.png)
MSP Mastery: Ctrl-Alt-Deliver
Welcome to Ctrl-Alt-Deliver: MSP Mastery — the podcast for IT leaders, MSP owners, and service delivery professionals who want to elevate performance, improve processes, and stay ahead in the fast-changing managed services landscape.
MSP Mastery: Ctrl-Alt-Deliver
The Modern MSP Architecture: Sales, Finance, System, and AI
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
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 special panel episode, we are joined by three industry experts to answer a fundamental question: If you were starting an MSP from scratch today, what would it look like? Our panel includes Aaron Smith from Morphability, Ryan Spillane from 360 Consulting, and Tas Gray from Axiom IT.
Each guest brings a unique lens to the table, from sales and marketing strategy to financial resilience and the cutting edge of AI-driven operations. This isn't just a theoretical exercise; it is a masterclass in building a business that is profitable, scalable, and built for the future.
What makes this conversation particularly relevant for MSP owners is the focus on building strong foundations before adding complexity. We explore the essential financial rules that protect cash flow, why your brand must sound human in an AI-driven world, and how to use automation to support your team rather than replace them.
Here is what we covered together:
✅ The 2026 MSP Blueprint: Our panel designs a hypothetical modern MSP from the ground up, focusing on niche positioning and a productised service offering.
✅ Spend the Ten Grand: Ryan Spillane shares a critical lesson on business structure, explaining why an upfront investment in a proper partnership deed is the best insurance a business owner can buy.
✅ Authenticity in an AI World: Aaron Smith warns against the "copy and paste" epidemic in marketing and explains how to use AI for structure while keeping your final voice authentic and local.
✅ The Three Numbers that Matter: A deep dive into the financial metrics every MSP leader should track weekly to ensure profitability and long-term sustainability.
✅ AI First Operations: Tas Gray shares practical use cases for AI, including how his team built a Claude Skill to review documentation and automate the quality control of internal processes.
✅ Standardise Before You Automate: Why great automation starts with great documentation, and how to use AI to keep your SOPs current and reliable.
✅ The Human Element of Service: Why the help desk remains the face of your business and how to use automation to free your team up for higher value customer interactions.
✅ Sales Strategies for Growth: Aaron Smith breaks down the simplest, most credible way to generate leads today by solving specific business problems rather than selling technical tools.
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.
Connect with our guests:
Aaron Smith LinkedIn Page:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/morphabilityas
Ryan Spillane LinkedIn Page:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fuzzyaus/
Tas Gray LinkedIn Page:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tasgray
👉 Read more episode notes here: https://mspmastery.blog
👉 Listen on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@MSPMastery
🎧 Listen on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/4gftErFYrR8F80kthgvFbs
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/msp-mastery-ctrl-alt-deliver/id1828105793
📸 Follow on Instagram:
https://instagram.com/mspmastery
Making sure that customer journey is documented and that first 30 days experience with a client, that's when they're going to be the happiest. It's very rarely that they come back a year later and say, Oh my God, you guys are so much better than you were a year ago.
SPEAKER_03If you cannot get out from being a tradee, the only customers you'll have will be the old gray ones who like it done the way it's always been done and off you go. The modern people are looking for advisory services around where I can use technology, AI, security, all of those sorts of things to evolve my business.
SPEAKER_05Welcome 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 Clift, 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 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 the hard-won lessons that inspire and add genuine value to our industry by helping you build a business that is both profitable and fulfilling. This is MSP Mastery. And today we have a special panel episode the 2026 MSP Blueprint. We're asking our panel the question: if we started an MSP from scratch today, what would it look like? And to help answer that question, I have four experts here to build this hypothetical business with me. We'll start with Aaron Smith from Offability. Great to have you here.
SPEAKER_03Hi. Welcome.
SPEAKER_05Nice, thank you. So Aaron's joining us to keep the conversation grounded in sales and marketing.
SPEAKER_03I like that you said grounded there.
SPEAKER_05That's I know. That's it's a bit of a bit of a misnomer, I think.
SPEAKER_03It really is. But there you carry on.
SPEAKER_05Not two sentences two words usually used in the same sentence with you, Aaron. Aaron and grounded, but never mind. We'll go with that. So we're talking what we sell, who we sell it to, and how we create demand if we were starting from scratch today. Ryan Spillane, or Fuzzy, as most of us know us, know him from 360 Consulting. Welcome.
SPEAKER_01Thank you.
SPEAKER_05So Ryan is here to cover finance and business structure, pricing, profitability, cash flow, and just the general operating structure that makes an MSP sustainable from day one.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so nothing important.
SPEAKER_05Nothing important, just that boring stuff, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Probably the thing that we all forget about at the start. I know I did. The first few years, I go, Oh, don't worry about that. There's a customer, there's a problem, we can go fix it. Let's go, let's go.
SPEAKER_03Pedal faster, mate. You'll be fine.
SPEAKER_05Our own Nick Clift, great to have you on the panel.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. Good to be sharing the stage with these gentlemen and yourself. It's gonna be a fun time.
SPEAKER_05Fun is yeah, fun's a word. So, Nick, you're taking us through service delivery, systems and processes, how we build a delivery engine that is consistent, scalable, and not dependent on heroics.
SPEAKER_02Wow, okay. That'll be fun. Might need your help on that one, Taz.
SPEAKER_05And last but not least, Taz Gray from Axiom IT. Welcome.
SPEAKER_04Thanks, Jenny. Great to be here.
SPEAKER_05It's uh a panel of um highly visionary people, so it's gonna be fun. Taz, you're here to bring the AI and or automation lens across the whole business. Where can automation create real leverage in sales, delivery, finance, and operations without compromising trust or quality?
SPEAKER_04Sounds like something I know a bit about.
SPEAKER_05Yes, it certainly does. That's yeah, and your previous episodes have certainly created a lot of interest in tapping into your knowledge in those that space. And finally, today, my job is to try and keep some structure, order, and decorum to the panel. I suspect chaos will be more the order of the episode, so wish me luck.
SPEAKER_02You need a bit of confusion and chaos before you have structure and clarity. Very true.
SPEAKER_05Okay, Aaron, let's kick off with you. So let's start with the foundation. We're creating this new MSP from today. Who is our ideal customer? What's our core offer? And what's the simplest, credible way to start generating leads?
SPEAKER_03In all reality, the ideal customer is is is not a simple answer, to be honest with you. It's where you often feel comfortable. If you're starting the ball rolling from point zero, your ideal customer will evolve too with you. You know, at the start of at the start of every journey, as we've said before, every customer is a good customer. You grow up to a certain point, and then at some point you start to discern, actually, I really don't like these types of people or their behaviors or whatever it might be that's there. But as you go through the ideal customer, you need to be constantly evolving and constantly reviewing what that ideal customer for you looks like longer term. Fuzz Fuzz and I had many a discussion around just getting rid of the little ones who we didn't care about anymore. And, you know, the answer was inevitably not to worry about that as we continue to grow and narrowed our focus more and more down to the types of people that were the right fit for us that fit really nicely with our service desk that added more value than weight. That's your ideal customer and that will evolve over time. So at the start, really, I'll be honest, most customers are good customers. If they're willing to pay a buck and they've they've probably more of a cultural fit that you want first, that'd be the first thing I'd look at. Someone you can get along with who fits in with your ideals, fits in with your values, fits in with who you are. That'd be my first port of call if you're looking for ideal customers rather than size, shape, or otherwise. If they get along with you, you get along with them, and they've got similar business practices to you. Start there.
SPEAKER_01I'd love to clarify we looked after and cared for all customers, not just the just the different levels.
SPEAKER_03Well, I mean, you you do post post-acquisitions, you end up with a lot of additional customers that may or may not fit with where you were at or where you're going. And I think that's the balancing act you've got to provide is where that balance and where that attention sits, and making sure that you appropriately service each customer. And that's that's the critical part for me as you grow, is the appropriate engagement with each customer, be they small or large, what is it that they need from you that's within fair and reasonable bounds of profitability and all those sorts of things, which Fuzzy will touch on later.
SPEAKER_05Generating leads, if you were to start off, where do you where do you look for them? Where do you find them?
SPEAKER_03Everywhere. The the the the the fact of the matter from a generating leads is you have to be out there and you have to be in market. And if you're not willing to put in the hard yards, the effort, the being present, being places, being wherever it is your customers, the types of people you're trying to encourage are hanging around, then probably not the idea to start an MSP, to be frank. You you need to be in the in the B and I's you need to be in the networking events, you need to be getting involved with other programs and places that people you want to work with are hanging out. Trade shows, whatever it might be, you need to be out there and you need to be talking to people at multiple levels, which is the simplest and incredible way to start creating leads is to just get out there and be where your potential customers are hanging out and hang out with them, talk to them, ask them questions, get to know their business and stop talking about yourself first and foremost. Stop talking about yourself.
SPEAKER_02And I I was just uh add to that, Aaron. I think you know the the topic here is if you're gonna start an MSP today in 2026, and the question is I get asked this a lot, and I I think, well, would you? You know, and is it is it something you would start from greenfield like scratch to dying? Like, and to me, the only way any kind of startup boot bootstrap business works, you've got to have passion. So I agree with what you said a hundred percent. You go like if you've got a passion for football, go and hang out with the football teams, the financial controllers. And one of our sales coaches once said, she would challenge us all to name your ideal customer. Just dream, it doesn't matter. One guy said, Oh, I'd love to be looking after the Collingwood football club. Oh god, why? I know we all said, you know, perhaps we need to review his contract, but you know But within 15 minutes, we had a contact who was a friend of the CFO of the Collingwood football club. And it was just because the coach asked the question, it made people think. But my point is if you're gonna go into a start up brand new business, there's got to be some super passion in it. And it's not gonna be, oh, I hate accounts, I don't want to deal with accounts, but I'm gonna market to accountants. Don't do that. Find what your passion and go with it. That was my two cents worth.
SPEAKER_01I think that's what people forget the most, to be honest with you. Even in even in not just new MSPs, I think that's definitely the right thing to do. But I think that's what even in established MSPs, people forget to do. They forget that when they started out, they hustled. They actually went and met customers, they spent time in front of customers. And I think that's the biggest thing I see owners not do nowadays and not be willing to do a lot of times. I'm not naming anyone out there, but I'm sure they'll I'm sure I'll get some messages after this podcast goes out. Uh, there's probably a lot of people out there that won't go out and go and spend time where those customers are going to be. They want, they go to the industry networking events, like as in the MSP events, but that's not where you're going to find customers. Like you need to do some of that too. But you need to go and find out where your customers, your ideal customer or your target customer profile, go and spend time in those people and talk to people. Just have conversations. Again, most people started their business exactly that way by just talking to people, solving a problem, getting known to be solving problems for people, and then people just again. What happens with tradies? We we often kill good tradies because we refer them to that many people. They can't keep up. They actually called you back, they came out and did a bloody good job. And then you kill them, you refer them, and then they come a shitty trade because they've got too much too much work, they don't have to know it.
SPEAKER_03They also don't know how to scale their business properly.
SPEAKER_05And then you call them and they're too busy looking after your friends.
SPEAKER_03I really do feel that because a lot of MSP owners are solidly introverted, there is a safety in what they know, which puts them into events to Ryan's point where other MSPs are hanging out and puts them where other Ps our other MSPs are hanging out and ultimately means that they are not actually with their future customers or their potential customers, they're hanging out with their competitors. Where if they went to a different sort of function, like B and I is a good example, those networking events are good examples, but they're also limited in their scope by the members that are in them. If you want to go out to something that's one too many, you've got to learn how to work a room, you've got to learn how to talk and put yourself out of your comfort zone, or more importantly, pay for someone who's happy to be outside their comfort zone, or find a business partner who is more that way geared, and that's the engagement point from there. Doesn't have to be you if you've got the right partner.
SPEAKER_05Absolutely. Fill the business gaps, you know, your skill gaps with other people who are who are good at those things. So, Ryan, let's go to you. And from day one, what's the business model and structure? What does that look like? And then what are the first three numbers you want the founders and the leaders of the business tracking every week?
SPEAKER_01Now I could answer this a couple of ways. Are you meaning the go-to-market business model for the managed services plans and things like that, or the actual underlying company and corporate structure?
SPEAKER_05The business model as to, you know, what does that look like, but also the structure. What does that structure look like?
SPEAKER_01Okay. So the business model, I think, again, initially when you're starting out, look, I don't think you should be doing break fix. I think you should be doing consulting. I have no problems in billing on a on a daily rate, or uh if you had to do hourly, maybe, but I'd just be doing billing half day or day rates and just keep it that way and just get known to be doing premium or a good offering, not just by the hour where people are going to then do like Nickel and I'm you on an hourly basis. So it should be again where possible, do it by the day. I think you should be building a good modern managed services model so that's billing for devices, for users, for and even now, and we'll probably talk more about this later, later in the panel, billing for AI robots or bots, AI or artificial, whatever you want to call them, people or such. Or yes, I think you should be billing for billing for those. There's a model, there's a name for it, I just can't spit it out. Aliens, the little aliens. Yes. It depends what they do with your data. But yes, I think you should be billing for any of the AI kind of components. And again, initially, no one knows how much of a billing for that, but I think just bill them as if it's another user to start with. At least you're getting something for it because you're going to get asked questions around it. And when they break, which they will, you're going to be asked to fix it. So that's probably what I'd look from a business model perspective. From a structure, obviously, this isn't tax advice or advice. This is for entertainment purposes only. Correct all of those tallow things, go and get your own advice. But I'd suggest you want to probably have a trust or some sort of family trust, et cetera, above, and then good proprietary limited company that actually is the one that actually goes to market. That's the one that's going to invoice the customers, that's the one that the customers are going to actually interface to, be aware of. So for what the corporate structure is above that isn't really a big issue. But I would just highly say don't trade a trust. That becomes an absolute pain in the ass later when you want to try and sell your business. Have good terms and conditions, as we've spoken about on plenty of other panels, etc. But just have good terms and conditions and get that stuff right from day one. Yes, you can go and claw it up or AI it up to the best of things, but just go and speak to a proper lawyer as well that'll actually clear it up a little bit. At the end of the day, if something ever goes wrong, they're the ones that are actually going to defend you. So you want to actually have someone that's at least seen them before.
SPEAKER_05To butt in on you there for one second, Ryan, is if you're in a partnership, get a really good partnership deed in place that saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars.
SPEAKER_01Yep. The amount of shareholder issues that I get brought into as a consultant is yep, is is huge. I was dealing with one dealing with one earlier on this morning.
SPEAKER_02Fuzzy, what about the concept of the like the go-to-market? Is I I hear people say, oh, with us, it's like yeah, it's all all in or it's nothing, right? You've got to take our fully managed services, you've got to take all this, our security stack, a whole we have to do the onboarding, the consulting project, and all this stuff. Or do you just do something really awesome for that client, make a happy client, and then build on it from there?
SPEAKER_01I think it's a bit of a religious debate, to be honest with you. It's it depends on how you want to do it. It's a political debate, religious debate, whichever way you want to do it. You could spend months talking about this and still not come to a one perfect way of doing it. But I think it comes partly down to your personality and what you're comfortable selling. I had a client for years that was uncomfortable selling managed services until they understood, until they really got it and they understood the value themselves, and now they're selling a hell of a lot of it and they're actually growing massively. And it's great to hear how they're going. But until they actually understood, again, the value of the managed services, what it did for them, but what it did for the customers, they were they were not confident selling it, so they didn't. Um and it caused a lot of issues in the start of their business. So yeah, look, I I think I still think having some good plans, I'm not against initially starting out. Look, Aussies love a lot of a lot, at least some options. They don't want to just be told to do this one thing only, and not unless you're at a surgeon's office or something like that, and you have no skill whatsoever. Outside of that, they they like the perception of choice. So whether you had a full remote only and then an all-you-can-eat offering, that's probably where I'd probably go. But the reality is, look, it's everyone wants the cheapest thing, and then there's an issue for you later in the desire is included, it's not included. Ideally, just have one plan that just covers the whole lot as to cyber. I've said for a long time you need to have the minimum amount of cyber that you're willing to accept your clients to have in the plan from day one. It's cyber is not an option, it has to be there. And then maybe have them an uplift. I think aligning to some sort of cyber, again, SNB 1001, Essential 8, NIST, if you're in the US, those things, I think SNB 1001 is good for if you're dealing with customers under 50 seats to start with. And it just gets them on the journey or gets them used to the idea of yes, they need to do something about it. And at least they're doing something about it compared to plenty of other businesses that are still not unfortunate in today's age. So I think that's that's your minimum. And I think you had a the other question there, Jen, at the start was what first three numbers? Like that's that's a hard one. I would say it's gonna be obviously look, how much cash in bank and how many months of runway you've got before you run out of cash. But I think in the early days, it's gonna be how many, how many people, how many networking events you've been to, how many prospects you've got, how many quotes you're putting out there. Look, because this is Aaron's territory, but that's the yeah, that's the the first three numbers or four numbers you'd be looking at.
SPEAKER_03I want to know about your engagement. I I want to know about your engagement, your networking outbound. I want to know how many discovery meetings you've completed, because there you wash in or out very quickly as to good fit or wrong fit. And then the third one is quotes out. And then finally, quotes one is the obvious piece there. But those are those are my sales-centric numbers. If you had to do one, it's discoveries, because the rest will follow. Discoveries are the key sort of marker point of qualified customer or not qualified customer if I had to pick one.
SPEAKER_01And that that'll soon change into what's the the agreement margin, the agreement profitability or the effective value rates, and some of those things as you win the first eight and ten customers and start building up and whatnot. And a lot of it's gonna be what the other thing I'd say is what's your capacity gonna be because are you starting this out as two or three people in the business as a startup, or are you actually one personing it, the one one person banding it, or are you saying, bugger, we're gonna invest a bit of money and a bit of burn and start with five or six people, which you can grow pretty quickly because you've got people that can onboard customers while you go and win new business. You've got people looking after the tickets and the support and providing good quality support to clients, which allows you to go and sell more. It's yeah. I think in the first year or two, you're basically gonna invest every dollar you've got and every dollar of revenue coming back in just to build that growth as quick as you can.
SPEAKER_02Interesting. And I'd need you to get Taz's thoughts on this one because one of our sons works for a vendor over in the UK and he had a client, a part, an MSP that he looked after in the US, and he had a $1.2 million business with zero staff, and he just resold a managed backup and he was worked for DATO at the time and he resold managed backup, and he was an expert at that. But he was a $1.2 million US MSP with one staff, no staff, just himself.
SPEAKER_01But I'd say that I'd say that was a specialization that wasn't MSP, that wasn't a CSP, that was fixing one little niche and one slice on it, which I think could work. But if you're trying to do any sort of support and consulting and whatnot, then that's not it's rarely just sustaining more than like if you're doing well, it's half million.
SPEAKER_02And like we we haven't really touched on the org structure, which maybe that comes into my question about or maybe I'm preempting things, which I tend to do. But it was more about would you build because we built a delivery engine first. We built the service desk. Because I started the business on a contract. I had the contract first, a big customer, right? So I built the service. But if I was starting it from scratch, and I know a guy that did this, he was he was a in the first five podcasts, I guess. Scott, he had six months of planning his business before he actually traded because he was on a non-compete. So he spent a whole lot of time planning it all out and he did the marketing, he did the sales strategy, and he had a plan for service delivery, but he didn't execute the service delivery until he had the first couple of customers. He did what you said, Fuzzy, he brute forced it, did all the work himself initially. But yeah, Taz, I'm just a question from you. If you were going to start another one today, would you would you build like a service desk first or would you try to outsource it? Would you automate it? How would you kind of work with sales and service delivery at the very start?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I definitely wouldn't outsource it. And I I don't think you can automate it, so I'd say that only leaves one choice, which is to build it, but I'd be building it lean.
SPEAKER_02Really lean. Like just you?
SPEAKER_04Well, the the question for me is am I starting again knowing what I know today, or am I starting again knowing what I knew when I started, which was less than nothing?
SPEAKER_02What you know now.
SPEAKER_04Oh, right. Well, yeah, in that case, it would be easy because going into it with the knowledge that I have today, which is that you need to have a very standardized offering. In our case, highly productized offering, which means that your service desk is is not getting hit with you know things out of left field all the time. It it really simplifies the sort of issues that you're dealing with. And being able to produce all of the processes and documentation that that come with that is obviously a lot easier because you're dealing with with a standardized offering and generating all that content has never been easier. As much as I'd like to say we didn't need a service desk, you need it. That's the face of the business as far as most customers are concerned. And you know, all clients that I speak to today, when we catch up, have reviews, that kind of thing. In fact, I had one this morning. It the he started that meeting talking to me about the interactions that his team have had with the service desk and how positive they are. So, you know, without that, you're in trouble. I don't think you can you can automate that away just yet because that's the human element, and and you and you wouldn't want to.
SPEAKER_05So, Nick, let's jump into operationally. We've just been discussing that, but what do you think the first three processes that need to be defined before we take on too many?
SPEAKER_02customers either processes or perhaps actual look i I think uh it's definitely the the customer lead gen kind of the warming up of of potential clients that's like the number one some some form of system for that a lot of people started uh like fuzzy said before and I think Aaron as well you just started your business back in the old days because you were good at it you knew a few people you helped a few people out but I think today it's pretty pretty damn competitive and the average Joe Blow in the business you've got the the 25 to 35 year olds in business they think they can do everything themselves with a bit of AI help on the internet so they don't even they don't even want to pay money to an MSP. So we've got to approach it differently and build up that repertoire and build up the the credibility and and a pipeline of nurtured contacts that going out and banging on a door and saying hey you need someone to fix your IT I learnt that lesson like a what do you call it when your train hits you in the face when it came to Indonesia I thought hey I've got all this experience I've run a really good MSP in Australia I can come to Indonesia and yeah it's going to be cheaper here labor the guys here they will not spend a recurring cent on anything in Indonesia it's just not in their culture. If it's broken I'll pay someone five bucks an hour to fix it. I don't care. So it was a big wake-up call to me. So I've kind of taken that lesson and thought hang on if you want to do a start a business today we've got to go to where the owners of the businesses need to be and take that business on a journey. So I definitely start Sonic Sonic CRM whether you contract a person to help you, you build it up, you've got to have a good list and a good way of nurturing that that would be number one. And the next one for me would be an onboarding process making sure that customer journey is documented and you know how to onboard and give that that first 30 days experience with a client that's when they're going to be the happiest very rarely that they come back a year later and say oh my God you guys are so much better than you were a year ago. If you've solved that problem you've given them this this yeah when you buy a brand new car, how good does it smell and feel the first time you get in that thing and you just you're in awe for the first three, four months and after that it's just a car. So you've got to leverage off that make sure that first experience is awesome. And then obviously the ongoing relationship management like the VCIO the strategic business review process that to me is still critical if we're talking about a managed service provider, technology service provider, someone is doing an ongoing relationship with clients all about relationships for me. I don't even care if you're using a spreadsheet to do your tickets in right at the start I wouldn't go off and invest millions of hours perfecting my ticket workflow and all that shit in the background that people get pedantic about because just make sure the customer experience is good.
SPEAKER_01That's where I'd start I've also challenged or just to extend a little bit on that, Nick, in that it can't just be the first 30 days it's got to be I I think it's got to be the first 90. I think yes the first 30 is the wow the first 90 should be cementing that wow but you can't then just drop it off. Like how many times do you see people put a a three-year contract in place, look after the customer for the first six months, ignore them for the middle two years and then want to be their best friends again for the last six months to make sure they get the contract renewal.
SPEAKER_03This is the whole entire point behind how are you actually engaging with that client your client engagement process is one of the first ones from a sales perspective which I suspect we'll cover all that but if you're ignoring them you don't deserve to retain them. Like you've got to have a system there that's depth beyond the people delivering it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah absolutely and people investing in your people like even though I love automation and I do a lot of work with AI and and a lot of people we talk to these days everyone's using it for some form of description but it's your team and the way you want to develop your culture you can be purposeful about that from the start and have a program and get them going and and build up that culture so your clients get the experience you want them to have not some random and to Taz's point before you wouldn't outsource the help desk I totally agree with that because you've got limited control over what that client experience is going to be at a at an offshore outsource.
SPEAKER_03It's your core product like literally that is that is your bread and butter. You you can't yeah outsourcing that is a you can outsource parts of it but your core product is absolutely the bit you need to have full control over Taz let's go to you and around automation.
SPEAKER_05So the question here that I wanted to ask was about what we deliberately do not automate at this stage where in the first month, couple of months, what do we make sure that we really bring that human factor to the forefront?
SPEAKER_04Yeah I would say that you wouldn't even be thinking about it in the first 30 days, which doesn't give me much to talk about unfortunately but I think that without process you can't automate anything and you're you're not likely to have too much process in the first 30 days anyway. I think the point is that the automation or AI or you know the mix of the two things together doesn't come into play until a little bit further down the track when you actually know what you're doing and you've and you've I think was it Aaron that said that you need to make a a deliberate decision about what the customer experience is going to be like and and the interactions with with your team and all that kind of thing because automation and AI for the sake of sake of it is is never going to be good. And I can certainly say that having been over a decade of experience now in all of this that the stuff that we do automate is just so that we can I guess free people up to deliver more of the customer service more of the customer experience that we want our clients to have so we can decouple the actual work from the tech.
SPEAKER_02It's freeing up people from the mundane task to deliver more of your customer service promise and more of your core culture and value. I think that's awesome versus automating the actual customer service component.
SPEAKER_03Yeah absolutely I mean I think that the user onboarding user offboarding all those things that are going to come up frequently is absolutely where you start but you know in the first 30 days you're not even thinking about automating that you're just thinking about well what does the actual process look like I was going to say I also don't think it's where you've got a lot of rinse and repeat things to start with you've that's where you can set the experience of that those people on the way in the front door automate the stuff in the future by all means but the experience should be hands-on there should be a level of white glove should be a level of positive experience in the in the front door and certainly for those first 30 days okay let's jump into sales and marketing so Aaron I'm gonna go to you on this one we're starting a business today we've got some highly experienced people here got a team of people who are going to go out and not automate and just go and start working on people's technical stuff.
SPEAKER_05What's our positioning? What's our first offer and where would you start getting that messaging out?
SPEAKER_03This keeps evolving I'll be honest it keeps evolving the bread and butter is still we keep the lights on. So managed services is always going to be there. There's always going to be a level of that but it can't be the thing you lead with as the initial part to it. I think most modern businesses are looking for someone to help advise where their business is going, what they're trying to achieve and how to bring technology along and use it to the best of their ability to improve and develop and grow their business. And for those of you who are in in a room with me in Auckland the first thing I said to all of you was that if you cannot get out from being a trade, which is your typical managed services, we keep the lights on, do all the rest of it and just having that conversation, you are going to be in the corner and irrelevant because the only customers you'll have will be the old gray ones who like it done the way it's always been done and off you go. The modern people are looking for advisory services around where can I use technology, AI, security, all of those sorts of things to evolve my business that's the first part in port of call for me is an open conversation advisory discovery, something along those lines. And I'm almost sitting there going, please just assume that we've got managed services covered. They are the fries. They're not the main meal anymore. And I I think that's the biggest shift for everybody in this industry is you've got to find your point of difference. And it might be your ability to guide them on an AI journey. It might be your ability to pull together some whiz bang cybersecurity something something something that keeps them defended. It might be your ability to know how your targeted industry works really, really well. Whatever it happens to be that is your little chosen initial niche, you need to focus there to start with or start having those conversations to a consistent and regular level. The first channel I would choose is to Nick's point before something you're passionate about. I don't care where it is pick something that when you start talking you light up because the moment you light up everyone else around you wants to come along for the ride. And what you will get is the other customers will come from the referrals out of those people who have lit your world up that you have been passionate about helping their business grow secure whatever it might be and the managed services we've just got covered. It's bloody easy we do it with our hands tied behind our backs and our eyes closed they're the fries.
SPEAKER_02I'm more interested in your business and if you were just to leverage on a bit from that if we were starting from scratch and we we'd figured out what our passion was is it yeah because today we're thinking TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn is it a website? Is it a radio campaign is it television? Is it literally just going to industry events like I'm I'll I'm passionate I've got to play I've got some runaway funding I just haven't got any customers what what where what do I do? Where do I go? Where do I put my where do I put my message?
SPEAKER_03Again there's no one size fits all here. There's a reason we are all sitting on a podcast right now because funnily enough IT nerds listen to podcasts like the people that we talk to the people that we engage with the people that we as a collective and I admit one of one of us is talking with others of us but realistically where are your customers? Where do they hang out? Where do they live? Where are they going? That is the forum you need to be in amongst again it's not if they're listening to TikTok be on TikTok. If they're listening to to Instagram be on Instagram you need to be presenting where your customers are hanging out. Don't waste your time elsewhere like it's it's dead money. Facebook and Instagram I would argue in most MSPs are dead money. Where's your audience? Where are they consuming things?
SPEAKER_01And that's and that's going to move and that's going to change and you need to change with it. You need to continually hone and adjust and whatnot and different stages of your business the growth is going to be in different places and yeah you're gonna tap out one area go and don't just have one start with one yes you ideally have three or four different unique places and it's gonna spend your time there.
SPEAKER_05And it's about measuring knowing what's working and what's not and not just doing what's comfortable Fuzzy let's go to you we talked about structure what I wanted to ask now about some financial rules so we've got a limited amount of money we've in these first you know three months, six months we've really got to make sure that we don't run out of cash. What are the first three financial rules you would set to avoid cash flow pain?
SPEAKER_01People don't like it, but you need to have a budget and you need to be almost updating it. So it doesn't have to be down to 50 lines or 100 lines or 500 lines in your chart of account to start with but you need to have again you need to know what's coming in you need to know when you're expecting to get paid you need to make sure you're on your accounts receiver and customers are paying you may need to actually get them to prepay for services or for definitely hardware and things like that to start with until you've got the cash flow to do it. But again when you're going to work with Disties you don't have a history yet so they're not going to give you credit initially it's going to take time before you build that up and that could be even 12 months or even two years before you get credit from Disties. So you may need to have clients pay you or pay you on seven days or whatnot and just uh use your funding very carefully it's not really a true budget to start with. I think it's more just a how much is coming in and how much is going out. It's almost like a cash flow budget not a not a growth budget. It's how long if I did this, what how long have I got? And look don't be wrong you it's going to you're going to be able to do the growth regardless just if the amount of growth is going to depend on how big your pocket is and how much your your wall chest to start with. If it's you started with 10 grand or 15 grand or something like that, well yeah you're not going to hire someone you're gonna be doing it all yourself. It's gonna be limited to start with. So I think you've got to be you've just got to be aware of what that looks like. Yes you can invest and you can start spending ahead of the revenue sometimes if you've got a couple hundred thousand dollars then yeah okay you can afford to have a couple of staff with you or whatnot for a for a few months over six months without too much of a hassle. Ideally you want to have three months worth of your running expenses in the bank as kind of your war chest to start with and eventually that builds up to six months if you can. But you're not going to have that in the first like it might be four weeks or six weeks but again you can't focus only on that you've just got to be aware of that. The focus should be on bringing that revenue in delivering services get the billing out and a lot of times in most again most small businesses and most small IT companies they're the worst at billing and it's like money you've got to be it's got to be one of your strong points is actually billing and do the work and bill it. The customer's not going to pay you until they see an invoice and until you send an invoice there's they don't even know about it. So get your billing right and that's why again if you can bill by days rather than hours it simplifies things to start with again a a simple PSA like don't go with the most simplest PSA that doesn't have integrated billing like no spend a little bit more and get a slightly better PSA that actually has integrated billing straight into your accounting system. So when you're closing invoices or closing tickets and closing your monthly your managed services billing gets automated all of those things. Make sure and spend again initially it's going to be a little bit manual but in time you'll have tools or automation to do this. And if you can do this sooner the better but make sure anything you're getting billed by your vendors and your DSTs is getting billed to your customers. How many times are you getting a bill for 10 Office 365 licenses but you're only billing eight to the customer? It's like well that that hurts you that takes the profit out of doing that from day one. And then you've got to go eventually reconcile it and it's like oh crap I've got to go and speak to the client tell them I haven't billed them for a couple of licenses in the last 12 months they're not the conversations you want to be having. So get your get your systems right get your systems clean and that gives you some scale by if you can automate some of that that does give you some scale in that you can take on an extra client or two without needing more bodies or not more people because those things just happen.
SPEAKER_04Ters can I go to you on this one just wanted to touch briefly on again automation any ideas on where AI or automation can reduce cost or time in those initial days on quoting, invoicing reporting we talked a bit about PSA but is there any other tools and keeping in mind this is early days for this hypothetical business that we can save time or money in this space I think so certainly for me personally now running everything through Claude so you know even even if I was starting off on my own having having Claude linked into the PSA for example and obviously email and just just helping with drafting comms and and all that kind of stuff's massive time saving. It's not really an expense at all really it's it's gonna save you far more time than it's gonna cost you so in terms of dollars.
SPEAKER_05So Nick let's go to you on service delivery and systems. What do you think the first five processes that we are going to document and what does a minimum viable operations stack look like?
SPEAKER_02Oh that's a good question. I'll put sales aside for now because that's Aaron's expertise and fuzzy so let them talk about that. But from a service delivery operations perspective you've got to have some way of a client logging a ticket with you and tracking the time against that so that ultimately can go against a contract or or an invoice. That'd be the number one you need to have some reporting an accounting system and I think an important thing is a some form of survey tool or client feedback tool. Just to whether it that could be manual could be ringing customers up and getting some feedback but in those first 90 days you want to be touching base with those clients and actually asking what's working what's not working how are we going because they're they're then they're new to you as well and they're going to want to give feedback and I think that's a really important thing. What have I what else have I forgotten guys?
SPEAKER_01I don't I don't think it should just be CSAP though Nick it should be you calling up I think there's the the most powerful piece that I see in MSPs and not just new ones right now is in the old ones is the business owners actually reaching out to other bits like to the customers and actually having an owner-to-one conversation of what's working well, what's not working well where could we improve because the business owners happily going to give that to another business owner whereas someone that's just got the the ticket CSAT or whatnot will say okay well what was that interaction like but they're not going to worry about anything else. I call them executive advocacy calls where just pick up the phone and talk to your bloody clients.
SPEAKER_03It's like it's executive sponsor that that role is critical particularly as you step away from being the primary point of contact and it starts pushing into your team. Ryan came to me about six months after I started having a big silk about the fact that nobody wanted to talk to him anymore. That's actually a positive in terms of him no longer being in the center of the universe but what we eventually got right because I didn't originally I was still very much a case of yeah I can do everything myself I'm amazing. Eventually once you get once you let go of that from a salesperson perspective you actually want to bring the fearless leader along for the ride and they should be having those conversations independently of you as a separate body of work. One of one of the managing directors that I I work with has a quarterly target of quantity of people that he has engaged with he's the one per week he has to go and have an executive level conversation with the C-suite in there without the account manager present. It's completely independent conversation because it steps that relationship away from being that one person as always who keeps things ticking along.
SPEAKER_02Yeah absolutely and and I think just reflecting on that another system I would want to have in place is a feedback loop from anyone in the company to the leadership team. And as you mature you put something like EOS or something in the in the business a business structure but it's really important to have those roles defined inside your business so people in your team know where to go. And then we would share that with the clients a version of our accountability chart if you like we called it a business structure document and it was a little bit different for each client but they knew who to go to who did what inside your business so it stopped you being the go-to for everything. And as you're starting and it's a new team I know it's going to be small but I mean you can have lots of boxes on the chart with different names in there doesn't matter they don't really know you've got to give the client something otherwise they're always going to be ringing you up always ringing the help desk for asking for everything. So that's another system.
SPEAKER_01So yeah collecting feedback tickets yeah I'm actually gonna I'm gonna ask you a question now Taz considering you've got a a good little uh good MSP and I'm not sure whether it's public or not but you you now live overseas how do you where you don't have that face-to-face contact but you have other forms of contact teams all of these types of meetings how are you doing that and keeping that that touch point up and and getting that feedback back from the clients some clients I catch up with on a monthly basis that it's like that would be like not even maybe 10% and and then others I'll have an annual catch up with but look during the pandemic obviously that that all went online digital by teams and it would be rare that I would sit down with someone face to face now even if I was in Melbourne to be honest.
SPEAKER_04So our business model's a bit different just what I hear from these conversations and from speaking to others you know I'd we don't have an account manager right I'd have never seen the need for one if we if there was an account manager I'd be it but I wouldn't be a very good one and if I was being measured by you guys I think I'd fail on on just about every level but the customers keep re-signing every year so it's a redundant thing but I'm also not out there trying to upsell them on a million different things. So but that's just me right you do you and I'll do me to answer your question it's all teams all teams calls and things like that. But I'm not involved in the day to day certainly not but things things do crop up from time to time and I've got a good enough relationship with the key people at all of our clients that they'll just call me or they'll send me a message on Teams. You know they're all well educated not to email me. I just I'm just horrible at email and I hate it so I just I deliberately just don't respond to email just to sort of reinforce that but anyway they know how to get me they're conscious they're usually business owners too so they don't they don't want to waste my time and because they don't want to have their time wasted. So they get it right. But that door's always open and and that's probably one of the biggest selling points that you know we come up against bigger MSPs in in competition from time to time and it's like well when things go sideways who are you going to be dealing with like go to first focus or whatever but you're not dealing with the owner of the business. You know, you come to me, well, different story and and I'll make things happen. So long-winded answer, but I don't necessarily have those formalized catch-ups so much, but it it's more just a regular team chat here and there and when things when when things are needed.
SPEAKER_01You are keeping that touch point to them and and maintaining that touch point, which does work.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. And I think a lot of people are scared to do that because they're worried about what might happen, but it's never been a problem. Like I I think people use it, people are conscious of of the the importance of your time, so they don't they don't waste it.
SPEAKER_02The question I've got for you guys is this comes up a lot and it's about communication with the clients. Like, yeah, when I started my MSP 1990, well, my IT services 1996, there was no option, right? It was phone. That was the only option. It was the they rang us directly, we rang them directly. Yeah, we basically didn't even have email back then. But today, is it is it phone calls? Is it a web portal? Is it chat? Is it some other ways? What are the team, what do you guys think about the options that we should have in this new MSB building? Should we have all options at once? Should we force everyone into using the phone? What do you feel about that?
SPEAKER_01I think it's whatever's look, I don't want to add too many options to be clear, but you've got to work what works well for you. And we just said Taz just openly said don't email him. And I know Aaron's even worse than Taz for that. But you've got to work out whatever method. Look, you could say to clients, oh give us the again, we used to joke, send a carrier pigeon to us for the support ticket if you needed to. But it's like it's whatever whatever gets the information from them helps is a is a good thing if you've got a scale to handle that. But you've also got to know that there's methods that you are better at dealing with and whatnot, and you've got to gently try and train and and guide the customers towards those things to get the best service out of you. But it may not be the right method for them. It's just something you've got to work through.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, if I was saying it again, I'd I'd almost want to get rid of the whole email help desk thing completely because I just, you know, I've had had conversations with the clients who go, you know, I can't believe we still have to email you to, you know, like it's 2026. Where's the live chat? Or like why are you using WhatsApp? Or, you know, phone calls and emails, very traditional. Probably one of the one of the things that I dislike most about our customer service is is that we still rely on those things. So starting again, I'd probably look look at ways to to not use them.
SPEAKER_03I think it also does, though, come back to what do your customers want. Because different industries work in different fashions. And I think if you're targeting a particular industry and they are an email and phone industry, you're not getting away from email and phone. If they're a more modern industry which will do live chat and those sorts of things, same sort of situation. I appreciate you can pick one to offer it, but your ability to be effective, like I I can tell right now, regional players that I work with, they're still phone call people. They still have to have the phone calls manned because ultimately that's what a regional player is expecting. They expect to be able to have a chin wag with the person they're talking to, have a chat, go, these are my problems, this is what's going on, log on while I'm sitting there with you, solve the problem, get off and be done with the day and move on. It depends on your location, depends on your industry, depends on the type of business you're wanting to target, which comes back to that first original question. Who's your ideal customer? Whatever they want, build for that. And if they're all different, then bad luck. Put them all in.
SPEAKER_05Ryan, keeping with the service delivery as a topic, what do you think the delivery metrics that are going to most impact our profit or profitability early on?
SPEAKER_01The the big thing I'd say is how much time you're spending with each customer or each endpoint or however you want to look at it. Again, you you would have modeled some some budget or budgeted and models and time that would go into each one of your managed services offerings on a per user, per device basis per month. So you need to know are you are you on track with that modeling? Are you spending far more time than what you had modeled, which which will drop the profitability down or drop your effective alley rate, depending on which way you want to look at it, versus what you had budgeted. So it might be sometimes, in a lot of cases, MSPs will do a lot of extra work in the first few months of a contract or the first year of the contract to try and fix up problems and bed things down. So then there's less ongoing issues for them. And that helps, and that definitely does help the numbers and the profitability, but they need to be acutely aware of that, especially in the early days. Are they spending far too much time with that client that they're getting nothing for versus going and spending time with a bringing in a new client that may be better, that may actually be taking advice or might actually replace things when they should be doing and all of that? So it very quickly turns into not every dollar is a good dollar. You've got to find the ones that are the right fit. And if they're not the right fit, you need to start moving them on pretty relatively quickly, even at the start of your journey.
SPEAKER_05And Chaz, I'll throw to you again around automation. What workflows are we introducing first, like early days for triage and documentation?
SPEAKER_04For triage is a tricky one. We're not great at that. So I couldn't comment too much on that because I don't I don't think we've done a very good job of it. But for for the documentation, the best answer I can give you there, I think, is that is just identifying what you need and what's coming up most frequently is is probably where I would start. And I guess I know what that is for us today, so I think that would be an easy thing for me to do again. But that would be the best answer I could give on that, I'm afraid.
SPEAKER_02So I would add to that. For me, one of the key workflows in the initial period is having something in your ticketing system that alerts the team, because you're only going to have a small team, so that means everybody, to something going off track from your brand promise. So if you have promised to answer the phone or ticket response in 15 minutes, you need to have a workflow in place to ensure you meet that. There's no point having a promise to your clients that you're selling your services on if you don't look at it, measure it, and have a way of action.
SPEAKER_04That's a really good point, actually, Nick, that I didn't even consider. But you you know, we have SLAs in our contracts, obviously, and having that SLA alerted on in in your PSA is is definitely one of the first things you need to get sorted out. That took us a long, probably I don't know how many years till we really even worried about that. But yeah, definitely something that you should look at early on. And I guess depending-I don't know what Halo's like within connect-wise, you you don't get that for free out of the box. You've got to spend a bit of time working that in. So perhaps it's different on the newer platforms.
SPEAKER_01Also throw in there as well some sort of automated customer reporting or customer that it has to be automated. It's compliance type reporting, it's feeds and speeds, and I don't like that to be clear, but you need to do it because so many MSPs aren't out there aren't doing it, and you can use that almost as a competitive advantage that you're sending out. How you're achieving to SLA, is everything up secure, how much how many infections, or how many things have you blocked through DNS filtering, or that your EDR has blocked X amount of apps from running, or if you're running ThreatLocker or something like that, you've stopped X amount of unwanted applications from running and things like that. Even if you don't necessarily talk to the client every single month, then at least they've received something from you that talks about what you're delivering to them and the quality of service you're delivering to them. That can probably cover a lot of sins in the early days too.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I would add to that, because we went through a big journey with that reporting, custom reporting. And I went back to the clients and said, Do you guys actually read this stuff? And a few of them did, but they did appreciate getting it, fuzzy, to your point. And so what we did is we just put every single tool we had, sent an email to reports at dwm.com.eu. It's just a mailbox. A lot of our tools we use out there don't have history. They're like dumb uh devices that forget everything after 30 days. So on the first of the month at 00am, all these reports hit this hit this mailbox. And we never looked at the mailbox until the customers that wanted the data needed at the end of the month. We would go get it and we read automation around that. But keep the data because yeah, it is a valuable asset to use for proof for value marketing, yeah, doing something the other guys don't do. So I 100% agree with that.
SPEAKER_05Okay, so we've talked a lot about automation, but I really want to sort of wrap up the panel with a bit of a deeper dive into that. So, Aaron, I'll start with you. How do we use AI to improve marketing output, but still keeping a real voice, not looking like we're just rolling out a whole bunch of copy and pasted chat GPT?
SPEAKER_03It's about for me spending enough time to have a brand voice, have brand tone and coaching AI on what that is for you. It's going back to it. I mean, even something as simple as M-dashes. I wrote a beautiful, beautiful email the other day, which was frustrating from a yeah, reasons. And it put M-dashes in, and I just missed them. And I hit send and I went, oh, cool. It was a really heartfelt message too that I'd created with AI. And so I I appreciate the oxymoron there, but here we are. And I just said to Claude, I went, can you just never ever use M-dashes again, put that in your memory ever again for anything you create for me, which it's taken into memory and off it goes from there. It's taking the time. We've got a morphability brand guidelines that talks to our voice, talks to our messaging, talks to our logos, talks to our size of logos, talks to our colors, talks to fonts, talks to everything that lives inside our design files. So all of those things in terms of building it in your way that looks like you, that sounds like you, that operates like you, is a time thing. You have to teach it, coach it. The one of the best things that we did was we've attached Fireflies now to every single meeting we have. And Fireflies knows how I talk to the point where both Brendan and myself both went into Fireflies and went, tell me what my rules are. And I'd be fascinated to see Fuzz and Taz and you guys, what are the things that keep popping up in your coaching sessions that keep going there? Brendan has a rule book. It's bloody, it's 20 pages long for the love of God. It is huge. But it it talked to things like holding the line in hard conversations. It talks to no fluff or babble, it talks to all the things that we coach people on. And AI knows that now. So when we go and talk to AI about, hey, can you create a proposal in our language that's tied to these things, review this, review the Fireflies transcript that we had from our discovery? I can now walk in, have a Fireflies, hit up our CRM, which funnily enough, I built using Claude, and go into there and go, fetch me a Fireflies and disseminate that into a discovery and then create me a proposal. It's all in our language, it's all written like I would sound. It knows how I talk because I've been talking every day, multiple times a day on calls. Yes, it it doesn't put as many expletives as I would otherwise put in there. It's pretty clean in terms of the way it goes about it. But it needs coaching and you have to spend the time making sure it knows who you are first.
SPEAKER_05I actually had this conversation this morning with somebody that I look at LinkedIn posts now. And if there's hyphens, if there's a lot of emojis, or if there's American spelling by an Australian person, I don't even bother reading it because I know it is literally just copy and paste unedited, straight out of Chat GPT or whichever tool.
SPEAKER_03And we've still got a person writing or rewriting and adjusting our final posts. But what she gets from us is we have a project inside Claude now that literally says, here are our rules, here are our instructions, here's how we walk, here's how we talk, here's everything. Review my Firefly's content from the last month, the last quarter, the last year, and give me outputs for the tell me what I should be talking in LinkedIn about. And it gives 25 odd LinkedIn post ideas that we then go, that one, that one, that one, and hand them off to our marketing person who goes, cool and schedule and go. That's a great idea. That's that polish.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03You are welcome.
SPEAKER_05How does AI change the way that we're thinking about cost structure and staffing?
SPEAKER_01Good question. I don't think there's an easy answer. I think it's an answer that changes almost every month. I think if you can have, again, pulling out ticket data and and having an AI or whatnot assist you and try to solve problems quickly, that helps for efficiency on your site. The catch is, and we talked about it earlier, the the the top of the podcast, the fact that clients can do that now too. Like there's again, there's everyone started out being able to, when Google came out, is like, okay, well, people can solve their own tech problems, and why do we need an MSP? And now you've actually got, you can actually have a create a bot or a channel or whatever and say, hey, you're an MSP, tell me how to fix these things in simple end user speak. There's going to be a certain company that are doing that now and possibly don't need an MSP. But there's at some point they need to come back and think, well, hang on, is their time better spent? And this is how we want a lot of customers over the years, is that person's time better spent solving tech problems in their business or actually doing what that business is meant to be doing and building whatever business it is that that customer's doing? And that's where their best time is spent. So that's why, again, you need to be able to identify why you're there, where you're adding value, and ideally how much time you're saving them from doing the shit themselves. That will help. I think, yeah, does it change the cost structure? MSP pricing has been getting more and more commoditized and getting uh pressured downward pressure. Obviously, with cyber spend and whatnot, that's been outstripping it. So the actual overall spend is generally going up. But if you're just doing a vanilla service, then yeah, it is getting driven down in price. And there's there are ideas, platforms getting developed that might be able to look after 20 C businesses that are just all AI. And instead of talking 200, 250 endpoints per engineer, we're talking 10,000 endpoints per engineer because it's going to be heavily automated. And there's platforms coming for those types of things. Very interesting. So it could be another another bit of a change. Again, that's why I think there's I said it's no easy answer. And I think you could, again, in a month's time or in a couple of weeks' time when there's podcasts, it's then that my answer would probably be different at that point in time again.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Maybe, maybe people, maybe people could ask in the LinkedIn post that goes out after this what the latest answer is.
SPEAKER_05So, Nick, how do we keep documentation and SOPs current using AI or automation without making them unreliable?
SPEAKER_02Funny you should ask that question. Because I may have been down a few rabbit holes on that recently. There's a few clients I work with closely, and it's it's a challenge. This it's a mindset thing about how much uh information, it's client-specific information we're talking here, like generic documentation, SOPs, procedures, that's pretty standard. I'd definitely be using AI to help you build those and put them into a SharePoint site or one of the documentation products out there. But when you're getting down to the individual client-specific identifiable configuration information, that is a real challenge to know. And a lot of people are hesitant to let AI have access to that. Personally, I'm a probably tends to be a little bit more uh open with it. Like we used uh a tool called Lionguard to automate all our documentation. So it had access to all the platforms, all the hardware systems, everything, and it populated IT Glue back in the day. It it did all the documentation pretty much automated. So I think documentation's really quite simple now. There's lots of tools that can screenshot, follow you along, do what you're doing, save it, just do what we're doing right now, record it and say, hey, go make documentation into my standard. I actually built a integration into Confluence the other day. Uh connected up a MCP server to that, and you can Confluence used to be very unstructured, like it's all data everywhere, but now they've got structure to it. So my answer is you just have to take whatever works for you guys if you're a if you're a SharePoint house, just do something in SharePoint. Like heaven forbid, one day Copilot's actually going to be able to do something useful in SharePoint. I don't know when, but one day.
SPEAKER_04Like when it comes to documentation, I don't think AI solves the problem entirely. It just makes it a lot easier. And every MSB has this problem where they're documented things and then they just get out of date and no one bothers to fix them. And it's just you end up with just this junkyard of stuff, right? And no one ever gets around to fixing it, everyone's too busy and and all the rest of it. So what one thing I've found AI really helped us with was that in terms of just getting at least our documentation, like for anything process related, where they had to follow a process, having a standard document layout for that. So what are all the sections that need to be there and all that kind of just conventions around headings and indenting and just basic stuff? But once once we had that worked out, it was really easy. Initially, I did this in Chat GPT, where I just created a custom GPT. It knew what correct looked like, and so I gave access to the team to that and said, if you're going to write a process, you need to run it through the GPT. It will tell you whether you're aligning or not. We we've now created a claude skill that can do that, and that's been really, really helpful to just to lift the overall level of our documentation. But also what I what I put in place with our service desk lead, I kept kept sort of discovering that people were sort of using processes that were old or out of date. And I was like, well, so why is no one doing anything about it, right? And and the reason was that I guess they just didn't really know what to do. So what I what I did with him is I said, Look, we need to set up in ConnectWise. Anytime someone runs into a process that's either wrong or out of date, they create a ticket. This is the ticket type, this is the subtype, this is the item, right? And that's going to sit there, and then someone it becomes someone's job to deal with that. So that gave them some sort of framework in which they knew what to work with. And then with obviously with AI, once that gets created, it's fixing, it's easy, right? But it's just it's about having having the visibility of the problem to begin with. So it it's a bit of like getting your team to to think about it the right way and and making them a bit accountable for it, but then leveraging AI on the on the other side to come in and actually do the heavy lifting, in my experience.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and and making it simple to do the right thing, like that, creating a ticket when you see the problem. Yeah, it's great.
SPEAKER_05So let's finish up with hypothetically building or designing an AI first MSP. So Taz, I'll get you to kind of drive this question. Two things. What are the pillars? So everybody jump in and share, but also if we can share a couple of use cases of AI that are both safe and I guess short term or immediate that we can put into place. Firstly, what are the pillars? Where are we going to start? What's going to be sort of the foundations of that AI first mindset, if you like? And then if any of you can share three AI use cases that are both safe and short term, we can put them into action pretty quickly.
SPEAKER_04Sure. I think that the biggest mindset shift that I've tried to push on onto my team is that they they should be looking to use AI wherever possible and helping them understand what's possible by by actually leading by example and and showing them cool things. So we have a weekly Friday wrap-up call, and I use that as my opportunity to show them stuff that I've been doing throughout the week just to get the cogs turning. And I've found that once once the team see that, that and and even I've I've found that works on Nick too. Just knowing what's possible just create gets that creativity flowing amongst people. So that's number one. I think as a company, your culture's got to be focused on that. But then obviously you need to have some discussions around how to how to do this in a way that's secure and responsible as possible. You don't want to be giving AI access to full read-write access to everything initially. You want to limit the scope, especially with people who are not so experienced with it. But then once you have those things in place, that the world's your oyster. Like there's just so many possibilities and the use cases are endless. I could probably spend another hour just talking about that. So I I won't do that. I'll maybe let the other guys jump in and share their thoughts.
SPEAKER_01I would say from my side, I'm I'm probably a little bit on the embryotic side on AI and that I use it. I've got a bit of chat PT and whatnot, and and ran it as a bit of a standing board from time to time, but I know I need to be spending a lot more time on it. I've just been traveling a little bit and not having as much time to play with it as I'd like to. So, but again, from my side, it's a bit different. But MSP, it'd be again asking for questions, getting it to give you again clawed code or any of those things could give you some good PowerShells and good processes, but you need to have a a testing environment. You can't just just don't go and just copy and paste and especially on production environments until you know whether what it does and how it works, or get one, if you need to, get one AI to test the code, or like you check the code of another one or something like that. Like you can't just go and copy and paste this shit, which I see a lot of people do, but and you do a lot of that when it comes to content, and I'm sure Aaron will talk about that in a second. But I think yeah, you've got to be very careful what you do. Um again, we're dealing with production environments. You can't just take it as gospel, you've got to test it and know that it's right and have good eye tillers, you've got to have a rollback plan. Yeah, I I agree, Fuzzy, and it's it's
SPEAKER_02Interesting because I use AI a lot for research and that's that's power. It's a pattern matching algorithm, is what it is. So if you give it enough data, it can go it's large language, it's not even AI, but let's not go over let's not get me on the on the horse. Yeah, it's just a just a pattern matching thing. The great thing is, yeah, we've all got these traditional like I remember my old MSP, we had I think at one account we had 900,000 tickets in the database. Yeah, I wouldn't give AI access to all that, but you can extract 12 months' worth of tickets, de-anonymize it, so take the client identifiable name out. But the subject matter when it got logged, the subject, the type, the subtype, the tech entries that went onto that, surely we can get that into some form of our own private protected data and use that and run an analysis on an incoming ticket against that. That would be my dream. I don't have access to that much data anymore. I don't have an MSP, but Taz, I'll hit you up, give me a copy of your customer database de-anonymized, anonymized, so there's no customer data. But surely we can do that.
SPEAKER_04That's a good segue into what I was thinking just as you were talking there, Nick. So one of the issues I've always had with the service test team is their ability to put comprehensive notes into tickets. Like I couldn't tell you how many times I've gone and looked at a ticket and I'm like, what the fuck did you do here? Like the next guy coming along has not got a hope in hell. So our database prior to 2026 was probably not a lot of help to you. But now there's just absolutely no excuse, right? We're using dial pad for our phone system now, which has just been transformative because it just pumps out the AI transcript and and the summary and everything like that. And so that goes straight into the notes. If they need to modify anything, they can use AI to do it. Like it's just the amount of our ticket notes, they're just they're just high fidelity now. There's a lot of information. There's too much. It's hosted PSA data storage must have gone through the roof this year because ticket notes suddenly pages long. It's a good thing. I'd rather have too much than not enough. And another thing that came up was every Friday afternoon on the wrap-up call, I'd sit there and be like, you know, you've done your timesheets, if you've done your timesheets, and they just never do it. And now I'm like, listen, just create a skill, one of you guys, create a skill and just give it to the other guys and just and just do the damn timesheet. And now I had didn't even do this. This is my team have done this. They've got a chord skill which submits their timesheet, but it goes through and checks for any time entries that are excessively long or look unusual and just does all that kind of stuff so that when the the actual person who approves the timesheet occasionally would find you'd find that eight-hour time entry that was clearly a mistake. So all that kind of gets sorted out ahead of time now. And and the timesheets just go in on time. So I guess removing a lot of that headache and elements of the service team's job, which they hate, and I appreciate it because I wouldn't want to do any of that stuff either, right? It's just admin and it's not not what they're here for. But AI Souls at least takes away all the excuses for not doing that, and it just makes it a far more seamless thing to do.
SPEAKER_03I think that's that's probably the biggest impact for me from a general standpoint with regards to AI, is that all of the nonsense that we had to do. I mean, hey Fuzz, how long did you spend trying to get me to track time? Years. I I eventually met Fuzz in the middle in regards to I actually want to know the profitability of my clients, I want to know the time spent, I want to know all those sorts of things. So I actually did actually make my team track meetings and client-impacting activities. I didn't approve the timesheets. I didn't approve the timesheets. They sat there for weeks, but one problem at a time. But the point that was there is that nowadays we're trying to get transcriptions, we're trying to get people to actually write notes. I mean, Jesus Christ, the amount of times I've spent trying to get people to follow some sort of process to just gather the data. Now I can just give you the questions to ask. Make it consistent, uncover business problems, tell me what's going on. Claude, no, sorry, not Claude. Fireflies, contented, you name it. There's so many recording tools out there, it's not even funny. Pick one. Pick one. And if you can somehow integrate that, bonus, if you can't integrate that, make sure it's drag and drop somewhere so that you can pull that data in, take the relevant summary items in there that go and create tickets and those sorts of things. More importantly, if you can then go and take that recording into something like Claude and go, give me what I need for a proposal. There are plenty of proposal tools out there that will literally ingest that entire content piece, the scoping session you've done, all of the bits and pieces to do with it, will then go, here is what you need, here's where that's at. Hand it back to someone to validate, and then go, cool, now build me a proposal. Plenty of tools that enable that to be a seamless process that fails, stops, wasting time on admin tasks and can be in front of people more frequently.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, so Aaron, with it Firefly, I use Fireflies too. If Fireflies isn't there, the meeting doesn't go ahead for me anymore because like I my memory was pretty bad before, but now it's sort of become redundant and I don't use it. It it's even more important that all this stuff is is taken down. But yeah, like I for me, like I've done a few projects, you know, automation projects lately, where you know I've got on the on a scoping call with a client, recorded it in Firefly, spent an hour they're taking me through things, and then literally just like the port integration with Fireflies grabs it, writes the scope doc. I probably spend 20 minutes fixing up a few bits and pieces. But I mean that would have taken me half a day probably beforehand, and and now it's 20 minutes. So the time saving there is is ginormous.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and and the last thing on automation for me is uh this question comes up a lot. Oh, aren't the big vendors gonna do all this for us? Well, the reality is we've some we've been waiting for Microsoft for 20 years to give us a multi-tenant management tool. It's never gonna happen. We've been waiting for all the big PSA vendors to have uh AI smarts on their triage. I think it's an impossible task to have uh a massive uh big vendor like that with a big SaaS product have AI to meet the needs of everybody. I think it's still gonna be a niche. I think every company's gonna be doing their own work and they're gonna be engaging people like us to help them build out those automation workflows that suits their business in their environment to meet their needs right now, because that need will change in six months' time, nine months' time. I don't think we're ever gonna see the big corporates drop a tool that solves this problem.
SPEAKER_04No, no, I but nor would you want to. I mean, it's it's a bit like asking them to come and train your staff. Yeah, I think that's how what AI is, it's just another brain, but it's scale, and and you and you don't want how could anyone else possibly do that for your business? It's just just not practical in my mind.
SPEAKER_03I still feel that, yeah, internally it's going to be a case of more and more people are going to be doing this. More and more people are going to pick it up. The bigger companies are already doing it. They are even just sales coaching. There's a company called grow.ai. And all they do is they integrate with the bigger end of town, the sales forces, the hub spots, and all the all of the above. And all they're doing is connected and they are a sales coach as a service. So they will integrate with your email, they'll integrate with all the things and just go, hey, review this email. Can tell me how I could have done it better. It's a tool that I direct people to because we're not available 24-7, but this thing is. And if you are using these sorts of tools as a salesperson to go, hey, I've just had all these conversations, give me some feedback. Tell me what I could do differently. Have a look at my emails from the last week. Can you highlight for me what's going on? I literally am in a financial conversation right now with somebody, and I said, Hey, can you just review this entire process? This is what I want to do. Can you just sanity check? I'm going about this the right way.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. It's already happening, Aaron. It's in my experience, it's like that it's not big businesses that are doing this. I've got clients who who are, you know, like I was on a call with a client the other day, you know, they're a decent sized business, close to 100 staff, but they're a market or let's call them a marketing media agency sort of thing. And, you know, like he he was showing me this app that he'd built and he'd five-coded the whole thing in claw that he was using to do projections and forecasting on Media Spend for their clients. And it was a full like web-based application that he and he'd built Microsoft 365 single sign-on into it. And like I was just sitting there on the call going, This is unbelievable. Like, I've no idea what any of this data means, but gee, it looks impressive. And when you he's basically walking into client pitches now and going, Well, here we can forecast all this stuff. And it's like none of his competitors are doing it, which is great. So they're winning, they're winning work left, right, and center, which is which is good for them, and it's good for us too. But he's not a tech guy, but he's he's built an app, and it's it it's just crazy. That would have been unheard of a year ago.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I I mean this is me, mate. I literally went in and cracked I cracked it with the CRM platforms that we'd been testing. And I went, I can do better than this based on seeing a couple of other people do it. And I and a couple of my clients had gone and built client-specific things that had things like quarterly business reviews and all those sorts of things in it. So I went, cool. I I said to Claude Code, build me a CRM. Here are the things that I need inside it. These are the things I'm wanting, and teach me via Claude Code. It taught me where to go, where to put it, where to host it, where to secure it, how to do it. I had Microsoft single sign-on turned on when I discovered I'll mate Nick here, could log in and create himself an account within seconds. I went, cool, turn SSO on, which is now on. And then I went, that's too hard because Nick now can't get in. So now we turned on to FA with with the right bits and pieces. It's doing everything for you. And I know nothing about coding, but here we are. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04I mean, I mean, let's not let's not underplay the potential risks of all of this. Like there's gotta be some guardrails. Absolutely. What could possibly go wrong? But that's that's gonna change, right? Like right now it's probably seen as a bit risky, but with the right safeguards in place, probably okay. But yeah, I mean it eventually it, you know, the the build versus buy discussion it's gonna be increasingly more difficult to justify buy when build is so easy.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I I think as long as you're aligned with somebody who's going to cross-check your work, which I am, and you uh have the right setups and can go and follow that path through, I think you've got the people now have the ability to do it. So if you're not guiding them down that path and you're not part of that conversation, you run the risk of being left behind. Which is why I think the initial sales conversations now should turn to what are you doing with AI? How are you utilizing it? How is it, how is it best able to be assisting your business to do whatever it is it needs to do?
SPEAKER_04In terms of sales strategies, you know, I think that that's 100% where I'm focused and where hopefully not too many other MSPs are focused. But if they're speaking to you, they probably are, which is not good news for me. But anyway, it's that's where the opportunity sits without a doubt. And as an MSP, if you're not if you're not onto this stuff, you're gonna fade into irrelevance real quick.
SPEAKER_05Okay, on that note, let's wrap it up today. Thank you to all of you. Thanks, thanks, Aaron, for joining us for sparing your time today, sharing your expertise. Thanks also to Ryan, Taz, and of course, as always, Nick. If this conversation hit 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. I've got plenty more great guests and stories coming your way. Until next time, this is MSP Mastery.