ERP126-How to Build Better Teams and Avoid the Peter Principle Trap

Dustin, welcome to the Evolved radio podcast. Hey, how you doing? I'm excellent. And you? I am good. I'm super excited to do the show with you. Yeah, this will be great. So we're going to be talking about general career ladders and, and I think we'll kick off. I'll give you kind of a question to lead into the first topic that we wanted to connect on, which is the Peter Principle. For those not familiar, the Peter Principle is someone who has been promoted into the level of incompetence. Basically, you continue to good at your job and everyone's like, hey, great job, here's the next level. Hey, great job, here's the next level. And at some point you kind of look around and go, I don't know what I'm doing here. Right. So that's the Peter Principle. For anyone who is not familiar with this, I'm curious from your perspective, if you have ever sort of like, what's the story of you seeing this happen to someone, either yourself or someone else, where you recognize like, oh my God, like this person or. I am in a bit of a world of hurt because I did great. I got here, but now I'm really over my head. Yeah. I mean, there's actually three scenarios that I've personally been through. The first scenario is when I found myself promoting myself to my level of incompetence. I'd say the second scenario is when somebody was promoted and they didn't recognize the risk or the dangers they were in. And the third was where I promoted somebody, they recognized the problem and they self demoted. Which I thought was probably the most mature response I've ever seen to the Peter principal. I can dig into all three or any one of those. Let's start with the personal story. I suppose I want to come back to the one that, that demoted himself because I think there's there's some, a lot of really important lessons around that I think would be worth touching on. Yeah. So we'll talk about where I've stepped into a role where I'm not very strong. And I remember actually I wrote an article about this for this peer mentoring group years ago. And it was the concept that you should always be firing yourself. Now as an owner, you get, you do get yourself into trouble because sometimes you have nobody else to put into a role other than yourself, so you have no choice. I don't know that the Peter principle applies there. I will say that the Peter principle definitely applies when there's hubris where you think you can do something as the owner, but you can't. Or where there's somebody that could be better at it in the company than you. But in particular, I know I am strong visionary. I am a weak integrator, if you're familiar with that concept. Right. And so I can keep the threads together. Right. I can keep the. The ball moving forward, and I can. I can come up as many as analogies as needed for this story, But I definitely struggle with details because they emotionally beat me down. I just get it mentally exhausted when I'm doing detail work. And so what I find is when I grow a company, this is my fourth company. When I grow a company to a certain size, I reach my incompetence because I have enough people working under me that I'm no longer suitable. And what happens is the company will stall out. And it's because. Not because of the vision of the company. It's because I've become a huge bottleneck. And. And if you're in operations, your whole job is creating multiple communication channels in the company. That's literally like your function as operations manager is connecting all the pieces of the company. Whereas I will stall out because I struggle to put all those pieces together as an integrator, even though that is the almost entire purpose of the integrator. And so that's when I say that I tend to, um, push myself into the Peter principle, usually because the company's new, usually because I have no choice. But then I don't exit fast enough from that role. Yeah, I think that's like, I. I see what you're saying. The. But I think it's. It's also like, from an entrepreneurial standpoint, like, you kind of have to figure all of these things out. And then to the. To your point, like, promoting yourself into a relevance is. Is, I think, a sign of success and for two reasons. One, that you've actually built a team that's competent enough to take things over for you. But also, I would say one of the major limiting factors that I think exists in small business is people are just so careful about removing themselves, thinking like they have some special expertise or knowledge or some capability in order to do those things, and they tend to hang on to them for far too long. And maybe it's because they promoted someone into a level that they weren't really prepared for, and they got burned by that in some past. Or that they, you know, they. They just fundamentally feel like, I don't know, I can't give this up, because what if it goes wrong? Do you think like those two scenarios of like, I can't give this up because it might go wrong versus, you know, I tried this once and it really went badly. Did you. Did you see sort of either of those scenarios? Yeah, for sure. I mean, keep in mind, my age, I've seen it all, right? And definitely I have delegated out task and now I'm better about measurables and KPIs. You know, in my mind, there's three management models. There's delegation, there's micromanagement, and there's abdication. And, you know, I think the struggle for most owners is you at first don't realize it, but you're delegating without measurables, which is just abdication, and you get really burned because you just. You bring on this awesome, awesome person as some marketing vp, whatever, and they just completely fall down and maybe it's your fault, maybe they should have said something, but you do that and you're just like, oh, man. Maybe you shift into micromanagement. But micromanagement is as destructive to the manager as is to the managee, and it's mentally exhausting. So you just don't end up delegating and you're stuck in this role and it's just becoming a mess. You know, I think really, what a great manager is somebody that learns that, that you have to delegate with measurables. That's. That's the only way to properly manage. But it's tough to get there. And so that's typically when I would find myself in the Peter principle is, especially early on in my career where I would burn myself and then I would hold on too tight the next time and then it would blow up because I was holding on to too much of that job role. Yeah. Yeah. So much there. So I think like the, the one of abdication versus delegation. I think this is a huge, huge problem. Right. Like, I'd be curious on your feeling on this. I feel like I've been talking about this a lot where, lately, where people feel. I think there's a. There's sort of this, this myth in business that's perpetuated by a lot of business books that focus on enterprise organizations and, and it maybe holds true in certain circumstances, like at enterprise level where you have like a VP or C suite person. And there's this idea of like, I want to hire smart people and get out of the way. Right. And I think this is a pervasive myth that is misunderstood in most small and medium business where that is not that practical. Right. Like the people that you're bringing into these roles don't come out of, you know, graduate degrees and have MBAs and all of those things of, you know, intern somewhere and have all this great experience that they can draw upon. So a lot of owners are like, they put someone new into a role and it's basically pat them on the head like, hey, you'll be great. And then they just disappear into the woodwork and go focus on other things. So of course everyone's going to be disappointed with the results of that. And I still feel like a lot of people want to hold on to this idea of I don't want to micromanage so therefore I'm not going to tell them what to do. And I think this is where that distinction between abdication and delegation really gets lost because you end up in abdication zone because you don't want to be a micromanager when realistically you should be closer to the micromanagement side in just supporting and helping the person to get things done. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a ramp up. I, I think the cold hard reality is, you know, I think I'm gonna invent numbers here. Let's say 80% of businesses or you know, 20 people or less, something like that. I know it's, most businesses are small. Just I'll give you some context to add to that. Like 90% of the MSP industry is sub $1 million, which is kind of mind blowing. Yes. But it also means that first of all, you don't have the budget to go hire that a player has the experience. Now you're going to have to make a decision generally when you hire, either you're going to hire smoked a lot of experience or you're going to hire somebody that's young and moldable and ready to get experience. But a lot of the fire has been lost when you hire the older person. But what you're getting back is just the sophistication and the experience. You got to figure out where, what you're going to go for because you're, you're getting really good on both sides, but they're going to have different attributes. So rule number one is you don't have the money to hire yourself. Right. And that's the thing. People think they're going to go hire another business owner and that's ridiculous. Unless you bring them own as a. Give them equity. Like that's how you bring in a. I hate to say rock star. I think that term's dead, isn't it? Dead. I Don't feel people say rock star anymore. I don't. Not as useful. LinkedIn. Only then, only then let's say only thing. But I don't know what the replacement term is for that. Hashtag awesome owner. But that, that's one problem. I, I think, I think that people need to spend a lot more time learning and understanding the measurables in their company so that they can better manage. I think people spend too much time developing, trying to develop the people skills and they want to have good relationships and they want to lead and then in that way they think, well, if I have a strong relationship that where there's open communication I can then abdicate my management role. Going back to what you were saying and I'm gonna let this, this, this shining store shine brightly. Alpha marketing. I'll just say marketing is the easy one. You know how hard it is to find that person. Like you just don't have the budget for it. Unless you're a ten million dollar organization, you don't have the budget to hire that person. And so you really need to lean more into. And I think you were saying micromanagement, but I suspect what you meant was more tracking of progress. Right? More task management. And are the numbers trending in the right direction? If the numbers on your KPI dashboard are green, you need to leave that person alone. 100% agree. Right. If they're yellow, then there's mentoring, coaching. If they're red, you need to determine did I miss hire? Do I have the wrong KPIs? Does this person not have the money, budget, tools they need or, or you know, is there some unknown out there that need to look at? The red is just tell you something's wrong. It doesn't tell you what's wrong. The yellow tells you you probably just need to do some mentoring and the greens tell you you're doing a good job or unfortunately you're still measuring the wrong things. Right. And I can have a, I can have a 10 hour conversation. KPIs. Oh, me too. Yeah, yeah. And I agree, like this is a big factor that I really try to coach people on and in their businesses is measure outputs, not inputs. Right. Like I don't care how busy people are, I want to know how much they've produced. Right. Because like busy is a very, you know, BS and squishy term. Right. You can be busy all day and accomplish nothing. So like what are we actually producing results from? And I think that gives you a lot more to measure. And I think like if you can use service based leadership approach of like, I'm curious, what do you need? How can I help you? Like, like just falling all over the person looking to provide some level of support. As long as you're not smothering them. Right. But it's not critical feedback and trying to correct every single tiny mistake that they make in order to help them to step up because that will just infuriate and frustrate people. But I think like to your point, that works at all the levels, at all the colors of that KPI, right? If it's green, you don't need to tell them what to do. They're probably doing well. It's, you know, what can, what can we work on? What can we improve? What insights do you have? Right? Like, like teasing that information out of them and looking for ways that you can provide additional support. Yellow is, let's understand this, let's work on this together. What do we not see? What do you think some of the problems are? Let's have some dialogue and go back and forth on this. And red is, do you understand this? And maybe is the number correct? We set this target as this number. Is it simply impossible? Let's have this discussion. So you're always at that service level of not telling them you're doing poorly. You need to do better because you know, no one ever responds to that type of criticism well and says, oh sure, I'll just, I'll just work harder. Those 60 hour weeks are apparently not enough. Right. So I think there's always a way to engage with people that is, comes from a place of support and gives people a clear picture that I'm here to help you. I'm not here to, you know, discipline you until you get better. You know that expression whippings will continue until morale. Yes, I like the beatings, but if I give you, if I were to kind of put a bow on that as a sound bite, I would say around that as well as one thing is, if your KPIs, the KPIs you're measuring don't change as your company grows and shrinks, that right there is a red flag. I think people that have static KPIs that they measure, they get themselves in a pickle because that green KPI that worked for you two years ago will destroy you in the future because as you grow it becomes, it's going to become a problem because there's some KPIs that could become bad at certain sizes. The other thing is, and I think people struggle with this is my strategy is My manager's. Wait, how is it my strategy I delegate as my tactics to my manager and that becomes their strategy. What becomes the they delegate down as their tactics that become a strategy under them. And so the bigger your organization, the more like contained the KPI is going to be. Like, I might if I'm a $10 million MSP, the only KPI I might want from a help desk is my CSAT. But if I'm a sub $1 million MSP, I probably want to see time to close and I want to see first time close like I want. I'm going to be closer to the KPIs coming out of the help desk because I don't have the layers between me and my technicians. And so their KPIs, the ones I'm looking at are much more raw. And then when I get to be a large company, I'm really just looking at the KPIs of my manager, which would be like a CSAT score. And so just kind of really handling hammering on the KPIs. You really got to think about the KPIs you're looking at. One is going to dictate where your company is going to go. Two is going to dictate how your managers try to cheat on the KPIs. And then three, it's really going to influence how you manage the people. If you're in a 10 million dollar MSP and you're looking at time to close on tickets, you're micromanaging. Right? I mean like the KPIs you're looking at tells you what your management style is going to be. Yeah. So we've gone into a wicked sidetrack because as you said, both of us could talk KPIs. Oh yeah. What are we talking about again? No, no, this is good because like I think this is, this is actually helpful because it does speak to why people get lost and they're kind of in the woods, not know what to look at or how they find some reference for this. And I think like two ways that I typically see this is KPIs that have been read for six months and no one seems to really care. Like it's just become the norm. It's like, you know, whatever. Okay, that it is, like there's always some excuse as to why it is. And then to that point, like the opposite side of that is it's also been green for six months. Like good. But like should we be looking pointless? Some level of improvement here? Yeah. Or maybe you shouldn't Be tracking it. Maybe. It's a pointless piece of paperwork. I'll share real quick. I did fire. If I have a minute to share a story where I fired my service manager because of a KPI that was red that turned green does sound an interesting story. Carry on. Yeah, so. So I, I had this service manager for several months and he maybe actually, let's say over a year, I think it was. And he kept telling me, dustin, there's just, we can't get these KPIs. It was, it was the, the SLAs, right. We can't get our resolution. We can't. Like, I don't have the staff, I don't have the tools for it. We need to throw bodies at this problem. Right? Yeah. And so, and so I was just like, man, I would look at the numbers. We were doing sea level at the time. And so we were able to compare numbers with the CLI, SLI numbers and all that. And we were already over budget on labor. And I was like, man, we need more labor. This is crazy. We're already over budget. And he went on vacation for a week. And I said, you know what, I brought the help desk in. I said, look, guys, we're gonna, we're gonna show ourselves. We can turn this screen. If we get these SLAs green by the end of this week, I'm gonna give everybody a fifteen hundred dollar check. Done. If we get, just get a green, I'm gonna just, everybody, you'll see, you'll get an extra deposit in your account from the payroll company. Fifteen hundred dollars per person. Because that's how big of the problem it was. And that service manager came back and I fired him that next Monday. Because we were green, right. And we were legitimately green. Okay. I was going to ask you, like. Yes. Was the name number gamed? Yeah. Okay. No, I went through every ticket. Yeah. And I said, because it was a lot of money, right? I think it was like $15,000 or something. I'd like 10x. And so I went through it and every single ticket was properly closed. It was documented. They had found ways around the problem. They figured out what's the big issue, what's the small issue? What's the artificial obstacle that I'm using? Because you put that much money in front of people for just one week of work, they're going to get it done. And so I fired him on that Monday because I was like, you told me this was impossible. I put money in front of them. And of course his arguments, well, what If I wish I had had those resources, I said, but you never asked me for anything other than hiring more staff. Like, like your role as manager just come to me with some solutions. But you never had solutions. You just said, I need to hire more people. And so that's why I fired somebody when the KPI went green. So I think that's insightful too, because I think there's a mindset shift that, that speaks to, right? Like those people that say that are in a defeatist attitude of like, this just isn't possible, right? And they assume that to be true, right? So that's their internal narrative. That person will never be able to convince the rest of the, of the group, like the team that they lead, that like, maybe we can fight our way through this. Let's just find some creative solutions. Or just as you said, like dig down and understand this on a ticket by ticket basis. Like, we're all doing Q reviews and figure out how we can close 50% of our tickets. Right? Like, that's the type of mindset shift that I think is really practical. And I see this all the time where those sort of grizzled, you know, grumpy service managers are just like, oh, this isn't possible and all these clients are jerks, blah, blah, blah. Like that mindset shift I think is incredibly important to not fall into this trap, right? Well, absolutely. The Griff service manager, if I remember correctly, one of the ways they solved it was because I whiteboard it with them every morning. We whiteboarded and I would always ask them just one question. What obstacles are keeping you from success? And if I remember correctly, one of the obstacles was like the Resolution Plan 1, one of the SLAs, they said it's actually impossible to ever get green. The way that things are configured, like there's nothing we can do. It's just going to be green, it's going to be red just by, by the, the formula being used. And so we all came up with a reasonable update to the formula. Nothing that been presented to me and we all agreed it was a fair formula. We updated it to. And that right there increased about like 10, 10 or 11%. And then they only had to go the other halfway to get that one green. Like sometimes you just got a whiteboard the problem and say, is there a clerical issue that's keeping you from being successful? And techs hate that. They hate the bureaucracy. Yeah, I agree, they do. And I like that approach because in a lot of cases, like I like using SLA in order to reverse engineer the process, right? Like you do a value stream map and understand like, how long does the ticket stay then spend in each of these stages and why is that? Right? Like, you know, we, we can't hit 30 minutes because this process, it requires this handoff and this person, like it goes into this queue and gets, and it waits. Like if we just put it into the role of this person to do this queue and send an email to the, to, to somebody else, to the client, like, boom. Like all of a sudden you've cut our SLA in half, right? So I like using it as a barometer. It's usually like where I started consulting with, with clients is like, okay, your SLA says that it takes you 46, 46 hours to acknowledge a ticket. And they're like, that can't be true. That's not true. It's like, okay, well let's understand the process because the system thinks that's how long it takes and that's what's important here. So let's understand why it thinks that's the case. Right? Okay, well that's KPI solved right there. We're done with that. There we go. So, and I think like a couple of these things I think are relevant to this, right? So let's, let's pivot to building a bit of a career ladder for people, right? I think one of the issues that I think a lot of MSPs make, and I'm sure either you made this mistake or certainly have seen this happen where they're just promoting the most senior person that's been around to become the service manager. Classic, classic mistake. Yeah. And it's such an error. Like I get under. I understand why people do this because it seems, seems to make some logical sense. And even I see people get caught up in sort of loyalty of like, well, I would have to make this person the service manager because they've worked here the longest. Like, no, that has no relevance to it at all. In a lot of cases, the most senior and certainly the most technical people in your organization have zero interest in managing people. So don't make them manage people. Everyone's going to end up unhappy in that situation. Well, it's like if you, if you're into NBA, you watch NBA, does anybody actually think every player on that court would be a fantastic coach? But they're the most incredible basketball players in the world. You cannot find a better player than in the NBA in the US when it comes to basketball. So according to the logic of 99% of MSP owners. Every NBA player is going to be a fantastic coach. Yeah. Or like, you know, this person has been on the team for nine years, therefore, we have to make them center. It's like, well, I don't know if that's a good idea. Right. It's. Their time has come. Yes. They're also like, they're probably. You bring out the sword and unite them because they've done the work. They're ready to go. Yeah, no, I. I definitely. Well, that actually is a good segue into where I promoted that one person who demoted himself afterwards. Yep. Where, you know, let's call him Frank. He. He had been with me for several years, and he said, hey, I want to try being a project manager. I just want to see how this goes. And this was a real project manager, not the project manager that's also the only project technician in the department. Like, this person actually would have tasks and timelines and people. And so I said, you know what, Frank? You've been with me long enough. Let's try it. And I said, if something doesn't work out, let's talk. And so we tried and we tried, and he came back to me. It was like three months, and we were having lunch. I was checking in with him because I used to do quarterly lunches with my staff. I would do one lunch per staff. That's how I would do my. My touch base. And he's like, you know what? I don't like managing people. I just don't like it. I like to just be behind my computer and get stuff done. And I said, okay, great. What do you want to do? And so he said, I just want to go back to my old job. And I said, done, done. It can. It can be effective today. And I said, how do you want to communicate this to the team? I said, you tell me how you want to communicate this, and then we'll. That's how we're going to do it. And so he said, I'm just. I want to be blunt. I want to just come out and say, you know what, guys? I've decided I like just doing the work. I don't like managing the work. And that's what we said. And to me, that was an incredibly emotionally mature way of doing it. And I think what's important. What's important here is also that I'm not saying that I'm gonna. I'm not gonna own this. But as an organization, he felt comfortable that he wouldn't be. It wouldn't be embarrassing for him. I think that's massive. That, that, that psychological safety. To be able to come to you and say, I don't think this is working. Like, can I do something else? I think that's huge. So like one of the things, like, I think this is a good segue back in, looping back on this. But like, how did you manage the payroll situation? Like, did he get an increase to go into that role? Like, how did you. No, I think it was, I think we agree, like a few months to figure it out. To figure, like to. I don't think I had an immediate pay bump to it. Okay. Because it was just high risk and I think we both knew it. I think that's where you can definitely get yourself into a trap, is giving somebody an instant. Well, my word of advice here is if somebody wants some type of pay raise, then you can at least temporarily give 100 pay raise around measurables. In other words, okay, great. If you do these things and you're hitting these numbers, then you're going to get 100% of this amount of money. And if they don't, they're going to know that they might not be a fit. But, but you can definitely get yourself in a pickle. If you give them their, you know, their base comp goes up, then what are you going to do? Exactly. That's a problem. No, so I, I think like you, you handled that perfectly. That's exactly what I, What I like to see in organizations when they do this is when they're evaluating new leaders is, look, just give them, just tell them they're going to be team lead for a temporary period. That's right. Make them a manager. Right. Like just, just sort of give them some ceremonial title and certainly don't give them a raise yet and act. And I think you guys were very smart to say like, this is a trial period, like, let's try this out. Because in a lot of cases, especially in technical organizations, people just look up and think, okay, if I want to make more money and have more responsibility, well, I guess I need to go into management. And that's not technically true, but it is true to everyone else sort of by sentiment and feeling because they don't see other alternatives. And we don't really do a good job in the industry about talking what is the career ladder? Like, how can you progress in the organization both in the technical capacity or into the operation side? So people just like, well, yeah, I guess I want more money, so I want to be a manager. And then in three months, like their team is Depressed and unhappy with the lack of leadership and how critical their, their new manager is. The manager is, all he's doing is technical work because he's, he hates all of the management stuff and just wants to avoid it entirely. And the owner is pissed off because the team is doing poorly and the manager is grumpy and, and just doing technical work. So it's a disaster. Yeah. Tie, tie the money. I, maybe long term, the comp, the base comp goes up, but definitely tie the, tie it into some type of deliverables. I feel like that's the safest way. And aligning your staff with success for the company means financial success for them. Yep. So, yeah, I think you're right about. Don't put yourself into a corner. Yeah. But I think just like the practical way of having an adult conversation about it, like, let's try this for three months. And then you check back in, you're like, how are things going? Like, do you like this? And they're like, yeah, it's awesome. I love it. And you think you both like. They like it. You feel like they're doing well. Great. Here's a manager title and here's a, here's, here's a, here's a pay raise to go with that because you're, you're, you're owning this. I think a lot of people have this, like, again, like, it's not, it's not a counterintuitive idea to say, like, if you're giving them more responsibility, you should probably give them more money. Like, I get why people feel that way, but let's be realistic. Like, you're just carving out 20% of their day and giving them administrative duties instead of technical duties. And if they're good at that, then great. Like, we can increase that and make them a manager. But you know, to, to just sort of automatically pull trigger and say, well, let's give them an extra $30,000 and, and this title and then to, to walk that back is really difficult. Oh, you got to fire them. That's the only thing they're gonna like. Yeah. You either, like, you can't because if you're going to like, take away that salary, they're going to quit. Right. And I think that's the difficult situation. And the other part that you hit on that is massive in this is how is this perceived by the rest of the company? So what is the narrative that you want to tell people about why that event happened? I think is really, really important. So that was super smart of you guys to manage that and the fact that you asked them straight up of like, how do you want this to be communicated to the team? I think is a huge benefit to that. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, I think that's super, like practical around sort of like ways to kind of build that career ladder of getting people into those roles in a safer fashion. The other thing that we wanted to touch on here, so you've lived in the MSP world as well, and now you're on the vendor side of the world and you kind of suggested there's a ton of things that you've learned on the vendor side that you would have loved to have known about marketing as an msp. So this is an area that I think a lot of people traditionally struggle with. If you want to share some wisdom on the things that you've learned along the way here in that transition, that would be, I think, really valuable. Yeah. So some background. I owned an MSP for almost 20 years and you know, we were small and then I grew to a pretty nice size, shrunk with COVID kind of grew it back up, sold it, and then it transitioned to being an MSP vendor with giant rocket ship. And it really is amazing. I think part of it isn't just being a vendor. It's just stepping away from the old company and leaving that machinery behind and having to rebuild things has really helped free my mind. The other thing is as a vendor, I'm really in product sales. As an msp, I was in service sales. And if MSP that's sub a million, for example, really, if you're sub. If you're, if you're 3, 4, 5 million or less, if you think for a second you're not selling yourself as the owner versus the process, you're lying to yourself. Y. A 10, 15, $20 million MSP sells process, a 5 million, a $2 million MSP sells the owner like 100%. Again, you're insane if you don't think that's true. And so as the vendor, a couple of things is man can overemphasize good old KPIs. You need to be tracking if you're going to be going hard on social media. You need to be tracking your impressions. You need to be tracking what type of posts work. You can't just hope it works. You right? I don't even care if you syndicated content. Syndicated content can work great for an MSP for social media, because it's not. It doesn't rely on SEO, right? But you need to be tracking what works. The other thing that I Think msps just don't want to believe is that cold calling works. Like all the industry numbers are clear that it is tedious and it can be expensive either in the owner's time or a sales exec's time. Cold calling still works and people don't want to put the hours into the telephone needed to increase the size of their customer base. Even as an msp, when we grew really quickly like before, I got a little lazy about it. It was because I was on the phone for three hours a day. I would put a sign on my door making calls and from 9 to 12 I was just making, I was on a dollar making phone calls. And that's how we get that initial bump. And so that's definitely a big deal. The, the last thing is people you have to make a decision if you want cost effective and slow or fast and expensive. Sales is fast and expensive. Marketing is cost effective and slow. And so for us we've been slowly but methodically increasing our marketing presence is starting to just now really hit. Now to get us here I had to do a bunch of active or proactive sells. Making phone calls, going to conferences, shaking hands. It's extremely expensive but it does work. And over time you need to fund marketing so you can transition into that more cost effective but slower burn funnel which is marketing. And I just don't think people look at marketing properly. They look at it as a three month game. It's a one, two year game. Yep. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Cool. All right, well anything we haven't covered either marketing related or, or people in process, we can, we can dip back. We can talk KPIs if you want. No, I'm joking. Next time we can talk dashboards. Dashboards 2000. Well, one thing I would say when it came to building out a, you know, a track for your staff, something I learned in the current company, definitely in the last company was you have a sales funnel. You should always have a hiring funnel. You really should. What is it? Always be selling? Abs Abi. Always be interviewing? Yeah, you should always be interviewing. It doesn't be once a day but once a week. You should really interview once a week somebody for some position and then the next thing is everybody should have. Even if it's just one step or promotion path. If somebody's a technical resource, you're right. Have a technical lead position even if it's unfilled. If you have a dispatcher, have a service coordinator position available. If you have a service coordinator, have a service manager position available. Always have one slot available to the person because otherwise they're going to quit when they hit the cap. Yep. Right. So I would say that. What's next? Right? Like, what is possible? What could. What should I be striving for? Right. Well, most msps don't have a next. That's the problem. Like you're saying. Yeah, exactly. No. Great advice. All right, Dustin, this is great. Appreciate all the back and forth and. And some insights. So appreciate your time, man. This was awesome. Thanks for inviting me. I hope I get to do it with you again. Cool. All right, take care.