ERP102 - MSP Growth Strategies to Escape "Death Valley"

The only pushback you might ever get is right when you do it the first time and you have to have a few like handful of hard conversations. It's not as many as you think it might be. And then it's just an understanding that this is going to be in the annual contract and it's going to happen every single year. anywhere from, you know, in this kind of inflationary environment, 6% is totally reasonable. Maybe if if the economy kind of normalizes here, maybe more like 3%. But I would absolutely be increasing my prices at least 3% at the bare minimum every single year and you will see no churn or almost no churn. 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 Evolved Management training courses, a whole series of courses built specifically for your MSP training needs. There's a project management for MSPs 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. Today on the Evolved Radio podcast, I'm speaking with Jake Gregorich, VP of Growth for Lyra Technology Group. Jake shares his thoughts on strategies and tactics to grow an MSP. Jake certainly knows what he's talking about since he's head of growth for one of the fastest growing MSP groups in the country. Jake and I explore what MSPs should do to escape Death Valley, which is that 1 to 5 million dollar range. This is a challenging space to succeed in and your exit options are limited. Jake shares his strategies to grow out of this phase. We also discuss some pitfalls of the centralized roll approach to acquisitions. And there are lots of great insights in this episode about marketing, growth, sales, and operations. So hope you enjoy this one. Let's go. Jake, welcome to the Evolved Radio podcast. Thanks Todd. Pleasure, pleasure to be on. Awesome. So if by way of introduction, if you could just give us a bit of background on yourself before we get started here. Yeah, sure. Today I oversee sales, marketing and strategic partnerships, so all things growth. for a family of IT services companies, mostly managed service providers. Before this, I was a consultant to MSPs and before that, I was a sales manager, frontline salesperson and sales manager player coach. Excellent. Okay, so lots of sales background. I think the sales and marketing aspects are going to be of particular interest today. So what we're talking about is growth strategies for MSPs. And what I really wanted to focus on today is the group of MSPs that are in what we sort of somewhat affectionately call Death Valley. which is you've got to 1 million, first sort of hurdle to accomplish in growing your business. Awesome, great work. It's an excellent place to be. Now the next leg is pretty daunting, that 1 to 5 million in growth. So really wanted to get your perspective on what you've seen successful and probably what people should focus on if they're trying to kind of get through that Death Valley and get from 1 to 5 million. So I'll let you lead off in any direction that you want based on that, but love to hear your thoughts on this, Jake. Yeah, I think maybe there's tactical things you can do and there's strategic things you can do. to get over that hump. I'm guessing the reason you call it Death Valley in the one to five range is because that's kind of a hard spot to be in. in terms of if you ever want to exit your business and it kind of realize the hard work you've done. There's not all that much interest and the interest isn't at kind of a price that feels worth it to someone that's built, you know, 10, 15, 20 years of a a business. In terms of some of the tactical stuff that I think companies in this size range can do is they can do what some of the bigger players do on a regular basis. to get basically easy wins. And and that brings you kind of to the 8 to 10% year over year growth mark. And the two things that come to mind are are cyber security and and simply running what we call our opt out campaigns. And that's kind of not leaving cyber decisions to your clients and telling them for these reasons, we're going to be moving you to our best practice cyber security stack. Sending out an email, if people want to opt out of it, they kind of have to recognize that they are taking on additional risk. And if they don't opt out of it via the email, you know, on their next invoice or the next quarter or whatever date you decide, we're going to put them up to that that stack. So that could be going from kind of traditional antivirus to an EDR or NDR solution. It could be adding vulnerability management or any number of kind of best practices that are really required in this kind of threat landscape to be able to manage people in a secure way. And there's really nothing worse than an MSP than having their clients breached. And so it's a pretty easy two sentence email to send out and it gives you kind of lift every year. And so cyber will never end. It's going to keep going. And so there's probably one you can do a year to kind of get some lift out of your current client base. And, quite frankly, it's being a good consultant and advisor to them to get them to the the the best in class kind of security stack. So let's dig into this one a little bit because I do like this idea of being more prescriptive about the stack. I think a lot of people as they're growing and maybe when they're they're smaller and dealing with with sort of more budgetary conscious clients, they tend to sort of set the budget for the client and assume, well, you know, like they won't want this or they won't pay for this. But I've seen a ton of success like routinely with people that are being more prescriptive and saying like, I know what's good for you. This is what you should have. So what are your feelings on sort of that that if you've had a bit of a a disparate stack and your standardization across your clients is a bit out of whack when you're when you're smaller. Do you sort of like the idea of being more single stack prescriptive or being a bit more cart? Yeah, I I think there's kind of a right way to do this. And when we we have a new customer, we'll take them on kind of as they are for lack of a better term. And as that hardware life cycle comes up, we're going to move them to our stack. So we're not all that profitable until the refresh comes up over the next one to three years most of the time. And that way we don't have to walk away from a bunch of clients. But in our contract, we're able to move them to our best practice, they become much more profitable, it's much easier to manage them at that point down the road. The in terms of kind of the opt out campaign and the security standpoint, I would just kind of urge don't be scared at all. I've never lost a client by doing this. Out of we have 20 businesses, thousands of clients, we've never lost any single one of them. Some have opted out, but I would say it's about around the 1% mark. So it's a very high success rate with almost no downside. You just have to kind of grow the guts and and do it. Yeah, it's so interesting. Like I find like this is I think a lot of things apply here, the same principle of like making mountains out of mole hills. And the internal conversation, the vacillation that people go through around sort of self-limiting beliefs around what will happen if they approach their clients with these things. And I see the same, like almost categorically those those sort of stories that they the owner is telling themselves in their head of all the resistance that will meet is mostly in their head. And there's just really not that much resistance that they run into when they they they try these strategies and try to sort of apply the best practices to their clients. It's interesting, right? It certainly is and the this kind of segued nicely into the next thing that all kind of larger more mature MSPs do and that's price increases on an annual basis. The only pushback you might ever get is right when you do it the first time and you have to have a few like handful of hard conversations. It's not as many as you think it might be. And then it's just an understanding that this is going to be in the annual contract and it's going to happen every single year. anywhere from, you know, in this kind of inflationary environment, 6% is totally reasonable. Maybe if if the economy kind of normalizes here, maybe more like 3%. But I would absolutely be increasing my prices at least 3% at the bare minimum every single year and you will see no churn or almost no churn. Yeah, that's a good one as well. Um, you know, what I I typically suggest for people is that that their contract actually stipulated at least a 3% increase is allowed per year. Even if you don't necessarily pull the trigger on that, at least you have the contract language to sort of hang on to in case you need it. And you're right, like the current environment, I think is right for this. because business owners are seeing their prices increase on everything, so it's not a surprise to see their IT costs going up as well. And there's a really good reason for this. You're not just sort of raising prices because you felt like it, there's a lot of external pressures you can point to, you know, Microsoft increasing costs and all of the vendors and software that you use are seeing, you know, 6 to 15% increases as well. So there's a there's a good business justification for this and I don't think people should be really worried about, you know, what will my client think of me if I decide to do this. They're they're seeing that from everybody and won't judge you on it in my opinion. Yeah, I think originally when I was in a smaller MSP, where this this first came from was that we had certain texts and they're really good at their job. And so in order to keep those texts, we need to pay them more. And so to justify that to the client, saying, hey, you like working with Johnny and Izzy and whoever else on the team. Like for us to keep the best people to to deliver this level of service, we have to pay them appropriately. And, you know, we can not and they can move on and you can have someone else or we can put this standard process in place and and we can continue to deliver the excellence in in service that we have been in the past. I would also say the kind of follow on to that is that you want to do a price increase that's more than the the salary increase that you give to your people or you're not going to have an actual expanding event. So unless there's that arbitrage between that the number of your, you know, biggest input cost, which is labor and and your price increase, it's not going to move the needle very much. Yeah. Okay. Next strategy, any other other tactics you got there? Yeah, I think this is more strategic and this is actually coming from something that we did two weeks ago. So Lyra is a part of a bigger organization called Evergreen. We've got 75 businesses, almost all of them MSPs within the family. So we have a really nice sample size of companies. And then we've also worked with a bunch of businesses, I have personally in the past. And so I was sitting down with Liz, she's our chief people officer. And we were kind of trying to put together what what makes the best possible CEO of a business. Like what characteristics, background do they have? And and what we found was kind of fascinating. From our grading of the best MSPs that we had ever seen, whether in our family or outside of our our family. All of them actually had an owner that stepped to the side and he had a second in command that he gave some piece of equity to. And then that business became the best business that we had seen from an MSP standpoint, once that person fully stepped aside and gave the reins like the CEO chair to that second in command. And so you might not want to do all of that and go so far as to give up kind of the the decision making and the the CEO seat in your business. But I would highly recommend if you find someone that can drive growth in your business and you've hit this glass ceiling and you've been there for 15 years. I think it's, you know, if you're able to check your ego and you're able to promote that person and give them a piece of your business. That's really where we've seen people not just get to 5 million, but get to 10, 15 million and then at their exit, you know, the valuation that that decision paid off on. was multiples higher, you know, 10X sometimes. And so those were the eight MSPs and they all fit that characteristic of having a second in command that was given equity and at some point that person took over as CEO either after the sale or beforehand and those were the best MSPs that we had seen. without an exception. Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm that that that lines up. And and I think you're right, like whether or not you want to give equity right away, I think the the planning around that strategy, I think is really crucial. Right? I always suggest like any great leader has a set has a strong right hand. Right? And identifying who that person is, whether or not they're in your company or you need to go find them. I think that's a really, really important growth strategy. especially for that kind of 1 to 5 million range where, you know, you can kind of get by doing this carrying all of the eight hats required to run your MSP at that kind of 1 million range. But as we said, like part of the reason that it is Death Valley. is getting to 1 million, you can kind of muscle and feel your way through it. But to get past 1 million, you really need to start thinking strategically about how you're building your business. And I would say that identifying a really strong service manager who could become a COO and be able to take on that the operational aspects of the business and really make things hum is incredibly helpful to make those things happen. Because then you can go focus on those more strategic activities and work on the growth side of the business as well if that's your interest, right? Yeah, yeah, I've seen it actually going in both directions too. I would say half of those people were were operations minded people and half were actually sales folks that kind of got bumped into a a top executive position and and were given an equity stake in these companies that then ended up leading to to the big results that came later on. Yeah, like a classic example that I see in the industry of of that scenario of the inverse, right? Like you don't necessarily need to be the sales or the ops person, but I think the the split between sort of the growth and external facing focused. aspects of the business versus the internal sort of operation side of the business is really crucial to understand and and having that that split there. But the the classic example. is uh Spotify where Toby is sort of the founder of the business, but, you know, he is not necessarily the chief executive, right? And the the the person uh I'm blanking on his name. Anyway. The other guy, uh he's a really, really good interesting dude, but he is more like the external facing person related to Spotify. Toby is identifiable, but he like he prefers just to be behind closed doors, coding, working on things internally, doesn't carry a very public persona. Right? So if you want to stay on the op side and work on the tech and have somebody else like go and grow the business, that that I think that's that's doable, especially at that size. But yeah, it's a different strategy for sure. Yeah, yeah, really interesting. Well, the I guess the next thing. Those are some of the things you can do kind of tactically and strategically, you know, at some point you have to sell new logos. If you're going to get to that mark, even if it's just a handful a year. You know, if you're a million dollars to get to 2 million dollars, that's like a couple good deals. Plus doing, you know, price increases, opt out campaigns, the other right stuff in the in the business. Do we want to talk a little bit about kind of the the sales and marketing side? Yeah, absolutely. because, you know, I think this is there's a lot of confusion around what works in this space. And I would love to see sort of hear your perspective because you have such a broad purview of of what works in multiple geographies. multiple segments, multiple sort of styles of business. Like what do you see as sort of the the the real go-to. ROI, high ROI marketing efforts, I guess. because if we're going to win some new logos, it's, you know, we're not increasing share of wallet. We're looking for identifying and and bringing in new prospects. So what's the best method for that? And I would say just a caveat on this is a lot of people I think will say referrals, which I think is absolutely a big part of this. And maybe that's your number one. But, you know, at some point you kind of tap out on referrals to some extent. So what are the other levers that you can start to pull from a marketing aspect? Yeah, so I I would really put this into to three buckets. There's people, I I call them trigger trackers because I think it's a fun name, but other people call it buyer signals. That might be someone had a breach, someone had downtime, they turned over internal IT, maybe they searched MSP services. These are all signals and there's ways to get insight into those signals. And those people we all want to just like get in front of at that moment because they've become a buyer and they're going to make a decision in the next three months. I think everyone kind of inherently knows that and that's a big reason why people change IT providers. And so it really comes down to how can we identify those signals. And then can we set up kind of a repeatable sequence of sales and marketing activities based on which signal it is to go out and actually be the ones that that get in front of the the customers. I could give you maybe one more I don't want to give away the whole I have a a playbook called my trigger tracker. I don't want to give away the whole thing or it's going to cause some problems for my my own companies. But I can maybe talk about one that's a little bit outside the box. If if you're keeping a CRM and you are what you should be or your sales people should be, uh recording when you talk to someone, which MSP they're they're currently with. You can, you know, understand contract end dates, of course. But there's also this other thing that's happening in the market, actually why I joined kind of Lyra and Evergreen. is that after a company's acquired, an MSP is acquired and they're integrated into a larger business, they're churning 15 to 30% of their customers in year one after the integration begins. And so if you have a good CRM or you have some way of knowing which prospects in your market are using which MSPs and then those MSPs are acquired and they're rolled into like a platform, a central operation. Those people are going to be really going through a bumpy ride over the next 18 months. And so they are prime targets for spending lots of money to acquire, whether that's bringing them out to one-on-one dinners, you know, inviting them to events, going and showing up and cold calling, writing a handwritten letter, like things that take a lot of time and money to do. I would highly recommend those if you have some of those insights. Okay. So like would you say a lot of your your strategies and that point on on sort of picking up as uh, you know, potentially a uh an acquisition is is is is sort of fragging off uh uh some leads. A lot of your strategies are are they more sort of traditional what we would think of as traditional sales where it's a it's sort of a lot of people contacting and interactions. And do you see sort of any value or outsized value in some of the traditional digital marketing? And and part of the reason I ask this is I think a lot of sort of the the the sort of younger. smaller MSPs, you know, technical founders, not necessarily really keen to do a lot of sales and and they're they're quite sort of nervous about that sales aspect. And they tend to want to sort of just rely on things and systems and buy some tools or some some digital spend like, uh, you know, Google AdWords or some Facebook campaigns or something like that. So like what what's your feeling between sort of that traditional people sales and interacting and, you know, not necessarily cold calling, but like reaching out to people. versus the more digital campaign and marketing strategies. Yeah, I I mean, I think you should do both if you have the time and and the the the cost, uh the budget to to do so. On on the marketing side, if you're just going to run some ads or you're just going to produce a ton of content or you're just going to do some podcasts or any number of single items, it's almost worth not doing it at all. You know, some people call it multi-channel or omnipresent uh marketing where you need to understand what are all of the channels and you need to be kind of hitting your customers at every aspect of that. I'd also, you know, tie this back to the whole signal identification thing of retargeting is a good way to use money if you're going to pay for ads. Someone that's shown their warm and not just like any old person that, you know, you're at the top of Google when you search and and you're the first name. Uh I would say retargeting could be could be pretty effective on on that side. Having said that. I would just say you're going to have to get out of your comfort zone and do sales. Like that's just like or you got to bring someone in that can do it like I I mentioned earlier. And so recognize that it's a weakness, bring someone that can do it. And and when I think about sales, it's similar to this kind of idea of omnipresent. I call it an ideal audience profile. And so what I mean by that is most people talk about the ideal customer profile and so they do all these things to try to get to that ideal customer. I think about it as our customers are in some segment, whether it's a vertical, whether it's a a group of peers. And and we want to get specific to them and we want to target the audience that they're around, the the people they trust and the channels that they consume information from. And so I think about who are the vendors that they're using, the suppliers, the strategic partners. Do I have anchor clients in this industry, are they in peer groups or their associations, events, you know, maybe they're a part of a nonprofit. But all of those places that they go and your ideal kind of customer is spending their time, I want to be involved in all of those those things. because quite frankly, they can lend their authority to me if I'm talking to a peer group of. you know, I don't know, defense industrial base and we have a CMMC capability. And so because I was invited to that event, they are lending me their authority by being a speaker there and now people want to to talk to me. So I'm entering the the conversation with them. Their introduction to me is through a channel that they already trust. And so I kind of recommend and we put game plans together to just like we would target just the ideal customer profile. target every single one of those areas so that we're hitting our our prospects from all aspects and we're kind of getting lent the authority of of the strategic partner or of the peer group, uh, you know, the event, whatever it might be. I love that strategy personally. I recommend this to to a lot of people when they're sort of nervous like, I don't want to do cold calling. And like cold calling can be effective, but it's certainly not for everybody and maybe not at first. But I find this super effective of like, pick your favorite customer that you work with, who's high value, they totally get it. And ask them like, what conferences are you going to this year and can I come along? And then you just show up as like the IT guy in the room who's interested in their business and wants to understand your client's business better. That is one of the best sales aspects you can have. Like you don't you don't need to be pushy. People will just be like, wow, like you're here at our conference, like, can I get your card? Right? It's it's a great little subliminal sales tactic to just be in the presence of of where where your other clients or potential prospects could be, right? Yeah, I I think you pulled out something really intuitive there in terms of like, uh, we'll call it a anchor client or a super connector. Those people can be absolutely vital. When we do, we always recommend doing account research of like, where did our customers come from and who are our best customers, how are they originated? And if you do that, you'll find out like half of your deals were originated by like two people. Like two people referred you into each of these areas and like maybe they happen to be in the same market segment or vertical. This is fresh in my mind because we I was just in a meeting yesterday in regards to this. They they have a customer that's basically an anchor customer in this tiny little niche market segment that doesn't have peer groups. They do have one annual association event. And so we're going to go to our like anchor client who's a a super connector and has plugged us in at like 10 different businesses. And we're going to have her reach out to her peers that are our clients and see if we can establish a peer group. And so if there is a and this is a business called OSG in Chicago. If there's an OSG sponsored librarian peer group and we set that up via our anchor client, like we are ingrained into this community. We built the community. I mean, look at Connectwise, right? That's the example. Like Connectwise built the MSP community and they dominate the the MSP software business because of it. And so if you can build at a very micro level, that peer group might be like, we just meet once a month to talk about like the challenges we're facing in whatever industry. I I think that's kind of like the holy grail and it's actually not that hard to get to if you have an anchor client that will bring you to their their audience. Yeah, especially if they are super connector and can kind of bring some weight to that that group as well. That's that's a really cool strategy. I like that idea. The other one, sort of related is is. And this one's controversial and I I I would say a caveat this with, I don't think there's a right answer here, but I'd love sort of people's opinion on this of. Are you for sort of vertical specialization in in IT groups and MSPs? Do you think that makes sense for certain people and what are the scenarios where it does or doesn't make sense, do you think? Yes, I am very much for it. I would say there's kind of separate things. There's that the trigger tracker, the buyer signal. Like we want to go after all of those businesses. We just need to get insight into that event. And so we should go after all of them because quite frankly, IT infrastructure is IT infrastructure. It doesn't change all that much. Having said that, you know, only 3% of your buyers are in the market to buy MSP services at any given time. Some people say up to 10%. I think it's closer to three. But nonetheless, that other 97% of people are not going to take a meeting with you unless you are specialized. And so if you're not offering them something that they don't understand, so you need to be able to educate them on something. You're going to be able to get in front of them when they're not in the market today. And so, you know, one of two things, when they come into the market, they already trust you and so they're going to buy from you. Or two, you're able to educate them and then they're kind of starting to look at their current MSP and thinking like, hey, my MSP doesn't know anything about CMMC again. Doesn't know anything about CMMC. I'm seeing all these rulings and and this guy keeps on sending me content about like what we have to do by which dates and like here's the steps to do it. Giving me free resources and all of these other items, like you could pull someone into the market by verticalizing and I just don't think that's even possible if you are not verticalized. Okay. Yeah, that's a great, great point. So we talked about some of the some of the growth strategies and to get through sort of that one to five. And like we we said, part of this is, um, you know, that one to five, it's difficult to sort of get acquired for some of money that allows someone to exit. Like you could roll up or partner or change your business so that maybe you're less focused on the day-to-day operations. There's definitely some some opportunities that you can pull on. But to really be attractive for for sort of a life-changing exit, you know, the 5 to 10 or 10 plus is certainly where you want to look towards. And I think I guess if you're going to get rolled up or like you're you're pairing up with one or two other MSPs to merge in order to sell. Like what are some I think one of the the really important aspects of this, like this thought process of rolling up a couple of MSPs and then secondarily the same thing applies in in acquisitions of any sort. It was cultural alignment. I think is one of the most crucial aspects to getting this right. And I'd love to sort of hear your thoughts and from your perspective of seeing this, you know, dozens of times. And what does that mean for how do you discover cultural alignment and how do you know you have it before you get into any type of merger and acquisition discussion? Oh man, I'm just caveat this by saying I'm incredibly biased here. Uh, so just know that this is coming from a a biased perspective, but I basically spent my career prior to to joining Lyra and Evergreen in that world. So I was a consultant to private equity companies trying to enter the MSP market or private equity backed MSPs that had already created a platform and were rolling up businesses. And I was in some of those businesses on both ends of acquisitions. And I just don't think it really works very well in in the MSP world. And the reason why is like you know every one of these companies is working with customers within 50 miles of their office. These are hyper localized businesses. And so when you centralize a bunch of services or you're reporting to someone that's not near you, you lose that feeling of accountability that you have to the small kind of 50 mile radius around your office. And so when you get centralized and integrated into the bigger business, that that culture, that locality breaks down and the customer relationship really breaks down. And so, you know, not to plug my company too hard, but our business model is to let people exit their business on their terms. If they want to retire tomorrow, we let them the day after the acquisition and we'll have a bench of people that can step in as CEO. Or we'll promote someone from from within. And then we have 75 companies, right? And those 75 businesses have 75 CEOs with 75 P&Ls, 75 websites, 75 ways of delivering services because we want to keep their culture intact. And that's what when I talk to to Elliot, the CEO of Lyra, he he kind of explained to me and I was like, oh, I'm not a consultant anymore. Like I'm joining this because this is actually the right business model and I have yet to see it work really well other places. And when I say work really well, there have been lots of successful exits, but for the employees and for the customers. I think it's gone not so great and then I think in the long term, you eventually like get what's coming. Uh, so that that's kind of my feeling on it. I I'm probably not the, you know, again, biased answer. But that's why I joined the the family of of companies here at at Lyra and and Evergreen. So I guess like maybe another way to view that is like the the cultural alignment being so crucial. Like it it it's so crucial and it often doesn't work. Like would you suggest like that's why that strategy, uh like you guys sort of take a different tact on this. The localization I get, right? Like a services business, I think will always be localized and when people complain about sort of. uh commoditization or, you know, AI taking jobs, those sorts of things. It's like, there's always going to need to be someone on the ground interacting with the client from an account management standpoint. You know, deploying devices, those sorts of things. But whatever happens on the back end, like those things are definitely going to be commoditized. So I think the localization I 100% agree with. And caveat again, like I've seen some really disastrous mergers and rollups where cultural alignment was not there. And, you know, it there was a lot of upheaval and problems that resulted out of it. And, you know, some people regret those. Seen I've seen some where it works quite well where they are very, very diligent about cultural alignment. But maybe it's so, so impactful and so difficult to get right. Like maybe you guys just sort of side step that and take a different approach. Is that right? Yeah, so I would say if you went even the ones that appear to go really well for the senior management team. who you probably interact with the most. If you go to the frontline employees, they'll share a different story in most aspects. Um, which I guess it depends what, you know, what what you're looking for. We have side stepped that and we've gotten to a scale now. where we still get all the big company advantages. So we still get the best possible pricing because we're the biggest combined MSP in in the country. So we get the best pricing from our vendors, we get favorable terms, we get leads from channels. From we can still do strategic partnerships. We're actually starting a few business units centrally that leverage the scale of our entire organization. And those businesses though are their own business units, they'll have their own CEOs and our companies will be benefactors of like getting leads via our central efforts. But we will never tell the CEO of the business what to do if if they hit their number. If not, the only decision that can be made is hiring and firing the CEO and then CEO compensation. Otherwise, if they are doing their thing and it's working, they get to do whatever it is that they they they is aligned to their culture within their business. Okay. So maybe one last way to view this then would be. What are the things that you guys are looking for when you're sort of judging a business or you've been had an intro to to a potential acquisition target. What does that look like and and how are you judging sort of the fit and the quality of things that you guys want to see? I think probably if people have heard these these ones a lot, like quality of revenue, percentage of recurring revenue. customer retention, all of those kinds of things. Like you can probably listen to, you know, an investment banker, an M&A person and get a a better answer than than what I can give. To me, what makes these businesses really good is do they have customer retention? Will we continue to have customer retention when the the owner moves on? So that, you know, we we can basically guarantee a baseline of like those price increases and those opt outs. Our customers are getting a lot of value. We're going to be able to do that. We know that there's going to be like a 20% lift in year one just via the fact that we get the best pricing on things. And so as long as the business is extremely stable, I would say that we are very interested in partnering with companies. because we don't have to have the cultures match one business to another. They're going to keep doing their thing. And so if they're stable, they can become a part of our family and it's basically a multiplier effect overnight in year one. Okay. Excellent. So let's let's make this uh really tactical to wrap up then. So, um, I want you to think like and this could be repeating sort of the strategies that you mentioned, the tactics that you started at the top. But like say you're, you know, you're speaking to an MSP owner who's, you know, just past a million, they're they're somewhat on their way to to 2 million. It's not difficult, they're growing sort of at a at a steady pace. But what are sort of the three bits of advice or or efforts that you would send them on to to do over the next say two years to really accelerate their growth and and put them in in a position where they're big enough to look at some type of equity event. Yeah, I I guess stating the the first ones of price increases and opt out campaigns certainly. I would say really look hard for a number two. That's going to break you through your glass ceiling and and then I guess lastly is once you find that person. just give it to them and let them run. The thing that the owner usually does that doesn't get past that wall is they just stand in their own way. And if if you hire a good person and you let them run at it and you offload that portion of the business, whether it's service or sales, and now you're just honing in on, you know, growth or whatever it might be. Decentralized command, let them let them go and let it rip. That's awesome. As uh someone who is operations focused and I spend a significant amount of my consulting energy to develop sort of second in command and second line leadership. That's uh that's music to my ears. So thanks Jake for helping validate the approach. Oh, yeah, pleasure Todd. As always, hopefully we can do it again sometime. Awesome. Appreciate your time. Bye bye. Part of the MSP Radio Network.