Vervint Introductions | Chuck Tsocanos

00:00:00 Ethan

Welcome to 10,000 feet, the Vervint podcast. My name is Ethan Wyant, and I’m joined today by Chuck Tsocanos to talk a little bit about who he is and what he does for Vervint and go into the future. Welcome, Chuck.

00:00:12 Chuck

Thanks, Ethan. Great to be here.

00:00:15 Ethan

I’m going to start with, you know, a little bit of an introduction. Can you tell us about yourself, your role at Vervint and just you in general?

00:00:23 Chuck

Yeah, sure. I’m the President and chief Consulting officer of Vervint started Jan 1 of this calendar year. I oversee the business, including our go to market, our delivery and our operations. I’m a New Jersey native, born and raised within 10 miles of where I live with my wife and 19 year old daughter, who attends JMU right now. I’ve quickly become a transplant this year, having spent at least half of my waking moments in Grand Rapids and gaining an appreciation for the city and community around here.

As a personal note, I have some hobbies that are in my DNA like playing guitar, gardening, fishing, and the funny thing is, all these have analogies to how we work together as we team and develop, practice, nurture, perform and reap the benefits of working together.

00:01:15 Ethan

Sweet. Thank you. Can you tell me what led you to pursue your career in consulting?

00:01:21 Chuck

Yeah, that’s a great one.  Early on and to this day I have the heart of an engineer. Even as early as nine years old, I recall telling my father I wanted to be an engineer. I always had a habit of taking my toys apart, putting them back together just to see how they worked, frankly, more than I actually, you know, spend time playing with them. 

Eventually I found myself in front of a keyboard, and every time I did, I would try to make it do something like make the computer do something by writing some basic programs, make the screen print things, make sounds, or just poke around under the covers to see inside how things worked on the hardware and software. 

Eventually my parents bought me an Apple 2. When I was around 11 and I never stopped tinkering after that which led me to job after high school. I was driving a little Jeep around the city fixing DOS and Windows and Novell machines. It’s how I learned to build my own PC’s and then a couple years later I found myself interning at IBM, which eventually led me straight into consulting. When I graduated from Rutgers.

00:02:36 Ethan

Could you tell me a little bit about your time at IBM?

00:02:37 Chuck

Sure, sure. IBM was a wonderful place to start my career. I sometimes joke that I still have some blue blood in me. I spent almost 10 years there. When I started, even before I graduated, I really didn’t know what I was getting into. I remember the funny stories after my internship there.

I ended up getting an offer for an IT specialist and I asked my hiring manager. What’s it? What’s the it specialty? He’s like it’s IT, information technology. I’m like, OK, well, what does that mean? He’s like, show up day one and I’ll show you.

So, I kind of got thrown into the fire as a consultant. I remember my first deal; my first project was working at a bank downtown during the Chase Chemical merger. Now it’s JPMC, but they were still merging back then, and I was walking around basically helping to track the merger of different systems as a young fresh hire and I really didn’t know what it meant to be a consultant.

I thought I was going to be a sys admin to be frank, but I showed up. I started talking with people and then I remember early on the advice I got from one of my project managers was “you can’t say you don’t know. You’ve got to have answers.  And do me a favor; carry a notebook around and write everything everyone says down from now on.”

So it was funny, early on igot a lesson like that about, you know what it means to be a consultant. It means to listen, but it also means to kind of actively listen and absorb what you’re hearing and start to formulate the actions out of that. And I learned that lesson early on.

Going forward IBM was a great place to work. There was a lot of technology diversity, they were really amping up the services business and they were replicating aspects of Mackenzie with consulting. And frankly to this day, there’s a lot of things I’ve learned about, you know, people and measurements and methodologies, how you track knowledge and reuse it that I still carry with me to this day and hope to leverage it at Vervint as we grow.

00:04:53 Ethan

That’s great. Thank you for that. So, moving to Vervint, what drew to Vervint, what made you say yes when approached by Vervint?

00:05:01 Chuck

Well, in retrospect, what drew me here were typical things.  Looking at my career, you know, can I get a better title? Can I get better money? But what, you know, really inspired me about Vervint were two things that don’t have to do with title or money.

The first thing is it’s a smaller firm. Given my background with large companies and a little bit of history, my father growing up had a restaurant, a diner in New Jersey, and it’s where I grew an appreciation of what it takes to run a small company.  It takes the ability to play multiple roles to treat people like they’re an extension of your family, treating customers like they’re an extension of your family and seeing the impact you have on them and the local community from time to time, that was inspiring to me.

The other part of this was, frankly, I didn’t know the full situation I was getting into.  But if everything was going perfectly, I probably wouldn’t have been, you know, hired into this job.

But I was up for the challenge. I mean, back to being an engineer. It’s part of my DNA as that engineer inside of me as a problem solver and ss someone who was taught to never back away from a challenge, Vervint brought an interesting challenge for me, but I was willing to focus and take it head on.

00:06:37 Ethan

That’s great. Speaking of challenges, what excites you most about the work that your team is doing right now?

00:06:44 Chuck

There are two things that are very exciting. Vervint itself is undergoing a transformation and a level of reinvention. Vervint has gone through multiple iterations in its 27-year history.

And once again, we’re looking at redefining and clarifying who we are as an organization, our purpose, our values, what we can offer our clients.

And in addition to that, the second thing is our industry is in the middle of a major inflection point. You could argue it’s akin to another industrial revolution. It certainly feels similar to the dot com boom.

I’m talking about AI. AI is changing how we work. It’s a force multiplier and it gives us an opportunity to reinvent ourselves as a company and adapt new ways of working. And what we’ve been saying lately is AI in everything we do from design, to build, to running technology solutions.

Another point, in addition to that, is what attracts me here is growing a team of good people.  Starting with the base of great humans that are highly talented and seeing people step up into bigger, newer roles while we bring in additional people with fresh ideas.

00:08:06 Ethan

That’s great.  That’s a ton of fun.  Moving on to like from what excites you to what challenges you. Can you talk about a recent challenge that you and the team faced recently and how you guys approached it and hopefully solved it?

00:08:20 Chuck

There’s numerous. The biggest one is 1 word: growth.

When I came here at the beginning of the year, Vervint was not in a good trend line and as a management team and the leader of the team, I had to make some changes quickly.  Without getting into all the details, it’s important to outline how we approached getting Vervint back on a growth trajectory.

So, a few things to consider, decisiveness and action orientation taking fear, anger, depression, those emotions and turning them into action, but more importantly, having the will to make very difficult decisions primarily about people and affecting their lives.

The other point to make is clarity of purpose. Making sure we redefine ourselves so that we’re clear about our why and then looking at empathy and trust and embracing people, getting to know them to start to build trust, which is really difficult as a new leader to gain the trust of the people and everyone knows it takes a lifetime to build trust, and it can also be destroyed within minutes.

00:09:31 Ethan

Yeah, the trust part is very big. My next question, you know your leadership style, what how would you describe your leadership style, how it’s evolved over the years and where you’ve landed on now?

00:09:43 Chuck

Yeah. So, there’s two things that come to mind leading from the front and not asking someone to do something you wouldn’t want to do yourself. I mean within reason.

Anyway, it’s akin to running a diner in New Jersey. There are days as an owner, you have to cook, you have to clean, take orders, manage inventory, manage people, and in a smaller company you have to be willing to forget titles and just roll up your sleeves to collaborate with your peers.

Having, myself, run a practice that is larger than this whole company made me think the president role was right up my alley, but this role is more extensive and requires a very deliberate human touch with strong communication, focus and empathy, more so than any other role I’ve had.

00:10:33 Ethan

Looking ahead, we talked about, you know, what’s happened so far and the things that you’ve done.  Looking ahead for Vervint, what do you see on the horizon as a whole? What are we running towards right now?

00:10:47 Chuck

I see a tremendous opportunity for Vervint given the state of change we are in and our industry is in.

In the simplest terms, the short-term answer centers on AI.  AI in everything we do through design, development and operations of solutions. It’s becoming table stakes, and it will be a force multiplier for us to bring us to a new level of value for our clients.

Beyond that, it’s further refining, you know, who we are, the value we provide and what’s in it for our customers.

People can read out there. There are multiple reports that say anywhere from 75 to 95% of all the AI POC’s proof of concepts fail to drive the right level of transformation or ROI.  I want us to address that and I think we have a great opportunity to do that leveraging a broad range of services that we have, focusing on how we connect people, the devices and platforms and fusing that with AI. 

I think it can unlock new value for our clients and that will lead us to be a trusted partner that they can rely on to Co-develop and operate their services.

00:12:04 Ethan

Thanks, Chuck, you said that AI optimization is becoming table stakes at this point. And I know that we recently did a case study for GR Tech week. I’m wondering if you could talk about that a little bit and what we went into with that case study.

00:12:17 Chuck

Yeah, it was interesting to bring together a new management team and in the course of almost exactly 30 days, one month from initiating the idea to having a working prototype, it was an interesting case study in a couple of different ways.

Number one, the team dynamics of how we brought together a new management team and settled on a problem, we ended up picking an internal case study to develop a digital product because we didn’t want to be encumbered by issues exposing any client’s information or intellectual property.

So, we focused on an internal solution around, you know, how we allocate and manage people and their assignments so that we could basically manage our bench or cost and assignments of the people and forecast all that.

So, with that we got together and thought to ourselves how do we develop a new digital product from scratch to, at minimum, a working prototype and be able to demonstrate that at Tech Week so that we could highlight all of our key practice areas from design of the actual need, looking at the personas involved, how they were going to interact with the technology, what they needed from it, how that then manifested into user interfaces, actual designs, prototyping it using figma and the AI tools within it.

To rapidly iterate on different user interfaces and then actually take that output in terms of wireframes multiple iterations and ideas for the user interface and even some of the front end code and that became the input to the development process where once again we used AI and showed how we put rules that the human assigns to the AI in terms of how and what needs to be developed.

And then watched as we applied a vibe coding approach to develop the actual application which then we looked at the data that was needed to support the application and went through how we actually mocked up and modeled the data model itself.  All the way to spinning up the schema inside of the physical database on the cloud to support the application.

And then we ended up pivoting to how we were deploying and operating, how we were leveraging AI to ensure that the deployment in the cloud environment followed best practices like well architected principles and also how we used AI to identify issues as we went into production from observability looking at monitoring trace this is the logs and seeing how AI could help us pinpoint issues that needed corrective actions. So, soup to nuts, it was a case study, not necessarily in Agentic AI but with similar principles of how do you look at it from a design perspective, a development perspective, data and operations.

And use AI to augment every step, and it was astounding to look at some of the metrics around how it used to take weeks to do certain activities. And our practice leaders were able to do it in some cases, going from weeks to minutes to develop some of these different technology aspects.  Soup to nuts, from the idea to the actual prototype, took us a month and mind you, this wasn’t our day job. This was done as a side project to prep for Tech Week.

We solved a problem for ourselves, but we also demonstrated how AI can it be infused in every step of what we do in every practice in our company and how it can dramatically improve the results and we challenge ourselves now with a big goal.

To try to apply this in everything we do so that we get the benefits, and our customers get the benefits, something like a third of the time to develop with a third of the cost with 80% or better accuracy of the output of the solution that’s game changing and that’s where we want to head with this.

00:16:34 Ethan

That’s great. You know, I think that that lined up on a couple of trends, you know, vibe coding and agentic AI.  Are there other trends or shifts that that you and the team are watching right now that you think are up and coming?

00:16:48 Chuck

Yeah, I think AI, particularly agentic, is the buzz of the year and the general trend around automation, but more importantly, it’s not just AI or automation for its own sake, it’s how it’s applied to streamline or even disrupt business process or the everyday lives of people. 

We’re living in interesting times where our smartphones are essentially supercomputers with the world’s knowledge at our fingertips.  How do we tap into that knowledge and make better decisions and improve the experiences of consumers or patients?

I think AI replacing people has been way overhyped, but there is something to be said about how it will be impacting knowledge work. Professions like consulting, legal, accounting, they all make money billing out humans by the hour. But with AI, the same work can be done in a fraction of the time.  This is why I’m keen on bringing what we call the human AI partnership model.

We kind of jokingly call it HAIP (Hype), but getting beyond the hype of it down to a level where we can define the roles and responsibilities of humans and agents in a granular enough way, but in a way that they target specific outcomes.

00:18:13 Ethan

Moving towards agentic AI and that partnership model has been something that I’m really excited about in my role and I can’t wait to see it continue to grow, moving towards personal insights and some values discussion. I’d like to ask you, you know, what are your values and motivation? What keeps you motivated and inspires your work right now?

00:18:34 Chuck

The people and the impact we make, whether it’s at work or in our community.

I love seeing people, teams, I love seeing them develop, identify their blind spots, work towards improving themselves.

I thrive in a culture that’s highly collaborative and growth minded, and these also happen to be part of our core values at Vervint. I suggest, you know, try to meet somebody new every week, try to learn something new every month. I personally don’t think I will ever be done learning and growing as a person.

00:19:10 Ethan

It’s that learning aspect, I mean that comes back to consultants all around. We’re always all learning. It’s great. You know with that, do you have some other advice for anybody that’s starting out at Vervint or consulting in general?

00:19:28 Chuck

Particularly in tech consulting or consulting in general, change is constant and I encourage you to embrace it.

We all are having had, we’ll have challenging points in our lives where emotions like fear, anger or depression may set in. My advice is to not let those emotions get the best of you and brace change and take action.

Action for me directly addresses those emotions and to anyone starting out their career, never be afraid of failing. Sometimes it’s the best way to learn. Sometimes the best way to make a leap in your career is to take a risk and try something new.

So, my advice would be, change is constant, embrace it and don’t be afraid of failure.

00:20:21 Ethan

Good, good. I think that’s important for everybody here. Let’s move on to some final thoughts here as we finish out my list of questions. Is there anything you’d like to share with our listeners before we wrap up?

00:20:34 Chuck

So, life is full of small and large moments, and sometimes it’s worth taking a step back, maybe going for a walk in the wilderness and thinking about your spot in life and what you can do to improve it or the team or your family.

As a parent, as a son, I suggest taking the moments with your young kids to bond with them and nurture them. Spend time with your parents while they’re still on Earth with us.

Take the time to stay connected with friends and family because you never know when you might need them most.

And I like to quote 80s movies. So as Ferris Bueller once said, “life moves fast if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

00:21:22 Ethan

Fantastic. Thank you, Chuck, I really appreciate you taking the time.

00:21:25 Chuck

Absolutely. And it’s been a pleasure.