Ep. 152 – Dynamic Marketing, Inc. COO, Alan Joskowicz

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Our guest today is COO Alliance Member Alan Joskowicz, the Director of Operations and COO for Dynamic Marketing, Inc. 

Alan is highly experienced as a director of operations & director of information technology with a demonstrated history of working in the wholesale, retail, and warehousing industry. He is skilled in negotiation, analytical skills, sales, retail, and databases. 

Alan joined Dynamic Marketing, Inc. in 2010 and grew the company from 250 million in sales to 500 million. He also brought the company from a very old technology-based setup to a modern-day virtual network. While at Dynamics Marketing, Inc., Alan created departments for Operations, HR, IT, and Marketing. 

Alan also added member services far beyond just purchasing and selling the products. Before DMI, he worked for the Federal Reserve, big pharma, and IBM.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• The set criteria for membership 
• When marketing was added into the mix 
• What has changed over the last 10 years of growth within the company 
• The culture of the organization and how to bridge the gap between the different factions within the company 
• How Alan and the company deals with the intricacies in the contracts for union employees 
• How DMI adapted as an organization during COVID

Resources:

Connect with Alan Joskowicz: LinkedIn 

Dynamic Marketing Inc. – https://www.dmiorg.co

Connect with Cameron: Website | LinkedIn

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Our guest is Alan Joskowicz, the Director of Operations and COO for Dynamics Marketing. Alan is highly experienced as a Director of Operations and Director of Information Technology with a demonstrated history of working in the wholesale, retail and warehousing industry. He’s skilled the negotiation, analytical skills, sales, retail and databases. Alan joined Dynamic Marketing in 2010 and grew the company from $250 million in sales to $500 million.

He also brought the company from a very old technology-based setup to a modern-day virtual network. While at Dynamics Marketing, Alan created departments for Operations, HR, IT and Marketing. Alan also added member services far beyond purchasing and selling products. Before DMI, he worked for the Federal Reserve, Big Pharma and IBM. Alan, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Cameron.

I am super curious about what you did with the Fed.

I was in what they called FRIT. That was the Federal Reserve IT in East Rutherford, New Jersey where we have all the exciting cash. Every day, I’d come to work and have to go through a metal detector. They’d be a person with an M16 standing watching me the whole time. It was quite the experience.

Tell us about DMI. What are you doing in terms of the marketing agency?

We do all our marketing in-house. There are a lot of different options in the marketplace for how you handle digital marketing and social media. We made a decision a long time ago that because we are a COOP and the money we use at DMI is our members’ money in essence so we want to do everything as fiscally as possible.

We decided, “Why don’t we bring someone in-house to not only be the middle person for all the marketing for our members and our company so they can execute as well?” We save on that 15% or 20% fee that you’ll get hit with on top of this spend on advertising. Plus, if you have someone do it in-house, they care about the execution and results. They’re doing it for their company.

Who are the members of the COOP?

We are built on independent appliance stores and retailers throughout New York, New Jersey and then the Tri-state area. Also, a lot of mom-and-pop shops sell appliances and furniture. Some of these businesses with two people who run the store are massive. They’re huge online retailers. We have a big spectrum of members.

Do you run some stores as well or are you the marketing agency?

We do not have any stores ourselves. We’re the buying group. That’s our bread and butter. We have a 600,000-square-foot warehouse. We do all the purchasing. We hold the goods and then sell them to our members. When we sell it to our members, it’s far cheaper to buy it through us than it would be to get it through the manufacturer direct because we’re able to take on cash discounts and things of that nature to help bring down the price point on these products.

You’re not only doing the marketing but you’re the buying group for the furniture as well for a lot of these stores.

The backbone of DMI is being the buyer of these appliances, electronics and goods for our members. That is what built the company years ago. Fast forward, it makes us different from other buying groups. Why be a member of our group versus someone else other than the location and services? We know marketing is number one on people’s lists when you open up a store. A lot of our appliance stores are excellent salespeople. They understand the product and know how to sell the product and service it. They take care of their customers. They have no time nor desire to get involved in marketing.

Dynamic Marketing: What makes Dynamic Marketing different from other buying groups? Why become a member of their group versus someone else? It’s because they prioritize service.

Do you have any territories for your members at all or do you have Bob’s Furniture and Mary’s Furniture and they’re three doors away from each other both buying from you?

There isn’t any type of laid out territories written on paper but there is an understanding that if I have an appliance store on 2nd Street, I don’t want to have three more stores open up with my group on 2nd Street. I don’t want to create competition for my members. Every time someone wants to join DMI, there’s a set criterion. I bring that in front of our board of directors. We review things like the location, showroom, reputation and everything. It’s important before we allow them to join our membership.

Do they pay to be a member and then they also buy the services? Is there a franchise fee? Do they pay to be a member first?

You put money into the company that accesses collateral for your buying power. There’s a flat rate that we ask for $50,000. That’s their money. We don’t keep that but they get a percentage of that to make purchases. We protect the other members since we are COOP. If someone new joins, pulls $40,000 in goods and then splits town, I have the money already to cover that.

There is an investment but it’s their money. We also have a membership fee. It’s very minimal. It’s what we determined from the beginning, what keeps the operation running. I have to pay for my staff, the building, the machine and so forth. We charge a small commission on each item they pull. Between that membership fee and the commission, that’s what I live on to allow us to operate. If we see a surplus at the end of the year, everything else goes back to the members and dividends.

How many members have you got?

We are sitting at 78 members.

78 members all in the tri-state area?

Yes. Everybody is from New York and New Jersey. We’re talking to some people in Pennsylvania. We have two people up in Connecticut. Our warehouse is in Hamilton, New Jersey. It’s fifteen minutes away from Princeton.

Did you get competitors in this space that are in other markets or competitors in your market as well?

It’s ironic. Competitors or friends, three other buying groups do what we do. Their services might differ but their bread and butter are the same as ours. They buy in bulk and then sell back to their members. The four of our groups are part of a bigger umbrella called NECO. We come up with purchase agreements with the manufacturers as a group. We work together but run our COOPs differently. We have our members. Our goal is to do the best we can to help our members and not want a member to jump to another COOP. It’s an interesting thing. It’s like you have your friends but they’re also your competitors at the same time.

How many employees have you got?

We have roughly 80 people.

With the top-line revenue, is that flow-through revenue? Do you book that $500 million on your PNL or is that the volume of transactions that your customers are buying as well?

That’s the volume of transactions. That’s not all revenue.

With $500 million in transactions, there’s a lot of logistics. Does all of that flows through your warehouse too or does some of that stuff get drop-shipped directly to your members?

All of it. The bulk majority comes through our warehouse. We book all the appointments. The manufacturers drop them at our warehouse and then we store them. We pull it when the members need it. There are drop shift offerings where our members can drop loads directly to a building site or their store. Sometimes there’s a benefit to that. The bulk majority comes through our warehouse.

That’s a lot of logistics to be able to handle all that stuff.

The good thing is we’re a FOB site so it’s anything that our members are responsible for like all the trucking. DMI before I joined had its fleet of trucks. It was a losing situation. What you’re asking is for all the members to pay a fee to maintain trucking, you have one guy who might pull merchandise once a week, half a truckload and another who pulls two truckloads every day. How do you balance that? What we decided is, “You handle the trucking. We’ll work with trucking companies and try to make it as appealing as possible to help our members. You are responsible for the cost, meaning you control that cost, which is a benefit.”

Do you coordinate the shipping and the trucking for them at all? Do you have a buying relationship with any of the bigger firms there?

We have some relationships with some of the bigger trucking companies that do certain services and we build relationships to allow them to offer deals to our members. The biggest thing is we have smaller trucking companies who want to help our members. They’re everything. Us working with them allows them to negotiate deals with our members. That’s in place.

We’ve tried strategies to have trucking in-house like an outside company but in-house. That never seems to work. What worked out for us is, “If you are reputable and have a good fleet of guys and trucks that are reliable, I’ll work with you. I’ll give you my members to talk to and they work with you.” That seemed to work the best.

I used to coach a company called Bluegrace Logistics. They’ve got huge groups all over North America. It’s a 700-employee company but the stuff they do is work with groups like you on taking that pain in the ass factor off. When did you add marketing to the mix?

It’s funny. It was something that we wanted to do. When I joined the company, they gave it to me as a project but I couldn’t launch it off the ground. There were so many things I had to tackle when I first joined the business back in 2010. I sat down and mapped out like, “This is what needs to happen before we even look at this area.”

Around 2017 or 2018 was when we took off with marketing but also around that time we found that there are ways our members had access to marketing that were not working. It was failing for them. They were falling away from that. The timing worked out perfectly. Years ago, we launched marketing in-house for them.

What else do you provide as part of the COOP?

We have product knowledge. We provide help with financing, managing your floor and giving them some guidance since we know what the other members are doing. We provide trade shows and other get-togethers to network, meet other members and learn from them. We’re always looking for new things that we can offer to our members to bring value to what we can do for them and also help them sell and be successful as a business.

Always look for new things you can offer to your team members so you can bring value to them.

In the franchising world, some of the values that good franchisors can bring to the table for the franchisees are buying power. When I ran my first business in 1986, I was running a house painting company. I was part of a group called College Pro Painters. College Pro got me big painting discounts and good deals on workers’ comp and insurance. Even though I was paying them a royalty, which was high, the value from everything else was almost an offset against that royalty if I’d gone and run it on my own.

If I was running it on my own, there was no royalty but I was going to be paying through the roof on everything else. Also, networking and learning are powerful too. Tell me about the growth. You’ve been with the organization for ten years and it’s doubled in size. What’s changed for you in those years?

It’s a mixture of things. Online has helped with that. A lot of people were early to adapt to online, especially some of our aggressive members who understood the online format, how to market themselves and get found on Google. They mastered that but consumers weren’t ready. Over those ten years, consumers became more willing and embraced that format to make purchases, especially large items like appliances. That was a big change.

For DMI, a lot of it was our ability to scale, update our systems internally and allow our members to have direct access to our order entry system via API so they’re able to streamline a lot of things. When I got there, I had members who were so smart. They figured out how to screengrab our system and force the entries in there. It was so dirty. If I was to make one change in my ordering system, it would throw their whole thing off.

Number one, we have got to create an API system where our members can streamline that type of process. Also, internally understanding we have different businesses. I have members who are growing at an exponential rate online doing sales cross-country. I have members who were brick and mortar focused on a local community. How do I make my business work for both of those types of organizations? It was sitting down, mapping out and figuring out how to help everybody without hurting anybody.

Dynamic Marketing: If you have members growing online doing cross-country sales or more focused on a local community, make your business work for both.

With all of this growth, was there a transition with the people? Have you been able to keep most of your people through the years? How’s that gone?

Something interesting happened as we moved. In 2014, we were in Brooklyn. We had a smaller warehouse and the only way to grow is to lease a bigger space. Brooklyn’s marketplace was already ridiculous. We started looking and we have to find this place out in Hamilton, New Jersey in 2014 random but we got a great rate for the lease. It made sense for our business and double the size of the warehouse but doing that also created a lot of turnovers in my staff. That hurt. That was 6 to 8 months of a learning curve.

We’re a unique business. People come into DMI. They don’t understand what we’re doing, why we do it or how it works. I was fortunate. We have an incredible staff that is credited to a staffing agency, Robert Half that we worked with at the time. They got us a lot of quality people. A lot of those people who grew at the company are now supervisors and managers that are contributing to the business.

How would you describe the culture of your organization?

It was very different when I first got there. I experienced a lot of different types of cultures as I grew in my career, going from IBM where you had frequent meetings and a lot of communication or when I worked in Big Pharma to working at the Fed. Every place was very different. I saw certain things that worked and certain things that didn’t.

When I got to DMI, I knew I wanted to create a very comfortable environment where people can talk, communicate and express when there’s a problem and work together. It was not like that when I got there. You were very divided. Our office and warehouse and a lot of companies have that struggle. People feel they’re treated differently because they work in one part of the business versus another. My goal is to bridge that gap.

The office morale is incredible and has fantastic communication. Everyone is working to meet the common goal to better the company to help our members. Over the last several years, I finally made that achievement with our warehouse. People are starting to communicate more with us. Everyone feels like it’s one team. The culture is we’re all working at this together. The better the business does, the better we all do.

The better the business does, the better everyone does.

Harvard has an article years ago called The Misunderstood Role of the COO. How would you describe your role as a COO to your peers?

I touch everything in the business and it’s something I say a lot when people call me. “How are you doing, Alan?” “It’s been a day.” Sometimes I sit back at the end of the day and think, “What did I do?” I start to think about what I accomplished for the day. I dealt with a problem in the warehouse, marketing, merchandising and IT. How did I do all that? That’s, crazy. It’s a lot of hats.

You’re doing a little bit of everything. The best way to describe it is like the potpourri of a job. My biggest struggle is I joined the company as a Director of IT. Shifting people to say, “I don’t run IT anymore. Do I oversee it? Yes. Do I communicate with our manager in IT? Yes.” Ultimately, I’m seeing other things too. It’s pushing people as nicely as I can and saying, “I understand you have a problem with this. Go speak to my manager of IT. Let him handle it. That’s why he’s here. I have something else to focus on.”

How do you get some of that stuff off your plate? Do you just say, “Go talk to the manager?” How does that conversation go?

It depends on who’s asking. With the internal staff, I’ll be nice about it but I push them in that direction. I say, “I hear your problem. I’m empathetic to the issue but unless it’s something I can answer quickly, it sounds like something that so and so can work on. Why don’t you throw in a help desk ticket? They’ll jump on that.” If the president of our company or our biggest member calls me about a technical issue, I’m not going to spearhead that and make sure it gets taken care of. If they’re coming to me directly and it’s an issue, then it’s already pretty serious. I also gauge the situation.

I’ve noticed over the years that CEOs often don’t do that very well. They tend to get a little bit more involved than they need to in areas. How does your CEO work on that? Do they make sure if it’s your area, they let you know, “Go talk to Alan. It’s his area?” Do they get involved? If they’re getting involved, how do they do it properly?

I’m lucky. What you would call a CEO is the president of our Board of Directors. In theory, that person can switch from year to year. We’re fortunate for the past couple of years that it’s been the same person. He’s also the owner of our largest appliance store and a member, which is great because he understands the struggles that the members have with the other appliance stores. He’s been very good about balancing things.

He tends to get involved sometimes in the negotiation of merchandise because that’s his expertise. He’ll sit down and get involved with our head buyer, give his opinion, help determine certain things and push for better pricing. It’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. If it’s anything else in the business, a lot of times, I get that CC’d email or a text from him saying, “I got an issue that came to me. Can you jump on that?” He lets me run with it. He knows I’ll go to him if I feel like it’s something that we need his involvement in.

What have your challenges been over the last several years? In the transition from the Head of IT into the COO, what were some of the challenges you had to work through?

Some of our biggest challenges are our warehouse and staff are a union so working with non-union and union staff, the rules can differ. Our biggest struggle is saying,” How do we build this so everyone has the same rules without breaking a union contract?” Personalities on our Board of Directors, people having a difference of opinion. Unfortunately, a lot of our board members are very business-focused when they’re in the boardroom.

Business rules can differ when working with non-union and union staff.

They think about DMI as a group and not for their own business. I’ve had guys come to me who are on the board or members who want to see change and it’s very focused on what they need. That’s my biggest challenge. How do you say no to a board member? How do you say no to someone who’s technically your boss?

How do you say no to them? Also, what information do you relay to the board? What information do you hold back from the board?

I don’t bother the board with day-to-day minutia. Unless it’s something that’s going to impact the membership as a whole long-term and it’s going to be a change in how they can run their business, that’s when the board gets involved. If I’m going to change our order entry system and in some way, you have to do a circle instead of a square every morning, then the board’s involved. I need to make sure that they’re okay with it, that they can live with it and that they’re okay with having our members do it.

All the day-to-day problems that we have, those struggles that you deal with every day and all the issues that come through my desk, I don’t bother them with that. It would stress them out anyway. I take that all in. How do I say no to them? It took time. It took years of experience and building respect with them where I can be very honest with them. I feel like I’m at a point where if someone calls me and I don’t think it’s a good idea, I’m incredibly respectful about it but if I don’t think it’s good, I’ll tell them why and suggest alternatives. That’s how I work it out with anybody who comes to me with an issue.

How about the unions? How do you deal with them? In all of our interviews, I’m not sure anyone has brought up union employees yet so this is intriguing.

It’s a very complicated subject, I have to tell you. First, I sit down and read the union contract a couple of times. There are a lot of rules that you have to follow. When I created an HR department and I brought someone in to run HR for us, I sat down with her and said, “Can we go over the employee handbook and match it to our union handbook?” In some places, l say, “Please see the union contract for guidance.”

In other areas, union contract tends to be very vague. They’ll say something but don’t address how to handle it. If it’s not in our handbook, how do we handle it? The biggest problem that I saw when I took that role to figure out was everybody got a different answer. They come to me and say, “Alan, do I listen to him or her? Whom do I listen to?”

I said, “The only way we can make it work is it needs to be documented. If it’s not written down, it’s always going to be an opinion. This can’t be an opinion. This has to be policy.” If Tom comes to me with this problem and Billy comes to me six months from now with the same problem, my answer has to be the same, especially when it comes to HR matters. It was very hard. You can’t give incentives to union members. If you give somebody a bonus, you’re breaking the contract. You can’t go into what’s considered independent agreements with an individual in the union.

Dynamic Marketing: You can’t do independent agreements with an individual in a union. You need to figure out ways to reward strong workers without hurting people.

You need to figure out ways that you can reward the strong workers without hurting people and how to make it a fair workplace where if you’re not a strong worker, all the rules will benefit those who are and those who aren’t will see the difference. That’s been a goal of ours to figure out how to handle that. I have great workers. We don’t want to make rules. Three people are not picking up the slack and that’s been the goal.

I’ve got to be careful with bringing my bias into the conversation and questions as well so I’ll flip where I was going to go up. What do you think are some of the strengths that come to your company because it’s a union shop? What things does it bring you that have proven out to be well or good for you?

It challenges us to be a better company and be fair across the board. It’s so easy to start to focus on your strongest staff members and not think, “Why is this person struggling? Why is this person not up to par?” With the union, I can’t just say, “Give raises to my strongest workers. Fire the guys who don’t do well and bring new people.” I can’t do that. “Why is this guy not as fast as this guy? Why this guy does not care much about what his work is?” Work with them. It forces us to train better and focus better on staff.

Does it force you to fire the underperformers versus keeping them for six more months too? Do the underperformers get in the way of things where it forces you to get rid of them in the right way?

In the union, you can’t just fire somebody unless it’s something egregious like they walk up and punch a manager in the face. It means you always need a performance plan. It starts with that verbal warning and then some write-ups go along with it. I’ve told everybody, “I don’t just want to write someone up with the intention to get them to be terminated.”

With a union, you can’t just fire somebody unless they do something egregious. Always prepare a performance plan.

You want to write them up with the intention to help them improve.

Yes. The difference that our shop steward has seen is, at first, he was a little apprehensive to work with me but I said, “I want to help the staff. If someone is struggling, let’s find a way to make it work.”

It’s good management.

I’m trying. It continues to be an ongoing balance but I see a tip in the right direction, for sure.

With some of the offerings that you have on the marketing side to your members, what are you noticing that’s working well for them or easier for you to put in place for them?

The easiest thing to do is social media. We found right away the way to get people kicked off. We don’t believe in this mentality where if you’re a member of DMI, you have to do this marketing program or buy into this idea. Everything is opt-in. You don’t have to do it. “We’re going to do it. Your dollars in the company are paying for it so you only benefit from it but if you want to do your marketing strategy and want our hands off of it, no problem.” We have over 60% of our members opting in. At this point, we’re at 100% opting for our top 10 members and these are members who know marketing. The first offering was social media like Facebook.

You put out some good offerings and get some likes and followers. That’s organic advertising. It explains to them what that means. We can continue helping you boost your brand without paying for it. It’s a wonderful thing versus Google. Advertising on Google is complicated. It’s super hard to do. My marketing person is a whiz. She figured out a way to make sense of it all. It’s a lot of work. Every day, I appreciate what she’s doing because I know the complications that get involved there and the constant changing that they do with AdWords.

Is there any area that you outsource for the COOP or do you do those services in-house?

Primarily, it’s in-house. We do outsource from time to time. We do it for knowledge learning. There’s one company that we inherited from one of our brands and they did marketing. We started working with them almost apprehensive because we’re always suspicious of these outside companies. They only care about themselves and we found a good one. This particular company cares about its customers. They took care of us. They’re not overselling us or trying to hurt us in any way. I have to say that’s been beneficial. We learn from them.

How about your stuff with the board itself? What are your meeting rhythms with them and with your leadership team internally?

Funny you asked that because I got done with meeting suck and that was very eye-opening. The board meetings are monthly so every month, we meet with them. It’s about a two-hour meeting. It depends. It can be faster or longer depending on the subject. With that, the structure’s good. We have an agenda. We send it out. We follow the minutes. That was a good structure in place before my time. The media of my internal staff, before I came to DMI, was nonexistent. There were no meetings. I started to meet regularly with my team when I was running IT.

When I shifted into running operations, I continue meeting with them for a while with the hope to say, “You’re in charge of IT now. Do this with them and then maybe I’ll jump in once a month to make sure that with your weekly meetings, everything is good. Bring me in anytime you need me but I don’t want to be a babysitter and come off as if I’m micromanaging. I don’t want to do that at all.” I’m working on trying to come up with meeting cadences for the rest of the group. I’m working on it to see what makes the most sense for us. We do have a business development team that gets together. I handpicked people from different parts of the business to join me once a month to go over things like, “What should our vision be like? What should our core values be like?”

Dynamic Marketing: Build a business development team with people from different parts of your business. Hold meetings focusing on essential things like your vision and values.

DMI never had those things in place. To me, that’s important. We’re growing as a larger business. We need that type of stuff in place so people would know what to expect out of us and someone new who joins the company should understand, “This is their values and vision.” I decided that I shouldn’t be determining that. Our Board of Directors doesn’t know the internal relationships as well so I decided to bring people from other groups in the business in, map it out, brainstorm and do it as a team.

I’m curious about the changes that happened because of COVID. What happened to the organization? You were in New York so you got hit hard back in March, April and May 2020. What changes did you have to go through as an organization to get through that?

It was crazy. I remember the date, March 16th, 2020. It was a Monday. We got together. It was funny. I was meeting with some people and they came to the office to meet about something. I said, “We’re going to have to do work from home.” They came and said, “No. We’re here to meet about a dealer trip.” I said, “Dealer trip? No one’s going anywhere. We’re going to full lockdown.” “No, we’re not.” I said, “Yes, we are. We need to figure out a schedule where we can have people work from home.”

We’re a very onsite business so we recognize quickly that we need a hybrid schedule. How do we bring minimal staff into the office that needs to be here while allowing people to have that social distancing and not be worried about the virus? We’ve never had that before. Working from home prior to COVID was almost a mean day off. Now people realize, “We can do work from home.” I could say with confidence that even when things go back to some sense of normal, we’ll have the ability to do work from home as well. Why not? It’s working.

It’s intriguing watching companies, especially the older firms. I was speaking with the second in command from AARP, the American Association of Retired People. They’re a clot. They’re 1,400 employees. There’re a lot of Baby Boomers working there. The CEOs were like, “There’s no way we would ever have let anybody work from home.” 3 days later, 1,400 people were working from home and then they’re like, “I don’t know why we have an office.” The changes are extraordinary. It is an interesting mindset to bring into our companies, not just around work from home but anything around change. “What if we could?”

When you go back to the tech side of DMI, when I got there, everything was physical. All our hardware was physical. It was a mess. When I was at the Fed, something that was very intriguing that was happening there is they were going all virtual. I started to research these virtual machines and dig into this. I came to DMI and saw that they had some semblance of it, a Citrix system in the warehouse but it wasn’t great. I said, “What if we go virtual?”

One of the people who were in charge of our billing department at the time said, “You can’t.” I said, “Why?” “That’s not how we do it.” I said, “Why not? Why can’t we try?” My first major goal was for everything to be virtual. My office was in Brooklyn. I lived out in the middle of New Jersey. If a server went down in the middle of the night, that was an hour and a half before I even got on site to reboot a server. What if I could do it from home? We did. We went all virtual. I could reboot something at 3:00 in the morning from my house. It was a life-changing business. That happens across the board. Why do we do it this way? It’s because we do.

I have another question about IT and then I’ll wrap up with my final one. I’m curious. My bias around IT had often been that IT is the tail that wags the dog. IT people are very smart. They want to build cool things and nobody else in the business understands them at all. You walk in and go, “We need the latest 82 gigs, 74B.” “What’s that do?” “It prevents this and this. We need two of them. How much do they cost?” “$74,000 each.” “I don’t understand how to argue with you.” I walk over to sales and go, “You guys aren’t selling enough.” Has your view of IT changed at all since you are COO? Do you see it from a different perspective?

I do but in a positive way. I learned this early on, which helped shape my entire career but I knew this mentality that you’re either tech or in management. You can’t be both. It’s quite different from that career path. I chose to go on the management side of it but I’ll always have a place in my heart for IT. That’s where I broke into my professional career. It is that balance of a budget versus what you should spend. As an IT person, you always want the latest and greatest.

Spending on IT is all about balancing the budget versus what you should spend.

The reality is stuff always could be better, leaner, faster and more integrated. “I agree but at what cost?” On the ops cost, we often don’t invest enough in IT because of the cost.

The buzzword for me is scalability. What do we buy today that I can use five years from now? If you want to give me 3 years of ROI, I’ll give you 5. If I give you that, the cost is so much less and we do. We’ll spread the cost of something over. Normally, it’s 3 years. If I can go back to my board and say, “This piece, license and machine we bought lasted us for 5, 6 to 7 years,” it was worth that higher cost back when we bought it because we didn’t have to buy it again. We didn’t have to replace it. It’s that mindset that’s changed as I went into my role versus being IT only.

If we were to roll the camera back to Alan graduating from college and getting ready to start in his career, what advice would you give yourself back then?

The biggest piece is listening and absorbing. When you’re brand new, people want to share everything. A lot of the guys who have experience love to brag but when they brag, they’re knowledge-sharing. Take it all in. When you’re young, you want to share your ideas. You’re so fast to say, “Look at what I could do and how I could do it.” Instead of saying, “How would you handle that situation and learn from them?” Over the years, I’ve learned that trick and it’s been so helpful in my career. Listen.

Dynamic Marketing: When you’re brand new to a team, you want to share everything. Instead of saying, “Look what I can do,” say, “How can I handle this situation?”

Alan Joskowicz, the COO for Dynamics Marketing and member of the COO Alliance. Thanks very much for sharing with us. I appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

That was awesome.

Important Links

• Dynamics Marketing
• The Misunderstood Role of the COO
• COO Alliance

About Alan Joskowicz

Experienced Executive Director, Director of Operations & Director of Information Technology with a demonstrated history of working in the wholesale, retail, and warehousing industry. Skilled in Negotiation, Analytical Skills, Sales, Retail, and Databases. Strong information technology professional with a Bachelors degree focused in Telecommunications and Business Management from DeVry University.