Transcript of interview with Atlanta Business Radio
Lee Kantor:
Lea Kantor here with Jason Holland and Gavin Lindeman with Holland IT. Welcome gentlemen. Well, Jason, why don’t we start with you since your name’s on the top of the billboard here. Tell us about Holland IT, how are you serving folks?
Jason Holland:
I started Holland IT about 15 years ago because, I saw a segment of the Atlanta population that were pretty underserved, that was nonprofits and arts organizations and that to this day is still our core business. I had been in corporate IT for 10 years before that. And while that was fun and interesting, I didn’t feel very fulfilled so I wanted to start giving back a little bit. Between my wife and I, we had a lot of contacts in the nonprofit world and I just started reaching out to those people and asking what they were doing for IT and how they were doing and almost invariably they were doing awful and needed a lot of help. So that was sort of the impetus to start Holland IT.
Lee Kantor:
When you’re working with these types of firms, are they nonprofits in the sense that they’re charities, for medical needs for kids or are they arts organizations? Nonprofit is such a broad category.
Jason Holland:
We have a pretty broad spectrum of clients, from theaters, examples that some of the listeners might know is Dad’s garage Theater Company or Actors Express. All the way to the women’s Resource Center for domestic violence.
Lee Kantor:
but some hospitals now are non profit . Are you involved in things where HIPAA and those kinds of securities, are a concern or cybersecurity like that as opposed Dad’s Garage. If someone has the list of the Improvers, I don’t know if that is as dire…
Jason Holland:
That’s a good point. Generally, larger organizations carry their own internal IT and we serve a population that’s going to be a smaller organization that can’t carry their own internal IT. The situations where we see HIPAA a lot are with a our clients that are therapist. For the most part we don’t work with big hospitals or anything like that. We usually top out at medium businesses, around the largest we have is about 80 to 90 workstations.
Lee Kantor:
And what type of services do you provide?
Jason Holland:
Soup to nuts in terms of IT. We can go in there and do desk side support for people’s workstations, we can build them a website, we can do their office set up, we can run cabling and their network infrastructure, get them phones, pretty much across the board for office IT.
Lee Kantor:
So everything from setting up a VOIP system to getting them on the cloud? Maybe they’re not on the cloud or some of them not on the cloud at first?
Jason Holland:
Absolutely. Yeah. We’re still seeing a lot of cloud adoption, especially in the for profit sector it’s fairly high. We’re still seeing a lot of nonprofits that still are working under an older paradigm, servers in the office, infrastructure that’s in the office. One of our main philosophies is to get that out of the office as much as possible to lower cost of ownership and increased reliability, make sure that there’s good backups, that sort of thing.
Lee Kantor:
Right. Whereas if they are having to handle that internally with devices that are in their office, then they’re relying on human beings to make backups?
Jason Holland:
You got it. That’s the one thing that I drill into all of our folks here is that, if you rely on humans, you’re not getting reliability.
Lee Kantor:
That must be an interesting conversation.
Jason Holland:
It’s one of the things that people don’t really understand is just how critical backup is to a small business or a small organization. How very quickly things can go south and really destroy an organization if you don’t have good backups, if everything goes wrong… and sometimes everything goes wrong.
Lee Kantor:
And it’s funny because companies that have leaned into cloud and rely on cloud, they don’t even think about that anymore. Right? Where these companies that aren’t in the cloud, that’s something they’ve got to do everyday before they leave, somebody hitting the backup button.
Jason Holland:
Absolutely, and we’re a big fan of leveraging the cloud, but even so we don’t the cloud 100 percent. We have the rule of three for backups that we like to see it backed up in three places if it is important to you. So even though you may have a lot of your data in the cloud, we often still back that up for several reasons. I mean it’s not likely that Google is going to go out of business tomorrow, but who knows, maybe their terms of service change or there’s some other issue that keeps them from getting their data quickly, if we have another backup that’s onsite as well, we can pull that down and get them going faster.
Lee Kantor:
So you still rely on something onsite?
Jason Holland:
Yes. Generally speaking. Because they’re already used to doing that anyway. The devices that we use these days are so much easier to deal with and one of the services that we do is to monitor those devices for the organization. Sol they don’t have to deal with it, but we could log into it once a month, make sure it’s updated, that it’s backing up, that sort of thing. That provides a really low cost safety level for them. It gives them one more layer of backup.
Lee Kantor:
Right, because if their donor list goes away and what do they do?
Jason Holland:
If you’re a nonprofit that relies solely on donors and that suddenly disappears, what do you do at that point? You might be able to cobble something together from some emails, but at the very least, you’re going to be down for weeks or months
Lee Kantor:
Right, It’s life or death for these people.
Jason Holland:
And these nonprofits are living hand to mouth anyway. I mean, there’s a reason they don’t carry an onboard IT staff instead, they don’t have the budget for it. So the minute you introduce problems like that, you’re going to have a lot of trouble.
Lee Kantor:
Now. What’s the impetus to get in contact with your firm? Did something bad happen usually or it’s time to grow up or they have a board member that heard about you? What’s your normal point of entry in one of these new accounts?
Jason Holland:
We’ve grown so much in the last couple of years that the way that people are reaching us is changing a good bit. Generally, over the course of the company, it’s been word of mouth because the nonprofit and arts organizations fairly close knit. A lot of people know each other, it was a lot of word of mouth. A lot of board members that talk to other board members and that sort of thing. The situation that we find is there’s almost invariably a lifecycle of these organizations. It starts out that someone is the IT person in the organization because either the software was on their desk or they had a son who knew a little bit about computers and they start doing that because the organization is small and it’s usually not very complicated. Then as the organization grows, it very quickly becomes unmanageable. Usually we get the call right at the point where things are starting to become unmanageable or they’ve already gotten unmanageable.
Lee Kantor:
What’s a typical first thing that becomes unmanageable?
Jason Holland:
What’s a good example, Gavin?
Lee Kantor:
Gavin Lindeman jump in here. You’re the brains behind the operation. What’s your role?
Gavin Lindeman:
That’s what I like to tell them. I would say a huge example for us would be something that might seem small at first that can become quite large like Quickbooks. A lot of clients were using a desktop version of Quickbooks, that’s been a piece of software that almost every business uses.
Lee Kantor:
But you have to update that.
Gavin Lindeman:
You have to update it and it can be very simple for one person to use, but some of the organizations grow larger and you need for users to get in there and start doing invoices and how do you do that? It’s very easy for our clients to understand how it works at a very basic level, but the second they have to step beyond that. It becomes very complicated and some someone like us would step in. What really happens there is that we’ll come on site and we’ll see the Quickbooks issue and fix the Quickbooks issue. And then you look around, you start asking questions and we started doing a full assessment and you’ll find out that there are always knobs that you can turn to make things run smoother and faster. Whether they’re using old network equipment, this slows down the whole network, whether they have their security setup right, maybe their website, it doesn’t have an SSL certificate and when a client goes to it, it gives them a big warning message before they get on a website and it’s not encrypting their data. There are a million things that needed to be done to make sure that your nonprofit or business is running properly from an IT perspective. The only real way to find that out is to have someone whose job it is to find that information, someone who can sit down and go through your entire business from end to end and find those issues so that they can start correcting them.
Lee Kantor:
Now, from the, from the nonprofit standpoint, where can you draw the lines of delineation between I have IT issues like my CRM, some of these cloud based platforms that I’m utilizing to run my business and then my website where I have a person that I want to go to the website and, and make a donation. So the delineation between my web stuff and my IT stuff, do you handle all of that? Is that a turnkey thing? Your help helping me from the website side where somebody can input their name and then they go to a secure place to do their credit card or to join a mailing list, do you do that all the way through to send out emails and newsletters?
Gavin Lindeman:
We do that all.
Lee Kantor:
Because not every IT organization does that, they have a kind of a hard line.
Gavin Lindeman:
Correct. We find the organizations that separate those two things tend to have them not work very well because those things should be very intertwined. You want that data from your website to end up in the CRM that you’re using, you want all of that information to be in one central location. If you separate that data, it actually becomes harder for that organization to use that data effectively. So a lot of times when we come into an organization they may just need an IT service from us, but then when we start talking about their website and what that website does for them, we open up that path and say, “well, let us do it all”. Because if we’re doing it all, we’re going to make sure it all works together properly.
Lee Kantor:
So you become kind of their chief technical officer?
Jason Holland:
Yes, pretty much. it’s a holistic approach, going in there and not saying “we’re just going to fix your phone” like a phone vendor might, but really coming in and saying-
Lee Kantor:
But you might fix their their phone.
Jason Holland:
Absolutely. Yeah, totally. I mean that could be the reason that they called us was that their phones weren’t reaching a certain place or whatever. So we’ll go in there and we’ll look around and say here are the other ways that we can make you more productive and make your just daily lives easier.
Lee Kantor:
Once you get into the realm of helping with their website, now you’re touching their marketing, now you’re touching a lot of another aspect of their business which usually isn’t in the scope of work for an it organization.
Jason Holland:
Yes, that is the case and that’s why we work with a lot of other companies to do that sort of thing. We don’t have all of this in house, but we have tons of partners that we work with that will do marketing, PR, and user experience, and bring those subject matter experts in under the umbrella of our consulting and say here’s what we can do for you as a one stop shop. You only have to talk to us. You don’t have to talk to 20 different people and we’ll be the people that will sit down and explain it and make it sound like a human to you. Let us speak to the Geeks.
Lee Kantor:
So the relationship the client has is with Holland IT and then if they need a marketing automation expert, Holland finds the marketing automation and then your the ones who are yelling at them and dealing with the problems. I’m yelling at Holland IT and Holland IT is yelling at the people doing the work. So I don’t have to educate myself because I have a good relationship with Holland IT.
Jason Holland:
Absolutely. That’s the way that it works.
Lee Kantor:
And you mentioned the target is nonprofits. Are they only Atlanta base or are they, are all over the country?
Jason Holland:
We’re not in entirely nonprofit, we do have a fair amount of small business so I don’t want to give that short shrift, but we’ve got them all over the US. We’ve got some folks out on the west coast, some in New York, DC.
Lee Kantor:
So how are they finding Holland IT? I mean, I guess there’s not a lot of people that are doing the whole combination soup to nuts for anything technology. Anything that is technological is under your domain kind of right?
Jason Holland:
For the most part. Yeah, when you think about that, I mean, and it is a pretty broad spectrum. Generally people out of town, again, it’s a word of mouth, we have some folks out on the west coast that are in the entertainment business. We have therapists in Washington dc that heard about us through other therapists in Atlanta, so there’s a lot of that, we get a fair amount of traffic through to just organic google searches.
Lee Kantor:
When you’re doing a google search, what are the key words you’re putting out there because it has to be broader than IT. Right?
Gavin Lindeman:
Well, consulting is a very big one that we are an IT Consulting firm and then just general technology terms. We try to post blogs on our website every week with different technology needs. Whether it’s about security breaches or GDPR has been in the news a lot recently, and just making sure that we’re staying relevant on technology and that our website has those key words and content relevant to that.
Lee Kantor:
So IT is kind of the point of entry, but the scope of the relationship, mmight broaden because once you get in there and you start having a relationship, you’re like, “hey, we might be able to help you with this or we might be able to help you with that.”
Gavin Lindeman:
I think IT as a whole has changed too. We think about this physical infrastructure, but so much of IT is in the cloud. It matters less that we’re physically in the same space as our clients. Like a client we have in Michigan, Jason went out and set up their physical infrastructure once and we’ve been able to handle their entire organization since then because we can remote into computers, the services are in the cloud that we can access remotely. There’s just not a huge need for us to physically be on site in the same way that you might’ve had to five or 10 years ago.
Lee Kantor:
Do you work with any multiunit organizations that maybe they have a base of operations in one place and then they have franchises and then you can work with all of. Because it’s a similar system in every location.
Jason Holland:
Yeah, absolutely. Actually a really good example of that is we have some self storage places. We work with a management company that is the umbrella organization for all of these self storage places. We go in there and it’s a huge market, especially here in Atlanta with so many people moving back into the city
Lee Kantor:
It’s one of those businesses that you drive by everyday and you don’t realize how much money those things just generate and how profitable they are.
Jason Holland:
They are printing money, Right? And one of our clients is one of the largest ones in Atlanta over in Brookhaven. Basically the idea is that we can go in there, their investors can say we’re going to open up a new place in Dalton, which was the one that they did just recently. We go up there, we do everything soup to nuts. We go in and put in a network infrastructure, get an ISP for them.
Lee Kantor:
So you’re managing putting in the cable and all that stuff.
Jason Holland:
Absolutely everything from the ground up, we go up there before the walls even go up, get the cabling-
Lee Kantor:
Deciding where the outlet’s go?.
Jason Holland:
Exactly. Yeah, I mean it’s that detailed. Then they start thinking about we need voiceover IP phones because we’re not going to use copper these days. You know, that’s the old style telephones. We need a website, it’s almost like a template that you can just roll out and say, here’s the website. We even clone the website and then we’ll put the content and we brand it to the location, the colors and the sign and all that kind of stuff. The managers at the store being able to use the software, it’s the same type everywhere. So you could even have someone from another location come over and train the new manager on all the stuff. So much easier.
Lee Kantor:
Some organizations they might have a website and social media presence. Like could you manage their social media presence?
Jason Holland:
Absolutely. That’s one of the things that Gavin works with
Lee Kantor:
one of your superpowers, Gavin?
Gavin Lindeman:
Oh yeah, we’ll do social media. We’ll do Facebook, Google Adwords, Instagram, Twitter-
Lee Kantor:
You can do the paid, you can do organic?
Gavin Lindeman:
Yes.
Lee Kantor:
You can help them with a content strategy. So you’re handling anything that touches their business through the web or through any electronic means.
Jason Holland:
Yeah. You got It. And one of the initiatives that Gavin’s been working on it and what a lot of people don’t know even exist is the nonprofit Google Adwords campaigns.
Gavin Lindeman:
Yeah. Google Adwords Grants. Google gives a nonprofit, now there are some requirements that your nonprofit has to meet, but they’ll give a nonprofit $10,000 a month in an Adwords budget to generate ads for their website. So that can be a huge donation drive.
Lee Kantor:
So like a credit?
Gavin Lindeman:
Yeah. It’s a credit for up to $10,000 a month.
Lee Kantor:
Wow.
Gavin Lindeman:
Yeah, it’s amazing. An enormous amount of money. That being said, Adwords is a very complex piece of software and to be able to even spend $10,000 a month.
Lee Kantor:
It’s not that easy, right?
Gavin Lindeman:
It’s not just like, write a check and you’re done. It involves really developing a strategy and executing that plan over a long period of time. But it’s such a positive impact for nonprofits that can invest in that for very little upfront investment. They can get this huge advertising budget.
Lee Kantor:
What some low hanging fruit that these small companies aren’t taking advantage of that maybe they can do themselves?
Jason Holland:
It’s really the cloud, if you’re working on an older system where you have an email server in your office or if you’re using the email that is provided by you web host like Godaddy’s email or Network Solutions. That stuff generally tends to be pretty low featured and not very reliable.
Lee Kantor:
So there’s better solutions?
Jason Holland:
Absolutely. The biggest thing I can tell you if you’re a nonprofit or an arts organization is to get on Gsuite, I mean Gsuite or Office 365. One is Google’s platform and the other is Microsoft’s. GSuite has nonprofit pricing, which is zero a month.
Lee Kantor:
Zero a month?
Jason Holland:
If you’re a 501c3, then you get Gsuite for free, which means you get unlimited users, you also get unlimited storage. You get all the bells and whistles that they have for you. Office 365 is $3 a user a month. And with that, you’re getting the office suite, which is the industry standard. So that’s still great value. Between those two things if I was starting a nonprofit, to me that seems like a no brainer.
Gavin Lindeman:
I think another good option is Tech Soup. Tech Soup is a website made for nonprofits for technology needs. It’s a great place that if you’re a 501c3, you can go on to and they have laptops desktops, and other hardware. Also software at a discounted price, so maybe you need the Adobe Suite. You can get that at discounted price for nonprofits. There’s a lot of simple stuff can do just by being a nonprofit to make sure that you’re really capitalizing on the programs in place for you.
Lee Kantor:
That’s a good example for our listeners that are in business. Now I know that you said that you don’t only do nonprofits, but that’s a niche that you serve. By immersing yourself in that niche, you learn about these resources that the average person who’s just superficially had done one website wouldn’t know, but because you’ve spent a lot of time in that world, you’ve learned about things like this and you can really serve your clients at a much deeper level.
Jason Holland:
Absolutely. Having 15 years of experience in this. I started very early with Wang laboratories back in 1993. You know, that was my first.
Lee Kantor:
That was the first t-shirt.
Jason Holland:
Yeah, exactly. I worked over on the clock tower on 41 and I remember it was a very early version of Power Point I was doing support for. Microsoft had you contracted that out to Wang. So at this point Wang wasn’t even making anything anymore. I think they used to in the seventies and eighties, like all kinds of computers hardware and stuff. But they had transitioned over to this vendor role for Microsoft and so I started in 93 and then went on to work at Mindspring Enterprises, which was a very early isp here in Atlanta.
Lee Kantor:
Right. One of the kind of niche players as well. Then Earthlink bought them.
Jason Holland:
Absolutely. I left there right when Earthlink took over. There’s experience that allows me to bring all these different topics in and be able to say to someone, you know what, I heard about this thing and we can try that or just like Gavin said earlier, keeping up with very current stuff, maybe even bleeding edge stuff that may not be ready for prime time consumption for some of these organizations, but keeping an eye on it and saying when that matures, that’d be perfect for this person.
Lee Kantor:
Right. Do you help if the organization is using open source software, do you help them manage that as well?
Jason Holland:
We don’t see that as much to be honest. Mainly because of the lack of support there is for open source. We use open source products in our office for sure. there’s a line of Linux boxes, etc. I personally love the open source model for a lot of reasons. One of them being security which is sort of counter-intuitive. But with so many people’s eyes on the code, it’s very easy to see anyone doing something nefarious. Where if it’s all inside one department in one company and it’s very secret-
Lee Kantor:
There could be a sneaky person.
Jason Holland:
Absolutely. So we love the idea of open source and we’d love to see it get a lot more traction. We don’t see a lot of it right now, but it is incrementally getting more and more.
Lee Kantor:
So what do you need more of right now?
Jason Holland:
I think probably what we need more of is just more knowledge. I mean, getting information out to people. The biggest thing that we deal with these days is security issues. So getting people knowledgeable about what is, the threats that are out there. The one that kills me the most is this one that goes around where supposedly Microsoft is calling you because they found something on your computer. They call you on the phone. it’s actually targeted at older people for the most part, and what happens is you get a phone call and they say, this is Microsoft and we detected a problem on your computer and if you go here we can show you exactly what it is. What they do is they open up a certain part of windows that always has some warnings in it and they point to this warning and say, see there’s something wrong here and there’s really nothing wrong. Then they say if you go to this website and download this piece of software, it’ll solve that problem, and up until that point they didn’t have a problem, but the minute they download that, they do. The ideas is trying to keep people knowledgeable. Not only home users like that, but workers in organizations realizing that there’s no way in the world that Microsoft would ever reach out to you like that. It just doesn’t work that way.
Lee Kantor:
The people that are being victimized by this, they just don’t know. They think the computer is like their refrigerator, you turn it on and it works every time and everything is doing what it’s supposed to. It’s a very complex machine and a lot of moving parts. There’s always a problem and usually it’s their fault when there’s a problem. So when something comes up or they’re told something is wrong, they think something’s really wrong.
Jason Holland:
It is this magical box, right? It’s easy to believe when someone tells you something when you don’t understand it, right? It’s not the fault of the people, but it’s our duty and our responsibility to try to let people know as much as possible and that’s some of the things that we do education wise on our website and We like to have like a training seminar at the end of any project. If this smells funny, it probably is funny, drop us a line and say, is this kosher?
Gavin Lindeman:
We’ve been seeing recently, there has been a very common email threat going around where someone will try to spoof the email of the director of a company. and what they’ll do is they’ll ask their employees to go out and buy gift cards and then try to get those gift cards-
Lee Kantor:
But it looks like it’s coming from the CEO or something?
Gavin Lindeman:
Yes, and sometimes it’s done better than others where it’s just one character off in the email name and they’ve copied the signature, and other times it’s a totally different email address. But just making sure everyone’s aware and sometimes it’s as simple as putting in place policy that everyone knows your director is never going to email you and ask you to buy something. That’s not how we do business.
Lee Kantor:
Right.
Gavin Lindeman:
So making sure that the whole organization understands that and has a standard in place to make sure that they’re able to handle a situation.
Lee Kantor:
Yeah. We had a guest on here talk about. I’m one of spoofing’s they saw on social media that the executive was on vacation, because they Facebook or whatever. It says “I’m on vacation.” then they sent a note to an executive and saying, “Hey, I’m on vacation and I need that list of all the blah blah, blah.” can you send that?
Jason Holland:
I bet it worked.
Lee Kantor:
It worked. I mean they’re just people, they take this little kernel of public knowledge but they don’t realize it’s public knowledge because I think they’re only talking to their friends and then leverage that. People are cynical about human beings, but we’re pretty trustworthy. And if somebody says do something, we do it a lot of time.
Gavin Lindeman:
So many of these issues are all based around social engineering versus someone actually hacking a website or hacking a user’s workstation.
Jason Holland:
There’s no super computer trying to break into your machine. They’re using public knowledge, you know, social engineering. We’re seeing that that’s what happened with a lot of the hacks that we saw on the national level with Russia-
Lee Kantor:
Right, with these organizations and big bureaucracies. It’s easier to happen because there’s was a lot more humans that they can be pinging. All it takes is one of them to screw up.
Jason Holland:
Exactly, look what happened with the huge Sony hack.
Lee Kantor:
So they can send a million emails that everybody else is deleting, but one person says yes to and now they’re in.
Jason Holland:
The security is actually really good these days. It’s really difficult to break into modern computers, with the encryption, VPNs, it’s pretty difficult, but it’s not very difficult to get a human to give up information.
Lee Kantor:
Well, there was another consultant we had in here that he had that a person, a human being that would walk around a big company and his badge said “This is fake security ID”. He would say I’m with IT, can I get your password? I got to do a check on your system, and people would give him the password.
Jason Holland:
I’m not surprised at all.
Gavin Lindeman:
My favorite email is when you need to get a password from a user and then they call you and they ask “was this really you?” Always warms my heart. That’s what you want to hear.
Lee Kantor:
You want that. Don’t you want “Hey, I got this email. Is this legit?”
Gavin Lindeman:
Absolutely.
Lee Kantor:
I’ll take that all day long.
Jason Holland:
In our organization for that sort of thing, we don’t even charge
Lee Kantor:
That should be free.
Jason Holland:
Exactly, because that saves me from having to deal with something on the weekend. But can you imagine what the opposite end is in terms of cost, if they are hacked. Think about what we talked about earlier. If someone got in there and they erase their data and everything-
Lee Kantor:
Or held it hostage.
Gavin Lindeman:
Yeah, this encryption happens now where they’ll get in and they’ll encrypt everything.
Lee Kantor:
Yeah, they Locked down your thing and say, send me some Citcoin and then I’ll give it back to you.
Gavin Lindeman:
Then you have me on the weekend, creating bitcoin wallet to try and get your data back.
Jason Holland:
It gets expensive quick. Just taking that five minutes and saying-
Lee Kantor:
Yeah, that’s good marketing to say, look, I’ll do that for free. It’s unlimited for that.
Jason Holland:
Totally, and that’s what we do. We want to help these people.
Lee Kantor:
Right, and their creatives, a lot of them. IT isn’t their first language.
Jason Holland:
Absolutely. I think going full circle to what we first talked about, there’s just not a lot of people out there that are doing that for this sector (non profits)
Lee Kantor:
Well, if somebody wanted to learn more and have a more substantive conversation, what’s the website?
Jason Holland:
The website’s https://www.hollandit.biz/
Lee Kantor:
Well Jason and Gavin, thank you so much for sharing your story today.
Gavin Lindeman:
Thank you.
Jason Holland:
Yeah, thanks for having us.