From Founder to CEO: Navigating the Journey For MSPs

You know, for most MSP owners, they kind of, you know, they're mostly technologists and becomes a matter of changing from technologists to leader and recruiter and builder of teams and strategist and, and all of those things because you can't, you can't scale without that stuff, right? Without actually letting go of a lot of the things that most MSP owners want to hold on to and you know, building a really capable, strong team to, to handle most of the day to day stuff and, and kind of get out of the way.

Love to hear, you know, starting off a little bit about your journey. I know you had an MSP, you built that up and now you're helping other MSPs. Tell us a little bit about your journey before you started your current coaching practice.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I actually started in the industry before there were really managed services. You know, there were a few people doing it, but before it came became mainstream. So, so I started in a very small, you know, just kind of consultancy with one other guy when, and built that, you know, kind of under the umbrella of a family office down here in Texas. So, so kind of like learn, you know. Yeah, learned, learned the business, you know, transition from break fix to managed services in there probably around 2006 or 2007 and built that, built that business for, for somebody else. And probably around 2015, 2016, I was like, hey, you know, I'm doing this for somebody else who already has plenty of money, so why don't I go. And you know, I kind of feel like I cracked the code of hey, what does it take to build, to build a successful msp? And so I said, hey, let's go do, let's go do this on my own. And, and I had a, I did have a financial partner when I, when I went into business together with him. But yeah, bought a small msp, about five people and then, you know, and then a couple years later bought another msp, integrated the two of those. When we were, we were in kind of the banking and credit union space. So most of our clients were, were all, you know, community banks, mostly in Texas, but kind of also in surrounding states and then credit unions kind of throughout the country. So yeah, so then, you know, I plan to run that for probably another five to 10 years. But as you know, as whatever fate or the universe or God or whatever would have it, we, you know, we, we ended up selling in 2020, late 2021. So just over, a little over a couple years ago and, and yeah, and then I worked for the buyer for a little over a year. And then after that, just about a year ago, kind of struck off on my own and now I'm coaching msps. I mainly work one on one with MSP owners, but also do kind of some business operating system implementation as well. And so, yeah, so that's kind of the, you know, the story, if you will.

Nice.

All right.

You comfortable sharing with us, you know, what, what are the revenue bands and, and size of the company on that journey like?

Yeah, and so, so we started kind of with five, we added another about 12 with our second acquisition. And then, and, and actually, you know, didn't grow that much people wise, but had a very, I would consider high revenue to people for, for an MSP as we grew. So, so very high margin, high profitability, you know, and in rough numbers, let's just say, you know, got it to around the $5 million mark and then, and then sold and sold about that. And I planned to kind of, you know, to get it to more of the 20 to 30 million mark and you know, things, you know, things, things happen. So but then, yeah, I mean I, and then after that I was running a $15 million business unit of the, of the company that I sold to and, and still a shareholder in that company as well.

You know, one thing we see is with, with any business MSP or, or any business, that journey can look very different at those different stages, you know, and what you have to do running a company and being a leader at each of those stages can change dramatically. And that's one thing we've seen people have trouble with, is making that shift right from it's me and then it's five people and now suddenly it's 10, 12, revenues are growing. Like how do I have to change as a leader and how does the company have to run differently for us to succeed at this level and, or get to that next level?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And it becomes, yeah, it becomes, you know, for most MSP owners, they kind of, you know, they're mostly technologists and becomes a matter of changing from technologists to leader and recruiter and builder of teams and strategist and all of those things because you can't, you can't scale without that stuff. Right? Without actually letting go of a lot of the things that most MSP owners want to hold on to and you know, building a really capable, strong team to handle most of the day to day stuff and kind of get out of the way in a lot of ways.

Yeah, completely resonates. Definitely something we Hear out there a lot is there, you know, in your coaching and your business, I guess. Tell us a little bit about your current business.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, so I spend most of my time one on one with MSP owners. We usually meet, you know, a couple of times a month. And, and we're, you know, what's, I think, different between what I do and what a lot of other people do in the industry is it's not like a program. You know, I'm not saying, hey, I'm gonna, you know, go, go do this homework and then come back and we'll talk about it and all that. I'm, I'm meeting them where they're at. Right. So, so I work for, with very small MSPs, you know, all the way up to, you know, over 100 million in revenue. And so everybody's at a different place in their, in their journey. And what we work on is what, you know, what's, what's most, what's most important for you right now? What are the, what are the things that are holding you back? Where are you stuck and how do we get you unstuck? And then how do we take a strategic view of what you're doing and who you are as a leader and what do you need to be and who do you need to be as a leader to get you where you want to go? And a lot of times, you know, a lot of times they don't know actually exactly where they want to go. Right. So we go through a process of helping them figure that out and, and then, you know, and then do the things that it takes to, you know, to get there, to get them on that, that path. So, so yeah, so I think of it in, you know, as far as, like, when I start an engagement with somebody, we're dealing with, you know, we're dealing with the things that are kind of like the most urgent or, you know, or the hardest, you know, hardest challenges to them right now. And then I go. And then we kind of go through, generally speaking, some process of working on vision and purpose. So, you know, what's. Why, why does this company exist? What are we trying to accomplish? Big picture, how does that fit in with my personal goals, my personal wealth goals, my, my financial targets as an individual, as the owner getting the vision piece, and then we work down into strategy. So if we know, we know where we're going, how are we going to get there? And then the execution on a, on a day in, day out basis, right? So it kind of, kind of follows somewhat of A business operating system path. And some, you know, some clients are ready to, you know, to jump into kind of an implementation of that. But, but many I just work with one on one in that stuff and they, and they kind of lead the implementation of that, you know, that piece themselves. So, so yeah, I hope that kind of answers the question you were asking there completely.

Very much fits with, with, you know, our philosophy and our approach. If you get clarity on your vision, which is much easier to do when you get kind of the big challenges out of your head first. Get those down. Put those over here. Now think, think about what are our outcomes and then come back and let's, let's look at the challenges we have. Let's look at the vision we have and reverse engineer how to get from here to there and look at what our biggest goals are. Do you find that there are different challenges that can hold a leader or CEO back at each stage of, you know, if we look at kind of those bands. Because you kind of crossed the whole spectrum with your coaching, right? You've got folks that are early, early stage. You've got folks 100 million. We think about kind of that journey from 1 to 10, 10 to 50, 50 to 100. Do you see sort of different challenges or things that hold them back or does it tend to be some variant of the same thing?

Yeah, yeah, well, and, and I'll say like in all frankness, I mean, most of my clients are on, are on the very, you know, on the smaller end of that side or on of that band. But yeah, challenges. I mean, I think, you know, in, in growth, it's, you know, you, you generally. So, so I'll go with like the, you know, the, if you start kind of on the smaller end, you know, think about a 1 to 2 million dollars shop. Often the owner can kind of like push through to that point by, you know, kind of doing everything themselves. Right? They're, they're like, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm the guy. Everything kind of runs through me. I do all the sales, I manage all the people, all the, you know, the clients. Whenever they have a problem, they call me. And there's a big challenge there in, in breaking out of that as far as, you know, as far as, like, hey, I'm used to being the traffic cop for the entire business, but then at some point they realize, oh, I'm never going to have a life if I don't, if I don't make some serious changes, right? So I've got to learn how to Find the right people and to delegate to, and learn how to delegate because they usually stink at delegating. They're just like, hey, you go do this thing. Instead of, you know, helping, helping people understand how and why and the, you know, all of the details behind that. And a lot of times if they don't, if they delegate something, they delegate a responsibility without delegating authority. That's another, that's a whole other issue. So, so anyways, yes, so you, so you run into issues there and, and that's a place to kind of get over the hump. And then, you know, and then you run into another kind of band where it's like, oh, I've got to, you know, not only do I need to delegate, I actually have to have people who can, I have to have leaders who can lead other people and, and you know, and then the next level, right, I have to have leaders that can lead leaders in building, you know, building another, another layer of leadership inside the organization. The next piece I' about is where, you know, in order to really scale, you know, you're, they're used to principle led selling for the most part. Of course, many people try to hire salespeople much too early, but in order to really scale and you know, when you get larger, you have to have a higher amount of growth to combat kind of the, the attrition that naturally comes. And so you gotta, you know, you gotta learn to build sales teams and you gotta learn to build, you know, a sales culture, sales leadership, all of that, in order to actually continue, you know, continue scaling on past the, you know, 10, 15, $20 million mark. You know, you're not going to be able to do that on your own as a, as an owner. Right. So those are a few things that come to mind. Just as when, when you ask that.

Question, what are some of the ways that you, you find are helpful for CEOs to think about things in order to make those shifts and address those three areas? Are there specific things you found that are, you know, particularly helpful? Does it vary from individual to individual?

Yeah, I do. I, I think it does vary. You know, I kind of, I always go back to a few things for me that kind of had this, this impact of like, oh, I'm, you know, kind of going from not really sure how to scale this thing to okay, I'm, I really know my next, my next steps and how to, and how to get where I want to get. So, so, and this was during the first company that, that I built was. Yes. So the three Things were, we're joining a peer group, so a group of other MSPs doing the same thing in accountability together. That was a huge step for, you know. Yeah. Just for understanding, understanding some of the keys to scaling. The second thing was implementing a business operating system right at the time for, for me that was eos, there's a lot of them out there. But, but that was a huge key. And then the third was, was having, was getting a coach like the, so the combination of those three things and a coach separate from consultant or, or implementer or something like that, that the one on one executive coaching made just a huge night and day difference for me. Not only as a leader and as a, as somebody running an msp, but also in my personal life as well. Because it's a holistic, you know. Yeah. I mean you're a whole person. You're not just, just a CEO or just an owner. Right. So, so yeah, and those, obviously it depends on the size and all that of how those different things affect you and your growth as an owner. But those three things are always, I just always go back to those in my mind when somebody asks that type of question.

So yeah, those are great distinctions too. You know, for those that don't know an implementer with a system like the entrepreneurial operating system, they're a business coach. So they provide coaching to the entire leadership team and a particular business operating system. And here's the steps you go through to install that in your company over period of a couple years. What you're talking about is really one on one coaching for the person to develop as a leader. Make sure they have the clarity they need to be successful at home, at work. Because you know, the more complete you are as a whole person, the better you're going to perform as a leader, as a CEO, scaling your business. So makes total sense, right? They're very different things.

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and there's a lot of people in the industry that, that call themselves coaches which, you know, you can kind of debate semantics of what is, what is coaching versus consulting versus I've got a program to take you through and all of that. But yeah, but what we're talking about there is really that one on one where you know, we're working on your, your personal growth, your growth as a leader, how, you know, how effective are you at what you do? Are you doing the right things that are to, to get you where you say that you want to go, holding up a mirror to kind of say, hey, you said that you wanted this but you're doing this instead. So what is, you know, what, what's the disconnect there and how do we address that or even want to address that? Or are the things that you said you wanted actually the things that you want? Right, so, so yeah, there's a, there's definitely some distinctions there that can, that are, that, that make it very different.

It makes total sense when it comes to, you know, improving operations and getting, getting CEO, leader of an MSP out of that kind of hair on fire mode that we can all fall into as we're building kind of the early, early stage of business where we're everything from chief dishwasher to trash man to sales lead and everything else. What are some of the systems you like to use to help them do that? Are you a fan of eos? Are you a fan of, you know, do you have your own variants? What are the, what are the business operating systems you've seen out there be particularly useful?

Yeah, so there, there are many out there and, and, and a lot of them come from kind of similar places, right? I mean, from, you know, Vern Harness.

About all of them.

Yeah, you know. Yeah, yeah. Concept, but concepts from, from Jim Collins, Linioni Carnegie, you know, obviously all of these, you know, different concepts that have been around for a long, long time. So, you know, I'm particularly partial to a, to a system that's been created specifically for MSP owners. And it's, and it's, it's through a company called MSP plus os, which used to be called connectstrat. And we take, you know, so we kind of have our own system, our own set of tools and take a lot from all of those different things and add in, you know, a specific spin for, you know, particularly for MSPs, that seems to resonate well for them. You know, we're all former MSP owners and so it's kind of created with that in mind. And you know, it's running, running. You know, we kind of started at the roughly $2 million range and I think the largest one running it is about 450ftes at this point. So it's kind of, it can take you a long way. Right? So, so yeah, yeah, particularly partial towards that. And there's a few key differences. We, we definitely dive more into strategy which, which, you know, some, some might say there's a little bit of strategy missing from some of the other operating systems as well as, you know, a different cadence that seems to, that seems to help. Excuse me. That seems to help owners stay a Little bit more focused kind of what.

Type of cadence, I'm curious, like what are the cadences look like? Are you doing weekly, monthly, quarterly kind of things?

Yeah, yeah. So, so there's quarterlies and then there's kind of a mid, like a six week check in as well. So we tend to keep the quarterly is slightly shorter than, you know, shorter than a day because, because you know, a lot in the afternoons people are already fading anyways. And so, so we repurpose some of that time to kind of a six week check in where we do more, we do more like we call it team and tools day where it's like, hey, you know, let's brush up on how, how's the team doing? Where are we at with our, you know, with our culture accountability chart, etc? And then like, hey, let's, we can take that time to also teach a new tool that, that can really help provide clarity and in some spaces that are, yeah, that there's, there's some, some spaces where some operating systems don't cover certain things that, that we found very helpful as well. So. Yeah, so, and then we start off instead of, you know, we start off with an owner's day like in, in as opposed to kind of bringing the whole leadership team in. From the beginning, the owners have, you know, a lot of times just different opinion on how they want things to go. And so we found it really helpful to have a, to have a kind of a half day with just the owner saying okay, what do you want this to look like? Who should actually be in the room? And, and, and what does that look like? Do starting with some culture stuff. And as far as like, are the people that you think should be in the room really good fit to be in the room based on the culture and all that. And so, so yeah, so, so we kind of start a little bit different and then we have a little bit different kind of cadence and we also throw in some kind of one on one in coaching as part of that too with the owner. Because that could be really helpful just to, to keep them on track if they're, you know, whatever having trouble with their, you know, with their weekly meetings or cadence or you know, holding people accountable and stuff like that.

So yeah, that makes total sense because I think with, I think what people miss about these operating systems is the operating system metaphor. You know, every MSP will know this, right? But what an operating system does, it's just the rules for how the hardware talk to one another and how you run software on top of it. Yeah, but the application in this case, the business is going to be unique. It's going to have its own set of challenges. And while the operating system can help you get the challenges out and most of them do a decent job of getting your vision out there, what are we going to do? Strategically, you start to get into much more nuanced questions and much more nuanced ways of thinking about things. It sounds like you're coming in really helping companies get get into those nuanced decisions and understand how to think about strategy, how that can inform things. I also really like the six week cycle. You know, we, we have been advocates of that for a long time.

Really.

90 days in some business arenas, you know, is good. But that's really to some degree a relic from an older planning execution review cycle, you know.

Right.

And while it's. We still need to have our quarterly financials and still need to do certain things quarterly, that six weeks of sprinting, you know, and getting into, yeah, getting into like, okay, we're going to focus and let's. What are we going to knock out over this six week time frame? It may take us a little longer than a month, but we don't have three months to wait. Like, let's get moving. So it pushes people forward.

Yeah.

And at the same time it gives you, you get twice as many learning cycles. Whereas if you're just doing quarterly goal setting, whether it's rocks or objectives and key results, you're getting four learning cycles per year. If you're running it right, which people aren't. Aren't. By right, I mean, you know, you need to adapt and adjust quarter to quarter.

Exactly.

Whereas the more frequent cadence, your learning velocity goes up, you're going to adapt and evolve more quickly. And what we've seen is whatever business operating system you're using, you're going to install it much more quickly. Right. The load time, you know, using the business operating system metaphor. Right. You remember the old days, two disks, two big floppies you had to put in things. Right. And it feels sometimes like some of the roadmaps for these systems, while change is hard, two years to load and really get everything moving, it can be tough to see the value for people. It can be tough to get the buy in at all the way down the organization if you don't have a little more urgency, not hair on fire urgency, but just that quicker cadence.

Yeah, yeah. Makes, makes total sense. Yeah. And that's why, you know, we just do it a little bit differently. But, but yeah, I totally resonate with that. And even, you know, yeah, that six week kind of like. Yeah, a month is maybe not quite long enough. Three months is too long. So hey, let's, let's plop it right there in the middle and you know, in it. Yeah, it tends to work really, really well.

Yeah, I really like that. So keeping everyone aligned and focused on the right things, is that done just through that six week cadence? Is there a weekly or daily cadence that you mix in as well?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And probably what a lot of people are used to, you know, a 60 or 90 minute kind of weekly, weekly meeting with a set agenda, same time, same people, all that kind of stuff. Making sure that you've got, you know, you're reviewing your know, your quarterly objectives every time your, your scorecard, your to dos. And then, you know, and then kind of a, you know, process of going through and you know, looking at issues and, and solving those as you're, you know, as, as time allows in those times as well. So. Yeah, I mean, probably something like a lot of people would be used to for, for a weekly meeting cadence with the leadership team and then other, and then other meetings where necessary, you know, like departmental, that kind of a thing. All depending on how, you know, how large the company is. But you know, it's, you know, I kind of kind of operate from the idea that everybody in the organization should be in some kind of weekly meeting cadence. Just, you know, at least one and many people will be in two and sometimes three just based on where, you know what, what area of the organization they're in. But yeah, so keeping on track on a, on a weekly super, super important and foundational to, to keep.

Yeah, we found it can. It actually cuts out a lot of the necessity for the ad hoc meetings or the meetings that just aren't really getting things focused because you can, you can cover so much in one focused session.

Yeah.

If you're, if you're teeing things up and then. Yeah, if those are. I always hesitate to use the word cascading, but if they're cascading out where each team is also running their weeklies, it's just so much easier than. Hey, let's, let's have another. Let me interrupt you again. Especially when you're doing techno problem solving related to technology, I think that I've just seen, I've seen all the meetings really get in the way. People don't. They barely have enough time to context switch into whatever the technical challenge is or the support cases.

Yeah.

And then here's the next meeting exactly yeah.

And, you know, and, and it's all about making those like the, the most productive time that there is. Right. Like let's, let's make it where we get the most important work done in this, in this time, you know, 60 to 90 minute time period. And, and then the rest is just executing. Like we made all our, we've made our key decisions, all of that. Now we're just going to go out and execute and then let's regroup next week and see, you know, see how we did, you know, make progress and all of that. But yeah, we got, we got to, in my business, we got to a point where it was like, hey, this, this is like the most productive time we spend and we get stuff done here. And the rest of the week is like, yeah, just kind of following up on that. Right? Making sure, making sure it actually gets, you know, executed and walked through. So yeah, 100.

I found it even. It leveled me up as a leader when I first started that cadence, because if something was an issue or a challenge or something didn't go well, you know, young Scott, younger Scott, you know, rookie Scott, if you, if you will, would be like, I'm gonna go address this right now. Let's go talk about it. And what that did on the one hand, was it. It for my emotional satisfaction? Okay, I got it off my chest. However, it didn't, it didn't always resonate in the right way with the other person or certainly not in the way I intended because I often wasn't thinking about my intention. I was just thinking about like, must fix problem. Having that weekly time really helped me start to become more reflective as a leader and be like, okay, what do I really want here? Is it really that Fred did this thing in a way I don't like, or do we need to establish standards? Have I been clear about what I communicated? And that pause and reflect almost immediately allowed me to take more ownership of what was going on. Ownership in a way of. Have I been clear, is this a people problem or is it a process problem? And most often I was surprised at how frequently it was a process problem, not a people problem. Whereas young, you know, when I was younger, there's so much literature out there on people and getting the right people in and right people in right seats. And it's so easy to go there. And I'm not saying that those aren't legit concerns.

Right.

But if that becomes your default, you fail to see, well, how can we improve our process? And where did things get dropped in a way that we're actually building something a lot of people can plug into. I didn't really expect that to be one of the effects of having that weekly cycle.

Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a great point. And, and something that I think a lot of people miss, frankly, is just. Is that, is that process piece and where it's like, hey, just go get this thing done. Well, you know, while that, that could be a good thing from time to time also, we, yeah, we tend to, we tend. Most people tend to under process. Right. There's not a process out there for most of the time. And, and that's another, you know, that's another piece that I talk with my clients about a lot is like creating that culture of process and documentation and having have, you know, being a champion of that stuff, because that's just yet another thing that's going to allow you to grow if you get it right. And if you get it wrong, you're going to have a lot of pains along the way.

So you find it takes some evolution to get those processes right.

Yeah, absolutely, 100%.

I mean, and I know that was sort of a soft lop question, but that's a thing I've seen people really like expectations get missed on. Okay, we're going to go document our processes. We've got processes. You. And what I'll see happen and have seen happen a lot is, well, we had this incredibly beautiful effort that produced these beautiful processes and so, and so did a great job or we brought in somebody who did a great job, but they're out of date now. Nobody's looking at them or they're too, they don't. They no longer fit for a variety of reasons. I see a lot of times.

Just.

People kind of over engineer v1 then get totally frustrated and drop it.

Yeah.

You know, and not come back to it. Do you ever see that?

Yeah, yeah, it happens all the time. And you know, and, and so something, something that I did and you know, it was, you know what I, I call it a culture of documentation or a culture, you know, culture of process. Right. Because if you, yeah. If you create it and then put it, you know, in some folder somewhere and nobody ever looks at it until the next time, it's like, hey, what happened to that process? Then? What. What good is it? Right. So, so having a living library of, of processes, number one. Number two, a, A process champion, like, you know, this is like somebody's job is to keep up the processes, to like to review them, to, to keep A list of the next ones that need to be created to, you know, to create them themselves and as well as, you know, as well as like championing that culture inside of the organization. What I, you know, what we always said was you either, at any given time, you either need to be following a process, creating a new process, or updating the old process that, that is now out of date. And if you, if, you know, not saying that worked a hundred percent of the time or that everybody's sitting there, you know, always like, okay, step one. Yeah, you know, but, but having a culture where that's like promoted and discussed on a regular basis and hey, did you, you know, this thing ended up going wrong? Did you follow the process? Yes or no? Okay, we need to follow the process next time starts to create that where it's like, it's becomes much more of a living, breathing thing instead of something that you create once and, and throwing the shelves in.

I think that is the key. It's got to evolve just like a product would. You know, coming from a product background, a software background, you're always improving. It's not even a negotiable. It's just part of the nature of it. It's, as you said, lifting, evolving. And it reminds me a lot of one of my new favorite books I just read after everybody recommended it, the Checklist Manifesto. Oh yeah, Wanda. And it's quite good. And you know, I thought it was going to be. I probably just, just got a little turned off by so much hype early on. But it was so aligned with how I like to think and how our teams have run. Like start, you know, get your minimum essentials in place and as you learn, you can build them out. But if it's, if the process is so overbearing. Right. That doesn't work. Yeah, finding, like just keep iterating until you find the right thing and stick with it because ultimately it's going to save everybody time, trouble, all those things.

100%. It's. Yeah, so, so such a good point. And speaking of Atul Gavan there, he has another book that. This is like completely unrelated, but it popped into my head. He has another book called Being Mortal that is fantastic that I, I read as a part of my healthcare MBA program. And it's, you know, a little, it's. It's about end of life. Right. So if you have parents who are aging or if you expect to age at some point, it's totally, it's totally worth the read. It's very important, you know, kind of Big picture, legacy type thinking worth checking out. So maybe that'll help somebody. Yeah, I try to follow when things pop into my mind, you know, like.

If it's, if it's as well written as a checklist manifesto because I mean that's an easy topic to make boring. I, you know, shout out to Bernie Smith who wrote KPI Checklists, which was another, I thought, well done book. Kind of took that idea and ran with it just about KPI's. What a perfect segue to. Another thing I wanted to ask you about. Do you have a set of KPIs that you like to use to gauge where an MSP is and that or that you recommend MSPs think about?

Oh my goodness, yeah. Well, yes. I mean there's some key things and it's going to be different for everybody, for every MSP at different times. Right. So, so you know, I obviously, you know, I'm thinking about, I mean, Right, yeah, it's like here's the, here's the set of data that I need to know exactly how the company is doing at any given time. Right. Obviously you want to look at forward looking things instead of backward looking things. And most of the time it takes several iterations to get something that's actually useful and actionable. Right. Because everybody, you know, it's like you want to put, you know, new MRR on there. Right. So, so we want to track our mrr. So, so what's that number? It's nice to know that, but you kind of already know that. So let's find a leading indicator that's going to, that's going to tell us something about what's coming up. Instead of a backward looking indicator, people want to put, you know, cat on there. Right. So okay, great. It's 98, you know, or 97.6%. Fantastic. What is that?

Customer satisfaction.

Yeah, yes, sorry, customer, yes, sorry, CSAT customer satisfaction. And so, but what does that mean? And you know, if it fluctuates between 96 and 98%, are we doing anything about it? Does, does it make any difference? Right. So maybe, maybe instead of that we want to track negative customer reviews and you know, or negative customer responses and that, that might be helpful because anytime one of those comes in, I'm going to want to go and in action on it. So, so yeah, so there's some set of metrics that, that's going to be a little bit different every time. But I want to look at, I look at forward looking sales metrics. So how many first time appointments, how many how many first time appointments booked, how many first time appointments did I actually go on? How many proposals did I make? How many closes of those proposals then you want to, yeah, look at some kind of operational metrics as well. So we're looking at, you know, yeah, some, something to do with help desk ticketing. That's, you know, that's helpful. It might be, you know, some people, sometimes people put total tickets on the board. Maybe not as helpful as how many tickets do we have that are over 30 days old and what's our target for that? We'd like to keep that down to like one or two at the max. We want, you know, we don't want to have, we don't have a lot of old tickets out there. What's our open to close ratio is probably more helpful than what, how many tickets we have total? So are we, are we closing as many tickets as we're opening? You know, is it. So we want it to be a negative number ideally so that we're making progress on our ticket queue instead of adding more to the ticket queue and then some, and then some project type metrics. Usually most people have projects and so we want to look at, you know, maybe, maybe project revenue, maybe how much outstanding what's already been sold that we haven't implemented yet. We've got this backlog of $300,000 that we could build, but we just haven't done the work yet. So we got to get out there and do the work, you know, so, so a lot of metrics like that will be helpful. But again it's like, it's so specific to how the business is run and then really figuring out what's going to be helpful and actionable as opposed to, let's just look at this and you know, this one has been read for the last six weeks and we're not doing anything about it. Well, it's not helpful. It's not a helpful metric for our, for our scorecard. Right.

At that point there's a good thing to have on your checklist for your KPIs. Like, you know, are we gonna actually look. Do something about it if it's red? This raises a point of personal curiosity. Just from having run say revenue operations and support desk organizations before.

Do you.

In an MSP environment, do you ever have tickets that are, what's the word? They're just not actionable for some reason. Like they need to be qualified. And so what I mean by that is this is gonna be a very specific case, but let's say a Salesforce implementation, for example. So not every MSP may support Salesforce, but this is the one that I'm remembering.

Fair enough.

Somebody says, oh, we'd like to automate these three things. There's just one person with this idea. We think it'd be cool if we could automate population of XYZ and these other five things, because that would make my job easier individually. And then, you know, upon examining it, there were a lot of reasons why that couldn't be done. It was going to make a lot of other people's jobs more difficult.

Yeah.

And so we had to have a metric that we could use to distinguish or a process maybe is a better way to put it. Like we're going to move things into just a backlog and a roadmap and they may live there for a very, very long time. They may. And we made it, we had to make it clear to everybody this may never become a priority in an MSP environment. Is there anything like that? Or are you just trying to always like, let's just be responsive if a customer asks for something, let's see what we can do to go do it.

Yeah, yeah, that's a, that's a great. Yeah, we can do a parallel. Right. So, so thinking about that for an msp, it might be something along the lines of, hey, we're getting, which many MSPs have trouble with this, but hey, we're getting a whole bunch of tickets on this particular issue with antivirus, let's say. And, and so we've gotten 10 tickets this month about this thing. If we did an automation to handle that, then we could save, you know, we could save ourselves 10 tickets next month. Right. So. So a proactive MSP intelligent one.

Yeah, I like that.

Yeah, yeah. So, yes, a proactive MSP is going to always be thinking about those things. And again, depending on how the company is set up, you, you will generally have some kind of NOC team or a centralized services team. And, and that type of ticket would go into, you know, a separate kind of queue. Right. So we've got the most MSPs. You'll have, you'll have a service board for kind of client f, you know, client called in tickets. Right. So that would be your help desk. You might have automatically generated tickets that would be in another spot, you know, and then you might have a, you might have a service board for sales, you might have a board for, for client management, et cetera. But then, yeah, but then you have kind of your, your network operations center or centralized services, and those would Be the people that would be responsible for kind of like creating those automations. Right. So like, hey, we see an immediate opportunity to save our help desk 10 hours next month. Let's go ahead and put that as a priority, that kind of a thing. So you'd have you know, generally a COO or you know, or somebody running your centralized services that's going to kind of make those decisions about where are we putting our time for scripting automations, all those kind of things. And, and how can we make, you know. Yeah, make our help desk more efficient? Because that's usually, you know, one of the largest expenses is that labor. Right. The labor on the help desk. And you want to make that, that's.

A good way to frame it. Because the question is essentially, I mean it was from customer support that had that ask on an internal system. So it's a great, a great analogy. And there's so many ways to slice and dice and manage tickets.

Oh yeah, always coming up, whether it's.

You know, whether you're talking about, you know, we, we deal with product roadmap items, what's strategic versus where is there a bug fix versus where's there's usability fix. Yeah, I feel like in the MSP world you got, you have even more because there's so many different systems that are often being managed. So many different customer situations that can come up.

Oh yeah, absolutely. It's huge. I mean, but you know, I mean the same with, with software it's like yeah, you never kind of never get to the end of the roadmap, right. It's like, you know, and a lot of people have, you know, six, nine month year long project your product roadmaps that you're, that you're still trying to build out and there's never enough people right. To get all the stuff done. So you just gotta, you gotta plan it out. Right.

Continually. Well, this has been great. Is there anything specific you'd like to cover before we, before we wrap up?

I think nothing else jumps out to, you know, I think we covered a lot of really good stuff as far as business operating system coaching, all of that kind of stuff. So, you know. Yeah, I would just, I think the, the, the biggest thing I'd, you know, I'd say to kind of wrap up is like don't, don't be out on an island alone, right? Like, like get, get some community, get a peer group, get a coach, something like that. Because you got, you know, everybody, everybody needs help. So, so don't, don't go at it alone I guess.

Great athletes whether you're great athletes or the CEO of a publicly traded company you're going to have a coach. Yeah every high performer I know of has gotten a coach everyone I run into and we've worked with so many coaches over the years we used to do some white labeling of products with coaches and yeah when when somebody gets promoted at the VP level or or executive level at virtually any large company HR is pairing them with a coach to ensure success yeah 100 when whether it's military or any other venue when it's time to figure out how we raise everybody's performance we invest in our leaders yeah coach them and we're doing investing in the leaders raises everybody and that allows us in turn to pour into all the people so absolutely a great message for everyone and yeah really appreciate your time and sharing your insights.

Brian oh absolutely yeah really really glad to to be here and and thanks for the.