Journey with us as we delve into the fascinating world of entrepreneurship with Justin Smith, President of Brite. Peel back the layers of Justin's entrepreneurial journey, as he, first with his father then with his brother, took a simple white box manufacturing business and revolutionized it into a thriving IT company with three distinctive units, including managed services. Hear the influence his entrepreneurial parents had on him and the lessons that helped shape his approach to business. Plus, from professional baseball, to working for Xerox, and eventually joining his father in business, Justin shares riveting experiences and lessons learned from these diverse fields.
We also dive deep into the core of the successful family business, examining the importance of maintaining strong relationships while keeping family and business separate. Justin also sheds light on the value of data-driven decision making, the impact of company culture on success, and the crucial role customer retention plays in their growth. His perspectives on organic growth, finding the right fit for business expansion, and reasons for not selling their business at this point are worth paying attention to. Come along for an exciting ride into the world of entrepreneurship, as seen through the eyes of the Justin Smith.
Get an in-person rundown on what N-able has to offer including products, insights, networking and more.
The N-able Roadshow is visiting more cities than ever before in 2024. Take a look at our first group of locations; we may be in a city near you! -> http://spr.ly/6000RsTOq
'Now that's it: Stories of MSP Success,' dives into the journeys of some of the trailblazers in our industry to find out how they used their passion for technology to help turn Managed Services into the thriving sector it is today.
Every episode is packed with the valuable insights, practical strategies, and inspiring anecdotes that lead our guests to the transformative moment when they knew….. Now, that's it.
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.
Journey with us as we delve into the fascinating world of entrepreneurship with Justin Smith, President of Brite. Peel back the layers of Justin's entrepreneurial journey, as he, first with his father then with his brother, took a simple white box manufacturing business and revolutionized it into a thriving IT company with three distinctive units, including managed services. Hear the influence his entrepreneurial parents had on him and the lessons that helped shape his approach to business. Plus, from professional baseball, to working for Xerox, and eventually joining his father in business, Justin shares riveting experiences and lessons learned from these diverse fields.
We also dive deep into the core of the successful family business, examining the importance of maintaining strong relationships while keeping family and business separate. Justin also sheds light on the value of data-driven decision making, the impact of company culture on success, and the crucial role customer retention plays in their growth. His perspectives on organic growth, finding the right fit for business expansion, and reasons for not selling their business at this point are worth paying attention to. Come along for an exciting ride into the world of entrepreneurship, as seen through the eyes of the Justin Smith.
Get an in-person rundown on what N-able has to offer including products, insights, networking and more.
The N-able Roadshow is visiting more cities than ever before in 2024. Take a look at our first group of locations; we may be in a city near you! -> http://spr.ly/6000RsTOq
'Now that's it: Stories of MSP Success,' dives into the journeys of some of the trailblazers in our industry to find out how they used their passion for technology to help turn Managed Services into the thriving sector it is today.
Every episode is packed with the valuable insights, practical strategies, and inspiring anecdotes that lead our guests to the transformative moment when they knew….. Now, that's it.
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.
And he's like well, you know, I think this would be a great opportunity and you guys can come back to Rochester and this is where your home is. And I said, yeah, you're right about that. I said maybe one day we will eventually come back to Rochester, but now it's not the day, so that was probably February. And then in March I don't know, fate would have it I lost a really good friend and it made me think about life in a little different lens. It all worked out really well at the end and we continued to pivot. I mean, we've had to pivot no less than three or four times here. Yeah, I'm sure there'll be another one.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Now that's it stories of MSP success. We'll be diving to the journeys of some of the trailblazers in our industry to find out how they used their passion for technology to help turn managed services into the thriving sector it is today.
Speaker 3:I'm Chris Massey this week on. Now that's it. Personal computers took the 80s and 90s by storm and a small white box manufacturing company in New York was riding the wave. Then, in the late 90s, that company brought on John Smith, a serial entrepreneur in the area and a consultant At the same time, john's oldest son, justin, was working for Xerox and living with his wife in Boston, perhaps in part to bring his son home together. In 1999, john and his son, justin, bought the company. Over time, john's other son, trevor, would join and Justin and Trevor would eventually buy out their father. The company also transitioned away from white box manufacturing and has grown beyond computers into three business units, including managed services. And, unlike their serial entrepreneur father, justin and Trevor have both stayed with Bright and continue to lead it nearly 25 years later.
Speaker 1:I grew up in a very entrepreneurial hang. Both of my parents were and are entrepreneurs. My mother, when I was young, owned a women's clothing, women's fashion business with her mother and a very successful business here in town, and so she was an entrepreneur and out there working actually six days a week. They were up on Saturdays, they were retail fashion shop and I remember very fondly Saturday mornings where she would go off to work and myself, my brother and sister, we would stay home with my father and we would bake pies while my mother was out actually working and that was a lot of fun. I have really fond memories of baking pies with our father and we would watch Fat Albert and he would make elbow macaroni for us. I mean, I literally I can still smell it to that.
Speaker 1:But then I started to think about it. I mean I'm not supposed to say that word cereal. It's supposed to be a negative connotation. In his case it's certainly not. He started his first business in 1979. And at last count I think we had a kind of like 22 or 23 businesses that he had started and sold and shut down and merged and acquired and all sorts of great things. Some of them were very successful, some of them not as successful as the others, but in all cases I think he put a ton of effort and hard work into all of those initiatives and that taught me a lot for sure, and really it was a foundation for me becoming an entrepreneur and lighting that fire of entrepreneurship Sure.
Speaker 3:But growing up it sounded like you had a little different plan. You were a pretty good baseball player when you were a kid. Is that true?
Speaker 1:Well, that is sort of true. I would say I was played a lot of baseball when I was growing up. I happened to have a really good mentor and my father, who was a pretty great baseball player himself, was drafted by the New York Mets in 1966 and had a career for a little while. But he taught me the game of baseball and showed me the love of the game of baseball, and I certainly continued that through my little league days and into high school and then, fortunate enough, to play in college and then play professionally in the Philadelphia Phillies organization for a little bit. It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:Certainly, kids dream come true. All kids dream at some point in time about playing baseball on a big field with people watching you, and I got to do some of that and never made it to the show, but that's okay. I met lots of great people and lots of great coaches. I still have lots of great friends from my baseball days and it treated me very, very well, so I'm very happy with it. No regrets, that's great, justin, you were a pitcher right, I was Right-handed pitcher.
Speaker 3:What was your favorite pitch?
Speaker 1:My father told me to always tell everybody fastball.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But probably my best pitch was probably my curveball. I had a pretty good curveball, fantastic. Yeah, you got to throw it hard, you know.
Speaker 3:Number one amazing congrats for being able to play D1 baseball at Villanova. That's fantastic. And then you to get a chance to play a couple years in the minors for the Phillies that's that's a fantastic accomplishment, so don't sell yourself short.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you. I was one of the lucky ones. I saw a lot of really Great, very talented guys who never got a shot, probably way more talented than I was just funny the way the game works.
Speaker 3:But yeah, so so obviously the the baseball dream ended at some point right and you had to go and find a real job and and when you were sort of figuring out what you wanted to do with the rest of your life, where what sort of came first. Was it an interest to be in involved in sort of IT, or did you have sort of an entrepreneurial sort of spirit in you early on in your career?
Speaker 1:After baseball I was working for Xerox and Boston. I got my my start in the in the world and my father all of his companies had always been IT related, so I'd had an IT sort of background. And when I got this opportunity to work at Xerox, I was Fortunate to get an opportunity to kind of work in their digital product line group. So in a chart you know, traditionally in a log light lens copier technology, they were making a transition onto this digital products World and I fit into that world better than than the copier world and so I got that opportunity to do that and Xerox was a fantastic place to Get your start in in in the world of business, just generally, regardless of what you were doing for them. They, the training programs were incredible, the people were incredible, the leadership was incredible. I just learned a ton things that today I still utilize in my daily business life. So I Was fantastic experience. But he he was again being very entrepreneurial and nature and never satisfied with sort of what he was doing. At the time. He he had an opportunity to do some consulting around this company called upstate wholesale supply, which today is bright Okay, and he was asked to do some due diligence to look at this organization. The founder of the company was looking to potentially sell the organization so he got involved in it and he asked me to get involved in it. So Fall of 1998 I helped get involved in that. I did some research for him and about the value-added reselling business, about the OEM White Box manufacturing business. You know what it's like to work with Intel and AMD and, and, just you know, do some kind of analysis with IBM and Gateway and Dell and all that stuff. So I was fortunate enough to get involved in that. At the end of the day turned over, or whatever research I had done to him in the fall of 1998 and I thought that was it was very happy at Xerox. I was married at the time. Yeah, I still am married at the time. 26 years later we're still married to the grass, great, wonderful lady and we were living our life up in Boston very, very happy.
Speaker 1:And he came back to me in like the February timeframe of 1999. I said, hey, I got a really good idea. Why don't you and I buy the company together? I said, awesome, I don't want to buy that company together. I am really happy here in Boston, stacy, my wife and I really happy here, we love it here in Boston, you know, extremely happy and he's like well, you know, I think this would be a great opportunity and you guys could come back to Rochester and you know, this is, this is where home is. And, like I said yeah, you're right about that I said maybe one day we will eventually come back to Rochester, but now it's not.
Speaker 1:So that was probably February and then in March, if he would have it, I lost a really good friend and I was in the fortune and accident and lost a really good friend and it made me think about life in a little different lens, sure, and Stacy and I started talking a little bit about this and Moving back to Rochester just sort of made more sense. We wanted to. We're thinking about starting to raise a family or start a family anyway, and we've always wanted to be closer to our family when we had kids and, and so I jumped into this Opportunity with him and we bought this company, bought upstate wholesale supply. It's a really tiny OEM white box manufacture at the time maybe 11 employees. My father, john, and I were employees 12 and 13 and the rest is history, 23 years later.
Speaker 3:So you you sort of inherited. Obviously you guys bought you and your father bought this, this business. That's a little different than starting a business from sort of the ground up. So what were some of the challenges that that you two faced as as you joined the company and obviously tried to turn it into something that you added a vision for? Well?
Speaker 1:you know, I think the first thing I'll say is I was 28 years old when we bought this company together. And when you're 28 years old, you think you know a lot and you probably know a lot. You know everything is relative, but you know very little in terms of of business and in how to run a business. And you know, the biggest challenge for me is that my father, being, you know, an entrepreneur, was Not only working up, right, but he's working on two or three other things at the same time, right. That's just the nature of who he is. It's uh-huh. It's made him, you know, very successful. And so I think he gave me probably too much autonomy at the time to run bright.
Speaker 1:And you know I made a lot of mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes at a young, 28 year old newbie entrepreneur would make, and you know some of those were were pretty significant in nature. We were a very small company at the time. You know we we weren't in positions to make, you know, significant financial mistakes and made a few of them. And you know, at the end of the day, maybe it was by his design or I'm not sure. We've never actually had that conversation. Maybe one day I'll just ask and I said, did you really? You know, you just let me go to see what would happen here and yeah, but you learn my lessons on my own or not? But yeah, definitely learned a lot of hard lessons.
Speaker 1:That's, that's tough. It was, it was really tough, but luckily I learned from all those lessons and Haven't made the same mistake for a second time ever. Made a lot of mistakes, I make them every day. Sure, I usually don't make the same mistake for a second time, which is which is good. That was the hardest piece. I think the second hardest piece is that when you Come into an organization and you're 28 years old and there's other people who've worked there for a long time, they're kind of all looking at you like, who is this? You know, rightfully. So I have no ill will towards to any of this folks. You're fantastic people and Still have one or two that are actually with us. You know, 22, 23 years later.
Speaker 1:But you know I need to kind of build my own team. It's it's tough to inherit a team. If I had to do it over again, I probably would have acted a little quicker and built my own team because it just it's really hard. It's really hard when you don't have people that are kind of all on board and Ready to jump in that foxhole with you. You know it's just, it's just tough and you got to earn it. You know, from from my perspective, I had to earn it and maybe I didn't do a good job good enough job earning it but, you know, needed to create my own team and once I created my own team, started serenity myself with. You know that different types of people that had that same vision or believed in my vision, you know we were kind of off to the Great. Yeah, it's cool.
Speaker 3:So obviously, if you could look back at at the 28 year old Justin and give yourself advice we create that team earlier is probably one of them. Is there anything else you'd tell yourself as you were buying this company at 28?
Speaker 1:Hey, buddy, it's gonna be a lot of work. Get ready to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, be exhausted and try and raise, you know, a family and be a husband and have a social life and all that stuff. Get ready, it's not easy, it's not easy and you're gonna have some moments of doubt and you know, just power through, power through him, and you know that's it essentially what I did. But I would say, just get ready. It's which was good, because I, you know, I think baseball taught me that I was never the most talented baseball player. You know, I had certainly had some talent, but I was never the most talented. But I was a really hard work and I still am a hard worker today and I I've gotten here, I think, because of a lot of hard work. My father always tells me you know the lucky year I get, you know it's, it's the hard-hard work, the luckier I get. I apologize.
Speaker 1:He's always said that, and it's so true. It's so true. How do you work a lucky year again?
Speaker 3:That's great. Yeah, so your brother joined you a few years later. I think you said, you know, four years after you and your dad bought the but the company, sure what? Why do you think it took him four years to jump on board with you guys?
Speaker 1:Well, trevor, very talented individual you know, probably could be Leading a you know fortune 500 company very successfully right now. I mean, he's just super, super talented. We probably, you know, weighed him down. To be honest with you, I'm very fortunate to have him as a business partner. But you know, he he's a couple years younger. He graduated from the University of Vermont and he wanted to move to the big city, which he did. He got a great start with Bloomberg, another you know Xerox type of organization. You gotta be feel very fortunate to get an opportunity to start with companies like that and he did, and he was very successful there. And then he got into you know software sales space down in New York City.
Speaker 1:He was sort of living that New York City life and really enjoying it and Similar to the efforts that my father made with with me and oh, by the way, mom was involved in some of these efforts too. Hey, that's gonna be a really good idea for you to come back to Rochester and do this with your father. You know, Sure, that mother's influence is really hard to ignore, right? I mean, your mom tells you something or asks you something. You kind of gotta really Think about it really hard. I gotta listen, yep, gotta listen, right?
Speaker 1:So you know, it took, took a little while for him to Sort of come on board and and and feel that heat from them. As well I was. I don't think I ever put that sort of pressure on him. Surely we were excited to have his, his talent to, to come on board, and you know, but it wasn't. We didn't have, you know, four years of conversations before he joined. He joined in 2003, 2004. We didn't have four years of conversations, probably like maybe five or six months, and say, hey, you wanna come join us and do this. So he eventually said, yeah, yeah, this makes sense.
Speaker 3:So that's great. So I got to know Trevor pretty well. In Boston he came, you guys attended one of our business transformation events and I got to know him pretty well and he's, as you mentioned, a very charismatic, passionate, energetic guy. The one thing that actually I really loved about him is he kept talking about security, security, security, security. And when I asked him about you know Bright's product set and he said we lead with security. And then when we started to talk about this a little bit, you said that was like he brought that to Bright and why do you think he was? That was so important to Trevor and obviously, how did he convince you guys that security was what we need to do?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so absolutely all the credit. He gets all the credit for getting us into the security space. So it's kind of funny like he joined us for an OEM white box manufacturer. That industry was changing. The writing was on the wall, right. We were very successful in that space. But you know, competing with the likes of Dell and Compaq and HB and IBM and all of the consolidation that was going on in the industry and businesses going out of business gateway and e-machines and other companies so well known at the time, was sort of daunting, sort of scary right. And so we saw that all happening. We saw the cost of our bomb going from $1,800 per PC down to some 1,000 overnight. We saw gross profit margin erosion and we needed, we had to diversify at least into IT services, right, and so we were starting to do that anyway.
Speaker 1:And then he, you know just, he really had this passion for protecting data and it was well beyond like just antivirus on an endpoint. It was how do we protect this data? And so it all started with full disk encryption. You know, you had these 10 gig hard drives or 20 gig hard drives that were tiny. Right now we got terabytes of little disk. He's like I think we've got an opportunity here and he did some research on the industry and this was something that was being talked about certainly at the federal government level and was kind of getting pushed down to the state government level and mandating the disk, you know, be fully encrypted so that people couldn't pop them out and steal sensitive data. And so that's how we entered into that space really protecting data at rest through full disk encryption products Started with a company called AlertSec for initially, and then AlertSec was purchased at checkpoint and then it just goes further and further and further.
Speaker 1:We went from the endpoint to the core. You know now, today it's just you know the amount of security work and the security conversations that we have, or they're just costing all day. So, which is great, and I think it's really top of mind for everybody in an organization, whether it's at the board level or the C-suite level or, you know, down through the IT organization. And, more importantly, you know the employees and the end users, the patients, if it's a healthcare organization. Or you know the financial folks that are banking with a small regional bank or whatever it is. They're concerned about their data. Now, right, they don't want it leaking all over the internet or all over the dark web, so it's a prevalent conversation.
Speaker 3:It's sort of an expected conversation. Security is now, but you guys were sort of early to market in that conversation, if I remember, and I think in our and when we were talking before, not everybody was on board immediately with we're going to lead with security. What was sort of the internal discussions about this? Obviously you've got to provide security services in your IT blend of services, but to be able to say we're going to secure your IT environment, what was that like? What was the conversations happening internally?
Speaker 1:Well, again, I think this is one of the challenges of running an organization. Right, you have a very successful component of your business that's sort of paying the bills. You're building these white boxes and it's a large portion of your revenue, 95% of your revenue, 98% of your revenue is a big part of our revenue, right? And so to start to transition into more of a services model or into a security services model or a security infrastructure model, whether it was integration, evaluating, reshalling or whatever, it was just fear of the unknown. And so you've got to take some chances. And there's been a lot of case studies out there Codex, a big one here in Rochester, new York, where they owned all this intellectual property around digital photography and they didn't capitalize on that. They didn't want to cannibalize their film business, and you can't fault those people for making these decisions. But I think that you can learn from those decisions that were made.
Speaker 1:And then Codex, at one point in time, was one of the largest companies in the world. It's not the largest company, and now they're very successful with what they do, but they're a shell of what they used to be, and that's because of the decisions that were made to not continue to look down the road and out into the future and to see what the world's going to be like. And we were fortunate. I can't say that I had this crystal ball. I can't say that I made this decision with a ton of data behind it. At the time it was just all too new. But it was exciting to us and it was something that Trevor was passionate in. And I saw that passion in him and I'm like okay, let's go do it, man, go take a chance, just like dad gave me a chance to run this business at 28. I'm like all right, you're on board, let's go. Buddy, you want to do this, let's go do it. And I know, thank goodness we did.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I always look at it as like you were diversifying your product offering to your customers. Right, Because you had this really successful business that you still have today. Right, it still feeds the top line. But you've got this other business that I've seen explosively grow in the last couple of years for you guys, and obviously the way you built your security offering, the way you built your IT managed service offering, there's a big reason for that. And so now you've got these, you got a handful of things that you can bring to your clients and you're almost a one stop shop, which I think is a really great thing. May not have felt like that years ago when you made that decision, but really important now that the world has changed the way that it has Certainly.
Speaker 1:I mean we needed to diversify our revenue streams because our nature of our business was very cyclical. Our PC business was really big in June, july and August. In September, because most of what we were selling PCs into is the education space, the institutions we're buying technology during the off months of school. So we saw this big spike in revenue and an opportunity in the summertime frame and then again towards the end of the year December, january timeframe but in between there was a lot of ups and downs and so by diversifying our revenue streams we were able to create a much more consistent revenue stream, obviously, and grow on top of that. So it all worked out really well in the end and we continue to pivot. I mean we've had to pivot no less than three or four times here and I'm sure it'll be another one. I don't know what it is right now, but I'm sure it'll be another one.
Speaker 3:It's great that you're always sort of anticipating the future. You can't predict it, but anticipating and being able to pivot, like you said, when you need to.
Speaker 1:And you need to save for a rainy day. I mean, that's the thing that I learned very early on is that you have to save for a rainy day. If you've got it all out on the line and you're highly leveraged, you can't weather any storms, whether it's catastrophic, you know, unfortunate event like 9-11 or the great recession, or pandemic. I mean you have to be positioned to weather those storms. And those storms could be a month, they could be a year, they could be three years. I mean, you just never know what they're going to be. So you need to save for a rainy day for sure and get your company well positioned to to weather those storms.
Speaker 3:While Justin and his brother were now both working full-time on bright computers, their father was more interested in other projects and Justin knew this was holding Bright back, so Justin and Trevor approached their father to start the conversation around buying him out this is this is this is tough, right?
Speaker 1:I mean, this is really tough. You have a father who has, you know, just been an incredible father to both of us our entire lives. Never missed a ballgame, never. You know who's always there, incredible, mentor, just you know, our hero, my hero, our hero, and you know, but there there, there came a time he was, you know, removing himself from the business. He was involved in some other entrepreneurial activities and maybe five or 10% of his time was being spent on Bright, where 100% of our time and focus was on Bright and we were heading in a much different direction than we were when we originally bought the company. We were transitioning out of the white box manufacturing space. We made that decision around, I think, 2007, 2008, to get out of that business. It took us until 2012 to fully transition out of the business. We built our last PC in 2012 or shortly after that, but along with that, we needed to kind of get, we just needed to make this change.
Speaker 1:A lot of times, entrepreneurs will kind of rob Peter to pay Paul right. They'll take profitability from one organization and put it towards something else they're doing, and there were times where that was happening. We were helping to fund these other entrepreneurial efforts. And it is what it is. I mean, I knew fully well that this was most likely gonna happen when I signed up. I wasn't expecting it to happen nearly immediately, but it did. And there's, bright was suffering and eventually I had had a conversation with my father and I was like, hey, listen, I think it's time Trevor and I would like to kind of work on a transition plan with you here and hopefully you'll give us some time to do that with you. And he was great. I mean, he was great, he allowed it to happen and took us a couple of years to kind of work through that process, but eventually we got to the point where we acquired his shares of the business and Trevor and I are the sole proprietors of the organization now and he's continued to be very successful with those other ventures. I think it worked for him too, cause it allowed him to like go work on that and not worry about what we were doing.
Speaker 1:We were kind of off doing fine at that point in time, but honestly it allowed us to just really rock a ship them. We had had some pretty sustained growth, but as soon as that happened we just went straight up and we were able to take, you know, that extra capital, I would say, and reinvest it back in Bright, versus reinvesting it in some of these other things that Trevor and I had nothing to do with it. We had no eventual benefit in it, and so it worked out well. That's great. So tough conversation though I fan, but you gotta have them. You gotta have them in family business. A lot of people don't have them, and that's when things go bad and I give him all, my father, all the credit in the world because he was great about it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so speaking of the family business, I mean, this is an amazing story of you and your dad, you and your brother and your dad and then you and your brother. Now, as you build this, you've run this business together as a family, a couple of different parts of the family, for a very long time. How have you done that? Without any sort of major issues, family issues, anything like that? Obviously, you're having some tough conversations in there, but how did you do that?
Speaker 1:It's all about effective communication and again, I sort of touched on this earlier. I think you have to keep family and business separate and you really have to work at that. You really do. You can get caught up in business related conversations at a family event, and that's just. We've tried not to do that. When we're together as a family, we just enjoy each other and do family related type of stuff. When we're in the office, we can talk about business.
Speaker 1:It definitely Trevor and I will be sitting, just sitting, relax in the family room or something like that, one night after some type of event and we'll have some business related conversations. Certainly, but it never impacted what happened during the day and the intention of why we were all getting together and you have to do that. And then if there's a disagreement, there's a disagreement. Trevor's called me to the carpet multiple times. I've called him to the carpet multiple times. He's probably screamed at me a few times and I probably screamed at him a few times. But you know what, at the end of the day, we really truly respect that and it's worked for us, that's worked for you. You're very few times.
Speaker 3:You only hear a few times. He only has good things to say about you behind your back. So yeah, you can be effing.
Speaker 1:Well, that's good. I mean you can have a disagreement, but the end of the day, you still need to be brothers after being business partners and that, ultimately, is the most important thing here. I mean Trevor and I talked about this very early on we are always gonna be brothers. We've been very tight since we were really little and we've always had a great relationship and that relationship, which really was forged by our parents, right, I mean like look after your brother, look after your sister. Blood's thicker than water, all that stuff I mean it's really reality with our family and nothing's gonna ever come in between us Certainly not business and so we're able to get through those conversations and move on and still be brothers. So it's just pretty cool. It's pretty cool. That's great, very fortunate. It works.
Speaker 1:Because of him, probably more so than me. You know I got involved early on in this business, four or five years before he joins the organization. A lot of blood, sweat and tears there. It was definitely a much more stable organization by the time he got there. It's become way more stable since he's gotten there. I don't wanna give myself too much credit, but the credit goes to him. He's always been great about the fact that you know we're gonna talk about things and hopefully come to consensus. But if, for some reason, we don't, he ultimately understands and he's been great about hey, you gotta make the decision. It's at the end of the day. You know, there's gotta be one general and I haven't had to do that very many times. I don't even think I can count on my hand five times that I've had to do that in our business career together, but just been a couple of times and you know, to his credit, he's the one that allows that to happen. It's great.
Speaker 3:After your dad exited, you had this explosive growth and that was sort of post-transitioning to this new service model. Right, you weren't reselling hardware and building computers anymore, you're selling managed services. How did the customers transition? Were you able to continue to maintain the same customers that you were servicing before? Were you having to go out and get new customers and, even more importantly, the ones that you did keep? Were you able to grow those customers?
Speaker 1:Certainly, it's always easier to sell to an existing customer, right Sell new products and services to existing customers. So retention has been a really big part of our success. We have had clients for, you know, the entire time that I've owned this organization. People that we acquired new, you know, 23 years ago are still clients of ours today and we're selling them something totally different than we did 23 years ago. So you know, certainly client retention has been a strategy. It has to be a strategy for any organization that wants to grow. You can't add one and lose one, add one and lose one. You need to add one and then add another, and then add another and another. And you know, of course, you know we're about to lose clients from time to time which is okay.
Speaker 1:You know that's okay. For one reason or another it just happens. But generally we've been able to do a great job of customer retention and then net new opportunities that really band what's, you know, catapulted us. You know we've created a lot of those opportunities on our own. We've also had a great deal of help and assistance from our partners. You know partners like Enable and Checkpoint and CrowdStrike and Intel I mean I could go through the whole history of everybody we've ever worked with. We've gotten some sort of assistance from them and I apologize for leaving some of you folks out, but it's not intentional, but everybody along the way has helped us for one reason or another, and I think the reason they have typically wanted to partner with us or work with us is because of our relationships.
Speaker 1:We have built some really, really strong relationships with some incredible clients that have allowed us to be in the position we're in today.
Speaker 1:They've been with us for so long and it's just really about the relationships and the multiple layers of relationships that we've created with these organizations. I have friends that I worked with many, many years ago that were directors or managers that are now CIOs or CISOs. You know they're up at the very top of the food chain in their organization and that relationship just has continued to blossom to the point where many of my clients are not just clients, they're really friends. I know them very well, I know their spouses very well, I know their kids and what they're doing, and we've attended graduation parties and 40th birthday parties and all sorts of stuff like that, because you just really build true long lasting relationships, friendships, and people like to do business with people they like, and we don't always they don't hand us anything, though We've still gotta work for it and we've gotta be the right partner, the right integrator, the right solution. They've got a duty to their employer and they do it so, but you gotta have good relationships to at least have the conversation.
Speaker 3:So, speaking of partnerships, justin, do you remember when? How did you come across the navel and what was sort of that like? Who brought enable into the business and what was that sort of like?
Speaker 1:Well, it's kind of funny here. I think it's been a long time I can't remember the exact timing but we got involved in the managed services space really because of Intel and we had a really, really strong relationship, as you can imagine, with Intel. We were building so many PCs and most of that was Intel inside a little AMD here. But Intel sort of saw the writing on the wall and was having conversations with their large OEMs, like us, and saying, hey, you start thinking about managed services, this concept of managed services, and we think it's a really good idea for you, because there's so much pricing pressure and these multinational corporations are forming and putting all this pressure on you guys and you wanna diversify your revenue stream to you for further. And we're like, okay, well, what do we do?
Speaker 1:And so we went to an event that Intel hosted and I believe it's down in maybe Orlando or some other one of those destinations, and it was great and there was a speaker there that we spent some time with who really painted this incredible IT services, managed services picture and we bought in and I believe it was surely it may have either been then or surely thereafter that we were introduced to enable and we needed a remote monitoring and management platform and we vetted a handful of those. You can remember all of them, but vetted a handful of those and we chose enable and central and we've been using that ever since. I mean we've got definitely 10, close to 15 years of use with enable.
Speaker 3:You've obviously been very involved not only in the product side of enable using our tool sets, but you've also been involved in some of the programs that we do around business transformation and operational efficiency. Can you talk a little bit about what your partners do for you to help you grow your business, sort of outside of the tool set that they're growing, things like benchmarking and such.
Speaker 1:Yeah, chris, that's been huge. I wish that we would have kind of gone through one of those transformational programs or benchmarking programs with you guys sooner. We've been a part of those. I mean, certainly the program that I went to many, many years ago with Intel involved benchmarking and looking at this, but that was so long ago, right, and the industry certainly has changed. I think when partners give their partners opportunities to kind of understand more about themselves and benchmark themselves against industry peers, it's very, very helpful and it helps build that relationship right, the relationship that we just talked about. That's also important, right. When you provide that additional value, it really pays dividends and it makes the relationship that you have with that partner that much stickier right.
Speaker 1:We're getting more than just value out of the software tool that we're using on a daily basis. We're getting this value that we can now use to make data-driven business decisions, to help improve our organization, and we've been in business for a long time. We've got a ton of data. It's really great tools. We're certainly much more sophisticated today than we were 23 years ago, and even five years ago or 10 years ago we got some really good information at our disposal on a daily basis. But going to those events, like Jackie and Trevor just went to up in Boston, it was really helpful. We've analyzed the data that we've gotten back. We've started to look at how we can better position our organization, and there's value in that and that makes us wanna do more with Enable right.
Speaker 1:When's the next one? How do we continue having these conversations? Are you gonna share this benchmarking data with us on a consistent basis? Can we tweak it a little bit to look at it? It'd be more helpful if it looked like this, or can we get a little more? Get inside of that data further? So that's really helpful and Enable does that. There's many of our partners that have done that, and then those are the ones we continue to work with for many years.
Speaker 3:That's really great. I got to know you a little bit. You talk a lot about company culture. That's really really important for you guys, and you told me a little bit about this book that you had written. It's this culture handbook. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Speaker 1:Culture's been so important. I mean, I learned that early on. And owning this business, right, you have to have the right people and you've gotta get them in the right seats on the bus. We were talking about that a little bit before, chris. But and then you need to kind of build this culture of a place where people wanna come to work, because we spend so much time working right, and I know the world's changed a little bit in the last few years.
Speaker 1:This is more of this remote work idea and hybrid work idea and so on and so forth. You know we have some of that here for sure, but the majority of our employees work in the office. They like coming here, and they like coming here because it's a fun place to work. At least that's what I'm told. I'm biased, right, so I can't sit here and say that without being somewhat biased, but people enjoy working here, and that's what I hear. I do 30 day check-ins with all of our new employees, right? They sit down and say, hey, how's the first 30 days go? What did we do well? What didn't we do well? Are you enjoying your time here? You know, don't be yes me. Tell me the truth. What's going on? We wanna get better, we wanna make this experience better for you.
Speaker 1:So culture is very important and getting that information and then making changes, and making changes quickly. One of the things that we I say all the time here is do not fear failure, fear of never getting a chance to fail. So we're gonna try stuff and if it doesn't work well, we're gonna fail fast and we'll try something different. If that doesn't work, we're gonna fail fast and then we'll try something different until we get it right. And you'll get a lot of feedback from people and from employees and we listen to that feedback and we try it and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but at least we've tried it. So you mentioned the cultural companion, our handbook. It's really, you know, it's a guide to working here at Bright and what's expected of you and about the history of Bright and where we're going, where we're heading, all the good stuff and it's not unique.
Speaker 1:Tony Shea, the fouter and previous CEO of Zappos, who eventually sold to Amazon. He was a company culture guru. He just built an incredible culture at Zappos and lots of documentation, wrote a book on creating happiness and all the good stuff in the workplace and it really resonated with me. It's something that I always wanted to do. I wanted to create a great place where people love to come to work. So we felt and still will continue to this we feel like documenting our culture. If you're serious about culture, you're documenting it. So we created this cultural companion. It's been great. Everybody gets one on day one and you know they can reference it.
Speaker 3:As part of his commitment to culture. Justin also believes in being a transparent leader, so much so that he broadcast his pay slip to the entire company.
Speaker 1:I'm a transparent leader. I really believe in leading transparently. I want people to understand how we're performing, how we're doing, I want them to be confident that they're working for a good organization, that when I tell them that I'm putting everything that we make back into the business to grow the business, to improve the lives of you know, the people here and your families, and I want them to understand that. And so I don't know, I was pulling together a sales, actual annual kickoff presentation and I had been doing some research and realized that I was probably maybe this seventh or eighth highest paid person in the organization. There was lots of other people in this organization that paid a lot more than me and they've earned it. You know, it's great, I love it. And they just thought, well, I have some fun with everybody here.
Speaker 1:So I put this. You know, I put this W2 up there and had redacted the name and the dollar numbers and we were kind of talking about dollars and cents and you know financials and P&Ls and balance sheets and what this meant. We just sort of an educational session. So I brought up the W2 and I say, hey, I want to walk through this W2 with you. Who knows what this says oh, this is W2. And you know, with this line, this, yeah, that's your gross earnings. You know, this is, yeah, this is what is pulled out of there by the government, but you know what this is? This is your net. Yep, exactly, I said pretty good number, huh, you know, everybody here would probably be pretty happy to have that.
Speaker 1:And you know, I then redacted the name. Yeah, it was mine, and I think everybody's a goalie, you know, and I just the point was that, hey, you know, yes, this is a lot of money, but there's a lot of other people here and people sitting in that room that knew they made a lot more than I did, and when I told them that I was reinvesting into this business, it was true, it's real. So people see that and, yeah, maybe I am crazy, I probably am crazy, but it, you know, cares, it didn't matter to me and it didn't really matter to them and it wasn't something like I was showing off, it was the point was hey, when I tell you that this is I'm a true transparent leader, I'm truly transparent and I think it resonated with people.
Speaker 3:So what's the future look like for Bright? I know we talk a little bit about. I'm sure you get M&A calls every day and every week and like are you looking to continue to grow? Are you looking to, you know, maybe buy some companies down the line? Is there some technical exciting stuff coming down the line that you're hoping to go for?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know we're firing on all cylinders right now, very excited to be where we are. We still have very aggressive organic growth plans. If we could find the right organization to kind of bring into the under the bright umbrella, we would do that Certainly. Culture's gotta be a fit. It's like kind of the number one thing, right? You know it's not just about the numbers and the profits and all the good stuff. It's gotta be the right fit because you spend so much time kind of pulling this thing together and building this cultural globe, right Snow globe of culture. That's gotta be number one. But you know, having said that, that's part of our growth strategy Organic growth.
Speaker 1:We've grown organically for 23 years here. It's been pretty incredible to actually be a part of and witness to some extent. If we could find the right mix, we'd love to bring somebody in on the full, but we're not interested in kind of selling the organization at all at this point. I mean just got too many other goals and objectives. Trevor and I are really competitive guys and we've got some goals and objectives that are pretty lofty and we wanna still get to those. So we got some more time here to invest in that seat for sure. Sounds good, justin.
Speaker 3:All right, I got one more question for you, so we call this Now that's it. And I wanted to ask you what's the point in your career? You've built this amazing business here in Rochester. What's the point when you realized, now that's it, like I've done it, what's that inflection point? You?
Speaker 1:know it's tough to pat yourself on the back. Great, I'm never satisfied. I said I was ultra competitive. I'm never satisfied. But you know I look back at walking in the door in May of 1999, first time, and you know, seeing, remembering that and seeing where we are today, and it's hard not to say, hey, you know you've done a pretty good job here. And I've had some private conversations with my wife a couple times and say, you know, this has been pretty good. I mean, you know it's been a lot of hard work and she's been a big part of it. You know, supporting me and taking care of three boys. You know when I had to go out on the road or do whatever or work long hours or 24 hours a day for five straight days or something like that. And you know there's times that we do sit there and say, hey, this has been pretty good. But never, never, really, this thirst is never really truly quenched and all there's. Once you achieve something, you gotta set another goal and you've gotta have, you know, some attainable goals that you and your team can get to. And then you have some really big, hairy, audacious ones right and you gotta go after those and that's what I love doing. I love, I love doing that and I've got a great team of people around me, like all these people there. They're just so great and the leadership team is fantastic and they're all on board. I mean they're energized to kind of go out there and conquer the world and we're trying to.
Speaker 1:I remember shortly after buying Bright and moving back home and running the organization and couldn't bend more than sort of a year, year and a half, stacey and I were very big Dunkin' Donuts fans. You know, every morning before we got on the tee in Boston and headed downtown to work, we'd grab a Dunkin' Donuts right down the street from our Brownstone. And I remember moving back to Rochester and there was no Dunkin' Donuts. And I said to Stacey I said I think we should start a Dunkin' Donuts franchise here in Rochester. You know there's only a handful of them. I think it would be great.
Speaker 1:And she's like no way in heck, you are gonna focus on Bright, you're gonna make that happen and you're not gonna be doing six or seven other different things at the same time. And so I have to give her credit for keeping me focused. You know you focus on this. This, you know venture and make it as successful as you can. And now, and so that's when I knew Bright was it she kind of told me Bright's it and she was right. I mean she was a hundred percent right. I mean I have put a hundred percent of my focus and effort since it growing this business, and that's that was the right thing to do, and so that's what I did. So that's when I knew it was it, Justin.
Speaker 3:I wanna thank you again for talking to me today. It was really great to hear about your amazing story and I wanna wish you and the Bright team the absolute best going forward. Thanks a bunch.
Speaker 1:Chris, thanks for having me. It's been fun having this conversation. It's great to look back and kind of reflect on and where you've been and where you're still wanting to get to. So thank you so much.
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