[20] – Interview with Wim Kerkhoff, CEO TopLeft

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts, Rayanne 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, everyone, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact Podcast with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayanne Buccianico. We're an independent PSA podcast designed to help MSPs all over the world on all things PSA.

You can get your questions answered by Rayanne and myself and learn how to get the best out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiencies within your MSP. Of course, you can get in touch with us on all of the social networks, and we'll put some links to those groups on the show notes. So, Rayanne, what's been happening with you over the last week or so? How's things in lockdown? We are living the dream over here in Florida.

Temperatures are rising because summer's coming really quickly, and weather's beautiful. My vegetable garden is doing great, and here we are having another wonderful podcast episode. So, thanks. How are you doing on your side of the pond? Yeah, all good.

We are sort of in a bit of a looser restrictions than we were when I last spoke to you. We're now allowed to go out to parks, although still a little bit of social distance. We still have to sit two meters apart, but we can now go to parks and exercise as much as we like and all that kind of good stuff. So, yeah, hopefully all is good, and hopefully it'll all be lifted soon. Yep, we can all hope.

Absolutely. So, Rayanne, with us today we have a very special guest, somebody who I've been speaking to over the past month or two. With us we have Wim Kerkhoff, who is the CEO of Kerkhoff Technologies, and they're the creators of a really, really good bit of software. Again, I've been having a look at that software. They do Kanban boards for Autotask, a product called TopLift.

So, I'm going to let Wim introduce himself in a few minutes and just talk about some of this awesome software that they've developed and how they can help MSPs to be more effective and more efficient. So, Chris, before you go on, for those of us, like myself, who do not know what a Kanban board is, can you just kind of give us a quick overview? Are you asking me or Wim? I'm asking you. We want to hear from you, Chris.

Yeah, right. She's asking me. So, do you know Trello? I know the name. Okay.

I don't know what it does. So, actually, I'm not going to carry on with this because I don't actually know it. Okay. I'm not going to do it justice, so I think it's best to let Wim do it. Just let me introduce Wim and then can we ask him that question?

Sure. So, hi, Wim. How are you doing? For those listeners who don't know who you are, please tell us a little bit about yourself and where it all started. Welcome, Wim.

Yeah. Thank you, Chris and Rianne. So, yeah, we're out in BC, Canada. I've had my own IT company now for 13 years. Love a lot of different technologies, love building tools.

And so, we've actually got two MSPs. One's doing Windows IT support and the other one is doing Linux servers, which is quite unique to have clients around the world that we support. And we get into a lot of development as well, just different tools and custom projects. And so, we got into building the Top Left product about, yeah, three or four years ago. We can get into that later.

But as far as what Kanban is, it's a simple concept that's been around for probably 50 or 60 years. It comes out of Japan and is using grocery stores and manufacturing on the shop floor at a lot of different places. And it can also be used for knowledge work. You can actually just do this with like sticky notes on a whiteboard. And so, Trello is a digital way of doing that, but I've actually talked to some of our clients.

They're actually in their office. They've got a whiteboard of sticky notes representing every service ticket, every project they're working on. So, it's a way to visualize what you're doing because it gets kind of hidden in your PSA, whether it's a ConnectWise or Autotask or whatever you're using. It's just a bunch of data. So, the idea is to visualize what you're doing.

That's the first principle is visualize what you're doing. Don't change your process. And once you see what's going on and what the bottlenecks are and what's falling between the cracks, then you can start to make small changes in that process. And the idea is it's not top down of people in the corner office or in the management team telling the rest of the team what to do, but enabling your people doing the work to say, hey, if we make this change or stop doing this or add this step, that will improve the quality and get work done quicker. So, that's the second one, continuous improvement.

And then improving flow, how do you get work done quicker? So, focus on finishing instead of starting. It's really tempting for everyone to start working and not finish it and gets just clogging up the system. And then the final thing is limiting the work in progress, like how many tickets are being worked on at a time. If you can reduce that, you improve your velocity.

Just getting, it's just perhaps a smaller, it's like a pipe of water. You can, it can be a smaller pipe. If you increase that flow and the pressure, then you'll actually get more coming out the other end. So, how do we remove those roadblocks in that pipeline to get more done? But it starts with just visualizing, understanding what's going on and making those invisible problems and bottlenecks visible.

Interesting. I'm sorry to just jump right in, but, so tell me how your product makes these Autotask tickets visual. Yeah. So, what we've done is taken, like, created a user interface that's much like a Trello or a JIRA or some of the other tools, but it integrated it to these two major PSAs. So, using the API, we pull the data out and then show those tickets as a card or as a sticky note on an interface.

And the idea is you can drag and drop between the columns to change the status. So, you can see that work moving from, yeah, left to right as it goes from just a lifecycle of a ticket. It's being created, it's being scheduled, it's being prioritized, it's being worked, completed, reviewed, closed. So, it's kind of an intuitive way of doing that. So, it's really easy to integrate and your data's up to date.

Whereas, if you use Trello, you have to type your data into your Trello cards and it's never up to date. You're always dealing with old data. So, how is it pulling the data from Autotask? I mean, is it using, is it sorting it by queues or how is it organized? Oh, okay.

Organization. That's up to you, really, as, or the needs of the team and what is your work. So, you could definitely do it by queue, but you could say, okay, let's do it by client or by resource. So, you can have a swim lane by resource if you wanted. So, you could basically, when you set up your Kanban board, you're going to choose which data to show and how to show it.

And then at runtime, you can further filter it. So, you can say, I have a board with all these tickets, but I just want to show Joe's tickets or Harry's tickets or to show Acme Corp. So, it's quite flexible that way to show what really matters. Like, you might have 400 tickets open in Autotask, hundreds in a queue, but it's just, you can't wrap your head around that visually. So, pick out what really matters, what are the urgent ones or what's a key process and focus on that.

Well, so, talking about, you know, you were mentioning about Kanban, kind of very similar to Trello. So, that's really, you know, kind of working from left to right, moving cards around based upon what status or priority or whatever that they're in. So, you know, if somebody isn't familiar with Kanban technologies and how Kanban works in particular, I mean, you know, is something like a Kanban solution or top left or something, is it easy for somebody that has no idea and no concept of Kanban, is it easy for them to pick up and start working with it or is there a huge sort of learning curve? You know, can you just talk around that a little bit for us? Yes.

So, if they really have zero experience with Kanban, really Kanban fits into lean and agile. If they got zero exposure to that, I think there's a bit of a learning curve on the methodology and the mindset. So, I would say it's this, there's a lot of benefit and potential opportunity to be had, but it's like 90% mindset and methodology and like 10% are tool. So, the quicker they can get up to speed with that, the better of kind of those four principles I mentioned, like visualize your work, increase your flow, minimize how many things you're working on at each step in the process, which they can get that, which is really, that's a simple concept. Yeah, they can get up and going quick with that and to get the real power, yeah, you got to keep learning, improving on that.

But if somebody is coming to our product, we do give training, we've got lots of stuff in our knowledge bases that's accessible, we've got recorded webinars, different things to help them learn the methodology behind it. But I encourage people not to overthink it because these concepts are really simple, like just visualize what you're doing, as crazy and as chaotic as it might be, you need to see the chaos so that you can start to make improvements. But I've seen people jump into this and like, oh, we've got to like reinvent our whole process. And I'm like, no, that's anti Kanban to go and redesign your process before you start using Kanban. So, that's some of the guidance we give to them.

But it's just like, yeah, just jump into it, get started, that you can get up and going in a day with this. There's not a huge learning curve that way. Yeah, exactly. I think, I mean, I've had a look at it and I'm fairly familiar with Kanban methodologies. But if you've used, like you say, a product similar to Trello or Asana or any of the others that are out there, then I think learning how to use a product like Top Left would be a very simple, you know, change to, or it'd be really simple to learn that and simple to kind of get on board with it because the principles of how the software works is pretty much the same as one of those tools.

Is that correct? Yeah, there's something like Trello doesn't do, like they don't do swim lanes and it's not full Kanban, it's close. But so it's often we compare to it, but yeah, there are some differences. Like they don't do work in progress limits at all. You can't have a setting on the column that says no more than five cards in this column.

They don't do that. And that's a key part of the Kanban method. Okay. And you, again, you've been talking about, you know, predominantly tickets. So, you know, do you sort of integrate with a project side of Autotask as well?

Because I think- Oh, yes. Yeah. We have full integration to projects and as well as sales as well. So, oh, sorry, I should correct you. That's the one thing we're missing in Autotask is the sales activities and opportunities.

But we do have that for ConnectWise. It's coming for Autotask. It's just really low on the list. Okay. So yes, you can definitely see all the project tasks as well.

Cool. So you mentioned ConnectWise there as well. So obviously you integrate with both the two products and you say from a sales perspective, you integrate with ConnectWise as well. So, you know, a lot of our listeners, we, you know, we're not specific to any PSA on this podcast. In terms of how it works with ConnectWise, did you mention that it uses the sales side?

So what is that? Like opportunities, you can move them around or- Yeah. Opportunities and activities. So you can create a board just to see all your activities and see how they're going through that, all the different stages of the pipeline and then see your activities. Whether it's like a sales or a billing or procurement activity, you can see all of those.

So the ConnectWise sell program used to be Quozel, right? Yes. Yeah. And lots of people that are not using Quozel may use QuoteWorks. Any future plans to integrate with QuoteWorks like you do with ConnectWise Sell?

Or is it simply the only reason that you're in with ConnectWise Sell is because of its integration with ConnectWise Manage? Well, we don't do anything with Sell specifically, but ConnectWise Sell will synchronize all its data into the opportunity tables in ConnectWise Manage. So that's what we're grabbing from. Okay. Yeah.

So I think- Go on, Ryan. I was going to say, we use QuoteWorks and I've used Sell in the past as well, so I'm familiar with both of those. Yeah, exactly. Ryan, I think it's more from the opportunity side. So once that opportunity is coming from QuoteWorks or ConnectWise Sell, it's coming from any of those two products, then it gets created as an opportunity in one of those PSA tools.

And then it's from there that it gets managed through the TopLeft product. I have seen more and more MSPs out there trying to use the CRM opportunities in Autotask. And one of their biggest complaints is their inability to see the data in a complete format. So I might encourage you to step up that priority on the Autotask integration for the CRM, because it is being used and people do rely on it. And there are many features that are lacking in the CRM that it just makes it very difficult to visualize the whole thing.

You can get to the opportunities board and you can see it, but there's not much you can do with that information other than click on it, right? So it would be great. Yeah. And that's the same challenge in ConnectWise. I've been using ConnectWise for 10 years and yeah, I've had multiple salespeople and they all struggle with the CRM.

And I see that's a common issue with a lot of teams is that ConnectWise has a lot of best practices around the PSA side and your service boards, but not much leadership for sales opportunities. Like the data is there, but it's so hard to access and visualize. That's where we come in. Yeah. And I think, I mean, that's a great thing you said there, Wim.

And I think a tool like this, I think would really help, as you said, to visualize the opportunity side of, I guess, any PSA tool really much more effectively than you currently have within the product. So the good thing about Autotask, for example, is it does have widgets and dashboards that you can kind of visualize your data in other ways than you can with other PSA tools. So you can have a graph that can show you at what stage you are in the sale cycle and all these kinds of things. But I think being able to integrate that with the same tool that you're using to integrate your tickets and your projects and all those kinds of things and simply just click on a card and drag it from one stage of the opportunity to the other and it changes the opportunity. I think that's going to be something that a lot of our listeners and a lot of MSPs, I think, are going to be looking for.

Yeah, the vision, my vision there is to be a lot like Pipedrive. So Pipedrive is a very visual sales pipeline tool. You can check on Pipedrive.com and I love their interface and I love to build that type right into our product on top of ConnectWise and Autotask that people don't need to switch CRMs. They can keep their data in their PSA because doing a CRM sync to like Infusionsoft or HubSpot, Salesforce, all those things, that's it's a lot of money and a lot of time. I just I think it's there's a lot of value in keeping your data in PSA and just integrate with some of these add-ons.

And another question for you in terms of, you know, how the data is stored within TopLeft, I mean, do you just reference the data that's inside Autotask or do you store it in any way? No, we suck it all down and synchronize it. So there's tasks that run every so many seconds and minutes to synchronize all those setup tables and the tickets and everything to our servers. OK, so that's going to lead me on to another question, which I know a lot of our UK listeners will certainly be asking is in terms of, you know, where are the data centers? Are they kind of in North America somewhere?

Do you have European ones? Right now, they're all in North America. Yep. And last month we finished the GPDR compliant stuff. So we've checked that box off as well.

OK, so it is compliant with GDPR in Europe. That's good because, I mean, you know, that's a that's a big thing, certainly for UK and European. I mean, I know, you know, you could argue that the UK isn't really part of Europe anymore, but I think we're still going to we still are adhering to the GDPR side of things. And I think, you know, there's there's still some agreements with how things are going to be, how data is going to be handled within the continent of Europe for UK customers. So, you know, I certainly think it's a it's a big thing.

Are there any plans to have any data centers in Europe or in the UK, or is it is it only kind of to keep them in North America? We're not against doing that. It's just there's got to be a request and demand for it. It hasn't been a deal killer and nobody says, OK, we're not going to sign up because we don't have it and it's got to be in the UK or nobody said that yet. So if that really came out and people say, hey, we want to sign up, but you got to have it in Europe and we can send something up.

It wouldn't be that big of a deal for us to do. So what's the price point on this? I mean, how are you selling this product? I'm assuming you're selling it to other MSPs, yeah? Yes.

And are you charging per user, per license, per amount of data? How are you charging for your product? The simplest way that we came up with the license is per per user for the users that you're displaying data for. So somebody might have, let's say, 30 Autotask licenses and they want to have everybody log in, but they're only showing data for, let's say, 10 people in their project team. They would only pay us for those 10 project resources that they're displaying tickets for.

Well, what if you're sorting the information by queue and all 30 people happen to have tickets in that queue? Then you would need to license all 30 so that you're not missing those tickets. Oh, I see. So you are displaying users' data and not some other way, right? Yeah.

Because we have clients where they might have 30 Autotask users and have a manager that logs in to manage the work, seal the work, dispatch, service management, project management for everybody. But it wouldn't be fair to us if they only paid for one license out of 30. No, right. I'm just trying to understand the logic. So let's say that a person was a secondary resource on a ticket and was not one of the licensed users.

Would that ticket show up because it was in the in the proper queue? It would only show up if the primary person on that ticket is licensed. Yeah, that was not a trick question. I was just curious how it worked. Yeah.

We do have another billing model which is based on managers. So we basically pay a bit more for a manager and they can see up to work for up to 10 people. But we found there weren't many people on it. So on that license or that licensing plan. So we've kind of taken it off the website, but it is still there if you click in.

So how much is it per user per month? I'm assuming it's a month. Oh, yeah. If people commit to an annual payment, then it's $21 a month per user. And if they just pay monthly, then it's $27 per month per user.

Is there Canadian dollars or U.S.? It's U.S. There's no set up fee. So we include that in training and help to get up and going. And the minimum is just three users.

Oh, OK. And just another question I know. I've used the product, so I kind of know the answer to this, you know, for the for the benefits of our listeners. In terms of the synchronization, I'm assuming it's a it's a two way sync. So if I change the status on top left or something, it automatically updates that status in AutoCask and vice versa and then moves it from to change the status in all the tasks.

It moves it from one lane to the other in the Kanban software. Is that is that correct? Yeah. Some things are basically a real time that as soon as you make that action, we're going to do an API call and update in the other system. Other things, we need to wait for like a 15 or 30 second timer to go because it's more pull based.

But yeah, that's sort of worst case is you've got to wait 30 seconds. But most things would be a real time updated. That's cool. 30 seconds sounds pretty real time to me. To me, it's too long.

I'm like, I want everything. I'm just an impatient kind of guy. But to me, I'm the most impatient person. I think my wife will attest to that. I am literally if something doesn't happen in a split second, I'm like, why is the software so slow?

Why isn't it working? But I understand that. I mean, 30 seconds obviously isn't isn't that long in the overall scheme of things. So actually, just one other question I wanted to ask you, I know again, I know you and I have had this conversation a couple of times, but if somebody wanted to learn about sort of the Kanban principles or just want to know a little bit more, are there any kind of books that you would recommend or are there any papers or videos or something that you would refer somebody to to kind of learn about this? Yeah, there's a number of things.

So there's general Kanban knowledge, like there's a book called Personal Kanban. How do you apply Kanban in your personal life? So you can have it on your fridge and managing what the kids are doing or different things, your to do's or your chores. You could you could do that as a book called Personal Kanban. There's a fellow from Microsoft had a book on Kanban.

I forget the title, but that one was really good. There is a popular book I really recommend for the IT industry called The Phoenix Project. It's written as a novel. And it gets into lean, agile theory of constraints, which is that's a whole other discussion on its own. But understanding bottlenecks and constraints in a process or in a company.

And so it's written as a novel of this IT department in this large like auto parts manufacturer, United States, and their transition from these huge monolithic projects that are all over budget and and like two years behind to a more nimble, agile way of working using Kanban and a theory of constraints. So I'm pointing at my background here, of course, which you won't hear on a on a podcast, but I love it so much. I framed the book cover and it's hanging on the wall. So we give that given out dozens of copies of that book and I highly recommend it. It's an engaging read with because it's a novel with real characters.

That's a great one. Yeah, just go on YouTube, search Kanban. There's lots of like five minute videos about what is Kanban. And another book is called Making Work Visible from Dominika de Grande, which is highly recommended to go through some case studies in the team she's worked in to visualize work. And yeah, I mean, based on your recommendation, I went out and bought the book and started reading.

It's a real fun read. So what we'll do is we'll we'll obviously put a link to the book in the show notes called The Phoenix Project. And when I say I've read it for people like me, I prefer to listen to stuff rather than read it. You know, when I spend a lot of time in the car, I have time to listen to stuff. But I've got the the audio books that is available on Audible as well.

It's a it's a great book, great read and really gives you an idea to learn a little bit more about, you know, Agile and Kanban and how all those things work as well. And then we also run webinars every month that are just educational, show value, educating around the Kanban approach, how do you pull work versus pushing it, minimizing work in progress. So obviously it's around selling our product, but there's a lot of education in there. So I recommend watching some of the recordings there. We have those product updates, different things.

So we have kind of two themes we have going, one around project management and the other one around service delivery. So you can see real world examples and Kanban boards for that. Cool. Rayanne, have you got got anything else for WIM? I do.

I do, Wim, because your your product sounds really interesting. How would people get in touch with you? Obviously, there's a website, topleft.team, and you can schedule a demo there. You can email me directly at WIM at topleft.team. That's W-I-M at topleft.team and get in contact that way.

You can schedule a call or answer any questions there. Is there anything more you want to tell us about your software or your product before we end our podcast for today? Not that, but there's a quote I really want to share that we had a demo with a potential client a week or two ago, and he loved Kanban so much, like just the methodology and the mindset that he said every morning he heats up some Kanban on a spoon and gets it straight into the main line. Oh, that's cute. I love that saying.

And when he found our product, he's like, yeah, just take my money, sign me up, let's get going. So you're going to frame that and put that on your wall as well, Wim? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a shame.

It's a shame that this is an audio podcast, because I think for those, maybe we should put a picture, I guess, of this on the show notes if we can. But, you know, for those who haven't reached out to, you know, if you want to ever have a conversation with him, I'm sure he'll be happy to do it over video. Have a look at his back wall. There's a bunch of cool books and actually one of them, I know it's nothing to do with Kanban, but one of my favorite books I see there is Traction. I noticed the Traction, too.

I was going to say something, but I let it go. Yeah, which I know a lot of MSPs are using, and I know, you know, and that's a whole other subject and a whole other podcast for another day. But, you know, yeah, what a great podcast and what a great product. And I really hope that, you know, people kind of reach out to you, have a look at the product, you know, and at the very least get a demo from you and, you know, see what it can do. So really all that's left for me to say, Rayanne, is your PSA is the key to your MSP success.

So go out and make an impact on your world today. 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.