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Justin Esgar (00:08):
What's up everybody? Justin here. I just want to take a minute before the show today to
(00:15):
Send my heartfelt feelings and everything to the family of Charles Edge. Charles was a CN member for a long time. He wrote 19 books in the Apple consulting world, including a book called How to Be An Apple Consultant, which luckily I was in and unfortunately we lost him over the last couple of days here. It has been a tidal wave of emotions for the entire Apple community. He was a pillar amongst pillars. He basically invented Jamf. He wrote so many books. He was writing so many different programs. Everyone questioned how he was able to do it all. He was the Alexander Hamilton of the Apple world. He will truly be missed and I'm really upset about this one personally. Charles was at ACEs in 2018 in Baltimore. We did a sit down, I just talked to him last week. He was super excited about 3D printing like an Apple Vision pro stand and all these things, and he will be missed and my heart breaks for the rest of his family. So we'll miss you, Charles, and here's one for you. What's up everybody? Welcome to the All Things Embassy podcast. I'm your host Justin Escar. With me always is my good friend. Podcast producer extraordinaire pirate. Mr. Eric Anthony. What's up buddy?
Eric Anthony (01:51):
How are you today, sir?
Justin Esgar (01:53):
Dude, I'm okay. Things are okay. It's Passover, which for those who don't know means I can't eat bread for a week, which doesn't seem like a bad thing except that you really miss it after six hours.
Eric Anthony (02:07):
Yeah, no, I get that. But it's a good representation and remembrance of all that went into that. So anyway, we don't want to turn this into a religious podcast. So today we're going to be talking about a couple of things, operational efficiency being the main segment of today's show. But of course we have the new segment that we've added to all things MSP podcast, which is from the group.
Justin Esgar (02:45):
From the group. Yes, we will read posts that we get from the Facebook group, facebook.com/group/all figure msp. Make sure you join it. Today we have Rick Cleaver wrote. Does anyone have an outline for their weekly staff meeting that they would like to, I did a search online but couldn't find anything on the topic and the answers to this are kind of funny. One of them was cancel all weekly staff meetings at the end. And to be honest, I think that's correct, but even at virtual we have our own staff meetings. We actually have a meeting, the director's meeting where we talk about what's going to happen at the staff meeting just so we can stay on track and we use things like clickup for it and stuff like that so we can get into what we talk about a little bit to see if we can help you.
(03:26):
And I'm going to actually open up my clickup here. And the way that virtual has done their staff meeting is we basically use that meeting as an opportunity to inform everyone. It's not very reciprocal, it's not very two way. It's very much this is what's going on. And so we start with who's off in the next couple of weeks, right? Because a good thing to keep reminding people every week that like, Hey, Justin's taking vacation or Lauren's going to be out, or I'm going to be out on Friday or whatever. We talk about incoming leads, new clients, we talk about, we do some training and then usually I end it with some sort of message for the group.
(04:08):
We only do it once a week. It's only an hour. We try to keep it. And the reason it's an hour is the majority of that is some sort of training. We dedicate 30 to 45 minutes of training. Oh, you know what we start with? It's not actually on the agenda here is we always start with something we call blueberries, which is kudos for the week. I forget why I call it blueberries. I read it somewhere that someone was giving blueberries and so we'll start the week off and I'll be like, oh, blueberries to Eric for doing this thing last week or for covering my butt when I was busy or whatever. So we start with blueberries, then we do everything else and the majority of that is training. And the reason we do the training is there's a lot of people on our team who may know something and there's a lot of people on our team who may not know something and whether that's reiterating something and learning or learning it for the first time, it's a great place to have that interaction and let everybody jump in and answer questions and stuff like that.
(05:02):
So we keep it pretty tight about that and that's our full staff meeting every week. We do have a directors meeting where we get a little bit more in depth where we talk about our tech stack, we talk about our finances, we talk about new leads and things that are actually happening that the directors need to know about. So we have that meeting and then we have the weekly staff meeting and that's it. We do a daily huddle though. That's the other piece we do. The reason it's so easy is because we do a daily huddle, 30 minutes every morning. First thing we talk about what are your goals for the week, where are you with that and what are you working on today? I'm like, that's it. And I just call out people in Zoom, Hey, I always go from bottom up. You came in last, you have to go first.
(05:41):
How are you on your goals? What are you working on today? Today I'm covering tickets for you guys. This way everyone else can work on other things. Great. What are you working on? Well, I updated everybody's computers. I'm going to do this thing. I have to email 10 people. What are you doing? Well, I'm in meetings all day, so don't bother me. Got it all. Cool. You do that. What? Yeah, pretty much. I even said that today. I was like, I took my huddle from my kitchen today. I was just finishing something up and I'm like, as soon as I go downstairs to my office, I'm not getting up until five o'clock and don't bother me. But there are days where I'm like, I'll cover tier one tickets. I have a little bit more time this way. My tier one guys can do training or working on other projects that I have them working on or finishing up or following up and things like that. So quick daily huddle this way the weekly staff meetings are short and to be honest, I don't even doing any of them, but it does prove to be efficient.
(06:37):
I know. I mean, 30
Eric Anthony (06:37):
Minutes is a little long I think for a huddle. Well,
Justin Esgar (06:40):
We have a lot of people on our team. That's why
Eric Anthony (06:45):
That would make
Justin Esgar (06:45):
Sense. We have eight people who join the huddle just to shoot out what they're doing for the day. That way keep in mind also my team is distributed. I'm here in Jersey and I got a bunch of people in Columbia, Missouri and I got Fred who's up in Boston, and I got Luke who's out in Brooklyn. And even the people in Columbia, Missouri, not all of them are in the shop at the same time. That's why it takes so long, a little bit of giggling time and then running through it, trying to tighten it up.
Eric Anthony (07:17):
And that's a dynamic that we haven't had until the last couple of years is having to do them remote. It used to be we could just do a standup in the tech room and cover it really quick and by standing up, nobody got comfortable. That's the reason why they're called standups. When I ran my MSP, it was not dissimilar from what you do. So I did a daily standup, probably 15 minutes max, but you're right, I only had four people. So it was very different. And were all, this was obviously pre covid, so we were all in the same office. And then I would have weekly one-on-ones with individual people and then we would have one team meeting probably every two weeks rather than every week just to go over the big stuff and the big plans going forward because everything else was either short enough to cover in the huddle or specific enough to an individual person to cover in their one-on-one,
Justin Esgar (08:25):
Right? There's the guy who runs AppSumo, what's his name? Noah Kagan. I remember watching the video a while back and he's got a whole video on what meetings he's brought into. He's got a lot of stuff happening over at AppSumo and there's meetings with the finance team, there's meeting with the HR team and there, and he was like, I took 20 meetings and I made it one meeting and here's how I did it. Or something to that effect. I don't recall it exactly. So keyboard warriors backup, and it was basically he just made, for the lack of a better term, a dashboard that said, okay, finance, you got five minutes. Tell me the high level points I need to know. And that's what it is. Our weekly staff meeting are like, what are the points that everyone needs to know? Everyone needs to know what's in the funnel for leads.
(09:14):
We have someone who's on our lead list who we're not talking to until end of the year, but it's such an important thing. Everyone needs to know that it's coming. So I just, Hey, reminder, this is coming, this is coming, this is coming. Or like, Hey, we're onboarding this client this way people, because not everybody interacts with all of our clients. So we onboard a new client. A lot of my triage tier one people aren't going to know about them because the tier two or tier three people are the one who are onboarding them and getting them set up, getting agy properly prepped, getting our business manager properly prepped, et cetera, et cetera. I don't want my incoming, my first responders to be get a ticket and then go, who are you? So it's important that they know who people are working on and it's not like we're onboarding 45 people a day anyway.
(10:00):
It's one every month through every month. So it's good just because I truly believe in information dissemination. This is why also I make every employee, when we hire a new employee, we give 'em a copy of the Phoenix project, that DevOps book by insert person's name here. I don't have it in front of me. The reason I tell everybody that is because the key element of that book is there's one dude who knows all the secrets to all the IT stuff and they have to do information dissemination. So I make all my staff read it because I'm like, this is what we need to avoid. And then inevitably we end up happening that. So now we're trying to get out of it.
Eric Anthony (10:36):
Yeah, yeah, of course. Alright, so Rick Cleaver, thank you so much for asking this question in the group. If anybody has individual questions about how to run meetings, what meetings to run, all that kind of thing, reach out to me, reach out to Justin, we'd be happy to share the way we do it or any resources that we can provide for you. So again, thanks Rick. That's from the group and thank you to this week's sponsor. Go inta. Your computer should work for you, not you, for the computer goes INTA connects your systems together to make sure you enter your data once and it goes into all the systems that it should. And checkout goes into text SMS for ConnectWise manage, don't just text your customers, text them and of course goes into Mobius sync ConnectWise, manage with QuickBooks online and also goes into payments.
(11:26):
Automatic billing gets you paid faster. Check 'em out at ATP link slash go into. We're having too much fun with this one. And that's a great segue by the way, into the topic that we wanted to talk about today, which is operational efficiency and there's a bunch of different places we could apply operational efficiency, but Justin and I thought we would talk about the two major ones, which are help desk and project work because those are the places where you're most likely to have the biggest inefficiencies in your business because that's where your business works the most. So Justin help desk, what is, if you can think of one, a situation where you just had a help desk failure somewhere back in your history
Justin Esgar (12:20):
Every day,
Eric Anthony (12:23):
It seems like that, I mean it did for me
Justin Esgar (12:25):
It does, right? Because that's the industry we're in. No, it's not. I don't think there's ever been a major meltdown failure. I think the biggest problem where we have with help desk is when the client isn't explaining things properly. And I think that's going to be true for everybody. The client says to you, this thing doesn't work. And remember the client doesn't speak tech, so they don't know here. Here's a great one. I go in today from a client trying to sign into the teams app and it says, sorry, you do not have access to this. Which first off, screw you teams. Alright, let's just start with there.
(13:11):
And the reason she doesn't have access to it is because she has a Microsoft Apps for Business license, which doesn't include teams. And she was trying to join teams as a guest but couldn't because she actually has a Microsoft account for apps, for business, for actual license, and therefore teams wouldn't let her log in. So I was emailing with her back and forth and finally I was like, this isn't working. And I picked up the phone and I called her and I was like, Hey, let's chat this out because it's not clicking for either of us via email. That kind of stuff happens all the time. And that's not necessarily inefficiency because you can only lead a horse to water. There's only so much you can do when a client is, and this person I'm talking to is a very, very smart person. She's wonderful. I love talking to her, so it's fine. But there's a lot of things like that. And so in my mind, the way to avoid as much of that as possible is one, have everything that you can have documented so your tier one teams can access resources fast and get stuff done. I dunno why I said fast that way fast. You get access resources fast. I'm so hungry for bread.
(14:29):
And then the other thing is that your staff needs to understand who they're talking to. I have a client who if they email you, it doesn't matter what they're asking, pick up the phone and call them. Because no matter what you write, they will either not read it or not understand it. They will only understand it if you talk to them on the phone. And there's no way can't legitimately write that into their ticket being like, you're a dummy, I'm going to call you. We have little flags that we can use within our ticketing system to say, Hey, just call this person. But it's more about knowing who's sending in the ticket, who's sending in the help request and being able to help them at their level, which is where the magic of being an MSP is. I know so many MSPs who want to bring their clients to their level and it's like, that's not the way to do it. You got to get to them, right?
Eric Anthony (15:23):
Yeah. It's kind of like when we all tried to get everybody to use a portal to submit a ticket, right? Great idea. Never worked. Now when you're talking about trying to solve things by email and the miscommunication, it brings up to me the psychology of task switching, which we used to call it multitasking, but then it became a bad word because, well, because the psychologist proved that we're not really multitasking. We're task switching. And the more we task switch, the less efficient we are.
Justin Esgar (16:02):
I'm the most inefficient person in the world according to that metric, by the way.
Eric Anthony (16:06):
Well, I mean, yes. And that's a common problem that I have as well because I do tend to the A DHD side of things. And so task switching is just a natural course of events for me, but we're looking at this way of doing it. You're answering a question, you're going back to something else, they email you again. So at some point you have to decide when to pick up the phone. And as most technicians are introverted, picking up the phone is not our first reaction,
Justin Esgar (16:44):
Right?
Eric Anthony (16:45):
So what do we set maybe as a best practice or a rule, maybe even something that we can do in our PSA where we can say, okay, after two phone call or after two emails, after three emails, pick up the phone.
Justin Esgar (16:58):
Yeah, I was actually going to say exactly that. There are ways in your PSA to have automations in place where it's like if the user has replied three times, it should auto make a private note within your thing that says, stop emailing them, please call them. You know what I mean? And you can make those automations in Halo. They call it a runbook. I don't know. I think ConnectWise, they call it an automation. There's ways of doing that. And if you are so introverted that you will not pick up the phone, you need to find someone who could work for you, who can, because you're going to be doing yourself a disservice. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I get it. There's some people who are afraid of hilarity. The funny part about this is that I have no problem picking up the phone because I want to here pick up the phone and be like, Hey, this is what you need to do, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
(17:56):
But I got into a conversation with my family yesterday about whether or not I would ever call a restaurant to order food. And I'm so nervous to call a restaurant to order food. That's why I only use DoorDash. My brother-in-law was so mad at me for that comment. But I will gladly pick up the phone and explain because not to toot my own horn, one of the reasons I am successful is I am really good at explaining complicated technical issues in a non-technical way. I use that a lot of analogies, I talk about cars a lot. Cars are probably the best analogy or Legos best analogy. Every adult knows that stuff. So true story. Yesterday I even talked to a client, I was like, we were talking about the owner of a company. I'm like, that person has a MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air, and they don't need the power of the MacBook Pro.
(18:43):
I was like, basically you have a Lamborghini and you have a Toyota Celica and they're both or Toyota Corolla and they're both doing 30 miles an hour in traffic on the GW Bridge. And she was like, got it. That kind of stuff. That helps. So being able to do that, if you don't have that ability, which is okay, you can either A practice or B, you need to hire someone who can do that because you're going to have those clients who need that stuff. And again, this is what I said earlier, which is cater to the client. The reason that successful MSPs are successful is yes, maybe they get clients that play in their playground, that play in their sandbox. They still cater to how that client needs to be treated. And I don't mean every client's a unique snowflake. I mean the CEO is the kind of person where I'm going to let the CEO O of my client text me.
(19:37):
I don't let clients text me. And when I connect with clients, I say, I go to the CI, here's my cell phone number, don't give it to your staff because I won't answer them. If a staff member or a client texts me, I'll say, please email support of ra. But if you text me, I'll write back. And if it's after hours, I will say to you like, Hey, I'm dealing with something. I'll do this tomorrow. And most, I also deal with clients who are reasonable for the most part, one or two that aren't. But so even today a client emailed, a staff member of a client emailed about an icon they saw in their menu bar. So people who use Mac know this, that if you're on a Zoom call or if you're on an audio call or whatever, there's going to be new icons that are up on the top where it's like orange or a microphone or it's purple for thing.
(20:26):
My computer always says My screen is being observed because I have a display link teleprompter thanks to you, and Display Link has this thing and it's actually a security issue. And I put security in quotes for whoever's on watching YouTube. And so the client emailed and then the CEO EO also texted me, and I have a good rapport with the CEO EO, and I was like, this is what it is. I was like, here's mine. It said Your screen's being observant. I'm like, trust me, no one's logging into my computer and I have the same thing. And he's like, got it. Cool. You know what I mean? Cater to the client to have that rapport. So bring this back to efficiency. Being able to respond to people in an appropriate amount of time. The way they can receive information is how you become efficient. Because a lot of us talk about, oh, I'll build automations and have macros in my PSA that I can just automatically spit out answers.
(21:19):
If a client comes to you and says, I need help with something, and you spit back a 10 step thing that they need to follow to make something work, they don't want to work with you. They want someone who's going to fix it for them. They're not an IT person. That 10 step thing is for you or your techs to do. That's why all of our knowledge based articles that we're write are internal. All of our knowledge based articles like how to Fix Ignite when you update your OS and Ignite needs the system extension. And I only use that not because it's you, but because I literally had to deal with that nine times this week. That list of steps is for my text only. And if I ever saw it and I say to my text, I go, if you share this with the user, no, not happening. You know what I mean?
Eric Anthony (22:04):
Yeah.
Justin Esgar (22:05):
So those are the efficiencies I think about.
Eric Anthony (22:08):
There are things like PIA that can help with some of those things and take those lists and actually do them for you to create efficiencies. But here's what I would do. If I'm an MSP listening to this podcast right now, I'm going, how do I even know if I have a problem?
Justin Esgar (22:24):
Good question.
Eric Anthony (22:24):
It's called reports. Run your reports. You can run reports out of your PSA or whatever you're using for ticketing. That's going to tell you how many emails are going back and forth between your texts and your clients. So you can see is it going over that threshold of 2, 3, 4, whatever it is that you decide is the breaking point for efficiency. You can also look at what your technicians are doing and which clients are the least efficient. And when you run those reports, you can actually find things to work on and they're concrete, they're not best guesses, they're things that you can say, okay, this is a problem because I said that this is inefficient and I see that this is going on in my help desk.
Justin Esgar (23:13):
What's funny about that is we're in the process of, because we've been in with Halo now since last August, and we built it in such a way just to get it going. We got the car moving and now we're building a gorgeous car around it, and we're revamping and moving stuff around and building all these workflows or whatever it is. You're
Eric Anthony (23:31):
Pimping your ride.
Justin Esgar (23:32):
I'm pimping my ride. Yo dog, I heard you pool. So I put a pool in your pool so you can pool while you pool and drive on the highway. For those who don't get it, I'm a nineties kid. Okay. Anyway, one of the things that was funny about it was that we were looking at some of the dashboards that come in Halo, and one of them is tickets by users. So you can see who's submitting the most tickets. The problem that we have is we feed everything into Halo, and we hadn't configured that section yet. So I had this, all of my users were one, two, whatever, and then I had this spike of 10,000. I was like, what is this? And I go Look, and it's our monitoring tool that monitors 700 endpoints and they all come from the same email address. So it threw off our report really, really badly because my number one user is the monitoring tool. The number two user is the other monitoring tool. The number three thing is another monitoring tool. And the number four was like Eric, I was like, what the hell is this? And so I went back and I was like, one, let's just take this off the dashboard because this is useless, and two, let's fix this later so we could actually get accurate data to work with because knowledge is power kind of thing.
Eric Anthony (24:49):
So that's some ways that we can look at help desk and find some efficiencies to fix. What about projects, Justin? What do you do to make sure that your projects are running efficiently?
Justin Esgar (25:01):
So projects are tough because no matter what project management tool we have tried at Virtua, it has inevitably failed. And that is only, and I'm going to be honest with it, right? I'm going to be honest with you people. First off, I'm always honest with everyone on the call the podcast because I want you to learn from my mistakes. Mistake number one, don't throw a conference. Mistake number two, figure out a project management tool. The project management tool, because the problem with the project management tool thing is you have to have buy-in from everyone. And when you have a staff that you get to a certain size, especially the way we did things where we brought staff on because we were acquiring other companies, it never really worked. So my director of technology, and don't get me wrong, I love him, has rejected almost every project management tool we've ever put in and wants everything to be done via tickets. And so we've tried all them. We're currently using clickup, but to be honest, I'm kind of falling out of Clickup a clickup professional at this point or whatever they call it evangelist or something.
(26:09):
But even that, I'm fighting it to be clunky or it's not working or I'm not able to track stuff. And the biggest problem that I have, and this is true of any organizational system, whether it's your personal to-do list or anything, is keeping up with it. I was thinking about this the other day. I was thinking about this the other day. I have a great friend who, his name is Rich Wingfield in Texas, and he runs a program called gobys. G-O-B-Y-T-E-S Go is based on GTD getting things done. I've had countless conversations with him about my own to-do list because I don't have a to-do list. I just don't. It's all in my head, which is not the right way to work. I have tried Asana, I have tried Todoist, I have tried clickup, I have tried the Notes app, I've tried everything. The problem is that if it's never right in front of me, and I know you have a lot to say about this, I see it in your face.
(27:09):
If it's not right in front of me, I forget about it and I need something that's easy. None of the programs that I've talked about so far work with the Lady in the box that's on my phone. I can't just go, Hey, so-and-so add this to my to-Do list. Actually, I was thinking about this the other day in the shower. I was like, maybe I should just use the Reminders app that comes with the Mac and the iPhone because I think that does work with Lady in the Box. So coming back to projects, the problem with it is you have to have buy-in from everybody, and they have to be able to have it in their face to be able to update it.
(27:45):
Again, because we're polishing, we're pimping our ride with our Halo. We're thinking about how we can do projects in Halo because onboarding a new client as a project. So instead of it being a project in Clickup, we're actually building an halo with workflows. So things like kick back and forth automatically. And that's where I think a lot of automation can come into play and help you as an MSP because if you have to do X, Y, Z steps, do them hit complete and it needs to go to so-and-so to find out billing, it could just auto assign that ticket or make a child ticket or whatever. Some of the other tools like Clickup, which don't get me wrong, clickup is great, and you can do Subtask and you can keep track and you can have all these different, what do they call that in progress or stuck or completed, whatever
Eric Anthony (28:34):
They call it, statuses.
Justin Esgar (28:35):
Statuses. You spend 90% of the time building what you wanted to do and then 10% of the time actually using it. You know what I mean? There's my problem. That's not people
Eric Anthony (28:49):
And that's not efficient. Now you get to a point, the business gets to a point where you have to have some type of project management tool, I believe, but it's only after you have reached this critical mass of the number of people actually working on a project at one time. I think personally that the smaller MSP, and this is what we did, is you can manage everything. Most of your projects can be managed through tickets. I just believe that that's the simplest way to do it. And in this case, the simplest answer is the best answer because it's the most efficient. Because managing the tool, you're right, it takes so much time to manage the tool that it outweighs the efficiencies that you're going to gain using the tool. In my mind. Can a
Justin Esgar (29:43):
Second, wait, can I interject for a second? I'm thinking about this. My wife works for Fortune 500, and I remember two years ago they finally decided to use monday.com as a project management tool, and it got to the point where they actually had to hire a monday.com professional in the company to manage the monday.com that they're all using. That's ridiculous. Granted, the company has more than enough money to pay for that person, but for a small MSB, you can't do that,
Eric Anthony (30:08):
Right? And that's where size and critical mass come
Justin Esgar (30:11):
In. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I, and
Eric Anthony (30:13):
Going back to your statement about using the Lady in the Box in the Reminders app, that is one of the things that is one of my capture systems for capturing things to do is I put them on a reminder. I ask her to create a reminder for whatever it is, and then that's just one of those buckets that I go through once a day to then get that onto my to-do list, which is currently on not much more than an index card.
Justin Esgar (30:47):
Actually mine is in my notes.
Eric Anthony (30:49):
Here's how nerdy I am about this. Okay, hold
Justin Esgar (30:51):
On. Oh, for those who are listening, Eric is currently going off camera. I'm an asmr. This Eric is going off camera to the left and pulling up what looks at me a report card from when he was in third grade. I
Eric Anthony (31:02):
Printed my own daily card that I can, it's dotted lines on the side and then this is half hour increments or 15 minute increments all the way down for 24 hour day. And so I can schedule my day and do my to-do list on this one card. I have to redo it every day.
Justin Esgar (31:28):
What's funny about this with this card thing that you're showing me is I got real big into creating eBooks, creating not eBooks, creating books on demand on Amazon for a hot minute. And I created a book called Your to-do List. It's a your Yearly to-do list. And literally it is a 365 page book, and it just has the date on top. I've already written out January 1, 2, 3, whatever, and it's got 10 blank lines in it. And you can buy this on Amazon for 18 bucks and you have a perfectly good to-do list. And I don't even use it myself. It's just such a stupid thing.
(32:09):
But it is on there. We'll have a link to it down below and I'll get my $2. But the point is that you do need something. And I also believe the idea, going back to projects, I do believe tickets are the answer. I think one thing that all MSPs have always tried to do is be like, how do we get to a single pane of glass, the mystical, magical, single pane of glass? And I think now more than ever, is that easier to accomplish because tools like your PSA are getting better and better. I think five years ago, yes, I know there were PSAs out there, but I think five years ago we wouldn't have been able to accomplish what we can accomplish that we can today. I know in Halo for example, there's an entire section for projects, but all it really is is just a different type of ticket with a different workflow.
(32:57):
So whether the project ticket is in the regular service queue or it's in the project queue, which I also tell my staff now, I want everything in the service queue because if we have too many sidebar items, nobody's looking at them. So have the projects in the service queue, they're just listed as projects and they just have to follow a particular flow chart or workflow to get them done. So I think your efficiencies are going to be built at best using the tools you already have. I love when people are like, what do people use your project management? I'm like, what do you have already? Because that's the thing, and I've talked about this in so many other episodes, and I think I have it in Mark Colman's book, stop Switching Tools, stop Changing. Just use what you have and what you have doesn't have something that built in.
(33:50):
Look at it holistically and go, do we need this tool or whatever it is. I'm in the process right now putting everything into Halo to the point where I can shave off our billing tool, our questionnaire tool, our project management tool. I can save probably $1,200 a month by filling everything into Halo. And yes, halo does 80% of what those tools do, but that's good enough for me. Now, if I can say $1,200 a month and get 80% of it out because Halo's not expensive and none of the PSAs are expensive. Done. There's your efficiency. Get everyone in. Because if everyone's in, one of the things we're doing for efficiency right now, as many of you know, I have an Apple authorized service provider down in Columbia, Missouri, and they use a tool called Repair Shopper. Repair Shopper is, it's owned by Synchro and there's not anything bad with it, but it's built for repair work.
(34:52):
It's built for Depot repair. It's built for Depot repair, right? Well, I want my team down there to be in Halo also. Well, now I have them sitting in two systems. So what did we do? We spent six weeks. Justin on my team who runs the Depot, Fred and Brent spent six weeks and we recreated what we could do in a repair shopper in Halo. We're actually going to go live with this, probably we're recording the day, we're recording this, we're going live tomorrow, so whatever. And we're going to go beta with it and see if it works. And we do that. Great. You know how we just created efficiency. I don't have my team in two systems.
(35:30):
Think about that. Yes, there's things that Repair shopper can do. It taps into Apple Systems the way Halo does it and all these other things, but we've figured out workarounds and maybe doing it in Halo takes them five, 10, even 20 minutes longer than it would in repair shopper, but for them to not have to jump back and forth between two systems all day. I don't care about those 20 minutes. We'll tighten that up. But to jump back and forth and get rid of that second tool, there's an efficiency. You know what I mean? That's where it's at. So for me, it's less about the how do I become more efficient about tickets specifically or project specifically to become more efficient. You just need to tighten that whole thing up. Get rid of the tools you use. I know so many MSPs who I was talking, who was I talking to the other day? Somebody, and we were talking about remote tools. I was like, what do you to remote in? Or whatever it is. And he's like, oh, well, so I have Splash top for this and I have team viewer for that, and I have whatever tool for that and another tool for this. And I was like, what are you doing with four or five connection tools? They all work the same. What are you doing? And they were like, oh, well, we inherited it this way from the client. I'm like, dude, no, no. That's one of the
Eric Anthony (36:45):
White places you really do need to standardize. Although I will say that there is some wisdom in having the one you use every day
Justin Esgar (36:54):
And a backup
Eric Anthony (36:55):
And then a backup one. Yes,
Justin Esgar (36:57):
A hundred percent hundred p. But to have five, I was like, you would be more efficient if you took a day off from work and set everybody up in one tool with a backup and was done with it. You can lose a day of work and do that. And then all the days after it are going to be way more efficient because I guarantee you that that person has a tech trying to log into a computer right now and has no idea which way to do it.
Eric Anthony (37:24):
We're kind of running out of time here. And so my one takeaway from today, or the one thing that I would definitely want to point out is beware yet another tool.
Justin Esgar (37:37):
Oh yeah.
Eric Anthony (37:37):
Because yet another tool is not, most of the time is not going to help your efficiency. So that's my big tip for today.
Justin Esgar (37:47):
Yeah, I'm going to make that into a T-shirt.
Eric Anthony (37:50):
That's what I was thinking.
Justin Esgar (37:54):
No, yeah. Stay away from another tool. What on top of that, as the owner of an MSP, you should always be, you're always thinking about how can I make my business better? How can I make my business better? Whatever, take a day. It doesn't have to be a weekend, take a day, tell your staff, listen, I'm going to take today to think. And if you're a single person shop, you might need to do this on a weekend or at night and list out everything you're using and figure out what is overlapping, what is a duplicate, what can you shoehorn into another system? And here's my challenge for you. I think this is going to go out probably around May. So it's about May, 2024. This is my challenge for you by the end of the summer. So what is that three, four months from now? Eliminate two tools and then come back to us facebook.com/groups/all things MSP and tell us which tools you got rid of and why. Because I think that if you start there and you really look at it from the 50,000 person overview, you'll realize that you're spending money and time on things you don't need that you can use something else with or combine tools or whatever it is. And that will make your entire team more efficient.
Eric Anthony (39:23):
Yep.
Justin Esgar (39:25):
That's my ending piece. Check us out, like I said, facebook.com/group/all things msp. Check us out on all of your favorite podcasting tools. You're listening to us on one, go check us out, subscribe on another, inflate our numbers, leave a review. We'd love to hear from you. Check out the YouTube youtube.com/at all things msp. I am Justin, that is Eric, that is the show. Bye.
Eric Anthony (39:47):
Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow us on Facebook, but better yet, go ahead and join the Facebook group. You can also follow us on Instagram if that's your thing. And make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel at all things MSP to catch us in all of our video glory. And last, but certainly not least, if LinkedIn is your thing, you can follow us there as well. And a special thank you to our premier sponsors Super Ops Move Bot goes into Easy DM a C and comtech. And we also want to thank our vendor sponsors. The All Things MSP podcast is a Biz Pal LLC production.