🗳️ backup everything with Saaher Muzafer

Welcome to another CEO Wisdom podcast. Stay with us. We have Sahir Mouzaffer. He is CEO and founder at Backup Everything. Sahir, can you introduce yourself, tell us a bit more about Backup Everything.

Yeah, sure. Thanks Charles. Yeah, so Backup Everything, we're a cloud backup company, been around for about nine years or so and essentially we provide cloud backup services to businesses around the world.

Right. How did you decided or why did you decided to start this company?

I think the main thing, I mean I was working for a cloud backup company before and I was just in the industry and I've always had that feeling of entrepreneurship, wanting to do something for myself. So. So the journey wasn't really cloud backup. The journey was entrepreneurship and trying to bring products and services to the market that new customers were looking for. That's really where it started from. Cool.

And your role is mostly sales as I understand. How do you get your new clients in the business?

Yes, I'm the CEO of course and CEO as we all know, has lots of hats in the entrepreneurship world. Actually a lot of our businesses through referrals, we, it's not, we don't really do much of kind of marketing or kind of SEO type thing. It's a lot of referrals through word of mouth and then yeah, we do the occasional marketing, but not as much as people would think.

How do you get all these referrals? How do you make sure to give out a great product and satisfy your clients?

Exactly. And a lot of our market is resellers. So resellers, they, they of course bring their customers onto our solution that they might refer fellow msps. So I mean we have resellers in, you know, over 10, 10 countries around the world, about 4,000 customers. So it just spreads quickly.

So 4,000 customers, that's quite a lot. So do they pay, you know, the typical hosting, 6 to 10 to $30 price? Give me a bit more info about the pricing.

Yeah, so we, I mean they start from anything for $5, $10 a month and it goes upwards. So the c. A lot of our customers are through our resellers. So we're about 80, 90% channel focused. And because you know, in this, in this industry it's all about trust and relationships. Right. Especially we're dealing with people's data. So it's not a question of you can put your services with anyone, you got to have a good feeling about the company as well. So.

Yeah, right. So resellers, do you mean, for example, I know about Bluehost or let's say GoDaddy which was initially for domains. I use namecheap nowadays. Can you define the reseller?

Reseller, yeah, there's various different names to reseller. MSP distributors, basically people who have an array of clients and they resell services. Backup being just one part of the service. They could sell cyber security, antivirus, workstation device kind of management. And we're just one small clog in the whole wheel of the MSP world.

Interesting. And how do you distinguish yourself from other companies? Because there's so many hosting companies nowadays. How do you make sure that you provide something better for the price that they pay?

Yeah, it's just transparency, Charles. I mean, like I said, in this business it's all about trust and who you are. Reputation is everything. So yeah, don't get wrong. I mean anyone who backs up data, there's nothing different there. But I think the way you present yourself, the way you talk about, not just yourself, about competitors, the market as a whole, that gives that feeling to customers like, okay, let's invest, investigate more. Steve Jobs did this quote many, many years ago about connecting the dots. So when you, when a customer looks at a disaster, for example, you can't connect the dots in front of you, you can only connect the dots. That's happened before. So customers usually like, oh yeah, I had a disaster five years ago, I should have had a backup service then. So I always tell this to customers. Just think about what you've done before and how the value of cloud backup could come into your workplace or environment. And then think about using our services. And that always seems to hone in the message. Definitely.

What are the costs of running a hosting business? Like is it pure metal buying and servers and where do you run those?

Yeah, so we use AWS as a storage. Then you've got software licenses. But a customer really doesn't need to get involved in all the integrity of the cost. It's literally a price per gigabyte or terabyte. Here you go. Or if it's Microsoft, 365 backups, for example, price per user. And that's it. All the backend stuff, I mean really, let's be honest, the customer doesn't really care about, they just want a good service and it works. And it's, you know, working all the time. That's all right.

How big is your team right now?

We have about 15 to 20 staff, some in the UK, some outside of UK and we just, like I said, we're channel focused. So we mainly deal with our account managers and sales people and marketing prospects. That we have kind of just deal internally with what's out there in the kind of the market today and kind of manage the current resellers and the relationships all the time.

Right. Because I see some of them are in ops, some of them. You have one sales guy. What are their role exactly? What do they do to improve the business?

Yeah, I mean when we say sales, I mean we're all sales, right. We're all account managers, we're all technical support. It's a bit like godaddy. I think when you call them up, they, there's always one the person you speak to has a bit of knowledge of everything. So we don't like to define individual people as in terms of sales, it's more the value that they can bring to a customer. So a customer says I have a technical issue. It's not a question of okay, let me speak to my support team. We all know a little bit about their problems anyway. So I think that's the value. When somebody contacts us, they don't have to wait for someone dedicated to answer their query. All of us can answer many questions to some extent. That's the value.

Right. And hosting companies, I, I like to think of them as mostly service companies, you know, like I've tried a bunch and I stuck with namecheap while they brought me with the price. Right. And they kept me with the quality of their customer service. The live chat's wait time is very low and every time I have a problem, they fix it. I tried blue holes for example and blue holes, the wait time was forever. Back in these days pricing was good but they lost me because their, their customer service was crap and I had something somewhat similar with holes Gator. So how do you make sure to keep your ticket downtime to, to a very low degree and, and the, the resolving rate to be very high?

Well, our main goal is always answer ticket. Literally within, within half an hour, one hour, that's the first thing. If not, it's quicker than that, like within a few minutes. Even if it's an ongoing ticket, we don't just keep quiet, we tell the customer. By the way, we're still working on it, we'll give you an Update later on, etc. Etc. We never just, if you don't know the answer to a problem, there's nothing wrong telling a customer, we're still working on it. I think this is the biggest thing that people get scared of, like oh, what am I going to tell the customer? Tell them what you're doing. There's no issue if you can't, if you can't do it and also if you do something wrong. Again there's no issue in being transparent about it. The key thing in the IT world is transparency. That's all what, what it comes down to for maintaining long term relationships.

Yeah, there's nothing wrong because you have backup if you mess up. So yeah, no that's, that's quite interesting. I want to know what's up, what's up next for the company. Like where, where do you want to take it? Because the calculus I did, you guys are probably at around 20-30k mrr right? Like where do you want to take it for this year?

No, I think we, we're, we've been developing our own product for the last three to four years so at the moment now we risk we reselling other products. So the idea is to reach you grow our own using our own solution to grow it, grow the kind of MMR and general customer base that way that will accelerate our growth for the next one year, two years, three years and beyond for sure.

Right, and what do you mean by your own product, your own SaaS, like what does that mean specifically?

We're developing our own cloud backup solution which can backup devices, servers and also Microsoft and other cloud to cloud applications. It's a unique thing. It's a bit like I'm not going to compare it really but iPhone, OpenAI, you know, watch this space. It's a bit like that. It's literally going to change the market in that sense and there's a reason for it. I'm not just saying that as like a plug. It's just because I know the industry very well and what people are looking for. It's a low price with unlimited licenses included and for sure people will take up the product.

Nice. And against who would you be competing in that backup area? Does AWS do that as well?

AWS is more a storage company but our backup providers, I mean the well known names are Acronis, Rubrik, Commvall, there's Comet Backup, there's Assay, there's acegra. Lots of competitors. There's nothing wrong with them. We never downplay a competitor. Everyone's equal, everyone has a slice of the pizza as it were but we're just bringing something different and I think in entrepreneurship as well, it's always good to bring in something that to develop what's already there and make it better rather than bringing something totally new which no one will kind of not, not know. Heard of improve what's There, that's much easier.

Yeah. And not reinventing the wheels, probably one of my favorite principles. So yeah, backup services. Yeah, I remember like with Holes Gator, I think they charged like. Yeah, it was pretty ridiculous actually. The price for a backup at Holesgator it ranged from like 30 bucks to a crappy backup to like I think it was like 200 or something like that. Namecheap. I'm not even sure if I have a backup with my cPanel so I think it'd be pretty bad if my websites would go down. Maybe we can like spend a couple of seconds here, talk about why backuping stuff and what is a backup exactly? And why don't all hosting companies keep backups? Because it takes too much space. Why do you recommend backup for everyone and backing up everything?

Yeah, back in the air. It's funny because, well it's. If you have a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, you've lost it. See people think just because you delete a date, delete a file, it goes in the recycle bin, that's fine. What if your computer crashes? So this is something you'd never ever think of. You never think your TV will break down, but you some, there's always insurances for it. You never think you get a roof, a leak in your roof, in your house, but you take insurance for it. Backup is just another, it's another name for backup is insurance. You lose something. We're here to get your data back. Without your data, you know, your business would have problems trying to restart. And that's really what the, what the whole message is about.

How do you make sure that, that, that data and that backup is kept safe and I don't get my shit hacked.

Yeah. So this is where we outsource to providers like aws. You know, they, they store our data. It's not like data in a server. In our bedroom for example, you know, we store it with AWS and once you tell people that there's no issues or you store it with reputable data center providers and there's no issue. So I think it's as long as you choose a reputable provider. Everyone's ISO 2700 uncertified these days, so there's no issue with that as well. So I mean there's no that, that's really what it comes about using a well known provider for the storage.

You talked about OpenAI. How do you think AI is going to affect your business?

AI will. AI is at its infancy in the backup world. It'll just make It a luxury where you can say something like, you know, create me a backup set to back up my data. 8 o' clock every day. I'm sure that will come already. I'm sure it's already there now. But in terms of the human intervention and AI, I think not just backup, but generally speaking, I think we're still a long way to go. I know there's a lot of media talk about, whoa, AI and it's gonna kill people's jobs and all this. No, at the moment now people are just curious about AI. So people are signing up to like tens and millions of different AI products. But in terms of backup and AI and generally AI and everything else, I think we're still. We're not. We're nowhere near the Terminator days, that's for sure.

Right. For CEOs and founders out there, what does your date look like? Any habits you would also recommend them to adopt to be more successful as a founder. CEO.

Yeah. Take care of yourself. Don't work 20 hours a day, literally. Take a step back, have water in the morning. Sounds a bit silly. Don't look at your phone, have a good shower, have some food, look at your customer emails, whatever, and just take it slowly. You know, with entrepreneurship, it's again a common thing. Enjoy the journey. Don't always think of the destination. The moment you start thinking about the destination, you just get stressed and anxiety. Think about what you're doing day to day. Look at your customers, how can you speak to customers, what other services can you offer them? And just enjoy the whole process. Don't just keep thinking about what's going to happen later on.

You're a football fan, the European one. How would you compare running a team to being a coach of a football slash soccer team?

That's a very good question. You've got different personalities, different characteristics. It's about putting everyone on the same page of the vision that you want to achieve. So the football team, of course, is about winning trophies in the back. In our business, it's about gaining more customers and providing that satisfaction. See, it's not about gaining customers, it's not about sales and commission here. It's about retention. You get a customer, very easy OPEX model, they pay you a monthly subscription. After one year they might say, oh, we're going to review our services. Why even get to that situation? Your team should be focused on helping the customer. And the worst mistake that people do is they put all the efforts, answer the do all the salesy stuff for a customer, get them on board after they sign up, they go quiet. Oh, we don't want to talk to them. Now we've got the revenue for a year. It comes to 10 months, 11 months. Okay, let's start talking to them. Customers hate that. Continually speak to them, manage them. So when a football game is there every week, prepare every week, it's the same sort of idea. Keep speaking, keeping, you know, keep asking them their pain points and you'll be surprised how long customers stay with you just because of that.

Love it. Where can people find out more about you and backup everything? So here.

Yeah, so I mean, our website is just backup everything.co.uk if you just Google back up everything. Funny enough, a lot of people just find us by typing in backup everything and they just come to our website because it's like just two simple words.