MSP Projects Behind Prison Walls (EP 969)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IIT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals and managed service providers, where we help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am back from Zero Trust World. I have just finished off week number four of my travels. 

I did three conferences in four weeks and two client trips along with that. So it is nice to be back home for several weeks in a row before we get back out there again. You've got a lot of podcasts to listen to as I did several recordings, but it'll be fun. 

In the meantime, I will still be doing regular shows here. And today I think I've got a good one for you. We are going to be heading up to the state of Maine to talk with Joshua Zukerman from Snow Pond Technology. 

And he's been in the game a while, folks. I have seen him out. And one of the things that I said I was going to do this year is get more people on the show that I've not yet spoken to and see what we can learn from them. 

So Josh, welcome to the show. Hi there. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for coming on. Even though we've seen each other out and about, I'll be honest. I don't remember when the first time we saw each other was. 

Do you have an idea? Probably would have been an ASCII EDGE event. Probably six, seven years ago before COVID, I would guess. Okay. 

Before the year of our COVID, probably up in the Jersey area, Chicago, maybe? Yeah. Maybe Boston. Would you ever go to any of the Boston events? I did go to Boston. 

Okay. Yeah. So it's probably around that time. 

Yeah. Nice. Nice. 

All right. You've had your business, what was it? 2004? Yes, that's correct. Yes. 

All right. And one of the reasons I really worked hard to get you is you are what I would consider a boutique MSP as well. Would you consider yourself that? Yes, I would say so. 

Yeah, definitely. All right. Let's do this for the listeners who may not know you. 

I got a little bit of your history there. Just tell us how you got started in IT. So I got started in IT really going back to high school. 

There was a local computer repair shop and I had an interest in computers. I used to hang out there a lot. And then they had job openings in the summertime to pull network cabling at a nearby high school and junior high.

So I did that for a summer for them. And then later on, I did an afternoon, evening job pulling cable at the high school that I went to. And so that was like my really first taste doing IT work.

And then later on, as when I graduated high school and went to college, I got a job working for a fixed wireless internet service provider in 2001, where we provided high speed at the time internet service. We're talking like 768k internet speeds. I was going to say high speed as in one meg. 

Yeah, exactly. To residential service and then a meg and a half to a couple of businesses that we had. And doing it on a fairly large scale, we were in maybe four or five towns.

At one point, we had about 300 subscribers. And it was interesting to do that at kind of the forefront of fixed wireless internet service at the time. There wasn't a lot of the equipment out there. 

Ubiquiti wasn't even on a glimmer in anyone's eye at that point. So we were using Lucid Orinoco equipment. For the OGs out there, remember that equipment. 

And PCMCIA cards eventually got USB adapters to get people online and then eventually ethernet. And we mostly had residential subscribers, but we did have some businesses. And what I found interesting in that job was we would go to these businesses and oftentimes we would be their first internet service provider. 

They had no network. Maybe they had a single computer or a few computers in their office that they were looking to have installed. And it really wasn't our responsibility to do that internal networking work. 

So we would hand that off to local repair shops if they didn't have their own consultant already. And when I got laid off from that job after DSL and other providers came in the area and basically killed our service overnight, I decided to start my own IT business. Initially, like many of us, doing a lot of residential repair work until I could build up my book of business and word of mouth to get enough business subscribers, customers that I could just transition over fully to doing business work, which is something I finished about eight years ago, 10 years ago. 

I completely switched over to doing business only and finished doing any residential support. And so I've been doing that since 2004. So it's 21 years in business this year, 22 in July, actually. 

It was July 2004 when I started. All right. So that's an interesting path. 

And I noticed bits and pieces of that story in my history as well. You kind of get started in one area and end up in another. I did very little residential in my beginning but switched over to business as soon as I could. 

Now, you talked about doing the high speed Internet stuff. Now, if I'm remembering correctly, tell me if I'm in the, you said 768K. So this was, this feels like it's still the days of DSL or is DSL what came in and knocked you guys out? That's what came in in our area. 

So Maine has always been a laggard in behind the technology and Internet service. We had cable Internet in the area, but it was only really in one town that we were in. And of course, back then it was Adelphia and it was way oversold.

So during the evenings, you basically had dial-up speed. It was almost useless because this was way before the technology of managing their networks and stuff. So we still had a pretty good foothold, but then once the telephone company, Verizon, finally started rolling out DSL to the various areas that we were in, it basically killed us overnight because they could provide three meg DSL at the same price or cheaper than we could and faster upload as well, slightly faster upload than we could provide. 

So unfortunately, it's just basically killed the business off almost overnight. Yeah. I remember that was huge. 

I remember I got one client, they were doing a, I don't think it was a true VPN. I forget what we did, but we had a Maine office connected to a warehouse and they were doing a database over that connection. And I remember getting them onto DSL and it was night and day for them. 

And at first they were balking at the cost, but then once we did it, they were like, oh my God, why didn't you convince us to do this earlier? Right. Yeah. And T1s were still, were readily available in our area, but they were at least a thousand dollars a month, closer to $2,000 a month. 

Because at the ISP I worked at, at one point we had three T1s and that cost us probably four to $5,000 a month in service. We had, we had with AT&T enterprise and then a couple of T1s with a local provider here in the state. So yeah, DSL was way cheaper for many businesses who didn't need to have dedicated internet access and didn't want to pay, you know, the thousand dollar a month premium for that always on service and, you know, SLA and, you know, the guaranteed response. 

Yeah. So tell me, and forgive me for saying it this way, but I think a lot of us, when we think of Maine, we think of not just, you know, the Northern part of the U.S., but we think of it as kind of a, still kind of a wilderness state, if that makes sense. We love your lobster, but I don't know very many Maine cities up there. 

So how do, how does the business market look up there? Yes, it is in places definitely would resemble the wilderness in rural parts of Maine, where there is, you know, some manufacturing, small manufacturing businesses here, there, and everywhere. Timber business is pretty big in Maine. Maine has the most forward, it is the most forward forested state in the nation per capita, where 83% of our state is covered in forests. 

So the timber industry is pretty big up here, even though several paper plants have shut down, which has been a huge job loss. Big cities in Maine would be like Bangor, where there's an air naval base there, air refueling wing with the Air National Guard, and Portland. Portland's the city that most people think about when they, when the word Maine comes up. 

That's our largest city on the coast in Southern Maine. The majority of our population lives in Southern Maine, so that's where a lot of their businesses are. I'm more towards the central part of the state near our capital, so I have to drive, you know, further, to meet my clients. 

Typically, you know, the saying in Maine, you can't get there from here is pretty accurate. It takes an hour plus generally to go to anywhere in Maine. If I want to go to Portland to, you know, do some, have some culture like a museum, or go to a music festival, or something like that, that's an hour and 15 minute ride. 

If I want to get on plane to go attend conferences, that's an hour and 15 minute ride. So in Maine, businesses are definitely more spread apart. There's actually a fair amount of MSPs here in Maine, and we seem to be able to have enough business between each other, where we're not stepping on each other's toes, at least none that I've really seen poorly. 

And yeah, so there's just a lot of businesses all spread out. It's not clusters of it, except for like the Portland area, where you have a lot of business located there. Right. 

Now, do you concentrate your businesses in a certain area, or do you cover the entire state? How does that work? Yeah, so my clients are mostly in the central Maine area around the capital of Augusta, but I do have clients south of Portland. In fact, I'm going to one on Wednesday to put up some security cameras. And I have a client north of me, by about an hour towards Bangor, one that has two offices, one that's down on the coast, and then a dental practice in Western Maine. 

So I do drive quite a bit for my business when I need to go on site for clients. But the majority of my clients are within 30 minutes of my office, typically speaking. All right. 

So now let me ask, how many of those businesses really have a grip on what managed services is, let alone cyber and AI? Yeah, absolutely. That's a good question. Out of my client base, I would say a handful actually do.

I've been working very hard to try to present the value of managed services to my break-fix clients. I have quite a few break-fix clients left that I'm still working on to present. Here's the reasons why we should be moving to managed services. 

I know this is something a lot of MSPs did five, 10 years ago, but again, Maine kind of falls behind on moving with the trends, technology trends. With the exception of probably AI, I definitely have seen an uptake in the past year of my clients using AI tools. I don't think a lot of the businesses owners are very aware of the AI tools being used. 

So that's kind of concerning to me. I think there needs to be some more discussion internally and policies written about AI. But I would say about half of my clients are using ChatGPT, for instance, to do social media posts, or to write up forms, or to do performance reviews, things of that nature. 

But then the others, I would say, are not using it. I don't know if they're looking at it. And then the rest looking at managed services, they're more of like, why do I need this? I can just call you right now and you fix my problem. 

So I'm trying to present that value statement of, this is the reason why you should be doing this. You've had business email compromises in the past that we would be able to resolve if we were fully monitoring and managing your environment, for instance. So trying to present those scenarios that I've seen with other clients that this is why we should be doing this with your business. 

So I remember when I started with my, it wasn't managed services back then, but I remember when I was doing the retainer for my law firms, one of the ways I got that recurring revenue is by telling them, yeah, I'm going to charge you a remote access fee for me to put my software on your machines. That way I can connect when we need to without me having to get in the car to come see you. And they seem to accept that. 

One, because it was a small fee in the beginning, and then I would just start to raise it as added on features and stuff. But I wonder if that's not a way to get some of these customers, because if you've got to drive an hour and 15 minutes to be able to say to them, look, for this much a month, I can probably remote in and take care of even half would probably be an incentive for that, would it? Yeah, absolutely. So I did the same as well about maybe 10 years ago.

I got an RMM tool and basically told clients, this is what we're going to do right now. We're going to put this on all your machines and you're going to pay a small fee. So provide endpoint security, patch your systems, it'll monitor it. 

Anytime anything breaks or needs to be done, that's billable labor. So now it's trying to get them from this hybrid model of monitoring only of their system over to the full managed stack. And I'm trying to use some things where, well, we don't currently have that in your monitoring system. 

However, if we move you up to the full managed services, we will be monitoring your entire Microsoft 365 environment. We will be backing up all of the emails in your Microsoft 365 environment, your OneDrive files, your SharePoint files, you know, those kinds of features that I'm going to try to keep out of the monitoring only and get them to try to convince them to move over to full managed services. Those things that I can resolve for them to make their business more secure and more proficient.

All right, you went ahead, you mentioned the RMM tool. So let me ask next what your, you know, typical business looks like in terms of client and what types of things do you have in your stack? Yes, so typical clients would be between 5 and 15 seats right now. I'm looking to get larger clients and focus more on the manufacturing industry. 

I think there's a need for my services in the manufacturing industry, whether that's going to be full managed services or a co-managed situation. That's where I want to focus my energy. Currently, my client base is all over the place. 

I have accountants, insurance, independent insurance agencies, law firms, a couple of dental practices, municipalities, and I've done some work for the state government as well. Very nice. Oh, and I should have mentioned my stack. 

You asked about that. So my stack, I'm mostly, for better or for worse, I know I'm going to get a lot of hate mail for this. I use a lot of Casea tools. 

Most of it prior to the Casea acquisition, I've kind of stuck with it because, A, I'm a solo shop. I just don't have time to really take on a whole new tool or learn a whole new environment. And B, for the most part, I haven't really had too many billing problems with Casea. 

I've only once had an issue and they resolved it. So for the most part, I've been fairly satisfied with their products. I use DattoRMM for my RMM. 

I use their Backupify for their Microsoft 365 environment. I use IT Glue, Documentation, Autotask for PSA. I've been with Autotask now for probably close to 10 years now. 

And the thought of switching PSA tools and losing all of that data just doesn't really sound palatable to me because that's nice having that history there. To export all that out is not very easy from what I've been told. So it's usually just start fresh with a new PSA. 

So that's kind of a, oh, I use Huntress for MDR. I'm very happy with Huntress. I think it's a great tool and the team over there. 

So that's a little bit of my stack that I use. All right. Listen, there is nothing wrong with staying with what you know if it does the job you need. 

Right. And that's it. My tools definitely have so far. 

I will agree with, you know, some of the naysayers that, you know, it's maybe not as innovative as it used to be post-acquisition by Kaseya. But for now, the tools do what I need them to do. I can get done my job. 

I can, you know, remotely manage their machines, do it as best as I can tell securely, and it works. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that. 

So let's now move into a question I asked you about in terms of, you know, what is, I guess, the one big thing that really either made a huge impact on your business or what's the one thing that you're most proud of that you've been able to make happen? So I think the most, the project I've been most proud of in my business was during COVID. A buddy of mine who worked for the state of Maine in the Office of Information Technology said, hey, we have a customer, which was another state agency, that has no internet service. And it's for an education network. 

And this is not something that we can support because it's not part of the state network. Would you be interested in going to this facility to take a look at it and see if you can fix it? I was like, sure. Give me their contact information. 

Spoke with the person. As it turned out, it was a Department of Corrections. It was a reentry facility. 

And I went down in the middle of COVID. This was, I think, May 2020, when we didn't really know of whether, you know, this was going to be something that, hey, if you touch surfaces, you're going to get COVID type deal. So I went there, fixed the problem.

Speaking of DSL, that's what they had. They had a DSL modem there. And the provider's modem had just crashed, lost its configuration. 

A couple hours later, I rebuilt it and got them back online so the residents there could get back into their college classes to, you know, be able to complete those courses and graduate, essentially, so that they're having the tools they need to better themselves on the outside when they get out. So from there, it moved into, hey, you're willing to come to a prison in the middle of COVID. Clearly, you have some screws loose.

Would you be willing to, you know, do some more work for us? So it eventually branched into every one of the facilities. They got a federal grant to put in an education network at every correctional facility here in Maine, which is, I think, about seven facilities. So I, with contractors and subs, was able to pull cable, install switches, install routers, firewalls, and build out an education network at every one of these facilities for the Department of Corrections. 

They managed the network themselves. It was mainly just me putting the network in and kind of handing the keys off to them. They have filtering set up through OpenDNS that they were able to get for free. 

And that was probably my most rewarding thing I've ever done in, almost in life, to be honest with you, to have residents come up to me at six o'clock in the evening after I spent all day pulling cable inside their housing units and mounting access points 35 feet up in the air on a man lift for them to say, hey, I'm now able to do my college work in my housing unit without having to wait the next day to go to the education building and only have a couple hours to do homework there or to attend classes is just game changer for me. It's really life changing. And thank you. 

And you just get that simple thank you from these guys and gals. All right. You just opened up a whole ton of questions that I'm sure people have. 

Let's start with an easy one. Were you the first person they called or were you the first one to actually say, yes, I'll do it? I'm not 100 percent sure on that. My buddy was the one who referred me and I think he was going to reach out to some other people. 

So I think he I was actually the first one that he referred me to them and said, here's somebody who might be willing to help you with your problems here. So I don't think anyone else was contacted on this issue because I was the first one to respond saying, sure, it's three o'clock in the afternoon. Where do you need me to go? I'll go do it. 

Let's get you guys up and running. And I was out of there at like seven o'clock in the evening and back online. Nice. 

So now that the question of working inside of a prison. Now, I'm sure the prisons in Maine are much different than the prisons down here in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, that sort of thing. But it's got to be there had to be a little bit of fear going in there, wasn't there? Not really. 

No, quite honestly, no, I felt very safe there. Actually, you know, I'm escorted everywhere. And just the interactions that I saw with my escort and the other correctional officers with the residents, it just there's a lot of like good feelings there. 

You know, sure, there's some people there who don't want to be there and make life difficult for other residents and for the staff. But I never really got to interact with them. It was other people there that were made mistakes in life. 

And now they were trying to, you know, figure things out and how to better themselves. So they were basically doing what they can do to correct their bad behaviors and the mistakes that they made and move on. So I never really felt unsafe at all in that facility. 

Not even once, to be honest with you. Now, all the facilities here in Maine, like you just mentioned, are definitely different than other states. We don't have a maximum security prison in Maine. 

So we have medium security. We have some that have some smaller units that are called close where they would be almost considered maximum security where they're not let out of their housing unit, except for showers and exercise, you know, one hour a day. I never really had to interact or go into those units because we weren't really putting education networks into them. 

So everywhere else was medium population or minimum and where most of the residents are allowed to move around with limited restrictions. And yeah, it was not hard at all. And I think the hardest part for anyone who may be interested in doing IT work or a contract with Department of Corrections or a correctional facility or anything like that is you go into a business, your normal business, and you think it's going to take two hours and it takes two hours, you get it done. 

No big deal. When you go into one of these facilities, everything takes three times as long. So that was one thing that I had to learn very quickly that when I'm quoting my jobs, this is how long it's going to take to put these wireless access points in this housing unit. 

I need to add three times the amount of labor to that because I'm mostly waiting around for access. Somebody needs to get keys. Somebody's not here today to escort me, waiting for the lift that's in the facility to be available, bringing my tools in, tool check in and tool checkout sheets that I have to fill out.

You know, those things is what takes a lot of time out of actually doing the actual work. Yeah, I imagine that that's got to be just the entering and exiting process alone have to take time, but having to wait for somebody to, you know, move you into the next space or something like that. I imagine there's tons of just sitting around and thinking, okay, I hope nobody opens the wrong door here. 

Yeah, yeah, they're pretty good on that stuff. I didn't have to worry about that. It was more of just waiting for that door to be open because they're handling other issues and we're kind of considered, you know, not really important to be doing things. 

And so, me not wanting to, you know, wait around and on my hands, sit on my hands and, you know, just wait for things to happen. I just want to get things done, get in, get out. You know, that doesn't really work that way in a correctional facility. 

Yeah. Now, was this a situation where you, you know, hired a sub to help you with the cable or were there, I was going to say, were there any inmates that were privileged enough to also help? Uh, both actually. So, um, a couple of times I did have, uh, some of the residents able to help me who were like trusted, uh, people who already worked in the, uh, education network, managing some of the systems there. 

Um, so yes, I had them to help me. And then, um, I had an escort who helped me on a little bit of the work. And then eventually I did a lot of it myself. 

And then probably halfway through the project, I realized I just need to get this done quicker and I can get this done quicker with a sub. So I brought in a sub and, um, got, you know, cables pulled and I did all the termination work afterwards. And then, uh, the only other subs that I brought in was fiber termination because I didn't have the equipment to do that.

All right. So that, uh, wow. How long did that take you, uh, to do that first, that first project? Uh, it probably took, uh, a good couple of weeks at least to do one of the facilities. 

Um, and then it just branched out from there. So, um, overall I would say that the contract was about three years and, um, we've kind of split it out over time to do each facility little by little. Some of the facilities, we didn't do it all at once. 

We just did part of it. Um, other facilities were being rehabbed and rebuilt. So the cabling was already done. 

All I had to do was just install the access points, um, and plug it in. So those are much quicker jobs. Um, but yeah, so I would say three years, you know, probably has spent 40, 50 days behind bars because I like the Chinook. 

I'm a heartened IT professional. Yeah. Uh, and what type of access points? Uh, so I'm, uh, I put in Ubiquity, um, because of the cost, they didn't want to pay licensing fees.

I didn't think it was necessary to put in Aruba or Meraki for that reason. And the state had to keep paying the ongoing licensing fees for the minimal amount of devices that were going to be needed. Stuff works and, uh, very easy to manage as a web interface. 

So I taught them how to go in and if they needed to change passwords or, you know, uh, check on the status of access points, you know, reboot access points, update things. It's very easy for even them to, to manage. Yeah. 

I'm late to the Ubiquity game, but I'm here. Yeah. It's good stuff. 

I've been using it for a long time. I would say early on, it definitely had its bugs and it was pretty bad. But the last, I would say four or five years, it's definitely gotten much more stable and, uh, reliable and the new features that Ubiquity's coming out with on a fairly regular cadence.

Yeah. It's nice, uh, being able to do the, the gateways, the switches, the access points. Uh, let's see what else that I did. 

I did door access. Uh, I did, uh, forget what the, called the unit port where you can put the cameras up on a TV. And I've not yet done the door access but looking to do that with one of my not-for-profits, if they're willing to, if they're willing to pay, even though Ubiquity's, uh, affordable, they're, they're still a non-profit. 

Correct. Yes. So, all right. 

Uh, so Josh, what, what advice would you be giving to somebody that, you know, either wants to, I don't know if anybody would, you know, aspire to work in a prism system or anything like that, but I imagine that it's some sort of government, you know, what do they call a request for proposal or something or a process to get started with that? Um, how was that? What would you advise to somebody that's looking to do that? Yeah. So for me, um, I'd already started and built the relationship because it started as kind of a break fix. Hey, I just, we needed a few small projects done and we'll, we'll foot the bill. 

Um, once it became necessary to build out these networks and all the facilities, everything had to definitely go out to quote, um, to a proposal. Um, they were willing to do a single source, uh, uh, contract, meaning they would just basically put the proposal out to me and allow me only to, uh, you know, submit, uh, the, uh, quote. And, um, that made things a little bit easier. 

I didn't have to fight other vendors to be low balled on price and things that said, of course, you know, I definitely had restrictions on, you know, my markup. I couldn't mark things up, you know, a thousand percent or anything like that. They definitely, you know, checked on that. 

Um, but my labor costs and, uh, equipment, um, sales, you know, all were within a reasonable, uh, price that I felt that I can make a good living on as well as not overcharging the state and that they would be willing to, uh, sign the contract. So for anyone willing to do that, I think it really starts with building a relationship with somebody within any state agency, whether it's department of corrections or somebody else, you need to build that relationship first so that you can get the information that you need, um, to build out the quote properly. Cause I think a lot of these quotes that people respond to the proposals that people respond to, you're not given the full information. 

You need to go into those sites and actually see what they're doing and what they need. He has a proposal is probably written by somebody who doesn't know technology. They just know the budget and basic needs. 

They don't know anything else. They don't know the specifics. So, um, and this goes also for schools as well. 

If anyone's looking to do school contracts, which I have looked at, I have not actually, um, done any proposals, but I have, um, sat down at some of the meetings for the proposals that were going to go out to bid. Um, so making sure that you have your information up front, um, to know that you're going to build your quote out, right. And not, um, underbid yourself or on the project. 

Um, and then just making sure your quote is very, uh, strict in the way of what is included and what is not included, what would become a change order, you know, cause those things are going to happen in the project that they're going to want to add new things or remove things, you know, making sure that's clearly listed in your contract. Um, and then to just be patient, these things take time and they take weeks for responses. And you're going to get on an email chain with a hundred people you don't know. 

So you just kind of have to let them talk amongst themselves in the email chain and wait to be, you know, messaged in the email, um, and just let them hammer and hash things out. And, uh, that's kind of how I managed to work this, this, uh, contract. Well, I will add to the process. 

Uh, I did do a quote for a charter school years ago, and it took about two months to get through the process. Uh, the project was only for, uh, was it three, three or four months? It was over the summer and they wanted to have everything done by the next school year. And I remember going through that process and I think we went up against three others. 

So there were four bids total. I actually won the bid and went in to do the finalization and sign everything. And they decided they were going to try to throw some more stuff in there. 

So between that and the fact that all through the process, I kept getting hounded by other people in the school. Um, the short way to explain it is the school that I was bidding on was actually two buildings and they already had IT people, one for each building. And they were kind of fighting each other and trying to, you know, short, to make it short and sweet. 

They were more of a problem than the work itself. And so between throwing stuff in at the last minute and me feeling like I had to babysit two IT folks, I said, no, can't do that. And they were mad. 

Yeah. Yeah. I've definitely had moments, not just with, you know, this, this particular project, but other client projects where, yeah, you're having to manage personalities as well. 

Um, and that sometimes can just be too much, but it's just not worth the stress and the headache of doing the actual work, then having to manage all this stuff on the side. Um, and that also comes with part of the contract, who's going to be the project manager as well. And putting that into the, the, the, the, the contract, when you're working with a state agency or a school system, you know, if you're going to be doing a project management, there should be separate fees for that too. 

Um, versus, uh, unless they're going to be providing that or an outside person to be providing that. Yeah, I didn't meet, uh, I was told I was meeting with all the people through the two months. And then all of a sudden they had this owner that I had never heard of. 

And that's who I met on signing day. And that was the person that's like, well, I want to make sure we do this, this, and this. I'm like, well, that wasn't part of the original scope. 

So I, I was like, oh, that's, that's frustrating. So yeah, getting all of those people, uh, on board in the beginning, uh, is, is key. Yes, absolutely. 

All right, Josh. Um, anything else? I think I've asked all my questions. I was waiting for you to sidetrack me there, but all seemed pretty straightforward. 

Yeah. Uh, no, I mean, uh, happy to, you know, help anyone if they have any questions about doing this type of work or, or if they wanted to reach out to me, you know, certainly reach out to me on LinkedIn. Um, you can also shoot me an email.

I'm happy or a phone call. I'm happy to discuss, you know, any of these types of projects, how I managed it, how I did it, how, you know, somebody may be looking to do it themselves. I'm happy to help with that. 

Or if anyone needs, uh, you know, some information or help with the project itself, I reach out, happy to do it remotely, or if it happens to be here in Maine or someplace else, I'm interested. All right. So speaking of where, where are we going to see you next? Uh, I think my next, uh, conference, uh, is potentially going to be, uh, uh, ASCII Edge in Newark in the end of April. 

I believe I'm going to go to that event. Uh, and I'm definitely going to PAX 8 Beyond in Salt Lake City in June. So I will absolutely be to that event. 

That's been. All right. Well, I will, I will see you in Utah. 

I'm not sure about the ASCII. In fact, they're going to hate this. I haven't spoken to any of them yet. 

So I guess, yes, I need to pick up the phone and see what's happening. Uh, I usually always do the one in Florida and the ASCII cup and there are none in Florida this year. This is true. 

Yeah. The cup, I don't know if I will go to, it's in San Antonio. So, um, a little bit of a ways for me to get there.

Um, but yeah, uh, if anyone is going to be attending ASCII Edge in Newark, uh, you know, shoot me a message, happy to meet up and talk shop or anything else. All right. Josh, thank you for coming on the show. 

Finally. We've, we've talked about this for a while. We have, yeah, this is great. 

And, uh, I've been a follower for a long time, so it's awesome to be on here. All right. Thanks again. 

All right, folks. Uh, that has been a conversation with Joshua Zukerman from Snow Pound Technology up in Maine. And hopefully you got a few ideas to think about. 

You can take back to your business or your MSP. And, uh, as always, if you got value from this episode, do me a favor, share it with another IT pro or MSP and, uh, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast app. Uh, Joshua's information will be in the show notes as well as on the, uh, episode page on the itbusiness.com website. 

Check it out there. Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back with more episodes from Zero Trust World. 

And I've got a couple of other special episodes coming up. Uh, just a reminder folks, this is 10 years of doing this podcast. Uh, so I've got a lot of things that I'm trying to work on for this 10 year anniversary, and I hope you guys tune in and stay with us throughout. 

So again, thanks for hanging out. Uh, we'll see you soon. Holla.