The Traineeship Strategy: Building a Team That Stays and Grows with Nathan Gemmill

Welcome to MSP Mastery: Ctrl-Alt-Deliver Podcast, the podcast for MSP owners and leaders who want to build a better MSP; one that actually works for them.

I’m Jeni Clift, joined by my husband and long time business partner, Nick Clift. Together, we’ve spent decades building, scaling, and eventually exiting our own MSP business.

In this episode, we sit down with Nathan Gemmill, someone we have known since he joined us straight out of high school as a trainee. Over the years, we watched Nathan grow from a junior team member into a confident and capable IT professional, making this a deeply personal and insightful conversation about career development in the MSP industry.

Nathan shares his journey from school leaver to experienced technician, reflecting on the value of learning on the job, the importance of having the right support around you, and why curiosity can be one of the greatest assets in a technology career. We also explore the realities of bringing trainees into an MSP, how to help them succeed, and why creating a culture where people can make mistakes and learn from them is essential for long term success.

Here is what we covered together:

✅ How Nathan’s IT career began with one unexpected conversation at a service station
✅ Why traineeships can be a powerful long term strategy for MSPs
✅ The importance of buddy mentors, structure, and support in the early days
✅ Why curiosity, hands on learning, and real world experience matter so much in IT
✅ How to build a workplace culture where mistakes are owned, communicated, and resolved
✅ The differences between MSP life and internal IT roles
✅ Why training the trainer can help build stronger teams and future leaders

We created this podcast to share the real conversations and lessons we wish we’d had more of while running our own MSP, practical insights from people who understand the challenges, pressures, and opportunities in this industry.

👉 Connect with Nathan Gemmill on LinkedIn: Nathan Gemmill
👉 Learn more about GMHBA: GMHBA
🎧 Listen to other MSP Mastery Podcast episodes here: mspmastery.blog
📸 Follow on Instagram: instagram.com/mspmastery
▶️ Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com/@MSPMastery

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I think it's about the workplace, having a culture that you can make mistakes, it's okay. Communicate it and come up with a way to fix it.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

If you want to use the tool or use the product to solve a business problem and help people, then you don't necessarily need a degree. You need to learn real life experiences. Part of the success of anyone in this industry is working in IT is not a nine-to-five job. You get left behind. It's three o'clock in the morning go, oh my God, talking to someone, I need to go experiment with that. If you haven't got that curiosity mindset, I think you really struggle to really love what you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Welcome to MSP Mastery, the podcast for MSP owners and leaders who want to build a better MSP, one that actually works for them. I'm Jenny Cliff, and alongside my longtime business and life partner Nick, we unpack what's really working in thriving MSPs, including insights from the trusted partners who support them. With more than 60 years of combined experience, we've seen it all from the first break fix calls to the sophisticated MSP tools of today. We've been early adopters of the tech and the strategies that shifted our industry toward recurring revenue and long-term success. Our goal with this podcast is to share the real stories and hard-won lessons that inspire and add genuine value to our industry, helping you build a business that is both profitable and fulfilling. This is MSP Mastery. Here's Nick, myself, and today's special guest. Today we're joined by Nathan Gemmel, someone Nick and I have a very special connection with. We've known Nathan since he joined us straight out of high school as a trainee, and it's been a privilege to watch him grow from those early days into the seasoned IT professional he is today. Nathan is the perfect guest to discuss a path many in our industry share, building a successful career through hands-on experience rather than a university degree. He's a prime example of how curiosity and learning by doing can take you from a trainee to an industry expert. We want to explore Nathan's journey and talk about why employing trainees isn't just a great way to start a career. It's a powerful long-term strategy for MSPs to solve the skill shortage and build a team that actually stays and grows with the business. Nathan, welcome to MSP Mastery.

SPEAKER_02 2:20

Thank you for having me. I've been a longtime listener. First time joining. It's very exciting.

SPEAKER_00 2:25

And first time podcaster.

SPEAKER_02 2:27

First time podcaster, that's right. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Good to have you here, mate. Good to see you again. Thank you. Well, I like the nostalgic shirt there you got there, so it's great.

SPEAKER_02 2:35

Yes. Made sure that I wore the DWM shirt today, a bit of a throwback.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Yeah. Were you impressed that we noticed when you joined us?

SPEAKER_02 2:42

I was very impressed. I did actually have to tilt the camera down a little bit to make sure that it got in frame.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

Nice. No, it's good to see you. So how long is it that we've actually known you? You were what, 18, still on red pea plates when we first met you?

SPEAKER_02 2:55

Great out of high school, 2012. I think it was it's literally the day after I finished my last exam that I first hopped into the office.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

Wow. Okay. So yeah, it's more than yeah, 14 years. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

As we always do as an EOS implementer, start our calls with sharing your personal and professional bests from the last six months.

SPEAKER_02 3:20

Yeah, I had a little bit of a think about this. And my personal ones, I'm a little bit of a geek outside of work as well. And I like to do even more IT stuff out of work. So I'm going to say my personal best is I created a lamp myself. It was 3D printed, and I had to custom design the whole casing and everything to fit an ESP32 inside. And I was able to create it in integration so that I could light up the lamp at sunset and have all these other cool automations running, which I think is pretty cool. Bit nerdy. And professional best would be we finalized a data center uplift and migration at work. It was a pretty big project and took a couple of months. I migrated to a cloud data center platform. Learnt a lot along the way and a lot of opportunities to learn new platforms and systems there.

SPEAKER_01 4:14

Yeah, that's cool. And I think, yeah, that curiosity is part of the success of anyone in this industry. Is working in IT is, my view, is not a nine-to-five job. You get left behind. If you just rock up to the office at nine o'clock, clock on, do what you're doing, and go home again and don't wake up at three o'clock in the morning going, Oh my god, there's this thing I saw. And I talking to someone, I need to go experiment with that. If you're not, if you haven't got that curiosity mindset, I think you really struggle to really love what you're doing. Because I still do that today. Open Java's just got announced this week, which is the Iron Man version of an agent platform, a build on top of Open Core. So I'm gonna check that out this weekend. So yeah, that was a good reminder, Nathan, that I'd like it. So ironic, you mentioned 3D printing because I was looking at one yesterday because I watch a bit of YouTube and these guys building custom parts for motorbikes, and I've sold my all my cars when I moved to Bali. And I've got five five motorbikes out in the driveway now. Four of them are mine, one of them's our staffs. There's little bits missing and broken bits. So I'm thinking of I'm trying to justify in my head how I can get a 3D printer to start making some custom carbon-looking parts for the motorbike.

SPEAKER_02 5:26

So yeah, if you get into it, let me know. I'm excited to help you get into it.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

Okay, and I'll get you, Nathan, just to introduce yourself. As we said earlier, we met you straight out of high school, but share a bit about your professional journey to where you are now.

SPEAKER_02 5:41

Yeah, cool. So I grew up in a small town called Kyram, right in between Achuka and Shepperton, regional Victoria. First job straight out of high school, as we've touched on, is straight into DWM Solutions. I was lucky to get the traineeship there. I don't know, it wasn't the career that I had in mind. I'm glad that it turned out the way it did. I think early on I thought IT was pulling the site off a computer and putting some new RAM in it or a new graphics card and off you go. I I had no idea what the business world sort of did for IT. Servers were a completely foreign concept to me. I think I was pretty fortunate to to land where I did and get the opportunity to step into a business supporting role.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

And then you were with us for a couple of years and then moved away, followed your now wife to Geelong. So how long were you actually with us initially? Three, four years?

SPEAKER_02 6:39

It was three years initially. I might have been about three and a half, something like that. Moved to Geelong. I was about 20 at the time, did just over a year at a another MSP down here in Geelong, learnt a few different things, like I don't like wearing tires to work. That was a big takeaway.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

Oh, but you look pretty cute in that brown tie and brown jumper.

SPEAKER_02 7:01

Yeah, apparently it made my eyes pop. Who would have thought? And then after that, came back to DWM and worked as the sole representative for DWM here in Geelong for about a year and a half, two years before Sam and yourselves moved down to Torquay. Yeah, I really appreciated when I finally had someone to work with in the office again. It did get a bit lonely here working by myself in Geelong. I had my own office and everything, but it was a bit lonely. The other co-working space, the others in there, they weren't super social. So it was good to have someone in the office again.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

I remember the discussion we had when you decided to follow your heart and move down to Geelong, which I think's a good thing to do. And we did talk about whether you would we would have a remote office down there. And I think we all agreed at the time that it was just wasn't the right thing. I think putting you alone by yourself at 20 was probably the right thing either. And going into another business with people around you, I think happy, yeah, you definitely came back to us with a bit more maturity and self-confidence in looking after yourself. So then we went into that kind of managed office down there, and yeah, it was good, been a fun time.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

Looking back to finishing high school, you said that you weren't really drawn into that IT role. But first I'll get you to share how you actually got the interview with us because that was a bit of an interesting story. And then that I guess that decision to to move into IT, thinking you were just literally going to be a screwdriver on a the side of a PC.

SPEAKER_02 8:33

Yeah, it was a pretty cool story how I got introduced to TWM. I think it was a case of the right time, the right place. At the time, I had a part-time job working at a server station. Literally, the day that I'd finished my last exam, I had an afternoon shift working at the server station. I just happened to see this logo here on my shirt, the DWM Solutions logo, and I'm like, what is that? Is that like some sort of scientific like seven atoms combined together? Or what is this? I happened to ask the guy that was passing through on his way home. He didn't normally pass through Kyabrum on his way home. He just happened to be low on fuel and decided to take a different way home, which I'm really fortunate that he did. Mentioned that I was looking to get in IMT and I'd just finished school and got his business card there. And then I made sure that the next day I drove over to a tree or I handed in a resume and said, I'm looking for a job. Traineeships would be great, whatever you've got. I think that's mum always instilled that in me. Make sure I get there physically, make sure that I'm in person, presenting that resume to someone. I'm putting in someone's hands. I'm not sending in an email and being another name with no face.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

Yeah, and it was such a as I was putting together your bio and whatnot, took me back to such a great story of just literally right place, right time, somebody going a different way, actually asking the question, what is that logo that's led to this sort of this long-term relationship that we've had with you? And and a great reminder of what you said. Get there in person, don't just email or post.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

Yeah, and recruiting in any industry is the secret, right? Good people make good businesses, and people love doing business with people. And the people you have in your business are a representation of you and your values and and all that kind of stuff. And often I think I'm at a yeah, a restaurant or a shop, and someone's on customer service or on the checkout, and they and the different interaction you have with different people, and it's just you should always be looking for someone. And there was a guy that I regret not following him up. He was a kind of food and beverage manager in a hotel we used to stay at in Sydney when we went there. And for two or three times we met this guy, Dean, and he just solved problems, he just had a really good vibe about him. And I thought, he'd be an awesome like customer service experience manager or an account manager or something like that. And got to know him a little bit. And the next time he came back, I said, I'm gonna ask him and see if he wants to come and have a chat. And that he'd moved on to a different place. Quite often you'll hear people just chance meetings, you'll run into someone. And I remember prior to DWM, we had another company called Trit Computer Services in his chooker, and there was a young kid, just finished year 12, and his mum ran the IT department at college, I think. Yeah, and Dan was looking to get into it. He would come in every week and just sit there quietly waiting for me to give him five minutes of time and just harass me for about two months. And then I said, Look, mate, I just don't have anything going at the moment. He'd come back and he'd come back. And eventually he just happened to come on the right day and I said, Listen, mate, I'll tell you what, have you got a license? Yep. Have you got a car? Yep. Do you know where Cobram is? Yep, good. You hired, get in the car, go over there, meet this guy. And there was this massive problem we had at one of our council companies. I needed extra bodies on the ground. I think we had to have the virus outbreak, we had to re-image 100 machines or something. And he started on that day, and similar story. He grew up and he's still, I think you're still in a chuca from what I know. But you just got to be ready for the opportunity. And as a business owner, you've got to look for people that are keen. And this, yeah, Nathan does the right time. We we'd already decided that trainees were the way the path for us, and we always had, I think always one, if not two, positions that we would take a trainee on a on an ongoing basis and that two-year traineeship agreement, which I think from memory, Nathan, you might have struggled to finish some of the certifications at the end of that period. We had to have a blokes talk, didn't we?

SPEAKER_02 12:29

We did, we did, we did. Yeah, it ended up being six months longer than we originally agreed to, but I got that.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

And that's not unusual in the tech environment. Like I do a lot of work with MSPs now, and it's still this thing that people uh there's this phobia about the certification piece of it. Happy to do the training, happy to get the experience, but actually getting the certification. I don't yeah, yeah. It's interesting because when I went to uni or RMIT, I I remember I used to love the exams because I could just completely forget about that topic and that subject forever. Never ever use it again in my entire life. So you asked me a question about a topic that I'd done an exam on, I had purged everything because I had another exam the next day. And in hindsight, some of that stuff stuck. It generally proves that you know how to learn. And that's what, as employers, that's what we look for. We look for someone with who's got curiosity, who's keen to learn, and is not afraid to put their hand up. And uh, yeah, there's lots of different stories we could go into, then I'll let Jen next question. I always sidetrack the conversation. Oh, that's your job.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

Okay, so take yourself back 12 years ago, those early weeks on the job, if you can think that far back. What how did we support you? As a trainee, we brought you in, you're brand new, you're trying to learn everybody's names, figure out where the toilet is in the kitchen. But really, how do we support you to set you on the right path?

SPEAKER_02 13:58

Early on, I remember it was such a different day-to-day than what I'd been doing. I'd come from high school, I was I had six hours at high school, and I had two breaks through the day. So, really, it's five-hour days. I come into a workplace, it's a nine-hour day with one break. And the first three months, I remember being so exhausted after every single day. My head felt like it was about twice its size by the end of the day. Just I was absorbing so much knowledge in that first three months. I'd go home, I'd have dinner, I'd go straight to bed. I was cooked after every single day. But I think I need to give a shout out to Caden Stammers at the time. He was like my person that I would go to whenever I had a question, when I needed help with something.

SPEAKER_00 14:48

Yeah, he was that sort of buddy mentor, wasn't he?

SPEAKER_02 14:51

Yeah, yeah. We had like a buddy mentor type system at DWM, and that was a godsend for me. I'd never dealt with these tools before. I'd never dealt with clients before. I'd never had the conversations that I was having. Like I became the expert. I was at school and I was asking my teachers who were the experts about all these topics. And now I was taking calls from clients and I was the expert on all these things. It was like complete flip of the script. It was an adjustment period that that first couple of months, but I really enjoyed it. And it definitely, definitely was the field that I wanted to stay in. I knew that pretty quickly. And I was very glad that I wasn't just building computers every day.

SPEAKER_00 15:34

Did you ever build one?

SPEAKER_02 15:36

First computer I built was only about three years ago. Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

So I guess the the real thing out of that is that sort of buddy mentor that you've got one person that is your sort of go-to person. You can build that relationship and dig into their skills and their knowledge rather than you're on your own, go figure it out.

SPEAKER_02 15:54

Totally. Yeah, I definitely needed that.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

Cool. And how could we have done better, if you're honest? If our listeners are thinking, maybe I'll try this path of putting trainees on. How could we have done things better to, I don't know, fast track, make that first few months easier?

SPEAKER_02 16:13

It's a little bit of a different environment these days with work from home and not needing to be in the office five days now. I think that would have certainly helped me early on with that adjustment of the longer days and all that sort of thing. But I think also touching on the training and that taking a little bit longer than we expected, I think turn training into a non-negotiable and one day a month or something, just don't turn on your wear computer, don't log into the phone system or anything like that, and just focus on getting that that training done. I know that it was self-paced and all that sort of stuff, and I had that flexibility to organise that myself. But again, coming from high school where everything was set out for me and I had this structure every single day, and it was the exact same everyday those deadlines, it was all there. Having just set days and that time to do the training, I think would would have been helpful for me, especially just that that change in routine.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

Yeah, for the probably that particularly those first six months, 12 months, just getting into that sort of routine. Because it it's a huge shift. You take somebody out of whether it's high school or uni, you really are coming from quite a structured and disciplined of these are the semester dates, these are your when your assignments are due, these are when your exams, into a workplace where it is self-managed. It's very different. And in most cases, you're dealing with people who are quite young and potentially immature and just don't have those skills.

SPEAKER_02 17:50

Yeah, I think it's yeah, a skills issue, pretty much. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:55

And as as employers over the years, it's interesting when you employ, when you interview people and you yeah, some of the things that I look for, or we look for is what has been your engagement in activities outside of school, especially if you're looking at a an early school lever. And the fact that you were working in a petrol station or McDonald's or KFC or a store of some description where you're dealing with people, that's what we always looked for. We had a couple of trainees come through that had zero experience other than going to school, and they really struggled. Like I think that transition from school to work, like you say, it's tough. And I never even thought of it from that perspective. So it was a good second man, maybe we should have a mandatory afternoon nap or something. It's like when you send kids to when you send kids to preps at school, they only do half days for the first month. And I go, that's actually a really good point. Because we're taking people out of an environment that's structured and less pressure and straight into this nine-hour work. So that was a really good insight. And for the listeners out there, take that on. If you're gonna do this, take that on board because I never even thought of that. And because you're new, you're not gonna put your hand up and say, Oh mate, I'm really bloody tired. I need to go home early today. Because everyone will look at you and go, What are you doing?

SPEAKER_02 19:05

You're that's a yeah, really good point. Like the first few months you're in your probation period, you're looking to impress, not say, I'm having all these issues. You want to get through your probation period. Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_01 19:19

Maybe it's a 10 o'clock start.

SPEAKER_00 19:21

But I think it's also, yeah, we have to take into account as as employers, as you said, Nathan, you feel like your head's twice the size when you go home because you're just trying to take in all of this stuff. And we're working on an academy, setting up an academy at the moment to allow people, particularly from here in Indonesia, understand working in MSP and all of the acronyms and terminology and all of these things, because not only are you going from an a structured school environment to a workplace, you are learning so much. And most people, when they start, get sick, and I think it's a combination of those things of the body just goes, Okay, enough. I'm downing tools, I just need a bit of time out. And if we are building that into a the structure of a traineeship, it's probably make it easier for everybody involved.

SPEAKER_01 20:15

Yeah, yeah. And I think not all people cope over the years, we've had people come from government jobs to come work in an MSP and vice versa. And the MSP industry, the beauty of it is its variety. Like you literally have no idea what you're gonna, you know the general gist of what you're gonna be doing, but you don't know what the ticket you pull up. The next ticket could be something you've never seen before in your life, or a really unique problem with a really unique person on the other end going, Oh, we call them gifts. We all know our special customers that we used to have, don't we? And the Sarah's of the world.

SPEAKER_00 20:50

So I'm gonna throw a question at you, Nathan, that I haven't scripted. There were a couple of times where maybe you got a little enthusiastic and perhaps clicked on the wrong thing or made a mistake somewhere. What did we do in that instance as a business? As say Hayden, who was your buddy?

SPEAKER_01 21:12

John Wright?

SPEAKER_00 21:13

John Wright was uh service manager, I was probably service manager at some point. Vicky, so talk not specifics of the mistake, but something didn't quite go to expected. You as a trainee, what did you do?

SPEAKER_02 21:28

So, firstly, who decides to put the restore button next to the browse button on a backup?

SPEAKER_01 21:36

Oh, I totally agree.

SPEAKER_02 21:37

It's like ridiculous, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

Is that like the red pill, the blue pill?

SPEAKER_02 21:41

Yeah. So I suppose in that situation where something has gone wrong, I've clicked on the wrong thing, I think it all comes down to how it's communicated after that. I could go and try and fix it and spend the next hour trying to fix it, and then after an hour Nick gets a call, you get a call. Hey, why is this thing down? Why has this been offline? Who's looking at it? That's not the approach that I would ever take. I would always say, I've made a mistake, my hand's up, I've clicked the wrong thing. I can see this is really bad. Yeah, I need people to know that I've made this mistake. We're gonna create a plan to fix it and we're gonna we're gonna get this thing back online. But in the meantime, people need to know that we're gonna get a few calls. We're gonna have this site down for an hour, two hours. I think it took us three hours to get it back online or something like that. We really quickly had a plan to get it back online, but I think the biggest thing is just own up to it. Don't hide it. Never never try and hide a mistake.

SPEAKER_01 22:42

And I think what you did perfectly well was you didn't panic, you didn't try to hide it, and you use the resources around you to resolve the issue. And I'm pretty sure John said, Don't worry, you if you work with the senior tech and fix the problem, I'll talk to the customer. So this is also something that we need to do as business owners and leaders is support our team and know the team need to know they have your back because we all make mistakes. Like I've done it, plenty of people have everyone's made mistakes. But the quickest thing to do is, and especially when you're I've been in server rooms where I've got the CEO breathing down the back of my neck. Like, when is this going to be fixed? And it's the worst possible thing because you're more worried about them than you are about the problem. And all the tech wants to do is fix the problem. So we need to have the right people on the job to fix the problem, and then the right people, the managers, need to be dealing with the customer. And in that case, it was no stress whatsoever. We had a completely plausible explanation for what happened. It knocked out some data for one department for a couple of hours. No big issue. On the flip side of that, I had the other opposite. I got the phone call from the CEO going, When are we going to have our servers back up? I said, I didn't even know they were down. Uh, someone had done them and made a mistake, which is everyone does, and taken out a basically a domain controller and the whole network was down. And this is at five o'clock. I got this phone call.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

And had been since midday.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

Yeah, and I had no idea. Couldn't get hold of the guy on site. He'd done it that shit. Or he's he was spittingly trying to fix it, yeah, clearly. But once the conversation happened, it was fine. Yeah, okay, we've got a plan. Bang, bang, bang. You fix the problem. And that was the that was an interesting problem, that one. But yeah, side issue. But yeah, I think the way you handle it was perfectly. And I mean, you would have felt terrible at the time. And all of us were feeling bad for you because we've all done it. We've all been there. I've all been like literally sitting there sweating, going, Oh my god, have I just lost my job? Are we gonna lose the customer? And we're gonna am I in trouble, and none of that happened because you owned up to it and you you you leant into the issue and we all worked together to solve it. And we, as a team, we said, Well, hey guys, this is what's happened. Everyone else, don't click that button.

SPEAKER_02 24:46

Remember the heart drop right as I realized what happened, but I think it's about the workplace having a having a culture that you can make mistakes, it's okay. Communicate it and come up with a way to fix it. And I think that's what John did really well. Fostered that culture. Yourselves did it very well through my entire time at DWM. I always felt safe admitting to a mistake.

SPEAKER_01 25:10

Yeah, and I think that incident itself, probably everyone, in including us, learnt more out of that incident and the process around that that than six months of customer service training would do. Because it was real. You could see the physical impact on people, and you could see the difficult conversations had to be had, and everyone learned how to handle that and they oh, it's okay, the world's not going to end. That's why it's important, even as business owners now, is having a mentor. That I've got a mentor now, Jenny's got one. Everybody needs to have a mentor you can trust and share these kind of experiences with, too. No matter how bad the situation is or you think it is, there's always something that's worse that's happened. And it's also whenever you think you've got everything 100% right, and it's beautiful, there's always someone else that's done a better or a different way. And so we've got to be real as be happy with where we are and use the resources around us to to help us get to where we want to get to.

SPEAKER_00 26:05

And I remember that particular incident. I was John came up to my office laughing, and he said, You won't believe what's just happened. And he was about as technical as me. He said, Nathan clicked on the wrong thing. I don't know what it was, but I've looked up and jammed together in my office doorway is Nathan and Hayden. Nathan was even whiter than normal, and Hayden was saying, so Nathan's had a bit of an incident, and this is the plan, but this is what it will take. So what do we do next? And John said he was just so impressed that you were both there. Like you were you'd owned up the mistake, looking quite panicked about it, but and Hayden there with you saying this is the plan. And he basically came up to congratulate Nick and I on building that culture where, like you said, it's a safe place and people can make mistakes, and we get it sorted. We don't he didn't ring up and say Nathan made a mistake. He said, Oh, we've had a bit of an incident, this is what's going to be. Nobody got thrown under the bus, nobody got blamed. It was literally let's work together, let's sort it out, and then let's learn from this so that it doesn't happen again. So I think the reason I asked you that question was around that sort of culture, and if we can build that sort of culture into a business when we are bringing in trainees, it just makes it a much more successful way of creating long-term employees. Okay, let's keep moving. So you've worked through the MSP industry, you've now left the industry. So, what made you decide to leave? You went from DWM, you came with us into the merged business of Otto, were there for a couple of years, but then took the role where you are now. So talk us through that, the process, the why.

SPEAKER_02 28:01

There wasn't any one single thing that caused the change. There was lots of little things, lots of things that caught up stacked on top of one another. I think the time that I left was around the time Jenny you'd fully stepped away from Otto, Nick, I could see that you weren't far away. There was a culture change that was happening gradually, but I didn't really have a say. I felt I had much more of a voice in DWM before the merger. That was one thing that sort of led to it. Another was moving into a corporate internal IT team. I felt that I could go a lot deeper. DWM gave me the opportunity to go very broad and I could learn all these things about so many different things, which is amazing. And I I still miss that. But being able to get something from I think you called it 87%, Nick. Be happy with 87%. If we could get more, great, let's get more. But internally, you've got the time to get that last 13%. You're able to just dive a lot deeper into a single product and polish it until it shines really nicely.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

You mean all the network cables are the same length and they're all in the racks absolutely spot on. We call that top-down patching. Yes. That's the one. I remember we used to do that a lot when we initially did the install, and you go back six months later and go, what happened in here? Okay, we need to have a weekend in here and just redo the whole thing again. Yeah, I appreciate what you're saying there.

SPEAKER_02 29:38

But I think I'm always gonna have a toe in the MSP industry. Like I I still do things on the side here and there. I always want to stay up to date with what's going on in the industry. Like I'm listening to the podcast whenever there's new episodes. I'm a subscriber, so I'll always have a toe in the industry, I think. I'm never gonna say I'm not gonna return to it. I could, who knows?

SPEAKER_01 29:58

Yeah, absolutely. At some point you'll decide I'm sick of working for someone else, I might go and start my own thing and get a group of people together that have got a common theme and a common idea, and yeah, I'll make it go make a dint in the universe, as they say. Yeah, exactly. So, what's some of the cool stuff that has been different? I suppose you go into internal IT. Like you mentioned, that you've just done a data center upgrade. Is there any specific project that was like that you got involved in from start to finish that was really cool?

SPEAKER_02 30:27

One of our uplifts for all of our branch sites that we did shortly after starting with GMHPA, I'd I was so impressed by how smooth the process was to replace a whole network. I'd I'd go in, I'd take out all the servers that they had on-prem, migrate the applications into the data center, I replaced all of the switching, networking, routing, everything on a single night. And then the next week the issues would have because we'd planned so much beforehand, it was near zero issues, which was really cool to see. All new computers, all new printers, everything, anything that was IT related got replaced in that single night. And the following week there was barely a peep from the site. It was mostly about, hey, I've got to do this authenticator thing now. What's this all about? And if that's the biggest issue, that's not too bad.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

That's good. I don't remember some of the projects we did that our bigger customers, we'd go in and put 50 or 100 computers in over a weekend. And we'd have someone on site, obviously. Yeah, so you do plan the bigger customers, the bigger projects you can. But in the MSP world, there's always a lot of pressure to get stuff done not to cause downtime. And and I think if people, business owners or technical directors, underestimate the planning and training makes successful projects. And yeah, I remember we used to had a big council customer, and it was a funny story that because I remember my first holy shit moment was when I was mucking around with our first version of an RMM and I set up a patching schedule to reboot all the servers, and I got my AMs and PMs wrong. And when I rebooted 50 production servers at 1 p.m., I got that phone call. Yep. 24 hour time. It's uh interesting. Oh my that was a panic, and I thought, once I figured out what the problem was, and I caused it, I absolutely did it myself. I said, ah, I see you there. Ah, okay. Yeah, no worries. Oh, about 20 minutes, and I'll be back up again. No stress. Luckily, it was 1 p.m. and it was lunchtime, so it was not a good phone call. But once again, it was communication. But oh yeah, that's my my I did the wrong thing.

SPEAKER_02 32:36

Another thing I'm fortunate to have in my current role is we do have a completely separate and segregated test environment. So we can put these tools in to the test environment, see the repercussions, Ivanny, and then plan for that before we put it into production and we're able to know what's going to happen instead of finding out what's gonna happen.

SPEAKER_01 32:56

Oh, where's the fun in that? That's the exciting thing. Okay, switch this thing up.

SPEAKER_02 33:02

That's what Alex is for. She's my test.

SPEAKER_01 33:04

Yeah, I'm sure she's happy about that. Yeah, so if you think about what you just described and they're having more time as an internal IT and you get to test and all that stuff, is there any particular things that you went back to your MSP days where you were looking after, yeah, you you became senior engineer and looking after a few of the the the bigger customers and had the service desk guys would come to you for escalations. Is there anything that you would change? You went back to the MSP and say that process-wise or tool-wise that you think would be a really cool fix for something in the MSP world?

SPEAKER_02 33:39

I don't think there was ever issues getting access to tools. We always got access to the tools we needed. It was mostly probably the budget constraints of what a client was willing to pay. Um, I think that's a tough one to fix. Say you're engaged by a council to implement something and they have to have it done before a certain deadline. It's really tough to deliver on that to the highest level possible in the short time frames that they give. Often they will come three, four months after they've already started thinking about it internally and talking about it internally. I suppose it all just comes down to account management at that point and making sure that you've got the right people talking to the client, making sure that there's regular touch points so that you know what's coming, you know what the client's thinking, you can help plan with the client rather than having the client plan and then come to you with, hey, I've found this, I want this. There's probably better options that can be collaboratively back and forth.

SPEAKER_01 34:43

Sounds sounds like you should be a VCIO.

SPEAKER_02 34:46

Hey. That's a bit of a throwback.

unknown 34:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

Oh, they're still out there. That whole Brendan, who we have in the podcast recently, he's you see that's one of the number one things when he goes into coach of business now, as you said, what is your roadmap technology roadmap strategy? Who's doing that? Who's having these conversations with the clients? So it's definitely uh a thing to do, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:12

So, Nathan, last question for today. Based on your own experience as a trainee, having come through the industry this way, any of your thoughts on why an MSP owner would look at this as an option, as traineeships as an option to bring people into the industry?

SPEAKER_02 35:30

Yeah, I think there's I have a little bit of a long-winded answer about this, I think. Something I've learned about training in the last couple of years is rather than training an individual or sending someone off to get individual training, the thing that you do now is you train the trainer. You'll send someone off to a class, they'll get trained, but there's an expectation that when they come back to the organization, they will then teach what they've learned to someone else in the organization. I feel like that's where we saw success. I'm saying from my point of view, this is where we saw success at TWM. Can't remember your nephew's name, but he came and did a month trial at TWM for a little while. And I was still a trainee at the time, but I was put in charge of training him. That was Corey. Corey. That's right, Corey. And I remember him picking things up so fast, and I feel like that was because I'd just freshly been through learning all these things, I was able to better communicate to him how to get started with these new tools, how to have these interactions with the clients, how to pick up the call and just get started with a ticket that you've just picked up from your queue. I think having that experience right from the start and learning the business from the start, rather than coming in with all these preconceived ways of handling tickets and making sure your clients are happy, all that sort of stuff. You're coming in and you're learning to do it that business's way. It was called the DWM way. We had the DWM way. I feel like that was most successful with the trainees that came through because we we were brand new to it and we were learning the way. It wasn't just the DWM way, it was to us the way of doing things, and we were able to carry that on when new people came on board as well.

SPEAKER_01 37:22

Yeah. We also did the work experience program as well. So while kids are students at school in years, I think it was nine and ten or ten and eleven or something, come and do like two weeks. And that was great because uh and a a number of those students that came through just said, This is not for me. This is not what I thought IT was. I said, All right, so you want to actually be a programmer. All right, then you go to university and you learn the theory of programming, and then and uh we'd all and Jenny, you would go and to industry events with the schools, careers days, and that kind of stuff and talk to people and tell them what we're about. And why I always had to ask the question a lot, do I need to do a degree? And I said, Well, if you want to design the computer or design the technology or write software in that at that time, yeah, be the engineer. Because engineering degrees were typically about learning how to design the tool. If you want to use the tool or use the product to solve a business problem and help people, then you don't necessarily need a degree. You need to learn real life experience, which is what you're talking about. We employed people like Aaron was straight out of university.

SPEAKER_00 38:27

He did that four-week or no six months placement part of his degree. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:32

And we figured out from that he didn't want to design the widget. He wanted to use the widget to help solve business problems. So if you want to work in the industry with people and help solve problems, like at the end of the day, any kind of person in the service industry, we're about solving people's problems. That's what we're about. We're not about inventing the fastest, bestest widget. And yes, you have to understand them. And yes, sometimes you do customize things to solve a business problem, but it's always what is the business problem we're trying to solve here? And you don't want to rush in and go and get training on all this different bits and pieces. It's not a thing that's applicable to be solving your clients' business problems. And today, in the world of five years ago, it was cybersecurity. Today it's AI. You need to be knowing about AI, not to invent the new AI tool, but knowing how to use it and how you can apply that to solving a business problem. So how you, as an MSP owner, leverage off that and have programs in your business where you can bring people in. We had the most success with people we bought in straight out of school or out of uni or with a couple of years experience. We did have some success with guys with five, ten years experience in the industry, but generally the people that came in and learned the DWM way and the way we approached customer problems, I think were much more successful and more engaged over the long time.

SPEAKER_00 39:53

And it is, it's a long-term strategy, really for probably for the first couple of years, very much that learning on the job, it does take up a lot of time of hey, in your case, was your buddy, it slowed him down. We always looked at it as a long-term investment and long-term strategy. But if we think of you, you, Nathan, Aaron Skeen effectively coming through that university placement program, Michael Prust, we had a number of people come through this program that I would look at probably some of the better players in the industry now. Well, Aaron's moved on out of the industry as well to something completely different, but as a long-term strategy. And we were our business was remote. We joked that we had to find people who wanted to work in IT, who had personalities and could hold conversations with people, and wanted to live in the country. It just adds a whole triple layer of complexity around finding the people that we wanted.

SPEAKER_01 40:55

Yeah, and I I remember trying to get someone to move to Horsham because we had opportunity down there and we had a couple of big customers, and it got to the point where I was offering a Tesla and rent a house for someone to move there. But yeah, I couldn't get anyone to take that. It was tempting. It was very tempting.

SPEAKER_02 41:16

Yeah, lifestyle change.

SPEAKER_01 41:17

Yeah, exactly. And you chose to go from the rural area into Geelong, which is like a metro, but still rural enough. It's good. You know, we enjoyed out. We spent four or five years living down that area. It's a great place, yeah. Any closing thoughts, mate? What would you just say to some young person out there who's thinking of getting into IT? What would your words of wisdom be to your 18-year-old self?

SPEAKER_02 41:41

Asking questions isn't a bad thing. It's a good thing, in fact. Ask lots of questions, stay curious, explore what technologies are out there, play with them. For me, it's become a hobby as well. So take it home with you as well.

SPEAKER_01 41:56

Yeah, definitely. Can't break anything with behind a keyboard, really.

SPEAKER_02 41:59

That's right. Nothing you can't fix.

SPEAKER_00 42:01

Will enough to just despite your best efforts.

SPEAKER_01 42:05

Did you ever just interesting, I was just thinking about trainees. And we had a program where we text in schools, and uh Korean Christian College was one where we had an agreement with those guys where we would it was fully upfront. We were employing a trainee. We're gonna place them on site two to three days a week, and yeah, they're gonna have support of the back end and all that kind of stuff. So it was cost-effective for the school, it was a good learning place for us. It was had that mix of being at the same place with a regular routine versus being thrown into the deep end of MSP madness where you don't know where you're going in what different days.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

So But it was a full-time role, so there was still two or three days on site at the school and then the other days in our office.

SPEAKER_01 42:49

Did you do that program? I can't remember.

SPEAKER_02 42:50

If you I was the first one to do it. Yep. Started with me. So yeah, it was every Wednesday I would go to Kerrang and just be their IT person for the day. It was a really cool experience. Definitely loved it. It was great.

SPEAKER_00 43:04

You got play lunch, you got lunch, you got to work school hours, that's right, you know.

SPEAKER_01 43:09

That's how I got to get in that extra break every day. And yeah, I just thought of that because as MSP leaders listening to this, that there is this kind of fear that oh, if I have a trainee, they're just gonna be a burden on everybody and like they're gonna have to, you know, and I don't have an office environment anymore. Everyone works from home. So that's a real challenge. But if you've got a client and have a conversation and say, they're looking for they can't afford your fully managed IT services, then there are options out there to do these kind of placement programs, and that worked really well for us. If we had a person, a trainee go through that program every year. Some didn't make the full six months, some did the program and left after the trainee program finished after the two years. Both one of our sons went through that program himself. Oscar did a different path. He went to got a diploma in marketing. And came in through that path, so he went a different way. But Sam definitely started in that trainee program up at Kerrang, and it was good for the school, good for us, good for our team. And after he finished his program and said, I'm not doing IT support anymore. I want to go make real money. He moved into sales.

SPEAKER_02 44:17

You didn't follow while it was there though. And I think it's a good way to teach you whether you like the MSP side of things, you like the internal IT things, maybe don't like IT at all, and maybe you want to go do sales.

SPEAKER_01 44:29

The other thing we learned after the experience with yourself is that we made that two-year trainee contract. So it was a two-year employment engagement.

SPEAKER_00 44:40

Nathan was definitely on that because I remember having the conversation that we were extending it for a period of time. And that was it. If he had didn't get it done by then, we were done. I do remember having that blokes talk with you.

SPEAKER_01 44:51

Ah, that it worked well.

SPEAKER_00 44:53

And the but the reason we did that, Nick, is prior, and I think Prusty was one that did this. We employed you employed a trainee, and that there was a two-year period to get the training done. But there was no leverage at the two-year mark if they were not there yet, because it was just employment. So we decided to do a two-year contract. And at the end of it, the training had to be completed. And then we would have the discussion. And we always be very upfront that we wanted to employ you as a trainee for a long period of time and become a valued employee. But we wanted needed to have that two-year contract in place to make sure that the training was completed. And then we'd have the conversation of putting you on as a ongoing employee. So it was never a two-year trainee, and then you're out the door and we employ another one. But it was just purely for that leverage of getting the training completed.

SPEAKER_02 45:51

I don't ever remember anyone finishing the traineeship work and then not being offered a full-time role afterwards either. I think everyone that finished it were offered a full-time role.

SPEAKER_00 46:01

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 46:02

And it was beneficial for us to finish the training because we got more pay afterwards.

SPEAKER_01 46:06

Got a pay rise. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 46:09

Trainee wages suck.

SPEAKER_01 46:12

That's true.

SPEAKER_00 46:17

Okay, let's wrap it for today. Hopefully our first recording has worked and we don't have to go and do this again.

SPEAKER_01 46:24

Oh, I don't mind doing it again.

SPEAKER_00 46:25

Yeah, nice to have a chat. Yeah, anytime. Nathan, thank you for joining us. Appreciate catching up with you and your time sharing with us today.

SPEAKER_02 46:34

Thank you for having me. I can't wait to come over to Bali again.

SPEAKER_00 46:37

Yeah, come visit.

SPEAKER_01 46:38

Good weather, rain stopped.

SPEAKER_00 46:40

Hasn't rained since last night.

SPEAKER_01 46:42

Yeah, might actually go for a swim now.

SPEAKER_00 46:43

Yeah, we've got one more recording today and then we're heading for the beach. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 46:47

Enjoy it for me.

SPEAKER_00 46:49

We will. But thanks again to Nathan. And as always, thanks to you, Nick. If this conversation hits home for you or got you thinking, head to mspmastery.blog and keep the conversation going. You'll find all our episodes there and more wisdom from the peers and partners who are shaping the future of our industry. And make sure you subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. We've got plenty more great guests and stories coming your way. Until next time, this is MSP Mastery.