind of, I don't know it's com natural to me. I actually went to school for engineering and was going to design buildings and systems, and wound up switching over to it there, because it was just a little easier, and in my opinion, funner to do with playing with both the hardware side of it and the software, and making them do things together. So I've kind of accidentally got into it, and that's the career path that I've gone down. I didn't choose the generalist life. It chose me by necessity, to date myself. I was always a fan of the show MacGyver, and that's kind of how my it. Journey has gone with some duct tape, some twine, a couple of zip ties, and a lot of ambition. I make things work, and I enjoy the challenge, and sometimes, you know, most of the time, I get a good outcome. Sometimes I learn an important lesson, and just kind of roll with punches. I guess.

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Keith Hawkey  

Do you have any mix tape in particular that you're the most proud of that you burned back in the day? I'm curious. What were you burning in the What years were this? Was this

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Stephen Self  

late 90s, early 2000s I was still download music from that strong dial up.

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Keith Hawkey  

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Lobster Napster. Did you ever get into I think lime wire was a thing. Yep, when

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Stephen Self  

we finally got DSL, high speed internet the house, I graduated Limewire. Could really cook out some CDs thing. God, I hope I don't go to jail for this. Talk about much, something that you

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Michael Coloma  

know, everybody did go incriminate yourself.

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Keith Hawkey  

That's right. So, so, yeah, go ahead. Michael, no, I was gonna say So Stephen, obviously current in your in your current role with Jim and Nicks. Tell us a little bit of background there. How long have you been there? What are some of your daily roles and responsibilities there, just so everyone has an idea of what you do for them.

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Stephen Self  

Yeah, so infrastructure and cyber security and physical security are my day to day responsibilities here at Jim and nicks, we're growing rapidly. I've been here two and a half years, and I think we've opened 20 to 25 restaurants in the two and a half years I've been here, and we've got seven more to open this year already. I used to, like was mentioned earlier. I used to, I started a catering business that became a food truck, that became a brick and mortar restaurant about eight years ago, and that was loosely modeled and based off of Jim and Nicks. I've been a Big Jim and Nick's fan for about 15 years when I ate at my first restaurant in Birmingham, and just everything about Jim and Nick's is quality. It's homemade, and it's just a great brand. It's gone through a lot of changes over its 40 year history, and I've always been a fan, so I loosely based my concept off that with my own recipes and things, but trying to mimic the hospitality and the customer service that Jim and Nicks is known for, but my day to day, I'm over all of our networking in our restaurants and our corporate offices, all of our cloud architecture. So. As applications. To a degree, we kind of have two IT teams. One's over the in restaurant, point of sale, and the systems that run the restaurant, and then I'm more of the back end, backbone of those systems with the networking and cybersecurity, and then also the physical security, with the alarm systems and the security cameras and all that fun stuff that ties it together to make a restaurant. Restaurants run and operate safely.

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Michael Coloma  

Got it so obviously, love the brand, right? Jim and Nicks. I know with there's, there's a couple, there's a location Charlotte, obviously me being here in Atlanta, I'm familiar with the the different locations that are here in the Atlanta area, and then obviously in Alabama, when I spent some time there, there's the original in Birmingham. So one of the things that you just mentioned here kind of sparked my curiosity, because we get this a lot of people. We get a lot of feedback similar to this from our customers, is, hey, our business is growing, our like we've been expanding right, whether that's through acquisition or mergers, but ultimately, a lot of the times the IT team remains the same size, right? And so I'm curious how you, personally in your career have handled and maybe this aligns nicely into how you become this generalist, right? You've had to wear a multitude of different hats to represent all the different IT solutions that are working within an environment. How do you manage that, just in your in your history, like, what advice would you have for another IT leader in a similar space that's being asked to do more with less resources?

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Stephen Self  

I mean, you got to be quick and you got to be nimble. And that's one thing. The faster you can learn something new, you can put that in your back pocket and use it later. I mean, it's advantageous. The quicker you can learn something and pick it up. You can take that and apply it to the current task at hand, or the current challenge. And then when it comes up in three years at another position at another company? Well, you've got that already, so you can not only reuse it again, but you can also mentor and teach other people on the team and and invest some in them. That's what I've tried to do. Just kind of keep filling up my notebook with all these little tips and tricks that I've learned over the years and pass it on to make somebody else's, it journey a little easier.

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Keith Hawkey  

I bet you have a good a good story around you know, a lot of the time in this industry, you learn a lot from from failure, right? And unfortunately, these failures can be quite nerve wracking. They can be quite impactful to organizations. Is there a particular lesson that this sticks out to you, that you learned through your career, that you've come across situations like that after the fact and realized, Oh, I know how to do this now. I'm glad I'm not making that initial mistake that I did maybe when I was a little greener behind the years.

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Stephen Self  

Yeah, I've had quite a few of those incidents over the years, and it's not really, you know, failure. You only fail when you stop and don't try again. So I kind of like how Bob Ross, how Bob Ross used to term it happy accident, you know, you can look at it. So that didn't work. How can we try a different way and make it work. So that's kind of how I run and run and go in this industry.

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Speaker 2  

I mean, I've got several examples I could use that are more in depth, especially around disaster recovery. I had actually just started working at one of the aforementioned brands we talked about earlier in the podcast, and we got a shiny new disaster recovery solution implemented and set up. And it was great. It was very early on in this particular kind of technology. We've moved off the old, ancient tape backups and stuff, and we had some issues. I can't go into much detail, obviously, but we had some ransomware, and it didn't affect anything customer facing, anything like that. It was just some internal files and things like that. But it wasn't an actual breach. It was just ransomware where all the data was encrypted. Luckily, we had this shiny new backup system with both cloud based and internal backups, and instead of being down for days, weeks, or who knows how long, we were able to restore the encrypted files and have everything back to normal, 145, minutes. And it's one of those leaps of faith where, again, this was a pretty fresh technology that had just hit the mark, and a lot of people were slow to adopt. And I took a chance. It was a great not only was it cheaper and more reliable than what we're doing with the tapes and everything, but again, it saved the day and had almost instant ROI. So it worked out really well for me. You, obviously, but sometimes you got to take a little bit of risk to get a bigger reward. And that was one of those

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Keith Hawkey  

times 45 minutes is is impressive for such a traumatic event as ransomware. What were those 45 minutes like? Like, what was your thought process of, what you needed to check first, second and third. Did you guys have, like, a response plan in place where you kind of having to think on your feet, what was going through your mind as what was priority number one, two and three?

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Stephen Self  

It's been a little while to recount exactly, but this wasn't good because, again, this is one of my first major titles in cyber security, so I was still relatively new to some of it, and it's psycho My God, what am I going to do? And then I went down the procedures that we had set up with the incident response plan, and we isolated the effective machine that caused it, and then we went about repairing the damage real quick. And after we made sure everybody else could do their job, of course, we took the Isolate machine and kind of reverse engineered it figured out where it came in. Of course, it was email. It's always email, and had some conversations with the individual at large about, let's be a little more careful. And you know, it wasn't bad. It was. It was really good stress test, though, to make sure that, you know, the investment had worked and paid off in the new system. And, you know, I got a little accolade for for, you know, recommending something that saved the company a good bit of money and time.

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Keith Hawkey  

So that is one of those expenses that I mean, Michael and I advise a plethora of IT leaders in this space, and a lot of them would like disaster recovery plans, and think it's a good idea. Obviously, it's a nice comfort for someone that's managing an IT environment. But it is. It can be a difficult sell for leadership, especially if it's just it's one of those things that it's difficult to demonstrate value, because you never know until it happens and serendipity with with with your situation. Recently, after the purchase of that solution, it demonstrated value very quickly, but for a lot of companies, it might take, could be years, or, you know, cannot happen at all.

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Stephen Self  

Yeah, and that's, that's a big hope these days, with the threat landscape like it is now, it's, it's really not a matter of if, but when. And we've gotten to that point since everyone's life is so ingrained in the digital landscape now, you know, the more you can protect yourself. And a friend of mine 20 years ago, when I first got in it, his motto was, Chance favors the prepared. And I've always kind of that sits in the back of my mind. It's like, well, what can what little things can we do proactively to be prepared? So when it hits the fan, you know, it's got the least impact. And that's how I've always kind of run my IT systems, as you know, from a higher level, it doesn't matter what firewall you use or what solution, you know, you use. What? What is the over encompassing effects? What if we get a breach here? Who is this going to affect? Is it going to affect certain departments? Is it going to affect to affect customers? Can affect everybody, and you know, kind of like an onion, it's layers. You've got the center, and then it goes out as you peel the onion, you know, what's going to be affected, and what can we do to make sure that when it happens, we get the quickest resolution and get everything back to normal as quickly as possible with the least damage.

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Michael Coloma  

I love, I love the Shrek reference, by the way. So thank you for working that into the podcast. I do. I do want to this week. It's been a recurring thing. It's a it's a good one to reference. I wanted to follow up on one of the questions you talked about, right like this, or one of the comments you made the the IT landscape is changing rapidly, right from when it from when you started 20 years ago to where you are today. What are some of the things that you do to familiarize yourself with new solutions out there, new products, new offerings, new technologies. How do you kind of stay on top of that? Because, again, you have a multitude of different vendors across all different aspects of the IT landscape. What do you personally do to familiarize yourself with what else is out there?

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Stephen Self  

Really a mix of things, you know, between different Facebook groups. I'm in LinkedIn groups. There's always somebody popping up with some new thing. I like to look at it and tinker with things and do demos and that. And then, you know, shameless plug for you guys. Opkalla has been a great resource. For me for the last six, seven years that I've been working with you guys on. Sometimes you guys come to me with things like, Hey, we got this great new vendor, great solution you want to take a look at. We think it might get help, and that's been a big help, too. And then just like I said, if I find a problem, I like to go look for a possible solution for it's my own research, and, of course, everything with AI right now, if you have a problem, you can have a conversation with the robot, and it'll throw up some pretty neat solutions you may not thought of as well. You just got to make sure it's not hallucinating what it tells you about this great thing may or may not exist, but so I guess overall, just be open to any and all information that's out there and see if you can put two and two together and make four out of it and come up with something that solves a problem.

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Michael Coloma  

I love that approach there. I do have one other question here that I think is relevant, because similar to what Keith and I experience a lot of the times is a lot of our clients will come to us and say, Hey, we've been tasked with adopting AI into our company, right? We got to get AI. It's on, it's it's growing, we mean, obviously evidenced by the Super Bowl and then the the numerous commercials that we're referencing AI as recently as last week, where do you see AI helping in the IT world? You know, whether the is it? Is it a process improvement? Is it more efficient? Is it a security piece like, where do you view AI in your opinion, as it relates to the IT world.

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Stephen Self  

I mean, I love it most days. I've done a little bit of everything with it. I've got, you know, either chat, GPT or Gemini or cloud. I'm using trying to compare and contrast most of the major players right now, just to see what works best in particular scenario. And it has been interesting on how each of these different llms reacts. But, uh, you know, some things. Again, being a generalist, I'm not an expert in a particular piece of it. I know a decent amount about a lot of different it subjects, and I use AI to close that gap, if I'm, you know, playing with a Meraki firewall. And need some quick reference on this. Instead of going looking through a manual or watching YouTube videos or stuff like we used to, now, I can go into AI and say, Hey, I'm playing with an MX 68 firewall, and I need to perform these couple of functions with it real quick to make this VLAN top of this VLAN, a couple of other things. And boom, I get a five step process. I'll do this, this and this, and learn something in the process without having to spend, you know, however long researching and looking up data, because AI, you know, can pull that data up in milliseconds and get me what I need quick. It also works with creativity, like I was playing with Nano banana the other day on Gemini and made some kind of fun for work. I came up with barbecue Santa to help with a kind of a little commercial plug for holiday Cyber Security Awareness. And I used Gemini and made a video of a bearded, buff barbecue Santa in front of a smoker telling Jim and Nick's employees to be careful about scams over the holidays. So it's like that, by your imagination and what you can do with this technology, it's both amazing and scary. You know, it's like anything can be used for good or evil. It's you got to be ready to fight the evil that it can cause and but also embrace it and use it to make life easier.

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Keith Hawkey  

Have you noticed any of the widely available llms Be more or less helpful to an IT professional? You said you've experimented with a few. Are there any that stand out as being the most helpful and resourceful for for this career,

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Stephen Self  

I will say. So I've played with copilot, Gemini, Claude, grock, chat, GPT, and then over on the creative side, I've used lovable dot Dev and built several apps with it already. That's that's been a lot of fun because I I played with basic and a couple of things way back when I decided that I was not a code monkey, nor would I probably ever be. But it's cool to be able to take some ideas I've had over the years, have a conversation with AI, and spit out functional apps that will do what I need in a pinch, for personal use or whatever. But surprisingly enough, I've actually had the best luck and success with Gemini, doing things with like Microsoft Graph and doing PowerShell scripting and whatnot. It seems to be a lot more functional with playing with PowerShell scripts, which takes up a good bit of my day, working with with intra ID and Azure and all that fun stuff. So. Even more so than the built in copilot. So that was kind of a surprising result so far. I hate to you know, slam Microsoft, but I think Jim and I've got them at their own game with that, at least with PowerShell scripting and graph and some stuff like that. GPT, it's like it's just GPS chat. GPT is more like the AI generalist. It can do a little bit of everything in AI, pretty okay. It can kind of do some video stuff. It can generate some images. But it's not the best at it. But just for, like, if you're going to pay for one single platform to do most of what you need to do, it can review a contract for something you're going to buy, and you can ask it to, you know, find any concerning legal language or whatever, without having to consult your attorney. You know, obviously proceed with caution if you do that, but just as a it's a high level overview for looking for errors or concerns. You can generate some images with it. I've got some notes on various things I've done for side hustles and Jim and nicks and all sorts of things I do like how you can keep your projects organized by folders and whatnot, and chat GPT that some of the other things don't have. But again, they all have their uses, and they're all seem particularly better at some things than others, like cloud, it's a lot more, you know, based around coding and development. So if you wanted to check some code and on a project you were working on, like I have it kind of double check stuff I do in lovable where I've built apps and websites and whatnot. It's helped with a few things there too.

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Keith Hawkey  

What about groq? Definitely, any have you used grok in any meaningful sense?

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Stephen Self  

I've used Grox been more of a recent one that I've picked up. A friend of mine was telling me about some stuff he did with grok the other day. So I signed up for the free plan of it just to start playing with it. So I don't have much of review on Groc yet, so I'll get back with you on how that turns out. But so far, Gemini, chat, GPT and cloud have definitely been useful in what they've done?

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Keith Hawkey  

Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard some of the things about about copilot as well, if that has some way to go in the space. But you know, as we've learned it is, it is an absolute arms race with these organizations, these organizations that have their own llms. And you know, whoever has the best model seems to change by the month,

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Stephen Self  

by the week, by the week. Anthropic put out a huge update to Claude. Lovabo is now built on the cloud engine for doing their dev and all their stuff. You know, open AI is investing billions and billions in their new engine that's about to drop, and it's just every other day, somebody has taken the lead, and then three days later, they're dethroned at somebody else. Like you said, it's little arms race of large language models.

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Michael Coloma  

Where do you where do you see? You know, being this arms race, right in this and this and the introduction and expansion of of AI in the in the IT environment, where do you see the future of the IT team, right, or the IT group within an internal organization? Where do you see that going to? Do you think that it is going to have more of a presence in the future within an organization or a company, or do you feel like AI is going to streamline a lot of that? So if you have an IT team of, say, 20 people, do you think that it could be, you know, reduced and still have the same level of efficiency and productivity that the team of of 20 might have? Where do you see that kind of playing out in the future?

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Stephen Self  

Right now, we're in a place where you still got to feed data to the AI so that it can give you an output, you know, with the eugenic AI that's coming out, where it can think for itself, like Cloud bot and all that that could get interesting. I'm interested to see where that comes from. But right now, you know, AI, in my opinion, is more of a helping hand, and it can streamline task. You can do a lot of automation with it, with AI agents and whatnot. That's kind of where I'm at with it. But as we get more into a genic AI that can think for itself, you know, they're talking about, they've come up with their own language that come up with all these other things on their own, without human intervention. That's the part that's going to be interesting. And then at some point, with robotics, catches up with it, so you can have a autonomous machine. They can think for itself. That's, you know, that's going to get into some of the stuff from sci fi movies, we can get to that point.

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Michael Coloma  

Yeah, I thought I would ask about this. Because, you know, in the past, I've seen, you know, for example, take McDonald's franchise, right? Like they used to have a bunch of counters open with people trying to take your order. Now they've replaced those people with you've ever walked into McDonald's recently everywhere kiosk, right? You don't even talk to a human being anymore. Then they take your order. So I was curious to see how that would translate to the future of AI in the restaurant industry as well, not specific to Jim and nicks, but just overall, right? Because you guys are a family oriented rest, almost full serve, fast casual type environment. But it is interesting to see how something like that could change the business model for a lot of other restaurant chains.

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Keith Hawkey  

If, if Bojangles asked me for another. If Bojangles asked me to add a bo berry biscuit to every order I make, I I'm gonna have a heart attack. I don't know what you guys are doing, but that that particular this AI where it's like, Would you like to add a bow berry biscuit to your order? I would recommend not going down that exact path with Jim and Nicks. I ran

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Stephen Self  

to one of those at Bojangles the other day and got asked if I wanted my heart shaped to add two heart shaped bow berry biscuits to my order. The whole process there. Like, is it cool? Yeah, but like, it took me five minutes to order two meals for breakfast and orange juice. And for some reason, I don't know if it's my southern dialect or what, but the AI was not understanding orange juice. So that creates some problems. Now, I didn't want my heart shaped bow berry biscuits, but yeah, we've got one of those locally too, and it's, it's an experience.

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Keith Hawkey  

So we're we're coming up on on time here, one thing we we really like to do on the IT Matters podcast is ask Stephen advice from yourself 10 years ago. What for we have young it practitioners that are getting into the space that listen to the podcast. What is something you would have told your younger self that would help save you some heartache, save you some time, bring you some mental clarity? What type of advice would you give your younger self just getting into the field

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Stephen Self  

10 years ago or and earlier, it was more about the tech and less about the business that the tech is based on. Because, you know, now, if you're in business, Tech is a part of your business. Whether you think it is or not, doesn't matter if you're a plumber or software company or a restaurant brand or whatever, technology is the backbone of your business, and if it's not, then you're already losing but from an IT standpoint, from technology standpoint, the guys that do the it, I think sometimes, especially in the early days, it was more about what can the tech do, versus how can it support The business? And they need to, for anyone getting in in technology, I think having some business acumen will go a long way, because you need to understand how technology affects the business and how it supports the business, versus, back in the day, some of the IT overlords are like, where it's going to be this way, because we're technology, and we say it's going to be this way, versus where everything needs to coexist and work together for the overall business goals. And that's just one thing from, from, you know, early, late 90s, early 2000s it now or back then everybody was if we're going to do this, because it says so, versus we need to all work for the common out, common goal of growing and prospering the business. But a little bit of business acumen can go a long way in your IT career, both to help you be a better IT person, and to help support other aspects of the business and

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Michael Coloma  

and in that thing that was well said, Steven,

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Michael Coloma  

good Yeah, I was just gonna say in that, in that same vein, right? Talking about advice to your your younger self, what, what continues to motivate you to to continue in this IT role that you're in, like, what's going to be your, your big motivation for the next 10 years? Right? Looking back, you would give yourself some advice. But how do you continue to stay motivated for the next 10 years in this business?

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Stephen Self  

I mean, right now, there's so much change going on. There's always been change, but now that we're on this, this AI renaissance right now, like, what's going to happen tomorrow? What's going to happen next week? It's just fun trying to ride the top of the wave, instead of go over and fall behind it and see what's going to happen the next weeks, months, years, and how it people and business insurance going to adapt to it?

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Keith Hawkey  

Awesome. Yeah. Well said, Steven. How can our listeners find you? What's the best way to get hold of you? If. If a listener has a question,

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Stephen Self  

I'm pretty easy to find on LinkedIn, so yeah, just shoot me a DM, and I'll be happy to answer any questions. Perfect.

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Keith Hawkey  

Well, we'll include that in notes. Stephen, thank you for your time today. Really appreciate your insights, and with that, we will see you in the next one.

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Aaron Bock  

Thank you for listening. We appreciate you tuning into the IT Matters podcast for support assessing your technology needs. Book a call with one of our technology advisors@opkalla.com that's opkalla.com if you found this episode helpful. Please share the podcast with someone who would get value from it and leave us a review on Apple podcasts or on Spotify. Thank you for listening and have a great day..

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