The Achieve Podcast - Bryan Currier (Advantage Technologies)

Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight the entrepreneurs and business owners who are building meaningful businesses and shaping their industries. I'm your host, Stephen Bunker, and today we're excited to learn from Brian, CEO with Advantage Technologies. Now, Brian, for those getting to know you, can you give us a quick backstory of your business?

Sure. Um, good to be here, Steve. So I started AdvantageTech about a little over 25 years ago now. I was going to local community college. I was living the proverbial living in my parents' basement.

Yeah.

And I was working for a construction company doing IT for them, and it was a horribly managed company. The last paycheck that I was supposed to get, or the paycheck bounced, company was going bankrupt. And I asked the owner if I could walk out with my office chair, the printer, my workstation, and the server to try and, you know, at least make up some of the money that I was owed. And loaded that all in the back of my truck and started a company to help pay my way through college. And so I could get a real job. Yeah, 26, 26 years later, and we have about about 100 employees spread across, uh, 11 states, uh, serving over, over 800 clients where we just managed all of their IT infrastructure. And that's what we do every day.

Wow, okay, that's cool. And what would you say is kind of driving your growth right now for your business?

Uh, so cybersecurity is a big one right now. Um, cybersecurity is one of the big ones just because so many of the threats that have been primarily in the larger business space really are starting to creep into the small business space. So seeing a lot more ransomware, data breaches, things like that. The other thing that's really driving growth for us is because we have doubled down on providing a really good tech support experience. And we're, we're kind of swimming upstream with that because just about everybody else in the industry is trying to figure out how to have you talk to an AI, a chatbot, or somebody from overseas so they can cut costs.

Yeah.

In the meantime, we're going the other direction and everything is, everything is in-house with engineers who are based in the Midwest and the Southeast of the United States. And that's how we do everything. So it makes it a bit of a differentiator while everyone else is degrading the support experience.

Oh yeah. I 100% see where you're going out with that. I mean, I've noticed the same thing with these AI tools. It feels like it's a, it doesn't differentiate you. It's like it just raises the floor of what everyone can do, but It just raises the baseline. It doesn't actually create competitive advantage, honestly.

No, it really doesn't.

So looking back for you personally, like, what are some of the turning points? I mean, like, you went from kind of trying to pay for college part-time to like 100 employees. Like, obviously your thoughts about how to run a business have changed during that period of time. Like, what have been some of the big turning points that have changed how you thought— think about running a business?

Yeah, so, um, I mean, in the early days it was, uh, do anything for anybody to just, you know, get some money in the door, right? There, if we've been entrepreneurs. And I would say the first evolution was having some structure and clarity on what we do and more importantly what we don't do, uh, and really getting to that point where it's okay to say no, you're not a fit, like this is, this isn't going to work. Or we just don't have the skill set, or you're just not the type of client that we want. Getting to that point was, was kind of a big deal. The second iteration— seems like these always come in 7-year, 7-year runs— the second one was realizing that just because you grow something doesn't mean it's really financially stable. And what you were guaranteed over the last few years isn't going to be guaranteed over the next few years. This happened to us during the Great Recession. Um, we got hit pretty hard and, uh, we found our financial footing out of that. We put some principles in place, uh, that we were gonna run as a debt-free company. We were gonna have cash reserves. We were gonna, um, really be very intentional, uh, with our financial management, not just for where we are now, but for where we want to be. Um, and that served us very well during, for example, COVID.

Yeah.

When a lot of, A lot of my competitors, as soon as things went into shutdown, they instantly laid off all their engineers. Well, we kept ours. We didn't have debt service. We had cash reserves. We were able to work through that. And I think we got a lot of loyalty from people because we were willing to stick with that. And that all came as one of those inflection points. And then the most recent one really is the what we just talked about, the cybersecurity and AI pivot. There's so many IT providers out there that really are, well, cybersecurity is somebody else's thing that you bring in. It's like, no, this is— if you're an IT company and I'm providing IT services to, you know, a dental practice or a law firm or other professional service, like, they expect us to do that for them. That's into play.

Yeah.

Realizing what those permission-to-play items are now that maybe weren't the case a few years ago is, is the next, and I would say continual pivot that we all have to figure out.

Yeah. So as you're currently trying to grow and expand, I mean, what is your biggest bottleneck that's currently getting in the way? Is it like this transition to the AI or what's your biggest bottleneck?

I, I think right now a, a lot of it is just uncertainty in the small business market. Economic uncertainty, where there are, there are projects that people just need to do, but it feels like they're, they're up in the air about things. There's a certain amount of validity that I'll assign to that. I think the other thing that we're really seeing right now for, for our space in particular, AI is using up all of the, all of the resources. So memory chips, process, all the GPUs, all of these things that go into servers, workstations, etc., which is a core part of what we do. All of those resources are being taken up by AI. Yeah, buying everything to get their hands on. You may have noticed it's like a memory stick. My nephew works at Best Buy and a memory stick that was a couple hundred dollars a few months ago is now $800. The same one.

Yeah. Wow.

Because, you know, OpenAI and Claude and these Anthropic, these other companies, they're buying every bit of infrastructure they can get. And so that's driving up the price of what you're going to pay for a server or a MacBook. And so that has, that has been a real challenge for us along with just supply constraint. It's not as easy to get stuff. And, you know, we've gone from Dell, who's one of our biggest suppliers, saying, hey, here's your specs and here's your pricing and this is gonna be valid for the next 90 days to here's your specs, here's your pricing and it's valid until Monday and then we'll give it. Yeah. It's created a lot of friction for my sales team and for my clients because it's really hard to get long-term visibility. We're doing the best we can to mitigate that. But it's definitely a challenging environment right now. On the actual infrastructure hardware side.

Oh yeah. Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, also a challenge, but kind of going back to your previous comment about— oh shoot, my brain's going blank all of a sudden. We'll continue. I'll remember. But what's been working well for you, like currently, as far as just like in the business?

Yeah. So we've got, we've got a great sales team. That we've put together. We've hired people who are really talented. We pay them really well, more than industry average, more than our competitors on the sales side, but we expect a lot of them. And that's done really well. And I would say the partnerships that we've established and referrals with our existing client base has been really helpful as well. So, you know, there's lots of people bidding for, you know, social and, you know, either AdWords or organic SEO positioning. That is really, really hard to do in my industry, the managed IT services. And I think there's something, I think there's something to be said when every other LinkedIn ad that comes up for me is how I can, you know, have 100,000 outreaches every weekend using AI. I think we're all kind of tired of it.

Yeah.

I think we kind of see it. I think we've all had enough of it. And I think if you're willing to invest in human-to-human connection, and really see the other person and see their business and what their needs and challenges are through the eye of somebody who actually cares versus an AI that's scraping your LinkedIn to try and provide some relevant material for a cold email. I think there's a lot of value there and I think the market is very receptive to that right now.

Oh yeah, I think there's going to be, I mean, I'm kind of thinking about in terms of what I do, I do a lot of marketing and like fractional leadership consulting and stuff like that. It's like at first I think with the AI, it kind of became a thing of like everybody can just do more, right? It's easier, faster, cheaper. And yet, you know, even with just communicating with my clients, as far as like where we differentiate, AI is not a differentiator. And so it's instead, I think a lot of companies think, well, I can use these tools to make things cheaper or faster, but it's like, no, everybody's using the same tools. Is actually making marketing even harder. And I think that the real trend is going to be a flight to quality ultimately, like quality blog posts. Like if you're using AI, the quality of your blog post has to be higher than it was prior AI. The quality of your ads has to be higher. Like everything you do actually has to be higher. And I actually don't think your output necessarily should go up. I think it should almost be the same. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah.

I think I view AI as it's a great research tool. It's a great tool to be able to delegate certain tasks to. I think the problem is there's this false premise in the market that, I mean, these are the headlines. Hey, X, XYZ public company lays off 4,000 people attributed to AI. They've replaced these jobs with AI. Maybe that's true in the enterprise space. I don't know. I know in the small business space, which is what I am and the people I serve, that's not the case. It enables my people to do more, you know, to do research and homework and to, for example, if you're on the sales team, you know, if you're going to see, you know, 15 clients and you're organizing stop-ins, used to have to kind of manually lay it out and route it and figure it out. Well, now I can dump that list into AI and say, hey, optimize this by driving this and starting from this point to this point, and it'll make you more efficient. So maybe I can do a few more of those, uh, because I'm more efficient. But I don't see it, certainly not in the, the near to midterm, making a huge market disruption in terms of employment in the small business space. I think it's just going to make us more efficient and allow us to do more with the same number of people.

Oh yeah, 100%. Kind of going back to the question I kind of spaced earlier, was you mentioned with the small business environment you saw that like there's some uncertainty there, and then you felt like that some of people's uncertainty was a little bit— I was just kind of curious if you could expand on that, like where you see the market currently.

Well, I think that on the uncertainty factor, it's a variety of things, right? So servers, for example, that 2 years ago were selling for, you know, $6,000 are now selling for $9,000. Right. And so we've seen— we went from the COVID environment to a pretty robust inflationary environment to then a supply-constrained environment. To now somewhere in between in the, in the, yeah, all of these variables here. And at the same time, you also have rapid technological evaluation, evolutions, right? Everybody is, everybody's trying to think, okay, how do I, how do I position technology within my business to make sure that, that I am keeping up with what's expected in the marketplace to make sure that I am getting all of the efficiency. And I think for small business owners, when it comes to technology decisions, it's much more complicated than it was just a few years ago. Oh yeah, it's way more complicated. And so distilling down those variables, I mean, I hate to sound cliché, but people sometimes get paralysis of the analysis where they find like, you know, whatever, screw it, I just will deal with this next month. I got to get back to doing the thing that actually makes me money. And I think there is some of that out there.

Yeah. I mean, I saw this chart a little couple of years ago about like the expansion of MarTech businesses and like in the early 2000s when SaaS was taking off, there's like 150, then it was like 250, 300, 1,000, 2,000. Now it's like 30,000, 40,000+ companies. And just being able to keep track of like that amount of technology and tools, it's like, I think a lot of this software as a service and things like that, like there's been a lot of promise on efficiency gains. But like as I run IT with other companies, like I was a chief operations officer for a home service company and like we tried a lot of different tools and technologies, but honestly we got to a point we just had software fatigue and we said we're going to go to old school and like our business is based off relationships. People buy from us because we actually build a quality product. And that flight to just like simplification actually made the business much more profitable and efficient. And we just kind of stripped out a lot of tech tech.

Yeah, we've, we've done the same thing not only with our clients, but even internally.

Yeah.

The rule is that if, if a current system that does this also needs to do this task, and it won't do it 100%, but it'll do it 90%. But if we go buy this other thing, it will do it 100%. We're going to go with the 90 because what we may be giving up in 10% of features and whatnot will be more than overcome by the efficiency and simplicity of only having one thing working. So for example, we have a, um, a PSA tool. It's like our, our ERP system, right?

Yeah.

It sucks as a marketing CRM. It just does. HubSpot would be way better for us. Um, but here's the reality. For me to run the two systems, I'm better off doing it all here, accepting the limitations, because the efficiency I get of having it in one system versus two that are linked together and syncing data, and there's this Zapier integration over here. Like, if you get rid of all that, it's like, okay, yeah, I, I, I do wish we could do this. But man, I sure don't miss having to do all of these things that could potentially break at any given update.

Yeah.

And then on the other side, I'm already paying for this one, right? It's, it's, it's kind of like when most of our clients are, if they're using productivity tools, are either Microsoft 365 or they're Google Apps, right? I mean, a great example is we used to use Zoom. A lot, which is ironic since we're on Zoom right now, right? Yeah, I'm not for Zoom licensing. Why? Because Microsoft Teams has video conferencing and everything I used to use Zoom for built in. Is Zoom—

same with Google.

Yeah, same, same thing, right? So I'm not going to pay extra. But it's amazing, nobody spring cleans their technology. Nobody goes through and says, do we really need all these things, or is there a way we can do this with less tools? That's one of the things One of our core values is make the complex simple.

Oh, that's a great one.

What's one of the things we just hammer on? Because it always has an amazing ROI if you can simplify. Always.

So when you think about like just your business in the next stage and just like the future, what are you excited about currently?

I'm really excited where the appropriate use of automation and AI can assist really in business processes. Great example, we've got a client, they've got two disparate systems, right? So right now what they have to do to reconcile these two things, one of them is kind of an inventory and the other is actually billing based on that. And the two don't directly link. And so for this client, they're, they basically their workflow is we run a spreadsheet from this one. We run a spreadsheet from this one and then somebody audits it once a month. Well, we're going to build them a dashboard that basically says, okay, pull this data source, pull this data source, see if they match. If they match, turn the line green. If they don't match, turn the line red, move it to the top. And so now instead of having to pour through all that, they're just looking for exceptions. And then the next step would be, do you want to build an AI agent that will go in and make the corrections for you. That's a business decision on their part. I'm, I'm one of those people, maybe it's because I'm in my mid-40s, where I'm a little bit hesitant to give AI right access to core databases. Yeah, I've seen too many stories. I think the technology is a little bit young, but we will get there. And so I'm excited by what that potentially looks like and the number of kind of low-level tasks that my people and your people and my clients' people that they have to do that could be streamlined and automated for them and make them more efficient.

Yeah, I'm super excited about those same things. One of the questions I've had though is like looking at the amount of just investment that's going into AI, I've wondered, I mean, it's cool, like with the amount of money that's getting poured into this, is there really enough economic impact to actually justify the cost?

Not even, not even close. Not even close. There's an interesting quote by, uh, and I won't quote it because I'll butcher it, but if you want to really get the nuance of this, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, was talking about how many users would have to actively adopt a paid subscription to AI to make it economically viable. And it's it's earth-shattering, the number of people who would have to actually be paying into this technology to use it. Um, it is, it is super cool. It is enormously expensive.

Yeah, I mean, I, I'm kind of concerned, like, in my own backyard I've got like 3 data centers coming in, and I can't, can't help but think about like the stories of like when they build the interstate highway system It was a huge expense by the country, and yet there ended up being a little bit of recession afterwards because it was just so capital intensive. Same thing with the railroads. There was recession after they built all the railroads, and yet we still benefit from the railroads and the highways 100 years later because it's durable capital. And yet I'm like, these AI data centers aren't going to last 50 years, and yet we're putting this much capital into it. It's crazy.

Yeah, it's It's interesting. I mean, I'm thrilled that we're talking private capital versus public funds. Like, yes, right. So I'm a big fan of not using tax dollars for this grand experiment.

Yeah.

You know, I don't want to see— I don't want to see Claude's infrastructure going on a Trump charge card. But I'm also— you can make a pretty compelling argument that we really don't have a choice. Uh, because there is the, there is the, um, macroeconomic competitive, um, competitive forces from friendly and unfriendly, uh, nations that we realistically have to, have to keep up with. Yeah, it's the classic, okay, maybe we don't want to move this fast, but this guy's going to, so Interesting times, to say the least.

Oh, I 100% agree. And I also think that like some of the demographics worldwide kind of necessitate actually some ways to increase productivity, um, in the knowledge space, or else we're just— we're going to be in a pinch. So it kind of has to happen.

Yeah, uh, without, without question. Um, it's going to— I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago And they were talking about the, the eventual potential outcomes of this AI scenario, like 3 or 4 different ones. There's, you know, this one all the way over here that is this utopia where you literally do have incredible productivity, incredible economic output, you know, uh, all of this, these amazing things. And then over here you have Skynet, right? And then he's probably somewhere in the middle. Right? I've had some, some amazing insights when I brainstormed with ChatGPT and just, you know, hammering back and forth this, this brainstorming. It's, it's an amazing tool for that. I've also seen Claude, you know, some posts with Claude, some outputs where it makes me think, wow, this is, this is a little scary.

Yeah.

Which is it? I don't know, we'll find out.

Yeah, I don't— I think anybody who claims to be an expert is full of it at this point. Like, nobody knows.

Nobody, nobody knows. And that's, that's one of the most challenging things for, um, particularly IT consultants and providers like us, is we'd love to bring some solutions to our clients. The pace at which this is adopting and changing is so fast that it's almost impossible to productize anything.

Oh yeah.

To be able to standardize, say this is something we're gonna roll out to our clients. You know, if you're a, a one-to-one AI developer consultant where that's, you know, you're a solo shop and that's what you do, you've got some advantage at this point because you don't have to standardize anything. You build something for one guy and move on to the next one. And you know, that's, that's one of the tricks though, is any sort of standardization in an era. I mean, it was what, 3 weeks ago that OpenClaw was the best thing ever? And you already see people saying, yeah, I don't need that anymore, I can do it right inside of Claude or right inside of ChatGPT now. People were buying Mac Minis like crazy just 3 weeks ago.

So yeah, it's crazy. I mean, part of me, I mean, I got caught up in the OpenClaw thing too for a bit there. I tried it out. Honestly, it was a pain in the butt. Yeah, I can't, I can't finding myself just going right back to Claude Code and just being like, this is like, yeah, does it have all the bells and whistles? No, but I'm pretty dang sure that they're going to come out with the same bells and whistles and they have. Yeah.

And that's the, that's the argument that I made with myself when I decided to not go down the OpenClaw rabbit hole was OpenAI just hired the guy who built OpenClaw for like, I don't know, $100 billion or something like that. Yeah, it's all this point. And if they did that, how long do I really think it's going to be before OpenAI can do everything that— before my ChatGPT app at the bottom of my screen can do everything that I'd have to spend all sorts of sleepless nights making OpenClaw do? A few weeks. I think that's safe bet.

I, I think you bet right. So, so you've been in this for a long time, 25 years. That's a, a huge milestone. Um, when you look at your journey, just like the wins and mistakes, like what lessons have stood out to you?

Um, it's probably the biggest things— let me, let me rephrase the question. If I could talk to myself 25 years ago, what would I say? Number 1 is hire slow and fire fast. I've done the opposite way too many times. Hire slow and fire fast. Number 2, stay out of debt and build a pile of cash around your company like a moat that protects the castle. Because when it gets real, that pile of cash is, is critical. Um, and, and number 3, never stop adapting and learning and looking for what's next, but don't allow it to be on the leading edge but not the bleeding edge.

Yeah, because then you're bleeding.

That's exactly right. You know, stay one step ahead of where your clients want to be, um, so that you can, you know, walk them through that but don't have them chat. I'm not going to deploy a bunch of OpenClaw servers at my client sites.

Oh yeah, you'd be— have a lot of tech issues right now.

I've made that mistake as well, more than once, where it's like, oh, there's this new cool technology, start rolling out to clients, and then it either turns out to be a train wreck or it gets abandoned. Or, I mean, not that this would ever happen in tech, it doesn't do what it was supposed to do or advertised. Imagine that.

So do you have any final thoughts or advice that you give other entrepreneurs who are on a similar journey?

Oh man, um, I, I think the biggest thing is, is to remember your own value. Um, you set that, uh, you decide where you want to be in the marketplace. And if you're somebody who is who's showing up with integrity, who genuinely cares about your clients, who does what you say you're going to do the way you're going to do it for the price you were going to do it and delivers it on time and isn't perfect but owns your mistakes and cleans it up and really just has that high level of integrity, you're worth a premium in the market. And man, does this market need you because there's so many there's so many shysters out there. Yeah, there's so many just people who do one thing or say one thing and do another. And after they've done screw— after they're done screwing everybody in the real world, then they go sell a course on Instagram. Yeah, it's just, if, if you're one of these people who's really doing things of value for your clients, you need to see your own value and charge appropriately. The market will respect and see that.

That's fantastic. Thank you. That's, that's great advice. Really appreciate you, Brian, especially taking the time to share your story with us. Um, this has been a fantastic interview. I felt like I've learned quite a bit talking with you, so thanks.

Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

So to learn more about Advantage Technologies, visit adv-tech.com. And that wraps up today's episode of the Achieve Podcast. A big thank you to our sponsors, Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional leadership for growing businesses, and Achieve Bootcamps, where entrepreneurs learn hands-on how to build their own marketing systems, automations, and AI-powered tools. If you enjoyed today's conversation, follow the show and share it with another business owner. Thank you for listening to the ET Podcast.