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GeekWire shares BoldIQ CEO’s 3 principles for managing everyday work and life

Working Geek: BoldIQ CEO Roei Ganzarski’s 3 principles for managing everyday work and life by MONICA NICKELSBURG

As a father, president and CEO of BoldIQ, and a member of the UW Global Business Advisory and WTIA boards, Roei Ganzarski’s time is in high demand.

At BoldIQ, a Seattle software company that crunches real-time data to help organizations optimize business operations, Ganzarski focuses on five key areas. He works on defining BoldIQ’s long-term vision, business development, daily operations, scalability, and marketing.

How does Ganzarski define his role? “I create great headaches for my team,” he said.

Ganzarski practices “inbox-zero” religiously and makes family time a high priority. To keep it all in balance, he has developed three guiding principles.

He shared his tips with us for this installment of Working Geek, a regular GeekWire feature. Continue reading for his answers to our questionnaire.

Current Location: “Bellevue, WA. Right across the street from Crossroads Mall. Great food all around.”

Computer types: “Combination of desktop and laptops. We are windows based – all PCs. With our choice, we are supporting another local company, Microsoft. :)”

Mobile devices: “To each their own. I personally have a Samsung S7 Edge. Love it.”

Favorite apps, cloud services and software tools: “Glympse app (I use it every day to let my family know about my commute); Google News & Weather app (to keep up with the world); Starbucks app (to get my daily dose of caffeine); WhatsApp (Overall communications. There is nothing like it!); Paymo cloud service for time tracking on specific projects as needed; everything else is pretty standard.”

Describe your workspace. Why does it work for you? “L-shape desk with two monitors right on the corner (+ the laptop screen) and snug against two walls with windows. This provides me with great coverage of all my data on the three screens and opens up the floor space as opposed to having some sort of desk blocking the way and separating me from my team.”

Your best advice for managing everyday work and life? “I live my life and work with three guiding principles:

• Always remember where you came from and where you are going
• Only dead fish go with the flow
• The light at the end of the tunnel could be a train

These three guidelines help me prepare, be proactive, and react to the various situations I find myself in, be it at home or work. And do it all with a passion!”

Your preferred social network? How do you use it for business/work? “My preferred social network is getting together with my friends for coffee or a great BBQ. And if I can’t see them in person I use WhatsApp to keep in touch. The rest (i.e. Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook) I use just for sharing work PR type things or posting that we are looking for new great team members to join.”

Current number of unanswered emails in your inbox? “At the end of each day = 0! I am very disciplined with my inbox. I use it as my to-do list. I either answer the mail, forward the mail if someone else needs to care for it, or I file it when done. Note that my initial answer may be an acknowledgment of the mail and I still have work to do on it, but it is at least initially answered. Discipline and my mobile phone are two things that help keep this intact. Also, a reason I like to come in early to the office to tend to the emails that came in the evening before and overnight.”

Number of appointments/meetings on your calendar this week? “15 and one of the days this week I am traveling to California for a customer meeting.”

How do you run meetings? “No phones or other distractions; one conversation at a time (no side conversations or whispering while someone is talking); everyone can voice their opinions openly with full transparency; everyone gets a voice but not everyone gets a vote.”

Everyday work uniform? “Full suit and tie…NOT. I have found that feeling comfortable allows me to do better work. Clothes, in fact, do not make the man. It is the person that makes clothes work. On any given day, you will find me in jeans, crocs canvas shoes (very comfortable) and a flannel shirt (or UW Husky hoodie).”

How do you make time for family? “I make time. Priority and discipline. It is easy if you decide to do it. It is your decision how to balance – make it, and live it. Don’t give yourself or others excuses. Your decision to miss a kid’s recital or game, your decision to take your kid to their sports practice, your decision to be home every evening for a family dinner. It is not right or wrong, but it is your decision. As the company leader, it is my role to enable my employees to maintain a healthy balance (which they have to be able to define for themselves) and I have to maintain one for myself and live it by example. Both during times of calm and during urgent hectic times.”

Best stress reliever? How do you unplug? “My kids. They make me laugh and they make me cry. But they always make everything else seem small and doable. Nothing like sitting around the dinner table with them and my wife and talking about their day.”

What are you listening to? “Right now…my employees talking about some feature they are working on…”

Daily reads? Favorite sites and newsletters? “I go through multiple elements of the Google News & Weather app. Easy and regularly updated. I also get various headline feeds from the industries we are in.”

Book on your nightstand (or e-reader)? “Sylvia Rafael: The Life and Death of a Mossad Spy”

Night owl or early riser? What are your sleep patterns? “I am up at 6 a.m. Take my eldest daughter to her high school bus at 6:35 a.m. In the office by 7:20 a.m.”

Where do you get your best ideas? “Everyone and anyone who will share them. Customers, employees, friends, family. My ears are always open to good ideas that when applied to our company, our family, or my life, could be great.”

Whose work style would you want to learn more about or emulate? “There is no one person I would want to emulate. I try to learn from each leader I meet, be they a leader at work, home, their community, etc. And I try to see what things work for them and what don’t and why. I then try to apply to my own style as I grow.”

Click to read on GeekWire

BoldIQ quoted in Fleetowner’s “Trump, trucking, and the outlook for 2017”

By: Sean Kilcarr in Trucks at Work

Lots of change may be on the menu for trucking in 2017 as economic trends and federal policy efforts could make further alterations to the U.S. freight market – everything from canceling regulations to the adoption of new strategies for meeting customer demands.

“When you move 70% of the nation’s domestic freight there are few issues out there that we are not a part of either directly or indirectly,” Chris Spear, president and CEO of the American Trucking Associations (ATA) trade group, explained in a recent phone interview with me. “Tax reform, trade, and infrastructure: we have a role to play in all of those issues.”

For starters, he noted that the 10-year $1 trillion infrastructure proposal put on the table by President-elect Trump could be a big positive for the industry in a number of ways.

“Infrastructure is our industry’s lifeblood: We need good infrastructure and getting such a package passed is key right out of the gate,” Spear said. “At least as proposed, that package will likely be tied to tax reform.”

Sandeep Kar, global vice president for mobility at Frost & Sullivan, added that few industries will face the impact — whether net positive or negative — of a Trump presidency as strongly as trucking, which is a leading indicator of economic activity and typically feels the effects of economic swings and fluctuations well before many other industries or sectors.

“While the effect of Trump administration’s legislative actions will be experienced primarily by the U.S. commercial vehicle industry, global market participants and markets will have much to note and consider,” he noted in a recent report.

Roei Ganzarski, a former Boeing executive and now CEO BoldIQ, which provides optimization software for asset scheduling, added another economic twist to trucking’s outlook where the economy is concerned: the rise of “demand-driven” freight transportation service.

“Consumers or customers want to get what they want, at the time and place they want it, and only want to ask for it [delivery service] when they are ready to ask and not before,” he explained to me recently. “Thus the transportation operator must be ‘demand-driven’ in order to serve such on-demand needs in an efficient manner that enables scale, growth, and profitability.”

That “on-demand economy” is also shortening planning cycles and significantly shortening decision making time frames. “This means the need for intelligent, data driven, and real-time decision making is critical,” especially in trucking, Ganzarski said.

He added that this “demand-driven” view assumes that trucking companies and other freight service providers have finite resources to do their work.

“This must be viewed differently from the so-called ‘sharing economy’ where an operation will use someone else’s resources because they are so inefficient, they have spare time or capacity on their resources,” Ganzarski pointed out.

That will lead to more consolidation and even elimination of some transport companies that cannot adapt fast enough to the change, he said.

Click here to read the full story on Fleetowner.com

BoldIQ featured in Seattle Times

Bellevue startup BoldIQ gets Boeing boost for business-aviation tool

A small startup scores big with a deal in which it developed a business-aviation system that Boeing’s Jeppesen division offers to its customers.

BoldIQ, a growing Bellevue software company, scored a big deal this winter when Boeing debuted a business-aviation system that uses the small company’s technology.

Boeing’s Jeppesen division launched a new operating system that helps business-airplane companies keep their planes fully staffed and running on time. The cloud-based system, known as Jeppesen Operator, puts flight scheduling, crew management, trip planning, pricing and many other tasks into one place.

“Today in the current state, without a solution like this, what operators have to do is acquire and maintain and use multiple systems that are disparate from each other,” said Mike DiDonato, director of industry services at Jeppesen.

With Jeppesen Operator, a business airline would use BoldIQ’s scheduling software to allow them to plan for flight crews and planes. But the biggest draw is yet to come.

BoldIQ specializes in optimizing scheduling using an automated system that recognizes priorities and makes sure everything runs smoothly. It automatically readjusts personnel and jobs if a pilot calls in sick or a flight is grounded or something else pops up.

It can reschedule hundreds of factors in minutes.

That optimization functionality is being added to Jeppesen Operator and is expected to launch in early 2018.

The Bellevue company has 21 employees and is hiring six more, partly bolstered by the Boeing deal. The contract gives it an extra layer of credibility, BoldIQ CEO Roei Ganzarski said.

“It also helps with market access,” he said. “What we’re able to tap into, we could never do that on our own.”

BoldIQ makes scheduling software for aviation and ground-transportation companies, and is developing technology for the health-care industry.

The Operator software, which launched in November, now has six business-aviation company customers, and may branch into commercial airlines to help with cargo planning and other unscheduled areas.

Click here to read the full story online

BoldIQ and Veterans Day

Affordable code schools would help vets fill in-demand tech jobs.

Washington state has thousands of unemployed veterans and an estimated 20,000 unfilled technology jobs. Cost is the most prohibitive aspect for many veterans interested in learning to code.

Daniel Browning was a network administrator with six years of experience working under extremely challenging conditions. His experience, though, wasn’t enough to get him a job, even in tech talent-starved Seattle. That’s because Browning’s experience was in the U.S. Army, not the private sector.

Photo: Daniel Browning, a veteran who works at Bellevue startup BoldIQ, speaks during the Washington Technology Industry Association’s FullConTech conference. Browing is a Code Fellows graduate.

The unemployment rate for veterans in Washington state is 3.8 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. It’s slightly higher among veterans who served after Sept. 11, 2001, at 4.1 percent.

Meanwhile, Washington’s economy suffers as a result of an estimated 20,000 unfilled technology jobs that prevent promising companies from growing and succeeding.

The state’s thousands of unemployed veterans could help fill the need, and Washington coding schools – which train basic computer science skills in a matter of weeks or months, not years – could help prepare veterans for technology roles.

While that may sound like a simple solution, both the veterans and the code schools have encountered major challenges in making it happen.

Recruiters want Stanford grads

The military teaches many of the soft skills required in technology roles, including attention to detail and working on teams, and veterans can often easily transition into the jobs with some technical training. Plus, many have obtained the security clearances necessary for government projects in the technology industry.

The tech industry has started to take notice. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos earlier this year pledged to hire 25,000 veteran and military spouses at the company, including training 10,000 veterans and spouses for cloud computing roles. Microsoft and many other technology companies including EMC and SpaceX have initiatives for hiring veterans, too.

The trouble is – even with deliberate measures, such as veteran-only job fairs – the skills veterans learn often don’t satisfy the region’s technology recruiters. There can be a stigma against hiring candidates who didn’t graduate from one of a handful of four-year universities.

As demand for technology talent continues to grow, though, companies are having to consider candidates whose backgrounds look a little different than the traditional Stanford graduate.

Dozens of code schools have formed to respond to the industry’s insatiable demand for programmers. Seattle has at least 12 code schools. Nearly all of them have opened in the past five years.

“A lot of people are often overlooked for a job they can do,” said Sonny Tosco, a recent graduate of Bellevue-based Coding Dojo’s California program.

The son of Filipino immigrants, Tosco wanted to be in the military from the time he was 4 years old. He graduated from prestigious military academy West Point and served in the Army until 2012, when he moved home to Silicon Valley.

“I was having an existential crisis and questioning my purpose outside of the military,” he said. “So I decided to go all-in.”

Tosco founded a company called Limelight, a mobile app that allow users to see others on a map and ask for a photo of their location. The app was inspired by an experience he had in 2012 during the Arab Spring, when he wanted information from people on the ground. He spent two years on the project before giving up on it and enrolling in a coding school. He graduated in early November and already has another plan for a startup.

Veterans, he said, are ideal technology industry entrepreneurs and job candidates.

“From a young point in your career in the Army, you’re already bestowed responsibility, leading people and managing resources,” Tosco said. “I was 28 and chief of operations for a 300-member organization. It was like being CEO for deployment. I don’t often see people that young having responsibility in the corporate world.”

Coding schools can help veterans like Tosco supplement the job skills they learn in the military with fundamental computer science skills. But for many veterans interested in learning to code, cost is the most prohibitive aspect.

The G.I. Bill problem

When Army veteran John Shaff decided he wanted to use his military experience for a technology career, he didn’t want to go back to school for four years.

But the G.I. Bill – the government program that pays for veteran’s undergraduate education – wouldn’t cover his coding school tuition, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

“It was honestly very frustrating,” said Shaff, who deployed from Washington’s Joint Base Lewis-McChord to serve as a infantryman and later as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan.

The G.I. Bill covers the full cost of an undergraduate education at any public university or college in the U.S. and many private schools. It also covers non-college degree programs, including truck driving, HVAC repair, emergency medical training and beautician schools. Code schools, until very recently, were not included.

In August, Seattle-based Code Fellows, where Shaff eventually enrolled, became the first coding school in the state to receive approval for the government program.

“From the military perspective, you don’t want to spend an additional two to four years in school. These are adults who have lives and want to transition from their military experience as quickly as possible,” said Code Fellows CEO Dave Parker, whose father-in-law was also a West Point graduate.

What’s great about the Code Fellows programs, he said, is that veterans who want jobs get into the workforce much faster than they would it they went to a traditional school.

Code Fellows has a variety of programs, most of which take about 10 weeks to complete. The school has trained more than 650 students since it was founded in 2013 and has a placement rate of more than 95 percent with an average starting salary of $71,000.

Still, most coding schools aren’t yet able to accept the G.I. Bill and many veterans with technology ambitions, regardless of experience, might have to settle for lower-paying careers.

The Washington Technology Industry Association and other advocacy groups are trying to change that by getting skilled veterans in front of tech companies looking to hire. It’s already starting to work.

Browning, the former Army network administrator, graduated from Code Fellows earlier this year. Through a WTIA program, Browning was hired on at Bellevue startup BoldIQ and has become one of the growing company’s most promising employees.

If Browning could teach computer networking to a group of Afghani citizens in the midst of a war zone, BoldIQ CEO Roei Ganzarski said, the veteran would likely do well at the scheduling software company.

“What we found was (he has) tremendous skills, capability and passion for what (he is) doing,” Ganzarski said, “and (he has) been able to achieve even more than we would have expected from any hire, even a brand-name school.”

Click to read the full article in the PSBJ

AIN’s Matt Thurber covers Jeppesen Operator at NBAA

Jeppesen is tapping its many resources to create a new single-source software solution combining flight planning, trip planning, runway performance, weight-and-balance, crew scheduling and management and reporting. The new product is called Jeppesen Operator, it is available now and the company is demonstrating it here at NBAA 2016 (Booth 1596).

The Operator project started more than six years ago, when Mike McCready joined the company and took a look at all of Jeppesen’s varied products to try to figure out how they could be developed for the future. Jeppesen has offered flight planning for decades, having purchased Lockheed’s DataPlan service in 1989, and it also is in the international trip-planning business, in addition to publishing aeronautical data and, more recently, developing mobile apps to display that data.

“This was a grand opportunity to write a small white paper,” McCready recalled. “I called it ‘flight department in a box.’ I looked at all the Jeppesen services and products and realized that Jeppesen could be in a position to bring a single-source solution [to the market]. It’s a platform to run a flight operation.”

To gauge industry interest and obtain feedback, Jeppesen formed a customer advisory board in 2011. “We started refining what the product should look like,” he said, “and what the software should do.”

The next step was to make sure there were enough internal resources to make the new product possible. Then, he said, “Over the years there was lot of work, and interviews. The customer advisory board gave us a lot of direction.” The board included Part 91 flight departments and Part 135 passenger and cargo operators.

Jeppesen’s international trip planning (ITP) team was key to a fundamental aspect of Operator: supporting schedulers and dispatchers who can do much of this work themselves, provided they are given the right tools. The software did need to be informed by the ITP team, but the software’s users should not be dependent on the team to set up and release flights for their operations.

“We found a way of doing that through using flight planning,” said McCready. When creating a flight plan, all the requirements of the flight must be met, so Operator then creates a queries database and from that a checklist for the trip, he explained. The checklist outlines items that the user–perhaps a pilot in a small operation or a scheduler or dispatcher–must either obtain or check. For example, an international trip may require a navigation permit. Operator not only specifies this requirement, but also includes information that will help the user satisfy the requirement, such as contact information for securing the navigation permit.

Behind the scenes, however, the Jeppesen ITP team stands ready to assist. “We know it’s going to take people time to get comfortable with that, and we built in a concierge button,” McCready said. “We want to provide the expertise of the team that you have access to through software.” Jeppesen understands that some operators may fly infrequently to a complicated international destination such as China and need help, or a large charter operator may be busy and wants to offload some of this work. “We still have our ITP team there to support you,” he said. “We built that functionality into the system to make it do-it-yourself. But we’re not going to forget you.”

Jeppesen isn’t trying to replicate what other software providers have created for operations and trip-planning software, and one of the big differentiators is a tie-in with BoldIQ, the creator of the Astro platform and its Solver optimization engine. “We’ve worked with them and helped them refine Astro,” he said, “and we’re in the process of building in the optimization piece so we can provide the Solver module for our customers. It will still have a single user interface, but Astro and Solver run in the background.”

Solver helps operators optimize resources (aircraft, crew, etc.) to make the operation as efficient as possible and also to help recover when something unexpected happens, such as an AOG, sick pilot or other unplanned event. “It’s quite amazing,” McCready said, “and is saving customers 10 to 20 percent due to increased utilization.”

The BoldIQ features won’t be available in the initial release of Operator and should be available next year, but in any case, customers will be able to subscribe to Operator and all of its capabilities, or pay more for Operator plus the BoldIQ features. The runway performance, weight-and-balance and other Operator features are all Jeppesen-developed. Operator will also integrate with third-party programs such as Camp Systemsmaintenance tracking and financial systems.

While Operator is cloud-based and will run via a browser on any computer, Jeppesen is planning to tie apps such as Mobile Flitedeck together with Operator and develop other apps to enhance its performance. “It’s all about making sure we’re connected through the whole process,” he said. “How to bring flight planning, runway performance, weight-and-balance, and make those talk with the trip-planning database so it’s easy to use. You don’t have to be a six-year-trained international trip planner. You’ll be able to be trained and execute trip plans and fly around the world.”

Flying covers Jeppesen and BoldIQ solution

Jeppesen Launches New Operator Software

At the NBAA Business Aviation Convention and Exhibition in Orlando, Florida, Jeppesen introduced a new software product aimed to streamline the work of flight departments. Jeppesen teamed up with BoldIQ, experts in on-demand flight operations and optimization, to create Jeppesen Operator, which integrates the many levels that go into managing aircraft and crew in an on-demand flight department, such as aircraft maintenance, crew currency, flight planning, weight and balance, flight permits, and more.

Once trip planning begins, the software creates an all-inclusive checklist. The checklist allows multiple operators to work on the same trip plan, and since the software is cloud-based, a plan can be accessed from multiple locations by several operators, allowing a trip plan to be started in one location and finished in another if need be. Operator can be managed through a computer or mobile app.

Jeppesen [Powered by BoldIQ] Introduces Next Gen Jeppesen Operator

Jeppesen Introduces Next Generation Business Aviation Flight Department: Jeppesen Operator

Jeppesen Operator integrates cloud-based key functionality in a ‘do-it-yourself’ operations solution

BoldIQ quoted in US News and World Report story about Amazon

What Industry Will Amazon Enter Next?

As ambitious as ever, AMZN isn’t afraid of entering new markets. It’s not just a retailer anymore. By John Divine | US News and World Report Staff Writer

Amazon.com, Inc. does pretty much everything retail.

What started as an online bookseller quickly expanded into other product verticals like electronics, clothing and toys, and eventually morphed into an all-encompassing web store with virtually every legal product you can imagine. AMZN even helped put a few billion-dollar businesses – RadioShack, Borders and Circuit City being three of the most prominent – out of business along the way.

There’s arguably no other American company ever that’s been so successful in so many areas.

That’s not to say there haven’t been flops. Amazon Local, the Fire Phone and Amazon Destinations each failed; the Fire Phone arguably registered as one of the biggest tech flops of the last decade. Still, Amazon’s track record of success far exceeds its failures, and with a hard-charging billionaire intent on taking humans to Mars at its helm, Amazon investors and competitors alike should be prepping for its next ambitious business expansion.

With so many irons in the fire, here’s a look at the ones with the potential to become the hottest over the coming years and decades:

Shipping. Watch out United Parcel Service, FedEx Corp., and DHL – Amazon is coming for you!

In recent years Amazon has been building up a fleet of aircrafts and branded trucks, has entered the ocean freight industry, and has lead the way lobbying regulators on drone delivery. Former Boeing exec and current CEO of the fleet/aviation software company BoldIQ, Roei Ganzarski, says these steps are necessary if Amazon wants to control the “entire supply chain,” which it does.

Amazon’s lightning-fast 2-day delivery for Prime members (it’s even testing same-day delivery for some products and locations) is a demanding timeframe for third-parties like UPS and FedEx to adhere to. So, like so many things, Amazon is in-housing logistics. The next step, Ganzarski says, is selling its shipping services to others once its capacity is large enough.

“Look at how they started Amazon Web Services,” the company’s cloud computing platform, Ganzarski says. “It was first based on internal need … when they figured out they don’t always need all of it, why not provide it to externals?”

Click here to read the entire article on US News and World Report

BoldIQ’s Support Engineer presentation identified as a ‘Standout Moment’ of 2016 FullConTech

At a crowded WTIA 2016 FullConTech conference, in front of over 300 people, BoldIQ support engineer – Daniel Browning – gave a presentation that was identified by WTIA as one of the standout moments of the entire event. Read the transcript below and see why he got a standing ovation:

Thank you ladies and gentlemen for your time. I would like to express my dearest gratitude to the people that helped me to get where I am today:

• My wife and daughter
• Fellow service men and women of the past and present
• Roei Ganzarski, Christer Lundin and the entire BoldIQ Family
• Julie Pham and everyone at the Washington Technology Industry Association.

A little over eight years ago, as a recent high school graduate, I made the decision to become the next generation in our family to serve our country. Like most recruits I was excited joining a lifelong brotherhood, seeing the world and having the honor to standup for what I believe in. I knew joining the military in a time of war was different from joining in a time of peace. I also knew that the military may not be a lifelong commitment and therefore I had three requests for Uncle Sam. First, I was in great need of having somebody in my life helping me to become more focused, disciplined and goal oriented. 12 weeks of boot camp and highly dedicated drill sergeants fixed that really quickly. Secondly, I wanted the military to train me and provide me the skills that would allow me to survive beyond the battle fields of Iraq and Afghanistan. And in the end, I wanted the experience to show me the world and help me to walk through doors that I did not imagine were open for me.

After serving for almost six years as a signal communication specialist, I left the service as a disabled war veteran because my last tour to Afghanistan did not end as I hoped for. At that time, I was on a fast track and wanted to serve for 20 plus years until I was qualified to retire. But when that did not work out as planned I had to evaluate my choices. I did not want a job, but a career, I did not want to pursue the often desired path by veterans to work for the government and I wanted to stay in the field the Army trained me in. I therefore assessed my fears, possibilities, my goals and how to get what I wanted. First thing I realized as a soldier and soon to be veteran was that there are stereotypes about veterans and civilians that I couldn’t allow to get in my way. I remember watching the movie major Payne where the main character gets arrested and blames civilian life for it, referring to it as “civilian puke’s existence”. The first thing that came to my mind was, that cannot be me.   So I grew a goatee, gained a few pounds, minimized my excessive military courtesy, minimized yelling and cursing, and above all I did not expect the world to owe my everything or anything. Because I met better men and women in and out of the service.

On the other hand, I was and still am, to a certain extent, fearful of certain questions and stereotypes about my military past, such as questions about my war experiences and political views, the general misconception of the military, and of course my struggle to realize that I don’t have to work 16-20 hours a day. Therefore, I would like to challenge everyone in this room, employer, educator, hiring recruiter, policy maker and any member of the civilian and military community, to picture in your minds, right now, what soldiers and veterans like me look like.  And if you’re picturing a bunch of people screaming at each other, more than kicking in doors and going after bad guys on the battle fields, what I encourage you to let go of that picture. Because the military – and the people in it – are so much more. I’m not a violent, gun tooting, super conservative fanatic who believes there is only one right way-my way.

It takes a serious logistical and business apparatus to fulfill the military and this country’s needs and goals. Let me tell you what my life as a soldier looked like:

• I was in charge of IT and military matters to fulfill the needs of up to 400 people.
• 80 people were under my direct command and relied on my technical, human and military leadership skills.

The big question for me was:  How can I profit from my experience and background, and most importantly, how can I help employers profit from my background and experience as a veteran.

To the military and veteran community, I can say that I have learned that the best way to overcome the many fears and misconceptions is to be honest and respectful. If someone asks how I feel about the current issues our society faces, I share my views honestly and respectfully, and I respect the views of others, no matter how much they differ from mine.  Furthermore, I also tell veterans to consider your options for becoming a civilian tech worker. For me there were two options, Option A) was to obtain certificates and option B) was to get a tech degree.  I chose to take advantage of my veteran education benefits, continue my education, and graduate with a degree in computer science.  This was a big bet with some risk – because as a 30-year-old non-traditional student, there were people dependent on me, my wife and a newborn child.  I needed to figure out the hiring landscape and get a job right after graduation.

But this wasn’t easy. Even in a field that has an average job growth rate between 10 and 27 percent, in an area that I refer to as the IT capitol of the world. It was difficult as a recent college grad who does not write and analyze code every day to successfully pass code skills test. It felt uncomfortable to be interviewed about my past by people who live in an area and work in a field that is considered to be heavily liberal and pacifistic. On top of that, the many miserable circumstances that many veterans face have always been a constant fear and reminder that failing is not an option. The fear of becoming a statistic, of becoming a homeless veteran, standing with a sign on the road asking for help or even worst, becoming one of the 22 veterans per day, who take their own lives. However, there are job and skills advantage of being a veteran that are often underestimated. We are very familiar with making critical decisions in stressful situations, we take everything serious and expect the best qualitative outcome of our work, we obtained leadership skills in probably the most diverse and challenging work environment, and we are always motivated and have a no quite attitude. Nevertheless, the problem is finding a way to close the disconnect between us and the technology world.

For me, the game changer was the Washington Technology Association and draft day. The Washington Technology Industry Association not only provided me with an insight on how to sell my soft skills and tech skills. But they also introduced me to companies that I did not know existed. They provided a college graduate with a nontraditional background a fair chance in a high demanding fast pacing field. After draft day the Washington Technology Industry Association introduced me to BoldIQ. A company that any nontraditional applicant could wish for. An employer willing to teach, provide guidance, training and an exciting workplace with great people to call colleagues and friends. BoldIQ is a scheduling software company that provides organizations the technology to operate at greater capacity. In essence that was exactly what I did in the military. Maybe in a different way, but I helped other soldiers through technology services to operate at a greater capacity, including assuring they come home alive and in one piece. So there can and is always a connection. BoldIQ has been proving to me that it is beneficial for companies to invest in tech rookies. Companies should be willing to train, teach, guide their employees and allow them to make mistakes. Because little did I know that after the service I can once again find an employer who I am loyal to, enjoy working for selflessly and to contribute to a team effort that aims to provide the best possible outcome.

An African proverb says if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.  Technology is a fast-moving industry, and I know that companies feel a sense of urgency when they are hiring new employees, and they want to find people who can do exactly what they need today.  But we need to keep in mind that veterans carry experience – like managing people, working under stress, staying focused on the mission – that might not be exactly what you need today but will deliver more and more value over time and continue to make a difference as they grow with your organizations.

Let us not go fast and fail because we did not see and look at the greater picture. But let us go together, as far as possible. So we can improve and positively impact our communities and the whole world by seeking the help and effort of everybody that has a true passion for technology.

Click here to read the WTIA review

Waples Precision Manufacturing CEO, to participate on BoldIQ panel

Darryl Smith , CEO of Waples Precision Manufacturing and Chairman of Cimcon Finishing, will be a panelist on the ‘Competing and Growing in the On-Demand World’ panel at the upcoming Wharton Aerospace this November.

Darryl will bring and entrepreneurial, small-business and supplier perspective to our panel looking at how companies can, and should, change perspectives and historically proven processes to accommodate the new on-demand economy. Prior to his leadership roles at Waples and Cimcon, Darryl held leadership poisitons at Premier Logitech, Platinum Equity and Accenture.

The 2016 Wharton Aerospace panel will be about Competing and Growing In The ‘On-Demand’ World. Like every other part of our lives, the need and desire for ‘on-demand’ is quickly changing aerospace & defense – from airlines, to logistics, from drone missions to mafucaturing, everything is moving towards a real-time dynamic environment.

Gone are the days of long-term planning and “simply” dealing with disruptions. Today, everything is based around continuous change and disruptions.

Customers want their service now, when and where they ask for it. But with this ‘on-demand’ culture comes a risk of great inefficiency, waste, pollution and increasing costs.

Led by Roei Ganzarski, President & CEO of BoldIQ, panelists will share perspectives on how they do more with their resources while decreasing waste and at the same time growing and competing in the ‘I want it now’ world.