Creating Strong Company Culture: Andrew Hollister of SimpleTech Innovations

Launching a business as a teenager, navigating the complexities of the entrepreneurial landscape, all while learning to face and overcome significant challenges. That's exactly what our guest, Andrew Hollister, did on his unconventional journey to becoming the successful founder of SimpleTech Innovations. In our conversation, he candidly shares his compelling story, packed with lessons learned, resilience, and adaptability. 

 Andrew pinpoints this as a significant moments in his growth journey and discusses how he created a strong company culture within his own business. Intriguingly, he has developed an innovative method of culture testing during interviews, which he reveals in this episode. Andrew further emphasizes the importance of employee well-being and the benefits of allowing team members to unplug completely while on vacation.

How do businesses plan for future growth and continuous learning? For Andrew, it's all about peer groups, learning from subject matter experts, and understanding different approaches to products and services. He talks about his experiences with business, cybersecurity, and N-able events, including a memorable rain-induced Chinese food and beer order in Austin. 

A strong advocate for technology, Andrew shares his vision of protecting customer data and automation as an aid to his team. Join us for this insightful conversation with Andrew Hollister as he shares his fascinating journey and his ideas on building a successful IT service provider.

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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.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:20

One, two, three, four this week on. Now that's it. I started very early. I started very young.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Andrew Hollister, founder of SimpleTech Innovations, takes us from his humble beginnings my uncle growing up.

Speaker 1: 0:33

He had an IT job. He would just drive to the office, pick up all the computers, bring them back home, fix them there to his first job in IT, and now that led to starting a zone company as a teenager.

Speaker 1: 0:45

I went downtown I filed my DBA paperwork spent I think it was $34 to get a SimpleTech Innovations DBA filed with the county and met with the customer and that was the first SimpleTech customer. The bumps along the way. I don't think I was even 20 yet when I had the first customer carry a balance and not pay me.

Speaker 2: 1:08

And how a unique approach to culture has SimpleTech thinking big about the future.

Speaker 1: 1:12

Anybody else who's listening to this and you're dealing with burnout. That was like huge for us Figuring that out. Welcome to Now that's it Stories of MSP Success, where we dive into the journeys of some of the trailblazers in our industry to find out how they used their passion for technology to help turn managed services into the thriving sector it is today.

Speaker 3: 1:35

Andrew Hollister. You're the founder and president of SimpleTech Innovations, an IT service provider based in Rochester, New York. That's a beautiful town, by the way. Yeah, I love Rochester. Oh yeah, why don't we get right into it? So, the young Andrew Hollister, when you were a kid, you grew up just like all these other kids. Right, you like these kids. These days they're like born with a PC in their hand and gaming all that sort of stuff. You were just like that, right.

Speaker 1: 2:03

No, not a chance. Ironically, I wasn't really allowed to use the computer for various reasons. In my upbringing they thought computers weren't bad, you shouldn't have computers, whether it was a religious reason or other reasons. And so naturally, when you tell a child they can't have something or use something, that is the thing that they want to do the most, that is the thing they're drawn to, and we grew up and you know what's the best way to put it Less fortunate than most around us.

Speaker 1: 2:32

I guess, as well say. So anything we had was really secondhand. So first computer was donated, I think, by like a family member whose company had retired at like four times, so something like that. And then the second computer we got we got this really cool Windows 98 machine. It came in a beige box so I think a family member gave it to us.

Speaker 1: 2:53

My uncle growing up. He had an IT job. He worked for an ISP. He had a strange remote to work job which was remote work didn't really exist then, so he would just drive to the office, pick up all the computers, bring them back home, fix them there. So I spent a lot of time just kind of absorbing that knowledge and becoming more interested. And I remember when he showed me email you know he was just showing me dial up internet and email and wrapping my head around. The concept of that was just wild. I'm like wait, the computer needs to be like doing the same noise with the phone to get this message Like they were sending, you know, and it was. It was just so intriguing to me. I absolutely loved it.

Speaker 3: 3:38

It's neat to hear other people's upbringing and how it drastically differed from mine, and you and I are about the same age. The difference was that my dad was the math teacher in the high school, and so he was naturally the guy that was like teaching early computers, right. And so I remember when the internet was the you know dial up, you put the phone on the modem. You got exposed to that late, but you didn't let that stop you Once again.

Speaker 1: 4:04

So hungry for this, I landed my first job at RIT, rochester Institute of Technology, and got a chance to manage computers there. It really wasn't supposed to. It was supposed to be more of like a shadowing type of position and we could spend a whole day talking about the experience there. But I got the exposure to managing 20,000 machines on the network really just everything from their desktop support service to their residential side, to their networking team, to their what they called DSS at the time, which was their distributed support for all the labs on campus. I got a lot of that experience under my belt. And then I also worked for a local nonprofit Boys and Girls Club of America managing a few of their networks.

Speaker 1: 4:48

And then, yeah, one day I was just wrapping up high school, getting ready, started to apply, you know, to go to school at RIT, get into college and somebody walks through the door at one of my jobs and says hey, you know, we're looking for somebody to manage this network for a medical office. They've got two locations. They need to connect them. It's gotta be HIPAA compliant. All of this. We tried to find a solution that's just too expensive for this small office. Is this something that you think you could do. I was like, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I went downtown, I filed my DBA paperwork, spent I think it was $34 to get a SimpleTech Innovations DBA filed with the county and met with the customer and that was the first SimpleTech customer.

Speaker 3: 5:30

You saw an opportunity right there and you jumped at it.

Speaker 1: 5:33

I went for it yeah, yeah, I did, and you know it's interesting because I did become a student at RIT as well, but that didn't last nearly as long, you know, because when you go to school and you have that much industry experience, it's really hard to sit in a classroom and go through the basic courses and you're like I want to deploy a domain controller. I don't want to learn what the start menu is, you know. And so the next opportunity that really presented to myself was maybe about a year and a half later, when I was sitting down with my academic advisor and I said you know, I'm spending a lot of my go to school. I was paying for school myself, so I was the one signing the loans and I was the one taking all that debt on and counting those dollars, and I was living by myself too. And I said you know, I need to take a break from school to really evaluate what's going on. And they said, okay, I signed all the paperwork.

Speaker 1: 6:28

The next day I go back to clock in and the chrono system will punch me in and I'm like wait, what's going on? And the manager comes out. Oh well, technically, even though you worked here before you became a student, when you became a student. We converge your employment to student employment and since you took a leave of absence, you can't work here anymore. And so at that moment I was like, okay, I mean this, any student was severely underpaid right Doesn't change anywhere in any time in history. And I was like, all right, I guess I'm gonna be full-time for myself. And so at that point I went home and made the company my full-time job.

Speaker 3: 7:03

You had a bunch of challenge thrown at you at a very young age and you were trying your best. But let me ask you like what was it like getting into business at such a young age?

Speaker 1: 7:14

I mean, my goodness, this is your life now and you're a teenager still, I'll be honest, in the beginning it was awesome, right, Because I only had like four clients maybe, so I could wake up at 11 in the morning, you know, and that could be the first customer support call coming at you, you know. But that is you grow. I went through some tremendous challenges and it didn't take very long.

Speaker 1: 7:38

I mean, I don't think I was even 20 yet when I had the first customer carry a balance and not pay me, Wow, and you know we're talking about nearly $10,000 of equipment that I had purchased on their behalf, and then they just did not pay, Stopped return, like my calls, like everything, and so, of course, like I started missing car payments, you know, I couldn't pay my utility bill. You know, gas, electric, you know it was. It was terrifying and I was just like trying as hard as I could to like dig myself out of that situation. So, of course, what I do, I racked up credit card debt. I had friends, they were racking up student loans. I was racking up credit card debt, you know, and the student loan interest is a little more friendly but it locks in for a lot longer.

Speaker 1: 8:26

So so I went through some immense challenges which really changed my business practice very quickly, but I was able to rebound. You know, it took a long time to get out of that, but I reaped a lot of benefits too, having that responsibility so early in life. Really, let me push ahead. You know I bought my first house when I was 21 years old, for example, and that has led to kind of a different shoot-off entirely where I've got a real estate portfolio now as well. So you know, there were times it was absolutely terrifying. I bet.

Speaker 1: 8:59

You know, and there still is. You know there always will be Stepping into new stuff, jumping into some of the bleeding edge technology, figuring out where you're going to invest your time, your energy and your funds in this space. Every day continues to get that little, that little twinge of adrenaline and excitement, but also a little bit of terror along the way.

Speaker 3: 9:19

I bet I mean that had to mature you very quickly as a teenager when you're introduced with that type of adversity, and I'm glad to hear that obviously you were able to rebound from that. But why don't you talk a little bit about that? These first customers that you add, I mean these are like known entities, right?

Speaker 1: 9:38

I mean friends if you will, if you could use that term.

Speaker 3: 9:42

And so to have one of them not pay their bill and know that, like you're a small business, it's really, really important. I mean, what was that like for you? And obviously, that relationship going forward.

Speaker 1: 9:55

I learned just A it doesn't matter who you are, people aren't necessarily going to pay their bills, right, I mean? And that's just it. And you know, I would even venture to say if you were to survey people and say who's more likely to pay it back a stranger or a friend? You know a friend sometimes like ah, you'll understand, I'll get you next time buddy, you know like, and so sometimes strangers do pay better. But what I learned there is, you know, doesn't matter where somebody comes from, you got to have good agreements in place.

Speaker 1: 10:28

I mean, one thing that we do that I think is becoming more common, that has resulted from this and many other slow paying customers over the years is that sometimes people don't value the IT services that you're providing. It's in the background. If you're doing it right, if you're doing it how we're doing it, customers don't normally see us because things don't go wrong, and I've had to explain to people. We don't sell break fix. You know we don't sell IT services. What we sell you is uptime, and so if you're having downtime, that's not the solution I'm trying to provide you. I don't want to show up and fix your stuff. I want you to think, wow, it's still working.

Speaker 1: 11:07

And when you talk to your friends in the other spaces and they go, yeah, the IT's here again fixing something, I want the response to be like really, we never see our IT guys. So we made changes like we just auto debit our clients period, no exceptions. We don't do. I know some MSPs that kind of like get around it. They charge for a month in advance. We don't do that because we do build some usage to our clients, but we auto debit their entire balance the following month and we do it straight bank routing numbers, ach collection through our bank and that fixes 98% of that.

Speaker 3: 11:42

I love that we sell uptime. That's maybe one of the best ways that I've heard MSPs describe their managed service practice. I spent many a year at a managed service provider and I remember distinctly those conversations of we never called you this month. Why should we have to pay you? That's why you should have to pay us right. And that was such a challenge. And, matter of fact, I don't want to say it's a good problem to have, but you are doing something really well. If you are having partners say, I barely noticed you this month, and then you say is everything working all right? Did you have any issues? Was anybody complaining? And the answer's no, and it's like well, I guess it was working right. I guess you did really help us. So that's great, andrew, all right. How long did it take you to grow those four customers into something a bit more substantial?

Speaker 1: 12:29

It was about a year till I opened a physical office location hired my first employee went through a few of them for sure.

Speaker 1: 12:38

It goes back to that same thing. Not that you shouldn't hire friends right, but sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You find out great friends are not good employees and vice versa. There was so much I had to learn about hiring and that's one of the things I think we actually have down pretty good Like. Our hiring process is incredible. We bring amazing people in. We understand our company culture, we know what it is. So when we bring people in, we know what we're looking for. I think any business owner, whether an MSP or not, will tell you that they thought their problems were bad until they hired their first employee, you know. But then they realized wait, now I have to manage people and sometimes you don't have the skill set to manage people. You can be incredible at your trade or your craft, but when it comes to managing people, that's just a totally different skill set.

Speaker 3: 13:32

Was it, the management that was difficult, or were you just bringing the wrong people in? Were you looking for the wrong thing?

Speaker 1: 13:39

I would say both and I would say I started very early. I started very young. That gave me a handicap. I kind of like the way I got over the handicap was just being very entrepreneurial, in the sense that I was just very driven. I had a lot of drive, I'd find a way to make it work. I had zero business experience whatsoever. You know, I never even worked for an MSP. I started an MSP before people were really calling them MSPs. Everything was, for the most part, break fix, so I didn't have the skill set to identify the right people for sure. I had very little skill set and management. So it was a combination of both. Like, some of it was finding the right people, others of it was understanding management, how to manage expectations and, you know, sometimes just holding firm on certain things that just weren't acceptable.

Speaker 3: 14:30

So what was the business like early on, andrew, when you're trying to hire, you're trying to find this first couple employees and you're cycling through employees and you're adding new customers.

Speaker 1: 14:40

So in terms of the team, for the most part positive, Right, Because most of the people you're hiring are also your age, so it's like have a great time at work, Go out and have a good time after work and everybody, just we kind of just built this family, this camaraderie, this whole. You know, make work not like work needs to be professional, Work needs to be taken seriously, but also have people around you that you enjoy being around and the after work you don't mind still seeing those people Like go out, have, I'd say, have a beer. I wasn't old enough to have a beer yet, but you know, like you know, go out wherever we did fun stuff too, right. Like we did a customer appreciation day. We ordered like 300 donuts and had them at the office, ordered in rental slushy machines, you know. And then here's the thing, not enough people came, so everybody's just sat there and ate donuts and drank slushy all day Put on 10 pounds.

Speaker 1: 15:37

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 15:38

You're a big culture guy, right? I mean we talk a lot about that and I got to know you I think back in Austin was the first time we met and you just preach culture over and over. Why is that so important? I mean, I can tell it's a big deal.

Speaker 1: 15:50

Culture is so important for so many reasons. Culture, I think, will make or break a company. Unless you have something else, that's so much better that your culture doesn't matter. So we're a small business. Realistically we can't compete with the salaries of some of the larger companies. We just don't have big enough accounts and we're still figuring that stuff out right. So if somebody from California that has a crazy different market wants to remote hire people from Rochester which Rochester salary market is just nowhere near as high as that they can do that. They can take an employee away right away.

Speaker 1: 16:26

But if you have a culture there where people want to come to work, they love their team, they love their customers, they feel like they're with family and in a good way you know it's just playing people that they can't stay in their family. And you can still have disagreements and you can still have different perspectives and you can be open about it and you can talk and you can work with these people. And then you clock out and you feel good about the fact that you went to work and when Monday morning rolls around and you go, I can't wait to get back into work. Then some of the other stuff that small businesses struggle with. That goes away. And then, on top of that, if you have that positive culture, the way those people treat your customers is just so much better. Like, imagine you go to work and you're like I love this place and somebody calls and they're having the worst time of their day. Because that's what we deal with as MSPs. Right, when somebody's calling you, they're not typically calling you to say, hey, I had the best day ever and just wanted to let you know. You know, usually they're calling you because, like, I have this emergency. It's super, super important, I need this taken care of, like yesterday, oh my God, the sky is falling. Please help me. And if you have somebody on the other end of the phone who's like I can't stand this place, what is it? It's, oh crap, it's only Tuesday. I thought for sure it was Thursday. Oh man, it's 10 o'clock. We're not even anywhere near five. How's that person gonna react to that customer who's? And the customer may be kind of like I don't wanna say mistreating the employee, but the customer may come off really strong on the get go because they're having a bad day, right. And if your employee feels that way, how is their response gonna be Versus same scenario. But the employee's like, wow, I just love being here. I just had an amazing meeting with my team. I'm so excited about this new software. We're gonna roll out.

Speaker 1: 18:15

Customer calls in with a problem. You're answering with a smile and you're like, yeah, I'm gonna knock this out of the park, I'm gonna kill this. And I know that this customer because I've worked with them for a few times. I know that they sometimes have problem with this other thing, that maybe it's user error. You know it still falls under what we're gonna help them with. Before we get off the phone, I'm gonna double check and be like, hey, how's that issue going? Is this working out for you? Is that how to guide? I print it out and left on your desk and how to log into XYZ app. Is that working good for you? Okay, awesome, yeah. Those are just two wildly different experiences and we want the second one. We want the second one every day.

Speaker 3: 18:52

I commiserate with you on the. No one calls to just say hello. Except when I used to run a services team back in the day, I used to keep an eye on the call logs and how long these calls are taken, how long my texts are on the calls. And I looked down and I saw one of my texts that was just he was really good about like just getting through tickets, like that was his number one quality and I could tell he was having a rough morning, had a couple of bad calls and things like that. And then all of a sudden he's on this call for like 25 minutes and I'm like what's going on? Man, you're on the phone and something, and he goes hey, I'll let you know.

Speaker 3: 19:26

This customer called me just to say hello and said that they really just wanted to say hello and they just they appreciate everything that I do and it was the nicest thing that I was having such a bad day. I just needed to talk to him for like 25 minutes to get my confidence all built up and then I like I will rally. So that's great. Every once in a while in a blue moon it happens the other one too around culture, absolutely when you feel like you are making a difference. That is a huge piece to culture and I love trying to inspire technicians Thank you so much for talking with me to make sure that they understand how important their role is, even if it's just a small role.

Speaker 1: 20:04

That's the thing. At the end of the day, there's really nobody more important than your employees. Like at the end of the day, that's true because I tell you what customers they can come and go right and we actually have an incredible customer retention rate too. I think it's because of the culture you know and the employees know from day. One part of the training is listen. If you're having a bad time, let me know. If you're having a difficult customer, let me know.

Speaker 1: 20:28

We've let customers go before over just mistreating our employees, you know, and it's not just like ah, customer, you're bad, bye, goodbye. It becomes a conversation like hey, when this employee from your organization calls my team, they're mistreating them and you know we are a service provider but we still expect respect, you know, being given to our team and I know that you might be frustrated or you might have somebody who's going through a hard thing. We're not going to take it personally, but I do need you to act professionally with my team and if it gets abused, quick call. Hey, I can tell this isn't working out. You choose the next provider you want to go to.

Speaker 1: 21:04

I will make it as easy as possible. All of your passwords, your configuration, everything I'll slide over. This will be the easiest transition you ever went through in your life, and the team knows that. The team knows and understands because they've seen it happen. The money that the customer is going to bring in is not worth what you're going to spend as an organization replacing good team members. It's just not, and that was before COVID happened. Now that COVID happened, you know it's hard to find people. So if you don't treat them right, if they don't understand that they're valued personally, it's easy for them to go.

Speaker 3: 21:36

So powerful for you to establish that in your MSP early on as an employee. They know very quickly that it's not all about the money right, which obviously you're running a business and so you are there to make money but for you to be able to walk away from some revenue that you would classify as bad revenue because of the way that the customers are mistreating your employees. I think that's really powerful and I'm sure it's not like you said. Oh well, they were having a bad day and they're upset Like it's a consistent thing that's happening Exactly.

Speaker 3: 22:09

And you've had conversations and you've given them the warning and then said look, it's just not working out right.

Speaker 1: 22:15

A lot of things could be solved with a conversation. But when it becomes the same conversation over and over again, it's just like an employee you know it becomes the same deal.

Speaker 3: 22:24

Let's talk about simple tech, as you guys really started to sort of explode with your growth. What was that thing that got you over the hump? How did you transform?

Speaker 1: 22:35

I think the first step is, you know, we identified that we had company culture. It all really does kind of come back to the culture, because you start asking yourself as as an employer a small employer who's only got a handful of people on the team well, I want another Gabe, for example. Like you identify somebody on your team who's working right and you're like okay, this team member is working out great, they're doing all the right things. What makes this person or what makes this team member the ideal employee? And then you start evaluating things and you go well, we're not necessarily the same type of employer as everybody else, so what makes us as an employer, fit that type of person? And then, as we started going into it, we're like it's, it's culture, that's, that's what it is. And so we decided we'd start investing time into understanding what company culture was. You know, and I kind of laughed because right now it's almost like a. It's a hot topic, it's almost a buzzword. Company culture, I mean this was I know this is probably almost eight years ago, maybe seven or eight years ago people weren't really concerned with that. And so we really kind of like dove in. I mean, we did stuff. We heard a firm to do personality testing and all sorts of things, so we could start getting data. And then it just digging through doing some research, we found this company who would put a tremendous amount of emphasis on company culture and found their slide deck and it was, I think, over 100 slides long. I can't remember it was like 98 or maybe even like 180, something, I don't know. It's huge and it spelled out everything they were looking for. And this company, by the way, they're still around. You know some people maybe they've heard of them, maybe not, I don't know like Netflix, you know, if you look at what Netflix did, I mean they had some incredible things and I don't know if the culture is the same there. I would guess it is. They were renting out DVDs, right, and they have stepped into the streaming subscription world and they, they made it. If you look at somebody like blockbuster, for example, they didn't make it. They were around a lot longer than Netflix was.

Speaker 1: 24:42

There are many other companies. They not only adapted and moved as technology went, they created strong culture and one of the things I thought was so interesting about their emphasis on culture was that they didn't want people in their organization that didn't match their culture. And that was one of the first things, like we realized. We're like, yeah, when we bring in somebody who doesn't match our culture, things clash. You know, like people are it's not that they're not working together, but they're not working efficiently you get kind of like one person feeling kind of bad, somebody else isn't pulling their weight. You know one person's on time, the other person isn't, you know, and you start to realize that, okay, so what? What makes everybody work well together is not actually personality types, like and I know there's there's people out there that'll say you need this personality type and you match it with this, and I'm sure there's a ton of science that says that's true. For us it's much simpler than that. We, you know we're not doing that. We don't do any personality testing during our interviews. We do kind of like culture testing and maybe somebody could argue it's the same thing. I don't know.

Speaker 1: 25:52

But for example, we're a very laidback company. We do not micro manage our team. In fact, the way we do things is, most of the employees are pretty autonomous. They do what they want to do. Part of that is, I believe that if you love what you do, you will do it the best that you could. Otherwise you need some other motivator, whether that's, you know, financial stability, some cool prize, notoriety, you know, name recognition there's so many things that motivate people. But if you love what you do, if you're passionate about it, you're already going to do your best, and then all those other things you'll still get. But those are just kind of like little cherries on top. You know, that's not the driving force.

Speaker 1: 26:32

One of the first things we realized as we started looking at our successful hires we realized that and everybody knows this when I say this, everybody's gonna be like yeah, of course, we all know this there's a lot of burnout in our field. Right, like, everybody knows, there's a lot of burnout here. You know, it's crazy to me too. If you look at like fast food workers and restaurant workers, those people get treated so badly they really do. Yet our industry has a higher burnout rate than theirs, does you know? Like, just think about that for a moment.

Speaker 1: 27:00

So we started looking at that and we said, well, what's differentiating people? We realized that the staff that were most successful, they had passions outside of work that had nothing to do with technology, like Gabe. We brought up Gabe. Gabe's a rock climber. He loves rock climbing. He is not checking his phone, logging into somebody's domain controller doing remote support while he's on the cliff. It's just not happening. You know, he is out there exercising his mind and his body in a way that's totally, totally different than IT. Yeah, we've had people who were guitar players and vocalists and bands, people who are body players and prolifters. We've had people that do taxidermy in their spare time.

Speaker 1: 27:42

If you, if you can think of something that's not what you would expect in very different than IT, probably somebody in our team does it or has done it. You know, and that was one of the first things we identified is if your passion outside of work is something different than work, you're not going to burn out as easily Like you're going to have something else to take your mind off of it. And don't get me wrong, people love gaming. For sure there are people on our team that still love ripping the part of computer at home. They love gaming till four in the morning. Like, don't get me wrong, those people exist.

Speaker 1: 28:15

Like, we have an in-house full-time developer. He develops, like our web apps and stuff like that. He runs a disc golf league locally. So you know, that's his outside passion. For me it's real estate and building other businesses. Everybody has something on the team.

Speaker 1: 28:31

That was one thing that you know if I could share with anybody else who's listening to this and you're dealing with burnout, that was like huge for us figuring that out, and then that actually helps push you into a cool opportunity for culture, which is now. Not only do people have things to bring into work they're not work related but when you want to plan company events, guess what? Hey, it's such and such as turn. Show us your passion and now the whole team gets to experience that team members passion outside of work. It's not work related at all, but man, is it fun, you know, and then you guys can all just have fun together. So, like we have somebody on the team that just started skydiving and he might actually go and get his skydiving like certificate so that he can take other people on jumps, and if he does that, we will probably do a company event and take the team skydiving.

Speaker 3: 29:24

We talk about the personality assessments, the disc assessments, things like that, and several of our business transformation programs, and I know so many MSPs that love to use those to sort of say is this person going to fit? Is that person going to fit? But man, what a neat way to think of it differently. And a culture fit, a culture assessment.

Speaker 1: 29:42

And there's other simple things too right, like would I take this person to dinner with my family? That's like you don't need a disc assessment to figure that out. You spend the half an hour to an hour in the interview room and you know, are you going to invite that person over to dinner in your house and your home with your family? Or are you like I hope I don't run into this person when I go grocery shopping, you know? Like? That's an easy one, you know.

Speaker 3: 30:06

I was doing my research on you and your company, I noticed that you actually had some time running for public office. What made you want to do that.

Speaker 1: 30:15

What was that all?

Speaker 3: 30:15

about.

Speaker 1: 30:16

I think, when you enjoy making change, especially positive change that just expands into other areas of life. And I think, as small business owners, some of us are kind of like put off by inefficiency and you know I won't get too political, but government's not overly efficient, you know and small business owners feel the pain of government regulation, especially tax changes, the most and, quite honestly, government's just typically very behind in technology. So I was really motivated by wanting my community to be better, wanting my state to be better. I was planning for a family and trying to think like especially in New York, this is the conversation that happens often oh, we're going to have kids, so let's figure out what state we're going to move to. Well, I have a business here and I have friends and family that I love. I didn't want to feel like that was the answer. So I was inspired to do some politics for a few years. It was an incredible time. I got to meet so many amazing people, got to hear so many stories. So why don't we talk about enable for a minute?

Speaker 3: 31:20

So do you remember when you sort of discovered enable and how you did?

Speaker 1: 31:24

When I discovered enable, it was back when the product we're using today was actually a company called the, called Max Focus, so I think it was before they were even acquired by SolarWinds. If I recall then SolarWinds acquired them. Then somewhere along the line enable and SolarWinds split out. But I think the initial connection was by another MSP who recommended the software. I said, hey, this is why I'm using Check it out. So seven, seven years ago, I think, is when we started using what is now today enable insight.

Speaker 3: 31:59

Since then, you've continued to be an enable partner and you found out in the last year or so about the business transformation programs, the programs that Robert and I lead. What made you want to attend your first one?

Speaker 1: 32:13

It was the right time for us, an exciting time for us to continue growing the business. When you figure out enough parts of your business, you start to realize that you don't have it figured out and also you start to learn what you're missing, right? So a lot of times this is like another staff training thing, right, I draw a circle on the board and on the whiteboard and then I draw a little sliver in here to make a pie graph, and then I just draw like a slightly larger sliver in that pie graph and I say, okay, so where we're going to start is the smallest sliver here. This is what you know. The slightly larger sliver is the things that you know that you don't know, and then the whole rest of the pie, which makes up like 97% of this pie, is the things you don't know, that you don't know. And so I think we're just at that point where, as a business, we were learning more of the things we didn't know and there was a hunger for some of the new stuff that's going on too, right, like you guys doing the business of security. Well, we were doing a deep dive into cyber like at that exact time, so we were hungry for it. We knew how important it was. We're watching everything happening in the cyber insurance world along with you know, knock on wood, we've had really good security for our customers. We want to keep and maintain that reputation, and what better way to do that than partner with partners that we already had like enable to learn from you guys?

Speaker 1: 33:38

And then take a step further. You show up at an event like that and we're not just learning from you guys. You guys brought in like an incredible amount of speakers and other third party people and then we got to meet and talk with our peers too, which peer groups are incredible, and that whole situation is like really good. It's like you have subject matter experts really sharing with you the information you want, and then you can turn to somebody in your field who's actively doing it and say how's this work for you? And some people shrug their shoulders and be like I don't know, I'm not there yet either, but then there might be somebody else at the table. That's like we've been doing this for a few years.

Speaker 1: 34:14

Let me walk you through how it works for our business. And we all know, right, we all know that somebody will provide a product and some advertising in a shiny, beautiful demo and you're like that's amazing, I want that. And then you talk with your peers and they go. Well, let me tell you the real story. What's going on, and that's incredibly valuable, because that doesn't mean that whatever products being talked about isn't like good. What it means is you might need to take a different approach to understanding it. There may be some steps learned along the way and, like I said, I started my business when I was young. Right, I had to trip and stumble and fall and like bloody my nose, like every couple of weeks, to learn. When you're in a peer group, some people have already done that. You can learn from them and that's just incredibly valuable.

Speaker 3: 35:01

I loved having you guys you and Gabe both there and Austin and it was even better having you there stuck at the hotel when the storms came through and we couldn't get out of Austin and had to order a bunch of Chinese and beers. Yeah, that was good times.

Speaker 1: 35:14

I've got an incredible video to share with you guys from that rainstorm Awesome, I'll send it to you.

Speaker 3: 35:19

So why don't you talk a little bit about what the future holds for simple tech? What's next?

Speaker 1: 35:25

We're really diving into cyber. We are doing a lot more cybersecurity than we've ever done for customers. Looking at different tools, different services. We actually and this is another thing that's really important yeah, we'll plug the enable events just a little bit more right by going to those events. There are things that enable had that we didn't know enable had and we didn't even realize that we should maybe be in a different solution than able has. Just based on, like automation. We were doing like some things that we want code to do more heavy lifting for our team. Well, enable has some better products for that. So for us, one of the big things is we're actually buying more enable products, which is the great advertising for you guys, but I mean, that's just the reality.

Speaker 1: 36:13

Is we identified through some of that stuff that over the next six months, like we're gonna make some big moves with enable, but then with other service providers too. Looking at changes to things like EDR, like adding in socks, we were really surprised. We service a lot of small customers. Every single one of them has said yes to a 24 seven sock. So far that we've talked to has said yes to it and you would never think that from some of these industries that you're talking to, like some of them are obvious, right, like healthcare yeah, that makes sense. Like insurance, property casualty that makes sense. But other kind of like service based industries that you would think aren't paying attention are now paying attention. So for us, it's making sure that those customers have what they want their understanding of how important it is to protect their data. We're making sure that we're doing that. So for sure, expansion there on the cyber stuff has been huge for us, even though the last six months, I mean, it's been tremendously huge.

Speaker 1: 37:11

More events, more peer events, for sure. So you guys keep throwing events. We're gonna still keep coming and, you know, not just with enable. Obviously, we wanna see other things. That's incredibly valuable for your team and it's another great way for employees to feel valued, respected. Like you know, there's a few events coming up that you know I'm probably gonna send somebody else and they're gonna have a great time. They're gonna have a great learning experience. They're gonna bring something back to the team. It'll be their turn to shine and say, hey, this is why I learned at this event and this is how XYZ company thinks we should change things, and we're just gonna continue to grow, learn from the people around us and continue to see how the industry changes, because it's a lot. I mean we haven't dropped artificial intelligence in this conversation at all yet, no, but that's. I mean I can't go to an event without that being a huge topic of discussion and it's bringing a lot of changes for us.

Speaker 3: 38:07

Sure is All right. So you've been doing this for a long time, andrew. You were a teenager you had, when you started this company. However, many years ago, when was the point when you knew now that's it. You know, I've made it, I've done it, I'm doing the right thing?

Speaker 1: 38:22

Now, that's it. When I was able to take vacation and not have to worry about anything, and I think that that's one of the biggest things especially small MSPs, even large ones, you know can you unplug when you go on vacation? And I would say the next step to that so that's the first one, right, like you, as the owner, you can unplug when you go on vacation. There's almost like a next level to that, and this goes back to that culture caring for the employees. Can anybody else on your team do the same thing? Because if you, as the owner, can unplug and go on vacation, that's great, you know, and that's like, yeah, you've made it as a business owner, right, but as a leader, can your team do the same thing?

Speaker 1: 39:05

Because I know that there was a point where I could take vacation but Gabe couldn't, you know, and that's the thing it's like. Or if any one of us was gone, that would be problematic. Last year, gabe took three and a half, almost four weeks off to do a through hike and he's obviously taken many vacations between now and then. But to be able to say that, you know, lead engineer on your team was able to leave for almost a month with literally no cell service like, not even like airdrop service or anything Like. They're only touched to civilization as like little villages in between and things are running fine and normal and smooth like that's it. That's IT.

Speaker 3: 39:43

Well, that's great, andrew, thank you so much for your time and for talking with us today. You have quite the story of how you built your service provider and obviously your backstory is so great, so entertaining, enjoyable, and I wish you the absolute best of luck in the future.

Speaker 1: 39:59

Awesome. Thank you so much, and I always love connecting with you and I can't wait to see you at the next event. Oh, it's coming up.