Brotherhood & Business: Josh Liberman (EP 919)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, broadcasting from the great, what is it, the great fighting city of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. We're here at the ASCII Cup, the last ASCII EDGE event of the year, and I'm joined by another long-time veteran of the ASCII group, and we're going to just chat about things and see where life is. I'm talking about Josh Liberman, owner of Net Sciences out of New Mexico, fantastic organization there.

Josh, how are you? I'm doing fine, Marv. You're in the city of brotherly fighting love, having a good time. I'm trying to talk about, you know, the Philadelphia Eagles, the Rocky movie, and the, what is it, the heartbeat of our American culture, where the Liberty Bell is, and all of that stuff.

This is where a lot of this stuff first happened. Yes, it is, it is. Now, I know this isn't quite related to ASCII and our event there, but you've been on the road, man.

You've been traveling. Yeah, I'm happy to say I've been doing some vacationing. We literally flew in last night just before happy hour from France.

We had been out there for a couple of weeks, and ironically, we had done the same thing six years ago. We flew into the Boston ASCII event for that show in 2019 from Paris. There's just where there's a non-stop, and it's a pretty good schedule, I'm going to make it work.

Nice, nice. That way I get to bring Heidi along, too, because she has no choice. Now, was it just vacation? I know there was a conference over there.

So, did you attend any of that? No, I didn't. Last time I did DattoCon in 2019, but this was just for us to travel around Burgundy and live kind of a rural life for a while, and then to spend the last four days in Paris. All right.

That seems to be the thing this year. Everybody's traveling abroad. I know a couple of people that went to Ireland for a week or 10 days.

Europe must be cheap to travel over there now. Yeah, absolutely not. It wasn't, and it's too bad, because I was lucky enough that I bought a bunch of euro back when it was more or less parity, a dollar to the euro, and it's about 20% the other way right now, but no, it's not that it's cheap, but I think a lot of people are in general experiencing more things than they're buying things, and I think that it's actually a good thing, but holy mackerel, the flights, the hotels, the travel, even in the serious shoulder season of mid-October, it was busy.

We went with the certainly naive idea that we'd go see Notre Dame, and we got out front, and there was maybe 4,000 people online, seriously. Wow. And I said, wow, I don't even think we'll be able to get past to the point where they're turning you away.

But that's open to the public, though, right? It is. You didn't have to have tickets or anything. You do.

Yeah, you have to go through and get tickets. They rebuilt it, as you probably know, in the last few years, and to get a true tour, now you can walk around it, and indeed we did, and took some photos of the 4,000 people visiting Notre Dame, and that's probably an understatement. It wasn't cheap to be in France, and it usually isn't, but it's all relative, and we found wonderful deals on great things, great food, great drink.

I can't even tell you how much we overdid it for 10 or 12 days. I feel like I need a month to recover and probably three months to lose the weight. Well, you've got one more party here you've got to partake in, so.

We'll get through it somehow. All right. Josh, I want to ask you a question.

You've been on the show many times, and we've talked about your business, we've talked about ASCII, but one of the things we have not talked about is I read somewhere that your Net Sciences business is the longest-standing small IT provider in the area. Is that true? Wow. I'm not sure I know the answer to that.

I can say that I started a business called PC Services. Okay. In 1990, but it was really a sideline until I left government employed at the end of 1995, or close to the end, and then started Net Sciences.

So it's either 30 or 35 years, depending on how you want to measure it. Okay. It really was the same business.

So we're certainly a long-standing one, but I don't honestly know the answer to that. All right. Yeah.

Give you something to think about when you go home. Yeah. I could do a little research.

I have a couple of ideas. I do know somebody who was doing what I did in the 90s, building PCs, and he actually moved into the VoIP field, and he's been running a VoIP business since before anybody could even spell VoIP. I think he started in the same year that I did, and there are a couple of fellows that have passed away that had PC businesses that started a couple of years before me, but I guess I'm still living, so maybe the longest living.

I don't know. Now I've got to figure it out. Okay.

So I'm going to call your company NSI, because that's where I've seen it there, and you guys at this point now do complete IT service, managed services, the whole kit and caboodle, right? Yeah. I mean, very simply, we started in 95 as net sciences or NSI. Unfortunately, I didn't grab that domain name.

That would have been valuable today. It would have been, yes. Actually, you already belong to network solutions, but anyway, we started out really as a system integrator.

We built machines and put them together into networks. Soon thereafter, we connected them to the internet and started to secure them. Soon thereafter, we became a broader solution provider, and right around our 10th year, so right around 2005, we started doing managed services without knowing that we were monitoring services using things like WhatsApp Gold or Event Log Monitor, and I think it was called RealVNC.

It still is. Yeah. Yeah.

We were out there doing that sort of stuff without realizing what we were doing. Proactive service is what I called it, because I'm a marketing genius. So that proactive service became an MSP service in 2010, and then in 2015, I abandoned anybody that wasn't letting us do only that.

So for 10 years anyway, we've done nothing but full MSP, and the five years before that, almost fully. Now, your version of the MSP, before it was the MSP, was it just simply, was it flat rate at that time? Or were you doing hours? No, I guess that's where I draw the line. Okay.

I draw the line at becoming a true MSP by going to a truly flat rate. So in 2010, we offered that flat rate, and we started to migrate our clients. But by 2015, we'd only gotten half of them moved, so I just drew the line.

I realized even if we lost the majority of the remainder, and we did, we could afford to make that transition. So we've been flat rate since 2015. Okay.

I know that there's a lot of MSPs still struggling with that concept, although most of us now are starting to realize, based on the pumpkin plan, that we don't need to keep every single customer. So the ones that are not willing to jump on board with some sort of agreement, we're letting go and stuff. Have you had conversations with other members that still struggle with that, and what advice do you have for them? You have to be realistic.

It's easy to go out on the forums and trade bravado and say, well, just get rid of them. I did eventually get to that point, but I didn't start that way. And I got to the point where, and there was only two of us in the business at the time I pulled the trigger.

Okay. Maybe three. Three, I guess.

But I decided that it was worth the risk because it was too much of a diversion of our energies and attention and too much wasted time. It really is true that the folks that won't engage with you fully are the noisiest, most needy, demanding, and least happy. And that just doesn't add up properly.

I was lucky. I was able to do that. I called it the shotgun pumpkin plan.

I just basically sent an email and said, we've been talking for a few years, and at this point, there's really no going back. We're committed to this process, and we're going to support those that want to take that journey with us. And I lost 40% of my seats and 60% of my clients in one month.

It was very sudden. And it turned around in a year. So it was spooky for a little while.

It wasn't Halloween, but it was spooky. And it worked out well, in my case. Yeah.

You mentioned the ASCII forum, and I actually caught you talking with a gentleman I interviewed earlier, Joe Balzerotti. Yeah. And I heard you guys chatting about longevity in the ASCII group.

Yeah. And he's got you by a couple of years? I think he said 32 or 33 years. I joined when I started the business, so that would have been the very end of 95, although I might have written a check in 96.

He joined in 92. 92. Yeah.

He's certainly been a long-term member. For me, it's just been since Net Sciences. I did not even know about ASCII until, I think, maybe the day before I joined.

As soon as they found out that there were other people out there thrashing around like me, that I might be able to learn from them, I leaped at that opportunity. Now, had they come close to you for an event, or did you just hear about them through the grapevine? Yeah, through the grapevine. I know nobody really comes to New Mexico for an event.

Sackwell had a partner conference in 2002 in Santa Fe, which was the first event. Microsoft had an office and an event there in 1999. But other than having private things, HP and others, Ingram meet there.

But having general events like ASCII, I'm not aware of one in the last 20 years. I don't pay attention west of the Mississippi, so I can't help you there. You know, I go all over the country and even Europe for this stuff.

But, yeah, if they've been happening, they've been under my radar. But I look for a reason to travel, and this usually fills the bill. Did you attend every event this year for ASCII? No, I missed one Toronto.

You missed Toronto? Yeah. That doesn't really count. Oh, it counts.

I had so much going on. I literally had to be in Portland, Oregon the next morning at 10 a.m. And there was no way to find an overnight flight. So I gave up and thought, wow, I don't have to take an overnight flight across the country.

That's cool. Well, Toronto is home of our ASCII member of the year, Mr. Chad Kim. Oh, Chad.

Yeah, that's correct. Shout out, Chad. Hey, man.

That's it. So let me ask you this. Not only do I see you active in ASCII, I see you active in a lot of other things as well.

But you seem as though you have an affinity and a loyalty to ASCII. Can I ask if that's true? And what was it that got that affinity for ASCII? It's certainly true. I've kind of adopted it as an extended professional family, I guess.

I think what happened is that early on, I ran into a lot of folks that were groping in the dark. Fortunately, not literally. And I realized there's a lot of affinity there.

There was a lot of similarity, and it could be helpful. As I started to figure things out, I also started to write and speak in the industry about 15 years ago. I felt like I could actually do something beneficial for others, not just figure it out myself, but maybe share the thrash.

And the journey is the phrase people like. That was very good. But ASCII was just more familial and more collegial.

It was more of a cohesive group than anybody else that I was exposed to. Certainly, I'm a member of many other communities, and also have been in several peer groups. Nice.

And I know also that you get the ear of a lot of people as well. I don't know if it's just because you just walk up and ask the questions that we all think, and you'll sit off to the side and be willing to talk to people. But of course, you have done that with Alan Weinberger as well, our deceased CEO and founder of ASCII Group.

So I've been asking a couple of the members here, what are your fondest memories of Alan? I had a very specific and deeply imprinted one. I met him about 15 years ago, which is really when I started regularly coming to ASCII shows. Five years before that, I did a few, but regularly.

And I walked up, he was speaking with some folks. I knew who he was, having seen a picture and been told who he was. We spoke for a minute or two, and his question was, well, what is your degree in? And it wasn't a challenge question.

He was saying, obviously, you've been educated. We were discussing something. I said, well, I got a philosophy degree, but that wasn't worthless enough.

So I went back and got a linguistics degree. He said, really? I said, no, I got them at the same time. But yeah, same story.

And immediately, he wanted to discuss Hammurabi. He wanted to discuss Maimonides. He wanted to discuss John Locke.

He wanted to discuss ethics, morality, and law, and the intersection thereof, which was, if you know anything about Alan, a one-hour long discussion, multiple drinks. And I realized right then, you've got to be careful if he wants to talk about something, because he really wants to delve deeply. And just today, speaking with his son, Ben, I said that it's funny.

As Ben will tell you, he's full of ideas, full of ideas all the time. Sometimes it was hard to get him to put wheels on it. So, and to be more precise, a few years back, we were somewhere, we'd had dinner, a few of us, and I asked him to call an Uber, and he got on, or he asked me if I wanted him to, and I said, sure.

And he got on and he started talking with people as he was doing it. About eight minutes into it, I said, did you order the car? He was, oh! I said, okay, yeah, putting wheels on it. He wanted to talk about the big things.

That's where his head was. Obviously, he ran ASCII and grew it for years, and built a really good, solid community that can persist without him. And that is probably the most impressive thing.

To build a small business, which ASCII is, that can not only persist without you when you're out traveling like mine does but persist when you're really not there. And he did that. And was a blast to hang out with.

Yep. So I will concur with your statement about Alan and his breadth of not just knowledge, but his ideas. I had the joy of sitting with, you know, Lauren, his wife, and she was sharing some stories of the early days and how it was hard to keep him on track.

Even as he's growing ASCII, he had all these other aspirations in his head that were just, each one of them would have been an astronomical feat for any of us. And he's thinking of these all simultaneous. Oh yeah.

Out of nowhere. I had no idea he was interested in making a movie. Then he comes up to me and tells me the story of it.

And then a year later he tells me it's done. And a year later I hear it happened. And it's like, wow, where did that come from? One thing after the next after the next.

He was really hard to nail down. One discussion, I am something of a polymath and a polyglot as well and I could follow along. We could have broad, wide-ranging discussions but you sure couldn't get him to decide what was for dinner.

Well, you know, what do they say about super smart people? They're smart in certain areas but in those little mundane, non-essential, I'll eat but I don't need to spend a lot of energy worrying about it. He was endlessly interested in the next thing. And that was surprising.

And honestly, he was getting older and I thought, well, he's probably going to step back from that way but to the best of my knowledge that did not happen. To the very end. Alright, so thank you for sharing that and sharing your thoughts and feelings about Alan. 

I'll ask one last question since we are here at ASCII EDGE and it would be in terms of what I guess role has things like the ASCII networking, the peer group or is there anything else community-wise within ASCII that would stand out for you as playing a big role in your success that you would pass on to a future prospect? Well, I would say that without a doubt, I trust ASCII members quickly and that is not something I can easily say across the breadth and depth of my life and it's been really amazing. I've received, we do some specialty work way back in the day in Hyper-V clusters and ever since and all along SonicWall, more complex SonicWall projects and I will do things for ASCII members. We share work and I know roughly 2,000 people in the industry and about 1,000 of them are ASCII members. 

I have a strange mind. I don't necessarily remember their name but I do remember their cell number and where they live. So I can make referrals off the top of my head as I did today for people looking to get something done somewhere. 

Now I also have contacts and details in there to check myself because, you know, I'm getting a little older but the reality is it's a wonderful community and in the sincerest sense of the word. So yeah, there are buying discounts and benefits like newsletters and insurance and on and on and on but the real benefit is that it's an actual community of people who are trying to help each other and that's cool. So I had one last question but I'm going to throw another bonus one in here.

At what point did you develop that unwavering trust? Probably not till I started coming to shows and meeting people personally and I am that way. I used to, I mean, 30 years ago when I started at Sciences Anyway, I used to go out and meet my vendors in Fremont, California or City of Industry, California or wherever they were, Chicago, anywhere in the country, D&H in Pennsylvania. I would go out and shake hands and meet people eye to eye and I've always been that way my whole life.

It's not a thing anymore. I recognize that very few people have that or of that ilk at this point but with ASCII that trust developed partly through the forum, the information sharing there but that was more or less concurrent with the same time that I started going to shows. So about 2005 to 10, I started meeting people and developing that trust because in real life it's still a good thing.

So that kind of goes along with the opening that Jesse always has when she talks about ASCII group. You get in, you get out what you put in. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, and you can I mean, when I first jumped in did I remember when I first jumped in the MSP field, they had a deal with one of the RMM vendors and I was literally saving three times as much per month as it cost me to be a member. Now that is the very definition of a no brainer and if you can't do that math you really shouldn't be doing this business. But that wasn't what got me interested. 

It was the knowledge and the actually meeting the vendors because there was a time it seems funny today, where I didn't really know any of the vendors. Now I know 1,500 of them but at the time I was just beginning to learn what the tools were and what these could offer us and what the tools could do once we learned how to weave appropriately with those tools. So that was great too. 

Yep. I remember when I first joined the discounts that I got through my distributors paid for the membership in two months. Yeah, I mean the very definition of a no brainer. 

I had in 99 the last law firm that decided they wanted to do something about Y2K met with me at 4 p.m. on the 31st of December and I thought that was humorous enough but after a few minutes of talking to them, their decision was they would just do extra backups so now they had a debate buying a box of backup tapes. I ended up just opening up the yellow pages and saying, look, there's a whole lot of folks that can help you but it's 4 o'clock on New Year's Eve. I'm headed home.

I'm not going to be one of them and I left there thinking there were 6 or 7 partner level people in that room. It was a $150 box of tapes and the first 6 minutes they had spent that money debating whether to buy the box of tapes and I realized the phrase no brainer doesn't apply to everyone. Right.

ASCII is a no brainer if you're going to engage. If you're not, you probably need to think it through but it might still give you one special deal that you've learned. If you're willing to put some effort into it, yeah.

It's a no brain seller. Absolutely. Alright Josh, last question.

ASCII Cup, last event of the year, big blowout party. Yep. Costume themed.

Oh man. What are you dressing as? Well I'm at a disadvantage. I came in from a trip in Europe but I did bring my muscle shirt and I can still rock it so as long as you can still say, yo, Adrian, I think I'll be fine.

Okay. Josh, thank you very much for hanging out. It's good to see you again in person.

This might be the last event of the year I see you. I'm going to be at a little one in CVX Expo in Phoenix next week and I'm going to be at Channel Pro a week after that in Orange County. But after that it's just personal stuff.

Alright. Well enjoy yourself while you're here. I'll let you get back to some of the sessions and stuff.

Okay. I don't see your little head shop station. Is that going to be on show? No, I'm not shooting this show.

I think there is somebody but for a number of reasons, including having been in Europe the last two weeks I just decided it would be nice to just be a civilian. Take a break. Alright Josh, thank you very much and that's going to do it folks and we'll be back with more from ASCII Cup in Philadelphia.

Holla!