Man in the Van vs. MSP: 10 Years Later (EP 913)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with a very special edition of the IT Business Podcast. For those of you joining us for the first time, this is the show where we help managed service providers and IT professionals run their business better, smarter, and faster. Our live stream is presented by our good friends over at ThreatLocker, Zero Trust, Total Protection, and I want to thank them for that. 

And this show, let me give you a little history to get us started. 2015, after we had attended a conference in Chicago and had a little rude awakening about how managed service providers viewed solo techs, calling them trunk slammers, Johnny ponytails, and other not so savory words. We, as a community of solo techs, computer repair shops, blah, blah, blah, decided, yeah, we'll get together and do some stuff. 

And we were going to put together a conference called the UnConvention. And it was going to be completely against what our industry knows as the big rah-rah vendor supported shows. And our good friend Corey Fruitman from Instant Housecall was putting this show together. 

He was going to be kind of like a sponsor, but not a sponsor. And I've had conversations with Corey and we were talking about the type of companies that would be coming to this conference. And I was trying to get Corey to understand that most of the people are going to be like me. 

In a sense, they're going to be solo tech, small shops. He was thinking everybody was going to be a big MSP, five techs, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, there's a lot more of us than you think. 

And Corey brought up the question, is the solo tech model a valid business model in the tech space? And I said, of course. And he thought, really, would you be willing to attest to that and go up against some MSPs and prove your point? And I said, sure. And that spawned the picture that you saw in the opening of the man in the van versus the MSP. 

And one of those people, afterwards, we had a nice little chat and he's like, yeah, you're not so bad. So I thought, this is going to be a 10-year reunion of that show. And it's still on YouTube, folks. 

So after we do the show here and I update the notes, there will be a link to that original. It wasn't really a webinar. It wasn't a podcast. 

It was something called IT Jetpack put on by Instant House Call. And this gentleman was a part of that. And we are going to do a 10-year reunion one week before because next week will be an absolute one year for that.

But let me go ahead and bring up, and I do want to acknowledge, I see some people in the chat saying hello, everyone. But let me bring up this person out of Canada, the CEO President of Fast Computers, Chad Kempt, who I now consider to be a friend. So Chad, welcome to the show.

Marvin, thanks for having me back. And absolutely likewise, consider you a friend as well. 10 plus years now, I guess. 

Yeah, absolutely. So I didn't want to give too much of a historical background of that show. People can go back and listen to it if they want. 

But we all know the conversations that are had about the solo techs in our space and the fact that a lot of times, larger MSPs will blame the solo tech for bringing the industry down, undercutting them in prices stuff. And I think there was a misconception back then that all solo techs were trunk slammers. And I was like, no, we're not. 

So let me just kind of ask you, when you look back 10 years, I don't think I've even asked you this question. What was your thoughts going into that show and your thoughts afterwards? Yeah, I had a lot of preconceptions. And I mean, it's probably the same for you, solo tech or not. 

When you're out there and you're talking to prospects or looking at client environments, bad tech is bad tech, whether it was done by a large company or a solo tech. And it's just easier to blame the solo tech because he's the only guy. It's a larger company. 

Sometimes it's like, well, that guy's not here anymore. The company's great. We just had a bad tech in there and we'll sort that out. 

You can't pull that off when you are the company. And so I had a lot of preconceptions about that. But going into that, after talking to you and then since then, I've really had my eyes opened. 

Our mutual friend Stan is a great example of that. There's been some extremely successful one-man-ish shops I've talked to. And they definitely don't run the same way as a larger company. 

That's for sure. But it's different. And my opinion back then going into it was, you either were in it to build a business or you were building a job. 

And my thoughts were you couldn't do the job effectively because there was too many roles. And while I still maintain you can't specialize if you're doing everything yourself, that goes the same for a smaller MSP with a few employees or even getting a little bigger. But there is some really quality people out there running small shops doing a great service for their clients. 

And yeah, I had a lot of fun on that show. Yeah. I think it turned out to be that we all understood that, like you said, a good job's a good job whether you're small or big. 

And I think it all depends on your focus and my focus. And I've kind of continued that, although I call myself a boutique MSP. I do manage services, but I operate technically as a solo shop. 

I mean, it is myself, but I have my wife that works with me full-time in the business. I have subcontractors, but I try to do all the things that a regular managed service provider would do except 24-hour service, but my customers don't need 24-7 support. So it kind of works out that way. 

I agree. I don't think the 24-7 support, outside of things like, and not to run a tangent, but having something in place like a Huntress or a Threat Locker, some sort of sock monitoring thing where they're locking people out at three in the morning while we're sleeping, we don't staff 24 hours either. The bigger issue is knowing your clients and not biting off more than you can chew. 

If you're a generalist and you're managing small business clients, and small business client doesn't necessarily mean a number of seats, right? I'm talking sophistication. If you start scaling up into more complex environments and things like that, it's very difficult to be an expert at networking, servers, client stuff, everything at a very, very high level. But as you mentioned, you can use subcontractors and bring them in. 

And I know a lot of distributors are trying to push projects as well. And there's a whole bunch of stuff we can talk about going down another rabbit hole with that. So it's definitely doable if you have the desire to do a good job. 

That's really what it is. If the small model wasn't a big deal, then Apple wouldn't be in business. So for those of you that are watching live, and I see we've got some people hopping in there. 

If you have questions or comments, feel free to throw them in there. We're not going to talk all about the Trunk Slammer or the man in the van. I want to hear some stuff. 

Chad and I, we have been friends over the years. We have not seen each other physically in a few years. I was supposed to make a trek up to Toronto earlier this year, but I took the summer off. 

And since you built that mansion out in the middle of nowhere, and you were able to get both the power company and the internet company to come to you, you don't seem to venture out into the city much more. I've taken it a step further. I actually now have two separate fiber connections coming down the different directions. 

A fortunate accident, if you will. The first connection I managed to get was one of those, not what you know, it's who you know kind of things. And I was able to get something that was not really readily available. 

And then the second one, they determined that our area was an underserviced area. And so there was a program, I don't want to call it a grant, because it wasn't that. It was some kind of loan to build the infrastructure. 

Anyway, without getting into the details, Rogers, one of the big ISPs in the area, they're kind of like AT&T for you guys in the US. They were given all this money to build out fiber infrastructure to the home, no cost. So my two and a half gig by two and a half gig connection for a hundred bucks a month, my secondary connection, I'm currently load balancing between them. 

So yeah, I do venture out to the city once in a while. I was at the show in August, the one I was hoping you were going to come to. I had a great session. 

You would have really enjoyed it, I think. And two sessions actually, but the one that was my session, the other one was a panel. So I hope you make it next year. 

I really do. I will try since this is an early shout out. I know the schedule for ASCII.

They are not in Florida next year. And I'm kind of a little miffed and upset about that, but I get it. That's how we're getting into Toronto though. 

Maybe that's the way. We take away Florida, he'll just come to Toronto. I mean, you know, it's... Yeah, I'll just leave the States in order to get to ASCII. 

That's what that is. I'm not here to judge. I'm just encouraging it. 

That's all. I appreciate it. So before we get all caught up in our other conversations and stuff, let me ask this.

In the 10 years since we were on that show, what changes have you seen for your business? And then I'll just go ahead and open it up. What questions do you have for me about my business in those 10 years? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just going at it, you know, high level, just real high level of getting into it on my business, you know, the desire to grow it. 

I've had a desire to grow the company to two different sizes. One, where I essentially make myself redundant. That's my long-term goal. 

And then I can, you know, operate as like the chair of the board, you know, that sort of thing. Or, you know, along the way, I want to get rid of any key man syndrome. Key man syndrome, I don't know if that's a technical term or not. 

But to me, that basically means that if any one person in the organization gets run over by a bus or becomes really ill or whatever, leaves, things fall apart. Because, oh no, they were the only one that could do XYZ, ABC, all that sort of stuff. So I've worked really hard to get rid of things. 

It doesn't mean that it wouldn't be uncomfortable if somebody left or went away, because you liked them doing certain things. It's just a matter of building in those redundancies. And I've worked really hard on that. 

We're currently at a kind of point right now, a little bit of a frustrating point where we need to build out a little bit more on our operations side so that we can scale more. We've got lots of clients, lots of work, but adding more techs without more management is a bit of a problem right now. So that's where we've started from and gone to. 

Even back then, I believe I was... I didn't rewatch the show. I mean, I should have rewatched the show before this. But I believe I was talking a lot about building a business and it being a thing as opposed to a job because that's really how I've looked at it. 

And yourself, I know you got your wife in the business. So it's solopreneur, yes. But at the same time, you do have the trappings of a business there, especially with the use of the subcontractors. 

You're not afraid of people stealing your clients. So you'll bring in people as appropriate to help. How has your outlook on things changed over the last 10 years with regards to growing the company? Has that been something you've worked on? Is that something you decided you didn't want to do? Where are you at with that? So the short answer is it depends. 

It's always this. There have been times where I have been at the brink of thinking, I got to grow. I got to bring somebody in. 

I've got to take some load off my plate. And I almost was there a couple of years ago. And the endpoint count was up there. 

But then I had a couple of customers get acquired by larger customers. And then I had my largest customer actually lose about 55 endpoints in just the multi-office law firm and stuff. Now, I'm not hurting. 

I don't want to make anybody think that life is grim down here. GoFundMe is going to be in the chat, right? Yeah. Support my link. 

Buy Amazon. So I was almost there. But I was able to re-look at things and be like, you know what? I can continue to do this for a few more years. 

Now, I do have my mindset on when the exit time comes. I want it to be something where it is a business that is in a box or bundle or something that I can simply hand over to somebody and everything can be run without questions. They can know how to get into the clients and the endpoints. 

And the clients have all their passwords. The office systems are set up. Of course, if somebody buys it, they'll take over and do what they want. 

But I want it to be something that is systemizable, if that's the right word, that people can just walk in and understand. I've tried to set up my clients so that if I have to hand it off to a subcontractor, I give them the access they need. They can get in and do the stuff they need to without depending on me.

So I've kind of been using that as my model where I'm still going to do it like I'm doing it. One, because I like it. Down here in Florida, I'm not going to say that techs are hard to find. 

But techs that are for my style of business are hard to find, if that makes sense. It's a funny thing. There's two things I wanted to touch on there that you brought up.

One is, as far as the techs are concerned, the smaller the organization, the more skilled you need the tech to be and the less resources, money, you generally have to pay said tech. That is a big challenge in growing from very small as you start scaling up. If you were at a size where all you needed to do was bring on a guy that was good at networking, that wouldn't be so bad.

But what would you do if you had a firewall? Platform security is a job in enterprise. They don't do switches or access points either. They do firewalls. 

How much actual firewall work do you have on a daily or weekly basis? I'm sure it's not enough to even remotely fill somebody's schedule. If it is, I want to know what the heck you're doing because that sounds... No, there isn't. I mean, maybe a couple of times a month.

And this is it, right? So the thing is that, even for me, that's a bit crazy. I hire people right now where they might be focused on networking, but they still have to be able to do some other stuff. I'm kind of at a pivot where I'm trying to separate support and projects. 

That's a really nice one if you can do that because project people work a lot differently than support people. But the other one I wanted to bring up that you kind of touched on was your exit strategy. I've been involved in a bit of M&A. 

We did an acquisition last year. And one of the things I found as I shopped the market to buy and then talked to private equity, not to sell, but something that was said to me several years ago and it stuck with me, is that if you don't run the company like somebody would want to buy it, then why do you want to own it? Why would you want to own something no one wants to buy? That doesn't make any sense. And so I've taken that to heart. 

And so I'm always keeping in touch with investors and asking, oh, what are you guys, what metrics are you looking at? How are you weighting things? What's the good and the bad and the ugly? And so always trying to kind of do that. Just keep my house clean, if you will. And so on that note, the one thing I will say is that you'd be surprised when you're the solopreneur, maybe you won't be surprised, how sticky the customers are.

And when you try handing it over, two problems happen. And I'm saying this just for the sake of saying it. I mean, we can go back and forth on it or whatever, but one is they like you.

So when they don't have you, there's that transition. You'll get stuck in the transition no matter what. The other one is the way you probably handle things. 

I actually don't know this. You can answer this. How quickly are you replying to people? Because we have live answer phones, but techs are busy doing things. 

So they live answer, ticket gets made, gets assigned to a tech based on priority, and then it gets answered. The acquisition we did was a smaller firm and they used to get them on a cell phone or they would get them on the direct line. It didn't have a cell phone, they had the direct line but went to a cell phone. 

And so if it was a quick issue, he would just jump on and fix it. But those quick issues are oftentimes low priority. So those are the ones that get a callback and that's created some friction, I must say.

So how are you handling that on your side now? Interesting. So I did have a customer issue this morning where it was actually a larger firm that called before business hours because they were having an issue with users getting into a remote server. And first was an email, then was a phone call into the office. 

They did leave a voicemail. I did get the voicemail, but I did not respond right away. And then five minutes later, there was another email with the all caps, where are you? Exclamation question, exclamation question, and that sort of stuff. 

Now, in this sense, that particular customer is kind of a one-off. He just thinks he's special and I should get an answer every single time. But all of my customers, I've adopted kind of a larger MSP model where, yes, you can call the office. 

Kim usually will answer and kind of triage what the problem is. Because I'm in the office doing a lot of remote work, I usually am either on the phone or doing something and she'll treat it like it's a regular help desk. Is it something that needs to be done right away? If it's an emergency, I'll push you through. 

If not, I'll have him call you when he gets done or when he's finished with this or whatever. So we are doing that. Nobody gets that immediate response. 

Nobody gets to me directly. I do have an app for my phone service on my phone, but people don't have my cell number. That's terrific.

If somebody calls the office, they can't get to my phone unless I turn on my extension app. So that's phenomenal because it's very easy when you're the guy doing all the stuff to go outside of that and offer that exceptional support above and beyond whatever you want to call it and not set expectations. But then the expectations are going to be way out of whack.

Obviously, the bigger the MSP is, the more out of whack they're going to be because the more levels there's going to be and things like that. But for us, that was a big one, was dealing with that. And when you think about it, when you're acquiring somebody, the people who you're acquiring as clients, they didn't pick you.

They don't want you. They were forced into the situation. So they already have a bit of a chip on their shoulder, if you will. 

The best of them are going to be wishing well for the person exiting, typically with the transition. It's like, oh, you've worked hard for us for all these years. We're nice to see you being able to get that kind of thing. 

But then the other ones are just going to not care. What's this mean for me? And I mention all this just because I think it's really important to consider this. This isn't theoretical exercises. 

This is real life. And you brought that up. It took me back to probably around 2005 when I think I probably should let listeners know and viewers know. 

So I did have a period of time where I had texts that worked for me full-time. I had two full-time texts and an office person who wasn't my wife at the time. So I did have a business. 

And I remember that as I would send out these texts to certain customers, their thoughts were, are you getting too big for us? Because we want you. And my comment to them was, well, if you want me, you have to pay me prices, which are different than tech prices. And it was that transition. 

Even when you have physical people taking over, if they're used to you in the beginning, that's what they want throughout. So same situation. We've gotten to the point now where a lot of the clients don't even know that I can do tech work, which is interesting. 

And yeah, it is. But sometimes you got to watch stuff burn a little bit, which is unpleasant. Just because if you just run in, then now you're going to start getting the... Once in a blue moon, I reset a president's account on Friday or Saturday night. 

I was at the fair and the huntress locked them out. And they're cloud only. So locking them up, you can't get in their computer, nothing.

And it was a legit lockout. But I had reset their password and I texted them or whatever. And then sure enough, Monday morning or Tuesday morning, whatever it was, I got a text from them asking about some other things. 

I just didn't reply. And they then called the office. But it's the planning. 

And the one thing is, when we talked 10 years ago, I remember a lot of the people that we were... Not name-dropping anybody, but I remember all the people we were talking to at the time that were on the show and different people. And a lot of them didn't have experience with M&A or exits or anything like that. And so there just wasn't a lot of information to go around. 

And you can only collect that by talking to people. And the thing is, once they exit, they're gone. So you can't talk to them anymore. 

So at the ASCII show in August, I don't know if it was the same guy in the US or not, but they had a guy that he had bought three companies and was selling his now. And it was his second exit. But this one, he was the owner. 

I think the previous one, he was like a manager or whatever. Anyway, he went into great detail on his acquisitions. And the one, they acquired a company that had $1.2 million in revenue. 

And within 90 days, he had it down to $800,000 in revenue. Because he didn't like the revenue. The clients were not... They weren't what he wanted. 

So he got rid of them. And so you got to look at your clients. Well, what are they going to want to buy? That's the thing. 

You might like Joe. You might think Joe's great, but does Joe fit? That's the thing. But anyway, I digress.

Yeah. That is always something, regardless of your size, looking at your customer avatar. What is it that you want to do? I want to go back and ask one question of you, because I remember this as part of the discussion. 

And I actually just had this yesterday, as a matter of fact, with another tech. We were talking about SLAs. And I still have the same SLA that I had back then, where I don't have an SLA. 

It is best effort. SLOs. Yes. 

That was brought up. Objectives were... And that might be something I transition to. But I do see a lot of companies still struggle with how to do an SLA properly. 

Yes. A company that I talked to a while back called me and asked if I'd be interested in working with them. Their current provider had like $15,000 in back money because of SLAs that were not met.

And my thought was, my goodness, how did you rack up $15,000 in SLA? This customer is probably in the four to five grand per month recurring revenue. So that's a lot. That much of that. 

The thing is, the thing is, is that if you're doing SLAs... So this kind of goes back to how do you price things when you start out, right? So when people are starting out, they kind of get out the old dartboard and they throw darts at it. And then they see if it works. And if it doesn't, they adjust. 

At least that's what I've seen people do. Some of them are a little bit more into research. And so they'll watch shows like yours.

They'll read up on forums. They'll join a peer group type of stuff. Maybe not a peer group, but like an ASCII or this or that. 

And they'll kind of get a feel for it. The SLA is the same way. You can't state SLAs that you can't meet. 

If you tell the client that you're going to respond in 30 seconds after them calling and within an hour, you're going to have a resolution, you're going to be paying those things. We have SLAs in our contract, P1 through P4, for our fully managed agreements. But we are way faster. 

We are just way faster than what the stated SLAs are. The other thing is, too, is there's also response times and then there's resolve times. And those are separate numbers. 

So you say, we're going to respond in this much time, but then the resolution is going to take this. So you might have an autoresponder or you might go a step further, depending on the client situation, have somebody actually reach out. But open a ticket, boom, autoresponder. 

We've now responded. So now we've responded and now we have whatever time to resolve. I mean, I think it's like within three business days for like a P4, five business days. 

I mean, you're probably resolving things a lot faster than that, right? And that's really what I'm getting at. Without going down the rabbit hole of the specifics of how I have them set up, you need to know how long it takes you to resolve things currently. And if you know what that is, and you set your SLAs appropriately, fine. 

If you start making really aggressive SLAs, the customer is going to need to pay for it. So if the customer doesn't want to pay, I don't even want to make up numbers here, but $400 a user, because you're going to drop everything level SLAs, then that's the case. So then the number is more realistic, but so is the SLA. 

That's how that goes. I think people oftentimes, they just copy stuff. They like, here, this was a good idea, or this sounds great, and they do it, and then it can really cost you.

The question I would like to ask, and I've asked before and never gotten a great answer, is I like the SLA to include an initial response and a begin time to resolution. I don't like to put an end time on resolution because you just never know what the issue is. And if it's something where you've got to replace a workstation, but it's a special order station, well, you just, like you said, some of those are going to be impossible to meet if you've got a special order stuff, and then there's a shipping delay or things of that nature.

So I don't like to put end times on resolution. Even a simple install, I've got a client right now with a third-party app, or not app, but a third-party business app that for some reason just stopped working. They called me. 

I tried to do my thing, and I'm like, sorry, I can't help you. You need to go back to the vendor. The vendor has been working on it for two days now, and that's not my problem. 

Well, that's right there. You just hit the nail on the head. That SLA is, that's not you. 

That's the vendor. So you need to make sure that that language is specific. Yeah, we have target response, target workaround, and target resolution times.

So on a P1, which is like a top priority, target response is 30 minutes, target workaround is four hours, and target resolution is three days. And you'll notice that it says target. It says target, not guaranteed, not live and die buddies, right? And it says, notes, in all above cases, the timeframes specified are targets, all references to elapsed time, blah, blah, blah, and it also is from when it was reported to us, not from when it started happening. 

So if- I'm here, by the way, keep going. Okay, good. It's one of those things where if you're sitting there and you've got a customer that has a user issue, so it's not nothing your RMM or tools are going to alert on, right? It's a user-specific issue, and they sit on it for three days before they tell you about it.

That starts when they report it, when the ticket's opened. And I've encouraged people, open a ticket, and if it's urgent, call, and call with the ticket number. Because if you email in a ticket, unless you're going to email and say your email's not working, please don't do that.

But other than that, the- which, you know, we get some of those. But aside from that, then it's in your words. So we may misunderstand, we may have to ask for clarification, we may not understand what you're requesting, but at least you got the point across and we weren't playing telephone game with our dispatcher reception where you called in, pulled them, and they kind of translated what they thought they heard. 

You know, but yeah, that's kind of how we approach it. So they are targets, but I do state them, and I think workarounds are important to put in there. Because, you know, I don't know about the line of business, that might be a terrible example, but if we use a downed server as an example, I'm not sure if you're still doing DATO or not, but if you're doing DATO, server's down, you're not going to fix the server within whatever, but you can get it running on the DATO in a certain amount of time, right? And then you can plan, you know, and I wouldn't even say that, you know, that takes a week or two, three weeks, whatever. 

There's a workaround, okay? So you, you know, so anyway, that's my take on that. Hopefully, I don't know if that answers your question better than you usually get, but that's- Oh, it does. Most people don't know the difference. 

They don't have- you've got a target response, and most people don't have- will respond and resolution, and that's it. Nothing in between. Yeah. 

No, and I don't- and that's just- I'm not knocking anybody that's doing that, and look, if anybody's listening and, you know, you're just trying to figure things out and you're just, again, using the old dartboard or stumbling along, like, everyone starts somewhere. I'm not holding that against anybody, but just, you know, if you're- I also find smaller clients, you know, you go into a small client, you're dealing with the owner directly, no, you know, operations or IT manager or general manager, just like the owner is the guy you talk to, they're a lot less picky about things like this, you know? So walk before you can run, you know, you get some of those clients and you level up kind of thing. You go into a client where they have a CTO and an IT manager, and you're offering to take over help desk, and you're going to put in SLAs, but you don't have the infrastructure for that, you're going to have a bad day. 

Real bad day. Or you don't have the mechanisms to bridge your operations with their internal operations. That's fun. 

I've got one scenario where, I don't really want to call it co-managed anymore, it's an office that has an internal IT person who's really just a desktop person who doesn't know desktop stuff, but they're there to be the first line of response if something happens, to at least swap out a mouse or keyboard, fix a printer, set up a computer, that sort of stuff. But everything else still comes to me, so it's not really co-managed. No, we have a couple where there's a non-IT person doing an IT role, like we have a car dealership where the parts advisor is doing what you just described, and you know, what he'll do is he'll help users if they're having issues in like an app or something, specifically the line of business ones too, because he's got familiarity with them, he works with them all day. 

He'll call the line of business vendor and spend four hours on hold so that they're not getting billed for us to be sitting on hold kind of thing. He'll help the mice, the keyboards, all that kind of stuff. He'll also even work with us on lifecycle refreshing.

We'll send him a spreadsheet with machines that are aging out and we want to replace these. He'll work with management to get them approved for us. So he kind of does a pseudo-IT manager job, but you know, it's a 30-person organization or whatever. 

They're not big enough to have an actual IT manager. You don't start seeing those till 150 plus seats usually. This one's around 100, but they're multi-office.

So that's kind of how it is. See, and it all depends too on the complexity. You remember, because you've been in this for a long time, Armin, you remember when you could have like a really small office, like a 10, 15-person office, and you could have, you know, a full terminal server environment in there and line of business apps, several of them. 

You could have a dedicated database, like a SQL server. You could have like a lot of infrastructure in a small organization. Today, to try to find a 15-person organization with that kind of infrastructure is crazy.

You're going to have, you know, 365, you're going to have some network infrastructure, and then, you know, maybe if the line of business apps haven't been forced to the cloud as SaaS apps, then maybe you're going to have a couple of line of business apps. But even those, you know, it's not like it used to be. Yeah, there's only certain areas. 

So I deal a lot with law firms, and there are some legal aspects where the vendors are not in the cloud. You still got to have an on-prem SQL server, which I've got five of those still out there. So in those, but those are very specific scenarios, not your typical, you know, your client. 

My other clients I just onboarded, it's a 14-person office, and 90% of what they do is in the cloud. They have one program that has to run on local workstations, and we're putting in an as for them to share files in the office. In those types of environments, you know, we toss everything into SharePoint, or if they had a ton of data, they could go into Dropbox because the plans are crazy sizes, like 50 terabytes, like massive things. 

But typically SharePoint, and then we're, you know, with using Teams at the front end, and then backing it all up with, you know, data SaaS back or whatever. And then the line of business apps, if we have that, oftentimes, it'll be like five people out of 50 need to access this line of business app because they're the only ones that work in it. We'll stand up an AVD environment in Azure, and they have remote desktop on, you know, for those five people or whatever in that app. 

Yeah, and then we're still able to get rid of all the on-prem infrastructure and just run it that way. You know, it's one of those things where, just to be clear, like, not that we're turning this into a cloud versus non-cloud, you know, type of thing, but just the right solution is the right solution for the client, not the right for me. So, you know, sometimes it's full cloud, sometimes it's a hybrid. 

I don't know what we're calling fully on-prem anymore. To me, that would have meant your exchange server and stuff was on site. I was going to say, I don't think, I mean, I think there was what, maybe 2% fully on-prem because everything else. 

Even that though, like, what are you, what are you counting though? Like, you're going to run, you're going to run Teams and stuff. You're not running like, what was it? What was the Skype thing called? You know, the messenger, Skype messenger, the original. Yeah. 

Yeah. Yeah. Like no one's running that sort of stuff anymore. 

Like it's, some of it's in 365 or, or, or sorry to the Google people, like in Google meetup or whatever, but none of that's on-prem. So I don't think anybody is a hundred percent on-prem anymore. I'm going to go to a lemon, you know. 

No, I would say at worst, like I said, my, even my, my large law firms, they are, I would say 50% on-prem because we, we've got, we've got their SQL server for their client management software. They are remoting into like all their branch offices remote into the home office. So we've got terminal servers on-prem there. 

They're still doing active directory on-prem, but their mail is hosted exchange. All of their client portals are in the cloud and their voice is, you know, hosted. And this is, this is, and this is exactly it. 

We have some, we have some clients, couple hundred users that are sitting in full AVD, nothing on-prem, multi offices, kind of like you're describing, you know, five, six, seven offices or whatever. And nothing on-prem, everything in the cloud. And, but their line of business app is some, you know, horrible, you know, access SQL, like whatever it is, type of thing. 

So yeah, there's a, there's a large server running in Azure and then they have all the, you know, the session hosts and you can do all kinds of stuff, scaling up, scaling down, you know, so it's not, no one's working at night. Okay. We can leave one host running so somebody can log in instantly, or we can shut them down.

And if somebody wants to log in at three in the morning, randomly, they wait two minutes for turn on and it lets them in. You know, we've been able to do a lot with that sort of thing. And then get rid of the refresh lifestyles. 

I don't want to get into like, you know, taxes and stuff like that, but there's some really advantageous things to being a hundred percent OpEx. For some clients, they can write everything off in the year they're spending it, not have to deal with, you know, depreciating things over a period of time. And then when you take away the criticality of the endpoints, they're able to have cheaper endpoints because it doesn't really matter. 

They're just logging in and, right. Yep. Your resources, your internet, you know. 

And then, and the big one is like, so we used to do a lot of like, everybody had redundant WAN connections, right? It was like cable DSL for SMB and then fiber plus maybe cellular or something for the larger guys. And some of them are opting just not to have the redundant connection anymore. They're like, we'll just go home. 

We'll just leave. There's 40 people in the office. We'll all leave. 

We'll go home. Everyone will just bring their laptop. We're not doing desktops anymore. 

And they'll work the rest of the day from home. And we can sort out the office between then and when we come back. Got a customer that just had an account life cycle meeting with their internet vendor. 

So their internet vendor is doing their internet with SD WAN and their VoIP. And he asked, he goes, can we get rid of redundant for all the other offices except this one? And they're like, yeah, we can, but we got to do this. And, you know, pull out the, that, and, you know, for them, it was like a hundred bucks a location. 

And he said, you know what, just keep it. But again, you're right. Everybody, it just depends. 

Like if you got five people in an office and, you know, you can, you can save a hundred bucks a month or something like that. That might make sense. You know, if there's a hundred people and you're saving a hundred bucks, that makes no sense. 

And that was them that they've got, they've got about 70 people working remote from all over the state. So, and they've got three branch offices where there's a lot of people in those offices. So you've got, you know, 20 people working in an office, you know, having redundant makes sense for them.

Oh, absolutely. Cause even the, you know, even if they go down for an hour, you know, them packing up, leaving, going home, like there's a cost to that, but it really depends on the business too. It also depends on how flexible they are with work from home. 

Anyway, if they're already doing, you know, two, three days  work from home and the others are in the office, that's less of an issue because you know, those users are all set up to work from home. If it's five days in the office and you're going to randomly send them home and they have to work at the kitchen table, that's, you know, not as efficient. So we've just had a nice little discussion that had nothing to do with trunk slamming.

It happens. It happens. It happens.

But let me go back and just ask, how has your outlook on solo techs slash trunk slammers evolved over the years? So it was, it was, I was actually appreciating them more and more as time went on. And in the last probably two years, I've started to be concerned about smaller MSPs and that's not even the solo techs. That's the, even the five man shops you're talking about.

The vendors are putting a bit of a squeeze on them. The minimum requirements are climbing. If you want to be a partner with these vendors, you know, like Microsoft's a good example, right? They got rid of the silver program. 

Essentially silver is gone, you know, and we have three solutions partner competencies in Azure. And honestly, like it's extremely difficult. And I was at, to give you a little bit more context, I was at an event last week. 

It was an Ingram event. They had Microsoft there and they were talking about how to get project dollars to do Azure. I'm not throwing this in any kind of marketing for Microsoft, but just in case that your viewers don't know, you can get funding to like assist with the project part, as well as some of the OpEx for the first few months to get things going. 

If you're moving people from on-prem to Azure, the problem is you can't do it. You need your distributor to do it as a project because there's requirements. And I had mentioned this to them. 

I said, Hey, we are a solutions partner, which is for anyone watching probably realizes how difficult that is. And they're like, Oh, that's fine. All you need to do now is get Azure expert. 

And I was like, you're making it sound like, you know, I go home and click a couple of checkboxes and I'm a little suspicious. They're like, Oh, it's no big deal at all. Just go check it out. 

I was like, okey-doke. So I went home and I literally did check it out. You need 15 tech certified with an Azure certification. 

It can be the lowly Azure associate one, but you need 15 techs, individual techs. This isn't like getting five smart guys to do three exams each. This is 15 techs. 

And then your Azure spend needs to be 350,000 USD a year. And if you can't meet those two requirements, you can't be an Azure expert. And if you can't be an Azure expert, you can't get the funding. 

Now this doesn't mean it's not worth doing because you can still be part of the project. You can bill for some consulting, whatever, but the project delivery and stuff you need to lean on. Anyway, my point is though, is that, are you going to say a company with 20 people, but they don't have 15 Azure people is a small MSP? I mean, are you going to say a company spending 300,000 USD a year on Azure is tiny and small? I mean, that's not my, just to be clear too, that's not 365 spend. 

That's Azure consumption. Azure only. Yeah. 

A lot of that's starting to happen. Even the vendors that are direct in our space, closer to our level, those minimum requirements, even if you're considering month to month versus a contract, a lot of them would do a 50 minimum endpoint entry. That's now creeping up. 

I just talked to somebody where it's 250 endpoint minimum, which I'm okay with. I mean, I'm not going to, let me start off. I can do that. 

But I know a lot of companies with three, four techs that won't want to do that. I don't know. I mean, I'm going to assume that they all can, but 250 as a minimum entry point is a little bit of a step up. 

You've hit the nail on the head too, the ability to handle the financial fallout. So, you sign, using our friends over at Kaseya as an example, if you sign up and take advantage of their best pricing by doing, we're not going to talk about the best pricing is, but we sign up for some best pricing on some three-year terms, that agreement is between you and them. And you need to be able to enforce the agreement with your customer. 

And if you're a one-man shop and you got, you're on the hook for 2000 bucks a month, 24,000 bucks a year, and you get told to go, the customer locks everyone out and they go bankrupt. That's going to hurt. That's going to really hurt. 

If you're bigger, you can absorb it. Doesn't mean you want to, but you can absorb it a lot easier. One of the guys in my peer group the other day said that he was trialing Ninja. 

And he said that he was going to roll it out to a small subset of his clients, of his endpoints. So, he's going to trial it on 800 endpoints. That was his small subset he's trialing it on.

Yeah. And so... Did he forget to end the trial? No, no, no, no. They're probably going to move to it. 

But it was like, that's not like, that's a fraction of his endpoints. He's going to put it on 800 to test. And you're talking about like a 250 minimum. 

So, when Ninja is talking to him and he's like, yeah, we'll try it on 800 just to see how it goes. And then we'll start moving into the rest of them. The vendors, they see that and the sales cycle takes the same amount of time, maybe a little longer, but maybe they can close a small one a little quicker.

But in terms of revenue, once they get somebody on the hook for 5, 10, 15,000 agents, that's a lot of revenue. And if they have support issues and stuff, they tend to have more people on staff, more technical people. They're going to lean less on the vendor support, at least historically, not always the case. 

Okay. I'm not saying that. But just from talking to vendors, it seems to be the case. 

And no vendor in particular. Just again, these are averages I've talked to. I'll make sure I'm being very clear. 

I'm not calling out any, right. And so, this is ultimately the thing. So, if you're a vendor and you want to make as much money as you can, you want to put the money where you can make the revenue. 

And not just the revenue, obviously, but the profitability, right? So, it's tough. And then you've got a lot of these consolidations happening. So, you've got these small MSPs rolling up into slightly bigger MSPs. 

And I think there's always going to be room for really good consultants, solopreneurs. I don't know if consultant's a bad word, like whatever we're calling it. I think there's always going to be a lot of work for that type of role, where you can be a trusted advisor. 

They can lean on you. They know you. They trust you. 

However, as the solo provider, what you're able to do might change. You might have trouble selling certain products. Yeah. 

I think it depends on the model as are you a reseller or are you a referral or associate or whatever. To be honest, probably about half of my stack when it comes to voice, M365, some other products, I'm actually a referral partner. I'm not the one reselling it.

And part of that philosophy is some of my customers, it's not that they're bad people, but I don't trust that they're going to pay on time. If something were to happen, I'm not going to be on the hook for that. So, that was another thing that I did there.

And of course, some MSPs are like, why would you give away some money? And I'm like, you know what, I would like some of the money all of the time, as opposed to all of the money some of the time. You know, that's funny. I like that. 

There's some truth into there and it's all about risk tolerance, right? And then some vendors though, like I can use Zoom as an example. We're a referral partner for Zoom. So, we primarily do Microsoft Teams. 

We have some legacy people on the direct, whatever it was we were using before. We still have some people on that. But most of like 90 plus percent of our new stuff is Teams. 

However, we have some environments. This is a whole other thing, but we have some environments where there's a parent company involved and they control the 365 tenant. So, it makes no sense to try and do Teams because we don't have admin on the tenant for the customer we're managing. 

So, it's goofy. So, Zoom is great because it's separate. But the thing is Zoom requires 5,000 or 10,000 phones to be a master reseller. 

And we don't have those numbers because they're not our primary thing. And the frustrating thing though, is that then managing it becomes a problem. As a referral partner, all we can do is have the customer make an account. 

We have to log in as the customer or make ourselves like an account on their domain. It's goofy. Whereas if we were a master reseller, we would have the multi-tenant log in. 

There's us and there's all the clients. So, it's that kind of stuff. But you just kind of reiterated what I was saying.

The risk, we had a client, 90 seats of M365E3 plus a roughly equivalent number of Defender P2s, I think. And there might have been some other mis licenses in there. They got bought six months into their term. 

And they were an American company. We're Canadian. I don't know if I said the beginning, but we're Canadian. 

They're American. And they got bought by somebody out of Abu Dhabi. And I looked them up. 

They had 9,000 employees, the company that bought them. I was like, well, I'm certainly not getting their business. And I was like, are they going to try and stiff me? Are they going to do an asset transfer and leave that corporation to rot? And I would have been on the hook for six months because of a lot of money in terms of those seats. 

Interesting. So, I had a situation. It's now going on two years. 

So, at the end of 2023, we had a customer doing Microsoft NCE. It was the annual commit monthly. Yeah.

70 licenses. And that company decided to go with another provider. And I had purchased through one of the distributors. 

So, it wasn't, you know, Sherweb or AppRiver or whatever. And that transition actually happened without me having to be on the hook. We just transferred not only a tenant, but all the stuff. 

So, I wonder sometimes if it's how you set it up, because that has been a fear of mine where... Oh, sorry. Let me add some more information then. So, yes, we just did that. 

We just had a client leave where we transferred the licenses to the new MSP and they took it over and have a nice day. They're all about board. Everyone's happy kind of thing. 

No problem. We've done it with Datos on both sides. We've sent them, we've received them, all that.

Mid contract, things like that. However, in this case, they were dissolving the existing domain and tenant. They were moving... No, I shouldn't say domain. 

They were moving the domain over to their tenant where they had their 9,000 employees. And they had added licenses on their tenant. And you cannot transfer licenses from one tenant to another. 

You could transfer the tenant from one CSP to another, but they didn't want it. So, they wanted it to go away. And I was six months left on a tenant they didn't want. 

So, they did pay me out. I did get... In fact, I normally don't discount. But they might not have. 

I'm telling you, this story has a good ending. But it's also reinforcing your feelings on this sort of situation. And why some MSPs, I think, should probably only offer monthly, monthly or annual, annual. 

And just the risk. But ultimately, I don't normally discount 365 licenses. But in this case, I gave them a one-time pay off the rest of the six months. 

I'll give you a discount. They were happy because they wanted to clean up the loose ends. They wired me the money and Bob's your uncle.

But funny enough, you still can't cancel those licenses. I had to still have them end on the subscription date. There's no way to pay it out and force-end it with Microsoft.

It is a little frustrating. And that'll be interesting going forward because there's so many moving parts to that. But it is what it is.

Exactly. All right. So, let me ask now. 

I'm assuming you have burning thoughts, burning questions that you wanted to turn around and ask me. You asked a couple earlier. But I'm going to give you this opportunity now. 

What questions do you have for me? Yeah. You're probably not going to see this out of left field. What impact has being involved with your podcast and being a bit of an IT business owner celebrity in the space had on your actual... It's true, though. 

You go to the conferences, people know you, they talk to you, the vendors know you. You're known, right? We're not going to put a voting thing up as Gary Pico or Marvin, who's more popular kind of thing. But what impact has that had on your day-to-day business, if any? Has that had an impact on your business? Have you leveraged it? Interesting question. 

The short answer is, it probably has not been leveraged as much as it could. In fact, because the podcast is really geared towards other IT professionals, it doesn't have a direct impact on my business. It's not going to... I can't count on it for 10% client increase or something like that.

I've gotten some project work from other techs that have called me and said, hey, I need help. Or, hey, we've got an office in your area of Fort Lauderdale. But that can be attributed to ASCII or any other group as well. 

So that's not... Let me add something on to that. Has it opened up any more doors to things like doing things with a vendor or things that aren't necessarily directly to the IT community that you wouldn't have otherwise had access to, which you then were able to leverage and use as I am a professional expert, etc., because I'm in this other thing that I was able to get into? So the short answer is no. Only because the leverage that I've been able to get from a vendor has been them wanting to have me evaluate their product so that I can then turn around and help promote it to my listeners and that sort of stuff. 

That I don't see as really benefiting me, except that I might get some discounts that I would normally not get. We're talking... I think when we're saying benefiting, I think we're both kind of alluding to revenue, top line revenue kind of thing. Outside of the revenue, how about just your enjoyment of being in the channel and your enjoyment of running your business? Has it added to that? No, I keep them separate.

You keep them separate? Yeah, I keep them separate. That's interesting. I mean, it's not something where... Right now, let's use this as an example. 

We are recording this. We started at 1 p.m. Eastern, which is the middle of the workday. So there are times where, yes, it impacts my day, but I treat it as just another appointment. 

In the middle of the day, I'm going to go right back to work after this. The business technically doesn't suffer because I've got Kim in the other room that can answer phones and stuff. Again, I've got those subcontractors. 

So if there was an emergency, she knows how to get in touch with them and get a customer taken care of and stuff. I would probably say the podcast has probably impacted the personal life more because I go home at the end of the workday, spend a couple of hours, eat dinner, watch some shows, and then I come back to the office to do podcast stuff. But that has replaced other things in my life where I used to play basketball when I was younger and sportier and more athletic and stuff. 

I don't do that anymore. The podcast fills that spot. It has opened up the door now. 

I really didn't want to say this, but I do have another podcast that I'm doing with a person here in Fort Lauderdale. It's a local-based podcast and it will be more focused on helping me to expose me and my business to the local community, but it's also going to be a social one where we get to go out and probably hang out at more restaurants, do podcasts on site. But that's probably the biggest impact that the podcast has had where I can parlay that into getting me access to stuff and getting this other person to partner with me to say, hey, let's do a podcast together. 

Now I can parlay that and maybe have it flow back. Does that help? Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense to me. The thing that's interesting is that you've been at this for so long now that you would know one way or the other and whether for all better or for all worse, enough times passed. 

This isn't something you've dabbled in for even a couple of years at this point. So I really wanted to hear how that works. And honestly, that new venture you have, that sounds interesting. 

And honestly, without all the experience and skills you have in managing and running it and streaming it and everything else, I could see all that translating really well into a different environment. No, that was the big one. And then you answered the other question I had for you earlier, and that was the direction you were going. 

And the way you've got your business set up and trying to systemize it, SOPs, all that sort of stuff, and having a, this is how it's run, not call Marvin and Marvin has stuff in his head that he knows. That's not something you can do overnight. Anyone listening that is like, oh, I'm just going to one day when I'm serious about it, I'll just start doing no. 

That takes a long time. Well, it's not only how long it takes, is you don't know when that may happen. The whole idea of you're going to have an exit. 

So either you know when it's going to happen or it's going to happen to you. That's a little morbid, but very, I think we both said goodbye to enough people and even assisted and helped with things that have happened. So yeah, no, you're absolutely right. 

And I guess for me, it wasn't even so much how long it takes to put it down on paper. It's more of a habit. Like if you're not, if your process isn't, for example, with even tickets, if you're logging all your time on tickets at the end of the day, like shame on you, not good. 

You need to be logging them in real time because you don't know what's going to happen. You don't know what's going to happen at the end of the day. You could wipe out the whole day, all the notes, all the everything if they're on your chicken scratch, you know, notebook or whatever. 

Well, first of all, if you're writing on paper, shame on you for that. Hey, listen, listen, I, you know, I'm, uh, whatever you're doing, maybe that was my, the Palm Pilot I was demonstrating running on your Palm Pilot. There you go, the Tungsten, the Tungsten E2 or whatever we use. 

So no, but you know, you know what I've, what I'm saying though, like, you know, I think we've all seen it. Like, and I've had texts, I have had texts that use a notepad at their desk and they like scribble down while they're on a call. They find it, you know, if you've been doing it that way for 40 years or whatever, it's a tough habit to break, um, for whatever it's worth. 

But yeah, we, we, that's one thing that I've kind of beat into people, but I make it very clear when we're interviewing them, that's our process. And it's, it's easy to ignore your own advice. I would say this here's, here's probably the, the biggest advice that I have learned to give is to get that documentation system in order. 

And as you talked about getting it in the ticket, getting it in your documentation is even more important. Having all of that information, passwords, router information, IP addresses, secondary, you know, line of business apps, all of that stuff that has probably been the hardest thing for me to adjust to over the years. I've had IT glue for years and I've put just enough information in there for me to be okay. 

Now it's putting enough information in there for anybody to be okay, that when they go in there, they can find what they need. One thing that we found, uh, helps, uh, is we, we encourage people for one, you can't close the ticket time entry until your information's in IT glue. Um, but along that line is, you know, I tell people if you're doing these notes at the end of the day, who are you billing? You're billing me. 

I want to bill. No, you're updating the client documentation. That's part of the ticket. 

So if the ticket was six minutes and it's getting grounded to 15 and you spend the, you know, a total of 13, well, it didn't cost them any more anyway. And if it does cost them more because you spent more time, well, that's who should be paying for it because it's their documentation we're building. And if we were to exit with them, you know, at the end of their contract or whatever, we're going to be handing over the run books and giving away the documentation so that if you turn at the end of the day and you make some generic time entry saying admin time, you know, time entry, you just billed me to do that time. 

And I don't, I don't want that bill. You can pay it. Not really, but you know what I mean? No, I get you. 

Well, that's always a thing. I had a phrase for that and I don't remember what it is because I didn't write it down. I'm going to make a book of phrases someday that I hope all of us will contribute to and do all of these things. 

Because I remember the best thing one of my attorneys told me, you know, he would always ask about, well, why do you bill me for this and not for this? Or why do you bill me more for this and less for this? He's like, time is time. Just, just build it all and, you know, put it on there. No, it's, and if they're, and then, you know, I get the old, but they're flat rate. 

Yeah. I don't care if they're flat rate and I'm still going to be looking at agreement profitability. And so by not having the time on there and then billing it against, you know, our internal time agreement, you are now making them look more profitable than they are, which is a problem. 

Like, you know, no matter what, it's a problem. So easier said than done, like I'm not, you know, this isn't roses and sunshine. It takes a long time to get this culture built and then to stay on top of it. 

Absolutely. All right, my friend. Well, we weren't sure if we'd take up an hour and we certainly have. 

And of course we should have known you and I, if I let you go, you'll go. I got no rebuttal of that. Yep. 

So for those that have joined us, I see we've still got people on that have been on, I don't know if the entire time but thank you very much for joining. Yes. The chat was quiet except for the couple of comments there. 

But yeah, the man in the van, I've, I've gotten rid of that nickname. I've gone to uncle Marv, but it was an interesting time back then. And thank you for joining me and staying friends over the years. 

And, uh, I guess I'll look at that ticket price to go to Toronto next year for asking. I'd be great. Although you can come to the U S you know, I, you know, that's a, maybe what happened to a PAX eight? Uh, yeah. 

A lot, a lot, a lot of Canadians converted their, uh, their ticket to Amsterdam. Gotcha. And, uh, yeah, I was going to go to Amsterdam, but, uh, I have a small child and, uh, I was scheduled to be sick and, and I was right on time.

Okay. All right. Yeah. 

School germs. Daddy daycare at your service. Yeah.

All right. Uh, Chad, thank you very much. And for those of you watching, thank you very much. 

Those of you listening, this has been an it business podcast, special edition. Be sure to head over to it. Business podcast.com. Click on one of the follow buttons, follow us in your favorite podcast. 

Why are you there? Go ahead and support us by shopping on Amazon. As Chad was laughing at earlier. Uncle Bob needs some money. 

Um, ask you to tune in for all of our upcoming shows and, uh, say hello to Chad, the MSP. I don't know why that was capitalized in the show picture there. Uh, but MSP versus the man in the van. 

Uh, it's been good times. I appreciate it. And, uh, we'll see you all soon until then. Holla!