[47] – Special Guests: Jeff Bogaerts and Patrick van Beek of Goolash

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, everybody, 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 today?

I'm doing great today. Chris, how are you? It's a bit soggy here in otherwise sunny Florida, but all is well. How are things with you? Very good, thank you.

It's sunshining in the UK, so I think we've swapped weathers because normally it's a sunshiny day in Florida and we seem to be having brilliant weather in the UK at the moment, so maybe we should swap countries. Maybe another day. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, Rayanne, with us today, we've got some very special guests.

We have Jeff Bogarts and Patrick from Goulash. So, hey, Patrick, hi, Jeff, how are you guys doing? Hello, Chris, hello, Rayanne, we are very good. Thank you. So, Patrick, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Tell us about Goulash and how it came about. Yeah, so how Goulash came about was actually a story most of our MSP colleagues are familiar with. I think Jeff is also the founder of another company, an MSP in Belgium. Started in 2013, I think, a company which I work for as well, started there in 2015. Small MSP, starting to grow, starting to have growth pains, and eventually, yeah, the larger we got, the less our profit was becoming.

So after some investigation, we saw, okay, where are we losing money? And we saw there was a lot of administrative overheads, basically being the main reason we were losing profits. After some further examination, we noticed we were losing money, not billing the licenses correctly, or wrong licenses got billed, and it was taking more time every month for our administrative department to get the invoices correct, and basically, it's not rocket science we were thinking. So how can we solve this problem? And eventually, we got our information from Microsoft, from Google, it was all there.

So we just had to connect the dots, and that's how Goulash came about. We found a solution for it, and after a while, we got this working, and we were thinking, hey, there's probably a lot of MSPs out there that are facing the same issue, and we should go for it. Yeah, we should put this in the market and see if we can help out other MSPs as well. That's how Goulash came about, yeah. Interesting, because, well, I'm over in the United States, and I have not heard of Goulash before.

So can you tell me a little bit about some of the benefits that would help MSPs? Are you just in Europe, or are you expanding internationally? Yeah, that's a good question. We're doing this internationally, which is a first for us. It's a big difference from working locally.

Yeah, we were saying, okay, this is a product, it's an issue product. So it's basically focusing on Autotask PSA. So our client base is only customers, MSPs that are using Autotask. So in order to address this, we have to go worldwide. So yeah, sure, it comes with some challenges, like time zones, et cetera.

But beyond that, it's going pretty well so far, yeah. And yeah, you probably haven't heard of Goulash before. It's not that we are existing for many years. I think it's fun, but Jeff, correct me if I'm wrong, three years ago. Some people seem to mix it up with Goulash, the food.

We get that a lot. But basically, it's a reference to the food as well. So what is Goulash? Well, it's kind of like a lot of ingredients, which you mix together and you get some really good stuff. They were thinking if we put some stuff from Microsoft and stuff from Autotask together, then we get some really good stuff as well.

And it's a catchy name. So that explains also the name from Goulash as well, yeah. Cool. Yeah, I was wondering where the name came from. So you mentioned about PSA tools, and you said predominantly, or you only work with Autotask.

So are there plans to work with any of the other PSA tools, or is it going to purely be on the Autotask platform? Or sort of talk me through what your plans are on that side. Okay. Yeah, obviously, today we are mainly focusing on Autotask PSA, because we've been using with the other company for quite a while. We know the product very well.

So, yeah, for us, it's easier to mainly focus on Autotask at the moment and have lots of integrations with Autotask. But we are, of course, looking at other PSA tools as well. There's Poplar ConnectWise, and there's some Halo PSA coming on, and we have some local ones in Belgium, for which we get questions, hey, do you integrate with this PSA or not? Of course, we would just like to support them all, but we have to take one step at a time as well. We did find using Autotask was a big benefit for us in the past, before you were using the typical Excel management to get everything around and about.

But after a while, your company becomes too big to work as a small company, and you have to be more professional. And that's when the tool like Autotask PSA comes in as well. So what particular services or vendors do you work with? You said Microsoft, but do you also work with other vendors like Ingram, because you're an actual distributor of these services now, yeah? Well, not entirely.

We are not a distributor, let us be very clear on that as well. Another big advantage of using CoolRush is that we are the reseller independent. So we get a lot of questions, hey, do you work with Ingram? Hey, do you work with reseller X or reseller Y? And then we tell them, no, it's not necessary.

Because what we do is we connect to Microsoft and we obtain the data from the amount of licenses you have over there. And we also do that for Google, and we also do that for other products as well. So it doesn't matter which reseller you use, even if you want to use another reseller for different products, it's okay. That's a big advantage. The disadvantage of that is that, yeah, resellers tend to sell more than just Microsoft licenses.

They sell domain names, they sell other services, the backup services as well. Yeah, we start to think, yeah, but what if it would be nice if we could also start integrating those services as well? So we are in talks with a certain type of resellers to see if we can integrate directly with our platform as well. And that would be, for a lot of MSPs, super easy to just have one reseller. We buy our stuff there, it gets automatically synced to Autotask, and we just have to invoice our customer correctly.

That's the whole idea. So if I understand this correctly, then an MSP won't buy any of those services from you. Like they won't be buying 365 or anything like that from you. What they'll effectively be doing is buying that from wherever they would normally get it from. And you guys would be integrating directly with Microsoft and bringing that stuff in and automatically changing the accounts on the contracts within Autotask.

That's absolutely correct. So yeah, the main reason why you would need a product like Gulasch is because the bigger you get, the more customers you have, the more human errors are being made. Like the administration department has to buy a license, it also has to not forget to put it in the PSA tool. Some companies just have the engineers buy the licenses, install them for the user, then they forget to put it to the admin department. That's where things get mixed up.

The other way around, it happens as well, a customer says, we don't want to use these licenses anymore. Okay, we just delete them in our reseller tool, but we forget to delete them in the Autotask PSA. The customer gets built, he's annoyed, you have to make a credit note. And it's all time consuming and time you could spend better doing other stuff. So that is the main reason we're doing this.

We don't want an MSP to be busy with these administrative repetitive tasks, we want them to focus on the customer. So tell me how we can get in touch with you? How can our listeners find you? Well, of course, there's always the traditional website, you go to goulash.eu, that's g-o-o-l-a-s-h.eu. You can find all the information about our products.

There's a friendly chat button at the bottom, which will not be replied by a bot, but it will be replied by a person. And yeah, we usually answer quite fast, depending on the time zone you're in. And we will leave your contact details as well at the end of the podcast. Great, we'll make sure that they get into the show notes. And can I just ask one clarifying question?

So you're integrating in with Autotask, so that means you're pulling the license count from Google or from Microsoft directly attached to the tenant, and you're updating the contract and your integration piece or the goulash piece, that's where you map it to specific services at the contract level? Yeah, that's exactly what it does. I couldn't have explained it better. That's correct. So there is an initial setup process.

You have to connect to your Microsoft accounts, and you have to create an API user in Autotask, for instance. And then we will periodically check, are there any new licenses in Microsoft? If yes, or have the numbers been changed, we will put them in Autotask as well. So there's an initial setup phase, but once it's set up, it's set and forgets, and you have to just sit back and relax. I know, relax, you have to work.

Yeah, at the end of the week, you will get an automatic report of, hey, these are the changes made in the past week. So you can still keep track of, hey, are those numbers being updated correctly, yes or no, but you don't have to manually do it anymore, and you can trust the process to do it for you. That's great. Thank you so much. Chris, did you have any other questions for them?

Yeah. So just actually one question. So you were talking about, obviously, you've got Google and Microsoft, and you integrate directly with those. What happens if an MSP is using some kind of different provider, maybe some antivirus company, and they wanted to integrate that with Gulasch? Is that something easy for you guys to add?

And do you have any others on the roadmap that you currently are looking at working with? Yeah, that's also a good question. We initially saw the need to have the synchronization between Microsoft licenses and Autotask. That was the most easy one. After a while, we got questions on, hey, I have this product X or product Y, and it changes also every month.

It would be nice if we could just have that with Gulasch integrated as well. So we got thinking, yeah, OK, that's fine. But not every SaaS provider offers an API that you can use just to connect and then obtain the data and put it in Autotask. So for each product, there's another way of obtaining the data. So what we initially came up for is a sort of a generic import function.

So if you are able to obtain the data from your provider, so let's say you sell web root and antivirus licenses, and you can export those numbers to a CSV file, we have an import function that you can just upload this once a month and then sync it to the Autotask contracts as well, which still saves you. It's not fully automated, but it still saves you a lot of time than doing it manually. And we're supporting every kind of product that you can imagine. As long as you are able to obtain the data, you're able to sync it to Autotask. So as long as we can obtain the data via some kind of CSV import or something like that, then you guys will be able to bring that in and import it into Autotask.

Ideally, you would provide us with an API key where we can obtain the data and then we will do it for you. But if it's not available, we can work with it on other way around. That's pretty awesome. That's good. I think there'll be a lot of people that would be quite interested in knowing about that.

So yeah, that's really good. Okay. So Brian, did you have any more questions? I don't think so. I really appreciate you guys coming on all the way from Belgium to join us today and your product sounds amazing.

So I hope you guys have the best of luck with the product and have worldwide distribution with it. So thank you so much. Yeah. Thanks, guys. And Ryan, all that's left for me to say now is your PSA is the key to your MSP success.

So go out and make an impact on your world today. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Jeff and Patrick. All right. Thank you, guys.

Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. 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.