In this episode, Peter Bell discusses his journey in the Managed Service Provider (MSP) industry, highlighting his longstanding business in Melbourne and his 14-year experience with offshoring in the Philippines. The conversation covers various topics crucial for MSPs, such as the benefits and challenges of staff augmentation, the shift towards remote support, and the increasing acceptance of remote teams due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Peter also emphasises the importance of maintaining strong client relationships, the evolving role of MSPs within their clients’ businesses, and the opportunity and risk posed by globalisation. The episode wraps up with insights into making an MSP business profitable and the critical balance between local and international service delivery.
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
01:10 Peter’s Background and MSP Business
01:37 Offshoring Business in the Philippines
02:25 TechnoGlobal’s Staff Augmentation Model
05:44 Challenges and Benefits of Offshoring
07:29 Impact of COVID-19 on Business Growth
12:13 Globalisation of MSPs
16:38 Maintaining Client Relationships
20:10 Balancing Local and Offshore Teams
24:52 Training and Development
26:07 Evolving Role of MSPs
31:39 Conclusion and Shameless Plug
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Connect with Peter Bell on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/techno-pete/
Connect with Daniel Welling on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-welling-54659715/
Connect with Adam Morris on LinkedIn by clicking here – linkedin.com/in/adamcmorris
Visit The MSP Finance Team website, simply click here – https://www.mspfinanceteam.com/
We created It’s a Numbers Game Podcast to help MSP owners learn and understand how to build and maintain a financially healthy MSP business. In this podcast series, MSP business owners like you will learn the fundamental steps, the tips and tricks, the dos and don’ts to achieve MSP financial growth.
We look forward to catching up with you on the next one. Stay tuned!
Transcript:
Dan: So Peter, great to have you, have you with, I would say us, but today it’s just, just myself as Adam’s sunning himself somewhere, interesting. And, we, we of course, really only met in person a couple of months ago, dating the recording of this episode at the, the MSP show in London.
Dan: And, I think that’s one of your, rarest visits to the UK, is that right?
Peter: yeah, look, first, great to be on the podcast. Appreciate, appreciate the time. SITS was our first show. We, first show for the, for the EMA market. we’ve predominantly been looking after the North American market, and that’s where we bumped into you, literally. I think you were walking past, and we threw a soccer ball at you, or football, as you would say.
Dan: a ab. Absolutely. and I think there was a, there was an interest in, Australian, gesture for, for goodbye as well. But, we’ll,
Peter: that’s for another day.
Dan: we’ll save that.
Peter: this podcast.
Dan: exactly. and, yeah, really interested to hear, your story, your background. and I guess, first of all, just tell us, our listeners a little bit about, your, your MSP business in Melbourne. MSP
Peter: Yeah, well, I’ve had an MSP business with my brother since 1994. So we’re coming up to 31 years now. We’ve been running the business in Australia. traditional MSP, original break fix, same as most people, still have it today, still going strong. It’s about 40 staff. and it, keeps us rather busy.
Peter: That’s one of my two businesses. And the other business, the one that you saw me at for the SITS show,
Peter: Which is our, offshoring business that we run in the Philippines. And we’ve had that one for 14 years. So that’s what, that’s took us over to your part of the world.
Dan: Brilliant. And, I like the fact that you’re, you’re in two, two temperate climates. well, a little bit chilly in Melbourne at the moment, but, but most of the time a lot warmer.
Peter: Yeah, it is. It’s a bit chilly at the moment, in Melbourne. We have a cold snap coming through, but I’ve got two offices. So obviously my office here in Melbourne and my office in Manila. And so I go from one degrees to 30 degrees. Just have to hop on a plane for eight hours to get to my office.
Dan: what are commutes?
Peter: Just a little bit. So yeah, normally I’m in nice warm weather where like Adam is, but no, today I’m in the colder weather,
Peter: which is why I’m sitting here in
Peter: a jumper while I’m talking to you.
Dan: while I’m talking to you. Indeed. And, yeah, so we, we obviously we’re talking, with your, technoglobal hat on and, I guess, The, the, well, perhaps we could agree on what the actual term is for what TechnoGlobal does.
Dan: I like the phrase master MSP, but I think probably, tech, technical resource or a team member as a service, would
Peter: Yeah, I, look, the formal, I guess definition of it is staff augmentation. I don’t particularly like it. Basically we just help MSPs around the world fulfil positions inside their business, any positions, sales, QA, service delivery, and yes, of course, technical, by supplying staff members in the Philippines.
Peter: obviously there is a, greatly reduced rate, in cost to those employees, but it’s the sheer availability worldwide, no matter what you do. MSPs around the world are struggling to find staff and find qualified staff and good staff, hardworking, passionate staff. in our industry, it’s a shortage.
Peter: So we help fill that gap. We call it offshoring for a reason. It’s very different to the traditional outsourcing model.
Peter: We provide you with the staff members, but you train them to do it your way. You manage their day to day activity. And for all intents and purposes, you treat them as your employee as part of your organization.
Peter: It’s what bridges that gap, that has failed in the outsourcing model previously that your end customer notice or feels the difference. Under this model, because they’re trained by you, managed by you and run by you, your customer feels they’re part of your organization. And so that’s the, essentially the model that we go by.
Peter: Yeah,
Dan: and so very different to the, master MSP, the outsourcing model where you’re delegating a process, which includes people process and technology effect. Effectively, this is the people part of it. the process, the technology is what the MSP would be using with their own locally employed staff.
Peter: absolutely. And the thing there is that you, the staff member that you hire with us, we use your tool set. So it doesn’t matter what software vendor you use, what tools you use. The staff member uses your internal tool set, which gives you full control over the access, the way the job is done, the way it’s processed, and it just makes it more seamless.
Peter: What we tend to find is, and having the MSP for 31 years now, we did try outsourcing 15, 20 years ago. It didn’t work for us because our customers noticed the difference and we didn’t want other applications installed on our,
Peter: where this way we kept it all in house. It’s an accidental business, actually, Daniel.
Peter: It was never meant to be. this business, Techno Global Team, was just meant to be back of house for our MSP, like, I guess, a lot of the vendors in the market these days. when one of our opposition companies come to us and ask us to put some staff on for them, we originally said no, and then we thought, why not?
Peter: fast forward today, and those two people are now over a thousand people in the Philippines. So, there’s obviously an appetite for the model out there.
Dan: quite right. And, a couple of questions. I’ve got one of, one of, Adam’s, would normally, he’s got a reputation for asking a spicy question.
Dan:
Dan: so, so,
Peter: I’ll strap myself in and get ready.
Dan: we’ve talked about, the benefits of this, more available and lower cost. what are the downsides? what problems do people have or should they be aware of that, that need to be mitigated when they think about this, this type of approach?
Peter: Perfect question and it’s not a gotcha because it’s the one I get asked the most I reckon. the number one thing you need to be aware of is that you need to invest. time in the process and people find that answer surprising, but they think it’s a, you know, a silver bullet that you just go and hire somebody overseas or hire a staff member.
Peter: And the problem is solved. You need to invest your time and energy in it. And if you don’t do that, it’ll never work. and that’s probably the number one gotcha where people, are time poor. We had one situation early on where it didn’t work for a client. And then the client, the CEO rang me up and said, why is this not worked?
Peter: And I said, well, how often do you talk with the staff member? And he goes, oh, the day we hired them. I said, well, that was weeks ago. You haven’t spoken to him since. He goes, no, we sent job tickets over. And I said, would you do that to somebody who had an office next to you? And he goes, of course not. And I go, there’s your answer.
Peter: whether the people, whether your staff are located in your building, down the road from you, if they’re located in another suburb, another city in your country, or another country, you still need to treat them as people. as staff members. And those that get that, those that put some structure around that, understand that communication is key, it’ll succeed.
Peter: but if you go into it hoping that you can just get an easy win, it’s not going to work for you. So that would be the gotcha, I reckon.
Dan: And I don’t know how recent that example was, but over the past four years, I think we’ve got, we’ve had a lot more experience in managing remote teams, obviously pandemic resulting.
Dan: so, my, my second question was around, what your growth trajectory has been like, like since then has, Have you noticed a more, an increased openness to looking at this as a solution as not only the MSPs, but also their end clients are now more accepting of the fact that it’s more remotely delivered and, it doesn’t matter whether you’re sat in London or, Manila.
Peter: Yeah, look, without a doubt, we went into the start of COVID wondering whether we’d have a business when COVID hit, to be honest. and we come out three times the size.
Peter: So we went in with about 200 staff, come out with about 600 staff. and that’s simply because I think the light bulb moment for a lot of companies and a lot of people that you don’t have to have your staff clock in at 9am in the morning and clock out at 5.
Peter: 30. You don’t have to see them every day. You just need to know that the work product is being done and the customers are being looked after. And the one thing that I’ve found over the last few years is customers I’ll be careful how I phrase this, being politically correct. Customers are more time poor than they are racist. And I, I don’t mean that rudely. What I mean is there was a time where people wanted to be supported, by somebody In their own city, in their own, even, you know, even here in Melbourne, Australia, some people didn’t want to be supported by somebody that was down in the country. They wanted to know that they were from around where they were, their local area, their suburb.
Peter: and then to extend that somebody in another state. Or another country, but people are more time poor now than ever before. And so what I’m finding is that, and this is even in my own MSP, our customers are less worried about who supports them compared to when they get that support. And I think those two dramatic changes over the last four or five years has really changed the paradox for MSPs where they have to be more conscious of time than they do worrying about what accent the person may or may not have on the call.
Peter: so hopefully that is not too, out there an answer, but that’s what I think it is. I think just our customers, so the MSP’s customers, are more time poor or time sensitive than ever before.
Dan: No, great. A great point. And I guess, the third dimension here as well is over this same time period or arguably before, but, but accelerated as well, over the past four years is the adoption of cloud versus on prem technology.
Dan: So not only. the preference for on site is less, but the requirement for on site is less as well.
Peter: We did it to ourselves, didn’t we, as an industry. So, I, I remember when PC Anywhere first come out, PC Anywhere was that, you know, the dial up modem remote, and we thought it was amazing. Prior to that, you had to try and remember everything and do phone support, or most of the time you’re on site. we have a fleet of 10 cars here in Melbourne, 10 pull cars for our staff to take on site.
Peter: I would suggest that probably two thirds of those cars just sit there all day long. They don’t go anywhere. we, as an industry have trained our customers to allow us to help them remotely. and because of that, we don’t need to go on site because we don’t need to go on site. The labour no longer needs to reside in the local area that you operate.
Peter: The labour can now be wherever it needs to be to get the job done. And I think that’s the second part of it. that we as an industry do things remotely. we don’t have as many servers on site as we used to now. a lot of us, a lot of MSPs that I know no longer sell hardware. They just tell their client, go down to the local retail store and pick one up.
Peter: When you get it, turn it on and I’ll talk through the rest, or I’ll get you to put a remote tool on or my agent or whatever that be. and I’ll walk you through the rest of the process. So we don’t need to physically be on site anymore compared to what we used to. So I think that’s also another major shift in our industry.
Dan: Yeah, certainly, in my early days, we, we played a lot on the local, resource and actually we covered lots of regions. We covered the central London, the west of London.
Dan: And, well, it’s probably okay for me to say this now as a decade on, following my exit. But, if I was visiting a prospect in central London, I’d be like, yeah, 70 percent of our customers are in central London. And if I was visiting a prospect west of, to the west, I’d be like, oh yeah, 70 percent of our customers are outside of London.
Dan: you know, I was right.
Peter: the confidence that you’re from that area.
Dan: that you’re from that area? Absolutely. but it was a key, it was a key, buying decision and, yeah, I mean, different times, and as you say, different priorities. so, we’ve talked about how MSPs can now be more international in terms of their service delivery.
Dan: Our conversation though, most recently took a really interesting, direction and, And we were starting to talk about how MSPs are not only, sourcing, internationally, but actually selling internationally as well. And of course it makes perfect sense because MSPs don’t work in a bubble.
Dan: the environment in which we’re in, The MSPs end user customers, they are now trading internationally and have staff all over the world. much more than perhaps they, they used to. So, that, that was, I think, a really interesting thread that we started to pull out in our last conversation.
Peter: yeah, I think you keyed at the globalization of the MSP, I think is what we were talking about at the time. We’ll try to come up with a name for that conversation. It was a very strange tangent. I guess if you look at it this way, quite often MSPs will have a customer who has a staff member overseas somewhere.
Peter: That might be manufacturing, that might be skillset, that might be a remote office. And so MSPs have been used to supporting one user or two users overseas for an existing local customer. and that’s been pretty standard or you might do remote hands work. I think we started talking about how in Melbourne we do remote hands work for a number of international companies who have a small office or a satellite office or a number of staff members there.
Peter: But the evolution of that is. and what we’re starting to see your 365 Office 365 tenancy is just a tenancy in the cloud. It’s irrelevant geographically where those users are based and whether you are an MSP supporting a customer’s tenancy, you know, in Australia or in the UK or in America. It’s irrelevant, and going back to the point we made just prior, because we’re not going on site as much, there’s no servers, we tell our customers to buy the equipment from the local retailer, and you know, you and I could have a customer in America right now and say go to Best Buyers, pick up a laptop, and we can support them from here, we can set it up, we can install it.
Peter: And I think the conversation that we had led to imagine the risk to an MSP right now in your local environment, that you are taking staff with us overseas right now for that cheaper labour component or the availability to labour is the number one driver. What happens at some point in the future when the, an MSP in one of those developing countries around the world decides, I will now go and try and support customers.
Peter: They’ve already got that labour arbitrage. They’ve got that cheaper component to their business already. They’ve got the same skills. They’ve got the same knowledge. they could enter your market and offer a greatly reduced price to your client base. So I think that’s where we come up with, the globalization risk.
Peter: you know, can it replace onsite? in person meetings and that, no. but that’s where I think we’re starting to see as an industry, we keep going down this path of automated tool sets and AI and everything in the cloud, the physical requirement of human being in that area is diminishing and opens up the opportunity.
Peter: For MSPs to enter other markets around the world that they would have been prohibited or not be able to enter in the past. And I think that’s what we’re going to see over the next three to five years is more and more MSPs entering other countries but not establishing an office there. Now let’s not even get talking about the taxation component of that because that’s another one, but, it’d be interesting to see.
Dan: A, a absolutely and a great, a great financial topic for Adam and I to, grapple with, in the coming years. But, so if we think just a moment about, what the opportunity, and risk here is, as you say, you can be going after a new market, but equally you may have increased competition in your own market.
Dan: and. and so presumably then we’d fall back to our, our relationship led, new business and account management. strategy, we’d fall back to, niching, even if, on an international basis. So now I don’t just look after accountants or, solicitors. I look after legal people globally now.
Dan: and that, therefore that becomes my, you know, my, my, my edge and my defence.
Peter: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s take the defensive part first. I mean, at the end of the day, as a friend of both of ours, Mark Copeland says, business is done between people.
Dan: and that
Peter: And that will never change. I sometimes feel our industry, the MSP industry, and I think this is my opinion, only obviously 31 years I’ve been in it, sometimes it feels like we’re a race to the bottom, and automation has a massive,
Peter: And I going forward, but we have to remember also that the more we, automate things and the more we make it a, function of the business, the less personal we are with our clients.
Peter: And then. If we’re all using the same tool sets, if down the track you’ve only got four or five vendors and the landscape we’re in the MSP market is the vendors being swallowed up and consolidation and all of those things are happening, it becomes that we’re delivering the same thing, using the same tool sets.
Peter: So it can only be about money, it can only be about price. and you’re going to lose nine times out of ten if you’re in a developed country and your costs are much higher compared to an MSP that comes into your market from a developing country with lower costs. The way you protect against that is to get in front of your clients, spend your time talking to them.
Peter: I advise everybody when they come to us at TGT, keep your smart people.
Peter: Keep your level threes, your project guys, your customer service experience guys, and girls. Inside your business locally. There is, and I use this term all the time, so my staff will know it. I never go to a meeting in my MSP if I don’t take one of my nerds with me, I’ve got to take one of my senior people with me just to show and explain to the customer, Hey, have a look.
Peter: The really smart people are close by. If you need somebody, we can drive out to your office in no time. We’re here to help you. It’s almost like a safety net. for the client, where somebody from overseas is not going to do that. Now, your price conscious customer is not going to care about that. They’re going to care about the price.
Peter: So you’re not going to win those. But are they really the customers, if they’re so price sensitive, you really want to have in the first place? Are they more the run rate ones that you want the offshore company to have? The reverse to that, where’s the opportunity? Well, if you have a niche, if you know a specific piece of software, and I’ll just use freight forwarding or freight brokering as an example, it’s the same software packages that are used by every country around the world.
Peter: So if you are, in a country that has a lower labour rate, or if you have a really good high skill set, say in Australia, if we have a skill set on certain software package, we could enter the U. S. market. And because of the. between the Australian dollar and the US dollar, we can be very cheap in the US market. Yes, it’s daytime, night-time. So it’s a bit annoying. but I can enter the U S market and I could take a piece of the action in a specific industry that I know very well, and I could do it cheaper. Some people see the podcast with anger. Ah, yes. But what about GDPR, PCI, you know, HIPAA, all these other legal frameworks and requirements.
Peter: and most of the time there are ways, not ways around them. There are ways to accommodate them and ways to. stay fully compliant, and that might be delivered some of, not all of the solution. So I think that’s the advantage that you can have. I think the only way you can really enter another market, if you are not from a developing country with a lower labour rate would be to have that specialty that you talked about.
Peter: and really know something well.
Dan: Yeah, interesting, especially the, attack and the defence, postures and, Really, what we’re saying there is, you probably do need to, if you’re going to maintain a quality premium end of the value end of the market, you can’t be entirely remote.
Dan: You’ve got to have, some people local, but those are, more, more commercial and perhaps some project delivery. but, but certainly your, new business, your account management team, they should be there and local and, available to, meet the customers in person.
Peter: Absolutely. Look, I’ll give an example of the 17 people. So my MSP in Australia is made up of 17 people in Australia and 22 people in Manila. So I have more people working for me in Manila in the MSP than I do Australia. Of those 17 people in Australia, the average tenure is 16 years. So the staff in the MSP don’t leave.
Peter: And the reason for that is simply 14 years ago, I took a lot of the roles, a lot of the jobs, the tasks that have to be done that nobody wants to do. And it doesn’t add value to themselves or the company. And that’s the golden opportunity for an MSP. They are tasks that. Just have to be done, but we don’t want to do them.
Peter: and if we don’t address that, staff will feel that they’re doing things they don’t want to do, so you don’t value them. So your staff end up leaving. 14 years ago, I took that little pot of gold. I made every staff member in Australia write down on a piece of paper tasks they did that met those three criteria.
Peter: That was my opportunity as an owner to realize that if I didn’t change things, I wasn’t going to keep my staff. So I took those roles and I took those roles offshore because I got them done. I got them done a lot cheaper than getting them done locally. And I made my local staff a lot happier by having staff that are around for a long time.
Peter: Customers get to know them. customers leave.
Peter: People inside the customers leave and go other places and they ring you up three years later and go is such and such still there? Of course they are. It gives them that again that warmth, that connection
Peter: And it’s why I guess, you know, we’ve been in business 31 years now That we have a lot of very strong relationships with our clients.
Peter: Average client would be with us for Anywhere from 15 to 20 years. So again clients don’t tend to leave because our staff don’t leave that’s the opportunity. That’s why you keep your smart people close to you.
Dan: Absolutely. And, what was we were, talking about commercial then, I think you mentioned earlier that, your, the people available, in, in the Philippines, business, can cover a variety of roles, not just technical.
Dan: so you have commercial roles, accounting.
Peter: Yeah, absolutely. It’s the biggest misnomer when you see a lot of the vendors out there. Everyone asks me, what’s the difference between TGT and the competitors in the market? And the answer is simple, that we are born out of the last 30 years, MSP DNA. We understand that an MSP has, A lot of moving parts and a lot of different positions.
Peter: You need help in every one of those, whether that’s an inside sales person, somebody that can provide the quotes and purchasing for you, whether that’s Q and A, someone that checks your job tickets and your staff and helps train them. service delivery. you asked before about how to keep that relationship going.
Peter: Well, we changed our service delivery manager onshore to a customer experience manager. Their sole job is just to make sure that the experience that our customer has with our MSP, whether that’s the sales department, the service delivery department, or the technicians, the actual, we’re delivering on what we promised in the first place.
Peter: So, any position, we normally stay away from bookkeeping. the reason for that is normally the response is my wife does that. And if I outsource her, I’d be in a lot of trouble. So we tend to stay away. We do bookkeeping and accounting. Darren, my. My brother and business partner is a CPA account.
Peter: So we do that, but yes, you need to relieve the pain points where they exist inside your business, to free up. And I call it the ladder approach. you’ve got to take your foot off the bottom rung to be able to put your foot on the next rung and actually move up the ladder. And, if you free up your staff from those menial tasks, you give them, if you can free them up 20 percent of the time.
Peter: You’ve just given them one day a week, whether that is to go and do training. And let’s face it in the MSP industry, you always need to do more training. There’s always new software, there’s new techniques, there’s new attack vectors or whatever you want to talk about out there. so you’ve got to find a way to free your people up to re-educate and retool.
Peter: Otherwise you’re not going to be an MSP in the next three or five years, you just won’t exist.
Dan: And, and of course, the training development topic applies to, your people in, the Philippines as well.
Dan: So, is that something you encourage or is there a solution around that you offer?
Peter: So four years ago, just coming, out of just before COVID ended, the universities in the Philippines were shut. So we decided that we weren’t going to find enough educated and trained people in the world. Let’s go and make them. We went to the universities, we hired some university lecturers, and we now have the Techno Academy.
Peter: And we produce, we just had our 18th group come through yesterday and we train them up and provide training to them, relevant industry training, to make sure that they are ready to go when they arrive with you and hit the ground running and the training is there to keep them up to date, I personally, you know, having done this now for 30 years, I hate training and going to school and exams and all those things.
Peter: So, it’s great to have people around you who like to study and like to learn new things. I think maybe I’m just getting a bit too old and set in my ways. but you’re right. Training is key because our industry evolves every three months, let alone every 12 months.
Dan: although maybe, maybe just as, something to wrap up in terms of like what, what has, what has actually changed in our marketplace. I, I’m, just a few years behind, behind you in terms of long longevity in the market.
Dan: but, you know, I think back to, my, my early days working for at the time it would be. and we would have done, servers and networking and, connectivity and, an email and, really our role was to guide our customer in terms of what, what was available and then ultimately deliver, maintain and, then upgrade, in due course.
Dan: And, and actually that’s kind of. What we do now, although the technology is very different, we still, you know, the technology has changed, but the actual, that the role of the MSP has remained pretty, pretty constant, I think.
Peter: Yeah, the only thing I’d say that’s changed a little bit, and I love the old days, I often wish I could go back to the 90s where we would buy components, build a computer, sell it, make good margin and be happy with that. I think in the early days of MSP, we delivered the equipment and solution to the customer and that was it.
Peter: Now, I think the MSP is tasked a lot more with the customer. Helping the client understand how to integrate and how to get the most out of that inside their organization. I think we are more penetrated inside the business now than we were previously, where previously IT was, you know, and this is where, how I know if a customer gets it, if a customer says, IT is an expense versus an investment, they start to understand how it can help them.
Peter: Run their organization. and a very quick example of that from a long time ago is we looked after a milk company. They used to deliver milk to, to, to small shops and they would spend. Millions of dollars on milk trucks, millions of dollars on trucks. Never a problem. Brand new trucks all the time. Never wanted to spend on IT until the one day the server did break.
Peter: And then all of a sudden they realized all the milk sat there. Milk’s got a shelf life. So if you can’t get the milk out and they can’t deliver the milk cause they can’t do the invoices, and it was a light bulb moment. Then they decided that they need to bring us in to look at all the parts of their business to see how we can help ensure that the milk was always delivered every day.
Peter: And that’s the difference. IT was on the outside and once they understand the value IT is on the inside. And I think that’s more and more relevant today than ever before with AI, with automation, with the tool sets that we have with tools like, Right now that we’re on this little podcast right now recording it.
Peter: How do you do that? How’s that relevant to their industry? So I think, MSPs need to be more. inside their customers businesses. and to borrow from, I guess, the Jerry Maguire movie, our philosophy at our MSP is less customers, but be more involved with the customers that you do have so that you can show them the power and the advantage of the solutions you’re putting in, not just drop it.
Peter: Sell it, move on. I think that’s the, what MSPs have to be and reinvent. If they don’t do that, then they become superfluous. The customer is going to go to the local retailer and buy the hardware. Now, does the customer really need your help just to install office 365? have to do is put in their email address and password once it’s up and running.
Peter: So you’ve got to think about how do you add value inside your client’s business, that’s what I’d say is the difference today compared to, All the many years ago.
Dan: ago.
Dan: Absolutely. And I think, I think it’s some great, great, insight there in terms of, you know, if you are not doing that, if you are not, if you are not that embedded in the, in your end customer, then you are probably missing an opportunity to, well not only add more value, but ultimately sell more.
Dan: and improve the longevity of that relationship. The more you can do for them, the more they get benefit. And, and the more they like you and the more they spend. And, and so, yeah, it’s a self perpetuating circle, isn’t it?
Peter: Oh, absolutely. You’ve raised on there. The more they spend the, my biggest gripe in our industry is everybody. And a lot of business coaches talk about increasing your MRR, your monthly or ARR monthly or annual recurring revenue, they just don’t talk about increasing your profit. Profits not a dirty word.
Peter: Profit is something that every business needs to have. You need to have it so that you can pay your staff more down the track and you don’t lose them. You need to have it so you can upgrade your own infrastructure, your own training. And I get really annoyed when I hear all these. Guru’s talking just about increasing your MRR.
Peter: You can have the best MRR in the world, but if you’re not making any money on it, what’s the point? And I think that’s where, when you’re ingrained inside an organization and you’re working with them, you can have a higher margin than just a box drop. And you can show your value and your worth to the organization.
Peter: And then your customer sees you as an investment, sees you as part of the board. I think it was phrased, at, DattoCon Ireland recently. I was over there and the line I think was used by Fred Voccola where he said the, Chief Information Officer is now almost, if not as important as the CFO.
Peter: So at a board level, having your IT people there, and we were always the leftover cousin who came to the board asking for more, you know, the Oliver Twist. it’s now people realize that you need to have a technology first approach to survive in this time poor world.
Dan: And on that bombshell, that’s probably a great place to, to end some, certainly some great insight there.
Dan: it’s around this time that we offer a sort of shameless plug. I guess we’ve talked a little bit about what you do anyway. but, if, if people want to carry on the conversation, how do they get hold of you?
Peter: Yeah, absolutely. I love a shameless plug. There’s nothing wrong with that. just, you can jump onto our website TechnoGlobalTeam.com. all of our details are on there. for those, that are listening that are going to be in, in Miami for DattoCon or in Orlando for the IT Nation, we’ll be there.
Peter: We’ll also have a couple of events. In, Sydney coming up as well. If you’re there, check us out, for the UK and Europe. We’re not heading back over again this year. Two trips in four weeks was enough for me. The time zone change has got me, but we will be back at SITS. So ironically, we end the conversation where we started it.
Peter: We’ll be back at SITS next year. I think it was a great event. I think everyone should get along. There’s a lot of great information there.
Dan: Absolutely, great event and, and very well crafted. And I think there’s going to, there’s going to be a lot more for that next year as well. So looking forward and definitely got that one in the, in the diary for 2020, 2025. So,
Dan: uh,
Peter: already, we’re talking about next year and we’re not even at the end of July,
Dan: No, exactly. Well, just being in July is scary. I’m not quite sure where the first half of the year went. So, Peter, it’s been a pleasure talking to you and, look forward to seeing you next year. And maybe before if, if I fly somewhere warm and appealing in the meantime.
Peter: Well Daniel, great chatting, and by all means, it’s only an eight hour hop across the pond for you, so I’d love to see you over in, in Florida in October, November.
Dan: Indeed. Very good.
Peter: Cheers.
Peter: Thanks
Peter: Daniel.