Episode 95: Kirk Versus Picard

Erick and Rich discuss the opportunity in cybersecurity for MSPs and the skills gap contributing to it, plus three strategies for coping with competition, client budget constraints, and profitability pressures. Then they moderate a panel discussion on operational excellence recorded live and onstage during the recent Kaseya DattoCon event in Miami. And finally, one last thing: why Cypress has as many cats as people.

Discussed in this episode:

Forrester Research: Global Cybersecurity Spending To Exceed $300B By 2029

CompTIA: State of Cybersecurity 2025

Cyprus has a cat problem: One feline for every resident

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. Blast off, 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, make it big and managed services. My name is Rich Freeman. I’m the chief analyst at Channel Mastered, the organization responsible for this show.

I’m joined as I am every week by your other co-host, our CEO and chief strategist at Channel mastered. His name is Eric Simpson. Eric, how you

doing? Doing well, rich. Catching up from lots of whirlwind travel recently. Got a little bit of a break here this week but you’ll soon be on the road again next week.

While I will continue to catch up here at.

And I know the weather is not the most fascinating topic for us to talk about in a podcast like this, [00:01:00] but my understanding it’s very sunny and it’s wonderful in Seattle right now. Last I heard from you, it’s a little Rainier down there than usual.

Yeah. Deluge comes to mind as a term, but yeah, it rained from 6:00 AM yesterday morning till well after 6:00 PM nonstop. It was when it rains, it pours. It never rains in Southern California, but when it rains, it pours. So there’s the adage,

it sounds like it’s behind you now. so that is good news.

and it, it is sunnier than in, in Seattle and Los Angeles. let’s dive right in. This is pretty sunny news actually. our story of the week is Pretty Sunny News for MSP. So let’s get right into that. And this is inspired by a research study published just yesterday as we’re recording this by CompTIA and I will underscore it’s by CompTIA, which spun out [00:02:00] from the organization that used to be called CompTIA.

That organization is now GTIA. CompTIA is pretty much the for-profit training arm. They’ve still got a very great research organization over there and they just published their 2025 cybersecurity market report. I’m gonna get into some data from that report in a moment. But first, just to set up why this topic matters, here’s some other very recent data from Forrester Research published about two weeks ago.

They’re estimating that global cyber cybersecurity spending is gonna go up 13.1% this year to $174.8 billion. And more than that, Eric, they’re saying that by 2029 the market’s gonna top 300 billion. And if 13.1% sounds like robust growth, it is. And yet that’s the lowest number you’re gonna see between now and the end of the decade.

According to Forrester, you’re gonna next three years, you’re gonna see growth rates in [00:03:00] the sort of mid 14% in 2029 for reasons I’m not clear on. They’re projecting 15.7% year over year ago. So a lot of money being spent in cybersecurity, it is a fast growing market. Now that gets us to the the comp tier report.

so among other things they asked folks, and this was a research that this was research directed mostly. At end users as opposed to partners they were talking to it and security professionals in the business world out there. And they asked people, what are your biggest changes in cybersecurity that you’re contemplating right now?

and here are the top five or four, excuse me, by, by a fairly comfortable margin. And it tells you a little bit about where the market is right now in security. number one on the list was putting a higher priority on incident response. a little bit behind that, [00:04:00] putting more of a priority on risk management.

So well to the left of boom. Pretty solidly to the right of boom, this is now getting more attention from people as opposed to the prevention, detection, response kind of thing. Mitigating risk, responding to incidents after something happens. right up there. with with those two was higher awareness, becoming more aware of adept at dealing with regulatory issues.

So compliance basically. We’ve certainly spoken on this show before about compliance is a big opportunity for MSPs. This kind of validates that. And then in the, rounding out the top four basically, as people are saying we’re gonna be making a greater investment in technology tools.

And let’s assume that the people saying that are company’s large enough to have an IT department and to be purchasing tools, but there’s clearly an appetite among larger businesses and smaller ones to have [00:05:00] more technology in place to handle these and other security priorities. Now, CompTIA as we said, they’re a training oriented organization these days.

And so naturally anytime they do a survey like this, they’re gonna be asking a lot of questions that are adjacent to or touch on skills related issues. One of the things they ask people in this survey here is, What kind of cybersecurity challenges are you dealing with right now and by a pretty comfortable margin?

number one on the list, cybersecurity skill gaps. they ask people about challenges they’re facing specifically in regards to ai. Number one on the list skill gaps in using AI tools. number two on the list, skill gaps in basic cybersecurity functions, inclusive of ai. what does this tell you?

basically Eric you put this together. security is a high priority for businesses. We knew this before, they’re spending a [00:06:00] lot of money on it, but they, they’re spending more and more by double digits every year. We knew that before and they are having a really hard time getting a hold of the skills they need in-house to meet their security needs and fulfill their security aspirations, which means.

There’s a lot of opportunity out there for outsourced providers of cybersecurity skills, and that is very much true as it always has been, NSMB, but in that co-managed space, as you get into the mid-market and even larger businesses, they too are gonna be looking to supplement their in-house ability to take care of some of these needs with some outsourced assistance.

This is an opportunity for MSPs too. in encouraging news, I would say for our audience here in terms of where we are and where we’re going in security.

Yeah. Rich, I am, I’m conflicted. I, so [00:07:00] let me ask you the question rather than giving my thoughts before hearing your thoughts, but 14.1%, 15%, that does that meet the need in terms of budget growth?

the opportunity it seems lacking to me, especially. When AI is creating so many more threats, not only from, the need to secure and govern AI implementations, but also from the threat actors out there leveraging ai. it sounds like not enough to me.

it’s it raises an interesting question.

So if you look at it spending overall, and I don’t have the latest numbers at my fingertips, but I feel safe in saying it, spending overall this year will grow somewhere between five and 10%. So there’s a lot more, a faster growth and spending on security. On the other hand if you look at the growth rate for cloud computing, say AI now, in ai you’re starting from a [00:08:00] smaller base, so it’s a little bit.

it feels basically Eric, like security is a sort of middle of the road priority. People understand this is it outranks their, IT budget growth needs overall, but maybe it doesn’t figure quite as prominently with them as it does in terms of cloud and and ai. And we could debate whether they’re setting those priorities appropriately or enough.

I don’t know. I don’t know that I can say is 14, 15% enough or not.

Yeah, I guess I’m curious. I saw a post by Jay McBain at Canales recently, and I can’t remember what percentage he said the managed services sector was forecasted to grow, but I just, I wish we had that at our fingertips, like you say.

But we’ll revisit this in another segment, upcoming show because it’s interesting, unpacking it and trying to. Connect the dots between, what traditional [00:09:00] cybersecurity spending is, and then is it accurately reflecting the need for governance for ai? And then also, I like the guidance that you shared around compliance.

I’ve said on this show before, like every, I think every company is gonna be regulated at some point for something, right? If, and today there’s we look at non unregulated and regulated. We know what those are, but at the end of the day, every organization is gonna need cyber liability insurance and you at least have to comply to those requirements.

But I’m thinking something greater. I think that over the next 10 years, every organization of some type is going to have to comply to some sort of regulatory compliance. if not only from, data that it collects from its customers and things like that. thoughts.

no, I think and you went exactly where I was gonna go.

every business [00:10:00] is regulated right now because they all need, if they, don’t have already cyber insurance and there are compliance requirements around that as we know. yeah. and and we won’t get into the weaves on this right here now, but I, compliance is one of those areas that a lot of MSPs shy away from because they’re very concerned about not doing it properly and the sort of reputation and liability issues that can come with that, which I totally understand.

and yet again, I’m a hundred percent on board with you. This is a a universal need. That is only going to be grow greater. We can see from the latest CompTIA data that it’s very much top of mind for businesses out there. And so if you are not finding a way to deliver some kind of compliance offering to your customers, they’re gonna be talking to somebody [00:11:00] who is doing that.

it’s definitely something you don’t wanna just plunge into unthinkingly, but this would be a good time to be thinking about that for all the reasons that we’re discussing here. And one quick last point you were saying, Hey, it would be great if if we had access to Jay and we could talk with him.

you also hinted that I’m going back on, on out on the road. next to where I’m going actually is to Chicago for the Canals forum. and in fact, one week from today as we record this, I will be interviewing Jay McBain. So I’ll try to remember that we had this conversation and see what he thinks and maybe we can revisit this in next week’s show.

Yeah, looking forward to to that update.

Until then, so I, I mentioned before overall it spending growing somewhere in that five [00:12:00] to 9% range. I think it’s fair to say, coming into the year most of the experts were predicting something closer to the 9% of that range. And then as recession fears and a number of other headwinds started to present themselves, they shifted down a little bit closer to the 5%.

This is a nice lead into your tip of the week, Eric, in terms of how folks in our audience should deal with some of the problems that they’re facing out there right now.

great lead in. yeah, rich, it’s, at the end of the day, I have this I did a webinar earlier today and I made a very clear point around, some of the segments I touched on were, MSP’s needs for operational efficiency and cost cutting and things like that, all.

Designed rich to increase company equity value. Like at the end of the day, [00:13:00] any business owner wants to, build something that they can then exit from. I would say not everybody, but the majority of folks are, not just creating a job for themselves. They’re building something that they leave behind as a legacy that has lasting value that then, a buyer would be interested in acquiring.

And getting enjoying the fruits of all that hard work and labor over time. And, so when we look at things that impact that company equity value, we talk about cutting costs, we talk about becoming much more efficient. We talk about increasing profitability. So the tip of the week that I’m gonna share is all about how to address this.

Uncertainty that we’ve got in the market today. MSPs are, having more challenges. Clients are holding the wallet a little bit tighter because of some of this uncertainty, and folks are being impacted by, tariff [00:14:00] uncertainty and rising costs and things like that.

So how do we squeeze more profitability as an MSP IT Service Writer channel to come out on top? So the first tip that may sound like a broken record, but adapt your pricing methodology into tiers. Good, better, best. If you have one solution, one option, then your only option is for a client to say either yes or no.

And if their budget doesn’t meet what you need to deliver the service. They’re going to try to negotiate you down on price, and some of us really need that revenue. we may end up negotiating on price. So tip number one, tier those services good, better, best. So that way you have a bundle, a portfolio of services that appeals to the broadest number of your target addressable market.

The good bundle is what you absolutely require every client to [00:15:00] at least subscribe to in order to be your client. And if they can’t afford that, then guess what? Rich? They’re not a good candidate to be a client. So then you can in grow with that client and when you, instead of, having one solution that you’re selling a client a bundle, then your options to upsell them are, more point product or solution upgrades, the, this version of that application or.

This larger piece of backup hardware, that kind of thing. But when you have these service bundles, good, better, best, you can say, Hey, I think it’s time to upgrade you to our next bundle of services. And you’re taking the entire user base up. So it makes a definite positive impact in your bottom line.

And of course, you’re structuring those so that your profit targets are 60 to 70% profit margin on all those things. [00:16:00] Now, the other thing that we need to do in terms of selling more profitable services, which actually increase, the higher the percentage of A-R-R-M-R-R that our revenue is represented by our revenue, the higher the multiples, right?

The greater the ebitda, the higher the multiple, the valuation at exit. The second thing that we need to do is to, yes, control our costs, lower our costs. How do we do that? A couple ways. Increase our efficiencies. If, we’ve got a service desk that everybody’s just, firing from the hip wild west style, and everybody’s doing something a different way, let’s standardize those processes.

Let’s document those processes. let’s standardize how we deliver incident management for tickets. let’s make certain that every technician is executing incident management and problem resolution the same way so that clients don’t, get away from being inclined to wait for their favorite technician, right?[00:17:00]

Everybody’s delivering the same or similar customer experience, allowing us to scale and serve as many of those clients as end users as possible. integrating platforms. There’s so much, that I hear from Partners Rich around how many dashboards that they’re in, and they’re creating these bespoke bundles of services and have multiple, applications that are servicing these clients.

Let’s see. You absolutely have to have these very bespoke, best in breed class of services. Integrate those platforms as much as possible so it’s simpler for you to manage those services. Simpler for you to bill and invoice and ultimately look around and see if there are other options out there where you may be able to collapse three or four different best of breed solutions into another platform that includes some of that stuff.

Determine whether you’re willing to make some sacrifices here and there to make things simpler [00:18:00] and more efficient. IE more profitable and allow you to scale much more broadly without bringing on more headcount. And then the last one, rich, will be let’s absolutely true up any of our clients that aren’t on our current pricing model.

Even if, you know they’re on a bundle of services, but they’re paying less than you would sell to a new client tomorrow, that same bundle of services. Chip away at that stone. You may not be able to get every client trued up to what your current prices are. I know Rich, ’cause we had clients that were 10 years with us and man, we fell into that trap as an MSP and it took a few years to get everybody close to truing up.

and then also upsell and cross sell more profitable solutions to your clients. Introduce tiered or bundled services. If you’ve got legacy [00:19:00] clients that had only the one thing right? Get everybody standardized and then annually get rid of your, absolutely your DNF client customers. If not, some of your C customers.

Make room for more profitable a RB clients or to be able to spend more time with your a and b clients. Cross-selling and upselling more profitable solutions.

So a couple of thoughts there, fir. First of all, I will just say kudos to you for getting through that segment without saying, for having the discipline to get through that, without saying invest in AI and automation to get more productive and therefore more profitable.

I don’t have that discipline, Eric, so I’m gonna go ahead and say that’s maybe a fourth item that you can add to the list. AI and automation. The other thing I’ll say as you were talking about, consolidating having too many dashboards and consolidating [00:20:00] tools, even before some of the economic issues that we’ve been dealing with here in, in 2025 as you and I both know there has been a trend among MSPs to consolidate vendor relationships and and that whole efficiency issue is a big contributor to that.

And you can see how that would, if it, if anything, only be accelerated by some of the economic concerns that MSPs have going on right now.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. anything that we can do, rich to increase our bottom line profitability, whether that’s, making tough decisions around.

customers that we need to release or making, changes in our solution stack. yeah, it’s tough to make these changes in flight, especially if you’ve got hundreds and hundreds of endpoints and you’re switching things around. I get it. but also, there are those, there MSPs out there that are very labor heavy, like they have [00:21:00] too many technicians and engineers I can count on, the fingers of one hand four or five partners that I’m currently engaged with that are definitely heavy and they think we certainly don’t want to let these folks go because it’s gonna be so hard to replace them.

But, you’ve gotta weigh all these, decisions carefully and sometimes, balancing those scales of efficiency and profitability and scalability and growth cause us to rethink some of these things. So the more efficient. And profitable we become and we still have a big labor cost, that makes that pain a little bit more apparent over time too.

speaking of efficiency and profitability that is a great lead in to what we have coming up next for you here. you mentioned at the top of the show that we’re both off the road this week. Last week we were at Kaseya DattoCon conference. [00:22:00] We had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion as part of the Autotask Community live event within an event at Dacon with three MSPs.

And we did that in front of a live audience at the show there. We also recorded it, and we are gonna share that with you right now. the subject matter of that session was operational excellence. You’re gonna hear some very. Specific ideas and suggestions from these three MSPs about tools and techniques that they’re using to get more efficient and get better At ops.

This will include AI and automation, but extend beyond that. We’re gonna talk about KPIs. Tons of really good stuff. It was a lot of fun, very informative and a lot of fun to do as well. And Eric and I are gonna take a quick break now. When we come back on the other side, we will have [00:23:00] that panel session.

for you. Recorded live last week at dacon. Stick around.

Welcome back for this panel session on operational excellence. In managed services. this is a twofer, I’ll explain a little bit more about that in a moment. This is both a session for you guys here. It’s also a recording session for a podcast that I do with the gentleman at the other end of the stage.

So my name is Rich Freeman. I’m the Chief Analyst at Channel Mastered. we are a consultancy. We work with vendors, companies like us say, to help them build, grow, optimize MSP channels. our co-founder at Channel Mastered also on the panel here is Eric Simpson.

Hey, Eric Simpson, CEO channel mastered recovering MSP.

So happy to be here. How you guys all feeling right now? Say hi. Love it. Alright, we got the right crowd, rich. All right,

perfect. [00:24:00] There we go. So this is the name of our podcast. It’s called MSP Chat. You will find it on YouTube, Spotify, Google, apple, wherever it is, you get podcasts. please, we would appreciate it.

Go. If you’re not already a listener or reviewer, go subscribe. after you discover how much you love it, rate review don’t hesitate. Do it right now before you forget. You’ll forget later. So go find MSP chat right now. just so you know, we are not officially recording for the show at this moment.

We will start in a few moments and I’m gonna need some help from you. Okay. So I’m gonna give you a 3, 2, 1, and point. That’s when the recording begins officially. And then I need you people to just lose your mind with excitement. We test it right now. Let’s do a test. Okay. Okay. Let’s we’ll practice [00:25:00] three, two.

One Go nuts.

That’s what I’m talking about. I love it. Thank you. that’s what we’ll do in a minute here. It’ll tell the podcast audience how crazy excited we all are to be on this panel and to be on the show, so I appreciate that very much. Quick little note, just so you understand, we do every episode of the show in three parts.

This is gonna be the middle part of the show that goes out a week from Friday. So when we get started, it’s gonna sound like we’re coming back from a commercial break or something like that. When we’re done, it’s gonna sound like we’re going back into a commercial break, but we’ll just dive into the the panel at that moment.

So I, I think we’re we’re ready, Eric. Here we go. Just like you did it before. 3, 2, 1.[00:26:00]

All right. And welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast or spotlight interview segment, or should I call it this week, our spotlight panel segment. ’cause we are coming to you live from the Autotask community live event in fabulous Miami Beach, Florida. where Eric and I are joined live and on stage by three MSPs.

We are gonna be speaking with them about achieving operational excellence in managed services. There are a lot of different ways, a lot of great ways to build a successful MSP. If you really wanna build a strong bottom line, there’s hardly anything you can do that’s gonna be more effective than getting more profitable by getting more productive, by getting better, smarter, more effective at the operational workflows you use to support your customers.

That’s what we’re gonna get into with these gentlemen here, all of whom [00:27:00] have great advice and insights to share on that topic. So let’s go ahead and meet them beginning with you, Dan.

Thank you. My name’s Dan. I am blessed to be a co-owner with my best friend, and we started at MSP in Chicago called Fairway IT Solutions.

Kobe. My name is Kobe Dudley. I’m the director of managed services for Becca, and we’re based out of Atlanta, Georgia, and Roman.

Hi. Hey everybody. My name is Roman Shane. I’m a Chief solutions architect, New York Consulting, and we’re based outta New York City.

here are the topics we’re gonna cover over the course of the session here.

We’re gonna set the stage a little bit. you’ll see what I mean by that in just a moment. We’ll talk about some operational specifics that folks on the stage here have put into place that have really made an impact some [00:28:00] of the challenges they ran into along the way in implementing those operational triumphs and how they overcame those challenges.

We’ll talk a little bit about hyper automation, so ai, RPA, that kind of thing. we’ll talk about KPIs and measuring operational excellence, and then we’ll wrap it up a little bit with some of the lessons. These guys have learned that they’re gonna share with you so you don’t have to learn them the hard way like they did.

So let’s set it up with this past and present kind of thing. So we’re gonna talk in a specific way down the road a little bit about what you’re doing with AI and RPA and scripting and all that kind of good stuff. I just wanna set the stage a little bit just to, to begin by kinda asking if you look at where you are in terms of [00:29:00] the operational effectiveness of your service desk today versus where it was a couple of different years ago.

what’s the contrast look like? How much improvement have you seen? And I’ll start with you, Kobe, just because when we were talking about this last night, you had a very interesting measure of improvement success there.

Yeah. So my biggest measure of the improvement as we’ve matured operationally and made some adjustments and things like that.

Is I’m now comfortable going on vacation and leaving my phone in the room. Yes, I’ll check it in the evenings just in case I miss something from a client if they reached out directly to me. But I don’t feel the need to take my phone with me and check it, every couple minutes to make sure that everything’s on fire.

Ton of work goes into achieving that milestone tools, people, processes the whole [00:30:00] thing. But it’s gotta be a good feeling. Dan, any thoughts on that?

Yeah. For us we are recent adopters to the Kase family. we switched last year to Autotask and VSAX. Hands down. it’s helped us with tracking SLAs and just ticket efficiency.

we were long time with a competitor just due to comfort level with it, but it got to a point where it was impacting our clients. And and they were requesting KPIs and SLAs, and now we’re able to do that.

All right. Roman? Yeah, similar situation. we were fairly new to the PSA as well, about a year and a half now since we acquired the Autotask.

And it’s been a game changer. we never really had a PSA before was called very elaborate email system, I like to call. It was literally, an email you could assign to a tech and then they work [00:31:00] it. The changes here are night and day, from a single pane of glass. I could see everything that’s going on.

tickets from tickets to the data RMM integration to it glue, integration to KPIs as mentioned. it just, again, it just gimme so much more visibility to things where before I didn’t have it.

Dan and Roman, you both mentioned KPIs, which is really one of my favorite things to talk about, but we’re gonna save that for a little bit later.

What I wanna ask our panelists is how do you define operational excellence today? And it doesn’t need to be re restrained to just the service desk or technical support or things like that, but how do you define operational excellence in general? And then how has your operational excellence improved over the last couple of years?

can you share,

start with you, Roman? Yeah. operational excellence [00:32:00] to me has being able to see. Where the ticket is at from beginning to end. So when the ticket was put in or request was put in, I want to know if I’m monitoring my text, I want to know who put it in, what time was put in and what’s going on.

Different stages of a ticket. Before it was very segmented with the other tools that we used. So yes, I knew ticket came in. I didn’t know what was being done to it. I didn’t really know who picked it up. Now with this new system, with audit tasks, PSA, I have alerts. I have kind of alerts going on. A ticket is received, I get an alert in team, somebody picks it up and get an alert.

A timer starts going right. So before, again, everything was so com segmented where ticketing was one system, [00:33:00] it glue was a different tab. Microsoft was a third tab and my texts were drowning in those tabs, whereas now it’s the single pane glass for me and for my texts to see everything in one place and at accordingly.

for me, it’s empowering other people to be able to make the changes or even just suggest the changes that help their workflows. the techs are the money driver, they’re the ones solving the customer issues and things like that. But creating a culture where people can come to you and say, Hey, I don’t think this is very efficient and accepting that.

And the answer might be no, this is the most efficient way to do it. But it might also not be, they, I’ve heard many times that the most dangerous words are, we’ve always done it this way. I tell my people all the time, come [00:34:00] tell me if you think something’s inefficient. You’re not gonna hurt my feelings.

we’ll look at it together. And that’s empowering people, whether we make the change or not. Then they’re more willing to share those ideas and they’re more willing to, take ownership in. Those changes and that, I think that is operational excellence because it makes a more powerful, cohesive team.

Dan, what’s your read?

Yeah, I definitely would echo that. we definitely have a next generation approach to management where we look for input versus the captain Kirk way of the captain’s kind of giving you orders. But yeah, I would definitely say for us it’s been providing proactive and as accurate support as possible.

Obviously there’s going to be mistakes made and lessons learned along the way, but you wanna minimize that and in doing so, being as efficient as possible. Ben,

you said Captain Kirk, [00:35:00] so just everybody in the audience. Captain Kirk or Picard? Shout it out. Best Captain Picard Kirk. Alright, rich.

We’ve settled that. It’s hard. Oh, okay. Kirk, by the way, was the Kirk I hear the fight music. If

let’s get into some specifics here now about how folks on the stage are actually automating processes in a way that really makes an impact. And I will start with you on this.

Roman you’re doing something interesting with Autotask and Teams To make sure that response times and SLAs get met. Tell folks a little bit about that.

Yeah. So basically I just figured a bunch of workflow rules and web hooks to kick off at certain times whenever I, whatever the automation calls for, right?

for example, with the example I provided earlier, need Ticket comes in, yes, it hits order tasks, but it also hits our teams channel [00:36:00] for that specific client. So we know right away that there’s a need ticket from that carding teams. My tech now press a button. Go right straight to order task without logging in, without opening tabs, without doing anything.

One, one click. if part ticket is sitting in the new queue, right? So the ticket is received, nobody looked at it, it’s past 15 minutes. Internally, we have a 15 minute first responses to life. If it’s past 15 minutes, same thing happens. That tech now, that, that channel rather now gets notified again, Hey, 15 minutes, what?

What’s going on? If a technician has it ticket sitting in their queue for longer than 30 minutes, they get private message on teams task with the automation set up, urging them to a, you still haven’t answered, you gotta catch with SLAs. So with that alone, I get, and me and [00:37:00] my personal watch at the desk, we get so much more visibility into what’s actually happening because again.

Dan, like you mentioned, servicing clients and reacting to clients is the most important thing. That’s what pays the bills, and that’s why they pay us to be their MSP. So if we are missing something, if things are falling through the cracks I wanna know about it and those automations gonna allow me to do that.

Dan, this concerns your R-M-M-V-S-A-X more than auto tasks. How are you using the automation in that platform to save time?

one of the biggest things that VSAX offers are workflows and for those who are familiar with it, know, but it would be like power automate in your Microsoft space.

Basically workflows of being able to identify just a stream of any process, whether it’s, a service or a task or an alert or [00:38:00] an email, and then conditions and criteria based on criticality. it’s been a game changer. we offer a best practice administration package where we maintain your servers, operating systems and patching and being able to automate that with the patching into VSEX and then for services it’s not just a matter of, Hey, is the service not running?

Start it. There’s dependent services on certain third party apps that require prerequisite services. So it goes through that chain of order. And so just being able to automate that, we’ve cut down hours with our BPA, our best practice administration service offering. And again, just doing being as efficient as we can with our service team’s time and efforts.

Okay, so we’ve talked PSA, we’ve talked to RMM. Let’s hit the third piece of the operational Excellence trifecta documentation. I’ll go to you Hoby on this one right here. and there [00:39:00] are two things I’d love for you to comment on. Tell folks a little bit about what you’re doing and what impact you’re seeing both with flexible assets and password injection.

I’ll start with the password injection, because that one’s the one that I know when it’s not working because they get loud. and it, I remember just a few years ago when that wasn’t there and having to, click over into it glue and go to the customer location and find the password and everything like that.

And it’s one of those, in, in hiking and camping, there’s ounces equals pounds, seconds, equals minutes. Those few seconds that it takes to find that password is extra time that you’re not fixing the problem. So having it right there in the debt arm m panel saves so much time. and then with flexible assets and within IT glue, it’s a [00:40:00] lot better for, in my opinion, for finding specific things for if this specific thing is broken.

If you haven’t documented as a flexible asset, you use all your related items, especially with the Smart Relate feature it’s very easy to say okay, this specific item is down right now. You click into the flexible asset and it’s, here’s all the documentation and there’s a potential, here’s all the connections and everything like that.

So those flexible assets I think are the best option because. I think some people try to teach, treat it glue search like Google. And it’s not Google. I know that might surprise some people, but it is not Google. so having a good structure to your documentation, but also using those flexible assets.

I, I just think it’s faster.

So audience, how many of you are concerned about the balance between too much automation, maybe [00:41:00] impacting customer experience? Say I, So Kobe last night at dinner, I’m gonna pick on you again and then I’m gonna get Roman and Dan’s thoughts on this. But that’s a real concern, right?

And you shared during dinner with Rich and I last night, that you’re actually putting together a Mastered’s thesis around this very subject. Can you expand on that?

Yeah. So it’s very near and dear to me because I love ai. It’s fascinating to me. but also I’m the director of a service desk and. It’s one of those situations where I think there has to be a balance for it.

I don’t think AI can truly, at least the way that we view it now, I don’t believe that AI can completely remove that human element to it, the empathy and things like that. And it’s not a unique problem to ai. You also see [00:42:00] it with, for example, you call a major company for some technical support, and the person you’re talking to is reading from a script.

Truthfully, I’ve had, I’ve interacted with some AI that’s a little bit more personable than some of those people. so there’s the human element to it, but it’s also a situation where there is a balance. For example, if a customer has self-service password reset, you shouldn’t be wasting a technician’s time calling that user and saying, here, go through these process, like this process right here.

So in those situations, I think an AI is a useful tool because it can say, like a chat bot for example, that Hey, I need to reset my password. It looks real quick, Hey, you have self-service password reset enabled. Do you want me to help you with that? And then it gives them the steps so that [00:43:00] they can do it themselves.

Ticket gets solved, customers taking care of very quickly, and you don’t have to waste a technician’s time when they could be focusing on a more complex issue.

Roman what are your thoughts around that balance and what are you thinking about how to strike that balance? Because like me, I get upset when I have to go through too much chat bot before I get to speak to somebody.

Like how many of you’re shouting into the thing? Agent. agent. try to get to somebody to speak with. What are your thoughts?

Oh, no, I pretty agree. there should be, there definitely should be a limit on whether you aware at this point. I don’t think AI can fully replace a service desk. You still need a human to think, right?

And I think like an agent, think like a robot, but think like [00:44:00] a. we do some automation with ai. For example, a ticket comes in for need Adobe help and I have Cooper Bots enabled where it searches at glue, it searches our documents for Adobe and it presents it to a tech on the right hand side.

Anything with Adobe related it presents. So that kind of AI is great. My feeling is AI should help not replace, and that’s what we’re trying to do. I’m not trying to replace us here. Trust me, the clients will know if they’re speaking to human or they’re speaking to bots. So we definitely don’t wanna replace, but we want to augment and but on top of our own knowledge, AI should help us not replace us.

We heard Kevin Rera this morning talk about augmenting, right? So that’s that augment, augmentation, not replacement, Dan.

Yeah, I would agree. Definitely. You want some human [00:45:00] oversight, I guess the whole 80 20 rule or maybe 90 10. we let AI. Do as much of the work as possible, but definitely wanna audit and review the data.

I also tell my guys, Hey, don’t just copy paste, make, add some personality to it that empathy to it. The client’s gonna know if it’s you or not. but yeah, definitely has. you want some human oversight and it can definitely do a lot of the heavy lifting, but I would say that 10, 20% we always want to review and authorize before you put your name stamp on it before something is sent out.

Okay. So this section of the conversation is about challenges and triumphs. We’ve mostly been talking about triumphs. Let’s talk about challenges and the biggest challenge that I imagine folks run into when they’re implementing the kind of changes you guys have been [00:46:00] discussing, which is getting the technicians bought in.

And and you have a great acronym, Kobe, for referring to summarizing this particular challenge. Tell folks what IDD is and how you deal with it.

IDD is, it’s different. Dam it.

Yep.

And it’s, I’ve gone through it before. we switched from ConnectWise to Autotask about 19 months ago.

It was different. I was not happy, especially because I was involved in the migration project and at that point I didn’t wanna see Autotask again in my life and I had to walk in the next day. again, and this kind of ties into what I was talking about earlier with empowering people, is when major changes happen, people don’t really want to, they want to come in, they want to have the familiarity so that they can do their job, take care of people, and go home.

so giving people [00:47:00] the ability to influence how things are done and understand why we do things the way that we do. And especially again, if something, if someone doesn’t think something’s efficient, listen to them. Take the time, listen to them, see if it does change it. I think that helps to reduce the IDD.

They’re part of the process instead of the Yep. the victim. The, of the process. Dan, what’s your favorite treatment for IDD?

Favorite treatment for IDD? It’s different. Damnit. we have an ongoing debate, whether it’s Cubs versus socks or iPhone versus Android. And when we had the same growing pains, ’cause we were a long time ConnectWise and, we had the switch and we had our naysayers.

so we said, hey and we heard it here at Dacon last year. it’s just like switching phones. The phone can make a phone call, it can text. You [00:48:00] just have to learn how to do it differently. And so in switching again if we want people to bring their criticism, but they can’t just like, just vomit and throw it at the table.

You also have to bring the some options for a solution to it. So we want to hear your feedback, but you need to be part of the resolution. So don’t just complain about it. Help be part of the team that’s gonna figure out how do we get across this challenge. So that’s how I would say we deal with IDD

Ramen.

Yeah, same story. definitely we switched to order fast about a year and a half ago, and we didn’t have a PSA, so yeah, it was very different. they were used to email looking client and just hit reply and, put it in and all of a sudden there’s this new PSA [00:49:00] and half of the things that they’re now able to do.

They we didn’t have ability to do or see before. So as I’m implementing it, I’m getting all kinds of pushback, people, and I tell ’em, listen, this is not, I don’t wake up in the morning and say, how can I make your life harder today? There’s a method of my madness, there. And once they understood the end goal, right now, everyth, you could see everything in one place.

You could answer a ticket, you could see it glue, you could see all these integrations where before you don’t even have it. Yes, it’s different. There’s so much more stuff you could do with it, Plus, every week I had sessions with my team where they used the product for a week. We used order tasks for a week, and I had a special channel where they [00:50:00] all kind of copy paste the issues they ran into and thoughts, any ideas.

And on Fridays we would all get together, review. And the takeaways from that are brought to the our auto implementation team. And together we molded the product to fit our needs, but also make it work. And I think that’s very important. You don’t just throw it out there, hey, use it. You have to evolve with the product, make the product you center and of grow, mold yourself to the product a little bit, but mostly make the product work.

So I’m gonna borrow IDD, thanks for sharing that with us. Like Star Trek, the original series fans know that the next generation is just, it’s different. Dammit. Like callback. Like callback. Alright. So let’s talk a little bit about AI and RPA. So harnessing hyper automation. Roman, you brought up Cooper copilot, so [00:51:00] I want to talk a little bit about how you’re using Cooper copilot and IT Glue starting with you Roman, and then going down to you and Dan and let’s get your thoughts around how you’re using the Ticket summarization feature and other aspects that are making a real difference for your teams.

Roman, Kobe and Dan. We’re good. Roman.

Yeah. let’s forward tickets summary feature. I haven’t been using it since it came out and then all of a sudden we hired this new tech. Their job is just to review monitoring alerts and I started seeing that this person is using it and it’s using it a lot.

And I looked at it and it’s really neat, like I started using it more and more. Now imagine there’s a ticket that goes back and forth. Sometimes it’s to get lasts up, a couple dates. Reading all of that, [00:52:00] I’m like, all right, I wanna know what happened quickly, and I want to see in one click it, it does it for me.

It really summarizes the ticket, and it could continue on if there’s more stuff. You click the button again, it does it, and it kinda brings in all the relevant points as far as automation with data or a memo. Just give you a, a clean example. For example, we get a lot of requests to install, say, AutoCast per client.

And now I automated it. So I have a procedure automation in data RMM and in Cooper copilot, I wrote the different keywords. If ticket contains words, install Bluebeam, install AutoCAD, install whatever, it goes to that RMM and it pushes the install most of the time before, even before my text pick up a ticket has been done.

same thing with internet issues. it [00:53:00] does a speed test, it adds it to the ticket, to the notes. If the internet is out, for example, I’m using it glue flexible assets to pull in ISP information, right? The ticket, so the decorator knows who to call, who to contact. So yeah, I think it takes me more time to actually figure out what I want to automate than automating it.

And that’s a good problem to have,

for me, the smart ticket summary has been a game changer, especially because usually by the time a ticket’s coming to me, there’s a million time entries on it. And instead of me having to scroll through the ticket and find it, and especially I have system notes active so that I can see what my workflows are doing on top of that.

So there could be 150 entries on a ticket by the time I’m getting involved [00:54:00] with it. So being able to hit that button at the top and it spit out a summary real quick, and I’ve got my technicians telling me like, this is what’s going on. And then the summary, it’s okay, let’s try this. things like that.

It helps to, I, I think it helps to speed the process up and I’ve started seeing my techs use it quite a bit. and then the other big one that I’m excited about, and we’re starting to adopt it more as the SOP generator, because I am a I love documentation. it’s tough though, especially when you have, high volume of tickets.

You’ve got critical issues coming up, things like that. It’s very easy to get distracted. You’ll sit there and working through something, oh, I need to write a document on this. And then you close that time entry and you’re onto the [00:55:00] next thing and you never come back. you mean? you never come back.

so the smart SOP generator’s been nice because, I go and go do a basic task, I just click that button, hit start, do the thing that I’m doing, two more button clicks and I’ve got a document and a completed ticket. So those two have definitely been, I think, the biggest ones for us.

And what would you add?

So I hope I’m not gonna get kicked out of the conference. We have not really leveraged the Cooper copilot, so I hope I get to attend the rest of the week. and that’s due to the Captain Picard approach of receiving feedback that it didn’t, the text didn’t like the the communication aspect of Autotask in terms of they liked communicating with their clients with Outlook.

And so what we decided was using Outlook, they were [00:56:00] always to copy the support DL or email so that it, the tickets would get updated, obviously the ticket number and the subject, and then whatever they wanted to write. what we do is we leverage copilot and copilot helps generate, does the same thing, summarizes and so forth.

And then but by always copying the support email and ticket number auto tasks gets updated. That’s how we’ve been able to use AI for our ticket summaries,

extra points for weaving Picard. Appreciate that. Picard fans. I’m tracking.

Dan, I’m gonna keep it with you. moving beyond summarization a little bit, you’re doing you’re using AI to accelerate scripting.

so tell folks a little bit about what you’re doing and the impact you’re seeing from that.

Yeah, as we all know, PowerShell can do almost anything in Windows. And just equipping our team with the tools that they need, whether [00:57:00] it’s Che EBT we ask them to please show us that you’re using.

The product. So by using chat GBT, and then when they run out of their free minutes, they’re like, okay, they’re actually using it for it, not planning their trip to New York next weekend. and so by then providing them a license copy, they’re able to leverage AI to develop those scripts.

And as, as we know with ai it’s gonna be more accurate, so there’s less chance of error in developing those scripts. And it’s just adaptive and just being able to talk through it. Okay, no, it’s this operating system or this version. and so there’s been less errors and there’s more efficient with their time in executing those tasks or requests.

so that’s how it’s been a game changer for us.

So one of the toughest roles on a service desk is the [00:58:00] service dispatch function, right? You got somebody there that’s the air traffic controller, trying to make sure the birds all get to the gates, moving birds around and making sure that we’re maintaining our SLAs.

So Kobe, how are you using the ticket routing function in auto tasks to help improve your operational efficiency and take some of that burden off of your dispatch folks?

So one of the first things is, I’ve talked about empowering people a couple of times listening to the feedback. when she’s overwhelmed, she’ll tell me.

And when that happens we start looking in to see what can we do to help with the flow and things like that. and it’s because of that. I, at this point, the ticket flow is more hers than mine. and I’ll call her out for it. But it’s finding simple things. e everyone talks about automating repetitive tasks, [00:59:00] the mundane tasks, everything like that.

There is no reason that she needs to manually move a ticket from level one to level two. If a level one tech looks at it and they need to escalate the ticket, she doesn’t need to see that. She just needs to see that the ticket’s available to assign to somebody. So I built a workflow so that if a level one Tech puts, puts the ticket into escalation requested, it moves and it’s, it goes into scheduling or required, it pops up on her dashboard and she assigns it to somebody.

and it’s the same for two to three and three to four. doing things like that, just removing the need for people to. Perform some of those tasks, allows her then to focus on other things. Again, as the seconds equals minutes, the extra couple seconds that she’s not having to [01:00:00] manually move tickets means that she can go focus on other things.

She can focus on the dashboards that she’s built that show, tickets are approaching SLA break and things like that so that she can then focus on actual problems. And, if she needs to manually move a ticket, it’s because it’s an emergency. So by removing her from the non-emergency stuff, it’s increased efficiency.

And that’s, the SLAs will kill you. So that’s a huge thing.

Dan I’m gonna come back to you ’cause we’re talking a lot about ticketing and scripting and and help desk specific work, but there are other operational processes that AI can impact as well. you and I were talking about some things you’re doing with AI just around specking products and services for your customers.

So talk a little bit about what you’re doing there.

Yeah, so just whenever a we sometimes [01:01:00] get feedback from our clients that they’re looking into a product or they, we’re sent a free stake invite and overheard a product. And so they’re always asking us, Hey we, We’re just at a lunch and they reference this product.

Can you tell us how this compares to, the service that you’re offering us? And just as easy as putting in, how does this product compare with this product A to product B? AI just tells you those differences. And again, the whole 80 20 rule it’s, it does most of the research.

For then, for us to just take that information, adjust it and tweak it accordingly so that it actually sounds like it’s coming from us. But I would say the time savings, I would say anything from what used to take an hour is now down to 20 minutes to respond to those requests versus, before, [01:02:00] I don’t know about you guys, but I’d sit on an email, I’d let it sit for a while and then come back to it and it literally, an hour goes by and it’s, and then the response you get is, thanks.

So 20 minutes versus, over an hour of time is a huge time saver.

Roman, quickly before we move on a, any interesting uses of AI that we haven’t covered yet that you’ve been experimenting with?

scripting is a big part of it, but I’m also, there’s the process scripting, but also this trend of white coding is coming out where, they create a script, they have no idea what’s in it, and if it breaks.

They don’t know why. And then, you have to go back to the drawing board. I’m all for it. And again, I used to, quick example is, I used to create scripts [01:03:00] for simple things like log into each tenet and 365 and change MFA enable to, from disabled to enable, for example.

And that took me Google and I would Google and I have different tabs, open copy, paste, run Now, it’ss literally done in seconds. But again, if you don’t know what you’re doing I always look over the code. I wanna make sure it doesn’t do more than what I requested. And some people abuse it, where, hey, write me a script, copy, paste, run, things happen.

And they don’t know how it happened, why it happened. And the main thing is, the most important thing is they don’t know how to fix it because they didn’t write the code. So yes, there’s, I guess there should be boundaries on using AI to code of course. And there should be a human element, human eyes always revealed.

So gonna [01:04:00] go back to this balance between AI and human interaction with and customers, at some point in the future, AI is probably going to have the ability to perform many, if not all, of the workflow functions of a level one or a tier one technician. if I asked you guys to think maybe two, three years in the future, do you feel like AI could replace an L one technician?

Would you then. Categorize your L one tickets differently to leverage the use of AI for maybe a subset of L one and then feel comfortable doing that? Or if not, what percentage of comfort would you feel you could potentially leverage AI on an L one or tier one type of a ticket?

Roman? Yeah, we just, like I said, a couple months ago, we just hired a person just to look at all monitoring alerts that we [01:05:00] get and we as the monitoring alerts and yeah, in a couple years I could see that his job would be defunct because there’s no reason why AI can’t look at the alert, verify what it is, contact the user.

Hey, you got travel activity, you’re in New York, but you’re also in Spain. That’s impossible. Are you travel? Is there a VPN, audit tasks could look at data or compared to aps. So ips are the same. Probably them close the ticket all of the day. Something that this person’s doing now could be very easily, a lot of it could be done now, but in the future, the, that outreach and the thought process most likely would be automated.

yeah, I could probably hand that also AI of you. I feel pretty comfortable with that.

Kobe, what’s your comfort level and expand on it?

So I definitely agree [01:06:00] on triaging. I joke sometimes about how, I’ve got, we have an operations analyst who triages tickets, but also does billing, but also does project management and things like that.

there’s a, that’s a very common thing in MSPs where one person does, four or five different jobs. So I always joke I want to get rid of Cindy, the Triager so that Cindy can just be an operations analyst or just be a project manager or something. Things like that. Yes, I think I’d be comfortable with it.

we’ve, smart Ticket Triage is a good start. there’s some things that we, I know that it’ll continue to develop. but my triage team’s already using it, so that’s already sped them up a little bit. But there are going to be certain tickets, I think that AI would be very difficult to handle.

such as, for example I saw up [01:07:00] on the board earlier it was talking about like a printer not working and AI is not really gonna be able to fix it if it’s unplugged, right? now it could potentially walk the user through Hey, can you do this. But that’s where you get that human element where I’d rather a person tell me to do that than a robot.

plus I am not entirely sold on sentiment analysis. On AI because it’s hard enough for a human to understand what a human’s saying over text. especially people who don’t use emotion when they’re texting. ’cause I don’t. so it’s also one of those situations where sometimes hearing a human voice is a differentiator when you’re upset about something.

And I don’t see AI accomplishing that in the next couple years. I might be wrong ’cause it grows very quickly, but I don’t see it,

Dan. I think [01:08:00] it’s gonna come one that is time will tell, but I feel like even now the, you’re starting to see it with major companies. I made a purchase on a pretty popular distributor had an issue.

And before I used to have to chat with someone overseas. And the responses I could tell where AI and my issue was resolved right then and there. And that’s when it, it hit me then that this is going to be our MSP space. One day there’s gonna be some task that can be automated, but again, it’s gonna be speak to a service technician, when all else fails.

So I do see a reduction in some of those level one tasks being automated. but then again, always having that human oversight and ability to speak to someone’s always gonna be there. It’s like we offer multiple means of communication, but at the [01:09:00] end of the day some clients just have to pick up that phone.

They just need to speak to someone and their panic. and so you’re never, AI is never gonna replace that phone call.

So we’re talking about autonomous ai, somewhat related topic is trusting ai. I, is there anything any of you don’t fully trust AI to do right now? Maybe I’ll start with you co.

’cause you had a very specific example about customer satisfaction.

Yeah, like I already mentioned a second ago, sentiment analysis I’m not sold on. and it’s, one of the, one of the sources that I found I think it was Forbes that I was, when I was doing my research project it was like, at the time 86% of people would just rather talk to a person.

And they reported that it makes them upset when it’s a bot. Now again, there’s [01:10:00] a major difference between the AI that you’re interacting with nowadays versus the robot that answers the phone when you call Comcast that you end up screaming at within a couple minutes.

on, sorry.

But I think there’s going to be, I think there’s always gonna be some skepticism with it.

and again is, when you get into the A NI versus a GI versus a SI kind of thing obviously a SI is, we’re not even close to that one. I’m hoping I’m long in the ground by the time that happens. But even until we get to a GI, which I don’t think we’re close to that either, it can’t, there’s no emotion, there’s no empathy, there’s no anything like that.

And I believe that generates distrust. so that, I think that’s gonna be a severe limiting factor on it.

Roman, anything you don’t trust AI to do? [01:11:00]

Yeah, ever since ha AI came out a couple years ago now feels like every vendor has their own flavor. Zoom has ai, Adobe has some AI agent, box.com that might a copilot.

And a lot of these tools, if they’re not properly configured out of the box, they’re very dangerous. for example, Microsoft Copilot has access to all the information, SharePoint teams, anything, right? And people are just oh, I want to use Microsoft copilot approve. They don’t know that, but it’s not configured.

I could be looking at, Hey, what, if, let’s say Dan is our HR manager and he has documents in SharePoint, I could literally ask, Hey, how much was, Linda from accounting making last year? It’ll search it. It’ll pull it up unless there are these boundaries and configured directly. Some of these things, especially out of the box, are very dangerous.

So we have [01:12:00] to know when to use it and when to hold back and say, wait a minute, and that should. This tool should not have access to PII, for example, right? This tool should not have access to documents or teams messages. So yeah, there’s a fine line there, Dan.

for me, I guess if it’s something autonomous as like a a ticket closure notification or, take it open, I’m okay with that.

But if something is going out with my signature on it I just personally would like that human oversight and just, even if there’s nothing wrong with it, I just, because my name is on it, I would just like to see that response before it’s sent. rather than wasting zero seconds of it automatically responding to a party, it’s gonna take me at, Five seconds to look it over and just have that assurance that it has [01:13:00] my stamp of identity and approval on it before sending out. We have a CRM system in place that sends out meeting requests and, qbr, we call ’em Tbrs at our company. And those are always being sent out. And we always get responses like, I didn’t know you spoke so professional, Dan.

I usually app a qui or again socks versus cubs is a huge argument in Chicago. So I’m always, throwing my little jabs in there and so they always know when it’s not me.

And if it, if your name is on it, you don’t want anyone thinking you’re the one hallucinating as opposed the ai.

Okay. I’m gonna clear out here and we’re gonna talk about KPIs. Eric, this is you.

Yeah. So obviously we can’t measure improve, we can’t improve or manage things that we can’t measure now. Back in another lifetime before I dipped [01:14:00] my toe in the waters of building an IT company, becoming one of the first MSPs and selling that company later in the enterprise is where I grew up.

And I started at level one and worked my way up to very high level positions, C-T-O-C-I-O positions. And before I left, what I was doing was building out and managing the build out and deployment and turnover of service desk and call centers for Fortune 100 organizations. So you can imagine the playbooks of KPIs that you know are in my head that don’t necessarily translate all of them into an SMB focused MSP practice.

So I want to talk about MSP KPIs and what KPIs you all prioritize and analyze in order to measure your performance. And improve performance.

Roman,

starting with you.

Yep. So like I mentioned before we have this internal 15 minute SLA just to a [01:15:00] first respond, respond to a customer. And that does not include, order tasks, automated, it’s again has been received here, the ticket number.

We need a human to respond, say, Hey, we got it, call us up, it’s an emergency, yada, yada. So that to us is very important. And if that gets breached, there’s something going on. ’cause our customers are used to that quick response from us. So yes, we before orders has, we did see it before and I had to manually track it, by bring it to look at a time that happens now.

Our triage person, she has a dashboard and it’s there. It turns from green to red, from green to yellow to red or the other way around actually. And everything is seed. Then on Saturday, because I have a non exciting life, I guess I review all these tickets per a week. [01:16:00] So every morning I review the tickets, I look at the time entries, I see who billed what, and I know that all my techs did the same amount of work.

If I see a tech billing 38 hours and another one billing 12 hours, now I have to go and look what’s going on. Did they just simply forget to put in time? Did they build 15 minutes instead of an hour and a half? So now, so I it’s not automated yet because like I said, we haven’t been tracking KPIs before and this is fairly new to us, but I’m slowly getting there and I will hopefully automate a lot of it very soon, which is very possible with audit task.

So a follow on question, Roman. So is your SLAA response time SLA first response? First response? Is it first contact resolution or are you. So [01:17:00] like some MSPs will say when we let a client know that we’ve got their ticket, that’s a response, but not in my playbook. It’s a first contact when a technician actually touches the ticket or actually reaches out.

So that,

that’s how it is. So So when order tasks, when you put in ticket for us, order tasks sends that automated, your ticket has been received, there’s your number. That doesn’t count for us. That’s we have. We have with Ian picks it up, it goes from that unassigned new status. To assigned text name is on there.

Tech reaches out, their name is on there saying, Hey, here’s your ticket number ticket. If it’s an emergency, please call. If not, it’ll be working on your ticket. I’ll email you with all the questions, whatever they write. I have, we have a bunch of templates as well. But yeah, [01:18:00] an actual technician has to reach out within that

15 minutes to make it count.

So we know that SLAs are probably one of the most important KPIs we need to track. Toby, what else are you tracking?

The U utilization’s definitely a big one.

Kobe: And I appreciate that you said maybe he just didn’t put time in or maybe it was a 15 minute instead, I see sometimes where someone accidentally puts in a 12 hour time entry because they were working late at night and maybe they accidentally put 9:00 AM to, 2215 or something like that.

So that one’s a good one because I always default to giving them the benefit of the doubt. I don’t believe that anyone that I’m employing is staring at the wall for six hours a day. So that’s a huge one. And I track it across three different teams. ’cause I have the people who are in the office and then we have two on site teams and then triage time, and then for when we’re actually working on the issue.

Those are two important ones as [01:19:00] well. First touch resolution is one. That’s very important because that helps you. And I’m actually, I have a concept of a way to track escalations because those are good measures of improvement on your team. If you have a level one technician who is not escalating any tickets, they probably shouldn’t be a level one anymore.

Roman: Love it,

Kobe: Dan.

Dan: Same. So SLAs and utilization. So in our monthly contracts we actually have SLAs. ’cause one of our clauses is termination based on performance. And so we have to be able to provide that data that we’re meeting and exceeding those SLAs. When it comes to our clients, it’s SLAs.

And in terms of our staff, it’s definitely utilization. We do bonuses quarterly versus annual. And one of the major contributors to that is, is their utilization. We ask for 80%. So if someone’s hitting 80%, they’re definitely gonna get that quarterly bonus. So it [01:20:00] incentivizes them. And then also they’re not waiting 12 months for their annual bonus.

So those have been a little perk that we’ve done for our group.

Rich: Okay, final moments here. We’re gonna play the lightning round. I’m gonna give each one of you 30 seconds to share one lesson learned about operational excellence that everybody in this audience can benefit from. I’ll work my way up, starting with you, Ram,

Roman: Invest in the PSA if you don’t have one, and then learn how to use it, out of the box.

It was great. It works, but you have to customize and tailor it to your e with order tasks out of the box. We found that the email parser was just not there, so we use it. We bolted on a third party company that feeds directly into Autotask API and made it work for us. So it wasn’t for that. We probably wouldn’t be with order task, honestly speaking, ’cause out of the box again, you just didn’t do what we were doing and what we needed to do.

Yeah. PSA is the heart of the MSP. Everything feeds into that [01:21:00] and customize the heck out of it, make it work for you, not the other way around. Kobe,

Rich: one last thing.

Kobe: Don’t give up. You may have an idea for something. In fact the idea I just brought up a second ago, I went to St. Start playing with it and realized very quickly that what I initially envisioned is not possible.

And that’s okay because I took some time and thought about it and I thought, okay, I have another way that I can do this. There may be a way to do what you’re attempting to accomplish. It may just not be blatantly obvious and it might not work the way you initially think. It, it does. Don’t give up.

Look into it again. Look at it from a different angle. Maybe ask somebody else. Empower a team member. Said it again. Empower a team member. Ask them Dan. Final words.

Dan: For those hesitant about ai I would say do your research. Again, there’s lots of free tools out there and they have their limits, but that at least gets you acclimated to it and trusted.

And even the paid versions I think is gonna have that return on investment. But again, [01:22:00] for us, we have our staff use the free kind of show they’re using it before we do that next licensed investment in them. But yeah. Don’t get left behind. The buses is leaving the station and they high, and you wanna make sure you have a seat ’cause it’s coming or it’s leaving in this case.

Rich: Alright. Awesome stuff guys. Folks, what’s here for Roman, Kobe and Dan,

four of the podcast audience. We’re gonna take a quick break now. Eric and I will come back on the other side, share some final thoughts about this very interesting panel discussion here. Have a little fun. Wrap up the show, stick around. We will be right back.

And welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast. And we are back in real time with you folks. What you were watching and listening to moments ago was recorded a week ago at Kaseya DattoCon Conference. Very interesting, [01:23:00] very informative conversation with MSPs. One of the reasons I go and I think a lot of MSPs go to conferences like DattoCon is to hear about the next new thing, the big new tech technologies and new products and new features and new revenue generating ideas.

This session for me, among other things, was just a good reminder that if you’re in the audience at an event like Autotask community live it is a useful way to spend an hour just to get into some of the blocking and tackling of what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis. To get a little bit more efficient here, a little bit more efficient there to manage your team so that they are open-minded about and will buy into change.

A lot of really just good practical stuff that we talked about there. And I just know from what we were seeing here from the audience that they were lapping it up.

Erick: Yeah. And it’s, you’re right, rich. And you and I have been to a lot of conferences. When I was in Ms.

P, [01:24:00] the, sometimes the most value I got from going to conferences was interacting with other MSPs or sitting in insects where MSPs were covering. How to overcome some of these pains and challenges and things like that. And that made it all worthwhile. Those relationships, those hallway conversations, we’ve talked on the show a lot about this camaraderie and spirit of sharing that we appreciate and enjoy in the MSP community.

And that has a very high value and, it served me in so many other capacity. Not saying that there wasn’t value from some of the other sessions and things like that, but these were va were valuable from the perspective of when I had a business problem or a, I wanted to bounce something off of somebody.

Way after the conference I had built a lot of these really close relationships and friendships where I could just ping folks and get ’em on a call. Just like I would get on a call when MSBs would, wanna collaborate with me. I [01:25:00] think, those experiences and those. Relationships and connections that are built through these conferences are definitely one of the most valuable things that you can get other than, bringing your team to get training and learning about m and a and all these other things.

But it’s the folks that you can rely on to help you out of trouble. Or even Hey, do you know somebody that can deliver this liquor control system to, a client of ours that we have no idea what that is? And, it always paid off in space.

Rich: Yeah. And that just is a useful reminder to thank Kobe, Dan and Roman one last time.

They got up on a stage in front of a lot of peers and they we’re successful MSPs. Here are some things that make us successful, have at it, and that very much is in the spirit consistent with that spirit of community and comradery that we so enjoy in the world of managed services.

And that folks leaves us with time for just one last thing and Eric, do you like cats? [01:26:00]

Erick: We own two cats here. Rich. I deal with them. The rest of my family likes cats. I I deal with them.

Rich: Then I’m gonna suggest your next vacation destination should probably not be the island of Cyprus.

Because they have an interesting problem going on there apparently, which is an overpopulation of cats. They like, just as a as a country, as a people. They like cats a lot there. And so they, they have a very cat friendly atmosphere. And what that has resulted in is a population, estimated population of approximately 1 million cats.

Now that sounds like a lot of cats. It, it’ll sound like a lot of cats even more once you consider that the population of Cyprus is about a million people. So there, there are approximately one, there is approximately one cat per person in Cyprus. Now, I was curious. Eric. So I went out and I did a little research and I did a little math here.

So if you look at a million [01:27:00] cats in Cyprus and you look at the land mass of Cyprus, it comes out to approximately 280 cats per square mile. Is that a big number, a small number? If you go to the US we have, by the best estimates I could find, there are somewhere between 70 and 80 million cats here in the United States of America.

If you do the division there, you’ll look at our landmass. We’ve got something more like 30 cats per square mile. So it just gives the cat density in Cyprus is enormous compared to what we’re used to here in the us. Great news. If you love cats, not so great news. If you’re okay with them, like you,

Erick: two thoughts.

I know chewy.com is now doing lots and lots of cat marketing in Cyprus and number two. Since the time it took you to share this human interest Eline interest story, there’s now 2 million

Rich: cats in Cyprus. I think that is not a bad bet. Yeah, [01:28:00] probably. Folks, that is all the time we’ve got for you this week on M MSP Chat.

Thank you so much for joining us. We’ll, we’re gonna be back again in a week’s time, but another episode for you. Until then, I will simply remind you that this is both a video and an audio podcast, which means that if you are listening to us right now, but you’d like to check us out on video, go to YouTube, look up MSP chat if you’re watching us on YouTube, but you are into audio podcast too, go to Google, apple, Spotify, wherever it is, you get your audio podcast.

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Here at Channel Mastered. Channel Mastered we do podcasts for folks, but that is just a tiny fraction of what we do. We are all about helping vendors grow, build, optimize MSP channels. And if you wanna learn more about all the different ways we do that, go to [01:29:00] www.channel Mastered.com. Channel Mastered has a sister organization that is MSP Mastered, that’s Eric working one-on-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’ll see you in a week. Until then, we remind you once again that yes, simply can’t spell channel. Without MSP.