ERP100 - Linchpin: The importance of the service manager role

this mistaken perception of I'll take my best tech and make him a leader. It's probably not the best scenario. Not that it doesn't work, but that person needs to be actually interested in what leadership looks like and what the role actually functions as. Welcome to Evolved Radio, where we explore the evolution of business and technology. I'm your host Todd Kane. This episode is brought to you by Evolve Management training courses, a whole series of courses built specifically for your MSP training needs. There's a project management for MSP's course, an MSP service manager boot camp, MSP security fundamentals and an IT documentation done right course. Check out the full suite of courses at training.evolvedmgmt.com. Or look for a link in the show notes. Welcome to a very special episode of the Evolved Radio podcast. On the release, this will be episode 100, which is a pretty big milestone for me with the podcast. And wanted to evolve things in keeping with the name, and behind the scenes I've been working a bit on video and wanted to maybe evolve the podcast to be also a video cast as well. So, doing a collaboration today with Kyle Christensen from K7 Leadership and taking this up a notch. Welcome Kyle. Hey. We're going to have this posted as a podcast, but we're also going to sort of chop this up and use it as some YouTube content and some other video content as well. So, this is a a bit of an experiment for me. This I think would be really cool, it's kind of the first time I've done sort of co-host in a webinar format. And also doing video at the same time for for this production. So, Kyle is our maestro for some of the the production elements today. And we'll be leading through. And this is a topic that both of us are super passionate about because it is so crucial for MSPs to get right. And it is something that is really important for all MSPs to work on and figure out, especially through their growth phase. And it often doesn't get a lot of the attention that it should. So, the title today of this session, I've called it Lynchpin. And the reason that I think that that's really apt is that the service manager in a lot of ways absolutely is the lynchpin to an MSP organization. The majority of your costs, the majority of your labor, the majority of your work is done in the service area of the business. And it is the highest portion of the work that is client facing, so it's a bit of a high wire act as well. Everything has to be done right and it will be judged very heavily by the clients. So, we really want to talk about the importance of the service manager role today. And basically we're going to go through a few elements, some ideas that we've put together here and then Kyle and I will just sort of bat things back and forth. So this is not the traditional kind of interview style format of the previous podcast, it's a bit more collaborative and will function a bit more I suppose like a webinar. So, what we're going to learn today, basically, the service manager is the second most important role for the success of an MSP company. Obviously, if you are the owner, the person who started that company, you're pretty important. But the right hand man, the COO, the service manager, they carry many different titles depending on the size of your organization. But that role is going to be ultra crucial, certainly when you start and definitely as you scale as well. So today we're going to be learning what is the service manager? What do they do and why are they so important? Number two, influencing the biggest resource in your company, people. So how you create a high impact culture. And then using goals and process development to build a scalable company that works for you and your clients. So that is what we're going over today. So a bit about me. If you've not seen me in the channel before, my name's Todd Kane, I run a company called Evolve Management Consulting. And I my background basically is coming from IT consultant before I graduated high school and ended up folding into a high growth IT consulting company. That went through this bananas growth phase where we were literally hiring 20 to 30 people a week for a sustained period. So you'll learn a lot about how to grow a company and what's required to scale your leadership. And that was sort of my first foray from technical side of the world to the operations and management side. And really took off from there. Before I started this company that I I consult with MSPs now. I worked at a very recognized MSP called fully managed, which was the birthplace of IT Glue. And we went through another kind of crazy ride where, you know, we tripled revenue, doubled head count, increased gross margin by double digits. Just a really, really awesome experience and understanding so that growth trajectory around maturity and development and how you scale an MSP. So a little bit about me. We got sort of this fun little scale in here. I love operations, I love goals, KPIs, process, so, you know, we're right in my pocket. As things that I love in this this little info session. I love gaming. Not terribly great at it. I've been honing my sourdough craft before it was cool. Before the pandemic, so I'm pretty good at that. And again, I like hiking, I think I'm pretty good at it, but maybe my sourdough game is stronger. All right, so that's enough for me for now. I'll turn over to you Kyle, you can do a little intro and background. Yeah, man. Well, first and foremost, I really do appreciate you having me on for this 100 episodes. It's like a milestone, right? Because there's just like starting your your business, your MSP for those service managers that are watching. It's very nerve-wracking to start a business from zero. The insecurities that go through your mind is sometimes you do these things, especially when you're operations or as Michael Gerber would call that accidental entrepreneur. Sometimes you're talking at a wall. Sometimes you're selling services to a wall. Sometimes you have a tool stack that's going to support thousands of end points. But you only have 10. So, I can imagine the struggles and the the imposter syndrome and the insecurities that you had in those first few episodes. But it's inspiring to see you push through to episode 100. Appreciate it. Yeah, no problem. So, I guess kind of who am I for those of that don't see my endless rants everywhere. So, my name's Kyle Christensen. I have been in the outsourced IT realm for the last 20 years. I started actually similar to Todd in at an organization that was hiring hundreds and hundreds of employees every month actually through being acquired into a larger entity. So, for the first five to seven years of my technical career, I was actually just in that massive people management area. Which quickly turned into what is referred to in the consulting space as a turnaround expert because then once we got through a lot of that, they would send me to region to district. And actually look at how we can improve those areas that maybe didn't get onboarded so well in the beginning. Quickly around that 2008, 2009 range, I actually ended up moving into the MSP sector as I did have an MSP that looked to me to help them turn that around. We were able in 2010 to about 3X that growth in about two and a half, three years. So quite a lot actually for those early days of MSP. From there, my next project, we actually grew it almost 4 or 5X in a matter of two years because we really focused on strategy and running departments through what some would call theory of constraints. Or the profit first type aspect. So I worked a lot with service managers on our team to look at how we can kind of get what we want with what we have. Rather than this endless supply of, you know, throw the kitchen sink at everything, so we really worked within the means of the organization so that everybody could win. And really just have a real logical structure to managing the business. From there, got certified in a lot of different business strategy models out there. And started Sierra Pacific Group with my co-founder out there and we were actually able to 5X that in about a year or two. Just really understanding community, marketing, the MSP sector, the tools, how can we help other MSPs achieve the same level of growth. And now these days it's really about education and content for me. I exited SPG last year. And just, you know, really having fun with working with the community. So like MSP Geekcon for those of you that went, I was part of the team that got to, you know, get that, see that to life. And seen all the service managers there. Um, and I even did a course exactly on this topic that we're looking to discuss today, Todd. Which is, you know, what is an effective service manager because for a lot of us that get put into that seat, we really don't get a great picture of what success is. Yeah. And that's a a good lead in, so we'll kick things off with what is a service manager and part of this is what is not a service manager as well. It's just a a given in the title. And what you alluded to, I think is one of the strongest points that people really need to understand in this. Is that a lot of people say, well, I was promoted to management or I was promoted to to service management, the service leadership group. And I think that's a bit of a misnomer, right? This is a career change. It is not a promotion. All of the things that made you successful in your previous role will not guarantee any level of success in this role. And I think what a lot of owners mistake when they try to elevate a tech to a service manager is they think, well, you're great at your job, how about I give you all of these other responsibilities and you can get the rest of the tech team in line. And that doesn't work. And I I understand where this comes from, like that entrepreneurial spirit of I muscled my way through and figured this out, so you can do the same. But people are not necessarily wired that way. And what you tend to see time and time again is that they don't focus on what they should, which is the results for the team and driving that accountability to to have the team produce more as a whole than as individuals. And when they're not sure what to do, the owner's busy, they don't get the time and the the mentorship that they need to grow into their role. Uh, a lot of management people spend 12 years in management before they have any type of formal training, which is really damning. So, what do they do, they end up just sort of getting nervous and defaulting back to the technical work because they feel like they have some level of control over it. They're like, I'm not sure what I should be doing with all of these things, it's very busy, it's very noisy, people are giving me pushback, people are the clients are angry, the staff are miffed, whatever the the case is. So, I'll just help them with tickets and that's that's how I'll help out. Right, so this this mistaken perception of I'll take my best tech and make him a leader. It's probably not the best scenario. Not that it doesn't work. But that person needs to be actually interested in what leadership looks like and what the role actually functions as. Kyle. Well, and Todd, if if I can comment on that real quick. It's funny because the there's a talk I give at IT Nation every single year. It's around managing managed services. And I simply state that service managers manage service. Right. They are managing the quality of the service that we are selling. Because it is our product. Is it coming off the assembly line in the way that we are proposing it to our client? And you're hitting the nail on the head a little bit and even if we zoom out, right? I work with a lot of CEOs or founders of the MSPs and it's funny because service managers are doing exactly what the CEO did when they started their business. Which is I'm a technical professional, therefore I'm going to run my company like I would run my profession. But there's no strategy behind it because I think in terms of quality of product or quality of the work that I do. But that doesn't lend itself to being able to strategize how I actually make profit. How I actually run utilization correctly. How I actually have employees that are mentored and trained and they have a clear expectation of what they are supposed to be doing on a weekly, daily, monthly, quarterly basis. And what happens with the service manager, the exact same thing. If I get lost or I have very blurry expectations, then I'm probably going to just go right back to what I know. Which is, hey, can I mentor you on how to fix that server? Can I mentor you on how to handle client issues quicker? It's all about your craft. And you you 1,000% I am right in line with you that a service manager is not a tier four engineer. That is not the next step in your career path. Yeah, agreed. So the staff mentorship and process development, I think is really crucial. Right. So meeting with the staff on a regular basis, I'm a huge advocate of weekly one-on-ones. Right. As a sort of the central role for how you can enable and better support your staff. And a lot of organizations will push back on that and say like, I don't have time for weekly one-on-ones with all of my staff. That's all I would be doing. That's just an indication that your team is too big and you've not created enough sort of incremental leadership in your group as is to really scale that well. So if you're struggling with that, think about sort of how you can break down your team and advance more of the the leadership within your group. Right. So that's a really important piece. And then the process development. This is a tricky one, right? I think because a lot of owners expect people to just sort of figure this stuff out. Even though like they've not figured it out themselves either. Right, so like just because this person is good at technology, how are they going to be gifted in in designing process and working through workflows? A lot of this stuff is not a given. And I I think if anyone takes anything away from this. In developing your your leaders in your organization is spend more time with them. And work collaboratively with them. That mentorship of just simply spending time with them will give them a lot of confidence and validation that they're they're a crucial role in the company. And spending time with your boss is is sort of this quiet subconscious validation of your importance. Uh, so I think just spending time with people and working on the issues in the organization is really, really key to the development of their leadership skills. Yeah, it's uh. You said something that I want to comment on. So, Cameron Harold, he has this book second in command and there's a Jim Collins article that coined that term in Harvard Business Review. And really the idea of that second in command, even as where Gino Wickman got the idea for integrator for a lot of this. Is they are the ones that are making sure that the rubber is on the road. Right. That's where the book traction got its name is they are the ones that are ensuring that the company is outputting what you expect as an owner. So as an owner, I can tell you right now, I expect for us to be growing in revenue and making profit that pays me enough to live the life that I want to live. So, why would we ever have any facades or complications in that logic? That communicates down to the service manager because if we're not aligned in expectations. And we don't work hand in hand. Then they're always going to either make assumptions because they can't read your mind. Or they're always going to work in different directions, which just frustrates you, so you're setting yourself up for failure. And in that moment, you mentioned the one-on-ones, which I do love for growing companies. And the whole idea of, oh, that doesn't scale. Well, there's interesting research on memory. And it's the whole reason that phone numbers in a lot of countries are seven digits. Because our mind in short-term memory can only remember seven bits of information. So, if you work with laws of seven. There's actually been management research that shows the optimal number of employees that one people manager should have is about seven people. And if you break that up into a 30-day routine, right, there's seven days in a week, there's seven people on your team. You now get into this moment of, yeah, I'm not going to do their reviews on weekends, right? So I'm I'm going to make sure I don't talk about that. But now I'm within a moment where I can keep all seven of employees in my short-term memory and go, hey, what's this person doing? What's that person doing? What's that person doing? Yeah. Just a little bit of an interesting management thought. Yeah. So I love this idea and and I think it's important to reframe the idea of I don't have time for this. Right. And that is categorically BS. Right. It is the most important portion of uh and intersection in your company. Is the staff and what they're up to. If you want to move at a certain speed in your business, how often you're meeting with people and course correcting them. That you don't want that to be quarterly, annually or monthly, right? That that becomes the speed of your business. So, doing weekly one-on-ones with an appropriately sized team is 1% of your time through the course of the month. Right. Like that's not a lot. Uh so if you can't spend that time with your team to course correct them, give them that feedback. Then your your prioritization of what you're spending time on is just upside down. And the other piece that I think is really crucial here is that. Spending time with that staff on a weekly basis and training them around what is actually urgent versus what can go into an agenda. That we can review on the our weekly one-on-one. This is your best defense against the pingy nature of management of the, hey, you got five minutes, right? And then 30 minutes later. Right, like that's all the time that gets buried and distracts you and pulls you away teams is constantly lighting up with people asking questions. That are probably not in real time in the moment necessary. So just spending that time appropriately with your staff will help redirect a lot of that energy and that time in a focused way. Right. Oh, completely. So the great book for any leader that I recommend reading, I actually require my clients to read it. Dan Sullivan's who not how. Because it's a it's a critical mind shift to now my team is not an extension of me necessarily. They're an extension of the company. So if I am unable to get that through my head as a service manager because I was the tier three guy. Right, a lot of times I don't have time to do one-on-ones because I'm an escalation source of the help desk. Yes. Or an escalation source or an extra set of hands for the project desk. And whenever I hear this Todd and you probably are the same way. I start to think in terms of budgeting and how you're managing finances, which, you know, that's kind of on brand for me. Because I'm going, okay, if you have a service manager, then I should have the economics to support a service manager, which is an operational expenditure, not a cog. So that means that my margins should be in place enough to where my service manager literally has no need to be a billable resource. Because I was able to design my services to allow them to manage those resources. Right, now they are managing a product delivery function in the organization. Coincidentally enough, I actually have an entire YouTube video that I'm posting right right now, probably in the next week, that's all about how to figure out this math. So, sorry for the plug, but there is that level to where you it's a whole level of lessons on how does that math work. Yeah. And this is a really important point, I think we actually come back to this a little later in in the in the talk as well. It's it's a key component of this of giving a service manager, someone who is responsible for a team. At least some level of visibility around costs and how to manage costs and and what that what the implications are for the growth of a team as well. So, yeah, definitely want to revisit that. Because it is it is a little there's a little conflict there, people disagree about sort of how to approach this. And everyone's afraid to teach it. Exactly. And there's like, you shouldn't be like. What anyway, we'll get to that. So team recruitment and culture manager, I think this is again a really crucial component. That, you know, my favorite quote about culture is culture is defined by what you tolerate. And I think that is so like it's such a microcosm of understanding what culture means and how you can influence it. A lot of organizations are frustrated with behaviors in the teams, yet, you know, there's no repercussions, they don't give them any level of coaching. And of course, you can expect that those behaviors will continue, like people are creatures of habit. And they avoid any type of resistance, right? So if there's no resistance to what they're doing and someone occasionally just says, hey, like I'd love you to enter your time, hey, I need you to be better on your ticket notes. That is not enough to influence someone to change what is a rooted behavior, it's not because they're a bad person, it's just that's their default behavior and there's no influence that gives them any motivation to correct it. So this is a heavy area of influence in a right way. Like you never want to be. The slave driver, cracking whips and yelling at people to make them do what they're supposed to, that will that is short-term results that will never get the sort of the the full production capacity out of your team. So that is a really dangerous approach. But if you can foster a culture where you people are engaged and and want to sort of perform because of the the camaraderie in the team and some level of loyalty to you as a leader. And and and a a service-based leader especially. That is a real game changer. And Kyle, I'm sure I think we've talked about this, you can validate that you need to come up with some name for a law on this. But what I tell clients is when you implement any type of management structure where you're you're formalizing your approach to team leadership. You can assume that 50% of the staff will just be like, huh, okay, yeah, makes sense, like I'm with you on this. Let's go do that. 20 to 30% of staff will say, hmm, I have some questions. And then there's a bunch of back and forth that happens and then eventually they're like, yeah, okay, I get this. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, I'm with you. And then there's 15 to 20% of the staff that just like cross their arms and they're pouting and they're like, this is I, this is not fair. And none of this makes any sense. They're complaining to other people in the team and being really negative. And the reason that recruitment becomes really crucial when you start managing your team properly. Is you can assume that 15 to 20% of your staff will wash out or need to be fired because they're not contributing in any type of positive way to the culture that you're trying to build. So, does that resonate with what you've seen, Kyle? You're probably seeing me side right now. Because it's definitely a hot topic in the sense of what I'm about to say. Or what we're talking about could be looked at unsupportive really easily or you're not being empathetic or, you know. There's a lot of things that could be taken from this. And even in my days of doing turnaround, I can tell you that as an accountability and expectations start to increase. Right, and it could just be that the business needs to improve or wasn't doing well before. Or there's tension, there's a thousand reasons on why a restructure sometimes happens, people will need to leave. There is always that 15%. And it's funny you said 15% because I tell my new clients, hey, you bring me on board, I can guarantee you 15% of your team or managers are going to walk out the door. And we're going to sit there going, later. Bye. Thanks. Yeah. And and I I say it, yes, I'm being empathetic, but I even posted on LinkedIn about this the other day. Those 15% are probably the ones that are dragging your margins and your productivity behind anyway. Yep. And I've even had instances where poor service managers, they were the bottleneck of any potential improvement. And the second that person walked out the door, you see the entire team just do the, oh, fuck. Collective sigh. Yeah. So glad. And it could be the sales guy too. Right. We've all seen the sales guy that sells anything by any means. And you're sitting there expected to turn water into wine because the sales rep told the client you would do that. And. If you really want to inhibit change and you want to foster a team that leads, you know, goes with your leadership. You have to be willing to uphold the expectations you set. It it goes back to Pavlov and the drilling dogs. Right, the whole idea of operational conditioning is that for every moment that you want a response, there has to be a variable that you introduce. Right. There has to be some action to garner a result. And it doesn't have to happen every time, right, as Pavlov, if you really look into operational conditioning, goes down the road of going, hey, why did the dogs drool when I ring the bell? And then stopped drooling if I stopped ringing the bell and introduced like a reward. He found that racial conditioning was always the most successful form because I didn't have to reprimand them every time. I didn't have to QC everything every single time. I didn't have to give him a steak every single time that it rang. But I had to do it in a randomized manner. So you don't have to be that guy running around after a stick saying 100% of your tickets weren't perfect, 100% of your time sheets didn't work. But every once in a while. Hey. Let's have a conversation, go fix your tickets, go fix your time sheets, go talk to that client and tell them you're sorry because that wasn't acceptable. You do it once in a while. That's leadership, right? And it's the Eisenhower quote of if you pull a string it follows you, if you push a string it goes nowhere. Right. Yeah, it's like that's really crucial to understanding. Like this is another area that I I love and spend a lot of time on with with especially junior managers and I guess even senior managers. That habit forming and behavioral changes is really crucial to making cultural changes in your organization. Right. So and it is a 1% improvement game. That's how these things basically come about. Right. And your point about like needing to define sort of what good looks like as an expectations and then triggers to allow those behaviors to set in and then feedback so that you can produce more of what you want in the future. Right, so positive feedback is not is not second nature to people. Negative feedback is pretty easy. Like it's pretty easy to look around and be like, all these things that I'm frustrated with that keep happening around here. Go on Reddit. Yeah, like and and again, like if I just start barking stuff and correcting people, maybe it'll go away. That's unfortunately not how things work. Right. Like sometimes it's useful. But it's like that's sort of 2% of the game, the other 98% is what are the behaviors I want to see, reward people and exemplify those behaviors as what you want to see in the organization. Well, and you can always go the 201 route. Right, beyond that, which is do I am I able to receive feedback that I'm doing a good job without having to have a conversation? Yeah. All right. So we talked a bit about this, why is the service manager important? I kind of covered most of these points here. Right. Like the IT requires constant management. It's just noisy. It's the most visible part of the business to the end users, the clients that you're supporting. It's the highest level of investment in staff and tools and time. And probably most importantly, this is your best leverage for profit. Right. Like so Kyle, you're you're big on sort of the economics and and the math of the service delivery department. I'll turn it to you in a second, I think the one thing that I I do want to say on this is that without effective service delivery. You cannot have engaging conversations with your clients about anything else, right? Like this is where QBRs go to die. Is you go into a meeting with a client and you want to talk about a strategic initiative, something on their road map, and the only thing they want to focus on is the ticket that they opened two weeks ago that they have no idea what's happening with it. So if your service delivery department is not bulletproof or at least sort of getting towards dialed in. Your efforts spent on sort of larger portions of the business on projects, on account management, on business development are really going to be half-hearted. Right. So I think it's it is super crucial to understand that this department requires the level of attention and care. That allows you to spend time on more strategic aspects of the business. And again, this is one of the reasons why the service manager is so important. Is as an owner, you want to spend more time on strategic activities of the business. If you're wearing both hats where you're the service manager and the owner. Then in both of these cases, you need service to be quiet so that it will just operate. And has minimal escalations and minimal fires so that you can spend time on the more strategic aspects of the business. So Kyle, let's let's hear a little on the the economics here. So at MSP Geekcon, the session that I gave and it was mostly technical professionals, right? We really had people sending their tech professionals, not their managers or owners. The number one course and I I probably led it was mine, which was. What did I call it? The economics of an MSP for the technical mind. And the reason being is when I ran my MSP. The biggest thing I did on day one was teach them how our business makes a dollar. I taught them from. Money in to money out, what every single thing had to be paid for, how our clients got charged. How the the distinguishing factors of we hired another employee happened. Because I never wanted them to be out of sync with what I would want as an owner. Right, I wanted them to understand that they get paid when we have a respect for the cost of the company. Because that's how we truly come up with pricing. Now, going into that, going more into your question on best leverage for efficiency and scale. Then you go on Reddit all the time, right? And it goes, oh, what should my pricing be? What should my pricing be? What should my pricing be? Which I think is too mature of a question for a lot of MSPs. Because to me, what should my pricing be is a market analysis. Right, that is me going, what do my competitors charge and how do they package and let me try to match that. But for a lot of us in the early days. I can't ask that question because I just need to make sure that I am making enough dollars, profit dollars on my revenue dollars as possible just to keep the business growing. So you might have to be lower than your competition, you might need to be higher than your competition. And the reason that happens is. There's a difference between margin and markup. This is another video I had to make. Which is right, margin is the relationship between your profit and your revenue. Where markup is the relationship between your profit and your cost. And you see this in big retail because a lot of its product where your costs are fixed. But the idea is that I have to have a certain level of markup on my costs in order to keep the rest of my business functioning. Sales, marketing, my service manager. And if I don't have that markup correct, I can't pay my service manager. I can't pay my sales team. And that is a very dangerous place to be. What's going to happen? You're going to have a frustrated owner or an owner that's scared shitless. And trying to figure out how to make payroll. Because now they're losing money every single month. And that's that situation coming full circle, Todd. Which was, right, you want the service manager and the owner to be in sync because the last thing you want is an owner is to not be able to have a conversation with your service manager saying, hey. We need to figure out how to get our our markup back up or get our margin higher because we got to pay for your own salary or your job is now on the line. And what it comes down to. And you have it in the slide, right, the best leverage for efficiency and scale. What that ultimately is referring to is economy of scale. Right. It's that relationship of. As my revenue goes up, my costs go down. And a lot of us, I think go right for the word operational maturity, but what operational maturity and and Paul Dible were trying to achieve. Was finding a way to calculate how are you improving your economy of scale. Right. How am I making sure my service team is more efficient? How do I make sure we're not having some very minor tickets? But that takes time. That's that 1% iterative improvement over time. Which going full circle here now is the same reason why that 15% attrition happens when you bring in really good service management because they don't like moving targets. They think that. If my target this month is to have 80% billability and you tell them, great. Now let's go for 81% billability. Then they're upset. But because we don't talk to them about the money and the functions that they have in the company. To them it's just you're saying it to be greedy and you're not saying it to make sure that I actually don't lose any money. Yeah, so this is this is really crucial. Like this is what we were sort of referring to earlier. In in the talk here. The visibility around finances, not only with the service manager is crucial, but even to the broader team, I think is really, really valuable. Right. Like this is sort of one of the solves for people, the text understanding like why is billable time so important, why are my time sheets so important? Is because functionally we sell time around here, right? Like it may be sold as a fixed cost MSA or a fixed cost project, but there's still time entered against those contracts. Which is drawing down dollars. So we need to understand how much time was spent on it at the very least. And those simple explanations of this is how this information is utilized. I'm not using it to try and big brother you and make sure that you were busy. Right. There's an element to that with poor performers. Maybe, right? Like you need validation of like, well, you haven't produced much. So I'm curious how you're spending your time. That's a different sort of analysis. But just at the the very low level, one of great book around this is the great game of business by Jack Stack. And then this is an excellent, excellent book that really sort of unlocks this idea that finances shouldn't be hidden behind sort of this this tall wall. And it's okay to share finances with the broader staff. And it's especially good and helpful to share finances with the service manager. And I run into a lot of owners that are very nervous about this and I don't think that it's warranted. They they feel like, oh, well, I can't show them the finances because then they'll have some opinion about whether or not the business is doing well or they'll think I'm paid too much. And all of these excuses in their head. Or they're going to quit when they see we're not making money. When it's ultimately the service manager's fault. Yeah, like. Right. And I've never seen this to be a problem where someone got access to the finances. And made some judgment. And and quit. Or like got. Pissy with the owner thinking that they were overpaid. Like first of all, on that note. You put the capital and the sort of like the the financial and personal risk to start your own business. Most people won't do that. Right, so yes, you're allowed to pay yourself whatever you want as long as you're not bankrupting the company in the process of doing that. Right. Well, and I would I would also argue from a financial perspective, if it's all on the P&L, if all of your payroll is on the P&L as an owner, we should probably have a conversation about that as well. Because you're probably leaving some tax incentives on the, you know, on the line there. Definitely, definitely. But no, yeah, it's it's a cat that eats its or snake that eats its tail. Because the only way for you to improve your profit is if the people that are managing your profit are in line with what you need to achieve. So it's it's hard to say the logic and I'm the same way with you, Todd. Every company I've ever ran, I've shown the P&L with some liberties. Right, you might class some other services out. That's more advanced finances and accounting. But at the end of the day, I need to know what good looks like. I need to know why. You know, it's that start with why premise, the Simon Sinek idea. Right. Of I need to tell them why this is important. And then for a lot of engineer-minded people or technical people, it's all root cause analysis. They're going to look at that and go. You want me to be at 40%. We're at 38%. They're going to immediately go to how can I fix it? They're not going to go. I'm going to leave. But that's exactly what they need to know. Right. Like otherwise, what I see a lot of. Is the owner and the service manager caught in this dance of. We need to achieve more as a team. Service managers respond to us. We need more people. Right. And that's a natural response of like, if you want me to do more, I need more resources to do that. Because I feel like we're pretty tapped out already. And that is a natural sort of back and forth between those two roles. Uh and the best antidote to that is is opening up the books. And at the very least, just giving them percentages, like if you even if you're not going to share a full P&L. Which we're arguing you should, but if for some reason you're still uncomfortable with that. Is at least talk about percentages. So then you can say, like our target margin for service delivery is 50%. Currently we're at 25. So there's a lot of work to do here. Like either we need more revenue or we need to cut costs. Or like I'm a huge fan of lean philosophy. And one of the best ways you can combat this where the team feels they're overwhelmed, slash how much you're doing, right, like all of the noise that comes into the service desk. That produces no value to anybody, the you know, the the 5,000 alert tickets that are on the board. That we don't want to miss anything. Like I guarantee you're missing stuff. There's 5,000 tickets that haven't been touched in three years. Right. Like that's where you need to cut some of the the the work that you're doing to help the team focus. That's a better effort. But you won't understand those and you can't get the service manager engaged on those things. If they don't understand the cost structure of the business that they manage, right? Well, yeah. What are the five KPIs that that reflect the 80% of the work that they're supposed to accomplish? Right. It's the we we get so much into analysis by paralysis or paralysis by analysis. Because we're we're data people, right? We're like, oh my God, my dashboard. I can put 4,000 KPIs up on the board. You're never going to move the target. Like how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? Go find the most important KPI that you need to move. And then from a macro to microeconomics exercise. Figure out how each person in your team can improve that high level output. 100%. All right, so that wedges perfectly into the next section, which is setting goals. And like the key point to this is what does good look like, right? So there's like we've talked about expectations and I think this is again one of those most crucial aspects. To the owner and basically the CEO and the COO as the visionary and the executor. Kind of getting this stuff and having alignment. Is what are we actually trying to achieve? Because we want to make more money and get bigger. Like that's not really a practical goal. Right. Like at least it's a start. You've communicated some intention. But having like an execution idea, what we're targeting and having some KPIs that relate to those those goals. I think is really, really crucial here. If it's not measured, it's not managed. Yep. It comes down to if we're technical people. And right, most of our team has a high level of intelligence. So the only way that you're going to get buy-in is through transparency and objective analysis. Right. If you don't give them that benefit. They're just going to sit there thinking you are just being that arbitrary leader shouting orders to keep them busy. Right. That's just where their heads jump to. It's not great. I'm not a huge fan of the culture we have in IT. Which is a whole different topic for another day. But if we have to work with it. Right. We do the Bruce Lee be water idea. Right. We need to use their strengths to our benefit. So if I show them. Here's the company dashboard. Here's how you contribute to it. And here is if you contribute this much of that, how much better we do, which may eventually have net gains. By the way, bonuses, profit sharing, higher pay, etc, etc. Sure. Then we all win. And when they all understand that and you're not putting this facade on, right, like, oh, hey, we want you to close a lot of tickets. Because jolly ho. Makes the owner more money. Right. That's that's exactly what they're going to jump to. Is, oh, the owner's just being greedy. Right. Without that visibility. Like that's why I love dashboards. Like what you noted there of like getting the team engaged on those KPIs and having them understand what they mean. And how they can collectively and individually influence them. That's how you build a performance culture. Right. Like one of the things I love to see that that you know sort of that performance culture is starting to to to creep in. Is when you have a dashboard up on on a on the wall or on a on a display somewhere. And you see people kind of lean over, talk about the the the KPIs that they're seeing. And then sort of internally strategize. It doesn't necessarily need to be directed. If you can get people engaged in what they're trying to do. There's a bit of gamification. And they feel like it's achievable. Right. Like just to say like we want this to increase by 180%. Like, okay. If that's practical, maybe. But if it's everyone's just like, that's never going to happen. Then you won't get that level of engagement. But if people feel that they can contribute to it, it gets people excited. And they actually start working towards these things. Right. So just those those sort of microcosms of this of setting a certain goal for the end of the week. And getting everyone to buy into that idea. And then celebrate the hell out of it if you get close or achieve it. And everyone's like, well, this is cool. This is kind of fun. Right. Versus just like crack the whip, you know, I want to see this by the end of the week style approach. Right. Well, it it's the team mentality. Uh I mean, if you do the Phil Jackson approach. Right. Everyone on your team should lead something, everyone on your team should manage something. Because then. It's now a team effort because a lot of those. Co-managed things that have to happen means that I need to now rely on this guy over here. I need to rely on that guy over there. I can only be successful if they're successful. So you you start to build these strategies and you see your team working together. And now we. Is a component of victory, not I. And that's a huge culture shift in itself. Because now we, not only is my our team as the help desk. But it's also the we of the company. And that's where when you see these companies that scale really fast and really well, that autonomy starts to trickle down. If here's your KPI. Come to me if you need mentorship. Come to me if you need to have some extra training or lessons or understanding. But at the end of the day, it's you that needs to see this be achieved. People get motivated by that. Right. People start to have job satisfaction because they now have autonomy as well. Phil Jackson's he has a great book that he wrote. On his conquest with the Bulls in the 90s. On how he approached leadership actually. Um, I highly recommend that for any new leaders. Don't worry about the sports references. It's more of how he did it. Sure. And that's like so that I think rounds out this other point around challenge staff to grow professionally and together. Right. And I think that that again is super, super crucial. Because you don't want people feeling like. Like uh and it comes back to that cultural element as well, is like if you have low performers on the team that drag down sort of the collective energy and the culture of the organization. Though your star performers will never really be able to excel in what they're doing. Because I often describe those people as boat anchors. Right. Like we could be going faster, but the anchor is dragging on the floor here. Right. Just pull up anchor and all of a sudden we're off. So that's I think a really important distinction. What's a fun actualization for that, Todd? Is I always like to do the, well, hey, let's do an exercise. So you have a a VMware stack. And what you find is that one of your servers, one of your blades, every time a VM gets migrated to it. The performance drops. What are you going to do? And right, they go, well, hold the blade. Hold the blade. Right. Replace the chassis. Okay. So let's think of your team as a hyper V stack. As a VM stack. You have one member, every time a ticket goes there. It gets lost. It gets damaged. Yep. Data gets lost. What are you going to do? Uh. He knows so much. But he's been here forever. And you know, we went to his birthday party when he turned 21. But he comes into work high every day and then tells our users to screw off. Culture is defined by what you tolerate. Right. So the last one here. I think that is really important when understanding KPIs. Like people are getting into this. Is lead versus lag indicators. Is I I think a really crucial part to understand about KPIs. And it's crucial to management. Right. Because where managers really feel ineffective and struggle. Is if they feel like they're fighting the past all the time. Right. And this is why like looking back as a manager can be really frustrating. Because it's immutable. You can't do anything about what happened last week. Last month, even yesterday. But you can influence the future. Right, so you're always trying to influence the future with your staff. And give them appropriate direction to help them be successful in the future. Correcting them the things that they made mistakes on is coachable. But does not influence the future and you can't correct the mistake that they made. You want to be able to influence that future behavior. And lead indicators are crucial to this, so you want to understand what is happening. So that you can manage it before it's a problem. Right. So like things like ticket kill rate where. You're closing as many tickets as are being created in a day, don't need to be same day closes. But this helps prevent a backlog of tickets. So, you know, we have 100 tickets this week, we got 150 next week, we got 250 the week after that. Like now this is impossible. Right. So what are your lead indicators that give you an indication of what your results will be? So you're not getting to the end of the quarter and say, well. Revenue didn't grow. Well, you know, okay. Well, I guess we can't do anything about that. Versus. Saying what is our lead indicator, it's number of proposals sent to clients on a weekly basis. If that's zero for the first four weeks, you've got a problem way before you need to deal with it at the end of the quarter. And. Where I would only challenge us thinking is Todd, this is a very advanced way of managing teams. So I want to like for people listening, I want them to understand that managing lead versus lag. That's when you get a lot more mature in your journey as a leader or manager. Because you do need to balance out the the proactive versus the reactive. However, you do have to get there. It it's still a part of your journey. Is being able to work with other teams where you feel like you mentioned in your example, I don't need to manage sales. Well, going back to your time is capacity is inventory in the company. If I have a bunch of product sitting on the shelf not being utilized, then I have depreciation. Or shrinkage in the finance world. Right. If I have product that I can't sell. So if I am increasing economy of scale and I'm not adding to it, eventually I will have team members that just sit there twiddling their thumbs. And I might get upset at that. But there's nothing you can do about it. You just find busy work. Right. You start looking for those extra KPIs. For more things to work for. You start to have confirmation bias. On why I need to work on some of these things. And ultimately the problem is. I have too much labor, I have too much capacity. I'm not selling enough for it. That's when you start having those tricky conversations of, do I have to lay one person off because I can't sustain this? Or. How now do I contribute to my cohort that's running the sales team or revenue team to where maybe I can find extra revenue to fill the capacity. And almost get into the uh kind of the legal model of eat what you kill, right? Did I bill enough hours to fill my capacity, which is a topic I know you love, Todd, which gets into true project management and professional services delivery. Yeah, you're right. It is an advanced one, but I think it's crucial to understand. As you're like thinking about KPIs. I think a lot of people, you know, potentially listening to this are a little more advanced and have KPIs. But like, you know. Not necessarily envisioning how to use them. And I I think it again. Speaks to this point of of an error that I see in a lot of managers. Is trying to fight the past. Or trying to correct the past. And and it gets. Gets you into a bit of a trap where you feel like you're just, you know, you're fighting yesterday. Whenever you're looking at KPIs. Right. So I think it's it's a crucial shift for for more senior managers to make. Yeah. And for the owners listening. Stop using it as your piece of detail on why a decision can't happen. It's like too often. I see the owner just handcuff the service manager and say, well, when I tried it, it didn't work. And I know best. Right. It's like, well, you were a different company. You probably had half the employees. You let's be real. You are an engineer that started an MSP and I am a people manager. We have two different ways of functioning this company. Right. So sometimes I do have to learn and one of the best lessons you can also teach somebody. As a very mature leader and mentor. Is let them go make the mistake. If they really are pushing for it. And you build a controlled environment. It's okay for employees to make mistakes. Just let them know that they need to clean it up. Yeah. At least then they'll believe that that wasn't the right decision. Right. Like, oh, okay. Yeah, that didn't work. Yeah, or or right, tell them like, hey, like here, build a safety net around it. I tried it one time. Right. Be more humble. Right. I tried this, it blew up. You're more than welcome to try it. But I'm just setting the expectation with you, Mr. Service manager or Mrs. Service manager. That you're going to have to work on Saturday if it blows up like it blew up on me. Right. Yeah, good point. All right, so people and culture. You know, this we've we've touched on this one constantly. And I think that that it is crucial. Right. Because this is how you build a high performance team. And again, like I'll just reiterate. A lot of my thoughts on culture because I think it influences pretty much everything in your organization. Like all the work that I do in coaching with MSPs. Whenever we're talking about a problem, I think nine times out of 10, it can be sort of reduced back to cultural influences. And in a people issue in a lot of ways. And and the first one. I think I know is just, you know, you can't dictate culture. But you can influence it. Right, so I often describe culture as a bit of a garden. Right. You can't tell it what it's going to look like, but you can create the condition and plant the seeds that you want. In order for it to sort of grow a certain way. But ultimately, it is organic. And, you know. It's either by design or by default. And most organizations, let's be real. Your culture is by default. You it was never intentionally created or designed. Right. Again, you can't tell it what it will be. But at least be intentional about what you're trying to foster and create as a culture in your organization. Kyle, thoughts on that? I'm 100% with you. Like most of the things that we're talking about today. Culture is. You can't control it. So, first and foremost, if you're an owner or service manager. You will never instantly change culture. It is something that just happens through trust. It's something that happens through the community that you're in. It's something that happens with how you build the company. Right. A lot of us are creating displaced workforces now. So culture is a very heavy topic on how do I manage people that have never truly met with themselves. And. Coming full circle, it's also an aspect of budget and my pricing and and how I build my company. Because your pricing. Your costs. Going back to markup. Can include things like water cooler moments, mentor moments, those one-on-ones that you were talking about. Right. That is how you now remove the excuses of, you know. Is this an environment we want to work with, going to a client profile. Are these the type of clients I want my team to work with? And are we building a structure? To where everyone can have a mutual win and they're not feeling like I'm just trying to put money in my pocket. Get rid of that shit. Yeah. All right, some other points, people join companies and quit managers. I think this is a really key component. Right. Like if you're having a ton of turn, it probably has something to do with your culture. And your management structure. And because a lot of this. Like that's how you create high performance where people that are engaged and feel some level of loyalty to the place that they work. I have seen numerous occasions where people get offered. A substantial amount of a raise, but they're like, you know, I kind of like it here. Like I like the people that I work with. And they'll turn down that offer. Now granted, you know. If someone offers them 150% of their salary, they're going to be a little crazy not to take it. Right. But just a 20 15 or 20% bump, I kind of like what I'm doing here. And I like the people that I work with. Has a huge influence. Like people leaving is not always about money. Sometimes it is, but it's almost always about the management structure in an organization. And the other piece here. Is just time entry being such a canary in the coal mine, right, around behaviors, people and culture. Everybody fights about this. The tax are just like, this is useless. I don't know why we spend time on this. And the managers just constantly trying to sort of force people to do this. Or accepting that people won't do it. I've got a very, very lengthy blog post on the idea of like, is time time entry even useful in our industry anymore? TLDR, yes, it is. Like it sucks. I agree. There are lots of ways that this can get better. But ultimately, this is still how the business has to run. We have to understand how how the costs are being allocated in the organization. Kyle, thoughts. We don't have enough hours in the day. We could have a whole episode on time management. Oh, man, you hit you hit a bell on the head. Honestly, so the whole reason I have a baseball bat with accountability on it. Is because when I gave a a talk at an IT Nation last year, I actually mentioned, oh, and if your engineers. I said it candidly. If your engineers are having issues with time sheets, tell me and I'll bring a baseball bat to the next meeting. So that actually got born out of this exact topic. My my whole little Gallagher stick that I do. For the for the audio listeners. Kyle actually held up a baseball with accountability burned into it. Right. Like what is it? It's laser out. Like it's it's. Yeah, it's actually laser out. And what's funny is this is actually now a gift that I give my clients when they when they get onboarded. And. High level. Making this objective as possible. This is one the reason why I go through the economics of how an MSP works. With all engineers. Even the tier one guys. Because they need to understand time entry has nothing to do with micromanagement. It has everything to do with. If I have a if I have a shelf with 40 cans on it, I need to know if one can falls off. Or a client steals one. Right. Like literally that is that is what is happening. Right, I am making sure that I have enough product to sell my clients. And if products are going stale on the shelf or being stolen. I need to know where they went. Right, I need to be able to manage my product, my inventory. And then second. Almost going back to culture in a positive sense, I need to know lagging indicators. Is there one tier one guy that you are sitting shoulder to shoulder with that's making you work harder? Then you they are. Right. They're the ones leaving at 4:15 every day. And you're staying till 5:30. Because you're a great employee. I need to know that. How can I objectively now manage an employee? That's making you feel undervalued. And again, like from a service management and a and a metrics perspective. If the team is constantly pegged at 80 or 85% utilization, you need to hire someone. Like they are at risk of burning out. But if you're asking for additional resources and the team's at 40% utilization, that's a tough sell. Right. So they they this this creates this transparency of like. I'm not trying to hawk your work day. And I don't necessarily care what you did with the other two, two and a half hours of your day. But I want six, six and a half hours of your day accounted for. The really scary statistic of this is like a lot of research has shown that most organizations will only get three to four full work hours out of their staff each day. So if you put it in that perspective. You know, like that like like there's a lot of room to grow here. And there's like if you're having accountability issues and performance issues. This is a component of why. And the best way to sort of fix this is to drive intrinsic motivation. So people feel valued, they feel what they're doing is important and they're actually motivated to do the work. Right. They they they have a bit of that that internal drive. That they're accountable to the team, they're accountable to the clients and they want to do better. And if you don't have that culture. That's one of those slow reforms that you need to start to make. Well, I think it's too. Why a lot of companies are starting to reel back. And say, oh, we're not doing work from home anymore. Because they have lost the ability to manage their employees objectively. And show them what good looks like. So they're they're only answer is, okay, well then go sit in a bullpen so I can micromanage you and stare over your shoulder all day making sure you're working. Right. And as MSPs, we're actually more mature than a lot of industries because we're so advanced with our ticketing and time entries. Like let's be real. Right, compared to other industries, we are so far beyond them when it comes to managing utilization. We are we are leaps and bounds beyond them. And. While utilization is is I also want to do a quick little definition set. Utilization, I think for you and I, Todd, is it's percent billable. It's not whatever your PSA says. Right, if I pay you for 40 hours, how much of that did you truly utilize to a client delivery? And that doesn't mean it's a 100% number. I define it as value to the client or value to the company internally. Right. Like training is fine. I'll consider that utilization. Well, as long as it's budgeted, right, as long as my my goal reflects that. And I think that's where people start to get confused with utilization targets. Is we don't ever have a same definition, you'll see like, oh, true methods or some other, you know. Indexing company told me I need to have my employees at 90%. But be curious. Ask him, what is in that 90%? Is it just clients? Is it client and company? Is it just what's ever on my my time sheet? Yeah. Agreed. All right, so next process. You know, this is the P word as some people call it. Right. My fundamental one on this is process doesn't solve people problems. And I see this all the time. Right. And I think the most emblematic example of this is people look around of like, can I just buy some SOPs? Because if I had the the the most awesome SOP for this process in my organization, then, you know. People would work better. Or, you know. This would get done correctly. That is categorically untrue. Right. Because all of this is culture and behavior. And so if you have a process that no one uses, it provides zero value. Right. So stop trying to buy SOPs off the shelf, build very rudimentary based ones that are contributed to and created by the staff. That are doing these bits of work and drive that accountability culture. Around utilizing the process that you have and building the process that you don't. Right. So one of the things I like to see on huddles and in one-on-ones and team meetings. Is a a section called missing systems. Where you identify. Like what do we not have, like what did you did you run into a high friction process? Or there was missing information. What do we need to reform, edit, develop all of those things? And create that culture of identifying these things. And trying to make process improvements. I think you noted here. Kind of trust and verify. I think is a a really important piece around this. I worked in an organization where our CEO used to work in government. And he hated the word process. Like to the point where he got visibly frustrated. When people said it in a meeting. So I started using the term framework instead. As I'll give you the scaffolding and some of the structure to be successful. But I'm not going to dictate to you exactly how to do this. And there needs to be enough of that wiggle room. Where you can have some creativity. And allow people to sort of iterate and create new process or develop a new way of doing things in a safe fashion. Not like blowing up the company necessarily. But you want to have enough process. Or enough of that framework to help them find their way through thing. And then develop that process-based culture. Of like, these things make sense, they help us do better. Right. So checklist manifesto is a great book that that really details this out. Of checklists are not to sort of to allow stupid people to do advanced things, but it's to help very smart people not make stupid mistakes. Right. That's how I love to think about this. Is uh this is to support you. To not make the dumb errors. And just enough process. Not, you know. A nine-page SOP with as built documentation with screenshots all the way through. That's not useful to a tier three. Who just needs to remember. Do this, do this. Turn off this radio button. Set this setting. Say okay. Then update this SOP. Perfect. That's it. That's all you need. Right. Yeah, it's counterintuitive to economy of scale actually. Because you're never going to have a process that is 100% perfect. You're never going to create a knowledge base article on how to fix that server. That's always going to be to best practice. And honestly, it's even a couple of the companies that I've built. It's why I've had a culture of we don't do best practice. Because I like the idea of someone showing me. Something very close to what I want to do or what what I want to achieve. But let's find a way to either one. Do it in a way that fits our culture or supports our culture. But two. Whoever wrote that best practice, didn't have your business, they didn't have your problems. They might have had similar problems. And this was actually when we built the consulting company, so apparent. Because we had a lot of, you know, frameworks as as you put it. That we would help MSPs implement. But yeah, they were trying to tell us. Just give us the PDF. Just give us the PDF. And we'd be like, well. Yeah, but I can guarantee you if you implement it verbatim. It's going to blow up in your face. And your reaction is going to be your best practice sucks. Right. The best practice doesn't suck. It just wasn't ever meant to be implemented iteratively. By 100% definition. It just gets you 60% of the way there. It's what I find. Always fascinating about this industry, I always describe it as like why I find the work that I do really fun. Is like. There's sort of a set defined sort of puzzle pieces that are involved here. But the pictures always look different. Because everyone in this industry fundamentally has almost the same business model. There's little differences here and there. Are you more of a var? Are you more a PS entity? Are you pure MSP? Do you do TM? There's little components that are different. But they're fundamentally operating the same business. No one does it the exact same way. Right. So that's why process just doesn't apply the same way it does to your organization. Even to a peer that looks very similar to you. The way that people work. The systems that you have. The the the workflows that you have. They'll never be identical. Right. Well, or, you know, like a who now how principle. You may bring on a new who two years down the road. That's a lot smarter than the person that built the process initially. That has a better way to do it. So that iterative mindset. Now you are constraining it. Right. It's a it's a weakness in your chain. Because you're having them do something that's inefficient. You're you're saying just do it. Because I don't trust that you have your own level of freedom. Or or flexibility. And kind of going back to the culture. We conversation. The thought that hopped up in my head a little bit, Todd. And you'll like this from a a project perspective. Is right, we all know smart. Right. Strategic, measurable, attainable, relatable and time-based. Or relevant. Well, MIT did a research paper on smart in 2018. And they released a a paper called fast beats smart. Because what they found was smart goals. Were not job satisfying and a lot of employees were starting to leave companies. Because their goals that they were being sent to, they weren't ambitious by any means. They weren't challenging. They were kind of monotonous. It was like, hey, just follow this framework. And this is how we get things done. And Google for a while struggled. Being the, you know, birthplace of the Agile framework. And they had to find a way to. How do we create more job satisfaction out of the things that our employees are achieving? And what they found was. They needed to add an ambitious metric to the smart goals. In order to to increase job satisfaction. So the goals had to be a little out of reach. And if a goal is a little out of reach, it's definitely not going to be to process. Because you're trying to push the boundaries of something. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it requires a lot of adaptation. Right. And it sort of reminds me of a quote that I've really liked that keeps ringing in my head a lot lately. And it's both personal and professional. Is strong opinions loosely held. Right. It's sort of how I feel about a lot of things. Right. Like I come across as very opinionated. And I think I am. But I'm not bullheaded about anything. Like if someone wants to teach me a better way to do something. I'll ask that you prove it. I won't take your sort of your word for it necessarily. But I am curious that way. Of like, oh, interesting. Okay, tell me more. Like like how's that worked for you? Is that different than what I do? Interesting. Okay, I like that idea. And I'll adopt that. Right. So, yeah, strong opinions loosely held. It's sort of a great way. I think to approach these things. Yeah, I I say it in a similar manner. Which is just absolute thinking gets you nowhere. Yeah, we're opinionated. But you can change my opinion pretty quickly. Right. Yeah. All right. Well, so we're just past the hour. We'll look to to wrap things up. This has been this has been fantastic. Appreciate your time, Kyle. This is always fun to to to wrap on this stuff. So. I think one of the things for for me, you know, if you want to reach out to myself or Kyle. Feel free to do so. We'll have some QR codes that you can look at here in the show notes. We'll have links to both myself and Kyle. Certainly for me, like this this stuff is core to to my heart. I have a service manager boot camp course that speaks to a lot of this as well. So if you're an owner or a service manager. That is looking to sort of skill up on your approach to service management. And a lot of these principles are are in that that course as well. So if you want to scale up. And and take that first step towards training in this area. That's a great first step as well. So any parting words from you, Kyle? Actually, one thing that we forgot to talk about, Todd, is in September, we're actually going to have a open forum AMA for service managers. Yes. So managers or owners, send your service managers, it's going to be a real simple webinar, Q&A style, AMA style. Right. What are you dealing with? What are you looking to achieve? We're really going to create kind of like a little minor community into the adaptive thinking. You need to have when you're managing people and teams and service. Because there is no black and white answer for any one problem. So what, you know. Bring us those great problems and Todd and I are going to live kind of both, you know. Uh spy versus spy, see how we would both approach the problems. Right. So that we'll have a QR code and a link for this as well. I think. But that is September 20th at 11:00 a.m. Pacific. 2:00 p.m. Eastern. So, definitely if this is this has been your jam. You've enjoyed hearing Kyle and I rant about this type of stuff. Then join us for the AMA where we'll continue to dive deep. And and get into the corners on this. And feel free to come loaded with some questions. And whatever you're struggling with. We'll help you out. And I think there's a lot of that pure community connection. That is excellent for for learning. Of just like, oh, that person struggles with that stuff too. I thought it was just me. But yeah, so bring your questions. And we'll do our best to to answer or crowd source some answers for you. Where it's a where where we may not know everything. Or the best answer to something. Uh there'll be lots of minds in the room to help out. So I think it'll be fun. Yeah, no, it's going to be a lot of fun. And then other than that, connect with me on LinkedIn and YouTube just because just like Todd, trying to build a lot of content for the community. To make sure that we uh ditch the absolute way that we have been thinking for the last few years. Awesome. All right, Kyle, this has been an awesome jam. So, all the best in your day and thanks for joining me for this little session and episode 100. Thanks for having me. Congratulations. Part of the MSP Radio Network.