Business
Dan Burt (Solzorro IT Services): From Firefighting to....MSP Services
In this episode of the MSP Owner Podcast, host Ben Tiglar interviews Dan Burt, owner of Solzorro IT Services, as they explore Dan's journey from aspiring firefighter to successful managed service...
Dan Burt (Solzorro IT Services): From Firefighting to....MSP Services
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Interactive Transcript
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Welcome to the MSP owner podcast where we dive into the journeys of managed service providers,
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unpacking their challenges, wins, and insights to help you build scale and exit your MSP business.
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So we've got a good one today. Dan Bert is the owner of Solzoro IT Services. He has an MSP
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based in Utah and they currently generate $1.6 million of annual revenue with a team of 10
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employees. So Dan's journey is an interesting one that I think a lot of other owners can relate to
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and comment from what I've seen is you make the leap from part-time to full-time entrepreneurship,
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you hire your first employee, and then you get to 10 employees. So he's done this over the course
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of 14 years through lots of chapters. So personally I want to thank Dan because he's been a huge
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resource to me and almost a mentor as I've acquired my first MSP business data tell. So we've
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gotten into it over the last year or so and excited to have him on. Welcome Dan. Thanks, Ben.
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Very kind. You can be here. Man, I'm excited to jump into stuff. I feel like we have just based
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off of our own personal conversations that we've had about our businesses as well as
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just stuff relating to your background and how you got here. I'm just pumped to dive in.
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So I want to start off with how do we first meet? How was it? I think you posted on Reddit a question
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about something and then I was like, hey, on that behalf of what I call with you and go over this
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and then you were like, okay, we left it. We got in the call and then your first question was,
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so are you in the habit of meeting strangers on Reddit or the internet? I was like, no, I just,
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you know, there's enough people. There's not space in our industry for everybody. And so I'm
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happy to give anybody a hand to get them a leg up. I think it was sales and marketing related.
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I think I was asking about hiring sales reps and success related to them and what's worked
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and what has not worked. I think that was. That was it. That was it. I just remember that you were
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an off put like I was some kind of a scam for being willing to tap with you. No, absolutely.
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Actually, I'll put I was just kind of giving you, you know, I was giving you shit basically. I was like,
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you know, I mean, I wanted to, you know, obviously as a new owner in the space, you know,
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I'm trying to learn as much as I can from other people who have been here, done it, learned it.
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And obviously there's some people who are really helpful and you're like in one of those categories.
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You're like, you're a core helper. Like that's like, you love helping other people. You love
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doing things better. I can tell that from when I've, you know, all of our conversations. So,
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I don't know. That's like a strategy that I use when like I'm like, I don't know anything. So
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what's the best route to learn more? It's like go talk to the smartest people I can find and
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got you on the phone because I posted on Reddit. And so those, those communities have been really
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helpful and helping me, you know, do the right things with my own business. So, man, thank you for
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taking that, taking that risk and, you know, being able to help out a stranger. I mean,
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that says a lot about you and what you stand for, honestly. Well, that's kind of you. But the truth
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is, as it always goes, I feel like I've benefited just as much from our conversations that, you know,
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we've probably had one every quarter since then or so where we keep you totally accountable. And I
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think there's, and there's multiple things you've done that have been really smartly. Oh, yeah,
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I can learn from this. And so one or two. I think ego will prevent a lot of people from learning
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and so just recognizing that everyone can teach you something is, is beneficial.
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Nice. So one of the things I've never actually talked about with you is your background,
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where you came from, how you grew up and like ultimately how you got into the IT business, right?
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And you live in Utah and it looks like you're, you're in your word or are an LDS member. So I'm
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especially curious about your upbringing. What did that look like? How did that inform who you are
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today? Oh, Ben, you're open to cano worms. I'm very interested in this. I'm very
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interested. I feel like it's huge. It's huge. So I did grow up Mormon. I served an LDS mission.
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I no longer consider myself to be Mormon. But I left Mormonism about 10 years ago. And it was
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very painful. I wouldn't wish up faith crisis on my worst enemy. It wasn't something I felt like
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chose to do. I wasn't like I was too lazy to live it. I just came to conclusion that what I had
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grown up believing was true was no longer as true as I believed you once for. But I served
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Mormon mission in Chile. I spent two years there. After my mission, I went to Alaska and I drove
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at tour bus. I would drive people from the cruise ships to the glacier and tell cheesy jokes. And
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just thought I was having fun. After doing that, I realized I didn't know as much about my own
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state as I realized and started getting into the outdoors and did a bunch of cool stuff there.
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And then I used part of my time in college to go backpacking through Europe. And then I spent seven
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summers in Alaska driving bus and telling jokes. And whether it was traveling the world or whether
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was being a tour guide, I was just chasing fun. Having no idea how much those experiences would
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inform and influence my entire career. And so I originally schooled be a firefighter.
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I was in the middle of nowhere Alaska and came across this kid who had fallen asleep at the wheel.
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And long story short, I spent a couple hours trying to keep this kid alive until the Medevac
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Hellhoppers arrived. And he died. And anyway, the tour through other experiences I've had
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had, it was just made me realize being a firefighter is not for me. But you know, this is back before
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ransomware and back in those days on a bad day, a computer would die. And that's so much better.
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And so I came back from Alaska. My wife was pregnant. I ate a job that had insurance.
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I took a job doing Dell tech support. It wasn't great. It was actually a bit soul crushing,
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but I had, but I realized I liked the industry. I liked computers. I just didn't like that job.
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And to give you more of my background, I weren't work for a then small MSP. This is 2009.
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And there were like six people there at the time. And during my four years there, they grew from
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six to over 140. And after a while, they started doing things in a way that didn't agree with.
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And so I started kind of raising the alarm bells. Like, hey, this doesn't feel right. This isn't
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the way to do things here. And they said, well, it is now. And you can either get out and do your
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own thing or you can get on board. Okay. So I started my company like that month. And originally,
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we were going to do backups for credit unions and then and a database for credit unions.
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And then we just transitioned to being an IT. And so that's that's the high level version of my
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background. Wow. There's a lot. There's a lot in there. Can we can we rewind back to when
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you were a firefighter and why what were the things about that role and that lifestyle that you
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just thought was not for me? So honestly, I think being a firefighter is for me putting white stuff
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on red stuff. That's fun. I grew up a pyro. I've always loved fire. And every firefighter for the
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most part is a pyro. And there is a brotherhood to firefighting that. Yeah, you have to go hang out
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with your your brothers, a fire station 24 hours. Yeah. It's but at least here in Utah to be a
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firefighter, you generally have to be a paramedic first. And and being the the paramedic side,
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you know, trying to do the the CPR, I've done CPR three times. All three people have died.
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And that's statistically correct. So statistically, the fourth person, 25% of CPR recipients live.
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So I'm saving it for the time I really care. But yeah, so it just, you know, there's one case,
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a gay guy CPR I managed to see and then I drove like two blocks away and I just cried and I cried.
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And it's just I'm a very empathetic person. I really do care about other people. And so I realized
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I really couldn't work in that field where there's just so much heavy feelings that you carry home.
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You just how do how do people deal with that? That seems you have a 75% quote failure rate in a good day.
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Like how do how do other people continue to do that? Like in that role. So it's interesting.
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Emergency responders have one of the highest divorce rates. So one could argue that that you don't.
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That it does. Yeah, that's kind of like the long profession where a lot of lawyers are discontent
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and a lot of alcoholics. They're similar to like. Well, and ultimately you do have to either
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become callous and disconnect your feelings from it. Even one of my clients is a law firm who
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specializes in family law. And the first few times I was around them hearing them talk about
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divorce so flippantly I thought, I don't know if I can work with these people because morally it just
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felt so I felt like you're taking a light the worst part of these people's lives. And then you
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realize you really can't work in the trenches and have it affect you every day. You have to
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become callous to it. And for me, I now don't think anything of when I hear people talk about
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divorce in that law firm. I am I've been there for 12 plus years. I'm I'm now I would be appalled by
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how callous I am to it. And that's how you have to make it. You have to either adapt or die.
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You know, you have to accept or move on. And and anyway, for me emergency medicine,
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I am so grateful people who do that. But it wasn't for me. Man, I don't know that that resonates
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with me so much because in my last healthcare business, you know, my last business was a was a
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dental dental company. I struggled with the healthcare aspect, the like delivery of services and
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dealing with that failure rate. Like even if you do everything right, you've got all the processes
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in place, you're still going to have adverse outcomes. One or two percent of the time that are
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really scary and you don't know what to protect, right? Or point one percent or point zero one percent.
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And that always kind of scared me and kept me up at night through that five years of operation.
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So I kind of not in such a traumatic way that you had, but I I felt that struggle as well,
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just from a personal perspective. Well, when I perform hip-a-training for my clients,
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one thing I have point out is that I know it's easy to fit a field just like a job,
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but you actually make a very meaningful difference when you are in the medical space. You know,
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that my mom is not well. She's on her way out of this world. And she told me that her biggest regret
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in life is not having been a nurse. She wishes she could have helped more people. But you don't
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think about what a difference your job is, but there's a lot of stress you have to carry to be
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caring for other people. Do you feel like you're still getting some of that with your IT business?
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Like you still feel like you're helping people and enable these businesses? Absolutely. Yeah.
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No, and that's I have a friend who used to do like online ad sales and he left that to do medical
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sales. And he says he did that because he wanted to help people. But realistically, I feel like
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there's no greater way to help somebody and help them pursue their dreams. And as an MSP owner,
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like maybe it's overly altruistic, but I feel like I help other business owners pursue their dreams
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that they can be entrepreneurs. They can do the part of their jobs. They do well because
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work protecting them against the things they don't even know they need or the things that they
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know that they hate. And so I absolutely feel like as an MSP owner, I not just make a difference
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in the economy. I don't just make jobs for my co-workers, but that I help other entrepreneurs
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pursue their passions. So they feel really good about that. And I understand I'm not stating
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lives, but I feel like I'm making a positive difference in a way that I feel like I'm making
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I can be proud of what I do.
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Hi, I'm Ben Tiglar, the host of MSP owner podcast and the CEO of DataTell, an IT managed
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service provider with 35 employees. The mission of this podcast is simple to have authentic
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conversations with IT owners about their journey, how it started, the challenges they faced,
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and where they're going next. Every episode I personally walk away with a new actionable item
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to strengthen my own business. But a quick word about my company, DataTell. We are actively
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acquiring MSPs who align with our service and culture. So if your company is generating
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between one and ten million dollars of revenue, I want to talk to you. But wait, you're probably
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thinking why me and why DataTell? First is, I get you. I understand the challenges MSP owners
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face being one myself, feeling overworked, overwhelmed, constantly being on call, struggling to
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bring a new business. I have the solutions and people in place to address these pain points.
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Second is culture. We run our business on EOS, entrepreneurial operating system, which has
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been transformative for our employees and clients alike. I believe that building a great company
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comes down to finding and retaining great people who are in the right seats. Everything else is
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noise. If any of this resonates, it probably means we're a fit and we should be having a conversation.
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Until then, let's get back to the show.
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Has it transitioned over time to like you first focus when you first started your IT business,
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you're focused on providing value to the client and now as you've gotten bigger and you've
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you have more employees now you're have you shifted at all to now I'm impacting my employees
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at all. Does that transition happen for you?
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So here's what I would say. My time as a tour guide really helped influence like I learned about
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value, I had language and you know when you're making money, you're live to hit based on tips,
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you learn how much the way you say things matters. And so as an IT guy for a long time, I felt like a
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unicorn that I had social skills and technical skills and that was very rare. My time as a
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firefighter helped me to deal with stress. My time was in AMT, I was never a firefighter, I was
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in key. But when you first start doing your business, it's scary that there's an analogy I liked
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from a TD show survivor where they had, I can't remember what it was, but one season survivor,
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they have these two outriggers and they are trying to make it to the island first. And on the item,
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I don't there's an idol. And whoever gets the idol first gets to pick their team. And there's
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like 11 people on each team, everyone picks one person. And then the last two people just go home,
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day one, they don't get to stay. So if they're running these outriggers, some people jumped off way
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too early and these outriggers left them behind. Others left too late and by the time they jumped
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out, other people were running to shore. So whether you're talking about going from part time to
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full time, whether you're talking about going from a loan operator to hiring your first employee,
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it's very similar that if you jumped too early, you can't afford to be in that space. And if you
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jump too late, you're going to be losing business because you're not taking care of your customers.
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And so although I did start the company 14 years ago, I really feel like about seven years ago is
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when I started employing people. And that's when things really started to snowball and becoming
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a real company. But you know, it used to be I stressed and couldn't sleep at night because I was
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worried about providing for my family. And now I have multiple mortgages and families that I feel
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like are all of my, on my shoulders that I, I really feel an obligation not just to my family,
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but also to my co-workers and their families to make sure that everybody is going to be provided for.
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And so I don't feel like my stresses have gone down. I just stress about different things.
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Hmm. Yeah, that used to stress. Do you feel like that obligation aspect? Because now you've got more
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employees, you've got more personal obligations, you've got a lifestyle that you want to live. So
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you're saying the stresses haven't gone down necessarily? No, because where I used to, I used to have
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enough clients that I knew everyone at every client. And so, you know, in a way, I felt like I was
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a part of, you know, 25 companies. And I would lay awake at night thinking, okay, which of my
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clients my most at risk of losing, what do I need to do to make sure I keep them? And now I don't
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just worry about losing clients, which of course you still do, but I worry about keeping my employees
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and how do I keep them developed? How do I keep them engaged? And so, you know, and then when you
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as one of the biggest lies that people think when they're considering starting their own company,
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is they think, oh, I love the idea of having a company and not having a boss. It's like, that is
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such a lie. It's a misunderstanding of running your own company. It's not that you don't have a
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boss. Now you have hundreds of bosses that my employees feel like just as much of a boss to me is
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I am to them. But yeah, at the end of the day, I'm the one who gets the size of things to stay
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here and not. But I have to keep them happy to keep them here. I have to keep my employees happy.
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I have to keep my customers happy. I have to make sure that I'm looking out for marketing trends. I'm
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looking out for industry trends, cybersecurity trends that the amount of responsibility just
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continues to increase that the what I do in a day changes. My workload has shifted, but my stress,
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I don't feel like has really gone down. I just I've had to change where I focus it. I feel like this
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is common, especially in the size that you're in and what other MSPs are in because you don't have
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the resources to go and hire someone of your caliber to go and run everything, right? Or take off
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some of that load and you're doing it incrementally by hiring capable people. But that's a challenge
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that I see from this one that two and a half million dollar range is like everything is still a lot
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on the owner. You've got to do sales most of the time. You've got to be the, you know,
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all for support. You're the backstop for any sort of account relationship. Like do you feel
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that weight right now or is that or is that going better over time? So much better and that would be
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it would be so disingenuous. My team is amazing. The myelad operations manager who one of the best
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things that you can experience as an employer is an employee willing to stress on your behalf.
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You know, I don't want that for my employees of course, but I've had multiple employees who
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have lost stress or let's leave or who have physically felt the effects of stress. And of course,
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I don't want that for anybody, but it means the world to meet that my employees care.
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And so my operations manager frequently says, hey, what can I kick off of your plate? And he
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takes care of dispatching. And I have two senior engineers who are so great that I have been
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fully out of IT for the last two years. I hired a full-time marketing rep last July.
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And he's been amazing. And so I'm trying to do all the things you're supposed to do to,
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you know, to remove yourself. I'm a huge fan of the book for our work week by Tim Paris. And
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the concept of getting Mayvans to do the things that you don't have to do. It's just I take my
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responsibility as a business owner seriously. And it's not just a matter of how much money I can make.
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It's I have such a great team. I want to make sure that each of them has opportunities to grow
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and develop. And in order to keep them here, I have to pay them more money in order to pay them
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more money. I have to make more money. And so you like I'd say half of my job is more about
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cybersecurity and and and relationships with clients. And then just overseeing the day-to-day
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operations. Like I I never would have guessed as a kid. I would grow up to work a job with so many
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boring meetings. I'm in three or four boring meetings a day and then I spend the rest of my days doing
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email. And it's like how did this happen? But I started my own company. I should have the job.
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You were going to be a firefighter saving lives. Now you're like in boring meetings.
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Well, and firefighters save lives, but they also play ping pong and watch TV and hang out.
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Take your festival for all. Yeah. But and and to be fair, one thing I love about working
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in IT is that I can still watch TV or whatever. I have a third monitor that's just shows. And so I
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start a pretty good gig. I enjoy the the pros that come with being in the IT industry. I just
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have seen myself get further and further removed from the things I used to think of myself as
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being very good at. Yeah. Part of why I wanted to do this podcast is to get the stories of owners
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and the owner perspective because a lot of times people don't people don't ask us. Like we are
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the owner, but we've got a lot of hidden responsibilities that people just don't see. And that aren't
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really apparent unless you're talking to other owners. And that was that was that's really the
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genesis for why why I think this is valuable to you know folks who are considering becoming an
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entrepreneur, but also to know like, Hey, there's other people out there doing what you're doing. If
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you're running your business, you can go and talk to other people who can help you unlock.
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So I was shocked like last July our company has what we call company camp buyers like town hall
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meetings. And last July, one of my employees had said, you know, back when you were checked in.
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And that just like hit me in the gut like you think I'm not checked in. And he was like, well,
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back when you were working more. And I was like, what? I was like, look, here's an open invitation.
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Any one of you, if any of you want to follow me for a week and just be with me all the time,
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I'm working. I'll be happy to have you with me because I work earlier than everyone of my co-workers.
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I work later than everyone of my co-workers that you know that because they don't see me in the
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trenches now resolving tickets and closing tickets, they don't necessarily. And there's part of that
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that I miss that you know when you are closing tickets, you can point to what you did in the day and
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say, I resolve these issues. And sometimes as a business owner when I'm responding to emails or
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I'm casting a net or you just you end your day and you think I worked 10 hours a day. I have no idea
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if I did any good. And so there's there's something about closing tickets that's actually
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satisfying that anyway, it was shocking to me to have people perceive that if I'm not at my desk,
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I'm not working. You're lazy. Right. And my co-workers, again, who are fantastic.
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They said, no, no, we see it. And now whenever they make jokes about me, they're pretty good
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about following up to say, hey, we appreciate what you do. And so I do feel like I have
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the best team of any MSP of my size. I'm willing to fight any other MSP owner who says their
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team is better than mine. I have a local competitor who I really love. We can long great,
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which challenge each other. I actually encouraged him to we should do like a boxing match this year.
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Hey, I want to fight you because I want to prove my my my team's better than your team. And I'll
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fight you if you say otherwise. And he was like, I'm not doing that. Dan, I was like, you're bigger than
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this. Is it really? Yeah. I wanted to have like a boxing match. I could promote it. Like,
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hey, let's let's promote this. Let's say, hey, whoever has the whoever wins this boxing match is
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the better team. And so this guy is like two or three just taller than I am. He looks stronger than
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I am. He's younger than I am. I think maybe even a step it up a notch and have it be like a
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WWE multi multi style, right? We've got you. You've got your operations person, your lead technician.
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Tech team. I love it. That said, although my guys, I surprisingly employ a lot of musicians. I
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feel like a third of my guys are musicians. I don't know that many of my guys that do well in
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the octagon. That's great. Can we rewind a little bit back to when you trends? I feel like there
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was an inflection point when you when you hired your first employee, you'd said like roughly seven,
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you said it was seven years ago, you hired your first employee, right? Yeah. What allowed you to go
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from no employees to one employee? Like, what was the trigger? What did you feel? How did you know?
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The first thing I'll say that the recipe of my success has started off using contractors.
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Former co-workers became pinning and contractors. I still use some pinning and contractors today.
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And so that allows us to do bigger jobs and scale up. But when I started using a part time,
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like a college student, I was using him 30 to 40 hours a week. I'm okay. And I'm ready to hire
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someone full time. And then I received a contract that was going to be a $5,000 a month contract.
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And I was like, perfect. That's an employee. And so historically, that's kind of how I justified
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hiring was always, I got an aged client. And they're going to be, or I get three-managed clients.
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And these are going to be enough to hire an employee. I've always known that the biggest
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opportunities on the back end. And so my perception is that a lot of MSP or entrepreneurs or small
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business owners fail because when they see their first payday, they take it. And so I have
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thrown off payday after payday after payday. I'm still in the same house I was before I started
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my company. I have kept, my life is better. I'm certainly having a better lifestyle. I mean,
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make light of that. But my life has not increased exponentially based on how much
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my net worth has increased based on the value of our company. And that's, I've continued to hire
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really good guys. I've continued to give my guys raises. I continue to try and find ways to incentivize
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my guys to stay long term. And so I have, when I started my company, I literally had $70 in my bank
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account. I had nothing. And so it took me six or seven years to have anything because I would,
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I bootstrap the company and that I would do a job. I get paid $200. I'm like, awesome. I'm going
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to buy a logo now. And then I would do a job and get paid. And it's a great. I'm going to get a
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website. I'm going to get a shirt, an embroidery, just, you know, every single thing went back into
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the, into the company. And even just this year, my wife, who's been so supportive, was like, hey,
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when we started Solzoro, a Costco trip used to be $200. And now it's $600. And our pay hasn't
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really gone up in the last couple of years. Like we need to bring more in for our fan. But
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I've just been so focused on the back and feeling like that's, that's where success lies. And so
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as a result in the last few years, and we've consistently grown over 30% year and year out. And
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that's easy when you're going from 100,000 to 130,000. But it's a lot harder when you're going from 100
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to 100, from 1.2 to 1.6. And so what we've just tried to do is, you know, be responsible. I've put
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money in the bank. So we've always had savings so that my employees have never had to risk me being
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late on paid. We make sure that. And so anyway, I'm telling a lot of you, Ben, so I appreciate your
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patience. But, but for me, the biggest part was making sure that if I hired somebody, they would
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never have to worry about whether they were going to make their their payments. And so we've,
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we've really invested heavily on on the front end of our employees so we could bend
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them the back end of our company. It feels like sacrifice is like a core tenant of what you've
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done. Like you're, you know, time and time again, right? You're saying, oh, I'm going to wait
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off till later to do this thing because I want to invest in, in either other people or in, you know,
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the future, right? Something you can't touch right now. It's not in front of you, but it's,
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but it's, it's there, right? Kind of that. How do you, it seems like it's ingrained in you? Like,
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where did that come from? So everybody says this and I'm no different. I grew up pretty poor.
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Yeah, there was a three or four year period as a child where my dad didn't have a paycheck.
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We'll aid of us, lead off my grandpa's social security. There was points in our
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the teenager where I had a job and my dad did not. And so, you know, my parents did the very best
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they could, but they, they struggled. And so I, every single day, I think it's a miracle. The life,
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the life I live, I can't believe it. But, you know, how well my family does and the truth is,
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you know, we're, we're now aiming to make more and more as our company, but there were a few years
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there where I was just so content like, oh my gosh, I don't, you know, for me, it's just a miracle.
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This might not sound like a big thing, but even just last year, I heard my son who was 15 or 16
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tell my wife he wanted in Ohio State hoodie. And it was like, you can ask for specifically what
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you want for your clothes? Like, by the time I was 13, I was paying for all my own clothes.
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You know, that my, my parents stopped buying these shorts or pants when I was like 11. That,
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so for me, I just feel like so brave of what I have, I don't, it doesn't feel like a sacrifice
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that I don't spend more because I'm spending so much more than I ever could have imagined as a child.
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It seems just part of you. And you've really like dove into it and embodied it, but then still,
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you've got your long term upside of where you're taking the company. Obviously, you're building
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significant net worth as you grow your company, but maybe you're not tasting it right away. And
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that sacrifices what enables the future to happen. And a lot of people can't, can't stomach that.
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They don't have the patience. And it's not like I, I'm, I don't want to put out some sort of
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perception that I haven't anyway embraced my life from this. I, my family's been able to go on
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some really great trips. But even when we were, you know, poorer, that we've, we've always
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done a good job of going camping, getting away that just, you know, I'm a big believer that,
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you know, in that altitude fixes my attitude, you know, and so getting out to the outdoors
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helps me to relax. But, you know, we, one thing that's really helped me professionally is,
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I've taken some of profits from our company and invested into realistic. And so that, I have a
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fourplex and that fourplex is my parachute that like, in a worst case scenario, I can sell my four
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plex and then I can keep funding my company. And, and that has really helped me to feel like I could
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focus on growth because that, that, that financial stability that I feel like I have found through
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being frugal has allowed me to now feel like whatever happens, I have something in the background,
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I can, I can fall back on. And so the last two years have been really focused on growth for us,
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which we couldn't have done if I didn't feel like my finance were in order.
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You got to have that baseline stability to know and foundation and know, hey, I'm going to
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be investing in this stuff and taking some risks. And so the last couple of years have been
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focused on growth. What is, what does growth mean to you? It sounds like 30% a year is like what
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your goal is? Is that no? So yes, but no. So two years ago, I was having a key strategic planning
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meeting with my key focus group and my two senior engineers and my operations manager. And two of them
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came to that meeting for the years saying it's time for Dan to get out of IT and focus on growing
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the company. And so that's awesome to get buy-in from your co-workers to do that. And so I tried
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hiring two or three different outbound SDR like sales development. You would do outbound leads for us.
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I won't say the names here, but they're two of the biggest names in the space. And I spent a lot
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of money, tens of thousands of dollars, about a hundred thousand dollars, and a year of them
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making outbound calls to not make any good leads on our part. I hired a marketing guy who he's so sharp,
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he's a brilliant talented guy, but he was going through a lot and his personal struggles
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really prevented him from succeeding professionally. And so I joined multiple networking groups.
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I just kind of hired an outsourced marketing officer. And so I would say in the last two and a half
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years I've spent upwards of $250 or $300,000 towards just growth. And some things have worked,
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but some things haven't. And that's year one, it was like I've spent the last nine months.
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And we are growing the same rate we've always grown. If I were to have done nothing,
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would we be right where we are? Could I have taken this year off? But word, you know, the truth is so
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much of work is about dividends on the back end. And so our company today experiences dividends
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from when we were making next to nothing. But you know, there's the weeks where I was working
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60, 70 hours a week, but only bringing home 40,000 a year is paying dividends today. And the
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things that we're doing today, I think I pay a lot of dividends tomorrow. And so what we've kind of
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done is shotgun that and just we're putting money everywhere trying to see what works.
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My wife, who was one of my greatest advisors in my life, she said something like I hired these
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SDRs, these outbound sales development guys to grow my company because I wanted to believe that I
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could just pay somebody else to grow my company for me. And it's like no, you need to have more
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skin in the game. And so through our ad words campaigns, through SEO, through, we've tried just about
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everything. And we've really found, we feel like we're now starting to find like what's really
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working for us. There's another podcast, the MSP camps, no fluff marketing podcast, no fluff
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domestic marketing podcast. And they've been super helpful for us as well. That and we went to
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scale con that combined conference or convention between tribe, tech tribe and an MSP camp. And after
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that, where we've been growing 30% a year, my marketing guy and I decided we want to double the size
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of our company in the next two years. And so 30% is what we expect to be happening on its own.
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And we want to, and we've had some clients who have had some struggles this last year. We had
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three different clients who got acquired our biggest client with your merger that even knowing that we
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might be losing half of our recurring revenue, we still felt like we're going to double our income
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in the next two years. And I feel like we're really laying around with that happen. And so
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wow, it's taking years to make the infrastructure so I can now focus on growth. And
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and I feel confident we're going to do it. And that is makes this the most exciting time of my
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career that I I come into work early. I leave work late. I'm usually not the first one here, but I'm
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one of the first ones here. And I'm always the last one to leave. And you know, there's so much,
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just the other night, it was like seven o'clock. My wife called me told me it was time to come home.
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I went home, had dinner with my family, I wanted to go back to work. And I couldn't. I just found
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myself unable to do it. And I realized there's so much truth to the Newton's first line or
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inertia that once you get something going, it's easier to keep it going. And so I felt like
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all of our efforts have culminated this moment where we're now getting things to keep going
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that's been very rewarding. It seems like you're a very hard worker. And you have been for a long
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time. Would you agree with that? I mean, I feel like hard as subjective, but I
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as someone who has been working since I got my first job and I was 13, I was watching
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dishes at a local restaurant. And you know, there are there are ways in which I feel like I worked
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hard around the teenager when I was you know, busing payrolls or watching dishes that that you know,
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or I used to construction, you know, that that's that's hard work in a different way. But I
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I have long believed in the value of work. I feel like I certainly couldn't retire today. But
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when the time comes that I could retire, I expect I will keep working longer than I have to because
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I think there's a lot of value in work. And you enjoy it. It seems like. I enjoy the work I
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do now. I did not enjoy the work I did as a teenager. But I've certainly even like,
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I worked at Dell. That was a still crushing job. And I know we buy Dell computers. I don't
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have an against Dell. But you know, some of the jobs I've worked I've hated, but they help
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advance my career to get to the point that I loved. So you're at a million six or revenue. You're
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looking to have some massive growth in the next two or three years. Even with some, you know,
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top customer potential issues down the road. Where how are you going to achieve that? And like,
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what are the things that would prevent you from achieving that? Like if we were to look three
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years from now and we're having a conversation, what do you think would be the things that why it
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worked or why it didn't work? A great question. There's things that are completely outside of
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our control. You know, that of course, AI being the 800 pound gorilla in the space that we
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just have no idea. And you know, and then you look at the economy that, you know, right now there's
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this concept of tear for us. And what's going to happen in the economy in two years? What's going
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to happen in our industry that there's so many things that are outside of our control. What I
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will say is talking to a good friend of mine recently, I was pointing out to him that I'm on a
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trajectory, but I could lose everything in a couple of years. And he said, Dan, if you've lost
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everything, that's a bad sign for all of us that, you know, that that's more of a reduced industry
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than in the markets than in our economy. Yeah, that sounds more like a personal, that doesn't sound
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like a realistic statement when you say, oh, I can lose everything. Like that's just not, that's
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just not even possible. That feels like a personal narrative rather than a like an actual fact.
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Well, I certainly hope so. You know, that there's that Mark Twain quote of, in my life, I had very
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had many fears, very few of whichever happened or something, you know, that it's very common for
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all of us to rob the good times with doubts for things that never occur. But when I look at the next
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couple of years, I think that the biggest things that will be about keeping myself going professional
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ways, keeping my, my house in order, but you know, the book Millionaire Next Door talks about how
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something like 90% of millionaires in America are, and my numbers are a little bit off here, but
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there are people who own service companies who are on their first marriage. And so I think that
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keeping my personal relationship with my wife and kids is an important part of that. And I also think
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that keeping my eye on the ball of not over extending ourselves. And so one of the things they talk
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about at scale con was people will do marketing efforts, get a bunch of leads so they stop doing
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their marketing efforts. They close those leads. Now they have no leads so they increase their
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marketing efforts. And so one thing that we are resolved to do is to not take our foot off the gas
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when it comes to what we're doing. And so we have augmented our marketing. We've hired someone
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through Upwork to do our SEO who's a full time guy. We were 30 hours a week for us doing SEO.
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And we're paying him less than we paid a local company and he's doing more. And so we're just
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one thing that we're trying to make sure we do is get accountability from our vendors that we
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want to make sure that we see what we're getting that we get the value and manage our client
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relationships. Because even if you look at how our business has grown so much of our business
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has come from client referrals that if I put on MSP subreddit for 14 years and you see people
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look who will say, yeah, we can just grow without even doing anything once we're trying to grow.
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It's going to be easy because we should always try referrals. That's actually not unique. I feel
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like that's very, very common. Not at all. And just from a business buyer perspective,
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because I acquired one and when I have talked to a lot of owners, when I hear what we get all
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of our clients via referrals, that's usually code for I have no sales or marketing process or
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methodology. Absolutely. That's really what it says. Yeah, but I have no idea how I got here.
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No idea. Just did stuff. My great. So I've got to build the whole sales and marketing engine.
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Wonderful. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so what we have found is that there is truth to that
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that our easiest referral source are our clients. And so when we have SEO and ad words and
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you know, even knocking door from these things go right for us, we actually have systems we've
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put in place to know at what point we asked for referrals from those clients. So when we ever
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get a new client, we got a new client about four years ago, who was a credit union. They
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referred us to four other credit unions. They referred us to a union. They referred us to
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a trade school. They referred us to some of their and just one referrals now responsible for like
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12 clients we've had. And so in understanding that, we recognize we need to deliver on every client
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opportunity we get so that we can have every client be both revenue and a referral source.
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So we picked up a client last year. And we're really big about the analytics of where we get our
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clients what industry they're in and what we found was we picked up a client last year through an
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ad words campaign. We have been doing a small amount. It's like $2,000 a month or something
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to work for them. And mostly it's it's licensing stuff. We gave them a security quote yesterday.
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Their company they were using was charging them 86,000. Our quote was 60,000 and three years from now
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the competitor which has another 80,000. Our quote for three years now is 40,000. They came to us
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yesterday saying, Hey, we do these same things for our clients downstream. Would you be interested
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in servicing them? And it's like, yes. And so part of what we believe and you know, everyone has
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like their niche. There's a reason why you became an owner of this reason why you're thinking
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about starting a company that there's there's some sort of a need that you think you can fill.
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For me, I wanted to feel good about where I worked at night. I wanted to feel like I was doing
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right by the customers. And so it started out very altruistically. But that's become our business
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model that we do right by our customers day in and day out. And as a result, they love us and
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they become our referral source for us. And so we have found that by knowing how to leverage
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these opportunities, we can often get more out of every client. I think most of our clients
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and this isn't unique to us. I think a lot of people love their IT providers. You know,
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that your IT provider keeps you safe, solves your problems, you know, they're heroes. You just
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don't necessarily think about giving them a referral unless you're asking for it. And how do you,
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it sounds like what you identified with your refer at least is like I would qualify that one
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client as a super refer. Right? Like they're someone who absolutely provide is you 10 to 12 clients
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over the course of four or five years, right? And the reality is is that person probably that one
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client probably makes up 75% of your referrals, right? Or you know, so like it feels like this is a
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game of you have to find who your super refer is and be able to nurture that because then they're
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going to be able to and the rest are probably not going to or have you seen a wider dispersion
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on your own. So we have found like our we have a partner that he does our cable pulls.
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And so we do IT he does cabling and we've cross referred that one person is responsible for
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on 25% of the revenue in our business. And so you know more than any one client is actually
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a partner who we cross refer business. He has been one of our best lead sources. And so that's
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one thing we're trying to do is cultivate relationships with other print companies or other
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phone companies and make sure that we have relationships where we can be mutually beneficial to
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have that synergistic value of cross referring. But one thing that we have found is that if we step
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down with the client and we first pick them up and make a roadmap of here's how we're going to
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onboard you. Here's more resolve your issues and communicate all the way through. When we go to
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meet with them after that they will frequently think we're trying to raise the rates because we've
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done so much more than they expected for that amount of money. And then we just make sure they're
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happy and say hey we're looking for other people who might all of them fit for our services.
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People are really good about saying you know what I do know these other people who are using the
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same IT provider we were using and they do much happier with you. Makes sense. So we've got three
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years from now we're also having conversation. What are the things that are going to prevent
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you from getting to where you need to go? Is it people? Is it getting enough clients?
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Like if you were to point it towards one thing you know what would that be?
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So I think the two biggest variables there are keeping our clients. And you know we lost a client
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last year that I feel like the employee made a mistake that led to them leading they say it's
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due to their acquisition. I think we could have kept it. And so there's a house keeping a measure
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of making sure that we keep the right guys on our team. Keep the quality up, keep the service
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intact while you focus on growth. And so that's the first part is making sure that you know I can't
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sell something I don't believe in and if we're not delivering on it I can't believe in it anymore.
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And to make sure that we're making good what we're saying we're doing internally. And then
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realistically when I look at the majority of our clients who have left us over the last 70 years
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almost all of them have been due to acquisition. You know not all but almost all have left because
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an acquiring company brought them brought their IK provider on and that's how we lost them.
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Because anyone figured that out yet how do you turn the tables on that because that's a very
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common thing like people say that all the time. Larger company comes in buys this one and then
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they're gone but I haven't heard I heard it more negatively from the MSP owner perspective that
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like we're always in the backseat and we're usually at the acquired company rather than at the
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acquiring company. So I don't I don't take it personally because I've benefited from it just as much
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you know we've had a client who's acquired like eight other medical practices and then we've been
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the incoming and they've been the outgoing. In some cases like we just had who is our current
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biggest client they went through an acquisition and I've been so nervous about losing them and then
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they called me like two weeks ago after the acquisition went through and they said hey we want you
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to know that we we fought to keep you and now okay let's just lip service here's the phone calls
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and they said and the company agreed that their IT will do the East region and we'll do the West
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region so you guys are still in the mix and it's like awesome and so one of the best things we did
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was just make our client love us to the point that they did fight for us and but in understanding
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the usual yeah that's that's amazing man that is a testament that's a testament to you and all the
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work that you've put in and it's also a testament to my honesty obviously that that it's they're
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the ones who I feel like are the ones who have been so delightful and so great response times that
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kept them and so but you can't control that so I feel like the only variable you can control is
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is that new clients you're bringing in and so you want to keep what you have but you have to keep
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growing because there is so much truth that old adage of if you're not growing you're dying yeah
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we've got a few clients who are acquisition hungry right they're going to acquiring multiple
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companies a year we've seen a lot of growth from them and so I'm like I'm like man I am really
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interested in this space where it's like man maybe going larger and focusing kind of this mid
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size space who are actively acquiring they need extra support and help because we're just
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we're struct we're doing so well for this client and we're solving a huge need and I'm like man
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this this could be the niche that we transform our business into and that's the best need we're
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the acquiring company because they have lots of integration challenges they don't have a consistent
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technical stack they have a lot of technical debt they're trying to get things done throughout
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a point where they have enough money that they just want stuff to work they start to care about
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cybersecurity and so that's like an area that we're really really excited out because we've been
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getting a lot of traction and it's it's the opposite of what I've heard for MSP owners which is like
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we have we have a small business client and they get acquired by this bigger company and we're out
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of the mix like that's the story 90 85% of the time and 15% of the time it's like we got lucky
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that's kind of like my gut feel after so we started I first thought I'd go after my
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personal business like boy there's so many three to five user companies that nobody nobody
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sees the wall these days where I should just focus my whole industry and all careers like no it takes
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you know almost as much effort to make a 300 person company hypocompliant as it takes a three
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person company that you know and so there just isn't the kind of ROI there and so yeah you
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when you realize the bigger the client the more volume there is there's a lot of opportunity
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if you can prove yourself on that space cool I think it's time to wrap up so Dan I really appreciate
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your time digging through your history and your business you are making some strides and moving
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stuff for I've high confidence that you're going to figure it out and in a couple of years from now
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we're going to have a conversation you're going to be like I did it there are some bumps there
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are some unexpected surprises and opportunities and I'm about where we thought we were going to be
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that's my guess well thanks a lot then I really appreciate having on and I appreciate your confidence
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yeah thanks a lot of men