ERP078 - MSP Insights Series 4

That allows us to be really sticky and close with our relationships with our customers. You know, we've never lost a customer since we started doing managed services. Because it is such a great program and they always, since we do have a great relationship, if something goes wrong, they know we're going to fix it. There's no question about it. You know, network goes down, they know we're on the phone with their their ISP making sure they're going to be up and having a timetable for that to happen. Or if they're mad and we do mess something up, it happens, you know, we're all human. Instead of backing away from it and pointing fingers, you know, my philosophy and our management philosophy is to run right towards it. 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 on the Evolved Radio podcast today is Ron Harris. VP of sales and partner at Omega Computers. Ron and I talk about how they developed their pricing strategy. And also that Omega has a very low client churn rate and we explore that. Ron tells us about why they decided to roll their own MSP tools, the strength of their brand and why upmarket clients are where you should be. It's a great conversation with Ron as he shares his experience in growing a successful MSP. 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. Ron, welcome to Evolved Radio podcast. Hey Todd, how's it going? Great, man. So, appreciate you being on and sharing your experience and running your MSP. If you want to kick us off, just give us a brief intro to Omega. So, yeah, I appreciate the time and having me on. Omega's been around since 1994. We're 15 people right now. We've been truly doing true managed services since 2009. The company itself started as a programming house and then we kind of morphed like everybody else does into a managed service provider. We're just turning over, I mean, we're we're now a pure MSP. So we're just turning over to closer to three and a half for revenue, which is good. But as the industry goes, we want more and more, so we're going to keep going for growth. And hopefully, uh, achieving these goals here soon. Awesome. And one of the the questions I'm kind of asking everybody in this series is, why did you start your IT company? Do you have a recollection of what it was or the aha moment on when you decided, okay, I'm going to start my own IT company? Yeah, so it was the way it came about was not a natural moment in life, it wasn't like I turned the corner, I was like, oh, I want to do managed services. I was an internal IT guy. I met my current business partner as I was a IT director. And we had an MSP come in that was time and material and just over dinner shooting the breeze. You know, came to the idea and the thought of, you know, we could do this, right? Just like everybody else does, they get with their buddies and they can do all these amazing things. So, we we said, yeah, let's roll the dice. He Bill was, you know, I was lucky enough and thankful enough that Bill had a pretty long-term contract with a company in town that afforded him to be able to pay my salary while we did this. And, you know, at the end of the day, I think we did it like like I would imagine everybody else starts a business. You want to serve something, there's a there's a bigger purpose in helping people and making sure they're understanding their technology, more so than turning a profit. But as we quickly learned when we got it going off the ground that, you know, money matters and that whole chain caused a bunch of stuff to happen pretty quickly for us. So, maybe expand on that. What were the early days like, especially kind of that first 12 to 18 months? So, it was rough, right? It was a shoe string budget, you know, trying to figure out how we were going to get servers. I'd quit my job to jump in, you know, full throttle at it and, you know, taking a pay cut and doing all that fun stuff. And like again, thankfully and lucky enough, Bill had that contract that they feed the beast here. But we rolled right into the to the bigger programs, we went into Autotask, we went into uh enabling Central. And we still didn't have any customers. So, we were putting a lot of the processes and the software before actually having customers. Which ended up driving us towards the abyss. Because back in the day, it wasn't like it is now, it was a lot more convoluted to get the simplest things done with some of these tools. And it was a struggle and then we didn't have any revenue coming in. So, we like everybody else reached out to our friends and family, our close network to try to bring in some revenue and we were lucky enough to get some customers during that time. But it's still, you know, we had that fork in the road moment where you say, hey, should we keep doing this or should we go back to our our normal jobs and keep pushing? And that conversation was was tough and it was honest and the only thing I could do was just ask for more time. And in that three-month period, I was able to get some more contracts signed and get some stuff rolling. And that allowed us to kind of pull out of that death roll or whatever, you know, whatever the saying is there. So we battled through it and I'm happy we did, we're here, you know, 13 years later, whatever it is and we're thriving, I want to say. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So, in that growth phase, what a lot of MSPs find is they they have to reflect on their their pricing strategy. Can you maybe tell us a bit about your journey and how you maybe started with your pricing and how you ended up with your pricing because I have to assume that they're different? Oh, yes. So, in the beginning, we like everyone else, you know, we um, we had the gold, silver, platinum junk offering. You know, I think that's the Gary Pika thing. And we actually went down to an IT Nation event. And it was fantastic and it was the first event we ever went to. But there's a lot of good discussions around all you can eat and how you want to structure that plan. And we spent the next two days after the event, locked in the hotel room figuring out how we were going to change our plan. Because those plans, the cart stuff, it puts you in a position to either charge a lot more than what you would seem would be necessary or it creates these weird relationships with customers where you're like they see your face and they immediately equate it to dollars. And that was really tough for me as a guy that likes to shoot the breeze and really enjoy a good relationship with our customers. So we we decided we're going to go all you can eat. And we raised our seat costs. We were at $60 for the cart stuff. You know, base cost per seat, now we're up over $220 a seat a month. Wow. So it was a big a big change. But we, you know, we also from that conversation and learning more from the from the industry events, we we do hardware, we do we do everything included in the package. So antivirus, all that stuff is in there, so there it's kind of like a set it and forget it price and packaging, so we don't have to have those conversations anymore. So it is really kind of a a all inclusive stack then, right? Yep. Yeah, so we replace when we, you know, we when we didn't and that was the biggest problem I had as, you know, as we're doing this, I'm the only technician and I'm having to learn, you know, I had a Cisco background, but then I had to learn all the other 50 different firewalls at the time. And trying to figure that out and learning on people's time, right? And trying to bill all that out and I was just we can't do this anymore. So we also in that whole process, we standardized our stack. We went with Cisco Moraki, we went with, you know, Sentinel one, Windows, Dell, all that stuff. We really looked at what we were using for vendors and how we can cost control. And how we can provide as we scale, how can we make that achievable and easy enough for employees to come on? And it's been super successful. As far as, you know, getting everybody trained on the same platform, trained on the same programs, same phone systems, that kind of stuff. It's a lot easier and it allows us to fix things a lot quicker. Yeah. And is uh the phone system included as a part of your package as well? Yeah, so we what we ended up doing was going from, you know, the gold platinum and all that other stuff. We went to two plans, a light and a full, the full includes the hardware and the light includes software or the support and software, it doesn't include the hardware. That way we don't have to make people spend money again if they just recently invested in their technology. Nine times out of 10, I mean, I think we're just over 100 customers and we probably have 95 of them around the full plan, 95% of them around the full plan. And we have a lot on the light or just a handful on the light plan. Because as they age out, they just slip right into our program. That way we don't have we don't have to have that conversation. It's it's it's a tough barrier. Look at somebody that's paying, you know, you know, $4,000 a month and be like, well, I need another 50 grand to get your hardware to where I think it should be. And they're going to say, well, I I think it's great. You're like, well, here's all the tickets, right? It just creates this weird, weird conversation to have to have with somebody that is trusting you and you have a good working relationship with. Yeah. That's a really good way to to to position it so that you can kind of age them out of uh of that light contract. And put and when it makes sense to move them into the full. Yeah, and it's like we don't do one so when when they go light to full, we replace it all. We don't do a step-in program. We used to do that. But it was so disruptive that we just said we're going to do the whole environment at one time, servers, you know, network, everything's going to happen at one time. And that's changed a lot of things too. Because now we're not doing a project, we're not doing it for three months, we're doing it in a week and getting them on board and moving on. And I think what a lot of this has led to is you said you kind of noted that you guys are very focused on relationships and providing sort of the right solution for your customers. And I think those two things are probably a bit of the secret sauce in the fact that you have a very, very low churn rate. Do you want to talk a bit about that? Yeah, so I come from the Alex Rogers tree of sales, right? So I went to the sales Academy and did all that stuff. And that changed our business tenfold. After that event, it brought to light a lot of feelings that I had of I need to really understand what their needs are, what their expectations are and how they work. Versus, here's some new shiny stuff, it's cool, it's this new Dell monitor, you're going to love it, we're going to put it in and forget it. It doesn't, you can't do that. You you have to be value-based all the time when you're doing anything in this industry nowadays. Because they'll shop it and you're not going to always have the best price. And we don't always have the best price on things, but they don't care about that because it's included, right? So, that allows us to be really sticky and close with our relationships with our customers. You know, we've never lost a customer since we started doing managed services. Because it is such a great program. And they always, since we do have a great relationship, if something goes wrong, they know we're going to fix it. There's no question about it. You know, network goes down, they know we're on the phone with their their ISP making sure they're going to be up and having a timetable for that to happen. Or if they're mad and we do mess something up, it happens, you know, we're all human. Instead of backing away from it and pointing fingers, you know, my philosophy and our management philosophy is to run right towards it. Okay. What's going on, how did we do this? Oh, we made a mistake. And let's fix it. Let's just get to a point where we we're we're moving forward again instead of pointing fingers. I think, you know, there's a lot of and we've had them employed here that there's a lot of people that tend to just lean back and start pointing fingers in every direction. When it's like, well, we may have played a little part in the issue, but we're going to fix it. At the end of the day. Yeah. No, I think that's a huge component of client retention. I I've seen a lot of circumstances in the past, I've I've sort of blogged about these uh events in the past where a major, major error is often a real opportunity to solidify loyalty with a with a customer. Because like you said, if if you sort of avoid it and and dance around the issue to avoid looking bad, sort of the blame almost gets amplified, whereas if you handle it appropriately and professionally, they're like, ah, these guys I can trust. Like I I I I I feel like they have my back when things go wrong. So it's sort of a, I guess not a an intuitive dynamic, but I think you're right in in just owning up to those issues and being present and being accountable is is often something that will save your bacon in a in a bad situation. Yeah, and it it's it's crazy to think there's a lot of and I did it in my younger days when I was a private, you know, in in the private sector business, whatever you want to say when I was working for a company. Is that you would just hide behind tickets, there's a lot of people that see these issues. And they're like, oh, sorry, that's the way it is. And no explanation. No how, no why, no nothing. And I I don't honestly don't believe anybody can be successful in in the times now that we have where all this information is readily available, you can't, you know, bullshit your way through solutions anymore because they'll just Google it and they'll just figure it out and then now you're devaluing your solution, what you're bringing to the table and you're ruining the relationship slowly but surely. And it may happen a time or two, but you always want to repair that relationship. And say, hey, I'm glad you found the solution, you know, if you mind sharing with me what wherever you found it. I'd love to add it to the knowledge base, that way, you know, now it's a give and take. And they feel better about it. And a lot of people don't do that anymore. It's just I can't say a lot of people, people that we've run into or some of the people we've hired don't don't like that mentality. Yeah. Yeah. I guess one of the other interesting parts, maybe a a bit of a unique situation with your guys's organization is that you're sort of approached rolling your own tools. Which is not a common practice, I would say. Maybe some of the the older organizations tried rolling their own tools early. But that's you I guess you guys are kind of the inverse of this because as you said, you started with the the major tools and now you're kind of looking to develop your own solutions. Is that pulling from kind of the original days of you guys being a coding shop maybe or how did that come about? No. So, back in the day, when we were with, you know, the the majors, we'll call them. I don't want to name any names. Every time you wanted to do something, it became more and more money, so I want API access, well, it's $500 more. It's this, that, the other thing. So we kind of started slowly to migrate to more API open-based solutions that weren't going to cost us money that weren't going to that were going to allow us to do what we have to do at a very low low cost barrier. And that really took off in the last two years. We hired a a full stack programmer who's now unifying all our various tools in a data warehouse. So now our onboarding is done through a web page essentially. No longer are the, you know, purchase sheets, projects, all that other stuff. It's just an automation of, you know, import the users, I I I close a deal, CRM, it gets populated in this program, here's the deal, this is what you got to do, blah, blah, blah, all the tasks get populated. And away it goes. And it and it allows us to still stay kind of free agents in the industry with a small investment to make sure that it's all our data, right? Because I can't tell you how many times we've looked at different spellings of different names in the past. Of our our our ticketing system versus our IT glue system, our knowledge base system. Versus even Office 365. So it was kind of we had to, we got to the point, you know, we're managing 5,000 people and their information. And trying to make sure that they're happy and taken care of and you don't want to call them the wrong name or the wrong salutation or any of that stuff. So, it just became it came time that we were able to do that and we invested in the the the programmer. And we got great ideas, you know, some of them are very pie-eyed like everything else. But, yeah, we're we're going down our own path and we're excited about it. We made our own inventory program tailored to us with a scanning option in like less than three months and rolled it out. And now my guys and gals know where everything is, when it is, it gets scanned when it gets dropped, emails go out automated, that kind of stuff. And we're we're very happy and proud of it. The portal that they our customers can log into, they can see their assets, their licensing, their tickets. You know, it was just more of being transparent with what we were doing and that's huge to us. And we couldn't find one platform that did it all. I guess another organization that I know that has gone down this road has some similarities. And do you find that this is advantageous for you guys because you're doing the hardware as a service as well? Yes. You know, and that was the biggest thing we were trying to figure out a way to provide hardware, keep track of it and and be able to to show that as a as a value add to them. Like, oh yeah, Suzy's got this computer or whatnot. And that was extremely hard to do with any tool that we were finding because it was hard to link in, you know, Office 365 accounts or AD accounts and that kind of stuff. And I think it it's a huge advantage for the inventory side of it that we were sorely missing. I mean, we order and push out millions of dollars in inventory a year. And it was kind of like this black hole for the last couple years. And we finally, you know, found the direction we needed to go in and we went in that direction. Interesting. And is this something that you guys have considered to potentially spin out as a software for the industry? Or are you going to retain this as proprietary or or have you decided on that, I guess, yet? I think we're going to once we get a a better feel of, you know, what it's able to do and the possibilities of it and then that might be something we'll we'll roll out. Because I know it's a hard, I have enough friends in the industry through Chartech and all these other, you know, these other associations we're in that that's the hardest part is doing onboarding. You see it all the time, what are you doing for onboarding, what are you doing for onboarding? And we're probably within the next six months going to have a fully vested onboarding with automation built into it. And it's something that I always got in the back of my head as the sales guy to be like, can we resell this, is this something that the industry wants or needs? And it is, but I don't there's always that fear of like, is it good enough? So, I I don't know what we're going to do, I would love to get it out there and let other people do it and try it. But we'll see what the future holds with it. Yeah. I mean, just sort of objectively, it's such a common practice, you see this so much in the industry that organizations are building something internally to scratch their own itch and then they spin it out externally as a as a software as a service, right? I saw this personally in my experience at fully managed developing IT glue, for example, right? And there's a dozen other examples of people that have built software for themselves that became an industry solution after the fact. Yeah. It's it's pretty common in our in our industry. And and you know, it's it's something that we might look forward to, but I you always get scared in those moments. Right. So, someday in the future, we'll look for look forward to the Omega PSA then, right? There you go. Yeah, it will be interesting. So, one of the other areas that I wanted to explore with you is you guys uh take your your process development and sort of lean operation quite seriously. Always looking for for process improvements and and a bit of a Kaizen approach. Do you want to speak about your philosophy on process development and and maturity development of your organization? Yeah, and it's like everybody else, we for the longest time, we had no idea what we were doing. We knew that we had tickets to close, projects to do, issues to solve. And as we grew, you know, from me and four other people and to do to doing all this, it became we went into probably five years of hyper growth, triple digit growth year after year after year once we figured out how we were going to sell this and how we were going to move it. And who gave a shit how it got done, right? It was just five of us and we were just going, going, going like gangbusters. And then probably four years ago, five years ago at that, you kind of look back at the wreckage, you know, we had our leadership meeting and I look back at the wreckage being like, okay, we really have to do something here. And that started with us getting, you know, the proper people in the right places. Maybe pulling some of those, you know, we need to make an inventory roll, pulling some people in different directions and doing different roles. We hired um HR person to come in and take care of our our staff the appropriate way too. Because we weren't even doing that. And that I mean, we were taking care of them, but we'd hire people and have all these great ideas with them and then they we'd burn them out or they'd fall apart. So even getting, you know, we brought her on and even getting someone to to just take care of that as a process has been fantastic. So, we we got really staffed up before the pandemic and as things started to shift around with that. You know, some people went moved on to better to better positions and better jobs elsewhere. And we were able to do what we're doing now with less people just by, you know, making minuscule changes. The way phone calls are handled, the way the service desk tickets are are routed around. You know, how are we allowing people time to do documentation? All that those little movements, I I want to say finite movements, those small things add up in a big way. Maybe not so much for time, but giving your staff the ability to do things that you're asking them to do appropriately. Right? Because there's a lot of times I'm like, oh, close tickets and write documentation. When do you want me to write documentation? I I in your free time, I guess, I don't know. You know. So it's it was we were able to kind of take the the foot off the gas and go back and look at everything from that 500 foot view to say, okay, where do we need to really improve on? And for us, it was a lot of just small changes. We were we were close. But now we're writing, you know, IT glue documents like it's our job because we we just had had all that information somewhere. We were using one note for a long time. And we we switched over to IT glue. And I feel like we still have articles in the one note that we need to move over. Yeah. Yeah. So, maybe just to tease out something from there that that I I I think I understood is that you guys were initially like maybe a last year or a year and a half ago were quite not significantly bigger, but probably a higher head count. And you guys leaned out from a staff perspective, but still maintained the same productivity on the client base, is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So it was we I mean, we're servicing all over our state. And it was that was tough. But we had to look at it and say, okay, how can we if we lose this person, you know, they just naturally went on to better roles. And you don't fill it, you don't fill that seat right away and you kind of let nature take its course. How are we going to do this and how are we going to continue to maintain our service levels? You know, our we we have a high SLA and we have a high customers or CSAT goal every every week we check them. And our our management meetings and they never went down. So then you're like, okay, do we really need to hire this person? Or can we just keep doing what we're doing and that came with small job changes too to remove some responsibilities from folks. And you know, giving them time to get that stuff done, but yeah, it was that was the kind of, you know, the the foundation started to have issues when the pandemic hit. Because all these amazing jobs were becoming open. And, you know, I'm not going to stop anybody from advancing their careers. And we just kind of sat on it and saw what happened and we had a good enough group of individuals. And support around them through training and HR and all that other stuff that they were able to, you know, move and change things as needed and it really improved what we were doing too. To me that really underlines the the the importance and the value of managing with metrics, right, the objective nature of the the view of your business. Because, you know, subjectively you would say, well, we have the staff, we have to replace them or things are going to get bad. Whereas you you guys had the numbers to see like, you know, maybe what we assumed was going to happen is not happening. So we should maybe play this out, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it's you know, we use bright gauge internally and it's it's helped us. Because I get we get the reports every day, service manager gets the reports. We know what's going on every day. And it and like to your point, that that's what we kept an eye on. And it didn't tick up or it didn't tick down and I was like, well, let's just keep going. And still managing trying to, you know, keep everybody healthy. That's the that's a big thing is keeping everybody away from the the big B word there. And we do that. And everybody will be successful and that's what we really aimed for as we started making some of these changes. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. Next one that I wanted to touch on for you guys as well is that you guys are not a not a large MSP, but, you know, one of the things that I've certainly viewed. My perspective is that you guys have a a very strong brand presence, both in sort of the the marketing that you do. But also your approach to marketing and positioning yourselves. I think as as maybe appearing more mature or developed than your size would represent. And is that been an an intentional approach to your marketing and your brand presence? I wouldn't say it's intentional. No. I think it's all of us having input and been through the things that we've been through. It just comes off that way. I don't think we've ever said let's look bigger than we are at any point in time. But it was more of, let's educate, let's figure out what's next, let's try to get ahead of the curve because as you're aware, this this industry is very wavy. Like you got to be riding the wave when you're surfing. Or you're you're going to be behind. So, you know, we we challenged marketing a long time ago to figure out a way to do podcasts, do the videos, do audit, do the audio stuff of it. And it's worked out very, very well. We got a great team managing that and running that and taking care of that. It speaks to what we deal with every day, a lot of the time the the the marketing team is interacting with the service team. To make sure, you know, what are the tips? What's this, what's that? Because there's got to be value with it. And we never really push packages or offerings or do any of that. It's more about educating and being there and helping. That way when something does happen, hopefully we're at the top of mind and, you know, we'll be the first phone call. And we we get a lot of sales that way. So it's been very, very successful just from, you know, that internet content marketing that we're doing. And it's it's worked out very, very well. And it's it's been something that we didn't have for a lot of years. And then we we had to invest in the marketing side of it, you know, hiring a marketing manager, hiring a content writer, a graphics designer and doing that stuff. And a lot of companies don't spend the money there, they're just they're hiring text, they're hiring text. And that's great, but you in my head, we had to grow and we're going to I can't do that. That's not my forte. So find people that can do that job, fill that role. And, you know, see where it went. And it went it goes pretty well for us. I mean, our our team's been fantastic. So that's if I understand correctly, primary a lead gen strategy. But are you also kind of getting feedback or recognition around that that content from your existing client base as well? Yeah. I wish we got more feedback from our existing client base, but as you're aware of email marketing. And blog notices and all that stuff. They sometimes don't get delivered where they want to go. But, we have we have a large interaction with our our blogs for our customers. We do a lot of tech tips in our blogs for our customers. We do. We don't do any like cold emails, like we don't have an emailing list that we send out emails to. A lot of our emails go right to our our existing customer base. Because they're all based on education, here's what's going on with teams, here's what's going on with Microsoft, here's what's going on with this. And we either generate the contact content ourselves or we we we get it from the Microsoft library. You know, you don't have to recreate the wheel if it's already there. And I think that's been a really good strategy for that. And and it shows that we're we're paying attention to what's going on in the industry and we're not just trying to chase the mighty dollar all the time. Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. The education component around marketing, I think is underleveraged. And really, really powerful, right? It has all the right intentions. But still benefits you in all the ways that that the business needs as well, right? Yeah. Yeah. And that's and it's you have a lot of smart people in in your in your office. Talk to them, tell them, ask them what they're seeing. What the issues are. Because you you have a wealth of just sitting in the tickets of what's going on. And it's great to speak to that because usually if you got one customer or client. Having the same Microsoft weirdness happen to them, then they're all having the same weirdness. So maybe give them some hints and helps and tips how that's going to work. And it's it's worked out really well. I mean, a lot of our stuff is word of mouth, referrals and stuff that they're seeing from us, you know, just based on the internet or I guess our web content. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. I wanted to circle back to something that you mentioned about your your seat price being. What was it, 225 or there and abouts? Yeah. So, I mean, that's definitely on the upper side of uh the typical seat price. And and uh one of sort of my philosophies is never be afraid to go up market. Uh and it sounds like you guys have uh have definitely kind of trended in that direction. Do you want to speak to kind of your experience in going from sort of a initially early on, you were I would say what it was probably a low cost provider. And now you're definitely on the upper end of the market. Do you want to talk about sort of your experience and the differences that that's made for the business? 60 bucks. Yeah. 60 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, that's definitely on the upper end of the market. Do you want to talk about sort of your experience and the differences that that's made for the business? It's been huge, right? It's we went from selling. Some seats at a loss to selling every seat at a profit. And it was important to get there because that allows us to get more tools. More value for our customers. So when we made this switch to to start pushing up all you can eat with hardware included, we had to find that sweet spot. And I had a tough time selling it at 200 for a while. But then instead of like selling the security package separately, we rolled that in. And I was able to start pushing us up to 225. Because now it's all again, it's all inclusive. So I'm not going to fight you over whether you want the security or not. You're going to get it and we're going to take care of it. And it it includes a lot of great stuff too, right? So that's the other thing when you want to sell on that value as you're going through that that proposal process with the customer. You know, I was taught to listen for the pain to then reiterate the pain and how you're going to solve the pain. With either tools or hardware changes, not so much just like Dell's cool. This is a new server. You're going to love it. It's going to be fast. So as we go through that process, you know, you make sure you're checking all those boxes. And then you said, you know, it's like the sham wow commercial, whatever. But wait, there's more. Not only are we going to do that, we're also going to give you a security package with, you know, perch and auto elevate and all these other tools. To make your life easier and to keep you guys protected. And I'm not going to nickel and dime you on any of them. And they're usually by the time we get to that part, it's it's over. They're they're on board. And it shortens up our our sales cycle too because you're not spending, you know, a week going back and forth on pricing. Our prices are price. We we do give discounts for nonprofits for most of the time we stay there because we know the value is there. And it's important that you always. Put that value out front over shining new shit. Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I guess one of the things that I tend to see or suggest is as with an upmarket strategy, it tends to limit the client options that you have. So, you know, you're kind of tightening the prospect pool of of who would be an ideal client if your price is higher. And I I see that kind of as a benefit and a pro and a con, right? Because, you know, then you're not sort of wasting time with people that aren't going to be able to see the value. Do you want to maybe speak to your perspective on it's tougher to sell, but it sells to the right people, I guess, is how I would view it? Yeah. Yeah. And that's I think that's spot on. I think and it's crazy the way it works, right? The way life is. Is is I'll give you an example. We just did a we just onboarded a customer that walked away from the table. I want to say they price is too much. And they went with a lower cost provider. They had some ransomware issues and they came right back at the full cost, right? Because they knew that in this industry you can't save that. Well, now they know. They didn't at the time. That saving that little bit of money doesn't equate to the same level of care that you're going to get. And, you know, we've had. We don't our customer base or customer size is usually 10 and up. Is our sweet spot to try to get to the smaller ones are tougher, right? Because, you know, a two-person shop, you don't want to throw in a, you know, $2,000 Moraki. It just doesn't make sense. But that's what our standard is. So we had to start cutting people out. And. And cutting deals. I want to say out, not customers. Anybody that was with us, they get their legacy pricing till their contracts up. And then we start having that conversation about pushing them up. But again, it's value led. So it makes a lot of sense. And it is it's a little bit tougher. But you have to you don't chase, you know, any word of advice. Don't chase the money. Because it's if you do that, you're going to end up with customers that you don't have a great relationship with and they're either going to walk at a moment's notice. The first thing that goes wrong is going to be the biggest thing in the world because you're just a check they're cutting. And that's not how you want to do it. Yeah. This guy down the street's going to give it to me for $5 cheaper, right? You don't want to have to fight about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When we started doing it, I mean, when we really started in 2010. I want to say is when we really got hot doing the MSP. Well, so did the entire industry, right? So I'm going into to do bids on these RFPs. And there's six, seven, eight, nine MSPs in there. You're like, wow, there's a lot of us. I didn't realize this. And then, you know, you go do it now, there's probably only four left in our city. So it's it's very interesting to see the way it went up and down with who's going to be an MSP. And who's not going to be an MSP, but we did in the beginning. We lost a lot of deals to people that were going to, hey, I'll do I'll do all what they're saying they're going to do. But at $25 a seat. And we still see it. And we still win the deals because it's all all all about the value. Because as you're aware that, you know, you may sign that $35 contract per seat, but you're not getting Office 365. You're not getting VEM, you're not getting all these tools. And it just stacks and stacks and now you're now you're paying what I was going to charge you anyway. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this has been great. A lot of great lessons learned. Any maybe parting advice you would suggest to people either starting their MSP or growing their MSP? Yeah. Yeah. I guess the biggest thing to take away is don't be afraid to say no. Don't be afraid to walk away from something that doesn't feel right in your gut. I do a lot of a lot of that when we when I get into a sales process. And don't be afraid to do it. Follow your instincts. If you're just chasing the dollar, make sure it makes sense for you as a business. Make sure it's going to be mutually good for everyone. You don't want it to be a one-sided thing just because you need a few dollars. We we we made all those mistakes and you learn the hard way. When you're trying to, you know, get them on the right side of the fence with you. So, just trust your instincts. Right on. Appreciate it, Ron. Uh if anyone wants to reach out to you on socials, anywhere they they should look? Yeah, Ron Harris. Calmazu on LinkedIn. Um and, you know, Omega MSP on Twitter and Facebook and anywhere else you can find me. Ron Harris, I don't have much social media anymore, but uh I'm on LinkedIn for sure. So, I'll be there if anybody wants to talk. Awesome. Appreciate it, Ron. Thanks, Todd.