Your MSP Is Not a Family, You're a Team

[00:00:00] Hey guys, Damien here. As I continue to interview the top MSPs in the world, one thing has become incredibly clear. It's time that we let go. Even more than that, every time I focus on my zone of genius and get out of the way and do the very few things I'm good at and delegate to others, I'm ready for that next level of growth.

[00:00:20] One way that I can help you is with Servocity. We co-manage more backups and disaster recovery so you can focus on what you do best, let us do the rest, and then what we do is we test the backups every single day so you never have to worry. If you'd like to engage us or just learn more, click the link below.

[00:00:38] The word family was used quite a bit. You know, I had to say, guys, you will never hear the word family from me. We're not a family. I'm sorry, never confuse that. You're not the crazy Uncle Joe at the Thanksgiving table that's going to always get drunk and blabber away and bring political discussions and create friction.

[00:00:57] We are a high-performing team, and I would rather use that construct, which is we're going to work together. We're going to design plays. You have a role to play in those plays, and if you're not executing, then we'll do coaching around those things, and if you're not responding to coaching, then I'm sorry. You're not going to be it, right? And so that's the big difference is we're not a family. We're a high-performing team.

[00:01:17] Hey, guys. Damian Stephens, host of MSP Mindset, founder and CEO of Servocity. Today, I'm blessed to interview Samit Cyberwall. Now, I know some of you MSPs, you're thinking, hey, if my competitor gets bought by private equity, that's wonderful. They're going to cut costs. They're going to deliver poor service, and maybe I'll even pick up a key employee.

[00:01:45] Until you meet somebody like Samit, who has increased headcount, who has decided that they're going to niche in not only the vertical, but in public cloud, and even go to the time and expense to build their own security operations center within their company. Now, if you want to learn how he did that and built a culture that is second to none and propelled them to number 11 on the top MSP list, don't miss out on my conversation with Samit today.

[00:02:16] So, Samit, you've got a really interesting story. Take me back to how you're going and what happened in 2020. Obviously, COVID, but what happened with your businesses and how they came together? Sure. Would love to, Damien. Thank you for having me here. It's truly a pleasure to rejoin you, and I'm a big fan of the work you're doing. It's tremendous.

[00:02:42] Thank you again for bringing MSPs together, and I always find great wisdom in a lot of the podcasts that you put together. So, my story, I have been blessed, Damien, for 32 plus years to be on this side of the equation, i.e. the service provider side, right?

[00:03:01] And for me, I have truly enjoyed that because I feel like back then, if I rewind back to 32 years, the movie had a similar plot that it does today, which is technology was disrupting business. And, again, you're a young guy, but we had the whole Y2K and digitization and the client server to web, and everybody thought that was the God's greatest gift.

[00:03:29] And, you know, all of the dot-com boom happened, and the bust happened right after. But, you know, there was a huge opportunity to take traditional businesses and rewire a lot of how they were working in, you know, ERP, supply chain, and all those buzzwords.

[00:03:46] And so, I, you know, joined consulting at that wave, and so it was tremendous, right, to be able to work on this side and extract the signal from the noise, work to digitize businesses, set up web storefronts, really enable the whole online experience that was sort of something new and a novelty.

[00:04:11] Fast forward that into the cloud, and then, you know, I had the pleasure of leading a business that was a digital infrastructure thing, data centers, pivot that into more of managed services, both private cloud, we built our own multi-tenant private cloud, and then increasingly managed services on public cloud, especially Azure.

[00:04:34] So, it was great to take that business across 15 years of working there through really three different paradigm shifts, and then eventually accelerate the public cloud business and have a 40-plus percent growth business. We eventually sold that business in 2019 to Madison Dearborn, and I told my wife, and I still remember this was August of 2019, and I told my wife, hey, I'm taking the year off.

[00:05:03] I have a long bucket list, and top of the bucket list is heli skiing. And so, yeah, you know, do heli skiing means you have to be a very good skier. So, I said, hey, I'm going. I've got my tickets already. I'm going to go. I'm going to be a ski bum starting December. I'm going to spend two or three months in Utah. And so, I love Ulta, by the way.

[00:05:25] And so, and I'm just going to, you know, get, I'm going to get some private lessons, and, you know, I'll see you when I see you. And she was like, December. She kept saying December. This was August. I said, what do you mean December? She's like, you'll be back at work in December. I said, why? She's like, you don't know how restless you get without a purpose in mind. And to her credit, in December, I was writing a thesis for my next thing.

[00:05:52] And so, it was a six slide thesis that I still go back to today, which is, hey, there's tremendous opportunity in the lower mid-market segment.

[00:06:00] But it needs to be addressed with very vertically specific use cases as an MSP and bringing the hosting and application worlds together, abstracting that complexity, delivering it as a service, really playing at the intersection of economies of scale and economies of expertise.

[00:06:22] So, that six slide thesis, and I live in Boston, and, you know, I'm blessed that a lot of the private equity funds that, firms that invest in services, be it BB, be it MC, be it Avery, are all here. And so, they were all very kind and generous with their time and, you know, sort of exploring opportunities in their portfolio. But they were also very generous with their contacts.

[00:06:50] And so, I still remember walking out of one meeting in Jan and I had within two hours 32 emails out to different private equity firms with the person introducing me and saying, hey, you need to talk to Sunit. He's got a great thesis. One of those ended up being, you know, our current sponsor, BluffPoint. And so, I walk in and they already had a platform investment in a healthcare-managed services provider.

[00:07:19] And they had done an acquisition on the legal side as well. And, you know, it was like music to their ears in terms of what I'm walking through. And they turned around and said, hey, would you like to come and operate this venture? And so, I jumped both feet in. And that's sort of a little bit of the backdrop to the story in terms of walking in.

[00:07:40] And so, we had walking in, we had a healthcare-focused MSP, and we just acquired a legal MSP as well that we hadn't quite integrated but was languishing on the side. So, that's where the journey started. You know, I think part of it was very apparent to me. Like, you know, we had a talent deficit in certain areas and we're in a talent game. And so, number one priority was shoring up talent and really shoring up the client experience.

[00:08:09] It was an owner, you know, to me, the most critical thing, you know, that I always advise private equity and certainly sort of is that whole owner-to-operator transition, right? You could write a whole book on it. And I think if you were to write a book, in our context, everything that could go wrong had gone wrong already.

[00:08:27] And so, rebuilding trust, right, stemming some of the exit of talent, rebuilding the client experience really took the bulk of the first, I would say, year and a half. But along the way, you know, it was very clear that discipline, discipline, discipline was the key thing. I would go talk to our sellers and, you know, I would ask them, what do we do? And who do we do it for? And what's our target audience?

[00:08:57] And I would get different answers. And I was like, well, that's a problem, right? We're clearly not aligned. And so, rebuilding a very cohesive go-to-market, and it's never said and done, right? It's about the discipline of saying, how do we then get everyone to not just align on it, not their heads, but operationalize it, became that journey.

[00:09:23] And part of what we've done is really embrace ABM or account-based marketing and really bring that discipline to say, not just who's our target audience, which is, hey, look, guess what, in the legal sector, our target audience is firms that are 25 to 150 employees. That's still a huge market. Okay, we've got four reps. So how do we further skinny it? Oh, we're going to go after these nine markets. Great. In these nine markets, then how do we further drill it down?

[00:09:51] These are our prospects. You know, let's go create a module of 80 to 100 accounts. Let's go map that module. So it's not about throwing darts on a board. But really creating accountability, but also creating that supporting infrastructure, channelizing our marketing dollars to warm up and generate, you know, our sort of mind share within those prospects. So I'm a big, big believer that, man, focus, focus, focus, right?

[00:10:19] Number one, not being everything to everyone, right? Defining our market. But then also making sure that we're being very targeted and pinpoint in a world where analytics and data and intelligence, you know, need to be leveraged very actively. I'd always say, you can go figure out what I had for dinner two days ago because probably that data has been sold in some market and they know all my preferences.

[00:10:45] We've got to be using that data to our advantage to understand where our buyers are, how our buyers are linking, and fundamentally educate, educate, educate, educate, right? Which is it's not about selling. It's about education. They will come to you. If we educate them and then we deliver a great client experience, the business is going to grow. And that's been, you know, the reflection in our growth rates. Our legal business, you know, has grown 24% year over year.

[00:11:15] Our accounting business has grown 36%, you know, and that's, you know, that's something that, again, is a reflection of bringing a lot of focus, bringing a lot of discipline into how we see the world and how we go to market. Sorry, long story, long answer to your question. There's so much to unpack there. So if I understand you came in and was COVID starting to happen or just about to happen when you were just starting here?

[00:11:44] I was lucky in the sense that COVID happened a week later is when the world went remote. So I started and I had one week of spending quality time with my key leaders and having some in-person interaction before everything pivoted to a remote model. And we were scratching our heads and trying to kind of figure out the playbook. And I still go back and laugh at the communication because we were like, well, we're going to open the office in the next three months.

[00:12:09] We kept shifting the date for when we were going to open offices to a point where the communication was, we don't know when we're going to open the office if ever. But it was really funny to now go back and read that, you know, communication and how that tone kept changing as we were getting six months, eight months into that whole pandemic period of working. I remember that very vividly, like a few weeks, six weeks, 12 weeks.

[00:12:38] We all thought it would tie it over and like, well, it's going to be around the corner. It's around the corner. That's right. And then eventually we said, you know, we had four different offices, Danian. And we, you know, what dawned on me six months into it was we weren't using our real estate, you know, wisely.

[00:12:57] And so a lot of it was let's start to create a plan to exit most of these offices with the realization that life's not going to go back to the pedal. It's not going to swing back automatically. There's some middle ground, but clearly we're not going to need as much office space.

[00:13:15] And so we reduced our office footprint and redirected some of that money into, you know, employee, you know, sort of investment both in terms of, hey, we want to pay people to get certified. Go get certified. Learn. We want to invest in your learning and education. We want to do more social happy hours. You know, that also, you know, that's always pulling people away from families.

[00:13:41] And so, but we've tried to do various things to invest some of that money back into our employees in a more direct manner as we think about sort of talent and the fact that, you know, we're squarely in the talent business. So being in the talent business, I'm curious, how did you deal with a week before COVID and all of a sudden everybody's remote and you had two businesses maybe not even integrated yet.

[00:14:09] And now, you know, now you're at the home. Now you've got to make sense of talent and strategy and working remote and growth. And it's hard enough to come into a new business, let alone two new businesses, essentially. And then working remote and COVID all at the same time. Like how did you and your leadership team try to make sense of things at the beginning? Yeah, I think, you know, look, I would say culture and competence is always a top down exercise, right?

[00:14:39] Trying to do it as a bottom up is an exercise in folly. And so for me, a lot of the initial core focus was do I have the right team? Do they share my values, right? And my values are ones where I'm very open, right? You know, it's radical but constructive candor, right? If there's a meeting after the meeting, I think we have a problem. And some of that was happening. And so, okay, that's a cultural issue.

[00:15:07] Two is, you know, really I'm very hands-on and I always say we're a small company. You know, it's like all our job descriptions you'll have start with a hands-on leader, right? You know, at the hands-on word is probably mentioned six different times. If I'm hiring you and you need to hire someone to do your job, I'm sorry. We've got the wrong person. You've got somebody who still goes and, you know, works with our sales reps on proposals,

[00:15:33] on structuring things without taking ownership away but telling them I'm in the trenches with them, right? I truly try to model that servant leader mindset and be in the trenches and be in the operation. So, you know, the culture of, hey, guess what? Everyone's hands-on. Everyone's a doer, right? I mean there's, you know, and you need to be a player coach in a smaller organization. Intellectually curious. You need to have a growth mindset, right? You know, the world around us is changing. And so tell me what you learned yesterday.

[00:16:03] Tell me what you learned, you know, six days ago. I'll tell you a great example. Our CFO who really models that intellectual curiosity and, you know, it's a pleasure to work with him. I mean we were trying to drive a certification initiative and he got certified in Azure. Now, you can imagine a CFO of a company saying I have an Azure certification.

[00:16:25] But because he had an Azure certification, he started looking at the Azure bills at a line item level, starting to understand some of the things and starting to ask some questions with our team. And guess what? We have unlocked additional savings because of that curiosity factor. And so always give that as an example of, you know, in a world where you blink in, you know, the public cloud, both Google Azure and AWS have launched 40 new services. You know, you have to really stay very curious.

[00:16:54] And you know what's happening around the air and we'll touch that on some point. But I think starting to look at how technology applies to you and to the world around you and what is your role is again a key in core trade. So going back to did I have the right team? And so part of it was do they share my values? And guess some of them did share my values.

[00:17:14] And so the first part of the journey, Damian, for me was transforming that core leadership team that I had, starting with the core value test and, you know, sort of saying which ones did meet the test that needed to be exited. Right. Because there are certain things. Guess what? If you lack it, I am not here to teach you basics. Either you have it or you don't. And if you don't have it, then this is the wrong place for you.

[00:17:40] So I would say a good, you know, first nine months was restructuring the leadership team, rebuilding that, you know, plugging holes in that, bringing new leaders on board that really shared my values. And so getting to a place fast forward a year later where I felt like I had a great leadership team. We were all cohesive and along the way spending a lot of time building alignment.

[00:18:02] So we still bring our, my core, my lead team together every quarter and spend three or four days together. And I call those sessions aligned. Aligned because Damian, my job is, I don't want, I am not the smartest guy in the room, nor do I want to be. But I want to make sure the left and the right are aligned.

[00:18:26] I want to make sure, hey, what we're doing from a marketing perspective and what my work leader in legal is thinking about, right, are cohesive and interlocked. And we use big rocks and, you know, elements of the OS. And so making sure we're knitting together our strategy with a solid execution plan and everyone has clear understanding of what success in a quarterly context and annual context looks like right down to what those big rocks are and how they tie together.

[00:18:56] That's a lot of that execution discipline that we've kind of built up that now, four and a half years later, is going to become muscle memory in the company. So now the next level down was, okay, man, after that was, okay, we've got a great core team. They're aligned. We're now starting to hum and sing in the same direction. The next thing is the mid-level managers. And how do we then build that? We'll build the right team. How do we give them the tools of the trade?

[00:19:22] How do we deal with a lot of what had taken place, which is the Peter principle, right? In a, nothing wrong, but in a owner-led model, right? There were a few things that were used that I never, in a big favor of. And, you know, sort of undoing that really was having some tough conversations. One was the word family was used quite a bit. And, you know, I had to say, guys, you will never hear the word family from me.

[00:19:52] We're not a family. I'm sorry. Never confuse that. You're not the crazy Uncle Joe at the Thanksgiving table that's going to always get drunk and blabber away and bring political discussions and create, you know, and create friction. We're a high-performing team, and I would rather use that construct, which is, you know, we're going to work together. We're going to design plays. You have a role to play in those plays. And if you're not executing, then we'll do coaching around those things.

[00:20:22] And if you're not responding to coaching, then I'm sorry. You're not going to be it, right? And so that's the big difference is we're not a family. We're a high-performing team. And so it's a very hard concept, very, very hard concept, Damien, for folks who have operated in owner-led environments to always understand. Now, some transcend that boundary. Some don't, right? They're used to – guess what?

[00:20:47] The owner used to, you know, embrace every sin of mine, and we used to have barbecues and picnics and other things together. And, you know, we used to go to the church together. And that's fine, but that's not what we're here for, right? So that piece, you know, meant change and transformation from a talent perspective. That also meant bringing a generation.

[00:21:10] And the second thing was the Peter Principle people being promoted just because they were competent didn't mean that they always had the managerial skills, right? So, you know, now the distinction between how to manage close friends, right, and hold performance and accountability was, you know, always a gray area. And so that next layer of transformation, which is still, I would say, very much of a journey, was sort of the second phase of the exercise, right?

[00:21:38] To be able to say, look, we have to have the right managers and we have to give them the tools of the trade and the coaching and then have them drive accountability with their teams and how we think about measurement and metrics, right? So I think long answer to your question in a remote world, measuring and building a cohesive set of metrics that tie operationally to what we're trying to achieve becomes even more important and paramount, right?

[00:22:07] So to be able to say, that's great, you want to work remotely, but there has to be some level of accountability around the performance of the business and we need to have some way to measure it, you know, as simple as how quickly chats are being answered, how quickly calls are being answered, what is that, you know, sort of measures of quote-unquote productivity, which is often viewed as a dirty term with employees. And so that's why I say with air quotes, right?

[00:22:33] But it's productivity, not necessarily in a context of, you know, negative context of operational efficiency at a labor. It's a positive context of what causes friction and how do we remove friction? How do we automate that? That's one of the big things we're looking to launch as we go into 2025.

[00:22:55] That has been very excited is, you know, a program within our company called a Net Better Program, which is like, hey, I will personally shepherd this, bring ideas forward. If your idea is accepted, right, and we're building a cross-functional team across the company that's going to look at all those ideas with me and, you know, ideas that demerit that are accepted, we're going to roll out financial incentives, right?

[00:23:22] Because that makes the company better, that makes lives of our employees better, and that makes eventually the lives of our clients better, right? So that Net Better Program, which is the intelligence is always there at the front lines. How do you not be the general that's in a bunker post, right, disconnected from the front lines is the big thing I always think about, which is like, how do I really get a pulse of what's happening on the front lines in a scalable, efficient manner?

[00:23:49] And then how do I take those data points and action them and channel them in a manner that becomes a self-fulfilling, virtuous, positive cycle? Yeah, there's so much more to unpack there. I want to go back to one thing you said, which is referring to it as a family. And I remember making that mistake, even as a founder, because the reality is our mission is to take care of our clients and to take care of our team.

[00:24:18] And if you become that crazy Uncle Joe like you were talking about, and if you're unwilling to be coached, if you're unwilling to help, then you're jeopardizing the mission for the rest of our team, for our clients. So I felt like I wanted to say family when it helped, and I didn't want to say it when it hurt. And so I realized that's the wrong metaphor, right? It is much more like a professional team where you can't always show up when you're going to act like crazy Uncle Joe, right?

[00:24:46] You have to show up and help the mission. And I think people get it because they're working really hard. And if you were jeopardizing their ability to achieve their goals and their mission, they do want you off the bus. And so nobody likes to talk about, oh, we want to hire the right people and get the right culture.

[00:25:05] But the truth is, unlike family, we have to move the right people off the bus, which I think is at least as important as being careful about who we allow on the bus. Absolutely. And, you know, the metaphor I always use, I mean, is, you know, with our employees, get on the bus, get off the bus. Please, with folded hands, please don't hang off the side of the bus. It's not good for you. It's not good for the company, right?

[00:25:33] And so whether you call it quiet coding or, you know, hanging off the side of the bus, I had to deal with a lot of that in the first two years, right? There were a lot of people who were just, well, you know, this is a very abrupt change. And, you know, it's like my first all hands, you know, when I, you know, really sort of really distanced myself from the word family, offended a lot of people. I was very chastised after the fact.

[00:25:58] But and a lot of people, unfortunately, chose to because, you know, I guess it was easier to hide in a remote model, too. But chose to be more passive about it. And so a lot of that journey is, look, you've got a career to build, right? You know, you've got kids to feed. I'm open to feedback. We all are open to feedback. But if this is not the right place, then this is not the right place. If it is, then let's go do great things together. Right.

[00:26:25] And so dealing with the people who hang off the side of the bus was also, you know, a big part of that journey in transforming the culture and getting it much more into, you know, sort of operator led culture. But operator, you know, led culture is often got the negative connotations. The private equity culture has often got the negative connotations. Right. And always say, look, it doesn't have to be right.

[00:26:51] And I like culture is always shaped in the smallest of actions and the smallest of behaviors. And I'll tell you a few things. I walked in and there was vernacular matters in, you know, sort of, well, what do we call the core leadership team? We call them the executive leadership team. I was like, guys, I don't know who the executive is. It ain't me. It ain't you. If you think you're an executive, go work somewhere else. Because, you know, I hate that term.

[00:27:19] You're never going to hear the term executive from me. And so banishing that and saying, I know I've got an executive in my title, but let's kind of that aside. Right. We're elite. Let's just call it that. Right. And, you know, guess what? The best leaders I've seen are on the front lines. Right. Let's not confuse, you know, title with authority and in a sort of with impact. And so getting that vernacular change itself was a big part of it.

[00:27:47] Second part of the vernacular, which I still get, you know, worked up about is I said, I don't know who you're talking about as a customer. AT&T has customers. We have clients. Right. So if you go walk into a law firm or a CPA firm, they will never call their clients customers. Right. So, you know, we're dealing with, you know, white glove service. We want to go above and beyond.

[00:28:09] And so reframing that vernacular in a lot of different dimensions became equally key in reshaping that narrative internally. So, you know, just little things like extraordinarily focused on two things from day one. One, recognizing the small things and celebrating the small wins. I always feel like, you know, it's like positive culture, positive energy comes from small actions. Right. They become not always the big ones.

[00:28:39] You know, people often will remember a handwritten note more than a thousand dollar incentive you send them. And 10 years from now, what's recall like and what impacts hearts, minds and emotions. So I'm a big believer in celebrating the small wins. You know, my weekly core lead team called Damien always starts with the first thing on the agenda is aha moments. Tell me, let's go around as a team. What caught your attention? What is something our employees did?

[00:29:07] What is what's something our clients said about, you know, our impact that caught your attention? Right. And then I take notes. And then I follow up and then I'll reach out to employees and I'll say, hey, I heard that we, you know, prevented a disaster going into the weekend because we were able to, you know, proactively identify, you know, the patching window was incorrect and take corrective actions. And I realized you have to come in on a Saturday to do that. I really, really, I heard the story and I just was thrilled about it.

[00:29:37] Right. So that those little things, you know, to me shaped the culture and the environment. I said there's a hundred reasons why our employees may quit. Recognition shouldn't be one of them. Right. So let's let's make sure that we're following up, following through on that. The second is communication. Right. The remote work and, you know, the lack of communication means a narrative is being constructed regardless of whether you like it or not. But and so how do we communicate?

[00:30:07] How do we have information flow through the organization? So we do monthly all hands. No surprise. The monthly all hands start. What's the first thing in the monthly all hands? Putting people on a pedestal. Right. Who are living our values. We start with talent celebration. We celebrate milestones. We celebrate. We have a big shot recognition, which is who's living our core values. People nominate, you know, this time we have 36 different nominations. Love reading.

[00:30:34] It's such a joy to spend a whole hour reading 36 nominations and then getting into a passionate discussion about who should we recognize. It's almost irrelevant who we recognize. You recognize all 36 of them, but you got to put one person on the pedestal. But it's just a joy. Right. And then I'll find ways to recognize the others. But that's what I say is that culture is a product of small actions. Like another thing we started doing, which is, hey, guess what?

[00:31:03] Let's do the hard work of saying what certifications are relevant to us. We created a catalog of all of them and then we allocated them into tiers of effort. This is small. This is medium. This large is extra large. And then we bracketed a bonus. Guess what? You know, becoming an Azure architect is the BFD. So let's pay a $5,000 bonus against that. Why won't we? Right. How many Azure architects are there? And we're blessed that as a small company, we have so many of them.

[00:31:33] And people invest time and energy outside of the core work. Of course, we're going to pay all the leaning training and support stuff. But let's give them right a check. Right. No strings attached. Right. Because it shouldn't be that, hey, we're paying a check and now you have to sign a retention agreement. Now, well, I think we were doing the right thing. Our employees are going to stay. So, again, doing things that align our intention, right, and the desire to shape a culture with the actions.

[00:32:01] That, again, becomes an example of that. So one thing I want to bring up is that there's this perception, I think, general, that private equity equals bad slash evil. And therefore, anybody that they hire, especially to bring in, right, and they bought a couple of companies and then they brought you in to run them. Right. Right.

[00:32:20] So I think, you know, to a lot of people, I don't know about your team, but to a lot of people, right, the private equity is bad and the CEO they bring in is going to be, by bad, I mean all about the numbers, all about cutting the costs, not investing, not worried about culture. Right. So I think that's a lot of people, not just a lot of people, not just a lot of people, not just a lot of those sort of preconceptions. Yet I hear you talking about how do we recognize people, put them on a pedestal? How do I reach out to them as an individual and thank them for what they did on Saturday?

[00:32:49] How do we give them a bonus with no strings attached? And it doesn't seem like that perception could be true in this case with all the things that you're doing. So how did how do you see that differently? And I guess how did your team, you know, react? Did they do they see this from day one as a net positive or did they have a whole bunch of concerns saying, you know, now there's new leadership and and, you know, I don't I don't until they knew you.

[00:33:17] They didn't know you. So generally speaking, Damien, I always say, look, at the end of the day. Right. What is private equity investing in? Right. They're investing in value creation. Right. Sustained value creation. Right. Because anybody can have one lucky year. But, you know, you have to have a sustained value when when when they look to go sell recap. Right. At the end of a five, six year old period. Right. Someone looks at it. They look at the historical numbers.

[00:33:43] It becomes very hard to sustain value creation, drive double digit growth rate, drive EBITDA improvement without doing the right things. You can you can fake it for some period of time. But, you know, to me, demons in the closet always catch up at some point. Right. And so if you're not focused on the online building blocks of culture, if you're not I mean, think about it.

[00:34:09] Like, you know, we talk about companies that have a great client experience. Zappos was always used as an example of this, that it's because they fundamentally invested in their employees. Right. If you go to Trader Joe's, as an example, Damien, and they are the most helpful. But they also pay on the higher end of the spectrum, you know, compared to other grocery stores. Right. So, you know, and they're not fools if they're they're also backed by a sponsor.

[00:34:37] And yet they're paying at the higher end of the spectrum because that's their product. That's their differentiation. So I would say, look, you know, we we as operators. Right. Are tasked with balancing both investing in our employees and delivering returns to our shareholders. Right. And what we can't do is punish our employees for poor execution on our end. Right. So that's the balance piece. Right.

[00:35:07] Because if you've got a good game plan, if you've got a good execution strategy, you're executing against that in a disciplined manner, you're driving accountability. Then you have all the room, I would argue, to do the right things. Now, if you're not, then, you know, you are reacting to it and, you know, cutting corners in a way that is masking the underlying structural issues. Hmm. Yeah. Well said. Help me book in this.

[00:35:34] So you came in, they had just bought a second managed service provider. And about how many folks full time were part of the organization? Yeah. About, you know, at that point was about, you know, about 70 folks. And today we're about 110. Right. If you look at sort of we've got some dedicated staff in India that are not, you know, our employees per se.

[00:35:58] But it's less about the staff, but it's more about operational efficiency and what we've been able to do. Right. In driving a disciplined model. And in that manner, both via automation, both via, you know, just better structuring of how work gets done and better placement of that and just better talent overall.

[00:36:19] Right. You know, sort of, you know, the productivity of great talent and their ability to kind of do stuff and get to problems and solve them faster is fundamentally different. So, you know, a lot of the, you know, revenue growth is not linear to the headcount growth story per se. And we're not done, by the way. Right.

[00:36:38] There's I still say we're we have plenty of room to become more operationally efficient in the non labor, not in the labor, but in the non labor categories of how work flows through the system. And that's the whole net better program and getting our frontline employees to say, guess what? You know, why am I dealing with this six times every day?

[00:36:59] And there must be a better way to do, you know, how the monitoring alerts are generated and, you know, what that's doing and why am I getting six alerts and why is it not correlating? And why can we just auto remediate these six things that we know are always, you know, the underlying thing is to go provision more resources. Right. We could orchestrate that action. So I think there's room to continue to do more of that.

[00:37:24] And that's sort of the focus as we think about next year, as we continue to grow and scale is having the revenue scale non-linear to the headcount piece. Hmm. Speaking of scaling and something you guys did invest early on, I believe. Tell me about the conversation with your CISO. And I think you guys might have considered acquisition of MSSP. But if I understand you've all the growth is gone organically.

[00:37:53] And what did that lead you to to build internally? Sure. So for us, it's been, you know, under my tenure over the last four and a half years, it's been all organic growth. So one of the things that early on was very clear to me, especially in the second year as we were going in, interacting with our clients is that, hey, the MSP and the MSSP value proposition is largely lost on our clients. That's terminology that we understand.

[00:38:22] But for our clients, we are really the provider that's providing both the infrastructure, the help desk, the managed services and the security piece. And so we need to expand and extend our competency. And knowing that there's a different level of skill sets and investments involved, right, to be a true MSSP and do it well, we need to look at building those or acquiring those skill sets.

[00:38:50] So the initial focus, you know, with the sponsorship of our parent private equity firm was to go acquiring. You know, there was a good 18-month period between 2021 and 2022 where we looked at a lot of different assets and MSSP players that were tucking that we could bring in.

[00:39:12] And, you know, sort of having done this before, you know, sort of they fell into one or, you know, two different categories, right? One was they truly had something meaningful. Or two were they were just, they had a skin on third-party platforms and they had just aggregated to build a thin veneer of IP. And so as you dug in, right, you kind of sifted through all of that to say, hey, what are the ones with true IP?

[00:39:39] And they had 12 other bidders or 15 other bidders chasing them. The valuation disconnects were just crazy. And so, you know, 18 months into it, I turned around to our CISO who had been a tremendous partner in this journey. And I said, look, Shippish, we've done this before in our prior venture. I know it was painful then, but, you know, we've got the playbook. We've got the knowledge. We've got the Rolodex of people and who to call, right?

[00:40:09] What do you think about getting back in the trenches and rebuilding all of that stuff? Which is, you know, that's a lot of effort because you're not hired. You're building a SOC from the ground up. You're putting a SIEM together with a lot of feeds, 25 different integrations across all the different vectors, right? You're building the rules for correlation and you're training the AI and the data models. And then, you know, you're training your security analysts on how to deal with all of that stuff.

[00:40:39] So he's like, you know, I've done this before, but you have to be patient, right? And I said, yeah, no, understood. This is not an overnight journey. It'll take some time. I think it took a year to put all of that together. And it took a few months more after that to iron out all the wrinkles and to get it fully operationalized, to have a few clients in there that were, you know, sort of gracious enough to be early adopters.

[00:41:06] And for us to get to a point where that has become the fastest engine of our growth and a tremendous difference here. Now, when you look at clients and prospects today, it's really, you know, sort of for me, tremendously gratifying, Damien, to be able to say we're vertically focused. So we understand the problems, right? You know, we're vertically focused on your segment. So you as a 150 person CPA, that's our ideal profile. That's who we cater to.

[00:41:36] We understand the challenges that you're facing with your CCH applications. We understand how to optimize that in Azure. We understand tax season and busy season and how to staff up and staff down for it. We understand application patching and how critical that is during tax season when updates are published and need to be applied overnight in a small window of three hours because CPAs are working 18 hours. And guess what? We've automated all of that. Our systems are built in gear for that.

[00:42:06] So we can speak the vertical language. Two is, you know, we operate in public cloud. We've embraced that for our size and scale. We've got, you know, architects, engineers. We live this, you know, fin ops or financial management of resources in Azure, in AWS is a core competency. We watch it like a hawk. We build hooks.

[00:42:30] We have a 40,000 line report that comes from Azure that gets processed via scripts and automation right down to a client level to be able to see where every cent is and why every cent has changed. So it's that level of investment of operating with diligence and excellence in public cloud. That's the second circle. And the third circle is security. And we've now, you know, have truly an integrated security offering that is proactive.

[00:42:59] That's capturing data across 25 different vectors that looks at the end user and their behavior and, you know, does user entity behavior analysis to say, why is Damien creating a forwarding rule in Office 365 and forwarding all his emails to Gmail? Hmm, that's suspicious. Why is Damien, you know, at 2 a.m. in the morning downloading files or uploading certain documents? That's suspicious.

[00:43:28] So why is there lateral movement from Damien's machine? Or why is Damien logging in from a geography he shouldn't be at? Or why is he logging in twice within, you know, a matter of two minutes? It's all of that stuff that's getting actively monitored and trapped. And time and time again, we have saved our clients from some very major disasters, right? And so we saved them from being in the headline news because of that.

[00:43:56] So I would say it's not a question of when. It's a question of, you know, when, you know, that happens. It's not if anymore because, you know, the human element is the most vulnerable element, right, in compromise, in threats.

[00:44:12] And so getting our clients protected with that additional what we call Nexus 360 XDR offering, right, which is that eyes on glass 24 by 7 actively monitored by our own trained security analysts, right, with our SOPs with a high level of automation built into really compress the interval from detection to remediation. That's the value, right?

[00:44:40] And so being able to say, tell me who's at the intersection of all three of these, right? And, you know, that's really a true competition. You know, it's not to say that, look, regional MSPs that may have a relationship with a managing partner don't pose a threat. They always do. And relationships, it's a relationship world, right?

[00:45:00] But, you know, that aside, we try and kind of focus on the value creation aspect and our ability to then not just play at the intersection of those three, but then deliver a great experience for our clients and global and beyond in both small and big ways. So different vernacular, but it's kind of what I would call like it's not a single niche. It's what I would call a triple niche, right? And you've chosen, for example, a CPA vertical.

[00:45:28] You've chosen to operationalize all of that with your expertise in Azure and public cloud and have all the capabilities and scripts and things like that, automation that that delivers. And then you've gone through the tremendous expense and effort to build out your own security operations center to tie into that, which very few MSPs have been able to execute on.

[00:45:55] And so, yeah, I guess my question is most people want to be where you are, right? You're right. Number 11 on the most recent MSP 500 list. What do you attribute your growth to? I would attribute our growth to great talent and focus, right? You know, at the end of the day, look, you know, I walked into a company that had great bones already, right?

[00:46:23] So, you know, my job was to make sure that, you know, there was a journey in both getting the right talent in the right seats, fostering and building great culture, making sure everyone's aligned. But more importantly, the discipline of who is our target audience? Who do we go after? I always use the word focus 10 times, not three, not four, right?

[00:46:47] And I always say to our team, if we're saying no more than yes, then that's a sign that we're being focused. And so it was some very difficult conversations up front, right, where every dollar matters and you're like, nope, we're not going to take this lead that's in the retail segment. That's not core to us. We're going to say discipline. We're going to build muscle memory. We're just going to go service clients in our target market, in the CPA, in the healthcare, in the legal space.

[00:47:14] And even then, I'll tell you some of the constructive kind of arguments with our team was, hey, guess what? There's this 10% CPA firm and I know it doesn't fall into our 50 to, you know, 500 demographic. I'm like, no, you know, I'm sorry. I know we're saying no to revenue, but, you know, discipline, discipline, discipline, right? We want to go after, you know, our value proposition is a co-managed IT model.

[00:47:40] There's some level of IT sophistication, value economics that play into it in firms of that size. And so I think that's what I would attribute that to more than anything. And then obviously a lot of what that focus comes, let's go educate. Let's go. Let's not try and sell. Let's just kind of tell them about security and what are the things we are seeing in the market.

[00:48:06] Let's go tell them about how difficult it is to run workloads in Azure as much as it may sound generous from outside. Right. Let's go kind of share some of that without giving the trade secrets away. Let's just kind of go through our journey and help our clients understand that so that they can learn from us. And, you know, along the way, build trust. I want to pivot for a moment.

[00:48:32] Samir, I'd love to learn what's the biggest lesson you've learned over all your years in building a, you know, as you said earlier, we're in the service business. We're in the people business. What's the biggest lesson learned from that? I think, you know, to me, the biggest thing is investing in relationships, right? Be it clients, be it employees, right? You know, sort of I tend to obsess, think a lot about that.

[00:49:00] You know, I tend to say, what do I do, right? To continue to build that relationship, to build that trust, you know. And, you know, that's always paid off for me. You know, it's just that investment. And because we're in a talent game and, you know, I have gone to people's houses, I've taken a flight and gone and sat down and broken bread with someone I was trying to recruit and got to know their family.

[00:49:26] And, you know, I have written, you know, sometimes I've directed my appreciation for the employee, not to them, but to their spouse to help them understand how much they've been a part in that journey. So I would say it's that people side of the equation, right? Understanding how people work and take, and I'm still learning quite a bit, right?

[00:49:45] So if I tell you, I reflect back on my listening skills of 10 years or five years ago to now and, you know, coming into the table with preconceived notions and already kind of, hey, I want to do this too. Now, truly being intellectually curious, right? And saying, how do I genuinely listen to understand, genuinely listen to really gain additional context and perspective?

[00:50:14] And I can't tell you how many times it's helped me transform disagreements into a positive rather than a toxic experience. And me five years ago or eight years ago would have been a, nope, we're going to do this. Come on, guys. What do you mean? Why aren't you getting this? Versus trying to say, look, there's a perspective, right? Right. Seek to understand and, you know, seek to give others the benefit of the doubt.

[00:50:35] So I think for me, a lot of it is, you know, continuing to develop as a leader and what's helped me and I always encourage everyone is go find a mentor. All of us need mentors and all of us should have people that mentor us. And my mentor who happens to be somebody who's built great services companies, including Mindshift. His name's Paul Chisholm. And he's the one, you know, when I took on this venture, I said, Paul, this is what I'm going through.

[00:51:04] I've got this legal vertical. It's largely languishing on the wine. It lacks leadership. He said, huh, I got a guy, you know, he used to lead my legal vertical. He may be of interest to you. You want me to call him? I said, absolutely. Absolutely. Now, that guy has become one of my best leaders. I mean, like it's hard, but, you know, it's just great when he came in. I pulled him out of retirement, David. He was retiring. I was like, come on, man.

[00:51:32] You know, it's like one more. You've got one more. And he loves, he's a great people guy, very incredible. He had his own legal MSP that he sold to Mindshift and then, you know, sort of just got corporatized. So, at some point he said, I'm done with this and I'd rather retire. And so, thanks to my mentor, I was able to connect with him, pull him into the journey early on. And, you know, four years later, I attribute a lot of our success to people, including him.

[00:52:03] That's wonderful advice. If there was one thing you could do differently or over or sooner, what would that be? I think, you know, sort of when I look at me early on in my career to now, right, I think fundamentally if I would pen a letter to myself, right, and this is me graduating college, I would say take risks early on. Take more risks, right? Err towards the uncomfortable.

[00:52:31] Growth always happens when you're outside your comfort zone. Growth always happens when you put yourself in, you know, sort of those situations. And, you know, I still remember graduating and we graduated at a great time. And so, there's no shortage of job opportunity. And, you know, a good example is PeopleSoft was just 50 employees.

[00:52:55] And Dave Duffield, the CEO and co-founder of PeopleSoft, came to our campus to recruit. He flew us back and I had dinner at his house. And I'm like, whose people start? The small company? Who does, right? And we're like, oh, this Motorola, you know, it's like we all had our start, you know, those, you know, gizmos. And so, like, oh, we work for Motorola. And, like, you know, my third month at Motorola, I'm like, what do you mean everyone's leaving at 5 p.m.?

[00:53:23] Come on, you know, this is not the culture I want to be in. Yeah. So, you know, I would say take more risks and push yourself outside your comfort zone more often, right? The question I ask myself now is what am I doing to push myself outside my comfort zone? And I get very concerned when I don't get a good answer. And so, that's my journey in life because I always felt – I've always grown when I've felt slightly uncomfortable.

[00:53:50] And so, that's a constant endeavor at a personal level and a coaching I have for folks I work with is get uncomfortable. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Yes. It resonates a ton. Speaking of that, what would you say is your biggest challenge right now? What I alluded to is, you know, how do you build a cohesive culture in a largely remote working environment?

[00:54:17] Right now, you know, the Amazons of the world can say, guess what? We're going to assure you that people are going to come back and good for them. It doesn't really work for us, right? Right. And so, I think the journey of building shared purpose, the journey of having everyone, including new hires, understand our values, connect with our values,

[00:54:41] create moments for them to sporadically connect, right, in a virtual environment that is analogous to the water cooler piece. And, you know, having a connection crew that's focused on – that's not me, but other people who are cultural ambassadors that are leading that change, that are driving ideas and giving them runway to do stuff. Some work. Sometimes it doesn't work. Okay, let's do a virtual wine event that fell flat. Okay, just, okay, that's fine.

[00:55:10] You know, you keep trying new ideas, and that's the journey is to kind of, you know, continue to drive that level of employee engagement in this virtual world. I think that's the big thing. You know, just, yeah, we have – you know, we're blessed with a sponsor that's continuing to invest in the business, that we're continuing to go organically, and we have an organic plan for next year that I'm genuinely excited about.

[00:55:34] And so it's a lot of work, but of course, you know, the opportunity is there, and it's about execution, and it's about sort of, you know, sort of focus. But the thing I think about is beyond that execution piece is the culture piece that, you know, I want to be able to have this be a lasting thing regardless of where we end up, right?

[00:56:01] Where there's a certain culture that stands out, is distinguished, that people recognize, that people talk about. You know, I always say my benchmark is when people go work at a different company, they look back and say, oh, we used to have this tradition, or we used to have to do this in our product company and refer to it in a positive manner. That's a wonderful way to phrase that.

[00:56:27] Speaking of those things, what are you looking forward to the most right now, Samit? Personally, I just climbed Kilimanjaro this summer, and it was wonderful. So you talk about somebody who never was exposed to hiking, and, you know, obviously there was a whole runway and prep over a good eight months to get into that.

[00:56:49] And, you know, sort of, I'm, you know, I love, I'm a gym nut anyway, so it was all kind of stuff I truly enjoyed. And, you know, what I learned was, you know, sort of having a goal in front of you like that, how I was able to really expand my personal regimen and do things, it was just fundamentally different than what I would have done, right?

[00:57:14] You know, going to, I live in Boston, so going to the Harvard Stadium and, you know, doing the stadium climb, I connected with a whole world that I didn't know existed. So, for me, having that goal at a personal level and, you know, orchestrating and operationalizing that and, you know, following that atomic habits, you know, kind of playbook there has been great. And so, you know, this year we're talking about Mont Blanc and, you know, doing that Mont Blanc range in France.

[00:57:42] And so we'll see, there's a lot of my friends are working to put that together. I think professionally, we've got an exciting journey ahead of us as we continue to drive that organic growth. So just continuing to get better as an orchestrator, as a servant leader and, you know, bring talent together and operationalizing what we need to do.

[00:58:06] And I think at the end of the day, working with our clients to shape that firm of the future, right? That firm of the future beyond cloud, you know, will have a strong adoption of AI and the right use cases. And so we're all learning. And so that's exciting. You know, at a personal level, I'm learning as well. I went through an eight-week course that I just wrapped up, right, on AI and how to start using AI.

[00:58:34] And I think everyone should be the best way, I always say, to learn is to use, right? And so that's the opportunity is kind of thinking about the role that MSPs need to play, should play, have a role to play, right? Have a value prop to evolve into as AI becomes more and more real in the workspace. What are your thoughts on AI?

[00:59:00] I'm curious if you think now is the time to be walking side by side with the clients and just talking about it. Now is the time to actively be using this new technology and actually building things or servicing them and generating revenue. Is it now the time to sit on the sidelines and wait? I think now is the time to look.

[00:59:22] Now is the time to work with clients and have active discussions and dialogues about, you know, where they see the opportunity and, you know, how we look at even, you know, doing some proof-of-concept work like building chat agents. And so I'll give you an example of a conversation we're having with a CPA firm right now. They generate engagement letters for their clients, right? So the firm's got thousands of engagement letters, right?

[00:59:47] So you can very easily, you know, sort of write an agent that sits up on top of those, get streamed on those letters, right? And then be able to kind of create a version that's more specific to the firm just on as simple as an engagement letter for audit or tax and being able to do that more efficiently. The book that's on my desk that I'm looking forward to reading, you know, over the holidays is this book called Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick.

[01:00:15] And this is about how do you get the most from AI and, you know, sort of I love his concept that it's really a jagged frontier is the terminology he uses that the boundary between what AI cannot do is shifting, right? You could put the same query in and you could get a certain answer. You could put it in and you get a different answer. And guess what? You know, we're all kind of going through the evolution of large language models and our use case for them and all of that's happening, you know, sort of.

[01:00:45] Pretty rapidly, right? So what we can do today versus I guarantee you what JADGPT 5.0 or 6.0 is going to be radically different. And so I think the innovation is always harder. And I always say in a firm context or in a company context, but at a personal level, right, we've got to drive that innovation and say, how do we look at us and how do we incorporate that every day?

[01:01:12] And that's where the revolution happens versus, you know, trying to say, what's that big thing? I'm like, what's the what? How do you incorporate it in a day to day basis? I'm sure you're using perplexity and, you know, sort of some of the other platforms as well. I'm certainly starting to use that a lot more. And, you know, one of my commitments going into next year is to have a lot of thoughts and ideas.

[01:01:36] I'm like, well, let's kind of start to write more and use, you know, sort of some of these tools to help polish some of those ideas and concepts more actively. Hmm. A great answer. Now, seeing as you have a PE backer, I'm curious, is M&A something you see going to be a part of your growth in the near term? Absolutely. All the time. I think it's the valuation disconnecting it, right? So, you know, we're always looking at assets. We just looked at an asset right now as well, right?

[01:02:04] You know, sort of part of it is part of the issue is, you know, sort of, you know, hypothetically, you'll go through it. The company comes in and says, hey, we've got six million revenues, two and a half million in EBITDA. Well, what's that two and a half million? It's adjusted EBITDA right now. Unfortunately, you know, being in this business as long as we have, we ask very hard-nosed questions and we dissect that number.

[01:02:28] And so the reality ends up being different than, you know, the seller perceives it to be somebody else comes along and takes them at face value. There's nothing I can do about that, right? So that always is the challenge. But having said that, we always look for, you know, sort of tuck-ins. Our job for tuck-ins becomes harder because they have to be aligned vertically to the segments we're in, right?

[01:02:55] So they have to be net equative to what we're trying to do. Otherwise, we always look at, hey, guess what? We could just pour more resources into sales and marketing and continue to drive a fairly aggressive growth rate that we already have in building our presence nationally. So that's always the challenge. What's the number one book you'd recommend? You know, for me, what, look, there's so many good books, right?

[01:03:24] But what I would tell you is what really changed me quite a bit, right? What I learned from there are so many books I read and so many books I – there's two I would shortlist for different reasons. So one is this book that I'm currently reading right now. So that's called When You Win by Russ Larraway.

[01:03:46] And what attracted me to that book is all about building that manager community, that mid-layer community, how do you build that cohesively? So, you know, operating, again, at the intersection of direction and driving clear direction, coaching both short-term, long-term, and career, investing in careers and thinking beyond the four walls of the company. So he's got a lot of good pragmatic advice on, you know, that mid-level layer, right?

[01:04:14] In every company I've led, you know, when I look at the lowest common denominator of success has been a very strong mid-level management layer. And so, you know, that's one. I think the other book that really shaped me and sort of, you know, one that I tried to really adopt quite a bit was The Trillion Dollar Coach. I don't know if you – Bill Campbell, right? That's a book that Eric Schmidt read.

[01:04:35] Bill Campbell was this working-class ex-football coach, right, with a completely non-tech background that coached some of the most influential tech leaders of my era and your era. And so – and there's so much – you know, I was – I never brought my emotions to work, right? You know, and so for him it was like, look, emotions and vulnerability is key and core to building trust.

[01:05:03] And this is about – it's all about people acknowledging, engaging people is so key. I go to a restaurant. The first thing I would do is ask the server their name. Before they ask me, I'll say, how's your day going? If I go and check in, you know, to an airline counter, they're not faceless people. There's a reason why they have a badge. There's a reason why the grocery car has a badge. How many times has somebody said, hey, Dave, how's your day going? You know, how's your shift going? How difficult is the day today? It must be really crazy with Thanksgiving, right?

[01:05:32] Acknowledging and engaging people in a genuine manner, not just perfunctory. And the more I started doing that, the more it became natural, the more it became second nature to a point where my wife's like, oh, you can't leave Sumit alone anywhere because he's going to start talking to anybody and everybody. So I'm doing this other reputation which my – we are – I'll tell you a funny story.

[01:05:56] We're in Iceland this August with our kids on vacationing. We're in the most remote part of Iceland. And I look around and, you know, I see this other gentleman and, you know, sort of – it's like a breakfast moment. It's like, you're having breakfast with – no, no, no. But she knows we're going to stop by and say hello. And I say hello and I turned out this person is from Boston as well.

[01:06:24] He's – you know, his name is Yogesh Gupta. He leads Progress Software. He's a, you know, very eminent guy here in the Boston Tech circles. And he's somebody I've been meaning to connect with a long time, right? And so I'm like, what's the odds, Yogesh, that you and I connect here in this remote part of Iceland, both of us, people in Boston? And so I think just, you know, for me, you know, that book has really shaped a lot of how I look at life, how I lead, you know.

[01:06:53] And so just trying to put a lot of those in practice. And then, you know, for me, feedback, feedback, feedback. So I always say feedback. What am I not doing? You know, where are my buying spots? And so I use this construct of stop, start, continue, which is with all my leaders. You know, I'll sit down every few months and say, what am I not doing, right, that I should start doing? So that's the start piece. What am I doing that's not helping our cause that I should stop?

[01:07:21] And the continue is, what am I doing that is working that I should lose sight of? Yeah, yeah. That second question is a hard one to come around to. It was for me. I love the framework there, Samit. How do you, you just seem so hungry. You seem so driven. Like, how do you keep that hunger over the decades you've been at this and different service providers?

[01:07:48] I think that, you know, there's a genuine inner, you know, I'll tell you where my energy and stimulation comes from is from people. Right. And so that's the struggles I have in this environment of remote is not always being surrounded by people. But I just love, I love this business of bringing smart, intellectually driven people together and aligning them to a purpose and a mission.

[01:08:14] And so that piece, you know, it's like, you know, there's not a conversation with my CFO. There's not a conversation with my, any of my leaders where I don't walk away learning something. And so that to me is the piece, right? Is, is I would say it's a people business and I'm a, I get stimulated by having smart people around me. Samit, this has been amazing.

[01:08:42] Can you tell folks if they want to reach out or connect with you, how they can find you online? Absolutely. So LinkedIn is always great. I respond to all of the requests I get on LinkedIn and you can always email me at Samit at netgamecloud.com. So my first name at netgamecloud.com. This has been a really huge gift. I've learned so much. Thank you for being on MSP Mindset, Samit. Thank you so much, Damien.

[01:09:09] And I truly am a big fan of yours and I say this in the most sincere manner. And I'm looking forward to, you know, all of the interviews you're going to do as well. And I truly wish you a great Thanksgiving. Hopefully you're able to truly disconnect and spend some meaningful quality time and create some new memories. I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you.