David Sohn of Helpt

[00:00:01] Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Today is December 17th. This is another edition of the MSP Initiative, MSP Talk.

[00:00:13] So mspinitiative.com. This is where you'll find all the stuff that we like to park online for your viewing, like this very session that we're recording.

[00:00:22] And we'll be on these sessions to have MSP Initiative, which links back to our podcatcher and our YouTube page and all that good stuff.

[00:00:29] So these sessions are online, like, share, subscribe, forward, download, have at it. It's all there for you.

[00:00:36] MSP Community Minds, we had now two consecutive years of this educational formatted event for the industry.

[00:00:42] Check out the last agenda online for this past year. Denver is online, so you can see we had some panels and some workshops.

[00:00:50] We're going to probably continue this into 2025. I think we're looking at Dallas area.

[00:00:58] So stay tuned for dates, but we love this format.

[00:01:02] You know, actual learning, not, you know, I'm trying to sell you something with a subscription at the end of it.

[00:01:08] Although there's plenty of that if you're out there in the world, if you want to buy it, but a little bit different event.

[00:01:12] Then we had all of our community block parties, right? We had Dallas and Berlin and Miami and Orlando and Dublin and Sydney, right?

[00:01:21] So we have parked all of the albums for all of those events at facebook.com slash MSP Initiative.

[00:01:28] You can see all of these albums with all of the good, candid moments going back forever ago, but definitely this year.

[00:01:37] Check them out. That's all online for you. And you can spot yourself, tag yourself, feel free, have some community offers.

[00:01:44] Feel free to check them out and see if they make sense for you.

[00:01:46] And then our very own Jen, who's behind the scenes, you know, here at MSP Initiative, took all of the known events that we have documented and put them into the 2025 calendar.

[00:01:57] Although they're still coming in, right? Fast and furious.

[00:02:00] And as they do, we will continue updating that calendar so that everybody knows what's happening out and about in the sandbox.

[00:02:08] So that is all the housekeeping. Again, MSP Initiative dot com.

[00:02:13] Once you Google initiative and a spell checks it for you, you should be able to get there pretty quickly.

[00:02:19] All right. So our special guest on the podcast today is from a company that you may have not heard of before, but we're going to learn about it today.

[00:02:29] We're also going to learn about our guest, David Sohn. Hopefully I said that right, David.

[00:02:36] I'm sure we're going to talk about all sorts of stuff.

[00:02:38] But for everyone that's kind of come on to this for the first time, we'd like to kind of let you talk a little bit about your history, right?

[00:02:46] In the sandbox and how did you get in?

[00:02:49] How was your journey like? What got you to today?

[00:02:52] And then we'll go from there.

[00:02:54] Oh, fantastic. All right. Well, George, thank you for having me on.

[00:02:57] I guess to start, you know, helped is 100 percent U.S.-based help desk force multiplier service.

[00:03:04] We're an outsourced help desk. We focus on the customer experience.

[00:03:07] Everybody's in the U.S.

[00:03:09] We started in the MSP channel about two and a half years ago, and we've really seen a lot of success in, you know,

[00:03:16] trying to address and deliver service to all of the different levels of the frontline support needs of our clients.

[00:03:22] Understand. What about you? What about your personal journey, David?

[00:03:25] My personal journey. Holy moly. All right.

[00:03:27] So I was born in 1980. No, I'm just joking. I'm not going to go that far back.

[00:03:33] You know, my professional got born in the same decade. It's all good.

[00:03:36] We all good.

[00:03:40] Professionally, you know, I started my career, my professional career, you know, doing technical recruiting.

[00:03:45] So I was learning a lot about a lot of different things when it came to engineering.

[00:03:50] And then I realized that I'd be so much better if I focused on one thing.

[00:03:54] And so I got a job with my buddy, Matt, and partner now at a company that sold the transceivers,

[00:04:02] you know, little fiber optic things that were going into data centers.

[00:04:04] And I learned a lot about that one thing.

[00:04:07] And so we grew that organization in the executive team to a very large size.

[00:04:14] It sold.

[00:04:16] And we said, you know, one of the things that would have made this a lot easier is having somebody like helped.

[00:04:22] And so that's what brought us to help.

[00:04:25] Fair enough.

[00:04:26] Yeah.

[00:04:27] Before we go down, you know, your lane, you know, because it's going to come up.

[00:04:31] So might as well get ahead of it with some kind of recent industry news.

[00:04:35] Yeah.

[00:04:36] I think industry, you know, guy, you know, I'm sure there's a better term for it, but I'm just going to go with guy.

[00:04:44] Jay McBain, who currently is at Canalis, which is like kind of one of those, you know, industry consortium type places.

[00:04:55] He does kind of like, hey, here's where the industry at.

[00:04:58] Here's what's going on.

[00:04:59] That kind of thing.

[00:05:00] Right.

[00:05:00] And I noticed, I don't know if you saw it, David, that I think yesterday he came out with like, here's the current state of affairs on like the PSA RMM kind of arena.

[00:05:16] You know, when it comes to like who the players are and, you know, where everybody's at, like in the last 12 months kind of thing.

[00:05:24] And so why I bring this up?

[00:05:26] Well, you know, number one, you know, a lot of MSPs have to run their business on, you know, not just manpower as we're about to get into, but just on technology.

[00:05:35] Right. So everybody kind of, you know, invest in tools and SaaS applications and, you know, systems, ecosystems.

[00:05:43] Right. People just keep on kind of reinventing the word, the verbiage here.

[00:05:47] But anyway, so I think yesterday Jay posted kind of like this and I'm going to see if I can actually grab the URL and share it live here.

[00:05:56] Just give me a second.

[00:05:57] But Jay brought up like the RMM PSA in the managed services space and like the growth percentages over the last 12 months, it looks like Q3 2023 until Q3 2024.

[00:06:13] And so it looks like, you know, the players here, Kaseya, ConnectWise, Ninja1, Enable, Halo PSA, and then others are kind of jammed together at the end.

[00:06:24] Anybody that, you know, not past a certain point.

[00:06:27] Looks like, you know, none of those names probably shocks you, David.

[00:06:31] Right. I mean, we've heard about these names for a long time, especially if you've been in the MSP sandbox.

[00:06:36] Looks like Kaseya has taken the top spot and is on just some massive growth.

[00:06:39] And, you know, he actually puts in there that Kaseya 365 is kind of their driver of it.

[00:06:44] Yeah, they've grown 55.1% combination of RMM PSA for Kaseya in the last 12 months, which is.

[00:06:52] Well, I would argue is pretty mature category.

[00:06:54] And to have that level of growth is crazy.

[00:06:58] They leap connect wise, right?

[00:07:01] Who in the same period only had 3.2% of growth.

[00:07:05] I mean, that's a staggering.

[00:07:08] Yeah.

[00:07:09] For sure.

[00:07:11] Behind them, Ninja1 is third in the market share.

[00:07:15] In the last 12 months, they've grown 54.1%, which is like, I know, you know, third in the list, but very good growth there.

[00:07:25] You have Enable behind them at 3.7, kind of similar to ConnectWise and the growth percentage there.

[00:07:31] And then Halo comes in the fifth position in market share.

[00:07:36] And they only have 3.1% of market share, but their growth is 102% in the last 12 months.

[00:07:43] Shocker.

[00:07:44] And then everybody else is 26.3% of the market share and 19.8% growth.

[00:07:50] So there's a lot of other names in there, right?

[00:07:52] Like Super Ops and Synchro and a bunch of other people.

[00:07:56] Anyway, long story short, those are largely the big players, right?

[00:08:00] I would say they did kind of explain who the others are they have on there, a Terra, a Manage Engine, Synchro, a Cello, a Cronus, so on and so forth.

[00:08:13] So when it comes to the MSP's business model, the one thing that we can all, and since I've walked into the sandbox back in 2000, 2001, or in 2024, it's almost 25, coming up on 25 years, David.

[00:08:30] And time flies by when you're having fun, right?

[00:08:34] Manpower is definitely, definitely, definitely in the mix.

[00:08:38] Here's the problem.

[00:08:39] As you add clients as an MSP, you can't – where the math breaks down is if you're having to hire as equal in terms of your client growth and your manpower, you hit a problem point, right, where the math begins to break down.

[00:08:55] And we've heard many stories of people who have gone completely the other way.

[00:08:59] They've gone into, like, automation, you know, zone, and they've been – you know, they're kind of like almost developers that happen to do technical support, which is a little bit of a different, you know, wrinkle to things.

[00:09:10] And they've been able to figure out how to get all these tools to actually do stuff for them.

[00:09:13] But bottom line is part of the reality to Manage Services is the customer experience.

[00:09:19] Part of the customer experience is human beings talking to human beings.

[00:09:22] I'm going to throw one more topic out there since I've been going on a rant here, right?

[00:09:27] This topic of Adam Walter asked where these stats are from.

[00:09:33] Adam, just go on LinkedIn, type in J McBain, M-C-B-A-I-N, and his most recent post titled,

[00:09:41] Significant Changes Reported in the Managed Services Software Market, PSA slash RMM Today.

[00:09:46] This was literally posted 24 hours ago, maybe less.

[00:09:49] So that's what I'm referencing, his graphic infographic chart that he's putting out there is where these percentages came from.

[00:09:55] So go check it out.

[00:09:57] But anyway, long story short, I'm going to throw one more topic out on there because as we do these podcasts, AI, right?

[00:10:05] There's a lot of people betting on, hey, we're going to solve your manpower problem.

[00:10:09] Some people tried to outsource it.

[00:10:11] Some people tried to, you know, fraction it into a crowdsource model.

[00:10:15] Some people tried to, you know, you know, insource it.

[00:10:18] Some people tried to automate it.

[00:10:20] Now we're going to AI it and we're just going to eliminate the need altogether for additional human beings because this new way of technology is going to just drive.

[00:10:30] You know, I was just like, yeah.

[00:10:34] I mean, listen, I'll let you speak to all of this, by the way, in a minute.

[00:10:38] But my opinion on all of this is you could be putting the best ass technology you can find in the world out there.

[00:10:45] And there's a lot of good stuff.

[00:10:46] You could be building your own, you know, unique stuff too.

[00:10:51] Awesome.

[00:10:53] But man, you know, chain is only as strong as the weakest link.

[00:10:57] And who is the weakest link in the chain?

[00:11:01] The least technology able person in the end customer's base, employee stack, who is calling in.

[00:11:11] And this is the person that has a hard time pressing a power button, remembering their password that's on a sticky note underneath their keyboard or plugging in a vacuum for that matter.

[00:11:23] Right. Like they are literally the people who frustrate the hell out of everyone on this side in MSP land.

[00:11:30] And quite frankly, if that person's experience isn't good, that person, my experience, goes to their boss and complains.

[00:11:38] And then their boss says that they're getting complaints and they're going to the MSP.

[00:11:42] And the MSP is saying, what are you talking about?

[00:11:44] And then they got to go do homework.

[00:11:45] And then they're using somebody like help.

[00:11:48] They're going to help saying, hey, what happened on this call?

[00:11:50] And then like bottom line is it all comes back down to somebody who doesn't remember their password.

[00:11:55] And that is the chain that, you know, the where the chain breaks.

[00:11:58] So I don't think as it stands today, it is December 17th, 2024.

[00:12:04] Could you imagine that person, the sticky note, password, can't plug the vacuum in person calling in, talking to an automated agent that's AI based and like try having a good experience?

[00:12:17] I can't. I'm having a hard time coming up with that being some magic bullet here.

[00:12:22] So I'm going to I'll leave that one out there.

[00:12:26] But I'm going to tell you right now and I'm going to remind everyone, I've said this now a couple of times, but I've just told this story yesterday.

[00:12:32] So it's top of mind.

[00:12:34] McDonald's, who has a very finite business model with very specific things that they deliver, like Jen, who's on the back end of this webinar, goes to McDonald's and just orders Diet Coke.

[00:12:46] No, I joke not.

[00:12:47] No hamburgers, no wraps, no chicken Diet Coke.

[00:12:51] So she went to some board somewhere that she was talking to and out of her car.

[00:12:56] And it was an AI thing, which, by the way, McDonald's did a pilot program and not in three states, 90 locations earlier this year where they took the human being order taker out of them.

[00:13:06] You know, the drive through and they put an AI bot into the board and then they scrapped it.

[00:13:13] And then they scrapped it.

[00:13:14] I'm not resetting a password.

[00:13:15] I'm not doing anything complex.

[00:13:17] One Diet Coke, please.

[00:13:19] I don't know how hard that is, but that's all I'm talking about.

[00:13:23] Right.

[00:13:23] Number one, please.

[00:13:24] Medium.

[00:13:25] Like it's very finite.

[00:13:27] That didn't work out.

[00:13:27] So the McDonald's, with all of the money available to them, so yeah, customer experience isn't good here.

[00:13:34] I very, very, very much worry that the technology is even far enough for this to be consistent and deliverable today.

[00:13:43] December 17th, 2024.

[00:13:45] All right.

[00:13:45] I'm going to get off my rant.

[00:13:46] I'm sorry.

[00:13:47] I had to get it out.

[00:13:48] But it fits this topic very, very clearly.

[00:13:52] Customer experience, David.

[00:13:54] So go ahead.

[00:13:54] Tell me what you think about all of that.

[00:13:56] So you nailed it.

[00:13:57] You did my job for me.

[00:13:58] I think one of the biggest things that we're running into is the speed of the technology.

[00:14:02] It's going too fast for people.

[00:14:04] We're not ready for the transition that is ordering that Diet Coke from the AI through McDonald's.

[00:14:08] What we need to do is focus on the technology that is AI, which I'm a huge proponent of.

[00:14:13] I think it's amazing.

[00:14:14] And we need to enable the people that are still the humans to have that human-to-human connection.

[00:14:19] And frankly, and I know you say December 17th, 2024.

[00:14:23] 20 years from now, when the generation of people that want to be able to pick up the phone and get a human live on the other end are potentially gone.

[00:14:32] Sorry, mom, dad.

[00:14:34] When that happens, then I think that we're going to be a little bit more open to that AI interaction, that first touch.

[00:14:40] Until then, helps can be the front line for all of our clients.

[00:14:44] We have some offerings where all we're doing is picking up the phone and understanding that the person wants a Diet Coke and then sending the form into our clients' PSAs, whatever it is, synchro, whomever.

[00:14:55] The next level, we're doing the dynamic or structured troubleshooting where we're understanding the issue.

[00:15:00] We're trying a couple of things with them.

[00:15:02] Hey, did you press that power button?

[00:15:04] Did you do that thing?

[00:15:05] And then the third one is where we're fully embedded in the help desk.

[00:15:08] And so we, at each level, will have AI empowering our agents at some point in time in the near future.

[00:15:17] But it's always going to be that human first.

[00:15:19] I think it's important.

[00:15:21] Where, as a society, human nature dictates that we get the warm and fuzzies from another human.

[00:15:27] We don't get the warm and fuzzies from AI at this point.

[00:15:31] Maybe it gets better, but that's not where we are.

[00:15:33] You know, David, I've talked to a lot of MSPs in the last, let's just call it September 1st till now.

[00:15:41] I've talked to hundreds of people at events for whatever it's worth.

[00:15:46] And I've asked the question, would you consider going down AI alley as like the first front customer stop in the journey?

[00:15:56] And some people are like, listen, I may tier my service where if you want to still get to the human being, it's a premium.

[00:16:02] I assume that with the service that you're offering, you know, where people are considering putting AI there, maybe they're putting your service there, right?

[00:16:10] They're like, hey, our people are too busy working on strategic things, projects, implementation, onboarding, you know, migrations, whatever.

[00:16:19] They're behind here in the back room, really like, you know, chugging away.

[00:16:23] Like we're trying not to disrupt them.

[00:16:25] So we're trying to do the day-to-day stuff and put it out front so that somebody can handle like, you know, the majority of the basic stuff that comes through the door.

[00:16:32] You know, it's like, hey, if you want to pay a premium so you can get to my tier three or in-house guy, then maybe you got to be on my, you know, super duper enterprise plan versus my entry level, you know, starter plan.

[00:16:43] I don't know.

[00:16:43] I'm curious how you've seen people talk about the packaging of this.

[00:16:48] At the end of the day, like I argue when I go to the airport and I'm going to bring up, you know, my good pal, Alex Danners, who's, you know, Mr. Booge.

[00:16:58] I'm sorry.

[00:16:59] You know, it's true.

[00:17:00] Delta, you know, galaxy level, right.

[00:17:03] You know, has to like have the special aid with the red carpet and, you know, wants to skip the line and I don't know, get in the Porsche instead of walking down the aisle at the airport and they drive him to the gate, whatever.

[00:17:14] Like.

[00:17:15] That is what people consider the VIP.

[00:17:17] That is what people consider the, you know, the red carpet treatment.

[00:17:21] Like people are willing to work hard to get to that level for that experience.

[00:17:26] They don't talk to an agent.

[00:17:28] They talk to a person.

[00:17:29] Right.

[00:17:29] They don't talk to a bot in the app.

[00:17:32] They're calling the 800 number for help.

[00:17:34] Right.

[00:17:34] Like, you know, you know, his version of Delta is my version of Chick-fil-A.

[00:17:38] Chick-fil-A signature.

[00:17:39] Right.

[00:17:40] Like I like being at the, you know, I don't, I don't care about being upgraded to first class.

[00:17:44] I want my Chick-fil-A, you know, my status.

[00:17:47] Right.

[00:17:47] I frequent it often.

[00:17:48] Grilled chicken these days for whatever it's worth.

[00:17:50] But I digress.

[00:17:52] So, you know, moving forward.

[00:17:54] Right.

[00:17:55] Let's not even go 20 years.

[00:17:56] Let's go three to five years.

[00:17:59] Let's go today into 2029.

[00:18:03] Now that's at this five years.

[00:18:04] Right.

[00:18:07] I argue from a packaging standpoint, does the MSP charge a premium to get human being VIP

[00:18:15] as service?

[00:18:16] I don't think that goes away.

[00:18:17] But you tell me how you see this being packaged.

[00:18:20] You know, some of the things that we've had the conversations around has been us being that

[00:18:24] next tier.

[00:18:24] And I think you're right.

[00:18:26] You know, AI is shiny.

[00:18:27] Everybody wants it right now.

[00:18:28] If it was the first level of service, if you called in and, you know, you explained your

[00:18:33] issue or whatever it was, or you said, hey, I need to talk to an agent.

[00:18:37] And that rolled over to us as the humans.

[00:18:40] That's something that I see could be a near future thing.

[00:18:44] AI is too cool.

[00:18:45] Everybody wants to play with it.

[00:18:46] So let's play with it for a while.

[00:18:48] At some point in time, I don't know, George, you know, any lawyers, you know, any lawyers

[00:18:52] in the family?

[00:18:58] Hey, how would you feel about calling and getting an AI person or sorry, an AI person

[00:19:02] and an AI bot?

[00:19:04] They're going to say, no, my time's too valuable.

[00:19:07] I get, you know, $800 an hour, some crazy number.

[00:19:10] I don't want to spend my time talking to that person.

[00:19:12] I want to go straight to the agent that's going to take care of me.

[00:19:15] And I think that that's never going to change.

[00:19:18] And so three to five years from now, I'm with you.

[00:19:20] Tear it out.

[00:19:21] You know, here's this, you know, maybe lower cost AI solution.

[00:19:24] And then if it bumps over to a human, you know, you got to pay a little bit more.

[00:19:28] Maybe it's time and materials at that point.

[00:19:30] Maybe it's not.

[00:19:31] Maybe it's just the plan.

[00:19:32] And then, you know, if you want to go straight to that human, it's a completely different package

[00:19:36] altogether.

[00:19:37] I think that that's what I'm hearing.

[00:19:41] Interesting.

[00:19:43] I'll tell you this, right?

[00:19:44] Since you're in the, your company is technically in kind of that evolution that I mentioned earlier

[00:19:49] in the call, right?

[00:19:50] We tried outsourcing.

[00:19:51] I think like the Dells of the world just absolutely destroyed that idea for a lot of people,

[00:19:56] right?

[00:19:56] Like, I remember calling in, right?

[00:19:59] MSP tech guy.

[00:20:01] I knew that there was a, you know, deficient part, you know, called 1-800-DELL, you know,

[00:20:06] got somebody who, you know, was reading a script with a fake name.

[00:20:09] You know, I was having a hard time understanding.

[00:20:11] And like now that call that should have been a five minute thing turned into a 25 minute thing.

[00:20:15] And like, I'm just like, why am I paying a premium for this warranty service?

[00:20:19] That's supposed to make my life easier.

[00:20:21] Like, I feel like I'm wasting my time, right?

[00:20:24] So like that, that being said, I think the out of country offshoring thing is not worked

[00:20:30] out well for a lot of people.

[00:20:31] Now, I'm not saying people haven't tried, right?

[00:20:33] I hear a lot of Philippines.

[00:20:34] I hear a lot of Costa Rica.

[00:20:35] I hear a lot of, you know, different parts of the world that apparently English is better,

[00:20:40] right?

[00:20:40] South Africa, maybe different parts of Latin America.

[00:20:43] But generally speaking, the history on it's not great.

[00:20:47] So how did you make this work domestically then?

[00:20:53] Yeah.

[00:20:53] Well, you know, the profit margins are terrible.

[00:20:56] No, I'm just joking.

[00:20:59] You know, one of the things that we really focus on is the pod idea.

[00:21:03] You know, you could go out to a call center that's overseas.

[00:21:06] And I think you mentioned the fake names.

[00:21:08] You know, there's 150 agents that are all, you know, John that day.

[00:21:12] And so you call in and you get a John.

[00:21:16] For us, you know, we're really focused on the pod.

[00:21:18] And we're focused on really being like a fractional support agent.

[00:21:21] When we get started with a client, we do an onboarding process that goes into the detail

[00:21:27] of, you know, where their office is, who else might be calling about them.

[00:21:31] You know, the details that we would need so that we seem like we're just a cube or two over.

[00:21:36] And I think that that, in addition to this idea of us being in a pod where, you know,

[00:21:41] that pod of people know as much as they can about our client, we end up in a situation where

[00:21:45] we truly are.

[00:21:46] We're just fractional support agents.

[00:21:48] We're not outsourced.

[00:21:49] We're not offshore.

[00:21:50] We're fractional.

[00:21:52] Interesting.

[00:21:53] Okay.

[00:21:54] That's great.

[00:21:55] I mean, listen, you know, you joked about the profitability.

[00:21:58] I mean, bottom line is like the reason people try and go out of the country from a U.S.

[00:22:03] standpoint is simply just cost savings, right?

[00:22:05] But back to the customer experience, right?

[00:22:09] It's not good.

[00:22:09] It also fails.

[00:22:11] So the fact that you were able to bring it back on this side and make it work, awesome.

[00:22:15] Well, let me go to the other side.

[00:22:16] And at least from my own personal experience, not with help, right?

[00:22:19] We're going back now to like 2010s, right?

[00:22:22] Not that long ago.

[00:22:25] Like, man, you know, I went through and documented the hell out of everything they asked for.

[00:22:32] Like, I spent actual time, right?

[00:22:35] And I like did the screenshots and the video clips and the help documents.

[00:22:38] And I made sure everything that they possibly asked for, plus, plus, plus, plus was there, right?

[00:22:44] Like, I tried to make it as straightforward as possible.

[00:22:47] But the number of things that got escalated to us from the front line help desk vendor was like north 50%.

[00:22:56] Like, to the point where I was like, does this make sense?

[00:23:00] Like, cost-wise, right?

[00:23:01] Like, if all they're going to do is be an answering service and just take a message and bump it up, like, that doesn't help enough, right?

[00:23:10] For the cost that we're putting out.

[00:23:11] So, like, how do you get that to a point where the percentages are better?

[00:23:16] So I think that the answer, I mean, aside from the documentation and aside from that conversation that we're having about AI empowering agents presenting them that documentation in a faster way,

[00:23:25] I think the answer is that it's about light escalations.

[00:23:28] You know, two and a half years ago, we didn't know enough about the MSP community to really build an offering.

[00:23:34] And I think that what that meant was that, you know, we came into this with our enterprise mindset and saying, like, hey, we just need to do what good is.

[00:23:44] It doesn't matter what, you know, format that looks.

[00:23:46] We just want to be as good as possible.

[00:23:48] And so we ended up in this place where we were focused on truly just being a part of the team.

[00:23:55] And so one of the things that we do is constant communication.

[00:23:58] You know, we're not going to take something off of a conveyor belt, look at it and go, oh, I don't know what I'm supposed to do here.

[00:24:04] And I'm too lazy to look at the documentation.

[00:24:06] So I'm just going to put it back on the conveyor belt.

[00:24:09] We look at that thing and say, oh, you know, I'm not quite sure the next best steps.

[00:24:13] So let me ping George and Slack or let me ping him on Teams or whatever it might be.

[00:24:17] Ask a few questions.

[00:24:18] And then when you answer it, we then put that into our documentation for the next time.

[00:24:22] It's just like you hired an agent.

[00:24:24] It's just like you're bringing on a new agent.

[00:24:27] That person is not going to know everything they want.

[00:24:30] But after a while, you're going to expect them to understand those things after you continue to provide them that information.

[00:24:35] And so hold on.

[00:24:38] No, no.

[00:24:39] You made a really important kind of point here.

[00:24:42] Back in the 2010s, when I went through this personally, there was not a real-time communication between the front lines on the help desk side, vendor side, and our inside engineers, techs, whatever you want to call them.

[00:24:54] So effectively, it was like the Chinese wall, right?

[00:24:56] You know, like, hey, we went into documentation.

[00:25:00] We looked once.

[00:25:01] Couldn't figure it out.

[00:25:02] But it was there.

[00:25:02] I promise it was there.

[00:25:03] And then they were like, oh, kicking it up.

[00:25:04] And then there was no way to send it back down, right?

[00:25:06] You're like, no, it's here.

[00:25:08] Here's the link.

[00:25:08] They're like, sorry, it's already been escalated.

[00:25:10] Try again next time.

[00:25:10] And I was like, so here you're like, hey, there's a Teams or a Slack.

[00:25:15] It's like, hey, I got so-and-so on the line.

[00:25:16] I'm running into this.

[00:25:17] And, you know, like, so there's an attempt to, in real time, like, get to a resolution point before we get to an escalation point.

[00:25:25] Exactly.

[00:25:26] And we call it a light escalation.

[00:25:27] We're going to send it over.

[00:25:28] And it's not a huge wall, but we're going to send it over the wall.

[00:25:31] We're going to say, hey, what do we need to do here?

[00:25:34] And it's a lot easier for our clients who might be out, you know, marketing, doing a conference or whatever it is, to pull their phone out, you know, look at that message and say, oh, it's in this area or it's whatever.

[00:25:45] Or, hey, escalate this to me.

[00:25:47] Let them know it's going to be a couple hours, whatever it might be.

[00:25:49] Instead of having to run over and pull their laptop out and do that actual ticket.

[00:25:54] And so that constant communication is definitely something that we saw as the right way to do things.

[00:26:00] So, you know, that's been our focus.

[00:26:02] No, I mean, that's a good evolution to this.

[00:26:08] Talk about the, you know, we start off with all these tools, right?

[00:26:11] I mean, so, you know, a lot of people use some of the companies that we just referenced, right?

[00:26:16] Kaseya, ConnectWise, you know, Autotask Data was part of that stack, right?

[00:26:21] There's Halo and Ninja and all this whatever.

[00:26:24] And then, like, there's Middleware.

[00:26:26] There's a lot of integrations.

[00:26:26] We all know.

[00:26:27] We've been to a lot of conferences.

[00:26:28] It's like 100 vendors, right?

[00:26:30] They're all supposed to integrate.

[00:26:33] Sometimes very paper-thin word, but it's out there, right?

[00:26:35] And then, like, then you got even new guys out there, right?

[00:26:38] You got the roosts of the world to, like, try and automate some of the steps in multiple systems.

[00:26:43] And, of course, there's the documentation platforms out there, like the IT glues and the hoodoos and whatever.

[00:26:49] And, like, how do you bring in people that even know how to function across not just one set of tools?

[00:26:57] It could be, like, every MSP could be using something different, right?

[00:27:01] Absolutely.

[00:27:01] So that was a great question.

[00:27:03] And I wish I had, like, this bulletproof answer that I can give you, but I don't.

[00:27:07] So what we do is we present our agents a platform that allows them to jump in between each one of our clients' tools.

[00:27:15] In addition to that, we show them the documentation while it's happening.

[00:27:19] And so, you know, yes, they need to pass a course that says that they know how to use Synchro.

[00:27:23] But once they know how to use Synchro, they can use Synchro for Georgia's MSP, and they can understand that this is how Georgia's MSP tracks time.

[00:27:30] So they're working directly in that system.

[00:27:32] They're a part of the team, again, and they're following the set of rules that have been defined over however many months or years that we've been in service to our clients.

[00:27:42] Interesting.

[00:27:42] So, like, if their documentation says, go to this tool, press this button, right-click, run this, they'll go that far?

[00:27:51] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:27:53] Absolutely.

[00:27:54] Interesting.

[00:27:55] How do you handle – because, I mean, this is any business problem that has to service people outside of banker's hours, right?

[00:28:04] Mm-hmm.

[00:28:04] So, like, how do you staff the graveyard shift, right?

[00:28:10] Like, how does that work?

[00:28:11] How do you staff the weekend shifts?

[00:28:12] Like, isn't that the – like, for us, historically, that's the hardest one to hire for, right?

[00:28:17] Because they're the ones that people don't want to do, right?

[00:28:19] So, like, how do you fix that problem?

[00:28:22] So, the after hours, you know, one of the things that we leverage is the different time zones.

[00:28:26] You know, we're a distributed workforce.

[00:28:28] We're all over the U.S.

[00:28:29] We've got folks on the West Coast where I am.

[00:28:31] We've got folks on the East Coast where I know you are.

[00:28:33] I think that that kind of helps a little bit.

[00:28:35] You know, we've got somebody that wakes up at 5 o'clock in the morning, you know, East Coast time, and then we've got somebody that signs off at 2 o'clock Pacific and, you know, neither the 24-year-old meet or whatever the saying is.

[00:28:49] That kind of helps us with that full 24-7 coverage.

[00:28:53] The weekend hours, you're right.

[00:28:55] It's tough, and I think that that toughness is the biggest benefit that we can give to our MSP partners right now.

[00:29:04] It's going to be tough to hire for weekends.

[00:29:06] It's going to be tough to have people on call.

[00:29:07] It's going to be tough to compensate to make sure you've got the right team.

[00:29:11] You've got all these things in place.

[00:29:12] Instead of doing all that on your own, you can look to us where we're kind of going through that toughness.

[00:29:19] Every one of our weekend people are weekends and weekday.

[00:29:23] We don't want to have a B team on the weekends.

[00:29:26] We want to have that same agent that's working on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, also working on Saturday, Sunday, or Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, also working on Saturday, Sunday.

[00:29:37] It's tough because people want their weekends, but there's value to a varied schedule.

[00:29:43] I've got some folks that their spouses are in the healthcare profession or something like that, so they're working three 12-hour days on the weekend anyway, so might as well work as well.

[00:29:54] Interesting.

[00:29:55] When you're hiring, you must advertise, hey, this shift is going to be Tuesday through Saturday, or hey, this shift is going to be Saturday through Wednesday,

[00:30:06] or you're actually finding people raising their hands up front saying, yes, I can do that.

[00:30:12] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:30:13] Our most recent post that we had for a support agent was almost exactly that.

[00:30:16] It was Wednesday to Sunday, and Sunday to Tuesday, whatever the – and then one of them was five in the morning East Coast,

[00:30:25] and the other one started it two in the afternoon East Coast.

[00:30:28] So it's all about kind of filling in the slots, and us doing that, making sure that there's those buns and seeds means that our clients don't need to.

[00:30:37] Maybe you get one call a month on Saturday at 3 o'clock in the morning, but that call is probably going to be really important,

[00:30:44] and so you want to have somebody there to take that.

[00:30:49] How do you handle the compliance questions, right?

[00:30:52] Because I'm sure they're not going down.

[00:30:55] They're probably going up because more and more MSPs are getting hip to the fact that their customers are forcing them down this road anyway, right?

[00:31:02] Like just now becoming almost part of the business reality, right?

[00:31:07] So I assume like everybody, you're probably background-checking your people, but like what happens when they say,

[00:31:12] well, in order for your people to service our customers, they need to be able to go through this security awareness training or this whatever,

[00:31:20] HIPAA compliance updated training or whatever.

[00:31:23] How do you get all of that in?

[00:31:27] We send it to our agents.

[00:31:29] Hey, you know, we're actually one of our clients is Sock 2 Type 2.

[00:31:33] We've been able to do recently.

[00:31:34] Every year we get the, you know, the little video that we have to watch and our agents watch it and they acknowledge that they watched it.

[00:31:42] And it's really like we want our clients to treat us like we're a part of their team.

[00:31:46] We have all the security in place.

[00:31:48] We use a, you know, Primer 81, use the remote gateway.

[00:31:50] We use all that stuff, you know, password managers, privilege access, things like that.

[00:31:55] But when it comes to the compliance, we want it the same way that you would, you know, assign that to your agent that's sitting that cube over.

[00:32:01] So send it our way.

[00:32:03] If it's a five-hour course, we won't be too happy about it.

[00:32:07] But if it's a 10 or 15-minute video or if it's certain, you know, practices and procedures that we need to follow, you know, we align that with our clients.

[00:32:16] Do you – you say you're doing this pod approach, which is awesome.

[00:32:20] Maybe I was coming into the beginning of that in my journey back in the 2010s on the vendor side.

[00:32:26] But do you – how much, like, time do you or even input do you get from the person subscribing to your services and them interacting with the people in the pod?

[00:32:40] Like, how much input are they allowed to give?

[00:32:44] Or, you know, do you include them kind of in the, hey, we're bringing a new person into this pod.

[00:32:48] We want to give you a chance to kind of, you know, maybe talk to them before we install them.

[00:32:52] Like, how does that work?

[00:32:54] You know, we don't.

[00:32:56] That's a really good question.

[00:32:58] You know, with the pod, if somebody were to leave the pod, we would just tell our clients, hey, they've left the pod.

[00:33:03] If somebody is going to get added to the pod, we just tell them, hey, they're getting added.

[00:33:09] It is a trust factor.

[00:33:10] You know, they have to trust that we're putting the right people in place.

[00:33:13] Beyond that, you know, one of the things that we like to do is allow our clients to actually, you know, show off our agents.

[00:33:19] And so we'll send bios and things like that.

[00:33:21] So, hey, here's this new agent that's going to be working on your team.

[00:33:25] You know, they like long walks on the beach.

[00:33:27] You know, they love this football team, whatever it might be, so that they can just kind of ingrain themselves in the client's ecosystem.

[00:33:35] Interesting.

[00:33:35] Okay.

[00:33:36] But not a lot of sign-off.

[00:33:37] Like, you know, we don't present, hey, here's five agents that could join your team.

[00:33:40] Which one do you want?

[00:33:41] It's more like, hey, we're going to, you know, swap this person out.

[00:33:44] Okay.

[00:33:47] What happens when there's a, as all things go with human beings, personality clash?

[00:33:54] Ah, yes.

[00:33:55] Okay.

[00:33:56] How bad is the personality clash in your scenario here?

[00:34:00] I mean, listen, as a guy outside of Philadelphia in the Northeast, you know, little things for some reason get perceived as big things.

[00:34:08] I digress.

[00:34:09] I mean, as a guy who lives in the Northeast, I feel like I can just air my grievances, you know, like Festivus, and like we just talk about it and we move on.

[00:34:19] But like, that's just me.

[00:34:20] That's just me.

[00:34:22] Everybody has a different, you know, way of handling problems.

[00:34:26] So, I'm curious, like, and I'll give you a couple things that come to mind.

[00:34:31] One, end customer had a bad interaction with an agent.

[00:34:34] They call upstairs.

[00:34:36] They're like, dude, what is this?

[00:34:38] Why did this happen?

[00:34:40] I don't want to talk to this person ever again.

[00:34:42] You know, send them out to go flip burgers at McDonald's or something.

[00:34:44] Who knows how that conversation, something like that.

[00:34:46] The other one could be, you know, an agent with inside person on company, right?

[00:34:52] Like, disagreement on, hey, it's here, man.

[00:34:56] Here's information.

[00:34:58] You know, it's all stepped out for you.

[00:35:00] Where are you getting stuck?

[00:35:01] No, I followed it.

[00:35:02] You know, I'm kicking it up.

[00:35:04] You know, now there's this disagreement on why it got escalated.

[00:35:06] I don't know.

[00:35:07] Those are two that I remember from my journey.

[00:35:09] I know not your company, but since we're in the genre of what you do, there they are.

[00:35:14] So, I think that we've, to answer the question a little bit more succinctly, we've had one

[00:35:19] instance of that happening where one of our clients wanted one of our agents not to support

[00:35:23] them.

[00:35:26] That, for us, was something that really illuminated a lot of our processes and allowed us

[00:35:31] to get better in the way that we train our folks.

[00:35:34] The auditability of each of these interactions means that if somebody calls me and says, hey,

[00:35:40] I had this really terrible experience or one of our clients had a terrible experience with

[00:35:44] your agent, we can provide all of the records that we would need to be able to kind of go

[00:35:49] to court and say, hey, here's what happens.

[00:35:52] You know, sometimes we have folks that just aren't having it that day.

[00:35:55] And it doesn't matter who's on the phone or who's taking their ticket.

[00:35:58] It's just going to be a bad experience for them.

[00:36:00] And so, we're able to kind of, you know, CYA so that we can make sure that that information

[00:36:05] goes over to our client.

[00:36:06] In that one case that we had, frankly, it was the agent was going too fast and they were

[00:36:11] making mistakes.

[00:36:12] And, you know, they saw the activity as productivity.

[00:36:17] So, all they wanted to do was crush the tickets, but they weren't really doing them well enough.

[00:36:22] And so, that gave us an opportunity to, you know, pull that person out of that pod, move

[00:36:27] them into something that was a little bit less hectic, you know, less frequency of tickets,

[00:36:34] and then train them up.

[00:36:35] You know, a year later, and, you know, we've only been around for two and a half years,

[00:36:39] a year later, we probably could have put that person in the pod and they would have never

[00:36:43] known.

[00:36:44] However, we respect the wishes.

[00:36:46] If you don't want somebody in there, we'll pull them out.

[00:36:49] No, that's it.

[00:36:49] I mean, listen, it's a great example.

[00:36:51] I'll give you the one story for whatever it's worth on my side.

[00:36:54] I had one of my largest customers as an MSB.

[00:36:59] They were like, hey, listen, you know, the interaction, you know, seems to be, they were

[00:37:03] saying inconsistent.

[00:37:03] I'm like, it's a very interesting word.

[00:37:06] What does that mean?

[00:37:07] Can you give me an example?

[00:37:08] And they then, you know, took a little bit, it came back to me and they're like, I have

[00:37:11] one for you.

[00:37:12] I was like, okay, what is it?

[00:37:13] They're like, we called in to reset a password for an email, for an Office 365 email user.

[00:37:18] And it took 17 minutes.

[00:37:21] And I was like, huh?

[00:37:24] They're like, no, 17 minutes.

[00:37:26] And I was like, that doesn't sound right to me because it's like a five minute, four

[00:37:29] minute thing.

[00:37:31] Like, why did it take 17 minutes?

[00:37:33] So what I was doing, because I was a little bit, you know, I don't know, like, you know,

[00:37:38] I was like, hey, you're saying you're recording everything, whatever.

[00:37:40] Right.

[00:37:40] I like whenever I had requested stuff, it took a while for that information to make it

[00:37:44] back to me.

[00:37:45] So I was like, I'm going to do something a little bit, you know, not tricky or mischievous.

[00:37:50] Right.

[00:37:50] I was just like, well, I'm going to have calls come to me before they go to the help desk

[00:37:53] so that I'm going to record them before they get to you so that when I come to you, I

[00:37:56] have it already.

[00:37:56] I don't have to wait.

[00:37:57] Right.

[00:37:57] Whatever.

[00:37:58] So I, so I went back to my vendor at the time and I'm like, I drove to their office and

[00:38:02] I sat down.

[00:38:03] Cause you know, I could said, I said, okay, play.

[00:38:08] And I started to watch and I just let, watched everybody, you know, just listening to this

[00:38:12] call and sure, sure as not 17 minutes.

[00:38:16] And I was just like, why?

[00:38:17] Yeah.

[00:38:18] And all they could come back to me was we'll work on that.

[00:38:22] That seems to be like training item.

[00:38:23] And I was like, dude, I was like, my biggest customers basically telling me you better do

[00:38:29] something about them or we're going to do something about you.

[00:38:31] Like not exactly that one three word sentence doesn't, doesn't help me.

[00:38:38] Right.

[00:38:39] So like, anyway, just bringing up my, my experience.

[00:38:42] Right.

[00:38:42] Like, unfortunately, like when you tell, like whenever I tried this, I was like, listen,

[00:38:49] give it a chance.

[00:38:50] Right.

[00:38:51] Like they may have not complained about things early on.

[00:38:54] Right.

[00:38:54] They kind of like, we're like, all right, well, on my, my fifth or sixth time when something

[00:38:58] didn't go wrong, that's when like, but unfortunately, because.

[00:39:01] They, you know, we didn't have that kicked up to us sooner.

[00:39:05] They're already frustrated.

[00:39:06] You know what I mean?

[00:39:06] So like that whole thing.

[00:39:08] One of the things that we do is we're really focused on the reporting and the metrics behind

[00:39:12] it all.

[00:39:12] And so we do have the average engagement time pretty visible.

[00:39:17] And so if you George saw that every time that, you know, a ticket came in or an engagement

[00:39:23] happened with us and it was, you know, 18 minutes on average, and you thought, you know

[00:39:27] what, I'm not really sending them stuff that would take 18 minutes.

[00:39:30] That creates that feedback loop a lot sooner.

[00:39:33] Um, so I don't know.

[00:39:36] I think, I think that that covers some of those potential issues, but you can't cover all of

[00:39:42] them.

[00:39:42] You know, we have calls that go way longer than we'd expect and we audit them and, you

[00:39:47] know, we see that it was a chain request or, or, or the person, you know, put us on hold

[00:39:52] or something might've happened.

[00:39:54] Um, and so, you know, it's kind of, it's hard to say that everything's going to be exactly

[00:39:58] four minutes, but if something starts straying, you know, we can see that deviation and we

[00:40:02] can start to, you know, audit it a little bit harder.

[00:40:05] No, that's fair.

[00:40:06] That's good.

[00:40:06] So back in my day, they would do it like they were charging by the workstation and by the

[00:40:14] server.

[00:40:14] Yeah.

[00:40:15] Okay.

[00:40:16] And then they had like during business hours coverage, only night and weekend coverage

[00:40:21] or 24 hour.

[00:40:23] Right.

[00:40:23] It was like a bronze, gold, silver type thing.

[00:40:26] Um, I know there, you know, everybody has like a slightly different packaging.

[00:40:29] This I've run into some people in the arena that say, no, we're going to do it by, you

[00:40:33] know, by number of tickets on time, or sometimes it's block of hours.

[00:40:38] Right.

[00:40:38] And we're going to chew it in certain increments.

[00:40:39] So like, what's your magic menu here?

[00:40:42] How does, how does this work?

[00:40:44] So I'm not sure if this is going to prompt a lot more discussion or you're just going

[00:40:48] to kick me off the show.

[00:40:49] Uh, we do it all, you know, consumption based.

[00:40:52] Uh, we go by the minute.

[00:40:54] So, you know, that first level of service, which is really that technical live answer,

[00:40:58] it's two bucks a minute.

[00:40:59] You know, we're going to pick up the phone.

[00:41:01] Average engagements are going to be two to three minutes.

[00:41:03] Somebody is going to say, my printer is not printing.

[00:41:04] We're going to assess it.

[00:41:05] We're going to put a priority to it.

[00:41:07] We're going to send it over in a form.

[00:41:09] Second level where we're doing that structured troubleshooting, they're going to say, Hey,

[00:41:11] my printer is not printing.

[00:41:12] And we're going to try to take them through a handful of troubleshooting steps to resolve

[00:41:16] the issue.

[00:41:17] 40 to 50% resolution rate, nothing too crazy, but the engagements are, you know, five to

[00:41:22] seven minutes.

[00:41:22] Those are three bucks a minute.

[00:41:24] So just to give you an idea, you know, it's 15, $21.

[00:41:27] The last thing where we're fully embedded in the help desk, because there are so many,

[00:41:31] you know, three to four minute password resets, account unlocks, things like that.

[00:41:35] And, you know, a variety of those ones that go a little bit longer are average there across

[00:41:39] the company is 12 minutes.

[00:41:41] And we charge $4 a minute for that.

[00:41:44] And so talking about, what is that?

[00:41:47] Less than 10 bucks a ticket, around 20 bucks a ticket for, you know, the second level,

[00:41:52] and around 45, 50 bucks a ticket for the third level.

[00:41:56] So it's one of these things now, they use the word lawyer.

[00:41:59] Don't get upset with me.

[00:42:00] It's like, Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to pre-fund you a certain amount of money.

[00:42:03] You're going to start chewing away at that money.

[00:42:06] And then I'm going to get to like a low re-up point where I got a refill.

[00:42:12] And then, you know, you're going to charge me for that bucket again.

[00:42:17] So we don't charge you for that full bucket unless you want to move over to that full bucket.

[00:42:20] So if you were to sign up for, you know, a thousand minutes, which we've got some, the

[00:42:25] best part about this consumption thing is we're the canary in the coal mine.

[00:42:29] If you start seeing that you're using a lot more time than you expect as an MSP, you would

[00:42:33] say, why did they take 30 tickets about this thing?

[00:42:36] Instead of just saying, Hey, whatever, it's unlimited.

[00:42:38] We're just going to send it over there.

[00:42:39] And then they improve that, which makes the process even better for their client, their

[00:42:44] end user experience.

[00:42:45] So that consumption thing kind of incentivizes everybody in the chain.

[00:42:51] Yeah.

[00:42:52] Right.

[00:42:53] And then I feel like I missed the thread of what you asked.

[00:42:56] What did you just ask?

[00:42:57] No, no, no.

[00:42:57] I was just like, you know, like, is there a minimum you charge?

[00:43:02] Like, like, like, you know, I'm coming to you for the first time, right?

[00:43:07] Like, and we'll get into what the onboarding part looks like in a second, but it's like,

[00:43:12] Hey, how, like, is it, you know, the number of customers and the number of employees by

[00:43:17] the customers and the time that I expect you to receive these support requests, how does

[00:43:21] that factor into the permanent thing?

[00:43:24] So we would just ask you, you know, as a mature MSP, you should have some level of metrics

[00:43:30] to understand what your volume is going to look like.

[00:43:32] Um, the first two levels of service are basically a retainer where it's making sure that there's

[00:43:38] butts in seats for 24, seven, 24, seven.

[00:43:41] And then that per minute, uh, from there, you can buy blocks of a hundred minutes at a

[00:43:46] time.

[00:43:46] It's going to be a little bit cheaper than if you just do it ad hoc.

[00:43:49] And so you could come to me and say, Hey, you know, uh, I really want somebody to pick

[00:43:53] up the phones on the weekends.

[00:43:55] Um, I want to know if it's a P one and how that escalated to me, but I don't want to be

[00:43:59] on the front line and we can say, okay, great, George, 200 bucks.

[00:44:02] You'll go, okay, cool.

[00:44:03] You know, sign me up for a subscription.

[00:44:05] Um, you use 10 minutes.

[00:44:07] We're going to charge you for those 10 minutes.

[00:44:09] You say to us, Hey, we're going to use a hundred ish minutes a month.

[00:44:12] We'll sell you a hundred minutes.

[00:44:14] That becomes your subscription.

[00:44:15] And you end up kind of knowing what that cost is going to be going forward.

[00:44:18] If you use 500 minutes a month for that, you know, a hundred minute subscription, uh,

[00:44:23] then we'd go back to you and say, Hey, you know, you're going to get a better deal.

[00:44:26] You're going to get a volume discount if you go to this higher level.

[00:44:28] Is this expected?

[00:44:29] And you might say, Oh no, I was out of town or something crazy happened or whatever it

[00:44:34] is.

[00:44:35] Then you just cover whatever the overage was.

[00:44:37] And we stay on that a hundred minute.

[00:44:38] Um, on the other side, if I don't use it, if I buy a hundred minutes and I use five, then

[00:44:43] what?

[00:44:44] Yeah.

[00:44:45] So that in that case, it is a use it or lose it.

[00:44:48] Okay.

[00:44:49] Yeah.

[00:44:49] It's like good old fashioned cell phones back in the day for everything was unlimited.

[00:44:53] Exactly.

[00:44:54] Exactly.

[00:44:54] Uh, were you a brick guy or were you a, um, Motorola flip phone?

[00:45:00] I started with the Nokia with the snake.

[00:45:04] Okay.

[00:45:04] But, um, I remember nights and weekends.

[00:45:07] I remember unlimited in network, right?

[00:45:10] You remember those?

[00:45:11] And then I, and then I remember, um, you could buy your messaging plan based on how many

[00:45:17] messages were included and you could buy your data plan separately.

[00:45:21] Right?

[00:45:21] Like it was all one big game.

[00:45:23] So I remember everybody waited until seven o'clock, right?

[00:45:26] Seven to seven.

[00:45:27] Right.

[00:45:27] You know, make all their calls or nights and weekends.

[00:45:31] And, uh, man, you know, when you went over your messages, you're like, what the, and then

[00:45:35] you used to be able to do like the pound star feature codes in order to figure out what

[00:45:39] you're, you were, you were at that in that particular moment.

[00:45:42] Right.

[00:45:42] So like, yeah, that wasn't that long ago, by the way, I don't care what anybody says,

[00:45:46] but, and I remember I was on a legacy unlimited plan for a long time when they got rid of unlimited.

[00:45:51] And then when they came out the new unlimited, they're like, oh, we need to get you off this

[00:45:54] legacy plan.

[00:45:54] I'm like, uh, huh.

[00:45:55] I see.

[00:45:58] Uh, but anyway, uh, no, that's interesting how you do it.

[00:46:01] And, and, um, what works really well and what doesn't work well at all?

[00:46:10] Oh, that's a good question.

[00:46:11] Um, what works really well, um, are clients that really, uh, subscribe to that collaborative

[00:46:19] nature that really think about us.

[00:46:21] Like they're hiring a new agent.

[00:46:22] Um, that means that they're more available for when we have those light escalations.

[00:46:26] That means that they're more willing to, you know, update documentation with us, collaborate

[00:46:31] on those things.

[00:46:32] Um, that works incredibly well.

[00:46:34] We have some clients, uh, that I can tell you about that are just in our Slack, you know,

[00:46:40] all day long and they're messaging about certain things and we are in lockstep with them.

[00:46:44] And when we deliver service, it's just like they were delivering service.

[00:46:49] And so I think that that's something that works really well.

[00:46:51] Um, conversely to that, um, I think it's the people that see us as, um, maybe, uh,

[00:47:00] um, something that they're, they're really delegating everything to and not expecting to have to

[00:47:05] do anything there.

[00:47:06] I don't want to use the A word, but they're abdicating.

[00:47:09] And when that happens, it makes it very difficult for us to collaborate, to, to understand the

[00:47:16] issue in real time, to be able to provide the level of service that they want.

[00:47:19] One of the things that I always say is that we deliver, you know, the fundamentals, we deliver

[00:47:22] the Mormon fuzzies.

[00:47:23] We're going to be professional.

[00:47:24] We're going to be friendly.

[00:47:25] We're going to be all of that stuff.

[00:47:26] But if we don't have a partner that works with us to help understand their systems, to

[00:47:30] understand the things that their clients are going to need, then that's kind of where things

[00:47:34] end.

[00:47:35] And that just means a bad experience for everybody.

[00:47:38] Okay.

[00:47:38] So like, Hey, I'm just dumping this on you.

[00:47:40] I don't care how many minutes it is.

[00:47:42] You send me a bill, but then they leave you on an Island and they're not reachable.

[00:47:46] That that's where things really break down.

[00:47:48] Yeah, exactly.

[00:47:49] And then they go, well, why are you escalating more than 50% of things?

[00:47:51] And we go, well, you know, it didn't get us set up with whatever admin access or whatever

[00:47:57] login, or, you know, we need to add a handful of people to this other system or whatever

[00:48:01] it is.

[00:48:01] And without that kind of give and take, um, it just, it's not a good experience.

[00:48:07] So what things won't you handle?

[00:48:09] Like, do you have like a go, no go lists?

[00:48:11] Like, here's what we use, what we're okay with handling.

[00:48:14] Here's what we're not okay with handling.

[00:48:16] Yeah.

[00:48:16] So we've got a little list, you know, our, our goal is really that level one, the tier one

[00:48:20] support, um, we have a list of all the things that are in scope.

[00:48:24] We'll listen to the things that are out of scope.

[00:48:27] I say that tentatively because I always like to say that we're level one plus.

[00:48:30] If you were to have a document that says you need to do these five things in something

[00:48:34] one to check whatever, or you needed to do these five things in this other tool to do

[00:48:39] this thing, we're going to look at that.

[00:48:42] And if we've got everything that we need, we're going to take care of it for you.

[00:48:44] So we can say, Hey, we're going to do the basic, you know, move, add, change stuff.

[00:48:48] We're going to do this and that we're going to do that.

[00:48:49] But if you give us what we need to be successful, we're going to take it and run.

[00:48:54] Okay.

[00:48:54] So documentation videos, you know, well-written things step-by-step is King.

[00:49:00] Right.

[00:49:00] That didn't change from my 2010s experience to now, which is great.

[00:49:04] Do you create like a separate Slack group teams group?

[00:49:07] Do you let them choose?

[00:49:08] Like, how does that work?

[00:49:08] Yeah.

[00:49:10] So we're internally, we're Slack only.

[00:49:12] And so we'll ask it, right?

[00:49:14] You know, a hippie tech startup.

[00:49:17] So we do create a Slack channel for our clients that have Slack.

[00:49:20] And if they've just got teams, then we'll get, you know, involved in their teams and we'll

[00:49:24] ping them directly to teams.

[00:49:26] Cool.

[00:49:27] That makes sense.

[00:49:28] Yeah.

[00:49:28] Interesting.

[00:49:29] So you've been at this for, it sounds like a little over two years, maybe closer to three

[00:49:33] or somewhere in between.

[00:49:35] How many MSP partners do you have right now?

[00:49:39] We're around 60 right now.

[00:49:40] So we're not huge, but we're growing very quickly.

[00:49:45] We've got a couple of new additions to the team that have enabled some of that growth.

[00:49:49] Some people that you might know, Amy, Amy Luby and, you know, sorry, calling their names

[00:49:54] out, but I know you know them.

[00:49:56] And so I think that that's going to really accelerate us.

[00:49:59] And, you know, the fun part for me is, is being able to create those processes and to

[00:50:04] grow the team and, you know, get the satisfaction of delivering the service that I know that we

[00:50:08] can for our clients.

[00:50:10] So that's the exciting part.

[00:50:12] That's awesome.

[00:50:13] That's great.

[00:50:14] I mean, that's actually a good amount of partners.

[00:50:17] I mean, I'm sure they're varying, right?

[00:50:18] Could be one man, could be pretty mature, right?

[00:50:20] I'm sure you know what's a good, you know, good customer.

[00:50:23] What's a bad customer.

[00:50:24] It seems like, which is good because it doesn't take long in my opinion to figure it out.

[00:50:27] And people like Amy who have done something like this in their journey, right?

[00:50:30] Like she probably comes with like a, Hey, I've been down this movie.

[00:50:34] Like I've seen this movie before.

[00:50:36] Let me rewind and just tell you the part, the good parts.

[00:50:38] All right.

[00:50:40] That's good industry knowledge for sure.

[00:50:44] That's awesome.

[00:50:45] So, and then you said you're distributed, but where's the company based out of?

[00:50:48] So we're in Orange County, California, myself, my partner, Matt.

[00:50:52] Yeah.

[00:50:52] You don't work from the beach, do you?

[00:50:55] No, but it is, let's see, 64 degrees right now.

[00:51:01] So probably not too great, but not too cloudy.

[00:51:05] Just, just, it's like, it's like, I'm the guy in the commercial.

[00:51:07] It says I work from the beach.

[00:51:09] Ah, it's all good.

[00:51:11] Awesome.

[00:51:12] Well, you know, I'm excited.

[00:51:14] I know a lot of companies that used to be in this category have either merged, been acquired, gone out of business, no longer in the MSP space, like decided to go upstream and leave the MSP space.

[00:51:26] So I feel like there was room for somebody new to come in and kind of like try and reset it and do it a different way.

[00:51:36] You know, I've heard of a lot of people trying to hire their own people in some of the international markets, but dude, you know, and some people have been successful.

[00:51:48] I'll give them credit.

[00:51:49] But for me, I have a lot of concerns there where it's like, how do I, you know, background check these people, make sure they're not doing anything bad and make sure they're not doing three jobs at once.

[00:51:58] Like, you know, like then there's the, do they have the knowledge they need to be successful at the job?

[00:52:04] How much training do I got to put in there in order?

[00:52:06] Like, I'm really hesitant when I, when I start talking about this, because back to the customer experience, like you only got so many bad, you know, you know, shots at this until it just derails.

[00:52:18] And then there's no recovery.

[00:52:20] So, you know, unless you're going to spend a lot of energy and like time over on wherever the other side is in order to do it right, whatever that means.

[00:52:30] And I would argue a lot of the MSPs don't have that time or money investment for whatever it's worth.

[00:52:36] Then it comes back to, hey, there hasn't really been a lot of US based versions of this that are, that are like, maybe they, I know the vendor I was with back in the 2010s started off US.

[00:52:48] And all of a sudden, you know, I made the ship.

[00:52:51] I was like, oh, well, you want to stay US, you got to pay premium now, this, that, and the other.

[00:52:54] Now we're in.

[00:52:54] I was like, that's not what I signed up for.

[00:52:57] What happened here?

[00:52:57] I mean, okay.

[00:52:58] All right.

[00:52:59] I'm sure you can guess, right?

[00:53:02] Because I'm in Philly and I was able to get in my car and drive to go see somebody.

[00:53:06] I'm sure you could put it together.

[00:53:08] But I will leave the name unsaid.

[00:53:13] By the way, it didn't end well.

[00:53:15] For anybody that wants to know my personal journey, after pretty much close to three years.

[00:53:21] And that's like, as much as you've been in business, I tried it.

[00:53:24] And I tried everything.

[00:53:25] And I went there eight times, you know, into the office and drove my car.

[00:53:29] And I sat down and I did, you know, examples and, you know, presented like very, very clear.

[00:53:36] I don't understand how we fix this, but here's what happened end to end.

[00:53:40] Because I wanted it to work.

[00:53:42] I was desperate for it to work at the time.

[00:53:44] And I just got to the point where I was like, this isn't working.

[00:53:49] But that was just my personal experience.

[00:53:51] And I think one of the benefits to a newer company, right?

[00:53:57] I think, you know, the argument's going to be, well, they're new.

[00:54:00] You know, can they scale this?

[00:54:02] It's a hard to scale business.

[00:54:03] I digress.

[00:54:05] But you also work with people, which I think is important.

[00:54:08] Like somebody who's very rigid.

[00:54:11] You get what I got, which was, well, you're just going to have to let us work through our process.

[00:54:15] I was like, so what is a reasonable amount of time for you to better the process?

[00:54:19] Three years was my limit for how reasonable I felt.

[00:54:23] Like at that point, like I've given you a lot of money and the time period did not change anything.

[00:54:29] But I digress.

[00:54:30] So, you know, I think that our goal is to be the easy button for this customer experience delivery.

[00:54:34] You know, we want our clients and our clients' teams to be able to do the things that they're really good at,

[00:54:38] which is, you know, the technical engineering.

[00:54:41] And I think that that's our goal here in this space is to just, you know, be the ones that take that stress off,

[00:54:47] that make it so that we're the buffer between, you know, the front line and the projects that you have,

[00:54:52] the, you know, keeping you from being in that distracted or interruptive state, you know, your regular day.

[00:54:58] We also want to have people take vacations.

[00:55:00] You know, there's a lot of MSPs in this channel that haven't vacationed for years because they're grinding.

[00:55:06] You know, we want to be able to empower that.

[00:55:09] I promised that I would talk about the Eagles.

[00:55:13] I know they're 13-1 right now.

[00:55:16] I mean, since we're there, David, yes.

[00:55:19] I mean, I would prefer, like most of the other people here in Philadelphia,

[00:55:24] that the NFC playoffs come through South Philadelphia.

[00:55:27] On the last podcast, he was a Washington fan.

[00:55:31] I don't even like the word commanders.

[00:55:32] I thought that was a horrible team name selection, but I digress.

[00:55:34] This Washington football team, I thought, would have been fine.

[00:55:37] You know, that's just me from the outside.

[00:55:39] But, yes, here in Philly, we would like to recreate 2017,

[00:55:44] where Minnesota had to come into Philadelphia for the NFC Championship.

[00:55:47] And if you recall at that time, it wasn't that long ago,

[00:55:50] it was Tom Brady and Bill Chow Belichick still together in the Patriots.

[00:55:54] And Nick Foles, off the bench, you know, came in, went the distance,

[00:55:59] and rockied our way to the Super Bowl.

[00:56:02] So, we beat Baltimore.

[00:56:04] We beat Pittsburgh.

[00:56:05] I mean, we own the NFC North or the AFC North, right?

[00:56:08] We swept them out, right?

[00:56:09] So, who's going to come to Philadelphia and beat me?

[00:56:13] That's a good question.

[00:56:15] I don't see it, man.

[00:56:17] I don't know.

[00:56:18] Fantastic.

[00:56:20] Come on down.

[00:56:22] I'll take any wager.

[00:56:24] Hey, you want to come to the game?

[00:56:26] I will get you there.

[00:56:27] No problem.

[00:56:28] But don't be upset when the fireworks gun off at the end.

[00:56:32] Fantastic.

[00:56:33] I'm going to be in Vegas in a couple weeks over the holiday period.

[00:56:36] And so, I might have to put a bet down in your honor to see if they can go the distance.

[00:56:41] Oh, I think they will.

[00:56:42] And I think they're probably favored at this point.

[00:56:44] But, no, I could be wrong.

[00:56:45] I'm not a big sports bettor.

[00:56:47] Although, I've run some people that were oddly in sports betting that I was shocked.

[00:56:51] I was like, what?

[00:56:53] Okay, cool.

[00:56:54] It's easy now.

[00:56:54] You just do it from your phone.

[00:56:57] I digress.

[00:56:58] All right, David.

[00:56:59] How do people get a hold of you?

[00:57:00] Figure out what the deal is with your company.

[00:57:02] Maybe get some information.

[00:57:03] Maybe figure out how to talk to somebody.

[00:57:05] Give them the ride.

[00:57:06] Yeah.

[00:57:07] So, I think that the first place would be gethelpt.com.

[00:57:09] G-E-T-H-E-L-P-T dot com.

[00:57:12] That's our website.

[00:57:13] And then I'm going to do something I don't do regularly.

[00:57:15] But you can send me a text or give me a call directly.

[00:57:18] 949-838-4113.

[00:57:20] Happy to chat with you if you've got any questions about Helpt.

[00:57:23] Want to show you the difference.

[00:57:25] Wow.

[00:57:25] You are one of less than 10 people I can count on my hands that have gone on this podcast and given out a phone number where somebody can text you or call you.

[00:57:34] That is absolutely crazy.

[00:57:36] First one on – the first one who did that was David Bellini.

[00:57:40] Believe it or not.

[00:57:41] I was like, David, are you sure?

[00:57:43] That was it.

[00:57:44] Yeah, I'm sure.

[00:57:44] Oh, okay.

[00:57:45] All right.

[00:57:46] I have a feeling that that David didn't say what I'm about to say.

[00:57:48] I accept any memes or pictures that you want to text me.

[00:57:52] That's fine.

[00:57:54] I'm poor.

[00:57:55] Got it.

[00:57:56] That was awesome.

[00:57:58] I enjoyed this one.

[00:57:59] Sorry for ranting a little bit.

[00:58:01] But, like, man, it was just like a couple of different conversations happened right before this call.

[00:58:06] And I was like, man, this is all perfectly targeted to this conversation.

[00:58:09] So, wish you and the team over there all the success.

[00:58:13] You know, I know some of the people on that there for a long time like Amy.

[00:58:16] I think you've put together, you know, some good help, you know, to try and build this startup up, which is great.

[00:58:22] I am – you know, if you don't already know this, I think you do, but I'm going to say it anyway.

[00:58:26] I am a fan of the startup.

[00:58:29] I've been there many times.

[00:58:32] I champion those people.

[00:58:34] I really feel like we should encourage people to do more of that.

[00:58:36] But, you know, there's a lot of business out there for all of us.

[00:58:40] It can't just be the big guys that I mentioned earlier on this call.

[00:58:44] And, you know, anything we can do to help your journey.

[00:58:47] Don't hesitate to reach out.

[00:58:49] Thank you, George.

[00:58:49] Thank you for having me.

[00:58:50] Where are we going to see you next?

[00:58:51] I know you're a road warrior.

[00:58:52] You know, we're in the middle like everybody else, I'm sure, of, like, planning out what is 2025.

[00:58:58] And, you know, January is already looking kind of busy myself, to be honest.

[00:59:03] But, you know, I think from an industry event standpoint, like, for whatever reason in this industry, which I'm sure you've already picked up, like, things don't really start to pick up until, like, March-ish.

[00:59:16] But, like, once it comes to June, then, like, the pedal is being put down.

[00:59:20] And then once you get to September, you know, we're emptying all the artillery, all right?

[00:59:24] And then, like, all these events happen in, like, a 90-day window, which I'm still recovering from this past Q3, Q4.

[00:59:30] So, you know, good news is, you know, we love airplanes around here as much as I love Chick-fil-A drive-thrus.

[00:59:39] Bad news is that everybody has probably somebody else in their life that doesn't like that.

[00:59:44] And so a little bit of balancing is probably for the best.

[00:59:48] But you probably won't see them on the road until later into, you know, late January, early February, right?

[00:59:53] When, you know, try and get a little bit of, like, team time, you know, at a crash course, like, get everybody online and use that beginning time part of the year that we hope is quiet.

[01:00:02] But I don't know about you.

[01:00:03] Hasn't been quiet.

[01:00:06] Well, enjoy the downtime if you get it.

[01:00:09] We will be in touch, my friend.

[01:00:10] Catch you on the other side of the holidays.

[01:00:12] Enjoy your Christmas and New Year's and catch you in 2025.

[01:00:16] Thank you.

[01:00:16] All right, guys.

[01:00:17] See ya.