Erik Boemanns With Improving Atlanta

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by on pay. Built in Atlanta, on pay is the top rated payroll and HR software anywhere. Get one month free at on pay. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:32] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor on pay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on the Atlanta Business Radio, we have Erik Boemanns with improving. Welcome, Eric. Thanks, Lee. I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about improving how you serving folks.

Erik Boemanns: [00:00:56] Sure. So improving is an I.T. consulting company. It’s based out of Dallas, Texas. But we have offices in Canada, US and Mexico and one of our offices here in the Atlantic region. We we actually have had a location here for about 13 years, but we were acquired by improving back in 2019. So we actually, like I said it consulting and we try to bring a slightly different approach to it consulting. We actually want to change the perception of it through trust. So if anybody goes to our website, you’ll actually see the word trust is one of the first words you see versus anything about what we do or the kind of services we offer. So how do we. Approach it in a way that builds trust and builds a relationship with our clients.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:42] So what is kind of that ideal client look like for you guys? What is an ideal improving client look like? Are they enterprise level? Are they small to midsize?

Erik Boemanns: [00:01:54] So we work with pretty much all sizes. We’ve got clients such as BP, American Airlines, all the way down to midsize clients here in Atlanta, as well as even startups in smaller groups. So we work with all the sizes and just depends on what they’re trying to do and how we can help.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:10] And what is the typical pain point that they’re having where improving is the right solution for what they need?

Erik Boemanns: [00:02:18] Yeah, so kind of two different pain points are pretty common right now. One is just in general the whole whole cloud thing. Right, is a lot of businesses are still trying to figure that out or they did figure it out, but are realizing that it’s quite a bit more expensive than they expected. So a lot of what we’re doing now is focused on how we can help with understanding how to best leverage the cloud, whether that’s Microsoft, Azure, Amazon, US or Google’s Cloud. All of those different things are areas that our clients are working in, and we’re helping them navigate those costs and helping them navigate. How do I actually use those services in a way that brings value to my business but also achieves on my goals? The second pain point, which is pretty common right now as well, is how do I staff my IT projects? How do I as a company, I’m needing to grow my IT services, my offerings, my products. How am I able to tap into talent that is very high in demand as they also are trying to hire? Also, instead of hiring, can a consulting company like improving it in a way that helps them accelerate projects where direct hire might be difficult?

Lee Kantor: [00:03:32] So it’s really turnkey services in terms of you can come in and fix the problem that I’m having. I can hire you as a consultant to fix the problems that I’m having. But you can also help me train brand new people to recruit or find the right talent to insert into my organization.

Erik Boemanns: [00:03:49] Yeah, absolutely. So we work on several different levels. One is absolutely that turnkey, that project based where we’re helping you solve a problem or even prevent a problem. Right. We can come in ahead of an initiative and help you plan that initiative out in a way that reduces risk and makes it a smoother implementation. And then we can help you actually implement it with teams that we can build from our side. And then ultimately we can actually even help recruit team members directly to to you.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:16] Now, what is the kind of the market look like right now? Historically, technology talent has kind of had a negative employment rate right there. The people you’re hiring aren’t just sitting on the couch waiting for the phone to ring. They’re already have a job somewhere or a project or they’re freelance or doing something.

Erik Boemanns: [00:04:37] Yep. And that’s only truer now. Right. A lot of big technology companies, especially in Atlanta, have either opened offices recently or some recent announcements that they’re going to be opening offices and hiring thousands of people. And if you’re already in Atlanta, you’re already trying to hire it. Then, you know, there’s there’s not thousands of people available. And so it absolutely is a market where the top talent really has their options in front of them and they’re looking for a job.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:04] So but part of your kind of secret sauce is you have the ability to help people recruit in this market and also retain their current talent that they have.

Erik Boemanns: [00:05:16] So so we can definitely recruit and that is something that we do help clients with. But I think the other part of that is more that we have our own talent, that we’ve been able to to build a strong team around in a lot of different trust principles that we bring. I mean, if a client’s working with us and we’re providing a team from our resources, they see consistency there. A lot of times you may go to a consulting shop and have a different consultant every month because they’re having their own issues. We work really hard with our internal team to make sure that we’re retaining the best talent internally so that we can always make those available to clients.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:52] Now, do you think that you’re good at retaining talent just because of the culture and improving? Like what is what is improving doing that maybe other firms can learn from in order to help them retain talent?

Erik Boemanns: [00:06:06] Yeah. Obviously, we’re not going to give all of our secrets away. But but yeah, I think culture is a huge part of that, right? We strive to really create a connection and a place for what we like to call magnets, where people see a reason to be a part of a team. They may be working with a client team, they may be working by themselves with a client, but they always feel a connection back to moving back to Atlanta office. We have tons of different type of culture events. We do a huge amount of internal education, typically two months of loans every week that are on different topics, both on technology and consulting, helping people identify. Because one thing about technologists is they almost always love to learn because whatever you know, today is going to be out of date sometimes within weeks. And so how do we connect to the individual with what they want to learn and where they want to head is something that we do that’s super important to our team.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:59] Now, when it comes to talent, are you finding talent locally here in Atlanta? Is it something that you have to kind of really be global in your thinking or are there kind of pockets of talent kind of hiding in plain sight in different regions?

Erik Boemanns: [00:07:18] Yeah. So that’s the interesting thing about improving, right, is we have offices in Canada, US and Mexico, so we are actively recruiting in all of those different regions from Minneapolis to Chicago to Ohio, Texas as well. And so each office has its own kind of recruiting focus. So here in Atlanta, we’re definitely focused more on local Atlanta talent. But at the same time, we’ve got employees working in Florida, North Carolina, Virginia. And so so we while we are Atlanta focused, when we do our recruiting, we obviously still have that global perspective because the talent could be anywhere. And with a lot more remote work, it literally can be anywhere. So we a lot of. To answer the first part of your question, a lot of the way we do find people is word of mouth and referral. People who work here, if they know people that they want to work with, often help us connect with those and bring them in.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:14] Now, you mentioned earlier training, coaching, education. Is that something you’re only doing for your own people or is it something that you do kind of outwardly to kind of grow your own talent so you can identify, oh, this person will be good here, and then we can give them a pathway to a full time position or a different type of position than they have currently.

Erik Boemanns: [00:08:38] Yeah, that’s a great question because we actually both offer training and coaching for technologies and things like Agile and Scrum to our clients and to their teams and help them adopt new technologies and new ways of doing technology projects. But we also absolutely offer that same level of of service to our internal clients. Our internal employees. Right. We’re helping them understand new technologies and grow. We also do National One and learn pretty much every week that are free to the public on a variety of topics. So we have a lot of different ways to to take the knowledge that we have, make sure that we’re sharing it with all of our stakeholders, whether they are clients, whether they are the general community or our employees. So that everybody has kind of that access to to new information, new technology.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:26] Now, you mentioned having the advantages of having locations around the world here in Atlanta. Are there kind of specialties that you’re you know, like we’re good at certain? Things here, like we’re going to health care I.T., we’re going to fintech. Are you finding the talent here kind of gravitates around those clusters or and then maybe a different part of the country that they have a bunch of people that are in cybersecurity or different types of specialties?

Erik Boemanns: [00:09:53] Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned both the medtech and the fintech. Those are both big for us in terms of our Atlanta office. We also do a lot of financial services, fintech and the insurance side, as well as the banking. And then but for a great example, right, our Houston office is much more involved in the the oil side of things. Right. So the local companies there. Dallas has some local major corporations there in the Dallas area. So you’ll see those slices, depending on which office you’re talking to, both in terms of the clients that we have, the internal expertise we have, and then also the the team members. We also do a little bit of technology specialization as well. So, for example, fintech may tend toward some of the Linux and Java side of things, whereas our office tends to lean towards Microsoft Azure. And so you’ll see a little bit of technology slicing in that way as well, just because of what kind of products and backgrounds those companies have.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:57] And I would think that that kind of gives you an advantage in the sense that you have specialists in all different areas because of your footprint all over the place.

Erik Boemanns: [00:11:09] Absolutely. Yeah, there are very few projects that we don’t have some level of expertise, whether it’s industrial or technical, not that we know everything about everything. There are definitely areas that we would always refer to a better specialist than we are, but we do have we can bring depth of experience to lots of different industries, lots of different verticals as well as technical backgrounds.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:34] So now when you’re working with a client, are you kind of triaging areas where they have a problem or a challenge, or are you kind of leading in the sense that you’re pushing them into, you know, into the future or like, say, like Web 3.0? Is that something that you’re like saying, hey, we have the skills to do this and you might be able to benefit because of this where they may not have been, you know, in a front burner issue for them.

Erik Boemanns: [00:12:05] Yeah, really, it’s both. I mean, we used to joke that you don’t hire a consultant if everything’s running great, right? Because why do you need to change anything? So we do absolutely a lot of that kind of troubleshooting, firefighting of systems, companies that have outgrown their current capacity, that are scaling beyond what they the systems they build. How do you take what you have, get it to a place where it’s stable and then how do you take it forward from there? And it becomes that next conversation. So if you’ve got something that you’re happy with and you need to grow it, scale it, become an international company, leverage the cloud better than you have today. And that’s something we can absolutely help. But a lot of times it does begin with that, hey, this is broken. Can you guys help?

Lee Kantor: [00:12:48] Now, what about kind of this push pull around hybrid remote in office? How are you kind of handling that turbulence in the talent market right now?

Erik Boemanns: [00:13:02] Yeah, I think that might be another advantage that we bring because we’re consulting, right? So we love to see people in our office when it’s safe and when they’re comfortable coming in or if it’s geographically convenient. We have an office in Alpharetta. It’s a great space, but at the same time. Even even beyond before COVID just commuting is can be a pain. And so we’ve always had a hybrid model. Our office is only about a quarter of the size of our company, so we actually never expect everybody to be here unless it’s an all hands meeting, which are almost quarterly at most when possible. So hybrid is really our assumption. So we’ve got employees who aren’t even local and even they will come in to some of these meetings, but that that hybrid model works well for consulting. The question mark is going to be our clients. Our clients also have to support a hybrid model or as they as the local companies are considering bringing their workers back to their offices. Will they be asking consultants to also show up? One of the things that we’re paying attention to and working with consultants who like the work but aren’t ready to show up on a client’s doorstep. So how do we create that balance of of local businesses who are ready to return to work that are our clients and we being a hybrid company, how do we support nearly both sides is one of the things that we work hard on now.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:29] Are you seeing any other kind of trends in the technology space right now that we should be paying attention to?

Erik Boemanns: [00:14:38] Well, you mentioned cybersecurity earlier. That is absolutely the biggest trend. So I mentioned at the beginning of cloud, right. How do we get to the cloud? How do we spend less money in the cloud? But the other current of all these is also how do I do that in a secure way? The amount of attacks on cyber resources, it’s only gone up every single month. And so how do we build something that is secure? How do we build something that meets a lot of different security requirements? That’s something that I personally work a lot in. I’m actually our local cybersecurity officer and have talked a lot about a lot of the different security approaches that we bring to a client’s all industry standards, the secret sauce there. It’s got to rely on what all the people are doing together, but I’d say that is probably the biggest trend other than just how do I better leverage the money I’m spending on my IT resources.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:34] Now, are you seeing regarding cybersecurity, there’s always been obviously attacks on enterprise level or organizations, you know, but now it seems like the the bad guys are going a little bit more downstream and attacking midsize and smaller organizations. And they tend to not have the, you know, all of the cyber security toys that the enterprise people have. And in some cases, they, you know, have their head in the sand. They don’t even want to think about it.

Erik Boemanns: [00:16:07] Yeah, no, exactly. And kind of saying is there’s a price for every size target. Right? I’m a grandmother all the way up to Fortune 500 companies. There’s a way to monetize an attack on any size of organization. At this point. It’s become very, almost a shopping cart style for the attackers to be able to make money off of anyone. Obviously, a lot more concerted efforts against the big players because it’s a bigger dollar value that you can get. The they’re the people who are doing the attacks obviously want to get a good return on their investment as well, unfortunately. But another thing that we’ve also seen and kind of want to make sure people are aware is as you’re thinking about that, they also look at LinkedIn and they see what your corporate org chart is. They also read your public PR releases. So we’ve seen companies who announce, hey, we just got this $50 Million deal a couple of days later. The attacks just go way up at that point because they just told the world that they’ve got some money coming in. So it’s a sophisticated environment that we’re operating in.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:14] Yeah, and that’s something I don’t know if everybody realizes that these are kind of professionals doing this. This isn’t the kid in the basement with Cheetos and Red Bull. These are they’re whiteboarding things out. They’re, you know, running experiments. They’re paying attention to not only your LinkedIn, but your Facebook. And if you’re I’ve heard horror stories of CEOs saying they’re on vacation and then on Facebook and then immediately somebody is sending a note to the HR person asking for something and, you know, pretending to be the CEO. It’s just these are professionals. These aren’t, you know, just kids just screwing around.

Erik Boemanns: [00:17:57] Yeah, absolutely. It’s it’s a monthly occurrence where somebody reports that they got a supposed text from our CEO and saying, hey, can you send some iTunes gift cards to me? And yes, they’re all fake. Right. And that’s the same thing we have to repeat. Our CEO has a different way. That’s right. And gift cards, right? That’s not texting the newest person who just got hired.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:19] Yeah, it’s it’s really it’s it’s tough for businesses because you want to be able to react fast and have that speed and the is expecting speed in in any interaction. But also you have to be cautious because with speed becomes these kind of mistakes that you can make. One click can be, you know, download malware and it’s game over.

Erik Boemanns: [00:18:44] Absolutely. Yeah. And that’s the balance. Right. And that’s what we’re working with clients is, is how do you strike that balance of speed to market, of being agile with your practices but also staying secure? How do you do secure software development? How do you do DevOps is a trend. Devsecops is the flavor that we try to preach, right? Because security really has to be present in every single decision point. If you leave it out, if you don’t have security, have a seat at the table yet you’re opening yourself up to huge risks. So it’s definitely something that we talk about a lot.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:19] Well, if somebody wants to learn more about improving, what is the website? What is the best way to get a hold of you or somebody on your team to have more substantive conversation?

Erik Boemanns: [00:19:29] Yeah. So improving. Com is our website. From there you can go to any of our local offices. The Atlanta office is there with our address phone number. I’m Eric Bowman’s as well. So I’m on LinkedIn and as well as the rest of our team. So it’s easy to find us and get ahold of us.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:44] Well, Eric, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Erik Boemanns: [00:19:49] Absolutely. Thank you.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:50] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

Intro: [00:19:57] Today’s episode of Atlanta Business Radio is brought to you by on pay. Built in Atlanta, on pay is the top rated payroll in HR software anywhere. Get one month free at paycom.