[18] – Interview with Lucas Meadowcroft, Chief Visionary Officer at CROFTi

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP. With your hosts, Rayan Bucianico 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 podcast with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayan Bucianico.

We are an independent PSA podcast designed to help MSPs all over the world on all things PSA. You can get your questions answered by us and learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP. You can get in touch with us on all the social networks, and we'll put some links to those groups in the show notes. Again, today we have a real international affair. We've got myself in the UK, we've got Rayan in the US, and we've got a very special guest with us today all the way from Australia.

It seems to be a theme recently, there's a lot of great bits of software coming out of Australia. Rayan, what's been happening with you over the last week or so? Hey, Chris. Not a whole lot's going on. We're all still locked down and doing our things, our social distancing thing.

Anyway, it's great to be here and it's good to see you, and it's nice to meet Lucas, who we're about to introduce, so by all means. Absolutely. Well, we're taking social distancing to the next level here, because we've got us in all three different parts of the world and looking at each other on the screen. They're the three best parts of the world if you ask me, but not many people do. But we get the UK, we get the US, we get Australia, everybody else.

Absolutely. We love everyone else in the world, right? Of course. Oh, yeah. No, just kidding.

Let me introduce our special guest today. He's Lucas Meadowcroft, who is the Chief Visionary Officer from Crofty in Australia. I'll let him introduce himself in a few minutes and talk about the awesome software that they've developed and how they help MSPs to make ticket creation more effective in the PSA. So, hey, Lucas, how are you guys doing? G'day, mate.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Good. Yeah, good to have you. And so, for those listeners who don't know anything about you, could you tell us just a little bit about yourself, about the company, where it all started?

Yeah, sure. 100%. So, we've been, I guess, in the innovation space for many years now, coming up to our sixth year. And so, a bit of a background myself and my co-founder, Dean, and also my co-founder, Amy, we've all been in the MSP world for 15 plus years. And I guess, as we transitioned from being an MSP over to doing innovation consulting, we realised pretty early on that we needed to...

I guess we were trying to solve a problem for ourselves, which was this whole level one IT support stack. And so, I guess, having a background in innovation, having a background in MSP, we kind of just evolved and brought the two together to, I guess, we're about to dive in and discuss, I guess, where we're sitting today. But yeah, so I guess to answer your question, pretty seamlessly, MSP has been our entire world for many, many years and transitioning into innovation. What happened actually was we were implementing tech from all around the world for our clients in Australia. And the tech that we were implementing, traditional MSPs didn't want to support that tech.

So if we're in the startup hub in San Francisco or over in the UK or in Israel, and we're getting the latest and greatest tech out of these markets to implement into businesses, the MSPs didn't want to support that innovation we're doing. And so we had to build a whole support arm of our business. So we got out of MSP into innovation and got back into MSP again to support the tech that we were implementing. Cool, okay. So tell us a little bit more about the software that you do.

So I believe it's Tribune. Is that the correct pronunciation of it? And why did you develop it? What was the need that you identified? Just tell us a little bit about what it is, how does it work, that kind of thing.

Yeah, sure. So three years ago, we found this problem internally where we're building our MSP team again, and we're going through the same challenges that I guess now we've found that every other MSPs go through which is around level one IT support. And so we're scaling up IT engineers, taking them through that journey to become really good customer service level one engineers. Then they get bored and they go, cool, I've done level one, now I want to do level two. Then you've got to start again, and you start scaling up more level one engineers again.

It's like this repetitive process you're continually going through. And so through that process and being an innovation tech company, we're like, cool, there's a better way of doing it. And so we've been a three year journey so far. We've developed this platform, it is called Tribune. You got the pronunciation right, which not many of the MSPs have been demoing to around the world, did I get it right?

And it means tribe. So we're bringing together a tribe of community MSPs from all around the world to understand exactly what they want to see in the latest and greatest technology. And so we can develop it in the way that they want to be able to use it within their organization. And so in a nutshell, Tribune has a fair few different components to it, but I guess at the end of the day, we're trying to solve the biggest problems when it comes to MSPs. And in this case, initial 12 months journey that we're talking about now is around level one IT support.

So how can we reply to customers easier, talk, explain tech terms in very layman terms to end users or to the clients that you're supporting and also solve the level one IT support jobs at the same time. And so once we can solve level one, then we can hopefully by then cognitive thinking will be a bit more accessible and we can start talking about level two and so on. Okay, so just in terms of what the software is, I mean, I've personally seen it, but just for the purposes of our listeners, I mean, from what I've seen, it's a plugin, is that correct, into Teams? Can you just sort of talk around that a little bit for us? Yeah, sure.

So the first iteration of it right now is to solve the biggest issue, which is around having the one-stop shop, I guess, painted glass when you're working with the MSP. And so we heavily have been using Teams in our organization for a few years now. It's been off and on, iffy at times, but now I guess for the investment into Teams and obviously now Microsoft, with everyone going into isolation, I think we have like 45 million active users a day now, which is insane. And so we've integrated the PSA we've been using for a long time now, which is Autotask, and we've implemented that into Microsoft Teams. And so our painted glass now is Microsoft Teams.

And so we hardly have to go back into Autotask to do many of the, I guess, everyday tickets or everyday escalations or working with our clients. We can actually effectively work from Teams on a daily basis. Can I jump in? I've got a couple of questions just based on that. So you have this plugin from Teams, and I'm gonna try to keep my questions focused.

Who is creating the ticket from Teams? Is it the end user or is it your tech? So you've got these teams where you can communicate directly with the end user, and then they can, I'm assuming it's kind of like some sort of form that they fill out and that form transfers over into a ticket in Autotask, or are you working the ticket directly in Teams and then push it over to Autotask once it's complete for approving in post? So I guess the simple answer is yes, yes, yes, and no. Sorry for the multiple questions.

The simple answer is yes. The idea is to work completely out of Teams. Now we have a three to five-year roadmap on this process, right? We're working effectively because our PSA is Autotask. We're working actively with the Autotask API team.

And so there are some limitations currently of what we can actually do. So we've got some workarounds in place, but once the REST API is available in a few months, that will open up the full ability. So back to your first question, right now it's engineers working within the tickets, so creating tickets, replying to customers, all within Teams. We do already have some beta customers on using the platform where we've got the bot that we've developed inside a Teams channel in the customers' Microsoft Teams. And so they're starting to communicate with it, but that's kind of like a workaround right this second because we're waiting for this REST API to be available in a few months from now from Autotask.

But the end goal is, yeah, eventually you won't have to use your Autotask as your pane of glass. You can use Teams to effectively communicate back and forth with customers, and also then trigger the next workflow that we've set up within the bot, which is actually solving, I guess, the level one issues, which is like printer not working, password resets, PC running slow, all the basic level one stuff that we encounter daily. So you mentioned, obviously, quite heavily here about Autotask, and that's obviously the PSA tool that you guys use. I mean, is there integration with any of the other PSA tools or is it just predominantly Autotask? And if it is only Autotask, are there plans to do it with the other PSA tools as well?

Yeah, so there's definitely plans to move into all the other PSA tools. Right now it is heavily focused on Autotask. One of the main reasons is Autotask was brought out by Datto a couple of years ago, and that was a massive transition. And because Datto was a really innovative organization, working with them has been super amazing. Like, they've been so good through this entire process.

And so we have reached out to other PSAs without naming names, and they haven't been so, I guess, adaptive to our conversation. And so we're really just sticking to getting it right for the MSPs that are in the Autotask world. You know, there's still 20,000 MSPs that work, I guess, use Datto products. So there's still a good opportunity for us to get this right. When I say get it right, yeah, okay, three to five year journey.

I'm thinking probably 12 to 18 months. We'll know that all these are nuts and bolts when it comes to Autotask and Datto RMM. Once we've got that to a point that we're pretty happy, then we can start tackling the other PSAs. And we do have a pretty extensive roadmap of about nine systems that we've got in our roadmap now that we want to integrate into. So the answer is not currently, but it's coming in the future.

Do you have a timeline on that? I mean, what's your timeline to have, you know, this whole thing up and running in production? I'm assuming you're building this to sell to other MSPs to help them use Teams with Autotask. That's right. So we've officially, even though we officially launched in July last year, the last, you know, six to eight months has been around the development side and to get it right for the few foundation partners that we've got on board.

We've now got 20 foundation partners on our platform using it daily and giving us feedback and giving us recommendations of what they want to see in the platform. We don't want to, honestly, we don't want to grow more than a hundred foundation partners ideally over this next six to 12 months. The main reason is because we want to make sure this is built for you guys, built for MSPs. We don't want to be one of those, because we hear so many stories that you come out, you launch, next minute you've got 10,000 MSPs on your platform and it's gone in 10 different directions and it's actually not serving anyone. We want to get it to be serving you properly first before we do our big launch to the rest of the MSP community.

So you talk about timeline, next six to 12 months, a hundred foundation partners, let's get it right. And then we'll launch into other categories, other PSA or RMM tools. And also you mentioned, I mean, so obviously, you know, you guys developed specifically in teams and we talked about other PSA tools as well. So what about other tools similar to Teams? So what about Slack and any of those other tools?

Is there any plans for any of that kind of stuff as well? Originally, yes. But with the latest developments from Teams, I don't see the need because what we've, I guess, I've had over a hundred demo sessions now with MSPs around the world. And even MSPs that have been heavily invested into Slack are now even thinking about moving over to Teams. And so if the demand there and people want it, then the answer is yes.

The demand and what I'm seeing in the market is people are moving away from Slack over to, well, MSPs are moving away from Slack anyway, over to Teams. So I guess we'll see what happens if Microsoft really cock it up and destroy the interface or doesn't work effectively, then maybe. But we'll just go with what the customers want at the end of the day. Do you have a price point for the MSPs? I mean, you know what you're planning to charge your partners.

You know, is it gonna be per seat? Is it gonna be per tenant? What are your plans? We've kept it really, really simple. So this last 12 months, we've done a lot of research into pricing and how this is going to work.

Now, because our platform is using artificial intelligence or we're using the Azure ML machine learning framework, it's based on consumption pricing. And so it starts at $59 US per month for the MSP. So not per user, not per engineer, but for the entire MSP. And so this is the two sides of the application. One is the reactive side and the other side is the proactive side.

So the reactive side is where you can run the commands, send the commands to all those tasks, and actually, you know, your engineers can get action tickets on a daily basis. That side, there's no consumption, there's no cost to it. So we're not charging for that component of it. That's like a nice to have. You can use it on your mobile, you know, you can use Teams on your mobile device and you can actively use it on a daily basis.

For any MSP, there's no cost to that function. The reactive side is based off how large your MSP is. So starting from $59 a month, where it scales up to a couple of hundred US dollars a month and this is all based on the consumption you're using. On average, we're seeing most MSPs sitting around that $100 US per month mark at the moment with the MSPs that we've got on the platform anyway, currently, but yeah, I had a conversation with a guy in the UK and he had 92 level one IT guys. And so I'm like, okay, well, your consumption is gonna be quite high, but we don't see it going higher than, you know, maybe $500 US a month, even at that size.

It's because it's based off the consumption through, yeah, ML. So another question on operability, is it a two-way street between Autotask? So if a ticket is created in Autotask, does it push to Teams? And if a ticket's created in Teams, obviously that pushes to Autotask. So all tickets that are in Autotask are now going to be in both places?

100%, yeah, that's right. Great question. So we've built it. Right now, we're gonna go launch in one particular channel within Teams. Once this REST API is available, then we'll go and launch into multiple channels.

What that means is if you have multiple queues within Autotask or within your PSA system, so level one queue, level two queue, maybe an onsite queue. So right now we're focusing on level one, obviously, because we wanna automate that through the RMM platform. So if you've got your level one queue initialized within Teams, any tickets that come into Autotask, whether it be via the portal, via third-party applications, text message, email, whatever it might be, as soon as the ticket is generated, it pushes through to Microsoft Teams to let the person know that that ticket's been generated. A few functions, and I guess it's hard to explain this without actually demoing it, but hopefully this will give you an understanding. So one of the functions from a service manager, a team leader, is that any new ticket that arrives within the system, they get notified that that ticket has been arrived.

In the activity field in the top left-hand corner of the Teams instance, that activity, the idea is to live out of that activity, right? And so they go, cool, a new ticket's arrived, what do I wanna do with that ticket? Do I wanna sign it off to an engineer? Do I wanna schedule a time directly into that engineer's calendar? Do I wanna open the ticket, i.e., do I wanna open it into the Autotask window?

So I can action it directly from within Microsoft Teams. Once the ticket is assigned to a particular engineer, then the engineers are living out of their activity feed. So they can do a similar scenario, action the ticket, they can reply to the customer. If a customer does reply to them, that reply comes into Microsoft Teams, into the pane glass within, I guess, the box that they're working out for that particular ticket, and it'll have the customer information, and that's where our artificial intelligence bot kicks in, understands the customer, understands what they're saying, understands what the next trigger should be, whether I need to escalate it to a level two engineer, whether I'm trying to run a script to solve the actual problem, that's where that intelligence lies for actioning the actual ticket. But the idea is that all engineers, all service managers will live out of Microsoft Teams.

And actually, just one other question. So you're talking about Teams. Obviously, Teams is available for people to use on any device. So I'm assuming that this will work whether you've got a mobile or the web app or the desktop app, whatever it is, as long as you've got Teams, and I guess across all platforms, right, whether it's on the Mac or Windows, whatever, it'll still work in all of those platforms as well. That's right, yeah.

We're actually getting, so we're relying on both Autotask API and we're relying on Microsoft's API, right? So it's a bit out of our control. But what we're seeing is the Android devices are getting a lot more functionality than iPhone devices. So I guess, hopefully, everyone will be on the same page, but we're getting different feedback from different people because they're using different devices. At the end of the day, it's out of our control because that's the Microsoft Teams thing.

But the feedback we are getting, well, this is before COVID, was when we're doing, MSPs are doing onsite jobs. They're going out to see their clients. The great thing is that we've built functionality into the system so when you are onsite, you can use, you can actually get tickets from the mobile device. So if you want to take a photo of a device, say a hardware device or a serial number, you can upload that attachment directly into Teams, which uploads it directly into the ticket in Autotask. So for onsite engineers, it's really effective using a mobile device that way.

Oh, that's pretty awesome. I'm glad that, I'm glad you said that Android has a lot more functionality. I've always been a big Android fan. So, you know, I have no idea why anyone would want to use any other mobile phone. You know, Android's the way forward, just saying.

I think he's going to have a whole podcast just on that one topic. Exactly. I think we should have an Android versus iPhone topic or yeah, just a whole series of podcasts on just those. So I know that sounds really cool. Rayanne, did you have any other questions that you wanted to ask Lucas?

No, I have to be honest. I did not even hear, I didn't even know Triviu. Yeah, I did Google you just to, you know, find out what you guys did before we met today. So this sounds really pretty cool. I mean, what do you think, if you could summarize it, what would be the number one benefit to an MSP in order to demo or partner with Triviu?

Efficiency. So our first goal is customer service and efficiency. And so if we can get more efficient time out of our engineers and get back to our customers a lot quicker, then we're offering better customer service, we're getting better efficiency into our MSP, that turns into dollars. And so that's our first focus is 100% around customer service and efficiency. I mean, this is a great tool.

I mean, I've actually spoken to Lucas and his team before, and, you know, I've had a look at this tool, I've had a play with it, and I mean, I'm really, really impressed by what it can do. So I'm not just saying that because he's a guest on our podcast. I mean, it really genuinely is. And as an MSP consultant, I show this to my clients all the time and people are loving it. So I think you guys have got a really, really good tool going on there, so, yeah.

Thank you, Chris, I really appreciate it. How can people contact you or maybe get a demo? Yeah, so we officially have gone live. Like you mentioned, like you hadn't heard of us before, that's because we've been keeping it under the scenes on purpose, because we didn't just want a massive influx of MSPs, but we're really comfortable with that too now. Going off like that, we've put all these workarounds in place before the REST API is available.

So if you are an MSP and you are using Autotask PSA tool, then we are now open to taking more foundation partners on. And so the links will be in this podcast. Honestly, I'm the only unique name in the world. So if you Google Lucas Middlecroft, the only one that appears, so that's nice and easy to find me. All the LinkedIn and website obviously all refers back to this particular product.

But yeah, I'm happy to share a code, a coupon code at the end of this podcast. You can share this with all your viewers or listeners and then they can easily jump on and subscribe and register to become a foundation partner. I should actually mention, the reason I'm talking about foundation partners is because these are the ones that are actually actively working with us to build it the way they want. And so we are giving a huge 40% discount for life on the actual platform. And the reason we're doing that is because they're the ones that are giving us feedback that we need to actually build it the way they want it.

So yeah, if you get in before that foundation partnership finalizes in the next few months, then yeah, massive discount for life. Awesome, that's great. And I mean, what we'll do is we'll put all those links that you've given us. I know you sent us a bunch of links before the podcast. So we'll put all of those in the show notes.

And if you can send us that coupon code, we'll make sure that that gets into the show notes as well. And then if anyone wants to contact you, they can come through there or contact you directly for a demo. So yeah, I mean, that was great Lucas and thank you really so much for your time and I wish you the best of luck with the product. Yeah, thanks Lucas. Thanks man, I really appreciate it.

It was great to have you. Thank you for having me. Good to meet you. All right, so Zoran, all that's left for me to say is the PSA is the key to your business success. Go out and make an impact on your world today.

Stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane. 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.