(upbeat music) - Hey, we're back with another episode of "Move Faster." I'm Adam Kranitz, and I'm delighted today to have Frank Brants join me, from Quatro Tax. Frank, how are you - Doing well. - in the Southwest today? - Hot. (both laugh) - Maybe we should have waited till the fall to record this session, but thankfully, neither of us are outside. I appreciate you making time for me today. We've been working with you guys for a little bit now, and I thought it'd be a good opportunity to bring you onto the podcast and learn a little bit how you're building resilient IT systems at Quatro Tax. Before we kinda jump into that story, can you tell us a little bit about your role at the company and what Quatro Tax is doing in the world of real estate, and transactions, and compliance? - Sure, Quatro Tax is a property tax consulting firm, and so what we do is, we take, we work with residential clients, we work with small, medium businesses, and we basically try to make sure that they're not paying more than their fair share of property taxes. So we handle a significant number of documents during that process, and we have to make sure that those documents are available to all of our agents, so my role is, I am the IT person for the whole company (laughs), so anything that blinks is my responsibility. (Adam laughs) - I like that approach. (Frank laughs) - Yep. - Do tell us a little bit more about the things that are blinking in your office and offices? Tell us a little bit about your tech stack from storage to networks, and, you know, probably pretty typical, right, but about what have you got in your stack? - Sure, when I first got here, I was brought in kind of in an emergency basis, because the company had moved offices, and their... They had no network, they had no internet connection. Their IT person was down with COVID, and they were scrambling, and so basically, you know, I jumped on board to try to get everything up and running, and as quickly as possible, and so I inherited everything that's here four years ago, and this company keeps moving so fast that I don't really have any time to upgrade anything, and it's hard to, you know, get upgrades approved sometimes. So we have, you know, in the Fort Worth office, we have file servers, basically one file server. We have a Windows for workgroup environment, which allows us to maintain a very simple setup, very simple environment. We don't have different departments that have to be segregated, and we basically store all of our files in one tree. So it's a small company, and that allows us to be agile. We don't have our IT getting in our way all the time and having it be a, you know, a hindrance, you know, everything that we need is basically always available. That's important. So I maintain, you know, antivirus protection, and everything that I have is very thoroughly and very carefully backed up, you know, every 15 minutes, so we don't, you know, lock down the workstation, because, you know, people need to be able to use their machines, and I don't want tech constantly getting in their way and saying, "No, you can't do this. You have to go call system admin." You know, if somebody... We're all adults, and if they break their computer, well, we spend one hour to reload the machine if necessary, which I've never had to do, and just go on down the road. What we do is we work on a commission basis, so if we don't, if something blows up and we don't save our clients any money, then we don't get paid at all, regardless of how much time we spend working on that client's accounts. - I hate to use the word relatively easy. When you have one office, one location, everything's in a, you know, you know, on-site, on-prem storage system. What happens, Frank, when you buy another company and they have a different system, (both laugh) than you have, - Yeah. - and more importantly, the other folks, the new folks, need to collaborate with the existing folks on the same documents across two networks. How do you reconcile all that? - Well, Microsoft says that you take your, you know, very happy client base, and you put them in a domain environment, and you restrict their world, and you buy servers, and servers, and servers, and servers, and servers, you know, backups to backups to backups to backups to backups, and throw a bunch of money at Microsoft, and just pray it works, which, after doing my research, I found it doesn't work (laughs), so, you know, the suggested solution was everybody in this office would move over to a domain environment, and then we would set up distributed file system replication, and I started to go down that path, and I was like, okay, you know, we have to do it. We'll just go ahead and get the servers in place, and we'll move everybody over to a domain environment. And then I started researching, and I was like, tons of people posting in Reddit and other places saying it doesn't work, you know, distributed file system doesn't work, and A, it'll take weeks to get data synchronized, if it gets synchronized at all, and then it just blows up for no reason, and you'll never know why, and it just stops working. - Why won't you know why? Is it that there's no control panel or monitoring? What's lacking on that side? - I didn't go into the real details (chuckles) when I was doing my research. I just kept seeing a lot of people posting "It blows up, and you'll never know why," and I was like, "All right, stop. These are documents that our agents have to have. There's no not getting this done. You know, it has to be done." When we purchased, you know, this new company, it was decided very early on that the local office, Fort Worth, was gonna be working some of the new company's cases, so we needed their documents, and it was also decided that the new company was gonna be working some of our cases, so they needed those documents, and we needed to keep that in sync. And the price of this acquisition was significant, and the cost of this process not working could possibly be the entire purchase price of that acquisition if we weren't able to get this problem resolved reliably. - How would you measure that in terms of, is it just man-hours to get the new system set up, or the cost of the servers, or the, - I mean, it's- - What was kind of adding up there? - Well, I mean, if you couldn't... A, if we couldn't get this set up reliably, the acquisition, - The (indistinct) time. - the acquisition could have been in danger, the entire acquisition could have been been in danger, so I mean... And the cost to us, if we have an agent that doesn't have the documents that he needs, when he goes into a hearing, then he's not prepared, we don't get the reduction, we don't get paid. That's the cost. That's the cost of this not working. - The files are the lifeblood of the business operations. - Yeah. - So was there a project? - Yeah. - What was the length of the project plan from like, hey, we're one company now, make it work? Was it a week, a day, a month? What were you looking at? - I had some advance notice, but not a lot. (both chuckle) - Yeah. - Just like any project, it was like, "We're thinking about doing this," and then, "It looks like it may happen, so how quickly can you set this up?" The timeframe to go the Microsoft route would have never worked, I mean, we needed something pretty quick, and it's, you know, I understand that process. I mean, the two companies were in negotiations, and they gave me some lead time, but if we had had to go the Microsoft route, we never would've gotten it done, and the amount of time that we spent getting Resilio set up, all told, I think it was about an hour. And I'm not the only one. I read here on Reddit, in r/sysadmin, there's a (chuckles) a post, one guy talking about, "Got a quick demo call with Resilio," or "Got on a quick demo call with Resilio. They got me a trial up and running in maybe 15 minutes, purchased shortly after that, and haven't touched it since." - (chuckles) I gotta get us a good link to that post. I don't think I've seen that one yet. (Frank laughs) Yeah, that's awesome. - Well, I mean this, I don't know if this is the one that I actually read when I, you know, started heading, you know, heading over to Resilio but, and he also says, "This was almost a year ago now. It just works," and, you know, that's been my experience as well, it's the... You know, I call my Resilio support people the lonely repair, you know, Maytag repair man, because, you know, every time they check in with me, "Hey, Frank, how are things going?" - Like, I see you sitting there like this, thinking, "Nothing to do." (Frank laughs) - Yeah, "You need anything, Frank?" And I'm like, "Nope, I'm good, (Adam laughs) I'm, you know, perfectly happy," so (chuckles). - That's great. So was there any concerns kinda going into, like, looking at an alternative to DFSR? Like, I gotta migrate all my data to a new platform, I gotta buy new storage, I gotta do all this stuff. Like, you know, was there any concerns kinda going into, "Oh, my god, I need a software solution to navigate this link between these two systems, but I don't wanna have all this downtime to do it?" How were you thinking about that? - Oh, I mean, I... Fortunately, I looked at the Microsoft solutions that were available, and I went straight to Resilio, and so I didn't really have to worry about that. I mean, Resilio is just an agent that runs on my file servers, so I really didn't... You know, when I shunned, you know, the Microsoft solution, which I did pretty quickly, and went straight to Resilio, after I did my research on y'all's website, I was like, that's perfect. I don't have any additional hardware costs, I mean, the software cost is not a problem, it's well within our budget to do this, and I was like, this is great, you know, this is fantastic, and we're not gonna, we're not gonna have to change the way we do things just to accomplish this task. The company that we were purchasing, they were in a domain environment, they were in a, you know, they're a very small company. they didn't have on-site IT, they had a remote IT service that was managing all their stuff, so they put them, you know, in a domain environment, so they could very carefully control what they did, so I had, you know, a workgroup environment here, and a domain environment here, and there was just no way to get those two to talk, you know, they were completely disparate networks, and so Resilio was able to bridge that gap for me and not change anything else. All it did was get that job done, perform the tasks that I needed, and not touch the rest of my environment, and I liked that a lot. - Amazing. - Yeah. - Amazing. So how deep have you gotten into the dashboard, and setting up automations, or just kinda like set it, and forget it, and go on? - Set it, forget it, and go on. (Adam laughs) I've got other things to do. I mean, I check in on it every now and then, and every time I check in, it's like, "We're good." I'm like, "Yeah," and it was, and it shows me, you know, I'm just looking at the overview right now, and it shows me, hey, we had, you know, two or three disconnects last week, but no problem, I just, you know, kept going. So, I mean, it's just been a fantastic tool. I was looking at the logs, and we've done... It has synced 1.6 million files, and we're approaching two terabytes with no problems. - Where do you see you guys headed next in terms of kind of building out your IT beyond Resilio? What's kinda next? - We like the way everything is set up, but our CEO has said that, you know, we want to expand, and one of the ways that more- - More acquisitions. - More acquisitions, and the way everything went with this first acquisition from an IT perspective, you know, the answer is, "Sure, go ahead, no problems here." - You know, we got it covered. - (indistinct). - We got it covered. Whatever, you know, company you buy, I don't care what their network is, I can do it, you know, because this model worked in that we were able to get our agents to work some of their clients and, you know, get their agents to work some of ours, I mean, you know, we, you know, we can, we can share that information across the networks without any problem, so. - Fantastic. - So it... You know, Resilio has facilitated the growth of this company. - So what advice, Frank, would you give other folks in your position who are ready to go on that journey of merging disparate systems together, mergers and acquisitions, lots of different storage systems? Like, what's your thought process to kinda like manage that process? - Well, the way I approached it is, you know, I wanted to see the experience that other people had had. I didn't wanna spend a lot of time setting up a solution, only to find that it didn't work, so, I mean, if somebody else has gone down that road before me and has had that experience, and shared that knowledge and that experience, then go look for that, you know, find out what experiences other people have had, because, you know, as... I'm the only person, I'm the only IT, you know, person in this company. I don't have time, I don't have a lab, I don't have time to experiment, I don't have time to do a lot of stuff, so if I can do some research, and find out what problems other people have had, and avoid making those same mistakes, then I'm gonna go that direction, and that's probably the most, you know, helpful advice I could share is that find out what other people have experienced, and that's what I did, you know. I looked at the problems that people have had with distributor file system, and just went, "No, we're not gonna do that," 'cause I mean, it would've taken us, the amount of time that it would've taken us to get that set up, I mean, it would've taken months maybe, you know, to get domain controllers, primary domain controllers, backup domain controllers, not only for the Fort Worth office, but for the Houston office, you know, and get all of that stuff to start syncing up, merging, play nice, just so we could share files? - Yeah, right. - No, that's just stupid, that's just absolutely stupid, - Yeah. - especially when you do some research and find out, oh, it doesn't work (laughs). So (chuckles) yeah, I mean, we're... Everybody, everything, you know, every company out there is operating as leanly, you know, with as lean a budget as possible, and we don't have time to mess around, so do your research, find out what works and what doesn't, and, you know, head that direction. - I appreciate you taking time to help us understand how to be successful in IT for today and tomorrow, and moving faster along the way. What would you say for folks who wanna learn more about Quatro Tax? Where should they go? What should they do? How would they learn about you guys? - Yeah, our website is qtax.com, and we've got all of our information up there, all of our contact information, it's all up there on our website. And, you know, if you're, if you get a property tax bill and you're not happy about it, give us a call. - Frank, you're amazing. It's been a delight speaking with you today. I appreciate all your kind words, and let's keep Resilio up and running and available for the next big acquisition. Any final thoughts? - Thanks for giving me my time back, and I'm not kidding. Thank you (chuckles). - [Adam] I love it.
