Your Service Desk is Trash: Building an MSP Service Desk with Data, Process & Heart

Is your service desk a high-efficiency engine or a breeding ground for "hot garbage" data? If you’re tired of technicians playing "Hero Ball" instead of following procedures, this episode provides the blueprint for taking back control. 

In this episode of How to MSP, host Andrew Moore welcomes Mark Sowden, a 20-year MSP veteran and former Vice President of Service who has built award-winning delivery teams from the ground up. Mark breaks down the exact strategies used to whip chaotic service desks into shape, focusing on accountability, data integrity, and scalable team structures.

In this episode we cover:

The Data-First Approach: Why your ticketing system is your only window into reality.

Capacity Planning: How to use the "half-hour/half-ticket" math to right-size your team.

The Service Industry Analog: Applying restaurant-style "front-of-shift" and "end-of-shift" routines to IT.

Talent Pipelines: Why you should embrace being a "talent generator" rather than fearing turnover.

Don't let "hot garbage" data ruin your efficiency. Tune in to learn how to whip your service desk into shape and lead with both intellectual honesty and heart.

Show Notes:  Episode 5 Notes

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Chapters

• 0:00 Why nobody wants to work on the service desk (and why that's okay)
• 5:21 Where to start: Data, contracts, and ticketing workflows
• 6:31 Top 5 KPIs: From "First Touch Resolution" to "Heavy Tickets"
• 10:52 Garbage In, Garbage Out: The danger of untuned alerts
• 13:56 Real-Time Ticketing: Why your work manifest must stay clean
• 16:46 Building the "Pod" System: Scaling from $5M to $12M+
• 20:11 The "Span of Control": Why 6–8 people is the magic number
• 24:39 The Arsonist vs. The Firefighter: Managing daily accountability
• 31:54 Becoming a Talent Generator: Developing the "Next Man Up" mentality
• 38:51 Pre-Shift & Post-Shift Routines: Borrowing from the restaurant world
• 56:16 Education as Culture: Why back-to-basics training never ends
• 1:03:04 Rapid Fire: The Goal, "Hot Garbage," and the best hire Mark ever made

Transcript

Mark Sowden (00:08)
at first, you take it personal. like, nobody wants to work on the service desk. But here's the deal, Nobody wants to work on the service desk. They're coming in and they've got their sights on projects. They've got their sights on a network admin position. So you have to foster that or you will lose good people. And then that monthly meeting,

This is what their accountability meeting, This is either you're doing great, you are looking at 70 % utilization, your CSAT scores are excellent, Or those are, like I said again, look for the arsonist, like there's something going on here, what's the problem?

Andrew Moore (00:47)
That was Mark Sound. Mark Sound is a 20 year professional the MSP space. He was formerly the director of managed services for the Iron Edge group, where Mark had spent over a decade building award winning service delivery teams specializing in service test delivery, account management, and project systems. Today, Mark's going to talk to us about how you can help build a better managed services service desk and how to hold your team accountable.

Andrew Moore (01:13)
All right, welcome back to how to MSP. I'm Andrew Moore and today I'm joined with Mark Sowden. Mark Sowden is the ⁓ previous director of managed services for the IronEdge Group. He is a almost two decades veteran of the MSP space, specializing in service delivery and particularly around

Mark Sowden (01:21)
Hey, hey.

Andrew Moore (01:38)
how to whip a service desk into shape at many, many levels. Mark, thanks for joining us today.

Mark Sowden (01:45)
thank you for having me, man. This is super awesome. Yeah, I'm super excited to talk about all the fun things.

Andrew Moore (01:47)
you

Yeah. So where does the podcast find you? Where are you physically at today?

Mark Sowden (01:55)
I

am in central Virginia, moved here from Houston, loved Houston. was time I made a promise to my wife 15 years ago and I was 15 years late on delivering to bring her back home to Virginia. So we are loving, loving life up here in a very rural part of the state.

Andrew Moore (02:15)
Excellent. I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad to hear that. And why don't you just give everybody a quick like two second. Why should they listen to you? What does it matter? Why should they care about what you have to say ⁓ regarding our topic today?

Mark Sowden (02:26)
Okay.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Proceed with caution. No, mean, as you know, I worked in the MSP space and in technology for about 20 years. I have held every single job in the MSP space. ended up as a, I think I finished my career in MSP as a vice president of service and I won multiple awards on help desk efficiency over my tenure.

And really just my focus has always been training, mentorship, client satisfaction. And I made sure that my work spoke to that end, right? So just, have a ton of experience in all different facets of the MSB space.

Andrew Moore (03:08)
Well, and I love the fact that you have moved on from MSP to formally join the education space as a teacher for middle school. And I strongly. Yeah, well, I feel strongly that that if you can manage a service test, you can manage a room full of 12 year olds. So.

Mark Sowden (03:30)
Yeah,

well, the 12 year olds, think, are, I'm still, you know, very new at this, but I don't think they've learned that you can say no yet. So they have to just look at me as an authoritative figure. So there are some benefits and some drawbacks. I do miss the MSP space a lot, the constant challenges, the people are amazing, the opportunities to train and stuff like that. So there is that component that I do miss, but this new endeavor has its fresh challenges and it keeps me young.

tell about a great hair. So the lighting.

Andrew Moore (04:02)
You don't have that much gray hair. You don't, don't even.

Yeah. I'm actually 27 years old. Like I've been, I've been in the MSP space way too long. ⁓ well let's, let's jump into it. So, one of the things I want to start with today, which I, I know that you and I over the course of our careers together as we've worked together in the past, we would approach,

Mark Sowden (04:09)
Hahaha!

Yeah.

Thank

Andrew Moore (04:27)
challenges within our service delivery team about every six to 12 months and major challenges in this light. We would look at it and say, if we were coming in fresh, how would we start? We didn't try to come in with preconceptions about, well, this is what we've been doing and this is how we're going to continue to do it just for the sake of that. We would certainly look at it and say, are we doing the right things? Let's approach this from a fresh perspective. So I want to start with saying if

someone were to come to you and say, Mark, I need you to come out of MSP retirement and I want you to focus on helping me fix my service desk. and I'm a, you know, a $5 million MSP. Where would you start? If you came in from that fresh perspective, what would you do to start looking at a service desk and what tips would you give somebody who's looking at their service desk with that fresh perspective to say, I'm to take a step back and maybe I need to reevaluate. Like what, would you start? How would you start eating the elephant?

Mark Sowden (05:21)
I mean, it's, there are a lot of different paths you can take. I think the first thing is, I'm looking at data and I'm, you know, data that may be available, right? Whatever data we've got, do you have a ticketing system? Right. And do you have workflows in that ticketing system? Cause if you have that stuff, then we can start looking at.

really where those problems lie, right? Aside from that, I'm probably looking at contracts. Do you have contracts? You know, it wouldn't be the first time we've seen a handshake agreements in an MSP. And that's kind of rough as far as what your service level expectations are, you know? So yeah, I'm looking at that data. And then I'm also I'm looking at your help desk configuration, right? What sort of inputs do you have and what are your outputs? So what sort of

systems do you have in place? What sort of overall expectations do you have from your service desk? You know, there's a whole host of things, but it's a long way to say I'd probably start with the data to see what I can uncover.

Andrew Moore (06:16)
So when you say start with the data, are you looking at anything in particular? Are you looking at, I don't know, a number of tickets, like backlog, ticket, like what are some KP, like if you had to pick three to five KPIs that you would just fundamentally say, we've got to look at this data, where would you, where would you look first? Even if the data isn't great or even accurate, where would you start investigating?

Mark Sowden (06:19)
Thank you.

Yeah, mean, the first thing I'm looking at is your close to or how many tickets do you have, right? How many tickets are you closing versus how many tickets you are getting into the system, right? That's a super easy one that everybody can look at and it'll show you kind of where you are on a workload or throughput perspective. The other I'm looking at is first touch resolution. and if we are talking about

If you have the statistics available, do you have CSAT scores? What do your clients think about you? Is that something that you have as a $5 million MSP? I'd say maybe, sometimes. ⁓ But if they don't, need those bellwethers are going to be your SLA, which I didn't mention before, but your SLA, the first touch resolution, and how much work you are getting into the system. And that's provided even in an inaccurate...

I guess system if you want to call it that in an inaccurate system. You'll still get an idea of maybe where some issues might lie

Andrew Moore (07:37)
I've noticed with some MSPs that I've worked with and just kind of in general in conversations that I've had with folks in peer groups, I think ticket age is probably up there for me. Just to say, you know, when I look at my board, if I sort by all of the tickets that I have, how old are my tickets typically? And I like to use a median, right? Cause you'll kind of toss out the early and you'll kind of toss out the long. But like when you look at those tickets,

Mark Sowden (07:47)
for sure.

Mm-hmm.

Andrew Moore (08:06)
I like to look at like how many tickets are on the board and how long they've been there. And then I also like to look at something, and this is a term that I just made up. So you'll love this. Speaking of not workshopping stuff. I call it, call them heavy tickets, tickets that have a lot of hours on them. Right. So you could have a ticket that's only a few days old, but it could have 20 hours on it for some reason. So I like to look at some of that data too. Like, what are your thoughts about incorporating that into some of that?

Mark Sowden (08:23)
Yeah, yeah. ⁓

Andrew Moore (08:34)
initial discovery or do you find that I'm barking up the wrong tree there?

Mark Sowden (08:38)
Not at all. I think that,

I mean, those tickets tell a story, right? Your old tickets are telling a story and then your heavy tickets, I love that term, ⁓ those are also telling a story and those stories can be wildly different, right? That old ticket could be anything from, I don't like that client. That just doesn't seem like a thing I wanna deal with. Or it could be, this is hard, right? Or it can be, there is no ownership on the ticket. You have 15 people assigned to that ticket and...

Nobody has the lead on it, right? You have no account management that's looking to see what's going on there, right? That tells a story. Your heavy tickets on the other side, usually it's either you've got people that are not following your escalation procedures, right? They are not, they're trying to own an issue and they want to play hero ball, you know? Or they haven't called the vendor yet. Like I can't tell you how many times in my career, you know,

If you have a system and you've spent 10, 15, even 20 hours on it and you didn't say like, it's time for me to call the vendor. I won't get mad at a lot, but that would get me a little bit red. So yeah, think those things tell you the, it tells you a lot about the workflow of your desk. How efficient is your desk running?

Andrew Moore (09:51)
Well, and one of the things that I'm also noticing is we'll call it ownership or accountability of the work that's hitting the ticket board. And so I've seen in some organizations where for whatever reason, the service manager or the service coordinator, someone doesn't feel like they own the ticket board as their own, as part of that department. And then they're saddled with

the decisions of other people within the organization of what type of work enters onto that board and how it's managed rather than them taking ownership. Can you explain why that might be problematic? Like if they're allowing tickets from, let's say an account manager says, yeah, well, we're just going to put those kinds of tickets on that board or, know, whoever's working the NOC like, well, there's no way I can turn off what's going on with the, with the Meraki system. So you're just going to have to figure out what's going on with those tickets. Can, can you talk about

how that can be detrimental to your service desk and how important it is to be accountable and to own that board if you're a service manager and what that looks like.

Mark Sowden (10:52)
Yeah, I mean, once you know, you you are not a stranger to this phrase, but it's garbage in garbage out. Right. So like if you're getting a lot of noise onto your ticket board, like and let's say maybe you are a small maybe you're a smaller MSP and you don't have, you know, the the capacity to have a dedicated we used to call it service coordinator, but, know, a dedicated ticket reconciliation manager, whatever you want to call. So you've got somebody pulling double duty.

That might be your service desk manager. That might be somebody else. If you have a thousand Meraki tickets over the course, you know, coming into a system because you don't know how to tune your alerts. I can promise you that there's a couple of things happening. One, you've got bad data to you are missing important things because if, if everything's coming in, you're not going to see that one Meraki alert that is actually important that you need to focus on. So you've got some service issues just waiting to happen. and then more than yes.

Andrew Moore (11:46)
Can I pause you? Can I pause

you for a quick second? You said something there and I don't want to bury that. You said you have two things that are going on potentially and one of them you said was bad data. Will you, I hate this term, I'm gonna use it. Will you double click on that?

Mark Sowden (11:56)
Mm-hmm.

⁓ no. ⁓ Yeah, well look, mean, it kind of goes into what we were talking about in that garbage in garbage out, right? If you want reliable data so that you know whether or not you are doing what you sell, are treating your own team the right way, you know, through ticket hygiene and things like that, that data is...

Andrew Moore (12:01)
Yeah.

Mark Sowden (12:24)
It's the only window you have into how your service desk is functioning. So you owe it to yourself to ensure that your systems are tuned. And when an alert comes in, it's something you need to look at. There should never be a case when you have a ticket come into your PSA or whatever system you're using and you're like, ⁓ that's an info ticket. Like those don't exist. Like there's an action. There should be an action to every ticket you're getting. And if not, then you've got an issue.

⁓ Now, whether that action is an automated thing, fine, but there will be a way to track that in your data. But if you're having to curate your data in real time to make the data look the way you want it to because you have thousands of Meraki informational tickets, then you're not doing yourself any favors.

Andrew Moore (13:13)
that, makes a lot of sense. And that's something that you and I worked a lot on, especially after we deep dived into The Goal and The Phoenix Project which are two books that I recommend every service manager read, ⁓ about theory of constraint. And we really focused on work manifests, right. And, data, how, how, how tickets move in and out of the system. So can we, can we dig into that just a little bit? Can you talk about the importance of.

work manifests and just kind of like why it's important to make sure that the tickets are coming in in a fairly structured or formatted way or that they're, you know, legitimately actionable, like just kind of dig into that for our listeners and talk a little bit about that.

Mark Sowden (13:56)
Sure, yeah. One of the things that we implemented with my team, we call it real-time ticketing. I'm sure a lot of people that listen to this type stuff know what that is. But you have to have accurate information in your ticketing system. Your work manifest has to be clean. And that's for a couple of reasons. One, we go back to data, and you're going to hear me harp on this a lot. Accuracy in data is everything. If you don't have it,

Good, listen to this, start clean, right? The other side of that though is, it's the old hit by the bus theory, right? If you have clean work manifests and you have somebody who quits, who is in the hospital, gets hit by a bus, right? Like that work manifest is all you have to ensure that your client who, let's be honest, doesn't care about whatever just happened, right? They just don't, it's not their job to care.

But having that clean work manifest, it's going to give you the right resource for the job. It's going to allow consistency and support. And it's also going to allow a backup system to be implemented like another resource, another technician. The other side of that, it's also going to tell you about what types of automations or potential future fixes you can employ to reduce your overall workload. So for example, if you've got a really clean

hygienic ticketing system, you're be able to very clearly see that X client is producing 50 printer issues a month, right? You're not gonna be able to find that data in a really meaningful way if you're not ensuring that your work manifests are tight and consistent across the board. So you're saving yourself hours, you're increasing your profitability, you're helping yourself all the way around if you're improving your work manifests.

Andrew Moore (15:37)
I love that. love that. when we know, just want to reiterate to the listeners when we talk about a work manifest, we're talking about anything that structures work that comes in or out of one of your work centers or department. So tickets would be a work manifest, right? That's a type of work that comes in a project or a project ticket, a statement of work, right? Those would be considered work manifests. So anything that comes in and produces an output so that work has to be structured. So let's talk a little bit about.

the organizational framework of a service desk. I know they change. I teach a lesson on, I think it's kind of almost an immutable evolutionary process of how an MSP evolves in size and like where personnel get concentrated. But let's just assume again, we're back at that $5 million mark. We're getting ready to build out kind of our first really structured work center for service.

Mark Sowden (16:05)
Thank

Andrew Moore (16:31)
What does that look like? Like, what do you want to see in that group? You know, how do you want to have that structure? What does that look like? How do you escalate just generally? Like, and we don't have to get into specifics, you know, as far as the exercise, but just an idea of kind of like, what do you want to see there?

Mark Sowden (16:46)
for me, there's a couple of factors in play. And it's kind of like what you said. A $5 million service desk will look a lot different than $12 million service desk and so on and so forth. So there are some key questions you have to ask yourself. First, what resources do I have? What sort of talent do I have? And the second one for me is,

what clients do I have? Because whether or not I have, let's say I'm mostly in the medical field, that escalation procedure or things like that may be different than if I'm in a heavy property management vertical or if I'm disparate across multiple industries. But if we're just going on simplicity, for me,

You've got your tier one or whatever. used to call them first responders. You've got those people and those are going to be your frontline folks that are answering the phones, right? Those are your interrupted people. Now those people will also work. You know, we call them scheduled tickets, but those are tickets that aren't coming in from phone calls or other interrupted media like chat or whatever. So you've got those people. They are your gatekeepers and,

really the key here is you need to make sure that their processes, like those processes for me, those are the most important processes you have because first you want to empower those people to confidently be able to support their systems. But more importantly is you're going to have some more expensive and more experienced resources behind them, your tier two and your tier three that are going to be escalated to and what you don't need is

those first tier people that are just learning, you don't need them escalating issues that they can very easily solve. So that's going to come back to, need to make sure that your documentation and your SOPs are tight, but you're going to have your pod, ⁓ you're going to have escalation points within that. And those escalation points like

those things, and I really can't stress this enough, those escalation points need to be hard and fast, right? And it's really, in my opinion, it's about getting the right resource to do the right job. If you've got your tier three person working on a desktop printer issue, then your escalation practice, something went wrong, right? And go ahead.

Andrew Moore (18:59)
Let me

dive into a few things that you said there, right? Because there was a lot to unpack. You went down the road with, you're definitely going to have tier one, you've got escalation resources above that tier one. And then you started to talk about a pod. Would you consider a $5 to $7 million MSP like a single pod type solution, knowing that at some point you might, and when we talk about a pod, it's a containerized service delivery team within the service desk.

Mark Sowden (19:05)
Hahaha

Yes.

Andrew Moore (19:26)
then you might have a second pod, right? And then kind of let's talk about the evolution of what it would, what you understand service desk to do over time as it begins to grow. So you get past five to 7 million and you start getting to the point where you've got 12, 15 people on your service desk. When does it make sense to start splitting it into groups and creating these pods? And what are your thoughts around? How do you do that? And why would you do it?

Mark Sowden (19:54)
⁓ so there's a lot of reasons to do it. now for me, if you're talking about you, you were in this specific scenario, you were talking about 12 and 15 people. I don't think you should have a pod that big. My opinion, you want to keep that to six ish people. You want to, you want to keep that smaller, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Moore (20:11)
six to eight, right? So that we can maintain managerial

control over, so span of control for a manager is really important. And I teach this with my coaching groups and in my learning management solution, which is you don't want to have more than eight people reporting to a single person at any given time.

because you want them to be able to do, and we're going to talk about this in a little bit, like standups, one-on-ones, direct interaction with the people on their team so that these KPIs that we've been talking about can be adhered and we can celebrate wins and we can do that sort of thing. So we'll get to that in a minute. But I agree with you 100%. I feel like that six to eight number is really the critical component so that you don't have somebody that's overburdened as a manager and inefficient if that is kind of the direction you were considering as well.

Mark Sowden (20:55)
Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. And then it does allow you when you do those pods and you do them strategically, you can kind of specialize your pods in a way to suit whatever your needs are. That need may be vertical, that need may be region, like we talked about before, but there's something to be said for.

you know, when, when you're talking to a team and they are specialized in say, ⁓ to go back to the medical field or the construction field, right? And they're building their SOPs with a knowledge of that field, right? Everybody wins in that case. It's also going to allow you to front load your newer talent, we'll say, your less experienced talent. And it's going to allow those people to grow up.

But you're also going to be able to do, I don't like using this term, but more with less. You've got some higher tiered people in the background, but those are your super specialized people that are doing your, you know, they're doing your preventative maintenance and they're doing like their break glass, break glass unless, you know, if needed. But yeah, so I mean, it's, for me, there's so many benefits to doing the pod system and you can mold it to

Andrew Moore (22:02)
Right.

Mark Sowden (22:11)
whatever your business looks like.

Andrew Moore (22:14)
Well, I'm going to, I'm going to drop in some things that I've worked with some of my clients on recently, which is so a real simple way to start kind of understanding how right sized you are on your service desk really kind of breaks back down to how many endpoints are my supporting, right? And so, you know, we typically like to see, you know, and that can be users or endpoints, you know, a lot of MSPs are doing it a bunch of different ways.

But it's about a half a ticket per person or per endpoint per month. That includes stuff that comes in for your knock or your alerting systems, not just user generated issues. And then you really want to try to solve most of those problems on an average within about a half an hour. So you can start running some pretty quick math to figure out how many endpoints a pod should be able to support based on the amount of personnel you're going to have. And then you can do some quick math to say, well, you know, we should expect, you know,

800 tickets a week on this pod. Therefore, you know, if my tier one guys are expected to solve all problems within 30 minutes or escalate and then they're responsible for working an average of about six and a half hours a day, right, between trainings and meetings and stuff like that. Well, then you expect them to close between 13 and 15 tickets a day. You can start doing some pretty quick math about how many people you need in that pod on a weekly monthly basis.

When you start talking about capacity planning for your pods or for your service desk, it's the missing piece that a lot of people don't take the time to really focus on, which is am I not tracking at the individual level? You really have to focus there from a capacity planning standpoint, because then you have to be able to go back.

and then incorporate your individual KPIs where you're holding your team members accountable. And that's what I want to dig into right now, which is when we start talking about accountability, we've identified overarching departmental goals and KPIs. We've now talked about how important it is to make sure that the work is coming into the system in an organized fashion and that we've measured our capacity. So now what we need to look at is from a departmental standpoint,

How do we hold the people on the service desk accountable to certain data points metrics in order to support the departmental metrics? Like what is the best way to approach that? How do you start with that? What do you look at as far as like setting the tone for meetings within the department's follow ups within the departments? How does that how does that play out for you typically when you when you want to address a consulting opportunity to look at that?

Mark Sowden (24:39)
Thank

Yeah. mean, so when, when we talk about accountability on the service desk, the service desk is, you know, you're constantly putting, putting out fires. ⁓ but for me, like it's super important to get in front of the arsonist, you know? way that you do that is, you know, for me, when I was doing it, it's daily conversations, it's weekly conversations, it's monthly conversations, right. With my team.

those daily conversations are going to be a 10, 15 minute talk with the group, right? What's the, what kind of stuff do we have going on? Just some sort of visibility into what, go ahead. look like you were about to yeah, a standup. so yeah, it's, it's understanding where we are, what potential issues we have, what did we wake up to? What Amazon cloud nightmare is, is, you know, inevitably hitting our service desk, right?

Andrew Moore (25:20)
stand up. Stand up, right?

Mark Sowden (25:36)
And and you have those and you set the pace for the day, right and that your attitude kind of dictates the way that that goes right I always make sure that you know for me it was

calm but moving, you know, like you just want to make sure. But anyways, It's 15 minutes a day. Do it. You know, you really do need to get a beat on your people and look at their, look at their body language, you know, look at

Are they checked in or they dialed out, you know, as something going on, get in front of something, right? Look for that arsonist. Yep. Yeah.

Andrew Moore (26:11)
Right. Well, cameras on right. Like like so many people allow their service delivery

teams to join these meetings and they're not on a camera for whatever reason. you know like get like put up a fake background right. If you're uncomfortable about what's going on behind you in your house. But if you're if you're remote like be on camera like we need to see what's going on right. We want to make sure that you're engaged with the rest of the team.

Mark Sowden (26:19)
That's cool.

Yep. Yep. And then after that, you know, you've got your weeklies, but then you're talking to your people. ⁓ I would say, you know, depending on your size, but if we're sticking to you've got no more than eight people that you're overseeing in your pod, you know, whatever that looks like, then you are having a weekly conversation that is going to be, you know, I'd say spend about 30 minutes with them, you know, on the weekly basis, if you can, with each member of your team, talking about their metrics, talking about like,

What are you running into? What are your struggles? Like get an idea of their headspace. Get an idea of what problems they're having. Not only ⁓ from a professional perspective as far as what tickets are they having, like how are they doing with their growth? Are they taking, what's next for them? And that's something that it's a bittersweet part of being a service desk manager is every single tier one person I have, they looked at me as a stepping stone.

And I always, at first, you take it personal. like, nobody wants to work on the service desk. But here's the deal, Nobody wants to work on the service desk. They're coming in and they've got their sights on projects. They've got their sights on a network admin position. So you have to foster that or you will lose good people. So that's where you're doing that stuff. And then that monthly meeting, that's where...

you are putting all of that hard work, all of that time that you've put into your people, you're putting it into practice, right? This is what their accountability meeting, right? This is the number I need you to hit. This is either you're doing great, you are looking at 70 % utilization, you're adding documentation on the regular, your CSAT scores are excellent, et cetera, et cetera. Or those are, like I said again, look for the arsonist, like there's something going on here, what's the problem?

right and get in front of it. Yeah, it's hot garbage man. You gotta be careful with it.

Andrew Moore (28:24)
They're setting garbage on fire.

So glad I got that in. So glad I managed

to slip in some hot garbage.

Mark Sowden (28:34)
That was, look,

that was my cuss word for the end.

Andrew Moore (28:38)
I mean, among among others, but yeah, I mean, you're reformed. You're a reformed service desk manager now. So I expect a much. No, no, I don't know. Maybe you could tell somebody that something that was hot garbage and hot garbage. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. That's fair. So I love that you had discussed kind of what what it looks like from a stand up and from a one on one perspective. I think that's.

Mark Sowden (28:40)
Yeah.

Yeah, I can't say that stuff in a middle school class, man.

I can say high garbage, but the other words...

Andrew Moore (29:06)
something that we really stress to our clients, which is, listen, you absolutely have to make time to hold each one of these people accountable every single day. I love that you had said you have to be prepared that people want to move up in the service desk or away from the service desk.

And so there's something hidden in there that I'd like to kind of double click on. I remember, love doing that. ⁓ I, it's so bad. ⁓ so I remember that when there was a time where you were super frustrated cause you're like the service desk is where everybody just comes to snipe my talent, right? They just take all these people I've curated and then I'm left with noobs and I have to like retrain and, and I,

Mark Sowden (29:34)
Yeah.

you

Yeah.

Andrew Moore (29:52)
And I was just like, at some point I was like, I stopped feeling sorry for you. was like, yeah, dude, that's just how it is. Like, yeah, like, and so it was interesting, like when we had that tough, but fair conversation between each other where I was like, dude, I know where you're coming from, but I'm sorry, not sorry. Like you're doing a really good job of developing talent and these folks are ready to move on. So talk a little bit about how that, that lesson potentially changed your opinion of how

Mark Sowden (29:57)
That's my job. Yeah.

Andrew Moore (30:21)
next man up ready, you needed to make the processes on the service desk. Like, and the training for new service desk employees. I know that's not in something that we had talked about going over today, but man, I want to dig into that for just a second, because you brought it up and I think it's really important and I want people to understand it.

Mark Sowden (30:36)
Well, yeah, I mean, look, the service desk is a high turnover business anyways, right? It's hard work. Anybody that's worked in a managed services service desk will tell you it is hard work, right? So there does have to be a carrot. There really does. And some people love it, right? I spent years and years and years on the service desk because I loved it. I'm just glutton for punishment, you know? But you do have to understand as a service desk manager, like,

Don't be a salmon. If you keep trying to swim upstream and keep trying to get that guy that's going to be on your service desk for years and years and years, you just need to understand what your role is for the company in a broader sense. What you're doing is you're building a couple of things. You're building loyalty with the person that came to you knowing nothing. That to me is super important.

building that loyalty because you put the time in for that person. you, ⁓ then more over than that, you get to watch somebody fulfill their dream and in however small that is. Right. And, and I would tell if I was talking to young Mark, I would honestly tell them to quit being a selfish asshole. Right. That's the truth of it. Right. It's like, I want my people.

Andrew Moore (31:53)
Right.

Mark Sowden (31:54)
And really what I did was I spent a lot of time missing the fact that I did train a lot of these people up into positions where they can thrive elsewhere. And not even in the company, right? Like that, we loved it when that happened, but sometimes, you know, they got a job doing something, you know, they hit the mother load on some internal IT job or whatever. you know, it hurts and it's sad because you develop relationships with these people. But at the same time, man, you have a rolling.

I actually had a coworker or one of my employees a while back, we had a guy leave and it did hurt. But a year later, that guy came back and he was like, it's got to hurt your feelings to see somebody succeed after they worked here. And I said, why? Under what circumstance would I be upset that somebody was able to, like we were able to impart

in somebody, something of value, they go out and then they're able to, you know, start a family or, know, like so many other things. Like you just have to own it, right? It's a mindset. It's, it's super important that you get around that mindset. And then once you, know, once you start swimming downstream and you understand what your role is in the MSP, which is you are a talent generator, you are a living, breathing pipeline for talented individuals. And that is a

Andrew Moore (33:01)
Right.

Mark Sowden (33:18)
non-stop part of your job. When you're not hiring, you should be still looking at resumes, you know? And I mean, that's, I could go on and on about, you the importance of that.

Andrew Moore (33:26)
Right?

No, I, I love that because I think what I find oftentimes is that folks don't realize that as a service manager, your job is to create a process and a system that develops talent, maintains client satisfaction and expedites work through the service ticket boards. Right? That's it. Right? Like it's not, sometimes you have to get in the weeds, but if you're creating these processes that allow you to

plug people into this service team and remove them out as necessary. And you're watching what comes into that board and you're managing that department that way where you're really looking at it as input outputs for both work and personnel for the folks that are helping to do the work. And you're finding ways to make that more efficient, expedient, data driven, but not heartless. I think that that's the key to being an efficient service manager when you unlock that in your brain. Because otherwise,

Mark Sowden (34:22)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Moore (34:24)
you're going to get stuck in the weeds and you're going to be focused on, Oh, I lost this person or, know, I got tickets on my board and I don't know why. And, you know, I'm, I'm upset because these people that are on my team sometimes have to go do projects and like, it's your job to figure out how to create capacity and to plan for it and to do forecasting and to understand what's important based on the contracts. Like what work are we supposed to be doing on these boards? And then create a, an actual attack plan that you can present to your management team to say,

This is what I want to do in order to achieve these goals and not just passively wait to get the shit kicked out of you by your clients, you know, because there you've got too many tickets on your board and things are crazy because expectations haven't been managed properly. Like it's your job to take control of it, right?

Mark Sowden (35:06)
Yep.

Yep. And I'll say this too, like you kind of keyed in on like the reactivity of the service desk. The service desk is an inherently reactive place, right? So you, as the service manager, if you are just echoing that reactivity, you're...

You're shooting yourself in the foot and you're shooting your team in the foot. Like, and I'll tell you also, if you, as a service desk manager are going up to your direct report, right. Or you're your boss and you're, you're forecasting and you're saying, Hey, look, depending on what your sales team does, I know I'm going to need this, this, this, this, right. I have a project resource ready for you. Right. You'll be pleasantly surprised at the, at the feedback that you receive. Right. And then you can really start having.

then you can start working on the business, right? And you're not just mired in the day-to-day nuts.

Andrew Moore (36:00)
Right now I love that and something that we've been working on and you and I have talked about this a little bit post our 10 years together. But you and I are kindred spirits and that we spend a lot of time in our college days, early 20s and late teens working in restaurants. Right. And so what I tell a lot of people is if you can find a service industry and you can make an analog to that in your mind.

that's something you understand and apply it to your managed services company. I applaud that because a lot of times managed services teams figure like they've got to make this up on their own. Like, I don't know. No one's ever done this. Like, first of all, there's plenty of MSPs who have done this. So, you know, join a peer group, get an accountability group, take training, get a coach like you can find, you can find people who can help you. Second, though, if you don't want to do that, find an analogous business that

Mark Sowden (36:41)
Yes.

Andrew Moore (36:51)
you understand that is service delivery based. And so when you and I have talked about restaurants and bartending, one of the things that I like about that is that we would have these morning or early afternoon huddles when we would come into wait tables, you would get the entire wait staff together and a few of the folks from the kitchen. Yeah, here are the specials. Here's how many tables we're going to get. We got a big top like a big table coming in tonight at 10. Right? Like we're two waiters short.

Mark Sowden (37:09)
Get the specials. Yeah.

Andrew Moore (37:20)
Right. Because so and so called out six. So you're going to have to take an extra section. Right. Like here's here's what's not on the menu because we ran out of it. Right. And then if you upsell the vodka like you'll get a bonus like cool. And then when when we were done.

They would go right out on a big whiteboard in the kitchen so everybody could see it so that if somebody came in later during that shift, right, they could see what was going on and they could ask the manager, okay, am I misunderstanding anything here? And then before I actually got a chance to start waiting my tables, right, which I, my analogy to that is before I log into my computer, I would have to walk around and make sure that like my salt and pepper shakers were full and my silverware was ready to go and that my water station was completely set up and I did all these things. And then I would go to my

front of the house manager and I would say like, I'm ready to, I'm ready to clock in and they'd be like, okay, did you, did you do your checks? I was like, yeah. And I would, I would hit the ground running. And the same thing would happen at the end of the evening when they would be like, this is your last table. We're to pull you off. you need to run your end of the day routines. And I would go through and I would, same thing. I would sweep up, I would wipe down my tables. I would do all this stuff, getting ready for whoever was going to take that section the next day. Cause it may not be me. Right. And I don't see MSPs running.

front of the shift, like front of the day and end of the day routines where they're asking their service delivery teams do the following five things before you clock in and do the following five things before you clock out. So I want to find out from you is first of all, why do you think people aren't doing that? And secondly, like, what do you think the advantages of doing that are? break that down for me.

Mark Sowden (38:51)
So people don't do it because it's hard and foreign, right? unless, and look, this is the truth. And let me say it this way. It's only hard if you haven't done it. Like it sounds hard. It sounds like a thing that is super difficult to do. It's like, ⁓ I got to tell these people to do one more thing. Like they're talking to me every day that, you know, that they have so much to do and that they're so busy.

you all of this stuff. And now I got to have them, you know, before I can get them to log into the queue and the phones are blowing up. I need them to do this checklist and with that, that, that, um, just fucking do it. Like, I mean, that, that's really where it ends up. Okay. And yes, just like when you're working out, right? You, it's the new year, you know, it's January eight, you know, I'm going to work out and it sucks in the mornings for the first two weeks. Right. Then all of a sudden your back doesn't hurt as much.

Then all of a sudden, your pants are looking better. and as far as the service desk goes, if they're doing their pre-check, their pre-shift routines, a lot of the, a lot of the headaches that you'll see from disorganization are going to go away. Right. ⁓ I didn't see that ticket on my board. I didn't realize it was a P one and I'm sitting here working on, you know, some internal thing that somebody told me to do. Right.

Those organizational issues are going to lessen. Nothing's, you know, a guarantee. Nothing's a hundred percent, but you do have to give it an honest effort, right? You have to wait till your muscles stop hurting to really understand whether or not what you're doing is working. And then the shift in routine, it's the same deal, right? And it's, you know, to bring it full circle to what we were talking about. we don't know if this person's going to get hit by a bus, get COVID or, know, like whatever that's going to take them out of the queue or have them out. Like you do your closing shift routine.

Andrew Moore (40:17)
Right.

Mark Sowden (40:38)
And it's not just for you. mean, it is a little for you, but it's also for that person who's got to like pick up your mess on the next day. Right. It's for that escalation tech that is inevitably going to have to deal with this issue. Right. So it's, it's a team building exercise, honestly.

Andrew Moore (40:55)
and what would you recommend people are looking at at the beginning of the day and the end of the day to make sure that, you know, just the very basics that their, service desk is prepared and communicative, right. And in client facing, like, what, do you, what would you look at?

Mark Sowden (41:10)
For me, when I used to do it, I would look at trouble tickets for one, right? I would have my team, I would want them looking at their queues, right? What tickets do they have where they've got hours on, right? And that threshold is gonna change based on your client, based on the issue, based on a lot of different factors. But if I were to see a tier one person who had two hours on a ticket for a client, the red flag is going off, right? I'm looking at that and saying, what is that?

And I expect the same thing from that technician and all of these pre-shift routines should feed into your daily standups, right? So when you're looking at the ticket counts, how many tickets? Did somebody, did a service coordinator or a ticket router, did they commit an uh-oh and give somebody 30 tickets, you know, and without knowing it? So you want to know what's going on there.

You're looking for stuff like VIPs in your tickets, right? It's like, do you have a CEO's ticket buried in there that might be coming up on SLA? like these are all warning signs based on your clients that you're gonna have to understand. Outside of that, I'm also looking at, you know, we would have a big board of, you know, client issues. Are there any projects that are getting closed, right? Like, what do we need to be aware of from ⁓ a service desk perspective,

Are you a liaison? Are you a technician that's liaising with the project team for Monday after support? Stuff like that. So there's a lot of different things you can look at, and then it's scheduling your day. Scheduling your day where you can, getting yourself as organized as possible. End of the day, it's making sure your ticket wrap is clean. No blank time entries.

No tickets that don't have a subject. No tickets that don't have a type and a subtype, stuff like that. And making sure that your hours are good. All of these things help you. Oh dude, one of the worst things that it would frustrate me to know in is I'd get a time sheet that is exactly one hour blocks of time where it was so obvious that somebody went back in on Friday, did it's like, oh, I did this thing. I did this thing and...

Andrew Moore (42:54)
Right.

Mark Sowden (43:19)
I can't use that. That is worthless to me. So making sure on a daily basis that these people are cleaning up their stuff and that it's ready to go for the next day for escalations or whatever.

Andrew Moore (43:30)
Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's incredibly great because what I want to see with my clients is they often ask me like, well, how do I implement these things? Right? So there's a, in the way that I've done this before I've recommended, there's a couple of different ways that you can do it. You can literally just have a team's channel open like a this year service test channel. And it's like ready to work. And then at the end of the day, they're like signing out. Right? So everybody knows they're coming and going.

To me, that's like, listen, if you say you're ready to work and you say you're signing out, to me, that means that you've got this checklist that you've printed out or laminated or keep up somewhere and you're going through it every day and you're on top of it. And, and, and, you know, I've had clients that have gone as far as like, they're going to have a ticket and that ticket's got, you know, a standard note or something in it that's got this information in it. And they literally go in every morning and spend five minutes on the end of their time. And they say, I did this. Right. And at the end of the day, they put in their time and said, I did this. You can do it that way, but.

the mechanism that I like to use for accountability to that is not you keep them out of the queue, right? Or you don't let them log in or you don't let them leave for the day. that's just ridiculous. Like we're dealing with professionals here. Like we're not dealing with waitstaff, right? Like we're dealing, not that waitstaff can't be professional, but you know, in most cases they're there. mean, yeah. Have you seen the movie waiting? so,

Mark Sowden (44:44)
I'm waiting for a professional as a waiter. Yeah.

Andrew Moore (44:53)
But when you do this the right way, if you're having your weekly one-on-ones, you can go back and say, hey boss, your time looks like trash and you told me every day this week that you were on top of it and you obviously weren't. And so I need this to improve. And if that doesn't improve in the next couple of weeks at our one-on-ones, then I may keep you from logging in until I check your work, right? Like you have a mechanism by which you can check it, but it doesn't have to be.

onerous on you as the service manager to every day wait around and start approving people by tapping them on the head and say, you're ready to go. You're ready to go. Right? Like you just assume that they are and that you're setting the expectation, giving them a process to check in so that there's some affirmation that they're doing it. But if they're not like, then you, need to, you need to make sure that you address it.

Mark Sowden (45:38)
I also, I think, and this is important for me, is a lot of this stuff, a service desk manager's hearing us and it's like, okay, you live in La La Land, if I go tell somebody, if I go tell my desk to do this stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah. Again, I'm gonna go back to mindset, right? Like, here's the thing. Yes, you need to do this as a service desk manager, but you also need to work to help your desk understand why they need it, right?

That's for me. This is not a micromanagement thing and it shouldn't be it never should be What this is is a consistent. This is a standard operating procedure And it's a mechanism for organization, right? That's it, you know in the same way that I wouldn't want you fixing a certain issue in 10 different ways As a leader as somebody who's trying to manage a desk and make sure that clients and my team is happy

Like having 10 different organizational systems, one guy's using a notepad, another guy's just winging it, another, you know, is doing something else. Like this is a mechanism of organization that will help you as just as much as it'll help you. So sorry, that's, that's something for me that I, because those are, those are things that I dealt with, right? Those are, those are struggles that I had where it's like, ⁓ I don't want to ask these people to do anything else. They're working so hard. And then you start understanding it's like, I'm helping them. ⁓

Andrew Moore (47:03)
Right.

Well, it's creating, it's creating consistent professionalism within the group. And, know, for folks who watch sports, you can see lack of discipline in a team, regardless of how well they, they may perform on the court or on the field in certain areas. Like you can see athleticism can mask lack of professionalism in their craft. And you can have a very skilled technician.

Mark Sowden (47:03)
It needs to happen.

Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Moore (47:27)
who's not going to ever be a great engineer because they lack professionalism, right? Like they don't want to document it. Like if you want to be a novice and you want to do computers on your own or you want to have your own like thing where you go out and fix your uncle's computers and stuff at his shop, then by all means go do that. But if you're going to work within a structured service delivery team, this level of professionalism is the expectation and not the outlier. Right. So I agree with that. And, and I think one of the things that I found in coaching

Mark Sowden (47:48)
It's a business. Absolutely.

Andrew Moore (47:57)
some of my clients is I like to start with the teams, dynamics and goals first before I get into the individual. So people are like, well, where do I start? Where do I start? I said, okay, well, let's, let's just look at the service board. Let's remove all the filters, right? Let's remove all of the things that, that, that make it look pretty to you. And let's look at everything that's on that board filterless, right? No list views, no nothing, just completely filterless.

Mark Sowden (48:21)
That's how to make a service desk manager

feel real uncomfortable.

Andrew Moore (48:24)
Right. Because all of a sudden they're like,

well, I excluded this ticket and this ticket. I was like, well, now you have trash on your board. Right. That's that that shit shouldn't be there. So you start with that and then you start establishing your KPIs for your group, your department, like my ticket age, like where is my SLA baseline for working or or resolved, right. Responded, whichever ones you're going to be measuring. You start establishing those baselines and then you go to the group and you say these have to improve. Right.

Mark Sowden (48:27)
Yep. Yep.

Andrew Moore (48:51)
our kill rate has to improve, our number of tickets we close has to improve. And then they said, well, how do we do that? I was like, well, you know, I look at these numbers and Steve, looks like you've, you've only closed six tickets on average every day for the last like three weeks. That's why our backlog is getting older or bigger and that our ticket age is getting older. I need you to close 10. I don't know if I can close 10. Well, let's start with eight. Can we do eight? Let's do eight for the next like few weeks and I bet you can. And then let's move up to 10.

Right. And then you can start establishing it, but what they need to realize is how they're contributing to the team. And then every day on that standup, as improvement begins to happen on the team's statistics, you need to celebrate those wins so that you reinforce positive behavior. Because to your point, the stick is never going to work 100 % of the time, right? Never going to work.

Mark Sowden (49:25)
Yes.

Yep. No. And

I mean, there's a place for the stick, but yeah, no. And rewarding that because look, here's the other thing is we all, you know, we're all in the muck, you know, like we're all sitting there in the trench, getting yelled at. It's everybody, right? You have to celebrate the wins. Like even if it's the worst day, as a service desk manager, know,

Office 365 and Amazon have gone down and every client you have hates you, right? There are wins to be had. So you need to those out and you need to reward them and you need to make sure that those people who busted their ass in that day the same way you did, that they are getting recognized, right? Like those are easy. It's a real easy thing to spread a little bit of kindness on your desk and you need to do it.

Andrew Moore (50:17)
Dude, so I was listening to a podcast the other day and this gentleman had written about habits and the importance of, of how you create good habits. And he said, one of the most difficult things about habits, especially things that we want to do that aren't immediately rewarding, right? So there are good habits and there are bad habits. So eating a piece of chocolate is immediately rewarding and you can create a habit around it. You can eat a piece of chocolate all the time and it's not good for you.

Mark Sowden (50:41)
Yeah.

Andrew Moore (50:45)
managing your ticket queue is a good habit, but it's not immediately rewarding. It's not like you're to look at it be like, man, today was a thousand times better because I, you know, went in and updated my ticket queues and stuff. and so when he started to talk about like, he began to look at organizations that were really, really good at creating habits in chaos. And he started with the armed forces in the United States and he talked to the Marines.

And one of the folks that was a general in the Marines or Colonel, he's a kind of high up guy. he said, he's like, we are a habit building system. We take individuals that have zero habits when it comes to reacting in a firefight or doing things that are completely the antithesis to everything they've ever believed their whole life, such as like killing someone. Right. Like, like we have to create habits that make this, this like automatic for them. And so a lot of the ways that they do that,

especially in group dynamics is immediate recognition of accomplishment by not just the person in charge, but the group. Right. So if somebody does something good, it's encouraged for the rest of the group to say, hey, good job. Hey, good job. Right. And that is so much more effective than the drill sergeant getting up in your face, which is more of a one off, but it gets all the recognition. Like it's hard and they're going to push you and they're going to drive you with a bit of a stick.

but it's also about the dynamic of the team. And it's also about the dynamic of making sure that that team is giving affirmation. So I want to see my service delivery teams as I'm coaching them when they're doing these standups or when they're doing like a midday thing or whatever, if you're on a thread or if you're in the middle of a service bullpen, somebody

Right? Whether that's the service manager or somebody else say, Hey, great job, everybody. Like we're on top of this. Like, Hey, want to give a shout out to somebody over there? Cause they killed it. Right? Like they got that ticket for me. Thank you. Like we have to encourage that because if we don't, then I don't think that you'll have any resort, but to manage the stick. And I don't think that you're going to get the results you want.

Mark Sowden (52:47)
It's not a successful thing. look, and I'll say this, you have turnover issues regardless on a help desk. If you start treating your people like shit and you don't appreciate the wins. And here's the thing too is, it's funny you talk about they do that in the military. Absolutely they do. We do it in the education sector as well. You're not gonna get a middle schooler to learn if you're just beaten information into their head.

You know, it's not successful. It will not work. So like there's no reason like this is a, this is a life strategy, right? This isn't just a professional strategy, but understanding and giving those props, giving those kudos, when somebody, you know, raises the bar, when somebody goes the extra mile, when somebody just meets a challenge that may seem super easy to you, but they're proud of it. ⁓ like allow them that moment they've earned it, you know, like that's.

Andrew Moore (53:41)
Yeah.

Mark Sowden (53:42)
That's not on you. That's on, you know, like it's your job to, be that person.

Andrew Moore (53:48)
Yeah, I know. I agree. I don't know. I mean, I don't think it's a soapbox, man. I think it's a it's a we've we've gotten the crap kicked out of us quite a few times over, know, many, many years. And these are some of the lessons that we've learned. And I think it's important for other people to hopefully pick some of this stuff up so that they don't have some of the challenges that we

Mark Sowden (53:49)
Well, that's a lot.

Yeah.

yeah. Hey, look, I've

managed with the stick. and just as far as this podcast is concerned, if I'm saying something, just ask me how I know. Like it's not because somebody told me like, Andrew, you told me all the time not to do something, you know, and you're not going to learn that lesson unless you do it yourself. And yeah.

Andrew Moore (54:23)
There was that wonderful time where you were like, I'm gonna hire this person. And I was like, you sure about that? And you're like, absolutely. This is gonna be the best. I'm not gonna get into who or why, but you're like, this is gonna be the best hire ever. And then like four weeks later, I was like, how'd that work out for you? And you're like, man. was like, lesson learned.

Mark Sowden (54:32)
No.

Yep. Lesson learned. Hey, look,

this is, you know, and, and that is, you know, it's a, it's, that's the service desk, right? The service desk is adapting. The service desk is, it's constant adaptation. It's, there's a level of discomfort. You have to be comfortable with that. You know,

Andrew Moore (54:48)
Right.

Ahem.

Right. Well, and one of the things that that ties into this is we're kind of driving towards the end here is I do want to talk about, keeping the team on track and you know, we've talked about accountability and we've talked about check-ins and one-on-ones and KPIs. One of the things that I see happen a lot though, is this idea that our SOPs are in our knowledge base or they're in SharePoint.

Therefore, everyone knows them and everyone follows them. an example is I was working with a company and they were like, well, we updated this SOP and we sent out a message to the rest of the company that this change was going to happen within the ticketing system. And therefore, everyone should be notified and they're now aware. And I'm like.

However, have we trained everybody on what that actually means for their job? Have we looked at what process? And so it kind of went down this road was like, what training do we have? How often are we training? Another client that I've talked to, they have a service manager and this process has been in place for three or four years. They've never circled back to retrain the team and they've had people that have been on the desk for a couple of years. And I'm like, everybody needs to be retrained.

Right? Like consistent. So can you talk to me about your philosophy on service test training and back to basics and kind of how that worked for you and why you recommend what you do when it comes to training and keeping your team current on not just the certifications.

Mark Sowden (56:16)
For sure. ⁓

For me, training and education is a culture, right? It is a culture in your institution. And it does have to be the foundation of a lot of what you do. So for me, on the service desk, I think that, you you talked about back to basics, right? ⁓ And, you know, not to...

do another sports metaphor, but here we go. There's the, is a football, right? Like, I don't care how much time you have in the service desk. If you're a new hire, you are going to learn how to do things the way that we on the desk as a unit, as a team, the way we do that.

Right. that's, so that's your back to basics. That's your ticket hygiene. That's the understanding of why of what we're doing, right? Like why, why we're serving our clients, why we have these SLAs, why we are requiring that you enter, you know, three, two or three levels of ticket details to understand, you know, advanced metrics, like, so it's the why and the how. And, and look for me, that is happening at higher date.

And then you are doing that probably once or twice a year. You are revisiting that. There is no such thing as, you know, oh yeah, I trained that. I trained those guys on that, you know, a couple of years ago. Like that's not a thing. if your, your, your mechanisms, your team will put the same level of importance that you do on them. Right? Like your processes, your team will see how important you think they are.

And if you train somebody on something two years ago and you're like, and you come back to them and say, I expect you to do it this way. No, you didn't. You did nothing to make sure that that person's doing it. ⁓

Andrew Moore (57:53)
Right. So just to be clear,

your expectation is you have some sort of documentation on your service delivery standards, processes that you use, right? You keep this documentation, whether it's a PowerPoint, it's a video, it's both, it's whatever. And you you don't just say, hey, every year, go back and reread that. Like you go through an actual like

Hey, we're going to have a bunch of people on a video. Yeah, it's a video call or you have a learning management solution where that data lives and you expect them to go through and take a quiz. Like you expect everybody on your service delivery team to go through remedial training and or ⁓ extra advanced training every year on processes and solutions for the company, not just Microsoft Azure search, right?

Mark Sowden (58:21)
This is training.

Oh, no, I would say the company. Yeah. So the Microsoft Azure, how to, you know, like we can talk about de-skilling and all of that stuff and how to do, you know, like office 365 training and all that stuff. That's fine. But no, this is your internal processes on how to be a company XYZ employee, right? And how to uphold the standards that, that we expect, right? And that you should expect to yourself. If you're not, if you're not setting your pace,

Like if you're not setting a cultural pace right at the beginning, Then you're going to be swimming upstream again. You're right back where you started. it is a recurring education situation just because like what you were talking about earlier, good habits, you know, a good habit is only a good habit if it stays a habit, like you're just going to stop doing it. And it has to be as important to you, the service desk manager, as it is.

as you're expecting it to be on that tier one, tier two, tier three. And I do want to harp on that. I don't care if this is, you know, your local technical wizard, they're in the training too, and because this is a team environment and we all succeed or we all fail.

Andrew Moore (59:44)
Right.

No, I love that. And then kind of one of the last things we talked about was, you know, over the course of this last hour, we've had conversation involving how to build the team. What does that look like? One of the things I do want to reiterate is although it is the service desk's managers edict to manage and control all of the processes and systems that are going on within the service delivery team. I also want to reiterate that it's not their job.

to do it all by themselves or to or to not delegate responsibility and to hold people accountable. And then also like as you're structuring your team, not to constantly be thinking about who might be the person that can step in behind me to make sure that I can go on vacation or I can grow within the company, whether that's a director level position, a VP level position, a COO.

Mark Sowden (1:00:18)
No.

Andrew Moore (1:00:43)
whatever that looks like, because I feel like there are so many people who just get really mired in like they're the glue. And I think that that will one kill you like physically, emotionally, mentally, and two, it's actually detrimental to the department. Right. And it keeps people from seeing what real leadership looks like. Can you dive into like line of succession and delegation just a little bit before we wrap up?

Mark Sowden (1:00:53)
Yeah.

Sure,

We just spent an hour talking about how important it is and understanding that a service desk person is gonna come in and they've got their sights set on something else. Not every service desk manager is gonna be contented with, I'm gonna be a service desk manager for the next 30 years of my life. So you do owe it to yourself. And you've been in this business long enough and we've both experienced what that burnout looks like.

And it's hard and it hurts and, know, you give everything, you bleed, you sweat, you give it all. Right. And you're the one, but until you start appreciating yourself enough and your team enough to look at your replacement and say, you know, your future replacement, your, the, that, that assistant manager, that person that, that, that's hungry, you know, that allows you to go on vacation and turn your phone off.

for a few days, you know, like those people are invaluable. And you have people on your team that want to take that on, right? Same thing for training, right? Like when I say that you are responsible, you know, as far as like getting your people trained and stuff like that, you are responsible for that, but that can mean you're responsible for having your training coordinator that loves to teach. You're responsible for making sure that you've identified that person.

Right. Or you've identified, your service coordinator. So you're not in ticket queues, know, like there are ways to work smarter and harder and it all comes back to making sure you have that next man up mentality. Right. Your, your desk has to be scalable. need to make sure that you're not in a situation where you have like that one wizard that when they leave the company, you're dead in the water. Right. Like that just, it expands, you know, infinitely.

Andrew Moore (1:02:28)
Right.

Right.

No, and that's a wonderful place to wrap up the conversation around the service delivery team. So I think this was super, super valuable and I appreciate your insights. So thank you for sharing everything that you did with us today. Before we go though, I have some questions. have the five questions.

Mark Sowden (1:03:04)
Okay.

Row row.

Andrew Moore (1:03:08)
that I that I want to ask.

By now, it's don't worry about it, because everybody just turns the podcast off at this point, because they're like, I heard all I needed to hear. I don't care about this guy's personal life. Yeah. But this is what I think is the best stuff, because some of it cracks me up. It's actually fantastic. So I am I'm going to ask you five questions, same five questions I ask everybody. So let's start. What is the best book you ever read that helped you in business?

Mark Sowden (1:03:15)
This is where the good stuff is.

I would give the edge to the goal I just really love that book and then after that the Phoenix project I did like unicorn project not as much as a Phoenix project, but but I think the goal for me was just like that book turned me on to the

the business fable, if you want to call it that. You know what I'm saying? Like, I can read a book about business that doesn't make me want to kill myself. Awesome. So it was super good.

Andrew Moore (1:03:48)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

OK. ⁓ your favorite curse word?

Mark Sowden (1:04:00)
⁓ okay. I would say that my two favorite, my old employees used to call them mark up Mark isms, but I would say that things are dumpster fire and I would call things hot garbage. those are, those were my things. ⁓ now as far as a curse word, I have to go with fuck. Like it's everything it's, it's the word, you know, it's, it's, it's the word that can be all words. So, ⁓

Andrew Moore (1:04:21)
It is.

I, I, I'm there. I get it. I'm not in disagreement. It's, it's fine with me. You're the second person we had another guy on John Katz. And he, he likes to use it like, like seasoning. He's like, I'll throw it into anything. put it off. He'll like, I'll put it in between. Like, he'll take a word and split the word in two and put it right in the middle of the word. He's like, you like that? Made like a little Oreo, Oreo sandwich with it.

Mark Sowden (1:04:39)
You

Absolutely.

Andrew Moore (1:04:51)
All right. Who's your favorite band and why?

Mark Sowden (1:04:54)
so I struggled with this question because.

Andrew Moore (1:04:56)
Could be artist,

could be artist. It doesn't have to just be a band. It could be an individual musician.

Mark Sowden (1:04:59)
All right.

I actually thought about this question a lot I would end up telling you a tie between two bands. And the first band is the Toadies because I'm a 90s kid and I've seen them more than anyone else as far as like in concert. I love the Toadies.

Andrew Moore (1:05:10)
OK. And they're from Dallas, right?

Mark Sowden (1:05:18)
And then my second, but my second is Monster Magnet. And yeah, so I have a special place in my heart for that band. but it's like Dopes to Infinity, not like Space Lord and all of that nonsense. It's the earlier stuff. ⁓

Andrew Moore (1:05:21)
Really?

Okay.

Mark Sowden (1:05:35)
right now I'm listening to Noah Khan and Matt Mason a lot.

Andrew Moore (1:05:39)
No, no cons.

Great. Especially because you've seen that you're actually in a place where there's a season. So you're like, look, there's fall and maybe no con makes sense to me now. Yeah.

Mark Sowden (1:05:44)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. He's

like, I have a northern attitude.

Andrew Moore (1:05:52)
Please let me have a Northern attitude. I saw him at ACL

Fest a couple of years ago and it was magical, man. Like that dude's so good. ⁓ One of the, I mean, I'm looking forward to it. Like that dude's fantastic. I watched on HBO Max, the Counting Crows documentary and yeah, I really enjoyed it. Like, and I was unaware of the fact that there are a lot of people out there that were like,

Mark Sowden (1:06:00)
He's coming out with a second album.

I have that favorited, I need to check it out.

Andrew Moore (1:06:18)
haters on Counting Crows and I'm like how like every dude like okay first of all August and everything after is one of the best like front to back albums ever written and secondly like every album they ever came out with has got one like complete banger on it like every album like even they're one that they just came out with I listened to it I'm like there's a song on there that I've got on heavy repeat like

Mark Sowden (1:06:20)
That's a weird thing to eat, man.

Yeah!

Andrew Moore (1:06:39)
it's it has now managed to make it into my like favorite songs of all time playlist. Like I listened to it as part of that.

Mark Sowden (1:06:39)
Nice. Okay.

Does

your Spotify DJ keep playing it?

Andrew Moore (1:06:49)
No,

my Spotify DJ played some hot garbage for me a couple of days ago I put like the AI on because I was listening to some workout music and somehow Marky Mark wound up in. I was like, what is this good vibrations? Like, this is terrible. They're like, middle aged white guy. You probably need to figure out how to get get Marky Mark with it or whatever. I was like, this is terrible. So.

Mark Sowden (1:07:13)
That guy's

success killed me in 1992.

Andrew Moore (1:07:17)
⁓ Let's see. Worst sales call, client meeting, personal meeting that you ever had and why, and you can protect the names for the innocent.

When I say worst, mean like awkward, but weird and funny, like something that was terrible. And you were like, dude, like this jacked up thing totally happened. And I got to tell you about it.

Mark Sowden (1:07:27)
Okay.

When I first started I was given my first client, they were a they were an industrial company

This infrastructure was terrible. And I'm going to age myself and say that it was SBS 2003 and I knew how to support it. okay. To anybody listening to this, shut up. No. And so they kept having issues on the network. And finally one day their network cratered and we told them it was going to happen and we told them it was going to happen and then it happened. But the reason it happened was not the reason that I thought.

Andrew Moore (1:07:53)
Hell yeah, SBS, baby.

Mark Sowden (1:08:12)
So it turns out that we had a, we had a, we'll call them a technician there, not an IT technician, but a technician for the company, industrial technician that really, really, really liked just some salty, salty porn. Just some rough stuff, man.

So actually that was my first ever uncomfortable conversation with a client. And I had to...

Andrew Moore (1:08:34)
Why? Because he filled

up the like the he filled up the network drive with porn.

Mark Sowden (1:08:38)
No, no, it was a crypto. He cryptoed himself. Yeah, but ⁓ they paid the ransom and then, we got the files back and it was just some real rough stuff, man. Like real rough stuff. And ⁓ this guy, I don't know if he got fired or not. The client eventually, like...

They went their own way, but it wasn't anything we did. was a, you know, they were cost saving, you know, the typical stuff. But yeah, that was super uncomfortable for me because I had to take record. had to take screenshots. had to, you know, and I had to give this to the, our liaison. And that was just a, now the team at work ⁓ They thought it was hilarious. but yeah, that was, that was rough. I felt real awkward.

Andrew Moore (1:09:03)
Yeah.

Mark Sowden (1:09:20)
Nobody wanted to step in on that one. was like, you have to talk to that person.

Andrew Moore (1:09:23)
Yeah, that's what we talked

about line of succession. That was I was like, Hey, Mark, I need you to go have this meeting with client.

Mark Sowden (1:09:30)
Yeah, exactly.

Andrew Moore (1:09:32)
Why don't you go do

that? Go knock this out, Yeah.

Mark Sowden (1:09:35)
I

can't remember the lady's name that I had to talk to.

Andrew Moore (1:09:38)
We probably shouldn't bring it up.

All right, last question. Is there an MSP owner, operations person, sales person, just contributor, somebody bad-ass in the space specifically, right, by name, that you might recommend that we should talk to on this podcast to make everybody smarter for it?

Mark Sowden (1:09:57)
Yeah, this guy is incredible, straight up incredible. His name is Jack, Jacqueline Court.

From a process and procedure perspective, that guy is a wealth of knowledge. From a tryhard perspective, that guy is a wealth of knowledge. If you just want somebody, if you want to meet somebody and talk shop with, he's just good. That's really all I can say.

Andrew Moore (1:10:22)
He's also the lead singer and guitar player in a heavy metal band. ⁓

Mark Sowden (1:10:26)
Yeah, yeah.

I'm pretty sure he's Nosferatu.

Andrew Moore (1:10:31)
He doesn't. He sleeps like three or

four hours a night. It's freaky weird. I'm like, you're going to die, bro. And he's like, nah, I don't thrive on this shit. He loves it. He's got like that thick Boston accent, right? And he's like real low key. And I'm like, you're the best. He's a good guy. he texts me during the holidays. And I feel like such a heel because I always forget to text him because we don't talk more than a couple of times a year. But he'll go every holiday. He's like, hey, Merry Christmas.

Mark Sowden (1:10:42)
Yeah.

Yeah, just super

Andrew Moore (1:10:57)
Happy Thanksgiving or whatever. And I'm like, you're also a good human being. You're really good at your job, and you're also a good human being.

Mark Sowden (1:10:57)
You filthy animal.

And he's

a delight. And he's an actual delight. So yeah, like I said, I've actually had maybe two conversations. Now we've exchanged emails a lot, and I learned a lot from those. But two conversations, and the guy's a fucking delight. That's really all I can say.

Andrew Moore (1:11:07)
He is, he's a wonderful person.

I

can't deny that. Mark Sowden it's been fabulous having you here on this, we'll call it reunion episode of the How to MSP podcast. So thank you for your time and I'm sure everybody got a lot out of this. So thank you for being here.

Mark Sowden (1:11:32)
I hope so. Thanks for having me,