MSP Spotlight: Tech Brews LLC (EP 907)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals and managed service providers where we help you run your business better, smarter and faster. Today I have a new friend of the show joining us. We are going to be doing an MSP spotlight and I have joining me Kevin Dukavich, technology professional based out of Ohio, the place where my wife is from.

So of course we'll chat about that. But Kevin is the owner of Tech Brews and that is an interesting name, Kev. So we're going to have to chat about that.

Welcome to the show. Cool. Thanks for having me.

All right. So let's start with the name there. Doesn't sound like your typical name of an IT company or MSP.

What made you come up with that? So long story short, I've been trying to, I was trying, I knew I didn't want it to come up with a business. I had been doing side work for a number of years and at some point I had the bright idea that I should like protect myself financially and legally in case I screw something up. So I figured I was going to roll all this side work into a small MSP practice.

And I didn't know what to name it. Of all things, my wife actually got one of those scam, try to renew business names. She had actually bought that name years ago or something close to it.

So when I was going through the mail that one day, I'm like, Tech Brews. Oh my God, that's it. And I asked my wife, Hey babe,  Can I steal this? I'm going to use it for my business name.

And she's like, yeah, I'm letting it lapse anyway. So that was mine. So she started it and I made it.

She bought it, but never did anything with it. She is one of those that will buy domains. At one point there was a not small number registered and any idea that would come up, she would just go and buy them.

So yeah, she's whittled it down over the years, but there's still quite a few. I'm assuming she's also doing tech stuff. Yeah.

So if you know what a Microsoft MVP is, she was one for 15 years, I think. So a good long run. She authored a book on PowerShell way, many, many years ago, and she is, what does she call herself? A polyglot when it comes to programming languages.

She can understand damn near any language you throw in front of her and give her a week. She will be basically working with that language on almost a pro level. It's kind of weird just how quickly she can grab that stuff and start running with it.

Interesting. Now, is her PowerShell book like a guide for dummies? Because I suck at PowerShell and I just basically grab scripts when I find them, but I need to learn more about how to actually create scripts when I need them. So her book was on PowerShell 2.0 to give an idea of how long ago that was.

But so the basics, the foundations are going to be there, but obviously some parts aren't going to work anymore in favor of new versions. Okay. All right.

Let's talk about your business now. Let me ask this. So many people know you from being involved with the dark side of our channel space.

You were previously at OIT VoIP, and nothing bad about OIT VoIP, I just say the dark side of the channel just because of that, and you had done that. You were there for a while, right? It was about a year, almost exactly a year. Just a year.

Okay. Yeah, it's one where, so I was at an MSP for 13 years prior to that. And as I started getting more involved with community stuff, obviously when you're more visible, people see you.

And Ray was one of those people that saw me, saw a lot of potential, and he actually needed someone to take over basically the CTO role. So he made an offer to me, and that's what I did for a year, kind of offloaded some of the stuff that Ray was doing and try to keep the rest of the company moving as far as the technologies used and whatnot. Well, I apologize for thinking you were there longer, but maybe you just made that big of an impact in that one year.

So kudos to Ray for doing that. So you were part of an MSP before that. I did know, I just didn't realize that I didn't do the deep dive research that I normally do.

So how long are you, you said you were at that MSP for what, 13 years? Yeah. So I started there way back in 2010, and that's one where, man, when I started, there was 12, yeah, 12 clients in managed workplace. If you know what level platforms and their managed workplace, Barracuda owns it now.

But yeah, I remember that list being only 16 companies deep. And yeah, when I left, or at our high point, we probably had 70 or 80 different clients. We had 2,500 endpoints, if not a little bit more.

I mean, it was pretty decent sized MSP. All right. Now, was that your first job out of college? Because I know that you did some stuff while you were in school, but was that the first official gig out of school? 

Nope. So I graduated with a computer science engineering technology degree. So yes, I'm an official engineering nerd. I graduated in 2002 with that.

In late 2002, I started at a manufacturing company. So when you say Ohio, I'm from Ohio, I'm in the Cleveland area. I mean, there's a ton of manufacturing.

And we're in the rest of- A ton, like 50% of the state is manufacturing in Northeast Ohio. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it is definitely a heavy manufacturing.

So I found my first job. Of all things, a networking within a gaming community. There's an old game called Asheron's Call, and I was pretty active in that game.

And there was an IT consultant who used to play the game as well. Kind of online people keep in touch with, got to meet them. And he actually sent my resume over to the manufacturing place who was looking for someone like me.

And yeah, I was there for seven and a half years, something like that. And as I put it, I did everything there. If it had a computer chip in it, it was my responsibility, as normal IT goes.

Okay. And we'll go ahead and get, since you brought up Northeast Ohio again, as I mentioned, my wife is from there. She is not too far from Stowe, which is, and I'm going to ask, you should know this, but most people don't.

Have you heard of the village of Rootstown? Oh yeah. That's just a little bit East. So the office manager slash client success manager slash you wore a hundred other hats.

She was from Rootstown and you pronounced it correctly. So she got you. She did.

All right. And then you went to the University of Toledo, home of that restaurant that was made famous by MASH. Wasn't the Blind Pig, was it? What was it called? Tony Paco's.

Tony Paco's. Yes. I have been there.

So yeah, I've, sad to say, I've been to Ohio way too many times, even before I met the wife. So Toledo, Dayton, Cleveland. Yes.

The Heights, all those places. All right. Yeah.

I've got family over in Toledo. So that's actually one of the reasons my parents graduated from University of Toledo as well. So it's one where I went over there for the engineering degree, was there for four and change years, and then moved back to Cleveland.

I was born in the Cleveland area and I've been here pretty much my entire life. Do you leave the state? Well, for, yeah, I mean, I'll definitely get out of here. I'm not like all the astronauts who have decided to leave the planet, but.

Gotcha. So, all right. So let's talk about Tech Brew.

So you've got this history, you know, that you had before working for an MSP, you went to work for OIT VoIP, and now you decided to run your own MSP. So I'm going to ask the question after all those years of doing it, what made you think you could do it now? What was that aha moment that it's time to start? So I actually started Tech Brews while working at OIT. And it's one where I discussed it with Ray, because I know some employers don't care.

There might be conflict of interest. And, you know, what if I'm spending too much time over on Tech Brews versus my main job? I made sure to have all those conversations upfront. Ray was cool with it.

And he even said from a tax standpoint, that makes way sense. And obviously, like I mentioned earlier, the legal and financial protection. So April 1st, 2024, I don't know who the joke was on.

The state of Ohio or me, but that's when Tech Brews officially was born as a recognized business in the state of Ohio. When I parted ways end of June with OIT, basically, I took most of July off and just kind of like, what am I going to do? So I had the MSP and I'm like, you know what? I need another big challenge in my life. So that's what I decided to do.

I decided to take Tech Brews and just start growing it out. The technical side of the business, no problems with. I've done this stuff for, like I said, years.

As it comes to find out, I suck at the financial side of stuff, all the administrative overhead, the sales and marketing. Those were challenges I knew existed. And I had high-level overviews of how they would impact someone.

But man, having that high-level overview versus actually doing it, there was many frustrating nights of why am I doing this? Well, that is, you know, something that we run into. I'm not going to say I started my business early, but it was on the younger side of my tech career, as opposed to a lot of people who do tech for a long time, then decide, I can do this better, and then get on the other side and like, oh, all this other crap I got to deal with. So you're in those throes there.

Now, when it comes to that, was there any of the previous work that you had done at, you know, Simplex, OIT, or whatever, that kind of helped in that area? Oh, all of it. So, I mean, at Simplex, I started as the second technician there. The first technician was going on to another job, so I was his replacement.

But for the longest time, I was the only tech there. So all my technical skills had years to build up more experience. And then as time progressed, as Simplex grew, we started adding more members to the team, and some of those members were direct reports to me.

When I left, I had eight people, seven? Seven or eight people reporting to me. And I kind of moved my roles prior to that to more of a, not CTO, but the CIO. So like, when we were talking about the TBRs and all that kind of QBRs, whatever you want to call them, I was doing that primarily, and I was not doing the day-to-day tech.

I had people to do that for me. And it was, from a business ownership standpoint, less expensive to have those techs go fix a printer versus me go fix a printer. So I definitely started shifting, and a lot of that was because of Bob.

At one point, he asked me, and I do this to every person now because of him, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I had that fork in the road moment of, do I want to keep going with the technical skills, or do I want to go more towards the management, the leadership, that kind of path? And I actually did pick the leadership and management side. And my entire reasoning, and right or wrong, was, at some point, there's going to be a kid half my age who can do everything I can do technically at half the price. So what's my value? Where am I going to be able to stand out? Well, the answer to that is pretty much, as the camera's well showing, all the white hair.

I don't call it white hair. I call these wisdom highlights. I've earned every single one of these things.

And that's what the 20-year-old can't have. They can't have 31 years of technical experience at 20 years old. So that was my driving force to kind of move more towards understanding how businesses operate.

Man, those TBRs were great. I used to love talking with all these different businesses on how they handled everything. Because we were not just fixing the blinking lights.

We were there to understand their processes, understand their sales, understand their goals. And that offered a lot of insight to how a business operates, which is part of the reason I felt comfortable, slightly more comfortable, starting my own business and carrying that forward. All right.

So was the reason that you have the white faux fur behind you to kind of highlight or hide those wisdom hairs? Oh, this ain't faux. This is a sheep. So this I picked up.

I've got family. You guys are still hunting your own animals up there? No, this is not an American sheep. This is an Australian sheep.

Really? We've got family out that way. OK. And one of the trips was you go to some of these farmers markets and whatnot, and there's usually someone selling furs and leathers and stuff like that.

And like, you know what? I want a big old sheep fur. So that's exactly what this guy is. Packed it up and brought it home with me.

I work in my basement, so it's relatively cold down here. So this guy works out pretty good for keeping me warm. All right.

May have to use that as the podcast cover. All right. So you make a lot of great points about philosophy and wisdom and the knowledge that we should have.

So let me ask this. In terms of doing tech brews, the questions always turn to what's in your stack and blah, blah, blah. But we live in a world that a lot of people that I've talked to when they start their business, they say they're going to be different.

They say they're going to do all these things differently from everybody else, but then eventually we all kind of end up doing the same thing. So do you have anything that's going to make you stand out and differentiate you from others? So I started Tech Brews with basically the goal of, and this is kind of turning into my little tagline, making sure IT is available to all businesses. And what I mean by that is over my years working at Simplex and OIT and everywhere else, you start talking to all these MSPs and a lot of them have a high bar of entry or pretty high monthly requirements.

Like they have to be a client. They have to pay X number of dollars a month. I normally would see like minimums of $1,000, $1,500, $2,000 a month to even engage with those MSPs.

Now I totally get why those MSPs do it. They have to be worth their time. And so I'm not faulting them for it.

But the problem in my mind is that creates an unfortunately underserved chunk of the market where small businesses cannot afford $2,000 a month for IT services. So you think your less than 10 employee businesses, where do they go to? Usually it's the cousin, it's the brother-in-law, it's the someone who happens to do IT. And that's great.

They can probably do stuff from the technical aspect, but they don't have that business understanding of how IT actually can integrate and help the business. The other unfortunate thing is, and I see this all too often, the small businesses are leaning on break-fix shops for IT support. And I usually try and point out to those places, you do realize a break-fix shop is waiting for your business to break.

So that way they can fix it and get paid. And tell me how well that works when your business is broken. So it's one where I wanted to create that MSP model for small businesses and no barrier of entry.

No one's too small. Currently working with a guy, he's a, I forget which real estate office, but he's a realtor. He's got his own little office, 365 tenant.

And he asked me to start looking over stuff. And he's just been doing this on his own for years with a little help here and there. And I just look at it like you're missing your DMARC record.

You don't have DKIM set up. Why are you using a Microsoft personal account for your business? Don't let licensing find out about this. I mean, just things like that.

He didn't have anyone else to go to. And I just don't think that's right. So that's why I started.

All right. So I like the premise. And I'll be honest, I don't want to say I'm guilty of all the same things as the big boys.

Because even though I'm a solo tech, I do try to have some minimum standards of what I will take. And I've toyed with the idea of having that minimum cost. Yeah, you can have one station, but you're going to pay this price.

But I've got a lot of legacy customers that have been with me for a very, very long time. And I just had a chat with my oldest client is one attorney, one secretary. And they're still with me.

I didn't dump them because I went MSB. They still need support. So we still need a lot of that.

And so this is I don't know how willing you are to go off road with me here. But the whole idea of if companies are going to put in those minimums, somebody's got to support the companies below those minimums. And the big companies can't complain that those people are being taken care of.

And that's where we have those fights in our industry where, you know, the Trunk Slammers are taking our business. You know, well, no, we're not. You didn't want it.

So Trunk Slammers are filling in the space. And I say Trunk Slammers in a way that is they shouldn't be called Trunk Slammers. Or I should say I made a comment on a previous show that just because somebody's a solo tech doesn't make him a Trunk Slammer.

No. Yeah. And I like to think I'm a perfect example of that.

And when I say Trunk Slammer, I normally associate that with the break fix folks. Again, nothing wrong with that model either. It has its place.

But one of my very few requirements for working with a business is they have to care about IT as well. Like it's one I can't be the one that cares more about their stuff than they do. You know, if you're going to be constantly cutting corners or if you're going to be doing something illegally, nope, nope, nope.

I will not engage with that because they don't see the value in it. And if they don't see the value in it, you don't we don't match. And I'll be perfectly upfront and tell people that as well.

So I know we've had conversations where we try to compare ourselves to the auto mechanics and the service industries, you know, where customers don't argue with their electrician or their plumber or, you know, try to cut corners. And, you know, yeah, you know, my buddy down here can do it cheaper. Now, there are those that do.

I mean, obviously, but for the most part, the industry as a whole in those areas, you don't have the issues that we do. Where customers will want to push back. And a lot of that is the Internet, you know, I think I say this, even though I'm on YouTube, YouTube is, you know, killing our industry.

AI is now the next thing. Where do you stand on AI in your business? Like anything else, it's a tool. Search engines were the original.

And it took a while before people could actually get some real value out of it. Personally, I do not utilize that much AI stuff. That doesn't mean I'm not learning about it.

It doesn't mean I'm still not using it. I actually do use Copilot a not huge amount, but a little bit here and there for stuff where it's usually out of my wheelhouse or I need someone else's opinion, even though the someone else is a bunch of mathematical algorithms. But it's one where I do like understanding it.

I built my own little AI box here at home. Happened to come across a quasi-decent video card, popped it in there through Linux on the hardware, and it's now running comfy UI and open web. So I still do this stuff.

My biggest complaint is I see it fail too often. And unless you have experience with what you're trying to do, you don't know when it's hallucinating. And that part scares me.

Like if there's some business owner out there that's trying to use AI to like supplement their IT work and they don't want to pay someone for IT work, that thing's going to spit out answers that are wrong. And like they don't know it's wrong. That's why I do.

I do caution against it. But like I said, it's a tool. Just understand the tool, understand its limitation.

And for the love of whatever deity you worship, don't treat it like a hammer and look at everything like a nail. That is not AI's place either. Yeah.

AI is souped up at Encyclopedia Britannica to some degree. And that's the way I look at it. It is search engines 2.0. It is there.

That's really what it is. It's basically just querying itself and it understands how to assemble the data in a way a little bit closer to where our brains make relationships. So it's a tool.

All right. Use it right. So as we think about those types of things, AI, cybersecurity, your business, you started it while you were at OIT officially April 1st.

What changes have you had to implement from the start of your business till now that you thought, yeah, I'm going to do this. And now that you're down the road, you're like, well, maybe I'm going to go this way instead. Nothing super.

I've had the same basic vision the entire time. What has changed is the tools that I've been using. And it's one of those where I'm kind of preparing myself for future.

So when I first started out, like my requirements were dirt cheap. Zomentum happened to be running a promo where it was a one-time cost for a lifetime subscription. Oh, the timing's perfect on this.

I actually need something like that because I wanted a very, very basic system to send quotes and accept payments and stuff like that. And the other side of that for like ticket tracking, I was just going to use the free tier of ClickUp. I wanted to make my initial investment super low and see how much I can do with it.

Well, when I moved on past OIT, it's one where, okay, these are not going to scale. So it's one where I started looking at different tools and then using all my past experience and knowledge, started identifying all the little things that I needed to start shoring up, like having an MSA, creating my documentation policies, creating my procedures on how I onboard a client and all of that kind of fun stuff. And what sucks is I did all that stuff before.

So I'm trying to remember things I did 10 years ago. Which has not been going well. And I did not leave with that information.

Like I'm not one of those that's just going to steal a bunch of info as I'm on the way out. That's not who I am. So I also kind of looked at where, yeah, I did this before, but that was Kevin and past Kevin.

Presently Kevin knows a lot more. So I might as well recreate this and update it for today's world. So yeah, that's kind of how I've approached stuff and how things have changed over time.

It's worked out pretty good so far. All right. So the stack has changed.

Any changes that you're willing to openly speak about? So I started moving off of, I was using OneNote for keeping some of my internal notes on stuff because I didn't have anything else. That has since migrated over to Hoodoo and great platform. I've used IT Glue for years at OIT.

There is Hoodoo as well. So I understand the power of those systems. And I also understand the work that goes into making those kinds of things actually useful.

Ticketing, I moved off of ClickUp and to Halo. And Halo is an unbelievably powerful system, which is almost a double-edged sword because the learning curve is insane. I will say that if anyone's thinking of going to Halo, please go through the training or engage with any of the Halo implementers like Rising Tide, Renata, there's other places out there.

Please, please, please just do that. Otherwise, you will just hate your entire existence as you try to figure stuff out, especially if you're coming from ConnectWise Manage like I was. I actually implemented Manage at Simplex.

So I knew that system inside and out. It was the cloud-hosted one, so I didn't have the chance to do some of the really cool stuff with the on-prem SQL and updating things directly. But man, I did pretty much anything else you could think of in the cloud version.

And I had to retrain myself, like stop thinking in terms of ConnectWise, take a step back and just reevaluate what the process is trying to do, and then fit that into Halo. And once you get that over that mental block or that hump, it actually does become easier. All right.

Since you've got the H theme working, Huntress, are they in there? All your stack items starting with H? No, no, no. Huntress is one I am seriously considering looking at. I love what they do.

They're just an absolutely great company. I cannot fault them. I have a number of friends over there at Huntress.

I love hanging out with them, both professionally and personally. Why am I not using it? So Simplex was a Sophos shop, or however you're going to want to pronounce it, Sophos, Sophos. So Sophos was the evil I knew.

And it's one where I started this business, and I knew I had a lot of other work to do. And I wanted to minimize how much I was adding to it. So with Sophos being the, quote unquote, known evil, I just decided to go that route.

And honestly, they have a pretty good system. Their MDR stuff, as far as I'm concerned, works. It accomplishes the same goals as what Huntress does and what a number of the other MDR platforms do.

So I also had some Sophos firewalls in place. The email filtering, I've used it in the past, and it's worked out pretty good. It just worked because I consolidated vendors, and I just didn't have to worry about learning too much new stuff in addition to starting up a business.

Well, you start off with the devil you know. And then you muddle your way through the deluge of all the vendors, because I'm sure you now have vendor calls on the regular, right? Oh, yeah. All the time.

So that's a fun journey. Yeah, and this is something I used to do at Simplex. I'm keeping that habit up.

End of the year is basically dedicated to making sure that the tools that I'm using actually make sense for myself and my clients. So come November, give or take, that's one where now I even have to look at it from two different points of view. Before, I just looked at it from the technical implementation and how it impacted our clients.

Now I have to look at it from the cost perspective. Does it still make sense for me to just do Sophos everywhere, or is it actually going to be time-saving and cost-saving to change over to something else like Huntress or Threat Locker or insert any number of the other wonderful products that occupy our space? All right, let me ask this question, because now that you mentioned having to look at it from a new perspective in terms of cost, I know that a lot of us have been told to think of success in terms of revenue and blah, blah, blah, and all the metrics and stuff. Have you sat down and figured out what it's going to mean for you in terms of measuring success for the business, for you? Any ideas yet, or is that still down the road? So, no, I've put some thought into it, because if I don't have a target, what am I doing? I've even set some BHAGs, so if anyone's familiar with Rockefeller or EOS, they always have the notion of the BHAG, your big, hairy, audacious goal.

I made sure to define that stuff early on. Are you thinking of how to say it? Yeah, kind of. It's one where I wanted to set myself up where I don't necessarily want huge, huge growth.

A lot of the sales and marketing places that I've engaged with, because I suck at that stuff, I'll be perfectly honest and upfront, short story, they're all too expensive for me. But it did make me realize I don't necessarily want to be this constant grow, grow, grow, grow, grow into something huge. Keep seeing things like 10x your company in one year if you do this.

Don't go away. I basically just want to leave myself at a spot where I'm comfortable. I don't have to worry about my bills.

My clients don't have to worry about missing stuff. I don't want a huge team. I don't mind having a team.

I actually miss it. I basically just want to see myself grow to a spot where I can be comfortable. That also means on the personal side, it enables me to do things like help out with the community in general.

I'm pretty active with MSP Geek. I was the organizer for one of the co-organizers for the last three MSP Geek cons. So it's just my way of giving back to the community.

I could do that more having my own business where I can kind of define my hours and I wasn't bound to projects being handed down to me and deadlines and this and the other thing. I still have deadlines and all that, but I can work them out a little bit easier because I'm the one controlling all of it. All right.

Sounds good. Sounds like you are on the right path for you. I've waited till this point of the show to give my little open disclaimer.

I mentioned you as a new guest to the show. We are probably just past 100 days of what I call first contact. When you and I first met, we are part of what I used to consider a little private peer group and now people know about it.

So I can't hide that anymore. And we chat here and there and stuff. So let me give you the opportunity because I think it's only fair.

What questions do you have for me? Oh boy. I mean, I've always been curious how you run your business and as you've told us over the different calls that we've had the last couple months, it's really neat to see how other people set stuff up. And having that understanding, hearing all of that, each of us can succeed better if we know more stuff around us.

So yeah, I mean, just how you handle your clients with your ticketing and your onboarding process and how you're handling your backups and how you deal with emergencies and stuff like that, I always thought that was really interesting. Yeah, that I do all the wrong things. You do your things.

Yeah. And it's one where it's not right or wrong. It obviously works for you.

You've been doing this a while. But I mean, as far as questions in general, is it like work only? Ask away. What question do you... You just thought of something, obviously.

What was it? I was just going to say, what do you do in the evening? Do you just keep working or do you just shut the laptop and go binge like a sci-fi show or you're like an absolutely avid Gators fan or something like that? How dare you? How dare you mention Gators? Just because I talk Florida man with a lot of alligator stories. The Gators are a hated team in here, in this household. To be fair, I know nothing about sports.

Like literally nothing. Most techs don't. I grew up on sports.

And yeah, I grew up wanting to go to Florida State and play football there. That did not happen. So we hated the Gators.

We hated the Miami Hurricanes. Enough said. Go Knolls.

So in terms of my business, so one of the things that... I always wanted to do was keep professional and private separate. So I made it a point early on to always have a separate space to work in. I thought I would have a store in the very beginning.

And then I quickly realized I don't want a store. I do not want to deal with retail and having open hours, blah, blah, blah. So in terms of the day, at the end of the day, I do go home.

But I don't stay home always because I have to come back and do things like podcasts. So we do have hours that we'll come to the office and then go home. I usually will spend a couple of hours at the house.

We'll have dinner, watch a show together, talk about stuff that we didn't talk about at the office because she works for me at the office. So it is a little mixed there, but we do separate things out. I do go home.

I do separate and watch things that are non-tech related. I don't game. I don't go home and drool about new tech stuff.

Actually, I want less tech stuff at my house just for that separation. But then I come back and I podcast a lot. I've actually got a few podcasts, so there's a lot of podcasting after hours.

That's cool. And then, of course, it depends on season. Like right now, it's football season.

So college football on Saturday, pro football on Sunday. Nice. I do get that in.

For me, tech is everything I do. I have an unbelievably complicated home lab here, salvaged parts from clients, stuff I picked up cheap off of eBay, Facebook Marketplace, stuff like that. I love Home Assistant.

I've actually given a couple talks on Home Assistant, and I'm going to be doing another one come January, an actual little workshop to set up Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi, where I just walk someone through start to finish, get this thing up and running, and have it turn a light switch on and off. So stuff like that. But then I'll also go ahead and build my own components.

So that computer science engineering degree that I had, you got to remember 23 years ago, the computer science classes were very different than they are now. A ton more electrical engineering. Like I think I was only six classes off if I wanted a minor in EE.

So I still remember a lot of that stuff. Like what a resistor does. What does a capacitor do? How does it work with this? And why would you do this? I do that stuff in my spare time.

So I am always in tech. All right. Now, are you the type of person where not just Home Assistant, but do you have, you know, like, what is it? The automated sprinkler system where they can, you can now do the customized watering of the lawn so that it will shape the water pattern in the shape of your lawn so you don't hit the street, you don't hit those sides of your house, things like that.

Do you have those Wi-Fi thermostats in your house? I mean, are you all out like that? Yeah. God, what was the, I can pull it up. Last I checked, I thought there was 1,300 entities in my Home Assistant instance.

An entity is, so like for the thermostat, the current temperature is an entity. The target high, the target low, the mode, the fan, all of those are entities. So, you know, something like my Ecobee will have 20 different entities.

So, but still, that said, there's like 1,300 in this house. Anything from white switches to, I built my own garage door controller. So in Home Assistant, I hit a button and my garage door will open and close.

I've got cameras integrated in it. I built my own little solar powered temperature and it's ultimately going to have some soil moisture sensors for my garden. Actually, a project I'm working on right now is for a heater for my off-grid cabin.

The batteries can't get cold, so I need to build a heater for them. So yeah, just fun little stuff like that. And it's actually even worked out for me.

My hobby bled into my MSP business a little bit. There's a guy I was working with, he came over for some help with his laptop and he saw my workbench and the ridiculous amount of tools and electronics spread everywhere. And he asked me like, I've got these little solar lights.

Is that something you can fix? I'm like, sure, let me take a look at it. And sure enough, he actually contracted me out to replace the batteries in like a dozen of these little solar lights. We charge them 10 bucks for them.

The lights cost them $50 each though. So I still make money, he makes money and less stuff goes in a landfill. So it's actually worked out kind of nice.

Interesting. Sorry I asked that question. 1,300 endpoints.

You know what the endpoints for my AC is? The up button and the down button. I still have one of those. Here, let's see if this actually works.

Yeah. Okay. So this is that project.

It's a little microcontroller with a whole bunch of other electronics and sensors and all sorts of fun math. And I'm still learning stuff. So yeah, it's fun.

For those listening by audio, he showed me a picture of what looks like a solder board. That's all I get. That was the image I got of that.

Breadboard. Breadboard with a small microcontroller, a couple of resistors and a whole bunch of wires. 

Well, Kevin, on that, I think it's time to stop because I don't want you going down gate lane and explaining more stuff in the home that I don't understand. But thank you for sharing all about your new MSP business, Tech Brews LLC out of Stowe, Ohio. Yeah, I hope to keep doing stuff like this.

I really am very community focused. Like I said, I've helped out with MSP Geek. I'm hoping to help out with next year's MSP Geek Con.

There's another conference called Code Mash that is pretty big in the developer space. I'm volunteering as one of the staff for the maker space there. Again, dealing with the electronics and whatnot, helping people learn how to solder and like what's basic circuit and little things like that.

But just overall, I want to see people do better. There was something that I learned many years ago. It does me no good to keep all my knowledge and experience in my head.

So I do everything I can to share that out. And we're all going to be better if we see what else is out there. So that's my little drive in life.

All right, well, very good to hear and hope to help you share that in the future. We'll have to have you back. I've not actually had anybody come on and talk about Geek Con.

So we should do that. Talk about some of the other stuff. So I'll be reaching out again.

Cool. Really? No, crap. All right.

The audio kind of went weird. Oh, all right. Well, any professional would say, we'll clean that up in editing.

But my listeners know that I will not. But on that note, let us say, thank you for joining me, Kevin Dukavich with Tech Brews. And for those of you listening, all of his information will be in the show notes.

Reach out to him and learn all about his 1,300 endpoints at the house. Kevin, thanks a lot. No, thanks for having me.

All right, that'll be it, folks. We'll see you soon. Until then, holla.