dnsUNFILTERED: Michael and Marlon Gutierrez, 210IT

 

[00:00:06] Mikey Pruitt: All right, we're live. Just to introduce myself, I am Mikey Pruitt. I'm the MSP evangelist here at DNSFilter. I'm here with Mike and Marlon Gutierrez from 210IT, I'd like to welcome everybody to the one of the MSP spotlights that we've been doing, and just take a second to introduce yourselves, Marlon and Mike.

[00:00:28] Marlon Gutierrez: Hi. Thank you, Mikey. I really appreciate you just putting this on and having us here. Today. My name's Marlon Gutierrez. I'm CEO over at 210IT, and we've been doing this for a while now. And Michael, here is my brother and he's also a managing partner. And so yeah, I just wanna introduce Michael.

[00:00:46] Michael Gutierrez: Hi, Michael Gutierrez. Nice to meet you all.

[00:00:50] Mikey Pruitt: You can tell that Marlon is the loquacious one. So let's start with, let's actually start with that. We were chatting earlier. You guys are, have, grown up in it together. Let's start there and figure out like how this journey culminated into 210.

It, like you guys were, I don't know, doing land parties at your house or, how did this tech journey get started?

[00:01:12] Michael Gutierrez: Yeah, I can start off for a little bit if you want, Marlon, since you Yeah, go for it. You can talk on the next part, but for the most part, yeah. We both started outta high school.

We actually started our company, it was called 210 before it was 210IT was actually called MMG computers. So we actually started. Marlon was actually 17 at the time, and I had just turned 18, so he was still finishing up high school. But prior to that he was actually working at a small computer shop here in San Antonio and had the opportunity, one of the owner that he was working for he would work after school and things like that.

And on the weekends, whenever just odd hours for that owner and was presented with the opportunity to take over and sublease. The business because his family and stuff was growing and so he had the opportunity to step away and he mentioned, Hey, you've been running it for, the last few months and whatnot, on your own, so why don't you do it?

I was actually working at a competitor's computer shop at that time which they were just doing a lot of custom built systems, things like that. And so he told him, he was like, Hey, why don't you bring your brother over and y'all run this? So we were actually still living at home with our parents.

I had just barely graduated working over there. Marlon was about to graduate, and so we just started it from there. Still living at home and grew a break fix model and custom built systems. We started the year 2000. So we thought the world was gonna end at that time. It didn't.

So

[00:02:38] Mikey Pruitt: 1999 rollover.

[00:02:40] Michael Gutierrez: Yeah,

[00:02:40] Mikey Pruitt: I remember that.

[00:02:42] Michael Gutierrez: We got our feet wet and started doing that. And so over the years up till about. About seven years ago we transitioned into 210IT looking more at managed services for small to medium businesses, people that actually needed more proactive support instead of just break fix, right?

So as we started moving over that model we actually realized that we didn't, that we needed to. That's when David another business partner actually had joined into the team. When we. Merged. And yeah, there's three business partners right now. And right now we've grown tremendously in the last couple of years, two, three years.

And that's where we're now, I don't know, Marlon, did I skip over anything? Yeah. No, that, that was all good.

[00:03:26] Mikey Pruitt: I'm curious, yeah,

[00:03:27] Marlon Gutierrez: the origin story.

[00:03:28] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. What were some of the pain points moving from that break fix model to the MSP model that you currently have?

[00:03:34] Michael Gutierrez: Oh, yeah. So that was a lot of the mindset that comes with clients not real.

You don't realize as a business owner that you always try to help the client and do everything for them, but. Shifting that mindset from going to a monthly recurring model to where you're paying for a proactive approach and you're paying for service instead of just oh, it's broken. Lemme go ahead and fix it.

I think that was the biggest shift because a lot of our clients just called us when something broke. And they don't need, they didn't see a need for it. So educating the client into a lot of the new cybersecurity threats, which is where, DNSFilter has played a huge role in helping with that sort of thing and a lot of other tools as well, but showing the client like, Hey, look, we can isolate, we can protect you.

Time wasters, things like that, that your employees are wasting on the internet. We can block those sites and all things like that. It just comes down to education. So I think that's where a lot of the the biggest shift was over the years from changing.

[00:04:34] Mikey Pruitt: Yes. You found a lot of success in that kind of education model.

I hear that a lot about just incorporating training and education into your sales essentially. Is that something you guys tend to do?

[00:04:46] Michael Gutierrez: We're trying to, yeah. For sure. And that's one of the things that even in the material that we're working on right now, the marketing material and things.

Stuff on our website emailing the clients and stuff, educating them through that part as part of the marketing as well. That's definitely part of that whole education process for sure.

[00:05:04] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. So let's get into the juicy question. What is it like working with your family? Because the MSP business is like highly stressful, but like I see a lot of stress on MSP owner spaces and you guys are brothers too.

Oh yeah. So how does that work

[00:05:21] Marlon Gutierrez: there? There's definitely time soon. We've been in business together now 23 years, just that whole process of working together. One of the things I can tell you we've had to simmer down a lot and just realize that professionally in front of the team, like when we come here though we are brothers we've gotta keep, we can't bring that into the business because the, those emotions.

Growing up together, we, I would always get, I'm the younger brother, I would always get the hand me downs and stuff. And so he would even talk to me in a certain way and in a tone when he was upset or angry and stuff. And so those kind of inflections and things would sometimes come out in front of the employees and they just thought, Hey, but they're family here and the brothers, but that's not very professional, right?

Over time. And so we've pivoted and worked on that. And our leadership team as well. Aware of that dynamic in place and stuff too. And so I think we've got it under good control. But I can tell you, Mikey, one of the big things for me that's always just been peace in my heart is knowing that my brother's got my back, right?

There's something about people go into business with a different friends or whatever relationship comes up and they've got an idea and they pen it down on a napkin or something, but. There, there's something awesome about that. Just my brother and I doing this together and doing it well together.

That there's that certainty that I know that he has my best interest in mind as family and, he's not stealing from the business or doing something shady off on the side. Because I know his dad, I know how he raised him. I know who his mom

[00:06:49] Mikey Pruitt: is.

That's probably a, and that's probably a good takeaway to apply to other relationships in your business.

'cause a lot of MSPs, you work really closely together. So keeping it professional and keeping it, business at work is probably good advice all around.

[00:07:05] Marlon Gutierrez: Yeah. And we do personality tests here at the office. Also, just for fun, but also just to know how, to how to communicate effectively with people and speak how people like to be spoken to.

What are the things that motivate them and what drive them. And I think that when you know that about a person it really helps a lot in the way of communication. 'cause at the end of the day managed service provider, it doesn't matter what industry you're in, every single business and company struggles with communication internally and externally, forward facing.

And so when you start to just really hone in on. The science of handling people and how to communicate effectively with them to accomplish the greater good. That's where you really start to get some traction in the right direction.

[00:07:50] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So it's actually a benefit really, that you guys are family.

[00:07:54] Marlon Gutierrez: I think so. Yeah. Yep.

[00:07:57] Mikey Pruitt: Let's talk a little bit about technology that you guys use. And the audience doesn't know this, but I've actually met Marlon and Michael twice now, which has been, both times have been really awesome.

We met at a conference in Nashville a few months ago, and even more recently, we. We invited you guys to an indie race with the DNSFilter team, which we can get into a little bit more later.

[00:08:19] Marlon Gutierrez: Yeah,

[00:08:19] Mikey Pruitt: that was cool. But you guys have told me a lot about your tech strategy, and we can't incorporate DNSFilter into this too, but you were specifically mentioning backup strategy and you had a pretty impressive solution to that kind of age old problem of file backup and replication.

[00:08:39] Marlon Gutierrez: Yeah. Yeah. So the kind of the context or the backstory behind all of that to make it relevant, because I think with all the different competing brands and tools that are calling to our attention, wanting to do a demo. Wanting to prove how they're the best thing that we can't live without, right? Like I'm sure every MSP owner is just constantly getting hit up for different things like that.

So how do you sift through all these different vendors and make sense out of the end game and the end result of what we're trying to deliver our clients? Just so everyone, for everyone who's listening, we went through an episode that it, I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, it's probably the worst thing we've ever gone through.

And most businesses would've been absolutely destroyed by it. But by the grace of God, he helped us to not only survive but thrive in that situation. And it was during a period a few years ago now. Wow. It's been a while where these different ransomware threat actors, instead of going, they were always going for the mom and pop shops and things like that, but there was this huge cross hair that suddenly came over the top of RMM tools.

And it was an episode where SolarWinds and Kase, y'all remember all that stuff happened with them? This was a little bit even before that, about eight or nine months before that, we were using a product at the time that one of the biggest names in the industry as an RMM tool, and they set us up with their product.

They wind and dined us. They took us to Florida. They showed us, just everything, how awesome it is. They set us up with a just kind of their cloud-hosted version. I would call it like just a vanilla setup, right? Just out of the box. And we get off to the races we're we set it up, rolled it out, had it on our, all our clients' workstations.

Fast forward some time, we're using it, everything seemingly going well, learning the product. And one day Michael, David and I are sitting at a restaurant and our phones just start to blow up. Text messages, two and three phone calls at a time. Each one of us respectively, offices calling us.

Something's going wrong. Something's happening. What's going on? Come to find out all of our clients, all of our clients simultaneously are going offline at this. At that time we had over 120 clients managed service accounts. This represents over 2000 endpoints that I'm talking about. It's a lot of computers that are going offline for us and.

We get these phone calls, rush back to the office and come to find out, okay, what does everybody here have in common? They all have our RMM tool in common. And so we call up the vendor and say, Hey, we need some help. Just try to investigate what's going on here. They then tell us, oh, we're looking it up.

Pull it up here on the back, and we see what it is, what's going on here. There's a portion of our product that leverages another tool called Screen Connect, which has admin privileges to everything. Everybody who logs into it can basically execute a PowerShell command on whatever they want. And the SSO that you guys are using between our product and that, that's cool.

That's two FA protected, but part of this vanilla setup, there's these other accounts on the backend that were not protected with two FA. One of those accounts, got brute forced threat actor, got in, ran a PowerShell script against all endpoints simultaneously to download ransomware, brought everything down to its sneeze in the same minute servers and workstations included.

So now you can imagine this is like a one o'clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday. We are absolutely like freaking out, but trying to figure out what's the plan, what's the next steps, right? Because the clients need to have know an answer. What are we doing to get them back up and running? Thank God we did backups.

Very well. So now became the big push to start virtualizing everybody, restore their backups into VMs, everything as quick as we could. By Friday, we had all our clients back up and running core services, right? The workstations were still trashed. But as far as core services, we had 'em back up and running.

Now, fast forward before the next three weeks, it was just a constant. We were working 16 hour days. Everybody on the team round the clock. Saturday and Sunday included, like it was just, it was bad. But we got everybody probably about 90% RU running stable, but then it's now the pebble in the shoe effect.

What happened to my PDF? All that spreadsheet I had on my desktop, the random stuff that everybody ha thought they had saved or had a copy of it. Now they don't. So we developed, that's what birth the silver lining. And all this was the fire that proved us is, I never want to go through that again.

How can we stop this from happening again? And we came up at that time, we've improved on even since then, but was a three pronged. Security approach. And I thought, okay, the reason it was able to download this script is because it could call out to this whatever website, this region in this country to this IP address.

What if I could block that and create a clean sandbox for my clients to where they can't get to this kind of trash? Then on the end points we had Webroot at that time. Webroot didn't even raise its hand to alert that something popped off and happened here. It just stayed quiet and took it.

We then thought, okay, we went with Sentinel One. We ended up switching to Sentinel One for AV product. We ended up going with a different DNS filtration product, which I'll get into a little story there on how we came across DNSFilter and Arons. Cyber protect for our backup strategy, single pane of glass.

The concept now became, I want a backup not only of servers, local and offsite, which we were already doing, but I also want a backup of every workstation seemed excessive. Seemed like a coming across with a heavy hand, but I thought, I never want to hear a customer tell me they had that spreadsheet on their desktop that now is not being backed up or whatever random thing.

Hard drive takes a dump and dies. Now all of a sudden I'm sending wasting a text time out there trying to get, Adobe reinstalled and the password and the bank scanner and all that other random stuff. No, thank you. We'll just restore to last night's backup. Throw a high five and everybody's on their way.

I'm not gonna get another ticket or phone call a week later about how something still isn't perfect. So this whole strategy of that three-pronged approach of Sentinel One arons, and at the time we were using Web Titan, which is now a bad word around here. Web Titan the DNS right? And the filtration, the cleaning, the content, filtering, all that stuff.

So it's not, no, there's no perfect solution, but let's put some big roadblocks up to the point to where at least we can say, if this was on that site, we have options and stuff, tried to slow it down or raise its hand, or if not, we've got an option to restore from a backup of some sort. So anyways web Titan, they set us up with all their stuff and.

Switching DNS is not like a simple snap of a finger task, right? You have to calculate, okay, we don't wanna create an outage, log into routers, make sure all traffic's only filtering through that. They boasted all this redundancy and huge awesome stuff with AWS and geo replication whatever.

Anyways, needless to say, their services stopped three different times over the course of a month, two months. Completely stopped, which meant all of our clients simultaneously lost internet access. This was like at

[00:15:58] Michael Gutierrez: first thing in the morning too.

[00:16:00] Marlon Gutierrez: Before you're walking at seven o'clock, eight o'clock in the morning, and you're getting 2050 phone calls.

That a, the Internet's down what's going on. They think there's another. Ransomware attack. It's just people are just freaked out at this point, like just kneejerk reaction. So after the third strike, we told the website, our clients were telling us, can you please turn the protection off? We have to work.

That's how bad it was. So we, that's when we reached out, started looking for other options, came across DNSFilter, looked at you guys', setup how your network is built out. There's just not a po. I'm gonna say from a end user perspective, I know technically on y'all's end, there's probably stuff that keeps you up at night, but from our perspective, there's not a way for my customers to be down if I have it set up properly.

Like they are not gonna lose internet access because DNSFilter dropped the ball, right? That's not gonna take place on this end. And so in that process I don't know if you want me to get into it, Mike, about the, what we do for dynamic. D IP addresses that because not everybody has a stack.

Yeah. That

[00:17:04] Mikey Pruitt: was, and that's actually what I was thinking of. I did not realize that the story of that tragic ransomware, which sent some shivers up my spine a little bit,

[00:17:14] Marlon Gutierrez: it was like, that's like

[00:17:15] Mikey Pruitt: business ending stuff and you guys fought through and survived. So that's like really impressive.

[00:17:21] Marlon Gutierrez: And check this out, like at that time we didn't have any contracts with people, so it's not like I could hold people to the fire and say, Hey, you have to put up with me because of I've got your signature.

We had no contracts with people. It was month to month. In that process, we only lost one customer, one client. It's a God story, right? Just clients were catering food, bringing it here to the office bringing us coffee. 'Cause they knew we were just like working around the clock and they were just like, Hey.

They were like feeling

[00:17:46] Mikey Pruitt: bad for me.

[00:17:47] Marlon Gutierrez: Really. It was actually pretty cool. Yeah. It was it was a heartwarming moment to see how much our clients loved us.

[00:17:52] Mikey Pruitt: And that's a. Testament to the strength of you guys and 210 it is like, how do you respond to something like that? And that was telling your customers, this is how we respond and that's why they stuck with you.

[00:18:06] Marlon Gutierrez: Yeah. Yeah. We went on a rampage of just at the time to drive around and sit down with every business owner was, there weren't enough hours in a day, so it was just booking Zoom calls, right? Just stack 'em up all day long, 15 minute sessions with the business owners and just laying our hearts bare, being transparent, Hey, this is what's going on.

This is what's happening, and this is how we plan to fix and stuff. And people, man they lifted our arms and rallied behind us and say, Hey, no, we, we understand y'all are going through a bad day. And, we're here with you. Just whatever you can do to get us back up as quickly as possible.

We know you're doing what you can. And so that was neat. But anyways, fast forwarding now to, not everybody has a static IP address at their office. We've got a lot of mom and pop shops, businesses, dynamic IP address, things like that. And so I know one of the big things with like DNSFilter is you wanna see the static address that, or an address that it's coming from.

So that way, this is a paying client, we need to filter their traffic. Or they're not, what policy do I apply to it? We need to, not filter their traffic. And so part of that backup strategy that we have, how we back up all the workstations locally, is not to USB hard drives or things that are locally attached to where then, it's now accessible and available to something to delete or trash that storage we use.

A NAS drive and specifically we've stuck with Sonology as a brand just like it, love it. It's got a great interface and great support and built in, baked into the sonology. It has its own like dynamic DNS right through their servers. It's a free thing, like for life. And so what I do specifically since the NAS drive.

We only use it for these quarantined backups on the network. The client doesn't use it for anything else. They don't even know it exists. Really. It's just capturing backups and it very specific passwords that only a krons can write to and things like that. That's the only purpose it serves, but it's ours and it's out there on every network.

[00:19:57] Mikey Pruitt: And you said that's where the daily backups are?

[00:20:00] Marlon Gutierrez: All the daily backups for the server and the workstations, and then we push the servers offsite, encrypted. All the backups locally on there are also encrypted, but leveraging the fact that this synology has internet access we put Google's DNS servers on it, so we're not using DNSFilters on it.

Google's DNS, so that if the IP address of that office changes, that device can still get out to the internet and resolve DNS. It can then use its dynamic DNS to reflect the new IP address of what the office changed to. And that dynamic DNS name is then what I put inside of DNSFilter. So it'll report back to DNSFilter, whatever that number changed to and DNSFilter then lets the whole office back online because the address is now approved coming from the right IP address.

So that one little device is sitting behind that network, making sure it's got accurate information. And since it's not. An end user workstation. The surface attack area is smaller because nobody's browsing the internet on it. Nobody has access to it, but it can phone home and report an accurate number.

And so we use leverage that little bit of technology to tell DNSFilter what that new number is. And it's worked like a charm. It just, it's just work, right? And so for clients that are smaller offices, they don't wanna pay for a static IP address. We've got that in place with the IP right? We could just pop that in and it works as designed.

[00:21:23] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. I dunno if that's really clever, but

[00:21:25] Marlon Gutierrez: it works over here.

[00:21:26] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. And that's what you had told me about when we were in person and I was like, that is very clever because that's a problem a lot of people have is like updating that I, that host name with the correct new IP address.

And to prevent downtime, you'd have this clever dual duty kind of appliance that's doing your encrypted daily backups. Sending the server stuff off site and also your, you're always connected device. To an open resolver to update the rest of your customers. That's very clever.

I, I did not realize that the backup story, the impetus for that device was from a ransomware attack, basically. Yeah. So you guys have there's so many branches. I was like, oh my god. Talk about all this stuff forever, but if anybody in the, anybody in attendance has some questions for Marlin or Mike regarding that ransomware attack, I find that like really interesting because a lot of MSPs or IT teams in general will never experience some type of attack like that.

And. The inroad in your case was from a vendor having, I would, sloppy, I guess you could say practices on giving admin privileges to a piece of the package that they delivered. So that's, questionable vendors should be a little bit more transparent about that. But yeah, there's like a lot of things to unpack there.

And it sounds like your learnings were. Daily backups that can be restored quickly. And that sonology device serve the purposes. Was there any other learnings that like came about from that o other than be the resilient team that you guys turned out to be?

[00:23:02] Marlon Gutierrez: Yeah, no. So there's a lot of things right that, one of the interesting things that was born out of that. So immediately think what's the damage control or the brand reputation loss, right? Because our clients clearly know that this happened. That wasn't our intent, it wasn't truly our negligence. They're gonna blame us 'cause it came from our product.

At the end of the day, they're gonna say it came through their it. But we had a client, a new prospect, they actually called us up and said, Hey we wanna. See what you guys can give us for a quote on managed services. We heard that you guys had a ransomware incident and I'm thinking, oh gosh, lemme explain this when it's right let's talk about it.

And they said no. We actually know the story we want. We want to engage services with you guys because we know ransomware is a real threat. And since you guys have been down this road and through this process already, we know that y'all are the best fit to be able to take care of us in a situation like that.

I was like, wow, that's a spin. I actually started gaining customers because they know we've been tried by fire and survived, right? It's not that we have a mechanism plan in place to actually rescue from that, but yeah man, it was just all these little things and then, 'cause you never want that day to happen again.

And so now the question we're already trained to think or see every worst case scenario. We're almost like that. That buddy, you know that police officer guy that when you go to the restaurant with him, he has to sit facing the door. We're that guy. Yeah, we're that guy in it. Every hard drive is on borrowed time.

It's like a light bulb. It's only it's, or you're not backing this stuff up. What are you doing? Everything's just an accident waiting to happen for us, and so this just further pushes that envelope to where. How can I avoid that day from happening again? And what if it did happen again? What are my options?

What can I bake into my solutions to where I know that even if a tool that I trust lets me down, it's still not the end of my life. It's not the end of my business. It's not the end of my customer. Like we still have options even throughout that process. Those are the things that we're constantly then always perfecting, always improving, always pivoting, right?

You never stop learning, and that's one of the reasons why we even go to these conferences and stuff and just comparing notes and seeing what's out there, looking across the aisle, what are other people doing? And just seeing you guys at these events. Seeing you guys out there putting your name out there, the indie events, getting publicity in front of even maybe an audience that doesn't recognize who DNSFilter is, but the fact that you guys are making yourselves transparent available, raising your hands and saying, Hey, this is something people need.

And if they don't know we exist, they need to know we exist because. I use the word DNS tech customer and I can see their eyes gloss over, but I start talking about how, they, we can block Facebook and Amazon and the time wasters from their employees playing on websites. Okay. That makes business sense.

'cause their payroll, they understand the burn rate of that. But I start then getting into, now we can protect from other threats. Some known, some unknown. I've talked to your team. On a technical aspect, and you guys are just working around the clock to constantly improve and perfect your product.

And so I'm just, I'm happy to have you guys in my tool chest, in our, just in the toolbox that we're using and leveraging you guys because it gives me great confidence to know that y'all aren't asleep at the wheel just on cruise control. Just 'cause you signed up on account. Y'all are always working and improving.

I see. I log into the portal, I see new features, a new button, this and that. The knowledge based stuff, the constant education, as a vendor we've really enjoyed working with you guys. Love it.

[00:26:31] Mikey Pruitt: That's definitely great to hear. I appreciate it. Yeah, and it looked like Michael in the chat had a similar ransomware experience with the Kase ransomware back in 2021.

So it's. More common than it seems. But you also mentioned something there a second ago about conferences and I actually met you guys first at the Robin Robbins conference in Nashville. And you were telling me that you guys were. A, have a renewed focus on marketing and sales.

Yeah, because of Robin Robbins. And so talk a little bit about that and because I think it's, that's one of the most important things that we as DNSFilter can do with our partners is, teach the sales and marketing piece because, sales don't happen by themselves.

We're all, mostly we're all relatively good. It people like that stuff comes naturally to us. It's the sales and marketing that is a challenge. So explain to us, like your venture out into that world.

[00:27:25] Marlon Gutierrez: That's a great question. So yeah, if you think about all the products, if I thought just DNSFilter alone and I started putting bullet points next to.

Why my clients should have it. I could take 10 minutes just explaining that in a sales meeting. Now I start going down the list of every other product and service I do. I know I'm gonna lose the customer, right? They don't have that kind of, they're maybe giving me 15 or 20 minutes and it better be high level enough to where the C-suite or business owner says, okay, this is gonna bring value.

I need these guys. They know what they're doing, right? Just display competence and a good tool set. One of the things that, with even Robin Robbins is we get real caught up and bent on the brands of products, tools, vendors that we use and swear by them. But when was the last time a contractor, somebody came out to your house to do something?

Let's just pretend yard work. Let's say somebody came to mow your yard. Did you stop him and ask him what brand of spark plugs he had in that mower before he got started? Like you don't care about that. The end game is, man, I just need my, I want the landscape to look good. I want the yard mow. You don't care what brand of trimmers they're using and stuff, or if they're installing drywall, Hey, are those DeWalt drills you're using?

I prefer Milwaukee. Said, no one ever. Like people have internal preferences and we do that with the stuff that we use and the brands and all that stuff, but the customer doesn't really care about that stuff. We care about that stuff. And so when we go on this rant about boasting of all these brands, it's we're wasting their time.

But when we talk about the end game, the high level picture, and that's just where we've refocused now with our marketing is talking to almost like the ignorant person, a layman, right? Somebody who's not in our industry, we're not talking to other techs, and how do we tone down the tech barf? To the point of where somebody gets it one months, right?

Like at the end of the day, is that what I'm doing to somebody so that they can get it? And so putting that, whether it's a flyer, a brochure, something that pops and hits the points, because I always thought shoot if only I could get in front of this person and I had some time to talk to them, I could convince them.

Cool. I can't do that with everybody. If the company's gonna grow, that just means I'm automatically now a bottleneck. How can I create a repeatable process that somebody else could do that could win as if I was the one out there doing it? I can do a brain dump and start putting my thoughts on a flyer or a brochure.

We can leave that behind if they are curious and wanna see that kind of level of information. They can sit there and read a little bit further, maybe do a QR code with a YouTube video, a link that then goes maybe to something that I did. And pitched and posted to where they can watch it and they can then spend another 15, 20 minutes listening to me rant about the, some of these things.

But that's really the focus is what's your elevator speech? If I gave you 30 seconds in front of your ideal customer, what are you gonna tell them? You better have that rehearsed. You better not waste that time. 'cause those are the golden moments. What's your network gonna look like?

So just. Having that front of mind especially as a business owner, as a we're in it, being aware of that, that people are not techie, we're techie. And how do we translate that forward facing to a world that doesn't get our world?

[00:30:32] Mikey Pruitt: So how are you delivering that message? So you're transitioning into this, benefit instead of feature, right?

Realm. But how are you like it's process? What are the nuts and bolts of it?

[00:30:42] Marlon Gutierrez: Yeah. Yeah. It's more of a traditional marketing approach just to give away a little bit of the secret sauce. Doing paid per click and things like that, the internet's already saturated. You almost have to go about it now, the old fashioned way.

And if you get letter in the mail, like it just feels like spam. But if I sent you a FedEx envelope, you're gonna think somebody just sent you something important, right? It's FedEx shoot, what is this? We send our letters in a FedEx envelope to the customer. So we curate and find very specific industries that meet our niche, what we're after, and then we go after that C-suite and send it to them so it gets past the gatekeeper.

Then inside of that, it hits and says all the buzzwords that they're looking for. In fact, we even staple a little aspirin. To the letter and it basically is your current IT solution, giving you a headache. Basically. Here's an aspirin on me and if you wanna call, so this is the little things. It sounds quirky but like it catches people's attention 'cause it's so different and it's unique.

And so now I've got their attention. Now they'll read through a little bit further. Then we follow up the next day with a discovery call. Hey, we just sent you something yesterday. Wanna make sure you got it. Then they usually laugh about it a little bit, and yeah, we just wanna come by, give you a second opinion, right?

We're not here, we don't necessarily wanna sell you something. We just want you to have the peace of mind of knowing that everything is okay and that you're doing a good job. And if you're not, maybe we can show you some ways to do. Little bit better. Cool. Yeah, I love that. That's not threatening. Now we go out there and do discovery thing, then we have a drop off piece called the Shock and Awe Box, to where now we leave all these bits of information that tells why we're different, what we do, how we go above and beyond what their bill of rights is what they're allowed, what they can expect from an MSP that's firing on all cylinders and really doing their job well. And so now the business owner can sit there and comb through that stuff. And when we then come back with our proposal. And after we've done our assessment, they've already had a chance to marinate in who we are and why we do thing.

And so when we come in and show them, then the game plan, our close rate is a lot higher. Yeah. But it took a lot to build those things up. It's like playing chess, right? You get strategic about it. You want to get in front of a very specific client and get strategic about it.

You can throw it to chance also and hope you run into them somewhere, and that a friend told 'em a word of mouth and that's really good. Also, constantly be building up that network, but there's also a strategic method to go about doing it too. And so there's a science in a number to it.

[00:33:02] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. And I also saw that you guys have a I think you called it an IT buyer's guide on your website, which I signed up for.

Read it. It was fascinating. Nice. It was really good. And then I got a handful of emails from Michael here, which were also really good. So it looks like you guys are doing a lot right. In the marketing department. Is it, have you have you seen it working? Is our, is revenue increasing, I guess is the question?

[00:33:25] Michael Gutierrez: Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's still pretty, it's still pretty new. We've been doing, we've been hitting it hard for about the last six, almost six months now. Is when we really started pushing it after we, 'cause we had to go through a lot of training and implementation. But yeah, so far there's, we, we definitely see a lot of good results coming from it.

[00:33:46] Mikey Pruitt: And I believe you guys mentioned a story where you didn't get a client because of some marketing material. What did that entail?

[00:33:55] Marlon Gutierrez: Yeah. So here's a story about we are already doing the managed services for a large client of ours. 70 plus, 70 plus endpoints. That's a good size account for us.

And they, we also do VoIP phones. And so we thought, cool, let's just bolt on some more monthly recurring revenue and stuff. We can do. We do phones very well. Let me just they were in the market for phones. Let me go give 'em a proposal and let's just bolt this on, throw high fives and move along.

I go put the proposal together, send it to them, and to my surprise, it didn't close as fast as I thought it was, and I was like that's weird. Followed up with them and said, oh we're actually getting a few bids. We're getting a few other quotes, and I thought that Spidey sense is going off, right?

It's that doesn't feel cool. Why are they shopping when they already have me. Just say yes. Whatcha doing?

[00:34:43] Mikey Pruitt: Say yes to the dress. Come on now.

[00:34:45] Marlon Gutierrez: The owner, she calls me in and says, Marlon like you a lot and stuff. I just wanna be transparent how you guys can improve and do better, right?

So use this as a teachable moment. We're not going to go with you on the phones, right? My heart sinks. I'm like, what do you mean? Why? And she. Proceeds to hand me a packet of this super fancy, flashy, all the information, an SOW a timeline, points of contacts, customer's responsibilities. It's a was, it was with at and t, but at and t at this point's, not even selling dial tone.

They're just white labeling RingCentral, which is just like super ghetto, but whatever. And she says, we're going with them. And I said, but they're more expensive than us and we already have a relationship. We're already handling all your stuff. And she goes. Yeah, but they have this, and she proceeds to pick up in her hands and give me like this full packet and brochure of just everything laid out nicely.

And I said, O okay, but and she says, Marlon, it's at and t. It's it's, and they have, and she says, let me break it down for you. This is basically what it is. They're organized, professional, and presentable. In other words to not insult me and smack me in the face and say, finish the sentence by saying, and you are not

[00:35:58] Mikey Pruitt: right.

[00:35:59] Marlon Gutierrez: I can understand where she was going with that. And so that was a huge wake up call for me, that just having a close relationship with a business owner in today's day and age, it's helpful, but it's not enough. It's not everything anymore. Our clients are still expecting to be dealing with professional.

Companies, right? They want to know that. O okay I like you and all, you tell me you're doing all this stuff, but I wanna see the meat in potatoes too. I want to know that on paper you're organized on the backend as well, that you have marketing, that you guys are gonna be here in two years, and that you're not gonna change your mind and go do something else.

You guys demonstrate for me, a long-term plan in everything to do, right? From me that started it sent me back to my car. Just a little defeated, deflated in that. But then I thought, no, this is an opportunity to improve because what she's asking for is nothing out of this world. What she's asking for is give me evidence to give me confidence in what we're doing with you guys, because it.

You can jump ship easily. If I got hit by a bus tomorrow and the whole company went up in flames, there are other IT companies who could come in and fill in our shoes and do what we're doing, right? She's not gonna fall out of business. Her phone system. Maybe not the same thing either, but people add a a weight to their phones 'cause it's the lifeblood of their business.

It's their communication, right? So for them, just knowing that they placed that egg in a basket that they don't have to think about or worry about, and in my mind it was a bad decision. She should have gone with us, that I didn't convince her of that. And that's where I need to come back and say my marketing was not on point because I had all the technology.

My toolbox looks amazing. Like the tech skills, my engineers, everybody, I've got all the right pieces to the puzzle. My marketing piece didn't convince her. And that's not her fault. That's my fault. 'cause I can fix that. I can change that, right? And so it only makes us better. So guess what We did? It turned around and went and perfected that process.

Now somebody else comes up, pow right in the face. Here you go.

[00:38:00] Mikey Pruitt: And they're gonna choose you over At&t next time. There's, yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. That's professional presentation of even the materials. And then you also mentioned there was like a timeline in there. So at and t in this case was saying like, what are we gonna be doing in six, eight months from now, maybe a year and a half from now, which means we are still here and we are, you're still our customer in a year and a half, two years from now.

And that's putting a mindset. In their head that you're in this relationship for the long run. And that's a very good move by at t. I'm gonna tell our marketing team that as well. So yeah,

[00:38:37] Marlon Gutierrez: you just pick up little things, right? You learn from the greats and stuff and just not everything's a good idea, but what is, and you can apply.

Sure. Grab it. Take it.

[00:38:45] Mikey Pruitt: And when I met you guys in Indianapolis, you told me about some expansion from some of your clients. So you guys are based in San Antonio, Texas, but your geo is, large and it's spreading nationally because some of your customers are actually going more national.

So what has it taken to manage those expansions from your clients?

[00:39:08] Marlon Gutierrez: I think that's a good question. So yeah, home base for us is San Antonio, and so that's our comfy zone. Like we can tackle that well and easy in surrounding areas. So then what ends up happening, there's a lot of particularly here in Texas, there's a lot of border towns and their technology down there.

It's not as good as the big cities, and so there's a lot of professional offices and stuff there, medical facilities and things like that. They need the high tech, and so they started reaching out towards San Antonio, towards the bigger cities, and of course we've got referrals, then word of mouth and stuff that we picked up.

Then a lot of clients in the border town. Going all the way up to Dallas, Amarillo, El Paso, Houston. So we started noticing that our nets started to, the stakes of our tent started to be expanded as our customer base and referrals. 'cause then it became, sure Houston's just a few hours away. Dallas is a few hour drive.

Sure we can tackle that, especially since we know in it so much stuff, we can do it remotely. But then we also have a team and the vans and the installers to where if we needed to roll a truck and do something, we could be there by tomorrow. And same day in a worst case scenario. But if, we can be there by tomorrow in a normal scenario.

And so Texas became our comfort zone. Then we have clients that are extra ambitious and they started building offices in other states. And so we're not particularly looking for business in other states, but we'll follow our clients where they go, right? And so they're popping off offices all over the east coast and stuff.

And so we've now started following them where they go. And so just rethinking how do we manage and support that? Because the impression we never want to give our customers is, you've outgrown me. You need to find another IT company. All that's telling me is I need to go back to the drawing board and figure this one out because this is what the next drawing on the ladder looks like, right?

We're all growing together and so I'm not gonna tap out or quit here. I need to figure this one out. And so that's what it's really pushed us to do. And so as we've done that for these clients, now it becomes cool. We've got a presence in these other states. Now we've done this work in this other spots.

What would stop us from picking up work in those places too. And so it's just at the end of the day, it's managing the chaos. 'cause everything, everything looks like a good idea. We don't want to get distracted by just any revenue. That's why we've become just really hyperfocused on what kind of revenue we're going after.

But if that pops off in another state now with confidence, we can say, yeah we've got a system for handling that. We can process that now because by way of example, we've done it. This many number of times. And it's helpful for our clients too, because then we've got a point of reference on Yeah, that's, we almost make it look easy now because we've done it a few times.

[00:41:51] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. And that's part of the whole presentation aspect. Yeah. Like they don't need to see the hard parts or the tech stack and all that stuff. They just need to know the end result is they're secure and you're available if you're needed.

[00:42:04] Marlon Gutierrez: Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

[00:42:05] Mikey Pruitt: Very cool. I have, okay. First any other questions from the chat or Marlon or Michael, do you have anything else you'd like to impart on the audience?

[00:42:14] Marlon Gutierrez: No, I'm good. One, one of the things that Marlon's, like

[00:42:19] Mikey Pruitt: Mimi,

[00:42:22] Marlon Gutierrez: I'm glad you asked. No, I was just gonna encourage everybody and say that one of the things that is, has been huge for us is just being part of a peer review board. If there's something in your area, whether that's something like, I don't know what other brands are out there, but something like tabs or EOS or C 12 or there's other tech related ones, but just be a part of something.

There's so much work out there. If we get into a greed mindset to where we think everybody around me, all my competitors, I need to beat them. If you're wasting your time looking at what other people are doing and worried about the business that they're picking up, that'll frustrate you. There's so much even going to these conferences, just rubbing elbows with other business owners, other IT guys, and just comparing notes and saying, man in my area, this is working, or I'm struggling with this, or, what are you guys doing over there?

You'd be surprised the camaraderie and fellowship that is in. Our guild, if you will, if in our profession and just rallying alongside other guys that you may even be able to develop relationships and leverage them to where it's a win-win for everybody. And there's so much work to go around.

I'm not even concerned. People ask what's your Compe competition doing? I honestly don't know what my competition is doing. I just know what we're trying to do for our customers. And the service that we're delivering for them and making sure we're checking off all these boxes and keeping them secure.

And at times when I look over my shoulder to the left or the right, it feels like a lot of other IT companies are not doing what we're doing. Some, somebody else, everybody's that

[00:44:01] Mikey Pruitt: means they're looking at you.

[00:44:02] Marlon Gutierrez: It's somebody will say, Hey a customer needs to save some money, or budgetary constraints, or they just, they're cheapskates, whatever it is, and they're gonna start shopping you.

And then they go off and start getting a bid from somebody else. And you tell the owner, this isn't even apples to apples. Look at the laundry list of stuff we're doing in this company. It's two or three things that they're doing over here for the same price. Oh, that's their whole service offering.

If it's actually what you want, if you wanna run around on the internet with your pants down around your ankle, sure. Like you can sign up for that. But that's not what we sell. That's not what we do here. I can't take it down that low and strip all those services off because I'm not going to leave you exposed like that.

But they will and they'll take your money all day long. Just making sure that we're taking care of our clients. And for me, DNSFilter's been one of those things. It's like we, we turned it on we committed with you guys and I've never looked back since because y'all have done us well and just made us proud.

So love you guys. And I even, you guys reaching out to have this little session together and stuff has been fun. And going to the race together, that was awesome. It just for everybody else that's listening on this call. When I came back with Mikey and the team from Indianapolis, I was almost embarrassed to share how awesome the weekend was.

'cause it was, the bragging was just over the top. These guys treat their customers so well that it just, I felt spoiled when I came back and it was just, it was cool. It was cool, man. Thank you Mikey.

[00:45:29] Mikey Pruitt: It wasn't just me, but Yes you're welcome. I'll say you're welcome. On behalf of the entire DNSFilter team.

Yeah. And you said a lot in that last statement. It's, I thought that came to my head was that 210IT is the Sword and shield of San Antonio and beyond. You can use that, you can run with it, you can tweak it, whatever. But yeah congratulations to you guys. It sounds like you're just getting started on your path to even more success and just congratulations.

And I wanted to let everyone in the audience know, and everyone listening to this in the near future that DNSFilter has launched our partner portal. You can get it@partners.dnsfilter.com. I'll share the link in the chat. There's a training courses there. You can get your texts or yourself educated on the ins and outs of using DNSFilter.

There's a community forum you can communicate with others like Marlon and Mike here and other partners that we have in our program. And then there's also some enablement material, things you can download and use to hopefully professionally deliver the message to your customers. At least for the DNS built DNS part.

And then we're gonna continue to grow that library of assets for the training with sales and marketing training some kind of troubleshooting training, and then enable the enablement material to just provide more, basically become your design department in certain ways. So that is open to access, to log in.

All you have to do is use the same credentials that you have with app dot DNSFilter.com, and you can log right in there and get started and go check it out. And I just wanna say a big thank you to you, Mike and Marlon, and big props to 210 it. Thank you.

[00:47:05] Marlon Gutierrez: Thanks brother. Appreciate it.

[00:47:07] Mikey Pruitt: All right, everyone have a wonderful day.

See you next time.

[00:47:11] Marlon Gutierrez: Bye. Take care.