Ken Knapton, CIO @ WIN Brands (Costa Vida & FatCats Entertainment)

Um, let's talk a little bit more about the business.

So you actually are responsible for it for two very different businesses.

Um, fat cats looks nothing like Costa Vida.

So tell us how or do you run it services across these two brands that really look nothing alike operationally?

Yeah, it's a, it's a fascinating role to be honest, which was again, one of the things that drew me to this.

Um, When I interviewed here, Fat Cats was its own company.

Costa Vida was its own company.

And they were both owned by the same individuals.

And the two entrepreneurs that started the companies have been running them for 20 years.

But

they run them completely independently.

Right.

And I was one of the first, one of a few first individuals that they brought in, a few executives that they brought in.

to kind of start to try to bridge that gap.

They

started to realize that, look, there have to be some economies of scale that we can find between these two organizations.

And they didn't have a lot of internal support, I should say, in that thought process.

Interesting.

And so they had hired this other individual I spoke about a minute ago from the HR perspective to try to bring the HR together.

They had a finance person they were bringing in, a new CFO, and then myself.

And these two businesses were operating completely independently.

They each had their own president, their own IT organization and, you know, HR and everything.

So, you know, I sat down with, and by the way, neither one of these are huge companies, right? And Fat Cats is smaller from a revenue and an employee perspective than Costa Vida.

And so when I talk about the IT organization, it was very small.

And they lean very heavily on outsourced managed service provider to help them with their work.