ERP076 - MSP Insights Series 2

It doesn't matter that I'm more rural. What I'm bringing to these businesses is the same thing if not better, than an MSP that could be sitting in Chicago or LA that they're bringing to their clients. So now it's not based on my geography. It's based on my delivery, it's based on my value add. It's based on what my company is doing for your company. Welcome to Evolved Radio, where we explore the evolution of business and technology. I'm your host, Todd Kane. The Evolved Radio podcast is brought to you by Evolved Management Consulting. It's our mission to help MSPs increase profit and decrease stress. If you're in the MSP industry and manage people, you should really check out my service manager training course. It's like the missing manual for how to run high-performance service delivery teams. Most managers in the IT space have never had any formal training. If you'd like to step up your game and become a successful manager, check out the Evolved Service Manager training course. at training.evolvedmgmt.com. That's evolved with a D as in Delta. Or you can visit my homepage and scroll down to the training section. Today, we're continuing our series of interviews with MSP owners and operators. We peel back the curtain a bit to hear from the people working inside their MSP businesses. We focus on revealing the lessons learned and experiences in building a managed IT service business. Joining me today is Aaron Zimmerman, founder of Total Care IT. Aaron shares his experience growing his IT business from a side hustle to a full-time gig. Aaron shares what he's learned operating in a more rural market as well. Aaron also recounts a difficult period where he lost a significant portion of his revenue, but ultimately was better off. Lots of great stories and experiences shared in this episode, so please enjoy my discussion with Aaron. 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. Welcome to the podcast, Aaron. Great, thank you. Happy to be here. So to kick us off, if you could tell us a bit about your company, Total Care IT, and just any parameters, revenue, staff, years in business, that type of thing. Just to give people a sense of the type of business that you're running there. Sure, sure. I started Total Care IT 14 years ago this summer. We are see four people in one office and two people in the other office and then our seventh employee is overseas. So there's seven people in the company at this time. We are on track this year to hit somewhere between 1.2 and 1.4 million in revenue. Cool, excellent. And what's the geographic region that you're in? So our primary office is in Southeast Idaho, Idaho Falls area, kind of a rural community here. And we within the last two years opened up a second office in the Boise Idaho market. Awesome. Okay, we're going to circle back to a couple of points there as well. First question that I kind of ask a lot of the guests in this series is, why did you start an IT business? Do you have a recollection of sort of a specific moment or a situation where you decided, yeah, okay, you know, rather than just work in IT, I'm going to run my own IT company. Yeah, absolutely. So I've I've been in IT for a little over 30 years. Once I got out of high school, started college, my first real job was or post high school type jobs, I should say. Was working for a place called DNG Connecting Point Computers out of Sacramento, California where I grew up. My uncle was the the controller there and he kind of got me a job and I got started in the the industry from that standpoint on selling. And after being in the industry for 16 years, we decided to sell our place in California, move to to Idaho where my in-laws had moved to a handful of years previously. Once we got here, I did take another corporate job working for a very large software company and I was a field engineer for them. But at the same time I started Total Care IT. And at the very beginning it was just evenings, weekends, you know, reaching out to to some small businesses, just trying to get to meet people. And at about the six-year mark, I was able to transition from doing both Total Care IT and my my other job to where I could do Total Care IT full-time. I had made a commitment to myself that I wasn't going to leave the full-time job because it had a very nice salary, benefits and stuff. So I didn't want to put my family at any type of financial risk until Total Care IT could absorb what our quality of life was used to. without it hurting the company. So that was about the six-year mark. And at about the four-year mark of of Total Care IT, I had hired somebody in to be a technician full-time. So I already had somebody on payroll when I joined the company. Interesting. Full-time, I should say. Right. So a bit of a side hustle that you expanded into be a full-time gig then, right? Yeah, and it was an interesting side hustle because my employer that I worked for, my my manager at the time, he knew about Total Care IT. I was very open. It wasn't anything that I was trying to take advantage of them. I was the highest performing field technician, so he really didn't care that in my spare time I was I was doing this other stuff because I was performing for him. Yeah. I mean, as long as you're not competing with the person that you're working with then and that you're transparent with it, I I don't see that being an issue either. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah, and these were completely separate industries. Very cool. I would say that's different. I don't imagine a lot of people that have IT as a side hustle hire staff before bringing themselves into the company either, so that's a bit different. Yeah, and I and I did that because, you know, I had some teenage kids at home, my wife was just starting what she was going to be rolling into from a career standpoint. After, you know, being with raising kids for, you know, 15, 16 years. So it it was a, you know, how do I do this from a conservative standpoint and not put the family at risk, but yet chase after what I really want to accomplish? How do I tame that entrepreneurial, you know, spirit that I've got? I wanted to bring that enterprise experience that I have working for, you know, Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies. Managing their departments and and campuses, you know, from an IT standpoint. How do I bring that to the small and medium-sized business? How do we bring protection and support and start building a a quality of life for myself, um, from a retirement standpoint. But also knowing going into it that as I build my company and I add staff, how do I do this from a context of making it well for them financially? Bonuses, benefits. Because I didn't want to create what I had just left, you know, the typical corporate culture, this is your little box and this is what you do inside that box and don't step out of that box or you get your hand slapped. I wanted to create a little bit more of an ecosystem that was a little bit more open where we can think outside the box, we can bring solutions and and be creative to our clients. And I think it was maybe six months to a year into after I started the company where I ran across Eric Simpson's book that he wrote back in the day. On basically what what's an MSP and what's it all about. And after I got through that book, I'm like, that's that's definitely what I want to build. So from early on, we moved very quickly from being, you know, that traditional break fix to a full-blown MSP mindset and then it's just grown and developed and matured over the years. Awesome. And also you're in, I guess what would be considered a rural market, you mentioned it as a rural market, just, you know, being that you're not in sort of a major metro center. What do you think are sort of the the differences or things that need to be considered in running your business in a smaller market outside of a major metro center? In hindsight, it comes down to networking, it comes down to who you know. On the eastern side of the state, which is more rural here in Idaho, when I meet a new prospect, usually the first question out of their mouth is, where are you from? It's not so much how long have you been in business. Now, we do have some clients down in the Phoenix area and about 20% of our clients now are over in the Boise area, which is much larger. And it's a different, it's a completely different mindset. You know, usually that first question is, how long have you been in business, not where are you from? So being in a in a rural area, you do need to create those connections, you do need to network. You you need to figure out who some of the movers and shakers are, if you will, in in that local community. Otherwise, you're going to take a long time to build your business. You know, we should probably be further ahead revenue-wise than where we are right now. Because I learned that lesson a little bit uh, I won't say late, but just, you know, a little bit more slowly. I I allowed it to bother me for a long time that I was being asked, where am I from? And it doesn't bother me as much anymore now, maybe it's because we've been here as as long as we have at this point. The other thing is in a smaller market, it's about the relationship. Sometimes it it comes down to price. Any smaller market, more rural, more conservative, price is usually a very big a big sticky point. That's when you got to sell on value and you got to sell on yourself, you got to sell on who you are. So I have found that me, even though I can go do the technical stuff, I've had to extract myself from that. And be more of the face of the company, be more of the I am who you are doing business with, I am who are making these commitments and promises to you. And my team will fulfill that. Right, a lot more of those deals on kind of chat and handshake type idea of of of connecting more on the people side of things. Exactly. Which is interesting because I I feel like maybe the smaller markets expose sort of the fundamentals of networking and sales. Right, like those the things that you describe, I think are are somewhat universal, but maybe in the larger markets you can maybe leverage the availability of more bizdev options. Whereas in those smaller markets, you really have to be up on the fundamentals of those personal aspects of of business building, right? Right, exactly. I I definitely would say that, you know, from that aspect, I've I've cut my teeth in the smaller market. And as we try to uh expand over in the bigger market, it comes more natural, it comes more more fluid to me in that sales process. Because I've had the experience in somewhere that could be perceived as maybe being a little bit safer, if you will. And Idaho has, I mean, a smaller market for sure, but my sense of this is that it's and you can maybe validate this, but it's a sense that it's growing as well. Because I hear a lot of people talking about Idaho and a calmer place to live, more appealing outdoors, all those aspects. You know, maybe I'm I'm listening to a little too much of the Joe Rogan podcast. But definitely it seems to be a lot of appeal. Do you see the markets growing? Do you feel like like a lot of people are kind of moving in? I see that every day. My my spouse, she's a realtor and probably 50 to 70% of her business this year alone has been referrals from other realtors from other states. Primarily California, some over in Colorado. So where she has a very established client base here in Idaho, she's getting a lot of traction from referrals that come in from out of state. And then helping them find land or homes and stuff like that. So I see it on the kind of personal side. And I see it on the business side as well. The state just just growing. Yeah, a lot of that that work from home people are recognizing, you know, you can work from anywhere. May as well go place some place that's definitely, you know, cheaper than the major metro centers and and potentially has a better quality of life and and closer to nature as well. Definitely closer to nature. We we have closer to four seasons here. The winters can be pretty brutal sometimes, but the summers are usually, you know, just very delightful. Yeah. So you had a bit of a scary event fairly recently with your business in a significant loss of revenue. Do you want to chat about that experience and sort of how that came about and what it taught you? Sure. About halfway through 2019, we had a a fairly large medical client, about $6,000 a month. They've been a client for many, many years. They came to us and said that they were moving on to a different IT company. We still to this day don't know 100% why. The reasoning that they gave us was they felt like as we were growing bigger as a company that we were not as responsive to their needs. Now I found out internally what was kind of happening from my support manager. But it was a little bit too late. Um, and I'll circle back to the lesson I learned from that in a few minutes. Fast forward a couple of more months. We had two what's referred to as critical access hospitals that were clients, one on the eastern side of the state and one on the western side of the state. And I had picked those clients up in an acquisition that I did back in 2016 when I bought another small IT company here in town. So a critical access hospital is a is a hospital that is in a very rural area and they're subsidized by the federal government to keep their doors open. So they're not going to be in a highly populated area, they are not going to typically have access to IT guys that live in the area. I mean, the doctors and the nurses and the specialists, they all have to travel in, they do a couple of days there and then they go back to wherever it is they they live. In some of the bigger cities and maybe they have jobs at the other hospitals or medical practices or what have you. So within a couple of months, both of these critical access hospitals. They had one had found somebody that was going to be accessible to them in the rural market and they they wanted to re what do you call it, insource instead of outsource. Right. And and it had nothing to do with our services at that time, they just felt like they needed the ability to have somebody in house seeing everything that's going on, you know, from the compliance side, administratively, technically and so forth. The other one very similar, when we took them on as a client. They had two in-house IT people. And over the course of three years, they had for whatever reasons, let those people go. And each time they let one person go, we would pick up more services. So by time they let the second one go, we were pretty much running the show as best we could for them being five and a half hours away by car. Now I did have a two technicians at that time in the Boise market. You know, so one of them would go up to this facility a couple of times a week. We would do the onsite and we would do everything else remotely. But what that hospital learned was that they missed having somebody there five days a week, somebody that was interfacing on a daily basis with their upper level management. Not so much through scheduled Zoom meetings or scheduled onsite vendor meetings, but just that day-to-day in the hallway kind of kind of activity. So they approached us, they approached me. And said, hey, you know, you've done a great job for us, but we want to hire your guy. We want to bring we we want to bring this back in house. We understand that we still have a service agreement with you. We'd like to buy that service agreement out and and uh bring that guy, you know, in house as an employee. Would you be willing to work with us on that? And at first I was a little bit shocked. You know, because I'm coming off of the, you know, I'm not used to losing clients and now all of a sudden this is three clients, three sizable clients in the course of a couple of months. And I started thinking about, you know, how much time we spend on these critical access hospitals. They have to be open 24/7. And our 24/7 was, hey, after five, it's on call, right, whoever's on call. So I I said, you know what, I want to I always want to do what's best for the client. So in the very beginning, it may not be the best for me or for my company, but I earnestly want what's best for the client. So I said, sure. Let's draft something up, so I had my lawyers draft up an amendment to our agreement that allowed them, you know, to not be in breach of so that they could hire this this individual. They wrote us a decent size check. We shaked hands, went went separate directions. They hired my guy. He wanted to work there because he actually wanted to move to that that rural town and we went our separate directions. So between these three clients, we lost about $228,000 of annual recurring revenue just between these three clients. It's a little sizable chunk of change there. And was that in the same year? Like what was the time period? That was all in the same year, 2019, right before COVID hit. Oh man. Yeah. So then we roll into 2020, we picked up a few new clients in January, February. COVID hits. People scattered to go remote. We picked up a few more clients throughout the rest of the year, we've added some clients here in 2021. So we're back to where we probably, well, we've exceeded where we were. But it took us 12 to 14 months to replace that lost revenue. I think the biggest lesson that I learned is to stay in your own lane. Focus on what you're on what you're great at. If I didn't have the ability for myself or somebody from my staff to be more in person, more available on a weekly basis to be talking to the senior level management. The strategy, the planning and all of that stuff that needed to happen with these, you know, larger clients. It was kind of inevitable for for them to look at us as a temporary solution. Even though that temporary solution was three years, it's still a temporary solution for both of these critical access hospital locations. Because they really truly needed somebody driving the department, not just the support and maintenance. You know, I learned that outside of just needing to have that availability of staff 24/7, well, being a smaller team, you're going to quickly burn your staff out. Nobody really wanted to take the on call because you're not getting a lot of sleep. So proper staffing levels for that type of engagement. And proper execution from a project management delivery standpoint, from a beyond what's needed in in in infrastructure support, user support, security. Beyond those things. You've got to have somebody at that that's meeting at that C level consistently with with those types of clients. So that you are not just delivering on what you promise, but you are having your finger on the pulse of what is needed inside that environment on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. There's two things there that I think I see a lot in in smaller organizations that are a bit of a struggle based on sort of that organic growth. And one being that 24/7 coverage or at least just on call, right? Like the number of companies that actually require 24/7 is a lot more limited than most people tend to think. Like in their then they're trying to build their business, they're like, well, what do I do about 24/7? You know, like at the company, the MSP that I ran, we got to I think 105 clients or so before we actually got to a client that really required 24/7 for their business. But your situation being different where they actually required 24/7 being a being a critical care hospital. And the other one that that tends to pop up a lot is that onsite, just that psychological need or the cultural need of having someone being physically present at the client site. Is one that I think is is attractive because it's what the client asks for, in a lot of cases, they tend to pay a lot more for it, but it's largely unnecessary from a practical support standpoint. Outside of those those uh those relationship building potentially and certainly kind of, you know, the critical response and and that that psychological aspect as well. Is that sort of something that that you've moved away from that hybrid IT intentionally or do you still look at those opportunities when they come up? We look at the hybrid IT opportunities when they come up, the co-managed if you will. We still have a few clients where they either have a director of IT, but maybe they're back east, but the facilities are here in Idaho. So we we do all of the monitoring and management and hands-on and and stuff like that, but we coordinate things with with with their director of IT. We have another client where they have an in-house IT person, the skill set may not be where our team skill set is, they don't have, you know, access to the tool set that that we that we bring to the table. So we do their, you know, level two, level three infrastructure, backup security, stuff like that, but they still have the guy in house, if you will. That's running out to the person's desk because they're their outlook, you know, did whatever. To me, the the key differences is that these are Monday through Friday, 8 to 5 type businesses. And that's that's where we thrive. We thrive in in the 8 to 5, the CPA firms, the law firms, you know, the medical offices. A lot of agri business out here in Idaho. Some manufacturing. So we're not big enough population-wise to just have focus on one vertical. So our vertical is more that professional services that's, you know, typically Monday through Friday, 8 to 5. Now, with COVID, people working more from home, people working different hours, we've had to be a little bit more flexible. But our clients don't take too much advantage of that or take advantage of it in a bad way, I should say. You know, we do have the, you know, press number one if this is an emergency after hours and it rings the on call person. And maybe the on call person that week gets one to three calls at the most. Versus, you know, one to five calls per night is how it used to be. So yeah, I I I still like engaging in those co-managed type scenarios. But it's got to fit a framework of do you fit with our culture, do you fit with our security mindset. Because, you know, about 18 months ago, we started going much more security focused and pivoting much more in the in the security realm. And, you know, we're not we're not cheap, we're probably the most expensive IT company in I I know for sure in Eastern Idaho, uh possibly even over in Western Idaho. And, you know, you have to understand the value prop that we're bringing and is that of interest? And if it is, wonderful, let's see what we can put together. If not, that's okay. I can still help you find somebody else if if we're not the solution. I think that that's a really, really important aspect of this in reflecting on the fact that you are in a rural market. I often see people suggesting or thinking that because they're in a rural market, like the the appetite for a higher price service or their package price needs to be lower automatically. Just simply based on the region that they're in. And this is something that that Paul Dipple rails against, and I I find that I tend to agree with with Dipple's approach on this. That the the yes, there will be lower cost providers, but that is not necessarily a good enough reason for you to compete on price. Maybe you can just speak a bit to your experience about sort of your thinking of the pricing for your service and and I guess positioning on value versus price in a rural market. Oh, a lot of good questions there. First and foremost, I I think it comes down to your value proposition. What are you bringing to the client? If you're just going to bring a help desk and some monitoring tools, then maybe you are a value priced MSP, maybe that is your your niche, if you will. I take a different approach, I take the approach of I'm I'm your business partner. We're an extension of your company, we we are your IT department. And we take a huge interest in in the security of your environment and in the productivity of your of your staff and of the protection and availability of your data. And the layers that we have to wrap around that costs money. You have to have the right staff, you have to have the right incentives to have the right staff. So it's benefits, so we offer benefits to our staff members. So we're a small company, but you get full medical, dental, vision, life insurance, that type of stuff. That costs money. We use fairly expensive tools to protect our clients, so that costs money. I think in today's world, the question isn't for me if I'm in Idaho Falls, Idaho versus Denver or Chicago, my price point is based on my value prop. And it costs me the same as it costs somebody in Chicago to provide the same the same value. Maybe a little less because, you know, salaries are a little less here in Idaho. So I really position it to my clients as, you know, I I don't use fear in my sales process with prospects, but I do use reality. I do point to the to the recent incidents in in the news. I keep my clients up to date. So, you know, in early July when when Kaseya had, you know, the issue that they had, we're not a Kaseya shop, but I made sure that I let my clients know. Hey, if you're seeing this in the news. You got you guys are protected. So it's that communication level that goes out. Five years ago, I had a completely different mindset when it came to trying to sell in a rural market. I felt like I had to try I had to be cheaper, I had to try to compete with, you know, what we joke as Chuck in the truck. You know, one man band, you know. Driving around in, you know, in his vehicle. And we literally have a guy here in Idaho Falls that drives a a red truck and he's called Fat Geek. That's all over his truck, you know. He's a one man band. My my hat's off to him because there are small businesses that are five, six users that they need that guy, okay? Exactly, yeah. We target clients that are bigger than that. So I changed my mindset, it's it's probably not a direct answer to your question. But I changed my mindset to say, it doesn't matter that I'm more rural. What I'm bringing to these businesses is the same thing if not better. Than an MSP that could be sitting in Chicago or LA that they're bringing to their clients. So now it's not based on my geography. It's based on my delivery, it's based on my value add, it's based on what my company is doing for your company. And I'm also more willing to walk away from a deal. If somebody says you're too expensive, you know, you're 500 bucks a month more. Okay, well, there's two things that have gone on here. Either you don't understand the value proposition and I've done a a bad job of explaining it. Or you've done a risk analysis yourself for your own business and you've decided that you don't need what I offer and that's okay. I may not agree with you, but it's your business. So, I think it's more of my mindset change. Versus the fact that we're rural or not rural. Yeah, I I think that that's a really important aspect of having the comfort to be able to walk away from business. Especially as IT companies are starting up or as they're they're trying to grow. They just sort of blindly grab at any business and treat it the same. One of my favorite expressions is not all revenue is created equal. And you have to be able to find those opportunities to say, I I'm just not comfortable with this. I, you know, I'm better off not having this revenue because it also comes with headaches, right? And if those headaches are not offset by the margin created by it, it is not a good opportunity, right? Agreed. I I would also add that through various industry groups, you know, that I've belonged to over the years. I've met MSPs that they live in Manhattan and their service area is four blocks. True. Enough business in four blocks that they don't go outside of four blocks. You know, I might have to roll a car that takes an hour to get there or two hours to get there. So you have to factor in that it's going to cost you more windshield time, it's going to cost you that wear and tear on your on your company vehicle or mileage if the employee's taking their own car. We happen to have company vehicles. Those are all added costs and just because you're rural, you know, I can't just put somebody and say, okay, go walk two blocks to the client, you know, they they may have to be in the car for 30 minutes to to a couple of hours. And like I said, those those have costs. You have to factor those costs in that somebody in Manhattan won't wouldn't have if they can literally walk two to four blocks to their entire client base as an example. Yeah. All right, speaking of geography. You mentioned earlier that you had a second office and I'm curious kind of what that geographic expansion taught you. I often find this is a area where there's a ton of lessons learned and a bunch of reflections as people grow in geography. What was that experience like and sort of what does it taught you about the potential future expansion in geography? Uh, a couple of key points on that. Um, when you're ready to expand to a different geographic market, make sure that you have extracted close to as much business as you can from your current market. I allowed myself to believe that because, you know, the eastern side of the state is smaller, it's more conservative and people take more convincing to let go of their their money, so to speak. That going into a bigger market would be a better thing for us. So I've had to, you know, get an office, hire staff. Everything from, you know, another office to ensure, another internet connection to buy, another router to maintain, all of this, you know, for your internal use. And that's great and two days after I signed that that office space lease over in Boise is when that critical access hospital said, we want to hire your employee. Yeah, I I'm decided to expand at the same time that I've lost revenue, right? But I didn't know that. Because I signed the lease first. So I had two staff members in Boise at that time, which then dropped down to one. And then you fast forward six, seven months later and we go into COVID and that employee goes home to work. So now a year into this this lease, I'm paying on, you know, a 1200 square foot office that no one's in. Nobody goes to. And the the interesting thing is is even though this employee's kids are going to be going back to school here in a couple of weeks, she's so efficient from home. What's the purpose of having her drive 20 minutes through traffic, you know, I mean, you're you're you're taking time, you're you're you're taking fuel. You're taking wear and tear when she's going to do the same job working from home that she does working from an office. So there's that little bit of of learning too that, you know, before signing a multi-year lease that's uh pretty iron clad. You know, make sure that you've got enough business to to handle that lease. And and we do overall, I mean, it hasn't been a big deal, but I'm paying for something that's not being used. So just make sure that you've got the cash flow for what comes with a second office. From everything that has to, you know, happen in that to the personnel that that need to be in it to justify it. And I would also, I would also say that my time as as the primary sales person for Total Care IT. When I go over to the other side of the state, I need to make sure that I'm there for several days at a time to make the value worth the expense of driving over there. It's a 300 mile drive each direction, that's four four hours, you know, each way. And it would be hard to just drive over there, do a sales call and come home. So, make sure that things are planned. Now, COVID kind of helped a little with with that because people got more comfortable with doing Zoom meetings. So now I can do that initial meet and greet and this is who we are and this is how we operate, quick 15 to 30 minute Zoom meeting and not have to make that drive. That's been a, you know, a positive thing that's come out of how some folks, you know, are getting used to working with other businesses has changed a little bit. Although I I will say that I do have the small benefit that my my daughter Chelsea, who's also our marketing manager, she lives over in Boise. So I do have a place, a very comfortable place that I could go and stay when I'm over there. You know, so that's nice. But it it really comes down to, you know, the time commitments, make sure that you've got the time. Make sure that that, you know, if if I spend 30 hours a month over in Boise and that's time away from the other market. Have I extracted what I can out of that other market first or would that 30 hours be more beneficial being spent in the other market before going to the additional market? So I think those are the top two, two or three lessons that I've learned on on trying to expand the business into another market. Yeah, I I think those are those are the two that I I I'm pretty strong on as well as uh that total addressable market is often kind of undervalued. And people think like, oh, okay, well, you know, I've I've got 500 K of recurring revenue in this market, so I must be tapped out. And that's always like a very, very far from the truth. I did a a blog post on this once about uh sort of how to calculate your total addressable market. And recognizing that most people, like you're probably serving 2% of your available market in most regions. So like there there's always more to to sort of dig up under the rocks as it were, right? Agreed. And the other one that I've heard that I think is is really relevant here is. A good way to think about this, I can't remember who said this. Again, it might have been Paul Dipple, but I heard the suggestion that if you're going to expand to another geography, you should be able to go to that office, have one or two meetings and get back in time for dinner. And that's sort of the the the the geographic ring that you should consider on your first expansion until you're big enough to be able to to have sort of a general manager that you can apply full-time in a in a in a separate region. So I think you kind of similar to your suggestion of uh, you know, it's close, but it's still a little far to to sort of have that that practical hand on in that in that business as well. Because you're right, like it takes more time than people think. To to manage that that separate office in in order to make it successful. You can have it, but to make it successful, it requires a significant time commitment. It sure does. Absolutely. Well, this has been great. Aaron, I really appreciate you being on and sharing some of the the lessons learned in in the growth of your business. Both in a rural market and and your expansion and and some of the lessons you've learned as you've you've grown. So. Absolutely. If anyone wants to reach out with you or connect, any any socials that you would share? Sure. We're on LinkedIn, I think it's IT- Total Care. It's kind of interesting. Our website, Total Care IT.net. There's a there is a Total Care IT.com, but there's some good friends over in Melbourne, Florida that's also an IT MSP, but we're.net, so. That'd be a great ways to get a hold of us. Awesome. Appreciate it, Aaron. Thanks for being on. All right, no problem.