Crossing MSP “No-Man’s-Land” to 40 Employees

[00:00:00] So there is that nexus where you're stuck in that in-between world where you have to work, but you can't develop. So a friend of mine told me the analogy is like a guy who has a gold mine, you gotta go with a gold mine, a third of your time is spent digging gold, a third of your time is processing gold, a third of your time is transporting your gold. So you only have a third. So you gotta find out ways to make that scale and to grow it so somebody's continuously mining and processing and then transporting in order for your business to reach whatever scale and profitability it potentially could be.

[00:00:29] That wasn't a small thing. It took a really long time. Hey guys, Damien Stevens, host of MSP Mindset, founder and CEO of Servosity. Today I'm blessed to be joined by Vince Grimillion. Now as a founder, have you ever tried to get out of sales and tried everything like me? Are you feeling stuck? How do I get out of founder-led sales and what's on the other side?

[00:00:58] Join me as Vince and I unlock the no man's land that every MSP is going to face and how to get to the other side. Vince, tell me how you came and when. It's been a while, right? Quite a while. Since you started your company. Oh, goodness. So I was working primarily for private internal IT privately back in the, I mean, this is late 80s, mid to late 80s.

[00:01:26] So there wasn't a whole lot of IT definition defined. The job that really got me started, I think the best, was I actually worked at a scrap metal company, which you would not think is a technology place. Right. But it was owned by a family and the second generation was running at that point and second generation happened to be a NASA engineer.

[00:01:49] So they had a warehouse that was full of test equipment like oscilloscopes and gear and basically a radio shack, you know, transistors, discrete components, all, you know, stacked to the ceiling. So it was my, I have a formal background in being a tech school, a trade school for electronics. That's when the oil industry in New Orleans was booming and you had, you know, radio, you need the radios repaired. And that was going to be, you know, I like communications. Modems were early.

[00:02:19] This was early, early days of modems. So I was intrigued by modem communications. Just curious. I had a very deep curiosity. So this company that I worked for in the Scrap Metal Yard had, you name it, minus 12 volt regulated systems for locomotives that powered radios. So I had to learn, you know, that had to learn the color code for a telephone, the telephone wiring system. And that was 30 minutes of instruction from somebody who was leaving the company.

[00:02:48] And then I'm walking down the color codes by hand and realizing, wait, there's a pattern. And that pattern repeats. And I'm like, oh, okay. And punch down tool. And I had to rebuild like, I don't know, 300 or so, you know, punch downs. And so I learned the color code really good by hand. And I had to learn RS-232. I had to learn optical isolated connections to terminals that were in a shed that was taking in junk cars.

[00:03:16] So it was very dusty and terrible. Constantly repairing those things. Backstory on that was that I got the job because I fixed three terminals. And one of the terminals, the NASA, ex-NASA engineer couldn't fix. So I improved my job by fixing all three terminals for the interview. And I was taken on. I did an early, early, early, early shielded twisted pair of Mac network where I ran the cables by myself through a dusty attics and wired up all these Macintoshes.

[00:03:46] And converted a telex, traditional telex dot matrix printer. I intercepted. I was able to decode all of the signals from the modem and convert through a program called Blast on a Mac and emulated a telex machine on a Mac that printed to a laser printer. So that had freedom. Like, that gave me freedom to do whatever I wanted to do.

[00:04:11] I actually designed a circuit, an opto-isolated circuit that was used at a NICU in California. So, yeah, it was interesting. So I had a lot of fun. And that came to an end. And he put me in charge of networking at a computer firm that he had started, a traditional retail when he was selling original Apple IIs and what was it? Zenith.

[00:04:39] Zenith, I think Zenith computers back in the day and IBM, 20, like five grand a pop, you know, for like a piece of junk, 16K computer with floppy drives. But yeah. Worked there for a bit. And then one of our customers was looking for internal IT support and hired me part time. I mean, full time.

[00:05:02] And then from there through a friendship and the things I had learned at the computer company, I would actually start selling equipment to the to the firm I was working at and building up that business. And then I got a call from a friend who worked at Tulane as an IT person, like for the student support. And they got a call from KPMG, Pete Marwick, that they wanted a part time Mac support person, which was perfect. So I started.

[00:05:30] I slid in the business by doing 20 hours a week at Pete Marwick and 20 hours a week at the law firm. And implemented Banyan Vines, TCPIP. I mean, you're talking about like early, early black screen. These are all PCs with black screens. Work perfect on a network on Banyan Vines. So I learned TCP IP. I did a Mac bridge on the network. Got a lot of hands on stuff. Did a lot of conversion of files. So I did a lot of text conversions.

[00:05:59] You know, just just whatever needed to be done. I had a curiosity for it and a desire for it. And I just pushed myself and learned on the fly. No formal training in any of this. Yeah. And so at what point did you did you say, hey, I want to go build my own business? Well, at the firm and Pete Marwick, I was I started getting calls from people that I hadn't seen in years. Like, hey, I'm here, you know, networking and I know somebody needs a network.

[00:06:27] And so it was kind of word of mouth. I didn't even have my sign up, so to speak. And that side hustle eventuality became permanent over time. It was just just a little bit here, a little bit there. So I don't know how else I could have did it. I wasn't a business planner. I didn't have enough business sense. I was perfect. E-myth. I was the E-myth guy. And the things I know and the 12 things I didn't know. And I came back from my house, you know, drove my wife crazy.

[00:06:56] You know, she had the kids at home and she's like, when are you leaving? I don't want you here. I get out the house. So I had to find a place. And she'd bring the kids to where the office was that we'd have lunch. And, you know, it was just crazy. The stairs. The thing I remember the most about that office is going up the stairs. It's always dead roaches at the stairs. And my kids were freaking out about the dead roaches. Not the nicest office to start with. No, not the nicest. But it didn't cost anything because I was right next to one of my clients.

[00:07:26] And, yeah, we still go by that place and remember fondly those years. And how old were your kids when you were just building this? Oh, man. My firstborn was a year old and still can't believe my wife let this happen. You know, let go of the steadiness of those two jobs and then to go full time. But it was there. It was evident. And then once we started having kids, she never had to work. So my promise to her was she didn't have to work once we started having kids. And so she homeschooled the kids.

[00:07:56] I did the work. She, you know, had a DSL at the house so you couldn't use the phone when, you know, no, we had a modem at the house. And, of course, then we finally got DSL and had worked remotely as best remotely was at the time. And it was just back in the day. It was just crazy. And real tube screens, you know, I don't know how many people even know what an old tube screen looks like anymore. Yeah. So, yeah.

[00:08:27] So. A little here, a little there. I don't know how to say it. It was really divine. You know, I thank God that, you know, he connected me with people. Like people I would know at the law firm that went to work for other places. Like, hey, I'm at this new firm. They have all these problems. Can you come over and look at it? And that became a relationship. That was a 15-year relationship with a law firm. You know, so it's just these. I guess the lesson is always, you know, relationships are going to be the number.

[00:08:55] One thing that gets you places and that helps you stay there and grow. And you can't burn people. You got to treat people well. And that's just a part of my normal life anyway. I'm not bragging, but, you know, treating people nice and treating people well and serving them. You know, my family's background is they were very, very always, you know, friendly and neighborly to everybody. So it's not easy to carry that forward. Yeah.

[00:09:22] I think maybe now, maybe now MSPs are known for good service, at least hopefully most. But I know there was definitely a period where tech guys were more surly than service. Yeah. I don't think that SNL skits helped a lot. You know, they were tapping into the frustration. But I think, you know, there are those people. There's no question. They didn't, you know. But the company we have now is so human focused.

[00:09:51] That is, the technology is second to the human component. It really is. Tell me what that means to you and why that's important, Vince. People want somebody they can talk to to help them. If I can just make that, is that quiet? Is that succinct? Is they want to talk to somebody.

[00:10:17] And as AI continues and chatbots continue, look, you know, they won't pick up the phone and say, yeah, I need your help with this. I don't want to even ask GPT. I don't even want to ask AI. I want to talk to a real person. At the end of the story, because the nuance is not going to be, the nuance is not going to be picked up by AI. You're not going to be able to type the Google search well enough. Yeah, you can use certainly. Yeah, absolutely can't.

[00:10:40] But you never know that what an end user might do is actually worse than them not doing anything in many cases. So it's just give us a call. We'll help you out. And it's flat rate anyway. It's unlimited. I have flat rate support, so call. Yeah. Yeah. Build relationships. And that's why our SAT scores are so high. That's why we're so high on our SAT scores. Tell me about that.

[00:11:06] Yeah, it's the number one measure for us as customer SAT. So we'll get 70 plus percent response on our surveys. Wow. Yeah. And what is your CSAT score? 99 plus, you know. So, yeah. What would happen to your MSP if you couldn't restore your client's data? How long would it take to regain your team and the community's trust?

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[00:12:01] No more crossing your fingers and hoping. Just peace of mind 24-7. If you want to learn more, book a session with one of my backup engineers who will walk you through our entire process and afterwards give it to you for free. No commitment necessary, but book a time while the slot is available. Wow. How do you, I mean, I think we all want to be there. How do you build an organization that gets you there? Like, what do you attribute to that?

[00:12:30] I think you have to, you have to. I mean, for us, we committed to culture years and years ago. It's taken quite a long time and we've gone through so many people. It's the people you hire and the people who manage the people you hire. There has to be a consistency top to bottom. Internal communications, internal respect, internal clarity, internal you name it. And I'm not even participating in most of these meetings. It's just somehow the DNA got picked up.

[00:13:00] And I can't really tell you exactly why or how. But the DNA got picked up and pushed through the organization. Better than I could have done it myself personally. I really, I mean, I couldn't have scaled the company without the people that are actually running the business right now. We were talking at one point about enthusiasm versus passion. And one of those is short-lived. Give me your perspective on that.

[00:13:28] Well, I mean, I guess, you know, I have a little bit of a bias against the word passion in a sense because I feel like it's fleeting and it's versus consistency. Maybe enthusiasm is, they're so close it's almost hard to discern them. The better thing to me is consistency. If you can consistently show up and be there reliably with enthusiasm continuously, then I think that says a lot.

[00:13:58] It's been said that a mediocre ad campaign is better than the best, you know, short-lived campaign if it's consistent. I think it's consistency in messaging, it's consistency in execution, it's consistency in what the customers are expecting. That says more than anything else from what I can tell.

[00:14:20] And I'd prefer somebody who's maybe, you know, not the top-notch but consistent over someone who's very good at one thing, but they can't continuously keep it going. So I think that's, for me, I think that makes the most sense. Consistency, I think, trumps everything. You can always escalate to an expert. Right. The consistency of support, most of your support calls are going to have a certain range about them.

[00:14:46] The odd scenario that comes up that's very weird gets escalated to the top people. And the top people are, even our top guy, who is very, very smart, is well thought of personally. That's huge. So it's very unique to have that mix of people. What do you do to make sure you have the right people and keep those people? Feed them. Yeah, tell me more about that.

[00:15:16] We feed them, like, today, you know, we cater at least twice. Well, we cater at least once a week and feed hot-cooked breakfasts on Fridays. So Monday and Wednesdays, there's a typical feed day. Every other Monday is cater day. And this past Monday was off day, but we did it because it was a holiday, and we just brought in canes, you know, chicken fingers and french fries. And people enjoy it. They can sit at their desk. They chat. You know, they relax.

[00:15:47] They seem to really enjoy the – one new guy showed up. I caught him in the kitchen. The kitchen's right next to my office, so I chat with people in the kitchen quite often. And he's one of the newer guys. And he was like, I know that my friends go to work because they have to. I go to work because I want to. Like, I can't wait to go to work and learn something new and take something home and practice and learn and grow. And he's just totally excited. I'm like, dang. That's the general right there. Yeah.

[00:16:17] We don't have quiet quitting issues, let's just say. Right. All right. Well, you said a lot there. It's interesting is, you know, you talked about you can't wait to learn. Right. So what is it about your culture or environment that you guys are encouraging learning? Continuous improvement. That's one of our hallmarks. We went through the whole traction thing, and, you know, our first one is help first and then is continuous improvement. Because that's what I do personally. You know, continuous improvement now.

[00:16:47] You know, it sounds trite, but, you know, they started a 100-day push-up-a-day challenge within the group. You know, I just found out about a few weeks into it. I'm like, I want to be in that. I do a 100 push-ups a day. So, you know, so everybody's, like, excited because everybody's doing push-ups. Like, well, I'm doing 100 push-ups and 100 kettlebell swings, you know? And, you know, so kind of notch it up, and let's see how that goes. And everybody's tracking it. And one guy brought his wife into it. Like, yeah, my wife's doing 100 push-ups a day. I'm like, really? So it's these little things that happen kind of spontaneously.

[00:17:18] It shows that there's a lot of health in the organization. Yeah. You foster it. You can only promote so much beyond what you're actually doing yourself. You can't expect something that you're lip-servicing, but you're not actually living. It's not a formula where, hey, we're going to do the thing this week. Thing A. But my attitude is actually not thing A. The attitude is what's going to come across. Yeah.

[00:17:48] So your organization is going to be who you are at the end of the day. Yeah. So I think a lot of people would kind of push-ups with suffering or work or hard or, you know, something like that. They're doing it voluntarily. Yeah. It's kind of cool. So is it just do your best to get that? Or is it how many days it takes you to get to 100? Or is it trying to do 100 every day? I think whoever started it, it wasn't me. It was just like 100 push-ups a day. It could be five at a time.

[00:18:18] It could be 50 at a time. Whatever you can do. And you can't just start. But no one has to do it, obviously. Yeah. But I think what we're seeing is there's this trickle down of a business partner watches what he eats. Everybody knows I'm very physically active. It's starting to trickle through. Mm-hmm. But that doesn't say a lot.

[00:18:44] You know, so it's, yeah, less said, more done. You know, and that's really kind of what it comes down to. You model it out by living it out. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of modeling, I think at one point you were talking about modeling learning, but by failure. Yeah. Making mistakes. How do you do that?

[00:19:10] Well, you know, there's mistakes, little n mistakes, and there's big n mistakes. I think you said earlier about a big mistake we made, I made personally for one of my largest clients. I can't even remember the year, but it was a New Year's Day. Nobody was working. I went there to install a new drive to expand the rate array. It's a normal thing. Normal. It's a normal thing.

[00:19:36] The highlight didn't make sense to me, and I ended up blowing the rate array completely away. It was the Exchange server, and picked up the phone, called OnTrack at the time before it was crawl, and asked them what it was going to cost, and it was like, I don't know, $1,500 to do the assessment. They dialed in, looked at it, said, okay, the data's there. We're going to rebuild it, blah, blah, blah.

[00:20:04] It's going to take, I can't remember the number, $15,000. Put it on the credit card, didn't think about it, and called in the troops from their holiday. Everybody showed up. We rebuilt the mail by importing their, convert the OSTs to PSTs, import them back into the system, and the firm, I'm still a client. They're still a client, and they talk about that all the time. Wow. They talk about that.

[00:20:33] I put my money on the line, put my time on the line, and that, you know, now I'm working on the second generation of leadership as they grow and move into a cloud primary thing from hosted services and lots of discrete servers to online cloud and 365 Advanced, SharePoint, and Purview, and all those crazy things in a completely different world.

[00:20:58] But, you know, that trust that was built all those years ago and proven, it keeps reaping benefits. Yeah. So, how did the team feel about you needing to call them in, but also admitting, like, hey, I've missed it. Yeah. Yeah. Still have the people that work with me. Still either friends with them or still employees.

[00:21:29] Yeah. Yeah. And I imagine, like, the fact that you didn't even think about it. Like, there's – I think it's easy to get caught up in ROI. Oh, God. A home man's 15 grand, but if they only pay me $1,000 a month, like, I'm going to be underwater for over a year, you know, like – but you didn't think. You didn't blink. So, you just did it. Why is that, Vince? I think it's the ethic. You know, that's who I – you know, it's what I am. I got to take responsibility.

[00:21:58] You know, it was my mistake, my carelessness, you know, at the end of the day. It was, you know, wasn't discreet enough or didn't take – hmm, I'm confused. Maybe I shouldn't execute this. Maybe I should call somebody. Maybe I shouldn't do it, you know, at all. Back off because it wasn't a half – it wasn't any urgency. It was just, oh, it's a holiday. I got nothing going on. It's New Year's Day afterwards, and I'm just going to pop this drive in. And no problem, right?

[00:22:27] And look, every good intention starts with that. It was a normal day. Yeah. It was a routine operation, and bang, you know. There was no thought that, oh, where's the backup? Is the backup good? And none of those – you know, if you look through any type of incident response, I was listening to the breakdown of how GitHub had a couple of serious incidents and lost a lot of data. And it was just a series of things. It wasn't one thing. It was a series of things.

[00:22:57] And that chain of terrible things that happened, and it happened more than once. And it happened with multiple companies across. It's people. Again, back to being human. Yeah. How do we stop to keep the human from doing wrong things that are destructive and intentionally or unintentionally? Yeah. Have you figured that out? I should have. I should have called. I should have gotten somebody else involved. I should have not did it. But, again, I wouldn't have a story. That's right.

[00:23:27] Where was the backup in this story, by the way? I was thinking about that the other day. I cannot remember. I don't remember. I think that the idea was by the time we restored the backup, which was questionable, because back in the day, exchanging an entire backup server, exchange server might not have been productive. And we didn't want to mess with the data because the data was pristine.

[00:23:52] Just the raid had to be basically the data had to be pulled off the raid by means that Kroll had, OnTrack had at the time remotely. So it was best not to touch it. Yeah. And we didn't have another system to restore it to. So the idea was we're going to stopgap this, import the mail from the cache files, and get the entire thing back up and running. It took about three days to get all of that going. Was that all hands on deck? The holiday helped. Was that all hands on deck?

[00:24:22] Absolutely. We gave everybody bonuses. We didn't charge the customer a thing. So we helped everybody out. It came out of our own pocket. Just like during 9-11. That was three months of difficulty. What happened during 9-11? The economy shut down, basically. Nobody was traveling. We lived off our checkbooks. We didn't make a salary for months.

[00:24:53] Katrina, same thing. I rebuilt that to Katrina. We didn't have a job. So we've been through the fire more than once. Yeah. Yeah. We still have our first employees, still have our senior employees. Excuse me. And even if they don't work for us anymore, we're still friends with them. What I can tell from our conversations already, Vince, is that it is like you said something to me. It's not just who you are. It's what you are. Right?

[00:25:20] And I think there's a number of good MSPs out there, but I think they struggle to get that across or convey that. Have you figured out any way to, whether it's when you're interviewing clients or interviewing team or others, to convey that we're not, unfortunately, there's enough people that say things that sound good? Yeah.

[00:25:48] You know, there's being almost a commodity item these days. Last couple of clients that I've had the opportunity to interview or preview before there's been any discussion was, you know, tell me about your business. Tell me about what's important to you. Like, is it just price? Is 20 cents a seat going to move the needle or are you there for something? And how do you tell somebody that doesn't know you about the human side of things and

[00:26:17] human support? So having had conversations with two clients that were. See, one was a competitive situation. The other one was a client we had and that was getting bought by getting investment, outside investment to expand quickly. And the outside investors had a call with us and they're basically saying, well, if we go with you as we grow this business nationwide, what's going to be different?

[00:26:45] And so it was a great opportunity to share that story. It's like, well, where we are now with the client is basically best effort based on what they wanted to pay. They've never seen us in the mode that we are proposing. Right. Because that's how they wanted it. They were limited in their perspective. And we ended up losing them to a national client, which we knew that as long as we didn't lose to a local client like that with a local MSB. It's a larger MSB across the nation. Don't mind losing to that.

[00:27:17] But the second client that we were in a competitive bid with that wasn't a client, it was pure price. And they didn't want to care. They didn't believe it. They didn't care. The people who made the decision just looked at numbers and that was it. So you don't have the opportunity to make that connection. That's why client retention for us is a number one. You know, the scripture in Proverbs says, look to your fields first and then build your house, which means take care of the things that feed you.

[00:27:46] Then worry about your house. You know, get your income stream settled. I talk to young men about that all the time. Like get a good job, get settled, get a steady income, build an emergency fund and a credit score and then look to get married. It'll make your life much easier. So that's amazing advice. I know it's not always been easy building a business. Tell me about how that's affected your life, your marriage, your...

[00:28:17] At times it was difficult. But I was able to come home every night, spend time with my kids, got tons of videos, playing kids, playing with the kids, especially being in a homeschool, a homeschool environment that the kids had other, other homeschool friends to do sports with or do trips with. We instituted a family camp out. We enjoyed the woods.

[00:28:45] So we go, you know, just go up, just pack the kids in a car and go find the next park or someplace to go, you know, splash around in the shallow end of a pool or of a lake and streams, rivers. You know, so anything like that, that we enjoy doing. So it was important, even though we might, we couldn't afford big trips. We would just take a lot of like three day, four day trips with her, my wife's sisters and her kids. We all together, we have seven, four.

[00:29:15] So yeah, that would be like 15 kids, you know, with parents and cars going to Georgia to the Nantahala River or whatever like that, or Arkansas, you know, it's a place that was close enough to drive. So that's how we would, we would supplement that. And plus they would have their sports with the, with their friends, um, activities, you know, cause at homeschool, you can be done half of the day and the rest of the day, you can go enjoy, enjoy bike riding, skating, whatever you want to do.

[00:29:44] You even played park. I coached a park team for once, um, ended up being the main coach, the main, the, the coach that was there at first dropped out and ended up having a bunch of kids, but ended up in second place and then in there, in our area. So that was a lot of fun. Just something you have to, it's like, it's important to you. You gotta, you gotta make time for it. How do you do that with a, with such a growing business? Um, make that time and balance?

[00:30:11] Being not a natural salesperson or anything like that. It was just, there was just this continuous stream of people just finding out about us through various means. So I wasn't out there hawking the business to the, you know, economic development groups. You know, I just didn't know anything. I just knew how to do much, what I knew how to do. And word of mouth is what really pushed us. So we really count on that as the favor of God and the blessing of God that brings it, that brings it. So I really, at the end of the day, I can't ignore

[00:30:38] that things happen that I can't account for how they happen. So how we got the clients we got, how we got the referrals we got, started going to the economic development groups, you know, but cause I mean, they're free, most of them. So I'm like, why not? You know? Right. But I couldn't do that and still run the business. So it got to a certain place where I had people working for me enough to where I can

[00:31:03] afford the time to do it. Hmm. So there is that nexus where you're stuck in that in-between world where you have to work, but you can't develop. So it's a friend of mine told me the analogy is like, it's like a guy who has a gold mine. You gotta go with gold mine. A third of your time is spent digging gold. A third of your time is processing gold. A third time is transporting your gold. So you only have a third. So you got to find ways to make that scale and to grow it. So you can, somebody's

[00:31:30] continuously mining and processing and then transporting in order for your business to reach whatever scale and profitability it potentially could be. That wasn't a small thing. It took a really long time to get done. Was there any tipping point that pushed you over the edge or helped you unlock that? Uh, realizing that you're capable of leading a company beyond a certain size.

[00:31:58] Yeah. Yeah. What was that for you? Like what, when this happened, maybe what size were you? Oh goodness. 13, 14 at the most. I think maybe at the most we're almost 40 right now. Okay. So you're about 13, 14 employees. And then there was some unlock where you said, I really can lead. I didn't have it in me to do it. I didn't have enough training, didn't have enough understanding and try to do everything. You know, sometimes the worst thing you do is try to do everything.

[00:32:28] And, you know, so when we started where my business partner actually became, Hey, you're really the back of the house. You're going to be, all you can do is procurement. All you're going to do is, you know, send invoices and do that important stuff. I'm still doing a service, um, involved in service and sales to a degree as whatever that looked like to get, you know, does a new client get a lead, go visit the client, close the deal. It's like, man, I got a hundred percent close rate. Like,

[00:32:55] well, that's only because you're doing two or three a year. I can only do two or three clients a year. But, you know, at the time they were good sized clients. Uh, but you know, when you ramp up, where you're doing 30 or 40 visits a month, you, you, you get to a more realistic close rate. Yeah. Yeah. It's a big difference. It's a big, big difference. So I think most of the folks listening can relate to hitting that, you know, whether it's 10 employees or 15

[00:33:21] or 20, but somewhere along there, you know, that, that leadership issue and like, what do I do? I can't do everything. Or you're hoping to get to that. Um, so you're hitting that and realized you couldn't lead. Yeah. What did you learn and develop to unlock that next level of growth? I think at that point going, being part of a mastermind group, which is a quarterly meeting of, uh, other MSPs all around the country in Canada and hearing their stories. Um,

[00:33:48] it was funny was the guys who made the most percentage profit, highest percentage profit were doing principle led selling, but their organizations were less than 10, but they were like natural in the sales business. Like they were natural. They would go golfing and hunting and, and, and hunting. And, you know, they just had that personality where they would just, and the market that they went were, you know, professional insurance and professional businesses

[00:34:15] and in their, in their space, in our area, it's not so much the same. It's not, not so much of that. So he had a unique market and a unique process. Those who tried to grow and scale, there is a no man's land. Like you have to pass through that no man's land and kick, do you have enough momentum and push to get from the principle led selling or principle led business

[00:34:40] to the system business? You know, like the UNF describes building systems. And boy, I tell you, if you don't have the right people doing that, uh, we had a technician who wasn't a very good technician, but we recognize a good operational and detailed skills. So we migrated him towards more operations and now he's pretty much running the business or the, you know, that is perceived as running the business and has them leading most of the meetings.

[00:35:07] And, but we still have our principles in the meeting with him. And those are the meetings where we're talking about long-term things, like how are we going to measure the effectiveness of a marketing projection? How do we replace this person? How do we anticipate aging out our clients? What's who's, who's threatening to leave? We don't, you know, how do we, so we have to have those types of meetings and they're based around the traction EOS idea helps keep us on track.

[00:35:36] So how did you kind of cross the new man's land that you pointed out this going from that owner led to systems led? It was hard because you had to give up, you had to give up control, give up, say so. And if it wasn't for some unfortunate series of difficult employees that actually made me realize more faster that I need to divest myself of this.

[00:36:04] Because if I kept being the problem and I kept being there, then the problem would never be perceptively resolved. So if I was to step back and let the problem be the problem, then we could get somewhere. And so taking a step back, I remember distinctly talking to my mastermind group, what, what, what we were going to do, what I was going to do, stepping back, not going to be the problem. Just going to put my head down and go to work and do the things I can do. And pretty soon

[00:36:34] within two or three years, all the problems had manifested in the going. Hmm. Wow. Yeah. I had the strength emotionally, professionally, or, but during that period of time, I got, I got it. I grew it. I had to deep, deep in myself and go through some transformative things in order to return a stronger person emotionally and then confront the issues. And then once they were

[00:37:02] confronted, then there was a short time later they were resolved. I think people that haven't been through it underestimate how much change is required of yourself. It's night and day. It's night and day. Now, now it's habitual. Like, I don't know how to go back to the person I was, thank God. Because it's so deeply ingrained and that's without the pressure

[00:37:25] and the necessity of it, existential necessity. Like, what do I do? Quit? You know, I just try to bang my head on, bang my head and hands on the table and demand things be my way. Or I could say, you know what, I'm going to put on the towel as Christ did and serve and not be the problem and see what happens and get better. And I think demonstrably that that did happen.

[00:37:52] What was the biggest thing you mentioned? It was, you know, there's energy, there was emotion, there was all these things. What was it you feel like was the part you had to change or unlock in yourself? I think, well, a number of things. So the communication, like, all right, so my business partner, I would role play and he would be like, you got to speak in such a way that people on the defensive. Like, so there's a whole thing, like, don't think you know all the things, like come

[00:38:21] in not knowing all the things and ask questions like, Hey, tell, tell me what's going on here. You know what? How'd that, you know, how'd we get to this place and not be threatening? Like, you know, how dare you do this stupid thing? You idiot. Yeah. Which was, you know, the thing was, you know, kicking in the door and blowing a shotgun, you know, like emotionally. And cause that's, you know, when that's all, you know, it's all, you know. And so that was the beginning of a very transformative process where taking the humility of, I don't know everything.

[00:38:48] I can't assume I know anything. And so make myself say, I don't know what's going on. Let me ask questions. And then my business partner, I actually would like role play. And I would not send out an email unless he looked at it. He's no, you can't send these terse direct sharp emails anymore. I'm like, what do you mean? And it felt like at some points, like I can't even breathe. Right. Like it got so bad. It's like, I can't even breathe. Right. Well,

[00:39:16] like just walking is wrong. Like I can't satisfy anybody. I'm just gonna close my door and go away. But didn't over time. And there were reasons why that was that perception or that pressure was on me. Yes, I had some issues, certainly, but they were being exacerbated in the background. So someone was actually stoking fires and then claim, Hey, look, there's a fire. Let me go put it out. So, but they were the ones stoking

[00:39:41] the fire and that became clear. But same time, I didn't, I didn't diminish my component, my piece, my part of that and got better across the board and had to outlive a bad reputation. And I've been able to successfully do that. Yeah. That's easier said than not. Oh, you know, and it helped the marriage and it helped relationships. It helped many, many things

[00:40:05] being very critical and judgmental, uh, very sharp, but you know, without training and without that, without seeing yourself in the mirror, knowing that you're the guy, you know, that it's you. Until you do that, I, you know, was Maxwell say, you know, until the pain of not changing is greater than the pain of changing. You don't change. Yeah. I think it's interesting that you role played with your partner. I know choice.

[00:40:34] I think it's wonderful though, but most people I feel like won't, you know, especially as you become the owner, you expect to know more and more and then to admit that you don't know. Yeah. And then I think it's another level to say, I'm going to role play because I think unless you're used to being in, let's say a sales role where that's common or something, most people don't want to role play. Like they go, I'm smart. Just tell me what to do. And I'll, I'll get the gist of it and I'll, I'll be nice to the client. But I think there's some real value in

[00:41:02] role play because you know, you're more prepared for those unexpected points in the conversation. Yeah. Super helpful. I wish I could figure out how to package that and help other people with it. But man, it's, it was so many little factors here and there. Um, but again, you know, don't assume you know what's going on, you know? So be humility.

[00:41:26] Is that be gracious and did have an employee who did a big mistake and we didn't fire him. Why didn't we fire him? Because then they'll never make that mistake again. Because tell me about why that's important to you, Vince. I think, you know, I was shown grace. I was shown mercy. Um, so to do that is,

[00:41:50] is critical because I think it builds loyalty and it also gives a hope to somebody like, Hey, I can, a mistake is not going to end my life. It's not, you know, my life doesn't end at the last mistake I made or the last success either so that, that we can grow beyond that. And now people come to him when these situations arise and he's able to bring his experience to the table and it's, you know,

[00:42:14] yeah, we lost a client. Okay. So we got other clients, but we gained a person and his, and he's a better person for across the board. And I think that seems, it says a lot, like not to give permission to make mistakes, but there's a reason he made mistakes. Same thing. I made the mistake. I didn't seek enough counsel, assume too much. And like, so that's a lesson before anybody does anything. And I do it for myself. Hey guys, I'm about to do something. Anybody have a problem with this?

[00:42:45] Anybody see an issue? Because it's, it's going to come up and it's best if you say it ahead of time. Everybody knows or they're like, who did this? Oh, it's Vince did this or Joe did this. Because all of the, everything's audited now. We know. So you can't hide. Yeah. So that's a, I think that's, that's super critical. I hope, I think it helps foster

[00:43:09] a team that thinks it's okay to ask for help and ask for questions and answer and ask ahead of time. Yeah. I think that's way better than, you know, ping pong tables or comfy chairs or, you know what I mean? I think sometimes culture, sometimes people read culture as the, the money you spend or the,

[00:43:33] the kind of inauthentic actions versus creating a safe space where you can be a human and make a mistake and it's not necessarily the end of the world. If you think back to those, there, those things are always really become a meme now because it was, it, it fostered the run culture. It actually now looks childish, which really everybody who was in adult saw that as being childish

[00:44:02] and no one's doing it anymore. That's not a draw. It's almost like, really? You still do that thing? That's like sub 1990s or 2000. It almost puts you in a time warp. Like, no, we, no one does that anymore. It stopped that. You know? So yeah, it's, I think people are back to a more, you know, a little bit more serious, uh, execution of business. Yeah. In your growth from 12 or 14 or whatever that was when you

[00:44:31] kind of realized and broke through there to somewhere in your 40 now, what's, what else have you run through? That's been a challenge or learned that stuck out? Well, to get through that, you asked earlier, I think a lot of that was accelerated by, um, by acquisitions, the acquisitions that we did and, uh, you know, through an acquisition, you get talent and you also get clients. So one acquisition we did, we got these, uh, the twin brothers that had been, you know, twins. So they were very

[00:45:01] complimentary in their roles and didn't like running the business. So when we brought them in, they actually became skilled technician and then skilled, uh, administrator slash technician. Both are very, very vital to what we do right now. And they share with the business, uh, through the, the, the, the, acquisition terms, they, they took less upfront to get more later. And so they, they saw that this,

[00:45:28] they saw the feature and that now they can take vacations and they can enjoy growing their families and enjoy time off. So very powerful. Yeah. It sounds like a win-win. So that's, that helped accelerate the growth through those transitory periods. Tell me about, uh, I think there was a time you had loss of a massive client or two.

[00:45:53] This year? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was, uh, this year was three significant losses, all legacy type clients, not the classic MSPs. The various reasons that we can't, um, one reason we know was because our competitor was in there as a phone vendor and became an MSP over the last few years and then offered them a year of free service. Wow. Yeah. They're just trying to, they're just trying

[00:46:20] to wipe out competition as much as they can. So now they're the enemy of all the MSPs who had brought them into their clients for voice services. Now everybody's trying to get them out. Mm-hmm . Uh, so it's, that's not great. One was, you know, a couple of them, one was an acquisition issue. Uh, private equity came in and took them over and one was just, uh, inexplicable internal issue at the business that we had no control over. They just decided they want to be in a different IT company

[00:46:49] every three years. That's, that's, that's their method. Every three years they change IT companies. That seems like buying a lottery tickets and maybe you'll end up on a good one. No idea why you want to do that, but they did. So yeah, that's really, I don't, I was going to say interesting strategy. I'm not sure it's even qualified as a strategy. Um, I, I think when we were

[00:47:14] talking, you had a client that just grew incredibly with something like a million dollars in ARR in a year and that we did. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, during COVID we, uh, through my workout relationship, there was a guy who had sold his business and wasn't happy with the way that the business selling thing took out of the entity that it became, uh, decided to come work for us and had a selling system

[00:47:43] that added over a million in ARR, uh, uh, the first year. But after that it dropped off super drastically. So your client, your client grew that fast in a year? No, we did. You grew that fast in a year. Okay. Wow. And it was, how do you cope with that kind of growth? Well, we had, uh, acquired, uh, he brought on a sales staff and, and we hired, we were able to hire

[00:48:10] some, some good people from his past relationships and they're still with us today. So from competitors who have been bought out by private equity that no one liked the PE acquisitions and what happens to businesses after that. So we picked up one key person and he brought in people that he knew and he was a very key hire and he became a linchpin for these other hires to bring them in. So he knew who they were and how good they were. And he said, Hey, I recommend getting this guy and this guy,

[00:48:37] and they became available and we picked them up. So it was, it was gone. It was difficult, but it was, it was good. But the, uh, you know, now that the first year of sales year and a half was really super crazy, but it tapered off very, very fast. And so that he's not with us anymore. He went off and started his own business selling his selling system. So he's a consultant now for selling systems. Uh, but we still have those clients and it benefited us, but at the same time,

[00:49:05] we lose those three legacy clients, it almost offsets the, the gains to a degree. So it's always, it's a constant flow. It's a constant, if you're not gaining, you're losing. It's hard to just, cause you have no control. So much of that, of our clients are getting, going through PE or shutting down or aging out. There's a lot of the boomers are heading, heading out the doors. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that? What we should be doing or not doing about that?

[00:49:37] Nobody to sell to their cup. Their kids don't want to pick it up. If they get picked up, uh, the group that picks them up already has an IT solution. It's really difficult to, to perceive, uh, what that even, you know, kind of, I started having conversations with our clients like, Hey, you know, you're kind of getting up there. What are your thoughts about the future? Cause I'm trying to look at my future. You know, I'm getting up there, you know, you know, should we have a conversation with whoever

[00:50:07] you think is going to take over? And boy, I tell you that gets very uncomfortable because no one likes to talk about that. That's kind of where my main focus now is, is, is risk looking at clients who are aging out to a certain level, um, and trying to build relationships to the next level. Yeah. Who might be the next person running it or continuing it? Interesting. Yeah. Um, how do you think,

[00:50:36] uh, if you add private equity into that, how do you think that impacts the, the, the market for managed services? Uh, a race to the bottom in a sense, like what would the P what's the, what's the goal of PE? First round, second round, third round, somebody's buying something each round. And every time they buy it, what's their motivation cut costs and make money for three

[00:51:04] years or try to return their investment. That's services out the window. And now you've blown culture up, you've blown relationships up, you've taken the heart and soul of a business out and you replaced it with accountants. It, I sell against PE acquired businesses because it's like, you're, why do you want to be one of a 10,000 clients when you just a number and you could be one of 300 with us and we

[00:51:32] know you, you know, so that we sell against those big things. And, but when a customer gets a certain size, they don't want to entertain the local, the local player anymore. They think, bigger is better period. And they sometimes end up coming back. It just doesn't work. I think he is, is not any PE endeavor is not about the market. It's about the investors making a lot

[00:51:57] of money, not so much improving the marketplace. Sorry if I'm stepping on toes with that, anybody, but we're not fans of the PE world. What is your perspective on, do you want to be acquired or be acquiring companies yourself or neither? Acquiring. Yes. Okay. Definitely. We definitely, we've, we've had a good track record

[00:52:22] doing five. Um, and we have done, you've done five acquisitions. Yeah. Okay. So let me put you on the hot seat there, Vince. How is one MSP acquiring another different than private equity? How is your company acquiring another different? Well, our goals are more aligned. We want to retain clients. We're going to grow and expand their, their, the, the spend, those clients improve their services.

[00:52:51] Cause most, most IT companies are picking up, don't have a level of sophistication and, and, and array of services that we do so we can end up growing the spend, but serving the client better. I mean, it's, it's almost every week now, you know, I got security survey. I need to resolve that. Like, okay, well, you're missing these components. If you want to answer truthfully, these things are being done. Here's a mix of services and products that you need to implement. Okay. Done. You know,

[00:53:19] cause we've done that so many times now it's, it's routine. They probably, they wouldn't know what to do. So we've helped their clients grow. Um, we walked them through incidents, uh, you know, to where they're prevented or minimized or, you know, never happened at all where the IT company had before it had no capacity to walk through an incident with them. And then the client, the technical staff ended up

[00:53:45] staying and growing and developing. So one of our best stories is a young man named Ryan. And he was so nervous coming on board because he was just basically running parts, you know, back and forth. And we told him, said, no, we see potential in you and we believe in you. And we kept developing and beyond, he's kind of kicking and screaming like, no, I can never be that person. Oh my God. Is he a great, he is exactly what we'd know he'd be. Our customers love him. He's married. He's got a kid

[00:54:12] and, and, and he's happy. You know, he's been with us for probably almost 10 years now. Um, and he's grown and developed and I, you know, I don't think he could have seen that the other, one of the other members of this group, same thing. He, he was very good with internal sales. And, and now we've grown his capacity and his income greatly against his own, uh, self limiting ideas of himself. Like this is how I did things for 30 years. Like, well, here's better ways to do

[00:54:40] things and you can serve your clients more and make more money. And you know how people get this crazy idea of, um, sales, like, Oh, I feel like I'm selling. Like you say that, that like, it's a bad thing. You're selling them the right thing where before you used to sell them, you undersold them and you felt good because you saved them money, but you didn't help them. You left a lot of risk on the table or something else. Yeah. You sell them a firewall, but without the security services. So you saved the money,

[00:55:08] but you didn't put any security services on it. Like what you could have just bought a router Walmart to, for what you just did, you oversold a product that wasn't doing anything more than a router off the shelf would do. How do you feel about that? Yeah. It's just, you know, so helping him walk through, you know, it has been, it's been a lot of fun to see him grow and develop and resist the change. But finally, when it comes around to changing and realize, Oh yeah, this is working out.

[00:55:36] This is good. Let me switch gears and ask you Vince, what's the biggest lesson you've learned over all your years? Lesson or lessons? Yeah. Yes. I think, you know, the value of the virtues are never,

[00:55:58] um, or never, it's never wrong to do the right thing. I don't care. Yeah. That's where I think private equity and profit driven, and I'm not saying this as a socialist or communist, so don't write me bad letters. I'm just saying there is a profit first idea that can't, that has some assumptions. Well, if I

[00:56:25] lose this client, no big deal, I just replace him with someone else. Maybe. And that's because you're spread across different regions and, and, and you have scale, you've reached a certain scale that you can say that, but guys like me, you know, in the space I'm at every client's precious, not from profit perspective, but from, if I lose a client, I'm losing it to competitor. Yeah. Um, so I may be growing my competitor by doing foolish things. And at the end of the day,

[00:56:54] that's not a good thing. So I think the lesson learned is, you know, continue to do the right thing by client, by people, be fair, uh, take care of your people and also take care of your clients. I know that sounds trite, but it's, it's, it's very, very real. Mm-hmm. And you really can't escape who you are. Yeah. Yeah. That's well said. Yeah. If there was one thing you could do all over again or do differently, what would that be?

[00:57:27] I think I definitely don't join a mastermind earlier. Um, but you, you don't know what you don't know. Um, hire professionals to do professional things like legal and accounting. Um, have somebody look over your books, tell you the truth, look at your agreements, tell you the truth

[00:57:59] and open yourself up to criticism. Be open to it, go find it. Literally go find somebody and criticize it. No, I know I'm not right. Tell me where I'm not right. You know, come in here, examine me and look forward. That's why the value of the mastermind was. You get out there and you got to represent your numbers and they're like, bro, you have, you said, you're going to fix this three, three sessions ago. You can't talk about it anymore. You know? And there was a moment,

[00:58:26] there was a time during our sessions and I just shout out to the guys that were there. That was just so great where you had to shut up and listen. Like there was a point where you couldn't defend yourself. You just had to stand there and just take it. And they did it for your benefit. I mean, it's for your benefit, but seeking out people who can criticize what you have for your benefit and for your good is, there's nothing like that. I don't think anything like

[00:58:51] that. If you can't handle that, then life will teach you lessons. Your clients will teach you lessons. Your employees will teach you those lessons and whether you're open to hearing them and executing them is going to be, there's going to be a difference between success and failure, be an employee or an owner. What is the, what is the peer group that you have been a part of or recommend? I don't know if it's even around, but Matt, we were part of Ingramicro's,

[00:59:20] was VTN at one time and then it became Mastermind. Uh, Heartland Technology Group, I think is still doing theirs. Mm-hmm. Vistage, but they're like across the board. They're not MSP focused. Gary Pika has groups, you know, so they're, they're accessible. I obviously like Robin Robbins. I think there's lots of opportunities for the thing, for these things. So the group by itself is not the answer. It's who's in the group. Mm-hmm.

[00:59:48] Maybe it's the right mix of people. Maybe it's not. Maybe there's somebody in there as a shark and all they need to do is try to buy up other companies or find trade secrets and use them or whatever. Maybe there's malevolence there, but maybe there's also genuine people. Mm-hmm. What's a myth about running an MSP that you'd like to debunk? It's a process and not a product.

[01:00:15] Mm. Tell me more about that. What, what you mean by that? I think we're, and MS, MSPs are sold all these single pane of glass. And I just can't stand that, that phrase. If I find that phrase in marketing, I'm going to probably not buy your product. All in one, do it all. We can do it all. You know, no effort, 15 minute conversion. Like, no, you know, that's, none of that's real. Mm-hmm.

[01:00:45] Tools are one thing. Processes and execution are completely different. You can give somebody the same tool set, but they'll, if they execute differently, you got two different results. Tools are not the thing. It's that it's the person with the tools, how they use it. You can simplify, you can simplify everything to the most simplest thing, the most simplest. You can do everything in open source for free. You really could. No problem with that. And people that do do it, but it's how you execute.

[01:01:15] Yeah. I imagine you're not the only MSP with the exact same tech stack that you guys use. Oh, no. Yeah. And so your operational maturity and processes are, are the differentiator. And yeah, nobody likes writing process docs. Yeah. Nobody likes following them either. So writing them and following them are two different things for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Vince, given all that's going on in the industry and just where you are

[01:01:44] at this point in your career, what is something you're looking forward to? I guess the scope of that, I would say, so for me and the business, for myself, a successful transition to the next, you know, owner group, whether that be an internal group or an external or acquisition that we continue to acquire. I like to be on that side of the, of the plate, I like to be presenting, speaking, you know, dealing, you know, helping the community out,

[01:02:13] mentoring the MSP as a whole. Uh, man, that's, I feel like we've been, we've kind of stabilized to a degree, but now AI has come in so hard. It's disrupting things again to a degree. I think there's going to be a real shaking out period of a, probably an overly aggressive adoption of AI that's going to back, that's going to come back to bite us. And I think a number one, as I'm talking through this, our vendors are our biggest threat.

[01:02:43] What do you mean by that? They change, they can change on a dime, change the product, drop a product, increase pricing, break up a product that was a bundle of things. Now it's a separate group of things and, or they can poorly execute something and cause a problem. Like my son-in-law is an IT company for schools and a hosting company was holding all his DNS records for him and his clients. And they mistaken,

[01:03:09] uh, they do some internal process, deleted all the DNS records for him and his clients for execution. And this is something you're paying a hundred bucks a month for. And so our vendors, I think are our greatest threat. They really, they don't, they have built a product set that's based on enterprise needs and trying to sell to MSPs in SMB space. I think that's a big, big deal. And I think their messaging is

[01:03:40] not, they're convincing the MSPs of a situation that is generally not true for their clients and makes them think that their clients need something that they end up really not even caring about. So I think there's, I think there's going to be some reconciliation in that space, some collapsing. Obviously you see the connect wise is in the case is they're just eating everything up. But at some point, those things are going to get filtered out into some something that we,

[01:04:07] what that looks like. I don't know how much control we're going to have. So you can see open source gaining footholds. I think open source is really starting to gain a lot of footholds and MSPs. Microsoft haystack of tools and products that are difficult to discern and put together and present their own challenges. There's a lot, there's a lot going on. I think the MSP world is so much more

[01:04:34] complex than it was when I got started. I would say that in a heartbeat, much, much more complex and higher stakes as well. So I hope you answered the question. Yeah, I think it's a wonderful answer. You mentioned that you believe that something like AI will be kind of overly or too aggressively adopted and backfire by vendors, by MSPs, by the clients.

[01:05:02] All of it. Everybody. I kind of want a bunch of licenses of copilot. Why? Oh, it's going to do these things. Have you read about the unintended consequences of copilot in your, on your, on your files? Finding things they're not supposed to find because you didn't set up security, right? Yeah. You don't want to do that. Yeah. We're going to see a lot of that.

[01:05:34] So as an MSP that is growing, what, how do you think you should be coming alongside your clients with AI, with facets growing? And I guess I'd love to see what, what level should you be engaging? You know, is this the time where things are out there? We should actually be selling things and delivering things and making a profit. It's too early. It's, it's somewhere in between. And how do you, how do you approach that? Well, I'm sure there's MSPs out there who have been ahead of the

[01:06:03] curve and probably become experts in that space. But at the same time, how do you market that to people? Um, most of our growth comes, our clients asking us things that are challenging to them and legal community, which are big in legal community is addressing this. They're being sold by, by lawyers,

[01:06:25] legal specific cloud products that are including AI. Um, so it's, it's helping them to be realistic about what to expect and to become X become very versus prompters. How do we build promptings and show them that and, and, and help easily the older generation, obviously is the one's going to be at the struggle with most younger generations are not going to struggle as most as much, but at the same

[01:06:53] times I think they may be a little bit more quick on the uptake and probably make the biggest mistakes. I anticipate that the younger, they're going to over anticipate what they can get from it and then over expect. And it's going to blow up in their face because somebody is going to say, did you write that with chat? Because it has a certain tone, the nuance is missing. Uh, so there's going to be some things that could bring into question a legal specific. Well, I don't know. You didn't just do

[01:07:21] this with, with AI. Why am I paying $500 an hour? I could have did it myself. You can't, you can't, but I don't know if you're going to be a, but you're going to be a, you're going to be a, you're going to get lazy. Is the title company going to get lazy? Is the doctor going to get lazy because AI is doing all these things? I think that's, that's the unfortunate trend of humanity to do that through over the rely on tools. So that's my pontification on that.

[01:07:48] So what do you think your role in this is with your clients? Hopefully, uh, uh, uh, an advisor, I'm partnering with a, another person on a project that's going to involve laying the groundwork for, for AI and copilot, because it's not where we're at yet. So I'm partnering and hopefully we can grow that partnership together. That's a, I don't think people know yet what this could be. And I think now's the time to get up to

[01:08:17] speed on it. Yeah, absolutely. What's the number one book you would recommend? At what stage of business am I talking to? Yeah. And, you know, MSP says it's going to be across the board. Um, if you, if you got more than one, uh, that you think are just amazing.

[01:08:41] The e-myth hands down, uh, profit first, uh, is a good book. Simple, super simple. Uh, was it easy numbers? They got by car, they got bought by car rigs. I think that guy, local guy from Louisiana, Greg Crabtree. That's what it is. Simple numbers. Yeah. Greg Crabtree. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. You have to have financial, you have to do something to get up to speed on

[01:09:09] financial. You have to be versed in financials. You got to understand balance sheets versus profit, profit and loss. You got to understand margins. You got to understand ratios, uh, service leadership being a part of our mastermind group did phenomenal job in training and teaching what those things were and why they are important. So service leadership was great. I think they even have their own peer groups

[01:09:32] now. So things about finances, anything about leadership, uh, leadership challenges, uh, leadership step by step. Joshua Spodick is an excellent book of literally training you step by step about leadership, trainable skills, repeat things you can actually put into play and practice and not just have, you know, your autism, you should've, a John Maxwell series, obviously 22 laws, irrefutable laws of leadership,

[01:09:57] communication, anything you do to grow in communication skills, like, um, how to negotiate, like your life depends on it. Was it a boss stuff really powerful, uh, question it behind the question, QBQ, really good book, but you know, you can read it, but you got to implement it. Yeah. You really got to put it into practice. And I think that's where they're being a part of a peer group or perhaps some sort of community of people around you that can challenge you is super important.

[01:10:26] Doesn't have to be the same MSPs, any type of business group I think will be helpful. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And of course the spiritual side of things that, because it's all fed by who you are. And if you are, is not rooted in some sort of, you know, virtues and, and, and, and transit and transcendental, uh, things that surpass that are more important than anything like wisdom being important, virtuousness and integrity and honesty, all those things. If they're not rooted in that, then you're

[01:10:53] just pulling levers and trying to make things work and you don't know why you're doing it. Hmm. Well said. So Vince, for everybody that's been listening, how can they find you online? Um, email me, Vince at restech.net V I N C E at R E S T E C H.net or LinkedIn. Uh, you just look up my name. Vince Grimmie on G R E M I L L I O N. Happy to take your responses. And if you're a PE person, I think you don't have to call me.

[01:11:25] Yeah. I get too many emails from these guys. You're interested in acquiring, not being acquired, just to, just to, just to be clear. I'm not averse to ideas of being acquired. It just have to fit a certain, um, it have to have certain conditions on our end. No, that makes sense. Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. Well, Vince, this has been amazing. Thank you for the gift of your time and your wisdom today. And thank you for being on MSP mindset.

[01:11:55] Okay. Appreciate it. Thank you.