Full Throttle Leaders Podcast- Jesse Alexander

All right, Michael Falato here again, GTM Full Throttle. This is Full Throttle Leaders Podcast. We got Jesse Alexander from— he's the EVP at Allcom. Jesse, thanks for making time. I know that we've been talking and I'm really excited about having you on the show. Tell me a little bit about Allcom and then why you joined the company.

Sure. Well, Michael, great to be here with you. Glad you had me on your podcast. Appreciate that. You know, look, we're both folks that are trying to make our revenue engines just really hum, right? And so, I'm with AllCom, which is an MSP that is currently focused in the Michigan area, primarily the Detroit metro area there, and very much have the dreams of making it a 5-state regional powerhouse in the area there. And that's going to come from just being able to expand the message of what do we do to help make business better for the people who are running those businesses and their use of technology to help them grow rather than just being a cost center.

And what's the biggest mistake that our people are making when they're looking for MSP right now? I mean, there's a commodity type business. Yeah.

You know, look, IT services is very much a commodity play, right? And different industries are going to tell you, well, they're different and all that kind of good stuff. And I'm probably going to get shot tomorrow because someone's going to say I offended them. The answer is really, look, you've got servers, you've got storage, you've got compute, you've got workstations, you've got applications. All of that is just a matter of how do you enable people to have the access to those assets in a secure manner with data that is secure from anywhere, anytime to do their jobs. That's the market today. All of that can be viewed as very commodity, but it's how do you do it so that you reduce the risk of the organization? Because there's so many ways bad actors can get access to our data. And the job is, how do you make that happen? And how do you make it not dependent on you and me? How do you make it not dependent on humans monitoring this stuff to make it happen? So, the biggest mistake people can make is, hey, I've got an MSP out there and they've got, Great people. And I know that those people are looking at my stuff. I'm good, right?

Are you mostly just over-the-phone IT support? Are you going out and hooking up routers and Merakis?

Oh, yeah. You know, that happens. Absolutely. But the business is being able to connect hardware and, you know, do cabling and all that. That's that low value add. It has to happen. You have to set it up. But once you set it up, if IT can't support you remotely, then I don't know what organization can. So, you know, with most of our clients, what we do is say, we're going to take care of this infrastructure, the security, all of that kind of stuff for you. We're going to enable your workstation so we can send you a laptop and be productive right out of the box. However, we're going to make sure that we can schedule to support them on-site. And also, we're going to even recommend that, hey, if you've got enough people on-site, you probably ought to have somebody who is an employee W-2 on-site that can work with us to say, hey, Michael's laptop's having this problem. Can you go on-site and we can work on it together to make sure it gets resolved?

Supply that talent, or is it mostly just the IT MSP background?

What's that again?

Supply that talent and maybe act as a recruiter of talent to put that person in the office as well, or no?

You know what, we can do that one, but that's one that most people have somebody that they trust that has grown up with the business for a while, and that this can be there. But if they don't, we absolutely can place somebody there, and that we've done that many, many occasions there where our people really become that trusted advocate on-site to help that client. Yeah.

How many endpoints are you managing right now?

Oh, over 25,000 right now.

Okay. And what is— do you have a goal for next year?

Um, well, you always got to have a goal, something to strive for, right? You know, I think a real— you know, the first number that popped in my head was 50. I'm gonna double that. Uh, the realistic is I'm gonna probably say let's, let's add another 3,000 endpoints to that next year. And, and I would be really happy if we did that.

And so you're targeting the, the 3 or 5 states around you. Is there a reason That you don't want to go further out, or is it because of the location?

Yeah, I'll go further because we have clients that are all over the US that have plants, that have facilities. We primarily focus on manufacturing and distribution in one vertical and then professional services, you know, in another, you know, engineering firms, insurance, legal, that kind of stuff in the other one there. So, we've got clients that have got offices and plants all over the US. In fact, some of them have got international facilities. But those headquarters and the majority, the concentration of their sites is right here, which allows us to be able to send people on site and meet them in an easier manner, a lower-cost manner. As we expand out, we want to make sure that we can expand out with enough concentration and enough— and the geographic closeness to be able to support them. It does become a little bit more difficult when we have to have somebody on site and they're in, oh, some remote place like Florida.

Yeah, I, I worked, I worked at TechMate, which is, they have serviced MSPs. Yeah. And so they were the helping hands, smart hands thing. So if you ever need help, that's

probably— Exactly. You know what, I, I am not afraid to use, in fact, I embrace that model of being able to use some smart, uh, hot hands on site to be able to help us out. So they get on site and we'll go tell, you know, they'll, they'll be able to go, hey, I'm seeing this. We go, great, we can adjust the configuration, we can adjust the settings and make it all work. What's your ideal customer? technology really becomes personal to you, right? As an end user, right, you don't really care as much about what's happening with the infrastructure and the cloud and all that. You want to know that you can use your laptop that's right in front of you right now to be able to do the things. And that's where technology becomes very personal to each of us each and every day.

What's your ideal customer profile to bring on for your company?

One that will pay me. No, actually, one that is— so we're looking for a couple of things. One, we're looking kind of mid, mid and lower mid-market, right? So between 50 and 500 employees there. Again, in those 2 verticals, manufacturing distribution on one side and professional services on the other, like we said. But there's 2 behaviors that really kind of make it real for us, right? One is when there's a client in transition, they're changing ownership, operating model, growth stage, that kind of stuff, or that they're actually in a growth mode. Those are the ones that we're really gonna be able to help help them as they go through things, processes that used to work and don't work anymore, and help them transform the way that their technology supports their business, not the other way around.

What's, either good or bad, what's some lesson learned in the last 6 to 12 months that, hey, I found this great AI, I found this great strategy, and it worked great, or it failed and I learned from it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think one of the— one of the biggest things is just that decentralized approach to letting people use AI in your company, right? So the thing that's at risk about that is what happens when your junior accountant puts your financials into ChatGPT to analyze that and now that's available for everybody? You know, what happens when your marketing person puts your company business plan in there to go ahead and start creating a presentation and now Which results are available to competitors.

But if you do, like, let's just for instance, because I hear about this, if you're doing that, can I say I'm looking for GTM Full Throttle's, uh, game plan and it will serve that up, or will it anonymize it?

Yeah, you know, it will not anonymize it. It will use it. It will be available. You know, people who know, they can go ahead and pull it up and kind of find it and that sort of thing. So yeah, that is, that is the, that is the biggest risk there. Now it's an easy thing to fix, right? Because all I gotta do is say, hey, use I like to say I'm a Microsoft environment. So use Copilot in my enterprise on our license. And I've had the settings such that the data can't be shared for learning outside of our entity. I've got it secured and locked down, and that makes sense.

Yeah.

So that's the single biggest, you know, helping the companies realize this is a big risk to your business, but you can lock that down, you can secure it, and you can do so in a way that everybody understands what the risk is risks are. So don't take company work home, do it on your personal. Use your enterprise-secured, you know, AI tool for what most people are doing AI with, right? Because right now, most people are using AI as a how-to, right? Analyze this, right? Or write this for me, create this presentation and write this kind of thing for me, right? That's how most people are using them. And they get amazing efficiency benefits for that. But we got to help them figure out, you know, how to use it in a controlled manner. Now, that being said, there's other issues there. And, you know, and those become an issue of the people who are using it to create agents. Now, the biggest issue there becomes of what data are you bringing into these agents? And second of all, are you counting how many tokens you're spending? Because that bill can get really large really quick.

So who do you want to reach out to as we end this Zoom call? this podcast, what's the best reason to reach out to you and how can they get a hold of you?

Yeah. You know what? The best way to reach out to me is just reach out to me at jalexander@allcom.com or I'm on LinkedIn and you'll find me just Jesse Alexander there. So, either place is fine. And I look forward to having a conversation because a big thing of what we do is we really help people understand What are the goals? What are the guidelines? What are the controls, the governance you want to put in place for whatever technology? And how is it going to support my business? So, if that's a conversation you want to have, I'd love to have it with anyone who's listening to the GTM Full Throttle podcast here. And I appreciate the time, Michael.

Thanks, Jesse.