Chief Technology Officer, PASS Training & Compliance

My name is Kyle Keesling and I work for a company called PASS Training and Compliance. It's a small software company that specializes in regulatory needs. I helped start that company about 10 years ago with a couple of partners. It's regulations actually relating to underground storage tanks, so essentially gas stations. There's a lot of state and federal rules that these facilities are required to follow, so we have a couple of products that help people stay on top of that. My main responsibility is making sure our two software applications are running the way they should. That's everything from coding, debugging, software updates, maintaining servers. So there's a lot of responsibilities in that in and of itself, but seeing as like I said, we're a shop of under 10 people, I'm involved in putting together marketing campaigns, more high-level business decisions, you name it, sales opportunities, so there's a lot of responsibility that goes on. But I say the heart of my job really is to make sure that our products are working the way the customers expect them to. We do a lot of trade shows, it's a lot about networking, who you know. Once you get a connection in a certain part of the country, even though we're located all throughout, it tends to feel like more of a small network, so a lot of the people know everybody. So there's a lot of going out and visiting people, there's a lot of, like I said, trade shows, and just word of mouth type communication that we look to. The other aspects are really around collaborating with my other colleagues on business development and sales. I'm the technical lead for a lot of what our company does, so I might be involved in a sales opportunity where we would do a web demo and show off our software. Some of the more technically-minded or larger companies are actually going to potentially want to do some kind of integration, so talking through that, there could be custom development involved and how that would work logistically. Even down to, at some days, we are sitting down looking at aged receivables and making those phone calls to collect. The less fun side of business, but something you gotta do.