Welcome back to today's episode of dissecting popular IT nerds.

I'm your host, Doug Kameen, and today I'm talking with Tom Schock, the director of

information technology at Shepard Electric Supply.

Welcome to the show, Tom. Thank you for having me. So, so, Ted, funny. Before we start, you know, one of the questions I always ask our guests, hey, you've been on this before. And you're like, you know, I've actually been on this podcast before. It's true. You're coming. You're coming back. You're circling back on us here.

But it's in part because we're having a different interview today than we did before.

You know, so you were a guest here on the show, I think a little, maybe around a year ago, maybe a little over a year ago.

And you talked with one of my co-hosts, Mike Kelly. And that conversation was very focused on cybersecurity and the nature of what it takes to stand up cybersecurity in a small, medium business environment, if I recall.

Yeah, that's correct.

But today, we're going to call this, we've started to kind of roll this out, but like we'll call this the Dising popular 18 nerds leadership series interviews. That's kind of where I, where I landed. You know, today we're here to talk a little about leadership and background and that type of stuff. So it's a different interview than before, but it's great to have you back on this, on the, on the show, uh, and have the chance to talk to you. Yeah, I'm truly looking forward to it.

So Tom, you're, just to kind of kick off here, you've been at Shepard Electric Supply for a number of years.

You know, so I think I've, I get the benefit of cheating with LinkedIn, but a little over six years, it looks like.

And so, you know, that's a, that's a place.

One of the things that I always love asking folks who have had a fairly long tenure,

you know, more than like two or three years at a place is, is by that point,

I think about career paths. And I personally think of your career, anybody's career as having, like, I'll call them, to borrow the Taylor Swift term, you know, eras of like three to five years, you know, so each, you know, you come in, you probably have some goals, you set them out, maybe a three, four, maybe five years at most.

You've really achieved some of those,

then you have to decide, you know, you come to an inflection point. Do I leave? Do I stay? Do I go on? Do I, there's a new project to work on? What is the next three to five year cycle look like? So it's like, I'm just curious from you from a leadership perspective, like, how does that look for you? and like what if you, how do you approach those types of inflection points or maybe do you see the same ones?

Yeah, no, and then you're, um, looked for you and like what if you how do you approach those types of inflection points or maybe

do you see the same ones yeah no and your um kind of you know motto is it affects very well with

my history so this is my third IT leadership position in the last 15 years um and they didn't

all you know change up right exactly at five years, but,

you know, it was in that ballpark. And I think, you know, your, again, your summary is pretty

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