Above the Stack Ep 5: Outcomes & Pricing: Turn Your Services Into a Scalable Offer

How you been?

Great, great. You, uh, excited for the holidays?

I am. I mentioned to you as we were prepping for the meeting, I'm, uh, I'm on my way back to Florida. I'm taking a road trip, so it's a lot of driving, but getting stops in along the way and making it more of a scenic route. So it's good.

Uh, no doubt going from Denver to, uh, to Ocala area is— that's a lot of driving, man.

Yeah, I mean, I'm stopping every, every, um, like I spent more time over the weekends, but I got stop in Austin and New Orleans and, um, doing a couple more, just breaking it up along the way. But I'm still getting some work done during the week and then spending time with the family next week. How about you?

Oh man, I love it. Um, we're probably going to go up to Kentucky. Um, we just had Frank Abagnale, um, from Catch Me If You Can as a keynote speaker at, uh, one of the Cyberfox events. He's like, never share with anyone where you're going. You know, he's right, but we all go Kentucky and see some family. It'll be, it'll be a good time. So not going to tell all of our listeners what days I'm going to be gone and what days I'll be here. You'll never know.

Just kidding.

But yeah, no, it's gonna be great. We're looking forward to it. Well, welcome to the audience, a whole bunch of folks that are on with us already today. And I know we always have, we have hundreds, Nick, I don't know if you know this, you probably do. We have literally hundreds of people that watch this on record, which is really cool. So we're going into the Empath app, we're going to YouTube, we're going to LinkedIn. So welcome to everyone that's here. The ones— I'm going to bring the chat up onto the screen here. So if anyone wants to chat, just let us know. Say hi. Emily checking in. Good to see you on Princess YouTube. I'll bring that back off. But we'll be able to see chat, especially I think LinkedIn and YouTube are the best places that we can see it. So come in and join the conversation if you would like to. Nick, why don't you kind of get us on the playing field a little bit about what we talked about Last Above the Stack, because that leads very much into what we're going to be talking about today.

Yeah, last week was— or last week, I should say, I think it was a couple of weeks ago now. We had a great episode around ICP, who your ideal customer profile is, and thinking about how you package up your offerings to really talk to that ICP. And when we talked about that, a A lot of people speak in generalities, right? And especially in the MSP space around commodity-level services like the best customer service, help desk, things like that. But when we talk to our ICP, we really want to narrow down the specific business outcomes, right, that we're communicating as part of our offering. And it doesn't mean that you have to go and change all of the things that you do or specifically all your backend operations. But a lot of MSPs, kind of coming back to the theme of our series here, is really leading with a lot of the tools, you know, that we have and trying to use them as the talk track versus talking in what the business wants to hear around, you know, reducing risk or aligning to audit, you know, controls that they have in place or driving business transformation where they could really speed up their productivity or help them, you know, dive into a new clientele themselves. So there's a lot we unpack there, and today we wanted to really double-click on what does that actually look like when we talk about positioning our offerings and making them, you know, in a way, in the sense of future-proofing for how we believe, you know, kind of MSPs are trending in the space, but also positioning it so that you're set up to succeed, you know, on that pricing and packaging front as well too. I don't know what, you know, thoughts you had after coming out of that last episode. We certainly dove into a lot, had a great worksheet that we're going to link to here.

But yeah, it was, yeah, it was a lot of fun last time, and I got some really good feedback from folks that really— what we're trying to do is really get tactical and get operational. So not just, you know, we all are guilty of saying things like, you know, it's about business outcomes, and people like, what does that even mean? Like, I'm tired of people saying that, not giving me tangible examples. And so If you missed last week and the past few, or the last episode, the past one, they're all recorded. Go watch them. They're on Cloud Capsules YouTube, our YouTube at Empath. You'll, you'll see them, no problems. But what we did, I thought was so great, was really diving into that worksheet and looking at ICP and looking at some of the measurables that go into it. And it's all there. There's a QR code at the top right. You can grab all of that. It's all free for you. We're going to have a worksheet again today. Same thing. It's all there free for you. So go check that out. So I, what I'm really excited about this today, Nick, let me get past ours, is this worksheet and really kind of getting into what those outcomes should look like and how to build towards them. So there's the QR, you can grab it. We're going to leave it up through the episode. So you'll be able to grab this anytime. They'll always be available. And what's cool is that QR will take you to all the previous worksheets and the previous materials we've had. So, so this will continue to drip through and you'll have all of this available. Luis is checking in. Hey, good to see you, brother. Really glad you're on. This is somebody that probably has a lot a lot to add to this conversation. Um, fantastic company. So, so Nick, why don't you kind of get us onto the playing field? Let me bring the screen share down just so people can see us and they don't have to deal with slides all the time. I know we really just want to have a great conversation. So get us on the playing field of, um, this whole conversation today about, um, what those outcomes and pricings should, should look like.

Yeah, so very high level, you know, when you think about talking to your ICP and, you know, really putting this front end in front of them that says, hey, I know your business, I can definitely help you. And to think about the backend operations and everything that you want to do to go fulfill that, um, you think about where you're at today as an MSP and trying to evolve into this future state. And I think from that standpoint, we have a lot of pressures coming down from things like AI, a lot of businesses reaching out to MSPs, or maybe not, depending depending on that relationship around how do I get started, I've got these specific business use cases, I have fears that our competition is going to pass us up, you know, if we don't start dealing with this today. So it's really driving a lot of conversation or a lot of interest, which I think we should all try to capitalize on. But regardless of that, I, I still think, you know, as, as we think about the MSP space and how technology is evolving and how we're moving as providers, there's kind of going to be a shift in the model itself. We went from break-fix, you know, largely into managed services. And now I think, you know, a lot of managed services is commodity-driven with, with help desk and things like that. And a lot of people do it really well, but it's not the differentiator that creates that larger stickiness with the client and also allows you to either move up market or have a better value perception that you're doing with your clients as it relates to advisory, as it relates to being that, um, you know, business growth engine for them. And so what we're going to unpack today is how you can think about that bridge between where you're at today and where you would potentially want to head, and some of the ways that you would go ahead and drive that. And to start, you know, a lot of the ways that you would start to think about that conversation and how you get into it is really taking an internal audit of your client engagement model. And that's something I'd love for you to speak to as well too, and just what you're seeing, but also where you see it work well, where you see it don't work well, because you know, yourself as well as, you know, other team members that you have like, like Alex, right? And certainly Luis on the call here too. He's got a really great idea around QBRs or, you know, just, just how we're interacting with our clients. I don't know if you want to speak to that for a second here too.

Yeah. Yeah, I'd love to. So, you know, I think we've all been coached well from every wonderful thought leader that's in the channel around you should do QBRs or whatever you call that, right? Whether it's quarterly cadence, it's bimonthly, We've all been told to do this. And Nick, one of the things I've recognized, I'll go to conferences all the time and I'll ask, how many of you do consistent, you know, QBRs, whatever you call them, with your clients? Every hand will go up, right? Either because they are actually doing it, kudos to them, or because they know they are supposed to raise their hand. Otherwise they're an immature MSP and they don't want to signal that they're not, right? So, so let's leave that aside for a minute. Let's take that and say that's an assumption we're going to work on. So if you're a younger MSP today, if you're getting into managed service, and that doesn't apply to you, that's okay, right? Thanks for being honest with us and we know you're working towards it. But let's just, let's have the assumption that you already have some cadence with your client. So if that's the case, what we really want to talk about today is the mechanics of what goes into that. Because what we've seen before, Luis talks about this, Alex talks about this, a lot of people talk about this, is what a QBR isn't, right? A QBR isn't just knocking on the door and saying, hey, it's me, your client, I need money. Pay me for something. What it really is, is getting to a degree where we're talking about some of these things you see here on the slide, right? We're getting into technology reviews, we're getting into roadmaps and budgeting, we're getting into advisory services where we're really tying in risk. And if they have compliance requirements, if they have cyber insurance mandates, if they have third and fourth party requirements, these are the things we're getting into. We're not necessarily saying that every one of your clients is 100% leveraging all of this. That's where we want to get. But what we're going to talk about today is how to step into this. And so what we want you to do today is bring this forward to say, what is our level of maturity? Where are we consistently at with each of these? And what degree is our MSP actually operating with maturity and getting, driving towards each of these? And I think, Nick, one thing that we could probably even say is you can even kind of look at these 3 budget or these bullet points here and say, we can almost use this as a roadmap, can't we? Where we start with getting, just getting the cadence of the strategy layer set, then moving into working towards roadmap and budget, and then moving into maybe the third tier of risk and compliance advisory. We can almost kind of look at that as like a step of 3 things, one to the next in a series, can we not?

Absolutely, yeah. And I think where a lot of people, like you mentioned, are focusing in that conversation is we have it, but we go through dry ticket data, you know, and kind of showcasing things that either they don't care about or it's not very exciting to them. They just do it as kind of like, oh, I gotta be here, um, type of conversation versus being excited for that call because you're delivering a lot of that heavy insight. And this is where you can begin to derive, you know, if you unpack that conversation well, this is, you know, uh, part of what you're looking at that, that then allows you to derive the better business outcome, kind of what we got into last week, but reframing what— into, oh, if you could do this, then what would that do for you, right? And so it's just kind of capitalizing in on what's most important to them. They feel not only heard, but then you can really emphasize your value translation in the services that you're offering. And we bring this up, you know, in the sense of the client engagement model, because it should be the, the main core driver, you know, as you look to now into the future of that engagement model. And it's my personal opinion that managed services is going to evolve into strategic advisory being kind of the core offering that you have, with managed services being more of an add-on. But I'd love to get your take on that too, Wes. I don't know if that's something you align with or how you think about that.

Nick, you're the one that really got me thinking about that exactly. This idea of, is the future not managed service? Is the future going into— what is the MSP of the future look like? And I've been testing what you've said a bunch. I travel quite a bit, and I've been testing this to see how other MSPs react. And I've gotten pretty much 100% agreement over what you just said of the— yes, we'll always do managed service. You know, you, you have this many seats, you're going to pay me this much, and I'm going to bundle in these things for you. I'm going to do this for you. But I have seen over and over MSPs say, yes, we believe that the future is not just managed service, but that will be a smaller component. What will grow is going to be project revenue. What's going to be things like, we call it business transformation, right? We're bringing in things like automation as a service, we're bringing in things like AI as a service. We're doing some of these things, we're helping the business grow, we're helping the business mature. And I don't mean our business, I mean our clients. And that is going to become a huge component of what the MSP of the future looks like. And really there's an element, Nick, where like managed service provider, like that term actually becomes more meaningful, I feel like, than what it is today. Because MSP just really just means I'm handling your IT for you, right? And so I really think you're on to something. And I've, again, I've tested this with MSPs that are out there, many of whom I deeply respect and all said, we're already starting to get into more of that to where, yeah, we always do managed service, but we have a lot more to bring to bear to the business than just, you know, handling all your IT and cybersecurity.

Yeah, and I've seen it firsthand with some of the MSPs that we work with. You know, they're, they're already diving into this and moving their business practice around it. Building their team around this holistically. Because I think one of the big things that you might have deficits on is that deeper level interaction of a conversation that gets deeper into the weeds on where they really need help versus just, we have something that's broken, let's go fix it. Um, you know, we, we have the server we need to migrate, all the technical speak that you really feel comfortable with as an MSP going into those conversations. But really building a competency around business process optimization is is a common one, right? I think, again, not to over-index on the AI piece of it, but it's certainly what's driving tons of conversations right now. So I don't think you can overlook it. And when you think about that, that's where, you know, we really can really shine as MSPs is to take the customer on that journey, but also think about, well, usually most of those cases, like what comes out of that conversation is not me building some AI, custom AI solution and in 8N, right? That's an example. It's, it's really just like, oh, you have a really inefficient business process. We can use technology, basic technology that's been around for years, to go in and fix it. We've never had this conversation before because we were too busy just handling in, you know, your reactive tickets as part of that. So I think the model that you build around that is going to facilitate all of your interactions, but also where you can have your biggest value drivers for your service model, but then also where you think you can build competencies in a product perspective around potentially add-on services that, like you said, managed services is always going to be there. I just think it's going to be more of an add-on because it's going to be table stakes, right? It's like, hey, yeah, we need support, we need you to, you know, maintain our users, we need, we need, uh, you know, basic maintenance and lifecycle things to be done around our infrastructure, right, as an example. But I want to take it to that next level of thinking we're at the seat of the business stakeholders, right? We sit with them when they make strategic decisions, they contact us. And I think if you do an internal audit of that with your clients today, you might find that you're not sitting at the table with a lot of your customers in that sense too.

Exactly, exactly. And you know, there's, we'll talk about some of this, but there's even some KPIs, some measurables that you can even use to really see how, how, to what degree of maturity do we actually have there? So like, for example, one thing I tell MSPs all the time is if I'm running an MSP and I'm, I'm looking at my VCIO function, whatever person and role that, that is, I'd be looking at things less about how much money they're generating, and I'd be looking a lot more about things like, hey, what consistency do you actually have with those meetings? Are they pushed off? Are they delayed? Are they canceled? Who are you actually meeting with? What's the role type? Is it an actual leader in the business? Is it, you know, the decision maker, or is it the office manager? You being gatekept, right? Those are some KPIs you can kind of to say what degree of maturity do we actually have here? But then you can actually mature this even more and start to say things like, to what degree have we built a roadmap where the client has no surprise unknown budgetary items in CapEx that they didn't expect, right? So, so, so, and I would even hold my team accountable to that to say, hey, I want to make sure that you tell the client, my job for you is to make sure you have no surprise spend coming up, that you know it, we're budgeted for it, we're prepared for it. Then you can step into the next step of like making sure that we're always ready to go with cyber insurance requirements, that we're meeting the requirements that we have when it comes to regulatory requirements, that when new things come up, we're bringing it to the client and they're prepared for it. So you can almost kind of step through some of this and use those data points. I'm going to bring up a comment here, if I may, from Dr. Keith, good friend of mine, CEO at Vistem out in, or Vistem out in LA. And he's right. He has been doing this for quite some time. He's selling the outcomes. And when you look at how Keith Keith sells and what Keith does inside of his MSP, he's going to his clients and saying, hey, look, I'm not the cheapest that's out there. For sure, you're gonna find a lot of people that are cheaper. What you will find from us is the ability for us to make sure that you are continuing to function. You are continuing to thrive as a business, and Vystin will be here to help you do that. Yes, we charge a premium, but we do that because we want to make sure that you're getting the results that you expect, right? So I love that. And then, of course, I love what Luis is saying too, kind of boiling the ocean down into making it really simple, right? Let's get a decision and let's move forward with it, baby. I love that. It's so good. So why don't we talk about the framework a little bit? I'm going to bring the slides back up. Again, we're not a big slide-heavy kind of, kind of show here. But sometimes it helps us kind of get on the map a little bit. Walk us through kind of what this repeatable framework looks like, if you would, here.

Yeah, I think simple, like, to piggyback off of what Louise is saying here, right, it's like, we don't have to overthink this, right? I think it gets daunting thinking about, well, what if they ask this question? What if they position this? And, you know, you kind of get think in your head about how hard, um, that, that might be. I can't support that. I don't know how to handle if they have an inefficient HR process, right? But I think in a lot of cases you're really well positioned to do that because you're seeing all these various businesses, right? And some of them might excel at that, some of them might have, you know, deficiencies, but you can kind of blend them in a lot. When we talk about a meeting framework, right, it's— you can keep it as simple as this about you know, well, what's changed in your business in the last quarter, right? And just getting an indication. They'll often, you know, peel back on like that, that question will somehow turn into what I'm frustrated with this quarter, right? Um, in a lot of these cases versus like, well, we went through this audit, we failed, or we lost this customer, you know, and it's really hurting me. If you're talking to the business owner or someone of like status, you will get more of those questions. And it's really that pain that you don't have to take advantage of, but certainly like that's where you can help them, um, in a lot of these cases. And when you unpack it more, like if they lost a customer, what— tell me more about that. And they walk you through the situation where they didn't have this, you know, part of their business aligned and they were losing this on this deficiency. In most of those cases, I think you can peel back that into something you can help with. Not all, you know, try to force it, but then that leads into kind of your, your tech alignment, right? It's like, well, how have you thought about, you know, where you're prioritizing, you know, new innovation, where you're prioritizing solving for tech debt, right? In some of these cases, depends on their business. But that's why it's really important to understand that business too, and understand where they're headed. So I think, you know, as you keep going through those, it's really just getting into the crux of what's happening today, where you have frustrations, and here's how we're thinking about like reducing your risk personally. So you always have something to bring to the table if they said absolutely nothing, right? In those situations, you're still providing value add on top with that piece of it, but not getting into the weeds on tickets and ticket volume. I think that's, that's not for that conversation. If somebody wants to have that, like what we did at our MSP was have one of our support managers go through and walk through that on a different call, but it wasn't the QBR. Yeah, it was a different, you know, separate call if you really care about that, because a lot of customers don't even care. They just want to say you're doing efficiently, send me a little snapshot, uh, tell me what's, you know, where we're having a lot of support issues. But that, that usually is not what's going to drive, uh, you said going up to an upsell conversation the next year about your services or trying to charge higher prices. They're not going to look at that. They're gonna be like, oh wait, well, how many tickets do we open? Yeah. And that's not the conversation you want to have, right?

Right.

Part of that.

Yeah, it— right, you're exactly right. And I'm gonna steal a page from Dean Trimpelis, um, uh, over on the Impass side of the house. He said, you know, one of the things I would do a lot, and we'd coach our team to do a lot at his MSP, you actually go to the help desk and say, hey, we have a client meeting coming up next week with this, this client. Can you just give me a summary of some of the ticket action that's been going on and just any open tickets I need to be aware of, any pain points and frustrations. He said the reason is because I don't want to walk into the client conversation unprepared and like, well, I didn't know that was going on. The worst thing you can have as a VCIO or whatever that role type is, is to walk in, the client's really angry and frustrated, and now you end up having to defend, or I didn't know, and now you look like you don't care. And so he's like, I would just be ready for it. But what you're not going to do is walk in and say, we've answered this many tickets for you, blah, blah, blah. I'm coming in armed for the knowledge. That way, if the decision-maker comes and says, you know, Nick, look, I think everything's OK, but Bobby is really frustrated over here because this one, this one thing that wasn't working before, it still isn't. I'm very well aware of it.

Thank you.

Here's what our plan of action is. Here's what we're going to do. I've got a plan ready for you, whatever it is. So you need to come armed with it. But you're exactly right. We don't come in and lead with, here's how many tickets we've answered and here's how many firewall blocks that we've had and blah, blah, blah. This is just data points that the client just says, look, I pay you for that stuff. Don't burden me with the data and the details that are just the cost of doing business. Get to me the things that I care about. So things like you mentioned, let's bring that back up, that slide you mentioned, because there's gold in these hills right here. The roadmap review, right? That, that third item, right? Here's what's— we built this plan for you. So here's kind of the next step in this plan. Are we ready for this? Here's the budget outlay that we talked about. Are we still good for this? Here's where we're at from a project implementation. We've actually finished these things as we've been held accountable to doing. We've actually done something tangible for you, right? So you need to be, you need to be ready for that. One, one quick question I want to ask you though, Nick, when it comes to roadmap review, how sometimes we talk about the expectation that, that the road, you just know how to do it. How do you actually build a roadmap? Can I just ask you that question off the cuff?

Yeah, I think, you know, when we, when we talk about it and we think about the movement you know, going forward of strategic advisory, I think you want to factor in, you know, some of those maybe more glaring items, right, that you mentioned around like we've had these support issues. When we had those at RMSP, it was largely around we need to change a whole process in order for this to work better. And so that might be a roadmap item that we're working on together as a group, you know, to make that more seamless or, you know, transition as part of that. And sometimes that was very technical in the sense of like I always remember one where we weren't deploying the getting 365 apps, you know, fast enough upon new workstation onboarding, and it was causing all this pain for every new hire that they had. And so we worked together, you know, to figure that out as a roadmap item. But I think about that, you know, I like to factor in a combination of factors, one of which is the support, you know, burden of just increasing efficiencies in that regard. The second of which is looking at it from the standpoint of, that strategic advisory conversation, right? So more around what are your business goals and are we aligned on that technology-wise? It could also be number 3, which is risk advisory, which is like, here's how we're going to reduce your risk over the next quarter and bake you into a continuous improvement plan for security. And a lot of that, you know, is 3 big levers that you can use for value translation, right? Of, hey, we don't only clean this up, But we are also working towards your business goal here. And at the same time, we're reducing this risk for you. Now, very hard to do on all fronts, you know, to facilitate that. When we talk about that, that's when you get into, I would never leave this MSP, right? Because they have my best interest in mind. And we are aligned to what we're going moving forward, the stickiness factor there versus like, I could move tomorrow and I just need to move my help desk tickets over to somebody else. And get my, you know, devices under management. They're just going to swap their RMM and AV products and I'll be good, right?

Right.

So I think it's huge. And I think, you know, it, it differs depending on your focus as an MSP too, right? You might be an MSSP, you might be security focused, you might focus more on the productivity business transformation side. So that interaction on roadmap could be very much more niched or niched down, um, in the sense of what you offer. Curious to hear what you think about that too, Matt.

I think you nailed it. And that's the reason I asked the question. Sometimes, if we're not careful, we hear people say, "Build the roadmap." And they're like, "I don't know how to build a roadmap. I've never done it before." And it's exactly what you just said. I'm going to steal from Luis. I'm going to bring his comment up. Ask the right questions. Literally ask those questions of, "Hey, what are we marching towards? What's key priority for us? What's strategically important? What are you trying to accomplish this year?" These are the questions that we need to be asking so that we can then apply what we know to say, how do we help you get there? Let's build a roadmap according to what you said you wanted to do. Where are you trying to go? And we'll help you. And sometimes we just know the things that they're not going to think about, like, oh, we need a— we do need an overhaul on like a Microsoft transition and we need to do some things. We can bring those to bear to say, in order to do this that you've, you've talked about, Ms. Customer, these are some things that we need to build. You don't have to do it on the fly. Capture, ask these questions. Let me bring the slides back up because you need to ask these good questions to get those answers and then take this back with your team and build the roadmap out. Then say, do I have the permission, Ms. Client, to present to you this roadmap? And does this resonate? And I know there's some technical things that are in here that we'll handle for you. I just want to make sure we're telling you these are the things we need to be able to do so we can accomplish where you're trying to go, right? So don't overthink the roadmap. And that's why I wanted to kind of mention that. Okay, so we're now going to do that. We're going to talk about those risks, the thing, the defensive things that we need to make sure we're protecting against, top 3 things. And I love this. I'm going to steal from David Powell over at LionGuard. He taught me years ago. He's like, you know, he's like, make sure when you're talking to the client, you don't overload them with 1,000 things. They're going to have risk paralysis analysis. There's a lot to do about this. Come up with the top 3 things. That way, you can go smash those 3 things, come back with tangible improvements, go back to the client, say, "Look what we've done, Ms. Client. Look, look at the things we've accomplished. Now we've got a couple more things," right? So keep it real simple. And then lastly, these action items. Here's what we've been doing. Here's what we're going to be doing. You need to be accountable to the client. So I love all this. Before we move to kind of the 3rd step in this, anything else that we're missing here you want to, you want to bring back, Nick?

No, I think you touched on it last week, but you mentioned SMART goals, right? We do want them to be achievable. We don't want to give them a laundry list because that's not like very much achievable for us either, given the workload that we have of just the reactive side of the business, right? It's plenty for most people, um, you know, to compare to the proactive items we want to implement. But I'd encourage to make those bite-sized chunks that you can deliver more frequent ROI touch points where it's like a constant stream to the client of, even if it's asynchronous, right? You don't have to do it synchronously every time, but if you send them like, hey, we did this, we updated that, you know, this, your risk score went down here, and so forth, because they're very much achievable, they're gonna think, wow, like there's a lot of value always coming our way. And then we summarize that again and reinforce, you know, their decision in working with us over and over and over again. And I think that that can't be beat, right? It's just basic psychology of a positive feedback loop of treats, right, in those senses as well.

So, yep, that's right. That's right. So before we go into next step of building a bridge, and we'll talk about what that means in a minute, just a couple of great quotes. I love what Keith said. I mean, he's like, and I know he does this, I learn the language. So for Boeing, lean is what they do. I learn what that means. I incorporate that in. I make sure that we're talking about the same things, even if I don't change my back office operations, I just change a little bit of the language. That's exactly right. Same for hospitality. And I learned, and I— if you want to keep a client, if you want to build a reputation in an industry, you want to charge premium pricing, you got to be able to learn to do each of these things. So I love that. And then Sean said this, and the quote kind of cuts off, but we learned this the hard way. If you use a QBR to sell, your clients won't show up next year. That's exactly right, because they're going to sniff it out. They're smart. They don't want a pitch session. They want a partner. We pivoted from selling software to leading deep dive strategy sessions. By focusing on their current infrastructure and aligning with their 1 to 3 year roadmap, the meetings became high value instead of high pressure. Impact is more important than upsell, and now our clients routinely show up every single year. That's exactly right. And then lastly, Luis checking in as well. I recommend MSPs keep a simple risk register they show at all QBRs. Over time, it helps moving the client from abdicating their responsibility for IT. These are excellent comments and thoughts that have come from this discussion, because I think this is actually easier than we think it is. But because we are technical by nature, we, we tend to overcomplicate, we tend to overdrive too deep into the weeds, and the client gets lost. And just like Sean says, at some point they just say, I think you're here to sell me something rather than to help me grow. So that kind of brings up this developing a bridge, Nick, and walk us through kind of how we start getting on the playing field.

Yeah, and I think to, to John and Louise's point there too, it's like if you actually are doing your job well especially from a security sense, things actually get pretty quiet, right? And the client might then perceive that as no value translation, right? So if you're not having the conversations, definitely they're going to think that. But then on top of that, if you're reinforcing like, hey, here's all the things we've done, and getting them into that conversation and bringing up their— the business side again, like there's never a question about that value translation and how much you are showing up for their business. Um, because I think there is the notion that you can be too quote unquote good, right? Especially at security where things are silent, never— nobody gets breached, um, things are working, you're handling everything behind the scenes, you built up a lot of talent and resources to be able to support that. But when we talk about, you know, kind of the thesis that I have around the MSP services moving into strategic advisory as that core offer, you got to think about creating this bridge. And this is probably a multi-year bridge at, you know, bare minimum, you know, when we think about this because of the perception today, but also because of how you want to operate around this. And later on we'll get into some suggestions about kind of where that bridge might lie for you in the sense of focus areas. But one of the things I would start doing today is start getting into this strategic advisory motion, right? And that's, you know, whether or not you have, um, you know, clients under that engagement model today, I would start to position it for your largest clients where it's bundled in, but really package it up as strategic advisory. And not just, you know, some other, like, we're just gonna have another meeting on our calendars, right? Because that's gonna totally erode the value perception that they're gonna have. But this is really around like, hey, number one, we recognize as an assumptive base that our largest clients are gonna have the largest business changes, they're gonna have the largest complexities to deal with, and they're also gonna value that extra strategic lens of us coming into that conversation as well to. So we should bare minimum start with them. But I would say, or to, to your point you made at the beginning of the conversation, like expand what that QBR conversation is into strategic advisory. So really leaning into where they have business challenges today, really how they're thinking about, you know, technology and AI moving forward, because that'll help you unpack a lot of that. And I would say a lot of where I would come at it from is still similar conversations around where you have tech waste, where you have opportunities for improving productivity, where you have opportunities— and think about it just business layer, right? Agnostic to any business, you want to have levers around how can we improve your sales funnel, how can we improve your conversion rate, how can we help you support your own downstream customers better, um, and those lenses too. So again, don't try to think about like, I don't know all this about their business. There's some natural assumptions you can make that that every business has to pull as a lever to continue to grow. And then you can start to proliferate that down into the rest of your clientele that might not be as larger. But once you get into a very firm state of what that looks like, it's thinking about having it as like an add-on service, or thinking about having it as a, you know, block amount of services that you offer. Um, and they will be engaged because you can reference maybe case studies you've done with other businesses now. So this is where it takes that time to bake, but it's thinking about, this is really where I'm going to wrap around that client engagement model around a core service. And the packaging of it, you know, could be something that's a flat rate, um, you know, like a retainer, much like you would see from a lawyer or something like that, all the way into a block consulting engagement, you know, as part of that, which is also similar, um, versus getting into per user, per seat costs. And this might actually turn into your highest margin, but also highest upsell engagement that you have, right? Because this will pull out project work. This should pull out where you have a lot of opportunities for packaging. So the, the actual riches that you can get out of this is quite expansive. But I'd love to get your thoughts too, Wes, on just kind of seeing this and some of the things you've seen potentially too.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I think a couple things when it comes to getting this going, like that's why we call this building a bridge. There's not a hard and fast only one way to do this. I think that's what you're getting at, Nick, is there's, I think, a lot of ways we can start to build towards getting this going. A lot of this is going to depend on the kind of industry you serve. It's going to depend a little bit of your flavor of how you've been doing things. I'll give you an example. If you, if you're a young growing MSP and you've been charging— I'm just going to name a number, not saying this is the right number— $100 a seat, $125 a seat, you're like kind. We all know you can't do that, right? You don't have the ability to bundle this in, right? So now you have a problem on your hands. How do you get that going? Do you either just say, I gotta just increase my seat price? You've— if you're gonna do that, you got to find a way to defend to the client why that cost is going up. Do you dump those old clients and grab new ones? Do you just leave them around and not do anything with them and know eventually they're gonna churn away? Or do you start to say, oh, okay, well, now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start to to really start to bring to bear through the right conversations, hey, these are some, some things we want to start talking about as the roadmap and get that going and letting the roadmap turn into, hey, these are some things that are outside the scope of our MSA and what we do for you by default under our covered managed service, but we can bring these things to bear for you. You're going to have to get onto that journey is my point. If you're a younger MSP, if you're a more mature MSP and you've been doing this for quite some time, probably a different calculus there. Probably what it's going to be is we're going to start to introduce some of these things, and maybe you do have the ability to bundle it into your seat price. Maybe, maybe you go after only a specific set of industries and you, you say, this is what we offer for all banking and it costs this much money, and it— maybe it's not even per seat priced, it's, it's something that, that you just say for every bank, this is— these are the things that we do, and it's a component that's a required add-on, and it's the strategic layer, right? But how you bring this to market You've got some flexibility to do it with your style and your capabilities, but you gotta learn that these are some things that we've, we've got to bring to bear, and the classic $150, $200 a seat is not going to allow you to build those things properly. So you got to find ways to get this to market that's going to work well for you. And so that's why we're calling this that Build a Bridge, because there's multiple ways you can bring this in, but you've got to be ready for for this, because if you don't, Nick, I think the biggest thing that I want to say here as we go to the next component is if you don't do this, understand that another MSP will come forward and say, hey, we can actually provide for you this, this strategy layer that you need. And then you have to say those words. They can literally just come in and ask the right questions about what the business is trying to do, what they're trying to grow into, where their challenges are, what their major outcomes are wanting to solve for. And all of a sudden the client says, that's a better conversation that I care about. I'd love to have them do— oh, you can also do all the managed IT stuff so that we can do all these other things? Let's go, baby. And, and so you're— if you don't start doing this, another MSP will come along and will do it.

Yeah, and I think that that's so important because it's also like, just be curious, right, in those conversations that you're already having today to unpack a lot of these things. Like, I can speak at least for myself firsthand, I do a lot of consulting, or did in the past, less of these days, but but it was all around. People reach out to me a lot for Microsoft consulting, right? And it's like every single one of those almost turned into more business coaching and business engagement of like, well, why does that exist over here? How does this happen? You know? And then we unpack like, oh, well, we don't even have a CRM tool and we're doing it this way to get contacts into our organization. It's like, well, that's a whole, you know, conversation. And sometimes like I don't even broach it because It's like, I don't want to even get into it myself, but there's plenty of opportunity there for an MSP to come in and say, well, we should really look at doing this because this could increase your efficiencies here. We can help you price and package these tools. And like, you'll learn along the way. And it's not to say you have to be a jack of all trades, to your point. Like, this is where we come back down into niching in the next slide too. But I think a big piece of it, um, you know, does revolve around you've got to step up for the client. And that is, again, not saying that you have to know all these things. It's just opening up the conversation. And to your point, they don't want to switch providers. They want somebody who already knows their business to come in and provide that advice. And you'd probably know it more than any other third-party provider that they work with or vendor in a lot of situations, right? Not all-encompassing, but you have a much better pulse on how the organization works and their individual users because you work work with them every day, right? And I think you can't really beat that, um, in, in the sense of like thinking about how you can evolve your MSP. And like I was saying earlier, like the margins on this service is higher than you're going to get any other service, right? Because you're just sitting and listening on a call, you're not necessarily taking action. Hopefully that turns into the project work that we talked about or upselling the services because you really identified a need. Say, hey, you know, based off of this conversation, it sounds you really need help with these audits, this is actually a whole service we provide, you know, that's outside of the engagement model that we're doing today, or whatever that might look like, right? So yeah, I think if you hop to that, that next slide there, um, the one piece that, you know, I like to couple with this is really thinking about how can you then package up very specific business outcomes. This kind of comes back full circle to our conversation last week about ICP and and packaging in this sense. But what I like to do is really draft and curate a, you know, front end that's really tailored to a business outcome or to a vertical or to a client in general that really speaks to them. But also on the back end, we're not creating 1,000 different SKUs in our PSA tool. And I think that's a big key because you want to have just enough diversity to get reporting around what products are, are being you know, quote unquote sold on the highest degree. But you don't want to create like, oh, we do one-off SKU for every single service, and that's just going to look messy on their invoice. So thinking about like, how do you bundle these things up into predefined packages and then find repetition of what works well so it's just a repeat process for you? Some of you might have this as like advanced security, like you can see in the bottom already today. But this could also just be around like, hey, we have a whole bundle around security collaboration and data sharing, right? And that's very specific, but I think it's actually better than like the wide open world of MSP space when you talk about like, we do managed services, then client thinks we do absolutely everything, and we don't, and we don't do it well in that sense. And it comes back to bite you because it's easy to be a yes man in technology, and I think that we have a tendency to do that because, yeah, well, we can do it, but it might cost us hundreds of hours to go in and operationalize that. But it's really thinking about like, how am I going to market this to not only the existing clientele but to others, but also drive satisfaction with that offering as well too? Because I'm doing it so well and I can only improve it from there versus thinking about we do everything and anything technology. I think that that's too much of a wide space, and certainly on the backend operations side, you know, there's, there's a lot to fulfill that ripples throughout your organization as you look at that too.

Yeah, so let's, let's jump into an example here then. Give us like a— we have this, this healthcare example, so kind of bring, bring us up to speed here with, with an example.

Yeah, so I think, you know, healthcare is, is an easier example because it's very specific, but I think you could do this with a lot of different verticals, or, you know, as Keith was mentioning earlier, just speaking in that language of your customer, right? Um, and really delivering things around them to tailor to their services. And you might be able to just do this today, right, and, and deliver it differently to the client. Say, hey, like, we're actually bundling this differently, we're going to step up and we're going to provide you, you know, these deliverables now as part of this new offering that we've built. And even if it's something you've been doing halfway, you know, repackage it, re-rebrand it, especially going into the new year. But thinking about this is like, hey, we're doing strategic advisory plus security hardening plus cyber risk management, right? And that could all be one SKU that you offer. But then the front end of how you're positioning and marketing that is different for every client, different for every prospect. In a lot of these cases that fit that specific, you know, channel focus, in this case, healthcare companies looking to get HIPAA compliant and stay HIPAA compliant, right? As part of that, And this is where all of the deliverable tweaks, um, is something that realistically in a lot of these cases, you're not necessarily having to tweak what you do on the backend to fulfill it. You're just tailoring the language that's being used on the frontend. And so it's a big distinction that I think we also get hung up on where it's like, hey, we're not actually asking you to be like very specific custom report for every single one of your customers. It's really just how you're tailoring the language behind it.

That's exactly right. So just to bring that to— this is what we do, right? As an MSP, I do each of these things. Clients are like, I don't want to buy that. I don't— I'm not going to buy your M365 security hardening. That sounds boring. That sounds expensive. That sounds— I don't want that. So what do we do? That's just the back. That's back. It's like a restaurant, back of house, front of house, right? But you don't want to see how the sausage is made. I just want want the great sausage, right? So, so what are we doing? We use these marketing wrappers to say things like, this is what we do, this is who we are, is what we deliver, and this is how we, we say it. So it— a client says, yeah, okay, this HIPAA thing, I know I've kind of neglected it for quite some time, I understand there's teeth behind, need to start working on. Okay, cool, that makes sense, right? Okay, cool, we're gonna map some of this stuff to your— what you're required to do, right? I don't care so much about this stuff other than how it relates to what I have to do, right? So I love what we're doing here. We're using the language here, these specific things, to start bringing to bear what the client needs as an outcome. Therefore, we, we now buy the right to be able to do these things that we do back of house. So I, I love that, Nick. You, you absolutely nailed that.

Yeah, I think, you know, when we, we've done past episodes diving into like, well, how do I think about niching down, right? And, and thinking about like that packaging model, because certainly HIPAA is very focused and it certainly commands a premium price point if you're doing it really well, have these tailored solutions. So it's very attractive in that regard versus being a generalist in everything to everybody. I'd rather if it's a generalist where they aren't under regulatory motions or audits or anything like that, I'd rather package it up for, you know, secure remote collaboration, or things that any businesses would want to, you know, try to go achieve. But it's got a very focused outcome at the end of the day, and it'll help them grow their business, it'll help them work easier, it'll, it'll help them, you know, grow without having to hire full-time employees potentially. Some of the things that you're just playing off those drivers, but it all comes back to that conversation, right? And so It's, it's really thinking about how am I framing this based off of what they've told me. And that's where I would say, that's where I drive all my energies into today if it was me working at an MSP doing traditional managed services, because those conversations is where you're going to learn where your base is at on the majority. You can synthesize that and then you can start to build out, this is what packages we think that, you know, we would want to repeat over and over. That'll be the most attractive attractive to these clients, and this is how we can word them. So you want to create both efficiencies in that regard, but you also want to, you know, understand the lay of the land, if you will, about where there's a lot of opportunity. And you're only going to do that if you start to have deeper conversations with your clients at that, at that point in time.

Yep. So I think a couple good comments I want to pull out. Muhammad's been jumping in with some absolute fire good stuff here, right? Eyes and ears are important. Eyes Sorry. Yeah, eyes are more important because you can spot which things have been noticed. Ears can help if the customer's already identified a problem and have some kind of idea on how to resolve it. My best sales were solutions that resolved pains which had never been addressed by the customer. I love that. And then Luis checking in, same thing. It's also important to stop saying we take care of tech so you can focus on your business. Newsflash: technology is their business now, right? I remember the eye-opening moment for my bank all these years ago was when we realized we're in the technology business, not the banking business, right? That people are using technology every single day to get their finances done. We've got to be in the middle of that conversation. Otherwise, we're irrelevant, right? That's exactly well said. So no, Nick, we have a worksheet. Is now the right time to bring that up?

Yeah, yeah, we can, we can share that too. There's something that we were providing at the top of the hour here, but just something that is helpful for more of an internal audit. You know, that you guys can leverage as well too to start to source some of this information. But part of it and what we're looking at here is also thinking about what is that bridge for me? You know, what— it's a common question, like, what do I want to be when I grow up? You know, where do I see my MSP in the next 5 years or so as part of that? And I think, you know, this is kind of some shifts that you can overlay as part of that. And these are just 5 examples, right? It's not meant to be the end-all be-all of where we think, you know, you could head. But certainly thinking about where you have your strengths in your business today versus, you know, where you have a lot of bloat or a lot of inefficiencies. And so that can be everywhere from like, we have a help desk, but we really don't, you know, invest a lot of time to it. It's not our, you know, primary core value add. We may want to shift into thinking about strategic first and leading with that as more of these advisory services, but less on the fulfillment layer, right? In that sense, it could also lead into a hybrid motion. It could lead into focusing on the security side, you know, as a big core driver of that. You have your own in-house SOC, very well positioned to move into that with strategic advisor on top. The big thing is you're always having strategic advisory in all of these, right? Just a matter of what other focus areas that you would want to have. And I'm certainly not saying down with the help desk or anything like that. I think that could be taken out of context. It's more of, well, is that a core competency for you today that you don't see ever leaving, right? Do you want to create a bridge where you are— I've talked to MSPs now who are positioning themselves to basically re-talent the help desk into automation engineers and into business process optimization optimization analyst, if you will, as part of that, just so that they can move into more advisory over time and less so into help desk in that sense, too, because they're working with co-managed clients, and so it's lesser of a need, right? But that all depends on their unique situation. So I think there's, there's a lot of different paths here, but I'd really consider the strategic being around that internal audit you take around where do we have a lot of those efficiencies today, core competencies, things that people tell us, you know, or we know, you know, that are just strengths as part of our business too.

Yep, well said. So I think as we kind of close shop today, one of the things we wanted to give to you is this worksheet. I'm going to kind of re-expand this so we can see this a little bit better here. This is in that QR code you see at the top right. It's a free giveaway. We're not charging for it, anything like that. It's just sitting here in Canva for you. And what you you can do is you can take what we've talked about today and really start to bring this forward to your team and use it to self-assess. Use it to say, how good of a job are we doing with, with all of this? And where are some of the areas we need to focus down? Which are some of our clients that we've not done a good job? Where are we doing a great job? And how can we replicate some of those successes? Might even identify some of the people at your MSP that are doing a great job of this and areas for improvement for for those that are maybe struggling. And so what we have here is, is a bunch of things. And Nick, I'll let you kind of jump into this a little bit more too. But starting with the strategic advisor we've talked about today, take each client and rate them on each of these things. How are we doing? 0 being terrible, 3 being great. Give us some notes for each client on are we doing a good job with the quarterly review for each of this. My share just went away. I'm not sure what happened. Let me bring that back.

Oh, we were still seeing it, at least.

Oh, you could. It just disappeared for me. Strange. Okay. Hopefully it comes back. Yeah, there we go. So work through each of those. Not for time's sake, we're not going to go through each of those, but you understand what each of these are, right? Then work through the client segmentation plan. We've talked a lot about that in the previous episode, so go pull those episodes if you haven't seen them. That QR code will have the same worksheets from the last episodes as well, so you can start to work through each of these and start to say, how does this look? How do we start bringing this forward, right? And then walk us through, I guess, parts 3 and 4 as well, and anything else that I missed.

Yeah, I think this is just thinking about from a monetary perspective, right? And we'll, we'll probably unpack more of this too in the next episode. But, um, thinking about, you know, how you're going to position it from a pricing perspective, like I said, you could do a straight retainer model, and there's some of the pricing in there that I've seen others use as part of that. You could do it in blocks. You could also do it as, you know, per user cost if you really wanted to. I think that doesn't really align though to what you're offering, so I'd try to stick with a fixed be as part of that, for hours as part of advisory. And then as you get into risk compliance, you know, thinking about kind of expanding on the exercise we did last month, but how are you talking about risk? What tools are you using to talk about risk? And, you know, how are you thinking about that in the sense of the business impact to them? That's, you know, not made up in the sense of like, oh, this costs other people $50,000 if you didn't do it. I've never been a fan of that, but thinking about how it could actually ripple through your business and then The same thing with the meeting framework, right? So thinking about how are we going to, you know, reposition these meetings? How can I package them up so that they know there's going to be a lot of value, but it's also going to be a different conversation because we're asking more in-depth questions about your business and your risk and the things we probably haven't been asking up to this point in time. And then lastly, you know, what are those delivery, you know, pillars that you have along with an action plan to go try to execute that as well too? So just a guideline, you know, you can use it loosely or tweak it how you guys want based off of your business or what you heard today. But just wanted to give you guys some, some helpful tools, you know, to just put, put pen to paper, right, and, and doing this internal thought process.

Yep, love that. So we're out of time here. We're going to wrap a couple minutes early. I've got another, um, uh, session that I've got to jump over to. But again, this is all here for you. So the goal for this is to take what we're giving, and we just— we, from day one, Nick and I wanted to be very tangible, very hands-on, very and just talk about things, but give you examples. And so we're— these worksheets are a big part of what we've really been focused on doing. So you have action items, things you can take away with your teams and really start building towards. So I hope this has been helpful for you. Really enjoyed this, this whole session on how do we get to outcomes? How do we get to pricing that works? How do we get ourselves moving forward when it comes to actually delivering outcomes that will not only help our MSPs thrive but continue to be successful, um, as the, as the future is, is upon us, right? So Nick, um, been really great today, um, really enjoyed the discussion. Um, anything else you want to close us out on?

No, be sure, uh, to join us next time too, guys. We'll have another one. We'll post on our socials and everything like that. We're going to go over, um, micro projects and kind of that whole concept comparatively to a traditional CapEx with projects. So just kind of unpacking that a little bit more and and how we're seeing that, but how that's looking in the future. But appreciate everybody joining today.

Love it. Awesome. Thank you all so much. It's been awesome. We'll see you on the next episode. The next episode is coming up. Just to let everyone know when that will be, it'll be January 21st. You'll see it on our socials plugged in, but it'll be January 21st, 2:00 PM Eastern. So hope to see you all there. Thanks.