00:08 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business podcast, the show for IT professionals, where we try to help you run your business and do your job better, smarter and faster. Welcome to this episode, which is sponsored by our good friends over at SuperOps, basically the all-in-one RMM PSA tool to help you supercharge your business. Today I am joined by a good friend, Raffi Jamgotchian , and we are going to continue with this MSP focus on money during the month of March. Raffi is somebody that I thought you know. You've heard me give my tips. You've heard some other people come on and talk about it from the accounting standpoint, but who better to hear about MSP money tips, do's and don'ts from MSP that literally focuses on the financial industry? So, Raffi, welcome to the show. Thanks, Uncle Marv, appreciate you having me here. It's good to chat with you again. So I described you as working with financial firms, primarily your company, Triada Networks. If I remember correctly, you actually specialize in cybersecurity for investment firms, correct, yeah? 

01:34 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
primarily, we work with a grouping of investment firms, typically called alternative asset managers, so you can kind of think of private equity firms, small hedge funds, these things called CLOs, which are basically junk bonds, these kind of not your typical investment processes. These are the ones that we tend to work with. 

01:58 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Okay, so you have a little better perspective on how these financial firms look at businesses, look at investments. There's been a big push in the last several years that you know we have venture capitalists, private equity firms, coming in and buying up tech companies and stuff. So this should be pretty good. 

02:18 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
Yeah, so we had I mean, we've had a front seat a little bit with, especially not only with Triada but even prior, where when the companies I worked with would typically go out and do investments, especially with tech firms, they would bring me in to kind of have do a little bit a part of the due diligence on the viability of the company, or at least a market viability of the companies, and I got a little bit of a sneak peek of what they looked at from a finance point. 

02:48
So that's when I learned these terms like EBITDA and all this stuff that we hear about now when it comes to mergers and acquisitions. That was kind of my early days of getting an understanding of financial, the financial language or the financial lingo, their jargon that they use. So it's been interesting. We've seen some, you know, and knowing the finances doesn't always mean that you're going to have success, but it also, if you're not knowing the finances, will mean you won't have success. So that's kind of the end of it. And so you know, we learned some things to do along the way and we learned a lot of things not to do, the latter being mostly our own mistakes, for sure. 

03:30 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right. So I would ask, as a foundation, how far along were you with your business before you think you kind of had a handle or a grasp on some of these financial do's and don'ts? 

03:43 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
I'll let you know when that happens. Yeah, we've been a business for 15 years. I feel like you know if I was going to be completely honest. This has been the year that we've actually kind of seem to have gotten our stuff together more than any other. We've had our ebbs and flows but it was always kind of, you know, we were one-man show for a long time. It's a little bit different animal when you're a one-man show. 

04:09
Understanding cash flows works differently. You're doing your investments within your own company work differently when you have actually employees and other things that you have to supply for. So that aspect of it, I think, stressed, I think the finances of our company differently, would say, in the last four to five years versus the first 10 years of being a business, and I think that's when we did our most growing from a financial literacy and financial understanding. I knew the basics. I did an MBA. They don't teach you anything there, you know. I learned my. I cut my teeth from hearing from these guys talking. You know I will look at their numbers. We'll lop off a few zeros to kind of make it a more palatable understanding for our world. But that was kind of the what led us to kind of understand that we knew that we had to get a strong grasp of our numbers and really understand what's going on if we're going to see long-term success. 

05:16 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right. Well, I would concur A lot of what you just said. My undergrad was in business administration, and all the stuff that you learn in the books in the classroom pales in what you really need to learn and deal with in the real world. So yeah, absolutely All right. So, Raffy, I left it up to you to bring a list today of the do's and don'ts. So let's roll. What do you get? 

05:43 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
Yeah. So I came up with five. You know everyone has to have a top five or top whatever, so I came up with the top five things that you shouldn't be doing when it comes to your finances. Some of these things are probably you've heard, and maybe some things that are obvious when you think about it, but not always something that we think about. The first one is around your operational efficiency, and you may be like well, what does that have to do with finances? But it's really kind of understanding you. If your businesses and processes are cumbersome, they're overly complex, requires a lot of manual work to it, it's wasted time, it's wasted effort and you lose, you lose, you lose money not only from that, but also from mistakes, and it's having a machine that kind of works smoothly and produces less noise ultimately is going to be something that helps you from a bottom line point of view. 

06:51 - Uncle Marv (Host)
So process, process, process. All the things that they teach us. 

06:56 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
Yes, sops, sops, sops. When it's you know I'm, look, I'm a, I'm a functionally lazy guy, I like, I like. I don't like doing things twice. I like it even less when my employees make the same mistakes twice. We want to make sure that those things are as buttoned up as possible to get the errors out, because anytime you have an error, anything you have to, anytime you have to reopen a ticket, anytime you have to retouch a computer, you're losing money, especially on a fixed price contract. 

07:31 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Yep, and if you have employees and you do onsite work, the I should not go to say the first time, but you learn pretty quickly that if a tech has to keep coming back to the office to get the right parts, or you have to keep running to the store or you have to do three visits to fix the same thing. 

07:50 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
That gets into it. 

07:52 - Uncle Marv (Host)
So operational efficiency, sweet Yep. 

07:56 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
That was number one we are. Our next was in terms of understanding kind of what your focus is. Recovery firms want to build, believe it or not, long term value. When they get investors in, they know that the investments are tied up, usually between five, seven, 10 years. It's not like a stock where you can buy and then sell it the next day or the same day. Even when you're investing in a private equity based fund, your money is locked up. 

08:30
But what that also means is that the expectation is that you're going to get a better return at the end of that investment, and one of the ways you do that is to make the company more valuable. And the only way you can do that is kind of thinking long term. So this is actually more of a lesson for my father-in-law that we have a tendency to think very short-term in many cases, not only what's happening right now, but this week, this month, this quarter, thinking five years down the line where your business is going and working your way backwards. It's very difficult, but it's very important to make sure that you're doing that so that ultimately, yes, Dave Ramsey says live like no one does today, so you can live like no one does tomorrow. No one can tomorrow Same idea. It's in the sense that do the work now so that you can make sure that you have that ultimate long-term goal as well. 

09:40 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Yes, that's part of his baby steps program. Was it seven baby steps that he's got I? 

09:46 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
have no idea. I'm sure I got the three or something, I don't know. You're in there, yes. 

09:56 - Uncle Marv (Host)
That's funny because I've talked with people over the last maybe a couple of years when we've sat down and had our group meetings and peer groups and people talked to me about how I've been able to do my thing. Part of it is, like you said, the long-term focus. One of the things that I did is when we leased this space this was the biggest lease that we had done and the landlord had built in automatic increases every year I had to basically say, okay, I need to know where my business is going to be five years from now to make sure I can still afford to be in the space at the end of five years. We just passed five years. We actually redid it because we got more space, which almost doubled our rent, so we had to do it again. But you're right, thinking long-term is huge for us because most we're thinking I just got to cover the bills, yeah, just got to get to the end of the month. 

11:05 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
You made a great point. You think about the vendor negotiations that you have now and you say, all right, well, I'm buying this now, I'm buying it for $10. I'm selling it for $20. But in five years' time that it's now $15 and you're still selling it for $20, that's not going to work. So that's the. You did it at a macro level with your lease for sure, and that's very smart understanding where, hey, this is going to cut in At some point. This is going to cut into my bottom line. Lease is one of those things. You're not typically making money on your lease unless you're doing something new within the property. So you're going to have to either constantly raise prices in order to accommodate for that, or you're going to need to somehow grow your company in order to accommodate for that so that's very smart. 

12:01
So number three is understanding or misusing. Really, the misuse of debt this is something that I did not do too long ago as well is not using debt appropriately. There are ways that we have a lot of folks that we mentioned Dave Ramsey before just in passing. He's definitely not a fan of that at all no, he is not. But there are other business leaders that do understand the appropriate use of that. For example, you shouldn't be taking a loan out for your operational expenses or for paying payroll or something like that. But if you do take a loan out in order to potentially purchase some equipment that is going to bring you additional revenue like one of your super expensive network analyzers or something like that if it's going to bring you that additional revenue down the road, maybe that is an appropriate use of debt. 

13:15
We did something I just kind of used as a personal anecdote. We did something during, for example, during COVID, when we had the ability to take out some low-interest loans from the SBA. We used it for sales and marketing. So we were trying to say, all right, well, we're going to take this money, we're going to try to use it with sales and marketing. It wasn't so much that that was the mistake. It was more the tactic that we ended up using rather than being strategic about use of that money, and that was the poor planning there. It's like we should have been more strategic about the use of that money. The more say understanding, all right, so we're going to take this loan out, it's going to take us whatever 10 years to pay it off, and so are we going to be able to bring in the appropriate cash in order to pay that off over time and end up being a complete flop, and so that ended up being definitely a poor use of debt. 

14:15
You know, another poor use of debt would be, like I said, using, like payroll services. 

14:21
You don't want to hire somebody unless they're going to be bringing in your cash right away, like it's like you have a project today so you need the money to pay in order to do it. 

14:31
I would say, be a little bit skeptical about using debt for something like that. But what the private equity firms are really good at is being really strategic of using leverage. So, and the way they do it is, they take their funds that they get in from their investments and they use that in order to get more funds in order to grow the company, and they do it because they have proper play works for sales and marketing in order to grow their companies, and that's where they funnel their debt into. Not saying that we should be doing that as small businesses, but it's something that, if you have an opportunity to, you have a, let's say, a working process that you just need to accelerate. That's an appropriate use of debt. In my opinion. What is not an appropriate use of debt is going throwing money into a black hole that you think might work, that you don't have any proof that it will, and use your debt that way. 

15:36 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Right, the first thing that came to mind when you started this segment was credit cards. That was the first thing I thought you were going to talk about that most of us fall into the habit of wealth. 

15:45 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
Most of us fall into the credit card thing. I mean, that's one thing, that. So my wife is extremely debt averse. I'm a little bit more of a risk-taker than she is. Thankfully, she is that way because we don't have credit card debt personal or business and the main reason for that is because of her. She's like no, we're paying it off, we're paying it off every month. If we're not paying it off every month, we're not buying it every month. 

16:11
And understanding that is very, very important to us, and in fact, it kind of leads into something else when we talk about cash flow and budgeting. So that, which is actually the next one that I was going to bring up, when we have a lot of things that we pay every month for our services right, we buy them, we resell them to our clients, many of which are either on ACH or credit cards, and if you don't pay those off, you're going to stick yourself in a hole. If you're paying for more than what you're selling for, it's not a good, not a good like. So understanding how, where your money is coming from, where it's going, is very important, especially yes, managed services is very is great, because typically you're getting paid before you're doing the work, so to speak, but you also need to pay your suppliers for part of that as well, and then, if so, if you're not paying your suppliers properly or you're not don't have the funds to pay them, they're going to take their nut. You're not going to have enough money to in order to manage your clients properly. So, neglecting planning and budgeting for your cash, also things like taxes, really, again, it's not. You have misused that foresight. One thing that we were not great at it we started doing is we've been following Mike Michalowicz profit first, and that's helped on a smaller scale. That's really helped us with our cashflow planning. So we understand that it is all right. 

17:44
When there was always a disconnect with I don't know if you have this problem, you're probably a little bit more with it than I was. When I pay an invoice. I send an invoice out. I'd get paid. That money would go into the bank account, but then the bill for whatever the product was that we purchased on that for that invoice doesn't get paid until later, usually 30 days or whatever, right, so it's 30 days after that, but you have to make sure you have the money in order to pay for that. That point is right. If you can't go out and on the spreading spree and start buying stuff because of that. So make sure that not only you bring that money in, you keep it aside for your cost of goods, but that part of those profits are kept aside for things like taxes and your own profits. 

18:32 - Uncle Marv (Host)
So to answer your question. So the short answer is I did kind of have that under review Either way a few years ago, maybe right before COVID, where I didn't do the full profit first plan but I did. At the end of each week I had a little Excel spreadsheet that I would say, okay, here were the deposits for this week and I had my 40%, 30%, 20% allocations. I didn't send them off to different bank accounts, but those were the amounts that I used. Okay, this much is going to go to pay for my purchases, as much as going to go, you know, to payroll, this much is going to go to savings. We are just now taking another step to profit. First, I actually just opened up two more accounts, another banking account and a savings account. So we're moving in that direction. 

19:24 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
We did something similar. So we, within our own bank account, we set up a savings account which we started using for taxes, and now I actually set up a separate account that we're using for more of the other funds as well and, and at the end of the day, profit first is. It's not magic, it's basically proper budgeting, forced proper budgeting right, without you know doing that. So now our next thing is really doing real budgeting, which is 2024 is the first time we actually had a proper budget. What does that mean? We look back at what we paid for things. We decided which, what things we're going to continue to pay for, and we gave an allocation. 

20:05
I do budgeting for our clients all the time. Every year, we're asked, especially for our larger clients, that you know what's our, what's our capital expenditure budget for next year, what's our operating expenditure budgeting next year, and that's not only including the stuff that they buy from us, but also all the other services and products that they buy. That's within that. You know the realm of IT or cyber, and so we encapsulate that into an IT budget for them, and so we've been doing that. We know how to create budgets Like why didn't we do this for ourselves and that's kind of the. That's been the difference. 

20:40
Now this year is now we're working towards a budget. So at the end of each month and then at the end of each quarter, we sit down with our financial team and we review and say, all right, where are we to our budget? Are we, are we over? Are we under? Is there, are there areas that we can improve? Is there any? Do we need to adjust our budget? That because our forecast is we're incorrect, and then we make that play every quarter or so. 

21:05 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Very nice and Profit First actually does a good job of allowing the flexibility to change those percentages. 

21:12 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
Yeah. 

21:13 - Uncle Marv (Host)
I mean, you can't be the same every year, especially with the way we are in our industry. 

21:19 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
Yeah, no doubt, no doubt, yeah, and you're going to want to adjust, you know you. You know you start your profit the profit piece, yeah, small, because you know it's safer that way and you add a point or two every so often and next thing you know you have some money that's actually on the on the side. 

21:37 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right, let me ask a question going back to the cash flow and the misuse of debt, because I think it's interesting that you mentioned the misuse of debt first, before the cash flow, and I think that's where a lot of us have to start. We get into that debt quite easily. 

21:55 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
Yeah, because you don't, you're misusing the cash flow, exactly right? So if you, if you properly use your cash flow, you probably have less reason to use debt for things that debt should not be used for. Then you use debt for things that you, you know, I don't know we don't do a ton of these, but you know, we know lots of guys that are bidding on very large infrastructure projects and when you do that, you need some funds, sometimes to buy things. We see more in construction. You know we have friends in construction. 

22:29
When they need to do a big job, they need to get, they need to have the capital in order to do that and similar with very large wiring and infrastructure jobs. So we've seen that for ourselves. Like I said, I think there's a strategic use of that. That leverage can be used, but if you're really bad with your cash management, you can very easily go into that, especially when it comes to the revolving credit debt that we all are either forced to or we like the points, so we put more stuff on our credit cards. You know, kind of thing. 

23:00 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Oh yeah, we fell into that trap. We got the, the card for the hotel and travel reward miles and all that stuff. But you know, interesting, you mentioned that. So this is year number 27 for me and it took until your 20 to actually get to the point where I could say we're running the business. Cash free, basically is the best way to describe it. Now we still use credit but, like you said, it's paid off every single month. Whatever the statement balance is that money is there to pay it off, so that we're not paying any money interest at all. 

23:37
I have a credit line that I try not to touch and that's kind of like the safety net If I need to do anything with capital expenditure, major purchases or whatever. And then we're doing these extra bank accounts to get better at the cash flow. So all things you mentioned that I'm finally I mean finally, I'm how are you using your line of credit? So it's funny because, to be honest, we've only used it a couple of times. So we used it, for actually I used it for my big purchase of my first fluke. That's where I used it and, to be honest, I am still using it. So with all of my cards. We're actually. We have at least one item that we're charging to it every month so that at least we're using it and then it's. Then it's paid off each month, but the credit cards are first. The line of credit is really for big stuff. I'm actually considering getting a new vehicle using that, but I'm. I have to talk to my accountant first. 

24:44 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
We had a vehicle in the account for a while. We pulled it out. After we paid it off we sold it to ourselves and vehicles are one of those odd things. It's a tough thing React benefits, good tax write offs, especially if you have a larger one. We were in a. It was a weird situation. I don't know. Do you deal with a large vehicle kind of tax write off, kind of stuff like that? 

25:14 - Uncle Marv (Host)
No, we keep that personal. And then I just write myself a mileage reimbursement check. 

25:20 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
Right, so we. So we tried to do cause my brother-in-law was in a business and they were doing a lot of truck purchases for their own business, and so when we were ready to do something like that, we did that too, but we bought. We bought an SUV at the time that was would qualify, but then the new model, because it was lighter, didn't qualify and so we weren't able to take as much of a deduction. So you know, watch your terms and conditions, I guess. 

25:51 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Yeah, my accountant keeps saying that we should put it in the business and I, I don't know, I have to. I have to sit down and crunch the numbers, I guess. 

26:01 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
Yeah, especially insurance. Insurance goes way high when you put it on your business account. Lot easier to have the insurance paid by your business than you carry it on your business, you know what. 

26:12 - Uncle Marv (Host)
That's interesting, because I still carry my personal insurance. And then the business. We have a. Well, is it an auto hired, non-hired thing under an umbrella? Is that? Is that what you're talking about, or are you talking about a different policy? 

26:26 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
No, I mean the actual yeah, if the vehicle is owned by the business, if you get a commercial insurance plan for the commercial vehicle that's what I'm talking about, and so that nearly doubled our insurance. So we were very happy to bring the car back into our personal insurance account so that we didn't have to have that kind of expense. So and quite honestly, for our work we do, a lot of our clientele is Manhattan. It's not like I'm driving a ton anyway, so it's it became kind of a necessary burden more than anything else. 

27:10 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right, so there's. That's a pretty good list there. 

27:14 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
Yeah. So last one, okay, number five, which is appropriate, I think, for our line of work. You know private equity firms will force forces may be a hard word could Joel nudge their investment companies to pivot and change? And we need to be, I think. I think most of us know that we need to be flexible, adaptable. I guess I'm a little saddened sometimes that I feel like the industry that is probably more capable of change, like us, that there are so many that are resistant to it. I understand that people want to do things a certain way and they are don't like to respond to market changes, but we I think there's a the certain amount of resistance is okay, but I think you still need to understand where things are going and that there are some things you can control and maybe some things you should just say okay, I'm going to go with this and kind of ride the tide, rather than necessarily go try to go against the grain. 

28:34 - Uncle Marv (Host)
So what's a good example in terms of being flexible? You're talking about things that we mentioned earlier with, like, our vendor costs and being ready to adjust with those, or something else. 

28:46 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
I think some of that is that for sure. You know, I think you can take both ends of that spectrum are the. Both extremes are bad, sticking around just with the. I've seen, I know of MSPs that they've been stuck with the same tool set for 20 years and the tool set has maybe evolved a little bit. You know, they're very entrenched and they're not willing to necessarily move and I understand that. That's an expensive thing. Believe me, I've done the other end of the spectrum, which has changed too often. That's not good either and I think where, in a world where we have a lot of things happening, you have to take stock in what you have, what you're using, and see where it makes sense to make adjustments, because sometimes you can get breakage for something, breakage meaning that the new cost is going to be less than the old cost by switching vendors. If the cost to switch doesn't eat into that cause, that's also a real thing. Changing PSAs every week is not a cool plan. It's going to be very expensive. 

30:05
I was thinking more along the lines of kind of macro trends, the resistance to cloud, for example, for many. In fact, at the recent conference I was talking to an MSP that had still a lot of clients on prem exchange. There's still quite a few companies out there, and sizable ones, that are sure they're making good money on it, but I think they're A, they're putting themselves at risk, so we're not talking about that. But then they're also potentially leaving a lot of money on the table and so, not being able to, you're not going to be able to raise. Going back to our one of our earlier ones talking about growing and putting creating value or long-term value for your company, that's very difficult if you're stuck in the past, so I think you need to strike a nice balance between that Is that move appropriately but move All right. So I was at a client today and there was a little issue. 

31:15 - Uncle Marv (Host)
They are still rooted in on-prem servers, but that's because of their vendors. Yeah, them too. Yeah, we have them too. Law firms just slow to move, although they're getting better. But this one customer is. I mean, they've got a hundred and something users and their vendor insist, and their vendor insist on on-prem SQL servers. So we are still managing Active Directory local and we're considering moving them to Azure AD and some other stuff. We've got their email in the cloud. We've got a couple of other products in the cloud, but we had this one problem today in a TJ on site. The first question is can we just throw all this up in the cloud? I'm like have you not been paying attention to the vendor? If we could, we would. 

32:08
It's not something that we can do. 

32:10 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
Yeah, look, there's reality and there's. Are there things that you can say that we too have similar kinds of companies that where there are line of business applications, the cost for them to change that line of business application does not make sense. For them to find something new and change just because we want to put something in the cloud or make it easier to manage, that doesn't necessarily. They don't care about that. They care about is this working for their company? Is the new thing going to give them a better opportunity to do better? We have a couple of law firms too. I get it. They're not. Some finance companies are no different in the sense that they don't want to necessarily change something out. 

33:02
We have a company that is their main investment from an office back office system is a traditional client server application. We happen to move it to a private cloud environment and set up a remote desktop just for those users that need to use it. Everybody else worked normally, but it's not great. It's not a great experience. I'm not a fan. I think I don't know how you did do with virtual desktops. For us that was a bust. That was a bust. Over the last 10 years of doing any virtual desktop work, we've all unraveled every one of them. This is probably the last remote desktop application that we have in place. It's good for disaster recovery, but for everything else it kind of is painful. But we have plenty of companies that are hybrid. They're part in cloud, part in not, because it doesn't make sense, and that's just. That's the nature of the beast. 

34:04 - Uncle Marv (Host)
It is, it is. I've had two clients doing the BDI stuff and one just asked to come off, so it wasn't us, it was the client that said we can't do this, let's go back. 

34:18 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
We've had four or five BDI vendors go out of business or closed shop that we had to do migrations Like, yeah, we don't want to do this anymore. So that was the last one. 

34:29 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Now, were you able to pull the client out before they went under or was it one of those where you oh yeah, yeah, it was a planned burnout On all. 

34:43 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
It's funny, the one that we have they're about to close shop. It was a more retail company. It was one of our early clients that we set up. They had nothing in their office. It was basically just piles of paper everywhere, so they didn't even have a place to even put a computer rack if we wanted to. 

35:04
So we went to one of the early cloud providers and they used OS 33. I don't know if you remember that, but there was OS 33 platform that was being used. It was being hosted by basically a group of MSPs that got together and spent all this money to host this and we used that for a couple of years and then they said, yeah, we're not going to do this anymore, and so it was like all right. Then we moved it to another cloud service provider and then they got sold and they said, yeah, we don't want to use do this anymore, and so forth and so on. So the last one we're again. 

35:40
It was like they're about to wind down. It's like all right. We just found the only thing they needed left was QuickBooks desktop. So we're just have some QuickBooks hosting company hosted for them for a little while until they shut their doors completely. But yeah, that's the last one. The others are all kind of completely managed by us. They're either servers that we fully manage in our environment by our environments I mean our cloud environments or in Azure, but everything else is. But we have more. I think we have more clients now that are like all SaaS based especially the newer private equity firms Like they don't want to buy stuff. They're like they want to throw a laptop at somebody and say go to work, and that's kind of their mode. 

36:34 - Uncle Marv (Host)
And that industry is doing really good at creating those products where it actually not only makes sense but it works and it appears to me, sustainable. 

36:47 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
Yeah, I think so. I think so too. It brings new challenges, sure, I think because of that. I think the move to the browser has forced us to have to rethink what kind of computing that we put on the desktop Processor matters less, the memory matters more. It's more and more and more. Every tab, there's another application, so it's chewing up. And then there's a security aspect of the browser too that is, as a cyber guy is concerning to me, because now that's become the new operating system, just like Cloud or Office 365 becomes a new endpoint that you have to manage or a new server that you have to manage. These have also this is now another endpoint that we have to manage are these browsers, and a lot of them are not well managed. Now I think that's starting to change, but I think we're a little bit behind in the SMB space for that. I think the enterprise has some better tooling there, but we're getting there. I know a little off track, but that's. 

37:55 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Yeah, it is. That's what happened when you have tech guys get together. 

38:00
That's fine, I know, I know, I know, but that sounds like a conversation we definitely need to have at a later time Because, yeah, the browser based desktop is something we're going to have to pay attention to. Yeah, well, Raffi, thank you very much and, like I said to the listeners, I wanted to get another MSP in here to chat about MSP money and tell us the things that are working and things that are not. So a good list of the top five for you. I appreciate it. And, roger, I was going to ask oh, here it is. I put a note here. I wanted to go back and ask. You said that this was probably what you think is the first year that you've been truly successful. I was going to ask what do you think maybe was the one thing that triggered this most profitable or successful year, however you're defining it? 

38:58 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
I think this is the first year that we've really had a good command of our numbers. Okay, and that's really been the significance to where we are Operationally this year. We're really not much different than we haven't changed that much in the last you know, two, three years. We've been pretty much in the same company. In that sense. It's mostly been between these two years and understanding you know where what money is, where it comes, where it goes, and being a little bit less dogmatic about certain things and understanding that there are. 

39:38
I think we have too many political fights and I use politics in the lower case, p in this case in our industry, and there was we. Just we just end up having to like we're slapping ourselves in the face sometimes with some of these, and so we understanding where our true numbers are and saying that's ultimately what matters to us is what number is on the bottom of that spreadsheet or that QuickWix report. That's the most important number to us. It's not the top one, I can care less, it's the what's on the bottom. And so are we doing the and what? That's what governs how well we can do for our clients. If we're struggling financially, we're going to struggle operationally. Where, if we're doing well financially, it means that we're also able to reach our clients’ needs as well. 

40:32 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right, I'm not going to mess that up by trying to summarize it again. You said it pretty well. Thanks a lot, and we'll have to catch up again another time. Are you out and about anytime soon? 

40:47 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
Oh yeah, we're doing some shows here and there. We just came back from CompTIA's community councils. I have some leadership there. So we you know we did some work in the cybersecurity community there, now renamed as the cybersecurity interest group. That, if you're not part of CompTIA, I recommend you take a look at it. And then, prior to that, I was at Rite of Boom, which was an excellent MSP focused security conference Again one of the. We can have another topic about conferences, because I've become a little bit disillusioned with conferences and there are a few that are doing a really good job and a few that are not. So I'll be yeah, I'll probably be at Asking, new Jersey. We'll be at a couple other conferences Taylor Business Groups Big Big Conference and a few others so we'll see. Hopefully we'll see you on the road, so Martin. 

41:43 - Uncle Marv (Host)
I'm getting out there. I started a little slow this year. I'm doing a couple of Florida ones down here in Orlando. My west of the Mississippi trip will be Pax8Beyond. oh nice, and I'm debating between the Asking Jersey or the Asking Boston, so I haven't figured out which one yet. 

42:03 - Raffi Jamgotchian (Host)
Well, if we see you in Jersey, we'll see you in Jersey, Sir. 

42:06 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right, rocky. Thank you again for hanging out and participating and listening. There you have it, Raffi's top five do's and don'ts for your MSP money, and if you have any questions or comments, send us an email and let us know what you think or what you may add to that list. That's going to do it for this episode, folks. We'll be back with a few more episodes on MSP money. Check us out every Wednesday 8 pm Eastern for the live show and anything else you want to know. Just head over to itbusinesspodcast.com and I can tell you what, following Raffi's five suggestions today, you should be able to establish yourself with a strong financial foundation and make sure that bottom number is as big as it can be. That's going to do it, folks. We'll see you next time and until then, Holla!