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
Freelancer to Founder: How Barinder Hans Built Red Rhino
What does it take to grow from a solo IT freelancer to the founder of a thriving Managed Services Provider with a 25-person team and a bold vision for the future?
In this episode of Now That’s IT: Stories of MSP Success, we sit down with Barinder Hans, founder and CEO of Red Rhino, to explore his journey from building PCs at his dining table to leading one of Canada’s most respected MSPs.
Barinder shares:
- How he transitioned from break-fix work to a fully managed services model
- The challenges of hiring his first employee after 10 years solo
- Why culture, documentation, and leadership were key to scaling
- How Red Rhino’s rebrand reflects a bigger vision for the future
- His take on AI, automation, and the next evolution of the MSP industry
Whether you're just starting your MSP journey or looking to scale with purpose, this episode is packed with insights, inspiration, and real-world lessons from someone who’s lived it.
Let us help you unlock your business's full potential.
N-able Business Transformation is Expert led and Peer informed.These valuable executive programs are tailored to provide effective guidance and a faster path to a scalable and successful business.
Book a Call with Chris Massey now to learn what Business Transformation can do for you!
'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, I think. If I really reflect on it back then I thought a lot smaller than I think now. You know, with competency, our confidence grows and with a little bit of success you're able to think a bit bigger. We think a lot bigger now and I think a lot bigger now than I would have at that time. Relationships are king. You have to serve people, you have to serve your clients, you serve your employees, you serve Red Rhino, and the rest of it falls into place. Welcome to Now. That's it.
Speaker 1: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 into the thriving sector it is today, all right, good morning.
Speaker 2:I'm excited to have the owner of Red Rhino, mr Berender Hans, here. Welcome. Welcome to the Now that's it. Podcast.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's a pleasure I tell you what. We've known each other for a long time and you've been on my list of folks to try to get here to really tell your story. I think you have an amazing story. I think you there's gonna be a lot of folks listening to this podcast that actually can relate to where you are today and where you've been over the last several years. So why don't we start off with everybody and just tell a little bit of your backstory, right Starting off? So I remember when we talked last. You've been in school for a while. You were a non-traditional student, as I like to call them, several years, right, and then you got a job working in IT, but then you said I want to do something different. Talk a little bit about those early days.
Speaker 1:While I was going to university I found a job, local computer company, worked there in the summers, took a year off, worked there, et cetera, and ultimately, even after I I graduated which I was telling you like took eight years to do my four-year degree because I ended up taking every philosophy, every arch, every other course other than my computer courses I needed to take. And when I ultimately finished I just still stayed with that company. I really liked working there and then at some point I decided that you know what I might be able to do this on my own. I'm not sure what I was thinking at that time on hindsight, but I called my wife, who I was at the time my fiance. She was in India doing wedding shopping and we were gonna get married. I'm like, hey, hon, I think.
Speaker 1:I think I'm gonna quit and try to do this for myself. And she's like is that a idea? And we were both young and dumb enough to think it was. And that's how I started freelancing. I did freelancing for quite some time. I think it was like nine years or so that I was solo freelancing and doing random things.
Speaker 2:Talk about when you were just an IT tech. What was the type of work that you were doing and what was going through your mind that you were doing and what, like what was going through your mind that that maybe instigated you saying I feel like I could do this better if I was on my own yeah, it was all break fix work.
Speaker 1:At that time it was a standard. You know, uh, computer retailer var, a lot of home-based customers and then business customers. But the home base was already drying up and getting commoditized by then, and so when I ventured off on my own in 2005, what I could see is that there was this transition towards the real need in business to have IT people be more proactive, more progressive, and that's all I knew. And also the way we were doing things wasn't always using the latest and greatest technology available to us to solve some of those problems. So I figured I could give it a try.
Speaker 1:In the early days. I would say and people ask me this question like you know, what did you dream of becoming? And things like that I think, if I really reflect on it back then, I thought a lot smaller than I think now. You know, with competency, our confidence grows and with a little bit of success, you're able to think a bit bigger. We think a lot bigger now and I think a lot bigger now than I would have at that time. I think, if you asked me back in 2005 when I started freelancing, or even the 2010 when I got more serious about it and and we started off our journey as Red Rhino, I would have said, you know, creating a small business where it can pay a few bills all right, good morning.
Speaker 2:I'm excited to have the owner of Red Rhino, mr Brenda Hans, here. How welcome. Welcome to the now that's it podcast here.
Speaker 1:That's when. So I used to the company I used to work for. The owner was always my friend and my mentor. So in 2014, I was actually able to buy his company from him because he was winding down and retiring, and so when that's how I got my first employee and a few other contracts, and from there on, that's when we really started out a second employee and a third employee. So I always want to just create a little company that could pay a few bills, and but then, you know, one foot in front of the other and, next thing, you know, our ambitions keep growing.
Speaker 2:What types of services were were you offering early on there and and what sort of clients were you servicing?
Speaker 1:A lot of break fix, a lot of break fix. We did start using RMMs from day one. We were on a PSA from day one. But all the clients were break-fix, reactive work and that was common back then. But the MSP space was in place and I would take some of those elements of hey, let's sell an essential package. I remember the first fully managed deal I got. It was one of my clients and I went and talked, went and talked to him like hey, how about we turn this into predictable revenue? Because you, I'm reading all the blogs, I'm getting excited about this MSP journey and this MSP space, what was still felt early at that time, but it probably realistically wasn't. And then I went and talked to him and I'm like here's how much we can do for you if you just pay this fixed monthly fee. And he said, yes, and it was $40 a seat, yeah, just giving it away. But I mean, a lot of us started that way that's great.
Speaker 2:So you know, early on, though, even before you started your own company, you saw the, the predictability, the proactiveness. But you start, you, you. You started the company on what you knew best, which which is break-fix and project work, and you did that sort of freelance work for a period of time. And then, at some point in time, you took a gamble and you gave something away, which is like what most of us had done at some point in time. And then how did that client, that $40 a month seat, how did that pan out? Did you realize quickly? I'm underwater on this. Did it give you enough confidence for you to continue to evolve that service offering? How did that work?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was actually a great decision, I will say. You know, sure, it was $40 a seat, but I had no overhead, I was building computers on my dining table and I had no rent, no, any other expenses, just some minimal technology expenses. And while it was cheap at the time it did give me confidence that there's an appetite for it. And then the next one you sell is at $50, the next one you sell is $60. And it just rises from there and I think I was like $75 an hour until for a very long period of time for my hourly rate and just it does give you the confidence. But what was clear at that time was people needed that proactive care which I think that need only grew with technology and the way things are. I mean, everybody knows the MSP space because cybersecurity is one of those things that over the last 10 years that risk has only grown for business. Talking to clients, the cybersecurity concerns and risk made it easier to sell, that's great Right.
Speaker 2:You just mentioned a little bit ago about your first employee. It took you 10 years to hire that first employee right. Why so long, and what was it that made you realize I got to pull the trigger and I got to bring somebody else in for some help.
Speaker 1:Yeah, going from zero to one I think is the hardest from an employee perspective. It was something I always wanted, but it's hard to selling is hard. Being an MSP that starts from nothing to grow to something I think is really challenging, and it was for me. When you have only X amount of dollars you're making, you can turn that over and give it to somebody else and, like all of us, sold shit really cheap back then, right, and you can turn it over and give it to somebody else and you have almost nothing left. It's tough to make that transition, knowing that you don't know when your next client is going to come from.
Speaker 1:I'm not a sales background kind of person. It's something that we grow into over a period of time and back then when I was looking for that first employee, you need them because I I mean, for 10 years I didn't take a vacation further than a three-hour driving distance, right, and I knew I needed somebody. But they need to be good. They almost need to be a unicorn, like we are, that can handle a lot of different things, including sales, including that upsell. Hey, this is how you solve problems. You need architect, but you also be able to crawl under desks and install computers and printers.
Speaker 1:It's tough to find that first person, it's tough to have enough revenue for that person. But when I did take over that existing client base from my friend, that's when we could afford to have that first employee and then soon after that second employee as well. And I'm proud to say that that first employee stuck with us for the majority of Red Rhino's life, up until about two years ago. And employee number two is still with us and he's head of our professional services now, that's fantastic, Berndur.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about building that team out. Right, you just mentioned you hired number one, number two you're quite a bit larger than that. Now what have been those sort of? What have been the biggest challenges, or what was the biggest challenge building that team out?
Speaker 1:Sales is always the number one challenge and I think we still struggle with that A lot better at it now we have a sales team, but most of our journey as Red Rhino, the growth, has come organically from word of mouth and referrals and it's worked only because we've provided good service and we haven't bled out, as we pick up new contracts bled out clients due to poor service. We've been able to have a very high retention rate. Almost all our clients stay with us forever. I mean we currently have clients that were with me and our largest client even was with me when I was a solopreneur, you know back in the early, you know in the 2000s, right or mid 2000s. So the ability to retain clients, I think, has come from. I remember when we got our documentation platform, it Glue. It was like outstanding for us to be able to document things and be process driven, and having the process in place allowed us to train team members, hire new people and give them that toolkit to say, hey, this is how you onboard your first two weeks, your first month, this is where we're going to start. You train you, and then we're able to retain those people in our company because they grow.
Speaker 1:Everybody wants to grow. Growth is part of our core values as a company. I'm in this only to learn. To be honest, right, I love learning, I love talking to people, I love the bar conversations at these events, because everybody has something to share and something to grow and learn. It's baked into our core culture and so when we hire people, we think about that growth, that journey for that individual. Put them on that roadmap of growth now, which is a bit more mature, but even back then we have to give them the tool sets, the ability to build new skills, and then they stay with us for a long period of time.
Speaker 2:This one makes me chuckle because I remember early in the, not even that long ago, but your org design right, your org chart has evolved over the years. Talk about how that. You know what's happened. What that, what's that? What does that look like?
Speaker 1:I've been spoiled. I've been spoiled in my life with all the people we have in both my personal life and work life and employees, with all the people we have in both my personal life and work life and employees. We always hired really good people, really smart people, and people think about management that we must be good managers. I'm the anti-manager, I don't micromanage, I just we got lucky with hiring good people. You give them a bunch of tasks and they do a great job. So I was able to mostly get away with having no management or middle management, no leaders at all, except if somebody had a question, they came to me, talked to me, we solved it together and away you go. But now we're at what? 25 people and I probably should have done this a lot earlier and in fact it was my peer group members here through Enable that really encouraged me to get a leadership team in place.
Speaker 1:So we took a look at all the people we had and a few of them got some additional roles and so in December no, in in the fall of 2024 we finally established a leadership team, because it was pretty much just me and a very flat structure. Now we have team leads and and departmental leads. We hired a coach to lead us through that journey. It's probably been one of the best decisions we've made. So, while we were lucky to have very good people that got us this far, now those same people are now getting additional responsibility. They get another opportunity to grow, just like I had an opportunity to grow. So, um, yeah, we're at this point exciting point in our journey where now it's not just me thinking about the business, thinking about the growth where we can get to. There's a lot of other individuals in the organization thinking about it, so it makes for a much more exciting journey.
Speaker 2:You talked about bringing that. Building that leadership team was one of the biggest inflection points on Red Rhino and you mentioned a couple of things that it's done for sort of the individuals, but how about for the business? What was sort of the state of the business pre-leadership team? And then how has that business evolved? What sort of the operations look like and the efficiency, everything like that?
Speaker 1:yeah, so um, when it comes to having a service manager and we did have a service manager for quite some time um, the ability for people to be able to come up with solutions that don't require my input and they're able to execute on it is so exciting to just watch.
Speaker 1:We just had our state of the company last week, so we have this annual state of the company where we review how the last year went and where we're going, and now in December, when we had our annual planning session, it wasn't just me coming up with what our new BHAG is going to be, what our new vision is going to be for the company.
Speaker 1:There's seven of us gathered around that table thinking of what that vision is going to be. It makes for a more fleshed out vision, a more achievable vision, but in some ways more ambitious than I might have come up with myself. And so, then, I'm so proud in our state of the company that I just had 15 minutes of talking time. The other 45 are other people who are sharing the vision in their departments and what they accomplished in the company over the last year. It gives other people, I think, the opportunity to think big as well, which didn't exist before because it was just the Brinder show and so now it's really a Red Rhino as a team show and it's a big inflection point for that team.
Speaker 2:The state of the company. That's interesting. I've never heard you call it that before. I've seen teams do things like sales kickoffs or sort of a town hall or whatever, but I'm sure there's a lot of folks listening that don't have something like that in place. Can you talk about just the impact that something like that was? Where did that come from? Why did you want to have this big sort of session of sharing? And then what has that done for the company?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we started this, I think, back in 2020 or 2021, about five years ago is when we had our first day of the company and it was really kind of like necessity is the mother of invention. I had, you know, you think about where the company can go and I started to think bigger for where the company could go and I really needed a place where I could share that vision but have an all-hands meeting where it's about that vision and to also be proud of the achievements we made over the year. Like we don't often take time to pat ourselves on the back to, you know, dwell on our success it's always about solving the next problem in our industry and to take a moment, reflect on the year before. So when we started that in 2020, it was pandemic year. We were going through a big change. We moved to a new office, but it was again thinking about inflection points in our journey.
Speaker 1:Things went to hell in a handbasket and there's a lot of uncertainty. I had more than one employee come to me in that first two weeks of the pandemic like are we going to have a job? And I'm like I don't know, but I'll do the best I can. Turned out surprisingly good for the IT industry. But I didn't know it was going to turn out that way, but it necessitated that conversation with the team to reflect, to share our vision moving forward now that we had this additional confidence about the resilience of the IT industry and and then we share our numbers pretty openly for our revenue and and such with the team so they could see our growth right, because otherwise they just think about the next ticket and the next project they have to solve. But what does it mean for us as a company? Yes, we're growing people, but you know, I think it's nice to share even that element about the business with the team so that we can have a greater amount of yeah, just transparency and culture.
Speaker 2:You just mentioned a little bit ago about sort of some of those early clients that you brought on when you were a solopreneur are still with you today. Can you share some of the insights of Red Rhino's success and obviously the client retention side, but also building those sort of strong, long-lasting relationships?
Speaker 1:Relationships are king. You have to serve people, you have to serve your clients, you serve your employees, you serve Red Rhino and the rest of it falls into place. And I'd always had that desire to serve and take care of people. I still do. And when we're talking about those clients, you know if somebody calls you about Cape Brinder, my printer doesn't work and it's. You know. This is like when I was a solopreneur. But they're doing retail. If their printer doesn't work, they can't print receipts and the customer journey for them is interrupted.
Speaker 1:You show up and you take care of that, and that's a small micro example, but you continue to take care of relationships over a long period of time. That's all people want. People leave people. Like you heard this in management, people leave people. But same thing is true for clients, right? If you take care of the client and serve them in the way they need, don't give them a reason to leave, and they're still with you. Up until recently we just rebranded, but up until recently our tagline was our relationships have zero downtime. Because, yeah, technology will screw up from time to time. We're human beings. We'll screw up from time to time, but we're gonna show up and take care of things together. If something happens that goes sideways, your server fails. I don't know whether you have a spare server ready to go. I mean, we could talk about that, but I know that we're gonna be there to solve that problem alongside of you.
Speaker 2:That's great. So you just mentioned the rebrand. Talk about how excited you are or what specifically excites you about the new look and feel of Red Rhino.
Speaker 1:Wow. Yes, when it comes to excitement for the business in general, every year I just get more and more excited about it. I love talking about it. I'm one of those persons like, if you're hanging out with me, I'm annoying because I only really want to talk about the business. I don't care about sports, I don't care about other things, I'm a really boring person. I just want to talk about nerdy stuff.
Speaker 1:So when it comes to Red Rhino, I mean, if we reflect back on 2010, when my wife and I were getting serious about the business and we're thinking about how to what to call it, as we're getting serious, inspired by Seth Godin and the Purple Cow, we came up with the name Red Rhino because it's unique.
Speaker 1:You could hang some marketing off of it, but it also represented us, something that is unique. We knew we wanted to do IT differently and and strong, and so when we rebranded now, we wanted those elements of uniqueness to be front and center. We're not trying to do IT like everyone else. Yes, there's certain core elements we are an MSP that are similar, but how we do it is going to be unique, and so when I'm looking at our brand, it doesn't feel like anybody else's. It feels like us, it's authentic to us, we're friendly, we're good at what we do, we're strong, and now we can go into the marketplace and have a modern look and feel, an aesthetic that we're proud of, and it just needed a facelift and an upgrade and, yeah, I'm real proud of what they came up with.
Speaker 2:That's very good. Yeah, what advice would you give, brenda, to someone that's just starting out in the MSP space, that's thinking about doing what you did, oh, say, 15 years or so ago, going out on their own or starting something new? What advice would you give those folks?
Speaker 1:A couple of things come to mind Know your strengths and double down on them. We have to fill in our weaknesses, but double down on our strengths, because that's what's going to separate you and your organization. In your organization, culture is king. People are king. Numbers follow, but culture is king. People are king. Numbers follow, but culture is king.
Speaker 1:Processes invest in processes and then talk to other people. I think for me, when things really started shifting was when I started joining peer groups and talking to other people. Getting out onto you know various conferences and and and in-person peer group meetings, you actually end up talking to other human beings who are solving similar problems. A you have somebody to share this journey with, because often as an entrepreneur and in our life, where you know it can be a lonely journey, you don't have enough people who share the same experience as business leaders. So you get to have that element of it. But they're also solving the same problems together and you can share those ideas with them and the more openly I could share that they could share back with me and it it just created some great friendships.
Speaker 1:But it really was, in my opinion, the key to Red Rhinos growth, because I'll always be the bottleneck in the business. Right, I'm still the bottleneck in the business. So the faster I can grow as a human being, as a business leader, as as a coach to our employees, the faster the business can grow. So get out there, have more conversations. This community is great. Everybody loves to share awesome.
Speaker 2:how do you balance the demands of running a rapidly growing MSP to maintaining a healthy work-life balance? And you have an amazing family. I got to meet your wife and your very young children just a couple of months ago in one of the peer group meetings. How do you balance that?
Speaker 1:I've gotten better at it. There was no balance in the early days Up until I had my kids, my, my older daughter. I've got two daughters. My older daughter is five and a half, almost six now, so when we had her, I started showing up at home for dinner every night, like it's rare for me to work late, and sometimes that happens. Before that there was no work-life balance. I just did what I needed to get done and that was it. Then there is a couple months here and there where you're working, you know 80 hour weeks, and that's okay.
Speaker 1:Now, um, I make sure that I'm home for the kids, cause they're, uh, the other priority in my life. They need to see me, um, and, and I want to see them, and that's the other thing. Like I, I'm as excited about them as I am about the business. So when I walk in the door they're running towards me, I'm running towards them and like there's no feeling like it right, and and and and I feel that same excitement towards the business, but it you need to have that division of what's important to you and to reflect on that and like, where are you needed in life? Right, and and and where are you nourished in life because if we run out of energy we're not serving anybody right.
Speaker 1:And there were periods in my life where I probably worked a little bit too hard, didn't take care of my health enough, and and then you know you hit a wall and then you crash and then the business suffers. Because you know, at the end of the day, if you're suffering, the business is gonna suffer. You have to invest in your health. You have to invest in those people in your life that are gonna replenish your energy yeah, so, brenda, what are your goals and aspirations for the future of Red Rhino?
Speaker 1:so we want to grow as a company. I think we're at a good point, and the brand is just one element of that change, but it's really and this is why I told the team this is our stake in the sand. This is where we are creating our own inflection point with the team that we've created a leadership team, a new sales team we launched last year. We have I think we're at the dawn of the new red rhino. We're at the beginning stages where we get to build this great company. That's, you know, one of the the best msps in the country. Um, where we'll end up, who knows? But I know that we've got a great team where I know I have the energy to grow this. I'm excited about it.
Speaker 1:I love showing up to work.
Speaker 1:There's not a day where I don't want to show up and so our goal is to at least 10X this company and do it in a way where we're not giving up the culture of the company, how we take care of our clients, in fact, doubling down and making investments for the long term, both in cybersecurity but also in being able to support our clients.
Speaker 1:We're lucky to do what we do, and now, with this newfound era of business transformation with automation and AI. You know, last 10 years have been spent scaring our clients about cybersecurity and protecting them. That's a value proposition, but that doesn't truly move their business forward. Like I hate selling cybersecurity, I'm preventing something bad from happening. I want to make something good happen for the business. With automation and AI and these new technologies that are hitting the market, we have this ability to go help our clients, and especially small businesses and mid-sized businesses, and turn them around and give them the tool sets to succeed, create more revenue, create more opportunity for their employees. So, yeah, we're lucky to be in this era of the MSP industry and I'm excited about what we can do for our clients in that space.
Speaker 2:You just started to share a couple of the sort of things you're seeing in the future. I know you like to travel to a lot of events. We're at an event you know this week that you're going to hear some other things. What are you most excited about for the future of the sort of MSP industry and the evolution right what do you see? You talked a little bit about cybersecurity. You know that was the thing that everybody had built their business around or is building their business around, but there's some new things on the horizon. What are you most excited about?
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a lot of change in our industry right now, mostly because AI and automation and change creates opportunity. Organizations that have a good team and a forward-looking mindset will start separating themselves from the average MSPs that don't invest in their own technology, and so I think that is exciting for us as a business, but also the space. The space has become so mature over the last 10 years, both from the tooling, the ecosystem, the learning from each other, like how to do an MSP, has kind of been solved. You can go ask somebody and they'll give you the blueprint. But now we're at this point where we don't know what the future MSP is going to look like. There's a period of uncertainty and there's a few leaders and marketplace vendors that are going to have to create that future.
Speaker 1:And that uncertainty creates excitement for us, for people like me. Like I don't know what the future is, but I get to be a part of it and I got to learn along the way, I get to grow. I mean, at the end of the day, all businesses is, you know, for me a crucible in which I get to forge myself and and so that learning personally is exciting, but then as a business, it's really about bringing that change and that opportunity due to the volatility in the tech space to our clients and serve them. And I mean that's the exciting opportunity to translate that. I mean that's what we've been doing as technology partners ever since Windows NT is like how do we bring that new technology into a business and serve them?
Speaker 2:And so now that there's more new technology, we get to do it again and it's a stepwise function change All right, Brenda, talk a little bit about the importance of compliance on the Red Rhino business and really the challenges that you guys have faced and really building sort of compliance-related services.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I'm up in Canada, I'm just outside of Vancouver, bc. In Canada compliance isn't as big as it is in the US. In the US very American of you you guys like to wield a pretty big hammer for compliance, and even here it could be better. But in Canada we just ask politely like please don't hack us. But when those things do occur, there's very little enforcement mechanisms around, whether it's big companies, low companies, to comply to a certain cybersecurity standard, whether it's big companies, low companies, to comply to a certain cybersecurity standard.
Speaker 1:But I find that in my one-on-one dialogues with my clients that appetite for compliance and for maturing cybersecurity to a best practice standard is changing. And now we're both for ourselves as an organization, going down the compliance journey, whether it's CIS or SOC, you know to have some amount of validation but then also be able to have a more interesting conversation with the client, say, hey, we're gonna align you to this baseline standard. This is mmm, think of it like a mini CIS. But what you really ought to do is say, hey, this is cybersecurity is journey, and let's put you down the CIS journey and build out that compliance framework. I think that's the future. Until regulations in the country catch up, and they inevitably will. European Union has done it, us has done it, canada will ultimately follow suit and do it as well, and so we're preparing for that future, and that also aligns with our vision of serving our clients. You have to do it right. If we don't do it, we're not serving the clients.
Speaker 2:Awesome Brinder. The final question I always like to ask guests on the on the podcast is when did you know? Now that's it.
Speaker 1:I would say, uh, that when, back in, uh, about six years ago, it was my 40th birthday, my wife surprised me with a big trip out to South Africa, I was gone for almost three weeks and for a guy who went 10 years not taking a vacation beyond a three-hour drive time to be able to go away and the business ran without me, no big surprises.
Speaker 1:There were a couple problems and they solved them without me to have that team in place and we were a lot smaller then but really knew we were on to something, that we were building a business. It is not just an extension of myself, it was. It was really created an amount of freedom for myself and for my family that we didn't have before, and it was exciting for me to know that the team could take care of it and they had the confidence to do it without me and I had the confidence in them, and so since that point, I don't think we've ever looked back and I fully trust the team. They trust me and it's it was. It was a big turning point for us.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Brinder, I can't thank you enough for being part of this. It's always a pleasure to have conversation with you and hear about all the exciting changes in your life and in in the business. I wish you and the Red Rhino team the absolute best of luck and thanks so much. Thank you appreciate having me.