MSP Success with ASCII Peer Groups: David Stinner (EP 922)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, once again, recording live at ASCII Edge, and I always say that, but I always mean the ASCII Cup. It is the last event of the year here in the city of brotherly love, the fine fighting city of Philadelphia, and right now I am joined by David Stinner, the president and founder of US iTek, and they are, they're not too far here, headquartered in Buffalo, New York. That's right.

So did you drive or fly? No, actually, I flew today, I usually drive to Philly, but nice, easy flight, 45 minutes. Yeah. Really, really simple.

Nice. Okay. Why'd you fly instead of drive? Because I have an engagement tomorrow at 8am, so I have to be back to attend something at 8 o'clock, so I just didn't want to drive tonight after the event.

Does that mean you're missing the ASCII Cup dinner party? Unfortunately, I'm going to miss it. So you don't have to dress up in a costume. That's what it is, right? Maybe.

Well, thanks for having me back. Well, thank you for being back, sir. We are actually going to talk a little bit different topic here.

You are one of the SPARK leaders, right? That's correct. Yes, I've been doing it, I think, for over three years now. Really? It's really awesome.

Okay. In the beginning, I thought it would be a lot of work to run a peer group, and it probably is, but I'm really probably getting the most out of it than anyone in the group because I'm learning so much, it's forcing me to be disciplined on topics, helping people, which is something I love to do, just like most guys running MSPs, we really love to help people with their businesses. It's really rewarding to help other MSPs by telling success stories that I've had, and then in turn, they've helped me keep my feet to the fire when certain things needed to be done.

Now, for people that don't know, ASCII SPARK is the peer group within ASCII. They are specific groups, purposely small, purposely graphically distinct, and everybody is similar in size, revenue, that sort of thing, so that the perspectives can be the same. At least that's how it was pitched to me when I was asked to join.

Is that still the way it is? That's exactly right. Okay. Different geographies, so that you don't have any competitors from your backyard, and then similar size groups, like our group is the around two million and above top line revenue, so that we're dealing with different problems than probably either larger or smaller MSPs are dealing with.

Right. Now, it's funny. When I've talked to people in other peer groups, it seems as though the conversations on the surface are the same, but the nuances are a little bit different because for smaller MSPs, if you're dealing with employee discussions, it's usually around first-time employee woes of hiring and firing.

At your level, you've done that hand over fist, right? Yes. Yes. That's the nice thing about having similar size groups.

Most of us are in the 10-employee range or some even larger, so we're well-adverse to certain things. We've already graduated from certain issues, but then there's all kinds of new issues, like dealing with managers. Some of us have managers, and it's not just us business owners running the business.

Marketing is always a topic. Sales is always a topic. Of course, there's always technical things that we want to get through.

I can remember one of our members was really gung-ho about Microsoft Lighthouse. It was probably a year and a half ago, and a lot of us didn't know what it was. He had a great call with a Microsoft rep who was like, I'm engaging with MSPs, ready to help you.

Then in turn, he asked that Microsoft rep to come on a Spark call with us and introduce all of us to Lighthouse. That's just wonderful collaboration. When one ASCII member is succeeding, he's helping all the rest of us succeed.

That's very nice. You said three years. Were you the Spark leader all three years? Yes.

Okay. How has the group evolved? Are most of the members the same those three years, or did you have people graduate to a larger group, and then you maybe got somebody new that was in a smaller group? How much has changed? There has been some change. We've had, I think, at least, yes, two business owners who were fantastic in our group who both sold their MSPs, so they're out.

Unfortunately for us, we have two members retiring December 31st of this year, so great for them, but for us, we're going to lose the wonderful collaboration that they've provided. Both of them have brought someone else in their seat because they're both MSPs that have multiple owners. Someone is taking over the seat when they are retiring.

There has been turnover. There have been some members who've left who just didn't have the time because it's something you have to dedicate to. We don't really allow someone, if they miss a lot of meetings, if they don't show up for two or three months, we really don't want them listening to the recordings and taking advantage without any contribution.

Sidebar question. I've worked with a couple of clients that had multiple owners, and it's always fun to try to talk to them and get them on the same page sometimes and stuff like that. Have you had discussions in the group where you've had to advise others on how to deal with multiple owners inside of an MSP? I don't know that that has come up that I can remember, but yeah, it's a difficult topic.

I myself had to overcome that. I had a silent partner investor from the time I was 22 when I first started my business that took me 23 years to buy him out. That was a difficult thing because he kept moving the goalposts after we agreed to a monetary number.

Like three times he moved the goalposts, so I finally did that in 2021, so I was able to have phenomenal growth after that period of my life. Very nice. So let me ask you this, for somebody that is brand new to a SPARK group and kind of wants to understand what it is, how much different is it to explain to them the SPARK version of peer group versus others that they may have been a part of? So I think what's different with the ASCII SPARK peer groups is there's not as much work and commitment.

Second of all, it's free with your ASCII membership. Some of the peer groups are charging $1,000 to $2,000 a month. We don't go as deep as those organizations where they're wanting everybody to share their financials or everybody using the same PSA or RMM tools.

So it's not that deep, so I think it's often easy for some people because a lot of MSPs are very busy and they just don't have the time for those other peer groups where you need to fly out once a quarter or have four-hour events. So it's just a different level, nothing bad about those other peer groups, but I think there is a need in our industry for the type of peer group that SPARK is. Very nice.

Now, you started to mention at the beginning that you're learning just as much and maybe more as a leader. Has there been anything that has really sparked a change in your business because of leading SPARK? Well, I can think of one story recently due to the difficulty of one of my senior network engineers. We still had Exchange servers in our environment.

Physical Exchange? They were not physical. They were in Azure, but they were moved into the cloud years ago, but they were left behind in a hybrid environment due to the graphical interface and all that technical business. I've worked with Exchange way too much.

So one of the members in my peer group, when we were talking about that issue, he said, man, how do you sleep at night? Why do you still have Exchange servers in your environment? So needless to say, I was able to fast track that, and in about 30 to 45 days, we did what it took to eliminate the hybrid environments and shut those systems down. And then I came back to the group in the next call, and I'm like, thank you. So big shout out to Isaac, if you're listening.

Thank you for holding my feet to the fire to get rid of those last Exchange servers in the hybrid environment. Yeah, I remember my last Exchange server was with a client that I actually fired. Not because of Exchange but being able to wake up Sundays without worrying about whether the information store went offline was so uplifting to me.

So another thing that I can think of is best practices of things that we didn't think about. We talk about HR best practices, of course, technical best practices, management, sales best practices, legal agreement best practices. And that really drives the way everybody's wheels are spinning and thinking, oh, this is really something I've never thought about or never addressed.

So when those topics come up, they really help all of us in the group go and do our homework and figure out the lacking things, and then we all become better. So it's just wonderful. Okay.

All right. Well, Dave, thank you very much for sharing about Spark, a little different show than last time. We'll have to get you on because I do have questions I wanted to ask you about your business in particular and some nice wins that you've had over the last year or so.

But we'll do that. We'll catch up. Yeah.

Well, let me know when you want me back. And just remember for those out there listening, if you're looking for a peer group, you join the ASCII group and you can join Spark as part of your membership. Sounds great.

David Stinner, President and Founder of USITEK, I keep looking at this in my notes and I meant to ask you, I'm just going to go ahead and ask you, were you really CRN's number one system builder? 2007, I was on the cover of CRN and it was actually because they were calculating that year the number of units shipped. So the backstory there is, yes, we were a huge system builder in the 2000s. And we got into computer recycling probably around 2004, you know, we're in upstate New York.

There was a big bank, HSBC, I'm sure most people know about that global bank. So their United States headquarters was in New York City. They have huge back offices in Buffalo.

We got the contract to take and recycle all of their desktop PCs. So that was, I don't remember, but maybe four or 5,000 units a month for a while. And part of what we had to do was wipe the units.

And then instead of putting them in the landfill, we reloaded windows and sold them on the secondary market. Nice. So we were exporting them to Morocco, Pakistan, India.

And that was before the official Microsoft Refurbisher Program, right? No, actually, we were one of the first companies in that Refurbisher Program. That's what we were reloading. So we were pushing out 5,000 units a month for a period of time.

And when I applied for that, I don't remember exactly how they found me, but they found me and then they came in and had a photographer do a photo shoot. It was quite an honor. Nice.

Very nice. Yeah, I figured that couldn't wait. I figured I'd ask you now about that.

That brings back some memories. Thanks for asking. All right, folks.

David Stinner, US iTek. Catch him at an ASCII event or find him in the contact information we'll have in the show notes. But that's going to do it for this episode.

And I've got, I think, two or three more here from ASCII Edge. We'll see you soon. Holla!