Listen to "All Things MSP" on Your IT Podcasts!
Justin Esgar:
I like watching this podcast. It's not a podcast. I guess that's a show on Facebook called Lateral with Tom Scott. He asked these interesting questions. So one of 'em was like Air Force One took off and landed and it was no longer Air Force one. Why? Right? And he's got a bunch of comedians, or I guess they're comedians. I dunno. They're smart people. I dunno. I don't know. Influencers, and they all try to guess what the reason was. Do you know the answer to this one?
Eric Anthony:
No, I do not. I mean, I can guess.
Justin Esgar:
Take a guess. Take a guess. What do you think it is?
Eric Anthony:
Because whoever was the president on the plane was no longer the president when it landed.
Justin Esgar:
So who was the only president that that could have possibly happened to? I Nixon.
Eric Anthony:
Okay.
Justin Esgar:
He resigned, got on the plane, it was Air Force One, and then who took? Carter took over, right? It was before my time. I'm from 1980, but it was Carter who took over, I think, right? Whoever took over. I look forward to your emails of how Stupid I'm about Americanism became president and the plane changes. It's called, it's no longer Air Force One anymore because the president's no longer the thing. So anyway, so he did one. There's a podcast called, I want to say the School of Fish, is that what it's called? And he asked the group, and the reason I thought it was relevant about a podcast, the School of Fish podcast released their 500th episode, but it wasn't their 500th episode. They released it one number short. Why? And they figured out that the show is associated with qi, which is this British TV show. It's about general knowledge. It's a great show if you haven't watched it, check it out. And then they started getting into it. They're like, it must be like a nerd number. Did they skip the pie? Or E or the guy's like, oh, keep going, keep going. Up until the 400th episode, it was fine. The girl was like, so one of the communities was like, did they skip four 20? And he is like, they would've celebrated four 20. Which one they skipped 4 0 4
And no one noticed.
Eric Anthony:
Well, it wasn't found,
Justin Esgar:
So they went 4 0 3 to 4 0 5. And I guarantee, I don't know when that came out, but I would love to assume that the timing of that was equivalent to the Mr. Robot episode where he visits his family home and the family home is not there and the address is 4 0 4 Main way or something like that or whatever.
Eric Anthony:
And by the way, going back to the American history, bit of it, the only reason I know the answer and didn't know the person was really because of the movie, not because of history.
Ad Read:
Do you have files or email to move from one platform to another? Or maybe you're doing a digital transformation from on-premise servers to the cloud. Check out Move Bot one of our premier sponsors here at All Things MSP. Moving files and email during a transition, onboarding or upgrade can be time consuming, tedious, and be derailed by surprises and risks. Reduce your technician workload and increase migration reliability with Move Bot. Check out mobo using our special link, which you can find in the description of this post. Or just go directly to ATMs p link slash
Justin Esgar:
What's up everybody? Welcome to the All Things MSP podcast. My name is Justin Esgar. With me always is my good friend. What looks to be a Jedi fight happening in the background there? Mr. Eric Anthony. What's up dude? Are you light side or dark side my friend?
Eric Anthony:
I think I tend towards light side. Funny story. I did actually, I was playing with the colors to see if I could get away from red and blue. It's not really on brand. It really should be red and orange, but it just looks all red when I do that. The orange really
Justin Esgar:
Doesn't. It just looks like the daytime you should just be outdoors.
Eric Anthony:
Something like that.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah. I recently found out that there was getting a little nerdy about Star Wars and I'm not a big Star Wars person, but you got your blue light saber, you got your green lights saber, everybody knows those. You got Samuel Jackson's purple lights. Apparently there was also a yellow and a white light saber. And the white light saber were for people who had the omnipotent force or whatever it is. If I'm getting this wrong, I look forward to your tweets and emails,
Eric Anthony:
Which I'm sure will be coming in and mass because great percentage of Star Wars fans in the group.
Justin Esgar:
I think there's most people that if you're a Star Wars fan and you're a part of the atsp Facebook group, facebook.com/all things msp, I am ready to take on you as a keyboard warrior because that's what Facebook is for.
Alright, we have a guest tonight. See, like I'm joking on my own jokes. We have a guest today. I love it when we have a guest. I say that often. We have the most interesting man in the world. Screw that Dos Equis guy, Mr. Jeff Ferris, CEO of CloudRadial. Let's bring him up. Jeff, how are you man? Good. Hey Eric. Hey Justin. Good to be with you guys. Thank you so much for being here. Jeff, why don't you give everybody a two minute who you are. What's cloud radial and what's your favorite ice cream flavor?
Jeff Farris:
Favorite cream flavor? That's a tough one because my first job was in an ice cream store and man, when you get to taste everything, you kind of create your own concoctions. So it's nothing better than being 15 in a ice cream shop, right? Lemme just tell you, that was like the dream job. So good life, good times. You're right. And I appreciate that. I'm the most interesting man in the world because I'm the only one I really know well. So that's good. And then just I think I'm interested if nothing else, because I've got the Dyson fan back behind me. I mean, I kind of would kill for Eric's background because again, the Dyson fan, I don't know, I don't know what it says about me, but I think it makes a statement. I'm not sure
Eric Anthony:
If you angle it correctly, because in the pre-show when we were talking and you were in a smaller window, it actually looked like the window in an airplane. So I was really impressed that you were joining our podcast from your private plane.
Jeff Farris:
Yeah, I'm just taking a break from that. Yeah, we're in a refueling area right now, so it's good. It's all good.
Justin Esgar:
Alright, so I'll redo my questions. So we'll start with, Hey Jeff, how are you? Tell us all about yourself and cloud radial and if you had an airplane, would it be called Cloud radial force one?
Jeff Farris:
Of course it would. Of course it would, right? Well then it'd actually be called cloud radial Force two, because there would be two of them. So I'm not sure which one I'd be on. Right. Okay.
Justin Esgar:
So why don't we tell everyone what is cloud radial and what's it do for MSPs?
Jeff Farris:
So cloud radial really simply is all things client. So if all the client touchpoints we pull together in a single unified client portal, sounds exciting, doesn't it? Pull together everything client into a single unified client portal. It includes ticketing, training, assessments, csat, everything in MSP would want to present, and especially reporting Office 365 reporting, ticketing reporting. If you have cloud radial as an MSP, basically you turn your relationship with the client from an email and phone relationship into an online relationship, a digital relationship. So everything you'd want to give to 'em is in the portal. Everything they want to give to you is in the portal. Basically, the cloud readle makes an MSP work every other vendor that small business works with. And so the last time somebody submitted an email ticket to Amazon to order something has been like never the last time you submitted a ticket to at and t to order a new phone has been never. And for an MSP, when you have cloud radial, you have that unified client experience. Basically the last time that they will send you an email, a ticket by email will be never right. And it creates a huge efficiency for both the client, for the MSP and really does take that MSP into a full digital relationship with clients. It's very scalable, right? Because the goal, everybody, if you've got more than one client, scalability is a factor. And putting that into a digital experience makes that a very scalable endeavor.
Justin Esgar:
That's awesome. A lot of times I always feel like MSPs are always looking for that single pane of glass. And if I'm hearing you correctly, you're kind of doing that. But for the client side, as opposed to the MSP side, right? The client now has this single pane of glass to be able to access all of the components that an MSP would be providing to that client, right?
Jeff Farris:
It's really single pane of glass for both. And what's interesting is when you start pulling together ticketing 365 backup, all these different reports into a single pane of glass for the client, you also have a single pane of glass for the account manager as well or for that MSP. And being able to work with the clients online and digitally just means that, again, you create that scalability. Not your clients want that single pane of glass too. They don't know what an MSP does. They don't know what even they're supposed to do, and they just know you from your invoice typically, right? So when you send 'em a $5,000 invoice a month, that's usually all the description they get unless you give 'em a QBR or business review. And they don't want those, right? I mean, you don't want the lighting company, you don't want the electric company coming out and tell you about their transformers and poles and how they comply with all the federal standards. And neither does the client want to know about all the things you're doing for security. You're either secure or you're not secure. You're keeping them secure. You're not keeping 'em secure from a client perspective. That's about all they want to know.
Justin Esgar:
I love that you're saying this because I'm literally having this argument with other MSPs I know, and even my own team, because the idea of there was this cartoon that, I mean, it's been out for a long time, but it came back around my desk the other day where it was a person is like, everything's broken. What are we paying for you, paying you for? And then the bottom one was like, everything's been working fine. What are we paying you for? And the idea that the client, I've never questioned my water company or my electric company, my lights just work. I don't care. You're right. I don't care about the transformers, I don't care about the wiring. Does it work or does it not? And I've never asked 'em for a report. And I find it funny that in our industry that is somehow or other the norm that the clients get to press on to be like, what have you done for me lately? Which it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be at all. It should be. You should not give a, what I've done for you lately, you're able to work and make money as a business. Well,
Jeff Farris:
It's actually even worse than that. I mean, because when a client asks what the MSP does and they're looking to that MSP to be their technology leader and innovator, maybe even their VCIO and the MSP goes, let me show you what we've been doing for you. Let me print this report and show you. So I mean, at the end of the day, the MSP is basically using 1940s technology to print and present a report to their clients where they're showing them that they're the technology innovator that's there to help them meet these challenges. It's painful to watch these MSPs do that. And then what's even worse than that when you're having to print and present and basically you're always on a defensive posture, you're always on your back on your heels because the client is kind of ticked off that you're charging 'em money because again, you're either not doing anything or you're doing it wrong.
And so they're just ticked because you even exist that they even need you. They don't know why they need you. And then when you're in there to defend yourself, you basically put 'em to sleep with all this technical data they're not interested in. And at the end of the day, an MSP, because of the way this is structured right now, the MSP never gets a chance to listen to the client and find out where that client's going, what they're going to do next, because they're always in there defending the business they did. They really don't have a good quality experience to talk about the business they're going to do. And so not only is it painful to have to do business reviews based on data that you have to print and present, but it just sets the tone all wrong for anything you want to do down the road. And what we're seeing with the trends in the industry with ai, with automations, all of this stuff that MSP, if we don't change things, the MSP's going to get way behind the curve in the next five years, just hopelessly behind the curve with where their clients want to go with what the MSP can actually do for them.
Justin Esgar:
I agree. There's part of that, and Eric, you can touch on this one because you've said this before about the MSP needs to not just be fixing things and saving money. You need to be able to help the client make money, which means you need a seat at the table, which is kind of like what Jeff is talking about here, which is like, where do you want to go with it? MSPs, I believe, need to really step up their fractional CTO skills, which that is not easy for a lot of people, and be able to bring that to the forefront because I feel like, and Jeff, you're dead on with the printing of the report. It's so archaic to say this is, and you know what you said, defensive and pissed me off a little bit. I got defensive. I realized that I had a client who called me a couple of weeks ago and they were like, the only reason I pay my bill is you answered my immediate text messages. These are, it's so high and I don't know what I'm getting from you, but you respond to me and that's why I'm paying you. And I got defensive about it. Now I'm getting defensive about being defensive. You know what? I'm done. I'm done here. Eric,
Eric Anthony:
I get that.
Lemme play devil's advocate for just a second. Not that I disagree, but I think this needs to be mentioned that traditionally up until now, up until the last probably four or five years, MSPs have been a nice to have rather than a have to have. We have not been in that position of a utility like the electric company. I also think that we lack the standards and the compliance of a regulated industry like the electric company or the phone company for good or bad. But I think what's happened then is there's such a disparity between one MSP and another that they do wonder what they're paying for. Because with the electric company, you don't have to understand electricity to know what you're paying for. You're paying for power to come to the house. And when you go to a light switch for that always to be able to turn on, which theoretically at this stage in the game is where the IT industry needs to be. We need to be more or less a utility because we are dependent on as much as electricity is. Now.
Jeff Farris:
Go ahead, Jeff. Well, so there's a commoditization of it that has to be there. And so do we have good solid equipment? Is it efficient? Is it secure? Those are basically commodities now, right? I mean, an MSP is supposed to design that and deliver it, but to remember, the typical MSP now, if they're doing things correctly, are charging way north of a hundred dollars per seat. Some MSPs are charging more than $200 a seat, and we're talking about a hundred to $200 a seat for a piece of equipment that cost about $60 a month. So the MSP is making more than Apple is on these devices right now. If you go back a little bit, and one of the things that MSP has, again, I believe it or not, I've been around the industry for a while in spite of my youthful appearance, but there was a time before MRR when basically MSPs were called more elegantly VARs and integrators.
So basically they would start each month with zero in sales, and they would have to talk to their client to figure out what to sell them that month to get more revenue. And in that phase, the VAR integrator, MSP was very tight with their client because they were in there trying to solve problems so they could monetize it and pay the bills. And then we went to MRR and things all became about the stack. And so we need to manage the stack. We need to manage automation. And MSPs went from being very customer focused to being very technically focused. And I think what's getting ready to happen is we're about ready to become very customer focused again.
And to go to your point, yes, there does need to be standards for MSPs, and there does need to be a certain base level of commoditization where when one MSP says you're secure, that actually means you're secure, right? Yep. Canada's going to a letter grade. We've got a lot of initiatives here. N 2.0 is coming out. There's a lot of things that will help drive some of that. But from a client perspective, let's think about this from the client perspective. And Justin, that client that talked to you has kind of ticked off, well, let's design this experience from their end back to you, because most of the MSPs today have been, so I call it navel gazing to a certain extent. You're busy looking at your navel, trying to figure out the meaning of life, the meaning of your stack, which tool is better? Which MDR tool do I want?
Do want MDR? You're so focused on those things to basically create that basic level of commoditization that we forget that we're supporting the client as a result of this. And so when we quit looking at our own naval, we quit naval gaze and we start talking to clients, now we start seeing it from their perspective. And we're a service business that really doesn't emphasize service. I mean, since we emphasize ticketing, but ticketing's not service, right? When I contact Amazon support, it's usually something's going wrong, not something's going. And so if you design your experience from the client in, that's where I think things have to come. And so if you think about from your client's perspective, their experience, the way you've designed it right now, Justin is around invoicing and ticketing. And so if they think about you as A-V-C-I-O, it's almost an accident, or it's because you've worked with them in depth because the ticketing and the invoicing don't necessarily leap out and say, I'm a qualified VCIO and I'm going to help you grow your business.
And so you have to go back and think about what a client wants. And it's the same way Apple does that client experience for Apple starts as soon as you open the box and then everything's designed. And then when you get to it, hopefully it just works. But you kind of get way into the path before you realize that maybe FaceTime doesn't do what you want it to do and you have to use another application or whatever it is. But Apple's push that so far down in the customer experience journey that you don't notice it by that point. You're already hooked on the ecosystem. And I think for the MSP, we start from the inside out as to what we're going to do, what tools we're going to use. I mean, if you look at Reddit, it's one post after another. I'm getting ready to start an MP, which piece?
What do I need with, I'd love to see the Reddit post go. I'm getting ready to be an Ms. P, what do your clients want from you? That's the better question to ask. What do your clients want? I'm getting ready to start an Ms. P. What do your clients think that I should be delivering as services to that client, right? Because if you actually ask the client security efficiency is one thing, but I think the next thing is you get into compliance, and most MSPs need to understand there's a huge difference between security and compliance. They're not related at all. And compliance is what their auditors ask about. Compliance is what their board ask about. That's the first step. Of course, clients don't want compliance either. So that's kind of an issue. But then the next step after that is productivity. And so how do I get the most out of 365, the tools that I have, other applications that MSPs don't manage typically, like the CRMs and the phone systems and all that.
How do I get that wired together? Collaboration. How do I facilitate a broad focus on inside that small medium business? Now, a lot of times emerging enterprise clients, that MSP service, how do I make them more collaborative and basically drive things? And then the last thing that every MSP should be thinking about for their clients is how to help that client make better decisions and how to get them better insights to make better decisions, right? Because in the scheme of things, if you want to be VCIO, you have to at the end of the day, deliver outcomes that help that small being in business grow. And that comes from data insights, collaboration, mobility, all the things that what the client wants. But we've been trained almost as an industry to focus on security. And so again, me, if you notice, I've got a couple of soapbox here I can pull out and I can stand on. But the big thing is we don't start from the client side out. We start with our PSA. And to me, that's just the wrong conversation.
Justin Esgar:
I am loving every piece of this. Because what's funny is you don't even, I run an Apple consultancy. So when you start talking about Apples stuff, I was like, does he know? And the ACEs conference, ACEs com, dot com is all about the business side of IT consulting, not the technical, because I'm trying to teach people, and we do that here on the podcast, and we talk a lot about it in the Facebook group. It's not about the technology. The amount of conversations I get sucked into with what PSA should I use, who cares? Just use whatever. It doesn't matter. Because really what you're saying about it being client-centric is so, so important. I've had fights with people about being an official Apple consultant. So there's a program at Apple called the Apple Consultants Network. I'm a member of it, and I have had literal arguments with people who, and they're friends or whatever, but I'm like, you're missing the C in a CN.
You're not being a consultant. You're being the plumber who's fixing the pipes because they said that FaceTime's not working or word's not working or whatever. You're not bringing anything to the table. Now, what's even funnier about this is that particular client who I was talking about earlier years ago, a good friend of mine showed me how he was doing kind of like a QBR ish document, and my client agreed to let my friend who was a consultant, my competition, but in a different area, who's up and down, go through this with them. And I put together a whole plan and built it out. And I'm thinking to myself now, and this is pre pandemic, I'm thinking to myself now, I was like, okay, we bought them new servers, we got them new computers, we got them new wifi and new this and new that. I was like, at the end of the day, they dropped like $50,000 of hardware and labor.
Did they make the ROI ON that? Did we actually produce anything to make them work faster, work better, work smarter? Truth be told, probably not. Sure. They're more secure. And I think every MSP who does Office 365, and I joke around about this saying, all of you do Office 365, stop saying that's what you do. We all do it. Get a different thing to work on. But to say, I do, I secure your Office 365. Why? Because you've gone into their tenant and you looked at that security score thing and did everything that's in the list for you to do. That's not being a consultant. You're not doing for the client. I'm cursing a lot in this episode. Eric's getting mad. He's going to have to bleep me nine times. But you're not doing anything for the client like that. The client doesn't care. The client wants to know, can I get to my email when I take my trip to Aruba, which is not in the United States, and therefore you've blocked it because you've locked down all of our stuff so tight because you tell me we're secure. And then they go to Aruba and it works and they go, oh, thanks for making it work. And then you realize, I didn't do it. I didn't set it up right from the GetGo.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah, I mean, Jeff, I share one of your soapbox is clearly customer experience, and I share that one very deeply because I believe that that is where we have to go, not just from a consulting framework, but because that's how people want to interact. And I think having a customer-centric portal, which is what Cloud Radial is bringing to the market, gives them that portal, that access that they're looking for, that like you said, they get from Amazon and those other places that they're always interacting with, and it gives them the access to that information when they want it, rather than having to wait for the MSP to run a report or schedule A QBR or something like that.
Jeff Farris:
So you're welcome to come help out our marketing team because that's exactly the pitch, right? Because at the end of the day, we had this campaign we ran calling, you Need to kill the QBR, and we got so much trolling in a sense for that, right? People in the industry and what we were talking about was killing the QBR the way it's done today, because they're not client business reviews. They're MSP business reviews. And basically you're reviewing your business for the client when that's not really what the client's interested. And then surprisingly, the client don't, they deferred or don't show or don't pay attention during those meetings. I was talking to one MSP and he said, we've got it all nailed down, Jeff. He goes, you don't understand. We go in there, we talk for 45 minutes, we ask 'em questions and then we pack it up and our clients are fine. I don't think they are. I don't think that's what they hired you for. And that's really what they want to talk about is how you're managing their transformers and wiring. I could be wrong, but I think maybe you're not reading the body cues. Who are you talking to in those businesses? I would love
Justin Esgar:
To know if that guy still had those clients too. That would be the other thing.
Jeff Farris:
Well, then what happens is you find yourself talking to whoever you get pushed down to. You talk to the office manager, you talk to the assistant office manager, you talk to the intern, you keep getting pushed down the stack because you're not that interesting. If you're interesting, they will push you to the ceo. They will push you to the board if you're interested and you have things that will help that business grow or really become more efficient, the office manager will walk and say, look, stop right now. You got to go tell what you just told me to the ceo. If they're not doing that, you're not really having an effective business.
Justin Esgar:
Other think you none
Eric Anthony:
First. And then you have to be strategic to stay.
Justin Esgar:
Was going to say no one can be interesting because obviously as we determine at the beginning of the episode, you're the most interesting person,
Jeff Farris:
Clearly, right? Yeah. I mean that's duh. So if you think about it, when say your sink isn't draining, right? You call the plumber and you probably got a favorite plumber in the book, but if that plumber's busy, you call another plumber and you don't think twice about it because it's commodity. Unclogging, a sink is a commodity service. When you need an agreement done and you call your attorney and your attorney's on vacation, you don't call another attorney. You wait for your attorney to get back from vacation, right? Because that attorney is strategic to you. He understands your business, he or she understands your business, understands what you're trying to accomplish, understands the risk factors your business faces, and understands basically how to engineer your agreements to help you grow your business. And if you look at the MSP, if they can't get into FaceTime or they can't get into, do they really need to call you? I mean, they call you because of your contract, but in the plumber analogy, they just call anybody that understands FaceTime and get that problem fixed. And that's the risk the MSP has in growth, their nephew, right? Their nephew, whoever. And if they can call another MSP and get the same answers that you would give them your commodity. And that's what MSPs are missing, because again, they focus on the tools not on the client.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah, a hundred percent agree. Your next marketing campaign is going to be don't be a plumber.
Justin Esgar:
Oh, hashtag Don't be a plumber. I know.
Jeff Farris:
Let me just create a little controversy here because I have this personal peeve, and again, I'd be curious to see how this flies, but I'm not a big fan of the logos on the shirts, right?
Justin Esgar:
Yes. No, I'm with you. I'm a hundred percent with you.
Jeff Farris:
So if you think about who shows up at your house or at your business with a logo on the shirt, it's never your attorney. It's never your accountant. It's never an interviewee. Basically, when you show up, you define through the way that you communicate subtle clues as to who you are and what knowledge you have. And if you basically build your relationship around ticketing and printed reports and boring QBs, and you show up with your name on your shirt, again, the combination of all of that just pigeonholes you as a guy that's smarter than the nephew, but not as smart as your attorney. And if you want to become that VCIO and you want to become that professional and you want to create that professional relationship with that client, I think you got to dress the part, act the part. And then we feel like with cloud radial, you need to carry that into the digital experience. So when they deal with you, they don't deal with a really clunky ticketing portal or an email. They talk with you with a portal that's their IT hub, not just your portal to submit a ticket.
Justin Esgar:
I'm a hundred percent on board with this, and it's funny because I'm hoping, I think he left, my HVAC guy was here earlier and he was wearing a polo with his thing. And I love my HVAC guy. He is a very nice guy. But yes, it does show a commodity. I make it a point when I used to go into the city more often, pre pandemic, you dressed professionally, I would wear a nice pair of jeans or slacks and a button down shirt or a sweater or something like that. I never, and as much as I'm a huge branding whore, I'm the first person to admit it. I have my logo on a pillow back here, but I have a virtual hoodie. I'll wear that only at home. I will never wear my brand out. I might have it on, I have a patch on my backpack, but my backpack is virtual blue, so it's on brand with what we're doing or close to, but I would never wear it on a shirt. And I a hundred percent agree with you. I was at an event, insert someone's name here, I'm not going to say who, but the amount, there was a big room, probably like 200 MSPs, and I was probably one of three Apple consultants in that entire room. If not, I think maybe one of two. And I knew everybody just by the shirt. They were wearing the gray or black polo with their logo embroidered here that they got at the kiosk in the mall. They bought five for 20 bucks. Knock that off. Knock it off.
Jeff Farris:
Yeah. I get a lot of flack from our own marketing team because at trade shows, if you ever see us at a trade show, all of our people in the booth, all the guys in the booth will be wearing sport coats because my feeling is we need to dress up to earn the respect of our clients. And if I'm advising clients on how to run their MSP, which we are, because every tool vendor in this space is doing that, we ought to go in there and treat them professionally and ought to look professional when we deal with them. Now, again, I get pushback all the time. We want polos with our logos. We want, it's like, no, we're business consultants. We're business professionals, and as painful as it is, we're going to wear a sport coat even in Vegas in the summer, right? Because that's, that's what we do.
Justin Esgar:
Let's do, for your team, we'll just get them printed cloud radial undergarments, so that way the marketing team is happy. We do have that. There you go. And no one has to see it. No one has to see it. And
Jeff Farris:
I'd stand up and show you, but it's probably a little more family show than I wouldn't be comfortable with.
Justin Esgar:
You haven't listened to some of our password? We try. No, no, it's all a mess. Okay, so let's bring it back to finish it up with CloudRadial. So this tool is basically, you built a tool that matches kind of the persona you're talking about with the professionalism front, right? We talked about it being a single pane of glass. We talked about it being your tool is basically presenting the MSPs as a person in a sports coat for their client, giving that client the access that they need to get to this. Sounds wonderful, and I feel like a lot of MSPs would love to get in on this. What is their first step to get in with cloud radial? Every MSP wants to know what's my barrier to entry? What do they need to do to get in? What does it work with? What does it not work with?
Jeff Farris:
We work with five major PSAs, Autotask, ConnectWise, halo, Kaseya, synchro. So we work with just all the major PSAs that are out there today. We work with Office 365. The easiest way is to go to the website, cloud radial.com and sign up for a demo. Again, I'm not a big demo guy, but I've always found every time I do a demo, I get smarter because I understand what they're trying to solve. I understand what they're trying to do, and actually I get educated on things I never thought about. And again, we see that a lot, and I can't tell you how many demos I've done and our team has done, and we get those little head moments when the MSP goes, I get it. I understand what you're doing. And so that's always a lot of fun because again, until you see cloud radial and you understand it from the client side, it's kind of hard.
We put the product together in a way that there's one last thing to leave everybody with, and that's what we call engagement maturity. And so if you think about operational maturity, which is basically how to run your MSP more effectively, more efficiently, more profitably, if you think about that, that's kind of like the way you design a kitchen. So you want your kitchen to produce food that's hot, fresh tastes good, all of that stuff. But if you don't have a wait staff to deliver that food from the kitchen, it doesn't work. And so we built around this concept of engagement maturity that mirrors operational maturity. But from the client perspective and the five levels, it starts off at the chaotic level, which is where most people are today, to be honest, where they're ticketing phone calls, every ticket's a snowflake, everything's a problem. And so from there, you move to structured, transparent, collaborative, and strategic. And what we found in developing this framework is every large MSP, every larger MSP is moving or has moved to that strategic level. And that's where you get out of the, Hey, we're here to fix your printer, or here to unclog your sink to a point of like, Hey, we're here to help you grow. Tell me more about where you're going as a business, and let me help with my experience, help figure out what I can do to help you get there.
Justin Esgar:
That's awesome. Alright, so go to cloudradial.com, click on book a demo. I'm sure in the form what I'll ask had you here, don't say at MSB, say you want to have a demo done by the most interesting man in the world, Mr. Jeff
Jeff Farris:
ERs. Basically, I've heard people just as interesting as myself, so almost anybody that gives you the demo is rock solid, right? It's fascinating.
Justin Esgar:
Awesome. Jeff, any final words before we depart for the day?
Jeff Farris:
No, not really. I mean, geez, stay warm. This is maybe a little topical, but geez, some real challenging times out there, but never a better time to be an Ms. P. The world is getting ready to change dramatically with AI automations again. Again, I've been around this industry a long time and I don't think MSPs are really cognizant yet of how much change is in store for 'em, but at the end of the day, the clients are going to be spending more money because things are getting more complicated and there's never been a better time to be an MSP. So life is good. Awesome.
Justin Esgar:
It's good to, can't think of a better way to end the show. So from Eric, I'm Justin. This has been the All Things MSP podcast. Follow us on all of your favorite podcast apps. You're listening to one right now. Check us out youtube.com/at all things msp, join the facebook group, facebook.com/at all Things msp. You'll find where we got links for merch via T-shirt. We have a lot of new stuff coming in this year, 2024. A lot of fun stuff, Eric and I have a lot of business conversations about to have, and we're going to be bringing you all awesome content. Not only the podcast, check out the live stream on Wednesdays. There's so much going on, I can't even get into it. It'll be a whole nother episode. So from Eric, I'm Justin. That's it. Bye.
Ad Read:
Super Ops is actively engaged in helping all MSPs improve their business. If you did not attend one of their super summits in 2023, all is not lost. They've taken some of the great content shared at those events and turned them into eBooks. The first one is called Skyrocketing MSP Revenue from 1 million to 10 million do's and don'ts with Dave Patel from Build Right. It contains 12 pages of helpful tips and guidance for MSPs to grow their revenue. Check it out. There's a link in the description or go to at MSP link slash Super ops ebook one. A big thanks to Super Ops for sharing this kind of content with the community
Eric Anthony:
From your host, Justin Esgar and myself. Thank you for listening to the All Things MSP podcast. Join the All Things MSP Facebook group or follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. The All Things MSP podcast is a biz POW LLC production. And even though we drink a lot of it, this podcast is still not sponsored by Liquid Debt. And now that you've watched that mess of a podcast, don't forget to watch one of these and go ahead and click that subscribe button so you get to watch more. Yeah, just go ahead and do it. Click the button and then we'll.