What Business Leaders Can Learn from This Small Town CEO

[0:00]  I think the most important I do is I I try to remind people as many times as possible that I'm the apolitical one in the room right I you know I work for an elected body I work with multiple elected bodies and volunteers but I'm not political right my sole purpose in life is to make sure that the people that are in the know and the people that are authorized to make the decisions have the information and the data and the background they need and to have those make those informed decisions I they say this is the information I have you know I'm trying to inform you this is my recommend based on my experience what I think we should do or what we can do or these are some grant funding availabilities or we reached up to a subject matter expert and that's what they said at the end of the day they own the decision they make and they are responsible to the residence of Marian so I really I really try to be at like a 10,000 foot altitude when I do that kind

[0:48]  of stuff now it's not easy it's much easier to talk about than it is to do sometimes right and you know even I you work very hard on something and you know one of my one of my biggest um uh personal learning pass is to not take things personally so but I I I take things very professionally and I work hard I want to make sure I have the right thing and then you give it to somebody and they like I don't that's crap you know I don't want to talk about that you know it's hard not to take that personally it's hard not to take it home but I work really hard to make sure that okay believe it or not there's another 150 things on my list so we'll move that one down a little bit and we'll move up to the one that's next all right guys welcome back to a brand

[1:42]  new episode of the heart and hustle podcast I'm incredibly excited because I have Jeff Gorman here today now this is going to be an exciting conversation because now Jeff is the CEO and Town Administrator for Marian now we've never had a municipal leader here on the show before so I'm really excited to be able to learn a little bit more about your heart and hustle Jeff but before we kind of get into it today how's your heart doing today brother how you doing man I'm good I'm good it was a busy day and I'm I'm looking forward to have some distraction this afternoon actually well I'm happy that I can be that for you there so as we kind of get into today's conversation I think it's really important for us to talk about your origin story and how we started to do the work that we do so if we were could take it way back how would you describe a younger version of Jeff what was he into what type of things was he prioritizing yeah sure I mean I grew up in a pretty small town in Illinois so

[2:30]  did pretty much anything that would you know keep us in moderate trouble uh around you know around the corn fields and the real Avenues of Illinois um I mean there wasn't really much going on we family you know we would camp and we would have fun and do those kind of things um went through school and and graduated and then tried to find any Avenue I could to get out and make up you know a better name of myself and what was that Avenue that you chose to kind of get out of the small town of Illinois what kind of you know things did you divulge and kind of really put your energy into it as a young man yeah absolutely I mean it was interesting you I would say in high school that I I um may have skated through a little bit and when it became time to sit down with you know I think in my senior year I finally sat down with my adviser you whatever

[3:18]  they called him back then and she was like well you're not getting into any of the schools you want to get into and do what you want you know and I'm like oh you know when I had a class of 30 30 people so being in the 10% is you know pretty pretty good the three top three but uh so I'm like What's the other Avenue to get out of you know the small rural rural town and kind of learned some new things and that was the military so I joined the military the Navy actually two weeks out of high school so I graduated and I was on a bus and two weeks going to De Mo Iowa and it was all downhill from there all downhill well here's my question for you you know one of the things that I think is really interesting is we often have experiences early in life where someone in a place of authority kind of checks us or level sets our thoughts on what we're going to be able to accomplish what was kind of the internal conversation that you had with yourself or your support system

[4:06]  that said hey just spoke with my school adviser they said I'm not going to get into these colleges did you always have that plan ahead for yourself or what was that moment of adversity no I mean to be to be completely transparent I had no idea what I was doing you know I mean compared to what how prepared my daughter was to go to college I I was completely unprepared and um and I don't blame it on anybody except myself you know at that time I was a young boy doing sports and having fun and you know and and and trying to catch the eye of the cute girl down the street but um you know I probably could have taken 50% of that energy and put it towards academics but I do have to think I had two very strong male role models in my life both my interal and maternal grandparents um you know they were both able to retire at 55 years old after working hard their entire life you know

[4:53]  one of them was a municipal executive like myself which kind of started the fire early the other one worked for John Deere his entire life and so you know I I really did look at them as my guiding line about I need to stop being a nudge put my head down and start figuring out I when I do work hard and make something of myself and so um I when I knew I wasn't going to college pardon me another option was to do with the military and there's a lot of opportunity with the military and so I went in that two weeks after graduating from high school we J joined the Navy you spend the next 30 years of your career in the space so what were those 30 years like they go by quick what typ of lessons do we learn I mean going looking back on them they went by extremely quick you know while you're in them it's kind of like you know it's like how you eat an elephant right it's a small bite

[5:41]  at a time and that's how it kind of works because you're kind of going four four years at a time excuse me uh four years at a time so you you I did my my initial four years I'm like oh I'm going to try something fun then I'm like well you know what but if I um stay longer they're going to send me to some place cool they're going to send me to a school I'm going to get more training and it just kept doing one of those um I was enlisted for about 9 years I was a a welder and a couple of other interesting things I did some non- instructive testing which I really enjoyed and then I was able to get my commission in the late 90s and then I spent the the remainder 20 some years of of my career as a as a naval officer and that was a little bit different I knew that I was going to I was going to continue on I already passed the half the decade point so at that point why

[6:29]  get out when I can retire after 20 and I happen to retire after 20 a little bit over 27 so well first of all congratulations on an illustrious career you know thank you so much for all of your dedication and serving you know our communities abroad and near and all the work that you've done is just like absolutely phenomenal man my my question for everybody as we're kind of sitting here navigating our episode is we had some family members who were Executives in the municipal space as well which is great why was it that we kind of came back to this specific work was there a calling was there an aha moment what kind of pushed us down this path to do the work that we're doing here today yeah that's a good one I think I think I don't think I'm I'm special in the fact that for people that are especially retired from the military and that go into the military so quickly after their High School I never had a resume I never had a job interview you know I mean I

[7:17]  cooked in high school but you know that was who you knew kind of thing right and so when I got out of the military I started looking back on 30 years of experiences and trying to figure out how am I going to translate all this military jargon into to civilian speak how I'm going to how I'm going to take these 20 years of managing people in big projects and translate them into into experiences that people understand that they hire me and so um I really thought I was kind of starting over again um when I retired and so I really didn't know what I wanted to do when I used I used to joke with my wife I don't know what I want to do when I grew up right and so luckily I had a I had a friend of mine who an acquaintance of mine who who offered me the opportunity to do a startup Financial Services company um that was extremely educational and impactful to to my professional

[8:05]  development um I spent a year you know you're doing a lot of thing building processes taking care of people moving money around it didn't end up being my ball ball of wax but you know I I really look back on it great um then I moved into life science space for about uh six years doing um field service things um um which I also found amazing because it I happened to be there during covid and I found it you know very um positively impactful to myself and other people that we were we were saving people's lives and help creating these vaccines and making sure that these labs in these hospitals stayed up and running during was an amazing time and not a single one of my gentlemen that I worked with got sick which I was very happy for and so I stayed with there but you know in the background the whole time I'm doing this

[8:52]  I I had moved to a town on Cape Cod called mashby for the first time I grew Roots right because I've been moving around every couple years for 30 years and I finally grew Roots my daughter was in school my wife was a teacher in the school district in the same town I'm meeting people out in town that I know because I'm social with them not because I work with them and so I started to see how I wanted to I wanted to really try to um extend my experience to the town and how do you do that so I tried some Civic engagement I I was elected to the school committee for two and a half terms um I was on the finance committee for mashby for a short amount of time and while I'm doing this I I continue to see other job openings and meeting other people that were in Municipal Executives and Municipal Management in multiple layers and I'm like that really is a a job that I can see myself fitting into

[9:43]  and it really scratches that itch that I have to be a civic-minded you know kind of responsible volunteer and so the job in Maran came up while I was still uh attached to the life science company um I researched it I talked to a lot of people I talked to the the the local exec in mashby to kind of get their their fit and lucky enough and honored I was honored to be selected and here I am and I think it's a great fit I'm really having a good time I want to talk a little bit about some of the challenges that you navigate in being a municipal executive you know one of the things that I often think about is our cities are incredibly well-funded right it's the government they have unlimited money to be able to improve our spaces is that true I I don't I don't think that I think that would be um a disingenuous statement uh to say for all that all

[10:31]  towns and cities are are well funded I mean a good example for for Maran I can only speak for Marian we all have very similar problems no matter the size of the town it's just how many resources do we have available to address those problems you know we're a small town of 5,000 people you go to Cambridge Massachusetts which I wish I knew the population probably in hundreds of thousands um they have the exact same problems that we have except they have five people that are working on that single problem and I'm the person working on with five different hats right and you know the scope of the problem may be smaller because of the size of the town but the resources are still needed to do it um you know it's interesting too for small smaller kind of rural under 12,000 um population towns we have the primary the primary funding for us to do services for our

[11:19]  residents coming directly from property taxes for us it's 80% right we don't have a large commercial Enterprise in the town we don't even have room to put a bunch of commercial there's many small towns like this around Massachusetts that have to rely on the on the pockets of their residents to pay ultimately for services throughout the entire town so I we are lucky again I I'm in an amazing town with amazing residents and we we are you know a fiscally responsible organization we have a high you know what's called the bond rating which is really the credit rating for municipality whereas high as we can possibly be um but I would I'd be a liar if I didn't say I needed more you know I mean we have we have you know one of the things that we like to talk about is roads right everyone drives on the road every day it's the first thing you're

[12:05]  driving oh this road is terrible in the potholes you know it's you know a a reasonable size Road let's say it's a mile long it's a million dollars right wow and you know that that money that we use some funds from the state that we roll over every single year and it takes 10 years to get up to a million dollars so you can see how quickly you can be behind the power curve with respect to keeping your infrastructure up and running um I would also I think the big thing you know I think there's there's a kind of a trifecta right now and probably with most municipalities and one of them is climate resiliency um housing um and um for us like internally more detailed wise is um having a pool of people to draw draw from when when folks like me retire um I

[12:53]  don't really talk about climate resiliency a lot because it's it's a hot button topic and gets too political and emotional but at the end of the day we're a Coastal Community and you know last December we had storms and flooding that reached um to streets that have never been flooded before and so even if we don't call it climate resilience even if we don't call call it climate change we as a municipality need to work with our with our um businesses and our residents and figure out okay how do we make ourselves resilient do we have to raise a road do we have a pump station for our water system that needs to be brought up do we have to do generators is there something that we can do that is not necessarily building infrastructure but um recreating natural barriers to flooding and and you know one of them is rutland's replication I think when we spoke we talked about Cranbury bog replication which is a big

[13:40]  thing on Cape and and Southeastern massive there's you know there there are gr there's grant funding available for us to go out to these farmers and they're like you know I'm not I'm not it's not the bank for the bucket used to be this is just sitting here we can get money and take that and turn that back into a wetland and that actually becomes what's what I like to think of as a sponge right so it's it's like a natural sponge to to protect us from that storm surgeon thing that seems to be more you know more prevalent over the last decade or so so Jee how does a how does a leader navigate some of those conversations because even topics like climate change right have become politicized but when they start having an economic impact because of the impact of the weather we have to think about them from a fiduciary from a responsibility perspective so how do you navigate some of those conversations when you have Tabo topics like that get politicized I think the most important I do is I I try to remind people as many

[14:28]  times as possible that I'm the apolitical one in the room right I you know I work for an elected body I work with multiple elected bodies and volunteers but I'm not political right my sole purpose in life is to make sure that the people that are in the know and the people that are authorized to make the decisions have the information and the data and the background they need and to have those make those informed decisions and if it you know if it causes somebody behind a table that's been elected to go off you know and spin up because I use the word climate change or I use climate resiliency that's okay you know it doesn't bother me and I don't take it personally I I just say this is the information I have you know I'm trying to inform you this is my recommendation based on my experience what I think we should do or what we can do or these are some grant funding availabilities or we reached out to a

[15:15]  subject matter expert and that's what they said at the end of the day they own the decision they make and they are responsible to the residence of Maran so I really I really try to be to like a 10,000 foot altitude when I do that kind of stuff now it's not easy it's much easier to talk about than it is to do sometimes right and you know even I you work very hard on something and you know one of my one of my biggest um uh personal learning pass is to not take things personally so but I I I take things very professionally and I I work hard I want to make sure I have the right thing and then you give it to somebody and they like I don't that's crap you know I don't want to talk about that you know it's hard not to take that personally it's hard not to take it home but I work really hard to make sure that okay believe it or not there's another 150 things on my list so we'll move that one down a little bit and we'll move up to

[16:03]  the one that's next um and housing if you want to move to housing or absolutely yeah yeah so housing is a big one too you know I I think that we're up into the up lower 70s upper 60s for a living wage for people in Massachusetts right now and of course it goes up if you have children and you know and and I'll give you a good anecdote it's not marrying but it's Nantucket the island of Nantucket you know so they're you know a seasonal Island and they have a you know um a cyclic Workforce and population but they have a set amount of police officers for example right they they can't hire 30 police officers in the summertime to support their influx of Tourism it doesn't work that way so they have to find a happy medium but they also can't pay um police officers more than the going rate which is you know to start is

[16:50]  in the upper 50s 50,000 or so 60,000 which seems like a a reasonable amount of money for someone to start a job but the average home price in ncka is $4 million so you get somebody on the island that's really good at their job they were number one in the academy they really have a good cultural fit for the police department but they can't afford to live there so that's a very common problem throughout especially the tourism areas on Cape Cod and Southeastern Massachusetts I think we're marrying into the 800,000 with our average home price and we have brand new teachers and entry-level teachers and people that just work at the gas station or people that we want to hire they're going to help us in the highway right or an administrative assistant this is one of the places where I say if I had more money I'd use

[17:36]  it because you know we we have a set amount of money for these ental Levy people to start and we want to make sure that they're able to at least live close to where they we don't want someone commuting two hours to come and do a job and doesn't get home till 8:00 every night because that doesn't La that's a stepping stone to another job um and then the other thing would be it's also attached with climate change you know one of the things that i' I talk a lot about is what's called Co what I call Coastal Retreat and so in in Massachusetts in a lot of places when you get houses and people that live near the ocean those are affluent areas High expensive homes um but now you know we're we're you know more more flooding we have you know rebuilt flooding maps that we get from the government that now um flooding insurance is through the roof and these people at some point are going to start

[18:23]  to retreat from the coast and what that's going to do is it's going to take those affluent areas in the high home prices and move it into the Uplands where now our people are getting homes that are reasonable for starter homes and so it's going to spread that out and it's going to it's going to continue to impact our ability to provide affordable homes for the residents that want to be here or our our folks that have families now they empty nesters and they want to downsize we want them to stay here right Marion's an awesome place but we got to make sure that we do that luckily we have a lot of really good opportunity right now in Maran we have um two projects in place one of them has got an En housing component so we're able to support that um and then another one that really hasn't been designed yet but we have an area we actually have an area that we could develop as well um develop a land in this area is is few and far

[19:11]  between in the last 20 or 30 years you know people have been barely hard about in our tourism areas is to to purchase these areas um these the these developable properties to make sure they don't get developed by some big conglomerate that wants to build high-rise condos and and Rents It Out for 5,000 bucks a week but what that does now is we have these big swats of land that could be used for housing that are permanently um you know open space they can't be their conservation restrictions they can't be developed yeah yeah I think about like the challenges of just sitting in your position and recognizing you know cost of living going through the roof right we only have so much money to be able to support the foundational roles in our community so how do you think we're going to be able to navigate our way out of these challenges because housing prices are going to continue to pump

[19:58]  right the jobs that we have are we're not going to be able to give more money we can't pay police officers 150 or 200 Grand a year so how you kind of thinking about this Challenge and how we're going to navigate it well there's actually another little layer too and that's that you know as the housing prices go up they get assessed higher so their taxes go up so technically we get more money but right Massachusetts doesn't allow us to increase our taxes more than 2.5% per year so normally that's you know in preco that was okay right we could deal with could deal with that because we were in an inflationary model between zero and 3% right so if inflation was 2% and we could raise our budget by 2 and a half% we're good right we can provide coal increases for our employees we can perhaps do some maintenance on one of the buildings you know the building I'm

[20:44]  sitting in right now is a tremendously awesome historical building from the late 1800s right I mean but it takes a lot of money to keep this you know in place and taken care of and right now we we have to continue to defer those kind of things um so how do you have those conversations again it's I don't mean to keep going back on the cliche thing it's about communication right it's about messaging and it's about it's about strategic Vision you know we we look at our budget at fiveyear chunks we you know I have a great Finance director we've determined that looking past five years you know it's a it's a it's a pretty precipitous slope of garbage data when you get past five years right so we have a 5year forecast we can kind of see where ups and downs are um and we we are very open with that we you know we have a long a budget process that's a bit

[21:33]  weird too um so our our fiscal year starts in July of next year we're already building the budget in September we started in September for July and we have to estimate almost everything right we have to estimate how much property taxes we're going to get we have to estimate how many local receipts we're going to get from fees and business taxes we have to estimate how much New Growth we're going to get how much the health insurance is going to cost and so there's a lot we're looking into a muddy crystal ball all the time but we try to we try to be very conservative we try to build in some flexibility um and I think those long-term historical fiscal responsible decisions that have been made well before me allow us to absorb what you're talking about the the UN the UN unexpected increase in I'll I'll give you a good example our retiree health

[22:22]  insurance went up 30% this year oh right that is an impossible an impossible budget line item to expect right but you know luckily we have built in safeguards and been conservative in other areas that will'll be able to absorb that now we can't absorb that year-over year over year over year right but you know one year we can and there's other there's other ways to do it um I think the other thing that impacts us too is is building that trust with the um the towns folk you know and I think we talked about the kind of what I consider an interesting government um in Massachusetts the way we do business you know I get a budget that's for the option of the town and it's approved by the town folk at at town meeting so we have a town meeting once a year and they approve our budget if something happens outside of the normal scope of of business that we need money for we don't have it it the only

[23:11]  way we can get that money is to go back to the town and have a special town meeting which in itself has a cost right to to put to put a town meeting together um so what we need to do is we need to when we have those Town meetings we we spend an an inordinate amount of time talking to people in advance we have a pre- toown meeting where we sit down and say okay no topic is off limits let's go bring it at me what concerns you have about this the what we call the warrant all of these stuff that's in in our book that we're going to we're going to approve during town meeting bring it at me right and so when we get to the town meeting 80% of those questions have already been answered and we've created we continue year-over year to create that trust I call it the patience well right with my previous job you know you by creating that trust the patience well

[23:57]  is always Happ full and so that you know you can go up and down when you make people mad they're like oh you know Gorman doesn't normally do this so we're we're going to give him a pass on this um because believe me I make mistakes I just make new mistakes every day right I don't make the same mistake twice um and so we build that and so when we go to the when we go to the budget and people start looking into things and they're like well you know why is this why is this budget line so high or why why does it continue to grow they understand that when we say well we built that in there as a protection to ensure that we had the flexibility for un unknowns they they actually take it at value there's not there's not a dozen people standing up and saying oh you're just want you know you just want money it's it there's a I mean there's so much about relationship building you know I I got another thing my door is always open right for anybody that wants to come in now the caveat is it's got a screen door

[24:44]  on it it doesn't really but I mean it's got a philosophical screen door on it there'll be times I can't I can't have that that talk my calendar does get full but I I just last week I was very happy there were some people that were concerned about some rumors that were going around town about our f our some of our finances and they reached o to me and said hey can you can you have a chat I'm like of course I can have a chat and when we sat down the first thing I did is I thanked them because I said I'd rather have a conversation with you for an hour than have 30 people running around this town spreading rumors and playing telephone and the next thing you know it's you know there's an allout um Mutiny on our hands it was a spectacular conversation I enjoy that kind of stuff I love coming to a table and trying to solve problems and I love talking to people and meeting them and learning how they their quirks and how they tick and we left there and everybody was happy

[25:32]  and I I really enjoy that kind of stuff and so that's what I really push for all of our philosophies and all of our people you know that that work with me because I I mean this is a healthy version of conflict right I mean when you think about conflict there's a lot of things that people talk about today in which conflict is bad we shouldn't have tough conversations but if you have a tough conversation one time it's much better than at being prolonged out and 30 different people having that conversation as well doesn't it it's I mean you mentioned 30% increase in Insurance what is the relationship that you have with some of those strategic vendors who provide health insurance like that when they boost by 30% a year that seems like a complete respon you guys can't respond to that no so how does that work the the unfortunate thing is that's you know we consider that a non-discretionary expense right there's nothing we can do about it it has to be

[26:19]  paid it's you know it's a built-in obligation now of course believe me we had a conversation and it was a hard conversation with our broker right and you know we made some changes that we we demanded some changes for the following year you know we had got that information quite late and here it is September October time frame we're learning about the 30% I know that they had information earlier right that that at least could have in you know indicated there was going to be a much higher um increase than we estimated we estimated you know 8 %. which is the normal Healthcare increase um I'll tell you about the schools too we had the schools went through the same thing for school bus transportation right so Transportation costs are just was ridiculous they were above 30% they re redid their their contract and you know who who absorbs that as the town I mean

[27:06]  that the schools don't have their own money they get money from the town I think right now we're almost 50% of our budget goes to our school um you know it's only a k6 school then the other well that's not true I'm sorry we do also have a Regional High School that we also have an assessment for but yeah I I appreciate your your your comment about the conflict because I think it's true and you know we we we've had discussions that you know we've had you know Massachusetts got this big thing called open meeting law too we cannot the EXE the executives in this town I'm Not Elected but the elected Executives cannot discuss cannot deliberate with themselves um outside of open open posted meeting and so there are times when they sit down and they have an emotional discussion with Town folk and we have a public hearing and that is not unhealthy that is healthy that is a healthy thing to happen not every

[27:54]  conversation has to be people smiling and laughing and joking around luckily we live in a town where primarily those are the conversations we have um but when when you have the emotional conversation and it's a transparent open in my big my big catch phase bilateral respectful conversation then um there's nothing to worry about you know you talk about it you learn you're you know don't be afraid to call your baby ugly just because it's your project right and and and say you know what nine out of 10 people think that this is a dumb idea it must be a dumb idea right let's go back to the drawing board and figure it out draw on some subject matter experts and and and figure it out you know in in our previous conversation you had mentioned you said you know uh I'm really good at knowing what I don't know right I thought that was really important so

[28:41]  when it comes to facing some of these challenges right you're not going to have the answer for everything but we did talk about the skill set of curiosity in our last conversation how do you think about curiosity from your position as a leader in the community and being able to I would to expand our Horizons and think about how we can tackle some of these challenges with cold heart cash what are you thinking about no that's fair so I mean I I I really do I really do account this for the military right so one of the interesting things not as much as when you're enlisted but when you're an officer your your job length is two three years right and your boss's job length is two three years so you could change a job have a boss get a new boss and then change a job in like you know a three-year time frame so one of the things you have to be very very Adept at is stepping on board and spinning up super quickly and one of the things I've is you you initially don't even know

[29:31]  what you don't know right and so it's very very important to learn that that list of things that you're talking to other people and again you know the two years one mouth adage listening to everybody and oh that's right my god I didn't even know about that and you're writing it down and I had the green wheel book in my back pocket that was full and so I I really learned to um learn you know figure out what I don't know immediately so I can fill those gaps and then I can do the stuff I do know that I want to polish up on and it kind of comes it because I only got two years to be successful right two or three years and that easily carried over into this you know into this mindset and all of that like you mentioned is about curiosity right I I've always been the kind of person if I don't come to a day of work and have it learned something new then it's a not a good day at work you know and you can you can boil it down to even more into kind of the

[30:18]  financial word learn and earn right if you're not learning and earning it's on a good day and um so I'm curious about everything I you know we were talking about the convers ation with well I was talking about the conversation with the people last the residents last week about finances you know I not only do I consider that a you know um kind of a brainstorming session or you know a solution finding project it's also for me educational there is going to be a question that somebody asked me that I've never thought of and the way that I get around that is I don't need to know everything but I guarantee I'll follow up with you right so my thing is I I don't know that and it's about the whole thing back going back to trust because when somebody ask me a question I don't know it You're darn right I'm going to get back to you and tell you because I found it because I am curious to know

[31:04]  the answer I don't want to not know the answer and because who knows what that knowledge is going to is going to extend to right they may ask that question I learn I'm like oh my God can you believe what I just learned on the Commonwealth the mas.gov website oh and there's a grant here holy cow that's a perfect grant for this project we want to do it is amazing how many different things connect together just because you stop listen think ask the hard questions be curious be mindful be respectful have open communication um I I I always think when I talk like this that every single word out of my mouth is cliche but it really means something right it act it actually connects together I should read a the the source and try to connect some of my other words together so I don't say the same thing all the time I feel like one of the big advantages of even

[31:50]  having a conversation like this is showing what it's like behind the scenes to be a leader of a municipal so like what we're talking about here is interesting how do you think about your last point that we made a little bit earlier was fostering the next generation of great leaders who are going to be able to come in behind you well when we talk about the economic pressure we talk about all the other things that are going on in the community people leaving the the shorelines right to be able to go to places where there's more affordable housing to be able to invest in their Community how are we thinking about your role in inspiring the next generation of you know the great leaders in our municipalities to be able to show up and do this work that you're doing yeah that's a great question you know one of the things that I I I learned very quickly on during my tenure and in previous jobs when I was doing some elective work in in mashby is that

[32:38]  the pool is shallow with respect to people that understand what a municipal job is you know the benefits of being in a municipality um and that the overall mind seat the local and Regional um organizations and the national organizations that respond to Municipal Executives I don't believe believe do a really good job at supporting the succession plans and development of people so that they can move up in while they're in the municipalities but also you know going into our local Community College Massachusetts for example just um made community colleges free right if you if you don't as long as you don't have you know there's an age limit and you you can't have a degree but you know so it's a it's a unique opportunity for some of these these Statewide

[33:26]  organizations you know I reached out to Cape Cod Community College our local community college and says hey what do I need to do to just have 45 minutes of time with folks in this class so I can talk about what it's like to work for a town you know and we can we can try to find classes that will fit to make sure they have the skills to roll right in here and start entry level because you know we just had someone retire that was in the finance department for 31 years right and she's got a very good retirement and she's got I think she can look back very fondly on all the things she did for the T of Marian um but the the knowled the wealth of knowledge that comes with that 31 years of negotiating and navigating the financial challenges of the community as well is something that needs to be tapped into before she leaves and somebody starts new and municipalities are not good at succcess succession planning and it goes It goes

[34:13]  back to a corporate job you know normally if you look even a matrix organization there's you can usually find one or two people that have very similar job titles and or job responsibilities and so there's several people that you can slide into a succession plan that can move up you know a town the size of Maran with with the finances has we're we're lean right we have one person to do one job and if if if I have somebody like I said her name was Kathy she's awesome and she she left she retired we you know it was difficult for us to pull somebody out of another part of the organization to do that transitional training because there's not a pool out there to hire somebody like that so that they can sit for a month with Kathy and learn and then the other the you know second and third order effects of that

[34:59]  are now you're paying two people for the same job yep on a budget that was created a year and a half ago that of course didn't include having another person so there's you know it it really does create a lot of a lot of outof thebox thinking and try to try to figure things out and so we're trying really really hard right now to to make sure that people understand that we support development that we support cross training and that we will find a way to fund it if people need to get certifications if they need to take if they need to move away from you know their current customer service role and move into a different customer service role for a couple weeks you know twice a year in order to kind of get those extra skills we want them to do it um the issue is it's a huge Paradigm Shift right it's not what their the municipal workers are used to they're they're

[35:46]  really used to staying in the same job for a really long time and then sliding into a similar role that may be a promotion um but not this not cross trining not transition from place to place not having somebody that you can point a finger to and say y okay Gorman just retired we need somebody to be here for 3 months while we do the hiring and then and then Shadow them for three more months to get them up to speed you know most towns smaller towns especially aren't built that way it's it's interesting to me because when we talk about things like climate resiliency and some of these changes and curiosity it's almost like and no I'm not saying anything negative about previous generations of somebody who's been a job for 30 years but that that element of curiosity with thinking about how we can do things differently it doesn't seem like we're going to be able to tap into that wealth of Knowledge from that

[36:33]  younger generation unless we get them in early and we start building that pipeline so what is that conversation like with Cape Cod Community College when you go and show up and say Hey listen I just need 45 minutes to start inspir the next generation is that well received what are the action steps that come from that I I think it was well received I mean you know the issue the issue with all these kind of um out of the box type of things is we're all busy right and you know I appreciate that the president of a community college gave me time to talk about this and brought in his CFO he gave me a name of someone who does the adult education portion of Cap Cod Community College you know and she actually stopped by the office and we talked and I appreciate the fact that they're very everyone's very excited for it but where do they find where do they find their funding for it where you know who who's going to do it what class is it going to be are these are these

[37:20]  kiddos going to be paying for this opportunity you know so there's a lot there's a lot more in involved to it as well and what you were talking about with the um I know you're talking about the previous generations and lack of innovation it is true right one one of the things I think is is kind of a positive with the with the pool getting shallow is that we're not stealing it's not like um it's not just this this constant flow of Municipal people back and forth from from from town to town just going from place to place chasing chasing the extra pay right we there's just not enough people to do that now and so and maybe in 20 years there'll be more people if we you know really push the education but what what I think is a positive about this is we have people like myself who have the skills and the experience to succeed in these roles but

[38:08]  have never been in this role I come at this in a completely different lens than people that have been doing this for 25 years some of it's based out of ignorance too right where I'm like I go tell the finance director I'm like oh hey why can't we just do this and she's like you can't that's illegal like what do you mean it's illegal I mean that seems you know like the like a really smart thing to do and she goes no the Masters doesn't let us do that oh okay and you know so I and then sometimes you look at things and you say something and people like wow I don't know why we didn't do that before and it's because people get set in their ways and you you're been sitting at the same desk for you know 10 years doing the same job in the same cyclic periodic budget review cycle annual time meeting and you kind of lose sight of the fact that you could make someone's job a little bit easier just by spending an extra 15 minutes discussing efficiency or or continuing

[38:56]  Improvement things things like that very I mean that's a very corporate mindset and you know I think that some of it you know some of that needs to extend into municipalities because especially for efficiencies and process Improvement there is there is a fit for that the the way that the municipality operates with pnls and and the way that um the corporate Matrix structures work and things like that doesn't doesn't lend well but um I learned that very quickly yeah it seems like we're in a really interesting point in time right now we've got technology like automation artificial intelligence where you got some people in certain sectors who are being evangelists or on the front end of the adoption curve saying this is the way to solve the problems that we're facing but we also have organizations like government bodies healthc care municipalities that are often aren't on the front end of that adoption curve and

[39:43]  so how are you kind of thinking about you know technology being kind of maybe the one of the golden BBS that we kind of shoot at many of these problems kind of be more efficient I I I I can I cannot agree with you more on that I mean one of the first things I came into when I came in this job was is I was absolutely astounded at our it infrastructure right I mean um when I got here we didn't have an IT director we you know we had people who had computers that were so old they couldn't even be updated anymore were using paper Time cover it's 2024 you know meanwhile the the you know the pay person who's in charge of payroll is spending an entire week doing payroll for a fairly small town and all of that can be you know really lend towards um infrastructure I'm sorry it

[40:29]  infrastructure Improvement and so one of the things I did you know when I first got here is we have this kind of neat thing called C our Capital Improvement plan so we do a 10-year Capital Improvement plan and it could be anywhere from buying a new police vehicle to u a new sewer pumping station to a sidewalk whatever it is right and um all of the department heads submit their 10year plans we put it a committee actually gets to go through and prioritize them and then during the budget process we see how many we can afford to pay for one of the things I added last year was an IT refresh program because one of the you know part of the problem with this is is that you know it's great there are there's software out there that makes HR easy there's software out there that makes budgeting easy there's easy or there's software out there that allows us to do better payroll but it all costs money and it all has resources that need to be put towards it in a lean in a lean team

[41:19]  like this which is difficult so because we're be pulling somebody off that's got five hats away from that and adding another hat to them and so we have to be very mindful about how big of a project we tackle at one time and so um so I did the it refresh program so we got money that we'll be getting money every year for three years where we've you know done first in first out you know um somebody's computer that can never be updated we've already replaced it my favorite story is and I don't know you know how much of a nerd you are or not Kean but we had a server um and this isn't beating anybody up it is what it is right we had a server at the at one of our our offices in one of our departments that had been running continuously for 5.9 years never restarted never patched and you know I mean first of all congratulations for

[42:06]  old school servers that can last that long because I don't think a new one would do that but you know I mean so that was a perfect a perfect example of why we needed this it refresh to make sure that that thing didn't first of all fail and now we're an emergency to try to find the money to replace it but this way we can proactively place it and make sure that we don't lose anything and we can transition to it into it Etc another thing we did with the same Capital program as digitization um you know I'm a big person about you know people walking up here and handing me a piece of paper to take a day off ridiculous absolutely ridiculous and so I'm like what what we need to figure out how we can make that automated right and and either automated or or a a more digital format process and so another thing that we requested through the capital program is a dig digitization it's a hard word for me

[42:54]  digitization process where not only for our own internal processes but maybe someone is building a home in Maran and they need a site plan from a house that was built in 1942 they can go online and request that and it's much easier for someone to shoot it out to them via the computer now they have it and it's a digital copy and so um that that's a great leading question I really appreciate it it's it's a huge project for us right now we it's a three it's a we call it my three-legged stool project right so we have the digitization we have the it infrastructure Improvement and then we we really need to work hard to try to find a place in the budget to have our own internal onsite it Network guy or girl right because right now we're providing we have a third party a third party supporting us and although they're a great company nothing is the same than somebody that can walk into

[43:42]  your office and take care of your mouse that doesn't work or your printer that's not printing as opposed to putting in a ticket and waiting for someone to call so we're too small for that you know all of our processes and the way we take care of our customers internally should be very Boutique right it not like a you know $50 billion global company yeah it's a it's a really interesting perspective because what you're fighting against is limited resources limited time but also the need to adapt to this new digitized world is challenging and you can't just shoot one Silver Bullet at it you have to shoot a hundred golden BBS that are going to tackle these things slowly but surely yeah yeah so here's my here's my you know as we kind of wind this down what is the future going to look like as a leader of an amazing municipality taking care of a city investing into time growing Roots what do you think is going to happen over the next couple years here you what's your C what's your shot that

[44:28]  you're calling if you're uh I think that I mean if you I mean if you're asking for personal stuff you know I would like to retire for real at some point um I I think that there's we are in a really good trajectory in Mary and on a both Prof personal and professional status to really um in the next decade really create a brand new kind of scope for this whole place so we're we're talking about in increase residential um housing availabilities increase our population increase our water and users which drive down our fees for water and sewer um um you know it's the you know the quote from f the dreams right if you build it they will come kind of things it goes both ways right but you know if we want more commercial here we need to have more people how do you get more people here you know if we want the school enrollment to go up we need to have

[45:14]  families here so again everything's connected and we're trying to be as strategic as possible to make sure we get it uh for me personally yeah I just retire and you know my wife and I have always talked about settling in Hawaii um at some point so we'll see we'll see how that we'll see how that goes I mean that's the that's the best spot to be man you know we love cape and you know I told my wife I said you know I grew up in you know the middle of the cornfields and I do have an affinity for the mountains and lakes and things and she goes I can't be more than a couple minutes from the beach I'm like okay sounds like the next chapter is goingon to put you in the middle of the Pacific you know what I mean well jefff I just want to say man thank you so much for uh coming on the show one of the traditions we have here on the podcast is our previous guest wants to ask you a blind question so in times of turbulence what does courage mean to you as a leader h I

[46:04]  think it is doing what you know is right even when nobody is watching um you know a big thing for me is integrity and you kind of as soon as you start talking about in times of turbulence and courage I had the the grand pleasure of spending a year in Iraq um and you know I immediately brought up some of the situations that I was in over there and you know I think you could very easily do some uncor Inc courageous things in those situations where um with you know the fog of war and you talked the inter turbulence of what's going on in the chaos and you know I think courage really is both in a peace time and a war time it's doing what you want to do and that if you're standing in front of somebody doing it that it's the same that you would be doing it when nobody's watching and that's a beautiful place for us to put a

[46:52]  wrap on it Jeff Gorman once again man thank you so much for coming on the podcast you are the definition of and hustle and it's been a pleasure to be able to share your story here today man oh thank you I appreciate I really appreci the invite Kenan have a great one