Key Terms

MRR

Nigel Moore

Tech Tribe

Traction - Get a Grip on Your Business

PSA & RMM

https://youtu.be/ENm80bsr28U

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James Steel [00:00:00]:

Hey, Harvesters. Welcome back to another episode of Harvest, the MSP Sales show. I'm here today with Ian Groves, managing director of StartTech. Now, Ian, you have got an impressive list of awards going on here. Now let me just read these out. So Comtier UK and Ireland Solution Provider Spotlight Award.

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Ian Groves. [00:00:17]:

Correct.

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James Steel [00:00:18]:

MSP Titan of the Industry Award. PAX8 Beyond Partner Award for Security Performance. And named among Britain's 50 Best Managed IT Companies two years in a row.

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Ian Groves. [00:00:29]:

Now that's not been announced the second year yet.

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James Steel [00:00:31]:

Okay, brilliant. Well, we're obviously behind on your information. Excellent. So the point is, I think you did fantastically well. I know you've recently reported 24% year on year growth or certainly this year. And I wanted to talk to you because it's not always been like that. And I think it's probably a fascinating story to dive into kind of where you were versus where you are now. But before we do that, I would like a misconception about you.

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James Steel [00:00:56]:

What do people get wrong about you when they first meet you?

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Ian Groves. [00:00:59]:

This is a great opportunity for me to put something straight. What is it? The misconception about me. I'm a tech at heart. So although I appear as Mr. Business Owner and very business centric, deep down I am dying to be a tech. I just want to get back on the tools and my team have to stop me going near the tools to the point where now denying me logins because I meddle. Maybe that's not a misconception. I think it often is.

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James Steel [00:01:23]:

That's good. So you really have the shiny thing syndrome down to a T. I have.

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Ian Groves. [00:01:28]:

The shiny thing syndrome. I think I'm the best tech that ever lived. Never mind at Start Tech.

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James Steel [00:01:33]:

Oh, you're one of those people that knows a little and is most dangerous and that's it.

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Ian Groves. [00:01:37]:

I've been aware and scoffed at those people for many years and it turns out I've become the very thing I swore to destroy. I am now the guy that knows enough to break everything, has the credentials to break everything. Although that's being slowly taken away from me by the wider team because there's messages on teams that can. Would whoever did X, Y and Z please stop doing this? I'm like.

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James Steel [00:01:55]:

And you just slope away into the distance.

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Ian Groves. [00:01:57]:

I just do. I've got a little sarcastic thumbs up sort of gif as to that's on me. So yeah, I'm a tech at heart and I have to fight every day to not play with the toys.

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James Steel [00:02:06]:

Well, listen, I'm glad you're not playing with the toys, because you're doing a fairly good job of running your MSP business. So let's dive in. So I think this is a lovely story because you've kind of been where a lot of MSPs are, where perhaps you reached a plateau. I think that's fair. Do you want to give us an idea of kind of what your business looked like then, back in the day, before you made a couple of step changes and then we can talk about the changes that you made?

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Ian Groves. [00:02:27]:

Yeah. So we're not a young MSP, we're 25 years old this year. I would say we've only been what I call an MSP for four years now. Before that, we were very much an IT company and I think there's a bit of a distinction between the two. IT company. We were techs on the tours, we fixed stuff and the reward of fixing something and a customer not being angry was our motivating factor.

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James Steel [00:02:49]:

How many of you were there sort of before you started making the big changes?

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Ian Groves. [00:02:52]:

Seven or eight, something like that. Quite a static team. We're quite proud to this day that a lot of our team came through on apprenticeships, so it's kind of very much that homegrown talent. So that was four, maybe five years ago. A bit of a perfect storm started to happen. I didn't start the company and I won't burn the precious time we've got going over all the details of the backstory, but there was an element to me where, having invested in the company, I was closing in on 40 and I was just aware that the gamble hadn't paid off. Why did I invest in this company? This isn't. We're not doing anything, we're not going anywhere.

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Ian Groves. [00:03:26]:

It felt quite flat.

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James Steel [00:03:27]:

Do you mind telling me. So how did it look in terms of the services you were offering and maybe even revenue levels, if you're willing to share that.

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Ian Groves. [00:03:34]:

So we were doing about 700k. We were flatlined there. Sort of referred to as being at a bit of a glass ceiling. Now I look back. So seven or eight staff, 700k, very little of. Probably less than around a third of that was what we call mrr. The rest of it was ad hoc sales. So it was very sporadic and unpredictable and not steady.

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Ian Groves. [00:03:52]:

We had a very loyal client base, which we thought was because we did a great job. In hindsight, I think it's because we were just very cheap.

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James Steel [00:03:57]:

Right.

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Ian Groves. [00:03:58]:

It's easy to mistake when you realise that. Yeah, I used to think I was the world's greatest salesman because I would never leave and not get the deal. Then it dawned on me one day that I was giving it away. I'm not the world's greatest salesman. The world's greatest salesman gets it for the price they want to sell it at, not what they gave it away at. Like, I close every single deal without fail because we have no idea what we should be charging. Yeah, it worked. It worked great for several years until I realised it wasn't that good an idea.

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Ian Groves. [00:04:21]:

So, yeah, we did a bit of everything. And this is part of the wider picture as to what changed with us, but we had clients on Google Apps for business, we had on premise servers, we had NAS boxes, we had people without any of that and just standalone devices, we had Windows Home systems.

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James Steel [00:04:35]:

So you're just satisfying what they're asking for. Essentially.

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Ian Groves. [00:04:38]:

Completely client led. Completely. Can you fix this? Provide this? Yes, we can.

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James Steel [00:04:43]:

Tell me how to meet. I'm interested to know when you went to meet a client meeting, how did that conversation go back in the day?

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Ian Groves. [00:04:48]:

Oh, it would usually be driven by the client. We want an antivirus and the old people use this. Can you get this? Yes, we can get that. It was yes, yes, yes, that was the problem. Yes was the answer to everything. And we felt like that was growth, like this was positive. If we came back and someone had asked us to do it instead of someone else, regardless of the circumstances, that was a win. Of course, it wasn't always a win.

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James Steel [00:05:09]:

So tell me there was a change at some point, was it an epiphany? How did it happen and what happened? What was the biggest, most significant change that you made?

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Ian Groves. [00:05:20]:

We all like this because I will loop back to someone who's already appeared on your podcast. I think the number one catalyst was the discovery of the tech tribe and the legend that is Nigel Moore. That happened. It was a perfect storm and they just came together by fluke. I was turning 40, so more aware that what am I doing? So there was a kind of want to get a bit more switched on and more out of my career, dare I call it that at the time I stumbled across a Facebook group to do with it companies which led me to the tech tribe and consequently Comptia as well as at the time. And I got introduced to a book called Traction, which is about running your business operating system. So that sort of perfect storm came together and there was so much work to do to put all the parts together that caused me to have to stop being the tech. I really needed to step if someone was Going to execute, pulling all the best of these things together.

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Ian Groves. [00:06:12]:

Someone has to stop being a technician and stand back from that stuff.

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James Steel [00:06:16]:

So what was your first step then, would you say? So you've got all this knowledge coming from the community about perhaps tools and processes and you got traction that potentially you could implement. Where did you, can you remember where you started? I'm thinking of people watching this who may be thinking, okay, some of this resonates and maybe I'd like to take my first step. What would your first step be, Jill? What was it?

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Ian Groves. [00:06:33]:

The first step really was to talk to the wider team and be quite open with them and borderline vulnerable and go guys, I don't actually like what I do. And that's probably an enjoyable meeting to be honest with you. They all agreed with me. It turned out one thing we were was on the same page but not talking about it and there was a slight element and I bought Traction, this book to do which is entrepreneurial operating system, which is six. It sounds a bit cult like when I say it and I really don't mean it to, but it's six key components on how to work with your people, how to have a vision, how to use data, how to track it and how to get traction and keep on doing it. And I got about 20 pages into the book and I'm not a book reader at all. This is like reading a Haynes manual by the way, for those of you who know about car manuals, mechanics. So as an IT guy, it was like reading a knowledge base article which really resonated with me.

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Ian Groves. [00:07:20]:

And I got page 20 something, it says get your management or leadership team together. I haven't got a management or leadership team. Okay, I'll order a couple more copies of this off Amazon, put a diary invite out to a handful of people. You, you, you. Monday we're going in the meeting room and we're not coming out until we decide if this book is rubbish or worth putting our stock in. Bought them a copy of the book, we went in the meeting room, the guys I'd got, they read it a couple of days before they skimmed it and they all came in and went, this could be really, really good for us. And I went, okay, page one, marker, pens out, wipe someone on whiteboard duty, let's just workshop this book front to back. And that's what we did.

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Ian Groves. [00:07:56]:

So we self implemented. So to your point, what was the number one thing? Getting buy in from everybody else. And that really was the beginning of it all and that got us to think differently Communicate differently. And it really led us then to go, we do too much. There's a huge amount of sprawl in what we did.

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James Steel [00:08:11]:

Is that where you started out? Is that the first realisation then? Okay, so let's slim down what we're.

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Ian Groves. [00:08:15]:

Offering and trying to process, trying to get processes and procedures in place as per the framework we were following. It was just impossible. We had. Every single client was different. We didn't have any decent documentation. It was all in everybody's heads. It was very, very relationship driven and we had a really good bond with our clients because we knew their systems intimately, because we didn't document anything, so we had to know them intimately. But you can't get past a certain number of clients and you can't scale if you don't document, standardise and simplify what you do.

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Ian Groves. [00:08:42]:

So that led us to then go, okay, the whole 80, 20 rule. Let's look at our lowest performing 20% of our clients, which we thought we knew. And then when we bothered to look at the data, it wasn't the clients we thought it might be.

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James Steel [00:08:54]:

Okay, okay, amazing, amazing. So, right, so you've got the team on board.

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Ian Groves. [00:08:58]:

Yep.

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James Steel [00:08:59]:

And you've got a new streamlined portfolio and your processes are documented. So I guess you need to start thinking about growth at this point because you'll have spent a lot of time away from the work that was making you money at that point. So there must be some element of like, okay, we need to make this pay now. So where, yeah, where do you turn to for, okay, we're going to start to grow this business in terms of, I guess, are you looking first at the existing customers and refining their contracts and stuff? How does it look?

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Ian Groves. [00:09:24]:

It's two part. We had a very low client base that had lots of fragmented, different systems. So we had to say, what are we good at? What do we like doing? What should be our core offering, which we do. So this is when I think we sort of became an msp, if you like, where we got rid of all the broken fragmented stuff. So that was where it was like, okay, Microsoft 365 or Office 365 as it was transitioning off at the time. That's going to be the future. I was quite hesitant with that in the early days. We were really good small business server guys.

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Ian Groves. [00:09:48]:

We loved a nice solid exchange server. We knew all the bits, we just learned that. But they were going. So we needed to get. This is our offering. And this was a key distinction and we had to put ourselves in check several Times. This is how we'll bill it. This is what you get.

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Ian Groves. [00:10:01]:

It's going to be better than the old package you had.

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James Steel [00:10:03]:

Now.

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Ian Groves. [00:10:03]:

We had a lot of work to do to convince people that we're paying peanuts for an all you can eat it support desk with no baked in services. They would pay an annual renewal on this or an annual. It was very hit and miss and there was no cash.

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James Steel [00:10:15]:

Tell me more about that. Tell me more about how those conversations were. How did you frame that for a customer? And is there anything in the packages themselves that kind of won them over or just a case?

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Ian Groves. [00:10:23]:

A lot of it was the trust. We'd got a lot of trust from our customers. And it was, the world is changing. Everything's going subscription based. We need to move to this, but we actually need to make some money because we don't make any money, which means I can't get better people. We can't train our staff as much as we'd like. So there's some quite open and honest conversations and good business. And we worked with some great companies.

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Ian Groves. [00:10:43]:

They respected that. There was almost an element of, well done, Ian. Now you're starting to act like a business owner and think the way you think. There was almost a kind of point of pride from certain customers. We'd worked really closely with these guys for years. They'd known me since my early 20s as their IT guy crawling under a desk. And now I'm saying we need to charge you more, but we're going to give you a better service. You won't be so dependent on me.

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Ian Groves. [00:11:05]:

I used to look after a lot of the clients at the time. I don't look after any clients now. I have no relationships. They wheel me out to close a deal every now and then. And then they put me back in the cupboard out the way. So there was a lot of honest conversation there. And we had to demonstrate that this is, you're not secure the way you are. And I don't mean secure from a cyber security sense.

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Ian Groves. [00:11:20]:

I mean from the reliance on us and how unsafe we were as a business. You know, one bad thing, we could have gone pop. And where would that have left them? Bear in mind we had no documentation to give them if something awful happened. So we had a lot of trust from the customers. That went okay when some of these guys, we were moving three, four times what they were paying before for this unlimited IT support. Some of them came on begrudgingly and some of them, we had to do a bit of, you know how we don't do price increases because that was something that, you know, no MSP does in the early days didn't do any price increases.

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James Steel [00:11:48]:

Do you do those now?

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Ian Groves. [00:11:48]:

We do them very well now, yeah. Without fail. Fairly automated as well, if I'm honest. We didn't do that. So then we had to kind of come up with like a calculator to go, well, had we have done a price increase since you started with us 15 years ago and added X percent a year, it would have been about this anyway. So you need to look at this like you had those years for discount and you're now only paying what you should pay. You're not paying three times what you are paying. Do you know what I mean?

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James Steel [00:12:12]:

That takes some tact to frame that conversation.

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Ian Groves. [00:12:15]:

Sometimes it didn't go very well. Sometimes it was understood and it went well. Sometimes it was like, we'll do this, but if the service isn't A one, you'll understand if we leave. Absolutely. And I want you to hold us to that and we respect that and that we're going to. Our promise on this is you will get an A1 service. And we weren't, obviously didn't. We weren't perfect before.

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Ian Groves. [00:12:31]:

If you couldn't get hold of me, only so and so knows about that server. He's not in today. Terrible answers to give to paying clients.

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James Steel [00:12:37]:

So fast forwarding to today, though. So, I mean, how do you differentiate yourselves? Obviously in the early days you had these fantastic relationships that you built up over a long period of time. You've entered the big boy MSP world now and you're up against some pretty good competitors, I imagine, perhaps in the area as well. So how were you differentiating yourself and how were you getting growth from your existing base there through that?

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Ian Groves. [00:12:59]:

The differentiator for us is we're quite arrogant, we're quite direct in that. Businesses, I feel, are looking to IT companies and cyber security companies to steer them and help them. It's a big scary world out there. There's a lot of information. They're actually looking to be told what to do. And it's a slight bugbear of mine where I hear people go, well, you should just take on board what the client wants and build what the client wants. I'm like, yeah, but 95% of what the client wants is stability, a productive IT system and thing that can work well in their business. Not many go straight off the tracks of that.

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Ian Groves. [00:13:36]:

Yes, they might want some bespoke bits on top of that, but that's.

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James Steel [00:13:38]:

How does the Conversation go for you now then? Because we talked about how it was in the old days. You just did whatever they asked for. How does it go now?

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Ian Groves. [00:13:43]:

Would you say we disqualify probably 60% of the leads that. Well, I say leads, we disqualify 60% of the people that contact us for IT services. And that kind of sets this kind of in demand tone a little bit. Like, I won't quite go as far as we've got it where you're lucky to be a client as such, but we are really conscious not to contaminate the pot that we've got of great clients that really want a partnership. We really sell Holland partnership. I got called into a conversation at the latter stages for what went on to be one of our largest clients and their CEO got involved at this point and so I was dragged in to sort of get it all in the meeting room to get over the table. And I went quite assertive to the horror of my guys with we're vetting you as much as you're vetting us for this relationship. I can picture, I'll never forget their faces.

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Ian Groves. [00:14:32]:

For the two guys on my team who'd worked very hard to get us to this final sort of point where a pen was coming out.

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James Steel [00:14:36]:

So he's done it again.

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Ian Groves. [00:14:37]:

Yeah, basically. Why do we bring him into these things? Wheel him back. Wheel him back. And probably through luck more than judgement, the guy on the other side of the table, he really respected that. Okay, I get it. We've got to invest in our it. We've got to be willing to partner with you, we've got to be willing to listen and if something goes wrong, we're going to be in the trenches with you. But I'm not going in the trenches with somebody unless they've listened to our advice.

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Ian Groves. [00:15:00]:

And that word of mouth spreads around that and that slightly assertiveness spreads and that buys sort of respect and that's working very well for us at the minute. And we do do what we say we'll do. That's great. But you do have to do the bit I said we're going to do and be there and make sure we are giving them the best advice.

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James Steel [00:15:16]:

Talk to me about how your pricing has changed and what your view is on it now.

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Ian Groves. [00:15:21]:

It changes more than I'd like to admit it should, to be honest, the way we put our. So we went from obviously having a bit of everything and we didn't really have any structure. Then we went to, okay, you have this basic pack and you can Add on this option and this option and they were packs, they weren't individual lines. So we grouped certain key services.

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James Steel [00:15:37]:

Why did you do that? Are you looking for a baseline, then the opportunities to cross sell or how do you view it?

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Ian Groves. [00:15:42]:

The baseline element was if everybody has the same basic stock setup as it were, then instead of us looking after 65 customers with two and a half thousand endpoints, something like that, we're actually really only looking after one giant estate. Because if there's consistency in the standards we do, the service desk processes are streamlined onboarding, streamlined support is the same climb. So there was a standardisation that came from this base pack idea. You've got to be at this level. And then if you wanted, I don't know, this extra mail security option, we can put that in as well for you. But we only do one offering, we're not going to do four or five. We do this, we're trained in it, we're certified in it, we're a partner.

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James Steel [00:16:18]:

Why is that important?

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Ian Groves. [00:16:20]:

Just time saving processes and time saving. We bring people onto our service desk. And if you're growing at the rate that we're growing, you need to be able to upskill people quickly. You can't upskill them if you're looking after four male security tools or three EDRs or this. You just can't. You can't do that and you become a jack of all trades. So, you know, probably one of the biggest things we get with the more modern, larger clients is, oh, we just signed a two year deal with such and such a SOC or an edr. You'll use that, won't you? No, we won't use that.

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Ian Groves. [00:16:46]:

That needs to go. And that's a tough conversation, but it was £30,000. We might be able to do some sort of buyout thing with our guys, but we will not, and I won't go back on the work we did to zero in our offering. As much as my guys come to me going, we could win this deal if you just conceded on this. I'm like, I'm sorry, we don't go back on that. And ultimately the businesses you want to work with, they respect that.

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James Steel [00:17:09]:

Do you think that's one of the key reasons you've been successful? I don't hear many MSPs talk with such conviction about sticking to cost at.

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Ian Groves. [00:17:20]:

Times, but it keeps us focused. So, yeah, I do think there's a huge amount of mileage in that. Yeah. Don't be wrong. It hurts sometimes. Sometimes it does cost us deals. And I'M not the most popular guy in the room. When my stubbornness does that, the guys ultimately get it.

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Ian Groves. [00:17:34]:

You know, there's always that want to get a new client in a new deal over the line. But if they're not going to do this on day one, what else aren't they going to do? So when you talk about white space and other offerings, when we do telephony or connectivity, white space for us tends to be quite, it's less about individual line items in an MSP space, about this add on or that add on. We've got quite an extensive base stack.

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James Steel [00:17:53]:

So when we're talking, just so you know. So when we talk, if you're not familiar with the term, when we're talking about white space, there's this concept of all your customers down one side and your products along the top and it's essentially a grid. And you're trying to fill in the gaps, aren't you? And that's how you can see what's the level of service penetration for my customer base.

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Ian Groves. [00:18:08]:

I want to know if the guys back at Sales Builder like the fact you call it essentially a grid. I'm sure it's a lot more sophisticated than that when you do a really good one. But it is essentially a grid.

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James Steel [00:18:16]:

When I'm asking for it, it's basically that.

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Ian Groves. [00:18:18]:

Yeah, yeah. So for a lot of people that would be, you know, do they have Microsoft 365 Business Premium? Do they have this EDR? Do they have that EDR? Do they have these? Are you looking to make it as green as possible? We put quite a bit in our core offering for this standard. So there's an element of nobody gets in unless they have our core offering. Nobody comes in and buys an ad hoc service or even a one time professional service office. The only time we will do a one off consultancy professional service is if we're fairly confident it's a lead into a full managed service. So we don't take one time project work for anybody because there's liability in going in there if you can't call it your own when something goes wrong with it six months later. And it distracts my techs to do other stuff. And actually the idea is we pride ourselves on being experts at these tools.

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Ian Groves. [00:19:01]:

So. And Cisco is not one of those. So we won't charge you to come and fix your Cisco XYZ because we're not the right people to pay for that service. So we shouldn't sell that service.

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James Steel [00:19:10]:

And so it says the account management function. So that's Their primary role is to run these SBRs effectively. Is there any focus, do you have any focus around like do you talk about, okay, so I think these services more profitable than others or is there any kind of structuring or is it literally okay, we're going to go in, have an open conversation and make sure that our packages, our base package and any add ons are.

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Ian Groves. [00:19:28]:

It's more about that. It is more about what saturation do we have? Are they having all the services? Is the mileage in them having these services from us? The profitability is fairly well set in when we decide to find the packages in the first place.

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James Steel [00:19:42]:

So you know that for each everything you sell, you know the.

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Ian Groves. [00:19:45]:

Yeah, we know that. So that's, we don't need to burden the guys with that so much that's built from, from top down. So these services will work in this way so long as you. As long as we sell enough of them, if that makes sense and as long as they're the right fit. Where they tend to cost us is less about the cost versus the sale, it's more the management time people are the biggest expense in an msp. Anything you can do to eat into that time and we're obviously in the full time of AI automation and systems like that that buy back time. Buying back time is the number one saver. It's not saving a couple of pounds going with this vendor because they're cheaper than that vendor or with these guys.

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Ian Groves. [00:20:18]:

I'm less worried about that because I'll get that time back through the relationship. The relationships work downstream with us to our clients and the relationship upstream to our vendors is every bit as important. And we don't hide that from our clients. We tell them who we work with and why we work with them. And I want them to understand that we work with them because they're the best people to work with. And you've paid me to make sure you're getting the best and I work with the best and we bring all that together.

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James Steel [00:20:43]:

So you've got a real focus on efficiency. Are there any areas within your business that you can think, okay, I've made a couple of changes there that really made a bit of a, made a bit of a step change in terms of reducing the amount of people cost involved in service delivery.

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Ian Groves. [00:20:57]:

We've done some stuff on the service desk recently with some AI stuff that helps triage tickets, put work types in, decide how sort of angry somebody sounds. There's a proper word for it, but it escapes me how angry they are on a ticket or how frustrated they are. So that's helped a little bit and that's helping the triage time. Which means if my guys are spending less time doing admin and wasting on inefficiency, clicking around a ticket and typing stuff in, they can spend more time on the phone, on the bit that matters with the actual relationship and the people. I think that's a key thing with the efficiency. It goes back to time, buy back people time so people talk to people. It's not about having AI, so people deal with AI or people deal with automation. It's so that that does the heavy lifting and the repetitive stuff.

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Ian Groves. [00:21:35]:

So service desk, it's helped with that general synchronisation across platforms. We recently moved to zero and the integration now from proposal at the beginning, from CRM proposal into PSA out through billing out through Go Cardless or DD collection, that is pretty much a straight line, which is great unless someone puts something in wrong at the top of the stream and it comes out in wrong at the zero. So there's been some painful learning curve there and there's been a lot of this has to go in right at the beginning, guys. You put the wrong address in there, it's wrong at the output at the other end. It's embarrassing. So yeah, that's helped, but we've had our fingers burnt a couple of times.

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James Steel [00:22:12]:

I'm interested to know in this, where we're at at the moment with cybersecurity. It's a frightening. And I've seen you guys do promote yourselves. You're cybersecurity experts. I've seen that in your. In your branding and so on. How do you tread that line between profitability and having the right services in place? Because what I see is a whole load of vendors pushing cybersecurity products and a whole lot of MSP is going, I'll buy that and perhaps not implement it correctly or. And so how do you keep an eye on that balance between profitability and security?

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Ian Groves. [00:22:46]:

It's a really good question and it isn't easy. You do what we have because cybersecurity is constantly moving. The goalposts are moving. The messages that come out from industry are constantly moving as well. So it's very easy and I am awful for it. For New Shiny Syndrome for We need this tool. We need this tool, we need this tool. I'm much better now at.

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Ian Groves. [00:23:04]:

We're far better at our overall financials of the company, which makes the little details of if we need that tool, it needs to provide A return. We don't do it very often, if I'm honest. We kind of review our stack once a year changes. The client can stay with the old stack for one more year and then that is no longer for sale. You have to move to our new stack offering and if it costs £20amonth more, it costs £20amonth more. And my argument to my guys is if you can't justify why they need to spend 20 pound a month more, we've got a real problem.

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James Steel [00:23:33]:

And this applies, I'm guessing, particularly to the security stack, because that's what needs to evolve probably the most.

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Ian Groves. [00:23:38]:

Yeah, I think so. The core pack doesn't change a great deal, but again, we're quite heavy in that security. It isn't an add on. You've got to do it, you've got to. So when we build out our baseline, we're quite secure on that. It has good controls and a lot of it is the way you deploy tools. I'm very dubious of the amount of toys out there you can buy that don't necessarily make you more secure. In fact, they widen your footprint of your estate and they are more of a threat vector than they actually help.

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Ian Groves. [00:24:05]:

So we try and keep streamlined, but squeeze 110% juice out of every tool to use it right before we move on to the next tool and add something else.

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James Steel [00:24:14]:

What keeps you up at night?

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Ian Groves. [00:24:16]:

Oh, what keeps me up at night? Not as many things as used to. I sleep pretty well. I got an 18 month old, she keeps me up at night. What keeps me up at night? Keeping the growth going the way we are. As you mentioned earlier, we've had significant growth year on year and my job is to make sure we keep the wheels on and we keep doing as good a job for our clients. I've seen lots of businesses get quite big quite quickly and the quality of the service they've offered has diluted quite radically. We've been through a lot of change and a lot of growing pains. A lot of clients that used to be mine were a bit hesitant to the change and I had to reassure them that you will get a better service from them than you ever got from it.

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Ian Groves. [00:24:50]:

I know you're like me and we have a history. They're better than me, trust me. What keeps me up at night is ensuring we do that.

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James Steel [00:24:56]:

What does good look like in we'll say five years time? That's a long way ahead.

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Ian Groves. [00:25:01]:

Ooh, five years. I should know because we have a five year plan, so I should be able to tell you exactly what good looks like.

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James Steel [00:25:05]:

Not necessarily in numbers, but good looks like.

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Ian Groves. [00:25:08]:

Do you remember when there was certain businesses when you were growing up where your parents or friends and relatives would say, if you could get a job with them, you'll be. That's a good place. They'll look after you. That's. That's a place you'll want to work for life. Which sounds a bit. Bit boring in this day and age, but you get the idea.

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James Steel [00:25:22]:

Yeah.

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Ian Groves. [00:25:22]:

There was those businesses that were. If you could get in there, you'd be set up, they'd look after you, you'd grow. I want us to be a business that's associated with that terminology. We've always had a pride history of working with apprentices. We've now got T level students. I want to make sure that we deliver a brilliant work experience for the people that work. They're giving me their time. They're trusting us to be their career and we've got to do a good job by it.

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James Steel [00:25:46]:

Well, that was way too much positivity. So it's a perfect segue into, let's talk about what you don't like about the industry. What is it that you've heard that you hear out there in our Industry Manure segment?

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Ian Groves. [00:25:59]:

One of the things I'm not a big fan of is, and this is slightly controversial, the client is not always right and the client doesn't want to always be right. They're paying us for a professional service and consultancy, not just to fix tickets and unjam printers. So I hear a lot in the industry of, you know, you need to sit down and listen to what the client's needs are front to back. And whilst I get that, and we do do it, 90% of the client's needs are, I need to sleep easier at night, I need to know my business is secure and I need to know we're getting the most out of technology. 90% of that is the same across every business. And if you listen to the client too much, you will go back to what I was talking about earlier. In fragmenting your offering and offering a custom service and changes, your team won't thank you for it. The billing will be complicated and it's not scalable.

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Ian Groves. [00:26:45]:

So I'm not. Yeah, it needs to be phrased safer than that. But I'm not a fan of the client is right. Listen to the client, do what they want. Not 100% love that.

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James Steel [00:26:55]:

That's an excellent point. So onto our next section, which regular listeners will know is Pass the pitchfork. So this is where we answer some of the questions from previous guests. So our previous guest on the podcast was Dan Scott and he's got a question for you he would like an answer for. And he said, if you're going to automate one thing, if you ran an MSP and you were going to look at bringing in automation, where would you focus the lens? What would you choose? What would you be looking at that could move the needle as a first step on the journey?

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Ian Groves. [00:27:22]:

Wow, okay. What would I automate? So something health and safety and HR is a personal pet hate of mine.

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James Steel [00:27:31]:

I thought you were going to say as a perfect personal love.

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Ian Groves. [00:27:34]:

No, no, it's taking a downhill.

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James Steel [00:27:36]:

Sorry if that's your business out there.

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Ian Groves. [00:27:38]:

Big respect to everybody who has to do this day in, day out. Personally, I find that quite a drain. Now, I don't know how much can be automated beyond what we do, but anything to streamline certain. Anything to do with admin automate, particularly health and safety, HR training, upskilling awareness, documentation sharing. Just make that happen for me and tick a box to say I've read it somewhere.

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James Steel [00:28:00]:

I love that. I love that. And actually we use a platform called Multiplier, so have a look at that. It does a lot of that. So we're not affiliated in any way. But if you're listening to this, I feel be remiss of me. Not to mention that you've got a discount code. So yes, it'll be in the description.

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James Steel [00:28:16]:

So we need a question from you then for our next guess. So it could be an industry expert. It could be an msp.

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Ian Groves. [00:28:20]:

Yeah. Okay.

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James Steel [00:28:22]:

Give them a tricky one to work with.

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Ian Groves. [00:28:23]:

So since it could be industry expert or msp, it's sort of twofold, depending on which side of the camera you fit on. What more do you think vendors could be doing with MSPs to strengthen partnerships or MSPs could be doing to engage with vendors more? I'm a big fan of the partnership element of things. I think there's more to it than just the transactional. We sell your service, we buy your service and you look at what else could they do behind the scenes in vendors, the resources they've got to help with marketing, sales, all this. That's a wealth of information to MSPs that don't have access to that. So I'd like to know what their ideas they could come up with to improve in that area.

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James Steel [00:29:01]:

Excellent question. Ian, it's been a pleasure talking to you. My goodness, we have got so many nuggets of wisdom there. I can't wait to dice this up. Get the notes written, and if you're listening, check out the website and you'll be able to find any sort of. Any. All the notes around, the key takeaways, the main points distilled down by the podcast. But thank you so much for talking to me.

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Ian Groves. [00:29:18]:

Thanks for having me. It's been brilliant.

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James Steel [00:29:20]:

No worries. See you around.

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Ian Groves. [00:29:21]:

Cheers, James.

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James Steel [00:29:21]:

Cheers.

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