ERP118 - Rethinking vCIO: Understanding The Client Experience

And the dirty secret is, the MSPs that are crushing it right now are these niche MSPs, like Winery Connect that just does vineyards. And they're offering a quarter of your service charging double to triple your rates. And they have extremely loyal people because they're giving a great experience. They're helping these vineyards and these wineries solve problems and be better at what they're doing. Welcome to Evolved Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. I'm your host Todd Kane. Are you an MSP struggling to build a truly profitable account management or virtual CIO program? You're not alone. Every day I see managed service providers facing the same challenges. Account managers who aren't sure how to deliver real strategic value. VCOs who struggle to justify their role to clients. QBR meetings that feel much more like tech support reviews than strategic planning sessions. And the constant battle to scale these services across different client sizes. After working with hundreds of MSPs, I've developed a comprehensive program that helps to solve these exact challenges. So if you're interested, check out the program in my training library at training.evolvedmgmt.com. That's training.evolvedmgmt.com. For more info about my account management and VIO program. Welcome back to the Evolved Radio podcast. We're continuing our rethinking VIO series with Adam Walter from Humanize IT. Adam helps give a fresh perspective because Adam has years of experience as a director of security and as a VIO in the corporate world. He has a great insight on what it's like sitting across the table from a typical MSP. In this episode, Adam shares a compelling story from his career highlighting the crucial role of curiosity in client interactions. So whether you're an MSP owner, a VIO or someone looking to enhance client relationships, this episode is packed with valuable insights and practical advice to help you rethink your VIO strategy. Adam, welcome to Evolved Radio. Thanks for having me on. Excellent, so uh we're going to get started with a story here that I think perfectly encapsulates a lot of what we've been talking about. started with my conversation with Luis of we're doing VIO all wrong. And Alex picked up the gauntlet to fight us in the comments on on some of the things we talked about there. And uh you have a great story that really encapsulates all of the things that we've been talking about. And really takes the the vision from the other side of the table in these conversations. So uh do you want to tell us about the the amazing situation and uh experience that you had with some MSPs setting up a project? Yeah, so when I first started in this field, uh a lot of people who've who if you listen to my podcast enough, you've you've probably heard this this story about a million times. But the uh the the story is that when I first started, I came out of the corporate world as this uh you know, director of security, have a lot of years of management under my belt and I'm going to help small businesses. Like specifically, private schools figure out how to get to Chromebook programs. And so I'm looking at what they're doing and these private schools are all on break fixes. And I'm like, okay, we need to bid you out and get some good services. Let's see what we can get, so I build up a little program, I build up a little RFP. And then the superintendent and the principal is like, sitting on these meetings with us, we don't know what to talk about. Cool. So I'm sitting in these meetings and we're talking about this school. And they had their standard questions, they come in with their three-ring binder with a stack of paper and they say, hey, we support Azure, here's what Azure is, here's what Azure does for you, big long explanation like four pages long. Here's our Lenovo laptops, we really support these, we do them every four years. All this great information and the people sitting with me, the superintendent and the principal are bored to tears. And I can see it in them, I'm bored and I'm a technical person. And so they're all coming in, bid after bid, you know, 8,000 MRR, 10,000 MRR. And not one of them asked what we were doing as a school. Where we were going, what our hopes and dreams were. And so every single one of them missed out on a $4 million build out of a new school that they were doing in the south. So they didn't get to have any of the wiring projects, they didn't get any of the wireless deployment, any of that stuff. All that went as a separate bid as part of the grant that they were applying for to pay for this. Or the the loan and the fundraising project they were doing. A whole bunch of things going on that were recorded as a separate ordeal. Had any of them been just a little curious. They could have won a massive project that would have helped out their MSP in insane ways. But they didn't because they weren't curious. They came in knowing everything. Like would it have been literally as simple as like, do you have any things that you guys are planning in the next year, would that have been enough of a lead in for you to tip them off? I I didn't know that they cared. Right, I as the as the CIO, the VIO or fractional CIO, you want to call me at the time. My job was to find a way to support this school and help them get to Google Classroom. To help them have less uh internet downtime. And then our our phase two project was going to be, we need to find somebody who's able to help them during this build out. So I had two phases of projects. If you had asked, I would say, oh yeah, we're going to do a phase two in the fall. And some people are going to be like, well, you as the CIO should have been more forthright about that. Like that's true, but that would have derailed my conversation. It was out of scope. If you wanted to discover what else we're doing in three years, I will happily talk to you about that. And I may not know, but the superintendent, the principal over here know. They know in three years, they're planning on doing X. They they had to get that to a uh a budget committee, which then reported to the donor board and so they have these things built out, you're just not asking. And they don't know they should talk to you about this stuff because they don't know that you're capable of helping them during a construction project to make things easier. They're not thinking, I need to put cat five in the walls. The architect's going to think about that and they're going to go to their favorite vendor. So positioning it correctly for them to sort of future proof themselves into the phase two, right? It's amazing what you can find when you're curious. So when I was working in corporate world, I worked for uh an electrical utility. And you won't find very many companies out there more old school than electrical companies. We have assets with asset tags that are 100 years old. Right, like light poles, um fixtures, things around your city. We have to track all those assets. You think you have a hard time with asset management, go talk to an electrical utility sometime. And what we discovered there is like, the IT department was disconnected from what the utility was doing. We we sent a level one tech along on a ride along with the people who fix your power lines, right, that's a ride along, so he got to know how the company was working. At the end of one ride along, he found out that they couldn't do time sheets because they couldn't get internet in their vehicles. So they were doing all their time sheets by hand, the superintendent would take or the supervisor of the group would take them back into the building at the end of the shift and spend an hour entering everybody's time sheets in by hand. We had an electronic time sheet system, people. Now, all you MSPs out there with technical ability are thinking, why don't they use a wireless hotspot? Because they didn't know. And the technician thought it was too expensive. But they brought it to me as a problem that was happening. Like, wait a minute, I can save eight hours of time a day by buying a $100 device. times 60 cruise, I'm doing the math, that was a no-brainer for the CFO. So that one actually gets into another sin that I see happening in a lot of IT organizations is. either text or sometimes an account manager will will sort of assume budgetary ideas or or requirements. Uh like you hear this all the time like, oh, they wouldn't pay for that. It's like, well, do you know that, have you asked them, you've kind of have, you should have at least have this discussion. And let them determine whether or not they're going to pay for that. I'm sure you've seen that as well where like the people make assumptions about budget and spend and they don't even present something to the client to let them decide, right? Skip's got a great uh story about the oil and gas industry where they had this um monitoring, like see if I can get this right, so skip, you can comment on this. system on uh yeah, Skip's my partner for Humanize IT and uh he can comment below and tell me if I'm wrong here, but. They had a monitoring system out in the field monitoring these oil wells and it would go down and if it went down, they had to send a tech out to verify what was going on and make sure everything was running correctly. It's like a like a two-hour drive or an hour drive, it's Texas. And the way to fix that, they're like, we keep going down, how do we keep this from going down? I'm like, well, I mean, if you wanted to, you could do a satellite connection, but that's going to be insanely expensive. Like, how expensive? Like $1,000 a month. And they're like, every time that monitoring goes down, it's a $1,000 a minute. So what you would normally think would be out of budget was a no-brainer, they did not know the solution existed, they could do a satellite link up for the internet connection. And they could have 100% up time and they wouldn't have to send this really expensive tech out there and be risk being down for this amount of time. Ask the question. Be curious. Yeah, it's really interesting so I have I have some background in oil and gas as well, the systems are the monitoring platforms that they use for for managing all of this stuff. And it is wild to the the length that they protect these systems, like they are on completely separated networks with different administrators that work on that side of the business. Because like if anything goes bump, they're potentially losing, you know, thousands or even in the range of tens of thousands of dollars a minute, it is wild. Yeah, it's so crazy. I see another skater guy here, you know. I I never had to work on skater systems, I just had to write all the policies for them. I was not allowed to touch the skater environments. So you were on, you know, more of the corporate side, that that CIO consulting side. Uh what brought you more towards that that uh smaller mid market, now you're you run a a VIO platform company, how did that come about then? Well, it's kind of like a lot of us, we we burned out of the corporate environment. I mean, the money is great, guys, in the corporate environment. I'm not going to if you want the velvet line rut, right? You're you're going to float up, you're going to do great. But the paperwork and the politics will crush your will. And anybody who's been in corporate long enough knows exactly what I'm talking about. I was a director level, right? I had $100,000 discretionary budget, that's just what I could spend without asking questions. That is like per item. Right, I I was sitting there and I was in a good place. But I really missed working with small businesses. And so my wife said, you should start your own company. I said, well, okay. So I talked to a few of these schools that I saw that were hurting and said, hey, what if I came in and came in fractionally and helped you guys get to Chromebook programs for your elementary schools and they're like, yes, please. And so I started doing that and that's when I noticed the problem in the industry. Of these MSPs went from what I knew back in the 2000s as business consultants, we were trying to help people get their inventories online, uh figure out how to do better. budgeting and forecasting, who's Lotus 123 people. We used to do that kind of stuff, we used to solve problems. Today we're just kind of best buys. I'm resell, resell, resell. And that's where like we when we initially launched, we had this great um marketing program where we said, hey, we'll turn anybody into a VIO under an hour. Got me in a whole bunch of trouble. Uh a lot of people go, you can't do that. Like, okay, fine, what we meant was is that you can take a technical person and if you give them the right questions to answer, you can drive these business results. So if you if you get your level one tech like the guy sent on the ride along and you say, hey, look, start investigating what they're doing as a business, you may not know the answer, but I'm guessing somebody on your engineering team does. I'm guessing somebody your MSP knows this answer. But you're not asking the question. And so that got me into this this whole system of how do you treat your clients, how do you align with them from a business standpoint. And given that you're busy, you have a lot of other things to worry about. You can't just sit there and go meeting, meeting, meeting, you you have to take care of your clients too. So I was using a gap analysis tool to discover what was going on with these these schools. What they weren't doing, you know, eventually got asked by several MSPs and um one owner of a software company, like, hey, can you teach people how to do this? I said, sure, if you think they want to know, I I'd love to teach. And so I started doing coaching, uh I started teaching MSPs how to have these conversations. And eventually that evolved into me buying the gap analysis tool I was using manage services platform and merging it with our coaching practice. So that everybody who buys our software gets coaching as part of it. So we're not just giving you a tool. We're helping change your mind and show you how to have better processes. Using simple methodologies like. Once last time you asked your client what their biggest source of revenue was. Do you know what your client is actually in the business of doing? What is their mission statement? Simple things like that change your relationship. So like you see a lot of this and a lot of people kind of coming to this world. And, you know, I mean if if they show up, they probably have an interest in developing this as a skill set and and a system in their their organizations. What are some of the common uh sort of impediments or or misunderstandings that people have about what makes a good account management or VIO process? Yeah, and that goes back to kind of what game got me in trouble saying I can turn anybody into a VIO in under an hour, right? This concept that you have to be highly technical to be part of this, right? As an engineer, I remember back you know, mid 2000s when I was, you know, the Nexus core engineer, right, I'm studying for my CSP, I'm a highly technical individual. And for somebody to know the level of technology that I did back in the mid 2000s would have taken them years. And I got asked a lot like, how did you get to your level of understanding of networking and business? Like, well, I started studying an MBA, went through that program, I have been in a number of environments. And it's hard to be a a really full-fledged VIO who gets the business side and the technical side. And so the biggest hurdle is that as engineers, we like to have the answers, we think we know what our client needs. We are so used to working tickets and fixing data centers. That we fall into the the stereotype of to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That is the biggest hurdle that people have. They think when they go to the client, they need to talk about the assets, they need to talk about warranties, they need to talk about Microsoft licenses. And they bore their client to death because the client doesn't care. They do it from an operational standpoint and budgeting standpoint. But they really want to know is how do I use technology to get an edge over my competition? How do I use technology to teach my kids better? How do I use technology to sell more hot dogs at the concerts? There are answers to all those questions. But you're not being curious about their business and so you're missing great opportunities. And I think it's because largely in the channel, all the money, the billions of dollars in the channel are going towards how to get MSPs to be better resellers. Sell my EDR, sell my PCs, sell my server, sell my Microsoft license. And the dirty secret is, the MSPs that are crushing it right now are these niche MSPs, like Winery Connect that just does vineyards. And they're offering a quarter of your service charging double to triple your rates. And they have extremely loyal people because they're giving a great experience. They're helping these vineyards and these wineries solve problems and be better at what they're doing. And that's what you need to be doing as an MSP. And that's the big hurdle that we're need to overcome. I thought when I was an engineer that I needed to teach these CIOs how to be more technical. I was wrong. I needed to learn to be more business savvy. And that's what I learned over time through hard rules of life that Adam had to learn and some of the best CIOs I worked under were accountants. So like let's look at some some practicalities maybe here. And like maybe we don't have answers to this or not, but I am I'm curious in your perspective of this. Because like what you're talking about is sort of getting the right person to have the right conversations. And if you're a growing MSP, a lot of organizations, it's it's the owner that is sort of capable of having these conversations because they know enough about their own business. That they can kind of relate to another president or another CEO to talk about their business. Like I agree with you that having technical people evolve into this role is okay as long as they're not focused on technical being sort of the the the the bulk of their role. What are your thoughts about sort of the development of additional AMs and certainly people that will be able to grow into VIOs in a in a growing MSP. Like if it's not the owner that wants to sort of own these conversations entirely or should they? You know, honestly, it's your sales people. These relatable, the person you want to go out and have a beer with. So there's a reason so in the early 2000s, a little bit of a story here, why why we use unicorns as our mascot at Humanize IT. Late 90s, early 2000s, back in the day, you know, painting you a picture. You've got this guy or lady, they they love computers and they want to learn more. What do they what do they go? There is nowhere. What do they have to do? Figure it out. You know, um there's a book you can get if you can find it, if you can order it, um you got to figure out where to order it from. You might be able to call Microsoft and pay $500 for a helpline. But how do you learn stuff? There's no degrees, there's computer science and that's it. And so this breed of people that came out of the 90s were these do it all Swiss Army knife people that could just figure stuff out. If you gave them a black box, they'd figure it out, they loved the challenge. And so this generation of people now have got 20, 25 years of experience under their belt. Here we are in 2025. Right, 25 years.com bust. And we're reaching our our CEO levels, right, right, we're taking over organizations, we're at the top level now. And we expect our new employees to be the same. They didn't go through the same gauntlet we did, people. I'm sorry. They don't exist. Finding that unicorn who can talk tech sales and business, you had to be one in the late 90s and early 2000s. Today, you can happily just fix HP all day long and never touch a Dell server. You can happily do Nexus Core or Cisco or Moraki uh brand and that's all you have to do. So you get to be siloed a little bit more. So how do you evolve somebody, you have to watch your employees for these people who can talk business and sales pretty efficiently, who are enjoyable to be around, who are very curious by nature. You can teach them technology. They'll figure it out. They'll pick it up. But finding that employee who's curious, might be a level one tech who just started with your company three months ago and just got that knack for talking to customers. Your 20-year-old, you know, employee, you're going to want to promote them into VIO because they're the most technical person you have. That is a bad assumption. They need to prove that they're technical and that's great. But they also need to be capable of not seeing everything as a nail. Not everything has a network solution to it. They shouldn't be walking in and trying to convince the uh customer that they need a layer seven firewall. That they need this lace and grace technology. They need to be walking in saying, I don't know everything. Please tell me about your business. I need to know more. Tell me a story about your company. And then that person has to be able to come back and talk to your your engineers and say, hey, for some reason this school, whenever they do a testing cycle, the entire internet jams up. We can't figure out why. And one of your engineers will be like, let me go over there, you're going to type in and like, they're going to, well, they're on a 10 meg connection, they've got 225 uh users. We look some more. Oh, they only have three access points. And the the they're like, what do they need, like, well, I'm going to have to do a heat map, I'm going to have to do a band assessment on them and I'm going to do this. Cool. Now that account manager can walk back and say, hey, I'm going to talk to my engineers, here's what we need to do, we can make that problem go away. And then the the no price point talking, no technology talking. I need to do these things, I need to I I our engineer needs to come and do a heat map, a bandwidth assessment and they need to make sure that everything is right sized. And then we're going to have this problem solved for you, you'll never have to worry about testing cycles again. School's going to say, do it. Yeah, such a simple conversation, right, and it's like it doesn't require a lot of back and forth, doesn't require uh spending six weeks on uh quotes and proposals and all this stuff that people tend to think of sales, right? It is largely conversations about the right things. Yes. And we get so distracted, we get so we get so stuck in the weeds talking about assets and warranties and operations and tickets. And we've trained our clients to think the same way. That they need to be talking to us about tickets and assets and warranties and licenses. And it gets in the way of the higher thing of like, if you can get technology to work for you. If you can solve technology solutions, you can grow by leaps and bounds over your competition. Imagine being the one hot dog vendor at a concert that has a 5G connection with a large antenna where they will never ever have to worry about dropping a credit card ever again. Now everybody in that concert knows they go over to Dave's hot dogs and they can get a hot dog within two seconds. All right, another one I'd love to get your input on, uh because again, this is like maybe common wisdom is not correct here. Uh uh what about the smaller customers that just don't have the level of sophistication that we want to engage them on in in a VIO process. And are they just not a fit, should we not be spending sort of this the this the VIO cycles on those lower sophistication clients or is there a different way to approach them more at their level? During your discovery of those environments, be curious. Right, so those schools I'm talking about, like we're on average about $1,500 a month, that'll be a small client to a lot of people. After a conversation with them, we found and moved them to 8,500 to $9,000 MRR clients. And that was because we sat and listened to their problems and solved their problems. Sometimes those smaller companies have big plans. And if you can just listen to them, maybe you got a let's say let's talk a lawyer, you know, right, you got a lawyer, you've got uh legal assistant, maybe two legal assistants and they do uh their ambulance chaser, right? Simplest thing in the world. You talk to them, they're a one-person office. Do you know how many one-person law offices there are in your area? Now, what if you could find a price point for that, let's say $1,000 a month times say 200 law offices. Is that worth it to you? Now, you're only going to be supporting Lexus Nexus, single PCs and you're going to charge uh, you know, premium rates for that. Now, a lot of these attorneys are are cheap skates. But you'll get to speak their language eventually and you'll expand out. But then you only have one vertical to worry about. And you get known as the MSP who helps out attorneys. If you want to see more about this, I think I had uh Joe Rohas on our podcast in December and he talked about this. In the in the building he was in in New York, he basically just did all the attorneys in that building and that was enough. So he had built up a single niche that worked, niche that worked. Because he was able to find out these small environments, shavings make a pile. And then when you have a a single vertical like that, you can create processes that are really, really efficient because you know what the problem's going to be when you walk into the next one. Or when you find a solution, hey, there's a better version of Lexus Nexus that's AI empowered and you can become a reseller for that. You talk to all your attorneys and say, hey, look, I've got 150 attorneys reporting to me, would you guys like a copy of this AI-based Lexus Nexus, oh yeah, that'd be great, okay, you just sold 150 copies with one call. So there are different ways to engage smaller customers then. Honestly, my my position on this was I often warn MSPs against engaging with customers sort of sub 10 staff or, you know, contracts under $1,000 or those sorts of things because it creates so much systemic risk. If if something actually goes wrong in those environments. Like, do you see a lot of a number of MSPs that are engaging on sort of those smaller scale clients and doing well and mitigating those risks then? I would say you're correct for a generalist MSP. Going after those small clients is a bad idea. Horrible idea. It's going to cost you way more in overhead. You're going to look profitable on paper, but when you start calculating in drive time and extraneous costs, you're losing money on them left and right. And a lot of you know it, but you like these small clients because they helped you get started. Hand them off to somebody, please. But for people in a niche system, it works really well. Because you can charge more because you are an attorney MSP, that's all you do. Or you just do medical offices, family practices, whatever it is in your system. And you can create efficiencies there that make sense for you that didn't make sense for the generalist MSP. You may be charging $500 a seat and they're charging $250 a seat. But you can charge 500 because you can also troubleshoot their epic HMS when you're on site. You have resources for that. You can troubleshoot Lexus Nexus while you're on site. And those those efficiencies can only happen in a niche market. So you have to decide as an MSP, if you're going to niche up, double your prices and deal with these smaller clients. And then you might start getting some of these larger attorney firms which are popping up everywhere where they're consolidating. And they're going to pay you big bucks. So you'll have a couple whales and you'll have a bunch of smaller smaller attorney offices. But then when a dentist office comes in and asks you, do you want to come in and do our stuff, you're going to be like, no, I don't do dentist office. Go down the street, um, you know, Sally's MSP might want to do that. So this maybe you're touching on this uh you obviously are, but maybe you to expand on this because this was an interesting point that I got a lot of discussion feedback after my my conversation with Alex around uh whether or not you should verticalize. Right, I had a lot of people ask like, did I understand this right, should I be verticalizing, like if I verticalize, should I just do this and not do anything else? Uh like what are your thoughts on sort of the parameters of say like a a smaller MSP maybe that that is like approaching a million, they're starting to to grow and scale. And they're wondering, all right, like should I niche down and verticalize or remain general so that I can kind of keep my options open. Any any thoughts on that? Uh standard um uh disclaimer, Adam Walter has never run an MSP. Okay, I know corporate environments extremely well. And so take my advice to the grain salt. I predict that if you are a mid-sized or lower MSP and you do not niche, you will die off here in the next 10 years. And the reason is is because we see a we see a trend in every kind of technology, I don't care what it is, if it's vehicles, tennis shoes, as an industry matures, it starts becoming more specific. So you look at uh like Nike or you look at uh like running shoes like Brooks. Brooks is a running shoe. They make running shoes. They make the best in the world. That's their thing. Now, when you go out and buy a running shoe, are you going to buy a Nike or are you going to buy a Brooks? And so that is that is the same thing that's happened in the the MSP industry. We're reaching a maturity state. Remember how I told you 25 years since the dotcom, people. We're reaching a maturity state, if you look at other industries that do the same thing. You need to be known for something. There is enough work for IT in a single vertical to sustain most MSPs. You have to define in your MSP what those are. Maybe you'll have two verticals. Maybe you do um, you do elementary schools, private elementary schools and then the other half of your business has some synergies with doing um colleges or high schools. Maybe that's what you do. And so now you're going to hire staff that are familiar with Google Suite, that are um familiar with Blackboard and a couple other uh systems. But what are you currently? I'm willing to bet most of you MSPs out there, you have something where it's like, your tipping point of 50% of your business is coming from this kind of area. And it's because that's how you got started or you have to have contacts in that area and that is how you're growing. But you've also grabbed on to everything you could because you want to make money. And what we've found and when I go to things like um, you know, like George's uh community minds, we have MSPs standing up right now and saying they're tripling their per seat rates. They're losing half their clientele and doubling their money. Things stories like that. Imagine having half your clients and making twice as much money. And these are stories I'm hearing. This isn't Adam Walter who has an operational goal of how you're going to get to your. You have to decide that for yourself as an MSP. But we're hearing this over and over again. And what's going to happen is eventually enough of these MSPs are going to niche out that you're not going to be able to compete with them as a general MSP. You're going to start getting breadcrumbs. As the more mature flower shops, doctor's offices, uh lawyers, grocery stores are all realized like. Oh, I work with CJ. CJ is my is the person in this field who does the best. They're showing up all the BNI events, they're saying, look, I only work with pediatric surgeons and Lincoln, Nebraska. Why? Because I offer these services that are unique to me, I will help you with your epic system, so when it goes down, I'll have somebody on site within the hour to get you back up. You can call Epic corporate, it's going to be four or five hours before you get it solved or you can call me. You're not going to be able to compete with that. Yeah, I I I like this uh as sort of a a challenge to people of like what do you envision the future of this industry and your MSP looking like? Because what you're talking about, I think lends to sort of my idea about what the future of the MSP will become. Uh and I agree with you, consolidation is coming, right? Like it started with sort of this drafting effect of the PE money collapsing a lot of the major players. That trend I think will will continue at a, you know, granted a bit of a slower pace, but will absolutely will continue into the future. And then we're going to end up with sort of these juggernauts that are doing sort of national IT services and commoditizing a lot of the the things that we sort of view as our bread and butter in this industry. And what it forces I think a lot of the industry to start doing is becoming more regional and more attuned to the client and I think account management and VIO become sort of the forefront of most of our interactions. We do projects, we do business consulting and everything else is just sort of background noise, like it's the stuff that happens with IT, but it's really not the product that we're selling anymore. Whereas right now I feel we're still in that stage of the industry where, you know, break fix is not really a thing, but what it does is been remodeled in MSP, but still fundamentally a lot of what we do is break fix. And I think a lot of that feeds to the background and becomes a lot more about interactions with with the business more that business to business interaction, right? Yeah. And what you want to be able to do is define what is it what is it you can already lean into. Because when that large MSP as this consolidation keeps happening in the industry. You're going to say, I can't compete with $200 a seat. What I can say is, if you go to $200 a seat, they're not going to care about your HMS, they're not going to care about your Lexus Nexus, they're going to say, you need to call your vendor on that. They're going to have a. SOP that says. This is out of scope. Call your vendor. Whereas you can come in and say like, you look at the winery connect for instance. I'm going to keep referencing that. Where a large MSP could come in and talk to any of his clients and they're going to just going to laugh at him. They're like, no, we love our MSP. He has helped us grow uh 2X over the last three years. And so they're going to stay with him because he understands their business, he understands how they do things, he understands what's important to them. And so these large MSPs are going to be forced to buy you as an MSP and you have an access strategy now because they can't break into your market, you own this market, it is yours. So if they want to get into the vineyard market, they have to buy your MSP. Or they have to find some way of talking to you. And that's how we work when you get that commodization as you talk about. You guys all need to remember that PCs are not going to be profitable. That life that Microsoft licenses and licenses coming from these different areas, they're already going directly to your customers and selling. They're going around this because the the margins are just shrinking year after year. And this is the way this is what happens with maturity of any kind of technology. From automobiles to look look at the price of a Tesla just 10 years ago to today. The the margins keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller. So if you're relying on those margins from being a reseller, you're going to have a world of hurt. I can say in 2007 2018, I was earning 36,000 MRR offering no technical services, just consulting. Agile and VCL consulting, 36,000 MRR as a two-man shop. So if you think you're too small to earn good money consulting, you're wrong. I love this model because you know, Adam, as an operator, I am much more a fan of an efficient lean operation that just kind of volcano of money. Rather than a very complicated large company that has a lot of revenue but is not necessarily generating the same amount of profit. I'll take the smaller company every day. Because it's a lot less stress and, you know, the the generally sort of the the profit output can be equivocal to an a company that's five times, 10 times as big, right? But that's not as profitable for the vendor community. That's the distinction. Who are we who are we fighting for, Adam? So like and that's kind of like the uniqueness here and I I challenge people to think like, who's making money off of this deal? Right, uh you know, people always say, follow the money, right, in politics. Are you doing that in your own business? Why are you reselling Microsoft, why are you so so stuck on Microsoft license reselling? Is it because you're just used to making money that way or is it because you actually need to do it? And so why are you needing to resell PCs? Why are you needing to resell servers, switches, firewalls and so on and so forth? Why do you even care where they come from? Why not just buy direct from Amazon and drop it on their doorstep? There there are good answers to these. I'm not I'm not uh but I'm putting up a straw man of challenge yourself. Because the channel wants you as an MSP to be a reseller, they're not in the business of you making more money. If an MSP is more profitable, it does not make the EDR company more money. What makes them more money is convincing you that you need to sell more EDR. What makes Fortigate more money is you selling more firewalls. Not you extending the life of the firewall, not you pushing out more services to help your client grow. They make more money doing. So the the the common thing in the industry is going to be like, hey, our margins are this, here's how you sell more, here's how you convince your client to do more security, more this, more that because they want you to sell more of their their items, their widgets. So if you look at your MSP and think, what if I were just a consult? What if I were just to work with my client on how to grow their business? What if I were to charge more? Like, hey, like I don't care if you want to buy a Dell PC from Amazon, it still has to run our image. You know, it still has to undergo this process. But I don't care where you get it from. Trend micro, whatever. What I care about is, let's talk about how your sales are doing this year and how we can get you to the next level. Let's talk about that, see there's technology out there that will help you be a better daycare provider, that'll help you do a check-in, check-out process to help kids be safer. Let's talk about this stuff. And let's create a a a consultancy firm the way we used to be back in the late 90s and the early 2000s and get away from being best buys. So even like VIO when it originally showed up in the MSP scene was a billable consulting engagement, you know, it was kind of minimum 2500, 3500. I even saw, you know, 8500 a month north, right, for these consulting engagements. I mean 5,000 a month. I I made 5,000 a month on average on an engagement for VIO. Now like that said, like we sort of talked about how the VIO function is just sort of been been put through the blender and mixed into the MSP and it's functionally account management is really what we're talking about. But if you're doing this well. It's potentially. that you're going to get a lot of haters. It's okay, we've talked about it a lot. So fight us in the comments, I'm I'm totally open to it. Spicy. Yeah, exactly. But uh like the other thing that I would say and maybe I believed this, but maybe I'm wrong that there is a certain level of sophistication of a person. Like a the person running the MSP or the people working in this MSP to be able to engage in these conversations. And a lot of people really just started a technical company and are still very, very technical. And this is not an area of of expertise or sometimes even a willingness to sort of lean into these areas. Do you think that that's a problem or do you think like this is a a specialized group that will sort of lean more into this consulting or is this a larger trend that everyone should get hip to? Uh this is where I get a little more controversial. I believe there's a reason why the the accountants I worked under that were CIOs were really good at their job. Is because in a larger IT department, you have a lot of resources, right? I you know, in the department I worked in at uh this large organization, there were like eight people just dedicated to asset management. That's all they did, licensing and asset management. It wasn't a matter of, are you on a desktop team, it's like, which desktop team are you on and what tier are you? Right, so we have like 500 developers and engineers in this one division that report to this one CIO. He's an accountant. Why was he good at his job? Because he was able to take resources and coordinate them to come up with great solutions for this billion dollar company and present them to the CEO. So is the VIO role a niche uh item, kind of, but you need to be less technical so that you rely on your staff more, you need to be a better leader. You need to be a better facilitator of information. And if you can do that, there's where you're going to make money. Because as an MSP, you're going to understand your client better and you're going to be able to translate what they're wanting to do to your staff, the engineers, the techs, the specialists and then present a solution to the client and say, hey. I think we can solve your problem with reselling hot dogs at concerts where you have network congestion. Would you like us to solve that problem, I've got three engineers who want to take on this project, they can start next week. And that is a great CIO. What's bad is when you have a CIO who's highly technical like me and walks in and I think I know all the answers and so I immediately off the cuff name an answer. But if I would have gone back to my staff first and said, hey, what do you guys think about this school that's has that struggling. They will come up with way more solutions as a 30-person staff or as a 10-person staff than I would as one person. And so I would like to encourage the environment. Like think of CIO or VIO as a virtual office of a CIO with a quarterback as its head. And in that way you won't have to look around for these unicorns that know everything. They're great people. But they you'll start getting people that are better at facilitating engagements with your clients, gathering information and bringing them back to a team and say, okay, here's this client, let's talk about this in an hour long stand up. Let's talk about this in a strategic session, how are we going to treat this client, here's the problems they're having, engineer one, technician one, network engineer two, tell me about what we can do for this client, it's going to help solve these problems that they're having. That's the engagement, that's going to result in more project workflow, stick your clients and be able get you to the point where you're going to be able to charge higher per seat. Because you're becoming a resource for them rather than just a janitor who's cleaning up messes. So I guess it's a it's a matter of what your vision of what you want your organization to grow into in the future then, I suppose. Yes, 100%. More facilitation, less know it alls. Awesome, well, this has been a good chat. I appreciate your your input, Adam, as I said. Sort of coming from the other side of the table, uh and giving us the the sort of the view of, you know, what the corporate world thinks of what we're trying to do and where we're potentially missing. Uh so missing the boat in some cases. So appreciate your input and thanks for coming being on the show. Oh, thank you for having me on.