dnsUNFILTERED: Dean Trempelas, Helpt

[00:00:00] Mikey Pruitt: Welcome everybody. Back to dnsUNFILTERED. I'm joined today by Dean Trempelas, Mr. MSP. I've got a lot of information from MSP Land, from Dean and Dean, welcome to the show.

[00:00:11] Dean Trempelas: Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

[00:00:13] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, happy to have you. I'm excited to be in your form so you can kick me off. Oh, maybe we'll tell that story.

But first, tell us a bit about yourself. And right before this, you said, which version of your story do I want? And I definitely want the Michael Bay extravagant version, so go for it.

[00:00:32] Dean Trempelas: So like many folks in this industry, I grew up with a passion for technology with computers. The high school, my father was a teacher at every summer they had to bring home all the computers so that they didn't just sit in this unsecured building.

So I grew up with, like a apple toe and then a Mac Lisa, and like pretty much any educational IT and what I should have done. What I should have done is I should have recognized, I love doing this. I've been building computers, taking apart computers, writing, stuff in PDOs, since I was a kid.

I should do that for a career. But instead, all my cousins went to engineering school, and this was like late nineties. They were buying like BMWs back then. I'm like, that's it. That's, I'm gonna go to school. I'm gonna get a job for $65,000 a year and I'm gonna get a BMW. And that's it. That's my life.

So I I stubbornly went to school for electrical engineering and had a rough time. You kinda gotta be good at math. And so anyways on my third try at my electrical engineering degree, I was now in my mid twenties going to school at UMass Dartmouth, which is a great state school in Massachusetts.

I needed the job pay my bills and I saw a computer company in. On Indeed that was advertising for a computer job, and so I thought, I've been tinkering with computers my whole life. I built a 2 86, 3 86, 4 86. I knew everything about desktop computers. I've got, went in, applied for the job at what I found out was an MSP and did not get it because it turns out that knowing a lot about desktops doesn't mean anything about supporting business technology.

The owner of that company had seen that I had some previous retail sales experience, and he said, listen, I need an account manager, so I'll hire you to do that. And I got my first job in the MSP space, $36,000 a year as a, account manager at a, so like a sales guy, basically? Yeah. Pretty much at a, not even that, like an order taker at a small MSP in southeastern Massachusetts.

In a tertiary market, in an old factory town. Just the saddest thing ever. And, recognized in the first two months. Holy crap. I don't know anything about technology. And that, that was my intro to MSP, and it could have ended there. But I'm Dean, and as I couldn't keep my mouth shut, so I'm walking around this place as the account manager.

And I keep spotting just general things that seemed wrong and out of place and kept articulating that. So after about six months, the owner said, you're a terrible account manager, but you keep yelling at everybody. You're the service manager now. And that's how I got into this. And, I was very lucky early on the owner of this company invested in sending me to training.

So I, I went to, we were members of Taylor Business Group and Robin Robbins at that time. So did a bunch of service management training with Taylor Business Group, was in a peer group, basically learned the depth of what I didn't know. And that kind of started us on a course of realization that wow, we, our MSP doesn't have to suck nearly as much as it sucks, we could actually be pretty decent. And so we took that MSP, that was about about 700 KARR at that time. And we grew that thing into a behemoth that when I left, ended up being over $50 million in revenue. And being. All over the East coast, which was super cool.

[00:04:05] Mikey Pruitt: Awesome. Yeah. So you like accidental MSP, and gained a lot of experience and knowledge there.

It's very cool. I wanted to point out, a lot of people say that computers and, stuff, it stuff is like math. And I'm like, no, it's not really. It's like a lot different. There's more of a, there's a lot more words.

[00:04:23] Dean Trempelas: I'm such a glutton for punishment with how bad I am at math. I married a math teacher, so you know, I can't escape.

[00:04:31] Mikey Pruitt: So you also referenced how Dean and I met, so let me tell this story. So I was about two years ago, probably an event was coming up Anyway, I had been asked by DNSFilter to become the MSP Evangelist. Which, I love the name evangelist. I'm from the deep south, so that's very fitting for my personality.

I like to go, spread the good word here and there. So I, first thing I did, not first thing, early when I got this new title, I went on to r/msp where all the MSPs hang out to introduce myself. I made a quick quippy video saying hello and someone. Reported me as vendor posting in r/msp, unsanctioned vendor posting.

And I was like, okay. So then I got banned from r/msp, my basically first week on this new title job. And, iT Nation in Orlando was not far away from that. So we went to it. Nation, DNSFilter had a party at a local restaurant bar place, and a bunch of people came. Dean was one of those people we met.

We were sitting at a table chatting with you and one of your coworkers, and Dean was telling the story of how he got a vendor banned on our slash sb. And I was like, tell me more Dean. And you kept going. And I was like, you set up a bee. That was me. I, and you're like, oh, here's the beer. I'm like, the free.

[00:05:58] Dean Trempelas: Important detail to that story as well. That was the year the big hurricane hit for IT Nation. That's right. And nearly every vendor that was doing anything offsite canceled it. Not y'all showed up. You were all there, you were present. You gave a great time to all the partners. I remember that.

It all showed up when everyone else stepped out.

[00:06:18] Mikey Pruitt: That's what we do here at DNSFilter. Dean and I have put that under the bridge and we've actually laughed about it many times on LinkedIn DMs and stuff. But, that's how we met. And very similar to MSP stories to start out of some joke or some incident that, ends up being a kind of a storyline, a through line through your relationship with people, which is really cool.

So thanks for being on the pod Dean.

[00:06:42] Dean Trempelas: Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

[00:06:44] Mikey Pruitt: So Dean now works for Helpt, which is a I don't wanna say outsourced 'cause you in fact crossed that out on your homepage there. But it's a technical answers and a kind of help desk and not outsourced, but very good help desk software and like personal attentiveness, like an extension of your customer experience, customer service department at your MSP.

But Dean, can you tell us just a little bit about Helpt?

[00:07:10] Dean Trempelas: Yeah, so I, okay, so I have a good segue. So that Reddit story, the reason why you got reported is not that you were a vendor talking about your product, it's that the rules of that community said there was a certain way you had to do that. And because that first time you posted.

While your intentions were really good and you were trying to help people, you didn't present it in a way that matched that format. It stood out as an exception, right? And so it got noticed and it got flagged, and that caused you to not be able to post there for 30 days, which. That stinks because it's not like you came in there to do any harm, right?

Like you, you were trying to help people and add value, but that didn't matter if you didn't understand what the sort of the client wanted and have the right tone. So I use that as a segue because we crossed off outsource. We are outsourced, but we crossed off outsourcing because so many outsourcing vendors, they basically farm it out to the cheapest labor pool available that has the requisite skillset to get the job done.

So many of the outsourcing providers in our space, the people that are doing the work, they're great. They know how to do the work. They're good techs and those companies have great intentions, but they haven't connected the dots that's not what your clients actually want to hear on the other side of the phone.

They want somebody that speaks their language the way they speak it. And I don't mean literally the language, like it's just the cadence the nuances, the style. So what we're trying to do a little differently at Helpt, we're a hundred percent US based. Everybody onshore, US citizen, and in some cases that makes a big difference.

Some companies that use us have, like DOD contracts, they need to meet a certification. So this is great 'cause they need US citizens working on their materials. But a lot of our other clients just, they come from small towns. They come from, those secondary and tertiary markets and they need that help.

They need outsourcing, but they need an outsourcing partner that understands their clients well enough that. Their clients don't feel like they're being outsourced. And it's that nuanced difference that it's not about languish and a lot of people when we have this conversation like, oh, it's the accent or nothing to do with that.

I think most folks in any country now, we're pretty globalized. Like it's not the accent, it's the way that you approach that customer experience. And our team is trained to treat the MSP's customers. Like they're our customers directly. And you can tell that slightly nuanced difference. Just like back to that Reddit post.

Yeah. We could all tell this was your first day on Reddit and like you notice that you don't have that problem anymore. That's true. Because true, you learn the cadence, you learn the language, you learn the culture of that subreddit. And so now your posts do not stand out at all in a negative way. They just come forward as being helpful and useful.

And so you figure a lot of outsourcing providers. Just don't wanna go on that journey to learn that. So we're filling that void.

[00:10:24] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. Great. And I was, that made me think of a lot of times when I hear you speak on social media or whatever, your Spicy Monday or Friendship Friday or talking, you mentioned a lot about how the MSP business has become commoditized and one way to stand out is exceptional customer service, and it sounds like "helped", is trying to, Helpt can solve that issue.

[00:10:49] Dean Trempelas: IT. C, service first is really important. The challenge that a lot of service providers have, and it's not just an MSP problem, it's a lot of service providers. They think the act of delivering the service itself is the product. And I love the analogy, if you think of a really basic service, imagine a lawn cutting service.

A lot of MSPs think that telling you, Mikey, I cut a thousand blades of grass today. That's the value add, that's what you're like, oh, that's amazing. Thank you. And you did it with a smile, but I don't care about that. You don't care about how many blades of grass they cut or what brand of mower they use to cut it or what kind of fertilizer they use.

You care that when they leave, that you have a nicely manicured lawn that looks good, that's what you care about. And if that end result is delivered in a customer first way with a smile, with a great experience, you love that. But not the blades of grass themselves. And it's so funny because we see so many MSPs, and I know you come up across the too with all the MSPs you run into, they say they're white glove, they talk about the client experience.

But they don't actually deliver a client experience. They just focus that all around tickets and how well they've gone and solved the problem, basically how well they've gone and cut the blade at grass. It's yes, your texts, when they pick up the phone, they're friendly. They're supposed to be friendly.

Your texts, when they pick up the phone, ask the user what's wrong, and then promptly address it. That's their job. That's cutting blades of grass. They're supposed to do that, like you don't get. To pat yourself on the back for that. That's not white glove. That's why you're here. The end product, the business outcome for your client, that's the experience.

Yeah, and if you focus on that, if you focus on how we make people feel, that we make our users feel valued, that we make our users feel important, that we don't bother them with how many blades of grass we're cutting and how we're cutting it. But how we make them feel about their wonderful, beautiful lawns afterwards.

People like that. People will pay for that. People will tell their friends about that. That's how you grow a business.

[00:13:00] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. A lot of the MSPs that I see get hung up on the technology stack or like this, amazing automation they built. And I agree with what I think you're saying is that's just table stakes.

That's, I. That should be there regardless. The gap and the differentiator is when you present that to the client and they don't even see that stuff that you're so proud of. They just feel the outcome, they feel that they're. Being well taken care of special in a way.

[00:13:31] Dean Trempelas: So a really good example of this.

Funny enough, I promise I'm not, I was not paid to show this. Come on, let's get a dean metaphor out there. Let's go. Let's talk about DNS actually. So way back when at our MSPS Sun You Out, before, when we were much smaller, when crypto stuff was first starting to hit. Everything. We picked up DNSFiltering open DNS that way here.

Nobody thinks I'm just like chilling for DNSFilter. So we picked up open DNS, we added that to our whole stack. We added the roaming client pretty much. Did the full DNS rollout the way you would like, 2015? And had a huge impact from a security standpoint to all our clients. 'cause right away, like any bad request going out of the network was basically stopped.

And so from an MSP standpoint, we're awesome. Like we think of all of the headaches we just prevented we're amazing. I think our clients said that a lot of our clients get really frustrated. Because, yeah, it is true. We prevented a lot of crypto. We prevented a lot of, malware rotations from being dropped from bad ad servers.

All these other security layers, we didn't know how to protect from or couldn't. Were all just stopped because of DNS. So yeah, subjectively we did a great job, but we didn't think about. What's the actual business outcome for our clients? Oh, it's a bunch of websites they can't visit anymore and we didn't actually bother to go through with every client ahead of time and determine what the impact would be to their business.

Do a discovery plan this rollout out and present this tool. In a way, it's our job to keep them secure, so of course we did that. When we came back to the clients that were aggravated that maybe they couldn't visit a restaurant because that restaurant site had been compromised and open. DNS was very correctly blocking them.

It was doing its job. We're like hey we're protecting you and thinking that the clients are gonna be like, that's amazing. Thank you so much. Thank You're the best. MSP and most of want pizza

[00:15:25] Mikey Pruitt: clients.

[00:15:25] Dean Trempelas: Yeah, exactly. Our clients like, I don't care. That's your job. Go do it. I wanna be able to, we're doing a company event.

I need to order a pizza. The website won't work. And it's that way of thinking about your technology and tools. That's where a lot of those service providers fail. And they think I I've made posts about this where I talk about, a lot of them will talk about we had a best in class tool, or we've implemented a best in class pro, process or Gartner quadrant ranked solution.

Perhaps I've implemented DNSFilter 'cause it's the best DNS solution. They dumped open DNS. That's great. But if you don't implement those products with respect to the end user experience and what that's gonna look like and how you can curate that and make those users feel like you actually care about what they do and what their outcomes are, none of that goodwill will.

Really get you anywhere. And in fact it, it might actually be the opposite. You may be looked at negatively. If I bring it back to the grass cutting example, I have a dog. So if I have a lawn care service come and they cut my whole lawn and they treat it with the best chemical, that will ensure that a month from now my lawn is.

Perfect. My neighbor across the street has an amazing lawn. We're in a lawn war, I'm losing. And so they do all of this and the lawn care guy is I am literally the best lawn care guy ever. This lawn is going to be immaculate. The dean will beat Chris next week in the lawn care off 'cause of how good his lawn looks, and he tells me as he is leaving, oh, by the way, no one can go on the lawn for three days.

That's a problem. I have a dog. So you just put poison on my lawn, that'll make my dog sick. And if I ignore that warning and bring my dog out anyways, my dog will ruin that hard work. So the net result is not to my benefit. And that's what happens at a lot of MSPs. MSPs will go and do something that is objectively best practice with no thought for.

How does this impact my actual end client's ability to recognize their priorities? And so that's all lost. It's all the goodwill is lost. And you end up having a client that's the guy knew I had a dog. What a jerk. Why? Why would he put poison him? He didn't even ask me. He knows I have a dog.

There's dog stuff everywhere. Isn't that obvious? He's been taking care of my lawn for years. He's seen my dog. And in your mind, you now feel like this provider doesn't care about you, doesn't have your best interest in place, and suddenly you're at risk of churn. Even though they objectively did the right thing and did it well,

[00:17:49] Mikey Pruitt: yeah, because I can see you sitting out on the lawn in the morning sipping a cup of coffee with your PJ still on, and just give a little wink and a nod to the neighbor.

Be like he's got a dog. He's sounds really nice. I wanna, I gotta pee.

[00:18:06] Dean Trempelas: I definitely have I definitely have some lawn fomo. He's, he is got all the gadgets and all the tools and, oh, it's perfect. It's so good. Does he cut it in

[00:18:14] Mikey Pruitt: lines, like on a baseball field? He

[00:18:15] Dean Trempelas: does, he does patterns. He's got the zero turn, he's got the thing he can drive behind that'll aerate it all the gadgets and gizmos.

He's my other neighbor now, just has given up and just pays my other neighbor to take care. He has lawns too long. When are you gonna, when are you gonna cave is the question. She's stubborn.

[00:18:34] Mikey Pruitt: I gotcha. So speaking of being stubborn and not listening to your clients, how do you when should a MSP spot that feedback is turning negative, like getting into the churn real?

Like how do you identify that?

[00:18:49] Dean Trempelas: So there's so many ways to answer that question, and the problem I have with a lot of MSP advice is. It depends on your business and your level of maturity and your goals. So there's not any one answer that perfectly answers that, but I can give a few. So from more of a tactical level, so more from that service operations standpoint.

A really important thing to look for. So if you figure you're a team lead or a service manager at an MSP, maybe you don't have anything to do with any account management in any tangible way. You don't really have a lot of insight into what's going on over there. You probably are doing some sort of Cs a you, either that's in your PSA or some other tool where you're sending out some sort of either per individual per ticket, some method that your clients can report back how you're doing.

And so obviously good CSAT is good, bad CSAT is bad. We all get that. At that tactical level, you really wanna look for the response rate because a client that gives you feedback, positive or negative, consistently, who then stops giving you that feedback, positive or negative, is a client that no longer fears is any value in giving you that feedback, which means they don't think that you are really gonna take any action or that you are listening.

And as soon as somebody in any relationship gets to that point, you're at risk of churn. So if I was a service manager or a team lead and I had no visibility into the rest of the business, but I could at least see that, that'd be a red flag for me. That a client who normally either complains all the time or compliments me all the time just stop silent or has gone way, way down, that's a problem.

They definitely feel like there's a loss of value in the relationship at a more strategic view. That's the point of where the whole VCIO and QBR thing started, and a lot of MSPs have now taken that to just be, let me show you a report of how many blades of grass I cut. And thinking that the client, back to that conversation, the client's gonna be excited that, wow, you cut, 10,000 blades of grass.

It's amazing. And, oh, you use a, a gravely tractor to cut out. That's great gravely, that's a great, American brand. Glad you bought that. And so a lot of QBR become that, and so don't, your QBR is like that. But more importantly, same idea. If your clients aren't taking QBR meetings with you, that shows that they don't place a lot of value.

On that meeting to begin with. Now, if you're just getting started on qbr, that's to be expected. You're gonna have to establish value. But if you did a few and the clients were taking them and now they're not, or they're putting them off, or they're like, Hey, can we get to it next month? Or Can we skip this one?

And that's happening consistently. That's a really good sign. At a more strategic level, that client doesn't see you as a strategic partner anymore. They're you. You are just somebody who cuts the grass and they literally only see you as the blades of graspers and you are no longer a strategic guy. And that's usually also a really good sign of impending churn no matter what the feedback is.

And I keep saying, no matter what the feedback is, 'cause common sense would say a client that gives positive feedback isn't at risk of churn. You gotta remember who's giving that feedback. Generally are decision makers who are in charge of the relationship. They're probably not filling out our CSAT surveys.

It's the users. So you can have a client where the users all hate you, but the decision makers don't. Or alternatively, you can have a client where all the users love you and the decision makers don't. So the CSAT value in and of itself is not. A perfect indicator of that churn risk. It's that engagement, that response rate, their desire to interact with you from a value added standpoint that's not there.

And it was previously that client's gonna churn.

[00:22:35] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, like the negative the numbers that are just not there anymore. That is really interesting. I've actually never thought of that way. And it reminds me of just like when you're trying to like, get followers on social media or subscribers on YouTube or whatever views are great.

Oh, I got a thousand views or 10,000 views, but like how many people commented, how many of those people subscribe? That engagement part is really what. Is important. And like you, let's say you're trying to monetize something from social media. Having 20, 200,000 followers is not good if you have, zero people seeking you out on other platforms, emailing you, signing up for whatever thing you have newsletter if none of those 200,000 people are doing that, there's no value there.

[00:23:18] Dean Trempelas: It's hard to recognize that sometimes too, because like we said at the beginning, the entire time, the. The initial reason they hired you, you're probably performing that well and I say this pretty confidently, most MSPs, even MSPs, that other MSPs they're not a great Ms.

P. Most MSPs perform the basic mechanisms of support perfectly confidently, like they really do at this point. There's very few MSPs I've ever run across. Where the aggregate support they're providing. I'm like, wow. That's criminally atrocious. Because most people get into this 'cause they're good at computers and they wanna help people.

And so most MSPs are okay at that. And it's funny because if you flip this conversation the other way, this is why we see so many MSPs plateau somewhere between one to 3 million in revenue because. That's about it. That's about as big as you can grow a support business while only focusing on how many blades of grass you cut and not really focusing on the end product experience for the users.

Because there's a finite amount of people that wanna pay for that in your addressable market. And you are probably not good at talking to all of them. It's just like being a human. If you're an average conversationalist and I drop you off in a random bar, you'll probably be friendly with, five to 10 people at the bar.

You're not gonna be friends with all of them. Even if you have all night you won't be, you're not gonna be friends with none of them. And so most MSPs are like that. They're decent, but they're not able to push it over that next level 'cause they're not really thinking about. How do I go in and really drive that experience, drive that engagement, make this client feel like this is an actual value added relationship?

Because that's hard.

[00:24:56] Mikey Pruitt: So if you're at that plateau, like if you're MSP watching this and you're at that one to 3 million a RR mark what are you going to do if you're the type of person or MSP that wants to break through to the next level? What are your like step one, two, and three for that?

[00:25:12] Dean Trempelas: So I, I could tell you what we did and other people I've seen who have followed a similar pattern, every one of them has been successful. I'm not saying that's the only way to do it. We came back and we looked at, we took the Paul Dipple methodology that there's enough business in our market.

So that's the first mental hurdle you have to get over. A lot of MSPs, especially in smaller markets, weren't very crowded primary markets. Come back with this idea of there's there's not enough to go around, or what we do is different, or my market, we've reached

[00:25:41] Mikey Pruitt: everybody.

[00:25:42] Dean Trempelas: Yeah. So you have to get mentally over that.

Your market isn't different in that sense. You are not different and your competitors aren't different. Like none of that actually matters as much as anyone thinks it does. Once you get over that and you recognize there is enough business here, I'm just not speaking to them properly. Most MSPs should have a light bulb moment that, oh, I'm not speaking to them.

I'm not speaking to all of them properly. I don't know how to speak to every business in my market. And you have that moment where you recognize, you know what, I'm probably never gonna be able to have one pitch. That addresses every business in my market because, this is a relationship. People are different.

Like we just said, you're not gonna make friends with everyone at the bar. You have that light bulb moment where you recognize that, hey, I can't be everything to everybody, but I can be exceptional to some people, and I can get really good at finding those, some people in my market and getting a hundred percent of them under my umbrella.

And so we typically call that verticalization and it sounds easy and it is it is literally that easy. Like you, you go back and what are a couple of styles of business that we've just really enjoyed supporting? So it's not just the ICP or the TCP argument of what's the, goal I'm trying to market to are my ideal client.

What's my team like? What type of business? What dynamics, what leadership style, what way of spending money what line of business, what tools, what software, what requirements needs, SLAs, urgencies, pain points, what's my team like? And you go and you compare that against, an ICP for your market.

And suddenly you realize, and in our case, we're like, we really like supporting veterinary clinics. They like technology. There's only three lines of business software. It's reasonably maintained. The doctors don't have big egos. They generally have a sense of urgency, but not the same way human doctors do.

And almost everybody at our company is a pet owner. So we all can internalize what it's like being their client. And we had that moment and we're like, let's just start marketing directly to that. So let's try and get every veterinary clinic that's within, a one hour radius. That was our service radius, one hour radius.

Let's try and learn all their line of business software. Let's get cozy with all of their, imaging and hardware manufacturers. Let's just learn this whole thing. It's learn how their VoIP systems work. Let's learn how their patient management system work. So now any other MSP that comes in to bid against us.

They not only have to prove, they can do the basics just as well as we can, which they can. They have to prove they know more than us about this particular line of business, which is very hard to do. That was it's, it sounds simple 'cause it is simple, but to get to that point, you have to mentally as an owner, get over some fears.

'cause it's a scarcity fear. If I'm only gonna focus, I couldn't grow already with every business and now I'm gonna narrow it down to one or two businesses, like this is never gonna work. You have to get over that. The marketing you use doesn't matter. There's lots of greatness. So if you use, marketing process, a marketing process, b whatever, just do something the stack you use.

Just pick something, the ticketing system you use, pick something. It, none of that really matters too much. Once you've realized that this is exactly the kind of person I want to have a relationship with and my team likes having a relationship with, we make these people happy and that's awesome.

That scales really quickly.

[00:29:10] Mikey Pruitt: So is that how you guys, did you guys identify a market like that and that's why you expanded because you were trying to find more of those ideal candidates?

[00:29:19] Dean Trempelas: Interestingly enough, what happened, we, we discovered our verticals by accident. So I had a unique challenge.

Actually, it's not unique. I just said my market's not different. I thought I had a unique challenge. So where we were located is about an hour to go to Boston or an hour to go to profits. So a challenge that I have is I couldn't retain high level talent. 'cause as soon as somebody got to that level two and a half, they could just, if they were willing to pick up an hour drive, they get a $20,000 pay raise.

There's just no way for me to compete against that. So what can I do with kids outta high school and medium level techs that eventually will graduate out of the organization? I'm never gonna be able to keep like that level three CCNA certified, level person. How can I do stuff with that?

And that caused us to really take a step back and look at all the tools and products that we were using. Like I need to find the sort of lowest common denominator version of each of these products that a relatively entry level person can execute our best experience on with little training. So we went through it that way.

And when I was done, I was like, I've built this engine and now it needs to consume something simple. It has to be simple. They can't have level three problems. What's a type of client we like supporting that doesn't have those problems? And there were two things that popped up for us in southeastern Massachusetts, the veterinary clinics.

And then at that time cannabis tech was growing like crazy. And so there's all these growth facilities being built. And they needed a lot of project work done to build out like large networks. They have all these like PLCs and operational technology to monitor everything, but it's simple.

It's all flat network. Like they don't need a fancy, I don't need a level three guy to do that. So we started focusing on those two things because there were just things we could execute well, and that's why I talk about the commoditization, because when you realize once you're doing that.

That's a McDonald's approach. That's, I know how to make a thing, so let me make that thing exactly the same in a repeatable process. I then only have to focus on executing that process well every time, which I can hire for, I know I can hire for, I get lots of high school kids coming out. It's on a tech stack that's very easy to train people on.

Not the fanciest tech stack, but trainable for clients whose expectations met our ability to deliver and. That's all very like not sexy when you think of it that way. But the thing is like that gets momentum and it gets moving and suddenly before you realize it, you have too many clients for one location and you're opening up satellite locations and suddenly, before you realize it, you're buying up some of your local competitors.

Remember, most MSPs are doing an acceptable job at the actual MSP and they're just not managing the relationships well. So now I've got a process. I've got a McDonald's approach to Ms. Ping with a very aligned way. We do things type of person we hire, type of client. We go into very easy to come buy your Ms.

P. 'cause then I just say to you, here's my playbook. I know your team's good. I know you know how to do tickets, so here's my playbook. Take your great team and your tickets. Run my playbook here. Here's the type of people we're gonna serve. Gets this momentum. So we did that for a while till we hit our ceiling of complexity.

And then somebody came in and acquired us. 'cause we had gotten to a point where we were just that attractive, from making acquisitions and somebody else Hey, like your company's very organized. Your books don't have any nonsense that your chart of accounts doesn't look like a heartbeat.

This is great. We got a great valuation, they bought us, and suddenly now we have all these resources behind us. Hey, let's take this model and let's just spam.

[00:33:01] Mikey Pruitt: Expand. So I wrote down some notes there. Step one, change your mindset, change your mind there. Your market is not saturated. Step two, identify your ideal clients or the ones you like serving.

Step three, specialize and customize your tooling and your personnel around a playbook. And step four, change your messaging to attract those ideal clients. So that's. That's really cool. So you basically built like a machine and there's no, no reason you couldn't replicate that machine into a different industry or vertical so you were talking about veterinary clinics oh, we also have a couple of lawyers on our client list and we really like them for whatever reason.

They have a slightly different need set. But we can also build that as another machine. So now you've got like a McDonald's and a Burger King, just, shooting for the fences. Exactly. And, but that's what the company who acquired you is doing. They're like, Hey, we need the McDonald's of veterinary clinics and here they are.

Should we buy them or try to replicate them or whatever.

[00:34:02] Dean Trempelas: So what's interesting about that, one of the larger companies we merged with so we. At my original MSP, we were just never able to get it to work with nonprofits. We just couldn't figure it out. It didn't align. It's even though you

[00:34:14] Mikey Pruitt: really wanted to help them, he just couldn't.

Yeah. We just, we

[00:34:16] Dean Trempelas: just, it never worked. And the, this larger MSP we merged with later on. They had a lot of extensive experience in how to navigate that area, but they didn't really have our playbook. We combined the two together and suddenly we were managing massive national nonprofits very profitably and very, and I was floored.

I was like, this is amazing. Like I had no idea this sector was worth doing business with. And that's how easy it can then become. We needed that person who knew that space. That's important. Yeah. But they were able to take that playbook and be like, cool, I get your operational playbook.

I know these people and how they talk, but put them together. Bam,

[00:34:56] Mikey Pruitt: God. And you can just repeat that forever because you, so the biggest asset in your MSP was that playbook and just swap, knowing that you could swap out pieces here and there and make it suitable for a different pipeline workflow.

[00:35:09] Dean Trempelas: But it's also, it's remembering too, it's that college football level playbook, not NFL it's not basing it around individual superstars of technology or people.

It's just, I can't afford those, I don't get to have those things. How can I arrive at the same outcome with regular things? And that's not always gonna be the result, you are eventually going to have so we were we had standardized on all Sophos, 'cause Sophos just has you buy everything from them.

The hardware, the software, it all just works and you don't need to be an expert. And you can hire their SOC and their SOCs like, Hey, everything's sofas. That's great. Sophos isn't maybe the sexiest brand. So eventually we were also offering Palo because as we got bigger, there were a small number of decision makers at our clients that wanted to know that.

They wanted to at least see there was a Ferrari parked on the lot. Yeah. There was

[00:36:04] Mikey Pruitt: a, a name brand out there that they recognized

[00:36:07] Dean Trempelas: they didn't necessarily need to buy that. And we didn't necessarily need to sell them that, but they need to know it was there. So I wanna be clear, like if you're an MSP and you're like I, this particular piece of technology we're famous for supporting, we're very proud of.

That's fine. I'm not saying you have to abandon that and move to peasant technology. It's just don't focus on that. And that's kinda the funny thing. So if you take this all back away from MSP and back to selling, which I think is funny, as an operations person, I talk so much about sales and marketing.

'cause that really is that important way, way back when in the past life when HDTV is the first coming out, I used to be in high-end home theater early two thousands. Back when a 40 inch TV would've cost you 10. And one of the things we were taught, Sandler style of selling, which I feel like a lot of MSPs learn like good, better, best type of way of selling was no one is coming into the store.

We, we basically only did game-based selling. So people would come into the store and they would say, I have money. I want to spend it on it. Tv, pick which one for me. And one of the things you're taught with game-based selling, it's much easier to learn if you're not selling on fear and pain is don't use features to sell.

Nobody is coming in. Like when you come in for a tv, you are not saying to me, Dean, I want a TV that has six HDCP compliant. HDMI ports at 120 hertz that can pass, ethernet over them at least 10 gigabits. Like two people a year come in looking for that. Most people don't want that. What you want is.

My kids have a bunch of video game consoles and we have the Comcast box, and we have the smart TV, and there's wires everywhere, and I just, I wanna get rid of boxes. I need a TV that will get rid of as many of those cords and boxes as possible. That's what you actually want. And game-based selling, it's very easy to learn to talk to your prospects that way because you've overcome already all the fear and the pain.

There is no fear and pain. You have a budget. You're gonna spend it today on the tv. It's just, which one? Learning that style though. That's really helpful when you're selling services 'cause it causes you as getting back to the idea of getting over yourself. It causes the owner led salesperson to get overselling out of their own pocket and to get out of value propping out of their own pocket.

So it's much easier to see through all that bullshit and you're like, the stack doesn't matter what we're doing. Doesn't matter. Of course, we are gonna take care of you, we're gonna secure you. We got all the details. We can go over R-P-O-R-T-O, our security edge, all. I will give you that info client, but obviously we're gonna do that.

Let's talk about you and your business and what you actually, the outcomes you need to see to make an investment in a partner like us worthwhile and. It's not hand waving that stuff away that we don't care. Like it's important. There's a good reason why you'd pick DNSFilter over open DNS or somebody else.

A lot of reasons. Yeah. But that time is not the time to have that conversation. And if you accept whatever DNS protection I have is good enough. Good enough for the time being. Let's table that. Let's talk about the business outcomes you need. Suddenly you recognize, you go back, you're able to reframe all the cool things that your products do, all those ports on that tv.

Now I'm able to reframe that hey, you said your kid has a PS five. You want this tv 'cause this TV has the port that's gonna get the best experience in that PS five and get rid of an extra cord for you. So those features did matter. But they only mattered once I understood the outcome that you wanted.

And now I'm able to bring you over there and say, you don't need to see the other nine TVs in the showroom. This is the only TV that is gonna do exactly what you want when you go home. And in fact, here's what that will look like. And you can describe that experience to your customer. And your customer's gonna be like, this is holy shit.

No one has ever talked to me this way about technology. Here's all the money.

[00:39:54] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, and it sounds like to them like, oh wow, all the features of this TV are exactly what I need. Whereas you just left out like, eight features 'cause they didn't matter to that particular client.

[00:40:05] Dean Trempelas: And it just, it helps, it then helps refine the entire.

Service delivery around that outcome. And so like getting back to my whole lawn thing, I want a good lawn that competes with my neighbor, but I have a dog. So now the lawn care provider took the time to figure those things out and they're gonna be able to say to me, listen, I can get you there. It's gonna take six months longer.

'cause I have to use products that are dog safe. It'll

[00:40:27] Mikey Pruitt: take longer.

[00:40:28] Dean Trempelas: So that's your outcome. But then you can brag

[00:40:30] Mikey Pruitt: about your dog, save lawn that looks better than your neighbors in six months, which will make it even, but Myer expectations

[00:40:36] Dean Trempelas: are also set that it's gonna take longer. Yeah. So I'm not sitting there on month three when my neighbor's on TruGreen being like his lawn's great, and my lawn's correct.

I'm on a plan I have an experience. The guy told me it's gonna take longer. The first three months, my lawn's gonna look like a mess. But these chemicals that I have opted into choosing for my outcome, which is keeping my long dog safe. They will get me there. I need to stay the course. My provider checks in with me.

Hey, how are things going? Are you noticing that these areas are browning slowly? Are you noticing some dead spots here? We're coming in next month, we're gonna put some, filler in. I'm like, wow, this is exactly what you said was gonna happen when you said it was gonna happen. This is amazing.

You're the smartest person ever, right? I feel so validated. I chose you. You're making me feel smart.

[00:41:20] Mikey Pruitt: Absolutely. So we're coming up on near the end of 2024 and we've been talking about, how to identify the signs, like of a churn risk and then how to prevent that from happening just to be a better MSP be a better customer experience of lead MSP.

What do you think the future looks like? Are MSPs going to start? Picking this up more and more, or is, or are they gonna languish, what's gonna happen?

[00:41:49] Dean Trempelas: I think I think this industry is incredibly similar to the food service industry roughly around the 1950s. So we've arrived, if you think of food service back then, where post World War ii, we have this massive economic boom, people finally can afford.

To spend money on a full meal and a full diet for their family, which is something that Americans had never been able to really do before. Only people that were very privileged could go and get fresh produce and other things like that. It was finally a possibility and the food service industry at that point pivoted, split.

And there was the sort of I don't care about that. I want it to be easy track. That started with all the processed foods that we have now, TV dinners, McDonald's, all that slowly and then everything else like restaurants only became a thing for the normal person after World War II around that time period.

Like the idea that you could afford to go and choose where to eat and spend on it. I think that's starting to happen in the MSP space. It's a very similar track, so I think we're gonna start seeing. It's so easy to become an MSP, which I actually think is a good thing that a lot of folks are gonna come in who are either going to provide very bespoke white glove service 'cause they're very tall very tiny, and can afford to be very bespoke.

So think of like your very small Michelin star rated restaurant where the chef, that's their restaurant that's gonna start happening more. And they're gonna have micro markets, niche markets. You're probably not gonna drive all the way across the country to go to that restaurant, but you will go to it if you're in town.

But I think on the other side, we're gonna start seeing not the PE back, the mega MSB, but the more modest sized mid-market MSPs between like that, like three to $20 million range. I think we're gonna start to see a little bit more commoditization where a lot of these businesses are gonna start to realize that, like we talked about now, a lot of the, those details don't matter to many clients.

Just the average MSP client wants. Their tech taken care of, wants to feel reasonably safe, wants to reasonably limit their risk, and is willing to pay a fair price for that. And they don't need you to be white glove. They just need you to be pretty good. And so I think we're gonna start to see that happen.

And my guess would be the middle is gonna disappear for a while.

[00:44:08] Mikey Pruitt: I always see articles and stuff about, enterprises starting to look at MSPs to outsource their IT work and stuff. But it, to me, it feels like the year of a bunch of desktop, like finally everyone's switching to Linux for the desktop.

And I don't see it happening even though I continue to see reports of it being considered. What do you think about enterprise using msp?

[00:44:32] Dean Trempelas: So fundamentally. So a little bit, but I think that's like the, it's the same argument you hear every three years that Microsoft is coming to take my clients.

It's I think the cyclical chicken little thing. Fundamentally, an MSP is a for-profit help desk, which means that all of the service employees are cost of goods. In enterprise, that's no help desks are run as for-profit. And you might be saying why does that matter? Because there's a fundamental difference in the way that you look at and approach problem solving in enterprise IT environment.

You objectively have a hundred percent accountability and authority to all stakeholders and all the time in the world to solve any problem. That's a different modality than for-profit help desk. Where we do not have a hundred percent authority or accountability and we objectively cannot take all the time in the world that we'll go out of business.

So from that standpoint, I think there's always gonna be two sides to that. 'cause there has to be like it is either a cost center or it's a profit center. But if it's a cost center, you're not gonna start treating it like a profit center in, in and vice versa. However, I do think that some of the tools and practices MSPs used.

Enterprise is starting to recognize that's not stupid. And recently earlier this spring, I went to, so the largest, I dunno if you know who the. If you care about this kind of stuff. So we tend to live in the MSP world and we think about MSP PSAs and like ConnectWise ca say they're very big.

[00:46:04] Mikey Pruitt: Yep.

[00:46:04] Dean Trempelas: But if you step out of our space, ServiceNow is like 20% market share of all ITSMs on Earth. They have a way bigger market share than almost anyone else. And the only other bigger piece of the pie is like Jira and Salesforce and Dynamics and ERPs like that. So I went to a ServiceNow conference.

And on a whim, and it was mostly enterprise companies there. What was really fascinating was a lot of the products and features they were announcing on their platform for 2024. Were conceptually things that we've been doing here for the last 15 years. Wow. And I thought that was fascinating. So they had a asset manage a single pane of glass asset manage and documentation system that integrates with your remote control software and your ticketing system, which anyone's listening.

This is gonna go, Hey, that's it. Glue or Kudu, or like any other product like that. Of course. Or the idea that I could manage open DNS directly from within ServiceNow and have a single pane of glass to both deploy the agent and report on it. That was a room full of people that were like, this is amazing.

Wow. We've never seen. So I think that element of what we've been doing, enterprise is finally starting to catch up on Hey, this idea of, we're still a cost center, but this idea of I have all the time in the world to solve a problem. Maybe that doesn't have to be true. Maybe I could be a little more efficient.

Maybe we could focus a little more on ticket deflection. Maybe we could focus a little bit more on our internal users experience with the IT department. I think those elements are absolutely starting to trickle up. 'cause they're good like, and I think enterprise companies that buy companies that are supported by MSPs, which happened to us a bunch.

As we got bigger, they see that wow. These users don't hate the IT department. These users don't, these users aren't hyperventilating. If they need to call for a password reset, they have a pleasant, how come, why is that and what parts of that can we learn? I definitely think that's happening.

[00:48:00] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. I love the kind of analogy of the Android features that have been out for years finally coming to iOS. Yes. Anyway. I've taken up enough of your time, Dean. I really appreciate it. That was a ton of fun. We'll have to do this again. Thank you for joining me on the podcast.

[00:48:16] Dean Trempelas: Yeah, thank you for having me.

This is awesome.

[00:48:19] Mikey Pruitt: All right. Thank you, Dean.

[00:48:21] Dean Trempelas: You're very welcome.