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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to another episode of the Audit podcast. I'm your host, Trent Russell, and today as the host, we have Eric Wilson. So, a little bit different this time. I'm actually the guest as opposed to the host. But I'm so used to saying that I'm the host, Trent Russell, that I actually said that in the intro. With that, I'm actually. I'm just going to go ahead and throw it to Eric and hand the mic over to him and let Eric take over.
- [00:27]
B
Yeah. Thank you, Trent. I appreciate it. And I figured we'd probably start with telling people why we're doing this and giving them a little bit of background, because it is different. So if you're okay with that, I'll. I'll walk through that. I guess I actually don't even have to ask you because technically I'm the host. So here we go.
- [00:42]
A
Exactly.
- [00:43]
B
You were kind enough to have me on the podcast several episodes ago, and leading up to that podcast, and since I've listened to and watched lots of your episodes, and one of the things that I notice is you do a great job of getting the audience to know your. Your guest and the topic that's being discussed and how that guest interrelates to that topic. But you don't necessarily talk a lot about yourself, even though you've got a lot of things going on that I found out through other conversations that we've had. So I reached out to you a few months ago and said, hey, why don't we do a reverse podcast? I'll talk about you, and you can answer some questions and give us some insights about all the things that you've learned along the way and then talk about the different things that you do. So here we are. Welcome to your own podcast.
- [01:29]
A
Thank you for having me.
- [01:31]
B
So I figured we'd start out a little bit different since we're already doing things different here today anyways. And I've. I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about how I wanted to structure the conversation today and what topics I want to hit on. One of the things that I figured we'd start with is a lightning round of questions. And I would like to tell you, Trent, that I spent an equal amount of time preparing this lightning round of questions. However, that would not be true because I forgot I was going to do this. But with the help of Brock and some Internet searches, I found 12. Hold on, let me read this again. 12 speed dating questions for the business professional.
- [02:11]
A
Excellent.
- [02:12]
B
Learn everything you need to know about the person across the table from you in 10 minutes or less. So I'm not going to ask you all 12 because that would take a while. And some of these, frankly, if I asked them, it would. It would get a little weird. So I narrowed it. I narrowed it down some for us, but the rules are single single word answers or short answers, unless I ask you to expand on it. So. Good with that.
- [02:37]
A
Good.
- [02:37]
B
All right, here we go. Fair enough. It's weird being on the other side of the table. If you could have a quote at the end of your email signature, what would it be?
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A
There's one from, I think Aristotle that says that it's something. It's on the background of my laptop. I'm already not lightning around the desk because I'm trying to think of what it says, but it's on a different laptop that basically it says greatness comes from habits. So if you do. If you follow the same habits consistently, then from that comes greatness. That's far from the exact quote, but for the sake of moving on, we'll go to the next one. Fair enough.
- [03:17]
B
What is your favorite item in your workspace?
- [03:23]
A
Most people who know me know it is the signed football from the unarguably greatest head football coach in college football history, Nick Satan.
- [03:33]
B
Unarguably, that's. That's gonna. That's gonna create some tension with some folks. If you could work anywhere in the world, where would it be?
- [03:42]
A
Probably Florence, Italy. That's one of my favorite spots in the world. So that would seem like a good spot.
- [03:49]
B
Controversial one here. IOS or Android?
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A
IOS.
- [03:54]
B
Oh, all right, we're going to have some words on that. Now, this one I know you're passionate about. I've seen you talk about it before, and I'm going to let you expand on the answer. If Is a hot dog a sandwich?
- [04:08]
A
Forget where we talked about that. Was it during a conference? Maybe we.
- [04:11]
B
I think it was on LinkedIn or something like that.
- [04:13]
A
That's what it was. Yes. By definition, I go, hot dog, sandwich, meat bun, done.
- [04:20]
B
All right, all right. If you were stranded on a deserted island, what skill do you have that would serve you best?
- [04:34]
A
I just started watching Survivor with my kid, and so I'm trying to think of, like, I'm tall. Fair enough. I can reach things. I could maybe climb a coconut tree. That's.
- [04:50]
B
Yeah, listen, my. My son is easily 6 inches taller than me, and I use that to my. A lot, so. Yes, I get that. All right. Last of the ones on this list. And then I have a bonus question. You decide to throw a Theme party for your clients. What's the theme?
- [05:08]
A
It would be sort of costume, but it would be a mix. So we would take, like, two different. Totally different genres and mix them together. Those are always my favorite Halloween costumes. So would be, like, a crazy mix. Would be like Lord of the Rings meets Napoleon Dynamite. Something to that effect.
- [05:30]
B
All right, I. I'm gonna hold you to that. I want to see that happen. All right, the last question. You know this question. Tables are turned here. What was your last AI search, question or conversation? What are you using AI for right now?
- [05:43]
A
On the personal side, what was the coolest thing I did the other day? Oh, you know what? I did it this morning. So we have a new sauna at our gym. I love going to the sauna. And the control panel is on the outside, and it's all digital, which is totally different. Old ones analog. And so I'd never seen it before, and I didn't know how to operate the controls. I just knew when I walked in, it wasn't as hot as I wanted it to be. So I took a picture of it in chat. GBT said, this is for asana. How do I crank it all the way up to maximum heat? And how do I turn, like, the timer on? And it perfectly. It was like, oh, that's this model. And click this button, click the menu button, click the plus sign until you get to the degrees, Click the menu button again, and then it's set.
- [06:23]
B
Nice. All right, I like it. Practical use there. Okay, so let's. Let's dive into Trent talking about. About you. I, I. There's a laundry list of things that you do, different businesses that you have the podcast, just being one of them. But once you start with, just tell us kind of, you know, how did you get to where you're at right now? What degree are you in? What was your career path? Because there's not a lot of people who say, you know, I'm gonna start going one way, and then all of a sudden, I'm gonna own a consulting company and podcasts and do conferences and things like that. So how did you get to where you are?
- [06:56]
A
Original biology major, always liked science. In high school, I had to sell a. No, I had to buy a football ticket for my then girlfriend so she could come to the game. And I got done talking, like, doing the hat, you know, the back and forth. And I was like, oh, that's fun. I'll switch to business. I also hated the labs, so I was like, I needed an excuse to go, so switched to business. The MIS program at the University of Alabama was top four in the country. And all I wanted was a job when I graduated. And so I decided to pick that one. I went to Ernst and Young from there because it was when I had my offer the year before I graduated. But at that time it was voted number one place to start your career. So I went. That makes a ton of sense. While I was working Ernst and Young, somebody showed me how to do a vlookup and I went, this is amazing. And so. And didn't understand why we didn't use analytics test controls all the time. So that kind of put the little, as people who are ardent listeners of the show know, a little drop of dopamine in my brain started to hit doing analytics. So that's when I got into analytics, left there and went to University of Alabama system office. So there's three higher ed campuses. The football team one, basically the science one in Huntsville and then basically the med school one in Birmingham and then there's UAB Hospital. So I did data analytics for the internal audit department to support all four of those campuses and did that for a while. And then I think like a lot of people always kind of had the bug to work for myself. I started listening to podcasts in 2009. I think is when it was. When it was not cool to listen to podcasts. Like I remember my wife calling me a nerd without knowing the content of what I was.
- [08:47]
B
Shame in that. No, shame of that.
- [08:49]
A
Yeah. Without even knowing the content, she was like, podcast equals nerd. And now she's listening to every whatever murder mystery or whatever they're called true crime podcast you can get our hands on. So anyway, the, the one that I listened to the most though was a. The Tim Ferriss show. And so he was like, to me, the person I looked up to, the way he kind of lived his life, the entrepreneurial dream, like he worked from home even back then, talked about flexibility all the time, talked about basically outsourcing all the stuff that you don't want to do so you can just focus on the stuff that you want to do. Read at least one of his books and some of some of the other ones, but they're massive. And so anyway, I'd always had the, you know, the idea of, of really wanting to work for myself. So there was another guy that I worked with at Ernst and Young. We brought him in to be the data guy, the full time data guy. And so he joined our. I was in the financial services office, but we did Sox work And they brought him in. They basically said, trent, you know how some of this stuff works. You keep him chargeable. And so we just basically started looking at every control that we could fail and go, all right, cool, now we can bring in our data guy and he can take care of it. And so we built a pretty solid relationship and we stayed in contact. His dad actually started a tiling business, I think, years and years and years ago. So he had that, like in his family. I think he had always wanted to work for himself also. And so it was kind of the nudge from him to kind of go out on our own. So one day he emailed me and he said, what if we do it like we used to do? He'll be like the very technical, do all the coding, for the most part work. And I would be the, hey, go talk to people. All that kind of good stuff. So we did that kind of on the side for a few years. So he was actually doing some contract work. And he was going to go to Lake Tahoe on his birthday the next day, and he just didn't wake up. And so I think he would have been 36. And so that kind of put a damper on things. And I really just kind of sat it to the side for about six months. And I think what's interesting was like, as I took a step back, I went, hey, like, we can be the greatest technologists in the world. And he was super, super good. I mean, I had ACL consultants, cause that was our main tool that saw some of his stuff and they went, I didn't even know you could do that. And these are people that used to work for ACL developing acl. And they said, we didn't know you could do that. So he was incredible. But we didn't know what the hell we were doing. And so taking a step back and went, okay, I have to have at least some kind of sales process and business processes to make this work. And so after about six months, my wife went, you seem super bored, like you're not doing much of anything. She's like, you need to pick it back up. And so we picked it back up and it just kind of ran with it from there. And that's where we are today. And there's definitely been some changes. Initially it was kind of like, you send us your data, we'll build you some automation, we'll develop the analytics for you and send them back, or create some kind of continuous monitoring solution. And kind of moved away from that, where we still do it, to A degree, but now it's more strategy consulting around AI and analytics. That's where I've seen the biggest failure. Like when I just again, kind of took a step back and was like, okay, why is this still not working? Like, we're doing the work for them. We're showing them how to do it. It's still not working for a lot of people. And it was because there was no. I'll call it a plan rather than strategy, but there was no plan or strategy in place. So that's kind of where we've been hanging out most recently. I think that answered your question. I couldn't imagine if I left anything out, so.
- [12:44]
B
No, it was good. I think two things that. That just kind of stuck out to me. And it's. And it's funny to hear you talk about the Vlookup thing that you. You didn't learn about Vlookups until you got to ey. And that wasn't. I mean, relatively speaking, that wasn't that long ago, right? And versus today. So my son is a senior in high school and my daughter's a sophomore, and they know how to use AI, crunch data, using LLMs, all these other things. And you think about how fast and how far we've come in such a short period of time that to you, you get into your career and you see Vlookups, it's like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe this. And then, you know, our kids, that's. That's archaic to them. You know, it's. It's. It's such an old technology now. So that was really interesting.
- [13:27]
A
Hey, everybody, we're going to take a quick break from our guests. And if you need to get analytics or AI actually working in your internal audit department, or if you already have some of it, you feel like you're not really getting exactly what you need out of it. You know, there's more. You're not getting that. Go to the Show Notes, look for the Green Skies analytics link. Click it on the website. There'll be other links that you can click that'll take you directly to a calendar to schedule time. It's literally three clicks to get the time scheduled to get it figured out. All right, back to the show.
- [13:57]
B
But talking about your friend who passed away, you know, I. I think one of the things I talk to our interns at Gulfport this summer about and some other people who, you know, when I watch them and they're just working themselves into the ground is situations like that help you get some Perspective on life. So, you know, you're doing a lot of things right now. I'm assuming that probably has some impact in how you balance things on a day to day basis with all these different businesses that you run. I mean, is that a fair thing? And any thoughts on that?
- [14:31]
A
That as well as talking to even CAEs. But I'll say wiser, maybe rather instead of older people who go, who would see me with my kid and go, they're going to be out of your house tomorrow or, or some. I mean there's a, there's a CAE that told me and he's a, he's a listener of the show, so he'll know what I'm talking about. Him whose daughters played high school volleyball, they don't even live in the same state that the kids grew up in now. And he and his wife were just sitting there, sitting around and they're like, we just kind of miss the environment of like high school volleyball. And so they went to a high school volume. They didn't know anybody was playing the game or anything, but just went and so stories like that definitely help keep things in perspective. One of the things, going back to the Tim Ferriss comment and the flexibility, I knew, like, I. There's very, very, very few things that if my kid's involved that I'm not going to be there. I mean it's, I mean, practices, I'm like, yep, let's go. You know, I'm, I'm gonna be there. I'm not dropping him off and leaving. Like we're gonna hang out. So. Yeah, it definitely changes the way you look at things.
- [15:42]
B
No, I, and I feel the same. And like I said, I've, I've had this conversation with people that I see put, you know, work above all else. And, and a lot of times you see that that can become career limiting because you burn yourself out and then you end up missing a lot of things at home and, and just outside of the office. So I think, I think that's such an important perspective that a lot of people don't get until they're, until they're older.
- [16:04]
A
So speaking of that, there was a partner. I won't say the firm doesn't really matter, but they said I'm a A plus partner and a C plus parent. This is before I had a kid. And I just remember thinking, there's nothing I do, like, that's great and that's what brings you happiness. That's great and wonderful. Who's to say what should make one person happy? Over another. But that was almost 20 years ago. And that quote stuck with me and will forever.
- [16:39]
B
Absolutely. All right, off of that side topic there. Okay, so you have multiple businesses. You talked quite a bit about the analytics one of it. So Green Skies analytics is your consulting firm. So talked about how that started, what. What is, and you said it's helping set strategies for people as they use AI, data analytics and things like that. I guess, first question, it doesn't sound like it's a, you know, anything to any one type of consulting firm. Sounds like it's fairly specialized and, you know, you're really looking for a particular business use case that you're going for. So. So what is that? Business use case. And then from the time that you started doing it to today, how has technology impacted that? What's changed?
- [17:26]
A
So as long as they actually want to get value out of analytics or AI, we can help. Yeah, that's practically it. I think a lot of people want to do it because they think they're supposed to do it, and there's not like a vision or an idea of what that's going to look like in the future. So those can be difficult. But in this day and age, there's so many quick wins because, like, the playbook on quick wins is out there. We've all done them or seen them, or if you haven't, you can. So there's always a level of value that we can add. But to like, really be the team within the organization that people come to and go, can you show us how to do that? Can you help us with this? You know, we didn't even know internal audit could build something like that. We want something similar. Those are the people that we. Well, I'd love to work with, but. And then your second question was evolution of technology.
- [18:21]
B
Yeah. How has that impacted what you do?
- [18:24]
A
Yeah, it was pretty terrifying when ChatGPT came out and I went, that's what we do. I don't know how we're going to make this work anymore. But with that, there's a ton of change that came with it. And so whenever there is change, you can either stick your head in the sand and like, cross your fingers that it goes away and everything's going to be the same, or you can kind of double down and go, yeah, I think this is real. This is going to be here forever. It's time for us to, like, buckle up, learn it, and. And go in feet first. So all those cliches aside, that I think I just rattled off three in a row that's what we had to do was to just go, okay, we are analytics. And there's, there's, I guess initially there were so many different routes we could go because of AI. Like, we could offer this service or this service. We could be a full on build now development firm and go that route. And then ultimately it went like, well, what do we do? It's analytics. All right, so analytics for internal audit has always been the thing. That's our thing. So it was then how do we use AI to support that, to make it better, to make it faster, to make it easier for our clients to learn? And so once we honed in on that, that's when it became a lot easier. And honestly, the anxiety went down significantly, going, okay, we have a plan. This makes sense. Let's roll with it.
- [19:43]
B
Yeah. So how long have you had Green Skies?
- [19:47]
A
I think we've been going on like seven or eight years.
- [19:50]
B
Okay. And I would imagine you probably started fairly small, fairly local. But what is your, what does the footprint look like now? Is it domestic? Are you starting to venture outside of that?
- [20:01]
A
Yeah, it's, it's all over. We have, we have or had had clients from California, like literally across everywhere. So California over to Washington, the Southeast. And obviously that's kind of where we hang out. Texas, Illinois. So we kind of COVID the footprint of the US And a little bit overseas, but not a ton over there. And some of that comes back to work. Life balance. Yeah, absolutely. So if it's like, hey, we have to jump on standups at 7am and I go, if we can make it work some other way, that's fine. But I got kid drop off at 7am and I'm not doing that.
- [20:42]
B
Okay, so I want to talk about an actual example from a conversation you and I had. I was particularly frustrated with a analytics module that I had licensed. And it is a kind of drag and drop analytics module. But there's still a lot of work that has to go in the back end. And of course, when you buy the module, it's presented as it's going to be the greatest thing ever. It's going to be super easy. But especially as most audit departments don't have resources just sitting around waiting to do something like that. It's one of those things that just gets pushed off and delayed, hopefully not indefinitely. And so we were talking, and in the same conversation, I mentioned that at Gulfport we have Copilot. And I was venting a little bit about Copilot because I know what the underlying LLM of COPILOT can do outside of a corporate model. And I know how it's a little bit hamstringed inside of a corporate model. But you pointed out that there are some opportunities to use copilot to accelerate the use of that analytics module. So can you walk just as an example for people to think through, like, oh, this is, this is something that I could actually use today. Can you walk through what that would look like and what we were talking about there?
- [21:53]
A
Yeah, and it's probably the two things we do, AI and analytics strategies for internal audit. And the other is teaching auditors how to actually do analytics. And historically, that success rate was 10%. I mean, we looked at it and went like, okay, only 10% of people are real data champions when we, you know, put them through this program with AI. If we just took the full population, that's now 40 to 50% full population of any given internal audit department. And if we hone in and go like, all right, who is the most curious on the team? Who's, like, itching to do use AI or do analytics? Who has the latest iPhone, even though there's no difference between this one and the last, you know, like, who's driving the Tesla? Who's, like, into this stuff? If we take that population and just work with them, it's a hundred percent, virtually 100% success rate on. They are now data champions. But the way we do that is through using Copilot or ChatGPT or Cloud or whatever you have access to and using that to actually write the Python code. And so that's always been the very difficult part for people. Regardless of it being Python or some other tool, it's super easy to begin with. And then you get to a point and it's like, I don't know how to do this. My brain's telling me, naturally, this sucks, it hurts, let's quit. Because that's way easier to do. And so most people give up on it. Whereas, like I was saying with myself, I got the dopamine drip and I just wanted to figure out how to fix everything. So from using Copilot again, or any other tool, you can have it write the Python script for you, and then there's a little bit of work to do to, to really make it work. But by and large, that's it. And then you have to operationalize that. But as you're going through any given audit or controls test, if you know how to do this properly and you have the data, then you can actually do full population testing, whereas you might not have had that skill set prior. You can do it now.
- [23:55]
B
Well, and I think one of the important things too is it's a limitation of knowledge, right? Because like, I don't know how to code Python. And even if I had somebody on my team who did know how to code it, I'm probably going to have them doing operational audits and compliance audits and consulting engagements. And then on top of that, I'm going to say, hey, by the way, go code this out and make it work. And in reality, from a resource allocation standpoint, the things I've committed to the audit committee and the board are those audit and consulting engagements. It's not necessarily streamlining or testing through automation. And so it's, you know, you sit there and you go, okay, I got so far, I don't know the next step. Plus us also, I'm being pulled in 20 different directions. And so this is going to the bottom of the pile. So what I really like about what we talked about and the example you just gave is using Copilot, using things that are available within an organization to basically backfill that resource constraint. Because I, from personal experience that to me, you can have people who are, who will 24 hours a day read up on how to code and do all these different things, but they still have to split their effort between everything else. And so unless you're a department that has that dedicated resource and becomes really, really difficult and leveraging those tools is huge. And I'm, I'm really excited for us to start doing that on, on our project. So I'm looking forward to that. Okay, so for, for Green Skies startup consulting, you've kind of focused in new technologies coming in. You guys have adapted, you all have adapted to that. What's, what's on the horizon for the company? What do you, what do you see coming up?
- [25:25]
A
Because everyone for the most part is on Copilot and everyone's still struggling with agentic AI. It would be a Copilot platform. It is relatively plug and play for folks on Copilot. So it's. And depending on what version you're on, you can basically like, we can develop agents, send a link to a client, and then they can leverage that agent. Also, we'd have to do some tweaking, obviously, but we're kind of, you know, waiting to see what happened on who's going to win the corporate AI battle. And Copilot has won so far. Who knows what's going to happen literally tomorrow. But, and so that's kind of, that's the direction we're headed in for 2026.
- [26:15]
B
All right, so onto your, your next venture and all your, your spare time, you have the audit and, and audit analytics and AI conferences that, that you do. So most people might think, you know, it'd be fun to run a conference. Very, very few people I think would actually take it the step of setting it up. And I know you've done several of them at this point. I've attended several. You just had one recently. So why, like, what made you get into this, this space as well?
- [26:49]
A
I would go to, and this is like the preamble whenever I kick off the conference. So anybody who's attends, if you guys want to put it on mute, you're going to hear the same thing you've heard for the past four or five years. I would go to conferences also like everybody else, and I would attend webinars just like everybody else. And I would always just go to, okay, there's. This one's about data, this one's about data, this one's about AI. That's the one I'm going to go to that given session. And then inevitably it was a lot of, this is why you should do this. This is how we did it. But there was not any, let's show you how to do it yourselves, you know, And I would go, look, I know all the use cases. I know why we should be doing this. Show me how to do the thing that you just did. Like show, you know, pull the curtain back and show me how you did it. And so that was really it. That's where it came from. It came out of frustration, more so than anything else. So we looked around and I went, hey, I think I know enough people that would be willing to do that based on just the conversations I'd had with other DA people in internal audit. So we partnered with the first year because I went, look, I'll emcee it and get the speakers. But I don't want to do any of the admin stuff. I don't want to have to deal with CPEs. Like, I don't do any of that. So we partnered with our local ISACA chapter and they took it on and did all that stuff for us. So we worked with them and likely, if not for them, it never would have taken off. And then we took it over about two years ago, all in house.
- [28:19]
B
I think you bring up a really good point. And I would hope that organizations that run conferences today don't necessarily see you as a direct competitor. Even though I'm sure that they probably do. But I think what would be more important because there's so many people who need CPEs, there's so many different, you know, timeframes that people have to go to conferences and everything else is instead of looking at you as an empire, they look at you. Somebody who says, and they say, okay, here's why he's doing it. Maybe we can learn something from what he's saying. Because you're absolutely right. We, at my last employer, we put in a process where if you went to a conference, you had to come back and do a presentation about what did you learn and what are you going to start applying? And what was really interesting is that everybody could come back and talk about what they learn. Very few people could come back and start talking about, here's what, I'm going to start applying today. And that can be, that can be frustrating. You know, you go to enough conferences and you go, okay, well I spent time, now I got to make up work. I've got a bunch of emails and everything else. I learned something, but I didn't actually learn a practical application. So I, I would hope that other organizations that, that put on conferences really look at what you were doing. Again, don't look at it as competition necessarily, but look at it more as that's a different route to go that maybe, maybe we're missing the mark on. So I appreciate, I appreciate you sharing that and also that thought process behind it and actually taking the reins and doing it because a lot of people think that most people don't actually go set up conferences. So that's great. All right, just organizationally setting up a conference, I mean, what's the biggest challenge? What was the biggest surprise the first couple that you set up?
- [29:55]
A
I think it's just the amount of back and forth to get everything done. And I'm guilty of this as a speaker also. So I try not to do it. But it's, you know, every time, every time you go, anybody you ever see on a webinar, they all have deadlines where they have to submit their bio, headshot description of the topic, objectives and all that kind of stuff. And everly that day comes and goes and then it's like, oh yeah, let me give you all that real quick. So that can be difficult. So we have someone now that basically does that for us, tracking everything down. So it's really just all the little admin things that add up is the most difficult. I think year one we had someone within a 18 hour time frame. They said, hey, I know I'm supposed to talk tomorrow or speak tomorrow, but I can't do it anymore.
- [30:48]
B
Okay.
- [30:50]
A
Unfortunately, I had enough content, and I was like, all right, sorry, guys. You got to hear me twice over these two days. But so lesson learned there. We always have at least one, usually two backups to go. Need you on the ready, not sure when. And actually, this is the first year we didn't have to pull in a backup. So we've had somebody drop out almost every single. Every single year, but I think that's it. It's just all the little things that you likely wouldn't expect to go on. We switched platforms last year, and so learning a new platform, going from Zoom, which is the equivalent of a Ford, you know, when it comes to these things, to on 24, which is the Ferrari, and learning it, that was. That was a lot of work and effort, too.
- [31:35]
B
Yeah. So if you think back through the conferences and how many years have you done this now?
- [31:40]
A
I. I think this is the fifth year.
- [31:42]
B
Okay, so you're running these conferences on the back end. I'm sure that there's a ton of work that goes into it. I've been on one of the conferences before where I've seen you sending messages back and forth to different people in the chat and everything else. I'm sure that there are probably things that pop up that you would find interesting, but you also can be on top of it and manage the backend. So how do you. How do you. How do you manage all that? How do you. How do you balance listening, learning, and also managing the conference itself?
- [32:09]
A
Yeah. So I'll take a note based on the timestamp of the thing that I heard that was interesting. So, like, you, of course, we. Everybody multitasks, but you can't really soak it in. And so while we're doing stuff behind the scenes, I'll go, okay, at the 3:15 mark, somebody said this, and I'm going to go back and listen to that, because I can't just solely dedicate my focus on that. So that's what I'll do. Or I'll just know the topic at large, like I already know what it is. And so this happened, I don't know, maybe a month ago. I was like, oh, I remember this person talked about exactly this during the conference. Let me go back and skip to the replay and watch that, because that was a question I had of. Of myself. So that's kind of how I do it.
- [32:50]
B
And from here. So how many. How many conferences are you all doing? A year.
- [32:54]
A
Right now we do two. So we do the, we do a mini conference in the spring, so that's one day, six hours, and then we do the full two day, 12 hour conference in the fall.
- [33:08]
B
Okay. Is that the plan going forward? Do you have any, any new things you're going to change up or add in or anything on the horizon there?
- [33:18]
A
We're doing a series on AI and analytics strategies, so most of that's being promoted through our email list. So if you guys go to like the autopodcast.com or any of the stuff that we put on LinkedIn, you can sign up for that email list. And so we just finished the one for October. We're gonna do one in November and December also. And then we're also supporting some, some of our partners and hosting webinars for them. So also through the email list, you can see where those are coming out.
- [33:50]
B
So, and speaking of that, you were just over in Europe emceeing a conference. How did, how did that all come about?
- [33:58]
A
It was different than just getting on a flight for two hours, but I think it went really well. They said it went well. I don't think they would say to my face that it went horrible.
- [34:08]
B
So who, who was the conference for?
- [34:10]
A
It was the chartered iia, so it's the IIA equivalent, but for Ireland and the uk. So, yeah, jet lagged, of course, getting over there, but for the most part, you know, the person whose job I said was to babysit me, her name's Cynthia and she's fantastic. I mean, she had like every 30 minutes and then even like five minute increments, depending on what it was within those 30 minutes of like, Trent, you need to be here. You need to meet this person. This is their bio. This is what they're talking about. Here's the talking points. And so I basically was just like a, you know, a bag of bones and just had to show up and do what I was told by Cinea, who made it super easy and then go, all right, coming to the stage, the. Honestly, the biggest issue was making sure I pronounced people's names correctly. And so I had, I would spend 10 minutes before each intro and go, okay, this is how you pronounce it. This is how you pronounce it. This is how you pronounce it. But it was fun. They do a fantastic job. I know. And honestly, it was, the venue is, I mean, there was like Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, we're within a block. Oh, so like, literally I looked out the window and there's Big Ben, right there. So the venue was really nice. You, you don't have to be a member to attend. So if anyone is interested in going, highly recommend it. It was top notch conference for me.
- [35:32]
B
Perfect. No, that's great. And I, I absolutely love people who are that organized because I'm not. And, and they saved me. So that's, that's, that's awesome that you had somebody there to kind of shepherd you around and tell you what, when and where. That's. That makes things so much easier. Okay, so when, when's your next conference?
- [35:51]
A
Full day conference is May 20th. It's all online. We also realized when we first started doing these that people would go, hey, I really want to attend, but I'm not waking up at 6am to attend this thing. Or I'm not staying on till 2am for people overseas to attend this thing. So I went, all right, well, we can record them and you can watch it whenever you want to. So we also do that. We also have some free CPEs going on. So through some of the partners that we worked with on their webinars, those are on the website now. So I know we have one right now. Depending on when we publish this episode, there will be two. So you can go to the audit analytics conference.com super creative name, I realize. And, and at least at this point, you can get at least one free cpe.
- [36:36]
B
Okay. And that's where somebody would go if they want to register for conferences, see what's coming up. Everything else.
- [36:41]
A
Exactly. We don't have the spring conference information up there yet, but by the timing this that we get this episode published, it should be. Hey everyone, thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Audit Podcast. Whatever platform you're listening on right now, I'm sure there's a subscribe button somewhere, so please hit the subscribe subscribe button there. If you're listening through itunes or Spotify, feel free to go give us that five star rating. It only took me about 16 seconds to give myself a five star review and it really helps to get future guests to come on the show, so we'd really appreciate that. Lastly, be sure to check out the show notes and follow us on all our social media channels, on Instagram, on LinkedIn and on TikTok. Also, if interested, please sign up for our weekly newsletter from the Audit Podcast. Thank you all. Have a great one.