[16] – COVID-19 Special Episode

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts Rae-Ann Buccianico and Chris Tim. 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. Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact. We're at a very unprecedented time.

This is a very special COVID-19 podcast with my hosts Rae-Ann and myself. Today Rae-Ann and I are going to talk about the state of the industry, what we've been hearing from MSPs during this period of time, how we've been able to help them out. So with me I have my co-host Rae-Ann Buccianico. Rae-Ann, how's things going with you? I'm doing great today, Chris.

How are you guys doing? Good, thank you. We're doing well, locked up tight, been very busy working with clients. So before we started recording, Rae-Ann, you and I had a conversation around how we've been helping our customers during this time. And we're actually going to put this podcast up outside of our normal schedule, just as a very special kind of COVID-19 coronavirus special.

So Rae-Ann, what have you been up to in the last couple of weeks? Well, here in the US, and by the way, Chris, you and I are taking social distancing to the next level here. You're in the UK, I'm in the US. So here in the US, we just passed a huge tax package for economic stimulus. And so I spent a ton of time working with MSPs in getting their fair share of that stimulus package, but also, you know, fixing up their PSA so that they can start to track their COVID-19 activity, whether it's internally, because now we have to track COVID-19 PTO or time off separately from regular PTO.

So now we're setting up some, you know, internal codes so that they can track that time off separately. And so I've been helping them do things like that. Now, have you seen anything on your end about other stuff, like maybe email blasts to your customers, telling people what's going on or maybe changing? So tell me what you've got going on. Absolutely, Rae-Ann, and yeah, no kidding, I'm taking the social distancing to the next level.

I mean, you know, you're in Florida, I'm here in the UK. So, you know, I think we can't be blamed for keeping the two metres apart or whatever it is, I think, a thousand miles apart. So, but yeah, I mean, we've been actually helping a lot of the customers in the last couple of weeks with their communication messages to their customers, right? So a lot of MSPs have approached me and said, you know, how can we communicate better with our customers? And one of the ways that actually most people probably don't know is you can actually do that quite effectively through Autotask with something called the contact group manager.

So, you know, this is a bulk email system. Very similar to what you get with MailChimp or one of those others that allows you to create, you know, newsletter style emails that you can send out to your customers on bulk. And I've had a lot of MSPs approach me and say, how can we do this? What's the best way to communicate with our customers? And I've helped them design not only the communications that they send to the customers, but also things like, you know, ticket updates.

So when a customer emails them in from wherever, you know, the response that goes back to the customer is a COVID-19 one specifically saying, hey, you know, our staff might be working from home, but actually the service that we deliver to you is exactly the same as we would do under normal circumstances. So nothing changes because we are utilising the technology that we have that allows us to actually work remotely. So, you know, even though we may not be in the same office, we may not be, you know, sitting next to each other, the level of service that you're getting doesn't change. And those are the kinds of things that a lot of my MSPs have been asking, how do we how do we send these messages to our customers? Right.

So I've been getting on with them and saying, it's either contact group manager, if you just want to set, you know, blast out and send a bulk email or on a ticket by ticket basis, you can actually have that communication going back to your customer. And that seems to have been working quite effectively. So, yeah, what's been going on on your side, Rayanne? Well, so what you said was really pretty interesting. I just think that it might be important to note that there is a security setting for the user to make sure that they have the rights to send out bulk email.

So if you're giving this sort of task to, say, the front desk receptionist, hey, get this newsletter out to everybody through Autotask, you want to make sure that they have the rights to do that. And you would do that in the resource screen, you know, right in the in the security settings. So I just thought that that was important, too. Absolutely, Rayanne. And actually, you know, just talking about that, there is a whole security process they kind of have to go through.

There's a video they have to watch that, you know, says if they kind of breach the system, then Datto or Autotask has the right to cut them off from that facility. So, yeah, it's, you know, it's not something I'm sure a lot of MSPs will be listening to this thinking, well, I can't see that feature, why can't I do it? Why don't I have the email ability? And you're right, it's actually a security setting that you've got to go and turn on in the security level for that user. Yeah, I suspect they just don't want people spamming the world with things that that has the Autotask name on it.

So some of the other things, you know, like I was saying earlier, is that we've set up internal codes, you know, for for the workers, the IT workers, because if they have to take time off to care for a sick child, or maybe they they themselves have gotten sick with the virus, or, you know, they just they need to care for somebody else or their school kids schools closed or something, then so we're tracking those things separately as, you know, additional time off because that money is getting reimbursed by the federal government in the U.S., just wanted to clarify that. But, you know, there's been some other things that that have come up. Many of my clients have some all you can eat contracts, and the question comes up, does this fall under an all you can eat contract, like even insurance policies say we're not going to cover an act of God. And I'm not saying that COVID-19 is an act of God or even an act of human, but it's it's one of those unforeseeable events that maybe a lot of MSPs are finding themselves in a position where they have to do this work for free, whether it's setting up, you know, the employees at home so that they can work remotely, you know, making sure that the remote systems are secure and patched. And a lot of that we're talking about an awful lot of time re-onboarding the same people that you've already onboarded, but a completely different way.

And, you know, some people can can invoice that outside the contract. But other MSPs are finding it very difficult or maybe they don't want to invoice their customer for it. So they're asking for ways to track their COVID-19 activity time. And so one of the things that I've suggested is maybe create a new work type so that at the end of the contract period, when you say that you have blown the budget on literally every contract you have, you know, then you can isolate the COVID-19 activity time, you know, from the work type to see whether or not the budget was really blown or whether it was just blown because of the COVID-19 epidemic, pandemic, I should say. Absolutely.

I really like that, actually, Rayanne, I think, you know, having that work type that, I mean, I don't know what you'd call it on your system, I don't know if I want to have a work type called COVID-19, but, you know, maybe C-19 or something. But yeah, I mean, you know, and actually that's a really, really good, good thing to have, because you could, if you wanted to go and bill for that and exclude that as part of your contracts, and then, you know, say, hey, look at all this work we've done for you on your home, your staff's home PCs, what have you. But also, and actually the way I would do it is to, depending on the client, is maybe say, you know what, I'm going to mark this as a non-billable work type, then I'm going to be able to go to them at the end of this period and say, OK, you know, look, we've all gone through a bit of a hardship here. But look at all this work we actually did for you during COVID-19 with setting up laptops at home, making sure we patched them, making sure they were secure. So we've done all of this work for you that we're not going to bill for you.

So what I would then do is go to them at the end of this period of time and say, you know what, I think maybe we need to re-look at your contract or something like that. Or when it comes to contract renewal time, I think it'll be a much easier conversation to say, you know, we kind of helped you out and we didn't actually bill you during the time that everyone is struggling. You know, we didn't actually charge you for any of this work, but look how much work we did. We've got all the proof of we actually logged all of this time against everything that we've done for you. And we can track that on our system.

We haven't charged you. We're not going to charge you for it. But now is a good time for you to maybe think about updating your contract. So when things get better, you can maybe up the rate or do whatever you need to do, change the contract at that point as well. So, you know, but the other thing I really liked what you said, Ryan, and it's not so much I don't see it much over here is, you know, the personal time off side of things.

You know, it seems to be a UK thing and I don't know, you know, if it's you guys over there in the US, but not too many people here track time off through Autotask. So either just normal time off or, you know, any kind of, you know, special leave or training or sick time or any of that kind of stuff. Very few people here in the UK, certainly the ones that I'm dealing with, you know, are not actually using Autotask to track any of that time off. Interesting, I had not considered that. So in the UK, it's not it's not an issue.

You know, if you need time off, you take it, you know, and there's really no benefit to calculating it. No, absolutely. I mean, that's that's it's not just the case of if you need it, you take it off. You get, you know, your allocated amounts of days in a year, but they just don't track that through Autotask, right? So they'll often have a different HR system that they might be tracking that through rather than actually using it directly through Autotask, which, by the way, I'm a huge advocate of actually keeping that information in Autotask and tracking it through Autotask because I think it's definitely something that that you need to do.

If your staff are going to be working out of out of Autotask, out of your PSA tool, they're going to want to be able to see how much time they they have available to take off. Also, you know, on things like the dispatcher's calendar and, you know, the engineer's calendar, that stuff shows up on there. So you're very quickly going to be able to track when you're when your staff are out of the office, when they're on holiday, when they're sick, whatever the case might be, you're going to be able to track all of that. So I'm a huge fan of actually doing it all through Autotask. It just seems like a lot of the clients I work with just don't seem to that's not a priority to them to actually track any of that stuff.

We use it all. We use it to track. Well, we have a very liberal PTO policy in my company. But if somebody needs to take some time off or if somebody is planning a vacation, I expect to get notified that there is a time off request through Autotask so that I can mentally prepare that this person's not going to be in the office for these days. And so I don't have many rules in my company, but one of them is if you're planning to take more than three days off in a row, I need to know about it in advance because that's a lot of time.

And if I didn't need you here for three days in a week, then I probably don't need you. You probably don't need a job. So and everybody's really great about it. But, you know, going in and requesting the time off. And I also want to see 40 hours on their time sheet every week.

So, you know, if somebody is out for being sick for a day or it takes a half day or leaves early for, you know, some to take care of their kids or whatever, you know, I want to see the amount of time at the end of the year when I'm not only reviewing my contracts with my customers, but I'm also reviewing, you know, my employee relationships, you know, and their performance and utilization. I want to see exactly how much time they've taken off. And generally, yeah, you know who is taking advantage of the PTO, the liberal PTO policies, you know, and the rest of the staff gangs up on them and says, stop this or you're going to ruin it for everybody. You know, so, you know, they kind of police themselves and I don't really, you know, have to do much with that. That's pretty cool.

I think I should actually apply to your company for a job. I think this is a great PTO policy. Yeah. Sounds like a great place to work. Well, I would totally hire you because I could sure use some help.

Absolutely. I mean, you know, one of the things I've been we were just talking, you know, about this unprecedented time about COVID-19, Corona, whatever you want to call it. And I've had a lot of people contact me over the last couple of weeks about, you know, saying, well, they've almost been forced into this period of time where they've now got time on their hands and they need to figure out what to do. So this is actually a really, really good time for MSPs to kind of re-evaluate basically all the tools that they're using in their business, you know, deciding whether these are actually the tools that they need to use and want to be using. And if they are, are they actually using those tools effectively and efficiently?

Right. And that's where, you know, somebody like yourself or myself can come in where, you know, we can actually help an MSP to understand their tool sets. We can help them to align their company processes with those tools and make sure that they're using them effectively and efficiently so that when we come out of the end of this unprecedented time, which we will do, you know, hopefully we'll come out stronger with a tool set that's actually going to work for us and make us very efficient and ultimately very profitable, you know, as an MSP. You know, so that's really a great idea. And as a matter of fact, I've talked to a couple of MSPs with the same idea that, hey, you know, we have some downtime now and a lot of our customers aren't busy.

So we're going to focus our attention on the broken processes and get them cleaned up. But, you know, there's even more to that, because if you think about this, Chris, you know, we are going to come out on the other end of this. This is not our first, you know, downturn yet. This might be our first pandemic where everybody is locked up in their homes all around the globe. But it's not going to be our first economic downturn.

It's not certainly not going to be our first recession. So the smart business person who has been through these things before will use this time to build up their business. And there's going to be a lot of, you know, one man shops out there who may not survive this. And you may know who those people are. And the MSPs out there, they may know who they are.

And it might be a good opportunity for you to merge or acquire some of those smaller shops. You know, you could help the little guy who might not survive otherwise. They have the customers. You have the cash. And if your PSA and your tools are optimized and your system is optimized, then merging the two practices together becomes a lot easier.

Absolutely. And I mean, and I actually I hear that from time to time, you know, I've heard that a couple of times, actually, this this week about kind of smaller MSPs that are worried about the future and worried as to whether they're going to survive. And a lot of those are people that are using a whole bunch of different tools. And, you know, they're coming to me saying, how can we make these tools work better for us and work more efficiently? And, you know, it's those kind of guys that are thinking like that, that I think are the ones who are going to end up surviving off the back end of this pandemic or this recession, whatever you want to call it.

You know, and it's those smart business owners that are understanding where their issues are and using this opportunity and this time to actually plug the gaps in their business and work out their processes so that they can come out of the other end of this much, much stronger. So, you know, I think, you know, in a few weeks, a few months, whenever this issue is over, you know, I think we're going to see a completely different breed of MSP coming out of this. I see people coming out a lot stronger, a lot better. And hopefully if they talked to you and me, they're going to come out a lot more efficient and a lot more profitable as well out of the end of this. So that's my aim and my goal, at least.

Yeah, I hope that for them, too. And there is an opportunity for people to use this time to really take a hard look at their business. Many people may be losing some revenue, you know, so maybe now is the time for you to say, OK, if my revenue is going to go down by 33 percent, then I think my costs have to also. So there's a lot, you know, there's a lot of room of learning to live on those smaller plates, you know, learning to use the tools that you have efficiently and to their fullest extent, because you may have a lot of overlap from the various tools, you know. So I think we're going to see a completely different IT channel on the other side of this.

And I am looking forward to seeing, you know, how people use this time to change the way that they're doing things and what the new IT channel will look like on the other side. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, talking of using tools effectively, I mean, I was actually talking to a friend of mine in the industry just yesterday or the day before, and, you know, he was talking about how he's using his RMM tool, right? So what he's now done is he's kind of said to the clients, look, you're paying for X amount of machines every month anyway.

So what we're going to do is we're temporarily going to actually allow you to have this RMM tool on your user's home machines as well. And we're going to swallow the cost for that RMM tool. But what we're going to do is we're going to do all the patching, all the Windows updates, make sure that those machines are up to date with antiviruses, all these kind of things that we would normally do on your office PCs. We're actually going to do a lot of those on your home PCs. Now, the advantage with this guy is he has clients that do everything in the cloud, right?

So they don't necessarily need to even connect into their machines in the office because everything's in the cloud. So what he's done is said, you know, turn off your machines in the office. And what we'll do is we'll just kind of transfer those licenses or those those agents on the data agents. And we'll kind of just bring those in and still manage your machines that your users are using at home. And that's a great way of leveraging the tools and saying we can still do the same job that we've always done for you.

But instead of doing, you know, your desktop in the office, we're actually going to do the same thing and we're going to make sure that your machines are patched and up to date, you know, or your home user machines as well. So, yeah, I think it was a really, really cool, good use of technology and a good use of of an MSP really working with these clients to help them out. Yeah. And on that same note, think about it. If instead of just, you know, blanketly giving your customers a discount, ask them, are some of these machines just sitting there turned off?

Maybe I remove those agents until, you know, those people come back to work rather than cut into your profit margin for the services. You know, maybe you just simply reduce the number of seats if the seats are not being used. If they send a bunch of workers home and those workers are not working from home, you know, or they I have one client who's who had a customer lay off 78 percent of their workforce in one week. And so the amount the number of seats that they were covering literally went down by, you know, 78 users. And so there's going to be less revenue.

The profit margin may be the same, but the revenue is going to be smaller because those agents aren't going to be used. So consider like talking to your customers, do you need all seven, all eight, all 20 of these agents on the machines, are these machines still being used? You know, if not, let's turn them off, you know, until the people come back to work and then we can add them back onto your plan. You know, in the meantime, if you need them to be at home, you know, your your friend's idea was a great idea. And it really builds goodwill between you and your customer to say, hey, let's take it off of here.

We'll move it over there. Same price, everything will end and we're securing your data at the same time. You know, I think that goes a long way with customers. Absolutely. You know, I'm a big fan of that.

I'm a big fan of goodwill and saying, you know, we're all going through the same difficult times. And, you know, it's at times like this, I think MSPs need to, you know, need to not be looking at charging for every little thing that they do, because I think in the longer run, it's going to come back and reap massive rewards for you, you know, later on down the line. You're either going to get the client to sign those services that you've been wanting them to do for a long time. You know, you're going to be able to uplift their contract or I'm a big fan of, you know, paying it forward and what goes around comes around and that kind of idea. Right.

So eventually, you know, those clients that you might have been desperately trying to get, you know, for the last few years, by giving back to your clients, you know, that that kind of stuff is going to start happening for you. And I'm really a big, big fan of that kind of stuff. Well, I hope our listeners got, you know, a few good tips from today's conversation. You know, it's a totally unprecedented time. We've never seen it before.

Hopefully we will never see it again. But, you know, while we're still in the thick of it, I thought maybe we could just help other people along the way. Absolutely. I agree. And, you know, and this was actually such a fun episode to record.

I think, you know, it's different from what we normally do. You know, a lot of PSA talk in here about how you can use your PSA more effectively. But, you know, just a completely different conversation. So, yeah, I really enjoyed it. I think it was really cool.

And I hope that our listeners have got something out of it, some kind of benefit. Hopefully everyone's keeping well and, you know, enjoying the sunshine. I'm looking out of the window and it's actually it's still sunny. And unfortunately, I'm not allowed to go out and enjoy the sun, but hey, whatever. So, yeah, I mean, all that's left really for me to say, Rayanne, is the PSA is the key to your MSP success.

So go out and make an impact on your world today. And remember this, be safe, be healthy and stay sane. Excellent. Thanks, Rayanne. Thanks, Chris.

See ya. 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.