Episode 98: AI is Coming for Us

Join Erick and Rich for a whirlwind visit to two tech conferences. First up is Ingram Micro’s ONE show, where they discuss the new definition of distribution in the age of AI as well as tactics for raising rates in response to rising costs without alienating your clients. Then, in a conversation recorded live at ConnectWise’s IT Nation 2025 conference, they bring you a conversation about the future of AI-powered service delivery with Lee Silverstone of service desk automation vendor zofiQ. And finally, one last thing: Forget about the World Series. The winner-take-all contest to watch is the Parallel Parking Championship.

Discussed in this episode:

zofiQ Takes on the Hyperautomation Big Boys

Yes, There’s a Parallel Parking Championship, and I Was a Contender

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. Bo Westoff Lady. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the MSP Chat podcast. Your weekly visit was two talking heads, talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need to make it dig and manage services. My name is Rich Freeman. I’m chief analyst of Channel Mastered, the organization responsible for the show.

I’m joined side by side, physically and in person this week by your other co-host, our CEO and chief strategist. His name is Erick Simpson. Erick, you tell me where are we? We are

Erick: in Baltimore, Maryland, rich at Ingram 1 20, 25.

Rich: Yes, indeed we are. And we’re gonna dive right in to the story of the week, which will be coming out of the show.

But tell folks a little bit [00:01:00] about the show and what’s been going on here.

Erick: Well, rich it’s been a jam packed couple of days, morning to night with lots of meetings, lots of presentations, lots of sessions by Ingram introducing some great new services for partners, their growth strategies and ways for that Ingram can help their partners grow and compete in the evolving.

Economy.

Rich: Now, I will preview this for folks here. One of the things we did yesterday at the show is record not one, but two interviews with Ingram executives Jennifer Anaya, who is essentially their global head of marketing. And Cheryl Rang who runs the technology solutions organization. The video for those interviews is not gonna be available for us in time for us to give you those interviews during the episode that you are listening to or watching right now.

They’re coming up in a future episode of the show. So we will be revisiting the Ingram Micro One [00:02:00] Conference an episode or two from now. But we do have a very good interview for you coming up on the show that Eric and I will be recording a day or two from now at the IT Nation Connect event that we are also going to be attending.

This is the first basically of multiple road warrior editions of the MSP Chat podcast. I love that. The Road Warrior Edition

Erick: Jing.

Rich: Let’s dive into our story of the week here. And I’ll just tell the audience right out. We are at the show. The show is happening right now, so you are getting this about as raw as it can be gotten.

I am working through for channel, my blog, my thoughts about what’s been happening at this show and its significance. Lemme try to set it up for you. This way. We know we’re in the era of ai. And we know we are on the cusp of the era of Agentic ai. Folks might remember back in June when Pax eight had its big conference and made its big announcement, which was essentially that they’re gonna be creating this agent marketplace and their vision of the future and the role of a company, of a [00:03:00] distributor or marketplace in the.

Era of Eant AI is that partners are going to need not just what they needed before the software and the hardware to deliver solutions. They’re going to need agents because the solutions that end users want are gonna combine hardware and software and agents. So PAX eight is building a marketplace where their partners can get all this stuff, basically weave it all together into a solution.

Shortly before this show began Ingram told folks like myself and the media what they were gonna be announcing here. And one of the announcements was that they were going to be rolling out officially their first agent. And I assumed this was going to be the first step down that same kind of PAX eight road that essentially Ingram sees a role for itself as a source of agents to vendors who are, or partners rather, who are gonna be building ag agentic solutions.

Not so much. And yet what they did announce here is indicative of where they see their differentiator coming. They did [00:04:00] announce an agent. It’s called the sales Briefing Assistant. Like everything else that they do, it’s part of their X Vantage platform. It’s it basically draws on this massive and I was gonna call it a data lake ocean.

But Sanji Savu, who runs platforms for Ingram, called it the Data Ocean this morning during presentation four petabytes of data, massive amounts of data. And it’s studying those data that data right now. What it’s doing is enable Ingram’s own people to understand you as a partner well enough to see where your next solution is, where your next vendor relationship is, and help you grow your business and help Ingram grow its business at some point very soon.

I, that’s, I was given the words very soon, they’re going to release that agent for use by their partners to do essentially the same thing on their own. And what this is really pointing to is where Ingram sees its differ differentiation in the marketplace, the [00:05:00] sophistication, the depth of its data, and especially of its ai.

In a sense Eric, as I was interviewing Igram executives, that this show, what they were telling me is that distribution as we know it. Is dead distribution. And the, you know what, the folks at PAX eight would sign on to this probably as well, distribution was born in the day when hardware and software came in boxes.

It sat in a warehouse. You ordered it from the warehouse, you got some financing, and that’s what you needed from a partner, right? At that point, what you need now in an era where you can go direct to LLMs, you can go direct to vendors, you can go to, to direct to the hardware manufacturers, but what you really need is a company that has relationships with all of those different organizations and can help you aggregate and orchestrate all that stuff.

Now, there are plenty of other distributors in the marketplace who have those same relationships. The thing that Ingram has and has been investing in now for three years and continues to invest [00:06:00] in pretty heavily, is both that data ocean and the AI that is taking advantage of it. And that is, they believe is going to give them a much richer, more sophisticated way of helping you identify opportunities, build and grow your business.

And it’s, it’s difficult for me in my position to compare their data and their AI to what is available from other distributors and marketplaces out there. But I will simply say, as somebody who covers all of those companies, the sophistication, the amount of time it’s hard not to come away from any Ingram event.

I go to any headquarters visit I do in Irvine without really feeling like. They are out there, they do have a bit of an advantage. They got started down this road earlier than some of the other companies out there. And what they’re banking on is that the value of that investment is what’s going to set them up [00:07:00] for the next era of their business, which is a post distribution era.

They haven’t settled on a word to describe exactly what they are, but they are perfectly comfortable telling me we’re not a distributor, we are a platform company, and it’s gonna be the platform X vantage that people are partnering with and that sets us apart.

Erick: So Rich, what you’re describing the kind of a legacy distribution model that we are now claiming is dead.

We, there’s a term for it that I hear all the time. It was pick, pack, and ship, right? Pick, pack, and ship. You described it. So what’s the new name for what we’re seeing? ’cause the different. Platforms and marketplaces are doing it a little bit differently. Have we coined one yet? Or is that something you and have to put our heads together on?

Rich: Yeah we’ll have to do this for them. ’cause I did actually ask Sanje Sahu, who’s been on this show before back in the spring, what are you guys calling yourself? So you’re telling me you’re not a distributor, right? So what are you [00:08:00] exactly. And he said, we’re, we haven’t really settled in on a name.

We’re not fixated on the name. It’s the idea that’s more important to us. And I had put aggregator out there. Orchestrator comes up. It’s all about the connections that they can facilitate for you and simplify for you and pull together. It’s about the intelligence that they can wrap around those connections so that those connections actually become useful and profit generating for you.

Yeah, I don’t know what the word is, but I best feel like we need one. It’s a little bit of a hybrid

Erick: of a couple of different. Kind of models that we’re talking about on the show lately. We’ll put some thought to it and maybe we will introduce something soon, but yeah, we need a name for it.

Rich: It would make it easier basically, if nothing else for us to talk about on the podcaster. Eric we grabbed a moment’s time here during a pause at the Ingram Micro One event. So you and I actually didn’t get a chance to talk about what your tip of the week is, which means I get to learn after that question along with our audience.

What do you got?

Erick: Here it comes [00:09:00] raw from conversations I’m having more and more with MSPs these days, rich, about the way that they’re structuring their agreements and the old way of getting clients to sign up for longer term agreements. Rich was basically to guarantee them a flat rate for a.

You saw it here live folks. That’s exactly how it happens when we’re shooting Packed house. Yeah, packed house. Packed house here. Where, and you probably hear a lot of background noise, but let me get back to the tip of the week. There, there was, and we did this as well, rich, and in our MSP, we said if you sign on for two or three years, we will give you better pricing over that period of time.

Guess what, rich, that doesn’t work anymore because customers expect there to be a flat fee that they pay for three years. While the rising costs of doing business for MSPs the increased fees that they’re paying for third party services, the cost of labor is going up. Heck, tariffs, [00:10:00] you name it.

All of this stuff is now creating this tremendous amount of pressure and stress for MSPs that are locked into these agreements and are having a hard time having an awkward conversations with clients that get them to true up. Couple of thoughts. First of all. One way that we could address some of this stuff is to break our flat fee agreements into a flat fee for some specific services that we’re gonna do on the regular, and then a portion of it on consumption based services.

So if we’re adding more licenses, if the cost of services go up or the consumption costs change, we can vary it that way. I am not as cozy with that idea, rich as I am with just having a clause in your agreement that lets the client know that it, the agreement will be reviewed annually no matter how long the term of the agreement is to make necessary adjustments to make certain that we are covering the cost of delivering these [00:11:00] services to clients.

And that rich takes a consultative sales approach, letting clients know that, hey. Things that will go beyond our control, like tariffs and things like that. Raise all of our costs. I’m sure you, Mr. And Mrs. Client also have to deal with rising costs and pass those on to your clients from time to time.

We’re just gonna put a clause in here. Sometimes we can tie to CPI Rich, sometimes we can tie it to not to exceed X percent of the agreement. That still puts us at a little bit of a risk. I think the best approach is simply to let clients know that we’re gonna work together as a team and we’re gonna identify and come to an agreement as to what makes sense moving forward.

And this is also one of the reasons why I like having three tiers of bundles of services that we deliver to clients, rich. Because now if a client says, you know what? That’s a little bit too rich for our blood. If we have a lower tier of service that can deliver, you know exactly what the MSP feels every client should get [00:12:00] when they sign up for them, we can have a conversation with clients.

That sounds like this. Mr. And Mrs. Client, let’s do this. Let’s just move you into a lower tier of service for 90 days or so, and then we’ll come back and re and revisit this. Because my guess is those clients are gonna feel the, they’re gonna feel the missing benefit of perhaps additional features or Rich, a better SLA from a response time perspective for some of their services.

But at least that gives the MSP and the client a better, more collaborative way to look at services as both of them doing their part to make sure that we both succeed. In the changing economy.

Rich: So in the example you just provided you suggest to the client, we’re gonna move you into this more affordable plan for 90 days.

So to be clear, ’cause one way to maybe do what you’re talking about, and this might be exactly what you’re talking about, is to essentially build the true up into the QBR. Correct. So once a quarter we’re gonna have a [00:13:00] strategic conversation and review about what we’ve been doing and what you need.

We’re gonna adjust our prices. Maybe up, maybe down, depending on your requirements. What I like about that a lot, Eric. The thing that is potentially risky for the MSP if they’re making price adjustments a lot, is that it denies the end user some element of predictability and, budget ability around what they’re gonna spend.

But if you tell them, if it’s just the way you do business, exactly the way most MSPs now are probably telling their clients somewhere in a Mastered services agreement or so on. We adjust our prices once a year. We adjust our prices once a quarter at the same at, and that’s just. Part of the plan that becomes predictable and the exact pricing adjustments, you can’t talk about in advance, but you can very much, let them know that, like you said, we’re gonna come at this at a team and come up with an answer that works for you and works for us.

And but there is that element of predictability and [00:14:00] that they know every 90 days this is gonna be part of our strategic conversation with you.

Erick: Yeah, I’d love to review comments, folks, so if you have some thoughts post ’em in the comments and we’ll respond. I think maybe 90 days might scare a few clients away that aren’t quite as strategic or mature.

There’s always the, the the northern, the the, the guiding light for MSPs that says, oh, we wanna have, a clients that are always growing and are strategic and we can have these conversations. The fact of the matter is Rich, we have a clients, we have B clients, we have C, D and F customers too.

So I think having something in the agreement that allows a review, I think, a year annually might be comfortable. And that way when you do true up, if you have to true up a lot, maybe you can catch up a little bit. I’m not sure if 90 days gives a business owner a sense of okay, enough predictability for them to say yes to it.

But [00:15:00] I’d love to hear the comments from our viewers and let’s respond appropriately.

Rich: Lemme ask you this quickly before we move on. If I was an MSP, considering what you’re proposing here, and I said I’m gonna do the 90 day approach, but just to overcome that, hesitation that the fear people might have about their prices going way up 90 days from when they sign the deal, right?

Can you potentially build something into agreement that says crisis will go up to X percent?

Erick: Yeah. Put a cap on it, put some guardrails around it. And that’s the idea around like an annual review. Sure you can do a 90 day not to exceed, but then, some clients might think, oh, you’re just gonna wait another 90 days and do another not to exceed and trim me up that way.

I’m, I’m always thinking of how to minimize the argument and the friction. But I’d love to see what partners, are trying out there and maybe we can, do a, do an update on this very. Thorny topic in a upcoming podcast

Rich: episode. So chime in [00:16:00] folks.

Let’s hear what you’re thinking, what you’re doing, if you have a different approach to this problem. If you are experiencing this problem but experimenting with an answer to it, we’d love to hear what you think. In the meantime Eric and I are going to take a break. When we come back, we will magically be transported to Orlando, Florida, where we will be at the ConnectWise IT Nation Connect event for one of a few podcast interviews.

We’re gonna be recording there that you’ll be enjoying on the show and coming weeks. Stick around. We will be right back with you in Florida momentarily.

And welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast, our spotlight interview segment, coming to you live from the ConnectWise IT Nation Connect Event here in Orlando, Florida. As you can imagine AI and managed services is very much on the agenda here at this event, and so we are pleased to be joined by somebody whose [00:17:00] entire business is built around that use case and the technology for addressing it.

His name is Lee Silverstone and he is from a startup named Zoic. Thank you very much for having me. Excited to

Lee: be here.

Erick: Welcome, Lee. We’re excited to have you here because you know what, we haven’t heard enough about ai these la this last year at all, so I’m looking forward to today’s conversation.

Rich: Yeah, likewise. So we’ve spoken once upon a time before. Yes. A lot of startup stories and managed services and even specifically in automation software for MSP, a lot of the, these stories begin with an MSP identifying a need, creating a tool for internal use. Productizing it. That is not your story at all.

No. So in the context of helping people in our audience get to know you, tell them a little bit about your background and how you wound up creating Zoic.

Lee: Yeah like you said I don’t come from the channel. I feel very fortunate that I found the space and that the channel has embraced us and taught me everything [00:18:00] I know about the space.

I come from a traditional software background. I this is my third time building a software company. I built an education technology platform right out of university and Canadian. And and then I built an iot machine learning company in the fitness vertical. So I built hardware and software to basically make gym equipment smart and push that data to the cloud right around the time of mobile becoming really big and wearables becoming really big.

And I then went and worked for a VC firm. I was doing early stage software investing based for a firm based in San Francisco and Los Angeles, primarily seed series A companies. And I’m a terrible vc. I love building product. I love working with people to solve problems.

And while I didn’t come from the space I spent about 18 months looking at different verticals to go build agent AI solutions. And I feel very fortunate that I saw these very early versions of, at the time, not even called AI agents, what AI was doing to software companies and [00:19:00] what I thought it was gonna do to service this companies in particular.

And I became enamored with that, and that’s what I wanted to go do. And my co-founder and I started looking at in-house it and building in the ServiceNow ecosystem. We met our third co-founder, Chris who, had helped build scale computing in Canada, who was a system architect, a countrywide system architect for at CDW.

And he said, have you guys ever heard about these things called MSPs? And and the rest was history. And, we started, I just started to reach out to MSPs on LinkedIn and ask for advice. And the welcoming nature of people in this space to talk to us, to teach us to let us sit side by side and watch what they do on a daily basis was so refreshing to me coming from other verticals that I was completely enamored on day one.

And it has been a two and a half year journey that I have loved every step of the way since then.

Erick: It’s an amazing community, right? They’re experiencing that. Before we move forward though, I’ve gotta say Lee. You’ve built [00:20:00] multiple companies. You are in the VC space. Yes. But you have no gray hair. How is that even possible?

I’m growing new gray hairs as we speak right now.

Lee: I turn 34 next week, so I’m expecting that the gray hair start coming from that. And if the camera zooms in really close, you’ll see some of them. I promise they’re there.

Rich: I remember telling you one of the things when you first discovered MSPs, one of the things that made you think this actually is a place to build is that there’s a lot of data.

Yes. And data is what makes AI and adapt. Before we get further into this topic tell us a little bit about Zoic, what Zoic does. Tell us about the role data plays in that and in particular because this is not just ai, but agentic ai, how agentic autonomous is it? Yeah, it’s a really

Lee: great question.

So data is at the core of everything we do and. What xFi is an AI automation platform for MSPs, right? That’s the tagline of what it’s, but that can mean a lot of different [00:21:00] things to a lot of different people. Our entire lens on the world is that thinking about AI as a function of a workflow builder is the wrong way to think about it.

The significant unlock of ai, the significant unlock of traditional machine learning that powers AI of all these components is that if you do it really well you can flip the script on its head. And instead of saying you need people to go, describe to an AI what sort of workflow you wanted to go execute on, you should actually allow the AI to build the workflows on its own.

And what that means for customers is that instead of spending six months, eight months a year, banging their head against a wall, trying to build workflows with an LLM, somewhere in the middle, you can actually let the AI build itself. And that’s the core differentiator. Zoic, is that at the core of what we build as a learning model that can build the workflows based upon historical data.

And so you made this great point, rich, which is data is at the core of everything we do. And if you want to build a truly agentic platform, data needs to be at the core of what you [00:22:00] do because it is to a certain extent, a traditional machine learning problem that you’re trying to solve for. You’re trying to teach a robot without a physical body how to execute task.

And I believe that MSPs disproportionately more than maybe any industry in the world, are sitting on a gold mine dating. I have this slide in a deck that I love to show MSPs when I do dinner with them. And I ask them, how much da, how much value do you think you’re sitting on in, in your PSA in terms of data?

People say $10,000, $50,000, a hundred thousand dollars. And I say, every single person in the room, I think is sitting on between a hundred thousand to $10 million worth of data in their PSA. And the reason why I say that is if you had to hire teams of people to go build all these labeled data sets that you need to train AI right there, literally.

Multi-billion dollar companies that are built around labeling data. MSPs are sitting on a treasure trove of label data. But until zoic, you couldn’t actually unlock the value in that [00:23:00] data. You could write workflows, but you couldn’t actually make use of that data to train an ai. So that’s a significant differentiator.

And you asked another good question, which I think is super important, which is how agentic is this, right? For me, the hallmark of an AI agent has th three things to it in my mind. I think we still don’t necessarily have a great definition of what it means to build an agentic platform, and everyone wants to call what they’re doing, agentic.

But for me, there’s three hallmarks to look at. So one can the AI agents train on historical data? That’s the first thing. Are they learning from labeled data sets And yes, xFi learns from their data sets. Two, can they take autonomous action? So it’s not you prompting it, it’s not giving someone a script.

It is actually being able to take autonomous action. And then the third component is that the agent can make use of tools, right? The RMM is a tool, the PSA is a tool. Meraki is a tool. It can make use of those tools and it can leverage a combination of deterministic and non-deterministic [00:24:00] logic that it has built based upon those data sets to go make use of those tools.

And SoFi does all three of those, three, those things for our customers to onboard really quickly and then take over entire functions of their business, starting with triage and dispatch all the way through to solving tickets, leveraging tools like, the RMM and NDI. So that’s how we think about the platform.

You

Erick: know, Lee, I’d never thought about the value of an MSP’s data. As a former MS P, I always valued the, the customer’s data and how we were protecting. Now of course, MSPs, put your. Mask on first. The cabin loses pressure so you can help others. Like we, we maintain our stuff.

But yeah, the way you’ve just described it is very interesting. It’s wow, putting, dollarizing the value of that MSP’s data, but not from a, what if you lost the data, but what can you do? Can you do with the data? The data? That is

Lee: very interesting. 100%. And you can really think about this as, if you had to hire a room full of people [00:25:00] to label data pairs, not, let’s even just put to the side what you can do with that data to build proactivity in your business, to train AI agents to solve things before they come become tickets.

And that’s a whole other rabbit hole to go down, which is that as MSP is mature, leveraging ai, you’ll see less and less tickets because issues will be solved at the edge, allowing the Ms. P to scale exactly or efficiently and profitably. And ev even if you don’t think about any of those things, and all you think about is how much would I have to pay someone to go label five years worth of ticket data?

How many people would that take and how many hours and how much would that cost you? And even at that base layer, you are sitting on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars of dating.

Erick: So again, looking at it from the MSP’s point of view, MSPs I would say in general, have confidence and trust issues, but especially with their data.

Sure. And especially with their customer information. Yeah. And things like that. [00:26:00] So in the world of ai Yeah. I know that there’s excitement there’s hope, but there’s also this risk averse perspective that MSPs have to Sure. Operate under. From your perspective, with your organization, what would you tell these MSPs Right?

To get them to look at things maybe a little bit differently, be a little bit open to try to get past that, that confidence and trust barrier. Yeah.

Lee: I think, so the first thing I would say that the biggest risk is not doing something with it.

Erick: Right?

Lee: That’s actually the biggest existential risk to your business.

The second thing I would say is you do need to find mature partners to work with. Look we’re a very new vendor in this space. I recognize that, but we bring a pedigree to this myself, my co-founders, the rest of our team that we have built and scaled products in the past. And I think it’s very important to work with vendors who understand compliance, security, take those things very seriously.

And, some of our first customers were MSPs and [00:27:00] people who were building, who have CMMC compliant departments in their organization. And so for us, security and data protection was core to what we did from the beginning. Now, I think to me, at the end of the day, AI is software.

At the end of the day, it is just a new way of interacting with a computer. But at the end of the day, it’s software. And so it’s, to me, not that different than working, picking a software vendor. The one caveat that I give people and look at Zoic, every single one of our customers has their own environment.

It’s multi te. We never cross pollinate data. We host all of our own models. No data ever goes to open AI or to Microsoft or anything. We host everything ourselves. And I think that’s really important to be able to ask those types of questions of vendors. And if they can’t give you those types of answers, if they’re not going down the route of soc two, if they’re not doing those things, is generally speaking a red flag.

But again, I always bring it back to, the biggest risk is not doing anything. You just gotta be [00:28:00] smart in the way that you pick the vendors and people you are.

Erick: Yeah, I like what you said. I’m feeling a little bit better about it.

Lee: A little bit better. Hopefully. Hopefully one Ms. P at a time.

Rich: Right?

Rich. So to help the MSPs in our audience get a more tangible grip. On the ROI Yeah. Story here. So talk a little bit about some of the things that partners either are doing or can do Yeah. With that data, how they can put it to work. The business impact Yeah. That, that can have has and how that compares to the cost.

Lee: Yeah. We are not another tool that we want to be a cost center for MSPs. I think there are a lot of point solution AI products in this space that are cool, but it’s pretty impossible for the m ever to show the ROI for us, because of our brand promise to our MSP partners. People are measuring RL on day one.

We set ourselves up for that on day one because we know we can deliver against it. And we think it’s only fair that they measure us against that because that’s how you build a [00:29:00] long-term company and that has staying power. There are four immediate use cases that MSPs are using s for today.

So the first one is. There’s one that everyone talks about, but it’s triage and dispatch. We, I was talking to our team this morning. We had a customer literally this week that went under an hour and a half had is AI agents in their environment trained and took over the entire triage and dispatch process from end to end in an hour and a half.

That’s very powerful. The ROI there is very extinct. The second use case that we see is that after the AI triage and dispatch is done we have AI agents that can take over and actually solve tickets from end to end. So let’s take the example of a, printer down issue, right? In the traditional world that had to get triaged assigned to a human had to go get the device information, and then they had to go press a bunch of buttons to run a script, and maybe it took 25 minutes or 30 minutes, whatever the case was.

We have a, a ninja RMM agent, for example, that could run those scripting on the device and actually go remediate that from end to end. [00:30:00] And so our top line number right now in our best performing MSP is about 25% of their ticket volume on a weekly basis is being handled entirely autonomously by AI a.

And then the third component is what we basically do when we can’t solve a ticket. So if we can’t solve a ticket entirely autonomously, we hand that off to a human. And you go human in the loop, HIL, right? And when you go human in the loop, we have an assistant that’s directly integrates into ConnectWise, manage, into Autotask, into other PSAs.

And as the technician is working in the ticket, it pulls them in all the relevant information they need. So it links the KB articles they need, it shows them how this ticket was solved. Historically, it tells ’em about blind spots. They might have that maybe they breached SLA with this customer already and they don’t even know it.

Or maybe that this customer has opened 15 of the same ticket in the past hour. And there’s actually an underlying issue that because they’re only looking at a ticket, they’re being myopic. And so that’s the third. And then the fourth is is analytic. So one of the things that customers came to us and said is exactly [00:31:00] this.

We have all this data, what do we do with it? And so we built these AI agents for them that allow them to comb their data on a weekly or daily basis. And it basically writes reports for them on what they need to go execute and maybe where their blind spots are more at a management level.

So those are the four immediate use cases for us. Where we’re really focused is on agents that solve tickets, that is our North Star. We believe that we can get to 75 and 80% and above of tickets that are being handled manually today should be handled by AI agents. And the role of someone who functions in an MSP is going to drastically change from reading a ticket and running a script to providing a really high level of service and guidance to their end customers.

And just very quickly, how long do you think it takes you to get to 80%? I wanna say about 24 months. I think we’ll be there in 24 months. But I think that’s potentially a conservative estimate depending on some of these significant unlocks we get in our product.

Erick: I’m gonna say less than 24 months.[00:32:00]

Okay. That’s ’cause the pace and the speed at which these tools are evolving and the, the intelligence that’s being gathered from the data itself. Like we can’t comprehend it because we’re thinking how a human would do it. Like you said, those four use cases really resonate with me.

And, you made me think a little bit about, it’s not only that we’re lightning the load from those technicians so they can be much more strategically valuable to the organization and the clients and things like that. But I also, just started thinking about, those tickets don’t have to wait in a queue Yes.

For the next technician,

Lee: as a matter of fact, sorry to interrupt. Yeah. They don’t even need to be tickets. Yeah. They don’t even ever need to exist as a ticket. Okay. Blowers more tickets. Go ahead, sir. So tickets today for MSPs are an indication that work needs to get done and there is something wrong, right?

Tickets in the future should be a historical record of what was done. It should not, you [00:33:00] should not have to wait for a ticket to arise, to go proactively do work. And what AI agents are really good at doing is reading telemetry data. Like I can’t read telemetry data, you guys can’t read.

It’s too much of it. But AI agents are really good at that. And so instead of having this, the old way of thinking, or maybe the traditional way of thinking, let’s call it where you’re waiting for an incident to go execute on it we actually think about these as as just actions.

You’re just taking actions before there is even a ticket, right? And so I think it, it is a reframing of what MSPs are doing for their customers. And the ticket still exists, but the ticket is a record versus a trigger.

Erick: So you were talking a minute ago, Lee, about, we don’t wanna be a cost center, we wanna be a profit center.

We’re, here’s, so here’s one from me to you. So when I’m looking at working with MSPs and helping them, optimize their incident management process, optimize the way that their PSA is configured, integrate [00:34:00] stuff and then adding the cost of labor for every level of technician so that I can get a cost per ticket at the end of the day.

Yeah.

All of the tickets that ZOIC is addressing.

Yes.

Other than the cost of Sufi.

Yes.

Our complete profit Yes. To the Ms. P. Yeah. So those don’t cause zero. Yes. They are

Lee: profiting the SP and you can scale it infinitely. And what I really believe is that m the MSP of the future is looks like a software margin busy.

I think that’s why you see so much private equity money funneling into the space of buying MSPs because they know what I need, which is that the MSP of the future very much looks like a software margin business, and they want to buy those businesses. So more like a SaaS valuation, that SaaS valuation, not services valuations.

Yes. Yeah. And what I would layer onto that too is that one of the things I hear from MSPs all the time, look, people are nervous about ai. I understand that. I [00:35:00] recognize this. This is probably the most, I don’t know if you’ll agree with me, but I think this is the most fundamental change and shift in technology that we’ve seen since the advent of the computer.

I truly believe that people could tell me I’m wrong, but that’s my lens and belief of the world. But what MSPs think that’s gonna do is erode their margins. They think that it is going to make them less value. I disagree entirely. There’s something called Jevons Paradox Rich, like this is something I’m sure that you’re, you read about all the time.

I think you’re gonna hear that talked about ad nauseum in the next few months. Jevons Paradox is based on a British economist lens on the world about the steam engine and what it would do to the price of coal.

Erick: Yeah.

Lee: And basically they said as steam engines become more efficient, the price of coal is gonna fall through the floor.

The shipping industry is gonna die because you’re gonna have these super efficient ships that can shoot things when you’ve got a more efficient steam engine. Guess what happened? The shipping industry exploded and there was a huge demand for it. And I think the same exact thing is going to happen to MSPs.

AI is the steam engine that allows them to [00:36:00] infinitely scale their business. And there is gonna be so much pull from MSPs to help the SMBs of the world deploy AI in their environment to continue to grow their businesses because technology at the core of what everyone is doing. And so I really do believe that is not only, to your point, an increase in margin for them.

I also think they’re gonna just see an increase in overall poll of end customers looking for MSP services. That scale I was talking about a hundred.

Erick: So you’re entering the market at a, not a early phase, right? In having to build, we talked a little bit about, all kidding aside this trust factor with aspect with MSPs.

Because AI now in the Ms P world, this driving innovation and the tools that the MSPs are using without them even asking for, they’re seeing the value and they’re adopting it, as they see fit. But are you now seeing an easier conversation with MSPs now that are, they’re willing to just double [00:37:00] down and adopt Zoic more readily than you may have expected before?

Lee: Yeah, I think so. I actually would say the number one reason why people adopt our product is because they talk to someone else that uses our product. That’s the number one thing. I still think people are very AI skeptical, but when they talk to a partner of ours who. Now this is the real deal and this is making a significant impact to our business.

This is the core of our service desk today that’s the best sales team we have. So I still get a ton of pushback from people. Okay. Just checking but having said that I was talking to one of our partners about this today. This time last year was like my first ever really MSP conference.

We spent 18 months building the product in stealth with a bunch of MSP partners, but we weren’t going to conferences. We were just heads down learning about their businesses, learning about their problems, talking to them every day. So last year, this time was my first big conference I went to.

And I remember talking to people and people told told me to my face, I was an idiot. People literally this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. AI is a [00:38:00] fad. It’s not going anywhere. Nah. Those same people today have changed their tone and to their credit to I think people’s credit, you learn new information, you change your opinion about the world, that’s totally fine. So for sure, people’s opinions have changed. The difference now is that everything is ai, right? So everything in the market is ai. And so you have an opposite problem, which is that there’s so much noise, it’s hard for MSPs to find a signal in that noise.

And so just slapping AI on a product that’s 10 years old and saying, now it’s ai I’m not a huge fan of that, but we see a lot. That’s the problem, right?

Erick: There’s bad AI out there too. Yeah. Rich.

Rich: So you, you can answer this question in terms of zoic or just more generically. Sure. It, it’s a given given that this technology is new and applying it within a managed services practice is a new thing.

It’s a given. It’s not gonna all just go swimmingly. Of course not. So what kinds of hurdles, challenges, mistakes, lessons learned should people in our [00:39:00] audience be prepared for and either know to

Lee: prepare for or avoid? Yeah. It’s a really good question. I think you’re a hundred percent right.

It’s not, never, nothing’s ever gonna go perfect. Nothing ever goes perfect with traditional software, right? And so I think some of the pitfalls I would I would caution people against, I see this all the time, is over zealously wanting to build things themselves. That’s one thing I caution people against.

I see this all the time and time again. Oh, we have someone on our team who knows AI and it’s great, they know how to use chat, GPT, awesome. And they are like, we’re gonna go build this ourselves. And they end up wasting six months, eight months, nine months, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousand dollars trying to build something that never actually gets to, to where it’s supposed to get to.

If you think about building any kind of company, you need a lot of infrastructure around it to actually, go make it work properly. So that’s the first one. The second thing, again, I’ll come back to I think the biggest mistake is a not adopting ai. I, I go to sometimes these sales calls and we’ll do a, a [00:40:00] webinar with the team or whatever it is.

And I’ll tell the CEO before the call we’ll have a private conversation. I’ll say, look, I guarantee you, but there are people in your organization exposing PII data into a publicly available model and you don’t know about. And they’ll say, no, we’ve trained our team. They’re never gonna do that.

And I go to the room and I’m my crew here post case tickets into chat GPT, and half the room raises their hand. And so I think the other thing that I’d be really concerned about is like, what they call, shadow A, I think John Hardin from Vic came up with that line. I love that line.

This shadow AI line shadow guy is a real thing. You should be, very cognizant of the teams, putting data into publicly available models. That’s very scary. And then the third thing I would say is when people have expectations that do not match reality. When people think that AI is magic, it feels like magic, right?

It but people expect on day one, we’re gonna turn this on and our entire business is gonna change overnight. Now for some of our partners, that does happen today. It really does. But I think there are others where it’s like, Hey, we need to spend some time [00:41:00] to configure this and to figure exactly for our environment.

And guess what? AI is gonna make mistakes. It’s going to make mistakes always. It will make mistakes. What else makes mistakes? Humans, people make mistakes. And so I think treating AI as an employee of your organization and giving it the ability to operate and learn is fantastic. But you also have to understand that just like a human AI is gonna make mistakes too, and it’s great.

You can yell at it and it doesn’t have very many feelings. Maybe it’ll come back for us later, but yeah that’s how I think about it. So those are the things I typically caution people.

Erick: Yeah. That governance over what’s happening. You don’t just let it run rampant, you have to monitor it and feed it.

Yeah. For all walk run, right? Yeah. Yeah. One of my favorite phrases. Attributed to the grape author Isaac Asmar, love Isaac about computers. He said, I don’t fear computers. I fear the lack of them. Yeah. I’m starting to feel that way a little bit about AI because I use it, every religiously single all the time.

And in a very, a secure [00:42:00] method. Sure, of course. So for partners that have, options like ConnectWise and other PSA platforms that are integrating some of these features and functionality into their platforms, what, what would you say to them when having the discussion about ZO Fake versus some of these other solutions that are Yeah.

Lee: That’s okay. I always tell that, I always tell them to just go look at the product. I’m like that the best sales team in the world for me is the competitor’s Prada. Look, announcing roadmaps is great. Announcing things you’re going to do in the future is great. What matters is delivering product to customers today, and I have this conversation with people all the time.

Kaseya said they’re gonna do this, and ConnectWise said they’re gonna do this, and this company said they’re gonna do this. And I’m like, that’s fantastic, but have they done it? And the answer is no. It’s really hard. It’s really hard to build these things. This is not simple products. You can get to 60% of the way there overnight.

You can’t do the last [00:43:00] 40% overnight. That’s very challenging. And that’s core IPO what we do. And so I always tell people that they should look around, they should look at other offerings, they should talk to people and ask them. My experience about that. I believe we will always win on a mirror.

And you know what maybe one day the bigger incumbents will get there. But I will always be two or three years ahead of them.

Rich: So one of the interesting things about zoic and tools like it to me is you could imagine. Companies like you are saying, you’re not gonna need an RMM again. You’re not gonna yeah, we’re gonna automate.

But typically the model is more that you’re wrapping around. Yes. This tool stack that an MSP has in place.

Lee: Yeah. And that’s our lens on the world. Like we don’t, we do not believe that the PSA and RMM are gonna disappear. I don’t like that lens on the world, to be honest with you.

I think the features and functionalities that are valuable in those products will change and morph over time, but I don’t think that they’re gonna disappear. You still need a system of record. You still need a place to store data. You [00:44:00] still need a place for agents to write notes. You still need a way to take actions against an endpoint and run scripts.

Like I don’t think those things are going anywhere, anytime soon. I think the way that they operate together, the way that they’re integrated, the way that they make use of data will change. And that’s our lens on the world is that we believe each one of these things is, are a tool and that you should give the agents access to those tools.

But we don’t think for a long time we’re gonna replace those. I think even just from a if you just think about it from a purely business perspective, there are a lot of PSAs that have shown up in the markets and so we’re gonna be an AI native PSA, right? Getting someone to switch off of a PSA is a very heavy lift.

It’s a really difficult prospect and they have a ton of data locked away in there. Why force them to move away? Something that’s working for them when you can augment and improve that existing infrastructure and systems and so that, that’s our lens on the world. Maybe we’re right, maybe we’re wrong, but we do not want to displace or replace those tools.

We want to make them more efficient.

Rich: And so [00:45:00] does your tool change the relationship an MSP has with those tools though? Just in terms of I’m in them less often or,

Lee: I think in the long run, yes, I think it changes. I don’t think it makes them be in the tools less often. I think it makes the relationship with those tools different and I think it maybe changes how they interact with those tools from a UI perspective.

From a UI perspective, they may use them less. And I’ll give you an example of this. We have our AI assistant that goes inside the PSA, right? And so because it’s plugged into the RMM, if you want to go get device information on the ticket you’re working on you can do that in natural language in zoa, and you don’t have to tab switch.

It doesn’t mean you’re using the RMM less. It just means that the UI is different. And so that’s our lens.

Erick: So yeah the RMM is the collector of the telemetry. Yeah. You need that to feed. Yeah. So let me ask you this question, Lee, a little off script here, but. I love it. I love a good off script moment.

Yeah. So does Rich. Nancy [00:46:00] loves when I just jump off the, here we go, ladies and gentlemen. Oh no it’s, so a lot of vendors are delivering services, solutions, products, applications, platforms, selling two MSPs. Zoic is selling two MSPs. Yes. MSPs see AI as, okay, great. I’m using it now, but how can I monetize this?

Yeah. To the ai to, can I re, can I resell it or deliver some value to my end customer? So is there an idea, a whiteboard notation that you guys are talking about behind the scenes that says, Hey, this is what we’re gonna do now, but there is a phase where we can help, really help the MSP money with Zic.

Lee: So look, we get asked that by our existing partners, which is this is amazing. How would I know? How do, like, how do I go sell this to our customers? I’m thinking of one MSP in [00:47:00] particular. I talked about this recently where they’re like, this is amazing. We work with really large banks and they need an AI assistant to plug into all their data.

How do I go do that for them? And so we are prepared for that eventuality. We do think that it will be something we help MSPs do in the near future. We think about these things all the time. I maybe have a bit of a divisive opinion on it. Sure. But my opinion is that if you are an MSP and you haven’t been building RPA style workflows for your end customer and haven’t really understood their processes and don’t have the setup and infrastructure to do that, you’re gonna have an equally hard time deploying AI and agent AI in their environments.

So that’s the first part. The second part to it is I don’t know yet how much of this for MS P or for MSPN customers for SMBs is gonna get solved at the application layer versus the services layer. And I don’t think anyone really knows that yet. So if you think about, our customer wants a workflow to automate [00:48:00] email into billing, right?

Some, so I’ll take something simple, how much of that is gonna get actually solved at the application layer of the billing software they’re already using today? And now the Ms. P has made this huge investment in building out a workflow that becomes irrelevant, in the near future. And and I think that I, the data would show, or maybe anecdotes would show, we’ve seen a lot of MSPs that got super excited about selling AI services in their customers only to have it to fall a little bit short, if I’m being totally honest with you.

And so for us, we are focused on doing it in the business first versus on having them res. The last point I’ll add there is if you’re gonna go resell something, you should probably know it really well for your business too. So you might as well already start by doing it for yourself.

Erick: Quick follow up then.

So in, in your roadmap then, ’cause MSPs, as you help them become more strategically valuable, what freeing up this time and they’re having more of these strategic conversations, taking that conversation from the server room to the boardroom, if you’ll, yes,

Lee: a hundred percent.

Erick: Will you be able to reflect [00:49:00] data that these MSPs can use in A-V-C-I-O-V-C-T-O 100 CO capacity and have really strategic conversations and road mapping with their clients.

Lee: We have MSPs doing that today already. Using zoic as a tool for preparing QBR for preparing these boardroom meetings that is already happening in platform today.

Rich: So one of the thing we’re here at at IT Nation Connect. One of the interesting things about the keynotes last night to me. Is that a lot of that, there, there was this sort of theme to a lot of what people were talking about, which is that AI is this very, it’s very new.

It’s moving incredibly rapidly. Yes. It’s unfamiliar to everybody here, and yet people have to make decisions with potentially long term implicate, knowing that two months from now Yeah. Everything could be different. Yeah, exactly. It’s a dice roll. A hundred percent. And this is obviously a challenge for the MSPs in our audience.

I’m actually curious, how do you Yeah. In terms of what you do, how do you deal with it?

Lee: Yeah, it’s, [00:50:00] you know what? Honestly, it’s just par for the course, I think for everyone. So I would say for the MSPs, choosing vendors who you think are going to continually build and change, and if, adapt to the changing environments is really important.

That’s back to my comment of don’t build it in-house because the thing that you build now, you’re gonna have to throw out and rebuild again. For us we do that all the time. We do it. We have destroyed the core parts of our product time and time again and rebuilt them from the ground up.

As models change, as compute power changes, as new techniques and research papers come out onto the market that show us different and varying techniques, you have to be willing to say, Hey, that’s great. This is the approach we took, but we’re only gonna get so far with that. Let’s throw it out and start again.

And if you’re not willing to do that, you are gonna have a very bad time. Again, not even just an AI and just traditional software, things are moving so fast right now. You have to be nimble and quick to be able to execute against that. And so I was talking with [00:51:00] someone this about the other day and they said, how, what do your split cycles look like?

Did you do a month? Did do two months? You do two weeks? I was like, we operate on a one a week cycle and we have a rule. And so we have a rule book at SoFi that we have, and one of the rules is if you think something is taking too long. When, or you think something is the wrong approach, you cannot get sucked into the sunken cost fallacy.

It is okay to take something and throw it out and start again. To exactly your point, because things are moving so fast.

Erick: You use the term nimble, agile comes to mind. So an organization like Zoic that is more nimble and agile, what does that say in the conversation with MSPs that you’re talking to about some of these larger, let’s say much larger established brands that yes, it’s not their core competency, but they’re adding it on because what you just described, like weak sprints.

Lee: Yeah.

Erick: That’s pretty unheard of.

Lee: Yeah. Again, I think that’s the advantage of being not an incumbent in this space and being a smaller business as you can move [00:52:00] quick. And I think one of our partners used this word to describe, I say, he said, you are a most dynamic vendor we’ve ever worked with. And I think being dynamic, especially now, is so important.

And that’s why I don’t worry too much about the larger players and them announcing roadmap items because I know it’s gonna take them so long to get there that by the time they get there, the technology will have already fundamentally changed and shifted, and they’re not prepared to deal with that kind of development environment.

And it’s just a byproduct of being a large organization. If we were 500 people, we’d have the same issue too.

Rich: So just to wrap up quickly the absolute least interesting question I’ll ask for people in the audience who are curious though, how does the pricing work on,

Lee: on something?

Yeah. So we actually think about pricing against the same way an MSP would hire headcounts. We actually charge on a per agent basis. So if you say, Hey, we want to hire a suite of agents that are gonna go do all of our knock tickets, what we basically look at it as, how many tickets would you be able to handle as if you were hiring a human for that role?

But hey, Zoic works 24 7, [00:53:00] 365. And so you get this ton of added benefit and hey, we want to go hire an AI agent, do triage and dispatch. Okay, great. That you’re gonna, go higher as a role. I not super sold on consumption model based pricing. I’m not super sold on outcome-based pricing yet, in particular, I find outcome-based pricing’s really hard for finance departments to wrap their heads around.

And so we started that way and we had a bunch of CFOs, these big MSPs be like, so what is the bill on a monthly basis? And I was like we don’t know yet. And it just kept, yeah, we just kept getting stuck there. And so we said, let’s bring it back to a more traditional pricing model where it’s, as if you’re hiring an employee, they just, have a, they’re just, they’re called zoic and your PSA, but they operate as if it was a hiring an employee.

So that’s how we think about it today, and that will probably evolve as the business and market evolves.

Rich: So it, it occurs to me, we’ve gone through this entire interview and for the folks who are listening on audio, just so you know, Zoic is spelled Z-O-F-I-Q? That is correct. The URL is zoic dot. Okay.

And so if folks in the Auto Rights wanna get in touch with you and to learn more about the product, they go to your website to get in touch with you, you go

Lee: to the [00:54:00] website or you can email me directly, [email protected] and I will answer anyone who ever emails me. Phenomenal. Lee

Rich: Silverstone from Zoic.

Thank you very much for joining us on the show. Thank you so much for having me. Folks, Eric and I are gonna take a quick break here. When you come back on the other side, we’re gonna share some final thoughts about this conversation with Lee. Have a little fun wrap up the show, stick around. We’ll be right back.

And welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast, which is a special treat for folks who are enjoying the show on YouTube. So part one of the show was recorded at the Ingram Micro Event. One particular location. Park two and three, were at the IT nation. So if you’re watching us on video you don’t really know segment to segment where the heck we’re gonna be, but we’re back.

We’re in Orlando now for this final segment of this episode. And we do thank Lee [00:55:00] Silverstone for joining us on the show. Super interesting conversation. It’s interesting, Eric you are a mind reader. You went exactly to where I was going towards the end of that conversation in terms of the contrast, and it is really a contrast between the agility of an ai, native AI automation only startup, and a much bigger company with a lot of products to think about and a lot of partners to think about.

It’s just harder for companies like that to move as fast as a zoic can, and it reminds me, so obviously they, they talk a ton about AI for MSPs at Kaseya, they talk a ton about AI for MSPs at ConnectWise, they really don’t at enable, and I asked them about this about six months ago. What’s your thinking about that?

And what they told me specifically is, we know we cannot move. We cannot be as agile as these younger companies can. And so our strategy is to partner really well with, they didn’t name Zoic specifically, but [00:56:00] companies like Zoic. And so it’s just it’s an issue and it doesn’t lend itself to easy answers for an MSP in terms of do you standardize with the same company you’re getting the rest of your stack from or go with a nimble company that’s gonna be on the cutting edge of the technology.

But it, it is definitely a dynamic you gotta consider.

Erick: And, it’s noble and refreshing that enable, doesn’t do What we’ve seen others in the industry do is tack on a.ai on the end of a product or something and then go, oh, we’ve got AI too. They’re being very clear about their approach to it and honest with their partners in the channel, which is great because, rich MSPs, they have a lot of options in who they choose to partner with, to, help grow their businesses and in the best relationships.

This is no secret, but both parties need to care about each other’s growth and, that relationship. It’s just [00:57:00] when I was at MSP. I had some clients that could care less how good we were doing as a company, right? Those were the CDNF customers. And then we had some clients that were like, oh yeah, we wanna make sure that, are you sure that’s enough?

Like I would have some clients tell me like, are you sure you’re charging us enough? And then, after I said, oh yeah, we’re good. A couple times I started to rethinking and go, you know what, tell me a little bit more about what you’re concerned about. And they go, let me go back and talk with my team.

And then maybe, we made a little bit of crisis, but I learned working with them just like they learned working with us, how to be better together and take care of each other that way. And so the parallel for partnering with vendors and MSPs, it goes the same way, right? There has to be that symbiotic relationship where, and we’ve heard this on a couple of interviews recently, that rising tide lifts all boats mentality.

Yeah, I really appreciated the conversation with Lee and what struck me [00:58:00] another differentiation was his background and his team’s background didn’t even start in this space. So they’re building a product from a best practices based perspective, from a software development organization, and don’t have, like these legacy tools or legacy group think that some larger vendors that are trying to, catch up and deliver some of these services, do plus they’re nimble and agile and, I think that’s, I think that’s a differentiator and a value driver for MSPs trying to choose who they wanna partner with.

Rich: And it’s interesting ’cause we are seeing more and more of that. We had the co-founders of Titan on the show, not too many weeks ago and AI native MSP roll up. And they are not from the IT world or the services world. They’re from the AI world. They’re from Silicon Valley and highly recognized [00:59:00] organizations in Silicon

Erick: Valley.

Exactly right. That pedigree is impressive.

Rich: Yeah. So I, and it’s, the managed services market has reached a point where it’s become a magnet for very talented, very smart people from all over who are coming in with their expertise. And that says

Erick: something about the MSP market that this, vertical that we’re in, this community that we’re in.

Who knew right? When we were trying to figure stuff out, making tools to make tools back in the old days, that it would be become this leader. Of technology that attracts so much attention, not only from vendors and distributors, but from, investors and PE firms that see the potential for growth and the value that MSPs and everybody in that whole supply chain driving solutions to not only SMB customers, but now mid-market enterprise or co-managed it.

This evolution that you and I have, been watching for many years has really, [01:00:00] taken such a dramatic growth and influence position in the economy that I never thought about when I was just trying to close tickets with my team

Rich: back in the day. It has been a remarkable journey for sure.

And this is as appropriate a place as I can think of to be talking about that. ’cause ConnectWise is one of those companies that was there at at the creation. Yeah. Incredible story. And it leaves us with time for just one last thing, ladies and gentlemen. Eric, how would you rate your parallel parking skills,

Erick: let’s just say Rich when they started installing rear view cameras and automobiles, I was very happy because yeah, I’m not that skilled at just using mirrors to back up and park in parallel spaces.

Rich: I would say pretty much the same thing of myself. Which means neither one of us is ever going to be a contestant. In the parallel parking championship contest? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, once a year in Pittsburgh [01:01:00] there is a contest where people can compete to be the world champion in parallel parking.

Now, I am looking at the formula that determines success and I really can’t quite make heads or tails of it. It’s basically time in seconds, times distance to the curb and centimeters divided by seven for some reason or other, that in an explained here, multiplied by a positive or negative equalizer depending on vehicle length.

I don’t really know, but people do compete for this. And and the time in seconds is a key variable there. The second place finisher with came in 18, 19 seconds and yeah, so I, I’m never gonna take this trophy home. It, I, and I don’t even know quite if I wanna sit down in the stands and watch this particular contest.

Erick: Rich I think that. The KPIs that MSPs measure are simpler than that. The second thought I have after reading that story is, boy, if we had to measure, the skills of our technicians being able to parallel park, especially in [01:02:00] very congested cities like New York and LA and things like that, probably wouldn’t be that pretty.

But the good news is, hopefully we’re delivering services from a more remote perspective and we’re doing, less truck rolls as we like to

Rich: say. Folks, that is all the time we’ve got for you this week on the MSP Chat podcast here. We’ll be back in another week’s time with another episode.

And who knows, maybe we’ll record the whole thing in one city. Let’s see. Only way to find out is to tune in next week. Until then, I will 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 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’re into audio podcast, go to Apple, Google, Spotify, wherever it is, you get your audio podcast ’cause you’re gonna find us there too. And wherever it is you find us, please subscribe, rate, review. It’s gonna help other people find and enjoy the show just like you do.

This show is produced by the great Russ Johns. It is edited by the also great Riley Simpson. They’re [01:03:00] part of the team with us here at Channel Mastered. They can of course create a podcast for you if you’d like them to. But there is so much more that we do for our clients at Channel Mastered, where we help vendors build, grow, design, optimize MSP channel programs.

You can learn of all about all of that. At our website, which is www.channel Mastered.com, channel Mastered has a sister organization called MSP Mastered. That’s Erick 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, please remember, you just can’t spell channel without [01:04:00] MSP.