Unlocking AI for SMBs: Data Readiness, Cybersecurity, and Community-Driven Investments with Hunter Jensen and Barbara Paluszkiewicz

[00:00:13] On today's show, we're diving into what small and mid-sized businesses really want from AI, and whether they're ready for it. We'll explore the rising cost of private AI infrastructure, the messy truth about data readiness, and why some MSPs might be better off focusing on the basics. Plus, a fresh take on M&A. Can community-driven investment models reshape the future of business exits?

[00:00:37] Welcome to the Business of Tech Lounge, the live version of the Business of Tech Podcast. It's Wednesday, June 18th, 2025, and I'm Dave Sol. I welcome questions and comments throughout the show, so make sure to submit them in chat. If you have a question, we will happily respond to it in real time. Now I want to thank Sales Builder, our Patreon sponsor whose support makes this show possible. Focus on your IT sales workflow with the power of automation, and visit them at salesbuilder.com.

[00:01:06] That's B-U-I-L-D-R.com. Reminder, I am watching chat and will take questions as they come in. Hunter Jensen is the founder and CEO of Barefoot Solutions, a custom software firm active for over 20 years. He specializes in deploying practical AI, especially generative AI, to boost productivity and data workflows for businesses. Hunter, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Dave. Hey.

[00:01:33] Barb Peluskiewicz is the CEO of CDN Technologies, a managed IT service provider based in Ontario, Canada. A recognized voice in cybersecurity and leadership for MSPs, she brings practical insight into client communication, team development, and the evolving role of technology in business operations. Barb, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me. Hi, Hunter. How's it going? Hey, Barb.

[00:01:55] Now, I'm excited to talk to you both because as we saw live before we came on, you're both dealing with customers, which is super exciting to have someone who's actually thinking this through. And I wanted to actually sort of ask for a real practical place line. Barb, I'll start with you. So, what are small businesses, medium-sized businesses asking for when it comes to AI? Are they looking for automation, customer engagement, internal productivity, or are they just AI curious?

[00:02:22] All of the above. Lots of them are AI curious. For the customers that we have, they're asking how do they use it? How do they implement it? For the customers that we don't have, they're curious as to how they can leverage AI to manage their business more efficiently and keep it scaling and moving forward in a positive direction.

[00:02:49] So, we're getting questions from all over the place, which is great because it's top of mind for everyone. So, it's definitely trending. And, Andrew, I'm dying to hear what are customers asking you for when it comes to AI? Yeah, I think, you know, the last year or two has been all about experimentation and proofs of concept and things like that.

[00:03:14] And now businesses are getting serious and putting serious dollars behind deploying solutions. And so, I think they still have some very fundamental questions, which is where do we start with this? You know, we know that we need to leverage AI. We know that we want to use it to boost the productivity and efficiency of our employees. How do we do that? That's kind of the question that I'm getting the most these days.

[00:03:43] And I'll follow that up immediately and sort of ask, like, Hunter, what are you telling them when they ask? Where do they start? Where are you starting them out? Well, I start by asking a lot more questions, right? And understanding what their use cases are. And what I've been what we've been doing lately, that has been pretty interesting is deploying, you know, self hosted, large language models and rag databases for our customers, right?

[00:04:10] And so that way they can use, you know, something like ChatGPT, but they can share all their confidential information and they can connect it with their other systems and all the rest of it. And so we've been seeing a lot of interest in something like that, where team members can boost their productivity, right? Without leaking sensitive information all over the internet and getting into training, open AI training data and all the rest of it.

[00:04:37] I feel like the same question is useful for you. Like, where are some of those entry points and conversations you're having with customers to get them started? It's pretty much the same as as hunters like, you know, they want to know how to use ChatGPT, how do you incorporate it? So it's a great starting point for us to help them upgrade their cybersecurity posture, because when you do that, you need to ensure that you have data loss prevention in place,

[00:05:06] you need to make sure you have endpoint detection, managed detection and response available because now you're opening up a new threat opportunity out there. Because before when the internet came and everybody would say, oh, just Google it or how do I use the internet? But now the question is, is ask AI. So with all of that information, you want to make sure you're keeping it safe.

[00:05:34] Now one of the themes that I keep digging into is, is that there's a lot of data readiness and data governance that a lot of customers are not quite ready for. But from both of your frontline experience, like how many clients think they're ready for AI versus how many actually are? Hunter, what are your thoughts on like sort of that division of how many people are really ready? Thus far, zero. Okay.

[00:05:59] You know, if an organization has been around for more than five years, they tend to have skeletons in their data closets, right? They have redundancy problems. They have just dirty data that needs to be cleaned. Their governance policies are not in place. And so oftentimes for companies that have been around for a little while that we have to start there. And, you know, with it's garbage in garbage out.

[00:06:28] And so we have to get the inputs in a place where we can get good outputs before we start, you know, deploying AI solutions at any business. New companies, that's a different story, but they don't have any data. So there isn't as much to do there. Now, Barb, you brought up the cybersecurity element of that. Like how much pre-work are you having to do to get customers ready to work with the AI from a data perspective?

[00:06:55] Are you confident that the customer, I mean, you lean into this or your customers are probably already ready. But give me a sense of the landscape of that security portion. You're right. Our customers are ready because it's all part of our offering and being secure for what's happening right now. The ones that aren't ready, they do have to have the cybersecurity posture in place. So essentially they do need endpoint security. I made a list. They do need to have MFA in there.

[00:07:24] You know what? They do need to have a seam for like logging and investigation because in the event that something were to happen, compliance requires all of that.

[00:07:34] They also need to go through a vendor risk review and they need to make sure in their contractual agreements that they have that needs to be reviewed by legal, that that's all incorporated in there, that they're using AI and they're being open and transparent about what they're using AI for and the information that's going to go in there. And then with that, you also have to have user training involved in there and security awareness.

[00:08:02] So it's pretty much what you need to secure a network. But now you have to make sure that all of the policies, procedures that you have in place, all of the boundaries that you have in place, everything that you do to keep the data and the information safe in your environment and in your customers environment is going to adhere to AI policies and procedures because you don't want another area for data to sprawl to.

[00:08:33] Now, I got to ask because you talked about deploying models directly for customers, those specific private models, but there's a cost and complexity of deploying infrastructure to run those private models. How do you think about that cost and complexity? And like, is there a breaking point for customers between using public LLMs versus needing the private models?

[00:08:56] Yeah, so to me, it's really about the information that you need to feed into the LLM. If you're making marketing materials, as an example, ChatGPT is a perfectly great solution for that. And I wouldn't recommend anything other than that. But when you're dealing with a lot of confidential information or any confidential information, or you need it to connect to some of your other systems, that's when these private deployments start to make sense.

[00:09:23] And when you think about it from a cost perspective, it's actually fairly similar or even less expensive to host it locally than to pay for credits. Like if a system is getting used massively, a third party system, those credits are going to start getting really expensive. And sometimes having your own hardware actually ends up being more cost effective. You have to do the analysis about what hardware you think you're going to need and what kind of usage you think is going to be there.

[00:09:52] Because, you know, if you think about it, you don't pay for credits when you're hosting it yourself. You just pay for the machines that you need to run it on. And so there is actually like kind of an inflection point where it would be more expensive to pay for credits than it would be to actually host this ourselves. Now, it feels like you've done some analysis on that. Are there rules of thumb, knowing that each customer is different, but are there rules of thumb that you've thought about the way that you think about it in size or usage? I bet you've got an instinct already for this.

[00:10:22] Give me a little bit of sense of where that might fall around. You know, I have and I am also still trying to figure it out. But what I can tell you, I actually had a meeting about that this very morning is that if we're running an LLM and we think we need to have about 20 or 30 concurrent users, we can do that on Azure for about $1,000 in hosting costs, which is not that bad at all.

[00:10:48] And when you compare that to like, you know, paying for credits for all of your users, you exceed that very quickly if you're using some of the state of the art models. Gotcha. Now for my listeners and watchers, if you've got a question, throw it in chat and I will definitely bring it up and we are happy to answer it in real time. Now, Barb, you mentioned the security pieces of this and I'm kind of curious, how are you approaching those conversations about data ownership, privacy and sovereignty?

[00:11:16] And I'll call you, you're a Canadian based provider, so you may have different thoughts about data being based in the US versus not like, how are you approaching those conversations? Very transparently. Okay. Because you have to. CDN technologies, we're Canadian, we like and enjoy using Canadian vendors and suppliers.

[00:11:40] So in the event that there's a supplier that you, we have to use or our customer has to use that is based out of Canada. Those are conversations that need to be had. You're going to have to bring me back to what the question actually was. In my brain, I was like, remember to say this, this and this?

[00:12:02] You don't have to be that formal. So what I'm curious though, is like there's particularly around one of my areas of interest in this space is the idea of sort of data ownership and privacy of that. Like, and there's a spectrum of that. Like, so as Hunter mentioned, there's some data that you don't have to worry about. You're building marketing materials. That's not necessarily something you need to worry about.

[00:12:23] And some organizations go all in on data privacy and ownership, even when they don't necessarily need to. So I kind of wondered if there was like a framework or the way that you approached having conversations with customers about like their data ownership and their privacy concerns. Yes. Don't use the free stuff always by the licensed version. So that's basically it. I know that Hunter and I do two to two different types of things.

[00:12:52] When we're talking with a customer about chat GPT on the pricing that's involved with that, you know, there's a $25 per user subscription, there's a $200 and then there's a $2,000 subscription. So which one do you fall into? And as for privacy, that's where all the security awareness and the training comes into place. You need to have a boundary.

[00:13:17] You need to have an acceptable use policy of what you're putting into chat GPT and what you're not putting into chat GPT because essentially you want to make sure that all of the data is safe and it's in one secure location and housed one day. Because it's the company that gets exposed when a vulnerability happens.

[00:13:43] Gotcha. Now, I'm starting to know a little bit of like about the particular uses of let's talk about some of the chat bot technologies. Like is it more are the customers when you're setting up these models? Is it more an opportunity for them to work directly with the model? Are they starting to look at automation workflows? Are they considering putting that out to be frontline conversations with customers? Like how are they considering the way that they're going to deploy?

[00:14:09] Yeah. So right now what I'm seeing is that they want to interact directly with these models in a chat interface. Reason being they don't trust them yet. And so when you start talking about automations, who's watching that? Right. That's happening in the background. And they're worried that things are going to come off the rails with these automations.

[00:14:38] And so right now what I find is that everybody just wants to work with it. It's about just being more efficient and more productive in your day. If you can save, you know, a few hours a day even on research or analysis or reporting, that's what that's really what they want to be using it for. Which does not align with a lot of the hype that we're hearing in terms of what gets reported in kind of mainstream press.

[00:15:06] And particularly if I talk about like, you know, I just reported for today's show, you know, Andy Jassy is coming out saying, oh, it's directly going to going to transform roles. It seems like in the field, this is a lot more, a lot further away from that are the business owners you're having. And Barbara, I'll throw this one to you. Are the business owners you're having conversations with? Are they literally just trying to wrap their heads around what it can do for them? Or are there even a subset of this that are starting to say, oh, I can start automating away particular roles or responsibilities within my organization?

[00:15:36] All right. I'll answer that question two ways for the business owners. It's more how can I how can I use this? So how can I and on the first thing that I say, use it as a therapist, because that's what the young people are doing to help them with their decision. So when you don't know how to say, hey, you owe me money, you know, you owe me money for a long time, like, you know, put that into chat, CPT and say, how would I phrase this professionally?

[00:16:03] And it'll give you a response, how to respond to emails quicker. You can put in like three, four thoughts and then chat GPT will generate a response. So as soon as they see that, then all of a sudden they're just like, hey, you know what? I could use this like, you know, this saves me a lot of time. So they're experimenting with it in the in the beginning on how to be more customer centric and friendly and to get things done. That's what I'm seeing. And they're learning how to do it.

[00:16:32] They're also using it to quickly skim through articles. So essentially, when you get that big, long legal document or that big, long contract that you have to sign, then essentially what are the main points? So you don't have 24 pages to read. Maybe now you only have like four or five pages to read, like just to get the skinny on the article. That's how I'm seeing it being used by our customers.

[00:16:57] What I'm also seeing being used is they're wondering how to implement it. Yes, they like the chat bots. No, they like the chat bots. But what chat bots and the A.I. is good for what I find is the ones that use it to help the sales process come along. Like even in our MSP, we're working on it right now. And it's not so that the customers interact with the robots.

[00:17:26] That's the last thing that I want or have them go through an A.I. automation beforehand. What I want is to make sure that when they call in, that the person who answers the phone, that they're saying they're reminded to say their name again. Reminded to ask them, is there anything else that I can do? Reminded them to say to remind them to ask for a referral. Like, you know, do you know anyone else that could use our services?

[00:17:52] Like, you know, to remind them to use a Google review because, yes, they have their papers and their templates to do this. But it's nice when you have a soft phone and it's on your screen and you can see it and you can leverage the automations of A.I. to help make the customer journey move forward in a positive direction. Gotcha. Well, it's distinctly sounding like the hype that I've been reporting on is a little disconnected from what's actually happening in the field. Now, I want to pivot. I know I could go for hours more on A.I.

[00:18:22] And listeners, if you have additional questions, make sure to throw them in chat. I will definitely make sure that we use them during the time. But I want to actually pivot a little bit to talk about some of the developments that I've seen recently over on the fundraising side. Fundraising side of things. I've been reporting a little bit around the shift in investment dollars, particularly from the VC funds that are a little bit less available in early seed rounds and moving a little bit further.

[00:18:48] And particularly as we look at the MSP space in the past two weeks, two different organizations have gone out with a very much a community driven model of that. The first I reported on recently was Empath, who's a vendor who went out with a $2 million raise, all done by insiders, by MSP. Oh, former owners, MSP insiders, experts in the space that were, you know, registered certified investors, but were investing directly.

[00:19:14] And then on top of that, recently the MSP owners group is pushing a new model, the idea of community driven acquisitions that aren't private equity driven. And what was interesting to me is, is to think about this as a kind of an emerging space. And I wanted to sort of start with this. Barbara, you throw out this interesting idea that the potential changing landscape, we're going to help smaller MSPs kind of pay the financial freedom forward a little bit.

[00:19:42] What's your thinking on this kind of shift and potential new option in investment? All right. That's a loaded question. So I think it's a good question. Well, there are when you look at the stats and I listened to that empath podcast that she did was fabulous. I think what Spencer is fabulous and he's always been very kind and very pro MSP. And the challenges is that lots of MSPs, they're small.

[00:20:12] Like, you know what they're so when they go to sell or invest like, you know, the bigger companies, the private equity companies, the VCs, they're not really interested in. That MSP that's like sub 1 million because the majority of them are they're really, really small. And I think the other stat was when you were talking with someone with. Oh, I forget what his name was. But you said that, like, you know what? There's 80% of the MSPs that are out there.

[00:20:42] Do 30% of the MSPs that are out there do 80% of the business. So you have like, you know, these like small MSPs that have their profits were profitable. Some are not. And you have like these chunk of MSPs that are doing really, really well. And now you see them that they're all joining forces together to become like these MSP titans.

[00:21:03] And the part that's good with that is usually when you do get asked to join an organization like that, it increases your profitability because lots of times the ability for them to buy from the vendor is that they are getting cheaper rates. So that part increases their profitability.

[00:21:23] So then when they truly go to like hand in the keys and to get the watch, then essentially they're making more money and they can invest so that they can get another rollout down at the end. So they get a little bit of cash now. And then, you know, when there's another flip, they get a little bit of cash later.

[00:21:42] So I see a lot of that happening and I think it's good because our, the MSP community, there's not a lot of young MSPs that are out there. If you look around, they've all been in the space 30 years, 14, 40 years. And like, you know, like they've done their time and they're ready to, you know, enjoy cocktails on the beach 24 seven. I'm not sure that the young people in this space are calling themselves MSPs, which is maybe some of why we're not seeing them as much.

[00:22:12] Now, Hunter, I wanted to ask you a little bit, particularly as someone who doesn't live and breathe the managed services space, but instead looks at this sort of from the development of the ISV and the software side of things. Are you starting to see shifts in the way investment is done by private equity groups, VC groups, seed groups? Like, are you starting to see a change in the dynamic of the way people are raising money? Very much so. Yes, I am. What I'm here's what I'm seeing.

[00:22:43] I'm seeing that VCs are not investing in pre-revenue companies at all right now. And one of the reasons for that is it's so easy to build products now. You don't need a million dollars in nine months to go build your MVP. We have tools that make it much cheaper and much faster.

[00:23:06] And so you basically have to build and get customers before you're able to really attract VC investment at all. And I'm hearing that from multiple clients who I'm really hoping they find some funding because they're going to make its way to paying for development with us. But it's a real struggle.

[00:23:31] I am seeing kind of other avenues outside of VC, like particularly angel groups that are doing more seed investments. We're not seeing a lot of the like community stuff that they're seeing in the MSP world.

[00:23:49] Although I will say it kind of reminds me of crypto in terms of like, you know, being able to let anyone kind of invest in your company and get and get a piece of equity in it and kind of making it more available to non like very savvy investors. Well, to be fair, Hunter may have just turned off an idea. These community driven ones are still qualified investors.

[00:24:19] Barb mentioned the Empath one that was, you know, they use Y Combinator safe notes to get, you know, people that come from this space. But you may have turned on to an idea that somebody may elicit of the idea of doing this with crypto. Crypto. You know, it is certainly a use case that was always talking about the blockchain that makes some may actually made some sense to me was smart contracts versus the idea of that, you know, changing out for money. Right. Now, I want to sort of sort of say, Barb, I'm going to throw this a little bit away.

[00:24:48] Like, are you finding that a lot of owners, I mean, you think about this as an owner yourself and you're talking with other MSPs. Are they undervaluing or overvaluing themselves when they think about the business value of their own organization in kind of that M&A or investment context? Well, the ones that I see, they're constantly overvaluing themselves. They think that, you know, they're making so much money and they're going to get these multiple massive payouts.

[00:25:16] And then they realize that that's just not happening. And in Canada, with all of the taxes that come into play, once that comes along and if they weren't managing their shareholders loans and dividends along the way properly, then essentially they realize that, oh, my goodness, I can't even sell like who can I even give this?

[00:25:40] I'm seeing a lot of that with the smaller MSPs because lots of times, you know, being female in the IT space, there's lots of people that have growth through acquisition and marketing campaigns. And and I do, too. And essentially lots of times, you know, that they're shopping and sometimes on the first person that they see,

[00:26:04] sometimes on the third person that they see. And when we go through the numbers, I'm just like, oh, did you know that you're going to like have to pay like $50,000 when you sell? And they're just like, what? Like it's a whole it's challenging when you have these tech turn owner operators that are very proud of what it is that they do. They're customer focused, they're customer obsessed and, you know, they've been making money.

[00:26:30] But when it comes to cash out, they're not getting a 10 time multiple or three time multiple or two time multiple. And when you go through the numbers, they realize that, oh, my goodness, I still have to work. But as I wrap up our time a little bit here, I kind of want to ask one other sort of fun question for the two of you. We're coming into the halfway point here. We're almost ending into Q3.

[00:26:52] Is there a particular trend event or something that you're keeping an eye on for the second half of this year that you think is is an important thing to keep an eye on? Hunter, I'll throw it to you first to see if you've got something in particular looking for. Oh, man, I was really hoping you'd start with Barb so I could think of something clever. You know, I'm in a eye just up to my neck every day.

[00:27:18] I read voraciously about everything that's been coming out.

[00:27:24] What I see in Q3 and Q4, and I've written some about this is it's time now to get agents operational, not just personal use, but AI agents at the business level scale, like across the entire operation.

[00:27:50] Right now, we're not there. We just it's been piecemeal. It's been error prone. But one of the one of the signals that I think is a really strong indicator that that's what's happening in the next two quarters is I don't know if either of you saw it. I think it's because I'm a beta user for open AI, but they just launched connectors.

[00:28:15] And so now you can connect your chat GPT account with your Dropbox and your Google Drive and your CRM. And like they launched with like 20 or 30, 30 third parties that you can connect with. It's not don't go looking on chat GPT. You probably don't have access to it yet, but it's it's in beta and it's coming out really soon.

[00:28:41] And to me, that is the the grand unveiling of like actually useful AI agents. So that's what I'm watching. So that demands a bit of a follow up before I ask Barb for hers because because I want to know, like, do you think all the pieces are there? Like, do we have the pieces to truly build the agentic AI? I'm with you that it's not actually here yet. But are the pieces in place? Are we still waiting on, you know, certain can build the capability?

[00:29:06] So so the biggest piece is MCP model context protocol, right? It is the new rest for the technical folks in the crowd. Rest is how you describe an API. MCP is how you talk to models and it's and it's doing the same thing that APIs did. It's making them available across the Internet. And when that happened. Now we're ready. That was the fundamental missing piece.

[00:29:35] And that happened in the first half of this year, right? I mean, it's been out for a while, but the actual proliferation of MCP is now we are here. And so now we can start building this thing. That's what I appreciate your instincts being there because I will point out for listeners of the Daily News podcast. I've been reporting both on the rollout of MCP and the connectors you talked about have been covered on the show. So at least I'm keeping an eye on the right stuff. I appreciate the validation there.

[00:30:00] Barbara, like what are you keeping an eye on for the second half of the year as kind of the thing that you're keeping, you know, that most interests you to develop? Ooh, I'm looking to see how at the vendors that are supporting the MSP community, what it is that they're doing to advance their products and the solutions that we're using to help our customers move forward in a positive direction.

[00:30:26] Because everyone seems to be offering AI this and AI that new and improved with AI. But what exactly is it? And so I'm looking to see how that plays out and trends because at the end of the day, my job is to keep my customers safe and to keep them moving forward in a positive direction. And the tools that I use from my vendors help that.

[00:30:53] So as they're implementing all of these AI automations, are they still going to have a human behind it? Or are they just going to be giving me a chat GBT interface to use because GBT stands for generative pre-trained transformer. So is the human that's behind the chat bot, like, you know, are they pre-trained or that they someone that they're just like, I'm feeling a bum in the seat to keep the chair warm, things like that.

[00:31:23] So I'm looking to see what the vendors do, what they implement on how to keep everyone safe as we move forward in this new world. Well, in a way, we're going to combine the two because we are starting to actually see conversations happen about MCP rollout across MSP vendors that is starting to be announced. So the two may actually come together. I'm going to know I can go all day long. Thank you to all of our new KICK listeners. This is actually new for this broadcast. So we've noticed a few updates for you. Welcome aboard those of you on KICK.

[00:31:53] Now, I can go all day long, but I want to be respectful of both of your time. Barb, if people were interested in reaching out and talking and continuing the conversation, what's the best way for them to do so? Oh, hit our website, CDNTechnologies.com. And Hunter, how can people reach out if they have additional follow ups or questions? Yeah, please do reach out. Email me, Hunter at Barefoot Solutions.com.

[00:32:16] If you say, hey, I heard you on the Business of Tech podcast, you will absolutely get a response and I'd be happy to chat with you. Well, really appreciate you both joining me. It's been fun conversation. I'll have you both back again soon. Now, I also want to tease. I mentioned this, but I mentioned the end of discussion with Andrew Bolton.

[00:32:34] He's the CEO of Tech Rescue and he shared his innovative approach to delivering tech support tailored for seniors, emphasizing the importance of empathy and human connection in the way they deliver customer service. He discussed with me how his unique business model not only addresses the tech needs of that often overlooked demographic, but also proves profitable, which I will admit I was skeptical at first.

[00:32:59] And then he talked about the way his subscription based service actually prioritizes personal interactions over automation and he's able to deliver it. Here's a preview of that interview. Tell me a little bit about the size of the organization, but then tell me like what's the unlock here that's helping you figure out how to run it and actually make some money.

[00:33:21] So currently we have about 67 employees and outside partners and vendors, and currently we're just shy as of today, just a couple numbers shy of a thousand end users right now. So we are going now is this Facebook numbers? Absolutely not. Are we sure are we are we on target?

[00:33:43] Actually, we're ahead of target based off of my board of directors, you know, their initial, you know, flow through processes are, you know, we're ahead of schedule, which is fantastic, especially in the economy that we're possibly facing now. We offer to we offer two subscription models, we offer a $50 a month and a $400 a year annual subscription. Now, where you're thinking about in terms of the profitability aspect is. We have certain call from we have certain call time metrics.

[00:34:11] So let's say, for example, within the first 15 minutes, I need to establish the root cause and automatically a step by step solution when we gain access to your phone, tablet or laptop. If you have Wi-Fi data connection, I can get to you. If you can get to me, I can get to you. Period. End of discussion. Sure. Within those metrics, I have within a certain let's say within an hour, I know where our profitability margins are and I know where our red zones are.

[00:34:39] So we have our standard operating procedures to establish the problem root cause and a solution. And if it goes past that, there are steps in place to bring it back. If it escalates past that, a project manager steps into place and it circles it back to the original problem. And then we move forward. If we can't move forward within a certain timeframe, we then are looking at a one to seven ratio in terms of our buyback time. Right. So we call it the grandpa roaming grandpa.

[00:35:07] So for everyone that gets lost in the weeds, we need seven calls to go within a certain timeframe to stay within the daily profit margins. Now, everything else in terms of the profitability, we don't have any operating costs whatsoever, except for our call center, our legal aspects, our sales team, marketing team and our basically our salaries. So we don't have an office, as you can see. I'm working out of my United States home.

[00:35:35] I also travel abroad so I can do this remotely and that costs a lot of costs. He brought some really interesting ideas and a very data driven approach to the way that he's delivering the service. Rethinking what we often think of as a space where you struggle to make money. I found it really insightful. It drove some of my thinking on the way that I might build a new service provider today. Patreons got that early. It's a benefit of supporting the show.

[00:36:04] If you visit patreon.com slash MSP radio, you sign up and get access to my interviews early. That interview is available right now, but my where what I would do in with building an MSP in 2025 is available for my Patreons drops this weekend on the YouTube channel and podcast feed. Now I want to thank sales builder, who is our Patreons sponsor who support makes this show possible.

[00:36:27] Focus on your IT sales workflow with the power of automation and visit them sales builder.com that's B U I L D R. Vendors. You too can get your name mentioned on the live show. It's a simple monthly subscription. Visit patreon.com slash MSP radio to learn more and listeners. You can support the show like share and follow on your favorite platforms or as I mentioned support directly on Patreon with our give what you want mom.

[00:36:56] You actually set what you think the content is worth and by doing so you get access to my content. If you have a question or listening to the recording either put it in the description and chat below or send it in at question at MSP radio.com. Answer it live on the show. Thanks for joining me for the business tech lounge. I will see you next time. Bye. Bye.