ERP105 - Scale Your MSP

We get really good text because they do get to work remote. So there's some real advantages and and in the US, this is the same true. Is that a lot of people, well, yeah, I'd like it, but I want to be able to work remote. This is becoming the new norm and the companies that can adapt to that well, I think are going to have a real advantage. 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 latest episode of the Evolved Radio podcast, we'll delve into the evolving world of managed service providers. With a special focus on staff augmentation. Joining us is Michael Nelson, co-founder of Scaled and owner of TLC Tech, an MSP in California. Michael's journey began with a skepticism towards remote work, but through revolutionary changes and an open mind, he since embraced a mainly remote workforce. Reaping benefits in productivity, profitability, and employee happiness. In this episode, we'll uncover the transformative impact of remote work for MSPs. The integration of overseas talent into local company cultures and how these remote powerhouses can reinvigorate your organization. We'll also discuss the distinction between staff augmentation and outsourcing. The importance of intentional onboarding and the necessity of regular communications to engage and retain top talent. Michael will share his personal insights on how remote staffing has reshaped his company and practical tips for maintaining company culture in a remote work environment. We'll also be exploring the creation of a remote employee engagement plan. And benefits of thorough documentation. Additionally, we'll touch on the cultural nuances of managing a diverse workforce and tackle the more subtle aspects of cross-cultural management. So plug in, adjust the volume and get ready for an enlightening conversation that just might change the way you're managing your MSP and your view of staffing. Let's tune in. Michael, welcome to the Evolved Radio podcast. Hey, Todd, thanks for having me. Great to have you here. This will be a great conversation, really interested to get into this. Because I think we share a lot of philosophies on this and hopefully dispel some myths and get people some some opportunities and some options for scaling their MSP as it were. So, great place to start, I think, is a bit of your origin story. Like how you came to this business, you're running an MSP and, you know, somewhat resistant, I would I would say based on our pre-conversation to to the idea of outsourcing in any capacity. So, how did that come about now that you're sort of running this business supporting MSPs to outsource? How did you, how did you get converted as it were? It is a funny story. So I uh started TLC Tech, it's an MSP in California 20 years ago. Uh, grew it up slowly but surely, it was all organic growth. Uh, bought my first building that we worked out of and so I was really adamant that we were all going to be in the office. Ended up growing, bought another building. Fast forward, we were probably 17, 18 people at the time. And one of our techs got promoted to technology manager. And he just did an incredible job and then he got promoted to operations manager. Now, my staff had been after me for a very, very long time about working remote. Nope, never going to happen, stop asking, it's going to be in the office only, non-negotiable. How about just one day a week? Nope, never going to happen, stop asking. So our ops manager gets promoted. And within a couple of weeks he comes to me and says, so, I have hiring and firing abilities? Yes, yes, you do. So, do you have veto power? No, I do not. And it's just like, oh, he's like, good, I'm going to fire somebody and I'm going to hire two people from South Africa. Okay, it's like, okay, he's going to have to learn the hard way, he's going to have to fail on his own, this is part of growing as a manager. These guys were phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal, he hired a third one within a few months. They became the the ticket crushers, they led the leader board every day on number of tickets happening all of that. By the time COVID hit, we were really, really good at having remote employees. So, we all, you know, I'm in California, it was one of the first states to shut down and we all went home. And I sold the office building we were in, rented a small little bit of it back and we're now that MSP is now a completely remote company. So, I guess first off is like, it was pretty brave of you to sort of like despite the pause. And wait a minute, what are you asking for, maybe I should have veto power. Like I guess against better judgment, I would sort of credit you on your leadership capability and saying like, no, okay, I, you know, I'm going to let him try this despite the fact that I don't think it works. So, can you maybe just dig into that a little bit? Well, that's part of building up a leader. He's really strong and he has continued over the years to prove that he really makes good decisions. And that was his first big request. There's no way I'm going to come out of the gate and say, no, I'm going to veto you on this. This was something he had thought through, wanted to try. Worst thing that could happen is it didn't work out. So, yeah, it was it and it it empowered him, but even better than that, it gave me extreme confidence in his decision-making abilities. I it you have to give people the chance to success and fail. Because they're going to learn from their failures too. Lord, no, come on. I owned an MSP, I've owned the MSP for 20 years. I've done my fair share of failures over the years. Yeah, it's uh yeah, failure can often be your best teacher is a is a is something I say for sure. Yeah. I guess the other piece like that I think is helpful here. Because, you know, we talked about this beforehand, I've I've recommended outsourcing for for quite a while. And I feel like the tide is maybe turning, but I definitely feel there's still sort of this uh inherent resistance to this idea. Do you you want to maybe just kind of go back in the time machine, like what were your your thoughts around the resistance to this? Why did you not want people working remotely, let alone outsourcing to another country? I didn't think they were going to work as hard. I didn't think they would put in the same amount of effort. We we worked incredibly hard at developing a culture for our company. Everything was based on providing extraordinary service. And I and I know a lot of MSPs do that. One of my favorite things and and I always taught this to the text is. You should try to be able to end every call with being able to say, that's what we're here for. Because the client said, oh my gosh, thanks, that was so awesome. And I loved being able to hear those and then the other text would hear it. So it was just kind of part of that culture. So I really thought to have that, we had to be in the office. And sure enough. I once COVID hit, I again, pre-COVID, we probably had five people overseas by the time that hit. Once COVID hit. My gosh, the staff was more productive, happier, they worked their tails off. We became more profitable. It just it was a phenomenal learning experience. Yeah, that's excellent. I I see very, very similar results. And and it's interesting, like the some a lot of the the the text that I've seen being available and and sort of offered up in some of these outsource scenarios are are South Africa. And I think you guys have a fairly strong association with that, especially historically. Do you have a sense of sort of why that is, like why are why are the South Africans sort of popping up as as a particularly. So prevalent in in this outsourcing option? Several things, A, they're native English speaking. Uh, they kind of sound a little Australian in their accents. Uh, there's really good technical training schools, so a lot of people come up through education, learning technology. And finally, they just have this incredible work ethic. There's there's there's it's really it's where it used to be in the US 20 years ago. It's just so these three things and they're raised watching a lot of our same TV shows, a lot of our same movies, so there's a lot of cultural alignment that's already there. So between the work ethic, the native English speaking and and the cultural alignment. It just it's a no-brainer. Okay, excellent. Yeah, the accent is an interesting one. I always sort of suggest to people like if it sounds Australian, but not quite, but it isn't English, it's probably South African. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's great. Okay. Now we've so hopefully converted people to to the the fact that outsourcing is a totally viable option. And I would say in a lot of cases can actually be a cure for a bit of the cultural malaise. I often suggest to people that having kind of when I bringing in one of these these outsourced people. There's no preconceived notions. There's often a higher work ethic. Uh because, you know, they they know that they're remote, they know that they they don't have sort of this proximity bias to to sort of show off or, you know, to demonstrate their effectiveness. And it just purely they have to rely on raw output and and just sort of work harder than everybody. I think that that's sort of that a bit of that psychology of theirs. And what I often find is this is actually a really great way to sort of reboot a bit of that cultural malaise in in an organization. Where you bring in a killer, they start sort of setting a new example of what's possible. Like all of the the excuses about why, you know, getting more done is not really practical in your organization, oh, because of this, because of that. Then you bring in this this outside person who just starts blowing the doors off everybody. And not in sort of a negative way of like, you know, just being brutal with people and and trying to put them down. It's just like, look, the bar is now here, like I'm not asking you necessarily to match that person. But if you're 10 steps below, like, you know, you got to you got to pick up a little bit. I think that that's a really sort of healthy competition of like, look, this is possible, I'm just telling you like like all of the restrictions that you feel you may have are probably imaginary. Do you have any other sort of like contributions to that around sort of that cultural shift that you can sometimes see in in entering into this? Yeah, absolutely, and I noticed it first in my own MSP. When we had the by the time we had three, it brought the bar up. And what happened is the other employees were like, oh. Okay, and we saw their productivity go up. We continued to add people from South Africa and it just it brought up everybody's boat as it were. Anecdotally, what I'm hearing from our clients as well is they're seeing the same things. They bring these these text on and they're absolute rock stars in the organization and it makes the local people do the same thing. It's like, okay, I guess I better step up here. So it it just it's a win-win all the way around. And by the way, we don't we don't call it outsourcing, we actually call it staff augmentation. Because the the outsourcing has this connotation that it's going to be an outsourced help desk, that it's never going to be the same person, any of that. And and it's really important that. My belief with having somebody from overseas or remote in your channel, remote anywhere is that they need to be full-time dedicated inside of your organization. Yeah, that's actually a really important distinction. I'm glad you brought that up. Right, because we're not talking about sort of like outsourcing to a master MSP. Which is also a viable strategy. But this, I think, is a different modality that is is I think important in two ways, actually. Like the fact that you say of like, they're a dedicated tech, they're effectively a part of your staff, right? And I think that that's a a really important distinction, both in sort of their availability, their stickiness and understanding sort of the details of your clientele, your organization, I think those are incredibly helpful. I would say like the the the the one piece of this that I think people potentially get wrong if they've ever tried outsourcing in the past. Is they think that if I outsource, like it removes me from the management of that person. Right, and they kind of like think it's like a it's like it's like a get out free card where they're like, oh, well, I don't have to do as much, maybe this will be easier. And it's such a damaging mentality, right? Like I I really want to impress upon people that if you have staff augmentation, if you're having someone especially remote and especially like if they're they're someone that is being staff in this type of scenario. You have to treat them the same if not better from a engagement standpoint than you would with local staff, right? Because they are remote and there's there's no difference in how you should be managing your local staff versus your remote staff or your staff augmented people. Right, the modality doesn't make a difference and you have to engage them in those same management practices. So I'm sure you would agree with that, anything you would add there? Yeah, absolutely, you have to behave the same way, whether they're whether they're remote in your state or whether they're remote overseas. They have to quickly be brought into your culture, they have to be made to feel like they're truly a member of your team. We are the employer, we we pay them, we take care of everything that way. But we also become a partner with our MSP clients. In that we're going to check in with them, we're going to help them, we're going to coach them how to be successful. One of the things that we have to start with is we want a 30, 60, 90 day success plan out of every client. So that we can work through that plan with them. Of how is it going to work, what do they need to do within the first 30, 60, 90 days to be successful in this engagement? Part of that's culture. We also help them understand how to how to draw into the culture. And we'll we'll get into some tips and tricks after a little bit. But yeah, there should be no difference in the way you onboard, train, mentor, and support a local person or somebody that's brought in from overseas. Yeah, I think that's actually like one of the benefits of this type of practice. Is I find organizations like yours that are good at this and are thoughtful about onboarding and the cultural components that make this practical. It actually upskills the MSP because they go through this process and they can add to sort of their onboarding practices and their engagement frameworks, maybe. So I think that that's actually, you're kind of you're kind of cribbing off of the best practices that you guys have built, right? Yes, absolutely. And the other founder, Jason Knight also owned MSP, so both of us come out of the MSP world. We know what needs to happen and what kind of a person is going to be successful in the MSP. So we have a pretty extensive vetting process that we go through, but the final final piece is Jason or I interview the final candidate in the final interview. And the one question we answer is, what I place them in my own MSP? If I wouldn't bring them into my MSP, we're not going to put them on the bench. And we only do level three, level two and level three and really high level three engineers. So we're not trying to look for every single position in an MSP or outside of the MSP industry. We work really hard at finding text that are going to be good in MSPs. Yeah, it's an important aspect, actually. Wanted to sort of touch on this about the, you know, what are the best sort of modes of engagement for the staff augmentation? You kind of noted it. Like should it be triage, should it be kind of a outsourced knock, is it an escalation resource? Like you kind of noted this, but maybe expand on that, like best the best roles that these types of folks are suited for, I guess. So, you know, our level two's come in, they're really strong, they're going to be the ticket slayers, they're going to be able to they're really most all of them are extremely strong in Office 365. So they're going to be that's kind of a sweet spot. The level two's are just the good ticket slayers. Our level three's, you can get in, that's where you start getting into escalation engineers, you can have that person be knocked. Then you can get into really high level three's, they're going to be the ones that are going to be doing the system build, design, specking, planning, project type things. Yeah, it's it's you talked about knock and that's a great position. Actually, in my MSP, we have somebody that starts at 3:00 AM Pacific time, they do the backups, the patching, the reboots, the the firewall, the server patching that needs to be done. Then they take the after hours emergency calls from 5:00 AM to 8:00 AM. And then they're available for a little bit for that morning ticket rush. The only caveat there is if you're going to start somebody, if you're going to put somebody into an earlier shift, make sure that they work your daylight hour shift and get really well steeped in your process and your culture and then start slowly moving them back into an earlier shift. Yeah, this is one of those huge unlocks that I find for. You know, I would say the outsource knock is is probably something that MSPs are leveraging more so than maybe some of the staff augmentation. But just the ability, you know, anytime I run into an MSP where they're their day staff are trying to manage escalations and after hours emergencies. Just like, you guys, you don't need to do this. You know, like especially if it's done in this in this sort of old-fashioned way of like it's on a group distribution list and like everyone kind of has to consciously be afraid of like an email in this inbox and the owner gets really frustrated when no one jumps on it immediately. It's like, there is a better mouse trap, like have someone kind of run different operating hours to do these things, right? That was, you know, it was similar to projects in my MSP. Is until we truly had a separate segregated project department, it did not work the way that it should have. Because the urgent always overtakes the important. And the same thing with knock is you've got, okay, this isn't crashing, but this could be a problem in the next 10 to 12 hours. So, but another emergency comes in. When you've got that dedicated knock, it gives you the ability to start doing things the right way. Yeah, yeah, you hit the nail on the head there. All right, so some general kind of pros and cons. Like, you know, we've talked a few of the pros, if there's there are a few, like absolutely we can layer on to that. Yeah, any any pros or cons that you see in in sort of the staff engagement model? So pros, you know, you're going to get a slightly you're going to get a lower price point, you're going to get the really hard working individual, good skills. The other we talked about, everybody's behavior kind of coming up. The cons really we really haven't seen any. You know, in my own business, like I in my own MSP, I was not into doing this. And turns out it was just pure upside. However, you have to be very, very intentional in how you bring on a remote employee. That's probably if anything, the thing that you need to think about most is how you're going to onboard them, how you're going to integrate them and how you're going to make sure that you really pull them into your culture. Yeah, I would agree. As as you were saying, I, you know, if there's no cons, I was like, well, okay, I can think of one. And that was exactly it. And it goes the same where for anyone, like even if you're not using staff, some of you will have MSPs will have outsource or excuse me, remote employees. And I think the the intentionality about how you engage those people becomes really, really necessary. You know, I am one of those people, you know, I run a management consulting organization. And the thing I hate most about any managers that I that I sort of bump into is no news is good news type management. It's like, well, you know, if something needs to be done, then I'll talk to them. You know, but there there's just no intentionality about it and everyone's just sort of drifting away, doing whatever they want and and not being as productive as they could be, they're, you know, their engagement is low. So those risks are always there for any type of remote employee. And I think it's really, really important that you think about that management framework and start to implement that across the board. As I said, like this is one of the advantages of leveraging these types of services that you guys are off. Offering is that it sort of forces you your hand to have to do these things and gives you a bit of guidance to actually implement them as well. The other thing, so in in scale, the other thing we do is we have employee success managers. They meet with they they do regular check-ins, but one of the other things they do is they do a 90 day review. Every 90 days with the staff that they actually reach out to the client, ask seven questions to make sure how things are going. So we know what kind of interactions, we're doing regular check-ins with our team members that are placed. And if they're not getting feedback and they're not getting that interaction. We'll actually reach out to the client and offer some advice on how to make that engagement go better. Because listen, when you work 100% remote, that can be a little lonely. You want to make sure that you're engaging them and keeping them feeling like an important part of the team. That that gets paid back in spades when you invest that kind of time. You know, we we talk about when when you onboard them. Show, shadow and support. Show them how to do it. Give them your your best text, often MSPs, it's funny, will give the person who's got the most time available to do training. What you really want to do is to give the best person. I've still got a guy in my MSP, the first employee has been there 18 years. He lives our culture. That would be the one that I want training on culture. You got somebody that's your best ticketing person, how they document, how they do this, how they approach things. Have that be the person that shows them on how to do ticketing. The other thing, just as a side note on showing. Is a lot of MSPs will say, well, I I don't think I'm quite ready, I don't have the documentation I need. Great, use this person to help you with the documentation. I'm a former school teacher, the best way to learn is by documenting and showing others how to do things. So, you can actually use this onboarding process to help get that documentation you've always been wanting to get. Then have them shadow somebody, again, go back to being your best people. And then move them into the support role, but have them have have your text listen in on their calls. Make sure that they're doing it right, give them the support that they need. So that's an another important, interesting distinction, I would say, between a staff augmentation and sort of a master MSP outsource situation. Right, because a master MSP where it is just a pool of people that are are are taking those calls. If you don't have good documentation, you have a very expensive call answer service and they're escalating everything. Right. So that's that's an important prerequisite to that type of uh model. And you're right, like this this the having staff augmentation, they're just a staff members and they have sort of a good skill set, that dedicated time and they can kind of start to dig into those sorts of things. And it leads, you know, your suggestion of having them go through the documentation reminds me of of sort of my approach to documentation back in the day. Anytime there was a new person onboarded, I would have them go through the procedures that we had and tell them like, you have fresh eyes, anything that doesn't work or doesn't make any sense, like document it, right? And it's amazing how many things people spot, they're like, it says to do this, but that's not an active share, like none of this exists, I can't go any further. You're like, well, no one's been using this documentation, obviously, if it doesn't work, right? So that's that's a huge unlock to be able to have have that capacity as well. And interesting, you just made me think of something. The other thing when you've got overseas text is remember that there are going to be some cultural differences. You say just, you know, if you don't think it's working or you don't think it's good, just tell me about it. That is not necessarily culturally ingrained in other cultures like it is in the United States. We had a saying in my MSP, if if they haven't heard it seven times, they haven't heard it. That is something you really want to reinforce with your remote text is I want you to come to me, I want you to speak up, if you see a problem, I want to hear about it. And then reward them for reward them and hey, thanks, I'm really glad you brought that to my attention. But it's something to remember, though they're they're very strong, there are some cultural differences. And and that's and and a good partner is going to help you understand those differences as well. Yeah, that's that's an important flag as well. It reminds me of I think this is in a checklist manifesto, the book where they talk about accidents that they had that they had in South Korean Airlines. Because culturally, like if someone is the boss, like you don't sort of like question what they're what they're suggesting. It's almost sort of like this very hierarchical sort of culture that they they have built in there. And they had a lot of problems in sort of breaking that down of like, if the captain was making a call and someone else in the cockpit like needs to be able to question that, but that was not culturally aligned and something they had to kind of compensate for. So that's a a good call out as well. Yeah. Yeah, as I remember that that was the San Francisco flight and the co-captain knew, but he didn't feel like he could say anything because he was too too green at it. Right. Yeah, just crazy. One other one that maybe comes to mind here is something that a lot of people don't really understand, like you say they were going to go out and try to hire remote staff in a different region by themselves. There's actually like some administrative things that that couldn't be can be a bit of an impediment here. And I'm curious sort of how you guys are managing this as a because they are your employees, like you guys are managing sort of taxation and sort of employment differences in different countries. Which is not something people are typically aware of if they're trying to hire remote employees, is that correct? Yeah, so it's the same same issue that people face in the United States. If you hire somebody as a 1099 contractor, tell them when they're going to work, how they're going to work and direct their day, they're an employee. And you're going to get legally nailed for doing that wrong and you're going to have a lot of taxes to pay. Same rules apply overseas, you you are going to have a misalignment. With your legal legal compliance. If you are hiring somebody full-time overseas and directing how they work. So we actually are the employer, we pay them in local money. We follow all the South African laws. We we take care of all of that because, you know, jokingly we kind of say that South African employment laws. Similar between California and France. There are definitely laws that have to be, you have to pay attention to. And you have to know what happens. And and and how to be compliant. The other thing that comes with it. Is it's the same issue in the US that we all face. You put up an ad on indeed, you get 200 people that are applying, you have to go through all those resumes, you narrow it down, you do 10 phone calls, eight of those show up, then you narrow that down, you get it down to three people. You do that final, you do the interviews between two people, you offer it to one. And they use it to leverage a pay increase at their current job. So, that's the nice thing about having a company like ours is we've got a bench of people that are fully vetted, ready to go. It's one of the things we hear pretty consistently after interviews is he may not, he's not the right fit for my culture. But everybody that you bring is really well qualified. So it just it takes that hassle out of trying to find that needle in the haystack. We've we go through thousands of resumes on a very regular basis to get down to a really good bench of people. Yeah, this is such an important aspect that I think is really overlooked by a lot of MSPs. Where, you know, I suggest alternatives for where. Because like hiring is hard right now. Like it was particularly brutal sort of through the pandemic when everyone was just sort of job hopping and things like that. I think Department of Labor stats say like there's a a negative 6% employment rate. Which means like you post a job, like it's hyper, hyper competitive, right? We're not just competing against, you know, the Amazons and and Microsofts of the world either, right? Uh, there there is an incredible amount of competition for good local talent. Uh, but, you know, that said, I think people sort of fake themselves out in sort of how to manage this process. Like I'll I'll often suggest like staff augmentation services like like scaled. Or, you know, using a good recruiter. And finding a good recruiter is hard, let's be realistic, right? There's a lot of them I I I sort of affectionately call them resume dispensers. It's like they're just like spitting out stuff that's totally unqualified. And I think people overlook the amount of effort and time that it takes to actually hire. And when they they look at these alternative services, they're like, well, I don't know. It's, you know, it's it's expensive, I could do this myself. And it's like, really? Like, is it expensive, how much are you paying for your time? And that's not something a soft cost or something that people don't tend to think of. Right, I think that the fact that you guys are are filtering so much of this and just presenting viable options that are are are well vetted and are ready to roll. It's such a time saver and ultimately, it is a money saver for sure. Yep, and it's funny, we were, you know, anytime we get a new client. They're always so amazed at how easy it is to get somebody. It's rare that we don't have them coming back. Most most of our client base now has already had their second, third tech hired. We've got one company, I think, doing their seventh tech right now. They've they've been growing at an amazing clip. And it's just so easy to get people added that way. Yeah, that's amazing. We get really good text because they do get to work remote. So there's some real advantages and and in the US, this is the same true. Is that a lot of people, well, yeah, I'd like it, but I want to be able to work remote. This is becoming the new norm and the companies that can adapt to that well, I think are going to have a real advantage. And like me, in my MSP, I was really afraid of what my clients would think. Once the pandemic hit and we all went home, that really stopped a lot of people's fears about having remote. And the other thing, and and we we also really counsel our clients to do this. Never hide that they're overseas. Have the tech because look, they have an accent. They're going to ask them. Wow, you you don't sound like you're an American. No, no, I'm South Africa. Oh, so they're outsourcing? No, no, I'm fully dedicated to their company. I'm I work exclusively for X, Y and Z, I'm dedicated to you. How can I help you? And it just it it's the other thing is that then that allows them to start building a little bit of a rapport with your clients. Funny story is one of the text one day, we we have chat channels for all of our team members that are placed. And one of the guys one day is like, I I'm question, but do women keep you on the phone? Somebody said, what do you mean? He said, I I on a call and said, hey, I need about five or 10 minutes, do you want me to call you back? No, no, just keep talking to me. They love Americans love these accents. And so it it it is an easy thing to start a conversation and build camaraderie with the clients. And as long, you know, we've had clients come up and say, I can't believe you're outsourcing. We're not, we're they're fully dedicated. Yeah, but you're not hiring American. And the easiest question that I always came back with, hey, Joe, let me ask you a question, do you have every job filled, do you have open right now? No, I'm having a heck of a time finding people. And and when you call us for tech support, are we slow in our response? No, you guys are awesome. There's a reason for that. And it's because we needed to have the right staffing, we couldn't find that in the US right now. You know. For us, if you can find US-based. And they've got the talent and the skills and the work ethic, bring them on. We're filling a gap where where a lot of companies can't find that right now. Yeah, that's fantastic. All right, Michael, we're going to look to wrap up. Any parting words of wisdom around staff augmentation, remote remote staff, work from home, any of that? So I'll give you the best trick. Part of integrating them into your culture is giving a really easy way for them to be able to reach out to you. When COVID hit, Hector, the guy running the company now. The MSP. Created a Netflix channel for watching movies. On Friday during lunch. And then at the at the time he was during that time. He was still the the technology manager. And on a Monday he he just popped in and said, hey, I'm going to be in the Netflix channel if anybody has any questions today. And he just hung out. In the video chat with his camera on, just waiting for people to show up. That is now morphed four years later into this channel where the text are in and out all day long. In between tickets they'll come in. One of the real beauties of this is the junior text will pop in and say, hey, I I have a problem. I'm trying to solve. This is where I'm going. Am I on the right path? Because they know they're not interrupting anybody, so they're not afraid to pop in and ask the question. So what we found, I I was scared to death that this was going to be a time waster. It reinforced the culture, but it also gave it lowered the amount of time that we were actually spending on tickets. Because there was an easy place to go. And if you're going to do remote people, this is one of the best ways to pull them into your culture. And final thing, cameras always on. It is hard being remote, having that camera on. Don't make a phone call, make a video call. Always do that face-to-face video whenever you can. Excellent. That's awesome advice. I appreciate it, Michael, it's been been helpful and I'm glad to see you guys are. Doing the the heavy lifting to make things easier, faster and better for the MSP community. Appreciate you having us on.