Channeling Success with Aaron Udler: How Trust and Innovation Drive Business Growth
Welcome to the IAMCP Profiles and Partnership, the podcast that showcases how Microsoft partners and IAMCP members boost their business by collaborating with other members and partners. I'm your co-host, Anthony Carrano. In each episode, I'll be talking to some of the most innovative and successful partners in the Microsoft ecosystem. The International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners, otherwise known as IAMCP, is a community of Microsoft partners who help each other grow and thrive. Members can find and connect with other partners locally and globally and access exclusive resources and opportunities.
Anthony Carrano:Whether you're looking for new customers, new markets or new solutions, IAMCP can help you achieve your goals. We'll hear their stories, learn from their experiences and discover the best practices and strategies they use to increase customer loyalty and grow revenues. Whether you're a new partner or an established one, you'll find valuable insights and inspiration in this podcast. We hope you enjoy this podcast and find it useful and inspiring. If you do, please subscribe, rate, and review us on your favorite podcast platform. And don't forget to follow us on social media and connect with us on our website, www.profilesandpartnership.com, where you can find more information, resources, and opportunities to partner for success. Thank you for listening. And now let's get started with today's episode.
Anthony Carrano:But before we dive into our interview, let me ask you, how are you leveraging the IAMCP and Microsoft partner network to grow your business? And how are you evolving your business in order to stay relevant and continue to provide value?
Anthony Carrano:We dive into these questions and many others in this podcast with the help of our guest as he shares stories, challenges and successes, as well as practical tips and advice on how to partner for success. Are you ready to join us on this journey? Then stay tuned because we have a great show for you today. Our guest is Aaron Udler, the CEO at Office Pro, an award winning training curriculum development training services and short and long term staffing solutions provider that has trained over a million people with professional high caliber training. Let's hear what he has to say.
Anthony Carrano:Welcome Aaron to the podcast today. Really appreciate you joining us.
Aaron Udler:Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Anthony Carrano:Excellent. Let's jump right in. Let's start off. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your role in the company.
Aaron Udler:Sure. I'm the President and CEO of Office Pro. We're started in 1984. My dad started the company back in those days, training on a brand new type of technology called computers. And man, have we come a long way. And so today we still do a lot of computer type training, whether it's Microsoft Office, we do a lot of break fix services in the AV space, we do help desk services, and we also provide AI training.
Anthony Carrano:Oh, okay. Excellent. Now, I also know, just heard that you played a little football in the day.
Aaron Udler:Yeah. I played football for Indiana University. I was, I was a walk on. And so I walked on as a kicker. I put on about 90 pounds in eight months and got really big and really tough and ended up switching to tight end. Finished up as a tight end and just had a blast doing that. It's big ten football, some of the best in the country. Got great stories. And then, you know, this past season, we had, one of the best years, ever in Indiana football. So it was great to be on the national stage.
Anthony Carrano:So I have to ask, what's your opinion about, you know, the the new playoffs, you know, the schedule and how that works?
Aaron Udler:I think it's really cool. I love change. I love how they expanded it. I just felt bad for Indiana because we had to play an away game in the first round. I wish we would have had a home game, but so it goes or maybe even a neutral site game. So I think in the future, if they go more neutral site games for that first round, it makes it a little bit more fair. But at the end of the day, I think it's super cool for for the game of football.
Anthony Carrano:Very cool, very cool. Now tell us a little bit, when did you join the IAMCP?
Aaron Udler:So I came to Office Pro and joined IAMCP both in 2013. My dad had been retired for about ten years. He had hired someone to run the company. And so when I came in, I just got my MBA, came to Office Pro. I was like, alright. What other resources are out there? How do I learn about the industry? Found IAMCP. Didn't really know much about it. And wow. What a terrific group, terrific organization. I'm glad to be a part of it.
Anthony Carrano:Excellent. Before, we kinda get into, you know, the actual, partner story here, can you share a little bit more about, Office Pro's, you know, areas of, specialization and expertise?
Aaron Udler:Yeah. We, you know, when I first started and till still to this day, our core is end user training. That's what we love to do. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, Teams, and so on and so on. Everything end user based.
Aaron Udler:And then along the way to keep our partnership Microsoft, we had to do IT training. So we love doing IT training, whether it's Azure or SharePoint administrator, or we're super big now in Power BI, we love it. That's like the hottest class that we teach today, that and Excel. And that's kind of what we focus on from a training side. And then we also have a whole staffing group within Office Pro.
Aaron Udler:What we do is we help partners whether they need, if they need MCPs to provide different services to help their IT group run, or if they need AV, which is audio visual, if they need video conferencing room support, we provide help there. We provide break fix services, and we also provide AI services. So we'll talk more about the AI stuff in a little bit.
Rudy Rodriguez:So I've got a question regarding the type of training that you do. Is it all instructor led or are you doing a blended solution or are you offering e-learning solutions as well?
Aaron Udler:99% of our training is instructor led training. It's either live in person or live virtual. Since COVID, it's been more live virtual, but we're starting to see more and more folks going back into the office. So we are doing in person training as well. We do have clients from time to time that say, Hey, we need some custom videos. Can we, you know, do a video on Teams or how to create a pivot table in SharePoint or create a pivot table in Excel or how to whatever it is, right? So we do create a lot of content in house.
Rudy Rodriguez:That's great to hear that. I noticed that you've trained over a million people. Is that correct?
Aaron Udler:Yeah. I mean, when you're a 45 year old business, yeah, you've kind of been around the block a couple of times. We've trained a lot of folks over the years.
Rudy Rodriguez:That's a lot of office training. My gosh. That's that's wonderful. That's wonderful that you've kept track of all that. I know how hard that is to do.
Aaron Udler:Yeah. We've done a lot of averaging and, you know, figure out, you know, what is that number? And so when we've we do a lot in the federal government space and we're big in several different agencies. We've been with lots of agencies for years and years, and we continue to win recompetes. When we factor in how many hundreds of thousands of people within all these different agencies, they add up and then add in the commercial side of the business and, you know, in state and local county governments as well. So yeah, we've done a lot.
Rudy Rodriguez:Are you on the GSA schedule or not?
Aaron Udler:We are on the GSA schedule, we're on schedule 70.
Rudy Rodriguez:Great. Great to hear. I'm sure our our partners would like to hear that too because there's, we have a lot of partners that do federal work outside of the DC area. So that's always great to know partners that are on GSA.
Rudy Rodriguez:So I've got a question for you because we want to hear the story. You know, we we received your story from the IAMCP headquarters, and we want to know more about this partner showcase. And can you tell us a little bit about, you know, what the project was? Don't have to tell us a client or any anything else about you know, but tell us about what the solution was, how you how you encountered this business and then the challenges that you might have faced on this project?
Aaron Udler:Yeah, you bet. So prior to joining Office Pro, I worked for a trade association called Infocom. And Infocom is now called Avixa, but they still have a trade show called Infocom, and it's an audio visual show. And it's all about understood channel sales. And a lot of people don't understand what that is.
Aaron Udler:And when I came to Office Pro, I knew that I had a small business. There were six full time employees. I was the one sales guy. Everybody else was ops, and I needed to grow and I needed help. And the only thing I knew how to do was channel sales.
Aaron Udler:So what is channel sales? That's a big question that a lot of people don't understand. And what channel sales is, let's take a TV that you have at home. Let's say you have a Sony TV at home, and let's say it costs Sony $25 to make the TV. Well, then Sony will sell it to a distributor such as Synnex or Ingram Micro, there's a lot of distributors out there.
Aaron Udler:They'll sell to them for $50 And then they'll sell it to a retailer like a Best Buy or Amazon for a hundred dollars. And then they'll sell it to you and I, the consumer for $200 And everybody along the way is getting a piece of the action. And there's different salespeople within that model, within that sales channel. So everyone's making a small piece of the pie.
Aaron Udler:And I knew when I came to Office Pro, I'm a small business. How am I gonna be able to grow my business with just me? There's just, I'm limited. So knowing this, went back to what I knew best, AV. And I went to an AV video conferencing show in New York and I at the event, I'm networking and this guy looks at my business card and he sees that we're a Microsoft Silver Learning partner. And he's like, Oh, that's a big deal. And this is back in the fall of 2013. I'm like, Yeah, I guess. I don't know, I'm new to Office Pro. I don't even know what this means that we're a silver learning partner. And I'm like, It sounds pretty cool.
Aaron Udler:Sure, yeah. I mean, it is a big deal. And so I started talking to this guy and he works for a VAR. A VAR is a value added reseller, which is kind of like a distributor. It's kind of like a retailer.
Aaron Udler:The VARs mainly sell to end users, to pharmaceutical companies and big Fortune 500 type companies to kind of give you an idea. And a VAR is a value added reseller. And so what we did was, or what I did with him was, you know, I was just trying to sell them over and over and I called them all the time. And finally he's like, Hey, we're doing a, there's a hospital in Chicago. They need some Skype for Business. Or I'm sorry, not Skype for Business. I think it was Microsoft Lync 2013 training.
Aaron Udler:Can you go train the super users on how to use it? Sure. So he's like, there's just 10 people going to be in the training. It's going to be virtual. And I was like, great, sure. We'll do it, dude. So we go and we go do this training and they loved it so much that they said, hey, we wanna train the other 200 workers at the hospital. I was like, okay, great.
Aaron Udler:So we proved ourselves to this VAR and I'm like, okay, this is pretty cool. And this is back in, you know, I don't know, probably middle of 2014. And this guy keeps on calling me literally for the next twelve months. Hey, I need an outline for, you know, now Skype for Business, or I need an outline for this or that, whatever it is. And finally, was like, Bro, you keep on calling me. You're a nice person, but you're wasting my time. I keep on sending you outlines. I keep on getting you quotes. I'm not getting anywhere. And all he said was, Aaron, stick with me, stick with me.
Aaron Udler:I'm like, Okay, sure. So we get to, right about a week or two before Thanksgiving in 2015, and he says, hey, and he names this big pharmaceutical company. He's like, hey, these guys are rolling out Skype for Business. I'm like, great. Who is that company? I'd never heard of them before. He's like, dude, come on bro. So I Googled the company and they're like, at the time, like, I don't know, 20 or $30,000,000,000 company. He's like, come meet me out at their headquarters in the LA area. I was like, okay.
Aaron Udler:So I fly out to LA and I meet up with them and we go to the spa room and we find out that they've got, I don't know, it was like 10 or 15,000 users on-site. They're rolling out Skype for Business. They have some Polycom video conferencing solutions. They've got some Crestron hardware. Crestron does, they have a product called AirMedia, which is a wireless screen sharing and it's manufacturer agnostic, meaning you can have a droid, you can have an iPhone, you can have a PC, you can have a Mac, it doesn't matter. You can wirelessly screen share in the conference room. And they said, Hey, we need to train everybody. Can you create the training content and train all, you know, 10 to 15,000 users? I was like, Yeah, sure. We can do this with our eyes closed.
Aaron Udler:Needless to say, we had never done any AV training before, but we're a small business and my background's AV. So I called up my buddies that I used to work with at Infocom like, hey guys, can you help me out with this? And so we came up with this whole training plan. And along the way, know, we do this training and next thing you know, we're like a big deal in the training space in both AV and in the Microsoft community because we got this contract through the channel. Now this channel was really bizarro.
Aaron Udler:It was a bigger channel than kind of what I mentioned earlier, because we had the end user, which sold to a change management company. The change management company sold to the VAR that I mentioned earlier, who's also a Microsoft partner, who's a part of IAMCP. They sold to us Office Pro and of course Office Pro, we're a small business. We had lots of subs on this as well to make sure that we had a successful project. And yeah, and we had a super successful campaign with this project.
Aaron Udler:We still do work for this company today. And again, this is big pharma. Multiple times over the years, this pharma has come to us and said, Hey, Aaron, we wanna work with you directly. And a 100% of the times, every time I said, No. And they always say, Why? We're gonna throw you millions of dollars. And I'm like, Well, you know what? It's not honest. And they're like, Well, what do you mean? It's like, Well, I wouldn't have been at this party to provide you all these good services if it wasn't for the channel.
Aaron Udler:And I learned in life that your integrity is like your virginity. You only can lose it one time and I'm not gonna lose it. And it's not worth it to make a couple extra bucks because I'd rather get all the other clients within that channel system, right? So I can, you know, do training for all the other clients that are in there. Sure enough, we've been rewarded and we do training for all their other clients within the VAR community.
Aaron Udler:So, you know, the first time that you, you know, take this extra, you know, money is the first time you ruin the channel and everybody sees you and they're like, alright, you know, Office Pro violated the channel. We're not gonna work with you. I don't wanna I didn't wanna have to go through that.
Rudy Rodriguez:Well, that's great to great story to hear because, you know, that's one of the one of the mantras of the IAMCP is about doing business ethically and building trust relationships. So that's an excellent, excellent story to tell. So is your friend retired at this company? Because you've made him a lot of money or what?
Aaron Udler:I wish he actually, he actually left the company to go work from from a, you know, a several hundred million dollar VAR to a fortune 10 type company. So he's he's really grown in his career as well. So it's been a, it's been a win win.
Rudy Rodriguez:Well, that's great to hear. Now I know what it's like to build those channel relationships and and, having been in your business before, I've seen all my friends retire. And it's like, you build those relationships at these companies, and it's always good to learn who are their their successors are. You're trying to make it work.
Aaron Udler:Yeah.
Rudy Rodriguez:Anthony, do you have some questions?
Anthony Carrano:Yeah. So when you were, working, you know, with, you know, this SI to serve, you know, the larger, pharmaceutical, company, what were some just things like during the course of the engagement that you would say were really important, as as some best practices to make it a successful engagement?
Aaron Udler:Yeah. I have a saying at Office Pro, communication wins championships. Firm believer in that. You gotta get everything documented. You gotta, you know, you know, repeat, repeat, repeat.
Aaron Udler:You gotta say things over and over and over again. When we started doing the conference room training, we ran into an issue. And it wasn't with the SI per se, but keep in mind that there was another change management company. We ran into an issue with them. And what happened was we're doing these trainings in these small conference rooms, and there's only four chairs in there.
Aaron Udler:But the page management company were doing tours of this new building and this new office space with 30 to 40 people in a group. Well, you can't fit 30 or 40 people in a four person conference room. Maybe you can get six, maybe seven. Right? And so, you know, we started getting a bad we got a bad review from both the, the end user and our VAR, our system integrator saying, Hey, what the hell is going on here? Your training's not good. I'm like, Well, what am I supposed to do? Right? I've got 30 or 40 people in a four person conference room. This is beyond my control. I need some help here. Can you help? Right? We went through this and all the review process and the channel partner that was the change management company, they made changes at the last minute, didn't tell me. Right?
Aaron Udler:And that's communication 101. You got to tell me so and make me prepared so we can make adjustments. Maybe we'd go into a larger conference room and they did have larger conference rooms, right? We'd adjust the tour. So it just goes back to communication, communication, communication.
Anthony Carrano:That's good. I'm smiling here because usually isn't it a defense wins championships, you know, coming from a former big ten college football player, but communication wins championships. So I like it. What about some of the other side of that, like, what were some of the challenges that you all experienced during the engagement? And, you know, how did you, you know, work together to overcome that in addition to communication? Like what what, you know, some things that you had to kind of work through?
Aaron Udler:Yeah. You know, the human aspect about, you know, you expect labor to be on-site and somebody calls out sick last minute. What do you do? You gotta figure it out. I remember telling my wife, I mean, for us, it was a big contract and we had someone call out sick the day before.
Aaron Udler:I live in Washington, DC and the client's out in LA and at twelve or 01:00 in the afternoon, I went to go book a flight, to go, you know, for a 06:00 flight to go to LA. And my wife's like, what the hell is wrong with you? And I'm like, well, I gotta make sure we run this training successfully tomorrow. I gotta be I'm thrown into action. You know, things like that happen.
Aaron Udler:You know, I remember one of my first sales jobs, my sales manager said to me, and this is when I was right out of college. He said, If you don't hit your quota for the month, what's your backup plan? Right? And that stuck with me, you know, to this day, you know, if I'm not hitting my numbers or if I've got someone that's supposed to be on-site, what's my backup plan? That's so important.
Aaron Udler:So, I mean, that was one of the biggest challenges. One of the other challenges we faced is that just from a payment perspective, I remember the channel partner wasn't paying us. They owed us $250,000 and I was freaking out and they were 90 days past due. And I had my, all my credit cards maxed and I didn't have a, you know, a bucket to poop in, so to say. So I was like, all right, what do I do?
Aaron Udler:So I literally had to call them up. I'm like, guys, look, I got my bills to pay. I got people to pay. I got my credit cards maxed out. I'm almost out of my personal cash.
Aaron Udler:And they're like, they said, you know what? I'm glad you communicated to me. Go ahead and send us a, what do you call it? Send us, you know, your invoice again. And they overnighted me a check, right, for $250,000 And ever since that time, I haven't had to worry about money since, because that was able to propel me, to the next level, hire the right people. I had to pay off everybody I needed to. It got me out of debt. And I haven't again, I haven't really had to worry about money since.
Anthony Carrano:That's fantastic. That is, that is awesome.
Rudy Rodriguez:So, Aaron, you know, in in, working on a large project like this, you know, getting customer sat, keeping track of customer satisfaction and how you, how there's a lot of logistics that you've got to deal with. Cause you've got two customers. You've got a customer, the person who introduced you to the event who's probably the prime on this, as well as the end user customer. And there's a lot of logistics in the training business, especially on a large corporate project. Can you tell us a little bit about how you handle those types of things? Because there's a lot of logistics that have to get handled and just a lot of tracking.
Aaron Udler:Yeah, no, you bet. So when it when we first got the contract, the system integrator, they wanted to make sure this was, white labeled or private labeled, meaning they wanted their brand. They didn't want, the Office Pro brand on it. So what they did was they assigned us, email addresses to their domain. So, you know, my email address was audler at their domain dot com.
Aaron Udler:Fine. So we were in the loop every step of the way. They were monitoring all of our correspondence. And so if there was a mistake made, yeah, you bet. We would know about it, right?
Aaron Udler:If we had success, yeah, we'd know about it. It's always fun to get those success emails saying, oh, you know, John Doe, you know, said training was terrific. It was really good. After a while, happened was people would wanna hit us up on LinkedIn. They'd say, Oh, Aaron, we see that you're with Office Pro, not the system integrator, what's going on?
Aaron Udler:And then we'd explain it and they'd be like, Okay, yeah, sure, whatever. Nobody really cared that much, but it was just mainly for the system integrator to track. But yeah, we would always, you know, after every training session, provide a customer or rather a student evaluation to see how we did, right? Did you learn more? What did you learn in the class today? Do you feel that the training today on Skype for Business and Polycom Trio, whatever the, you know, whatever we were training on, did you, you know, what was your knowledge before the training? What was your knowledge after the training? What'd you like most about the class? What'd you like least about the class?
Aaron Udler:So, and we would take all these surveys and just compile them together and give it back to both the channel, you know, to the two channel partners and the end user so that they knew what was going on.
Aaron Udler:Because again, transparency is super key. And if we're making mistakes or if we're missing something, we gotta know about it. So that's kind of what happened. Along the way, which was kind of flattering too, is that our system integrator, there was another proposal that came out and they lost that proposal to one of their competitors. Well, the end user ended up saying to that competitor, Hey, we love working with Office Pro.
Aaron Udler:They know the right way of running training. They know the right way of staffing this. You need to work with these guys and we're not gonna accept anything else. It's because they understood the channel and I understood the channel and I'm not gonna go direct and violate that. And so next thing you know, I'm working with this, you know, a much bigger, you know, system integrator and they're, you know, we're providing the same services to the same pharmaceutical company.
Aaron Udler:So ended up working really nicely. And because of that, because they were voluntold to work with us, now we're doing more business with that second system integrator. And next thing you know, we're marketing to everyone's competitors and blah, blah, blah. So we're a sub on a lot of different projects these days.
Rudy Rodriguez:Wow. That's great to hear. That's great to hear. So are you still the only salesperson for your company or how have you are you training other people to do some of these things?
Aaron Udler:Yeah. No. I've trained other people. So we we we split our company up into, we've got our government or, you know, we got our government training or end user training department. I got a, I got someone that manages that from a sales perspective. And then on the AV side of the business, I got someone that manages that, in terms of selling and we kinda tag team it. But, yeah, that's you know, there's multiple people now.
Rudy Rodriguez:So are you working still primarily with the IAMCP chapter there in Washington DC, or have you connected with other IAMCP members across the country?
Aaron Udler:Yeah. I've connected with other IAMCP members across the country. Unfortunately, I think the DC chapter folded as we're part of the national chapter right now of IAMCP. I am the leader though of the, the Washington DC Microsoft Teams user group, which is which is a 501c3. So I'm running that for the DC area.
Aaron Udler:So it's kinda like IAMCP for DC for the DC area, but not really. It's again, it's just a focus on Microsoft Teams. But I loved I loved during COVID when we had the national conventions. I think it was I forgot what they called it, the Microsoft Conventions, whatever they were called. I remember being in some of the meetings and hearing, let's say, you know, a speaker and I'm looking at the attendees in the meeting, I'd be like, oh, this person's a trainer.
Aaron Udler:I reached out to this gal and next thing you know, she's a trainer with us. I reached out to this other guy and he owned a, an LMS, training company out of Toronto. And, you know, both these guys are in the IAMCP community. They're in the Microsoft channel community. And we're partnering with those guys.
Aaron Udler:And it's one of those where you gotta make yourself available and you gotta put yourself out there and take a risk on people and see their work, interviewing. You know, you gotta know what the needs of your company are to help you grow, and we've been able to grow with partners. It's a beautiful thing that, you know, this ecosystem that we have. I love it.
Rudy Rodriguez:So you've mentioned a lot of end user type training. Have you jumped into the more technical, areas like, you know, you mentioned, I think you mentioned Azure as well. And have you moved into, you know, can you tell us a little bit about what what your other product areas are?
Aaron Udler:Yeah. So we're doing a lot right now with, Power BI is huge right now in the government, especially in the government space. We do a lot for different government agencies. You know, take NIH, for example, I'm gonna I'll name those guys, because they deal with health on a regular basis. And can you imagine the number of columns and rows of data that they have for whatever diseases are out there, medications, whatever it is?
Aaron Udler:So we're helping those guys, you know, work in Power BI and create dashboards and things like that. Azure is super big right now in the federal government space and we do a lot of DOD work. And so when we work with DOD, it's funny because, you know, our troops are always moving around the world, right? You know, they're protecting us. So, you know, nailing down dates can sometimes be challenging, but we're doing a lot of Azure training in the government space.
Aaron Udler:AI is big too, right? You've got, different AI courses that Microsoft's come out with. Unfortunately, Copilot's not in the government space yet. It's coming though. It's not part of GCC High, we're waiting for that, but we're doing Copilot training more in the enterprise space right now.
Aaron Udler:And then we're doing basic AI training for different federal agencies. One of the cool things, I think that, not to get too political, but one of the cool things that I think President Biden was able to implement during his presidency was an AI agency. So there's AI.gov. And so AI right now, I think we can all agree is kind of like the wild, wild west. And this is the first time that industry has come to the government and said, Hey, we need some regulations around that.
Aaron Udler:Can you put something together? So the Biden administration puts something together and every federal agency has to put together a certain amount of content and leave it in the public domain in terms of how they're using AI. And so we've been able to come into the agencies and say, Hey, you know, this is how you write chat prompts correctly using ChatGPT, or, Hey, this is your agency's policy on using ChatGPT. What do you put into it? What do you not put into it?
Aaron Udler:Because we gotta remind folks that whatever you put into ChatGPT, that goes into the public domain. So you wanna be very careful what you put into it. Some agencies, they encourage people to sign up for ChatGPT with their government email address and some say, No, please use your Gmail address or Hotmail address or a non government related address. So every agency is still trying to figure it out. They do have guidance from the AI.gov agency.
Aaron Udler:I don't know what that agency is off the top of my head, but there are rules and regulations coming out, for that. So it's really cool what I think is happening in today's day and age.
Rudy Rodriguez:Yeah, that's one of the things I stress about with, I have friends who work for a large Texas state agency, and, we were having lunch the other day. We were talking about, hey, have you all deployed ChatGPT or CoPilot in your organization? This is about over 100,000 people that work at this agency. And they said yes, but it got issued without rules and now we just have chaos. And so that's what will happen if you train people to use the products with the specific purpose and security.
Rudy Rodriguez:Which leads me to another question, have you moved into anything in the security world at all?
Aaron Udler:We're doing a little bit in security. We do a little bit of, I forgot the name of the Microsoft courses, I think it's like MS 500 or SC 500. We do a little bit of training on that, but, for the most part, that's not our bag. It's just when companies specifically say, Hey, can you guys do security training? We'll help them. We've got a whole network of instructors that we help out with, but again, it's not our specialty.
Rudy Rodriguez:Okay. Thank you. Appreciate that. Anthony, turn it back over to you.
Anthony Carrano:Just to even backtrack a little bit. So I'd like to kinda get your perspective on what you're seeing as, how because you you know, you work with enterprises, you also work with, you know, federal government. How are they approaching it, AI differently? And how are they approaching it the same?
Aaron Udler:We'll start with the same. Both the government and enterprise are excited about AI. They're ecstatic. They're like, Wow, I didn't know I could write an email to a dissatisfied customer in like thirty seconds. I can take their email, put it into an AI platform like ChatGPT and have it completely turned around.
Aaron Udler:Everybody's super stoked about that part of it, right? The government is, there's been a stereotype of the government for years that they're anywhere from five to ten years behind industry, right? And I think that's still the case. AI has been out for several years now, but it's becoming more mainstream. The media has picked up on it.
Aaron Udler:Putting in front of us on a daily basis, but the government is just much slower to react. Small businesses is more quick to react because you know, I'm a small business guy. Right? We can pivot really quickly. Bigger business, enterprise, those guys have have I don't wanna use the term, you know, tons and tons of money, but I think they've got tons and tons of money because they're able to put together that plan, you know, pretty concise and put it together very quickly.
Aaron Udler:They have access to rather Copilot, right? The federal government's not there yet. It's not part of their program. So, I mean, those are some of the differences. But I think at the end of the day, everyone is just super excited about AI.
Anthony Carrano:What about then since you work with both spaces, what lessons have you learned from working with both the enterprise clients and, you know, the government entities that can benefit other, like, smaller partners?
Aaron Udler:Yeah. It goes back to communication, communication, communication. Right? You gotta sit down with the customer. You gotta explain to it what AI is. You gotta do demos of it. You gotta make sure that they're comfortable with it. One of the things I do from a sales perspective is is especially when people are nervous is I wanna create an environment that's safe for them to make a mistake. Right? We're human.
Aaron Udler:That's adult learning theory. It's okay to make a mistake in training. So when I meet with somebody, I'll be like, hey, you know what? Have you opened up chatgpt.com yet? No. Or have you tried Copilot? No. Well, you know what? We've got a training account at Office Pro. Why don't you log in with our training credentials to our Microsoft ecosystem and give it a shot?
Aaron Udler:Let's, well, let's create a PowerPoint presentation with Copilot. Let's, you know, ask ChatGPT to to write a, you know, a love letter to your spouse or significant other or whatever. Right? There's there's so many cool things. One of the things that my staff loves is that, my son, and and I'm sure he's gonna hear this recording in in several years, but, his mom or my wife, you know, she was out of town, and my son lost a tooth.
Aaron Udler:And my wife said, hey, Aaron. You gotta write a note from the Tooth Fairy, to our son. I'm like, I don't know what the hell to write. So I go to ChatGPT, and I type in, Hi, ChatGPT. Can you help me write a note from the tooth fairy to my son? He just lost his first, two teeth on the same day. I have no idea what to say. Can you help me out? And sure enough, ChatGPT said, yeah. Hey. Let's use this. And the email started or the email the notes started off with, dear brave tooth explorer. Wow. What a wonderful occasion for you to, you know, lose two teeth on the same day, and it just goes on for two or three paragraphs. And I was like, you know what? ChatGPT, can you make this, you know, six sentences in total, not three paragraphs?
Aaron Udler:So it was, you know, it was super cool that, you know, I was able to to to get the what do all I was able to get these notes to my son because, again, I don't know what the heck to write.
Anthony Carrano:Yeah. You should you should go back to that for the next time and then just, you know, after you write the you know, you get, like, the the main like, the message that you want. But then go back and say, you know, rewrite this as and put in, like, x, like, you know, character celebrity persona type in there, and then it'll reformat and rewrite it in that voice.
Aaron Udler:Yes. I've done that before where I've taken an Excel. I say, Hey, can you write me an Excel pivot table lesson in the voice of Doctor Seuss? And the thing that all the words are rhyming with each other, it it is really cool.
Anthony Carrano:You should do it in the in the voice of Yoda. That would be that would be awesome.
Aaron Udler:I love that. That's a great idea.
Rudy Rodriguez:Well, well, Aaron, your son's gonna learn that the tooth fairy didn't exist and ChatGPT is just a dream crusher, right?
Anthony Carrano:That's it.
Rudy Rodriguez:So, you know, you've told us this great story. You know, how do you how are you planning on working with more and more partners and finding more VARs that you want to work with? We've talked about reaching out to other IAMCP partners. What's part of your business plan to continue this? And also as the market keeps evolving, what are you doing to evolve your business?
Aaron Udler:Yeah, so from a growth standpoint, I continue to go to all the different events that are out there. There's great industry events from all the Microsoft shows to shows like Enterprise Connect or Consumer Electronics Show or Infocom or I don't know. There's like a zillion different events out there. So I think from our standpoint, we know what shows to go to. But for other small business partners, hey, figure out what is your niche and what industry events can you go to and where can you put yourself in front of other partners that could help you out.
Aaron Udler:I think that's always important. One of the things that we've been doing is, I'm always trying to think ahead, right? Where's the industry going? And so from a Power BI's perspective, we were able to recognize that, hey, Power BI is going be something special. We need to invest money into it.
Aaron Udler:So I got my full time instructor certified in it. We're training it. We've created our own content to complement Microsoft's training content. That's been big. We saw a need in the federal government space.
Aaron Udler:You heard me speak earlier about ChatGPT and training federal government employees on how to use AI. We think that was a big deal, so we invested a ton of money and resources and time to create our own training content. And then to put icing on the cake about 6 or 8 months ago, we bought a website called AIHeadshotMasters.com. And what that site is, it's AI generated selfies of yourself. So the way the site works is that you take 10 selfies of yourself, you upload them to our site.
Aaron Udler:Once you upload them to our site, the pictures get sent to what's called a GPU, a graphical processing unit. And within thirty minutes, you'll have a hundred pictures with 13 different backgrounds of yourself. And they're really cool to use for LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever. If you look at my Facebook or I'm sorry, my LinkedIn photo, that's my picture. It's it's an AI generated photo.
Aaron Udler:You know, it's AI, right? It goofs up your fingers or limbs sometimes, but you have a hundred pictures to choose from and it's really cool. And what we're primarily doing with this site is selling it to or actually, we're actually giving it away for free for for companies that sign up for AI training with us because we think it's cool. Hey, you know what? You're gonna learn about AI training and let's get some cool pictures in front of you.
Aaron Udler:But we also sell it to workforce agencies because we see a big need in workforce development where people, need to have their hair done or their makeup or their beards trimmed or they need nice clothes or good backgrounds, whatever it is. And this is something that job seekers can do in the comfort of their own homes. So the workforce agencies don't have to hire a photographer to come into the office and then hope that, you know, all the the folks looking for jobs need to then go to the workforce agencies offices. So it's kind of a cool thing that we're doing. We enjoy it. It's a lot of fun and I highly recommend you guys check that out as well.
Rudy Rodriguez:So you haven't worked that into the, you know, students come in before training and after training yet and give them their headshots there?
Aaron Udler:Well, we've done it mainly for clients that when they buy the AI training, they get a free code to go to the website and it reduces the cost down to zero so they can give it a shot. But no, we're very careful. We don't want to overly sell in our private classes to the clients that have not specifically asked for it.
Rudy Rodriguez:That's good to hear. No, that's a great, great product or great service that you have there, especially with workforce development. That really, really works well.
Aaron Udler:Yeah, thank you. Yeah, those guys are super stoked about it. So it's fun to see the smile on people's faces when they realize, wow, I didn't even know that green dress existed or man, I look great in a suit. And you know, they don't necessarily own a suit because they're in between jobs and they can't afford a new suit or whatever. But it you know, it's their image. And and that's what we, that's what we as, people buy when we're trying to hire somebody. We wanna see somebody look sharp.
Anthony Carrano:I didn't realize when I was, when I was doing research and, you know, obviously looking at your LinkedIn profile that that was your photo was AI generated. So it it does a really good job. I mean, it's it's you don't look it doesn't really look fake or cartoonish or anything like that. So, yeah. No, that was pretty impressive.
Rudy Rodriguez:I got a question for you regarding workforce development training. Have you worked through any colleges or universities or community colleges to deliver some workforce development training? Reason I'm asking because we we need to talk after this. I'm aware of a grant here in Texas that is $17,000,000 for workforce AI training for workforce development. Just so we can talk later.
Aaron Udler:Interesting. Yeah, no, thanks for that info. Yeah, mean, do a lot of work with different colleges within the state of Maryland and we're big fans of the MOS certification, which is Microsoft Office Specialist, Right? So if somebody wants to get a Microsoft certification in Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, or Access, you can get a certification in it. And Office Pro is one of the top two, top three companies in America that are new in all the exams for it.
Aaron Udler:We're proctoring for it. So it's a really cool service that we offer. And so we've partnered with different colleges where we can both teach them how to use Excel and teach them proctor the exam. One of the reasons why I think this exam is important, especially Excel, is that most students today, at least in the state of Maryland, they're being taught Google. And I'm all for free market capitalism and having competition with Microsoft.
Aaron Udler:But when you have 80% of businesses in the entire world that are on the Microsoft ecosystem, I think the school systems need to teach that. And I don't think the school systems, at least in the state of Maryland, are doing a good job because they are on Google. And I understand the reasons why, and those reasons are mainly because Chromebooks are a hundred bucks, and I don't think Microsoft has come out with a, you know, a lower expensive computer yet. But again, I think we're doing a disservice to the students if they're not learning the Microsoft ecosystem in addition to the Google. So we partnered with different colleges in the state of Maryland where we're teaching them how to use Microsoft Excel, and then the students are getting their MOS certification in Excel. So it's been really cool to see that because there are a lot of jobs out there that do require the the MOS certification in Excel.
Rudy Rodriguez:Are they going to incorporate Copilot into that anytime soon? Or have you heard anything from Microsoft regarding that?
Aaron Udler:I haven't heard anything from Microsoft on that yet, but I could see that coming out soon. I mean, that it would be a great certification.
Rudy Rodriguez:Yeah. I would. I certainly would. Anthony, back to you.
Anthony Carrano:Yeah. This this has been fantastic, Aaron. Really appreciate your insights and perspectives. How can how can folks find out well, where can they go to find out more about you and connect?
Aaron Udler:Yeah. Feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn. Aaron Udler. I spell my name just like Aaron in the Bible, a a r o n. And my last name is Udler, u d l e r. Hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm I'm on there pretty often. I've always got posts on there about, training and AI. But in if you're ever in the DC area, hit me up. Let's grab a let's grab a beer. I'm I'm open to meet just about anybody.
Anthony Carrano:Excellent. Excellent. Well, definitely, I know my wife and I love DC, so I'll have to take you up on that.
Aaron Udler:Awesome. Looking forward to it.
Anthony Carrano:Excellent. Well, you have a great rest of the day. Appreciate you being on.
Aaron Udler:Cool. Thanks. Thank you, guys. Appreciate you.
Rudy Rodriguez:Thanks, Aaron.
Anthony Carrano:Well, that was a fantastic episode. I really enjoyed having Aaron on. I mean, he was so conversational, had a lot of really great insights. You know, I know in particular, the one thing I appreciate, especially I thought it was so cool. I mean, was a former, you know, big 10, football player.
Anthony Carrano:And the fact that they talked a lot about communication wins championships and just how just the importance of, you know, communication, communication, communication, and just, you know, just being very intentional, you know, about, you know, repeating those points just to make sure that your message gets through. So I I really appreciated that. You know, being a being a coach, always preaching, you know, defense wins championships. I think I'm gonna slip that in there that, communication wins championships for sure.
Rudy Rodriguez:Oh, that'll definitely help. That'll definitely help.
Anthony Carrano:Well, know you because you played, you know, college ball as well. So I'm sure, you know, I know everyone says defense wins championships, but, that communication, I'm sure that helps too.
Rudy Rodriguez:It really does. It really does. I mean, your coaches communicate everything they expect, and what they want you to do, and how you do it, and communicating with your teammates, it really rings true. It really rings true. You know, what I appreciated about Aaron, was his forthrightness and stuff about how, you know, he had worked out in industry before coming back to his family business and how he had to reshift the focus of the family was a small business with only six employees, and then how he changed the whole focus of the business and how that business kind of took off on them.
Rudy Rodriguez:And he did that by building trust relationships out in the channel, which really helped and dedicated staying serving those markets and turning that around and leveraging the experience he had from being in the channel and understanding how building a channel worked and building relationships worked and they used that to grow their business. And it turned into something where, you know, now they've trained over a million people over the years. So it's really exciting to learn to learn that. And I think there's, you know, he had several other stories about working in the channel. I think you have some comments on that.
Anthony Carrano:Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it was really fascinating too, especially them being a smaller partner connecting with a mid sized partner to sell into an enterprise, you know, multi multi, you know, you know, billion dollar, you know, pharmaceutical company, and create such an opportunity. But the thing that he, you know, he talked about just the importance of, you know, honoring the channel and really respecting the relationships and that there was an opportunity where and it's not like that, you know, the client was doing anything wrong or insidious. They were just they really liked the work that they did. So he went direct, you know, after the engagement was done to see if they can do more work for them.
Anthony Carrano:And he was like, I can, but I'm not gonna cut out my partner. And, you know, to your point that, you know, one of those aspects of those, you know, those trust relationships is that it's just it's important, not only, you know, just to be delivering during the course of the engagement and communicating, but then even maintaining your integrity post engagement and really respecting that relationship. Because that's something that, you know, I mean, word spreads quick, right, in the community, both good and bad. And, and just to to, you know, not try and grab, you know, the easy money or grab more money, but, you know, respect that and honor that relationship, you know, and have that long view when it comes to, you know, having partners. So I thought that was really fantastic.
Rudy Rodriguez:Oh, it it really was. And it that really hit home because that's part of what we what the IAMCP preaches is about building strong business partnerships and trust relationships. And and he he really epitomizes the value of those relationships. So I thought that was a really good story from Aaron. It really was.
Rudy Rodriguez:We want to thank all of you for joining us on this episode of IAMCP Profiles in Partnership today powered by Dunamis Marketing. We hope you enjoyed this podcast and find it useful and inspiring. If you did, please subscribe, rate, and review. Review us on your favorite podcast platform. One of the best ways to partner for success is to join IAMCP, a community of Microsoft partners who help each other grow and thrive.
Rudy Rodriguez:IAMCP members can find and connect with other partners locally and globally and access exclusive resources and opportunities. Whether you're looking for new customers, new markets, or new solutions, IAMCP can help you achieve your goals. To learn more, visit the website at www.iamcp.org.
