Reflections on Service Delivery: Nick & Jeni Clift on Lessons That Shaped Ctrl-Alt-Deliver

Welcome to Ctrl-Alt-Deliver: MSP Service Delivery Mastery.
I’m Jeni Clift, joined by my husband and longtime business partner, Nick. Together, we’ve spent nearly 30 years building, scaling, and eventually exiting our own MSP business.

This episode is a little different — it’s just the two of us behind the microphones.
 We’ve revisited some of our favourite Ctrl-Alt-Deliver conversations and unpacked the big ideas that truly stuck with us — the lessons that continue to shape how we help MSPs strengthen their operations and elevate client experience.

Here’s what we explore together:

💡 The hidden cost of overwork — and why timesheet transparency builds trust. 💡 Why the best MSPs act like a farm shop, not a supermarket.
💡 How aligning marketing promises with delivery creates genuine client loyalty.
💡 What really makes an acquisition work — from people to process to purpose.

It’s an open, honest look at the realities of growing a service-focused business and the habits that make lasting success possible.

🎧 Listen to other Ctrl-Alt-Deliver episodes: https://www.ctrl-alt-deliver.blog/episodes
👉 Connect with Nick Clift on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-clift-mspcoach-mentor-eosintegrator/                                                                                    🌐 Learn more and master your MSP: https://www.tenassia.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Helping your customers, customer ultimately grows your customer's business. You should know the top three business issues for every single one of your clients, and we should be proactively educating them, them, introducing them to people that can help that knock on effect. An insurance broker was one of our best better of influence clients. Every business needs insurance. Every business needs IT.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Test your own business to see if you're delivering what your marketing says. So if you are, you know, we're super responsive, ring your office periodically and check. Welcome to Control Ot Deliver, MSP Service Delivery Mastery, the podcast for MSPs who want to sharpen their operations, elevate client experience, and master service delivery. I'm Jenny Clift, and alongside my husband and business partner, Nick, we've spent nearly three decades building and scaling an MSP. From the early days of BreakFix to today's complex managed services, we've learned that real success goes beyond technical skills. It's about consistency, communication, and creating real value for your clients. In each episode, we're joined by industry experts and MSP leaders sharing practical insights, proven frameworks, and lessons learned in the trenches, all to help you raise the bar on service delivery. This is Control Alt Deliver. Today's episode is a little bit different. It's just Nick and me behind the microphones. We've gone back through a few of our previous episodes and pulled out some of our favorite highlights, those moments that really made us stop and think. We'll be doing a deep dive into four of those conversations, unpacking the big ideas, sharing what stood out to us, and exploring how those insights apply to delivering great customer service in the MSP world. So grab a coffee and settle in. This one's going to be a great mix of reflection, learning, and a few laughs along the way. Nick, welcome.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Thank you, Jenny, and welcome, guests. It's going to be a fun day today, a little bit different to what we normally do, but I thought it'd be a good idea to do a bit of a wrap-up of some of our guests and uh share a bit more deeper on some of the subjects. So yeah, looking forward to it.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Okay, so let's start with our very first episode. So Brendan Rose from Morphability, I guess, brought a bit of a different perspective. He spent a long time working in MSP, but really working in the sales team, not in uh direct, so not in a technical role. And now has moved to a company that helps MSPs with their sales process. One of the things that he talked about that really caught my attention was transparency around capacity and the cost of overwork. So people, techs getting lost in the detail and spending way too much time on tickets, or projects completely overrunning and nobody knowing until it's too late to have that conversation with the client. So what's your take on that?

SPEAKER_00 3:00

Yeah, it's it's a common problem, and I think it comes from two separate places. One is the technician or engineer's ego, I suppose, you know, I should be able to do this in an hour, and I'm already at two hours, and oh, I don't really want to put that in my timesheet. So I'll I'll just do another hour and figure it out, and then ultimately I'll put half my time in the timesheet. So the the two problems that come out of that is one is we could be dent doing work that's not scoped for the client for free, which is not ideal. But more important, more bigger issue for me is we have people that are working extraordinary amounts of hours not putting it in the timesheet, and then they're starting to really resent the company. And we had this example back in at the old DWM days where yeah, it it was a big problem, and the guy's utilization was not where it should be in his timesheet. But when we dug into it, he was actually doing about 60 hours a week because he thought he should be able to do the work easier than what it was taking him. So yeah, it's it's a challenge. And and I think the the way to solve that is to combination as well. It's it's saying to the guys it's okay to say you don't know what's going on or you need help, like always ask for questions. That's very important. And the second one is the service coordinator or service manager should be watching these tickets and projects. And to my view, anything, any service desk ticket that's over an hour should be having it at least a discussion every couple of days. Yeah, just to kind of dig a bit deeper and figure out what's going on. And this still happens day to day. Like I've got a client I'm working with at the moment, and we have this big challenge across all the different service delivery teams. The compliance with timesheet entry is so different. One team reports five percent of their time, the other team reports eighty percent of their time. And it's just weird. Like you're doing work, you have to record it. And we've learned that lesson in Indonesia, in Bali, if they don't take a photo, it didn't happen.

SPEAKER_01 4:52

That is very true. No photo, no happen, as the saying is here. And you know, on that note, we've had some interesting photos sent to us of air conditioning being fixed, of plumbing being rectified, our dog being cremated.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

Yeah, that was a bit that was a bit off that one.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Oh, yeah, that was definitely way too far. Something I didn't really need to see. So, what's the cost of that overwork? So, you know, a project we've scoped it and we've charged it on a fixed price for 20 hours and it's taken 40. What do you do?

SPEAKER_00 5:23

Lots of trouble with this as well. And yeah, we've tried lots of different methods of of solving this problem, and I think the ultimate one is just being super transparent with your team and with the client. So if it's a fixed price project quote, for example, and it blows out, you've got to stop. When you're getting to 80% of the budget time, you've got to actually have an internal review and say, what's going on? Are we on track? And we mean you should be doing this at least once a week. Best off with projects. I think you should be reviewing projects twice a week at least, because they can go off track really quickly. And if it's you know, if it's acceptable, it's a good managed service client, it's a small project and it's not the end of the world if we blow a few hours, just be conscious of it, talk to the team, make sure they follow it through. If it's a change of scope or it's out of scope work, you have to have stop work, have a conversation with the client, then make the decision. Um, you may still decide not to bill them for it because it's a critical part in the overall scheme of that client. It's a very important project to get finished off, and you can make the gains of that further down the track. So they're the two options, and you've you've got to do it. Um, if you're embarrassed that you misquoted it, don't want to have the conversation with the client. It's still super important that you track all that time on the project. And when it comes time for billing, and I had this happen to us, um, we had a big project, it was quoted, I think, for 80 hours. It took us 150, and it was our fault. We missed, we definitely missed the ball and we underestimated, and we know we knew this client, like we'd been looking after them for 10 years. So, but what I did is I I tracked all the time on it. I sat down with the client and said, Look, this is what happened, this is why it happened, and this is why I didn't come to you in the first place. I said, We basically made a bit of a mistake, but we knew the result you needed, and we negotiated. In the end, I did get paid for half that time, or paid for half rates. I just I just did it as a cost recovery discussion, and the customer was super happy. They appreciated it, could understand where we went wrong, but we had to have all the data. So don't let your team not record time. That is, it's not their decision what's built. It's your decision as the business owner, as the service manager, as the account manager. It's not the technician or the engineers. Their job is to record the time so you can make a business decision down the track. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Just while you were talking through and thinking and reflecting back through our journey, I think some of the roles and some of the functions within our business really helped us as we grew and matured. And that was the service manager. Um, and I've sat in all three of these roles, service manager, making sure that you are having uh, you know, looking at that data, whether that's a proven post, whether it's timesheets, whether it's, you know, the the reporting out of your um PSA around um utilization rates, those sort of things, but really watching those and yeah, have to do it. Um, you know, I I looked at um I did the approved post daily to keep on top of that. And I looked at uh projects weekly as the service manager and I looked at those efficiency rates uh regularly as well, definitely monthly, but more often than that just to see what was going on. And it only once you've got those, that uh rhythm of those reports and you know you can log into things and have a look at them straight away. That's really important. Uh if you have a service coordinator, um get them to have that weekly catch-up and those ticket talks with all of your team. Because if not, if not, then the service manager should absolutely be doing this. And Brendan touched on this as well. Making sure that you are having the ticket talks, you're looking at what they're doing. If you've got a tech who's not really, they're struggling to get timesheets done, struggling with their time management, it needs to be not a scheduled thing so they can kind of, you know, hide or or get things up to date. They need to be surprised with that until they get into that rhythm of get your timesheet up to date before you go home every day, um, you know, before you go to lunch every day. Service coordinator, if you at a scale where you have that uh that role in place, they should be watching this as well. They should be making sure that the techs have got all of their timesheets and and while you're still working on this ticket, it should have only taken you half an hour and it's now two hours. So they should be watching and uh because often techs just jump down rabbit holes and let it come up.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

Yeah, well it's fun, it's something exciting. That's that's what we're here for is to solve problems. So if something new and exciting comes up, and I I just and I was just gonna add to that, Jenny. The um depending on on everyone's different, right? That we've learned that in our journey over the last 30-odd years that yeah, people don't think like me. Engineers don't think, and we evolve and we do change over time, so I am living proof that men can actually change. Because yeah, I was definitely the um egotistical, arrogant engineer that knew everything was right and blah, blah, blah. Uh and I learned a lot over the years of running the business. Um, and we would have a senior engineer come into our business, got really good skills. I would expect them to be as good as me because I'm paying them good money and they're level three to being around. But they have absolutely no idea how we did things in our business, they had no idea about our customers. And it wasn't that they weren't intelligent, smart people, they just had no idea how we did it.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

And that's what we came to call the DWM way because people came in, as you said, great tech skills, great experience, but they didn't know the DWM way.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

Yeah, and and ultimately people are motivated in different ways. And this is a this podcast and what we're talking about is service delivery. And we're in a service industry. So if you get upset by having tickets in your queue, probably not the job for you. If you want to, you know, we don't work in a zero inbox world, you know, because in the service desk world, tickets come in every day. You're doing your 10 to 15 if you're you know normal service desk in Australia a day. When you get that next morning, there's gonna be 10 to 15 in your queue. At least, so you have to have a mentality and a psych psychology that you can deal with that. Um, but there are ways to present the rules or the the the way we do things in a way that helps the person understand. And for me, it was about helping the client, helping your colleagues, like you can't not do time entries. What happens if you know you do the big winning? What happens if you win Teslato and you don't come to work tomorrow and all your tickets for the last three days don't have any time entries on it? You've put the company in a bad position, you put the client in a bad position, and you put your colleagues in a bad position because nobody knows. So just do your time sheets and you know make it a bit fun, but also understand ramifications and time, how you spend your time, they need to understand the impact and your story, Jenny, about the timesheets, the time entries on the timesheet. You know, someone is gonna read this effectively as a report on a contract or an invoice. Would they pay this? Would you pay for this service? So, anyway, that's that's enough about that. The bottom line is you've got to understand your team, you gotta understand the mentality and the dynamics that drive them so you can present the information in a way that works. And it's not the same for each person. It's just one more thing. When Jenny said about um catching up with teams and catching up with your technician on the service desk and reviewing their tickets, if a guy's really struggling, a guy or a girl are really struggling with getting their timesheets done, there'll be somebody in your team who's an absolute wizard at it. Just get them to go learn off them. You know, then I don't tell them do it my way. Say, hey, Bill over here, he's an awesome like he is always at 105% utilization, he's always got his tickets under control, never has a problem. I don't know how he does it. Well, go sit with him, ask him, yeah, yeah, yeah. Have a bit of fun, learn from each other, help each other, guys. That's all we're here for.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

So I guess if you're just to close that off, if you're listening in that idea of that, and it is that sort of chaos feels a bit familiar, take it as a nudge, I guess. Step back, look at really what's going on in your business and how can you how can you actually know one more thing I want to talk about. That is project coordinator was the third role that I think is critical in in tackling this issue. If you have a project coordinator, the game changer for us was firstly we sent him on a I think it was an agile project management course so that he understood how to deliver projects. And we did big projects. We you know we worked for councils and water uh authorities, so they weren't just a insorting a couple of PCs, these were big projects that he was uh managing. So that completely changed the way that he ran those projects. We just used an autotask uh project module. My view was always it's it was clunky. I'm not sure about now. It's a few years since I've looked at it, but it was all in one system. So it's you know, we kept everything as much as we possibly could in one PSA. And the other thing was we gave him a budget every month. He had to deliver$50,000 worth of projects. And we thought that Aaron was not money driven. But as it turned out, when we gave him that that um target to hit, I think he hit it for three years without missing a single month. Where before that it had been all over the place. You know, it might be a hundred thousand this month and ten next month. But once we actually gave him that target that every month he had to deliver fifty thousand dollars in project, just completely completely changed the way that he looked at them.

SPEAKER_00 15:02

That target was also the tools and the process to to report and manage the time and all that kind of stuff. So you knew he had he, you know, he we set him up for success and he he nailed it. Absolutely. That's good.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

So let's jump into our second episode, which was with Lyndon Jackson from Agile IT. And he brought up the analogy of we're the farm shop, we're not Woolworth's analogy. I just love that of you know, we are we're that little boutique shop, we only have a limited supply, you know, um amount of produce. And I just love that. It's what do you think makes an MSP more like a farm shop, Nick? And I you and I used to have this conversation that my view early on in our business was we gave our customers a a shopping cart and we sent them down the aisles of Woolworths and said, you go choose what you want and then we'll make something of it. But over time we we changed that. But what's your thought?

SPEAKER_00 16:04

Chocolate cake story, yeah. True method chocolate cake, you know.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

But I used that before that a shopping cart. I was ahead of my time.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

So I and I suppose it's you either you're selling a list of ingredients, like you're selling components, or you're selling a cookbook where or have a menu so you can select what you want, or you're delivering an experience or an outcome. Yeah, our favorite thing in a restaurant, we don't want to go in there and pick the ingredients or even pick the menu. We just say feed me. Yeah, we've done our research, we like you, we want to work with you as yeah, as a restaurant for tonight. Just I trust you, just feed me. And I think that's where MSPs want to be. Be the trusted advisor. So the customer is not nitpicking and picking this and that and that. And yeah, Lyndon's point was keep it narrow, they're a small team. If we deliver really well on what we say we do, then we're gonna be fine. We're not trying to solve every problem for every single person. Um, and it's tough to do that, especially when you're starting up or you're you know you're chasing a bit of revenue. Um, you and I did it for the first five years, I said yes to absolutely everything. That's why we were looking after poker machines all the way along the Murray River. That's why we were doing um F-POS machines in petrol stations and poker machines and cash dispensers, and nothing to do with the traditional IT that I was trained on. But there was we had people in the area, we had a need, there was a need, we were able to service it. You know, you know, we didn't that didn't last for long because I decided this is too hard. But yeah, you've got to get a niche down and be good at what what you're trying to deliver and be really good at it. And um the the flip side of that is you don't want to be Mr. No, which means you don't want a customer to ask you this, you go, Oh no, no, I can't help you with that. Oh, I can't help you with that. You always have to be the person that says, I know how to do I know how to get that problem solved. And having a connection and collaborations and partnerships is is really, really key in this day and age. Yeah, 15 years ago, you could be in your niche area, you could be a one-stop shop. But these days I think the collaboration is more important and being able to help take the customer on a journey and and solve their problem. Like we never got into security. We didn't never we never installed Wi-Fi networks, but we had partners that did that for us. And we sold a lot of Wi-Fi networks and we looked after some big security solutions, but we didn't do that work. We took the help desk call, but we we managed the relationship. We had partners to do that work for us. So yeah, I I get it. Yeah, the the being the form small farm shop. Yeah, that's good.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

And I guess, you know, just again reflecting back, you know, I I remember at one point, I don't know how many different backup solutions we had at our clients, where the reality was our clients wanted a backup solution. They didn't care what it was, but we allowed them to choose, you know, here's the here's the seven different ones, you choose which one. And of course, they'd pick a different one again. And, you know, then our staff were trying to troubleshoot problems on a product that they'd never even heard of before. So really narrowing it down.

SPEAKER_00 19:11

Yeah, you're exactly right, because we were mostly on-prem back in the day, and we had a half a day out, half a day per day, so a half-time tech was looking after backups and resolving backup issues. Because we had this we did have six different platforms. So we standardized on our on a cloud B C D R device, and we I just migrated every client across to that over the next year, and we went down to 30 minutes, no, less than 30 minutes, 15 minutes a day on spent on backups. So that and the customers didn't care. As long as I could show them I could do a restore, showed them that we had consistency in our backups. Um, they don't really care at the technology.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

And I think that sort of then you're moving from that, you know, trying to sell the cheapest or trying to sell a particular product. It's really the outcome is what the client is looking for, you know. They go into the farm shop um and they walk out and they've got their shopping list, they've got their tomatoes, their zucchini, you know, they're whatever it is to make for dinner, the variety of tomato, who cares? They don't want to walk in and you've got 12 different ones, and this one's for this, and this one's for that. And it's like, just give me a tomato.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

And this that is this is a really excellent thing that's just happened here. So when Jenny said farm shop, I'm thinking of a farm implement shop where you buy fence posts and tools and like bunnings like that, and then and she's thinking of a farmer's market, like a boutique food shop type of thing. And I'm like, it's just so interesting how people can have a different perception of exactly the same thing. I mean, the stories all all are relevant, but it's just a different type of shop. You get fruit and vegetables from hunters. How do you do that? Like, yeah, you get the tools to build the fruit and veggies, but not the actual fruit and veggies.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Yeah, the farm shop that I've been to only sold fruit and vegetables. Okay, let's move on. Okay, let's go to our third episode with uh Scott Atkinson from Tribe Tech. And what resonated for me, we've known Scott for a number of years now. He was um in one of our masterminds there for a while, and we went on a bit of a journey with him while he explored marketing his business through various um avenues. And I found that really fascinating and you know, with varied results and you know, lots of, you know, uh different price tags on them. But what he realized, and and I guess what he shared with us in that episode was that marketing only works when it's connected to delivery. So, why do you think so many MSPs struggle to get that right, Nick? And what changes when marketing and operations actually start talking to each other? So we're actually marketing what we do rather than marketing from a pure marketer's perspective that may not necessarily understand the MSP industry or what we deliver.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

Yeah, that's a that's a good question. And plainly because I'm doing some marketing research for a couple of different companies at the moment, including our own, it is really interesting because if you just look at classic marketing, there's a theory, a whole lot of stuff. So you've got to have collateral, you've got to have a hook, you've got to have a pitch, you've got to have an offer, all that kind of stuff. And I think people start working down that plan, including I've done this in the past, rather than the easy low-hanging fruit, which is what do you do really well now? What customers love what you do, let's let's leverage off that. Let's get some testimonials, let's get some case studies done of what's really sold, you know, what's solved problems for them and what's really helped them. And work from that bottom ground level up. And I think there are there are lots of money can be spent on marketing. And I'm gonna personally I've never spent a lot of money on marketing but I've discovered that's what held our business back. And the more research I'm doing into it, the more people I talk about it. This five to ten percent of your gross revenue should be allocated to marketing. Yeah 5% to advertising and 5% to the sales team. So basically sorry it's more than that it's third 13 to 15% should cover sales and marketing. 5 to 10% should be on marketing alone. That's the tools processes advertising etc and and most MSPs will go what the there's no way I can afford to do that because I'm only making 5% net profit with no marketing. So how can I take five all of that plus another 5% and spending that on marketing that's why you're only got five percent net profit and it it's a it's a chicken and egg thing but there are some stuff you can do to help with the basics like like like we're doing with this podcast and you know and podcasts on webinars share some information that helps get your name out there run some webinars some events the most successful stuff we did at DWM and at Auto was was running quarterly events inviting subject matter experts to speak that were adding real value to our clients and prospects and just getting people together for a couple of hours to share stories. No hard sell no offers we I don't think we ever did any kind of special offer sign up here type of thing. Never did that um just sharing information and building credibility what we failed to do was the follow up marketing after that and leverage off those events and leverage your partners like marketing development funds is a real thing. There's money out there to be had uh all of the vendors and the Dis D's will help you with that for sure. Just got to come up with a theme and going back to Lyndon's comment about you know being the smaller shop focus in on what you're what you want to be if your focus is security this week or it's AI next week or sorry not week quarter we have to have the quarter focus um it could be yeah eliminating risk could be yeah it could be a whole heap of different stuff. And yeah and develop that network of center of influencers people that can refer you to people that understand your same client base are getting referrals from your current customers.

SPEAKER_01 25:19

I mean I'm not a marketing expert there's plenty of people out there um to do that but and and add some value too like with ours it wasn't always technical we would talk about I did a session once on EOS so bringing some business process uh into the conversation it might be bring your marketing person in and share some marketing tips but add some other value and I think for those quarterly events something that always got me to others was time for me to do some networking so I was able to come along invest my time learn something and and then potentially meet other people that might become our clients um so make sure that you're really adding value and don't make it super techie.

SPEAKER_00 26:01

Good think about what success means for you guys. Most of us measure number of seats yeah you might have a dollar figure in your head as a top one revenue but if you've got I look after 500 seats I look after a thousand seats I look after 2000 seats how do you get more seats you know there's only two ways you get net new customers or you help your current customers grow. So the mindset of helping your customers customer ultimately grows your customers business. And and we did that with I think it was a group of accountants or financial planners or something we've ran some sessions and invited their clients into those sessions and just some basic high level stuff that helped them be more efficient in their business which then got our client more clients and then yeah it's a knock on effect. You know we're not here to solve technology we're here to use technology to solve business problems. Like if you if you're still in the business of building white box PCs and yeah oh we we we roll out PCs every week and that stuff well you know you're not adding a huge amount of value to your customer you need to be looking at his business what are his pain points you should know the top three business issues for every single one of your clients um and we should be proactively educating them them introducing them to people that can help and that knock-on effect I mean an insurance broker was one of our best standard of influence clients yeah every business needs insurance every business needs IT every business yeah we treat financial sorry accountants as gods we take their value sorry their word as gospel and we do what they say it's the same with data and security and risk you know we need to be treated having the same level of conversations with those businesses because the directors are accountable for data breaches now and data just as much as they are for financial judiciary or whatever that word is edit and insert the right word here.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

And just I guess the last thing to touch on marketing and this is an experience that we had yesterday test your own business to see if you're delivering what your marketing says so if you are you know we're super responsive we answer the phone within three rings ring your office periodically and check but what are you actually doing? Because we uh we're here in Bali yesterday we were going to a lunch and the particular hotel where this function was being held um it's a couple of days um um technical retreat if you like and we were just invited to the lunch so all of their marketing big sign of the building you know amazing buffet lunch and great service and all of these sort of things uh went in and the staff were great, took us to um they were actually going to just take us into the room and interrupt the session and we said no no no don't do that we'll just wait here because we're meeting them for lunch and they were a little bit confused and keeping in mind that we are we are in Indonesia so sometimes things get lost in translation but to take two people into the room in the middle of a session I thought was a bit of a you know not not should not be done. The lunch when I went through the buffet it was basically empty and there were staff just wandering around aimlessly and not refilling that now they knew that 30 people were coming through for lunch so it wasn't like it was a big group that came unexpectedly the it was just really ordinary um the the food was nice enough but it just wasn't replenished to keep up with the booking that was there. But when I look at the marketing for that hotel it sounded like we were going in for a full five star experience but we probably got about a two star delivery. So I actually said to Nick while we were there I wonder how often the owners of that hotel actually go and check, go in for lunch, see what's happening and check on their own marketing are we delivering what we're promising here? And we've had this with uh a few clients where we've tested what their service is and it's not what they're saying at all. And MSP clients.

SPEAKER_00 30:10

Yeah and it's I make a point anyone I work with I I buy something from from their business just to go through the still need special treatment just let me I'll just go to the website I'll do the buttons and I'll do the thing and we'll sit down and have a debrief afterwards and the owners will say well that shouldn't have happened. That shouldn't have happened that that should have happened well this is what actually happened you know and uh oh okay um yeah maybe we need to test that and you do because we all get complacent at I did the same thing yeah you and that's why I I you know one of the reasons we were involved with EOS and as a both of us were implementers Jenny still is is it it teaches you the discipline of reviewing everything every quarter and simple things like get someone externally to be the you know not the boss undercover but the customer undercover and just tell you what the experience was like because a brand new client is going to have that experience and if if that wasn't that bad they probably won't say anything.

SPEAKER_01 31:10

If it was bad they probably won't hang around you know so you gotta you gotta test let's move on to our fourth episode Scott Jeffries from Revolve IT now Scott went down the path of an acquisition to grow the business so he bought a print business managed print business so not necessarily manage print but I wanted to talk about that you know acquisition as strategic growth so if you can just share your thoughts again Nick whether that be managed print whether it's another MSP or or another um you know um aligned business but what have you seen that works where you can bring another business into yours how do you manage the branding how do you manage that transition how do you manage the you know bringing the clients along on the journey so you don't uh lose them as you go through the process?

SPEAKER_00 32:05

Yep that's a big question in a true EO style you only you should speak from experience that's things you've personally been involved in or you've been directly involved in so going way way back to 1996 when we first started TriTech computer services up in Echupa but we ended up going into business with two partners from the US which was fine and I I was a corporate guy I had no idea I worked for UNIS at the time I didn't know how to run a business so we ended up going with an accounting firm in Sydney as the company accountants because I I had no idea all I knew is how much am I going to get paid? What do I need to do? Where are the customers? Let's go because I knew how to I knew how to deliver good service so I went through that and they said oh there's this customer that I ran into that was selling their service part of their business they divested well sorry diverged into software so they built an application for local government and the old shopslash service department was for sale and I thought well they're regional based like us that sounds like a great idea I had no idea how to um how to evaluate this so I just said to the guys in the US I how do we do this I will get the accountant to do a review. Blah blah blah and the accountant went down did the review all the numbers and he said yep yep and the end of the day we agreed to pay$50,000 for this old client list basically and that's that's literally all it was it was a list of clients I got one staff member came off across to our team to help us and this is a regional Victoria location during the final like handover the old owner said don't expect too much out of this list and I've gone what what are you talking about? We've just put 50 grand to me at that time back in that was in the probably late 90s was a huge amount of money and he goes yeah well things haven't been going too well down here for a while and gone holy shit so we've done this joint like letter to the customers introducing us and I think we got three clients out of that list of 50 clients so that's a story in how not to do it. Don't trust remote accountants purely based on the numbers okay so that's that's a real toughie really need to go and meet and which I didn't do in this case because I didn't know what I was doing back in those days. Go and meet the core customers you know I didn't even look at the numbers to be honest I just got told to go do this. So yeah be aware look at the numbers go meet the clients especially look at the longevity so the next one that I can talk about is another acquisition that we did in Melbourne also not ideal circumstances because Jenny met this met Jenny met their bedgers business coach I think on a Wednesday night they had a discussion that day had a coffee I ended up having a conversation with the manager of the business on the Friday and I said look I think I know where you're at I think we can help I like the sound of it. So we went down on a Sunday had a meeting with the owners the investors the accountant and we did a deal and took over the that operation completely and started the Monday morning. That was a walk in walk out we took all our staff all their liabilities but I knew what I was looking at then I looked at all the numbers and it was a it was a good much much better deal I think we kept 95% of those clients and the staff. So that worked really well and yeah there's a couple that's a couple of stories there but I suppose the reason you would do that is if you're looking that second one for us we were looking to expand our Melbourne presence we needed staff we needed an office and a couple of extra customers would have been great as well and that's what we got out of that the deal with that was with Technia. So that worked really well and then and then for the next yeah four or five years we kind of put customers on and off and averaged all out and then we sort of how do we grow like what are we actually looking for so that's when we end up doing the merger and it formed auto but that process took three years like that was the other end of the scale. So the third time you went into it really with your eyes open looking at all the numbers all the processes and we knew exactly what we were doing. We didn't lose a single customer we didn't lose any staff because it was really smooth merger and yeah as it turned out we end up Jenny and I end up living out of that year and a half later the process was really really good and we got it we got it right. So why would you look at doing that you're either chasing revenue which I don't recommend or you're chasing skill or geography to complement what you do. And in our example with um in the auto deal is we had a geography and an on-prem skill set and Balan had a city based cloud process and they kind of fit it over the top of each other really, really well. So that we we it worked well for us.

SPEAKER_01 36:43

They probably edit half that out so let's wrap so I guess if anything that we've talked about today resonates these are the sort of things that we really help clients with. Most of the guests that we've had on the the podcast are people that we've worked with in the past or working with now but really you know in some form have been helping them along their journey whether that be through process or just through experience through masterminds whatever. So if what we have talked about today resonates, uh we'd love to hear from you. We'll make sure that we have our contact details in the show notes. So do reach out and thanks for tuning in to today's episode of Control Alt Deliver. If you enjoyed the conversation and want to hear more insights from industry leaders and experts make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss an episode. We've got plenty more great guests and stories coming your way