Episode 109: Inherited Chaos

Erick and Rich discuss the impact that security and AI maturity are having on MSP valuations and three concrete techniques for increasing valuations by increasing EBITDA. Then they’re joined by Michael Assraf, CEO and founder of Flamingo, to explore that company’s unconventional open-source approach to MSP tooling. And finally, one last thing: A data-based look at the most overused buzzwords in email, and a confession by Erick and Rich that they use most of them.

Discussed in this episode:

Flamingo home page (including links to OpenMSP and OpenFrame)

Flamingo’s Unorthodox Plan to Turn MSP Systems of Record into Loss Leaders

The Top 10 Most Overused Email Buzzwords

Some guests on this podcast are clients of Channel Mastered. Compensation plays no part in their appearance or the content of the discussion unless the episode they appear on is a “bonus episode” explicitly labeled as sponsored.

 

Transcript:

Rich: [00:00:00] And 3, 2, 1. Blastoff, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the MSP Chat podcast. Your weekly visit with two talking heads, talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need to make it big and managed services. My name is Rich Freeman. I’m Chief analyst at Channel Mastered, the organization responsible for the show.

I’m joined side by side, virtually as I am every week by our CEO and chief strategist at Channel Mastered. His name is Erick Simpson. Erick, how you doing?

Erick: Doing pretty good. Rich, how are you doing?

Rich: I’m doing great. I’m doing great because I’ve got about a week and a half until a Super Bowl that I’m really looking forward to, and I think I’m on the winning end of a bet.[00:01:00]

Erick: Yeah, I think you might be rich yeah. You might very well be. And just for the folks at home rich and I had a little bit of a wager of which of our teams were gonna make it and to the Super Bowl and win the Super Bowl. And I might owe you something rich because my team is out.

Rich: You and it was a very good game. You have a very good team. I’m not just being polite, that was something, but I believe you made a very generous offer like I offered you. Smoked salmon coffee. You like, had a ticket to a Rams game that you were and we’ll have to talk about that.

’cause I did that. I was down in southern California to have taken a Rams game with you this season. I’d love to do it again.

Erick: Yeah, that was a great time. We had, and one thing that I’m, I know it’s the, the Rams fans are great. We pushed hard. We didn’t quite make it, man. It was a great game.

But the decibel level, the decimal levels in SoFi versus, the Seahawk stadium, they get to about 1 0 3, 1 0 4. I remember [00:02:00] watching a game a few weeks ago when the Seahawks played at your stadium and they were showing the decibel levels were hitting like one 11 and above you attended that last game.

What were the decibel levels? Because I’m sure they’re showing it on the big screens.

Rich: They absolutely are. Yeah. I was at that game. I think the high and this isn’t like something that. Showed up once or twice, like pretty consistently. It was at one 15.

Erick: Oh my goodness.

Rich: So it was wide left.

Erick: My, yeah.

And I have to plug my ears at, at 1 0 3 at SoFi Man. Man, I don’t know how people can hear for a week after a game like that. That’s louder than a rock concert, that’s crazy.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah.

Erick: Yeah, wager and and I look forward to hosting you this time because last time when you and I went to the game at SoFi Seahawks, beat the Rams there, and so maybe we’ll get a chance to pay you guys back.

Rich: No. The Rams won that game.

Erick: The Rams won that game when you and I went.

Rich: Yeah. It came right down to the, right down the last play.

Erick: Yeah.

Michael: Yeah. [00:03:00]

Rich: I had a chance to win on like a 63 year field goal, and they couldn’t quite make it. And yeah, the Rams won.

Erick: Now look at us now. All right.

Alright, let’s get into the story of the week. Rich. We got a pretty interesting story of the week. And I’d love to talk about it.

Rich: Yeah. And we were talking off the air. It just kinda works out that what I am planning to talk about here lines up a little bit with what you’re planning to talk about and lines up a little bit.

I would argue with our interview guest this week, we’re gonna be joined later in the show by Michael Asra. He is the CEO of a company you may or may not have heard of called Flamingo. They’re doing an open source tool stack for MSPs. We’ll get into that in a bit. For right now, story of the week. And from a certain perspective, this is not gonna come as news.

This is not gonna be shock or shocking to regular MSP chat listeners and viewers ’cause this is something that comes up in interviews we do. It comes up in conversations that we have all the time. But [00:04:00] basically based on some things that I’ve been seeing and reading about based on our conversation recently with Kevin Lancaster, a better tracker and channel program.

One of the things he said when he was on the show is that AI maturity is really gonna factor into the valuation that MSPs get. Which certainly makes a lot of sense and it aligns with things that we’ve been saying and talking about. I’ve been reading stuff about how in the private equity world in particular security.

Operational rigor is something that acquirers look at. They wanna make sure that they’re acquiring a company that has just internally has its security ducks in a row. And so I wanted to go out and test this, both of those propositions specifically in the world of managed services. And so I spoke to the CEOs of two very large private equity backed MSPs Integris, which is a roughly $300 million a year company, and logically don’t know the top [00:05:00] line number there, but it’s a nine figure number there as well.

And I asked both these guys. Is it true? Do you care about AI maturity? Do you care about security operational processes and and protections in place when you are evaluating a potential acquisition target? And do those factors weigh on how much you’re willing to pay? The short answer is yes.

From both of them, absolutely. In both cases, and Glenn Mathis, the CEO of Integris said. We look at AI maturity and security SOPs as force multipliers. They’re not Boltons, right? This is something that must be there. They’re built into how we design work and how we manage work. And so we want to see both of those in any company that we acquire, and it will absolutely factor in what we’re willing to pay for them.

So let’s break that down a little bit. Security. What Mathis of Integra said specifically about security is they’re looking [00:06:00] for the fundamentals. Strong fundamentals was the wording. He used. Those are gonna matter more, he said, than the flashy tooling. We can scale tools, but we’re not interested in inheriting chaos.

And I think those two words tell you a lot about the degree to which your maturity in terms of security as an MSP is gonna factor into an exit value. Nobody is gonna wanna inherit chaos and have to come in and clean that up. Joshua schemes, the CEO of logically said absolutely they’re looking very closely.

How well are they protecting themselves? How well are they protecting their customers? Says a lot about the maturity of the organization as well as the possibility of inheriting chaos. But he also said, we’re looking to see how much security are they selling into their customers? ’cause obviously, security is a very hot market.

So the better you are at security internally, the more you are sharing those best practices with your customers, the more interesting, the more valuable you will be [00:07:00] potentially to logically as an acquisition target. Let’s pivot to ai. What logically is looking for there is there something that you are doing?

You don’t have to have a deep AI maturity, and I’ll come back to that. But if there is something that you’re doing a service, you are providing a tool, you’ve created, a solution you’ve created, if there’s somebody on your team who is very AI savvy, if you are bringing something to the AI table for logically, you are absolutely going to sell for a lot more than if you are just another MSP.

And you’re gonna be a lot more attractive to them. On the Integra side, what math has said, basically they’re interested in automation, systems, tools, AI based that you’re using internally. They’re very sophisticated, very mature at Integris in terms of all that. But again, they wanna see that you’re doing that kind of thing as well, that you have some of that.

Operational experience and knowledge, but [00:08:00] they’re also interested in that because they have this kind of motion and integris where they will adopt or create some kind of AI automation tool internally. And when they get good at it and see the impact that it has on their business, they will turn that into a service that they offer to their customers.

And so if you come in with something that’s gonna be valuable to the company, that’s great, that’s gonna get you more money If they look at you as somebody who can help them develop services that they can sell through to the end user even better. Now, I mentioned in terms of logically specifically, you’re gonna be worth a lot more if you bring some AI maturity with you to the company.

But what Joshua Schemes did make a point of saying is we will also buy companies that are good in all the other ways, but maybe not so mature on AI because, we know that we can bring our AI maturity to those companies and scale them grow. There’s a lot of latent [00:09:00] upside in that company when we come in with our AI expertise and shield technology partners tighten these venture capital funded MSP roll-ups with Silicon Valley developers doing, that’s their thesis as well.

They’re looking for great companies that are maybe not so operationally mature AI because they know there’s a lot of growth potential there and they can capture some of that. So anyway, we’re getting, I’m getting some real world confirmation from companies that are in the market for MSPs all the time, that you will sell for more that security maturity matters and AI maturity does as well.

And if you are interested in exit values, the more you focus on those two things between now and your exit, the more money you’re going to collect when you sell.

Erick: Wow, rich. I think what’s what I’d like to see, and maybe I don’t know if you have a sense for this, or maybe as you continue interviewing folks that are very [00:10:00] AI forward and are, in the hunt for acquisitions of MSPs and things like that, it would be interesting to try to get a sense for what type of additional multiple an AI forward MSP might command, in a negotiation, all things being equal.

I’ve got two MSPs. They’ve got about the same, top line revenue and prob about the same ebitda. Stacks are pretty similar, but one is AI forward and leading with ai. I wonder if that’s a half, half a percent of additional multiple and additional percentage. We talk about m and a lot on this program, and I have a lot of experience with m ms.

P, m, and a. I found that there’s two kinds of, there are two, two kinds of buyers. Typically there’s the financial kind of buyer that’s just looking at the numbers and looking for ways to improve that bottom line revenue for, another exit later as they roll things up. And then there’s always the financial perspective, but then there’s the [00:11:00] strategic component that adds that extra qua, that extra essence that says, oh, that’s going to, complete something a gap in our stack, or You’re already speaking our language, we’re moving forward with this.

You’re already on the team. So that’s one thing that I would be interested in finding out. And then the other thing that, that struck me from what you just said is the shifting sands here is it going to be a, MSPs have their stack that says, I am an Ms. P? We typically talk about.

P-S-A-R-M-M documentation platform. Is AI now a required part of the stack? I’m feeling like it’s moving in that direction and as you and I have been talking about recently on the program, may even be potentially replacing some of the functionality of some of these things. But we don’t know yet.

Rich: And I, so two really great points and great questions. And so [00:12:00] this is more me than, the folks that I’ve been talking to, but particularly on that last point, I don’t know that we’re at the stage now where you’re just not really going to be an attractive acquisition target if you’re not using some form of at least service desk automation internally.

But I’ve gotta believe we’re not far away from a point in time where the issue becomes not even how operationally inefficient is this company that I’m buying here. ’cause again, that’s a situation where we can come in with the AI and we can make them more valuable. I almost wonder if acquirers are gonna start asking how thoughtful, how mature how good is the leadership team if at this point in time, here we are in imaginary terms.

January, 2027. Here we are in January 20, 27, and they’re still not doing that at all. Is this a company that’s led by people that has the kind of culture that we wanna invest in? I don’t know that is or will [00:13:00] factor into decisions, but I could very much imagine that will

Erick: Well, and on that last point, the real risk for MSPs that aren’t yet thinking about an exit or at the early stages of mulling that over, the real risk for them is for their customers to churn because they feel that the MSPs, they’re leaving them behind.

They’re not keeping up with that business’s needs. And as we know, there’s AI in every business today. I will put a pin and I’ll say there’s very few businesses that somebody in that business. Even the leadership may not be aware of is using ai, it’s using one of the, AI platforms out there.

I really believe that. That’s the real immediate risk to MSPs. It’s almost Hey, if you’re not, taking the lead here and by not taking the lead, you’re allowing risk to enter into that environment. That’s not gonna be a good day [00:14:00] for when, the client calls you and says, Hey, I thought you were on top of all this stuff.

Because, rich has, MSPs always say, oh, we take care of everything. You sleep good at night. So there’s that maturity factor again, which kind of ties back into what you just said, Hey, do folks want to invest in an organization that isn’t leading with this? Or at least integrating it and things like that.

They may not be as mature as, the folks that you mentioned in delivering. Things that they’re developing to their clients, but they absolutely have to be in front of, the co-pilots and the chat GPTs and all the, all these other things that are potentially could be exposing company data, in a way that the leadership would not appreciate.

Rich: I’ll quickly note before we move on, that you’re absolutely right. Every, the absolutes like every, are a little dangerous, but pretty much every organization has some AI going on there. And the stats say if there’s not a lot going on, the leadership team is the most likely set of users, and [00:15:00] those are the people with the checkbook folks.

Now AI maturity security maturity, these are gonna factor into your valuations increasingly going forward. But that does not mean that EBITDA and MRR the classic metrics don’t matter anymore, which is my transition into your tip of the week. Erick.

Erick: Yeah, thanks Rich. I’m gonna, I’m gonna pull a quote that star Wars fans will appreciate tip of the week this week.

Rich is do or do not? There is no try when increasing EBITDA rich, as most MSPs say they want higher ebitda. They want to be profitable because that’ll unlocks the door for them to be able to do lots and lots of things, grow their organizations, be competitive. The more profit that they generate, the more price competitive they can be while still maintaining margin.

The more that they can reward their internal teams to keep them from churning out and investing growth, they can hire the right folks. All these things in the checklist of, Hey, I have more profit. I can do these [00:16:00] things. And also over time, EBITDA is the primary driver to valuations. Whether or not we’re talking about a strategic.

Acquisition where you have, a special, tool or vertical focus or something unique that strategic buyer says, Ooh, that would fit my gap. Or, Hey, you are AI forward, we want, or you are so AI forward that we want to, pay you more so that you can help roll more of that AI goodness across all of our portfolio companies, right?

So it works that way too. So MSPs say they want to be more profitable, and that’s what three tips about becoming more profitable from an EBITDA perspective are about today. And it’s just, again, not an accounting metric. It is the single biggest driver of valuation for an Ms. P, aside from a strategic advantage that you can bring.

So here’s the three things that [00:17:00] MSPs must do. Not try, if they want to materially increase their ebitda, and some of these are gonna sound like, oh my goodness, are we gonna hear this again from Erick? Yes. Yes. And you’re gonna hear it from not only me, but anybody that you know knows what it takes to increase profitability in a business, no matter what it is, ruthlessly, and I use the word ruthlessly, standardize and productize your services to expand margins.

So look at what you’re delivering to your end clients. Rich. If you’ve got, a different agreement for every client, that probably means you’re supporting different things for different people all the time and having to keep up with it. And that is just not a scalable strategy.

So standardize on your stack, standardize on your pricing. Make it easy for your sales team to sell. Be competitive, but make sure you’re maintaining your margin. You’re standardizing on [00:18:00] deploying and maintaining these services over time. If you have a three year agreement rich for a client in that second year, I expect you to be more profitable than the first year.

’cause you’ve taken care of a lot of the noise and things like that. The third year should be your most profitable year. And then having those agreements renew typical agreements with an MSP renew three times over their lifetime, whether that’s a year or three years. Think about that Rich.

So let’s make sure that we’re renewing those agreements and every time we renew them, of course we’re adjusting our pricing to main, to maintain our margins, but we should be much more profitable every time we do this one-off services, custom work, things like that. Our noise, when you get to a maturity level, when you can begin to standardize and productize and sell, I let you know, rich, I like good, better, best, right?

So that way you can move up or down depending upon what’s going on in that. In, in that client’s situation it gives you a lot more flexibility. Yeah. [00:19:00] Number two, rich reprice, repackage or exit low margin clients. This is that true up conversation where you have, again, I’m gonna use the word ruthless again.

You have to be ruthless about identifying clients that you may have the best relationship with, but man, they are just not meeting that same margin potential, or they’re not growing as the rest of your clients that you would sign tomorrow. So here’s an opportunity for you to say, you know what? It’s been great.

We’re gonna help you find a new home. And be very professional and polite about it. You know who your MSP competitors are, and friendly co-opetition is one thing that we enjoy here in this industry, which is unlike a lot of other industries, you guys go to the same conferences, you go to the same user group meetings.

Find folks that would be willing to take on these clients that are at a different level of maturity that will be happy to do that. And maybe even you can strike a little bit of annuity out of that for the first 12 months after you transition ’em over, Hey, it might work for [00:20:00] you. We used to do that in our msp.

So price to match your margins, you’ve gotta true up your existing clients. And sometimes it takes two or three years to true up a client that you know is just on the verge or they’re just on the edge there. Let’s see if we can grow and we can get them to pay a little bit more. But then what you’re doing is you’re impacting your ability to scale with the existing staff you have.

So it’s like a mathematical wizard formula, rich. And then three, this one is ties right into what we were talking about reducing owner and senior engineer dependency. Through leverage and automation. So again, nobody wants, you said that, nobody wants to buy chaos. Nobody wants to buy a job and nobody wants to buy a job That is just chaos all the time.

So make sure that you’re leveraging automation, you’re integrating your platforms, you’re looking at your stack and you’re thinking about is it too complex? Are you, are your technicians looking at 17 screens all day? Can you [00:21:00] simplify that? Can you look at other vendors that maybe have a solution that packages all a little bit better?

Can you leverage AI in a way that allows you to quiet the noise and give your technicians more effective ways to manage the tickets? What can you do with AI to help surface things that you know, and testing out the agentic nature of ai, like getting the thing to actually do stuff to help close tickets and things like that.

So those are three quick tips, rich and. Bottom line here is every dollar of EBITDA is not just profit to the company. It is leverage and then a cherry on top. If you’re leading with a very hot strategic technology like AI and pulling through cybersecurity behind it, extra value at the end of the day.

Rich: Yeah, the. First. And so all three of those are important pieces of advice. The first and [00:22:00] the third kind of tie together a little bit for me, and the first one really resonates. You were talking about standardization and you and I have spoken about research that I’ve done in the past.

What is it that makes the the fastest growing, most valuable MSPs? What do they have in common? And I always point to the four S’s, which is specialization, scalability, strategic competence and standardization. That is one of the ingredients that makes for success and managed services, long-term, durable success.

And so couldn’t agree more there. And it gets to the third point, which is reducing dependence on specific people in the business. If you’ve got standardized processes and tools and workflows in place, the likelihood that you’re. Clients are in love with your company and the experience of working with your company and the quality of service that they get for your company is gonna be higher versus a client who is in love with you.

And when you go away, they start shopping around for [00:23:00] somebody else and acquirer’s not gonna be looking for high degrees of churn. And standardization and making sure that you, you are not, the only thing kind of making this company work are closer related in my mind.

Erick: Absolutely. The organization has to operate in the buyer’s, in the seller’s absence after close.

’cause even in lots of situations that we’re aware of, someone sells their organization and they agree to stay on for, salary and benefits over time, but after the transition is done they’re just, they have a job now and they may decide to leave. If they can’t leave because they’re the person that kind of keeps everything together, that definitely is gonna impact a buyer’s interest, their ultimate valuation, because now they’ve gotta invest time, energy, and effort to make sure that we prepare for that eventuality, right?

You don’t wanna put the onus of standardization and increasing efficiency and all that on the buyer side because you’re not gonna get a lot of offers and the ones you do get are [00:24:00] probably not gonna be the right offers and you might regret it.

Rich: So EBITDA has always ma mattered. It continues to matter despite the importance of AI and security.

Here’s an interesting option for increasing your ebitda. Ebitda. How about reducing your tool expenses to zero say? We are gonna take a quick break here. When Erick and I come back on the other side, we’re gonna be joined by Michael Asraf. He’s the CEO of a company called Flamingo that is very deep into open source free software R-M-M-P-S-A, et cetera for MSPs.

They also have an interesting product that they built with some AI on top of open source software. Very different approach. To issues that a lot of MSPs are facing right now. Interesting conversation coming your way. Stick around. We’re gonna be right back

and back to part two of [00:25:00] this episode of the MSP Chat podcast, our spotlight interview segment, where we are very pleased to be joined by Michael Asraf. He is the founder and CEO of Flamingo. He is here to talk with us about a topic that you may not have thought about very much as an MSP, although increasing numbers of you are thinking about it, and that is the possibility of running your business on open source tooling.

Michael before we dive into all that for folks who are new to you, new to your company, tell ’em a little bit about yourself, a little bit about Flamingo, and then just at a high level, help them understand what Open MSP and Open Frame are.

Michael: Of course. Yeah. Thanks Rich for having me. And thanks for thanks for this discussion.

What a bit about myself song coming like I’m an engineer, always have been. 10 years ago I started a cybersecurity startup where we started to focus most of our revenue operations in the us. I started to work more with MSPs and I also noticed a few things in [00:26:00] the MSP business model that seem a bit broken to me.

The first thing was, as you mentioned before. A bunch of the if you look at the p and l of a common MSP, you’ll find two major expenses. The first one is vendor payouts. As a reselling costs. You bundle up software, you resell them on a per seat basis. The vendor’s costs are pretty high.

And I saw MSP starting to switch up to source. And the second one which is a, I think even a bigger expense is the labor cost. You need to provide 24 7 or nine to five support for your customers. You need to pay the engineers, you need to have either 24 7 knock or soc whatever. That’s another huge huge expense.

And once I saw MSPs starting to switch off to open source as a natural progression, once I moved from my previous business, I took seven months in order to deeply research and understand whether one can take an entire. SP stack, starting from Ironman to backup and disaster recovery, MDM, remote access control, everything you have, [00:27:00] and build a layer on top of it that will will serve as an orchestrator and a unified API and data layer, et cetera, and pretty much facilitate the open source model for MSPs so they can significantly reduce or almost even zero out the vendor costs.

And on top of that build an AI layer that will also help decrease the labor costs or even not from. More efficiency, just supporting more customers. So if you have two engineers and you’re supporting X amount of customers with the assistance of AI and open source vendors versus a commercial, you will be able to have much more healthy business and scale.

Into supporting many more customers from what’s open MSP versus Open frame? Open frame is our product open frame is a collection of open source tools with a unified API and data layer on top of it. That’s the tooling part. That’s called open frame core. That’s available also as an open [00:28:00] source, so anyone can go to our GitHub and self-hosted or as.

Self-managed version. And on top of that, we have our open for MSP, which is two AI agents. Once is a technician, site agent, and another user site agent that intended to assist and support MSPs in their day-to-day operations. Open MSP is the result of my research about open source. So I took all the commercial tools I found that are very popular among MSPs and I I matched them up with with open source alternative for each one and how much they can save.

That’s a free community, nothing commercial. Anyone can just go to open MSP AI registered. There’s also ai report builder. So you put your stack, it suggests you which open source tools you can you can self-host. And what would be the probable cost from decreased perspective, but also how efficient it is.

We also have a Slack community. For open MSP with around 300 validated MSPs that talks about open source, et cetera. So that’s [00:29:00] my background. Sorry for the long intro.

Rich: No, there are a lot of important pieces to get in there. You and I met for the first time, just a few weeks ago. I was researching a story that I wound up writing for my blog channel, Wallach, about what you’re doing.

You explained to me what the open MSP piece of of all this does. And afterwards I went into it. So it is among other things, a directory of open source tools for MSPs. I was a little startled, I’ll tell you the truth. I was started looking through there. There are a lot more open source tools for MSPs than I would’ve guessed.

Give folks a feel for just how many tools there are out there in, in how many different categories, where are they coming from?

Michael: Where are they coming from? That’s an interesting question. I think that open source I think that in general, not even for MSPs, I think that the open source tools are underestimated when it comes to the maturity level and how many of them are actually packed by commercial companies.

The directory and maps out 19 different categories that we [00:30:00] saw that are most common tools among MSPs. As I said before, R-M-M-M-D-M SSO, identity and Access Management. All of this is tools that we see as a very common stack for MSPs. So of, for that tools what we did with open MSPs that, we took each tool and we categorize it, and for each tool you could, you can see exactly what are the open source tools that are associated with it. But we didn’t stop there. We did another thing. We one, we we went to GitHub and we checked how well maintained is this project, how many commits does he have, how many pool requests, how many issues open, et cetera.

And the second thing we did, and that’s not only for the open source tools, it’s also for the commercial tools. We mapped out seven top MSP Reddit, I’m sorry, sub Reddit channels. And we saw how much this vendor or open source project is being discussed. And by combining these two, we have our open MSP scoring.

So we can tell you, listen, you are using this RMM commercial tool, but you probably should consider [00:31:00] that because. It’s highly maintained. People talk about it on open Ms. P then sentiment is good. People have voted for it, for et cetera. And for some of the products we also have a button says deploy now.

So we partner with another company that basically takes open source tools and allows you to self host it, to self-host them just with a click of a button. So you just provide credentials to your you just provide credentials to your cloud provider and they do all the hard work of maintaining it, backup, upgrades, et cetera.

So you don’t even have to worry about it. And again, that’s something completely, completely commercial free for the community, just to educate MSPs that there is a better way for them to support their business with with open source and create much healthier businesses and increase their margins.

Erick: Wow. Michael, so much of what you’re sharing with us is resonating with me. But first I’ve gotta say you had me at, I’m an engineer ’cause I’m an engineer too, so appreciate that. [00:32:00] But holy cow. Now you’re compelling me to go take a look because Rich, I am very surprised that I’m not aware of all these open source alternatives and I’m sure that’s music to many MSP’s ears that are dealing with, like you mentioned, cost tool, spr, all this other stuff that, they’re trying to reduce complexity, but they’re also looking at reducing their overall cost to be more competitive.

So my question to you, Michael, is how much adoption of open source MS. P software are you seeing? You’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting and the legwork for MSPs in, in strategizing this new business model for your organization and to benefit the MSP partners out there. So how much is really being adopted by MSPs and beyond what you’ve already shared, what’s really driving it?

Or is it just what we’ve been discussing? This is what’s driving it, it’s cost and being, not tied at the hip with, three year agreements and things like that with some of these platforms.

Michael: So first, [00:33:00] I think you’re right on the point that MSP vendors have have been known to have a lot of aggressive terms when it comes to contracts and things like that.

So that is a strong driver of people just want to break free from those three years contracts and all this type of stuff. I think like work from working with MSPs, I saw like how much they want to work on a monthly basis because. They work with small businesses getting established, go bankrupt, shut down business, hire employees, fire employees on a monthly basis.

So an MSP most of the time can’t really commit on the number of seats you might have for the next three years. You probably can’t commit for the next month or so. That’s a big struggle. But let’s put aside the commercial things that a certain M MSS P might have with is current vendors.

Let’s talk a bit about on the Mac macro level and the perspective of how the market operates now. Like we have those huge rollup Ms P players that are just buying off a bunch of MSPs and they can negotiate much better terms against the vendors, [00:34:00] right? So once they negotiate better terms with the vendors.

They can decrease their proceed prices and provide more for their, for that same price per seat, which means that they can outbid the smaller MSPs, right? So because the a big MSP vendor is not gonna provide significant discounts for someone that buys 20 licenses, but you will provide a discount for someone that buy 10,000 license.

And so that’s create that creates a significant problem for the smaller MSPs, which I think can definitely be answered with open source. Back to your question about adoption. We see adoption for MSPs on the lower, like on the smaller side of MSP. So let’s say five sub 5 million of revenue as a one-off.

So they will switch, they will switch RMM, they will switch identity and access management, but as a whole, it’s hard to duct tape everything together. That’s why open frame exists.

Rich: Lower licensing fees, no vendor [00:35:00] lock-in. These are two pluses, two positives for an MSP in terms of going with open source tooling.

But there are gonna be some negatives too. Let’s paint a bigger picture of the pros and cons, basically for an MSP of choosing the open source route what would you point out as the biggest advantages and then maybe some of the trade-offs they have to deal with?

Michael: If the MSP decide to self host to self host the tool on its own, it’s probably gonna be like he’s not he is gonna have less on the vendor payout side, but he’s gonna have more from maintenance perspective.

Also would need to probably have someone with deep expertise and DevOps or even kind of him being the person that is taking care of whatever is happening on the infrastructure. I think that if you look at it from and I think you also mentioned it on, on, on the article that you wrote.

If you look at it from where does AI takes us with the combination of open source, that’s much more interesting because let’s say that if you have a [00:36:00] terminal access to or partial access to a device, if you combine knowledge of AI alongside that that tool there is much more you can do.

For example, you can run backups on a scheduled basis without a real backup solution, right? Because you can provide AI with credentials for S3 or any other call storage. You can ask him to run backups on a certain device using RMM and deploy it to the cloud. And once you need to recover, you can do the opposite.

I think that. Once you integrate AI into the process, there is a bunch of things that can be limited from stack perspective and that will also limit the work of the MSP if it decides to sell post. And that’s how we started with our roadmap. We started with the tooling that makes one plus one equals stream, or four or five, not one plus one equals two.

So we started from RMM, we started from MDM, we built our own sim and we started from remote access control because this is the core, core things that an SP need. And again, if if an MS P [00:37:00] like just wants to get started with open source, you can just take the so hosted version of open Fare, which has already Kubernetes support.

It has a CLI that supports it, it has monitoring, it has everything he needs to maintain it. So I would say that taking the taking approach of segregated different tools. It’s gonna be complicated. It’s gonna be complex. That’s what we see today with MSPs that decided to go on the open source path.

If an MSP will decide to integrate all of them together through orchestration, automation, log ingestion, et cetera. That’s pretty much what we did with open frame. So we can just go ahead and go to our GitHub and use open frame.

Erick: So Michael, it sounds a lot to me, like you’ve anticipated the needs of the MSPs and the challenges that they have.

I, it’s interesting how you position that, the smaller MSPs are doing kinda one-offs and things like that. Two questions. So does that, do you see larger MSPs going more deeply into replacing more of the stack this way? [00:38:00] And second question. Second part of that question is, do you see open frame as the easy button to allow to help MSPs no matter what their size to overcome some of these challenges and adopt?

Of these types of solutions?

Michael: That’s a good question. I think that we started from the smaller ones just because what you said. The bigger Ms. P role of et cetera. Let’s take our article for example. Article Wolf is not an MSPs and NDR, but article grew organically for many years and then, they started to raise private equity money and they started to get into the more of a growth stage or late lead growth stage.

And then this is was the point when they start to acquire other other vendors, they acquired a sim company some time ago. They acquired a, an endpoint company some time ago. So I think that for the bigger ones, because they can negotiate prices better versus a smaller MSPs, they can push it to later.

They say, okay, we don’t need to handle this. We don’t need to invest right now in r and d and we don’t need to integrate our [00:39:00] own solutions. We’re just gonna have, just gonna have it later. The small, like for the smaller MSPs is a necessity. They have to do it now, otherwise, as we said before, the bigger rollup MSP is gonna decrease prices and either their margin even more so they’re gonna left with less money at the end of the month.

So I think that the adoption will start from the smaller MSPs and obviously once the product’s gonna be more mature, we’re gonna outgrow to the entire industry and so this is how we see things and if it makes sense.

Erick: Yeah, I appreciate that distinction that you made there. That clarifies it for me.

And understand why the smaller MSPs need the help more than the larger ones who have, advantages of scale and leverage that way.

Michael: And, most of the Ms. P industry is smaller MSPs. Most of, 75% of the MSPs are sub 3 million affair or less than 15 employees. So

Erick: yeah, that’s our Ms.

P channel. We love them.

Michael: Of course. And so am I.

Erick: Yeah.

Rich: We’ve been talking on and off [00:40:00] again about an open frame. There are actually two different additions of that product. So just to help people understand, there is a self-managed, self-hosted version of that, that because it runs on open source software is a completely free, and then there your ultimately your monetization play with the solution is a paid addition of open frame, which introduces some of the AI functionality that you were hinting at before.

Just how people understand those two options with open frame and then tell us a little bit more specifically what the AI functionality they get with the paid edition does.

Michael: Of course. As you said, as you correctly said, the tooling piece, so we have two packages for open frame. By the way, we’re still on, on data.

We haven’t start charging for the product. So if anyone wants to join our wait list and get invite code, they can go to our website, Flamingo dot grant and register to the wait list. Open frame core, which is the tooling piece, is open source. Exactly like you said. We have to make it open source because we utilizing other [00:41:00] open source tools and those type of licenses are contagious.

Meaning that once we utilize an open source tool, our products become open source as well. And we happy to do that. We happy to give it back to the community. We’re utilizing other open source tools and we’re happy to give it back. So that’s the self-hosted version. There are two GitHub repositories on Flamingo Stack handle on GitHub.

One of them is the code itself of the platform, which does not a bunch MSPs can do with that, but there’s another one, which called Open frame, CLI the CLI is just allows you just with a few commands to deploy your own your own open source stack, your own instance of of open frame.

That’s the open source version. It includes right now RMM, remote Access Controls, sim and MDM. This is like the core piece of MSPs. This is what we saw as the biggest pain points. We are gonna add by the end of this core PSA and and knowledge management for the open source version.

And the AI [00:42:00] version is basically sits on top of those tooling. Those tool, this tool stack and orchestrate it autonomously, meaning that. Let’s say that you’re an MSP. You deploy open frame, you install it to your users. Your users will get a native app on their desktop called Fay. Fay is the user side chat.

And once the user have a problem, his computer is running slow. He needs to deploy a new software. He needs to remove the software. It, he’s scared of a new vulnerability that came out. He can just talk to her. And she has pre-baked security guardrails and pre-baked access to all of the tooling so she can run things like query the device see which software exists, run a command, remove a software, deploy a software, do whatever can be done with MDM and RMN, with guardrails, meaning that U-S-D-M-S-P can say, okay, every time Faye wants to download the file, I want to approve it through the dashboard.

Every time Faye wants to remove a software, I want to approve it or. The user needs to approve it. You can define certain levels [00:43:00] of approval, and once that happen, you will get a notification onto your dashboard where it says, listen on this device phase, asking permission to do this, and that, please approve or decline.

That’s the user facing chat. This is basically our version of PSA. We think that the future of PSA is gonna be chat-based and voice-based, meaning that Faye in the future will also be able to call you, you will talk to the AI and she will fix things for you. And then, and the second agent is called Mingo is the technician side chat.

And he can run unco unprivileged activities, meaning that you can tell me the things like, please query all of my devices and check which devices are missing, Adobe Reader version five, or whatever. And if they’re missing it, automatically deploy it. And he will go ahead and orchestrate all the different tooling and we’ll do everything on its own.

And at the end, we’ll come back to you with the result.

Erick: The future is now. Michael? So you’ve confirmed that your target audience [00:44:00] really, at least at launch is the smaller MSPs. Do you have any kind of thoughts around if and when an Ms. P would ever outgrow an open source solution like you are developing and releasing to MSPs today?

And what kind of an impact, if any, does using a platform like yours or just basing your service delivery and operations around open source tools have an impact on maybe company valuation at an exit for an msp?

Michael: So if we’ll continue with the current stop with the current status of how MSPs are being valued.

SOPs on the exit are being valued four to five X on EBITDA MAR on EBITDA margin, right? So it’s more or less there. If you talk about an NSP with 20% margins five four to five Xs basically zero revenue, right? So it’s five, four to five four to five x on on EBITDA is [00:45:00] basically is revenue.

We think that with with open frame MSPs can increase their e their EBITDA margin to around at least double it. So at least get to 40 to 50%. And this is the idea that when I was pitching Flamingo to I investor, when I was to investors, when I was raising money, this is what I said, we are gonna take those services businesses and we’re gonna turn them into a.

AI enabled software businesses and increase their margins. And if that’s we obviously still proving this paradigm because we’re still young, but once we’re gonna, once we’re gonna prove that it’s working, we hope to help those MSP sell their businesses and almost double what they sell. Now,

Rich: It, it’s interesting as we talk about this, Michael e Erick and I have been talking on the show in recent episodes about the rise of these service desk automation tools, systems of action.

From companies like Thread [00:46:00] and Pia and Zig, which ConnectWise just bought recently. And we’ve been talking about the contrast between these sort of leading edge agentic AI automation tools for MSPs, systems of action versus systems of record, which is like the traditional PSA solutions that assist MSPs with basic functions they need to perform, but don’t actually do the work for them.

The way AI is capable of doing, including Faye and Mingo and your solution. And it almost feels Michael as if a sort of underlying thesis of what you’re building here is that system of record functionality, that sort of classic PSA functionality is so commoditized at this point that you at least feel comfortable literally giving it away because people.

Can take open frame and it has or will have PSA functionality that’s free. The money that they’re gonna pay you and the value that [00:47:00] you’re gonna deliver to them is coming from the ai. I don’t wanna put words in your mouth, but does any of that resonate with how you’re thinking?

Erick: I a hundred percent agree.

We

Michael: like our path to to make profit is not from the software. Like we, we like the per seat or whatever we still haven’t finalized the pricing completely, but the package price for the tooling piece is gonna be almost what we pay for to host. We would like it.

We don’t like, we are not planning on making money from the tooling. As you said, correctly. We plan on making money from the AI piece. And I think that again, if we’ll go a bit up and look at the entire industry and entire software industry right now and what’s happening the MSP is one huge industry that is always being overlooked when it comes to VC money and things like that.

That’s a topic for another discussion. But the MSP industry is a huge industry. It’s a $90 billion industry that most of the time gets gets [00:48:00] innovations. The less, like it’s, they’re not getting the most updated, EDR tools or whatever. Most of the tools are outdated.

So I completely agree with you because MSPs traditionally get used to tools that are okay. They’re not top notch. They’re not the best. They’re okay. To find replacement with open source for that type of tools. It’s not that hard. Like you have good tools for that. And if you look at it from a market perspective, software is becoming invaluable in general.

There are all these stories right now of people that build DocuSign over a weekend. So obviously that’s that’s not really what happens. But this is where we’re heading to. We are heading to a place where you’re not selling software anymore. You’re selling a solution that encapsulates inside everything from taking care of communication with your customers to get tickets, close them and report back.

So I really liked what you wrote on your last piece about system of records versus system of actions. And I think that the MS fees that will [00:49:00] adopt to this mindset of actions. I like let’s forget about what we had before. Let’s forget about all the tool stack that we had before. Let’s focus on what’s happening right now in the world and how fast we can move.

I think those kind of, the MSPs that will that will make the larger profits when the AI strikes in and it’s already strikes in, right? Like you guys talked about a bunch of tools that orchestrate existing tool set.

Erick: We just took a different approach where we both have the tool set and

Michael: the ai.

Erick: Michael, not only are you taking an unconventional approach to the way that MSPs operate and the tool sets that they utilize and finding these alternatives for them and packaging, packaging it up for them in a way that they can deploy and hopefully reach, higher percentages of ebitda and scale a little bit more broadly.

But you also have in unconventional take. On vendor vendor integration. Sorry. Explain what that is [00:50:00] and why you’ve adopted it.

Michael: So if you’re referring to the way we we work with with open source tools that that we use, I think that every, so let’s say, let’s put it this way, I’m coming from security background.

So a lot of time, like 10 years ago when I started my firm business, if you would say to an enterprise customer listen I, I wanna I, I wanna move for from Splunk to Wazo, or I wanna move from that commercial XDR to that commercial, to that open source tool, he will look at you like you’re crazy.

We have come a long way and a lot of hacks and a lot of problems that we had with commercial tools that prove to the industry that open source is winning and it’s winning not only because. You have more eyeballs to check the code. It’s winning because of the way it can be customized for each person and each individual specific needs.

And that what kind of like the way we decided to build our business [00:51:00] is exactly aligned with that. We are pretty deeply integrated into each tool we use. For example when we wanna pull log from a certain open source project that we work with, we don’t work with APIs. We hook it directly into its database, and as soon as something gets in there, we immediately stream it.

Our way of integration those tools is is quite deep. Meaning that we have very long and scrutinized a process of figuring out what’s the right solution for let’s say for the next quarter. We wanna integrate identity and access management. What’s the best.

Identity and access management open source project for MSPs based on the product features that he has, but also what’s the security posture? Can I back it up? Do I have proper way to upgrade it? So all of this is integrated into our vendor selection process.

Erick: Glad you mentioned the security posture component there and you being, background in security because, [00:52:00] we know how important and how risky it is for MSPs to operate these days and to keep their customers secure.

I just wanna make a comment there,

Rich: what, when we spoke in terms of integrations I think what Erick was getting at is something that struck me as a little bit different about how you do things too. When we first met is it’s a real traditional thing in the managed services world to, purchase a stack or part of a stack from one vendor and then integrate it with the rest of the tools in their stack via APIs. And that, it sounded like is less of a priority for you in terms of open frame.

Michael: Oh, got it. Yeah. That’s correct. As we talked before about open msp if the listeners and the viewers of this episode will go to open msp, do AI and will go to our vendor directory, they will see that there is a filter called open frame selected.

So there is open, like there is open source commercial and open frame selected. Our go, our ultimate goal is to take all the nine, 10 [00:53:00] different categories of tools that NSPs are using and embed it into open frame. So at the end, we’re gonna have everything in NSP needs to to run this business.

And that’s a strategic decision. That’s not a tactical decision, meaning that. We’re not gonna integrate a tool that has a good open source alternative, but we do gonna integrate the tools that we cannot displace, or they’re just too cheap for us to build on our own. For example, we cannot replace Office 365, alright?

We cannot replace Google Workspace where we can’t be the email provider and things like that. So for that for that tools, we will be, we will build deep integrations because if you have a new user joining one of your clients and you want to run an entire onboarding process with Mingo, we need to have APIs that will create the user, that will provide privileges, et cetera.

For anything that cannot be displaced with open source, we’re gonna build integrations for anything that can be displaced. We are gonna inter, we’re gonna build on our own or integrate open source [00:54:00] tools into the product. And this is our strategic approach to the product management.

Rich: Michael, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Erick and I talk about new companies, new products new innovations, all the time on MSP Chat. But we rarely get an opportunity to speak with someone who is thinking differently to quite the degree. You this is a very different beast within the world of managed services and a very interesting one.

For folks in our audience who wanna get in touch with you, maybe become part of the beta, learn more about open MSP open frame. Where should they go?

Michael: They should go either to open nsp AI and join our Slack community. We mostly over, we mostly available there. It’s either me or the managers in the business or they can just go to Flamingo Run and submit a request to join our wait list.

We currently have, we had 200 MSPs testing the software. We tighten up the tighten up the [00:55:00] criteria. So now we enforcing MSPs to have x amount of devices deployed to the software to, to keep on maintaining their beta. So we have around 50 that moved completely their business into open frame.

And we providing more access codes all the time. So if anyone wants to test out the product or if he wants to solve those, he can just go to GitHub. The handle is Flamingo dash stack. And then he can find there the two repositories that I spoke about before Flamingo SS tenant and open sorry, open frame, OS tenant and open frame CLI and check the product on its own.

Rich: Fantastic. We will have those links plus a link to my coverage of Flamingo from Channel Holic in the show notes for this episode. I encourage you to dig into all of that and learn more. So Michael Asra, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Folks, Erick and I are gonna take a quick break.

Now when we come back on the other side, we’re gonna share a few final thoughts about this very interesting conversation with Michael and the very [00:56:00] interesting solution that he is building for MSPs. We’re gonna have a little fun. We’re gonna wrap up the show. Stick around. We’re gonna be right back

and welcome back bar three of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast. I really wanted, I only met Michael as I said just a few weeks ago. I really wanted to bring him on the show because what he is doing, what Domingo is doing is very different from more or less anything that I’ve seen in the past.

And it does shed light on this whole open source software phenomenon that honestly, I just. Hadn’t been paying attention to, and it’s clearly worth paying some attention to, a, a few thoughts, two, two thoughts in particular, come to mind. First of all this is a really interesting way.

So we talk a lot about the rise of these big MSPs like Integris and logically who we’re talking about at the top of the show, these PE backed roll-ups, and they’ve got enormous [00:57:00] advantages in terms of technology and people and budget and the pricing that they can get from vendors just because of the scale at which they’re buying.

This is an interesting way to level. Playing field on that a little bit by investing in tools that potentially don’t cost you anything. So that’s an interesting thing to think about for a smaller MSP who does not wanna sell into a rollup, but wants to be competitive with them, this is an option worth at least considering in terms of leveling the playing field with the bigs as some folks call them.

And then the other thing is we talk a lot about, and this goes back to your tip of the week, we talk a lot about increasing ebitda, a lot about increasing profitability, and there are all sorts of techniques that you recommend for doing that. We don. Generally talk about just spending less on stuff that you need to have the run to run the business.

But that very much goes to the bottom line. That is a relative, compared to some of the other things you can [00:58:00] do, that’s a relatively easy way to increase your profitability and your margins. And this is another way of or another reason to at least look at the open source alternative because it’s to invoke something you said and an easy button way maybe to increase your margin.

So a lot of interesting stuff to, to think about there.

Erick: Yeah, and if you think about the, there’s only two ways to increase ebitda and one way is to sell higher profit margin services, but the other way, and they both have to work together, is lowering your operating costs. And you’re right, Rach, I think the, behi behind.

Our labor costs as an MSP, our tools costs are probably our second biggest cost when you think about it all in, and, having a disruptive kind of option that says, oh I can replace this. If I’m spending 60, $70, per user in my best bundle of services, my cost [00:59:00] to all my various vendors, the average is 17 or 20 vendors or something.

Now in an MSP stack, I can reduce that significantly. Now that means I can be a little bit more price competitive or I can maintain my rates and enjoy that multiple. The comment about we’ll double, we look, we think we can double an MSP’s ebitda. That is a bold statement and I’ll bet Rich that is going to resonate very loudly and clearly.

With the MSP channel. And so not only is it a disruptive strategy and a solution for MSPs, but it’s also disruptive to all the, all the other vendors that are delivering these platforms to the MSPs and charging them money. So it’ll be interesting to see, how this shakes up the MSP channel, because, if I am, if I decided for any reason, which I want to dive back in and start another MSP [01:00:00] practice or an MSSP or an AI forward MSP, because I think, oh my goodness, I could, if I wanted to create a strategy that says I wanna build something very profitable, very quickly, and have an exit in three years, I definitely would be leveraging lowest cost platforms, AI forward tools and strategies.

Then running as lean of a team to deliver these services as efficiently and profitably as possible. And I know that there are MSPs out there doing just that today.

Rich: It says something, or at least it might say this will be an interesting thing to watch in the year ahead. But it potentially says something very interesting about where we’re at in the industry now in terms of the relative importance of AI automation in comparison to the traditional functionality provided by systems of record, like PSA systems that these guys in particular flamingo, are charging for the AI and giving away the PSA.

That doesn’t necessarily mean [01:01:00] that’s where the whole industry is going, but it says something about the moment we’re in right now that will be interesting to watch. So

Erick: The cell phone industry is a parallel to that. Remember we used to, have to pay for these mobile phones.

Now just sign up for a plan and you can pick a phone, right?

Yeah.

Rich: Absolutely. And folks, that leaves us with time for just one last thing and I’m just gonna tell you going in, I hang my head in shame just a little bit as we get into this here, because I am supposedly a professional writer, which means I’m supposed to have, I’m supposed to be good with words.

I’m supposed to be at least somewhat original with them, right? A company called Zero Bounce, they’re an email verification service, so they see a lot of emails in the course of their work. They took a look through just under 1.1 million emails to kind look for terms, phrases that show up so frequently that they can clearly be referred to as buzzwords, overused cliches, et cetera.

And [01:02:00] I’m looking at the list here, Erick, and I’m, yeah, at least in email, I am just guilty as charged. Number one on the list, reaching out. Just reaching out to see if you had a chance to think about how often do I follow up?

Erick: Yep.

Rich: Check in. Hope you’re doing well. Hope all is well. Circle back. Oh my goodness.

And now this, I’m not asking you to hang your head shame, but just a little bit lower on the list. Behind these others is one that I know I, every time we get on a meeting on a Friday, I know I can count on you to say Happy Friday. It’s a nice thing, Erick. I look for, but Happy Friday’s on the list.

Apparently it’s not just you. I, I don’t know. I guess it’s just easier to lean on these phrases instead of actually having to think about how to make the same point in a slightly more interesting way.

Erick: Thank you Rich for shaming all of us, because we’re all guilty of this. And I’ve used Zero Bounce from time to time.

It’s a great platform and I love [01:03:00] that they’ve taken the time to say, Hey, here are some of the most used. And probably, and, my job as part of the organization is to make sure that, our marketing is top-notch and we’re getting into, prospects and clients’ inboxes, or we’re messaging them.

So I’m, I feel like I’m a little bit more advanced in that than a lot of folks that are just doing it. Reactively, right? It’s, I’ve been doing it for a lot of years and trying to figure out that secret formula that, gets folks to open our emails and gets them to register for webinars that we do and events that we’re doing and the podcasts and things like that.

And yes, I use these phrases all the time. So when you use a phrase like this a lot, then that then becomes a flag. For spam filters and quarantine, services like Microsoft Quarantine and things like that. So thank you for bringing this to my attention from a, yes, I’m in that cam too, but also oh, now I’m gonna change my strategy a little bit and see if it improves open rates, [01:04:00] deliverability and things like that, because these are the metrics that we track very carefully.

Rich: How about that folks? A bonus tip of the week for you about the the end of the show here. A little marketing tip for you and and we’ll check in with Erick on a future episode of the show and see if he saw any impacts. For making that change. But for now, that is all the time we’ve got for you on this episode of msp

chat, thank you for joining us. We’ll be back in a week’s time. Until then, I will just remind you, as I always do, this is both a video and an audio podcast. So if you’re listening to us right now, but would like to check us out on video, go to YouTube. You’re gonna find us there. If you’re watching, but you’re into audio podcasts, go to Google, apple, Spotify.

Wherever you get your audio podcast, you’re probably gonna find us there too. And wherever you find us, please subscribe. Like rate review. It’s gonna help other people discover and enjoy the show. This show is produced by the wonderful Riley Simpson. He’s part of the team with us here at Channel Mastered, where we help vendors build, grow, and optimize MSP channels.

You can [01:05:00] learn more about all of the services we provide. www.channel Mastered.com. Channel Mastered has a sister organization called MSP Mastered. That’s Erick working one-to-one with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business. You can learn more about that at www.mspMastered.com. So once again, we thank you for joining us.

We’re gonna see you in a week. Until then, please remember, as we so often ask you to, that you just can’t spell channel without [01:06:00] MSP.