Death to the Ticket

[00:00:00] Welcome to MSP Business School, led by our deans of business development, Brian Doyle,

[00:00:08] Tim McNeil, and Rob Rogers.

[00:00:11] Each week MSP Business School is committed to delivering you proven strategies, tips,

[00:00:16] and tactics for MSPs to accelerate their business growth and revenue through better sales, better

[00:00:23] marketing, and true account management.

[00:00:26] Classes start now, so me and my son. Yeah, we're lucky to have Tim back today. He's been like the walk-in wounded for the better part of a month. Yeah, he's been for a while. Finally getting back. But it is good to have the whole team back in the new year. But more importantly than us being here, we've got a great guest today

[00:01:41] and I'm really excited to have him on.

[00:01:43] We've got Mark Olive over at Thread

[00:01:46] and he is an MSP.

[00:03:02] My background, you know, I'm extremely technical and have worked in an MSP for Fixing computers getting dispatched. There's no to reroute hedge fund portfolio managers homes on Christmas Eve You're a young guy and they put you in the line of fire right away. That's right Pulled up for that one That's right. Well one time I was supposed to be sent on a helicopter because one of these hedge fund guys was having a nuclear meltdown

[00:04:22] Unfortunately, I didn't get to go there somebody more senior got to go on the helicopter, right? Right?

[00:05:24] You get that coupled with a few type A hedge funders, right? And that's not an easy battlefield for a 17 year old.

[00:05:29] That's right.

[00:05:29] That's right.

[00:05:31] And then what was interesting is the startup scene

[00:05:36] was really evolving in New York.

[00:05:38] And I had an urge to build something.

[00:05:40] And I tried to pitch inside the MSP.

[00:05:42] It was about 80 people back then.

[00:05:44] By the time I left it, the second time around,

[00:05:46] not because of me right back in as the Director of Service Delivery. Awesome, so that's a pretty varied backstory because it sounds like you went really from the, you know, the more infrastructure, security-based world of the IT group into development. And those are two different worlds, really. You know, at least I've come to realize that

[00:07:00] as I came over here to the vendor landscape.

[00:07:03] You know, it sounds like that really helped round down

[00:07:06] a lot of your skills that you're now able

[00:07:07] to employ in the threat.

[00:08:04] Thread is all about for the listener who might not be familiar with the company

[00:08:05] Yeah, absolutely So thread is a service experience platform and what we do is we help to innovate on both the end customer experience as well as the technician

[00:08:13] Experience and the way that we do that is by providing digital first communication

[00:08:17] So many many people know us as the chat platform. We are we provide probably the leading solution at this point of

[00:08:23] Chat for the MSP industry. It's multi-ten? Draft me an email. So it's all been about removing this overhead work and a big thing you'll hear from us, we are the radical companies, debt to the ticket. Nobody

[00:09:40] likes them. Customers hate them, technicians hate them. And so we focus on that service to punch it into a mainframe in order to store what's the status of the request? And that's all it is. It just continued to move forward and it's just a data store. Like what's the status who's assigned, do you have your time entries to build? It has nothing to do with actually facilitating the communication, right? I think the last innovation in MSB space

[00:11:01] was the email connector from Connectwise in like 1999

[00:11:04] where they're like, oh shit, we can create a ticket

[00:11:07] from an email. Now, all those things that you've just touched upon were so big when I ran my MSP. You know, our dispatcher was continually chasing down people, looking to get those answers, looking to get them done so we can get monthly billings out, especially when we're still in that kind of crossover from T&M into MSP style work. And it was brutal. It also put a lot of power in a seat that wasn't intended to have power, the dispatcher

[00:12:24] as well.

[00:12:25] So, you know, when we were talking just prior to this call, too, and it's also one of the things that led, I know, at least when I had my MSP, to some of our better engineers ultimately wanting to leave, because it was just a burden,

[00:13:40] the administrative side of the job. And a lot of them would leave us for corporate where,

[00:13:44] yeah, they might only be working on one type were in the industry at the tickets, man. When we would have to chase clients, when I was talking earlier about having a make-up time, and you would just guess how long you were at the client, and then we'd send the itemization to the client.

[00:15:00] They would say, oh, he wasn't here for two and a half hours.

[00:15:02] He was only here for an hour and a half.

[00:15:04] Then you have to go through all that mess. It was a lot of wasted time going back to me. I would use that as a marketing tool for my recruiter. I would definitely use that as marketing tool for my recruiter. Rob, that's a phenomenal idea. Now that you're saying it, one thing that I, what we see in adoption patterns is once threat is adopted by the MSP,

[00:16:20] the existing technicians that are already used to the ways

[00:16:24] whether they're good or bad,

[00:16:25] obviously change is always hard. But it was critical. I mean, I would find thousands of dollars in that day that we would have otherwise not captured without a full-time sheet Review with the enterprise level, but man, the level of work it was. I mean, it's 12 days a year. And Brian, you brought up a good point that I think it's worth double-clicking into for the folks that are going to be listening. You said it was a big problem while it was T&M, right? Even though I'm on the project team and I know those projects theoretically out of scope, you'd be amazed how many of them habitually just chose the managed service contract and applied it to their time entry anyway, because that's what they traditionally did for that customer. So, you know, we could probably dive deep into 100 different ways that helps.

[00:19:02] But basically what it sounds like is it's just like, you can do anything you want. But the question is, what do I do? Where we have a very strong opinion. And because we understand the life cycle of a service request, you respond to a thread, we automatically assign you, we start the timer, we change the status, there's so much that's happening, because we understand the nuances of the

[00:20:21] workflow, and we're showing you through opinionated software

[00:20:24] how to run a very successful MSP. The other angle is we were opinionated software and what are the advantages that you have in your data sets? It's a leverage generator of AI and yeah we map it to the right action? So if we can understand that you're asking for a Microsoft 365 license

[00:23:00] and we have all the tools in place like cipp.app,

[00:23:04] where you can go and say, okay, let's check how how can we look forward and help you innovate your law office, your dental office, by repurposing those resources and being a true technology partner? So that's my vision. I think that we're going to see a lot of simple tasks in the next three to five years disappear. And we're going to see a lot of shift of resources move upwards towards more complex problems.

[00:24:21] Yeah, I agree.

[00:24:22] Awesome.

[00:24:23] Yeah, questions.

[00:24:24] I'm glad to see that.

[00:24:25] I don't think there's going to be job loss,

[00:24:27] because I think the market right now is really,