Abhi Saini (00:02.798)
Hello and welcome back to the Panda Award Show. My name is Abhi and I'm joined with my friend, my co-host Ben, who's also our special guest for the day. How are you doing today, Ben?
Ben Climer (00:14.039)
Man, I'm doing good. How about yourself?
Abhi Saini (00:16.686)
You know how it is. It's this podcast episode if we if we hit our schedule We're gonna release it about two weeks before my wife gives birth and I am excited for that. So You know For me at least I'm stressed happy excited nervous every emotion in the book all at once
Ben Climer (00:35.191)
You
Dude, you're gonna do great. It's gonna be a lot. Change all the diapers that you can. You got this.
Abhi Saini (00:45.902)
I've been told that she doesn't want to do any of those, so I might.
Ben Climer (00:49.669)
You got this.
Abhi Saini (00:53.614)
So, you know, the last episode, you got to interview me. And it was cool to talk about myself. But, you know, I want to hear more about you. We've known each other for a while, but I want to learn the story of Ben and what made you become who you are today. So I'm just going to let you start this one off just from the very beginning. Whatever you like, you know, what
Ben Climer (01:16.8)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:22.863)
man.
Abhi Saini (01:23.948)
What was, what's the first thing in your life that just made you think, I like computers.
Ben Climer (01:30.307)
let me think about that. I really suck about talking about myself. So I kind of have a guide to keep myself from getting too off rails. But I think when I think about technology, one of the earlier member, like memories is I kind of, I got a little bit in trouble and stuff because while my dad was at work, I would take apart like,
Abhi Saini (01:37.611)
you
Ben Climer (01:58.243)
his computers and like put them back together and really just anything. so eventually they would go to yard sales and, know, get something that was $5 and say, okay, you can take apart that is don't take apart the stuff that matters. Um, I mean, you know, just really old desktops and things like that. Um, and I killed some stuff too, like one computer I left open while it was running and I dropped a nickel in it and killed the computer.
Somehow it like, shorted the circuit board.
Abhi Saini (02:30.676)
seen that happen. I've seen that happen. have have anecdotes about that if you ever want to hear them one day.
Ben Climer (02:38.058)
Um, but I think just, just a lot of like, you know, things back together. Uh, if I, if I think about like some of the first money I made when I was really young, like elementary school age, I would, we'd get up. My mom was a cafeteria worker. We'd get up at 4am before, like this is a school day and getting up at 4am. We go to her work and I'm just like hanging out and kind of at a table.
and I would make greeting cards and sell them to the staff at the school for quarters and then, you know, I'd buy like soda or some shit, but I'd like draw up greeting cards.
Abhi Saini (03:15.63)
You're making me think that you were like born in the 50s. You're making greeting cards. That's pretty cool. That's not a common thing that kids are willing to start off and do.
Ben Climer (03:18.688)
Right?
Ben Climer (03:25.3)
Yeah, I don't know what led me to that, but I liked drawing and stuff like that. So I think, and I would just steal, you know, printer paper from the cafeteria and it's like, all right, here's a greeting card. Yeah. And I would make like five or six at a time and I would like fan them out and be like, what do you want?
Abhi Saini (03:35.214)
Cogs zero.
Abhi Saini (03:48.502)
I love it. I love that.
Ben Climer (03:50.272)
I'm sure they were very poorly drawn, and it was mostly bought out of pity, but...
Abhi Saini (03:53.774)
Sorry.
They wanted to just see the art, you know? That's one thing that...
Ben Climer (03:58.998)
Yeah.
Yeah, that was my early art career.
Abhi Saini (04:04.534)
Okay, okay. So, you you started with art and you enjoyed taking apart computers. So did you go down the path of 3D art and try to make, you know, real life transformers?
Ben Climer (04:12.161)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (04:21.473)
Not at all. didn't have Legos, didn't have Mega Bloks. It was kind of random. I had a lot of Hot Wheels and things like that. And you know, I'd get into video games, but it'd usually be like the consoles that were a couple generations old that were really easy to get and everything for the most part. Like I think, you know, I probably got Pokemon.
Abhi Saini (04:23.351)
you
Ben Climer (04:50.493)
yellow, I don't know, six to eight years after it came out or something.
Abhi Saini (04:56.29)
Okay, so you delayed gratification for sure. Yeah, okay. That's not, you I wasn't allowed to have video games in the house, so I had to rely on the friends that had them. So I would always get the game when the new game came out, so I got to play blue when yellow came out because he got to play yellow. You know, and then when the next generation came out with gold, I got to play yellow.
Ben Climer (04:59.696)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (05:06.421)
Wow. Yeah, there you go.
Ben Climer (05:13.406)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (05:18.241)
Abhi Saini (05:25.376)
you
Ben Climer (05:25.857)
There you go. I,
Yeah, I was trying to think what I like. Yeah. no, that's what it was. So I my best, my best friend in elementary school was divorced. And so when I'd go over to his house, he would have like both consoles, like, know, most. Well, I mean, they get it for him, but yes. Right. Yeah, no, my friend was not divorced. His parents were.
Abhi Saini (05:31.79)
So.
Abhi Saini (05:48.898)
His parents, not him.
Abhi Saini (05:53.474)
No, no, his parents are divorced, not him.
Yeah, okay, okay, okay.
Ben Climer (06:00.881)
And because of that, he would get the Sony and the Nintendo products when they came out. So he had the GameCube and the PS2, whereas most kids got one or the other.
Abhi Saini (06:08.462)
Okay, Nice. Okay, okay. Now that's how it works, you know? The smart parents don't get them and they rely on the other parents to buy too much. It's like, all right, we'll just share. We'll share.
Ben Climer (06:18.696)
Right?
Abhi Saini (06:22.926)
Plus it got you out of the house, right? So that, you know, if you are, if you're making greeting cards, I'm assuming that you're, it's like elementary school age, young. How are, how are some of the things you explored then and trying to, you know, you, you were tinkering around with things, taking things apart. You were doing things that were creative. Obviously you had this mindset or this mentality of, what is that, a little bit more left brain.
Ben Climer (06:24.722)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (06:33.226)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (06:53.548)
right? So how did that curiosity or that creativity start to shift and morph your... how did it make your like middle school experience or your high school experience?
Ben Climer (06:54.751)
I think that's fair.
Ben Climer (07:06.976)
Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, yeah, I think like the tinkering kind of carried through, um, you know, anything I could take apart and figure out how it worked. So, uh, you know, I had to, I was really fortunate with the elementary school that I was at. was pretty good. Um, there was a car plant that had opened in the area.
When we moved to our place, there was a stoplight and that was all that there was in our town. And then a GM plant came in and kind of put us on the map and we started slowly getting like a grocery store and things like that. so we get to middle school though, and technically where we lived, we were, this is another one of those, I guess, luck things. were a hundred feet from being in a different County that would have had like,
a much worse school system and like a much lower income area. and like that, like that was the difference was a hundred feet, was the difference between the school I was in. when I get to middle school, I get shifted to kind of a different area and they weren't going to serve my house by bus. So I would have had to be drove in. So we ended up going to homeschool at that point, which,
Was interesting. It was a lot of, it was a lot of here's the workbooks, you know, go do the work and then you'd still have standardized testing and, you know, I did fairly well in those standardized tests and stuff, but, you know, I feel a lot of, a lot of ways it was pretty isolating. So the.
Abhi Saini (08:48.75)
What I'm getting out of that though is that you learn how to be a self-starter and able to work in silos. There's something you can get out of it. There's positive spin to everything.
Ben Climer (08:53.79)
Yeah, if I was in an interview, I think that's how I would spin that. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, what cool thing I did is radio shack was still a thing and they had the little starter electronics kit and I worked through the workbook on the electronics lab.
Abhi Saini (09:15.447)
cool. You know, that's one thing I loved about my childhood. I think I still have one of my first electronic sets. you you light up something.
Ben Climer (09:23.389)
Yeah, this one it took like this one took four D batteries and it had like a breadboard on it and like each chapter was a different project you were doing and had like cool LED or I think there were LEDs but I don't remember exactly but you'd kind of map things out. It was pretty cool.
Abhi Saini (09:30.486)
cool.
Abhi Saini (09:41.71)
I want to say back then they weren't LEDs.
Ben Climer (09:45.203)
They probably weren't. I'm just, yeah, I don't remember it that well. yeah.
Abhi Saini (09:46.798)
There were probably some... I mean, we're not that old, you know, LEDs were not commonplace, I think, when we were kids. They were...
Ben Climer (09:55.645)
Well, well, and for me, I mean, frankly, until recently, like, I feel like I don't know if it's repressed or forgotten, but I couldn't, you know, tell you much about my childhood and still until I started peeling back some of it and like, okay, that was a thing.
Abhi Saini (10:12.462)
You were really a kid, you weren't born thirty years old.
Ben Climer (10:16.464)
Right, wasn't, I just didn't pop out an adult or like appear into existence.
Abhi Saini (10:24.078)
So as your homeschooled, you're learning, a self-starter, did you end up wanting to do more things that were curious and you started building your own stuff online or you started creating things? That's what I hear a lot is like when you, if you have to do things, if you're learning that way, you're gonna start to like, what else can I learn?
Ben Climer (10:50.514)
Yeah. Yeah. So it was one of those things where we had dial up internet. So I didn't have access to the internet all the time, but when I did, I would look up whatever I could. And one of the things that I did find was homeschooling is a bit isolating at times. and, know, so was kind of cut off from the friend circles that I had before. And I found community in a
site or chat room called Habbo Hotel, which you kind of have like a little avatar and you make rooms and I definitely lied on my age to get in there. I think you were supposed to be, you know, like 14 or 15. I was in there, but you know, it gave you like a way to communicate with others and you know, obviously I was following internet safety. So I think my original identity was I was Chris from California and I was 16, even though I was like 12.
Abhi Saini (11:48.546)
not in California.
Ben Climer (11:50.204)
Not in California at all. but the reason I'm, I'm tying that in is because one of the aspects of the head were called fan sites. and they would have different things. They would like, there was a trading market on Habbo, which is kind of interesting. And cause there was furniture and certain kind of furniture is rare than others. And they would assign values based on the market. And these sites would track the values week by week.
And one of the currencies was called Habbo Club sofas because it was kind of a rare that everyone got. So it was considered almost like a currency at the time. So, you know, if a new rare item came out, you would trade Habbo Club a certain number of Habbo Club sofas for that rare.
Abhi Saini (12:30.278)
wow, okay.
Abhi Saini (12:41.976)
Man, that brings me back to like RuneScape, Neopets, like the markets we created. Oof. That's pretty cool.
Ben Climer (12:46.865)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (12:51.353)
Yeah. But the other thing, the other thing that these fan sites would do is they would actually have radio stations and it would use this technology a lot of times called shoutcast. And you could you'd have like little you'd have teenage DJs that were like online and stuff. So, you know, they would host like get togethers in the Habbo.
Abhi Saini (13:00.334)
Abhi Saini (13:05.409)
Yeah, I've heard of that.
Ben Climer (13:17.821)
like rooms and then you tune into the radio and hear the person and I actually was a you know, D which is kind of funny to say but a DJ at like 12 or 13 I Hopefully this is past this statute of limitations, but I pirated Sam DJ broadcaster and Became an internet DJ
Abhi Saini (13:31.886)
okay.
Abhi Saini (13:41.41)
Hopefully though you paid for WinRar. That's the most important thing. no!
Ben Climer (13:45.601)
Yeah, about that.
Ben Climer (13:50.83)
I was terrible influence at that time.
Abhi Saini (13:54.616)
So you're doing these things online. You're becoming a DJ. And that's pretty cool that you got that experience early age. I think that's one of the reasons that you wanted to start this podcast. And that's similar, in a similar vein. I learned audio production when I was in grade school and I fell in love with it compared to other forms of creativity. But what are...
Ben Climer (14:15.089)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (14:21.368)
What are some of the skills or tools or things you use then that you feel gained or made your skill set better that kind of carried you to the next year or five years down the line? What was the next thing after that?
Ben Climer (14:39.484)
Yeah. So what kind of started as me DJing for other people, I became really determined to create my own fan site, um, for whatever reason. Uh, I don't really know why it would do it. No, uh, no, cause like it was interesting. Like there's a whole ecosystem around like making sites. Like these were full fledged websites. These weren't like pre-built the people were making.
Abhi Saini (14:52.642)
Geocities? Geocities? No?
Ben Climer (15:10.98)
There was some Joomla usage. think it was a little early for WordPress, but Joomla and Drupal were around, I believe. But so I started figuring out how to build a website. So I went to W3 schools and which is kind of a free online resource even today. And I started learning how HTML worked. And to be honest, the way that I started is I kind of took an existing design and I
Abhi Saini (15:17.516)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (15:40.571)
You know, copied it and then I just started like making it work. You know, obviously I wasn't, uh, you know, making a site from scratch. I had no idea what I was doing, but I think, yeah, I think at one point I might've used Microsoft front page. Uh, that's, that's a name you haven't heard in a while.
Abhi Saini (15:49.454)
Yeah. You gotta love templates.
Abhi Saini (15:57.115)
nice. Yeah. I was lucky enough that I think the first website I made was in Dreamweaver, which...
Ben Climer (16:04.24)
Yeah. Was it Macromedia, Dreamweaver or Adobe? Yeah.
Abhi Saini (16:08.394)
It was, it was Macromedia during, were back in the day.
Ben Climer (16:12.027)
And it surprises me that Dreamweaver is still around. I guess there's a market for it, but yeah.
Abhi Saini (16:19.47)
Not just still around I have had clients request it For something not never really work usually like hey, I'm doing something. I need it for personal reasons. I'm like, okay Sure, we can we can make it happen
Ben Climer (16:23.439)
Really? Okay. Yeah.
All right.
Ben Climer (16:35.914)
But yeah, you know that so I kind of get my first exposure to web design or web development If you can call it that like these were pretty rough looking sites They weren't masterpieces or anything. But hey, I was 12. So give me a little bit of a break I was 12 I had my had my fan site that I had made and I had like this little crappy 3.5 mil or like
Abhi Saini (16:50.914)
Yeah, exactly. It's not like you were getting paid.
Ben Climer (17:00.398)
pencil beige microphone that I'm using. I'm sure it sounded awful.
Abhi Saini (17:06.06)
I think I know exactly the one you're talking about. You're like it comes with a Yep, you have it on a you have it on a heavy base and it just sticks up and little tiny Yeah, that was that was the mic That was the mic did you ever were you ever like the kid that just like you put your mouth over it. You're like
Ben Climer (17:09.208)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Climer (17:16.868)
Yep.
Ben Climer (17:25.903)
I'm sure.
Abhi Saini (17:30.19)
This is where we lose all of our subscribers and listeners because they're like what are these people talking about?
Ben Climer (17:32.92)
I never said like this guy, this 12 year olds just like playing panic at the disco that he pirated on Mimewire and.
Abhi Saini (17:41.57)
Hmm, good old days. I think I started with a Kazaa was my first one. I didn't do Napster, but Kazaa for sure.
Ben Climer (17:49.541)
Yeah. but you know, so we, we have that. And then I think the next kind of progression is we get to high school. and I recognize this is kind of a weird place to start for a career story, but I think there's defining moments in here that like come into play. Like,
Abhi Saini (18:09.006)
Come on, episode I said I started in middle school, right? Like seventh grade was when I was like, yes, I like this. It's crazy.
Ben Climer (18:12.282)
Yeah, I mean if you can start in middle school I can start with my greeting cards so. So we get to high school and you gotta think I'm kind of three years removed from my friends circles and so they have moved on and have new people and I'm just the new kid at high school.
Abhi Saini (18:20.054)
Yes, exactly.
Abhi Saini (18:37.422)
Yeah, totally understand that. So, I mean, I went something through something similar, but very different at the same time. And so I can completely understand what you might have gone through. How did that, how did that change your, your like your day to day desire to, to do things? Cause I know when I, when that happened to me, my, um,
Ben Climer (18:47.354)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (19:07.35)
my passions changed, because my friends changed, and as a child you're pretty impressionable. So I'm curious how that was, what that experience was for you.
Ben Climer (19:09.176)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (19:17.816)
Yeah. So for some reason, you know, kid me assumed that going to high school, I needed to reinvent myself. So no longer was I going to be the kid that was in Habbo chat rooms. and you know, I wasn't going to follow pro wrestling anymore. Like those were things that weren't, cohesive with being a high schooler. Cause yeah, we're past the heyday of pro wrestling being pop culture at this point. in
Abhi Saini (19:26.584)
Mm-hmm.
Abhi Saini (19:46.126)
Okay.
Ben Climer (19:47.5)
And so, you know, I think with that, I didn't really add passions back. If that makes sense, I just kind of took them away. I'm the new kid, kind of the outsider. And I really think, you know, kind of fell into a little bit, you know, more of a down phase. I mean, I was doing pretty awful in school overall. think English I was getting an A and then like.
Like history and science I probably gotta be and then the rest were like C's and stuff I got a C in gym because I wasn't willing to wear gym shorts I got self-conscious and if you didn't wear gym shorts, they would just dock your grade for that day
Abhi Saini (20:33.063)
yeah, yeah, you can't participate so you get a zero.
Ben Climer (20:36.319)
I would participate and do all the things, but because I wasn't wearing shorts, they would dock me the grade.
Abhi Saini (20:38.299)
well, we...
Abhi Saini (20:42.223)
see, we weren't allowed to participate unless we were in uniform. So, you get to sit on the sidelines.
Ben Climer (20:50.347)
Yeah, I I would I would run all the laps. I'd do all the exercises. I just didn't want to wear shorts. And so that earned me a low C for not wearing shorts.
Abhi Saini (20:55.478)
OK.
Abhi Saini (21:03.544)
I think at one point it took health online, so who knows? There's ways around it.
Ben Climer (21:09.144)
But kind of in this down point, you know, I was I made a couple friends freshman year But then they actually moved away the friends that I did make freshman year, which was really unfortunate and so that summer was pretty dark because I don't have anybody I don't have my previous passions and at that point I actually do a
Abhi Saini (21:25.387)
That's not...
Ben Climer (21:40.15)
a suicide attempt that was not successful.
Abhi Saini (21:42.437)
my god. Well, thank god for that.
Ben Climer (21:45.673)
Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm here, so that part may be obvious, but.
Abhi Saini (21:48.43)
Well, that's that man that is that's a that is a tough thing to admit and I'm proud of you for being able to say that on a public space like this. That's a it's a big thing. I'm assuming after that happened.
Ben Climer (22:04.044)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (22:12.846)
A lot of things I've read on Reddit or seen online and stuff is like after something like that, you have a sudden realization of certain things or something comes to mind or your mindset changes, your passion, your ideas change, something happens. And so I'm curious if that was anything for you after that. Did you start to change what you did on a day-to-day basis?
Ben Climer (22:36.74)
to be honest, I'm going to, this is probably a little bit against the grain, but I don't think I had that moment immediately. I think.
I almost instead of an appreciation for life, I developed a fear of death is what I've kind of determined with my therapist is there's kind of a self preservation there, the yin and yang. And so, yeah. So that experience was a little bit different for me. Um, but you know, I think it's one of those things where I don't know that I always healed in high school, but
Abhi Saini (23:01.153)
I see. Okay.
Okay.
Ben Climer (23:17.024)
You, you go on, you continue is kind of what I would, and, and I will say like, is skipping ahead a little bit, but I'm not much on like always on like fate or things happen for reason always, but that experience actually let me help people later in life that were going through similar experiences. and it did let me be able to speak.
Abhi Saini (23:20.366)
Great, great.
Ben Climer (23:46.783)
with them in like a little bit different terms and help them through their own battles.
Abhi Saini (23:53.546)
Yeah, I'm glad that you were able to get some... It's hard to even think about what I would want to reply to you on this, but I guess I'm glad that you had a somewhat positive outcome from a pretty scary topic and that you're able to help others that are going through similar things. That's a huge, huge benefit to...
Ben Climer (24:12.883)
Yeah. Yeah.
Abhi Saini (24:20.46)
for them, right? I'm very glad that you were able to help others.
Ben Climer (24:24.212)
Yeah. And obviously, you know, looking at it now, like where I'm at, have an amazing wife. have three amazing dogs, but when you're a teenager, you don't see that far ahead. Frankly, like you're, you're, you're not that far. I you're just like, I'm in the middle of this and this is awful and I don't want to do it anymore.
Abhi Saini (24:37.888)
Yeah, no. No, my,
Abhi Saini (24:45.836)
You telling me that high school relationships don't last forever?
Ben Climer (24:49.494)
There's so much pressure on that too. Like I feel like I wasn't a couple relationships in high school and they were terrible fits. And it was just trying to be in relationships with people just to not be alone, frankly.
Abhi Saini (25:05.005)
So I am curious, after that you kind of had this forward looking mindset a little bit. You wanted to not be alone. You wanted a bit more of community and camaraderie. Did you end up joining any clubs or getting involved in the outside organizations?
Ben Climer (25:26.984)
Yeah. So I would say my sophomore year, I had a lot of, there were some of them that were okay. I some really bad core teachers, you know, like the core curriculums. I didn't get along with them, which didn't help anything. But because of the school system that I was in, they actually had some, what they would refer to as CT classes, career and technical education classes. And as I enter my sophomore year,
Abhi Saini (25:51.606)
yeah. Yeah.
Ben Climer (25:56.19)
One of those was web design. I was able to do that. And then there was also a pro like it a class called programming and logic and they actually told a taught us a language called dark basic in that. Yeah.
Abhi Saini (26:12.28)
Really? okay. Okay, that seems a lot more fun than when I learned BASIC and we were learning BEEBEEBASIC.
Ben Climer (26:21.181)
Yeah, dark basic was kind of this, I think in some way simplified language and you know, they wanted to gamify the learning so you would build games in this language. and when I looked it up the other day, I think it's kind of dead, but.
Abhi Saini (26:32.046)
cool that's so cool compared to when i was when i when i went through basic we were learning just literally just is like here's visual basic create some forms and buttons like okay drag and drop i guess
Ben Climer (26:44.339)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (26:50.198)
Yeah, so we're learning dark basic in the program and logic class. And, um, the other one that I caught on to was media production. And I had this idea when I was going in, I was like, well, I've used a camera before. What are they actually going to teach me? You know, I'm going to be the hot shot and just know what to do. Cause I've pressed record on a camera before I had no idea what I was doing. I'll put that in.
Abhi Saini (27:16.558)
I still don't.
Ben Climer (27:19.689)
But I got in and you start learning about storyboarding a video and the rule of thirds and you start learning what shots are called and once you learn what the shots are called at school, you immediately start noticing the shots in your shows and movies afterwards for a while.
Abhi Saini (27:39.608)
Yeah. Yup. It's like, if you're in, if you work in networking odds are anytime you go to a hotel, you look up and you're like, yup, that's, that's an Aruba.
Ben Climer (27:47.836)
Yeah.
Yeah, I had to get the shots out of my mind because it was annoying watching shows and noticing what the shots were. But when you're first learning, like, over the shoulder, medium shot, that's the establishing shot.
Abhi Saini (28:01.826)
You know, nowadays I worked in the marketing industry for a while at one company. I didn't work in marketing, but the company was. And now I know it as product placement way too easily.
Ben Climer (28:17.321)
Yeah.
we also had cabling rodeos, like we had a lot of XLR cables and different BNC cables and stuff. And they taught us the proper way to over and under a cable. So like that you don't like mess it up and everything. And they would do a yeah. And they would do a cabling rodeo to see like who could do it the fastest.
Abhi Saini (28:35.958)
I do that to my ethernet cables. And my USB cables.
Abhi Saini (28:43.086)
That's awesome. I love it.
So you're, you know, I love that you're learning design and you're taking these classes. But these are more of courses during the school day, right?
Ben Climer (29:03.113)
They are. So what the path that they would designate you on what they would call paths in high school. And there was kind of the normal one. And then there was one called the CTE. and it had different core requirements than what a normal student would take, but it gave you the opportunity to take more technical classes. And they actually got rid of it and are drastically changed it after I left. So it was something that wasn't there for very long, but
like one of the examples is which I guess I kind of regret, but I probably wouldn't have had much fun in it is I didn't have to take a foreign language. and that would come back to bite me later. Cause most colleges want you to have a foreign language.
Abhi Saini (29:46.05)
Yeah, that's true. But I think at least I think it does a disservice to the students learning a foreign language because you're forced to do it. like I spent I spent like six years learning Spanish and I still don't know it well enough. Right. I should have just gone to Spain for six months. That would have been so much better.
Ben Climer (30:02.174)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (30:06.399)
Maybe just watch some soap operas that are in Spanish or something like that. Get the drama aspect.
Abhi Saini (30:15.16)
So, you know, I love that, I love this part of your high school experience, because it's really similar to mine in that we were both doing technical classes in school. You know, I mentioned that I, that like I was in a PC support class, which is, we didn't call it CTE, but it's exactly the same thing, just different states, different terms. I'm curious, did you...
Did you do any outside competitions with, so like I did FBLA, which was a Future Business League of America, and that was a lot of fun. I should have mentioned a bunch of stuff about that, but I'm curious if you guys had access to programs like that at your school.
Ben Climer (30:52.359)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (31:01.907)
We did. And I want to step back for a moment because one of the things that I do like to do is give credit to mentors. And, um, I don't know if they'll ever listen to this, but Mr. Keith Stephens was my kind of teacher in a lot of the computer programming related classes. And Matt Balzer was the media classes. And those were teachers that you could tell cared, which makes a difference. Um,
And you know, especially when someone's in a darker period, knowing that someone cares is can be huge.
Abhi Saini (31:38.296)
Absolutely. It is, it's amazing how you can look back and see yourself as a young adult or as an old child.
Ben Climer (31:50.451)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (31:52.886)
and realize that you had access to these really cool things, or these amazing people, people that wanted to see you succeed. And at the time, you don't really treat it with the respect that it deserves. Like they go out of their way. And like I know for a fact that my PC support teacher, she didn't like me because I was pretty arrogant. You know, like I've mentioned this a few times, I've been told that I'm not, I wasn't a nice person when I was younger.
Ben Climer (32:00.21)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (32:21.164)
But she taught me a lot. She opened so many doors and I wish I maintained that relationship with her because I would love to, you know, I would love to like have a coffee, sit down 10 years later, 15 years later and be like, hey, you, helped me out so much. And I just want to say, so thank you to all the teachers out there that have helped students. Absolutely huge thank you to all of you.
Ben Climer (32:23.208)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (32:38.024)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (32:45.126)
Yeah. Yeah. Even, you know, even if you're too far to get a coffee, go send a message to the people that changed your life today. If you get one takeaway from this episode, thank the people that helped you coming up. to get back to your question, so although, okay, I'm going to do one more sidebar. I did get a little bit arrogant at one point in computer repair class because that's one that
Abhi Saini (32:58.144)
Absolutely, absolutely.
Abhi Saini (33:07.91)
you
Ben Climer (33:12.9)
I naturally got pretty good grades in just from knowing how to take things apart and things like that. And it does. one of the days the thing was to just like put together a computer. So like I slept this thing together in no time and I'm just like chit chatting and I made a grave error that I would learn once I turned on the computer. Cause I was in a hurry and it would put
Abhi Saini (33:17.548)
Right? Right? It inflates the ego so fast.
Abhi Saini (33:40.43)
I wanna guess, I wanna guess.
Ben Climer (33:40.848)
Like it was posting and stuff, but I pressed the power button and I turn around to talk to my peers and the computer starts smoking. Do you have any guesses what I may have done?
Abhi Saini (33:55.214)
There's a few things I'm assuming you
Ben Climer (33:57.062)
No
Abhi Saini (34:02.518)
No, see, that doesn't happen here because the power supply switch can cause some issues. I've seen forgetting to put thermal paste on the CPU. I'm thinking that you had to use a paperclip to inject.
Ben Climer (34:11.762)
Not thermal paste.
Ben Climer (34:16.882)
It was pretty quick. It wasn't. It didn't take a while.
Abhi Saini (34:20.536)
I don't know, I wanna know, I wanna know, what did you do?
Ben Climer (34:23.249)
So as I'm putting this computer together and I unplug it because I'm like, well, I don't want it to continue to burn. We open up the computer and like what happened here? Luckily the fire alarm didn't go off, but we had to air out the roof a little bit. This computer had a floppy disk and floppy disk have three pins and it's possible to put only two on there. So I had shorted the floppy drive and that had fried the whole
power supply.
Abhi Saini (34:58.144)
man, that's... And here I was thinking... Here in my head I was like, he had to have used a paperclip to eject a CD drive and then he dropped the paperclip inside the computer. But my god.
Ben Climer (34:59.503)
So that was a pretty humbling experience.
Ben Climer (35:11.056)
Nope.
Abhi Saini (35:16.254)
least power supplies are pretty cheap. Forgetting to put the heatsink on a CPU a little bit more expensive.
Ben Climer (35:18.862)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (35:23.675)
That's fair. Once I get a new power supply we posted, I was able to install one desk, but that was pretty humbling.
But so to get back to your question that a teacher Keith Stephens, one of the things that he was involved with was an organization called Skills USA. And if you haven't heard of them.
Abhi Saini (35:34.766)
That's awesome.
Abhi Saini (35:45.806)
yeah, I have. You don't have to explain it. It's okay. wait, right. Sorry. For everyone else.
Ben Climer (35:50.832)
We have some, if you haven't heard of it at a super high level, they support career and technical education in schools. And they actually have competitions where you go to compete against other students and kind of, you know, get a different contest experience or competition experience. And they had a category called computer maintenance and repair. And it was basically sort of a plus based and he.
They had the opportunity and I guess the school funding and stuff and said, you know, let's send them to the contest for that.
Abhi Saini (36:28.994)
Nice. Okay. So we had similar things in FBLA and I know that you have like you're you sometimes have school testing or school competitions, county, regionals, states, districts, what I don't know all the terms right. Did you get to compete in you you just said that right you went to those competitions. How did you do? How was the experience?
Ben Climer (36:53.669)
Yeah. So with that, you could compete in the same category a couple years. The first year I won first place in regional and I didn't place in state at all. The second year, and I don't know if I had a takeaway of what I did wrong that time around, to be honest, but I can tell you what I did right the next time. So the next time around I
Abhi Saini (37:09.698)
Okay.
Ben Climer (37:21.858)
I placed first in regional, I get to state and I think it did pretty well with most of it, but there was one challenge that nobody was getting and it was drive mapping actually. And I was actually fortunate that, our school system had like a bad drive map policy or something. Cause I would have to remap our school drives constantly. So shout out to the school system ID.
Abhi Saini (37:47.424)
a little bit of experience.
Ben Climer (37:51.528)
but I got to that challenge and I tried mapping it via the GUI and I could also use net. I'd figured out how to do net use. I tried both of those and I was prompting for a password and, you know, like I sat there for a second and there was, I looked at the instructions and there's no password on the instructions and I'm kind of sitting there like, don't like, you know, run out of time and stuff. And so I finally called the judge over my.
Hey, I'm looking at this challenge. There's no credentials on here. And when I'm mapping this, it's asking for credentials. And he put the credentials in and it came up and was like, I was looking at the sheet. Don't need to do anything else. Said, Nope, that's it. okay.
So I don't know if the credentials were supposed to be cached or if the challenge was like being willing to ask a judge a question and that's what they were testing for. I don't know.
Abhi Saini (38:52.0)
I bet you they forgot to put them on the paper.
Ben Climer (38:56.176)
I like the idea better that it was a challenge of being willing to ask a question to the user. I like that version better.
Abhi Saini (39:05.038)
It's like, that's a hell of a lesson. It's like, you sometimes you just don't know and you need to ask.
Ben Climer (39:11.874)
Yeah. But, yeah. So it's kind of funny. Maybe I'll put the picture of this on the stand. Cause I've got this like goofy long hair and stuff, but, so the way they do it, they pull you up to the stage and there's three of us. So we know that we placed somewhere and I'm standing to the side of the stage and I'm like, man, you know, I'm probably like third or something. So they call the third person like, I might've made second.
And then they called the second person and I'm looking around like, this, this is me. And there's like a person like directing, you know, traffic cause it's, you know, it's high schoolers, the directed people. And she was like, it looks like you won. I'm like, so then you, I'm up at the stage and I think, I think if I look at the picture, I'm kind of like puffed out. I'm wearing like this white.
Abhi Saini (40:06.008)
Yeah, you're just like, yes! Yeah, that's right. I knew I'd win.
Ben Climer (40:08.303)
Yeah, so I get through state and that summer we actually you could choose if you wanted to go or not, but I decided to go to nationals and see what that was about and one of the the main judge there was Mike Myers who if you don't know is with professional seminars and he wrote a lot of the
Abhi Saini (40:12.814)
That's amazing. I love it.
Abhi Saini (40:32.363)
shit!
Ben Climer (40:38.167)
A plus books you would see for a lot of years.
Abhi Saini (40:38.444)
Yeah.
That's so cool. he still produces content and you can still find videos on his YouTube channel and I think he does content production for multiple other testing and certification platforms. Super cool.
Ben Climer (40:45.209)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (40:55.287)
Yeah. And, and he was kind of a, he was a like larger than life, really nice dude. Like he would wear the cowboy hat you saw in the videos. He was wearing that in person too.
Abhi Saini (41:02.658)
His cowboy hat? Yeah. Yeah. You know, actually, I think I'm pretty sure that his videos are on empath. The A plus course path is done by him. If I remember correctly, it might be part of his team, but that's super cool. I think I literally have a. Yeah, I have a network plus book, an old.
Ben Climer (41:16.431)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ben Climer (41:25.529)
So.
Abhi Saini (41:32.238)
an old like legitimate original CompTIA Network Plus written by Mike Meyer certification book over there.
Ben Climer (41:42.84)
Somewhere in my parents I have a signed copy of the A plus book which you know it's not worth anything but it's cool to me.
Abhi Saini (41:47.886)
That's so cool.
That is worth a lot to us.
Ben Climer (41:55.342)
But it was kind of interesting, National. So I couldn't tell you everything we did, but one piece was you had like a part identification and they would have some really old parts and things like that. You would have to identify what the computer parts were. They actually had a computer with a dip switch issue, which I had never encountered, but figured out just by like reading the prompts. Yeah.
Abhi Saini (42:17.624)
hate that so much.
You
Ben Climer (42:21.998)
You had to troubleshoot a computer and the issue was the dip switches were set wrong. And I think the prompt, like they made the prompt fairly easy. It's like, you know, the user said that they adjusted these dips, which is from an online article and now their computer won't start. And it told you which one they adjusted. So I just like, and then it posted, I'm like, like, uh, is this the challenge?
Abhi Saini (42:25.55)
Ugh.
Abhi Saini (42:39.342)
Only two options.
Abhi Saini (42:45.486)
The challenge is finding a tool to push the dipshits.
Ben Climer (42:50.668)
Yup. I think they did provide a tool for that, which was nice.
Abhi Saini (42:56.408)
So not a pencil.
Ben Climer (42:57.974)
Yeah, I can tell you the one that I failed at the time I had not made many network cables and you had to make a network cable that would pass the tester and I failed that one for sure because I couldn't remember the order.
Abhi Saini (43:11.944)
what? A or B.
Ben Climer (43:15.106)
you could do either. I think it just had to pass.
Abhi Saini (43:17.986)
Just, no, pick one. A or B. White, orange, orange, white, green, blue, white, blue, green, white, brown, brown.
Ben Climer (43:19.649)
be all day. Orange, red, orange, green, white, blue, blue, white, green, brown, white, brown.
Abhi Saini (43:26.414)
We would, I learned to make cables in middle school and when you're middle schoolers learning to make cables, you start to like memorize the color order. And to this day, I can just like spit it out in a breath. Like poof, there it is.
Ben Climer (43:41.897)
We'll touch on this later, but I think I learned it best when I was in internal IT and I made 140 cables. And so by then I was getting it down.
Abhi Saini (43:51.694)
Yeah, this 139th failure. Yes, finally!
Ben Climer (43:55.085)
Well, you know, at that point I was smart enough to have a cheat sheet, but eventually once you do it long enough, you're like, it's this. but so all that, the cool part about that though is part of your score. And one thing that you got to do at nationals is you got to take the eight plus test. And so during that.
Abhi Saini (44:19.374)
that's a saving.
Ben Climer (44:21.869)
Yeah, during that I passed my A+. I think I was 16 at the time. Yeah.
Abhi Saini (44:25.133)
Night.
Nice, okay, nice, that's awesome. wait, you're telling me that that means...
Ben Climer (44:30.274)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (44:35.31)
Did you get a plus lifetime or was that?
Ben Climer (44:42.331)
I missed the lifetime cut by six months.
Abhi Saini (44:45.268)
my gosh, okay.
Ben Climer (44:47.063)
So I am not A plus certified today. That is long expired.
Abhi Saini (44:51.974)
That's okay. That's okay. We can we can re-up. GTIA, we're looking for sponsors and... So this is year you're 16. You just got an A plus certification. You just did you got first place in nationals.
Ben Climer (44:55.98)
I may need to take it again just to make sure I still know what I'm doing.
Ben Climer (45:15.229)
sorry, I did not get first place in nationals. Yeah.
Abhi Saini (45:18.158)
Oh, sorry, state. And you competed in national, right? But that is is huge. Like that that must have made you feel like you could do anything. You know, like what what was the next thing? Did you start to? You know, at 16, I'm assuming you were in 10th or 11th grade. That's sophomore, junior year. Yeah, so you still had a couple more years of school, maybe.
Ben Climer (45:22.07)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (45:31.648)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (45:40.576)
than like that. Yeah.
Ben Climer (45:45.004)
Yeah. So one more thing I'll give a shout out on. we weren't necessarily sure if my parents even had the money for me to go nationals and, uh, Mr. Stephens took the time to go to kind of a peer group that he was a part of. There was a private education, like peer group for the school system and a local bank along with a, uh,
gosh, I think the other one was a marketing firm, not one that I worked for, but a marketing firm as well. They actually put up the money for me to go to the competition, which I may have not been able to do without that.
Abhi Saini (46:23.874)
That's awesome.
That is, I think that's the.
And I was talking to a friend about this, about like how businesses can do more. know, the whole, a little bit of a sidebar, I guess, but the conversation we had is about how to grow your own business and stuff. And I was like, to be honest, the number one way that we grow our business is through community outreach. And we're not doing it just to be like, yeah, we're, we're donating money or yeah, we're contributing to this nonprofit.
Ben Climer (47:01.268)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (47:03.458)
But I grew up doing a lot of nonprofit work, a lot of volunteering. I graduated high school with too many hours of volunteering. one thing we talked about was how the whole reason, or one of the giant benefits to contributing and funding nonprofits or contributing to your community is that you
Ben Climer (47:04.373)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (47:30.848)
you have the chance or an opportunity to help the next person, help some kid become the next president or the next billionaire or the next astronaut or the next, you know, CEO of something, right? Somebody you have a chance for making a huge impact on somebody that for you as a business owner might be a drop in the bucket.
Ben Climer (47:47.424)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (47:54.562)
But for that kid, it's what accelerates their career or changes their entire mindset or finally gives them the chance to shine. And I think that worth it because uplifting, uplifting our youth and uplifting community is what we need to be doing more of as a society. But anyways, circling back to what you were saying, I love that you were able to go because of your community.
Ben Climer (48:01.792)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (48:11.274)
100%.
Ben Climer (48:15.986)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (48:21.096)
Yeah, and
Abhi Saini (48:21.546)
And now today, you're a huge proponent of community.
Ben Climer (48:24.948)
Yeah. And I'll say like, you know, one of the things that obviously they didn't do it for this, like the ROI is not there, but they, they like did a press release and like I had my, this was a cool aspect, but I had my picture in the paper after I won state for the, from these like, cause the, the like bank owners took a picture with me and took me to a steak house or whatever. So like at the time, like, this is pretty cool.
Abhi Saini (48:43.928)
Nice. Yeah.
Abhi Saini (48:54.312)
Absolutely.
Ben Climer (48:56.886)
but, yeah, we, we, we get through the competition. I come back, I'm actually doing pretty well in media class and I got, you know, connected with some really good people that I was able to work with and create some cool things. And, I would get signed on to, had a, like a weekly school broadcast. I got signed onto that team. Mr. Balzer was.
I don't know. think he pitied me a little bit or something to put me on there, but it turns out some of the graphics that I had created, I created like a lower third graphic and kind of an arched like news banner type graphic. And those along with another person, we would actually won an award for our graphics on the news broadcast. and, and our news broadcast one on like,
first and second that year because you submitted two shows. So somehow we won first and second. And then I also had an experimental film, which is kind of like a, I don't know exactly how to spell, this drama, like, but genre. But basically the video that we made was really trippy for lack of a better term. And so they put it in the experimental category and we won that year.
Abhi Saini (50:23.512)
Dude, that was awesome.
Ben Climer (50:26.6)
Yeah, I mean, that's it was a state level, but I mean, yeah, it's awesome. Yeah.
Abhi Saini (50:29.614)
still there's so many kids that are competing alongside it so to be able to that's one thing that I don't think people realize when you have high school competitions there's a lot of people participating like it's not like when you have college competitions it's a really small group but high school like I got there's our those events are terrifyingly large
Ben Climer (50:35.561)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (50:57.768)
Yeah, I can't, I can't myself speak to the college ones, but, but yeah, the high school one, there's, quite a few people there actually. and so.
Abhi Saini (51:07.67)
I have friends that work corporate events and their high school events that they run are massive compared to the college events because they start to get smaller and smaller. That's crazy. Absolutely crazy.
Ben Climer (51:17.383)
Wow. Yeah. But I go through these contests and then now I have my A plus, which I'm kind of hoping open some doors for me. And so, you know, the first place I apply was Geek Squad, which is, you know, we learn in your episode is a place that that you you had a short spurt in.
Abhi Saini (51:43.522)
Yeah, well.
Ben Climer (51:47.688)
but I would actually be rejected by mine. They, they weren't liking what I was putting down, but I was 16. So I'll cut them a little slack.
Abhi Saini (51:51.982)
I
Yeah, I don't... Are they allowed to?
Ben Climer (51:59.078)
Well, so I applied to some.
Abhi Saini (52:01.358)
So at least when I worked at Best Buy, I think they refused to hire miners in Geek Squad.
Ben Climer (52:07.622)
Yeah, that's probably the case. I applied to some local shops and they just ghosted me for the most part. and so I actually go back to a little bit of that fan site experience in middle school and I, I kind of hyper focused on this on WordPress sites and making them perform better, which was something that a lot of people, you know, this is 15 years ago.
Abhi Saini (52:32.13)
Okay.
Ben Climer (52:36.208)
So some companies barely had a website if they had one still, which is kind of wild to think about, but,
Abhi Saini (52:42.958)
Right, right. Yeah, like websites were still new. They're like, like, we don't need a website. We're in the yellow pages. Like, there's a reason the yellow pages only died off like this decade.
Ben Climer (52:46.855)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ben Climer (52:55.729)
Yeah. But you know, people would put these themes up and stuff and they were made horribly inefficient. So, you know, with DSL was still a pretty common thing and you'd have these sites that would take 10 seconds, 15 seconds to load. And, know, at that time people are just going to give up and not visit your site, honestly, like if it's that slow. And so I started the Google came up with a tool called page speed insights, and it would tell you.
where your website was horribly inefficient. Yeah, it looks a little bit different today because obviously a lot of practices have changed. But so I would start to identify like what was slowing their site down. And I went on a site. This is a minute ago, but a site called Fiverr and I put up gigs and I would make like five or 10 bucks speeding up WordPress sites and fixing issues with WordPress sites.
Abhi Saini (53:25.838)
Yeah, that's still around, right? Yeah.
Abhi Saini (53:54.324)
Okay, okay. That is... That is a... Man, I wish I did things like that when I was 16.
Ben Climer (54:03.144)
And I mean, I had a surprisingly I don't know. I probably fulfilled 50 orders or something like that, which for a high school kid, that's pretty good.
Abhi Saini (54:05.09)
remote
Abhi Saini (54:12.642)
Wow. Yeah. And I'm assuming that you weren't, you know, if these weren't $5 jobs, you were charging a decent bit more. I mean, sure, probably not reasonable for what it was worth, but...
Ben Climer (54:24.34)
I definitely under charged. It just depend. I think if I were to do an ROI calculation, I probably lost money on the WordPress fixes, but a lot of times it would lead to the speed gigs as well. So it kind of got like a bonus buy out of that because I would fix their WordPress issue and then they would go by the speed optimization.
Abhi Saini (54:49.612)
Hmm, okay, okay
Ben Climer (54:51.921)
But I mean, I was gaining experience from that. like, it's like, this plugin's crap. You should use this plugin. This plugin's why your site's broken.
Abhi Saini (55:01.868)
And I'm sure you learned a lot of skills beyond just simply making money, right? You learned how to communicate with clients. You learned how to, you know, take payments, how to manage your own money, how to start to sell yourself and advertise. You don't realize you're learning those skills when you're in high school, but it's important. And that's actually something that like SkillsUSA teaches, teaches you how to start to communicate and be a better... Well, now I think about it. All those jobs are just told how to be have better employees.
Ben Climer (55:05.319)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (55:09.233)
Yep.
Ben Climer (55:14.065)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (55:18.469)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (55:33.492)
I also went to Nationals
Ben Climer (55:40.583)
That's funny how that works, but but they circle back a little bit like I have the a plus now I'm doing this wordpress stuff, but I want to find something that you know, I can do with this a plus thing that I have now and Yeah, I've applied to Geek Squad I've applied to local shops and they're not happening So I go to my trusty pal Craigslist and I start responding to every ad and the computer gig section that I can I can find
and it was like odds and ends kind of work, but one of these days I found, find an ad, for a company that's like, you know, just looking for someone. think the requirements were like a plus or something like that. And I interview and they don't ask me my age at any point in the process. And so I submit my resume, I do the interview and.
I even had to send them driver's license at one point, but they accepted me. They said, you're hired.
And so what this company did is they had the contract for HP's warranty work. You would, you could fix printers, laptops, desktops is primarily what they did, sometimes servers. And the way it was worked was kind of gig base. You would log into a portal and you would see what jobs were available that day. And it would tell you how much they were paying and stuff. And they kind of had a system where when a job first came out, it would be worth.
Abhi Saini (56:57.887)
cool.
Abhi Saini (57:04.408)
Mm-hmm.
Ben Climer (57:19.302)
Maybe 20 bucks at the time and then if it was on there longer I think it would get up to a max of $40 or something like that and then different types of jobs Paid different things one of the problems is you know There's actual adults on this platform making it a full-time job, and I'm just trying to part-time this thing and so They would get the closer and better jobs before I was able to log on
Abhi Saini (57:27.278)
Ben Climer (57:49.158)
So there were jobs that were pretty close to me that paid pretty well and they would grab them. So what I primarily ended up doing there was motherboard troubleshooting, which is really weird, but.
Abhi Saini (58:02.412)
I'm surprised that you actually got to do troubleshooting, it was just... replacements. Okay.
Ben Climer (58:06.286)
It was mostly replacements, but you had to verify that the motherboard was actually bad. had like, these are the conditions. had a multimeter and you would measure the voltages and make sure like the power supply was good.
Abhi Saini (58:10.656)
Right, right.
Abhi Saini (58:17.169)
wow, wow, that's different than how HP does them today, that's for sure.
Ben Climer (58:21.989)
I'm sure. And then you had, it was a paper sheet, you know, the tablets weren't in his comments. We had a paper sheet. You had to print out that had the address and the customer name. You go on site. the first thing you have to do is call the company and you went on hold for hours. So I would just start getting to work while I'm waiting on hold. And these are remote places and I had really crappy cell service. So, this job didn't allow me to get a phone, but.
Abhi Saini (58:26.232)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (58:49.133)
I had really crappy service and so I'm like using the customer's landline. I'm replacing the motherboard. I'm on hold for 60 minutes. there's a process you have to do called tattooing the motherboard that took a little bit. And yeah. So, when you look at OEM licensing, the way that the OS determines that you have a valid license is through a process called tattooing the motherboard. When it's originally installed, OEMs have a tattoo on the motherboard that has the license.
Abhi Saini (59:01.582)
No, I'm sure.
Ben Climer (59:20.389)
And so I burned this I burned this Yeah, yeah, so I burned the disk and when you install it you type in the serial code or the serial number and it burns that into the motherboard to give it a valid license
Abhi Saini (59:22.158)
Fill the secret sauce.
Abhi Saini (59:35.576)
Dang, that's pretty cool.
Ben Climer (59:37.062)
I believe it's like a right once chip, like you couldn't change it after it's written two once. I believe is the way that that worked.
Abhi Saini (59:39.98)
Yeah. Right, Right. This isn't a physical tattoo or a physical burn. is... Yeah.
Ben Climer (59:47.138)
Right, I'm not bringing out a tattoo gun. It's like a digital tattoo.
Abhi Saini (59:51.342)
Alright, right. That's pretty cool though that the, that I didn't know that was a thing that you would have, you know, one-off chips that were just waiting for a code to be entered and once it is, there you go, it's as validation.
Ben Climer (01:00:04.281)
Yeah, I think the process is similar to day except USB instead of CD, but it's possible it's different now. That's been a long time ago. but, but I'm mostly, yeah, but I'm mostly doing these motherboard game cause that's all I could get. They were really far away and they took a lot of time for not a bunch more money.
Abhi Saini (01:00:15.384)
Wow, okay. Yeah, it's, I haven't done.
Abhi Saini (01:00:28.482)
you
Abhi Saini (01:00:32.046)
And takes so long. Motherboard laptop replacements or laptop motherboard replacements 10 years ago were not fun. No, God. Laptops were hard to take apart. can't tell if I'm talking to my bro. That's a lot better. And honestly, I would say it was almost easier than it is today.
Ben Climer (01:00:47.887)
We would do desktop motherboard replacements too though.
Ben Climer (01:00:57.798)
HP had a way of making it hard. They would stuff things in there, so you had to take everything out of the case to replace them.
Abhi Saini (01:00:59.298)
Things are smaller now.
Abhi Saini (01:01:05.624)
That's true, that's true. But things have gotten so small today, it's like I can't, my fingers don't fit. I'm like, I still have, I don't know where it is, but I have my, I have the cover for my, my NVMe card on my computer because it's too difficult to put back in my desktop. It's like, it's an aesthetic cover. Who cares?
Ben Climer (01:01:10.265)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:01:23.661)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:01:30.37)
Yeah. so then I started to look for a little bit, study your work cause I'm getting these like one off motherboard replacements and they're kind of a pain and I'm driving my crappy little high school car, which I had a car, but you know, it wasn't the best car. was tried to break down on me a couple of times and stuff like that. But I find a little bit more steady job. there was a marketing startup that this is
another one of those things where I was at the right place at the right time, I guess, but they reached out to our school and like, do you have anybody that would want to intern? And so I got a position. Yeah, I got a position at this marketing startup and the role that they gave me for my internship was it Ninja. So that was my first kind of, yeah, that was first steady job job title was it Ninja.
Abhi Saini (01:02:09.675)
yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:02:21.07)
Ha
Ben Climer (01:02:30.402)
And it was web focused. And so I would build these little tools and things like, so one of the things that they would have me build would be web scrapers. my web scrapers were not terribly efficient. They told me that they didn't want it to go too fast and get them blocked. So I made ones that were much slower than they probably should have been.
Abhi Saini (01:02:55.84)
Sleep sleep sleep
Ben Climer (01:02:58.02)
And, I'm going to, I'm going to be honest, like I.
I thought I knew what I was doing. I was on the peak amounts too, but I'm looking up, you know, on websites to figure out what I'm doing and like pasting together internet code and I'm getting the job done, but yeah, I guess that's what high school interns are good for is pasting internet code together.
Abhi Saini (01:03:12.396)
You're an intern. You weren't supposed to know anything.
Abhi Saini (01:03:23.854)
better or worse than AI code?
Ben Climer (01:03:25.923)
That's a tough one. I didn't hallucinate things that didn't exist. It just it's the Internet meme picture that has like the old car with the lanterns on the front. I think is a good illustration of it. Or you paste something from Internet and it's accidentally fancy in one aspect.
Abhi Saini (01:03:47.214)
So I love that you went from just a few years, you went from just starting to figure out what you wanted to do and what you liked, to having a job. And you're still an adult at this point. You're still a kid.
Ben Climer (01:04:03.128)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:04:09.345)
Yeah, this was my junior year of school. I got hired at this company.
Abhi Saini (01:04:13.55)
Wow. Okay. So did you continue to go down that path? When did you step into your quote unquote first real job?
Ben Climer (01:04:27.235)
That's fair. Um, yeah, I will get there to a second. I'll tell you really quick is one of my mistakes is I did not do a good job juggling all that or communicating with the boss that I had that I was overwhelmed because I started this job in the summer and then school came back up and frankly, I was overwhelmed with everything. I was going to school and then after I got off school, I would work for six hours.
to eight hours there and then I'd go home and try to learn more stuff and be up till 3am and then get back up at 6am was my routine. And so I didn't know what this was or that I was, but I burnt out frankly.
Abhi Saini (01:05:12.11)
Okay, that's.
I know how it worked in your state, but I don't think we were allowed to do that.
Ben Climer (01:05:20.354)
I don't know. I was considered part-time. Nobody asked any, like the government was never involved in that situation.
Abhi Saini (01:05:29.742)
Wow, okay. Okay.
Ben Climer (01:05:34.042)
but so I burn out and you know, it gets to a point where, it's not a good, it's not a good working relationship. I do tell them that I'm kind of, you know, ready to move on and stuff. It wasn't a good fit for me. And, know, my senior, I kind of start focusing back on kind of some of the freelance stuff I did and not having a steady job again, cause,
Abhi Saini (01:05:34.604)
So.
Abhi Saini (01:06:00.972)
Gotcha.
Ben Climer (01:06:01.698)
And you know, maybe if it was at a different time, like if I would have got that job after high school, I think I'd probably would have done a lot better, but just the way the cards lay sometime. So.
Abhi Saini (01:06:12.888)
Yeah, I mean it's really hard sometimes when you're trying to learn how to do a job and going through those formative years. mean, hell hath no fury like a teenager's hormones.
Ben Climer (01:06:21.548)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:06:26.635)
Well, and that doesn't help, right? Cause at the time, like I'm starting to build a friend circle too. So like I'm not getting to hang out with the friends that I've made very much. I'm working all the time and like my school grades are suffering and so I'm just, it wasn't a good fit. I should have quit the job before school started again and came back if I in retrospect.
Abhi Saini (01:06:32.814)
Mm-hmm.
Abhi Saini (01:06:36.749)
Right, right.
Abhi Saini (01:06:48.27)
So what, you know, I think it's, like that you're reflecting on that and you realize that now. But back then, you know, you probably didn't realize it. So what was, what was the next thing?
Ben Climer (01:07:00.701)
No, I mean in some aspects I was kind of a little bit of a cocky kid too at that point because I had my A plus and stuff. So, know, I'm starting to feel a little bit like hot stuff kinda. And so I get out of there. I've saved some money up. So I try a few different things and making money. I invested with like a shady Forex guy and lost a little bit of money on that. bought some, well, I didn't have a lot.
Abhi Saini (01:07:08.814)
Right.
Right, Yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:07:21.953)
You
Abhi Saini (01:07:26.19)
just a little.
Ben Climer (01:07:29.461)
to lose, but for me it was a lot of money. but, know, we're probably talking maybe 300 bucks, which when you're in high schools quite a bit, I also got into micro niche sites. and the way this would work is these people would sell you businesses basically, and they would come up an idea for a blog. They would build the site and the blog, rank it on Google and sell it to you.
Abhi Saini (01:07:56.193)
back.
Ben Climer (01:07:59.177)
And then the idea was you would bring in AdSense revenue. I had some really weird ones too. had one was called Turtle Facts. I had Trending Tote Bags, which was a purse site and I had Netbook versus Tablet.
Abhi Saini (01:08:15.62)
my god, I remember those days. god, knitbooks were the worst. Really fun, but god...
Ben Climer (01:08:20.434)
Yeah. And the idea was you would capture these long tail keywords where people were searching for things. And because your domain was netbook versus tablet or tote bags, you would get picked up and get the adsense revenue or other revenue for that.
Abhi Saini (01:08:38.328)
back before everyone knew about Google search trends.
Ben Climer (01:08:41.706)
Yeah.
but yeah, good.
Abhi Saini (01:08:45.516)
So I like that you went from having a formal job, working at a desk essentially, to doing whatever. You're all over the place. And you're approaching adulthood. How did... I'm having a here. How am I going to ask this question?
Ben Climer (01:08:56.405)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:09:14.208)
I think I get what you're trying to say. So I do have one more twist because why can't, you know, I should have a bunch of different jobs, I guess. But so I get towards the end of high school and I'm not sure if it or web development was the right thing. I can tell you that when I was in web development, I, was in office, remote work, wasn't really a thing. And I sat in this cubicle that was 12 feet high, or at least it seemed like it back then to me.
Abhi Saini (01:09:21.131)
Okay, yeah.
Ben Climer (01:09:42.924)
And they just put me on a quiet quarter and I didn't get to interact with anyone else in the company. They just had me making these tools. And one of the thoughts I had is I don't think I can do this for a career. Like this is awful being in this cubicle. And so I took a left turn and decided to start training to be a car mechanic.
Abhi Saini (01:09:56.184)
Right. Yeah, I can understand that.
Abhi Saini (01:10:05.282)
What?
Okay.
Ben Climer (01:10:10.847)
I actually get a scholarship to a technical school to learn how to be a car mechanic.
Abhi Saini (01:10:22.433)
Okay.
Ben Climer (01:10:25.768)
And so.
Abhi Saini (01:10:26.54)
I mean, at least in your defense, a car mechanic is the same as a computer technician. When you get down to it, yeah, it's like, it's the same stuff, right? You troubleshoot, you twist some stuff, you swap out some things. There you go. Just one has more fluid than the other. Unless you're dealing with water cooled systems.
Ben Climer (01:10:37.097)
There's a lot of critical thinking involved if you're doing a good job.
Ben Climer (01:10:50.399)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So I get, graduate high school and I'm kind of picking my next path of what to do. And I have this mechanic color skip. kind of want to go to college, but what, like I said before, I, I didn't have the foreign language that they wanted. So they wanted me to appear in front of a board and explain to them why I should be admitted to their college, even though I didn't meet the requirements, which felt kind of yucky to me.
Abhi Saini (01:10:55.905)
You
Abhi Saini (01:11:26.304)
Interesting. Okay. Huh.
Ben Climer (01:11:29.335)
so I didn't do that during this time. I mean, Mr. Stephens comes in clutch again and he's had someone from this it company reach out to him and ask him if, you know, they had anybody that wants to like have an internship or be involved or something. And he forwards it over to me and he's like, Hey, do you have any interest in this?
Abhi Saini (01:11:52.174)
another internet.
Ben Climer (01:11:57.855)
And so that is when I am introduced to what the heck an MSP is.
Abhi Saini (01:12:06.382)
I still have that question sometimes. So this is your first foray into a full-time job is at an MSP. Holy crap, that's like trial by fire. I'm curious, did you start out as a level one tech?
Ben Climer (01:12:10.527)
Ben Climer (01:12:18.836)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:12:26.363)
It is.
Ben Climer (01:12:34.27)
So when I started, my title was intern. Uh, and the thought kind of the, that kind of was that I would be there for a couple months and then maybe I'd go to school, the technical school, or I'd figure college out or something like that. But I was just going to be there for the summer and make a little money. And, um, I mean, I thought I was doing pretty well because I think it was making like $14 an hour. So, you know, coming out high school, like my friends are working fast food and I'm like, Oh man, I got this going for me.
Abhi Saini (01:12:38.582)
Okay, truly interesting.
Abhi Saini (01:12:51.566)
I'm joking.
Abhi Saini (01:13:03.66)
Right, right. So, you know, now that you're at an MSP, you're interning, you're only gonna be there for the summer, what kind of stuff were you doing? What was your, what did you fix? Like, what did you start to realize? Like, my God, there's so many different things you gotta know.
Ben Climer (01:13:09.234)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:13:23.485)
Yeah, so I can remember the first ticket I got was an Adobe reader issue and it had something to do with the margins and I think they were expecting it to be a little bit of a challenge for me, but I Googled it and I came back like 10 minutes later and I went to the bus. Okay, I fixed that. Do you have anything else? And they were like, okay.
Abhi Saini (01:13:51.662)
They're like, ugh, we got stumped on that. I guess the new kid.
Ben Climer (01:13:53.501)
Google that. I don't think they were stumped. I just thought that they just thought, yeah, I was just going to be some kid to hang around for the summer or something. like, he may be a little bit useful after all.
Abhi Saini (01:14:05.326)
Alright.
Abhi Saini (01:14:13.07)
They just like, we just need to check a box off to say we did this. And they're like, never mind. I guess this person's able to do some work.
Ben Climer (01:14:15.865)
Yeah.
Yeah. but, so then like I kind of learn more and more, like there was a, a network admin, named Adam, who is a super nice guy at the time he was kind of burnt out. And the thing that I always remember about him is he would, he, he really liked to focus on one thing at a time. I think I could say that and that would be true for him. And, know, MSP life, you're shuffling a lot of things.
And so he'd already be working on a ticket or a project and he's going along and then someone would link him with an issue and he would just start angry typing. had the IBM buckling spring keyboard and he just like, he's like responding back. Like, did you try this?
Abhi Saini (01:15:08.52)
angry or was it just really mechanical?
Ben Climer (01:15:11.357)
It was a little of both. It felt personal. I'm going to be honest when I bought it. But so, so what I did, like I kind of picked up on that. Um, and you know, some of this may be my trauma, but I kind of picked them that like, how can I help this situation? And so I would try to be the least annoying person possible to network admin. So when I came to the problem, I would have a detailed list of everything that I tried.
which were the things that he had told me to do before. I would write down everything he told me to do before when these issues would come up and I'd say, okay, Adam, I tried all this, this is this. And then his typing would slow down a little bit. He's like, huh, let me look at this. that's the sound that he would make you go,
Abhi Saini (01:15:57.742)
I gotta yell that even that once
Ben Climer (01:16:01.297)
And, and I had some really cool opportunities where like, I would stay late just to learn more because he would work late. And so, I got to be involved pretty early on and like helping them move between data centers and things like that. And, know, I'm just the guy like moving cables and stuff. I'm basically labor, but you get to start to pick up on some of that stuff that you normally just wouldn't be exposed to.
Abhi Saini (01:16:18.478)
cool, okay.
Abhi Saini (01:16:28.514)
Right. And you're, if I remember correctly, you grew up pretty close to the, was it the population center of the country? Right. So you, you have pipelines. so like the reason that FedEx is located where they are in Memphis is because that's pretty close to where the, the, it's not the geographic center. It is like the economic.
Ben Climer (01:16:56.508)
The lower 48th center is in Kansas actually.
Abhi Saini (01:17:00.814)
Right. Yes. But the, like the, the UPS hub and the FedEx hubs are where they're the ideal spot that you can get to pretty much anywhere in the country in about the same amount of time. It's like the optimized location. And you grew up pretty close to that area or that like relative to your graph, right?
Ben Climer (01:17:10.896)
the most people are. Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:17:15.772)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:17:21.83)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:17:25.638)
think that's fair. You know, within a couple hours or something like that. Yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:17:29.996)
Yeah, so I'm curious, did you guys have a lot of data centers and networking things around you? You know, like I'm, I'm down here in Florida. We do have data centers, but they're typically like the connectors to South America, not necessarily the transit hubs between half the country.
Ben Climer (01:17:44.582)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:17:49.34)
Yeah, I wouldn't say we had data centers like that. Doesn't mean I had some cool opportunities in high school looking back when I was in high school, we got to. I can't remember the name of the company. I think it was like Pete 10 or something like that. There was a corporate data center near our, you know, within like an hour of our school that we got to go to. And when we were moving data centers at SNS MSB.
We moved from a wind stream data center in Nashville down to this data center that was closer and a little bit easier to get to and not in downtown Nashville with all the traffic. Cause there's nothing worse than having a down server and having to fight traffic to get to it.
Abhi Saini (01:18:36.206)
That is like a mistake that I think... not a mistake. think that is something that a lot of people don't realize. You have to know how do you get to your data center on the worst possible day? if you don't know that... if you don't understand that problem before you sign to get into that data center, you're in for a...
Ben Climer (01:18:44.368)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:19:06.072)
hell of an awakening at some point.
Ben Climer (01:19:07.779)
Yeah. So, so we moved to this other data center and these weren't big connection points. Atlanta is really the big connection point for the Nashville area. It might've changed now that Nashville's a little bit bigger, but you know, at the time, I think at this time, Google may have had a rack in the local data center and it was a cache, not for YouTube, but for Google itself. Like the Google search engine had like one rack that was the local cache.
Abhi Saini (01:19:30.573)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:19:34.324)
Right, Man, I've always wanted one of their servers. They're expensive now. They're like collector's items.
Ben Climer (01:19:39.919)
Yeah.
Yeah.
but yeah, so we had a little bit of, again, I'm pretty much the labor at this point and I'm just observing how it's done and things like that.
Abhi Saini (01:19:55.59)
But you're learning from Adam, you're learning from your coworkers. And did you start to pick up on things that they were doing and be like, I can take that, I can use this? did you start to figure out some processes and be like, how can we do this better? Or how can I use that troubleshooting mindset that Adam keeps yelling all the time?
Ben Climer (01:20:01.294)
Yep.
Ben Climer (01:20:15.556)
Yeah. Yeah, so.
Yeah. Another, and jumping a little bit, another good mentor I had kind of the person I was working under was Dan. And I would refer to him as almost a customer service expert. And he really gave me like a lot of mentorship on how to give the customer a good experience and frankly, how to deal with angry customers and you know, all the above, but, yeah, you know, as, as I move along, like I start coming up with improvement ideas and.
I was probably annoying at times, but like I had coworkers, but I wanted to make a positive change. So I had coworkers that were getting headaches and we had these like really obnoxious fluorescent lights. And so I like wrote up a proposal to change the lights to a warmer white. So people wouldn't get headaches as often. And I wrote up a proposal to, uh, to
by an RF modulator because we didn't have metrics on all the TVs that were in the screens and we couldn't afford a computer for every TV. So my idea was to take the output from the computer, put it in RF modulator. We already had co-ax running to all the TVs. They were wired for cable and just like turn to channel three and see the metrics across the house.
Abhi Saini (01:21:41.71)
What is this, elementary school all over again?
Ben Climer (01:21:45.366)
you
Abhi Saini (01:21:49.774)
That's a fun one. That is still a difficult problem today. Even with all the technology, and to make it so much easier than it was back then, and yet it still can be a headache, with screens across an environment.
Ben Climer (01:21:52.154)
It did not get approved.
Ben Climer (01:21:57.892)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:22:06.66)
Yeah.
So I'm probably a annoying at times, but you know, I'm learning along the way. the other thing I do with it stayed late. My boss would play League of Legends and he invited me to play League of Legends with him. I don't know if he expected me to say yes, but I was like, okay. And so we'd get to end of the day and you know, deal with all of our tickets and then we'd play League of Legends and I'd main master ye main ash.
Abhi Saini (01:22:14.807)
You
Ben Climer (01:22:38.33)
vein, eventually jinx, like some of those characters.
Abhi Saini (01:22:45.198)
That's fun. Damn. So you're not only you're not only learning you're having fun. You're getting gaining more and more experience I can only imagine that you start to take on more roles and Do more and more with your career there? I mean you're starting to step the foundation for actually having a career in in IT Especially in you know within the MSP industry
Ben Climer (01:22:50.383)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:23:01.677)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:23:06.934)
Yeah.
Yeah. So I feel like I can think mapped network drives for a lot of points in my career, cause they were involved in the comp of me winning the state competition, I think. And next thing that they would come in.
Abhi Saini (01:23:16.846)
You
There was the ROI on that.
Ben Climer (01:23:26.796)
Just learning how to map a network drive was huge, apparently. So, one of the things that I would always try to do is kind of pick up things that weren't being done. And, one of the things that I noticed is we had some clients with 2003 servers and, just some inconsistent environments to the network drives would drop off and we'd get daily or recurring calls sometimes from different sites to remap a network drive.
And you'd have to, we're using VNC, so it actually took a second to connect in. Cause you know, some of these clients had T1s even. So you get the call, you have to try to figure out the computer. Hopefully it's named to match the person's name. You find the computer, you click VNC, you sit there and wait for this page to load across so you can see their screen. Then you get in and try to figure out the map drive and what server it's on and all of this. It's so...
We had a tool, automation tool called LapTek and I set off to try to figure out how to make that process a little bit smoother. And when I did the research on it, when first I tried using my net use command that helped me so much in high school in the competition and that did not work. Do you know why that is?
Abhi Saini (01:24:50.158)
There was no domain.
Ben Climer (01:24:52.096)
Not quite. So when you run scripts in an RMM, oftentimes they're ran at the system level. They're not ran at the user level. So when you're doing something like mapping a network drive, it's specific to the user profile.
Abhi Saini (01:24:59.732)
yeah, that's right.
Abhi Saini (01:25:06.25)
I forgot that because I can run my scripts as the current user and I do that quite often. But yeah, that is completely right. You can't just do that.
Ben Climer (01:25:14.465)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:25:18.742)
Yeah. and so I look up and I find this VB script on how to run a script as a current user online. And I put that in lab tech and now I can map network drive. So I create an automate script and I like pre-populate, I forget what they're called, but there's kind of these variables per client. And I would put the server, like the drive paths in those variables. And when you ran map network drive,
Abhi Saini (01:25:28.11)
Mm-hmm.
Abhi Saini (01:25:46.254)
Oh yeah. These are the custom variables that Connectwise has. Yeah, Ah.
Ben Climer (01:25:48.074)
it remapped any drives. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you would run the script instead of connecting in and you'd be on the phone and you're like, hang on, let me run the script. And the script would say running and then it would say complete. Like, is your network drive there now? No. Can you refresh? there it is. And so you saved all this back and forth in time.
Abhi Saini (01:26:12.686)
Was there not a domain? You're not using AD for these?
Ben Climer (01:26:18.251)
there was but the map drives would fall off. I don't know. I couldn't tell you what the issue was at the time, but they would disconnect or in disappear.
Abhi Saini (01:26:25.87)
I
See, what I did, I think when I had that problem, is I've done it a few times too. I think I just set them to reconfigure every login.
Ben Climer (01:26:39.828)
My script did that. So the nice thing is as my script went through, it started fixing these so we didn't get future calls back.
Abhi Saini (01:26:48.219)
nice, okay. Sweet. you're... you're... you're...
Ben Climer (01:26:50.664)
Yeah, so was kind of a two for one.
Abhi Saini (01:26:56.322)
you're already starting to automate things and learn more about how to increase the efficiencies of the IT department and technical.
Ben Climer (01:26:59.04)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:27:12.814)
So you're already starting to do so much to learn all this automation and figure out how to make your job easier, how to make your clients better, happier, make the technology more efficient. Did you then start to do more and more of that and realize that, scripting is awesome. Let me start to make scripts for everything under the sun.
Ben Climer (01:27:18.368)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:27:27.349)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:27:39.667)
Yeah. so one memory I have on that is I was sponging all of this up because you're dealing with such a diverse set of technology and you know, wasn't retaining everything, but I'm sponging all of this fire hose, and just trying to figure out all the things. And a weird moment I had is we had hired somebody like I'm like a level one at this point. and we hired somebody that like,
On the resume was all about the AD experience and everything. And I was showing him how to do basic AD tasks cause he had lied on his resume. Yeah. So I got, I'm like the level one and like, this is probably not going to work out.
Abhi Saini (01:28:26.766)
You
Ben Climer (01:28:29.142)
but, to your point, so I start to get more things and I continue this path of looking for what's not being done and trying to pick things up. And there wasn't a lot of automation happening. There was a lot of reactive support happening. And as I did that more and more and started building more things and implementing things that were shared online, they, I think our lab tech.
rep maybe reached out and offered a discounted cost or I couldn't tell you the pricing details, but the company decided to send me to the lab tech bootcamp, which was our RMM that an actual in-person bootcamp you could go to.
Abhi Saini (01:29:13.356)
Yeah!
Ben Climer (01:29:15.666)
so I go down there and I'm loving it. I'm in the Tampa area at their headquarters. this is the first time, like one of the first times I flew on a plane. It's the first time I take a taxi and the, the taxi driver drove wild on the way to Tampa.
Yeah. but, I get down there and I am like loving the training, the, I couldn't tell you the name of the trainer. I wish I remembered, but, I was really engaged with it. I'm asking a lot of questions. Like I want to know more about this and how to do this. And one of the things that I actually got out of that, that I wasn't aware of is there was a site called lab tech geek that had came out.
And if you're not familiar, Lab Tech Geek at that time was a little IRC channel. was like Martin at ConnectWise was there. was some, one of the cool things is every now and then Greg would pop in and he was the person that wrote the software. And so if you had a weird enough bug, Greg would be like, that's kind of weird.
Abhi Saini (01:30:32.302)
Well, Greg, you're the only person here that can fix it, so...
Ben Climer (01:30:36.511)
yeah. Often he, he was actually really good though. He's like, this is how this would work and stuff like that. But, you know, you're in the sire channel. This is a really cool experience. I'm like, I'm loving it. But I also, from a community aspect, I stay in touch with all the people that I go in the camp with. We still have a Facebook group today that's called lab tech camp, like 2013. And we still keep in touch with everybody from this boot camp.
Abhi Saini (01:30:58.285)
Nice.
Ben Climer (01:31:05.105)
over 10 years ago.
Abhi Saini (01:31:05.678)
That's so cool. That's awesome. There's definitely something special about maintaining those relationships over time. You don't realize how, you might not talk every day, but it's just cooler to be able to have something shared you can kind of center yourselves on.
Ben Climer (01:31:12.501)
100 %
Ben Climer (01:31:16.426)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:31:20.723)
Yeah, just those friends you see now and then you're like, hey, bud, you know, how are you doing and everything? then the following year I would get to go to automation nation and that was a cool experience because I, I'm probably one of the younger. Yeah. Yep. Automation nation was, you know, primarily based around lab tech and, I'm probably one of the younger ones there.
Abhi Saini (01:31:26.382)
you
Abhi Saini (01:31:36.674)
That's also run by Kinequiz, right? Yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:31:44.29)
Right.
Ben Climer (01:31:47.656)
But, you know, I'm getting to hang out with a lot of the, like a lot of people that I've seen in the chat room and posting on the forums and stuff like that. And like, these people are in real life now. And you get to see kind of the new things that are coming out. it was, you know, I don't know if I had rose colored glasses. I don't think I did, but it was a really cool experience for sure.
but I built all this knowledge and my MSP is kind of like, know, Hey, he's pretty good at this kind of stuff. And we were in peer groups and I would actually start running, doing some basic consulting for other MSPs in our peer group that were using lab tech. And I'd help them like do very basic stuff that they weren't doing today. We always start help building software deployment, automation, some things like that.
Abhi Saini (01:32:42.936)
Nice. Okay. So you're not only, not only did you learn more how to do your job more easily, it sounds weird, but you you want to, you want to try to make, as lazy. My mindset sometimes when I'm looking at what automation to do is like, how can I be as lazy as possible? Because if you kind of think about that, you're like, okay. And the idea is not to, the goal is not to be lazy. It's to make it so you don't have to do the mundane, menial stuff over and over. One,
Ben Climer (01:32:58.302)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:33:05.895)
Hahaha
Ben Climer (01:33:09.938)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:33:10.872)
so doesn't waste your time and two, so you don't make mistakes because you know, if you do the same thing over and over, you're bound to screw up at some point and when you're onboarding a new user, it's not a good time to mess up.
Ben Climer (01:33:19.283)
100%.
Ben Climer (01:33:24.359)
Yeah. And, you know, we actually kind of make this little practice, I guess, where, we're also selling lab tech to internal it clients and, it's probably weird for them to be learning from like a 19 year old, but I would go on site and I would run like a very short version of the camp. That's just like, here's how you use lab tech.
Abhi Saini (01:33:37.014)
Nice. OK.
Abhi Saini (01:33:49.698)
Hey, it's, I think I was, taught a, I taught a senior citizen group. I, when I was 18 or 19 at the time, it was like, I, was Apple iPads and iOS. It was like your guide to iPad. And literally I was teaching a bunch of people that were four times my age, how to use the iPad so that way they can run, they can, you know, FaceTime their grandkids.
Ben Climer (01:34:01.64)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:34:07.535)
Ha ha ha ha.
Ben Climer (01:34:12.979)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:34:19.308)
They loved it. They were just like, this is great. I bet you those clients were just like, this is awesome that we can learn this cool technology and then they can take it and run with it. No one cares about your age when you're learning something cool.
Ben Climer (01:34:21.363)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:34:33.992)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:34:37.368)
So as you're doing this, you're, you know, you're starting to do more and more. I'm assuming then you continue doing more and more. you, are you starting to like, now you're the, you're the head honcho for automation at your MSP? You know, what's, what, where does that lead? Cause I know where you are today. You know, I'm trying to, I'm trying to almost predict your path. And every time I attempt, I'm wrong. So.
Ben Climer (01:34:57.661)
Yeah. Yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:35:07.15)
I want to know what the next twist in your story is.
Ben Climer (01:35:11.795)
Yeah. so the next thing we kind of get to is, uh, I'm helping with this automate stuff. Uh, I actually get a little bit of an opportunity to do a little bit of web development. So I helped some of our clients with WordPress stuff while I'm there. Like I'm just doing a little bit of odds and ends all over the place, frankly. And I never have like an automation title. I'm still just, you know, technology consultant or whatever the role was at the time.
Abhi Saini (01:35:33.154)
Ha ha ha.
Abhi Saini (01:35:40.43)
How'd you say you were still intern?
Ben Climer (01:35:41.939)
No, no, but by this point, you know, I think I'm going to stick around. I'm not the intern anymore, but I am like the level one, you know, technical consultant, frontline help desk, and then doing this other stuff on the side. and so, you know, what better thing to do when you're a tier one than why don't you start a side hustle? And so I started a digital car magazine.
Abhi Saini (01:36:12.536)
Man.
of all the things you could start you start at a magazine and here I'm like hmm he's gonna start he's gonna start offering residential service because his MSP probably doesn't do residential or he's gonna start you know tutoring lessons for high school students learning technology but no you're
Ben Climer (01:36:19.719)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:36:24.421)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:36:32.593)
Yeah, I kind of saw this void in the type of car that I liked and was passionate about where there weren't any blogs or anyone writing about them. But I knew that that that car, which was a Chevrolet Cobalt, was too small of a niche to do a magazine. Just that someone had done that before and failed. So I'm like, I know what I'll do. I'm going to is the name of the engine is ecotech.
as the Eco Tech engine, and so I will create Eco Tech magazine. And because that encompasses more than one car model, that will be my key to success.
And I do a little bit of guerrilla signup marketing here. So what I did is I joined all the Facebook groups related to these cars that had these engines and I would message the owners and I would say, Hey, one, do you want to be involved in that? Two, can I share it in your group? I wouldn't post it without asking permission, but everyone said yes.
Abhi Saini (01:37:11.374)
So how did that?
Abhi Saini (01:37:35.406)
Nice, okay.
Ben Climer (01:37:36.825)
And so I grabbed a group of writers that were different group owners and things and they would write the articles for the magazines. And if you looked at my look on my LinkedIn, I have a digital copy of that magazine, the first magazine that we put out.
Abhi Saini (01:37:54.542)
Okay. Okay.
Ben Climer (01:37:56.444)
So I wrote a couple articles. We had articles from different people. And then I paid someone on fiber to put the magazine design together. And then I made, yeah. So then I put that, I put together a website and put the magazine on there and we got 20,000 people viewed the first magazine.
Abhi Saini (01:38:07.64)
giving back the next five or person.
Abhi Saini (01:38:22.616)
What? Dang, that's actually, that's a lot. Okay.
Ben Climer (01:38:28.297)
Another strategy I had and I couldn't really tell you where I got this from, but on these Facebook groups, we ran a competition to vote for who had the best ecotech car. And so they had the link to the magazine in the picture and they would have all their friends vote on their car. And we got to post in all these groups running this competition. And there really wasn't even a prize. It was just being a part of the community and being in the magazine. But.
that got us a ton of viewership. had people that were deployed reach out to me via email because they were kind of restricted in what sites they could access. And they would ask me to email them the magazine, which was kind of cool.
Abhi Saini (01:39:12.142)
I also love that, that is crazy. I would never expect that you were able to like find like success in getting your content out there at your first foray into production, know, print media, but digital.
Ben Climer (01:39:25.392)
Yeah.
we go along for a couple, you don't get it too excited because we go on for a couple of, of, issues and I'm looking at like, I don't know that I want to put the money into this to have the designer do it every time. And I was like, this doesn't make as much sense. Like I didn't have the smarts to look for sponsors. And yeah, cause there were definitely companies that would have sponsored it.
Abhi Saini (01:39:46.07)
Okay, okay.
Ben Climer (01:39:57.328)
but I just didn't have the networking or connections to make that happen. And I was like, I'm kind of putting money into something that's not going to go anywhere. And so I gave up pretty early on that because I'm also doing this IT job thing and it's taken up a lot of my time too.
Abhi Saini (01:40:02.093)
Okay.
Abhi Saini (01:40:15.736)
So,
Abhi Saini (01:40:19.95)
We're at 140. I want to pause right here real quick. I'm to mark it.
Abhi Saini (01:40:26.19)
I need to run to the restroom, but yeah. Are you able to pause this or do we just let it record? I hit the marker button, whatever. No, I hit mark. So it just like, we'll know the timestamp. Yeah. Okay. Cool.
Ben Climer (01:40:27.736)
Okay, I'm gonna do the same.
I think we'll just let it ride and then we can cut it out. You hit a pause button. OK, perfect. Yeah, perfect. We'll hit the can and come back to this.
Abhi Saini (01:42:42.734)
I also need more water.
Ben Climer (01:42:44.542)
Okay.
Abhi Saini (01:43:56.99)
Okay, your story's long, bro.
Ben Climer (01:44:00.958)
Yeah, maybe I'm being a little too long-winded. I don't know But I think this last bit will go Yeah, I think this last bit will come together pretty quick and by the time it's edited It'll probably be closer to the hour. It might be an hour 10. We'll see
Abhi Saini (01:44:06.156)
What's that word that Brandon used? Verbose.
Abhi Saini (01:44:19.021)
Really?
Ben Climer (01:44:20.652)
I think so.
Abhi Saini (01:44:58.222)
Thank
Abhi Saini (01:46:44.654)
Sorry, okay. I noticed something was like, it looked strained and turns out when I raised my desk, the power cable from my monitor was like, I was like, ooh, I should fix that real quick or loosen that slack before something bad happens.
Ben Climer (01:46:45.503)
No, you're good.
Ben Climer (01:46:59.011)
no.
Abhi Saini (01:47:09.696)
Okay. I think this is...
Ben Climer (01:47:11.944)
yeah, I mean, if we need to cut out some of it, I'm fine with it. We'll just have to, we'll see where we come out when it's done.
Abhi Saini (01:47:18.894)
Yeah, no worries. Nothing like a... Oh, I finally clicked your mouse pad too. That's so cute. I like that. I wonder how much it costs to make some of these.
Ben Climer (01:47:27.818)
I know.
Ben Climer (01:47:34.348)
I'm not sure, they... I'm not sure.
Abhi Saini (01:47:37.248)
I wanted to make a barium networked one.
Ben Climer (01:47:40.436)
Yeah.
It can be hard to find the companies that make the right material though and aren't crappy, but yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:47:43.47)
I have to find it.
Abhi Saini (01:47:49.396)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'd have to like reach out to Linus Tech Tips and be like, what'd guys do? I think he usually had a video on it or Sarah Butt made a video. I like her. She's Okay. All right, let's get right back into it.
Ben Climer (01:47:58.39)
Yeah.
She is.
Ben Climer (01:48:09.516)
OK. All right. Welcome back, folks. We had a quick little break here, but we're going to hop back into it.
When we last left our hero or our IT technician he had He had his car magazine. Yeah, I wouldn't go that far I was kind of taking the play on words like what you know, would watch the superhero cartoons when we last left our hero I Wouldn't go that far though. I'm probably not that supposed
Abhi Saini (01:48:27.47)
Did you just call yourself a hero?
Abhi Saini (01:48:49.134)
digest. The few times that you and I have gotten to work together has been more than delightful, so you're definitely a good person to work
Ben Climer (01:48:55.532)
Well, thank you. Thank you. So I have my car magazine. We do a couple of issues and then like this, this isn't it. This isn't the entrepreneurial journey that I want to take.
Abhi Saini (01:49:12.91)
Yeah, so I'm really curious. What's your next thing? Because you're starting to do more at your MSP. You're not getting the title you deserve. I'm assuming you're not going to get the raise you deserve. You're starting to branch out into other things. And they are not working.
So what happens? What's the next step in Ben's career?
Ben Climer (01:49:49.522)
Yeah, well, you know, why don't we just throw another twist in there where I become a bank robber, but it's not going to be that fun. So I'm checking along with MSP and you know, they gave me a couple little raisins, stuff like that. But I felt like I was bringing a lot of value to the company and I was working a lot of hours. I was salary at this point. They.
Abhi Saini (01:49:57.328)
my god, no wonder I haven't seen you. You were in jail.
Ben Climer (01:50:19.196)
said, I think they thought I was working a little bit too much over time because I'd take whatever I could get and I would do productive things. I wasn't just killing time, but I would work a lot of hours. and, and, and I just felt like I was worth a little bit more. I had had another offer from one of the MSPs that I went to bootcamp with the, that would have been for a lot more.
Abhi Saini (01:50:31.318)
Mm. Nothing wrong with that.
Ben Climer (01:50:45.342)
but I didn't really want to move to Louisiana because again this is remote thing that wasn't possible for IT people to work remote that'll never work
Abhi Saini (01:50:54.336)
Right. Of course.
Ben Climer (01:50:58.923)
So I'm going along and you know, for, for everything, the first MSP from some of the horror stories that I've heard, they, they didn't treat me poorly. I just felt a little undervalued. And as a young kid, you know, you're kind of frustrated when you're feel like you've hit a ceiling and you can't move forward. And so, I, but kind of happened, but kind of happenstance, I actually have the,
Abhi Saini (01:51:21.154)
Yep. Yep. I know.
Ben Climer (01:51:29.338)
old startup marketing firm that I had worked for, that person had started a new company and they reached out to me and let me know that their IT manager was leaving the company and they wanted to know if I might be interested in that position. So.
Abhi Saini (01:51:44.878)
Hey, that, mean, besides pivoting careers, if you end up taking that job, but the fact that you had an old boss that reached out to you and you were an intern, right? You were not a fully fledged regular employee. You were an
Ben Climer (01:52:04.19)
I was probably a bad intern, but I think he did follow my story from there and kind of saw like, you know, this guy's doing IT work and you know, maybe we both had some growing to do that sort of thing as we would talk more.
Abhi Saini (01:52:17.698)
Yeah, but for you to leave an impression, I think that's one of the most important takeaways is you never know when a past connection gets you even a connection or, you know, that links you to the next step. That's why you never burn bridges. It's important that you always, you know, treat even though you might not like the situation, you still have to treat it with some respect because you never know when it's coming back to to hopefully not bite you, but treat you right.
Ben Climer (01:52:29.737)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:52:33.268)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:52:46.324)
Yeah. their IT manager had left. He was getting into college IT. He would actually work for one of the big colleges in Nashville area. And I think he had a good time there. He eventually moved on to some even stuff even cooler than that. But that was what he felt was right for his next step in the career, kind of leaving this gap at this marketing firm and
So I did the interview and I really prepped for this interview. I didn't take it for granted that it was someone that I was new and retrospective is maybe a little bit cringe, but what I did and I'm sorry, SNS, I used the office printer for this, for my job interview. I printed my resume on the office printer. And the other thing I did is we kept track of customer surveys and I had a real lot of really nice customer surveys.
And I printed out all those surveys and brought them with me.
Abhi Saini (01:53:45.819)
I need to dig those up. Those are always good to read.
Ben Climer (01:53:49.801)
So I go to this interview, they have like a, know, pretty common for it jobs then and now to have a little quiz. So they have, like a two page quiz, the existing it guy comes up with, and I get pretty much all the questions, right? When it gets to the port questions, the key thing that I would say sometimes is I'm not sure. think it's this. then
The nice thing is we're going through a list of ports together that he's asking and then later on like, that's not the port, it's this. So I would go back and correct myself. I hand them the stack of customer surveys, which was probably a little bit goofy. And then I had a tablet and I showed them like some of the cabling work that I was doing and different projects I had worked on along the way.
Abhi Saini (01:54:40.576)
okay that's pretty cool so you you prepared you had your stuff ready you were just like you know i deserve this and then i bet he was just like you already had the job dude i don't need to see any of
Ben Climer (01:54:44.861)
Yeah.
Ha
Yes.
Yeah, he's not the kind of guy to say that, but probably in his head he's like, okay, dude.
Abhi Saini (01:54:59.95)
I don't know what thesis means.
Ben Climer (01:55:01.064)
So I didn't really know what kind of money would be involved because I'm just interviewing for this job and I'm going to see if I can make a little bit more there if it's a better fit. And they sent me an offer and it's for I'm not even 21 yet. It's for $60,000, which from at that time was a lot.
Abhi Saini (01:55:11.384)
Right.
Abhi Saini (01:55:20.91)
Wow, that's great. Right, and you, I don't know if we clarify this, but you hadn't gone to college. Right, like this is 65 with just a high school diploma. At 21, right? I think when I was 21, was making, not even through 20.
Ben Climer (01:55:38.46)
I wasn't even 21. I started the job right before I turned 21.
Abhi Saini (01:55:45.07)
When I was 20, almost 21, I was making 23,000 a year.
Ben Climer (01:55:52.616)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:55:52.75)
a full-time job. It wasn't it wasn't full-time a year like it was a whole thing it's not like I was underpaid but the number of days I worked yeah you didn't get too much money out of it but that is amazing 65k
Ben Climer (01:56:05.64)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (01:56:09.448)
I don't know if this was a rude move well So the way they had it laid out is it was sixty thousand and then if you stayed for three months you get a five thousand dollar signing bonus Which was pretty attractive to me to get like this pile of cash dumped on me
Abhi Saini (01:56:21.314)
Gotcha.
Abhi Saini (01:56:26.476)
Yeah, yeah, one time easy buy myself a new computer
Ben Climer (01:56:29.291)
yeah. but you know, I really wanted to be loyal to the MSP that had given me much. And so I can't tell if this was a rude or smart thing to do, but I was transparent with them. I blacked out the company name and I took the offer back to them. And I was like, Hey, this is the offer that I have. Do you think we could meet in the middle on this somewhere? Cause I wanted to give them the chance. Like I would have liked to continue my career there.
dressing up nicer. Like the standard attire was, you you kind of pretty typical for it to you guys, like, you know, like a collared shirt and in Nashville it you could wear jeans as long as they were nice jeans. Like that was pretty typical. for this sales job, they wanted me to like dress up a lot more and it
Abhi Saini (01:57:36.002)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:57:52.706)
Got it. Be more front facing public.
Ben Climer (01:57:57.286)
Yeah, they want me to do that and they wanted me to, it was, actually going to be less money on the flip side. Yeah. No less than the offer. It was probably two. Yeah. So this new offer was like 15,000 more than I was making and they came up, I think like 2000 or something.
Abhi Saini (01:58:06.394)
less than you were currently making or less than the offer? Okay. But you told them to meet them in the middle.
Ben Climer (01:58:27.025)
But there was the potential for commission. I'll give him that there was a potential for commission. if I, if I go to the flip side, this other company is going to offer me more, offer me a signing bonus. They said in their culture, we just want you to come to work in a t-shirt and jeans. Yeah. So, you know, as a 20 year old, you're like, well, I, I want to be
Abhi Saini (01:58:30.574)
Sure. Okay.
Abhi Saini (01:58:45.518)
It's in your current outfit.
Abhi Saini (01:58:53.048)
Yes.
Ben Climer (01:58:54.193)
Comfortable my own skin. I don't want to like be someone I'm not and feel fake like yeah And so I did I put a lot of thought to it and I ended up going for this IT manager position and You know the first thing that you should People listening out there if you if you get a good raise the first thing you should do is keep your existing budget and Not spend extra money. You should keep spending what you're worth spending and save the rest
Abhi Saini (01:58:56.927)
Right. Yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:59:01.91)
Okay.
Ben Climer (01:59:23.281)
keep your lifestyle, what your former income was. don't, don't do what I did, which was take my signing bonus and go buy a car.
Abhi Saini (01:59:26.188)
Yeah. Yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:59:34.84)
Was it an EvoTek?
Ben Climer (01:59:36.294)
No, we got a little bit of an upgrade. I went up to a V8 charger. So yeah.
Abhi Saini (01:59:43.63)
Okay, you didn't just pick a more expensive vehicle, you picked one that may not have the best mate.
Ben Climer (01:59:53.445)
Well, it was was it was a sporty car. It was fun.
Abhi Saini (02:00:00.421)
I'm giving you flat, but if I had the money, I would have gotten a Mustang GT 350 in a heartbeat
Ben Climer (02:00:01.753)
Yeah.
Yeah, at the time I test drove the Mustang, the Camaro, the Challenger and the Charger and I decided to go with the Charger out of them. At the time...
Abhi Saini (02:00:17.08)
So you pick the one that's not the muscle car. Technically.
Ben Climer (02:00:20.101)
So here's the thought process. I test drove the Mustang and it had pretty good technology and the interior was pretty nice, but the ride was really bad in the Mustang and it's a really compact interior too.
Abhi Saini (02:00:36.398)
And this is more than 10 years ago.
Ben Climer (02:00:38.309)
It's like 2015. Yeah, it's like 2015.
Abhi Saini (02:00:42.474)
Okay, about 10 years ago, yeah, okay, I can agree. I wasn't a huge fan of the stuff back then.
Ben Climer (02:00:44.197)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:00:47.875)
Yeah, I get in the Camaro. There's no technology whatsoever. Like it handles pretty well. It drives fun. There's no technology and you know, I'm a nerd. I want a little bit the technology to it. You know, decent radio and stuff. And then I checked the.
Abhi Saini (02:00:53.39)
It drives fun.
Abhi Saini (02:01:00.334)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:01:06.67)
I feel like Chevy still doesn't do tech very well.
Ben Climer (02:01:09.45)
I think their audience may just be a little bit like prefers that to be honest, like the people that enjoy GM and Chevrolet are looking for technology in those areas sometimes, or if they are, they're buying the, the upper level trims that have some of that stuff.
Abhi Saini (02:01:14.7)
Hmm, yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:01:24.136)
Right, Yeah. mean, and also Ford, Ford did like Ford sync was a big deal. Right? Like that was a, that was a game changer in the industry before Android auto and CarPlay became the norm. No, now Android auto even has, it's not Android auto, but it's, it's something else. They call it something else as the base OS for the infotainment system. Not necessarily the interface, but the, like the
Ben Climer (02:01:36.963)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:01:44.965)
Hmm.
Ben Climer (02:01:48.645)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:01:53.282)
The car companies can brand it entirely for themselves and then Android Auto can sit on top of that. Like that's pretty cool. Pretty cool to make it more streamlined. Anyways, this isn't a car show. My favorite car show is Car Talk.
Ben Climer (02:01:55.727)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:02:03.525)
Yeah, so I guess I guess to wrap that up I tried the Challenger it had the challengers of that time probably still do had a really large blind spot that I didn't like and And so then again the charger and I could see really well around me and it handled really well like that's the difference between a Challenger and a charger is the Challenger is made for like straight line driving You know drag racing type the charger actually has pretty good handling
Abhi Saini (02:02:15.253)
yeah, yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:02:23.438)
Here's that.
Ben Climer (02:02:33.189)
which is.
Abhi Saini (02:02:33.992)
I I feel like there's a reason the police use some them or so often, right? Like, it's a good vehicle.
Ben Climer (02:02:38.501)
Yeah, that was a fun aspect of it that I didn't think about is you're going down the highway and people just get out of your way. Even though, like, because it, because I had a black charger, I didn't have like a guard or anything, just a black charger and people just get out of your way when you're on your way to work.
Abhi Saini (02:02:48.27)
you
Abhi Saini (02:02:54.956)
Hey, no, okay, fair, fair. I'll admit if I see an explorer or a charger, I immediately switch lanes because I'm like, I don't want to.
Ben Climer (02:03:03.557)
Yeah. If it's an Explorer, the tip is a roof racks, a police car, police explorers and drangers don't have. Fair enough. But, getting back to this, it's a weird story. So I go with the IT manager position and, um, it was kind of tough to say goodbye to these people that had kind of helped me get started and everything, but.
Abhi Saini (02:03:10.186)
I can't tell from the rear view mirror. All I see are headlights. And I'm like, yep, OK.
Abhi Saini (02:03:23.67)
Nice, okay. Okay.
Ben Climer (02:03:32.612)
I knew it was time to not get stagnant and to do something different. And, you know, I felt like it was a little bit undervalued for what I was bringing to the table. Some of the projects that I do on there, when I get there, their firewalls crashing all the time. They had a little watch guard. Their access point was overheating because they were in a metal building and it was on the ceiling of the metal building, which gets really hot in the summer. Their server closets.
Abhi Saini (02:03:58.475)
no. If they have a metal building, typically means the ceiling height's pretty high.
Ben Climer (02:04:04.544)
It is. So it's a bad experience that they're getting from Wi-Fi and the network.
Abhi Saini (02:04:08.746)
Yeah, okay.
Ben Climer (02:04:11.566)
So there's server cloud that's overheating. So I put together proposals for all this and I say, you know, and this is the first time I'm doing more like network proposals and stuff like that. But I'm like, here's, here's where your options are. And we put in my firewall option and suddenly the firewall stops crashing. We put in more access points in spots that aren't the metal roof and the wifi experience improves.
Abhi Saini (02:04:38.542)
Yeah
Ben Climer (02:04:43.927)
But they grow pretty rapidly. We moved to a new office and I actually helped with that build out in determining like where we're going to have Wi-Fi access points, where we're going to have computer drops and how many and they cheap out a little bit on the help and they kind of hire this group that primarily does AB kind of stuff and
They were paying them hourly and this was like a bonus deal because they got the contract to do the boss's house, to do the AV for his house. And they're just doing a favor by helping with this network cabling at the office.
Abhi Saini (02:05:20.903)
I'm familiar with that. That's happened.
Ben Climer (02:05:23.107)
So they were they were Kind of hard to get scheduled like I'd be like hey guys when you're come out and finish up this project because we have like a moving date Approaching the cabling has to go in and we have these moving dates approaching and We actually end up in a situation when I a little bit of foresight before when I was talking about network gripping I end up terminating over a hundred runs and me and the
Abhi Saini (02:05:34.146)
Right, right.
Ben Climer (02:05:53.251)
Or the financial control and I end up like it becomes like crunch. Yeah, he was a little, um, I love, I love Brian. He would have quotes like he wouldn't do something right. And he'd say, well, that's future Brian problems was kind of his, but, um, you know, he, was related to the owner and he would do catch all stuff kind of like I led.
Abhi Saini (02:05:56.832)
A controller? That's fun.
Abhi Saini (02:06:10.605)
you
Ben Climer (02:06:18.839)
to do, like there was something that needed to be done, even if it wasn't in his job description, he was going to help do it. And so we were on a crunch. so it's Brian and I at like 8 PM on a weekday and we're running network cables and we had a concrete masonry drill because we're running, they core drilled the concrete and we're running network cables under the concrete. We're putting in anchors.
with eye hooks and we're running them back to the network closet and then we're crimping them. And during this process, he dislocates his shoulder because if you haven't used a masonry drill like this and you're going into the concrete, it can catch rebar or other like supporting materials and it will crank your shoulder. Uh, and at first he doesn't tell me what's going on. So he's just like in pain. I'm like,
What's going on, buddy? Did you like tap your arm against a vent or something? And he doesn't tell me he just like walks out of the room and I'm like, you OK? And he like goes and I don't know if he like apparently this has happened before to him. I don't know if he like this. He like slams his shoulder into the wall or something, but he pops it back in place and continues working.
Abhi Saini (02:07:38.551)
You know, I-
Abhi Saini (02:07:45.07)
Goddamn, what the?
Ben Climer (02:07:52.77)
We had a deadline. We had 100 drops to hook up.
Abhi Saini (02:07:56.131)
God.
Okay, first off, if you're going to be drilling your concrete, especially poured concrete, you got to get an SDS drill and you got to use the drill bits that have... Okay. And you have to use the carbide tip bits that are designed to go through rebar.
Ben Climer (02:08:07.456)
Yep, we did have that. We had that going for us.
Ben Climer (02:08:16.598)
I don't know if we had that going for us and we probably should have had respirator masks on and we didn't so we probably got like asbestos concrete or something that's gonna affect me.
Abhi Saini (02:08:18.72)
Okay, yeah, I, the last time.
Abhi Saini (02:08:25.198)
We're gonna have fun.
Cilicoliosis? Is that how you say that? Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:08:32.05)
Yeah, I think so. Yep.
Yeah, we just had like concrete dust in our nose. It was not great.
Abhi Saini (02:08:40.686)
Anyways, enough of that twist.
Ben Climer (02:08:46.37)
And then I guess so we pull it off through the pure effort of the controller and I just getting things done we
Abhi Saini (02:08:57.87)
Talk about being a hero. think control is like this. This is, I mean, they may as well be the CFO. Like we're going to have cost overruns. can't afford them. We got to this done.
Ben Climer (02:09:05.396)
Yeah.
It's really funny because he did like saving money. I'm not sure if he thought that that was the best cost saving measure after going through it, but the last quick bit on them is we end up setting up an event venue and we hosted Nash cocktail, which is kind of a networking event, and I would help kind of run the technology on those events for a little bit.
Abhi Saini (02:09:18.466)
You
Abhi Saini (02:09:31.526)
cool, that's awesome. Okay, so a little bit of internal, a little bit of external, you're doing some fun stuff. Okay, cool.
Ben Climer (02:09:38.655)
Yeah, we, think, I think the statutory on this is out too, but the owner like was in a disagreement with our, with our neighbor and made an agreement to give them internet off of the building. So we set up a point to point from our building to their building to, to resolve a disagreement.
Ben Climer (02:10:02.224)
Yeah, cause why not?
Abhi Saini (02:10:04.546)
Yeah, why not? Sure.
Ben Climer (02:10:07.832)
but ultimately I kind of grew restless. So we get through all that and then you can, have this big move and stuff and I'm knocking out it issues, but, there's not as much of the project work coming and. You know, I start getting put into tasks that I'm not as thrilled about doing and I'm still 21. So I don't do a good job commuting that to communicating that to my manager.
And I kind of, I kind of grow restless a little bit and I believe I was on a performance improvement plan and I made the decision that it was time to look for something else.
Abhi Saini (02:10:49.848)
Gotcha, okay.
Ben Climer (02:10:51.944)
And again, you know, that's, you know, I'm a younger guy. I could have handled things better looking back, but,
Abhi Saini (02:10:59.746)
We always can.
Ben Climer (02:11:03.041)
Um, so, so I ended up interviewing at a few spots. Uh, one of the MSPs that I reached out to wanted me to fill out a five page paper application. So I decided that they were not a fit for me. If you're an IT company that has a five page paper application. Um, that's probably a goofy reason. They may have been great. I'm sure they're great. Uh, 20 year old me wasn't about that. Or 21 year old me wasn't about that.
uh, interviewed with a company that was based out Atlanta and would have actually been a remote position, but they wanted me to drive to Atlanta on a pretty regular basis. And I didn't think that that wasn't the best fit, but I went through some of the interview process and they were nice enough and everything. Um, one of the people I work with at roost now actually ended up working for them and it sounds like I possibly dodged a bullet there. So maybe things worked out after all, but, uh, ultimately,
I the company that that I was supporting as an IT manager, they determined that maybe they don't need a full time IT person anymore. And I make a referral to my old MSP and kind of connect the two of those guys together. And, you know, my cave, maybe this is a fit for everybody here. And in talks with them, the owner kind of said, you know, we go for lunch.
kind of talking this client over is like, we funny enough, the person that we replaced you with is leaving our company. Do you want your spot back and we'll pay you more than what you're making at this, than you were making your IT role.
Abhi Saini (02:12:50.722)
Look at that. Okay.
Ben Climer (02:12:52.272)
Yeah, so so I come back to the MSP that I was working with at a wage that was more of what I was looking for.
Abhi Saini (02:13:01.186)
Nice, okay, okay, so you're already, you're finally, and you're still, I mean you're still in your early 20s.
Ben Climer (02:13:09.918)
Yeah, I don't think I might have turned 22. I may have not even turned 22. And we're making a little bit of a job up here.
Abhi Saini (02:13:15.598)
Damn dude, you're-
Yeah, you're already 22, if that, and you've already gotten two former bosses to call you and be like, hey, I want you back.
Ben Climer (02:13:30.824)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:13:32.13)
That's pretty... That's pretty dope.
Ben Climer (02:13:34.203)
I feel really fortunate not everybody gets that opportunity and it's not always things that they do. Sometimes you can show up and still not be recognized.
Abhi Saini (02:13:38.461)
yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:13:43.83)
I mean, talk about.
Abhi Saini (02:13:48.002)
I'm thinking about it now. like, think about like you from from bringing the lonely kid in middle school to being the sought after employee that people want to be around, talk to and work with. So, hey, I love it. I love it. So you you very interesting that you've now gone back to your original
Ben Climer (02:14:05.384)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:14:17.698)
your roots in the real world, right? As we want to call it. How did that end up? Because you're not there today. So, and I know, you know, there's a there's a lot of time between then and now. And so I'm curious, how did your how did your path continue to evolve at that MSP? What was the like? What?
Ben Climer (02:14:21.256)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:14:28.318)
Yep. So.
Ben Climer (02:14:35.74)
It is.
Abhi Saini (02:14:44.814)
What did your title become or what was the like task that you were handling and what set up the stage for you to go into? You know, I look and what I'm trying to get here is like you're working for Roost today, a company that's all about making automation. The easiest thing in the world. So you know what set up the foundation for you to become an automation expert?
Ben Climer (02:14:47.581)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:14:57.352)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:15:03.198)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:15:09.438)
Sure, so I'm probably gonna fast around a little bit just to be respectful of everyone's time. know, you know, we're running a little bit long, but I'm gonna kind of cover, we're covering seven years here and we're gonna fast around a little bit. So I come back as a senior technology consultant. I continue to do good work and become a lead. And then I continue to do work and become eventually,
a CTO of the company and brought on to part of the leadership team. During this, I kind of become what they would call a hat collector because I'm continuing to do what I would call picking up things that aren't getting done. So we would identify processes or positions that weren't being done. And I would start doing them. I did a little bit of technical sales. I did some of that lead work. I did some project work, just a little bit of everything.
Abhi Saini (02:15:44.632)
Nice.
Ben Climer (02:16:06.77)
Along the way. I was also involved in our hiring process, which I loved doing. I found that really enjoyable. And it's one of the things that kind of, led me to believe that I might like making this podcast is my favorite part of the interview was learning everybody's story.
Abhi Saini (02:16:23.662)
Ah, cool. Okay. Okay. I mean, I think that's one thing that I've always enjoyed too, is like in... I think that's a... It's one of the reasons why this episode's a little longer than we thought it might be, is I think we both have a really big passion and just wanting to learn more about the people behind things and...
Ben Climer (02:16:46.353)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:16:49.314)
So anyways, you're doing more and more. You've gone into a CTO, you're stepping into a leadership role, an executive role. Was it a true real role? Was it one of those titles that doesn't mean so much? I think I had CTO on my resume at one point. And then when I was looking for a next job, I removed it because it made no sense.
Ben Climer (02:16:53.821)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:17:00.785)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:17:09.391)
Yeah, I'm going to be honest. It was probably a little bit. Yeah, I'm going to be honest. There's probably a little bit of a bloated MSP title if we're completely honest. I'm doing some of those things. I'm leading some of that direction, but it's probably a bloated title.
Abhi Saini (02:17:19.918)
always have.
Abhi Saini (02:17:24.718)
So you're both level one, level two, level three, automation expert, sales, CTO, and you have to go get the snacks.
Ben Climer (02:17:38.119)
That was something that I would actually do. I would go to Sam's club and pick up the office snacks like during my lunch break. Yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:17:43.286)
Yep. yep. Those, those Costco runs were my favorite days.
Ben Climer (02:17:49.053)
But I'm skipping one little bit that I'll show appreciation for before I get to CTO. One of the things that I do is I run across, you know, I'm running across in my automation is this little site called Cyber Drain.
Abhi Saini (02:18:05.934)
No, let's go Kelvin.
Ben Climer (02:18:08.028)
Yeah, is this random Netherlands guy is posting all these cool PowerShell scripts that I'm getting a lot of value of and he comes out with the CTF that I'm aware of and I miss the first one by the time I saw it, it was over. So, you know, I kind of bookmarked this and follow this and I know I'm going to do the next one. So I think the second one is the one that I'm involved with and
Abhi Saini (02:18:16.973)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:18:37.98)
It fell on a week that I was on vacation already, which didn't thrill my wife I don't think but I spent some of my vacation hammering my head with this competition super high level CTF is capture the flag the cyber drain one is more sysadmin or MSP based so you get to interact with issues that real MSPs have had and just learn more and I got so
Abhi Saini (02:19:03.48)
which differs from most CTFs which are cybersecurity based. So it's rare to find ones that are general IT or sysadmin based.
Ben Climer (02:19:07.59)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:19:14.704)
Yeah. And I would get so much value out of these because some of it I already knew, but other aspects, one of the challenges was a SQL cluster and I had never had to dealt with a SQL cluster before. And it was an issue where the, I'm going to use the wrong term here, but the database, kind of corrupted because one of the cluster host went offline. it was, and the idea of the challenge was to make you aware that that's a thing that could happen.
In part, but because I was able to complete that challenge when we had a potential client come on board that had that issue I was able to fix it from just practicing it in this safe environment
Abhi Saini (02:19:58.894)
So you're telling me that a CTF actually taught you a real world skill that you actually essentially do the exact same thing.
Ben Climer (02:20:03.555)
Absolutely. It's important to have safe places to learn. And as MSPs and IT companies, we don't always get our employees safe places to learn. And the cyber drain CTF is one of those places that you can learn safely.
Abhi Saini (02:20:15.96)
Absolutely.
Abhi Saini (02:20:20.398)
100 % and I'm I'm annoyed that I missed the everyone that he's run and I want to do one the next time he does it and Just today on the day we record this podcast. I participated in An IR game in IR game the their tabletop exercise. It was fantastic. It was super cool You know Bob was on there Bob Miller
Ben Climer (02:20:25.659)
You
Ben Climer (02:20:33.913)
Yeah. How was it?
Abhi Saini (02:20:43.928)
Fantastic guy. Kind like the leader for IR game. IR being incident response. It's the tabletop exercise game company that him along with I think 12 other people have kind of made happen. Offers free CTFs, sorry, was free tabletop exercises on a monthly basis for MSPs and anyone else that should or could be involved. So if you're an MSP out there, you're just a technician, you want to get involved.
Ben Climer (02:20:57.147)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:21:13.582)
and just experience what a tabletop exercise is all about and learning how to navigate a security incident. You can go to IRgame.ai. I don't know why I'm pitching this, but it was just that cool. And it's free, completely free. And it was really cool. I got stuck being a tech. I think there was someone who was more technical. They got stuck being...
Ben Climer (02:21:20.165)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:21:25.891)
No, I love it. Do it. Go participate in our games.
Abhi Saini (02:21:39.82)
like an executive, it was cool that we got to exchange all these roles and you have to navigate your way through a ransomware attack.
Ben Climer (02:21:48.805)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:21:49.07)
I'm like, what are you going to do? You know, and it's not the technical side. It is truly like, Hey, should we release a statement? Our clients are scared. We're not, are we able to get new business? Do we stop the server and take down our website? You know, things like that. the ideas are that what actions can you take to fix the situation and what consequences do you need to overcome every time you do take an action? and these are.
Ben Climer (02:22:01.861)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:22:16.025)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:22:17.868)
These are things that if you're in a technical role, you don't realize are part of the problem or part of the situation or part of the incident. And so these exercises you do are just part of the training to understand the possibilities out there. And so that way you're ready for an incident the next time it happens, because there's no doubt it will happen.
Ben Climer (02:22:21.616)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:22:26.224)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:22:41.132)
Another shout out I'll give if you're that MSP tech, go check out black Hills info sec. have anti-siphon training, pay what you can. It's pay what you can training and they will give you an intro to sock, a getting started in cyber security and get you familiar with all the terms and some very basic incident recovery and kind of frame it around like endpoints and all of those things. but if I kind of circle back my
Abhi Saini (02:22:49.591)
yeah, yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:22:58.573)
Nice.
Abhi Saini (02:23:07.519)
Absolutely.
Ben Climer (02:23:09.411)
career would not be where it is today if it weren't for the Cyber Drain CTF. It's one of the most frustrating experiences you'll ever go through and it'll be one of the most rewarding things that you can do.
Abhi Saini (02:23:19.139)
you
Abhi Saini (02:23:23.06)
Anything designed by Kelvin.
Ben Climer (02:23:25.785)
He can be a bit sadistic at times too, like he thrives on the suffering of the contestants, but I was fortunate in the four that I competed with to place top five in the four that I competed with. I mean, frankly, I leverage that with my existing MSP at times is I would get that CTO title.
Abhi Saini (02:23:43.278)
Nice. Nice.
Ben Climer (02:23:51.033)
You know, as a way of like, look, I'm participating in community and showing myself as someone who, you know, has positioning or, that's probably a poor term, but you know, is doing well in comparison to some of the industry. And I'm really putting myself out there and trying to better myself.
Abhi Saini (02:24:10.178)
That's awesome, So, you know, you and I, we were talking about this all day. I absolutely love participating in a number of CTFs, some cool things out there, but it's, you know, how did, how did participating in the CTF, starting to collect those paths, starting to do...
Like not only are you taking on more role and responsibilities, your role is expanding, you more responsibilities. You're starting to realize that, you you have a really strong technical acumen. You're getting better at fixing computers, resolving network issues, you know, and not just that, but extrapolating information from a business need into what, what the true problem is from a technical perspective or translating technical into business.
Ben Climer (02:25:07.321)
Mm-hmm.
Abhi Saini (02:25:07.472)
You know, and you're working at a pretty decently sized MSP. What, you know, how is that starting to shape what you're dealing with and who you're working with and you guys are getting bigger clients or, you more sensitive clients, you you're dealing with industries that might be.
Complicated in nature and they're almost one-offs, you know, like I There's some there's some stuff out there and I'm curious what you guys saw or what you ended up dealing with
Ben Climer (02:25:35.853)
Yep.
Ben Climer (02:25:42.839)
Yep. So one thing that I'll kind of tie a bow on the cyber drain CTF.
some of the outcomes of the CTF is Kelvin forced me to learn APIs, which was something that I was not looking at at all. And while I was at my MSP, I got to build out automations and different automation platforms related to APIs. Now that I knew them, we started offering projects to clients like, okay, I can make these two things talk to each other.
And so I was able to bring in additional project income that the MSP wouldn't have otherwise. And I start building rapport with some of these larger clients that have these larger initiatives. They send me out to do the largest one that I'm dealing with. And I'm doing these API projects with, they have a ton of network issues and network technical debt. And so I go to all of their locations around the company and some of the pictures that you see posted on.
LinkedIn or from some of those projects where we came in and gave them a nice tidy working network. and all, and all of that comes from learning APIs. And then we get to today. And because I took on those API projects, because I participated in the cyber drain CTF and learned APIs, I saw a job opening at Roost, which was this company.
Abhi Saini (02:26:53.442)
Gotcha.
Ben Climer (02:27:15.244)
that I had been watching for a while and they were looking for a rock team member and I applied to that and I was very fortunate enough to be hired.
Abhi Saini (02:27:27.224)
Dude, is, it's crazy how you started your career at an MSP. You did a bunch of stuff. You did things that made no sense. You did things that failed. You left the MSP. You came back to the MSP. You're still in the managed services market. You're still doing outsourced IT. And then,
Ben Climer (02:27:27.742)
And.
Abhi Saini (02:27:56.078)
on a whim almost it feels like you see the job you apply for the job you get the job and you are now working for you know one of the top vendors in the MSP space and that's I mean you you went to the dark side sorry but
Ben Climer (02:28:14.783)
I did. And there's a little bit in between there because I couldn't decide if I wanted to work for a vendor. And, I saw this crab guy on LinkedIn whose name was Dean and I'd seen some of his stuff on Reddit and then he started popping up my YouTube feed and teaching me how an MSP business actually works. And so I was taking that information and it was driving some of those
Abhi Saini (02:28:28.538)
Hahaha.
Ben Climer (02:28:44.181)
sales conversations I was having, some of the conversations that I was having with MSP owners. And I really, if I stayed there, I wanted to be more involved in some of those financial conversations and provide input and value. and that wasn't something that they, I think we're ready for and that's okay too. you know, they, they don't owe me anything. They treated me really well, but, I kind of built this relationship through commenting on this crab guys channel.
Abhi Saini (02:29:13.87)
you
Ben Climer (02:29:14.523)
And I, and I DMed it. I'm like, Dean, you said this term, what does this term mean? And that's how our conversation started. And you know, he's been kind enough to check on me and I, you know, still like to follow his videos and stuff. But when I'm was considering the decision is like Dean, because he's a guy who is kind enough to tell you the truth. That's not something that you always get as someone who's kind enough to tell you the truth. It may not be the truth that you want, but he'll tell you his honest opinion.
Abhi Saini (02:29:44.342)
I will say, as brash as Dean can be, he is by far one of the most honest, straightforward, no bullshit people in the industry. He has done so much. I can't wait to talk to him and be like, you need to be on this show. We don't want to hear your story because I still don't understand how he did what he did.
Ben Climer (02:30:13.505)
Yeah, we'll have to find that out. But I'm talking to him and I'm like, Dean, you know, what do I need to know about being a vendor? He's like, first off, when you move over to the vendor industry and you go to conferences, your vendor trash and none of the other vendors will want to give you free t-shirts anymore.
Abhi Saini (02:30:14.04)
I'll talk about it more times.
Abhi Saini (02:30:32.684)
That's not true. You all trade all the time.
Ben Climer (02:30:37.622)
and you know, he told me some other things that were really valuable. kept it vague. I don't know if I thought he was going to like tell my boss or something and I was going to be had that I was looking at another job, but I kept it vague. and I was like, you know, what, what should I know? And he was gave me some very honest feedback and with that feedback and you had some other thoughts. I just, talked it over with my wife who's, you know, always obviously been a big.
Aspect and all this along the way as well and I made the decision to to go to the dark side
Abhi Saini (02:31:15.822)
Hey, that's a big change. I'd say it's probably a little bit less stressful too, right? Not dealing with client facing necessarily, there's still stress, but a different kind of stress.
Ben Climer (02:31:32.667)
you work your brain in different ways. roost is kind of a unique situation. I think there's vendors where perhaps that could be true with roost. We dinner, we interact with MSPs, which in themselves deal with a diverse range of products and we're helping them automate their diverse range of products and nobody has the same stack. And like some people have the same stack, but they don't at the same time. So
Abhi Saini (02:31:36.472)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:31:52.12)
Yeah, it's true.
Ben Climer (02:32:02.089)
When you talk about breadth at MSP, when you're working at Roost and the supports position, you really have to have breadth because you're dealing with whatever software and you have to really put your critical thinking cap on and work through these issues because they're kind of all over the place. We support so many integrations. We have custom integrations. So if we don't have an integration, you can integrate whatever you like that has an API for the most part.
Abhi Saini (02:32:31.726)
As someone that's trying to do some basic automation, I don't have enough need where Roost might be useful for my company yet. But having seen what you guys do and have the number of integrations you have built in, my God, is it complicated. Even stuff that's not complicated, companies change their APIs on a whim. It's just like, we're going to change the name of this variable. Why?
Ben Climer (02:32:32.862)
Ben Climer (02:32:55.017)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:33:01.481)
Yeah. And that's some of the value of Roost is having a group of MSPs that are doing the same things. And we're taking care of some of those changes for you. Cause and yeah, there's nothing against the MSPs that want to use power automate and Aiden, there's room for more than one tool in the market to do the right job, but you gain a lot of value by some of the work that we're doing for you and just some of the flexibility.
Abhi Saini (02:33:01.634)
Why does it change?
Abhi Saini (02:33:31.7)
I will say I've worked with a few automation companies out there. There's one really popular one. I'm not going to name drop, but they, if you are doing anything custom at all, they're like, we can't, we don't know. just, we're not because it's custom. don't know. And I'm like, what do mean you don't know? just, I just, I need the logs. Like, I just need you to help me.
Ben Climer (02:33:42.43)
Ha ha ha.
Ben Climer (02:33:51.497)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:33:57.897)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:33:59.512)
figure out because I'm blind to the issue and yet when working with you guys you're like okay well let's let's get technical let's figure this out let's solve the problem yeah
Ben Climer (02:34:07.732)
It's a choose your own adventure. It reminds me of the golden days of lab tech where it's this open world where you can build whatever you need to build.
Abhi Saini (02:34:21.314)
So that really, that piques my interest there. What, are there any cool things you've done at Roost so far that you're allowed to say that, you know?
Ben Climer (02:34:32.597)
We're working on Skynet. We're not quite there yet. But so when I came in, I continued my tradition of trying to pick up some things that maybe weren't where they should have. So the first thing that I started doing was documenting and they did have documentation, but I brought in even more documentation. And every time I would ask a question, I tried to not ask it twice. I would create.
Abhi Saini (02:34:51.694)
Smart man.
Ben Climer (02:34:59.856)
a document in our internal KB whenever I asked a question, I made sure that it was somewhere. And so I kind of improved some of our internal documentation. I was able to bring in some of my MSP experience. We have a wide range of really sharp guys and some of them have developer backgrounds even on our support team. You have a diverse set. Yeah. And
Abhi Saini (02:35:07.63)
Very smart.
Abhi Saini (02:35:22.126)
Hmm. That's cool. So I mean, not only can you, not only do you have to fix the problems, but you actually know how to. and almost every aspect of the pipeline there. That's super cool.
Ben Climer (02:35:32.072)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:35:38.228)
There's been situations where even I have given a vendor advice on how to improve something, which I mean, you know, five years ago I didn't know much, but now looking at more APIs like, Hey, it would be better if you did this.
Abhi Saini (02:35:54.221)
Right.
Cool.
Ben Climer (02:35:57.803)
and then I keeping along those lines, I kind of latched on to some things that maybe, you know, not everyone was adopting that there were still earlier things. So one of those things was app builder. and I've kind of worked to skill up the team, but early on it was an alpha product that, you know, was still early and not everyone was trained up on it. And so I grabbed that and.
You know, kind of went after it and learned how it worked. My first project was I made a MySpace page, like recreated my one from back in the day in it. and then you have just kind of learned more about that and trained up people. And I've had a lot of great conversations with Roost customers and kind of get being in some cases, their first touch point on app builder and learning it, which has been very rewarding when people come back and they've built cool things.
Abhi Saini (02:36:56.268)
That's super cool because you wet their tongue and then, or that's not the phrase, they wet their beak. And then they learn so much after that. They go with full board and you're...
I mean, I love it when you do the smallest things. They seem like the smallest things. And then all of a sudden that person just takes it and runs with it. Like super cool to see.
Ben Climer (02:37:23.548)
Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, I'm giving them in some cases, these intro calls and they really run with them and make these amazing sites. It always impresses me when I see my month later presenting on the open mic and like, that made that that's so cool to see. And that kind of brings me to this other bit. The other bit that I latched on was custom integrations. Cause I was thinking how powerful it is to be able to
Abhi Saini (02:37:41.358)
you
Ben Climer (02:37:52.879)
integrate with all these solutions that maybe we don't have an integration for, but the MSP still uses, and has an API. And so, sometimes vendors don't have the best API documentation. And so I kind of learned, I kind of learned the quirks around what some of those issues were in their schemas. And I built a tool for myself at first.
Abhi Saini (02:38:08.12)
Sometimes they have not.
Ben Climer (02:38:20.378)
maybe a little bit selfishly called Schema Doctor and it would fix these common issues. And I would start fixing these schemas that the clients would come to me with like, you know, this scheme is not working right. And I'd put it in and it would come back and it would work. And so then I shared it with the internal team and they start using, you know, the other rock members and other members of Roost. And they're like, this is pretty nice actually.
Like this fixes a lot of the issues.
Abhi Saini (02:38:51.662)
It's amazing how simple you guys you automated your automation
Ben Climer (02:38:58.598)
Yeah. And the original idea I made in a lunch break, it, some of it was, you know, the, the design and stuff I had, but I made the core idea and the core design in a lunch break and it's had a huge impact. I've, I've iterated on it. I released on LinkedIn. get surprising, like it's kind of funny. It's grown to the point where people I hear about people discussing schema doctor and
Abhi Saini (02:39:12.462)
Wow.
Ben Climer (02:39:28.252)
They're people that I've never mentioned it to. So it gets passed around the community as this tool to help out, which is really rewarding actually.
Abhi Saini (02:39:37.56)
That's awesome dude. So I mean you're doing...
You're doing so much to make...
Abhi Saini (02:39:50.638)
What am I trying to say here? You're doing so much, you and your team at Roost, your coworkers there, you're doing so much to further the efficiencies of technicians and MSPs in general, right? the, it is such a cool thing to see how not only are you affecting your clients and your customers,
how you're trying to improve the processes internally and you're making things and doing things that end up you're not selling right there open source tools now or they're they're just solutions the doc you the the things are there to
make it so everybody can improve and do a better job. You're showing, you show so much value and you keep showing value and giving back. that's, I think that's fantastic name. It's going tell me a lot about you. And it's really awesome to hear your story and see how you've done so much with so many changes and twists.
Ben Climer (02:40:37.883)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:41:01.633)
Yeah. I mean, I think we will definitely have more unusual stories. That seems to be the key word in everybody that we interview is that their story is unusual. And I think everybody has their own path and it can be a little unusual at times.
Abhi Saini (02:41:09.313)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:41:12.888)
Yeah, exactly.
Abhi Saini (02:41:19.165)
And you know, I think it's fair to say for anyone who is curious about who we're going to talk to next, we know a lot of people in the industry. We have a lot of friends, coworkers, whatever it might be. And I think some of your coworkers have shown interest that they want to even give a talk. So it'll be cool to see what else we can tell.
Ben Climer (02:41:43.45)
Yeah, I guess at a high level though. I that's my story. You know, these days I'm about to release a new version of Schema Doctor that's going to be a little bit better still. I'm you'll see me on the open mics now and then for Roost. I'm working on a training class that's kind of in progress about power should like with basic scripting for people that are just starting out in the industry.
Abhi Saini (02:41:49.164)
Yeah dude, like...
Abhi Saini (02:42:12.843)
Okay.
Ben Climer (02:42:13.154)
And you'll find me here on this podcast too in the coming weeks.
Abhi Saini (02:42:18.094)
Nice, It's crazy how when you start to educate, you start to give back, you start to more of the uplifting, and you just can't stop. I think one of the coolest things about it is that you start to learn more about yourself.
Ben Climer (02:42:34.948)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:42:46.262)
you start to get better at figuring out how to do things more efficiently. One thing that was a problem for me during COVID is that I stopped talking to people because I wasn't in office anymore. And it made me...
It made it harder for me to get to verbalize my thoughts. I started to lose the ability to speak fluently or cohesively. And even now, like I'm still struggling every now and then to put together a train of thought that makes sense. It doesn't help that we're recording this a little late at night, but hey.
Ben Climer (02:43:19.844)
Yeah.
Ben Climer (02:43:25.047)
Yeah.
Abhi Saini (02:43:27.726)
But Ben, mean, this absolutely amazing to hear your story, learn more about you. I'm so happy that you and I are friends and that we get to do this together. And I can't wait for, I can't wait for the next thing you do. The next, whatever the next schema doctor is going to be and continue doing this podcast with you,
Ben Climer (02:43:51.791)
The pleasure is all mine. I'm really grateful to know you as well and I'm grateful to be a part of this podcast. think I'm hopeful that we'll be able to impact some people with this, even if it's just one person, that's enough.
Abhi Saini (02:44:08.674)
Yeah, yeah, and that, you know, if you're listening and you have any comments, you have any questions, you want to know some, if you have any thoughts at all.
Reach out to us. Feel free to reach out to us on our website, on LinkedIn, connect with us. We're open and we want to help uplift you in your career. This is literally the thing that we wish we had when we started out. And just being able to give back to you is gonna make it so that way the industry just keeps getting better and better no matter what.
Ben Climer (02:44:46.532)
Yeah.
Thank you so much, man. Thank you everyone for listening to us ramble through this and we'll see everyone next week.
Abhi Saini (02:44:56.45)
you
Take care.