Above the Stack Ep 4: If Everyone’s Your Client, No One Is: ICP for Specialized MSPs

Communications arrays are aligned. Nobody cares about your stack, bro. It's the truth. Your clients don't care. Your tools, they're not really all that important. I'll tell you what is important: security maturity, leadership, strategy, and outcomes that drive to a difference.

We're stepping above the noise, the checklist, the buzzwords. This is where MSPs stop guessing and start leading because frameworks like CIS, they're no longer optional.

Welcome to Above the Stack, where business meets technical and security becomes your differentiator. It's time to go from operating in the weeds to owning the airspace.

Control all lead.

Signing off. We will see you next time. See you there. Nick Ross, what's going on, my friend? How are you?

Doing well. How about you, Wes?

Man, good. Have you, uh, recovered from Mighty Nation and the craziness there?

Yeah, I was talking to a partner the other day that just signed up with us, um, was telling her that I was in bed all day on Saturday just recovering. And so how about you?

Man, it was great. It was a true whirlwind. We brought— we were smart to bring a bunch of people, which was so good because we were just, just cooking at the booth and so many great conversations. So hats off to ConnectWise. Great event. They did a great job. We just loved every second of it. It was awesome.

Yeah, you guys crushed it. How many of those plush Emmy elephants did you end up giving away?

We gave away— I don't know, call it 160 or so. I ordered 300. They're all custom made. We gave away a bunch at DattoCon and then the rest of them we all gave away at IT Nation. So we're pretty much out and we've got more on order. So the sooner they get here, the better for sure. Dean Trimpel is checking in. What's up, Dean? Wearing his new Cloud Capsule shirt. Nick, how do I get one of those? Nice.

Yeah, we got to send you guys the full kit.

We'll have to do a trade day and I'll rep Cloud Capsule, you'll rep Empath, and it'll be fun. We'll confuse everybody.

Yeah, I didn't want to take one of those. Those toys there because I know you guys were giving them out for— Yeah, yeah. Do a demo. But that was definitely the part of the most popular at the show that I saw, at least people.

I am rocking a Cloud Capsule sticker on my laptop, so at least I got that going for me. So, well, let's jump in, my friend. For people that are new today, or if you're watching this on a recording that have not come across Above the Stack before, You want to just give a recap, Nick, on kind of what we've been working through and what we've been talking about so far and really kind of what the mission of Above the Stack really is all about?

Yeah. Oh yeah. So I think, you know, one of the big things that we're looking to do with this show is, is kind of go above, you know, the tool stack that you would have within your MSP because largely a lot of us out there like to go converse and get excited, you know, about all the tools that we're using and implementing in our customer environments. But at the end of the day, our customers don't really care and they really just want to see those business outcomes. So a lot of our focus in on the show is kind of the tools and tactics and tips that you guys can leverage in your MSP to really go about, you know, in this case, over the past few weeks, we've been talking about moving from, you know, standardization into specialization. So you can start to think about niching down, you know, into different verticals or different focus areas, which is what we're going to continue to expand today. But really getting above, you know, that that layer, which is, you know, dragging a lot of people down, which, you know, is preventing them, I think, in a lot of ways from growing with their clients just because they're speaking in a lot of technical terms and focused in on, you know, the tools that they offer as part of their service.

Yeah, I love that. And so to continue that, one of the things that you're going to get today from listening in on us is you're going to specifically get a couple of things from us. We're going to talk a lot more about ICP. And Alex and I were talking, my co-founder, Farlan, we were talking about this at lunch, is that a lot of people talk about ICP and that's great. We need, we need that. But we're going to be talking about today is that angle of ICP that will be very valuable of how to align not just our services, but to even think about as a security-first MSP, how do we start aligning some of that in correctly into like, we've talked about this journey, like Nick said, of specialization, doing less is more, making sure that we understand it's important to niche down. But today, if you stay with us at the very end, we'll have a link to an absolutely free guide, no charge to this, is like, and we're going to work through this today, is an ICP worksheet that will really let folks kind of start for the first time, start to say, who are Who are we trying to become? And then going from there into actually delivering with an output something that makes sense with clear objectives that can even turn into marketing language and website copy and things like this. So maybe to get us kind of onto the playing field, Nick, is something I was thinking about. And I think you were, you were talking about this too, this idea of like, if I want a great meal, if I want to take my significant other to a great meal, I can go to a buffet, right? It's not going to be a great meal. They're gonna have an endless list of things. Nothing's going to be great because it's, all mass-produced food, right? Or I can go to a Cheesecake Factory that has 400 pages of what's on the menu. It's going to be better. But because there's so much they have to serve, there's not a special to it. But we've all been to those Michelin-star restaurants or something that could be Michelin-quality worthy. And they have a narrow menu. It might be 5 things on the menu, might be 10. But you know, one of the reasons for that is because the chef has said, I'm, I'm focusing on these things. This is what we do. And this is what we do really, really, really well. If you want a list for everything and chicken nuggets for the kids on top, go somewhere else. You want a great experience with fine dining with a specific set of objectives of, or specific set of outcomes, it's just the best food you're going to get, come to me. It's not going to be a big menu. And I think that's a little bit of what we're going to be talking about today is that it's OK, as we continue to grow, to start to narrow down, right? Does, Nick, does that kind of get us on the playing field for today?

Yeah, spot on. And great analogy there. I think, you know, the thesis behind this is actually like subtracting is going to enhance your business overall. And that kind of ripples through all of the complexity in your organization as it relates to your operations, but also how you talk to your true ideal customer profile, not Insane Clown Posse, as a lot of people may have interpreted that title. So nice. We got Zoe in here straight from Cohort. That's awesome.

Fantastic. Yeah, Zoe's great. Thanks for joining. Yeah. And the rest of us, check in. There's a whole bunch of you on today. Check in, say something in the comments and join in on the conversation. We very much want you to do that. So Nick, back to what you were saying, riches are in the niches, right? As we often hear people say that quite often, but walk us through like what that really means for an MSP.

Yeah, yeah. So in the last episode, if you guys want to check that one out, we can link it here as well too after. But we talked about some of these tactics, right? If you want to move from standardization into specialization, you're not going to do that overnight. You're not going to abandon what you've been doing. From an SOP layer, you know, from existing client workflows or client engagement models. And somehow, you know, all of a sudden you're, you're a master at servicing the dentist industry, right? Overnight or something like that. But I think, you know, one of the big focuses is, you know, starting to think as we're going to walk through today in the sense of where you have your largest strengths and where you serve, you know, the clients the best. And thinking about what makes up those clients or even the inverse, right? Your favorite clients? What are the best ones to work with? Not just because they're the most profitable. Um, certainly that I think plays into it, but I also think it's around, you know, what does that engagement model work look like where, you know, it's mutually beneficial. You actually enjoy working with that customer. You feel like you're truly helping them grow. Um, and then the backend operations to be able to fulfill that. So that's a lot of what we'll be unpacking today. Um, but just starting to get into that mindset.

Yeah, I love that. So, so here's maybe a thought for folks. And give us— I'd love for you to use chat here. We can— I think we— I know we can see LinkedIn. I think we can see YouTube as well, because I see our friendly Dr. Zoidberg commenting in as well. So give us some feedback in chat. What do you want your MSP to look like 5 years from now? Like, honestly, think about that. Not— don't just say, "I'm at $1 million today. I want to be at $5 million in 5 years." Like, that's fine. But like, who do you want to become? Who do you want to serve? Because I think the more we focus on who we want to serve, the more we're going to— that will influence what we start to deliver. Right? So we're going to, I think today, in the workshop we're going to do, we're going to use like banking as an example. So if you say, well, I want to, I want to be great with banks. I want banks to know me, to trust me. I want to have a name behind banks. I want when banks think like IT and cybersecurity managed help, whether it's co-managed or all-in, I want them to think about me. OK, great. So now that you have that, What you deliver should be an offshoot of who we're trying to serve. Right. And that's the lens we work through. Right, Nick?

Yeah, I think you made a great point around, you know, not just thinking about it in a monetary sense, like your profit, like I'm going to be a $5 million MSP, you know, as part of that. It's more so taking stock in what you're doing today and what you're seeing with your existing customers and thinking, if I continue to double down in what I'm doing, is that going to take me to the place I want to be? Even just like emotionally, right? In some cases, right? Because you got some clients that can really wear you down, um, from the standpoint of their engagement with you, because it's like pulling teeth to do security, or they always bring a budget and, you know, they're not moving off of legacy systems. There's tons of different use cases there that you could inadvertently, you know, invest in without even thinking about it. And they might actually refer other clients like themselves that are just the same, you know, as part of that as well too. So I think It's really important. You know, it's kind of a cliché question of like, where do you see yourself in 5 years? But I think it's also just kind of where we're at this inflection point of technology and, you know, kind of the shift in the MSP space that we're seeing to a large degree. It's a great time to start to at least take a step back and do some brainstorming.

Yep. I love it. Nick, you may be too young for this quote. I'm not sure, but I am absolutely following what Jason is saying. What do we want our MSP to do today, Braden? The same thing we do every day. Pinky, try to take over the world. I love me some Animaniacs. That is such a great show and a great segment there. But yeah, I mean, ultimately, even that too, right? Like, I want to take over the world. I want to be, I want to continue to grow into an empire-building MSP. You know, how do we get there, right? What do we do to make that happen? And so I don't think Nick or I, neither of us are saying, like, we dump everything and everyone, every possible thing we've ever been doing to focus down. But like, I can tell you, even in my world as at Empath or my previous, you know, work at Perch, like, you do eventually figure out who you serve well who you don't. And I'll just give a war story of this, Nick. I'm not allowed to say the name, but we had as a client a very, very, very, very, very large financial services company that used Perch. They deployed our sensors to every single device or every single location, like I guess data center I should say, throughout the world. Like we were even running in Russia. And we ran into some significant problems. And one of the reasons we, like, yeah, the deal size was huge. And so of course we're not going to say no to we started as a young, hungry startup. I mean, I'll say yes to any dollar I can find, right? Like, I get it. Like, my ICP was like, do you have cash? Can you, can you send me money? Do you even ACH? If so, then yes. But one of the things that we ran into was we spent so much time trying to serve the needs of this super large org to where we're meeting weekly and they were getting deep into like kernel-level problems, packet drops, not, not just like we lost an hour of traffic, but like I saw one packet in a whole TCP stream. Got missed. You know, they wanted a full analysis, an RCA, like root cause analysis on all— it just drug us down to the point where we just had an internal meeting. We said, "We're going to lose them." And after we got over the pain, worry and fright of, "We're going to lose them," it started to become actually a good thing. Because, yes, we had the hit of revenue and had to explain it to investors and all the normal stuff. But at the end of the day, it's like, that's not who we served. And we were not supported for that. We didn't have the capability for that. And ultimately, we were better off with them walking away. And so that's kind of a little bit of what we're going to talk about today is making sure we do a good job identifying who we are trying to serve, so that when we do get in front of them, we're going to be our best. We're going to hit, we're going to bat the best we can bat, knowing that we practice for this, and this is who we're talking to and who we're looking for. Does that make sense in your end, Nick? I'm curious if you have any war stories in your end.

Yeah, no, it totally does. And I think it's a great example of, you know, a client that was larger, right? They're bringing in a lot of revenue, not necessarily what we think of maybe naturally of a vampire client, right, that has, you know, a lot of our time but isn't paying us a lot of money. So it's kind of, you got, you got both paying us money, so we're financially obligated or want or incentivized to try to help them, but it's, you know, rippling across the entire organization and bringing us down. We saw that, you know, at RMSP, we sometimes said yes, you know, kind of more of a yes man to deals where we didn't have the internal competency built. Um, you know, something, somebody, some bigger customer come to us and say, hey, we need support on this Citrix virtualization environments, 500 users, you know, we do all this, and we really no competency. But I think that's a common thing I see in the space where you don't want to say no to that because realistically you can figure it out, you're smart, you know, and you can go in and do that. But it still doesn't mean it's the right thing to do or that's a great client for you, you know, that you can easily say, hey, we're not a great fit for that, we do these 3 things, you know. And it could be any number, right? But just keeping that to your point earlier, the Michelin star type of menu versus the buffet is really also where they should resonate, right? If you give them a sushi menu, I think that's helpful in certain situations where, you know, you have a co-managed client or they need a specific function as part of that. But really the majority is going to want, you know, a very narrow area and you just want to pitch them that, you know, not the buffet.

Yeah, yeah, exactly right. Couple comments coming in. No, I am not, Aryan, going to Ignite. I don't know if you are, Nick.

No, unfortunately not. Maybe next year. We got a lot of people asking us about that, just given our focus, obviously, and my focus. But But not this year, unfortunately.

Yeah, same, same for us. Zoe checking in here. Thank you, Zoe. What a great comment. Saying no to a prospect or client is always hard, but it's what being a partner is all about. If they are better served somewhere else, and that's what's right for both parties. And you know, this is so true in like all things in life. Not, not just even in like IT service delivery and packaging and pricing, but all things, right? Making sure that we're teeing the right person up when we know someone is better suited to do something than we are. Like, that's a smart thing to do because that's where we build trust. That's where you just never know. I've had situations here. You have too, where like, I don't try to go get someone's business at all possible avenues, only direct the relationship. I've had people come back and say, "Hey, you know, I've been following you for years. Perch was—" I've had this happen literally. "Perch wasn't a good fit for us. And here we are talking today at Empath because they didn't ramrod my solution down their throat." Right? And so I love that, right? I really do. So why don't we jump into this, Nick? I think what I'm going to do, I'm popping this comment up as well. Just some good banner going back and forth. I'm not going to read it, but but y'all, y'all can kind of read it as we go through. In a second, I'm going to pop up the QR code. And what that's going to do is that's going to give everyone access into this worksheet. So y'all are welcome to use it with us. We're going to kind of role-play this together. We're going to kind of work through this together. And what we want this to be is something you can take home with your teams. You can do a lunch and learn with your people and say, "Let's really start to refine this." And maybe if you already have done this ICP exercise, might be a chance to refresh some things, maybe add some things to it, maybe reassess, maybe even go back and look at your base and say, "Are we Are we actually doing a good job with this? Have we communicated this to our entire account management team? Are they, are they well aware of this as well? So let's, let's kind of make all that happen as well. So Nick, let me go ahead and hit the— I'm going to go to QR codes. I'm going to pop that up. So it's right here. And it's just empathmsp.com. Well, the URL is too long. So you're going to have to just hit the QR code and deal with it, or someone can paste it in that trusts us more. But it kind of is what it is. So let me go ahead and share my screen now. And, uh, Nick, I'm gonna have you kind of get, get us on the playing field a little bit. Absolutely.

Yeah, so, um, you know, I think this is a great exercise. I think, you know, if you guys choose one, it's, it's helpful versus thinking about another. You can certainly go through this exercise multiple times around, you know, the different types of clientele you might think about. But I think, you know, your initial gut feel about who that might be is helpful. But starting to put into place, you know, what, what is the structure? What does that client actually look like? So you can maybe define that and say, is that consistent across these other clients that I think fit this ICP in my market? Is there a little bit of variance? Just so you can start to profile them a little bit better. This is not only going to help with the initial investigation, but it should help you then, you know, in future targeting, right, of, of your marketing, of everything that you want to do there. And there's certainly some areas like compliance regimes as an example. You could also replace that with verticals, you know, as an example, back to my, you know, maybe it's, you know, the, you know, dentistry industry as part of that, right? Or maybe you're really good with manufacturing clients, whatever it might be as part of that too. And then you move into things like core apps that could be, you know, certain ERP tools like you're really great at Salesforce or HubSpot management, you know, as an example, or you are really great with QuickBooks Online. You know, there's, there's a couple of different line of business apps that you could be very much certified in, right? They might have core competencies and skill sets on your team that also allows you to deliver a superior service. That could also just be a specific, you know, on that note, very much knowledge gap that you have. That could be CMMC for DoD customers, right, as an example. So there's a lot there, you know, that you could look into. The Microsoft SKU baseline is a great example, too, where if you're looking at clients that are on or won't move above a Business Standard, as an example, it's usually a red flag, right? Because it has little security, and, you know, they're not getting the protections that they would need, you know, by moving to a higher-level standard. And the same thing with the devices that could also extend into, you know, their networking or other physical aspects about that infrastructure. That you really either specialize in, or you say, like, that's a, that's a big red flag for us. Like, we don't do VDI, you know, as an example. So Wes, I'd love to hear your thoughts too, just on, on seeing this first section.

Yeah, let's— so what I'm gonna do, I like this, this, this style. For those of you who don't know, Nick and I don't heavily practice. We kind of work through this. So, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to let— so Nick's going to introduce each section, and then I'm going to start working through it with a scenario in mind, and then Nick, of course, add to it, right? So today, we're going to pick, for our ICP, we're going to pick community banks and credit unions, right? And one of the reasons why is I came out of a community bank. So I know this space really, really well. And so I can kind of speak to this in a way. So we start thinking through this, let's say, OK, so seat range, right? What's a good seat range for a, for a credit union? Well, I don't know where my paste went. I was pasting stuff in here. I was hoping I could just write into this, but I'll just do it this way. Yeah, there we There we go. Okay. So one of the things I know about credit unions are, and you might have like a very small credit union or bank that's maybe like as small as like maybe 10 users. And that might sound crazy, right? Some MSPs might say, I'll never serve someone that's 10 users. That's like a coffee shop level. Well, remember, we're talking about banks, right? They have a compli— we're going to get into this, but they have a compliance mandate. They understand, largely speaking, that they're going to pay a premium for a lot of the things that they need to have solved for. Now I'm going to cheat into that in a minute. So I don't mind We're trying to say we serve a 10-user bank, but one question we might want to come up with is, what about the top end? At what point do we say, "Eh, that's getting a little beyond us," right? And so we might say, "I'm going to just put in 200 users," right? Because anything above that, one of the things I've learned is you start getting out of the community bank level, or you get to the larger side of community banks, where they start to be in $1 billion in assets and up, and one of the things they start to do is they start to look for, they have their own in-house IT, they might even have a security team, and if we're not trying to, if I don't I don't do like standalone MSSP-type of service, then I'm probably not going to be a good fit for them. So for my imaginary MSP, I'm going to say 10 to 200 seats is what I'm going to say. So Nick, the next question comes into locations, right? So one of the things I want you to talk to them about this a little bit more. I see that location becomes less and less of an issue as we're continuing to modernize and everything that MSPs are doing. I'm running into more and more, they're like, "Man, I don't care. I'm in Kentucky and I have," I was talking to one the other day from Kentucky and they're like, we have tons of clients in New York City. So like that, that becomes less of an issue, right? Any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think, you know, certainly with the rise of remote work and hybrid work, this has become lesser of a consideration. But you also may have a very big specialty in being local in your area, being very well known. You might also do, you know, services that really are differentiated for you as far as the delivery goes, like StaffHog. As an example, even for, you know, certain customers because they're that big and they don't want to hire somebody full-time as part of that. But yeah, I would agree it's becoming lesser of a consideration. But certainly there's, there's that use case of, you know, that's even a further niche down, right? It's like we, we serve, you know, credit unions in the southeast of, you know, Texas or whatever, you know, your situation is of that. If that area or population is diverse, but I think that kind of limits your TAM at the same time too. Yep.

Okay, sounds good. Yeah, and we can even say locations. I mean, I guess you can interpret this many ways, but I'm going to say for, you know, 1 to let's say 20 branches is what I'm going to say. So that way, you know, we can say we don't really care where they're at, that sort of thing. Okay, cool. And by the way, Abraham checking in, good comment I'm going to bring up here, and he makes a good point. I want to talk about this a little bit. Honestly, I believe the word MSP is bad. We should name ourselves after ICP, and I wish customer shopping would look solely for MSPs with an ICP. Don't disagree with that at all. I think, Abraham, you're right on the money. The challenge that we have is sort of we're dealt with the cards we're given, and I think managed service provider is a terrible— the reason I know it's terrible is anytime I talk to family or friends, like, so what is it you do? And I'm like, uh, don't even ask. I'm like, I work inside this industry called managed service provider. It makes no sense. It, you know, I'm with you. And I know like ConnectWise tried to change it to like technology service provider, TSP, and even that has its limitations. So I'm with you is I guess all I'm saying. And, and whoever this LinkedIn user is, is getting me going because the same thing, same with vCIO, right? Like very few MSPs actually practice true vCIO or fractional CIO. It's usually just, let me charge you extra to make sure that you're paying for all the things I need you to, I need to sell to you. It's what we disguise it as because that's what we've been taught for years, which is a topic of its own difference.

Yeah, on that, on that note too of like, you know, your family asking you what you do. One thing I heard from this other MSP, Joe from Transformative, he's got a great quote. Quote, you know, kind of thinking forward-thinking MSP around— he does a lot of business transformation, but his quote is, you know, when they ask him, you know, what do you, what do you do for work? And he says, you know, I help businesses unlock the revenue trapped inside their organization, you know, something like that. So it's kind of conveying a higher power, like a higher function of the MSP, right? We should all strive to try to do that and help them unlock revenue through using technology, right? And being more efficient with their business. Which kind of transcends MSP, right, in that sense. Yep, yep.

Okay, so now we're going to shift a little bit into kind of this idea of compliance regimes, and I think it puts C— I think CFPB. So one of the challenges I know serving a bank is that they have a lot of regulations over their head, so many that they actually formed up the FFIEC, which is a conglomerate of multiple regulators all together so they speak a unified language. And then of course, more come in later, whether it's actual legislation and less regulators like Dodd-Frank Act that came in and, you know, whether it's PCI independent standards that we are forced to comply with because we are issuing credit cards and we are handling credit card transactions. Then we have state-based regulators that come in and say, oh, well, that may be true what FDIC says, but I go more, you know, and that can be common with each state. Now we have Treasury notices. In the requirements for reporting. We have CFPB that came out a few years ago. And so there's probably more than that. I'm just firing a few in. But you see how complex this can get right away. And as an MSP, we don't necessarily have to be the world's greatest expert on all of this, but we certainly need to know the regulations that we serve, for the clients that we serve. We need to be able to speak to what those requirements are. Nick, can you kind of elaborate a little bit more on the compliance regime?

Yeah, I think, you know, we'll get to a little bit later in the document here too, but I think that's where you're going to find a lot of their pain statements, right, of what, what do they worry about, what, what concerns do they have. And it's usually around failing an audit, getting fined, you know, not meeting these standards, losing customers because of it. So a lot of their pain exists around these specific things. And you also, you know, you promote a higher service if you even— to your point, you don't have to be an expert in it. Completely. But if you have a higher level of knowledge than the average MSP around it, you can really, you know, start to build your offerings, you know, based off of that knowledge that, you know, showcases your expertise in there, that moves you outside of a commodity, you know, vendor view into somebody who's a strategic partner to grow. And I think one thing we've touched on in another video that's really helpful with this too is that this actually allows you to move back into a little bit more of standardization because then you can do repeat processes around this vertical because they have the same pain points, they have the same needs in a lot of cases versus like your, you know, credit union versus your hospital is going to have a way different workflow, obviously.

Yep, well said. If you're just joining us, we've seen some new folks come in. That QR code at the top will get you access to what we're working on right now. We're working through an ICP guide that can help us sort of understand who we are as we specialize. And so we're choosing a bank to kind of get through some of that. Okay, so let's move on and now we're going to come into core apps, right? And so this is where I think MSPs can really actually do a lot of good for themselves. Let's say it's Fiserv. That's who the main, let's say we know Fiserv, we know FIS, we know Jack Henry. We know that those are some of their core platforms that you're using, not just for like banking, but for all the banking-related services. A lot of times these companies will do all kinds of things like web hosting and they'll do ancillary things like online banking or bill pay or all these other like check cash, like all these things that they might do. And so, Nick, one of the things I think is really valuable is when you as an MSP sit down with a prospect and you know those names, you know what they do, you know how they operate, you can even kind of joke with them about what they're good at, what they're bad at. All that's going to do is, is really convey a lot of trust to the prospect to say, "Man, this MSP really knows what they're about. They speak like we speak. They understand the challenges that we have. They automatically know because we're using Jack Henry, we have this and this and this." Those are things I think not a lot of MSPs really take advantage of, because again, if I have to serve 15 different industries, the chances of me having an account manager, a VCIO, whoever it may be, knowing all of these for every industry is impossible. No human knows that, short of like a Rain Man. And so we look at this and we say, this is again where we have the ability to demonstrate that we know their business well, and we know the surrounding apps that we may not be managing,, but we certainly know what their requirements are around it and can really convey trust.

Any other thoughts there, Nick? Yeah, I think it's just, you know, that's what you can continue to revisit too in your QBRs, in your engagements with your clients, because you do have that, you know, internal knowledge of how those tools exist, even if it isn't on a molecular level. You can certainly look at how you can improve their workflows around those tool sets as well too, which drives into everything that you're doing today already, likely, which is around employee lifecycle management and, you know, optimization of workflows, things like that, that can really play back into that as well too.

Love it. Cool. So for M365 SKU, I'm just gonna put Business Premium, and then I'm gonna say mostly Windows with some Mac and iOS is no problem. BYOD. We'll get into some of that kind of stuff as well. Anything else though you want to put in these two before we move into the buyer?

No, I think that we kind of touched on those before. That's pretty straightforward there.

Okay, cool. So walk us through the buyer.

Yeah. So I think, you know, in this situation you really need to know who you're speaking to. And this might vary based off of obviously the company size, you know, the primary engagement. So for who were you guys, you know, what did that look like for you?

So, you know, it really depends. If it's a small bank, it might just be the CFO. Every bank is going to have a CFO. They're required. So, okay, well, if that's the case, it's probably going to be the CFO that rules it. And generally, you know, the CFO runs the budget. So they know their IT spend. They know, they know all of that. And so they're generally one that builds a budget, runs a budget, owns a budget, operationalizes a budget, whole thing. And what you'll find for small and mid-sized banks, what I've found is that many of them, the CFO is a little bit of a COO and a CFO mixed together. And typically they'll have a bit of a stronger mix on one of those two things than the other, just based on their background. So I had a CFO who was a legit legit CFO, but was very good on the operations side and could ask the right questions, could sniff out what was real and fake. Just really, you couldn't pull the wool over his eyes. And so for me, the economic buyer was the CFO. Now, what you might run into in a midsize bank or credit union is they might have a CIO. And so now if I have a CIO, I need to know that they're the buyer. I need to know, are they the one, not just the normal sales mechanics, you know, are they the influencer? Are they the decision-maker? You know, all those kinds of things. That's important. But I also need to know, what's their role and what's their skill set? And what are they good at and not good at? Because this is where co-manage starts to come into play. This is where I need to make sure that they understand I'm here to augment their job. I'm here to help them, not to upset them, not to run them out, right? And so I'm going to steal a line from David Powell. He's now over at LionGuard, but he made this statement to me a long time ago. We worked together at Perch. I'm going to kind of butcher part of it, but I think the idea deal will convey. He said, when we did at my, my MSP, he said, all these years ago, when we did a lot of co-manage, and we're talking to a CIO, he said, I learned to kind of have a different talk track that would disarm them. He'd say something like this. He's like, you know, Miss, Miss CIO, you have a lot of plates that you're spinning for a company your size. And we know with all these regulations that you're dealing with, we've already talked about some of those, you typically are dealing just in the IT world alone, you're dealing with like telephony; router switching is the second category; like desktops and all that kind of like endpoint kind of devices, printers; cybersecurity and cloud, I think is like how he split into 5 buckets. It's something like that. He said, "In our experience, a lot of times banks like you are really good at 3 of those things and bad at 2. And I'd love to know what you think those 2 bad things are, because we'd love to talk to you about how we can take those away and take them off your plate." He said what worked really well about that comment was that it disarms the CIO to let them know, "I'm here to help you. I'm here. I'm not here to take everything away. I'm not here as like this foolhardy MSP that thinks I know the bank better than you do. I'm here to make your job awesome." "Awesome! I'm here to take away the pain that you have." Or maybe you have a small staff of 2 full-time FTEs, but you know you can't handle it all. "I want to let them do what they do well, and we'll take away the rest." Right? And so this is why I'm mentioning this now, because it's not just identifying the economic buyer, but also understanding how they think so that we know how to talk to them. Does that make sense?

Anything else you'd add to that, Nick? No, that's a great, that's a great line. You know, it's disarming, like you said, but also very much speaking to that persona. I I think, you know, it's the same that we've seen as well too, where your conversation with that persona is going to be, at least you try to keep it highly non-technical in most cases, unless they fit, you know, a certain persona that wants to speak more technically, but they're going to be looking for the high level, much different from this next persona, you know, your day-to-day champion as part of that. But, you know, they're looking for business outcomes, but you also want to know that you're helping them drive their core business, you know, goals forward as part of that, whether they, you know, manage that with, you know, OKRs or whatever their goal setting is part of that, or maybe it's just initiatives, right, that they have for that quarter.

Yeah. Yeah, I love it. And so, so this is where we can start to say, if it is an IT director, that's the day-to-day. I think two things stand out to me here. One is that we need to make sure the IT director, they're the ones that we ultimately have to make happen. Right? If they're not happy, they're, they're the ones that, if in like typical sales theory, they usually say the technical decision-maker can never say yes; they can only say no. In other words, they could come and crush a deal because they say, "That vendor is terrible because of whatever; we cannot use them." And then the actual buyer says, "Then we agree." But a lot of times, the technical decision-maker might come up and say, "I don't dislike them. They would work for us. But you have to make the call." See what I mean? They can only say no, not yes. And so one thing we need to remember, that day-to-day champion, is we need to keep in mind the fact that they— I need to keep them happy so they don't say no, that they don't come back and say they're slow on tickets, they don't answer things well, they don't understand, I'm doing more work than they're providing. We need to be concerned about that. But we also need to understand our job, at least on a monthly, if not quarterly, if not monthly basis, is to go above and back to the actual economic buyer. So I'm reporting metrics and value based upon other things. And we can talk about this in a future episode to the CIO, perhaps, but the day-to-day is managed by the IT director, the way we— those relationships are different. And I have seen MSPs break down because they're good at one and bad at the other, and they don't understand how they failed because the CIO's in love with the data reporting, but the director can't stand them because of all the extra work it causes for them, just as an example, or vice versa. So I've found this to be a pretty important piece.

What do you think? 100%. That was always, in my experience working with a couple MSPs, that was always my my, you know, number one person I wanted to be friendly with, you know, and develop a great relationship with because it drove a lot of what went up top, but made things a lot more smooth in the sense of our projects we were rolling out, just having them as that, that POC. And for co-managed, it was, you know, sometimes could make the relationship toxic, right? If you had a bad relationship with that person and they didn't want to do what you were asking for, they would go behind your back, and then it turns into a bad relationship. Relationship, right, overall. And that, that client engagement then becomes, you know, very much a negative experience. So it's very important, um, you know, to, to maintain that relationship, but also understand, like Wes Spencer is mentioning there, the dynamics of how you speak to them, what kind of information they're going to want to hear versus the, the economic buyer.

Yeah. Okay, cool. So, so now, Nick, that gets us into these triggers, and we're saying pick the top 2 or 3. So I think what we're going to say here, but I want you to, to really flesh this out, is Some of these may be— we're just— these are examples. Don't say— this is not Cloud Capsule and Empath saying these are the only triggers. It might be none of these. But you do need to know what the optional potential triggers are for your ICP. And maybe these adapt over time. All of a sudden, something new becomes a bigger trend because of something that's hit recently, right? So these can change. But walk us through, first of all, what is a trigger? And then we'll start to work through some of these.

Yeah, I think this is where, you know, they're, they're experiencing pain that you can really help support and lean into, you know, as part of this. That might be, um, you know, where they are spending a lot of time, you know, with this, where they want to be working on the business. That might be where they're failing, you know, audits or fearing failing audits. They may have recently gone through a security incident or worried about going through one. Um, you know, they may have you know, a lot of growth that's going on with the organization, like new sites or M&A, things like that. So all these are kind of those, those examples. I think certainly you can, you can naturally gravitate towards these external pain points that are drivers for them, like an audit, like a security incident, and so forth. But you could also think about it in the sense of the internal pain that they might be experiencing as well too, that might be related to, you know, the fact that they that their communication feels scattered, right, internally to the organization. It could be very much like tangible that most organizations could go through. They could be worried about losing track of client requests, right, as an example. So it could be very specific pain in the moment of time of their business, um, you know, related to that too. So I just want to call that out because it's easier to think about like audits and, and security breaches and things like that.

Yeah, well said. And I would just say one thing that really stuck out for me at IT Nation was, it was in Chris Ryan, his VCIO University cohort. And man, one thing that just rent-free in my brain ever since, he said, you know, MSPs are really shifting, going back to a little bit of Abraham's point of just not even liking the word MSP. He said MSPs are shifting to where managed service is going to become less and less over time. And that MSPs are going to find more success and more revenue in consulting and walking into client conversations where they say, "We can help you with that. We can help build this. We can help strategize for this. We can build a plan for this." And I love this because you do need to have that in mind when it comes to triggers, because we expect, if I'm running an MSP, I expect my VCIO to walk into conversations with the actual executive decision maker and say, "What are we trying to focus on?" on? What's mission-critical for us? What are our goals next year? And they may just want to, if we're not careful, they'll just sideline us to the little kids' table and say, "Go away, nerd. I don't want to talk about your IT stuff." And you might have to pull them back and say, "No, no, I'm actually not talking about IT. I'm just talking missionally, objectively, where are we trying to go as a, as a bank?" And you may have to prod them to say, "Hey, are we having any new, new branches?" You know, you don't have to tell me where; we've got an NDA, of course. But like, we can help you build out the telephony and the infrastructure and capabilities for that new branch. And that might turn into a, you know, a perspective where they say, you know, we're actually thinking about a concept branch. We're gonna try something brand new that we've never done before and have kiosks in there. We're gonna do some new things for us. Great! How wonderful! We can help you with that, right? They may come in and they say, you know, we, like you said, we've, we're not doing so well in an audit. And there's a couple things we're really struggling with. OK, got it. We can help you solve that. But knowing, you've got to have your VCIOs the ability to think on their feet and ask the strategic questions to look for the triggers. Because I think one of the things that we're saying here is if we're not good at discovering triggers, we're not going to be good at discovering what they actually need. And we're going to fail to deliver well for them, because we've never actually understood what their, what their true needs are, instead of just, "I sell IT service in a bucket. Buy this from me, please." And that's the differentiator for next year and beyond, I think, Nick.

Yeah, I think one of the questions I always like to ask is, you know, where do you feel like technology is slowing you down right right now. And that usually invokes kind of this emotional frustration response, right, of whatever they might be going through right now, um, during that time. And then you can, you can prod at that. That's kind of what you would want to pick at to find the broader need of where you could provide a lot of help. In most cases, I feel like with that too.

Yeah. And then the last thing I'll say on this is the triggers turn into marketing. The triggers turn into, um, all kinds of things that you can use. When you, when you make the phone call for the first time, you pull the door open, you can say, you know, generally speaking, we're seeing other banks like you I struggle with this thing. Right? Oh, OK, well, I'm birds of a feather, right? At least now I'm not the only one. It's good to know. And they knew that I struggle with that. And that puts me in a source of authority. So yeah, I can't— that's why we paused on the triggers for so long, because can't really say enough about them. And we need to understand how valuable they are. So then triggers turn into pain, right? Walk us through some of these.

Yeah, I think if we take that example, right, of, you know, if we said that question of, where is technology slowing you down? You might get the broad, more broad response of, well, you know, we're really struggling with communications right now across the organization, you know, and that turns into, well, tell me more about that, you know, what's prompting that now? It's like, well, you know, we've got a lot of different tools. We use both Teams and Slack, you know, we have text messages, we have a lot of files that are in disparate systems. A lot of those files are, you know, completely different versions and they're floating around. We don't know who has access as part of that. That. Um, and so you say, well, you know, that's, that's obviously a big pain point that I'm hearing. It's part of that. Um, you know, what, you know, if it worked perfectly, right, if you could, you could switch that and it's a 180, what would that actually look like for you? And they'll describe their perfect world, which is probably involving, you know, we have faster workflows because we can communicate better, we have fewer IT headaches that we're even submitting tickets to you for, um, for things that we can access from a documentation perspective. And we'll feel better about our data security because we have all of that kind of buttoned up as part of that. And so that's where you can immediately then begin to reframe that back to them and say, hey, what I heard you say is, you know, you'd love for us to come in and take a look at upgrading your documentation and communication workflows so that you can enable, you know, secure, efficient collaboration across, you know, your remote workforce. And that statement is, to your point, what you then repurpose to marketing, right? We help businesses, you know, enable secure, efficient collaboration in a remote workforce. That's a really good anchor, you know, that you can start to pick from as part of that too.

Yeah, got it. So I'm peeling out some what you're saying. I'm just popping in. So these, these top 3 pains, they may be— what you're going to notice is the more you start to do this, to Nick's point, you're going to notice that we typically see the same pain points pop up over and over. Maybe not expressed exactly the same way, but they're largely the same. Thing. So I'm just writing in 3 that came up. I can tell you, as the CIO at a bank before, my prior life, audit exam anxiety was a huge, huge issue for me. Because I'm spending at least a month and a half in preparation for the 18-month audit, getting data, making sure audits, my own audits are done, that we're not missing things, that we've done all the checks and balances that we have. That's huge anxiety for me. I'm like, shut up and go away to the rest of the world until I feel like I've got my data room ready for the, for the examiner when they come in. Just as an example, right? So knowing those, those pains, to Nick's point, is so valuable for the marketing to make sure you can speak correctly to them, that you know that you have a role and a place to solve. And even if there's not something you do functionally as an MSP to solve it, just knowing that those— what those top pains are is so valuable to be able to speak the language. I love that. Anything else that stands up for you on top 3 pains?

Nick? No, I think, yeah, this will vary obviously, but then to your point, like it'll become repetitious, right? And that's the point of niching down is to say that, you know, likely once you have recognized, you know, the clients are saying the same thing over and over again, especially if they're in the same vertical or, you know, compliance standard, they're going to say, hey, we're really struggling with this audit, you know, as part of that. And so that's how you can pitch it better. You can resonate with them. You shorten that trust barrier. To your point earlier, too, Wes, on just, they know that you know their business, right? As quickly as possible, right? That's all you're trying to convey in a couple of lines really would be the goal.

Yep. That's great. Awesome. Oh, there's a big comment that came in. Probably can't read all that. I'll come— we'll come back to that in just a second. But thank you for putting all the effort into that one, Bahram. OK, cool. So let's go into desired outcomes. So I think this is really— this is where we start to really hit home, isn't it, Nick, where we start to say— by the way, SMART statements, if you want to look what— look that up, just search, literally search SMART statements, or I've got a hyperlink for you in the document. So you can actually open that and it'll take you to, I think, yeah, an Atlassian link that walks through what SMART goals are. So it's just an acronym that helps us describe something that's measurable, achievable, attainable, all that kind of stuff. So walk us through outcomes and success. We probably don't have time for all of this today, but maybe doing work you want.

Yeah, I think that's where you reframe, you know, those pain points into, you know, what, what outcomes can I deliver that, you know, makes you feel really great about, you know, that, that pain point kind of being evaporated in some cases, or maybe significantly reduced. They feel the trust, you know, kind of transfer to you, you know, on that delivery as part of that as well too. You can pass audits confidently. You can, you know, go through this and not have to spend all your time and spend your time back on actually growing your business and not the minutia of the manual effort or hours that would take to go back into this, which will really resonate with them. And success, you could look at that in a couple of different ways, but it's really around what is actually deliverable to them. That could be a metric as part of this, but this could also just be how achievable is part of that. That, um, you know, for the outcome. I like, you know, the, the framework of the value equation. I think it's from Alex Hormozi, but, um, you know, what he talks about is pitching a dream outcome where you also, uh, show them that there's a high likelihood of achievement with a low level of effort on their part to achieve that outcome.

You know, say that again. I'm gonna write that down. That was so good.

Oh yeah, so this is Hormozi's value equation. So you're kind of pitching them this this dream outcome, right, which is, hey, you can go pass your audits without spending a ton of time. And then, you know, as part of that, you're going to show them that there's a high likelihood of achievement. So it's really— there, there's confidence there that's going to go, um, you know, get done. And there's going to be a low level of effort. So, you know, on their part specifically, they're not going to have to spend a lot of time, they're going to get it done, and they're going to achieve the dream outcome as part Boom, love it. Boom.

Yeah, I love that. So this, this is gonna take— I do think this is gonna take some time for you to really hone in on this. But, but I want everyone to understand this, that the days are gone that you differentiate yourself by your stack. It's one of the reasons why we call this whole thing Above the Stack. We all sell the same stack, maybe just a different vendor name. That does not make you unique. That does not make your value proposition unique. Better than anyone else, or worse. What makes it better is you being able to communicate outcomes and show a, this is the, this is how we deliver that outcome. You do that, and you're going to be able to defend the price that you charge. You do that, you're going to be able to continue to keep a client in front of you. And this is something I think so many of us skip over because we don't want to go through the blood, sweat, and tears to build build and understand and know and communicate these outcomes and then deliver them. But MSPs that deliver well on promised outcomes that the client understands and cares about and is asking for are the MSPs that are successful tomorrow. Yeah. Okay. So, then we kind of get into buyer team. We get into budget ranges, change tolerance, legacy blockers.

Anything here you want to talk about? Yeah, I think it's really, you know, budget is really an interesting one because I hear a lot from other MSPs. Like, man, I'm really struggling to get customers to see security as an investment. Man, I'm really having a hard time trying to increase my prices or expand my offering as part of this. And I think budget, when we unpack that with them, it's usually I say, well, how are you communicating what you want to do or how their environment's looking? It's usually very technical, very dry, very market jargon. Lexicon of Microsoft or security is being forced on them and they aren't actually perceiving the value that you're trying to pitch in a lot of those cases. And a lot of this, you know, can be alleviated by what we're talking about, which is really focusing in on those pain points and the objectives and having that alignment really driven out to you, you being able to specialize in those areas and being able to command a higher price point for it because they actually see that this is the business outcome that I want. I didn't want an 80 Secure Score in Microsoft. I wanted to pass my HIPAA audit, right? And that's a clear distinction that they'll pay for that is not being communicated appropriately in a lot of cases. I don't know if you see the same, Wes Spencer. No, I do.

Yeah, I totally do. And, you know, one of the things about that is like, it's nice, just, you know, all the, you know, I'm not speaking too broad with a brush, but like when people just come out and say, well, you should charge $300 a seat, $250 a seat, $500 a seat, whatever the number is, it's wonderful to say. I say it. But it's a different, it's a different requirement to be able to defend that and get the client to say, "I see the value in it and understand why. And, you know, I may not be happy about it, but I'll do it." And a lot of what we're working through is what demands it, right? So if you walk in and just do that without doing all the prior work here, you're gonna have a real hard time. But you do all these things above, and all of a sudden you realize that it may work. Yeah. OK, so for sake of time, change tolerance, legacy blockers, you need to understand those kind of things. For a bank, they're probably going to have some tolerance for change, but only when it's well communicated and they have at least a month, if not 3 months, to plan. And if it's major regulations coming in, they probably want a full year to plan and be ready for it. So change tolerance means that we need to be very well aware of the data. We need to be aware of the scorecarding and the actions that are happening, potential hot-button issues. We also need to be students of their industry, knowing what's coming down the pipeline. We need to be reading what they're reading. So if you're not good at that, and all of a sudden they spring on you something or you spring on them something, your value is significantly reduced. If you get in front of things early, your value is significantly increased. And then legacy blockers, just knowing the things that typically get in front of that industry that make things difficult. So maybe it's the core provider we mentioned before, Fiserv wants to do all their managed IT. OK, well, we have to learn how to overcome that. We have to learn how to kind of speak about why we're valuable and what, what makes us different with that and on and on, right? So for sake of time, we're going to move into the no list. So I think one of the things that's as important as getting the yeses is to know the things that are just a hard no. And so we've got some examples here that, that you're going to need to customize, just like the triggers. You'll need to work through these and come up with your own nos. But based on who you are and the industries you serve and the ICP that you're defining, you need to know where your nos are. Elaborate for me a little bit more on this if you'd like, Nick.

Yeah, I'd love for you guys in the, in the chat here, if you guys have a definitive no that you always say is a red flag, or, you know, say that's a non-negotiable for us moving forward on engagement, love to hear it. Security, obviously, you know, I think comes up a lot when we talk about that. If a client's not willing to put in, you know, basic cyber hygiene like MFA, as an example, it's usually somebody I don't want to work with, right? It's not just for that one particular, um, you know, data point, but it kind of ripples into how the rest of that engagement is going to go, right? About how they value security, about how they, you know, probably budget around it. And you likely don't want to move into that. But certainly there could be a lot of, you know, various aspects here that go beyond the tech back. Could be the way that they're working. Could be, you know, obviously, um, you know, some of the partnerships they may have that, that don't, you know, uh, mesh up with your operations and how you maximize your value add to your ICP. So there's a, there's a few different areas there, but I think, you know, a lot of these, um, you, you need to stick to hard as well too, I think, is the other piece of advice, I guess, is, is really thinking about, you know, saying no and being comfortable with that because they're not meeting that criteria. Yeah. Yep. Yep.

That's well said. OK, so now, and I realize we have about maybe 7 minutes left here. So quickly on the conditional yeses, it's the flip to that, right? Like, what are the things that we want to get into? What are the things that it's like, "Oh, yes, that is right in our wheelhouse. It's right in our bullseye zone. It's what we do well. That's exactly what it looks like for us." So getting close into that is really valuable. So we've got some examples of some of these, right? Like a remote-only "Can you possibly work in multistate?" We're like, "Yeah, no problem. We're really good at remote. And we can really help you build towards that." We have a lot of other banks that we work with that do have that as a method of working. And we know that we have to deploy that in a great and efficient, but scalable and accountable way. So we have some tools that we can deploy to make sure that those devices are protected wherever they're at. You know, we don't do old-school VPN anymore. We do some new things that really kind of let us stay more modern, but It's also more secure. So kind of working through some of those things of looking for the yeses. Now let's get into, I think, where these are, this is where we really start to hone in towards the value. We've done all this homework. And so now we get to this Section 3 of Outcome-First Discovery. So walk us through some of this, Nick.

Yeah, I think this is largely where, you know, you want to get into this engagement model with the client, right, where you, you start to ask them these more open open-ended questions, right? And that's to peel back, you know, those, those statements of underlying pain, but also that it starts to get them to lead down that path like I did in the example earlier of the collaboration, you know, where there's a lot of pain where you can provide a lot of value. But it could also be around, you know, obviously again, that specific ICP and what they're looking to do and accomplish within their business. So it's really thinking about, you know, where you have a lot of opportunity to layer up or lay up with the, you know, the outcome, you know, translations of whatever that might be. In this case, you know, when was the last time you had an audit insurer create surprise work? You could obviously unpack a lot out of that, and that would reposition the statement back into, you know, how are you thinking about the outcome that you're delivering? We'll take that off your plate. We'll make sure you pass the audit, right?

Back to that earlier example. Yeah, this is so great. So Yeah, so a couple things that stand out to me here. I'm going to pop in— had this already written out. Let me go find this here. FFIEC exam readiness with evidence on rails, meaning we have an evidence pack. We have all the data ready to go. It's, you know, there it is. So readiness. So I love this, right? And one thing that's really valuable to this is that we have to understand that Your decision maker at this bank is not going to just wake up thinking, man, I just want to pay this MSP a bunch of money for strategic IT work. No one thinks about that. What they do think about is I'm sick and tired of waking up and all of a sudden I have to go to my board and explain why this $50,000 bill that I didn't plan for came due. They're sick and tired of saying, I'm sick— I am tired of having every single year issues in my regulatory framework and, and having examiners come in and say you're woefully behind in these areas. Or they might think the other way of like, I'm reading about all this AI stuff and I want to know how that works for us and how we get involved, because I'm scared we're— as an old school bank— we're going to get left behind. Those are the things they wake up thinking. So getting into what Nick just said, these outcome-first discoveries, these open-ended questions, is so valuable. Don't undersell them. And I would just say this: roleplay on those Ask those things and get really good at knowing what to ask and then making sure you have measurables that come out of it, right? It's like good evidence, good scores, like, as for this as an example. OK, so we're about out of time here. Walk me through this Offer and Guardrail Builder that we've got, Nick.

Yeah, I think this will play into nicely into like the next episode we'll have. We'll kind of expand off of this offer, you know, and kind of how you want to start packaging this, given, you know, it's moving Subsequently, thinking about managed services that you have today in that bridge, right, as part of that. But thinking about how can you package these things up so again, you can fulfill it the same on the back end, but the front end of what you're delivering is really catered to the messaging of your ICP, whether that's that credit union or the healthcare firm or very much specific to a business outcome for any business. Maybe it's small businesses, but you're really great at doing business transformation. To the cloud, right, as a specific example of that. So a lot of these, you know, as we, we go through the last sections here, are really looking at, um, you know, some of the non-negotiables, right, um, that you just say this is DQ if it, if it comes in and has, um, you know, this, this, uh, criteria, right, that's, that's baked into it as part of that. And then some ways to start to measure that, you know, as you get into the executive outcome scorecard and thinking about, you know, some of the ways you can quantify that for the executive team is also helpful. We touched on that with the economic buyer, but they're going to want to see, you know, how do you, how do you deliver ROI in a really efficient manner that they know, you know, we've communicated this and they're delivering on it. And the more frequently you can deliver that touchpoint to them where they don't just ignore it or dump it into the trash, you know, that's the other hard piece sometimes with this, is, is going to be key. Biggest part of that too.

Yep, you nailed it. And so these, these scorecards, man, these— don't use these hard. Like, these are examples. Again, you're going to change these scorecards based on the industry, the size, all of this kind of stuff. Some industries may not care about some of these things. There may be other things. Yep. And there you go. And so the ultimate goal is to finally kind of get to this section where this is sort of like a bonus. But like, now that you know this, you know how to speak to it. And you can even put this into website copy. You can put this into marketing materials and call scripting all these kinds of things that really start to say, we now have a defined ICP. We know how to speak to it. We know how to operationalize around it. We know how to win. So I love this. Nick, this has been really good. I've really enjoyed this discussion with you. You want to just in maybe 30 seconds kind of tease what's coming up next?

Yeah. So next episode, we're really going to get into, you know, outcomes and pricing, right? So thinking about how can you take a look at your ICP and where you're at today, and think about yourself, you know, 5 years in the future, like we, we started this call with, and thinking about how do I package that up so that I keep my operations really clean? You know, I can, I can build a repeatable practice with that, but I start to lean into some of these concepts that we talked about, about the engagement model with the client, but also thinking about how do I package it so that it speaks to that customer, but I don't cripple myself into, you know, that's, that's the only thing, or I have to create a million SKUs in my P&L. PSA tool, right, to serve all these various outcomes. So that's a lot of what we'll be unpacking, a lot of great detail in there with where you're at to start to develop that bridge.

Love it. Awesome, awesome, awesome. So we'll see y'all next time in the next one, uh, the next, uh, Above the Stack. Thank you all for joining today. Um, we will see you on the next episode. It'll always be LinkedIn Live and YouTube on Cloud Capsule and Empath's pages. Um, give us any thoughts or comments you have as feedback. Um, but Nick, this has been super fun. Hope this has been valuable for folks, and, uh, thanks everyone for watching today. Yeah, thanks guys.

We'll see you next time.