Webinar - MSP Strategies for Success

MSPs face numerous challenges in growing and expanding their businesses. 

Watch this webinar featuring two successful MSPs: Hunter McFadden from GreenQube, based in Louisiana, and Mark Lamb from M3 Networks, based in the UK. The session was hosted by two of TitanHQ's MSP veterans, Marc Ludden, VP of NA Sales, and Eddie Monaghan, Sales Enablement Officer. 

Topics covered included:

• Key decisions that fuelled their MSP business growth
• The impact of industry consolidation on MSPs
• Best practices for structuring the sales side of your MSP business
• The importance of keeping your MSP business model simple
• And much more.

Discover how these two MSPs built their businesses from the ground up and gain practical tips you can implement immediately.

Learn from their experiences and discover how to elevate your business.

Key Takeaways:

• Boost Productivity: Learn strategies to grow your MSP business in a competitive market.
• Leverage Technology: Discover how to review and upgrade your IT stack to better serve your customers.
• Empower Your Business: Identify the right tools and solutions to empower your MSP.
• Stay Informed: Keep up with industry trends and tech best practices for sustained success.
• Drive Growth: Leave with actionable strategies to increase MSP sales and drive business growth.
• Lessons Learned: Hear from two experienced MSPs from North America and the United Kingdom on how they achieved success.

 

Webinar Transcript

0:05
Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar. I'm Travis Tankard and I work in events and partner marketing at Titan HQ. We're delighted to have you all here today for what I expect to be a very interesting discussion on how MSP's can grow and scale their business. Let us know where you're tuned in from and where in the world you are. I'm in Galway, Ireland.

0:26
Yeah, so we have a great host of speakers today with Avast with vast industry knowledge and experience. So just before we get started, just some brief housekeeping and then I'll introduce the speakers. So it would be a panel discussion today, so not usual presentation deck, so be led by Titan HQ's Eddie Monaghan and Mark Ludden. The webinar is being recorded and will be sent out to everyone after the event. You can feel free to send on to anyone your team to watch back afterwards. You can ask questions throughout. I think we could be tight on time today because we've got a lot to get through and there's a lot of us here. So we'll try answer a couple at the end. If not, we'll contact you directly if the answers. So yeah, don't be shy. You can ask them for help.

1:10
So introduce our speakers. So firstly, we've got Mark Ludden. So Mark is the VP of North American Sales at Titan HQ. He's worked on Titan for 13 years, starting out as business development and work his way through the ranks to head up our North American sales department alongside Mark with Eddie, Sales Enablement Officer. Eddie's been an entire MSP, Titan Sales for 12 years. So they've been in company for quite some time. Many people on the call might know Mark from over the years. So both Mark and Eddie bring so much growth and experience and see a lot of change in their time techniques. So they bring so much MSP experience knowledge to the table today. So joining Mark and Eddie, we're delighted to have two of our MSP customers. So we have Hunter McFadden CEO Green Cube of very successful MSP based in Louisiana.

2:05
Hunter has been working in IT since 1998 and started Green Cube in 2009. He has a passion for IT and making digital employee experience much better. We're also joined by Mark Lamb or sorry. Yeah, Mark Lamb. I was thinking again, my name is mixed up. Too many, too many Marks. But yeah, we're here with Mark Lamb today, CEO and Co founder of High Ground, a platform designed to help MSP sell more and reduce their risk. And Mark is also part of Ms or M3 Networks,

2:35
Scottish MSP, providing IT support and cyber security services to businesses across UK since 2009. So both you guys have been in business quite some time since 1009. So yeah, thanks so much for being here today. I appreciate your all so busy. So it's great to have you all here. Just one thing I want to do before we get started. I'm really intrigued to get the challenges that MSP's are facing. So I'm going to do a quick poll and then I'll leave you alone. Then

3:07
in the background, let the experts speak. So if you could take just two seconds to answer this poll, I'll put it live now.

3:19
Now I've launched that, it'll be interesting to see with Mark. Eddie, can you see that poll? It flicked up just for a moment. Yeah, on the screen. Good.

3:40
Yeah, we can see it now. Yeah. So I'll leave it there for a minute. Where in the world are you guys all tuning from today, Mark? Somewhere in Scotland I think.

4:00
Yep, Perth, Scotland.

4:04
OK, well we'll kick on anyway with that. We'll continue on about the poll anyway or finish it there. So

4:14
yes, so Mark, I will hand over to you. Perfect. Thanks for you. Look, welcome everyone. I suppose this is the first of a series of discussions that we'll be doing over the next few months. And I suppose the, the view of what we're looking to achieve with this series of discussion or webinars, and it's to leverage our large MSP ecosystem so that we can kind of share experiences and learnings across our customer base.

4:45
We're obviously very, very excited to have both Hunter and Mark talk about their journeys, growing their MSP's. We really hope that you find this session valuable and that you get or gain some really good insight into some of the dos and don'ts of scaling an MSP from Hunter and Mark's perspective. So I suppose with the introductions all done and, and, and hopefully the poll all filled out, I suppose it's time to get the

5:15
the show on the road. And so I suppose I'm going to start with you, Hunter, if you don't mind.

5:24
So can you tell me or tell us a bit more about your MSP business, Green Cube, you know how long you been in business? Bit more about like, you know, the endpoints that you're protecting and any specific verticals that you sell to? Sure. So we started Green Cube in 2009 primarily as a hosted desktop as a service platform to our clients and we service about 5000 users, 2000 in points.

5:53
What was the other question you asked? Sorry.

5:56
And it's Pacific verticals that you sell into verticals. We're in healthcare primarily and financial services.

6:05
OK, great. And in terms of the, the number of staff, you know, Trevor mentioned that you, you, you started the business yourself in 2009. Uh, how many staff do you have now under? We now have 15 on our staff.

6:20
Great, great. Uh, Mark, same questions please.

6:26
I remember them, uh, with, uh yeah, MSP in Scotland. We've got about two and a half thousand endpoints and about the same in users. I would say that the count them exactly about 25 staff. We work across multiple industries. We're not isolated to what anyone in particular, which good some ways and bad others. Um, but yeah, we're not, we're probably more generalists than than Hunter and focusing on healthcare.

6:58
OK, OK. And, um, you've been obviously Titan HQ partners for a while and, and we'll, we'll speak about the partnership throughout the presentation, but really in, in terms of, you know, setting up your business and scaling your business, Can you give us a bit more of the journey to where you are today? And I'll kind of move to Mark for that question. You know, how long did it take you to, to get to a place where you're comfortable, where you're growing the business at, at certain rates? And are you happy with the growth rates that you're, that you're achieving right now when you're MSP?

7:39
Yeah, I'm not sure you ever become comfortable as an MSP. Uh, every day is a challenge. Our journey was very much like the first four or five years. It was like in it till like an apprenticeship or like an internship, if you will, just learning business, because we weren't business people when we started. We were engineers. And so it took quite a while to, I think just to understand what we were doing. I think that resonates with a lot of MSP's, right? They they go through that journey and then from there start thinking about like,

8:09
how do we grow this? How do we, how do we find new customers and how do we get any good at sales? You know, a lot of focus on the service part. So a very sort of windy Rd. It's not like a direct sort of track straight to success.

8:23
We've been growing, uh, certainly for the last five years we've been growing 30% year on year and that has probably been down to a couple of key decisions that we made around about that time, which I think could it could help any MSP answer the question, Does it?

8:41
Yeah. And I suppose what were some of the key decisions that you made that I suppose evolved that growth over the last few years? Mark

8:52
Yeah, I would say the key, the single key thing that we did, uh, well, maybe two. First one was hiring, hiring an account manager that that is the single biggest thing and it was a really scary thing to do because I, me and partners had a lot of the relationships. So the fear associated with that often holds a lot of people back in. The second one was probably more generalist, but getting off the tools, as much as I love being on the tools off that translates across the pond. But you know, getting away from that and focusing on working on the business is a hard thing to do because you just want to go back into everything. But hiring people that can take that on and and then evolve on yourself and what your business needs you to be that that's a that's been a real challenge. But there was, you know, those, those are the things I would say probably generating have generated the most of our growth. And then about 3, three years after that, sort of three years ago, so a couple of years after that, we then hired a new business sales person. I think a lot of MSP's get that wrong. They hired a new business salesperson 1st instead of actually focusing on expanding out their existing customers and their existing relationships there. So then we added that into the mix, which is then combined with account management, that sort of hunting and farming sort of approach really works in terms of increasing sales Hunter from from what Mark has mentioned there. Has your journey been similar in that approach or have you gone down a different roof?

10:24
Yeah, I mean, it's it's very similar. You know, when we first start, we first started as engineers and we would take on anybody and everybody that that said, hey, can you do this for us? Yeah, we can do that. And, and then we learned that, you know, maybe we should focus in on better defining who our target customer is and also what kind of culture we wanted to cultivate in our, in our company. And,

10:55
you know, that led to, you know, proper hiring of the right team and also led to defining who our key customer is and who who that target is. Because if the customer isn't a good fit, then we don't want them around. And if they're toxic, that creates a toxic environment as well. It's not just toxic employees. You got to be cognizant of, you have to be aware of the toxic customers.

11:24
Yeah, it's, it's a really important point being an MSP or in any business that that that you, you look to scale is making sure that you know who the right persona or profile business that you want to attain. Hunter, can you, can you share with our audience a bit more to how you actually did that process? How did you decide what your sweet spot customer was?

11:51
It kind of boiled down to where do we have our experience in? You know, my first IT job was in a hospital. So I learned a lot about healthcare, healthcare IT and going through that process. So we ended up, that's kind of a strong point for us was healthcare had a lot of, you know, people that I've met through being in healthcare. So just we basically started out with who do we know? Who are we networking with? Who did?

12:25
I don't know. I guess a really good question would be is who don't want to be friends with?

12:30
You know, that's, that's where I started at my customer base is, is people that are related to people I could be friends with. Not necessarily that I would invite them over to dinner every night, but at least be friendly, be friends with, have a good relationship with and and then serve them with excellence.

12:53
Mark, similar question because you, you mentioned something very similar to, to, to, to Hunter in terms of profiling and going after, you know, the, the right type of customers. How did you go about deciding on who's the right customer for you?

13:12
We, we kind of started off the way that Hunter has described and for us actually those industries that we were focusing on, uh, were healthcare mostly actually dent in the UK here would be dentistry, but actually that, that industry went through a period of consolidation around about that same time. So a lot of our industry, a lot of our opportunity,

13:40
uh, was actually disappeared in the market was, you know, aggregate and, and they were thought, hang on, you know, would be very careful here because we could get ourself in a real model. And the same thing actually just even as recently as four or five years ago, we were quite a presence in the automotive industry and the same thing happened.

13:59
Private equity comes in and they tried to start, you know, buying everything up to try to create relationships at the highest level. But you know, there's only often only going to be 1 winner there. And so we actually have, despite all these years, we, we've actually taken a slightly different approach and, and typically we find a more generic memo of a client of ours, which would be somebody who is multi site because of the way that we've positioned our business in Scotland. We've got three locations. We actually have a bit of a pleasant stone in the north and the NW as well. But we're positioned in a way that organisations that have multiple sites have a need to because all businesses local, right? And they all want to know that you're within their region. And so companies that are working in Scotland's always quite a large country in terms of travel time, maybe not known as big as United States, of course, but in the UK, it can take quite some time to get around. And so the way that we set ourselves up,

14:54
you were quite valuable proposition to customers who said, you know, we've got a site in two different parts of the country and we want to make sure we don't wanna use two providers. We wanna use one provider that can care to our needs. And so we were, we were well positioned for that. It certainly company as we've grown, the ideal client profile has changed as well. So it's gone from like, like, you know, would probably take and anyone who had a computer, you know, that has changed from that to like, you know, minimum clients for ours or certainly a minimum of 10, but ideally a minimum of 2025.

15:25
Piers Navas saw that we were looking at and, and then the upper end of the market getting into coal manage. That's a whole other ball game. But you know, we, we do have offerings in the coal mining space as well. But you've really got to be positioned to to do that or else it just brings you a whole load of stress.

15:42
Yeah. It's, it's from my experience talking to a lot of our MSP's that are, that are now partners, something you both mentioned in certain, especially in, in the infancy of certain MSPs, as they grow and as they scale their businesses, they will take anybody's business, but that can sometimes come at a cost. And it's very important be, you know, a vendor, be an MSP or, or an SMB to understand the, the, the market that you want to go after and be focused on that market because we're focus comes results. Uh, you, you mentioned Mark, you know, 10 to 25 seats is definitely the, the kind of area that you really focus on in terms of, you know, user account hunter for green cube, Where does that user accounts in terms of your ideal customer? Yeah. So I mean, we do have some minimums. We being in the House of desktop environment, we have found that, you know, 50 plus is, is a is a good place to start. But you know that anything below that we start looking at are you going to, are you going to grow? Are you in a position to grow? How can we help you grow? And so a lot of those qualifiers start coming in to play in that area.

17:01
And so if, if it's like a 5 or 10 user kind of company, we definitely need to know how you're going to either going to grow or there's going to be a premium because, you know, for the same cost of infrastructure and support staff and all that, I can go support 50 users as opposed to, you know, 5 users. And so same time of acquisition, same time of, you know, commitment to serve. So it's, it's got to be worth the the endeavour. You know, I'm not saying that, you know, people with five employees or less is not, not a good business. It's just, is it a fit for us and can we adequately serve them and can they afford the services that we offer?

17:44
Yeah. You mentioned about them, your network and networking within that space being very important to you. How about referrals? Is it our referrals, something that you find yourself asking for? Do they, do they walk in the door to you or is it, is it difficult to get referrals? I suppose the question it's not difficult to get referrals when I actually ask. OK. OK. So this is the asking for the referrals that I think we sometimes forget to do.

18:17
But when you ask again, which is great, Mark you, you mentioned about your customer acquisition and the fact that employing an account manager in the early days was very important.

18:29
How does the, when you're employing an account manager, you've got your existing accounts and obviously you're looking to acquire new accounts. How does the hunting farming thing play into that decision? Are you looking for an all rounder? Are you looking for someone that's specific in, in, in, I suppose expanding those accounts or how, how does that sit with you?

18:52
So um, yeah, we are find it. Those people are very hard to find like if some people are hard to find, you're probably better not trying to find them, right? If I try to break them down. So this sort of hunting, farming is, is like a mentality more as much as it is a skill, right. So the people who are doing our new business development are not the same people who are doing our account management. So our account management team are they, you can imagine account management expand the account, but our new business here, people are trying to land the account. And so we have very clear delineation between them that keeps them both focused. But they both come under sales and our organisation. Because although what happens is that you end up with a bunch of account managers that if you don't, if you complement the wrong way, they end up just sitting on these accounts making money forever. And they're not, you know, they're not doing what they need to do for the business. And so it's important that, but at least for us, that that's the only way that we found would work. We tried it the other way, we had it the other way around and it just was not working. So we changed it up and this definitely works a lot better for us.

20:03
Are there any kind of key successes or key things that you would point to that drives the success of new customer acquisition with with your business development team?

20:16
Yeah, yeah, we've been pretty successful over the last couple of years doing these lunch and learns. I know people use just talk about that a lot, but we have a slightly, I don't know how everyone else is doing them, but the way that our team approached them is that they're pretty small, they're quite close knit and there's a couple of tactics. I mean, I'm probably not the best person to talk about this particular part, but I know that like one little thing they do is they get the customer or the attendee to choose their lunch. Let me just ridiculous, but apparently if you choose your lunch beforehand, beforehand, the drop off rate massively reduces. Maybe

20:49
you know what you're getting for your lunch, but something something really small like that has a real impact. Like they they talk about it all the time, like they swear by it. This is what you should do so that these lunch and learns and these little tactics about getting people there and making sure you deliver value, making sure that they don't feel like they're being sold really hard to. But and also they're quite small. You know, there's never any more than 15 people in them and they're keen careful not to invite the competitors in beside each other. So it's quite a safe space and they often start talking to each other up about about their own problems as well. So it almost becomes like networking for them too as well. And obviously picking a nice location, a nice a nice place to do it that also has a good bearing.

21:34
Interesting FM. Just remember that one for sure, Hunter to ask you, do you ever find yourself turning away customers or second customers?

21:47
Ohh, yes, we we have fired some customers. It goes back to that toxicity, right? We've had some customers that were toxic this either they didn't, they didn't treat our team well. And so it made it, it made it hard for our team to want to want to serve them. And so you always run into those type of people and you have to have the, the, you know, the crucial conversation with them to say, Hey, you know, if this doesn't change, then we're going to let you go. And sometimes it doesn't change. And so therefore you have to let them go. And that that could also be, you know, to the tune of, hey, we have our, our set security stack and you're, you're at risk. And if we don't change this, you're still going to be at risk. But now we're at risk and we that's not a good fit either.

22:40
And so when you just as much as that would be context for, quote, firing a customer or sacking a customer, as you said, that could be a good context for bringing on a customer. You know, you know, go into their environment, you know, how how do they treat each other? How do they treat their customers? Because you know, how, how they treat each other, how they treat their customers is ultimately going to have to treat you.

23:04
And then, you know, so that's one aspect. And the other aspect is, is that we, you know, we do take in to consideration, Hey, where are you at in your security posture or your, your cyber posture, however you want to, you know, say that and then, you know, where do you want to grow? And are you willing to grow there?

23:26
You know, because there's, there's some people that come into this and they're like, they're not protected. They don't have the right tools, they don't have the right mindset and posture. But if, but if we can't coach, lead them and guide them along that journey, then they're not going to be a fit. And it's going to be a, you know, bumping of heads along the way in this, maybe you know your benefit for somebody else because you relate to them better.

23:50
Great. Thank you.

23:56
Ohh, sorry. Right for me to answer the question as well. So I think Parkland you're on mute their marketing, sorry. Yeah,

24:03
technology these days, Hunter, you know, I'm gonna ask the same question to you, Mark. But when you look back at, at your, your, your starting point in 2009, would you ever thought that you'd be, you know, not that you want to be firing people and saying no to business. It can be an uncomfortable position to be in, you know, when you come from your days of growing the business and you want all the business you can probably get in and the revenue that you can get in.

24:31
And some of our MSP's are on the session right now. We're probably getting to that space where they're, they're trying to profile who their ideal customer is and they're looking at some of their customers saying, you know, really we should be letting them go. Is there any advice in that journey is like, is it, you know, do it? I, I suppose it's probably going to be your answer, but is there any kind of Nuggets of information that you could share with them on your view around that? And I suppose the benefits of doing this as I questioned me to Mark Hunter,

25:08
that was to you, Mark. Sorry. Ohh, Sorry what you're talking about there. No, no, I wasn't.

25:15
I mean, obviously if I own a customer, it's not an easy thing to do, right? Um, you know, we've been, we've, we've tried to get them to fire us. We've tried to fire them ourselves. Like we've been think we're trying to every permutation of that. And in terms of how to, if the question was how to approach that and how, how to go around it. And from experience, I would say just just get on with it and speak to them. I mean, oftentimes customers know it like if you're feeling it, they're feeling it too. It's not like a one way thing.

25:45
Um, because you know, like if they're constantly like nagging you and getting in the way and you know, the feel like they're getting the service, then oftentimes it like we'll sit down with the client and have a conversation with say, look, you know, obviously addressing elephant in the room is because you as an MSP have grown and they likely haven't and they want it to be how it used to be, but you're trying to move on and be different and they kind of like a thorn in your side. You've got a great example. We're just talking about it and our leadership meeting this morning about this customer who just walks into the office. They still think that's acceptable just to walk right in here with the computer because they're in the same building as us. And you're thinking, oh man, you can't just do that.

26:23
You can't just walk in here. But but they, they don't listen. So sitting down with the customer and explaining, look, things have changed. It's not how it used to be and we're maybe not the best fit for you anymore. I think it's a better way, a better moral way of dealing with it than simply like hiking the price and hoping they go away. Because in the process of that, they're going to cause you even more heartache by complaining and dragging you in meetings and telling you that things aren't what they used to be. So I think that explaining like this is how things work. The biggest challenge I think we've had with that is that because we've grown, the things that we used to do don't work anymore. So we can't, we just can't do it. You know, if some guy takes that computer that comes in through the door and he fixes it, guess what? Something else that was scheduled for a customer in London doesn't get done and that customer gets upset. I mean, trying to explain like we have a way of working because it's the only way you can guarantee that quality, that quality and customer service that we provide. So if we start doing things like we used to do them, we will start to fall off and everybody gets upset and that's no good for anybody other and customers are generally understanding of that. But oftentimes the customers who do do that, they do tend to go and work with smaller MSPs who will give from that service that they became their custom to you providing. So I think it's better just to be honest and upfront and just explain that you've changed and grown and you can't really force them to change. So if they don't want to, then

27:46
this should probably find someone that can give them what they want. Yeah, I, I fully agree. And I was, you know, I was hoping you would say that because even ourselves as we have scale and evolved as a business, we've had had that conversation with with people. And you know, as Trevor mentioned, myself and Eddie have been here 13 years and we would at the start be open arms with any type of business and any type of revenue coming in. But again, like yourselves and your in your journeys, we've had to really sit down and identify who

28:17
is our market, who we after, who we gonna focus on and, and build our products and our and build to our strengths around around that profile. And what we have found, what I found in my own personal experience there and Mark is it's having those tough conversations and having that honesty policy and that integrity around, you know, I just, we just don't feel it to fit anymore for our partnership. And as you mentioned, the customer knows and so and so do we, you know, and it's really important, I think, to have that, that honesty. And we've even

28:48
we've even saw an object there, Mark. But we've even got relationships with our local competitors that were smaller than us. And we will often be like, I'll give them a name. Hey, Eddie, I've got customers probably better for you. So when you approach the customer, you're looking, I've already got this alternative guy for you who And they feel better instead of just because they feel like, Oh my goodness, who am I going to speak to now? Like it's, you know, Eddie's here, he's ready to speak to him and he wants to look after you. And they're like, OK, that's even because it's like that thing, right? When you leave, you want to leave them with a good impression.

29:19
You don't want to leave him with a bad impression, especially if they've been with you for a lot of years. You almost owe them the decency. Yeah, yeah. It's a it's a matter of exposed respect. And at least there, you're coming with a solution to the problem. You know, you're you're helping them along that journey. I'm just conscious of time. So I'm gonna kind of move on slightly again back to,

29:47
um, the MSP space and how it has evolved over the, the, the number of years. I suppose for, for me, when I'm, when I've spoken to MSP's, if I go back eight or ten years, there would have been a lot of MSP's that would have been very much a la carte type services. And what I mean by that is again, open arms to business coming in and letting the customer rule the roost in terms of the services that they brought into their MSP. So if I'm on

30:18
a Spam Titan licence, but Mark, you don't sell spam Titan. Well, you know, they were asking for you to bring in that service and they came to a place where like MSP's would have like 3 or 4 e-mail securities, they have three or four DNS providers and so forth. And that that comes with their own problems, as we all know from your own career, from your own experiences with Green Cube and Entry Network have have ye? Did he ever go down the route of a la carte menus or, or you very, um, I suppose strict on here's my stack, here's my offering. And if you're if you're signing up to my MSP, you're getting this service. And this is the service that you're getting. And this one's for you, Hunter. Yeah. So

31:07
one of the things I learned before I even started in Green cube is try to keep things simple. And that's a difficult thing to do.

31:17
And then so that you know, if you can keep it cookie cutter, so to speak, as far as your tool stack, as far as your offerings go, um, then that makes it easy for you to to offer the same thing and be efficient and keep things simple. And you know exactly, you know if it's spam tied and then you know exactly what to go fix and spam tighten to the release the emails or to do the proper rules or the proper setup of the customer. So that being said, in as far as bringing on a new customer,

31:50
we onboard them into our tool stack. Sometimes it's not all at once, sometimes it's over time because they may have a commitment with the, you know, a tool that they're currently using that, you know, they, we need to get them out of at some point. But the the idea is, is it one of the questions we ask our customers is that if you're locked into this tool,

32:15
how well do you like it? And are you willing to transition over to something new that we can manage more easily? We have a conversation with them around that and say, hey, if we can simplify the tool stack for us, it makes us more efficient in helping you. It's a benefit both ways. It's win win question there. How does that play? And when an existing vendor you're working with brings in a new product into the stack and you decide you wanna

32:46
move that into your clients how that we brought fish type into the market obviously quite recently and we're seeing good demand on it. How do you bring that into the conversation with your stack? So you've already set your stack, now you want to add something in there? Is that a renewal time or is it, is it an upsell or do you eat the cost or how does that, how does that sit?

33:06
Well, I, I think that depends, right. So brand new, brand new product for us, like if we don't, if we're not offering it, we'll pick a couple key clients that we have really good relationships and I call them raising fans. They're the people who are going to give us referrals whether we ask them for or not. That's that's a good thing.

33:27
And so I'll go to them and typically and say, OK, hey, we've got this new anti phishing software that we want to interject into your, into your business. And we think it's going to, you know, better protect your e-mail services for you and, and give you some heads up on whether it's a phishing e-mail or not. Let me put it in there for free. I want to see how you like it. Let's let's try it out for the next three months and then we'll go from there.

33:56
Excellent, excellent. Mark. How how, how do you approach it with your customer base when you're bringing in new product into the second?

34:05
Yeah, for me, I think it was a case of there as I say, not as I do. I've made the mistake that I'm, I would suggest you don't make, which is many of the things that our vendors are bringing now are make micro innovations, right? They're innovations that make the service fundamentally better. Fish tighten as an example. But there's so much product in the market and the customer, if you go to your customer and talk product, it's really hard to sell because they don't really care for product. They care for solutions that you're going to provide. And so my advice would be don't build your stack. You should always be looking at your stack and should always be trying to innovate and improve on that. But you should make sure that you leave sufficient room in there with marginal overheads to be able to have some expansion in terms of cost, I should say. So

34:59
over, over extra margin in there to be able to accommodate it because this is happening all the time. So that means speaking to your vendors, finding out what they're bringing out next, getting a rough idea of what you think that's going to cost. And then of course, you're going to pass those costs on. But you're gonna do that probably more annually or something like that. So you're not going to be eating that cost for long. But I think that that is the biggest challenge for them. Space right now is vendor comes along with a shiny new thing. And of course we want it, but we don't want to sell it to the customer because that's going to be painful. Well, how? What do we do?

35:30
We're stuck. We can't attack ourselves that on into that whole by approaching the problem the way that we do. You need to get smarter. Maybe I just need to get smarter.

35:42
Interesting. I guess your solution selling is really you're hitting the nail on the head there with your business development and your and your farmers as well to to talk to to solving the problem as opposed to the actual technologies. But yeah, really interesting.

35:57
How does platform play into that? I know we're we've launched our platform, we've 2-3 products in there now. In fact, how, how important is having all of those solutions in a single platform? Does that resonate with the end customer or is that more for your convenience and the customer's convenience? Maybe Hunter try that over to you first. Yeah, I think that goes back to this some, you know, keeping things simple concept, right? If, if, if I have a single pane of glass that I can manage things through and that simplifies the, the stack for, you know, our tax, our engineers to get in there and manage. If I've got to have a, an app or a browser open for every tool that we have to manage it, that makes it hard. And, you know, that's the thing, that's why we look at PSA and RMM integrations and, you know, how much of that can come into the, to a ticket that can click on a ticket to go manage and, and what, what integrations and automations can we put in? Because that makes us more efficient,

36:58
that makes us, that makes it, you know, simplifies the management of that stack and allows us to go deliver customer service, which is what we want to do. You know, we want to, we want to develop those relationships. We want to, you know, actually have a conversation with the customer, not always, you know, answering an alarm bell somewhere. That's where referrals come from that service. Yeah. Fantastic. Mark. What what, what's your, what's your view on it?

37:29
Yeah, I mean, obviously platform is definitely where it's at, right. I mean that's I sit and watch in the battle of the Titans at the minute between like Kinect wise, you could see right and what's going on there, and that's a slightly different stack, right? That's the sort of, you know, Adam PSA documentation, RPA sort of thing that's going on. But absolutely, I mean, it's Hunter says it's about efficiency at the end of the day, but it's probably too good. Arguably too, unless you want to get really deep in bed with one of them, which is a risk in itself, then you probably need to be thinking,

38:04
ohh, yeah, we want to be using the platform with one vendor, aggregating as many of those technologies that fit well together together with one vendor, one on on one platform. But that platform's got to be,

38:16
uh, interconnectable through APIs to other platforms, right? Because if not, then you're locked in. And that that can really affect, like Connor says, you're with a client and you want to do something and you really need to bend the rules or do something a little bit different. And if you can't do that, you're completely at the mercy of of that platform. So, right, I think this idea that you could have one single platform, I mean it's a great idea, but well, certainly not here yet. And other people would say different, but it depends how much you want to put your faith in, in all those vendors.

38:51
It's all about layered security really, isn't it? Yeah, you, you really do like you. You can't put all your eggs in one basket. I think you definitely have to layer across multiple vendors to to so that you're not at risk and you're leveraging that risk. Mark, I think, you know, back to the platform play and Hunter and Mark, you both mentioned the single pane of glass and, and how that would make your life easier from a tech perspective, from an onboarding perspective. But in terms of creating new revenue streams and presuming by having, you know, one or two or three vendors that you deal with specifically that have multiple products you it gives you the ability to generate more revenue streams. So when you're looking at potentially new vendors to bring on to into your sack, does that come into your decision making process that they have multiple products? Or is it very much a case of it's a certain product that I need right now with my stack and if they only have one product, they're only off one service? I'm OK with that as long as the product works.

39:49
Mark, I'll pass that onto you.

39:52
Yeah, um, I've just gone through this exercise, so can I answer that phone direct experience that, uh,

39:58
what I found is, um, is that sadly, most of the vendors doing this, they have one really strong offering. Often the one that you've worked with them because of, but then the other parts have maybe just not as fully featured, are fully developed. And so as techs, we're always like all we want the best product and we want the best. You know, there's a solution and it's an internal battle with yourself. Often it's like, do we really need all those little bells and muscles that we get with this other vendor that's more of a pureplay in that area, or do we go with this one vendor?

40:29
It's got two or three solutions, but you know, one of them's really good. The other two are, you know, not quite where I want them to be, but I think you can probably you can temper that with the commercials, right? You have to. I think that like anything, if you're going out to buy on your product, you need to know what you wanted to do. So you should at least write down like, you know, your 10 like it must do these five key things. That's essential. Everything else is cells and muscles because often I think MSPs and probably most customers don't actually understand what they want. So they want it all and then realise I don't need it. All right, so you're causing yourself on necessary stress. And then of course, when you get into the conversation of financials and if you find out that it's cheaper,

41:10
then you're even more stressed because you're like, ohh, I really should do it because it's cheaper. I can make more of a margin. But but then you're kind of getting yourself tied in knots thinking of all these other functions and features are really essential. So I think get clear on what you're going for before you start going out shopping. Don't go window shopping for products,

41:30
Hunter. What's your perspective on this kind of the same thing? I mean, it's at the, you know, from a vendor selection process. I mean, we just switched PSA's. We switched our Ms because of vendor relationship, not necessarily because of the product didn't work. Somebody was in a relationship, some of it was, it didn't adequately allow us to serve our customers in the, in the capacity we wanted to.

41:59
And so we made some switches and we, we, we did a lot of vetting because there wasn't a lot of new players in the, in the market, you know, on that side.

42:08
So when it comes to vendor selection for, you know, part of the tool stack is, is it's going to come down to this price is one of the last things we look at. But it goes back to defining that culture is, is the partner a good fit for us as well? You know, as the employee good fit is the customer gets fit, you know, you know, because if we can remove a lot of the barriers, you know, through conversations upfront, those are conversations we don't have to have down the road.

42:38
And so, yeah, vendor relationship is, is, is good. Does the tool work? Does the tool deliver on what they promised? And as Mark said, does it, does it cross the T's and dot the eyes on, on, on our list of, of needs. And there are in there the wants, you know, the needs have to be met 1st and then the wants can can come later.

43:03
OK. So if I'm hearing this right, in terms of like the most important criteria for you when picking a vendors, definitely that vendor relationship between you in terms of being a right fit and being able to work with that relationship with that Fender After that, then obviously the product has to do what it says on the tin. Yeah, the product has to deliver. But I'm going to look at this in a relationship for sure. OK. And Mark, is that the same type of ranking in terms of what's important to you when you look at new vendors?

43:32
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I probably should have said that what Hunter said, they're too about the relationships. That's that's absolutely essential. You've got to be able to work with them, you know,

43:42
because otherwise it's just, it's just a nightmare. You just can't get anywhere because you'll just be honest. You see the seal, the shiny stuff in the sales process. It's only when you start to use it that you start to uncover the other stuff. And if you can't deal with the people that you're going to deal with, and then it just becomes it just escalates into a much bigger issue, right? So yeah, I would I would agree with 100% guys, how long are we working together Hunter with green coupe? How long are green Cuban Titan age and I should know this partners?

44:18
We were actually partnered with Titan before I started Green Cube, so since 2005.

44:25
Fantastic Mark. How long are we working together?

44:31
Ohh jeez. This is like when your wife asks you how long you been married for Love. Love it. Great the relationship with that. So that's brilliant.

44:41
Eight years. You're so more fantastic. That's Mark was a professional football player. So coming back, yeah, I actually still, I actually sold you Mark. I think I think it was 2017, 2017, 1018 I think would have been the time. So yeah, it wasn't far away. Yeah, while back, a while back. I think we're nearly out of time guys.

45:04
Lots of lots of really great takeaways there. I suppose one segue in terms of, you know, because both he had been with us for quite a while and you've been with us through our scale and our growth and our continued growth and scale and we we've all kind of grown along this journey which is great. And what is probably maybe one of the key one or two things that you like from working with Titan HQ. I'll start with you, Hunter, since you're here with us a bit longer than Mark.

45:34
It's, it's, it's, it's got to be the accent Mark it really it has the, the relationship we've had with Titan has been a really good one. So you know, as far as as partners and and vendors go, we have enjoyed the relationship the most.

46:00
You got a good product, but the people are better.

46:05
Appreciate that back

46:08
yeah, I mean, I'd say first of all the people, um, that's for sure. And I, you know, I've, I've had the, the, the benefit and pleasure of meeting some, some very senior people at tight end and it goes all the way through the organisation, which is rare. You know, sometimes you get one and two good people, but you don't you don't see that all the way through. So and so at the openness to the talk and and and communicate that, you know, we're not perfect, but you know, working on it and I were. The second thing would be that I've seen that play out as well. That's probably the combination of those two things work well because we have gone through times when it hasn't been great. And

46:47
but you know, you asked us to stick with you and as we did and, and sorted them problems out. And, you know, I say to our customers, you know,

46:56
judge us on how we respond, not necessarily the problems we have. And I'd be a hypocrite not to do the same with defenders. And you know, you guys are one of the few that have actually seen it through and that that makes a difference. Yeah. Just just to mention that, Mark, you know, I think for us, you know, our CEO Ronan has been has been in the building for 18 or 19 years and myself and Eddie, you know, we're employee number six and and. 11:00 So we've, we've,

47:26
we've tried to maintain that culture and that DNA of customer first the whole way throughout. And, you know, it's tech,

47:34
things happen, things break. And it's about at that point getting on the call, having the honest conversation. Just like when you, you potentially have a customer go

47:43
own the issue and then make sure that we address the issue and get, get, get the service back up and running and make sure that you're back in a happy place where you were when you first initially bought. So there will always be hiccups and will be many more hiccups along the way. Hopefully not. But you know, when it does happen, we're definitely there to get on the call and, and, and own that. If, if, if that's the case, I think that's an important trait in any business that, that, that, that we have. I think, you know, we're, we're with a lot of great content, which is really, really good.

48:14
And I suppose for me to kind of summarise and finish, finish up and, and, and kind of give some of the MSP partners a sneak preview in terms of the platform, especially the conversation that myself or we all had around some of the benefits of it.

48:30
We have now as we've done a lot of different things around overhauling our MSP journey for our MSP partners. So we've changed the customer or the partner portal, We've restructured our sales teams. We are a long way down the road of having all our solutions within one single pane of glass. And what we're really focused on, and we built this from the ground up,

48:54
is focused on ease of onboarding, making sure that, uh, you know, like fish Titan can now be on board within six or seven minutes. That's that's the kind of estimate that we have internally and we're hitting those type of stats. So within this view right now, we have our fish Titan, which there are advanced anti phishing solution. We have a fishing simulation solution, which is now in beta and will be released soon, soon over the next few weeks. And we have our e-mail archiving solutions. We have three of our six products within this this platform. We will by the end of kind of, you know,

49:24
end of at 2024 or Q1 or 20 to 25 have all our solutions integrated within, within the view. And we're really excited because we feel that this is a real game changer when done properly. And we've really tasked our, our dev team to, to think about everything that we do within our products through the lens of an MSP. So really focused on, um, making sure that on boarding, ease of use configuration can be pushed out to all your customers within one single pane of glass and that they're supposed to last value add that would add to this would be my only selling of the of the session is really around giving the MSP the ability to have six solutions. We know our solutions kind of sit very, very well in terms of the key elements of every MSP cyber security stack that you offer to your customers. And it's about giving you the the ability

50:20
to create new revenue streams through our platform and using our different services. Because when you on board one of our products, you, you will be on boarding three or four as we move on throughout throughout our journey. So it'll be very easy for you to switch on different services and manage your customers across this view. So

50:40
really, really excited. You know, we've, we've spoken about some of some of this journey to our, our MSP because we, we meet a lot of our MSP's regularly. And this is the feedback that we've heard. We're now step three done working on step four and we'll have step 6 done, you know, by hopefully end of end of 2024, but definitely early 2025. So exciting, exciting things. And I just want to kind of give you a preview of where we're going within our within our MSP journey.

51:08
Brilliant. Well, lots of good takeaways there. Relationships matter and let them pick their own lunch as well as as a good big one.

51:18
That was the poor one. Yeah.

51:23
I just want to say thank you all so much for coming and joining us today. I think there's some really great discussions there and some really great takeaway points. So yeah. And thank you for everyone to attend me. I know everyone's so busy, so I really appreciate everyone's time. I've just put a together a little survey. So if you don't mind for attendees, we don't mind. Just do a quick feedback, see how you enjoyed this session. We've also put in like a question there about future discussions

51:52
and yeah, things you'd like to see, things like that. So I know there's a question here about sales and kind of incentives for the sales team. And we were talking about this the other day about maybe potential future discussion about the business development side for your M SC business. So yeah, lots of things come in. So give us your feedback and thank you all so much for being here today. Hunter, Mark, we appreciate your time. It was, it was amazing.

52:21
Thanks for having us.

52:23
Thanks guys. It was really enjoyed it. Thank you,

52:26
Aye.