Jeff Farris, Driving Business Growth with MSPs: Leveraging Analytics and AI for Success

[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 let's get started. to the show. Jeff, how are you today? Doing great. The guy's glad to be with you, done the start of a one. I think it's going to be a really good year, really interesting year. It's going to be an interesting year. Yeah, definitely agree with that. Why do you change his comment for sure? It's just a few. But we love to kick off these shows by learning a little bit

[00:01:40] about the person behind the screen here.

[00:01:42] And Jeff maybe tell us a little bit about how you found your way

[00:01:45] into the MSP community and how much it changed and some ways how little it changed in that same process. So, you know, I feel like I've been in this MSP space for 40 years. And then for four, you know, so I mean, it's, you know, it's a very interesting industry that we work in.

[00:03:01] I think that's a great statement though. You know, it changes about MSPs are on the forefront of all of this change trying to adapt and expand and again eight years from now it's going to be AI or whatever succeeds AI right I mean it's not that it's you can't put off this change it's just how to adapt to it yeah yeah I mean we've seen

[00:05:23] that in this industry where somebody's surprised by what they created, right? So that's a good thing or a really scary.

[00:05:27] Yeah, there's a little of both on that.

[00:05:30] Right.

[00:05:31] You know, not often do we hear, I got more than I was expecting, right?

[00:05:36] That's really what you're hearing there.

[00:05:39] Yeah, yeah, especially by somebody that's not even sure how it works internally, right?

[00:05:43] Because again, if you look at the compute power that big ones, the ones that are, you know, really principal. And, you know, yet everybody's, you're asking everybody to pay money to you for the MSP services, but you don't have time to spend with them that you really need, right? And so one way to do it is to charge a premium and become

[00:07:03] that VCIO where they actually pay you for consulting time. And I know you and I travel in some of the same circles and what I'm really seeing is the customers are really enjoying the portal aspect of what cloud radio has to bring to the game.

[00:08:20] Really being able to get in there

[00:08:21] and see their big picture in one single pane of glass

[00:08:25] has been something that I hear repeatedly

[00:08:27] from some of our essentially the VCIO relationship for every client, not just a select few. And so if you can present that information in the portal and help direct it through a client portal,

[00:09:42] that's a huge first step and it becomes hub, right? And so if you think about, you know, we have an HR hub, right, typically, to manage our payroll and manage our staff. And for a small business, now with Cloud Renewal, the MSP can present an IT hub so they can basically

[00:12:04] become that CIO for those small to mid-size customers that don't have one. And we're just, I think, starting in, you probably agree with this, Jeff,

[00:12:08] just starting to see that evolution in the MSPs where they're seeing that they need to do that.

[00:12:12] And they're really stepping up their game to kind of meet the customer where the need lives.

[00:12:17] Absolutely. And I think what's essential out there, again, if I go back 40 years when it was before MRR,

[00:13:27] like you mentioned, Brian, is AI, right? It's not only AI, it's analytics. It's a lot of collaboration.

[00:13:33] How do you deploy these things in scale inside a small business? Again, we're trying to, in our own business, we're trying to link together like a dozen different SaaS systems into a co-heren hole,

[00:13:39] provide analytics on it, and then get AI insights on it. And that's, you point. It doesn't matter how much automation, AI, any of that. I mean, you're always going to have the human touch, right? And I think that's where people sometimes can confuse that point, just because we're heading into the AI world with the automation and everything

[00:15:01] kind of integrating together.

[00:15:03] The human touch and having those conversations

[00:15:05] to help businesses move forward, that's still going to be. three of that person, right? Because you need people that understand the AI issues. But then how you translate that for the client, how to get that benefit for the client, you need people that can see the opportunities inside the clients and wire it up and direct it internally so to create their learning models for their business so they can thrive, right? And I don't think it

[00:16:22] matters whether you're a small business or a large business. I just think everybody's headed It's really, I mean, going back years ago, the idea of getting a PC out of the box, set up, deployed, working with Office installed, all of those things, that really was a very technical process and required dedicated staff to go do that. Now I can send any of my team out to Best Buy to buy a Mac,

[00:17:41] and they're good to go.

[00:17:43] I mean, they're ready to,

[00:17:44] again, the amount of labor and intelligence

[00:17:47] to manage it on the back end on onesie twos. those tools. So, you know, it's a constant learning curve, obviously, for the MSP and the community to stay out in front of those needs. You know, the whole idea and consulting is you have to be what is it 30 seconds ahead of your client to write be a good consultant, right? And that's fricking hard today. You know, I mean, 30 seconds ahead of your clients who are really smart, again, digital natives,

[00:19:03] as you said, it's hard to, you know, it's hard not think on your side, which is delivering outcomes and deliver outcomes you have to listen. If you can create a framework between the MSP and the client where they can listen and then they can figure out the outcomes that the client wants and drive to those outcomes,

[00:20:22] that money is so margin-insensitive.

[00:20:26] When you're installing, when you're selling Dell or you're competing against Amazon, when when we were chatting, you've got some new things coming into Cloud Radial in the not too distant future. Maybe you want to share with our listeners, which might be doing around the world of DNS. So this is really interesting. For a long time, we were just simply connecting clients to the tech stack, and that really was the PSA, right? So you think about the classic ticketing portal.

[00:21:42] It's basically connecting the client directly

[00:21:44] to your PSA through a ticketing portal.

[00:21:46] Well, we've done that well, ticket or the clients had to submit a ticket, they've asked for a report, the MSPs had a print report.

[00:23:01] What we've done now with Scout DNS

[00:23:03] is we're going to be a real interesting solution for our partners and

[00:24:22] ultimately I've been based on the impressions we've seen from clients

[00:24:25] already who have seen this. I mean they're just in love with the ability to