Corporate Ladder to MSP Owner: Lisa Niekamp-Urwin on Building Tomorrow's Technology Today

One, two, three, four. And I got up one morning and I looked in the mirror and I was like this is just not what I want, you know. And my husband, he is so supportive. He said, lisa, you've always wanted your own business, you've always wanted your own corner office. Why don't you make your own? I'm like you know that's a great idea. Why didn't I have that? And so I went to the owner and I said, hey, I'd love to start a business, I love to have you as my first client and I promise the rest of my life I will take the best care of you ever. And I still do. He still calls into our help desk. I still help, support him. Welcome to Now, that's it. Stories of MSP success, where we dive into the journeys of some of the trailblazers in our industry to find out how they used their passion for technology to help turn managed services into the thriving sector it is today.

Lisa Neitkamp-Irwin, the founder president, ceo of Tomorrow's Technology Today, a full service IT support company based in St Henry Ohio. Welcome to the Now that's it podcast.

Thank you, Chris. I'm excited. I wanted to come on here a long time ago, waiting for that invitation.

You were sick, I was sick, I went to Australia. We ended up here together.

Yes, I'm excited. This is vibrant, you know, sitting here next to each other.

I'm excited to have you on the podcast. I've really gotten to know you over the last couple of years through our business transformation programs. You're an amazing Enable partner, but you're an even more amazing person. I think you're very genuine and that's why I'm looking forward to us just chatting today. So again, thank you so much, Super excited. So let's start off in the beginning. Lisa, you went to school for business as well as project management. What type of role were you looking for when you came out of college to get your career started?

Well, actually I really started in programming database management, Oracle, DBA. That was my thing, I was hanging my hat on.

And.

And yeah, that got boring.

Yeah.

And then I saw the opportunity of projects and that's where I went down to the master's in project management and so I thought I live in the corporate world, climb that ladder and have that executive office. And, yeah, I hit a few glass ceilings and said that's enough.

What were some of those jobs like early on?

A lot of politics. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I'm such a outspoken person that politics probably is not one of my forte.

Did you experience things that if you ever were to own a business in the future, you would make sure you didn't do?

Absolutely, absolutely yeah, I wasn't going to be that kind of person. I just Absolutely yeah, I wasn't going to be that kind of person. I just I wanted to. As I just built the business, I was like I want to give my team a great life, I want them to have. You know, people talk about you know turnover and I really you know turnover is good for an organization, but there's still some of that longevity and I still got that first employee.

That's amazing. I've come across a number of amazing CEOs. I love the CEOs that think like you do. They think about it as a family. These folks look at me as almost like a relative. Right, I'm taking care of them, they're taking care of me, and it makes you want to work even harder for an owner or an MSB when you know that you're making a direct effect on people's lives. It's great. So how'd you get your way into starting your own business?

Unemployment, yeah. So construction industry took a hit there in 2001, and I had just had our youngest and came back from maternity leave and they're like we're going to put the project on hold.

We really don't need a project manager if we don't have an ERP implementation going on here. We'll give you some training, we'll give you some resources to help you build your resume. And I went home and I was just like this sucks, you know, I'm in IT, I'm never unemployed, right? That was detrimental and that was kind of a wake-up call. And I did take a job with a manufacturing company and I was running quality tests on their plastic stuff and setting up quality systems and I was also installing the server and helping the users.

And I got up one morning and I looked in the mirror and I was like this is just not what I want. And my husband, he is so supportive. He said, lisa, you've always wanted your own business, you've always wanted your own corner office. Why don't you make your own? I'm like you know that's a great idea. Why didn't I have that? And so I went to the owner and I said, hey, I'd love to start a business, I'd love to have you as my first client and I promise the rest of my life I will take the best care of you ever. And I still do. He still calls into our help desk. I still help support him. And, yeah, he sold the manufacturing company but we still. He still has home problems and we set up a sonology for him and those kinds of things. You know, he was still pretty geeky, so we always help him on those little things.

That's super fun. I always talk to owners. It's this is sort of one of these things that intrigues me about entrepreneurs is you have to have some level of risk tolerance, because things can go South very quickly and not only will you be unemployed, but you'll also be in debt, right, because of all the money you've spent to try to build something. But you did it smart. You said I want to do this, but I kind of want to do this together. So trust in me, help me get this off the ground and be my first customer. And so you know, day one you have you don't have revenue, and that's a beautiful thing. So I commend you for getting very, very crafty and scrappy and figuring that out from the get-go. That's great, awesome. So I want to ask you where did the name come from? Lisa of the company.

Actually my dad.

Awesome.

So whenever we were thinking about starting that business, we were sitting in the basement and I'm like we need a cool name. And Dad came up with he goes how about tomorrow's technology today? And I'm like, oh, that's genius, and that is exactly what we live by. We really want to be that leading edge not bleeding edge, but leading edge of bringing tomorrow's technology to our clients today.

Very great. What were some of the services that you guys were offering? We?

really thrived a lot off of that small business. Small business server implementations where you had the Exchange and the SharePoint and the file sharing all together. And that's actually where George came into the picture. I started researching this and started to tackle it and I'm like, oh, this is over my head, this is not DBA work, you know. And so he came in and moonlit for me on the weekends. So we started building those servers and next thing, I know, we had three going and had a couple referrals.

And then I started on the website side of it. I started developing some websites and I thought that was easy work, easy money. I had a real estate agent and I helped him build out a custom site. So he had all of his listings on there. We updated them every week, took pictures, and we were really on the leading edge of that. So that was kind of where I went and did that. And then I'd go home and do the billing at night, you know, and eventually got to the point where I found a part-time person and I'd go drop off all the Ingram, the stack of Ingram invoices. She'd get all the bills together for me and back then, you know, we put them in the mail. She'd envelope them up and off they'd go.

I remember those days I was working in MSP with a guy that you know, that you become really close with, and I just remember those days that were, yeah, hand stamping envelopes, sending bills out, and then calling people why haven't you paid your bill yet. Right, chasing people down, those are fun. So you were a break fix shop starting off, lisa, like many IT service providers, I might add. But what was the thing that got you started to really look into managed services?

I guess searching on the internet of how do I automate this stuff, and I signed one, started down the path with Dell, had one going and that was a total bomb. I got out of that contract. Fortunately I hadn't paid them anything yet, so that was an easy one. Then I went to another one and I can't remember what it was and then all of a sudden I stumbled across Enable and started talking with them and signed up with Enable. I jumped on the band early there and Stephanie Hammond started me. She kept talking to me every week or a couple weeks, I don't know when we were in and she talked to me about this managed services. You've got to get into this recurring, recurring, and I don't know what took me so long to realize this is such a good model. You know you get income coming in every month. They pay you for the services you're doing. Just keep doing them.

Stephanie is an amazing resource here and an amazing person. She's just so, so enjoyable. I had the pleasure of doing a mainstage session with her yesterday and it was so neat to watch her prepare. She was really comfortable when she went out there. I actually had a couple of comments about yeah, you and Stephanie were the best of the group. But to help MSPs like she lives for that that's all she wants to do is make phone calls, jump on webinars, help people out.

Anytime I got stuck. I was like dropped her an email and she'd be like calling me. You know, hey, let's talk through this, and that's definitely how we got our start, how we got to where we are.

Yeah, so what's the one thing that sort of made you fall in love with managed services?

You know that reoccurring revenue, that's okay, I think you know as an owner it's okay to, it's okay to want money, you know, and then I can do with it what I want.

Do you remember the early customers that you had when you converted from sort of the time and materials to fixed fee billing with managed services? Do you remember any of the stories of you know? How are you messaging to them the benefits and how do they receive that?

I remember struggling through that and actually talking a lot of that through with Stephanie. And how do you get that message to them? How do they understand? You know, I guess the promise of this is what I'm going to do for you, you know, and you didn't have the proof of this is what I'm going to do for you and you didn't have the proof. You had the industry information but you didn't have the solid proof that this was going to work for you. But I had a lot of trust in those new, those early clients had a lot of trust in me. I think it had a lot to do with our location, being in a rural Ohio, going to church on Sunday and seeing all these people, you know, looking them in the face and and being at events with them. I think that just that trust is what is what really helped helped move that needle.

That's great. So I'm sure, like like most small businesses, you sort of took business from all shapes and sizes and and and you're just happy when you could convince somebody to sign on for the managed services side. But was there a specific industry that you sort of fell in love with early?

Oh, manufacturing. There's just something about that product, you know, turning out something. That's shipping. You know there's a lot of passion, there's a lot of and there's a lot of personality. You know the same kind of personality in the manufacturing world. Did they appreciate?

IT as well, because I know there's a lot of you know I talk a lot with MSPs that say, well, my clients don't value IT and so it's really hard for me to upsell them and talk to them. Was the manufacturing industry a bit more receptive because of their, their need, need, their reliance on IT?

Yeah, I feel like it, yes.

Yeah.

And my team had personality. I think that really helped. They were part of all of the manufacturing Anywhere we went. Just was talking this morning and one of our team members he has a band, it's kind of this imaginary band, but anytime we get a new client he's in there. He's like okay, so who plays music? So he was at a new client this week and he's like I found a sax player. So he's like next thing I know I'm going to have a whole orchestra.

That's great Talk about some of those hires. You mentioned that you have some long standing employees. What types of qualities and personalities do you look for, Lisa, when you're hiring for your business?

So when it comes to the techs, they got to be geeky, they got to love camaraderie and they just got to fit their personality. I found that the guys that game seem to work well in our office. They can kind of relate to each other. And then and then we got Justin. He's just, he's just out there, you know, but he's got that personality for professional services that he can go anywhere he can. He's that chameleon, you know, just kind of fit in anywhere he wants. So it just depends on the position we're looking for. But kind of really honing in that personality, it took us a while, it took us quite a few turns in there to figure out what really worked well in our office.

Yeah, it does. I've seen a lot of MSPs just try different types of people in different roles. I've seen MSPs you realize solely on the resume, which always scares me because I don't know if it was Dave. Or one of our mutual friends said everybody lies on a resume, so you just take that with a grain of salt, but those personalities seem to be that initial. You know, hey, is this trust? Do I trust what's coming out of this person's mouth? Or would I want this person on the phone fielding calls right and you can teach somebody tech right? But the personality is really hard to teach?

Yeah, exactly, they've got to have. And trying to get through that bullshit line. Yeah, trying to see you know where, how quick can we end the honeymoon and really get to the marriage? Yeah, trying to see. You know where, how? How quick can we end the honeymoon and really get to the marriage?

Yeah, so you've been part of a couple of our business transformation programs, and Rob always talks about the levers that you know MSPs can pull to help them grow the business. You have a favorite lever, don't you that you, you started early on. What is that?

Oh, I love sales and marketing. Marketing is ah, yeah.

How early did you realize that you needed to invest both time and money under the marketing side of the business?

Oh, very early Back in 2011, 10, 11, yeah.

Awesome. And then, without giving away any of your secrets, are there any things that you can share about sort of marketing tactics that really helped you early on that maybe some other MSPs might be interested in?

Oh, you want to know the biggest secret. You got to do it. There's so many. You know that they start into the marketing and it's hard work. You know it's hard work, just like tech is, and you got to love it. You got to find somebody that's passionate about it and you just got to do it. And the activities that work are the ones that you do. You know you got to put your time into them. You got to think them through and you got to be consistent. Marketing is all about numbers. That's all it is. You know, figure out I want three new clients a month. I need six FTAs a week. From there, I need about 12 qualified leads to go there, but it comes down to I need about 7,000 in my database to market to for the year.

I look at it as an opportunity. Dave Wilkerson said I was wasting a couple of years of my life, but I ran marketing for a very large MSP and, as a technician running marketing, I was running and learning marketing at the same time. And my favorite thing, lisa, was I looked at marketing again and, as an intellectual, I said this is a science experiment. We're going to try different things. We're going to measure all kinds of stuff and the motions that work we're going to do more of and we're going to spend more money on, and the stuff that doesn't. We're never going to do it again. And so that was one of the early things that I learned. And I definitely wasted a lot of money, lisa, but I did find some really cool ways to go to market.

You know whoever you partner with to do any of your marketing. If they tell you they can't give you an ROI, run fast because marketing is all about ROI. You got to know your numbers. You got to know what it's going to turn into Awesome.

So what makes the culture at Tomorrow's Technology today so special?

I think it's the people. It's our passion, our passion to help. You know our core values really get it. You know, making sure that we're doing the right thing for the client, for us. We're humble, we're confident, just all part of that, putting it all together.

That's great. Can you talk about what it's like? I don't think. I've been to a number of IT conferences, a number of Empowers, and you are always there. What is it about these types of events, lisa, that you're one of the first people to sign up and you love coming to?

Oh my gosh, yes, the networking you know. And the more different conferences you go to, the more different people you get different ideas. I always my husband's commercial roofing sales. I go to his national sales seminar. You can pick up things there. You can talk to other business owners I've networked there with a couple different roofing business owners, you know and getting ideas from all industries, all different vendor, all different walks of life. So it's, yeah, it's all about gathering information, taking that page of notes and going home and, and you know, tuning into on what. What's my next big thing?

I bet you have a lot of notes from this week. You were sharing offline your feelings of of what this conference was like. Can you tell everybody how much you enjoyed the Empower 2024?

Oh yeah, going home is disappointing, you know, in a sense Usually I'm exhausted, but I've still got energy on this one and I'm looking forward to this afternoon diving into a couple of things. I got a couple appointments already set up for next week. I'm actually off to another conference next week, so set up some appointments there with some of the vendors from here over there and we're going to connect a couple of different vendors together. It's all about networking connections.

That's great. What would you tell the early days? Early Lisa.

Take a risk. Take a risk If you're uncomfortable. If you're not uncomfortable, you're not growing. And take a risk. It's okay to fail, but you got to learn from that failure. And my daughter was talking about failing oh, that's so bad, it's such a bad mark. I'm like no, no, no, you got to learn from it. Grow from it. You know every step backward you make two steps forward, so just keep going.

That's great. What's next for tomorrow's technology?

today, Ooh collaboration talking to a few MSPs seeing if we can put together a platform, see what we can do. Collaboration you know if you're not, if you're not growing, you're dying in this industry and don't want that to be scary for any other MSPs. But you know, with attrition, you know, with clients that are being, I've got a lot of clients that have been acquired by big corporations and you know there's there's gonna I might have to off board some of that One of them. I was able to keep on but you know you got to with that. With everything that's going on in the world with with M&A, you got to keep moving forward and I found a couple of good-minded people here that we'll see where it goes.

Exciting. I wish you luck there. So you've had a very successful career. You founded an amazing company, but when did you know? Now that's it. I'm not done.

It's not it yet we still got more to go. You know, I was energized last night thinking, yeah, I told somebody else, oh yeah, I was doing some spreadsheets in my sleep. The other night I got the VTO all laid out, got the ideas going. They're like what you got to get some sleep. I'm like, oh no, that's multitasking, we can keep working while we're sleeping. We got it going.

That's great, lisa. Lisa, thank you so very much for being with me today. I absolutely love chatting with you. Every time I see you, You're always smiling, you're always happy, so keep being that amazing person that you are. I wish you and your team absolutely the best of luck in the future. Thanks, chris. I love doing this.

I wish you and your team absolutely the best of luck in the future. Thanks, chris, I love doing this.