[21] – Interview with Karl Palachuk, Small biz thoughts

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts, Rayanne 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, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts, Chris Tim and Rayanne Bucianico. I'm Rayanne, and I'm here with my co-host, Chris Tim.

Chris, how are you doing today? I'm good. Thanks. How are you, Rayanne? I'm doing great.

And, you know, we have a very special guest on here with us today. If you would allow me to please introduce Carl Palachuk. Carl is the author of many books in the IT channel. He speaks at a number of different places and conferences, and he has a podcast or two or three. I don't even know.

I've lost count over the years, but so please welcome Carl Palachuk to PSA Impact. We are so glad to have you. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself and, you know, what you've got going on?

Sure. So I built and sold a couple of managed service businesses in Sacramento, California. I've written more than 20 books, almost all of them about running IT service businesses. And I run a community, the Small Biz Thoughts Technology Community. And basically, I'm at the point in my life I can now dedicate everything I do to helping everybody else to be very successful.

So if I'm not doing that, just book me and I'll see what I can do. And you're quite a bit of a traveler too, although this year you probably haven't gotten out much. No. Well, so it's funny. So I am a bit of a traveler.

I put on 50,000 miles, a little over 50,000 miles in February of this year. And then I came home and haven't been allowed to leave. So a bit of cabin fever setting in perhaps? Well, it's funny. So I've actually already bought tickets to go to three different events in October and to go to another three countries in November.

And I don't know if any of that's going to happen. But I have the tickets because the airfare was super cheap and it's all refundable. So worst case scenario, I get my money back and I reschedule. And one of the things for people who can't obviously see this, obviously it's an audio podcast, but Carl has a picture of Hawaii behind him. So at least if you're not traveling, at least you can turn around and look at Hawaii behind you, right?

Yeah. You can take a screenshot if you want. Yeah. Maybe we should take a screenshot and then we'll put it up in the show notes so everyone can see what's behind Carl. So anyway, I wanted to have you on because you are just about to, or have you already released your latest book?

Tell us about that. So the latest book is The Absolutely Unbreakable Rules of Service Delivery. And it's going to be out in July. So right now it's in the hands of the layout artist and then it needs to be proofread again and then it'll go to print. So The Absolutely Unbreakable Rules of Service Delivery literally came out of the rules that I use to run my businesses.

Over the years, I would write down these things that I say all the time, like get paid in advance for everything. And there are certain just phrases, we don't have to pick up every nickel we find, right? But they grew and grew and grew and eventually I would create a poster and people who work for me would have this poster on a bulletin board next to their monitor. And then eventually I just said, you know what, I should actually write these up for other people because it's not like there's 75, there's about 25 rules, 27 rules altogether that I consider to be absolutely unbreakable. And they primarily work for an IT consulting business, but you know, there's a whole lot of them that are good for any business out there.

Interesting. Like, what were some of your favorites? Well, my favorite, my number one favorite, because it's the number one rule is prioritize everything, right? So I'm a big fan of disabling the ability to use that scheduling tool in the PSA, for example. I think that you should only schedule things if you absolutely have to and everything else, people should work from highest to lowest and from the oldest to the newest.

So you know, you get bored, you look at the board and you say, okay, which tickets can I work? And you take the highest level, oldest ticket that you can work and you work that, right? So if you prioritize everything, everybody in the company is always working on the single most important thing they need to do at any given moment. And so when your phone rings, you know, let's say right now your phone rings, what are the chances that answering that phone is the single most important thing you need to do in your business? My guess is there's no chance of that.

I guess it's the million dollar prospect, right? That's about to pay you a million dollars for doing some business with it. And how many times has that happened in your... Agreed, right? But that's the thing is, we always think, oh, but it could be super important.

It could be this, it could be that. And it's always a salesperson. You know, I love this about you because I always learn something from you. My entire life is on a schedule and on a calendar. And you know, so Gabrielle, she's in charge of my calendar and you know, most of the days I wake up, I have no idea where I'm supposed to be or what time I'm supposed to be there, you know, until I look at my calendar because that is now officially somebody else's job because I always say that, you know, I need adult supervision.

Somebody else needs to be handling my calendar because I can't do it anymore. But what you're saying is that, you know, only the high priority items should be on that calendar and then I should start to triage the rest of the work, you know, because I will tell you that I have emails probably that have gone unanswered for the last three weeks because there's no time left in my schedule because there was never any left in me time. Think about it this way and I'm pretty sure this is the same in the UK. If you go to the doctor after 9.30 in the morning, they're behind schedule and they will remain behind schedule for the rest of the day because they have everything set up in these tightly blocked tiny little appointments and if you go over by 30 seconds, well, then the next person is 60 seconds late to start and they go over 30 seconds so the next person is two minutes late to start and that's how the day goes. I believe that if you're always working on the single most important thing you need to do, then you don't, you know, it takes practice to not worry about the list.

But I used to have a technician, Dan, and he was always like frustrated all the time and I sat him down one time and I said, what is wrong? Like why do you feel stress? And he said, because we have literally at the time, we have thousands of machines under management and there are hundreds of tickets in the system and it never stops and you close a ticket and there's two more and it just keeps coming and coming and coming. And I explained to him, you don't have to worry about that, right? Manny has to worry about that, right?

You have to worry about one ticket. You take one ticket and you do absolutely the best that you can do and you close that ticket and then you go take one more ticket. You're guaranteed employment for the rest of your life and we get to stay in business because there's a backlog. If there's no backlog, there's no business. So you know, use the ticketing system.

And it's also why I believe that absolutely everything that you need to do in your business should be in your PSA or your ticketing system. Whether it's internal tasks or client facing tickets, absolutely everything that needs to be done should be there and then it can be prioritized and then you can work from highest to lowest, oldest to newest. And it's only when somebody says, well, this vendor wants to update their line of business software. It's got to be Thursday at two o'clock. Great.

Set an appointment. But even with clients, we would tell them, hey, we're going to be there Monday afternoon or Monday morning. We don't say nine o'clock because at nine oh one, then we get a call, hey, your technician is supposed to be here. What the hell? So big blocks of time and schedule as little as possible.

It's a change in lifestyle, but it dramatically improves the productivity of your company, in my opinion. So, Carl, I just want to touch on something you mentioned about everything is a ticket. So as far as you're concerned, absolutely everything that you do in the business, even admin tasks or anything like that, is that a ticket or is it only the support stuff? Yeah, when we first installed our first PSA, I remember testing the system by putting in a task that said clean your desk and then assigning it to a technician. And then I look and sure enough, there was a guy who never, ever, ever, ever cleaned his desk the entire time he worked for us, except that day.

So I knew that I could use it for internal tests. So I mean, literally everything. Did the invoicing go out right? Did you contact clients or follow up on this? Did you schedule roadmaps?

Anything that needs to get done should be in that system. And actually, nowadays, I mean, Autotask makes that so easy, certainly as a PSA tool, because it's got checklists built into your tickets, right? So you've got your ticket categories and then you can check off different options on the checklist as you're working through stuff. So that ties in kind of really nicely with using a PSA specifically. Also think about there's an entire industry.

You can Google tools for scheduling or project management or team management. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, and they range from $20 to $99 per user per month. And you already have all of that in a ticketing system. Absolutely. You do.

And in a PSA, you have literally every one of those scheduling kind of tools or some kind of tool that allows you to check off those checklists. All that kind of stuff nowadays is built into pretty much every PSA under the sun. Right. And you also have a list of all of your employees right there, right? I mean, it's literally all the pieces you need for monday.com or one of these systems.

It's literally all there. Absolutely. So Karl, just to kind of change tack a little bit and just talk about, there's a question that I wanted to get your opinion on and I kind of know your opinion on it, but it would be useful for our listeners to speak to you about this. So it always comes up from people about whether they should do or go for a PSA tool first or an RMM tool first. And if they get an RMM tool, should they go with the RMM tool that comes with the vendor or should they get a vendor agnostic one?

What is your thoughts on that? Well, first of all, if I were going to start another managed service business today, I would start with the RMM tool. And for the very simple reason that it allows me to do all of the things I promise I'm going to do in my managed service business, right? It allows me to remote into everybody's machine, set up the antivirus, set up the alerts, begin patch management, all of that. Now, assuming I'm going to start with just me, then I got to figure out how I'm going to track my time.

And so very quickly, I would get a PSA or at least get a ticketing system that allows me to track not only my time for tasks, but also my total time with regard to payroll. Even though it's only me, I have to track all my time in order to know how billable a client is, how billable a project is, how billable a ticket is, so forth and so on. So for me, it's a really quick one, two step, but the RMM does come first by a minute. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, so I think you and I have kind of different schools of thought on that, because I would actually go for the PSA tool first, hands down.

For the reasons you just talked about, right? Because I can then track which clients are more profitable. I can also use the RMM tool to feed information into my PSA tool. So now I've got all of that information about the customers stored somewhere, because the PSA tool is the kind of the heart of the business. It's the central operating system of the business, if you like.

So everything needs to feed back into that. Well, it is by a minute, right? That's all. But there is something to be said about, you know, if the topic is service delivery, how is one person going to deliver all of those services without that RMM tool, right? So the RMM tool will allow you to log in or at least run scripts in order to, you know, push patches and update antivirus and all of these other things, you know, check backups.

You know, there's so much, you know, at the service level, I think that the RMM tool does and the PSA manages the administrative type of work. I kind of think they go hand in hand. You know, you can almost not have one without the other. Although there are tons and tons of MSPs out there using neither, right? You know, so...

It's amazing to me. Like when I meet people who don't have an RMM or a PSA, I'm like, how do you actually run your business? And there are people who've been doing it for 10 years, 20 years. Great. Absolutely.

I mean, I was, in fact, just speaking to a guy today for something completely different. And he doesn't have a PSA tool at all in his business. And, you know, they're in the process of looking. And I think, you know, he was saying they were using Excel to do their management of tickets and they were manually when the customers were phoning in. I'm like, how do you run a business like that?

But before any of this stuff existed, when I hired my first employee, I built a website with a form so that they could go to a client's office. There was a dropdown of what client they were at, who was filling out the form, when did they start, when did they stop, what did they do? And I would take that and literally copy and paste it into QuickBooks to send an invoice. Right. And but it was like, how can you not have a system for tracking this stuff?

You know, and so I remember that, trust me. I remember that you gave like you gave out like pads of these. I was at your desk today. Checklists. I remember that.

We used to have a thing that technicians would carry around with just a little half sheet of paper. I was at your desk today. I did change your password. I did not change your password. You know, I checked the antivirus and we used to have a there's a four step process in our company of how you stand up from a client's desk.

So before you stand up from a client's desk, even if all you've done is adjust the colors on their monitor, you verify that they can print, that they can get to the Internet, that they can send and receive email and that they can open a file on the server. If you don't do that, then you will stand up and they will say, oh, you know, it all worked before Rayanne sat down. Occasionally you find something that doesn't work and you fix it. I have been accused of that from time to time, by the way. Exactly.

All you did was adjust the color on the monitor. But now the email doesn't work. OK, so I have a question. 2020 has been a and let's say let's call it an interesting year. And, you know, we're about halfway through the year.

So what do you think or what do you see as being on the horizon for the IT channel and MSPs as a whole in what's coming? I will say it's so interesting to me. This is one of the few times when I can predict that exactly what we went through, we will go through backwards in the second half of the year. And here's what I mean. So Q1, most people had a good Q1, like by the time it was over, they knew stuff was weird.

They knew stuff was coming. They had collected up all their cash, I hope, and squirreled it away and, you know, sort of set in for a potentially long haul. April is so interesting. April starts out the quarter gangbusters. I mean, we made money hand over fist, getting people out of their offices and into their homes and setting them up.

May was OK. June, we're starting to feel the pressure. And so Q2, most people actually did OK, but that was dominated by sales in April, right? Which when you're selling recurring revenue, that means sales in May and June don't have to do as well for you to have a good quarter. Does that make sense?

So I think the exact opposite is going to happen. I think that we will have a very weak July, followed by, you know, getting back up to speed in August and having a great September. And then Q4 should be good if you put all your stuff in place and we somehow manage to push through all the quarantines and everything else. But, you know, if you are feeling pressure now, trust me, you will feel far more pressure. And again, the loss of sales in July will echo through August and September, right?

The good news is we tend to have clients for life, right? So if you can get new clients, chances are good that they will stick with you. And you've got to focus on service delivery. But if I were to guess what the rest of the year looks like, it looks like a lot of hard work. But then nobody said this was going to be easy.

Yeah, no, I agree. I think, yeah, you know, I think we're over the worst of it, right? I think that, well, certainly the whole world seems to be coming out of quarantine. And I mean, I know some parts are going back in. There are certain counties in the UK that are kind of self-isolating again, just, you know, that county on its own is kind of going back into isolation rather than the whole country.

So for you guys, obviously, counties here are not what you guys would call counties. Ours are kind of what you guys would call estates, right? So, yeah. So, you know, what they're doing is they're saying because they've found, you know, those particular areas to have, you know, quite a lot of cases of corona still, they are locking down just those areas and the rest of the UK is sort of starting to open up. So I think overall, yeah, I think we're pretty much coming out of it.

And I think it's going to, I agree with you, I think it's going to be a little bit bumpy in sort of July and August. And then, you know, toward the end of the year, I think we're going to have a really good year, hopefully. I hope so. So my experience has been a little different and I think that my outlook is maybe a little different as well. I'm finding, right, so May was flat.

May, you know, May was kind of like nobody knew what was going on. People were not letting go of their money. They, you know, they had the money from the PPP. So they, you know, were focused on keeping their employees paid and, you know, on the payroll, you know, and then here comes June. And then the, and Chris, you probably are not familiar with this, but we have what's called an Economic Injury Disaster Loan that the Small Business Administration.

So now people's bank accounts were full in June. And then I have seen a number of MSPs sell a ton of hardware in June. So they actually had a very strong June. And I think that July might be, you know, residual cash left in the EIDL loans. And then come August, I think the PPP money, the EIDL money, everything's going to be gone.

And that's when we're going to start to see, you know, what the recession or what the economy is really going to do for the remainder of the year. That's what I'm predicting. I don't think that it's going to get better. You know, other thoughts aside, we don't have a great plan as a country, as Americans, we don't have a really good plan as to how we're going to get this virus under control. And until somebody comes along with a decent plan, I'm not sure that we're going to get out of it anytime soon.

And that's all I have to say about that. I don't think anyone's got a good way to get out of it. I mean, I think everyone's the same, right? I mean, in terms of we're coming out of it here, but I think it's still no one really kind of knows how long it's still going to hang around for or, you know, no one's got any plans to, you know, vaccinate everybody. So, you know, I don't think anyone really has an answer or anyone.

And if they did, then, you know, I think this would be the time for them to obviously come out and get everyone vaccinated and get us back to normal, right? But I don't think anyone has got that. So getting back to some of your books, Carl, before we run out of time here. So I know that you've got this new book, the, you know, the Unbreakable Rules of Service Delivery, but you have a number of other books that have been, you know, helped people and MSPs and the IT community over the years. Out of all of your books, which would you say is your favorite and you feel has been the most beneficial to your readers?

So if you don't mind, I'll talk about three books. So my favorite of all time is called Relax, Focus, Succeed, which isn't directly related to IT service delivery, but is more about work-life balance. And, you know, I wish I wish more people had read that. I really give that away as gifts because, you know, it is one of those, you know, and it's quite frankly, it's my favorite book of yours as well. You know, it's a very personal story.

You start off that book with a very personal story. And, you know, and you start to like really get to know Carl, the human being inside that book and all of the things that you've, you know, you've gone through and how you've overcome things and how you changed your life. You know, I found the whole thing very inspiring. And as a matter of fact, my brother-in-law has RA and, you know, and I said, you know what? You really, really need to read this book.

So, you know, and that's that started me giving out this book as gifts to anybody that I could tell, you know, was not living life. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. Didn't mean to interrupt you, but I just had to put that out there. For me, that book is sort of like I figured out a few things and then I wanted to help other people have the same success without the chronic disease.

Right. So second, I would say just very, very selfishly, the network documentation workbook, my first book. You know, we sold thousands of those and it really it set me up in terms of people had some idea who I was. It allowed me to start teaching. It allowed me to start speaking and traveling.

And so I always say that book did more for me than I ever did for it. So just because it, you know, helped me step into this community so much and meet so many people. And then the third book is Managed Services in a Month, which just continues to, I don't know, do more work than any book I've ever done in terms of people sit down and go through it and tear it apart and, you know, try to figure out how to learn some lessons for their business. But whether they learn by following it or by not following it doesn't really matter. They learn something and I get notes about that and I appreciate it.

I mean, honestly, Carl, I think, you know, if I was to answer that question of my favorite of Carl's books, it would have to be Managed Services in a Month purely because, you know, I transitioned my entire business from being break-fixed to managed services just on that book. And I actually remember, you know, having the audiobook version that was kind of pretty audible days. I think I had an MP3 or something on my iPod and I used to listen to that in the car all the time. And, yeah, I mean, honestly, you know, if it wasn't for that book, I don't think I would have ever transitioned my business fully into managed services and then ended up selling it. So thank you for doing that book because I think it's, you know, it's a really, really good book and it's one of my favorite all-time Carl Palachuk books.

I mean, they're all my favorite, but that's the one I think is my all-time favorite. I appreciate it. So I'm going to wrap this up and just, you know, if there are any listeners out there that if you have a favorite Carl Palachuk book, reach out to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, you know, and let us know your thoughts. You also have Cloud Services in a Month. Yep, Cloud Services in a Month.

So yeah, I mean, I have actually over 20 books at this point. So I've gotten into a nice groove of writing a little over one book a year. So one and a half books a year. So how can people find you? Although, you know, all they really have to do is Google your name and they're going to find all of your websites because you have a handful of them, right?

Thank goodness for the Internet. I mean, it's like Buccianico, to be honest, right? If you get close to Palachuk, you'll find me, right? Because they go, oh, did you mean this, right? My name used to be a detriment, but then the Internet came along and now I'm easy to find.

But anyway, so I have a great little seminar.com is where we do our classes and smallbizthoughts.com or smallbizthoughts.org is my online community. OK, well, thank you so much. And also, I should before we even go away, I should just plug the Small Biz Thoughts community because, you know, what an amazing value the smallbizthoughts.org community is, right? One annual price, you get all of your material, written audio, huge discounts for the classes. Plus, you also have some classes that are member only and you have your monthly calls.

So you've got a ton of things going on. Yeah, and if I can second that, I mean, I actually just joined the community like literally this week, I think, or back end of last week. So I've only been a member for a week and I'm already seeing a huge amount of value out of it. So, you know, absolutely well worth the investment of, you know, spending that one annual fee. So if anyone wants to find out more about that, you can either, you know, reach us at psaimpact.net on one of the socials.

Or, of course, you can reach out to Carl directly. I'm sure that Carl would be happy to answer any questions that you have for him. So, Rae-Ann, all that's left for me to really say is your PSA is the key to your MSP success. So go out and make an impact on your world today. Thanks, everybody.

Thanks. Cheers, everyone. Thanks, Carl. Thanks, Carl. 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.