Scaling with Empathy: Don't Lose Your People and Culture While Growing

[00:00:00] You end up losing the people that are most valuable and preserving the people who are struggling. And the other thing that was a surprise to me over the years is that every time I made a hard call, I can look back and those people by and large are significantly better off than where else. I would put so much pressure on myself to not just be empathetic but to be the answer to all of the things, and to be everything to everybody, and it just doesn't work that way. So, Empathy at Scale is really the only way that it works to scale an organization effectively.

[00:00:33] Hey guys, Damien Stevens, host of MSP Mindset. Today I continue my mission to interview 100 of the fastest growing and most interesting MSPs on the planet. Today I'm joined by Peter Melby, the CEO of New Charter Technologies, which happens to be one of the largest MSPs on the planet. And if you want to learn how you went from two employees to building a $20 million MSP,

[00:01:00] to becoming the CEO of New Charter with somewhere north of 1,200 employees, then don't miss out on this conversation. However, we talk about Empathy at Scale and how you can use that as the secret to drive deeper relationships with your team and with your clients and leverage technology as a lever to drive business change. And now there's no more race to the bottom, commoditized MSP or tech stack.

[00:01:28] So if you want to differentiate your MSP and set yourself up for growth like none other, then don't miss out on our conversation. Because you've had this crazy rise, but... Yeah, it's... You can frame it differently, but I think you had to be a different person. Yeah. A few times, probably. I've... So yeah, I've had an interesting journey in the MSP space in 24 years. And it's been my entire adult life.

[00:01:56] And it's changed a lot from, you know, having... From being a single employee myself to having 1,200 employees. And obviously there's no way to shortcut that. And along the lines, or along the way, my passion has changed as well. You know, I grew up in a place where, you know, my passion was the technology.

[00:02:26] You know, I... Computers were new. Yeah. It didn't matter that I was young because I had the same amount of time, you know, with a computer that a lot of other people did. And so it was just that thing that we were able to bring. I created success for people just because I knew how to operate a computer, how to fix a computer, you know, things like that.

[00:02:51] And it created a sense of impatience for me around school, around what a longer term, you know, our investment in a career might look like, because I had this thing that was right in front of me. And so the short synopsis of my journey, you know, is that I started an MSP. And at the time it wasn't called an MSP. It was just an IT company.

[00:03:17] And grew that with my partner, you know, through a lot of different stages. And it's 20 plus million dollar MSP, joined in and really helped spearhead this platform that I now run called New Charter Technologies. And that's a different animal, you know, as well we've done, you know, we've acquired 28

[00:03:40] best in class MSPs and created, you know, value, created synergies, created, you know, more value for the customers, you know, through our strategy there. So, yeah, like, like you would imagine, the journey required very different pivots, you know, very different times. Some of them intentional, some of them known, some of them not as known.

[00:04:08] So happy to dig into the whole journey. You know, there are specific pieces that we want to start with. You, you, you tell me. This episode is brought to you by Serbosity. I started Serbosity because I was an MSP that lost data because I thought backup success meant I could recover. And boy, was I wrong. If you've ever been there or anywhere close, you know how much your stomach turns over the

[00:04:35] thought of not being able to recover any version of the data for your client. Now, naively, I set off to build a better mousetrap and build a better backup product until finally I realized it's all about the people and the process. So you have a choice to make. Do nothing and bare your head in the sand or level up your processes. Now, you can do that by either hiring Serbosity, where we'll take all the workload of managing backups off of your plate and test your backups daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly.

[00:05:04] Or you can keep the tech stack you have in place, your existing backup into your provider and steal my 18 years of knowledge and download that process and add that to your operational maturity today. Yeah, let's come. I want to revisit the timeline, but I'd like to stay on that thought, which is like you said something interesting, which is different. Even your passion changed and not everybody is either aware or shares that. So what do you mean by that? You know, it's funny. I say it changed.

[00:05:34] I don't know if it actually really changed that much or if it just, you know, got deeper and deeper, you know, and I understood it more over time because there is a common thread, you know, with what I've been passionate about since the very beginning.

[00:05:50] And it's doing something that no one else can do or has done, focusing on people and people organizations at scale and the idea of creating value in ways that are innovative. And so that was true at the beginning, too. I just didn't know that.

[00:06:15] It looked a lot like I like playing with computers, you know, and helping people when they thanked me for, you know, for doing something that other people couldn't solve for them. You know, that made me feel good. And if I understand you were, you started at Graystone, like 20? 20. 20. And dropped out of college. Is that right? Yeah. So the funny story there, it's funny now.

[00:06:38] I don't think it's funny about parents at the time, but people love to say that, you know, they look at people like Bill Gates and, you know, Zuckerberg and all of that. And so college dropouts, you know, visionaries, you know, brilliant. That wasn't me. I, I was, I was impatient. I was bored and I was a little lazy. And I said, I can fix a computer.

[00:07:05] I could develop, I could code, you know, I could do HTML, you know, code and some programming for websites. I could do a lot of technical things that were very much in demand and interesting. You know, at the time the school was not interesting and I didn't get anything out of it from a immediate satisfaction point of view. So it was all the right obvious recipe to drop out, you know, and, and do this. The, the differences for me, my parents are teachers and my dad's a college professor.

[00:07:33] So that was always, it was never even not part of my plan. You know, that it was something that I was going to be, you know, I didn't know if I would go into science or if I go into technology, but not finishing college was, was an assumption, not just for them, but for me. You know, and so it was an interesting conversation when I, after, you know, one year where I really focused more on what I was doing business wise and technology wise, I said, yeah, I'm going to take some time off.

[00:08:03] I remember my dad said, he said, I know what that means. He's like, it's going to be really hard to go back. But he said, I also know that I have, I have students who are here and I can tell it's only because their parents expect them to be here. And they don't learn the things that other students learn. They go through the motions, they check the boxes. So they didn't like the decision. They didn't agree with the decision, but they supported it. And that's big already. It is absolutely.

[00:08:32] And then, I mean, I, I owe a lot to that. The thing that I say as it relates to that decision and how all of that stuff has worked out is that sometimes we make good decisions and sometimes we learn how to make our decisions good. And this was very much the latter for me. This was me being in a situation where I woke up one day and said, oh no, I got to prove that this works.

[00:09:01] So my work ethic, my drive, and I found a new level of passion, you know, for acceleration, for scale, you know, for learning new, you know, how to do new things around this came from a lot of fear of about the decision that I had made. And the fact that I knew that it wasn't for the right reasons. You know, I didn't have a plan. I just had some skills, some skills.

[00:09:24] And so I credit that, you know, the year and a half after that with a lot of, you know, what the, just the foundation that I needed, you know, where I looked at it and said, I got to pay rent. I got to do these things. I don't have any help. I'm not living in a dorm. I'm not, you know, I don't have support. I've got to, you know, I've got to make it happen, you know, and ultimately that piece, I thought I really like making it happen. I really like, you know, pushing hard.

[00:09:49] You know, I didn't work as hard as I should have at school, but it didn't mean that I wasn't capable of really, really pushing to do things, you know, that I knew I was capable of doing and even things beyond what I knew I was capable of doing. And so that's, you know, I say oftentimes, I don't think I would be here if I hadn't quit school. I don't think I would be the person or have the drive that I do. But I can't look back at that decision that I made when I was 19 years old and say that it was made for the right reasons.

[00:10:20] And that's one of those two things can be true at the same time type of statements, right? Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, when I started the VMSP really in earnest, you know, that next year, before that I just dabbled in, you know, really freelancing from a web development and IT support perspective. And, you know, I could pay my rent with the work that I was doing kind of ad hoc.

[00:10:50] But I called it a business, but it really wasn't. So Greystone started by my business partner, Jesse Armstrong, and I had known each other since I was in high school and he was in college. We worked together and he had the vision for what Greystone could be. But he had a commitment to an enterprise technology job that was a great opportunity for him. And so he stayed, you know, he was an advisor, you know, in that. And I was doing the work the other day.

[00:11:20] I was having the conversations, you know, I was fixing the computers. I was, you know, just basically building a client base, you know, around that. And he focused on moonlighting and doing some back office stuff and billing and the things that I wasn't thinking about. That was another level of structure that really helped me, you know, was that, again, I had talent, but he had some of the understanding of how all that stuff, you know, came together. He didn't finish college.

[00:11:48] So the, you know, the, the idea was for a while, we'll just, hey, let's, let's do this and see what happens. But, but it was something that I never thought was my permanent career. I remember thinking every year, like, hey, this is a good thing for me to do. I kind of figure out what the world is like. And then we'll, if I'm going to go back to school, if I'm going to get a real job, you know, things like that. And year over year, we looked at it and said, well, it's, it's getting a little better.

[00:12:19] It's going forward, you know, and I think 15 years later, I woke up and said, oh, I think this might be my real, my real job. Yeah. Yeah. So I think people, you know, it's crazy to think, to ask people to, to say, what are you going to be when you grow up? You know, sometimes I think, you know, you haven't figured it out at this age, let alone when you're 18 or 20. Yeah. I even apply that to people who look and say, what's the five year plan for your business?

[00:12:50] In this, there's a couple of things about that. Well, number one, in this industry, the outside forces are going to be very different in five years than they are now. We can do some level of prediction, but we don't know entirely. Right. And two, if I would have set out a five year plan in any five year period over the last 20 years, I would have sold myself and the business short on what we ended up being able to do. And I don't credit myself for that. There was a lot of people around me, a lot of circumstances.

[00:13:18] I mean, there's, there's so much that has gone into this, but at no point along the way that we look at this and say, hey, let's build a, you know, 300 going on $500 million organization in this space. It was, I remember the first time I had an employee and the first time that I had, you know, three employees and the first time that I didn't have to be on call on the weekend. I mean, those were the big milestones. I remember those too. Yeah. I was like, this is it. This is easy street. When I'm, I remember I was so naive early on.

[00:13:46] I was like, if we get to where I could have two employees, it would be so much easier. Yes. Yeah. I remember, you know, my, my wife, my girlfriend at the time saying, are you going to have to work every holiday? You know, and we had some, some clients that were, um, you know, event centers and, you know, it's like, I, yeah, I don't really have any other options.

[00:14:13] This is what I do, you know, and I don't have anything else to fall back on. And it was annoying, but it was just the reality of it. And I, I developed some really bad habits, um, out of necessity over those first years that I even tried that I still try and break now where, you know, text messaging wasn't a thing. You know, we, we got some of the first blackberries, you know, so we had an email on our devices, which is great.

[00:14:35] But even before that, it was just always having to pay attention to my phone and always having to be so reactive to if the phone rang, I had to jump on something, you know, and if I got an email, I had to jump on something. I had to know right away because there was no backstop, you know, with that. And even, you know, 20 plus years later, I look at it and I still just get that same kind of urgent reaction when something happens. I have to get on that now, you know, to, you know, unwind some of, you know, some of that stuff.

[00:15:03] But it also created that, that understanding of what customers need, you know, and what the, what this industry looks like, you know, and should look like over time. And so if we follow that kind of passion path again, what I, how that evolved in those early years is that I looked at it and I said, all right, it's really, really hard.

[00:15:25] You know, people are really struggling, you know, as I talk to them and understand them, the bigger they get, they struggle with the team building, you know, with culture, with the people aspect of things. So I really need to focus on that part and that's, it's natural to me as a person. So that's, that, that's helpful. And then I need to focus on what it takes to just keep bringing on new clients and grow to the point that I can have a bigger team so that things can be spread out a little bit more. Mm-hmm.

[00:15:57] And so the, the passion has shifted away from just the technology and more to the organizational structure, you know, in that still with that root passion of let's build something that no one else is building. Mm-hmm. And we started out those, those years by saying, you know, we're, we have to, to be a relationship oriented business. That's what made me successful in my first IT jobs is what, you know, is where I saw success in communicating with, with customers.

[00:16:25] I wanted people to enjoy their experience. But I didn't know at the time was that I was actually better, not just because they enjoyed the experience of working with me, but because they started talking to me, you know, and building, you know, and I built a relationship with them and there was trust. And so they would tell me more things. And ultimately I didn't know how to fix every problem, but I did know how to get to the root cause of some things.

[00:16:49] So look at it and say the, and, and oftentimes the root cause of their stress was things like I can't print, you know, right now. Okay. Well, that's a blanket statement, but understanding what they're trying to print when, you know, if they're on a deadline, then even buying myself the time by rerouting, printing to overhears, so that they, you know, their stress level calmed down while I figured out how to, you know, how to solve the issue that I didn't understand.

[00:17:14] Those were, were phenomenal learning points for me because it was all about the experience. It was all about what they were trying, you know, what, what, what they had, had to get into that. And so I said, we, we have to scale that. We have to scale the ability to have those, um, those types of, of experiences.

[00:17:33] So we have to be relationship oriented and we built our business around having deep relation, individual relationships with customers, even as we, you know, the employees, the employee account grew. And I remember being in an industry meeting one time and someone said, uh, you can't do that once you get five, you know, once you get past five people. Five people. Yeah. It's pretty low number to give up on relationships. Yeah, exactly.

[00:18:00] And then, and then the next time it was like, I, you know, that's not going to scale to 20 people. Next time is scale past 20 people. It's like, well, that's not going to get you to 50, you know? And then, and, and at some point you're going to, you're, you're going to have to break that. And just, you know, we didn't have your, you know, nameless, faceless help desk, you know, or things like that. It was a much more of a boutique, you know, deeper service connection.

[00:18:22] And, um, over time we very much learned that we had to, um, to evolve, excuse me, evolve our view of relationships and what that looked like. But we could never afford to let it go because it wasn't about just them liking it. It was about them getting what they needed from us and be able to communicate what they needed.

[00:18:48] Um, and that has been the fabric of scaling a lot over the years is realizing that it's still a people industry. Yeah. Um, and if we, if we lose sight of that and forget that, then we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because I feel like it's too easy to get caught in the day to day.

[00:19:09] And, uh, if you go on a lot of technology forums, especially the public ones like Reddit, man, I always can get caught in this conversation of like, which, which part of the stack do I change out to, to make it, you know, 1% difference in my margin, uh, instead of spending more time with the client or making a bigger impact with the client or, uh, equipping my team in a better way. Um, so why do you think that is?

[00:19:38] It's a, it's a perfect question. If we look at the kind of this timeline in, you know, in, in the journey and using that as a backdrop for some of the stuff. So, you know, in that, that point by 10 years in where we've got a team of, you know, eight to 10 people, um, we start to see, you know, to, to work with more sophisticated clients, you know, more sophisticated companies.

[00:20:01] And we succeeded by, again, by having deep relationships, understanding them and getting a little bit deeper than it was used to getting in, in understanding the business, you know, uh, what, what, what's your job? What are you trying to accomplish? You know, and, and, and going one, you know, not just setting up the technology, but how, and then how to use it and then how to use it for your specific, you know, needs in that.

[00:20:24] And I've said this thing for almost 15 years now that we, IT has the most visibility of any, any other party in an organization. You have, you know, the leadership and you have to have relationships there. You know, the team, you understand the systems, you have access to data.

[00:20:50] You, um, you know, the inner workings better than, you know, across the board, probably better than anybody else because everybody else is pretty specialized and siloed or really, really general and technical. And so if we under, if we have more visibility in the, in operations than anybody else, we're, we've spent the last 20 years using that to just do a better job of fixing printers, you know, and changing passwords.

[00:21:19] We haven't cracked the code and, and, and, you know, even though we've talked about it, you know, for, for a long, long time, I haven't cracked the code on the idea that we are, we need to be able to change business. I need not just change the technology. We have to solve business problems with that, with technology. We're pretty good at solving technology problems. We always happen.

[00:21:41] So that's the, the, if you look at the type of people that tend to go into it and then it have tended to go into it and also where we're, where we're comfortable. It's significantly more in things like the stack, you know, and what tools, you know, what's, um, uh, you know, all, all of those pieces.

[00:22:03] And so, um, I think that's, that's a lot of where, where that mindset comes from. And it's really hard, hard thing to get out of it. We built a culture around it and then it builds an industry around it with all these vendors. So, but I think that, I think that's the challenge that you see in there is the, the fact that, that we, we, we go to what's native to us.

[00:22:30] And so if we need to change the business or we need to get excited about something or find something new, innovating in the technology, it just seems to be more native, you know, to, you know, and, and it, it leaves open a significant market opportunity, but it's a market opportunity that gets increasingly harder to capture, you know, as the business landscape, it gets more and more complex. So I want to go back to your journey a little bit.

[00:22:57] So you started at 20 with, uh, I remember I started my first business, I think also at 20, which is, if I recall, that was the peak of my wisdom. That's when I thought I knew, right? Uh, and, uh, and you built Greystone technologies to larger than almost any MSP by itself. So over what period of time and about how, how large did that get by itself? Yeah.

[00:23:24] So we were, um, and it's funny as I look back because the, the, the transition to new charter, you know, it wasn't that there was an absolute date, but it wasn't, you know, necessary. I mean, it evolved, you know, through the process we built for, um, 19 years, uh, on our own, about, you know, close to 20 million.

[00:23:49] And it's, it's interesting because $20 million for an MSP, you know, for, for a business is still considered a small business by government definitions or, you know, but in the MSP space, it's massive. It's, it's, it's top, you know, it's past 1%. But what I love is what you're saying is it's interesting because in other, aside from the government, you're like lower mid-market, you know, right? You're, you're not even mid-market yet in every other industry.

[00:24:19] Yeah. And so you think about why that is and you realize that the fragmentation and the limitation, I think it's what we learned at the beginning is that people want to work with people they know. People want to, there, there's a trust element. We're part of someone's organizational structure in their business as an MSP, you know, as an outsource provider. We're not a product, you know, and so it's a people business and people businesses are really, really hard to scale.

[00:24:47] And I learned early on, I mentioned, I had, I, I was, I had interest in people. I had a knack for communicating with people and, you know, I cared about them and, and, and all of that. And I said, that's going to really help me in this. And it did for a while, but I got to the point where we were a million in revenue and actually learned through a series of circumstances.

[00:25:12] I didn't know much, um, to, to, you know, culture at scale. And what I even say, you know, empathy at scale, because it's easy to understand a person. It's easy to understand, you know, their mindset, ask them questions, you know, one-on-one. It's a little bit harder to understand everybody when you got, you know, five in the room. Yeah. A lot harder when it's 10.

[00:25:42] If you have 20, you just can't. And so you end up with this, this artificial ceiling because you can no longer control and see enough to control the outcomes for those customers through the relationships that you have with your, with your employees. And that's where most growth breaks down, you know, is in, and, you know, it's, it's different employee numbers for everybody. But eventually you're just like, all right, the service degrades.

[00:26:12] The people are unhappy. Um, they're looking at this and, you know, they're, they're not understanding the fact that I care about them. They're not understanding the fact that, you know, we're building a business for their, their benefit. They're seeing all the downsides and thinking that we've got it out and that we're, you know, we've, we've got it out for them or that we're trying to, you know, manipulate them or make, you know, um, and things like that. And I looked at, we're not trying to do any of that, but it was, it's a very natural course for people on this, that, you know, on any business journey.

[00:26:43] And in the MSP space, it just happens to happen for most when we reach some of those, those, you know, sizes, um, employee count and revenue and all of that. And if you think about that in context, um, one of my favorite books, uh, is by Jim Collins. And most people think of good, great. Thank you. Jim Collins.

[00:27:11] One of my favorite books is called how the mighty fall by Jim Collins. And I have to be honest about the fact that I don't actually remember what much of what it says. It's one of my favorite books because of why it exists. He had to write that book because all of his case studies from good to great, massive bestseller, they all faltered and they all failed. Yeah. Yeah. You read it now and you're like, it's not relevant.

[00:27:41] The case studies, you're not relevant at all. Yeah. As it was a point in time, you know, that was just, um, so. So that if you, if you, if you think about that and one of the things that we, we learned and really just started to establish in our organization is a recognition that. On a long enough timeline, every culture succumbs to what we call the laws of human nature.

[00:28:08] That if you try to prop up something that's not uniquely connected, you know, in terms of how humans actually operate, um, then it's going to have a short lifespan. And so if your culture is based on, um, let's all be best friends, let's all be family. Let's have happy hours after work. Let's give, you know, great benefits. So unlimited vacation. I would say, you know, if the best thing about your company is that you can spend unlimited time away from your company, then you got a problem.

[00:28:35] So, um, but none of those things really are sustainable culture culture. Culture, you know, for me comes from recognizing that we all want something out of life. We all want things. And some of those things are very different, um, person to person, but some of those things are the same. And if we understand what we want, that is the same. And we align our culture in those things. And it's, it's, it's big themes. It's things like everybody wants to succeed.

[00:29:05] Everybody wants to improve. Everybody wants to have, you know, authentic connections and be able to be themselves. Everyone wants to, uh, make more money, you know, and people generally like doing new things and taking risks as long as they have some level of protection, you know, and safety net around that. And no one wants to fail. Those are all things that are true of, of a company too.

[00:29:33] And so by being intentional about culture and saying, Hey, it's not all these perks. It's not this short term definition. It's actually tables and beanbags. It's yeah. And don't be wrong. We have that stuff like at a foosball table. You know, we enjoy each other. We have, you know, happy hours. There are there's camaraderie there, but that sits on top of our culture. That exists because we set out on, you know, with this, this desire to make sure that our culture was rooted in authenticity.

[00:30:01] And that authenticity was a recognition that, yeah, we do have a lot of things that align us. And so when we can look at it and say, Hey, we want to grow. We want to add more customers. And that's going to add stress to a service team. But once we add X number of customers or X amount of revenue, we can employ, you know, more people in another layer. And then we can have you, you go from on-call services being, you know, once every three weeks to once every eight weeks.

[00:30:30] That's, you know, material change for everybody. And, and, and growth, you know, along the way incentivizes, you know, it creates opportunity for everybody. And when we started doing that more intentionally, we started understanding what it took to get the types of people that we wanted, you know, in those roles. Once they understood, yeah, we're a growth company. So don't come in here if you really just want to do the same job every day for 20 years.

[00:30:54] Because we're not going to be able to incentivize you to really, you know, be, to have what you want in that space. But we don't have to. I mean, the, the, the, the people that we have come in, you know, are the people that were ambitious about changing things. So it created a very different view of what we felt like sustainable culture was.

[00:31:16] And that was probably the most important and also the most painful lesson because it sucks realizing that your people don't think about you the way that you think about you. Think about the company, the way that you're really investing in the company. They don't see how much you're trying, you know, for that, you know, in those lonely days. Yeah. So, but that, that was transformative.

[00:31:39] And that for us was, you know, this is, um, it, that kind of, the journey started in that 10 employee timeframe, you know, and, um, it, it wasn't just automatic realization. We're, we're fine now. I mean, the, the, it continued, you know, for a number of years and a number of other trajectories, you know, trajectories, because we realized that the next step, you know, after realizing that is then figuring out how to build process to do it at scale. You know, and at every scale along the way.

[00:32:09] And so that's a, that's, that's a totally different thing. So what do you attribute all the growth? And let's just stick with the graystone for a moment. We'll, we'll come back to, um, but all the growth at graystone or not all, but obviously you made it to a point that most nobody does. So what do you, what do you attribute that to? Relentlessness around customers and employee value. Honestly, the fact that we never gave up.

[00:32:36] We, even in those really, really hard times, you know, when we had disconnects, cultural issues, you know, that stemmed from our inability to effectively manage, you know, different mindsets and people who had different ideas and manage them in a healthy, effective way together.

[00:32:53] Um, and then, you know, tolerating behavior that we thought was, you know, or that, that was difficult that, you know, because we thought the people or the processes were too critical to what, what we did, you know, not being willing to change those. Um, but we never gave up and we never lost. And we, we, we, we going back to those original, that original advice, we never looked at it and said, yeah, you know what? They're right. We have to stop being a people, you know, focused company.

[00:33:21] We have to stop being a relationship focused company. What we learned is that if you're relentless about institutionalizing some things, you know, um, and elevating some things and making hard decisions, you know, and, and all that. And so the relent, the relentlessness was always a bit of a chip on the shoulder, probably going back to, you know, quick, quick school to do it. Or people told us that this wasn't going to work this way. Um, but also because it felt like it was right. I felt like it was the right way to do it, that we were doing more for businesses because of how we were able to operate.

[00:33:51] You know, I think there's a lot of people that need to hear that because you can, there, there are peer groups and there are service leadership and there's all these things that are wonderful. They're not bad, but I think sometimes I can get caught up and say my EBITDA is not high enough or my growth isn't high enough along with EBITDA or some other margin and squeeze the business in kind of an artificial way. Yeah.

[00:34:18] And when you squeeze the business in an artificial way, it's a great way of saying it. It's different than trying something and making a mistake and, you know, and correcting the mistake. Like it's intentionally setting something on a short term path. And that actually probably pivots pretty well, you know, into the new charter phase, you know, of things and where that, that, you know, um, came for us. So we, we, we got to the point where we were, we, we were at the top of the pack, you know, in terms of MSPs.

[00:34:47] We looked around, we were excited about it. You know, we had saw plenty of issues. I mean, businesses are all about just solving, you know, continually solving the challenges that are in front of you. And we said, you know, the, the M&A calls were coming fast and furious. And we look, we long said, you know, we didn't talk to a lot of them, but we long said, hey, we don't like this, what this is doing to our industry.

[00:35:13] We had competitors acquired and we loved that because customers and employees would, you know, scatter. So we collect those up. We can provide it. Great for you. It's so great for us. Yeah. But we also encountered the challenges of having the capital that we, you know, wanted to be able to do the types of things that we wanted to grow past that, you know,

[00:35:37] and being a bootstrap, you know, $20 million organization, it's a really hard, it's a hard endeavor, you know, to, to maintain. People look at it and say, oh, you've arrived. You know, it's like, well, if this thing significantly falters, if there's some issue, I, I'm not liquid enough to be able to, you know, just write the check to address all of this, you know, and it's still my livelihood on the line.

[00:36:02] It's just on, you know, much, it's a bigger line, but it's more precarious, you know, it's, it's, it's harder to have a PG at that scale. Yeah. Cover payroll. Yep. Exactly. And, and, you know, we, uh, yeah, you talk to any entrepreneur about the stress of cashflow, you know, and cashflow stress doesn't go away if you get bigger, you know, uh, the swings can get bigger. And then the volume is something like, oh, I don't, I don't know what to do about that.

[00:36:31] So we started having those conversations to say, how responsible is it that we continue this path? And what are our options? And we hated everything that was out there. Um, let me interrupt for a second. Yeah. I just love the frame of that, right? How responsible is it that we continue this path?

[00:36:46] Like that's a different question because a lot of people say, I'm not ready to sell until I'm a certain age or why should I sell or sometimes frame an exit or a partnership or joining a platform or just anything other than me maintaining control. Right. And the negative. So I love that you framed it as what's the responsible thing to do.

[00:37:12] And, and it's, it probably, I mean, it relates in some ways to personal feelings and personal experience in that because it does come from the stress that comes with, you know, the balance of that. But absolutely there, there's just a different dynamic, uh, when you look at it that way. Um, and we looked at the other things too, in terms of, okay, giving up control. We've, we've done well by being in control. We've done things our way.

[00:37:35] We don't really want somebody who doesn't understand what's going on in this industry to, you know, or in this business to be all of a sudden making all the, all the decisions because of what they see on a piece of paper or a spreadsheet. Um, but mostly we looked at it and said, when these companies, and I, I kind of, I misappropriated this, you know, initially it's a private equity. But I would say, well, private equity comes in and says, all right, let's buy two companies and smash them together. And two plus two equals five.

[00:38:04] Every piece of evidence that I saw was the two plus two equals three. Mm-hmm. You know, that you actually don't even get the return on what you bought when you, you know, bring them together. But because it's, but because it's, uh, it's integrated and you say it's one company that someone's willing to pay more for one three than they are for two twos. You know?

[00:38:26] And so the, the wealth creation investment thesis, you know, hold some water, you know, as long as that, that, you know, arbitrage continues. But the value to what you're doing in the business does not. And that's a really different, you know, that, that, that was the, the challenge we saw with, you know, is that the employees are the first people to go out for an acquisition because they don't know who they work for anymore. And they don't see that vision and the employee and the clients go, cause they're not connected to the company.

[00:38:55] They're connected to the employees, you know, the experience that those employees provide. So when we, um, we started looking at what was available in the market, we said, it's not there. I mean, and even the idea, we were big enough that people said, well, yeah, just get investment and you can be the platform and other people come into you. But it creates actually the same level of, of distraction, you know, the same level of challenge.

[00:39:23] If, if you're the platform, not just the platformy or the, you know, one being integrated. And so Mitch Morgan, um, who's the, the founder of new charter and, and I had known each other for a long time. We had had a lot of, a lot of these conversations about what we felt like needed to happen and what was missing.

[00:39:43] And, you know, he, he has spent time in technology companies and, uh, you know, running organizations and then also consulting with MSPs and talking and doing a lot of, uh, both operational and, uh, M&A consulting. And I said, what, what, what if there's a different way to do this? And he took all of his background and said, I think there is a different way to do this.

[00:40:09] You know, we, we can create a platform that doesn't need to, you know, centralize everything. It doesn't need to, you know, can, can have a very different thesis that we can still get investment back. And we just have to have the right investor who believes, you know, in that idea. Yeah. And the, yeah, he, I tell a story. He, he, he, he, he came to Denver. He flew in. We met at the train station in downtown Denver. He just took, took the train from the airport.

[00:40:39] Um, Jesse and I met him, went through what he was looking to do, you know, with this company, new, new charter technologies. And, um, got excited, you know, and thought it was a really cool concept. Uh, and he, an hour later, he went back, got on the train, went back to the airport. And Jesse and I turned to each other and said, that's a great, it sounds really cool, but there's no way it's going to work.

[00:41:10] And it didn't, you know, we, we did, you know, connect into, you know, that original group. We talked through the thesis and all that, but we just couldn't find the right investor at that point in time, um, for what we really needed to, to do, you know, to get it off the ground. I'll unpack that a little bit. Cause I think that's easy to miss is the fine. You couldn't find the right investor. Cause I think it's easy.

[00:41:33] I've been in this trap of saying, well, an investor is just somebody that writes a check or it's just capital, but there's some nuance there. The, um, there's definitely nuance. And the nuance for me in that is that, and I've learned a lot in the, you know, the last five years, you know, um, but one of the things is some people are, there are two types of investors in the MSP space.

[00:42:03] There are people that don't know how to run MSPs. And there are people that know that they don't know how to run MSPs. And, you know, what we found was people who looked at this and said, well, let's, every investor has some thesis for what they think and how they think they're going to create, you know, wealth and value, you know?

[00:42:26] And, um, a lot of them have, have playbooks that, you know, that, Hey, you take this company that maybe doesn't have all the maturity there. They've got a lot of potential. Um, and you run a playbook or you run an integration playbook or, and a lot of that has to do with, you spend a bunch on salespeople, you know, you really ramp up a sales engine, you know, things like that.

[00:42:47] If you look at our, our, our industry and it's a little bit of what we, you know, I talked about in that, that segment, um, that I did recently with Bob Berg, the fact that sales is not persuasion in the MSP space. Sales is influence influencing people to do what they need to do in their business. You know, it's not convincing to do something that they shouldn't normally do, you know, in their, I mean, that's not the best option for them.

[00:43:12] I can't imagine you could say if I, you know, 50% off this firewall, if I find a way, can you buy today? Like, you know, like car sales tactic to try to move or manage services. We sell the time in this space. It's much more a job interview than it is a sales process. We have to be methodical about it. We have to be good at it. We have to be consistent. We got to, you know, involve the right people. We need to be able to scale that process, but we can't pretend that it's different than it is.

[00:43:42] And so you look at some of these, these private equity playbooks when it comes to other industries and they just don't apply very well to our market for the same reason that our market doesn't scale very easily. You know, and companies, you know, stay small and things stay fragmented. There's a reason. You got to understand that reason.

[00:44:00] And, you know, so we, so I always say when you look at for investors, alignment, you know, what I learned was that control was overrated. You know, we all worry about control of our entity. Control is overrated. Alignment is not. Alignment is underrated.

[00:44:27] And when we're looking for an investor to say, okay, well, what is your outcome? What is your process? Why do you think this is valuable? You know, and a lot of people are just trying to convince the investor to maximize the value of what they're, they're doing, but that doesn't maximize the future. You know, you, and if you want to sell your business for a point in time and never think about it again, great. You've got different options out there. You get more options. I don't know anybody like that.

[00:44:53] I said, I felt like my, my goal or as someone probably could have offered us enough money that it would have been worth it for me to watch them destroy what we built. But, but I never found that offer, you know, and I don't know what it would have been, you know, it would have had to, you know, incentivize a lot of different people, not just me, you know, in that. To give up on the thing that we care so much about.

[00:45:31] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I think that's a lot of them too. Mm-hmm. Because they're coming in with the understanding that their stuff, I mean, that their view is going to work.

[00:45:59] And if we know it's not going to work or we don't feel it's going to work, it's irresponsible, even if it's the highest dollar amount. You know, it, you're not going to get the best return. Yeah. So we, we didn't find the investor. We went on our, our, our separate ways. We had a few companies, you know, to together at that time that were focused on doing this together. And that was 2018, kept in touch with, with Mitch.

[00:46:26] And in 2020 came back and said, Hey, we, we found an investor. We started in a little, you know, slower process, you know, just investing in one company at a time. And we were to the point where it's, it's really working. And so I think it's time, you know, it's time for you guys to consider that again. And that was a month into COVID where we're all like, well, this is the craziest time to think about selling a business. It's the craziest time to think about doing something different.

[00:46:56] We're all just kind of trying to survive. Yeah. But we looked at it and we went through the process and without meeting anybody in person, we joined New Charter, you know, that, that August. And that's the, the, the time when New Charter started, we had the critical mass to build out some corporate structure. We had a CFO, we moved some people around, you know, and really started focusing on what the culture of this organization was going to be moving forward.

[00:47:22] And the thing to go back to the investment piece that really connected with us is that there, it was a, an, a common investment structure, but it was, it had unique nuances to it. So Oval Partners is our, our investment sponsor.

[00:47:43] It's a small spinoff from Golden Gate Capital, a couple of Golden Gate Capital partners who are really deploying multifamily office money, you know? So it's money that, that, you know, is, is theirs, you know, and, and close to them rather than going out and raising really large funds with, you know, specific fund timelines and things like that.

[00:48:06] So, um, call it multifamily office money, you know, um, also patient capital, you know, in the sense that it doesn't have to exist on a really specific timeline for return.

[00:48:18] But what they did, so instead of having a bunch of, of LPs, you know, limited partners in the fund that are the beneficiary, the investors and then the beneficiaries, they invited and invite the founding sellers, you know, to participate in that at the same level as them.

[00:49:04] Mm-hmm. But there's still a significant portion that's, you know, that's driving things moving forward. That vehicle, especially with it all being class A shares, you know, single class of stock, we have alignment. We have alignment on the outcomes, you know?

[00:49:23] And so while we, while we have some patience and some, you know, discretion around timing and what that looks like, um, there's, there's no wondering, you know, oh, are they going to, you know, uh, make out well and we're not, you know, or things like that. And that just gives a tremendous amount of security across the organization. What it also means is that we don't, we don't buy companies where the, the, the CEO, president, you know, are interested in just going away.

[00:49:51] We want organizations where they come in and they build with us, you know, and they are a key part of what we're doing at least for a season while we shepherd things into the future, you know? And so, um, not, I mean, obviously everybody's on their own timeline as far as retirement and things like that.

[00:50:08] But if it's not a rip the name off the door, you know, change leadership, all that on day one, we don't have that, that, you know, shock to the business that is created, you know, in a lot of the other investment structures and a lot of the other platforms that we've seen over the years.

[00:50:22] Um, and the, the real fun part is that in, in, in, in having, you know, people with so much skin in the game, lifelong entrepreneurs in the MSP space coming together in this platform that we've got a room of experience that nobody else has in this industry. So now we've got, we've got the autonomy in the market spaces. You know, we, we integrate, you know, back office, you know, we integrate key systems, but there's the, you know, and we've increased that over time.

[00:50:52] As we've seen value, you know, our, our mantra is, um, we consolidate and integrate for value, not vanity. So the value has to follow the value chain of customers, employees, you know, and then the leadership, you know, platform partners, you know, that we, we can't lose sight of, of why we didn't join one of the, the, the traditional methods, you know, uh, to begin with, we, we never want to be that because we, we need to deliver more value to our customers and our employees.

[00:51:20] Um, so in, in doing that, it doesn't mean that we can't consolidate things. We absolutely can. We just do it with a different lens. Uh, and, and that's, what's fun for us is that no one's doing it that way. And some people have started doing it, you know, a little bit more that way because some of the traditional ways haven't worked as well. But, you know, we're not afraid of them, you know, looking at what we're doing and, and, and, you know, joining along, you know, with that idea. We have this incredible room of partners.

[00:51:47] We have this incredible critical mass, you know, of, of business. And now we have the ability, you know, our focus now is how do we take this and become the organization that, that changes the industry. Um, we have to look very different in the age of, you know, I mean, in, in 18, 12, 18 months in terms of what our services look like, deep engagements with customers, going back to solving business problems with technology, you know, employee AI and all of that.

[00:52:16] So we have this ability now to, um, to take this, this platform and we've got all the pieces, you know, the only, the only thing that can get it in our way is us. So in your view, why is new charter technology as a platform? I think there's some people that say, you got to roll them all together. You got to integrate everything. Some people would say, maybe don't touch anything. Don't integrate anything. Just buy them and hold them. Yep. What's your view? It's great.

[00:52:46] It's one of my favorite questions. Um, both sides of that are much, much simpler. I don't know. Well, you know, um, consolidate everything. You've got, you know, you've got one thesis. You've got one purpose. You, you've got very little, little complexity. You just have to wrench and contort businesses to get them into that mindset. And that's painful. And it typically costs a lot. And you're, you're starting over in a lot of spaces.

[00:53:13] Uh, the number one, um, you know, impact to that is in organic growth or is organic growth. Um, you know, those organizations typically are so caught up in the integration mindset that, um, and, and, and, you know, the work that they have to pause, you know, focus on what really makes them relevant in the market and what makes them great at bringing on new customers.

[00:53:40] On the other side, you've got your, your portfolio companies, um, uh, you know, or your, your, your holding companies that, yeah, buy them and hold them. Um, really bred from the same thesis, but with none of the upside, none of the ability to build something together for the future. And I think that that mindset has come from watching or experiencing the failure of integration, you know, in organizations.

[00:54:10] So the reason why we're a platform, the short answer is because we do far more together than separate. People don't realize that in new charter. Um, and we, we, we build value together, uh, and we have more opportunity and we have more value in what we do because of new charter than we would ever have independently. You know, um, the, the longer answer is think about this.

[00:54:41] If you take two companies, two, two static companies, you know, and where they're at and say, all right, you guys need to merge. And you focus on taking some of the best parts of each of them, or maybe one of them the better. So you fold one into the other one, but they're static organizations. Mm-hmm. Our view of that is that you, you end up with, you're just putting concrete shoes on those organizations. They're going nowhere.

[00:55:08] So they can get, I mean, rationalize the business together, you know, figure things out, um, you know, get used to it, replace all the people you lost, you know, all of those pieces. And you might end up with something very, very compelling, but what's that, what's the cost of it? You know, how far back did you go? That integrating two static businesses is more costly than it's worth.

[00:55:32] In my mind, integrating and consolidating on a journey forward is a lot different than that. You know, you get two companies that sit side by side, they're different. And we're not paying attention to, okay, you do this now and I do this now. We're paying attention to in the next 18 months, we have to both be able to do this. And it's got to look like this. So what's our path to get there?

[00:55:56] And then you have two companies that both have forward paths that they have a point that they're meeting, you know, at, but the friction isn't there. You know, the noise isn't there. You're not, you know, the, the disruption and shock, you know, it's, it's not easy. You have to, I mean, it's, it's not as simple as just drawing a couple of lines on paper, but the thesis is so much different, you know, in that.

[00:56:18] So we're willing and as part of our strategy to be patient in how we do those things, again, focusing on where the value is and where we're creating value. But, you know, so from a platform, I mean, a holding company would not look at this and say, well, let's invest in our future service strategy. Our, our, you know, AI enabled services strategy are, you know, the, the depth, you know, of, of services that no individual company can offer.

[00:56:45] The specialized services that come around that, you know, that, that only a large platform could offer. But let's plan for that and let's put everybody on, you know, their own individual path towards the same point. So the milestones along that are, yeah, we, we bring together finance here. We bring together, you know, and, and ultimately service will look very, very similar without us mandating that service becomes uniform because we've already, you know, worked to elevate systems.

[00:57:13] We've already worked to elevate, you know, some of these things into the future and say, yeah, let's change it together. Let's change toward that point and use our momentum, not, not just stop our momentum so we can turn, you know, and make sure that we, you know, just rationalize all of this in a horizontal frame. So does that make sense? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I like the, we're all going in the same direction. We're aligned. We all have our own path.

[00:57:38] So is it fair to characterize this as, you know, we're all in the U.S. and we're all in major cities and we all happen to be fortunate to have a direct flight to Hawaii. One path is we're all going to fly into Atlanta, whether you're on the East Coast or West, and then take the flight to Hawaii. Or I could board directly from San Francisco or New York or Miami and get to the same place.

[00:58:06] Yeah, that's, that's conceptual. I said, I'll say the, the, the one difference in that, you know, I, I, I like the analogy, but there's benefits in being close, you know? And so it's not just about the destination. We can create value along the way. I don't need everybody to operate, you know, the exact same way, you know, in terms of how they, they triage a ticket, you know, and go through it, interact with the customer.

[00:58:33] I need them to know their customer and I need to make sure that I understand how the customer feels about the relationship and how they're engaging with that in a consistent way. So, you know, our, our view of client satisfaction, our view of employee satisfaction, our view of so many of those things is absolutely important. Um, you know, to have consistent measurements or consistent, you know, a consistent view, you know, on that. Do I need to, you know, do I need to be the one to say, well, you skip the step and how you went through that ticket?

[00:59:03] Not at this point, you know, I, that doesn't create value for us, you know, in that. Now, when we, when, if we reach, you know, a perfectly final destination on that to say, all right, you know, we've, uh, we've arrived. I don't think you ever really arrive in business.

[00:59:18] Um, but you know, we, we get to a place where, um, you know, we might care about some of those nuances, but if I start caring about those nuances now, I, I'm going to have a problem because I have to care about things that really matter. You know, bringing those together. So it's interesting.

[00:59:37] And I, to make another analogy, you've got investors that if you don't understand the nuance, a family office does have more patient capital than a fund with an exit. They have a timeline and they have to return the capital by a specific timeframe. Um, and they're judged on that. And then it sounds like you're, because you're retaining the talent, you're, you've got these folks that nobody else has. These guys have run this businesses forever.

[01:00:06] And then you kind of have a, for lack of a better way of saying the analogy, patient operators. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll say part of the challenge in it is the fact that people want to know timing. I mean, there's a reason why it's great when you, when you do understand that. But so if we had the capital without the transparency with our partners, you know, around kind of, I mean, what's happening and working with them can, you know, consistently updating and engaging them.

[01:00:36] Then that, that would be a bit more of a challenge. But our, our job in this, you know, is to maximize the market, you know, and maximize at any point in time, you know, we're building for something, you know, with permanence.

[01:00:50] And we are, we're also building so that our strategy is the one that the investor, you know, that the investors that are climbing over themselves, you know, to invest in down the line, you know, so that we have to pay attention to what the future investments are. But our strategy being, you know, and why it's so important that we build effectively for the future and maintain organic growth is that that's what an investor wants.

[01:01:20] And if they can have both of those things, they're not going to disrupt a strategy. So I don't need them to perfectly buy into and understand every piece of what we're doing. I need them to understand that our pursuit of, you know, this, this, you know, deep, you know, service model with our customers through, you know, the value chain of customers, employees, you know, all that, that, that it works, that it continues to be the right thing for the future.

[01:01:46] And that it's the right thing to invest in and to put more investment into and to, you know, to continue that, to do more of that faster, you know, is, and so that, that's where I, you know, as a CEO, that, that's really what my job is. You know, is, is to make sure that not just the vision, but the execution of the vision is something that's leading the industry. You know, that no one can look at it and say, well, that company would be great if only they would, you know, turn that direction, you know, or like that.

[01:02:15] So it's more, far more intentional, I think, than what the general market sometimes sees because of some brand fragmentation, you know, and things like that. But inside the walls, you know, if you see kind of the, you know, specific steps, you know, that we have in this position, the specific ways that we measure and look at success, it's a much different view. So earlier you talked about an MSP is hard to scale. I know. I had a much smaller MSP and it didn't feel easy to scale as I added.

[01:02:44] And so there's a, man, I don't, I think that's the easy argument to make, but I have a question, a counter one, which is if it's a people business, if the core of it is people, this is a hard to scale. I buy that. Why do we have gigantic law firms? Why do we have the big three? Uh, if those are people businesses. Yep. They are people businesses.

[01:03:11] And we've asked ourselves the, the same questions. Um, you have those partnerships. The, the difference is I think that we're a people business. I think that we're, we are far more like a law firm and a, you know, an accounting firm than we are like cool tech companies. You know, we provide services. Um, but. So many services in a law firm and an accounting firm are individual. Can you mean provided by individuals?

[01:03:41] So it's, you don't have to scale an experience. You only have to scale the ability to support those individuals and their relationships. It's their book of business, you know, and, and all that. Think about technology now and all that, you know, bringing together multiple skill sets and also changing rapidly, you know, in there. The, the framework's more complex. It's, it's still services.

[01:04:05] It's still, you know, um, you know, outsourcing what might be, you know, positions that they would hire for, but they're, the, the layers of it are significantly different. And so when you work with your attorney who works at a massive law firm that has 450 attorneys, we can't just say, Hey, we have 450 IT people. Here's yours. Or this person has this specialty because of this one thing that you're going through. Yeah.

[01:04:31] So we have to build a programmatic experience that is far more complex. It also, I think is where the industry, um, has opportunity is because people need six, seven, eight skill sets, even before they can hire six, seven, eight people to do those things. And so continually the opportunities, you know, open up, you know, in the larger small businesses, you know, and lower middle market to say, Oh yeah. Outsourcing maybe doesn't make more sense because it's getting more complicated in terms of the landscape.

[01:05:00] The technology is getting easier, but the landscape is getting more complicated. So that's why I think that, that, you know, it's also, I think that those organizations are going to be some of the first that are right, right. For disruption with AI and some of those things.

[01:05:14] I mean, I'm already looking at, you know, just from a, you know, as we, we look at normalizing, you know, service agreements, um, using AI to compare service terms, you know, into, you know, into contracts to know where the dissimilarities are, rather than trying to go through and read all of the, that information.

[01:05:35] You know, I mean, and obviously it'd be very focused on, you know, security and all of those things, but there's ways to do things now without picking up the phone and calling an attorney or calling an accountant and they still need them. But those industries, you know, that where it's much more than one-to-one relationship, I think are going to be the ones that, that, that struggle. And we're going to be the ones that they grow through this because we're bringing simplicity to something that's massively complex. You've got a unique view of the market.

[01:06:05] What's your view of M&A and what, what ending are we in? I think we're reaching a point where the things are going to net out that, that, that are positive and things are going to net out that are negative. We're going to see a shift in, but I think we're going to continue to see M&A be, you know, where it's at, you know, if not more so, but it's going to be different. Um, I think that by, by everything you can and just, you know, we'll, we'll trail off, you know, um,

[01:06:36] Is that because they're learning or is that due to cost of capital or some other? I think it's honestly going to be the cost of available quality in that is that, um, I mean, inventory is not, it's already not that great, you know, compared to what it was in terms of looking at businesses saying, well, that's going to be value added value add to us. And I can add value to that, you know, um, we, we say no to far more businesses than we say yes to right now.

[01:07:06] Um, and so there will be some, I think some players in on the lower end that will look at that as an opportunity to consolidate smaller or less mature organizations. But if you think about that, that just, they have to bring the maturity to all of those, you know, in the process of consolidating them to be able to play in the bigger space. That's, that's challenging.

[01:07:30] Um, but I think that you will see more consolidation, you know, of organizations at, in the larger scale, you know, and so, um, you'll see, uh, platforms consolidate. You'll see big companies that have grown in the past have said, well, I'm staying independent until I get to a certain size coming together. And I think that we're going to see a new round of valuations around those businesses.

[01:07:54] We're going to see a new round of learning about what it takes to bring platforms together, not just, you know, individually bootstrapped MSPs. And I think that you're going to see a new, I mean, it's going to require different skill sets to go back to a question that you started with at the very beginning, like change, you're having to be different people, you know, along this journey, you know, and yeah, it's going to require something significantly different, you know, in order to take skills to that very next level.

[01:08:24] Well, on that note, how have you become that different person? And I don't know how many times, but you had to be a different person and you had to be it more rapidly than most. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't talk much about the transition, you know, to, you know, being the CEO of New Charter, you know, which was, um, methodical and, and, and not, not fast.

[01:08:52] Um, it's, it's, it's, it's been recent, but if you look at that, that transformation over time, um, I can trace it back far better than I can, you know, map it forward. Yeah. Um, or, you know, map it forward from back then. Um, but if I look back then, the most important part of it is that it never feels like becoming a different person.

[01:09:18] If your passion is to figure out how to constantly be a different person. Mm-hmm. The natural, you know, partner to that is a curiosity about what it takes to do it. And a lack of, and, and, and candidly, because I'm looking at, and I've always looked at doing something that isn't a known path.

[01:09:45] I don't have to care too much about proving that I know what I've done in the past, that I know what I'm, I'm doing or that I know everything already and I'm perfectly ready for all of these things. Right. Um, and so by letting go of that, that, that idea that I've got a posture, I've got a show that I, I know all of it. It opens up the doors for just massive curiosity. Like I, I don't love being wrong, but I love figuring out better ways to do things.

[01:10:14] And so in that you love the process, you end up loving the process of figuring out that there's something you didn't know. Mm-hmm. You know, the change quickly, you know, in these things, if it wasn't just built into how I want to operate and how, and what's most exciting to me, you know, in that space.

[01:10:42] Now it can't be manic, you know, I can't be the kind of leader that wakes up. I have to be a consistent leader, but learning to listen to what's around me and watch what's around me for curiosity, not just to be able to prove my points, you know, or justify things is something that I just constantly have to be on alert, you know, about. I have to be listening, you know, to those things.

[01:11:07] And so as I look at, you know, within Greystone, it was, yeah, the, the individual, you know, person doing IT to the team lead, you know, as people came on to, you know, running the sales operation, hiring, you know, a sales leader to being a partner in larger organizations. We were focused on, you know, to, you know, all of those different things were micro reinventions. Some were more painful than others.

[01:11:35] Some are less natural than others. So when, when Mitch, you know, started New Charter and he always told me, he said that his biggest regret was not doing it sooner. You know, and he knew that that would be the last stage, you know, in, in his career, you know, is very family focused and very, very, you know, it was just. And, and so we, we talked about it for, even prior to, to Greystone coming into New Charter.

[01:12:05] And he always felt like I had the potential in that. And so he, a few years ago, he and the board hired an executive coach, you know, that had gone, that had done a lot of CEO transitions to both, you know, coach and also assess. You know, it's a little bit like having a business counselor where there's no confidentiality, you know.

[01:12:32] But throughout the process, you know, obviously they, they, they gained comfort, not with who I was then, but how I evolved over those years. And recognizing the trajectory, because you said something, you know, when one of our conversations about, you know, it's surprising that, that they would elevate, you know, an MSP founder. You know, bootstrap company, you know, a lot of the, a lot of investors love to put their people, you know.

[01:12:58] And, but really what investors want is to maximize upside and minimize risk. Yep. That's it. And so my focus was on becoming the highest upside, lowest downside option for them, you know, as they looked at this, which is everything from knowledge of the industry to, you know, you know, the ability to influence people.

[01:13:23] And all of those things that I learned a lot of through the years, you know, of, of building Greystone. But the new skills were doing that at scale, doing that, realizing that I have to cascade that down through so much more. I have to simplify a vision. And then I had to lead the execution of that vision with that, with very little regard, you know, for, you know, tolerating waste, for tolerating, you know, things.

[01:13:52] So it's, it's this, this science and art of realizing that at the end of the day, the results have to speak for themselves. You know, and we won't, we have to, you know, make short-term, medium-term and long-term decisions for the business. And we have to articulate that effectively. And we have to make sure that people are, are, are aligned. And it started with coming in and saying, we've got this room of people that are, love each other. It's great. But do we all know why we're here? Are we all here together?

[01:14:19] And can we connect on, on the commonality for why we're here? And, and things like that. So it was through that process of, of articulating what I felt like the future needed to look like, that was, that, that demonstrated to, to the board, you know, as they looked at their options, that I was the highest upside, lowest downside, you know, option.

[01:14:44] And it does come from the fact that it helps that I have the experience in knowing this industry inside and out, but it helps that I use an entirely different skill set now to do my current job. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the second part is probably the unusual part there. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

[01:15:01] And if I go back to that curiosity, if I go back to, you know, I mean, in the coaching and the understanding, you know, of all of these, these different pieces, I can't do things the same way, but honestly, it's way more fun realizing that it doesn't all come down to me. I have to be accountable for all of it. I have to be accountable for the results. I have to be accountable for the outcomes. And I'm fully comfortable with being accountable. I mean, I've learned over time to be that I have to be accountable for things that I can't directly control.

[01:15:30] But at the end of the day, it's not all about me. You know, it's about, especially as we scale people, the right people in the right places with the right understanding of where to go, being able to, you know, drive those things free of, you know, restriction, you know, and the chains that hold people back. I can't afford for me to make all the decisions in this business, you know, the way that I did the early years of Greystone.

[01:15:58] And I can't afford, I would be miserable. And someone told me one time, I said, you won't enjoy every day of this, but you can assess some of your abilities in the job and how it's going based on how much you enjoy when you wake up. Because if the burden of everything is on you, then you have an appropriately enrolled people and empowered people, you know, to share that.

[01:16:23] And if it's so stressful because you don't know what's happening in the organization, then you've pushed people too far away from you. But in that sweet spot, and there are definitely stressful days and stressful times and frustrations and all of that. But in that sweet spot, I would wake up every day and say, I thought I had my dream job 10 years ago, you know, and I have a new one and this one's better. I love that so much. What's the biggest lesson you've learned? Through all these years.

[01:16:52] I don't know if it's the biggest, but it's one that comes, it's the first one that comes to mind that I talk about a lot. And that is the idea of empathy at scale. Compassionate people and people who enjoy, you know, interaction with people, you know, their emotional intelligence, you know, empathy is something that comes up over and over. And we should be leading our company, especially people oriented companies with empathy.

[01:17:17] There's a difference between empathy for a person and empathy for the masses or the majority. And oftentimes you have that one person who's struggling and or not, not cutting it, you know, and you're really just trying to get them up to the, you know, and, you know, or, hey, they're really good over here, but they're, they're struggling with their team members over here. And you're focused on how do I make this work for one person?

[01:17:45] How do I make sure that I don't have to let this person go? Because that doesn't feel empathetic. And you lose 10 other people because they can't tolerate the fact that you're tolerating this or, you know, not addressing this. And what I learned over time is that every decision that I made, where I looked at through the lens of where, how, how can I be empathetic to the entire landscape? It doesn't mean that I'm not empathetic to the individual.

[01:18:12] We all absolutely work to handle every situation with empathy, you know, for individuals, but my decisions can't promote the idea that this one person is more important than the organization. You end up losing the people that are most valuable and preserving the people who are struggling.

[01:18:30] And the other thing that was a surprise to me over the years is that every time I made a hard call, I can look back and those people by and large are significantly better off than anywhere else. That I, I would put so much pressure on myself to not just be empathetic, but to be the answer. Yeah. All of the things that, you know, and to be everything to everybody. And it just doesn't work that way.

[01:18:54] So empathy at scale, you know, is really the only way that it works to scale an organization effectively. That's beautiful. I think it's too easy to hold on to like, well, they won't have a job. They're going to have a job. They're going to be successful somewhere else. What's one thing you would do over if you could? I would listen. I would create structures to listen to different people more effectively that weren't as vocal. I didn't feel like they were speaking up at various inflection points in our organization.

[01:19:24] We learned things later that people thought and felt because they didn't feel comfortable. They just weren't as vocal about things. And so the vocal majority, you know, ran too many things for a while. And there were times if I would have really understood what was happening in all the mindsets, it would have changed that pretty significantly. Wow. That's really powerful. What's one thing you're looking forward to? Hmm. You know, every quarter I look forward to getting together with our partners.

[01:19:54] Every quarter. I mean, it's my favorite thing when we get together as a group. We talk about strategy. We have hard conversations. We have fun conversations. You know, we have late night conversations and we have, you know, big boardroom conversations. Those relationships and understanding the power of what can be harnessed for what we do is something that I look forward to constantly.

[01:20:16] The thing that I, you know, one thing that more in the future that I'm looking forward to is rolling out the benefits of an automation and AI, you know, platform strategy. Mm-hmm. Yeah. For the folks that are listening, if they'd like to learn more about New Charter or find you, connect with you, how would you recommend they do that?

[01:20:44] So find me on LinkedIn, Peter Melby. It's a relatively unique name. I think the only other Peter Melby I know is my uncle and he's a doctor. I'm called to drop out, so that's not me. The, but yeah, hit me up there. Newchartertech.com is the website. I definitely love staying connected with people in this industry. This was so amazing. I love your curiosity. I love your heart and empathy. This was just a gift.

[01:21:12] So thank you from the bottom of my heart for being on MSP Mindset. Yeah. Thanks for, thanks for having me. I appreciate it a lot.