Dr. Dan’s Health & Business Power Hour Season 2 Ep. 5 with Kyle Wentworth

00:00
Hello, this is Dr. Daniel Pozarnsky here with season two, Episode Number Five of Dr. Dan’s Power Hour. Today we are with Kyle Wentworth. He is the founder of Wentworth Consulting Group. He is an Information Systems Security professional and dynamic leader with proven success in creating, developing and managing IT security and service solution practices. He is an innovative engineering consultant who creates and delivers IT services that provide a diverse range of clients with the computing design and integration solutions that they need to run their business. Kyle has challenging leadership roles throughout his life, his father of world war 2 and Korean War veteran. Eight of his siblings and himself makeup 10 immediate family members who have served in the United States Armed Forces. Kyle served nine years in the US Army as an Information Systems Security Officer. After the army, Kyle was set up by the Department of Energy at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he served three years as a security engineer, and major problem solver. Kyle has had an exemplary and long standing career in computer science. He has an outstanding ability to communicate, and uncover the technology we need today and share new ideas in the information technology field. His understanding of business and application process, modeling and the worker process providing unmatched perspective, connecting your business to your technology. He brings your company the tools you need, make wise, economical security minded, productivity, driving decisions. Welcome to our show, Kyle Wentworth.

02:23
Dr. Dan, how are you?

02:24
I’m doing good. How are you doing today? Kyle?

02:27
It’s great to see you. I’m doing wonderful.

02:29
Yeah, I was great to see you. Let’s see here. Your Business also– I’m not finished yet, folks. Your business, Wentworth Consulting Group also puts executives back to work doing the job that they were intended to do, that is running their business. How do you do that Kyle? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

02:59
So Wentworth Consulting Group, is a new business venture that I started last year. I’ve been in the IT services industry for the– well, I’ve been in IT for 44 years. But in the IT services industry as a managed service provider for the last 28 years. Middle of 2019 end of June, I sold a 28 year managed services company in Michigan and I moved to Texas. That company is a managed service provider managed security services provider called Fusion IT and one of the things that we noticed with all of our clients was that we would go to a client with a quote and spend a couple of hours trying to explain this quote to non IT people, trying to get them to understand the purpose of the need for putting in a piece of technology or a collection of technology solutions. And then after we would finish explaining that quote to them, we would break and then they would take that quote and review it amongst themselves and then potentially go out and get additional people to re-quote it, to get competitive quotes, of course only to find out after two or three or four months that they didn’t understand the original quote in the first place. And by that time, the technology problem that they were having is probably exacerbated, getting worse. And once we get to that particular point of past 30 days or 60 days, the quote hold needs to be refreshed. So now we have spent more time working on it. And all the time and effort and energy that they spent and all the hours that they spent working on it usually don’t save them enough money to compensate the difference between our costs and maybe a competitor’s lesser cost for a lower quality product. They have wasted all this time and effort and energy and money and resources and problem exacerbation stifling the progress of their of their business, when they could have spent all of that effort and energy towards something more profitable, doing their job..

05:20
Yes.

05:21

05:22
So that’s where we come in today.

05:25
Okay.

05:27
If Wentworth Consulting Group was a partner with that client ahead of time, that quote would have come in from the IT company, we would have reviewed it, we’d have known exactly what the quote meant. Whether they were on spot with the cost of that quote, and based on the budget of the client, we’d have known what could have been done today and what needed to wait. And more than likely, because we were already on board with the client, we would have known that quote needed to come. We would more than likely been telling the managed service provider who was doing that work, to produce the quote. All of that provides a much more efficient manner that keeps the executives of that client working on their day to day job and not having to deal with technology problems, technology planning, because we do all of that, we interface with a managed service provider for you.

06:25
And your whole goal is to bring security first, through efficiency of business processes, correct.

06:38
So security is always a focus of our business. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a technology security, discussion, or whether it’s a business security discussion, a physical security discussion, whether it’s an educational security discussion, educational security’s kind of interesting. When somebody walks in the front door, and they’re new to the business, maybe they’re a salesperson for somebody else, the person at the front counter is in most cases, accommodating. So that receptionist at the front counter, the gatekeeper is usually a very accommodating person, they greet the person who comes in the door, they’re friendly, the person says, Hey, this is what I do. This is where I’m at, this is what I’m looking for. Can I talk to this type of person in your business? And while that person potentially could be distracted, that person might be a competitor, it might be a salesperson from a competitors office, who’s actually just fishing for information that he can find around that building, about the competition.

07:49
Let’s imagine it’s my business, so they walk into my door, they’re looking for information.

07:58
Patient information you left on the desk.

08:00
Yeah, HIPAA violators.

08:02
HIPAA violators, potentially, but maybe they’re just looking for new customers. People who are already receptive to chiropractic care, they want to market them. Maybe they have their cell phone in their pocket and you get distracted, and you get up and walk away, or they asked you for something, maybe a business card that’s not currently on the desk, and you got to get up and go away and get it. Or you get up and you go away, or the receptionist at your desk goes to find you to get you to come out to talk to this person and while she’s gone, their cell phones out, taking pictures of the contents that’s on the table. Does that happen all the time? No. Should it be happening? No. Should I be aware that I could be the cause of it happening as the person behind that desk? Yes, education is a function. Security, education is a function of the business. And it should be part of the business process. And that’s part of what we help companies do in building our business process models that essentially establish how every function in a business operates.

09:05
We’ve spoken about the process or processes in a chiropractic office or in my business. What kind of markers do you look at or what kind of data do you track to see what should we prioritize, what shouldnt? I’ll give a you a problem here. So in my office, I’m I’m trying to decide if I should hire a chiropractic assistant, who will make seeing patients more efficient like our processes faster. So I can see more people, so they can do the rehab and the muscle work while I’m doing adjusting, or should I hire a chiropractic associate and pay them like a base pay, that’s similar to the chiropractic assistant and have him do similar things like rehab and muscle work that he should have learned in school. Certainly avoid having to teach as much. And hypothetically, I would have a greater ability to bring in more patients. But I’m going to have to increase marketing and —

10:58
–trying to solve your problem?

10:59
Yeah, yeah.

11:00
So, essentially, what business process modeling does, is it helps you to identify the process that you’re currently pursuing, the process that currently takes place. And it does that by looking at the business from the top down. Essentially, you have a organizational chart. The organizational chart is kind of confusing to people, you may have three people in your business, organizational chart has a person on top and two people below them, whether they’re in a straight line, or whether they’re a triangle, you know, one person at the top and two people below them, or whether it’s like this with three people. Regardless of that, there’s probably anywhere from 20 to 30 positions that those three people are fulfilling.

11:53
Correct.

11:54
So the organizational chart identifies all the positions in the business. Regardless of who’s wearing what hats, what a hat on every one of those positions. And then today, you identify who’s sitting in the seat wearing that hat. You may be the janitor at night, the janitor is still a position in your business.

12:17
Yes.

12:18
You may be the person that introduces new people when they come in– that meets new people at the office when they come in and takes in their their personal information and their insurance information. Whether you call that person receptionist, or a medical clerk or a medical assistant, whatever you call that person, it’s a position in the business regardless of who’s doing it. Eventually, when you’re busy enough, the hat can come off of you and on to the person who’s actually fulfilling that job. But they can’t, if it’s never defined. So the definition of a business process model is to take all of the different positions in the business and create definitions for them, create standard operating procedures, which essentially are guides to how that job is completed, not the tasks or steps that are taken. But just the overall summary of how that job–what it takes to do that particular job, medical assistant,coordinat–

13:28
Workflow or is that just the–

13:31
Now we’re past our past standard operating procedure, into the worker process. The worker process is what each individual person does on a day to day basis to complete a task. So every specific position has a series of worker processes that they do to do a specific thing. Each worker process is a unique process. How do I enter insurance information? How do I respond to an insurance claim? Two different processes? Okay. Those processes need to be identified step by step. Now, I use this analogy of putting gas in your car. Currently, you drive your car up to the gas pump, and you get out of your car and you tell the pump I want to get gas and then you put in your credit card and you pull it out and put in your zip code maybe. And then it says yes, you can continue and you pull the pump out and you put it put gas gas handle out, you put it in your car, and you tell it what type of fuel you want, and you pump gas. Those are a process. That is all a manual process today.

14:51
However, if you have the 711 App on your phone, you can pay for your gas with the app in your car and then you just tell it what pump you’re at, at what store you’re at, you got to the car, you walk out to the pump, it’s ready for you to go. So there was an automation process that occurred inside of the App for processing of credit card information that you put in once. There’s another company that I just watched a TED talk that they’ve actually started developing automated pumps that will reach out, open up your gas cap, and put the fuel in your car and pump it for you, and you never get out of your car. Now, these are different processes that occur, some process happen manually, currently today, and 90% and 99.999X percentage of the places that we have to go get gas, it’s a manual process. Okay? Maybe not someday. In the future, putting gas in your car will be an automated process. There will be software that’s involved in automating that process. And the software functions that it takes for you to do a task we call the application process model. So the application process model is what identifies the automated steps to completing a function. Even including the identity of the things that happened in the back end, that are happening in an automated state; such as an email that gets generated to the new customer that comes in thanking them for coming into the business today. Just because you entered their information and they showed up for an appointment. Yep, you appeared for the appointment, I put a check in the box, and I click enter, bang, they’ve got an email right now. Now, that’s an automated process that happened in the back end. But it still needs to be defined. All of these things happen with business process, application process modeling, worker process modeling, and standard operating procedures. All of these things get defined in a business to help you identify exactly what functions in your business happened in what way so that when Joe goes on vacation, and Bob’s filling in for him, Bob can walk over and open up the business processes that are required to do Joe’s job, successfully performed Joe’s job just a little slower, because he’s not used to doing it. But I may not have to hire an external person to come in and fulfill Joe’s job because Bob’s been previously trained on how to fulfill Joe’s job. But when Bob goes on vacation, Joe does Bob’s job.

17:52
But they can’t do that if there isn’t a definition document associated with it. What happens when an employee gets injured, and they’re immediately gone. And they held the keys to the kingdom. And maybe they’re in a coma, you had a stroke, maybe they died? What happens in the event that all of those things happen to your business? What happens when you want to duplicate your business and become a second office with the same type of people? What if you’re a medical practice, and you want to have a medical practice in another city, exactly like your medical practice in this city? Well, currently only the people in the city you’re currently in, understand how to put your business in a second place. So you have to hire a whole bunch of people who sit in your office not making any money because they’re just costing you money, learning how to do your business, when you could have realistically built your business in a business process model,diagram and a couple of trainers need to go out and teach those people in a short amount of time how to do the job and how to follow the business process model. Because they’re already trained in doing what their job is, all they have to do is follow the business process model to learn how to do it for you.

19:05
So what do yo– to define the business process model? You just like pen and paper or you have a software? How do you do that? Everyone want to do this thing, but like it’s not like something you just do overnight? And it’s not something you do overnight well.

19:26
No, it’s not something you do overnight at all. Because it’s like eating an elephant. How do you do that? One fork at a time?

19:37
Yeah, because I think about doing this, I’m overwhelmed.

19:41
Right. So those of us who love business process, don’t get overwhelmed with it. We understand that it is a team effort. And we have tools to make it happen. We use software that we use to track all of the processes and eventually connect them all together. And then we interview employees, we give tasks to people, because you don’t do the receptionist job at your office, the receptionist does. Who does it better? you when you’re sitting at her desk or her when she’s sitting at her desk? Or he’s sitting at their desk? The reception does the job better than you do.

20:25
Correct.

20:26
So it’s best to utilize their brainpower and their knowledge of their job to not only say, this is how I currently do my job, but this over here is stupid. I should really be doing it this way, but I can’t because my software won’t let me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll get to that. That’s process improvement. Continiuos improvement projects have to have to come after developing a business process, you can highlight in red, the things that are bad throughout the system. And you can have them take notes of how they would like to see it look better, so that we’re prepared to do it in the future. But currently, we want to know how it’s done. And then we create efficiencies after those processes are completed. But we have software and flow charting applications to help us guide ourselves in the users through that process. And everybody has access into their portion of their business process models. So they can just enter their processes right into the system. And we can actively see this business process model growing as people are doing their work.

21:39
So do you have your own software that you use? Or do you find the software that works best for each industry?

21:46
No, we have a single software package that we use for the function; for the business process flow creation. And there’s actually a couple of different applications because we have the the flow charting application, and then we have a documentation platform that creates the actual step by step processes, the flow of everything, the verbiage of it.

22:18
You’re first going to define all the jobs, and then you’re going to document the–

22:26
–functions of the business. We find all the functions of the business first, essentially, all of the major hats that people wear. So, finance, accounting, both finance and accounting can be different. They can be separate functions of the business. You can have the finance officer, and you can have accountants in your business, or you can have clerks in your business, finance clerks in your business. So these are all positions in your business. We have HR person, we have the CEO, we have the Chief Technical Officer, the Chief Information Officer, Chief Security Officer, we have the marketing administrator, the marketing manager, all of these different pieces of the business are things that currently are being done by somebody. And we have the essentially the overall template, for examples and historical examples of all of the different types of positions that happen in each business, but everybody’s business is a little bit different. So once we define this hierarchy of structure in the business, then we can start identifying all of the hats that people have to wear, and it’s never perfect right up front. It’s a constant, growing, living, breathing document, that gets changed all the time. And it gets changed all the time throughout its development. People are identifying,Oh, hey, we do this over here, we forgot to tell you. Well, we do this thing over here and actually, this contractor out here does this for us, too. These are all hats that have to be designed in the; to find in the business.

24:13
So is that what you need create the document of the–

24:22
The flowchart?

24:25
Yeah.

24:25
The process model, what happens before this happens, before that happens. And then when this happens, what gets triggered over here that has to happen, so that none of the parts in the process get missed? Eventually we create standard procedures. Standard procedures are pretty much governance documents that have definitions built into them that says, okay, here’s a good example, surveillance; security surveillance in a business. Our company as we’re talking about the standard operation, procedures for security systems in the business, our system wants to stay extremely secure, our business needs to stay extremely secure. As a standard rule, all entry points into our business are controlled by keycard access at a gate and keycard access at a door. And video surveillance monitors all entrances. Video Surveillance covers all aspects of the business 360 degrees, all entryways are covered. All shop floor operations are covered. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s a definitions document that talks about security and surveillance.

25:54
Yep.

25:54
It doesn’t say, put this camera in this position, in this location, pointed at that position of a doorway, or in a hallway or a corridor or around the corner of a building, cover it by this degree, this way and that degree this way. That’s not in the definition; that’s not in the standard operating procedure. The standard operating procedure is a definitions document that says that kind of stuff is done.

26:25
And break it down further.

26:26
And then we break it down further into worker processes. Things like video surveillance would be broken down into configurations documents of floor plans for a video surveillance system. But the software package that gets monitored, who monitors that software package? How often does the stored images– how often do they become overwritten? Do we back them up someplace? Do we keep them for seven years on the backups? Because the the recording system can’t store all that data today? So do we record them someplace else, do we send them to the cloud? All of these things are written in the technology specifications of a video surveillance solution. They may not be in the step by step procedures of the worker process. But who’s ever sitting at the software package that looks at that software package that says I need to configure a backup schedule on the video cameras or I need to check that the backups are happening on a weekly basis. So every week on a Monday I come in, and I have a worker process with an application process that says, go to this software package, login as this user, do ABCD and E to make sure that backups of the videos were done, that actual videos were taken. Watch three videos from this timeline to that timeline, from each camera to make sure that they recorded content, look at the size of the files that were recorded. And sure that the size of those files all are equal for the amount of time that the content was recorded. All of these steps in the process are part of the worker process and the application process to ensure that video surveillance actually did its job. All of this needs to be defined. Once you do it at this building, now you could do it in another building and you don’t have to rewrite the documents. Why does McDonald’s make the same burger, the same way in every single McDonald’s store? Because they have a phenomenal business process that everybody is required to follow. That’s how they can franchise because somebody sat down and they wrote a document, take this burger out of the box, put this burger on the grill, cook it for this amount of time at this temperature, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, put it on a bun, wrap it up this exact same way every single time. You get three burgers out of a bag, they’re all going to be very, very similarly wrapped. Why? Because there’s a process on how to wrap them. And every store wraps them exactly the same way. Almost. Because humans are still involved.

29:11
Yeah.

29:12
So there’s all of these things that create business process that define all the functions of your business, from point A to point B to point C. And all of those things really need to be defined so that somebody can do them the same way over and over and over and over.

29:34
And you also find what doesn’t need to be done over and over and over?

29:39
You’re correct. Why you’re not going to do this and why you’re not going to do that.

29:46
And also, what you’re not doing that might need to be done over and over and over.

29:52
Correct. Correct.

29:54
Okay, so then you sit down with each person and just have them tell you the job or what how does that– do they enter into your software? How is this created?

30:14
We define all of the positions in the business.

30:17

30:22
My team of business process models.

30:25
Okay. Right.

30:28
So the business process modeling team gets involved with creating a fulfilled Business Process Model. They’re not involved in every single event. Because in some cases, companies have processes that they previously developed. So as a standard function of our managed services contract that we have with clients, we do business process management. And we’ll take in their existing process models, evaluate them as part of our monthly service fee. If a complete business process modeling project has to occur, there’s additional costs for that; it’s a project cost. And in a lot of cases, there’s a project cost that also has an attached management service contract that’s put on it, to continue further development of it. Okay, as companies want to grow, they don’t want to be stagnant. You don’t want your business process to define what’s going to happen with your business. today, tomorrow, and in 20 years. If you’re still doing the same things today, 20 years from now, you fail that business.

31:45
Yeah, how are you gonna adapt?

31:47
Just because we did it yesterday, doesn’t mean it’s good for tomorrow.

31:50
I imagine there’s hundreds of thousands of businesses going through that exact thing right now, because the world’s changing really fast.

31:58
It is. And especially in the technology environment today, there are tons of changes happening right now You and I are having a live Zoom meeting conference, an incredible quality. And six, seven months ago, the amount of people who are currently having this number of conferences, in a zoom conference at the exact same time, our quality would be degradative, if we had all just hit zoom at the same time in one day. And that kind of happened.

32:31
Yeah, it’s amazing how the platforms were able to change and adapt. Exactly.

32:43
They change and adapt, because the business process that they had at that time, had a point in it that said, we need to be able to adapt when XYZ happens. So when our bandwidth thresholds reach a certain amount, that needs to happen, this new thing needs to happen.

33:03
They have that in place already.

33:04
I would hope so. If you’re forward thinking, the production process of your business, if your business process model has been defined to define thresholds in your business that require change events, such as let’s say I have a manufacturing company. And I’ve got three lines to manufacture chairs, and I manufactured chairs all day long. And I can process 70 orders of chairs every single day. What happens if I get 80 orders of chairs? What happens if I get 180 orders of chairs? Do I have predefined in my operational guide, in my business process model that thresholds have been established to do A, B and C and when I reach a threshold, that’s X number of percentage greater, I make some kind of a change to allow me to accommodate this in my business process. And if I didn’t prepare for that, and 911 occurs and COVID hits and whatever the villain is that we have to battle in our fight to continue with business, whenever those challenges reach your desk, you fail or you have to completely start reinventing things. And people have to just bend over. They either have to bend so they don’t break but a lot of businesses have been breaking because they couldn’t prepare fast enough to accommodate such a change as COVID.

34:48
Yeah, after working around the– well feels like around the clock every day to try to figure out how to be coded and grow my business in this time. Because I moved out into my own business, January 1.

35:08
Sure.

35:11
It’s been an exhausting year.

35:14
So business process is what helps businesses, make those adjustments, make those accommodations. A good business process model helps businesses make accommodations when change needs to occur. Now, like we said, business processes are not static. They can’t be static, because business isn’t static. But documentation before implementation, that is a coined phrase I’ve been saying for 30 years, if it’s not on paper, it doesn’t exist.

35:48
Documentation report implementation.

35:50
You write it down, you document it, you prove the process change, and then you implement the process change. Now, there’s always an accommodation that can happen in an emergency situation. If somebody finds something in a business process, that’s a safety issue, and it needs to be adjusted right away, you might make an immediate change to help somebody to not hurt themselves in a process. And then the documentation process has to come, the documentation improving and adjustments have to happen later than that. But there’s always some kind of a safety write up or something that’s included inside of that business process that says, hey, we had to make an organizational adjustment because of A, B and C happened. And so somebody in the organization still approves that. And then there’s an immediate task that’s added that says, yes, documentation before implementation in a permanent state, we need to get the change process documented, prove that we documented it correctly, and then make sure that we’re implementing it correctly and make sure everyone’s trained on the new process.

37:03
But as for– you could get an update in a software package. And now the menu that was on the left is now on the right. The function that used to be there is no longer there.

37:16
So then you have to update.

37:17
You have to update and adjust. Okay. And a new plan has to take place. So this is where change control processes come into play. And that’s why this document, this worker process model document, the business process modeling documents are all living and breathing documents that keep your business flowing.

37:42
So me as like the CEO, or president do I keep either the role of that document?

37:50
Keeper of the keys, it’s commonly not. Most commonly, it’s somebody who’s in the controller position in a business that’s responsible for day to day business operations. So business operations managers, sometimes it’s the CFO, depending on the business. But whoever is placed wearing that hat, is usually the person who’s put in charge and responsible for ensuring that the business process modeling team is engaged, when business process change needs to occur.

38:25
Okay, So they’re in communication with you then.

38:29
And that’s why it’s a service that we provide, it’s a managed service. Because quarterly, there may be things that need to be readdressed, or tested or proven. Because what happens when you tell the kids that dishes are supposed to be done at 6 o’clock every single night, eventually becomes 6.05. And then one of the kids has to go to the bathroom at six at 6.07. And then the dishes don’t get started till 6.10. So if you’re not proving your processes to make sure that your business processes are happening all the time, the right way by the people who are supposed to be performing them, instead, somebody looking at a process and saying, you know, I used to stitch that garment this way and I found a faster way to stitch it. I use less thread to stitch it this way and it takes me about three minutes less time to get it done. Yeah, but did you prove that the stitches don’t pull apart? After you stitched it that way, did you prove that the quality of the product didn’t degrade because you decided to take a shortcut? That’s why these business processes need to be monitored and maintained to make sure that quality control is always number one. That security is always taken in as a focus. Safety is taken in as a focus and that people aren’t making shortcuts to the business processes. And, then if there is a reason that those stitching process needed to change, we put in a change control document, do a time study on it, do a quality study on it. And ensure that the change is actually a good change to happen. The proper people vote on it say, Yep, thumbs up, let’s make a change. Now we document how that change occurs. We put it into play, we retrain people, we get rid of the old version, we put in the new version, and now we have a better process.

40:34
So what keeps going through my head is time like how much time does each person have to spend to create the document and could you put it into like, a frame, like a week, a day? How much time?

40:53
No. There is no set time limit, there’s no set time mentality that says it’s only going to take this amount of time to do each individual process. The process that it takes to generate an email or to put in somebody city state zip is not the same amount of time that it takes to put in somebody’s medical information and verify that their medical card is actually valid and not out of date. Matter of fact, here’s a here’s a great example. Back when I was in the Army, one of the other jobs that I had while I was in the Army was hydraulics and pneumatics mechanics.

41:41
We would have to bend tubing in order to get the tubing to a specification where it would go in between this port that it fed the the fluid to in this port that it came from? Y If you had a tube that had three bends in it, there was a process for creating that tube with three bends. If you had a tube that had 15 bends in it, that process may take an hour longer to develop that tube than it did to make the three bend tube which might take five minutes.

42:18
But what is the failure rate on a 15 bend tube versus a three bend tube? Because if you’re off by one degree on the first bend, you’re off by 27 degrees on the last bend.

42:31
That make sense. Yeah.

42:33
So what is the failure rate? Who is checking that process? And who’s proving that you have enough stock to make three mistakes in order to get this one tube out. So you can’t really define that this tube and that tube should take the same amount of time to write the business process to do that particular bend. And the same thing would be in any other kind of business. Every business process takes as long as it takes to develop the process. Every business process takes as long as it takes to prove that you got all the steps right. And then there’s change when you figure out Oh, hey, I missed this step. Or realistically, I should have said, hold your mouse with your left hand when you’re doing this, instead of with your right hand. Who knows what the change is. But in all honesty, the change happens, the document gets created as somebody is doing the task. Now we ask ourselves, why is this so important? Because at some point in your office, somebody is going to not be there for whatever reason. Somebody is going to go and have a baby, somebody is going to take a vacation. Somebody has to do the work that person that left needed to do?

44:00
Definitely.

44:01
So if you don’t have a business process in place to define exactly what those people do while they’re gone, imagine when they’re gone permanently. All the intellectual property loss that is lost when somebody leaves the business that did a whole bunch of stuff that you didn’t realize they did.

44:25
They took it with them.

44:27
They took it with them. It’s lost permanently. Maybe it’s lost because they’re no longer there performing those functions on a day to day basis. And the next person coming in, doesn’t know that those things had to be completed. And now you’ve just had to reinvent the wheel and it never gets reinvented the same way. Sometimes that’s good, but what happens to all the processes that were being done by the previous person that are now just dropping off? And then what happens to the other end of that process that’s kind of expecting something to happen, that just doesn’t happen.

45:14
Yeah. I have experienced that with losing people–not losing people, but like turning over people, and then trying to scramble to figure out how to get duty A to Person B, and you lose a lot of time and you lose money. Because you lose time and the time is the key factor in all of this. If you said time.

45:43
One of the one of the common things that happen in church ministry is people leave. And they go to work for a different ministry. Maybe they move and they go away. If a person created an outreach to a public entity, and they were the only person in that church, who knew that they created this outreach to this public entity, and the church’s name was on that event, even though they might talk to other people, hey, I’m doing this with XYZ and ABC, what happens when that person leaves and there’s no one else who knows how to take the reins to continue that ministry. So that’s happened in several churches that I belong to. And the the external ministry involves children. And those children are expecting.–

46:54
And I’ll give you a great example of this, one of the ministries was to an outreach school. That was for kids who had kind of had difficulty staying in mainstream school. So it was like a second chance High School. Yeah, and these kids never could afford or even get to go to prom. So the church, one of the people in the church set up this ministry, to outreach to this school, and one of the things that they did was set up prom.

47:35
Okay,

47:36
Okay. And they held a prom for all of these kids in the events area at the church. Well, there was a three or four month period during the year where the church didn’t interact really with that organization. But all of the steps had been put in place in order to schedule prom, then this person left.

48:06
Hadn’t or they had.

48:07
They had already put it in place but they left after they had put it in place. And nothing really happened in the preparations time. And a couple of weeks before prom was supposed to happen, the school reached out to the church and said, Hey, we’re just wondering, we hadn’t heard anything about prom and blah, blah, blah. And the church hadn’t already coordinated because that person had left another event too occur when prom was already scheduled. And all these students were already expecting for prom to happen on that time. And there was anybody else to take over the reins to make prom happen. And prom didn’t happen.

48:44
Oh, didn’t? Oh, I see.

48:49
So the process is to continue with the documentation.

48:53
If you document before you implement, and all functions of a business, before that function can take shape in the business as a certified operational function of the business, if it’s documented that these operations occur, and that this position, this hat and the business performs those functions, if that hat is removed from the business, if the person leaves the hat still is there. All of the business processes that that person handled in that business are still functioning and operational. Just somebody else has to put the hat on.

49:35
Okay.

49:36
But if you don’t predefine all of them ahead of time, they go with the wind.

49:43
Yes. And this could also decrease like micromanaging also because myself is like the president or the the main pastor, that church wouldn’t have to look over every single process.

49:56
No, you just get updates and briefings on, hey, these are the things that I’m doing, these are things I’m in charge of. And with some really great collaboration tools that are out today, there could be long term notes and non reinventing the wheel of how the process actually took place. As well as review processes for after action reviews, once the process is completed, some process take a long time to occur. There’s a lot of steps in that process in order to get it from from start to finish. So, when you’re reviewing all of these processes, after each one of them completes, you do an after action review on that, you go back to the beginning, and you look at all the notes of what everybody said while they were chatting about how this process was done. These new like Microsoft Teams and Jive and several applications that are out give you the ability to collaborate on a particular project. And as you get through it, you can go back and review it and say, okay, we want to do this again, but we don’t want to do that, we don’t want to do this, we don’t want to do this, let’s update our business process model or worker process models, so that we follow the steps better than next time.

51:15
Build a house, the second house should look better, third house should look better, the fourth house should look better. If you build a great business process on how to build a house, eventually, the house time that it takes to build from the first stick to the last stick, gets shorter and shorter and shorter. The house gets stronger and stronger and stronger. It’s more efficient. It’s it’s more effective. It’s a better quality home, it costs less to put together. All of these things are business process efficiencies that occur when you document before you implement.

51:52
Accurate implement. Yes, I totally agree. How many businesses like small business do you think actually do this? I bet there’s a lot that don’t that.

52:05
There’s a high percentage of close to zero.

52:09
Really? Yeah. That implement or don’t implement?

52:14
Yeah, very few companies implement business process models.

52:17
Yeah, yeah. But the ones that do are probably very successful.

52:22
They are because they’re the ones that grow. They’re the ones that understand how to defeat change issues, how to defeat problems like COVID. And can prepare for the future because contingency plans have been put in place in order to accommodate for immediate needs of change. In addition, they don’t scramble to find out how something was done because all the processes are currently there. And with COVID, a whole bunch of jobs got severed, if you will, because there was just no work for the person to do while nobody was coming to the office. A lot of those jobs still had to take place but the same person that did them originally is not the person who’s doing them now. So everybody’s having to reinvent the wheel.

53:17
Yeah.

53:19
And it’s all because there’s no documented process for how that function was done in the business.

53:26
Yeah.

53:28
So if you had a template to go by how to do every single process in your business, it doesn’t matter who does it; follow step by step by step procedures in order to get it done. There is always a talent factor. I am not a welder.

53:46
Yep, finding the right people.

53:49
The right person for the right job is very effective. But if the last person’s not available, and he was a welder, and I find another good welder with the same capabilities as the first welder, and I hand them the business process, the work process to get something done, they should be able to within a short amount of timeframe be able to produce the same widget at the same quality. But if the process isn’t there and left with the brain of the person who was the previous welder, you’re having struggles as a business.

54:22
Yeah, you’re stagnating and you’re not getting out your (inaudible) enough time. And then your competitors if they have this processing intact and they’re going to advance farther in front of you. You’re going to fall further behind, I would imagine.

54:41
Definitely.

54:42
So to like summarize, we’re coming up on an hour here, to summarize, like the top three things that we went over today, what are the most important?

54:56
Well, business processes is definitely an important function we talked a lot about that, of course, I spent quite a bit of time on that. We didn’t get a chance to really chat about the three primary functions of Wentworth Consulting Group. And realistically, quickly, the purpose of Wentworth Consulting Group is to get executives back to work, like you said in the beginning. Executives who currently have to handle a technology problem or technology decisions without a background in technology can feel like they’re trying to change the engine in a car when they’ve never really changed the oil in the car. And it’s difficult to even watch YouTube videos by a mechanic, who’s an expert mechanic to try and follow instructions, even though they have a process to follow instructions on how to change an engine in a car when you have no experience changing the engine in a car.

56:03
Yeah, they don’t have the talent.

56:04
The there’s a serious talent and there’s a time factor. Like I heard a doctor say once, I saw it actually on a sign. It says, do not let your Google research for the last 24 hours negate my 16 years of education as a surgeon.

56:23
I would agree with that one.

56:25
And, and that’s extremely important. I’ve been doing it for 44 years. Yeah, I translate binary into hexadecimal, into decimal and into octal even in my sleep.

56:38
You worked out one of the first computers when you’re eight.

56:47
When I was eight, it was a long, long time.

56:50
I listened to Steve Jobs, talking about the exact same computer working on it. And he said he didn’t know how it worked at all. And I said, Kyle do.

57:02
My first problem was with the Zenith Data Systems Computer, and a keyboard controller that had failed. And that was a long, long, long time ago. So the knowledge that it takes in order to successfully traverse the technology industry is consistently changing. But it takes a great foundation to understand when somebody doesn’t have the right process or the right ideas in place for a specific type of business. So when a vendor comes in with a quote, and it’s $100,000, to refresh a network, and they bring it into the CFO of a company, and they spent two to three hours trying to educate that CFO on that quote for that project, the CFO is overwhelmed with new information that they really can’t make heads or tails off. They know a lot of the verbiage because they’ve been talking to the IT company for a while. But they really have no business figuring out how to replace the engine in the car.

58:10
I feel like that’s a problem too, especially in this day and age, there’s way too much information. Tons of information.

58:20
That’s a problem that I am having is there’s a lot of things to do, there’s a lot of information, how to implement it, and when and that’s basically the problem it’s solving.

58:32
So if the CFO had an opportunity to hand off that meeting with the IT company, to somebody who was trained and educated on how to handle that meeting. And understood when not only whether or not the the quote was valid, but whether or not the price for the quote was going to be valid or close, or whether there should be something else in the quote that’s missing or something that’s taken out. Or what could be done today and what could be saved for three months down the road, because budget isn’t there today. All of those decisions should be made by somebody who’s technically trained to handle that discussion. The position in that business is called the Chief Technical Officer. When there’s software involved, and data in that software and security of the data in that software, that’s when the Chief Information Officer gets involved. When there’s security of any nature, whether it be educational security, physical security, firewall security, switch security, software security, user security, is all involved, that’s when the chief information security officer gets involved. And you put all three of these people together in the room to evaluate the quote that’s coming in, and to do business planning related to technology implementations for your business. And a CFO gets to go back to his job and do his job all day long, and only review the quote number that came in that the chief technical officer said, hey, I’ve got everything all figured out, this is what it’s going to cost. And the budget for it is this, but we’re going to push this off for six months, so you only have to worry about thi and this and this right now financially. That’s what the CFO wants to hear. He knows how to manage that decision at that point, because it’s strictly a financial discussion, not a technology discussion.

1:00:29
Yes,

1:00:30
That’s where Wentworth Consulting Group comes in. And we do that by understanding your business and managing those decisions as a part of your team not a part of the managed service provider who’s providing the quote. We’re on the the team of the client, not on the team of the company who’s providing that solution.

1:00:50
Yeah, you’re gonna help the client make the decisions.

1:00:55
Correct. So we have a very agnostic approach to the decision that’s being made. And we understand what products should be offered. So if the managed service providers coming in with a product that we think is either overkill, or underkill, for a solution will know, based on the needs of that client. We don’t need a $50,000 switch for a 10 user company.

1:01:24
Yeah, exactly.

1:01:25
And a lot of times, that’s what is sold.

1:01:28

1:01:28

1:01:30
Right. A product that’s way over the necessity of that particular implementation. And we’ve seen it many, many times. But then at the end of the day, if a UTM firewall needs to go into a client, which pretty much every client needs a UTM firewall, and if you don’t know what it is, look it up. But every business needs a UTM firewall. But if you can’t distinguish the difference between a UTM firewall, a switch, and a server, all sitting in a rack, at the same time, you have no business being in the meeting, deciding which technology solution that vendor is going to provide. It’s not your job, but it’s not my job to run to the finance office. I wouldn’t be the right guy to run the finance office. That’s why I have a finance person to run my business. Financially, you know, I can be part of the discussions to make sure that the budget is there, but at the end of the day, which chart of account needs to have that particular entry is not my job, but it is the job of the CFO. I leave the decisions to how the books need to look to the CFO, and they leave technology decisions to me.

1:02:51
Yep, that makes a lot of sense.

1:02:53
And that’s where we come in to help because most businesses with 1000, 1500 users and less don’t have a position in their business that is for the Chief Technical Officer of the business. It’s usually a position that’s a hat that’s been given to the CFO, to the controller, to the Operations Officer, sometimes the CEO. And then a couple of cases I’ve seen the HR manager.

1:03:22
Oh, really the HR?

1:03:24
Yeah, for 500 users organization, the HR manager was put in charge of technology because her brother was an IT guy.

1:03:31
Oh, gosh.

1:03:33
And that happens. If you have questions, ask your brother. You need somebody in your business, who understands your business, who understands your business process, who understands that technology runs your business, and you do not you facilitate the technology that is in your business to make your business happen. Leave that, turn it off.

1:03:58
I like that.

1:03:59
Technology runs your business, you do not.

1:04:04
That’s almost all businesses now.

1:04:07
The better you facilitate it, the better you document it, the better you deploy it, and the better you watch it and monitor it and make sure that it’s being watched and monitored, the more effective your business structure is, and the better you can handle COVID-19 and 911 occurring.

1:04:27
That makes a lot of sense. So wrapping up then, what would you say your 44 years is the most important thing you’ve ever learned.

1:04:40
The most important thing I’ve ever learned is that I am not the smartest person in the room. Room is only as smart as all the people in the room. Everybody has a capability. Everybody has a function. Everybody has importance. And an all people have input. No one person runs the room.

1:05:07
Okay, You are not the smartest person in the room, the room of people that are what make the room smart, correct? That’s correct.

1:05:21
Correct

1:05:21
And you heard it here from Kyle Wentworth. And what will be the best way to get a hold of you, if people are interested in implementing or helping their own process or implementing their processes, or new processes?

1:05:36
Really easy. Wentworth Consulting Group.com Gets everybody in contact with us. There’s plenty of pages on there for people to fill out, contact us forms and they’re all over. There’s a page in there specifically based on education. And education will help to identify different parts of the technology world, the technology business, that you may just have questions on. What is a managed service provider? What kinds of businesses use managed service providers? What is the cloud? What’s the dark web? The deep web. What’s the surface web? Great definitions and documentation on all of that? Should you be concerned with the dark web? What do you do with dark web? There’s a lot of information and education, and we’re adding to that stuff all the time.

1:06:38
And can you talk live about that dark web, I believe on the informational video you have on the about page also?

1:06:49
Yeah, it’s actually one of the pages that’s in WCG, daily.

1:06:55
WCG daily on the website, folks.

1:06:57
Right.

1:07:00
Which is where this video will end up. One of our partner companies is called ID agent. It’s part of Cassia, which is a company that develops a monitoring and management software package. And, and a package for helping managed service providers manage their business. ID agent was recently purchased by them. And what they do is they monitor the dark web for your information and let you know when a compromised has happened so that you can be aware that your information is ended up on the dark web.

1:07:33
Oh, okay.

1:07:35
Yeah, there’s no way to stop it. There’s no way to change it. Once it’s there. It’s there. How do you remediate from it? That’s what we help you make sure it’s done?

1:07:44
Well, quickly. I’m curious now, what’s the difference between the surface web, the dark web, and then–

1:07:51
The deep web and the dark web. So the surface web is where the majority of us interact? It’s where you go to YouTube, it’s where you go to Yahoo to Google. It’s where you go to the to the front of your bank, and access your bank in order to do transactions. It’s where the majority of us use Internet Explorer, and edge and different browsers in order to access the internet. And incidentally, I’m going to give you a piece of information, if you want to try and keep yourself, your computer clean of garbage, the brave browser is the browser to work with. It’s built on Chrome, but it stops all the garbage from happening, stops all the plugins from running on your site. You will end up with certain pages that don’t operate the way you thought that they should but that’s in by intent because they’re usually running bad stuff. And you just click up on the line at the top, the brave line at the top, and it will tell you all the shields that have been blocked on your site. Okay. So then you can turn certain things on or off in order to manage that page and get it to work correctly. So that’s the surface web. The Deep Web actually contains the dark web. The dark web is a small little cell inside of the deep web. The Deep Web is an area that search engines like Google and Yahoo and Bing can’t get to.

1:09:28
Okay.

1:09:28
Most of the content that’s in the deep web is essentially a hidden universe that’s contained inside of conventional searching capabilities. And it usually requires certain kind of browsers and authentication in order to get access to the contents that’s there. Private sites, some academic, some government networks, all of those things are located inside of the deep web. The dark web is another contingent inside of the deep web that contains areas where hackers store their content.

1:10:10

1:10:12
So it’s servers and databases and, non accessible to the normal public websites that contain information most commonly compromised data that’s up for sale; tools that are available for purchase in order to compromise data.In order to hack in and gain access to legitimate companies. The dark web is estimated to be 550 times larger than the entire surface web.

1:10:52
Really?

1:10:53

1:10:54
So what we currently interact with on a day to day basis on the internet is just a symbol of what’s the data that’s currently in the dark web. And it requires special kinds of browsers, Tor browsers to gain access to that content. And that’s what the ID Agent does;is they get access to all of that content and search it for your information. When they find it, they report it to you and let you know that your information has been out, they’ve been found out there and this is where it is and this is how it was compromised. And this is possibly what they found if that data is all available, and what they recovered.

1:11:35
Great. Well, thank you for describing that for me. And I’m quite interested in that. But we’ll never have time to go and look at it all.

1:11:47
Well, if you imagined an iceberg. What’s above the water is the surface web. What’s below the water is the deep web. And inside of the deep web is the dark web. The dark web is 550 times larger than the surface web.

1:12:05
The Deep Web is huge.

1:12:08
Tons and tons and tons of information that the normal public can’t gain access to.

1:12:13
Okay. Okay. So we learned a little bit about the surface web, the deep web and the dark web. That’s great because most people don’t even know that much. I imagine, because I don’t know about technology. But, of course, as much as you do, Kyle, you,ve 44 years of experience. And I think we’ll wrap it up there today. And for the viewers out there, it’s Wentworth Consulting Group. Kyle Wentworth is the CEO and he helps put the executive back in the driver’s seat, correct?

1:12:56
Perfect. Couldn’t said it better.

1:12:59
I enjoy talking to you again, as always Kyle. And we’ll have another conversation.

1:13:10
Great. Dr. Dan, thank you very much.

1:13:12
Thank you.