Welcome to “The Horse’s Mouth” with Tom McManus, a unique talk show where guests belly up to the bar to discuss business, technology, marketing, and life. No gossip, no hearsay, no BS, just the straight-up truth, right from the source.
Tom’s longtime love of bartending has come full circle since his days as a linebacker on the inaugural Jacksonville Jaguars football team—slinging drinks and talking shop with everyone from high-profile sports figures and entertainers to business leaders, journalists, and community leaders. Tom and guests trade insight and anecdotes, explore day-to-day topics and tackle the hard subjects, all with equal measures of energy, honesty, and laughter. Get the skinny on the real people behind the headlines, straight from the horse’s mouth.
This week, Tom spoke with James Lampke from Robert Half Technology, Jeff Hootselle from Auditmacs, David Webb from BrightMove, Mark Bishop from TSYS Global Payments and Ambre Goff from Level Up Kids.
How is IT being affected while COVID-19 is going on?
James Lampke
It’s difficult not having the physical presence to really continue with projects, migrations, implementations, upgrades on the hardware side. It’s been a really big challenge but I am pretty surprised how creative companies are getting to keep the wheels turning.
Jeff Hootselle
We’ve been helping customers all week with getting set up for remote work, whether it’s things like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and others. With today’s technology, if you are set up properly you can pretty much continue work.
David Webb
Well in I.T. we’ve been doing remote work for 15 or 20 years. This is nothing new to us. I haven’t been the same physical location of any manager of any enterprise company that I have worked for in nearly 20 years. With video conferencing today, it’s easy to be remote. The audio quality is great, it’s just as good as being in a conference room with somebody.
Mark Bishop
Well, for our development team we are able to work remotely as well. However, I have been noticing a shift in our business. We offer mobile payment solutions and over the last few days, we’ve actually seen a strong uptick in the demand for that. There are retailers that need to be able to take payments at the curb and service customers outside their store with mobile phones they are able to do that. We’ve empowered a number of businesses to really make that happen and keep their doors open when they can’t bring customers inside their doors.
Ambre Goff
We are obviously going to an online platform, offering classes online versus in our centers. For a lot of the existing Level Up centers in Canada, that’s their model right now is that students are able to take the classes online. We’re hoping that once we come out of this and we start recovering that we’ll be able to offer a traditional campus.