The People Pillar – Why Owners are the Biggest Bottleneck to Growth

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 kick off part one of a special three-part series delving into the pillars that shape every successful MSP. We are starting with the most critical, and often the most challenging, component: People.

What makes this conversation essential for MSP owners is the honest look at the "Owner Bottleneck". We explore why so many leaders struggle to let go of control, the psychological shift required to trust a team, and the practical difference between effective delegation and simply abdicating responsibility.

Here is what we covered together:

• The Owner Bottleneck: Why MSP owners often become the biggest constraint to their own growth and how to stop being the hero addicted to having all the answers.
• 87 Percent Perfection: Why chasing a 100 percent "my way" approach will send you broke, and the power of accepting that your team will do things differently than you would.
• Delegation versus Abdication: A deep dive into why "dump and run" leadership fails and how to provide the structure, documentation, and evidence-based progress needed to truly let go.
• The Psychology of Communication: How understanding behavioural profiles like eDISC and Kolbe helps you adjust your language so your instructions actually land with your team.
• Accountability over KPI Theatre: Why static reports fail and how real-time dashboards and manual scorecard entry create genuine ownership in your technical team.
• Hiring for Vibe and Humility: Why raw technical brilliance often pales in comparison to team fit, and the story of the "God Complex" tech who lacked the humility to ask simple questions.
• Creating a Safe Place to Fail: Why firing someone for a major technical mistake is often a disservice to the business, and how to build a culture where the whole team learns from errors.
• The Intern Era of AI: A brief look at treating AI agents like grade five interns who need coaching and mentoring rather than expecting them to replace creative human work.

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.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you want to scale your business, then you have to have some rules, some parameters, some standards, and then you've got to teach people how to manage to those standards. And as we grow, we had team members, we add clients, and it's really tough to kind of let go of this baby that you've built and then trust someone else to take it on that journey. But truly, if you want to grow, you've really got to learn how to let go of control and trust people.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Welcome to MSP Mastery, the podcast for MSP owners and leaders who want to build a better MSP, one that actually works for them. I'm Jenny 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 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, no special guest. Today is part one of a special three-part MSP Mastery series where Nick and I are delving into the three pillars that we believe shape every successful MSP. Part one today is people, part two is process, and part three is the mindset of a leader. Across this series, we'll share lessons from decades in the industry, challenge some common assumptions, and explore what really drives sustainable growth and success for MSP owners and leadership teams. So, Nick Blints, first welcome for a start.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Thank you. Yeah, I'm excited about this. It's you know reflecting on the podcast that we've recorded so far and the guests we've spoken to on our recent trip to Australia, which was three weeks of meeting with clients and I've managed to get a few industry events in. It's going to be a good reflection on what works and what doesn't work.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

So let's start with the owner bottleneck. And this is something we see time and time again. An MSP owner says they want to grow, but they really are the biggest bottleneck in their business. They want to scale, but they just can't stop being the hero, consciously or unconsciously. So what I wanted to delve in today is is it a genuine lack of trust in the team, or are we just addicted to being the one with all the answers? So can you maybe share some examples that you've come across where an owner became the biggest constraint to growth?

SPEAKER_00 3:00

I think we all are. And then when we employed people who had a different opinion, I'd kind of subconsciously maybe sabotage stuff, or it just they'd bring something to me and say, no, no, that's not right. You've got to do it this way, this way, this way. And it took me a long, long time to develop the right mindset around how to trust people and let go. And the big thing, I think the big changing thing for me was when I realized that no one is going to do it my way. No one is going to be a hundred percent the way I want it to be done. And that's completely fine. So that was probably the big tipping point for me is understanding that it doesn't have to be my way, it doesn't have to be a hundred percent the way I want it to be done for the client to be happy. And John, one of our business mentors back in the day, said 87%. He said anything above that, you go broke trying to get perfection.

SPEAKER_01 4:29

And Pareto principle.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Yeah, it's it's okay to have people that don't do it your way. So once I learned that, it was still a struggle, and I would definitely change my tact instead of being worrying about the technical stuff, but then I focused on the sales, got the sales going, and then I'd go through these cycles of letting it go really well, then putting too much pressure on the professional services to deliver, and then I'd back off on that, and then the cycles continues on. So I'm not sure if they answered the question or not, but yeah, I think so.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

And I guess what I get from that is firstly, I hate this thing, because it just conjures up images for me, but you know, more than one way to skin a cat. It really is about the outcome. And what I saw with you is over time and the longer that you were out of off the tools, effectively, things change, tools change, ways of doing things change. And certainly now with AI coming through that something that might have taken days, weeks to complete, we're now doing very, very quickly. But you've been off the tools for five years, for example. There's a whole different way of doing things now. And always coming back to that my way is the only way, I think is doing everybody a disservice.

SPEAKER_00 5:39

Yeah, definitely. And it's restrictive because it you can't the secret of if you want to scale your business, then you have to have some rules, some parameters, some standards, and then you've got to teach people how to manage to those stands. You don't want to have every single deal come to you to be signed off on. If that's the case in your business right now, then you think of put yourself in the seat of the professional services and the project engineer or the pre-sales guy. He's gonna go and do all this research, do all this stuff, and he's gonna come to you, and you're gonna say, no, no, that's not how we do it. We need to do this, this, this, and this. And how does that make them feel? Like they've just busted their ass to come up with a solution. So there's ways of coaching a person to get a closer result to you want without undermining their confidence levels and taking away, I call it stealing their happiness. Like you've got to let them have the win. You've got to teach people to win or they can stand their own two feet and win for you. And it's like the analogy of going way back to your child, for those that are fortunate enough to have children when they first start to walk. They take three steps or one or two steps from fall down. Do you say to that child, oh my God, you're hopeless. You're never, that's not the right way to do it. You're never gonna walk. Of course you don't. You get them up, you encourage them. That's amazing. Like, let's let's just do that again, do it again. And you teach them how to walk. Whereas in business, I was guilty of this 100%. I'm paying good money for these people with experience. They should be able to give them a laptop, there's a log into the PSA, off you go, you're a legend, just go run. And I'd get really disappointed when they were doing one or two tickets a day and they were breaking more stuff than they were fixing, and then getting really frustrated. And I thought, oh, this is not working. And even the smartest person doesn't know anything about your business or anything about how you want things done for your client. So onboarding and teaching people, no matter what level they come into the business, is super, super important to set them up for success. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:33

Teach them how you want things to be done. So let's jump into the next thing. And I wanted to talk about the difference between uh delegating, and this is something as an EOS implementer, I teach session after session after session, delegate versus abdicate. So delegate is here's this thing I need done, here's the documentation, here's the process, here's our way of doing it, or abdicating, which is go do that with absolutely no information. So again, if you can just share perhaps some experiences around where abdicating has brought you down and learning to delegate has moved us forward.

SPEAKER_00 8:17

Yeah, and I think before we get into that bit, I want to share a story about something I learned through the journey and it had an immense impact on me. And it was that not everybody is the same.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

Oh my god, really?

SPEAKER_00 8:31

Definitely not the same as you. The world had 20 nicks in it, it would be a very sad place. The beauty of the human psyche is that we're all different, we all have a different perspective, we are a result of our environment that comes from everything from when we're born to when we're sitting at a table having a discussion with you right now. And part of the journey for me was to learn that my way of sharing information and receiving information is completely different, potentially completely different to the person you're trying to coach and mentor in your business to do a certain task. And I learned this amazing thing about behavioral profiles, a bit of Tony Robbins stuff. Then we got onto e-disc and Colby, and there's a bunch of them out there. But my God, that was such an empowering tool for me to understand why I only need to know the high level, where are we going? What do we need to do? When's it need to be done by? Yeah, give me half, two paragraphs, I'm right to go. Other people need the 40-page project plan with a contingency for every single thing that might go wrong. And when I'm having a discussion with a project guy and I want, they just need a new host, new backup solution, and we need faster internet, and we want Wi-Fi's for all these buildings. That's my brief. They're going away, nodding their head, going, look, there's so many questions, and I go, well, that's like figure it out. Yeah, I didn't give the guys the chance to ask the question because I didn't need to know the questions. Like, you just go look at what we've done last time for that client, talk to a vendor potentially, and then just make it happen. Like it's not that difficult, but that's not how people work. And there's a whole lot of work we do as leaders to learn how we behave and then how our behavior impacts other people, and then how the other people behave and need to receive information. So I suppose the key takeaway for me on that one is I learnt to have a discussion, and most people, if they're dealing with the owner or a senior person in the company, they're gonna nod and say, yep, yep, yep. And we've learned that living in Bali, that yes means that's a great idea. Yes means I have no idea what you're talking about. And yes also means, yep, I've got it, I'm gonna do that, I'll have it done by tomorrow. So everyone answers yes, but their version of a yes is way different. So you have to learn to ask clarifying questions. Okay, so what do you understand by what we just agreed to? Now we didn't agree to anything. We just had a conversation. I agree with you that it's an idea. I don't even agree with you that it's a good idea. And I'm thinking, hang on, we just agreed that this is gonna happen. And I was flabbergasted that like three weeks, I can't even remember the exact thing, but three weeks later, this had not happened. I went back to the guy and said, What is going on? He goes, Well, I said we had a discussion about this. He goes, Yep. And we agreed this is what we're gonna do. He said, No. I agreed that that was an idea. I didn't even agree it was a good idea. So I go, oh, okay, that was on me. So uh yeah, you need to figure out your language in your business and what's acceptable and what's not acceptable. And sometimes we go a bit overboard and try and we went through this journey in our business. We kind of over-corporatized at one point, and we had uh we had some people working with us who were very detailed oriented and very opposite to me, and they wanted to have a 25-step documented process. I would have had maybe two steps in that process, and we became a little bit paralyzed. So there's you've got to find the balance that works for your team. So yeah, I think communication, it all comes back to communication and expectations. So if you want somebody getting back to the question, which was about delegating versus abdicating, I would abdicate. I would say, I want this done. That was it. And then if it didn't happen in three or four days, I'd start to get anxious because I I had no feedback. Like, how do I check? So if you're dealing with someone like me who's a kind of a fast starter, D personality, just want to get shit done, give me the high-level details. I still need to know it's happening, it's moving. Like you can't, if I ask somebody to do something and I don't hear anything from them for a week, I'm expecting they've just You're presuming it's not done. It's 100% not done, nothing's happened, you've completely forgotten about it, and I'm starting to panic. And I'm thinking, I need to jump in and do this now. And I've 100% done that. I've jumped in and done the work of somebody else when they had it all planned out in their heads or some other hidden place. And that's another tip to get efficiency and scale, is you have to develop a culture that people document their work in progress in a shared environment. Like we all use SharePoint. We used to have file service, like when we do it EOS rock sessions, I would always create the rocks, I would create folders for the quarter with the individual's name, the initials, the rock name, the due date was the title of the folder, and any work that was done on that rock needed to go in that folder. So therefore, if you're a compulsive, obsessive kind of ADHD spectrum type of want to know everything about everything type of guy, and you know who you are, the guys out there listening, you don't have to harass the person and make them feel embarrassed or difficult. You can just go look in the folder. And it's just such an easy thing to do. But you'll be surprised how many people won't do that because they have this perfectionism and they don't want to publish anything until it's perfect. Well, you haven't done anything if you'd haven't published anything. So just dump your chook scratching thoughts, even if it's a piece of paper with handwritten notes, take a photo, put it in the folder. Because so many people just hold all this stuff in their head, and we as humans can't hold that much stuff. Like it's part of one of the lessons we teach is the issue system. You know, you get it out of your head and it frees up your cognitive space to solve real problems, not hold this big list of things that we need to do all the time. So just so many things contribute to an effective leader being able to delegate work to someone. You've got to have the understanding of how to communicate with each other. You've got to have some systems and processes and structure around the physical work and the documentation so that if the person's away or you're not harassing them on their day off or when they're sick and trying to get an update on a project. Like we have amazing tools, we have PSAs, we have documentation assistants. You'd need to get that culture going where people use that and it's second nature. It's not I'm checking up on you and making sure you're doing your work. Like we know whether you're doing the work or not. None of us have people in our businesses that are slacking around and loafing. It's just you've got to have evidence that you're moving forward. And for the control freaky type of guys out there, which is one of the topics we're talking about, is if you want to grow, you've got to learn to let go. And the only way you can let go is if you've got evidence that we're progressing. I've had lots of discussions with business leaders and owners, and the whole system stops when they don't have the trust that the work's getting done. And it's purely evidence-based. It's because the people are not documenting in the right spot. They've got it on their the old-fashioned word, the C drive, or in their notebook, and that's literally thinking about it in the head. Yeah, to be crass, it's like pissing in the wind. It doesn't actually achieve anything. Just like that doesn't do anything. You've got to have evidence, even of the progress.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

So if we wrap that up with just thinking about what you've talked through there, is delegating has some structure around it. Abdicating is dump and run.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Yeah, it's like the old seagull thing. You fly in, you have a great idea, shit on everyone and run away, and everyone's going, what the hell?

SPEAKER_01 15:52

What just happened? While while trying to wipe the shit off their head, yeah, their shoulders. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

And most people have already got a. I don't think there's any MSP out there or any technology company that has people sitting around wondering what to do next. I mean, they might be confused about the priority on what to do next, but they're not stressing about not having enough work. Like there's a lot to do all the time.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

So knowing what to do next.

SPEAKER_00 16:15

Yeah. Helping people set priorities is super important.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

Okay. How do you know when you have become the ceiling or perhaps the bottleneck for your own team?

SPEAKER_00 16:30

For me, it was when I can just remember this so clearly. I call it interrupt-driven. When you're trying to get in the zone, it takes us about 10, 15 minutes. If you're an expert at meditation, you can probably get into what we call the flow zone where you're doing really good work in maybe, maybe five or 10 minutes. The average person, it takes about 15 minutes to put all the noisy shit out of their heads. Like I'm recording this podcast, everything on my laptop is turned off except for this recording program. No messages, no teams, no nothing. It's off, right? So you've got to get into that work mode where you can. And what used to annoy me the most, and I knew things were, I was the problem, is when I couldn't get into flow mode because I was continually being interrupted. In the early days, it was people banging on the door of your office or just walking in, go, I can just answer this.

SPEAKER_01 17:16

And yeah, or standing in the doorway and staring at you. That was always your favorite.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

Yeah, especially when I'm on a phone call. Yeah, I said, piss off, like come back later, you know. And that was when I knew this is crazy. I can see that I am the bottleneck and I would have to work back at night. And I remember back in my early days at UNISES when I got promoted to be the service delivery manager in Victoria, and I had 70 engineers reporting to me. I basically had to work, stay in the office back in those days. There was no remote work. So I would an hour from home to the office and I would stay back on a Wednesday night till about 10:30 p.m. And from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. is when I actually had the ability to get some of my work done. My entire day was interrupt-driven by various people and bits and pieces and customers. So that's how I coped with it. I didn't have the skills and the leadership skills on how to manage my team leaders for them to take the brunt of that. Everything was passed through and it hit me, and then I'd have to give them an answer and go back. And I literally walk into my office in the morning, and the girls would have printed out like 50 emails were printed on my desk that I had to answer that day. I hadn't lasted in that job for 12 months. It was a complete overwhelm.

SPEAKER_01 18:23

So I learned But they replaced you with three people.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

Correct. So they I think they could see I was failing at it. So this is not working, guys. I'm not doing this job anymore.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

And clearly they'd missed the whole memo around a team can share a small pizza.

SPEAKER_00 18:38

Yeah, yeah. Six to eight people max is the ideal team size, a slice each. So yeah, when you when I suppose when you know you be the roadblock is when you just have this constant barrage of things to do. You know, and I work with a number of MSPs today, and it still happens today. And it's not by design, it's just by the DNA of the company or osmosis or something. Somebody's did something once and now they're their expert. And because they did it once, they didn't document it. No one else knows anything about it, and then subsequently, two, three years later, they're in a different role completely. It's nothing to do with them. But they are the person you have to go to. And we all have them. Like I'm the roadblock for some things in our business. We've got a small team now, but even Baguse, he doesn't know the history of what we've done, and it's not all documented easily. So it all comes back to documentation and having that discipline. I always try to say that whatever I'm doing, if I don't document this, I am going to have to do this a thousand times. And if you get that mindset a thousand times, oh my God, I can put up with it five or ten times. But if I have to do this a thousand times, I am documenting this so I never have to do it again. And it's more and more and more relevant today because if you document it properly, you just feed that documentation into your favorite AI agent buddy and say, hey mate, how do I automate this in my business? You know enough about what we do, the tools we've got, help me to not have to ever touch this again. And that's a cultural thing in your business that you need to figure out how to extract documentation. That's a tough one, but that's another topic for another day.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

Okay, I want to jump in now to again something we hear time and time again around real accountability. So almost every MSP has dashboards or scorecards now, yet we still hear owners saying no one takes real ownership. So what I wanted to dig in here, are we actually building accountability or are we just performing KPI theater where the team only cares about the numbers when they often find out about them in a meeting because we've missed them? So, first question can you hold someone accountable for data that they can't see in real time?

SPEAKER_00 20:56

No, definitely not. And this is one of the big, big issues we have in the the world of where we are today, right? And I remember that we did a podcast with Brian Doswell from Stretti from that 20 or 30 episodes ago. And one of the principles is that your scorecard in your level 10 meeting, there's a person accountable for that number, and they need to manually put that number into the scorecard. It's such a big psychological difference between a person collecting the data, looking at it, and then physically typing that number into a scorecard versus it being automatically populated from an API call to the PSA, and in the meeting, they get questioned about the number and they go, Well, I didn't put it in there. I don't know why the number's like that. Whereas if they've got to go do the research and physically put the number in themselves week after week. Week after there's this kind of ingrained psychological ownership for that number. Like you're not going to put a number on a board or into a report that you don't know why it is that number. And you'll know whether it's bad or not while you're analyzing it and be prepared. Prepared to answer the questions. That's a professional leader. There's people that come into meetings and there's numbers and they go, I don't know why it happened. Well, mate, that's not leadership. That's just not even fair. So I suppose the point there is I strongly recommend having live dashboards for everyone in your room. We were fortunate enough that we went down the auto task path and they were very early adopters of the dashboard. Once they put that dashboard system in where you basically any data in the PSA you could present as an individual dashboard for a person, it absolutely changed our world. Everyone should be accountable for a number. If you want to run a professional business and you want growth and you want your people to be successful, they've got to have two to three numbers that they're kind of daily accountable for. And that data's got to be right there in their face. Too many times today I still see people using PSAs with a big long list of tickets. And I'm telling you now, if your list is over one page to scroll through on the PSA, so it's normally about 20 tickets. If there's more than 20 tickets on their board, they are in overwhelm. They will not be able to decide what to do next.

SPEAKER_01 23:03

They'll spend half their day trying to figure out what to do next rather than actually just working through their list of 10 items for today.

SPEAKER_00 23:10

And honestly, a KPI of number of tickets left over, I don't think that's a good number because our business is doing tickets. Like that's a no-win battle. You're never going to have like back in my early days at UNICES and Burroughs, we had a z our mission was zero-zero. So zero unscheduled maintenance tickets open at the end of the day and zero scheduled tickets open at the end of the day. And we had a team of 70 engineers running around Melbourne, right? So it was pressure, but that's what happened those days. Because these machines, mostly banking, if they broke down, the customer couldn't work. It wasn't like you could go to another computer and do the job. So we it was different back in those days. But today, it's not a zero sum game. It's not zero, zero. That's not what we're looking for. But what we're looking for is productivity efficiency and doing a reasonable amount of work and having people understand what their numbers are.

SPEAKER_01 23:58

And backlog, making sure that you know, keeping those old tickets.

SPEAKER_00 24:02

Yeah, you're winning. You know, Otto, when we end up with two pods, we had the two teams up on a board and we had the cure rate and the average response time and the average tech time per ticket. And it created a competitive kind of healthy competition. Healthy between the two teams. And if one team was like five tickets below the kill rate for the day, they would last an hour of the day or half an hour of the day. They would push hard and get that number to where you need it to be. And there's a lot of business books about this stuff. And having a number and a target that's achievable is great. But I still believe giving people access to the data in real time on a daily basis. If someone's accountable for a number, they need to be able to see that themselves on a daily basis. It's not a thing you can spring on them in a meeting once a week or once a month because you get zero ownership. And a lot of this is about psychology and mindset, I suppose. But that's as you get older, you kind of realize that that's the key. If you just like my son, my younger son, right? Sam, love him to death, he's really good at what he does. But if you told him to do something, his default answer is no, why would I do that? He needed to have explained to him why it needed to be done, what his part in the role was, what the bigger picture was for the company and the customer, and why it's important to get done. Explain that. He's on board 100% and he'll kill it. But if you just say, go over there and do 10 of those, it's not going to happen. And you know, in your own teams, you'll have people that you tell them to go over there and do 10 of those, they'll go over there and do 10 of those. They'll have no idea why they're doing it. They'll have no idea of the impact. No ownership. The plotters, and you can't hold them accountable because they really don't understand it. So this accountability, and to get true accountability, the people need to understand their impact on the result and their position in the big cog of your business from end to end. And that means the impact to the client as well. And if you really want to get this 100% right, get your great clients to come in and talk to your team and explain to them the impact of them not putting decent ticket notes on, for example, things like that. So it's yeah, transparency, live data, and understanding the purpose and the reason why we are doing this. That would be the key thing for me on those KPIs. And just having like you see Cognition 360, it has every metric you can possibly imagine in a PSA. And to me, it's just, I just get so confused. There's just too many things. Like the dashboards are great, the data's there, but there's like it's written by an engineer for an engineer. So it's got like 400 items on one page. I'm talking a dashboard with three numbers, visually represented by bar charts or gauges or graphs. That's how you get results. Clarity, simple, focus.

SPEAKER_01 26:38

And that's what how we ran our daily huddle. So it was a stand-up meeting, literally, everybody's standing up. People get tired, they want to go and sit down. But there were three things, and we changed it regularly. So it was always how many tickets in your queue, how many tickets you completed yesterday, your timesheet and hours from yesterday to make sure that timesheets were done, and anything you're stuck on, something you need help. And if somebody said yes, I can help you with that, it was taken outside of that meeting, not a 15-minute discussion backwards and forwards with two people and the other three or four people standing there bored to tears. So it was always three things. And on a Monday, what was the highlight of your weekend? Friday was what's your plan for the weekend, or what are you looking forward to? So changing it a little bit, but keep it really, really simple. And that idea of three, that's absolutely the number that we aimed for in that huddle.

SPEAKER_00 27:27

Yeah. And mix it up. Most MSPs today still have a timesheet issue. And I know we don't bill by the minute, but there's other impacts, right? If Billy's done four tickets yesterday afternoon and he hasn't put any time entries in for those four tickets, and Billy goes out for a great meal and he gets food poisoning that night, he doesn't come to work for three days, you're screwed. Like you don't know what the status of those four tickets are.

SPEAKER_01 27:50

Well, they're still open, nothing's been done.

SPEAKER_00 27:52

Yeah. And it's just not fair, and that's how I explained it to our team. Said it's not that I need you to track your time so I can keep my eye on you. It's that you're gonna hurt your colleagues and the clients if you don't document what you're doing as near it to real time as you can. And don't go home without finishing all your time entries for the day. It's just no point.

SPEAKER_01 28:10

On Friday, do your time sheet for the week. You have no idea what you did last night or what you ate for dinner, let alone what tickets you did on Monday.

SPEAKER_00 28:17

Yeah. And somebody in your team, service coordinator, team leader, needs to be checking time entries daily. Just and if people are not getting their numbers right, just find someone in your team that is getting them right. So, hey, go sit with him for half a day and see that how he does it. Because that was another game changer for us. Like, even the way the PSA is configured, their default view screen, the people who are super efficient and got lots of work done, they had it set up a different way to the guys that were struggling and didn't know what the hell I were doing. And it was purely just the way you set the columns up and the displays in the PSA. So even that is a simple place because that is your first point of real-time data collection, is looking at your home screen in your PSA. It should tell you automatically where you're at with all your statuses and where what you need to focus on. Next SLA, oldest ticket, highest priority. Bang. There's no choice. You that's the next ticket you do. You don't go and cherry pick through the list and oh, there's a password reset. Oh, dude. I mean, password resets are important, but that shouldn't even get to a tech. Like your triage dispatch should be doing password resets. Or you should have an automated tool self-password reset. That's not a tech problem. That's just an operational BAU thing.

SPEAKER_01 29:29

Back in our DWM days, we always leaned towards hiring for team fit and attitude over raw skill. Others in the industry obsess over technical brilliance, the genius tech who can fix anything but can't hold a conversation with a client. So why do you think we went with that or leaned towards that cultural fit? And why are people so afraid to do that?

SPEAKER_00 29:54

Yeah, I'm thinking back over the history and it's the vibe, it's the Marbot effect, it's the feel of it. You can tell pretty quick whether a person's gonna fit into your team. And for us, we were a family business, we were people first, all of our mission statements and vision and everything was all around helping people. So we were 100% people first. Yes, you needed to have technical skills to deliver products. The most important thing for us, and the people that didn't succeed, were the ones that came in and were skilled people, but had a complex, they had a self-expectation that they should know everything. And the reality is they know nothing about our business, our clients, and how we've even configured stuff up. And I remember this vividly, one of the senior guys came in and he's getting angry about this problem at this customer site, and he's he's going on this is just absolute bullshit. Who set this shit up? This is completely wrong. I said, Well, actually, that was me. I designed that, I actually installed that and it solved the customer problems. And he went, oh, because yeah, I was the owner. And I said, Look, mate, there's a hundred different ways of doing it, and I am not the world's greatest technologist and skilled person at this particular tech, I don't even remember what it was, something to do with sand configuration or something. I said, your way's probably a better way, but that's not how it is. So we need to work with what we've got. And when we come around to replace this system or redesign it, I'll get your input. And I really had to knock him down a few notches and say, and I don't expect you to understand everything. You need to learn to ask questions. And then we went through this whole coaching session on asking questions. And I remember he was a new father as well. And his words to me that really stuck were, oh my God, now I know why my wife hates me. I said, What? I don't ask any questions about how to deal with a baby. I just think I need to know how to do it all myself. And he that was his thing. He would not ask questions. He thought it was a sign of weakness to ask questions. And we had to teach people asking questions is a good thing.

SPEAKER_01 31:55

It's a good thing.

SPEAKER_00 31:56

It's a very good thing.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

We've rewarded people for asking questions.

SPEAKER_00 31:59

And what do people in the world, what do you love doing? You love helping people. So if you don't ask people for help, they can't help you. So you're stealing their happiness. And it's a bit of a play on words, and it sounds a bit woo-woo-ish, but it absolutely works. It's all mindset, like these unbelievable, unrealistic expectations that people have on themselves. Been in the industry for 10 years, I'm a level three tech, I should know everything about everything. I can't ask questions. I'll go and burn 50 hours to solve a problem that I already knew the answer to. That's ridiculous. That's just ego at its worst. Be humble. So when we hire, we look for people that are humble, that don't say they know everything, that can have a conversation, show some humility, have some experience at dealing in teams, ideally a sport of some description. If they've just been a hacker at home in the closet, they're not going to be really good people, people. You can teach technology or you can go and partner with someone. We partner with our vendors, we partner with our distributors, we partner with other MSPs that had skill sets we didn't have. I wasn't worried about the skill set. I was worried about maintaining that awesome relationship with the client. So I will always go for people fit. And hey guys, don't be afraid to employ people and it doesn't work out. We got to a point that our team would tell us we do the interview round and we get them to come in and work for in our business for half a day, and they'd either go out and have lunch with some of the team or a coffee or a beer afterwards, and then we'd do a debrief the next day. You say, would you take this person home to meet your mum? Would you want to have lunch with them again? And if it was a hell no, we said, okay, they're off the books. And that worked well for us because getting someone, they're going to be the best at the interview in the first month, right? They're going to be on their best behavior. All their little bad habits are going to be suppressed. They're going to be very, very conscious of being the best they can possibly be. And if that's not good enough, then pull the trigger and mate, sorry, it doesn't work out. Use that probation period to your advantage. Don't feel like you have to employ someone. You definitely employ people with a view they're going to be long-term prospects, but don't be upset when it doesn't work out. You need to act fast for their sake and for your sake and the rest of your team's sake.

SPEAKER_01 34:03

And absolutely, touching on that probationary period, that's six months. Or if you're a small business, it's actually 12. I think under 15 staff, it's a 12-month probationary period. That six months is the honeymoon phase. And if you're starting to see cracks in that six months, absolutely act within that. Don't keep them on thinking it'll get better because it won't, it will actually get worse. Humans can present their best side for a period of time, but then those actual traits start to come through. So we've done this, we've kept people on too long and then had to manage them out. If you are not 100% convinced in that probationary period and you wouldn't enthusiastically hire them again, move them on for your sake and for theirs.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

Yeah, and that's not to say you don't coach them, right? And give them every opportunity to be successful, because obviously you hired this person because you saw something in there and they had some skill or some value to bring to the business. So you don't want to just ride them off because I use five minutes late one day or you wore a dirty shirt to work. You don't get rid of people for that. But if they're consistently not meeting expectations after coaching and mentoring and sitting down and having those discussions, then rip the band-aid off because it's they're going to be in pain as well, and they're going to know straight away. Oh, this is, I don't know, this is a good fit for me. And we've had a number of people that have mutually agreed this is not, I'd say most people actually that we have had to move on would be mutually agree that yeah, this role that I'm in not the right for me, I'm not the right fit here. And they've gone on to be very successful at other places. So early days, I took it very personally. If I made a bad hire and or the person didn't work out, I thought it was a failing on my part. And it's we need to get past that as leaders and say our job is to provide a safe, supportive environment for people to work in and succeed and reach their potential. If they haven't got the potential we need, you need to set them free to go somewhere else and find a different potential.

SPEAKER_01 35:51

Absolutely. And just wanted to touch on something Sally Ducksfield said when we recently caught up with her and Sally's done an episode with us as well recently. She mentioned that if a member of the team makes a complete screw up, like makes a major mistake, that then the team's got to jump in and get it sorted, you know, management's involved, there's a client, they will never do that again. So if you fire them, I think you're actually doing them a disservice unless they've done something really illegal, illegal, dumb, and you can look at that person and go, they haven't learned from this. But for most people, they've had a big learning in that they're part of the team because everybody's had to get in and help them. Keep them. Because you fire them and you bring somebody else in, chances are they'll go and do something same, same but different. So take that as a learning episode for everybody. Don't fire somebody for making a mistake.

SPEAKER_00 36:53

No, I agree 100%. And I've always said that we all make mistakes. I said I have made more mistakes than you can possibly even imagine. So don't be scared of making mistakes. Don't be reckless. But if something goes wrong, you just gotta put your hand up straight away. And we've had people try to hide the mistake. That didn't go well for me, didn't go well for lost the customer. He lost his job because he was literally lying and hiding. And that was a no. You know, we're not going past go here. Whereas other people have made serious mistakes, like we're talking blow complete networks away. Yeah, I've done it myself. I've changed a hard drive and lost the entire RAID stack. I didn't feel good at the time. But first thing I did, ah, this I went to the client and said, this didn't actually go the way the plans. You know, I said it'll be up in about three hours, it's going to be about 24 hours now. Oh, no problems. Own it, learn from it. And like Jenny said, if someone has made a critical mistake like that, they will never, ever, ever make that mistake again. So don't write that learning off. And to what Sally said, I think she's 100%, especially at a senior level. If you actually make a crazy mistake and you lose a customer over it, but the team learnt a big lesson of what not to do or do a deep dive, figure out why it happened, what happened, what were the scenarios. Everybody learns from you may be throwing out the baby with the bath water, as they say, if you sack that person for that particular incident, because they'll never ever, ever make that mistake again. They'll learn from that and be much more diligent in everything else they do and agree with that. Mistakes are how we learn. We don't learn from things going right. We learn from things that go wrong.

SPEAKER_01 38:22

And I think it's a whole team learning too, because if you've got somebody who's been there a period of time, has made a big mistake, the team's jumped in, everybody's helped, and you've got somebody in their first or second week and they've seen this, it really creates that safe place to make mistakes. They know that if they do something, which is likely when somebody's new, they put their hand up, the team jumps in, everybody helps out, and that becomes the culture of the business. Not that it's go screw something up to cause a bit of mayhem, but you make a mistake, everybody helps, we all move forward and we all learn from it. So I in some ways I think it's a good thing as long as it's not a deliberate thing.

SPEAKER_00 39:01

Yeah, and today it's really tough because we talk about this a lot. Nearly 10 years ago, we had our office with DW in the Chuca, and everyone was based in that stuff up there. So we had a policy of having trainees. We would have one or two trainees either straight out of year 12 or straight out of uni all the time because we had an environment where they could learn. And I don't know how you would do it today. I had this discussion with people this week. How can we bring on new young talent and create a safe space for them to learn, make mistakes, and gain experience? Like it's it's tough. You need to be in the bullpen literature with people and hearing conversations with clients and how you deal with tickets, looking over somebody's shoulder. It's so hard to do that remotely. And I I worry for that. I don't know how we're going to do that. And all these AI agents, and I'm when a few really active chat groups about AI in the MSP world and all this automation stuff, these AI agents are like grade five level people. But they need a lot of coaching and a lot of mentoring and a lot of teaching and learning. And they will get there. And once you get there and you've got the program right, you can replicate them. That's the power, right? So if you've got an AI agent that does your true agent dispatch, for example, it might take you six months to train them to get half as good as a human. But if you get to that point, then you can just replicate that and that's what's going to happen. But we have to treat this agentic era there that we're in as these people are interns. And I just came back from uh the AIS conference in Singapore, and that was the big lesson. He said, these are interns, they're not people, they are machines that learn routine and match patterns. Don't think of them as people, they are tools to do a job, and people get all emotional about my agent. And I play with open core and call mine donor and bits and pieces, but we have to be really, really careful. They are not people, they are not inventing things, they're not creating, they haven't got creativity, they can match patterns and do stuff. We have to remember that.

SPEAKER_01 40:57

Thanks, Nick. Let's wrap up our episode for today. And as always, thanks to all of you for listening. 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 part two and part three of this special series, where we'll be unpacking the process and mindset of a leader. Until next time, this is MSP Mastery.