Episode 15: Navigating Budgeting with Your #MSP Clients

And we're back. What's up? Oh, never a dull moment. Alex, you're muted.

That's mostly to protect me from myself.

Oh well, hey, at least it's not like Slutskin and jumping on with an F-bomb.

You know, if you're not here— if you're here, let us know you're here, right?

Woke us all up real quick.

Nothing like, nothing like an F-bomb in the green room to wake us all up.

Well, hey, a little less technical difficulties than last time, so we appreciate everyone, uh, uh, hopping on. Um, Lots of really good response to the one we did last, uh, what was that, 3 weeks ago now on budgeting. I'm sure everyone now has a nice little, uh, budget sheet that they're working on.

Yeah, I'm sure everybody's made a lot of progress.

If you guys didn't see, I did make an extra video on YouTube for MSP budgeting, uh, where I actually go through how to have that conversation with your leadership team so that they can weigh in and buy in. So go over to the K7 YouTube channel and check it out. If you would like the little calculator I built, email me or message me on LinkedIn and I'll gladly send it to you. It's definitely a sandbox. It's not going to be your P&L, but I've got that locked and loaded. And for those of you that are not owners and you're not on the leadership team, you're more in a VCIO role, that tool and that video still may have value for you because it'll let you understand how budgeting works for a business. Which is a perfect segue with what we're going to be discussing today, which is how your clients budget, which we're kind of involved in that a little bit, aren't we, Alex? Yeah.

You know, if we're not, we're probably setting ourselves up for failure. And that's part of today's conversation. So it'll get real interesting as we dive into that. I'd be interested to hear in the chat— and my technical difficulties aren't going to let me see that, but that's okay. Kyle will relay the message. I'd be interested to hear in the chat, though, just from the start, how many of you were actually involved in that, that client meeting, in that budget process, you know, where all that gets built for your customer?

I mean, and I guess as a follow-up to how many of you have actually studied what a business budget is in order to communicate with your clients, especially their CFOs?

Yeah, yeah.

I can tell you the first time at my MSP, Alex, I sat there with mine not having a budget. This is 2012. I'm just kind of throwing darts at a wall. And I had a client telling me, well, we don't have money in the budget for that. And I instantly had that, well, what do you mean you don't have money in the budget? Your server's about to break.

Well, and it's amazing. The budget will do a couple of things for you as an MSP, right? It'll help you identify which of your customers are mature enough to be operating with a budget. And it'll help you identify which ones you're kind of leaving behind as you grow up and start to follow what we did in the webinar 2 weeks ago and start to build your own budget and start to behave like a little bit more of a grown-up business than just a lifestyle business that you were last year or the year before or the year before that. And the more you mature, your clients who aren't making the same maturity journey with you will stick out like a sore thumb, right? You'll be able to see them a mile away and say, these just aren't my people anymore. And there's a little bit of that, hey, can we bring some of them with us on the journey? Will they come with me and join me? On that journey? Or is it a little bit of a case of the people who got me here aren't the people who are going to get me there, and I'm going to outgrow some of these customers, and that's okay? This isn't the fire the customer conversation. It's simply the, you know, as our business matures, we would like to attract people who are at the same maturity level as us. And this is one of those exercises where maturity level matters.

Well, and I think for even your clients, and I can tell you right now, working with law firms and dental clients that couldn't do math if they tried to, You being a trusted advisor and coming to them saying, hey, do you have money in the budget for them? May have, or for this or that, or for next year. You garner a lot of respect because they're sitting there going, you're not asking for money today. You're asking for money for something that you're seeing down the road. And they may have never taken the moment to think that far down the road. And now you may mature them as a business owner to go, maybe I should think about the things I need to budget for next year.

Well, and this is the difference between presenting yourself as the guy who comes in begging for money because payroll's due or your Tesla payment's due, and the guy who really is that famous trusted advisor, that thing we've been trying to figure out how to become for a decade. This is the thing that helps set you up for that conversation. It gets you invited to the seat at the big table when they're going to make decisions. If you're a VCIO, it's the thing that lets you earn the C in VCIO, right? VCIO is virtual chief information officer. You're a guy who's supposed to sit on the C-level team and run a department for an organization. And I promise you, everyone else who sits on the C-level team and runs a department manages a budget for their department.

And for those of you that didn't see the episode that Alex and I did on You're Doing VCIO Wrong, maybe Alex, we should redo that session. There, there's an entire industry to where VCIO, you could argue, is a different business model than MSP, right? It's very consultative. It's very much eat what you kill. It's very fractional in how you deliver it. And I don't want to get too in the weeds in that because a lot of MSPs bundle this in just as a client management, uh, objective. And we'll get more into this, and I think Alex, you have a lot of ideas on there.

Uh, yeah, the difference between the technical account manager and the VCIO, right?

Oh, completely right. And that's where I think you and I agree, it's not the greatest of titles, but it's what we got.

It's what we got. Like every, like every other acronym in our industry, it's what we got. Thanks, marketing.

Yeah, exactly. Thank you, marketing. So without further ado, who are we? That age-old question. I think at this point most of us know who we are.

Homeless guys in the MSP space. Actually, we're not even homeless anymore. We have a home.

Yeah.

And a proud sponsor.

Yeah. Well, and a proud sponsor. And I'm sitting here going, huh, for some reason, you know, it wouldn't be a dull moment. Uh, the slides are not transitioning on Ecamm. This is fantastic. You know, it's like it wants to just give us a little bit of a headache. So with that being said, Alex, do a little intro on who you are.

Yeah, yeah. So Alex Farling. I've been in the MSP space for going on 20 years, actually just over 20 years now. But you know, most of my experience comes from being an MSP for 16 and a half years. But then I spent 3 years as a vendor building out Lifecycle Insights and now working with Wes. On, on this fancy thing called Empath. And just last week, we, we brought— we announced and brought over my friend, my confidant, uh, my co-host Kyle Christensen. So now I'll let him talk to you guys about who he is.

Me, this guy, uh, I have been in the MSP space a similar amount of time to Alex. I co-founded Sierra Pacific Group, where we helped 1,000+ MSPs mature through their operational efficiencies, tools, help desk, bookkeeping, all that good stuff. As well as I was an MSP turnaround guy where I've generated about $50 million in MSP revenue a year at this point in my career. Um, and really at the end of the day, Alex and I have come together because we've learned quite a bit over our years to where we've kind of become that jack of all trades a little bit, Alex. And that's why we've decided to join Wes Spencer with Empath, because we've, we've, we've dipped, we've weaved, we've dodged, we've learned that best practices only get you 60% of the way there, and sometimes just other ideas help you make that special MSP with something a little bit different that separates you from your competition. And I think that's key from even when you look at other business frameworks, right? You look at something like EOS or Pinnacle or Scaling Up, you look at really successful businesses, they kind of use a little bit of everything.

They, they do, but you know, the biggest difference in all of them is accountability and execution, right? The, the ones who succeed hold themselves accountable, um, and that's it. Hold themselves personally accountable, and, and that's how and why they execute. So I think that's super important, um, and it's something that we cover a lot on this show. Speaking of the show, we've got awesome news, right? We have official name, um, and we're moving to a new, new home.

Yes, guys. So Alex and I for a while have really— we, we didn't like calling this a webinar, and we didn't like 'Cause at the end of the day, we're not, we don't have calls to actions. For those of you that have been on this show, we, we, we don't, we're not sitting here trying to sell anything. We're not saying, oh, click this link to get a free download. And we'll also go ahead and market you to death on what you're gonna buy. This really came out of our passion to educate, have conversation, pivot some of the conversation on your interactions. It really turned into not a, not a podcast, not a webinar, but this collaborative thing. So we found a platform called Crowdcast. If you've ever done the Cyber Call with Wes Spencer, Um, and Andrew Morgan, they use this platform as well. It's extremely collaborative. And what's cool about it is you don't have to sit there and register every single time. You just say, hey, I like these guys, and it will keep you abreast to when the shows are. If we do offline, it, it still allows you to watch recorded stuff and collaborate as a community. So you can even chat with us in the platform when episodes aren't going on. So it's a really cool way to just stay in sync. We have the link there. The link never changes as well. So you'll always see the episodes we have in the hopper. Uh, we do have a really cool one coming after IT Nation on the 14th that we'll announce right now. We're bringing Reg Harnish and Wes Spencer on to talk about the things in cybersecurity that you should not do as an MSP. I'm actually really excited.

And if you don't know Reg, he's got an interesting, interesting backstory. Uh, he is, uh, one of the, one of the OG guys in this space, but he's been behind the scenes and not a lot of folks know who he is, but amazing story and, uh, always a great guest. So that will be—

Yeah, he was one of the founders of Autotask, right?

Yeah, he was the chief technical officer, uh, the tech side of Autotask as a founder.

Yeah, yeah.

So he's been around a while and he's seen a lot.

Exactly. A lot more than probably what we have. So let's get this going though.

Yeah, let's jump into this. Um, you know, today we want to talk about budgets and, and all that kind of stuff, which I always like to start this conversation with a joke, um, which is, how does the typical MSP enter a client meeting? And it always goes about the same way. It starts typically with something like, "Knock knock, I need money," and it goes from there. Typically the client gets frustrated, the client decides this isn't the meeting that they want to have, and they tell you they may not want to come back to the next version of this meeting. And this is where we have that standard conversation with MSPs around, "Hey, I don't really know that I want to show up and come back to your QBR because I know you're just going to sell me the next $2 widget." And by having the wrong meeting with our customers, we encourage this behavior, right? We go in and we ask for money and then we turn into very quickly the partner, the vendor, we really turn into the vendor, not the partner, who's just here to make the Tesla payment, who's just here to charge me a couple of extra bucks so they can make payroll, who's literally just trying to nickel and dime me out of everything they can possibly get from me. And that is the worst type of relationship we can have with a customer. Who we really need to buy our products and services and to commit to our business model and to, to understand that cybersecurity is, is more of a business model, uh, more of a business thing than just buying products and bolting them on. So as we get that better level of engagement with something like a budget forecast, and that's why I'm so big on it because it creates that next level of engagement. As we get that, we can turn our relationships around. We can have customers who believe in the products and services that we sell, the services that we sell, not the products, and really come with us on a journey of cybersecurity. Ah, there it is. The tech is going to be the bug today, isn't it?

Well, you know, as long as we keep running in the conversation. But it's funny, I think we've all made this mistake, and I'm curious in the chat how many of you have entered the conversation with your clients and they've maybe pushed back on you? How many of you have also made this mistake where your customer inadvertently feels it's death by a thousand cuts? And every time I talk to this guy, he says, hey, you know, open up your pocketbooks because I forgot to tell you about something.

And it's not necessarily your fault, right? Every time you turn around, a vendor comes to you and says, hey, you need this extra thing. And cybersecurity has changed, which fairly it has. The goalposts continues to get moved. That is a real problem for MSPs today. I think the forecasting piece really helps us to get out ahead of it and to fight this a little bit. But it is a real struggle and a real problem. And it's something that we want to kind of talk through today and figure out how we can stay ahead of it.

Well, it's a double-edged sword because I can tell you right now, one of the, the largest clients I ever stole from an MSP in San Diego, we was a travel agency with about 100 employees. They were a large travel agency. And the number one reason they started looking for another MSP is they had a switch break, and that switch broke, and the MSP comes to them and says, oh yeah, we should have told you the switch is like 14 years old and went EOL like 8 years ago. And the MSP looked at them, and I remember what they said, we're hiring you guys because we need someone to be proactive and not coming to us saying, hey, your switch died because it's too old. Yeah.

I built Lifecycle Insights because I had that problem with my customers, right? I had tools out there that would show me when the warranty expired, but I had nothing out there that would show me when did I buy it, how old is it, and when should I talk my customer into throwing it away? And how can I come to them and say, I'm going to need you to spend money to throw stuff away in a year or two instead of knock, knock, Windows XP is dead, please give me money. And so, you know, I joke about that all the time, but it's not really a joke. It's how I ran my business and it was terrible. So we have to do better. And when we started to do better, things really turned around. So that kind of gets into what are we going to talk about today, which is what does a good budget look like? And we always say, hey, go build a budget for your customer. Well, what does that mean? That's a really big nebulous statement. So we'll dig into what are the components that have to exist in order for your budget not to suck, in order for your customer to see value in it, and in order for it to really become that participatory exercise where the client jumps in and works with you on that budget forecast. Part of that, of course, is how do we have the conversation? How do we make this something that the customer cares about? Because especially your less mature customers, this isn't a journey they've been on before and they probably don't care as much. And then my favorite is how do we delegate this process, right? Once I've learned how to do it, how do I give it to Kyle so I can go do something else, right? How do I scale Kyle's so that I can give it to 2 or 3 or 4 account managers or CIOs and let them go do this as a product manager?

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's the problem of the week now. How do we scale Kyle's? Plural.

There we go. There we go. Well, I think it's already been proven you can just clone Kyle's. They're everywhere. But the last couple pieces too, just how do we improve product gross margin? Service Leadership did a study that said those who get a budget out in front of their customers get 2 to 2.5 times more product gross margin when they're selling products to their customer. So if you want to sell a product to your customer and have them not go out on Amazon and sanity check your price, get it on a budget, show it to them a year ahead of time, and then come back to them and say, hey, remember that conversation we had? And then of course I like to talk about the cycle of unpopularity. This is the one where I come to my customer and say, hey, Windows XP died, you got to spend $30 grand buying new workstations. They bought everything, it's all now brand new. They replaced nothing for 4 years. And then everything gets old all at once and I have to go back and ask them to replace it all again. So I have this unpopularity when they spend $30,000. I'm popular for a couple years after they forget about it and the pain goes away, and then I get unpopular again when I come back to them and say, hey, we bought it all at the same time last time, so your, your financial penalty is due again. These are a couple of really tough conversations that just don't always go well for the MSP. In fact, just by having these conversations, sometimes we set ourselves up for real failure.

Oh yeah. And I can tell you from a financial mind, your CFO becomes the worst enemy of your customers, of your clients, because they're sitting there going, this MSP just— they're not worried about our own cash flow. They're not worried about our own ability to scale our business. I can tell you the most popular conversation I had with my clients was OpEx versus CapEx and talking about how can we make their buying process match what they need to spend on a yearly basis. When I actually showed the CFO of my clients, hey, we have leasing options that go in the OpEx category, they would jump for joy because they're replacing computers every 3 years. They're thinking 10, 12-year cycles and they're going, yeah, we need more write-offs. This easily tackles a lot of our tax problems. Let's OpEx this because that scales every piece of technology per user per month, which is how they think.

Well, Wes talks about this a lot, right? He talks about understanding how money moves through your client's organization. And if you understand how money moves through the organization, you can build a budget that aligns with that, whether it be leasing or hardware as a service or something like that, or just knowing that, hey, this customer has their version of retail Christmas that happens in the summertime. And if I catch them in September, they've just rang the cash register all summer long and they're chock full of money. They can spend money in September and I need to be prepared to strike in September. They need to know it's coming so they can stash some of that money when the cash register's ringing. 'Cause if I don't catch 'em till October, November, December, they've spent that money. I'm not gonna, and it's not gonna be back in the coffers until the end, until—

Well, that's a, that's a great point on knowing your customer's calendar cycles because a lot of us think of budgeting and think January through December. Now there's two things I immediately think of, which is one, like you mentioned, the holidays, which is, so for example, I had a lot of CPA clients. January through April, you do not talk to them. You do not touch them.

And you certainly don't make any—

You do not touch anything. Right, yeah, don't unplug anything, don't move anything, like everything literally do not let anything in that's in their environment. But the second May, June, July pops around, they'll have conversations all day long about spending money, right? Because they hate taxes. And then the second is not all of your customers are on a calendar fiscal year. Some of your clients, especially for the nonprofit sectors, right, their years end in June, July, August.

Municipality is the same way, my K-12 organization is way, right? And my K-12s, we couldn't touch anything for them until July and August, and then we had to do a year's worth of maintenance in July and August. So, um, you know, understand your customers, understand those businesses, especially if you're in a niche. Understand that niche so that you understand what it is that, that really moves the needle for that customer and how you can use the budget to really support their business and enable it, as opposed to, um, you know, cutting them off at the knees.

So what's in it for me?

I think we just covered the majority of that. I think we're good. We're going to go into all that today. But first, I want to quote somebody who is— boy, if you've ever found somebody contentious in the space, right? Chris gets everybody riled up all the time. But I love him and he says smart stuff. And one of the things he said from stage about the first— this might be the first 7-figure event I ever went to. He stood up on stage and said, expenses get cut, budgets do not. And when I say that, how many of you sit back and think, My customer sees me as an expense. I know it was my gut reaction. All my customers saw my MSP as an expense. And this just kind of goes to the point where if you have planned for it, if you've been strategic about it, you can really dive in and turn this into one of these things where we help our customer avoid unplanned expenses and understand what cash flow needs to look like. It's way easier to tell your customer, hey, I'm going to need $40 grand. In 2025, then go to them in 2025 and say, I'm sorry, I know you plan to take the family on vacation and have a great holiday, but I need all that money to prop up your, your aging technology infrastructure. And that's kind of what we want to talk about because it really is a difference in how your customer looks at you. So as we start to think about building a budget, I think the next slide is going to really set us up for what is in a good tech budget. And you'll notice I've listed 4 categories here, and I think these are the most important. But if you pay attention, I've also added some CIS Controls next to these because these are things you already should be doing. Hardware and assets, the physical things that we own. CIS Control number 1 says you must know what you support. Take an inventory. What's a budget? It's literally just taking that inventory, adding a replacement date and a dollar value next to each of those items. It's really not that tough. So for following even the most basic of CIS controls, which if you're following us and talking to us, I'm hoping you're doing something along the compliance route or along the framework route just to make sure that your stuff is standardized. This is literally just a really tiny extension of taking that asset report you already own, add a couple columns on the end of it, and turn this into the foundational, the first swing at your budget. What do you think of that, Kyle? Are we on board? Are we on the same page?

Yeah, no, I'm right there with you. It's— you got to know what's important. You got to prioritize it. But also, a lot of our clients are in these frameworks now. We got to be able to point to it. Now, your clients, they don't want to hear that it's in CIS Controls 1, 2, and 15. They could give a shit less. So if so, if I have anything to add to that, do not go into them with a PowerPoint saying what CIS control they come into. But you guys as technologists need to understand that because if they ever do need to fill out any of these forms or they need to fill out any of these insurance waivers, Right. Here's where you have already got them covered and you don't have to have one additional conversation with them now saying why something else is needed.

Yep. And so if we're following CIS Control 1, right, inventory our hardware assets, know, know, know what we support, what are we patching, what are we taking care of, what are we protecting for our customers? Well, let's just add a couple of fields to that. If we take it a step further, software licensing and vendor contracts, and we'll get into these in a little more detail in a couple of the next slides. But software licensing and vendor contracts, those are pretty much covered under What software applications are we patching? What's our software inventory and all that? CIS Control 2. And then vendor contracts and vendor management falls under CIS Control 15. If you've got a vendor, you probably have something associated with it, whether it's software, whether it's door access control, whether it's a camera system, something like that. But we should be inventorying all of those things. If you're not, then your budgeting exercise is a great opportunity to go out and find those folks, right? If we sit down with our customer and say, Here's all my physical assets. I found your camera system when I scanned the network, but I don't have a patch management vendor. I don't have a vendor contract for patch management. Who patches the camera system? And they say, well, you know, we bought it at Costco 17 years ago. It still works. I mean, nobody's patching it, but it hasn't caused us a problem yet. Then your spidey senses should go off, right? You should have a little tingling on the back of your neck and you should be going, okay, it's time to help my customer replace said camera system. And talk about what maintenance and what supportability actually looks like.

And I can probably guess the username and password to log in. Admin, admin, admin, password, password.

Yeah.

Now there's an interesting bullet point, though, on that third client goals.

Yeah.

Part of this conversation— no, I was just thinking out of my head. Part of this conversation, the client should be presenting to you what their goals are for next year. Right.

It's one of the things that it's, yeah, that's one of the things that our best MSPs taught us at Lifecycle Insights was if we lead with client goals, everything else becomes easier. And if we sit down with our customer and show them, hey, you said you wanted to buy a building. And as part of buying a building, we're going to have to relocate a bunch of stuff. And when we do, let's go ahead and replace a stack of switches. Right now, all of a sudden, my, my hardware replacements match up with a client goal and they become way easier to swallow.

Oh, and the customer won't sit there. You're not working against them, right? You've eliminated the entire conversation of why. That entire objection of why goes away when you align it. They tell you they want to grow 30% next year. You know that they're going to add maybe 10 employees, 15 employees. You can immediately talk to them. You're, like you mentioned, your spidey senses, your spidey senses go off going, you need infrastructure scale. You need software scale.

And we need to get rid of that. And as soon as I think infrastructure scale, I think retire that old server and move some things out into the cloud where I can scale up and scale down as the customer moves around, right? So this 2, 3, and 4, they really kind of tie in really closely together because I'm always making recommendations to my customer. Hey, what's the thing you can do that moves the needle the most? And as I see alignment between the thing I want them to do for security or for ease of management or whatever that thing is, if I know and understand their goals and I can tie those things together, My client's way more likely to say yes. And I can tell you from working with 1,100 MSPs at Lifecycle Insights, the ones who got that, understood that concept, were way more successful than those who didn't spend the time to learn and understand their customers' goals and how those might impact budgeting. All right. To Kyle's point, you're not working against them anymore.

So it's— and go ahead, Alex.

Oh, I was just going to say, so we're starting from zero, right? We haven't, haven't done any of the work yet. I have a magic invisible printer on my screen and I don't know why on your screen it shows up, but I'm just flipping through these and my printer is absolutely invisible. But, uh, but I'm glad it shows up on your side. Um, we're gonna have technology woes for, for, for the foreseeable future, I think.

So it's all right.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna assume that not all of us have the best budget to go out and put in front of our customer, right? And, and if you look at this list, like, here's a real high-level list of some of the things that we might think about.

About.

Windows devices, servers, workstations, you know, the tablets, whatever. You could even expand this out to include some of those mobile devices like the iPads and things like that. Most of us probably have a pretty good grasp of those because there's an RMM agent deployed. We know what and where they are. We know they exist. They're easy to find. Network gear sometimes gets a little tougher. I'd be interested to hear if anybody in the chat thinks they have all of their network gear properly documented. Um, if you're—

that includes that 5-port switch that's above the, uh, the ceiling tile, right?

Right. I see we always put it behind the, uh, the front desk lady's office, behind her desk, attached to some printer somewhere.

Someone was telling me a story one time where they found one literally behind the wall because they had to put a false wall in for the backing of like a, uh, something that was being hung on the wall.

That's hilarious. I'm not surprised at all. Um, but we know that stuff exists all over the place. You don't find it until one one of the devices connected to it stops working, right? And so network gear becomes a little more problematic. But I also want you to think, when we think, when we talk about network gear, I'm also talking about all those weird things that you got hooked up to the network, right? Where does the door access control device at? Where is the internet-connected thermostat or the internet-connected toaster, right? We wanna make sure that all of those things get patched, that they all get maintained. Remember the list that we collect here will set us up for success when we start talking about vendor contracts. So it's really important that you take the time to sit down with your customer and decide from them. Mr. Customer, you have a $10,000, you know, color multifunction. It prints, it staples, it folds paper, it collates, it does all this stuff. Things sitting over in the corner. I'm sure you want that on the budget. Are you worried about the—

Vince asked an interesting question in chat. I think this goes right to where you're talking, which was And I know exactly what he's referring to, that there's a dollar value most small businesses in the United States use as a percentage of revenue for budget planning when it comes to technology and IT. Now, we need to separate those two conversations. IT and IT hardware are usually not in that same budget class. It's, it's because of some things end up on the balance sheet and some things end up on the P&L. That gets a little bit CFO-y. Yeah, there's some depreciation that plays in there. Vince, I think what you're referring to is most IT spend is anywhere between 5 and 6% of a dollar per revenue, uh, is what most small businesses in the United States budget for. Sometimes it's a little bit higher, especially with wages of technical professionals skyrocketing during COVID And that's where I know for myself, as my MSP, our foot in the door was to just say we're cheaper than in-house IT, and then we account managed them up to all the extra practices. That's part of our grow and scale— scale and growth plan. So it was knowing that, hey, Mr. CFO, you come to me, you're spending 7% right now, I'm gonna do it for 5%, and I'm gonna show you why that scales.

Yep.

So I just wanted to answer that real quick since it had popped up. And but that leaves—

that sets up the exact next point that I was bringing up, which is, you know, we got the $10,000 MFP in the corner, we definitely want to budget for that. We have the $89 inkjet printer on the finance person's desk that they only use to print checks. Do we care about budgeting for that asset? That's a question you have to have with each individual customer, right? And printers always get fun anyway because there are those assets that your customer is not going to replace until they catch on fire. Printers typically are one of them. We always like to budget forecast for printers, and when we build our budget forecast, we would slide that 10-year-old printer into an overdue for replacement column, right? And this column might build up to $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 of stuff that the customer said, not going to replace that just yet. I don't care. Right? And at first it took a lot of restraint to not go into the customer and go, you need to spend $20,000. And learning over time that the best way to use that column in the budget, that overdue expense was just to tell the customer, This is what better be in your piggy bank because this is your rainy day fund, right? If we have an emergency, if all these devices blow up at the same time, I'm going to come to you and ask for this much money. And we think they could all blow up, whether it's because we have to upgrade to Windows 11 and there's not a driver, whether it's because we have to make some other change. For some reason, all these old assets eventually are just going to go into life. I'm not telling you— Well, on the flip side—

There's a flip side to that. Sorry to cut you off, Alex. Which is at the end of the year, I know a lot of my medical clients, there would be a bill signed in December that said all of a sudden medical clients could spend an extra $20,000 in write-offs. They'd be coming to you saying, hey, what can I buy for $20,000? I need to do it like yesterday.

Sometimes your tax guy comes to you and says that, right? Um, and again, that, yes, that column sits right there and lets you just queue up the softball and say, yes, here's all the stuff that we should have been talking about. So, you know, I want to inventory that $89 printer. Some of your customers might say, hey, if it's less than $200, you can surprise me. I'm not going to freeze break out, it's okay. And battery backups play into that same, that same conversation, right? The, the battery backup on your server might be $2,000. The battery backup on the finance person's desktop computer is probably $59, and we don't really care that much, right? So you're going to have that conversation with your customer and say, hey, do you want me to inventory down to the keyboard? And if I do, then it's going to take me more time, and it's going to take a bigger investment in time and energy. But we think that you should inventory down to $200, $250, whatever, and we'll try and inventory every asset that is more expensive than that. And get that understanding in place with your customer early because it's really going to enable you to say, I understand now this customer and how they operate. I know what level of inventories they want to maintain. And the folks who come down to you and say, I need inventory to the keyboard, I need to know where every mouse lives, you're going to understand who that customer is a little better and what their appetite is for a surprise expense. And when you do that, you basically wind up with the understanding with that customer, hey, you know, I can't know where every mouse exists. So you're going to have to participate in this process. And it's one of the ways to reel the customer in and say, I want you to help me create budgeting. I want you to help me create budget forecast.

Contracts and licensing. I love this one because this is the one where we end up on our face probably the most and we don't even realize it. Yeah.

You know, the beauty of this is, number one, we collected all that random network gear, right? The camera systems and the IoT devices and the internet-connected toaster, nobody realizes that we should be patching that toaster. Nobody realizes that thing needs updates. As long as I can push a button on my phone and toast pops up, life is good. And every one of your customers has some stupid widget in their office that falls into this category. Nobody's patching it. Nobody's doing anything about it. And it is not just a point of risk, but it's also one of these things that's going to come back and bite us in the butt when it blows up and we forget the entire business doesn't run unless the internet-connected toaster works. You know, insert whatever, whatever weird device you could possibly want there. It could be a software application.

I was just going to say a lot of our clients, a lot of our niches in MSP have line of business applications that have some type of a support contract that either collects it once a year, monthly, or it's a, hey, when the new version comes out, give us $10,000 because you need to upgrade. And by the way, you can't call us for support anymore, Mr. Tier 1 Help Desk Guy, because you didn't renew it.

Don't you love that? And those can be really problematic for you, right? Imagine Kyle, Kyle's my customer. He just renews HubSpot for $35,000, right? Big chunk of change. He just dropped that check all at once because he got 8% off or something for paying annually. And then I come rolling in the door and go, Kyle, I need $20 grand to replace all the machines that don't have TPM chips in them because we got to upgrade everything to Windows 11. It's that time, buddy. I'm sorry. You got to write the check. These machines are all 6 and a half years old. You should have replaced them 2 years ago. I never bothered to tell you because I didn't really care that much, but now I have to care. And Kyle literally looks at me and goes, have you lost your goddamn mind? We're about to go into a recession. Get out of my office. What he didn't say to me was, I just paid HubSpot. This week is really inconvenient. I need you to give me 3 months to build up some cash reserves. Has anybody ever had a customer say that to them? We don't have a lot of customers who are that transparent. There are a few, right? There are a couple, but they're rare, right?

They are.

The answer we normally get is, I just got out of COVID like, I, I just can't, there's no way, like, have you not seen the economy? Like, times are tough right now. I— we just don't have the cash flow for that. We just don't have the money for that. When really, in most cases, what's happened is we surprised our customer and they were caught flat-footed. And yeah, they're not sitting on $40,000, $50,000. But if we had planned ahead and they knew it, they could have stashed some money away and been able to pay for this thing. And historically, I used to use leasing as my bailout for this. But as we started to budget for these things with our customers, it just got easier and easier. And leasing either became part of a long-term strategy that we knew we were going to use, and we knew in advance we were going to use it, or it became something that fell by the wayside and our client was already prepared because I had told them they needed money instead of my knock-knock I need money joke. Um, and it's only kind of a joke because, because we've all done it.

No, it's only kind of a joke too. And Vince just brought up— thank you, Vince, by the way, for participating— uh, the comp— when you engage with them and try to have that conversation, the ones that don't want to engage and don't want to talk budgeting with you, that should tell you something as well, right? Right there. I know exactly the people that you're talking about, Vince. I've worked with those business owners before to where I had to say—

face flashback in my mind, like a former customer. Like, I could see his face when you say that.

Right, because they're just right there putting their heels in the sand saying, don't ever sell me anything, I'm already paying you too much money, so just get the hell out of here.

What they're saying is I'm an immature business that doesn't understand technology and how technology supports my business. So you can do one of two things. You can educate that person until education fails, or you can figure out where your limit is with this person, how much technology debt you're willing to let them accumulate before you have to walk away, because it's eventually going to blow up in your your face. And I had this customer and I had multiple times them refusing a more modern backup solution as we brought all of our customers onto Datto appliances. They were on a really antiquated backup solution and they just wouldn't spend the money, wouldn't spend the money, and wouldn't spend the money. And when their systems crashed, it took us 2.5 days to get them back online. And they literally came to me and said, you know, we're going to fire you for this. I said, do you remember all the conversations that we had around backups? And they said, yeah, but we were down for 2 and a half days. Somebody has to pay for that, so you're fired. And it wasn't that we hadn't had the conversations. They knew, they knew exactly who was at fault. But, uh, you know, the guy who was in charge wasn't going to go to the board and say, no, I told him to shove it, I was, I was too cheap to pay for that.

Well, it's funny, Vince, I, I had a con— I had a coaching call with one of my clients in, uh, New Orleans, uh, yesterday on this matter, where we were talking on the security front, letter of indemnifications, right? Like, hey, what can I separate my risk from the clients if they decide to go against this process. And I learned from this process actually when I built the MSSP that in my MSP we actually started to build this process as well to where if they're sitting there saying, I don't want to budget, I don't want to refresh this stuff, I would give them a letter of indemnification where I would say, hey, just as a reiteration, this is a denial agreement saying you didn't want to replace these computers, you didn't want me to be proactive. So everything that I am able to send you through email saying, hey, go replace this crap because you don't want the meeting. I'm gonna bill you for. And they would either, one, not want to sign the form— I never had this form signed, by the way, it was fantastic verbal judo, right? Where they'd be like, oh shit, I don't want to be caught with my pants down being cheap and my CEO finding out. Or two, they would just fire me, which was fantastic.

Yeah, well, it frees you up to go spend time on the customers who give a darn. And what I've found is that if you start to spend time building these budget forecasts and putting this stuff in front of your customer, the number of project dollars that flow through your MSP is— becomes astronomical. I mean, it literally doubles or triples. And the ability then for you to have a dedicated resource to spend time on these things gets easier. We met a lot of MSPs who were sub-a-million dollars or close to a million dollars who were able to have a dedicated resource to, to do these kind of things. And when I say these things, right, this is a cornerstone of doing quarterly business reviews and account management properly. And having an account manager who can actually earn their own keep.

Well, if there's one thing we learned from Peter, MSPs are losing money on projects left and right because we're sitting there thinking that it's a value add or I'm going to give it away for free or my customer won't pay these prices. It's because we don't have that relationship or trust with them to where when I tell them it's going to take 100 hours, Mr. Customer, and yeah, that server I told you that you need to buy for $10,000 is finally here. Right now I'm able to build margin towards an actual profitable solution to where I'm not sitting there hoping for the love of God that my managed service has a margin enough to compensate for that loss. Most of us don't have that margin.

So before we get caught flat-footed, let's jump into what all those contracts ought to be. So for those of you who aren't doing this well, who aren't capturing vendor contracts, just screenshot this page, steal it, take it with you. We'll see if we can include this in the outtake too as we send the marketing letter back out. But all of these are the kinds of contracts you should be including in your budget forecast. There's some things here that'll just make you think, right? The copier guy. How does he bill your customer? Do you know? Would it surprise you if I told you that most copier companies bill your customer quarterly? They're just weird in the way that they manage their maintenance contracts. So, you know, go look at some of that kind of stuff and figure out how it fits into your bill, how it fits in, how it aligns with the rest of your cash flow. Because if that quarterly copier guy bill and the annual line of business application bill and a couple other things all line up and all land at one point, your customer's going to be broke, right? So let's make sure we include equipment lease renewals, VoIP and telco, of course, internet and data circuits, cloud, anything that they're buying cloud that doesn't come through you. A lot of folks have a data destruction, a shred, or an e-waste agreement. If you don't have— if your customers don't have one, if you ask for this and they say, "Oh, we don't have anything like that," guess what? Now you know you have a customer who's disposing of sensitive equipment without properly shredding or destroying it. This again is another sign that you have a client— something's falling through the cracks here. We've been working with them for 15 years. We didn't really care so much about shredding hard drives 15 years ago, but we do today and we need to focus on that. Web hosting and certificates if you're, you're not an MSP, if one of those hasn't bit you in the butt. So make sure you know the end dates for those. Firewall switches, wireless access points, and all the maintenance on those, right? Every one of those has a maintenance agreement, especially if you're selling like a Meraki or something that's a, that's a real cloud product. Door access control, internet-connected toasters, all of that kind of stuff. And then real— figure out from your customer, do they have some sort of technology training IT training agreements or some sort of subscriptions around training and those kind of things. If they're not doing security awareness training through you, I had a couple of customers that had to do it as a mandate through the state, so they didn't use our solutions for it. They got KnowBe4 mandated to them by the state of Delaware. And then cyber liability insurance, right? This is one that everybody misses. It's probably not cheap. It probably lands in January. But just by capturing the information about their cyber liability insurance agreement, you can identify when that customer is going to be due for a renewal and when they're probably going to need extra products and services to meet the ever-increasing requirements from insurance companies, right? 2 years ago, insurance companies just said, hey, you got to have, you know, you got to have MFA on your admin accounts for Microsoft 365. Today it's MFA everywhere, right? And now we need to deploy a product and we need to make sure that it's managed and we need to understand it. And I'd like to find out about that 45 days in advance instead of the day that my customer needs to sign and return their insurance liability forms. So each of these has an advantage and a benefit to putting it out there, to gathering it, to collecting it. But the biggest advantage is now when I go to my customer and say, hey, I need you to spend money. Kyle, I need you to spend $20,000. I'd like to be able to walk into Kyle and say, Kyle, I'd like you to spend $20,000 on this, but I can see your HubSpot renewal happens here. And that's the same time your lease renewal happens and you got to buy out some old equipment and a couple other things kind of pile up in that quarter. Looks like a really bad time. Does this fit better for you 3 months down the road, or should we try and get this done before you get to that period where you got to spend a bunch of money? Which of those makes more sense to you?

Well, I think there's an unforeseen bonus. There's a dark side of the moon on this. The big one that I see is 2 layers. One, if you start to track all this information, you're going to start seeing data that all of your customers as an MSP start to use and go, huh, they all use the same copier guy at Ricoh. I should go talk to that guy at Ricoh, right? I need to build a relationship with that guy at Ricoh. And maybe you're going to start going— he's a really good guy— and he's going to go, hey, how about this? You have other customers? Can we trade customer relationships and I'll give you 10% on anyone you bring in? And now you have this extra commission revenue coming in with someone you have a good relationship with.

Well, and how about VoIP, telco, and internet circuits, right? How many of you sell or have a partnership with like an Intelisys or a Tolaris, right? If I know exactly the date your VoIP agreement ends with your current provider, or better yet, I know what the notification window is because I read the contract and I know you've got like 3 days and a blue moon and it's got to be a crescent moon in which like that tiny little period in which you can cancel your contract. If I know that and it's marked right on the budget when that happens. Guess what? I know when to go in and say, hey, how you making out with that phone company you got? Remember that tough support call we had and we couldn't get any help? How would you like to have one neck to choke and be able to call me and use the same phone system we use in our organization so that it's easier for us to troubleshoot and support? Guess what? Now I get 20 points of margin.

Well, or be the superhero. If it's something you can't manage, right? It's something that say it is like a big copy machine and you're like, I'm not going to sell copiers. I'm gonna go ahead and— Good.

You don't want somebody still using a Panasonic copier in your building?

Well, that— but I might be able to say, let me bring in another guy where they'll save you $100 a month, $1,000 a month. You know how big of a champion you're gonna look like just saving the customer money?

Yeah, a no-brainer. And well, and we used to, we used to sit down with our customer and say, hey, you know, I understand you've had a great relationship with, with Kyocera for years and that equipment served you well. We're not good at supporting it. So every time you call us, you have an unnecessary delay of 30, 45 minutes while we figure out what the heck to do with it. If you were to buy a Canon machine, we'd be way better at helping you configure and maintain and support this thing. Does it make sense to look at a Canon dealer this time? In fact, got a guy in my pocket who sends me some leads and I'd be happy to introduce you to him. Right? So back to Kyle's Ridge.

We got a couple things in there that I like, right?

What's that?

No, we got some things that we like, but first, you know, Eric, you said something on considering the title Accountability Manager, and you know, as the Chief Accountability Officer, um, you and I are going to have a great relationship because that, that's exactly how well we can read that.

You need to, you need to hold that up the other way so everybody can read it. It's a pretty solid—

oh yeah, right, like it's a solid piece of equipment there.

There's the accountability bat.

Yeah, but I'll send you one actually, Eric, at this point. Um, But the other thing that was brought— that was mentioned was, and it might be a different topic and it might be a curveball. So David, your question we might get to in a separate episode, but what are your thoughts on a co-managed agreement services to where when our client does get to a level or is at a level where they need someone on the ground? And I've seen this in two different directions. Either one, they need the sysadmin in-house if they're super complex, like a dev shop or an architecture firm. Or on the other side where they're so high maintenance, like a finance firm or a law firm, they need that tier 1 to just have someone there. There is legitimate value. There's ways to make a shit ton of money on this, and I've made a shit ton of money off of this. I just don't know if this is really in this conversation about account— this budgeting cycle with your customers, unless they're growing to a size that you are beyond your skis on trying to support their tier 1. And I've had this happen personally I guess to kind of make an aside on this, I had a financial firm. They were day traders. They were trading millions of dollars every 15 minutes. They got to about 130 users where there was not a price in the world that I could give them help desk SLAs that would make them feel comfortable. So we actually built what I refer to as an augmented staffing agreement to where I would, I would basically hire somebody dedicated for them to have boots on the ground for that, which was in parallel with my managed services agreement. And I actually had one incident where we got into a client where I actually hired their tier 1 guy and then resold it to them so that we could handle the management. Lots of conversation on that one, but I just wanted to kind of answer that real quick.

Yeah. And but that kind of leads into like there's a little bit of— there's a lot here, right? We're talking about copier agreements and we're talking about phone contracts and all this other stuff. The number one question I always get when we start to have this conversation with big groups is, why am I the right person to do this? What business do I have doing this? My customer's never going to show me this information. They don't want to share this much with me. I'm sure some of you are thinking Alex is just in a pipe dream where customers love him enough to open the books and show him this. My answer to that is, think about who who your customers are, think about who works there, think about the behavior of the humans or just the technical knowledge of the humans there. Who there knows about the internet-connected toaster and the door access control machine that's still running Windows XP that sits behind the door in the equipment closet? Or any of the other bodies that are buried on that network somewhere, who else understands all of this to the level where they even could build a budget for your customer? Around that information.

Yep. And that person— and I think, Alex, this is where we went into the conversation of why fractional CIO or CIO is kind of a different role, because this can take a lot of time to be that trusted advisor. But there are ways to do this where it is not so time-consuming, where you need to sell all of your margin to make this happen or increase your pricing to a level to where your customers will no longer be Well, I built a platform because I couldn't figure it out.

So I'll be interested to hear how that worked. You know, this was tough. No, my point is, this is tough, right? Our tools don't do a good job of some of this, right? So you can do this in a spreadsheet. You can do this in some of your tools. If you are using Halo, I learned that Halo is the only PSA in the space that actually will track vendor contracts for you. So if you're a Halo partner, start tracking your vendor contracts in Halo. They belong in there. Your engineers need access to that information. For some reason, none of our other core tools really have that information. The same way they don't have end-of-life dates for physical assets in our PSAs and RMMs. There's just some critical fields that are missing that we really need to either go back and supplement or start to track somewhere else. The, the, the, the, the baby version of this, the I'm just getting started, I still got my training wheels on version, is we do this in a spreadsheet. There are several platforms out there that will help you speed up this process, but nobody else at the customer is capable of doing this unless you work with a customer who you are that second tier of support, that add-on support where they have a CTO in the building already. If you have a CTO or a CIO in the building, they can do that. There's another C-level person, right? I'm back to my VCIO thing. There's another C-level person in the building who can oversee technology. Technology. A CFO doesn't have a chance where this comes, right? They're very good at budgets, which is why we send them a copy of this in a spreadsheet so they can import it into the rest of their budgets. But they don't know about the thing that's bolted to the wall that has an Ethernet port on it that we still don't know what it does, but it's done there, been there for 11 and a half years, and we just keep, you know, keep walking in the room and going, pretend that thing's not really a thing, put it on some VLAN and run away, um, because we don't know how the black magic happens. They don't even know it's there. Right? They don't know about the XP machine that does the door program controller thingy that is too expensive for them to replace. I remember— Well, I think it goes into the thermostat. I had a customer that had a Honeywell enterprise grade. It was a school. They had a Honeywell enterprise grade HVAC system. It was $30,000 just to buy the software to make the upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10.

Oh, I remember when Server 2012, I think it was like SMB 1.1 got deprecated. And every single copier machine at my client healthcare sites completely became— you couldn't use it at all. And it was one of those things that none of us thought of. No one thought the copy machine that's going to cost them $50,000 to replace is going to be basically a boat anchor.

Yep.

You know how much contention I had over a hard piece of product I didn't even have to sell, right?

100%. And we've all been involved in this, right? So, so the ability to plan for this in advance gets really important. And that's where I say, you know, it's important to know how old your assets are, even if you're not planning to replace them, right? Because it's way easier for me to go back to a customer and say that asset's been in the expense, you know, in the column that we should have replaced already by now, a past due expenses column for a long time. And I've been telling you this day was coming. Now today's the day because of SMB 2 that you can't use your old device.

And I think if we were to give a good actionable, reasonable one where you're sitting there saying, hey, I'm not at the size where I can have a tool to help with my client life cycles, and I don't really have enough people to manage this. Make it simple, right? The whole reason we're using the elephant motif is eat one, eat one bite at a time when you try to eat the elephant.

100%.

Age and price, right? Set a threshold, right? Set a threshold. If it's a certain amount of years old, then it needs to be talked to with my client. And then the second variable is put a number threshold. Mr. Customer, When do I need to have a conversation with you? $500, $1,000, $2,000, you tell me, because I will set the threshold of wherever I can surprise you.

And the age threshold should be in your contract, and it should be a conversation you have with your customer very early on, because you might sit down with them and say 4 years on a PC, and they might say, mm, 5. And if you say, okay, that works, I can support that, then no problem, we're all on the same page. If they say 14, you probably need to pack your things and go find another customer, because that customer's never going to spend on technology. So there's a balance, right? And there is some give and take, and your architecture customer who only runs CAD machines might buy things in 3 years, but you need to make sure that you're building that budget in the way that they operate. We're going to run out of time if we don't get to this next slide. So let's jump onto this next one, because I really want to talk about this one. How do we get our customer to participate? The one who we know is going to push back on us and say, Alex, I really don't want to show you that much information. I'm going to give you a sample. I'm going to tell you to pick 3 or 4 contracts, right? Pick your internet circuit, pick your telephone, pick your main line of business application. Put a couple of those on the contract, on the, the budget. Guess what they spend on those. Take telephone, $35 a user, put a number on the budget forecast. Take their internet circuit, mark up what you spend by about 50%, put it on the budget forecast. Take their line of business app, pull a random number out of the air, put it on the budget forecast, and take it into the customer and show it to them. Mr. Customer, I'm starting to build your budget forecast and I don't have all the accurate information that I need. I'm so sorry, I just guessed here and I'm sure that some of these are wrong. If you'd like to participate in this process with me, you can help me update these numbers and then we'll be able to identify where things are going well and where things are going poorly in your organization. And by doing so, basically we're engaging our client's ego. This is back to the psychology of how do we talk to customers. "Right, but Mr. Customer, what I'm trying to do here is remove surprises that are going to come up for you down the road, right? We're not trying to avoid them, we're trying to completely remove them so you always know when expenses are coming." Your customers are going to be so excited to be smarter than the IT guy for once. They're going to come to you with their agreement for their phone system and say, "I don't pay $35 a user, I'm not that stupid. I pay $27 a user. I got a great deal," right? And those of you who are paying $20 a user are just kind of snickering under your breath, but at least you got the contract, right? We're able to see the information. They will come to you with this information just to correct you and prove you wrong. And once they start to participate in the exercise, then we get the opportunity to go down that list that we were looking at 3 slides ago and say, well, now would it make sense for us to put the camera system contract on here, the copier vendor, and a couple of those other things that play into our you know, into our business model. So really, this is about stroking their ego a little bit, giving them an opportunity to prove you wrong, right? Step back and be the, be the better person. Like, just cue them up a softball and get them to do the work for you to show you what these things might be.

Yeah, there's a power, guys, in negotiation, and we're horrible about this in IT. Being wrong in a conversation is the biggest piece of leverage you can have when you strategically do it. It's a very common negotiation tactic, right? Just like for like because of how you laid it out. But we are coming close to time. So I do want to make sure that we do respect everybody and kind of being able to get out of here. Right. We do want to go ahead and give a call out to Empath for sponsoring this. We are starting to take demos, by the way, guys, to start. We're going to have a lot more conversations like this inside of Empath that turn into courses that you can assign for your team. I can't wait till we do an episode to show you the new tool. God, it's sexy. Um, I'm so glad I can talk about it now too.

There is a full, um, you know, budgeting livestream series in Empath now that you can go check out. Um, actually there's not. That's the next livestream we're doing. Sorry, sales process is in there. Budget forecasting is coming. Um, we'll be doing a whole livestream series on this along with some, some spreadsheet handouts and some free freebie easy ways to do this and then some, some wonderful recommendations to go buy cool products like Lifecycle Insights. Um, you know, we built it to solve exactly this problem. Uh, I don't work there. I'm not, I'm nothing but a shill for a good product at this point in my life, but, uh, but it is the best product in the space for solving this problem. RejectionCon, Kyle, for the two people who haven't heard about it and don't know what it is.

RejectionCon, guys, we wanted to tackle two different things. One was a lot of really good content has been made for conferences that gets left on people's hard drives, right? Because what happens, the vendors can only allow so many people to speak. And that, what also hurts with that is future speakers aren't getting at-bats to practice their craft. So we wanted a way to help those that have been rejected. And on the other front, we do love ourselves some charity work at the end of the year. We do love the tech fund, uh, the Rural Tech Fund to make sure to help those underprivileged youth that have the opportunity to break into the tech world. So we figured let's do both sides. Wes had a fantastic vision, which ultimately it helps both. So all 100% of all fees do, or yeah, 100% of all fees do go to the World Tech Fund. So we're not making any money off of this. And if you are interested in talking and submitting one of those talks that you have rejected, go ahead and go to rejectioncon.com/awesome. And we would love to get you on the list. It's all gonna be peer voted on who gets to speak. And if you need help throwing, we're refining your talk at all, hit us up and we'd be happy to give you some pointers and give you some at-bats to test this out. That being said as well, IT Nation is next week. So if you're still on this call and you're like, hey, I would love to talk to these guys, I put my LinkedIn URL in chat. Just message me and say, hey, I would love to sync up with you. I'll send you my cell phone number and we'll find time to sync up.

The good news is we'll buy you a beer on Wes Spencer's credit card. So come on out. Yeah, come on out, catch us at IT Nation and we'll buy you a beer on Wes Spencer's credit card. Wes likes whiskey too. So if you're a whiskey drinker, we'll even buy you a whiskey on Wes Spencer's credit card.

I like it. Well, with that being said, guys, we appreciate all of your time. As always, Crowdcast will be our new platform. Very similar enrollment. We'll see you in 2 weeks.

Thanks, everybody.