Thank you for joining us at the Sun Leaders podcast service management section. I am your host, Ryan Bankston, founder of CIO Legal. We focus on IT solutions and operations solutions for solo practice and small law firms.

Get a part time CIO for your law firm starting at just 200amonth, month to month. I am so happy to be joined today by Nicholas Pollack, IT veteran Tampa native and an IT leader at tia, or Tampa International Airport for going on seven years now, in charge of field services and client support. I think.

Nicholas, what is that? So to translate that would be like your service desk and your desktop teams and then all the itsm, different areas like change, incident, problem, request. So I wear a lot of hats at the airport? Yeah, a lot of hats. That’s awesome.

You said itsm and I got to ask about that given we are the service management section of Sun Leaders here. What is itsm? It’s Information Technology Service Management. So that’s born from itil, which is Information technology.

Itil. The name escapes me at the moment, but that’s a best practice, right? It’s a framework for how you can manage your IT infrastructure, how all the different things work, how things come in, how they get resolved and then how do you look at IT to make things better? And then how do you continually make things progress and get better so that it’s just more efficient and has a better customer service standpoint for everybody. So I own the service desk and the desktop side of that for the
airport.

In fact, when I went to the airport in 2018, they didn’t have a service desk. And a service desk is a specific thing for itil. Before you may have heard of help desk, right? Where like you call and well, you hope they can help you.

Right? There’s no specific training, there’s no structures. Just make a phone call, they pick up, they help you the best they can, Right? Service desk is a little more specific. Where the agents are trained, there is a ticketing system.

There’s some expectations around how you work a ticket. Is IT when it’s opened, how you fault with the customer when it’s closed? Is there knowledge management? If there’s a continuing issue, is there something that we engaged another team on? Is there something we follow as a process for when we are going to change something so that we’re notifying the customer so they don’t have to call in? There’s just a little more forethought around what do you do in IT that keep things efficient. So in a
help desk, someone may have restarted the server.

Right. And that server may’s been something everybody was using at the time. Well, that’s probably going to make everybody call in or email in or come down or get angry or upset or frustrated.

Well, using the idle methodology and service desk and change, you would plan that in advance and you would look for that timeframe where it’s not going to impact customers or let them know, hey, it’s going to happen at this time. Don’t use it and then do it at that time. So that’s one of the hats that I get to wear.

And it’s boring, yet exciting for me. Yeah, yeah. Well, I get excited about it.

I’ve spent a career in service desk and in that operation of it. So a lot of what you say, of course I can identify from experience and from years of aligning it with business outcomes. Right.

Like what are we really here for? And service desk being that single point of contact. Oh, the spoc. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Single point of contact for. For customers. But that leads me to a question.

You know the service desk for Tampa International Airport, like, who’s calling in? I can’t imagine. Just like anybody that walks into the airport and sees like a Coke can in the middle of the terminal is going to call the IT service desk. But maybe what’s like a ticketing agent who like all the machines go down at their desk.

Right. Are they going to call their company? They’re going to call. That’s.

It’s a really interesting question because the airport, if you think about it, is its own municipality, right. So there’s. You have every department that a city might have.

You have transportation, you have police, you have fire. You have all the administrative, you know, procurement and finance and executive and IT obviously. And then you have the business of the airport.

You have airplanes and airline agents and all their supporting people there. So you have all their supervisors and managers and people that print things and people that deliver stuff. And then you have all the concessions people.

Right. So think about the Applebee’s or the, the Chick Fil A’s and the pizza places and the coffee joints. We have 37 or 39 restaurants on site and we sell more Starbucks at the Tampa International Airport than they do anywhere in Tampa.

Wow. So. So if you think about, we supply a lot of the infrastructure, so our IT group and supplies the infrastructure for them to do business.

Right. Their. Their Internet effectively and the WI Fi.

So obviously everybody that works for the airport, there’s about 800 people. Ish. That we directly support.

Beyond that, there’s another 10,000 plus vendors. Right. Between the concessioners, the real estate folks, all the people that come on the airport for business, if we are going to support them, we have a phone number like literally printed out and pasted on their monitor for support.

Call this number and they call us and we can typically support them. The airline agents are the most fun ones. So if you can imagine the airline industry, if you’ve ever flown, when you go to the ticketing counter, it’s typically people that if you’re flying, especially like some of the, like European airlines and some of the Latin airlines that go to South America and Middle America, sometimes there’s a language barrier, Right.

So we get calls from them all the time for all of their stuff. So it’s never a lack of busyness at the service desk. It’s more what can you prioritize first? And that’s part of Eitel.

And how do you get through the day and make sure that everybody’s covered? Right. But you mentioned something made me think no one’s going to call if they see a Coke can in the airport. I would be surprised if there’s a Coke can sitting on the floor.

One of the things that when I first, the first day I was at the airport in 2018, I was getting a tour from the director of it, my senior manager and some other folks. And we’re walking around and I, the director, bent over and picked up a piece of like boarding pass paper that had been dropped on the floor and didn’t miss a beat, just bent down, picked it up, kept walking. And then my senior manager at the time did the same thing.

Like we walked out of the way to go pick up some trash. And as they were talking, they just said, you know, it’s part of our culture here at the airport is everything gets picked up. Everybody, including the CEO, is always picking up.

Why? Because we want that to be the America’s favorite airport. And part of that is just staying clean. Wow.

So there’s a lot of thought that goes into that. Wow. Sounds like there may have been some thought that went into that walk.

If it’s day one onboarding, like that is a, that is a great way to communicate, like, what’s your culture here? What’s alignment? They didn’t say it. They did it and then told me why they did it. And it really stuck with me.

So I do that to this day. Whenever I onboard. I actually literally have a checklist at six pages long on when I onboard somebody of all the things that I want to do and that’s the last part is giving them the tour and making sure that I’m showing them all the things that we do during our tour of the airport.

So it’s a long tour, as you can imagine. There’s four airsides, three floors of the main terminal. Short term, long term, all sorts of areas of the airport.

We walk around, it’s like a four mile walk. So there’s all sorts of things we do and it’s a lot of fun. But that’s one of them, is making sure that we show them, we clean up, because that’s a big thing when you go to the airport.

You notice things like that. Like a Coke can. Yeah.

So when I heard that, my mind went straight to that first day when I was at the airport watching all of my leaders pick up trash. Wow. Well, you know, that is something I’ve noticed before.

I think a lot of locals, folks that live in the area have a lot of, a lot of love for Tampa International Airport, especially any of us that have traveled for business in and out of other cities, like fly out of Chicago, fly to New York, fall in love with Tampa International Airport, come here to LaGuardia. It’s nice to know, though, that how much, how much hard work goes into that and that there’s a culture, you know, among those in service at the airport that keep it that way. It’s not just the
design of the building, but the.

Yeah, it’s not by accident, that’s for sure. It’s about that walk on the first day. That is awesome, Nicholas.

Well, tell me, you know, when did you know you were going to get involved in it as a career? Oh, man, it was kind of accidental. So I graduated high school and like any kid that was. Like any kid that was in high school, that first summer out was glorious, you know, I did absolutely nothing.

And the best thing my mother ever did for me, she sat me down in the backyard and she said, nicholas, you have three choices. You can move out, you can live here and pay rent, or you can live here rent free and go to school. And it was the most accountable thing my mother did for me up until that point.

I said, you know, my friend Jeremy, he’s going to this school in Lakeland. Maybe I’ll do that. I’d like to live here rent free.

So I went and checked it out. It was a tech school. It was called a Florida career college.

And they had a, like a computer networking and engineering course that you could take. It was like 18 months or 13 months or something. And I ended up getting into that course, and that’s how I started my career.

I loved every moment that. There’s so many great memories of that school. So many.

But when I got out, I was working at Best Buy way before there was Geek Squad. I was the guy at the front, Netflix Computers. And I was just literally the geek at the time, the front.

And I got a phone call from some guy named Jeff Peavey, and he had a real Southern drill accent. He said, my name is Jeff. And he offered me a job over the phone.

Never had met me. He had my resume. But I’d been recommended by the school as one of their top candidates.

And I was offered a job to be a field tech for Dell. So I did field tech work for Dell in this area in Pinellas. I’m looking at the buildings outside the window, and I’m kind of remembering I’ve probably been down this street and I have probably fixed computers in these buildings in my career.

So I did that for eight years. About 12,000 service calls between Pinellas and Hillsborough and Orlando. Keeping count.

I did. I did. I’m a.

I’m a big data guy. I like knowing what my performance is. But I transitioned there.

I met a. Met a wonderful young lady who I eventually married. And I decided, you know, if we’re going to have a family, probably need to get a job.

Like a job job, not just a contractor deal. So I went into the call center for Dal. I was like, well, transition.

I’ll take a step down, take a little less pay. And I was on the phone for a little bit, about three months. And then I made senior, then I made manager.

And then I started launching call centers around the world in El Salvador and Canada and in Tampa, launched a couple call centers for Dell. And I saw that, the impact I had, I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it. And what cemented that for me was we got a phone call one day from Someone on Highway 60, which is here in Brandon.

And at the time, I was with the Enterprise team. I managed the Enterprise line of business. Riddell.

You know, all the technicians, they were joking. They went, this guy’s right down the street and he’s got a failed raid 50. We could go take the hard drive to him, rebuild his array, and get back before we can walk him through over the phone with this.

And we all kind of laughed about it, like, just kind of the juxtaposition of the. How close he was. And I drove home that night, and I drove past where that building was because we Looked up at Google Maps and it’s.

It was literally on my way home. And I remember looking at that and it struck me that I have fixed or my teams have fixed hundreds and thousands of computers all around the world, and I’ve only seen this one. And I. It stuck with me.

And I decided then I wanted Local Impact. And I started working for a local msp. And then when I saw the position come up at Tampa International Airport, I thought, where else would you want to work? Like when you say, hey, where do you work? And someone says, tampa International Airport.

Every time someone goes, wow, you work at the airport? I go, yeah, sure do. It’s something to be proud of. So that’s why I landed where I landed.

That’s awesome. That is awesome. That is a great story.

Well, we’re connected through HDI in our local chapter. What is that? So HDI is a local or is a national organization that is out there to help individuals that are not necessarily in tech right now, but want to get in tech. And also those are in tech to promote their skills, to get them to their next level.

One of the things that, the reason I’m even in this organization is when I was coming through tech, I had no clue what was out there. I didn’t know that there was a desktop technician. I didn’t know there was a server technician.

I didn’t know anything. I just knew there was a guy that took care of computers. That’s about as far as I do.

And HDI breaks it apart, right? They introduce you to the ITIL concepts, they introduce you to the training that you can take that can help you be the right candidate for the role that you’re applying for. A great example right now, I’m sitting in front of 200 people applying for a role that I have open and hr, obviously they cut out a whole bunch of people, but then I’m left with like 20 or 30 that I got to look at. Now, how do I determine between those folks? Well, if someone’s got some
certifications and some education and maybe some experience, I’m going to look at them first.

And that’s what HGI hopefully does, is they give you some certification and training. Beyond that, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Right? You can know all, you can have all the certifications, all the education.

You may have fixed a couple computers, but I’m probably not going to talk to you unless you have talked to somebody I know who can vet you. HDI has local panel meetings. They have local Events and that allows you to build your network much like LinkedIn.

You may know some people, it’s kind of the Facebook of the tech world these days and the business world. But a local meet, you can see someone face to face and you can really get that foot in the door and they’ll remember who you are. And that’s the other thing.

And the last thing that HDI provides is that local connection so that you can know people who can get you a role, who instead of you looking for a job on a website that may or may not be posted in a way that you find they reach out to you. They go, you know, I got a guy for this, let me call him, make sure he sees this. And that’s the last bit that HDI does for a local members.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The network of HDI has always been very helpful for me, since I got involved right out of the pandemic is actually when I got involved, somebody I was working with real closely in it was my client. They said, hey, there’s this conference, this group.

I know, I think they’re great. They have, you know, a great collection of best practices and there’s a conference. Why don’t we go together? I’m like, sign me up.

You know, great time. We ended up being there together, even though I don’t think we, you know, we didn’t become friends. I mean, pass each other in the hallway, line danced at the party.

Was that the Orlando one? Yeah, 2021, I think it was 2021, wasn’t it? Yeah. Into 2021. November, I think.

Yeah, that might have been service management. That was. No, that maybe I was in Vegas.

All the conferences start blending together after a while. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That conference was so much fun though.

I remember when I was there feeling like I was among my people. You know, I’d been many years working in help desk role, service desk role, leadership and that side of it, that customer facing side of it, even working with engineers that are going on site constantly to work on the same partner’s machine that just needs that little extra help over the shoulder. It is nice.

Same buggy printer. Right. When you’re at the conference, like I said, you’re with your people.

You’re with your people. I think my favorite part of the conference, and I don’t know if the conference people will like this, but my favorite part of the conference is lunch because they usually have those big 15 people tables at the conference. And I kind of look around, I go, what’s the group that isn’t that looks like the me’s of the table.

Like I go sit with the people that are just don’t look like me. I go sit down, I go, hey, my name’s Nicholas. Where do you guys work? What do you do? What are your challenges? I like talking.

And you end up finding people that are really passionate about what they do and they have unique solutions and they have great stories. And that’s probably one of my favorite parts is the lunch table because everybody’s got their guard down, they’re eating, they’re not in front of a microphone, they’re not in front of a panel, they’re not being interviewed. It’s just people that are in your industry that are sharing their stories with you.

Yeah, I love going into the lunchroom and seeing people I know already. I love meeting people. But there’s a special moment being, especially a conference that’s out of town.

You go into that lunchroom and see somebody. Last big conference I was at, I saw the help desk manager of Acreman and I hadn’t seen him in a while and I was like, oh my gosh, you know, when sat down, caught up, sharing more stories. You remember when, which that probably is on your bingo card.

Yeah. Talking about the good old days. Hi there, this is Josh Naiman, CEO and founder of Name It Creative.

And we’re the ones who produce the podcast that you’re listening to right now. But on top of podcast production, we take care of all, all sorts of things related to websites from design, development, maintenance, management and hosting. And today I want to talk to you about a website being like a house.

Think of your website like a house. If you take care of it, there’s a good chance it’ll increase in value over time. And if you don’t, it’ll decay into opportunity for everyone besides you.

So how do we keep a house in order? Well, we make sure to maintain it from the builder, all things atrophy. We’ve got aversion control and stay organized, keep good records. We have to develop processes and stay consistent to keep things running well.

And we need to build in new updates. We need to respond to new needs in context of the use. And how do you let your website slip into decay? You leave it alone and it’ll be overtaken by nature.

You let problems compound, you won’t know where to start and you hire amateurs to fix it so you can have to fix it again later. Avoid all of this. Make sure that you make your website an asset like a house.

Contact us today at naming creative.com and we’ll make sure to take care of you just like our own homes. Yeah, speaking of bingo, I’ve met a lot of people over my years in management and leadership that think employee engagement is a survey. What do you think about that? What’s employee engagement to you? Employee engagement is every moment that you’re there.

So the employee engagement survey is like how did we do over the last year? Right. And that’s like the objective measurement that gives leadership a way to objectively measure did we do better than last year? Are we better or worse? Like what the areas can we get better in? Or what can we, what can one group do better than the other? Can we do the same thing in other group? And that’s the objective part of it. But that’s one day.

That’s a little slice of a day. And you may have caught that person’s time and attention on that survey where they just got, you know, a bad experience with their boss. And you know, you’re getting probably not the most realistic slice of the year.

Employee engagement is all year long. As a leader, and we were talking about this a few minutes before this podcast. Everything that you say as a leader is going to drive a behavior regardless of what it is.

If you say something positive, they’re going to react positively. If you notice something that maybe they didn’t notice, they’re going to think, oh, he’s looking at that. And that’s going to drive a behavior.

So you have to be very conscious about what you do as a leader because that will for sure drive a behavior. And that’s employee engagement. So things like I have a candy dish.

So at the service desk, as you can imagine, if you’re in finance or procurement or if you’re in any group where you are the like a maintenance is a great example. This is a great story. Busy maintenance folks.

These guys fix things that the normal person has no clue how they work electronics and the electrical system and how you get a three way switch to work and why the LED lights don’t work and why the plumbing doesn’t work. And they can fit all. They know everything.

They have all the special tools. It’s amazing to watch those guys work. When it comes to computers, they are super scared to come ask for help because they are the person that never has to ask for help.

So in order to lower the level of engagement for anyone, we have a candidation service desk. And what that means is we literally have a little dish sitting out front where people walk by that’s filled with Delicious candy. Like hi chews.

And I don’t think the. What are the little. What are the little caramel chocolate deals? Toots, Tootsie rolls.

Those are terrible, by the way. I very much don’t like those. But we put them in there because other people like them and we have dum dums and we have all sorts of candy.

We change it up all the time. And the intention behind that candy bowl is so that when someone walks by that doesn’t necessarily have an IT problem, they stop and they grab a piece of candy. And that’s a moment in time where the service desk can engage with a person on something that isn’t it.

Where they can get to know my services person as Zane and not that scary IT Guy that’s in behind the desk that always have to ask whenever there’s a problem. So now they know him a little bit. And they do.

They get candy a couple of times. Right. They know that’s our candy spot.

Right. Well, now when they have a problem and instead of them going googling it or trying to figure it out or trying to overcome it and getting frustrated and tired and now a technology roadblock has happened. Now instead of that taking an hour, let’s say.

Let’s say they spend two minutes on it. Go. You know what? Let me go talk to Zane.

I’ll cut a piece of candy while I’m talking to Zane. He can fix this. So now they’re less frustrated.

They’ve probably overall spent less time getting their issue fixed and they’ve also built a relationship with Zane. Right. Right.

So human connection. My team has had 100% CSAT scores for months in a row. Wait, I thought that was impossible.

I thought it was impossible too. We’ve had two blips and both times. So our scores are one through five.

Right. And five being the best. The two blips were two people gave us ones because they thought we were number one.

Because I call them because if we get a bad score, like, I look every day at the scores. It’s all my checklist things to do. And I saw a one.

I went, oh, man, let me give this guy a call. What happened? Here I go. Hey, this is Nicholas, the manager of the service desk.

I see that you left us a survey score. I want to understand more about what happened. Like, oh, you’re the best.

You’re number one. I’m like, did you score us number one? Like, we’re number one? Yeah, you’re number one. Like, yeah, that was a one.

Like, we’re bad. And they’re, oh, I’m so sorry. So both those times were a mistake.

But that candy dish is that. That reducer of engagement. Right.

So that you build a relationship and you have that engagement with each employee so that their frustration for doing their job comes down. And it helps the service desk. Because think about selfishly, when someone calls the service desk, they’re not pissed, they’re not upset.

They’re truly just looking for help, and their defenses are down, and it’s an easy conversation, and no one’s getting hurt, and they get it fixed, and they feel better for it. So the candy dish is a huge help and employee engagements every single day, and there’s a million ways to do it, and the candy dish is just one of them. Yeah.

I mean, that’s thoughtful. That really speaks a lot to customer experience and, like, being very thoughtful about that engagement with the customer base. Right.

And the alignment. And it’s a great excuse to expense just lots of different kinds of candy. Even the ones you don’t like.

Even the ones we had a couple months ago. We had. We had.

We got tired of the same old candy. So Amazon had this pack of Asian candy, and it was, like, all the candies from across Asia, and then they had a Latin America pack, which is, like, candies across, like, Mexico and Central America. And we set them out, and we were.

It’s like a little experiment to see which candies disappear first. The Asian candy is objectively better, in my opinion. The Latino candy is something else.

Wow. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. I’m sure there’s probably some passionate opinions about that. Oh, yeah, I’m sure there is.

Because the one candy that sticks out to me, they had, like, these licorice strings, and you would unpack the back and add a little, like, a tub. If you could imagine they’re sitting in there, then have a little separate packet of salsa. Yeah.

So these liquor strings also had, like, peppers in them, and then you had salsa. So you had sweet and salty and, like, then the peppers and tamarind, and you dump the salsa on these little licorice strings that are like cherry or strawberry or something. Then you would eat them.

Yeah, yeah. It was as bad as you think it is. It was not good.

I’m sure someone loves it, though. That reminds me of a moment I like. You talked about opening service desk kind of around the world in different areas.

I was in the Philippines, where I had a service desk that I had opened in Manila, and that team was great, and they just showered me with all this wonderful stuff. Home cooked food. Things that were popular among their friends and family.

And one thing that popped up a lot were like dehydrated banana chips. Which at first I wasn’t a big fan of it. I’m like, oh, thanks.

And then I was like, oh my gosh, I have all these bananas. And then somebody was like, you know, they’re kind of paying attention that wasn’t eating them. They were like, have you dipped them in your coffee? I’m like, what? Dip a.

Dip a banana chip in my coffee? Like, yeah, that’s, that’s what they’re for. Changed my life. This is really so good.

It’s just like dehydrated banana chips. It’s like the French fry in the Frosty. Really.

You know, I have to try that. I’ve never, I’ve never had it. Give it a go.

You got some, you got some banana chips. I will stop by someplace and get that later on. Yes.

Next time you have a snackle box, you know. Oh, good times. I always love chatting with you about these things, but I want to pass on some value to our audience.

You recently learned something that we were talking about in our board meetings and I thought that the audience would really benefit from the knowledge. What is it that you learned about Microsoft licensing for nonprofits and, and not for profits and what the heck, I thought those were the same thing, Nick. Oh man.

I’ll tell you, coming into a nonprofit organization like HDI as an officer on the board, I, I knew I was gonna be out of my comfort zone. I had to learn a lot. This was one of them.

So we’re always looking for a free solution, right? Because we don’t have a lot of money. It’s a non nonprofit organization. We’re not for profit.

Heck, I can’t even remember which one we are now to go look at my notes either way. So I figured, well, we’re not for profit. Microsoft gives away things all the time for free.

Google gives things away all the time for free. So I went on the webpage and started looking for how to get free stuff from these companies so that we could have our own email addresses and 365 cloud accounts and all the things that make us productive. Right.

Well, learning has shown me that Microsoft considers some non for profit companies different from other non for profit companies. If we are a company that services like disadvantaged folks. If you could think of like Make a Wish.

Make a wish, Exactly. Great, great example. Like the Make a Wish foundation.

The, the, like the Goodwills of the world. Those kind of places. Well, you are okay for Microsoft to give services to, right? Like, well, it’s, it benefits them.

Here’s. I guess they have to draw the line in the sands. Yeah, they’re like here, here’s your three subscribe account.

You can use it, it’s whatever. But if you’re just like an HDI where we’re not directly helping disadvantaged folks like a professional, what we’re doing is we’re helping people get into the professional industry of it. Right.

And helping them move through that profession and industry. Well, we’re not exactly the same and we’re classified differently and you have to have an IRS tax number and you have to have an ein. There’s all these things that I’ve had to learn and well, we’re just not, we’re not giving enough apparently because there’s different levels of organization.

So we’ve had to look for other free tools. But yeah, like you said, it’s a lot of learning and learning how to look for those solutions, learning how to research for the solutions and then also how to kind of break the news to the rest of the team. Like, hey, listen, here’s what we’re doing.

But I couldn’t make this happen. I was really excited, but I had to tell everybody, listen, I was unable to get it done and here’s why. It’s hopefully not my fault, but it’s Microsoft drawing a line in his hand because as you can imagine, if I were Microsoft, I’d have to draw a line in Santa and saying, well, anyone could be a non for profit.

Like you can literally register. Like I registered this chapter with the state of Florida and started a not for profit business and pay the $65 and had to learn how to do that and start, open up a bank account and put that in there. We got the ein, we got all that stuff and it was just me, like a guy that’s not a lawyer.

And I said to Google some stuff so literally anyone can do it. So I’m sure Microsoft put a line in the sand, keep me from doing that as a, as a regular old entity to getting free whatever for a business I’m running as a side business. So I’m sure there’s a reason there.

Yeah, it’s challenging though because we have cost, of course, but we’re not, we’re not like selling a product. Right, right. We’re not like, we don’t really like offer something like that, but we cost like that $65 you mentioned or you know, we had a conference not too long ago.

It was in Denver National Conference. And we were fortunate to have several, you know, HDI Skyway, our local chapter, several members that were nominated for various things. So, you know, obligated to do our best to get them to Denver to be present on shade stage if they accept that award, you know, and it’s hard, but we have to rely on either membership dues or sponsors or the organizations that those people work for supporting us sponsor them to get their people to the conference.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is. Well, the good news is HGI has a really compelling section that says convince my boss.

Right, Yeah. A piece of paper that you have to hand out, like you have to print it, you have to go give it to your boss. Oh, yeah.

Firstly, they have the first conference I did. I absolutely used that convince my boss statement like, hey, here’s what I want to do, here’s what I hope you get out of it, here’s what, what the industry says, here’s what I want to do when I come back. And I gave that to him and I made a business plan for me spending thousands of dollars of the company’s money to go off effectively on what might have been considered a mini vacation.

Yeah. And you know, I came back revved up and it was really exciting. When I came back, I put a lot of things into place and those have been implemented and they’ve been impactful and I kind of revert back to those and I tell my boss, hey, look what we did when I came back.

That’s where these ideas came from. That’s where this energy came from. So if you go to these conferences, you’re going to meet people who you can then also reach out to to revitalize that energy to input or implement these changes that you want to make that are truly impactful to your company and your customers and it drives revenue 100%.

But you got to be able to tell that story. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah. I can think of something that I wouldn’t say that I single handedly put it in place, you know, but, but I was in a session at conference, I took some notes, I downloaded a wonderful PowerPoint deck, showed it to a couple of bosses, got a couple of managers excited before, you know, everybody’s like. Or a significant portion of the leadership team’s like, hey, I think this could work.

We could change how we hire. You know, get 90 days ahead, you know, use our natural attrition rate for, for good. Instead of thinking about it as like this awful thing that’s always keeping us.

Sounds like a Call center. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. A word.

Oh, my gosh. There’s just so much to learn at those. Well, we have an event coming up.

We do just a couple of weeks because of course we’re recording. But that event is September, what, 26th, 26. Yeah.

6pm to 8pm at the Tampa International Airport Sky Center. I can’t say this enough. I love working at the Sky Center.

It is a beautiful building. Funny story, if you ever get to go to the Tampa International Airport sky center, if you walk into the atrium and you smell that is a branded scent they pump in. It’s branded.

So they have this ginger jasmine smell in there. And it’s not sweet, it’s not floral, it’s not. It’s a lot of things.

It’s almost not savory. I’m not really good with describing smells, but if you imagine the smell, if you’ve ever walked into a Teavana, and it’s not overpowering, but you’re like, ooh, this is nice. I want to smell like this all the time.

It’s that inside of a building. And you’re like, wow, this is a really smell. And it’s branded for the building.

Tampa International Airport, they contracted with a company that made the scent for them as their scent. And it gets pumped in through the H Vac. Wow.

Where do I get my bottle? I wish they would sell it. I would put it in my office at home. But we don’t sell it.

It’s only in Tampa International Airport. That’s the smell of the airport. Wow.

Wow. At that building, at least. That’s wild.

See, that’s why. That’s why we love Tampa International Airport. I never knew that that type of effort and thought went into the experience of not only the people that work there, but the people that come in and out every single day.

You know, from the mayor, welcoming me home, when I get off my flight, I’m riding across to that smell that is. That’s just awesome. Yeah.

They count the number of steps you take. So there’s a number of steps that’s optimal that they want you to not exceed to get to your airplane. From the car to the airplane, I think it’s like 700 something steps or a thousand steps.

It’s not many steps. So if you can imagine, that’s a huge campus, but it doesn’t feel huge. It’s miles across the.

But you’re not walking more than 700 steps. That’s pretty insane. And they engineer everything to meet that.

Wow. Wow. So you have to Work hard.

If you’re wearing your Fitbit at Tampa International Airport, you’re going to have to get some help to get those steps. You can get some steps. So one of the teams I used to manage was the common use team and their job was to get there at four in the morning and make sure every screen was working correctly in the airport.

It’s a four mile walk at four in the morning to go look at all the screens everywhere. I miss that screen that you used to could put messages on when you had like family flying in, you know. And so when they’re riding that long escalator down, it would like come up and it would be like welcome home, you know.

Oh, I didn’t remember that. No, I know. The one you’re talking about goes down to baggage.

Yeah. That screen is gone. Right.

And they’ve replaced it with an even nicer screen. But they do sell all advertising. I bet you could buy it.

Yeah. I’ve never asked. It was probably some company’s advertisement.

Probably were doing it. But it was just, it was so cool. I’ll see why you couldn’t put advertising on there.

That’d be a great idea. If you want to advertise at Tampa International Airport, think about that big screen heading down the baggage claim. Oh, yeah, yeah.

One of the best places of the airport, in my opinion is if you’re ever in the main terminal where the people are coming off the train and there’s four spots. Right. And if you ever see someone standing there or family with like a sign that says welcome home.

Every time I stop and I wait, if I got a couple minutes, I’m going to wait because chances are I want to see that family reunite. Yeah. And there is no greater zenith of humanity than seeing a family reunite after they’ve been apart for so long.

Usually you can tell because they scream and they run and they hug and there’s just a few moments of just the absolute perfection of humanity. And then I get to go on and have my chick fillet. That’s wonderful.

That’s what I’ve been fortunate to be there for. One of those where a dog’s present, you know, or like a service dog back when they were all over the airport a couple years ago. But yeah, seeing like a dog running up like.

Oh, yeah. Tails shaking. They’re crying.

Oh, yeah. Well, we’re getting pretty close to time, Nicholas. But, you know, let’s, let’s give the audience something.

You’ve been to Tampa International Airport for a while. Do you have any tips for Travelers, the tips for travelers. I would say Tampa International really puts a lot of thought and effort into the recreational traveler and the business traveler.

There are some unknown things that are out there that when you’re not traveling that you could take advantage of. There’s a tour of Tampa. So if you go on the Tampa International webpage, there’s tours that happen all the time.

In fact, my family, just one on one, the people in my cul de sac, all the little kids, up to 11 people for free can sign up and you get a tour. They put you on a bus and they drive you on the air sides, they take you to the fire department, they take you to the airfield maintenance, they drive you all over the airport where you could never drive. And there’s someone telling you all about the airport, all the behind the scenes stuff where the baggage goes, everything for free.

That’s amazing. And they do that constantly. They do tower tours, they do airfield tours.

There’s all sorts of tours you can sign up for. You just give them a call and you’ll speak to PI Darius and he’s the one that is at the front desk and he can tell you what tours are, what dates are available, and they’re again, they’re all free. Wow.

Another thing that’s free that no one knows about except for people that know about it. Obviously, you can get a day pass. So if you go to the Tampa International Airport, and I think it’s the website, you can sign up for a boarding pass that will allow you to go to any airside.

And you can go in, you have to go through tsa, but you can go visit any of the restaurants and have lunch at the airport. So I mentioned earlier, we have 37 restaurants. There’s things like Columbia, Goody Goodies, the Cafe Cuba, there’s all sorts of restaurants.

4 Green Field is out there. It’s one of my favorite Irish places and I get great fish and chips there. But you can go as just a regular traveling member of the public that doesn’t have a ticket to go fly, go get the free boarding pass from the information center, go to the airside, go have lunch and go home.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah, that’s.

That’s interesting. I didn’t know you could do that. That definitely changes my thoughts on like a.

Families go in and it’s like an early flight and, you know, get through. It’s like you can. You can actually go all the way through security and wait at the gate if you wanted to.

There’s a. There’s a mise En Place there, which is a amazing restaurant that I don’t think there’s one in Tampa. I haven’t looked.

But it’s a, I think it’s a French restaurant. And they, they’re in, I think, Airside E. Yeah, Airside E.

And it’s a great rated restaurant. And you could get a free pass to go to the airport and go eat at Mise En Place. That’s.

That’s awesome. Yeah. Well, Darius, you can expect to hear from me.

Cause I have a child that would probably love those tours. Oh, man, I know I would. I’ve always been a sucker for airplanes.

Yeah. They actually drive you out onto the taxiway and wait for a plane to take off while you’re on the taxiway. So there is no greater experience than having a plane take off literally next to you, shaking the bus like you’re there with the plane.

It’s a surreal experience. Wow. Thank you for free.

Thank you for those tips, Nicholas Pollack. And thank you for joining us today. We’ll go ahead and end it here.

It has been so nice spending some time with you today, listener. Join me next month where I will have Martin Catania, longtime IT veteran man who hired me in 2010 and I have considered a mentor ever since. We’ll be getting together and sharing a lot of stories of do you remember that time when.

And of course, we at SunLeaders put out a podcast Every week we have several different hosts talking about all kind of wonderful topics about building the community, our community here in St. Petersburg, Florida, in the greater Tampa Bay area. A lot of great topics about entrepreneurs, about doing business and community outreach. So we’d like to see you.

Have a great day. Sam.