Hear how Jimmy Puckett, an MSP visionary, transformed the tech landscape through the power of automation. Jimmy shares his journey, revealing how leveraging automation not only revamped his business but also set new benchmarks in the industry. Get ready to explore the impact of technology evolution and uncover the game-changing potential of automation in managed services. This episode is a must-listen for anyone in the MSP world looking to stay ahead of the curve and harness the full potential of technological innovation. Join us for an eye-opening experience with Jimmy Puckett, where determination meets groundbreaking strategy in the fast-paced tech arena.
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.
Hear how Jimmy Puckett, an MSP visionary, transformed the tech landscape through the power of automation. Jimmy shares his journey, revealing how leveraging automation not only revamped his business but also set new benchmarks in the industry. Get ready to explore the impact of technology evolution and uncover the game-changing potential of automation in managed services. This episode is a must-listen for anyone in the MSP world looking to stay ahead of the curve and harness the full potential of technological innovation. Join us for an eye-opening experience with Jimmy Puckett, where determination meets groundbreaking strategy in the fast-paced tech arena.
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.
One, two, three, four. This whole automation AI collection of tools and opportunities that are in front of us are unlike anything I think we've ever seen. I don't know that people fully embrace or understand how much the world is officially evolving and the speed at which it's going to evolve is unlike anything I think any of us have ever even seen.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Now, that's it stories of MSP success, where we dive into the journeys of some of the trailblazers in our industry to find out how they use their passion for technology to help turn managed services into the thriving sector it is today.
Speaker 3:I'm Chris Massey. On this episode of Now that's it stories of MSP success, I talk with the visionary founder of Spinning, jimmy Puckett. Today, jimmy and Spinning are leaders in integrating automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence into the business. This is due in part to Spinning's focus on standardization, which came with a powerful decision to move on from about 70% of its customers. And while big ideas and entrepreneurial spirit have always been there for Jimmy, he actually got his start with computers, designing a website for a car dealership in the 90s.
Speaker 1:And we built the first website for Jasper G and that was my introduction to building webpages. Do a lot of stuff with computers.
Speaker 2:Wow. So you ended up essentially sort of teaching a class right when you were at Mercer. How did that come about?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really pretty interesting. That summer this was back when actually bookstores had computer sections and that summer I went home and I would buy about every book that you could find in those two or three aisles of the computer section and gested about every single piece of material I could get my hands on. And Mercer at the time actually did not have a HTML web class and my college professor, this amazing, amazing guy, he let me teach that class. Mercer does not have student teachers and so they let me do that class in conjunction with him and it was really pretty wild. I had some of my fraternity brothers in the class. It was, I think some of them signed up at first thing. Oh, that's great. One of my fraternity brothers is teaching class. This will be easy, but that was a role on it. It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:That's pretty neat. So you started looking at a dial-up company, I think shortly after that, but you pivoted right to the website side.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so when I moved to Macon, at that point in time there was not a good dial-up internet. Well, there was one company and so I had gone to my aunt, had talked about potentially getting her to invest money. We started digging into what it would take to get a bank of modems and meanwhile somebody needed a website built and we said we could do that and so we charged our first customer. It was like $790 or $790. And I was like this is awesome, we officially have a business. And so we pivoted and focused actually on software development, web stuff and got rid of the idea of having all those modems in dial-up.
Speaker 2:About how long were you just sort of in the website application side of the house?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so actually still today about 20% of our business comes from a little bit of that type of work. But from about $97 to somewhere about $03, $04, we were actually like 80%, 90% web custom application development and people just kept asking us to fix their computers and at that point in time in your business any money was good money, so we would take those jobs and they just kind of kept growing. And here we are today.
Speaker 2:So they're asking you to fix your computers, and so you start to build this break fix side of the business. And then, at some point in time, what made you say this is the future, we should pivot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I was very fortunate. A person who spent my life who was an accountant, who has became a very, very close friend, and he kept poking us saying we were running a YMCA game and that we weren't really running a business, and he kept saying that we needed this thing called a neutized revenue and I had no idea what he meant. But in 2007, we were predominantly project driven and so, of course, when 2008 rolled around, we lost a lot of our project work. But we were very, very fortunate. We were just starting to get clients where we charged a fixed monthly fee. Our very first client we didn't know it was called managed services. At the time we charged $5 a PC and $25 a server, and so their fixed monthly bill for all you could eat IT services was about $230, $240. There's still a client today. There are now thousands of dollars a month, but that was our very beginning of managed services.
Speaker 2:Jimmy, tell us a little bit about sort of the beginning of the structure of the ownership of your business back when you were going through some of the changes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so various people get put in your life at a right time and you don't always understand at the time that maybe there's some trials, but they're putting your life at the right time to kind of help get things going. And so in the very, very beginning I walked up to the guy that was running the computers and computer science department. I had this idea about this dollop and I had no idea what it took. And so I thought, well, the guy that runs all the computers for computer science department, he would probably know how it takes to start a dollop company. So he was my initial partner, my co-founder. We at the time we were 50-50 business partners. That will honestly be the last time I will be 50-50 business partners with someone, but at the given time we were both there for each other in ways that we needed to be, and somewhere about 2001, 2000, I had this idea and we talked one of my fraternal brothers actually into his father in investing money in the business. And so we kind of restructured the business a little bit and I gave 5%, the other guy gave 5%, so we were 45, 45, 10. And that was structured the business from about 2001 to somewhere around 2003.
Speaker 1:I got married. I was very fortunate. I got married in 2003, had a super supportive wife Matter of fact, I wouldn't be here today without all the support she's given me, but anyhow, we'd been married I don't know six months a year, decided to go out full-time and she really encouraged that, pushed me to do that and that really, shane stayed, actually, at the university, my co-founder. He stayed at the university and I went on out and somewhere along the way our interest became kind of split and so there was a lot of tension at one point in the business Matter of fact, the point that I thought we were actually gonna shut it down. Yeah, it just didn't seem like it was gonna work out. We couldn't figure out how to unravel it, and so Shane gave me a number and he said, hey, if you'll pay me this, I'll sell you my 45. And you know, we hadn't been married about about a year.
Speaker 1:I went home that night, I told my wife what we needed to do, or what I'd like to do, and so we scrounged together all the pennies we had and came up with about 75% of what Shane wanted for his 45% of the company. So I sat down with him and I said okay, here's what I got. I can give you this much now. I'll give you this much in six months. I'll give you this much in six months. And it was about 20, 30% more than what he asked, but it was spread out over 12 months. And he goes, he said let me go home and think about it. And I said well, you gave me your number, I'm. You know what is there to think about? And he says I want to think about it.
Speaker 1:So we meet back again a couple of days later and he's like, yeah, I don't want to sell. And I'm like, yeah, I don't think you understand, like I think this has been so stressful to the relationship that we need to, we need to go about splitting something. And fortunately, my dad had actually offered to give me the rest of the cash. And so I said you initially said you want this, I've got the rest of it, let's go. I don't know, I really want to stay. This will work out.
Speaker 1:And I don't know why and I didn't even know what it was called at the time. But I said here's, here's, here's, here's plan, if I'll give you what you're asking for now or if anytime over the next 24 months, I feel you're not doing what you said you're going to do, I'll pay you half as much. And I said so. You want me to trust you. I'm asking you to trust me, and so if you don't think you really do it, then you should walk now and take the money, or you give me the power that over the next 12 months I get to say let's separate it for him.
Speaker 1:And so he thought about it and he said okay. And so I called our attorney and our attorney said yeah, you're the one who was called an option. At the time, of course, I didn't know what an option was. So we fill out the paperwork and so we went on about things and it was great for a bit, but the relationship was just too stressed and it wasn't working. So after about six months we went to lunch and we sat down and said look, I just this isn't working. And so we ended up. I ended up painting what he initially offered. I didn't exercise the option in full, and never since then I have been the primary or the principal owner of spinning.
Speaker 2:That last lunch that you had, when you sat down and said, shane, this really isn't working out, did he agree? Did he realize it wasn't working out?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, he saw it. And we've stayed pretty connected and at that point in time we were putting each other's lives because we were supposed to help each other through some stuff. And, yeah, he saw it.
Speaker 2:So not long after that, though, you hired your first employee. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And it was your waiter. Yeah, so it was about Christmas, somewhere in that 03 or 04 era, and I'm sitting out at the table with my wife and we're eating dinner and I'm telling my wife that we need to hire somebody and it was really scary for both of us, right, like this was really really a big move because, you know, I just quit my job and so the gentleman that was waiting on me had an amazing customer service, just amazing customer service. And you know, we've been very fortunate at the office. We've always hired people on their attitude, because you can teach a lot of skill but you really can't teach it to you. And so I just absolutely was blown away by this guy's attention to detail, kind of anticipating what we needed, what we wanted.
Speaker 1:And so in the middle of dinner, a proposition D-Must had said so what's your story? And he's like I'm a senior at Mercer, I'm going to be graduating in six months, and so I tell him a little bit about who we are and the fact that we were looking for somebody to join us, and so we met. He was actually about to go out of town for Christmas break, and so we met, like he's not going to meet with me before he went out of town. We met he told me how much money he's making and waiting and tips, and he said, can you pay me this much? And at the time I was like man, that's a lot of money, I don't know. But I think we can figure it out. And he says, well, I'm willing to give it a try. And so that was employee number one. He turned out to be an absolute godsend. He was very instrumental in us getting into managed services, things along those lines, and so again, it was two people put in their life and pass in their life. That just the right time.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:And he's still with you today. He's not actually he about 2019, he had an event transpired, a personal event that transpired that kind of changes the director of what he was looking for in life, and so we're still pretty close. His brother actually still works with us and does some stuff with us, but he is not with us any much.
Speaker 2:So the time you brought James on was about the time you were introduced to enable or you found out about enable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, james was one of the people that helped us find, find enable. So at the time we had we had these three ring bonders. Okay, so as the business kept growing, we we had these three ring bonders that we were doing for all these clients and so it was like a weekly checklist and so it was like did you know, check the logs, check the backups? And and so we we had a bonder for all these managed services clients and we couldn't scale it. We couldn't keep up Like we weren't really checking off everything as best as we as we wanted to, or people were having to work all weekend, and so we knew there had to be a better way. And we had hired a guy that had came from another place that said they were using this piece of software by the center of other manufacturers. So we started kind of digging into it, and so that's that's when we really started digging into the software and found, you guys, what?
Speaker 2:what were the things that you were hoping to sort of alleviate from an RMM at the time? That enabled was able to answer.
Speaker 1:I remember, I remember digging in and looking at the software and the monitoring was really intriguing to me.
Speaker 1:But the automation is what started making my mind spin, because we were thinking about all the things that we were doing and, of course, because we had the software side, we already were doing a lot of programming and doing a lot of things to do automatic deployments and stuff along those lines.
Speaker 1:And so I remember I was amazing, I was working with Mike and Frank and so we were digging in and, as we were comparing enable versus several of the tools at the time, the ability to do the things that we wanted to do from an automation perspective were just leaps and bounds beyond what everybody else had. And then, honestly, there was one or two tweaks with the software that would have made the software work better for us. And we got to sit down with some amazing product owners and we expressed those things and I could tell there was such a partnership, and so it was so crystal clear that there was not this perfect piece of software but there was a perfect partnership. And so I knew that we could sit down and talk through items and figure out what we needed to do to make each other better, and so mixing in the automation with just the commitment to the partnership is ultimately what we picked enable that's awesome.
Speaker 2:That was a long time ago 15 years ago. We really appreciate you still being with us, jimmy. That's great, and the process to pick your PSA was an interesting story as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So we actually didn't even know what a PSA was, and so in that journey, in part of the onboarding, they were asking us what PSA we were using. We're like we don't even have one. And so we started down a path with one of the major players and our data was so dirty, like so dirty, and so we spent months just getting stuff cleaned up and ready. And I can remember it was like right before Christmas break. We were supposed to go live January 1st because we were gonna switch the accounting everything essentially on the new, new software at the beginning of the year and I, about a About a week, maybe two weeks before Christmas breaks it was like early December, late December I decided, no, we're pulling the plug on this, we are absolutely gonna go a different direction. So we switched PSAs but luckily all the hard work we've done to clean up our data just made it easy to flow in and so that was the beginning of our PSA RMM. It just absolutely Let us on fire.
Speaker 2:You said you didn't know what a PSA was, but I would assume you're. You were logging incidents and people were calling in Tickets and things like that. We were just using something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we were using. We were using us a piece of software, actually called it, I believe it's called a help spot, okay, and so it was a traditional help desk system that had tickets, but none of the CRM, the accounting, none of that. That piece is a part, it was just totally 100%. Just yeah, cataloging request.
Speaker 2:I remember when we chose our first PSA as well it was. We had gone from a homegrown. Yeah it was more like a glorified Excel spreadsheet that was logging tickets Over to one of the major players that's still around today, and it was pretty, pretty game-changing for us to be able to, you know, have like, like you said, that CRM piece and project management down all those things that were important.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, yeah, we've recently changed PSAs and that was an absolute experience because you know, you've got 10, 15 years of All those little tweaks and all the little micro trainings and if you add up all that over that 10, 15 years time, that's that's a lot of work and so game. This year we pulled the plug and decided to go a different direction and it's been amazing not to mention the, the history.
Speaker 2:You've got 12, 15 years of history. Oh yeah, it's. It's really hard for the PSA to ever completely go away, but you've made a pretty significant transition to it. I mean you're oh yeah, we're very fortunate.
Speaker 1:We you know, because we have some programmers we were actually able to write a lot of software to Forklift all of our data well, and so it really gave us a big advantage of bringing over that data in a very clean manner.
Speaker 2:That's great. So you were just a few employees there, james. A few other employees there worked on the software side, but now you're 40 employees. What was that like? To move on to grow. That that's substantially in the last several years, and you know how have you been able to find the right fit. You talk a lot about the types of people that you're looking for what's that been like?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's, that's been an interesting challenge up. I'll tell a story about about first employee or first really realizing how important employees were to the business. It was actually James's wedding, and so my wife and I was down a great, beautiful place in St Samans and it was a Saturday morning and we were enjoying, you know, being able to spend some time together. And there was a project going on back at the office and some of the employees were doing it and I was just quickly adding up what money we had made that weekend and I was talking to my wife about how fortunate or how just amazing it was that here we are getting to spend some time and I was somewhat trying to apologize to you because there's a whole lot of work that takes like I'm gone a lot, so. So I don't want to come across as every Saturday morning I'm in some Ritzy hotel somewhere, but you know we were sitting there talking about how did not lift a finger that weekend and In these people at the office, these amazing people had taken this process all the way through, and that was the time I was like I think we've made it like.
Speaker 1:This is this? Is it like like we were finding a groove here that is sustainable and and all this, this, these promises that I'd made her that, hey, it'll get better. I can, you know, I can, I can back off some stuff. That was, that was the weekend that it really kind of clicked for, for me and for her, I think it wasn't just the the hiring of staff either.
Speaker 2:Your business Transformed over over those that decade a time there, and you often referred to something called the third phase of IT business. Yeah, what do you mean by that, jimmy?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I think I think I think, coming there, there's kind of these three phases that I've seen.
Speaker 1:There was this original phase where the IT guy was this mythical, almost like a like like a witch doctor to some of some extent, and and people were Amazed and and IT was this, it's kind of honestly, somewhat a necessary evil.
Speaker 1:And so we came in and we kind of just made IT work, you know, and that was a phase for a long period of time, that that tied a lot in with the, the break fix phase, and somewhere along the way Technology started becoming front and center and people almost put this technology up on a pedestal and and businesses would even use the their technology and it was like bragging rights, that their technology is better than somebody else's technology. And so we were there to make it all work. But but we're now kind of moving into this third phase where technology is blending more into the background, that it's more about supporting the users, it's more about helping the users be more efficient with the technologies, and so technology, I think, is blending into the background a lot more and our Relationships and our interactions with our clients are way more along the lines of helping their teams and helping their people leverage that technology and more of a behind-the-scenes. You just don't even know what's there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's really amazing. I mean, obviously you know MSPs are in business to to keep businesses online right. I mean uptime right now.
Speaker 2:I think that's that's important. But it's that interaction that I think makes, makes MSPs Different than just IT text that you have on staff. And so if you can build that relationship and you can talk about the evolution of technology with your, your MSP customers, and that's that's, that's next next generation, that's, that's really game-changing, pretty powerful. So, jimmy, so you scaled the business out and then you scale the business back down again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I am yeah. So in 2018 we we went through a bit of a metamorphosis where we had sold and sold and sold and we were actually getting to the point where Our reputation was starting to to get tarnished because we weren't delivering on our commitments Like we'd promised all these people, all these things, and we were so blessed with all these amazing opportunities, but all the the reasons why clients Initially picked us or went with us was starting to become overshadowed by the fact that we couldn't deliver, and so we started kind of looking at what did we need to do so that we could really get people the quality and in the interaction they deserve. And so, in In 2019, we started on this journey to really standardize our offering, and so we sat down. We said, okay, I'm, quite frankly, this was, this was the motto. It was like if, essentially, look at each client and pretend it was your, your parents business and you were gonna inherit it one day, like what would you do to set that business up to be the absolute most successful version of itself, so that, when you did get the chance to take over, it would just run? And so we came up this curated list of Exactly how we would run this because it's Tom, you know, we had, like a good antivirus and we had a better. Or you know, an EDR and we had a Good backup and we had a best, better backup. And so if you, if you take the 20 or so tools that an MSP needs to support a business and you multiply that times two or three variations, you've got 60 tools, 50, 60 tools that your, your technicians, have to keep up with. And so you become a, you know, a Jack-of-all-trades master of none.
Speaker 1:And so we sat down and we said what is the the right tool for this, what is the right tool for that? And so we put that list together and we went to every single one of our clients and we said, hey look, we love working with you. Thank you so much for all the time You've given us and all the opportunities you've given us, but we've got to move you to here. You, you've got to use these tools. Quite frankly, we want to be able to go to sleep at night.
Speaker 1:And you, picking this, this inferior version of software, we felt like we were actually enabling them. It was in, you know, we wanted to help them. It was all about customer service, but we were enabling them to actually make bad decisions, and and then if they had a problem, they would of course drag us into it and say well, why did you even let us have this lesser quality security thing? And so we put together that list and said this is what it's got to be, and we structured our pricing at a holistic model. So we now charge a flat rate per person and we include every single thing except for the business critical or the business centric applications.
Speaker 1:They're there just became a point in time that that their business interests in our business interests were not aligned and they were better Served with with a different company. And so by freeing us up and not getting drug into like all these crazy reactive things, it really gave us an opportunity to go out and find clients that we had a better fit with Internet and their network gear. We include the firewall, productivity, security, all those pieces in parts. So we we went through every client, said you got to go here, we're gonna transition here or we're gonna transition you to a new IT company. And it took us about three years to go through all of our clients, but we have about a third as many clients today as we did at the end of 2019, the beginning of 2020. So it's it's been a very interesting journey.
Speaker 2:So what did that do for you guys as a business? Obviously, you scaled back at least it appears to be the amount of revenue, but was it?
Speaker 1:no, yeah, so my team likes it when I follow up with. We've almost doubled our end user count, but it sounds a little bit more shocking to say we have a third as less customers. But we have been so blessed, like it is amazing, all, pretty much all the project revenue has turned into completely anodized, very predictable and because we got rid of a lot of the clients who who was not at the same operational maturity as we were with the business. They Don't pull us into a lot of the reactive scenarios. That was actually a massive distraction and I'm not, I'm not, I'm not knocking those those relationships, like I'm so thankful that they allowed us to have the cash and the opportunity to grow where we, where we got today. But and and so it has been it's been amazing the new customers that we've added. We're just in step with them.
Speaker 1:Our goal is to actually spend the most amount of time with the fewest amount of customers. I think sometimes we all get wrapped up in this growth, growth, growth and we grow for the sake of growing. But I think there's so much lost opportunity to generate a lot of revenue Because you're adding an amazing amount of value to a lot of these businesses and I think if people would really focus on the value they could drive to these businesses and these clients that they already have, there is so much potential upside and so much potential money that you can just make from those relationships. That is such a win-win, and so we are just Absolutely enjoying this much more intimate Relationship with these clients because we're able to really impact and drive real change in their business.
Speaker 2:I think that's really important for MSPs there's I went through that as well, jimmy All revenue was good revenue for a long, long time. Yeah, but that's not the case when you're trying to scale your business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, you look at a lot of this stuff and and my team thought I was Crazy when we started talking about getting rid of some of these these clients or transitioning in the way and it was scary. Like you're looking at, you know there goes a ten thousand dollar a month client, there goes an eight thousand dollar a month client, but but it's so much more than just that revenue, like the liability, the, the, the distractions that some of these clients would drive and, quite frankly, if they don't see the value in this more holistic perspective, their interest, interest are not really aligned and they will drag you into so many distractions. It's not even funny.
Speaker 2:When did us come into the fold for you guys?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so back in that 2019 2018 era, we actually started working with service leadership and we were doing all of this work to put all this data in the system, and it was Amazing. It was telling us all these items that we needed to be focused on and working on, but, quite frankly, I had a very young leadership team at the time and we didn't know how to execute on them. We couldn't do it like like we were so Focusing. We had all grown up so much in the business together around delivering solutions for our clients, but we did not know how to To deliver solutions internally. Couldn't do it I, and it was such a frustrating experience because we kept seeing all these amazing things that we knew we needed to get done from all this time that we were spending in service leadership, and so Paul Dippel actually started talking to us about using EOS, and so he introduced us to an amazing husband and wife implementing team. They had grown a big MSP, sold it off and gone out full time helping businesses with EOS, and so we ended up picking them.
Speaker 1:We were going to start Q1 of 2020, right, so we had the plan for the decade. We went on this amazing big family vacation in 2019 and we were going to come back destroy the next decade. So we had our first EOS meeting somewhere there about February March, when they started kind of talking about shutting a lot of things down, and so, unfortunately, we spent the first year year and a half doing EOS all virtual, but it has been so transformational in our business Like we would not be where we're at today without that framework. I tell people a lot of times that EOS is not about. There's no rocket science to it. There's no amazing trade secrets to it. It's a collection of common sense items that just gets everybody rolling in the same direction. It's been so important for our team to be able to interact with each other and do the things that we're doing.
Speaker 2:That's great. So there's this concept of right people, right seats. You have a different label for that, right.
Speaker 1:Well, so we'll be back up. So a couple of minutes ago, you had asked me about picking the right people, and how did we get where? We knew that we were adding the right people to the team. And so with EOS, they've got this concept. They call right people, right seat and it's all about aligning people with the right job inside of the business. And so, prior to us knowing what right people, right seat was, when we would do our interviews we would ask people what jerks them out of bed, like we would tell people at the end of the day, we want you doing what you would be doing even if you weren't getting paid for it.
Speaker 1:I'm very fortunate that part of this journey of growing this business is that I have been able to focus on the things that excite me the most, the things that get me going, and I've been able to surround myself with people that are able to compliment or offset the items that I'm extremely weakened Like.
Speaker 1:I cannot dot eyes, I cannot cross T's, I'm a hand waving, big idea person and the actual implementation of a follow through those items miserable at.
Speaker 1:And so with with the US, they've got the same called right people, right seat, and because we have been so intentional about who we added throughout the process and making sure that they were a fit.
Speaker 1:At the time we didn't, we didn't understand the process that we were going through, but we have really, really focused on making sure that the people that we add to the team are customer service first. You know, there's some brilliant IT people out there that don't necessarily know how to interact with with the client, and so we have looked for people that grew up in some type of customer service role, something along those lines, so that they could bring together their technology understanding, their technology experience, but also not make that customer feel like there that there's something wrong with them because they don't know how to do some setting right. And if those people knew how to do those settings, they wouldn't need us, and so that's why it was so important for us to find people that were customer service driven first and then right people right seat with the US just kind of helped us align some of those people and slightly better roles and positions in the business.
Speaker 2:Jimmy, I've gotten to know you pretty well in the last couple years, and I've heard you speak at a couple of different events and just even in conversation. We spent some time out in Prague and empower, and you're always just such a passionate person. I've heard you say this a couple of times, though, where you say you know clients need to be at the same operational maturity as you are, can you?
Speaker 1:explain that a little bit. I think when your business is at a similar point in its development that your clients are at, you're able to have conversations and understand where each other are coming at a much better level. If you have a business that is the beginning of a client, that's at the beginning of their journey and every revenue dollar is important to them, or every single thing is in that position of just scraping by or they don't know how to work on their business they're always in their business Then it's really hard to sit down and have strategic level conversations with them. If your business is at a point where you're thinking a lot of forward, a lot of strategic things, and then you've got a client that's not in that same place, then they're always being reactive, they're messing with your plans, your team. They're very accustomed to building these structures, to building these budgets, these plans. Then when you have clients that are not in that same place, then it really frustrates your team. Or the inverse, if you're just beginning of figuring out how to run your MSP but then you have these very sophisticated or very mature businesses and they're thinking about next year's budget, they're thinking about strategic initiatives and you're not able to have those conversations with them, then it'll just be a matter of time before you get replaced with somebody that is having those conversations.
Speaker 1:I think the better the alignment there. It allows you to really roam the same direction. What's also amazing about it is it gives both of them a chance to grow up together. We have businesses today that have been on the same trajectory and the same growth that we've been on. It has been so amazing. They take pride in seeing what our business has done and we take pride in seeing what they've done Together. We've been down this journey together. It has been amazing.
Speaker 2:Jimmy, I think there's probably many adjectives all positive that people would mention about you. The one that I probably hear the most is Automator. Automation is something that is always at the top of your mind. You come from a programming background. You have that side of the business, but it took you some time before you hired your first full-time automator. Talk a little bit about that and why that was important.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So that is funny, I think programmers are usually. There's a running joke that programmers are usually inherently lazy. We will spend eight hours writing some piece of software to do something that might only take 15 minutes, but we would rather spend that eight hours writing it than to do that 15 minutes of Monday and work, and so I think my classical training in programming is what really drives a lot of that.
Speaker 1:With the infrastructural automation In our business, we had everybody kind of working on automation, but it was nobody's job and because of that, it would be the thing that would get neglected. And so in 2020, when we made this decision to really streamline things and work with things, we knew we needed a full-time person who that was their job. And this was scary for us too, because at that point in time, pretty much everybody we hired was there to bill hours to a client, and so this concept of hiring a person who wasn't necessarily turning in directly billable hours, that was really scary for us, and so I think the fear of thinking about making that investment really put us off. I think that we thought that we could just kind of do it on the side, that we could just kind of hack it together. That was all that. And then, quite frankly, it's almost impossible to do the level of automation that we're doing today and what we want to do and what we need to be doing without the standardization, because it would be really frustrating. We would come up with some automation and we would start the journey of building it, but then we would realize that we had some snowflake over here for this client, and this client was a little bit different and that client was a little bit different, and so the scripts were not able to just fire and go because we had so many exceptions.
Speaker 1:And so in 2020, when we made that decision to hyper, hyper standardize our clients and to treat all clients exactly the same way one, that gave us the infrastructure that we could do the automation. And two, as we kind of looked at what was going to be happening over the next little bit, we knew we couldn't afford to not do that. And so we were able to find an amazing, amazing young gentleman, young guy that had a foot in programming, a foot in infrastructure, and he has been so instrumental. And we actually brought on our second automator about three, four months ago. He has spent the first two, three years in help desk but he likes to program and so we've got him in and he's working with our team to kind of learn some of our processes and we'll be full time in the automation team by the end of this year.
Speaker 2:Automation is obviously really important to you, but also you're continuing sort of evolution and involvement in machine learning and AI. What's you know, how are you guys continuing to? To sort of look at that and integrate that into your MSP?
Speaker 1:this whole automation AI Collection of tools and opportunities that are in front of us are unlike anything I think we've ever seen.
Speaker 1:I don't know that people fully Embrace or understand how much the world is officially evolving, and the speed at which it's going to evolve is unlike anything I think any of us have ever even seen.
Speaker 1:And and and so I'm I'm so thankful that the last several years we have spent so much time and energy standardizing our customers and standardizing our Solutions and our offerings and and getting everybody acting as if it's, if they're one large enterprise, because I Think that we're going to be able to leverage a lot of these tools inside of our business due to the fact that there is such standardization and we can use various things to Find patterns in our data, to make decisions with our data, to give clients more Accurate responses, because we have put everything in kind of a similar similar boat and a similar similar perspective.
Speaker 1:We were actually very fortunate. Right now we're running a CEO roundtable, so we're getting together about 10 local businesses, the CEOs, the C levels, and we're talking through what does it look like, how should they be doing, and we're helping them actually even put together a roadmap on things that they should be doing over the next 12 to 18 months, because I think businesses that are not figuring out how to leverage AI right now are going to be in Major trouble over the next few years. There's this amazing quote. I love it says AI will not take your job, but someone using AI will, and so I think it is so Fundamental that people are sitting down and trying to figure out how can they leverage this tool to get rid of some of the Mondaying tasks or some of the repetitive tasks in their business, so that they can give more accurate, more focused results to their clients.
Speaker 2:I've seen at firsthand what, what you've done with, with chat, gpt and Machine learning and AI, and I think you know to your point Sometimes it's not even about making it easier, it's just making it better. Yes, right, like I've seen the communications you send out to your customers that you've run through chat, gpt, it just it seems like it was done by someone that was a higher skill set than maybe it was, and and not that you don't have great People behind you, but it's just having that tool, that technology behind you fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yes, I'll tell you our first kind of, our first beginning with with AI and Several people may have heard the story we talked about in, you know, power Prague, but but our very beginning of this was just taking the summary. So you know, your clients send you those, those emails and of course the summary is computer down or you know Internet's down or or whatever, and then they would actually type the summary and we all work this board and our technicians are all looking at this long list of Items and they see very detailed you know Process, payroll and they see these ones and you know you sit there and you have to click on it, you have to open it up, you have to read it, you have to process it and you realize you're not even the right person to do this and so we all pay. We've had people that sit there and they triage the board, they read these items and they and they rewrite the summaries. About six months ago, seven months ago, we actually funneled all of the incoming requests through open AI and Ask it to write a seven to ten word summary and we resummarize every single incoming ticket. It has been so impactful to our business in helping our technicians align with the right ticket at the right time and Give us much quicker response because the right person is able to get on it, or instead of jumping over this generic title that deeply buried inside of it is some critical issue. They now know what it is, and so that was.
Speaker 1:That was the very beginning. We did that for several months. We've moved on to some way more advanced stuff with it now where we're actually Using something called embeddings and it and it takes tickets and it finds similar. So we we've we've processed the last several years of all of our clients request, and so now when a new ticket comes in, we can link that ticket to the five tickets that are most like that ticket and we can actually estimate, based off of the the historical work of the other five tickets, like what was the average time it took to respond, what were the steps that we took to process, and so it is so Fundamentally changing the, the speed at which we're able to give response to our clients. It's amazing and, matter of fact, I'd say, something that everybody should be doing right now.
Speaker 1:We had an area in our help desk where we had the resolution, but the resolution was written from the perspective of you know, giving some feedback to the client. You know, mr, mrs Client, it was great working with you. We did these things, but we were keeping it very high level and so we now have a section in our help desk which I think everybody should be doing that is Private, it doesn't go to the client, and we lay out the like five, seven Bulleted points, very technical, very. I did this, this, this and this because now, as we continue to train or use this content, as we find the most similar items, we will actually be able to have it summarize. Here are the five steps, the top five steps that you should process, and we're going to be leveraging that internal Documentation field, probably within the next six months, 12 months, because we'll have enough data in there, because right now it has to pick apart the Client-facing work versus the actual kind of tech to tech work. So I think everybody should be looking at doing something like that right now.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic, jimmy game changing for sure.
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely awesome.
Speaker 2:So what's next for spinning? What's on the horizon?
Speaker 1:our biggest next move is To figure out how to scale what we've done.
Speaker 1:We've been very, very, very blessed and very fortunate with these amazing clients and we've we've spent these last several years. I told you, you know, we our goal is to spend the most amount of time with the fewest amount of customers, and I think we have. We've mastered that with these clients. However, I know that if we can figure out how to Continue to rinse and repeat this model, we can continue to start actually building it back up and and going after growth. And so we're looking at some acquisition, but we're looking at some odds and then things that we can do to to allow us to leverage this, this framework that we've built, and and bring it to a lot more clients. And so I think that's that's our goal because, quite frankly, we're a little smaller than I would like us to be because we've invested so much in a lot of Operational items. We brought in some amazing consultants to help us out with some mods and things, and so it is. It is time to add a little bit more revenue to the business.
Speaker 2:All right. One last question, jimmy. We like to ask everybody that's on this podcast when did you know? Now, that's it.
Speaker 1:I guess I kind of alluded to that a little bit early on, but I Will never, ever forget the moment it my wife and I was off on a trip, when we were getting to spend some time, and I'd been promising her for years I'm like just, yeah, give me a little bit more patience, let me work all weekend, let me do this, let me do that. And she was so amazingly supportive and so that that weekend that we were sitting there and it was Saturday morning and there was a group of people it was finishing something for a client that I didn't have to do, didn't have to touch, that was the moment that I was like this is this? Is it like we officially have a business? This is not just two guys on a laptop. That is a legitimate business. And so that was that was when we knew we'd made it.
Speaker 2:Wow, jimmy, thank you so very much for being with us today and thank you for sharing your story with everybody. It's always great catching up with you and I look forward to talking to you again. Yeah, look forward to it, thank you.