The $14M MSP Lesson: Stop Waiting to Feel Ready w/ Billy Adams

Welcome to the $10 Million MSP Podcast. This podcast is where I dive into the real stories of MSP leaders who have gone beyond $10 million in revenue, how they built their teams, created scalable systems, and turned their businesses into valuable wealth-building assets. I'm Brian Hoppe, strategic coach to MSPs. I work with MSPs generally in the $5 to $50 million in revenue range. In each episode, I sit down with leaders who have built MSPs beyond $10 million in revenue to unpack the inflection points that truly matter. From the personal stories behind their journeys to the fundamentals like culture, operational maturity, and driving profitability. This isn't another MSP podcast about tools and tech. On the $10 Million MSP Podcast, you'll get behind-the-scenes conversations with leaders who've built thriving MSPs, their biggest wins, their toughest lessons, and the practical takeaways that you can take back and use right now. If you're an MSP owner who knows that growth starts from within, That mindset, leadership, and strategy align to create both wealth and meaning, then this show is for you. New episodes are released every other week. So let's jump in. All right. Welcome everyone to another episode of the $10 Million MSP Podcast. Um, today I'm joined by Billy Adams. Um, Billy runs ACS, uh, up in the, uh, Boston area. And, uh, he, he's got a great story to tell, which is a little bit unique from a lot of, uh, the stories of how other MSVs kind of got started. And so, Billy, welcome to the show, man.

Brian, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited for the conversation. So, you know, I always like to start with a question that makes people think a little bit. So, you know, I know that you've grown the company, so, you know, it's kind of transitioned in the family. And, you know, one of the things you've mentioned is that you're more of like a salesperson who happens to be running a technology company. Um, rather than the other way around, which is kind of how most people get started as, as, as tech. But what, what would you say that, what, what do most MSP owners kind of like misunderstand about what it takes to create meaningful organic growth?

Sure, sure. Yeah, you're exactly right, Brian. First, uh, in terms of how the, the typical MSP is structured, my dad started ACS in 1985 and he was a, he was a technical operator and I came into business in the '90s and I'm a sales operator. And over the years we worked together, he retired and I took over and we started to see pretty rapid growth at that point. And I think what a lot of people miss the boat on is being a little afraid of growth, right? In terms of hiring sales folks, in terms of putting commission plans together, in terms of putting yourself out there in peer groups and learning. I think a lot of folks, and my dad, I'd put in this category.

Yeah.

My dad was very safe and didn't want to take a lot of chances. And if you start on the organic growth path and it gets a little fast, people get nervous, right? They want to be slow and steady and make sure as they grow, they're ready for the growth. And I kind of feel like if you wait and try to get ready for the growth, you never grow, right? So you got to kind of put your foot to the metal and get going and be a little okay to be uncomfortable.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, yeah, I think that's something that we, that you commonly see. It's like, hey, you know, maybe a little imposter syndrome. And I even see, you know, one of my big 3 pillars, like, I'm like, everybody should be in a peer group, right?

Yeah.

But then you talk to people and they're like nervous to get in because it's like, Well, I don't really, you know, I don't know because all these other people are like probably way ahead of me and I'm gonna be embarrassed or something like that. You know, it's like, no, you know, everybody's got their problems and, and you don't have to be worried about that. You know, but yeah, and I'll be excited to dive more into the sales end of things because you've got an engine cooking.

Let me tell you how we, my dad again was like, you know, I need you in the office going away to be in a peer group is, for a week is a waste of time. And I got invited by Arlen Sorensen back in like maybe 2005, 2006 to join like early HTG groups. And I turned 'em down because my dad didn't think it was a good investment. The second I bought my father out, literally like I bought him out and the next thing I did was I joined the peer groups. I did multiple peer groups.

Yeah.

So yeah, I agree with you. I couldn't agree more. It's like getting in those groups is It really helps you shape your business, helps you put your finger on the pulse of what's going on in the economy and in your industry. So, mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes. 100%.

Yeah. And I know, I, I know you're, you're big on that. And, um, it was such a key part of my, you know, my, my development growth and, and the success of the company and, and everything that I've learned and the way I serve clients now and, and all of those kind of things. So, um, Yeah, we can't, or yeah, I will be the biggest advocate for peer groups. So, and yeah, so give us, I mean, you kind of mentioned, yeah, you bought your dad out, that kind of a thing, but like, give us a rough estimate of the scale of the company today and where you've taken it, you know, from that point, from the point when you bought it until now. What is the— What's the revenue look like? Employees, like all of that kind of thing?

Sure, sure. I began to transition with my father 2017, 2018-ish. We were about $3.5 million in revenue and about 20-some-odd employees. We should close this year just around $14 million in revenue and we've got about 50 employees.

Okay.

And quite honestly, I feel like we've done it really, I mean, I know we've grown or we've times 4x the business from where it was. But realistically, I feel like we're growing kind of slow to be totally honest with you.

Okay.

As I'm building up my sales team and as we're adding revenue, I'd like to be growing a little faster. But at the same time, we haven't used any M&A, we haven't talked to private equity, we're not bringing in outside investors. We're bootstrapping the whole thing by ourselves. So it's been aggressive, but it's been slow as far as I'm concerned. But Yeah, we're gonna be about 50 people and we should be just under like $14 million in revenue. Of that, we are, uh, gonna be a little over $1 million a month of MRR. So we're mostly MRR, about 85/15-ish, 80/20, uh, MRR to, uh, to professional services.

Okay, gotcha. And so, um, like, dude, $10 million, uh, growth over the last, or less than 10 years, right? Like, uh, you know, 9, 8, 9 years.

And Brian, I can tell you in the middle of that, we had in 2024, we had a stretch where we lost $150,000 a month of MRR and we gained $150,000 a month of MRR. So we were kind of going like this, then all of a sudden we did one of these and then we went like this.

Yeah.

So we kind of like paused for a second. We had M&A in our customer base. So we had a couple clients get acquired. They were like $25,000 a month MRR customers. We had a couple acquired. We had a managing partner of a law firm switch, and the new managing partner wanted to bring his folks in. And then we had another customer brought a business.

Yeah.

And those were all at the time top 10 customers. So we lost a bunch of MRR really quick, which was kind of unexpected. Uh, yeah, freaked us out a little bit, but at the same time, our sales engine was, was coming along, so we made up for it. Um, yeah, so the growth is really like misleading. Yeah, you know, we should be a couple million dollars probably ahead of where we are if we didn't—

Yeah, yeah. And, and that, that's stories that I hear a lot, right? Like, it's like, hey, um, we don't, we don't— most MSPs, it's not like we're losing clients because we made a mistake or it's bad service or anything like that. It is, hey, you know, there's M&A activities happening in our businesses that we're serving. And, you know, as much as you can, like, even if you have the best playbook for those scenarios, if your client gets bought, I mean, maybe 25% of the time you get to keep them if you're running a great playbook. But if, well, if you're not running a great playbook, then they always go away, right? Like, so. You know, so, so it's something we had to plan for, right? Like we got to plan for that attrition. And I think you've, you've probably seen the numbers. It's something like, I mean, best in class churn still about 5, 5.5% of their business every year. And so, you know, and the industry average is more like 10%. And so, well, if I want to grow 10%, I got to, I have to sell 20%. If I want to grow 20%, I got to sell 30%. More than what, you know, so anyways, yeah. Um, things you got to build into it, but so, so where do you, where do you guys, I mean, like today, um, and we can get in, like, I want to get into like the sales engine that you've got running, but like, um, you know, so that year you, you added $150K. Like, what are you, what are you adding roughly per year now?

In, uh, we're adding, we added last year, uh, about $220K a month.

Okay.

We're on pace this year. We added about $70K so far this year.

Okay.

And we have a really good pipe for Q3. We actually missed our number in Q2. We should be about $85K.

Okay.

But we are— am I breaking up there, Brian? I don't know if I'm a little choppy on video, but I wasn't sure if I'm—

Oh no, it's— so the video is, it'll upload and we'll, I'll mark it here so they know. But yeah, so the video will look choppy, But it's, it's stored locally and then it uploads. So it might look weird or it might sound weird, but it's getting high quality either way. So yeah, you're good.

So yeah, so I'll just start over again. We, we, we added like $220K last year. We got $70K so far this year. We hope to be at, we hope to be about $15K ahead of where we are right now. But we had a client kind of stall at the end of Q2. So now Q3 is shaping up, you know, we're looking to add $35K. in Q3, but we've got about $100K in the funnel. So we should be well north of our number, but very close to $100K. So realistically, at the end of this year, if we're at $150K of new MRR, we're happy, but I feel like we're going to be a little ahead of that.

Okay. So, well, and I think there's a lot of people listening who would say, hey, if I were to get $150K in MRR ever, I'd be really happy.

Right. So, so funny, right? My dad and I used to talk about getting to $200K, like total. And we said, when we get to $200K, we're gonna give ourselves raises. Like we can't wait to get to $200K. I remember talking, having that conversation with him, and now it's like we're at $200K a year. Right. So it's, uh, different, different times.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, so yeah, you're at a million. Um, yeah, it's great. It's crazy the difference. So. So, um, what does it take to produce that? Talk, talk about like, what, what do you, how do you, how are you doing that?

Yeah. So, so we were, we were growing pretty steady. Um, and then we hit a little bit of a wall where we were transitioning. I was, I was trying to transition myself completely out of owner-led sales.

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, build up my sales team. And it was just a little, then this was right around the time we lost some MRR, right? So it was like, I'm trying to transition out of owner-led sales. I'm trying to build a sales team. We lose a few customers due to M&A. I get a little nervous. I end up jumping back in as, you know, owner-led sales, if you will. And which I know is not like SLI best practices. There's a lot of reasons why, you know, owner-led sales isn't right. The, isn't the, isn't the right way to do it or isn't the buzzword or it's frowned upon. So, but I jumped back in. I started to work with the guys over at Growth OS, MSP Growth OS, Dave Stave Graves. Dave helped me with our sales process. Dave helped me kind of build out our line in the sand, if you will, or like what we're willing to do and what we're willing not to do. We kind of doubled down in terms of investment. So I hired a couple young SDRs to make phone calls for us. I had a BDR who was helping both kind of set appointments, but also Follow the sales process and follow the proposal process we had, and then he'd bring me in to close. And that just started working really well. We started making a lot more calls, we started hiring SDRs. So now we have, we're gonna have 4 SDRs by the end of the year. We're gonna have 2 BDM or BDRs by the end of the year and myself. And all of us kind of cranking. They're doing it. An absurd amount of activity. They're getting after it. I've hired really, really good kids. I say kids, they're under 30 years old. They're young professionals and they're like drinking from the fire hose and they're making a ton of phone calls. They're doing a ton of door knocks. So they're canvassing business parks in different buildings in the city. They're going to a ton of networking events, both local and kind of regional. Um, they're sending emails, they're using LinkedIn. I mean, they, they're doing everything and they're doing a heck of a job. So, so they're doing a lot of the lead generation. Um, then we have a team that is the, like the BDR team. So basically the SDR lead gen first appointments are being fed to these gentlemen.

Okay.

Uh, they're going out, they're conducting the first appointment, they're prospecting, uh, themselves to some extent, but they're taking these first appointments, they're doing discovery. And then when they get to the point where we've got all the data we need in terms of budget, pain, decision maker, timeline, then they bring me in for like the presentation and close proposals.

Okay.

And they're doing a heck of a job there. On average, I think you're setting 2 to 2.5 appointments each per week.

Okay.

They're lighting it up. So we're getting, you know, 8 to 10 New first appointments every week. Wow.

Okay. So, so, and this is between all 6 of those people or are, okay. So, so are, so SDRs traditionally sales development representative, BDR, business development representative, but really the BDR folks are the ones actually doing the meetings. They'll probably set a few of their own meetings, but they're also taking the meetings set by the SDR.

Exactly. That's exactly it. Right. So they're hunting a little bit, but they're really, They're getting, they're getting fed the appointments from the SDRs, but then they're going out and they're closing some, they're setting some appointments as well.

Okay. And, and how, how much, so like a good SDR, how, uh, I mean, are they, are they expected, what's, what's their quota for appointments in a given month? Yeah.

So their, their quota is, uh, 2 appointments a week is the goal.

Okay.

Okay. Yeah.

And, and are they generally hitting that?

They are.

Okay.

They are.

Amazing.

It's amazing. And, and I'll tell you what, they're, uh, They're, they're, when I say they're getting after it, I mean, we have a young lady who has set, I don't know how many first appointments, like at the end of the day on Fridays, they hit her number. She sits in the office till like 6 o'clock making phone calls because she doesn't want to go home without hitting her number for the week. We have another gentleman who's only been with us, he did an internship with us about a year ago that we gave him a return offer. He came to work for us full-time just a couple months ago when he graduated college. And I think he's set 4 appointments last week.

Amazing.

It's awesome. It's awesome. You know what? It's all, it's just these, these kids are hungry. I've known them. So a little side story to this. I coached both my boys in soccer, lacrosse, basketball, like every sport in the town we live in. And I know a ton of kids who are all graduating college or have in the last couple years have graduated college. Bunch of smart, Good kids, came from good families, just really hard workers, did really well in school, and they're having a hard time finding jobs. So quite honestly, like, I didn't think much of an SDR job at a small company like ACS being a great job for kids, but the ones who've gone through our internship program, a lot of 'em wanna come back. So we've got like a pool of folks we're hiring from who are just awesome. So we're pretty excited about that. That's on the sales side. We've added a couple of technical interns, you know, and gave full-time offers and they came back as well. But on the sales side, we built our whole sales team kind of grassroots of folks that we knew, local, you know, knew somebody, knew a friend. I coached them in a sport, knew my kids, and we ended up hiring them.

Yeah. Love it. Oh, that's great, man. So, so yeah, so you've got this whole kind of thing going and, and really it's like, oh, at this point, if you lose a person, it's not that big of a deal. You can backfill them. The engine's still going to keep running.

Um, and we've lost, we've lost a couple folks, right? It hasn't been, you know, we've, we've had a couple folks that just didn't fit. You know, they try really hard, they just didn't fit the mold. They weren't missing their— they weren't hitting their number, they were missing their quota. We had to move on from them. Uh, we had another gentleman who wanted to take a job at a bigger company, a national— not an MSP, left the industry, um, but took a, took a, um, job at a, you know, a, you know, 100,000-person company. So That's, you know, we, we, we've lost some, but at the same time, yeah, if we lose one person, the engine's kind of built, right? So it's, um, in a perfect world, these SDRs we have, they're going to transition into BDRs, you know, as they mature and go through. And, and 2 of them we have right now, that's their goal, is in 2027 to be BDRs. So they're well on their way, quite honestly.

Yeah, well, and that's like a— that's going to be a virtuous cycle as you, you know, because as you grow, it's kind of like, well, You know, once, I mean, if you're at $14 million, uh, you know, and you want to grow 20%, I mean, you got to grow $2.8 million, right? And so the bigger you get, the more folks you need, the more appointments you need, the more sales you need in order to continue that, you know, 20% top line growth.

Absolutely. Yeah.

So, yep. Um, yeah. And, and what I see a lot is with, with MSPs is like, uh, you know, hey, we've gotten, We've grown to where we're at with really the, the principal-led sales, um, you know, kind of idea. And, and it's like, well, I've gotta, you know, I, I've gotta go hire a salesperson, you know? So, so you end up with, um, you know, it's, it's kind of like, it's hard for a lot of MSP owners to make that initial, you know, investment because, well, it's probably gonna take a year for that person to be successful if they're ever going to be successful. And more often than not, Yeah. They end up not being successful. And so, so they're in, they're in this cycle of like hire a bad salesperson, hire a bad salesperson, and then it, and then next thing you know, you're 3 years down the road and no, no better off than when you started.

Um, I'll tell you, Brian, the way we're gonna handle that is, and it was, you know, from a couple of the folks in my different peer groups, we've had these conversations and, um, my goal is to hire a couple BDRs or a couple SDRs at the same time. Knowing that we're gonna lose one, right? Like, and I've heard the ratio, you know, I've got a friend who was gonna hire 20 at once. I mean, pretty aggressive. He was looking at hiring 20 and knowing that he was gonna be able to keep like 6 or 7, and then he was gonna hire 20 again and keep 6 or— he knew that he was gonna have like a 30%, you know, success rate on these folks. And it's, I mean, it's really hard to dedicate that revenue or that income, you know, the profit to pay salespeople like that. And you're paying them you know, $50,000 to $100,000 base salary depending on the role. Yeah. You're gonna spend $150,000 and it might be wasted.

Mm-hmm.

Right. So for a lot of people, that's a scary thing to do. Right. It might— my dad and I would talk about it and we didn't wanna do it. Right.

So, yeah.

And we were, we just got momentum and we built it and now we're kind of reinvesting in ourselves and that's how we're doing it. So, but it's a scary proposition to go out and kind of, you know, let go of the vine like that and hire those people and See if it works, you know?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay. So man, yeah, you guys are, you're doing great. You know, I'm curious too. So you're coming in and doing most of the closing. What is it? What, I mean, how are you like the people that you have, they're obviously hungry and getting stuff done. How are you compensating them?

Yeah. So they're getting a base salary. And again, the role between SDR to BDR is somewhere between, you know, $50,000 to call it $100,000 base salary. And then in terms of the SDRs, they get paid for setting qualified first appointments.

Mm-hmm.

They get a small stipend for that. And then they, if a deal actually goes to proposal and closes, They get somewhere between 10 and 20% of the sale. And by the sale, I mean we pay folks, we only do 3-year deals. Our average deal is about $7,500 to $10,000. That's kind of the number we're looking for. If you're below $5K a month of MRR, we typically won't even fall through in the process. It's gotta be at least $5K of MRR for us to be able to pitch it. And then we're giving 2 months Recurring revenue. So if it's a $20,000 a month deal and they sign a 3-year deal, the sales rep gets 2 months MRR.

$40 grand in their pocket.

$40 grand.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. Love it.

That's awesome. Yeah. We had a BDR make almost $250 grand last year.

And you were happy to pay it?

Happy. Yeah. He was very happy.

I love it. I love it, man. Yeah, because I mean, that's, you know, that's your— that's revenue for the business from here until, you know, for a very long time, right? Yeah. Okay.

Brian, too, they're getting to the point now that they're very close to closing appointments on their own, right? So I don't have to go on every deal, right? I don't sit on every deal. They're getting to the point now where they can run deals and we'll have conversations in kind of pre-deal conversations to say, when do you need me? Do you need me at all? You wanna make a run at this deal without me? That's fine too. I mean, we're to the point where they want to get there. That's where they want to be. So, um, I'm trying to coach 'em up and, and give 'em the flexibility and, you know, we, we don't wanna lose a deal. But I think that's the only way to learn is maybe if we do lose a deal here or there, um, kind of learning from our mistakes. So, uh, yeah. So they, so they're getting better. Just like the SDRs are starting to run their own first appointments. These BDRs are starting to, uh, look to close.

So, okay. Yep. And, and now, and how many, how many, uh, I mean, the, the folks that are doing the calls and stuff like that, I mean, what, how many touches are they doing in a given week to get those 2 appointments?

Yeah. So I'll give a little plug to, uh, we're using this company called Nooks, which is an auto dialer.

Okay. Nooks.

We just got Nooks, N-O-O-K-S. We just started using it maybe less than 6 months ago. Okay. The amount of cold calls they're making per week per person is somewhere around 1,500 calls per person a week.

Wow.

It's wild. And then from that we measure, so we measure cold calls, we measure connections, which is like a conversation. We measure first appointments, we measure quality qualified first appointments, which have a stronger criteria. You know, first appointments, we've got no-shows, we've got cancellations. It's not like everyone turns into a really good meeting. Yeah. Qualified FTAs, we give a little more bonus to and seem to go through the sales funnel a little smoother. So we're measuring all those different metrics and they're, the amount of touches, quite honestly, are crazy. And then the conversations they're having somewhere between, depending on the person, 30 to 50 a week. Um, which is then turning into the 2 or 3 appointments. So, so we're at the point now where we're really turning the screw and we're, we've got the activity nailed down. We're trying to get more conversations in turning into more qualified FTAs for the amount of touches we're gonna have. Um, or we're gonna, or reduce the touches with a lot more quality, right? For, for qualified activity.

Yeah. Okay. That's fantastic, man. Um, so. Okay. And then, you know, what I'm curious about is, because often what happens, you know, like you've been growing, it's fantastic. Often what happens is when you're growing as fast as you guys are or have over the last 10 years, operations starts to break, especially if you're not a technical or operational guy.

Yep.

So how has that looked for you over the years?

Yeah, we have an awesome team. I'll tell you, we, well, one of the things we did, again, soon after my dad retired, one of the peer groups I joined, I joined a Vistage peer group, which is all CEOs. We meet every month. And after the first couple meetings, the term EOS was getting kicked around a ton. And I kind of nodded at them and say, sure, EOS. Like I acted like I knew what they were talking about because I, I felt a little awkward that I didn't know what EOS meant. And then I started looking into it and I was like, what is EOS? And we ended up implementing EOS.

Okay.

And for those that don't know EOS, it's Entrepreneur Operating System. It's been awesome. It's been, I would say, life-changing for us. We measure metrics. So if you know EOS, it's all about getting the right people in the right seats. So having awesome people, having awesome culture, process, and really driving process. And then it's a scorecard and it's measuring data. So getting the right people in the right seats, building the process, and then measuring success has been huge. And we had to turn some people, right? We had 20-some-odd people. We do EOS. Over the next few years, we're still at 20, but, you know, a couple left, couple came, and slowly and surely, um, we've kind of retooled our team. And, and by the way, we have people that have been with us for over 20 years. So we have staff that have been with us for 20, 23, 25 years. We've got a whole nother group that's been 15 years plus.

Yeah.

Um, so we've got some pretty tenured folks, but at the same time, once we realized like the core values had to be there to hire the person, and if they weren't living the core values, we couldn't keep them. So EOS really drove that. Yeah. And the operational maturity came along with it.

Mm-hmm.

Because all of a sudden we have a bunch of people that really care about our customers. They wanna do the right thing. They wanna succeed as a team. Um, so they live our core values and, uh, they're helping each other and the customers see it. So operationally, um, sure, we have bumps, obviously. I think everybody does.

Yeah.

Um, but I think at the end, the clients understand that we really care about 'em. So as we've grown and I'm like, we're dragging the operations, we, you know, the operational maturity has to kind of speed their game up to keep up with the sales growth. But I'll tell you what, we've done a pretty phenomenal job with it. And, uh, we have really awesome people.

Yeah.

So we've been fortunate. And, and I, uh, uh, when I say like, I'm not an operator, when I started working for my dad, it was just my dad and I. And I mean, I was basically building servers, um, in white boxes and setting up like Windows NT and like, uh, Novell networks and running like coax cable. So, yeah. So I technically was a, I was a tech kind of to start the business, but my personality was like a sales relationship kind of operator. So I knew I was, I mean, I was good enough to be a tech, but as we scaled, I hired smarter people than me to handle that piece of the business. And I know my sweet spot. So yeah, but operationally it's been awesome. We have some really awesome people.

That's great, man. Yeah. And well, I mean, hey, you're hitting on a lot of the stuff that I, That I talk about a lot, right? Like EOS or some kind of operating system that is going to connect what you're doing for strategy to execution on an annual, quarterly, and ideally week-to-week basis, right? And EOS happens to be the system that most people use for that. It doesn't have to be exactly that, but it does. But you need something that, besides like You know, oh, this is what the owner thinks is the most important right now. You know, so, so everybody goes and does that, right? Keeps everybody rowing in the same direction, allows you to build the right leadership team and all of those kind of things. So awesome. That's, that's fantastic. And now, well, so I want to, you know, well, I think, I think when we were talking before, you were saying, you know, you're kind of thinking about, okay, what's the next leadership layer that you're looking at in the business, right? Because, you know, yeah, you have to have layers of leadership in order, you know, especially as you grow, because you can't be in touch with, you know, every person in the organization all the time, right? So what does that look like currently and what are you looking at going forward?

Yeah, so in the US structure, the names of the the job descriptions or the names of the jobs are a little different than a normal org chart would look like. You called it an accountability chart, right? And I'm the visionary, and the visionary's clearly the sales leader relationship person driving the culture, driving the core values. And that's what I am, right? So the next person kind of on the food chain, if you will, is an integrator. And an integrator is basically like a COO, or a general manager, VP of ops-like person who's kind of keeping the trains on time.

Yeah.

We've struggled filling that seat. We actually have a fractional integrator right now.

Okay.

Who does a phenomenal job. Tough to find. We are lucky in the Boston market. There's a company, Beacon and Blade. They do a really nice job and that's what they do. They do fractional integrators. So we hired a fractional integrator and he came in and his job, quite honestly, has been to help me build my leadership team.

Yeah.

And over the last couple years, we've done a heck of a job, right? We've, we've had people that were in seats that didn't want to be there. What we didn't realize, right, like they didn't want to be leaders. They wanted to be part of ACS. They had the core values, but they were over their heads and they liked being part of the company, but they didn't want to, they didn't want to have to lead, right? They, they, that, that wasn't their sweet spot. Yeah. And you looked outside, uh, we recruited some folks and we're slowly checking the box, you know, I We just hired a head of finance not too long ago. She's phenomenal. We have a head of CSM. She's also phenomenal. Our head of MSP, our director of MSP, he's been with us for about 5 years now. He is excellent and he's running— he now has professional services kind of tucked under his org chart as well, his accountability chart. At some point, we're going to need a head of sales because we've been doing it with myself. And with GrowthOS kind of tag teaming it. Yeah. Eventually I need a head of sales to come in who's gonna, it's gonna be really important that they fit the culture and that they fit the core values and that they understand what we want to do. And I'd like them to be local in the Boston market. So we're kind of searching for that right person. And then the integrator seat, which is a part-time fractional seat right now. Eventually we'll have a full-time integrator, but that's kind of like the leadership team, if you will.

Okay. Gotcha.

Yep. As you come down from there, I mean, we explained the sales team with our SDR, BDR kind of composition. Finance is pretty flat, right? It's like AR, AP, kind of self-explanatory. On the operations managed services side, we've got a couple things going, right? We have our kind of AI team, which I can talk about that in a sec.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. Our AI team, our innovators team, which is awesome.

Okay.

They're basically man— they're handling all the All of our AI initiatives, both client-facing and then internal. We have our network operations team that's dealing with a lot of our toolsets and dealing with a lot of our alerting, a lot of our patching, monitoring, that sort of stuff. We have our help desk, which is amazing. We've got a few different pod leaders, if you will, team leaders who are doing really, really well on the managed services side. And then our professional services team has been with us, longest tenured group in the company. Um, I think the average is 20 years for the team.

Wow.

Okay. Which is unbelievable.

Nice.

Um, so, so that's kind of like what the, what the service delivery team looks like.

Perfect. Okay. Awesome. Yeah, that was super helpful. Um, I, I think it's, it's always good for folks to kind of understand, okay, what, what does that look like in a 50-person company? But I do wanna hit on the, you know, on the AI stuff because I know you're doing some, well, hey, everybody's talking about AI.

Yeah.

Nobody seems to have figured it out exactly. We're like, okay, so what does this look like? For internal use? What does this look like for, uh, how do we bring it to our clients? How do we become the expert, um, to our clients so somebody else doesn't come in and say, hey, I can help you with AI. And then, and then they've got that relationship, right? So, so yeah, what does that look like for you, for you guys?

Yeah, so it's been, uh, it's been awesome, right? So I was kind of beating the drum of like, we need AI, we need AI. In my EOS quarterly meetings up on the issues list, we have AI practice. We gotta do AI. We gotta get involved in AI. And we've had an AI internal operations, I'm not gonna say team, but the NOC team has been dealing with different applications we use for escalations, for cybersecurity. So we're using a little bit of AI tool setting, if you will, but I wouldn't consider us like an AI shop at the time.

Got it.

I attended a bootcamp. Pax8 put a bootcamp on. I thought it was going to be for Copilot. Honestly, when I saw the ad, it was like, basically, I felt like we were gonna go to this thing, get pitched by Microsoft, learn how to sell Copilot, and that was gonna be the deal. Well, I took my director of managed services along with me, and it was completely opposite of what I thought it was gonna be. And it turned into governance, security, just understanding. It wasn't based on pitching Copilot at all, which was pretty cool. It was kind of vendor agnostic. And it was all about, like, what is AI? How do you talk to your clients about AI security? What they should be doing first, and then looking at business outcomes.

Mhmm.

So what we're talking to cl— so, well, to, to start internally, we hired a full-time AI innovator who is basically running our AI team. He's like our AI team lead.

Okay.

We have 3 folks on his team who are working, helping build, and helping understand AI internally at ACS. We sat down as a leadership team and went through business outcomes, went through workflows, and understood like, where are bottlenecks in our own internal operations? And we started stack ranking those, uh, kind of bottlenecks to figure out which ones move the needle. Uh, then we started attacking and building workflows with, with automation on each one of those business outcomes. That's internally.

Right.

Okay. Externally, what we're talking to clients, and this has been a great sales conversation for FTAs as well, is what does your AI security and governance look like? Like, what are you doing for AI from a security standpoint? Do you have an acceptable use policy for AI?

Right.

Let us help you draft one. Right? Like, basically, it's not like we wanna shut AI down and we don't want our clients' employees to use AI. 'Cause you're gonna lose people. I mean, and everyone's talking about AI. They think you're gonna get better. It's not malicious. You know, they're trying to, they're trying to do the job faster. They're trying to be better than the next guy. So they're implementing AI at your office without any guardrails.

Mm-hmm.

They're using whatever, you know, application is their kind of application of choice. They're probably expensing it through the business, right? Their credit card. Um, so you've got like 100 people using 100 different, you know, uh, non-business-grade AI applications. They're taking payroll blueprints, customer proposals, you know, RFPs, whatever it might be, feeding it into this public learning AI model. Again, not malicious. They're doing it because they don't know any better. It's kind of a disaster, right? So—

Yeah.

Get your acceptable use policy locked in. Choose the program of choice for the organization, A, for the program for people, help people understand from fiscal responsibility how to pay for it. You've got everybody signed to this acceptable use policy. Now you need some way to police it. So you need some sort of a SASE app, which we found one we really, really like. It actually lets us police AI. So if you're using Claude, for example, and I wanna go in Perplexity and I type in Perplexity, It pops up and says, sorry, Billy, Perplexity is not the AI application of choice for ACS, and it points me back to Claude. So I can't even get to it on my own machine.

Oh.

In ACS.

Yeah. Interesting.

So now we're, and we're not, we're not trying to stifle it. We're just saying, hey, we get it. Like, let's go this way. It also will take screenshots and will watch. And if someone accidentally tries to put in PI or you know, Social Security number or any sort of information, it'll actually catch it, block it, give a warning like, oh, by the way, you can't upload that information. Sorry. That's, you know, ACS Purview Acceptable Use Policy. You can't put Social Security numbers on, that sort of— so it polices it for you. We have another product we bring in that will allow us to go through the Office 365 tenant, because now what's happening is when you're feeding all this information into AI, It's looking at SharePoint, it's looking at OneDrive, it has access to all your information. You need to make sure you have your tenant secured. You have to make sure you're following some sort of policy, whether it's NIST or whatever your policy you're following. We tend to lean towards NIST. It will scan the tenant, it will align it to NIST, and then it will watch for drift. So it will alert us to, oh, by the way, this policy changed, this user changed, There's a rule that got added, and it lets us police that. So now, all of a sudden, you have a policy saying, please only use Claude, for example. Oh, by the way, we're policing it, making sure they're only using Claude. And oh, by the way, we're managing the data. So now we have governance around your data to make sure that people aren't pulling in documents. You're not accessing HR when you're on the sales team, or if you're on the finance team, you're not going to operations and So it keeps everybody, keeps the guardrails there. And we're, and, and quite honestly, it starts with, you know, what are you doing for AI and is your MSP helping you with that? When we sat in that, when we sat in that bootcamp, uh, the first question they said was, there was probably 200 people in the room. First question they said was, uh, raise your hand if you're excited to start implementing AI for your customers. And Brian, maybe, maybe 30 people raised their hand.

Yeah.

No exaggeration. The other people were like, eh, not for me. Yeah. Nope. We're not consulting, we're not AI, we're not experts in AI. And kind of like the thing I said earlier, which people are afraid to kind of jump out, jump into the pond. It's like, you know what? I think AI's gonna be huge. I don't think it's gonna replace jobs. I don't think that's the case, right? I think it's gonna make people, it's, it's like a force multiplier. So instead of the sales guy making 1,500 calls, he can make 300 calls, 3,000 calls or whatever. Right? Instead of the, instead of the BDR being able to put 10 proposals out there, maybe you can put 20 proposals out there. Right? Instead of our, like, simple vendor reconciling, reconciliation of vendor invoices for us, you know, our Kaseya, our ConnectWise, Pax8, Duo, all these invoices come in. We built an AI agent that scans them all, looks at our ConnectWise agreement for the customer, and says, oh, geez, you might wanna look at that. Looks like they have too many users under their Microsoft subscription, or— You never shut off step 1 for these guys. It looks like Kaseya is charging you for 30 when it should be 50 or whatever the number is. So little things like that, I feel like AI is gonna just move the needle for people. And the conversation people have is like, we need AI. And it's not you need AI. You need a business outcome and you wanna build automation to achieve the business outcome.

Right. Right.

And then because MSPs aren't talking about it for— I mean, some of them are, but like, When we're calling, when we're cold calling these folks and having conversations like, what's your acceptable use policy? And they're like, eh, geez, we don't have one. Let's set up a meeting.

Quick pause. Let me ask you a question. If you stepped away from your MSP for 90 days, would the business keep getting stronger or would it slow down? Your answer tells you a lot about the operational maturity of the business. I created a short MSP maturity assessment to help you identify what's working, What's breaking and what might be capping your growth. You can take it at brianhoppe.com/assessment and the link is in the show notes. All right, back to the episode. Yeah. So, so I'm curious because I love what you said, like, hey, like AI is cool, right? But at the end of the day, what do we care about? What do our clients care about? If, if I'm an MSP, my clients care about a business outcome, right? And if I can help them be more efficient, I can help their, I can help their, their life be less annoying in some way, shape, or form, um, by helping them with AI, um, then, uh, or help make more money, whatever it is.

Yeah.

That's what we're looking for.

I, I can tell you, Brian, that talking, so we have a big construction practice, right? Construction's one of our leader, uh, biggest practices within our organization. And when we started talking to the CFO, CEO, COOs of construction companies, Every one of them was like estimating. We're going to talk about estimating. So there's a massive situation in the construction space where the estimators are guys like us, right? They're like 50-year-old guys who have been in the space for a while and, you know, and that's it. And then they're trying to transition these like 20, 30, 40-year-old folks in to become estimators, but they don't have any job experience. Like the, you know, the guy who's been there for 30 years goes, oh, it's just like that job we did 10 years ago. I know this job. It should cost $1 million. And they just know it. Right?

Yeah.

Without some sort of a knowledge transfer, you're never gonna get the 40-year-old young lady, young man, 35, whatever, who went to school, who's been working for 10 years, but just has never had the experience. So if you can figure out how to take that knowledge transfer and use AI to search former proposals, instead of these estimators getting out 5 or 10 proposals, Mm-hmm. Now they're getting 20 proposals out.

Yeah.

And for construction, it's a numbers game, right? Like it's relationships.

Yeah.

And then volume. The more jobs, the more swings they take, the more chance of them getting more business. So using an AI workflow to help skill up the, the more, the greener folks and turn 'em into more experienced, and then take the senior folks and get 'em just move more activity without having to do 80 hours worth of work. Um, every construction company we've talked to has been like, estimating, help us with that. So that's exactly what it is. It's exactly, they're not trying to fire people. They're trying to do more. They're trying to make more money.

Right. Yeah, absolutely. And that's a lot of the conversation is like, hey, the point isn't let's automate away jobs. The point is let's get rid of the mundane stuff that is easy to automate so I can, my brain space can be freed up for creativity. Right. And I do that personally in my practice. You know, I work with 27 different MSP owners every month, multiple, meet with them multiple times per month. So where's my energy best used? It's, it's in, it's in the conversation, right? So like, that allows me to be like the, the ways that I use AI allows me to be more present, more available, um, and, and, and more creative because I'm not wasting cycles on stuff that, well, a computer can do for me, right?

Sure.

And now it's like, oh gosh, how much more stuff can it do for you than even like 6 months ago? It's crazy. So, but so I'm curious, like the offering for your clients that, so like, so you're going into your clients saying, hey, we can do acceptable use policy, all of that kind of stuff. What is the, what is the, you know, do you have a managed service around AI that where you're getting MRR? Okay. So what does that look like?

Yeah. So it's basically kind of what I described earlier, like the acceptable use kind of security and governance in a box, if you will. It's not really a great term for it, but it's based on the SASE product we use to manage and have the guardrails is a per-user managed product. So we add our managed services on top of it and we have the product we resell per user. Then we'll have another tool that's included that is the kind of managing the Office tenant, the Microsoft tenant. O365 tenant. Those are both recurring revenue. We both have managed services on top of that. Okay.

Is that like an Enforcer type tool? Like that kind of thing?

It's exactly what it is. Enforcer. Yeah. Enforcer is the one we use. We've actually looked at a couple of the products. Enforcer is fantastic. Okay. Great. Yeah.

And what's the one you're using for the AI stuff?

Well, there's a bunch of ones that do it, but we use iBoss.

Okay.

And iBoss has been awesome. And they're just—

Like the letter I, boss? Yeah.

So we got them through a— one of our clients was going through CMMC Level 2, um, and they had a relationship with IBOS. We started talking to IBOS because, uh, they wanted to use IBOS as a SASE product for some security. Uh, I got on the phone with the IBOS folks and I was like, by the way, like, have you ever thought about selling any sort of an AI as a service type of security? And they said, well, geez, our product right now kind of does that, right? Like, and they walked me through a demo. And I said, guys, I wanna buy just, I wanna buy that exact thing right there. They were like, well, sure, let's figure it out. So I think just, I think they were at PAX 8, uh, Beyond pitching it, like telling people, oh, by the way, this is, we were the, we were basically the first MSP to start using it. Um, but I think now they're pitching it to MSPs as a kind of exactly what we described, that use case. So, so the beginning recurring revenue, depending on the amount of users, you know, if it's a, if it's a 100-person organization, It's probably $1,500 a month, $2,000 a month for, like, the managed AI component. After that, we bring in our automation team. So now we basically exactly what we did internally, we're using, we're doing externally. We're saying, let's get your leadership team together. Let's have a little think tank session around business outcomes. Like, forget AI. Let's just talk about, like, estimating or reconciliation of vendors or, you know, proposal generation or whatever the, whatever the workflow or whatever the, exactly what you said, like speeding up business, taking the mundane stuff away. Let's find something that really moves the needle for you. We, at that bootcamp, we learned kind of a scoring system that was like, find the business outcome, figure out who the stakeholder is, understand what the business workflow is currently, and then figure out the dollar amount. Is it a $10 problem or is it a million-dollar problem? And if all of a sudden you start kind of scoring and it's like, all right, it's the CEO that wants to drive this thing, very important in the organization. It's estimating, for example, and it's gonna help you quote 3 times as many jobs. And if you got all this right, it's gonna add $10 million of revenue to your company next year. That sounds like a pretty important problem, right?

So, right.

So when you talk about knocking these business outcomes around on the whiteboard, It's almost like going through the, the issues list in the EOS, right? It's like, eh, we can cross this one out. Not that important. Eh, this one's not that important. This one right here is important. So we, we help the customer kinda go through that process. Once we have that business outcome, it's like, okay, let's get our innovator team together and start understanding, like, tell us what your process is today. Do you have a workflow?

How do you do it?

This person makes a phone call, then they go to HubSpot, then they go to, you know, They, they do a proposal, they do a PowerPoint, they upload the information into some sort of a CRM. Like, help us understand how you do it, and then we can look for, like, the blocking, and we can figure out where the automation will help. And we're turning that into a managed services now. It's, it's not fully baked. It's more of like a time and materials model today.

Right.

But I think as we continue to kinda check the box and have these case studies, we've already got a half dozen that we've done between internal ACS case studies in external studies that we've done for some clients. So we're starting to really understand, um, the, how to build these agents very focused on these business problems. So, um, I, I wouldn't say we have an exact science around the recurring revenue of like maintaining the agent just 'cause we haven't been doing it long enough yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's still developing, but, but at least, at least you have something. Yeah. Yeah. But, but you have something that you're Like, you're tacking on, what, $15, $20 a user per month for, with, for AI governance, more or less, is what it sounds like.

Exactly.

On top of what you're always doing.

It is like, what I'm realizing, it's the most important part of the entire process. Like, and I didn't, we were like, let's sell AI. Let's kind of like our customers were like, let's do AI. We were like, let's figure out how to sell. But now it's like, geez, you gotta lock down your environment first. Like you, it's like, it's like not having a firewall, right? Or not having any, some MDR. It's like, That is the equivalent of what these people have. If you have a, if you have a 500-person organization and people are all using their own chat, Claude, Perplexity, whatever, and they're, and they're, and again, not malicious. They're trying to get better at their job. They're trying to sell a deal faster.

Yeah.

And they're loading information up into the Wild West, not realizing it's the Wild West. Right?

Yeah.

So fixing that problem, in my opinion, is like, even if it's only, you know, adds a couple thousand dollars MRR, It's not gonna be, you know, $200,000 MRR we're gonna add. But as we, as we layered on every one of our clients, something we did really successful was as we were adding new logos, we were also cross-selling.

Mm-hmm.

And we're not pushy salespeople. Like, we're not new business development, our CSM team. It's not sales. It's not like we're knocking people down for sales.

Right.

It's like, hey, we can do a really good job with MSP. If you want to use this, great. We think we're going to be really good for you. And oh, by the way, once we stop working with you, the thought leadership is you really need to consider having security awareness training.

Yeah.

You really need to consider having some sort of an email threat protection. You should have some sort of an ITDR. You know, you have to have something around your Office 365 environment. You need to have something in the form of like a SentinelOne or a CrowdStrike or some sort of an antivirus automated MDR, um, detection and response. And as we start getting all of our customers aligned on our security stack, that's adding recurring revenue, right?

Right.

So it's like we're doing it, we're doing it in 2 ways. We're adding it by adding the new clients spending $20,000 a month, but then we're also adding it by taking all of our existing clients and saying, let's get AI governance. Let's make sure you have security awareness training. Let's make sure you have Datto Backup. Let's make sure you're doing this. And we're just adding products all the time. And not, again, not hard closing. It's like, you really should think about this. If you don't have the budget for it, we understand, but let us tell you why we think you should do it. And our customers trust us and they add that, they usually add it.

So, um, love it. I love it. That's perfect, man. So yeah, well, and this is kind of like part of the whole transit. I mean, it's a big transition, I think, for our industry. And so, Like, it's still, it's still going to be a while before it's like figured out. You know, I have, I have this theory, like, I mean, who knows, I could be completely wrong, but you've got, you know, you've got your, like, you've got a couple of tools that you're already using. So like the iBoss thing, that kind of a thing. My, my theory is that at some point somebody is going to create something that's like You know, it's like an RMM, except it's AI, right? And, and, and then, you know, it's going to make it dead simple for MSPs to deploy agents into their client base and, and, and charge, you know, MRR for that and all of that. And I think that's what it's going to take for most MSPs to get into it. Um, could be totally wrong, but I think it's, it's something like that's going to happen.

I agree. But, um, Yeah.

But so in, but in the meantime, it's like, I think, well, you're, you're doing what MSPs need to do in the meantime in order to continue to own that relationship with the client until such a time as you can figure it out because yeah, otherwise somebody else is going to come in and have that conversation with the client.

Right.

I agree. Yeah. Um, so, uh, yeah. And, and, and like, as much as the, uh, governance part is like, it's not like the sexy part of, of AI or whatever, but I mean, it's like you gotta have it, right? So, um, okay. So man, this is great. So like, I'm, uh, just a couple more things, um, before we wrap up. So one, I'm curious about like, I mean, what's, what, what do you, what's next for, for you, for your company? Like where, where do you, where are you, where are you trying to take this thing?

Yeah. Um, I'll tell you, it's interesting. I, when I first, uh, when I bought my father out, right, was, was the initial, he wanted to retire. He wanted to transition out. We took a loan with our bank and I, and I made a payment plan with him and he, he held paper and I, and I bought him out over time. Soon after that, when I started to grow, I have the Boston market's got some great MSPs. It's been very competitive over the last, call it 10, 15 years. And I'm friendly with most of the CEOs of the, most of the MSPs in the, in the area. And slowly they were calling me and making offers and saying, Billy, join the team. Let's roll you up. Let's get in here. You can be a— You'll be the next acquisition. Oh, by the way, you can be the head of sales or the CRO, or what do you wanna do? We'd love to have you join our team. We're all ready to go. And I was very flattered in the beginning.

Mm-hmm.

It sounded pretty awesome. And the amounts of money they were kind of throwing around was extremely, I mean, it was life-changing for me. It was extremely interesting. But then I started to think to myself, you know what? I like what I'm doing. I'm young, 53, you know, I got a lot of gas in the tank and I like to do this. And I'm not sure I wanna do that. And then, and then I slowly saw once these companies kind of transitioned with the private equity thing, slowly after a couple years, employees started to complain, employees started to leave, and customers started to complain because the white glove and like the, this, the ownership leadership changed and they don't know the people involved and it's a big bureaucracy now and you can't, you know, you put a quote in, it takes a month to get a quote back and all this stuff's going on and— And I started to see like these, these, um, these companies in, in, I don't wanna say like break my heart because it, I mean, we, we stopped winning customers and winning employees. Yeah.

Yeah. They come back to you.

It's helping us. Um, but I just started to say, you know, I don't want that. Like I, I've got folks that have been with me for 20 years and if I sold to private equity, like these guys have a part of my family basically. Right. Like, and if I were to, if I were to do it, just, it doesn't appeal to me. Right. So, so then I, I actually, a quick story. I introduced my, my son, uh, just graduated Fordham University. And I have another son who's at Providence College right now in Providence, Rhode Island, and they both go to school for business. And I've been coaching them in everything in life, sports and life and everything else since they were 3 years old. And I had them talk to an investment banker friend of mine, my older boy, because he's in finance and he's trying to figure out what he wants to do. And Jay Jung is his name, and Jay's an awesome investment banking— I don't know if you've met Jay.

I have.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know. He's the best.

I love the guy. So I said, hey Jay, would you do me a favor and have a conversation with my son, you know, and help him with investment banking? So in the back of my mind, I'm like, maybe Jay will offer him a job. I don't know, like maybe Jay will make a phone call for him and help him get an interview. Well, my son talks to him. He calls me after the call and says, hey Dad, Jay was great. But I said, what did he say? He said, uh, he told me I shouldn't get into investment banking and I should join your MSP and run your MSP. I was like, what? So I hang up with my son. I call Jay. I'm like, hey Jay, what's going on? I thought you were gonna I was hoping you were gonna help my son out. And he's like, well, you wanted me to be honest, right? I said, no, I wanted you to be honest. He said, honestly, I told him not to get into investment banking. It's a terrible industry. And then take your MSP and take it to $100 million.

So there you go.

So I started talking to my kids and I'm like, guys, do you wanna get involved in this thing? And one of the things, just like the, you know, the AI governance and security, my Vistage Group, as soon as they started talking about kind of this third generation potential business situation, My peer group came in and said, whoa, hold on. We need governance set up. You need to have family governance. You need to understand ownership, stock, how it transitions, trusts. Like, you've got to put all kinds of structure here. You've got to make sure you do this right. Oh, by the way, the boys might not be, they might not be able to handle it. They might not be able to, the jobs might not be there for them. They might not want the jobs. Like, there's infighting in family business. There's like a third generation. It's such a jump. So we're just starting that. You know, my oldest son graduated. He's gonna be working in New York for— he's leaving for New York in, in the fall to work. And, um, I guess in the back of my mind, I, I think about like a 5-year window where they're gonna go out and kind of sow their oats, if you will, and then come back in the business. And in the meanwhile, you know, we'll call it the next 5 years, I'm on a growth track. I wanna get to $30 million.

Yeah.

Right? Like I'm gonna get to, we're gonna get to $14, we're gonna get to $16, we're gonna get to $20. going to get to 30. So I'm growing as if we're building a platform.

Yep.

Without any investment banking or private equity guys. We're just doing it ourselves. Eventually, there'll probably be some M&A. I've got a bunch of great friends in the space, in my peer groups and different things. And quite honestly, I'd love to maybe team up with some of those guys at some point. I don't know where that's going to go. That's just kind of in the back of my mind. But the reality is building my own platform and keeping it Uh, for my, maybe as a family business, I think is like spitballing it. That's kind of where I think we're gonna go. Yep. But things change. But, uh, that's, that's the plan as of today, Brian, uh, July, uh, 13th, 2026.

I love it, man. I love it. Yeah. Well, and hey, um, that's, that's awesome. Um, so yeah, man. Uh, so just as we, oh, uh, here's, here's one that I always love to ask. Like when you think, when you think back on your leadership journey, What is the, uh, what's the biggest mistake that you've made as a leader?

Yeah, I'll tell you, it was, um, maybe letting emotion, uh, run things, you know, without having a structure like EOS. Uh, I have, um, geez, at least a half dozen MSPs in like the New England region who the owners and/or top people came from ACS. And it's like, Geez, why couldn't I hold onto that guy? And I'm talking like 20 years ago, hold on, right? So I joined ACS with my dad, Brian, was in my early 20s, and it was my dad and I. We started hiring employees. So technically I was like an executive in my 20s, had no formal business training, didn't belong to a peer group, very emotional, going fast, trying to do things. not respecting people as much as I probably should have, like lacking empathy in certain situations. Just maturing as an owner, as a leader. Joining Vistage, Kitaden is another peer group I'm in, joining Evolve, EOS, all these things have now kind of shaped me. So I think previous to that, to kind of answer the question, I was an emotional guy.

Yeah.

And I probably shot first and asked questions later type of thing. But yeah, no, in hindsight, like I look back at it and it's like, there's a bunch of great folks who I know who I'm still friendly with. And I'm like, in the grand scheme of things, that would've been really good. I would say that the second thing to kind of piggyback off was not joining like Arlen in like HTG, like number 3 or number 4, which is when he started that he was like, hey Billy, come along. And my dad was like, You're not going to Iowa or Nebraska. You're not doing that. Like, this is crazy.

I never did it. Right.

And, uh, so I would say not joining peer groups earlier and allowing myself to, um, unstructured leadership, you know, with, with, um, yeah, leading with emotion, right. Versus data.

Right, right. Yeah. And, and that's such a hard, I mean, that's a big transition. So thanks for sharing. Thanks for being vulnerable, uh, with that because, yeah. Well, there's, I'm sure a lot of other folks deal with, deal with some of that stuff. And, and those are the kind of things I get into a lot with the, with my clients. Right. It's like, hey, well, you know, all of this, I mean, it, this journey is, it's tough. And, you know, and, and when you're, you know, when you're kind of feel like you're out there on an island on your own, it is, it, it can be really heavy. And so, yeah. So, so all of that, like, man, we're, we're on the, We're on the same page. I always like my, my big 3 things. It's like get in a peer group, get, get a business operating system in place, EOS or whatever. And, uh, and, and find yourself a, you know, an executive coach, um, or thought partner or advisor or somebody that's gonna be in your corner on your team. And those were the 3 things for me. And so that's why I'm always telling folks. Um, so anyways, um, okay. So I like to finish with the lightning round. So quick questions, quick answers. So first, what is a belief or something that you've changed your mind about in the last few years?

Allowing my leadership team to make decisions and step away, like not be the boss, right? Like when there's 3 people going one way and I want to go the other way, I'm like, hmm, Maybe I'm wrong, right? Letting leaders lead. Yeah.

Okay. I love it.

Yep.

That's a tough one, but necessary, like actually delegating decision-making. Okay. What's something you've been curious about lately?

You know, honestly, it's the business transition, family transition thing. You know, it just, that conversation I mentioned with Jay Jung that happened a year ago and it changed the way I was thinking about things and I'm really, You know, I'm excited about the possibility, so I'm thinking a lot about business transition, family transition, you know, third generation type stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. That's a big conversation. What's something you can't live without in your daily routine?

Talk to my family, spend time with my family. I love spending time with my wife and my kids. It's super important to me. And I try to be available for the business, but I have to be available for my family. So I can't live without talking to 'em, hanging with 'em, just getting some, even if it's a couple minutes.

100%. Love it. Okay. So, and then end of the day or the weekend, what's your go-to way to unwind?

Well, summer right now, it's getting on the boat and going, finding a nice place to drop an anchor and just You know, read a book or listen to Chris Stapleton and have a couple. I'm drinking. I'm drinking Spindrift carbonated water.

Yeah, yeah, with a little little flavor, but not that much.

Like a little lemon. I drink like a dozen of them. It's delicious. Yeah. So sit in the boat, have it. You know, listen to some music and just hang out and and just relax.

Hey, that's that's me as well. I'm a I like I'll just yeah take the boat out in the middle of the lake and just. You know, plop out there. Fantastic. And then, okay, so, and then what's, what is either like a book or an idea or a piece of advice that you feel like has shaped you the most?

That's a great one. I hate to say maybe Traction, maybe EOS Traction. I mean, I've read a million business books and I've taken little things from all of them, Yeah. Um, but Traction was in the very beginning when I first started looking at EOS. I bought Traction and I listened to it on Audible. Yeah. And I read it and I li— I listened to it and read it kind of simultaneously. Yep. And I was all in on EOS.

Mm-hmm.

Um, I would, I would tell every business owner they should read Traction. I think it's a great, um, I think it's great. And, and I, I'll tell you one more book, um, that I was already kind of living my It was my kind of my core values before, but ConnectWise, Arlen, the Go-Giver. And it was something that Arlen and it was big in ConnectWise where they're like, you gotta read the Go-Giver.

Yeah.

And I was, I had already done, that's, that's what I already did. I was like a connector. I'd, I'd build a bunch of relationships and had friends and trying to get people to do business together and all this sort of thing. And then I, yet I read the, the fable, if you will, and I listened to an Audible and I loved it. It was awesome.

Yeah. That's great. Yeah, I love Bob Burg, love The Go-Giver. If anybody hasn't read that one, it's definitely worth it.

Awesome.

And it's just a great way to live. There's no downside here, right? So love that, man. Thank you so much for sharing and being vulnerable and stuff, man. These are always great conversations, and I know this is going to be really helpful for a lot of folks. Um, hey, if somebody wanted to connect with you or learn more about ACS, or they're like, hey, you know, I'm in Boston and I need a new MSP, like, where— not surprisingly, like, multiple guests have had, have had, uh, clients reach out. So where could people get in touch with you?

Uh, well, first, acs.com. Uh, very easy domain. ACS, 3-letter domain. So we've had that for about 20 years.

That's a good one to own right there.

It's a good one. We bought it a long time ago. We've held onto it. It's been like, it's a great one. Um, And I would say hit me up on LinkedIn.

Okay.

I, I'm, I'm an active, uh, I'm an active participant on LinkedIn. So, uh, if you wanna have a conversation, if you're a fellow MSP and just wanna hear some of the stuff we were talking about and get some tips again from the Go-Giver thing and the Evolve thing, I love helping people if I can. If there's a question you have or, or numbers we went over or just wanted some clarity on something, I'd love to talk to you. And, and if you're, if you're a business owner in the Boston area or New England region and need help with AI or any of that stuff, we, I'd love to talk to you. Even if you have, even if you have an MSP and you're happy with them, doesn't matter to me. I'd love to just talk to you and just, and just help you learn.

So. Helping it, help in any way you can. Yeah. That, that's because you're a go-getter, man. I love it. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Billy, thanks so much, man. This has been great. And, um, well, I'll, I'll, I'll be seeing you at peer groups here in less than a month. But, um, yeah, until next time, uh, thanks everybody for listening and thanks, Billy. Appreciate you, man.

Yeah, Brian, thanks for having me. I'm, I'm an active, uh, avid, uh, $10 Million MSP, the newsletter, I've been watching all the podcasts. So it was, it was an honor to be on here.

I appreciate it. Awesome. Awesome, man. Well, thanks so much. Thanks for listening to this episode of the $10 Million MSP Podcast. If this conversation got you thinking about growth, profitability, or what might be holding your MSP back, I invite you to take my MSP maturity assessment. It's a short assessment designed to help you identify what's working, what's breaking, and where the biggest opportunities in your MSP may be. You can take it at brianhoppe.com/assessment. And again, that link is in the show notes. I'll see you next time.