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Justin Esgar:
So, do you know why if you take a sonology and put it on a rack and you plug a power cable into the back of it that you know is working when you took it off the rack, why it doesn't turn on.
Eric Anthony:
So you unplugged it from somewhere where it was working, it had power. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you stuck it in a rack?
Justin Esgar:
No, I took it to my desk. I fixed it. I brought it back to the rack. I plugged the power back in and it won't turn on. Cause I was an idiot for four and a half seconds. Then I realized what happened.
Eric Anthony:
It was working at your desk.
Justin Esgar:
No, I never even turned it on at my desk.
Eric Anthony:
Oh. Oh.
Justin Esgar:
I took it to my desk just to rese the hard drives. So it was working in rack. I unplugged it from the back. I checked out the ethernet cable. I brought it to my desk. I opened it up. I re receipted the hard drives. I closed it, I brought it back, plugged in the ethernet, plugged in the power, pressed the power button and nothing happened. Why
Eric Anthony:
You didn't press the power button when you took it out of the rack?
Justin Esgar:
Mm. That could have been it, but it's not. The answer is, whilst it was sitting on my desk for the last four hours, the short power cable that goes to the power brick. The power brick, used gravity and unplugged itself from the sharp power cable <laugh>. It's a lot better than my, my desk where my keyboard goes like this every time I type on it. For those who are who, if this does make the cut for those who are not watching the YouTube, my keyboard goes up and down because my desk has like a, a, a pinnacle a point a p a pivot point. What do you call that? And it looks like the,
Eric Anthony:
It's the place where the folding table folds Justin.
Justin Esgar:
Right. But it's not folding flat is the problem here. Right? So every time my keyboard I type on one, my left hand leans to the left, my right hand leans it to the right. So these are first world problems here on the All Things MSP podcast with me, your host, Justin Escar and OG host, Mr. Eric Anthony. I don't know what we're talking about today. So I'll let you throw me a topic and let's see what we can do.
Eric Anthony:
Well, let's continue for just a second on the topic of desks because I have a new one coming thanks to Prime Day.
Justin Esgar:
I do too. It's in a box in the other room cuz I need to have the wall behind me painted and the floors redone and my brand house burnt to the ground
Eric Anthony:
For probably four years. I mean, I have a regular desk, a fixed desk, okay. Which is where all of this is set up. Yeah. But I also kind of as a wing to that desk, I have this very small new pneumatic standing desk. So I grab two bars on the sides, pull 'em in, and then I can pull it up or push it down, you know, so I have a standing desk.
Justin Esgar:
Nice.
Eric Anthony:
However, that doesn't really do me any good because the only time I could ever use it is I would like pivot it in front of my my TV that's here in the office. And then I use TV as the monitor and, and it's okay, but it's not my regular setup and it just doesn't feel right. So Prime day, $183, highly rated four and a half stars, like 7,000 reviews.
Justin Esgar:
6,980 of them are fake.
Eric Anthony:
Well, whatever. I mean Yeah. If a thousand number are fake, it doesn't matter cuz there's 6,000 more. Yeah. But 63 inches wide, 24 inches deep in the colors that I wanted, cuz I didn't want something that was white. And most of the other ones that were on sale were white. This is black with like a natural wood top. Yeah. And I, i $183, I'm like, that's no brainer. Like my daughter and her boyfriend bought a hedgehog for $350 the other day. <Laugh>. And it'll die someday.
Justin Esgar:
<Laugh>. That's the worst analogy ever. Wait, so it's an automatic standing desk.
Eric Anthony:
Yes. It's automatic.
Justin Esgar:
Right? So I, I mean, I don't mind a standing desk. I don't, I don't particularly care for them. Myself, I actually, I bought an entire, I'm gonna do a big IKEA hack. And then my normal desk, which the viewers of the podcast have never seen because in my old house, in my studio, my camera never pointed at my old desk. My executive desk is going to be my new studio desk. So, as things progress here, and if you're watching this on YouTube youtube.com/all things msp and you're watching this in chronological order, you can watch how I'm building my, my studio and maybe, maybe if I'm, if I do this right, and Eric and I talk about this offline, I should film myself building the studio. And then we can have a whole thing about building studios and what that means and how to start a podcast and why you shouldn't start one, which was episode one, <laugh>.
Eric Anthony:
I think it's a great idea. I mean, I, because I could re I could do a reveal of, you know, when I get my new desk Oh, in place,
Justin Esgar:
Leave a comment below if you wanna see battling of the nerds desk. Battle <laugh>.
Eric Anthony:
Hey, it's something that'll make them keep watching or listening. Right? Of course. I guess I'll tell you, it doesn't work if they're listening,
Justin Esgar:
It doesn't work if they're listening. Yeah. But if you did listen to the episode with David Lindsay, please keep in mind he was an exc cage fighter and we're talking about fighting it out, battling desks. So yeah, welcome to the podcast folks. I, I think the desking is important. I used to have, by the way, I used to have the greatest desk before I actually moved up upstairs. So I used to do my own stuff. In my, in my old office, in my old house. I had this Ikea desk, which you could buy the separate parts for and make your own desk with it, which was, so I actually had a full L right? It's one of their, it's, it's one piece. It's a big L with a curved middle. And then the add-ons was, I had an extension piece for one side and I had a, a bumper, curved bumper on the other.
And I even had an attached secondary shelf. And so all the, the, the extension, the bumper and the shelf were all extra pieces. And then you pick out which legs you want. So I picked up the appropriate legs that worked with the system and I had this massive desk. And for a hot minute I had on my desk. I'm not kidding you, I had a 34 inch monitor, two 20 inch monitors that were on a single stand, a separate 22 inch monitor. And my laptop open. And someone came over and was like, why do you have all of this? And much, much like all of us, I answered with because I get, and like that was the end of it. It was too much monitor for me to be honest. But like, that's how big this thing was. And I loved that desk.
It was great. But it didn't have any like, storage space cuz it was just a flat, you know, yeah. Half inch thick piece of wood. But I mean, I had room for days. I love also going on Instagram, all those like best Mac desk setups and you know, desk, desk awareness and all those. The, the problem is though, like, there's only so many of them that are in there that are like different. Like at this point they're all kind of the same. But the problem is they're also all the kind that I like that industrial modern, you know, Edison bulb a tan, not a, not a light wood, but like a medium wood with the dark frames. Like you'll see with my new stuff, I have like wa black wire with thick, nice, you know, the darker wood. Not, not that, you know what I'm talking about.
I don't know what color. It's brown wood. I don't know. Wood. Like walnut. Like walnut, yeah. I like that stuff, you know. And once I get the lighting in here redone, I, I don't, my head doesn't look so shiny, which would be great. It'll, it'll be wonderful. That'll that post my Ironman post. I don't know which side about that Ironman poster will go up on that leaning, that leading G five will just go somewhere else. And you'll see more expansion. Cause I'm planning on a couple of different camera angles and stuff like that. I have, I have grandiose plans for a studio that I have zero money for. So if you're, if you're interested in sponsoring the All Things MSP podcast and sending me some camera stuff to play with and maybe try out some stuff to talk about, live here on our podcast at MSP link slash sponsor. Yep. Liquid Death. I'm looking at you guys.
Eric Anthony:
<Laugh>. Yeah. I mean, we already have a video on the YouTube channel for Liquid Death. I mean,
Justin Esgar:
<Laugh>, I should, I should, I think I know people who work there. I should reach out to them and share that with
Eric Anthony:
You. I I will put that in the show notes.
Justin Esgar:
Put everything in the show notes. If you can't read the show note, what do you, you know what, I, I have this thing about podcasts and I know we do it too, but everyone's always like, I'm gonna put this in the show notes. I have never listened to a podcast and gone to the show notes and I'm sure many of you haven't either. So how can we make this, I'm putting you on the spot here and we may want to edit. How do you get, how, how can you, how can we get that information to people more easily than having to look at the show notes? What do we need to do? You know what? I don't wanna ask Eric this. I wanna ask you the listener comment on this episode, facebook.com/group/all things MSSP or on our YouTube channel. Don't forget to like and subscribe.
I'll tell you a funny story about that in a second. And tell us how you want us to feed you information that we talk about here on the podcast. Do you want an email? Do you want a a Facebook message? Do you want a punch in the face? Like, what is it? What's it gonna take something on my computer beeped and I don't know what. There I go. What's it gonna take for us to get you that information and what do you wanna know and how do we get that to you? That's what I wanna know from you.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah. Let us know cuz we'll do it. Right. We already have a subscription to MailChimp, so we'll use that. We'll do it by email. We'll do a separate post maybe after the podcast drops or maybe maybe just in the the post where we say that the podcast is dropped. Right. That's an easy way because I'm already doing it.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah. You're the best producer I've ever worked with, by the way. I want you to know that.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah. From what you can see out here, I'm a hot mess on the back end of it.
Justin Esgar:
I, in all fairness, all producers are hot mess <laugh>. But so what's, alright, so what do we wanna talk about today? What, what's what's happened in the MSP world? WWDC happened a little while ago. Mac, Mac admin's PSU is next week if you're listening to this. On the time that we're dropping this, depending on when Mac Mac's, PSU is July 18th through the 21st, I'll be there speaking about peanut butter and jelly. A love story and documentation.
Eric Anthony:
<Laugh>, I, I think I need a recording for that cuz I can't be there. But I will be at Channel Con August 1st through the third. And by the way, if you're not registered yet, use the code e a n t h 23 and you too can go to Channel Con for free. You just have to get yourself there and make sure you're not sleeping on the street.
Justin Esgar:
Where is it?
Eric Anthony:
It's in Vegas. So sleeping on the street is normal, but it's August. So you don't wanna do it.
Justin Esgar:
You wanna do it? I'm, unless you're sleeping on like the misters of one of the things next year I'll come with you to Channel Con. I can't come this year. Yeah. Due to, due to timing and other things that are going, I actually have to go to clients in the week after Channel Con. I have to go to clients in Des Moines, Iowa. So I'm trying to limit how much traveling I'm doing to be away from my family. Yeah. Sometimes we do wanna be with our family, sometimes we don't. That's understandable. But,
Eric Anthony:
And also as a public service announcement for anybody going to Vegas for Channel Con in August, do not wear Crocs outside. They will just melt to the concrete
Justin Esgar:
<Laugh>. No, don't. Which is it? Is it one particular hotel or is it strong
Eric Anthony:
Across? It's the Venetian.
Justin Esgar:
It's a good hotel. I like the Venetian. Yes. And the Palazzo is gorgeous. There's actually, oh, if you're at the Venetian, okay. There is a, in the Venetian shops in like the newer part, there was a store called Shinobi. It's a menswear store. And the theme of their store, and I, this is a true story cause I was just there in, I wanna say March. I walked in, they said, hi, have you ever been here? And I said, no. And they said, our theme is, and I was waiting for something and he goes, James Bond on his day off. And I was like, I love everything about this store. And so I bought something, I bought a jacket, I bought some sneakers. It is, if you've ever wanted to feel cool and spend a lot of money, cause that's the first kinda makes expense check. Just go check out the SBI store. It's awesome. It's small, it's cute. It's got really, really nice clothing, backpacks, accessories. And if you wanna be like James Bond in his day off, there's a lot of pictures of Daniel Craig in a bathing suit around that store.
Eric Anthony:
So that's where all your money went for building your studio
Justin Esgar:
<Laugh>. Yeah. I spent it all on a sneakers and a jacket.
Eric Anthony:
And, and I, and by the way, I believe we actually mentioned this store in episode one or two.
Justin Esgar:
Oh right. Cuz we had just started <laugh> Yep. Around you. Yeah. So have you had Channel Con go say hi to Eric, tell him you wanna be a guest on the show and then go buy him something nice from the SBI store? <Laugh>.
Eric Anthony:
Oh, okay. I, I'm, you know what, I, I was, I was gonna flinch at that and I'm like, no, no, I'm good. Go ahead and do it.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah, bribery works.
Eric Anthony:
Bribery will get you everywhere.
Justin Esgar:
<Laugh> we're trying to bribe our sponsors. We're trying to bribe our guests,
Eric Anthony:
Which by the way, by the way, breaking news, I have a verbal commitment Ooh. From our first sponsor. I, I'm not gonna name names yet because in case something happens, but I have a verbal commitment from our first sponsor.
Justin Esgar:
Verbal commitments gonna be
Eric Anthony:
Awesome.
Justin Esgar:
Verbal commitments in some countries is legally married. <Laugh>, don't ask me which ones. I don't know. I just, I know there's a joke somewhere around that, but whatever.
Eric Anthony:
I'm sure there is.
Justin Esgar:
So, so what's been happening in, in the MSP world? I mean, to be honest, with the move I've been kind of out of, out of things, I'm not gonna lie, but there have been some, there's been some changes. I know there's a lot of things that are, that are, that are in the works. Jamf recently acquired a company that does like dashboarding let me just pull up their thing. Data Jar. They acquired a company called Data Jar. A leading Apple technology managed service provider data jars UK based leading MSP focused on providing powerful and apple and jam services for business and education. The terms obviously were not discussed. This is kind of important because there, now JAMA now has the ability to offer managed services. And this is, I think something on the PC side. I think a lot of people were maybe getting a little worried about what happens the day, you know, the Big K starts offering MSP services or Microsoft. We talked about this last week a little bit with Ryan. If you're listening an order go back, if not, go back and listening to the episode. Msps take on the Giants with Ryan Grimes and you know, what happens if Microsoft starts offering MSP services? What does that do to the one two person shop and how do they survive?
Eric Anthony:
Well, I'm gonna be consistent from when we talk to Ryan, right? I believe that large companies, aka Electric on, you know, the, the Windows side of managed services and, and all of the larger companies too, like Microsoft, Amazon, I don't think that they're going to be able to provide the level of service. Let me call, let me call it something different. Lemme call it the detail of service. The specialization of service that a local IT service provider or managed service provider, whatever you wanna call it, is going to be able to provide for the s and SMB businesses,
Justin Esgar:
Right? I think that that white glo, we call it a lot the white glove service, right? That detail oriented, I'm gonna help you from start to finish cuz not to knock on jam, Jamf is like the IBM of of of MDMs for the Apple thing. But Jamf has always promoted the idea of zero touch, right? You hand a new employee a computer with a password on a sticky note, which is already a bad idea. And say you can log into everything with this. But then that user has to sit down and set up their email and set up, we'll sign it to Slack and accept all those end user license agreements. And while you're not supposed to do that, as an msp, a lot of us do this way, when the user starts on day one, they don't have to do all that stuff. Their mails already working, their calendar's already configured, their notification's already set up, their Zoom preferences are already set, their team preferences are already set. All those things that we do, that's the white glove service we're talking about. That's the detailed service. And I, I agree with you on this one, man. Like, I don't think that a big tech company jam, Microsoft, Google, whoever is going to offer that level of commitment and detail oriented service.
Eric Anthony:
Well, and I think it's, I think it's actually more basic than that. I think it's almost at a physics math level. Okay. For them to be able to do it at the price point where they become competitive, they have to do it as a commodity,
Justin Esgar:
Right? If
Eric Anthony:
They do it as a commodity, you're gonna lose all of that detail, all of that specialization that makes it unique to that small to medium sized business. Which by the way is why I initially companies like Electric have taken off and because people can buy their basic support from that company, but that basic support only gets you so far. Yeah. Right? Yeah. It doesn't get you to the point where, and I think Dave Sobel is the one that talks about this a lot, is it doesn't get you to the point of adding value and adding revenue to the bottom line of that small to medium sized business.
Justin Esgar:
Electric's doing PC work now. I thought they were only on the Mac side.
Eric Anthony:
I'm pretty sure they're doing Windows stuff. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.
Justin Esgar:
No, I mean, I, I'll be honest, I I've definitely lo I've lost clients to electric before, solely on price. Mm-Hmm.
<affirmative>. But they I find out through Grapevine I that they leave electric pretty quickly. And I'm not trying to sh I'm not trying to Ish on electric. No, no. If you're looking from there, it's fine. But like there, there's a difference between commodity and service. And, and this is what we're kind of talking about, the s in MSP is service. You have to provide service. I always said like, I have the same thing with the cns, right? Apple consultant network. The C is the more important part. It's not the a it's not the thing that, you know Apple, it's that you are a consultant and you can provide consultative services that you can guide the people in the right direction. A lot of the time these big companies that are gonna try to provide the services, they're just gonna cut through all the fluff and go right to the answer A straight to B no, an they're not gonna take time to get to know the person, understand their, their personality, know what, what else needed, how does it affect other things? Is it more business? And, and no, without having to ask the questions like, is this affecting your entire business? Like these are the things that we as the small companies can do and do better than these, than the large companies that are trying to offer this as a, as an add-on.
Eric Anthony:
Right. And you know, part of it is competing on price is a race to the bottom. Right? I mean, I I don't think anybody's going to have runaway success getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Yeah. Regardless of what your costs, which you can get your costs down to. And I think there's also, there's a, lemme call it a synergy between the small to medium-sized business owner that owns an MSP and the small to medium-sized business owner that owns a restaurant or a doctor's office or a law practice. There is, there's a mindset there that they both get that I'm not sure a big business can.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah, there's a great little video I've seen online about competing on price where it's like two gentlemen are selling a car, are selling a box of eggs, and the first gentleman says 60 cents and the person next to him says 50 cents. And then the first gentleman sees the 50 cents and lowers his price to 40 cents. The second gentleman sees the 50 cents, lowers his price to 30 cents. The, the first gentleman that looks at the second person and buys all of his eggs for 30 cents, buys all of them, puts 'em on his stack and then makes his price 60 cents again.
Eric Anthony:
Yep.
Justin Esgar:
Like that's what we're talking about. It's a, it's a raise at the bottom where someone's gonna lose. And it's not gonna be us, the small to medium-sized IT provider. It's gonna be the client.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah.
Justin Esgar:
And then eventually it all come back. It it, it should, if, you know, history is an indicator, it all should come back to us eventually. At which point you get to go, well since you left, my price has gone up two, two x and now I'm gonna charge you three 50 an hour as opposed to 1 75.
Eric Anthony:
Well, and it is an opportunity to do that. Right. Because, and, and I don't even think it's underhanded or unethical. Right. Because
Justin Esgar:
You folks,
Eric Anthony:
You are probably undercharging to begin with because most of them are, come on. I mean, we all were there.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah.
Eric Anthony:
And the client now sees the value like they never saw before. They understand the difference between what they got from somebody who's just delivering a commodity versus somebody who's delivering a true service and consultation.
Justin Esgar:
The the pricing thing is also a really interesting one. Like if you haven't updated your pricing in six, in the last six to 12 months, you're undercharging. Yeah. I just wanna throw that, I just wanna throw that in there so we can continue on. Because like the, the people that I have this pricing question a lot, and it's weird because New York pricing is obviously different than Midwest pricing. Like I was just talking to one of my staff members today who was like, what are we charging for residential? Because 2 25 an hour seems high. And I was like, that's New York price. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I was like, how much do you wanna charge him? Well he's like, our normal price is like one 15. I was like, that is way too low even for Columbia, Missouri. So we settled on 1 75. I think that's fair. And the person can either go, you know, the person can accept it or not.
It's fine. But like your price does dictate your level of service in your client's eyes, which again proves that you're not a commodity and that you're coming with years of expertise, personal expertise, knowledgeable connections, and also that white glove deliverable to do and to know the client and do what's best. I mean, if you, if you, if you have a client who's gonna start working with one of these big tech firms, they're not gonna get an email on their birthday. Like you should be sending them just to say, Hey, happy birthday Noah, what's today? She's thinking about you, thanks so much. Or, you know, sending them a proper holiday gift or you know, they, you hear, you hear about them in the news and you see it and you send them an article being like, Hey, I saw this on LinkedIn. This is awesome way to go. Those big companies aren't gonna do that. That's the personal touch we're talking about.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah. And I wanna go back just a second to the 1 75 Sure. Because a lot of people are gonna say 1 75 for residential. Yeah. Because Justin knows what kind of client he's going to get at 1 75 that he would get a whole bunch more clients if he was at one 15. Right. But they're not the clients he wants. Yeah. And there's the difference now if you're starting out and you're in the mode of, you'll take anybody and your expenses are low, go for it. Just realize that as you move forward, as your reputation grows, as your skills grow, you need to be raising that price consistently to make sure you're getting the customers that you want and not getting the customers you don't want. And by the way, interesting note on this because I, I was having this conversation with an M S P I think it was Tuesday, about pricing. And I'm like, you know what, we're starting to sell sponsorships for all things s p Yeah. I need to go ahead and in my calendar, I actually put a reminder for January of 2024 to raise the prices. So if you're listening to this and you're a vendor, sign up now cuz we have discounts
Justin Esgar:
<Laugh>. Yeah. I the other thing is you never know what someone's gonna pay you. Right? Like everyone's so worried about their marker rate or whatever. It's like we used to work with somebody and their, and they started with at $75 an hour and I was like, it's way too. They're like, people here won't pay more than that. And I'm like, they will. And we started to do it and we did it slowly. Every client we brought on, we added an extra $5 to her, $2 to her, whatever. Till we got to the point. And it was kind of annoying from a bookkeeping standpoint, I'm not gonna lie. But we got to the point where now that $75 an hour area is now I think 1 65 or one 70 before people started to say no. And the, it was the people that we wanted that were saying no.
Right? So we learned that that area is capped out, but like we could have just been content selling at seven or we, not contemp, but we would, we could have just kept going at $75 an hour and been losing a lot of money when in reality we would, we're now making more than double on the same job. So if you're afraid about raising your prices, don't be do it slowly. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> if you, if if you fear that like you're at the max, the next time you do service with somebody, you say, Hey listen, since the last time we've talked, my price has gone up a dollar, $2, $3, don't go more than five. Cuz they'll freak out about that. But like on the next person after that, or for every new client you bring in, this is a Gary Vaynerchuk move. Every new client you bring in, you continuously raise the price until they stop showing up.
Eric Anthony:
Yep.
Justin Esgar:
And that's how you figure out what your market cap is. And then once you find out what your cap is, where, where that market cap is, every new client comes in is paying that and every client before then your next job it is to move them all up. It'll take time, but you move 'em all up and next thing you know, instead of $75 an hour for, you know, 50 clients, now you're charging 1 40, 1 50, 1 60 an hour for the same 50 clients. You've doubled your income and you've done zero extra work. Yeah. Ideally.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah. And it's not just about profit, I mean profit's good. Okay. Let's not, you know, try sugar, try try and say it's not cuz it, cuz it definitely is, but it also gives you more options. Right. Because it gives you the option of maybe hiring that extra tech or hiring that extra salesperson because now you've built up a war chest, you have more expendable cash flow that you can use to build the business. And more than taking money home as a business owner, which is important and you deserve it. Right. But more important is having the war chest to be able to build the business to make it better.
Justin Esgar:
Right.
Eric Anthony:
In my opinion.
Justin Esgar:
No, that's true. You gotta be able to put some money away and save it. You never know what's gonna happen rainy day. And that's, that is important. That is a big part of it. So work on your pricing. I don't think we as the, I don't think the majority of the listeners are gonna need to be really worried about these big companies yet. I, I, I think a lot of this is also speculative. But we love talking about speculation cuz it gives us topics and we can make fun of people. The the idea being that these companies are gonna come in and start taking our jobs. Don't start screaming that from the rooftops. Be the best you can be and do more, do more for your clients. Make them want to work with you on the regular and make them want to not have to question when Microsoft calls 'em up and goes, you know, we could do it for $35 an hour, they can go, no thanks. Yeah. Whoever's in charge of my, I was gonna say Steve or Bill, but neither of them are charge for Microsoft anymore. <Laugh>.
Eric Anthony:
So I agree with all of that and, and I think if I were to sum it up look at your pricing, have a process for how you create your pro your pricing. You don't have to get really scientific about it. There are some good books out there that you can buy. Nigel Moore's book package price Profit, I think it is. Yeah. I think that Carl Puck has some, some chapters in his book on it, but have a process for doing it so you know what you are making on your different products, on your different services. And then have a process for evaluating those prices every year to know how much you should be raising your prices every year. Because if you don't have a process, it's just, you're not gonna do it. We have too many interruptions as managed service providers to just one day go, oh, I think I should work on my pricing today.
No. That, that's not the way to do it. Build a process. I actually have a couple of office hours episodes coming up over the next probably three or four weeks on building a culture of process in your business with Allen Edwards. So it's gonna be, you know, really informative. It's, you know, we've already recorded it so I know the content is good. And this would be one of those processes that you want to build into your business. And in addition to that, I want to kind of talk about being the, on the consultant side of things, right? I'm actually seeing some managed service providers switch to more of a consulting model because one of the things that a lot of people have been saying about managed services for a long time is standardize, get your costs low so you can lower your price and be more competitive. No, don't do that because like we talked about earlier, that's the race to the bottom. What you want to do is become more valuable to your client and how you become more valuable to your client is adding more revenue and adding more profit to their bottom line. And that will keep you sticky.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah. Sticky's good. Add more value. Close your time. And, but the thing is also in order to add that value, just to put the icing on this is what I think is something already said earlier, which is know your client right? To provide the best value you need to, you need to know the details about your client and that's something that those big guys aren't going to do. And so all of this combined, here you go, you now have a client for life.
Eric Anthony:
Yep. And part of that process is qbr. S if you're not doing them, do 'em If you don't know how to do a mask, and I'll see if I can get Alex Farling on here to talk about 'em.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah. We can bring that in in another one. QBR s are good. I, I'll be honest, we don't, we've been trying to, we don't, it's different a little bit in the Mac world, but I, I think one of the things is, and we can talk about this in another episode, and actually I would love to do, let's just do a live time with somebody about it is asking the right questions because I think so many, again, this goes back into that whole argument of Mac versus pc, I think all the QBR software that's out there is so PC heavy and that they don't care about the Apple people. Every template I've gone to is like, you know, what's your change management for active directory? And I'm always like, this doesn't exist macro. Then it becomes a problem for people. But yeah, there are a lot of things you can do to increase your stickiness with the client based on your value proposition for them. And that, and that's kind of where we're getting now. Yeah. And so we book listen to podcasts and Learn and Grow.
Eric Anthony:
And it's not called a quarterly technical review, it's called a quarterly Business review. So take that <laugh>.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah. Mic drop.
Eric Anthony:
Boom. And that's probably, I think that's enough for this episode. We've rambled on long enough. But I think it was great information and I think it's number one, it's an important topic because it's something that's coming up frequently is are these big companies gonna take away, you know, and, and there's a little bit of a fear campaign I think going on. I think there are people stirring the pot about this and it's, it's unnecessary. So hopefully we gave you something interesting to think about today and something to implement in your business.
Justin Esgar:
Stay tuned for more episodes of the All Things MSP podcast of me, Justin Escar and OG host and producer, Mr. Eric Anthony. Don't forget to follow us. Facebook.Com/Groups/All things msp youtube.com/at all things msp find us on your favorite podcast app. Leave a comment, leave a review, like, and subscribe. Real quick, my little like and subscribe story from the beginning of the episode for those who have made it was a friend of mine's young son who was like three or four years old and was sending a video message to his dad who was away. And at the end of the video message he said like, and subscribe cuz he heard so much on YouTube <laugh>. That's awesome. That's awesome. And as always, we promise we'll do better next time. That's it. Bye.