Welcome to the next episode of the Bridge Podcast. I'm your host, Scott Kinka. This week we had the opportunity to sit down with Mike Nowak, who is the Chief Revenue Officer of BCM One. I won't steal his thunder, but if you're not familiar with BCM One, they are an MSP, with what Mike describes as a Nordstrom class approach, to customer fulfillment, if you will.
They're in connectivity. SDWAN SIP. They've got about a million UCaas seats out there. Very interesting company. Mike's a great speaker, dad to two girls, a self-professed builder, as he says. He goes out and builds stuff in the yard for stress relief, when his wife lets him, which I loved. We talked quite a bit about the pandemic, kind of their seminal moment for realizing that this was going to be something, you know, corporate and worldwide affecting, was when one of the big shows in our industry, Channel Partners, was canceled.
This was the company that was already prepared for remote work as they're in it, but he did talk about how depressing it was, how shocking it was to see empty offices, stopping traveling, stopping seeing partners and customers. He gives some really good feedback, even though the office vibe is sort of lost, at least to some degree, about trusting your people.
How that's the way to pull them in, give them leadership opportunities. Really interesting. We talk about that. We did get into a little bit of what BCMs return-to-work policies are going to be going forward. They have made their decisions and that may be useful to you and your business. BCM One is also a partner with, on a handful of the collaboration platforms, WebEx teams.
They have their own, which is part of the netsapiens platform. We talked a lot about Teams becoming sort of a default in the pandemic and how business sort of ran into it and are now trying to figure out what their long-term strategy looks like. It's really important to understand what the hybrid work strategy looks like.
He cautioned against people just saying: “Hey, this is what we did in the pandemic, so let's just do that going forward”. It's about figuring out requirements. How do we want to work? Who do we want to be going forward? We had a fun conversation about desk phones and whether they matter. We even talked about fax.
I can't believe we did, but we talked about fax. Mike also talked about security. You know, businesses rushed into decisions. They made mistakes. And we got a mulligan, if you will. But now's the time to figure out what the businesses should look like on a go-forward basis, both from a security perspective and from a collaboration perspective. And then lastly, we had some really interesting banter about the role of the CIO and how their role changed within the pandemic and how they now have a strategic seat. But the key to holding that seat is to become a student of the P&L as a tech leader to understand business financials as the way to become part of that strategic conversation in the boardroom. So, you know, I'll stop blathering on. Mike's a super compelling guy. We had a great conversation. I really hope that you pull as much value from this conversation as I did. So let's get to it. My conversation with Mike Nowak from BCM One.
CONTACT MIKE
Web: https://www.bcmone.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bcmonenyc
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bcm_one
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/business-communications-management/