Jason Cohen of Mission Control NOC & HelpDesk Services

[00:00:02] Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to a February 13th edition of the MSP Initiative, MSP Talk. Man, it is a great time, at least in my part of the world, here in Philadelphia area, because you know, not four days ago, we had the Super Bowl. And man, oh man, this whole place has been on a week-long party.

[00:00:27] So we'll talk about that and a bunch of other things happening in IT land, because it never stops, constantly is turning. We're going to bring our guest on, Jason Cohen from Mission Control. He's been with us before. He comes again, this time in a happier mood, because we've got a Super Bowl win this time rather than the Super Bowl loss, right? MSPinitiative.com, that's where you're going to find everything that we do. You'll see recordings, like sessions like these in audio and video format.

[00:00:56] You'll see all the recaps from 2024, all the parties, all the events that we did, MSP Community Minds, the calendar, you know, which our friend Jen in the background, you know, in between Bravo TV shows updates as we find more events out in MSP land. It's like, I don't know, 300 already for 2025, believe it or not. Not that we're going to be at 300. I don't think we have enough energy to be at 300 events, but I digress. So check out MSPinitiative.com for all that good stuff.

[00:01:26] Welcome, Jason. How are you doing today? I'm good. I think you're better, but I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm doing great. I am fantastic. You know, you were kind enough to have me on the show last year at exactly the same time the week after Super Bowl and man, the mood has changed. Well, you know, listen, you know, nothing, nothing can't hold anything back from Andy Reid, Mahomes, the other Kelsey brother, whatever.

[00:01:55] You know, Andy Reid was here for 14 years in this city as a football coach, and he left us with lots. Yeah, we want to one Super Bowl for NFC championship games and not. You know, like he never did. He didn't deliver. And then he goes to Kansas City and yeah, Super Bowl, Super Bowl, Super Bowl, you know, like a little bit jaded over here. And then nobody wants to be, you know, you when you go into a billion dollar event with 140 million people watching.

[00:02:24] You don't want to end the Super Bowl on a questionable penalty to decide the game. That's not good TV. That's not good sports. So, listen, I don't know what you heard up there in good old Canada, but down here, I would say you turn on any sports television show or radio station in America going into the Super Bowl. What do you hear? Oh, it's going to not just be you're playing the Kansas City Chiefs. You're playing the refs. That's not good. That's not good.

[00:02:54] Man, my team said, well, we don't care who's on the field. We're just going to run them over. I love that. I mean, think about this. We didn't have a championship win in Philadelphia since 1960. I wasn't even born. OK, until 2017 or I guess 2018. Right. With Nick Foles, our quarterback went down. Carson Wentz. Funny enough, he's a backup quarterback this year for the Kansas City Chief. Aha. And walks off the bench like a Disney movie.

[00:03:21] You know, I'll remember the Titans and he beats the best of all time. Brady and Belichick. This time we had to be the current best. Right. Read my homes. And we did. We just beat them. We railroaded them. I love them. And the people of Philadelphia, we feel vindicated from two years ago. You know, to the point. Let me tell you, Jason, little things matter. Little things matter. They wore white. The Eagles, you know, had their midnight green jerseys.

[00:03:50] But this year, instead of two years ago, they wore green gloves. OK, the ref after the game said he threw that flag at the end of the game because he saw the green glove holding on to the white jersey for the Chiefs. You know what they wore this year? Eagles defenders wore white gloves. Smart. Not that that mattered, because the game was like absolutely juggernaut. Could have should have been 40 to six. I mean, the garbage, you know, points at the end.

[00:04:15] But anyway, I know this is supposed to be a tech podcast. I digress. All I can tell you is, as far as I'm concerned, as a Philadelphia sports fan, and I've spent stupid money, you know, investing in my teams here, like I'm sure the rest of Philadelphia. It's all about the parade, man. It's all about the parade. If you don't make it to the parade, what are you a fan for in Philadelphia?

[00:04:40] So, 2018, 1.4 million people made it to the parade. I think 2 million make it to the parade tomorrow, and I'll be one of them. So, anyway, sorry. Thank you for giving me my soapbox. It's out. I, as I said, last year, very different tone. And last year you had to get it out. This year you deserve to get it out. I feel so happy for champions in champion cities.

[00:05:10] You know, you're all decked out the sweater, the hat, you're ready to be celebrating. And I'm excited for that for you. Awesome. Yeah. Well, I'll enjoy, you know, America and the world. Enjoy this one. It's for all of you. You can all join in. But if you make it to Philadelphia and you're going to the parade, hit me up. I'll have a good time. All right, Jason. Let's start off with some hard hitting questions. You know, you know, I've thrown these out there last, I don't know, month or so, but you know, they're topical, right?

[00:05:40] Let me start with this one because it hits home, you know, and we'll give you a chance to give your quick background, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna start with, with curveballs here. Ready? Do you agree or disagree that the AI chat bot agent, whatever the hell you want to call it, you know, the machine is going to displace the frontline help desk worker? Yes or no?

[00:06:10] None. Not for the most part. No, no, I don't. Okay. Why? I had my town hall two days ago and we were actually talking about this at length. People that make a phone call do not want an automated system on the other end of the line.

[00:06:29] If I were to take all of my dispatch folks, the ones that answer the phones and replace them with today's most sophisticated, the one that sounds like a person, the one that has all the logic, the one that has all that. And if that one VIP were to call in that has a bad experience because of the AI, it will ruin a business relationship overnight instantly.

[00:06:52] And so I feel like for the MSP world, I think there's a lot of consideration to it right now, but I don't see it taking over. I do see it affecting some. I do feel some will implement it. I feel there'll be a percentage. I don't think it takes over.

[00:07:11] Okay. So about a month ago I was on with Brooklyn. She's over at line guard now. I didn't, you know, we learned in that call that Brooke had a long consultant run before she moved into vendor land. So we, we, we kind of compared notes. So like just in general, right. And we're going to use airlines because now everybody has experience in airline at some point in time, there's the economy lane, right? Frontier spirit, you know, that kind of thing.

[00:07:40] Then there's the premium lane, right? Right. Delta American, whatever. I argue that there's clientele for both sides of the spectrum in MSP land, right? You got the people who don't want to pay and you got the MSP who's constantly trying to figure out how to lower the price to get business. Right. But I argue to what end, right? Is that customer profitable for you? Question mark.

[00:08:08] On the other side, you have people to your point who are like, I'm not texting 911. And when my plane says that it's not going to show up and I'm going to miss my connecting flight, I do not want to chat with the chat bot. I want to talk to somebody, figure out when the hell I'm going to make it home.

[00:08:26] Is there an argument for a premium MSP, right? It's like, hey, listen, everybody can go the nouveau way, right? You can all fight who doesn't want to take your phone call and what answering machine you want to use. But when I taught when I would text someone when I don't want to text 911, I want to call 911. I don't want to text my airline. I want to talk to my airline. And I'm willing to pay a premium to get to that human being. Do you agree with that? I do.

[00:08:55] You know, just like when the automated systems first came on, the auto attendance. And you'd have, you know, we try and get an answer from you. But eventually, if you press zero enough times, you'd get through to somebody. And I feel like that's partially where this is going. The other part is a paid advance or enhancer enriched service that has the personal touch and the basic doesn't.

[00:09:21] So, I got to tell you, I keep bringing this up because they haven't reversed course. I'm shocked. Not long ago, but within the last, I don't know, 24 months. I think I even mentioned it on our last call, but I'm going to bring it up again.

[00:09:36] Yeah. Frontier Airlines eliminated the ability for you to call in and talk to a person. And on my way back from the Super Bowl, American, you know, my first flight was delayed, delayed, delayed, no reason, no weather, just delayed. And then before I even landed, they already booked me for a flight for the next day. I'm like, for what? For who? I don't need like, why?

[00:10:04] I don't imagine if I couldn't talk to somebody, I would have pulled my hair out. I don't have any hair to pull out. Like, I can't, like, let me go this way. And maybe this is another curveball question. When a human being's having a bad day, they call into the service desk of whatever MSP you're calling into. I bet you that interaction's not great.

[00:10:31] And when they got to reset their password for the 18th time and they're having a hard time and they're about to throw their computer out the window. When you call in, you're probably not having a good day, right? The chatbot's not the right situation in that scenario, right? I think that's just going to aggravate the hell out of someone. You're going to say, well, what if it gets the job done? What if it's fast? What if it just finishes the job? Jason, have you seen it? Have you actually seen it work? Because so far, I haven't seen it work.

[00:11:00] I haven't seen it work. I know a few companies that a couple have already approached me to consider putting that in my service desk. And I've declined it to date. But I mean, I know a few companies that are doing it. And we go through all the arguments and all the scenarios. But they all lead back to exactly the situation you're talking about. The VIP who will not tolerate this shit. Abuser is having a bad situation on a bad day that will not tolerate it. There is several of those.

[00:11:28] And I don't care, you know, if you don't give the option to speak to, at least the option, to speak to somebody anytime and you force them down this automated path, I think you're setting yourself up in a lousy state. That said, companies like Frontier are getting away with it. They might be losing some business. So to what end are they willing to consider this an investment strategy, something to try? I don't know.

[00:11:58] I'll tell you this. I sent some merchandise, a couple hats, a couple shirts, you know, trying to include people in the Eagles fandom here, right? To Ireland. Never made it. I'm like, well, that sucks. Like I had it perfectly timed and everything. So I went back to the post office, believe it or not. I went up to like a person, a human being. And I'm like, hey, you know, here's my receipt. Like what happened here? They're like, oh, come over here.

[00:12:28] Let's figure it out. They're like, well, it made it to Ireland. It just never got delivered once it made it to Ireland. I'm like, I hear what you're saying. But like, that's kind of what I paid for. Like, if it never made it to the person I was sending it to, why did I buy? You know, it doesn't make sense. So they're like, well, you got to call this number. You know, like they'll open up an inquiry to figure out what happened to your patch. I said, okay. So I called into this USPS number, US Postal Service.

[00:12:56] And instead of like, because my tracking number had letters in it, right? And obviously, like, then you got to play the keypad problem when you're calling into the auto attendant. What's your tracking number? Well, like, do I press the button three times? Like, whatever. So you know what they did? They're like, hey, are you calling from a cell phone? Press one or press two. I was like, okay, yes, I'm calling from a cell phone. We're going to send you a text message. They sent me a text message. I clicked on the link. I typed in my tracking number. I pressed go.

[00:13:20] And it like gave the phone system the information like in a secondary mechanism. I was like, oh, that was pretty neat. Because like, I would have been totally fighting this keypad with these freaking letters, right? And they're like, okay, now that we know what you're calling in about, we're going to route you to an agent. I was like, that was smart. That was efficient. It didn't force me down totally talking to the answering machine. It just helped me get to the information in to get me where I was trying to go.

[00:13:46] I was like, that was a very good implementation of a middle of the road, right? And I said, this is something that makes a lot more sense to me, right? Hey, we're going to send you a text message because we're going to use that in addition to the fact that you're calling in. Once I submitted the number in the web, you know, I clicked on the link. I put it in and press it in. It's like, hey, we got your number now. We're switching back to voice mode. I was like, that was pretty smart.

[00:14:14] I like, what do you think about that? It's not quite totally automated. It's not quite totally manual. It's kind of in between. I think that's where we are today and where it's got to be for a while. You have a lot of automation in chatbots that are very, very helpful for appropriate situations. You have automated systems that are doing things that are supposed to be helpful and that work very well. It's that when you need a person moment, right?

[00:14:41] Like I still am a very, I miss the office life. There are so many situations where I try to convert. If I wasn't doing a person-to-person interaction, what would that be like? You can't automate all of it. You can't humanize all of it. The argument's going to be from the AI world is going to be yet, you know? I'm one of those guys that actually fears how far AI will go. I am.

[00:15:06] But at the same time, we're starting to use it in our triaging processes, just not client-facing. And I fought it for a long time. Again, it's maybe due to fear. But it comes to terms with it can be good. It can do good things. But not for everyone and not for every scenario. So I'm very in for the hybrid. Okay. So I love what you just said there. Let's flip that then.

[00:15:36] Explain to the people how you have successfully done this not client-facing implementation. Like what does it help with? What does it do? How does it enhance the story a little bit? So, I mean, just think of a ticket triage process. And this would work for any MSP. It certainly does work for us. When a ticket comes in, it's going to come in with certain defaults. You don't know if those defaults are appropriate.

[00:16:05] If you think about something as simple as a ticket priority, an end user is going to send in an email to your ticketing system that's going to default to a priority of medium. Well, your definition of what medium is and your definition of any other priorities that you've got set up may not align well with what that ticket is actually asking. And we used to use a person every single time to look at that ticket, read it, understand what it's for, and set the appropriate priority correctly.

[00:16:37] 99 times out of 100, and I'll still say there's still the one of 100, but 99 times out of 100, AI is going to get that right if you instruct it carefully and closely enough. Hmm. But I don't need to have an AI system answer the phone for that. That's when the ticket already exists. If you're talking about it, somebody's calling. I can't have AI answer that phone call. Because again, if it's for me, the biggest fear is if it's because I'm a wide labeled service, so it's my client's client, right?

[00:17:06] So if that VIP calls in, this wouldn't be the same for any MSP. Your VIP CEO of your biggest customer calls in and he's having that terrible day we talked about and he needs help right away. And you force him down AI. You force it down his throat and it doesn't go well. That's my biggest fear with that. So I can use it for automated stuff. Same idea, but I can't use it for that human direction interaction. Okay. I like what you're saying there. Totally makes sense.

[00:17:34] Do you envision, based on everything you've seen so far today, right? Like, let's not think about the future for a second. Let's just talk about the present today, right? Everything you've seen so far. Do you feel AI can help the agent answering the phone, the human being answering the phone, make different decisions or make some of their decisions for them with a better outcome? Or are we not that far yet?

[00:18:06] You have to give it, I don't know if AI is the right thing for that. Because I feel like either way, you have to give it a lot of instruction and guidance, right? So one of the questions we ask if somebody says that they can't print. So the follow-up questions are, do you have another printer you can use? You also ask, is it the scenario equivalent to it's payroll day, it's the one check printer in the office and you can't print checks and you can't pay people, which becomes a much

[00:18:36] more critical timing situation. I don't need AI to pre-program my dispatcher that if they get prompted with a printing issue, that those are the follow-up questions. So it's not AI necessarily. But again, going along with the line of automation, AI and other technologies can do that. And that is so useful, right? Because I don't want to rely, sorry, on any employee that might forget to ask that question. It just might slip their mind or it might, you know, they might be having a bad day and

[00:19:06] not remember. So the automation stuff in there to help is, I think it's very useful. Okay. So today, February 13th, 2025, maybe we would book you right now for next year, same time, 2026, but today, 2025, the answering machine, you know, with the AI wrapper around it. Because like, that's, by the way, that's how I view it, right? I don't care if it's a tape cassette player.

[00:19:34] I don't care if it's an IVR, you know, system. I don't care if it's the AI bot, still an answering machine. That's how I see it. You say whatever you want. Still not the right, still not the right mechanism. If you're delivering help desk services in real time, and you got a triage, right? Like if it's somebody that's expecting help now, not the answer. They got to speak to somebody right away.

[00:20:03] It's got to be real. It's got to be quick. It should be, in my opinion, at least that's the, you said February 13th, 2025. My opinion today is it's got to be a person because you've got to, that initial touch is not a technical touch. It's a customer service touch. And anyone who's listening to this, that is an MSB or in the IT service business or in the service business should know that that first touch is a customer service touch.

[00:20:30] It is to make the end user or whoever's calling in understand you've got them. You'll take care of them. You know how to solve, or at least to get them the answer that they need, and you're going to do it efficiently and effectively. They will be calmer and happier. Even if their situation that they're in is bad, they should end that call in a better spot. Right?

[00:20:54] I don't see AI today doing that as effectively as a person who's good at their job in that role. People vary, but I hear you. I hear what you're saying. Not everybody's the same. It was good in that role. Okay. That's fair. That's fair. I like, I, by the way, I agree with you. And I'm sure we can, we could probably put the AI coding people on the line and they may give us the, you know, the other argument, but right now me and you, we're definitely on the same page. All right.

[00:21:23] Let me go to the other, the other part of this. So before AI bot creation, there was the concept of outsourcing. It was not a new concept. You know, Dells and HPs of the world did it real early, like mid-2000s, early, mid-2000s. Right? Right. Right. As somebody who had to call those Dell and HP lines, you know, trying to get warranty support,

[00:21:53] it did not go well, man. It did. It really just train wreck. You know, I think over time people realized that didn't work out well. And they kind of flipped the story and they're like, Hey, we're instead of outsourcing out of, you know, the country over water, we're going to keep it in the borders. Right.

[00:22:17] How do you keep the person, the good person in the chair, like functional enough at their job where they can fix more things than escalate more things. Like there's a lot of moving parts to technology, right? Not every MSP is using the same technology components in their business. Right.

[00:22:41] So if a hundred percent of the service desk calls that MSPs send to you rather than are handling themselves by their own employees, you know, I don't know what, maybe, you know, maybe I'll ask you a question. What percentage of ones do you solve versus escalate? And then I guess second question is how do you empower the people on your side to move that number higher rather than lower?

[00:23:11] There's a lot in there, man. So if I say out of a hundred percent, I'm going to get a certain percentage of tickets that shouldn't have been given to us in the first place. I'm going to eliminate those because those are things like if an MSP sends in a ticket for a cabling job and an automation brought that to us, that's obviously not something I can control, but we got that anyway. Sure. When we look at scope or I think of the, even the escalation idea. So the escalation is for us. We are stuck. We need help.

[00:23:40] We cannot continue. That is for us a two-way street with the MSP, which is very unique to us. I find that was something we wanted to change and I don't want to get into the salesy part of it, but we, our mechanisms are such so that we can ask questions and get the information back and continue working. So our escalations are not just always a, here you go, it's your problem. It's most of the time a mechanism of communication to continue working on what we started. Okay.

[00:24:06] That said, we are tracking everything and it's all done through automations and integrations, of course. So we want to track tickets that we send back to the MSP or questions that we ask, but specifically what they were for. So if it's out of scope because it's a cabling job is very different than we couldn't get into their RMM because our account got locked or we need a password reset, or we cannot find

[00:24:33] the documentation in a documentation portal where simply if someone documented them or us next time we don't have that problem, or it requires an onsite or it's, so there's, there's a whole bunch of stuff in there. There's also the mechanism of if they send us a ticket and they realize they should work it, they can take it back at any time. There's also that we can give it to them. They can do stuff and then give it back to us. And we're tracking all that motion.

[00:24:59] So when we do reviews with our partners, we're not counting how many escalations. I feel like that would be valueless. We're counting the different types of escalations and focusing on the ones that can be avoided next time because those are the numbers we want to see go down. If automations are sending us tickets and we shouldn't have those anyway, we're going to focus on those in a different way, kind of asking them to tune their automation in the tickets they send to us. But we're paying attention to all of them. I don't know if that answered some of them. No, no, no.

[00:25:29] There's a lot of answers in there. All right. So what would you call in scope versus out of scope at a high level? I don't want to need to get three levels down, but big picture. The cabling job is a great example. What else would be considered? Hey, this really wasn't supposed to be sent to us. We're sending it back to you. Procurement. We want to get a new computer for Sally. Okay. No point in that. We would like a quote for an exchange migration to Office 365 project.

[00:26:00] But we can do it, by the way. But Lord knows that's got to go through the MSP first. See if they want to engage us for that. It really tends to be requests. End user point of contact to MSP. And then some sort of flow is bringing that over to us. We always have phone flow and ticket flow, but the MSP controls both. So phone flow, if they're going to forward the call to us, they control the forwarding. MSP user or end customer user always calls the MSP so that they're sticking to them, not

[00:26:29] sticking to mission control. They don't even know what mission control is because we're a white label service on their behalf. And if they forward the call, we'll answer. If they don't forward the call, they keep the call on their side. Ticket flow can be anything from our members alerts, other integrations, emails from end users, manually created tickets, you name it. They're all just tickets on the MSP's PSA. And so automation bringing that over can sometimes not be tuned in the best way. And then we get things that we shouldn't get in the first place. Okay.

[00:26:59] Let me go a different, let me do another question here. Of the new MSPs that you onboarded in 2024, right? Let's just take a look at those 12 months. What's the breakout of PSA that they use? Well, so we've got six that we're working with today. So they've got to be one of the six. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to do it. We're always constantly adding, but we have, you want to know like which ones? Yeah. Just look at the percentage.

[00:27:27] It's 10% this, 50% this. You're going to get me in trouble with them. I mean, like we're just looking at a macro here. Yeah. We're probably at about 30% Autotask, 30% ConnectWise. And then I'll give the other 40% a spread between Halo, Synchro, Kaseya, and now Ninja. And then just starting to make the climb because they've got their ticketing piece. All right.

[00:27:57] So those are the six. ConnectWise, Autotask, Halo, Synchro, Ninja. Autotask, ConnectWise, Kaseya, Synchro, Halo, Ninja. Yes. Got it. Got it. So the big two that make up 60% Autotask, ConnectWise. Yes, I believe so. Got it. Do you find that you have parity with all of the systems?

[00:28:26] Like, how does the integration work? Like, how does the MSP go in and decide this is a ticket that automatically goes over to Mission Control versus this is a ticket that never goes to Mission Control? Like, is that something they do in their own system? Or do you give them a portal to decide that? Well, I guess a bit of both. So we have by device models, which is not very unique. It's probably the most common way that a service provider like us would service. But what is unique is that we also have time-based services.

[00:28:55] So if we're doing device-based services, MSP is paying a flat fee for unlimited incident support for that particular machine and the user. Time-based, time is actually spread across the entire client base, and they can send us whatever they want as a general overflow available 24 by 7 for anybody. So it's kind of different. If an MSP, let's say, had a single customer that they wanted us to do everything for, they go by device.

[00:29:22] If they have, say they want to send us random things during the day as general daytime overflow, and they want us to handle their after hours, evenings, weekends, and holidays, they would do the time-based model. So you can pick and choose and mix and match. So you can say, these couple of customers don't touch them. These couple go by device, and everybody else will just send you time-based stuff. And the way the integration works is if it's on a by device model, we are going to grab all those tickets automatically because it's a flat rate. The cost doesn't change. Better value if we do more work. Time-based, they have to assign us.

[00:29:52] But the assignment would happen through some sort of manual process. So edit the ticket and assign us. Or through automations, auto-task categorize the concept of workflow rules. The other PSAs have something similar where they can automate that assignment based on certain conditions. Makes sense. Makes sense. It's that second part that, so if they're doing an automation and they're doing a time-based service, it's usually that automation that is including too many things that sends us the things that we shouldn't get.

[00:30:21] The quoting, the procurement, the onsites, the projects. Got it. Got it. Got it. Let's talk about that part for a second. You said you do project work. The Exchange migration 365 was the example you used. What other stuff do you offer the MSP in that realm? I mean, there's lots. Most common things have been migration type of stuff. But we then, so you're talking file service, SharePoint, Azure to Active Directory, other mail systems like Exchange Office 365.

[00:30:51] We did a bunch of server 2012 replacements when it was time because that went end of life. And they had to get something new. Sooner will be 2016s and a lot of Windows 10 replacements to Windows 11. And then you get the weird stuff. You know, some accounting software package changes or any sort of large rollouts. We can involve all kinds of stuff like that. Now, do you usually create... Is that like a flat fee project or is that time and material? We quote it. And we quote it as a fixed price because, you know, if an MSP is going to...

[00:31:21] If I were to give them a range of hours, I don't know how they'd be able to trust what number is going to come back to them at the end of the day. So we work very carefully with them to scope the project, create the project plan, price it as a fixed number. They're going to take that number. They add in their own internal costs, expenses, and profit margins and then go to their customer with their proposal. But that way they've got a number that they can rely on. So it doesn't matter if we're over or under our time estimates. That's what it is. Okay. So how many phone calls a month do you think you field on a regular, on an average?

[00:31:50] Like for a health test, not for everything? No. A month? A month. It's thousands. It's many thousands. And I would assume even more in terms of tickets. For sure. How do you handle like throughput or bandwidth or volume? I don't know. Pick a word that makes sense to you. I mean, it's the... So the MSPA is going to have a completely different requirement than MSPB.

[00:32:19] MSPA is going to use us for after hours only. They want us for the after hours, evenings, weekends, holidays for a few hours of just in case. MSPB is going to have a few customers that they want us to do on that by device model. It's 200 devices. And the next customer is going to have 300 hours that they want to buy because they've got a large clientele and they send us things during the day. And they're done hiring internal staff. They're happy with their internal staff quantities. They don't want to deal with hiring anymore. And they use us for the rest. It's...

[00:32:47] That's the difficulty with our business is allowing the MSP to scale up and down as they need. Because they might also hire somebody internally, in which case they need us less. They might lose somebody. Or if somebody quits or they got to fire somebody. Now they need us more. They might bring out a new customer. And that customer is a monster for them. They can never handle on their own. Now they got to engage us more. They might lose a customer. They got to drop down. So that's the complication with us. We do a potting system. We're pretty effective at it.

[00:33:16] But knowing, again, even still, because we're not just tier one. We have all the skill levels, juniors, intermediates, and seniors. And we staff all those around the clock. We also need to know that MSP that's giving us just five hours. They're using us for help desk basic stuff. But the customer that's doing 300 hours, they're going to include a bunch of server maintenance in there. Backup checks. More knock-related things. And so I've got to have my intermediates and seniors more on that account. So how many people do you hire every month?

[00:33:47] It depends. I mean, we're up to about 110 staff right now. You know, that's where we'll be for a little while. Unless we get a bunch of massive customers. Okay. We have the staff to buffer, I suppose, is the challenge with it. Right. And that's kind of where I'm going to, right? It's like, well, how do you forecast properly to make sure that you're not caught inverted, right? More volume than you have people to process? Yeah.

[00:34:13] We do, for example, like we won't allow an MSP to go from 10 hours to 300 hours overnight. That is a gradual growth plan with them. If an MSP is coming in, they're larger at the beginning. We're going to space out their onboardings to make it more palatable for us, you know? But it's also a good thing. You know, running before you walk is no good. So I like the slow approach, slow grow together. Makes sense. Totally makes sense. So all your people are in North America?

[00:34:42] Not all. We do have some European folks out there. Most of it just started, again, because in COVID, and again, in Toronto, we got locked down stupid hard for two years. But most of it started because we had people that were here and they moved back with their families. There was no sense in staying here. And, you know, people refer people and people have family, et cetera, et cetera. And it kind of grew that way. No, makes sense. All right. So what's your split? Is it 90% North America, 10% Europe?

[00:35:10] It's probably about the 85-15 or 90-10. It's somewhere in there. It's definitely a majority of North America. But, you know, we don't want to let good people go just because they're over there and they used to work and live here that we'd like to keep them. If they're going to refer good people, our requirements are still the same. Perfect English, perfect connectivity, and have the skill set to do the job. As long as there's no compliance. When you have compliance, then we've got to do, you know, U.S. soil and that kind of thing.

[00:35:37] But the general approach to IT, it doesn't matter. Are you dealing with any MSPs that are actually out of the U.S. and Canada? Or is it all U.S.-Canadian MSPs? Oh, we have. I mean, we've got customers in Australia, New Zealand. We've got customers in Europe. The concept isn't follow the sun because we stack around the clock. We've got a bunch of night owls in North America that like to stay up. So we don't do the follow the sun thing.

[00:36:06] It's just more of the shifting for what's most appropriate for the staff member. Got it. So you just, you know, that being said, you're able to handle these other areas because you have coverage. Yeah. I mean, well, Australia, New Zealand, their nighttime, which a lot of them are using us for after hours is our day. It makes it easy, right? So we end up with a balance.

[00:36:26] It's probably right now, if I think about it, our nighttime in North America is still a lower volume time than our daytime because most of our customers are North American and they're not just using us for after hours. But, you know, it's probably about a 70, 30, 75, 25 where the daytime is busier. Got it. Got it.

[00:36:45] Do you find, and this one's going to be hard because I'm sure it varies, but does the size and maturity or even the revenue volume, you know, of an MSP determine whether they would work with somebody like you and your type of business or not?

[00:37:02] Like, is it, do you find smaller MSPs that are low, you know, that are, you know, maybe lower in revenue and maturity start, you know, more with you or, you know, is there a certain threshold where, you know, they tend to want to try and do things all internally versus not? I don't know. You see where I'm saying you're going with this? It's an amazing question. So we don't have, I mean, if an MSP has existing clientele they need help with, as long as they would meet a tiny minimum, then they'd be fine with us.

[00:37:32] It's more, not the revenue. It's more the maturity. Process maturity, right? If we are looking for documentation on a line of business software that they're asking us to support, it kind of needs to be there. I don't need documentation on how to install a printer. My guys are super capable of doing that without documentation. But if you're giving us some specific application, it's got to be there. Process in terms of being able to hand things back and forth.

[00:37:59] If everyone is used to calling the MSP owner, single business operators, cell phone, that process has to change to calling a system that can direct the traffic to them or to us if you want to answer calls. The cell phone thing isn't going to work and it's a bad habit to teach your clientele. So it's more about that process maturity than it is revenue. They tend to go hand in hand sometimes.

[00:38:22] But yeah, I'd say any MSP that's doing active service for their clients, if they have a need for us, it works. Eventually, they get too big when they hire their own. But most of the time, even though they're hiring their own, they're still not staffing 24-7 around the clock. They're still not staffing for the holidays. So they still might use us for that after hours, evenings, weekends, and especially holidays.

[00:38:48] Do you find that there's a shift going from the cloud back to edge or prem-based technologies? More and more and more and more MSPs are cutting out the on-site infrastructure. Okay. So it's still shifting that. It's still going that direction. Yes. Okay. Any other trends through all, like you do thousands of calls, thousands of tickets.

[00:39:14] Are you finding any specific technology starting to bubble up that wasn't in the mainstream for you before? Or are you starting to see a particular type of client and customer that's bubbled up more than they were before? Or anything like that that you've seen through big picture data? The AI is the thing that's coming up the most. And funny enough, not in the case of like for the MSP.

[00:39:40] It's that end user that wants to implement AI and they're doing something with AI that we now have to get into. Compliance is going to be a thing for a very long time that a lot of people still are not ready or clear on how to navigate. And I feel for the MSPs in those cases because they're really the ones that have to navigate it. And if they use us, we're acting as an extension and we can only do so much. But I feel for that piece. I had an MSP contact me.

[00:40:10] He's like, well, we bought the server in 2025. Like 2025. So the new version of Windows Server is the one you can buy. It's not even on the shelf yet. So you have to buy the latest version of Server that people are going to have to know. And the latest version of this side and the other people are going to have to know. Those are all still the same, you know, at their core, I suppose, with lots of new features. But it's still cybersecurity stuff.

[00:40:32] That's the biggest hurdle for us today is all the different cybersecurity tools that, although they do a great job of protecting, they're also very intrusive to the end customer. And they need help to either unlock something or unblock something or block something or whatever. Just because it's trying to do its job. And we get a lot of those calls. But there's so many of them.

[00:41:01] You know as well as I do, you walk these trade show floors. Still 70% of the booths are cybersecurity product or tool. 100%. I agree with that. No question. I mean, all right. So what are the top security products that you guys run into that you're trying to field service tickets on? I feel odd about making them here. But anyway. Listen, I asked you about the PSAs. I mean, listen, I'm just asking for macro here.

[00:41:29] So, you know, again, so your SaaS alerts, your threat lockers. I mean, there's a bunch of them. What they all have in common is they're very, very good at the detection and they have an automation to lock something down. But inevitably, if you lock something down at the wrong time, you're now causing disruption to that end user.

[00:41:51] If it's the VIP who's traveling overseas for business that didn't let the MSP know that they were traveling and it didn't unlock the geofence. And now that CEO is pissed and can't work. We get enough of those, you know, and it's it's just because SaaS alerts was configured to protect the customer that hopefully they appreciate. That's fair.

[00:42:42] A lot of these backups should be set and forget, but they're not. Got to fix them. That's fair. Do you. Coming back to current events, right? I turn this out on every call. So I throw it at you. Love everybody's opinion as I go along. So like. You know, Ninja just bought DropSuite. All right. Kaseya keeps Kaseying and they're Kaseya 365. Although now, you know, they're looking for a new CEO.

[00:43:11] Right at the mid to end of last year, you had ConnectWise. Accient acquisition. They also did. Skykick. Yeah. Yeah. So they acquired both. New CEO there. Right. She's been in the chair for less than six months. So there's a lot of movement at the top. Right. Of the players in the sandbox.

[00:43:38] Like from the people that you work with, talk with all the MSPs you support. Concerns. Are they shifting? Is it just status quo? We don't know. We're just going to wait and see. What's changing? Concerns are still. I think they remain. I don't, you know, I don't think that the, I think that there's a wonder of why all this change. You often don't get the real story of why a CEO leaves and start to wonder what's going on.

[00:44:06] Not is the company in trouble, but more is the industry changing in a way that I'm not going to like. You still have the two or three big, big boy players out there. You know, you've named them and they own far too much for a lot of people's comfort. Hmm. And they keep, okay. They keep Kaseya-ing. I'll use your term. To an extent that every, every six months when Kaseya does their conferences, they're

[00:44:35] announcing a new acquisition or two or three. And that has been consistent for several years. That has not slowed down, but yet CEO changes. Okay. So they don't know why nobody knows why they just know that Kaseya keeps Kaseya-ing and now somebody new is going to come in and what are they, you know, are they going to keep the same idea? I guess somebody's got to pay for the Kaseya center. But anyway, it's, it's, it's uncomfortable for a lot of people that I talk to. We talk about it in certain groups that I'm a part of or that I moderate.

[00:45:05] It comes up in our town halls. It comes up a lot. People are not comfortable. And, you know, I like what Ninja is doing only because I think that the channel needs it. I mean, I like them. Don't get me wrong. I like them anyway, but I like what they're doing because in the same way that Synchro made noise when it first showed up, I don't think they're making new noise today. Halo made a ton of noise when they showed up and they're still making noise, but still quieter than they were at the beginning.

[00:45:33] Ninja's making noise now with acquisitions and the investment that they got with into their ticketing. So I think as long as we can see healthy competition out there, continue to battle the big boys. That's one thing when it gets to a point where there's only two or three, that's really discomforting for everyone I'm talking to. How do you feel about it? You know, I have no ties to anyone. I'm agnostic like you, right?

[00:46:03] I mean, I don't have to, I don't have to do anything other than sit back and watch the same movie on roll on, you know, like everyone else. I'm kind of torn. You know, I ran an MSP for a long time and I definitely drank the Kool-Aid of, I like to pick my, my vendor in each category because then I feel like I picked the best bang for my buck, best capabilities for affordability, you know, that whole thing.

[00:46:34] But then the management and all of that is an overhead that you often forget, right? Like, you know, like, and then all of a sudden, like it doesn't just run, right? Just like you said, backup, right? Set it and forget it. Not quite. It does need work, right? Like, so the marketing versus the reality, I'm not sure it ever totally aligned, but I digress.

[00:46:58] I think, you know, from the, are you confident in the technology that you've bundled together to deliver a good experience versus, I hate to even say versus, but it's true. Are you profitable? As an MSP, are you profitable? I know a lot of MSPs think they're profitable until they look at the, you know, the balance sheet and the tax return at the end, you know, and then they're like, what happened?

[00:47:26] And you're just like, you need to charge more or you didn't realize the amount of time it took to keep all these light switches on, right? And like all of a sudden it caught you by surprise. But there then comes the concern where, and it happens to all of us, and I can only imagine what your service desk is on a bad day, right? What's a bad day? Let me guess. CrowdStrike was probably a bad day for you.

[00:47:55] Or Azure, Amazon, Google, when, you know, half the country goes down, it's probably a bad day for you. When Microsoft goes down, you can put your hands up in the air as MSP and say, electricity's out, man. I'm waiting like you're waiting. You know, you can follow it where I'm following it. What do you want me to do? It doesn't always compute that way to the customer, does it? All right. You're selling them something. You've bundled it together.

[00:48:24] They didn't tell you what they, you know, what vendor to select. So in a day where it's not going well, you're the guy, right? You recommended it. You sold it. They're paying you. You're getting hung, right? That's a tough day. That's a tough day. So, you know, I think that scenario coupled with the time issue, coupled with the broken

[00:48:53] levers of expectation versus reality, even for the end customer, right? You know, like you, they think they bought a premium service, but you're actually running this thing on, you know, the answering machine, right? Like there's a, there's a, it's not, it's not on the same level. Perception breaks everything, right? You take all that, you put it together, throw the word that you threw in there on top, compliance and regulation into the mix, which say what you will.

[00:49:23] I look at that as a tax. I look at that as a tax because it costs everybody money to do it. It's tough business, Jason. It is a tough, tough, tough business. And I think it gets harder from here. Not, I don't think it actually gets easier. I think it gets harder from here. So the way I see it, if you are not charging properly now, then you won't.

[00:49:50] And I, and I argue many of you out there, MSPs are not, you are either breaking even or losing money, which at that point, why are we in business? Every six, eight, 12 months, when things get more expensive and more rules come into place and more work needs to get done. Now you're even under more than you were before. It's a, it is, it's like almost a stock market.

[00:50:15] In my opinion, you need to head your bets, watch the ticker and make sure that you're reacting properly or else you're going to lose. And I would say, I even hate to say it. And I would love to hear your opinion on it, but I think it's more like the casino, man. The house always wins and the MSP gets lucky in a lot of cases. You need to change that story too.

[00:50:45] I forecast it properly because I'm paying attention and I've buffered myself and I'm constantly, you know, adjusting so that I don't end up on the bad end of the stick. If you're not doing that, I think you're going to lose more times than you're going to win back to the casino. I really do. And, um, does that mean you need to think like a business person sometimes more than an IT person? Yes.

[00:51:16] And I, and like, to me, if it means controlling your rates and locking in your costs and being able to properly forecast what's going on longer than every cup, every, you know, when your bill shows up at the end of the month, I hope so. So that's the only way you can properly package things to your customer and make sure that you don't get caught upside down. But I think a lot of people are upside down and, and they don't realize it until way later.

[00:51:45] That's what I think. It's a lot of, there's a lot of hard, potentially cold truths in everything that you said, but they're all true. It's in your case, you talk about the casino though. For me, the casino in this case are the vendors, the big boys, because they're always going to win. They always get paid for their stuff. I don't know. They're not talking about how much and all that stuff, but they get, they get theirs, right?

[00:52:12] The MSPs out there that are not setting themselves up properly are the ones that aren't charging appropriately. Don't really understand their own internal costs, uh, costs of doing business costs of all these tools. I mean, that's, so I feel badly because I agree with you in that I feel that it's getting worse, uh, harder is the better word for it. It's getting harder for MSPs to do what they do because everything is so damn expensive and

[00:52:41] they'll get the cost argument from, from their clients, especially ones that have been used to paying lower fees. But the reality is the, the, the internet world and the world that every business is living in today that relies on the MSP to be able to support is just more complicated. It does cost more to protect them. It costs more to do what they do every day from start to finish. Um, and they have to prepare themselves for that.

[00:53:09] And there's no sense in having a losing client. They're just, there is, it doesn't make sense. So I can echo a lot of stuff that you're saying. I agree with it for sure. On that point, right? The, Hey, I'm going to start small with them and grow with them. If you're not profitable the whole way through stop, say no. And, and I, I feel for you, especially if you, you, you, you're starting out and you're just trying to rub two sticks together to make sure that you can pay your credit card bill at the end of the month.

[00:53:39] I'm with you. I've been there. I understand where you're at, but what ends up happening when you take those customers in the beginning is they are negative the entire way to the end. Whenever that is probably years later, you got to understand what the, what the number is to be profitable. And, and you know, if, if that means that the customer wants to go with somebody cheaper, I would say error on the side of it's okay.

[00:54:07] Let them go really honestly, let them go because you know, I don't know about you, Jason. We've all been on a call with somebody who's upset and it didn't go the way we all wanted it to go. That happens. I think the MSP works really hard in most cases to make people happy, right? They're in business to deliver a good experience and you bend over backwards to make somebody

[00:54:35] happy, to keep them happy so that they keep paying you. And then hopefully they grow with you. But most of the time you are putting way more effort in than they are, but you're not getting paid for that. I'm not trying to be Wolf of wall street here by any means where money is to be all end all. I like to say, make it fair for everyone. That's usually what a good relationship is. Good partnership, right? Where everybody's getting what they need out of it. But I think for most MSPs, it's not fair. It's upside down. It's upside down.

[00:55:04] And so like you give and take, but back to the question of the big guys, I think they're a tool. I think they're a box of tools. And I think that you need to understand what you're working with and you need to understand what it costs and you need to make sure that their terms align with your terms. And if you can do that, those tools can work for you. But if it's not aligned, it's back to the casino, man.

[00:55:34] It's back to the casino. And you know what? That's not a good place to be in. I think the worry is, you know, you mentioned that the Microsoft outage, that is something that I think the end customer can understand is out of an MSP's control. It's Microsoft. They understand that. When it's one of these vendors, and if it's a vendor that you have a lot of other things into because they're the big boys and something doesn't go the way it should with that vendor

[00:56:04] and it can affect your client in oh so many ways, that is where the fear that at least the ones that are coming up in my conversation, that's where the fear is coming from. That, I don't know, monopoly is the wrong word, but that kind of thing where you are so dependent, not just on one tool, but now on so many tools that you're using in your business that can really just set you the wrong way. Anyway. No, no, that's fair. There's a little bit of truth.

[00:56:32] And that's, you know, that's why I want to, I always try and get everybody's opinion, right? From a, from a big picture, right? Like, what is everybody, like, what is, like, collect everybody's thoughts and I put them together. Where, where do they all kind of, you know, kind of chart out on the map here. But I just want, if any, if you take anything away from this call other than Jason is a guy that seems to have been around for a while, talks to a lot of people and has a general gist of what's going out there in MSP land. Might be a smart guy for you to talk to.

[00:57:02] So we'll let them tell you how to get ahold of him in a second. But there are a lot of cool options out there. And like, I don't think any IT services or managed services company should be running their entire business thinking that they can do everything. Like, you surely cannot. I promise you that. You don't have the time or the money in most cases. You gotta need help. There's a lot of help out there to get. Please work backwards from your math.

[00:57:30] And if you do that, I promise you will be in a much better position than trying to wait to figure out whether you're profitable at the end of the year when the tax guy comes and you got to do a tax return. If you do it that way, I think you're going to be very upset. I really do. So plan for the win. Prepare for it. Plan for it. Execute on it. You know, I hate to use this cliche on the way out the door. Like, don't let your business run you. You need to run your business.

[00:58:02] Jason, how do people get ahold of you, buddy? You were giving some good information today. Mission Control, mock-end help desk. If you are looking for help on the technical side of things and servicing your customers, anything from front-end user-facing support, us, we can take the call, we can make the ticket, we can do the actual technical support work, junior level, intermediate, and senior. We can do the server support, knock for servers and network appliances. We can do project work. We can do all of it.

[00:58:30] It's technical services as a white-label service available 24-7, exclusively offered to MSPs to help you as a white-label extension and servicing your clients. It's missioncontrolknock.com. Email me, jasonc at missioncontrolknock.com. It is not AI that responds. It's me. But I do support the AI initiative for certain triages we talked about earlier. But yeah, Mission Control, if you have any need, please hit me up.

[00:58:59] Happy to chat with you about strategy. That's what I'm really good at, and that's what we do well. Awesome. Guys, this session was totally recorded. You can probably go back and look at the other sessions, and you can track our notes and figure out what we got right, what we got wrong. But I digress. You'll find all of those at MSPinissue.com under sessions. Keep coming back. We do these for you. I want to keep on bringing the voices in the sandbox so that you can hear what's up. Because if we don't see you in person, guys, this is just another way for you to learn

[00:59:27] what's actually going on so that you can run your businesses better. I digress. Jason, hopefully I'll run into you and talk to you before February 13, 2026. Hopefully the Eagles win another Super Bowl next year, too, because I'll be just as happy as I am now. Maybe more. We'll see. I like that, George. Yeah, there you go. For everybody else, I'll be at a Super Bowl parade tomorrow, so you know where I'll be. Please don't have an emergency. But if you need to, I'll be outside in the cold like everybody else in Philadelphia. Thanks a lot, Jason. Thanks a lot, everyone else.

[00:59:56] Catch you on the flip side. Thank you, George. Be well, everybody. See you. See you. See you.