[60] – Special Episode Recorded Live from the Acronis #CyberFit Summit in Miami with Special Guests Erick Simpson and Pat Hurley

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts, Rayanne Buccianico and Chris Timm. Learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP business. Let's listen in. Hello everyone, and welcome to a special episode of PSA Impact, with your hosts, myself, Chris Timm, and my co-host, Rayanne Buccianico. We're coming to you live from the Acronis CyberFit Summit in Miami Beach.

Hey, Rayanne, how are you doing? I'm doing great today, and it is indeed another special episode because we're still in the same room, and this is our second time here at the Acronis CyberFit Summit in Miami. But today, we also have two very special guests with us. We have Pat Hurley, and we have Eric Simpson. Probably neither one of these need an introduction, but we're going to let you introduce yourselves anyway.

Hey, Pat, welcome. Thanks for having me, Rayanne. Thanks, Chris, for being here. I run sales for the Americans Division. I've been here for about 14 years, which in this industry is a bit like being a dinosaur, but really happy to be here, excited to talk about the subjects that you have here.

We've done a lot with Eric over the years, so we're excited to have a chat with him as well. Welcome, Eric. Thanks, Rayanne. Thanks, Chris. Hey, Pat.

Thanks for having me, team. Oh, so I launched and sold one of the first MSPs in the industry back in the early 2000s. I co-founded MSP University, where I coached and trained 30,000 IT providers through their transformational journey from being their professional services business model to managed services. Today, I coach and consult with MSPs, and I do work for channel vendors and distributors, and I've enjoyed a very long and fun relationship with Acronis. I think this is my fourth Acronis Cyber Summit that I've been invited to speak at, and every single one has just been bigger and bigger and bigger.

I think, Pat, this is the largest attendees that Acronis has had since you started doing these here in Miami. Is that right? It is, despite the pending tropical depression or hurricane, whatever we're calling it now, and other events competing with us as well for this type of channel opportunity to have these types of engagements. For us, it's a tremendous success. Yeah.

Congratulations. It's been a really great event so far. Thank you for having us here. One of the reasons why we wanted to invite the two of you to come on our show is because we like to talk about PSAs and profitability, right? Both of you have a lot of experience in these areas, so we're just going to fire some questions at you, but I want you to just feel free to chat, and we're just having a conversation, but I'd like to start, I think, at the pricing models because Chris and I were talking, and you were saying, Chris, about ...

Yeah, so I was reading an article actually around, and I think it was actually from Data that was recently released about the global state of the MSP market, and they said that 35% of those people that they surveyed actually said that break, fix, and project management revenue was up by 24% from last year. What does that mean for the MSP industry? Does that mean break, fix is coming back? Is managed services all you can eat dead? Do you want to give us your opinion on that?

Yeah, I read that report as well, Chris, and I would not say that managed services is dead by any means. I think that what we're seeing is probably the result of the additional needs that businesses have expressed coming out of the pandemic or maybe during the pandemic for services, solutions, hardware that fall outside of the traditional MSP agreement. I think in that same survey, I forget what the percentage was of MSPs that mentioned that they see their recurring revenue services grow into 2023 at a pretty notable increase as well. I think that there's a choice that IT providers have when they're delivering their businesses or their services to their clients. We have a choice to say, hey, we're only going to deliver services to clients that are under an agreement, and that's the approach that we took when we had our MSP.

We struggled with serving the needs of these legacy customers that we had and moving into this managed service agreement type of model. In fact, we called it flat rate IT services. We hadn't heard MSP yet when we were doing it. There's a lot of folks that were doing something similar to that, and then the MSP moniker was coined. I struggled with seeing that break-fix revenue go away from existing customers that didn't want to move forward with a flat fee model.

Of course, the typical objection we would get back in the day was, well, Eric, why should we pay you more in advance every month for services that you do now for less money? When something breaks, you guys are out here, and you fix it, and we pay you in 30 days or whatever the case may be. We had kind of painted ourselves into a corner back then. We weren't very mature from a business model perspective or from a business acumen perspective, I'll say. We were always promoting our services as the fastest, the most cost-effective services.

I think a lot of providers back then were competing at that level. Only after we began to really mature and grow and see the value of, hey, recurring revenue, we can now forecast for growth, forecast for investment in growing the company, we had a choice to make that said, should we continue to serve these Reactive Break-Fix customers? I really struggled with that because we were generating probably $50,000 to $60,000 a month in Reactive Break-Fix services every month from our client base. I saw that as revenue that was going away, but we made the decision to go ahead and move forward and find homes for those customers. We loved our customers.

We took care of them. We got to the point where we were only serving clients that were under a managed services agreement. Two things I discovered that I was not expecting. The first thing was we were more profitable after getting rid of those Reactive Break-Fix customers. That was because these were the noisiest customers.

These were the customers that wanted to be treated the same as anybody else that was paying us on a managed service agreement with SLAs and response time. They were the ones that haggled over every invoice that we sent them. We were ending up writing down invoices. That was surprise number one. Surprise number two for me was with all those customers that went away, our customer service challenges dropped by like 90% because they were the noisiest customers that were paying us the least that wanted the best service.

I think what ends up happening is some providers still provide some of those Reactive Break-Fix services along with managed services. I think that today's post-pandemic buyers, if you'll remember, we also saw during the pandemic the highest sales of hardware during that first year or so of the pandemic because MSPs, as providers, were delivering laptops, extra monitors, mice, keyboards to support that remote workforce dynamic, that hybrid workforce dynamic. Long way to answer the question, do I think managed services is dead or dying? I think the absolute opposite of it. I think that every provider reaches levels of business maturity and growth and makes decisions based on what they feel is best for their organization.

I think that because we are in a service industry, we want to support our clients. If they want some services that are outside of the agreement, we'll figure out how to deliver those and bill them for that if we want to maintain that relationship with them. When I heard managed services is dead, I immediately thought, long live managed services because it's not dead. Hurrah, hurrah. Clearly, I agree with you, Eric.

It's 100% the impact of the pandemic. It doesn't mean that that's going to go away because more and more organizations are rethinking the office environment and are they going to continue to enable remote work and hybrid work environments? A lot of companies want their employees to go back into the office. I think Elon Musk has done some changes at Twitter and I think you've seen some articles written about Apple and Google with them trying to get more people back into the office. Obviously, those are very large companies, but the point being all that stuff that they spent on laptops, hardware, lighting for all the Zoom calls you're doing and WebEx you're doing, microphones, all that stuff, that's a big investment.

I don't think the spend that you see addressing the break fix is going to go away. It's probably going to lighten a little bit as the workforce continues to maybe move towards more of a hybrid environment, but no, managed services isn't going anywhere. It's going to continue to grow. How about the all-you-can-eat, the flat fee, where everything is included? I think the pandemic really brought to light the problems with the all-you-can-eat model.

As people were trying to work from home, now you're sending texts to a faraway place so that the worker can get set up at home and it was very disruptive to a lot of MSPs. Do you think that that will continue on, that maybe the all-you-can-eat model goes away in favor of maybe something a little more hybrid? Yeah, we're going to provide you these services at this flat fee, but I'm not going to hop in my car and drive two hours out of the way just to plug in a printer for your work-at-home person. Also, just to add to that, the different packages, there's gold, silver, bronze, all these things. Is that going away?

I see that a lot. I see a lot of people moving actually just to one package. This is what we offer. I'd just be interested to get your take. Do you want to start with you, Pat?

Sure thing. I think with the flat fee stuff, customers are getting smarter too, right? They're seeing that they're paying a flat fee, but are they leveraging everything that comes with that package? Is there additional noise in there that they don't necessarily need and they think they could consolidate that down and maybe pay a lower fee? They are fairly sophisticated.

They know what they're getting. They have expectations. They want to get value out of the relationship they have with their MSP. When I look at the packaging and the price of stuff and presented some information on this yesterday, there may not be a bronze, silver, platinum, or a good, better, best. There's going to be a way that the MSP, from a marketing perspective, is able to set up a feature set and a capability or a service delivery package that's going to address what they want to sell.

They may have three packages, but there's only one that the customer is going to view as actually being the most value for them. You have to be creative in how you build that and how you make it look. We talked to a few partners this week that they actually use stars and banners and put that over the best package because it is the best value for the customer, but also because it's the most profitable for the MSP. They will create a decoy package and put it in there and make it look like, this could be really good, but wait a second, I get more over here and the price isn't that much of a difference, but it actually is a big difference from a profitability standpoint for the MSP. I don't think the bundling and packaging will go away from how you set that up.

Maybe you see two offers or three offers, but it's always going to really drive the customer towards the best offer. I agree. I want to caution everyone about using the term, all you can eat, because that is, wow. What you think is all you can eat and what I think is all you can eat might be two different things. I think we need to get away from that.

I think that as a result of evolving organizations through the new risk that everyone is under from cyber threats and cyber criminals and things like that, we have to be very mindful of how we promote our services. I will admit that when we were promoting our managed services and my practice back in the early 2000s, we would say things in our marketing material and in our sales pitches like, hey, we take care of your entire network so you can sleep good at night. Can you imagine having an agreement that said that or some marketing today and says like, we take care of your cybersecurity needs so you can sleep at night? That is a very dangerous, precarious thing to say. So I would say, I guess if we went that way too, I would say that it's not all you can eat anymore or please don't do that anymore, change your marketing.

What you're delivering is a specific set of services. It's governed in your statement of work and you will be delivering these services to a gateway client for a recurring subscription fee every single month. So be very careful about what you're saying and then what you get your clients to sign. So that's one part of the conversation. Go ahead, Rian.

You have something? Yeah. Do you think it's important for the MSP to have specific exclusions in their MSA? Yeah. Yeah, I answered that question I think in my session yesterday.

So a statement of work is, it indicates and documents every single thing that you do for a specific price, right? Whether it's, you know, it could be a project, you could have a statement of work for the project and here's what's included. So we want to be clear that we don't become the sales prevention unit by having a ton of exclusions in our sales proposal or our sales template. Now, there's two different conversations that happen when we're selling. There's the sales conversation where we say, look, you know, we're trying to get you to yes, to say yes to our enhanced cybersecurity services or our managed IT services and we're going to very clearly, we're not misleading the prospect, but we want them to say, yes, I want a conceptual agreement so that now when I present my statement of work, I can go through the statement of work with a client and then clearly let them know and there's probably one line in there that, you know, clearly says anything that is not included in this statement of work is excluded and will be quoted, you know, we'll be happy to quote you for that, right?

So again, I'm going to sell you a series or I'm going to present you a set of services that's included in my statement of work. Anything that's not in the statement of work is excluded and we'll be happy to quote you on this and that's where we get some of that, you know, extra break, fix stuff or hardware stuff and things like that and we sign off on that. But I do have a feedback for the bundling and pricing as well. Go ahead, Chris. So the million dollar question for either of you is what should be included in that statement of work?

So, you know, what services should MSPs be including and not including, right? That's the question I hear all the time. So I'll answer it this way, right? So we have to understand who our target audience is, right? So there's, I mean, who is the audience?

Is it a small company, an SMB company that wants us to own the responsibility for the infrastructure and the end user support and things like that? That may be a much larger series or a set of services than if we're doing some sort of a co-managed IT engagement with an organization that has some internal IT where we're not responsible for everything but we are supplying a set of services, the core services, that allow them to do other things with their organization. So it depends on what should be included. But I will answer the question from a cybersecurity portfolio perspective, okay? So I'm a big fan of bundling services, good, better, best, name it, something very specific to your organization, your brand, so that your prospects feel like they can only get that set of services from you, number one.

And your good set of services, and let's just take cybersecurity, for example, right? That good set of services should align with that client's minimum requirements in their cyber liability insurance policy in order for them to cover a claim, right? So we're seeing requirements like, hey, we need end user security and awareness training, we need 2FA, we need this, that, and the other thing. So that minimum bundle of services not only should align with meeting the requirements of their cyber liability insurance policy, but it should also be the minimum set of services that you as an MSP or an IT provider require a client to subscribe to in order to be your client. Okay?

So there's a couple of things to unpack there, right? Now, the reason I like three options is, you know, good, better, best, if we structure it correctly, what we'll tend to find is that 60% of our clients will take our middle bundle. If we're good at what we're doing, maybe 25% will take our highest bundle, and 15% will take our lowest bundle. We want to skew what's in those packages along with how we price them, along with our SLA. So with each successively higher-priced bundle of services, there's more features and value, along with a better SLA.

And I'll give a shout-out to a book that I'd like to recommend. I have no interest, you know, or any commissions on this, but the book that really changed my mind about selling in bundles is called Secrets of Question-Based Selling. No, I'm sorry, that's another one I'll recommend later. But Secrets of Question-Based Selling will teach you how to ask the right qualifying questions for a sale. That's by Tom Fries.

But the bundling book is called Million Dollar Consulting by Alan Weiss. And Alan has, you know, he's a very high-level consultant and teaches other consultants how to sell services and how to value your services correctly. But what Alan says is, look, you're getting clients to have buy-in in terms of the option that they want to take. Now, I'm not saying that you should say, hey, here are our options, pick one, right? We recommend what we think the client should have because we'll understand during the qualifying phase of the sales process what their budget range is, right?

So we know kind of from doing these, you know, what the range might be from our, you know, entry-level bundle to our highest-level bundle. So if a client says something to you like, well, hey, Eric, I don't know how much I should budget, right? They have no clue. And you can say something like, well, for clients of your size with your risk profile, right, we typically see a range of budget necessary between X and Y, X being the lowest bundle to the highest bundle. You know, do you think you could find some budget within that range?

And if they say, yeah, I think we could find some budget within that range, then the next question should be, well, would you say that would be in the higher range of that budget range or the middle, right? I'm trying to kind of bracket them in. If they say something like, oh, no, I think maybe in the lower range, then I know they're probably candidates for my, you know, basic minimum bundle, right? But that doesn't mean that I'm not going to present the value of the other bundles when I go into the sales conversation, right? So there's a value there because it allows the client to understand all of the things that we offer even if they can only afford one thing, right?

Because a lot of the challenge that I think MSPs have is the majority of our clients don't know everything that we do, right? So it's a good way for them to appreciate what we have and to also get away from that perception that later on maybe that we can't support their business growth because we're selling kind of one thing. And then everything else we sell is kind of transactional after that, right? An upgrade to this or an additional component this way. The other thing that I like about bundling is that later on, instead of selling a client another transactional sale, you can say, look, you know, during your QBRs, you're tracking their business growth and at a certain point, you can let them know, look, when we get to this point here, we're going to want to upgrade you to our next bundle of services, right?

We need to enhance your cybersecurity posture. We want to add these other additional services, right? So it gives you a little bit of latitude instead of just selling one thing to selling something that increases your MRR pretty dramatically, you know, maybe 40, 50 bucks a user in some cases. So, Pat, do you think there's a secret sauce of profitability? You know, like, what is that sweet spot that an MSP should be looking for?

That's a tough question. I would just add to what Eric was saying, like, in your base models, you're going to have some table stakes stuff, right? You're going to have backup. You're going to have some minimal security capabilities that are built into that base model package. But then once you go up to that better best, you know, you get into endpoint detection response, you're talking about disaster recovery, you're talking about much deeper security capabilities at that point.

So, very clearly, you can put a little bit of flood into your customer's mind and say, all right, here's this, but if this happens, you're not fully protected. But I understand your budget. Up here, you know, you got all these capabilities that are going to really make sure that you're taken care of. So I think from that perspective, it's important to have them protected to a degree with a base level package, but also have the higher level. The other thing I would mention is that for any one of those, you want to be building in, obviously, any service that you can automate that's integrated with any of the platforms that you play with today, right?

So if you're using an RMN tool, you want to make sure that the capabilities that are built in there that you'd be leveraging are part of that automation that you have as part of your business model that you're already operating in, right? So because that in itself is going to increase the profitability for each one of those customers. I agree. And I think that, you know, it's really tough to raise your rates with a client. You know, if they're, let's say that you're selling a 36-month managed service agreement, right?

Unless you have some specific clauses in there that allow you to raise your rates over time, right? Which I recommend and have in some of my templates. It's kind of like, hey, we have the right to review the agreement on a yearly basis to make adjustments based upon, you know, our cost of business going up, right? So maybe our supply chain issues or maybe our labor shortages, vendors may raise the, you know, our cost for some services or license, things like that. It's not meant to true up like, oh, I haven't billed you for those, you know, 25 Microsoft licenses for the last 12 months.

Whoops, now I'm just going to, you know, increase. It's not for that, but it's for reasonable rate increase. And sometimes you can put a, you know, not to exceed a certain percent in there to, you know, keep the clients to feel comfortable about that. But generally, the only way to increase your profitability after an agreement is sold is to reduce your costs, right? Do the things like you just talked about, Pat.

Integrate your platforms better. Consolidate your platforms better. Increase automation. You know, reduce the cost of manual labor, right? And quiet the noise in your clients' environments, right?

If you take them through kind of an onboarding process that may take, you know, a little bit to get the noise quieted down and then build it that way. But in my opinion, we need to be shooting for 60% margins on managed services. And if we're selling, you know, more SaaS-based solutions, that changes the model a little bit. But, you know, when I started coaching partners years ago, you know, we were striving for 50%. And now we're seeing best-in-class MSPs hitting north of 60%, right?

So I think that's the new target. So, and you bring up an interesting thing there about, you know, the services included in the contract. But just one of the things I wanted to talk about was vendor sprawl versus best of breed. I mean, the topic always comes up about all eggs in one basket. And do you think it's better to find sort of one vendor and somebody to use all of those vendors' products or have, you know, multiple products in your stack from multiple vendors?

I'll come to you on that, Pat. Yeah, and our CEO and our marketing department and other people in our company will probably shoot me for saying this. But yeah, there's not one solution. You don't want to have one solution. You can't have a single point of failure.

That's not just relevant for large enterprise customers, right? It goes for any small business. You can't have a single point of failure. That's not a good way to build your business. Vendor sprawl is certainly a problem.

It's something we try to address at Acronis. I talked to a number of partners this week at the summit. They're talking about, I probably have vendors that I'm getting billed for today. I don't even really keep track of them, but I'm not getting paid for them on the back end when I'm delivering to a customer. So that's a real problem.

At any time, you can clear that stuff up. You're obviously going to free up some opportunities to optimize your profitability. So yeah, nobody in their right mind is going to think that one solution can fix it. There's a lot of players in the space, vendors in different areas that claim to be the best at certain things. If you look at their website, they're the best at this.

They're the hero here. They're going to come and save the day. But at the end of the day, it's just not the way it happens. You need multiple solutions in your stack to be able to really, truly combat the threat service that exists today for your customers. Yes, best in breed is good, but best in breed can also be extremely expensive and might not have the profit barge that you need as an MSP.

So again, back to the packaging piece of it, right? There may be capabilities that you have from one vendor that are maybe in a lower end package that provide good enough protection for that customer. But then on the higher end, you're sending something a little bit more high level. It might not get you to that 60% or 65% profit margin level you want to get to, but pretty damn close. Yeah, I'd agree.

And you touched on a point there. Obviously, we want to mitigate our risk. We, as the service provider, have to make sure that we put on our oxygen mask first before helping our clients. So that means that we have to be around to support them. That means that we have to adopt enhanced cybersecurity for our own organizations.

We have to be training our staff on potentially different solutions based on what you just said, Pat, because you could look at the good, better, best pricing model and say, okay, well, for my entry level folks, for my region, for this target audience, I know that if I went with a best of breed solution for one piece of that stack, it would kind of price me out of my ability to sell it very easily to them. So you may select a different vendor for those lower packages. And then as you do your advanced or your even higher level bundle, you have that best of breed opportunity. And then I like that you have that opportunity because then that makes it easier for you to upsell your clients later as well. You also want to be careful you're not bringing on a vendor to solve the needs of one customer.

You need vendors that can solve needs for multiple customers. And you may have some legacy guys. We deal with this all the time because we do a lot of competitive displacement, right? We don't work with many partners that don't already use somebody for backup or antivirus or whatever. So it's very important to understand your customers' needs from that standpoint.

So just be very careful taking on a new vendor just to go after that one big client, because then you got to train your staff. You got to support them. What happens when something goes wrong and inevitably will go wrong? And then how do you deal with it? So provide solutions that are going to address multiple customers.

You're likely not to consolidate on one vendor for backup, one vendor for disaster recovery, one vendor for security. It's just unlikely because your customers each have unique needs. We have a lot of rich features in our solutions, but we can't do everything that everybody else does. And we might do things maybe just differently than other providers do. So it's important to understand that.

And you really do have to do your research in terms of the capabilities that are there within each product. Here, here. And last point I'll make here is, yes, we want to guard against those single point of failures and that risk. But I will say that the solutions that we do choose to include in our packages to our clients should have the ability to tightly integrate with each other. Again, maximizing automation, maximizing reporting.

That's another opportunity that I see a lot of MSPs struggle with is, okay, are you having meaningful strategic conversations with your clients? And how are you demonstrating to them in an objective manner that they need to make different decisions in terms of investments in their technology? And I don't see a strategic business review as a showing my report card to my parents kind of thing. Oh, look at all the things we did. Look at all the, you know, stuff that we did.

Look at all those tickets we closed. I see it as we may say, hey, of course we took care of all that stuff. But let's talk about the value of this meeting being, I'm your strategic advisor. I'm your virtual CIO or CTO. And we're going to roadmap the next 36 months of your business growth and how we're going to align technology to support that and the things that we're going to introduce.

And that's a great way to introduce, you know, at this point in time, we're moving you to our next bundle because, you know, that's where we're going to need to be at that point. So, and that's a great thing about, you know, products that you're going to be selling to your customers. But what about as an MSP buying products that you're using internally? So, you know, your documentation, so you got your PSA, and now you're buying all these other tools that kind of do all these jobs. That's, I see all too often that people will buy a tool, you know, for documentation or for quoting or something else and never use that tool.

And very often, the PSA has that functionality built into it. So, I mean, what are your thoughts on that? I think, you know, in my opinion, I think, you know, an MSP should obviously really try and use the PSA tool as best they can to, to, you know, do all of those things that they're trying to do like quoting. And rather than spending all this money on tools that they're never going to use. And while we're at it, what are your thoughts on the future of the PSA?

You know, the all-encompassing tool to manage an MSP or an IT service provider? Well, you take this one first there. So, what I tend to find with partners that come to me for help is, you know, I tend to focus on kind of four P's. I call them the letter P. So, four P's, it's, you know, platforms, processes, products and services, and people, right?

And when I begin an engagement with a partner, the first thing that we look at are the platforms, right? And what I tend to find is, like everything, we're very, very busy. So, we'll, you know, make an investment in a PSA solution, for example, and we get it to the point where it does what we need it to do right now today with the intention of coming back to it and really, you know, getting more and more and more out of it. Well, what tends to happen is we get really, really busy and we're using it for the basic functions that the PSA delivers, which might be ticketing. And even at that point, the configuration and the optimization is not ideal.

We're not leveraging, you know, any of the automation services. We're not, you know, categorizing, you know, the issue types, sub-issue types and item types for every ticket. So, there's any reporting that we get is meaningless and things like that, right? So, it's critically important that we understand that we're making a huge investment in probably the line of business applications that's supposed to run the majority of the functions of an IT provider or an MSP. And when we make that investment, we have to understand that we have to invest the time, energy, and effort on a consistent basis to continue to optimize that platform.

And that's one of the things that I bring to partners is to say, look, how much time are you spending? Who's the guru for the PSA? Who's the guru for the RMM? Who's the guru for the documentation platform, right? Who owns that and is responsible to spend X amount of time on a regular basis to tweak, tune, and improve it?

And especially from a reporting perspective, if we can't measure what our team is doing, you know, we have no chance at making the right decisions in when to hire, right? When to raise our pricing and things like that. So, I think that we have to make a concerted effort in first of all, evaluating the tools that we have now, optimizing them as much as we can before we decide whether or not it's suitable or we need to switch it or change it or whatever. And, you know, that's how I would answer that. I think there's a huge opportunity for improved efficiencies and making better objective decisions without emotion when we can report on actual performance of individuals, of business units, and of agreements and sales performance.

I agree 100%. You have to make data-driven decisions. These tools enable that type of business decision-making to happen. The only thing I'd add really to that is like, there's a lot of those players in the space today, and there's a lot of consolidation happening in the market, and everyone's looking at, well, what's next? What do our partners need next?

So, you have a lot of, what I see is a lot of ISVs out there. They're acquiring more and more tech and more and more pieces, but it never really gets integrated that well to their main stack. So, and there's some providers out there today that have made 8, 10, 12 acquisitions over the years. And MSPs want to have one consolidated unified experience within the platform, but it's not that experience yet. And you're going to different places to do different things.

So, in an ideal world, you have that one PSA that has all that in one system, but I think it's really rare to actually see that existing in the markets. I don't know if you've had the same experience. Yeah, I think what I see from an operational maturity level for MSPs, if you look at the PSA, it does a lot of things. It's kind of the Swiss army knife. But if I'm going to carve a steak, I'm not going to get my Swiss army knife and carve this $100 Wagyu steak with my Swiss army knife.

I'm going to get my high value kitchen knife. I forget the Hinkle's or whatever your brand is, but I'm going to get the right tool to slice that steak. And I think that these PSA tools have kind of grown from what the original need or use case was, okay, I need a ticketing system. Okay, hey, guess what? We can make this a CRM system too.

Oh, guess what? We can throw a sales module on there. Oh, we can throw a project management module on there. Some PSAs have done that better than others. But at the end of the day, it's still kind of, if you were to build one from scratch today, which some vendors are, you would take a completely different perspective of it and look holistically at what's happening and look at best in breed solutions.

Like, let's say if you were to ask 10 people what sales CRM platform they feel from marketing and their awareness is probably the top tier, you may find things like Salesforce, right? And things like that. So Salesforce is a very purpose-built solution to do that one thing. And I guess where I'm going with this is, you know, as MSPs mature, they are selecting these other tools outside of the core PSA. They may keep it for some of the service delivery stuff, but they're using other tools for sales CRM.

They're using other tools for project management. They're using other tools for VCIO-type services, right? They're using other tools for documentation, even though there is some capability in some PSAs to support documentation, right? But yeah, I think as you grow and feel like the tool that you're using, you need to find something else to support, you know, that further business growth or your business vision. You're going to justify that based upon what you think that new tool can do to accelerate the performance in one or more of these areas.

Okay. So it's so much fun speaking to you guys. I mean, we could go on and talk about this. But I think our listeners probably will... Are they losing consciousness?

Yeah, exactly. Is that what's happening? We put everybody to sleep already? Probably. We weren't fun enough?

No, absolutely you were. No, no, absolutely. But what we love to do with them, just before we wrap up, one of the things we love to do with our guests is just have a little bit of fun. So what I'm going to do is completely unrelated to what we've talked about now. I'm just going to ask you both a completely random question.

Does it involve alcohol at all? Well, I'll ask you the one that might involve alcohol. Okay. So I've got them in front of me here. I just pulled up a website.

So I'll actually start with you then, Eric. Oh, no. So what is the wildest thing you've ever done in a hotel room? Oh, my goodness. Okay.

I will share what I witnessed, the wildest thing in a hotel room. That wasn't me, it was a friend. That I didn't participate in. But it was at a conference when I just started, you know, having this awakening around, oh, my goodness, you know, I should probably pull my head up, you know, out of my monitors from delivering service to my clients as a flat rate IT service provider and go to some of these conferences and see what's going on. And, you know, these were the days where there weren't a lot of conferences, but the conferences that people went to, it kind of tended to be the same, you know, usual suspects.

We'd end up in a hotel room or playing, you know, poker and drinking and things like that. And I guess one of the participants in this poker game had a little too many alcoholic beverages and kind of tripped. And there was this, you know, glass coffee table. Oh, I know this party. I was there.

Oh, you were there too. Holy cow, we are aging ourselves. When was that? What year? Oh, gosh, I'm going to say 2009.

It was in Vegas. This is like the beginning of Tom Hanks, Bachelor Party. Is there a mule involved? And what was, you know, and again, I'm not outing anybody, but it was kind of a vendor sponsored little get together. And yeah, this person kind of went through the glass coffee table.

Luckily, luckily, no serious injuries. But yeah, there was a lot of help cleaning up that glass that night. I don't know how they explained it to the hotel, you know, the next day. How do you explain? Oh, we just happened to break your coffee table.

Sorry about that. Put away all the booze. Get rid of the poker shoes. Quick. Be honest, Eric.

It was Rayanne, wasn't it? You know, like I say, I'm not outing anyone here. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right? It is. It stays in Vegas.

Absolutely. Oh, that was great. And a question then for you, a completely random question. This is kind of quite a fun one. And I've been interested to know this.

I should have probably listened to some of your podcasts, more recent stuff before I got out here. If you could wedgie any historical figure, who would you pick? I could wedgie any historical figure. Who would I pick? It's an interesting one.

I would think it would probably be something sports related. But I mean, my experience, I'm a Boston sports fan, so we've had some pretty good success over the last few years. Probably Eli Manning. He cost us a perfect season with Tom Brady, right? 18-1.

We ended up losing the Super Bowl, and then he did it to us again on some pretty freak plays. And he seems like a really nice guy. What he does with Peyton on those Thursday night games, I think it's Thursday night games, or maybe it's Monday night football. They're like, they're hilarious and they're really fun. But he took two Super Bowls away from us.

We could have eight rings now without a couple of those plays. So I would probably wedgie Eli Manning. It must have burned Peyton that Eli had the rings before he did. That's always a burn, yeah. Absolutely.

That's all I have for today. How about you, Chris? Got anything else? That's all I got. That was a lot of fun, guys.

Really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for coming. And Rayyan, all that's left for me to say is your PSA is the key to your business success. So go out and make an impact on your world today. Thanks, Chris.

Thanks, Eric and Pat. Thanks, guys. Thank you for joining us today on PSA Impact. We hope you've learned something and that you'll join us next time when we answer new questions posed by our listeners.