[36] – Special Guest: Matt Takhar, CEO of Inbay

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 with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayanne Buccianico. Hey, Rayanne, how are you doing?

I'm doing great today. Chris, as always. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. It's a nice, wet, rainy UK.

And today, Rayanne, we've got a very special guest with us. We have Matt Takah from InBay, and I've personally known Matt for a long time and somebody that I'm honored to call a friend. So I'm going to let Matt introduce himself in a few minutes, but welcome, Matt, and thanks for being with us. Welcome, Matt. Thanks for joining.

Thanks, guys. Thank you very much. And yeah, Chris, we go all the way back to 2013, so thanks for the warm intro. Yes, we do. So Matt, do you want to tell us just a little bit about yourself, who you are, and how you come to be here?

Sure. So I'm Matt. I'm currently the CEO of InBay, which I'll come back to. I've been with that company now for several years. Prior to that, I worked in the industry, in the technical channel, if you like, for around 20 years.

I placed at Datto, Autotask, and also as a fairly large MSP as well. Excellent. Okay, so... So welcome, Matt. I'm Rayanne, and it's really great to meet you.

Don't take any offense to this, but I have not heard of InBay. And so when Chris sent me an email saying that you were going to join us, and I saw the list of questions, but I did not have an opportunity to take a look at, find out what InBay is. Can you kind of start with what InBay is, when did you start it, and what do you guys do, and how did you get there? Sure, thanks. Nice to meet you, Rayanne.

InBay started life, actually, as an MSP, and I think a lot of people don't know this, but we used to be a managed service provider, and we've been around for about 16, 17 years. As a matter of fact, a lot of the staff within the business have come from a managed service provider as well. Before I tell you what we do, I'd like to tell you why we do it, if that's okay. So I'm going to just steal this from Simon Sineek. I'm sure you've probably heard of that guy.

He's a great motivational speaker, author of several books as well, and Simon says that we should be starting with a why rather than starting with a what, so I'm going to have a go at doing that. So our why within the business is everything we do, we do to empower our partners and their end clients. We want to transform service offerings and traditional technology environments to a new, improved business as usual. So we want to really be an extension of a managed service provider to help them lift their game up, help them offer services they may not have been able to offer before. And let me go on and talk about the how.

So we do this by investing in great staff ourselves, great employees who are committed and personal and professional, highly skilled team who work around the clock to deliver our services. And then the what we do is we provide fully managed, white-labeled, 24-7 services such as Service Desk, Network Operations Center for looking after all the backend devices, security, which obviously is a hot topic right now, product services, dedicated resources. So everything that an MSP may provide themselves with their own technical resources, we can provide for them as well to help them improve what they're doing. So Matt, so what are the benefits of outsourcing for MSPs? So it kind of leads on from what I was just saying, is that we can help them extend their own capabilities.

So it might be that we have an offering that they're not yet offering, such as security, so Security Operations Center, or it could be maybe extended support. I mean, that's quite a common request. So let's just run through an example, you know, MSPs support lots of different clients. Some of those clients now want to go 24-7, they want out-of-hours support. So it might be that they're not skilled up enough to offer that themselves, or they don't want to put in the shift patterns or staff roaches, and quite common, an MSP might have some technicians on call, which is great, but what happens the next day is that they're tired of being on call overnight.

So we can offer extended hours of coverage, or it could be that the MSP has different technology stack that they now need to support, because technology changes all the time, right? There seems to be releases of different products all the time. And it could be a difficult thing for the technicians to keep up with that technology stack. So we can help offer that as well. Another common example, if I can just go on one more time, is delivering out-of-hour projects.

So same issue that we run 24-7 operation, they may have a project or component of a project such as Azure Migration, Office 365 Migration, et cetera, that maybe deliver out-of-hours, and we can help them deliver that for them. So, and I'm just kind of putting it all together, right? It sounds like, you know, you can offer some outsourced services, but you will even go so far as to be an outsourced NOC, right? And there's a handful of those around the world, but you know, one of the things I think in being in the UK is that you would be able to offer hour-after-hour support, right? So or for, I'm assuming you're doing this for companies all over the world, right?

And if somebody calls a help desk, you know, at three o'clock a.m. my time, you're having breakfast and, you know, and you guys could answer the phones and take those support calls. Am I on the right track? Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, we have staff and ship patterns running 24-7. So you're out of hours, maybe are in hours, but regardless, you know, we're a global business.

We have clients here, there, and everywhere, which is great for us. That's exactly what we do. And so what kind of tools do you use? How do you track, you know, how do you track those tickets? Let's say one of your clients is using, let's say, Autotask, right?

So do you like have them outsource the ticket to you or how do you work that? Yeah, so we have a number of different ways of interfacing with our clients. So you can imagine that a lot of MSPs will have PSA systems such as Autotask or ConnectWise, but we have to work with many different MSPs, we work with many different end customers. So you can imagine it can get confusing pretty quickly. And what we don't want is our technicians spending time having to look up what systems log into for which particular end clients, because it wouldn't be efficient.

So everything we do, we have to do it, be ultra efficient in doing so, so we can deliver a high level of service and make sure we're hitting everybody's SLA's in the right time. So because of that, we've developed our own middleware solution, which really is like the glue of InBay, which helps join all these different PSAs together into one common PSA, which we use. So we actually use Autotask internally, but it's the glue, it's the middleware, which connects everything together. Then the front end of our middleware is what we call our InBay Partner Portal, which allows our partners to onboard through that system, to go through an onboarding process, so they connect up their RMM platform and their PSA into the Partner Portal. And once they've done gone through the onboarding process, they can simply come in and enable and disable services, whether it's RMM device supports or end users throughout that portal.

Matt, so just wanted to ask about the, obviously, we've just come out of a, or we're in the middle of a completely different working regime, I guess. And how is this current new regime of people working from home impacted the need for outsourcing? Yeah, it's a really interesting one, Chris. It's been definitely challenging times for many businesses and many of our partners as well. So if we go back to kind of pre-COVID, and let's take a component or service like service desk.

So MSPs were insistent on having all their service desk staff work together, probably work in a pod or some type of pod system so they can easily communicate, triage tickets between themselves, pass information around, ask for help. But of course, COVID has forced us all to do things differently. And it's taken from an MSP's point of view, many of them have had to work remotely, where they haven't had the luxury of having all their staff together. So because that's kind of happened, it's made a lot of MSPs stop and review what they're actually doing. So we've had a number of come to us and say, actually, now we're kind of used to outsourcing because we're outsourcing to our own staff that are in lots of different locations.

So we can potentially outsource to you as well. There's no real difference there, because they can still deliver a great service working that way. And they know we can deliver a great service. So really, it's kind of increased the need for outsourcing, or it's increased the awareness of outsourcing, the possibilities of outsourcing from our point of view. Obviously, that's been great.

We've had a number of services that have been very popular, including our dedicated tech service, which is where we provide dedicated technicians at the right skill set for that MSP. It could be one, it could be many. So that's really the main changes that I've seen is really given the general awareness to MSPs that outsourcing is possible, and it can work, and we can still deliver great SLAs. So I just need to ask this question, and I'm sorry for just throwing this one at you. But you were an MSP, and you were kind of doing your thing, and then you were not.

And then you woke up one day, and you said, I think I want to start an outsource now today. How does that come about? Yeah, great question. So we were an MSP that actually had an offshore technical team. So as we built our MSP, we built the technical team offshore, because we had connections.

So actually, our technical service delivery center is actually based in Sri Lanka, in Colombo, in Sri Lanka. So we saw this as working for us. And we were networking, pretty much like you guys do as well, talking to other MSPs, seeing it as working. Then we saw an opportunity to do something different. Separate from the MSP space, but to offer what we had built to other MSPs.

That was really how the first service, which was the NOC, was born. Interesting. As a matter of fact, I was just talking about that book, Purple Cow, from Seth Godin, about doing something unique and different. Because there's so many average things to choose from. What can one person do that can make their business really stand out?

It sounds like you've capitalized on that. Yeah, great observation. We did decide to do something different. Being MSP was working out well. It was going in the right direction.

But because we had this off-site facility, this outsource facility, if you like, that was expanding with growth, and at a very lower cost as well, when we were talking to other MSPs, they were interested in actually using it. So yeah, I think many businesses sometimes will find it difficult to differentiate themselves from others. And that was our way of doing it. And that was really how the current InBay was born. And that was a good six years ago now.

So, Matt, just another question. You mentioned earlier on about ConnectWise and Auditask, and if people are using those PSAs, you can integrate with your middleware. So what about an MSP that either might not be using any kind of PSA tool or using one of the many others that are out there besides the Auditasks and ConnectWise? How do you work with those? Yeah, good question, Chris.

There are many tools out there. It's a changing landscape, isn't it, in the world that we work in? Lots of great tools coming up. And we often go through a development cycle, or rather a review cycle, of looking at different tools and working out how well they're being adopted to work out then whether we need to onboard that tool into our business. So we go through quite a lengthy process of reviewing it, looking to see whether to onboard it, and then onboarding includes obviously training the staff how to use it, and then it will finally include integration into our middleware platform so we can be really optimized when interfacing with the tool.

So our middleware platform, our partner portal, currently supports the most common two, which we see in the industry, which is Auditask, PSA, and ConnectWise. But we have expertise across a whole wider range of them. So it really depends on how those tools work and which ones they are, whether we perhaps use a product like Zapier, which is great for integrating between API to API, or we look to do our own development on there. It all depends. But what we'd rather say is that the MSPs, throughout the early part of the conversation, we ask them what tools they are using.

What are they using? What are they using for documentation? That's another key part for us to make sure that we can deliver a service as part of them. So like I said before, we want to empower them and really be an extension of their team. We can't do that if we don't have great documentation in place and access to passwords quickly, et cetera.

That brings up a whole slew of questions. Sorry about that. But no, what's your price point? I mean, do you charge per end user, per end managed device, per month, per something? But then you started talking some more and I started wondering, well, what does the smaller MSP do if they're not using a PSA, if they don't have a way to, you know, if their customers don't have a way to submit a ticket other than sending an email or making a phone call?

I mean, how would you onboard somebody like that? Yeah, okay. Let me address the first question. So we charge in a very similar way to how MSPs charge their end customer. We really want to be flexible so that our pricing model adapts their pricing model so they can just add their margin and resell the services.

So that's typically per user when it comes to things like service desk. It could be per device when it's RMM support. It could be a combination of the two. Project work is typically done at a hourly rate and then we do a fixed price on the project. And when it comes to MSPs that are not using tools, PSA tools, we can give them access via our tool set as part of the client access portal.

Address it there. Or we do stuff via email passing. But I really would encourage MSPs, I really guess it depends on what part of their journey they're on as well as an MSP. So I'm sure we're all aware of the MSP maturity model and how they're progressing, whether they're going from break, fix, more into managed services, et cetera. So I suggest that they just say, reach out, have that conversation.

If there's a way that we can work with them, we'll definitely make it happen. And so I'm going to put you on the spot here a little bit, Matt. I mean, are there any kind of MSPs that you won't or haven't been able to work with? There isn't any. You are putting me on the spot.

There isn't any that I won't work with. I'm more happy to have a conversation on the team with absolutely everybody. We do find sometimes that small MSPs or perhaps MSPs that are just starting out, not necessarily the best clients for us. But then having said that, we do have some where they have started out early. They've come to us early.

And they're now modeling their service offering on what we're doing. Because that's another thing that we'll provide as well. Is that we'll white label a lot of our own marketing material. So going back to the why of InBay, which I started this conversation with about empowering them in our partner portal as well, is we're providing marketing content, which is optional if MSPs want to use that to help retail services. So you can literally top and tail it, change some of the wording, etc.

And then use that to best market with that particular service. Did I avoid your question nicely there, Chris? You did. Nicely said. You should be a politician.

Perhaps next time around. Okay. So tell us something about you that many people don't know. Wow. Okay.

Great question as well. So let's stay away from tech. Let's go personal things. So something about me that many people don't know. So I like keeping extremely busy.

If being a CEO of a business that has global outreach isn't busy enough, when I have downtime, I have a number of different hobbies I get involved with. So quite recently I've managed to get hold of my first 3D printer and I completely geeked out. I'm a techer at heart. If you go back 20 years ago, I started off life as a technician. I've gone through a lot of different technician roles, then into management, then consultancy, and where I'm now.

So I still geek out with tech. I love learning new things. I think everybody should try and learn something new as often as they can. So I've just been learning all about 3D printers, how to use them, how to optimise them, how to get the best results right now. Oh, that's awesome.

That's one of my things that I really, really want to carve time out to do is play with a 3D printer. Now I've got friends all over the globe that have been playing with their 3D printers and I'm like, okay, I've got to step up, right? Yeah, yeah. I recommend it, especially if you've got a creative element to you. I mean, there's so much you can do with them once you start researching it and looking at it.

Wow. I think you and I should talk offline, Matt. I think we've got similar interests. I mean, well, I think all three of us, right? I mean, maybe we should start a podcast on kind of 3D printing and all the cool things.

We should have Matt as a co-host and start a whole new thing here. Sounds cool. I'll be the noob. I'm one step above you, because I've only been doing it for about six months now, but I'm printing a very complex model at the moment. Going back to my geeky side, so I'm into sci-fi films as well.

So I'm printing out the AMP, which is the big mech from the film Avatar at the moment, which has been ongoing now for almost two months. Oh, wow. So yeah, I don't even know where you would begin to design something like that, you know? Because I have another friend, I think he's also in the UK, and he was building himself a little drone, or printing himself a drone. And he had to design it first, and then I guess you have to configure or calibrate the printer to do, you know?

So the whole thing's just fascinating to me. So after this podcast, I'm off to Amazon to go and buy a 3D printer, because I think you guys have inspired me to kind of get the creative juices flowing. So yeah, I mean, this has been such a fun podcast. So Matt, just if anyone wants to get in touch with you, either personally or through the business, how does somebody do that? Sure.

So business website, I'm going to say that first, is inbay.co.uk. And anybody, feel free to email me. My contact details are on the website, but my email address is just matt.inbay.co.uk. And then look me up on LinkedIn and get connected. I'm more than happy to chat to anybody.

Excellent. Yeah. And we'll make sure that those will go into the show notes. So yeah, it's been a real fun episode. Thank you very much for your time, Matt.

We really appreciate it. Thanks so much, Matt. I've learned like a great deal from you today. So that was a lot of fun. Absolutely.

So Rae-Ann, as always, all that's left for me to say is your PSA is the key to your MSP success. Go out and make an impact on your world today. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Rae-Ann. All the best, guys.

Thank you. Thanks. Cheers. 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.