ERP070 - Lessons learned building an MSP

But what if you have 40 people or 30 people or 25 or 15, whatever that number is at that million dollar mark, right? I think it's like 20. So let's say you have that kind of head count, things that used to be so organic now have to be planned. I swear to God, and everybody can laugh at me for this, but it was right around that million dollar mark where I said, do we even want to be a process-oriented company? That's a really good question. I swear to God, that was an actual utterance out of my mouth in a meeting. Welcome to Evolved Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. I'm your host Todd Kane. Today on the podcast, I'm joined by Matt Lee, director of Technology and Security with Iconic IT. Matt and I chat about his experience and lessons learned in growing an MSP from a handful of staff to a multi-million dollar business. We talk about staffing, team structure, client management and tech stack much more. There are a ton of insights that you may find familiar in your growth story. And there are also some great takeaways that could help you in any stage of your business as well. Matt's a great guy, very open and honest, and this was a fun discussion that I'm sure you'll enjoy. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. It really helps to spread awareness and bring more listeners to the show so we can share the message with more of the community. Now, on with the show. Joining me on the podcast today is Matt Lee, director of Technology and Security and CSP with Iconic IT. Welcome, Matt. Thanks, Todd. It's nice to be here. I appreciate you having me on. Absolutely. So, you're a industry veteran. I wanted to spend some time and chat with you about something that people would probably find familiar. And that's basically the growth of your experience in the trenches and working in an MSP and building an MSP and some of your experiences in that field. You've sort of started from humble roots in a small organization and now work in a much, much bigger organization. I wanted to sort of map out your path in the growth. So, what did it look like in the early days of your MSP and your IT security career? Yeah, absolutely. You know, I I started at a time when there were six people that worked at a break fix company that did block time, right? So we were, you know, sub a million dollars in revenue. And I was just technician number two, right? Or or number whatever it is, I suppose. And we came in and and as we kind of started down the path of, you know, you have these assigned clients and they're the ones you're going to go work on and maybe you visit them three times a month or you do these things that are part of that block time. these things that are part of that block time and, you know, you might work on different things, but very quickly there, we started to say we wanted to be an MSP. It was right there in 2011 or so and we said, you know, we're going to we're going to have seats on a bus if if you remember the old term. And we started discussing what would it look like. And what's really cool is because we were such a small organization, basically whoever wanted to do the work, kind of built out what the offering would be and I I wanted to do the work, right? I never I never shied away from from a request, right? In fact, sometimes that's much to my own chagrin. But essentially, you know, we went from trying to do these block times to say, hey, let's make it to where someone does an all you can eat contract. We're going to choose some things and and what was really cool is we did choose a lot of things in the very beginning that we didn't know at the time but really helped us, right? Like we controlled the firewall, we controlled the antivirus. We controlled the DNS protection. We just had a lot of things that we put into our seat price very early that made it somewhat expensive and harder to sell quite frankly, initially. But what we realized out of that was this normalization aspect, right? As we went down the road. that made things easier to manage as you had scalability. But at the time, we basically started being able to do projects that we wouldn't have necessarily had done because we would have sold it. We would have had to have convinced, you know, mom and pop organization to do something that they don't find value in and I'm not good enough at that time to explain. the reason the value is there if I'm honest. And it was basically just a very kind of intimate relationship where immediately it let a technician that wasn't overburdened and oversold to go do stuff proactively. And it was it really was the magic of what we wanted to do. There weren't many things we understood and we really were faking it till we made it, right? I mean, I think there's that that piece. So that was the beginnings, right? It was seven or so of us. And and it grew, you know, not too much in that first, you know, year or so. We started selling, we got a pretty, you know, good adoption rate with clients. But over that next two years, we gradually sold all or phased out the ones that were block time that wouldn't sell. And and we just basically stopped supporting them. And at that time we were right at that million dollars in revenue mark, I think is is kind of where we hit that. We acquired a small MSP that was also in a very similar kind of nascent state. But, you know, if you describe the client experience at that time, right, it's glorious. You have this instant transition from a kind of block methodology where people had to count their hours and to, you know, initially a really high consumption. But also a lot of things got done that that needed to be done that made the consumption drop, right? You fix a server, you implement a better project, you do those things. And we really were like all inclusive. It was a really bad, I think decision at the time, like all the project time that we wanted to do just got made it just instantly free, right? if you will and and and I was one of those people just wanted to go do a lot of that work. So the clients felt this really intimate experience. They got more than what they were supposed to. They had all the new tools and protections that we put in place, right? Like it was actually a really good, you know, thing at that time. But if you fast forward, you know, just a little bit and you start getting into this kind of growth phase where you have, you know, let's say 20 employees, right? So you've now moved forward a smidge and and you're dealing with them probably in some form of a group. Like there aren't clients necessarily directly assigned anymore. At least that was one of the follies we made, right? So we we now had a pool of technicians that served all tickets coming in. You know, at that time we didn't even have a help desk. It really still was just picking and pluck, right? And anything that came in. We then developed a help desk, we dedicated a couple of technicians to sit and and take the tickets and triage and do some of that distribution. And so now you're already starting down this road of like not having a go-to person defined necessarily for a client. My guy, my IT guy. That's what they like to say, right? Yeah. Yeah, you lost that my IT guy or gal feeling. And so we, you know, we actually saw CSATs drop. We also had some really interesting failures like along the way and and I'll caution anybody listening to this that, you know, make sure you find some methodology to keep your agreements growing with your clients. If you're not doing that, if you're trying to do some kind of methodology to assess them every year or pass on a 3% growth. If we're doing our jobs right, they're growing. They're adding bodies. They're making more revenue, right? Like ultimately, if we do our jobs right, our clients will grow and we missed that. And we missed that to a lot of revenue. We missed that for about two years. So this means like you weren't adjusting the agreements, like you signed them for 20 and all of a sudden they were 25 and you'd not adjusted the agreement. Yeah, this is a really common issue. Yeah. Oh, it was brutal. I mean, it really was brutal because you realize that there's unhappy clients and a lot of things you're coming into a lot more load that you don't have the revenue to support, right, a W2 multiplier increase if you will. And so, you know, there was there was a lot of things going on and, you know, Chris got involved in Robin Robbins and was doing a lot our CEO and was doing a lot of growth. And so we grew through the 1 million and and 3 million and 5 million, you know, space and six and, you know, before our merger, which, you know, I've actually been at the same company now for, you know, 10 years. since it was those seven people to now the 173 that we work with, you know, today, I think is the count. But back to those, you know, days in that 3 million range when you when you're you got a lot of growth. You've got 30 or so employees probably if I had to guess. And in that space, you have admin staff now, you probably potentially have dedicated sales staff. You should, I would wager at that space. That was very helpful, right? But, you know, the client experience blew up for a little bit. And one of the things that we did to solve that ultimately, and it's still in place today was this concept of pods. In the sense that you would have an infrastructure admin if you will. you know, the primary relationship for the client. And then you'd have a four-person team of system admins, right? Maybe more entry level technicians potentially, not necessarily as seasoned in the business conversations, obviously, and having that with the client. So you'd have those four and another pod and those two IAs share the four sys admins. And so what you now have is a person, a backup person and a group of persons that are always involved. They see the same names on tickets, they see the same thing. And what you allow to happen is by using, you know, Ford or the I don't remember what the term breaks down to, but all the pieces of data about the clients to build relationships, you now can form that intimacy yet again, even at scale. And so that's one of the things that we implemented around that time frame when we were getting to those lower CSAT scores, clients were unhappy. So we were able to implement the pod system and it's actually fixed a lot of that. So you did vertically integrated pods where like the T1, the T2 and the T3 were essentially within that pod with dedicated clients then? Yep. So I usually approach this in two ways. My preferred approach is a flat tier one structure. And then the pod started at the tier two and sort of launched tickets up from there. No, that's fair. That's a description we're doing because we still have a help desk in front of that. Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I apologize. I misstated, but yes, you're accurately describing that. No, no, just clarifying because both of those like both of those are legit ways to approach this. One of the things I'm always I'm somewhat cautious about in having a vertically integrated pod is you end up with an imbalance where you you've got sort of two or three really noisy clients in one pod and the other pod is kind of, you know, all things are well and got my feet up on my desk. We've shifted pods around a bunch, right? Like you're 100% right. I'm not as close now to the tactical operational aspects of that. But, you know, even when I was, they absolutely would have times where you're like, okay, let's look at the consumption. Let's look at the rim, right? Let's look at our reactive hours per endpoint monthly. And let's see who are those really expensive clients. And that's when they'll start looking at the methodologies to reduce that or redistribute that potentially. So I know that you've hit the nail on the head on that. The help desk, you know, bringing it back to that tier one. I don't know if I define them as tier one, two and three because we've actually staffed our help desk with really tier threes probably in most cases or at least in one of our orgs. And so those help desk people were capable of doing Of session builds, right? I mean, so you do get a lot of massive triaging. They have scopes, they have limits of the things they should be working on. They have things that need to go different places. But, you know, I would define it more just as triage, right? It's that helping always have a place for somebody to go look at something and determine priority and filter. If technician number two, who's a tier two or tier three person, that's our IA, has got their hands in a server closet and not their cell phone on their on their body looking at it. Somebody else can triage that and can give some pretty good help there. And and so yeah, but what we did the pods for, if I would define it is really like a tier two type technician and then a tier 1.5 type technician, right? So you you're you're almost like vertically integrated but backwards, I suppose. And the IAs are the ones that are there to run the relationship. See the common, find the root cause analysis, do those things. We also have a concept of tax. And the tax concept was a technical alignment coordinator if you will. And essentially it was just somebody that goes and looks at are the things that should be in place, in place. And are they in place correctly, right? And that changed so much. We didn't call it that back then. I don't remember what we called it, but it essentially was someone that that was dedicated to checking and just being that validation circuit, right? with these clients and it it helps to normalize the client experience because you could have one pod where someone's not performing. That helps find that, right? Because the alignment side of that is going to say, okay, are we doing this? Why do they still have this firewall when we're paying for one? Why do they still have, you know, those type of things? But it shifted so much. And I think the biggest thing that I could like rewind it all and say, how do we get to where we are and why were we so successful? was we went through a million iterations. We failed 999,000 times. Right? Like we we just kept trying to fix it assuming it was always broken. And it is always broken. I think that's an important sort of realization or reflection as well. Because I find a lot of people in companies are so cautious and wanting to get it right that they sort of do analysis paralysis. And they never really make that forward momentum. And you're right. Like I had a similar experience in the MSP that that that I helped grow is that like we tried everything. We were in HTG, we were in true methods, we were in service leadership, like everywhere we could scrap together some information and just iterate was was I think a big component of that success. And it's not how should we do this and I won't do anything until I get it. I know I have it right. Like it's never going to be perfect, right? So I think that's an important reflection. Perfect is the enemy of good. Yes, right? Perfect is the enemy of good. Yes, that's right. That's right. So growing through that $1 million point because like we discussed before, like that's a that's sort of an important period. And where a lot of sort of the small growth organizations tend to get hung up. What were some of the things at that size kind of growing past that that initial $1 million where you sort of stopped, looked around and said, things are not really working the way that they used to and maybe we need to start to iterate. What did that look like? Yeah, I mean it really was the alumnus of those three you just mentioned, right? Like we we were true methods, we are HTG, we were SLI. Actually, now that I've said HTG, I have to do push-ups, but um, you know, we you're you're 100% right is I think the biggest one is the communications inside an organization. were the biggest challenge at a million dollars as I remember. In the sense that if you're in a room with five people and you holler, dang, Bob's down again. I'm going to go check on this. Everybody knows Bob's down. It's done. They know Bob's down. That is communicated and efficiently dealt with. But what if you have 40 people? or 30 people or 25 or 15, whatever that number is at that million dollar mark, right? I think it's like 20. So let's say you have that kind of head count, things that used to be so organic now have to be planned. I swear to God, and everybody can laugh at me for this, but it was right around that million dollar mark where I said, do we even want to be a process-oriented company? That's a really good question. I swear to God, that was an actual utterance out of my mouth in a meeting. Yeah, no, I've heard that before. Yeah. I worked I worked at an organization where the former CEO, he was a government engineer. And therefore, he hated process. Anytime we talked about process and the importance of process for growing an organization, he defended against it. So eventually I just started calling it framework. It was kind of the same thing, but it was looser. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. It just worked on the mind hack. That's an important reflection, like how do we want to go about this, right? I think that's again, a really important reflection. And looking back now, there's zero possibility of scale without process. And and it's one of those things where, you know, I like to tell people there's three things that you have, right? You have the what I know bucket, what I don't know bucket, and what I don't know I don't know bucket. With what I know, I fairly know it. I mean, other than the whole, what is it? Kruger Dunning's problem, but what I know, I know, yeah. What I don't know, I can usually contextualize off of what I know and that's how I found I don't know it, right? It's something you've identified that gap somehow. But what you don't know you don't know is the stuff that is straight up paradigm shifts that you cannot even think of. You have no clue because you are not an insider. It's similar to like walking into a club where there's always a secret handshake and you don't know that. You just have no way to know that because you weren't part of the club, right? And so I would say there's so much in your don't know you don't know bucket at those early stages. Even with all that guidance, it was still a lot of iteration. I mean, we were an EOS company. That was probably the biggest and most fundamental aspect was having some type of an operating system, right? How are you going to iterate? How are you going to make it so the loudest jerk in the room and for those that are just hearing this on audio, I'm pointing at me. isn't the one that always wins the discussion. It has to have some methodology of of discussion framework and that was huge for us between process and then having a method to iterate. Actually being purposeful on working on your business, not in your business, I think is the, you know, the the statement, but you know, that was that was massive. Did you did you guys have something similar in the company you worked with as well? Yeah, definitely. So we were a Gazelle's organization, which is the Vern Harnish system. It's basically the predecessor to EOS. So Gino Wickman, creator of EOS was sort of the right hand in the Gazelle's organization. And then broke off and kind of built his own system. So they're very, very similar. Yeah. So once I found traction, people were telling me like, you know, the system that you use here, like it's EOS, right? And I'm like, well, not really. And I'm like, I haven't even read the book. And then I went and read the book. I was like, wow, this is spooky. Well, and nobody does EOS anyway, right? Like nobody's 100% doing EOS. Even with an implemented organizer and manager, like it's always bastard EOS in my opinion, at least mine is. That's exactly how I describe mine is like it looks like a bastardized version of traction because it's a bastardized version of Gazelle's anyway. Yeah. Right. That's funny. But it did help. I mean, having the ability to look at issues and see them as things that are rocks that need to be solved and broken down into into pieces. Like it helps you become more of a business, right? Like one of the challenges of of serving SMBs and being an SMB is that you often don't have business acumen. You often don't have service acumen. You often don't have a lot of the things that are requisite to succeed and in order to do that, you have to flex those muscles and you have to get them bigger. Yeah, most people that that start an MSP don't come out of business school. They are former techs themselves, right? So, yeah, as you said, no business background. Yeah. I think the other important part about having some type of framework or EOS system to to give you some guidance is especially in the early days and some of this never goes away, but defending against the shiny object syndrome. God bless us. Yes. Yeah. And all the entrepreneurs in the room know exactly what I'm talking about. Like, oh, oh, hey, we should go do this. And then three weeks later, oh, oh, hey, we should go do this. We still have an AV department, so I get it. I understand. Yeah. So that I assume that those systems helped you guys to at least stay somewhat focused through a quarter with major initiatives that you worked on rather than just sort of jumping from thing to thing to thing, whatever was the the shiny object in the room, right? Yeah, I mean if you just had that alone, it probably wouldn't be as effective. I think with accountability and that, yes, those two combined, right? So the the peer groups, accountability groups, whatever you want to call them, it's really just somebody else to go, hey, you said you're going to do this. You agreed it was good for you. Have you done that? No? Okay, then we're going to publicly shame you and you'll either stop coming or you'll start doing it. Right? Like that's the that is the beauty of an accountability group. I think that without that, we probably would have you know, squirreled a bit more if you will. But yes, I would say those two combined kept us extremely focused on what mattered and what needed to be dealt with. You know, I will say there's there's times where I look back and, you know, if I was writing a book about this, like there were such obvious decisions right in front of us for like three years sometimes. you know, sometimes like I think we had a problem employee that we literally talked about in leadership for two years, year and a half. Like he was so good at closing tickets. He was so good with the customers, but he was sick every other day. And and was like every Monday. Yeah, and he would come back and close two times the number of tickets with high efficacy. And we we could not fire the guy and I'll tell you firing the guy was the best decision we ever made. 100%. Yeah. It was the under predictability or the unpredictability of of that person showing up and the load it bore on the team, but we stared at that for two years. I mean, I'm, you know, sad to say and I just I guess you're going to fail. It's the other side of this is you are going to definitely fail. But that's another really important one that I think a lot of people need to hear because I see this time and time again in my work. people not recognizing, you know, that that person is not as defensible as it may seem, right? Like, well, we can't possibly get rid of this person because of all of these things that they do. One of my favorite expressions around this is culture is defined by what you tolerate. And I find owners defend or sort of macerate on these issues for far too long. And what I often find is once they actually like sort of saddle up and decide to get rid of that person, the teams comes to them quietly and says, oh, thank God. Yeah. That person was such a nightmare, right? Like, yeah, they were good at what they did. But if they're a net negative on the culture of the organization, it's not worth it. Like pressure. You can find somebody else to step up and take that rain. They're not a unicorn. And you're likely pushing that person down artificially by maintaining, right? The other person that could rise up into that position and You know, actually you bring up a really good point that's pretty funny because I was the always the one that said yes. And so what that meant was, hey, we need somebody to do this tonight. Yes. Hey, we need to do this. Yes. Hey, we need to do this. And so I always said yes. It wasn't it was just it was just the way my brain works. I want the knowledge. I want the framework capability. I love that you chose to use framework with your boss, but I want that in my head. That's how I that's how I I work. And so what that meant though was there was always a yes. So no hard problem went unsolved. There just wasn't that challenge. The issue is if you ever try to to move or abdicate from that position, you know, I went through a life plan. You guys can laugh at me if you will, but No, those are important. I I went and sat in Iowa, Clarinda, Iowa, I think it is. And went through a life plan and decided that my Habu, my highest and best use was not still maintaining client systems at that time. And this was when we were in like that three to five million dollar range and it was like, listen, we need you to be in R&D, we need you to be, you know, kind of a a high-level tier three resource. We need you to be and so as I tried to to take off some of the duties I was doing, I didn't realize how much I had artificially suppressed the capabilities of the other technicians. Because I just would do it. And so their growth didn't have to be there. They didn't have to go figure out the VLANs in VMware or didn't have to go figure out, God bless us how to upgrade a Zen server or, you know, they they didn't have to deal with with things that were complex because they would just pass it off and I would probably say, you know, back to the original point, it's very important to allow others to flourish and grow and to allow people to have some hope for another position, another role, a growth opportunity. You know, as you start getting bigger, it's really tough because you have the syndrome where you should be paying more probably for most of your employees and you can't viably make the hit to do that in an argument. And and I think there's some challenges there too. So I think that that you hit on something as well. Like I describe sort of the value that an employee gets in an organization is like a pie. And a section of that pie is pay, but it's the only one that they sort of tend to sort of ask because it's the one that they feel that they can they can have some influence or some input in. But there are other things like the challenge, the lessons that they can learn, the growth of their career path, like all of those things are really important considerations. So that sort of does lend me to something else I wanted to ask you about is as you were growing through that state and sort of started to recognize like I need to challenge other people to step up into the roles that I need to delegate. How did you grow your leadership team as you guys were getting bigger? Was it intentional or you hired people externally or how did you scale up kind of the internal staff to take on the the roles that you started to need as you grew bigger? Everybody that's in leadership today was there in that seven employees in that org. So I would say that we definitely trained up from inside. I wouldn't say it was intentional. I wouldn't give ourselves that level of credit. I would absolutely just say we just filled the void. I mean in all reality, right? Nicholas Herrera was employee number two. He's the general manager in Wichita now. He was the person in charge of operations in Wichita when it was a single company. He was my boss, you know, for my entire career with them there at in Wichita at that time before I went corporate. And, you know, Shane is our service manager and he he's been there for X as many years. I think he was employee number three or maybe he was even number two or one, but Keith Host has been there since year one. I mean, the people all grew into those leadership roles and and I'll be honest with you, I think in some ways are ill-fitted for them to each of us, myself included. I would just say that it's kind of a grassroots thing. It's almost a magical cultural thing. that four separate MSPs all had, it was just strange. I mean, right? You you have leadership people that that were there. Now we we have hired some leadership people now after the merger that that brought us into to that, but predominantly everybody's still an internal employee that that worked at one of the orgs. I mean, we're we're kind of just like every MSP, but we just kept growing. And I think we did have purposeful leadership people come in and train us. We did hire people to do the Larry Little stuff. We had, you know, different things to try to educate ourselves as leaders. So we definitely did the things. I just maybe it was more purposeful by our CEO and it's not in my frame of reference. So I don't want to steal from his credit from Chris if it was something more purposeful. But we certainly took the time, spent the time, rented an an alternate place to go do our quarterly meetings, spent the time doing the actual flexing of the muscles of growing the business as a leadership team. And we brought new people into the team. We we we kind of voted on it, you know, like an island. Hey, we want to add this person or not, right? And you know, some that we made some real mistakes on and and some that could have really destroyed us as a company. But we screwed up enough and just enough to make it. if that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. It's a razor edge for sure. So what about the technology side of things? Like what what were some of the sort of the growths and and changes that you guys saw and reflected on and and the changes that you made as as the company grew and how you relied on technology. You you talked about sort of that technology advisory role that you had within the pods to kind of work on standardization. What what did that look like and how did you sort of land on your tech stack and then smooth out that standardization, especially as you got bigger? Well, that's that wouldn't say it has any past tense, but it's it's a constant evaluation. I mean, I think the thing is, you if I could do it again, I certainly would have never named a product. I certainly would have never skewed part of my stack as a product. I'd call it advanced email scanning, not iron scales, right? And and I I think there's a lot of value in being able to be flexible in what you consume. as things change. The clients tend to not care, right? Like they don't really care what product you use unless you're in kind of midmarket or enterprise, they might ask, but yeah. Yeah. But in small to mid, even in the in the lower end of mid, you know, sub 300 employees, they don't care. I mean, they might ask, but ultimately it's part of what I'm supposed to provide. And so as time went on, you know, we first started by grabbing just whatever the box deal was, right? Think about what that time was in 2011. You had, you know, connect wise standing up and saying, hey, if you sign this deal today, we'll get you these 900 things and you know, and so ultimately, it started that way, less purposeful. As we've gone through now, we align with with cyber security frameworks and and try to make sure that we're crossing enough of the core components. For example, we just upgraded to Sentinel One complete from Sentinel One so that we could get deep visibility and meet the checkbox for most clients for a a SIM capability in some ways. But yeah, it's always changing. When we first did it and before security was a thing, because I do want to speak to this, like how do you deal with for the client? This need to increase the stack, right? When you find out you have material holes in the stack, and you were in a sell to model to the client for those holes and maybe you didn't have a candidate or maybe you just didn't sell anything. They didn't buy it. You give them a choice, they they won't consume it nine times out of 10, it seems in your mind. But one of those great examples where that's wrong was we decided we needed email backup, right? The email backup was a critical thing because Office 365 in their service agreement says, hey, we don't back up your email. Like we're not we have some redundancy, that's what we do, but we don't back it up. It's not a backup. Just pause on that for the people that don't know this. I still find that this this is a thing that that most people know, but I still find there's a few people that don't know this. that say that again, Office 365 is not backed up and neither is G Suite. Like this is up to you. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, carry on. Well, well stated. No, no, good. So we we just said, okay, we're going to send an email out or a letter out and an email. We did several correspondences on it. But they just says, hey, we're turning on email backup for you. You have 30 days to let us know you do not want it. And we will take it off. It'll be $3 a user added on to your Office 365 price. You'll see that on your next invoice. So what we did, we just sent out this letter, yeah? That was bold. We had three people decline. Three. Everyone else consumed it. We we added 18,000 in revenue by just saying next, we're turning this on. And I think what a lot of people have is they're they're afraid to be prescriptive. Yes. Right? They're afraid to just say, yeah, here's what you need to do. Right? My doctor, I I've said this and this adage gets worn out, but maybe your listeners haven't heard it. But I like to make it like professional services and think of doctors. Think of the sense that, you know, a doctor doesn't sit in that waiting room with a bad revenue year. And go, man, I don't want to lose Matt as a patient, but I got to tell him that he's fat and he has high blood pressure. I'm just going to tell him about the blood pressure. I'm going to get him on the pills. We won't deal with the fat thing because I don't want to insult. Not a fucking chance. That's not what a doctor does, right? This doctor just comes in and says, hey, listen, Matt, people that have higher obesity are going to die like they have higher obesity. You need to solve it. People have high blood pressure die like people with high blood pressure. You need to solve it. Here's the thing you need to take and you need to go to the drugstore. He doesn't go, hey, Matt, you know, we need to check and see if this is going to be on your affordability plan. No. Those aren't any part of what they do. They don't talk about the price. They don't get in any way about that. It's it's not their their job and we don't expect it to be. Why? Because we do hold their advice in high regard. We care about and trust in our own ability to die, right? And so we have this this need for doctors. Yet we're in the same damn space with our clients. And I'll get on my soap box on this, but we are the only way our clients are going to have a chance in the SMB space of surviving the breaches and the things that are happening today. Period. That's the only way. Period. No other way to say it. The automation and speed of the increasing of speed of the attacks is massive. And I'm not trying to live in a fear uncertainty and doubt. I'm just giving empirical data, right? That we are seeing more and more sophisticated attacks happening faster and faster. So that being said, right, we we know that these clients need that and yet we can't walk in and just say, I'm turning on email protection. Why? Why do we find a failure there? It's because we don't believe it. We ourselves are either ignorant, we don't believe it. We have chosen to be willfully ignorant or we certainly need to grow our skill sets. And it's probably some combination of all of those, present company included. Yeah. I think that's super important because I think you're right. Like I I see people, you know, hand wringing about the necessary changes that they need to make in an environment. And I think where people fail in the sales pitch around this is not being prescriptive. Like you're in the room because you're the trust, you know, trusted advisor is a terrible term and but no one has a better term for it either. But you're the professional that knows this stuff. Like they're not IT experts. So, you know, I think a lot of people go to the client and say, you know, we we think you should do this. Is that okay? Like they're looking for some level of approval from the client. The client doesn't know. Whereas if you come with confidence and say, look, this is an issue. And you these all your your email is not backed up. So what I'm going to do is is add this product line. This is how much it's going to cost and this is what it'll do for you. Make them say no. Right. And your experience is most people go, oh, that makes sense. Okay, sounds good, right? Same thing with like increases to contracts, all of those things, right? We did. Yeah, I'll I'll take that same statement forward, right? We we did the same thing just recently on on advanced email protection for for iron scales. We were having a lot of business email compromises just recently and we went out to the Wichita org and the Wichita org is used to this. We'd already had a cadence of being massively prescriptive. And so they just said, hey, we're turning on, we're going to give you 30 days free or 60 days free. I don't remember what they did. We paid for a month or two. And we're going to help protect you and this is why you need it and here's a video and we went on an education campaign. And I think that's what this comes back to. One of the challenges in our industry is that there is no other industry that a CEO has the pleasure of saying that's the smart guys and gals that do that. There's not another one. If you go look at a a CEO in a trucking company, they'll know the pressure of the third dump truck, right? Like on the PSI of the hydraulic line. They know what type of fluid it takes. They know the schedule of when they'll be available. They know their shop time and scalability needs. They are involved in that as if it matters to them. Yet technology, they've spent their lives since E date saying, we're going to let those nerds over in technology. They're smart enough to get this stuff figured out. Why in the hell have we chosen an industry where we're going to ignore learning? as a C suite in the SMB world. And I think part of our job is educators. Part of our job is not only to be prescriptive, my doctor doesn't come in and go, hey, you have this very mysterious disease, take this pill. They spend the time if they're good at what they do telling me about it and explaining it to me in a way that I can comprehend what my life might be like based on these things and these variables. And what my choices might be if I don't do that. If I decide to say no to the surgery, here's your outcome. And it's not fear, uncertainty and doubt. It's not all this crap about fud, it's fucking certainty. Right? It's empirical data. Why do we sit on the same empirical data? Right? And and allow these customers to say, I'm going to leave that to you. No, you're going to be part of this decision because I'm going to educate you. And you're going to understand it because if I don't do that, I'm a really shitty advisor. I didn't check if we can cuss on this. I know I'm with an Australian. I apologize. Oh, sweet. We're all adults. Yeah. But you know, I do believe that, you know, it's our jobs to to partner with the clients that can be taught. to make them feel educated, to make them feel empowered, to make them feel like they've learned. Like I have such a heavy-handed security role in my company. There is zero chance of me accomplishing that if Tony Miller, my my VP of operations does not completely understand the gist of what I'm talking about and what the risk incurred would be. And I think that's the magic word. We never talk about risk with our clients. These things, these attacks, these failures, these my computer's old, they won't buy new hardware. They're all just risks. They're all just quantifiable risks and experiences and outcomes. If we get better at speaking to clients in the terms of business, then we will find a higher adoption rate with those clients, right? And I think that speaking about risk and saying, okay, let's play a game, Mr. and Ms. client. You do dump trucks. What happens if I take out your dump trucks? Oh my gosh, I I couldn't do the the dirt hauling I have to do. My gravel plant would get behind and I would okay, great. What happens if we do that for three months? Oh, Jesus, I'm out of business. I don't even have operational insurance to cover those things. Great. Okay, what are the components in those dump trucks? Well, I got to have gas. Great. They got to work, mechanic shop, fantastic. That pressure we talked about in the line, got to have that. Right? All of those things, but then you go, okay, how are the dump trucks get scheduled? Well, we got this fancy software from Trimble. We use it, it GPSs them, we know where the trucks are at all times. Great. No problem. What if I can't get that back online for two weeks? Oh my god, we're chaos. We're dead again. Awesome. We've just discussed a restore time objective. Right? We've just discussed the criticality of things in your environment, right? It's just that. That's what we should be doing is having those conversations and saying the what if games and if clients won't engage you in those things and you can't get that from a client, someone will probably beat them in business and it's a self-solving problem. So, maybe it's long filter. Maybe that's the long tail conversation, but I would say that, you know, it really is our job to be prescriptive, to be educating and to bring our clients to the table. We act like we don't have a seat at the table. We haven't invited them to our table. Like we own the table. Like I I just don't get that mentality. Yeah. No, that's really well put. When I guess one piece that I would maybe add or ask in this is what do you do when a client just won't engage, right? Like is that sort of a deal breaker of them not being compliant with your standards and and you can't service them anymore or do you have them sign a waiver so that you're you're you're not held held for liability if something actually happens? Like what's your approach? Newspaper doesn't care about the liability. I think the challenge is you have to shed those clients. I mean, I think you have to shed them and another effective method is just price them out of the market. And one of the things we did was the, I think it's a Finciani, but the the pumpkin plan and I'm so bad about names, but the pumpkin plan where we and once we realized we were so far behind, we just penalized clients that won't do the things that are necessary to make them better. And initially and so, you know, we we would say, hey, there's a 300% increase, you know, and and what was funny was when we did that, we actually didn't realize that we had to put our money where our mouth was. In the first round of that, the gentleman that was running that was very successful. And we actually increased revenues by a few hundred percent on on the bottom third and nobody left. And so we were we realized how bad they they knew they were taking advantages of us for two years on their contract prices. kind of what that boils down to. I often describe this as the the PETA factor. So it's the pain in the ass factor that goes into into their pricing. Yeah. So they're either a risk or they're highly volatile and difficult to deal with. Just price it in, right? Right. Yeah, that's true. The challenge we find and I actually think about this a lot is that if I was starting an MSP today and going through what I was going through from a growth, I would be much more horrified than I was back then. I don't have the joy of willful ignorance today as an MSP. Like we don't. We're going to find the privacy laws that are coming. will probably be very, very, very, very bad for us. I think the customer suing us is getting a precedent being set right now. There's a there's an airport in Pittsburgh, I believe that's suing an MSP over not patching. You know, we're we're going to start finding that the standard of care will be defined. Yeah. My hairdresser has more license than me. I mean, not true now because I'm a CSP, but I don't need it to do what I do. I don't have to have it. People trust me just because I can type on that fancy computer. Right? And and I think the challenge is that our industry has no standard of care. And I think if we don't solve that problem, we probably just get sued out of existence and and and I think the challenge is you can't just regulate us because if you just regulate us, the client can just do it themselves. There's nothing forcing them to consume this higher priced product that does solve their problems in the way they should be doing things. And so chaotic is the best way to describe it. And so what I would say is if I had advice to someone in the position I was in, I think you you stay away from the risk with the clients, no matter what the revenue impact. I know that's easy to say and hard to do, but I think if you have a client that is going to die, that you know is going to be hit by the choices they are making. They have exposed 3389, they they won't use multi-factor on anything. They but if you start getting down that path, we die that way. I mean, that's the reality of it. is whether it's the privacy aspects, whether it's some of the new things coming from the hippo perspective, I think there's just a lot of stuff that that really will impact MSPs if if we're fake it till we make it like we used to. Right. I think you're right. Like it is easy, it's easy to say from a a position where you've grown and you can make those choices. I often describe in the early days, the MSPs are quite scrappy and they'll just take whatever business they can find. Like two-person shop, okay, I'll sign you up. Done. Woohoo. I I want a client, right? Yeah, but maybe that is sort of that reflection point around that $1 million mark because the $1 million mark tends to be a bit of a magical number in the industry. Like if you can crack past that and continue to grow, you're well on your way to continued growth. But it tends to be a really sort of artificial ceiling for a lot of organizations. And I would suggest it's probably one in the same as to why is they're tending to hold on to their legacy clients that drag them down and they're not investing in the growth enough to be able to replace those comfortably. And that's what limits you from growing to to a larger number. So I think it is one in the same. Like be scrappy, take the business that you can win. But have the confidence to grow more more in a scalable fashion with clients that suit the the service that you're trying to build, right? And I think that's the challenge I'm putting out is that that scrappiness doesn't change that your name goes in the paper on a ransomware thing or right? It doesn't the sad part of this. And I think that is the challenge that horrifies me is that you have to do that to to start. I do believe. Now, I think that's also not true in a way that's really interesting. You know, we talk about this Pareto principle in in our industry, right? Which is this theory that, you know, at the end of a maturing market, 20% of the companies will own 80% of the revenue. And I think that actually might have some inverse capabilities in the near future. Like we're finally heading down a technology path where you could pick a client that uses all SAS applications. and uses their desktops in a way that's just using active directory for the heck of it, bind them straight to Azure active directory, use in tune to manage everything. Lighthouse is going to be a multi-tenant portal. There's definitely going to be some improvements that I can't talk about in that space. There's definitely improvements in permissions that I can't talk about. There's definitely things that make a very viable low-cost strategy for one person that's really good at having business conversations to go and grow and scale a massive linear, scalable operation that 15 people could run. and consume the revenue I consume. And I'm being a little hyperbole, but the people we're hiring there are now people that can talk business. They can talk technology in a way that it touches business and grows the capabilities of the clients' client experience. And I think we're going to be in a much different world in the next 5 to 10 years than we've ever seen ourselves in before because of it. If I now can say immedibly, when a user signs in with our service, we're going to make sure Microsoft set perfectly for permissions. Why? Because it's just a script. It's the same script for everybody. We're going to make sure that their connection to their services like Salesforce is SSO. Why? Because we're just going to script it. It's the same script for everybody. You're starting to see these normalizing variables if you will. mean that I don't have to plan for this is how you upgrade if it's server 2008, 8R2, 12, 12R2, 16, 19, right? We don't have that iteration of variables thousands of times over. It becomes so simple. And you have people that are G Suite or Microsoft or AWS and we actually increase and improve the capabilities of their lives. And Microsoft ultimately executes this from a revenue perspective. We will have to pivot. We will have to be trusted advisors. I know you use the term in the same way as I do. I don't have a better term, but we'll actually have to start acting like advisors. I was a financial advisor when I was 19, I passed my series 7. And you know, you have to be an advisor. You have to be prescriptive. You have to have and believe in what you're saying and you have to be a knowledgeable practitioner. There has to be some degree of I know what a top 10 OOS is. I understand what's my adversary is going to do. I know what the risk is to this company. I understand and you'll start seeing that you could grow a very, very, very, very, very lucrative business. and have a much easier to hire set of humans than the highly technical people we we were born with and needed to scale, right? You need technicians to deal with infrastructure. You do not need technicians to deal with Paz and Saz in the same way. It's scriptable. Yeah. So that that's I guess your your look at the future. Your your crystal ball. Prognostication. Yeah, your prognostication of the the evolution of the of the market. We always like to talk about the the evolution of business and technology and that's yeah. I think you're right. Like I I have to say like the people that are starting MSPs now and are the one or two man shops and are outsourcing 90% of their their ticket workload and just focusing on the clients, the account management and the project implementation. Like that's an enviable position in a lot of ways for the people that like us that were in the early game of the MSP where you really had to build everything and buy it yourself and and it was internal. Yeah, and you had to host a server and you had to not screw it up and you had to like I don't have servers other than the automate server I have to consume right now. I don't have servers, right? I I do everything serverless and I do everything in in methodologies that I could do the same exact experience for my clients. I can give them a predictable user experience. I can build an intellectual property and more importantly, I can strip that intellectual property. that is my automation if they aren't using me, which means it becomes a very sticky methodology as well. And I know of at least three different providers that are trying to figure out how to make that easier and easier for an MSP. Or now you don't even have to have the API skills. You don't even have to have if you consume the right stack, you could just say, when I hire a client on, when I bring their Microsoft tendency in, I want the following to occur. And that's coming. And if you follow what that means, it means that your cable provider can be your IT people. Your, right? You actually have the ability to scale a very, very, very predictable, wonderful environment for a client. that you can do things like data analysis. You can say, if you touch this edge, you're getting sucked in and we're going to put our security tools on, right? My people know that. If you go use your iconic credentials somewhere, I'm going to own the device. It's instant. I'm going to own the device, period. Immedibly. I can tell that in a compliance story. And I I think that as you start seeing compliance these these answers and COVID drove this forward like four billion years. Yeah. is my real prediction, but I think we jumped, you know, a curve or two during COVID because of all the demand. and the people listening for education. And there was so much content and education that I think we raised the tide. for small to mid-sized business several years in knowledge and and education. 100%. Yeah, people wanted to talk about what COVID changed. I always wanted to suggest it changed nothing. It accelerated everything. Yes, it did. It was a catalyst like a hot ball of platinum dropped in the middle of a chemical experiment. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this has been awesome. I don't want to run too long. I could chat with you for hours, so we'll definitely meet up at a conference once we're we're able to travel in the future. And I'll probably have you back maybe to talk a bit more about security at some point in in the podcast future as well. But really appreciate your time, your insights. This has been awesome and valuable. If people wanted to reach out to you, any socials that they should hit you up on? Yeah, it's Cyber Matt Lee. And that would all be on LinkedIn. I I really just stay in LinkedIn. I don't play in the others much. Okay, perfect. All right, Matt. Well, thanks for your time and all the best. Thanks, Todd.