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dnsUNFILTERED: James Shuler, Centre Technologies
Podcast > Episode 31 | July 07, 2025
Mikey and James Shuler from Centre Technologies discuss the evolution and current state of Managed Service Providers (MSPs), focusing on redefining success metrics, the importance of cybersecurity, and the integration of AI in IT operations. They explore how Centre Technologies positions itself uniquely in the MSP landscape, emphasizing a strategic approach to project work and managed services. The discussion also highlights the challenges and opportunities in the cybersecurity realm, particularly in light of recent breaches and the growing demand for robust security measures.
Mikey Pruitt (00:00)
Welcome everybody to DNS unfiltered. James Schuler is here from Center Technologies and he is ready. Are you ready James? This is going to be, this is going to be really fun. I've watched a few ⁓ of your videos on the internet for Center Technologies that you've done stuff like ⁓ the hot sauce challenge, ⁓ cooking barbecue and drinking whiskey. like, I feel like we should do this in person next time.
James Shuler (00:47)
Yeah, couldn't be more ready. Whatever you want to throw away.
Yeah, so I think that's on the horizon, right? I don't know if Sarah's been loud with you about this, but I think that's our hope is to get you down here or us up there to do one of those in person. So that's definitely the goal,
Mikey Pruitt (01:15)
I'll be there.
So we wanted to talk to James about MSP stuff because Center Technologies is a pretty ⁓ evolved MSP, guess you could say. So there's like a eye roll at the beginning. So I wanted to first talk about this redefining MSP success. So you guys have emphasized that the success metrics aren't really about
James Shuler (01:28)
Something say that? Yeah.
Yeah, sure.
Mikey Pruitt (01:43)
the support ticket. Like how many support tickets did we answer? So how do you measure success at Center Technologies?
James Shuler (01:45)
Right. Yeah.
Yeah, so that's a good question. So Center predominantly is a managed service provider. We do have a large mature practice of doing project-based work. We have a procurement arm as well. So it's not to say that this is our only success measure, but we look for things ⁓ to measure as a KPI that's going to impact customer experience. So I got to kind take a pretty big step backwards to get into the topic, but I will add just to hit your point home, we hate the MSPs.
Mikey Pruitt (02:14)
Yeah.
James Shuler (02:18)
that measure total quantity of tickets closed. What we find the behavior that breeds in our customer is they take their monthly bill, they divide it by the total number of tickets closed and they say my cost per ticket is X. And that's kind of what they judge what they wanna make done next year. They say, I wanna keep my cost per ticket the same. I wanna lower my cost per ticket. Well, good IT team is solving things permanently. And so we wanna see things reduce in ticket count over time. So I think that's what you're.
hinting at there is the reduction of total tickets is a good thing when you're fixing things the right way. ⁓ But Mikey, I gotta go way back. Like how does someone define IT? Right, so how does someone define IT before we get into how does someone deem it successful or not? And that may be, I would argue maybe the biggest challenge with a brand new customer of ours or a prospect, an early stage is getting our consultants on the same page as the client.
Mikey Pruitt (02:55)
Let's go. Let's go way back.
James Shuler (03:14)
as to what IT means to them. So I'll put you on the spot. What do you think of the moment you think of IT?
Mikey Pruitt (03:22)
⁓ wires, routers, and servers.
James Shuler (03:28)
Yeah, so that's fair. Most don't even think of servers because it's out of sight, out of mind. Sometimes, yeah, you might not be normal. When we consider the MSPs really service in the small business and bringing a lot of enterprise grade products and processes to the small business, you start picturing a lot of times the keyboard, the mouse, the computer screen, maybe a help desk ticket, my wifi. Maybe that's the extent of it. Maybe the conference room.
Mikey Pruitt (03:32)
I got one right here I'm looking at right now. It's staring at me going, you've got work to do, get over here.
James Shuler (03:58)
Also never works when we need it to. ⁓ But that to me is where I see lot of misnomers is IT is an IT guy, it's stereotypical belt with a flashlight on it, maybe a pocket protector of some sort that's gonna translate technical terms into English for me. ⁓ I picture the SNL skit, move! The IT guy has them get out of way and starts banging on the keyboard until they get everything working again.
Mikey Pruitt (04:19)
You
James Shuler (04:24)
But we're all trying to shift IT from that misnomer into something far more impactful to the business. Part of where center gets its name is actually that, that technology is the center of every business. So we wanna make it to where all departments can rely on how to be enabled to grow faster and move quicker based on technology. If you're the opposite, IT is looking like a boat anchor. It's a reason that we can't move fast. It's keeping us from making change.
So Center's goal is to not be the boat anchor, to make it simple. We're trying to push businesses forward.
Mikey Pruitt (04:59)
It's a really good way to put it. You've got me thinking of that show, The IT Crowd, which I think is like a British show. ⁓ it's so funny. It's like, and they'll call in for like to support help. And it's just like, did you plug it in and plug it?
James Shuler (05:06)
Yeah, it is. Yeah.
There's been
a couple really good shows about IT. There's one, Halt and Catch Fire. Did you ever watch that?
Mikey Pruitt (05:19)
that's
good. That's I wouldn't call that like a spoof show. It's like kind of deep and serious. It's really good. It's like Silicon Valley at its worst in the early 80s.
James Shuler (05:22)
No, it's not a spoof at all, yeah.
It might be a spooky
show, but it's not a spoof that when that one Yeah, taking us back into when IBM was was redefining how tech sales was gonna make sales reps not be snake oil salesman. ⁓ That's it.
Mikey Pruitt (05:40)
So that's kind of
where that's kind of like that era is kind of where all this IT stuff started. Like people started inventing computers and then we figured out how to connect them together. We invented DNS and now we have MSPs like to manage it for people who don't understand. And I'm just curious like are the people at center, are they those nerds that love the stuff that seem like they are? You seem like you are. I am.
James Shuler (06:03)
Yeah.
We've got pockets of different passion and it's interesting, there's some that are, ⁓ they make their own keyboard. I got a guy in Oklahoma, love him. He makes his own keyboards. That's like his hobby is making keyboards from scratch with parts. They look incredibly well designed. They look awesome. But you'll have that kind of geeked them all the way into really the history side of it. ⁓ We do this center 101 thing where we bring some new hires in. We talk about different paths.
And we'll bring in old hard drives that are like, know, big, huge drives from mainframe days and talk about this evolution that through the early nineties, when your IT guy, the MSP in this case would come out as a fractional person, would put their hands on keyboards or on cables, run to Fry's or Micro Center, buy what they need, come back, repair and say, we'll see you next week. And then whatever is going wrong a week later, get your grocery list of things ready and start working again. ⁓
But we'll kind of take our employees through that evolution and give them a view of where we think things are headed to give them some sense of purpose or guide into what our mission is. So maybe a little bit, but I definitely am a bit of a nerd on that topic.
Mikey Pruitt (07:19)
I'd love to hear that and I do want to get back to you where we think things are headed. I think that's a pretty important piece. But first I wanted to talk about the evolution and more like the positioning of how center technologies is not your average trunk slammer MSP. How do you position yourself?
James Shuler (07:25)
ok.
Yeah, I love that term trunk slammer. So
if you're going to be good at the IT stuff, you can take one of two paths. You can take the path of as a business of what SHI has done, or they create a procurement model to simplify the IT guy's ability to buy stuff. Or you can take the path of expertise, where you're going to take the path where more of, I'm not going to sell you what you think you want to buy. I'm going to help you craft what you don't know yet exists.
and then we're going to buy that together, implement and support it. We've definitely taken a hard approach on the anti-SHI side. We know anyone can go buy anything on the internet. We're not going to be better than say Amazon, CDW or SHI as a procurement model. We're going to be vastly superior at design architecture and implementation. So it's interesting because we're one of the few that takes the MSP, which is supposed to be help desk, right? That's supposed to be what MSP world is, is help desk.
And we're saying we're gonna take a enterprise grade architecture design and implementation approach to MSP. ⁓ That may feel really nuanced. In the world of MSPs where there's so many of them right now, we think that's kind of part of what our differentiator is. The differentiator is pretty easy. We're gonna take enterprise grade processes and tools, and we're gonna take local touch, which is really defined one as proximity, but two, my ability to intimately know you.
We're going to take those two and combine them better than our competition can. So ⁓ take all that back into why we're not the trunk slammer. We want to help you design what that future state is, which means we're constantly in a gap analysis. So a business owner might come to us and say, you know, I just got a report from a cybersecurity insurance company. They say that we are inept in these areas. Or I just found out our business has been doing this forever. Seeing them see now states we have to be registered with them as level two.
before I can do any more business. How do I get there? So we're gonna take that gap analysis and give them a path forward that's both cost efficient, excuse me, and also that's gonna be technically sound so that it's secure, efficiently fast, and then qualified to meet those standards. If we can't do that, we're probably not a good fit. But most MSPs would tell you, as long as you got computers, we can support them. That's kind of really not our pathway. We wanna try to find a way that we're in the middle.
Mikey Pruitt (09:56)
Right.
So you mentioned that kind of reseller model and I go to a lot of MSP shows and I do see this type of MSP ⁓ come up and they're there. It's it's very business focused, which is great. You know that needs to exist, but it sounds like you guys have kind of shied away from that that model alone, but it is still necessary because you do still have to buy stuff and having an expertise on like the the.
know, millions of combinations of Microsoft licenses. Like, what are they doing over there? But anyway, like you still have to have some ⁓ knowledge in that area.
James Shuler (10:36)
We were, yeah, you're not wrong, Mikey. We have to be skilled in the same areas to be able to scope and know the go-to-market strategy of the typical manufacturers. But think who we're all selling to. We're all knocking on the doors of the same people. And so if I were to ⁓ knock on the door of every door and say, can do this cheaper and smoother, it is valuable, but it's only valuable until the next guy knocks on the door and says, I can do this cheaper and smoother. And they will, someone's gonna find a better way.
Mikey Pruitt (11:02)
And they will.
James Shuler (11:05)
So I like where we sit in this, because I can't, I'm being pretty blunt upfront, is I can be cost competitive, but I probably won't be cheaper because I'm not trying to sell you one piece of hardware. That said, if I can help you with the design and the application of how you want to accomplish a problem you have today, if we can get there together, my guess is your total cost of ownership is cheaper. I bet you, end up saving money than the opportunity cost of doing it wrong.
And we can find a way to make that be that we have a seat at the table on the team as opposed to just being another vendor. ⁓ And I think that's the goal of all of us is that trusted advisory relationship that we all aspire to be.
Mikey Pruitt (11:46)
Yeah, that total cost of ownership is something a lot of people don't really look at. They just look at the per ticket cost.
James Shuler (11:50)
Well, they're tasked, right? We
may be jumping ahead, but let's touch on this. I mentioned earlier what everyone thinks IT is is different. I got another one for you. No matter who you talk to in a leadership role, when you're an MSP at least, IT is different to them too, which stinks because your customer, your direct end user could be someone in accounting, could be someone in sales. It's anybody with a computer that you're helped us for. But who your actual point of contact is, is usually very technical.
But if that IT director or that CIO in the org chart rolls up to the CFO, it's very different than if they roll up to the COO or the CEO. And the reason that usually happens is the CFO is very budget conscious. And not that the CEO is not, he usually is, but he's usually more strategy driven, more initiative driven, where that CFO is gonna be thinking, here's your task. Don't go outside of this box. Find me the cheapest way to accomplish this.
And so if we go down that path over and over and over again, you wind up with a beat down IT guy who's only looking for best price, who's got a hodgepodge of tools, but no cohesion between them. They're not talking together. There's no rhyme or reason. It's just ⁓ a parking lot of product that was cheap at the time.
Mikey Pruitt (13:11)
So
let's talk about that cohesion for a second and like centers role in like these conversations that are going to happen. If you're talking to someone who's going to roll up to the finance director or whoever versus someone technical, what does the story look like when you guys go into pitch, let's say?
James Shuler (13:30)
Yeah, that's good. Usually all of our conversations, no matter what stage they're in or who they're with, there's something around pain points. And how we get them to expose a pain point is different every time, but that's the outcome. We learn what's not working well. ⁓ So traditionally, it's what do you do for the team you have today? And we uncover the team they have is understaffed and under budgeted. All IT people think they're understaffed and under budgeted. So we can kind of safely assume that.
and they'll work into what they do really well. And the truth is what they do well, we can't do better. They do it every day. So we probably can't do that better. But they're going to be ⁓ faced with some different ⁓ fork in the road that we see more often than they do. A common one is an acquisition. Another common one is an office move or a data center move. I mentioned CMMC or some level of certification or audit. When those things happen, your team that you have in-house
is typically guessing on how to navigate those waters. So we find those areas that we do comment that we know businesses don't to ask questions. And that usually leads to an opening of where the team themselves are deficient. And if the team has deficiencies, CINTA can typically step in and help in those narrow areas, or we can take on larger chunks of the team's responsibilities. So you hear a lot of requests for, can I get a CISO, but at fractional.
I just want somebody here every so often to give us direction leadership. Well, sure. In fact, I can take on a lot of other support around security. I can mature your security side and take on that CISO role, but all part of a managed service, not just give you a body and then step away. And it's the step away that makes us nervous because how that end user leverages the tool is not in my control. If they don't leverage it the way we intend it, well, then we won't ever see the value that we sold it at.
So long answer, pretty long-winded, that's where we try to take the conversations around the team, where their deficiencies and gaps are, and how we can fill those.
Mikey Pruitt (15:26)
So let's.
So let's take this conversation to security because you brought it up and I've been thinking this has been onto my mind is like, when did cybersecurity kind of start and when did MSPs really get involved? And I don't know what it was. I have a feeling it was sometime around the target breach of like 2011. like, everyone's credit card got stolen on Black Friday. Like genius move by the bad guys, by the way. But like MSPs were cables, routers, servers, laptops.
James Shuler (15:38)
Alright. Alright.
Yeah.
Yeah, did
Mikey Pruitt (16:04)
computers
James Shuler (16:04)
it.
Mikey Pruitt (16:04)
forever. now I think cybersecurity is the top priority for them. Would you agree with that?
James Shuler (16:11)
Yeah. Now I highly doubt the layman IT, the layman people that are managing MSP relationships are your top listener. You probably have technical people listening a lot. So I'm going to, I'm going to bore a little bit of them. We do this a lot too in our presentations where what is IT to us? Well, there's three categories for the managed service provider. There's mundane tasks like patching, which man, that's overlooked to the IT guy that does patching that's listening.
Mikey Pruitt (16:21)
Yeah, probably. Hi, technical people.
James Shuler (16:41)
Like your job could not be more like I'm thankful for it, but no one, no one thanks you for that role. The second one that's in that mundane task or backup jobs. It used to be full-time backup admins. That's all they did were backup jobs. And now that's like just another hat somebody else is going to wear to make sure that they were successful. And then you have a hospitality side, like interacting with end users and doing the tickets, ⁓ fulfilling the break fix of the relationship. And then you have now security.
Mikey Pruitt (16:43)
Bye.
James Shuler (17:11)
And you're right, antivirus was kind of the beginning of the first thing that we included as a default security tool. And then the beloved Cisco umbrella, ⁓ OpenDNS and stuff like that became something that we added as an inclusion. When you bought it, we did this. So you brought up Target. That's a great one to bring up. I'm gonna get back into patching in a second. Do you remember why they got into Target? Remember how they got in?
Mikey Pruitt (17:38)
Through HVAC company that was one of their vendors genius
James Shuler (17:40)
Yeah, through the HVAC. So
picture 10 years ago, wasn't that long ago, 10 years ago, ⁓ even Target had some IT policies that were so immature ⁓ that the HVAC and facilities team could add stuff to the network and give it an IP address, plug it into a hot port without telling the IT team. These things happened with good reason. They needed to be more efficient and turn those things down after hours, turn them up after hours.
⁓ No one told IT. Well, if you look at stats today, manufacturing is still top of the list when it comes to getting breach. I can guarantee you it's assembly lines where people are being efficient, making smart decisions, plugging in new technologies sold by some whiz bang sales guy. And it's opening up a gap in their security posture and they never know it. So you're right. Now we need tools that can scan IP addresses, make sure there's nothing in the environment we don't know about.
default with our offerings. So while did it shifted that fast, I was going to tell you that I think the day started maybe a little bit later than that, not much, ⁓ but right about the time that we decided as America to define critical industries, which put a target on all bad guys who enjoyed hacking. These are the ones we need to hit. They're the ones with the most to lose. Here's the list, focus here. And then second to that, once COVID hit and then the
Mikey Pruitt (19:01)
They gave him a list, hit these first. So stupid.
James Shuler (19:08)
that everyone went to remote work and the ⁓ use of Bitcoin and anonymous transfer of cryptocurrencies became popular, it was wildfire. But I think the announcing of here are the industries of most criticality might have been the day that everyone said we got to do something about this.
Mikey Pruitt (19:27)
And there was already proof from the target thing. That's actually really funny. I'm feeling there's a blog post there, like the history of where did cybersecurity come from? There's Target, there's the announcement of the list, who to focus on. There's Bitcoin in the mix there, like anonymous transactions, Monero. Not that I know about Monero, but anyway. And then there's COVID, which is like the final boss that cemented cybersecurity into our everyday lives.
James Shuler (19:30)
Yeah, right. Yeah.
So, All right.
once.
Yeah, so we just did a presentation on the evolution from 2021 to now. Now, no one cared about those dates, but just between us, those dates. But we were talking about Colonial Pipeline, JBS Foods, the announcement that Killware is now a thing. All these different terms that came up. And then all of a sudden, like a spigot, they just kind of turned all that off. And so just keep your evolution going when Colonial Pipeline got popped.
Mikey Pruitt (20:09)
Yes.
James Shuler (20:24)
They went ahead and paid their ransom. Next thing you know, it's announced that the FBI had reached into a virtual wallet of the bad guy and handed that money back to Colonial Pipeline. Well, it's anonymous. What happened? It's supposed to be anonymous. How did they reach in there and do that? Well, turns out there's not very many exchanges that can turn cryptocurrency into cash. And so when they caught it was right there at that transfer moment, they're able to get that money back and hand it back. block block chains, block chains,
Mikey Pruitt (20:51)
I did not know that part of the story. Wow.
James Shuler (20:54)
probably still a bit anonymous. bet you there's still a way that you can capture some trail, but I thought that was fascinating that they bailed out Colonial Pipeline and told all the competitors of Colonial Pipeline, even though y'all been better at investing in preventative security measures, these guys weren't and they were taking their profits home with them. And when they got popped, we gave them their money back.
Mikey Pruitt (21:17)
But the FBI is not going to come help you when it happens. So.
James Shuler (21:19)
So I've been told that number
today and it's changing, I've been told that number today is a ransom of $3 million or higher. The FBI is gonna get very involved. Now I'm gonna-
Mikey Pruitt (21:28)
So the
bad guys are like 2,999,000.
James Shuler (21:30)
Too late.
Wouldn't that be great? Now know they've matured a lot too, right? So like, why not go after the small business when they're going to be able to pay a smaller amount of money, but they're not going to be able to get FBI help. They're not going to hit the radar for taking down the entire oil flow with the Eastern United States. So let's just pop some smaller businesses and move quick.
Mikey Pruitt (21:44)
under the radar.
Yeah, like I-
So when people are coming to you, maybe they're coming from another MSP or maybe they're just doing it themselves. They got a guy that knows how to fix iPhones or whatever. When people come to you, what are you really seeing in the trenches? Who are the people seeking out the cybersecurity services?
James Shuler (22:12)
man, it's quite literally the two I brought up earlier are the most common. My CEO has invested in a cybersecurity insurance policy and we are failing this piece of paper. So let's consider that paper the audit of the small business that didn't exist 10 years ago. ⁓ And then it was the new announcements around CMMC that DOD contractors, after they changed it from a five level to a three level step process,
Mikey Pruitt (22:14)
Is it everybody?
James Shuler (22:41)
⁓ They've been coming out of the woodwork saying I got to get this shored up this year or I'm not going to do business next year.
Mikey Pruitt (22:48)
So lot of the businesses that you see are almost being forced to embrace cybersecurity measures. That's kind of kind of scary. ⁓
James Shuler (22:53)
Yeah. Yeah. I'd say before you asked
me the same question last year, I'd tell you it's the customers of the businesses we support. Well, it's that. Yeah, that's probably true. It's the service provider for someone, say, like AIG, who's already mature in their IT process is going to hold their vendor to a higher standard. So they have to live to a higher standard. It's kind of like if someone came to me and said, hey, you'll carry a strong insurance policy for liability.
Mikey Pruitt (23:01)
Those are the early adopters, I guess.
James Shuler (23:22)
but I want you to double it or I won't do business with you. Well, I have a business decision to make. Do I want to spend money on that insurance or not? If I choose not to, I pass on that business. Well, they're doing the same. My biggest customer just came to me and said, I have to live to these security practices. And if I don't, they're going to find a vendor that does. So they're asking us, how do I get there fast? But how do I get there without eroding all my margin I have on this one account? So we have to find creative ways ⁓
to figure out where is the business's appetite for risk and how do we surround it with the right tools that can be managed in an efficient manner.
Mikey Pruitt (23:59)
So I was gonna ask, do you feel that center was prepared for that question? Like we need to meet these standards like.
James Shuler (24:05)
Yeah,
that's a great question. ⁓ The one I get just as often is that actually is when everyone else had worked from home and you were supporting their networks, how did y'all work from home? The funny answer is our CEO decided we were ⁓ critical infrastructure. And it turned out, like we laughed about that. It turned out we ended up being, our industry ended up being categorized as one of those 16 critical industries.
I was shocked. thought that he was just saying that to keep business afloat, but it was real. We ended up being really well set up for that mainly because of our size. We're 400 people big. We cover five different territories and six different office spaces. Our phone systems are already set up for the round robin you would expect. We're not siloed on separate domains. We're one business under one tenant under Microsoft. So everything was already kind of established.
So I ended up with a very smooth transition there with what you're seeing now around ⁓ the NIST adoption for things like cybersecurity insurance, taking this standards and putting them to a questionnaire. The center managed services offering had already aligned with NIST before all this became popular post COVID. ⁓ So our strategic direction to offer security tools as part of our offering was already in full alignment.
So we ended up having no problem with this. I can tell you it was full certainty. It was either ignored by our competition or they scrambled and they signed on with typically groups like Kaseya or ConnectWise who are the backbone of MSPs to just say, whatever your tool stack is, we'll use it. Our approach, Mikey, is different. We have a C-Stack committee that R &Ds a lot of different products. And then we pick our own tool stack and we don't rely on someone else to choose it. So with that,
If someone else, like a customer came and said, I heard this is a better tool, we can kind of pull the paperwork out and say, well, I don't know. Here's what we found and we did it.
Mikey Pruitt (26:08)
So you said you have a, you call it a C stack and they base the committee.
James Shuler (26:11)
Yeah, it stands for Center
Technology Stack. It's what are we going to adopt at the highest level of expertise so that we're not trying to be everything to everyone. ⁓ We'll take kind of a siloed approach per ⁓ industry bucket and say who's our preference. And then if something else comes out, we'll test it against that standard and we'll make a decision if it's more best of breed than the other and RIs.
Mikey Pruitt (26:25)
Yeah.
So I got to get the sound by it. You mentioned ⁓ OpenDNS earlier. Now is DNS filter in this C-Stack?
James Shuler (26:42)
It is
same process. had the Cisco umbrella as part of our standard. We put the DNS filter through the same process. It gets first nominated by a member of our team. That team then brings it into a Friday meeting we have where a group of people with technical and sales review certain metrics. It got trialed and then it got put into full production. So now 100 % of our managed services
Customers are all enjoying the DNS filter features and none of them have the ⁓ Cisco product anymore. So yeah, y'all went through that not too long ago, I'd say 12 to 18 months.
Mikey Pruitt (27:21)
Yeah, it's been about
a year, little over a year. Awesome. Well, good. I'm glad we beat the test there. We passed.
James Shuler (27:28)
It reminds
me, you like talking about movies. So I was thinking about that one already. So that one reminds me of Animal House when the lights are off and everybody's eating pizza and they put the pledge picture up on the wall and everyone throws like wadded up paper and booze at them. And then the next one, they're, yeah. It's very Animal House in that regard, just corporate lunch edition.
Mikey Pruitt (27:50)
I feel a AI video coming on of the C-Stack committee meeting. That's going to be hilarious. So we've been talking about like these, this kind of shift. And we talked about, you know, the building of cybersecurity into, you know, post COVID era, which is where we are now. ⁓ I'm curious, like, do you feel like most MSPs are ready for this current world? And then how do we get ready for the next iteration?
James Shuler (27:52)
That'd be good. That'd be good. We should do that. That's a funny idea.
Okay, one of the things that we hear a lot from business owners, more so than IT guys, is they all wanna talk about AI. They don't necessarily know what they wanna talk about, but they know the initials.
Mikey Pruitt (28:32)
Right?
James Shuler (28:33)
Being my age, I always think they mean Allen Iverson. They never mean Allen Iverson. They always mean artificial intelligence. ⁓ I'd like to kind of talk about that as we bridge into this. ⁓ One of the reasons being is every business owner has a friend who's another business owner, who's talking about how they used or saw AI used at some conference, some story. ⁓ What I see MSPs doing to stay up with these times
Mikey Pruitt (28:38)
Never.
James Shuler (29:01)
is they're adopting tools that have written their own AI or machine learning models. So picture the security companies that do ⁓ MDR, you're probably familiar with those, the Arctic wolves of the world. Why do I want to rewrite ⁓ a code to do that kind of AI machine learning to scan through logs when there's someone else who's already invented it? So that's probably the small business approach is to stay afloat.
you probably adopt someone else as what they started, and then you offer that mature enterprise grade product to that small business through your service offering. I'm gonna pause there for a minute. Am I heading down the completely wrong path to where you're headed?
Mikey Pruitt (29:44)
⁓ Not where I was going, but I love this line because on this podcast, someone mentions AI. I've probably said this on another episode. Someone mentions AI. Usually it's me, so I'm glad it's you. Keep going.
James Shuler (29:55)
No. Well,
I don't have too much deeper to go on that. You asked, are they ready for this? They're definitely ready for what's hitting them with security. Because if they weren't ready by now, they'd be dead. They wouldn't be an MSP in the game anymore. ⁓ What more I'm seeing right now is how are MSPs scrambling to adopt AI tools to help automate certain practices in their operation that today are highly manual. ⁓
because it's taken more more labor to get people out of cyber attacks. So the best way to be efficient, don't let any of your customers get into a cyber attack by giving them all the layers of security tools that they would need, a definable security posture based on this. And then on the flip side, adopt somebody else's AI that they've already created and have that watch your back to make sure that nothing gets through the cracks. I think that's what you're
Mikey Pruitt (30:48)
So you were talking about
the ⁓ kind of, I would call it maybe level one where you're adopting someone else's AI, but it sounded like you were going into maybe creating your own AI. Is that where you're headed?
James Shuler (31:02)
I'll tell you, I think that's where ⁓ things are going. there's two types of IT people out there. Those that are okay with Windows and those that are okay with Mac. They rarely, there's not any that are the same. Yeah, there's two kinds. So those that have adopted Microsoft though, across the board that are using SharePoint to do a lot of their file storage, they're doing OneDrive, they've got Teams is all their ⁓ transfer and shares and stuff like that.
Mikey Pruitt (31:15)
Windows is terrible, but anyway, go ahead.
James Shuler (31:32)
all their collaboration is through that. I'm seeing a lot of new adoption into changing their financial software ⁓ out of whatever they're using from QuickBooks to ⁓ NetSuite, Sage into the business central or dynamic solutions that Microsoft offers. When you start to get your end users using Copilot the right way, your data saved in the correct manner, which is like on their SharePoint, not in your own file servers.
And then you start adopting those other tools around finance and ERP. A lot of this AI stuff is already there for you. It's just, am I going to choose to adopt it? Am I going choose to reach out and grab it? For the MSP world, I do believe that there's going to be a day that all of the logs that we read to figure out what's wrong with the computer, ⁓ which is a lot of what we do when the computer is acting funny, we read the logs. lot of that's going to be automated. What patch needs to go out? What?
What needs to be clicked next or fixed on it? What needs to be run? There's no reason that AI can't start catching that and running those processes. Maybe the only reason it's not now is trust that sometimes you run a patch in production and it breaks other things. But there's no reason AI can't figure that out either. So today, no one's doing that. It's probably where the MSP industry is headed. We'll still have the personal side of picking up the phone and hearing what's wrong.
But odds are an AI tool has already picked up on what's wrong, identified where it sits and what to do, and has already been running something on it. So that's probably where it's headed, but no, we're not there.
Mikey Pruitt (33:08)
think you kind of mentioned you were talking about Microsoft Dynamics and a few other pieces of software that I don't know anything about. But it sounds like you were, I don't hear that often. So it sounds like you were describing what an MSP, the size and caliber of center is 400 people strong. You you guys are tightly integrated with your customers, servicing, you know, providing them.
James Shuler (33:16)
Yeah, yeah, sure.
Mikey Pruitt (33:35)
support and installation I assume for their finance software and I feel like the smaller MSPs like 20, 50 people aren't really tackling that. Do you see that too? What is IT?
James Shuler (33:45)
goes back to what is IT, right? How do you
define IT? So you're not wrong. Selling to an accountant on changing out of the lifeblood of how they run their P &L statements and how they do billing, that's totally different than talking to an IT guy about refreshing these laptops that are aging. So there is a weird bridge there. comes down to eventually a company decides this pain's too much for us to live with. Let's get off of QuickBooks and onto something else. Maybe that's it. We've all grown this.
Well, before they go just buy a product, it is a software, a SaaS offering, or maybe it's still an old school physical ⁓ license key that they're gonna type in off of a CD, I don't care. ⁓ They need to talk to IT about what's this gonna take to roll out. we're hoping that those conversations being that, again, technology is the center of every business. We're hoping we're at the table for those making recommendations on what would tie all these tools, these disparate systems together.
⁓ Yeah, what's the point? If you've already adopted Microsoft for your cloud, your Windows OS, the office software, everything else, why would you go against that for accounting software? At least look at it.
Mikey Pruitt (34:59)
That's your basically technical advisor advice. You are so deep in this ecosystem.
James Shuler (35:04)
There's certainly industries that are niche where
we would never advise that. Like we would say that there's something purpose built for what y'all do because y'all are unique. But 90 % of organizations out there, ⁓ it only matters what system they're using because they know it. The people they've hired know how to use it. They know the ins and outs. You know how many people use QuickBooks to ⁓ the standards that QuickBooks says are best practices? Like none. They've all just...
Mikey Pruitt (35:30)
I'm done.
James Shuler (35:31)
to some form bastardized it a bit to fit their world. And that's okay, that's important. yeah, most of these products, like what NetSuite can do versus what say Dynamics can do, the differences are tiny. They both do very similar things. It's more of just what language do you speak? I don't wanna talk about that anymore. That's kind of halfway boring, isn't it? mean, is, it captain's purpose. Well.
Mikey Pruitt (35:51)
Some key.
You're like Microsoft Dynamics, lame. But I'm
curious about, so Cynter is, ⁓ I would say, well respected in the MSP community, accomplished. how did you get there is my question, really. Was it luck or strategy?
James Shuler (36:11)
Yeah, no, I would argue it's strategy, but I bet you outsiders would say there's still luck in there. Chris Pace founded CineR in 06. What was really cool about when he founded CineR is a lot of the things we do today in assisting mergers and acquisitions at a large scale, which is kind of on that project side of the house that we haven't talked much about. He was doing back in 2006, collapsing domains or companies that had hundreds of domains into one.
so that they had one single platform to operate off of. ⁓ He was doing a lot of exchange upgrades, which email upgrades, now we're doing 365, right? A lot of that stuff stays very true to what we're good at, what our bread and butter is. ⁓ So some would say just clean up Active Directory, for example, Chris's mentality is create new Active Directory and cut over so that you get rid of all the mess. And by doing some of those things, doing it right and not just trying to band-aid it,
That's what's led to where we sit as a managed service provider. So a couple of examples. It would be easier to not take on bringing in DNS filter. It'd be easier just to renew Cisco umbrella. It's already out there in all of our customers. We wouldn't have to communicate anything. It'd just be easier. But if we stared at it right and said, can fix certain problems for the customer, and here's the amount of pain it puts us through.
Is it worth it? Well, to do it right, yes, it's worth it. If it was my business, I would do it. So picture being support for that many customers, you technically have that many bosses of IT leaders telling you what to do in IT. They've got to all agree. That's hard to get everyone to agree on. So I don't necessarily think that it's luck, but strategy to be able to explain why we make the decisions we make, what's the reason.
A small business needs a definable security posture or why are we bringing a system down or changing a tool? All of that matters. And so I would say highly strategic.
Mikey Pruitt (38:15)
So you mentioned project work in there. And I thought project work was the thing MSPs were trying to get away from. Tell me about it.
James Shuler (38:23)
Yeah,
that's a call. Yeah, that's a good call. Do you know why they're trying to get away from it? Well, core MSPs that don't do much on the procurement side, they're evaluated off of a multiplier of that recurring revenue. So technically speaking, a project or selling hardware would hurt that ratio of recurring to non-recurring revenue. It's a little more complex that not all recurring revenues treated equal, but you see my point.
Mikey Pruitt (38:29)
No.
James Shuler (38:53)
So the idea would be, I do need to get away from that. Centers Outlook's a little different. ⁓ Project work is, in my world for presales is like dates. It's going on dates with somebody. They get to know you, they get to know your professionalism, they get to see how you lead the environment afterwards, they get to see the documentation, the care. And then the managed services contract is a lot like a marriage contract. Like now we're working together and we're tied, contractually together. ⁓ Once we have...
done projects for somebody, it's hard to tell them in the future we're not. So you would never tell your wife, no more dating, no more movies, now we're married. So we continue to do projects for our customers. ⁓ The other thing that does for us is it eliminates, it kind of boxes out the competition that does do projects. They can't come in and say, hey, by the way, I also offer a managed service. ⁓ Let me do this project and I can show this to you on the side. So instead we just take care of that. We wanna kind of be that one stop shop.
both sides of the house. That also allows us to advise when a customer doesn't need an MSP, which happens, on strategy that they should take on. Again, maybe that's security tools, an office move, maybe it's advice on getting rid of Windows 10 and getting into Windows 11, which that date's coming up. Depending on what the company has, we want to be able to consult regardless of what their only situation is. We're not trying to fit you into an MSP, in other words.
Mikey Pruitt (40:20)
I, uh, in a previous life, I was an electrician. My family is an electrical contracting company and we, everything is project work. We'd worked on a lot of, uh, like multimillion dollar homes with like 250 network drops. And I was the only person doing this stuff. Um, so it would be a project and the project was over when the people moved in and we were gone. However, the people were like, Hey, now that we have all this technology stuff, we would like you to come back and be.
a service provider. And at this time I was naive to the MSP term and I was trying to get out of this. was like, this seems like, this seems like a nightmare. First of all, you want me to explain everything, how it works. And then I have to like actually fix the thing or, you know, improve or whatever the thing is. what I, it sounds like what you're saying is that is what builds the relationship and probably why these homeowners that I got to know over several months.
James Shuler (40:57)
Yeah.
Mikey Pruitt (41:18)
wanted me to continue on to help them, but I just didn't have the time.
James Shuler (41:22)
Yeah, I would say in its perfect sense, the project team's kind of our reputation builder. The better they do, higher, the more repeat business we get, the more referrals we gain, all that stuff. ⁓ The managed services team though is our, it's what we are. It's kind of funny. know Bucky's the gas station down here? Yeah. Well, they're known for their bathrooms, but the bathrooms don't make them any money, right? It's a cost center.
Mikey Pruitt (41:27)
Hmm.
⁓ do I know Bucky's? kidding me?
James Shuler (41:49)
Our projects make us money. They're not a cost center. So it's not the best analogy, but we are an MSP, ⁓ but it's our projects that build our reputation.
Mikey Pruitt (41:59)
That's a really good outlook and I don't hear that a lot from lot of MSPs. So that's good to hear. I am curious, I'm coming to the end here, but I want to jump back into AI, the famous acronym. And yeah, Allen Iverson, tell me your favorite Allen Iverson tool at the moment.
James Shuler (42:12)
Alan Iverson, great.
Well, I'll tell you the one I hate the most. I start there. I have one I like the most. The one I like the most is probably one of these goofy ones that like makes an AI song for you when you put in the details. think you and me ought to sit down with one of those tools and create like a DNS unfiltered theme song to open up the podcast. I think that'd be a fun idea.
Mikey Pruitt (42:22)
That works too.
I actually made an AI song last night for my four-year-old to put on his pajamas. He's got like splatter paint looking pajamas. So we had an AI song all about splatter paint and pajamas and brushing your teeth. And it was like an eighties cartoon intro theme song. It was great.
James Shuler (42:46)
is.
That's awesome. Yeah, what would that be? Putting on my PJs, every days?
Mikey Pruitt (43:04)
I think it went something like, splatter
jams, splatter jams.
James Shuler (43:09)
That was
too good. The one I hate the most is actually a bit, ⁓ I probably shouldn't say it. I hate co-pilot. ⁓ Used right? I love co-pilot, but I tell you what I don't like is that the AI buzz has become such a thing. So many businesses are buying one or two licenses of it and they're chunking them around to different employees and they're saying, test this out, see if you like it. And all that's going to do is allow someone to be a little bit lazier on meetings.
Now they know that a meeting is listening and they are going to get a transcribe of it. That transcribe is probably never going to be read later. They're going to rest assured that detail somewhere, but they're not going to go back and look at it. ⁓ But businesses that do that haven't taken the steps yet to put their data in the right spot to leverage the tool the way it's supposed to be. So I know it's kind of a self-serving comment. It's like, hate the way businesses are using Co-Pilot, but it's been pushed out in a way that's kind of led to some failure.
We hope a lot of businesses would just like data readiness assessments to make sure that that data is sitting where it should before you put an AI tool on it. That's a lot of fun. ⁓ Maybe, yeah, that's probably my best answer I could give you on that, unfortunately, Mikey.
Mikey Pruitt (44:24)
Yeah,
I think a lot of people like, you know, the AI stuff has been out for maybe two or three years, I guess. And we're still all kind of at the, just at the edge where we're, yeah, we're just scratching the surface of like, you know, that instead of going to Google, now we go to Chad GBT or perplexity. I use them all. I'm a bit of an addict, I guess. I got the music one. Got an image one. You got Chad GBT perplexity is really good for web searches.
James Shuler (44:30)
Yeah.
Tratching the surface. We are.
What is your favorite?
Someone on my... Okay.
One ⁓ of my favorite customers, friend of mine, he was early adopter of the smart home and he started building some very basic code using already established AI models. I guess it's like AI as a service models that he's trying to apply into his smart home ⁓ that's connecting all of his devices. And I think what he's doing is pretty cool. That's a neat thing to think about is like, how is this gonna...
move us forward into the Jetsons reality that we used to see in cartoons. Forget the flying cars for a minute, just having all of our devices connected in a better way. ⁓ But yeah, I think the other fun thing for me is how many people misuse AI when it's probably a machine learning or automation thing, but they just buckle everything into AI.
Mikey Pruitt (45:43)
Yeah, I think that's actually the best use case right now is like some automation that you already have, like somewhere there would be great to have like a human-esque type of thing, like review it or kind of add some context to it or description. then you send that piece to AI and then come back to the automation and keep going.
James Shuler (45:55)
Yeah.
Yeah, that would be. ⁓ Let me give you one more, since we're coming to a close. We did a presentation in ⁓ Oklahoma and we were using an incident response team, the 911 crews that come in and get your business back out of a breach, an active ransomware attack. These guys are awesome. They do like negotiation with the bad guys. They're given a presentation on how it's kind of like been one time there was a group called Conti in Russia.
Mikey Pruitt (46:05)
Let's hear it.
James Shuler (46:29)
The government blew them up, they became another group. They blew them up, now they're a new group. And here's how they're managing their attacks. Here's what they do. Here's their typical ransom amount. And one of the coolest stats I saw in there is that it's not the zero day threats. We hear about zero day threats as like a buzzword, but it was actually like 10 very specific vulnerabilities that are well known and published.
that were exploited for like 60 % of the ransomware cases they got. So like the 80-20 rule is very, very alive out there. So I picture like, if we can get the AI tools to get us to a point where we can at least take care of the human being negligent. Ah, negligence is wrong word. The human cares, thinks he's doing the right thing, but maybe misses something. If we could just protect ourselves from the human, then we'd be in a really good spot where the...
Mikey Pruitt (47:12)
Yeah
James Shuler (47:24)
I guess the employee who's doing what you and I are doing and downloading our own AI tools is currently a risk. It starts to make it okay if we know exactly what doors are already open. So long-winded way to say we gotta get to that point to where we can protect ourselves from the stupidity of our own employees. Yes. You're correct. You're the front line.
Mikey Pruitt (47:45)
Yes, that's actually what DNS filters whole goal is. Don't click it, or if you
do, whatever, we'll block it.
James Shuler (47:55)
Y'all are the front line of the defense of protecting the business owner from the stupidity of their employees. Y'all should redo your commercials. That's a really good tagline.
Mikey Pruitt (48:01)
Actually, we're
going to have you on the next one. James, thank you so much for joining me today. That was a blast. I'll see you in Texas for hot sauce really soon.
James Shuler (48:10)
That'd be great. Thanks, Mikey. Appreciate it.
Mikey Pruitt (48:12)
All right. That was fun.
Welcome everybody to DNS unfiltered. James Schuler is here from Center Technologies and he is ready. Are you ready James? This is going to be, this is going to be really fun. I've watched a few ⁓ of your videos on the internet for Center Technologies that you've done stuff like ⁓ the hot sauce challenge, ⁓ cooking barbecue and drinking whiskey. like, I feel like we should do this in person next time.
James Shuler (00:47)
Yeah, couldn't be more ready. Whatever you want to throw away.
Yeah, so I think that's on the horizon, right? I don't know if Sarah's been loud with you about this, but I think that's our hope is to get you down here or us up there to do one of those in person. So that's definitely the goal,
Mikey Pruitt (01:15)
I'll be there.
So we wanted to talk to James about MSP stuff because Center Technologies is a pretty ⁓ evolved MSP, guess you could say. So there's like a eye roll at the beginning. So I wanted to first talk about this redefining MSP success. So you guys have emphasized that the success metrics aren't really about
James Shuler (01:28)
Something say that? Yeah.
Yeah, sure.
Mikey Pruitt (01:43)
the support ticket. Like how many support tickets did we answer? So how do you measure success at Center Technologies?
James Shuler (01:45)
Right. Yeah.
Yeah, so that's a good question. So Center predominantly is a managed service provider. We do have a large mature practice of doing project-based work. We have a procurement arm as well. So it's not to say that this is our only success measure, but we look for things ⁓ to measure as a KPI that's going to impact customer experience. So I got to kind take a pretty big step backwards to get into the topic, but I will add just to hit your point home, we hate the MSPs.
Mikey Pruitt (02:14)
Yeah.
James Shuler (02:18)
that measure total quantity of tickets closed. What we find the behavior that breeds in our customer is they take their monthly bill, they divide it by the total number of tickets closed and they say my cost per ticket is X. And that's kind of what they judge what they wanna make done next year. They say, I wanna keep my cost per ticket the same. I wanna lower my cost per ticket. Well, good IT team is solving things permanently. And so we wanna see things reduce in ticket count over time. So I think that's what you're.
hinting at there is the reduction of total tickets is a good thing when you're fixing things the right way. ⁓ But Mikey, I gotta go way back. Like how does someone define IT? Right, so how does someone define IT before we get into how does someone deem it successful or not? And that may be, I would argue maybe the biggest challenge with a brand new customer of ours or a prospect, an early stage is getting our consultants on the same page as the client.
Mikey Pruitt (02:55)
Let's go. Let's go way back.
James Shuler (03:14)
as to what IT means to them. So I'll put you on the spot. What do you think of the moment you think of IT?
Mikey Pruitt (03:22)
⁓ wires, routers, and servers.
James Shuler (03:28)
Yeah, so that's fair. Most don't even think of servers because it's out of sight, out of mind. Sometimes, yeah, you might not be normal. When we consider the MSPs really service in the small business and bringing a lot of enterprise grade products and processes to the small business, you start picturing a lot of times the keyboard, the mouse, the computer screen, maybe a help desk ticket, my wifi. Maybe that's the extent of it. Maybe the conference room.
Mikey Pruitt (03:32)
I got one right here I'm looking at right now. It's staring at me going, you've got work to do, get over here.
James Shuler (03:58)
Also never works when we need it to. ⁓ But that to me is where I see lot of misnomers is IT is an IT guy, it's stereotypical belt with a flashlight on it, maybe a pocket protector of some sort that's gonna translate technical terms into English for me. ⁓ I picture the SNL skit, move! The IT guy has them get out of way and starts banging on the keyboard until they get everything working again.
Mikey Pruitt (04:19)
You
James Shuler (04:24)
But we're all trying to shift IT from that misnomer into something far more impactful to the business. Part of where center gets its name is actually that, that technology is the center of every business. So we wanna make it to where all departments can rely on how to be enabled to grow faster and move quicker based on technology. If you're the opposite, IT is looking like a boat anchor. It's a reason that we can't move fast. It's keeping us from making change.
So Center's goal is to not be the boat anchor, to make it simple. We're trying to push businesses forward.
Mikey Pruitt (04:59)
It's a really good way to put it. You've got me thinking of that show, The IT Crowd, which I think is like a British show. ⁓ it's so funny. It's like, and they'll call in for like to support help. And it's just like, did you plug it in and plug it?
James Shuler (05:06)
Yeah, it is. Yeah.
There's been
a couple really good shows about IT. There's one, Halt and Catch Fire. Did you ever watch that?
Mikey Pruitt (05:19)
that's
good. That's I wouldn't call that like a spoof show. It's like kind of deep and serious. It's really good. It's like Silicon Valley at its worst in the early 80s.
James Shuler (05:22)
No, it's not a spoof at all, yeah.
It might be a spooky
show, but it's not a spoof that when that one Yeah, taking us back into when IBM was was redefining how tech sales was gonna make sales reps not be snake oil salesman. ⁓ That's it.
Mikey Pruitt (05:40)
So that's kind of
where that's kind of like that era is kind of where all this IT stuff started. Like people started inventing computers and then we figured out how to connect them together. We invented DNS and now we have MSPs like to manage it for people who don't understand. And I'm just curious like are the people at center, are they those nerds that love the stuff that seem like they are? You seem like you are. I am.
James Shuler (06:03)
Yeah.
We've got pockets of different passion and it's interesting, there's some that are, ⁓ they make their own keyboard. I got a guy in Oklahoma, love him. He makes his own keyboards. That's like his hobby is making keyboards from scratch with parts. They look incredibly well designed. They look awesome. But you'll have that kind of geeked them all the way into really the history side of it. ⁓ We do this center 101 thing where we bring some new hires in. We talk about different paths.
And we'll bring in old hard drives that are like, know, big, huge drives from mainframe days and talk about this evolution that through the early nineties, when your IT guy, the MSP in this case would come out as a fractional person, would put their hands on keyboards or on cables, run to Fry's or Micro Center, buy what they need, come back, repair and say, we'll see you next week. And then whatever is going wrong a week later, get your grocery list of things ready and start working again. ⁓
But we'll kind of take our employees through that evolution and give them a view of where we think things are headed to give them some sense of purpose or guide into what our mission is. So maybe a little bit, but I definitely am a bit of a nerd on that topic.
Mikey Pruitt (07:19)
I'd love to hear that and I do want to get back to you where we think things are headed. I think that's a pretty important piece. But first I wanted to talk about the evolution and more like the positioning of how center technologies is not your average trunk slammer MSP. How do you position yourself?
James Shuler (07:25)
ok.
Yeah, I love that term trunk slammer. So
if you're going to be good at the IT stuff, you can take one of two paths. You can take the path of as a business of what SHI has done, or they create a procurement model to simplify the IT guy's ability to buy stuff. Or you can take the path of expertise, where you're going to take the path where more of, I'm not going to sell you what you think you want to buy. I'm going to help you craft what you don't know yet exists.
and then we're going to buy that together, implement and support it. We've definitely taken a hard approach on the anti-SHI side. We know anyone can go buy anything on the internet. We're not going to be better than say Amazon, CDW or SHI as a procurement model. We're going to be vastly superior at design architecture and implementation. So it's interesting because we're one of the few that takes the MSP, which is supposed to be help desk, right? That's supposed to be what MSP world is, is help desk.
And we're saying we're gonna take a enterprise grade architecture design and implementation approach to MSP. ⁓ That may feel really nuanced. In the world of MSPs where there's so many of them right now, we think that's kind of part of what our differentiator is. The differentiator is pretty easy. We're gonna take enterprise grade processes and tools, and we're gonna take local touch, which is really defined one as proximity, but two, my ability to intimately know you.
We're going to take those two and combine them better than our competition can. So ⁓ take all that back into why we're not the trunk slammer. We want to help you design what that future state is, which means we're constantly in a gap analysis. So a business owner might come to us and say, you know, I just got a report from a cybersecurity insurance company. They say that we are inept in these areas. Or I just found out our business has been doing this forever. Seeing them see now states we have to be registered with them as level two.
before I can do any more business. How do I get there? So we're gonna take that gap analysis and give them a path forward that's both cost efficient, excuse me, and also that's gonna be technically sound so that it's secure, efficiently fast, and then qualified to meet those standards. If we can't do that, we're probably not a good fit. But most MSPs would tell you, as long as you got computers, we can support them. That's kind of really not our pathway. We wanna try to find a way that we're in the middle.
Mikey Pruitt (09:56)
Right.
So you mentioned that kind of reseller model and I go to a lot of MSP shows and I do see this type of MSP ⁓ come up and they're there. It's it's very business focused, which is great. You know that needs to exist, but it sounds like you guys have kind of shied away from that that model alone, but it is still necessary because you do still have to buy stuff and having an expertise on like the the.
know, millions of combinations of Microsoft licenses. Like, what are they doing over there? But anyway, like you still have to have some ⁓ knowledge in that area.
James Shuler (10:36)
We were, yeah, you're not wrong, Mikey. We have to be skilled in the same areas to be able to scope and know the go-to-market strategy of the typical manufacturers. But think who we're all selling to. We're all knocking on the doors of the same people. And so if I were to ⁓ knock on the door of every door and say, can do this cheaper and smoother, it is valuable, but it's only valuable until the next guy knocks on the door and says, I can do this cheaper and smoother. And they will, someone's gonna find a better way.
Mikey Pruitt (11:02)
And they will.
James Shuler (11:05)
So I like where we sit in this, because I can't, I'm being pretty blunt upfront, is I can be cost competitive, but I probably won't be cheaper because I'm not trying to sell you one piece of hardware. That said, if I can help you with the design and the application of how you want to accomplish a problem you have today, if we can get there together, my guess is your total cost of ownership is cheaper. I bet you, end up saving money than the opportunity cost of doing it wrong.
And we can find a way to make that be that we have a seat at the table on the team as opposed to just being another vendor. ⁓ And I think that's the goal of all of us is that trusted advisory relationship that we all aspire to be.
Mikey Pruitt (11:46)
Yeah, that total cost of ownership is something a lot of people don't really look at. They just look at the per ticket cost.
James Shuler (11:50)
Well, they're tasked, right? We
may be jumping ahead, but let's touch on this. I mentioned earlier what everyone thinks IT is is different. I got another one for you. No matter who you talk to in a leadership role, when you're an MSP at least, IT is different to them too, which stinks because your customer, your direct end user could be someone in accounting, could be someone in sales. It's anybody with a computer that you're helped us for. But who your actual point of contact is, is usually very technical.
But if that IT director or that CIO in the org chart rolls up to the CFO, it's very different than if they roll up to the COO or the CEO. And the reason that usually happens is the CFO is very budget conscious. And not that the CEO is not, he usually is, but he's usually more strategy driven, more initiative driven, where that CFO is gonna be thinking, here's your task. Don't go outside of this box. Find me the cheapest way to accomplish this.
And so if we go down that path over and over and over again, you wind up with a beat down IT guy who's only looking for best price, who's got a hodgepodge of tools, but no cohesion between them. They're not talking together. There's no rhyme or reason. It's just ⁓ a parking lot of product that was cheap at the time.
Mikey Pruitt (13:11)
So
let's talk about that cohesion for a second and like centers role in like these conversations that are going to happen. If you're talking to someone who's going to roll up to the finance director or whoever versus someone technical, what does the story look like when you guys go into pitch, let's say?
James Shuler (13:30)
Yeah, that's good. Usually all of our conversations, no matter what stage they're in or who they're with, there's something around pain points. And how we get them to expose a pain point is different every time, but that's the outcome. We learn what's not working well. ⁓ So traditionally, it's what do you do for the team you have today? And we uncover the team they have is understaffed and under budgeted. All IT people think they're understaffed and under budgeted. So we can kind of safely assume that.
and they'll work into what they do really well. And the truth is what they do well, we can't do better. They do it every day. So we probably can't do that better. But they're going to be ⁓ faced with some different ⁓ fork in the road that we see more often than they do. A common one is an acquisition. Another common one is an office move or a data center move. I mentioned CMMC or some level of certification or audit. When those things happen, your team that you have in-house
is typically guessing on how to navigate those waters. So we find those areas that we do comment that we know businesses don't to ask questions. And that usually leads to an opening of where the team themselves are deficient. And if the team has deficiencies, CINTA can typically step in and help in those narrow areas, or we can take on larger chunks of the team's responsibilities. So you hear a lot of requests for, can I get a CISO, but at fractional.
I just want somebody here every so often to give us direction leadership. Well, sure. In fact, I can take on a lot of other support around security. I can mature your security side and take on that CISO role, but all part of a managed service, not just give you a body and then step away. And it's the step away that makes us nervous because how that end user leverages the tool is not in my control. If they don't leverage it the way we intend it, well, then we won't ever see the value that we sold it at.
So long answer, pretty long-winded, that's where we try to take the conversations around the team, where their deficiencies and gaps are, and how we can fill those.
Mikey Pruitt (15:26)
So let's.
So let's take this conversation to security because you brought it up and I've been thinking this has been onto my mind is like, when did cybersecurity kind of start and when did MSPs really get involved? And I don't know what it was. I have a feeling it was sometime around the target breach of like 2011. like, everyone's credit card got stolen on Black Friday. Like genius move by the bad guys, by the way. But like MSPs were cables, routers, servers, laptops.
James Shuler (15:38)
Alright. Alright.
Yeah.
Yeah, did
Mikey Pruitt (16:04)
computers
James Shuler (16:04)
it.
Mikey Pruitt (16:04)
forever. now I think cybersecurity is the top priority for them. Would you agree with that?
James Shuler (16:11)
Yeah. Now I highly doubt the layman IT, the layman people that are managing MSP relationships are your top listener. You probably have technical people listening a lot. So I'm going to, I'm going to bore a little bit of them. We do this a lot too in our presentations where what is IT to us? Well, there's three categories for the managed service provider. There's mundane tasks like patching, which man, that's overlooked to the IT guy that does patching that's listening.
Mikey Pruitt (16:21)
Yeah, probably. Hi, technical people.
James Shuler (16:41)
Like your job could not be more like I'm thankful for it, but no one, no one thanks you for that role. The second one that's in that mundane task or backup jobs. It used to be full-time backup admins. That's all they did were backup jobs. And now that's like just another hat somebody else is going to wear to make sure that they were successful. And then you have a hospitality side, like interacting with end users and doing the tickets, ⁓ fulfilling the break fix of the relationship. And then you have now security.
Mikey Pruitt (16:43)
Bye.
James Shuler (17:11)
And you're right, antivirus was kind of the beginning of the first thing that we included as a default security tool. And then the beloved Cisco umbrella, ⁓ OpenDNS and stuff like that became something that we added as an inclusion. When you bought it, we did this. So you brought up Target. That's a great one to bring up. I'm gonna get back into patching in a second. Do you remember why they got into Target? Remember how they got in?
Mikey Pruitt (17:38)
Through HVAC company that was one of their vendors genius
James Shuler (17:40)
Yeah, through the HVAC. So
picture 10 years ago, wasn't that long ago, 10 years ago, ⁓ even Target had some IT policies that were so immature ⁓ that the HVAC and facilities team could add stuff to the network and give it an IP address, plug it into a hot port without telling the IT team. These things happened with good reason. They needed to be more efficient and turn those things down after hours, turn them up after hours.
⁓ No one told IT. Well, if you look at stats today, manufacturing is still top of the list when it comes to getting breach. I can guarantee you it's assembly lines where people are being efficient, making smart decisions, plugging in new technologies sold by some whiz bang sales guy. And it's opening up a gap in their security posture and they never know it. So you're right. Now we need tools that can scan IP addresses, make sure there's nothing in the environment we don't know about.
default with our offerings. So while did it shifted that fast, I was going to tell you that I think the day started maybe a little bit later than that, not much, ⁓ but right about the time that we decided as America to define critical industries, which put a target on all bad guys who enjoyed hacking. These are the ones we need to hit. They're the ones with the most to lose. Here's the list, focus here. And then second to that, once COVID hit and then the
Mikey Pruitt (19:01)
They gave him a list, hit these first. So stupid.
James Shuler (19:08)
that everyone went to remote work and the ⁓ use of Bitcoin and anonymous transfer of cryptocurrencies became popular, it was wildfire. But I think the announcing of here are the industries of most criticality might have been the day that everyone said we got to do something about this.
Mikey Pruitt (19:27)
And there was already proof from the target thing. That's actually really funny. I'm feeling there's a blog post there, like the history of where did cybersecurity come from? There's Target, there's the announcement of the list, who to focus on. There's Bitcoin in the mix there, like anonymous transactions, Monero. Not that I know about Monero, but anyway. And then there's COVID, which is like the final boss that cemented cybersecurity into our everyday lives.
James Shuler (19:30)
Yeah, right. Yeah.
So, All right.
once.
Yeah, so we just did a presentation on the evolution from 2021 to now. Now, no one cared about those dates, but just between us, those dates. But we were talking about Colonial Pipeline, JBS Foods, the announcement that Killware is now a thing. All these different terms that came up. And then all of a sudden, like a spigot, they just kind of turned all that off. And so just keep your evolution going when Colonial Pipeline got popped.
Mikey Pruitt (20:09)
Yes.
James Shuler (20:24)
They went ahead and paid their ransom. Next thing you know, it's announced that the FBI had reached into a virtual wallet of the bad guy and handed that money back to Colonial Pipeline. Well, it's anonymous. What happened? It's supposed to be anonymous. How did they reach in there and do that? Well, turns out there's not very many exchanges that can turn cryptocurrency into cash. And so when they caught it was right there at that transfer moment, they're able to get that money back and hand it back. block block chains, block chains,
Mikey Pruitt (20:51)
I did not know that part of the story. Wow.
James Shuler (20:54)
probably still a bit anonymous. bet you there's still a way that you can capture some trail, but I thought that was fascinating that they bailed out Colonial Pipeline and told all the competitors of Colonial Pipeline, even though y'all been better at investing in preventative security measures, these guys weren't and they were taking their profits home with them. And when they got popped, we gave them their money back.
Mikey Pruitt (21:17)
But the FBI is not going to come help you when it happens. So.
James Shuler (21:19)
So I've been told that number
today and it's changing, I've been told that number today is a ransom of $3 million or higher. The FBI is gonna get very involved. Now I'm gonna-
Mikey Pruitt (21:28)
So the
bad guys are like 2,999,000.
James Shuler (21:30)
Too late.
Wouldn't that be great? Now know they've matured a lot too, right? So like, why not go after the small business when they're going to be able to pay a smaller amount of money, but they're not going to be able to get FBI help. They're not going to hit the radar for taking down the entire oil flow with the Eastern United States. So let's just pop some smaller businesses and move quick.
Mikey Pruitt (21:44)
under the radar.
Yeah, like I-
So when people are coming to you, maybe they're coming from another MSP or maybe they're just doing it themselves. They got a guy that knows how to fix iPhones or whatever. When people come to you, what are you really seeing in the trenches? Who are the people seeking out the cybersecurity services?
James Shuler (22:12)
man, it's quite literally the two I brought up earlier are the most common. My CEO has invested in a cybersecurity insurance policy and we are failing this piece of paper. So let's consider that paper the audit of the small business that didn't exist 10 years ago. ⁓ And then it was the new announcements around CMMC that DOD contractors, after they changed it from a five level to a three level step process,
Mikey Pruitt (22:14)
Is it everybody?
James Shuler (22:41)
⁓ They've been coming out of the woodwork saying I got to get this shored up this year or I'm not going to do business next year.
Mikey Pruitt (22:48)
So lot of the businesses that you see are almost being forced to embrace cybersecurity measures. That's kind of kind of scary. ⁓
James Shuler (22:53)
Yeah. Yeah. I'd say before you asked
me the same question last year, I'd tell you it's the customers of the businesses we support. Well, it's that. Yeah, that's probably true. It's the service provider for someone, say, like AIG, who's already mature in their IT process is going to hold their vendor to a higher standard. So they have to live to a higher standard. It's kind of like if someone came to me and said, hey, you'll carry a strong insurance policy for liability.
Mikey Pruitt (23:01)
Those are the early adopters, I guess.
James Shuler (23:22)
but I want you to double it or I won't do business with you. Well, I have a business decision to make. Do I want to spend money on that insurance or not? If I choose not to, I pass on that business. Well, they're doing the same. My biggest customer just came to me and said, I have to live to these security practices. And if I don't, they're going to find a vendor that does. So they're asking us, how do I get there fast? But how do I get there without eroding all my margin I have on this one account? So we have to find creative ways ⁓
to figure out where is the business's appetite for risk and how do we surround it with the right tools that can be managed in an efficient manner.
Mikey Pruitt (23:59)
So I was gonna ask, do you feel that center was prepared for that question? Like we need to meet these standards like.
James Shuler (24:05)
Yeah,
that's a great question. ⁓ The one I get just as often is that actually is when everyone else had worked from home and you were supporting their networks, how did y'all work from home? The funny answer is our CEO decided we were ⁓ critical infrastructure. And it turned out, like we laughed about that. It turned out we ended up being, our industry ended up being categorized as one of those 16 critical industries.
I was shocked. thought that he was just saying that to keep business afloat, but it was real. We ended up being really well set up for that mainly because of our size. We're 400 people big. We cover five different territories and six different office spaces. Our phone systems are already set up for the round robin you would expect. We're not siloed on separate domains. We're one business under one tenant under Microsoft. So everything was already kind of established.
So I ended up with a very smooth transition there with what you're seeing now around ⁓ the NIST adoption for things like cybersecurity insurance, taking this standards and putting them to a questionnaire. The center managed services offering had already aligned with NIST before all this became popular post COVID. ⁓ So our strategic direction to offer security tools as part of our offering was already in full alignment.
So we ended up having no problem with this. I can tell you it was full certainty. It was either ignored by our competition or they scrambled and they signed on with typically groups like Kaseya or ConnectWise who are the backbone of MSPs to just say, whatever your tool stack is, we'll use it. Our approach, Mikey, is different. We have a C-Stack committee that R &Ds a lot of different products. And then we pick our own tool stack and we don't rely on someone else to choose it. So with that,
If someone else, like a customer came and said, I heard this is a better tool, we can kind of pull the paperwork out and say, well, I don't know. Here's what we found and we did it.
Mikey Pruitt (26:08)
So you said you have a, you call it a C stack and they base the committee.
James Shuler (26:11)
Yeah, it stands for Center
Technology Stack. It's what are we going to adopt at the highest level of expertise so that we're not trying to be everything to everyone. ⁓ We'll take kind of a siloed approach per ⁓ industry bucket and say who's our preference. And then if something else comes out, we'll test it against that standard and we'll make a decision if it's more best of breed than the other and RIs.
Mikey Pruitt (26:25)
Yeah.
So I got to get the sound by it. You mentioned ⁓ OpenDNS earlier. Now is DNS filter in this C-Stack?
James Shuler (26:42)
It is
same process. had the Cisco umbrella as part of our standard. We put the DNS filter through the same process. It gets first nominated by a member of our team. That team then brings it into a Friday meeting we have where a group of people with technical and sales review certain metrics. It got trialed and then it got put into full production. So now 100 % of our managed services
Customers are all enjoying the DNS filter features and none of them have the ⁓ Cisco product anymore. So yeah, y'all went through that not too long ago, I'd say 12 to 18 months.
Mikey Pruitt (27:21)
Yeah, it's been about
a year, little over a year. Awesome. Well, good. I'm glad we beat the test there. We passed.
James Shuler (27:28)
It reminds
me, you like talking about movies. So I was thinking about that one already. So that one reminds me of Animal House when the lights are off and everybody's eating pizza and they put the pledge picture up on the wall and everyone throws like wadded up paper and booze at them. And then the next one, they're, yeah. It's very Animal House in that regard, just corporate lunch edition.
Mikey Pruitt (27:50)
I feel a AI video coming on of the C-Stack committee meeting. That's going to be hilarious. So we've been talking about like these, this kind of shift. And we talked about, you know, the building of cybersecurity into, you know, post COVID era, which is where we are now. ⁓ I'm curious, like, do you feel like most MSPs are ready for this current world? And then how do we get ready for the next iteration?
James Shuler (27:52)
That'd be good. That'd be good. We should do that. That's a funny idea.
Okay, one of the things that we hear a lot from business owners, more so than IT guys, is they all wanna talk about AI. They don't necessarily know what they wanna talk about, but they know the initials.
Mikey Pruitt (28:32)
Right?
James Shuler (28:33)
Being my age, I always think they mean Allen Iverson. They never mean Allen Iverson. They always mean artificial intelligence. ⁓ I'd like to kind of talk about that as we bridge into this. ⁓ One of the reasons being is every business owner has a friend who's another business owner, who's talking about how they used or saw AI used at some conference, some story. ⁓ What I see MSPs doing to stay up with these times
Mikey Pruitt (28:38)
Never.
James Shuler (29:01)
is they're adopting tools that have written their own AI or machine learning models. So picture the security companies that do ⁓ MDR, you're probably familiar with those, the Arctic wolves of the world. Why do I want to rewrite ⁓ a code to do that kind of AI machine learning to scan through logs when there's someone else who's already invented it? So that's probably the small business approach is to stay afloat.
you probably adopt someone else as what they started, and then you offer that mature enterprise grade product to that small business through your service offering. I'm gonna pause there for a minute. Am I heading down the completely wrong path to where you're headed?
Mikey Pruitt (29:44)
⁓ Not where I was going, but I love this line because on this podcast, someone mentions AI. I've probably said this on another episode. Someone mentions AI. Usually it's me, so I'm glad it's you. Keep going.
James Shuler (29:55)
No. Well,
I don't have too much deeper to go on that. You asked, are they ready for this? They're definitely ready for what's hitting them with security. Because if they weren't ready by now, they'd be dead. They wouldn't be an MSP in the game anymore. ⁓ What more I'm seeing right now is how are MSPs scrambling to adopt AI tools to help automate certain practices in their operation that today are highly manual. ⁓
because it's taken more more labor to get people out of cyber attacks. So the best way to be efficient, don't let any of your customers get into a cyber attack by giving them all the layers of security tools that they would need, a definable security posture based on this. And then on the flip side, adopt somebody else's AI that they've already created and have that watch your back to make sure that nothing gets through the cracks. I think that's what you're
Mikey Pruitt (30:48)
So you were talking about
the ⁓ kind of, I would call it maybe level one where you're adopting someone else's AI, but it sounded like you were going into maybe creating your own AI. Is that where you're headed?
James Shuler (31:02)
I'll tell you, I think that's where ⁓ things are going. there's two types of IT people out there. Those that are okay with Windows and those that are okay with Mac. They rarely, there's not any that are the same. Yeah, there's two kinds. So those that have adopted Microsoft though, across the board that are using SharePoint to do a lot of their file storage, they're doing OneDrive, they've got Teams is all their ⁓ transfer and shares and stuff like that.
Mikey Pruitt (31:15)
Windows is terrible, but anyway, go ahead.
James Shuler (31:32)
all their collaboration is through that. I'm seeing a lot of new adoption into changing their financial software ⁓ out of whatever they're using from QuickBooks to ⁓ NetSuite, Sage into the business central or dynamic solutions that Microsoft offers. When you start to get your end users using Copilot the right way, your data saved in the correct manner, which is like on their SharePoint, not in your own file servers.
And then you start adopting those other tools around finance and ERP. A lot of this AI stuff is already there for you. It's just, am I going to choose to adopt it? Am I going choose to reach out and grab it? For the MSP world, I do believe that there's going to be a day that all of the logs that we read to figure out what's wrong with the computer, ⁓ which is a lot of what we do when the computer is acting funny, we read the logs. lot of that's going to be automated. What patch needs to go out? What?
What needs to be clicked next or fixed on it? What needs to be run? There's no reason that AI can't start catching that and running those processes. Maybe the only reason it's not now is trust that sometimes you run a patch in production and it breaks other things. But there's no reason AI can't figure that out either. So today, no one's doing that. It's probably where the MSP industry is headed. We'll still have the personal side of picking up the phone and hearing what's wrong.
But odds are an AI tool has already picked up on what's wrong, identified where it sits and what to do, and has already been running something on it. So that's probably where it's headed, but no, we're not there.
Mikey Pruitt (33:08)
think you kind of mentioned you were talking about Microsoft Dynamics and a few other pieces of software that I don't know anything about. But it sounds like you were, I don't hear that often. So it sounds like you were describing what an MSP, the size and caliber of center is 400 people strong. You you guys are tightly integrated with your customers, servicing, you know, providing them.
James Shuler (33:16)
Yeah, yeah, sure.
Mikey Pruitt (33:35)
support and installation I assume for their finance software and I feel like the smaller MSPs like 20, 50 people aren't really tackling that. Do you see that too? What is IT?
James Shuler (33:45)
goes back to what is IT, right? How do you
define IT? So you're not wrong. Selling to an accountant on changing out of the lifeblood of how they run their P &L statements and how they do billing, that's totally different than talking to an IT guy about refreshing these laptops that are aging. So there is a weird bridge there. comes down to eventually a company decides this pain's too much for us to live with. Let's get off of QuickBooks and onto something else. Maybe that's it. We've all grown this.
Well, before they go just buy a product, it is a software, a SaaS offering, or maybe it's still an old school physical ⁓ license key that they're gonna type in off of a CD, I don't care. ⁓ They need to talk to IT about what's this gonna take to roll out. we're hoping that those conversations being that, again, technology is the center of every business. We're hoping we're at the table for those making recommendations on what would tie all these tools, these disparate systems together.
⁓ Yeah, what's the point? If you've already adopted Microsoft for your cloud, your Windows OS, the office software, everything else, why would you go against that for accounting software? At least look at it.
Mikey Pruitt (34:59)
That's your basically technical advisor advice. You are so deep in this ecosystem.
James Shuler (35:04)
There's certainly industries that are niche where
we would never advise that. Like we would say that there's something purpose built for what y'all do because y'all are unique. But 90 % of organizations out there, ⁓ it only matters what system they're using because they know it. The people they've hired know how to use it. They know the ins and outs. You know how many people use QuickBooks to ⁓ the standards that QuickBooks says are best practices? Like none. They've all just...
Mikey Pruitt (35:30)
I'm done.
James Shuler (35:31)
to some form bastardized it a bit to fit their world. And that's okay, that's important. yeah, most of these products, like what NetSuite can do versus what say Dynamics can do, the differences are tiny. They both do very similar things. It's more of just what language do you speak? I don't wanna talk about that anymore. That's kind of halfway boring, isn't it? mean, is, it captain's purpose. Well.
Mikey Pruitt (35:51)
Some key.
You're like Microsoft Dynamics, lame. But I'm
curious about, so Cynter is, ⁓ I would say, well respected in the MSP community, accomplished. how did you get there is my question, really. Was it luck or strategy?
James Shuler (36:11)
Yeah, no, I would argue it's strategy, but I bet you outsiders would say there's still luck in there. Chris Pace founded CineR in 06. What was really cool about when he founded CineR is a lot of the things we do today in assisting mergers and acquisitions at a large scale, which is kind of on that project side of the house that we haven't talked much about. He was doing back in 2006, collapsing domains or companies that had hundreds of domains into one.
so that they had one single platform to operate off of. ⁓ He was doing a lot of exchange upgrades, which email upgrades, now we're doing 365, right? A lot of that stuff stays very true to what we're good at, what our bread and butter is. ⁓ So some would say just clean up Active Directory, for example, Chris's mentality is create new Active Directory and cut over so that you get rid of all the mess. And by doing some of those things, doing it right and not just trying to band-aid it,
That's what's led to where we sit as a managed service provider. So a couple of examples. It would be easier to not take on bringing in DNS filter. It'd be easier just to renew Cisco umbrella. It's already out there in all of our customers. We wouldn't have to communicate anything. It'd just be easier. But if we stared at it right and said, can fix certain problems for the customer, and here's the amount of pain it puts us through.
Is it worth it? Well, to do it right, yes, it's worth it. If it was my business, I would do it. So picture being support for that many customers, you technically have that many bosses of IT leaders telling you what to do in IT. They've got to all agree. That's hard to get everyone to agree on. So I don't necessarily think that it's luck, but strategy to be able to explain why we make the decisions we make, what's the reason.
A small business needs a definable security posture or why are we bringing a system down or changing a tool? All of that matters. And so I would say highly strategic.
Mikey Pruitt (38:15)
So you mentioned project work in there. And I thought project work was the thing MSPs were trying to get away from. Tell me about it.
James Shuler (38:23)
Yeah,
that's a call. Yeah, that's a good call. Do you know why they're trying to get away from it? Well, core MSPs that don't do much on the procurement side, they're evaluated off of a multiplier of that recurring revenue. So technically speaking, a project or selling hardware would hurt that ratio of recurring to non-recurring revenue. It's a little more complex that not all recurring revenues treated equal, but you see my point.
Mikey Pruitt (38:29)
No.
James Shuler (38:53)
So the idea would be, I do need to get away from that. Centers Outlook's a little different. ⁓ Project work is, in my world for presales is like dates. It's going on dates with somebody. They get to know you, they get to know your professionalism, they get to see how you lead the environment afterwards, they get to see the documentation, the care. And then the managed services contract is a lot like a marriage contract. Like now we're working together and we're tied, contractually together. ⁓ Once we have...
done projects for somebody, it's hard to tell them in the future we're not. So you would never tell your wife, no more dating, no more movies, now we're married. So we continue to do projects for our customers. ⁓ The other thing that does for us is it eliminates, it kind of boxes out the competition that does do projects. They can't come in and say, hey, by the way, I also offer a managed service. ⁓ Let me do this project and I can show this to you on the side. So instead we just take care of that. We wanna kind of be that one stop shop.
both sides of the house. That also allows us to advise when a customer doesn't need an MSP, which happens, on strategy that they should take on. Again, maybe that's security tools, an office move, maybe it's advice on getting rid of Windows 10 and getting into Windows 11, which that date's coming up. Depending on what the company has, we want to be able to consult regardless of what their only situation is. We're not trying to fit you into an MSP, in other words.
Mikey Pruitt (40:20)
I, uh, in a previous life, I was an electrician. My family is an electrical contracting company and we, everything is project work. We'd worked on a lot of, uh, like multimillion dollar homes with like 250 network drops. And I was the only person doing this stuff. Um, so it would be a project and the project was over when the people moved in and we were gone. However, the people were like, Hey, now that we have all this technology stuff, we would like you to come back and be.
a service provider. And at this time I was naive to the MSP term and I was trying to get out of this. was like, this seems like, this seems like a nightmare. First of all, you want me to explain everything, how it works. And then I have to like actually fix the thing or, you know, improve or whatever the thing is. what I, it sounds like what you're saying is that is what builds the relationship and probably why these homeowners that I got to know over several months.
James Shuler (40:57)
Yeah.
Mikey Pruitt (41:18)
wanted me to continue on to help them, but I just didn't have the time.
James Shuler (41:22)
Yeah, I would say in its perfect sense, the project team's kind of our reputation builder. The better they do, higher, the more repeat business we get, the more referrals we gain, all that stuff. ⁓ The managed services team though is our, it's what we are. It's kind of funny. know Bucky's the gas station down here? Yeah. Well, they're known for their bathrooms, but the bathrooms don't make them any money, right? It's a cost center.
Mikey Pruitt (41:27)
Hmm.
⁓ do I know Bucky's? kidding me?
James Shuler (41:49)
Our projects make us money. They're not a cost center. So it's not the best analogy, but we are an MSP, ⁓ but it's our projects that build our reputation.
Mikey Pruitt (41:59)
That's a really good outlook and I don't hear that a lot from lot of MSPs. So that's good to hear. I am curious, I'm coming to the end here, but I want to jump back into AI, the famous acronym. And yeah, Allen Iverson, tell me your favorite Allen Iverson tool at the moment.
James Shuler (42:12)
Alan Iverson, great.
Well, I'll tell you the one I hate the most. I start there. I have one I like the most. The one I like the most is probably one of these goofy ones that like makes an AI song for you when you put in the details. think you and me ought to sit down with one of those tools and create like a DNS unfiltered theme song to open up the podcast. I think that'd be a fun idea.
Mikey Pruitt (42:22)
That works too.
I actually made an AI song last night for my four-year-old to put on his pajamas. He's got like splatter paint looking pajamas. So we had an AI song all about splatter paint and pajamas and brushing your teeth. And it was like an eighties cartoon intro theme song. It was great.
James Shuler (42:46)
is.
That's awesome. Yeah, what would that be? Putting on my PJs, every days?
Mikey Pruitt (43:04)
I think it went something like, splatter
jams, splatter jams.
James Shuler (43:09)
That was
too good. The one I hate the most is actually a bit, ⁓ I probably shouldn't say it. I hate co-pilot. ⁓ Used right? I love co-pilot, but I tell you what I don't like is that the AI buzz has become such a thing. So many businesses are buying one or two licenses of it and they're chunking them around to different employees and they're saying, test this out, see if you like it. And all that's going to do is allow someone to be a little bit lazier on meetings.
Now they know that a meeting is listening and they are going to get a transcribe of it. That transcribe is probably never going to be read later. They're going to rest assured that detail somewhere, but they're not going to go back and look at it. ⁓ But businesses that do that haven't taken the steps yet to put their data in the right spot to leverage the tool the way it's supposed to be. So I know it's kind of a self-serving comment. It's like, hate the way businesses are using Co-Pilot, but it's been pushed out in a way that's kind of led to some failure.
We hope a lot of businesses would just like data readiness assessments to make sure that that data is sitting where it should before you put an AI tool on it. That's a lot of fun. ⁓ Maybe, yeah, that's probably my best answer I could give you on that, unfortunately, Mikey.
Mikey Pruitt (44:24)
Yeah,
I think a lot of people like, you know, the AI stuff has been out for maybe two or three years, I guess. And we're still all kind of at the, just at the edge where we're, yeah, we're just scratching the surface of like, you know, that instead of going to Google, now we go to Chad GBT or perplexity. I use them all. I'm a bit of an addict, I guess. I got the music one. Got an image one. You got Chad GBT perplexity is really good for web searches.
James Shuler (44:30)
Yeah.
Tratching the surface. We are.
What is your favorite?
Someone on my... Okay.
One ⁓ of my favorite customers, friend of mine, he was early adopter of the smart home and he started building some very basic code using already established AI models. I guess it's like AI as a service models that he's trying to apply into his smart home ⁓ that's connecting all of his devices. And I think what he's doing is pretty cool. That's a neat thing to think about is like, how is this gonna...
move us forward into the Jetsons reality that we used to see in cartoons. Forget the flying cars for a minute, just having all of our devices connected in a better way. ⁓ But yeah, I think the other fun thing for me is how many people misuse AI when it's probably a machine learning or automation thing, but they just buckle everything into AI.
Mikey Pruitt (45:43)
Yeah, I think that's actually the best use case right now is like some automation that you already have, like somewhere there would be great to have like a human-esque type of thing, like review it or kind of add some context to it or description. then you send that piece to AI and then come back to the automation and keep going.
James Shuler (45:55)
Yeah.
Yeah, that would be. ⁓ Let me give you one more, since we're coming to a close. We did a presentation in ⁓ Oklahoma and we were using an incident response team, the 911 crews that come in and get your business back out of a breach, an active ransomware attack. These guys are awesome. They do like negotiation with the bad guys. They're given a presentation on how it's kind of like been one time there was a group called Conti in Russia.
Mikey Pruitt (46:05)
Let's hear it.
James Shuler (46:29)
The government blew them up, they became another group. They blew them up, now they're a new group. And here's how they're managing their attacks. Here's what they do. Here's their typical ransom amount. And one of the coolest stats I saw in there is that it's not the zero day threats. We hear about zero day threats as like a buzzword, but it was actually like 10 very specific vulnerabilities that are well known and published.
that were exploited for like 60 % of the ransomware cases they got. So like the 80-20 rule is very, very alive out there. So I picture like, if we can get the AI tools to get us to a point where we can at least take care of the human being negligent. Ah, negligence is wrong word. The human cares, thinks he's doing the right thing, but maybe misses something. If we could just protect ourselves from the human, then we'd be in a really good spot where the...
Mikey Pruitt (47:12)
Yeah
James Shuler (47:24)
I guess the employee who's doing what you and I are doing and downloading our own AI tools is currently a risk. It starts to make it okay if we know exactly what doors are already open. So long-winded way to say we gotta get to that point to where we can protect ourselves from the stupidity of our own employees. Yes. You're correct. You're the front line.
Mikey Pruitt (47:45)
Yes, that's actually what DNS filters whole goal is. Don't click it, or if you
do, whatever, we'll block it.
James Shuler (47:55)
Y'all are the front line of the defense of protecting the business owner from the stupidity of their employees. Y'all should redo your commercials. That's a really good tagline.
Mikey Pruitt (48:01)
Actually, we're
going to have you on the next one. James, thank you so much for joining me today. That was a blast. I'll see you in Texas for hot sauce really soon.
James Shuler (48:10)
That'd be great. Thanks, Mikey. Appreciate it.
Mikey Pruitt (48:12)
All right. That was fun.