NSITSP Spotlight: Jason Thomas (EP 883)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals and managed service providers, where we share product stories and tips to help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. Today, I've got a gentleman with me that we are going to share some stories and talk tech and then discuss a little bit about the National Society of IT Service Providers, otherwise known as the NSITSP. And I have joining me today, Jason Thomas, CEO and founder of JATAG Solutions.

He's got himself a nice little IT services company up in or in or around the windy city of Chicago. Right. Chicagoland is our is our focus.

Yes. Thank you for having me. Jason, thank you for coming on the show.

So up there in Chicago. So you're up there with my buddy Paco LeBron, Lori Tisnai, and some others up there. Yep.

Yep. Both good friends. See them at a lot of conferences here.

Randy Carnegie as well. I think you know Randy. I do.

So let's do a quick little recap. Now, I know that you've been around a while. I'm not going to dictate how many years, but I think you and I are close in being in the industry for a while.

Your company, you've got what are you, about 10, 12 people now? We're 10 people. OK. Although we are taking on an intern this summer that's going to focus on cybersecurity.

He's going to Purdue in Indiana for cybersecurity, and I'm like, come on board for a dozen weeks and we'll see what we can do with you. OK, well, that's an interesting place to start right there. Why would you bring an intern in for cybersecurity? Well, I have a director of cybersecurity with Craig Urban with all of the certifications and knowledge.

I'm bringing Eric on board to actually help us document and get our SOPs and procedures in place, both for ourselves internally and for our customers. Essentially, he's a kid I've known for a long time, involved through Boy Scouts of America as well. But he is going to school for cybersecurity, and we're going to have him essentially go through our entire system and document it properly because everyone knows how much we love documentation, which is almost not at all.

And he and then at the same time, I'm helping him with a summertime project that lets them, you know, college kids always need the real life experience. And that's what we're going to give him for the next 12, 13 weeks. All right.

Well, that sounds great. So you said he was going to school. So is he, I mean, obviously going for IT, but is he doing a specialty in cyber? Well, his special, he's just finished up his freshman year.

Oh, so he doesn't know yet then. He doesn't know where he's going to go. So I'm going to expose him to everything from, you know, 365 to CMMC to CIS Controls version 8.1, and really, he's working a couple of days a week, and I'm hoping by the end we will have our documentation and plans in much better shape than what we're doing now.

Okay. All right. I'm going to take a side dip here and ask about the Boy Scout connection.

You're involved with the Boy Scouts? So it's called Scouting America now, and both of my sons went through it, both made Eagle Scout. Oh. I've been a leader for the past 15 years in it, yeah.

Okay. I was a Boy Scout, and I was one merit badge short of being an Eagle. My oldest was five days from missing his Eagle.

He did it, he finished it up within five days of turning 18, and my younger guy finished it by the time he was 16. So. Oh, that's motivation there for you.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

He's my motivated kid, and he works for me full time. Nice. All right.

So let me ask about JATAG, and I mean, I know you've had the business a couple of decades now. Let me get a sense of, you know, what was your aha moment for starting the business? I had an opportunity to leave the company where I was at, and I always enjoyed the IT part of my role there. And I got a couple other IT service providers to guarantee me hours.

This was back in 08, and I essentially owned a job at that point. I was just, it was just me. I took care of a number of my own customers, and then did subcontract work for a couple of other larger firms.

And then in 2018, I got the chance to buy out a friend's book of business. And of course, COVID hit after that. And since then, we've been growing by two or three people a year.

We're up to, like I said, 10 people now since 2020. So it's been a roller. It's been straight up in the past five years.

Okay. A lot of us get started by leaving the job that we were at. I was no exception.

I was running the back end of a tech shop, and my boss did not want to do any on-site work, which he was just giving away business at that point. So I picked up that slack and started doing on-site support for businesses, and that got me into the biz. So a good path for all of us.

It is. I think it's one I hear a lot. And I was always involved.

If you remember the old SBS groups, there was a really active Chicagoland small business server group meeting at Microsoft every month. It was the heyday of user groups. And I got into, that's where I found a lot of my friends, like Lori Tisnai and others in the area from those groups.

And it's been awesome in that we all trust each other's expertise and that we're not going to poach each other's customers. It lets you get away on vacation because you know that another expert has your back. Right.

Now, that leads me to another point that I want to ask you about, because when I started my business a little bit before you, and it was known in that time you didn't ask for help from people around you. It was pretty much everybody kept to themselves. We were all afraid of each other stealing business.

I met a group of people down here where we actually did work together. It was my group of five, my very first peer group that we were all local and worked together. You still do that, but in a much different sense.

As I understand it, you were doing a lot of level one support for people in the area up there. Yeah. And for essentially getting, a lot of people don't like to be on site or interacting with customers directly.

And I don't mind it. I will talk a story into the ground, whatever you want. And so your bedside manner, computer side manner makes a difference.

And if you can master that, people will keep on asking you back to interact with their customers. Okay. Nice.

It seems as though when I was trying to get some more information on you, because I like to try to dig, that your business seems to be built a lot on empathy and trust and prioritizing honest communication with your customers. Was that intentional from the beginning? Yes. Yeah.

Very much intentional. And I can tell you that I actually, most of the people that work for me, I have known for years, if not decades. My operations manager, I met at her son's and my sons were both in scouting, known her for 10 years.

And when I brought her on a year and a half ago, that changed my business again, completely. But we all have the same drive to be able to offer great service and to be truthful about everything upfront. It's just one of the, there's no reason to either sugarcoat things or to not be absolutely professional to your end users.

They will, even if they don't like hearing it immediately, they will come to respect you that way. All right. Do you think that has been part of this major growth that you've experienced since the year of our COVID? I think it has helped contribute to me retaining all of the customers that I've, that have come to use JATAG.

Yeah. All right. Very nice.

Let me ask the old man question in terms of if you were to look back and try to give advice to a younger self, what do you think that would be? From a business-wise, it would have been, I would have hired a project manager or an operations manager a year or two sooner, because I drove myself running four techs, I drove myself into the ground with trying to do all of that and run the business myself. I would have pulled the trigger on that a year or two sooner. And otherwise, it's make sure you take time away from the business to recharge, to essentially get away from living in the business.

And for me, that's backpacking and camping and getting out into nature, somewhere where I don't have a self-signal to be able to make those, you know, your brain chews on the things in the background, and you make those good business decisions when you get away from the busyness of your business. All right. Sounds like you've experienced the same things that a lot of us do, you know, sometimes we got to get out of our own way, in a sense.

So a lot of times that seems to be the biggest hurdle. First of all, for ourselves, you know, out of our own way. But in terms of the overall perspective, you've got a pretty good insight, I think, to, you know, other businesses, people in our channel and stuff.

What do you see as the biggest challenge in our industry today? Keeping the professionalism high, and we have access to business owners and we have access to someone's business from everything that lets them run that business from their domain to internet access to all the computers that run every business these days. And if you're not professional and making sure that you're taking care of them 100% from backups to patching to looking forward to what they're going to need next year, you're doing them a disservice and you're not living up to your potential in just meeting the needs of our customers. Yeah.

I found that trying to get yourself into that position of partnership. Trusted advisor. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I'm even thinking trying to go deeper than that. I was, I want to find a word that's even better than partner to where, you know, they're looking at you as somebody that could help guide their business, protect their business, and be thinking about it just as much as they are, in a sense, because that's, I think that that's what we're supposed to be doing.

We're supposed to be looking ahead at all the things that could derail them when it comes to their IT, whether it's the cybersecurity threats that are out there, an old machine that could fail, all that stuff. But we're doing it in their best interest, not necessarily ours. Right.

And keeping our professionalism high in doing it and knowing that that's one of the reasons that I'm a member of National Society of IT Service Providers is keeping that professionalism high that we have a code of ethics that we stand by. And we mean it when we say we do care about putting your business first. All right.

Since you brought it up, let me ask, when did you first join in SITSP? Something I'd heard from Karl Palachuk a couple of years ago, and he invited me to be in the first round of membership when it was just starting off. And, you know, just like, you know, in Illinois here, hairdressers have to have a thousand hours of training and certifications. And to do IT work, you just need to know how to turn on a computer or swap memory.

And people think you're an expert. So I think that getting the professionalism, raising the bar on professionalism for IT service providers has been needed for quite some time. I was originally on the formation committee in the society, which transferred over to the governance committee running the elections for all of our positions.

And this past fall, I was fortunate enough to be elected to the board of directors. OK. So I've slowly been moving up and still an active participant in everything in SITSP.

Yeah. You're in charge of the money now, aren't you? I am the treasurer as well. All right.

So you've talked a lot about the professionalism and both from your business and of course that is a primary focus of the NSITSP. I want to ask you, though, in terms of once you got involved and looked at everything, has there been an impact on your business from the NSITSP? So it's another way that I can show my customers that we are a professional organization. There's no continuing education credits.

There's no other, you know, some certifications are, if companies know about them, they're not really aware overall. This as a national society gives us that a bit of, I don't know, street cred for being a real legitimate IT company that the single owner MSPs can obviously have because they can join and follow the same code of ethics. But the newer people in the industry or that just want to take care of, you know, rebooting your computers and patching them, but you don't actually have verified backups every month that everything is working the way it's supposed to or your cybersecurity is in place.

So you're going to be properly protected if and when you're breached. That takes a lot more dedication to the IT service than some of these companies have out there. You mentioned street cred and that prompted me to think of a question that I've not asked any of the previous people on the show before, but sometimes there's a sense that our customers could care less about the certifications or the plaques on our wall and stuff because they don't know what that means.

If we have national society in front of it, that might give it a little bit more. But you know, one of the things I think is how do we as MSPs get that message out to the small businesses, our clients and stuff like that? I know that I didn't prep you for that question, but do you have any thoughts there? I do. We just last year joined our local chamber of commerce that covers three cities.

And we're going to be putting on a presentation there that talks about not just what you should look for. You always hear what you should look for in an accounting firm or an investment firm that there's certain national standards. This is something we've come up with ourselves as an industry to say, hey, we're going to follow this code of ethics.

We're going to make sure that we are responsible to each other to make and that we're setting the bar high and that we are going to live up to that. And that's what this provides. That's what we put our logo on just about everything we can from our shirts to any flyers that go out that we're a member and we're proud to say that we're following this code of ethics.

That just made me think, and I don't know why I hadn't thought of this before, but I've been seeing this commercial out there that people are sitting out looking distracted and then all of a sudden they're in front of somebody talking about money. And the question is, are you a certified financial planner? Yeah. I don't even remember who the company is that put that out there, but it almost seems as though we need something like that.

Oh, I think we do. And hopefully this is going to be NSITSP, which is a cumbersome acronym. Maybe we just call ourselves the society and be done with it.

And then have movies written about us. But yeah, there's no other regulatory body that says you need continuing education credits. And we don't want the Dells and Microsoft’s of the industry to set those standards via legislation from states or national government without our input and making sure that we're not going to force out the single owner MSP that is just the guy taking care of his dozen customers and treating them all well and right and doing all the right things and being forced out because regulations are geared toward the larger companies.

Well, I don't even know if it's going to be just that. I mean, there's going to be situations where, you know, whether it's a lawsuit or something, service providers are going to be held accountable by somebody. Yes.

And even large organizations, if they do something improper, you know whether it's a lawsuit from a client or a lawsuit from a state organization or something that can affect us all. Yep. Yep.

Absolutely. So. All right.

Let me ask you one final question in terms of getting the message out to other service providers and trying to get them to join us in this cause. What would be your thoughts and how would you encourage people to get involved? Um, that if, if you don't want to be told what the new regulations are, get involved so you have a voice before, um, uh, all these rules are going to be pushed down on you. Um, it, it helps to have a voice in the community, um, and not just, um, a, let's see, not just a sheep to follow the herd, um, be, be that leader to, um, take control of where you want this industry or where you want your business to go.

Yep. Uh, we've got to start taking a stand somewhere. Uh, obviously a, a change is coming to our industry and you can be a part of the group that's trying to transform our industry into the profession, establish those, those high standards and ethics and, uh, improve the, what does it say on the website? Improve the perception and credibility of it professionals all over the place.

So, uh, we will have the link to that, uh, nsitsp.org where you can look for more information, get involved, join, uh, not a lot of money to, uh, join up and not a lot of commitment, but, uh, Jason, I do want to thank you for getting involved early and for staying involved, being a part of the leadership. It's, it's all about looking forward to the future. It's, uh, you know, it's like planting a tree.

You may never sit under the shade of that tree, but you know that the people that come after you will enjoy with all the work you put in. And, uh, that's, that's really a, um, it's, it's looking forward, looking forward for the industry that I love and has given me a wonderful life. Well, you actually have, uh, some motivation because you've got kids working with you.

I do. My son's been working for me for the past couple of years. And, uh, it's, it's really nice to get a, uh, unprompted compliment from a customer about him and go, Oh yeah, that he's actually my son.

And thank you. I appreciate that. Well, you've done something right.

And, uh, good luck with that. Good luck with the intern this summer. Uh, I think we might have you back to do a show on that.

Great. Yes. I'd be happy to.

All right. All right, folks. There you have it.

Jason Thomas, CEO and founder of JATAG solutions in the Chicago land area board member of the NSITSP. Uh, check out his website in the show notes below and check out the website of the society. And, uh, that's going to do it for this episode.

We'll be back with more. I check everything out over at itbusinesspodcast.com or follow us on the socials on behalf of Jason. Thank you.

And we'll see you next time. And until then. Holla.