Dan McGraw, CEO of DPT Solutions, joins us to talk about Consumers’ new experience webinars for work, community and technology.  This new webinar series will focus on the steps you can take today that won’t break the bank or take months to plan.

 

[transcript]

00:06 Lynne Jarman-Johnson: Money, I’m Home. Hi, I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson with Consumers Credit Union. Since COVID-19 and our “Stay Safe, Stay Home,” we’re in for a new experience. And joining us today is Dan McGraw. He is the CEO of DPT Solutions. And Dan, we have an awesome webinar series scheduled that I’m so excited to talk to you about today.

00:27 Dan McGraw: Oh, Lynne, this is gonna be absolutely amazing. I love it, and we’ve got a great list of panelists that will be joining us as well. Super excited.

00:37 LJ: So, we’re gonna talk about the webinar series, which there’s going to be three different series, and it’s all focusing on the new experience. I really wanna find out from you … Tell us a little bit about DPT Solutions, and what’s happened since the start of March, when all of a sudden, there was a “Stay Safe, Stay Home” order. What did that mean to your business?

01:02 DM: Yeah, so, for us, much like many businesses, it was a scramble of, “What are we gonna do to keep our employees safe? First and foremost, employees, their families, what are we gonna do to keep them safe?” Thankfully, being in the digital and technology space, our folks were very easily able to pick up and work from home. So, we were very fortunate from that perspective. The second piece, after the priority of health, was then to make obviously sure that all of our projects and all of our customer engagements had a continued, seamless flow. Obviously, those customer interactions were being reduced to online, Microsoft Teams meetings, those types of things. So, again, thankfully, we had that technology, but just using more of that, and adapting our approach, video calls and those screen sharing, those types of things, were a big priority. And thankfully, we are one of the businesses where it’s working very well.

02:08 LJ: Now, you must also then have really started to jump in to help companies with making sure that they’re connected because that was … If you did not have the tools in place, Consumers had … every person had a laptop well in advance of COVID, so that really did set the tone and the stage for us to be able to work remote. But if that wasn’t on a docket for companies, what were you finding was difficult?

02:39 DM: Really, we had, not only with existing clients, but also just some friends of friends, those types of things, would get referred to us. And we actually … there are several things that aren’t our specialty as it relates to the IT field. So, for example, Microsoft Teams or a Microsoft partner, but Microsoft Teams really isn’t our specialty focus. But we found ourselves really helping a lot of not only existing customers, but people who just had heard about DPT or somebody said, “Give DPT a call.” And really, we ended up doing a fair amount of just pro bono, “Hey, here’s how you can stand this up. Here’s how you can get started with it.” And then frankly, referring a lot of those people, if it was a more complex piece, over to some other business partners of ours.

03:31 DM: And then in our space, which is more kind of digital transformation, process transformation, we actually were building a fair amount of apps. And in fact, we released a case study recently of one, where one of our customers that said, “Hey, we can’t place a receptionist in the lobby anymore to make sure guests are signing in, we have vendors that come in to the business and need to do things for us.” And so we created an app where a vendor would walk in on a tablet device, they would register themselves, it would take a photo of the person, they would sign an agreement, and then they could go about doing what they need to do as a vendor. So, a lot of unique types of things that we weren’t asked for maybe in the past or weren’t doing a whole lot of really ramped up quickly. And thankfully, we’ve got a great team that were able to adapt to those requests and fulfill those things rather quickly.

04:27 LJ: Well, I’ll tell you what, that really does lead into the new experience that we’re all ready for, or getting ready for, and I think have so many questions, which is why we’re going to be doing the webinar. And the focus is the new experience for the employee, the business and consumer, and tech. And you’re an expert in all three with your role, Dan. So, tell us a little bit about what you’re excited about for the webinar.

04:54 DM: Really, what I’m excited about is two things. I know, Lynne, when we talked about this, there’s a lot of webinars that are going on out there, and some of them from very large organizations. And, one of the things that we, your team, the Consumers Credit Union team and DPT had talked about is we really wanna make this with a small business focus. There’s a lot of businesses out there that maybe don’t have the capital to just go invest in new technologies or new ways of doing things. So one of the things I’m really excited about is being able to bring this, and a lot of our panelists, in to the small business realm and really bring a feel of, “What can you go do today within your business that’s not going to require this big capital outlay or months and months of planning and work? What are some considerations that you can take today and get started?” So, I’d say that’s probably the biggest thing that I’m excited about for the webinar.

05:57 LJ: Well, the first one is going to be May 27th, which is a Wednesday, and it’s the new experience for the employee in returning to work safely. And, I know that we’re focused on, in Michigan here, of waiting to hear what the governor decides on May 28. But it has already been shown in the UP and in the northern area that, “Hey, we are going to be getting back to work.” You as a CEO, tell us about the webinar, but also about your own thoughts on employee safety.

06:28 DM: Absolutely. So, for us, we’ve already determined we are going to continue for a period of time. Really, status quo. So, working remote. If you don’t need to go into the office, don’t worry about going into the office. Working remote’s perfectly fine. We’d rather have people keeping their family safe. So, we’re very fortunate from that perspective. But the other things that we’re considering is, “What does it look like when we’re meeting with customers? What are some different protocols that we wanna put in place for those things?” And really, just ultimately, not adding any unnecessary risk or exposure to our employees or our customers, where we don’t have to. And again, thankfully for us, we have a lot of the tools in place that allow us to do that, and I know a lot of organizations don’t. So we’re also working on how can we help our customers that are maybe in the manufacturing space or spaces where they can’t create the separation that they would like to or do things over video calls, how can we help them with technology?

07:36 LJ: The panelists for May 27th are stellar, and they do represent very diverse organizations, including non-profits, also the legal aspect of it. Shawn Premer, our chief HR officer, who has helped put together our go-back-to-work plan, which is public. It’s on our website and anyone can download it to see. I think the key here, Dan, is it that truly every organization is different, and it’s okay to create your own plan and be ready to change.

08:07 DM: Absolutely, I think there’s a common goal, which is keep everybody safe. But definitely, each organization’s a little bit different, each organization certainly has their differentiators and everybody’s gotta kinda come up with their own plan. So, to your point, with the panelists that we have joining us on May 27th, not only we’ll talk about some of the legal factors, but we’ll talk about some of the different angles that maybe you wanna consider. And it’s certainly not a cookie-cutter approach.

08:43 LJ: Well, isn’t that the neat part that each week, we really will focus on the employee first, and then business and community, and then tech. When you talk about the tech world, do you think that people are now adopting faster to new technologies because of what has happened? Or do you think it might become a, “Well, where we’re just gonna go back to normal. I really just want my life to be traditional again.” And it’s just funny to think about.

09:13 DM: Yeah, and it’s interesting. I have so many different thoughts on that naturally, [chuckle] just with my background. But it’s interesting because I believe that people are creatures of habit. And we’ve always believed as a business that technology isn’t going to replace the natural feel, what feels natural in our lives. So, I think there are gonna be pieces of technology that maybe people didn’t use before, and now they’re like, “Wow. You know what? I like this. This is actually intuitive, it’s complementing maybe a manual process that I had before. It’s really complementing it.” I think that’s the type of tech people will stick with. I think the type of tech that doesn’t feel natural and it feels clunky is the type of stuff that will be ditched. I think another kind of thought on that, that front too, is that as businesses have maybe purchased technology today in the software-as-a-service world, we can swipe our credit card, so to speak, and all of a sudden, we’ve got the technology subscription. I think that a consideration as folks analyze now the technology that they’ve purchased and maybe rolled out, is the security aspects of that technology, and ensuring that if that is technology they’re going to continue to use to complement their business and their process and whatnot, that they’re taking all the security factors into consideration there, too.

10:51 LJ: And, definitely, you can easily register at consumerscu.org, which just type in the new experience or new experience, and you’re gonna hit our events page and can sign up for all three of the webinars. So very simple, too. So, we’ll make sure that we get those links to everybody. Dan, thank you so much. Looking forward to next week.

11:13 DM: Yeah. And then, Lynne, we should also mention one more thing. We will record these and issue the show notes afterwards. So, if you can’t attend one, we will publish these. But hopefully, you can attend and ask some questions, if we’ve got time towards the end of the webinar. Thanks so much, Lynne. Have a great day.

11:34 LJ: Well, thank you so much, Dan. Hey, it’s Money, I’m home. Thank you so much for joining us from finance to fitness. If you have a topic you’d like us to share with others, just send them our way. Thank you, Jake Esselink, for producing this weekly broadcast. And, we will see you next week.

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