IT Leaders

Very different than Mitch's because I'm really going to focus on the last three years and not start back with my first job at Dairy Queen when I was 14. But I'll get going. This is just kind of what we've done over last three years here over at Churchill Downs. Still, with all the interviewing we've done, we've more than doubled our IT internal department over the last three years. I still get folks who are local who come and interview and don't really have that depth of understanding of how different we are and we're not just a track, right?

So, 2021, dollars 1,600,000,000.0 revenue company. We're about $2,700,000,000 now. The $1.6 it gets a little weird because of the pandemic. But we've more than doubled, and I will say that what we've doubled with has been acquisition and construction. We even have our own director of construction who reports straight to the COO now.

It didn't exist three years ago. And we've really become a pretty massive player in the regional gaming space. If you've ever been to Derby City Gaming, that's the HHR space. We have Derby City Downtown, we've built those facilities across Kentucky and are building them as I speak. But what we had, when I first took over as CTO three years ago I'd been with Churchill since 2011, but I had been recruited directly into an acquisition that they had acquired, United Tow, a year before that, and I had run that business for ten years.

Similar to Mitch, I'd been in that role for a very long time. I really liked running that business unit. It's fun to run a business unit, to be open, but I'd done it for ten years. I'd been first year I was VP of Ops and I'd done it for ten years. I really liked working at Churchill Downs.

And when the CTO role opened up, my background I'd been in IT. I'd been a CIO as the regional CIO and then a global head of infrastructure for a local company, Sud Khemi, which used to be called United Catalyst, those who've in Louisville for a long time, and now is Clariant, so it's changed names over the years. But I've been doing that for a few years, started at GE. But I wanted to get I wanted to grow with Churchill and I knew that this was an opportunity with the CTO position because one thing to be the P and L lead for a small business, another thing to go be the CTO as we looked towards all this new growth, and it was in the pipeline. So, the three key acquisitions in 2022 that were huge, the majority of this growth in terms of revenue was through our P2E acquisition, Peninsula Pacific Entertainment.

It was Colonial Downs and the Seven Rosies Gamings in Virginia, Del Lago Resort and Casino in the Finger Lakes, or that area, and Hard Rock Sioux City. So Churchill actually owns the Hard Rock Casino in Sioux City. What I inherited when I kind of jumped over the fence and I don't even want to say it was inheriting of the IT department as it was from a corporate standpoint, but overall as a company, one of the first things the CEO said to me when I was in my new role was, Three or four months ago, Nate, I was very proud of being a holding company of a lot of great companies. And he goes, Now we need to be a corporation. So and it was we were all staring down to seize acquisition.

We weren't really built for ingesting all that new acquisition growth. We had a few builds under our belt, but it was definitely something where, over the many years when we acquire or divest a business, the entire IT department would just stop what they're doing and go focus on this project for the next five months. And then when they get done, they say, Okay, where you know, what do we need to get back to operational growth? And that was not going to scale with this massive amount of growth that we were taking on. Another nuance of technology when it comes to gaming, when you do a gaming floor, everything's local.

You can't put anything in the cloud for regulatory purposes. So those regulators in New York want to be able to walk into a room at that facility, see a VMware stack, know that all the applications are there. I mean, there's a few variances. Obviously, your financial ERP system can still be central, but anything that touches that gaming floor, of the 60 apps that go into a major gaming facility with 1,000 machines, it's going to be in that somewhere hosting that VM on-site. Maybe a little bit of cloud touching cloud now as we've continued to advance our loyalty program with our Fast Track.

You know, if you guys have ever Caesars Rewards, we now have Fast Track. If you go to any of our facilities across the country, we've kind of co branded, and we still are going to integrate those as we go. I'm looking at John, who's in the BI team, who helps that. But basically, inherited a team that had grown organically and really through almost feel like under duress. And then a company that was kind of, as a whole, whether it be finance, HR, operations, that wasn't used to the scale we were about we pretty much had already signed up for because the deal had not closed, but we were headed down that path.

So, overall, I realized quickly it wasn't going to be so much about technology. In fact, I had some good quotes here I was thinking about. It's all about changing culture, not just in the IT department, but starting to about how you can change culture as a business. And really thinking about as I was thinking about bringing up so many leaders, we had a very flat leadership structure in IT, and one of the first things I did was we really need to create a new layer as we grow of management. So as we start to do that, natural thing is to look at your natural talent and leaders and your individual contributors or even your lower level managers and say, Who can take that next step?

Because we're going create a whole other layer here as we grow. So what we did at that time, I went up it was February 2022 that I took the role. By April by the way, through all this growth, we got to make sure that we have a flawless Kentucky Derby, as you guys can imagine. May April, May is our busiest time of the year, very technology focused event. But some of the things first was, okay, let's restructure IT.

Let's build a bigger company IT structure. To be frank, I even took the business line, Position for Growth 2022 structure there. That's kind of the overall way, conceptually, that we reorganized IT. I took it to my boss, the CEO, and said, This is the way I think about the verticals. He's like, Yeah, that makes sense, which kind of gives you a feel for where we were in 2022.

Now we talk about our verticals all the time. We talk about our we call them segments. But at the time, it wasn't something we even thought about. Like, Well, you know, why isn't Churchill Downs in there with some of the racy nose in gaming? We treat it different.

Churchill has a very different model than Fairgrounds, which has got a full Class III, Class III would be like Vegas style casino and a racetrack. But we really are at those kind of facilities, we're much more gaming forward. You have more gaming leadership. But at Churchill, it's really about the derby and about racing. So that's a separate vertical.

All those new gaming facilities going into that other and then trying to figure out how do we take what we had, which was a very infrastructure focused team, and put it into a structure that aligns with the business because it's no longer as easy as it was before to just go upstairs and talk to people. You know, we were running six projects a year on average before, I took over. Those were six projects that you could go talk to the CEO, the COO, the senior leaders of each now vertical and you could explain to them where you are. We were rapidly ramping up to 32 projects, right? And that includes in construction, major, major projects.

And so it was a huge change in just the structure and how we did it. From that saying, creating controllers from governance. You know, it was a very rapid change. We obviously, massive amounts of hiring needed. We needed to get going and then there's the added layers of management.

We also looked at you know, as I looked at that, and this was something where I think I brought some of the P and with me, said, Where's my support structure? So as I come in, you know, if I was running the P and L, we were kind of a holding company. I had that. I had really good finance support. I had good HR support.

And one of the things before, I took over as CTO, there was no dedicated HR for IT. It was kind of a shared resource. Finance was kind of like more just accounting, you know, for IT and so saying, Hey, where we need to go? I had a lot of support from the CEO, I will say, that was also helpful, but he was looking at it and saying, Yeah, you're going need this. You're going to need these extra resources, And that was great because we identified that quickly as we thought about all the things we need to do.

Because we wanted to make sure and one of the things I sold early on is that we didn't just inherit businesses and just leave them with their tech stacks. It was basically going to become inefficient very rapidly. And as I said, if you give me double my current headcount, the next time we double, I'll give you 10% growth. So instead of 100% growth, we can get there, but we've got to build the how and because at the time, we, as a medium I always overdo how small we were because we were already kind of getting pretty big we were very much a culture of can do, but we weren't a culture of how you do it. It was just get it done.

Wasn't as blatant as pre the assembly line. We didn't have everything broken up, not broken up and everything custom, but we weren't that different because everybody wore a lot of hats. I kind of get into that a little later. But also, starting to think about process. So bringing back fundamentals, like we started sending everyone across the entire IT department to ITIL training.

Right? Let's get back to what's an incident. We needed a ticketing tool that was modern and we needed a common understanding more than the ticketing tool even, common understanding what tickets what we're doing with the tickets, metrics, etcetera. These were things that we just didn't have to do before that or we did it, it was very basic because we weren't that big and we weren't it wasn't necessary. So, go on to the next one.

So, again, looking at this from a scalability lens of where we were in 2022. We had a great IT department, very infrastructure focused. We had folks we were very flat. We had folks with 16 direct reports. Mitch mentioned, you know, 11 was tough.

I've always heard eight. My wife, who's a leader, would say seven. Issues were there. In that infrastructure group, you had the two folks that were focused on corporate applications. It was very black and white of what we own or what we don't own.

If we didn't own it, it was ownership was kind of murky. Typically, that was applications because of all that rapid growth. We were already starting to run overcapacity, especially if you started to take into account what our maintenance cycles were. And everything's execution focused. When the corner offices came down and said, We have a new acquisition.

We're going to do X. It was like, Drop everything. Focus on the execution of that. We'll come back to whatever we're working on in six months or whenever that's over and we'll go to the next one. A lot of process was tribal knowledge.

You know, I think we had grown a fair amount before that but more steady versus this massive doubling in a year or two. And so, that tribal knowledge really hurt us because there might have been a document, but was the last 10 people we hired aware of that document and where it was and what it meant in terms of standards, etcetera? We were lower volume, so there had not been a lot of effort and probably justifiably not effort into those repetitive tasks that IT does, more automation, right? But we were rapidly hitting the engine. And so that hands on, very much pride in do it ourselves.

I think some of this comes from that focus on the Kentucky Derby every year, where it's like, You got to make sure it's perfect. So we're not going to go mess around with a vendor we bring in for a month. We're going to do it ourselves. Big focus on infrastructure, talked about varied tech standards. That was more because we didn't have a culture where, when we did have an acquisition, where we automatically said, We need to get to our standards.

I think we had some good progress as a company from InfoSec before I started as CTO, but it wasn't normal for someone to go upstairs and say, Hey, we just acquired this new company. I need this network. I need these basic fundamental standards. So we were very active, as you can imagine, medium, small. When I started in 2011, again, I was doing United Tote, but IT was 15 people.

I think it might have been less. So it was a very small group over a very brief period. By the time I took over, it was about 60 ish. We're now up to 154, roughly. So maintenance was treated as projects.

It was actually an interesting dynamic in that everything we did, if it didn't get put into a project or a project manager, it definitely suffered. And we didn't you know, if you wanted to go figure out what you want to do next year in terms of network refresh, it was a project itself to go do the research because there wasn't an easy access to some of that data. We had a lot of technical debt and little like I said, very little focus on how, just do, you know? So what we're staring down, which was a little daunting, was thousands of new employees. We literally now have approximately 10,000 employees, anywhere between 9,010 right now.

With user base, you know, we've more than doubled our user base over the span of three years. We had to support the redevelopment of those sites. We had to support just because you acquire something doesn't mean you need it day one, especially when you're in a gaming environment where things are 20 fourseven, your busiest times are weekends, you don't want to shut down that facility the day you purchase it if you can afford it. So there's going be a transition phase. How do we support the Aruba Networks when we're a Cisco shop, etcetera.

And then delivering continuing to deliver on these critical parts of the business that we needed to keep running, that we'd owned for a long time, whether it be Fairgrounds, Calder, Churchill Racetrack, but also fundamentally changed the way we work and getting out of that mode where before, you basically had that pat on the back if you were the hero, that meant that a lot of other stuff got dropped if you were a senior leader because you were over there doing the hero work while everything else kind of fell apart. So, go next. Oh, I already talked about the fundamentals. I think I skipped a slide ahead, so I did this one first. So small to big, we talked about kind of where we headed.

So a lot of that, it's hard to talk about the three year journey we've been on. Some folks in the room have been on that. I think Dan's around here, too, came in early as a governance lead. Again, go back to standards. We didn't have that culture of look outside.

We were so proud of doing things internally. I think it was very rare that we were going out, very low conference attendance, etcetera, and saying, Hey, we're going to be this fast, change the culture to say best practices. Go borrow from big steel, look at ITIL, look at COBIT. We started going to Leadership Louisville, which I know is coming to the next speaker. Said, How do I take a lot these leaders who are new?

And 2022 was a brutal time to hire, for those that remember, so there wasn't a big market. We're also a five day and have been probably since six months after COVID originally hit. We're five day in the office company. We've never been a remote work company, so hiring all this staffing, the first round of hires after I kind of put the new org structure in was 37 people we needed. I was naive thinking, Let's go.

Let's just go hire, hire. You get the approval, you're like, You got it. It took us forever to hire that many, especially when you're calling people in '22 saying, We want you in Louisville, Kentucky. You're not from Louisville. Everybody had a job, you know, at that time.

It was very, very tight. And then, We want you to be in the office five days a week. So it was very difficult. One of the things, too, was thinking about the shift in mindset. So starting basically with some new things like the chess thing, which I came up with, which was really starting to get out of that mode of firefighting for non critical things.

So there was a lot of, like, Hey, this happened. Let's do that. Let's just quickly fix it. And then it would happen again in three months. So trying to bring we talked about continuous improvement, holistic thinking, so build for scale.

We weren't ever that wasn't our culture. It wasn't like, Okay, we're going do this and we're going to make sure that it's what we're doing today will last us if we're going to do it for the next five, ten years. It was like, What do we do today to get us to the next day? Now we need to start thinking about, even if we didn't choose the option of the scalability, we need to see what it was and educate ourselves on what that future looks and then we could decide whether or not we're going to stay where we are. But generally, I was pushing teams who had been used to being told kind of, Hey, keep it tight to give me the option that lasted us the next ten years if we keep growing.

Execution, of course. As much as I said, Hey, we're so execution focused before, you just need to think about how. You have to change the way you do it, but the reason we're all here and we're leaders is because we know how to execute. If you don't know how to execute, then you can't get things done. You don't get there.

And then simplification and standardization. So that was around the documentation standards, etcetera. We implemented a quarterly IT excellence award because what was very important to me was to bring along the team who and we went from a light gas push to a full on slam the gas down and get going. And so part of that was building this new culture around, you know, awards. We did the IT excellence awards quarterly.

We built the peer recognition system, where people can start awarding each other because we don't get to slow down that business growth while we wait to hire those 37 people. And so a lot of this was making sure everybody and doing my best to make sure everybody could see the future in IT so that when we're asking them to kill themselves to integrate that next business while we're hiring, they know that the cavalry is coming because that's a big thing that's important for motivation. You can't say, Go kill yourself to get this place inside, and then they think that they're going to be back in that overwhelming thing nonstop. And so part of that was making sure that people could see we were moving in the right direction and that helped as you asked people to really put you know, push themselves to standardize as much as possible. We've also been continuing this process as we look at we have a new purpose architecture we worked with that came out of the Six Cs discussion as we think about why are we here, what's our purpose as IT, how do we fit the bigger picture.

Overall, I mean, my notes is 99% has been around people. We had the right elements of technology out there. We just weren't using them in the way that scaled as well. And so a lot of it is around bringing the people along and then integrating the new people and bringing in also new ideas and making sure that when new people join, you're saying, Okay, what can you bring to the table? And borrowing what they may have best practices from, whether it be you know, we've hired from everywhere, all over the country, Humana, UPS, etcetera.

I know David's here. So we've brought in a lot. But I started thinking of, like, what are some lessons learned? And they're a little odd because I think it's not every day. I started out in industrial businesses, so my first job right out of college was with GE Industrial Systems in Connecticut, not even Appliance Park because appliances, like people are but industrial, it was hardcore, electrical switchgear and that kind of thing.

I started out there. Then I went to SUKEMI. We talk about a big multinational catalyst company out of Munich. And so what were you I was in the IMLP program right at a school with GE, which is the Information Management Leadership Program, they were training us about you could tell when we did these six month training, it was like getting us used to, like, cutting and, you know, generally industrial, the margins are lower and you're always kind of trying to be hyper efficient but also be pretty cheap. And so when I took this role as CTO three years ago, it was different.

It was like, grow. Grow, design, build, but it wasn't systems. It was people, org structures, etcetera. And so, I think, again, this is a little unique, but I do think some of this is just something consciously think about. Because some of this actually, as I started to sum it up, we did consciously think about, at least at a leadership level.

And some of it's just kind of, like, natural, right? But I think it's interesting to talk through some of these. So from hero to architect, you know, we talk about, even our leadership, those mid tier leaders and even some of our senior leaders, you know, you've got to delegate aggressively. You have to actually constantly say, I'm going to start giving this stuff away, because you can't scale if you're involved in a bottleneck at all costs. Supposed be probably the people who can solve problems without you.

So I'll tell you that there's a challenge even changing the culture of IT, but also changing the image of IT with the rest of the business because they're like, Well, why can't I just come to the Vice President of Ops and have him solve my PC issue? Right? And that was not, like, an ongoing thing, but it still happened, right? And we still have talked a lot about how do we create that white glove service because, really, a lot of IT was white glove service across the board, not just for the senior leaders. And we're still in that process.

But a lot of it is, you know, we're I had the advantage that right at the beginning of growth, I was the senior leader who came in and started with fresh eyes. And some of the other leaders had been there all along and took them a little longer, you you could tell, to start kind of realizing, Oh, woah, you know, this is different. You know, I can't have that meeting where we talk through every initiative. It just isn't going to work. Like, would be, you know, an all day meeting.

And so part of that is, again, what I would say a lot to the team over the last few years is control what we can. Don't be stressed that HR hasn't updated their process yet. They're coming. But get into where we can be an example, we can move ahead, we can document the process, we can give them the interface that makes sense, and we can partner with them and they'll come along. It has been that way.

We've moved ahead and the other teams come along because it just is natural. There's not really a way to avoid the changes that come with this level of growth. So this is a classic. Firefighting and strategic planning, getting the teams out of that mode of constant firefighting, everybody most people, if you ask them, intellectually, they hate firefighting. But it's really an addiction.

So getting people to get out of that addictive mode of, Hey, when you start to remove that firefighting, when you start to like, we brought in something that I used to at GE called QMI where we look at all the major severity incidents every two weeks and we say, What can we do? Come prepared. What can we do to not have that happen again? You start to reduce naturally your sevs and you can see there's a few people that are in that love that firefighting mode where they say and they deepen their hearts really don't like it, but the adrenaline, etcetera, and they start to feel a little lost at sea. Because all of sudden, it's like, Well, I have to start thinking about, I always wanted this, but now I don't know how I have to plan, because it doesn't mean that I need to plan.

And so we've made a lot of progress on that, but it was definitely a shift. I saw that actually when I first took over United States, too. We were an operational service business for the racing industry. And when I first started, there wasn't even ticketing. And we had 80 customers across the country.

And it's like getting people out of that mindset takes time. Like, this is stuff where can put the process in place, but it's not like you can just say, Stop being addicted to this constant flow of unplanned work. We need to start planning the work and get out of that mode. This is a tougher one, and I wanted to make sure I brought up a few points on this. So it I knew this at the beginning, but it was harder to articulate.

I think some of this is from family to professional team, right? We weren't tiny, but we'd grown together. And I'd say we because I'd kind of been over there running P and L separate from IT but I could tell I knew the team, I knew of the team. We were small. And it was very family oriented.

The town halls were small. And that's just not possible at 154 people. And so how do you change that culture? You know, I had some good notes here, but, you know, the family professional team is like, you've got to start focusing on more communication, back to some of the stuff we did around, you know, what I didn't show earlier, you see, like, bits and bytes. We started a newsletter.

We started and that was something they did at the company before, but now we had an IT newsletter. We started putting all the information in it. It went out to not just the corporate IT teams, but all the directors of IT at all the different on-site IT at each site and started doing that. So a lot of it is clarity of communication. You have to start doing that because you can't do the one offs anymore and assume it will spread.

You have to get formal or more formal. You know, we try to keep it light. But I think if you try to maintain that family, you know, feel when you're adding 70 new people and you're going through all this, you know, one of the things trying to maintain that family can lead to favoritism. It can lack accountability because you have those folks who are like, Oh, I've been in the family longer. You know, it's that informality doesn't work at scale.

And so, it was something that early on I remember actually talking to my boss saying, Hey, we're going to change. It's going be less of a family field. For IT, it's going be more of like a big group of people that really respect each other professionally and get along very well. It's going to change. You know, a lot of it was the structured communication and it's continuing and even I feel it.

You know, I know a few folks here in the org. When we first started growing, I always would ask for the last interview. And really, it was only a thirty minute interview, the only time I got to that interview, even if it wasn't in my purvey, was if one of my folks said, This is the one. And so it wasn't because I was actually interviewing. The person didn't know it, they were already in.

I just wanted to make sure I had FaceTime with that person and they got to know me personally because we were growing so fast. But we grew so fast that eventually that had to become the first week or two they joined the company. Now it was like, No, I'm not going get into the interview process. I'll just have them schedule thirty minutes with me post. So still working hard to keep the face to face so that I'm not walking down the hall and someone doesn't even know me or hasn't met me as a person but not putting myself we kept changing as we went, not putting myself into a bottleneck situation where I like, Oh, I'd really like to meet this person in thirty minutes.

But we still do that because it's still important because there's still groups now with all our growth and specialization, which I'll get to, that I don't interact with as much. Have to make a concerted effort, especially as a CTO, as we try to keep the team going. So again, I think it's very difficult when you're at 155 versus sixty, seventy to keep that family. We're probably at the edges before. From generals to specialists, right, as you grow, first of all, it makes financial sense now to say, Okay, I need more depth of experts in this area, instead of the general hats, everyone wore.

This was a big one for InfoSec, because before, when I inherited the team, a lot of folks had been there a long time and they'd rolled from system administration to InfoSec back over here and guess what? They kept their credentials the whole time. And so, some of that is also professionalizing. We need to really tighten this up. We need to get specialized teams.

We started to build out we didn't have an applications team at all, so we created the business relationship management group that we started putting applications on and aligned them with those verticals. But, again, starting to specialize. I think that was a big shift, too, over the last three years, was getting people to realize that it's not black and white. Ownership isn't black and white. It used to be, We own it or We don't own it.

And so some of that is, We own things at different levels. Ultimately, what I did, as scary as it was and even daunting a bit for me, was saying, We own it all. If it's technology, we own it. But we own it at different levels. Because ownership in the old days was with Churchill, our culture was, if we own it, we know it, we have people who literally could build that system, application, whatever it is.

That doesn't work at our scale. It's like there's levels of ownership. If it's your ERP financial system, you probably want a deep bench. You know, if it's the contract management system that flows things through, you just need to have the way for someone to call, get help, and then the third party that you can start to work with to help support that. So a lot of that was starting to get in those really kind of racy type things of, Yeah, call us.

We own it. It's not, We don't own it because we don't have the depth. It's more getting those more structured ways of thinking about ownership and where we own same like, if we inherited a site, we couldn't integrate their network right away, we couldn't bring it to our standards. Yeah, we don't have a deep bench of Aruba, you know, networks folks, but we still own it. Call us.

We'll figure it out. We'll have a small contract. We'll bring that along until we can integrate it. So that was a big shift because before, I think it was more like, you know, I don't know who you call, but, again, trying to be the helpers. Think Mitch brought that up.

You you never want to be the person that calls like, That's not us. You know, you could say, That's not us, but or, That is us. Let me take that, handle it for you and be that service oriented person and call that third party. But also, again, adjusting customer expectations because we're not going to have this deep bench if we say we own it. We're going be able to take it, probably solve some basic stuff and then we'll bring in a third party and we'll manage that relationship.

And then generalist to specialist, we talked about, and then bootstrapping into strategic outsourcing. Really, think that was something because we were so focused in house, there was a brief period every year at Derby where we might bring a few folks in, but we really continue to work on building vendor management skills, and that's something that's really, I'd say, anyone who wants to grow needs to lean into, you know, if you're not doing it already. But that's been a tougher one, too, because, first, that comfortability to say a vendor. A lot of times when you go to a third party, especially when you're such an in house shop, it's that fear of, like, they'll never do as good. I have kind of harsh opinions where it's like, Well, if they're not doing that vendor's not doing as good for us as and you think they're awful, it's probably us that's managing them inappropriate most of the time.

So a lot of that is continuing to build those skills, but really focusing on how can I make sure that I'm not doing things that are not strategic to the business? Or if I am, I'm doing them in a limited way and moving up that that's how we scale. Like, think a lot about people, teams. This is a process a lot of this is still ongoing, but we're getting there. We got to outsource SOC recently.

The nice thing with growth is, like, we didn't affect any of our existing SOC employees. We just added that on top. Now we have much better metrics and services overnight. We're working on third party service desk right now. We keep looking at places to flex because that also, as our CEO is a big fan of acquisition growth, so need we to constantly be ready for that next thing, and I know the folks in here will hear me say over the last three years, Is this solution one where if Bill Carstangean, our CEO, popped up and said, We're going to grow again.

We're going to double. Will this solution handle that? Or how do we do that? And if it doesn't, then we need to talk. So really putting it through the lens of, We're growing.

We're going to keep growing. Are you building for the future and not for the now? Generally, though, I think hopefully, picked up on this. It's about the it's really about people and leading the people through that, because we had a lot of the great technical skills, but it really a huge shift in how we work, and it continues. Like, right now, we have a course going on today, second day of a course, to bring 25 people through Lean Six Sigma intro, right?

Continuing to build that culture of and part of that is that build that continuous improvement. Building in those processes. We didn't have those maintenance processes built into our structure. It was more, Hey, when do this year, let's go do this project to replace those switches versus there will always be that happening. There's a constant rotation of switches or equipment or software updates, etcetera, and that's still something we're much better at, but we still are working through the culture.

It's helped because we brought in a lot of folks from other things that kind of say, This doesn't feel weird. This feels normal, but it's still something that we're working through because we still, you know, we just announced three weeks ago we're acquiring a, we haven't closed yet, but we should close in the next couple of days, new facility in New Hampshire. So, we're building we'll be opening up Roshire, a full facility down in Virginia in a month and a half. So we're still doing that and trying to grow folks, and my thing is to think through how to, like, infect people's brains with some of these concepts and ways of thinking back to the whole thing of, You've got to train people to do this stuff because you can't control everything from the top. We're way past that.

It's really how do you get people to think through efficiency, growth, scalability, and it's continuous improvement. That was what I wanted to cover. So questions? A couple of questions. You brought a lot of people from individual contributors at the beginning of this journey up into leadership roles.

Everybody successful at it? Some. I would say my gut tells me the majority. You know, we had a few that, self mostly self ejections. So and a few that struggled because I wasn't joking, and I think everybody else I'd say that I pushed the gas really fast, but it was a reaction at that point to the business growth, right?

So we had to move, we had to change our mindset, and we had to do it quick. And so I think, yeah, there were some people that didn't make it. The good news is most, I feel like, have. But it's tough. I think part of that, too, is when your infrastructure group, which was 80% of IT at the time, becomes just a quarter of IT, right?

So there's also a psychology of the importance, you know? Like, I used to be the kings and now we have this huge applications group and they're focused on these bigger applications. We're in the midst of an SAP. We didn't have a professional I'd say we had a very basic sourcing system before. Now we have Ariba.

You know, all these things have grown extremely fast and that lack of hands on, you know, that infrastructure focus to that breadth of focus has been tough, though I don't feel like we're I try not to favor any one team. It's really around where we are, but it is different, you know? All of sudden, those teams might have been interacting even with their own vice president over their area more often, now they're kind of as you build process, the good news is sometimes you don't need to be in that room all the time. You've got things to run, but, again, you lose some of that camaraderie that you naturally have when you're out working together in a room to solve that crisis. You know, so I think it's yeah, it's been interesting.

But we've been able to really tough, we've taken individual career, and now they're senior director in three years. So we've been able to really it's been a great place for the folks that had a lot of talent to just shine and move quick. Are you able to keep in touch with the skip level people, you know, two notches down? That's still something I feel okay at it, I think we've actually been talking more about continuing that to enhance that process, just to keep in touch. Especially because even for me, we're running 32, 34 different major projects at a time.

I get all the updates. I read through the weekly updates from the different project managers. We've massively expanded our project manager. We have 18 folks in our PMO that's under IT that we have, and we kind of provide basic PMO for most of the company, but we had five, I think, when I started. So it's definitely tougher.

And so a lot of times, I actually interact with some of those leads and the lower leads through projects when they're doing updates, etcetera. But even I, you know, I was one of those leaders that was, like, keeping up with everything, eventually, it's like, I can't sit and go through every single project every week. Like, it would just be a four hour day. So it's really focusing on a lot of it is, you know, I think as a leader is truly being good at your experience and prioritizing. Because I think if you looked at where we were three years ago, we did you know, a year before I was CTO, we got our first expense report system.

We were doing paper expense reports before that. So I don't we weren't that small. We didn't have lot of travel, right? We were again, it wasn't this focused on this bigger corporation type processes, but I think where we came, we've come a long way in three years, applications and operations wise.

I'm in

a high growth environment in our second PI where we've had burnout is like the common theme across the board. How have you dealt with burnout? And then how do you communicate? Because we're working on hiring resources. So how do you communicate like, hey, this sucks.

There's more people coming.

It was a little bit of being very open and saying, This sucks. There's more people coming. A lot, right? And so trying to communicate all over communicate, whether it be in the quarterly, we do a quarterly town hall where we bring all two fifty because we talk about all the on-site IT as well, though they're less impacted because you might have four or five folks at a casino that do the hands and feet and some of the direct work there, and just talk about we always put open positions. We've emphasized heavily, we have a referral program for internal employees, and part of that is keeping really keeps the forefront that we're hiring, right?

So I think that's been a lot of it. But burnout's been a huge stressor because, especially back in 2022, when all this onslaught was hitting us, it was a brutal hiring market, right? Things have completely changed, I think, over the last few months, but 2022 was brutal. I mean, watch, with all the hiring we've done, I could tell you, like, a project manager, you know, entry level project manager is now 30,040 thousand dollars more expensive than it was three years ago. So certain roles, InfoSec is tough as hell no matter what.

But we watched. It was like this weird thing. First time in career, I actually could see the market change, you know, as you moved and it was difficult because, also, we didn't have a great structure around that either. So we were trying to make managers and we had all sorts of imbalances and strangeness in the salaries and stuff like that. So a lot of this was also and the world was changing, as we all know.

So you might have hired someone and have to already be adjusting their salary a year later because you're now having to bring in more people as you hire more. And so a lot of it was also working very closely. I had really great HR support and a few folks know the folks great HR support. And that helped, too, because but that was another one where you started to bump against some of the old ways that we thought about this stuff as a company outside of IT. And so we worked with HR and kind of, I'd say, brought them along but really partnered and say, Hey, this is changing.

This is legit. This is not you know, we're not the market's changing rapidly and we need your help to standardize some job descriptions, standardize titling, bring in new leaders, but we still you know, it's still a tougher thing, we're in a much better situation there, too. But, yeah, a lot of it was constantly communicating that more folks are coming, but also some of it was when we started to kind of bring in some more externals, especially into some of the team lead roles, that helped because a lot of the times, it was our folks had been loyal to us for a long time, had been there most of them had been there a very long time, and having someone that parallels you, because we created kind of a dual structure in most areas where it'd be like at the time, it was like, Okay, we'll create a team leader or a director of growth, a team leader, director of core, instead of ops versus, you know, projects, right? And part of that was my attempt to say, Hey, these are the folks we need for the growth, but trying to parallel those two, one internal, one external.

So when you bring someone in and say, Hey, we're running an ITIL. We're going to roll a whole new ITSM tool out, we're going to really dedicate ourselves, and some of the folks we've been with for a while are like, Yeah, we'll see. But the folks who came from outside are like, Yeah, that's what we do. So it was like getting people to realize, like, This is not that big a deal. It's a big deal for us as a company, but everybody does this.

So some of that was just bringing in fresh blood and making it not seem monumental to bring some of those basics in, get those tickets in, do those processes.

How did you identify which resources to hire first? So, like, right now, because of the common theme of burnout, it's like, oh, we got to hire everybody, right?

Well, open it was a lot of infrastructure because one of the first things I did, I actually, lightly weaponized InfoSec, which I do own. We have a CISO, but, so when we brought this in, you know, it wasn't normal to go up and ask for all the capital, etcetera, when we had acquisition and say, We need this and we need it tomorrow, and it doesn't matter if the equipment that they brought along is only a year old. We need to put in our standards. And so I was able to kind of use, I wouldn't say weaponize, but, you know, use InfoSec as we grew. We also and that helped, you know.

So really, bringing InfoSec in meant infrastructure. So a lot of that first growth was just bringing in the infrastructure that we needed while we built out the business relation management organization, but the immediate, like, need was infrastructure. If you think about it, you're going to do applications, etcetera, you're talking about longer cycle. Like, if you know, we're not talking about building our own application. We're talking about bringing in Ariba and going through all that.

That takes time. So you're building that more slowly, but right away, you're staring down you know, we have slides that we do every year of just infrastructure growth, and we talked about on prem, you know, being a standard for gaming. So it was a huge amount of infrastructure growth. So, and I got buy in for that pretty quick. I'm like, if we're going to manage this at scale, we need to move as fast as we can to integrate the infrastructure, and we used, you know, our firewall, our rubric, solutions around that are more infosec focused to start getting leadership used to, This is what we need.

This is our standard. And then we keep bringing in those standards and it kind of worked down from there. And once everybody got over that that was something we were going to ask for every single time and we get it, we started I started to kind of put under the line that. It wasn't as big of an argument. Was just like, Oh, yeah, this is the thing coming through for IT, new acquisition.

Here's what you need. But again, that was a shift. So it was mostly it felt very obvious of knowing what we needed. We're sitting there and saying, Okay, what do we need at the time? But I think we're I brought kind of my former skills from much bigger enterprises was more around the structure, you know, saying, Okay, here's the structure eventually everyone's going to fit into and we're going to put teams around.

But there were a lot of times where we created, like, a team lead or a management role and that person, because it took so long to hire the new people to go under them, ended up having to do a lot of individual contribution for a while while they continued to build that team. And now we're working through and we've done this for the last two years because it took a lot longer to hire is trying to bring more of those folks into more training around what does it mean to be a manager, how can they lead. But we still have a fair amount of like most organizations, we have a lot of working leads, team leads, etcetera. Over there.

I I love this scalability thing, but I have questions related to this. I I see it as definitely the way to run a steady state organization with great standards and thing. However, I well, how would you address adaptability and innovation? How would you address retention or loss of the family belonging? How would you address cross benefiting from cross experiences across the organization.

So there are I I love this structure in general for a steady state because it's needed. But how would you address these issues? Because they will emerge, obviously.

Yeah. Well, I think, you know, bad luck for me right when this all started, AI, you know, LLMs came out. So good luck for me was that it wasn't this huge focus from our board at the time. It's become obviously something that we are looking at. But it does make it more difficult because really what I would say last year is I consciously knew we weren't out focusing on innovation.

We really needed to bring in tried and true processes, tried and true applications because that's where we kind of were lacking. We have a whole division under our TwinSpires, Unite Tote, our wagering services segment that has a huge amount of development that I don't own that is very focused on customer facing innovation. So if you're a twinspires.com player, you know, you're going to see all sorts of things. Yeah. So it's great.

So, but for McCore IT, was like sometimes you just have to prioritize different. And so for the last three years, the number one priority is getting good at integration. Right now, the team three years ago, we brought in our first, you know, P2E acquisition, we're sitting here talking through and sweating for weeks about how do we do tenant to tenant migration. And now, I'm just relieved when I get told that we're going to acquire a gaming floor because we all know how to do And so I think that we're getting good at that. You know, who knows what the next exhibition will be?

But that's it. I think we just kind of weren't focused like the business didn't need innovation from that last year. They needed to put in standards. We wanted to we would buy a gaming floor. They'd have a separate casino management system.

We had to go through and completely replace it, bring the BI team along, put that in there. I mean they've had to grow a lot, too. I'm looking at John because he's in that division for BI. So it wasn't a big focus. I think that that's something where, like more recently, AI, etcetera, we are looking at that.

But also, more from my background, although I am a CTO, I'd say that, you know, if you look from outside my responsibilities, it's more like a CIO responsibilities. I'm still in that point where to stay efficient, you know, stick with tried and true, try to find stuff off the shelf, tweak it to your needs because probably for me, the last three years is we're going to keep growing. And so trying not to go down some path where you're going to suck a bunch of resources that's less tried and true because we're not as I've said, we're a very special company, but the core business processes we have are not that special. You know, they're if you procurement, need procurement. There's a few things in the gaming, definitely some more things in racing because it's got some uniqueness, whether it be the financial settlements, etcetera.

But right now, we just need the fundamentals. Like, we're implementing SAP, S4HANA Cloud right now. So that's just bringing us off our older ERP system. Also, I would say from a change, you know, the good, bad, whatever, in the midst, I think about a year and a half in, Caesars and MGM got hit very, very hard by external threat actors, Scattered Spider, but that also helped us. I mean, it was very nerve racking, but it also helped us continue that momentum of saying, Hey, we need to be professional.

A well organized central structure for the growth we're on is also a much easier to secure and educate, you know, having all these various different tools, much easier to secure structure. Structure. So I'd say that that's something that I do keep in mind, but it's not at the forefront, you know? The business itself is taking the lead, the business is saying, We're going to grow through acquisition and through builds, and, no one's coming right now and saying, Okay, what's the next big innovative thing to bring those customers in? They've that.

That's usually actually over as we work through marketing and data analytics.

Again, you had the stabilization and standardization as the main

goal. Really, for me, I think of it like a pyramid and the foundation. We're building a really solid foundation. Innovation's at the top of the pyramid. We have parts and pieces.

For me, where I want innovation is for people to continue to go to the conferences, get best practices. So innovation in process versus innovation in technology. What are other people doing that they've figured out whether even sometimes saying, Okay, there's a group over here that has you know, as we look at Identity Access Management, we say, There's a group that's actually outsourced that and it's working well? Okay, let's go figure out how they're doing it and see if that's applicable. So I'd say, for me, it's more of that innovation and process is what I would be focusing the teams on versus, you know, developing new customer facing applications for now.

Nate, thank you. Thank you.