Starting and Scaling an MSP with Perry Bowles of Ziptech Services

Perry Bowles, technical director for Ziptech Services, shares his story of starting and scaling an MSP. Perry tells of a conversation that led to a meeting with a total stranger turned business partner nearly 20 years ago.

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This podcast provides educational information about issues that may be relevant to information technology service providers.

Nothing in the podcast should be construed as any recommendation or endorsement by N-able, or as legal or any other advice.

The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the podcast does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent.

Views and opinions expressed by N-able employees are those of the employees and do not necessarily reflect the view of N-able or its officers and directors.

The podcast may also contain forward-looking statements regarding future product plans, functionality, or development efforts that should not be interpreted as a commitment from N-able related to any deliverables or timeframe.

All content is based on information available at the time of recording, and N-able has no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

Transcript

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It was really, really early days, But we were just doing it in a different way. This week on Now that it we kind of have the same vision. we approach it from different angles completely, but we kind of meet in the middle. Perry Bowles talks to Chris Massey about the unique origins of his business and make some bold predictions for the future of the MSP industry. zero interest in selling zip tech. actually want to build it and build it and build it and make it one of the best MSPs in the world. Welcome to Now That's It. Stories of MSP success, where we dive into the journeys of some of the trailblazers in our industry to find out how they use their passion for technology to help turn managed services into the thriving sector it is today. All right, Perry, thank you for being with us. No problem. Love to hear a little bit about sort of your background, how you got started in the managed service industry and maybe a little bit more about zip tech. So oddly, what really got me into the managed service was a rival Kaseya, funnily enough. So I was working at a company. We did I.T. support the traditional I.T. support. And I had this idea mulling around about doing some sort of proper remote support rather than onsite. So I used this thing called SMS. I don't know if you remember that, Microsoft SMS.. So you could do some sort of remoting. We had to kind of had a VPN in and that sort of thing. Kaseya came along, So we started using that internally and I thought, This is great. I'm going to take this tool, I'm going to start my own business of out of business. Few years before. Before that I thought, I'm going to take my idea. So we kind of formulated this what turned out to be like an MSP business internally, and I thought, I'll take this externally. The CTO of Kaseya UK came to see how to set it up and what sort of things. Goodness, this is this is pretty good. And I said, Yeah, I think it's pretty good. I'm not going to take your tool. I'm not going to take it and, you know, stop it. And he said, Well, actually I know someone who's looking for someone technical because they were on the sell side to set up in business right now, said, okay, give me his number. So we spoke. That's R&D. Jim Simpson. Mm hmm. Our CEO. So I met him. We were absolutely in unison to the point, I think six months after we started working together, he saw a mind map done when I was working with this other company. And he said, Did we go through that? Is that the mind that we put together? I said no, I had that before I even met you. You know, we were just in parallel, in sync. But he was sales. He couldn't find anyone technical that got the managed service thing because everyone in their mind was break-fix because they just didn't get it. Yep. So we started off as managed service sort of monthly recurring revenue. So that was kind of it. You know, that's where we started and it was just the reason Jim wanted to start the business, because he was working for some larger companies. He used to be a turnaround CEO. So he'd go in and one of the things I wanted to cut back was staff. Obviously not a nice job to do, but that's what you have to do. And he could never find anyone that any way of cutting back on it because he couldn't find anyone that could come in to a smaller business, you know, 300 to 500. So business not an enterprise. And and do I.T. as an outsourced managed service. So I thought, well, I'm going to fill that gap. So we came from different angles. Yeah. But, you know, at the same time, at the same place kind of thing. So that's where we started. And that was it. So, yeah, so Kaseya was our way. And in the early days we are used to it was really early days, right? So we had access to the developers of Kaseya. We could put in an idea and it would be in the product a week later. Wow. It was really, really early days, but we started managed service. We've never done break fix. And MSP even then wasn't a thing. We called ourselves monthly recurring revenue, whatever. Yeah. MSP became a thing later, as in the name MSP managed service provider. But we were just doing it in a different way. Wow. That's fantastic. So. So the tool led you to the the vision that this was Well, this is how we sort of want to run run the company kind of the other way around. Okay. So the vision came first. Yeah. I'm always waiting for the tool to arrive. I gotcha. And then the tool arrived. Yeah. I said, This is what we've been waiting for. I had this idea about doing this remote service for a while as a SMS wasn't good enough. There wasn’t anything else on the market. And this agent that, you know, an agent or machine. And then they reporting back through secure port four, four, three, always calling out, you know, no one, no one's going in the server. So, yeah, it was the other way round. Gotcha. Because I arrived and then that was like, there's the magic moment. So let's talk about sort of early days, midday as you've grown. I mean, you've you've been at Ziptech for a number of years, right? 18 Yeah, that's fantastic. So as the company matured and you guys grew as a company, what were some of the challenges that that you guys had run into and what was the point where this vendor that you had sort of put all your, you know, your your faith in that it was, you know, you maybe had to look outside in. Yeah. Good question. So in terms of the early challenges, break fix was the way that IT was done. Yeah. So all the people we went to were going like, hold on, we have to pay you every month, even if nothing's going wrong. Right? Hold on. The idea is we prevent things from going wrong. Right. So therefore, you don't have the I.T. problem, so you carry on doing your business. We'll run your I.T., you run your business, everyone's happy. But obviously, on the back of that, we need to do reporting and say, right, this is what we've done for you this month, because otherwise it's like nothing's has wrong. Never quite as simple as that. Because things went wrong. Of course, you know that that was the that was the idea of. Well, we'll show you. We are doing stuff in the background. And when you do need to call us, we're there, you know, and we can jump onto your machine really quickly because we got this RMM tool. So, yeah, getting that across to people, they didn't get it. As I said, Our CEO couldn't find a techie that got the concept, let alone clients, customers, you know. So in the early stages that was it. But when we got better, that discussion telling people this is how it works and this is the benefit of it, and you know what you're paying every month because a really bad technical person could cost a huge amount to them because they spending 4 hours fixing a problem that should take half an hour or less. Whereas if they're paying a monthly, they know what's going out every month and it's a simple per device cost. So yeah, and the world started catching up with us because obviously we were the first people ever to do it. Yeah. So anyway, so yeah, that, that kind of managed service thing started to become a thing. So, you know, people were more comfortable with it, but yeah, I mean the challenge right at the beginning on top of like the sales piece and convincing people this was the right model for them was just the scaling, but it was like scaling up and it's just the problems of running a small business, right? So you don't want to get the next person in because in case you don't get the clients, you can't service the clients without getting the next person in. So you have to make that jump and get people in. Just just make that, you know, make that leap. Sure. But once you've got to a certain amount of peak where you can start doing a better service and bringing things that you you should do, like ticketing. In the early days, ticketing wasn't that easy and we didn't have ConnectWise. In fact, the reason Salesforce as our ticketing well, oddly, because it was quite you could manipulate it, you could make it do it, you know, so you could record things in it. So we used it for sales as well as for ticketing, but it just wasn't up to it. Right. So then we looked for PSA. There was not much on the market auto task, was it in its infancy. And it was it was quite broad, but very shallow. It couldn't do very much. ConnectWise It was actually pretty good in its day. Now it's really hasn't moved on very much. It's quite clunky, but you know, you're kind of wedded to it. So that kind of management became a bit of a a thing, you know, managing tickets, managing just the business from sales through to ticketing through to invoicing and through. But PSA really helped if we’d gone N-able back then obviously there's now that you know that part Yep that we could have utilized but you know and now it's almost impossible for us to get away from ConnectWise onto something else. But yeah, so the challenges were they were less technical and more convincing people. And just the, just the thing about growing a business, right? Yeah. Oddly, our MSP was the owner, sort of the MD was a sales background. Most of MSPs a a put together and built by technical people. So we kind of had that as an advantage. That's got its pitfalls as well. So, you know, there's no there's no sweet spot, there's no proper balance between sales and technical and who should be running whatever. Right? So I'm the technical director CTO, but I'm the technical director of a technical company. Yeah. So that so the CEO's job is to run a technical company. So does that cross cross over? You know, in a non-technical company, CTO is kind of the guy that looks after the technology and knows the technology and the CEO kind of looks after the business. But our business is technology. So there's that. Yes, kind of, you know, things to work out as well. But you know that it's is another challenge. I'll I'll say that what I've seen you know I come from a an MSP as well and in America that had a number of of of sort of executives and leaders and some that were sales focused, some that were that had some technical nano technical and then some that were just technology focused that had no sales focus. And but as as I have been exposed to our partners and MSPs that I would say are, you know, maybe doing things or best in class or just really different, they do have that model and, and you know, where there's there's sort of a a CEO that is more sales focused and a CTO or a technical leader that is more technology focused. And in that pair, that dynamic, that number one can see the vision simultaneously, but go at it from a different direction is a really, really powerful thing. And yeah, actually that's a really good point. Yeah. So Jim and I, we kind of have the same vision. Mm hmm. But it's odd you should say that, because we approach it from different angles completely, but we kind of meet in the middle. That's right. When we used to work out figures, you know, How much do you think this would cost? You'd say. And I'd work it out. Say about this. I think he said I came to almost exactly the same figure, but from a completely different way of working out, which is interesting. This kind of checks and balances. Yeah, that's right. you, some of the early years ago, when was what was the point. We decided the Kaseya wasn't the right tool for Rainbow. Yeah. it was really because they got, they got purchased they, they, they lost sight of the MSP, they decided that there was a goldmine here, the way they changed the top people. So we didn't know Neil Blackie and the owner, the CEO and people that developed it. Then there was this takeover. Everything changed. They, the UK technical director, got booted out as it most of the staff. They did a complete change around and it was clear the focus went away from the MSP or more into the happy just to fringe price. I can make huge amounts of money off the back of it and not that they lost sight of where they where they started from and that was an issue for us. Yeah. So we looked around and I found April it was an able then, then it became SolarWinds MSP and we're a neighboring N-able again, which is good. It was like, how can we find something? At least we knew what we're looking for we’d experienced a tool. N-able had only just brought in sort of a managed AV at that point. So it was about ten years ago, I guess. Sure. And it seemed like I think within a few weeks there was a there was an event in Amsterdam. So I went to that and I thought, you know, these are good guys. This seems this seems good. This seems like a company that's taking it seriously is a good attitude. They put more into the product. So I thought, Yeah, okay, we'll do that. So we transitioned over. We haven't looked back, to be honest. Right? I was an early N-able 1.0 customer as well, and I remember the same thing it was, it was definitely a different type of a vendor to work with. It was a relationship. It was the folks that you knew back then. Most of them are still here today, which I think is it says something about about the business. But but I love your point about, you know, sort of the focus on the MSP, And it was one of the reasons why I wanted to join the company is as an MSP. I love a partnership where, you know, you know, I work for a team now where my sole goal is to help our partners grow. Yeah, and and that's great that we've made an investment into something like that. And so. So I love to hear that, you know, something that was really, really important to you. Obviously, you know, unfortunate that another vendor, they lost vision but that you found it with us and and thank you for. Yeah. And I love the honesty as well. So David Weeks says every time you know, this is about you. That's right. But he's honest saying if you grow your business, it grows our business. You know what I mean? So it's not trying to hide behind it. We're all about you has nothing to do with our business. You know, we just for you. I love the honesty. It's a two way thing. Yeah. And help grow our business and helps grow your business. Yeah. And, you know, in some of your sessions, you say, Look, we're not selling product. We're not even going to talk about N-able product, but, you know, we're we're trying to make your business better, right? That's it. It's a beautiful thing. It's a it's it's the greatest job in the world to be able to talk to MSPs and share my experiences and bring other MSPs together so that you guys get better as MSPs. I love it. was N-able spam experts. Incoming email filtering helps protect your network against spam, viruses, phishing and malware attacks with nearly a 100% accuracy rate driven by a continuously updated intelligent protection and filtering engine. Spam experts provides one of the best and most complete email filtering platforms on the market. The solution works right out of the box and is compatible with nearly any email server, whether deployed in our highly redundant cloud or on your on premises hardware. It has readymade integrations, automation, plug ins and APIs. Simply add the domains you want to filter and reroute your email through an easy Amex record change in your DNS. The multilevel control panel offers different permission levels and gives you the ability to access quarantine, extract reports, perform custom log searches, manage, allow or block lists, and even customize it to your own brand. The incoming filter also provides valuable email continuity by adding an extra level of redundancy to your email flows in the event that your email server cannot be reached. Email continuity is designed to safely queue your incoming messages and prevent them from being lost or immediately bounced back to the sender. Dude, messages can be accessed via the web interface and will be delivered when your mail server is back online or it can be manually retried. Spend less time dealing with spam and more time focusing on the tasks that really matter. Start your free trial today. doing Perry, Think about back, you know, 18 years ago up to today. And, you know, what was the point that maybe you you guys got together and said, you know, this is it. We did the right thing. We made the right decision. We've created the right type of company. This is what we should be doing. This is we're helping our customers in the right way. Was there a point in time that you remember like, Yeah, that's a tricky one because I think we both the first year was really tough and we're all working stupid hours and wearing all the hats, you know, with HR Where, you know, all the internal stuff we're doing all of the all the admin stuff, the accounting, the whole lot. I think pretty much from the beginning we thought this is right, right, this is this is where we should be. This is what we want to be doing. Let's say Jim did it because he saw there was a gap in the market and needed to fill it. And I did it because I saw there was a gap in the market for a different gap in the market for, you know, doing this remote service for helping people get their I.T. working properly. So I don't think there was a point where we went, you know, this is right. Yeah, we've I think we kind of always knew this was the right thing. Yeah. It's just working out the nuances of how to run it, how to do it properly. Yeah, there wasn't a workbook, because there wasn’t any MSPs, everything was break fix. So, you know, pretty much everything was break-fix. This conversation was happening more in the States actually. So, you know, being UK based, we're a bit behind the curve and I'd say most of the time. So we used to have this the lady called Robin Robins, who used to do a kind of a masterclass in marketing, and we listened to her stuff and got some good ideas. Yeah, you know, we've always been open to that sort of external thing. Yeah, but, and that kind of made us in those days it was like, well, do free audits go to site? Do free audits? You know, we used to spend two or three days auditing looking at absolutely everything within within an organization to put this, you know, red and green traffic light together, to say, this is where we are, this is what we've seen, this is what you need to do. We don't do that anymore. Right? Because whenever you go in, even you can't get under the you can't get under the hood until you really in there. So we we saw the service. It's been hours doing this is kind of expected as well. Yeah. We don't do that anymore. Yeah. We kind of do a little of discovery, but yeah, we just, we say we'll. We'll find this out as we go. Yeah So let's talk about the future for Zip Tech. What do you think? What do you think it's going to look like? Perry? Is there is there plans for maybe even some M&A or how how what's the growth strategy vector look like for you? So so we we engaged in something called the EOS, the entrepreneur entrepreneur operating system. Sure. As well. It's true method sovereign, the winner's circle and that as well. So we've got some frameworks that we work around. The great thing about the EOS, the traction thing is you plan ahead. So we've got quarterly goals so quarterly rocks. So we got annual company rocks and we've got a three year vision and a ten year kind of where are we going to be in ten years? Where would we like to be in ten years? Because you can't plan for ten years. Sure, you can't plan for three years. To be honest, not not in this market. Moving too fast in three years, our plan is to have acquired a company so we have no interest in selling. We are literally zero interest in selling Ziptech. We don't want to build it up, make it really, you know, worth huge amounts of money and selling it out. Yeah, it's a lifestyle. It's a it's not a lifestyle, but actually want to build it and build it and build it and make it one of the best MSPs in the world. Right. So, you know, no interest in selling it, but we do and I'd say we’ve grown it organically. We've literally started. We've never bought a penny and we've never been in debt and we've got money in the bank and we need to invest that money. And a great way of doing that is to buy acquiring other MSPs that maybe need help or maybe want to sell off. And because they're a lifestyle and they want to go and have their Porsche and drive around Italy or whatever it is they want to do, and it's a great way of acquiring customers without all the marketing and that sort of thing. So M&A is something we all we are looking at and we want to say within three years it's a goal. So we'll do it because we achieve our goals pretty much all the time. But yeah, that's one aspect of it. But in terms of where we see the business going, everyone's talking about it. It's AI, it's automation, it's business analytic, you know, and automation is a big field in itself. So if you're talking about automation, we're starting to automate internally. So we've just taken on PIR as a automation for ConnectWise to try and help that. So that's help desk people, we're heavily going through the cookbook for automation through N-able and we so we had a goal last quarter to can’t remember the figures but it was to fix a certain amount of things through automation. And then we got a tick box now in ConnectWise that if you fix it through automation, tick the box and it's a go and it was a focus. So that's big for us. But for our clients, obviously they're not fixing computers and not fixing things. Automation, it's the process automation, automating their internal processes, making things run smoothly, stopping people having to do this boring thing of taking something from one system into Excel, then exporting that into another important into another system, and all that manual stuff, trying to help them along their business process or just using things like power automate to actually streamline their their operations or do things that they hadn't considered and didn't know about. So we've run workshops, we start to run workshops with our clients and we hold what we call directors briefings. So they're briefings on what we think would help businesses out. Currently, we're doing automation series. In the past, we've done things on 365, Azure. Teams, SharePoint and that sort of stuff. But yeah, automation is the big focus right now. And off the back of that or side by side with that is the business analytics piece we see AI a little bit down the road, but it's there. We're not ignoring it. In fact, we've told all of our staff will pay the $20 a month, but you get ChattGPT4, you know, get the subscription version. It still only goes up to September 2021. Yeah. You know, so don't use that for anything. You know, we look at who's that, who's the prime Minister still think there's Boris Johnson. But yeah, so that's, that's where we're seeing that vision. Also the other bit which where we've kind of slightly lost focus on is the security. So we're not an MSSP, but we think we should be. We do take all of our clients through cyber essentials. It's mandatory. It used to be a bolt on beast to take me through it and service interest plus, which is the UK Governance is quite a low level, but it's really good stuff is solid stuff. If people do that, they're so much better than before they did it. They do it properly and not just tick box exercise. So we properly take them through that and they are more secure at the end of it than they were to start with. So it's mandatory for a client. But I think to fill that we need a managed stop and SIEM solution. You know, I think more and more of our clients are going to be asking for it. One or two do the larger ones. I think at some point with I don't know, maybe the cyber insurance thing that's getting tricky because they want more and more things in testing and that sort of thing. I think some consumers are going to be a think about how you prevent that, you know, you know, under attack, that sort of thing. So I think I managed something simple kind of a bit like when we started, we had to persuade some of our clients that they needed to do backup. And then we went out on actually, this isn't even a conversation. If you want us to manage you, you have to do backup. That's great. You know, I think it'll end up being that, you know, it may be three years time, it will be mandatory that have a SOC and SIEM solution and the prices have to come right down and so we're looking at right now, by the end of this year or financial year, we want to have a permanent compliance and security person. All they do is security and compliance in place for internally, but mainly for our clients so that we can use that as a service, a bolt on service amongst the work, and how can we make it a proper monthly recurring revenue, what you add in to make that happen? So we're also, ISO27001 ourselves, right? Most of our clients have no requirement for that, right? Some of our clients, we would have had them as client if we weren't 27,001. They don't need to do that themselves, but it gives them that assurance. But I think to gets, you know, PCI or whatever it happens to be and I need to look at this this, this too that's coming out and you know because we Brexit it so we're not part of Europe anymore as such. We're still very, very closely aligned. So I need to see if that is going to be a compulsory thing for us in the UK as well. Right? That's where we actually got from, from this, right where people are asking questions about it. It's like, oh, wasn't even aware of that. So that's something I need to look up when I get back. Great. But I said, so security, automation, powerBI type stuff, analytics and that sort of thing. And eventually AI, we see those as a big things coming along. So we're building sort of little business units around that at the moment. Excellent. Perry What a pleasure it was to talk to you. It always is. This was such a great conversation. Thank you so much for being here and I wish you and tech all the luck in the future. Thank you. Thanks, Chris. Been a pleasure. Great. Take care. To receive updates about future episodes, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on YouTube or your preferred podcast platform and follow N-able on LinkedIn. We appreciate your support and encourage you to leave a rating or review as it helps us reach more listeners who can benefit from the wealth of knowledge shared on this show. Remember, success is not a destination. It's a journey. By immersing yourself in the stories of those who have walked the path before you, you'll gain the tools. Inspiration and confidence to achieve your own triumphs. Stay tuned for more exciting episodes of Now That's It. Stories of MSP Success. This podcast provides educational information about issues that may be relevant to information technology service providers. Nothing in the podcast should be construed as any recommendation or endorsement by N-able or is legal or any other advice. The views expressed by guests are their own in their appearance on the podcast does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent the views and opinions expressed by naval employees. Those are the employees and do not necessarily reflect the view of N-able or its officers and directors. This podcast may also contain forward looking statements regarding future product plans, functionality or developmental efforts that should not be interpreted as a commitment from N-able related to any deliverables or timeframe. All content is based on information available at the time of recording. And N-able has no obligation to update any forward looking statements.