Turn Buildings Into ISP Profit (EP 1001)

[0:54] Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals and managed service providers where we help you

[1:03] run your business better, smarter, and faster. This is the Wednesday Live Show brought to you by our good friends over at ThreatLocker.

[1:16] And I forgot the tagline that I was going to use for them, so we'll keep right on going. So this is the show where we talk about the real world side of running an IT business. Today, we're going to be digging into something that I'm sure a lot of you have thought about, but most of us have not quite figured out, was how to get more income that has been reserved for those big ISP vendors and you know a lot of us I know some of you have figured out how to be that internet provider for your clients buildings uh not talking about reselling a circuit not calling a master agent but actually turning on that bulk bandwidth coming into a multi-tenant building into your recurring revenue under your brand so that's what we're going to be chatting about tonight and uh robin miller in the chat hello there as we get going oh all right we are live streaming on LinkedIn Facebook and the YouTube if you have any comments or questions be sure to throw them in the chat I’ll see the question and comment from all three chats and then I’ll respond here in the live stream if I’m paying enough attention and we get it on time but we'll be good.

[2:38] So one of the first things I want to do is I want to...

[2:45] You know i want to make sure that i admit to you guys that yes i make mistakes and one of the things that kind of annoys me is when we as i.t providers we as techs we as msps, don't want to admit mistakes or are afraid to say yeah i don't know and I’ve been doing this This is my 29th year in business, and I've gone through my share of mistakes. In fact, I did one just two weeks ago. You guys know that I jumped onto the Ubiquiti bandwagon, and I think Corey Clark has stopped watching because of that. I still have SonicWALL’s out there, but every now and then a Ubiquiti appliance fits the scenario a little bit better. So I'll put in a Ubiquiti appliance. And in fact, I had a Dream Machine SE here running in my office because, of course, I, as we always say we should you know be eating our own food that we're selling to the client so i had it here running and i wanted to swap it out to give to one of my law firm clients.

[3:58] They have dual internet and i needed to make sure i had something with you know dual wan connection so the dream machine does do that so i said I’ll just give them this one I’ve only had it a couple of months so it's not that old I’ll just order one of the smaller gateways because I’ve only got the one, uh, business fiber connection here at the office. So I ordered what I thought was going to be the appropriate gateway. And instead it was, I believe it was the UXG model, which meant that it wasn't its own cloud controller. And I did not pay attention. I didn't know. I mean, I know that you have to have a cloud controller. I just assumed all of the gateways at a certain price point or whatever had their own controller well with the one i purchased you had to have the little key plus thingy i didn't have that so i spent i don't know an hour maybe an hour and a half seeing the gateway come up but not figuring out okay how do i make this primary how can i configure it drove me bunkers and so finally i did a little research i almost called some people that I didn't. I figured out that, oh, I bought the wrong one. And what's funny is they're the exact same price. So I don't know, you know, if you have a controller already and then you want to just get a gateway, yes. Otherwise, just get the one with the controller, which is what I should have done.

[5:26] So that was my mistake. Bought the right controller. It's running in my office now. The dream machine ready to go to the client.

[5:33] Big oopsie on my part. Now, why is that interesting today.

[5:38] Today, I had one of those email battles with another company who was trying to send my client email, and it was being bounced back to them as spam. And they swore that it was our issue, and I had to fix it because they're lawyers, and so they think they can demand the outcome. And I said, no, not a problem. I'll go in. We'll check. I went ahead and whitelisted the domain. We're using M365, so I went into the tenant, did that, blah, blah, blah, still being bounced to spam. Okay, not my problem, but I had to prove to them that it was their problem, so I just simply went to the free website MX toolbox, stuck in their domain, and boom, all of these issues. DMARC was wrong. and SPF was wrong, something else was wrong. There was a ton of errors on their domain. And so I just took a screenshot and sent it to them. Well, let me rephrase that.

[6:48] I told them that they had an issue and they should talk to their IT provider. And then if their IT provider had questions, they could get in touch with me. Then they sent back a request of, can you please send us what you did to check our domain? Because they're saying that there's no issues in our end. The DNS records are correct. They went to the website intodns.com and everything was good. And I know into dns.com because I've used it before in the past. And that's a good place to go to check and see if all of your DNS records are okay. But it's mainly for the website. And it'll give you a section at the bottom where I'd say, yes, you have good MX records. It'll tell you if you have duplicate MX records. There's a couple of things that it does. But it does not do what MX Toolbox can do. And I just had to go through and say, okay, this is what your IT provider needs to do. And the IT provider then wanted to push back with, well, we have Barracuda and you must be some blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, you know what? We are not going to start down this path.

[7:59] I have been doing this too long. I have fought with too many companies. And I don't mean, I don't mind being called, you know, a solo tech. You guys know that. I don't mind being called the boutique MSP. I don't care about that. What I care about is if I know my stuff and you don't.

[8:20] Let's just accept that fix it move on and i actually had to put together here's actually you're not going to be able to read this and I’m just showing you i had to create a document, for this other it provider to tell them here's all the things you need to check, about your email health and domain before you go blaming somebody else for a mistake, and so i had the section here I’ll just read you what i put together i put together the section of authentication records so yes it is dns related but set up spf configure DKIM enforce DMARC, And in this particular case, I'm starting to add this little beamy record. If you want your brand logo shown in, you know, email clients, um, I'm playing with that. That's not a big deal, but I just added that just cause I thought I could. Um, and then we talked about sender reputation. Now I think that their domain is fairly new because it is not a.com. It is not a.net.

[9:28] It's, it's a.law. I'll just say that. Now, I don't know how long dot law has been in existence. I know that it's fairly new within the last few years. And I don't know if this is a brand new law firm. But one of the things is if you have a brand new domain, you can't assume that your internet health is up to speed. You've got to, you know, the internet's got to know who you are for a little time. So you've got to, you know, do some testing, you know, send in email to one of those email test sites, uh, mailtester.com or, or whatever, and see what the response is with the sending reputation. Of course, if you're sending, you know, bulk mail, that's going to hit you with a, you know, compliant rate. Um, yada, yada, yada. You guys probably all know this. And if you don't, I'm just reminding you. Um, and of course the big thing that they got stuck on was because they were using Barracuda, and I don't know if they were using it, just the spam filter portion or if they were using the appliance, but they were so stuck on the fact that our IP and domain are not on any block list. And I had to explain to them, just because you're not on a block list doesn't mean your mail is going to get through.

[10:48] I think there were two emails on that one. There was some other stuff in there, but the bottom line is I just said, look, first thing you got to do, run your domain through MX Toolbox. You can start with the very first page that comes up. When you go across the screen, you've got Super Tool. You plug in the domain, it'll give you a whole bunch of information. But the section that I love pointing people to is email health.

[11:16] And all you do is go there you put in an email address or a domain and it will tell you the health of you sending email from that domain it'll tell you about spf DMARC DKIM it'll give you a whole bunch of other stuff about soa and dns uh and there's i don't know there's like 300 things that it'll tell you what could or could not be wrong with your domain so uh it was very interesting so that was my day and so i thought let me at least tell everybody um we are so gung-ho on all these new fancy tools and features and you know all the cyber security things that we can do and now we're you know into ai and automation and stuff but sometimes you've got to do the simple basic stuff we still have to deal with all of that ancient it you know all the stuff that is just simply meant to keep a business running you know desktops networking email that's all stuff we got to keep up with and i think what happened with this it provider is they just got so reliant on their tools that they weren't checking and to just simply say to me yeah we got barracuda it's not our issue.

[12:32] That's a dumb thing to say, in my opinion. But I said it. So now we'll see what they say tomorrow. And if you think I'm wrong, tell me. I see some of you out there. You're not commenting.

[12:46] Throw something in the chat and let me know. All right. Let us do a couple of things here before i get into the regular sponsor commercial i want to share that uh we have an event coming up from Acronis.

[13:05] And the bottom line is that most MSPs are still using legacy platforms with AI features tacked on. We know that that won't scale in 2026. So on May 13th at 1 p.m. Eastern, Acronis CEO Jan Japp or JJ Jager is hosting a free live event that every MSP owner needs to see, the pivotal point of IT building services for the AI first era. It's not just another webinar, it's a complete vision of how AI is transforming the AI business model. You'll see AI-native platforms, how they beat retrofitted solutions, you'll hear about the new Acronis Partner Program, there will be some live demos, and as a special bonus, each attendee will receive a free $329 security compliance certification, and that will basically handle GDPR in NIST and NIS2. So if you're an MSP owner, IT director, or tech entrepreneur planning your 2026-2027 strategy, this event gives you the competitive edge you need. Again, that's May 13th at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific. Register at the link that you just saw on the screen or in the show notes, and don't get left behind see what's next.

[14:35] All right let us do a quick commercial break and then we'll be right back with our guests for tonight.

[14:48] Tonight's live stream is brought to you by ThreatLocker, the zero-trust security platform designed for today's MSPs. Forget hoping your antivirus catches the bad stuff. ThreatLocker flips the script with a deny-by-default, allow-by-exception model, meaning only the apps and scripts you trust are allowed to run. With powerful tools like application-allow-listing, ring-fencing, storage and network controls, privilege elevation, and built-in EDR and MDR ThreatLocker gives you true preventative security all from one easy to manage console and they're not stopping there ThreatLocker keeps raising the bar with integrated patch management web control Microsoft 365 cloud control plus the new user store and insights.

[15:41] Helping you simplify your stack while tightening security across every client so if you're ready to make zero trust your competitive advantage check out the link in the show notes protect more and manage less with ThreatLocker okay my guest tonight is Brian Higgins founder and CEO of Aditum connect many of you might recognize Brian he started out in the MSP world but he saw how much money was being left on the table by landlords and it providers and built an ISP-in-a-Bots platform so MSPs can deliver white-labeled internet to office buildings and MDUs, without becoming your full-blown telco Brian welcome to the show thank you for having me, and you couldn't have described it any better so i think we're done okay well short show nice uh thanks for coming on so let me ask you this so i mentioned that people know you from the MSP space.

[16:46] And i first want to ask you how did you recognize this as an opportunity because most of us yes We would either call the ISP provider ourselves, or we would connect with a master agent, which I did a few years ago. That made life a lot easier for me in terms of finding out what options were available. I didn't have to do all the running around.

[17:09] Yeah, I get a little bit of commission on the back end, but they handled everything. But you, my friend, took that a step further. How did that come about? Well, so after many years in the MSP space, starting out back when MSP wasn't even a term, it was still VAR and just systems integrator, I actually founded an internet service provider. So we covered two and a half thousand square miles of the Midwest with, for the most part, the first broadband provider to ever touch those addresses. And so I have a lot of experience having built an ISP and figured out how to grow it and then sell it later. So when I got into more complicated office building scenarios where Internet was still very poor.

[18:01] Having come recently from that, we'll call it a place of luxury where I had my own fiber and I had all my own infrastructure and I could connect anything I wanted relatively easily and free. Um, it just seemed like a natural fit. So I started doing some of these projects for buildings to fix connectivity problems. And one thing led to another, and it was actually at an ASCII show in 2014, um, that someone had heard about one of the projects I did in, uh, central Connecticut and was asking me questions about it. Not because they knew I had built it just because they knew I had experience in that space. And coincidentally it was a project that i had built and next thing i knew i had a circle of people around me for the next three hours asking questions so interesting kind of what, triggered everything okay now let me ask this in terms of how it is set up and you know how it works is this something of a master agent program, No. In fact, it works with your master agent program. So that master agent relationship you have that helps you bring in a fiber circuit to a property or to a business right now is the same process you're going to use to bring in a bigger fiber circuit to the whole building.

[19:20] So working with the master agent or working separate like a master agent? No, you're going to work with the master agent to bring in that fiber circuit. But instead of bringing in maybe a hundred or a 200 meg connection into a single business inside of a building, you're now bringing in a full gigabit, two gigabit, maybe even a 10 gigabit connection into the property itself. And now you're going to take that bigger circuit, which you're getting a bigger commission off of, and you're going to split that off into the different businesses inside that property. And each one of them is going to be buying a piece of that fiber circuit instead of buying the whole thing.

[19:59] Okay. So I'm going to ask you to expand just a little bit more. You saw my face, and we've already done a pre-show, so we've talked about this, but there's still this mental block as to, I get to sell to an entire building. So what are some of the questions and the mental blocks that MSPs have to get past, you know, when you're talking about something like this?

[20:19] So what you need to think about is utilities, electric and water. Just imagine that you're the electric company feeding a main line in from the street coming off the transformer and you go into the distribution panel for the building. Well, normally the businesses all have their own meter and they pay the electric company for their usage. Well, instead, as the property owner and the systems integrator MSP that is deploying this for them, you're putting in the meter. It works the same way. It's just your meter instead of the electric company's meter.

[21:01] So I get to bill that building as MB systems. Yes. Not as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast. Exactly. Nice. You're billing them. Now, sometimes the building owner will pay the circuit and just pay an MSP type contract management fee. So you can work it either way. But often, yes, you're doing everything as MB systems, white labeling the entire platform and the circuit. So a lot of buildings that I've been in.

[21:40] Those business managers, office managers, or building managers, however it is, they usually will do agreements with the major providers, five years, 10 years. Are we talking about the same type of deal where we can get those same types of contracts?

[21:57] Not only are you getting a similar deal where it's a 5-10, sometimes 15-year contract with those buildings. Those contracts that they're getting from the major carriers are usually far less lucrative for them than you the contract you can present the contracts they get from the major carriers usually only involve one-time payments when people sign up for service they rarely if ever include evergreen payments off of long-term contracts so if a tenant moves in and they have service in the building for five years, the owner's probably not getting five years of recurring revenue off of that from the major carrier. They'll get a one-time payment or fee off of them signing up. Every once in a while, they'll have a renewal or an annual payment, but it's not a lot. With our system, it's a service you're providing. It's managed service. It's your, meaning you in the building, your platform, which means every month you're collecting the revenue. Property owner is getting monthly revenue for the entire life of the system, however long it goes. We've had projects that have been live in office buildings now for 11 years, and they're still generating the same revenue today that they were 11 years ago.

[23:13] So the next part to that is a lot of the office buildings that I have worked with.

[23:21] They just give access to the space and each provider gets in there each tenant brings in their own contract so you know whatever its broadband fiber or whatever the building technically is not providing internet so what you're talking about is for us to come in and say look put in our internet service let us provide internet for each of those tenants so if there's a tenant that moves in, let us be the first right of refusal or just find a way to say, hey, let us resell internet as part of the rent? How is that working?

[24:02] It's really up to you. You can do any of those, all of them. You're going into a building and saying, hey, we have a product, we have a solution, and we're going to deliver a higher quality internet connection than the tenants are likely going to be able to afford on their own, at least at the budget that they're purchasing. And the reason it's a higher quality is because you're buying a dedicated fiber circuit. And most of those tenants are buying cable modems, business class cable modems or other similar services. And so you're delivering symmetrical bandwidth, SLAs, way higher uptime, way lower latency. And so it's a value add to the tenants in that space. The property owners are getting a benefit it by having better connectivity for their tenants.

[24:48] Now you can further incentivize the property owner to work with you by paying them every month, a fee, a commission, you know, rev share, however you want to structure it. Or the property owner can actually outright provide the service themselves and then pay you just a management fee or any combination thereof.

[25:06] Okay. So we've talked a little bit about, we can work with a master agent, we can work with the building, we can work with the tenants directly, but in terms of the actual breakout, in terms of, you know, between the carrier, us, you know, those agreements, because part of what I'm thinking is, yeah, I get into a building and the building all of a sudden decides they don't want to pay or the tenant doesn't want to pay. That means I'm on the hook. What type of hook am I on with the carrier? Well, if you sign the contract with the carrier, you're probably on the hook for a 36-month agreement, being blunt.

[25:47] But if the tenant doesn't pay, you also have a very quick recourse because one click, you can turn their service off. And that's our choice too, right? Yeah, that's your choice. you're suspending the tenant's service for non-payment. In fact, if you use our automated billing system, it's going to do it for you. Really? If payment was due on the 6th, the morning of the 7th, their service is shut off when they come into the office. Oh, that sounds a little harsh. Have a little grace. Well, the bill was invoiced on the 1st, and if it was due on the 6th, I mean, you control that. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, I get it. So yeah, even if you give a grace period, if they're past it, I mean, automated shutoff sounds awesome. Automated shutoff, automated late fee, uh, issuance and automated, uh, reactivation upon payment. Hmm.

[26:45] No. Okay. So that sounds good. But let me now go to the tech side of the story. How do we manage that? Are we managing the edge routers? And how do we get the circuit in there? Who does all of that stuff? So we'll work backwards on that one. The circuit is really no different than what you're doing right now for any other client in a building. If you go into an office building and you have a business that you're working with as a managed service provider, and they say, hey, we have the budget, we want to buy a gigabit connection. Here's a $2,000 a month budget for bandwidth. Find us a carrier. It's the same thing. You're doing that, whether it's the building or the business. The only difference is where does the circuit get installed to in the building. You're just going into the basement DMARC in the MDF. That's it. As far as the connectivity and the equipment, so we have a core router that sits at the edge. So right in the MDF, the handoff from the fiber carrier usually goes straight into our equipment. And then out of our equipment, you're going to plug into switches, HP, Juniper Aruba.

[28:00] Cisco doesn't matter any, any kind of switch you want, every brand, every make, every model, whatever switches even unify. If you have your cloud key controller, um, you were listening to the monologue. Um, so you, whatever switch, uh, infrastructure you want through the building and it's just standard layer two ethernet. Like you want to extend fiber, you extend fiber. It's no different than wiring up any other office. Um, and you terminate a connection into the suite. Just like every other wiring job you're used to in a building. The only difference is that wire isn't terminating into the tenants, the businesses switch. It's terminating into the WAN port of the firewall that they use. Or a little biscuit on the wall that they plug into, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So we have zero-touch routers that are used mostly in residential models, residential deployments, but some commercial businesses will use them. And the zero-touch routers are pretty much plug-in, automated setup. You really don't configure anything. They just work out of the box. Literally, you take them out of the box, you plug them in, you grab the serial number, you put it on the account, and you're done. If you want to change the Wi-Fi, you update the Wi-Fi in the portal. And that's really all you ever need to do for those. Great for a residential model, little restrictive for most commercial tenants. So if you want to use...

[29:28] Take your pick. I heard SonicWall earlier. You want to use SonicWall router, you plug your SonicWall router and configure it appropriately. And that tenant is online with their SonicWall router, with their security policies in place, with their Wi-Fi controller, their settings, their VPN, public IPs routed all the way into their firewall, everything that they would expect from any other connection, except they're buying that connection from you and the building. Okay. Now you've made, you, you said residential. So is this something that we can do with like apartment buildings? We know somebody that's got, you know, a 20 condo unit that we can go in there and say, Hey, let's provide internet to, uh, all the people in that association. That's what Florida has. We, all our condos are condos associations. Yeah, we have, we actually have a lot of buildings in Florida uh apartment complexes though not so much on the 20 unit they're usually more of the 200 to 500 unit uh properties but yeah i gotta think bigger okay, there isn't uh economies of scale you need to meet in order for uh it to make sense in a residential model um, Typically, that's somewhere between 20 to 50 apartments is kind of your break-even point. You got to take that fiber circuit, that bulk cost, and divide that among the number of paying customers in the building.

[30:50] Obviously, you're trying to make money at this, so you're not trying to do this at a loss. You have to have enough paying customers to cover the cost of the fiber. Right. Yeah, it's not cheap to bring in a circuit, so you've got to make sure that money comes in residential. Yeah, they only want to pay a hundred bucks or so for a circuit. Businesses, you can get away with charging a little more. Yeah, typical business connection is going to be between really more like three to four hundred dollars for an average. If you look at it across the size of a building, you got plenty of businesses that are in that hundred to two hundred dollar range. But you also have a lot of businesses that need more than that. They're absolutely happy to pay $300, $400, $500 a month for higher speed, more IPs, just overall more enterprise-centric kind of connection. But they're still not ready to go all the way into a dedicated fiber connection because those are going to start typically $1,100, $1,200 a month and up. So there's a large range between where someone wants that dedicated enterprise connection but can actually budget for it.

[32:02] All right so you mentioned enterprise and my first my just now thought of uh dual, wan which i was talking about earlier so how many circuits can you get away with doing in a single building because my first thought is i want to do a fiber i want to do a broadband backup is that something that's easily done it can be done there's some technical caveats you have to consider. So it really comes down to IP addresses.

[32:30] Since a normal commercial deployment, we're routing the IPs all the way down to the firewall and the tenants in their unit. So if we have IPs coming in over a primary fiber circuit and that circuit goes down and we want to use a failover circuit, we either have to have a BGP routed connection where those IPs will fail over to that other connection, or we drop those IPs from a routing point of view, not a traffic and still provide outbound connectivity. We just don't have the inbound routing on their public IPs. Okay. So there's some technical considerations, um, depending on what the tenants need, but failover is definitely a possibility. And if they do need that IP routing, uh, you know, redundancy on the pass, then you're going to do a BGP type circuit. And that's actually going to sit upstream of our equipment in that case okay all right i know I’ve peppered you with a bunch of questions and I’m probably all over the place uh let me ask you uh do you have like a you know star project that you usually tell people about like this is a typical example of how we're set up so that msps understand the full story we've got a couple um so off the top of my head um.

[33:50] We've got a large property out in la and i have to be careful because our system's white labeled and so that means a lot of the property owners don't know our system is installed they think it's the MSP so i can't really go into detail on the ones that haven't given us permission to share their deployments um but one property yeah out in la um the systems integrator reseller called Commercial Connectivity Services, and they deployed our system with a fiber connection into the largest retirement home in the country.

[34:31] And it's over 1,000 retirement units in a three-tower configuration in downtown LA. And it's all fed back to one controller, and they've got, at any given time, 900 to 1,000 occupied units that are online and they've actually had that system going now for five years something like that maybe longer um and it's been great they it's a low maintenance um i mean they have people moving in and out they have to deal with the tenants coming and going but in terms of the equipment and support on the technical side it's extremely low maintenance um on the commercial side um.

[35:21] Hmm. Which ones can I talk about? Commercial carters. Um, we have a property in, uh, New York city. That's, um, uh, a high rise and has, um, has some well-known businesses in the building. Um, I wish I could go into details, but we don't have a media release on that property. That's too bad. If I, if I start guessing names, can you like, give me a, uh, you know, a silent signal or something? I might. Well, let me, so let me ask this because, so I, I should have asked you about the white label feature and we talked about, you know, working with our master agent and stuff.

[36:04] Probably one of the questions MSPs are going to ask is, how do we go out and get those types of businesses? I'm not used to going to, you know, the Chamber of Commerce meetings and finding a lot of those big buildings and stuff. Do you, you know, help with that? Is this something where you've got contacts all over the country and you're looking for MSPs to partner with? Is it something where, you know, we've got to figure it out ourselves? What's the process like at this moment it's more of a figure it out yourself we are working on building those relationships and building out that network um so we can do more referrals we do have deals come in we do give referrals out to our partners um i wish it was more i wish we could be giving a lot more referrals out but we don't have um as many referrals to give out as you know our partners want um but we're working on that um as far as finding them, the easiest thing for an MSP to do is to go into the businesses you already work with you already have clients in office buildings those clients already have bandwidth needs if you have a customer that's got a cable modem and it sucks because they all do.

[37:25] Talk to them about bringing in fiber they're probably going to tell you well we can't afford fifteen hundred dollars a month for a fiber circuit and that's where the conversation starts because well okay if you can't if you don't want to spend fifteen hundred dollars on a fiber circuit we have a solution because now we can bring in a fiber circuit for fifteen hundred dollars a month but we're going to work with your neighbors in the other businesses in the building for sharing that out and having each of them pay in part of it. So you're not on the hook to buy $1,500 a month. You're only going to have a $300 a month bill.

[38:03] So that brings up a question. So I know that, for instance, some of the big carriers, when they go and, you know, lay fiber in an area, they go around and solicit business because they want to obviously get as much of that pie as possible to cover the expenses of bringing that stuff in. So that puts us in the same scenario where we're competing against the carriers in a sense, are we? Really? No? No. Because the carriers are out there to sell that $1,000 to $1,500 circuit or more. For the small business that has 20 employees, they're not buying that circuit.

[38:45] That's just not in their market. So the carrier may have fiber in the street in front of that building. And one office in that building might have a fiber to them. But the rest of the businesses in that building probably don't. They're probably on coax, on cable modems. And they're spending $100 to $200 a month, $300 a month for business class cable service. And they would benefit and they would love to have that fiber connection, but the carrier is not going to sell it to them at that price. So that's your market is to go in and say, we're going to bring in this circuit that you aren't going to be able to budget for right now. It's too expensive. You won't pay. You won't pay. You don't want it. But if we get 5, 10, 15 other businesses in this building to each pay $300 a month, now we cover the cost of that circuit. We're all making money. You're all getting the quality and benefits of this circuit. It's a shared buying model. Well, I get that. Just for some reason, I'm afraid that the carriers are going to wake up one day and be like, you know what? We can bring in service to a big building and we'll just work directly with the building manager and do that same model. So the carriers are actually talking to us when they want to do that about selling us to the building. Okay.

[40:14] I have two carriers we're working with right now for doing that. So when the carrier does want to do that, it's because they have no interest in working directly with the tenants. They actually just want to sell the one circuit to the building. Okay. Yeah. They don't want the headache of all the little things, right? No, a typical fiber carrier is not in the business of selling retail circuits. They don't want the headache of those small accounts. They want every single account they sell to be a four-figure or larger price tag. If it's not four figures, they're just not interested in the accounting. It's not worth it to them. So they're going to happily offer a big connection to the property. They'll make a little bit more off of that than they would have selling one or two circuits in the building. And now they're coming out ahead. We have carriers that refer deals to us. Interesting.

[41:11] All right now let's talk about the run-up time so i know that it's you know 30 to 45 days for us to identify a property qualify it order everything uh you talked about having you know hold provision edge routers and stuff so what's the typical turnaround time well any fiber deal you order from a carrier um you're probably 90 days from order to installation so that that's kind of your baseline um you can identify a deal and uh work on the contracts in that first 30 days um and let's say you sign the deal uh with the fiber on day 30 um now you've got 90 days to take care of your low voltage, Before anything else is ready. Right, extend the DMARC, all that stuff. Yeah.

[42:05] So in practice, you're talking four months from inception to going live is probably the fastest you can reasonably expect anything. Just simply because you've got a 90-day window on almost any fiber circuit. There are cases where that circuit can get installed in two to three weeks or 60 days, but those are the exceptions. Yeah, I don't know where I hit the 30 to 45 days, except that when I had my carriers providing fiber, but it's extended through copper. So they just spliced off and brought a copper circuit in. So that only took a couple of weeks. But you're right, installing a new circuit, we tell everybody here in Florida, it's 120 days. Just count on it.

[42:50] Yeah, AT&T, there's a famous story I heard once. Um back when they owned almost every telephone pole in the country that back from the mob bell days um they had a desk that where anytime someone would put an order in to hang fiber or rent at you to get access to the poles they had a desk that was nothing but contracts and they were laid out by date um and so they would go through and your order would actually get put on the last business day before the 90th day and they would intentionally not approve it finalize that until then the last business day before the 90th day because they had 90 days under statutory requirements to approve those orders and that gave them a competitive advantage because they could approve their own fiber circuits on day you know one through ten and anyone else any competitive of carrier that wanted to come in and use the poles had to wait 88, 89 days. Hmm. That's interesting to know.

[43:52] So I work with a lot of those, uh, providers that are buying from AT&T and they still have to wait. It's well, yeah, because AT&T, if they were doing the install themselves, they would just go hang the fiber. But for the other guy working with AT&T, they got to wait for the permit.

[44:10] Very interesting. I don't know how true that is today, but I know the 90 days is still pretty true. That was an old story I got told from a guy who owned a massive fiber network out in Indiana back 20 years ago.

[44:25] I also know that when we talked before, you talked about the fact that this can actually, once it's all installed and everything, deployment really is about an hour with the proper training? Oh no, it's about five minutes. Five minutes? Yeah. It takes me longer to train someone than it does for them to actually do that okay um just simply because all the questions are going through everything in detail um but the once the low voltage is done once your switches are uh installed and you've got your layer two pathway from the d mark all the way into the tenant's unit uh let's just for argument's sake say that part is done and now you've got the fiber circuit is installed you rack and stack the core router, power it on, configure it with the IP address provided by the carrier, plug it in, and about five minutes of configuration in our system, and you're already servicing connectivity to the tenants. Very nice. All right. I think I've gone through every scenario in my head of what, you know, MSPs are thinking of asking, is there anything that I've missed? um.

[45:41] Well, I want to cover the financial side of a deal real quick. Okay. We kind of skimmed over that. So if you take a typical small office building that has about 20 businesses in it, you know, pretty small building. If you assume that each of those businesses has an average of 10 to 15 employees in there. So you've got about 200, 250 employees in the building. That property is going to generate an average cash flow of about $5,000 to $6,000 a month. You've got, you know, the typical margin is going to be $300 to $400 a month per business when you're sharing fiber like this. Um so you by the time you factor in the cost of the fiber you're left with about a three thousand dollar profit monthly so it's a high margin sale and it's one that's going to run for 10 to 15 years um one of the biggest things I’ve seen msps mess up when they go into buildings is offering a three-year contract as if they think they're trying to get one over on the building owner by locking them in for three years when the building owner looks at them and says three years no we don't do anything less than 10.

[47:06] The building owner wants a longer contract because they want stability and consistency right um they don't want to have a turnover and have to replace suppliers. Very interesting well I and they're used to that with the with the carriers I mean they're used to 10 and they want that stability. They don't want people going in and out of their building all the time.

[47:28] Correct. So that makes sense. Yeah. And that's the other values. If the property owner has control of all the wiring in the building, they don't have to let anyone else in.

[47:40] Oh that's you know what that's interesting we could get I’m not a monopoly on it but yeah you've, you're there i mean it's captured audience if you get in from the ground up um during construction there's no requirement that a carrier is allowed to pre-wire a building if a tenant comes in moves in and orders service from Verizon the property owner can't stop Verizon from servicing that tenant um tenant has a legal right to buy from Verizon but if Verizon didn't get to come in and pre-wire the building or comcast whoever um during construction Verizon comcast whoever is going to look at that building and just simply say no we don't service that building it's not worth us doing the build out now that the building is built and if the property owner has gone through and done fiber or gigabit capable uh ethernet we'll just throw it in a generic box for that um if they have gigabit capable wiring in the building the tenant doesn't really need to go anywhere else and they're not benefiting by going anywhere else.

[48:48] There's no gain for the tenant to go to Verizon or comcast if you can deliver a gigabit service that's gigabit up and gigabit down okay so just one last question about that arrangement so you're going into the building to sell circuitry to the building.

[49:12] You've got to make sure you can get enough tenants to sign up, correct?

[49:17] Yes. Because if a building says, yeah, we'll let you put it in there, but you're on your own to sell to the tenants, then you've got to go knocking on all those doors.

[49:27] Yes, there is, I'm not going to say it's a gotcha moment, but there is that caveat where you have to have the cash flow. You have to have the sales in order to justify everything. Um, it's the same problem where I mentioned before on a residential building, you need certain economies of scale to make it worthwhile. And in a residential model, that's 20 to 50 tenants, depending on the cost of the fiber and some other factors. Um on a commercial building you're probably talking more 10 businesses but that depends on the business whether they're high dollar accounts or low dollar accounts um and you could have an anchor tenant in the building that it wants about that's willing to pay five hundred dollars for their circuit and then the rest of the businesses say no we're happy with a hundred dollars we don't need the higher capacity so there is a little bit of salesmanship that you have to go through to sell this and go in, but you're talking high dollar, high margin, long-term accounts. It's worth it. Yeah. And you mentioned a great thing. If you can get in during construction, pre-construction or whatever, you know, partner up with somebody to where, Hey, we've got a building going up. It's going to be, you know, 30 floors, you know, 60 businesses or more. Uh, that would be awesome.

[50:48] On the commercial side, especially for the MSP, there's another benefit that we forgot to cover. Let's say that you go in and you sold the circuit to all the businesses in the building now, whether you did it through the building or you went direct to the other tenants. Well, now you have a foot in the door to every one of those businesses to sell the rest of your MSP services to.

[51:13] You're now the ISP. You are the fiber provider in their mind that provides their connectivity. And you can now sell them external security monitoring. You can go in and offer them VoIP services, internal support and security. Anything that you want to bundle in as an MSP, you can now make that available to them because they are now your customer. Nice. Nice, nice, nice.

[51:43] All right, now let me ask you this question, Brian. You started out in the MSP space.

[51:51] Did you think you would be here talking about a channel-wide ISP program from the time you started? From the time I started? Oh, definitely not.

[52:06] Um when the idea for turning this into a uh a marketable multi-tenancy product and by multi-tenancy meaning allowing multiple people to use the platform simultaneously versus what i was doing for a while which was totally custom one-off uh implementations um yes at that point it occurred to me that This is something the whole channel should be familiar with. All right. Well, my friend, you've hit jackpot, man. Trying. All right. I suspect you have. And now I'm thinking about all the deals I can go around Fort Lauderdale and try to get. So that'll be interesting. See if I can work something out here. Well, if you think about every commercial business that you support as an MSP, How many of them are in shared office buildings? Actually, it was funny. Not as many as you think, because a lot of my attorneys, they own their space. But there are a couple in some good-sized buildings. I don't have anybody. See, I've only got one that's in a nice high-rise that's 30 stories that I get that. Well, for an office building, it doesn't need to be 30 stories. It could be two. It could be three stories. It could be a strip mall.

[53:34] Yeah, but I'm the type of person, I've never really approached a strip mall for business, but in this scenario, I mean, you know what? A lot of those places, a lot of those warehouse districts, that makes perfect sense. So I'll give you a little insight. The company that owns all the Publix properties in Florida, there is one property owner that owns almost every Publix, the land that almost every Publix is on. They are looking at doing internet through their properties because. Pick me, pick me. I'm here in Florida. Um, because Publix isn't the only tenant in those buildings.

[54:21] There's restaurants, there's diners, there's flower shops. Oh yeah. There's, yeah, there's, I mean, department stores, pet stores, there's gyms. Yeah. If you think about when you pull in that parking lot, all the different businesses that are inside that, that property that are all physically connected to one another. And they're all in contiguous structure that they may not be walkable internally, uh, internally, you may have to walk out and down the sidewalk to the next, but internally that's one building and they're all owned by the same people. And all managed by the same property management company.

[55:04] The largest property management company on the residential side in the united states is a company called gray star now I’m guessing a lot of msps don't know their name because it's on the residential side but how many properties do you how many units do you think that they manage, i don't know so I’m thinking of some of the large ones around here that are managing you know they're putting up you know a thousand units in each building and if you talk about one or two per city uh that adds up pretty quick gray star manages over a million apartments yeah, they own something like a hundred and maybe 150 000 apartments outright the other 900 000 that they manage are under contract from other property owners, but they manage them globally. Hmm. Yeah, if you need help, let me know.

[56:09] Well, I know there's a lot of buildings in Fort Lauderdale. And a lot of new ones going up. So now my perception of them has changed.

[56:20] I can tell you, well, I can't directly tell you, but I can tell you that there are some properties not far from you that we've had our systems installed in recently. Right. We're going to have to talk off air. and I'm going to have to change my thinking because I was condemning those buildings for coming in, but now I'm rethinking. I can get a little recurring revenue for 10 years. That would be nice. Well, we have multiple properties within, we'll say about 10 miles of you. All right. That's a good circle for me. All right, Brian. Man, this has been pretty awesome. Thank you very much. I know that, uh, when people listen back to this show, uh, they're going to think about now a different perspective like me of when they walk into an office building, uh, walking by, you know, the internet closet or whatever, um, the fat pipe coming in the building, um, that's a revenue opportunity. The takeaway that I want everyone to think about is how hard as an MSP, how hard do you work for a sale? That will leave you a monthly profit, not gross, the net profit of $2,000 to $3,000 a month.

[57:44] Well, I mean, some people probably have that, but the amount of daily work to manage that with regular, you know, MSP managed services type work. This is something that, I mean, what, you watch a portal every so often. And if there's a problem, you watch your inbox for the alert. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's a, it's a much different, a much different process there. So fantastic. We have people, we have partners that have individual support staff that are supporting around a thousand units by themselves. Some more. Very nice. Some even higher, but around a thousand is the point where you start to have issues with, oh, I have a second call coming in while I'm on a call.

[58:35] Interesting. All right. uh folks Brian Higgins added some connect uh you probably know him from the ascii days of heading out on the road trips and stuff but uh now helping us provide isp in a box and uh making us think of much higher ways to get that recurring revenue uh Brian thanks for coming and sharing your story.

[58:59] Thank you for having me it was a lot of fun yeah uh we're going to close out tonight folks i do have a Florida man story but i just want to give you uh the real quick information you can click on the link to get the whole one but uh this comes from our favorite and i hope that someday he's going to be America’s favorite sheriff Grady Judd uh shares a story about a 68 year old Thomas Alan Hicks, who plays Santa at local events. Well, Santa's in trouble. He was one of 19 suspects arrested in a week-long human trafficking and child sexting operation. He allegedly agreed to pay $200 to have sex with someone he believed was a 13-year-old girl and faces charges, including human trafficking, traveling to meet a minor, and using a computer to seduce a child. That's your typical Florida man story, but I noticed that with Sheriff Grady Judd, and it had the word computer in it, so that was the closest connection we got to tech. But I have that link in the show notes, and then of course all the links to Brian and Adytum Connect and find a way to go out there and make money.

[1:00:17] Take a look at your client list folks and circle every multi-tenant building you touch, and uh that's going to be the new prospect list for uh the be the isp offer that we just talked about now um to everyone watching and listening thank you very much and uh let me know how it goes if you guys do this send me a message or come share your story live and that's it for tonight I’m uncle Marv helping you turn the stuff you already manage into real recurring revenue until next time keep the packages flowing and the profits growing we'll see you soon holla.