IT Service Management

Jason Null: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of DIY-IT. This is episode three. We're gonna dive into the power of IT service management today. Again, we have a, a round of guests. We have, do you wanna introduce yourselves this time? Absolutely. I'm, since I did it last time. Yeah,

Duane Taylor: yeah, yeah. I'm Duane Taylor. I'm a vCIO at MIS Solutions.

Adam Ringland: Adam Ringland, operations manager at MIS

Jason Null: Solutions.

Duane Taylor: Nate Jewett, operations manager. MIS solution. You're the operations manager too, are you? Yep. You're

Jason Null: the, you're a V [00:01:00] UCI buddy. I am. So today I am. No, Nate's actually one of our other V CIOs, so we put the V CIOs across from each other so they could battle it out.

Just trying to take my spot. Geez. Yeah, so we can't have that. No. So we're already not following standards, so that's good. We're gonna be talking about standards today. Lots of you guys have just completely just blown the entire podcast, so I love that. So lots of editing. Thanks again for joining us today.

I'm Jason Nall, the Vice President I Solutions. So. Let's dive in today and let's talk about Ium and we can throw up a little definition for you guys too. Sure. But definition of ium is it's basically information technology, service management, and it's the activity that we do to manage it for our partners in the s and b space.

So let's talk about how Ium and how our IT management can help streamline operations and improve efficiencies for our partners. What do you guys think? How do we do that? I think

Adam Ringland: it all starts [00:02:00] with these two and their department being proactive in the face. And that's

Jason Null: V C I O and oper. No, this is VCI

Adam Ringland: good one.

Operations. So there you go. Yeah, it starts with the, with the vci department, working hand in hand with the, with our partners and, you know, basically formulating their business plan and getting feedback from them, formulating it from that and based upon their spending needs and spending what they can.

And then they work hand in hand and figure it out.

Duane Taylor: And to expand upon that, I think one of the, the things that we help the businesses do is, Allow them to focus on what they do as a company and what they do to generate their revenue so we can take off the load of the, IT concerns all of those, it jobs and, and, and all the maintenance and all those things so that they can focus on what they're good at.

And let us do what we're good at, which allows them to be more [00:03:00] efficient and streamline and raise more

Nate Jewett: money. Kind of like what we talked about in the first episode where, you know, you've got a person that you hired for the specific task, right. And they are now pseudo

Duane Taylor: it. And then, and we see that all the, we see that all the time where they have you know, There's five people that start and someone's, like you said, pseudo good at it.

Mm-hmm. And then the next thing you know, they're, they're trying to create user account. Then they get out of their realm. Yeah. Then they just kind of get buried. But they're, then they're not doing the job you originally hired them to do, which is accounts receivable. Right. Right. Which is collect money.

Yeah. Right. Where's, where's, where's all our money at now?

Jason Null: Well, and they're not managing it at all. No, they're, they're just, they're

Duane Taylor: just doing it. Right. They're just handling it. Correct. Yep. So managing is. You know, that that encompasses everything from, you know, proactive, reactive, you know, all the, all, all the backend work that needs to happen to keep everything going.

One of the things that we see a lot is those, those small businesses where it's hard [00:04:00] to have one person doing three roles when they were hired to do one. So we try to go in and. Explain to partners that, okay, how much do you spend on it of your time and, and how would that affect you to get your 20 hours a week back?

Mm-hmm. And then we do the, we do the comparison and, and the analysis. And then that's how we kind of get in the door with Jimmy needs to get back to collecting ar. Right. And we can handle your it for a fraction of what you were paying

Jason Null: Jimmy. Yeah. Well, and Jimmy's now actually doing the job you hire.

Yeah, exactly. So you're not even. You weren't even really paying him, you just weren't even getting out of him what you actually hired him to do. And

Duane Taylor: it's hard to quantify that. Oh yeah, it is. Because you're like, well, it's just 20 hours a week, or it's five hours a week, or sometimes it's no hours a week.

I'm at the end of the day, I'm like, it's, it's it's

Jason Null: hours a month. Well, and having these standards that we're helping put in place and set to make sure everything's good, we've talked about in the past with the infrastructures right end to end, you know, having the ability to manage it end to end, make sure that you're using the right firewalls again.[00:05:00]

The right, switching the right laps, having the right security in place. Running Windows updates. Mm-hmm. Managing that all. So you have a better overall customer satisfaction. Right.

Duane Taylor: It goes back to it, just because it's not broke doesn't mean it's not working either. Yep, yep. You know, it, it doesn't mean that it's working as efficiently as it could.

Jason Null: Yeah, very much so. Yeah, and I mean we've, we've seen over time. You know, people don't want to hire that IT person because they're gonna be X amount of dollars for a full-time person. Right. And for us to come in, it's usually half that. Right.

Adam Ringland: And even sometimes, then they're like, oh, I don't know. That seems expensive.

And then it's like, well, you're also getting the 20 hours from this person's back that you're paying him. He's not it. Correct. Yeah. So, you

Jason Null: know, yeah. It balances out. That's. It's valid and all of a sudden now your business is becoming streamlined. You have all these standards that we're like aligning your business into, right?

Yeah, I

Duane Taylor: mean we can, I can do a perfect example of one that we've helped. I mean we help 'em all, but one that we've really [00:06:00] helped streamline is a recent partner that we onboarded back in January and you know, the CEO of this company, it's a multimillion dollar company, had, you know, has, has a cfo and then they have a.

Person who was like AP and they were all kind of ordering laptops from Best Buy, and they were sending them to mom, and Mom was packaging them and they were losing inventory, and we took all that. We didn't take all that away from them. We streamlined that and we handled that process. Now the CEO can run the company, not worry about an $800 laptop from Best Buy.

Jason Null: Yep. Well, and that comes into all the frameworks that we kind of try to follow. Right, right. Covid it's I t I l all these frameworks come together to help us align businesses. Right. There's a framework out there that's been defined to help, you know, this is a law office and this is how the framework should look.

Yep. And now, a lot of times it's, it's the same across a lot of different industries, industries. They all start with a core here, but then there's different pieces. We get into HIPAA compliance, right? [00:07:00] Sure. And different other areas where they are required to have this. We have PCI here. HIPAA there, and then, I mean, we've heard every acronym there is out there for some type of security

Duane Taylor: standards, and, and you can equate it to.

The game plans varies per vertical. It does, but the end result is same. What's the end result In the game execution. Correct? Yep. So if, if you, if you can put that together, we may have the same game plan overall to win. Right. But each, each vertical has, its. Own little game plan. And

Adam Ringland: what's, what I thought was cool was like, you know, some of these, the things that we're talking about today, they haven't even, they were created and kind of just talked about very recently and these are all things that we've been doing for our partners for, for years now.

So that was like, oh, that's cool. We're tailor making. You know, our experience to their industry, to their specific business model, and it's, it was, it was cool to see

Duane Taylor: that and, and the service management piece also, I, I believe [00:08:00] that I'm a firm believer that when you corporate, it can get stagnant. Hmm. MSPs like ourselves, we we're handling multiple verticals, we're handling multiple different areas.

And when you can get stagnant, if you have just one person handling your at environment versus a crew of people that are dealing with the latest and greatest technologies, not worrying about just putting a bandaid on a bullet hole. Yep. You got multiple cause

Adam Ringland: of eyes. They're constantly working in different fields, different environments.

Like, oh, that's a great idea. This could work

Duane Taylor: over here. Right. I mean, it, it, that's, that's

Adam Ringland: huge because if you have the one guy in corporate it doing it, you better hope he's just constantly reading Reddit instead of watching YouTube after his first two

Duane Taylor: hours of the day. You better hope he's still interested.

Jason Null: Correct. Right. Well, and there's, there's so much out there to stay on top of. Yeah. I mean, I think about the. What is it? The Cyber Inter International Security Association that we get? Mm-hmm. The cease [00:09:00] emails. Right. I remember getting those emails years ago. We get like one a week maybe. Of course. I don't like that many.

Nowadays we get like 50 a day. Mm-hmm. There's, here's all the vulnerabilities in Firefox, here's all the vulnerabilities in this product and it's. It's a constant Right on. You know, and that's where we're having to have all of our standards follow these best practices. So yeah, these are security holes, but having those best practices helps prevent firewalls being open to allow exploits into this web server, right?

And, and making sure the passwords are secure and that things don't have rude access to everything.

Adam Ringland: And what's cool too, but you know what I think sometimes makes us different from some of the other MSPs in, in the industry is, you know, we do have the V C O office. Mm-hmm. They can work with the end user, their point of contact for each partner and determine the framework that works best for them.

Duane Taylor: The game plan. Oh yeah. Correct. The roadmap and,

Adam Ringland: and yes, we're tailoring the framework. Okay. We can do. We need all of it. Right. You need a couple pieces of it, but you [00:10:00] know, yeah. Being able to, you guys being able to get in there and, and build that relationship right off the jump. It's also

Nate Jewett: helpful with like the operations as well.

Mm-hmm. When we got, when you have like our, our pet teams, you know, we go in. They're working with the same people they know. They know the guys that they're gonna be working with. Absolutely. Versus talking to some dude in Texas that they might

Duane Taylor: have never get to see. And that's what our pet teams do. Our partner experience teams, they're, they're, they were designed to be more intimate.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. With our, with our partners versus just working out of a pile. Yep. Mm-hmm. And we, I say that all the time. You don't call here and speak to five different people over five different days about your same problem. These pet teams are, are, are designed to, to be able to say, wait a minute, Billy called in three, this the second time they've called this.

Hey, you guys have talked to Billy too, right? When you're working out of a pow and you're calling some call center, they're not able to put two and two together. Yep. And then the end user is not efficient, frustrated. And you know,

Jason Null: [00:11:00] that's a good point because that really brings back that customer satisfaction.

It helps keep the, the customer moving, moving forward because we're able to identify a reoccurring problem. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because the teams are small enough, they're intimate enough. They're able to understand their customers. They actually know their customers. Yep. Right. They actually have gone to these people most of the time they've met them.

And so when they call in, like you guys said, like when Sally calls in, she's talking to, you know, you know Joe, every time and Joe, or even if it's Darrell, those two are talking to each other and they know. Well, she just called in yesterday for that same problem. Well, that's weird. Well, me, there's a bigger issue going on right, than this little thing where you talked Earl a minute ago about it could be five tickets later.

This has now been going on for two weeks. Right? Sally is so angry. We're not meeting our SLAs. Being able to get her problems solved in an adequate amount of time. She's angry. And then, As you guys go in to [00:12:00] meet, you're hearing about it, right? Yeah. We take a brunt of it sometimes. Yeah. More than the tech.

Doesn't mean the tech do take a brunt of it, but yes, I do. You guys get it too? And that's, that's a big piece between you guys and operations Sure. Or you and the operations guys, depending on what, what office Nate's working in today. Right. Doesn't Nate even have an offer? I, you know what? I don't know.

It's on the dock. Hey. Yes. Red swing line, I guess.

Nate Jewett: But we also put like safeguards are not necessarily safeguards, but I guess you could say it that way in place here internally to kind of prevent those types of things too. You know, our ticketing system, we assign the assets to the tickets so that we know, hey,

Duane Taylor: this problem has occurred 15 times on this computer.

What fix this problem? Why is this hard drive, keep filling up?

Jason Null: That's a good point to have that kind of, Stuff and have that telemetry. One of the reasons we went so hardcore in rmm, right, to be able to manage that stuff, linking it to the hardware to know that this person has had this Sally again, right, [00:13:00] right.

She calls in a lot, but she's had this blue screen DA every day now. Now we're getting that telemetry cuz the automation is running, the tickets are being open, she's calling in, and now we're seeing because the tickets associated with that hardware and that asset. You can see, oh wow, look at this, there's a problem.

Maybe she's got bad memory. Maybe the motherboard is bad. Maybe it's time to replace the computer. Oh, look, it is at the three year mark.

Duane Taylor: Mm-hmm. Yep. Okay. There's a difference between break fix and the solution. Yes. Correct. That's, that's a good point right there. There really is. I mean, a lot of people, a lot of folks out there, competitors or whatever, they're more break fix.

We call, call when you need something. Nate and I are constantly engaging all of our partners. And doing, you know, 70 plus assessment question assessments on everything from hardware, from, from the cloud to the floor, from to acceptable usage policies too. How's the wiring? All of these aspects were being addressed every quarter, [00:14:00] monthly maybe as well.

But all of that just helps with the IT service management

Adam Ringland: piece. And then what happens is you, you guys have that data, you're meeting with them. They've, you know, you've helped 'em kind of, Hey, what's important to you? And then that's when you come back and you say, all right, here are operations. Let's make this happen.

And that's when it rolls downhill. That's when we kind of go ahead and then implement how they want this to look for them. Yeah, fair, true. It's not all or nothing, you know, again, depending on size, depending on industry. You know, but, but I think that that's another really good part about us is how well we work together.

And you know, just coming back say, this is what Susie wants for, for her company and this is how we're gonna run things. And,

Duane Taylor: and that's the benefit Yeah. Of

Jason Null: having. Yeah. Right. Well, having managed IT services is a huge benefit to the partner. Mm-hmm. I mean, for us. We talk about our tool set, we have multiple tool sets.

Yep. And all those tool sets have checklists. All those checklists have requirements that must be meet from your team. Mm-hmm. To even the VCI [00:15:00] office. Yep. I love the tool set you guys use. When you guys discovered that a few years ago, that was cool. To be able to take, and you run this all the time, and I know that you're being newer and starting to run these, but this tool set of yours has a checklist in it and it's actually going through a compliance checklist with the client.

And you're showing 'em basically what It's almost what's your score? Yeah, almost score. And isn't it almost a red light, like red, yellow, green? Mm-hmm. It's like

Duane Taylor: you're risk needs attention satisfactory or,

Jason Null: and this and the clock acceptable risk. And the partner can then be like, This is an acceptable risk for now.

Right? And And it's okay. Mm-hmm. Right? Because we can make notes in our system. At that point. You're running through that compliance with them, and then that's going on to our auditing tools, right? And so the texts are then fixing things and you're putting in tickets when you come back. And it's just this.

This constant revolving process. Yeah. You're going back

Adam Ringland: with your data and you're showing them, Hey, what you guys wanted is what we've done for you. Yeah. And you know, that just keeps their

Duane Taylor: [00:16:00] buy-in or what you want. This is how we're gonna get there. Yep.

Adam Ringland: Right. Yeah. I mean that's exactly, it's, it's, it's, Hey, we're partners now.

Trust us. This is what we do. We do it well. Back to one of the points you made earlier, and we just need your, we need your help, we need your confidence and let, let's roll and let us do our thing. And yeah, back. I love that. Going back, the, the first QVR you guys had after. Or have after an onboarding. Is getting that feedback and showing, look what we've already done for you guys.

Absolutely. You guys trusted us out of the gate. We came together with this, you know, a framework for you, a package for you. And here we're delivering already three months in. Yeah. It

Duane Taylor: builds that trust as well.

Jason Null: A hundred percent immediately. And I know that's hard for you because you're like, believe.

Believe us, you hired us to do this. This, these steps are gonna make it better. Mm-hmm. And sometimes it's hard to get 'em to commit to that. Mm-hmm. And then they do. And the successes just

Duane Taylor: shows. I mean, it's not everybody's the same, that's for sure. Yeah. You have some that are like more like you got some tougher, tougher people than you got others.

But some PE sometimes it takes me six months to get it, or sometimes it just takes time. Yep. So you say not [00:17:00] told you so, but Right. You know, warned you so, and sometimes

Adam Ringland: you

Duane Taylor: really wanna say that. Yeah, absolutely. I don't ever say told you, so maybe we have talked about this

Jason Null: in the past. I saw your little dance you have that you like.

Yeah, no, I usually shut the door, but no, but I mean, like, We've seen partners over time just not want to make steps forward. Right, right. And it's because they're, maybe they had an IT firm before, or sometimes they had an internal, they got internal IT person. Well, they're just scared and they just Yeah.

And so they had a bad experience with it. Correct. Right, because that internal person maybe didn't really know what they were doing and they were trying to get it done for 'em and they failed or they had an ms. P who just wasn't really responsive. That's the one we get the Yeah. The non-responsiveness is non-responsive

Adam Ringland: and they're just like, oh my

Jason Null: gosh.

Yeah. Yeah. I

Duane Taylor: mean, I ran into that. Mm-hmm. You know, then Adam helped a lot with putting a little bit of a bigger hammer down on some of the folks and saying, look you know we we're gonna do this or you're gonna design, we're not re we're not, [00:18:00] we're

Jason Null: not responsible for it. Yeah. Correct. If you won't do two factor for your infrastructure Right.

We can't be held liable

Duane Taylor: for breach. Absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and I think that's a great appreciation and that's a

Jason Null: standard. It's not us. It's breaking that, that's a standard, that's not an mis thing.

Duane Taylor: Right. Right. And that's helped a lot bringing them in this stuff. Mm-hmm. And throwing that out there, Homeland.

Security's been doing a lot of tours over the last 18 months to 24 years doing all kinds of seminars, talking about passwords, nist Yep. Cybersecurity, all these things. And I'm constantly getting all these emails and I'm like, we do all that. Yeah. I mean, maybe we could talk for Homeland Security. Be, be a special guest.

That'd

Jason Null: be good. We should, I, I'm gonna go back to Guitar Center cuz I ran into a guy with, with the Air Force who was on their cybersecurity team. Yeah. Maybe I'll go hang out there and see if I can stalk 'em down and bring 'em on the podcast. Yeah. It was kind of neat. He had this cool cybersecurity Air Force patch on that.

That was kind of neat to see that, you know, you know, locally we have those resources. I mean, how many times have we actually talked to Homeland Security because of issues [00:19:00] going on with security locally. Our partners were breached. And Homeland

Adam Ringland: Security, right? Yeah. Came in. Yeah, it's wild. Yeah. It got to have to do with the bank and it was like, yep,

Jason Null: we're home.

We got this and it wasn't breached on our side. Correct. So let's clarify that. So yes, Scott is correct. There's an HR system outside of our control. Yeah, right. Yeah, it wasn't internal, but it was, it was a, it was a third party system, right? It was hr, and we see this all the time. I mean, We joke, I, I get this, I get an email once a week for somebody in our office to change their direct deposit.

And it's like, it'll be like, Nate and Nate's standing next to me and we're talking as the email comes in and I love responding to the guy and I do it every time. I'm always like responding to him like, I just need your social security number, credit card number, and I can process this change for you. And he never emails me back.

Right. But then he picks another one of our employees and does it to, you know, does it gets me he unemployment claims. Yeah. Yeah. We've gotten that.

Adam Ringland: She's still working here. Right. Right.

Duane Taylor: I'm

Jason Null: looking at her right now. Right. I mean, we just had that happen with one of our employees. Right. She just answered the door.

Yeah,

Duane Taylor: I saw it. Yeah. [00:20:00] So, I mean, it's there. The, the one of the

Jason Null: things that I liked, no, the best one was, sorry to interrupt you. Was when Micah, the president of our company. Oh, he, I got the unemployment claim. It came to me Yeah. To approve his unemployment claim. I'm like, I actually report to this man. Yeah.

And you know, yeah. He still works here. Yeah. So, I mean, I haven't seen him lately. I don't know. But you know, just kidding. But. But

Duane Taylor: explaining that to people and using these examples and our, to our partners that are a little tougher. Mm-hmm. Thicker skin, they don't want to make the change. We have one particular partner that just really didn't want to listen to any of our suggestions from a security standpoint.

And they got burned. Yeah. And every time they got burned, we were allowed to do something we've asked to do. Mm-hmm. You know, then they got burned again. Then we had to do all of a sudden this huge email migration in one day. Yep. But you know, we got it done. And then they got burned and then two factor gotten.

So I think he's been burnt to where there's no more, there's nothing left to burn. Right. Yeah. I mean, how many times can he, we've gotten through all the security now. Yeah, but it was

Jason Null: at his expense. How many times did he have to go back to his insurance? [00:21:00] Right. And try to get the funding back for that. And we see lots of those little hacks, you know.

The biggest one now is going after HR and trying to change direct deposits. Yeah. It's amazing how many people, it's so easy. It, yeah. Because

Duane Taylor: of muscle memory and, and, and those are just all the things. These are just a few things that we could talk about the benefits of having an Ms P all day long. And what are those benefits?

Well, we've hit a lot of 'em. I mean, we've,

Jason Null: they have, having Dwayne, that's a benefit, right? Absolutely. Just ask me, having actually, you know, one of the, his shoulder hurts. One of the biggest, biggest benefits is having an sla. Right. You have something to hold somebody too. Correct? Absolutely. That's one of the biggest things that we can, it's on paper.

It's right. Somebody's

Adam Ringland: read it at your company and signed on it. Signed on about it. So, and,

Duane Taylor: and the thing I like about our SLAs is everybody looks at 'em and they're like, well but our response immediately is those are just, we have to have something on, we have to have something in there in case this happens.

But literally the majority of our stuff [00:22:00] has done well beyond,

Nate Jewett: so like 90. 98% of the time our SLAs are

Duane Taylor: exceeded by, exceeded by 98%. Yeah. Yep.

Jason Null: Well, and that's customer support, right? Yeah.

Adam Ringland: Sla, service level agreements for those that might not know what the Ackerman is, but yeah, it's, it's basically what holds us accountable to our partners.

We say, Hey, we're gonna do a service. We can do a, you know, if it's scenario A, you get done in X amount of time, scenario B, scenario C, yada, yada, yada, down the pike. And yeah, if we're consistently failing at that, that's when they could look at us and say, not no bueno here. But that, what's funny is when people start complaining, if.

We don't get something done in maybe four hours when they're used to getting, being done in two hours. And I'm like, whoa. Like, okay, time out. I'm sorry. Sorry that it took an extra two hours, but if you really look, we got like three more

Jason Null: days. Right. This is actually a decent scenario. Right. And we are, we are still 18 hours within our sla.

Yeah. But it's cool because. That just shows you how they're [00:23:00] used to that level, right? We're able to supply quick responses. That's why people are like, you know, well we can't get ahold of our current msp. We're like, we'll pick up the phone and call in. And we have in like onboardings or even demonstrations when we're bidding out to, to partners, new potential.

We've actually even called our help desk and somebody answers, yep, of course. Then they think we're using a spec test. We've had him test us because a little bee of sweat every once in a while. Please answer. Please be there, Danny.

Duane Taylor: We got one guy just. Sitting at the office waiting for those calls. We have a special number.

We know when our meetings are. Right.

Jason Null: Right. So, but we've, we've seen that we have gone and met with a partner. Right. Potential partner. We've come back to the office and we're all sitting around talking and all of a sudden you see our call log. Yeah. And you see that per person calling in. And then our texts like, hi.

Yeah. Okay. And they're like, no, we were just testing something. You hear 'em talking to 'em and they're like, okay, well thanks for calling in and. You're like, wow, they actually tested it and they, and it's not one time. Right. They call you. Can you see 'em calling at different times just to see Maybe two, three times?

Yep. Mm-hmm. Well, that's a great, it's like checking somebody's [00:24:00] reference for thems. Yeah. Good for

Duane Taylor: them. Yeah. You know, good. They should, right? They should, yeah. Because they might, obviously, they didn't do it with their existing ms. Fee. They wouldn't be unhappy with 'em. Correct.

Adam Ringland: And I'll tell you the other thing too about, you know, we got back to what our partners are accustomed to from an SLA standpoint.

That's another reason why sometimes, you know when, when our sales department will come over and be like, Hey, we got this down, this, this, this, down the pipeline. I'm like, well, we can't take this, this, this within 30 days. Because you guess who's

Jason Null: suffering? Yeah. Our current partners. Correct. The people that we've put time and effort into hundred and they put it into us.

We want

Adam Ringland: it to be, we want to be fair to them. Yep. We want to, and we want to give the new partner the best onboarding experience they can. Right.

Jason Null: And sorry, and I'm sorry, it's gonna take 15 days to get there, but that's just where we're at. Correct? Yeah. We talk about

Duane Taylor: that, that day that we show up. You're get, you're getting all of us correct?

Yep. Talk about, we're not worried about anything else. We're actually coming in, we're gonna take care of you. Mm-hmm. And bro, you into the mix with everyone else. Yeah. Yep. Talk about 15 days,

Nate Jewett: like it's a long time. Correct. You know, most places you hear in the grand scheme of things, most [00:25:00] places you hear are like, oh, well it's 90 days, if not 120 days before I get my windows installed in my house.

A hundred percent. Yeah.

Jason Null: Yeah, that's true. You gotta get something done today, like externally for your house or plan it out.

Duane Taylor: You can sign for it, but you don't see

Jason Null: it for a bit. Yeah. It'll be delivered in. Six months right before your deck actually gets built. Yeah. So yeah, I can see that. So it's just a part

Nate Jewett: of providing the best customer

Jason Null: service for, and that's what they're doing and that's what that person's doing for you at your house.

You know, whether they can make it in a day or in 30 days. So yeah, I'd rather it be up

Adam Ringland: upfront and say, yep, it's gonna be 30 days rather than, it's gonna be a week. We'll get you going in a week. And then you'll go and then postpone, postpone, postpone.

Jason Null: This isn't a good, and where it's not a good experience, you don't want to slam somebody into place.

Cause I mean it systems. Are not easy to integrate into. Mm-hmm. Right. We, we walk into a place, right? Our first time's in, yes. We have our check sheets, we have all the standards that we want to comply with, and then we have, they give us a, a piece of paper and it's got a few passwords on [00:26:00] it. Right. And at that point, it's like starting a new job.

It is. We have to, we have to figure it all out. Right. There's not a, a runbook, we never get a runbook that says This is how right all the systems are integrated and all this stuff. We have that today, right, because we've integrated 'em into our system. So we have all that stuff, but very rarely do, even if it we're taking it from another msp, they won't provide us that information and I understand why, but they'll give us the passwords and we have to go back.

We have to go in, put the puzzle together. Yeah, you do. You, you start, you start here and you start moving your way back and then, and sometimes we miss stuff. I mean, we're human, right? Correct. And then we run, our tools start going out there and all of a sudden they start discovering something and we're like

Well, you guys, you know, said you guys only had 10 these and we're finding 25. Mm-hmm. Why is that discrepancy? And all of a sudden you start finding out, oh, we got this going on. We had these in a closet. And you're like, okay, and, and we can help drive the business. You start peeling

Duane Taylor: the back, right? Yep. And, and, and that goes back to like what you said earlier, like.

We can, the cost and the budgeting and things like that, there's not only an associated cost savings with going with [00:27:00] certain NSP or Itfm. Right. There's a huge savings because we, you get more than one person at a fraction of the cost. Correct. So if we need 17 hands on deck for one big problem that we're having, which we've been known to do way back in the day.

All 17 or 22 people go, it's not, you only got four people on your team, or you

Adam Ringland: only have them one internal IT person and they're on vacation. Right.

Duane Taylor: Or you know, so you get more than one person who, right. So there's, there's the benefit of that and then, and then it's budgetable cuz it, it really changes. Unless you add services or

Jason Null: Sure.

You know well, and that's a big thing right there, the budget. Right. To be able to look at it and say, these are my fixed it costs. Right, right. So I at least I have an idea that everybody here Monday through Friday between eight and five, Is going to be able to get help for this cost and I can budget for that.

And now you guys come in after you're kind of already, you know, [00:28:00] been in there 60, 90 days and now you're building that hardware budget, right? And then you're also building into that your is P budgets, right? And phones. And you start bringing, youre bringing our service. Yeah, you're bringing it all together and then you have.

Services in your budget for it. This is equipment and you're putting people and you are doing the same thing. You guys are putting people on these rotations, right? In three years, these 10 machines have gotta go because they're yellow. Right? Right. In your yellow system, these green ones are good, but then there's a couple red ones and we really need to start budgeting for that stuff too,

Duane Taylor: and it helps.

That just helps with that whole, not that lack of planning. Yeah, that lack of planning. It's not a surprise, which is what Nate and I do now. For our partners is we plan that for you so that you don't have that huge capital expense one year and then you do a five year rotation. You've got that huge capital expense again in five years.

Right? We wanna roll that out over the 60 months. Yep. Maybe do two a month, maybe we do a few early, maybe we do a few late, but it's still better than having to. [00:29:00] Call and have a talk with someone and say, I need 50,000 versus two every two months. Yeah.

Jason Null: It's having that rolling budget right. Makes, makes such a difference.

It's funny is. Having you guys on staff. We never used it for ourselves until recently. Nope. And all of a sudden we were like, Hey, we have this great tool. Right. What We're not managing our own equipment. And it was like we started eating our, our own cake, you know? And we now we're, now I'm meeting with Adam cause over our, our company.

Yeah. Go over our own IT budget for what we need systems wise here because we have to buy computers too. Yep. I mean, our techs, we want 'em to have the best. Stuff out there possible. Yeah. If we're

Duane Taylor: doing it for our partners, we should be doing

Jason Null: it for ourselves and, and you know, it it, it didn't dawn on us at first, we're kind of in the trenches doing the work.

Right. And you're like, Hey, we have this great tool. We should use it internally. And, and it has, it's made a difference for us. I mean, our guys have some great hardware these days. Yeah. No longer are the days that we're trying to like, run down the microcenter and buy the Well, I just don't wanna have to buy 10 at one time.

Well, that too. Yeah. That's, that's the other thing. That's the [00:30:00] key. Yeah.

Duane Taylor: Yeah. Who wants to spend, we wanna practice what we preach. Correct. You're not, not preaching and go do other things. Yeah. I don't be going to Best buy for our own folks. Yep. And then telling our partners that you got, you should do this.

Adam Ringland: Yep. Yeah. And I don't, yeah. I don't want my text coming up with me with their laptop. Like, I could really use a new

Duane Taylor: laptop. It's their toolbox. Correct. And it can't be full

Jason Null: of sports, right? Yeah. If they're, if these guys, if their computers are not working They are, they're in trouble. They're in trouble, aren't they?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They cannot do their job. They cannot on the phone. They're a plumber coming with no tools. Correct. Yeah. Yep. Just a crack or bunch, but fu. Just the, so I don't know, what else do you guys think? I mean, I think we've covered a lot customer satisfaction, SLAs, budgets, you know, we've, in other episodes talked about the infrastructure just overall, you know, touched on cybersecurity.

Is there any big other outlying issues that. We do for partners to keep them secure, keeping them in standards that we may not have covered.

Adam Ringland: [00:31:00] Oh, what we need to do, we guys, we gotta work on our ts. Our what? Our Ts for the next episode.

Jason Null: Oh, the Ts, yeah. So episode four, that's, that's the big one, really where it all started.

Yeah, it does start at episode four. It does. I mean, that's really where it comes together, I think. I mean, I mean, that's the best You're, if you're, if you've made it this far and you're ready. I mean, episode four is just gonna be,

Duane Taylor: are you guys like plugging the next one? Yeah. Okay.

Jason Null: I need Toray on sometimes.

Thank you guys again for, you know, visiting with us here. Simon, I'd like to do drawing rings, no drawing rings. Print hands, so episode four, it'll be next episode. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. All the other places that you can find people, social media, I mean, we're on LinkedIn and everything.

Yep. And so thanks again for coming, sitting down with us. Maybe we'll get some coffee next time or maybe we just move right to the whiskey. Right. Episode four. That's the teaser. Yep. We're moving to whiskey. So thank you guys. Thanks, adios.[00:32:00]