You’ve Gotta (Bruce) Buffer Your Data w/ Alex Sanabria

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello friends. Today's guest is Alex Sanabria, our digital marketing architect here at P3 Adaptive. I think we're all familiar with the unfortunate feeling of expecting one thing and getting less. Like for example, your car has been making a noise for a long time and you finally take it in, you get it fixed, you get it back and you're excited that sound is going to be gone and it hasn't been fixed. Or a long awaited shipment or a product arrives at your house finally and you open it up and the thing is broken. But what about the opposite when you get something that's so much more than you expected? That experience is much more rare and you tend to remember it really sharply, well that is exactly what happened when we found Alex or did he find us? What we needed and what we thought we were getting when we hired Alex was a solid competent web developer.

Rob Collie (00:00:55): And we definitely got that. Alex is very much the genuine article on that front, but we did not know that we were getting someone who would quickly blossom into a leader here within the P3 org. And I use that word leader in many different senses, most obviously he's become a manager here and has been doing an amazing job in that role. His team is motivated, organized, cared about, developed. He's also an incredibly proactive problem solver. This is not someone who ever says not my problem. He's fun to be around. He's good for morale and it is just overall been a godsend. So we obviously get his origin story and listen carefully at how he seems to create his own luck over and over again. It's long been a theme on this show that careers are often shaped by a series of happy little accidents and the ways we react to them. That's definitely true of Alex.

Rob Collie (00:01:50): I also think though, he's involved upstream of the accidents a little bit more than most of us have been. And one of many fun little details of working with Alex is that about once a week, he goes into Slack and he poses a question to the team. Recently asked, what's your go-to karaoke song? And one time he asked if you were a professional wrestler, what would your walkout song be? Well, he's also done some amateur boxing and in that same vein as the walkout music, I thought we'd surprise him with a little bit of a gift at the beginning of the podcast. I used his same stick. I went into Slack and I asked everybody, what would their nickname be if they were a professional wrestler or a boxer or something? And predictably really only Alex answered. And then, we use that information to have our one and only first and probably last ever Bruce Buffer podcast intro custom recorded for Alex. So you definitely won't miss that, it's right at the beginning. I remember this one as a lively conversation and I myself look forward to re-listening to it. So let's get into it.

Announcer (00:02:51): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please? This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast with your host, Rob Collie and your co-host, Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element.

Rob Collie (00:03:22): Welcome to the show, Alex Sanabria. Maybe that's not doing you a sufficient justice. Let's put some respect on your name, Alex. Let's try it with more energy, like ring style. You think I should try like a Bruce Buffer impression? You think so? Okay. Welcome to the show, Alejandro Sanabria. How'd I do?

Alex Sanabria (00:03:51): Perfect.

Rob Collie (00:03:51): Hey Luke, do you have any fancy reverb filter you can put on that? Maybe we can get a little closer to reality. He's got all kinds of effects.

Bruce Buffer (00:04:02): Alejandro "Mucho Macho" Sanabria.

Rob Collie (00:04:14): Oh, yes. Oh. Damn. That's a good effect. It's amazing what he can do. Isn't it?

Alex Sanabria (00:04:26): That's crazy.

Rob Collie (00:04:28): The filter, the reverb, even put your nickname in.

Alex Sanabria (00:04:32): I know. That's crazy.

Rob Collie (00:04:33): All right. All right, Luke. Roll it back and play it from the very start.

Bruce Buffer (00:04:38): And now it's time, introducing the champion. Fighting out of the red corner, he is a digital marketing architect. Standing 1.1 bad asses tall and weighing in and approximately, don't F with me. Fighting out of Mexico City, by way of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Presenting the champion of the world, Alejandro "Mucho Macho" Sanabria.

Alex Sanabria (00:05:32): That's one of the best intro ever. And I'm above now. That's awesome.

Rob Collie (00:05:44): You're looking sharp. Did you get a haircut?

Alex Sanabria (00:05:46): I got a horrible haircut. I didn't mean to get it like that. My son says I look like a Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street.

Rob Collie (00:05:54): A little bit. A little bit. Maybe. It's adorable that your son...

Alex Sanabria (00:05:58): Yeah. He bullies me all the time, but it's okay.

Rob Collie (00:06:01): He comes by and honestly, doesn't he? So, your title here is digital marketing architect. In your own words, what's your role here at P3 Adaptive?

Alex Sanabria (00:06:11): I make sure that we give the best image that we can for the P3 Adaptive brand. Also, I make sure people find those easily and pretty much I'm the publicist of P3 Adaptive. I make sure the image is good, things like that.

Rob Collie (00:06:27): So when I say something like, "Oh, I really need to call my publicist about this." And I'm calling you.

Alex Sanabria (00:06:33): That's me.

Rob Collie (00:06:34): I'm calling you.

Alex Sanabria (00:06:34): Yeah. You call me and we'll fix it.

Rob Collie (00:06:36): Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. You manage a team here. How many reports do you have?

Alex Sanabria (00:06:40): Three. Kylie, Kristi and DosX. We call her DosX. Her name is Alexx, but my name is Alex too. So...

Rob Collie (00:06:48): Yeah. And she has two Xs in her name. It was just sitting there. Otherwise, a team of four and two of them are named Alex. This was going to be very confusing. And fortunately, she really liked the idea of being referred to as Dos Equis.

Alex Sanabria (00:07:01): Yeah, that worked out. So back to my team, two of them are our content editors. We call them digital evangelist. And the third one, Kylie, she's a graphic designer. And my background is a web developer, so we make the perfect team for social media, website, everything in the online.

Rob Collie (00:07:17): How long have you been here now?

Alex Sanabria (00:07:18): Two years and a half.

Rob Collie (00:07:20): Two and a half. Holy cow. Yeah. When we hired you, we were looking for purely a web developer, right? I wasn't saying, "Hey, let's go find someone who can basically run, manage, orchestrate our entire digital presence." That was not the goal. The goal was to find someone who could handle all of the web development work that goes into that effort with me still managing it. So along the way, discovering that we got a lot more than a web developer, a tremendously positive surprise. Yeah. What a happy little accident that has been. How has that felt for you? Before you came here, would you have ever described yourself as anything more than a web developer? Was this a new experience for you? Give us some flavor on that.

Alex Sanabria (00:08:07): It's definitely a new experience. Thank you for your kind words. And I just thought about it and I've been here for a year and a half. So back to your sentence, yeah.

Rob Collie (00:08:13): Yeah. I told you now.

Alex Sanabria (00:08:16): For the long run it is. Yeah. One year and a half, not two years and a half.

Rob Collie (00:08:20): Hold on. Now, I'm going to say, God, it feels like a lot more than a year and a half.

Alex Sanabria (00:08:25): Yeah. Before I joined P3 Adaptive, I knew everything about digital marketing for the company I work at because I was just a web developer, but I had my hand in a bunch of different things. So people from Salesforce will tell me, "We need to put this form here and things like that." So I knew a little bit everything. And then when I joined as a web developer, I saw all the opportunity I have with P3 Adaptive. And from the beginning, I was like, I wish I was in charge of more things here because I think I can make a pretty big impact and little did I know things just fall in place for me to take over.

Alex Sanabria (00:08:58): The biggest thing for me was Google Ads, because I just knew that we could do a lot in there and we have been. And the hardest part for me has been managing people, because I never done it before so I was a little nervous of how they will see me, especially Kylie, because we started as equals at the beginning. So I didn't know how she was going to take it, but she's been awesome. And I don't even have to manage her. She just gets things done right away. So it's perfect.

Rob Collie (00:09:23): We have a really good team and that helps. It is worth noting that I have found your help on the management front. Keeping things organized, keeping things moving to be every bit as impactful as anything you've done for us technically. At this point even like a fraction of your time here in which you've been in more of that management role for us. Seriously, a number of things have been going on in my life professionally, personally, where in the past that would've taken my attention completely away from everything and people would've sat and not known what to do. Not only would we have lost traction in those eras, but people would've like gotten the wrong message as well.

Rob Collie (00:10:05): Our growth curve certainly on the digital side has been, I think, greatly accelerated by your rise to prominence here. Again, very, very fortunate thing. So let's come back to that in a little bit. Talk more about that transition to more of a leadership role. Let's get in the way back machine. How did you first get into development? How did you first get into technical work? Where is your first collision with the IT field for lack of a better term?

Alex Sanabria (00:10:33): That's a good story. So when I was growing up, I was always very good at math. My grandma and my dad, they were accounting people. And I just thought I was going to be an accounting. That was my thing. I liked it. I liked numbers. Even since I was 12-year-old, I knew how to use Excel a little bit and I thought I was the doing that right. And I never thought about getting into that programming, I just like count. And then one time when I was in high school, there was this guy that we just didn't like each other and we were in computer class. I don't remember what happened, but we started fighting. Somebody pushed somebody it would just beat each other. And then, at that time when I had pain in the floor, the teacher comes in and of course they blame me because I was winning the fight.

Rob Collie (00:11:17): Yeah. You want to be losing right when they walk in?

Alex Sanabria (00:11:21): Yeah. So I get in trouble with the teacher and my dad was very strict. So I told him like, "Please don't report me because he wouldn't let me go to football and things like that." So he was like, "Okay, well I need help cleaning all the computers. So you'll lose your recess for the rest of the year and you'll start here with me." I was like, "All right, I'll take that."

Rob Collie (00:11:40): That teacher recognized that moment, recognized the leverage.

Alex Sanabria (00:11:45): Yeah. He got me good in that time. So, I lost all my free time, but then I started helping him cleaning computers, opening mouses, installing Windows from scratch and things like that. After a couple months he said, "Okay, you can be released from your duties." And I was like, "Can I just stay?" Because he was teaching me how to program in Pascal, I think, remember that was it.

Rob Collie (00:12:03): Oh, wow.

Alex Sanabria (00:12:07): Creating program and things like that and I just started loving it and it was really fun to change things, break the computer and then reinstall everything again. And that's how I got into it. When I went to college, I got on a scholarship for a really cool college school, Tecnologico de Monterrey. I didn't know what career to pick. Like now, the computer thing was in my mind, but also the accounting stuff and then my mom was telling me, "Oh, engineers are the... is the career you need to pick because of the money or whatever." And so we get to the place where they needed me to sign which career, and I didn't know which one. There was a teacher there and she was in charge of computer science program. And she was like, "Oh, you should go to computer science program. You know what? Because I'm there." And she just made me laugh that she said that. "Oh, all right, shoot. I'll do it. I love it. It was everything I wanted." I started learning JavaScript, PHP and things like that. And that's how I got into computers.

Rob Collie (00:12:58): So, that's amazing. I did not know that. You were on course to be one of us in a different way. You could have easily found yourself as a power BI maestro in that original trajectory. And then you got deflected by a high school scuffle.

Alex Sanabria (00:13:13): Yeah. Let's just put it that way.

Rob Collie (00:13:16): That is really funny. So, that's how you ended up studying at the university level. You studied computer science and programming. Then what?

Alex Sanabria (00:13:24): Then I met this really good guy. My mom was working, selling houses and then the company, I was selling houses, they needed a website and called... Mom said, "Oh, my son goes to school. He can do it."

Rob Collie (00:13:35): Yep. Yep.

Alex Sanabria (00:13:36): I couldn't do it. Because I didn't know anything about making websites, but she just got me into it. So I was like, "Shoot, I'll find out how to do it." I knew a guy there that people said he was good at making websites or working with Fash or something like that. So I asked, "Man, can you help me with the project. I will have it with you?" And from that moment he said, "Yeah." And we become best friends. He started learning about back end programming, PHP, databases. And he told me, "Okay, you learn the front end, JavaScript, CSS, HTML. And we built this website for this company." I think we got paid like $200 and we thought we were rich and it was really fun. And after that, we just grew that friendship and for some financial problems in the family, I had to drop out of college and he stayed there.

Alex Sanabria (00:14:18): So after that, I had a friend living in Wisconsin and he's like, "Why don't you come with me for a couple months, work, make some money, come back and finish college?" And that was my idea. So I was like, "Sure, I'll do that." So I came here and I just fall in love. I always like the US and I always play American football. I watched Home Alone and all that stuff. Like, "Man, I want to live that life." As soon as I got here, I called my parents, I think the second week of I'm not coming back, I'm staying here. And that was a big shock for the family, but they just dealt over there.

Rob Collie (00:14:49): What month of the year did you show up in Wisconsin?

Alex Sanabria (00:14:53): May.

Rob Collie (00:14:54): May. Okay. All right.

Alex Sanabria (00:14:55): Of course, it was May. If I knew the winter was going to be like this. I would never, never do that.

Rob Collie (00:15:00): Yeah. Like February you've been like, "Yeah, mom, dad."

Alex Sanabria (00:15:05): And when you ask people at first how cold it gets, "Oh, it's not that cold. You don't even feel it. You're always inside like BS." Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:15:11): Yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah.

Alex Sanabria (00:15:14): Whatever. So, yeah. So I came here, I started working in everything. I work in warehouses, restaurants. I did a little bit of everything until I landed a job at jelly belly and I was a packer and then the printer broke and I told them, "I can fix it." And they look at me like an idiot. "You can't probably fix it." I was like, "I'll fix it." And I fixed it. They knew that I was good with computers. So they put me in charge of the internet orders. That was my dream job because I get to use a computer, print the gift cards. And that was really fun to read what people was writing those gift cards. You'll be surprised. They were like, "I'm sorry, I cheat on you with your sister." But he is on Jelly Belly mail. There were all really sad ones where like, "Sorry, Timmy, grandma passed away or whatever." He will cry and laugh and everything just bring those gift cards everyday.

Rob Collie (00:16:06): Oh man. Yeah. That's that's like CIA level intelligence. The leverage you hold on people. Who would have ever thought that the Jelly Belly gift card printing job would convey such ESP mind reading. So, little detail, Jelly Belly used to be one of the big case studies for analysis services, like the original multidimensional analysis services. Jelly Belly was a celebrated case study of having adopted and used the MDX flavor, the precursor to Dax.

Alex Sanabria (00:16:42): Oh, wow.

Rob Collie (00:16:42): The gravity was strong, right? You didn't even know you're being pulled.

Alex Sanabria (00:16:46): That's crazy to know. And now that you mentioned it. Yeah. They were always using the latest technology. Even the lifts, they were top technology all the time, the handhelds to pick up the orders. And now that you mentioned it, the managers in the morning, they always come with that report. "Okay. Your performance was this much. You could pick it up like you did on Tuesday." And they knew like how fast you were working, what times were your peaks and everything and that was fun to watch and to see how everything worked out. I ended up losing that job because the economy went down so they just cut half of the workforce. So I left there and I started working in a restaurant again and I was happy with my server restaurant.

Alex Sanabria (00:17:26): And about that time, I reconnected with my friend from Mexico through Skype. And he told me, "I also have to stop college." Because problem with his family. But I just came back where we left off. "So how about you helped me pay for my books and I go to college in the morning and then at night I'll teach you what I learned." So I pretty much finished college through him. So he taught me everything. He wasn't nice about it. He's like, "Are you stupid or something? Why don't you get it?" I think he would just relieve stress just teaching me and telling me how stupid I was for not learning quick enough. But anyway, he got me through it and he told me everything I know from SQL, MySQL, PHP, JavaScript, NBC, everything.

Rob Collie (00:18:07): What a cool arrangement. I wouldn't even think to do something like that. It makes total sense. It really does parallel parts of the movie, Goodwill Hunting, right? If you have the books, right, and you have the time you don't really need to be in the class. But I was even thinking about Goodwill Hunting when you accidentally ending up at Jelly Belly, right? So, jelly bean manufacturer, right? Also, one of the most tech forward organizations in the country, especially at that point in time. Okay. So your friend in Mexico, the two of you established a symbiosis, like a symbiotic relationship and both get through college. You both finish that education. So what happens next?

Alex Sanabria (00:18:47): I worked in Red Robin, in the restaurant for a while and I started getting regulars. And you start talking more. Some people are nice and they talk to you about what do you like to do? What do you go to college for? And I met a couple of business owners that they need a website, so I was, "Oh, here's my number." "Can you do a website?" So like that, I just started getting a lot of work. He did my website and then they will call me somewhere in the middle there. My son was born, one thing led to another, you go to the wrong party and then stop.

Rob Collie (00:19:25): It doesn't sound like it was the wrong party. It sounds like in many ways it was the right party,

Alex Sanabria (00:19:27): No. It was the wrong party,

Rob Collie (00:19:33): Nothing like that has ever happened to me at a party. Okay. So you end up becoming a father?

Alex Sanabria (00:19:41): I end up becoming a father. There's nothing wrong with being a server, but when I was growing up, people just like my grandma. "Oh, you're going to do great things. You're very smart, things like that." And then, I started think, I want to do something that my son is proud of, where I can use my skills better, not just adding up the tip or things like that. And so I went ahead and started looking for a job for a programmer or web developer. It was hard to find a job at the beginning because I had a portfolio, but it wasn't business experience and people were like looking for.

Alex Sanabria (00:20:18): I know a cool story, I went to the casino and I was playing Black Jack and I was doing pretty well. I was up like 10 bucks or something. And then this drunk guy next to me, just sat down and just started hitting on 16s and just doing horrible things all the time, right? And we started losing and I started getting mad. I was like, "Okay, you just got to listen to me. I told you what to do and we both win." And he was very big, I wasn't. And he ended up making $2,000 just for my freaking advice.

Rob Collie (00:20:50): Your advice that was intended to allow you to go back to win.

Alex Sanabria (00:20:55): Yeah, I didn't even get back to win and he went $2,000. So I was cranky about that. And then, we finished playing and he's like, "You want to go eat? I'll buy." "Okay." So we started went to the restaurant, we got some drinks, and then he started telling me that he owns a marketing agency and things like that. And "Oh, when I'm a programmer looking for a job." And he gave me his card and he's like, "Oh, just come tomorrow for an interview. We're looking for a programmer." I thought he was full of crap that he was just being like grateful or whatever, having fun time. But the next morning I call him, he's like, "Yeah, yeah we're here come out today, man." I went there and Downtown Milwaukee, they asked me about my background and what I can do and what I can't do. And at the end of the interview, he told me, "Okay, here's a design file. If you can build this website in the next four or five hours, heres a computer, it has Photoshop, everything you need, we'll give you the job."

Alex Sanabria (00:21:42): So I did, I build the website. It wasn't exactly at the mark-up, but it was pretty close for that time and they were very impressed with me so they gave me the job and it went uphill from there. I started getting better rates, better job. I learned more skills. My body was also working with big companies like Mercedes Benz and Volvo and things like that. So he was learning more hardcore stuff that he was also still teaching me. That's how I got to this point. Started jumping jobs finding better jobs every time and that's how I landed here.

Rob Collie (00:22:11): That is really cool. And I did not know all of that. Most of it, I didn't know. So I'm glad to finally get all of that. There's so many people who've been on the show have this series of accidents, fortunate, positive, benevolent accidents that have led them to where they are today. And I would say that there's something about your version of that zigzag path that even stands out a little bit to me. So there's certainly a lot of accidents, but the way that you responded to the accidents, the way that you made the most of each one of them is an outlier. To a certain extent, you have to almost like court these sorts of accidents, right? You have to be willing to interact with people. If you hadn't been interacting with people, when you were working in your server job at Red Robin, you could have just done the job.

Rob Collie (00:23:02): If they order you bring it to them, you could do that without any personality or any human interest. People get to know you, you get to know them, a trust builds. And then when it turns out that they discover that you have a talent that they need, if they discover that in the first minute of knowing you, they would never connect with it. And the same thing with the guy at the blackjack table, first of all, I don't really play blackjack but if I did, I would be the guy hitting on the wrong things, not the one complaining about it, but I would be the one that would be telling you by the way, that it doesn't matter what I do, Alex, your chances of you, of your strategy being successful does not change whether I'm sitting next to you messing up. You're just going to cherry pick the things that...

Rob Collie (00:23:45): I've annoyed people at blackjack tables, "Yeah. Just shut up and play your strategy. It's going to work just fine. Don't worry about me." No one wants to hear that at a blackjack table, it's like sacrileges. But yeah, so he was invested in you at that point. He liked you enough to ask you to go eat with him and everything. I think you made a lot of your own luck. Your percentage of making your own luck is high and I think that's a credit to you.

Alex Sanabria (00:24:09): Yeah. Thank you. And the way I see it is like 50/50, because I've been lucky enough to find the right people at the right time. For example, this guy, right? He took a chance of me. My friend who told me, "Oh, I have a friend in Wisconsin." I think the biggest one is being my best friend who taught me the programming. I'm very grateful for his friendship. I'll never tell him that, but that's true.

Rob Collie (00:24:28): No. Why would you?

Alex Sanabria (00:24:29): No. No. No.

Rob Collie (00:24:30): Why would you ever tell your best friend how grateful you are? That would be really a bad move. Don't do that.

Alex Sanabria (00:24:38): Yeah. Yeah, No.

Rob Collie (00:24:38): Come on, Alex. Is he going to listen to this?

Alex Sanabria (00:24:40): I hope no.

Rob Collie (00:24:44): What's his name? We're going to send it to him.

Alex Sanabria (00:24:48): Let's call him Mr. X or something.

Rob Collie (00:24:50): Mr. X, okay. All right. There was another thing that you were saying, which was when you were working... This was earlier in the conversation. When you were working in digital marketing for other organizations before coming here, you served a role. You were the dev in a way at a certain level of the project anyway, you were being told what to do. So you were getting exposure to the functions of the other people that were writing, were basically giving you requests or commands or orders or whatever, right?

Rob Collie (00:25:17): You could be a developer in that role. And someone from marketing department or the sales department or whatever comes to you and says, "Hey, we need you to do X, Y, Z." And it's like when you're the server at Red Robin, you could just go do X, Y, Z. But I think what you had to be doing and based on what you told me is that you were thinking about what was going on on the other side of the fence. Why are they saying they need this? Even if they're not telling you why, you're sort of role playing the other side of the conversation. Is that something that you found yourself doing?

Alex Sanabria (00:25:54): Yeah, that is a little bit of that. And the other thing is when I work in a company, I try to wear the shirt. I tried to do the best for them and I like the clients and things like that. And a lot of times with when I was in these big teams, you have to wait forever for the guy to give you the Salesforce API code or create a form. So at one point you're like, "Okay, I need to get it done. Just give me the password. I'll do it." Then you get there and then you learn it. I was like, "Okay, well I just learned another skill. I don't need you no more."

Alex Sanabria (00:26:26): So I think that was my biggest motivation to learn more things, to be able to handle things when they come and not depends so much on other people to make it happen. There are things I can do. I can't design. Thank goodness for Kylie, I also can't write a case study and things like that, but I can tell you, I see it I know it's good. That's one of my good skills that I have.

Rob Collie (00:26:46): Yeah. You've got good editorial control, I agree. Some people can't create exactly what they want, but they know when it's good, right? Other people lack both. I'm a good writer, but I think most of the time I'm in that same bucket as you with most things, I know when it looks good. I'm working with an illustrator these days for a secret project and I can't begin to draw any of the things that they could do, but I know when it's good and I know how to suggest that it can be better even, but boy, ask me to put pen to paper even for 10 seconds consecutive and I can't do it. It's just, nope, not happening.

Alex Sanabria (00:27:25): Yeah, exactly. I feel the same way.

Rob Collie (00:27:27): Yeah. So it's that big picture mentality. Again, you could view yourself narrowly as I'm supposed to do X, Y, Z. And they haven't given me what I need to do X, Y, Z yet. So I'll just sit and wait. There's a lot of personality types that do that. That just, this is my silo and I'm not going to look beyond it or reach outside of it or anything like that. And that is definitely not you.

Alex Sanabria (00:27:50): Yeah. I know. And I think I learned that from my grandma. She used to tell me the story all the time, where there's this boss, right, that has two employees and keeps giving a raise to one of them and not to the other one. The other one that wasn't getting the raise goes and ask why I might not getting a raise, why is the other guy? Because the other guy is better than you can explain me. And he, he told him, "Okay, I'll show you an example." He give him 10 bucks and told the bad employee go get me two pounds of apples from the store. So he goes and comes back and says, "There were no apples. Here's the money." "Okay. And then watch this." And he gives the same $10 to the other guy. He goes to the store, comes back and says, "Okay, there were no apples, but they have oranges. I brought you oranges."

Alex Sanabria (00:28:34): He provided him with a bunch of different options when there were no apple. See that's the difference he's trying to look for ways to solve the solution. The problem is that I'm hungry. He's finding me different solution. Maybe it's not the one that I wanted, so I always remember that story. And I was like, "Okay, let's get it done. I don't know what it takes, but let's get it done." I remember a problem we had at P3 Adaptive where all the Bitly links weren't working.

Rob Collie (00:28:57): Uh-huh. Oh, yeah.

Alex Sanabria (00:28:58): So, I'm not trying to shame the company, but I will.

Rob Collie (00:29:00): Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. We pay them not vice versa.

Alex Sanabria (00:29:04): Yeah. And we weren't even using the free version. We were reach using the premium version.

Rob Collie (00:29:08): That's right. Yeah.

Alex Sanabria (00:29:09): Out of a sudden, our links were showing 404. They were just not working.

Rob Collie (00:29:13): Yeah. Many of our older links were just 404 and for no good reason, right?

Alex Sanabria (00:29:17): Right. I tried to fix it myself, I couldn't. I reached out to support, they said they don't know what's happening. They get back to us a day passes and no answer and not fix. So I went and just played with the settings and I discovered that if I open the link, recreate it and resave it will fix itself. So I was like, "Okay, well I found a solution. Let me see how many links are broken." And little did I know a thousand links that we have there that were all broken and these are links that are on Twitter, Instagram and in your book that you go...

Rob Collie (00:29:50): Book. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Sanabria (00:29:50): So I just went ahead and just fixed them all. I spent probably a few hours at night, but they got them done.

Rob Collie (00:29:56): Did you manually edit and save each one of them?

Alex Sanabria (00:29:59): Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:30:00): Yeah. I was just absolutely dumbfounded the next day when you told me that, in a good way, like oh my gosh. So yeah, we'd still be waiting on the support, right?

Alex Sanabria (00:30:10): Yeah. That was ridiculous. I think after two weeks they got back to us. "Oh, looks like nothing is with your links." "No, because we fixed it." I should have leave one bad link so they could have fixed their problem but...

Rob Collie (00:30:22): Fixing Bitly's business isn't necessarily our game unless they hire us, right? I'm so glad you brought that story up again. That's a perfect example of this. And there's been so many things like that.

Alex Sanabria (00:30:33): Yeah. I love this job. It's very rewarding. One of the projects that was the most rewarding was when I worked with Luke on changing Power Pivot Pro to P3 Adaptive. I learned about our Twitter account, our Instagram account, where to get the passwords, who had access to what. That project just... It was massive. Involves Salesforce, everything. And when we wanted to get it done and you worked out.

Rob Collie (00:30:55): That was so impressive. We had run the company as powerpivotpro.com as our domain name, the better part of 10 years. It had seeped into everything. It was everywhere, back end systems, our front end systems and our social media account. It was almost like a Y2K level problem to do a top level domain switchover. And it just went off without a hitch, didn't it? Maybe one little minor thing we had to clean up the next week, and that was it. That was one of those, this couldn't be done sort of moments, right?

Alex Sanabria (00:31:30): Yeah. That was crazy. I remember when I flipped the switch on GoDaddy for the domain, I was like that guy from the Ocean's 11 before he sets up the EMP bomb, he's like, "Oh, shoot it out."

Luke Pirozzoli (00:31:44): By the way, I just wanted to add, Alex, thank you for mentioning me. But 98% of the heavy lifting was you in that project? Yeah 99.9%.

Alex Sanabria (00:31:51): 99%.

Rob Collie (00:32:00): 99%, yeah. This is a joke between you and I that I want to share with the listeners is I like to say to you and laughing when I say it, knowing that it's a joke. Alex, this thing that we need to do it probably not even really doable. I don't know. It's probably too much. Let me know if I'm pushing... If I'm expecting too much.

Alex Sanabria (00:32:20): Yeah. You got me good with that one in CoverHawk.

Rob Collie (00:32:24): You've also built like a really, really slick Power BI embedded website. The documentation on how to do a Power BI embedded website is really not complete. It's missing a bunch of little nuances, a bunch of things that have to be figured out the hard way. Yeah, coverhawk.app is a really good example that we are still able to use to this day with clients to show them what the art of the possible looks like to get something to that level of polish that we ended up having several hundred high school students using CoverHawk each week during the football season last year.

Rob Collie (00:33:02): You kind of have to have a very solid solution to roll it out like that and not end up with a tremendous support hassle, right? We never heard a peep. It just worked. That level expertise comes in handy over and over again, whenever we need to do something with clients in Power BI embedded. Speaking of Power BI, you came here not having touched it. One of the handful of people didn't really make sense. You didn't need to know that for this role. You've been picking at it a little bit here and there, haven't you?

Alex Sanabria (00:33:34): Yeah. I have been. I'm so mad, I didn't know this tool before, because it would have saved me so much time. And in the previous company I work at, we had a Magento Store, which is an e-commerce platform. It's a very robust system, but the reporting sucks.

Rob Collie (00:33:48): Yeah. Always.

Alex Sanabria (00:33:49): So I build all these reports from a scratch using Highcharts, JavaScript and things like that. But it will take me a lot of time to first to build a query and then to build a report and then make a portal for people to access it and all that stuff. And this company used Microsoft for everything and I just didn't know why they didn't know about this tool. Literally that took me six months. It would have been a week with Power BI, that's how powerful it is. I didn't realize it until I start playing with CoverHawk and things like that. And then, you can also apply my web development, JavaScripting on Power BI and create custom visuals and things like that. And that just blew my mind that this is the tool to use.

Rob Collie (00:34:32): So that is of course, an age old pattern, which is you have some sort of line of business system, doesn't matter what it is, Magento in this case. And it's really good at what it does, e-commerce right? It does a good job with that. But reporting is not its core DNA, that's not a BI company. They don't have like the resources of a Microsoft or a Tableau or something like that to build out their reporting function. And even if they did, they wouldn't have the need for it. It wouldn't be a good economic investment for them to make. So they just mail it in on reporting and that's everywhere. Salesforce mails it in. Of course, Salesforce went and bought Tableau, maybe they don't mail it in quite so much anymore.

Rob Collie (00:35:12): That shows you the level of investment you have to make. It's sort of the exception that proves the rule. So mind a business system sucks at reporting. So you go and you build it custom, you put a lot of effort into it and then after you built that custom reporting, after you considered it, quote, unquote "Done," How many requests started coming in to change it?

Alex Sanabria (00:35:37): Tons, tons everyday was something else. Can you filter by date? Can you build filter by Salesperson? Can you do this and do that? And it was also job security for me because I know they will always need me to get this reports fixed. But inside of me, I just knew this wasn't the way, there has to be a better way and I did a lot of Googling and I never... Maybe Microsoft marketing team needs to step it up a notch because if I were to find Power BI, I would have just used it right away. It has the connectors that I needed because we use a MySQL database which is a no brainer for Power BI.

Rob Collie (00:36:11): It really does highlight the disconnect between the usefulness of Microsoft tools and the way in which they sell them, small to mid-size business. Power BI is like an even bigger godsend to them than it is to enterprises and that's not sliding it the magnitude of the gift that it is to enterprises. It is an amazing game changer for enterprises. But for the SMB market, if anything, Power BI is a bigger deal. These are organizations with even fewer resources to begin with. And by the way, the pricing model is crazy, crazy, friendly to the SMBs.

Rob Collie (00:36:49): However, Microsoft doesn't really strategize around selling to them. They strategize around selling to the enterprises. And so, when you go Googling for what's the best way to make Magento custom reports, no one at Microsoft has taken the time to seed or SEO that thing to connect you with Power BI, right? It's just not part of their go-to market strategy at all. But if it were, you would've just grabbed it and run with it, right? It would have been the best thing for you, but it's just not Microsoft's thing to tell you that it is, which is ironic.

Alex Sanabria (00:37:25): Which is also good for us because I means there is a lot of opportunity out there. I did a quick Google and Magento has almost half a million websites out there that we could go after.

Rob Collie (00:37:35): Yeah, that's right. So let's keep going down that road. The people who are using Magento would need to connect the dots with Power BI in order to find us today. So we would have to go out there as P3 and do Microsoft's job in a way, do it for them and create landing pages like on our website that were just all about Magento and Power BI. Treat it like almost like a Magento, Power BI blog, build momentum, put some investment in it and then start trying to get that moving up and up and up the organic search score. We could advertise for it against search queries, but again, you'd find like the search volume for alternatives to Magento reporting wouldn't necessarily be as high volume as you would expect. People don't even really think about it, right? It's this problem that you and I have started to call inception, which is telling someone that isn't asking a question, they're not asking a question, is X, Y, Z a better alternative to what I'm doing?

Rob Collie (00:38:38): You have to go and tell them and open their eyes to X, Y, Z. And that's a much harder problem than just connecting with people who are already interested in what Power BI can do for their company. Then all we have to do is make them aware that we exist and explain why we're different. That's a challenge enough. That's a large percentage of what your team does, is to get us into that conversation when an organization is thinking that thing, like, "Okay, we're going to do some Power BI, maybe. Who should help us?" But yeah, planting the seed.

Alex Sanabria (00:39:11): Planting the seed, that's the way you say it. Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:39:14): Yeah. That's the inception game. And I've been trying to do that for years, various ways. And I think it's one of those impossible problems that we are sooner or later going to start to actually prove that it's possible. Maybe we start with Magento. Yeah, I don't know.

Alex Sanabria (00:39:29): That was just thinking about that. Yeah. Because especially for product management is where they lack. They have a report that says, stop five sellers. What do I need this scrap for? I want to see the trends on my stock so I can order ahead and don't run out the stock that sells all those reports will be very easy to make with Power BI. And also, I don't think I told you, but in August I'm taking the P3 Adaptive classes for...

Rob Collie (00:39:55): I was about to ask you.

Alex Sanabria (00:39:56): For Power BI. Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:39:58): You're going to take foundations in power query. Are you going to try to string it together back to back with advanced because you just don't need time, do you? I'm just kidding. We like to say that there's six months minimum between taking our foundations class and taking our advanced class. Six months of real world expertise, real world experience. But are you planning to just daisy chain them all together?

Alex Sanabria (00:40:18): Yeah. Me and my team. We're going to do it.

Rob Collie (00:40:20): Wow. What a cool thing to do together as a group.

Alex Sanabria (00:40:24): When you're going to sell a product... Okay. Let me try the share first. I like it. So, maybe I should have done this before, but never too late.

Rob Collie (00:40:33): That reminds me of something else that you do. Like on our Slack, you are periodically introducing topics that are just personal interest that sort of get everybody talking to each other. If you are a professional wrestler, what would your walkout song be? And I love that you do that. You take the time to do those sorts of things. It's very deliberate and it's very human. I really appreciate most of the time I even participate. What are some of the others we've done? You did karaoke the other time.

Alex Sanabria (00:41:02): Karaoke song. What would be your karaoke song?

Rob Collie (00:41:05): Yeah. And what was your karaoke song again?

Alex Sanabria (00:41:07): I can sing it, but I'm not.

Luke Pirozzoli (00:41:08): I think it's September by Earth, Wind & Fire.

Alex Sanabria (00:41:14): (singing).

Rob Collie (00:41:14): I don't know this song. Just keep going.

Alex Sanabria (00:41:15): No, I'm not going to keep going.

Rob Collie (00:41:18): September by Earth, Wind & Fire.

Alex Sanabria (00:41:20): Yeah. Yeah. Everybody knows this song. They play on everything. Yeah, that's a good song. Just put in a good mood right away.

Rob Collie (00:41:31): All right. Whenever you feel it just jump in.

Alex Sanabria (00:41:35): It's coming. (singing). Okay, that probably goes.

Rob Collie (00:41:48): I love this song. How did you discover that song? Do you even remember when you first heard it? It just seemed like it would've missed you. You're not old enough that you were alive when the song came out.

Alex Sanabria (00:41:58): Yeah. And I was born in '86. That song is actually pretty popular in Mexico in weddings. They always played in weddings.

Rob Collie (00:42:05): Really?

Alex Sanabria (00:42:05): I don't remember how I know it. Probably my grandma, I spent a lot of time with her. She always played this kind of music, The Beatles, these songs and things like that. So I just have in my head, but I go through periods of time where I like to listen rock metal. So I got really into a Black Sabbath. I even went to see him in Madison Square Garden, which he was awesome. I also see Mexican bands. I probably shouldn't mention this, but I went see Justin Bieber at one point in my life. It wasn't my choice, it was the girl I was dating, but I did go and it was... I enjoyed it. He sings like the freaking angels. He's good on what he does. I love all kinds of music, country, I don't like country that much, but I do respect that Johnny Cash is awesome.

Rob Collie (00:42:51): Old country is different, right? There's a gritty authenticity to older country that I can connect with. So let's talk about some data stuff. What have been some of your favorite projects from whenever, from P3, from before P3, doesn't matter. There's something different about building solutions that have a web front end and things like that and how they deal with data. For instance, the first iteration of Microsoft's fantasy football service that they produced at MSN was a disaster. I didn't have anything to do with it. They did it before I joined the team, but they had tremendous outages in their service because of the way that they interacted with the data layer was bottleneck and inefficient. I'm just giving this example to seed your thinking a little bit, from what I understand, they had a website HTML and et cetera, right? And then that talked directly to SQL and it melted, they had nothing but problems and terrible customer service. It was a nightmare. Have you ever built from scratch a data driven website with like MySQL underneath the hood and all that? What goes into that?

Alex Sanabria (00:44:01): Yeah. So one of the first projects I took with my friend, he was working for a university and we build a system that basically will... You will fill Excel sheets with the grades and you will import them in the website and then the website will show you the trends per teacher, per classroom, per the time of the year, the weather, everything, just to see what things will affect, the way we approach that. First, we got to design the database, right? So you have your users, all the attributes of each user, and then we have the assignments and then we have the teachers and then you create the relationships. That's the first step designed a database. And that's the most important one. Because if you have a good database the rest is just querying the database.

Alex Sanabria (00:44:45): So we did that part and then we got the request from the teachers saying, "Okay, I want a report that I want to be able to filter it by date and to show me the trends on the grades per this attribute." So the attribute was whether, where the class, the age group and all this stuff. So, we just build it that way. And that's how we really got to learn how to build MySQL queries, which MySQL and SQL are very similar that you can change things here and there. But if you know one, it will just take you a couple days to learn the other one. And then, we're running through what you just said, the Microsoft run into performance issues. And now we start thinking, now we got a cache results because some results don't need to be life all the time, so because we were pulling life data all the time.

Alex Sanabria (00:45:30): If the grades already went to it, they're not going to change after a couple years, so we can cache them and then we learn how to create store procedures, then we learn how to create views, which it was the biggest theme of sliced bread for me. Because before I used to write all these queries all the time and then, "Oh, I can just put it in a view and then query that view like it was a table and that table gets.... And then you use the engine of whatever database you are using to do that performance for you." So that's how I got into building queries and things like that.

Rob Collie (00:46:03): That caching layer, just from a technical standpoint, when you start doing caching, what does that look like? How is the cache stored? Is it also stored in MySQL or is it written to the web servers disc or is it held in memory?

Alex Sanabria (00:46:18): So there were two types of cache with it. The first one we created something called flat tables, which there was like an index processing that we created that it will go every hour, we'll run these queries from all these different tables. Some of them were calculated columns, measure columns, all this stuff and it will just save it in another table, so that way we have that in cache. And then, we just save somewhere the timestamp of that table. So we know the last time we run and how fresh is the data and then we create a button to refresh it if we needed to, so that was one of them. And the second one was just to store their results and adjacent file in the user's computer so-

Rob Collie (00:46:56): Oh, okay. Client.

Alex Sanabria (00:46:56): ... so that way, they could see the data wouldn't even have to be online. If you have internet, but you downloaded the latest, you can do your queries and things like that locally. That's the two types of cache that we use.

Rob Collie (00:47:08): Wow. Client side caching, that's really cool. You said that website, the way that it got populated would people would upload spreadsheets to it?

Alex Sanabria (00:47:16): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:47:17): Okay. So let's talk about that. I bet that was fun. Like part of the website that's responsible for ingesting the spreadsheets, that had to be pretty sticky. Could it read any format?

Alex Sanabria (00:47:30): No.

Rob Collie (00:47:30): Did have to be XLSX?

Alex Sanabria (00:47:32): It could read XLSX and CSV, but it was only the first sheet. It wouldn't even look at the rest and you have to click download template and then you fill it and then you upload it. But if you did one on your own, it would probably won't work. And what it will do, it will grab the data and then separate it by comments or by tabs, whatever the file format was and then store that in an array and then go data by data. And there were some validations here and there, but for the most time it worked, there were some people that would put comments in a number, 1,000 comments and that would just gross up all the time.

Alex Sanabria (00:48:08): And at that time I didn't have the skills to just filter that or clean it out up for them. So that was something that we always fight with the creators of the report, because they were like, "Well, you should be able to take that." "Well, I'm telling you just put a number, just do it." But now, with that experience and with the business, that I know how it works, I know it was my fault and I should have figured out a way to clean that data and not put the blame on the customer.

Rob Collie (00:48:34): Yeah. It's a natural thing as you're working your way through the engineering of things, right? It's that human element, right?

Alex Sanabria (00:48:41): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:48:41): And learning the importance of it has really changed everything about how I think since my early days at Microsoft.

Alex Sanabria (00:48:48): There is an acronym that says, "Problem exists between computer and chair." Or something like that. And me and my friend will always use. When they use it, we wouldn't get it. I forgot how it goes.

Rob Collie (00:48:59): Yeah. I've heard that one too. I forget exactly what it is. We'll have to look it up, but yeah, it leaves the user very much in the responsible place, the responsibility zone. Did you use any libraries to digest those spreadsheets or were you cracking open the XLSX file and looking through the XML?

Alex Sanabria (00:49:18): Just cracking it open and looking into it. There were some helpers functions from PHP, but basically, you have to just dig your way into it and get them open. And now, there's some really cool libraries that they'll give you everything you want and they have LOOKUPs and things like that.

Rob Collie (00:49:34): An XLSX file is just a zip file. You can rename it.

Alex Sanabria (00:49:36): Yeah. I just found that out when you told me that last week, I didn't know that. I always thought it was something else.

Rob Collie (00:49:41): You can look inside it. Even Windows Explorer will let you poke around inside an Excel file and look at all the different sheet files and everything. And I think they've changed the way they store it. But there used to be in power pivot models there used to be this one file inside the zip called itemone.data and that was the entirety of the power pivot model, all of the cache data, all the measure definitions, all the relationships, everything was hiding in that one binary blob, hiding inside of the rest of the Excel stuff. And of course, it was always 99% of the file size was in that itemone.data as well. So I've got a couple things I definitely want to talk about, so you've got a number of personal hobbies, you play a lot of soccer.

Alex Sanabria (00:50:23): Play soccer on the weekends. Boxing.

Rob Collie (00:50:27): When was the last time you were in a boxing ring?

Alex Sanabria (00:50:33): February of this year.

Rob Collie (00:50:34): February? Okay.

Alex Sanabria (00:50:34): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:50:34): Do you still train? I would consider sparring with someone. I would consider that to be in the ring. Have you sparred since February?

Alex Sanabria (00:50:42): No, I haven't spared since February. I used to go everyday in the morning, but then my coach couldn't do it anymore. So now, I just go every time I can, which socially once a week. Last sparring was in February and last fight was also in February, which I won.

Rob Collie (00:50:58): Walked out a winner.

Alex Sanabria (00:51:00): Well, I don't know about that because I was the one bleeding, but I won the fight, nobody believe me.

Rob Collie (00:51:05): Scoreboard. Scoreboard.

Alex Sanabria (00:51:06): Someone's got body shots. I don't hit the face enough and look all beat up and then they all look clean.

Rob Collie (00:51:12): I don't know how you do that, man. I can't imagine being no matter how much padding is involved, whatever. I just can't imagine being in a small area with another adult of a similar size as me and the goal is to hit each other. Maybe I would surprise myself, but I'd be very surprised at myself just getting into that situation.

Alex Sanabria (00:51:34): Yeah, it's fun. And when you spar with somebody, it's like a cold to take it easy and just raise the level little by little. Somebody hit you in the face and you see his reaction is fine, okay, you keep going. But if you're hitting him too hard and you know, he can keep up, you relax, but he's sparring. That's what I was used to. But when I had my first fight, I didn't know it was all in from the beginning. I was all scaring the corner and just covering. The coach says you got to go after it. And then, that adrenaline, I love it. I know it sounds dumb that you like getting hit and getting in the ring, but just putting myself in that situation is cool.

Rob Collie (00:52:08): It's clear watching people who do it, that they are definitely getting a charge out of it. All right. So what are your observations of working here versus working other places? It's a different place to work.

Alex Sanabria (00:52:21): I think the biggest thing is that in this company, you really feel like the bosses, you and Kellen, they care about their employees and they show it. It's not like, "Oh, you're a good boy." They put their money where their mouth is, their actions of the malice, their actions, while they're always looking for the best of the company, they're also looking for the best of employee. And there is no reason why you never do one or the other. You don't have to pick. And you don't see that anywhere. Like I said, I worked in a lot of companies and it's never that way. That's the biggest thing.

Alex Sanabria (00:52:52): On top of the talented people that work here, I was always the smart one in all the companies and then to get here and being the average one, it hurts my pride a little bit, but it also challenged me a lot. And even though I'm not a Power BI developer, I like picking in in this Slack channel as a friend. And sometimes I know the answer, "There you go. I answer one. This counts for something."

Rob Collie (00:53:14): I saw you in the client services channel this morning with a little friendly tip about database results and another tool that can be used and things like that. I see you, Alex.

Alex Sanabria (00:53:25): I try to prove myself so they don't think I'm the dumb one.

Rob Collie (00:53:29): Yeah. I don't think anyone thinks that.

Alex Sanabria (00:53:32): But no. And I also love the culture of the company. Everybody is really cool with each other. You can talk about everything you want. People share stories about his family, about work with clients and things like that. And you never feel that you're alone. Like I never feel like, "Oh, I got to figure out this by myself." We were having trouble with the Power BI for advertising, everybody was jumping in. Maybe we don't have full-time somebody, but we were using Anthony and then it was coming Lucio and then DosX did amazing, that she just learned... she learned SQL and start fixing stuff on her own. And just things like that. It was really awesome to see how the team is behind you. You also help us with that.

Rob Collie (00:54:09): AdWords changed their entire reporting API. To the extent you had a data warehouse everybody, it's no longer valid, good luck.

Alex Sanabria (00:54:19): I should pay attention to those email that they would keep saying, "We're going to retire the API." But I didn't think they were going to change their table names and everything. I just thought the API were changing the function. So I believe that's it.

Rob Collie (00:54:30): Yeah. Yeah. We didn't anticipate that Stitch would suddenly like... Stitch didn't do anything, right?

Alex Sanabria (00:54:36): No.

Rob Collie (00:54:37): I think we expected that Stitch was going to adapt to that new API for us and we weren't going to have to deal with it. And then, maybe it just wasn't possible for them to do it, but either way the net result was the same, no data for you.

Alex Sanabria (00:54:49): Yeah, that was crazy. But it also was helpful because before I didn't know what Stitch, how it work or anything like that. If you weren't around, Oracle wasn't around, I would be SOL to fix something like that. And now, we know, we have access and we can fix things. So even though it's suck for a couple months, I think we got a lot of... out of it. And that's one of the biggest things that has been happening with P3 Adaptive. Some problem comes in and we end up on top, learning something new and having more skills. That's also cool.

Rob Collie (00:55:18): Well, oh, that's really gratifying to hear. It's definitely the way that the way that we wanted the company to be. You can be good at business and be a good human at the same time, whereas most people choose to be one or the other. And if you choose to be one or the other, in the end, you still pay for it. So you might as well be holding yourself to both standards all the time. It is harder. I think it works out. I think it's net positive. You end up with a better business when you're thinking about both.

Alex Sanabria (00:55:43): Yeah. And I think that one of the biggest indicators like for you as the owner or CEO, is that they retain in of employers. We all still here and we all still want to be here, especially in these times where everybody's switching jobs. The market is crazy right now and to keep an employee in the company happy, that's not easy feature.

Rob Collie (00:56:01): And I've stayed. I've stayed for some of the exact same reasons. I'm not sure when this was the point where I knew that I was really going to like you was when you told the story about being in a meeting with some of your managers and you were in front of a client when you were working for a consulting agency, a marketing consulting agency of some sort, the client said, "Yeah, what about this? Can we do this?" And you said, "Oh yeah, no problem. I can do that in an hour." And then afterwards, when the client was gone, you got to talking to from your managers. Am I getting that story? Right?

Alex Sanabria (00:56:38): Yeah. I said, "That's easy. We can do it in an hour or something like that." And she said like, "We never said that." You say, "You have to say something." You say, "Oh, that's interesting and report it." But I always been transparent like that. It's going to take me an hour, it's going to take me an hour. But you want me to tell you.

Rob Collie (00:56:55): When you told that story I was like, "Oh, you came to the right place." Because you were telling that story as like something that annoyed you. And it wasn't like when they told you that you were like, "Oh, that's how it is. Oh, I'm so glad for the lesson." Right?

Alex Sanabria (00:57:08): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:57:08): You told this story was like, that's bullshit and I hate that stuff, right? And I'm like, "Oh, that's us."

Alex Sanabria (00:57:14): Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:57:17): If it's easy, you might as well be transparent about it, right?

Alex Sanabria (00:57:21): You scared me for a second. I thought you we were talking about the Cancun story that-

Rob Collie (00:57:24): I liked you long before that. I wasn't going to make you tell that story. Let's just say don't ever screw Alex over and lock up his passport. It's going to end. He's going to have his passport.

Luke Pirozzoli (00:57:41): Wait a second. I don't know if I've heard the rest.

Alex Sanabria (00:57:52): What happened is that I went to Cancun and I rented an ATV and I was leaving the next day. I was coming back to Chicago the next day. And then I told the guy, "What time?" Because they were asking for a $400 deposit or to leave your passport. I was like, "Okay, I'll leave my passport." And I was like, "What time do you guys close because I leave tomorrow?" And he said, "Oh, we close at 8:00." "All right, cool." So we went out on the ATV. We were back at 6:00 and it was closed. The place was shut down and he had some huge windows, very thick, nice looking windows. And they were all, shut down, locked, there was nobody there. Then the guy left me his number. I call him and just he hang up on me, he was just being rude.

Alex Sanabria (00:58:35): And then somebody told me that the hotel next to it, they work together or something like that. So I asked the hotel and she started texting him and he was replying. "Just told him to go to hell. It's not your fault that he's an idiot and can't plan for his trip." And then, I still kept my calm and told her, "Tell him, I'll give him $100. He just comes and opens and gives my passport." And you know, she text him that. And he still like, "No, tell him to hell again. I'm not doing nothing. He's an idiot." Just being so freaking rude. And just when I was pissed, "All right, thank you." And I go, I check it in there. I look at the establishment and I'm pretty sure he put my passport in that notebook. And I look at the back and there was a little window, I think I can a sneak in there. So I tried to [inaudible 00:59:23], like people think we're skinnier than we actually are. So I couldn't feel my tummy.

Alex Sanabria (00:59:32): I got back and then I was desperate and because I needed to be in Chicago because I had to take son school or something like that. Anyway, long story short, I grabbed a rock, I look at the windows. I just waited for a time where a big truck came in. So it make a lot of noise.

Luke Pirozzoli (00:59:45): That's awesome.

Alex Sanabria (00:59:49): I broke the stupid window. I walk in and I look for my passport and it wasn't in the notebook. Oh, my God. So then, I look at the one like a big security box with a code-

Rob Collie (00:59:57): Safe, right?

Alex Sanabria (00:59:58): A safe. It was a safe. I like, "Crap, I'm not going to be able to open this safe." And then, I just look on top of the safe and the code was right there of the safe. These guys were just idiot. I found my passport. I take it out and I was just going to walk out for the same window that I broke. Well, no, I'm going to walk on. I never walk in from the same windows. So I broke the other one next to it and I left. The only problem was I cut my hair pretty bad. The second hit I think karma or God were like, "Okay, we gave you the first one."

Rob Collie (01:00:32): We gave you the safe. We gave you the window and it wasn't enough for you, wasn't it? You wanted more.

Luke Pirozzoli (01:00:45): [inaudible 01:00:45].

Rob Collie (01:00:45): It was locked up in the safe.

Alex Sanabria (01:00:51): Yeah. So yeah, I got my passport and I left and those windows are super expensive from what I heard.

Luke Pirozzoli (01:00:56): Oh, man. Fantastic.

Alex Sanabria (01:00:57): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:01:00): Well, Alex, I'm glad we did this. I have to know some pieces of the story that were... that I didn't know, that were really, really important. What a cool human story. I'm glad we did this, but I'm of course so grateful that we cross paths. Another one of those happy accidents. You've really, really, really been a godsend for our efforts. And personally, I really enjoy working with you. I enjoy knowing you.

Alex Sanabria (01:01:24): Yeah, same here. I've always be very grateful for taking a chance of me. And then, last year I think I met you at work. Kellan, helped me figure out things to get my house and that was incredible. I was only here for like six months, for you guys to take a chance of me that big and stuff like that. It was amazing. So I'll make sure you guys never regret it.

Rob Collie (01:01:45): We never will, man. Seriously. This is the old fashioned thought, right? Is that two things. Number one, that people are stronger together when they collaborate. And number two, companies do something for the world while doing something for the people who work there. That's the transaction. That's the way I always looked at things. Companies, especially in the US really aren't viewed that way anymore, right? It's all about multiple. It's all about free cash flow and all those sorts of things, which are all nice. I'm not against those things. I like high multiples. I like lots of cash flow.

Rob Collie (01:02:20): That fundamental thing of we do something for each other while we're doing something for the world is really how we're wired. Like biologically we're wired to work that way. I love it. So of course, you get your house, whatever it take. We'll help you fight the bureaucracy. Fighting bureaucracy, that's just... that's like apple pie and baseball and stealing your passport back from the bastard who locked it up. It's on the right side of the equation. So, I hope that we have many more years working with each other, knowing each other and someday we'll meet in person.

Alex Sanabria (01:02:58): Yeah. Soon.

Rob Collie (01:03:00): Yeah, it's coming. It's coming.

AUDIO (01:03:02): Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast. Let the experts at P3 Adaptive help your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Have a day today.