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Jake and Rob have a fun conversation as they walk back through their introduction and experience with technology. They reminisce about their first computers, first software, initial experience with the Internet, and talk about mobile devices.
For more information about Funeral Results Marketing, check out the website or contact Rob at robin@funeralresults.com or at 1-800-810-3595. For more information about the Johnson Consulting Group, check out the website or contact Jake at jjohnson@johnsonconsulting.com or at 1-888-250-7747.
See the complete transcript here:
Rob Heppell:
Welcome back to the Funeral X Podcast. I am Rob Heppell, and I’m joined with my Funeral Results Marketing business partner, Jake Johnson. Hey there, Jake.
Jake Johnson:
Hey, Rob.
Rob Heppell:
How’s it going?
Jake Johnson:
Living the dream.
Rob Heppell:
Good. Good stuff. Hey, you know what? I’ve enjoyed our chats here. I know that we’ve talked about these types of things in the past about just our technologies and how we use them and things like that. I thought it would be fun to share a little geek-out session of our background with technology, the internet, that type of thing. I think our little generation, I’m I think five years older than you or so, but we learned what it was… We grew up not technology and we’re fully embraced in it, right?
We’re one of the rare generations that will have transpired and worked through it into now. It’s maybe even controlling. Our lives are very dependent on it. Hey, just right at the beginning, and what I’ll do, I’ll ask you some questions, you share your thoughts, I’ll share my thoughts, and we’ll just kind of go through the last two or three decades of technologies. In school, did you take computer classes or typing? Was your school offering that when you’re going to high school?
Jake Johnson:
Yes. I remember components of it like, well, Macintosh Computers in middle school, and I believe the thing that comes to mind is Oregon Trail. Probably everybody remembers that one. That was like the intro to me and I just thought it was the coolest thing. You had it up on the screen, and it was interactive. Games are really where it started for me, I’d say middle school. But in high school, I don’t recall computer classes in high school. It’s crazy.
Rob Heppell:
I’ll get to a little funny story towards the end about my dad and when we reflected back on computers and high school. I never took it. Some of my buddies took it. They’d all walk around with those little computer cards because they’d have to take that to class, those maybe like seven-inch by three-inch little pieces of cardboard. I never took typing. Those are probably a couple of things that I should have done. One of my buddies at that time, his dad was kind of into electronics, so they had the Apple and with the floppys and we’d go over to his basement and we’d play games.
The first computers that I had though, were like an IBM XT or 286 XT or AT. It was big when it was getting into like, okay, there was like a hard drive, but you still had the five and a quarter floppy, and then the three and a half little hard disk still floppy. That was really the first one I started getting into computers was right after grade 12. I think when I was working at McCall’s, a great help was Paul Taylor. He was the office manager. He was doing accounting and he brought in a computer. McCall has never had any computers up until 1987, ’88.
He was instrumental in showing me, like teaching me DOS and things like that, how that all worked. He would help me troubleshoot things or if I messed things up. What about like at home, did you end up getting a computer?
Jake Johnson:
Yes. My parents had a computer. I always wanted to get one, and it was too expensive or seemed unnecessary for me. I always played with my parents’ computer, and it was IBM. I think probably similar to what you’re talking about, clone 286, something like that. Then they went to 386, then 486 and then Pentium, and then 486 DX2s with like overclock. It had all these whole series of things, and it was always intriguing to me. On the home computer, again, games were kind of my thing, but learning how to… The five and a quarter.
I don’t know if it had hard drives then. It was something just intriguing to me. I had a cousin that was big into computer computers and, again, gaming was the part that I always found fascinating. And then once I got into college, I started learning more about the practical side, things like that, but it was a lot of fun to learn. Quite honestly, I really started getting into it in college and building computers and things like that and installing hard drives on old 286 or 386s and things like that. It’s always been a fun technology. The web has always been an intriguing thing.
In fact, this will probably be a question you’d come to, but I remember when I first learned of the internet, which was in college, which was an interesting thing in itself.
Rob Heppell:
Everything was just so new back then. I would think of the hours that I would spend. There was a time… When I was at McCall’s, I finished my apprenticeship and got my license, and then I actually stepped away from McCall’s for a year. Thought I’d be an entrepreneur. Me and a couple buddies, we bought a skateboard store, which was fun, but we bought this automotive garage. Now, the automotive garage, we had some great parties at the… because it had this big mezzanine in this garage. We didn’t do well on the revenue side.
And unfortunately, since the garage didn’t do well, then we had to get rid of both. But at that time, I bought my first computer. What’s weird is most of these computers that I bought over the were like two to $3,000. Back then, and this would’ve been 1990, I spent $3,000 on the computer. And funny how like today, if you were to get the best MacBook Pro, it’s going to be about $3,000. The price tag stayed the same.
Obviously, you can get them cheaper now, but I kind of made a deal with myself and I’m glad I did, and this is maybe where I made up from not taking it in high school, was that I wouldn’t play any games on the computer. It would only be work. Besides like with the Word processor, it was learning Lotus 1-2-3. And again, Paul Taylor from McCall’s taught me how to use that and the calculations. I think we’ll get into Excel a bit later because I do want to… You’re an Excel whiz, so I’d love for you to kind of share that.
It was just funny how every time I went to go buy a computer… And this included the printer too and the monitor and that, but this kind of $3,000 limit kind of stayed there for like two or three computer purchases, even though the things were getting… They were getting better and better, but the price was staying the same. And now you could walk out with probably paying $1,000 for something that would be over a hundred times better.
Jake Johnson:
In college is where I really started getting into computers. That computer for me at the time, which was a great computer, was a 486DX2 and it came with like a 200 meg hard drive that was huge. But I remember, you talk about pricing, the standard on hard drives at one point was a dollar a meg. If you bought a 400 meg hard drive, which is nothing, it was 400 bucks. It’s insane how that’s changed for sure.
Rob Heppell:
Oh, for sure. Now we’re talking terabytes and hosting it all in the cloud. What were the first few softwares that you kind of really dug into?
Jake Johnson:
Mine was DOS actually. I mean, I really learned how to navigate through DOS, use it, directory setups, batch files. If you ever created batch files back in the day, you know what I’m talking about.
Rob Heppell:
Yes.
Jake Johnson:
And then you had a batch file, like visual menus. This was before Windows, and then Windows 3.1. I think there was a version before that, but I think 3.1 or 3.11 was the first unbuggy kind of popular Windows. Learning that. Learning Microsoft Office in general, like Word, Excel. You didn’t really use… I don’t know people know this, but Excel was not real popular when it first came out, because Lotus was so dominating. Lotus was more what I learned. That they would teach in college.
There was not a Windows that was used. It was all through DOS. But I remember you get excited because the new DOS version would come out and this was visual-based, but you learn how to do it.
Rob Heppell:
That’s a good platform to kind of know what’s going on. You’ve obviously gone deeper into that than me, but Yes, creating the little menus and little tiny programming, but at least there’s a little bit of a foundation there to somewhat understand what’s happening now, but a lot of it’s…
Jake Johnson:
I remember one of the most fun games I’ve played, which is comical because I was living in LA in high school. We went to a swap meet and I bought a five and a quarter inch floppy. It was like a Dungeon game, but it was all out of the characters on a keyboard. The visual was like whatever the symbol is that’s up and down, and they would make walls. You’d be attacked by zombies, which was a bunch of Z attacking. It was the funniest thing, but that’s how the world’s changed.
Rob Heppell:
Oh, for sure. Yes. For software, for me, I think my sister had a computer at home. I was creating some resumes and I was using WordPerfect. Even Word wasn’t, as you said about Excel.
Jake Johnson:
Right. WordPerfect was more popular. You’re right.
Rob Heppell:
Yes. That was a kind of adopted at McCall’s. I created a system that they used, I think, way too long, they don’t use it anymore, but it would be a kind of mail merging from Paradox, which is now no longer, I don’t think, or you never heard of it. Paradox was the database and we’d enter that in and make a pretty little entry form. This is the beginning of… This is our do yourself POS or call management system. And then it would mail merge into WordPerfect and it would print out the stats form and the death certificates and that.
Oh, the hours, Jake, that was spent doing that not very efficiently. Ran a thousand call funeral home for well over a decade, and then eventually it went to a proper funeral industry software.
Jake Johnson:
I remember PageMaker. Do you remember all this PageMaker?
Rob Heppell:
Oh Yes.
Jake Johnson:
That was one. That was just all those tools back in the day that was pretty cutting edge and everything was new. It was pretty exciting. I mean, just the notion of typing in a Word processing software that would autocorrect or show you where you spelled wrong or the notion of even moving words around, I mean, we’re a generation where you were typing on a typewriter. If you did something like that, you were hosed.
Rob Heppell:
Yes, oh Yes. Probably funeral homes are one of the last businesses that still have a typewriter somewhere just in case you need to like type something out, right? Probably most businesses don’t have them. I was thinking of PowerPoint when we first started doing PowerPoint presentations and using those for memorial videos, because there wasn’t memorial video software, right? We would do like a slideshow presentation and these things would sometimes crash, because the image was so big and you’re doing the transitions.
Kevin Armstrong, my best friend, he were worked at McCall’s and now he’s the Western Canadian Dodge Chemical representative, but he would be doing presentations. He’d say, “Hey, can you help me build this?” I can remember getting all sucked into the animations and transitions with the anatomical structure of the face, right? The face is like five eyes wide, right? We’d have these eyes kind of flying across the screen and it would just take probably just totally overdone getting too stuck into the shiny objects, right?
All those little funny features. You talked briefly about when we were chatting with Lori there how you started Performance Tracker before it was just the survey program. Weren’t you using was it Access and you’re doing like a mail merge in itself too?
Jake Johnson:
Yes, no, I think about all the software just in the funeral business that I’ve been involved with and really early on was pcAnywhere, If you remember that. I don’t know if they still have that around, but it was the notion of connecting to another computer, which was like cutting edge at the time and being able to see the screens. But we would use that for downloading files to consolidate data with multiple locations back when I worked at a consolidation company.
And then you had Director’s Assistant, and then you had Director’s Assistant for Windows and all the other software platforms that came out subsequently. But I took that interest and experience. And obviously, when it came time, where our Performance Tracker software was at a size that we needed to get more automation to it, it first started with Microsoft Access. I had gone to Access development classes. I don’t know that I could prove this or if this is even true, but I always thought of Access a more user-friendly FoxPro, if you will. I don’t know if FoxPro is still around or what have you.
Rob Heppell:
I think they combined. I believe they…
Jake Johnson:
Yes, that makes sense. I mean, that’s where it was heading. My first use of Access was at that consulting company for CRM purposes to have something where we could monitor and look at contacts and things like that. And then I went on to use it at Palm Mortuaries in Vegas as a customer service system. We didn’t have one there, but we had an intranet so we could host a file in one place and all the locations could open up their instance of Access and open up and look at customer service requests for the cemetery.
I don’t know if they’re still using it, but it was real handy and you could see who did what and when. You had a grid that showed what requests were still open, if there were flowers missing, or if there was a headstone that needed to be cleaned or things like that. I used that knowledge when I came in as Performance Tracker grew to develop an Access database to handle the functionality of the mail merging and reporting of the data we got. And eventually, that got so big, I outsourced that.
And then that got so big that that was my first foray into software development and then bringing in teams from overseas with product owners that would look over the product development of the software and build it out that way. It was very interesting and a lot of fun.
Rob Heppell:
Good to have that base, right? You understood how things actually go together back in the beginning. Now, before we jump too far ahead, what about your first introduction to the internet? What was that like?
Jake Johnson:
I think it was a class in… One of the things, when you’re building computers, was when you had the introduction of these modems and then they started getting up to the first one that was like, wow, you can actually do something was the 56K, if you will, if I recall. I don’t even know if they call them modems or what it is. I am always intrigued that it’s modulator, demodulator, modem if you will. But then connecting to other computers, and then finding directories that had information about things you were looking for.
But I would say the first visual depiction of the internet was at Xavier University in a class where we were using… I wouldn’t say if it was called Web Crawler or it was like… I just remember the logo of a spider web or something. Where then it really became revolutionary is when Netscape came up. I remember when that came out and that little spinning globe and like, holy cow, I wish I had invented this. And then now where are they today? It’s unbelievable how things change.
Rob Heppell:
Oh, for sure.
Jake Johnson:
Netscape, I think that’d be my junior in college, something like that.
Rob Heppell:
Okay. It would’ve been 1993.
Jake Johnson:
Yes, that’s right.
Rob Heppell:
Yes, because I bought a house at the time, my first house, and I remember setting up and getting into whether it was CompuServe. Never kind of went the AOL side, because you’d get those discs in the mail, right, to get you onto AOL. It was CompuServe, and then you’d kind of search for these lists or kind of bulletin boards before there are the websites, right?
That was kind of the first like, oh wow, look at all the cool information here. Then it progressed with Netscape. I’ve talked about before on a previous episode about once we got into the websites and then going into the different search engines and how that worked. I had a buddy living at the house. I think I was using Alta Vista or something else and he says, “Hey, there’s this new thing called Google,” and it was just so basic, right?
But it worked. It’s amazing how, as you’ve mentioned before, some things have faded away and other things have just gotten bigger and bigger and are now dominant.
Jake Johnson:
I mean, Netscape, you would have thought they were going to run the world at one point. That success story was one of the first early ones of like these guys that created this thing to visualize the internet and how much money they made and how successful they were like wow. It was just something new. What’s interesting is that my computer just the other day got a little buggy reason. If you scrape the visualization away, you talk about these directories and whatever, it’s still kind of that.
If you’ve ever run into an issue with your browser or it takes away the visualizations, that’s kind of what it looked like back in the day. I think the other thing that’s kind of funny is that Windows if you can still go behind the scene of Windows, you still have your DOS commands. It’s like some of that stuff is the backbone. It’s just still there. Maybe it will always be there. I don’t know.
Rob Heppell:
Yes. Probably why Mr. Gates is one of the richest people in the world, right? What about domains? I, shared before about getting heppell.com in ’98, getting a free t-shirt with my $20 purchase. What about you? What were some of the first domains that you bought?
Jake Johnson:
Gosh, really it started for me with Johnson Consulting. We had JohnsonConsultingGroupInc.com. That was our domain name.
Rob Heppell:
I remember that.
Jake Johnson:
Oh my gosh. I can’t remember. I was talking to somebody like, “Well, you can look up who owns domains. Which one would you like to have?” And I said, “Well, JohnsonConsulting.com would be nice.” I did this sort, that was in 2005, and I found Dr. Johnson out of Atlanta owned JohnsonConsulting.com and he wasn’t using it. I can’t remember what I paid, a thousand bucks or something for it, and brought it over and called him. Went through the whole domain transfer thing. I remember talking to him and he was asking me what I was doing and I appreciated it.
I asked him what he had going on. Once it got redirected to the website, he called and said, “I should have charged you more.” I was fortunate to get that. It’s not an uncommon name to use Johnson Consulting to do other things, but that was my first foray into domains. And then since then, just buying them, the ones that make sense or I may use in the future. But people have made a career, at least early on, out of buying these key domains and lawsuits have come from them. It’s been crazy.
Jake Johnson:
I think the most interesting domain story for me is moving next door to a son of Bob Parsons, the guy that created GoDaddy. I remember their story of the father trying to determine the success of doing this, and they had a couple of domains that were purchased or kind of comical names and he said, “Maybe we’re onto something,” and that obviously became a big company.
Rob Heppell:
Yes, that’s a great story. I used to love listening to the Parsons Podcast. It was very just a character.
Jake Johnson:
He doesn’t hold back.
Rob Heppell:
No. No. He was good. Same. I think I’ve started to… There was a time I was up to 300 domains and that’s $3,000 a year or so. Have paired that way back. What about different devices? What was your first… At McCall’s, we had… When I started there and you’d be on call, right? We’d be on call. It was pretty good at McCall’s. I know lots of folks are on every other night. we were on one night a week, and then one week in a month because we had a pretty big staff. But we started with pagers. You’d have this pager you’d clip onto your belt.
The only other people that had pagers were doctors and drug dealers, right? But we would have this little pager. It would go off, we’d have to find a phone and phone down to the funeral home to see what was up. Then it went from there. What about you? Did ever have a pager at all.
Jake Johnson:
Yes, no. When I worked at Palm, they gave me a pager. I remember 911 meant that they were busy at the funeral home and I had to head over to the funeral home to help do funeral arrangements. It was run very lean and efficient at that company. When they needed help, they needed help quickly. It wasn’t uncommon depending on the day that you might have at a 700 call funeral home just one funeral director, the manager, and the front desk person. If you got a bunch of calls, you needed help. Yes, the pager, that was my experience with a pager.
My first cell phone was… Let’s see, that would’ve been 1998. My wife worked at a company called PrimeCo. In fact, I still have PrimeCo tchotchkes at my office here, but it would eventually be bought by a company at the time that was growing called Verizon. Everybody had them. I think it was a Nokia. They kind of flipped the earpiece up. It went up about four centimeters. Apparently, that was a big help. And then you had this antenna that you weren’t sure whether it was doing anything or just delivering it through your skull or something. That was my first cell phone.
Rob Heppell:
Did you ever have a PalmPilot?
Jake Johnson:
I eventually got a Palm Treo.
Rob Heppell:
There was either infrared. You bump them and you could transfer information.
Jake Johnson:
Right. Right. The little stylus in it. I remember seeing that. For me, that was actually I would say late for me in using one. I was 2004, ’05, somewhere around there. That was pretty cool that you could go through your list and it would sync up with your Outlook and things like that.
Rob Heppell:
Yes. Oh Yes. Just thinking about that now, the hours of trying to get them to get it synced properly, but it was cool. And then there’s a time that I had one of those Kyocera, right, which was really kind of that next step, right?
Jake Johnson:
Oh Yes, I remember those.
Rob Heppell:
Did you get into BlackBerry’s at all?
Jake Johnson:
I did. Yes. The brick toast is what somebody would call it. I mean, it’s just like a big slice of toast or something the way those things are big square.
Rob Heppell:
Yes.
Jake Johnson:
But I think at one point we even had the BlackBerry server that Johnson’s Consulting so that we could redirect our exchange service through that for phones. As Apple phones started becoming more relevant, it just didn’t make any sense anymore.
Rob Heppell:
Yes. It’s another company that was there. I think there are other things that happened. I know we’re going to wrap things up here pretty quick. What was your dad’s observation of… Obviously, he was in funeral service and knew the business side, but like here’s a son with all this technology stuff. What was his thought of your technical expertise and where did it kind of go from there?
Jake Johnson:
No, no, I think it was kind of beyond… I mean, he had his people that were helping him, and he knew I was interested in it, of course. For his company, Prime Succession, my interest in his technology was that you had this local area network, Novell Network, where it was the first and very early times where you could do first-person shooting games. We would take over the office after hours and play Doom, which was a huge advancement in gaming. That was kind of that.
I’ll tell you what I learned a lot from was or just intrigued to me is we have a gentleman by the name of Bernie Garza that works at Johnson Consulting and Bernie’s son, just absolutely amazing with databases and technology. I watched him create controllable viruses for keystroke logging. He had his stories of tracking down spam callers to where the spam caller would call back saying stop calling because he would just redirect the call or email like tenfold, whatever. He showed me about EPROM programming and things like that.
But I think for dad, he knew that it was really one of the early things at Johnson Consulting that he brought me on for, quite frankly, is to take this draft process that he had started and created templates and automation out of it through my Excel skills, originated with Lotus. You mentioned Lotus. The one fascinating part of Lotus, if you remember early on, as they had Lotus WYSIWYG. I’m like, WYSIWYG? Why would you call it that?
Of course, it meant what you see is what you get, which was some revolutionary thing that whatever was on your screen was what it would look like.
Rob Heppell:
With my dad, right, and this goes back to the high school because I wanted to kind of wrap up with this, he never said anything at the time. He didn’t say you need to do this or not. But then over time, I would say maybe 15, 20 years ago, he’d say, “I think you should have taken computers.” And I was deep into computers at this time, but he said, “You should have taken it to high school,” and I said, “Oh dad, I think I’ve done pretty okay without having to do it at school, right? I learned on my own and that.” This would go on back and forth.
Funny thing about my dad. He’d ask me again, right? And now my dad, I’m sure he was sitting there plotting. He’d come up with this idea and he’d go, “Okay, now I got an answer.” Same thing “I think you should have taken computers in high school.” “I think I’ve done quite well without it.” He says, “Well, maybe if you did, maybe you would’ve been more like Bill Gates.”
Jake Johnson:
Oh gosh.
Rob Heppell:
It was funny. He couldn’t wait to lay that on me, right? He was just that kind of guy. He was kind of a prankster, but methodical, right? Okay, now I got the response. Anyway, Jake, hey, this has been fun. I know it’s a light episode, but it’s just interesting to kind of walk back through memory lane on technology. Just neat to hear your side, but it all kind of helped to get you where you are today, right? Like now you’re creating softwares and technologies and way more than just sitting in front of a black and white screen on DOS, right?
Jake Johnson:
Well, it is so much of our lives. You made a point early on that in some fashion controlling them. With the way social media is and what have you, it’s almost like The Terminator, but it’s not a big robot. It’s the internet doing damage. Technology is here to stay. It gives us all the information we need right at our fingertips. You don’t have those Encyclopedia Britannica salesman coming to your door anymore. You don’t need it. You and I would remember those people and having encyclopedias at your house and what have you.
The Internet’s just changed everything with these handheld devices and the way in which we can communicate information, the way that we can use that information to make better business decisions at our business. It’s really the reason for my interest in Funeral Results Marketing and what you’ve done and why J3Tech was created.
I mean, we have multiple application projects within that J3Tech, contractor for hire software, a data hub, data analytics software for aggregating from all different types of platforms within funeral service, a tribute software, e-commerce software. It’s just fun. It’s fun to do, and it’s like a playground, but with purpose.
Rob Heppell:
Exactly. Well said. Well, thanks for this, Jake, and thanks for spending time with us today. It’s our goal for you is to share some of our experience and our insights and today some of our experiences with technology. We hope that it’ll help other funeral professionals get some insight, serve more families, and help those families make more meaningful services. Make sure you check back soon for another episode of the Funeral X Podcast. Until the next one, this has been Jake Johnson and Rob Heppell.
Jake Johnson:
Thank you, Rob.
Rob Heppell:
Great. Hey, thanks, Jake. Appreciate it.
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