Speaker 1: 0:00

I was never a numbers guy so I always avoided the finances until I went from 3.2 million to 2.6 10 years ago and I'm like, okay, I need to figure out where the deficiencies are. So you've got to have those uncomfortable conversations with yourself to figure out where you can utilize somebody like you and I in a conversation to help them get into that boardroom program.

Speaker 2: 0:26

On this episode of Sell Me this Podcast, we sit down with Tim Thompson, former MSP founder, business coach and the man behind Cybertrends. After scaling his previous MSP to over $7 million in revenue, tim faced the kind of hard lessons that most people only talk about behind closed doors. Today, he's using that experience to help other MSPs grow faster, smarter and more sustainably. We'll get real about what it takes to go from 1 million to 7 million, why most MSPs stall out and how AI is changing the game for IT service delivery. If you've ever wondered what separates average tech providers from true strategic partners or how to break out from the same year on repeat trap, this conversation is for you. Let's dive in. All right, tim, we are so excited to have you here today. Thank you for making the trip down from or, I guess, up from Kelowna. Up from Kelowna yeah, how long have you been in town for here?

Speaker 1: 1:17

Just a couple of days. Came in on Sunday, so heading back after this, but super excited to be here. I've been following your show for a while and Robbie put you out and a few others around there that I know. So excited to be here.

Speaker 2: 1:26

When I told my wife this morning that someone was actually coming in for the show, she didn't believe me, so she'll have to watch the episode, I think, to prove that it's real. Yeah, but super grateful you made the trip.

Speaker 1: 1:46

Tell me a little bit about yourself, tim and here. So yeah, I started an MSP back in Calgary back in 2003. I bootstrapped it to $7 million a year in revenue. So very grateful, I had the opportunity to do that. But I also had the opportunity that it didn't go very well at the end, and so one of the things that I've been doing in the last couple of years is really focusing on helping other MSPs grow on scale and do the things that they need to do. So one of the things they say is IT people start IT companies to solve IT problems. They don't have business acumen to get them from that million to three to five, to seven to $10 million, and so I work with a lot of MSPs out of around North America and just really help them avoid the pitfalls that I went through.

Speaker 2: 2:23

You talked about 7 million and I think for anyone listening, 7 million is a very large MSP and you probably know the stats more than I do. That would probably put you in the top percentile of MSPs globally.

Speaker 1: 2:35

Yeah, so there's 300,000 of them in the world and 90, no, 85% of them are under $3 million. Wow, so the effort and energy it takes to get to that level. It's not a lifestyle company at that anymore, right? It's actually like you're now doing full-on business decisions and you have the right team and the right people and the right bus, and so it was a journey and unfortunately, it didn't end very good, and that was the first time I've actually told anybody this publicly. But due to some very bad decisions and poor mistakes and some lack of trust, things went sideways and Dan Martell talks a little bit about your greatest story. You need to talk about your darkest times and make it that your story to help everyone else.

Speaker 2: 3:14

Yeah, and that's a really brave way to open up as well, Cause I know we've talked a little bit about this privately, but I think some of those battle scars as well probably just A make you 100 times stronger going forward. So, as you're coaching some of these folks, whether it be through growing their business, whether it be through navigating their own partnerships or their own ecosystems, I'm sure there's just a different level of story and advice you can give from that gained experience.

Speaker 1: 3:40

It is, and one of the things when I got into the mentorship program it's we build fundamentals of the business and the business needs to have those to scale from that one to three to five to seven million, and back when I was scaling it every million dollars, there was a change in how we do processing or how the processes work within the business, and so now, with all of the technology and everything that we have now, we should be able to build a foundation now at a million dollars, which Dan Martell called the pain line, and then, once we have that foundation in place, then we can layer on and scale as fast as we want. But a lot of people don't understand. You'll see a lot of mentors on LinkedIn and it's all about sales, it's all about marketing, but if the whole ship doesn't move with it, you're never going to get there.

Speaker 2: 4:24

Yeah, and you need to build those solid foundations in order to actually be able to grow and scale and build those sustaining ecosystems. You deal with so many different MSPs at different stages. If you were to put two MSPs in front of you right now, one that was doing everything correctly and one and I recognize this is going to be a very declarative example one that they're doing everything right, and the second is that exact example you're talking about in the negative, where they're struggling, they're having a hard time. It just feels like so much work. Are there a couple of observations you'll usually have right away of that company that feels like everything is just like rolling the boulder uphill, like rolling the boulder uphill.

Speaker 1: 5:02

Yeah, it's the same conversation. It's hey, I can help you scale and grow. Great idea. I'm working 80 hour weeks. I don't have time to figure out how to work with you for one hour a week and it's.

Speaker 1: 5:13

This is where I come in, and I use again, like some more of the buyback principles around a time energy audit to determine where you're wasting time, so we can start focusing working on the business and not in the business, and they just. It's easier to gravitate to the blinky lights and the shiny things as it is to actually look at a balance sheet or a P&L statement or whatever it is that you need to work on the business to help get it to the next level. And so a lot of times the MSPs will throw in oh, we need cybersecurity, we need VCIO services, we need more and more, but more is not always better. Let's figure out the package and the plan and get really good at it. Focus on focus is follow one course until success, but they're just running 100 miles an hour and they can't get out of their own way, yeah.

Speaker 2: 5:59

There was a video that I saw the other day that talked about this challenge that a lot of entrepreneurs face, where they just feel like they're reliving the same kind of nine months over and over again, Whereas as soon as you get to that friction point whether it's you have this great idea, you have this. Maybe it's a new security service, maybe it's a new offering they rush, they bring it to market, maybe they sell a couple of them, they get some internal reinforcement, but then, when it starts to get hard, they pivot.

Speaker 1: 6:21

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 6:22

And then maybe they leave it on the shelf and just start doing something else, but they relive the same six to nine months over and over again. Is that something that you're seeing a lot in that space as well?

Speaker 1: 6:31

Yeah. Yeah, people don't stay the course long enough to figure out what success looks like. It's easy to go okay, let's go throw in AI now. Let's go throw in cybersecurity. Let's pivot here because we've got a little bit of traction. But I got to get good at.

Speaker 1: 6:43

Operational maturity levels have to be defined in order to go from that one to three to $7 million, and I learned that my first key hire was a fantastic operations manager and that just took everything off my plate. And then I can figure out how to move into larger contracts. With more operational maturity levels, you have the ability to approach bigger customers to deliver on SLOs and SLAs, and the biggest customer that I had was $92,000 a month here in Alberta, 52 locations, 1800 staff across Canada. Sorry, but I had to build a service desk and then I ripped it apart after three months and I had to rebuild it again and they brought in a proper, a guy that ran a service test for a long time to help me build out the maturity level to define how to build that thing home. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 7:30

And I know we both kind of have our battle scars in different ways from building out some MSPs, and you definitely have to reinvent the wheel every couple of hundred kilometers as you're building that bus. But you also mentioned that AI is now changing the game for a lot of business leaders and so obviously, when you built your MSP and when I was in the MSP world, those tools didn't exist in anywhere near the same meaningful way. No, how has the playbook changed for some of these folks that are now building their MSPs?

Speaker 1: 7:59

It's changed, the ones that are interested in adopting AI. So the way I look at this now is, if they're trying to scale to a million dollars, it's not that hard to do. In this day and age, we can create as much marketing and sales material as we need. However, the MSP has to adopt the AI process in readiness within their organization but then also have the thought leadership to go to their customers and understand their pain points from their workflows and different things, so that they can go in and speak to the ownership group and say here's what we can do. We can implement an AI strategy to integrate your SaaS applications that are not talking right now, and we can do it on pennies on the dollar. But you're creating a new revenue stream. But you're also creating business advisory leaderships, rules, mentalities and thought leaderships. So the QBRs and the monthly meetings that you're going to have become a lot more interesting to talk about, because now you have the ability to solve real business world problems and not just throw a firewall in.

Speaker 2: 9:02

Yeah, and so I feel like you opened up a can of worms here that I'm going to die. I'm going to. I'm going to bite on the firewall versus business problems comment. This is something that I hear over and over again is I wish my MSP was a strategic partner in the business. Almost every MSP that I talked to at the same time wishes that they were at that table and they're saying I wish I was in the conversations, I wish I was invited to the board meetings. Where's the disconnect?

Speaker 1: 9:28

The relationships when I was when I were Hockey, canada was our first customer. I was in the boardrooms. I knew when Scott Smith and Bob Nicholson were working early mornings. I was in there at 6 am on every Tuesday and every Wednesday fixing their computers or just talking to them, built a relationship. Nhl had a lockout period in 2004. And I said to Scott Smith I go, does anybody know anybody at the Flames? I'm going to go offer my services for 50 cents on the dollar. He introduced me to the CFO. I was there for 12 years. So it's building that relationship. It's understanding the business and how to solve those problems. Yeah, and having the ability to talk to either your direct contact or the CEO or the president. But a lot of these MSP owners, well, they'll just go in and they'll have their monthly meeting. Or they won't have it or they'll just screw around on a quarterly business review. But the quarterly business review is around defining where the business is going and solving problems, as opposed to oh, we just need another access point down the hall.

Speaker 2: 10:27

Yeah, and so many businesses that that exact QBR, and they're all looking backwards as well, right, like none of them are enabling there. Yeah, here's all. Here's how many times your switch died. Here's how many times we updated your antivirus, how many tickets.

Speaker 1: 10:42

How many tickets the executive or the assistant? Yeah, antivirus. How many tickets the executive or the assistant open? There's a gentleman named Adam. Adam Walter owns Humanized IT. He's all over LinkedIn and he's built an operational maturity platform for MSPs and he speaks volumes about utilizing a SWOT analysis framework to get in those rooms with those decision makers and have that smart conversation, pump them up. What are you great at? Define what the weaknesses are, create opportunities out of those weaknesses to solve business problems, to create better outcomes which create a better experience. But the IT owners or the MSP owners don't take the time to figure out how to get into those conversations or have the business acumen to do that.

Speaker 2: 11:28

So if I'm an owner of an MSP that will say, is right, in that kind of that small spot, I'm a million dollars or maybe just knocking on the door of it, I'm wanting to figure out how to actually do this. How do I take those first steps to be able to even unlock the skill? Maybe they don't have the skill set, maybe they don't have the confidence. Maybe they don't have the skill set, maybe they don't have the confidence, Maybe they don't have the tool set. How do they start to unlock those things so they can bring?

Speaker 1: 11:49

that to their customers Get out of their own way. Unfortunately, ego gets in the way of a lot of things. And so having the time to work with somebody like you and I that have 25 years of experience in doing this right and so taking the lead on understanding how in doing this right and so taking the lead on understanding how to have a sales conversation with, through tonality and the proper connection, questions or utilizing a SWOT framework to go out and say, to figure out how to solve problems for them, and so the challenge, like one of the biggest things, that my biggest hurdle in my MSP. I was never a numbers guy so I always avoided the finances until I went from 3.2 million to 2.6 10 years ago and I'm like, okay, I need to figure out how, where the deficiencies are right. So you've got to have those uncomfortable conversations with yourself to figure out where you can utilize somebody like you and I in a conversation to help them get into that boardroom.

Speaker 2: 12:42

That makes total sense, and so how can I feel like I'm picking on this a little bit, but how can someone start to even look in the mirror and have those conversations? Is there ecosystems? Is there conversations? Is it talking to their dog?

Speaker 1: 12:54

I think what they have to do is they have to decide when they're ready to take their IT MSP company from a personal based company versus an actual business you convert it into. Because one of the things I was talking to an MSP and he goes oh, I got a great engineer. He's been with me for 10 years. I gave him a management role and he sucks at managing people. I'm like no shit. He sucks at managing people because he's good at solving engineering problems.

Speaker 2: 13:19

We have a, I think, a mutual connection, that is, it always is referred to the idea that if you promote your best engineer, or even your best salesperson, for that matter, into a management role, they're not getting a promotion, they're getting a new job. Yes, and you're functionally starting a brand new job with no experience. Right Like it is a clean slate at that point.

Speaker 1: 13:36

Right and yeah. So you got to the biggest breakthrough that we got to at 2.3 million. I ended up hiring a rainmaker salesman here in town and then he converted into the CEO and him and I converted from 3.2 to 6.95 million in three and a half years. That's incredible and it was a lot of work, like it's chaos. But I guess the message of that is that I knew, I know where I'm good at, but I'm not the rainmaker salesman and I'm not necessarily a CEO as good as he was. So we work together.

Speaker 1: 14:07

So you it kind of goes back to the replacement ladder and the VIVAC principles is that you figure out your time, energy on us and then you move through operations and the sales and the executive leadership role. And just because you're an owner, it doesn't mean you're a great CEO. Some of the CEOs that are the owners of MSPs that I talk to they would rather put in firewalls, fill your boots, but you have to have look in the mirror and really understand what you're good at and where do you want to take your business. Is it a lifestyle business or is it going to be a true business with a 10-year exit strategy? And here's what we need to do to build that team and when I went through portions of potentially an acquisition, we needed that. We needed a CEO with experience, we needed proper sales, we needed structure, we needed maturity levels because the group that was looking at us, they had similar size clients and they wanted to make sure that how we deliver and how we grew the business is in the same path right.

Speaker 2: 15:07

Yeah, so I don't want to jump on the Dan Martell excitement quite yet, but I know we've talked a lot about some of the principles from his book and buy back your time. I've recommended it to probably a hundred different people. I know. When you and I first met, that was one thing that we connected over. Yeah, are some of those principles. If I'm an MSP owner, where do I start with even dissecting some of those things? Because it sounds like a lot of those principles are tied to your coaching frameworks and how you're giving advice to MSP.

Speaker 1: 15:34

I built my coaching around it. I wish I had. I told you that.

Speaker 2: 15:36

I wish we had that book 20 years ago. I'm still new to it and it's an incredible book.

Speaker 1: 15:42

Yeah, I've got it. Mine's all marked up and written. But what I suggest to anybody is just read that book and you, when he talks about scaling and growing in different like 300,000 to 700 to a million in the pain lines, you can resonate with it, like it. Just when I read it I'm like, damn, I wish I had that at that point.

Speaker 1: 16:00

And so, again, you have to be as an ownership. As an owner, you have to be willing to open up, check your ego at the door, figure out what you don't know and solve that problem Right, Cause you're good at something and I'm good at something, it doesn't mean we can do it together. It's better to compliment each other than it is to you know what I mean.

Speaker 2: 16:20

Yeah, and I think that it's evolving as well, like even in our business. I'm going through some of those same realizations right now. Where do you want to play? Yeah, where are you helping? Where are you in the way?

Speaker 1: 16:29

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 16:30

Yeah, and it's always an evolving conversation. With the work that you're doing with MSPs. What are some of the roadblocks that you see over and over again? I know you mentioned the process side of things. Is that the big problem that a lot of these organizations run into?

Speaker 1: 16:46

Yeah, it's again. It's getting them to focus on working on the business, right. So buying back time figuring out like if you want to implement AI and you don't know how to do that, then you got to find some time to figure out how to do that Right. And but the other thing too is we can now optimize operations 10 times faster. So it was like when I had a service desk. We wanted our service desk guys to do 15 tickets a day, right, and then they just cherry picked a little hanging fruit. Now I'll just create an AI agent that'll do all anything under 15 minutes password changes, printers installs to solve those problems quickly. So the operational maturity level that MSPs need to build into growing into bigger customers, because everybody wants the $25,000 a month contracts right, but they're not always the most profitable.

Speaker 1: 17:37

But if you want to continue to grow and scale, you're going to have to move from the $1,000 to $5,000 to $10,000 to $20,000 a month contracts to get to that $5 million mark.

Speaker 2: 17:46

Yeah, the AI agent example you just talked about is something that I believe a lot of businesses are talking about and how they consume services, but also a lot of MSPs, I think, are uncertain with how to navigate and how a lot of these emerging technologies are really going to shape what service delivery looks like. How are some of these technologies going to change the face of service delivery and what does that make MSPs look like in the future? I realize this is a giant question.

Speaker 1: 18:13

And it's a great question, because who's the CEO of NVIDIA? The director of IT is just going to be an HR manager for.

Speaker 1: 18:21

AI agents Jensen Wong yeah, yeah, that's him, yeah, and so you still have to have I still believe you're going to have to have some human interactions. But just think about this If you have a client that's billing, you're billing them time and material and you're talking to them every month about bills. Right, you could just give them an AI agent portal and have them ask those questions to find out the answers to what's going on, as opposed to sending an email to the director of IT. The director of IT goes to the finance department. The finance department comes back right, so there's a whole different. Like you just improve those operational efficiencies. And the other thing too like most MSPs are bootstrapped with employee, we don't have 15 people sitting on a bench like Longview and other ones.

Speaker 1: 19:05

If you can take 80% of the 15-minute quick fix tickets off of a human's plate and solve them through AI, then I can take that individual and I can apply them to a billable project, because when I was running at $7 million, I had $1 million of projects that I was backlogged because I could never get to it. $7 million, I had a million dollars of projects that I was backlogged because I could never get to it. I can use AI to optimize and slipstream tickets, but then I can then utilize the resources on other projects and other delivery mechanisms that we need.

Speaker 2: 19:36

And so how far do you see that going? Because I think it's an interesting thought experiment when you start to say, as some of these AI agents get smarter, as the data sets get larger, as some of these AI agents get smarter, as the data sets get larger, as permissions start to change, what is the role of the MSP in the future? And I think it becomes a really interesting discussion because I think there's some really cool possibilities here. But is there anything that stands out to you in terms of what changes if we're looking five to 10 years down the line?

Speaker 1: 20:01

Yeah, great question. So we're moving from MSP 1.0 to 2.0, which is your standard RMM stuff, and then you get into the cloud and security to 3.0. And when I talk about this quite a bit, it's having the business acumen to get to solving business problems. So the MSP needs to lead as a thought leader to solve business problems and implement technologies and not just go and sell hardware anymore. A lot of times now we just we need. When I ran my MSP I knew my key customers Flames, hockey Canada. I knew all of their technical challenges inside and out and every year budget season came in I had to load it up with budget. But that's how you have to think. At Hockey Canada they dropped. They had a whole 300 USB drives of old World Junior footages. At the Father David Bauer Arena Somebody dropped a USB off the counter and it broke and they lost all the video.

Speaker 1: 20:53

Oh my gosh, it wasn't anything crazy. But the point of that was is I was out with my key contact and we were having lunch and he said, yeah, this happened. The video person's all upset and how do we solve, how do we fix that problem? I'm like, just leave it with me. So I went and put together an EMC Isilon storage unit for $600,000. There you go so relationships, understanding business problems, coming up with solutions to solve it. They didn't care if it was HP, emc or Cisco, they didn't give a rip. We solved that problem.

Speaker 2: 21:22

And I think that's the gap that a lot of folks miss. It's not like they'll get stuck in the what's the best technology for this use case, not what's the story around the use case.

Speaker 1: 21:33

Yeah, like you got to have Cisco access points throughout you. But it doesn't matter, as long as it solves whatever problem you're looking for. But that's the difference between a technical owner of an MSP going well. I'm just a Fortinet guy, so we're just going to put Fortinet in here, versus putting in a full on cybersecurity solution with a SOC in there.

Speaker 2: 21:52

Yeah, so let's talk about security a little bit as well. So you've mentioned security. I know that this is an area that you feel incredibly strongly about. Security and MSPs haven't always fit hand in hand. In fact, security and IT are even at a little bit of an impasse sometimes. What's that relationship like, and how do you see, in a Shangri-La state, those two things fitting together?

Speaker 1: 22:13

That is a very deep conversation in the boardroom.

Speaker 2: 22:19

We're about to get philosophical here.

Speaker 1: 22:21

Yeah, but it's a tougher. Msps have to take on those roles and responsibilities. The problem that I see with MSPs now is they tell everybody they got a cybersecurity solution. Okay, we all got EDR and we all can do vulnerability scans. But when I look at cybersecurity, I'll talk to MSPs and I'm like, okay, where's your VCIO services? We don't have one because it can't afford it.

Speaker 1: 22:41

Vcio is up here. Compliance is the next phase. So VCIO drives compliance, compliance drives the tools and technology. So if you're trying to scale and grow as an MSP in the security space, you need to be able to fill all three of those and you're in the driver's seat if you're making the decisions at the top. Now the problem is we have security people on one side of the fence and then we have the infrastructure team on the other and everyone's fighting for power. So it's almost it's almost a little bit like a soap opera, where you're trying to figure out how to manipulate somebody to get their way. It's like having a development team to build, like you've got a development team for software development. They'll have full access to whatever they want on their software servers, but they don't get. They don't get anything in production. Then they get pissed off.

Speaker 2: 23:25

Yeah, and I feel I'm curious on your opinion on this as well that there's also this we'll call it battle between technical IT and operational IT as well. I was at a round table the other day around some of the new critical controls act that's happening with our oil and gas energy sector here, and one of the really interesting ahas that I didn't realize there was this much friction around was that battle between we'll call it corporate IT, which is here's our standard controls, and operational IT, which is here's how the world works in the field, here's how the world works in our minds and here's what happens if you put in place these controls and how it impacts our revenue. I recognize that most of the conversation we're having is around MSPs, but how can MSPs play a role in guiding their customers through some of these things that are really delicate conversations that require so much business context?

Speaker 1: 24:15

Yeah, and you get into the IoT stuff right. So you've got different networks for different things and different valves and compression units, and it's the again it really comes down to the business acumen to understand. As an MSP owner, I should know all of the nuances of whatever client or vertical that I serve. So if I'm an oil and gas, I need to know all of that, I need to understand IOT, I need to understand the difference in networking, the security, all of that stuff that goes together. And so, again, it comes down to really creating that relationship because they're going to look to you to provide those guidance and that recommendation to bring it all together because you're going to have those battles battle over power. Everybody wants to have control right. So again, you need to understand. You got to understand your market, you got to understand your customers, you got to understand their problems and you have to have relationships to speak to those problems.

Speaker 2: 25:03

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense If you were to give some guidance to a customer that is evaluating an MSP based on their security posture you mentioned. There's a couple of red flags, even on the VCIO front. If I'm an end customer and I'm asking someone, how do I separate good from bad, how do I separate the sales material from practice, what are some questions that you would ask or what are some rocks that you would turn over that'll help them uncover that?

Speaker 1: 25:28

It's around the maturity practice, like how are you delivering? Okay, so I'm in oil and gas. How are you delivering these types of services to others? Take me through your compliance frameworks and your solutions that you deliver on that, and again it's not a vendor specific, it's how are you delivering on compliance? What does your reporting look like, your maturity look like? And again you get down to tools, tools or tools whether it's Sentinel one or whatever it is or Windows Defender or Microsoft Defender.

Speaker 1: 25:55

It really comes down to understanding the business and how the maturity of the delivery of those services come. So the challenge when you have a smaller MSP, that is starting to scale. If I'm the client, I'm looking at their customer base to see what other customers that are similar in size and similar requirements, similar to the RFP that we talked about, that we worked on and so that they can deliver on, they can provide information that they've delivered on in the past, and so do you think that industry specialization is super important as we get further and further down some of these, we'll say niches around compliance, around security, around industry, or do you think just that relationship is the key thing?

Speaker 2: 26:38

It's both.

Speaker 1: 26:39

Like in the States right now with CMMC. It's a huge grab for MSPs right now. So not only are they going to be able to deliver on it, but they also have to have the relationship. So it's still I always like. The only reason I built $7 million a year business is because I built relationships around it. I was never a cold caller. So I build relationships, I build trust and then I deliver on business solutions that I needed to deliver on.

Speaker 2: 27:01

Yeah, as much as it's technology, it's still a people business. Yeah, so you shared an interesting stat with me before we got started here, so I usually am the one that touts that. There's a really interesting stat about Calgary, which is we have the highest MSPs per capita, I think, globally, and you said you shared a number, I think the amount of MSPs in Florida which might rival Calgary here per capita. What was the- 1,664 MSPs.

Speaker 1: 27:25

So I've got a client in Florida. So I was doing some research on AI with Proximity or Proxima or whatever it's called, and I'm like how many MSPs in Florida?

Speaker 2: 27:34

1,664.

Speaker 1: 27:36

Give me the top 10 services that they deliver and give me the vertical spaces Right. So we're trying to figure out a way to niche out a delivery. It was medical lawyers and aerospace in Florida, and so we're trying to do the research on that, but there's 1,664 MSPs.

Speaker 2: 27:54

That is a lot of MSPs. If I'm a customer in Florida right now, or really across the board, there's a lot of noise. For someone to pick one of these 1,664 MSPs, how do I start? If I'm the CEO of a midsize furniture retailer, we're 20 million bucks a year how on earth do I go about starting to pick one of these, these partners? Cause there's so much noise out there and there's so many people that are clamoring for attention.

Speaker 1: 28:21

I love this question. Okay, I love it Because it's I hate this cause it's. If you go to a hundred MSP websites, they're all the same thing. Yes, we don't talk geek speak, we got good contract, blah, blah, blah. We got to figure out an MSP 3.0 land is how to differentiate yourself, and Produce8 is a digital work analytics platform that's built for MSPs to help define and help their customers show where productivity deficiencies are. And so one of the MSPs signed up and was bidding on a number of different proposals, and in their proposal, the differentiating piece was they're leveraging AI and digital work analytics to provide business value to you as a customer. That stood out for two or three of their major wins. So it's again.

Speaker 1: 29:11

It's like how do we sound? We deliver the services, but how do we differentiate yourself? We want to be thought leaders. We need them to be thought leaders. We need to be able to go in and solve those problems, create better outcomes. But you got to have a better story right. Like I can go in with produce eight and I can manage. I could run reports on 500 teams and I can see how many meetings they're wasting a week, how much time they're over over time they're working their sentiment scores. But it's a different story, it's? I can now go in and say, hey, keith, you got 25 staff. You guys are like you seem to be a little top heavy here now. And how do we, how do you resolve that? So back in the day, we'd always have timesheets. Oh, I'm so busy. We need more staff, I need more staff, but you don't have anything real true raw data, right? So the Produce8 digital work analytics piece, along with AI, is just a really great differentiating story to have those conversations with.

Speaker 2: 30:06

So are we seeing, because I feel like there was a time and this might have been about five or six years ago where MSPs started to, we'll say, meld together and they all I feel like the narrative that you're talking about I resonate with completely they're all starting to say they're all starting to use one of three PSA tools, they're all starting to use one of three RMM tools, they're all using one of five EDR platforms, and literally every single MSP is starting to look exactly the same from a tool set, from a delivery, from a best practices standpoint. Do you feel, in this MSP 3.0 world that you're referring to, that we're starting to branch out again and starting to have these MSPs find their own identities once again, to differentiate from?

Speaker 1: 30:46

I think so, but it's going to be the more the ones that are that three to $5 million a year revenue, the more maturity again, right, they have time to think about how to work on the business, but they again having a differentiating story because you're going to have we all know the same billing practices. We had the one guy at a another guy at a floor that had 10,000 MSPs as clients and built all the exact same websites because I had it too, yeah, and so you get commoditized very quickly.

Speaker 1: 31:13

But now you're starting to start to see these conversations around AI and differentiating stories and we got to get back to solving business problems.

Speaker 2: 31:22

Do you think so? In your opinion, then it sounds like the key differentiator is the ability to understand, articulate and solve for those business challenges. Now that, like a lot of the, if they have their house in order, from a technology standpoint, right, yeah, you can you have to have the ability to stand out in.

Speaker 1: 31:39

There's a lot of MSPs in the world, there's no doubt about it, and everyone's doing the same thing. And it all like technology is technology, right, yeah, how do you differentiate yourself so? And it all like technology is technology right, yeah, how do you differentiate yourself?

Speaker 2: 31:53

So you have to be a thought leader in how to be a better partner to your customer. So there's a lot of folks that have MSPs right now and I think that a lot of the people that we don't need to have the same narrative and conversation that existed before, which was do I need an MSP or do I need an in-house IT person. I feel like that conversation's matured a lot, yeah, but there's a lot of people that I talk to that seem to be settling, and they're settling for what I would call good enough right now, and that fear of something else is keeping them where they are, but they're probably ranking at a 6 out of 10 on their satisfaction scale. Are there simple things that you can recommend to a customer to be able to turn that 6 out of 10 to an 8 out of 10? Are there nudges or things that you're seeing and how customers interact with their MSPs that are shooting themselves in the foot?

Speaker 1: 32:32

Yeah, they've got to set the boundary or the standard that they expect from the MSP. Yeah, and if you go back to ticketing right, so all of a sudden, like for me, I always had VIP contacts from each customer in my PSA so that if the CEO called I knew we had a priority sequence on that. And so you've got to be able to deliver a maturity model to those customers. But the customer has to understand what they want. If it's an architectural firm or it's a engineering firm, what is their requirement? Is it an SLO? Is it an SLA? And then you have to demand. You have to demand demand is a strong word, but demand the requirements that the MSP has to deliver on.

Speaker 2: 33:17

Do you think that customers are good at identifying that?

Speaker 1: 33:20

No, and I think that's why guys like you can help solve that problem.

Speaker 2: 33:24

I realized I'd, so I did not intentionally team myself up there for a golf ball, but I feel like but it's true though.

Speaker 1: 33:29

But you got to remember when you brought up outsourcing MSPs or do you bring it in-house? What I always said is that you, as a business Hockey Canada you're a nonprofit sporting organization. You're not in the IT business. That's my job. Stay in our lanes and we'll just work on your thing. But the problem now is that, because technology is changing so fast that they need partners like you and others and me to help guide them through some of those decision-making processes, to understand where they're truly their business is at and where it's going to go, I feel like I'm going to blush now.

Speaker 2: 34:01

I've never had this turn on me here, no, and I obviously totally agree with you, but I think that you mentioned Hockey Canada a few times and obviously I think there would be. You'd be remiss to find anyone that didn't know who they were. What about that relationship made it so special for you? It was like cause they're all hockey guys, just because it's cool, it's your childhood dreams coming true.

Speaker 1: 34:23

Yeah, you got to be around it, you got to see it. Bob Nicholson's an amazing man. He works for the Oilers now and it was like, and there was like eight or 10 at the executive level. It was kind of like the old boys club, so it was never. It was always about the vision of hockey and it was as opposed to a business and a grind. And so, yeah, it was my first client and we had him for 15 years and it was a, it was an amazing experience.

Speaker 2: 34:46

Outside of the fact that most people would just love to be in the orbit of Hockey Canada, be in the orbit of the Flames, were there things that they did as a customer that made you working with them even better? Outside of the fact that they were cool and did cool work?

Speaker 1: 35:02

Yeah, like I got, I did a lot of Christmas parties with Hockey Canada and I got I had I was fortunate to get some tickets for the Flames and just being a part of the community. And so the other thing that we did too at NSI is we bought into a lot of nonprofit stuff, so we did sponsorships for hockey tournaments and we did some seat sponsors for Winsport, which is another one of our bigger clients at the time. We bought stuff from the Flames so we wanted to try and give back as much as we could. Or if they went down to the food bank to volunteer, we would go with them. So I felt like we were a part of the organization, even though we were just an outsourced partner.

Speaker 2: 35:35

But you felt like they brought you into the organization and even before you alluded to the fact that you were in their board meetings, you were in there at 6am with the team and so being part of it there, yeah it was just a great experience and so many good memories, so many good people, and everything has to come to an end at some point, but fair enough. Yeah, you couldn't ask for two better. First, clients.

Speaker 1: 35:56

Right, they were your first clients. Yeah, it was my first, and then the Flames was my second.

Speaker 2: 36:02

I feel like that sets the bar to. I still remember my first customer when I first started my career, which was made for a day on 33rd Avenue. I don't know if they're still in business, but you always remember your first customer. So, before we run out of time today because I feel like we could keep down this track for a while I do want to take a tiny bit of time to talk about Cybertrends and the work that you're doing, sure, so why don't you explain a little bit about the work that you're doing, the mission that you're on and the challenges you're solving for MSPs today?

Speaker 1: 36:25

Perfect. So Cybertrends, yeah, we talked a little bit about it. We started it off as a three-day training corporation preparedness for cybersecurity to help corporations prepare, and then, through COVID, things changed. We pivoted a little bit and then, when I exited out of NSI, I just dove headfirst into realizing there's a lot of MSPs out there, and even security companies and technology providers in general, that just don't have business fundamentals. And that's not a bad thing, like nobody goes to gets their MBA to go start an MSP. Let's be honest here right, you solve a problem. You start at a company to solve problems.

Speaker 1: 37:01

So for me, it's the passion of giving back to the MSP community. I don't believe it's that hard to scale to a million dollars with today's technology, with AI and everything else that's going on. But you have to have the framework and the fundamentals and you have to have someone on your side that's done it. And so for a small investment to put a 12-week framework program together to get you on your way from mission vision all the way down to financials and technology, to look at your business inside and out, I think goes a long ways, because I know when I was at 250,000, 500,000, a million, two and three and five, so I wish I had someone that I could talk to.

Speaker 1: 37:40

I remember saying that to my dad. I'm like my dad was successful building an insurance company. He's like I don't understand your business. So the opportunity for me to give back to the community of the MSP world, that's where I'm really get excited about. I used to teach for Microsoft and I love public speaking and I love teaching. So this is just. Every time I get on a phone with an MSP, I can just see quickly, at a high level, how to solve some of these low hanging fruit problems. That'll just changes the game.

Speaker 2: 38:06

It's really clear how much you love it and how much you're passionate about this topic. If someone wanted to get in touch with you, either they want to sign up immediately for your program or they want to dive into one of the variety of topics that we've covered today. What's the best way to get in touch with you?

Speaker 1: 38:20

You can find me on LinkedIn under Tim Thompson at CTI. One of the things that I am doing and I'd like to let people know if they're watching is I'm creating a similar type podcast, but what I'm doing is I'm interviewing MSPs to showcase their talents at all the different levels why they started the business, what makes them successful, what's their why, and then what I'll do for that. It'll be a 30 minute conversation and I'll just cut up the content and then help those MSPs post that on social media, and one of the biggest challenges that I see is in social media. It doesn't even spin around, but it's still fairly new. Not everybody likes to talk to their phone, right, and so we me as a mentor and a coach I see so many MSPs not doing anything on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1: 39:04

People buy from people. They don't buy from companies, right, and so we're in the day and age that we need to build our brand, which is what you do, which is what I do, and so I'm really pushing the MSPs that I talk to to think about that, right. So, where they are, where do they want to go and how do they want to get there, and the average person won't buy from anybody and they'll watch them for six months a minimum of six months on social media before they engage with the buyout. So for me, giving back and helping them, as an MSP owner, understand the nuances of the power of social media and helping them grow and scale, and that's why I think we can I can scale MSPs a lot faster these days.

Speaker 2: 39:42

I love it. Thank you so much for coming on the show, tim Perfect, and really appreciate making the trip from Kelowna and I hope you have safe travels back home.

Speaker 1: 39:50

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. It was great, phenomenal. Thank you.