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Community IT Voices: Johanny Torrico, President and Chief Operating Officer
Join us for our series featuring interviews with Community IT employees. In this series, we talk about nonprofit technology career paths, career resources, skills, and certifications. We also touch on mentoring opportunities as you start out on your career and ways to give back if you are further along.
Today Carolyn talks with Johanny Torrico about her recent promotion to an executive position that the Community IT Board created for her: President and Chief Operations Officer.
Building on our past “Voices” series interview, this conversation provided an opportunity to delve into Johanny’s strategic vision for the company’s future. We explored how the new position was created to recognize her role guiding the company through a period of significant growth and innovation in the past few years, ensuring that we continue to provide the highest level of service and support to the nonprofit community.
We also touched on the challenges and successes of our expansion at Community IT, doubling both staff and clients served in the years following the pandemic. From scaling our services to meet increasing demand to fostering a cohesive culture as our team grows, Johanny shared valuable insights into the dedication and strategic planning that was required to navigate this dynamic landscape.
A key theme is the importance of talent and culture in a rapidly changing environment. Our President and COO shared personal reflections on her extensive career in IT and operations, highlighting pivotal moments of challenge and the principles that have led to her success. This led to insights on what it takes to recognize and nurture talent within an organization, offering practical advice for HR professionals, managers, and job seekers alike.
We also explored the unique benefits of being a 100% employee-owned company. This model is a cornerstone of our internal culture, fostering a deep sense of ownership and commitment among our staff. Ultimately, this shared purpose and dedication not only helps us attract and retain top talent but also directly translates into the exceptional service and long-term partnerships we provide to our nonprofit clients.
Johanny has a lot to say on the benefits of a culture that encourages staff to be happy and capable, and the focus at Community IT on customer service – the face to face interactions of people with people.
“As an employee owned company, we all have a stake in the success of our company. For sure, that is something that has contributed to the culture that we have. A culture of work-life balance. A culture of team building, of learning together. I think that part of staff development, that part of working together for the better good, supporting nonprofit organizations, is definitely what makes Community IT unique in the sector.”
– Johanny Torrico, COO
Speakers:
Johanny Torrico brings over thirty years of experience managing teams and operations to her role as President and Chief Operating Officer at Community IT, where she leads the largest internal team providing services to clients. A calm and organized leader, Johanny is responsible for the service and technical operations for all the teams at Community IT. She also leads staff development and internal business processes, with a focus on staff retention and career mentoring.
As Chief Operating Officer Johanny played a critical role in leading the dramatic expansion of our service operations. She established new teams, expanded company management and led the successful adoption of a wide range of new technologies. Johanny has a special ability to promote standardization of our services in ways that add value for our clients. Johanny brings decades of experience, professional maturity and tremendous skillsets as a business leader.
During her twenty year tenure at Community IT, Johanny has mastered every role she has taken on including network administrator, network engineer, and service manager. She still enjoys providing technical support to our clients, participating in our professional services team, and implementing technical solutions. She draws on her long experience interacting with nonprofit clients in various roles to understand how best to partner with our community.
Prior to joining Community IT, Johanny served as Director of Technology for The National Association of People with AIDS (NAPWA) for nearly four years. Previously, she worked for 11 years at Whole Foods Market, where she was the Facility Leader for their food plant in Landover. Through these management experiences Johanny gained extensive leadership, planning, management, and customer service skills.
Johanny holds a B.S. in Computer Information Systems. She is a VMWare Certified Professional and a Microsoft Certified IT Professional for Office 365.
To learn more about Johanny’s career path, view her interview, part of the Community IT Voices series.
Carolyn Woodard has served many roles at Community IT Innovators, from client to project manager to marketing. With over twenty years of experience in the nonprofit world and marketing, including as a nonprofit technology project manager and Director of IT, Carolyn knows the frustrations and delights of working with technology professionals, accidental techies, executives, and staff to deliver your organization’s mission and keep your IT infrastructure operating.
Carolyn is excited to help manage Marketing at Community IT Innovators and is always looking for new ways to tell stories and reach people. She has a master’s degree in Nonprofit Management from Johns Hopkins University and received her undergraduate degree in English Literature from Williams College. She thinks the best thing about being with Community IT Innovators is the people.
We hope you enjoyed this Community IT Voices interview with Johanny Torrico. Community IT is the right place for you if you find fulfillment in helping others succeed and love mastering new technologies.
Our employees stay and grow with us, and over half of our staff have been with us for over a decade. Community IT is an employee-owned company with a positive, sustainable workplace that promotes professional development and a healthy work/life balance. We have been 100% employee-owned since 2012. Check out careers with us here.
Transcript
Carolyn Woodard: Welcome to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics Podcast. I’m Carolyn, your host, and today we have a big announcement that we have just made at Community IT. We have a new president and chief operating officer, Johanny Torrico, who is with me today. So, Johanny, would you like to introduce yourself?
Johanny Torrico: Yes, Carolyn. Thank you. Thank you. I’m Johanny Torrico, I’m the Chief Operating Officer. Well, now the President and Chief Operating Officer for Community IT. I started with the company in 1996, so it’s been almost 20 years growing alongside with Community IT. It has been a great, great, great experience, and I’m looking forward to this podcast.
Carolyn Woodard: Thank you. Thank you so much for making time because I know you’re really busy.
So, my question is, you and I did a Voices interview, I don’t know, maybe a year or so ago, about your career and what you do at Community IT. And I know you’ll be retaining the Chief Operating Officer role, and then also stepping into this new President role. So, I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about what you’ll be doing now, that the board has created this new position.
Johanny Torrico: First of all, I’m very excited to take on the expanded role or the expanded leadership role. And you’re right, my responsibilities as the Chief Operating Officer will remain.
But I think with this change, my responsibilities will broaden. My strategic involvement in the company’s future will be greater. I will continue to focus on ensuring the efficiency and the effective delivery of our managed services, oversee operational performance, continue to foster the culture of excellence that our clients have come to expect from us.
But with the added President title, I will work more closely with our CEO, Johan, on the long-term vision and overall strategy for Community IT. And ultimately, Carolyn, I think my focus personally will be, I think, on structuring our company for ongoing and that sustainable growth that we want to continue to have, building on the strong foundation that we have been able to create together for the past few years now.
Carolyn Woodard: That was going to be my next question! In the pandemic and the shutdowns, we had to change a lot. Nonprofits changed a lot, the nonprofit sector changed a lot, our country changed a lot, how we work and how we do our work. And we grew a lot. You’ve just said you’ve been at Community IT for 20 years. Can you talk about the challenges of that growth in the last four or five years and our successes?
Johanny Torrico: Yeah, that’s an excellent question. And you’re right, that period since the pandemic has been one of a deep transformation for Community IT. And like many MSPs, many in our industry, the shift in how the world operated opened up big opportunities and Community IT was not the exception.
And I would say that the main challenge was managing our quick shift from being an MSP serving the Washington, DC metropolitan area to becoming a national provider for the nonprofit organizations nationwide. It really felt, and I have mentioned this so many times, and Johan has too, it felt like we were fixing the airplane mid-flight.
And there were several things that we had to do to make sure that the consistency on the service delivery didn’t suffer.
We had to focus on staff augmentation, so hiring, we were hiring, hiring, hiring. We were focusing on process standardization, and at the same time, leveraging the emerging technologies that were also kind of, you know, making that big leap because of that. So, operationally, you know, the biggest challenge I would say was managing the big scale on our hiring process effort.
We expanded our team by nearly 50 percent in about two years, which required us to completely overhaul and standardize and also automate our recruiting processes, our, you know, new hire onboarding processes. Because at the same time, like I mentioned, we were becoming a remote office and we wanted to preserve our culture, and we wanted to preserve the quality-of-service delivery. That’s very important. So, staff retention and expansion was one process.
I think the other one that I want to mention is the fact that we were onboarding a record number of new clients,right? We almost doubled our pre-pandemic client base. So that also forces again to streamline the new client onboarding processes, as well as focusing on nurturing that new staff that we were adding, so that we provided consistency and positive experience for those new clients that were coming in.
And you asked about challenges and also kind of, you know, successes, and it’s very interesting to think that navigating these challenges is actually what led us to our great successes in my mind. We successfully transitioned to becoming a mostly virtual company, and also that allowed us to expand our talent pool nationwide.
And not only we became an MSP that served the US, but also, you know, that opened doors for adding new talent. As we were growing, we were able to provide more competitive salaries, attract excellent talent. And ultimately, while the growth was very tough, our biggest achievement in my mind is the incredible team that we were able to build. We’ve been truly blessed to have such a dedicated and talented staff who rose to every occasion because it wasn’t easy.
Carolyn Woodard: Yeah. I feel like Community IT also had a few things in place that really helped us provide those services. Because we had been working exclusively with nonprofits and we had been advising and recommending and helping our pre-pandemic clients move to the cloud, that had been part of our recommendation for years at that point, was to move off of servers and into the cloud.
And I think knowing how to do that successfully and having a lot of experience in doing the IT support for nonprofits that are in the cloud really positioned us well at that moment, when a whole bunch of, like you said, we doubled our clients and they were all coming to us for being able to work remotely. And we were like, yeah, we know how to do that.
Johanny Torrico: We know how to do it, right. It was a matter of having the resources to do that at a bigger scale. I totally agree with that.
Carolyn Woodard: And I think that that also points to another strength of Community IT in that we are always, the technicians that I talk to and the teams that I talk to, we’re always looking ahead and trying to find the technologies that will help our clients move into the future.
Which was one of the reasons we were already recommending that people get off of a physical server and into the cloud because it creates all of those efficiencies and saves money as well, which is something we’re always advising to our nonprofit. We understand where our nonprofit clients are coming from in that. And so, I think that probably compared to some MSPs that are maybe more rigid or more, “this is the tool that we use, and you will use this tool.”
Johanny Torrico: Yeah, being able to be flexible and having kind of the diverse knowledge on different tools helped us a lot, right? Because we meet our clients where they are, and some of them use the Microsoft Stacks, some of them use the Google Stacks, some of them are kind of, you know, are using Zoom at that point. And we were able to, you know, just kind of switch through those technologies, yep.
Carolyn Woodard: And I think it’s also something about the MSP model that we talk about a lot, where if you have one IT person on your staff who’s trying to do everything for your staff, they have to wear all those different hats of knowing how to migrate a server and be able to be the help desk and also take on any projects that you’re trying to do.
And when you have an MSP, not only are you benefiting from all of our wonderful staff that you just described, all of the people who have lots of ideas and interests and experience and expertise in providing this service, but we also learn so much from our clients, right? So, if you’re a client and you want to do a certain type of migration, we probably have other clients who’ve already done it. We have best practices that we can share with you.
Johanny Torrico: Right. Right, right, right. Yeah. And I think that was again the focus on process, right? When there’s a lot of chaos, you have to have processes in place.
Carolyn Woodard: And that was a big part of your role and a big part of just your talent in being able to see through the noise and help us have these processes and standardization and draw on all of those experiences and build it into best practices.
So, that was going to be my next question was if you could talk a little bit about your career in IT and operations, where you were challenged, you know, what has helped you succeed? I mean, this is obviously such an amazing promotion and, you know, your leadership at our company is, you know, has led to this position.
But I wonder for others listening, like HR staff, managers, job seekers, what advice would you give on recognizing talent and creating those opportunities? And just if you could reflect a little bit back on your career as well, what helped you over the years?
Johanny Torrico: Yeah, that’s kind of a little bit of a packed question. I’ll try to be concise, right?
I would say in terms of my career in IT and operations, it has been, I mean, I’ve been with Community IT for almost two decades. And, you know, like I mentioned, I think my career in IT and operation has been a story of growing with Community IT. And I’ve had the privilege of seeing the company evolve. And I have been also growing alongside with it. And I’m grateful to have had that opportunity.
I think the most significant challenge in my career was without doubt the period of the hyper-growth that we experienced after the pandemic. I mean, there was a lot of things going on.
Operationally, it meant rebuilding processes, like I mentioned, the different processes, hiring, client onboarding, growing our staff by 50 percent, and to, you know, doubling our client base, and all of these at the same time as becoming a remote first company.
And I think what has helped me succeed through those times, and I think I will narrow that to two core principles.
One is, I think, a deep-seated belief in process. And you know me, I mean, we’ve worked together for a long time, and that’s very important to me. And I think in times of chaos, having solid standard processes are what allow us to scale without sacrificing quality, right? That’s, I think, very important.
And the second one, and most importantly, I think it has been our relentless focus on our people. Technology and operations don’t run themselves, right? We need talent. And I think we’ve been able to attract dedicated, talented people, and that has been individuals, and that has been great for Community IT.
I think trusting the team, giving the staff the right tools to succeed, listening to what they have to say, to their suggestions, to their insights, because they’re on the front lines. And I think that factor has been very critical for our success, especially navigating all the challenges that came up as we were growing, and the challenges that we were facing, in my opinion, you know, listening to staff was critical for us.
So that’s, I think, that’s kind of the challenges in my career.
In terms of advice and recognizing talent, when we, in the period that we were, you know, hiring and augmenting our staff, we had so many resumes, right? And a resume can show you what someone has done. But I think what we learned through that process is that as we talk to those individuals, we had some good questions to dig in into their problem-solving skills, their curiosity, because that will reveal what they can really do, right? I think so that’s one part.
The other part that we also, that it was super important for us was cultural fit. But cultural fit can mean looking for people that it has affinity, right, with kind of what you do. But I would push that a little bit farther than that. And I would say that we’re also kind of looking for people that can, that could contribute to make that culture even stronger. And to us, that was looking for talent that brought a new perspective, different backgrounds, a different skill set, having a diverse team.
And I think that’s what makes Community IT unique, is having staff with those different perspectives, with those different backgrounds, different experience. And that actually has strengthened our culture a lot. And I feel like now I’m revealing too many secrets, but I think that being a diverse company, I think it’s very important in what makes us unique and definitely a part of our success. So that’s one.
And then the last one in terms of creating opportunities for staff, right, because when we bring talented staff, we attract that, we want to make sure that we keep that, you know, we keep our talent in the company. I think looking for ways to invest in your people. And sometimes when we think about investing in our people, we think about sending them to these expensive trainings and all of that. And that’s important.
But I think having a culture of knowledge sharing creates camaraderie, right? And I think there is so much that we can learn from each other. And by doing that, it adds up to our uniqueness as a company. Providing a safe space to learn and a safe space to try what you have learned. I mean, creating that kind of openness and a safe space to do that.
And lastly, having a clear path for career growth. I think, you know, when you have motivated staff, you want to provide those opportunities to learn, to do knowledge sharing, to sharpen their skills, but also kind of, you know, they want to have a goal. Like, what’s next for me? What else can I learn? And having a clear path for that has been very important for Community IT in terms of retaining talent.
Carolyn Woodard: I have one final question, which is we are a 100% employee-owned company and have been for a while now. Can you just talk briefly about what impact does that have on all of the things that you just discussed? Having a supportive environment, having a lot of diversity, valuing different opinions, but sticking to those core values?
Johanny Torrico: As employee-owned company? I would say that as employee-owned company, we kind of feel like we all have a stake on the success, right, of our company. And I think for sure that is something that has contributed to the culture that we have, and, you know, culture of work-life balance, a culture of team building, or, you know, a culture of learning together. And I think, you know, that part of staff development, that part of working together for the better good, right, supporting nonprofit organizations, it’s definitely what makes us unique.
Carolyn Woodard: Thank you so much for your thoughts today, Johanny, and your time. And congratulations again. I know I speak for a lot of people at Community IT and being so happy and proud and pleased that you have this new position.
Johanny Torrico: Thank you so much, Carolyn, for the opportunity.