P & L

Service Gross Margin

MSA

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James Steel (00:00.14)

While most MSPs are out there hunting endlessly for new clients, the smart ones know their richest opportunities lie in the fields they already own. My name is James Steele and this is Harvest, where MSPs and industry experts share proven ways to grow profitable revenue from your current customer base. No theory, no fluff, just field-tested strategies that work. Let's grow.

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Dan Scott 

There's no reason why we shouldn't be fairly compensated for what we do as an industry. There's no, you know, I laugh and joke that if your lawyer wakes up and thinks about you at half three in the morning, in the morning they'll bill you 30 minutes. You know what I mean? If you so much as cross their mind when they can't sleep, they'll bill you in the morning. There's no shortage of an open and honest conversation where you have to say what you need in order to be profitable.

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There is no harm in making money. There is no sin in being a profitable and growing organization. Your client should want to do business with a healthy company. The key to, you know, don't put perfection in the way of progress. The best plans are usually about version 15 in my humble experience. Everyone's business is different. Everyone's goal is different. The journeys have parallels. People's journeys have parallels, but you can't tell people how to do it.

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The destination is unique to the human beings.

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a huge welcome Harvesters. In this episode, I'm really lucky. I'm talking to Dan Scott, who is the Director of the IT Nation Community in Europe. We're going to be talking about all things to do with price increases, unlocking hidden revenue, and empowering your team to spot opportunities as well as just your sales team. He shares some really practical ways as well to have those horrible, awkward money conversations that none of us like.

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James Steel (01:49.038)

Dan is always great value, he's got so much to share, it's a great conversation. Make sure you've got a notepad handy. Let's get on with it. If you worked on a farm, you'd want Dan Scott helping you check your crops. As regional director of IT Nation at ConnectWise, he helps high performing MSPs dig deep into their metrics to unearth hidden growth. With over 13 years of hands-on MSP experience and running the IT Nation peer groups in Europe, Dan knows exactly where to plant the seeds of success. Dan Scott.

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Pleasure to have you on my man.

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Dan Scott 

Mr Steel, very good to see you my friend. How are you doing? You well?

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Very well, yeah, this has been a long time coming. It's fantastic to have you on the first series, but listen, we've got no time for small talk. So I'm really keen to know, you work with many MSPs in the peer groups in which you're involved. What are the major differences and the surprises that you've found between those that are struggling and those that are perhaps the best performing ones?

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Dan Scott 

people who execute consistently, profitably consistently and are in the top 25 % or in the top quartile, the highest before is those that have a plan, those that stick to the plan and those that execute the plan. Those three things, you've got to do it all. Making one shoving in the drawer doesn't do anything. You've got to go out and you've got to execute on it. But the people who write one, they stick to it.

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Dan Scott (03:09.996)

and they execute on it are the ones that have the most consistent and highest growth because they know what to focus on. They know by proxy what not to focus on. As I used to say many management meetings over the years. So by looking through the agenda, we're going to focus on absolutely everything for the next quarter. And we expect that to be a success.

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So thinking a little bit about the existing client base and generating revenue from those. So when you think about the best performing ones, is there one or two things you can cite that they do really well in terms of extracting the most revenue from the clients that they do have?

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Yeah, absolutely. there is a often say to people in when you're talking to an audience, talking specifically about business growth, we'll do it virtually. know, it's like everybody put the virtual hand up if you listen to this and you have a client that's been with you for longer than or clients who've been with you for longer than say five years and then keep your hand up if they're still paying you what they paid you five years ago. Sadly, I would imagine about 10 percent, at least probably nearer to 20 of the virtual audience has still got a hand up.

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somewhere as an industry we we are a professional services industry we're no different to an accountant or a lawyer or any other professional services trade that you care to think about and we should we should act accordingly

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Price increases are scary, Dan. No one likes to implement those. Customers will hate them.

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Dan Scott (04:28.984)

do, but then let's think about your personal life or personal and business life and think about anyone of you who have a recurring engagement with that you're still paying the same as what you paid five years ago. Their costs have gone up. You want their costs to go up because you want them to be investing in their team. You want them be investing in their people so their people stay and give you a consistent service so that people learn and are trained and provide you a new and better service and they keep pace with especially in an industry like ours where

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No one skill sets what it was five years ago. How do you?

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do you approach that then? How do you approach that conversation? So if you're an MSP that really never wanted to do this, feels like they're doing the dirty on their clients, how would you approach that conversation? How would you pitch it to client?

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should be contractually of there should be no reason why any managed services master agreement, whatever you would call it, MSA shouldn't have some form of contractual anniversary price increase built into it. Remove the emotion. I think the emotion you put in is emotion to an extent you're to get back out of that conversation being being very cut and dry about how you do these things and very keep it factual. Keep it, know, keep it honest, keep it factual of this is what we do.

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This is going to happen. It's going to happen automatically. mean, again, I even hear of occasionally you have conversations with people and you hear terrible things such as that for that business anyway of I felt the need to absorb that. Let's say, you know, a large external price increase that was put onto the channel by, you know, big by a large cost item. We all know there have been variations in the Microsoft 365 costs over the last couple of years. Of course, there are Microsoft responding to.

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Dan Scott  (06:10.104)

global economic trends. have to. If we want them to provide an amazing 365 service, they've got to react. And people who have not passed those on, people who have said, I felt the need to protect my clients from them. It's not your fault. It's not your making. And it shouldn't be a reason why you have to sacrifice within your business.

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As you go back then, if you're in that position, mean the contractual outline is great for those new customers. If you're thinking about the legacy ones that perhaps, sorry, the existing ones I should say, they're not legacy to MSPs. How do you start that conversation? What's a good way to do it? Have you come across this in the peer groups?

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Open and honest. I've come across it in the peer group. I did it in my MSP career as well. There's no shortage of open and honest conversation where you have to say what you need in order to be profitable. There is no harm in making money. There is no sin in being a profitable and growing organization. Your client should want to do business with a healthy company whose team members want to be there. And they want to go into work every day and they want to do an amazing job for their clients.

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And to do that, businesses require investment and team members require investment. So to go to somebody and say, this is where you are, this is where you have to be, these are the reasons why it is for us to maintain our relationship. This is where we're required to be. We've all had to have conversations where, let's face it, there's a bit too much water gone under the bridge. Ideally, it's a bit awkward. It just is, you've left it too long. It won't get any easier the longer you leave it. No one's going to call you up one day and say that we've noticed we've been paying you the same for a while.

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So you just got to, you know, the Americanism got pulled the bandaid off.

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James Steel (07:49.666)

Yes, just get it done. Let me ask you, I know you're not privy necessarily to the actual data, the actual financials and things that the MSPs have within the peer groups you operate, but in terms of the sort of the output and what you've seen from sort of the feedback, where has there been any times when MSPs have been really surprised looking at their numbers and they've sort of come out of a meeting and said, crikey, there's like something really drastic here that hopefully will improve the business if I put it right.

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Yeah, no, to pick up your point, no, I don't see any of our members' financials. totally confidential between them and their peer group members. The numbers that we share publicly, which are aggregated across the entire community, are the only things that I get visibility of. We're very strict on data confidentiality. It's one of our guiding principles within the community of our core culture building blocks when it comes to how the IT nation of old community is what it is. Luckily,

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Because of what we do and how the amazing job that our members do, you don't get too many curve balls is what I would say. So we don't get too many gotchas.

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Even the new join, even the newcomers perhaps, the new joiners to the...

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As people get used to it, quite commonly what happens, it might be the first time that someone's looked at their finances in such a level of detail. I've seen that more than once where it's a someone's P &L or general ledger has been examined because we all use the same, as in we submit in the same format so we can compare between members. Some members can get a direct comparison between people in the room. And there can be some gotchas.

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Dan Scott  (09:29.238)

One of the ones I would highlight, I've seen it myself, unfortunately, especially working one-on-one with MSPs is when you peel back the onion on service gross margin. So on, we have a managed service that provides X security, continuity, whatever, insert your flavor here. And it makes us money. So the first cry, the first sort of level of thing, we make money from it. And then the second one is we think we make about X.

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But then all of a sudden you factor in all the costs that go into really delivering a managed service and X isn't quite where you thought it was going to be. And I'm talking about the amount of your team's time that it takes to support the service, the installation costs that go along with it if they're not being directly covered by the client, the training costs of the team in order to deliver the ongoing service, the credit control costs. If perhaps it's got some

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billing quirks and queries and you haven't quite got that bedded in and it's causing credit control team a bit of a nightmare. The washes through all the way through the chain when you actually look at the real cost of delivering a service quite commonly it's well we buy for X and we sell for Y and so we've got

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How does this happen, Dan? How does that come about? How do you miss that?

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just because people don't want look at it. I think when people don't think to or they don't want to, it's just a perception of, well, people are doing what they're doing anyway, like the team are there, so we can look after that, it'll be okay. It'll be fine. And again, it looks, on the face of it, looks healthy, by the way. It's always through good intentions, always. It's one thing you realize that very few people are looking at things that you... There's things that the human brain doesn't want to look at. I've got plenty of those. Or we choose not to, or we just don't see. It's a huge role of the peer groups.

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Dan Scott  (11:15.968)

is to show people like you say your goals are A, B and C and yet we can see this within your business. I think you should be focusing on D, and F. That's going to move the needle for you. And that's huge. When you've got someone in the room who has no iron in the fire, all they want you to be is successful and they can hear your goals. They understand your goals and they can see where you currently are and they help you bridge the gap between the two. And that's huge. So when it comes to looking at say that service gross margin gap,

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It's just, we weren't counting it. thought this was pretty good. But then actually we've done a bit of research. We've asked our team to recategorize some of their service tickets so we can look at their time that they're bringing through. And actually that service is in the top three of our drains on our team that aren't clients having issues. Nursing that, triaging it, maintaining it, managing it, it's much higher than we thought it was. And we're spending an awful lot of time on the phone to the provider or providers that we use to construct.

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the service for the underlying tool set. So it's something we've got to look at because what we thought was really highly profitable, actually not as much as we thought it was going to be.

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Okay, I think this is really another point worth just emphasizing because I've seen this exact same scenario play out. I've seen MSPs that have struggled because they've suddenly realized that they weren't as profitable as they thought. And I've also seen the flip side where you've got those MSPs that have really taken the time to map out the exact costs within their PSA. know exactly what's going on in terms of their profitability levels and they've absolutely flourished because of it and ended up with a nice profitable exit. So this can't be emphasized enough.

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I can imagine it's frustrating work to have to really map out every element, but at least do it for the top services so you know the true profitability that you're working to. So that's a really good focus area then, isn't it? If you're thinking about, into next year, how can I turn the levers and dials potentially to increase my profitability, to increase, I guess, increase revenue as well potentially, that's one of the areas you could look. Are there any others? Can you give us maybe one more example perhaps of if you were to look at your existing client base?

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James Steel (13:20.386)

where would you focus your time? Where would you look for potential, could be new sources of revenue or it could just be profit gains.

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Yeah, absolutely. So another one and you and I have spoken about this before is looking at who buys what from you could put quite simply, you know, having a look at your clients, having a look at the agreements, the products and services that they that they could they take from you, the managed services that you provide and then looking at the the white space, the gaps that exist in the grid. So almost clients services tick across, tick across or blank, tick blank. Looking for those those patches of white.

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I had a conversation with an MSP owner just recently and that conversation went along the lines of we've realized somehow, just slipped our mind, know, just something we'd never really forensically looked at, that we still have clients for whom we don't back up their Microsoft 365 or their cloud environments anyway, because they could have other cloud environments except for that. We're still not, they don't have a backup of them.

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All our new clients do because it's in our new managed services agreement. It's within our MSA It's within our bundles, but we've got people on legacy pricing. Of course you do We know one very few people will be watching this that had a business that they've just started and have every client on the same contract It's it's a romantic goal, but it's one that can be quite hard to get to So we need to go back and get that fixed pretty quickly and I we kind of went through a few ways and means of doing it the by the way the for people listening if you want to complete the circle the upshot was

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there's going to be a letter that goes out and they're going to be told that we can't knowingly provide that service to you without also doing this. It's irresponsible of us as a provider. So as of X, it will just be added to the agreement and we will then provide you and here's the details of the service attached. And I think it's again, like keep an emotion, keep the emotion out of it.

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James Steel (15:07.566)

Okay, I think it's worth pausing here just for a second because what Dan's highlighting isn't just about you getting greedy and wanting to make more money. It's about you having a sustainable, healthy business. One that will support your customers in the best possible way that it can. And so when you've got clients that are pushing back on the price increases, you got to kind of think, are these the ones that you want to be working with long-term? The other question I would ask you is, are they the ones that are demanding more in terms of...

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better service or faster response times. Definitely worth thinking about and evaluating whether those customers are ones that are really ones that you want here for the journey in the long term.

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The end of the day do what you do to be a responsible responsible technology services provider and and that's part of it Yeah, at what people buy from you what they don't and then looking at what would be appropriate because of course perhaps not all services would be appropriate for every client I get that because some will be there thinking well There's a reason we don't this clients and have that so we can't back it up or with it They don't have on-premise equipment, so we can't do BCD are what I don't know. I'm making it up now

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So that could be a really, mean could be a really lucrative source and I everyone should definitely go through that. What I am interested in though is the impact maybe that pricing can have on this as well because obviously that's all your services but what you're charging, some MSPs depending on their growth will be at different levels of confidence in terms of their pricing. What are your thoughts around pricing strategies these days?

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Yeah, so throwaway term, dislike throwaway terms in the industry, but I'll use it because people might recognise it. But it's better to dig into it and actually get to what it really means. But value based pricing and it's another one of those buzzwords, isn't it? It's like the trusted advisor. That one winds me up as well. But the

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James Steel (16:50.862)

You can wait for that though, you get your turn later on to call out what ones you're

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A of sins in that one, they, it's look, if you're if you're providing a service that's going to be providing, that's going to be saving X number of man hours or personnel for a business, that's going to enable them to produce more effective, you know, proposals or tenders or take an operational pain point from their team and remove it. It shouldn't be.

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know, it shouldn't be a couple of percent for a few thousand in the first invoice and then nothing else. There's no reason why it wouldn't be an ongoing payment. There's no reason why a managed service can't achieve 50-60 % gross margin. There's no reason why we shouldn't be fairly compensated for what we do as an industry. There's no, you know, I laugh and joke that if your lawyer wakes up and thinks about you at half three in the morning, in the morning they'll bill you 30 minutes. You know what I mean? If you so much as cross their mind when they can't sleep, they'll bill you in the morning.

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It's so very true. When you think about the best performing ones, is there anything, any that stand out to you?

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you

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James Steel (17:55.342)

This episode is sponsored by Sales Builder, where I work. I really wanted to tell you about us because I see so many MSP sales team buried in admin instead of talking to customers and building relationships. We help you automate your sales process with standardized product catalogs and professional proposals. Our service matrix or the white space module, that's the bit that shows you visually where the opportunities are in your customer base, from service gaps to upcoming renewals.

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Everything links directly with your PSA and of course your distributors. If you'd like to free up your sales team's time and spot more revenue opportunities, simply connect with me on LinkedIn or head to salesbuilder.com. Well, you think actually these guys, you know, I know they charge absolutely top whack and the reason they can do this is there's a number of.

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Let's get back to it.

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James Steel (18:44.992)

approaches that they take, whether it's their communications or how they conduct meetings or what's included in the service they offer. Is there anything that stands out for you? Maybe just give us one example, maybe.

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alignment, business goal alignment, it really is the secret source at the moment. If you want to know where people are doing it really right and where they're finding success is because actually they are more than a technology provider. They are a business advisor and a trusted business advisor. I hate the term. around a boardroom table.

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and the business having a goal. Again, every client that you manage will have three things that have to happen in 2025 for their business to have been classed as a success. You may not know what they are. Hopefully you do. But they how can you contribute to that success? And by the way, it might not necessarily be around the terms around the world of technology is being a value business partner that owns the tech in the room. So you think about it this way. You're in a board meeting.

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Someone will own op, someone will own finance, someone will own sales and other disciplines that that business has. There is no reason why the person that owns sales also doesn't have an opinion on the finance or on the operations because the whole point of a board is everyone contributes. That's where the really, really successful businesses, that's where they're operating with their clients. They have a seat at the table, they have a valued voice. And then when the business says, we're going to, the goal for next year is to grow by,

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making this up of course, as a client's business they make widgets, we want to grow by two million pounds of top line revenue, by five hundred thousand of bottom line profitability and we want to do that by the end of calendar year 25. And so then round the table of course what's the job of that board and leadership team is to say then things they're going to do to make it happen. These are the bits we've got to get done to facilitate. It's not going to happen on its own or it would have happened already. So then as the technology provider what are you going to do?

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Dan Scott  (20:43.926)

And that doesn't just mean we're to put a new firewall in, you know, that then it becomes far more strategic of we've got to look at how we're using data. We've got to look at how the sales team are operating when that because at the moment the processes they're using are a manual and cumbersome. And so that when we accelerate, that's going to break. We've got to look at the service department because they're going to get busier. We're to look at the way that you communicate with your clients because at the moment, again, it's too manual and it will cause friction points. So we can look at the list is endless. It goes on and on and on and on.

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which then becomes valuable to them because you're only doing it for one reason. Doing it because it helps them hit their goal, not because they've got a firewall that's going to go into life and you need to swap it out. It's a very, very, I know that's really like being hyperbola and being over the top because it proves it, because it shows a point. We all know that the reality of the world is far more granular and it's a bit more gray, but that's where people are. You that's where they're operating of take the table stakes out. The right, if you're working with the right businesses,

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they'll want you then you do that anyway that's what they want you to do but you take care of all of that that's kind of table stakes we assume you're doing it but operate at a higher level where you're helping us run this business not just helping us run the computers within the business

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Is there like a common mistake that really stands out for you that kind of just appears over and over again in the group?

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I see businesses too often that don't empower their teams to help them grow. That doesn't mean we're making everyone a salesperson because if people want to be in a growth-based role, the odds are they will be or they're to ask to be. However, don't overlook the power of your team in helping you grow. I've seen some amazing businesses and when you again, you look in, you look at the habits that people are doing, let alone look at the numbers or look at the job titles or anything like that, but look at what they do. Look at what people are doing.

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Dan Scott  (22:33.676)

And here's definitely one of the secret tricks that people use that unlock growth is that they empower their teams to help them grow. I'll talk about, I'll give you a specific example. And again, it's a bit over the top, but it proves a point of, you know, client talking to a team member on the help desk and they've had lots and lots of issues with say spam email, you know, with junk email coming in for that help this team member to say in a conversation that we're not targeting them. We're not quotering them. None of that.

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if you know, and let people do what they do and what they were put on earth to do of, you know what? We've had other clients that have had similar problems to this. This service that we use, it just gets rid of them, just gets rid of the problems, you know, that literally the phishing emails just go. And for the most part, you know, we find ways to solve it. It works really well. All I see from my perspective is we hear from them a lot, then we don't hear from them. And that's really, powerful because it's a recommendation from a friend and from a trusted source and from someone who's there to

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help you get over a problem and it can remove a lot of friction and issues and you know, remove a lot of the work of someone who is tasked with revenue growth and with service positioning from being able to come in then through a trusted handover to say, I believe you had a chat with the person on the help desk. And if you would, if you value some more information, I'd love to give it to you. Just drop a call in my diary or I'll send you something over and we'll chat about it next time. I'm in for our QBR. We'll add it to the agenda.

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and go forward that way. So it's just giving people the keys to say, actually, you can help here. You can help get rid of the problem again, spin it in a way that's relevant to the person, you know, talk about you never talk to the same people that talk to different people in the same way. You always do different teams, different messages. So I'll give you a working example from from, you know, my days when I when I was part of an MSP, I remember talking to a team member of mine who it and so am I, by the way, as you can see from the background, he was just a massive techie and and he is awesome. So my

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So it's a kindred conversation of if you want to play with some of this really, really cool stuff, wouldn't it be great that your clients had it and then you can have, you you get to use it and you get to see it in the real world rather than just in the training lab. And they were like, yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And do you know what? That's exactly what happened. And you know, he went off and said, yeah, we've got this thing, it's really good. And this is what it would do for your business.

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Dan Scott  (24:58.222)

I don't know any of the stuff like pricing and any of that stuff, because that's not a me thing, but I think it would do this and this is going to help us fix the problem that you've got. And then it allows that conversation to happen so much quicker and easier. it's about putting those empowering the team. Let's say, for example, you've got a team of five people and 50 clients that within the business. If one of those is the only one of those people is the person who's tasked with going and seeing everyone sitting and having the QBR talking about what's new in the world of IT.

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talking about what are the products and services we could bring in that's going to benefit the business and help move it forward. You can only get around so many. If all five are having some form of conversation, wow, that opens a lot of doors. But it's also not about putting a quota around people's necks. People don't want it. That's not about doing that. No one's going to pull anyone up on how many times you've done it this quarter, anything like that, know, anything. But empower the team. It's amazing what happens when you give people the ability and the trust.

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and you empower them to go and have those kind of conversations. Stuff happens.

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this is really great advice. And it also resonates with my own experience, albeit on the distribution side. So we used to work with customers who had overloaded email boxes and we had an email archiving solution and the sales team would, you know, they would be selling good numbers of this archiving platform. But I'll tell you what, the technicians, because they knew it was in their interest to keep the load down from people's mailboxes.

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it was their recommendation at the point they saw even a grumble about email load or whatever, that they would recommend the software and could complete a sale almost just by having that trust already. And also there's a particular tone I think that some technical engineers have that is just less pushy, that is just maybe a little bit less enthusiastic. I think you know where I'm going with it. So this is hugely powerful. And as Dan says, you can have a real force multiplier there if you can.

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James Steel (26:49.654)

enable just two or three of your additional staff members to get on board with this. So can't recommend that one enough. Dan, we've reached the point where it's time for Industry Maneuver, the most awaited segment of our beloved podcast. Can you give me an example of something that really grinds your gears in the lovely echo chamber world that we sometimes live in in the MSP industry?

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Well, I've got a couple of sneaky ones in already, if you know what I mean. So there's a few that we've had so far. But they, yeah, there is quite a bit. There really, is.

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I have to pick one for the purpose of this podcast.

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Yeah, what am I putting in room 101? You know what mean? What's going in there?

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That's a trick, we should have called it Room 101. I don't know if you're listening to it, I'm not sure if that translates across the pond for a US audience.

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Dan Scott  (27:34.726)

It's a TV show. Anyone's watching thinking what are these two Brits on about this time? you know what I mean. It's a TV show where you can put your pet hates in a virtual room.

disappears like a verb out into a into oblivion so what's going towards it absolutely what's going towards oblivion that what's best

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Dan Scott  (27:53.132)

Going towards oblivion, something that something that grinds my gears, something that gets me something that tells me, yeah, annoys me in our industry a little bit too much is dogma. Dogmatic approaches to especially when it comes to telling people how to run their business or giving a formula or giving a you have to do it this way, no matter who you are or what you do or who your clients are.

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or why you got into this. love founder stories. That's one thing I could put the opposite of this one founder stories. I love them of you have to run it this way. And I just doesn't compute with me. I'd see I've been part of the privilege of being part of and of the privilege of working with amazing businesses and they all do it to their own flavor. Again, within the evolve community, we are not a community that tells people that this is how you must run your MSP.

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And this is how you must run your business. Everyone's business is different. Everyone's goal is different. The journeys have parallels. Okay, people's journeys have parallels, but you can't tell people how to do it because for person A, it might be an exit strategy for person B. could be an increase in operational maturity person C. It could be an increase in gross margin. The destination is unique to the human being into the business. So one thing I really does get me a little bit is almost like the this is the

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this is the formula or this is the prescription, if you will, with people businesses, with people doing business with people. And what are people? Unpredictable. I love working with entrepreneurs because entrepreneurs wake up every day to build careers for people, to help their clients, to build a business. It's the extra child at the dinner table that, you know, it keeps you awake at night. entrepreneurs are amazing people and I love, it's my privilege to support them and they don't need that.

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What they need is to take things and adapt it. What Collie told me, wonderful phrase. I want to put a lens on it. I'm going to take your golden nugget. I'm going to apply the lens that is our business and our clients and our team and our culture and our way of doing things. And then it's going to, I'm going to use that to make us amazing. Not, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.

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James Steel (30:08.844)

This is how it should be done.

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No, because I don't find, yeah, I just don't find that it's done from a place of this work for the person that's prescribing it. Yeah, there we go.

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So in tradition of the show, we have a question from our last guest. So was Jeff from SIFT and he has a question for you. So considering we're coming up on the beginning of a new year, if there's only one thing you could accomplish within your business next year to exceed the financial performance that you have, so your goal, what would that one thing be?

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If you haven't already, assume most have not, you need a foundational plan for how you are going to go on a journey towards process automation. How are you going to get onto a place where AI is a buzzword, isn't it? But you need a hyper automation, AI, machine learning, whatever you're to call it. What's your plan for how you're going to go about getting on that journey? Because unfortunately,

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There are lots and lots of people I think they're watching, they're looking, they're learning. However, they've not they've not started yet. And the key to you know, don't put perfection in the way of progress. The best plans are usually about version 15. In my humble experience or you know, version one of something is usually at least in my all I can talk about is me. Version one is awful. Version two is possible. Version three is getting somewhere. And it you iterate you iterate don't don't go for

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Dan Scott  (31:35.022)

trying to shoot for the moon in one arrow. If you know what mean, go for, we're gonna do one small thing and then we're gonna do another small thing. Do know what, you do 10 of those and you got something pretty cool. And the other, people often look at other businesses when you go to conferences or you go to events or you read online and you think, how the bloomin' heck have they done that? And you think, I'll tell you how they've done it. They probably had 10 goes at failing.

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Although for 10 things that kind of worked and kind of didn't, but they built on them and they took learnings and they got rid of the stuff that didn't work. So I see the automation wave and by that I'm really talking about things that are going to impact and benefit clients. Not talking about products, not talking about any specific discipline, but things that are going to make clients lives bigger, better, faster, more productive. If currently you're watching the market and thinking, yeah, we really should do something about that.

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We're still doing what we did. Then get that plan written about how you're to kick it off. Because what you're going to start seeing in 25 is the people who have done that in 24. They're kind of building below the waterline. It's like an iceberg. There's more of it underwater than there is above. So at the moment, people are busy doing the bits underneath the water that you can't see and your clients can't see them and the market can't see them. But then they're going to start executing on them when the house, when the foundations

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When they pull the concrete in the ground, building a house is really boring. When they start putting the bricks up, it starts getting fun because you can see rooms and you can see stuff. And the market's getting to the point now, the leaders in the marketplace are getting to the points where they're to start laying the bricks. And so we're going to start seeing, you know, success stories on LinkedIn. If we now offer this service to our clients where they can self-serve these things, where we have, you know, automation that's taking care of things that previously a person would have had to have gone to. we're doing them in half the time.

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you need to be on the front end of having those conversations with your clients because they see it elsewhere. It leaves you in an awkward spot. So start talking about how you write that automation plan because it's a huge wave. It's not going anywhere. I'm a bit of an AI Luddite. I'm not afraid to admit it. I'm sort of behind the curve on it all, but then I've started doing a couple of things and like, wow, that's cool. And then you, but they're small, know, they're small. We're not going to come up with something that's going to

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Dan Scott  (33:54.126)

You're not going to build something on day one that's going to automate in a cloud server deployment process and remove your first line help desk team. It's nothing like that. Don't think about things like that. Think about how you can take something that's really small and annoying and how you can remove it from people. And how are you going to build that plan? Because there's always a carrot and a stick to anything. The carrot is the efficiency.

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and the process improvements and the client satisfaction, the stick is you're going to start seeing the market do it. And so it's better to be ahead of the wave than it is getting hit by it.

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Okay, so I have to ask you then, what's your question for the next guest on the show?

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So to the next victim, I mean guest, mean, you know what we're calling these days.

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I you.

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Dan Scott  (34:44.429)

Right, okay.

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I'm gonna him off for the re-invite, he's not coming back.

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It's never gonna happen never if it was I'm doing something wrong the right get next question for the next guest is if You were gonna automate one thing if you were gonna look if you ran an MSP And you were gonna 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? Where would you focus?

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To finish up, Dan, your 30 second yell from the barn. So give us a shout out, anything you'd like to plug and where we can reach you, where we can find out more about what you're doing at the moment.

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Absolutely. So we've spoken a little bit on the call today about the IT Nation Evolve Community. If you want to be in a community and you want to be surrounded by your peers who support, challenge and hold you accountable to grow, then please do come and have a look at who we are and what we do. Theitnation.com. We're a peer group community in Europe. We meet once a quarter for two day peer group meetings and a day of what we call Community Day, where we bring all of our peer group members together to learn from our guest speakers.

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Dan Scott  (35:51.626)

It's a peer group that focuses as much on your personal life as your professional life. We believe in success in both and providing an environment where our members can learn from each other, can support each other, can challenge each other. And as a community, we all succeed and we win together. So it'd be a pleasure to meet you and to learn more about, help you learn more about Evolve if it's something that you see and you think actually that looks like good fun.

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Dan Scott, that has been a fine crop of wisdom. Thank you.

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Thank you my friend. Thank you. Thanks everyone for listening. See you soon.

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Okay that is it for this episode of Harvest. If you found this useful all the links we mentioned are in the show notes and of course if you enjoyed it please do leave us a review and share it with a friend or even better someone else in the industry who you know would get value from it. Until next time, happy harvesting.

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