ERP094 - The Power of Partnerships

you can do amazing things by yourself, but eventually you're going to hit ceilings and breaking through those ceilings can be very difficult unless you have that person who is equally invested in the vision of your company and equally invested in the workload, right? It's got to be a little bit of both. Can't be one or the other. in order to really get things moving in the right direction. Welcome to Evolved Radio, where we explore the evolution of business and technology. I'm your host, Todd Kane. This episode is brought to you by Evolved Management training courses. A whole series of courses built specifically for your MSP training needs. There's a project management for MSP's course, an MSP service manager boot camp, MSP security fundamentals and an IT documentation done right course. Check out the full suite of courses at training.evolvedmt.com. or look for a link in the show notes. Today on the Evolved Radio podcast, I'm chatting with Shane Michler from SDTech. Shane and I discuss the power of partnerships. The lessons he's learned in running an IT business with his business partner. We also chat about the pros and cons of having a business partner. And I explore how Shane and his partner share responsibility and ensure effective communication between them as they run the business. We also dig into how partnerships should be considered with clients and vendors. It's a great conversation for anyone who owns a business with someone or is considering maybe taking on a partner. Please enjoy my conversation with Shane. Shane, welcome to the Evolved Radio podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Todd. I appreciate it. So we'll launch straight into things. If you want to give us just a brief background on yourself and I'm always curious how you ended up in IT. All right, so the brief background on myself, that's that's nice and easy. I am the chief operating officer for SDTech. I've been with the company for a little over three years. Prior to that, I did 10 years in upper management for a couple of different corporations. My background in IT came from just as a kid being interested in video games. And translating that into computers whenever I was a teenager, having what appeared to be a leg up on a lot of my peers. And technology is just so ingrained in everything we do. It was a very easy, it was very easy for me to decide that this was my passion and pursue it as a career. Awesome. Similar background. Uh I got my start building boot disks to play certain games with different configs for for my PC when I was younger. It's a great way to get into it. It really is. That's I I introduced my daughter when she was about four in the same manner. She wanted to play video games on the computer. And I was like, well, if you're going to do that, let me show you at least how to access the files and we'd hide them a couple folders deep. And she started learning and I'd say it helped her out quite a bit. Very cool. Yeah, it's a great to get started early as you said, can certainly give you a give you a leg up on on other kids as well. I don't know how much of that applies still today, like everything being so digital, but uh either way, still an incredibly important skill. Regardless of what you're going to do with your life, digital fluency, I think is just a kind of given. that you have to have nowadays. I absolutely agree. It's, you know, when when we were kids, it was learning how to play video games and you had to have access to a computer and now our kids are have grown up with technology. all around them and can she can at navigate an Apple or Mac significantly better than I can and I've been doing this for decades. Yeah. Yeah, I'm I'm looking forward to that day where like my kids supersedes me on something where I don't know, they they start setting up like a an OBS studio or like a maybe a VR AR environment. I'm like, yes. Yeah, it's amazing. Very cool. All right, so sort of topic for for today, we wanted to chat about is the sort of the importance and the prevalence and maybe some of the pros and cons on partnerships. So your organization SDTech operating as as a partnership between yourself and and your business partner. How does that work? Obviously, like kind of the background of this is a lot of MSPs. I don't know if this is kind of 50/50 or what the number breakdown would be, but a lot of MSPs are partnerships. And I I think this is particularly prevalent in our field. And as a lot of people will sort of sort of truthfully joke that having a partnership in a business is a bit like a second marriage. So there are definitely sort of the the the pros and cons that come with this and maybe you could just explain sort of your experience and and some of the pros and cons that you see in in the business partnership that you have for your MSP. You know, Todd, so I appreciate the fact that you said that a lot of people joke about it being a second marriage. I treat all of my my relationships, my professional relationships as traditional relationships, minus a couple of key components. Uh but I joke with my employees about this and all of the things that are important in a marriage are equally important in a professional relationship with the number one being communication. And if you don't have good communication between you and your your business partners, your client partners, whomever those partners are, uh the relationship's going to fail. So, I started with SDTech just a little over three years ago. SDTech was founded in 2000, so the owner founder built the company up for 18, 19 years working primarily by himself. And then with a small team. He had a a master installer who assisted him with buildouts and he had one or two help desk technicians that would do the front end. But all of the business development and growth was on his shoulders. So you you can imagine, you know how this is, so 18 to 20 hour days for the vast majority of the man's life. And he built up an incredible company and had an excellent footprint that went well outside of our local area and honestly it was a it was a small footprint nationwide, but it was still a nationwide footprint. And when the two of us met, it was it was honestly it was by chance. Uh one of his employees was one of my friends from high school and he had been the employee had been having some rough times. And I had invited him to come live with me and I was providing him some coaching and uh just just life coaching. Just trying to help him get on track and through that relationship, I met West, the owner of SDTech. And we had a spark. There was just something there and it was like, I asked him about his background, he asked me about mine and then he said, uh, I would like you to come work for me. I have no idea what you can do and I was like, I don't I don't know about that. And so but we we met and we talked and what was supposed to be a 30-minute conversation turned into an hour and a half conversation and multiple follow-ups and when you find that magic, it's, you know, you feel it. And so over the next six months, we we started working together and started feeling things out and and building it up. And then I I recognized all of his pain points and our partnership and what we've offered each other has grown and developed and it's not a traditional partnership. I think for a lot of MSPs, you're correct, you know, a lot of them are two-man shops where it's a business partnership 50/50 and then they might have one or two people in admin or a help desk technician that's working for them. Uh that's the majority of what we've seen in in our greater area. And it can work really, really well, but I've also seen a good number of people who are running their business solo. And you can do amazing things by yourself, but eventually you're going to hit ceilings. And breaking through those ceilings can be very difficult unless you have that person who is equally invested in the vision of your company. And equally invested in the workload, right? It's got to be a little bit of both. Can't be one or the other. in order to really get things moving in the right direction. Personally, I would not be where I am right now if it weren't for my life partner, for my wife. I need her backing me up on the things that she backs me up on. And I also need her to tell me when this isn't a good idea. And she'll tell me, Shane, like, I I think that we need to take a step back. And let's make sure that we're looking at this from multiple angles and I've gotten to where I am in my life because of a 15-year relationship with her. And that's the same thing that I want to bring to the table in all of my relationships and all of my partnerships. So that's the biggest pro, right? Is having a partner who you can bounce these ideas off of, having a partner who can say, let's take a step back or let's go all in or whatever it is, but at the same time, that's that can be a con. When you have somebody who's telling you, hey, this isn't a good idea or hey, we need to take a step back. If you don't have quality communication or if you don't have a shared vision and shared workload, then it goes very quickly from being a pro to being a con. And just like in a bad marriage, it's going to fall apart quickly if it's not good. And so it's it's tough to explain that the biggest pro is also the biggest con. But we've all been in good relationships, hopefully we've all been in good relationships, but I know we've all been in bad relationships. And it's just one of those things that uh you know it when you see it, but unfortunately sometimes you don't realize that until too late. Yeah. The share of the workload, I think is an important one. Also, um just a quick comment on on sort of the ability to sort of trade things off and have someone to support you through the tougher times. I think is is a really legitimately important part, uh especially of an IT business. Like it is incredibly it's an incredibly stressful industry. And being able to have someone just like, you know, this is not my week and sometimes this is not my month. And someone can help you kind of carry the burden. And and you trade off on that. And I think that's an important aspect. Like there is a sort of an extra burden of having a solo business, even if you have staff and you're still running it by yourself. Like the buck still stops with you and and not being able to share that burden with someone else is pretty heavy. So I think that's a that's a really important aspect. One one thing I did want to ask into is is the other part that I think is interesting is not everyone shares the workload similarly in these relationships. And what I mean by that is like the responsibilities and accountabilities of the business. So, you know, you being a COO, are you focused more on the operations and and your business partner is focused more on the bizdev? That's that's often some of that split. Or it's just sort of like 50/50, we share everything together and just sort of talk and and make sure we understand who's in what lane, right? Uh so a bit of background on on how you share that workload. That's really interesting the way you broke that down, Todd. I have spoke with a lot of various people in in our industry. I've spoke with various people just uh on a friend level, on a professional level. And they ask about the partnership. Uh nobody's very quickly broken down what our partnership actually looks like. And and you just did and it was almost as if I had told you about this ahead of time and I know we didn't talk about it. But yeah, so our responsibilities are really broken down into he handles the bizdev and I handle internal operations. And now don't get me wrong, you know, there's a it's a Venn diagram and there's a massive overlapping circle in between. But uh for the most part that that is what our partnership looks like. But we work incredibly well as a team. So when we have uh an important prospective client that's coming up, we will come in and we'll tackle it, you know, together as a sales team. Or when I am struggling with an internal issue and I need to to bounce some ideas off of somebody, you know, like if I'm struggling with coaching one of our employees, we're going to sit down and we're going to work through those types of things together because there's enough overlap between us and enough experience to to give different perspectives. Yeah, it's a good point. I think like the the Venn diagram being the greatest sort of uh visual reference of what this looks like. But I think it is really important to have sort of clear responsibilities and to be able to know your lane and who is sort of primarily accountable for any particular portion of the business. It just creates a lot more clarity around vision and direction, sort of who is developing the ideas for this, who is primarily problem solving for this, but then obviously there are those circumstances where it is a partnership and you want to get input and potentially some support from the other party in whatever you're working on, right? That's very true, Todd. So the development and growth of a partnership, if you opened up your business with your business partner from the getgo, that's a pretty clear. You know, most people understand that you're going to divvy up responsibilities early on and there there's going to be some shifting over time, but there's an innate level of trust that goes into that versus in my position, I came into SDTech after it was already very well established. 18, 19 years uh in the making and so you you have a founder and owner who has been doing everything on his own. And so now over the last three years, one of one of my goals, not a short-term, it's a long-term goal and it was a five-year goal. And so I got two years left in it and I think I'm making great progress. But one of my goals is to to really establish a high, high level of trust that allows for the owner to take a step back. And really trust that my, you know, lifetime experience of coaching and development is going to handle the internal operations while he can truly focus on the bizdev. And we're doing fantastic in that area, but it doesn't mean that you're mentioning earlier that we have bad days or bad weeks and it can be very difficult to to trust that that's going to be handled. So that's something that, you know, we get to sit down and we we talk about. And then for me, it can, you know, it can be a a pain point whenever I'm concerned about how's how are these conversations going with this, you know, with this client or how are we doing with your the objectives with our sales team? And I want to be involved, but you don't want to step on toes and you want to stay in your lane, but there is still that that give and take. And it's a lot. Uh but it's a burden I would much rather share between two people versus dealing with all of that on my own or leaving it all back on West's shoulders to handle. Right. I always say it's uh every CEO needs a great COO, right? Like I I think that that division of responsibility, you know, somewhat subscribing to the EOS model of uh visionary and implementer, I think that there's that that's a good model, right? Because there there again, like that streams of accountability. And as you said, like uh just having someone be able to step back and have a broader vision and not be kind of drawn into the day-to-day tactical things. That definitely creates a lot of value for the business to uh you know, helps someone at least to be able to work on the business, not in the business as the saying goes. So I think that that's a huge component. I'd say it also rolls down. And I I often expand that to say every great manager needs a right hand, right? And I think that that's incredibly crucial that like there is someone to sort of at least delegate some of the responsibility to. But at least also just to get perspective, to share the workload, to get inputs, you know, have someone else read the situation where you may not be seeing certain things. So again, like partnerships start to show up kind of everywhere, right? And no man is an island, uh for sure and having people to sort of trust and get perspective and share the workload with is is crucial at any level, right? It truly is Todd and I'd say that's one of the the biggest pain points that a lot of individual owners are are going to experience and not realize that they're experiencing it. So West has ran a solo business, you know, a handful of employees, but his his network of professional relationships is relatively small and they're strong, but it's still a small network. So when he needs to find a replacement, you know, you're you're just relying on traditional manners of finding new employees and that can be a struggle. Uh versus where I had taken a totally different path in my life, I had the opportunity to work with thousands of individuals over the last decade and I absolutely pulled from my network of relationships and my right-hand man is sitting across from me right now in silence listening in because he he's he's being coached and trained and he's keeping everybody off my back while I'm able to sit down and have these and it's fantastic, but the the relationships, the partnerships are uh very, very vital. What what we're seeing here is is no different than the partnerships that we build with with our clients or the partnerships that we build with our vendors or the partnerships that we build in our personal lives that sometimes impact our professional ones and vice versa. Yeah. So you mentioned communication being sort of the like one of the most crucial vehicles for for making these these partnerships work at any level. What is sort of the rhythm that you guys use between you and Wade for making sure that you're communicating enough and that the quality of the communication is is meeting your needs? That's funny. There's no blanket answer. Not not at all. West and I have to meet on a regular basis in order to make sure that we are communicating to each other's needs. And you know, I've brought in some traditional methods, setting up regular weekly meetings and that's fantastic, but that doesn't do it. So for the two of us personally, there are there are things that we've implemented over the last few years, realistically, there's things that we've implemented over the last year and a half. One, we have weekly meetings to discuss a few high, you know, priority topics. So we'll put together a running checklist. This is going to be this week's topics. And that helps keep us on track with some of the bigger stuff. We have uh regular meetings with our greater team. And then so that gives us another opportunity to partner and say, from your end of the business, what are we bringing to the table to discuss with our frontline employees and then the same for him. So we'll have our bizdev highlights and we'll have our internal highlights. And then we also have a weekly dinner. We we get together every Wednesday. So last night we go to our favorite restaurant. We invite out a couple of our key employees. We invite some of our clients. Um and then sometimes it's a little bigger of a dinner, sometimes it's a little smaller of a dinner, but to give us an opportunity to stay in tune with one another. The weekly dinner is a novel one. I've not I've not heard that uh as sort of a standing meeting. I really like that. That's cool. Yeah, it's a standing it is a standing meeting. And we are friends just as much as we're business partners. Tonight we're going to the movies together. And it's it's always the two of us and usually our our wives will be invited and then a couple of key employees, but it centers around our relationship. And then we do keep it very family-centric and and friend-centric that we we are, you know, we're just staying in tune. But a very important part of maintaining that communication isn't just these regular standing meetings. It's checking in and saying things that can be slightly uncomfortable. Lately we've been talking about this. This is what I feel I've been saying. I need to check and see what you've been hearing. Whoa, whoa, do you think that we're not on the same page? No, no, not saying I I think we're not on the same page. I'm saying I think it's important that we check and make sure that we are on the same page. And, you know, just I I've introduced this with with other employees and other relationships in various ways, but a very easy one is to put a red, green or yellow light saying, we've been talking about this. Is it working? Do we need to stop? Do we need to go or is there something that we need to change? Right? So there's a lot of different models that are built around that. But with communication, I think it's important to actually stop and say, this is what I've been trying to say, what have you been hearing? And making sure because often times we think that we're communicating in one way and we think that we're being heard in the same way that we're trying to be heard in and then you're you're you're not. And if you're not having those checkpoints, then it's very easy for distance to start forming between you and your your partner in whatever relationship that is. Yeah, it's we're you're funneling into all of my favorite quotes today, Shane. So I'll throw I'll throw a couple based on what you're saying there is uh one, I think first off that this is hitting exactly to the quality of the communication. And I think you you said it quite correctly that that like making sure what what is heard, not what you're trying to say is incredibly crucial. And this is a quote from Mark Horseman. Communication is what the listener does, which I think is a great like simple phrase to to really spin this. And understand that like it doesn't matter what you think you're saying. Like it depends on how it lands and what the other person feels and hears based on what you say. And I think that that idea is pervasive through every interaction, every communication that you have with anybody. You know, business partnerships, staff, spouse, kids, everything. That's a huge one for me and just being cognizant of that. And then the other part that you hit on is another one of my favorite quotes from Tim Ferris, which is the a person's success in life was often determined by the number of uncomfortable conversations they're willing to have. So I love that because like this this has become such a life philosophy for me is is just like, yeah, this is uncomfortable, right? Like employee feedback, not terribly comfortable, especially if you're trying to correct or coach somebody, but it's important to lean into those things because that will determine whether or not that person improves or the quality of your relationship gets better, right? It's very true. That first quote, communication of what the listener does. I really like that. I've never heard that. But yes, that's it's true. It really is. So that that same business practice we've we've adopted wholeheartedly in uh our company. Whether that be in our personal conversations in house, but in very similar conversations with our clients. You know, often times it's so easy to just find ourselves in a transactional relationship. We provide you service, you provide us money, and then we just do this back and forth over the couple months. Sometimes our service is lacking and you tell us, sometimes your payment's late and we tell you, but it just becomes very transactional. And when you end up like that, you're you you find yourself walking on thinner ice than you would like to be. All everything ends up having a greater weight to it. So we meet with our clients and we say, you know, these are the things that we've been wanting to communicate. How how have we been doing? Are we doing a good job? What have you been wanting from us and let's sit down and talk about it. Not saying that I think that you're coming up short or that we're coming up short, but if we don't make sure that we're on the same page, then we're going to be in we're going to end up being in different books. And it just it's not a great place to be. Yeah, it's such a crucial aspect too. And especially in this business where there is certainly a level of commoditization that that comes into IT work. When a client doesn't have sort of the understanding of the business to differentiate us from other people in the industry. And this this has multiple impacts of like, how do I differentiate you versus the trunk slammer down the street that's, you know, billing by by the hour. They're charging 50% less than you, right? Like, why are you guys so expensive? And not being able to understand those things is uh is a serious risk around how you can actually differentiate yourself and and provide that that quality of interaction. So some of the sort of the typical modalities, it sounds like you guys are meeting regularly with clients. So I assume you're you're doing TBRs or there any other type of intentional things that you're doing to facilitate the partnership with your clients? There's our standing meetings that we have with our clients and they look, you know, they look different based off of the client because uh well, just every client is different and some of our clients have a more traditional corporate model where we're meeting with actually one of our clients we're meeting with their VCIO on a regular basis. And other clients, even large ones, we're meeting with the owner on a regular basis who's still overly involved in his business even though he has 150 employees and is running a a billion dollar plus business. It makes no sense to me sometimes. Uh but uh just yesterday I have a a great story that popped up yesterday. We have um a large client. They're a nationwide or they're they're the leading international real estate agency. And one of their largest franchisees is opening up a, well, they're transitioning locations. So they're going into a much larger building. And we're doing the build out for them. They have their own internal IT director at this office and so we augment their workload. I'm so used to having to explain this stuff, but you and all of the listeners of of this podcast are pretty familiar with this. Co-managed IT, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So so we work closely with their IT directors. Well, this IT director in particular isn't in the best of standings with the company. And so we're working with the owner and we presented them the the estimate for how much everything is going to cost for the build out. He ran it by his IT director as I mean that makes sense and the IT director came back and said, hey, I think that a lot of the labor seems overpriced. And so now we're going back and forth. The owner's like, I've always trusted you guys, but now I have this guy saying this. So, you know, there's traditional emails back and forth and then it's text and it's like, wait, hold on, let's let's stop for a second. Take a step back. So West came to me and he's he's, you know, this is normally his department. But he loose me in and he says, Shane, let's sit down and talk about this. I want to I want your perspective because well, he knows that when the relationships get choppy is that's my forte. This is what I'm great at. So, let's take a step back. This particular owner doesn't know all of the ins and outs of what we do. He does have a very high level of trust for us. So let's break it down for him. Get him on the phone. Send him an email breaking everything down, send him a couple of estimates, showing what it is, and then let's talk. And we were expecting a 30-minute conversation and in reality, I think it ended up being like six or seven because we get the guy on the phone. And when you when you stop what you're doing and you say, this is what I'm trying to communicate, what are you hearing? What are you trying to communicate back to me? And instead of having all of this back and forth, everything is resolved in a matter of minutes and not only does it secure the work that we're trying to get, but I'm pretty sure it just resulted in additional. I'm pretty positive that he is looking to let go of his internal IT director and offer that work to us. So we we have a we've built out another avenue for taking care of our clients. And and part of that is we provide essentially staffing solutions. So when they have an internal IT director, rather than them handling everything on their own, doing the hiring, the management and all that, we will take one of our employees and send them over as a FT and we we put them in their office. We do the coaching, we do the training. And I truly believe where we saw some friction in this relationship over the last couple of days because of questions on whether or not pricing was appropriate, it most likely just resulted in us getting one of our employees into their office and further solidifying that relationship. Not always about the money, right? Yeah, I mean it is, you know, but you get to the money by determining the needs and the wants and, you know, the desires and the pain points of these these relationships and I always I I do, I link everything back to my wife and I and when when you're struggling a little bit, I think it's really easy to say, you know, communication hasn't been where I want it to be lately. So I think I'm going to take a step back and spend a little bit more time at work or, you know, come home and relax and I I don't want to deal with the things that that I know that we probably should be dealing with because it's uncomfortable. But if you sit down and you spend however much time is needed, which honestly isn't usually very much, but you say, I've noticed this and I think we should talk about it. Let's make sure we're on the same page. And then bam, you know, your relationship's moving forward in a great direction again and it's it's got a nice little boost and everybody's happy and it's the same way with our clients. It's the same way with our partnerships internally. And I think that uh it can be a fantastic thing as long as you're willing to put in the work, the uncomfortable work. Right. Got to get those uncomfortable conversations in, right? Last one I uh sort of area to to explore, I think is is an underleveraged portion of probably most businesses, but it's I see this as particularly prevalent in the IT space is not not really advancing relationships with the vendors. I think this is an area that's underserved for a lot of organizations and I know you have some thoughts on that. Do you want to expand on that? I do, Todd. Uh I I absolutely have some thoughts on that. So we are entering into the franchise space as as a company. So we just became franchise uh a franchise or in April of last year, got all of our FDD and everything squared away and so now over the last four, three to four months, we've been really expanding that portion of our business. So by expanding, I just mean the you know, the marketing side of it. We don't have our first franchisee yet, but while we were putting together the training model and and everything that it's what are we going to need to onboard our first franchisee? And it's like, well, how how do you onboard somebody like this that's so much training, you know, like we have to train them up on all of our products, what services do we use, you know, which what software do we use for cyber security? And it's like, man, we're going to have to like hire a trainer full-time. We're going to need to invest tons of time into development of this. And then it was West, West was like, wait, we have a fantastic relationship with Pax 8. And anytime we go to to sell one of these products, they are always there to step in and say, if if you want us to do the introduction to this tool, set up the meeting and and we'll facilitate it. We'll we'll run them through everything that way you don't have to do it. So we reached out to our manager with them and said, hey, this is what we're thinking about doing for our franchisees. We're concerned about the amount of time that we'll have to spend with training. Would you guys be willing to step in and and help teach some of these the the product piece and they're like, well, is that any different than what we would do for your clients? I'm like, I don't think so, but I don't know if you'd be willing to do it. And and they were immediately like, man, you know, we're happy to help you out wherever we can. That's a really good example of where we we fall short in really utilizing the full capabilities of our relationships with our vendor partners. That that was a huge lifesaver. And since having that conversation, it's turned into what other things can you guys be doing for us that maybe isn't happening right now. And in turn, what they're hearing is, we we have this one relationship that's we're looking for new ways to be beneficial, to be good partners for one another. And we've already heard feedback where they they've gone and talked to their other clients and started sharing these practices and now, you know, they're strengthening their relationships and we're all sharing these best practices and everybody's super happy with each other and it's just a win-win across the board. Yeah, it's amazing. Like I often find sort of cynically that that a lot of IT people will look at, you know, their partnerships like Microsoft for example and say, you know, like I talked to our account manager. Back in the day when, you know, Microsoft had account managers for for IT firms that are not, you know, 2,000 people. And they said they they would often be dismissive about it and saying, well, like I talked to this guy and I asked him for some leads or something and I didn't get anything. So like like they're dead to me. I don't have like doesn't seem like there's a relationship there. But they like they were very specific in what they were looking for and that's not necessarily what that partnership is there for. And I think like you kind of hit on exactly that of like just the exploration of what can you do for us and leaving it kind of broadly open and just explore some opportunities is a way better leverage to uh point for any of your partnerships in in the partner ecosystem, right? It truly is, you know, that's our our partnerships with our vendors is very different than my partnership with my wife. I need my wife has to be my everything. She has to, you know, provide all the different things. But when we're looking at our professional partnerships, we don't just have one partnership. We have multiple partnerships. So you need to be able to look at each of those partnerships and say, what can I do to help you and what can you do to help me? And just because it's not that one thing, often times it is leads. I think you're it's nail on the head there. But just because that's not on the table, doesn't mean that other stuff isn't. You know, and and when you when you dig, when you explore, when you work together to figure out how you can really best help one another, beautiful things happen. Yeah. All right, so last question as we look to to wrap up here, just, you know, through your experience and in your professional career and certainly through your your MSP experience. Any uh strong tips or direction or advice for our for the listeners in their MSP journey, things that they should either be doing or not be doing that you would suggest? So, my suggestion is look to leverage the current partnerships that you already have and think about that in in hopefully a different way. I I really hope that some of the conversation between you and I Todd has maybe made somebody go, you know, I hadn't I hadn't considered that. And even if you are a one or two man shop, if you already have a business partner, look at what the two of you or the three of you or however many, look at is what it is you're doing well and do your best to stay focused on that. And then identify where your pain points are and have the conversation internally that we have with our clients, right? So when anytime that we're meeting with our clients, I know that we all do this. What are your pain points? Let us as your MSP help fix that. Treat your partnerships in the same way, treat your relationships in the same way. How can you leverage your relationships to offset your pain points? And if that means, you know, maybe, maybe it's time that you you go out and you actually find that person who is going to be equally invested. Um if you don't have a COO right now, then, you know, look and and ask yourself. I've been successful to this point. I've grown my company to this point. You know, maybe you're $500,000 revenue or maybe you broke a million dollar revenue on your own. What can you be doing if you had a second or third person who is equally invested? And it's not an easy find, but if if you're if you're motivated and if you know that this is something that you want, then you can really take your business to the next level. And I know that most of us are aware that the average MSP is never going to break a million dollars. And the reason that you're never going to break that million dollar cap is because we're stubborn. And it can be very difficult to to lean on another individual, but when you do, it's not just doubling your efforts. It really allows for you to do so much more than just double. As a COO, I would say that's my my biggest takeaway. That's I I really hope that there's a even just one person out there that stops and goes, I think I am ready to to make that shift and grow my business to the next level and I know that finding somebody to assist me along the way is a good way to do it. Awesome. Appreciate your time, Shane. Thank you, Todd.