TRG Solutions: Joe Yanoska

IndustrialSage

Joe Yanoska, CIO of TRG Solutions, joins us to discuss the vital importance of transparent and accessible data in supply chain and ecommerce.

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Danny:

– Hello and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. I am joined by Joe Yanoska, who is the chief information officer at TRG Solutions. Joe, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.

Joe:

– Thank you very much. Happy to be here.

Danny:

– I am very excited to jump into today’s episode and learn a little bit more about you and about TRG Solutions. First off, tell me a little about TRG. Who are you guys? What do you guys do?

Joe:

– Well, we’re a managed service provider in the enterprise mobility and payment space. Really the easiest way to think about us is if it scans a barcode, we can help you figure out what devices are right for you. We can help you source them and deploy them out to all of your locations. And then while they’re in the field, if they experience a need for repair, you can ship them back. We can repair them, and then certainly at the end of that life cycle, if they need to be securely destroyed or whatever, we can help you with that as well. And then certainly, if you want to replace them, we will help you do the whole cycle all over again. So really being experts in that space and trying to help our customers use these however they need to, whether it be warehouse management, point of sale, whatever, we’re there to show you what devices work best in your environment and then can help you manage that entire lifecycle.

Danny:

– Great, awesome. So before we get more into the business and challenges and all that stuff, this is a special segment where I like to go in and learn about my victim—I mean my guest on the show. Joe, tell me a little bit about: how did you get into the industry?

Joe:

– Well for me, I started from the technology standpoint. I went to college to be a developer, an engineer, software engineer, and spent some time at Key Bank out of the gate. Then my second stop was at American Greetings where we spent a lot of time trying to save the world one greeting card at a time. One of the interesting things we got into there was personalized greeting cards. We really started to figure out the logistics of, obviously, taking something online, personalizing the card.

But once you’ve taken that order, you’ve got to print it. You’ve got to kit it. You’ve got to ship it, and hopefully that it’s all right. If you think about Christmastime, you might be shipping out hundreds of cards to somebody or shipping them to everybody on their list on their behalf. There was an operation there to figure out how all that worked. And then that dovetailed into my time here at TRG Solutions where we really help people in those areas, especially around any of the mobile devices that are required to help any of their supply chain needs from, again, warehouse management to shipping to retail. You have all these touch points that need to happen along that way, and really these are the devices that are helping you collect that information, get it into your ERP systems so companies can manage their data, their inventory, all that stuff, as seamlessly as possible.

Danny:

– So you’re specifically, maybe some sort of RFID scanning. You said anything that basically has a barcode, essentially.

Joe:

– Barcode, RFID, anything that you’re able, helps you figure out where–– whether it’s a product, whether it’s luggage from an airline, whether it’s whatever, it’s got a barcode on it. And usually you want to know where that is all along the way. It’s these handheld mobile devices that people, their employees have in their hands scanning these barcoding. It’s usually updating an ERP system to let them know, hey, this is where it is in its process. And that’s where we’re really helping companies with that technology to make it as seamless and as easy as possible.

Danny:

– Excellent, well—but kind of going back a little bit, I’m going to take you back again. You said you wanted to be—program engineering, is that what you were studying?

Joe:

– Yeah, software developer, software engineer.

Danny:

– It sounds like you’re kind of still very much in that space.

Joe:

– Yeah, I’m the CIO here which means I handle all of the technology needs of our company. I call myself the head nerd, and I say that very proudly because it’s the systems that we put in place that help run our business, that help us help our customers run their businesses much more effectively.

Danny:

– Yeah, so in your career—one of my favorite questions to ask executives is hey, tell me about somebody who really had a big impact in your life, professionally primarily, but it could be personally as well. Who was that for you, and why?

Joe:

– Yeah, for me it certainly was a former CIO who I reported in to. It was actually in my time at American Greetings. One of the things that I really prided myself early in my career on was being a really good software engineer. Not only was I doing that, but I was also starting to lead software engineering teams. But that was my silo, so that’s what I was getting really good at. I remember I would—I always remember this day where I walked into his office and he’s like, “Joe, I want you to take over QA.” Now QA in software development is, you write the code, you send it over to the QA team, they test it. There’s always a little contention in that world because they’re finding stuff that’s wrong with your code. I certainly didn’t want to do that because I was a developer. I was on this side of the wall. What he did is, he saw something in me where I could come in and maybe make something better. Maybe something I didn’t see in myself.

And so I ended up taking the challenge on, and that’s when I really saw my management career take off in that I could take on things that weren’t what I went to school for. The phrase he always used to use with me was, you need to get comfortable being uncomfortable. I still use that phrase today. I teach it to all the people that report in to me because I think there’s something to be said there where when you’re given a new opportunity there’s a confidence over time that you may develop to say, I can go into that situation. I can learn about what it is that I need to learn about. And I can start to manage that in a way that is maybe better than before. It may not be in an area that you were absolutely trained on. Now, that doesn’t mean you don’t need to go get training or you don’t need to go get a lot of books and start to study in the area. But what you do is, you develop a confidence that you can go into that situation. You can educate yourself enough, and then you can start to manage and operate that function in the business in a very effective way. And he was the guy that introduced me to that term and then started giving me other opportunities. QA was one of the first ones. Then I got the call center which was really outside my area of expertise, but you had to learn about that. That’s where it really helped me grow as a manager. And then it really set me up for higher jobs up the chain. I sit here today with a CIO title. I would never have been able to have that if it wasn’t for him.

Danny:

– That’s awesome. I absolutely love that mantra of being comfortable being uncomfortable. I love that. Actually it’s the third time it’s come up in this very short week already. It came up on Sunday. It came up yesterday. It came up now again.

Joe:

– It’s catching on.

Danny:

– It’s super catchy, but it’s also not just catchy, the meaning of it. It’s that everybody has fear, and it’s about what do you do with that fear? Because the opposite is being complacent. If you’re complacent, you don’t grow.

Joe:

– Absolutely. When I’m coaching some of my staff up, sometimes you can see some of those nonverbal cues where they’re uncomfortable, and I’ll ask them. Are you uncomfortable? And they’ll say, “Yeah.” I’m like, good. You’re growing. You’re now going to go learn a skill set that you didn’t have last week, and it’s going to help you in your career. And so those are things to be embraced and not be feared.

Danny:

– That’s awesome. I absolutely love it. That is 100%—love it. So today you got the title, the CIO title. What energizes you? You wake up in the morning, hey, here’s what I want to go tackle. What’s that thing for you?

Joe:

– For us it’s just constant improvement. One of the things that I absolutely love about where we are today is that we’re a mid-size company growing into a bigger company every day. And so what you’re constantly looking at, especially in the CIO seat, is do the systems, do the processes, do the people scale the way you need them to scale?

A lot of cases where you go from startup, there’s a certain mentality in a startup company to a mid-size company, and oftentimes the things that got you where you were don’t get you where you need to be. You’ve got to think about things more strategically. You’ve got to think about systematizing some of your processes and procedures, things that you could do on a spreadsheet now are too big for a spreadsheet, and you need a system to manage it. It’s really coming in and working with our operations team, one, on how do we make our operations much more efficient and scalable— those are the two key words—and also throw secure in there as well because we would be remiss if we didn’t because those come with growth.

Then the other side is, how do you work with your sales and product teams to make sure that the things that we’re putting into the system are things that maybe we could take to market and sell and show that we’re doing this and it’s a differentiator for us? When we’re in that sales cycle and we’re up against competition, we shine in that area and people want to bring their enterprise mobility business to us as opposed to one of our competitors.

Danny:

– That’s awesome. No, I love it. That’s great. Looking now with everything that’s going on in the industry, pandemic and all that fun stuff, how has the industry changed for you guys?

Joe:

– I think for us, and this is in helping our customers, our customers need to be much more transparent with their data than they ever have before, whether that is forecasting, whether that’s inventory management, whether that is putting in digital displays at retail. All of that requires systems. It requires people to help them service some of those things. Sometimes they’re putting new systems in, and it requires us to come in and help with some expertise, what systems they should buy or what kind of devices they should buy.

A lot of it depends. Are you working in a warehouse that is basically a big freezer and is minus 20 all the time? Well, there’s a different type of device that will help you there. Are you working in an airport, like we talked about where the weather is going to be changing on a dime, and in some cases the device you might send to Minneapolis might be different than the device you send to Arizona because it’s different weather conditions all the time. Those are the things that our customers are constantly dealing with. We’re able to come in and help them figure out what’s the best way that they can service their customers or implement new devices or technology that helps them be more efficient and helps us bring value to their organization when we do that.

Danny:

– Absolutely. It was interesting; that’s probably the first answer that I’ve heard about transparency relative to—that’s a great answer. And it sounds like it’s across the board relative to suppliers, stakeholders, obviously end customers, just across the whole playing field.

Joe:

– Absolutely. When you look at retail now, think of all the things that they have to know inventory-wise. You expect to open up an app and know, in this store that is three miles from you, what they have on the shelf because you want to know they have it before you make that trip. That takes a lot of systems, a lot of inventory to make all of that work seamlessly, and that’s not going to change.

That’s one of the things the pandemic really accelerated because now all of a sudden you went from a scenario where yeah, you were doing stuff on Amazon, and you were going to buy stuff in a store. But now all of a sudden the pick and go stuff is now big. And all of that requires that you know what your inventory is. You know what the prices are. And you’re making that available to your consumer base which you never really did before. Or maybe it’s not at the store, and it’s at the warehouse, and you want to give that customer a chance to say, okay, I can’t get it at the store, but we’ll send it to you in two or three days. You’re also starting to see that happen actually in retail. I was in a local sporting goods store not too long ago, and I was buying a new pair of running shoes, and they didn’t have my size. Literally the guy was able to say, with his mobile device right there, says, yeah, I don’t have it here, but I can have it shipped to your house in three days. Do you still want them?

Danny:

– That’s great.

Joe:

– And so he might have saved a sale by doing that.

Danny:

– Absolutely.

Joe:

– Again, required having that device, being able to locate it to your inventory, having somebody at the other end checking in that device and knowing what you had on the shelf. And all of that requires all of this enterprise mobility technology to make that work really well.

Danny:

– Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great story there. Actually I had a similar story, opposite; I won’t name who. Went in, bought something online, got in there, they didn’t have it. Big spike; it was Atlanta Braves World Series gear, so I’ll give them a pass. Everybody was rushing to the stores immediately. They tell me, they’re printing these shirts as fast as they can. They’re coming by the truckload. Very exciting time. Where do you see things going—obviously there’s a lot of learnings that, I’m sure, that you’ve taken from the pandemic. Where do you see things as things start to settle and going forward a little bit? Where do you see areas maybe coming back or staying? What are your thoughts?

Joe:

– I certainly don’t think any of the things we introduced in the pandemic are going to go away. They’ll certainly probably level because you’re going to have some people who like going back to the store because they like that browsing experience where they’re seeing physical things. But your curbside pickup is going to stay. If you’re a restaurant and you’re not doing curbside pickup, or you’re not doing—think of DoorDash and Uber Eats and all that stuff—you’re not doing those things, you’re losing revenue. All of our businesses are going to be more connected than they ever have before. They’re all relying on mobile devices to help us, whether it is, we’re checking out at retail, whether it is, we’re doing, again, inventory or warehouse management. All of that has to work more seamlessly than it ever has before, and if your company’s going to succeed, you have to be doing that really well.

Danny:

– Absolutely.

Joe:

– I see that only increasing and not decreasing and going back to pre-pandemic scenarios.

Danny:

– Totally, I agree. I think people have just—from a consumer standpoint, I can tell you it’s been fantastic. When you ask my wife, she’s like, oh, this is awesome. I don’t want to go into the grocery store. I can just go run, people bring stuff, put it into my trunk, and it’s great. Or it’s being shipped to the house or what have you. I think one thing that we’ve learned as well is just the value of time. Not that we didn’t know that before, but when you think of the traditional experience of just going grocery shopping and how much time it takes to do all these different things, you’re like wait a minute, I could just quickly on my app—and even if there’s stuff that I repurchase that maybe I wouldn’t get through an Amazon or wherever else, I could quickly just boop, that’s it. Here’s my list, go. I just carved out 45 minutes out of my day.

Joe:

– Yeah, it happens. My wife and I–– we got Instacart. When we joined, we were driving back. We were on a trip, and we realized we hadn’t done any grocery shopping for the week. We were driving back from where we were at on a Sunday, and we had an hour and a half ahead. She pulled open the app, and within a half hour, we had our grocery shopping done. It was going to be delivered right around the same time that we showed up. We get there; the bags are on the door, and away we go.

Danny:

– That has revolutionized our family vacations. It’s like, you go somewhere; we went to the beach, boom, same thing. We’re like hey, this is awesome. We don’t have to worry about all this other stuff. Yeah, that’s not going back. At least I hope it isn’t. I’ll be mad. What is your organization doing right now to really stay ahead of your peers?

Joe:

– I think for us, and this is constant, it’s an investment in our people, our services, and our systems to stay ahead. People to make sure that we have the right people to help our customers come in and have those good technical conversations and help, hopefully not be a vendor when we come in and hopefully be a trusted advisor when we come in to help them think about what technology they should be implementing and how it can help them and drive the business outcomes that they want to have. We then also internally need to invest in our own systems, so when we give services like repairs and all that stuff, we’re doing that as efficiently as possible and transparently as possible for our customers so they can see where their devices under management are because that’s part of the services that we offer. It’s people, it’s systems, and then services, so we’re also constantly thinking about where our customers need new services that can help them.

One of the things that we have launched this year is actually a security service to be able to monitor your networks because we can certainly come in and help you set up networks, set up mobile devices and all that stuff, but now somebody needs to monitor them for security purposes. Certainly if the company has any sort of SOC or requirements that they have to meet, that’s an important thing so we can now throw that service on top. We can really become a one-stop shop as much as we can for our consumers. We have a tagline here where we try to make technology simple. I’m sure a lot of companies say that, but in this space what we want to be able to do is come in, help your decision-making, and then once you’ve made the decision, hopefully we can then provide the services to manage the devices that you’re buying, to manage the networks maybe that you’re putting in and do that in a secure manner. And if we do that well, you’re going to do more business with us. Again, we constantly strive to be that trusted advisor as opposed to just a vendor.

Danny:

– Well it sounds like it. I like how you’re thinking in the different dimensions and certainly bringing that consultative solution standpoint and bringing in those—you mentioned security being—that’s actually a huge topic right now with cyber, especially as we move into more digital transformation, and you’re seeing all of these issues. It’s an important thing.

Joe:

– Without a doubt. If you’re not looking at security, you’re behind the curve because that activity is only increasing and will continue to increase. The things and solutions we have to put in place need to have that. And if you’re a CIO and you have security rolling up to you, that’s certainly something that’s going to keep you up at night. Hopefully we can provide some services to help you sleep better.

Danny:

– Yeah, that’s a good benefit, good tagline there for sure. Talking about really staying—we talked about how your organization is staying ahead of your peers—I want to pivot to you a little bit. A lot of leaders like reading books, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. Are you a book reader? Read any good books?

Joe:

– I used to be a really good book reader until Audible came out. Now I’m a big book listener. Yeah, there are two books that I’ve just gotten through, and I thought they were both really good. One is the more classic, and it’s called The Ride of a Lifetime by Robert Iger. He was the CEO of Disney, so it basically looks at his career, but there is a lot of interesting stuff in there in terms of how do you navigate company politics in a big company? It took you through some of the deals that he made with Marvel and Lucasfilm and Pixar which were absolutely fascinating to read because I think everybody knows of those deals. It’s really nice to see a little behind-the-scenes. Obviously somebody who was operating at a really high level, had a really good run.

That’s one. And then one sort of off the beaten one is called Captain’s Class. It’s a guy who looked at—and he did a lot of math to figure this out—the 10 best teams, dynasty teams in the history of sports. He looked at basketball, rugby, he had all sorts of things. Really what he was trying to figure out is what made those teams great. Was it a good coach? Was it an elite player? What he found out is, really the factor was it was a team captain or a guy on the team who maybe wasn’t the superstar but kept that team together. He tells stories on all the teams. I found that book really fascinating because if you’re doing anything in corporate America, you have to be doing it with teams. I think it’s always good to know what makes teams tick and then what kind of people you need to put on those teams to really not just make them tick but perform really, really well because that’s what you’re going for.

Danny:

– That’s fantastic.

Joe:

– I found that to be a really interesting read.

Danny:

– Wow, that’s great. I’m going to write those down. What are those again, the Bob Iger one?

Joe:

– The first one is The Ride of a Lifetime.

Danny:

– The Ride of a Lifetime, okay.

Joe:

– Yeah, and the second one is Captain’s Class.

Danny:

– Alright, cool. That sounds fantastic. I’ve done—I actually haven’t finished it, but Be Our Guest about Disney, about all the customer service and just the systems and what they’ve got. Fantastic, but that sounds super fascinating.

Joe:

– It was, especially if you’re a higher-level executive, you’ll relate to a lot of the situations in the first book because you’re like, yeah, I definitely encountered that situation, and it was interesting to see how he navigated it. Certainly like when he—there was a point where he was the chief operating officer and went to be CEO. How did he make that transition? He did it in a weird way where the guy who was leaving maybe wasn’t so popular. He had to detach himself a little bit from that but not insult it in the same way. He had a very fine line to walk, and it’s really interesting to see how, from his perspective, he walked it and how he really threaded the needle there and then went on to be a very successful CEO of that company for over 10 years.

Danny:

– Yeah, it was a very good run. That’s super fascinating. We’re going to need to—we haven’t done this in the past, but we totally should. I think we’re going to have to put Amazon links in the show notes. People can go get these books because I’m certainly going to have to go get that. Joe, listen, I’ve really appreciated you spending some time with me and with our audience, and just a lot of great, valuable insights. I’ve got a lot of notes here I took.

Joe:

– That’s great.

Danny:

– Thank you for that.

Joe:

– Well thank you. I really appreciate the time to come and talk to you. I hope this interview gets shown to a lot of people.

Danny:

– Oh, it will be. And so for those that are interested, who want to learn more about you guys, they can go to trgsolutions.com.

Joe:

– That is correct.

Danny:

– I got that correct? Alright, great. Joe, again, thank you.

Joe:

– Thank you.

Danny:

– Alright, and that wraps up today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series with Joe Yanoska. He is the CIO, chief information officer, at TRG Solutions. The website is trgsolutions.com. Go check them out. They’ve got some great technology. I love hearing about just how they’re really tackling a lot of these challenges. I love how they’re talking about, they’re solving this transparency challenge that their customers are having all across the entire life cycle there, whether it’s end user customer to operationally. I think it’s fascinating, so go check them out. And if you are not on our email list, I highly recommend it. If you like listening on a podcast or if you’re maybe on social, go to IndustrialSage.com. Get on our email list because you’re missing out on great content like this great episode. So go do that. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got for you today. Thank you so much for watching, and I’ll be back next week with another episode on IndustrialSage.

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