Brian J. Weiss: TechStack, Tenant Control, and Redefining PSA Ownership for MSPs

[00:00:01] When an MSP decides the PSA category is broken beyond repair, the obvious move is to switch vendors. What is far less common, but being talked about and far more consequential, is building a replacement on a general purpose enterprise platform. That is what iTech Solutions is doing, and the questions it raises about cost, control, and whether any of it is repeatable are the ones every MSP owner should hear before forming an opinion.

[00:00:30] This is the Business of Tech. Brian J. Weiss, you are the CEO at iTech Solutions. Welcome to the Business of Tech. Thank you for having me. So you started this journey to build your own platform kind of late 2023. But before we get into what you built, kind of walk me through the operational pain when your platform, your PSA was failing you.

[00:00:57] Like, what's the kind of virtual Tuesday that it broke and what it cost you? I'll try to keep it short going all the way back to when we started in 2005. We actually had a development department in-house. We did web apps. So initially we built our own PSA, you know, ticket system. We even built our own password manager documentation system back in those days.

[00:01:26] And so when I started my MSP, I had a lot of flexibility in using software and getting it to do what I needed it to do so that we could operate more efficiently. Fast forward about 10 years, my development department was too busy with cash projects. Cash is king and they couldn't keep up with our needs on our own homegrown solution that we had developed.

[00:01:50] And that's when I found the MSP community and PSAs, these things that are PSAs. I don't even know they were called PSAs. And we adopted one of those and ran it for, gosh, it was about eight years before we started running into issues.

[00:02:12] I think in that eight year journey, what was most interesting about a PSA is while it had some good fundamental workflows built in for what MSPs need to perform on a daily basis. Every time I ran into I wish I could do more with this, I wish this wasn't as clunky as it is, I was literally told to go buy another tool. So fast forward, you know, into our eight year journey, we'll call it with this PSA.

[00:02:41] I found that I had like six or seven tools augmenting the PSA doing things that in my mind, the PSA should have done out of the box. And it became cumbersome to manage and maintain at the end of the day. Now, you look at that, is there like a better configured version of what you had that would have fixed all of that?

[00:03:02] I mean, is it kind of APIs? Is it extensions? Like, is our version of this like an alternate universe that might have you might have gone down if they'd done it a different way? I mean, we went all in with Roost. I spent almost two years. That's really what opened my eyes to the tech debt that was in the industry, mainly because you're right to your point. It's like, well, what about using the API more? Well, most of these platforms, the APIs were barely built out because they were truly an afterthought.

[00:03:31] And so it's not like an enterprise type platform where it's more of an API first mentality. So even when I told myself, well, if I can't do it within the program, I'll just do it outside of the program and just use their API to manipulate the data I need to manipulate. Even that was a struggle. So I think it really just came down to the natural life cycle of software.

[00:03:56] I mean, if you build something in the early mid 2000s and it's 20 years old, it's it's going to have some archaicness to it. There's going to be just inherent limitations and clunkiness that you can't get around even as a developer. Like you just can't wave a magic wand and get rid of.

[00:04:15] And it almost requires like a redevelopment, right, of the platform to really bring it up to speed so that you're not hindered, you know, with with old code, code, if you will. Right. Sure. So so you've described yourself as sort of building your own purpose built ERP. I know tech stack is is in there, too, and they come, you know, they've got a product portion of that. So draw me the line. Like what did what did you buy? What did you build? Like walk me through what you created.

[00:04:46] So so, yeah, I had, you know, I sold our development department off in 2018 because I just saw it becoming really commoditized. We did mainly a lot of web apps and here we are today with everyone, you know, vibe coding their own app. So, you know, I saw something. There's some good reason I was getting rid of it at the time.

[00:05:05] But I didn't want to have to build out a development department in house again, because I what I loved about selling that part of the business off is it allowed me to focus on our core, you know, wheelhouse of services being an MSP. Right. Providing IT services. And and we're only 11 employees. We're not a huge MSP. And and so I'm thinking through what I went through before, because when we had a development department, we got up to like 35 employees at one time.

[00:05:34] I was like, I do not want to manage a bunch of bunch of employees and even build that out. And and I and I decided on dynamics because of the future of where I was going. I did take a look at Halo and got a sandbox of that and figured, well, if I'm going to do all of this work with Halo, why not just do it with dynamics and have it built into Microsoft and have AI literally be a checkbox?

[00:06:02] So I looked around and vetted a couple of different companies, looked at what they had out of the box. TechStack was the one that stood out the most. They were the closest to reaching that goal of what is a PSA look like on dynamics because Microsoft. I don't know that they're ever going to develop a PSA because they take an enterprise focus. And if you look at the dynamics modules they have, they're all very siloed.

[00:06:28] And if you asked Microsoft, I want to replace my PSA with dynamics, they tell you to use four or five of their modules. Right. Which is four or five different databases and data sets you have to maintain and manage. And so what TechStack did is they took the customer engagement module, which is essentially the module that's like customer service focused.

[00:06:51] And and and they're they built they built on top of it all the things that, you know, a PSA needs. And and they were probably about 60 percent of the way there when I found them. And the two areas that they had well flushed out are the two areas that PSA is already suck at and was going to be the biggest hill to climb. And that was project management and sales CRM. So they had those two built out really well. And I said, well, this is awesome.

[00:07:21] Now we just got to figure out what's missing on the asset management and agreements and ticketing system with ITIL features and, you know, kind of the stuff that PSAs do well. You know, let's bring those in. You already figured out what they don't do well. So that's that's why I picked TechStack and also because I didn't want to have to build out another development team. And I really got along with the guys over there. They're a great team to work with.

[00:07:47] Now, walk me through that and like what your team built, like is it schema extensions, workflows, automations? Like what did you build and who owns that portion, particularly as you said, you've sold off your dev arm. Very, very workflow focused. Right. Right. Like and role based. So, you know, we've been we've been coached along the way quite a bit on what what what good looks like.

[00:08:13] You know, we've got a full triage and dispatch workflow and process where we have dedicated employees that just handle that. And what are those workflows look like? We we've got the whole engineer workflow of once something's handed off to them, what are all the next steps they need to perform? Um, we've got our service delivery manager. Right. What are the KPIs that they care about? Our account manager.

[00:08:37] One of the things I'm most excited about for my account manager is they'll be able to see everything going on with an account, whether it's technical, non-technical, because it is a true CRM. It's tracking all the calls, all the feedback, getting pure customer sentiment, you know, versus right now. It's a very clunky process to try to figure out customer sentiment. Our industry tells us, look at the CSAT score, which is like a tiny fraction of what really matters. Right.

[00:09:07] There's going to be a maturity level as well to understand, you know, where is an MSP at in their maturity? Because I don't know that this would be for every MSP. Um, I'm actually on the small size of someone that's, that would be adopting this. It's got to really be for someone who cares about, you know, processes and following them every single time.

[00:09:33] Um, I would say, you know, probably above $3 million MSPs or 20 plus employees is probably the market. It might even be larger than that. Um, but I think the big advantage other than having the built-in workflows that you don't have to manually set up yourself like you do with the other PSAs that follow the best practices in our industry is the fact that it's built into the Microsoft.

[00:10:03] Uh, ecosystem and dataverse. So like one of the process we've built out for onboarding a new client, one of the first steps is getting them added into our partner center, right? Via like the G DAP permissions. And then guess what? The PSA all of a sudden says, oh, we noticed you have a new client here. Would you like to onboard them?

[00:10:27] Um, and it pulls in all their information from their Microsoft tenant to help, you know, initially populate everything about the client. Um, so it's really Microsoft first centric. Um, one of our next steps that we're going to be doing is building out agents for each one of these roles that I mentioned that helps assist them in their process.

[00:10:48] So, um, an engineer, for example, one of the ones I'm most excited about, we're in testing right now with it, um, is this idea that doing a brain dump of something you've worked on for a client, right? You just brain or your brain dumping along the way. We actually use whisper. I'll, I'll give a little, uh, call out to them to kind of track the, the audio, you know, verbal to, to text. And, and the idea that it's a bunch of information you just want to brain dump. You don't have to think about grammar.

[00:11:17] You don't have to think about how you're going to type this out, what order it might be, how clean it looks. And then you give it to this agent and it automatically creates an internal note that is for technical, um, purposes and even gets linked with our documentation system. Um, and then it's a client facing note. So out of one brain dump, you get an internal technical note. That's great for the team and future use to help train AI on how we're fixing things. Right.

[00:11:46] Versus a customer facing note. That's more less, that's less technical. I should say. And it's more like, here are the things we completed. Here are the next steps. Right. Just calls it out nice and even.

[00:12:00] Um, so getting consistency, um, I think is, is a big key item as, as we develop these agents out to where engineers, even though they all have their own little working behaviors are entering consistent sets of data, you know, as they're working with tickets. We'll be right back after this message. Are you and your clients tired of the time consuming ticket tennis of coordinating meetings and help desk calls?

[00:12:29] Wouldn't it be better to automate this process with a tool that connects directly to ConnectWise Manage or Autotask? TimeZest offers scheduling automation that gives you complete control of your schedule and eliminates the hassle of calendar ping pong. As the only service designed specifically for MSPs, it integrates into your workflow and makes scheduling appointments easy on you and your clients. Plus, you can try TimeZest for free.

[00:12:57] Visit TimeZest.com slash MSP radio and use the code MSP radio to get 10% off your first year of TimeZest. And we're back. Now I want to baseline this because I know you're a preferred ThreatLocker partner and you sit on their partner advisory board. So I wanted to check on your relationship with TechStack as a commercial partner. Like, are you a customer? Are you a design partner? Or do you have an interest in the platform?

[00:13:25] Like, what's the commercial relationship there? Definitely customer zero for this platform. Also a design partner. I would say more of an architect and interest as well. So we're currently working on potentially even spinning up another company name, but we're probably going to start out product, just product.

[00:13:50] But we're really developing high level what we're calling an MIP operating system. Being managed intelligence provider, you're leading into that nomenclature? Yep. Yeah. I've gone full in with our MSP on that model, even, you know, customer facing, client facing. But at the end of the day, we really want to be customer zero.

[00:14:13] So what does it look like for an MIP to drink their own champagne or be customer zero as the new terminology is taking place in our industry? So give me a little insight into the costs here. Like, you know, I assume there's some subscriptions, but there's also some dev costs. Like, walk me through the cost structure of going this route. As far as the costs direct from TechStack, we haven't gone to market yet.

[00:14:43] We're hoping to go to market starting next year. We're still in customer zero, testing out what that looks like for a final price for TechStack as the dev and support arm. But as far as dynamics goes, you know, it's obviously there's licensing from Microsoft.

[00:15:01] Now, what's great about Microsoft is if you're a Microsoft partner and you buy both of their package packages, there's the partner success and then the partner success core benefits. I believe it's about four, maybe five grand for both of those packages for the whole year. And that covers up to like 35 employees. So those are your Microsoft licensing costs. I mean, not to mention all the other licensing it comes with.

[00:15:30] You know, you get your your business premium like it just covers so much. So that's what every MSP at this maturity level thinking about using dynamics for a PSA should be doing anyway. So technically, the dynamics licensing in my mind is very cheap from Microsoft. And then as far as dev and support arms, you know, that's where we're trying to understand what does that look like? Go to market.

[00:15:54] How do we how can we be competitive with other PSA platforms that are out there to understand, you know, what that looks like? Because when you think about how this works, it's different than the actual the average SaaS platform. You look at the average SaaS platform that's out there, whether it's a PSA or not, you're pretty much given a production environment. You're working in production. You're making changes in production.

[00:16:19] You know, yeah, you can get a sandbox, right, that you could potentially play with and make changes. But then you have to get the company to be willing to push those over. It's not as seamless as the way dynamics is designed. Dynamics is a true ERP where you do have a dev test and prod environment. So where tech stack comes in and really provides the support is around keeping all three of those environments up to date with Microsoft's roadmap.

[00:16:47] Because Microsoft has their set of features that they're constantly adding to. Then there's the second layer is the tech stack layer. This is really the customized added PSA features layer on top of the customer engagement module, right? Where it's filling in all the gaps so it feels like a true PSA.

[00:17:10] Well, there's a third layer that is your own custom layer where you could say, hey, I love what you guys gave me as a PSA out of the box on top of Dynamics customer engagement module. But I'd like to tweak things just a little bit. I'd like them to work a little different. With a traditional SaaS platform, you'd have to add that to a feature request. Hope it shows up on the roadmap. Hope they develop it out for you to even see it one day.

[00:17:35] With tech stack, it gets added in the queue as a change that you want to make to your environment. And then you own that customized layer. So MSPs have the opportunity to build their own IP on top of this stack, right? And everything lives in their tenant. So they're not at the mercy of a shared SaaS tenant with everyone else, right? Where they all have to be on the same revision of everything.

[00:18:05] Now, I want to get your take on this because you've moved the operational core of your business onto a platform from tech stack who've got somewhere between 11 and 50 employees. They've got no disclosed funding. And they've been recently pitching themselves as early as recently as May. They were pitching as a Salesforce alternative, right? You could make an argument that an organization like ConnectWise has an engineering organization and 20 years of experience doing it. So from your perspective, like what made that smaller dependency the safer one?

[00:18:34] So I don't look at it as smaller per se because it is dynamics, right? Like it's literally Microsoft's dynamics customer engagement. It's an ERP. It's huge. It's got a ton of backing by Microsoft. What I look at tech stack helping deliver is customization on top of the customer engagement platform.

[00:19:00] So it would be the comparison I would use is I've signed up for ConnectWise and they've given me my own on-prem version of ConnectWise. And I've hired a development company to come in and customize the heck out of ConnectWise so it will do exactly what I want it to do without having to wait for feature requests to go through ConnectWise roadmap and get approved.

[00:19:23] So I look at it more as I'm not depending on them as necessarily the sole creator and owner of the product. They're helping me develop out customization of a layer that really sits on my own tenant, which is then ultimately backed by Microsoft, if that makes sense. Sure. I follow the logic there. We'll be right back after this message. This episode is supported by ScalePad.

[00:19:53] There's an argument going around that customer success isn't a department you add to an MSP. It's the operating model and that most shops are running service delivery and calling it the same thing. ScalePad rebuilt Lifecycle Manager around that idea, bringing the information you have about a client into one place. So instead of piecing together the story across different tools, your team can understand the whole client, plan what comes next and manage the relationship more strategically.

[00:20:23] The idea is to make customer success something your whole team can actually operate around and give your clients a complete view of how your work connects to their business goals. You don't have to buy the software to find the argument worth an hour of your thinking. ScalePad.com backslash MSP Radio. And we're back. TechStack's making the claim about 80% of routine user interactions are automated.

[00:20:52] Are you seeing that number yourself in your operations or is that like their number? So right now, being customer zero on this PSA, a lot of the things that you'll see on their website is more focused on their other customers that aren't MSPs. So they have SaaS companies that use their product. So that's why out of the gate, it was primarily focused around project management and sales.

[00:21:21] Those are the two functions that SaaS companies primarily need. As far as to speak to, but to speak to that for as a PSA, 100%. We're building in automation and workflows that didn't exist in traditional PSAs without having to buy another tool. Or even if you bought another tool, there was still some clunkiness to it. Gotcha.

[00:21:49] Well, as we wrap up our time, I kind of want to give the practical advice to the audience here. So like you've spent a bunch of time building on Microsoft platforms even before you were an MSP, right? So if I'm thinking about what you've done, I want to know, is it replicable for a 15-person generalist shop? Or are there areas besides just broad size that you would say like, hey, these are the criteria you need to have before you think about taking this route?

[00:22:19] I would say any MSP that doesn't have the majority of their processes documented probably isn't ready to move to this. I would say alternatively, another way to look at it is if you're barely using a PSA for everything that it can actually do, if you're just using a PSA as a ticket system, maybe to do some billing,

[00:22:45] if you're not using it to its full functionality, probably not ready to move to this. I mean, I would say 20 employees or above is probably a sweet spot. We're doing it at 11 mainly because we focused on maturing our processes a lot. We're using Autotask to its full capability, including inventory control for that matter.

[00:23:12] So it's really the maturity level of the MSP. Now, is it replicable? We're doing all the hard work right now. So, you know, but the thing is an MSP that wants to take shortcuts and doesn't follow processes to a T as they're servicing their clients, it's not going to allow you to take shortcuts. It's going to require you follow processes to use the product.

[00:23:41] So if you don't have those processes in place, you probably don't want to use it right now. Well, there we go. Brian, if people are interested in continuing the conversation, what's the best way for them to get in touch? LinkedIn. Look up Brian J. Weiss. Brian, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for joining me today. All right. The hardest part of running an MSP? Doing it alone.

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