Member Spotlight: Mike Prachar
Mike Prachar is the Chief Operations Officer at Big Green IT, a Cloud Services company located in Rocklin, CA. Mike started out his career in telecommunications on the sales side, eventually moving into technical and operations. With a further shift in stride in 2010, Mike focused his career on IT, specifically cloud computing, and joined Big Green IT in 2015 with the purpose of building a first-class Microsoft cloud practice.
Big Green IT is a California-based professional services IT organization. They work with clients to choose and deploy the best technology solutions. With their expertise, Big Green IT has helped hundreds of companies shift from purely on-premise systems to Office 365, Microsoft 365 and the Azure Cloud.
What sets Big Green IT apart from other IT companies?
Generally, I think it’s the amount of time and effort that Big Green IT puts into understanding how our customers do their business, and finding solutions that are not just specifically good for their business, but also trying to design solutions that make the most sense for any given client of ours.
Note: Just a quick look on their website revealed how great their client service is! Listen to Jeff’s Philosophy on Business on their Career Page to hear about Big Green IT’s emphasis on providing the best customer support.
What business tips do you have for those just getting started?
Be smart. In my opinion, when you are just getting started, that’s the time where you have to be the most impressive with your clients and/or supervisor— this your time to make the best impression. I think it’s important to take the time out, in whatever you are doing, to do it right and do it better than everybody else. Whatever it is, from flipping burgers to designing integrated circuits, just do it well, do it right, and do it better than anyone else can.
What do you love most or find most rewarding about your job?
The most rewarding part for me is actually the back-end stuff that nobody sees. It’s creating systems, automating processes, building something in such a way that, when I’m done, there's an easier, faster, and more accurate way to accomplish tasks that somebody used to have to do by hand. Sometimes, it’s even simpler than that; sometimes the “easy” stuff is rewarding too. It’s kind of like the work equivalent of washing dishes— when you’re done, the stuff on the left-hand side of the sink is now on the right-hand side of the sink, and it makes you feel like you accomplished something. And finally, one of the most rewarding goals we strive for is realizing business goals for our clients that make our customers’ experience better, especially when we are able to provide just the right results, exactly when the customer needs them or before they even have to ask.
What inspired you to get involved in your line work?
I used to be in telecommunications. My main designated role running the organization, was operations, and there were often times when I needed to do stuff with computers. A lot of different tasks would bubble up to me because we didn’t have anyone that was officially trained do it. So, I would just learn how to do it. And over time, those efforts trained me; showed me what could be done, and what was out there, and I found it all interesting. As voice minutes, and people having top pay for phone calls, started to go away, I knew it was time to start doing something different. I recognized that I enjoyed this back-end side of the business and it kind of evolved into everything that I do today.
How has Big Green IT been dealing with the pandemic and do you have any stories or struggles that have occurred amidst our shelter in place?
From our company’s perspective, all of the infrastructure to work remotely has been in place for years; because of the information technology industry that we’re in. However, we do miss out on face-to-face customer interaction. While we’re doing just fine, that whole piece of the sales mechanism is just broken. We can get it done of course, but it’s missing the extra human touch. But other than that, everything has been really fine. A lot of the tools people use [to work from home] has been out there forever and has been slowly gaining traction. Now, suddenly, everyone’s started using it. I mean, everybody’s grandma knows what Zoom is now. So, the need for what we do has only gone up, because we design and deploy those solutions. The business that we do has been dramatically accelerated by COVID-19. Microsoft is our primary cloud solution, and we’ve had tons of forward progress in the past two months. As a rule, what we do in our daily work, is only in more demand than it was prior to the pandemic.
What we are concerned about, a concern that is very real but keeps getting delayed by stimulus packages and other things, is when clients start being unable to pay us. A big part of our business model involves us extending services to client. And we have to pay for those services regardless of whether or not the customer pays us. We've been very fortunate so far that none of our clients have gone under, and there are a lot of businesses that look like they're going to be in the right line of work to survive. However, some of them may not come out of this at all. In another few months down the road we could be hit with a big wave of bad debt.
How have you been adjusting to working at home now?
For me, I've been working from home for over 20 years, sometimes more and sometimes less, but I developed the work ethic, patterns, and routines I need in order to be effective at that a long time ago. So personally, it’s been great. I’ve been getting all kinds of stuff done. I enjoy this much more than a 3-hour commute and sitting in meetings. Often, travelling for a one-hour customer meeting could derail my productivity for the entire day.
Do you have tips for those that struggle to work at home?
Everybody’s got their own routine. Some people dress nicer on work days than they normally would to just hang around the house. I learned pretty early on that getting up in the morning and taking a shower as if I was driving to the office, and not sitting in my pajamas at my desk all day, just because I could, was my ticket to being productive from home. It’s been hugely helpful to me to do the whole nine yards every morning. It’s the rhythms and patterns, all the same things that make people more efficient and productive in their daily lives regardless of whether they're at home or commuting somewhere.
Another important thing, I think, is to invest in your workspace. Whether investing means spending an afternoon just moving furniture around or actually buying specialized furniture (it depends on what your work consists of). Having a workspace that is work-oriented helps greatly. And, depending on what your home environment is like, you may need some sort of isolation to help others understand that that space, whatever it is, is your work environment. My kids are old enough now that it’s no longer an issue, but I remember working from home when they were younger. Little kids don’t really understand how to respect work boundaries very well, or if they do understand it, they know a great button to push when they want ALL their parent’s attention is to completely ignore those boundaries. If you can make it happen, I strongly recommend an office door you can close!
Why did you decide to go to start coworking?
When I was doing this 20 years ago, coworking places didn’t really exist. Working in coffee shops doesn’t really work when you need to communicate professionally with other people. Many times, you’ll need a more professional environment like Davis Coworking. For plenty of people, that could be how they choose to invest in their workspace. At Big Green, we have a handful of workers that are nearly 100 miles apart, and Davis Coworking has been the perfect compromise between driving all the way into the office and just having video calls.
What do you enjoy most about working in Davis Coworking?
About a year ago, we started trying different places to have an offsite meeting where Jeff [CEO of Big Green IT] and I could meet outside the distractions of the office to get some focused work done. I must have tried a dozen places, from big expensive conference room facilities, all the way down to small coffee shops with an extra room. Many coworking spaces have an open design. Those can be very economical and are just fine for working with headphones on. But, if you need to communicate with another person in the same space as you, it's uncomfortable and can be disruptive to everyone around you. Davis Coworking’s facility turned out to be perfect because it’s got two actual conference rooms with doors where we can speak freely. The monthly subscription model also works well for us and it's almost exactly right in the middle [location-wise] between Jeff and I. So it turned out to be awesome!
Contact information
If you would like to contact Mike about his work or are interested in Big Green IT, check out their website at biggreenit.com or contact their company at (916) 787-3223.
Or you can find Mike on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/mikeprachar!