38 Held Meetings Per Month?? It's Possible for Your MSP | Guest: Jeff Newton

[00:00:00] Hey, before we get into this interview, my team and I, we're going to be in person at the Grocon 2024 event in St. Petersburg, Florida. It's December 3rd through the 5th. We're going to be recording with amazing MSPs like you. And if sales and marketing is something that you need to be better at, and let's face it, all of us MSPs do, then this is the event you can't miss. So join me and my team there. And by the way, it's completely free.

[00:00:39] GrowCon, the industry's leading conference dedicated to one thing, and that's helping you grow. The real value for us here is actually putting an action plan together to achieve the goals that we're setting out for 2023.

[00:00:59] People will definitely take the time to invest into you and let you know, give you some ideas about how you can improve and get better in what you're doing.

[00:01:12] We're going to help you do one thing and that's achieve your dreams one step at a time.

[00:01:29] They're unwilling to go through the valley of despair to get to the point where you'll start to see those returns.

[00:01:34] And you have to be committed to risking at least six months of capital to start to see that it's working anyway.

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[00:01:48] Hey guys, Damian Stephens, host of MSP Mindset. Today I am blessed to be joined by Jeffrey Newton, founder of SIFT.

[00:02:01] Would you like to grow your MSP so fast that you ended up breaking operations?

[00:02:08] Jeffrey did just that and added $3 million in recurring revenue in just 28 months.

[00:02:16] Now, after that, he was tapped to go on to the operations side to help fix the issue that he helped create.

[00:02:23] If you'd like to break your MSP in the same way, make sure to listen to this episode.

[00:02:29] But if you would, Jeffrey, tell me how the heck you went from tech to the other side of the coin and 18 years at how many MSPs?

[00:02:40] It was five different MSPs, but seven different times. So there were a couple of boomerangs in there back and forth between a couple of the same players.

[00:02:48] So the stories, maybe it's interesting, maybe it's not. I don't know. For me, it was a very natural evolution.

[00:02:55] I came out of college. IT services and managed services is all I've done professionally.

[00:03:01] Right. So it's been my whole career. And I like to explain it as I was always afforded opportunities I didn't deserve, but by people who knew I wouldn't let them down.

[00:03:12] And so the role opportunities were always sort of like one step beyond where I actually was.

[00:03:17] But I understood what was necessary and willfully stepped into those opportunities.

[00:03:22] And that starts at field technician, right? That was my first role in MSP and then kind of graduating up in their structure to the support desk.

[00:03:32] Did support desk for a while and then naturally progressed then over to their project team, implementation team after maybe two years on the support desk, kind of do an escalation, that kind of stuff.

[00:03:43] And then implementation team was like, you thought you were good until you got kicked out on the island and you were on your own and you were doing full rip and replaces, you know, and when things went wrong, you really figured out if you had the chops or not to do it.

[00:03:57] That's actually where I started to see the superpower that eventually led to the sales path, which was I was never the smartest tech in the room.

[00:04:05] I was never the smartest technical resource.

[00:04:07] I couldn't pass any certification test that I attempted to take because I just don't take good tests.

[00:04:12] And so it was pretty apparent early on the first three to four or five years that like that path was going to be a challenge for me if I really wanted to pursue it because of all the traditional means that success created there.

[00:04:25] But what it also then did is it forced me to get really good at people, right?

[00:04:30] Like I didn't need to be the smartest tech in the business because I knew who the smartest tech was and I knew how to unlock that code of people to get them to want to help me,

[00:04:39] to get them to want to help save the day, to get them to help want to teach me and coach me and mentor me and make me better.

[00:04:46] And if I just encapsulate that as like a rinse and repeat, that's what the first 10, 11, 12 years of my career was ascending the technical path.

[00:04:56] There was two years in there actually that I was a network operations manager.

[00:05:00] I was responsible for 26 people and all sides of the business.

[00:05:03] I wasn't even like responsible for myself.

[00:05:05] I had no business running a team of people, but I had good instincts.

[00:05:10] I knew people.

[00:05:11] I could communicate well.

[00:05:13] And I cared deeply, perhaps more deeply than, you know, others even wanted to.

[00:05:18] And I think that was a component that never really got lost along the way as well.

[00:05:22] And so it was a really natural ascension of every opportunity that came open.

[00:05:27] I said yes to, even if I knew I wasn't ready for it.

[00:05:29] And then I figured out how to get ready for it.

[00:05:32] Um, and I think that, not, I think that I know that that came mostly from my father.

[00:05:37] Cause he always told me to show up ready for the job that you want, not the job that you have.

[00:05:42] Right.

[00:05:43] And so in my mind, it was always something beyond wherever I was, uh, each way.

[00:05:48] And, you know, naturally that was very much decoded through the people part.

[00:05:53] Um, and anyone that works with techs knows also that, you know, techs aren't the easiest safe to crack at times.

[00:06:01] Right.

[00:06:01] Um, and to me, that was a great training ground for what eventually turned into a little bit of a, a middle ground.

[00:06:09] There was four, four-ish years or so where I was kind of in that account management VCIO kind of overlap before the industry started really using those terms a lot.

[00:06:19] Um, which really just translated to a highly capable technical individual that was equally as capable at holding business conversations with business people.

[00:06:29] Right.

[00:06:29] And really thinking long-term and strategy.

[00:06:32] So I sat in that zone for a couple of years, like I said, and that's ultimately where the whole, uh, realizing I was on the wrong side of the coin literally, uh, came to me where during that VCIO timeframe, maybe two and a half ish years there.

[00:06:46] Uh, I was getting taken on every single sales opportunity, sales meeting, sales call.

[00:06:51] Didn't matter if it was on person in teams or whatever at the time, just to play like the subject matter expert, if you will, of helping businesses understand.

[00:07:01] What this black box of managed it was because everyone looks the same on paper.

[00:07:08] Everyone says the same things.

[00:07:09] Right.

[00:07:10] But like, how do you get people to understand it's a catalyst for their own business goals?

[00:07:16] And, and I mean, this was five different reps across three territories that were taking me on all their meetings.

[00:07:22] And I loved it because I, I just loved being on stage because you can connect with people and really help them understand that it didn't need to be scary.

[00:07:30] Uh, and what their dream was, was possible or their, their goals or priorities.

[00:07:34] And, um, subsequently our, our best sales rep, sales executive, he left after six years at the company.

[00:07:41] He'd been the record setter year over year and he eventually left.

[00:07:45] And when he was left was when I realized that's when I was on the wrong side of the coin.

[00:07:50] So I applied for his role because on the, uh, on the ops side, that's not where the commission area was for the sales piece.

[00:07:59] Right.

[00:07:59] And so kind of dumb little me at that point was like, well, I've been going to these meetings for years, not doing all the work, but doing plenty of it.

[00:08:06] Um, the selling in the meetings and, uh, jumped full into sales exec and got humbled insanely fast in that very first meeting that I thought I had.

[00:08:17] You know, tell me about that getting humbled.

[00:08:19] Yeah.

[00:08:20] Um, I learned really quick that sales is a lot is about a lot more than just being on stage, right?

[00:08:29] Being on stage to me meant the sales rep scheduled the meeting.

[00:08:32] We walked in, they made the introduction to me.

[00:08:35] And then for the most part, the meeting was, was handled and managed by me as the subject matter expert for the topic.

[00:08:41] Right.

[00:08:41] And, and really kind of doing the selling, but I didn't have to do anything of the bookends on either side of that meeting because the rep handled it all.

[00:08:47] And eventually a contract would come in and we'd celebrate and buy some beer and pizza for the office or whatever.

[00:08:52] But that was kind of my experience with it.

[00:08:55] So to jump all in, uh, with perhaps like blissful ignorance, you know, it wasn't arrogance, but it was ignorance.

[00:09:03] Um, I went to this 13 seat opportunity.

[00:09:08] They were local.

[00:09:09] They were, uh, they were, their culture was built on raving fans.

[00:09:13] They did the Clifton strengths finder stuff.

[00:09:15] Like to me, it was all of these pieces of the Rubik's cube that I just loved.

[00:09:19] We tapped into had phenomenal meetings with them from my opinion, right?

[00:09:23] Like everything was great.

[00:09:24] It was on lock from the beginning.

[00:09:27] Uh, I knew that there were two other competitors in, and I just also knew that like, I've got this because of the way everything else went.

[00:09:35] And I got the call.

[00:09:37] His name was Ryan.

[00:09:39] He called me to let me know that they went a different direction.

[00:09:41] And it gutted me because I didn't understand, right?

[00:09:44] I was so blind at the time to the other pieces that mattered.

[00:09:48] And, and maybe I'll park an idea there.

[00:09:51] There's a huge difference between the buyer's buying process and the seller's sales process.

[00:09:55] That was the first indication of this.

[00:09:58] But, um, he was a great down to earth, like salt of the earth kind of guy, young, ambitious, but the company was, was really exploding.

[00:10:07] He was a former sales guy, uh, before he bought this business and took it off.

[00:10:11] And so I asked him on that call, I'm like, why, what did I miss or what didn't I do?

[00:10:17] Right.

[00:10:18] Uh, he said, if you come to my office, we'll sit down and we'll talk about it.

[00:10:20] I'm like, I'm not going to pass up that opportunity.

[00:10:23] Right.

[00:10:23] So drove over to his office and sat down in his conference room for about an hour and a half.

[00:10:28] And, and he remembered every single detail.

[00:10:31] Right.

[00:10:32] And he's like, here's what I would have liked you have done in this very first meeting.

[00:10:36] Like before you even got to the conference room kind of stuff.

[00:10:39] Right.

[00:10:39] Like just super nuanced, subtle things that I wouldn't have known, wouldn't have thought of, wouldn't have considered, um, until someone made me aware of it.

[00:10:50] And yet someone that, you know, has cut their teeth in sales would have known and does know all of those things.

[00:10:56] And really, um, it's not like it was, it wasn't magic.

[00:11:01] It was strip off the mask.

[00:11:04] Don't show up as a representative and just remember it's people.

[00:11:09] Right.

[00:11:09] People talking to people trying to solve a problem.

[00:11:12] Now there's elements of psychology.

[00:11:14] There's elements of persuasion.

[00:11:15] There's elements of choreography.

[00:11:17] There's elements of all these things that eventually I built those into my, uh, skill sets too.

[00:11:23] But the ability to sit down with Ryan for an hour and a half and have him go through and essentially dissect the whole process from his side and my side.

[00:11:32] You know, it was, it was better than winning the deal by far because that was the, that was where things clicked.

[00:11:39] Um, where for about six months I was on my own as a rep running.

[00:11:44] Right.

[00:11:44] But after that it was winning and learning and growing and continuous iterative improvement is kind of how I'm wired as well.

[00:11:51] So like I never showed up to do the same thing, the exact same way.

[00:11:54] It was always reflecting on the way home on the drive or whatever, and figuring out how I could have done this better.

[00:11:58] I could have say this next time.

[00:12:00] I can reposition these things around to understand this will have better impact.

[00:12:04] And about six months in is when they handed me the, the outside team.

[00:12:10] And then, uh, maybe another six months or so, then I had the inside team.

[00:12:13] So then I had seven reps total.

[00:12:16] You know, I don't, I don't like to say underneath me, but I was responsible for them and, um, the whole revenue arm of the, that org.

[00:12:22] And then that's where I learned how to really embrace sales as a framework and not a process.

[00:12:31] Right.

[00:12:32] So I worked with my, can you unpack that a little more?

[00:12:35] Yeah.

[00:12:36] One of the things that I think many businesses, but certainly MSPs get wrong.

[00:12:40] It kind of goes back to that whole best practices thing is like, we're so rigid.

[00:12:44] We're so like, this is the way that it works.

[00:12:47] It's sequential.

[00:12:48] It's, it's, uh, a science.

[00:12:52] It's not an art is really kind of the way that sales stuff is usually taught if it's taught at all.

[00:12:58] And from my experience was if I ran a sales process on a prospect, I left zero room for them to have any part of their own buying experience kind of back to that point.

[00:13:10] And so everything I built, coached, trained and taught and ran with my team and myself was then a sales framework from that day forward where it's like, these are the milestones.

[00:13:21] These are the primary or the major components that you have to hit in order to unlock the emotional safety or the psychological principle.

[00:13:30] Like all of these things mattered, but it was, you now know the field you're playing on, but you have total autonomy and authority to pivot and call an audible and do something different based on where that buyer is.

[00:13:42] And then we started to chart out, okay, here's a traditional buying process for, uh, people that are buying MSP from us.

[00:13:51] And so then we had both sides of the playbook.

[00:13:54] It was like matching up plays at that point, right?

[00:13:56] Where it was, okay, if, if they enter our world at this stage, then this is the formula and the prescription that we need, but not in a rigid, hard and fast.

[00:14:10] Like, I must get through these 18 questions in this format.

[00:14:13] And you have to give me all those answers before I can move on to the 19th or, you know, MSP.

[00:14:19] I usually laugh too.

[00:14:20] Cause it's like, well, we'll say it this way.

[00:14:23] If these questions are in your discovery process, then odds are you're doing it wrong.

[00:14:28] How many users do you have?

[00:14:29] How many endpoints do you have?

[00:14:31] How many locations do you have?

[00:14:33] How long have you been here?

[00:14:35] Are you cloud or like, none of that matters.

[00:14:38] It matters to MSPs because that's how we do what I called order taking.

[00:14:43] Right.

[00:14:43] And 95% or more of what I experienced MSPs doing in sales was order taking, wasn't selling.

[00:14:51] And there was a huge difference that Ryan taught me in every sales engagement after that for the next eight years, uh, building, growing and running sales teams was all about professional sales and professional selling.

[00:15:05] Which was more about, again, communication, expectations, persuasion, psychology, um, humans, people to people.

[00:15:14] And where it is you're, you're reasonably successful.

[00:15:18] Over the, over the few MSPs or the next, uh, four or five MSPs.

[00:15:22] We were, we were, we were, I was extremely fortunate.

[00:15:24] My team was, my teams were great.

[00:15:27] Um, leading them was a blast.

[00:15:29] Yeah.

[00:15:29] So the, the first, that first stop where I made the formal switch into sales and then was responsible for the team.

[00:15:35] Uh, we went from being down $30,000 MRR to goal when I'd taken the team and we did end up, uh, beating goal that year, uh, which was 112,000 MRR net new MRR, uh, for the year.

[00:15:51] And then subsequently the next year, uh, we hit 142,000 in net new MRR and set a new revenue goal or, uh, a, uh, record rather.

[00:16:05] And that was a blast because there was so much creation and building in that, right?

[00:16:10] Like I said, we didn't, we never went out and did the exact same thing twice, but what we were doing is we were bringing elements into the process, the framework that we were building the whole time,

[00:16:19] which is how it was rent repeatable and replicable.

[00:16:23] Um, you know, and I had a team that was running that.

[00:16:25] And so, um, then, uh, I made a transition after that year to a smaller MSP.

[00:16:31] So when I was at that MSP, there was like 125 employees or so.

[00:16:36] It was one of the ones that I was, that I went back and forth to and from, but, uh, I went to a smaller MSP who had really big growth ambitions and goals.

[00:16:45] Um, they wanted to grow their MRR 50% year over year, three years in a row.

[00:16:50] Wow.

[00:16:51] And, uh, I joined the company.

[00:16:54] We were at 5.2 million.

[00:16:57] And, um, when leaving, we were at 8.3, eight and a half, if you count some of the other ancillary stuff.

[00:17:04] Right.

[00:17:04] But, um, so naturally unpacking that we went from a traditional MSP.

[00:17:10] And when I say that it's slow, steady up to the right growth, word of mouth referrals, principal or founder led sales.

[00:17:18] And I was coming in to build the team that was supposed to, uh, not so well, supposed to, but did, um, hit those goals.

[00:17:25] Right.

[00:17:25] We didn't hit 50% growth, but we did 42 and 44.

[00:17:29] And then, uh, we never had the opportunity to get past 50 because we actually stopped cold turkey outside sales overnight, um, 28 months into the plan.

[00:17:42] Why would you stop selling?

[00:17:44] Like now that it's working.

[00:17:45] Yeah.

[00:17:46] Uh, so you can't, you can't do that to a sales organization.

[00:17:49] You can't.

[00:17:50] And that's a phenomenal question.

[00:17:52] Um, now why, why it was done was, uh, fundamentally operations couldn't keep up with sales production.

[00:18:01] We were closing on pay.

[00:18:03] We were, we're pacing six new customers a month.

[00:18:06] Um, you know, it didn't start off that way.

[00:18:09] We started nothing and went up there, but, um, six new customers a month.

[00:18:13] And I don't know if you've, uh, read much of like the Vern Harnish stuff, but we talks about gazelles and really fast paced growing companies.

[00:18:22] Scaling up.

[00:18:23] Yeah.

[00:18:23] Like I, the company obviously needed to change fundamentally, needed to be a different company to be a company that could manage that kind of growth compared to the company that it was for the 20 years prior.

[00:18:35] And, uh, it's a lot of change in a short period of time.

[00:18:38] And, uh, the, the snake needs to be able to shed its skin fast enough to keep up with that kind of growth.

[00:18:46] And, um, we just ran into some challenges where we, we had the foresight to know that if we kept growing at the pace that we were growing, that everyone would suffer rather than, you know, doing a good job.

[00:18:56] And so their most logical choice was to turn off the outside sales engine, let the org breathe, kind of put the new scaffolding in and then turn it back on.

[00:19:07] Um, wow.

[00:19:09] And that was, yeah, that was pretty wild.

[00:19:11] So we did, um, year one, it was, it was like 74,000 year two is like 86,000 in net new.

[00:19:19] And then in those, what would it be?

[00:19:22] Eight months.

[00:19:22] I think it was, um, that we were running up to speed.

[00:19:26] We were on pace to be at about 140, uh, but we stopped in the eighties again, uh, when, when we stopped selling at that point.

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[00:20:11] Yeah.

[00:20:12] It sounds like they learned the hard way how much they could actually grow.

[00:20:14] Yeah.

[00:20:15] Per year.

[00:20:16] Yep.

[00:20:16] It sounds like a fantastic problem to have though.

[00:20:18] It really is.

[00:20:19] You know, I, I had a, a mentor of mine early on in the sales process when I'd switched, um, sales leader.

[00:20:27] And he would always say that, uh, as it relates to sales, it's like when the numbers are good, everything's good.

[00:20:33] When the numbers are bad, everything's bad.

[00:20:35] Right.

[00:20:35] And I kind of took that as, well, yes, it's true, but also it's my responsibility to deliver.

[00:20:41] Right.

[00:20:42] So like one of the things that I really prided myself on in both scenarios was building out projections and pipeline and, um, the ability to report at an 80% accuracy level 90 days out.

[00:21:00] Meaning ops knew 90 days before what, what, what was going to be delivered within an 80% accuracy.

[00:21:09] Um, and you know, there was a lot of science.

[00:21:12] It was much easier to say than do.

[00:21:14] Yeah.

[00:21:14] It was much easier to say than do.

[00:21:16] Yeah.

[00:21:17] It was, um, it was the by-product of the analytical brain that I, that I gained growing up on the tech side and all the sort of business sense of running the MSP transitioning fences to, I'm just here to sell.

[00:21:34] Um, I never really let go of it.

[00:21:37] And so like, I understood ironically enough, I was actually trying to avoid the entire time.

[00:21:43] Like I can't break the system.

[00:21:44] Right.

[00:21:44] I can't be a parasite that destroys the host.

[00:21:46] Like we have to be symbiotic.

[00:21:49] Mm-hmm.

[00:21:50] And a lot of sales folks and sales leaders and sales reps, like it's just too easy to pad or fluff or, you know, like get caught up in your ego of a number on a spreadsheet rather than really applying a realistic approach.

[00:22:07] And so as an example of what we had done, we took our win rate and applied, applied that to the formula of how we were doing our projections.

[00:22:16] So at no point were we ever projecting more than what our win rate percentage was on the entire pipeline.

[00:22:22] But then we broke down every stage of the sales cycle with a percentage that preceded, right?

[00:22:29] Our win rate percentage.

[00:22:30] And then, uh, we also had a time factor that went into each deal stage.

[00:22:34] And so collectively speaking, the entire pipeline whittled itself down to where we had defensible numbers and believable numbers and real numbers, um, rather than like, it's going to come, it's going to come, it's going to come.

[00:22:49] Right.

[00:22:50] Or like, I just need another month or it's just going to pull through.

[00:22:52] Like none of that stuff, um, is acceptable in a sales org.

[00:23:01] Um, but you know, a piece there is most MSPs that are founder led sales, like they're, they avoid the fact that they're, they don't, they don't give themselves a number that they're going to fire themselves for if they don't hit.

[00:23:18] Which then naturally translates to when they bring in the first salesperson, they bring them in as like a relief pitcher.

[00:23:24] Yeah.

[00:23:25] Right.

[00:23:25] I'm not a great person.

[00:23:27] So like analogies are tough for me, but like they bring them in as a relief pitcher.

[00:23:30] Like here's a thing you're now responsible for all the things that I didn't really want to do anyways.

[00:23:35] Go do it.

[00:23:36] Right.

[00:23:36] And like no training, no enablement, no comprehension or understanding, no real goals, certainly no accountability.

[00:23:44] Cause again, it's one of the main factors why people started MSPs.

[00:23:48] Like they, they wanted to be, they wanted their own reality with no one telling them what to do.

[00:23:53] Um, that might be overgeneralizing, but that was my experience in most cases and, uh, whether they knew it or not.

[00:24:00] And so then you hire salespeople and then you end up in that like turn and burn once, twice, maybe three times.

[00:24:05] And then one other issue I've found with, it may be in all industries, but again, I only worked in MSP, so I can't speak for other industries.

[00:24:15] But MSP was like, I tried that and it didn't work and you write it off, right?

[00:24:22] Like sales doesn't work.

[00:24:24] Salespeople don't work.

[00:24:25] Marketing doesn't work.

[00:24:26] Outbound doesn't work.

[00:24:27] Ad, Google ads don't work.

[00:24:29] It's like, we're just so binary and black and white and like tried and failed.

[00:24:35] So like move on to the next thing.

[00:24:36] And, um, that's where most of the lost opportunity sits too.

[00:24:41] A couple of things that were very, very true.

[00:24:44] So, um, in both orgs, we ran a 68% win rate at one and up to 62% in the other.

[00:24:54] And to get to that number, there were so many pieces that needed to be unearthed and built into what we did.

[00:25:01] Right.

[00:25:01] But follow-up was one thing that was like a fireable offense if it didn't happen.

[00:25:07] Because again, in my experience, maybe it's different for other people, but MSP, there's two timelines that two time horizons you have to manage when you're selling.

[00:25:15] There's a 90 day pipeline and then this 18 month window because whether you admit it or not, MSP, our sales process, our sales cycle is event driven.

[00:25:29] It's the buy on the buyer side.

[00:25:31] It's event driven, right?

[00:25:33] Because the perceived pain of changing providers or doing something different is greater than the actual pain experienced.

[00:25:40] And as a result, you're selling against either indecision or inaction most of the time, sometimes the incumbent.

[00:25:49] But in most cases, those are your chief competitors or the objections that you didn't overcome that shouldn't have been there to begin with.

[00:25:56] And so you have these two time horizons and people are so focused on the order taking transaction.

[00:26:05] Then when you apply that to selling, you're just kind of like, well, I sent the quote and I emailed twice and then it fell to the bottom of the list of the stuff I didn't want to do anyways.

[00:26:15] So I never continued to follow up.

[00:26:18] And that's one of the first downfalls when you hire reps too, right?

[00:26:22] It's like not managing that process too.

[00:26:25] So you sort of need that infinite tail.

[00:26:28] So let me put a pin in that and come back.

[00:26:30] I want to, I'm not going to let you get away with, I got to hear what the heck did you do?

[00:26:34] When they said turn off sales, because now you've got a thriving organization.

[00:26:38] It's not just you.

[00:26:40] Right.

[00:26:40] How many people were there?

[00:26:43] And.

[00:26:44] Yeah.

[00:26:45] And what did it, what did that look like?

[00:26:46] What'd that look like?

[00:26:47] Because you can't turn sales off, right?

[00:26:49] You're commissioned.

[00:26:50] And if you turn sales off and you can't hunt and you can't close, then everything, my experience falls apart.

[00:26:56] So what happened?

[00:27:00] Rather than falling apart, it was a graceful descent of decoupling what was there.

[00:27:05] Right.

[00:27:06] I think of it as when I showed up, there was no engine.

[00:27:12] Right.

[00:27:13] But there was a box of parts and a willingness to commit the resources to, to assemble it.

[00:27:17] So that's what I did is like, I had the, the best pit crew in regards to commitment and resources to build it, which we built.

[00:27:26] And it produced.

[00:27:28] Subsequently, when it stopped, it was okay.

[00:27:32] Decouple the whole thing and like put the pieces on the shelf.

[00:27:36] Now that's pretty easy to do with like the tech and the, the tech, meaning the technology, the stack, the tools, the stuff, like the messaging, the deck, all those assets.

[00:27:46] But it's not easy to do with the people.

[00:27:49] And to your point, you know, there, there were comp plans that were solely designed to produce.

[00:27:55] And so when we tell them that you can't produce, then there's some pretty uncomfortable conversations that have to happen.

[00:28:00] And, you know, day one was let's go have the uncomfortable conversations.

[00:28:06] Right.

[00:28:06] Like, here's the reality, guys.

[00:28:08] We were given a task and gals said both.

[00:28:11] We were, we were given a task of hitting these particular numbers and we outpaced it for long enough that we have to stop.

[00:28:19] Right.

[00:28:21] How many people at this time?

[00:28:22] There were three inside and two outside.

[00:28:27] So five people plus you.

[00:28:29] Five people plus me.

[00:28:29] Yeah.

[00:28:30] And my transition, it was a little deja vu because for me, the request was there's nobody close enough or more aware of like what needs to happen on the upside to fix this so that you can start again.

[00:28:46] So the original intent was to stop for 90 days, their decision.

[00:28:54] And then we'd start it again.

[00:28:56] Like, and myself knowing that if you stop for 90 days, then it's at least six months before you're actually starting again.

[00:29:03] And then another probably six months before you see the results of what you're starting again.

[00:29:07] So like, I kind of knew that and I wasn't going to take any of my team for granted because it wasn't their fault and it wasn't their responsibility.

[00:29:13] And so I was just up front with all of them.

[00:29:15] Like, one, I'm not going to eliminate anyone's position.

[00:29:18] Two, this is the reality of where we are.

[00:29:21] Three, the timeline is volatile and I can't guarantee you that it's 90 days.

[00:29:26] But what I can tell you is there's a massive opportunity cost for all of you personally in like sticking around for hope.

[00:29:33] And so one of the other lessons that a mentor gave me was earlier on was to never pass up an opportunity today out of the hope for the opportunity tomorrow.

[00:29:43] Right.

[00:29:44] Or whatever, whenever it happens to be.

[00:29:46] And so I passed that information along to you.

[00:29:48] Right.

[00:29:48] If you guys come across something.

[00:29:50] Right.

[00:29:50] There were things that we could do when we had to manage the pipeline to send some things out.

[00:29:54] So it wasn't like stopping was cold turkey, but there was about three months or so of pipeline management left.

[00:30:03] And so kind of naturally the team just trickled off.

[00:30:08] Right.

[00:30:08] They found new opportunities, support them in that, wrote letters of recommendation, just did everything I could do to put them in a position to be successful.

[00:30:15] Because, you know, who wouldn't want to hire reps that broke the system basically.

[00:30:20] Right.

[00:30:21] Yeah.

[00:30:22] Yeah.

[00:30:22] That's a great resume.

[00:30:23] Yeah.

[00:30:24] And so, you know, looking back, that was probably the most rewarding part of the whole process for me.

[00:30:31] I did end up moving over to ops.

[00:30:34] I was there for, I was all in it day to day for 30 days and built a plan.

[00:30:41] Right.

[00:30:41] Here's the 90 day plan that needs to happen to be able to turn everything kind of back on again.

[00:30:47] And it included, you know, changing out leadership, installing new levels of leadership, because again, the company just grew in all directions faster than perhaps operationally it was adjusting to that.

[00:31:00] And so I was there for maybe 30 days.

[00:31:03] And then pop back over and really kind of did more retention focused activities for the next six months or so.

[00:31:12] And not so much retention as in like the sky was falling, but really good salespeople have a sixth sense for what needs to happen as it relates to relationship.

[00:31:22] Right.

[00:31:22] And other people do too.

[00:31:23] It's not just salespeople, but specifically the salespeople that sold the deal know how to keep things intact along the way.

[00:31:30] And so I really kind of went into that kind of running, running cover and managing communication expectations.

[00:31:35] And then subsequently we eventually did turn on sales again, but it was 18 months later, you know, so it went from a 90 day expectation to 18 months, you know, and, and the organizations in a, a four better spot, you know, as a result of kind of building the foundation for what it needed to do to, to have that kind of growth.

[00:31:56] But it was no small feat by any means.

[00:32:01] I appreciate the candor where you shared that you were open with your team.

[00:32:05] You know, you didn't say, Hey, 90 days, don't worry, hang out, you know, cause you didn't know it was super volatile.

[00:32:10] And I love how you address the risk to them, not just the risk to the, your number or the pipeline or the company, because it's easy to think one sided and not think from both sides.

[00:32:23] Right.

[00:32:23] So I think that was really, uh, some excellent foresight there or, or, uh, thought in the moment.

[00:32:31] Yeah.

[00:32:31] It was, uh, the thing that I, I couldn't sleep without talking about the opportunity costs to them as people, right.

[00:32:40] As my team, because I also knew one, what they were capable of, but also like where all of them were pacing at all times.

[00:32:48] Right.

[00:32:49] And it's like, I know that you can ride this out and I know that you would ride this out.

[00:32:54] I know that you're even telling me that you want to ride this out, but I need you to like go home tonight and put literal pen to paper and understand what that means.

[00:33:04] And I'm not going to tell you, I won't take you, but I am going to tell you like, we're, we're not selling.

[00:33:10] And I know what your commission draw normally or like your pace is.

[00:33:14] So like these aren't small, insignificant decisions, um, or impacts to you guys.

[00:33:21] And how long before I imagine everybody did leave.

[00:33:24] What was that?

[00:33:25] You said it was, it didn't just fall apart.

[00:33:26] You kind of helped it.

[00:33:27] Yeah, it was, um, it was about one a month for the first three.

[00:33:32] And then, um, I had, I had one, two, somewhere in like the next three months over that course of time.

[00:33:41] Uh, but really I was kind of down to the one outside rep that had active stuff in the pipeline was kind of like the longest to, to hang on or work through it.

[00:33:50] Um, which perhaps made some sense too, because obviously if we'd have closed it or dealt with the way that that worked, then there was still money on the table for those.

[00:33:58] And, and we did close some of that stuff out too, but, um, yeah, I guess I'd give it a good six months to be honest about the whole process, but it was a trickle along the way.

[00:34:08] Yeah.

[00:34:09] Anybody listening that thinks that, you know, folks that are revenue leaders or sales leaders don't have a real heart.

[00:34:15] Obviously you led, um, in a way that showed that you put your team first.

[00:34:20] Also crazy unusual to be this successful in sales, but a hundred times more unusual to be a guy that could tap to come back and say, how do we fix operations?

[00:34:30] Uh, yeah.

[00:34:31] Right.

[00:34:32] And so maybe what role did that play in giving you the, um, thoughtfulness to understand, you know, let me go focus on what the business needs.

[00:34:44] Let me go do something that can be valuable at instead of just saying, Hey, you know, I'm the, I'm the sales lead revenue lead.

[00:34:51] Yeah.

[00:34:51] That's your problem.

[00:34:53] Like, I'm just gonna, you know, maybe I'll pause for a little bit, but you figure it out and then I'm gonna either go full blast or I'm gonna jump ship.

[00:35:00] You know, one of the undertones of the lesson, I'd be remiss if I didn't bring it up is the power of relationships.

[00:35:07] Right.

[00:35:08] Right.

[00:35:08] And the power of people and, and goodwill and respect, you know, I had all of those things with, uh, with the owner that was responsible for sales.

[00:35:21] Right.

[00:35:21] I mean, I had a great intimate relationship in that regards.

[00:35:24] And so there was a lot of like, we're in it together, uh, too.

[00:35:30] Right.

[00:35:30] Um, and, and that same thing cascades down into the relationships you should be building as a salesperson, as a technician, as an ops manager, as an account manager, like in any role, it doesn't matter what it is.

[00:35:46] Like we're all still just people and we all have a job to do.

[00:35:50] We all have expectations and something we need to produce.

[00:35:52] And so to me, it was one, I did believe that what needed to be done, I shouldn't say wasn't that hard.

[00:36:02] Right.

[00:36:03] But to me, it was like, we've, we'd strayed from the basics.

[00:36:06] And so distilling ourselves back down to the basics of clear expectations, clear visibility, clear measurability, clear accountability, and, and really pulling back into the fundamentals of picking up the phone and call.

[00:36:24] Right.

[00:36:25] Like, um, you know, I, I could, I should go grab that manifesto because it went out as an all staff communication.

[00:36:31] There was basically sent out weekly all staff communications of here's what I'm seeing.

[00:36:37] Here's what, here's where we're going.

[00:36:38] Here's what's going to happen.

[00:36:40] Um, and luckily I had the respect of both sides of the house because having come from the tech side, I never was the sales guy that was just lobbing dead cats over the fence either.

[00:36:49] Right.

[00:36:50] I mean, we did a real process, a real job, a real, um, we were intentional about the businesses that we were bringing on.

[00:36:59] And so that afforded me a lot of longitude and respect with the ops people, um, to where they even, you know, would listen to the sales guy that was crushing their soul, you know, the day before basically.

[00:37:12] Um, but it really was, man, it was, it was the basics.

[00:37:17] It was, we're going to talk to every, every ticket gets touched every single day.

[00:37:21] Right.

[00:37:22] And attempting communication does not mean using closed loop through connect wise and calling it good or letting your out of office indicator be the thing that like trips the SLA on it.

[00:37:32] Like, no, it's, you're going to call the cell phone.

[00:37:34] You're going to call the landline.

[00:37:36] You're going to call the receptionist and ask for the person.

[00:37:38] And then you're going to follow up with an email that says, I tried these three things.

[00:37:41] Is there a time I can get back scheduled with you to connect on this?

[00:37:44] Right.

[00:37:44] Like every ticket every day period without fail.

[00:37:49] And I don't care if the first week is going to suck because we're going to be here till seven o'clock at night.

[00:37:53] Like this is the only real way through, not the only way, but it's a way to bring back a lot of those fundamentals that also needed to be there of just like we're a service business.

[00:38:04] We're not a tech business.

[00:38:05] And I think that's something MSPs get wrong oftentimes too is it's really easy to get caught up in the blinky lights and the widgets and that kind of stuff.

[00:38:15] But it's, it's a flawed way to look at your reality.

[00:38:21] Like you are a service business that happens to be in tech.

[00:38:24] You're not a tech business in most cases.

[00:38:26] And so it was really trying to bring back many of those principles and like building the culture that we needed rather than the culture that we tolerated is probably the easiest way to say it.

[00:38:41] That's a powerful unlock there.

[00:38:45] Yeah.

[00:38:46] So was it that, how much was it that you guys were so unusually successful that you didn't have the right, that that was it?

[00:38:56] Or how much was it that you had a wrong leader or the wrong culture or something else that just, you know, I know there's, they could have been perfect on both sides, but like how much do you think was one or the other?

[00:39:07] Yeah.

[00:39:08] You know, the way I looked at it, and this might be an oversimplified analogy, but I kind of looked at those old padlocks that have like four tumblers on it.

[00:39:17] Right.

[00:39:20] And if three of those tumblers were not sales.

[00:39:24] So if one tumbler to sales, like we were already there, we were on the combo, we were unlocked with the exception of the other three tumblers.

[00:39:31] And the thing is, that's why I like this analogy is it doesn't matter if you have three of the four, two of the four, one of the four, like the thing's not going to be unlocked or it's not going to be operational.

[00:39:45] And so categorically, I would say sales, you know, fell in the one bucket.

[00:39:49] And then we really had, I would call it customer service, which is going to be separate from actual service, like the doing of the work.

[00:39:57] So more like the account management, the relationship management arm, it was dialed in.

[00:40:04] The service org was not, and neither was the leadership, right?

[00:40:10] Because it was sort of a, it was a Peter principle issue, right?

[00:40:16] And so the Peter principle is where you rise to your own level of incompetence, which I knew it because I lived it and breathed it.

[00:40:24] I explained it earlier in the conversation, like every opportunity I was given, I was, I was out in fresh powder under my skis.

[00:40:31] Right.

[00:40:31] And so, um, because the org grew so at such a velocity and scale, we just met that Peter principle concept sooner than you would expect or at all, because you wouldn't expect to.

[00:40:47] But ops doesn't generally act or react fast enough to things as well, because it's generally made up with a group of people that have a real high fear of failure.

[00:41:06] And the fear of failure gets misaligned or misassigned, like misread, misrepresented as either knowing what you don't know and knowing when to ask for help or just having the willingness to say, okay, let's try something new.

[00:41:25] Right.

[00:41:26] It's not that you failed.

[00:41:27] It's just that things have changed, right?

[00:41:30] Things have changed and we need to change as a result.

[00:41:32] Um, and so to get back to that analogy, like where we were at, we had sales dialed in.

[00:41:38] It was on customer relationships on ops.

[00:41:42] It was just the slow trickle that we got what we tolerated, right?

[00:41:45] Like we didn't have standard operating procedures as crazy as that might sound, right?

[00:41:51] We were a 49 employee MSP.

[00:41:54] Um, we did the natural evolution.

[00:41:58] And this is my take on the evolution of MSP is that you kind of go from a group of really great people doing really great work, really consistently to needing to transition into this is just the way that it's done.

[00:42:14] And then you can plug really great people into the system.

[00:42:17] But along the way, we didn't build the system we needed to plug people into.

[00:42:21] And so instead we fell again, victim to a very common thing in the MSP world.

[00:42:25] Talk about this all the time too, is that bodies don't buy bandwidth or bodies buying bandwidth is not the solution.

[00:42:30] You can't just hire yourself out of that issue.

[00:42:34] All you're going to do is compound your inefficiency and suffocate the profitability.

[00:42:40] And then every dollar that comes in is going out.

[00:42:43] And then like, what are you doing it for?

[00:42:44] Um, so we, we probably went through some of that too earlier on before really being able to say, okay, like these are the expectations.

[00:42:55] If you don't like it, I'm sorry.

[00:42:57] There there's other places that you, that may be a better fit for you, but this isn't going to be one of them.

[00:43:02] Um, and having to do that to my, my A team that I built, that I recruited, that I put together that produced like on the sales side, it made it pretty easy to go over to the upside and have those same candid conversations of like, you're just not going to get away with doing like seven tickets a day anymore.

[00:43:21] Right.

[00:43:22] The minimum is 13 to keep your job.

[00:43:24] And that's easy.

[00:43:25] Cause I could sit down next to you and do it right now.

[00:43:28] And I haven't done this stuff.

[00:43:30] So like, I really tried to put myself in a position where I would never ask anyone to do something that I wouldn't do.

[00:43:38] And that's what I did.

[00:43:39] Like day one, when I was responsible for service, I literally took, well, took my laptop and I went over and took the one open spot in the knock and I sat there.

[00:43:48] So when I was observing and trying to figure out what's going on, it wasn't like the ivory tower version, which I think a lot of MSPs do as well.

[00:43:56] It was, I'm sitting in it.

[00:43:58] I'm taking phone calls.

[00:43:59] I'm in the queue.

[00:44:00] I'm working with you.

[00:44:02] I'm figuring it out.

[00:44:03] Cause I needed to understand at such an intimate level, like, are we stripping it down to the studs or is it just kind of a fresh coat of paint?

[00:44:12] So I wanted to go back a little further in that and figure out since most of us that are MSPs, we never make it past the owner-led sales.

[00:44:22] Yeah.

[00:44:23] And I've seen so many folks say, I'm just going to get a sales rep and hand them a phone book or tell them to go to the after hours.

[00:44:31] Uh, or maybe I'll cherry pick the ones that I've got and I'll hand them those leftovers and expect them to crush it.

[00:44:37] Yeah.

[00:44:37] You know, there's so many mistakes.

[00:44:39] Um, but what do I need to prepare for?

[00:44:42] And what kind of mindset do I need to have to move out of owner-led sales and get to that next level?

[00:44:49] Yeah.

[00:44:49] I think this is a universal truism that I realized in many different aspects of MSP life, but the problem is not dissolved when the decision is made.

[00:44:59] The problem is solved when the problem is solved.

[00:45:02] And what I mean by that is it's, it's a natural reaction for an owner that wants to pull out of owner-led sales and wants to grow to hire a sales rep because they felt like that was the solution.

[00:45:15] And so like the decision to hire the person was when the problem was solved and they moved off to the other thing.

[00:45:20] They didn't think about onboarding.

[00:45:23] They didn't think about structure.

[00:45:24] They didn't think about process.

[00:45:26] They didn't think about deliverables.

[00:45:27] They didn't think about anything that really goes into building, growing, or managing a sales org.

[00:45:34] And if you can't fault them for it because they didn't do any of those things either when they were them, when they were that person.

[00:45:40] Right.

[00:45:40] And so like, that's a, that's a really critical component to understand like, what does solving through the problem look like not solving for the problem?

[00:45:51] And this is something that when I was an MSP vendor relationships taught me is that, you know, before turning into a vendor, but vendor relationships taught me that so many vendors look at solutions short-sightedly.

[00:46:07] Meaning they only look at the world through this lens of what their solution solves.

[00:46:13] They do not look at the additional one to five or more problems that their solution creates.

[00:46:19] Right.

[00:46:19] Right.

[00:46:20] And so when you onboard, and what I mean by that is when you bring on a new tool, well, first you got to train, first you have to implement it.

[00:46:27] Right.

[00:46:28] Enable it, onboard it, make it functional as a, as a tool, but then you have the people part of it.

[00:46:33] You got to train it.

[00:46:34] You got to know how to support it.

[00:46:35] You need to know how to update it.

[00:46:37] You need to know how to manage it.

[00:46:38] You might need another person.

[00:46:39] Probably in today's age, you have to end up throwing extra bodies at just running the thing to make it work like the demo.

[00:46:46] And I only go through that illustration to say that hiring the salesperson is very similar.

[00:46:51] Right.

[00:46:53] The decision to switch from one spam filter to the other isn't solved just because you executed the contract.

[00:47:00] Like you have to go do all those things, but you have to slow down long enough or have the time or the space, the capacity or the discipline.

[00:47:08] Or the attention span to go do them.

[00:47:12] And it was a lesson I learned as well when I actually built that sales org that broke things.

[00:47:18] We, we were an MSP that was inbound principle led before me.

[00:47:23] Right.

[00:47:23] And so that meant everything that was in place was not producing inbound leads with the exception of maybe 10 a year word of mouth leads.

[00:47:32] Right.

[00:47:32] Well, you're not going to get to 50% growth with 10 inbound leads.

[00:47:36] And so we built an outbound engine.

[00:47:39] That's really what the engine was, was an outbound sales engine that went from zero leads to 38 held appointments a month.

[00:47:47] Right.

[00:47:48] Like most MSPs go ghost white when I say that because they can't imagine 38 held meetings in a year.

[00:47:54] We were doing that in a month.

[00:47:55] Right.

[00:47:56] But it didn't start off that way.

[00:47:58] Like it wasn't a turnkey fairy dust kind of reality.

[00:48:02] I treated it like that until week number three when I realized, oh, this is, this is far bigger than like the magical lead machine.

[00:48:11] And so I quickly had to get really granular and really detailed and really involved in that process to be able to build what I ended up calling like the on-ramp to the interstate.

[00:48:21] Right.

[00:48:21] We had the sales process.

[00:48:23] I used it, I built it and used it at a prior MSP.

[00:48:25] I knew it would produce at this certain level, but fundamentally it had no gas in the tank because we didn't have leads.

[00:48:31] It was like, okay, I need to fix the leads thing.

[00:48:33] And then the leads will flow through the system and it'll produce the result that I was used to, which was only partially true.

[00:48:40] Because outbound is different than inbound leads.

[00:48:43] And so that's where we really focused in on building that on-ramp and what that looked like.

[00:48:49] Did you hire out some of the lead generation?

[00:48:52] Yeah, we actually outsourced the whole thing on the cold calling website, rebuild, everything with one of the vendors in the MSP space.

[00:49:01] We kind of went all in on that relationship because I didn't want to build it internally at the time.

[00:49:07] To me, it was just not where I wanted to spend my time because I needed to do the enablement of my sales team.

[00:49:13] Because when I took over, I had two outside reps.

[00:49:17] One was the sales manager who, you know, I mean, I got hired into that.

[00:49:22] It was no longer the sales manager than basically two outside reps running a completely different play with a completely different position and a completely different everything.

[00:49:30] And so I really had to lean in and be more like player coach for the first six or so months to really help install the system and then run the system, manage the system, and build the system there.

[00:49:43] And I needed all my focus there.

[00:49:44] I think a lot of people miss that point.

[00:49:46] They think especially like you're a sales leader, not just an owner.

[00:49:50] So theoretically, right, at deletion theory, you go, oh, you've got the bandwidth.

[00:49:54] So I want to break this down.

[00:49:57] What's the vendor that you hired and what did you ask them to do?

[00:50:01] Yeah, so we went with Marketopia.

[00:50:03] We looked at several, right?

[00:50:06] And I'd vetted both, well, multiple other ones as well before I had come to this MSP.

[00:50:12] And so I'd kind of done a lot of that legwork.

[00:50:14] The thing that I did not want in any outsourced relationship,

[00:50:19] it didn't matter if it was the sales outbound or if it was like the CRM.

[00:50:24] I didn't want a vendor who didn't intimately understand MSP.

[00:50:29] It's hard enough to tell someone who knows what an MSP is, what an MSP does.

[00:50:36] It's even harder to tell an organization that doesn't know what an MSP does, what an MSP does.

[00:50:41] And so the reason we chose Marketopia was I could have a peer-to-peer conversation with the team at Marketopia at the time.

[00:50:48] And so it really shortcutted the pain involved in just getting the thing stood up, right?

[00:50:57] Because we did – I went all in with a three-year commitment for what at the time they called it a Mach 4 plan.

[00:51:06] I don't know if they still have any of this stuff or not, if it's different names, but it was a Mach 4 plan,

[00:51:11] which was a new website, SEO, pay-per-click, managed social, managed blog posts, syndicated blog post stuff,

[00:51:22] and one full-time caller at the time, right?

[00:51:26] And so imagine the position I was in coming into an MSP that didn't even have a marketing bucket on the GL, right?

[00:51:36] There was no GL account for it, saying, hey, all right, if you want that kind of growth,

[00:51:40] I need you to give me 400 grand in commitments just up front, like on the resource side of things,

[00:51:47] to even begin to do what you're asking to be done.

[00:51:51] And that's where a lot of MSPs miss the mark, first of all, is that most don't sit down long enough

[00:52:00] to like translate the expectation into a goal and then the goal into a plan.

[00:52:07] And even if they take it all the way down to like smart goals and all that other stuff,

[00:52:10] like they don't commit the resources necessary to achieve it.

[00:52:14] And so that was a conversation I had up front is like how committed are you to your expectations?

[00:52:19] Because if it's not there and the resources aren't there, then I'm not going to,

[00:52:22] like we're not failing for that reason, right?

[00:52:25] At any rate, that's kind of an aside.

[00:52:27] So we do a full three-year commitment with Marketopia.

[00:52:29] So I wasn't, I personally wasn't in a position to let it fail.

[00:52:33] This is my reputation on the line in addition to other things, right?

[00:52:38] And so that forced me to go from, okay, well, I signed the contract,

[00:52:43] so I'm going to start getting eight meetings a month, right?

[00:52:46] And then I'll close a certain percentage of them.

[00:52:53] There's a lot that happens between those two points,

[00:52:56] between a cold outbound set meeting and building a sales process

[00:53:02] and everything else that goes into making that turn into MRR on the other end.

[00:53:06] And so I spent, while kind of retooling the team, like I talked about,

[00:53:12] I spent a lot of the same amount of time really leaning into that relationship

[00:53:16] to understand like the mechanics of what I didn't know I didn't know going into it,

[00:53:22] which was fine.

[00:53:22] I didn't blame them.

[00:53:23] It wasn't my fault.

[00:53:24] I looked at it as, again, my responsibility to salvage what I knew was possible.

[00:53:29] And perhaps I did have the belief that there was absolutely no way for me to fail

[00:53:35] if they produced eight held meetings a month.

[00:53:38] Because that amount of opportunity pumped through the system that I already knew would produce,

[00:53:44] it just couldn't fail.

[00:53:46] The numbers would be there.

[00:53:47] And so the way that we grew that relationship was I was cash neutral on the expense.

[00:53:54] I wasn't profitable, but I was cash neutral on the expense in month seven.

[00:54:02] And I want people to not hear what I just said there too.

[00:54:04] It's super important because I get, like peers still ask me all the time to help like with their

[00:54:08] ABM or their outbound stuff.

[00:54:10] And it's like, they're unwilling to go through the valley of despair to get to the point where

[00:54:14] you'll start to see those returns.

[00:54:16] And you have to be committed to risking at least six months of capital to start to see that it's

[00:54:23] working anyway.

[00:54:24] And if you can't curb your emotions as the owner on those dollars, the check you're cutting every

[00:54:30] month for at least six months, then don't do it because it's not going to be worth the stress

[00:54:35] or the headache or the false belief that it isn't going to work and it failed.

[00:54:40] And then you've literally written off your future for growth anyways.

[00:54:44] So you need to commit to the six months it's going to take to get to a point where you have

[00:54:48] something that you can make tangible, right?

[00:54:50] So seventh month and trust me, I went through that with again, multiple owners who hadn't

[00:54:56] spent a dollar on marketing, committing a huge amount of cash on a monthly basis to growth.

[00:55:04] And it wasn't until month seven where we grabbed two contracts that paid for it, right?

[00:55:10] Cash wise, not profit wise, but cash.

[00:55:12] Well, as soon as that happened, I knew I'd use that six months to figure out the new system.

[00:55:17] And so I was cash neutral.

[00:55:19] I doubled down.

[00:55:19] I got a second full-time caller because now I just bought, I compressed time, right?

[00:55:24] Now I'm going to get twice as many leads in the same amount of calendar days.

[00:55:27] And six months later, we were cash neutral on the second.

[00:55:31] So I tripled down and I got a third for six months.

[00:55:36] And ultimately that's where this whole concept built itself up to where we were getting 38

[00:55:41] held appointments a month.

[00:55:43] It didn't start off that way, right?

[00:55:44] Like it took work and it took everything else, engagement and involvement.

[00:55:50] I guess the short answer to your awesome question at the beginning of that too is like, you've

[00:55:54] got to be committed to doing the work that you're avoiding if you really want the success

[00:55:59] to come from it.

[00:56:00] Because I never would have, I would have squandered the whole agreement with them had I just

[00:56:05] turned the key and said, give me the leads and MRR is going to grow.

[00:56:11] So it wasn't their responsibility to close deals.

[00:56:15] It was mine.

[00:56:16] And so I had to figure out two parts to that.

[00:56:20] How do we bolt on outbound to this process that only dealt with inbound?

[00:56:24] And two, how do I bridge the gap in such a way that's so congruent for the buyer that

[00:56:30] it's natural and it evolves and it produces results in the end?

[00:56:35] Yeah.

[00:56:35] And how do you give yourself the time that you're going to need to spend with the closing

[00:56:40] team?

[00:56:40] Yeah.

[00:56:41] Yeah.

[00:56:42] I think that's a part that's missed because I think you can do it all.

[00:56:46] You can build an outbound team, you can coach an inbound team and do all of those things.

[00:56:50] And really it's not just outbound and inbound.

[00:56:52] I mean, it's sales, it's marketing.

[00:56:53] Like you mentioned, there was a website, there was social media, there's all these things.

[00:56:57] And I think it's easy as a CEO or owner to say, go sell stuff, produce MRR.

[00:57:03] Like it's an outcome, that's a wonderful outcome or a goal.

[00:57:06] But I think that would be akin to saying, I want you to build a cybersecurity practice,

[00:57:11] a CIO practice, a SOC, this and that.

[00:57:15] Like, you know, you're smart, you're a CTO, go build like four disciplines across multiple

[00:57:21] business areas simultaneously.

[00:57:24] Yeah.

[00:57:25] Yeah.

[00:57:25] Something that I picked up on, I learned it personally, but I watched it happen more and

[00:57:31] more out of MSP leaders, probably because I had learned it the hard way too.

[00:57:36] But just because you have the capability to do something doesn't mean you have the capacity.

[00:57:44] And if you can't, if you can't really sit in and lean into the capacity piece, like,

[00:57:51] can I commit three times more time, energy, effort, and resources than I think it's going

[00:57:56] to take to make this successful?

[00:57:58] And if you're unwilling to answer yes to that, then just don't do it.

[00:58:03] Because otherwise it turns into this, like starting controlled burns that aren't even

[00:58:08] controlled burns.

[00:58:08] It's like starting brush fires everywhere versus controlled burns and really paying attention

[00:58:12] to what you're trying to do.

[00:58:14] Um, you know, Tim Conkle at the CEO had a bunch of conversations with him, um, over the course

[00:58:22] of time.

[00:58:22] And one of the things that really stuck with me that he talked about was at his stage in

[00:58:28] the business, one of his critical things is that he'll just set like, this is the one

[00:58:33] thing that I have to get done this year, right?

[00:58:35] Like as it plays into the greater plan, but I don't have three things or he doesn't have

[00:58:40] three things.

[00:58:41] He doesn't have 12 initiatives.

[00:58:42] It's not quarterly rocks and all this other stuff.

[00:58:44] It's like, this is the one thing.

[00:58:46] And I think that speaks to it from the other lens of again, capacity and capability where

[00:58:51] it's just like commit to doing the one thing phenomenally well, something you'd be proud

[00:58:59] of, right?

[00:59:00] Something that grandma would be proud of, um, something that, you know, as soon as you

[00:59:04] stop touching it, it's set, it's golden.

[00:59:06] You don't have to come back.

[00:59:07] Um, in MSP, I think it's a little bit more like teaching a kid to ride a bike.

[00:59:13] Um, where, but it's instead it's about every two to three weeks.

[00:59:17] They forgot everything you taught them because you didn't actually set them up for success.

[00:59:21] Yeah.

[00:59:21] You just like sat them on the seat, started running them down the sidewalk.

[00:59:25] Then they fell and scraped themselves and like, okay, we will come back and do it three

[00:59:29] weeks from now.

[00:59:29] It's like, we didn't actually do any of this stuff.

[00:59:31] Like communicate ahead of time, set some expectations.

[00:59:34] Like this is going to be a bit scary.

[00:59:36] You're not even going to know what to do.

[00:59:38] That's okay.

[00:59:38] I'm here for you.

[00:59:39] I won't let go of the bike.

[00:59:40] Everything's going to go right.

[00:59:41] This is how it works.

[00:59:42] Watch out for the rocks and watch out for the curve.

[00:59:44] Like you got to just slow down to take that time and like really help people be successful.

[00:59:52] I was super fortunate in my first MSP that one of the things that CEO, his name is Phil,

[01:00:01] preached all in.

[01:00:02] There were many, but this is one of them is that we put each other in a position to win,

[01:00:08] right?

[01:00:08] It was one of our core values is you put someone in a position to win.

[01:00:11] Now that was, that was strategic and that was micro and macro scale.

[01:00:16] It was both, right?

[01:00:18] But I didn't realize how well off that one belief set me for the rest of my career too,

[01:00:24] is like similarly to maybe how I managed the people during that process.

[01:00:29] Like if you feel like your people are failing or not meeting expectations or struggling or

[01:00:35] whatever, like you really have to sit down and take that long, hard look in the mirror

[01:00:40] and ask yourself, did I do everything that's in within my power to set this person up for

[01:00:44] success?

[01:00:46] More often than not, I think the answer is no, if we're honest with ourselves.

[01:00:51] Speaking of setting up for success, it seems like the typical is, oh, I'm on lead sales.

[01:00:56] Let me just go hire a sales rep.

[01:00:58] Yeah.

[01:00:58] And again, like you said, we've never had a sales job.

[01:01:02] Like we've been the owner led sales, but we didn't know about the CRM.

[01:01:05] We didn't know about the playbooks, the processes, the onboardings.

[01:01:07] So as an owner of an MSP, am I better off hiring someone like you?

[01:01:15] Do I need to be hiring that director of VP of sales or some revenue leader that figures

[01:01:21] out what needs to get done and builds that org?

[01:01:25] Or is it practical for most of us to actually execute on building that wall brick by brick?

[01:01:32] Yeah, that's a great question.

[01:01:34] And sitting with it for a second to really think through like advice rather than an answer.

[01:01:42] I don't think that it would be in most MSPs best interest to start with the sales leader

[01:01:48] that can come in and build it and install it.

[01:01:50] Unless, kind of like my commitment to the Marketopia agreement, if the organization can be emotionally

[01:01:58] detached from the outcome for at least six months, as well as being okay with the sunk cost

[01:02:03] of the leader for at least 12, then it's probably not the right play.

[01:02:10] Like if that's going to strap the business too much or constrain you, you had to hire the

[01:02:14] leader so you couldn't hire the rep.

[01:02:15] Like there's a magic secret sauce, so to speak in that, because I think it's probably even

[01:02:21] more rare to find someone who has the system and is willing to get in and cold call or go

[01:02:27] to the meeting and like do everything at SDR and AE and sales director and all the way

[01:02:33] up.

[01:02:34] And so instead of having a process that's solid with the minimum viable product tools to bring

[01:02:42] accountability and visibility to the process, a rep is your first right move.

[01:02:52] Or if you as an owner have the capacity and you actually do enjoy the owner-led sales piece

[01:02:57] and you want to do more of that, then you could go a different route where it's more like,

[01:03:00] okay, well, you just need more leads then, right?

[01:03:02] Probably not the referrals, but that would be an interesting thing.

[01:03:08] I'd love to talk to some owners that have done that because I don't know that true selling

[01:03:14] is really going to be where your passion is as an owner of an MSP either, because they're

[01:03:18] not the same conversations.

[01:03:19] They're not easy.

[01:03:21] They're not warm.

[01:03:22] They're not like those referrals.

[01:03:24] Not like a referral where like you just happened to go to around the golf and then they called

[01:03:29] you and you sent some paperwork that you didn't have to follow up on.

[01:03:31] And now you have a client, like that's just not how the selling piece works.

[01:03:35] And, um, you have to be, I don't want to say you have to be cut differently, but like

[01:03:42] you have to have a certain mindset to be successful in sales because you're the, the function of

[01:03:51] the role is to live in an inside adversity, an overwhelming amount of adversity for the small

[01:03:58] doses of dopamine that come in between it.

[01:04:00] And it's like one to a hundred ratio, probably more.

[01:04:03] Um, and, and on that same point, because I've experienced this myself personally as multiple

[01:04:12] times, as well as with team members, the very first reaction that most MSP owners have to

[01:04:19] successful sales people, whether it was the leader that did it all great, or it was just

[01:04:24] a rep that actually crushed it.

[01:04:26] Don't go changing the comp plan and certainly don't go doing it within the same 12 month cycle.

[01:04:31] I've seen more businesses crucify themselves by cringing at the check they cut because they

[01:04:39] look at the numbers through the wrong lens.

[01:04:41] And it's like, well, I can't pay someone more than I'm paying myself.

[01:04:44] I've been doing this for 20 years.

[01:04:45] I'm the one that stayed up for 36 hours a day doing the server migrations and blah, blah,

[01:04:49] blah, blah.

[01:04:50] All that stuff may very well be true, but you have to look at the numbers on an appropriate

[01:04:57] timeline.

[01:04:58] And one example of that is I've had, I've had, uh, leaders that I report to as well

[01:05:05] as peers that I've coached talk about sales numbers specifically.

[01:05:09] Right.

[01:05:09] And oftentimes ops minded people will look at things through the same time horizon.

[01:05:17] Meaning again, like when we signed up with marketopia, I'll just use that because it's

[01:05:21] easier numbers is like, just look at the total spend over a 12 month timeframe.

[01:05:25] And then measure the amount of revenue collected on that same timeframe.

[01:05:29] It's never going to wash.

[01:05:31] And yet if you can decouple, these are going to come in the back half of the agreement because

[01:05:36] they're going to take time to spin up.

[01:05:38] Right.

[01:05:38] That goes back to that 18 month timeline I was talking about earlier is you have to give

[01:05:43] opportunity a long enough time horizon to materialize.

[01:05:46] In my world, that was 18 months, but we never stopped after 18 months.

[01:05:49] That was just sort of like the shelf life that we watched because if we didn't measure that

[01:05:54] way, then we didn't offer enough time for an event to happen for that lead.

[01:05:59] We proposed to a year ago to call us and we closed them in a day because they'd already

[01:06:04] gone through all the process of the decision.

[01:06:06] They just needed some refresh pricing and then we're closed.

[01:06:10] And so, yeah, that's one of the biggest fatal errors in my opinion, because it causes

[01:06:14] you to knee jerk again, right?

[01:06:16] Like you're kind of, it goes back to the emotional attachment to the resources.

[01:06:21] And when you do that, then you just, you start overreacting.

[01:06:26] And by that, I mean, you make decisions too frequently without offering enough time for

[01:06:32] the results to mature.

[01:06:33] And then you're constantly in react mode.

[01:06:35] You think you're acting, but you're actually reacting to the decision that you impulsively

[01:06:39] made like 60 days ago.

[01:06:43] So let's, one last thing, I guess, on this topic, which is if I'm at the stage where I

[01:06:50] do feel like it's, I need that revenue leader, how do I, what do I look for?

[01:06:55] And I guess, you know, how do I, what kind of questions do I need to ask to find someone

[01:06:59] like you?

[01:07:00] Yeah.

[01:07:01] So interestingly enough, like success does leave clues and people like me,

[01:07:11] this was something my first MSP taught me to a players surround themselves with other

[01:07:14] a players, right?

[01:07:16] And so I went to peer groups in person.

[01:07:19] I went to meetings in person.

[01:07:21] I approached people and talked to them when I was there.

[01:07:24] I leaned into what is their reality?

[01:07:27] What are they doing?

[01:07:28] How are things?

[01:07:28] I built relationships that then took off outside of peer groups and one-off calls and conversations.

[01:07:35] So I, one, I guess you could say I went seeking the opportunity.

[01:07:40] And two, maybe the other side to that is, so to you MSP owners that are out there listening

[01:07:45] and you don't think that going to the trade show is worth your time because you're going

[01:07:50] to see the same swag in the same booth with the same people and you can only have so many

[01:07:53] steak dinners before you're tired of it.

[01:07:56] Like you're paying attention to the wrong part, right?

[01:07:59] The people that are driven or the ones that are driven and connected to those that would

[01:08:04] make the introduction for you.

[01:08:06] They're usually the ones that are putting in the effort to go to those kinds of things.

[01:08:10] And when they're there, they're not the ones staring at the floor, like halfway behind their

[01:08:15] booth, not really wanting to talk to you.

[01:08:17] They're the ones that aren't overly eager to get in front of you either though, right?

[01:08:20] There's that fine balance between, in my experience, I usually saw it as the quiet

[01:08:25] observer in the room was the one that you wanted to go corner during the breakout.

[01:08:32] Because they're taking in all of the pieces of what's going on and they're actively thinking

[01:08:37] through how to leverage any of that information.

[01:08:40] And so like the first place I would be going and looking for the talent is the trade shows

[01:08:47] or the conferences or whatever, but it's inside the breakout sessions, right?

[01:08:51] If I'm an owner and I want a salesperson, maybe I'll go to the sales track instead of

[01:08:57] the ops track or the shiny new object track.

[01:09:00] And I'm not there actually for the content, although you should probably pay attention because

[01:09:03] you'll learn something for when you hire that person.

[01:09:06] Like observe the room.

[01:09:07] Who's in that sales track room trying to get better at doing the thing?

[01:09:11] Go start some conversations.

[01:09:14] Um, and usually those lists get pretty short too, right?

[01:09:18] Like as you start actually diving into the people, like you can kind of figure out the

[01:09:21] seven degrees of Kevin Bacon to get to the right place, but relationships are the currency.

[01:09:28] And so you've got to go make them.

[01:09:30] Um, they don't just come to you.

[01:09:31] And that's certainly all the relationships I forged over my time have served me well while

[01:09:38] I was in MSP and even beyond since I stepped over to the vendor aisle where, you know, I

[01:09:43] have relationships I can call on and people will pick up the phone.

[01:09:47] Um, so that's a long answer to it.

[01:09:50] The other place that I would look is if you know, as you, you as the MSP, if you know certain

[01:09:58] MSPs who are further down the path where you want to be, and you can sort of reverse engineer

[01:10:04] who contributed to that, then, you know, you could certainly put on your recruiting hat

[01:10:09] and start talking to the people that have gotten to where you're trying to go and don't,

[01:10:15] don't shoot for the moon.

[01:10:17] Just go find like who's 18 months in front of you, right?

[01:10:20] Who's 24, 36 months in front of you.

[01:10:23] Um, go look at LinkedIn histories, right?

[01:10:27] Um, on, and competitors and those kinds of things.

[01:10:31] It doesn't even have to be competitors.

[01:10:32] That's one of the nice parts I think about the world today is that it's a lot bigger

[01:10:35] than it used to be too.

[01:10:36] So remote's an option, um, reach out and ask questions, right?

[01:10:41] I mean, people like me know people like me.

[01:10:43] Uh, so I, we can always make connections, those kinds of things too, but.

[01:10:50] Let's switch gears again.

[01:10:51] If you don't mind, Jeffrey, tell us what you're doing now and why now you think it's

[01:10:55] the right time, if you do think so.

[01:10:58] Starting in June of this year, 2024, I, I switched sides of the aisle.

[01:11:04] Uh, so right.

[01:11:05] I, which I guess I've done it once before.

[01:11:06] I went from tech to sales.

[01:11:08] Then I went from 18 years in MSP to co-founding a vendor for MSPs.

[01:11:14] Um, you know, and so that company is called SIFT spelled C Y F T.

[01:11:20] And we are really the world's first voice to PSA platform.

[01:11:25] That's designed to eliminate the space that exists between your people and the PSA.

[01:11:31] So think about things like, um, still chasing timesheets, right?

[01:11:37] Trying to get engineers to put their time on a timesheet, let alone submit an empty

[01:11:40] timesheet for the week.

[01:11:41] Well, all that stuff exists because the interfaces that we're forcing our team to use, you know,

[01:11:49] most of them are from 1995 or they're newer, but they were still designed in 1995.

[01:11:53] And it's like, the interface is just total garbage.

[01:11:56] Maybe that's all right.

[01:11:57] There's too much friction to do the administrative side of, of the world.

[01:12:03] And so we kind of said, well, if we inverted the problem and thought completely differently

[01:12:10] about solving it, what if we introduced a new modality to doing the job that they're

[01:12:16] already doing and everyone does it right.

[01:12:18] Speaking.

[01:12:18] So natural language, you can literally just say, Hey, SIFT, uh, create a ticket on the managed

[01:12:25] service board for, um, in our, in our use case, it would be Darth Vader at Galactic Empire,

[01:12:33] right?

[01:12:33] In our test instance, uh, QuickBooks server as an error.

[01:12:36] One, two, three, uh, created a incident with a subtype of server and item as application.

[01:12:43] And then we process it.

[01:12:45] And within 60 seconds, that whole process, including you talking, it's pushed straight into

[01:12:50] ConnectWise and it's there for you.

[01:12:52] Same with a time entry.

[01:12:54] Um, so why now?

[01:12:56] And why now?

[01:12:58] Because certainly not while I've been alive, have I ever been a part of a time at which technology

[01:13:04] was innovating and elevating and evolving faster than the introduction of it, AI into,

[01:13:11] um, the traditional world.

[01:13:14] And so as soon as I saw it, I consulted with them for a couple of months before joining as

[01:13:19] a co-founder.

[01:13:20] And as soon as I saw it, I couldn't unsee it.

[01:13:22] I mean, it's, it was a complete game changer through the lens of all of those roles that

[01:13:29] I talked about having before.

[01:13:30] I knew how I would use it.

[01:13:31] If I was a field tech, I knew how I would love to have had it when I was an account

[01:13:34] manager and I was starved for time and a human, human bandaid for everything.

[01:13:38] And I ended up with like legal pad pages of notes that I had to sit down at eight o'clock

[01:13:43] after my kid went to bed and put it into the system.

[01:13:45] Like all that went away because I could instead just pull my phone out and say, Hey, Sift,

[01:13:50] create this.

[01:13:51] Right.

[01:13:51] Um, and, and, and why this, I love managed services, right?

[01:13:59] I never left it, um, 18 years in it.

[01:14:01] I don't even consider this to have left it.

[01:14:04] I feel like what I've done now is I'm a part of building a platform that will elevate the

[01:14:11] impact that I can have for MSPs and kind of like for MSPs by MSPs.

[01:14:16] Because again, I, I swallowed the tough pill of a lot of vendor solutions that kind of fell

[01:14:23] flat on trying to implement as an MSP.

[01:14:25] And so that's hard coded into our DNA, right?

[01:14:30] I was the buyer for a long time of vendor stuff.

[01:14:32] And now I'm the seller of vendor stuff and, and also informing the product.

[01:14:36] Like this is how we need to solve the problem to come alongside an MSP and meet them where

[01:14:42] they are rather than making them conform to our platform.

[01:14:47] How can you have a stack of tools when all of them make you conform to them?

[01:14:50] Right.

[01:14:51] And so an example of how we, we don't do that in our world is our fastest onboarding

[01:14:57] has been 10 minutes and six seconds, because all you have to do is build the security role

[01:15:01] and type in your API keys.

[01:15:04] We've built ourselves to be agnostic for however you've customized or Frankensteined your instance

[01:15:09] of manage.

[01:15:10] It doesn't matter, right?

[01:15:11] Because everyone's different.

[01:15:12] It wouldn't make sense to say, nope, you got to retool the whole thing so that you can

[01:15:16] now be compatible with us.

[01:15:17] Instead, we can just say, okay, based on the context we know via the API, we can look

[01:15:22] in your instance and say, here's how we map these things up and tie it all together.

[01:15:27] What kind of impact do you see this having, not just to what you're doing, but AI and voice

[01:15:32] AI on our industry?

[01:15:35] Yeah, I think, I think in the not too distant future, that voice specifically is going to

[01:15:42] be the medium that people use to interact with computers, period.

[01:15:45] All sorts of technology, not just computers.

[01:15:49] Because the tech exists now.

[01:15:51] It's just a matter of adopting it and conforming to it.

[01:15:54] But it's so much more efficient.

[01:15:55] We've seen it on the business to consumer side for years, right?

[01:15:59] Amazon Alexa and Siri on the iPhone and stuff.

[01:16:02] But even that was sort of like a glorified version of Dragon, even though Dragon worked

[01:16:08] better, right?

[01:16:09] From a, I hear you and understand you.

[01:16:11] AI introduces this whole level of reasoning and critical thinking and strategic thinking.

[01:16:17] And I can remember countless conversations banging my head and fists on a conference room

[01:16:23] table trying to solve problems inside MSP where it was like, if I just could have had

[01:16:28] visibility into this problem or into this thing, this signal, then the rest of the situation

[01:16:35] wouldn't have happened.

[01:16:36] Well, all that thoughts and instincts and decisions are really just algorithms, but they're people

[01:16:43] instincts.

[01:16:44] But we can turn it into an algorithm.

[01:16:46] And now we can say, it's one thing to do data in with voice.

[01:16:49] But instead, imagine this, Damien, where it's like, I'm that same account manager.

[01:16:53] I'm the same human band-aid.

[01:16:55] I'm running between a million things.

[01:16:56] I need to leave the office.

[01:16:58] I didn't have time to prep for the QBR like I wanted.

[01:17:00] I say, hey, Sift, give me a QBR for Acme Corporation.

[01:17:05] And we've already kind of gone through the logic of what information matters.

[01:17:09] And it creates it for you.

[01:17:11] And you have a PDF in your inbox by the time you got to the client location with information

[01:17:15] you can trust.

[01:17:16] Because again, I was an AM.

[01:17:18] I can't tell you how many times I'd like looked in manage really quick before I had to

[01:17:21] go have the conversation.

[01:17:22] And then I get like foot in mouth where it's like, oh, all right, never mind.

[01:17:28] Those tickets didn't get created or we didn't solve it yet.

[01:17:31] Like you couldn't trust the context, right?

[01:17:33] And so the evolution of AI can really take the thinking, the reasoning, the strategy, and

[01:17:43] the assessment of like real-time data and turn it into, in our world, it's data in and story

[01:17:48] out, right?

[01:17:50] So if you can get everyone to put the data in using your voice, one, you get better data.

[01:17:54] We structure it with AI.

[01:17:56] So now it's AI ready.

[01:17:57] So then we can also report on it and pull it out.

[01:17:59] And now you have, why is Acme Corporation calling my cell phone?

[01:18:04] 10 seconds later, the answer is, well, it's because you have 16 blown SLAs in the last seven

[01:18:10] days for Acme Corp or whatever, right?

[01:18:12] But you didn't have to touch an awful interface once.

[01:18:16] It was just conversational.

[01:18:19] So yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense as humans to have a conversation instead of figuring

[01:18:25] out how to navigate through all these dropdowns and searches and indexes.

[01:18:30] Yeah.

[01:18:31] Because when I was sitting in those seats of needing to make decisions on the MSP side,

[01:18:35] it didn't matter if it was, I mean, I had plenty of the tech stack, same as everyone else.

[01:18:39] I had BrightGauge until I had MSP bots and then I had MSP CFO and I had like all of it,

[01:18:44] including all of the hours of my life.

[01:18:46] I'll never get back on the reports that I build inside manage with ReportRider.

[01:18:50] And like none of that actually solved my problem anyways.

[01:18:54] It was just hopefully addressing the visibility problem, but not the like actionable takeaway.

[01:19:01] And so where we look at that and say, I mean, all of that's replaceable because I don't need

[01:19:07] another gauge.

[01:19:08] Like the last thing that any MSP really needs is like another gauge for something or another

[01:19:12] this or that.

[01:19:12] They need the information that they need to make a business decision now.

[01:19:16] And that one moment in time is that one moment in time it's going to change.

[01:19:20] It was different five minutes before it and it's different five minutes after it.

[01:19:23] You need like the actionable intel that you can trust instantly so that you can make the

[01:19:30] decision and move on.

[01:19:31] And I think, well, I don't think, I know that's the direction the world is going and you can

[01:19:37] sort of make the decision as an MSP.

[01:19:39] Do you want to operate with that as a piece of your tool, like your toolkit, your stack,

[01:19:45] or do you want to compete with someone who has it?

[01:19:47] Like you only have, it's a binary option.

[01:19:49] You can either have it or your competitor will, and then kind of like good luck competing

[01:19:55] with it.

[01:19:56] Right.

[01:19:57] I could talk all day with you about this if time permitted.

[01:20:02] Yeah.

[01:20:03] But since it doesn't, would you let everybody know how to find you, how to connect with you?

[01:20:08] Yeah.

[01:20:08] I'm really only active on LinkedIn.

[01:20:11] So you can find me there.

[01:20:12] Jeffrey Newton.

[01:20:13] Sift is the company name.

[01:20:14] Sift, C-Y-F-T dot A-I.

[01:20:17] That is where you can find me for the Sift side of things.

[01:20:20] And then on the sales side, I do actually have some consulting through that lens too.

[01:20:26] So mspsalessecrets.com is where I take care of all that stuff.

[01:20:31] Jeff at mspsalessecrets.com, where we build and run and manage basically that playbook in

[01:20:36] a way where you can drop it and install it into your business and hire that rep to go

[01:20:41] execute it basically, right?

[01:20:43] Yes.

[01:20:43] That's something that so many of us struggle with.

[01:20:45] Yeah.

[01:20:46] Thank you for being on MSP Mindset today, Jeffrey.

[01:20:48] This has been such a gift and I just appreciate it so much.

[01:20:52] Yeah, absolutely.

[01:20:53] Appreciate you having me, Damien.