Why People and Relationships are the Real Future of MSP: A Conversation with Brenton Johnson

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 am Jeni Clift, joined by my husband and long time business partner, Nick Clift. Together, we unpack what is really working in thriving MSPs, including insights from the trusted partners who support them.

In this episode, we are joined by Brenton Johnson, Managing Director of Uptake Digital. Brenton has built a strong reputation for helping small and mid-market organisations get real value from cloud, security, and smarter technology decisions.

He is a practitioner who thinks differently, cares deeply about culture, and invests heavily in people, which makes his journey highly relevant for any MSP owner looking to scale without losing the human side of service.

What makes Brenton’s story particularly relevant for MSP owners is his focus on becoming the "least valuable person" in his business. We explore the strategic decisions behind building a team of experts, the importance of "manufactured gaps" in customer service, and why leaning into a niche is more powerful than trying to be incrementally better than the crowd.

Here is what we covered together:
✅ Becoming the Least Valuable Person: How Brenton took five weeks off and discovered the business could run successfully without him, and why that is the ultimate goal for every owner.
✅ Manufactured Gaps and Cultural Stories: A masterclass in empathy where a technician suggested a stressed client stop for a cup of tea, and why Brenton now writes these stories down to preserve the "why" of his business.
✅ Leadership and Emotional Self-Awareness: The hard work of catching yourself before you react, building vulnerability-based trust, and managing the HR challenges that come with growth.
✅ Don’t Be Better, Be Different: Why Brenton challenges the "commodity" mindset and explains that technical capability alone cannot beat a deeply understood niche.
✅ Neurodiversity as a Superpower: A candid conversation on the "Gold in the ADHD brain" and why the traits that cause friction in school are often the exact ones that drive entrepreneurial success.
✅ Investing in Internal Growth: Why promoting from within and training leadership skills is the most reliable way to build a high-performing and loyal team.
✅ Vendor Relationships and Win-Win outcomes: How treating vendors as true partners and understanding their incentives leads to better results for the MSP and the client.
✅ The Value of Being a Country MSP: Why lean, empathetic, and relationship-driven "country values" have helped Uptake Digital stand out in a crowded metropolitan market.

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

For more about Brenton and Uptake Digital visit: uptakedigital.com.au
Brenton Johnson LinkedIn Page: linkedin.com/in/brentonjohnson

👉 Read more episode notes here: mspmastery.blog
👉 Listen on YouTube: youtube.com/@MSPMastery
🎧 Listen on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/4gftErFYrR8F80kthgvFbs
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/msp-mastery-ctrl-alt-deliver/id1828105793
📸 Follow on Instagram: instagram.com/mspmastery

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Do we have a saying that people don't leave jobs, they leave bosses?

SPEAKER_00 0:04

You can be friendly but not friends with your employees. If there's a problem, how do you manage a real performance issue with your friend? If you're friendly, it's a very, very different thing to being friends.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Great business owners, great entrepreneurs do is they create something out of nothing and then they see things that other people don't see and they make those things of it. And it's just such a rare trait in people.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

With 60 plus 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. Brenton Johnson joins us today, who's the managing director of Uptake Digital and someone we've known for years through industry events and SMBIT professionals meetings. Brenton has built a strong reputation for helping small and mid-market businesses get real value from cloud, security, and smarter technology decisions. He's known for thinking differently, challenging the usual MSP approach and staying focused on what's genuinely best for the client. He's also a familiar voice in the industry through speaking, education, and podcasting. Brenton, welcome to MSP Mastery.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to get into this today and have a bit of a chat about what it's been like running an MSP and the modern era, I'll call it.

SPEAKER_02 2:19

Yeah, exactly. And Brenton, I've I've known you for years and years and and but I don't really know the backstory, so I'm looking forward to this as well. I think one of your team presented an SMBIT and you weren't able to make it that day. He did a really good job and gave a little bit of insight into the culture. But um looking forward to hearing the story and and yeah, how it's worked out for you. Excellent.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Yeah. Happy to share.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

And also an experienced podcaster. We just had a a brief chat before we kicked off here. And you on the podcast with Robert Crane for what? 18 months you said?

SPEAKER_01 2:52

Yeah, about 18 months. So I think I was after Mark Keane, and then before that was Tech Tribe. Nigel, Nigel Moore, yeah. So I called him and said, Should I be on the podcast? He goes, I lasted 18 months. So I said, Okay. Uh I'll see how long I lasted, and I lasted exactly 18 months, pretty much.

SPEAKER_02 3:12

So well, you only need to last like 45 minutes here, so it's okay, mate. You should survive.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Yeah, I should be okay. Look, it's it's a real effort to regularly do a podcast, and people don't realise how much goes into it. So thank you very much for inviting me on and sharing the stories. I'm a listener, and it's really nice hearing the stories of some of the people that I've known for years but don't really know a lot about.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Okay. And today's topic is a little bit easier for you. No preparation required to uh to talk about yourself.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

Yeah, it's super easy. Uh I'm an expert in myself.

SPEAKER_02 3:45

So maybe you'll even understand the questions you ask yourself. You know, that's that's that's the challenge when you get to that point where you're asking yourself questions and you go, shit, I don't know the answer to that.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

Hopefully we won't get there today. Anyway, what I'll get you to do first, Brenton, is introduce yourself and please share your personal and professional best from the last six months. As an EOS implementer, I always start the the podcast this way.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Yeah, I I think from a professional best, we've hired a key person who's coming in and building out capability in our team. So this is definitely a luxury item for us. This is not a role that we required, but the opportunity arised and we said, Absolutely, and I'll snap your arm off. So I was asked for a reference and I said, How about a job instead? And yeah, so now I have a very senior, experienced manager who's worked with us before, so she did 12 months helping me set up the business. I want to first start bringing staff on and telling me all the things I was doing wrong, and it was it was really refreshing actually because yeah, when you get true experts into your business, it really can change the the whole game. So so I'd say that's been really good. She's been reading EOS and helping us put in level tens and keeping us accountable, and it's really taken the business to the next level. So I'd say that's my professional best. Personal best, like there's just so many good things that have been happening this year, but I can't really point at one, but things are just really good. Like we it was sort of five or so years ago that we started hiring people, maybe a little bit longer, and they say it takes about five years to build a business, and now it feels like it's built, and that there's a lot of the problems that we're having from being sort of a new business, uh, a lot of those are now becoming how do we take it to the next level. So yeah, we've always been great with customer outcome and looking after customers, but we're also thinking about well, how do we think a little bit more further ahead? So we're doing a lot more of that sort of thinking, which has been really good for me personally.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Good to hear. You might five years in you can actually have a life.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

Yeah, it does feel like that actually. So I do go to a lot of industry events, but I do now I I took three weeks off actually, not by choice. I got sick when I got back from Thailand. So in sort of five years uh five weeks off in total, and I come back and everything was there and it was working without me. Which is terrifying in one sense and really rewarding in the other. So it's I'm the least valuable person in the business. So that was my whole goal when I started this thing is to really I I didn't want a business that was all built around an individual contributor, although that's what it was like when we first got started. But over time we've just built in capability into the team, and now they're just taking it and running with it. And then sometimes I disagree with things, but I'm like, no, actually, that's a style thing. I've got to step back a little bit, I've got to be a little bit more. I'm not the expert anymore. I'm hiring these intelligent, highly capable people, I'm investing in them, I'm sending them on training. I can't be then dictating to them how they should be doing the work that they're doing. So very hard personally, actually, but very, very rewarding when you see the what happens once you do sort of let people run.

SPEAKER_02 7:22

That's very insightful, Brenton, because that's exactly right. And I was in a similar boat. Took me about 15 years to get there. So you you're a fast learner. But yeah, you do employ smart people, intelligent people, and you need to get you need to put a good team together and get out of their way, we say. Let them be. And are they gonna do it the same way you would, as good as you would? No, they're not, but that doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

They've got theirs, as you say, do it better. Oh, absolutely. Just done a AI assessment of the billing, and I'm big pitcher, I'm like off the charts visionary. And then Chris, who sort of runs business side by side with me, he's very good on the details, he's very technical. I'm very technical, but uh, we looked at the billing comparison and the AI come back and said, oh, it's like 96, uh it's 98% accurate in Chris's time when he was doing billing, and like 76% accurate when I was doing it. So according to our definitions. So a lot of it has been like obviously the bills weren't out by that much, but the way that we've defined it, the way that we structure it now, we've got rules, we've got process, like all of that stuff is what my team's really good at implementing and running. And I'm the guy who does the big picture, big idea, what's next. And we just lean into those str strengths now. I think that's been a real key to our success. And no one's trying to out-visionary me in the business, and I'm not trying to out-integrate anyone in the business.

SPEAKER_00 8:47

And on that note, I highly recommend another of the EOS library, which is Rocket Fuel, which is the relationship between the two of you, the visionary and the integrator, and good because it's such a key relationship, and getting that you know, those boundaries and and those lanes clear between the two of you, it can reduce a lot of sleepless nights and stress for both of you.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

Yeah, I have read that book actually, um, and it's very good. Anne's read it as well. And one of the things in the book, it points you to a survey.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

Yeah, the assessment.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

Yeah, and it's and I'm like a 96 visionary and like a 70 or 80 like integrator. I'm definitely not much of an integrator. I might be even a 68 integrator. Whereas it's flipped. I think I was like 89 and 54 or something. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm I I might be rating myself a little bit high on it, I think, on the integrator scale. Anyway, it doesn't matter. But that's okay.

SPEAKER_02 9:43

The takeaway there is you've you've found your people, your tribe, and you've given people permission and authority to do their roles and you work together, but keep out of each other's lanes, that's what it sounds like, which is awesome to be able to get to that point. So met lots of people that do the motions, but they just can't let go. And they're always stepping in, always overriding, always kind of nothing's ever good enough, and it just deflates people dramatically. And you just end up losing good people because they don't feel like they're being heard or listened to. So it sounds like you've got that formula right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

Yeah, we have a saying that people don't leave jobs, they leave bosses. So yeah, being really self-aware, checking in and listening for those things that they're not telling you around your behavior, and and then coming back and really saying, okay, well, I was wrong in this situation. I said that I was gonna do this thing, or I said I was gonna behave this way, and I fell back into my old habits, and you know, we're all we're all victims of falling back into bad habits, but I am actively trying to make things a bit better.

SPEAKER_02 10:44

It's not it's not easy because we as humans we have this protect, fight, flight, protect mode in our core of our brain, which is reptilian. And when you feel stress and strain, you go back into the default natural behavior, which is protect, yeah, eliminate all uh external things and protect the thing you need to protect. And it's it took me a while to realize I could feel it coming on. I just had this funny feeling and I didn't know what it was, but I had this feeling, and I've I learned that that is me getting anxious. I'm about to react rather than respond. I had to learn to you know hold my knees, breathe deep, listen, listen, listen, put myself in the other person's shoes. Okay, now I understand potentially why they could be saying that they're not having a go at me, they've got something else going on in their world, and it is that awareness that you're doing it. It's such an empowering thing. And as the Jenny and I coaches, when you see someone do that and they say, Oh, I felt myself going down that path and I I caught it and I pulled myself back again. Yes, that is yeah, that is the super consciousness of the humans that the AI is never gonna have, hopefully.

SPEAKER_01 11:51

Yeah, and it's I and you're right, it's the hardest work there is in business. And if you go and talk to any business owner and you ask them what their problems are, they're all HR problems generally. And if you can get your HR problems largely managed and and well managed, a lot of your other problems go away because you end up providing an environment where great people can do great work. And yeah, it sounds really simple, but as I said, like every business owner is struggling with these same challenges. And a lot of it is them growing as a leader, other people growing as a leader, external factors that have got nothing to do with the business. Just there's so much complexity to it on the outside and the inside. But if you really focus, I think you can come into alignment, you know, build those relationships. It's hard now with people not really doing stuff out of work, where you might go out for drinks on Friday night, that's sort of gone away now. You know, the the younger people don't really go out for drinks. Most of them don't really drink, as as seems to be my experience. So, you know, trying to build those relationships. So we're we're trying to find innovative ways all the time to say, well, how do I still build relationships in a professional way, but also have that sort of layer of friendliness and care. And it's it's not just about work, right? They're not just a ton of toms that you're putting into jobs. These are real people with real real things going on, and how do you have those sort of relationships without sort of crossing lines or upsetting people? It's really challenging. Like it's a lot easier with team of wear at seven, so it's not too bad, but it's still something that we're all working on and actively working on every day to to get better at.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

So say you can be friendly but not friends with your employees. If there's a problem, how do you manage a real performance issue with your friend? If your friend Lee, it's it's a very, very different thing to being friends. Let's actually get you to introduce yourself. For those who don't know you, just share a little bit about your professional journey.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

So yeah, I started my business maybe 15 years ago, but it was just me doing things. Uh, I used to build websites, I moved to Bandigo from oh, Horsham. I used to live in Horsham, and then before that I lived in Bellarat. So I'm a country boy through and through. I'm living in the city now, mainly for work purposes, but I'm fundamentally a country boy. So I've moved in, I've looked around the job market, I couldn't really find anything that I really liked. I had that sort of youthful arrogance, I guess, was maybe 24. How hard can it be? It's you talk to the plumber and you go, my boss is a lousy plumber, I'm so much better than he is, and then you become a you run a plumbing business and you go, Oh, it doesn't actually matter how good a plumber you are, it matters how well you run the business. So I think I had that youthful naivety, but I was just doing more consulting type work. I come out of that. I was talking to business owners, I'm talking to them about websites and business problems, and they're all saying my email sucks. I can't work, no one works efficiently. It was sort of on that time where the server was stopping the sort of gold standard and the cloud was coming in, but it wasn't really there yet. So when we started, it was still a Telstra exclusive, so no MSV would ever put their customer in a in a Telstra uh tenant. I I think our business today probably wouldn't do that, but we just saw it as the future. So we're like, great, let's move it in. And it all worked out, fortunately, because Microsoft 365 was the right horse to to back. And yeah, I just built that up over time. Ended up doing about 50 365 migrations in a two-year period. So a lot out of GoDaddy, some out of exchange, and that's pretty much all I did was just get people into Microsoft. That got me a phone call from Microsoft. They said, Do you want to be one of the first CSP partners? I said yes, and we sort of went from there. And then when the pandemic hit, we're talking to customers and they're like, I my IC provider's not great. I can't talk to them, they're difficult to work with. You know, do you know anyone? I'm like, I reckon we can do it. So that's when I hired someone, my first employee. We say internally, a bit of a bit of a joke, but sort of like a practice employee, where I was making a lot of really poor management decisions, and you know, we're in the throes of COVID, and it was a fully remote, he was living in Melbourne. We were friends before as well, so you had that sort of element to it. So we're like going through it, he's and then we're sort of getting pretty busy, so he said, Hi, my best mate, he's just as good as me. Because the first person we hired was highly capable, really could do anything, just throw any ticket, could just solve it. He's 19, but just could kill it. It's like, oh, hi my best mate, and that was my best mate from the talk you're mentioning before. And he came in and he didn't have the same level of technical capability out of the gates. He had a more normal level of technical capability, so that's when Ann came in and basically said, Yo, you're doing everything wrong. Let me come in and help you. There's nothing like screwing something up to motivate people to want to help you. Yeah, so she came in, did all the OH and S systems, did all the HR systems. She said, Did you interview him? I'm like, Oh nah. Okay, well you gotta interview him. Oh, okay. Uh there's a lot of that sort of stuff. You know, really teaching me what really, really great management looks like and clarity of expectations, you know, following up after conversations, making it really clear, giving people chances to succeed rather than sort of getting angry when things aren't getting done. So it was a very that was a very good relationship from our perspective. And then obviously having another sort of senior person in the business who could do pretty much anything. Here's a lease, here's this, like a sort of a bit of a multi-tool that could do anything. So that that really enabled us to build the base that we had then and build out a really strong team. And that's a credit to everyone who sort of come on that journey with us. It was it's a very, very tough thing starting business, and it's tough on the owner, but it's also tough on the staff. They don't have a HR department to go to, they don't have an IT department, they don't they've just got to figure a lot of stuff out on their own. And yeah, like I've always got a lot of respect for the people who sort of hung around and really made a go of it and really put the effort in, which was probably a lot of most of our staff to be honest, but it it was a very, very tough time. So we built that up and then come out of that. I guess it's like we're now five, six years in, and yeah, we've got a very established manage services practice now. It's very clearly defined. We've we've got our key person who sort of owns a tech stack, owns billing, which is really good. So kind of like having two partners in the business now, which has made it so much better. I do the account management, sales, a little bit of finance, and then yeah, the tech work and the billing and the sort of service quality stuff. I don't really get involved in that stuff as much anymore. And and it works really well.

SPEAKER_02 19:08

It's it's interesting when you say that you stuff things up, people help you. And I think that is uh that's a key point because as humans, we we like to help. And it took me a long time to realize that everybody is trying to help people. Well, there there are exceptions, right? There are the yeah, point double oh one percent people that are there to help people that are take advantage and do things, but that's that's you know, it's you get that anywhere. But generally, most 99% of people are there to help and they get satisfaction from helping. And we we had some struggles with some level three guys that we hired into our business that they were great people, good technical, but they had this challenge where they had a higher expectation of themselves than what we did. I'm a level three, I should know everything. And they they might be really super smart people. And the reason I'm mentioning this, I want to get your feedback on your perspective on this, is they come into your business, they absolutely know nothing about your business or about your clients or about how you've implemented the technology into those clients. So I have one guy in particular who he got off a ticket or something, he's like, Oh, who was the bloody idiot that put this shit in here? And it's like I said, Well, you're actually looking at him. It was me. And at the time, it was the right solution for that problem for that client. I agree, there are better ways to do it now. And I said, just a tip, you never know who's done the work before you, so you can't have that attitude. And he he had a bit of a white face moment going, Oh my god, I've just you know it's two months in and I've just called the boss an idiot. But I think we all have to be vulnerable and create an environment where people can be open and honest and say what they need, but you also the people need to be respectful of the person before. So, like we never ever burn bridges, right? That's the number one thing in life and business. It doesn't matter what happens to you, bad things happen to good people. Just can't burn bridges because you never know what's going to come around in a circle. So ha have you had that situation that you how did you deal with it?

SPEAKER_01 20:59

You're just describing me and my younger days, Nick, you know. But the the thing is, I think when you have young people in particular, they are able to grow in these huge leaps and bounds. And uh I think of a kid taking their first steps and that first four years of life, and how you're able to learn like 75% of everything you know in like four years, and then it sort of tapers off over time, and you start bringing more perspective and more experience in. And it can be easy to go, I don't understand that decision, I don't un look why are we doing it that way? And y you know, you can be an absolute expert at that, but there's a reason for it, right? So, how do you get back to the reasons? And when we think about documentation now, and we go through our documentation, we write a lot of how we do things and what things are, but we don't write a lot about why. I think Fuzzy mentioned it on one of the podcasts, and that's the actual important piece. Why is this in here like this? And being an owner business, it's quite easy. Right, you can go to NEC, EO Jenny. Why does this exist? And someone will know the answer, right? But when you're coming in and out of different organizations, the organization's changing staff all the time, often it's not clear why that decision was made. And it can be quite difficult to sort of reverse engineer. So we have a really strong documentation culture. It's really been one of the key things that I'm really stressed about all the time. I think for me it's about being able to say, if I am away for five weeks, that people don't have to come and ask me questions because it's written down somewhere. And we're doing a lot more and understanding why are we doing these things and communicating that down to the team so they know why as well. It's like we we had a really good example of a cultural story that we had, and it we're doing interviews for our new trainee, and the and the story sort of went along lines of, oh, this person was having a hard time with a support issue. They're on the phone for over an hour. The technician on the phone, which was Dan, who was our sort of second employee, he took a breath and he said, Hey, like it sounds like you need a little bit of a break. Do you want to make a cup of tea? He had very good rapport with these with uh all of our thing. She goes, you know what, that that's exactly what I need. Put the phone down, disappeared for 10 minutes, come back, picked up the phone. You still there? Yep. You know, this is a senior leader, very, very stressful job. Last thing she needs is IT. So we use that to educate technicians on it's not the IT, right? Through not writing this stuff down, it sort of turned into, oh, and then there was a gap in the conversation, and it's like, no, no, no, there was no gap. It was manufactured gap. In fact, that's the whole point of the whole story, right? So I'm like, right, I need to write this thing down because when I tell people that story, it's a real differentiator for us. It's a really important cultural story, it's a real piece of leadership from the ground up. That's not something we taught or or teach people. We teach it now, but it's something that came as a result of how we treat people, we care about people, and then the application of that on the ground. So it's a it's like, how do I how how do I make sure that these things don't get lost over time? Because that's a timeless story. And um, when I talk to other people in the industry, they're like, I would like give my left arm to have a technician that thought like that, even just like once a week would be nice, like, because they're really stuck just solving the problem in in front of them, and that's what you pay them to do. But really, that's not what we're here to do. We're here to help people succeed.

SPEAKER_02 24:38

It's interesting because that brings back a couple of thoughts about our process. And we had a we were fortunate enough to have a nice big office in Muni Ponds at one point, and we had a table tennis table set up in the middle of the office, and it got to the point where we had what do you call it, a a quad, four desks, whatever you call that, like a quad thing, right? So we had four sales at one end of the building, four techs at the other end of the building, and Jenny and I had an office on the side and the meeting room and this big area in the center that was kind of vacant walkway. It was big enough to fit the table tennis table in there. And every now and then, I'd say five or six times a day. So Righto, time for a game. You'd hear someone in that similar situation, they're stressed out. They're don't know how you'd get them off the call or when they finish that course. Like, Righto, we're doing a uh quick game to eleven. And it was really good because when when you can hear someone playing ping pong, everyone in the office kind of looked up and said, Oh, that's a good idea. And we encouraged it. And just like a quick game to 11 takes five minutes, and it was just that that breaker, that stress breaker that you needed, and you go back to your desk refreshed, and it's like encouraging people to go to the gym. I would purposely go to the gym during work hours, not at lunchtime, because I knew my productivity would double after I'd been to the gym. And so I wanted that experience for other people. It took a long time for people to be game enough to go to the gym from 10 to 11 instead of from 12 to 1. Not many people did it, but those that did, they came back and that productivity in the afternoon was astounding. But yeah, little tips like that are fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 26:04

And I think uh to going back to your point about the table tennis, what that really generated in our office was a culture of people looking out for each other. Because it was never somebody saying, I need to go and play table tennis, it was somebody sitting there listening, and the moment that phone was hung up, they're like, let's go and have a quick game. So it was taking them away from that situation a bit of a reset, and it just created that that real culture of looking out for each other, sometimes calling each other out on behavior, language, but really that genuine care for each other. This person needs to go and have a quick break.

SPEAKER_01 26:44

Yeah, that's uh that's a really good story, and it's it's a sort of culture that you want, right? And this is what drives high performance, right? Like we're not machines, we don't work nine to five, or it's not like that at all. It's really a managing energy, managing brain cycles. One of the things that, you know, say we have a cyber event come in, everyone's stressed. First thing I'm like is like wind the clock, right? So in the fighter jets, the first thing in the thing if you're getting shot at is to wind the clock. It's like, well, what does it do? Well, it's actually there just to make you stop and think and take perspective because it's very easy to get into problem-solving mode and really lose perspective. So it's like that table tennis example is a really good example of that, where not only does it sort of have that pastoral sort of nice after afterglow around it, but it also takes people out of situations and they'll go back to their desk and go, Oh, I've been struggling for three days and I went and played table tennis for five minutes. Yeah, I'm sure that's happened more than a few times. And but it's easy for people to say, well, you know, what how much work are they getting done there? Like, what are they doing? But it's just not how we work as humans. We have to have those breaks, we have to turn our brains off. And then the subconscious seems to like fill in the gaps and solve the problems. So that downtime is so key.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

You know it's bad when I when I was sitting in a service manager, service delivery manager over the years when the techs would ring me to talk through a technical problem because a technical discussion with me is really, really short. I have no idea what you're talking about. Turning things off and back on again is the level level of my ability. But they ring me, talk me through it, and then get sort of two-thirds of the way and it's like, it's alright, I figured it out. Thank you. You're welcome. No idea what we just talked about, but you go be, you go fix it.

SPEAKER_02 28:30

And it just makes me think, Brendan, about the that that getting out of the changing state or getting out of the situation. And that's why a lot of high performers do extreme sports. Like I used to race cars, you know, do dirt bike riding, and I can guarantee you I am not thinking about a billing issue, a staff issue, or a ticket issue when I'm riding a trail bike through the forest at 100 kilometres an hour, trying not to die. I'm a thousand percent focused in the zone. And there are other ways of doing that. Alcohol's probably the worst and drugs is the worst, but you know, yoga meditation, but a lot of tech people like extreme sports, like they'll go hang gliding or yeah, whatever they do. But it's that escapism. And I remember back in the early days and we started our business in 1996 when we had a six-month-old, and then two years later we had another baby, and they both grew up in the house. And my only escape was X-Files on a Wednesday night. I couldn't go to do the car racing, the motorbike riding anymore. And we ran the business from home, so that was the taboo time, right? 7 30 on a Wednesday night. I watched the X-File, and that was it. That was my little escapism. And and that was enough for me back in those days. But yeah, you've got to figure out what's for the guys listening, what's your what's your stress breaker or your relief? What do you do in a productive way? Because there's lots of destructive ways of doing stress relief. But what is your productive good way of breaking stress and and figure out what that routine is?

SPEAKER_01 29:55

Look, for me, it's all about helping other people, right? I was a Rotarian at 21. I got volunteer the year award, you still a lot of community work. It's a lot harder once you start running a business and you've got a lot more responsibility and time sort of gets away from you, but I always try and give back. So it might be doing podcasts, I try and have coffees with as many new entrepreneurs as possible. So that particular first 12 months where they don't really know what they're supposed to be doing or charging or how to spend their time. And uh sometimes it might just be one thing. It's like, yeah, you can go read books and stuff, but you kind of if you just talk to enough people who have done it and try and you know take some of their tricks, you'll do really well, right? And I think the content is one side, but having that person who feels accessible, who's an expert in a particular thing, or I'm IT, so I'm like, if you have IT questions, just call me, I'll point you in the right direction. Like they're not gonna really be customers of ours, but it gives me a lot of satisfaction, particularly when I see them in five or ten years and they've you know really gone off to the races and taken off, and you go like, I've done I've done none of that, right? But maybe there was a conversation there that averted disaster, or maybe it just helped people mentally get through that piece because like one of the hardest things is starting business, and it feels very lonely. You talk to your friends that understand, you talk to your partner, probably not so much in your case, but you know, they may not fully understand, but you have a shared appreciation of it that you know your family don't understand, and it it's very lonely and it's very isolating, and then you get put in a room full of entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial types, and you go, Oh, I'm not strange, I'm not weird, I'm not different. I'm actually just an entrepreneur. Um, and I like to build things and I think differently. And you see a lot of ADHD entrepreneurs, there's like too many to list in this industry. Those traits that they've been told at school have been so destructive to their schooling career, are traits that serve them extremely well in running these sort of businesses because you need that level of energy sometimes, you need that focus time, you need to really be on your feet and moving around and getting out and doing things. So it's those things that really held you back in school, which helped me back in school. Like I I did pretty well at school, but yeah, I always found the actual doing of the schoolwork the hardest part. The learning part was easy. I'm like, I can learn it, but if you make me sit down and write the thing for like four, five, six pages, I'm like, I can't do this. I'm not gonna spend the rest of my life, I'm never gonna be a journalist. That's not my jam. But uh, you know, I'm pretty good at figuring stuff out, solving problems, working with people, finding gold where there's where no one else sees it. And I think that's what great business owners, great entrepreneurs do is they create something out of nothing, and then they see things that other people don't see, and they make those things happen. And it's just such a rare trait in people. But how do you get the kids who are you know out there just thinking they're weird and different and you know, maybe they're not gonna make it, and they're to go, oh no, these traits are really actually gonna help me in the future. Uh, I don't know how we solve that because but I think the best thing we can do is just try and give back and constantly spend time trying to make the play the industry better, more friendly, create opportunities for young people coming up. That's why we hired a trainee. We don't need a trainee, we don't really have any level one work anymore. However, we do need to give people opportunities in the industry.

SPEAKER_02 33:36

Yeah, how how are those people gonna gonna learn and get foot in the door? And that's that's a that's a great, great initiative. We always had trainees. Um, we took them out of high school, out of university grades, you know, placement programs, etc. And they've been our most successful hires because they they truly get to see it from and and a lot of uh work experience as well. And I'd say 60, 70% of work experience said, Well, this is not what I thought it was. Said, no, it's hard what we do. You know, and it takes you actually have to talk to people. Yeah, you definitely have to talk to people, and and the work never ends. Like this, if you are the kind of person that likes to tick a list off and have zero left at the end of the day, then don't get into the MSP or IT support industry because it's ne it never ends. It never ends. It's a constant the the wins are making a happy customer, making somebody's day, getting a compliment, helping a mate, solving a really hard problem. They're the wins. The number of tickets you've done is not that's what you do, but that's not the win.

SPEAKER_01 34:33

And it's kind of like the end result, right? Like if you do these other things, you're gonna get the result. But it's hard to see because it's not really a straight line. I completely agree with you. I think you have to continuously invest in the industry, invest in the people. And the best people are people you grow, and the best promotions are usually internal promotions. That's the first thing Ann taught me about HR. And then she said, you ever have to decide between the internal applicant and hiring externally, you train the internal applicant and you make them good at that job because they'll always be better at it every day of the week. I've never seen it work the other way. This is the secret, this is how you get a really great business. You build and develop people and you rot move them into increasingly more interesting roles that challenge them and keep them engaged. And we're just following that playbook at the moment. But it it is hard in a small business where you know there's not necessarily a linear progression. It may be we need this today, and we kind of need this role. But if you can sort of get the team working together, then it kind of it's you can make it work, I think.

SPEAKER_00 35:36

I started working with a an EOS client actually a a couple of years ago, and it was very, very brief during the first session. One person put up their hand to be integrator, and the owner responded with, You've only been here nine years. I don't think you're ready yet. And I I was astonished and more astonished that I believe that person is still in the business, working in the business. But how long do you have to be here? Like, is it a 10 year? Is it 15? Is it 25? At what point is this person who was was actually in the integrator role but was not even the title because the owner just could not let go. And yeah, like I said, the thing that astonished me most is that person still there, still doesn't have the title, still being treated i in that way. I was I was actually appalled at at the comment that the person said it out loud.

SPEAKER_01 36:31

Yeah, and it's a real foot and mouth moment. It really s it says more about the owner, right? And it's it's really sad, right? It's a that's a really sad story where you have a highly capable person, but you know, they're getting help back and there's really no reason for it.

SPEAKER_02 36:48

So it it the hard thing Us as leaders, our job is to uh uh give people opportunities and then uh coach them, help them, train them to put them into the role. You know, these these are two trains of thoughts. You've got to prove to me you can do the job before I give you the job, uh or you show initiative, I put you into the job and coach and mentor you to be successful. And we were always the latter. Yeah, we were always giving people chances, but you see it all the time out there now, and and uh it's uh people expect someone to come in and just gotta do the job, earn the job before they get the title or they get re-recognized for it. And I just don't think we have senior citizens of the IT industry now, Nilly.

SPEAKER_00 37:28

You are, I'm not.

SPEAKER_02 37:30

You're not, yeah, you're not. But if you think about the you know, I don't even the word millennials is not even the right word. You think of a 25-year-old today, who's mentoring them on how to present themselves to play the political game of getting a better position in the company? Nobody is. So they they they don't have those skills, so they're reliant on I don't know, I I really feel for them. I don't even know how to help guys like that, other than to share experience and and teach them skills because how do they say, for example, you're a tech at 20 years old, you come into it and you you say, Oh man, I really want to be the senior VCIO, for example, the senior consultant. Do we, as leaders, do we have the strategies in place to take that person on that journey? Or is that person going to have to go and change jobs 10 times, oversell themselves at each point, which is with the old way of doing it, and then you get a job and you you're there for a year, you learn a bit more, you take that skill, your resumes build out. I I I just don't know. I don't I don't know the answer to that. So it's probably a question rather than a statement, because I don't know how to I wish I knew the answer to help young people want want to break into the industry because it's gonna be tough.

SPEAKER_01 38:38

Yeah, for us it's all leadership skills, right? You hit the nail on the head before. So we send people away on leadership course. So Brendo, who's our now service manager, and he's very, very new. He's just learning how to have staff, he's just learning about KPIs, group KPIs, and he's going through a very, very sharp learning curve. And I I feel for him because I've been through the same learning curve uh when I was building my business. I'm seeing all the same mistakes, and I'm like, I've got to let him make these small mistakes, but I don't want him to bankrupt the company. So but I don't want him to think I'm setting him up to fail either. So it's like, how do I how do I do that? So we we send we do uh annual retreat every year and we take everyone away. There's a component of planning, but there's a very at least a day of really introspection leadership skills, helping people really understand themselves better. And as a result of that, we've had staff members say, Hey, like I want to move to the UK and live there for a while. We're giving you like four months' notice. I wasn't actually gonna say anything because I know that's not the right thing to do in business, or you never know what's people gonna react. But I feel really comfortable because we have that vulnerability-based trust and yeah, we did the right thing. We didn't use that information nefariously. But it the feedback was that that would never have happened if we hadn't had those conversations and we hadn't invested in that piece. But it can be a bit hard when you've got people who are trying to learn technical skills, people skills, communication skills, they've just got so much on their plate, and just going, stop, have a think about, you know, whatever. The you know, how how do you how did you re react in that situation and you know they don't quite have the self-awareness when they're younger that they do when they're older, and try to build that in. So I I think that's the key to it, Nick, and anything that you can do to help people with leadership skills, and they just they never go in out of fashion. You just continuously become better at everything, the better your leadership skills are. Even if you don't have staff, even if you uh really don't want to ever have staff, everyone needs those same skills.

SPEAKER_00 40:48

Absolutely. And that leadership goes across community, it goes across your client base, you know, every part of your life. If you can build out those skills, it makes such a huge difference to to you as a person. Brendan, when we had a chat before the podcast about you know what we might, what topics we might cover, you said that you really felt that you hadn't followed the MS crowd, you were doing things differently. So can I get you to share one piece of advice you would give to an MSP owner who feels like they're stuck kind of following the crowd, doing the same as everybody else, but they want to start doing things differently.

SPEAKER_01 41:28

Yeah, I I think this really speaks to my core philosophy in the business, which is don't be better, be different. By being different, you can be a lot better. So our business is very, very focused on not-for-profit professional services businesses. We do a bit of legal, we do a bit of, you know, regulated type industries, but we're really good in that space. We understand their business, we understand how they report. And you know, there might be other MSVs out there that are highly technical, highly capable. They probably do song and dance and whatever, but they won't win against us because we've got the unique source that's exactly what our clients are looking for. And I I think if I was starting again or I was thinking about how I would go about it if I had an existing business, I I'll really be looking at what are your strengths. And it's sort of what we're saying before around like start with really thinking about what do you do well. And it can't be, oh, we have a great service desk, we we have smart techs that can fix technical problems, we have cool tools that automate things. Everyone's doing that, right? So you have to think very, very deeply about your business, think about your staff, think about your key stuff. Yeah, we use that example that I mentioned before about picking up the phone and having a break because the client needs a break. And then that story gets told in the client and it sort of ripples out, and then it leads to referrals. So that's us, right? But that may not be your team. Your team may actually just be able to solve problems that other people can't solve, or you're very, very automated, so you can do things at a lower price point, but still provide a phenomenal service. So I've seen all different types of MSP, and I I think the biggest mistake I see across MSPs is they think they can't differentiate, it's a commodity, there's only one way of doing things. But like even just listening to your podcast and how you did things, it's still very different to how other MSPs do things. So it's lean into a little bit of that, get external input on that as well, and saying, talk to your customers, do a survey, find out what it is about you that makes you really special and differentiated. Get out in the industry, talk to people who know a lot of MSPs, who understand a lot of different MSPs, and try and pinpoint what it is. And then if you just focus on that one thing, which is the scary part, right? Of saying, I'm gonna start saying no to these things because. we're not the best at it. And I'm and I'm going to put it out in the world that we're not doing, let's say, we only do managed services. That's not controversial anymore. But I suppose when we were doing it, people were there was still a lot of, oh well, my biggest clients are break fixed. They don't like managed services. But we just made a decision that we we didn't want to have a bad technology experience for clients. And we decided that we couldn't we couldn't live with ourselves if something happened, they didn't have backup. Like we take that stuff really personally because we actually really care about the clients. So we we just decided like we're not going to provide cheap services or or scale down services that don't meet our standards to try and help clients. We've just made the decision that those clients are better served by someone else who has a model that suits that better and they can provide a a better experience for that client. And then we just focus on the things that we're really really good at which we're great at customer I say just fix customer service but we've got that empathy and we care and the country values piece that is kind of rare because there's not many country MSPs. So you know people really feel that when they're on the phone they feel that when they're doing QBRs with us. It's not just a job for everyone here. And for us we've really lent into that and that's probably why we've ended up with so many not-for-profit clients that are doing really important and amazing work because we just identify with that's how we want to spend our time but we don't want to do you know we don't want to go out and do NDIS. We want to help people do NDIS better. And we want to be the the background people that enable those people to have very stress-free experiences with technology. So like that's just a working example we're using our business but I've seen all sorts Taz is a another exceptional example another guest of your podcast an upcoming guest of your podcast again I've may have heard and he is he is the epitome of do things differently don't follow the crowd. Yes he runs all the same MSP tools he he's doing the similar sort of tasks but the way that he thinks about things he loves self-service most MSPs don't like self-service he leans into that he leans into automation he's like I need to spend time with the customer on things they care about. So if they care about AI I want to spend time talking to the client about AI. I don't want to be talking about device refresh and user onboardings and offboardings right he's like no customer cares about that. So that's how he's sort of positioned his business but if I compare our two businesses it's an extremely different well we're doing the same thing with the same technology same Microsoft we're very aligned in our thinking I I really like the way Taz thinks and runs his business but on the other hand we're very differentiated we're very different we have very different sort of ways of working and it's not that Taz is bad or I'm bad it's just two different things. It's like do you want an apple or a banana? They're both good.

SPEAKER_00 47:01

Both good I like bananas so I'm going to pinch that well I'm allergic to bananas so you can have all those and I'll go with the apple. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:08

There's a couple of things in that session there that I really related to because I'm it's different now but for me back in the day when we were kind of in our prime I got the feedback about what we were doing well and not well from our partners and that was Dell Sophos and Datto. I had partner managers there that worked with hundreds of MSPs and we did QBRs with the with the partners right they were driving my business QBRs based on what's the revenue forecast and especially Dell because Dell was a big company and they had quarterly targets and Sophos was pretty much the same when it was private and Datto was very much the same. So they I learned a lot from those three account managers of those three vendors and they taught me a lot about what we were doing that was unique from the other guys because they got to see a lot. I'm not so sure in the current environment where everything's been pushed back to distribution and online whether you're going to get that knowledge from there. But you've got to find a place to get the feedback like you said Brenton. And it's not all in MSP industry events. Like yeah we when we're talking about sales and business development to MSPs it's go to where the clients are like who actually runs client councils where you get a group of your key clients together to tell you what their joint problems are. Sometimes I'll tell their peers and I had a lot of local government clients or we had a lot of local government clients in regional Victoria and they always talk. If I got a few of them in the room then they would tell me everything about everything that was going on between them and their compet there was a little bit of competition between local governments and but it was such a powerful thing. Whereas if you have a one-on-one it's a different conversation but getting that group I call it group therapy it works well and somewhere you've got to find a way to get your group therapy whether it's like you mentioned about entrepreneurs we were members of the or we still are members of the entrepreneurs organization. We're members of peer groups of our own industry so you need industry knowledge you need business knowledge you need leadership yeah it's a whole lot of stuff it's hard running a business isn't it mate?

SPEAKER_01 49:14

Well it's easy to sit there and do support tickets and you know I keep going back to my plumber example but you know it's the more time you do spend outside of your business talking to vendors talking to customers understanding things the better you understand your own business um somewhat ironically so I think that's a really good lesson I think people are too quick to forget about vendors and not necessarily build great relationships and I think that's one of the things that I've always admired about you is that you you don't just see the client as the only relationship that matters which some MSPs do. You see the vendor as just as important and that you know you're there to make sure that the vendor can provide an exceptional service to the client and without you it probably wouldn't be able to be even possible but with you that's it's a two-sided marketplace. So and it's easy to go well I'm the customer blah blah blah but I think that's a complete wrong way of doing it. I think that when you have something happen and use a customer example but we we had our office go into liquidation we were in a co-working space and it was like the public holiday with the long weekend for Melbourne and all our clients come and helped us move stuff out of the office and picked up laptops a lot of stock there and they just like they and they were all having their time off somewhere away so you know that I think that's the kind of relationships that you want to have with customers and vendors right you don't want to just have a transactional relationship at the vendor level and then have a really you know just because you can't solve all the customers' problems by yourself. You need vendors you need partners you need people who really have resources and ways of solving problems that you don't have and to be honest it's probably been one of the secrets of us as well that we've really been to weddings of partner managers I've you know I get invited to things people ask me for my opinion you know I've been sent on trips overseas but it's not because they want my business or it's about me being a customer it's just really they value that I'm trying to help them succeed as well. It's not just about me and my success. It's about well I know you've got sales targets you know I always ask them you know how do you get compensated what are your sales targets what are you focused on what's the US interested in like you can just ask those simple questions and they just go well no one's ever asked me that before. And it's like well this is your whole world if you don't meet these targets you disappear and then I'm out a really good partner manager. So I like if you know and people do this much better I think in the enterprise but not in the not in the MSP space as much. But you know they go if Microsoft is pushing AI you go and sell AI because then your account manager meets their targets which keeps the Microsoft's gods happy and then you end up with a really good outcome as well because you're aligned with what the vendor's trying to do. Plus you're providing the outcomes and the things that customers are asking about usually it's a fairly full alignment across the stack. Sometimes it's not always that perfect but a lot of times it is and it's like you want to sell the old SBS box still but Microsoft's like we're not compensating that anymore we're moving everyone away from it. That's your time to go okay we need to pivot as well we're not going to sit there and criticize the vendor and go, no, we don't believe in that we're going to do our own thing we don't care about the vendor. So it it is a very delicate thing because at the end of the day you do work for your customers but the best way to service your customers is to have excellent relationships with vendors and make sure that they can provide the services through you that they need to make their businesses successful as well. It's got to be win-win win otherwise it's just you know it just makes business so much harder.

SPEAKER_02 53:02

Yeah and it's there's no fun in an adversarial relationship whether it's with a customer or with a partner like nobody wins and it's just ends in tears and I 100% agree with you. Yeah win win win is definitely of it's definitely doable. A little bit of flexibility here and there but if we've all got a common goal and a common vision and that comes through having proper conversations.

SPEAKER_00 53:21

I remember back at DWM our office in Ichuka that we custom built and we had a big kitchen, full kitchen with big dining table and each week we had a person on kitchen duty that basically had to turn the dish roster on and off each day and empty it and that sort of thing and but once a week they had to prepare lunch for everybody and our customers and our vendor partners got wind of this. So we'd get often a few phone calls on the Monday to say what day's lunch and so we'd have 25 people sitting around the dining table and it was most of our team a few account managers a couple of clients and they'd just turn up and be sitting around the dining table in our office just again building those relationships and connecting and and I think that's one thing that we did really, really well was we just we'd always kind of called ourselves a family but sort of it was probably pretty much a you know Nick and I called it that but then over time it just sort of became our thing of we really did, you know, everybody sitting around the dining table once a week having lunch together was was just part of who we were.

SPEAKER_02 54:27

And when we won that tender at Baloque for five years that the reason they gave us is because you guys treat us like family. You know you're price wise you're the same as the other guys in the competition but we know we're going to get treated like family with your team so you're we're with you. So that was that was a really good thing for me.

SPEAKER_01 54:42

So when I was young I used to have a mentor I was 21 I was even worse than I am now and they used to run a business now that business got soul goes down whatever she said the thing that she's most proud about in that business is that the staff still catch up every week all of them whenever they can so there's this sort of cadence that for nine years after they've left that their core staff still have lunch every single week. So this is a country business but that was really a really good reminder that this isn't wasted time. This is time that you know really enriches people's lives and and makes things better and that's what we need to be focused on. We've got to really stop worrying about everything else and really focus on those relationships and those people because that's what drives your business.

SPEAKER_00 55:37

Absolutely yeah what they say people don't remember the problem that you fixed or the you know what you've said but they remember remember how you made them feel and make them feel valued whether that's a customer or a member of your team and you know everybody wins okay Brenton thank you so much I love this conversation and and really today that's really what it was just a conversation thanks for your time thanks for sharing your experiences.

SPEAKER_01 56:04

Oh no thanks for having me and I'd I'd love to come back if you'd have me. We'll try to stick to the questions next time.

SPEAKER_00 56:10

Yeah we might actually ask some questions next time.

SPEAKER_02 56:13

I'm a real I'm a real culture wonk and I think you guys are too so yeah we probably talk about culture for another eight hours if we wanted to just remind me every not we go back to Australia every quarter to to meet with our clients face to face and and probably every second quarter we we do a kind of DWM catch up from the the old days and we'll put a lunch on somewhere and yeah it's just different people when they're available I come and drop you but it's the same thing. Like everyone gets together yeah maybe not every week obviously maybe maybe twice a year something like that and it's so good because just here and where people have gone to what they've done what they've learned reflect yeah reflecting on some of the old stories and bits and pieces of of what we did in the day and the crazy things we used to do and our awesome Christmas parties we used to have where we take people away for two days at a time and yeah it was great. So yeah thanks thanks for the memories you brought brought back a lot of memories for me too so I appreciate it. Yeah thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00 57:08

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