Cat Memes Built my Data Model, w/ Krissy Dyess

Krissy Dyess is a prime example of inspiration and adaptability. She made a decision to better her knowledge of the updated and evolving BI tools through self-teaching, and with help from the amazing data community. She went from being stuck in a cubicle, to being a team leader at one of the best BI consulting firms in the world. And she creates excellent Cat Memes!

References in this episode

Telling Ain't Training by Harold D. Stolovitch

David Churchward's SQL UNPIVOT Makes My Data Skinny blog post

Dave Grohl Explains Everlong

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Episode Timeline:

• 0:00 - Krissy's history is her story, Krissy is the nicest stalker ever, and the art of self-teaching
• 23:40 - Abstract learning vs hands-on learning, the role of the community in teaching, Krissy is a Power BI Evangelist
• 45:00 - Krissy's thirst for knowledge leads her to Seattle and a moment of clarity, her transition into being a consultant and trainer at a young upstart P3 Adaptive

Episode Transcript:

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Welcome, friends. Today's guest is Krissy Dyess, one of our directors here at P3 Adaptive. And I want to say that today's episode is brought to you by the words, inspiration and human. At P3, we are in the inspiration business. Now of course, we're also in the implementation business. We're not just inspiration. Otherwise, we'd be McKinsey. Necessarily, we're in the reality business. We have to bring things to life. But in today's data landscape, the art of the possible is so much wider, so much more valuable than what it ever was before that we'd be doing a disservice to our clients if we weren't also in the inspiration business.

Rob Collie (00:00:39): Krissy is basically the living embodiment of inspiration. Whether you're an organization plotting your course through an ever-changing landscape or an individual planning your career as a power platform professional, I think that inspiration theme will shine through as you listen to Krissy. And that second word, human that's also Krissy. You'll notice in this conversation that she keeps circling back to training.

Rob Collie (00:01:06): And we still do training here at P3, but the majority of our business is now project implementation. But even when we're building things with our clients, we can't help it. We're always transferring knowledge. We're always teaching. We're always training and it's that human connection, the need to help, the desire to help that shines through over and over again in this conversation with Krissy. She's just an incredible person. I'm so glad that she took that leap and joined us four years ago. She's grown tremendously in her time with us and we as an organization, as a team have grown tremendously right along with her. I hope you smile as much listening to this as we did while we were recording the conversation. So let's get into it.

Announcer (00:01:54): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?

Announcer (00:01:58): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast, with your host, Rob Collie, and your co-host, Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 adaptive is data with the human element.

Rob Collie (00:02:21): Welcome to the show, Krissy Dyess.

Krissy Dyess (00:02:24): Hi. How are you doing?

Rob Collie (00:02:26): Oh, we're doing fantastic. This is one of those things that it's a real pleasure. I'm already like all curve ruffled. You just asked me how I'm doing and I'm like, "Shit, I'm not prepared to answer questions." I'm already failing.

Krissy Dyess (00:02:40): It's one of those days.

Rob Collie (00:02:41): We interact a lot because we work together.

Krissy Dyess (00:02:44): We do.

Rob Collie (00:02:45): I figured what we could do is we just do sort of like a story of your life type of thing today. But also we could just almost like conduct like a one on one meeting and just record it for the world. What do you think?

Krissy Dyess (00:02:55): Okay.

Rob Collie (00:02:55): Sound good?

Krissy Dyess (00:02:55): Sure.

Rob Collie (00:02:55): So you've been with P3 for how long now?

Krissy Dyess (00:03:00): Ooh. It's interesting that you asked me that. I just realized yesterday I was outside in the yard, just taken in the nice spring weather and the angle of the sun felt familiar and I couldn't place it. Then all of a sudden I was thinking and I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is actually four years ago that I came to P3." And the angle of the sun, I remember it. I remember it so fondly, because I don't know if I ever told you this before, but I actually did not read the book before applying to P3.

Rob Collie (00:03:37): I'm going to give you my false gasp before there.

Krissy Dyess (00:03:42): Did I tell you this?

Rob Collie (00:03:43): I don't really care. It doesn't bother me. You've kept this secret.

Krissy Dyess (00:03:46): Oh my gosh.

Rob Collie (00:03:48): You've kept this secret all these years because you were afraid of... No.

Krissy Dyess (00:03:52): No, no, no. It wasn't that I was keeping it a secret, but everything just kind of came together so rapidly. I was in my cubicle back in the day. I had been following the blog post for a long time, 2013. I think you could go back in the data and find my actual subscriber date. Yeah. So I've been following the blog for a really long time, and one of the blog posts came across looking for full-time consultants. And I thought, "This is it." All my energy shifted and I went to the website and filled out all the information. There was a lot of information and I was like, "Whoa, whoa. I don't know about this."

Krissy Dyess (00:04:29): So I filled out all the information and put my resume together. Gosh, it had been many, many years. I'd been with the previous organization for 16 and a half years. I hadn't really updated my resume. I had to get that together and sent that along. And then I entered into the interview of doom process if you will. It was quite interesting. I expected it. I expected to be quizzed and grilled a bit. As I met for the first time with Kellan, it was my first ever video interview, if you will. That was new.

Rob Collie (00:05:04): Yeah. We were video interviewing before it was cool at P3.

Krissy Dyess (00:05:07): You were. And to be honest, I was in my cube for 16 and a half years. Really wasn't interviewing or moving anywhere. But this was really a new thing for me. How am I going to come across in an interview using video? I guess I said all the right things. And then I was notified that I would be moving on to an interview with Rob and I was like, "Oh my gosh, because I don't really have celebrities like growing up. I never really had crushed celebrities. Not that I had a crush, but this was like this person that I had been following and even some in my previous job would say stalking. They used to joke about me like stalking because I knew everything.

Rob Collie (00:05:48): You stalked me, but you didn't read my book. I just want to point that out.

Krissy Dyess (00:05:51): I know. I know. Right? I'm not a great stalker.

Rob Collie (00:05:55): Well, that takes a lot effort. Who wants to read the book?

Thomas LaRock (00:05:58): Yeah, but did she pay for the book? That's the important thing. If she paid for the book, you don't care if she reads it?

Krissy Dyess (00:06:03): Well, honestly, I didn't know about the book. I didn't know. Clearly I was stalking. I was reading the blog. I even had read the one blog post where you were looking for people to help with the Keller version and at that point in time, I was like, "I don't get it." Right? In any case, I didn't really realize the power of the book. It wasn't communicated in the ecosystem that I had fallen into.

Krissy Dyess (00:06:27): So I just felt like if I'm going to be interviewing with Rob Collie, the owner of the company, I should probably read the book. I actually thought I would probably get questions about the book. So I'm like, I better read the book. So the interview process, it moved pretty quickly once I made it through the screening, once I made it through the first interview. I didn't have a whole lot of time. It was like, "You're meeting with Rob."

Krissy Dyess (00:06:57): I literally was losing my mind. I was like, "Oh, I need to create an environment that conveys that I can conduct business in a remote environment." You can see me now. I'm still in the same spot. I think I had screens. I probably put plants up, tried to look super professional. I ran up to borders and I bought the book and I came in my backyard as I like to multitask, the weather was nice. It was April. Weather was nice. The sun was out and here I was laying in the sun reading through this book.

Krissy Dyess (00:07:27): As I kept reading, I was like, "Oh, yeah, this is cool." I had no formal training. I was self-taught. I learned a lot. I went to a lot of user groups and talked to other people. And back then, Power BI, it wasn't even Power BI, it was Power Pivot and Excel. I just sat there and I'm reading this book and so many light bulbs went off when I compared to the self-taught method versus what I actually was reading. And I was like, "Man, this would've helped me out immensely had I only had read the book when I started my journey." But I didn't know.

Krissy Dyess (00:08:04): So in any case, I read the book, we had the interview. It went great. I got the job and I joined the team in April. It was just so interesting yesterday that I remembered that feeling and just that sense and that memory just by going outside and the angle of the sun.

Rob Collie (00:08:23): It's so neat the things that can trigger memories, isn't it?

Krissy Dyess (00:08:26): They say smell. A lot of times they say smell. But oftentimes, for me, it actually is time of year. Even though I'm in Phoenix now where our seasons are pretty much just hot, I always feel like this is association to the surroundings, the weather. Just how you feel. For me, that's what went through my mind yesterday and I was like, "Oh, I don't know if I ever told Rob." But I did read the book and it was great. And then after I read the book and I got the job, I was like, "Oh man, I haven't been doing this stuff right at all."

Rob Collie (00:09:00): Well, you still got through the interview, which is no mean feat. And you talk about the lack of formal training, right? So what? No one really has any formal training. And it's not something that matters. I'm not really a fan of this band, the Foo Fighters. I'm a real Dave Grohl fan. I like that guy.

Krissy Dyess (00:09:20): I do too.

Rob Collie (00:09:20): It's just a video of him explaining the origins of one of his songs, Everlong. It's just him with a guitar and he's telling the story. It's just so powerful and so touching, the whole thing. He's just so authentic and so awesome. Listen, he said, "I don't have any formal training. I can't even read music."

Krissy Dyess (00:09:39): Wow.

Rob Collie (00:09:39): And he's like, "So I can't explain to you in musical terms, what these notes are. In order to remember them, I had to go record them really quickly so that I wouldn't forget." He doesn't have notation and he is explaining to you like, "And by the way, I look at a guitar and I just see these strings down here are like the kick drum and these up here are kind of like the symbols and stuff." He's just completely transparent about it.

Rob Collie (00:10:02): In a way, he shouldn't be here is what he's saying. But he knows he should, at the same time, there's so many interviews with him where he shares things like this and I'm not a musician.

Krissy Dyess (00:10:13): It sounds like you could be. Actually, that's not true. I've heard some of your work.

Rob Collie (00:10:17): You've heard some of my auto tunes singing.

Krissy Dyess (00:10:21): I don't know. Some fantasy football thing. I don't know.

Rob Collie (00:10:23): That's right. Including videos. Yes.

Krissy Dyess (00:10:26): I was on the team, but I didn't do too well.

Rob Collie (00:10:30): That's okay. That's okay. So four years ago, you made the leap, right? So what were you doing before P3? What was the nature of your job? You said you've been there for over 16 years. That had to be quite a leap.

Krissy Dyess (00:10:45): It was. It's really interesting. That job that I was at for 16 and a half years, took me from my 20s, to my 30s and then into my 40s. I guess people can find out my age. I'm not trying to hide my age, but I'm in my mid forties now. The interesting part is as you journey through life, you are in a different place in your 20s and your 30s and in your 40s.

Krissy Dyess (00:11:07): I started there in my mid 20s and actually, it was my first job as I relocated to Phoenix. What's really interesting was when I came to Phoenix, it was back in 2000. It makes it really easy. I've been here for 21 years now. When I first came here, I actually was exploring this idea of posting my resume online. That was new. That was really new. I had graduated college.

Krissy Dyess (00:11:35): I had my first job and I had to choose, "Ooh, what color of resume paper," because there's the standard gray. There's also the yellow. Do you want to be a little more bold? No, no, no. People weren't ready for it back then. Right? Just the color of your resume paper, people were not ready for, right? So in any case, I came out here for the weather and I'm looking at interviewing, sending my resume out. So I did.

Krissy Dyess (00:12:00): I sent some on some resume paper. I also faxed some of my resumes. I got the newspaper and I'm really dating myself here. Right? So I got the newspaper and I sent some faxes. I also went to the local library and I got a Yahoo account. Honestly, I got interviews from every single source. So it was like an AB kind of like test scenario, right? Like back in the day, just around getting a job.

Krissy Dyess (00:12:25): The company that I ended up going with found me. They had recruiters. They found me, brought me in and I went into this building and I walked in. I was in my early 20s and there was all these people, and there was all these cubicles. I was like, "Wow, look at all the coders. This is amazing." Later, I found out it actually was a sales organization and the people were making calls and doing sales. They weren't coders and doing programming.

Rob Collie (00:12:52): But it looks like programming. Right? When people come to visit us at Microsoft, it was like, there was never anything interesting to show them. If you had family in town like, "What are you going to show?" There's no assembly line, nothing. It was just like, we just go walk down long hallway of doors where some of the rooms had nerds in them, some rooms didn't. There wasn't a whole lot going on.

Krissy Dyess (00:13:17): I mean, for me in my early to mid 20s, just coming out of college, having just one real job, I think really at that point in time, my impression, my perception was that, "Wow, these are all coders." I found out later, "No, that was at the case." And the thing that brought them in was FoxPro. Visual FoxPro was on my resume. It was a keyword that got picked up. I actually came into an analytics, strategic analytics department.

Krissy Dyess (00:13:47): At the time, the organization had been founded. It was a startup business way before my day. The owners had started it out of their basement in fact. We were doing outbound sales for IBM, HP, Toshiba. That was the core business. We were doing analytics in that group around customer retention.

Krissy Dyess (00:14:11): At that time, we were acquisition, penetration like all the buzzwords, right? That's essentially what the role was. We were churning through data that at the time was in Oracle and there was processes in with that department that would extract the data and we would use FoxPro. It was part of it. We would go in and we would extract the data. We built our own databases of data. And then we would build out these reports, speaking to those different key metrics, if you will, at the time.

Krissy Dyess (00:14:43): We would create these reports every month. Every month we'd have these reports on how the business is doing and then we would layer in recommendations and strategies around how to improve key said metrics. It was really interesting because there was no SQL server then. This was random data, black and white screens. We had this analytical department that was doing this whole FoxPro.

Krissy Dyess (00:15:08): I mean, we were like a little mini IT for, or what we were doing, like bringing in the data, creating the structure, building the reports. If you could imagine, it was extremely time consuming, extremely time consuming. After you kind of get in and you get your wings and you do that over and over again for many months, you're like, "Man, how can we do this better?"

Krissy Dyess (00:15:29): Then also at the same time, we had another department in the organization that was building things in access. Their databases in access. And guess what, their numbers in access were different than our numbers in analytics. Right? Like surprise, surprise.

Rob Collie (00:15:44): Of course, yeah.

Krissy Dyess (00:15:46): But they were on the reporting side and they were exploring intranets and putting the information out there for the sales side of the business. So they were pulling in data, putting it into the access, churning it out through the intranets. Cold fusion was popular back in the day. Again, I'm dating myself here.

Rob Collie (00:16:05): You keep saying that, but we all know that I'm older than you, barely.

Krissy Dyess (00:16:09): A tiny bit.

Rob Collie (00:16:10): That's right. You're a youngin.

Krissy Dyess (00:16:12): This is true. This is true. Age is how you feel. Right? Most of the time I feel pretty much like I'm still in my mid-20s.

Rob Collie (00:16:20): Yeah, me too. Just that my body doesn't work the way it used to.

Krissy Dyess (00:16:22): You know what though, it comes across. These body builders that start when they're 65. Women too. Maybe it's coming up on my feed and everything. It's possible, Rob is all I'm saying.

Rob Collie (00:16:34): There's a Mr. Olympia title in my future.

Krissy Dyess (00:16:38): It is possible. It is possible.

Rob Collie (00:16:40): Through the power of hard work and drugs. Maybe a lot of drugs and then diet. Oh, no.

Krissy Dyess (00:16:50): Yes. There's definitely a diet. You definitely got to have an extreme died there. In any case, the state of the union at the time that I entered into this organization, I think was probably... We were advanced, I think.

Rob Collie (00:17:02): Yeah. I mean, 2000, right? This company was doing analytics, doing BI-

Krissy Dyess (00:17:05): We were.

Rob Collie (00:17:07): ... in the year 2000, which by the way, is before I'd even heard the term. In the year 2000. I Was probably four years out of being introduced to this whole domain, really. I mean, I was using Excel at Microsoft at that time, but I didn't cross paths with BI and corporate analytics until probably 2004, 2005.

Krissy Dyess (00:17:26): That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, there definitely was Excel. Excel was a part of the equation. There was outputs generated from FoxPro into Excel and then we would take that output. We would create charts. We'd create visuals. We'd prepare them into this analytics that we'd present. Ooh, even then, back then we would print it out. We would actually print these documents out. I'm talking hundreds of pages of analytical reports that I don't know. We would put them in the mail and then we would send them to the clients.

Krissy Dyess (00:17:58): I don't know. They would read through them and then we'd have these meetings and we'd decide on such and such things, and the whole process would happen every single month. For us, like back then, this was new stuff. It was exciting. It wasn't too much longer after that. Maybe about two or three years that SQL as database storage solution entered the equation and the birth, if you will, of an IT team in the organization to streamline the data.

Krissy Dyess (00:18:27): One version of the truth, if you will, in a SQL warehouse. And we went down that path. At the time, we did have very similar types of data coming in. We had sales data. We had call data. And it was very easy for the IT org... I say easy, like I wasn't doing it, but it was very easy for the IT team to create data warehouses with the customer table, the invoice table, all these things and replicate and populate with the data that we could use for sales reporting. We could use for analytics. That was that next evolution.

Krissy Dyess (00:19:04): It was really the first time I went down... Well, not exactly the first time, but it was one of the first times that I went down this self-learning path. And coming into the SQL environment, database team, IT putting data out there, figuring out how do we do what we were doing in Visual FoxPro and Excel. But now over in the SQL environment. And it was slow. It was slow.

Krissy Dyess (00:19:27): We went through basic queries like self-taught. There was no preparing the team, but there was a deadline of, "You all need to move things over and make everything work and get the same numbers and using that environment." That was one of the things that stuck in my head. Like you said, talking about self-taught versus just figuring it out. Honestly, what I've learned is that you can learn and be more productive faster with a little bit of guidance, a little bit of core training and guidance.

Rob Collie (00:20:04): The right kind of training. Your experience reading the book that you talked about, It's actually the same as me. I would often remark to myself, I would've loved to have had this book that I'm writing when I was learning to write it.

Krissy Dyess (00:20:14): It's true. But who does that? Who reads a technology book? Because here's the other thing. My experience was, and even with SQL, I got a SQL book and I read it and I was like, " It doesn't make sense." Until I got my hands in there and started doing things and seeing things and then piecing it together, then it makes sense. In my mind too, who reads a book on technology and gets it? There are people that are due, because everybody has a different way of learning. But I clearly cannot read a technical book and make everything click.

Krissy Dyess (00:20:48): I need to get my hands in there. I need to touch it. I need to feel it. I need to, again, see that holistic picture. Not that I'm going to create store procedures and create views, but not just the drip method like learning, "Oh, this would be the better way to do these things." And actually prior even to coming to that organization, I learned Visual FoxPro hands on, self-taught, no Google.

Rob Collie (00:21:14): Oh, no Google.

Krissy Dyess (00:21:17): No Google. Yeah. You saw I pause there.

Rob Collie (00:21:18): Yeah.

Krissy Dyess (00:21:21): Just pause. Minds are blowing right now all over the place, right?

Rob Collie (00:21:25): Oh my God.

Krissy Dyess (00:21:26): Oh my God. What do you mean no Google? What is that? That was hard.

Thomas LaRock (00:21:35): Did you just use [inaudible 00:21:37] instead?

Krissy Dyess (00:21:37): Oh, I could have. Actually, I had a coworker that was from Nepal and he thought it was super funny to just let me get a little bit frustrated before he would kind of help me out. And that's usually what happened. But again, that was that self-learning experience. Not ideal. SQL, self-learning, not ideal. Honestly, when Power Pivot was introduced to me, it happened back in the year 2013 as our organization updated to Excel 2010, which was very advanced and very modern, and I was very thankful that I was in an organization that always looked for the newer technologies and gave us the opportunity to use the tools.

Krissy Dyess (00:22:19): That is when I found out about this Power Pivot, and I started the Googling. At the time, the Googling there wasn't a lot of information out there. When I came across the Power Pivot Pro blog site as it was back in 2013, I started reading it. I started doing things. I didn't really put any of the connections together. Really in the early six months even to a year, I didn't really put the connection together. But I sat quietly in the cubicle and I was stalking like I'm a bad stalker.

Krissy Dyess (00:22:55): Here's what I was watching. What I was watching was the blog posts. They went from once a month, twice a month. They started to grow. There was more of them. It was interesting to me. I still didn't really know the bigger picture, but I was pulling on little nuggets that was just enough for me in my current role, still using the SQL environment that kicked off back in my early 20s and then still using that SQL environment, competing with the analysts who are using a lot of heavy Excel. I'm competing back and forth.

Krissy Dyess (00:23:28): I was always like, "SQL is better. Let me make your life better." But I ran into those same pitfalls of now I was in this process of writing queries and tweaking queries, and giving it to them and seeing what they were doing, and that whole back and forth thing that it was.

Krissy Dyess (00:23:45): I slowly started watching the blogs and listening and paying attention more and realizing that there was other people out there in the universe that was experiencing something similar so much so that they created a blog. There was others. There were other are people in this space, but honestly, I honed in very quickly. I keep going back and forth because then it was Power Pivot Pro. Now, we're P3 Adaptive. But that was the place. That was the one place.

Krissy Dyess (00:24:16): In the early days, when that light bulb went off, I reached out. I sent an email directly to Rob and I was like, "Hey, do you train?" I didn't know. I don't know if you remember that. It was a long, long time ago. I know you get a lot of emails, but I remember it because you emailed me back. I was very surprised that somebody out there in the worldwide web universe actually responded to me, right?

Rob Collie (00:24:39): On the other side of the Google.

Krissy Dyess (00:24:40): Yeah, right? To me, like this was like a whole new territory. People out there. And do I even want to be out there in the social and expose information, because there's all that stuff that comes with it too. But you responded and you quickly passed me over to Jocelyn. And Jocelyn sent me all the details and I exchanged some of the information with her. Ultimately, our organization didn't buy into any training as far as I know. I don't believe they still even to this day. I have tried.

Rob Collie (00:25:10): Well, we showed them, didn't we?

Krissy Dyess (00:25:12): Well, I try. I reach out because I still have analysts. I have analysts now. Honest to God, I kid you not, it wasn't even a couple months that I left and I came to Power Pivot Pro that the organization is like, "Hey, what is this Power BI?" I literally like gasped. I was like, "Because it was in Excel, what I was doing. I was using Excel. I was using the SharePoint Power Pivot gallery for Excel for a while, while it was compliant. Then of course there was some changes. Then I was using the one drive for distribution. It was a really awkward time. But you make it work. As soon as they saw this in this new container, they were like, "What is this Power BI?"

Rob Collie (00:25:57): There's a theme I want to Zoom in on here, and it's a common theme for us, I think. Maybe we've never talked about it in this particular way. So there's two different kinds of learning, at least. Let's talk about two in particular. Especially in the tech space, there's a type of learning that is sort of conducted in the abstract. And it's only a certain kind of person that's interested in or can do it this way. And spoil alert, it's not me.

Rob Collie (00:26:21): That's also not you, from what I know of you and from what you've been saying. In a way, it's almost like tech for tech's sake, this kind of learning, but you get really into the abstract concepts. So for example, if you approach decks and the first thing that you gravitate to are these concepts like filter context and row context. If those really speak to you, then you're this abstract kind.

Rob Collie (00:26:46): Then there's the more hands on practical, what's sort of the benefit in my day to day life kind of learning. It's not really one of them is better than the other. They're just different. When you talk about the technical books, most technical books are written for that first kind of learner that abstract kind of learner. But there are so many of us out in the world that are more the hands on practical kind of learners.

Rob Collie (00:27:09): The books just generally speaking aren't written for us, and there's more of us. But who writes the technical books? Typically, the people who are good at the tech, right? So they learn that way and that's the way that they think everybody wants to learn. So the hands on practical learners like first of all we have to stumble into a benefit. We can't go too long learning something new without there being any benefit.

Krissy Dyess (00:27:29): That's true.

Rob Collie (00:27:30): Because then we'll give up. Right? If something doesn't have some sort of even modest payoff for us, like in the first couple of weeks of screwing around with it, we're going to lose interest. And you're talking about sort of like missing the bigger picture. Of course, that's what the hands on practical learners are going to do. Right? We're going to assemble all these little islands of benefit. We learn this trick. We learn that trick.

Rob Collie (00:27:54): We're not putting together necessarily in the early days like the whole framework of how this thing works and the whole framework of how it's going to be different from other tools. It's just that we know that that one benefit we got. We weren't going to get that from another tool. That was magic. And slowly these islands, you start to build the bridges between them. One day like, "Ah, now I have this archipelago." And I'm starting to see the framework. I had to travel that exact road to get to the point where I could some number of years later write a book.

Krissy Dyess (00:28:24): Sure.

Rob Collie (00:28:26): And almost had to derive the concepts of filter and row context back out into English, and then later on I go, "Oh, that's what you call that."

Krissy Dyess (00:28:35): Right.

Rob Collie (00:28:37): It goes back to the Dave Grohl example as well. There's no questioning that he's a fantastically successful and creative musician. How did he learn play guitar when switching from the drums? He just started thinking of it like a drum set and screwing around with it. He's come up with some very iconic sounding guitar riffs.

Krissy Dyess (00:28:55): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:28:55): They're unquestionably interesting. I think there's sort of like an inherent self-judgment that a lot of those practical hands on learning types tend to inflict on themselves because they know they're not the other kind. We know we're not that other kind. We know that we're not that abstract learner.

Krissy Dyess (00:29:13): That's true.

Rob Collie (00:29:14): And we read the books, we see the books that are written for those people. We're like, "Oh, it's very invalidating."

Krissy Dyess (00:29:19): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:29:20): Right?

Krissy Dyess (00:29:20): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:29:21): To experience technical content that for some reason doesn't speak to you. You're like, "What's wrong with me?"

Krissy Dyess (00:29:25): It's true. I never even actually thought about it. I kind of have the idea of everybody learns differently. That's a message that we share in all of our trainings. I definitely appreciate, and I recognize, but I never really thought about it or heard it interpreted the way that you're speaking about it now. I do feel that sense of like, "I want to learn that way." The people that can learn that way I feel like, "Gosh," because there's so much information out there. If you could just go in and grab it and digest it, that's amazing. You could do so much. But because I do have more of that hands on applied, I need to do it wrong three times, then it's going to stick forever.

Rob Collie (00:30:04): Yeah.

Krissy Dyess (00:30:04): Right?

Rob Collie (00:30:04): Yeah.

Krissy Dyess (00:30:05): I think that also helps me to be a really good trainer is that I've done it wrong three times, and I know how you're going to do it wrong three times. I can honestly understand that perspective and the other kind, they're just amazing. They're just amazing people, and I'm not that kind. But what it doesn't mean that you can't be amazing, no matter what kind you are.

Rob Collie (00:30:30): That's right. If you're one of the technical abstract types, one of the common weaknesses for them, it's not universal, but a common weakness for the technical abstract types is that they're not grounded enough in sort of the human reality in which the problems are trying to be solved. They still kind of want the tech to be the star. If you're going to be successful in modern BI, modern analytics, I really do think you need to be one of these tweeners. You need to be very firmly rooted in the human element. You can at least say that for the practical hands on route, that you're going to be grounded in the human reality.

Krissy Dyess (00:31:06): That's true. That's definitely true. Honestly too, when I was back in the early days for me being that hands on learner and for not a lot of content out there, the blogs that were out there was that little bit of inspiration that kept me going to keep learning and overcome those challenges because I truly believe that I was exposed to this other universe out there. I didn't know who the people were, but I was stalking everybody and learning as much as possible.

Krissy Dyess (00:31:35): And honestly, that little bit was enough to help me to keep going, even though I didn't understand the technical terms, the filter and all the different like language that later I found out was right there in the book. Even though I was having these challenges, not really understanding it, I knew what I was doing was better. I knew that I wanted to understand it more. And really the internet at the time in the blog post was where I got a lot of information to help that drive if you will.

Krissy Dyess (00:32:08): It can be extremely daunting to learn a new technology, not see those immediate wins and experience that frustration just to do something super simple. It does. It takes you those couple times to drive what is the right way? And that's really where I feel like the book is very great, but our two-day training, if I could have had that in the early days, I would've done far more. Just no doubt, no doubt.

Krissy Dyess (00:32:36): And again, that just goes back to this idea of even right now in the ecosystem, it is very different. There's almost too much information out there for people that are uncovering these tools. They go out and they do the website searches and even you start those self-guided. I run into it all the time. You start down these self-learning paths and great, but there is something about that human connection from the people that have learned these from the early days, digesting, bringing everything down to you in a rapid delivery that I think really resonates with our students.

Thomas LaRock (00:33:14): So you two have danced around a concept without actually saying, so I'm going to say it for you. I'm sure you're aware that there's a whole science and field dedicated to education. Right?

Rob Collie (00:33:26): Well, get out.

Krissy Dyess (00:33:28): Wow. Mind blown.

Thomas LaRock (00:33:30): People are in their doctorate in this stuff, right? And there's actually a love research on adult education and how you learn as an adult as opposed to a child. But there's a fabulous book out there called Telling Ain't Training. And the idea is you can't stand in front of a room, deliver a lecture from slides or whatever or have somebody just read a book and think that they are now trained in whatever aspect it is.

Thomas LaRock (00:33:59): I've been skewered for saying this publicly, but if you're not putting your hands on something, you're not doing training. Pure and simple. You're delivering a lecture. That's fine. You're delivering a lecture, but you're not training somebody. If I tell somebody, this is how you read an execution plan, I've given the lecture. But until they have to start doing that themself and put their hands on the product, then that's when the real training begins.

Thomas LaRock (00:34:26): You two have talked about this without actually saying those three words, and I always like to emphasize that. When people say, "Hey, come to my training event." I'm like, "Oh, they'll be hands on labs?" "Well, no. It's just me standing in front of a room. You're not training me. You're giving me information that I can then take and do my own self training. But what I want is if I'm going to a P3 Adaptive training seminar, I'm opening that laptop. I'm going to have Power BI in front of me and I'm going to be putting my hands on all the nerd knobs that I need to know in order to be effective when I go back to my employer."

Rob Collie (00:35:04): Indeed. Indeed, you will. I think if we could adjust the title of that book, it wouldn't be as pithy. But we could give it a subtitle, Telling Ain't Training, and then parentheses for most people.

Thomas LaRock (00:35:17): You know what? I'm going to go see if there's a subtitle. Hold on.

Rob Collie (00:35:21): Here's the thing. I think if that were true for 100% of the world, we wouldn't have that kind of training at all. The problem is that there is this small single digit percentage of the population that actually does like to learn that way. They'd love to learn in the abstract. That's what they live for. Now, it's not most of us.

Thomas LaRock (00:35:42): I didn't say you couldn't learn that way. We're talking about training.

Rob Collie (00:35:45): We're not disagreeing. What I'm saying is, is that whether or not that class is judged as a success, if it's a very telling oriented, here are the concepts. Just laying them down like you would like in a math class in college, right, there is going to be some like one out of 20, five percentage group that's going to walk out of that training and would honestly have been greatly improved by it.

Rob Collie (00:36:08): It's just the other 95% that are just feeling inadequate and they didn't really get anything out of it, but they're blaming themselves for it, because there is this other or 5% that you can see. They tend to be very visible. I completely agree. It's just that we have to acknowledge that there is a small slice of humanity for which that stuff does work, and which is what keeps this whole kind of racket going, is this 5% preaching back to themselves.

Thomas LaRock (00:36:35): Yeah. This is where the doctorates kick in, and they have their philosophical discussions about the learning part.

Rob Collie (00:36:42): That's right. That's right. And then those doctorates, what do they do? They all go back and teach third grade. No, they don't. They stay in the ivory tower. We stay away from those front lines, whatever you do.

Thomas LaRock (00:36:53): But I mean, one example I always have used in the past, I should say is like in the army. They train you to use a weapon and they do that with a lot of PowerPoint and things. But you don't go into battle until you've actually fired that weapon. You don't sit there abstractly think, "Oh, I know how this gun is supposed to work. This isn't like a movie." You're actually going to put the weapon in some of these hands so they can feel it and understand what they were given as a lecture or whatever format, right?

Krissy Dyess (00:37:26): Yeah, that's definitely true. And I think that is one of the thing that differentiates our training. We give you that experience, right? It is hands on. Not a lot of slides is the expectation that we always give at the beginning. Right? So you're immediately hands in. You're immediately working through like a real life solution. Now, you're in a training environment so that we can tee up all the things we want to teach you, and then we layer in a workshop following the training that allows you to apply what you just learned on training data to your real data.

Krissy Dyess (00:37:58): That's always the next play, right? Just because you've attended a training, you've had some hands on. Making that translation of how does it work with what I'm dealing with, that's another part of the learning process with Power BI. And I think even too, if you're learning style is one way or the other, what really people need to take away is you're getting the ingredients, if you will.

Krissy Dyess (00:38:22): We're giving you all the foundational ingredients, but when you go back to create or build your solution, you're going to need to create your own recipe from those ingredients. That can be a difficult concept for people wanting to learn new technology because they want to step by step. So again, by setting that expectation that these are the core things that you really need to walk away with, it sets them up for success through those workshops, the hands on aspects of it.

Rob Collie (00:38:54): I like that approach.

Krissy Dyess (00:38:55): Yeah, me too. That's why I love training. I get so excited. When I came on board, I got to do training, got to do consulting. It's amazing. It's been an amazing opportunity. Every single training engagement, every single student has taught me something along the way to become a better trainer. Recently, I've been doing... Once a month usually, we do these modern Excel analysts in a day workshops. They're free. We have one this month in April. We also have one in May. It's really interesting because we just kicked off this new training in December. It started in December of 2020.

Krissy Dyess (00:39:30): And the feedback that I've been getting is really reinforcing the hands on learning pieces of that workshop. So people want more time. When we put the agenda together, we laid out the content, the information layered in with the hands on learning. Really have gotten a lot of feedback of, "Hey, instead of 30 minutes, can we have more 40, 50 minutes to work through this?"

Krissy Dyess (00:39:59): So that's been a key takeaway that I'm bringing into each additional workshop is giving more time. Giving them more time because there's a true benefit from that experience and being able to ask questions and kind of get the... What is the overall? What is the end game? What is the overall? Let me get my hands in there. Let me try some of the button clicks. So it's been great.

Thomas LaRock (00:40:21): Krissy, what's your title at P3? The official title?

Krissy Dyess (00:40:24): Ooh. My official title is director of client services.

Thomas LaRock (00:40:28): Okay. So after everything you've been talking about here, I've been listening and fascinated for a while, I've realized is, Rob, just make her your principal advocate, because she's a wonderful evangelist for everything you do there at P3 Adaptive.

Krissy Dyess (00:40:43): I don't remember the email exchange that Krissy talked about back in the day when she still worked for the other company of inquiring about training. But I do remember the time that I met her in person, which is about four years ago.

Krissy Dyess (00:40:56): Yes, it's true. You were in Phoenix. Are you talking about in person, in person?

Rob Collie (00:40:59): Yeah. In person. Real in person.

Krissy Dyess (00:41:02): Yeah. And then here's the, "Oh, Krissy, can you find a place for us to meet?" "Oh yeah, I got it. Let's do a Starbucks." I don't go to Starbucks. I don't drink coffee. This is a big deal. I haven't made a decision and we have this opportunity to meet by coincidence of the universe. Rob calls me and he is like, "So I'm at this Starbucks. It's in a grocery store."

Rob Collie (00:41:26): I'd forgotten that one.

Krissy Dyess (00:41:27): Do you remember that? Oh, gosh.

Rob Collie (00:41:28): I've totally forgotten that part.

Krissy Dyess (00:41:29): There were red flags all over the place

Rob Collie (00:41:31): You're just like, "Oh my gosh. I hadn't read the book." That would've been okay. But doesn't know her way around coffee? I don't know.

Krissy Dyess (00:41:38): And then to make it even more awkward, I don't even know if you remember, but we get to the right Starbucks. So there's another one right across the street. Right? Rob shows up in this fancy car. It even matched the green. And I was like, "Oh my god. Meeting with Rob at the wrong Starbucks, at the right Starbucks. Here I come in my broken down Rav. It's got dents and everything." And he pulls in, in this fancy car. It was a rental.

Rob Collie (00:42:03): It was a rental. Yeah.

Krissy Dyess (00:42:04): I didn't know.

Thomas LaRock (00:42:05): Yeah, of course it was.

Krissy Dyess (00:42:08): So we go into the Starbucks and he says like, "What do you want?" And I'm like, "Absolutely nothing." And then I was like, "Oh, well, this is weird. I should probably at least get a water. I don't know. Or tea. I have no idea." I don't go to Starbucks. I joke across the team. I'm not a fancy girl. I really am not a fancy girl. I'm like so not fancy that being at Starbucks was like weird for me. I'm like, oh, but I guess this is what techy people do.

Rob Collie (00:42:33): Nothing fancier than a Starbucks, right? Teenagers in there in their pajamas and their slippers.

Krissy Dyess (00:42:39): You're talking about somebody that had been in the cubicle environment for 16 and a half years. My team, they were excited for me. They could tell how excited I was. Nobody knew like, "Is Krissy going to be able to make it in the outside world?"

Rob Collie (00:42:56): Outside the wire? Do you know what's out there?

Thomas LaRock (00:43:00): There's Starbucks out there.

Rob Collie (00:43:04): There's Starbucks out there.

Krissy Dyess (00:43:04): There's Starbucks.

Thomas LaRock (00:43:04): What's she going to do?

Rob Collie (00:43:06): She doesn't even know venti from grande.

Krissy Dyess (00:43:10): I don't.

Thomas LaRock (00:43:11): It's like two different languages.

Rob Collie (00:43:13): She's going to go in. She's going to order a small. You just know it. It's going to be a disaster.

Krissy Dyess (00:43:19): This is true. This is true. But you know what? There was so many things like in the early days that I'll tell you, if I hadn't had the passion and had the opportunity that I cherished, I really did. It's the weirdest thing. I've never been a kid that's like, I am laser focused that one day I want to be X. I have never had that experience in my life. I've been raised on the, go to school, get good grades, go to college. That was the generation. Get a degree, find a job, and have a happy life.

Krissy Dyess (00:43:50): I was never like laser focused on the company or the job, and just kind of fell into things along the way that I think really prepared me as best as possible for when this opportunity came. And it was exciting for me. It's still exciting for me. And that energy really is what got me through all the early day challenges because it wasn't easy. It still isn't easy what we do. The technology is moving so quickly. There's a lot to learn. No matter what kind of learner you are, you're still going to hit challenges and you need to be a problem solver, you need to be able to figure it out. You don't need to know everything.

Krissy Dyess (00:44:30): I did learn that over time here. I remember when I first joined, it was very clear that there was a lot that I didn't know. But what became more clear as I delivered trainings is it was probably about the 80/20 rule. I mean, I knew probably 80% of what people were asking, but then there was always these little nuggets, that people would ask you along the way. I know you experienced this too, Rob, because that's a lot of probably the blogs.

Rob Collie (00:44:56): Yeah. That's what the blog was being asked questions. I'd never encountered before.

Krissy Dyess (00:45:00): Right. And because we're curious and we want to problem solve and we want to help people. I know I'm really grounded into wanting to help people. So it gives you those cha that in that cubicle environment, I really wasn't exposed to, and wasn't able to really thrive in the way that I've seen myself here in the last four years. It's just been such an incredible journey that I had no idea how incredibly life changing, all these choices that I made and all the opportunities that follow would provide for me. It's been amazing. I mean, don't get me wrong. There's the days where I'm like, "Ugh, team meeting. Get the slides together."

Rob Collie (00:45:40): Those slides were on point yesterday.

Krissy Dyess (00:45:42): Really, really?

Rob Collie (00:45:43): Yeah.

Krissy Dyess (00:45:43): Okay. I got a lot of feedback.

Rob Collie (00:45:45): The PowerPoint arms race between you and Evan is taking us to new highs.

Krissy Dyess (00:45:50): Ooh, it's a tough battle.

Rob Collie (00:45:52): I'm starting to see it as a collaboration too.

Krissy Dyess (00:45:54): It is.

Rob Collie (00:45:54): That's where we become our best, right?

Krissy Dyess (00:45:56): Oh, yeah. It is. I mean, just in the leadership role, that's been different too. Right? So I came in learning the training and consulting and then moved into the leadership role. There's been a lot of learning along the way. I anticipate I'm going to continue to learn more. It's really exciting. So advocates, spokes, whatever. I don't know, Tom, if you had a name for it.

Thomas LaRock (00:46:18): Yeah. An advocate, an evangelist.

Krissy Dyess (00:46:20): Evangelist.

Thomas LaRock (00:46:21): You'd be a natural if there was ever a role like that at P3 Adaptive because you certainly communicate not just what you do, but you communicate the emotion that goes with it of how just a general positivity, the impact this has had. And Rob has talked about this as well. This is life changing for a lot of people. You were stuck in a cube for 16 years.

Krissy Dyess (00:46:42): I wasn't stuck. I chose to be there.

Thomas LaRock (00:46:46): But you were in a cube for 16 years and you wanted to get out. You wanted to get, as Rob said on the other side of the wire. And the thing that was there for you was Rob and Power BI, but data analysis in general. I just think that there's a lot more people like us out there that just need to hear that story being shared and knowing what's possible. Allington, he was working for Coke and he's like, "Wait? I could do Excel for a job?"

Krissy Dyess (00:47:17): That's interesting that you hit on this. I had no idea before being on the pod, if like there was any kind of script or anything like that. Clearly there's not. But it's interesting because I had a script because I like to be prepared. It is interesting that you brought that up just organically because honestly, sitting in the cubicle world, the life changing moment, like a key life changing moment for me was that blog that went out with Matt's picture. Here's a man working at Coca-Cola, very important, lots of years experience changing his career. That was the signal that I picked up on, and at that point I started this idea in my mind that this was going to become a company, and that one day I wanted to be a part of it.

Krissy Dyess (00:48:09): That's where this dream, if you will, of something that I wanted to do really came into my energy and my life. And I would. I would go into work and I would just do the things. I'd do them a little bit better, keep learning everything. I would come home and I would sit down on my couch, on my cell phone, because now I'm getting more advanced technologically. I would read things and keep learning. And it really started that blog post. In fact, when I joined P3, I joined in April, I think it was June, we all got together up at Seattle for the...

Rob Collie (00:48:44): Oh, right. Yeah, the summit.

Krissy Dyess (00:48:45): The summit. I got to meet everybody on the team that was here face to face. And we all got together in the evening. Ken Puls was there and Matt Allington was there and there was all these other people that, again, like I thought, "Who are these people? How would I ever have any contact?" And for me, even that moment was just amazing because just that story... I didn't know Matt. I didn't really know anything. That was enough for me to shift my energy, to keep going. There's been many people along the way, just in very small, they don't even know that have contributed, and I do look at every time I go to a training or anytime I do have an interaction with anyone that, "You know what, I don't know what I might say or what I might do, but if I could spark or trigger something in somebody else that would just be ultimately amazing and very rewarding.

Rob Collie (00:49:43): Something I want to press the bold button on here is the thing that Tom was saying. We've been talking about this from the perspective of a lot of our conversations, like what makes good training? And by the way, Tom, at that Starbucks meeting, when we eventually got it together, and got our orders or whatever it was, at the end of it, I looked at Krissy and I said, "You are going to change lives."

Krissy Dyess (00:50:06): You did. You signed my book and I went, "Oh my God, somebody said I'm going to change lives. This person is crazy."

Rob Collie (00:50:14): Then I went and I got in my fancy rental car and I drove off into the desert.

Krissy Dyess (00:50:17): It's true. Here's the thing it's so ironic is because I've been following the blog and stalking Rob. Not really. There's so many elements in those posts that were life that I related to in the movie themes. It's like something out of a movie. It literally that day felt like something out of a movie and that was the ultimate decision where I was like, "Okay, yep." In fact, my mom back then, she was like... I was telling her and I was so excited and she's like, "Who is this company? Do they have a physical office? I don't know that this is something you should do." I thank my mom for looking out for me, but of course then I went against her. I said, "I don't know. They don't have a building."

Rob Collie (00:51:02): What we're going to do is we're going to go get like six bricks and some mortar and just squish them all together into a cube and say, "Yeah, we're a brick and mortar business."

Krissy Dyess (00:51:11): Well, my mom's okay now. And everybody is okay. It's been amazing. I couldn't have written this story. It just organically came together.

Rob Collie (00:51:19): Where we were living at that time, there was this old, like antique abandoned, 7-Eleven down the street that had some really old 7-Eleven logo from the 30s or something. It had been available and we were always thinking like, "Oh, maybe we should try to snag that and turn it into the data store or something like that." There's never really been a need for a physical office it turns out. But instead, Elon Musk's brother turned it into a restaurant.

Krissy Dyess (00:51:47): Oh, wow.

Rob Collie (00:51:49): Which is already closed. COVID took care of it. It wasn't particularly good either.

Krissy Dyess (00:51:52): Okay.

Rob Collie (00:51:55): Those bastards, they stole our data store from us, the location. Anyway, back to what I really wanted to say, which was that the number one thing that I would want people listening to this to take away is that for most of us, this is what legitimacy sounds like.

Krissy Dyess (00:52:13): Or some people say crazy.

Rob Collie (00:52:15): Yeah. Well, okay, if that's true, then you've also come to the right place.

Krissy Dyess (00:52:21): I think what it is like I get so excited and there's so many twists and turns. That is one of the things that I've been working on in the leadership role is you got to be clear and concise. So that's why I kind of joke there at the beginning. I definitely have so much excitement and passion over the work that we're doing, the organization that we've created. It's really easy. There's just been so many life experiences that I've been able to have the opportunity. I even remember too, going to my first training on an airplane by myself, sitting there and I would do this.

Krissy Dyess (00:52:55): I still do this to this day, and that's why my book is all beat up. Literally, when I would go to a training, I would go through the book to refresh that perspective of what it is for a new learner.

Rob Collie (00:53:06): To be new. Yeah.

Krissy Dyess (00:53:07): To be new. And every single time I deliver a training event that's our curriculum, I do have that experience, and you have time on an airplane, right? I'm not a fancy girl, so I pull out the book.

Rob Collie (00:53:21): Airplanes.

Krissy Dyess (00:53:22): Airplanes.

Rob Collie (00:53:24): I heard they might be making a comeback one of these days.

Thomas LaRock (00:53:26): Magical.

Krissy Dyess (00:53:28): I didn't sign up to travel. It said remote consultant. So my biggest worry was not having a human contact. I was used to going into the office. Anything that you come across in life, you can look at it, however you want it be. And if you're going to look at it in a negative light, that's what you're going to see, and that's what you're going to experience. I truly do believe that the energy, no matter what you're dealing with, what you're doing, whether it's data or anything, the energy that you put out and the light that you see it is going to drive that experience for you.

Krissy Dyess (00:54:05): I find myself drawing upon that principle a lot, because life isn't easy and data and technology isn't easy, but if you make it fun and you can, it's more enjoyable and usually leads to a positive outcome.

Rob Collie (00:54:20): Solving problems, and making improvements is fun. That's where a lot of the fun comes from.

Krissy Dyess (00:54:26): But not when it's not working and you need it done now. That isn't fun.

Rob Collie (00:54:31): That does get frustrating. Right? And the technical literature isn't helpful.

Krissy Dyess (00:54:37): That's right. That's right.

Rob Collie (00:54:37): The all function is being described as a table function and you're like what...

Krissy Dyess (00:54:43): What? What does that mean to me?

Rob Collie (00:54:45): WTF does table function... It's the remove filters function. Okay. Move on.

Krissy Dyess (00:54:48): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:54:49): I just want to make sure that we really hit this right on the head, which is, it's so easy to doubt yourself coming up through anything that's even semi-technical and certainly Power BI is technical. It's so easy to doubt yourself because of the existence of that 5% that both learn and teach in the abstract. And it's so obvious to you that you're not that. This is true for me too. Right? Despite my computer science degree and having worked at Microsoft, I was kind of miscast. I was not one of the abstract ones really. I thought I was, but I learned the hard way that I wasn't.

Rob Collie (00:55:23): So for people who are listening and who have been walking sort of a similar path, so I want those people to know that every bit is legitimate of a path. It's not even just that that path is okay or acceptable. It's actually great. It's no better or worse than the technical path. The technical path, isn't a guarantee of success. And in fact, again, like the mindset that draws you to that technical path very often distracts you from what's truly valuable. Distracts you and insulates you from the human world where you can actually have an impact.

Rob Collie (00:55:54): So you've got something to overcome coming out of that world. Tom asked you what your title is. You're one of our directors. You're a leader at our company. And deservedly so. Imagine, and if along the way that other voice in your head had been just a little bit louder, the one that was saying. "Nah, I'm just kind of faking it." Right? If that voice had been too loud, life takes a different turn. I'm really grateful that that voice wasn't that loud.

Krissy Dyess (00:56:25): Yeah, I'm grateful as well.

Rob Collie (00:56:26): Everyone's got that voice. Everyone in the 95% that learns via the hands on practical way has that voice to varying strengths. Right now there's people out there that are going to be listening to this, that whether consciously or unconsciously, they're wrestling with exactly this, to put the cherry on this sundae like I sincerely believe that we are the best power BI consulting firm in the world. I believe that.

Krissy Dyess (00:56:50): Oh, yeah. I agree as well.

Rob Collie (00:56:52): You're one of our leaders and this is your story. So people out there are listening and this story sounds familiar to them. Here's the terrible news is that your glass ceiling, which your limits are as a professional, are you can be one of the leaders at the best firm in the world. That's going to be your high watermark. I'm sorry.

Krissy Dyess (00:57:12): Yeah, for sure. I think a lot of us have those voices in our head. Not to say that there weren't challenges. Right? So you still have to want to overcome those challenges.

Rob Collie (00:57:22): If that's your background, that's where you're coming from. I want you to know that you can be legitimately a leader in this space like Krissy, like you are. You're a leader at-

Krissy Dyess (00:57:32): That's right.

Rob Collie (00:57:32): If not the best firm in the world, certainly one of the handful. And you're crucial to us. Again, imagine if you had derailed yourself. You doubted yourself, which is natural to do. I'm really grateful that you didn't.

Krissy Dyess (00:57:46): Well, thank you. And I'm grateful that I didn't either, because it has been an amazing opportunity. One of the things that I do appreciate in this leadership role, in this company that we're creating is not only are we a new type of consulting firm. Even our leadership it's so night and day, just so night and day. We are encouraged to bring ideas, be our true authentic self. Having that ability to be able to connect and share in a safe environment, I think has allowed us to put ideas out there, try them.

Krissy Dyess (00:58:24): If they're working well, fantastic. If we need to modify them, we can change them. And we quickly do that. We just operate very differently than what I've experienced in traditional environments and with traditional leadership roles. I do think that truly makes us a different organization. I get so excited too, as we start to grow. So now we're growing the team. what is our future? What are we going to look like? And just let's stay away from the things we all know that are not great.

Krissy Dyess (00:58:55): As a leader, we get to contribute and drive that and make sure that we're all synced up and on the same page, rowing at the same direction. And that's where we're at right now. We're all rowing the same direction. You can really tell.

Rob Collie (00:59:07): Yeah. I mean, even with the PowerPoints.

Krissy Dyess (00:59:09): Who knew you could put a cat meme.

Rob Collie (00:59:11): And nail it.

Krissy Dyess (00:59:11): And nail it.

Rob Collie (00:59:12): Who says you can't lead off a team meeting with a cat meme? We're not the company that's going to say no to that.

Krissy Dyess (00:59:18): You maybe should, but nobody has yet. So I'll embrace it. I'll embrace it as long as I can.

Rob Collie (00:59:23): Well, as you said, it's an AB kind of thing, right? We run a few cat memes to start out and it doesn't seem to be working, well, we're not going to cat meme it anymore.

Krissy Dyess (00:59:31): Well, you notice when there was like the little technical glitch and there wasn't the cat meme, the demand already increased. People were looking for it.

Rob Collie (00:59:39): You just got to keep people hungry every now and then. You're expecting cat meme, but no cat meme for you today.

Krissy Dyess (00:59:46): That actually just kind of creeped in. Honestly, it's just kind of in my way, I think in the cubicle world, when you're having a bad day. If you're having a bad day, you could always go out and find a fun cat meme to pass around with your coworkers. And yeah, I kind of trickled over when I started doing blog posts. And apparently it's still sticking around like I said. It makes it fun.

Rob Collie (01:00:06): We enjoy ourselves on the team meetings. That's for sure. When Kellan was a guest on here, he said that something that I very much agreed with which is that in your first six months working here, the pace and variety of problems that you get exposed to is just so much more concentrated. It's like pressing this fast forward button on life. So much exposure to so many different industries. So many different types of problems and different kinds of questions and everything that you grow just a tremendous amount, even just in that first six months.

Rob Collie (01:00:38): It's also challenging. Right? It's fun. If it were easy, it wouldn't always be as much fun. How much do you remember about that mythical first six months?

Krissy Dyess (01:00:48): Yeah. How much do I remember? I've been to my therapist and I try to suppress a lot of those feelings. They're slowly reemerging. It went very quickly from super excited to here's my first project. It was tough. At that time, I actually was more comfortable, had been more comfortable in the Excel, Power Pivot side of things. Of course, my very first project was in a Power BI desktop environment. Back then, you didn't have the ability to go into the grid and filter.

Rob Collie (01:01:22): Yeah. It was a big, big limitation. This is the big problem.

Krissy Dyess (01:01:26): That was huge when they finally worked that out, because I honestly found myself taking Power BI solutions moving them back into Excel where I felt comfortable to work through them, which it wasn't the greatest way to do it, but that environment was just so night and day and limiting with having to drag and drop. You're talking to somebody who's like a SQL background and likes to just type in and not have to navigate the UI.

Krissy Dyess (01:01:54): I appreciate the UI. It's super helpful. The power query side of things, you can do so much easier. Things like unpivoting data versus SQL. Ever do that in SQL? It's not fun.

Rob Collie (01:02:05): No, I haven't.

Krissy Dyess (01:02:06): Oh, really?

Rob Collie (01:02:07): I'm aware of it. We had a blog post on it that was written by David Churchward. SQL UNPIVOT Makes My Data Skinny was the title of it. But I wasn't even aware of it that unpivot existed in SQL until he brought that up.

Krissy Dyess (01:02:19): Yeah. It does, but it's terrible and nobody wants to do that when you have Power Query and you can just click two buttons. So again, you have to look at the pros of different things. I would even say first couple weeks, one of the first things I did was come to one of the trainings. So I had a project. It was really challenging. I overcame it, but I did need to get a little bit of help from Kellan and the team. In fact, when I reached out to get a little bit of help, at first, I tried to do my due diligence because I'm like, "I got to solve it. It's my first project. I can't like fail on the first project and reached out to Kellan."

Krissy Dyess (01:02:53): He was like, "Yeah, I don't know. This is one of the hardest decks things I've ever seen in my life." And I was like, "What?" I was thinking, "Well, I guess that's the job. People are coming to you with the most challenging problems. Yes, we do run into them. But as I later found out that a lot of the work was 80% of what I did know and there were these nuggets that I was learning along the way, but the early days for me were very, very challenging.

Krissy Dyess (01:03:19): I did come to one of the training events. It was up in Chicago. In fact, I didn't even have all the details, and I thought that was part of seeing if I could figure it out. So I'm down at the front desk, "Hey, is there some Power BI training here?" And they're like, "Yeah. It's over here." So I came and I actually got to sit through one of the trainings.

Krissy Dyess (01:03:40): I think even after the training Kellan said to me, "Do you think you could do this?" I thought, "Well, yeah." But I didn't even know that's what I was signing up for. I didn't know." I don't think the organization knew exactly either. Right?

Rob Collie (01:03:54): Those were still some very early formative years for the organization.

Krissy Dyess (01:04:02): Oh, and then one of my other favorites was this thing we had that was office hours and I got to pilot that. Oh yeah,

Rob Collie (01:04:09): Yeah. So you get to be part of that failure. Right? Which had nothing to do with you. It was just a tough idea.

Krissy Dyess (01:04:16): It was a tough idea. Actually, it happened recently. I was sifting through some of our Salesforce data and I came across that product offering and I went, "Ooh." Then I saw my name stamped across it. I didn't know. Nobody told me. It was like a terrible experiment to do it to somebody like me.

Rob Collie (01:04:33): It wasn't nice. We feel bad about it. I feel bad about it.

Krissy Dyess (01:04:37): To be honest, it helped me to grow because every day I'd look at my calendar and what I need to work on. And I'd see my office hours on the schedule, and I'd get the tummy ache. I'm like, "Deep breaths. I'm going to get through it." Because what it was, it was to help support people after training. They definitely had questions and needed help. We had some of the early adopters. They had some pretty deep questions in the service that we would provide. It was a round Robin. You showed up. You had no idea their data, their industry. You hadn't worked on any projects with them. And they would literally just come to you with all these questions.

Krissy Dyess (01:05:18): Even, I think in the early days, there was questions around mobile. Integration with mobile and best practices around mobile. What I started to do was just get a heads up. I created a funnel that for these services, I would get a little bit of a heads up of what is your team wanting to talk to? Because a lot of it, I had to research. I mean, it was just so new. They didn't know. I hadn't been exposed. But again, it gave me that opportunity to look at what they were asking.

Krissy Dyess (01:05:46): In a lot of these, they ended up moving into more projects for us because they weren't a simple five-minute answer. Oh, here's the whatever button. It was some pretty deep stuff, especially in the financial space. Some sophisticated things that they were trying to do. Yes, we could do them, but could I answer it without getting my hands in there and doing some things, which is what I found I would do after hours for free. Then Kellan told me that we were a business. So that model didn't work really well.

Rob Collie (01:06:13): Yeah. It was an experimental product. It sort of goes back to that thing that you were saying, which is as a team, as a business, we're willing to try things out.

Krissy Dyess (01:06:20): Yes. But nobody told me until after the fun was had. They're like, "Oh, yeah. That was impossible. Nobody could have did that."

Rob Collie (01:06:28): It's introduced to you as, "This is the thing that we're going to do now." Right?

Krissy Dyess (01:06:32): I thought this is my job. I have no idea.

Rob Collie (01:06:34): But actually we thought it was going to work. And it turns out that just a very product. It doesn't actually address the needs that the client actually has.

Krissy Dyess (01:06:44): It's true.

Rob Collie (01:06:44): It sounds like it does, but it doesn't. And that mismatch in addition to the random, constantly being hit from the flank was something you didn't expect. It's probably one of the most difficult things we ever could have assigned to you.

Krissy Dyess (01:06:58): It was. It was, but at the same time I knew it, and I would. I would kind of be like, "Oh, dear God. How am I going to make it through?" But I did. And even in a challenging situation, I did make it through. I did bring back answers. I didn't have a lot of them immediately, but I added so much into my toolbox because I felt like all these things that they wanted to know, I would answer what I could. And then I would research and find the answers to the things that I couldn't.

Krissy Dyess (01:07:31): It was an interesting time. A lot of excitement out there. A lot of people really excited about the tools, wanting to learn things. Most of those answers I would know easier, but at the same time, there was a lot of just really more complex things. And that's also what I learned in some of the early days is people come to you with their simple problem, right? It's only going to take... It's easy. It should be easy, especially for an expert. And there's always more to it.

Krissy Dyess (01:07:59): Even now. Even in the landscape now, if you go into any model and you just want to make a simple change like you introduce a new field and it needs to flow in and it affects some other business roles. There's a lot of dependencies around things that are built and you might think to yourself, "Oh, this is just a simple modification." But where you start to see it trickle through, it does take a little bit of time. And the benefit is that, yes, it does take a little bit of time, but once you've brought it in into that living, breathing, growing solution, it's there forever. And you don't have to worry about at it again.

Krissy Dyess (01:08:35): So there's always a little bit of a time investment in things. It can be a little bit tricky to make something that should seem simple, like integrate in, but at the same time you do it one time and then you're good to go. So it's super amazing.

Rob Collie (01:08:48): That's sort of like being good to your future self. It's kind of like what Power BI is, is put in a little bit of time now, and recoup all kinds of time later. It's not just about time savings. Of course, it's how you feel as a human. And it's also that if you save enough time, you make more time. You actually start doing things that you never did before. It's not that you're doing the old things faster, you're doing better, smarter things that would've never even occurred to you to attempt when you're more labor constrained on things.

Krissy Dyess (01:09:18): That's exactly right. It's interesting. I've done a lot of trainings and you go in, and you start delivering the trainings. One of the things that I usually... It'll make its way in is this idea that I actually do not consider myself technologically savvy. I'm never one of those people that goes out and gets the newest widget or whatever. I just I'm not. I'm not a fancy girl.

Krissy Dyess (01:09:45): People will look at me when I say this, right? "What do you mean, you're not technically savvy? You're up here, you're teaching, you're providing instruction on a very sophisticated technical solution." I feel like that's one of the key takeaways in addition to the training. One of the key takeaways that I want them to understand is if you don't think of yourself as being able to do this, you must certainly can. Yes, I do have the technical background with SQL and things like that. And been working around data for a long time. But at the same time, I'm not super technically savvy. I just am not.

Rob Collie (01:10:24): That resonates with me. Even when you were using SQL in your former job, I can't imagine you ever introducing yourself to anyone and describing yourself as like a SQL developer.

Krissy Dyess (01:10:38): This is true. In fact, when I would try to explain what I would do, a whole bunch of words would come out and they wouldn't make sense and people are like, "Okay. I don't really have any understanding what you're doing." I'm actually technology adverse is really the term that I use. I feel like maybe you relate to that a little bit, Rob. Every time we have a new system and our company and our organization, you're like, "Oh no. Well, what is this? What buttons do I need to click on?" It'd be fine.

Krissy Dyess (01:11:01): They are really great nowadays with tutorials. But everybody's got to move very fast. I don't have time. So the small little nugget tutorials work really great. It takes me a minute to go in and get my bearings. And it's best done with like, "Focus me to the areas that I care about. Give me exposure to where other things are that I might need, so I'm aware." That's how I describe myself as this technology adverse. I can get in. I can figure it out.

Krissy Dyess (01:11:33): But when you send me something new and in fact, even Power BI, this whole monthly release cycle, when that started, talk about having to get comfortable, being uncomfortable. I would go to a training one week. I've locked it down. I got my flow. Then the next week they would just do something that... I would joke a class. I would say, "Actually, this is the first time I'm actually seeing this tool." Because sometimes I felt like that because you get in, you get used to your routine. You're moving and going through the motions. And now you're like, "That button is not there anymore. They're calling it something different." Then you had the people with the different versions and things like that.

Rob Collie (01:12:13): I'm having this vision right now of the engineering team at Microsoft who has moved the button that you've been relying on. Right? They've got like some like closed circuit TV feed of your training. The moment you go looking for the button and you can't find it, they're all just sitting there going, "Got you."

Krissy Dyess (01:12:30): But here's the thing .I recognize that was the direction that technology was going. I've been in it. I can do it. It makes sense to me. I've been grounded in technology. I also have a feel for end users and interaction with technology. Even though I don't call myself tech savvy, I had make a decision. Am I going to just be an old dinosaur in a cube or do I want to embrace what is going on? That was a tough decision to make. I share that story with a lot of people that are on this journey or thinking about even entering the landscape in 2021, right?

Krissy Dyess (01:13:14): There's just a lot out there. It can be very daunting. But you can make a choice. And one of the things that I like to just convey is I definitely thought of myself as somebody technology averse. I definitely made a choice to just go with the flow. And it's okay. I learned to just adapt and get used to it and just roll with the changes. That's one of the great things about being a bit older. You have a lot of life experiences.

Krissy Dyess (01:13:38): It led me down this path of embracing it. I can also set that expectation and communicate that message to other people as they're thinking about... Even right now with COVID, a lot of people are trying to educate themselves on different areas. I just talked to somebody that I connected with over the summer. It was a women's leadership group and just sent a, "Hello. How are you doing?" She said she was education and she actually made a transition into data and analytics.

Rob Collie (01:14:08): Awesome.

Krissy Dyess (01:14:09): Yeah. So I'm living proof, if nothing else. I have a lot of valuable information. I feel like I have walked that journey. And guess what, if you're just even a little bit better than me, you've got no problem. That's all I got.

Thomas LaRock (01:14:24): That's all you got?

Rob Collie (01:14:25): That was amazing.

Thomas LaRock (01:14:29): That's all I have.

Rob Collie (01:14:31): That's all I got to say about that.

Krissy Dyess (01:14:32): That's about it.

Rob Collie (01:14:34): I mean, holy hell, I've never heard you say those things so explicitly before.

Krissy Dyess (01:14:40): Yeah. You should come to one of my trainings.

Thomas LaRock (01:14:42): Evangelist.

Krissy Dyess (01:14:43): I know, I understand people that have sat in a similar seat and I know what's possible for these people. They ultimately have to do it, right? They ultimately have to do the work and have to navigate their path, but it's for sure possible.

Rob Collie (01:15:03): There was a part of what you were saying that really struck me as being very similar to an explicit decision that Tom made in his career. This is like one of your core themes, Tom, is that you were at one point... You talked about in our very first podcast, the inaugural podcast of Raw Data, that you were a storage professional, and you made the explicit decision to transition, at least partly into analytics because you saw where the wind was blowing.

Thomas LaRock (01:15:31): Yeah. You said storage, and you made me think I was a...

Rob Collie (01:15:34): That's right.

Thomas LaRock (01:15:35): ... like a server admin for a second. I'm like, "Wait." Or a janitor.

Rob Collie (01:15:40): That's what...

Krissy Dyess (01:15:41): I definitely was thinking janitor there.

Rob Collie (01:15:42): That's what happened in our first podcast as well. I used the word storage and you recoiled a little bit. And then he went, "Ah, I guess you're right. I guess that does... Yeah."

Thomas LaRock (01:15:51): And you are right, because that's how you think of...

Rob Collie (01:15:55): Someone's got to write the data down somewhere. So if I'm going to analyze it later, someone better be storing that shit.

Thomas LaRock (01:16:03): So earlier you had mentioned how Rob, it was four years before you even heard the term BI.

Rob Collie (01:16:10): Yeah. From when Krissy was doing it. She was doing this four years before I even could spell it.

Krissy Dyess (01:16:15): I was doing it. I was already doing it.

Thomas LaRock (01:16:17): So in that timeline, I exist and I'm at events that are, let's say, SQL server focused. We'll call it SQL server forward. But there would be a track that was called BI and data warehousing. Those two had to go together because you couldn't just have a track that said business intelligence, because what the hell would that be doing at a SQL server event? So you had to have the data warehousing and the name just to legitimize it in front of that group. And to me, that was a track that I was just like, "Yeah, whatever's happening over there. I'm just going to go look at some query plans." That was my world.

Thomas LaRock (01:16:55): And now like Krissy, I have a degree in mathematics. I forget when it happened, but when I first made the connection as to what they were calling data sciences, the stuff I had been doing rather easily for a long time, and I have a master's in mathematics and all of this stuff, I'm looking at going, "Oh, hell, I used to really enjoy this stuff. I can do this again. Everything old is new again." I can start getting involved in data science projects. And I don't know, start to enjoy some of the things I'm doing.

Thomas LaRock (01:17:32): For example, I Kaggle. I love Kaggle and the stuff that you can find on their website. They had competitions. Rob, you'd like this. They had the data science competitions. The men's and women's bracket and you had to build a predictive model for any possible match up for all the teams that were seated in this year's tournament and predict who would win. [inaudible 01:17:55] score is how they score everything. I had fun building the model, submitting the prediction and seeing how awful I am at this. But it was fun.

Rob Collie (01:18:05): The real world is a real pain in the.

Thomas LaRock (01:18:07): See how much more fun that was than picking up the phone. And somebody complaining that some disc somewhere was full and I just go delete some data. What the hell am I doing anyway? You're like, "What? Who is this?"

Rob Collie (01:18:19): Have you ever get tired of the head geek business, or is it chief geek? I forget. Is it head geek or chief geek?

Thomas LaRock (01:18:25): It is head geek.

Rob Collie (01:18:26): Head geek. Okay.

Thomas LaRock (01:18:27): And I'm not tired of it yet because it's still the doesn't feel like work.

Rob Collie (01:18:31): Okay. Well, that's good. But if you ever get tired of it, I want you to derive some inspiration from Krissy's story here. Maybe you can come put that math degree to good use. Or you could just go back to your Kaggle exercises.

Thomas LaRock (01:18:43): Some of those competitions have some money behind them.

Rob Collie (01:18:46): They totally miss the Kaggle exercises.

Thomas LaRock (01:18:47): Now, I did miss it. I did miss it. I'm just letting it go. I'm letting it go right by, Rob.

Rob Collie (01:18:55): Because Rob is a 12 year old.

Thomas LaRock (01:18:58): I saw it. I heard it. I watched it go by like a parade. I smiled, I waved, and I let it go.

Rob Collie (01:19:05): Clearly you've been trained in meditation. So that is the thing you're supposed to do with your thoughts. Oh, look at that happy little thought going by. Just let it go. Look at that.

Thomas LaRock (01:19:12): It's like a fish. I see the worm on the hook and I'm like, "Yeah, but that's a trick. I ain't going there."

Rob Collie (01:19:18): Don't do it for that. Yeah.

Krissy Dyess (01:19:20): Actually, I had another thought too, just like thinking about how things were and where the future was going. And another reason that drove me to this whole remote consultant type of a role, I always had this theory, I think it was probably back around 2010, that what we would see in the future... I have kids. So let me just bring everybody back in. I have kids. I have two boys. I got a 13 and I have an 11-year-old.

Krissy Dyess (01:19:48): I think about their future, and I think about my journey. I think about those pivotal things that led me on a path and the people along the way. As I'm thinking about my kids and thinking about the future, I started thinking to myself like the future is going to be very different. Even in terms of education, my friends say, "You're crazy."

Krissy Dyess (01:20:09): I'm like, "No, I don't really think kids are going to need college in the future." I kept throwing that out there. And that was another reason why I wanted to take this journey and take this step, because back then in 2017, I was doing remote in the organization a couple days in the office, a couple days from home. But this idea of connecting with other people that are really driving change in leadership and doing work differently.

Krissy Dyess (01:20:36): I started to envision this network of remote workers and remote people that would Excel and create communities. And they exist. They exist out there. I started thinking about, I want to get into this just to prove my kids that anything is possible. As they're working on their life path, just to be that role model, if you will, to represent something that was different and unknown, and to just plant the seed with them, that it doesn't necessarily mean you need to go to college.

Krissy Dyess (01:21:08): Because look at me, yes, I went to college and I had my job. I learned this power pivot tool myself, not in any kind of training program. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to do it and to have the data to work with and things like that. Definitely for the future, I don't know that they're going to need to do college. If you can get out there in this Kaggle, these other different types of competitions, there is opportunity abound that you can go out. There are people that are willing to mentor you to help you.

Krissy Dyess (01:21:44): It's interesting because I offer like I'm a very open, helpful kind of person. I put it out there with a lot of the training and workshops. I do. I get people that connect with me on LinkedIn and maybe ask me some questions, but I would expect more people to take me up on it that I actually do.

Krissy Dyess (01:22:05): I think it's one of the things too that I found as I came into this community, how willing people were to help each other. It was different than the competitive. There's still competition, but it's a very different landscape and ecosystem. Even this last year, like here, I thought I was like light years ahead, this visionary of wanting to get this experience, right?

Krissy Dyess (01:22:28): Now, we've all been catapulted forward into it. I still feel like other organizations aren't thriving in this culture. It takes a while. It takes a while to navigate it, get comfortable, really be able to excel. You've taken away those opportunities to just ask quick questions of each other. Yeah. You can kind of do it on Slack. But it's different.

Krissy Dyess (01:22:48): I still feel like even more so the future for people coming out of college or even considering changing their career because of everything that happened. There's a lot of opportunity out there to get free data samples, to find somebody to help mentor you, to give you some guidance. And that might be all you need to land that first opportunity that takes you to the next.

Krissy Dyess (01:23:12): Again, you might not know how you're going to get from A to Z, but if you do a tiny bit over the course of 365 days, you're somewhere versus doing nothing. And then you never know what could be. And it's still early. It's so early with these tools, and they're branching out all over the place. The cloud, solutioning. Just even how do you take processes and transform them into those action loops? It's still early and pioneering the best ways affecting large organizations.

Rob Collie (01:23:47): I'm really glad we took that little side loop.

Krissy Dyess (01:23:49): I got many side loops. It's just like, which one do you want?

Rob Collie (01:23:55): Where organisms comprised mainly of side loops. Yes.

Krissy Dyess (01:23:58): I have so many side loops. I have to laser focus in, I meet with the directors. And we have a lot of fun. Every appreciates everybody for their strengths and their weaknesses. So it's super fun. I'll often joke after a long monologue, there's some good nuggets. Go in there and find them and pull them out.

Rob Collie (01:24:15): Yeah. We'll grab them. That sort of like viewing the future as kind of like a malleable entity is a really, really valuable mindset. If you wake up every day expecting that today will be like yesterday, and it will, it'll resemble yesterday, won't it?

Krissy Dyess (01:24:32): That's true.

Rob Collie (01:24:34): But over the course of, you talked about like a little bit of change in yourself over the course of a year piles up, a little bit of change in the world over the course of a year, also piles up.

Krissy Dyess (01:24:40): That's right.

Rob Collie (01:24:41): And you can end up in a dramatically different place one year later, as we've seen. I think I really benefited from being close to my grandparents growing up because they lived through times of tremendous change. They weren't programmed by their early formative experiences to expect stability. Everything was always changing underfoot. They were born before the Great Depression who were old enough to experience the bottom falling out. Old enough to see like the world go to war with itself in a way that even the ancients would've looked at and had their breath taken away.

Rob Collie (01:25:16): The whole world reorganized in the space of five years. It's crazy when you think about it, how short World War II was? They spent so much time with me growing up, and a lot of that I think rubbed off on me. One of the books that didn't sell very well, I dedicated it to them at the beginning. I think it was something like, thanks for teaching that four-year-old boy to color outside the lines. The generations that followed them did get to expect stability.

Krissy Dyess (01:25:40): That's true.

Rob Collie (01:25:41): I think we're coming back around to one of those white waters where things are going to change rapidly in a short period of time.

Krissy Dyess (01:25:48): I agree. I don't even know what changes to expect on the horizon. I try to take all the data in and process it. It's really hard to predict. I do feel like the future is very uncertain, but what I have feel like I've also learned from previous generations very close to my grandparents as well is somehow they all got through it and they're doing okay. That's what comforted me through everything that happened last year is just their resolve through what they had been through and that everything is okay. But you do need to evolve and adapt because some people are not evolving and adapting and that's sad. So we won't go there.

Rob Collie (01:26:29): Krissy, I've really enjoyed this. I've known you for four years. And yet I feel like... I don't feel like, I know that I got to know you even better just during the course of this conversation. So many things I didn't actually know about you that we talked about for the first time ever.

Krissy Dyess (01:26:41): Well, that's great. Yeah, we worked to together, but we're both very busy. I definitely could come back. I could come back.

Rob Collie (01:26:48): You're not out of words, are you?

Krissy Dyess (01:26:49): I am not out of words. Anybody that knows me, there are more words. Are there words that everybody wants to hear? Again, there's good nuggets in there.

Rob Collie (01:26:58): Krissy Dyess on podcast. It's a sustainable industry.

Krissy Dyess (01:27:02): Actually, you know what, it could be.

Rob Collie (01:27:04): Thanks again. I really enjoyed it. Thank you, Tom.

Thomas LaRock (01:27:06): Krissy, wonderful to meet you.

Krissy Dyess (01:27:07): Thank you. Have a great day.

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