On this episode of The Vurge, Rebecca connects with Joel Benware, an innovative healthcare technology leader and mentor. Tune in as they dig into the importance of education and life-long learning, remote culture, and Joel's journey from CIO to President of Acmeware.
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On this episode of The Vurge, Rebecca connects with Joel Benware, an innovative healthcare technology leader and mentor. Tune in as they dig into the importance of education and life-long learning, remote culture, and Joel's journey from CIO to President of Acmeware.
Thanks for listening! Like what you hear? Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and be sure to subscribe to The Vurge for the latest episodes and more!
Interested in being a guest on the show? Click here to learn more.
Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the Verge, where today we have Mr Joel Benware. Welcome, joel.
Speaker 2:Thank you, rebecca, nice to be with you.
Speaker 1:So Joel and I go way back to Vermont where we were both CIOs at community hospitals, and what Joel doesn't know is he's one of my biggest mentors, if you knew that or not. He's followed me and helped me through the treacherous water of being a CIO and a new CIO at the time and guided me to the right conferences, and we've talked along our years of experience and as we transition to other roles. So I can't thank you enough for supporting me and everything that I've done, joel.
Speaker 2:It's so mutual, it goes both ways. It's fun to work with somebody that's gone through the same things you have and then to watch your career blossom and where you've gone probably gave me the courage to try some similar things. So it's certainly mutual mentorship. That's a thing.
Speaker 1:Oh, thanks, yeah, jumping over to the dark side. So your new interior role of CEO? Right, so you've jumped over from CEO.
Speaker 2:I'm currently president of ACMEWare.
Speaker 1:Yes, and so how is that going and sort of tell us the story of how you transitioned and how you found ACMEWare and a little bit of what they do.
Speaker 2:Sure, thank you. Well, I've been a customer, I've been a hospital CIO for 18 years, over three different community hospitals. I happened to all be in the Meditech space. The Meditech was our primary electronic medical record system. And I became a customer of ACMEWare probably greater than 10 years ago and wasn't a company that was jumping out at me all the time, it was just a trusted partnership that just grew and grew and grew over the years and last winter their owner, glenn DeBate, approached me and he said I'm looking at moving to retirement and I keep seeing you as the face of my company and would you be interested? And it wasn't a quick yes, but it wasn't a quick no, it was oh wow, that's really interesting. I had never thought of going to the vendor side. I worked very hard and got my credentials and education and all that to be serving in a community hospital and loved what I did for a living, love the people I worked with and I wasn't eager to jump to the vendor side by any means. But as Glenn and I talked more and more, I think we kind of like Tuesdays with Mori, if you know that book, it was Tuesdays with Glenn. It was every Tuesday night we'd be on the phone talking with each other and just sharing ideas and we decided, yeah, let's make this jump and hopefully we set it up. So he needs me to be successful. I need him to be successful for this to carry on.
Speaker 2:Acmeware has a 25 year history in the Meditech space. I've been a customer for at least a dozen years, so it's now my job to learn and meet our customers on a different side. So, as you said, gone to the dark side of consulting or the vendor side. I went to my first Meditech conference meeting a couple months ago and it was the first time I had been at that event as a vendor, where I had been participating as a CIO. I was actually the host of the event a few years ago, so it was good.
Speaker 2:But I really like it now. I like meeting our customers because I've sat in that seat and I know the pressures they're under, I know what they're facing and I love having solutions that can help them out. So it's been a nice transition. It just feels very comfortable and I'm glad the way Glenn and I have done it. I've seen a lot of people say I'm leaving, hire this new person in and there's no transition time. We've really baked in quite a long transition period. In between. Glenn's not completely retiring. He wants to go into programming a couple hours a week and is just slowly transitioning the company over to me as I get more comfortable with each line of the business. He's kind of stepping back a little bit each month, so it's been good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think, both of us being on the vendor side, being able to bring our past CIO experiences I find that when I talk to the clients, I'm able to ping pong whatever direction they're having a problem and be able to relate it to something that I've actually done because we've been brought up through the trenches and I feel, and you can probably relate, that both of us, working for a community hospital, allowed us to be in the trenches a little bit more than probably other CIOs, to the point where I found myself picking up the help that helped us sometimes and and doing things that might not have been, you know, in the norm to a large-scale hospital. Do you want to, do you want to speak to that?
Speaker 2:Well, there's, there's no doubt about that. And even when you're in the senior team of any hospital, you know your primary job, whether it's technology or finance or HR, you know that's probably 75% of your job. And then it's hospital administration. If you've been a hospital Administrator on call or something like that, you get to deal with all kinds of stuff. The hospital I just left they just had a water main break in the city and the hospital didn't have water for a couple days. I certainly dealt with that in Vermont and have spent the night in the hospital because we didn't have water and try to figure out how to keep operations going, yeah. And then on the converse side, you could be doing the cyber attack or something like that, and you're you're totally entrenched in technology. Yeah, we're having to plan for major System upgrades and and all that. So there's lots of reasons you get to spend the night in hospitals as a CIO.
Speaker 1:Although I chose not to have my second and spend the night with a C-section at All I worked at. I actually switched to a different hospital, but that would have been a different reason to be Staying at the hospital, right.
Speaker 2:My wife and I probably should have done that when she gave birth to our third child. It was at a hospital I was CIO at and you know she was taking her time, so I was going around updating the nurses computers. She is like no, no, focus on me.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. That's awesome. I know we Do you want to speak to. Is there anything that really stands out in your mind that you know, being a community hospital you brought up a few occurrences but when you really bridge the gap between IT and operations and really helped your organization Utilize the EHR or another application more than they were prior.
Speaker 2:Well, I think in recent years, you know, finances are just paramount to every organization Survival these days and the CIO position has to shift to say how can we be a value add? You know, certainly you got to keep the place safe. You got to keep the technology updated. What's the best use of the technology and are we leveraging it too many times? Hospitals have too many systems that they're they're using 10% of the system. Yeah, so I really think making sure we double down, people are trained and know how to use the functionality of the system. Even the company I work for now, act me, where we just were experts in the Meta tech data field. So just getting reports out of the system, getting the information to the people that can make decisions, instead of spending all this time just constantly running reports and the data goes Nowhere. So we want to transfer that data to knowledge is our mission statement and we live by that. So we're constantly working in that area.
Speaker 2:Another area we're working in and I worked in as a CIO was where do you find the money? You know I was trying to get to the latest version of a meta tech platform and Hospital. We just didn't have the money for it at the time. So I was like, okay, we don't the money for it, can I be writing grants? Can I double down and try to find the money?
Speaker 2:And Brought another partners on supply chain and we realized we weren't capturing all the dollars for the work we were doing. So how do we leverage technology? How do I get my analyst out there working with materials management, the OR, finance and really making sure our operations are as Optimal as possible to make sure we're getting paid for the work we're already doing? And it was pretty sobering to go through there. I think within a few weeks of our work, we were increasing charges by a thousand dollars a day, just capturing the money for work we're already doing and just not being able to bill for it accurately for for one reason or other. So that's what I think CIOs need to focus on these days. Because the revenues Streams are getting harder, we got to find ways to bring the money in and we got to justify all the technology that we're implementing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I found myself and I even had one of the Employees tell me when I was up in Vermont. You ask why all the time? And I found myself just always asking why. Because it was a older hospital but had just switched to Meditech and, you know, was new to the EHR. And so the process from paper going to electronic record made me ask why we don't. Maybe we have to do it the way you've done it for 20 years, but maybe we don't. And is there a more efficient way to turn around the operations? And how do we leverage the millions of dollars of software you've purchased? Yeah, for the greater good right.
Speaker 2:And how do you leverage it with the turnover we're seeing in health care these days? I mean some hospitals have upwards to 50% turnover. In the nursing home space it's even higher. Yeah so that's where they need to leverage companies like yours or mine, where we have the expertise. We've had people that have been through the industry for Numbers of years and work at multiple different hospitals that can see those best practices right.
Speaker 2:So, we're constantly training new report writers and even folks that are just they're understaffed, they're overworked, they're being pulled in a thousand different directions.
Speaker 1:So we can go in there and augment what they're already doing and just bless our work Helps them be more efficient right Us as well, and even finding that we're going in and helping bridge that gap because we've gone in and done so many other assessments and you know EHR agnostic but that we've done the other assessments or help them with analytics or Digital, that we can then replicate that and say we've seen it done. You know three different ways in 10 hospitals. This is where we think it will be the best scenario for you. So it's almost like they're jumping forward thousands of feet instead of starting from scratch again.
Speaker 2:And I've said that to anybody that works in technology or hospital administration. You know it's not a linear line. You get the leapfrog. So, yes, you might be on a 20 year old version of a certain product, but leapfrog to that new version, get your team trained up. You don't have to go through 20 years of development. You can. You can jump to that stage, but you got invest in the job and make sure your current team is trained up on the latest uses of that software.
Speaker 2:That probably frustrates me more than anything when we have the money to buy a system but not the money to buy it, to get the people trained in using it properly or plan for the turnover. You know turnover is going to happen. We had a saying at many of the hospitals I worked at the team you start with is not the team you finished with on a major electronic medical record upgrade or something like that. You've got to keep that constant education at the forefront of everybody that shows up to those meetings. Yeah, life happens and people are moving around more than ever these days. They have more opportunities for working remotely or for different organizations, so keeping that training up is key.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I agree with that training. Only my mantra was a little bit different. When I was CIO in a community hospital, I went in there to really help them with their EHR implementation. That went bad. I grew this amazing team that I still miss every day. But everyone would say why are you so big about training? And my mantra was one day I will leave Porter Hospital. But they won't, because they're families, they're aunts, they're grandmothers, they're all here. I have nobody. So I want to set them up for success with the best training, with you know the certifications and the education they need to work at the top of their license and because I'm going to leave one day.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what are you all doing in terms of all of your staff working remote? How are you staying engaged? At AcneWare, we have a divergent. We have Mikaela, who's amazing for employee engagement. She does coffee hours. We did a cake task. They're about to do, I think I heard, like a barbecue themed event and all remote. So what are you guys doing to keep it fun and lively and staff engaged?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. And it was my biggest concern for saying yes to this job is my colleagues, my team members that I've worked with at the last two or three hospitals I've been at. You know they become family, you get to know them, you get to know their spouses and their kids. We'd get together after work and that just makes life worth living or work worth doing, because the people that you work with matter. So I thought how am I going to go to this company one trying to lead it? But then we have people from Nova Scotia, canada, to Honolulu, hawaii, and so you're dealing with time zones and we're a small company. So you got people all over the country, and so one thing they did is I said yes to the owner of the company, to Glenn, and he said I'd like to set up a cocktail hour.
Speaker 2:And we did a virtual cocktail hour and I remember we scheduled it for an hour and my first question to them was what makes you a team, what makes you part of feel like your ACME Wear feel of a thing?
Speaker 2:And the meeting scheduled for an hour took two hours to complete and they just shared stories over and over of how their best friends are now ACME Wear employees or their clients. So I was so relieved to see that that they truly embed themselves with work, with helping each other and helping the clients, and I haven't found the technology to be a barrier. We're on teams throughout the day. I jump from meeting to meeting, either meeting with clients or meeting with our own staff. You know, a major skill set we learned as CIOs is to round on our employees. It's a quint studer, you know trademark. So I still round with my employees here just to check in on how they're doing, what makes them tick and what do they need. And I love the fact that really put your hours in. I don't care if you're working at nine o'clock at night or six o'clock in the morning or whatever.
Speaker 2:The work's got to get done, but so do the kids have to get the dentist appointments and all that stuff during the day. So it's a nice platform to be able to work and I certainly, even though I worked in the hospital, gave people that type of freedom as well, that some, some jobs. You got to be there from certain hour to certain hour. I get that. But I used to hire help desk people and say hospital's open 24 hours a day. We have hundreds of tickets. I don't care what. You work right, you know, get your job done. And there's got to be some, you know, some safety guards, some rails on that policy of course. But you got to be human and you got to work with people to make them successful. And if you're very rigid on those hours, people are going to find something else to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely yeah. They'll switch to another rule. No, remind me I think when we were talking, you all still meet in person every once in a while as well. Two do you do a company or just executives? How often do you guys meet in person?
Speaker 2:Well, we try to get together every couple of months in person, at least our executive team. But even when I go to corporate office sometimes we're still on Microsoft Teams talking because we still have certain exec members that are across the country as well. So about once a year we get together for an in-person event. Other than that we're truly remote.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you also mentioned and I thought it was a good point when we were talking about the security hole of employees and turnover and engagement and where you were going was the disengaged employee is the biggest security risk and you have to work harder in a remote environment to get them engaged and in that disengaged employee, more engaged right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that's something I really focused on in my career as a leadership team member at hospitals is we always looked at hospital engagement scores and a consultant had told us one time your disengaged employee should be your biggest concern. And I was certified in healthcare compliance. I was compliance officer and CIO. And then the CIO security world. You're going wow, you're never concerned about that engaged employee. You know they're there for the right reasons, they're doing the right things. If they make a mistake, it wasn't intentional. It's your disengaged employee that's covering stuff up or making mistakes and not reporting it. So I always look for that.
Speaker 2:And now that I'm working basically for this virtual company, you know employees have a responsibility to be engaged. There's only so much we can do from headquarters or from my home office to keep them engaged. Yes, we can have cocktail hours and Lou Ouz or whatever themes teams meeting we want to have, but at some level as a professional, you know you got to remain engaged and so we look for that all the time and I check in with managers and vice presidents of how your team members doing what they have going on in their life. You know we all can't be 110% engaged all the time. You got stuff going on, whether it's health of family members. You just don't feel good that day, and so maybe you want your camera off for a meeting. But other than that, I think cameras should be on. You should be completely engaged in conversations, because we all have too many distractions these days, so employee engagement is paramount in my mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I definitely agree. We have a camera on kind of code at Divergent as well, and it's true If my camera is not on, I'm looking at my other screen and multitasking or answering email, or you know what I'm saying Exactly.
Speaker 2:It's a way to engage convenience, yeah.
Speaker 1:Unless I'm just eating lunch, then my camera's off, right, yeah, oh, I think it's interesting when we were chatting about when we were on the topic of education and certifications, and how much does certifications matter these days? How much does education matter if the person's willing and eager to be trained from the start? And I'm just wondering, how much does that affect you at AcmeWare? I have my own opinion about education, but I'd love for you to go first.
Speaker 2:Sure. Well, it's something I've looked at my entire life of. I started my career as a middle school teacher and it was really Y2K that brought me into technology and I ended up working for the school system that I was a teacher for as a systems engineer and they paid for my first master's degree in technology management and that brought me to the Albany College of Pharmacy and I was a CIO for a college for a couple of years. And then my hometown of Malone, new York, needed a chief information officer of their hospital. So I went and did that and a couple of years into that tenure a friend had called me and said hey, do you have your master's degree? I said yeah, I do. He goes, oh darn. I said what do you mean, darn? He said I was doing a healthcare administration master's degree and I wanted to do with somebody and I was like I'll do with you. Just because I thought I'm in this field now this is what I do for a living I better make sure I'm the best at it, or at least the most knowledgeable at it. So I went after and took care of a second master's program in healthcare administration and I think once you're in that learning mode. I just got interested in learning more and went after certifications, whether it was through ACHE or CHIME or HIMS or healthcare compliance. So I ended up picking up certifications along the way and I just kind of made it my goal of either get a degree or a certification every two years. Now that's all nice and well and good Great, I know it's good on a resume and get your foot in the door, but the work still got to get done.
Speaker 2:And what I've noticed over the years and you probably have seen it as well when we start a major project, I always look for natural born leaders, who are those people in the trenches that just emerge and they can pull people together and they get problems done and they meet deadlines and all that. And I've seen it time and time again. And some of these best, the best people I've had on my team, aren't well credentialed and I'm thinking, boy, they couldn't go anywhere else with the resume they have, but we got to take care of them because I don't want them to leave here. So I've gone to administration multiple times for my natural born leaders to say, hey, we got to protect this person and make sure they stay on our team. They're worth their weight in gold. And I say all that with trying to respect and honor the degrees and certifications that other people get. So I think it's a fine line.
Speaker 2:I often talk about being a CIO. There's an art and a science to do in the job. You've got to be able to read people and see who's bringing value to your team, because I've had the converse of that. I've had people with all kinds of degrees and certifications and I don't want to call them useless, but they're just not performing to the top of their licensure, as you put it, going Well, geez, all the degrees on the wall could be nice, but you're not getting any work done. So I do look here at Acmeware.
Speaker 2:Obviously, technical skills are important, but we need to find those people that can communicate through different mediums, can work out, reach out to our clients and bring them in and make them part of a group that's getting things accomplished. So certainly it's a nice mix as well. And we've got people with masters of health and other degrees. And then we have people that just worked really hard at hospitals for a dozen years and wrote reports for hospitals and they want to work remotely and the hospital wouldn't allow them to do that. So they came to work for us. So it's a fine line. It's a mix. Again, it's an art and a science of being any type of leader these days, where you want to honor the education but also the work's got to get done. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree, I mean when yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if I would have been able to become CIO without my masters because I was at such a young age, but at the same time, I'm not a book student and a really good test taker, so certifications are hard. But I also think of all the people in our industry that are hands-on learners and the get shit doneers, and when I built my team, those are the ones you want to grab onto and you know that they're just going to soak it up and want to move up and grow, opposed to the ones, like you're saying, that have all the certifications in the doctorate and, you know, can't pull their own weight. So, yeah, it's definitely a balance, but I feel like I see the certifications in the education not that it's not as important, but people are more often than not like looking past that and seeing how well their work ethic is these days.
Speaker 2:And, quite honestly, are they jerks? There's no room for jerks these days. Everything's so transparent. You've got to be able to work with other people. You've got to understand differences and bring in as much diversity as you can, diversity of thought, I mean. I think so long we've been run by one layer of thought, especially in technology, it's been very, you know, white male dominated field, and you're doing your best, rebecca, with Bluebird leaders and things like that, just to bring in that diversity of thought, and I think that's so important. And so, yeah, you got to be able to meet people where they're at and help grow them. And something I'm most proud about in my career was just getting hired into this current job. I thought I never had a. I never got interviewed. I'm like how did I get this job?
Speaker 2:Glechus knew me and he told me afterwards he goes. But I've been watching your career for 10 years and I got to know the people you were leading. The people on your team spoke so highly of you so I knew you were my guy. Yeah, and you know isn't that something? That there were no interview questions, right, it took me to do one night to meet the board of Acmeware and we just talked and we just talked life, we talked family, we talked goals, personal missions, whatever. The news of the day was Yep, and they said, okay, you're our guy. You know, you've got the background, you got the pedigree, with some some certifications and that sort of thing, and you've met a ton of people and you know the industry. But more than that, you seem like you're a nice guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I think I told you my story too. A divergent I got brought in with no real interview, got asked to a large dinner table of probably 20 people they were in Boston doing a Go Live and after that had a day and met a few people and then and then got an offer and have been here almost a year now. And so I think it really goes to show you where we have built a network. And I tell all my mentees build your network, build your rapport and don't burn any bridges, like don't go out guns blazing as much as you might end up hating a job and you're going to transition. Go out peacefully because it's too small of a world.
Speaker 2:Too small of an industry and it's just amazing how people cross paths over and over again every whatever number of years, whatever that cycle is. It's just amazing who you come back across and I love helping people out. I love when people reach out and just say, hey, do you know so and so? And help make those connections. And we do that now, even with our current customers. You know, if we can't solve their problem, I might know, yeah, but you got to go talk to so and so.
Speaker 2:Right, and so I love referring people out to make sure they get the connections they need, whether it's personal or professional.
Speaker 1:Right right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's something to your point. I think that's something what the younger generation is missing. I worry about online colleges and all that stuff and I see kids go through this like, oh, I got my four year degree in three and a half years online, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, well, yeah, but who did you meet? Yeah, you know, see, you passed some tests, you read some books. Okay, I'm worried about that. Who did you meet? How did you grow your network? Where did you travel to Right? Where were your internships? Getting a piece of paper through the mail to say you did the coursework, that's nice, but you really got to develop yourself socially in that professional network.
Speaker 1:Right, right, have those phone of friends that you can call on, right? So when I needed a new set of podcast interviewees, I called. I called Joel Benware, I need some more people and you, you know, graciously accepted. So we're going to squirrel for a minute. So what type of dog do you have behind you? Because nobody can see it, but I can.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that's Bailey, that's a Bernadoodle.
Speaker 1:And how old is she?
Speaker 2:She's three. Hi, bailey, oh fuzzy. So I normally have the, you know, the screen up, the virtual background, and your technology is not doing that. So that's okay.
Speaker 1:Oh, so cute. Oh my gosh. Okay, so does she go? Does that boy or girl?
Speaker 2:That's a girl.
Speaker 1:Okay, and does she go running with you on your jogs?
Speaker 2:Sometimes she will. My knee's not real great, so I can't have her tugging on me the way she wants to go or chase squirrels or whatever. But yeah, we certainly walk every day and I do take her for some runs.
Speaker 1:Okay, so tell us about your, your athletic life. Right, we're very similar and we're both triathletes, so it's super fun to hear about your training. You've done a lot more than I have, and what is your? What is your race that stands out to the most? That is your, your favorite, or the one you almost died on, or something you know?
Speaker 2:there are those. Yeah, I never. I was never a great athlete. In high school. I graduated in the younger side of my class, not due to talent, but just because my parents started me in kindergarten when I was four years old. So I was young. When I graduated, I was okay, I could make teams and stuff, but I didn't excel.
Speaker 2:And I don't know, by 24, I think, my wife and I were expecting our first child and I thought that what a perfect time to train for your first marathon not knowing a thing. So I had a little quarter life crisis and had to go out and train for a marathon and I did that. And then it just seemed like every couple of years I thought, yeah, I should probably keep a marathon of the books to stay in a little bit of shape, I guess. And I love other sports mountain biking and racquetball and tennis and things like that. And then I just got busy. You know, careers grow, families grow, you get different houses and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:And I went to the doctors when I was 40 years old and they're like, okay, we're going to start you on some pre-diabetic medication. I thought, no, you're not. You're going to give me six months to get this straightened out and we're going to figure this out. And the doctor was like, well, okay, she goes, but I got to see you back here in six months because most people don't change their habits and I thought, okay, good, wake up call. So I just went out and God knows why I signed up for a half iron man. So that's a 70 mile event of swimming a mile. I was a mile and biking for 56 miles and then running 13 miles and I didn't own a bike and I didn't know how to swim besides the length of a backyard pool, and so I just started training. I started going to local high school pool at 40 years old on YMCA swim nights and trying to swim three laps and try to swim four laps and five laps and slowly grow that Then I'd start running and I still didn't own a bike. So I thought, well, I'll save up and I'll buy the bike in the springtime.
Speaker 2:And the year I was doing that, I got a job offer to move from Malone, new York, to Vermont. So I thought, oh, yeah, let's throw a job change and a move on top of this as well, which ended being a little bit of a blessing, because we wanted our kids to finish school where they were at, and I started working Vermont a few months early, so several nights a week I was staying by myself in Vermont, so I bought a bike and would go out and ride 30, 40 miles a night, get up the next morning and run and then jump in Lake Champlain or whatever lake I could find and do some swimming. And so I got my first half Ironman done at 41 years old and then that just took off for me. I ended up doing five different half Ironman events and three full Ironman events Lake Placid and Mount Tromblant, where the two sites I did the fulls at and that was just something that just kind of grew and I don't know you got to put the time in.
Speaker 2:I feel like I'm more focused, more dedicated when I have a race like that coming up, because you have to budget your time and it's not. You can't steal from anything. Well, you probably steal from sleep, which you still need sleep when you're training for those events. But you could be up at 435 o'clock in the morning and some mornings I was knocking out a 13 mile run and then going into work and you can't use that for being tired or as an excuse. So you get through it. Go home, have dinner with the family, put the kids in bed and maybe hop on the stationary bike for a couple hours till 10 o'clock at night or something like that, so you find the time to do it.
Speaker 2:I just I started that when I got done my master's degree, so I kind of supplemented the time I was doing homework and all that for my master's program. I just moved that into working out and trying to focus on that. And doing an Ironman is like getting a master's degree or a doctorate in health and physiology and nutrition and all that stuff. You learn a ton about yourself and what muscles hurt and why they hurt and okay, if this hurts, let's go do this activity today and try to supplement it. And then you know, focus, rest when you're resting. You got to really truly be resting. So I don't know I'm not a top athlete in Ironman or anything like that, but over 10 years I think I got eight events done and you throw the COVID years in there as well. So that was a pretty good track record to get that done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 2:But the race I loved the most wasn't a race. I had a Chime conference in Scottsdale or Phoenix, arizona. I said, okay, I want to go do that. I want to go to that event and my son was a senior in high school and I thought I want him to see what professional networking is like. So I reached out to Chime and I said I have a son who's a senior in high school. Can he be an intern? Can he come to me to this conference and just see what it's like? Can he work at your booth and hand out bags or again, grow your network and professionally? They love the idea and they said geez, why aren't we doing more of this? Why aren't we inviting high school and college kids to come in and intern at a conference like this? So my son, jacob, came with me and I said, jacob, now if I take you to this, I want to do something else.
Speaker 2:The Grand Canyon is only four hours away. I want to run the Grand Canyon from the South Rim to the North Rim and we can do it. There's only a couple of weeks out of the year. You can safely do it, because it's either too hot or too cold or they close the North Rim, yep, do the snow or something like that. So I think it was the end of October, 1st of November. I said I think this is kind of the window when you can do this. And so I was in marathon shape. I had just done a marathon two weeks prior and knew I was going to be doing a marathon two weeks prior. So I was training certainly for the distance but not for the hills. So him and I started training hills and running. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I've never planned something out so closely to the minute of flying from Vermont to Arizona, running a car, driving five hours north of the Grand Canyon, meeting my clients, checking into the hotel inside the Grand Canyon National Park, waking up four hours later, her dropping us off at five in the morning at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, and then she drove around five hours to the North Rim. Well, jacob and I ran seven hours through the Grand Canyon, and so everything you bring, there's no official race, so you just do it Right.
Speaker 2:And it's not recommended. A lot of people get sick. If you can't make it, you got to pick up a phone and have a helicopter pick you up for $15,000. So it's got to be a deal and we did it. We ran the whole thing. I just had a great bonding experience a ton of nature and came out the other side of the Grand Canyon in the North Rim with my aunt waiting for us and then she drove us I think it was seven or eight hours from the Northern Rim of the Grand Canyon to Phoenix, arizona, for the Chime Conference the next day. And Jacob and I could barely walk the next day but it was so fun to be hobbling around the conference and people were like what's wrong? With you.
Speaker 2:It was like well, we decided to fly out here and run the Grand Canyon the day before the conference.
Speaker 1:Oh, my God, I'm thinking about it.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking about the Grand Canyon. How sorry.
Speaker 1:Your legs cramping up, like in that eight hour drive over to the Chime Conference.
Speaker 2:And you're still covered in red dust when you get done the darn thing. You don't realize how dirty you are and you don't have a shower for seven or eight hours after the run. It was quite an experience, but I'm glad we did it. And it's a race. You run and there's no one there to hand you a medal. When you're done it's just hop in the car and let's go.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. So what is your like? Because you're a race and goal oriented person, just like I am, and so I know I've already pinged you a few times for suggestions for my next half Iron man next year, and so what is your do? And I know you have a bum, denny, but I do have something that is in 2024 that you're focused on.
Speaker 2:We'll probably just be able to do it again. I tore my ACL last winter, so just trying to recover from that and gain strength. I'm doing quite a bit of cycling Running seems the pounding of it's hurting right now, so I'm trying to figure that out. I don't have that in mind. Life through is a curve ball this summer with some of my wife's health, so we're focused on that right now getting her better. She was a breast cancer survivor from three years ago and doing really well, getting strong and all that Between my job of being CIO to joining ACME, where I took a month off in between, I thought I want to plan my life.
Speaker 2:I want to be in charge of my life. Let's take a month off and really spend time with a family and travel and learn. We bought an RV and we had a whole trip planned throughout Canada. We were going to go all the way up to Prince Edward Island and explore that area. We did all that Out in Prince Edward Island. My wife ended up having a seizure. It was later diagnosed with a brain tumor. Our adventurous trip of a month long turned into about a 10-day trip and ended us up in Dana-Farber in Boston where she had surgery a week later and is actually doing very, very well now. I'm very pleased with her recovery and thank God we were together when the seizure happened and we were able to get her to the right medical care. Life has had a different focus in the last few weeks, certainly running an Iron man or a.
Speaker 2:Marathon doesn't take precedence right now. Make sure everybody's healthy and getting strong is where our priorities are at right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:I don't recommend that's the way you should start a new job. By the way, I want to take a month off. Come in relaxed, tanned and five pounds lighter. And I came in stressed and overwhelmed. I remember calling Glenn, the owner of the company, and just explaining what had just happened. He said with the most peaceful tone Joel, we got you. That's why you joined a company like Acme, where we take care of each other, we take care of families, you're part of the team. He talks the talk and he walks the walk and he's been doing that for 25 years. That's why I joined this firm and not some other vendor.
Speaker 2:It's a big thing for a company of Acme where size you see a company that's been around for 25 years, and that's when these owner operators are looking for retirement. They often go out to venture capitalists or find outside investors to come in and take over the company. Glenn didn't want that. He didn't want it for our customers. He didn't want it for our employees. This was very strategic on his part to find the right person to partner with that we can continue to grow the company organically and keep it cell-phoned Other companies. I'm not criticizing anybody else's strategy for how that happens. This was Glenn's strategy and it's been a very interesting ride. I'm glad we're doing it and I'm glad I have the time to learn this side of the business.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you've made the jump, been pushing you a little bit throughout the years. I'm so happy that you've landed in such an awesome spot. I was a customer of them as well years ago and I can't wait to watch your ride and see what difference you make. With that, I always end with a question, and my question for you is what is your superpower that you are bringing to the world?
Speaker 2:Wow, my superpower I'm bringing to the world. Let me think I don't want to regret anything when life is over. Take those chances, say yes to opportunities In stealing that. The more people I meet, I feel like we're our own worst enemies for spreading our wings and trying to grow In thinking other people are experts out there. If you place yourself in that situation, it forces you to learn, it forces you to grow. Maybe that mentorship and advice of just keep growing, keep spreading your wings and not to settle. I get very discouraged when I see people my age they just turn 50 and they're talking about retirement or they've only got X number of years left to work and I'm out of here. That's not a fun way to live in my mind. I'd rather keep growing and keep exploring, keep adventurous all the way to the end. I just don't want to end my career and have regrets about trying something. I guess that's where I'm at.
Speaker 1:Don't end with regret.
Speaker 2:I wasn't a great student in school or even college, but I love learning, I love traveling, I love meeting people. I love hearing other stories. For me, I always have to hear not just two sides of the story. There's always more than two sides of a story. Being in life, I try to understand as many perspectives as I can and try to weigh in and make situations better.
Speaker 1:Awesome, Joel. Thank you so much for your time today. It's great to have you.
Speaker 2:Absolutely an honor and it's fun that you and I are sitting here. From the runs we've been on together or just the phone conversations we've been on, I don't know 10 plus years ago at CIO, it's fun being in this place now. Thank you for inviting me.
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