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Eric Anthony:
This episode of All Things MSP is brought to you by Move Bot. Move Bot is the simplest, fastest data migration and moving tool there is supporting over 30 storage and email platforms today, move data like a pro at movebot.io.
So first of all, I gather you have not set up your own asterisk server before.
Justin Esgar:
I have. I have. Oh, you have? I have. Okay. History Time, boys and girls. Back in 2005, I worked for an ISP. I ran the Mac department at the ISP and I was trying to get out of just doing Max and get into VoIP. And so I had spun a asterisk server on the company's big Linux box. And it's true story. I lived in an apartment with two other roommates at the time and I had, what are those? What's the box called? The A TX box that converts ethernet to four wire for telephone, I forget what it's called, like a SIP conversion box, key box, something like that. And so I got one of those from VoIP supply.com or something, whatever. And we had a old telephone in the apartment literal with a push button. Hey kids, back in the day before cell phones, we actually had to physically pick up a phone and there were buttons.
And even before that there was a thing where I had to rotate dials. And so I had ethernet into the AT box, the at box into this one phone. And if you called the asterisk number, our SIP number, it was an IVR that was like press one for Justin, press two for Veeva, press three for Jason. No matter what button you press, it rang that phone. And then if no one answered it went back and put it into the proper person's voicemail and then it would email the voicemail. And it was great. It worked. I was able to do it, but thinking about it on a large scale and being able to do it for multiple clients, no way in hell do I want to do that. It was such, I remember we try to deploy it for a lot of our clients at that internet provider and it took four people to manage that one server, which now that I'm thinking about it, I'm imagining four people literally holding a one U blade try to balance, but that's kind of what it was. Yeah, yeah. All things MSP podcast. I am still your host, Justin Esgar, and with me always still is Eric Anthony. And this is part two of our conversation about outsourcing and things you can outsource as an MSP. Last week we talked about a whole bunch. Today we talk about more. The reason I'm saying it like this is because I'm not really sure where my podcast producer's editing and making the cut, but hey, don't listen to me now. Take a listen. Here it is. Let's go.
Eric Anthony:
There's another type of outsourcing that I think I want to talk about that's relevant to our industry and that is outsourcing your help desk. And I know that there's lots of different opinions on this and I think that there may be a place for it in some instances because Help Desk is kind of a commodity at this point, especially level one, level two, level three, that's something different that's specialized. What are your thoughts on outsourcing help desk?
Justin Esgar:
I am actually a pretty big fan, although I don't do it at Virtua. I know it sounds weird, and I think the reason I don't do it at Virtua is mainly because of the knowledge of the broad stroke majority of outsourced help desk who don't know Mac. And that's probably what it's, but there are a couple people who I know in the industry who have it, and I've tried it out for a while and it's really good if are in your verticals, you have clients that are doing work after hours, right? So let's say your vertical is restaurants and bars and you're a nine to five kind of person. One, why are restaurant and bars your vertical side question, but they're going to have problems with their network or their POS at three in the morning and you're going to want to be sleeping perfect use for a outsource help desk.
Or if you want to start expanding your reach and you want to deal with clients in other time zones, we're based on the East coast, but we do have clients on the West Coast Host, 6:00 PM for them is 9:00 PM for me, and granted, I only have two or three actual users out there, so it's not that big of a deal. But at nine o'clock at night, I don't want to be on my laptop trying to help somebody reset their Microsoft Word password. I want to be watching Loop on Netflix yet again. Good show. So it depends, I think the use case, but I am a hundred percent on board with this actually. I know a couple of consultants who use an outsource help desk for tier one and only do the tier two and tier three stuff, and it's working really, really well for them as a business model.
There is, however, a limitation to the, we'll have to draw it out one day and we'll share it in our new all things MSP Patreon A chart that will explain the cost break parameter for how many endpoints you can have before outsource help desk becomes too unwieldy in terms of a cost factor. There's always that magic. There's always that magic number there. But other than that, I think it's a great, I think if you're a one or two person shop and the majority of clients have really easy, how do I do this? How do I do that kind of stuff? Yeah, I would service help desk a hundred percent. I'm a hundred percent on board with that.
Eric Anthony:
So you mentioned something there that I also want to dig into a little bit, and that is, you talked about time zones and help desk being a great solution for time zones. And that kind of made me think about geos, right? So what should the MSP do when they have a client who's out of geo? What do you do for boots on the ground?
Justin Esgar:
Make friends, I'm not lying. I know it sounds sarcastic, but one of the reasons, one of the best things that has come out of me actually starting and hosting the ACEs conference for the last 10 years is I have boots on the ground. I got four or five people in Seattle. I got people in Portland, Oregon. I got 10 people in la. I got five people in San Francisco. I got people in Denver, Texas, Georgia, Missouri, up and down the coast of Florida. I think the only place I don't have somebody is Montana. Really? I have people in Australia, but these are people who I deal with on a regular basis because I'm in the MAC admin Slack work group as well. So that has helped. But when I say make friends, I'm not go to conventions, go to conferences, go to nerdio K and IT Nation ConnectWise and whatever Kaseya is and all these things, come to ACEs and meet people and make those connections, but keep those connections. And you know what, also the all things MSP Facebook group, which if you're listening to this, you're probably already a group member, but if you're not facebook.com/group/all things MSP and post, I just saw a post earlier today, which kind of gives away when we're recording this. So someone's like, Hey, I'm looking for someone who can do a break fix in North Florida or something like that.
Eric Anthony:
I think Jacksonville, I think it was
Justin Esgar:
Jacksonville, which I know somebody in Jacksonville, but they only do Mac, so I don't know if they can help but reach out. So yeah, you got to make friends. I know. It's weird to say that because as IT people, we tend to be introverted. I don't think I've left my basement in nine days and it's starting to smell down here, but I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. But make friends with other people. Because also the other thing is that it's not just boots on the ground. You're outsourcing your knowledge base. I ran into a very odd specific problem with managed Apple IDs yesterday for a client. It does not matter what the problem is, but as soon as I ran into this prom, I have my internal team and I got John and Luke on a call. I was like, what is this? And they were both, I don't know.
And so as soon as none of us figured out what we can do, I literally grabbed my phone and I texted seven Apple consultants, three smart ones, and sorry, I've been making that joke since yesterday. And had to put the Voltron, combine the forces of all of their knowledge to finally figure out the answer and found out that we found a new problem that needs to be dealt with as a community, but it was putting all these pieces together and outsourcing that knowledge base. This goes beyond what I knew. I have people that are kind of on the inside of Apple. I have people that are on the inside of MDM providers and stuff like that. And I started just making all those phone calls and writing on the information down and became, and I just outsourced my brain basically. I didn't know the answer to this. So those things come in handy. So yeah, boots on the ground and knowledge is definitely things you can outsource for sure.
Eric Anthony:
But that that's where the relationships, the friend networks, and really the only place that you build that, I mean, I think you can do a little bit of it online, but most of it is done at the in-person events like you were talking
Justin Esgar:
About. What I'm going to do right now, just because, and I want to time this against when people listen to this, I'm just going to post on the all things MSP Facebook, who wants to be my friend? You'll get this later. Just see what happens, because when this comes out, people are going to go, oh, that's what he's talking, yeah, yeah. Oh, on the top contributor. That's awesome.
Eric Anthony:
Of course you are, because you welcome everybody when they come to the
Justin Esgar:
Facebook group. I do. Yeah, you can outsource a lot. I mean, to be honest, a true entrepreneur, and I'm not going to suggest that anyone does this in our industry, but a true, true, true entrepreneur would outsource everything. And I am always brought back to the guy who ran the voice department at that internet provider that I worked at who one day I said, what do you want to do in life? Where is this going? Show me, what does asix mean to you? And this has always stuck with me. And I'm telling you, I was 25 when he said this. I'm 43 now, right? So we're going on almost 20 years. And he said, I want to be sitting on a beach collecting checks. And I was like, yes, you're a man. Same like mine, same like heart. That's where it's at. And first off, I know for a fact that that gentleman is not doing that right now, but that's beside the point.
But you could outsource tier one help desk. You could outsource tier two help desk. You can even outsource your knowledge base creation. You can use things like AI conversation later on writing that stuff or answering tickets. If you write certain skill sets within, I dunno what it's called in other PSAs, but in Halo it's called a Runbook or API connectors, like Zapier or whatever. It's to tie things together to automatically run. You could build up your entire business and basically outsource all of it if you outsource how your invoicing works, because you're not sending paper invoices yourself, you're outsourcing it to a piece of software like FreshBooks or QuickBooks or whatever. You're outsourcing the incoming. Well have your incoming go to your outsource bookkeeper and have your bookkeeper send you a monthly report of Are you profitable? Yes or no. You know what I mean? You could legitimately outsource this entire business. And to be honest, if you're doing that and you're listening to this show, one, why are you listening to the show? And then two, I want to interview you on this show at MSP link slash guest
Eric Anthony:
Podcast.
Justin Esgar:
Oh, sorry, at MSP link slash podcast.
Eric Anthony:
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Justin Esgar:
I want to know how you're doing it, but I think there's a lot to be said there, and I think there's a lot more that can here. Here's just an example, content creation, right? Here's Eric and I recording a video on a service that we're paying for Streamy Yard. So we're outsourcing the recording and the graphics that you see here in my name and all the other stuff. And then Eric, if he were smart, would outsource the editing. It's not that he's smart, he's a smart guy. I'm just saying if you outsource the editing and then all of a sudden now all we have to do is show up and flop our mouths for a little bit. And then we have a piece of content which we can then cut up. And I think you were talking about this with Jennifer on the live show this past week, the February 14th, Valentine's Day love show, live show, love show. See what I do there where you can take a piece of content like this and you use some AI software to break it up and cut it up into a whole bunch of social stuff,
Eric Anthony:
Right? Yeah, exactly. And we do more than that. Actually, the transcript for this show is done by ai. A lot of the other stuff behind the scenes is done either with AI or with outsourced. So there's a lot to this, and I think that there's probably more topics that we could come up with around outsourcing. One of the things that I think makes outsourcing much more achievable today is the fact that you can pay people much easier and regardless of where they are with platforms like Gusto and things like that. So there a lot of the barriers to doing it have now been broken down to the point where it makes it feasible for a small business to do more outsourcing.
Justin Esgar:
What's funny is Eric outsources me. I mean at the chorus, I know I'm kidding here, but at the chorus of the core here, I don't work for Eric, I don't work for, I'm not an official employee of Eric's company, but Eric wanted someone to come do the podcast and basically outsource me. And you can do the same thing if you want to create content and you're not comfortable being on camera, but you're really good at writing scripts or really good at writing technical documentation, you can outsource a voice actor or a professional reader or whatever.
The point here is that anything could be outsourced if you know where to go. So I don't have how much time we have left, and I'm pretty sure now we're in part two of this episode, but I do want to talk about places to go get things outsourced. I feel like a lot of people think that when you go to outsource stuff, you're going to find inferior quality products. And I want to tell you right away, I've outsourced a lot of different things in my career. I've outsourced marketing, I've outsourced sales, I've outsourced, I even outsourced the illustrations for the children's book I wrote with my wife years ago. That's an Amazon on print demand. I've outsourced engineering years ago. This is a true story. Years ago when the black trash can Mac Pro was out, the one that looked like a New York City trash can, it had six thunderbolt ports on the back of it.
And I had found a way to actually use IP over FireWire, which was an old Apple technology using the thunderbolt ports. And I made the connections for a client who had only four people working on very, very large graphic files a thousand times faster than going over ethernet. I had a way of doing it over it. And so I was like, this is a brilliant thing. I want to build a Thunderbolt networking doc. And I went and I found an engineer who understood Thunderbolt technology and chip design. I don't know chip design. I know one guy named Chip ate a lot of potato chips, but I can't do PCB design. And Glenn, whilst you can do this now a lot easier online, there's tools online I've seen, we're talking 2010, 2011, but you can find these people online. So my three go-tos, and I want to share my three go-tos, and we'll have links for all of these in the show notes.
My three Go-tos for and quality of what you're looking for is going to come down to who you can vet through these services. It's not that one is better than the other. You need to understand what these platforms are used for and who you're going to find on these platforms. My go-to for a long time was guru.com. I've actually stopped using them, but guru.com was great for a lot of programmers. I found a lot of programmers on guru.com. I personally stopped using them just because I just found another site and I just went to another site. My other go-to website is upwork.com and on upwork.com, I have found video editors. I have found programmers, I have found marketing people, I have found engineers, I have found accountants, I have found, and not only for me for clients as well, and they have so many people.
And what I like about Upwork is you can choose very specific pieces to limit your search down. So yeah, it's 10 to a hundred times cheaper to get programming done overseas than it is in the United States. And when I was doing sign iPad, we would hire programmers in India. But when I got into an app that I needed someone to build a very, very specific niche, and I needed to explain it better, I needed someone who would understand the New York me. I'm not talking about English versus not English. I'm talking about just my mannerisms. So I looked for someone who was a programmer in New York, so that way they would understand the rationale of what I was trying to get at. So you can limit that time. You could limit down whether or not it's an individual or an agency. You can limit it based on the number of reviews.
You can limit it on if they're new or not, whatever, all these things. So upwork.com is a great one, and I still to this day use it. We actually, a lot of the video stuff that we've done on our website and the Mac Mentor website was all done with, and some of our stuff is older, but if you find the ones where I'm in a blue shirt, we have this great video editor who unfortunately got a job at a cruise, so she no longer could do our video editing, but everything was there. And you could actually find, how I find on there a lot is administrative assistants, VAs virtual assistants, people who can pick up the, and I add them to my Slack and I'm like, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this. I obviously have taught them what to do, right? But do this, outsource all this up. So upwork.com is a really good one. And then the other one, which I'm sure everyone is waiting for me to say is Fiverr.
Fiverr for me is really good for a one-off one and done. I'm never going to talk to you again kind of thing. Okay? Right. However, the All Things MSP podcast video and intro that you saw at the beginning, if you're watching this at youtube.com/all things MSP was done by the same person who did the one for virtual computers. They were responsive, and I liked how they worked. I gave 'em the things I needed. They were communicated before they did anything, and then we paid them and they moved on. So for me, the difference between Fiber and Upwork is the complexity of the job and what the job is. I'm not going to go find or look for a programmer on Fiverr because I kind of feel like if you're a programmer and you're trying to sell on Fiverr, you're not a good programmer. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm, I'm misjudging. But I think for one-offs, you want someone to record your IVR for your phone system. Fiverr. You want to find a virtual assistant who's going to work with you for nine to 12 months, Upwork. So there's my sites.
Eric Anthony:
So I think that's a great place to end this episode.
Justin Esgar:
Justin. Yeah, we went a little longer than normal, which is why this is a two part episode. But hopefully you have some ideas to work with here. And if you have any questions about outsourcing whatsoever, find Eric and I in the all things MSP facebook group, facebook.com/group/all things MSP Become my friend by answering my post on the Facebook group. We'll check that out. We have some new things that are coming down the line. We talked about our merch earlier today. We have our new Patreon that's launched, patreon.com/all things msp. Follow us on YouTube, youtube.com/at all things msp like subscribe, hit the bell, leave a review. Look, you all know the spiel by now. I'm not going to keep repeating it though. You may hear it at the end of the show because we have new bumpers that we recorded, which oddly enough we didn't outsource. We could have done that. We should have eaten our own dog food and outsource our own things. But that's it. We're done talking here. Hope everybody has a good week. And that's it for us and all things Ms. P podcast. Bye.
Eric Anthony:
And thanks once again to our sponsor of today's episode, move bot.io. Move Bot is the simplest, fastest data migration and moving tool there is supporting over 30 storage and email platforms today, move data like a pro@bot.io. 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.