ERP056 - How To Price Your MSP Offering

I see too many MSPs, myself included for for quite some time, not make a big enough difference between their managed service plans and their time and material offerings. Welcome to Evolve Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. I'm your host Todd Kane. Today on Evolved Radio, I'm chatting with Nigel Moore, leader of the Tech Tribe. Nigel is a favorite guest on the podcast and if you haven't heard episode 35, where Nigel and I discuss the transition from time and materials provider to the MSP model, I encourage you to check out that episode as well. Today, Nigel and I are chatting about one of the most common questions that gets asked in the MSP community. How should I package and price my offering? What should you include? What should my seat price be? Should I have termed contracts? All this and some fun war stories about life in the MSP channel. So stick around and enjoy. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast so you get every new episode. Also, if you wouldn't mind, please leave a rating and review in your podcast app. This helps others find the show so we can reach more of the community. Now on with the show. Joining me on the podcast today is Nigel Moore. Welcome to the podcast, Nigel. Thank you, Todd. It is awesome to be here again. Yes, returning champion. So always a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Uh tons of energy, lots of insights, so I'm sure this will be a lot of fun. Uh we wanted to talk about packaging and pricing and how you offer MSP services, because this tends to come up a lot. You're obviously a great expert to have this discussion with, as you have a book on the topic as well. So, uh if you like, uh maybe give us a a sense of what you're hearing from the people that you hear this question from. I assume you wrote this book in part because you got that question a lot and I hear this asked all the time. How do I package my services? What should I include? What shouldn't I include? Should I should it be all you can eat? All of those questions. Uh so give us a bit of the background of what you hear around that question. I I wrote this question in full because I get asked that question so the book in full because I get asked that question so many times. And uh when I first started in the MSP space or coaching in the MSP space, uh I I thought that the biggest challenge everybody had was around marketing and sales and and attracting new clients. But this this question just kept getting asked and asked and asked and asked and that was how the heck do I price and package my plans and offerings? And and when I reflect back when I had my MSP, which I had for I was in the MSP space for 12, 13, 14 years, something like that. That was an enormous challenge for us in the space and I I went through 3,000 probably different variants of our pricing model, and tweaking and testing and trying and failing and doing all of these different things and always got it wrong and always figured out another way to do things. And uh so being in the the the space where I I now host a group of um or a community of MSPs around the world, that question gets comes up a lot and so that was the impetus to throw the book together to get all of my thoughts out and all of the different um lessons that I'd learned over the years out into one thing that people can go and quickly read in in 90 minutes. The real thing is it doesn't actually answer the question directly because there is no way to answer the question directly. There is no perfect pricing package, there's no perfect way to lay out your plans. It's there's best practices, there's there's things that you should avoid, but for every MSP out there, it depends on on your marketplace and who you're serving and your your maturity as a business, and your your sales skills and all sorts of different things is what it depends on as to how you price and package your individual plans. And so the book touches on different things to get people thinking about what they should be taking into account when they are coming up with their their packages. Yeah, and I think that's sort of the uh maybe the anti-climactic answer to this is people they they hum and ha and hand ring over how they should uh design their their offering, and they're looking for that perfect solution as if like that that, you know, here it is on a silver platter. This is exactly how your offering should look like. And and that unfortunately just doesn't sort of compute that way. That everyone will be slightly different and I've always found this sort of the fascinating thing about our industry in IT services, and especially managed services. I I I say that we all kind of do the same business, but none of us do it the same way, right? There's there's only so many sort of differences that you can have in a in a in a typical business, but uh everyone borrows from the same set of best practices, everyone attends the same conferences, reads the same information, and then the implementation of those ideas look completely different for a whole variety of reasons. So I think that's really interesting. So uh I'm sure you've asked you've been asked this as well that uh when people say, okay, okay, I get it. These are the best practices, but really, like what should I do? So what what would you say is sort of the best place to start? Maybe we'll start with uh uh sort of the the upstart solopreneur who's maybe expanding to add uh the the second and third tech and then after that we'll move up the chain and see if it looks a little different. Yeah. Yeah, so so first step, go and read the book. That's right. I can answer most of it for you. So so my my favorite area is the small MSPs. I call them nimble MSPs because they can move fast, they can test, they can tweak, they can try things. Once you get larger into the 30, 40, 50, 70, 80 seat size MSPs, it's much harder to test things. And so smaller MSPs, what I encourage is get some plans out there, ASAP and start testing and start getting feedback. Now what I encourage for smaller MSPs is to to approach what's typically heard of as the good, better, best methodology. Where you have a good plan, a better plan and a best plan and you hear lots of people in the MSP space saying, ah, you've got to go the all-in seat price uh in there. And I know you love the all-in seat price, Todd, and I love the all-in seat price as well. Uh however, for small MSPs or startup MSPs that are just understanding and just starting to understand their pricing model, I typically like to see a good, better, best model because it allows them to test different offerings and test different inclusions and and learn and gather feedback from what's working on on the different plans in there and how to position different things. And if you're in the early stages of your your pricing journey and you go to market with just one plan, then you've got you've got nothing to fall back on. You've got to try and sell that one plan and um and you don't know any data and you don't know any any feedback. You don't know what mistakes you might have made in that particular thing. And so I like the good, better, best thing for the other reason being is that it's it's fairly easy to sell with a good, better, best uh offering in front of clients, especially when you're on the early stages of your sales maturity. If you're only just starting out understanding the sales process and and how to take clients on an experience from from prospect to to closing the deal, it's often easier to help them close a deal or help you close a deal if you've got some multiple plans to help them pick from, rather than trying to to get them onto the one single plan. However, what I will say is that most MSPs should aim to mature to the single plan over time. And and that mean that takes not only some sales maturity, getting used to being able to go into an environment and selling people exactly what they need, but it also takes operational maturity in your business, in your service delivery and and what not as well. And so that you know your costs and you really understand your costs because there's there's nothing worse than going out into one of these like an all-in seat price plan and locking someone into a termed contract when you don't understand your costs in there very well. And uh locking yourself into what might be an unprofitable agreement for you or a a wildly profitable agreement that sees the client hate it and and churn out within a couple of months because they're you're not delivering enough for them. So so it's again, there's no perfect answer here. You may come in and start an MSP and go straight to the all-in seat price, but but typically the good, better, best offering is a great place to start from and and learn and go through and adjust and tweak things. And and there is a lot of sales psychology behind having three offerings out there with um price anchoring and how that works and and setting up different um pricing levels so that the high one in there makes the the middle one look cheap and and all that kind of stuff, which is called price anchoring. Which uh there's there's a lot of that stuff that goes to play with making it happen. And so my to answer that simply, if you're a small startup MSP or you're looking to get your your pricing, maybe you're still transitioning from break fix to cost to MSP, consider good, better, best plans and consider coming up with something where you can you can start to get them out there quickly and learn some lessons. Yeah, I agree. Like um we we were debating this uh in a in a tribal gathering recently, and and you suggested the idea of having the good, better, best is uh or having the all-in seat price uh assumes that there's some level of sales maturity. And I think that's a really good point because the nimble MSPs, uh a lot of people get into this this uh industry because they're technical people at heart. They're not necessarily sales people and if there's one area of sort of our industry that people legitimately struggle with is just a skill or a or a capacity that they don't have is sales and marketing. So I think it's a good point that, you know, they have to get comfortable with this. Um one that maybe we may differ on, I'm curious on on sort of your perspective on this is in that good, better, best or the sales offerings that they have, um and say that this is a person transitioning from the the T&M, uh should they have a retainer-based kind of monitoring solution, where they, you know, you pay me a very small amount for some tools, I'll I'll monitor your your network. I put that in quotes very uh very specifically. And then if there's any issues that pop up, then I'll come out and help you. Or are you better off just to have a solution that you are a managed customer? Do you you see any issues with having that sort of that blended break fix retainer model? I don't mind the retainer model. However, I like it to be unadvertised because you want to go for your best plans first. You're good at good, better, best plans first, but then you might come across a particular prospect that for whatever reason, maybe they've lost trust in IT because they've had some horrible partners or whatever, that they really need to take things slowly. And if that's the case and you you can see that there's light at the end of the tunnel and you can shift them across to gaining trust in you again, but they're not going to sign a good, better, best plan, then you might have an unadvertised monitoring and maintenance plan. Now, what I've I've seen a few MSPs do this extremely well where they go out to to to their clients and um when they're going across from the break fix to um to manage services transition, and they they come up with a a free monitoring and maintenance plan where what happens is um uh either free or extremely low cost, like a loss leader essentially. But what happens is the monitoring when monitoring alerts happen, they instead of the MSP seeing the monitoring alert, they come up with say they set up say 20 or 30 high critical monitoring things like running out of disk space and all those types of things that are are going to put your business offline. And they they set it so that the alert sends the client the email from their PSA saying, hey, Mr. or Mrs. client, this alert has just popped up on your network. If you would like us to or here's the type of impact it's going to have. If you would like us to remediate it, hit reply and say yes, and it will then automatically pop across onto our help desk system and we'll remediate it on a a prepaid block hours agreement. And I've seen a few MSPs use that very successfully, but because what inevitably happens is they get it on there and they get these 20 or 30 monitoring alerts set up and the first month or two go okay. And then by month three, the the primary contact at the business goes, can you just stop these alerts from coming through? They go, well, we can. That's what we've got to we've got a good, better, best offering for and we we move them across to that. So I do think there is scope for it. You've got to be careful though because um it can be hard to move people from that plan as well. And from a monitoring and maintenance plan and so uh be very tread carefully if you do go down that route. Um do it either as a temporary interim thing and put a timeline on it, or use it as a loss leader with some sort of thing in there so that it can can help gather some of the people that that may perhaps not be ready for managed services yet, because they don't understand the benefits of it just yet. It might be a three to six month journey for them to understand the benefits of it and to to be educated on it. Yeah, I like the idea of it being unadvertised because I always my issue with T&M and uh for people that haven't heard our previous discussion, it is about the transition from T&M to MSP, so you can look back at that episode uh previously where you were on and we we dug into that topic deep. But uh I find if people are doing sort of that blended model, it can get them stuck and the T&M uh can be very disruptive to a business that is not mature enough to be able to segregate those and understand that the the time and materials goes over here and does not disrupt the business that we're trying to build, which is managed. So if you're I think it's a both it appeals to the the lower uh maturity, the the lower the sort of the the less scalable businesses, um that uh if they're not careful, will sort of overwhelm themselves with that time and materials and not be able to bridge themselves towards that managed services. And I think that's why I tend to resist that model in general is I I find it's uh it's it's sort of gets you um more focused in the type of businesses that long-term you don't want. So as long as you can make that transition and understand how they're different and how you spend the time on them, um that that can be different. And the idea of using it as uh essentially an invisible offering, that uh if you see the client is actually a good fit for you long-term and there's just maybe some issues, but you'd like to put them on a prospecting list, then yeah, sort of get them on that funnel, uh build some relationship with them in the idea that you're eventually going to transition them to a fuller offering. So I think that's the I would agree with that as a a good solution to sort of bridge that gap between those two models. Yeah, and the um the the thing if you are offering a that hybrid where it's it's essentially time and materials with some sort of monitoring and maintenance stacked underneath it, is to make sure that there is a big gap between that and your managed offerings. And and things like I see too many MSPs, uh myself included for for quite some time, not make a big enough difference between their managed service plans and their time and material offerings. And so they would give things like immediate support to people on time and materials plans, which when they're not on a guaranteed response time offering. And so over time, we had to artificially stretch that gap between our response times for our guaranteed for our our premium care plans, which were our managed service plans, and what we called our casual offerings, which were the break fix clients. And um and so over time, it got to the point where if someone was what we called a casual client for whatever reason, they decided not to go to one of our premium care plans. We still had a few that we kept on, uh because we had one for instance that um used to purchase every two to three months, they'd purchase a $15,000 block of prepaid credit from us and uh and their head office, they were owned by a Japanese company over in Japan, and their head office had a rule that we're not going to sign contracts at all. And so we could not get them on a contract. It was physically impossible. They were next door to us, they were 100 meters down the road to us, and every three months they paid $15,000 in prepaid labor. Now, they knew that they got no guaranteed response times on that labor whatsoever, like our premium care clients. And they knew that we did zero monitoring and maintenance on their network, so things broke very regularly. And when things broke and they had outages, we had a a process in place where we charged them emergency labor fees. So they they knew that if their servers were down or whatever and they wanted fast support, then it's either a two-day wait because you're you're best effort when you're on casual, or you pay us a couple of hundred dollars and then we will treat that particular ticket as a an emergency labor rate ticket. And so we made it when we did have uh in the later years of my MSP, when we did have still those casual break fix clients, we made sure it was very on our terms and that there was a very defined gap between between break fix and and managed offering. And maybe a bit surprised that for a 15 grand uh prepaid labor account that you didn't make a a a a distinction for them and and maybe slide them into the SLA Q maybe. Well, it it would have been. Yeah, it is. Rules are rules and they to do it, they would have had to sign a prepaid thing. Like an agreement where they had to get automatically build and whatnot and they just would not do it. They only believed in in pre-paying these hours and they did it with every one of their suppliers. And um and it was it was crazy. We we were over there and now even some of the people over on the team uh were frustrated because they just knew that we wanted to get in there and proactively do stuff and plan these things and do all this stuff, but it just was not allowed. And um and it drove us mad as well. We would love to have got it in there, but uh and I suspect maybe over another year or two we might have got them to the point where they just they finally got it because they kept getting all these these crazy um bills for emergency labor rate all the time. They they'd they'd ping the emergency labor rates probably once every second week on on an issue. And that would that would drastically reduce those those blocks down, but it was crazy. So sometimes you have circumstances like that where it does make sense to keep one there on your terms, have the defined difference between the two and have it so that if they do want fast responses, make it so that they've got to pay the difference, because they're not paying to be to have the privilege of being a premium care client or a managed client in that case. Right. Another area that comes up I find is people, where do you feel on this that people feel if you're outside of a major metro center, you're kind of um out in maybe a rural area or small towns that they feel like the the price automatically needs to be lower. And if you hear some of the uh the experts in the in the field, I know Dipple rails against this idea uh vehemently that that your price should always be the industry standard and where you where you live is kind of irrelevant to what you should be charging. Uh what's your feeling on that? Do you feel like it should be different depending on region? I agree mostly, but I agree there's certain areas that that it just the marketplace would not handle things. However, in in the reality is most people, so if I look at a an MSP in a in like in a really rural area, like uh I used to live in a town of 3,000 people and there was an MSP in that particular town. And if I look at them and I knew that a lot of the people in that town, they would have struggled to have charged what I was charging in Sydney. And that's not because of their sales maturity, it's because of the maturity of the marketplace and what the marketplace was used to paying out there. Because all of the other people that they worked with out there were they were whether they were their accountant or whatever, they weren't charging Sydney rates, they were charging rural rates. However, what I will say is that that that point that I touched on then, that sales maturity has a big say in it. And and because managed services is not just about it's not it's not time. We're not creating time or we're not billing for time here, we're billing for value. And the more you get better at at being able to educate your clients around the value the value transition that's happening or the value transaction that's happening, the closer you're going to get to market rates. And so so Paul is I I completely agree with Paul Dipple in that um that the goal is should always be to get to market rates in your area, but sometimes it might take you a little bit longer to get there or sometimes you might have to to meet a little bit halfway depending on your particular area. And saying that, I spoke to an MSP about six months ago that was operating in a tiny little marketplace, something like three to 4,000 people and was doing $2 million in his MSP's turnover, because he owned the entire area, every single business worked with him because he he was known, everyone referred him, and he was doing two million with something like 23 or 27% Ebit in there. So he was throwing himself a cool half a million dollars a year out of this business in a tiny little regional town, charging premium prices because he understood his value proposition and um and it worked well. So I think I think if you were to look at it, probably 20% of it would be if you were to look at there being a price differential between the two. 20% of it would be because of marketplace differences and the buyers. 80% of it is just in our heads. And it's stuff that we've artificially fabricated. Oh, totally. Yeah. And also I think part of this distinction is what we talked about earlier is is just the maturity of the businesses both that you are as well as the prospects that you're engaging. Um and I often say that never be afraid to go up market, right? So I always encourage people to go into that more premium market, that premium pricing. And part of the reason why is that I would much rather have uh a a bit of a walled garden where you charge a premium price and that automatically uh uh eliminates a large section of the market. That these people just won't pay these prices. They're they're probably not the type of clients that you're trying to attract to that business. And people need to be comfortable with the idea that I'm going to have far fewer prospects, but the prospects that I have are probably higher margin. And the flip side of that is again, like if you maybe don't or you're not as comfortable with the sales process and you need a wider net to cast in order to build the business, then have a lower uh uh cost of sale. And so that is maybe the distinction there. Um and and you can choose to to go to into one side of that market or the other. Uh and maybe that's just a transition over time is you cast a wide net, then refine your offering, refine your sales process, start to understand how you do a value sale and then start to transition up market and eliminate or sell off the clients that you initially started with. So that's in my mind what I try to encourage people to do and how that relates to the smaller markets is the same, right? There's going to be those those few clients in that smaller market that if they understand the value that you're selling, then they're happy to partner with you at premium prices. It just means that instead of owning uh you know, say 100 clients in your area, maybe you have 20. But you make a really good bank off of those 20 clients and your headaches are probably lower. That's the sort of my idea. I focus a lot more on the operations. So I I'm really passionate about making sure that what you have works. The top line is a vanity number, but the bottom line is really what you're going to be looking at. And and the gross margin comes from probably having those those higher value offerings, right? Correct. And you look at um at people like Andrew Moon, who's one of our tribal elders inside the tech tribe. And uh and he had some clients where he did exactly that. He moved so far up the value ladder that he was getting over $500 per user in his seat price in there. Because he was he was doing home support for the high-end CEOs and all sorts of stuff and and packaged up as an entire agreement. He was getting a huge amount of money off them, but I think we we naturally as humans, we we go through that journey where we start off casting the wide net and getting everything in there and at least getting some revenue in the door, even though it's not perfect revenue. And then we as humans and as businesses, we mature over time. We go, ah, well now I we're at a point where we're now comfortable that we can get rid of that stuff. And it's like we move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs where right down the bottom, we're just throwing in every bit of revenue we possibly can just to survive and and just to to feed our family. And and we don't care whether it's crappy revenue and and low margin revenue and and painful clients. And then we just naturally as we go in a business, hopefully most of us, we should naturally gravitate further up that chain. And then we go, okay, well now now it's time to get rid of that one or it's now time to get rid of that plan or now it's time to to package this or now it's time to increase prices over here. And and in hindsight, I think every one of us will agree that when we do make those shifts in our business, it was always too late. Yes. Always too late. I know it for me it always was. I'd look at it and I'd make the change and I'd go, oh man, I should have done that sooner. It was easier than I thought. Yeah, and I think to your previous point, it's often the mental block. It's the, you know, when I encourage people to uh change the business model, change their pricing, uh you know, talk to that client that has a had a poor margin on their agreement. And they make a big deal of it in their head and then they go and have that conversation with the client and the client goes, you know what? I knew I was getting a good deal on this. I'm glad you finally came to talk to me about this, right? Like I swear 80 to 80% of the time, you make a mountain out of a out of a mole hill. And and it's all in your head that this is going to be oh such a problem, such a problem. And then you go have a quick conversation with them and they're like, yeah, okay, you know, it's not great. I don't want to pay more, but yeah, I understand. I want to stay a partner with you. This makes sense to me. Sure, let's do that, right? I call it head trash. It's head trash and we've all got these horrible head trash. I had a you just reminded me of a perfect example in my MSP that I'd been putting off for we had this once I started tracking my my gross margins in my agreements, once we got to that point in our business, I realized that we had this grossly unprofitable agreement. Most most of our agreements were sitting up at 60, 70, sometimes 80% gross margin mark. And we had this one that was like 10, 20% gross margins in it. And I'm there going, oh, but I love this client and I don't want to change things. And and we we luckily at that point, we also were we're using some um one of the called dashboarding tools that was allowing us to report on what was using most of the the data or most of the labor across that client. And it was line of business support and we had when we negotiated that agreement, we'd put in line of business support in there. And one of their apps was driving us crazy, driving our tech team crazy. And uh so I was able to have some quantitative data and for months and months and months, I just put it off and put it off and put it off. And and I finally went out to the client in one of their their TBR or QBR meetings and um and sat down and said, all right, and last but not least, we've got to talk about the pricing because we're not making any money off this anymore. And uh and I went in the whole thing and I displayed the thing that showed the report saying that like line of business app tickets are are just huge and we we're doing it because we love working with you guys. And she goes, she goes, you should have told me that six months ago because I knew that we were we were over it. And uh and I knew that you guys are are pedaling hard and doing the work and my team absolutely love working with you guys on it. And we hate the line of business vendor and and whatever. Just charge us more. We don't care. And I just went, you don't care what? Like I've been here for six months thinking, oh, we might lose the client and we might whatever. And it was just my head trash that got in the way of it. And she goes, just bill us like bill us double if you got to. We just want our team to know that your team is there helping us out through this because the vendor is crap. We know the vendor is crap. We can't change from that vendor because of of certain compliance in our industry. So we need someone like you guys to be there doing it and we want that vendor support still sitting in there. If you got to charge us double, charge us double. And she said, if you got to charge us triple, charge us triple. I don't care. This falls into uh my one of my favorite quotes from Tim Ferris is uh a measure of a person's success in life is often determined by the number of uncomfortable conversations they're willing to have. Yes. Oh yeah. Exactly in that category. Yeah. 100%. So one other one is um term contracts. This is yeah, so it's interesting. A lot of a lot of organizations, you know, naturally if they've not sort of looked at rejigging their their contracts or or uh kind of changing the scope of how they they determine their billing process, don't have terms, maybe they have 90 days, maybe they have 30, sometimes they'll have a year. And then the more mature groups tend to have those three-year term agreements. And I had an interesting conversation recently um with uh a lady named Linda Rose on mergers and acquisitions. And she suggested sort of counter to what we tend to hear in the industry is that the agreement length tends to not matter as much as people think when you're looking to be acquired. And I found that really interesting because you hear a lot in the industry, like you have to have three-year terms, you have to have three-year terms. And and I can see how that is true or not, depending on who's trying to value your organization. What's your feeling on terms? Yeah. Well, I I've got loads of loads of thoughts on this one. And and again, there's no perfect answer. Uh there is no two ways about it. Having termed contracts will in the vast majority of cases value your business more. When I sold my business, uh funnily enough, we we had we had 35 people doing due diligence on our business when we sold. 35 other MSPs doing doing pre-diligence at the pre-diligence stage before we sold. And out of that 35, only about 10 to 15 asked us even if our agreements were termed contracts. And the person that bought us that gave the better deal above everybody else, uh did not even ask. They didn't even know whether we had term contracts or not in there. So it's not relevant 100% of the time, but it is in the further you move up into the mid-tier space, the more it becomes relevant. Because in the mid-tier space and and I this is why I like the term nimble MSP because I love I love the nimble MSPs, the smaller MSPs, because they can typically provide this awesome level of customer customer service to their clients. Mid-tier MSPs often struggle with that customer service level and uh and some mid-tier MSPs have to keep their clients via contract terms, which is horrible. But it's how they keep their clients out there is via contract terms, not by providing an awesome level of service. And so so they go out and they go, oh, we're going to buy another MSP to tack another $5 million onto our our revenue. We're going to have to find someone that's got contracted terms in there so that we don't lose them all because we we know our service is not amazing as well. And we know we're going to lose them shifting them across to it. And um so it becomes a bigger thing in the mid-tier space. Um what's one of the things that's that I encourage MSPs as well is to to consider that when you're starting out, you as you said, Todd, you hear everywhere, like you must have terms and you must have three-year terms. And to me, it's not black and white because it comes down to where you are again in your journey. And if you're just starting out as an MSP, the last thing you ever want to do is go out and throw some packages out into the wild and and sign clients onto three-year terms and then realize on month two that they're unprofitable for you. Because that's the the fastest way to send you out of business, right? And so I I encourage MSPs, if you're starting out and you're getting used to your pricing and your packaging and you're you're not completely confident in your costs, don't sign terms just yet. Sure, it's going to make a a little impact into your business valuation if you sold right now, but you're probably if you're starting out, you're probably not at the point where you're wanting to sell at the moment anyway. And and you're going to be providing that higher level of service, it's going to keep the the client sticking around. You don't need the terms to keep them sticking around. And then again, you mature to terms. And you might get two years into your journey and you say, okay, well now I understand my costs very well and I'm happy to sign a three-year agreement, because I know it's going to maybe I'm going to exit in another two or three years and and I know it's going to it's going to shift the value of my business. And you go out and then you you negotiate with your clients to get them onto contracts and you might do it with discounts, you might do it with free months, you might do it with whatever way you do it in there. But mature into it again is what I say. Don't don't try and go out there and do it immediately and perhaps send yourself broke out there because it ain't fun. So this I think really encapsulates sort of a something that I find prevalent in the industry is people go onto Reddit or talk to other people in the industry at uh conferences and things and they look for this type of advice. They're saying like, like what should I do here? And people are very are very open in our industry, which is one of the beauties of the industry that we're in. Is you ask a question, people are more than willing to share with you. But I think people need to be cautious with how they utilize the advice and where that advice comes from. Because as in most business advice, the answer is is largely it depends, right? And that's the distinction here. I think that maybe we're trying to draw out is when you're smaller, do this and that maybe makes some sense. But even then, we're not going to give you a prescription for it. And then when you're bigger, maybe you do this. But again, it's it's a it's a sort of a personal choice and there's a lot of factors that play into whether or not those best practices actually fit you and your business, right? Yeah, correct. And one of the other places that I see termed contracts happen a little bit more as well, or where there's a need for them is when you get into the the larger client size as well. And not only does the client uh the client is some in some circumstances is the one that's actually pushing for the term contract because they've got board mandates that they need contracted agreements with all of their vendors in there. Because they don't want to go and have to shift vendors every couple of years as well. And so that that typically I see that come in at the the kind of 150 to to 500 seat range. You kind of start to see those those things pop in where where it's not the MSP pushing for the term contract. It's actually the client itself pushing for the term contract and it makes complete sense. Yeah, right on. All right, so we'll look to wrap up. Uh Nigel, this has been a lot of fun as it always is. Um so uh obviously encourage people to check out the previous podcast that we had uh on Evolve Radio. And definitely check out the book. Um the package profit uh package price and profit. Package price profit. You can get it from I think it's the tech tribe.com/book will redirect you to the Amazon page where you can go and grab a copy. Perfect. So that's the the first call to action would be to to check out the the link which we'll provide in the show notes uh for the episode as well. And obviously if people have not heard of the tech tribe, it's an awesome community that uh I would largely encourage people to to check out. Uh it's very accessible and the community is excellent at sharing information and you guys have really turned on the jets at providing some really high value stuff. Like the uh just amazing materials that you provide basically for free as a part of the membership. So uh really, really thank you for kind of what you're contributing back to the community and uh really encourage people to check that out. Any parting words of wisdom from you either on the tribe or other things? Uh I think to to go and join the tribe, you've got a link set up at the techtribe.com/todd, don't we? Yeah. I think we've got something set up there. So if you want to check it out, go there. Um my parting words is is just go out there and and if you if you're struggling with how to price and package your things, go out there and get something out there and realize that in in the grand scheme of things, we often get too caught up in the weeds of things. And the reality is is that quite frankly, we just need a business that is got revenue coming in and cost of goods going out and profit left over. And don't get too caught up in the weeds of trying to make it the absolute perfect pricing model or the perfect package or the perfect inclusion or making sure your gross margins are exactly within what you hear other people's are. Just go out there and get your things out there and then make a commitment to slowly improving things each and every month from then on in. Yeah. Iteration. We're coming in industry of logical people that want it to be perfect. Perfect first go and it's not possible. It's just get out there and my whole theory in my my MSP in the last couple of years was that we just operated like like the Kaizen theory. Like um Kaizen or Kaizen, I don't know how to pronounce it. Like uh like the Japanese companies and Toyota used to adhere to, where it's just continual incremental improvement. We'd get something out and then we'd figure out to how to improve it. That might be a checklist and we'd get the first version of our checklist out and it was horrendous. But then the next time we went through, we added a step and the next time we went through, we added a step. And after a year or two of of doing this continual incremental improvement on our pricing and our packaging and our monitoring and our maintenance and our checklist and everything, we had some awesome stuff and so that's my encouragement. It's just tiny little baby steps, continually incrementally improving and and you will create something that is far far greater than what you ever thought you would be able to. Awesome. Really appreciate it, Nigel. All the best. Thank you. Thanks for having me on.