ERP116 - Rethinking vCIO: Delivering Real Client Value in MSP Services

Welcome to the pod. Thanks, Todd, for having me. It's awesome to come back time and time again. Is it, like, my 3rd time now maybe? I, I love it. You're this is, 3rd time, and, you're now tied for, I think, recurring guest character. So if we have you back one more time, I guess you're gonna be in lead. But, you also have the the head start in that you were on, actually, episode 5 of the podcast. And when this goes to to to publish, I think it'll be episode 116. So, you know, you're you you've been back and back again. So great to have you. Well, thanks, man. I appreciate the, the honors. And I think I I owe some of that to just being a bit on the early adopter side on just about everything. You know, I I definitely suffer from a bit of the FOMO, a bit of the shiny object syndrome. And so whenever somebody comes out with a new show, I was like, oh, I wanna come on new show. And so lucky am I that people actually invite me to them. So thank you. Yeah. I love hanging with you. Love catching up. If if we were joking on, on your podcast that we haven't seen each other much this year, if at all, I guess. So, this is a a good substitute to to connect with you, more more often virtually anyway. So So true. So true. And I like the the ability to kinda have, a bit of a structured conversation around it. You know? Because sometimes people get together, You just talk about nothing and everything, but nothing mostly. So it's kinda nice when you have a topic to to to do a facilitated discussion, if you will. I appreciate that about these conversations for sure. For sure. So with that, we'll launch straight into it. Luis, are we doing VCIO all wrong? Oh, gosh. What a question, Todd. I I feel like you could look at it from a few different perspectives. Right? And and a lot of it is gonna depend on where in your own journey as an MSP you find yourself in or or what kind of situation you've created for yourself. I was just in Portugal last week with a great bunch of the IT nation evolve group MSPs and, and Joe Burns, one of the MSPs there actually drops a really cool, terminology that that clarified a lot of what the issues that we have are. And he says if you've created a lot of white space for your MSP in your process and what he meant by white space is that if if one of the ways that you sell into the industry and you go to market is that you kind of start with the basics and then you kind of institute a land of an land and expand strategy, meaning we're gonna sell them a small basic easy to consume package, something they understand, and then you go and upsell them on all the other things, you you kind of perpetually end up just trying to fill the white space over time in your account management process, which which we call the BCIO process today, proper probably incorrectly. But if one of the ways that you go to market is kind of standardized on your approach, you kind of include everything, of your productized service in the same package, right from the get go, you perhaps spend more time doing more strategic conversations after the fact because there's not a lot of this effort spent over rotating on trying to fill the white space. It's like, oh, we need more customers to buy more of the solutions that we offer. Sure. And so I think if when you ask the question, are we doing vCIO wrong? I guess it depends on what you want to get from that process. If if you created a lot of white space initially and one of the things you need to do and want to obtain from the process of like quarterly business reviews and whatnot is to actually fill the white space Then maybe that's a good outcome and the thing that you should be doing If one of the things you did was, you know, you sold a complete package and you're having great, maybe strategic discussions, then that's a great outcome as well and and maybe the purpose is a little bit different. I'd say if if you framed it in the context of what is the most valuable thing for the client and the majority of MSPs are just trying to fill white space and trying to, you know, pitch them on projects and things to standardize their stack in every QBR then I would maybe argue that we're doing VCIO all wrong. Is that maybe the function of account management? It's perhaps better suited. But, man, there's lots of places to go from there. Yeah. So I I strongly agree with this. And funny enough, I, like, I just recorded video for a course that goes through kind of exactly this of, the distinction of sort of these different roles. And I I sort of describe it on a spectrum. Right? That account management, like, right down to technical account management exists over here on the left, and then it moves to kind of account management. Then it goes to more broad consulting. And then I think VCIO sits sort of very much further to the right. And if we think about it, like, the original basis of the VCIO role was it was actually a billable product. Like, this was a package that you sold to people because it had so much inherent value that it was billable outside of the MSA that they were already subscribing to. And some MSPs had a lot of success in just selling VCIO services to customers that didn't have an MSA at all. And I think that's sort of the distinction that we're missing. I think you're a 100% right. It depends on where you stand because if, I like that description of filling the white space being a reference point for this because the distinction between these two is where they're applicable is if you're just doing account management in order to sell a more feature rich MSA. That makes sense. Whereas other organizations have sold a prescriptive full stack package, and that is not a requirement. So, therefore, they can spend more time on that right end of the spectrum and doing more consulting. So I think that's a a great way to frame sort of the problem and maybe gets to this point. Like, VCIO in the industry is one of the most derided terms that you can throw around. And maybe this is exactly why, because it doesn't really mean what it used to. But, like, why do you think people hate the term VCIO so much? I don't know. I think it's just, you know, Alex Farling actually made this comment about the term is that what it is today is probably a misrepresentation of what it should be. And I think maybe that's the frustration with the term. It's that right now, it's really just lipstick on account management is the term that he that he uses, and and I believe that to be true. I think a lot of people are are misusing the term VCIO when when the rotation that they have around that function or role is really just technical account management focused on the MSP selling more of their stack into the customer and not so much about creating value for the customer. And this was kind of borne out a few months ago. I had, Chris Jensen on on MSP Confidential, and I feel like that episode single handedly created a pivot for me in in the narrative of all my conversations going forward because I I kinda pose the same idea or topic to him. It's like, have we been doing this all wrong? And he's an enterprise CIO that often works with MSPs. And I've been using this, like, one minute sound clip of him describing, an experience that he had where he was working with one of his clients and they were swap changing MSPs and the new MSP came in and kind of went in and was like, wow, you know, they they presented to us, and also the client calls Chris back after a meeting with a new MSP and they're like, so what what was that? You know, these guys they came in and they they said these are the things we're gonna put in and this is the timeline we're gonna put them in and, and basically you're gonna like it. And the client goes, like, why they were not focused on my business at all. They know nothing about my business, yet they came in and said these are the things we're gonna do and when we're gonna do them and you're gonna like it. Like, I don't understand how that works. And so, Chris's comment in that moment is, like, it just doesn't sit well in the long term. And I thought it was so interesting that that the the whole VCIO process kinda has has the the eroded to basically be this purposely to trying to fill the white space process, and it's so difficult I think to do a proper customer centric motion when that's really the focus. When when you've given your account managers a quota of, like, filling white space, how are they supposed to go create value for the client in inside of that context? Right? I think that's the the most pressing question we need to ask ourselves. I think that I would push back that it's also really difficult in that context too because the the pre seed requirement of that is filling the white space. No? Right? Because, like, if they don't consume the full stack, they're not on sort of, say, your Wi Fi that you use, and therefore, they're not in sort of your unified vision, your unified dashboard for that. They're using WatchGuard firewalls when you guys are standardized on Ciscos or something else. Right? Like, if if they're not consuming your your full stack, that is something that should be fixed. Maybe you don't go in there wholesale and change it. And then, like I said, this is easier for people that sold a full stack to begin with. What kind of looks like that conversation of, like, wait a minute. Is this for me or for you kind of kind of thing? So, like, it's a requirement. We need to get this done, but we shouldn't represent it as VCIO. I think that's the distinction. But wouldn't wouldn't you agree that those, precede parts of filling that white space still needs to happen? Yes. And I think the challenge that we or or maybe the problem we create for ourselves as part of, like, needing to do that. And by no stretch am I saying like we shouldn't be doing account management. I think it's an integral part of like how MSPs continue to find and grow project delivery, you know, a lot of the project stuff comes out of the QBR cadence. I think just think there's an opportunity to evolve the way that we do them to some extent And maybe the challenge is that because we are so focused on the wide space we've actually lowered the barrier of strategic discussion altogether and we're not having any of the other required conversations around strategy that are so critical. And this is kind of, represented by the the questions that people ask me when I'm out in the market a little bit at the events and the conferences. Like, yeah, but how do you how do you make your QBRs more strategic is kind of the question. And I think the challenge is just that, is that if you're needing to fill the white space, you're gonna inherently lower the strategic value of the QBR process because it's really difficult to deliver that at scale with somebody who's is doing a lot of these and just needs to fill the white space. And so one of the interesting, maybe counterintuitive things that I talked to MSPs about is is actually creating a separate cadence for the strategic level conversations that is not focused on the account. Like, if you try to now suddenly build in the strategic portion into your regular QBRs, well, what's the problem with that? It's like, first of all, you've already been relegated most of the time to, like, a non executive point of contact on your regular quarterly business review meetings. So you're not gonna get the kind of traction that you need strategically from that person. So all they're doing is kind of just passing along the broken telephone message to somebody else. There's no you're not hearing as an MSP any of the conversations around the business goals or the business outcomes or the business challenges for that matter, like, if they're not necessarily good at articulating goals or strategy because they're a small business themselves, this is an inherent challenge we have too. Then at least, you're not even hearing the actual problems or challenges they're having either. And so, instituting a separate cadence, getting yourself invited into the customer's own strategic meetings or or annual board meetings or annual, like, cadence of some kind is is really interesting. And so doing it separately from the function of account management that you need to keep going for the purpose of filling the white space, I think needs to be done separately. So I I there's opportunities to to do more strategic engagement. I just think we'd be hard pressed to try and and and shoehorn it into the exec existing QBR process if it's strictly white space, process driven. I really like this. I think this is this is a very apt and smart approach of actually separating the technical account management from sort of the business consulting aspect of this. And I think it it's helpful in 2 ways, kinda what we're already talking about of, like, the technical stuff needs to happen over here, but don't represent it as sort of inherent business value and and sort of overselling what those what those meetings and engagements typically look like. That happens over here, and then we can have more business conversations at a lower cadence because that is sort of more priority or, how you have more influence or the time sensitivity of those things tend to make sense. I think the other part that this is helpful with, and and you'll remember this, since, you ran an MSP for years years, that there are certain conversations, certain, executives that just like to meet with other executives. Right? So you would have a president or a c I a CEO of an organization, and they wouldn't really show up to a meeting. But every once in a while, like, we would send a CEO or someone who, like, who is higher up in the food chain and has a different, role title. And then all of a sudden, they felt like that was a meeting that they could attend. So I think in a way, we're kind of separating the work, but also providing potentially people a contact point that is more representative of them. Because you could you you should as even if you're a small MSP, hopefully, like, you don't wanna be doing all the QBRs. I mean, if you're small, like, you know, 5 or, 6 staff, then sure you're probably doing all the QBRs. But as you get bigger, delegating the technical account management just to a lead or a technical person on your team so that they can coordinate with a controller, a CFO, or even an office manager on the client side so that you can still maintain, say, biannually, or an annual conversation with the CEO. I think that's a division of labor and also sort of categorizes the work that you're doing those meetings much much better. I really like that approach. And I'll make a couple of other points. One of them being we as MSPs we do work with a lot of smaller customers and and I kind of mentioned the inherent challenge that we have already in that if they're like sub 15 people perhaps they're not running any kind of strategic cadence themselves at all or having any kind of discussion around specific business outcomes and goals and so one of the interesting things that we think is part of standardization is part of the ability to scale any kind of process inside the MSP is like, oh, well, you know, that's a lesser maturity client and we're gonna do fewer meetings with them and maybe they just need one annual review of, like, all their technology, period. And it's counterintuitive to think about it this way, but you're actually eroding trust with a customer that you meet less often with and I think this is so true. And so one of the interesting, things to try and consider redoing or doing differently is to meet more regularly at a lighter touch with some of your smaller customers because the maybe the monthly call for 15 minutes 20 minutes actually helps create create trust and you're plugged into sort of some of the, just in time issues as they happen. You know, I used to make fun of the fact that your cybersecurity doesn't wait for anybody. If you're waiting for a year to talk to a customer about any given initiative or challenge, like, you're already so behind the 8 ball that is just it's just almost comical, to think that you could wait a year before you can talk to any one customer about anything. And so but it's counterintuitive. Right? Because we equate the cadence or the regularity of meetings with the maturity or or money, spent by the client on our services. And so that's one aspect, that I think is important to change. Yeah. Because I I used to I I don't know if I still run counter to the industry in this, but originally, I did. But, there was a lot of people, thought leaders in the industry that would say, if you're not doing QBRs on a on a quarterly basis, you're failing. Right? And and I never really believed that to be true because of exactly this. Like, most of us are dealing with, much smaller businesses that, like, won't even give us sort of the the time to spend, you know, an hour or 2 in in these in a QBR. So we've moved to sort of technology business reviews and all the myriad of other names that we started to name this process. And I think that that piece of that process is really important to recognize, like, it doesn't necessarily have to happen quarterly. And in a lot of cases for those smile small clients, that is a total impracticality and potentially dangerous to your profitability. If you're gonna spend all this time developing a QBR for someone that pays you $1500 a month, like that, you can kiss your profit goodbye for most of those months that you're doing this. It just kinda makes no sense. So I like this approach. This is something I've suggested in the past as well. It's just simply reach out to people as a person. Right? Like, you have no intent in talking to them. You just call them up and say, like, how are things? How's it going? How's business? Right? More as a peer and as a as sort of a friendly person. Because a lot of the clients, they tend to sort of put their armor on whenever you show up because they feel like you're just coming with a bunch of stuff to sell them. And that's a pretty understandable position for them because it's typically what's trying to happen as we're trying to fill this white space. So if you have these other touch points of just ringing them up, having a 10 minute conversation to catch up and moving on without expectation, I think that goes a long way to building a more trusting relationship. And here's another idea Todd, which I think is is an interesting sort of pattern interrupt, which is I heard Simon Sinek on an interview with Trevor Noah. Yeah, he was on Trevor's podcast And they were talking about trust, and I I think it was interesting how he kind of flips the script a little bit about around how trust is built. And he was saying Simon Sinnick was commenting, you know, trust is actually not built by helping other people. Trust is is is more quickly built by allowing people to help you and I thought there was an interesting, pattern interrupt and, and I saw this play out when one of the MSPs that I know out in the market, they're about a $20,000,000 MSP, They they started a client advisory board with some of their customers and so this is squarely that opportunity for clients to help you, give you the guidance, give you sort of the insight into what are the the things and challenges or or communication styles or data that they want to see from the MSP. And and so imagine, you know, a year, 2 years down the road, these clients are now invested in that MSP succeeding. And does you know, if you had to guess whether that increased the level of trust and loyalty to the MSP or decrease the level of trust or loyalty to the MSP, what would you say? Of course, it increases it. Right? So I I thought that was an interesting way to to flip the script a little bit around trust is that we see it as us being the heroes coming in and help them and solve all their problems, but we kind of have to shut up for a minute and let the client figure out how to help us along the way as well. And this is proven a bit because every time I go into these boardrooms with MSPs to talk about this, I asked them, you know, is there a situation where you have a client that is wildly more mature than you are? You know, if we had to use Paul Dippel's operational maturity level scale, you know, are you below the maturity of your clients at any given point or too high above at any given point? And they're like, no, you know, it doesn't work, in either direction. You kind of end up kind of in parallel moving a bit of the maturity up or down together because, that's kind of where the relationship naturally and organically kind of finds its place of support is that you're kind of continuously improving together around some of these issues. The clients way too mature for you, they're gonna drop you and vice versa. And so I thought that was interesting is that if they help you in this process of continually improving our operational maturity, you might actually have an interesting, creator of trust and loyalty in the process as well. Yeah. And as, the sort of the adage goes is, if someone has a hand in creating something, they're less likely to pooh pooh it. Right? So if you you're getting input from your clients on what this process looks like and they're providing active input, they feel a level of engagement in that, and they're more likely to participate and see value in it. So I I think that makes a ton of sense. I like the idea of of sort of, couching it in a way that they feel like they're helping you. That's that's a a really cool way to look at it. I totally agree. It reminds me of this this great video I saw this week of somebody says, you know, I feel like I'm having a moment of deja poo. And the person goes, do you mean deja vu? It's like, no, deja poo. I've heard this shit before. I like it. So with that Are you are you 18 plus on your podcast side? I don't wanna give it to you. We can say whatever we want. It's it's all adults listening unless they have kids in the car. So, with that, should we call VCIO something different given the fact that what we're doing typically isn't VCIO? Like I said, this started as something that was a consulting exercise that was that was often more expensive than the MSP services we're providing, and then it's just sort of devolved into this account management. Is it just simply that we should call this account management, or should we look at this in some other way? That's an interesting question, man. I I feel like, you know, VC like, if you think of what a CIO does in the enterprise, their role is one of risk management squarely, and I think the the the outcome of the role is different than the title of the role has sometimes, maybe if if if the role if the name VCIO has kind of devolved to be something or mean something else entirely, then I think we either need to redefine it or just pause and say, okay, we we all have to agree that the role of a CIO is to to manage and mitigate and decrease risk for the business that they're working with, then I I feel like the the VCIO should be doing that as well. And so the the problem is that we've used that term now interchangeably with account management, and and it's creating a bit of a rub, certainly in terms of, like, what the value that it can deliver to a business actually is. So I I don't know if I changed it, if we were using it correctly, if we were doing the the things the CIO actually does, but, yeah, it's starting to grind, the wrong way for sure. Well, and I think that's sort of the inherent problem with this is, like, the water has already gotten muddy with the term, so you can't really sort of pull it back either. And I don't know that people would love the idea of just sort of saying we're going to account management, and that's what we're doing over here because it just you know, it doesn't feel maybe as strategic in some way. So, you know, maybe what comes to mind we'll have to, like, we'll put this out there. Like, everyone should start arguing about this in in Reddit and, in Slack groups and throw it in the comments. Like, what should we call this process to to sort of get away from, this icky term that we don't like called VCIO, and and that to call it something that more represents what we're doing here. One that comes to mind for me would be just maybe borrowing from the SaaS world from from you guys is the client success tends to be the term that this is utilized. And maybe that is a sophisticated enough term, but I also feel it's more representative of what we're trying to do here. Like, I'm trying to really help you with your technology in order to make that spend successful. How does that resonate with you? How about client success in the MSP side? Yeah. 100%. I think, I've seen many MSPs actually they're they're what would be their VCIO team they call it the client success team and they each of those folks are called the client success managers or they have a focus and role squarely trying to drive outcomes business outcomes with the customers around technology enablement and and all the things that are you know what we envisioned this role to be and and I think you're right because you know client success or customer sex success is a little bit more comprehensive and holistic I think an approach than what we tend to think about you know when we put the the veil of risk management, on the conversation solely, you know, it's kind of like you send in your security people to have a conversation around compliance, and they're kind of squarely just trying to put in, security point solutions into the conversation, or the account manager, as we talked about before, is kind of squarely trying to fill in white space, which is primarily focused around the standardization of the of the tech stack alignment and and this is mostly just good for the MSP even though you could derive some customer facing value out of some of those conversations, I think you're you'd be hard pressed to to squarely connect one thing to the other because we're just not even having the conversations around business enablement and and business issues and discussions. And so and then the other challenge is, you know, the industry has kind of squarely beat us over the head over the last 20 years to say you got to scale all your processes in order to do that you got to deliver 80% of as much of you can with the least expensive people. And so on top of like just being a white space focused role we've now, you know, started delivering that with very entry level folks that can't necessarily hold a c level conversation or the attention of an executive leader in a meeting because, you know, they're just being pitched by the person on what next projects need to be done to check off some boxes in your heat matrix. And so, you know, there's all these issues around it, but client success, customer success, I think that's it's a it's a mindset shift for sure. Yep. I I think that's an interesting point as well that you bring up that, we're expecting, you know, a tier 2 or, you know, someone who's just graduated into tier 2 to have executive conversations. Because a lot of what VCIO should be doing is more business consulting. And if you don't have a business background and have kinda worked with a p and l and understand risk, and and process improvement and spend time in understanding that, Like, a VCIO functionally, I think, should look more like a business analyst role. So I think it's safer to sort of, again, I think it comes back to this this suggestion that you made of breaking the cadence between the more strategic meetings and and functional meetings. So that tier 2 or that that sort of low end tier 3 that's having more of those standardization and technical discussions is meeting with someone who's more appropriate at that sort of business level, and maybe you occasionally need to get some approval from someone higher up for some budgetary spend. But as far as the sort of the cadence and and the inputs of those meetings, being more aligned with the skill set of the person that should be having them in the first place. Again, I think all all of these sort of ideas of breaking this up and reenvisioning what this process should look like are actually beneficial to both parties. There's I I think there's a a layer of, I I hate that I'm gonna drop this term, but if if you are, quote, unquote, an accidental business owner and or you're primarily technical, or you're a solutions architect that is kind of squarely thinking about, you know, these project deliverables and that kind of thing, I think there's still the opportunity to ask a very different type of question that maybe elicits a bit of the thinking on the customer side about, the processes, the the multi departmental communication that we've failed at organizing or facilitating. That's another big one, by the way, quick tangent on that. I think overall many of our customers have grown into their size over time along with us and if you've been an MSP for 10 15 years, you know, there are some customers that started as 10 person shops that are maybe 50, 60, 70 people today and and nowhere along the process did you stop to reevaluate should we be talking to some of the other department heads? How are they talking amongst themselves between the teams and trying to uncover some of the interesting, you know, cross departmental challenges that that we just kind of are going with the flow because it's just grown organically from the beginning. So so back to the the conversation around how a technical person can get a little more strategic, I think it's just a matter of asking a slightly different type of question, And one of the favorite ones that I've been talking about with everybody from Marissa Maldonado of Produt Technology to Alex Farling to vendors that that anybody who will listen, I'll I'll ask them this question and a lot of them will say, just ask the question, you know, how does your business make money? How does money flow from one department in your business to another? And I love that question because it just creates the opportunity to understand the first principles as I call it of that business the the individual moving parts, the small pieces that you may have not known to ask about otherwise, and this is where innovation happens. This is was like, oh, that sounds like a broken process right there between, you know, getting the the order from the sales team over to the production team. You're just, like, somebody's just printing this out and putting it in a folder. Let's talk about that, right? And so, that that is the question asking process could be an easy target to to go and change about a bit of the the outcome of some of these conversations. I love that because it it definitely aligns with I what I see as sort of the future of our I would say our industry in general, but also very much aligned to sort of this the the role and the the problem that we're talking about today, is I think more business consulting will be a requirement of this industry going forward because we've gotten to the space where a lot of the technical stuff is being commoditized. I think standardization is easier. I've always been an advocate of a more prescriptive approach to the techno technology stack and telling people, like, this is what's good for you or this is what we're gonna implement because this is what we support. I I think that's a more mature approach to this. So if not spending time on these standardization discussions, which if you haven't got there, it's an important part to spend on. But once you've aligned that stack once with this client, where are you looking for business value? And that's I think that the way that you position that question gets to where we should be viewing this is, how do I how do we make money? How do we save money? Those are the 2 things that you should be digging into. And I love the idea of this process optimization because there are so many examples of that in any customer that you actually sort of quiz and and evaluate how they're doing things. They're emailing each other forms all the time. Like, maybe they should be looking at, some Power Automate process or or at least utilizing some SharePoint forms or something like that. Right? Like, there's so many micro improvements that can be made in the average SMB business that we know about, but we just never get to that level of conversation to be able to impact that change. And I think where this extrapolates to is much more around, you know, do they have a CRM? Are they implementing an ERP? Like, these are the type of more strategic discussions that are still technically aligned that we haven't there are certain organizations that are starting to dip into this territory, but I think this is much more the future of what our industry looks like. How does that land with you? Totally, man. I mean, if you think of, like, what we wanna do, if if creating value for our clients is the objective and and most people would agree with that statement is like, yeah, you know, we're here to to deliver an incredible service, enable technology for them to to deliver true business outcomes and ultimately create value and you see this kind of like there's been a challenge understanding from a client's perspective of them understanding what value you're creating or delivering because we get this question all the time it's like how do I show more of the value that we're creating to our clients? And the simple answer is well, you got to create more value, first of all It sounds like a silly answer to give, but the reality is that, you know, just doing a white space QBR does not necessarily create value for the client even though you might think it does And so I think that's an important part of the conversation is, you know, coming to terms with whether you're actually helping create value ultimately or not and whether the client perceives it and we don't often ask the question from a feedback perspective is like, you know, what are the outcomes you expect from these meetings? We kind of just bring them in, we talk at them for the 30 minutes or 45 minutes, if if one of the things we're doing is trying to chase down the users that haven't completed their security awareness training, then 40 of the 45 minutes are spent on that. You know, it's a difficult thing to manage too for sure because, we just kind of, let the process settle into this very technical conversation. But overall, like, the the idea of creating value, I think, just has to come from the conversation of the customer, you know, being able to express a little bit of what are the challenges that they're having and and you trying to manage IT to that and creating opportunities to solve some of those challenges, and I think, ultimately, that's that's what creates and drives value. I'll tell you, one of the things that came up in many of my conversations last week is that as MSPs, we're actually particularly terrible all of stare telling the story around the data, and I'll give you an example. You know, most of us, maybe have a process where, technical account manager goes in and says, hey, we really would like you to implement this solution or this other solution, and they say yes, and then you send in the the project team to go deliver that thing and then they're done and then they move on to the next thing. And does the account manager or the VCIO ever go back and talk about the results of that project, of that initiative? Like, almost never. It's so interesting that we never go back and say, hey, after we implemented MFA or conditional access, we saw the number of failed logins decrease by 94% or whatever the story is. There's a a million of those little stories that a) validate the client's choice to send to spend money on a project or or initiative and b) it just helps you very very, easily, show the value that you're trying to to deliver through some of these projects and so that's an area that I would say it's it's probably an easy hit for a lot of MSPs to do is just actually look at the data of the thing that you deliver, the initiative you drove, and talk about it, it's already there. Yeah. Versus, you know, the the just, you know, spending 30 minutes to go through the laundry list of all of the KPIs that you wanna report to them that really don't have a narrative around them. So this is I love this idea, Luis, of, like, what do you actually want to tell them? What's the story you're trying to convey to that customer? Pick 2 or 3 KPIs that represent some story and tell that story and support it with some evidence. Like, you don't need to print out an 80 page report and be like, hey. Look at all this value. And I think this is part of the thing that we get wrong, especially about this process. And it goes to, I would think, a more systemic issue in the industry is that we tend to be technical people. And one of, one of my favorite expressions is is, peep is tools don't solve people problems. And account management and VCIO is inherently a people process because you're trying to derive and provide value to a person in that organization for their business. Right? So it is it is very much a a people centric approach to this if you do it correctly. And I think where we kinda get this wrong is I see a lot of organizations that confuse the tool with the process. Right? Like Scalepad, you guys have great tools that will help to support this process in doing life cycle management and things like that. But, like, to spend an hour with an executive to tell them, like, here are all the workstations that you're gonna replace, that's not value to their business. It's just sort of a necessary thing. And I think that, like, if you just stick with the the the the components of the tools and think that that's the process, that's potentially a problem. The tools should really make that process easier for you. They're a component of it. So not confusing the tool with the process, I think, is a really important aspect of this. Not that the tools aren't helpful. They absolutely are. But they're a supportive component, not the the process itself. Right? A 100%. And there's one other area that I feel like we make the mistake of quite regularly and it depersonalizes a bit of the ability to tell a story Last week we had Ben Hanlon, who I would best describe as a magician who figured out how to use magic as a vehicle to talk about engagement, with people in whether it's 1 on 1 conversations or presenting or so on. And one of the things that he dropped as advice that I thought was so salient to me of his entire presentation this is the thing that I that he made us circle the one thing that that stuck out, and this is the one thing I circled, is don't talk about a 1000 people. Talk about 1 person. And we tend to depersonalize a bit of the story that we do tell if we tell it at all by talking about, oh, all our customers do this or all our other customers do this. The customer that you're talking with in that moment cannot attach to a story when it's like everybody, But they can talk they can specifically find, you know, a parallel to 1 individual or one company that you're giving an example about even if it's sort of anonymous, much better than if they're talk if you're talking about a 1,000 customers, potentially in a thousand you know, most of us don't have a 1000 customers, but you get what I mean. Yeah. That's, I think it's a Stalin quote, actually. One death is a tragedy. A 1000 deaths is is a statistic. Right? It goes to that point of, like, we just can't sort of comprehend that. We don't wrap that around our brain. But I think, your your point is well excellent thing, like a tangible thing that you can weave into your your your account management, or if it is a VCIO process, your VCIO process. The of looking for specific examples and bringing value from other organizations in your portfolio. Like, if you're dealing with a construction firm, you probably have another construction firm that you can say, hey. I saw so and so, you know, x y z company doesn't necessarily be need to be named, but another construction company in the industry doing this or they utilize this process or this tool. Like, that's the type of value that you can bring to them that actually sort of has a a business value component to it. Right? And just looking for specific reference points, spend 10 minutes before that meeting coming up with an idea of some value that you can relay to them based on the experience that you have in having, been in these situations of viewing dozens of other companies. Yeah. I love that. Okay. So we've, we've solved the world of VCIO and and account management. I think, we're we're still looking for the broader term client client success, customer success. I think that that maybe resonates. So as I said, you know, fight us in in the forums. Luis and I will be there to take all of your input. But I think at the the the root level of this, I think the the really important component, I think, big takeaway from this conversation is just naturally segregate the technical account management from the business consulting and the the the true sort of strategic value. I think that's a huge takeaway that is actually really practical, and potentially allows you to do a little less work. Right? Maybe you're not doing a quarterly session and just doing a a strategic session annually. Let someone else do the technical account management with someone else lower on the total poll on the on the client side. I think that's a huge value that, people should consider. Anything else we have With with the cautionary tale of of not letting that be the only time you talk to that customer is once yearly, if you do have to sort of break this out into a yearly cadence for a strategic conversation, You definitely have to be having those light touches every every month or every couple months or or whatever cadence makes sense, but just not once a year because I think the the trust and the opportunity for loyalty is lost over the the 1 year meeting. I think that actually creates downward pressure commoditization wise is because they have no relationship to stand on and so if at that point all the customer can look at is, you know, what they're paying, for what they're getting, This is exactly the point of comparison with anybody that's down the street charging a little bit less for the same service. Yep. People buy from people. Right? So be a person, show up, and and represent yourself that way. And and like you said, it's not that hard. Just call the person once a month, be curious, be interested, drop by their office, bring some swag or some donuts every once in a while, and just be visible in that capacity. It brings a ton of value, and it's really not that hard. Right? The the the value that you'll derive from spending a little bit of time on that, I think, is is absolutely massive. But for me, being a very process oriented person to this, like, for example, I'll take this home a little bit because, you know, I I for, I don't know, weeks, maybe more than a month, probably more than a month, I was supposed to hang this this hanger in in the garage. And this this morning, my my wife reminded me about it, and she said, well, I'll do this thing when you do that. And then, of course, I I pushed, Siri on my watch and told her to remind me this afternoon to go and do this thing. And and she sort of chuckled, like, thinking I was doing it just to make her do the other thing. I was like, no. Like, I've thought about this a number of times and just forgotten. Right? So I need these systems and these processes. And I'm sure many people are like this, not everybody, but, like, build tools and systems around this process. Like, utilize a CRM, you know, your PSA, if that's all you have. Great. But actually build recurring tickets or recurring activities for yourself to just call your clients and build a system around that. So you're not like, oh, hang on. When was the last time I talked to that person? And you shouldn't find yourself in that situation. So if you need a tool or a system to follow, then absolutely do that. Anything else, that we haven't touched on, Luis, that that you'd love to to get in here? I don't know, man. Now all that I can think of after this entire conversation is that I want some donuts, if I'm honest. And so thanks for dropping that in there because you made me squarely, like, change my entire prioritization list. Going to find some donuts now. Have some salad first, then you can reward yourself with a donut. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Siri. Remind me to have some salad before I eat donuts. Awesome. I need a I need a systems, system and a process for this. Yep. Always great to have you, Luis. Really appreciate it. There it goes. To you. Siri responded to me. I appreciate, that opportunity, Todd. Now I'm gonna have a little giggle by myself, at 4 PM. Siri comes back and says, reminder to have a salad. Great. Good to have you, man. Have an awesome week and, and great holidays through the season, and hopefully see you a little more of you next year as well. Yes, sir. Thank you, Todd. Always a pleasure, and, good to see everybody. Ciao. Take care.