Starting an MSP in 2025 (EP 897)

I'm going to give you a few minutes to think about what you're going to be doing in the course of this lecture. Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals, where we talk about business, we talk about tips, and we try to help you run your business better, smarter, and better. This is the Wednesday live show, and I've got a special guest that is actually here in studio, and he's over there, but I wanted to do my little intro here and make this look like a studio and try to do the show here.

It has been a great week here. I don't have a Ubiquity update. I think some of you are getting used to me every week coming on and talk about Ubiquity and what I've done new, although I did send a quote.

So we'll see how that goes. This one is just going to be taking over some cameras for a not for profit. It's going to be about 25, 26 cameras, so that should be good.

I had a little fight with an ISP today. That was interesting. A customer had closed down an office, and they have 36 phones that are now no longer needed, and they thought they would have to be sent back.

The account manager there said, no, no, you guys are done. Just do whatever you want with the phones, resell them, donate them, blah, blah, blah. So as I went to go start resetting the phones, they're Polycom’s, so I know how to factory reset those, so I would reset it, turn it back on, turn it back on.

And all of a sudden, the phones would phone home back to the ISP, which is Windstream. So I'm going to call them out, although they're not really Windstream anymore. They just merged with a company called Unity. 

So I don't know what's going on there. So I had these phones, wiped all 36, started hooking them back up, and they started phoning home and reconnecting to the Windstream network. They're part of a system called Office Suite, and they are hard configured somewhere.

And so I opened a ticket, said, hey, I need these phones wiped, and they were like, oh, yeah, that's fine. Send us the MAC addresses of the phone. And my first thought is, they're in your portal, you see the MAC addresses, you see they're assigned to the site, oh, no, we need you to send them to us.

So I actually go into their portal, download all of the phones, the MAC address, whatever else came with them, uploaded the Excel spreadsheet, and they said, okay, got it, thank you, we'll have this done in about an hour. So four hours later, they sent me an email saying that, oh, no, we need to get approval from the primary account person in order to remove these phones. And I said, are you kidding me? So first of all, I am one of their primary account holders. 

I'm a partner with Windstream, and I wrote them back and told them all this. I'm like, you have our permission. I even sent them the email from the account manager that said, yeah, wipe the phones, do whatever you need to do.

So as soon as I sent that email, I thought, I'm not going to hear from them for a long time. Five minutes later, my phone rings, and it's a representative from Unity, not Windstream, that says, in order to have these phones removed, we actually need your account manager to put in a partial disconnect order for this account. And I told them, I said, the account's been disconnected for two months already. 

But just because it's physically disconnected doesn't mean it's disconnected. It still shows up in the portal. My client is still paying for internet service, 36 phones for this office that has been closed for two months.

And now if I want to get phones wiped, they actually have to put in a partial disconnect so I can do the phones. And I said, well, why don't they just do a full connect or disconnect because they're not there. So that's a whole nother story. 

I'll hopefully hear from the account manager tomorrow, and I'll give you an update on that. But that's not why you came. So let me go ahead and do a little bit of trickery here and bring to the stage. 

There it is. Matthew McCahee out of Miami, Florida. He's started a new MSP called MSP Cyber. 

I'm going to take my headphones off so you and I can talk like normal people now. Matt, welcome. Thank you.

So here you are back again. And for those of you that don't know, Matt was actually here in studio last May. That when it was? Yeah. 

I researched. May 13th. And you were working for a company called ProSource? Yep. 

MSP out of Orlando. Out of Orlando. You were there at the time, eight years.

Yep. Doing their development work, helping them go out, get money, talk to clients and all that stuff. And then you said, you know what, I can do this myself. 

Is that how it went? Yes. Let's just keep it at that. Okay.

But yeah, just an engineering background and an obsessive, impulsive need to do things my way. Yeah. And learn the hard way or figure it out myself through the business development venture.

I was always a person that liked to fix things. Whether it was on the technical side and then being a sales engineer, that's all I ever wanted to be was a sales engineer. And hey, here's our problem.

Okay. Here's how we should fix it. Let's sell it and fix it. 

And well, that took me a lot further than I thought it would. So then I had, you know, sales reps, BDRs under me, marketing people, marketing vendors, which we should talk about because it's one of the main reasons I started this. And at one point, you know, kind of overseeing everything.

And everything, you might as well run the whole show. Well, there you go. All right. 

So let's start off with some basics. Now, I kind of took this as an opportunity to say, okay, here's somebody starting an MSP in 2025. So I started mine 28 years ago.

Back when it was super easy, just, you know, I got a loan from a friend for $5,000 and I was one of those trunk slammers. But I had some customers already. I'd worked at a store.

We were already doing on-site work and stuff. But, oh my, just to get started and going and stuff. So I wanted to hear your perspective on, you know, what's it like to start an MSP now.

But let's actually start with what was it, I mean, you talked about, you know, if I'm going to do all this work, I might as well do it myself. But what was it that made you decide to do this in the location that you are? Because you are in Miami, my friend. Yeah, I'm in the heart of it.

Well, first of all, Miami is underserved. If you look at it and you do the market research, you'd actually be shocked. If you look at the MSPs, the quality of work they have, the other entrepreneurs I've spoken to, services they're getting are really shocking.

Really? Yeah. Okay. I would not have guessed that.

Right, nobody does. Me neither. I've had clients in Miami, or let's rephrase that.

I've had clients with offices in Miami. I did have one that was out near the airport. That was too far of a drive for me.

I had, my last one was at the Glades Interchange, and that's where I'm like, that's as far as I'm going to go. And I had a couple literally right downtown. I mean, I'm not going to say they're tough rides, 35, 40 minutes, depending on traffic, right off the interstate there.

But man, I hate Miami. Yeah, yeah. And I would say that there are different parts of Miami.

I never go. I was at Brickell for lunch today, but that was for a meeting. Did you say hi to Kaseya? I honestly couldn't even point their building out if I told you.

Kaseya and I are not on speaking terms, let's just put it at that. So we have an IT glue backstory there that is for another day. But yeah, I mean, I love the Grove, Gables.

I live in Kendall. Obviously, there's a lot of business, economic opportunity in downtown and Brickell. But it's kind of been turned into a mini city.

Not the spirit of Miami, I'd say. A little more sterile. It's been interesting.

I've been to Brickell a couple of times, and I mean, it's nice to people watch. But other than that, I don't really want to have to try to get around and make an appointment on time and that sort of stuff. So you say it's underserved.

Now, one of the things that I've talked about in my journey with dealing with clients in this South Florida area in general is being undercut in pricing. So my question is, are clients being undercut, I mean, underserved because they're demanding low support prices? Or are companies charging too much? I mean, what's the reason? All right, I guess this is the time to get into it. I'm a big value guy.

So people will pay for what they value. I think what we've seen in the MSP industry, and I've been guilty of this, is we had a big shift when we went from break-fix to managed services. That was, over the last five years, the big transition in the managed services industry to some price per seat, price per user, price per workstation, whatever that might be.

And the whole impetus there was unlimited support. And as someone that drove that trend and talked to a lot of the figureheads where, hey, how do we make more money? How do we get higher monthly recurring revenue, drive the valuation of our business? It's, okay, we'll target larger companies, manage services, get more money per headcount. And the way most MSPs do this is they bundle a couple tools, they add a help desk element, maybe some fractional CIO services.

And I have a whole tirade around that, about how CIOs provide value and MSP fractional CIOs provide value. But the value began to dilute in, I would say, the last two years for managed services. Because what's the value of a help desk? Something's breaking, right? If something's breaking, productivity's going down, money's being lost.

So if the value you're providing is being that insurance plan, that help desk, which everyone still needs a help desk. I'm not advocating to get rid of that. I'm saying that the value of your technology partner shouldn't be derived from that.

It needs to be derived in other ways, such as business process improvements. And in my instance, I'm really leaning into actually being a digital marketing company as well. Because in my role, overseeing business development, I worked with some of the top MSP marketing firms, and none of them could deliver.

And it became very, very frustrating for me, as someone that was accountable for those metrics, to get the dog and pony show and sign on and hear all the stuff they can do for us, and then none of that be delivered. And through a couple contract cycles of being through that with different industry-leading vendors, it became apparent that really none of them are equipped to do that. And there's a technology aspect there that they ignore.

So one of the big things for me is a CRM, a CRM to run a business. A lot of the PSAs, you know, Halo, ASIO, Manage, Autotask, whatever it is, have CRM functions. None of them are really a CRM.

They're contact managers, right? Exactly. So bouncing around these marketing companies, one of the things they do is you have to use our CRM, you have to use CRM, and you end up in the CRM ping-pong, going back and forth and never really getting value from your technology. And us as an MSP and a fractional CIO should really be looking at an entire ecosystem of technology for ourselves and our clients and understanding how is that technology impacting the broad spaces across the entire business, and not just, okay, you're my help desk.

It's like looking more strategically from an orchestration standpoint, understanding how things are flowing through the business, where there's opportunities for automation. When I talk about underserved, most MSPs are still in the trenches of either transitioning to managed services or thinking managed services are, hey, I'm your help desk. I can run on-site and fix your printer, and we meet quarterly for a QPR.

They bring a bunch of reports, and they say, look at all these tickets, look at metrics, and that's kind of where they end. And for me, that's where it should begin. And you should be beyond that and providing value beyond those types of things.

And when you talk about pricing, you have to pay more. But if people are seeing more value, they don't have a problem paying. Well, I think when you talk about help desk, and everybody's kind of stuck there, and they're looking at the help desk in a reactive mode as opposed to the proactive mode that we've tried to convince people that we're doing, then we start outsourcing help desk.

My help desk is outsourced. Trying to lower that cost and stuff. And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with it, but when you're doing that, you're actually, to some degree, lowering that L1 role because you're trying to reduce those truck roles.

You're trying to reduce all that stuff where I don't know how much you and I mirror our business and stuff, but I don't have a help desk. I still go see clients. I try to get out of my office once a day.

That's where your time should be spent. I'm a big believer in owner-led sales, so every minute you're spending not doing that is not a minute wasted, but you're diluting your value because no one can sell like you. No one's going to have the energy, enthusiasm, drive, or commitment to your business that you have.

And whether you hire a salesperson or whether you're just stuck in the weeds of supporting things day to day, your growth is going to suck. So you've found this niche of underserved stuff. Now, in terms of actually starting your MSP, where did you think the ground level would be with making that jump and making sure you have everything that you need to deliver that service? I was very methodical about not starting too fast.

I was very lucky. I have a wife. She works.

She's got insurance for both of us now. So I understand I've been very fortunate in terms of my situation and the time at which I started this. I have some benefits other people might not have that gave me a little more grace to take my time, honestly.

Not that I wasn't working any less because I was sleeping way less and working a lot more. The stress was crazy initially. The second you decide to start, it's like a laundry list of things that only I can do.

It's not like you're waiting on vendors or you're waiting on somebody else. You're talking about, oh, I'm waiting for this vendor to get back to me. It's all on me to move the needle.

So that out-of-the-gate piece was important, and I knew early on I had to provide more value than my competitors or peers. So how was I going to do that? I came up with a whole philosophy called the architecture of growth. It's like a three-tiered pyramid.

The bottom is your IT foundation. I want to talk about that for a second because in the industry, the whole mantra for the last couple of years, and I've been in True Method, Gary Pica. I've been in a couple of the Manage Evolve peer groups.

I've been in the Galactic peer groups, Galactic Advisors out of Nashville. The kind of push is, hey, make more money by getting bigger businesses. And we did that.

What I started to see was that the objections I was getting in the sales cycle started to shift for the last two years. It was no longer monetary. It was not, you're making money.

We disagree with the strategy. It was, hey, we agree with everything you're saying. Our other IT provider is not meeting our needs.

There's too much friction, all these different things. But to make all these changes you're proposing is going to cause too much organizational strain. And it's like, okay, well, you know you need to make all these.

You're agreeing. And the friction in your organization, friction is my favorite word. So you might hear me say that a couple of times.

But the strain within the organization to make all the operational changes when it comes to technology is so great that they can't commit to that. And it's like, okay, well, these are all cybersecurity best practices or things you should be doing, you know you should be doing. But you still don't want to do it because it's too much of a change.

I equate it to turning a cruise ship versus turning a dinghy. So listening to all these bigger heads saying, target a market, go for bigger companies. Well, my whole philosophy is get it right from the get-go.

And the risk is much higher and the churn is much higher with the smaller sub-10 user companies. But what's the lost opportunity cost to those customers and the clients if they have a mishmash of technology going from 5 to 20 or 5 to 30 employees and dealing with all that strain through growth stages as opposed to getting it right early stage, onboarding clients or onboarding employees and the way they work is the way they work for the rest of their life cycle there. And for me, the opportunity cost there is so, so high that I think businesses are now investing more early stage in technology where they really couldn't afford managed services previously.

Right. Do you think that is partly because the generation that's coming up is more technical and they understand that they have to embrace it? 100%. Okay.

Yeah. Especially with AI now. And all these new founders and a couple of my clients are my age younger and they want to know how they can use more technology.

They want to know how they can adopt AI faster. They want to go, go, go. And they understand cybersecurity more.

They understand the risks that it poses to their business. Are they going to go? And what I tell everyone is someone tells you you're going to be 100% safe run, right? Anyone sensible knows you can never be. So it's just about what is your risk tolerance? Everyone's risk tolerance.

Right. So where are your economic factors? Where's your risk? And kind of balancing that and getting it to a place that you're comfortable with. Okay.

So your foundation is set. What's next? Scalable systems. Scalable systems.

Now, let me ask you this. Does that mean your stack? No. The stack is in the, I mean, in a sense, like operationally.

So for me, I have a video coming about this. CRM is HubSpot. I'm a HubSpot consultant.

I'm in the HubSpot partner program. I run a HubSpot for myself. Four of my first six customers are HubSpot consultants.

Two are re-implementations. That's not a part of the channel. But it goes back to how are you deriving value from technology? Okay.

And where people want to see efficiencies, where they want to see operational improvements, are in sales and marketing. So how are our sales cycles? How are we managing deals? How are we tracking revenue? How are we tracking sales-generating activities? How are we building lists, data mining, those different things? And I got this experience because I went from engineering side to the revenue side of the business, and I had to figure this out. And then I hired marketing firms to do it for us, and they couldn't do it for us, so I figured out how to do it.

So it was a learn-out-of-necessity type of scenario. And everyone needs to be doing this if you want to grow a business. It's not a matter of if.

It's a matter of when you want to make these investments. But for the clients that do and want to grow rapidly, these are necessities to operate efficiently. You need a good CRM.

So if the stack is just a part of it, CRM is what you're putting at as the starting point. At the front end. What else follows? That's where it starts to diverge, I would say.

So for me, it's Halo. I'm a Halo PSA guy. So it's HubSpot, Halo, QuickBooks Online.

Kind of my three core tools, and I have an entire Miro topology I'm going to release to show everyone my actual topology of my business. But those are kind of the three core home pillars that run the business. That's not what we're taught.

We're taught to start with the RMM first. I don't even use an RMM. I use Intune.

All my clients are on Business Premium, and they use Intune. You can't hot patch with an RMM. You can hot patch with Intune.

I don't use my RMM to patch, full disclosure. I have an RMM, but I use another product to patch. But the tool sprawl gets crazy.

It is. I was guilty, so guilty of this. We used to have a leadership team of five people.

We were all engineering focused. The group think was, it wasn't toxic, it was dangerous. Because we all agreed with each other, and we wanted the best tool for the job and everything.

I was super guilty of this. Now, I'm on the other side of the bell curve now. Less tools.

Less tools. I mean, okay, it's not perfect. Does it do the job? Does it mitigate the risk to a point that is sensible? And does it provide value? Okay.

So, CRM first. So, you've got Halo, and then you've got scalable stuff there. HubSpot.

Your firm name is Miami Cyber. Yeah. So, where does the cyber part come in? So, it's everywhere.

I mean, cybersecurity is fundamental. Like we were talking about these new generation of entrepreneurs and founders. Not even new generation.

I mean, I'd say it's beginning to seep into everyone that they know they have to. And I'm big on education because, like I said, you'll never be 100%, but you can educate yourself on what your risk is, what your unique risk is within your company. Understand, hey, what are the platforms I'm using? What are the vulnerabilities, right? Again, Microsoft 365, Defender, vulnerability management.

Really good. I get emails on my phone. Hey, last week for iOS, 8.8 CVSS vulnerability.

Okay, easy. Two seconds. Remediate up to my phone and get a little Defender push notification update.

It's all on platform. I don't need third-party tools. So, is it a menace to configure all that? Yeah, but that's why SIP and Enforcer exist, and tools like that to help you do that multi-tenant management.

But, you know, I'm hard-pressed to add additional tools back, which, like, you know, tariffs, those increased costs for me are getting past the client. Okay. So, that sounds like an interesting philosophy.

Now, granted, I, like I said, started many, many moons ago, so that wasn't afforded to me. You said you had a long run-up, so you got to plan for it and stuff. From the monetary side, if you were to look up, you know, tips and tricks and guides to starting an MSP, they're going to tell you need between $10,000 and $50,000, you know, set aside to do all this.

And a lot of that is just your business formation and all that stuff. I'm assuming that part is easy for you in terms of, you know, would you set up an LLC or an S-Corp? LLC. Yeah, just for government entity.

Did you invest in, like, a hardware infrastructure? You already said your help desk is outsourced, but in terms of your setup? So, I have, like, a WeWork office, so it's an industrious and coconut grove. So, in terms of, like, the operational overhead, it's a fixed fee per month, and they give internet. Okay.

And so, it's pretty simple there. I bought a nice MacBook to do some editing and stuff like that. So, you know, it's a thousand bucks down the drain.

Okay. So, but no, my, I mean, that estimate is probably right. I got lucky early on that I picked up a client that was a development firm, and, you know, I was looking at them to develop my website, and I knew that was going to be one of my big startup expenses because, again, I'm going to do digital marketing.

My digital marketing has to be very strong. On point, yeah. On point, right? I want my stuff to shine and be an example of what I could do for other businesses.

So, you know, I was looking at a 40-page website build. 40? Yeah, long-tail SEO, so 36 different keywords. Backers.

Yeah, so it's up now, MiamiCyber.Tech. I'll have to go look at it because I think most of us start with five. Yeah, so, but that's, you know, that's, SEO is a long play. I'm not going to reap those rewards overnight.

So, I have to start now. I have to have my long-tail SEO correct. I have to have the site structure back-linking, all those things built so it gets crawled and starts to get indexed early, and the content plan kind of feeds into all of that.

But, with that said, when I went to the developers, I told them what I was doing, like, oh, we need what you're offering. So, do you want to trade? So, that was a huge expense relief that I could spend a little bit of time, well, not a little bit, quite a bit actually, but they developed my site. My services, and I figured out a good agreement there.

Nice. So, that offset, I mean, probably $10,000 to $15,000 for that. Yeah, I was going to say, if you're doing a 40-pager, that would creep up.

Yeah, so on the low side, probably, realistically, because, you know, sure, I can build a website, but it's not a polished SEO fine-tuned machine, which is what I was trying to build. So, that helped a lot. But, you know, I have my expenses here, $15,173.

Really? Yeah. Okay. So, that's where I'm at right now, in terms of my costs.

And the bulk of that was your website? No, I didn't pay anything for my website. Oh, you didn't. It was all traded, 100% trade.

It was all traded. My big expenses here, I'm looking at my P&L from QuickBooks, office expenses. So, I bought a printer, I bought a MacBook, $4,000 there.

Let's see, 26 rent to my office in Coconut Grove. All right. I've had that for a couple of months.

Did you throw out money for professional services? So, accountant, insurance, all of that sort of stuff? Yeah. So, insurance is pretty low. You know, I have right now, so it's not too bad.

Just general liability? Yeah, general liability. E&O? What about cyber? So, cyber liability, I don't have yet, because I don't have any clients yet. I'm just doing fixed projects right now.

Okay. So, I've limited the liability scope in my statement of work, the legal section. Okay, nothing wrong with that.

And, you know, one thing I'll say about starting the business and the costs and everything is that I got a lot of stuff for free because through my entire professional career, I've made connections and I've talked to people and I've kept in touch with people. And when I went to an attorney to talk to him about services, no questions asked, send me everything, I'll write it up for you. I don't even want you to pay me.

And it's just like, I want to help you get started and get going because I look for people like that and I kind of do the same, right? Hey, can you help me out here? Let's talk about it, right? Let's see what's going on. I'm a big value-first person, so it's like provide value for the show that you're talking about and that you can help someone and then talk about, okay, what is a longer-term engagement like? And I've had that from a CPA, I've had that from an attorney, I've had that from multiple sources. My friend who are CMOs helping me with my copywriting and a lot of my marketing stuff.

The list goes on and on. And that would never have been possible if I wasn't making connections throughout my entire professional career with the value-first mindset. How can I help? How can I help, right? That's how you should operate.

Okay. So you have identified 15,100, you said? Yeah, 15,173. Okay.

Now, if you had to guesstimate those other services that you traded for, website, the attorney stuff. Double? So, yeah, I'd probably say 30 to 40 is probably the way to get off the ground and get going. Okay.

So you did not take the approach that a lot of people take where it's just, let me just get going, let me service a couple of people and I'll grab stuff as I needed. You came out of the box saying, I'm going to prepare for this up front. And I have no managed clients right now.

And I have a trip coming up that we've been planning for like a year and a half for going out of the country for a couple weeks. I didn't want to have that managed overhead of having to worry about that while I'm trying to relax. So right now I only have fixed project engagements that are all ending.

So it's honey, support me for another few months, right? No, actually. And I mean, looking at this P&L, so I'm in the black $7,090 right now. Okay.

$26,000 still pending for me to get paid. And it's all labor. So there's no cost of goods sold there.

Really? So I have, because I do like milestones on my statement of work. So like I hit a milestone, I bill you for that. So all those milestones should be done by the time I leave in September.

So I'll have about $30,000 in profit by the end of September. Okay. So there's a segment of our channel that is saying, break-fix is dead.

You shouldn't do projects unless you do it this way. You have not done managed services yet, and you are profitable already. So what was it about those projects that you were able to one, find, and two, make them profitable? Great question, because the finding one, it was all word of mouth, just like every other managed service.

I mean, I left my last place semi-abruptly, and a lot of people were shocked and reached out and said, what are you doing? And as soon as I said, I'm kind of doing my own thing, they were kind of shocked, and they wanted to know what I was up to. So there are, do you want to wait for the audio? Just checking to see. So we are here in studio, and I'm just going to ask the question out there.

Can you guys hear us? I'll put this in the chat, and if not, then we've got some issues. We could start over. Yep, 4 o'clock, no audio coming through LinkedIn or YouTube, so very interesting.

Okay, that's why we have no viewers. So we will have to go back and put this in, but very interesting. All right, I am, wow, we've already been talking for half an hour, so it's not like I can go back out there.

Is it recording on here now? Yeah, the Rodecaster is recording. Yeah, I'll have to do that. So I'm going to test a couple of things here.

Can you hear us now? That old Verizon commercial. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? And let's see. Test, test, test.

I mean, I see audio in the studio there. So we'll sync it up, folks, and I have to redo all this, but thank you for letting me know. Sorry, I did not notice.

I made sure my audio is good by clicking other YouTube videos. Okay, there. So sorry, folks.

I'll have to edit for the first time in a long time. That was fun stuff. So there we go.

It's funny because I was looking up, and I'm like, oh, I see we have people. They're staying there. I guess that they were trying to listen, hoping it would come back.

So yeah, I am sorry about that, but we'll continue on, and those of you that get the audio version will, of course, get everything. And hopefully I'll get this reset here with the syncing of the audio and the video later. So why don't we do this? Let's take a quick break here.

Let me play a quick commercial, since we're about halfway through, and we'll do a quick test of some stuff and see which video do I want to play here. Let's do this one. We'll be right back, folks.

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And I did hear or I did see in the chat that people said you can hear the commercial and that's probably because I have the video and commercial uploaded in the studio. And I did do a quick unplug of some stuff here. So we're just going to do a quick check to see if you can hear us now after the commercial.

Typing slowly. And I can't see the screen because I am blind. But see if everybody stayed.

Corey, if not, I'll fix it. Nope. No, sir.

All right, we'll keep on going here and I'll just wave and let you guys know we see you out there. All right, so we've talked about expenses. We talked about your three pillars of the architecture growth.

I remembered that. Let me go ahead and ask when you decided to make this change, who'd you tell and what did they think? Everyone has known I've wanted to run my own business for a long time. I have been very vocal about that.

I would never be able to live with myself in my deathbed and I never gave up. Very hard-headed, I guess. Okay.

And just felt that I could do it myself. Honestly, my skill set doesn't fit into a role. Okay, well, Overseas Service Delivery.

Okay, well, I have sales skills. Over the tenure of my career, it's just been setting me up for this, I think. And some things transpired that happened a little earlier than I thought.

And I was looking at potentially going to work somewhere else and I just didn't feel right going back to work and having the opportunity in front of me. So I just decided to seize it. I mean, my wife obviously knew first.

And the deal was six months to see a dollar. Yeah. It was kind of our handshake agreement.

And that changed really quickly within two months. So since then, it's just really just breakneck pace of trying to do this and really looking past when I get back from this vacation to start onboarding my managed clients. And I already have three of them lined up.

So it's kind of setting up my managed help desk. Obviously, they're offshore. My whole philosophy there is look at all the tickets every single month and find out why are there tickets.

And it's either a hardware issue or a user training issue. Do we need new hardware or do we need to train the user? And if it's a recurring issue, it's a management issue. And those are the clients I'm looking for that want to operate their business that way, that want to invest in ahead of those types of things to avoid the downtime, keep it productive.

The self-healing in Windows 11 is very good. Things don't break that much anymore if you're doing it right. Networking issues, VPN, those types of things, sure.

But that's a higher-tier help desk item than a monitor. So there's always going to be a need for it. My whole philosophy is be proactive and try to mitigate as much of the help desk as possible because someone's on the phone calling the help desk.

They're not on the phone calling your clients. So let's try to apply philosophies and strategies that can be proactive. Early on before you're 30, 40 employees when your tech is a mess and your house is on fire and you're begging us to come in there and save it.

And it's going to take a lot longer to apply those strategies, apply all those different things within your organization to start to drive those ticket volumes. That's what I've been doing for the last three years. Interesting.

So you've obviously looked at this from the perspective of the client and stuff. But pointing it back towards you, so you made the deal with the wife six months. Yeah.

And you talked about two months, everything going good. Did you lay out a six-month plan, a one-year plan, a five-year plan? How far did you look down the road? One, three, five. One, three, okay.

I'm an entrepreneurial operating system guy, so EOS. EOS. So I sat down, I spent the time to build out my VTO, Vision, Traction, Organization, my accountability chart.

Obviously, I'm the only one accountable for all of it, so it's fun putting your name in all the boxes. But just a segment to start to build a strategy, start to go, hey, if I hire this role, these three boxes are going to go here. If I hire these, it'll go this way.

So what I have right now is one year, which is I'm really counting it starting in $2 million, three years, five years. That's what I have right now. If I hit one in one, I'll probably beat the three- and five-year expectation.

That's crazy. Yeah. Because I'm not counting this really.

I am, but I'm not really pressing as hard as I can. Okay. So that's kind of my approach.

Do you have a breakdown as to how much would actually be managed services? How much would project work would you continue to do? I have a performer that I'm working on right now to show, hey, if I onboarded a 15-person customer and they're consuming managed IT, some level of ongoing CRM support and then digital marketing services, what those monthly recurring revenues could look like. Because in a model like I'm doing, I can spend a lot more time doing those lines of service versus managed IT. I'm not just fighting over the 3% to 5% they're allocating for an IT budget.

Now we're talking about the 3% to 5% for an IT budget, maybe 2% to 3% for consulting, and then the 15% to 20% for the marketing. Right. So I'm able to capture a lot more of the revenue that the client is allocating.

Okay. So the accounts are higher on revenues. So I'm working on my performer right now.

My cost of all of that for all those big service offerings. I plan to have it be done by the middle of next month because I have some, I'm looking at potentially taking investors. Really? Private equity after all? No, no, no.

All this channel has been through. What I've heard from a lot of people, and it's funny you talk about private equity, I have a trending hot comment on Reddit right now on the Huntress Q&A. That's the first one because it was about private equity takeovers and how that's kind of the kiss of death.

And I kind of put the feet to the flames and got a great response from Chris. I can't remember who the one that responded. I didn't see the response.

I saw the post and I was like, ooh. It shot to the top. I'm like, ooh, and he's coming on the show.

I read it today. I haven't had a chance to digest or respond to it yet. I'll get to it at some point.

But I've talked to very successful people in the M&A space and the capital space. And all of this is my own money. So they all say OPM, other people's money.

So I recognize that. And I'm looking at potentially hiring a managing partner or a founding partner by the end of the year. CBD.

Okay. Because that is an option. You just get a silent partner to help with the funding aspect.

Right. So there's a lot of options. And that's where I'm at right now, to really catapult me forward is an option.

Or I can just keep on the pace that I'm on and take on people at the pace that I can and get to the point to hire someone else and try to go or take on capital and then hire a couple people and then say, hey, you're in charge of this and let me do what I do well, which is sales. And I think of the trap a lot of MSPs fall into is the owners get stuck in this log of owner, the help desk, tech, engineer, and we're all engineers by trade. And the first thing that's going to suffer is not the engineering.

That's the thing that's going to take priority. Well, that's what we're good at. So the business side is what's going to suffer.

And then we complain, why can't we get more business? Or why are people complaining all the time? I need an account manager. Shut these people up. So, but with like EOS, there's KPIs on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly schedule that you need to be looking at and meeting to drive back into your goals, your one, three, and five years.

So it's like, okay, who's going to be accountable for these goals? I know what I'm accountable for from the growth perspective and the goals and the metrics that I have to hit, but how do I backfill people in the position that I trust to exceed my expectations honestly, right? Meeting would be great. Exceeding is what I want. And make sure they're culturally aligned because everything, and I've seen firsthand what EOS can do.

I was outsourced to a company, an electrical engineering company, power grid engineering, I can say it. And they went from 50 to 350. And I reported directly into the president and they credited a lot of that growth that structure it adds to the organization because to be able to scale like that and keep the wheels on the bus, you need a system.

When you know where the next peg is supposed to go, it makes it a lot easier. So, all right. So I guess we should probably clarify, even though you're based in Miami, you're already talking about projects that are not in Miami.

So you're not directly competing against other MSPs in this space, even though you talk about Miami being underserved. But when you do, when you do go in and have to compete against these other MSPs and stuff, there's two sides from my perspective, what I've had to go up against. The MSPs that are trying to charge that $200 to $300 a seat and be all-in-one to everything.

And then the ones that are below me that are charging $95, $75 and stuff like that. Where do you see your company in terms of how you deal with that market? So I think, and the $200 to $300 seat, I've sat with these consultants. I've seen the structure that goes into privacy prices.

And it's advanced tooling, a lot of tools, generally in compliance spaces. Soc is probably part of it because there's a human capital element with running a sock that drives costs up. I don't want to sound egotistical, but what I'm offering is not the same.

Okay, not apples to apples. Yeah, it's not apples to apples because what MSPs are consulting for PRMs and how they drive sales and marketing operational. But what MSPs are doing in marketing and content creation.

So when you start talking about, and not that I'm bundling those per seat, but if we're looking just really one-to-one. I probably see myself, and what I'm deciding right now is to back out of an all-you-can-eat plan because I think what drives the cost so high is that the risk of having an unlimited help desk. Because the variable, when you look at MSPs, the help desk is okay, if I have a 20-person company, they pay us $3,500 a month, and one client calls for five hours a month and the other client calls for 50 hours a month, profitability on those two same accounts are wildly different.

Absolutely, yeah. And a lot of what I did in my last role was doing profitability and driving. If I talk about ticket volumes and that, what MSPs want to do is they want to drive it down, want to have very high profit margin accounts, and they want to meet with you quarterly, talk about things, and that's kind of where their role ends.

But in my eyes, that's where my role begins. That's just the foundation, and that's where the opportunities to add additional value is. Right.

Well, you've talked about getting out of that 1% to 3% where a lot of us, we think that we go in as IT and we try to capture everything that's tied to the network where a lot of MSPs didn't do phones years ago, and now we do phones. We didn't want to deal with cameras and copiers, and now I think most of us are getting to the point where if it touches the network, that's what we want to manage, the network. You're talking about going beyond that and actually becoming a partner in the business.

A true CTO. Yeah. Let me actually help you get to where you want to go, help with the operational efficiency, from a tech perspective still, but all of that.

So that is, that's that CTO, CMO. CRO that we all keep talking about, but nobody's quite. Right, because you look at any generic MSP webpage, and it's like, oh, you're a partner for growth, or our MSP will help you grow, and it's like the perspective they're bringing is it will help you grow by keeping you.

Right? And there is truth and there's value in that, but that value is kind of quickly diminished with everyone that's doing it. So I feel that, for me, I need to go further, and my experience allows me to go a little further, and not that I know everything. I don't know every ERP, every niche scenario, and Sage, or QuickBooks, or SAP.

I don't know what I don't know. That's why I have people and third parties that I can bring into certain deals. But if you're not having those conversations with your clients, you're losing, maybe not money, but value on the table, because you're not solving all their problems.

Technology touches it. So I, last week, got to sit down with one of my law firm clients, and it was actually there, I forget what he termed it, operational efficiency flow chart, whatever. So one of the managing partners is leaving, and the one that's staying now is like, oh, I want to grow.

So I want to look at all of our systems that we're using, and how can we make them better? And I want to incorporate AI, and he wants to do all this stuff. And so it was myself and another consultant that sat as basically a discovery meeting. Like, when you talk about operational efficiency, you talk about processes.

What does that mean? And it was funny, because in their eyes, they thought, well, we just want a program that has AI built in it, so we can add all the information, and AI spits out our pleadings, and our briefs, and our stuff. And we were like, that's not how it works. So now we're doing a whole health assessment where that other consultant's going to come in and sit with them and talk about, how do you do all of your work from the time a case comes in to the time you either close the case, go to court, or whatever? And luckily, she's able to give them more of a viewpoint than I would.

My stuff's going to be from the tech side. How can we add more automation in your forms, in your folder structure, in your case management, and that stuff? She gets to come in with that operational aspect. But, ooh, it'd be nice if I could have had that.

Yeah, exactly. So my loss lead, right? Everyone needs a loss lead. I'm a big believer in that.

Provide value first is the technology mapping. And I'm a big fan of Miro, which is a better version of Visio. It's a web-based topology app.

And I sit there, and I map their entire data flow. I map all their IT systems. And I say... I'm one of those pens, so I can write this down.

Miro. So I map all that out for them. I mean, I'll show you after this the one I have for my business.

And I say, okay, because everyone wants automation. Everyone wants the AI. When someone asks me about AI, I go, show me your SOP.

Show me how things are done. How can we automate things? And they never have a written process for any of that stuff. So it's like, okay, well... Susie has it.

Well, so I was talking to somebody else the other day, and he said, the first thing I do with every client is a then what exercise. Okay, so tell me how you do it. And walk through the entire process, document it.

Then we can have a conversation around, okay, well, what makes sense? What's the sensible next step? You can't just slap AI on things. You can. But that could be disastrous and exacerbate poor cybersecurity.

Well, especially now that people have realized that doing work in public AI means that your stuff is out in the public. If the service is free, you are the product. Yep, that is true.

So that's what I tell everybody. All right. I know that I had a bunch of notes we did not go over.

I think we did a good job here. But in terms of starting an MSP, I think I've asked you all the questions. We talked about money, which I was glad that you decided to share that.

Yeah, of course. You talked about your timeline, your processes, talked about insurance and all of that stuff. Is there anything that you had prepared to bring that I did not ask you about? No, I don't think so.

I think for me, starting this MSP, one of the big things that I've learned over the years and coming from that engineer mindset of the tooling and the perfect tool for every job and having a perfect PSA and really maybe getting a little hyper-focused on certain things and not being the force of the trees, we used to always say, it's just about understanding not everything is always perfect. And that's a hard reality to wrestle with sometimes. Yep, it is.

And I think it comes from a place of having to be uncomfortable and living in that gray area, so to say, for a little bit, for a period of time. I'm in a gray area, and that's a couple times right now. I have clients texting me already, oh, we have new computers we need set up.

You're not really under that managed engagement yet. And I did a project, and it's like, I don't want to leave you hanging, but technically I shouldn't do this for you. Is that an approved computer? Right, exactly.

It's an uncomfortable position sometimes. I do my best to educate them on, hey, this is where we're at. This is kind of my next steps for you.

If you want to work with me, these are kind of my non-negotiables and where I'm at. I've been very transparent with people, because one of the first questions I get in a lot of the sales cycles is, how long have you been in business? How many employees do you have? And when you answer with one and a couple subcontractors, red flags. So how do you dismiss that early stage? You've got to have answers to these questions.

And one thing I learned from Gary Pica and True Methods is approaching everything with a philosophy of what happens after what happens next. Because if you are constantly thinking about, okay, the branch logic essentially of, if this person asks this, I need to be prepared for this. And it can get a little daunting, because there's a lot of branches that can potentially happen, especially in sales cycles, and you're not familiar with people and personalities.

But if you at least endeavor to operate with that mindset, you'll be in a way better position. And you'll at least be able to head off some of the maybe contentious points or put yourself at ease a little more, if you kind of critically thought about scenarios and made yourself a little comfortable with how you're operating. All right.

All right. Well, Matt, thank you very much. And for those of you, again, Matt Mulcahy.

Mulcahy, it's a tricky one. Well, I'm sitting here thinking, they can't hear us. We can dub it in later.

Miami Cyber, and just actually, you know what? I have to apologize. I didn't make your grand opening last month, or this month. Oh, yeah.

Two weeks ago, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a good time. But, yeah, I mean, hey, two of my clients are MSPs.

There you go. Because we're an MSP, and I know the MSP challenges, and I know product stacks, and I know kind of managed services. So not to bug myself, but.

We'll ask you afterwards and see if I know who they are down there. No, none of my clients are in Miami. They're not? Okay.

That's, you know, you start a whole locally, you know, really locally focused business to try to drive that. And then, you know, it's just funny how things happen. I was having lunch today, and someone was like, it never goes how you think it's going to go.

Well, of course not. Of course not. All right, folks.

Matt's information will be in the show notes. He'll have a guest page on the website. So if you've got questions, you like what he's talking about in terms of how to frame your business, whether you're just starting or maybe you've been around a few years and you're like, eh, what I'm doing is not working.

But that sounds pretty cool. Reach out and say hello and see how it's going. For right now, let us go ahead and talk about the latest Florida man story.

Tonight's headline is out of central Florida. And another chilling reminder about wildlife encounters that can take a dangerous turn. I will have a link to a video that I will show you.

But a Florida man was attacked by a black bear outside his Apopka home in the early morning hours. It was actually last week, but we just got the video out there. It was captured on his ring doorbell, as I said.

It shows Alexander Rojas stepping outside, attempting to scare off two young bears that had wandered into his yard. But his shout only prompted a bear to lunge at him. And we actually just miss on the camera the bear attacking him.

So we don't get to see that. But he suffered injuries to his forearm, requiring stitches and facing possible nerve or tendon damage. But he managed to fight off the bear and escape back into his home.

And the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission came out. They set a bear trap on the property and emphasized that while bear encounters in Florida are increasing, such attacks remain rare. And the biggest warning is if you spot a bear near your home, don't attempt to scare it off.

Retreat indoors and contact wildlife authorities immediately. So I will grab that ring doorbell camera and put a link to that for you on the show. That is going to do it.

Again, we will sync up the audio as best as possible to get this out. But those of you that watched whether it was live or Memorex, thank you very much. For those of you on audio, yeah, you're good.

But that's going to do it, folks. On behalf of my friend Matt Mulcahy, have a good night, folks. We'll see you soon.

Holla. Yep. All right.