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You've Been Heard

416- Your IT Team Should Work Without You w/Scott Kutz

You've Been Heard

Philip Howard

Tech News, Technology, Business, Management, News

0.00 Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2026

⏱️ 49 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Scott Kutz runs IT at a construction equipment dealership where excavators connect to the internet and OEMs move faster than the infrastructure can follow. His answer isn't to be the hero. It's to make himself unnecessary. Scott Kutz is five months into his role as IT Manager at Brooks Tractor, a construction equipment dealership where service managers remote into customer excavators in real time and OEM vendors push cloud platforms faster than most dealers can upgrade their bandwidth. He came from a larger privately held construction company where he watched IT people hoard knowledge, refuse to explain their work, and position themselves as irreplaceable. He decided early on that wasn't going to be him. Scott's approach comes from his father, a twenty-year Marine veteran in communications who taught him that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. "It's okay to not know, but it's not okay to stop learning and it's not okay to stop teaching. Because knowledge kept to yourself isn't being kind." That line runs through everything Scott does. He lets his team push buttons on decommissioned systems knowing things will break. He asks people what they do for fun so he can explain IT problems using their language. He told one coworker he fixed their computer by changing the spark plug in their engine. We get into how construction equipment dealerships are quietly becoming high-tech environments, why Scott turned a frustrated coworker into an ally who championed a company-wide bandwidth upgrade, and how he earned a seat at the leadership table five months in by learning the dealership's service operations before touching the IT. Scott's test for himself is straightforward. If he wins the Powerball tomorrow or gets hit by a bus, the business should keep running without him. If it can't, he's not indispensable. He's a single point of failure disguised as expertise. Key takeaways: Make yourself unnecessary. The business should run without you.; Let people fail in low-risk environments. They learn faster that way.; Learn the business before you try to change the IT.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey, everybody.

0:10.5

Welcome to another episode of You've Been Heard,

0:12.9

with a podcast where we're talking to IT leaders

0:15.4

and found out how they've been heard to get to the position they're in

0:19.1

and what we can do to follow in their

0:21.6

footsteps today we've got scott coots who lets likes to let us know that kindness costs nothing

0:28.0

and running IT operations like you meet it so uh scott welcome to the show thanks mike i appreciate

0:34.8

for having me here and and thank you for everybody listening to hear my voice on a podcast for the first time.

0:41.2

I appreciate you being here.

0:43.3

Yeah.

0:44.2

So talk to me about your career.

0:46.7

Where are you?

0:47.3

What are you doing?

0:48.1

And how did you get there?

0:49.6

Yeah, absolutely.

0:51.0

So my career, right, I started off as an IT intern, right, circa 2011, 2012,

0:59.1

right? Yeah, way back, Glenn and I worked my way up through the ranks in the help desk,

1:04.4

service desk area and really kind of found a calling within the leadership perspective and

1:10.1

loving to teach individuals and teaching

1:13.0

people. And then really just having some really great opportunities that kind of led me today to

1:17.9

be an IT manager at my current company of Brooks Tractor, their construction equipment dealership.

1:23.8

And I've been kind of in the construction space that entire time with my previous

...

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