In this podcast episode, Simon discusses his journey and current endeavours in the Managed Service Provider (MSP) world, including his background in IT and the establishment of his MSP business, Host My Office, 12 years ago. Simon delves into the benefits and challenges of hosted desktop solutions, particularly for professional services like accountants and legal firms, and predicts its relevance for about another decade. The conversation then shifts to cyber security, with Simon explaining the genesis and operations of his new business, Cyber Guards, which provides a comprehensive security platform to other MSPs. Key points include the integration of security products, the importance of simplifying tech for easier client understanding, and the value of continuous evaluation and collaboration within MSP businesses.
00:00 Welcome and Introduction
00:05 Simon’s Journey into the MSP World
02:07 Hosted Desktop: Evolution and Relevance
08:06 Cyber Security: The New Frontier
11:10 Navigating MSP and Cyber Security Solutions
16:08 Simplifying Security for MSPs
28:13 Final Thoughts and Contact Information
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Connect with Simon Luck on LinkedIn by clicking here –https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsupportsoutheast/?originalSubdomain=uk
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 look forward to catching up with you on the next one. Stay tuned!
Transcript:
Daniel: Simon, welcome to the podcast.
Simon: Thank you very much.
Daniel: So Simon, you and I, we’ve never met in person, but, had a really interesting conversation, recently, understanding your. Your, current, current endeavours in the MSP, world, and, and also really interesting journey. So perhaps you could just give us a, a potted history of, of how, how you came to be involved in the MSP world.
Simon: Yes, sir. I guess. I mean, I’ve always been, breaking and fixing computers in school. it was never supposed to be my career, but it was a hobby. And then after the first couple of jobs ended up looking at it going, actually, I’m supposed to be working in I. T. That evolved from being sort of pre sales tech or technical pre sales tech that moved into account management, business development and so on from there.
Simon: set up the M. S. P. Business host my office about 12 years ago. and we look after cut clients, across majority across the southeast. but that does stretch national. and our niche has always been around hosted desktop. The basis for that is it’s one platform. So rather than having, say, 300 clients with 300 different platforms with then different, you know, different end devices running, you know, 10 or 11 or whatever the versions might be, different service packs.
Simon: It’s one common platform for our engineers to support. so that benefits our clients. It benefits our retention for staff. we make the investment in all the backups and You know, to provide the business continuity, disaster recovery, all that kind of stuff. so that’s been the focus over the last 12 years.
Simon: And then about two years ago, we started into, another business, Cyber Guards, which provides cyber security platform to other I. T. Providers to other MSPs, which is using a product called Guards.
Daniel: and I think one of the, one of the sparks for our conversation was actually that we’d, we’d had, Dor from Guards on the podcast, maybe last year, the year before. And so, so there was a point of interest there, which I’d like to get onto. in a moment, you, you mentioned hosted desktop and, and looking back over, over my experience, that, that was going to be one of those next big things, in it, and, and I seem to recall, and, you know, we, we had across our, a state of clients in my original MSP business.
Daniel: We had a number of clients where hosted desktop was absolutely the right thing to do. it did come under the at a premium though, and there was a different risk profile, around it. How have you, navigated that? Or have you seen the same thing or have you found like there’s a real definite niche where hosted desktop, did and still does persist as a solution?
Simon: Yeah, so I would say that hosted desktop isn’t gonna be around forever. I think it’s probably got another 10 years for it. and, It still has its niche for certain industries. So if we take our professional services, accountants, legal, insurance, those guys, they still have a lot of on prem solutions or clients that use the on prem solutions.
Simon: So be it, if you’ve got an accountant, they still might have clients which are using previous versions of Sage, for instance. And so they can load multiple versions of Sage onto the hosted desktop, just fire it up, especially this time of year with self assessment. and they, their year ends, plug in the data, And then run that for that particular client, rather than having Sage installed on many devices.
Simon: there is still the need for, or the want and appetite for having the data in one point, it not being reliant on, another, public client. Sort of space like SharePoint or AWS or whatever they might be using. but equally we have seen that for the smaller businesses, things like SharePoint, which 12 years ago probably wasn’t as resilient as it is, but definitely wasn’t as resilient as it is now, and was in its infancy, is now probably more suited for those businesses.
Simon: but there, there are certainly lots of, on prem solutions still out there and clients wanting to use it for, you know, accessing the same pot of information in the same way for their team to see, not wanting to move across to SharePoint, and happy with how it plays out.
Adam: So it’s interesting, isn’t it? Cause certainly it’s something we, we played with 10, 15 years ago, I suppose. working out who do we partner with and trying to get ahead around it. And how did it, was it cloud? Is this what cloud was or was cloud something else and trying to sort of understand it, and it looked looking back on it now and in terms of where it is, I suppose it looks like it’s, a 20 year, maybe 25 year segue into what cloud is perhaps, or fully software as a service, shall we say?
Adam: and we weren’t quite sure what things were at the time. but it kind of looks clearer now. It’s interesting. Is this, it is interesting how the professional services accountants, lawyers, are still focused on it. and how some of those larger line of business applications. Certainly used to be slow in moving across.
Adam: I mean, is that still the case then Simon, that there’s, I mean, you said there’s maybe a decade sort of left in this industry. you know, what is the situation with those big, bigger sort of line of business players? you know, the sages, the others that are out there in terms of their strategies.
Simon: I mean, they’re obviously definitely moving across, you know, the Sage, the Iris, they’ve got their own cloud software as a service platforms but whether the appetite from the client. The end user is to move over into them, whether they’re looking at other solutions. So, whether they’re evaluating costs from an iris or a sage or whatever that vendor might be.
Simon: there’s equally businesses that the smaller more niche. applications that are out there where if you need to actually migrate it from one platform to another or to update it from one platform to another comes to the end user a high cost. I know, for instance, we have a client where to actually upgrade them from the on prem solution to their cloud solution is about 100, 000 or more and for them.
Simon: It’s not broken. So so why do they need to make that investment on? We’ve virtualized the application, put it into the hosted environment, and it’s working well on DSO. They can keep that money. Back or invest it in other tech. so that’s where I think it’s still going to be around for a while. and equally, you know, we publishing apps through Citrix again gives that feel of actually using the cloud base.
Simon: So we’re working with partners where, they may have an application which still is on prem, but to deliver it to their clients, they’ll actually publish it through Citrix, so they get the same sort of app feel, web feel, but actually still running back in the, in, on a hosted environment,
Adam: Yeah, and like all aspects of businesses, you know, there’s always so many niches and so many specialisms, aren’t there? So it could be, this is around for decades because there’s always someone that still needs it for whatever business case, and actually there’s fewer and fewer people out there that have the skills for it.
Adam: So who knows? It could be a longer term
Simon: maybe. yeah, could be.
Adam: Yeah. Last, last business standing soaks up all of the, all of the continued, I bet there’s, I bet there’s money in, third party hardware maintenance still as well if you if you if you dig into again that was 20 years ago now that’ll never continue and just goes on and on because Yeah. There’s still a market for five and a quarter inch floppy disks. That’s a small market, but there is still a market for it. In particular, the, the, the nuclear, facilities in the U S which are completely off grid and built from the eighties. So they still have a need for eighties technology.
Daniel: Interesting. so I took us on a bit of a diversion there, but an interesting one none the nonetheless perhaps the segue here is into And the next big thing is always, is always a continuous theme within our, our marketplace. and I guess the latest next big thing, if we discount AI for a moment, is of course, cyber security.
Daniel: And, and interesting that you’ve, you sort of found, found an angle on that with your new business, perhaps talk us through a little bit about how that came about.
Simon: Yeah. So again, like cyber security, I think it’s been around for a long time, whatever shape. I know that my, you know, one of my first roles was actually working on a security card, which was a modem, which encrypted data. 20 something years ago. And I think, you know, We’ve looked at cyber security and wrapped it up into different things like business continuity, disaster recovery, what happens if, and what that threat might be.
Simon: Now that could have been that a server’s gone pop, or it could have been that they were attacked. or internally, you know, somebody might have deleted a lot of data or whatever that might have been. so, so My passion has always been around that, you know, the business continuity, the disaster recovery, how can we make your systems more efficient and how, if something happens, how quickly can we get you back from that point?
Simon: More and more clients were coming to us and say with cyber, insurance, asking us to complete forms for the insurance, which we could easily tick off all the boxes because of the hosted platform. but what we were looking for is, delivering more products out through the MSP, be it email security or, secure browsing, phishing simulations, whatever.
Simon: so we, we were. looking over the years, and whether it was just an amount of time or when it was going to happen or just a chance coincidence that we tripped across guards. and that would probably have been in the end part of 23 that we started talking to them. and then in early 24, We were having lots of conversations, probably daily conversations, really liked the product for various reasons.
Simon: they were looking for distributors and it was like, absolutely, let’s talk to that. We’ve already got a relationship with other MSPs where they’ve been buying hosted products. Solutions from us. So there’s that we’ve already got good relationships with that. with our sort of gulf networking, we talked to lots of I.
Simon: T. Companies through that. and so it seemed a bit of a no brainer to open up another business separate to the M. S. P. Which we just be talking to M. S. P. S. So the, you know, our program is to. We were not delivering this solution to the end users. We’re delivering this to the I. T. Companies and we’ve already had companies approach us saying, can we do this?
Simon: Can we, you know, look at guards and go, yes, great. Have you got an IT company? Yes, we have. Great. Are they happy? Are you happy with them? Yes. Fantastic. Can we talk with them about this, and deliver this product to you through them? If not, if you’re not happy with them, then we’ve got some partners that we can put you in touch with.
Simon: So we’re putting back in, into the channel. and that’s great. We really like that relationship. so, so we’ve been doing that now probably since, well yeah, the business launched probably February 24. So, just coming up to our first year anniversary on that.
Daniel: And perhaps I can take us straight off into a cul de sac then, around,I guess some of my own experiences of, of having well, in fact, I’ll use a, I’ll use a phrase, the son of two fathers, where you have both end users and and channel partners and how, how you, again, na, navigate that challenge where you support your partner and the end user at the same time and having, I guess.
Daniel: Um, constructive and positive rules of engagement and set sounds like you’ve, you’ve got a, you’ve got a well rehearsed model there in terms of if you detect there’s a partner there, then you’ll promote and help them, I guess the question would be if the end user is contacting you, why are they not talking to their MSP?
Daniel: maybe.
Simon: there is that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it might be that they just sort of tripped over it. And because we provide, a risk prospecting report, at the outset, these are non intrusive. Look at their, their domains, DNS and all that sort of stuff. And it report back to them. giving them a bench or giving them a score against their industry standard benchmark.
Simon: so it could be that they’ve scored 50 out of 100, but the industry standard is around 75. What do they need to move that up to 80 and then essentially lower their risk, and potentially lower their insurance. So we’ve had people approach us through that, but I appreciate what you’re saying.
Simon: If they’re contacting us, why are they not asking their IT company? we’ve had a couple of those as well. but we’re very clear on, you know, we’re not looking to steal anybody else’s food. We want to help promote, you know, the MSPs. Promote, build their business and their revenues, and with guards, there’s two sides to it.
Simon: There’s one from the techie side of things where it’s the nine attack vectors in one place. So there’s not lots of different, portals that they need to sign into to understand if there’s a problem, it’s all in one space, but equally with, guards, there’s a sale side of things, which has again, the prospect to report If you’ve got a new prospect that’s coming along, you can go out armed with a report to say, this is what we’ve done some homework for you.
Simon: this is what we found. they can equally use that with their existing client base to say, look, you know, rather than us being techie with you. This is, you know, we’re doing all of this great stuff with our managed stack as it is, but we could be doing so much more for you. and, you know, helping your team with, awareness training, doing some phishing simulations to see where those points might be.
Simon: and then just building that love between the client and the MSP.
Adam: So Simon. if I’ve understood that correctly, is that going some way towards what other VCIO and road mapping tools are doing that you can buy commercially? is it like a light version of that in sort of tracking and helping account management? and sales teams, to help upsell and cross sell into additional services.
Simon: Yeah, it is. So, so the, there’s the initial report will look at everything externally. Once you then plug it in, you can integrate it with Google 365, Slack, Monday, et cetera, Dropbox, and it will interrogate those and create an ongoing report. So, there’s a return on investment report, which you can run ad hoc or set it to run a period.
Simon: So monthly, quarterly, however you want to do. And then that easily. Or provides, a digestible version for the client is, you know, using graphics where if we look at things like, the auto tasks that connect wise when we’re trying to, you know, in Extract information from that to deliver back to a client.
Simon: It will give us all of the cases that we’ve worked on the times. But actually, how does that look for the client? Whereas this is actually right. You were here at this point. We’ve got you to hear. This is what we’ve done. And actually, this is gives a value on what you could have saved. You know, if you’re.
Simon: At this point, you’ve got a risk of, say, 20, 000 or 100, 000 or whatever it might be. Now you’re here, that risk is much down, but much lower. your cyber insurance premium is going to be lower because you’re doing all of this. your team are much more aware. And so, so it, it includes that.
Simon: Retirement investment. There’s lots of bits and pieces within it from a growth hub. So there’s case studies. There’s, information that they can, send out. it’s, white labelled. So it comes from them rather than from guards or cyber guards. So again, all of the reports are generated. So it looks like MSP as well.
Simon: there’s some great sales tools for it.
Adam: Yeah, that, that sounds really good. Actually. I’m a big fan of, I can’t remember the word you use digestible report was it, I think you said. I, you know, I’m a big fan of helping MSPs. With that translation piece from a technical product into business value because, you know, quite frankly, our clients aren’t interested in the technology.
Adam: They’re just interested in the ROI or the outcome, aren’t they? So, I’m a big fan of that. What, so just taking a step back then overall, if you’re in a, in the shoes of an MSP owner out there. Potentially listening to this podcast and you’re thinking about, the complexity of the security space, and you’re not sure if the tool sets you have today are the right ones.
Adam: and you want to, you know, do a bit of a review. what might you say to them, to help guide them around what’s important, what to focus on and how to go about working out what a fit might be potentially.
Simon: I think it depends where we are. On the M. S. P. Journey on what products you might actually have in the stack already. so you could be a beginner status if you will, setting up an M. S. P. starting to look at security products. Maybe they’re looking at email security. Maybe they’re looking at secure browsing or endpoint security.
Simon: what are the products that they’re looking at for that? are they individual? Are they coming from one space? What’s the cost of actually onboarding? What’s the cost of actually supporting? How much training is required? Where do they want to then go? then you’ve probably got your intermediate where they’ve probably got more of the security stack.
Simon: But again, where’s that stack coming from? Are they using best of breed products? Are they again, what’s the cost of actually onboarding the client? How quickly can you see where your most at risk client is? what, and indeed, what’s their, most at risk, team member within that client? you know, are they, Getting reports back from Microsoft from things like suspicious rules or logins or whatever, how they look, what’s their processes and procedures around that?
Simon: And what cost is that to them as in time cost? How are they managing it? Is somebody managing it? You know, there might be that sort of rush of like, yep, got this. I’m going to do this. Who’s actually who’s appointed to look after that on a technical basis? Who’s then, reviewing that, and managing that and what cost is that to the business because that can be quite an overhead just looking at those on a daily basis, you know, tickets coming in, which might have been alerts for, say, a hard drive that’s running low on space or CPU usage or whatever, you’re going to get similar alerts from your products, and it could be actually, I’ve got this doing, I’ve got, an email Suspicious log in here, but actually I’ve been I have I clicked on something there from an email point of view on and how the two talking to each other are they talking to each other and are they, you know.
Simon: Looking at it subjectively and thinking, well, actually, that could have been a compromise or what’s going on here. I think it’s more simplifying it, making it easier for the tech team, the support team to deliver the support back out for the client. and the easier that you can make that for the team.
Simon: As humans we don’t, we like the path of least resistance and if you can take away the hurdles then you’re getting somewhere and I think that’s part of it making it easy for the support team.
Daniel: Um, I’m imagining all these routes sort of going out into all areas of the MSP business from this one topic. Um, quick question is figuring all of this out the responsibility of the technical director or senior technical leader in an MSP, or is this, or would this be driven by, say a commercial or sales director?
Daniel: or is it working together? and, and then my next question would be, is that, is there a way of simplifying that? And is that the value that you bring to distributing? this platform to MSPs that you can help with that. So there we are. unpick that question.
Simon: I think it’s, I think it’s, I think it’s joined up so it needs to be tech and sales together working on it. and, you know, you could have a come, you could have a product that might be, a pound less. But equally, the salespeople aren’t going to sell because of the complexities around it or a pound more.
Simon: And, you know, they’re not going to sell it because, you know, there’s finding that happy medium that you could have. you could have a really fantastic product, but if it’s too difficult to sell, then the guys aren’t going to go out and sell it. Because they can’t get it over the line because when they’re talking to the end users, they’re like, well, we don’t understand it.
Simon: We, why do we need to see this? What are the benefits, etc. And if you can deliver that again in a much simplified format, then everybody sort of wins. But equally, you’ve got to buy in, you know, it buy in from all of the teams. So not just the top level, actually have the, have people within the teams look at it, evaluate it and go, yeah, this is great.
Simon: Or no, I can see this, you know, falling down because of this, or I can sell this because of this or whatever, but actually having it reviewed, you know, so if people are. You might be in bed with a certain product for quite a long time and loyal to that product, and you’d evaluate that, maybe you’d say, okay, well, we’re evaluating our antivirus or EDR or whatever it might be on an annual basis, but we might not evaluate our backup for, we’ll do that every two years, or whatever the products are on your roadmap within the business, how often do you evaluate those products?
Simon: Who evaluates those products? And it could be that, you know, things change, you know, we know we’ve all seen products that have started off fantastic and then have dropped off for whatever reason. Maybe they’ve been, you know, that company’s acquired lots of other products, bolted it all in together and then all of a sudden becomes bloated and slow and causes more problems.
Simon: You hear that back from either the client or the people within the team because they get more and more. Cause and tech cases about that. So then that’s time to evaluate it and look at it, but actually get the tech team involved in the sales team involved to say, yes, we were all on board with this rather than it being pushed upon.
Simon: And like, this is our product and this is what we’re going to deliver, get the whole business to, to buy into
Daniel: And in, in your experience, is that have you been, for fortunate to work with MSPs that are enlightened and are, coming to you and doing that? Or are you having a role in energizing them to that level of awareness and execution?
Simon: it. So we’re working with MSPs and when we show the, the, product to them, guards to them. the sales guys love the sales side of things and the tech guys love the tech side of things. and that’s why I liked it. You know, I’m obviously going to, I’m going to be slightly biased towards it, but, you know, when we’ve taken out, so when I first saw it, it was like, I’ve seen this product.
Simon: And I then went out to my, my, my colleagues and, you know, to, to the team. And then I started talking to other peers, you know, I’ve seen this, what do you think of this? And everybody’s like, yeah, really, you know, this. It does what it says, you know, and it’s easy to use. It’s got everything within one platform.
Simon: it’s built from the ground up. It’s not lots of different things bolted in together. the guys that have built it have thought about it and they recognize that it’s not going to go toe to toe against best of breed. So, for, you know, and it’s not designed to. And, there, if you take, you know, how much of Excel do we actually use on a day to day basis.
Simon: How much is certain packages we rarely use 100 percent some businesses do and that’s great And so they should use that product for that. And so there might be a best of breed product that you need to have. but you could also then plug that in or have that and then have guards around it to deliver all the other elements.
Simon: And you can switch off. certain sectors if you want to, because, you know, for email security, they need that part of it for best breed or for fishing simulations. They need that part of it for whatever reason. but I think it’s, you know, again, from a guard’s point of view, it’s delivering a certain price point, which helps the sales guys sell it, increases, you know, the recurring revenue.
Simon: Keeps the client, on board nice and sticky and the tech guys can deliver it out without looking at it, you know, again, going back to the onboarding costs. If you’ve got nine different platforms to, to, to on board, what, how long does that take you to do guards? you can connect it 365 and it can start working within minutes.
Simon: and so that’s the onboarding process where, and as I say, you can sort of see, not sort of see, you can see who are your most at risk clients, Straight away within the platform. Who’s the most at risk employees within that? And that’s tying all those of tech vectors together in one place, rather than going and having to pull those reports from nine different products or however many different products into one place.
Simon: So.
Adam: and Simon, so the GARDS product, has, a number of, products or services within it, which do different things. and if I understand this correctly, you buy the whole thing. what do you recommend to your clients that they slice and dice it up? and. sell parts of it individually or bundle it all together as a single solution with one price, or, I mean, is that territory you get involved in?
Simon: So, yeah, we providing, with guards, we’re providing our, webinars to, to our clients as well as, so, so the we are sort of con, continually working with them and their sales and tech team as to how to deliver this more so with the sales side of the team so they can go out. But obviously we’ve got the tech side of things as well as to how to onboard and answer any questions.
Simon: but, where we’ve seen it successful with existing or. He’s actually giving Putting it into one price, actually providing the whole suite as one rather than individually sort of slicing and dicing it. It is all there in one place and comes at one cost. And so sell it all at one cost. We’ve seen clients which have gone out and they’ve increased their consultancy because they’re like, We’re here.
Simon: This is this. We’ve benchmarked you. We’re doing all of this great stuff for you at the moment. We can do all of this more for you. We can shore up the systems. This is the report. This is where you are. This is the cost to get you from here to there. So here’s some days that will take you over this 12 month period.
Simon: We’re going to take you from this point to this point. and actually putting it integrating into the stack, whether they then sort of say we’ve got, security and then security class on. It’s one of those questions. You go into the three tier system or not. Clients might always go for the lowest here. existing clients, you can go out to them and say, we’ve got this, we want to do this for you, and with your prospects, you can build the story up and go along. Everybody has integrated it at one cost rather than splitting it down.
Adam: And to some extent, well, I think we’re out of time, but to some extent, does that mean you’re saying to the client, the end client, there’s a difference between what we do and what others do, because we’re not going to keep coming back to you, asking you to buy this over here and that over there.
Adam: it’s one price for 90 percent of your needs. it’s a simpler conversation.
Simon: it is a simple conversation. I mean, we don’t know what else is, you know, what’s going to happen in the next couple of years and what technology is going to, you know, deliver down. I mean, from the, for the products that are there, you know, the nine attack vectors, I don’t think they’re going to change too much.
Simon: it could be that the client’s requirements may change. and so they then may need to have an additional bolt on for whatever reason. but I, you know, the, Guards are obviously investing and growing and doing more and more. so, well, they’ll enhance the endpoint security, they’ll enhance the secure browsing.
Simon: the, awareness training is always been updated with new videos and new campaigns and so on. so you’re always pushing that out to the end users.
Daniel: And as Adam quite rightly said, we’re pretty much at time. just reflecting back on, on the sort of highlights, I think from my site one, this has been a good reminder that there, there’s a certain overhead for R& D, that needs to be allowed for in the MSP business model. So, maybe allowance for that in working out the.
Daniel: The true cost of sale, rather, strictly speaking, is it an overhead, but you know, making sure you’ve got enough in there to, to cover that continuing investment of assessing and collaborating with your colleagues, both commercial and technical. and the other thing that I think I’d.
Daniel: Took from today was even though we’re making it easier for the end user to consume or understand and consume digest, the concepts and the products and services, this won’t sell itself. There needs to be, a TAM role of some description that’s driving and pushing and managing the adoption of this.
Daniel: and, and I think that’s probably we should revisit the TAM topic. I think, in a future episode sometime soon. We’ve talked about the TAM role a few times, but this definitely was a nice reminder for that. So, any final thoughts from you, Adam?
Adam: Oh, for me, it’s always, it always comes back to, simplifying the conversation with the client, and demonstrating true business value, steering away from the technicalities, assuming your client is a business owner and not a, an IT director, of course. so, so if any product helps you do that, then I’m always a fan.
Daniel: Very good. And Simon, we normally offer our I guess a shameless plug, but, I think we’ve again, we’ve picked some interesting topics, which I think, lean very much into what you do. So probably just suffice to say how best to get hold of you. If anyone wants to carry on the conversation with you
Simon: Yeah, reach out to us. the website is, www.cyberguards.co.uk and guards is with a Z at the end. or find me on LinkedIn, and reach out. happy to talk to anybody.
Daniel: and often found on a golf course,
Simon: Often found on a golf course. Yeah, absolutely.
Daniel: super, super stuff. Brilliant. Simon, been really interesting talking to you today. Thanks ever so much for joining us.
Simon: No, thank you for your time.
Adam: you.
Simon: you.