42. "It Costs Us $20K/Hour of Downtime," Jason Jackson, IT Director for American Glass

Working in a family owned business, Jason earned his way up the ranks from a glass delivery driver, to the director of IT operations for the largest auto glass distributor in TOLA (Texas-Oklahoma-Louisiana-Arkansas). "I built my first computer with my dad when I was 9 years old...he taught me everything I knew" When Jason took over the IT operations, there were decentralized systems with zero failover. Outages happened frequently and cost the company an estimated $20k/hour between missed opportunities, employee wages, and other damages. Fast forward to now, Jason has managed to overhaul the entire network. Leveraging a cloud based phone system (UCaaS) from RingCentral along with SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) from Cisco Meraki, he has built a network that simply has not gone down, period.  What do you think is most valuable skill for IT leaders? "Troubleshooting: Don't be afraid to bring on a new project and just play with it; break it, fix it, that's how you learn it," For more info about the show, visit: www.CatchCloud.com/podcast