Now That's IT: Stories of MSP Success
Now that's IT: Stories of MSP Success dives into the journeys of some of the trailblazers in the Managed Service Provider 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.
Now That's IT: Stories of MSP Success
From Help Desk to Headliner: How Tim Barton-Wines Earned the MSP Spotlight
What happens when the right product meets the right moment—and the right voice? In this episode of Now That’s IT: Stories of MSP Success, we sit down with Tim Barton-Wines, the dynamic force behind Halo PSA’s meteoric rise.
Tim shares his unexpected journey from selling vodka in a wine shop to transforming Halo from a little-known help desk tool into one of the fastest-growing PSA platforms in the MSP space. You’ll hear how Halo earned trust without private equity, how a £10 Reddit campaign helped build a global footprint, and why saying “no” to acquisition has become their boldest strategic move.
Whether you’re an MSP owner looking for the next great tool—or a leader thinking long-term about brand, culture, and independence—this episode is packed with insight on building momentum the right way.
🎧 This one’s for the builders. The believers. And the ones playing the long game.
N-able also produces Beyond the Horizon. Hosted by industry veterans, this podcast delves deep into the findings of the annual MSP Horizons Report, providing actionable insights to transform your IT business. Listen & Subscribe Wherever You Get Your Podcasts.
'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 go. It was a hell of a turnaround going from net help desk to a Formula One partner. I had a weird scenario and a weird problem that was presented to me to go and manage where we had the right product and no one knew who we were. So then, suddenly, extroverted, tim comes out the box and we have to come in like a tornado and we have to leverage the tools. We have to go and cause as much notoriety as we can and awareness to get people to understand who we are, because as soon as we knew, as soon as people saw the product, being a product-led team with technical founders, that is likely going to be the best fit and they'll be really excited to use it.
Speaker 1: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 2:Today's guest wasn't just named the CRN 2025 Channel Chiefs List. He didn't just get introduced into the Channel Partners Circle of Excellence. He's doing something far more rare in the world of msp and psa platforms he's building trust through momentum culture and the power of listening to your partners. I'm really excited today because we have tim barton wines on the now that's it podcast. Welcome, tim, nice, nice, great to be here. Thanks, ch Chris. This is going to be a lot of fun. I have been a big fan of everything you guys have done. I can't hear enough from our partners and those in the industry talking about all the great stuff, but today I want to talk a little bit about you. All right, I want to start with you a little bit, so I like to go in the way, way back machine here. Your start, while it wasn't necessarily off-brand for you, doesn't typically lead to software development. Let's talk about your alcohol sales days.
Speaker 1:I've had a weird trajectory into the space where I was working part-time at like a restaurant and then my gym buddy's cousin was opening a spirits concession in a wine shop and he was like, do you know anyone that can help sell some alcohol? And then I got a text message and I was like, yeah, I'll do that. So my first real job was a vodka salesperson and I was selling just premium alcohol in a in a wine shop to start with, and that really taught me a lot about, uh, the what it takes to take a, you know, to go from nothing into hustle. I guess it was my first real taste of hustling. And then, moving on from there, I uh had I've got a lot of friends who seem to refer me to jobs, because I had another friend who had come back from Australia after traveling after university and she was working at a local sass company in business continuity and where I live very small, like 20 20 person shop and uh, she was doing Q&A, it's like a entry-level role and she uh asked me, uh, if I wanted to come join her and I said, yeah, sure, because you know the margin on alcohol is about seven percent.
Speaker 1:It's you have to, you know, when you're 20 years old trying to make money, that's all. There's thousands of bottles of alcohol before you actually make a wage. Um, but yeah, my first ever job when I transitioned into the sas industry was, uh, the sort of the job interview was can you log into facebook? Backwards from memory, I guess that was just some sort of functions test to make sure I was, you know, normal. Yeah, I uh. My first job was Excel sheets hundreds of lines. Go here, click that, does that work? Yes, next line. And that was just my full-time job. That's great.
Speaker 2:Now. So what's interesting is that partners that don't know you uh is probably going to go. Wow, weird uh starting an alcohol sales. Those that do uh make sense. Right, they're good Now they understand. Yeah, and it that's an inside joke. So for those that, sure I mean.
Speaker 1:I mean it won't take long from listening to me to understand that I'm very irish, very extroverted. Yeah, very much a people person.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're yeah, you're a great host let's I'm a great host. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it awesome. So how did you discover halo and when did you meet Paul?
Speaker 1:That's a good question. So how did I meet Paul? How did it all start? So, to carry on from that story, doing Q&A at his little SMB business continuity firm called Vocal Limited way back when, got promoted into customer support, then into internal IT, then technical account management and then I started doing implementations. Then that company got acquired by a large, a much larger US firm and then he floated on the NASDAQ and I suddenly became employee number 2000 or whatever. And then I was.
Speaker 1:Then the cubicles came in and it got very corporate and serious. I kind of had a moment. I kind of woke up one day and I thought is this how I die? I'm just going to die in this cubicle. So I pulled myself out, went to university, started a business degree and then realized that the commitment was only like seven hours a week. I didn't need to quit my job. So then I got a bit restless, sitting around all day because the content was pretty bare, and then I thought I still had all the contacts from my alcohol days. So I actually started a company called Barton's Wines and Spirits Limited and started like a 20, whatever I was a young, 20 year old something. I was selling alcohol globally and limited success. To my point earlier about margins. And then I also picked up a part-time role for a Canadian business continuity firm who specialized in disaster recovery software, sort of emergency communications and I was doing implementations and working in the square mile of London, working with, I mean, you name it the Shard. We worked with Royal Mail, we worked with Michael Kors, some cool names and, yeah, essentially that part-time, the side hustle was growing an alcohol business.
Speaker 1:And then when I finished my degree, I thought I'd start applying to graduate roles to see what where that could land me, because I tapered off the alcohol business because of the reasons as a young 20 year old, you need to raise a lot of capital to be able to do that scale and make a good living, and that was not something I was able to do. So I went on. Indeed, you know there was a supply into, like Fujitsu and others, and there's this little ad that said graduate scheme, net help desk in Stone Market Applied to. It went down. There. I was in a three piece suit. Minds View was with Paul, the founder of Halo.
Speaker 1:Um, this is not where we were back then. This was, like you know, we're talking 2016, where it was, um, and we had a renovated pub, was the office, which is super english. Now we reflect on it all these years later. That is a. It's a funny starting point for where we are today. Um, and then, yeah, paul was in flip-flops, shorts and a t-shirt. Um, we sat down and then there was like a three hour long interview, like multiple office tours. Um, and I later found out that if paul likes you, after the first sort of 10 minutes he'll start selling halo to you. Um, and yeah, uh, from there off we went. That's how I met paul. That was my first interactions with halo.
Speaker 1:And then I um, even though I had previous experience, everyone in a graduate scheme because halo just for clarity, halo only, uh, employs graduates. If you go to, you know our job board today. If you go, look at it, there's one job and it's the halo graduate scheme and we're growing so fast. You'll come in, you'll um, wherever your strengths lie, you'll gravitate towards. So, if you're extroverted sales, if you're uh, if we can, if you're technical but can happy speaking to customers, you'll go into, uh, sort of consultancy, implementations, onboardings, and if you're just very, very technical and introverted, you'll end up probably in the, in the development team. Yeah, um, but yeah. So came in, spent 12 months on support and then onwards that journey went from there so pre-halo, psa, you come in as a support guy.
Speaker 2:Uh, which, again, when we talked about that up until this point, minus, minus the wine sales, very, very sort of introverted jobs, right, your Q&A support Support. There's some customer interaction, but not the Tim that we know today right.
Speaker 1:Yes, I've had to can this up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, bottled it up, and so pre-Halo PSA days. What was Halo like at?
Speaker 1:the time. Sure, so Halo, like at the time, was actually called NetHelp Desk, way back when. It was a Windows application and it was not the glamour, the craziness you see today. I was employee number 11. So the entire team on a Friday could fit around a table at the local pub. It was very, very small, very focused. I mean, where we were was nothing nice, it was a very how do I say this? It was a very different office and we kind of had to look around at each other and go. You know God, we need to put our heads together and get ourselves out of here, which was kind of the mentality, I guess.
Speaker 1:And what happened the transition from their help desk into Halo was Paul. I remember just like it was. Yesterday, paul came into the kitchen in the old office and he was like, do you like the other Tim? And I was like, yeah, he's all right, I've not had much interaction. And then next thing, I knew I was in a room probably half the size of this where I put up the first Halo PSA website, which we'd only taken down and changed recently. And he put up the first Halo PSA website which we'd only taken down and changed recently. And he put up the first trial and we probably did about 30% of what a PSA was meant to do and off I went. It was just me and him and one other guy, ross, who did the onboardings and that was the genesis.
Speaker 1:And the story is that Halo started in the ITSM space. So we started off as a help desk, matured into creating a full service desk, matured into creating a full ITSM, then ESM, and along the way, we had accumulated probably a few hundred MSP customers who were just using it for basic ticketing and we were kind of like you know, we took this decision, so I think it was 2017, 2018. If we should let this part of the customer base just die, or we just all focus on ITSM or we do something about it. And Dan was up for having a crack at it and he took me along the way. I guess it's probably the best way you could put it.
Speaker 2:It's fascinating to see how quickly you guys have evolved as a major player in the market. But where it started from Obviously great foundations, the ITSM product is very relevant in the Halo PSA side, but those early days it was a ticketing system.
Speaker 1:Yeah exactly, it was a ticketing system.
Speaker 1:But I guess what created that platform? I guess if you distill down why Halo has got to the position it has today, it comes down to probably the foundation that Paul the founder has laid. So if you meet Paul very technical Scottish guy, wears kilts to events and he has a funny story where he grew up in quite a poor village at the tip top of Scotland. When I say tip top of Scotland I mean he opens the front door, he looks north and there's the sea. He got a degree doing computer science and then got a graduate job at EY and he absolutely hated the culture there, where it was not how good you are, it was who you knew. And the catalyst that created Halo was actually a book called Maverick by Ricardo Semler and it's this crazy story of how a Brazilian businessman inherited a business which had very traditional corporate values, hierarchies, you know, meaningless jobs and this sort of journey where he transformed this into a very profitable business. And that message sort of resonated with Paul. It sort of aligned to all the things he thought anyway, and then he felt very emboldened to take those values and just run with them. And Paul was a very all or nothing guy and he will. He will just do it with zero compromise. So we ended up using and so, basically, basically, paul, for example, was a big believer in being privately owned. He thinks he's never going to die. He figures out where the value is, he just goes for it.
Speaker 1:So, long story short, he spent 15 years from a bedroom growing in. Well, actually, the story is that he met the other co-founder when EY was working with an MSP, and Alan, who's now retired because he's got about 25 years on pool and pool's in his mid-40s. But Alan had created an online space to store stuff for a local council back in the 90s and the project got canned canned. Alan was just a hardcore developer and he had taken this um, he had taken this offline and just started playing building it as a hobby very much, and then he started an msp. He left the council and that's how he met paul. This is about circa 2005, 2006. And Paul was like Alan, you can commercialize this. And then they came to an agreement and off Paul went. He was the sales team, the onboarding, the account management, the billing team, and it was just him for about five years, about 2011. And then he started hiring more staff and I came in at number 11.
Speaker 1:And then the real moments where it became halo as we know it today was we were quite late, if you um, to the the web app game, so we were still. You know, we're talking 2017, we're still a windows application, which is unheard of, right, um? And we had the advantage that um, meta facebook had released a, a brand new and open sourced, uh, a webframe technology called react at the time, way back when, and it was a very easy way, uh, to create modern, sparse applications over old Angular web frame tool sets. So, yeah, basically we were early adopters of that, so we actually leapfrogged the competition because we had waited so long to do it. And then we were just NetHelp Desk one platform we served everyone.
Speaker 1:We decided to focus down the marketing, so we changed our name to Halo, because the name NetHelpDesk doesn't conjure up lovely, modern software. And then we'd added acronyms to the end of the names. So you knew what you were getting into when we changed our brand. Halo had no equity. No one knew what it was. So if you had the word psa at the end, you knew what you're getting. So when we updated the name, updated the front end, it was still a bit spotty, but it's for the psa. It's the psa side of the business and the story there um, it didn't post covid 21, we just got billing into the web app. So you never, never, needed to leave the web application, uh, to do your day-to-day operations.
Speaker 1:And soon, as soon as that moment happened and the lockdown releases came off, it was me on my own for four years selling halo globally. And it was, you know, we're talking a few hundred msps a month. We were moving towards Halo at that stage and the actual catalyst of how we became known, the go-to-market strategy was. We just put Tim Bowers on Reddit for a year and said be friendly, be helpful, but don't be confrontational. And that was it. A year later, we'd built a reputation, people were telling other people and we were able to take advantage of the community spirits of the MSP space. You sure have.
Speaker 2:You guys could write a book on the marketing that you guys have put together, and we'll talk more about that in a minute. But let's go back to the sales. So selling Halo PSA this is your first sort of SaaS sales role, right?
Speaker 1:Yes, it is First one, and it didn't necessarily start off great after the first one.
Speaker 2:You want to tell that story, yeah.
Speaker 1:I'll tell that story. That's a fun bit. So I had done at this point every other role apart from sales in the software industry, in SaaS, and I was doing implementations. I was doing implementations. I asked Paul if I could do this, because the best software salespeople are technical and also extroverted. When you have those characteristics, you know you'll gravitate towards that space anyway and you'll be probably pretty good at it. So I asked Paul to do that. Paul was very reluctant and he ended up asking me to do outbound phone call SDR roles and I was calling a hundred people a day as a target and I did that for about a month and then it didn't yield many results because that sales cycle was a bit short and Paul was a bit skeptical. And then he said to me I'll never be a good salesperson, which is very funny now we look back on it, sure, together, and I then moved into that and then basically this is around right around the time of the, the carving up from NetHopDesk to Halo, and it was Tim and Tim, me and the other Tim, and then, ironically, on the other side, it was Tom and Tom.
Speaker 1:So it was Tim and Tim, me and the other Tim, and then, ironically, on the other side it was Tom and Tom. So it was Tim and Tim and Tom and Tom, itsm, psa, and off we went. And then I was. That was my first sales role and at the moment, at the time, I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what I was doing. There was no real training. I had the other Tom to help me out with some written persuasive content, but that was pretty much it. I just sort of unleashed. I guess that was a moment, to your point, where I sort of unbottled Tim and became the start of who I am today.
Speaker 2:Wow, To think back of a different Tim that didn't know what to say or how to have that conversation. Oh, that's amazing. All right, so let's talk a little bit about your go-to-market strategy. Halo PSA was was different than Halo uh, itsm. So why was that? Why was it different? How was it different? Why was that? You know, why did you go a different direction with, with the go-to-market?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the well so the so we decided whether or not we wanted to let that part of the customer base die. So not wanting to do that was the motivation. The use cases between a PSA and an ITSM slash ESM are relatively similar. We are serving either internal IT teams or external IT teams, people who are selling their IT experience, msps so the core service engine between the products is shared and then the bits around the outside include all the commercial bits, so the CRM, contracts, quotes, billing, the go-to-market strategy was different because of the audiences, of course, and the markets.
Speaker 1:So we were able to benefit from the community of the MSP space that was created way back when with Arnie Bellini and allowed us not to have to spend loads of money on marketing. So we had no money in marketing and we just put Tim Bowers on Reddit and called it good, and that yielded massive results. By the way, that was a huge ROI for us. Where on the itsm solid house it was we spent millions on white papers, google ads and had very limited success. So I mean at this. So to give you an example, at this stage in 2025, I reckon we have about a 30 brand and product awareness, so I reckon one in three of all ms know who Halo are or have heard the name, but in the ITSM space I reckon it's 2% or 3%. So we've been able to accelerate through the MSP space in terms of awareness way quicker than the ITSM space, just because of the nature of the market and it's basically due to the community aspects of the MSP industry.
Speaker 2:So most of your marketing comes from sort of that organic community interaction. But you have spent some money.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So you mentioned the F1 deal was really, really critical. That's been your key.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was a funny moment. So everyone probably now knows as far as what we are in terms of how we are related to motorsport and uh, but if anything, you know, we had the entire leadership team are technical. Uh, we are privately owned, we develop in-house and we had spent no money on marketing for 15 years and we were waiting until the product was right. And then it was right as in, like it was, we were winning. You know, the conversion rate on a first interaction was about 70%, so you'd never heard of us. You tried it. It was almost likely a great fit. And then, um, um, at that moment we were like right, now's the time, what do we do? And I got a text from paul I think it was 23 january 23 and I got you know, when you get like a horrible task from your boss and it's like how that, am I going to do this? Yeah, um, so paul would text me and he is uh, there's one sentence can you connect me to some F1 teams? And I was like, right, okay, how do you know? Because you go on their websites. There's no contact us.
Speaker 1:And after the fact, I found out that 99% of all inbound leads that they get are junk. F1 teams find their sponsors by outbound reaching and they'll decide which brands they want to work with and it typically that works best for them. So I had to do some funny stuff to figure out the right person to speak to and then getting their email address, and then I drafted a script and what I was going to say to each one. And then me and paul had a thing where I would go in the room, set the scene and would I would text Paul and he would then join. So I could you know, because when you're talking about eight figure deals with some of the top top percent of sales guys on earth, you're working F1 deals. They qualify pretty quickly, upfront, whether or not this is a good fit because the money involved is horrendous. So a month later I'd managed to contact about eight out of the 10 teams on the grid.
Speaker 1:If you want an idea or numbers of pretty fun, one Mercedes wanted, I think it was 25 million euros a year on a three year deal and you didn't get a sticker on the car. I'll probably get in trouble for saying that, but whatever, and yeah, so the numbers were, yeah crazy. I mean that was probably about 40 of our revenue at the time. So it was like, right, okay, this is um. And uh, yeah, we got really far along the way with mclaren, ferrari and aston martin. Then it became a game of who's lying, because they're all saying I will be winning soon. So me, me and Paul and the guys had to put our heads together to figure out where the best bet is. And it just felt really authentic. With McLaren, they were 10th out of 10th at the grid all the time.
Speaker 1:Alonso and Aston Martin were getting podiums suddenly and it was like you know, but it felt right, the gut was there and it felt when we were getting towards the tail end of that deal and signing stuff, um, and, by the way, uh, when you're dealing with those sort of deals, you know you have like freebies in our world, maybe like a ramp period. You have a ramp period in that world. It's like, oh, we'll fly you to Las Vegas, come to a trade track, we track, we'll spend, we'll put you in a paddock club. Those sort of interactions are just it's like it's off the scale. I've never seen anything like it. Um, but yeah, we, you know we were, we signed that deal, it. It felt like a bad thing at the time. Uh, obviously very exciting. We have to see through all the the fluff.
Speaker 1:And then me and paul drove up, uh and richard drove up to MTC McLaren's HQ. Zach Brown, the CEO of McLaren racing, was there. Ironically, when you look at the cars there's like Cisco, cisco, microsoft, google, very serious corporate gray companies and there's a local country club next to the MTC where they normally stay, because me and Paul are not from money and Halo is privately owned and we're a bit scrappy and this is like we're easily the smallest partner on that card in terms of size of employees, number of employees. But we turned up, we booked the travel lodge which is, just for everyone's record, is an entry level hotel.
Speaker 1:The police were outside, uh, knocking on one of the rooms as we left because of, uh, the sort of place we were staying. We didn't matter, we actually shared a room. It's very funny, um, and then the guys at mclaren were like, oh, where did you stay? You know, did you fly in? Did you stay at the country club? And we were kind of like, oh no, we just put the travel lodge. And then uh came on down. I've got some great photos of Paul signing his F1 deal. So it was a hell of a turnaround going from net help desk to a Formula One partner.
Speaker 2:You had to. So a gut feel is one thing right. A lot of MSPs they say, oh, we should spend this money on marketing or buy this billboard or whatever it is. I have a partner that has a billboard at one of the MLB stadiums and I saw what that cost and I say, how do you justify that? So you talked a little bit about being nervous and you weren't sure that it was right. I mean, thinking back, obviously you've spent this money. You've got to figure out was it worth it. I mean it's already been spent. But there's also the perception.
Speaker 2:So, how do you deal with that?
Speaker 1:That's a great question. Why does any company sponsor anything? Normally it's not for a good reason, or it's used for a peripheral purpose or a target. It's great. It's a great question. Msps should ask that question.
Speaker 1:So Halo had no awareness Zero and that was the most cost-effective deal to get in on an F1 car and it was more cost-effective than the others. And we use it as a very specific purpose to gain notoriety. We probably won't do it forever. We're using it to go from zero to a percentage over our next couple of years being a partner when that deal lapses, we'll see what happens use it very specifically just to go to come into a room. No one's ever seen this before.
Speaker 1:We had the idea of wearing the race suits so people could see us and be aware of us, because the likelihood is that if we get people engaged with us and they see the software, they'll realize, oh, the software is really good. Um, which was? Which was the purpose? So I had a weird. I had a weird scenario and a weird problem that was presented to me to go and manage where we had the right product and no one knew who we were.
Speaker 1:So then suddenly, extroverted, tim comes out the box and we have to come in like a tornado and we have to leverage the tools. We have to go and cause as much notoriety as we can and awareness to get people to understand who we are. Because as soon as we knew, as soon as people saw the product, being a product-led team of technical founders, that is likely going to be the best fit and they'll be really excited to use it. But yeah, it has a very specific purpose. It was the most cost-effective deal and we're not going to be doing this forever, likely. But yeah, that's a great question. That's something I would ask as well.
Speaker 2:First of all, it's done wonders. I mean, I've known you for the last several years. You come to these events. You've got your McLaren in the corner Like you've got people come into your booth even if it's just to see the car. Like you've got people come into your booth even if it's just to see the car, but you've got their attention and then he can say, oh, we have this badass psa by the way as well. And so you have that faith, you know, that confidence in what you built. It's just getting awareness right.
Speaker 1:It was that was, that was the scenario, and it's uh, you know, if you come to a halo booth, we will likely have a tv on the stand. Yeah, so we will. Literally as soon as you see the shiny McLaren, you walk towards the guys in the red race suits which are probably going to retire after this event they're getting a bit tatty now, but we have a screen. We get the product to you straight away. We want to show you the product. It's not book a demo, come down later. If you approach a Halo booth and it's off the sides, it will have tvs that we want to show you the product as soon as you come over and we know that it will be a great fit. But when you're in a room with hundreds of vendors all doing similar things, how do you stand out?
Speaker 2:and the answer, it turns out, is wear a big race suit and get an f1 deal so it's been really neat, tim uh, you guys aren't the new kids on the block, but you. There's a buzz about Halo right now that hasn't existed for really any of the vendors in the MSP space. One of the most interesting things that happened in the last year was you guys publicly came out and said we're not going to sell right, so no acquisitions, no private equity, entirely private funded. And Paul, your founder, he's taken a bold right somewhat stance by putting this out there. Why is speaking of Paul like? Can you add some context to that positioning? Where that comes from?
Speaker 1:Yes, that's a funny one. So Paul is not a big believer in private equity. Yeah, halo gets approached by every name you can think of in our space, and private equity investment firms as well, every single week.
Speaker 1:And the answer is always the same we are officially not for sale and Halo is. You know, I think. I think the best way I can describe this is Paul took a real roll of the dice because in those early days and I couldn't have done it, you know, it was dicey and there was not a lot of money, and then suddenly it wasn't right, it wasn't right, it wasn't right. And then it's right and I really feel Paul, he feels vindicated, that he took a long-term gamble and a bet and it's paid off and he's now riding the journey that he created for himself and the platform he's provided us, the rest of the team, with to go and create the world's best software company is something that's not been done elsewhere. I can't imagine another firm in our space being like let's just take a 15-year bet that we'll eventually be a good fit and most teams will start a company, go, raise some capital and off they go.
Speaker 1:Halo's entirely owned by Paul and a couple of other employees and, yeah, essentially we got to a size. I think it was 2022. And we had just won Microsoft. So Microsoft, a division of Microsoft in Seattle, had moved from Dynamics to Halo, the cloud resourcing division, and people were getting worried that we were going to get acquired, and I think it was Paul and Tim that got together and they were like, well, we're not going to do this. What would it mean if we just publicly announced that for a rolling 10-year period we're not going to be involved in anything and that's like so that's per contract. So if you sign a contract today, 10 years from that contract date, it will roll. So it feels we signed today. It means at the minimum in 2025, we're not going to do anything until 2035. That's how long term we think.
Speaker 1:And then, yeah, we announced it and it was probably one of the most positive PR releases we've ever done yeah because that sort of said to the rest of the industry you know, if you distill it down, halo and the leadership team are a bunch of technical geeks who were just building their own dream software company that they'd want to use themselves is probably the best way I'd put it. But that was a wild moment in 22 where we took that stance.
Speaker 2:So when I think about where Halo is in the spectrum of PSAs or ITSM platforms, in my opinion you've sort of caught ConnectWise, and now you have your sights on sort of ServiceNow. How has that changed your day-to-day?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a funny one. So I work with our largest teams globally. So when I started out I remember very distinctly thinking a 10-man team was a large MSP and ConnectWise felt like this huge target in the distance we're not able to reach. And I'd probably say in the last 18 months a point came where very large teams were moving from ConnectWise to Halo more often than not and I think at that point I think this is sort of late 23,. We had overtaken the maturity, uh, of functionality and connect wise. And then I would say most of my day to day now is working with some of the largest teams on earth as they mostly come up against service now um and other customer spoke platforms. So I've gone from working with smaller shops helping them get more out of their existing PSAs day to day, and I spend a lot more of my time working with enterprise clients, some of the largest on earth, which is a crazy moment for me.
Speaker 1:I'm having to really change a lot of how my talk is. It's transitioned a lot from raw functionality into strategic enterprise service techniques, which has been a fun skill set to learn and a new challenge for me. As it's meant it's not got to stay all for me. But yeah, now you know, in the ITSM space it's driven from the ITSM space. So Halo was in the ITSMm space first and it means that we are. We are out of the box, idle aligned, so we're full v4 at the moment and, uh, it means that the maturity of the service engine on the itsm side has always led the way on the psa side and there's a few interesting things. So, for example, um, it feels like we are helping msps align to itil.
Speaker 1:So if they're doing co-managed it with larger teams who demand that of their msps, it's just native out the box of halo. Something else would be as well would be the service portal, typically an afterthought in this space, I feel like from my, my lens, but in halo it's the it Halo it's because of the requirements set. That differs from MSPs. In the internal IT space. It means that the portal experience is second to none. I mean we go up against ServiceNow and win. So if you're trying to move from an omni-channel service delivery model and bring it under a single high-quality portal experience unbeatable in the space today. So there's been cool contrast like that I would say yeah.
Speaker 2:So I, as a former msp, I always felt that there was a gap. We went from connect wise to service now and I always felt like service now was a little too much, uh, a little too robust, a little too you could customize everything. Do you feel like you're filling that gap?
Speaker 1:now or are there some other things? So there's a conversation with service now versus halo. Is we'll do probably 90 something percent of idle alignments of service now for about 20 percent the cost. That's the, the raw deal, but the, um, the raw contrast. But the, the, the but the raw contrast.
Speaker 1:But the detail is the fact that Halo is so, for example, servicenow, you need to have an overhead of developers to help you manage and build and maintain this thing. Halo, because of our React framework technology, halo's setup has standardized configurations, so it means that, um, you don't need coding ability to be able to build out your halo account, and the maturity of the tool set means that it will do. If you're less, you know, unless you're, if you're north of 90 percent idle alignment required, you have those requirements. You're probably bank, and if you're not a bank or HSBC or something else or a very mature organization, why are you spending the extra? But it was an over-option. So interesting to your point is we were accelerating through the marketplace at a certain rate and we were starting to sort of plateau off. It felt like, and as we've got in the last um year or so, um, for the largest teams on earth, if you had requirements north of connect wise with the service uh model. Um, it felt like you'd either do uh, I won't mention names, but you'll do. You'll either lean on connect wise for custom development. You'd either use a bit of ConnectWise and then just custom build your own tools around it to do what you wanted it to do, or you would go and buy ServiceNow and sort of fit a square peg into a round hole.
Speaker 1:And a lot of those teams who are using ServiceNow are transitioning to Halo. Some of the largest teams on Earth are moving from ConnectWise to Halo. It just means that the velocity of the onboarding, the codeless nature, means you don't need to have a technology team to manage it and build it day to day. It gives you way more agility. It's a more modern tool set and with ServiceNow, when you bespoke create your own ServiceNow, you then have to have quite tough support requirements. So because Halo has standardized config, it means that you can pick up the phone and get someone to support you on your account tomorrow. But the teams that move from ServiceNow to Halo, they typically save north of a million a year and their service increases and they have a more modern product. So it's a real landslide. So, to answer your question, at the top end of the market it's felt underserved and it means that the largest teams on earth can use Halo over service now and increase their profitability and get a better deal at the end of the day.
Speaker 2:So, speaking of these sort of two markets, you've got these enterprise, this top end, and then you have the MSP market, which, by the way, there's some MSPs that definitely fit in that enterprise but the majority of the market are smaller teams. How is Halo going to continue to service both sides?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah that's a great question. So, because of the products constantly moving, we have an internal development team based in the UK. We have offices in Seattle, in Florida, uk and Australia. Four international offices, or four offices, 250 staff between them. Halo is. We only sell one product, we use it ourselves to run our own business and we do a release every two weeks, but a large, polished, quarterly, stable.
Speaker 1:So over that period we've matured the product and it means that as it's growing and getting more mature, we are starting to take lower enterprise use cases. So we're working with Red Bull right now, which is north of a thousand technicians, a very serious use case, very complex requirements, different world to what a small MSP would require. So the engine will handle those capabilities and it will be built out accordingly so it can do. But we spend a lot of time, um, with the out-of-box trial experience to make it as simplistic as you need it to be. So, to your point, there's probably a period, you know, it's probably a point in a journey of a, an organization, where they go from needing a single psa and sort of transitioning into best of breed. So you know, at scale, if we're interested it's not worth upsetting hundreds and hundreds of sales staff or HR staff to cat them into a single PSA solution. Because, you know, halo's CRM capability is not on par with Salesforce's for an enterprise use case, which is not a dramatic thing to say and it means that you would probably. But Halo's service engine is. It competes with the world's best. So there's actually a transition point where teams will go from PSA to ITSM and in a recent you'll see this shortly that we are dropping the acronyms off of our name. Now. We felt talking about exposure earlier. We feel that we now have the brand equity, that you just know who Halo are. So it's now usehalocom, the Halo platform, and there are use cases that can be done and it's a Lego set to build in what you want it to be. So that's the background.
Speaker 1:How do we keep it relevant for small teams? Yeah, in all honesty, they'll probably become a point where we it won't be a good fit for the smallest teams. They will. You know, using like an Atera, synchro or super ops would be a better fit. So I had someone tell me, which is a great way of thinking about this.
Speaker 1:You know you can cross a river in a battleship, but do you need to? So, but some of the work I did last year because I work quite hard with this. But you know, out of the box trial, we keep simplistic as we can to help small teams pick it up and I um, one of the reasons I won that award you mentioned at the start of this podcast was, uh, I had worked with ninja to create this bundle and offer it at scale to teams to give them one place to get those tools for teams who are just getting started, so they can skip the whole RMNPSA one tool which, once you get past a few people, you get out of maturity pretty quickly. So there's loads of initiatives. It's hard to do to take a, you know, a mona lisa and make it out of duplo sometimes so I would uh, yeah, we work hard.
Speaker 2:It will be difficult to support a scale over time, I reckon you've done a a pretty darn good job of it, so I'm sure'm sure you'll continue for as long as you can.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree, there's no plans to do that, but you need to be ready for a tool set that will be the last PSA you move to. So if you're ready for that, it's there waiting for you. We have a lot of onboarding partners. I'm doing a series. We're actually launching a hundred part series on youtube, I think later this year or next, where it's just a step-by-step onboarding onboard it yourself. So we're we're doing our best to standardize and help that as much as we can. Um, but yeah, it is. It is definitely a balance so you have been.
Speaker 2:You personally have had the last five years been an incredible run. You've been traveling the world selling halo psa. You're growing this incredible business. You're the coo now of this amazing brand. But what's next for tim barton wines? What are your goals?
Speaker 1:uh, what's my goals? I am probably the travel less. Um, we feel like we've got to this point in our journey now where the exposure is at a point we're satisfied with. I think everyone now mostly knows who Halo are. For me, what's up next? Let's talk about it. I think there's a few things that are on my mind which I'm working on right now. One of them is we want to look at our contracts again and I we're discussing internally what it would mean to create the fairest contracts on earth, like, for example, slas. If we breach an sla, you get compensation automatically applied. What would it mean if we just created the fairest contracts on earth? So that's something we're discussing in real time right now. Another thing we're looking at is compliance as a service, so I'm working quite hard to try and get that into the platform to allow teams to get into that space and facilitate it with relative ease. I'm also um announcing some stuff at the show, and you let me know if I could talk about it now. Sure, you can.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's talk about what sort of craziness I pulled together for Empower 25, which I'm hopefully you will enjoy. This is pretty happy with this one. So one of the things we did was I had a moment because I work with hundreds of our top teams every year contrasting the use cases and I can spot the gaps. So one of the things I noticed was a lot of our customers had the capability to do new startup requests but hadn't automated it. So I sat down with Alex Golden, one of our top technical guys at Halo, and I said is there a way we could create a script and ship it in Halo for free that would allow teams to pick up Halo, integrate it into CSP and achieve zero touch news data requests, which would save hundreds of hours a year for technicians? And we figured it out. We are launching that tomorrow. It's already in the trials on the website, so you can just go to our website and start the trial, hook up CSP and you've achieved it.
Speaker 1:That's number one. Number two is leading on from that because, like Enable Best of Three Partners, we're trying to work with enterprise MSPs and we're trying to be everything they need all in one space for your entire tech stack, and we've recognized that's something we're both really good at and we work very hard together to unify that experience and integrate it as much as possible to create a very seamless suite that an MSP can pick up at scale with enterprise requirements and deliver effective service better than anywhere else. Create a very seamless suite that an MSP can pick up at scale with enterprise requirements and deliver effective service better than anywhere else. So one of those things is there's two things. One of them is working with a mutual partner, roost, who is an automation platform. They've, you know, halo's runbook capability will do about 30% of what roost does. Roost is more polished and it goes way deeper than what we can do, uh, today.
Speaker 1:Um, so I got chatting. When was it? I think I had a couple drinks with the cro charlie, which is very yeah on brand, yeah, and uh, I said to him what would it mean if we, you know, brought this together and you created like a Halo automation pack in Roost as a product that a customer could come along, buy Roost, buy the Halo automation pack, bolt it into Halo. And there was sort of almost like a light bulb moment and we created we're starting out by doing off boardings so Roost in record time, I might add, which I'm dead impressed with they, um, were able to create a very intricate like multiple, like it's tens of steps within essential halo and roost to be able to have a customer fill out a request, a off-boarding request form, in the portal, in Halo's portal. It would go off into roost and it would remove everything. So zero touch off-boarding as well, and we're going to be building out a portfolio of these automations as a pack and we are announcing that partnership official partnership and it's live today and it's in the trial. So for small msps, people who are just picking up halo, there's zero touch news starters and we'll do more with that.
Speaker 1:For teams who need more and want more and have bigger requirements, we have the partnership with roost which will really cement and make. I guess what it's doing is it's taking the hardest automations out there and making it really accessible, which we're. I think that's the. The value, and then the biggest one which everyone at enable and at halo has been working really hard for the last six months on, is halo is becoming the most integrated partner with enable. So we enable from lovingly. Thank you forever.
Speaker 1:You are the first RMM on the market to create your integration from your side into Halo, because when Halo was small fry, no one wanted to deal with us, which is fair enough, so we had to create it from our side, but there's a lot of stuff and automation and endpoints in your API that we can see. So, long story short, the nCentral integration into Halo is being revamped. It has richer device data being pulled into Halo. It includes billing and it syncs more often, which is super cool. That's just a free thing that's available in about two weeks from today.
Speaker 1:We also have the N-Site integration, n-site RMM. We also have Passportal and the two new ones as well Adlumen integration, so you can take threats from Adlumen into Halo, create tickets and automate threat detection resolution at scale, and the same with C cove, which is super cool. So cove, adlumin and central have all been redone for this show. We're announcing it at this show. Um, most integrated partner. We are sort of presenting the partnership two tools that work really well together at scale. All we need in one place for your enterprise requirement.
Speaker 2:MSP. I'm looking forward to the reaction at this announcement this week and really, really exciting stuff, tim. I appreciate you sharing that on the pod and, by the time this goes out… I hope I don't get in trouble.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry in advance if I've told something I'm not meant to.
Speaker 2:We'll be great. So you are absolutely crushing it, tim. My last question, the one I always like to ask folks, and I heard a little bit of this earlier, but when did you know, tim? Now that's it.
Speaker 1:When did I know? Now, that's it there was probably. When was it? It was probably. Do you know when it was? I think it was.
Speaker 1:It was a moment post COVID, because pre COVID, net help this days, very early halo days. It was a rough ride, I think when the first few months came by after COVID and it started to pick up and I was pulling myself out of the swamp and it's it felt like the reaction was good from the msp market. People were excited to see us and I think we could boil it down uh, do you know what? You know what? I think the, the big, the. That was probably the initial moment.
Speaker 1:I would say a big moment was probably actually at empower last year when, uh, I came on stage in front of 750 people and we and we shared with them something they'd never seen before. Uh, I had old team watching. I thought do you know what? This is it? This is something that I'd be happy spending the rest of my life doing, and since then it's been more of the same. But I really think there was a jump in just quality of life and positive reaction when we actually felt like it locked in. That was the moment. It was probably, um, as an extrovert, as a attention seeker, uh, walking off stage to a round of applause and I've since. A number of those teams in the audience I didn't know at the time, one of those being impact networking, one of the joint customers up in in chicago, er Eric Alea, saw me for the first time on that stage, and there's other stories like that as well. That really felt like that was the moment, where that was it.
Speaker 2:That's awesome, tim. Tim, you guys are absolutely crushing it. I thank you so much for your partnership, your friendship, over the years. I wish you and the Halo team the absolute best in the future and thank you so much for being part of the podcast.
Speaker 1:No, I appreciate it. I think it's the first time someone's actually sat down and asked about this story, so hopefully it's a good exclusive for you.
Speaker 2:It's an interesting story and I'm glad you're able to share it, buddy. Thanks so much, jim. Thank you so much.