December 20, 2024 • 43 mins
Today, I’m chatting with my old friend Luis Giraldo, Chief Experience Officer at Scalepad. Luis and I are discussing how most of our industry might be doing vCIO all wrong.
vCIO has the Critical Objective of creating real client value by delivering services that lead to genuine business outcomes, but many struggle to make this a reality.
We discuss why people hate the vCIO title and ideas about what we should call it instead.
We discuss some common pitfalls, like focusing too much on tools over processes.
Whether you’re trying to start or improve your vCIO process, this episode is a must-listen. So let’s go.
This episode is brought to you by Evolved Management Training Courses.
Online courses specifically crafted for MSP needs. A Service Manager BootCamp course, a project manager for MSPs course, an MSP security fundamentals course, and an IT Documentation Done Right course.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the pod. Thanks, Todd, for having me. It's
awesome to come back time and time again. Is it, like, my 3rd
time now maybe? I, I love it. You're this is,
3rd time, and, you're now tied for, I
think, recurring guest character. So if we have you back one more time, I guess
you're gonna be in lead. But, you also have the the head start in
(00:22):
that you were on, actually, episode 5 of the podcast. And when
this goes to to to publish, I think it'll be
episode 116. So, you know, you're you you've been back
and back again. So great to have you. Well, thanks, man. I
appreciate the, the honors. And I think I I owe
some of that to just being a bit on the early adopter side on just
(00:44):
about everything. You know, I I definitely suffer from a bit of the FOMO, a
bit of the shiny object syndrome. And so whenever somebody comes out with a new
show, I was like, oh, I wanna come on new show. And so lucky am
I that people actually invite me to them. So thank you. Yeah.
I love hanging with you. Love catching up. If if we were joking on, on
your podcast that we haven't seen each other much this year, if at all,
(01:06):
I guess. So, this is a a good substitute to to connect
with you, more more often virtually anyway. So
So true. So true. And I like the the ability to kinda have,
a bit of a structured conversation around it. You know? Because sometimes people get together,
You just talk about nothing and everything, but nothing mostly.
So it's kinda nice when you have a topic to to to do a
(01:29):
facilitated discussion, if you will. I appreciate that about these conversations for
sure. For sure. So with that, we'll launch straight into it.
Luis, are we doing VCIO all wrong?
Oh, gosh. What a question, Todd. I I feel like
you could look at it from a few different perspectives. Right? And
and a lot of it is gonna depend on where in your own
(01:52):
journey as an MSP you find yourself in or or what kind of
situation you've created for yourself. I was just in
Portugal last week with a great bunch of the IT nation evolve
group MSPs and, and Joe Burns, one of the
MSPs there actually drops a really cool, terminology
that that clarified a lot of what the issues that we have are. And
(02:15):
he says if you've created a lot of white space for your MSP in your
process and what he meant by white space is that if if one of the
ways that you sell into the industry and you go to market is that you
kind of start with the basics and then you kind of institute a land of
an land and expand strategy, meaning we're gonna sell them a small
basic easy to consume package, something they understand, and then you go and upsell them
(02:37):
on all the other things, you you kind of perpetually end up
just trying to fill the white space over time in your account
management process, which which we call the BCIO process today,
proper probably incorrectly. But if one of the ways that
you go to market is kind of standardized on your approach,
you kind of include everything, of your
(03:00):
productized service in the same package, right from the
get go, you perhaps spend more time doing more
strategic conversations after the fact because there's not a lot of this
effort spent over rotating on trying to fill the white space. It's like,
oh, we need more customers to buy more of the solutions that we offer.
Sure. And so I think if when you ask the question, are we doing
(03:22):
vCIO wrong? I guess it depends on what you want to get from that process.
If if you created a lot of white space initially and one of the things
you need to do and want to obtain from the process of like quarterly business
reviews and whatnot is to actually fill the white space Then maybe that's a good
outcome and the thing that you should be doing If one of the things
you did was, you know, you sold a complete package and you're having
(03:44):
great, maybe strategic discussions,
then that's a great outcome as well and and maybe the purpose
is a little bit different. I'd say if if you framed it in the
context of what is the most valuable thing for the client
and the majority of MSPs are just trying to fill white space and trying to,
you know, pitch them on projects and things to standardize their stack in every
(04:06):
QBR then I would maybe argue that we're
doing VCIO all wrong. Is that maybe the function of account
management? It's perhaps better suited. But, man,
there's lots of places to go from there. Yeah. So I I strongly
agree with this. And funny enough, I, like, I just recorded video for a
course that goes through kind of exactly this of, the
(04:28):
distinction of sort of these different roles. And I I sort of describe it on
a spectrum. Right? That account management, like, right down to technical account management exists over
here on the left, and then it moves to kind of account management. Then it
goes to more broad consulting. And then I think VCIO sits sort of very much
further to the right. And if we think about it, like,
the original basis of the VCIO role
(04:51):
was it was actually a billable product. Like, this was a package that you
sold to people because it had so much inherent value that it
was billable outside of the MSA that they were already subscribing
to. And some MSPs had a lot of success in just selling VCIO
services to customers that didn't have an MSA at all. And I think
that's sort of the distinction that we're missing. I think you're a 100% right. It
(05:13):
depends on where you stand because if, I like that
description of filling the white space being a reference point for this because
the distinction between these two is where they're applicable is if you're just
doing account management in order to sell a more feature
rich MSA. That makes sense. Whereas other organizations
have sold a prescriptive full stack package, and that is not a
(05:36):
requirement. So, therefore, they can spend more time on that right end of the
spectrum and doing more consulting. So I think that's
a a great way to frame sort of the problem and maybe gets to this
point. Like, VCIO in the industry is one of the most
derided terms that you can throw around. And maybe this is
exactly why, because it doesn't really mean what it used
(05:58):
to. But, like, why do you think people hate the term VCIO so
much? I don't know. I think it's just, you
know, Alex Farling actually made this comment about the term
is that what it is today is probably a misrepresentation of what it should
be. And I think maybe that's the frustration with the term. It's that right
now, it's really just lipstick on account management is the term that he that he
(06:20):
uses, and and I believe that to be true. I think a lot of people
are are misusing the term VCIO when when the rotation
that they have around that function or role is really just
technical account management focused on the MSP selling more of
their stack into the customer and not so much about creating value for the
customer. And this was kind of borne out a few months ago. I had,
(06:43):
Chris Jensen on on MSP Confidential,
and I feel like that episode single handedly created a
pivot for me in in the narrative of all my conversations going forward
because I I kinda pose the same idea or topic to him. It's like,
have we been doing this all wrong? And he's an enterprise CIO that often
works with MSPs. And I've been using this, like, one minute sound
(07:06):
clip of him describing, an experience that he had where he was working
with one of his clients and they were swap changing MSPs and the
new MSP came in and kind of went in and was like, wow, you know,
they they presented to us, and also the client calls Chris back after
a meeting with a new MSP and they're like, so what what was
that? You know, these guys they came in and they they said these are the
(07:28):
things we're gonna put in and this is the timeline we're gonna put them in
and, and basically you're gonna like it. And the client goes,
like, why they were not focused on my business at all. They know nothing
about my business, yet they came in and said these are the things we're gonna
do and when we're gonna do them and you're gonna like it. Like, I don't
understand how that works. And so, Chris's comment in
(07:49):
that moment is, like, it just doesn't sit well in the long term. And I
thought it was so interesting that that the the whole VCIO
process kinda has has the the eroded
to basically be this purposely to trying to fill the
white space process, and it's so difficult I think to
do a proper customer centric motion when that's really the
(08:11):
focus. When when you've given your account managers a quota of,
like, filling white space, how are they supposed to go create value for the
client in inside of that context? Right? I think that's the the most pressing
question we need to ask ourselves. I think that I would push back
that it's also really difficult in that context too because the the
pre seed requirement of that is filling the white space. No? Right?
(08:33):
Because, like, if they don't consume the full stack, they're not on sort of,
say, your Wi Fi that you use, and therefore, they're not in sort of
your unified vision, your unified dashboard for that. They're
using WatchGuard firewalls when you guys are standardized on Ciscos
or something else. Right? Like, if if they're not consuming your
your full stack, that is something that should be fixed. Maybe you don't go in
(08:55):
there wholesale and change it. And then, like I said, this is easier for people
that sold a full stack to begin with. What kind of looks like that
conversation of, like, wait a minute. Is this for me or for you kind of
kind of thing? So, like, it's a requirement. We need to get this done, but
we shouldn't represent it as VCIO. I think that's the distinction.
But wouldn't wouldn't you agree that those, precede parts of filling
(09:17):
that white space still needs to happen? Yes. And I
think the challenge that we or or maybe the problem we create for
ourselves as part of, like, needing to do that. And by
no stretch am I saying like we shouldn't be doing account management. I think it's
an integral part of like how MSPs continue to find and
grow project delivery, you know, a lot of the project
(09:39):
stuff comes out of the QBR cadence. I think
just think there's an opportunity to evolve the way that we do them to some
extent And maybe the challenge is
that because we are so focused on the wide space we've actually
lowered the barrier of strategic discussion altogether and we're
not having any of the other required conversations around strategy that are
(10:01):
so critical. And this is kind of, represented by the
the questions that people ask me when I'm out in the market a little bit
at the events and the conferences. Like, yeah, but how do you how do you
make your QBRs more strategic is kind of the question. And I think
the challenge is just that, is that if you're needing to fill the white space,
you're gonna inherently lower the strategic value of the
(10:21):
QBR process because it's really difficult to deliver that
at scale with somebody who's is doing a lot of these and just needs to
fill the white space. And so one of the interesting, maybe counterintuitive
things that I talked to MSPs about is is actually creating a
separate cadence for the strategic level conversations that is
not focused on the account. Like, if you try to now suddenly build
(10:44):
in the strategic portion into your regular QBRs, well, what's
the problem with that? It's like, first of all, you've already been relegated most of
the time to, like, a non executive point of contact on your regular
quarterly business review meetings. So you're not gonna get the kind of traction that you
need strategically from that person. So all they're doing is kind of just passing along
the broken telephone message to somebody else.
(11:06):
There's no you're not hearing as an MSP any of the conversations around
the business goals or the business outcomes or the business challenges for that matter, like,
if they're not necessarily good at articulating goals or strategy because they're a small
business themselves, this is an inherent challenge we have too. Then at
least, you're not even hearing the actual problems or
challenges they're having either. And so, instituting a separate cadence,
(11:29):
getting yourself invited into the customer's own strategic meetings or
or annual board meetings or annual, like, cadence of some kind is
is really interesting. And so doing it
separately from the function of account management that you need to keep going for
the purpose of filling the white space, I think needs to be done separately.
So I I there's opportunities to to do more strategic
(11:51):
engagement. I just think we'd be hard pressed to try and and
and shoehorn it into the exec existing QBR process
if it's strictly white space, process driven.
I really like this. I think this is this is a very apt and smart
approach of actually separating the technical account
management from sort of the business consulting aspect of this. And I think it
(12:13):
it's helpful in 2 ways, kinda what we're already talking about of, like, the technical
stuff needs to happen over here, but don't represent it as sort of
inherent business value and and sort of overselling what those
what those meetings and engagements typically look like. That happens
over here, and then we can have more business conversations at a lower
cadence because that is sort of more priority or, how
(12:36):
you have more influence or the time sensitivity of those things tend to make
sense. I think the other part that this is helpful with, and and you'll remember
this, since, you ran an MSP for years
years, that there are certain conversations, certain,
executives that just like to meet with other executives. Right?
So you would have a president or a c I a CEO of an organization,
(12:58):
and they wouldn't really show up to a meeting. But every once in a while,
like, we would send a CEO or someone who, like, who is
higher up in the food chain and has a different, role title. And then
all of a sudden, they felt like that was a meeting that they could attend.
So I think in a way, we're kind of separating the work, but also
providing potentially people a contact point that is more
(13:18):
representative of them. Because you could you you should as even if you're
a small MSP, hopefully, like, you don't wanna be doing all the
QBRs. I mean, if you're small, like, you know, 5 or, 6
staff, then sure you're probably doing all the QBRs. But as you get
bigger, delegating the technical account management just to a lead
or a technical person on your team so that they can coordinate with a
(13:40):
controller, a CFO, or even an office manager on the
client side so that you can still maintain, say, biannually,
or an annual conversation with the CEO. I think that's a division of labor
and also sort of categorizes the work that you're doing those meetings much
much better. I really like that approach. And I'll make a couple of
other points. One of them being we as MSPs we
(14:03):
do work with a lot of smaller customers and and I kind of
mentioned the inherent challenge that we have already in that if they're
like sub 15 people perhaps they're not running any kind of
strategic cadence themselves at all or having any kind of discussion around
specific business outcomes and goals and so one of
the interesting things that we think is part of
(14:25):
standardization is part of the ability to scale any kind of process
inside the MSP is like, oh, well, you know, that's a
lesser maturity client and we're gonna do fewer
meetings with them and maybe they just need one annual review
of, like, all their technology, period. And it's
counterintuitive to think about it this way, but you're actually
(14:47):
eroding trust with a customer that you meet less often with and I
think this is so true. And so one of the interesting, things
to try and consider redoing or doing differently is to meet
more regularly at a lighter touch with some of your smaller
customers because the maybe the monthly call for 15 minutes 20
minutes actually helps create create trust and you're
(15:09):
plugged into sort of some of the, just in
time issues as they happen. You know, I used to make
fun of the fact that your cybersecurity doesn't wait for anybody. If you're waiting for
a year to talk to a customer about any given initiative or
challenge, like, you're already so behind the 8 ball that
is just it's just almost comical, to think that you could
(15:31):
wait a year before you can talk to any one customer about anything. And
so but it's counterintuitive. Right? Because we equate the
cadence or the regularity of meetings with the maturity or or
money, spent by the client on our services. And so that's
one aspect, that I think is important to change. Yeah. Because I I
used to I I don't know if I still run counter to the industry in
(15:52):
this, but originally, I did. But, there was a lot of people, thought
leaders in the industry that would say, if you're not doing QBRs on a on
a quarterly basis, you're failing. Right? And and I never really believed that to
be true because of exactly this. Like, most of us are dealing with, much
smaller businesses that, like, won't even give us sort of the the time to
spend, you know, an hour or 2 in in these in a
(16:14):
QBR. So we've moved to sort of technology business reviews and all the myriad
of other names that we started to name this process. And I think that
that piece of that process is really important to recognize, like, it doesn't
necessarily have to happen quarterly. And in a lot of cases for those smile
small clients, that is a total impracticality and potentially
dangerous to your profitability. If you're gonna spend all this time developing a QBR
(16:37):
for someone that pays you $1500 a month, like that, you can kiss your profit
goodbye for most of those months that you're doing this. It just kinda makes no
sense. So I like this approach. This is something I've suggested in
the past as well. It's just simply reach out to people as a person. Right?
Like, you have no intent in talking to them. You just call them up and
say, like, how are things? How's it going? How's business? Right? More as a peer
(16:58):
and as a as sort of a friendly person. Because a lot
of the clients, they tend to sort of put their armor on whenever you show
up because they feel like you're just coming with a bunch of stuff to sell
them. And that's a pretty understandable position for them because it's
typically what's trying to happen as we're trying to fill this white space. So if
you have these other touch points of just ringing them up, having a 10 minute
(17:18):
conversation to catch up and moving on without expectation, I think that
goes a long way to building a more trusting relationship.
And here's another idea Todd, which I think is is an interesting sort of
pattern interrupt, which is I heard
Simon Sinek on an interview with Trevor Noah. Yeah, he was on Trevor's
(17:39):
podcast And they were talking about trust, and I I think it was interesting how
he kind of flips the script a little bit about around how trust is
built. And he was saying Simon Sinnick was commenting, you know, trust is
actually not built by helping other people. Trust is is
is more quickly built by allowing people to help you and I thought
there was an interesting, pattern interrupt and, and I saw this play
(18:01):
out when one of the MSPs that I know out in the market, they're about
a $20,000,000 MSP, They they started a client
advisory board with some of their customers and so this is squarely that
opportunity for clients to help you, give you the guidance, give you sort of the
insight into what are the the things and challenges or or communication
styles or data that they want to see from the MSP.
(18:23):
And and so imagine, you know, a year, 2 years down the road, these clients
are now invested in that MSP succeeding. And does you
know, if you had to guess whether that increased the level of trust
and loyalty to the MSP or decrease the level of trust or loyalty to the
MSP, what would you say? Of course, it increases it.
Right? So I I thought that was an interesting way to to flip the script
(18:44):
a little bit around trust is that we see it as us being the heroes
coming in and help them and solve all their problems, but we kind of have
to shut up for a minute and let the client figure out how to help
us along the way as well. And this is
proven a bit because every time I go into these boardrooms with MSPs to
talk about this, I asked them, you know, is there a situation where you have
(19:05):
a client that is wildly more mature than you are? You know, if we had
to use Paul Dippel's operational maturity level scale, you
know, are you below the maturity of your clients at any
given point or too high above at any given point? And they're like, no, you
know, it doesn't work, in either direction. You kind of end up kind of
in parallel moving a bit of the maturity up or down together
(19:26):
because, that's kind of where the relationship naturally and
organically kind of finds its place of support is that
you're kind of continuously improving together around some of these issues. The
clients way too mature for you, they're gonna drop you and vice versa. And so
I thought that was interesting is that if they help you in this
process of continually improving our operational maturity, you might
(19:49):
actually have an interesting, creator of trust and loyalty in
the process as well. Yeah. And as, the sort of the adage goes
is, if someone has a hand in creating something, they're less likely
to pooh pooh it. Right? So if you you're getting input from
your clients on what this process looks like and they're providing active
input, they feel a level of engagement in that, and they're more likely to
(20:11):
participate and see value in it. So I I think that makes a ton of
sense. I like the idea of of sort of, couching it in a way that
they feel like they're helping you. That's that's a a really cool way to look
at it. I totally agree. It reminds me of this this great
video I saw this week of somebody says, you know, I feel like I'm
having a moment of deja poo. And the person goes, do you mean
(20:32):
deja vu? It's like, no, deja poo. I've heard this shit before.
I like it. So with that Are you
are you 18 plus on your podcast side? I don't wanna give it to you.
We can say whatever we want. It's it's all adults listening unless they have kids
in the car. So,
with that, should we call VCIO something different
(20:55):
given the fact that what we're doing typically isn't VCIO? Like I
said, this started as something that was a consulting exercise that
was that was often more expensive than the
MSP services we're providing, and then it's just sort of devolved into this
account management. Is it just simply that we should call this account
management, or should we look at this in some other way?
(21:18):
That's an interesting question, man. I I feel like, you know, VC
like, if you think of what a CIO does in the enterprise,
their role is one of risk management squarely,
and I think the the the
outcome of the role is different than the title of the role has sometimes,
maybe if if if the role if the name
(21:42):
VCIO has kind of devolved to be something or mean something
else entirely, then I think we either need to redefine it or just
pause and say, okay, we we all have to agree that the role of a
CIO is to to manage and mitigate and decrease
risk for the business that they're working with, then I I feel like
the the VCIO should be doing that as well. And so the
(22:04):
the problem is that we've used that term now interchangeably with account
management, and and it's creating a bit of a rub, certainly in terms of,
like, what the value that it can deliver to a business actually is.
So I I don't know if I changed it, if we were using it correctly,
if we were doing the the things the CIO actually does,
(22:24):
but, yeah, it's starting to grind, the wrong way for
sure. Well, and I think that's sort of the inherent problem with this is,
like, the water has already gotten muddy with the term, so you can't really
sort of pull it back either. And I don't know that people would love the
idea of just sort of saying we're going to account management, and that's what we're
doing over here because it just you know, it doesn't feel maybe as strategic in
(22:46):
some way. So, you know, maybe what comes to mind we'll have to,
like, we'll put this out there. Like, everyone should start arguing about
this in in Reddit and, in Slack groups
and throw it in the comments. Like, what should we call this process to to
sort of get away from, this icky term that we don't like
called VCIO, and and that to call it something that more
(23:09):
represents what we're doing here. One that comes to mind for me would be just
maybe borrowing from the SaaS world from from you guys is the
client success tends to be the term that this is utilized. And
maybe that is a sophisticated enough term, but I also feel it's
more representative of what we're trying to do here. Like, I'm trying to really help
you with your technology in order to make that spend successful.
(23:31):
How does that resonate with you? How about client success in the MSP side?
Yeah. 100%. I think, I've seen many MSPs
actually they're they're what would be their VCIO team they call it the client
success team and they each of those folks are called the client
success managers or they have
a focus and role squarely trying to drive
(23:53):
outcomes business outcomes with the customers around technology
enablement and and all the things that are you know what we envisioned this
role to be and and I think you're
right because you know client success or customer sex success is a little
bit more comprehensive and holistic I think an approach than what we
tend to think about you know when we put the the veil of risk
(24:15):
management, on the conversation solely, you know, it's kind of
like you send in your security people to have a
conversation around compliance, and they're kind of squarely just trying to put
in, security point solutions into the conversation,
or the account manager, as we talked about before, is kind of squarely trying to
fill in white space, which is primarily focused around the standardization of
(24:37):
the of the tech stack alignment and and this is mostly just
good for the MSP even though you could derive some customer
facing value out of some of those conversations, I think you're you'd be hard pressed
to to squarely connect one thing to the other because we're just not even
having the conversations around business enablement and and business
issues and discussions. And so and then the
(24:59):
other challenge is, you know, the industry has kind of squarely beat us over
the head over the last 20 years to say you got to scale all your
processes in order to do that you got to deliver 80% of as much of
you can with the least expensive people. And so on top of like
just being a white space focused role we've now,
you know, started delivering that with very entry level folks that can't
(25:21):
necessarily hold a c level conversation or the attention
of an executive leader in a meeting because, you know, they're just being
pitched by the person on what next projects need to be done to
check off some boxes in your heat matrix. And so, you know, there's
all these issues around it, but client success,
customer success, I think that's it's a it's a mindset shift
(25:43):
for sure. Yep. I I think that's an interesting point as well that you bring
up that, we're expecting, you know, a tier
2 or, you know, someone who's just graduated into tier 2 to have
executive conversations. Because a lot of what VCIO
should be doing is more business consulting. And if you don't have a
business background and have kinda worked with a p and l and understand
(26:06):
risk, and and process improvement and spend time in
understanding that, Like, a VCIO functionally, I think, should look more like
a business analyst role. So I think it's safer to sort of,
again, I think it comes back to this this suggestion that you made of breaking
the cadence between the more strategic meetings and and functional
meetings. So that tier 2 or that that sort of low end tier
(26:27):
3 that's having more of those standardization and technical discussions is meeting with
someone who's more appropriate at that sort of business level, and maybe
you occasionally need to get some approval from someone higher up for some budgetary
spend. But as far as the sort of the cadence and and the inputs of
those meetings, being more aligned with the skill set of the
person that should be having them in the first place. Again, I think all all
(26:49):
of these sort of ideas of breaking this up and reenvisioning what this
process should look like are actually beneficial to both parties.
There's I I think there's a a layer of, I
I hate that I'm gonna drop this term, but if if you are, quote,
unquote, an accidental business owner and or you're primarily
technical, or you're a solutions architect that is kind of
(27:12):
squarely thinking about, you know, these project
deliverables and that kind of thing, I think there's still the opportunity to
ask a very different type of question that maybe elicits
a bit of the thinking on the customer side about, the
processes, the the multi departmental
communication that we've failed at organizing or facilitating.
(27:34):
That's another big one, by the way, quick tangent on that. I think
overall many of our customers have grown into their
size over time along with us and if you've been an MSP for 10
15 years, you know, there are some customers that started as 10 person shops that
are maybe 50, 60, 70 people today and and
nowhere along the process did you stop to reevaluate should we be talking to
(27:57):
some of the other department heads? How are they talking amongst themselves between the
teams and trying to uncover some of the interesting, you know, cross
departmental challenges that that we just kind of are going with the
flow because it's just grown organically from the beginning.
So so back to the the conversation around how a technical person
can get a little more strategic, I think it's just a matter of asking a
(28:19):
slightly different type of question, And one of the favorite ones that I've been talking
about with everybody from Marissa Maldonado of Produt
Technology to Alex Farling to vendors that that anybody who will
listen, I'll I'll ask them this question and a lot of them will say, just
ask the question, you know, how does your business make money? How does money flow
from one department in your business to another? And I love
(28:42):
that question because it just creates the opportunity to understand the
first principles as I call it of that business the the individual moving
parts, the small pieces that you may have not known to ask about
otherwise, and this is where innovation happens. This is was like, oh, that
sounds like a broken process right there between, you know, getting the the
order from the sales team over to the production team.
(29:04):
You're just, like, somebody's just printing this out and putting it in a folder.
Let's talk about that, right? And so, that that
is the question asking process could be an easy
target to to go and change about a bit of the the outcome of some
of these conversations. I love that because it it definitely aligns with I
what I see as sort of the future of our I would say our
(29:27):
industry in general, but also very much aligned to sort of this
the the role and the the problem that we're talking about today,
is I think more business consulting will be a requirement of
this industry going forward because we've gotten to the space where a lot of the
technical stuff is being commoditized. I think standardization is
easier. I've always been an advocate of a more prescriptive
(29:48):
approach to the techno technology stack and telling people, like, this is what's good for
you or this is what we're gonna implement because this is what we support. I
I think that's a more mature approach to this. So if not spending time on
these standardization discussions, which if you haven't got there, it's an important part
to spend on. But once you've aligned that stack once with this client,
where are you looking for business value? And that's
(30:11):
I think that the way that you position that question gets to where we should
be viewing this is, how do I how do we make money? How do we
save money? Those are the 2 things that you should be digging into. And I
love the idea of this process optimization because there are so many
examples of that in any customer that you actually sort of quiz and
and evaluate how they're doing things. They're emailing each other forms all
(30:32):
the time. Like, maybe they should be looking at, some Power Automate
process or or at least utilizing some SharePoint forms or something
like that. Right? Like, there's so many micro improvements that can be made in the
average SMB business that we know about, but we just
never get to that level of conversation to be able to impact that change. And
I think where this extrapolates to is much more around, you know, do they
(30:54):
have a CRM? Are they implementing an ERP? Like, these are the type of
more strategic discussions that are still technically aligned that
we haven't there are certain organizations that are starting to dip into this
territory, but I think this is much more the future of what our industry
looks like. How does that land with you? Totally, man. I mean,
if you think of, like, what we wanna do, if
(31:16):
if creating value for our clients is the objective and and
most people would agree with that statement is like, yeah, you
know, we're here to to deliver an incredible service,
enable technology for them to to deliver true business outcomes
and ultimately create value and you see this kind of like
there's been a challenge understanding from a client's
(31:38):
perspective of them understanding what value you're creating or delivering
because we get this question all the time it's like how do I show more
of the value that we're creating to our clients? And the simple
answer is well, you got to create more value, first of all
It sounds like a silly answer to give, but the reality is that, you know,
just doing a white space QBR does not necessarily create value
(32:00):
for the client even though you might think it does And so
I think that's an important part of the conversation is, you know, coming to terms
with whether you're actually helping create value ultimately or not and
whether the client perceives it and we don't often ask the question
from a feedback perspective is like, you know, what are the
outcomes you expect from these meetings? We kind of just bring
(32:22):
them in, we talk at them for the 30 minutes or 45 minutes,
if if one of the things we're doing is trying to chase down the users
that haven't completed their security awareness training, then 40 of the 45 minutes
are spent on that. You know, it's a difficult thing to manage too
for sure because, we just kind of, let the process
settle into this very technical conversation. But overall,
(32:44):
like, the the idea of creating value, I think, just has to
come from the conversation of the customer, you know, being able to express a
little bit of what are the challenges that they're having and and you trying to
manage IT to that and creating opportunities to solve some of those
challenges, and I think, ultimately, that's that's what creates and drives value.
I'll tell you, one of the things that came up in many of my conversations
(33:06):
last week is that as MSPs, we're actually particularly
terrible all of stare telling the story around the data, and I'll give you
an example. You know, most of us, maybe have
a process where, technical account manager goes in and says,
hey, we really would like you to implement this solution or this other solution, and
they say yes, and then you send in the the project team to go
(33:28):
deliver that thing and then they're done and then they move on to the next
thing. And does the account manager or the VCIO ever
go back and talk about the results of that project, of that initiative?
Like, almost never. It's so interesting that we never go back and
say, hey, after we implemented MFA or conditional
access, we saw the number of failed logins decrease
(33:50):
by 94% or whatever the story is. There's a a million of those
little stories that a) validate the client's choice to
send to spend money on a project or or initiative and b)
it just helps you very very, easily, show
the value that you're trying to to deliver through some of these projects and
so that's an area that I would say it's it's probably an easy
(34:12):
hit for a lot of MSPs to do is just actually look at the
data of the thing that you deliver, the initiative you drove, and talk about
it, it's already there. Yeah. Versus,
you know, the the just, you know, spending 30 minutes to go through the
laundry list of all of the KPIs that you wanna report to them that really
don't have a narrative around them. So this is I love this idea, Luis,
(34:35):
of, like, what do you actually want to tell them? What's the story
you're trying to convey to that customer? Pick 2 or 3 KPIs
that represent some story and tell that story and support it with some
evidence. Like, you don't need to print out an 80 page report and be like,
hey. Look at all this value. And I think this is part of the thing
that we get wrong, especially about this process. And it goes to, I would think,
(34:56):
a more systemic issue in the industry is that we tend to be technical
people. And one of, one of my favorite expressions is is,
peep is tools don't solve people problems. And account management
and VCIO is inherently a people process because you're trying to
derive and provide value to a person in that organization
for their business. Right? So it is it is very much a a people
(35:19):
centric approach to this if you do it correctly. And I
think where we kinda get this wrong is I see a lot of organizations
that confuse the tool with the process. Right? Like Scalepad, you guys
have great tools that will help to support this process in doing life
cycle management and things like that. But, like, to spend an hour with an
executive to tell them, like, here are all the workstations that you're gonna replace,
(35:42):
that's not value to their business. It's just sort of a
necessary thing. And I think that, like, if you just stick with the the
the the components of the tools and think that that's the process, that's
potentially a problem. The tools should really make that process easier for
you. They're a component of it. So not confusing the tool with the process, I
think, is a really important aspect of this. Not that the
(36:04):
tools aren't helpful. They absolutely are. But they're a supportive component, not
the the process itself. Right? A 100%. And
there's one other area that I feel like we make the mistake
of quite regularly and it depersonalizes
a bit of the ability to tell a story Last week we had
Ben Hanlon, who I would best describe as
(36:27):
a magician who figured out how to use magic as a vehicle to talk
about engagement, with people in whether it's 1 on 1
conversations or presenting or so on. And one of the things that he dropped as
advice that I thought was so salient to me of his entire presentation
this is the thing that I that he made us circle the one thing that
that stuck out, and this is the one thing I circled, is don't talk
(36:48):
about a 1000 people. Talk about 1 person. And we
tend to depersonalize a bit of the story that we do tell if we tell
it at all by talking about, oh, all our customers do this or all our
other customers do this. The customer that you're talking with in that
moment cannot attach to a story when it's like
everybody, But they can talk they can specifically find, you
(37:09):
know, a parallel to 1 individual or one company that you're
giving an example about even if it's sort of anonymous,
much better than if they're talk if you're talking about a 1,000 customers,
potentially in a thousand you know, most of us don't have a 1000 customers, but
you get what I mean. Yeah. That's, I think it's a Stalin quote,
actually. One death is a tragedy. A 1000 deaths is
(37:31):
is a statistic. Right? It goes to that point of, like, we just can't sort
of comprehend that. We don't wrap that around our brain. But I think, your your
point is well excellent thing, like a tangible thing that you can weave into your
your your account management, or if it is a VCIO process, your VCIO process.
The of looking for specific examples and bringing value from
(37:53):
other organizations in your portfolio. Like, if you're dealing with a
construction firm, you probably have another construction firm that you can say,
hey. I saw so and so, you know, x y z company doesn't
necessarily be need to be named, but another construction company in the industry
doing this or they utilize this process or this tool. Like,
that's the type of value that you can bring to them that actually sort of
(38:14):
has a a business value component to it. Right? And just
looking for specific reference points, spend 10 minutes before that meeting
coming up with an idea of some value that you can relay to them based
on the experience that you have in having, been in these
situations of viewing dozens of other companies. Yeah. I
love that. Okay. So we've, we've solved
(38:37):
the world of VCIO and and account management. I think,
we're we're still looking for the broader term client client
success, customer success. I think that that maybe resonates. So as I said,
you know, fight us in in the forums. Luis and I will be there
to take all of your input. But I think at the the the
root level of this, I think the the really important component, I think,
(39:00):
big takeaway from this conversation is just naturally segregate the
technical account management from the business consulting and the the the
true sort of strategic value. I think that's a huge takeaway that is
actually really practical, and potentially allows you to do a
little less work. Right? Maybe you're not doing a quarterly session and just doing a
a strategic session annually. Let someone else do the technical account
(39:22):
management with someone else lower on the total poll on the on the client side.
I think that's a huge value that, people should consider. Anything
else we have With with the cautionary tale of of not letting that be the
only time you talk to that customer is once yearly, if you do
have to sort of break this out into a yearly cadence for a strategic conversation,
You definitely have to be having those light touches every every month
(39:45):
or every couple months or or whatever cadence makes sense, but just
not once a year because I think the the trust and the opportunity for
loyalty is lost over the the 1 year meeting. I think that actually
creates downward pressure commoditization wise is because they have
no relationship to stand on and so if at that point
all the customer can look at is, you know, what they're paying, for what they're
(40:07):
getting, This is exactly the point of comparison with anybody
that's down the street charging a little bit less for the same service. Yep.
People buy from people. Right? So be a person, show up, and and represent
yourself that way. And and like you said, it's not that hard. Just call the
person once a month, be curious, be interested, drop by their office,
bring some swag or some donuts every once in a while, and just be visible
(40:29):
in that capacity. It brings a ton of value, and it's really not that hard.
Right? The the the value that you'll derive from spending a little bit of time
on that, I think, is is absolutely massive. But for me,
being a very process oriented person to this, like, for example,
I'll take this home a little bit because, you know, I I for, I don't
know, weeks, maybe more than a month, probably more than a month, I was
(40:51):
supposed to hang this this hanger in in the garage.
And this this morning, my my wife reminded me about it, and she said, well,
I'll do this thing when you do that. And then, of course, I I pushed,
Siri on my watch and told her to remind me this afternoon to
go and do this thing. And and she sort of chuckled, like, thinking I was
doing it just to make her do the other thing. I was like, no. Like,
(41:13):
I've thought about this a number of times and just forgotten. Right? So
I need these systems and these processes. And I'm sure many people are like this,
not everybody, but, like, build tools and systems around this
process. Like, utilize a CRM, you know, your PSA, if
that's all you have. Great. But actually build recurring tickets or
recurring activities for yourself to just call your clients and build a system
(41:35):
around that. So you're not like, oh, hang on. When was the last time I
talked to that person? And you shouldn't find yourself in that situation. So
if you need a tool or a system to follow, then absolutely do that.
Anything else, that we haven't touched on, Luis, that that you'd love to to get
in here? I don't know, man. Now all that I can think of after this
entire conversation is that I want some donuts, if I'm honest.
(41:58):
And so thanks for dropping that in there because you made me squarely, like, change
my entire prioritization list. Going to find
some donuts now. Have some salad first, then you can reward yourself
with a donut. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Siri. Remind
me to have some salad before I eat donuts. Awesome. I need a I
need a systems, system and a process for this. Yep.
(42:20):
Always great to have you, Luis. Really appreciate it. There it
goes. To you. Siri responded to me. I appreciate, that
opportunity, Todd. Now I'm gonna have a little giggle by myself,
at 4 PM. Siri comes back and says, reminder to
have a salad. Great. Good to
have you, man. Have an awesome week and, and great holidays
(42:43):
through the season, and hopefully see you a little more of you next year as
well. Yes, sir. Thank you, Todd. Always a pleasure, and, good to
see everybody. Ciao. Take care.
Welcome to the pod. Thanks, Todd, for having me. It's
awesome to come back time and time again. Is it, like, my 3rd
time now maybe? I, I love it. You're this is,
3rd time, and, you're now tied for, I
think, recurring guest character. So if we have you back one more time, I guess
you're gonna be in lead. But, you also have the the head start in
(00:22):
that you were on, actually, episode 5 of the podcast. And when
this goes to to to publish, I think it'll be
episode 116. So, you know, you're you you've been back
and back again. So great to have you. Well, thanks, man. I
appreciate the, the honors. And I think I I owe
some of that to just being a bit on the early adopter side on just
(00:44):
about everything. You know, I I definitely suffer from a bit of the FOMO, a
bit of the shiny object syndrome. And so whenever somebody comes out with a new
show, I was like, oh, I wanna come on new show. And so lucky am
I that people actually invite me to them. So thank you. Yeah.
I love hanging with you. Love catching up. If if we were joking on, on
your podcast that we haven't seen each other much this year, if at all,
(01:06):
I guess. So, this is a a good substitute to to connect
with you, more more often virtually anyway. So
So true. So true. And I like the the ability to kinda have,
a bit of a structured conversation around it. You know? Because sometimes people get together,
You just talk about nothing and everything, but nothing mostly.
So it's kinda nice when you have a topic to to to do a
(01:29):
facilitated discussion, if you will. I appreciate that about these conversations for
sure. For sure. So with that, we'll launch straight into it.
Luis, are we doing VCIO all wrong?
Oh, gosh. What a question, Todd. I I feel like
you could look at it from a few different perspectives. Right? And
and a lot of it is gonna depend on where in your own
(01:52):
journey as an MSP you find yourself in or or what kind of
situation you've created for yourself. I was just in
Portugal last week with a great bunch of the IT nation evolve
group MSPs and, and Joe Burns, one of the
MSPs there actually drops a really cool, terminology
that that clarified a lot of what the issues that we have are. And
(02:15):
he says if you've created a lot of white space for your MSP in your
process and what he meant by white space is that if if one of the
ways that you sell into the industry and you go to market is that you
kind of start with the basics and then you kind of institute a land of
an land and expand strategy, meaning we're gonna sell them a small
basic easy to consume package, something they understand, and then you go and upsell them
(02:37):
on all the other things, you you kind of perpetually end up
just trying to fill the white space over time in your account
management process, which which we call the BCIO process today,
proper probably incorrectly. But if one of the ways that
you go to market is kind of standardized on your approach,
you kind of include everything, of your
(03:00):
productized service in the same package, right from the
get go, you perhaps spend more time doing more
strategic conversations after the fact because there's not a lot of this
effort spent over rotating on trying to fill the white space. It's like,
oh, we need more customers to buy more of the solutions that we offer.
Sure. And so I think if when you ask the question, are we doing
(03:22):
vCIO wrong? I guess it depends on what you want to get from that process.
If if you created a lot of white space initially and one of the things
you need to do and want to obtain from the process of like quarterly business
reviews and whatnot is to actually fill the white space Then maybe that's a good
outcome and the thing that you should be doing If one of the things
you did was, you know, you sold a complete package and you're having
(03:44):
great, maybe strategic discussions,
then that's a great outcome as well and and maybe the purpose
is a little bit different. I'd say if if you framed it in the
context of what is the most valuable thing for the client
and the majority of MSPs are just trying to fill white space and trying to,
you know, pitch them on projects and things to standardize their stack in every
(04:06):
QBR then I would maybe argue that we're
doing VCIO all wrong. Is that maybe the function of account
management? It's perhaps better suited. But, man,
there's lots of places to go from there. Yeah. So I I strongly
agree with this. And funny enough, I, like, I just recorded video for a
course that goes through kind of exactly this of, the
(04:28):
distinction of sort of these different roles. And I I sort of describe it on
a spectrum. Right? That account management, like, right down to technical account management exists over
here on the left, and then it moves to kind of account management. Then it
goes to more broad consulting. And then I think VCIO sits sort of very much
further to the right. And if we think about it, like,
the original basis of the VCIO role
(04:51):
was it was actually a billable product. Like, this was a package that you
sold to people because it had so much inherent value that it
was billable outside of the MSA that they were already subscribing
to. And some MSPs had a lot of success in just selling VCIO
services to customers that didn't have an MSA at all. And I think
that's sort of the distinction that we're missing. I think you're a 100% right. It
(05:13):
depends on where you stand because if, I like that
description of filling the white space being a reference point for this because
the distinction between these two is where they're applicable is if you're just
doing account management in order to sell a more feature
rich MSA. That makes sense. Whereas other organizations
have sold a prescriptive full stack package, and that is not a
(05:36):
requirement. So, therefore, they can spend more time on that right end of the
spectrum and doing more consulting. So I think that's
a a great way to frame sort of the problem and maybe gets to this
point. Like, VCIO in the industry is one of the most
derided terms that you can throw around. And maybe this is
exactly why, because it doesn't really mean what it used
(05:58):
to. But, like, why do you think people hate the term VCIO so
much? I don't know. I think it's just, you
know, Alex Farling actually made this comment about the term
is that what it is today is probably a misrepresentation of what it should
be. And I think maybe that's the frustration with the term. It's that right
now, it's really just lipstick on account management is the term that he that he
(06:20):
uses, and and I believe that to be true. I think a lot of people
are are misusing the term VCIO when when the rotation
that they have around that function or role is really just
technical account management focused on the MSP selling more of
their stack into the customer and not so much about creating value for the
customer. And this was kind of borne out a few months ago. I had,
(06:43):
Chris Jensen on on MSP Confidential,
and I feel like that episode single handedly created a
pivot for me in in the narrative of all my conversations going forward
because I I kinda pose the same idea or topic to him. It's like,
have we been doing this all wrong? And he's an enterprise CIO that often
works with MSPs. And I've been using this, like, one minute sound
(07:06):
clip of him describing, an experience that he had where he was working
with one of his clients and they were swap changing MSPs and the
new MSP came in and kind of went in and was like, wow, you know,
they they presented to us, and also the client calls Chris back after
a meeting with a new MSP and they're like, so what what was
that? You know, these guys they came in and they they said these are the
(07:28):
things we're gonna put in and this is the timeline we're gonna put them in
and, and basically you're gonna like it. And the client goes,
like, why they were not focused on my business at all. They know nothing
about my business, yet they came in and said these are the things we're gonna
do and when we're gonna do them and you're gonna like it. Like, I don't
understand how that works. And so, Chris's comment in
(07:49):
that moment is, like, it just doesn't sit well in the long term. And I
thought it was so interesting that that the the whole VCIO
process kinda has has the the eroded
to basically be this purposely to trying to fill the
white space process, and it's so difficult I think to
do a proper customer centric motion when that's really the
(08:11):
focus. When when you've given your account managers a quota of,
like, filling white space, how are they supposed to go create value for the
client in inside of that context? Right? I think that's the the most pressing
question we need to ask ourselves. I think that I would push back
that it's also really difficult in that context too because the the
pre seed requirement of that is filling the white space. No? Right?
(08:33):
Because, like, if they don't consume the full stack, they're not on sort of,
say, your Wi Fi that you use, and therefore, they're not in sort of
your unified vision, your unified dashboard for that. They're
using WatchGuard firewalls when you guys are standardized on Ciscos
or something else. Right? Like, if if they're not consuming your
your full stack, that is something that should be fixed. Maybe you don't go in
(08:55):
there wholesale and change it. And then, like I said, this is easier for people
that sold a full stack to begin with. What kind of looks like that
conversation of, like, wait a minute. Is this for me or for you kind of
kind of thing? So, like, it's a requirement. We need to get this done, but
we shouldn't represent it as VCIO. I think that's the distinction.
But wouldn't wouldn't you agree that those, precede parts of filling
(09:17):
that white space still needs to happen? Yes. And I
think the challenge that we or or maybe the problem we create for
ourselves as part of, like, needing to do that. And by
no stretch am I saying like we shouldn't be doing account management. I think it's
an integral part of like how MSPs continue to find and
grow project delivery, you know, a lot of the project
(09:39):
stuff comes out of the QBR cadence. I think
just think there's an opportunity to evolve the way that we do them to some
extent And maybe the challenge is
that because we are so focused on the wide space we've actually
lowered the barrier of strategic discussion altogether and we're
not having any of the other required conversations around strategy that are
(10:01):
so critical. And this is kind of, represented by the
the questions that people ask me when I'm out in the market a little bit
at the events and the conferences. Like, yeah, but how do you how do you
make your QBRs more strategic is kind of the question. And I think
the challenge is just that, is that if you're needing to fill the white space,
you're gonna inherently lower the strategic value of the
(10:21):
QBR process because it's really difficult to deliver that
at scale with somebody who's is doing a lot of these and just needs to
fill the white space. And so one of the interesting, maybe counterintuitive
things that I talked to MSPs about is is actually creating a
separate cadence for the strategic level conversations that is
not focused on the account. Like, if you try to now suddenly build
(10:44):
in the strategic portion into your regular QBRs, well, what's
the problem with that? It's like, first of all, you've already been relegated most of
the time to, like, a non executive point of contact on your regular
quarterly business review meetings. So you're not gonna get the kind of traction that you
need strategically from that person. So all they're doing is kind of just passing along
the broken telephone message to somebody else.
(11:06):
There's no you're not hearing as an MSP any of the conversations around
the business goals or the business outcomes or the business challenges for that matter, like,
if they're not necessarily good at articulating goals or strategy because they're a small
business themselves, this is an inherent challenge we have too. Then at
least, you're not even hearing the actual problems or
challenges they're having either. And so, instituting a separate cadence,
(11:29):
getting yourself invited into the customer's own strategic meetings or
or annual board meetings or annual, like, cadence of some kind is
is really interesting. And so doing it
separately from the function of account management that you need to keep going for
the purpose of filling the white space, I think needs to be done separately.
So I I there's opportunities to to do more strategic
(11:51):
engagement. I just think we'd be hard pressed to try and and
and shoehorn it into the exec existing QBR process
if it's strictly white space, process driven.
I really like this. I think this is this is a very apt and smart
approach of actually separating the technical account
management from sort of the business consulting aspect of this. And I think it
(12:13):
it's helpful in 2 ways, kinda what we're already talking about of, like, the technical
stuff needs to happen over here, but don't represent it as sort of
inherent business value and and sort of overselling what those
what those meetings and engagements typically look like. That happens
over here, and then we can have more business conversations at a lower
cadence because that is sort of more priority or, how
(12:36):
you have more influence or the time sensitivity of those things tend to make
sense. I think the other part that this is helpful with, and and you'll remember
this, since, you ran an MSP for years
years, that there are certain conversations, certain,
executives that just like to meet with other executives. Right?
So you would have a president or a c I a CEO of an organization,
(12:58):
and they wouldn't really show up to a meeting. But every once in a while,
like, we would send a CEO or someone who, like, who is
higher up in the food chain and has a different, role title. And then
all of a sudden, they felt like that was a meeting that they could attend.
So I think in a way, we're kind of separating the work, but also
providing potentially people a contact point that is more
(13:18):
representative of them. Because you could you you should as even if you're
a small MSP, hopefully, like, you don't wanna be doing all the
QBRs. I mean, if you're small, like, you know, 5 or, 6
staff, then sure you're probably doing all the QBRs. But as you get
bigger, delegating the technical account management just to a lead
or a technical person on your team so that they can coordinate with a
(13:40):
controller, a CFO, or even an office manager on the
client side so that you can still maintain, say, biannually,
or an annual conversation with the CEO. I think that's a division of labor
and also sort of categorizes the work that you're doing those meetings much
much better. I really like that approach. And I'll make a couple of
other points. One of them being we as MSPs we
(14:03):
do work with a lot of smaller customers and and I kind of
mentioned the inherent challenge that we have already in that if they're
like sub 15 people perhaps they're not running any kind of
strategic cadence themselves at all or having any kind of discussion around
specific business outcomes and goals and so one of
the interesting things that we think is part of
(14:25):
standardization is part of the ability to scale any kind of process
inside the MSP is like, oh, well, you know, that's a
lesser maturity client and we're gonna do fewer
meetings with them and maybe they just need one annual review
of, like, all their technology, period. And it's
counterintuitive to think about it this way, but you're actually
(14:47):
eroding trust with a customer that you meet less often with and I
think this is so true. And so one of the interesting, things
to try and consider redoing or doing differently is to meet
more regularly at a lighter touch with some of your smaller
customers because the maybe the monthly call for 15 minutes 20
minutes actually helps create create trust and you're
(15:09):
plugged into sort of some of the, just in
time issues as they happen. You know, I used to make
fun of the fact that your cybersecurity doesn't wait for anybody. If you're waiting for
a year to talk to a customer about any given initiative or
challenge, like, you're already so behind the 8 ball that
is just it's just almost comical, to think that you could
(15:31):
wait a year before you can talk to any one customer about anything. And
so but it's counterintuitive. Right? Because we equate the
cadence or the regularity of meetings with the maturity or or
money, spent by the client on our services. And so that's
one aspect, that I think is important to change. Yeah. Because I I
used to I I don't know if I still run counter to the industry in
(15:52):
this, but originally, I did. But, there was a lot of people, thought
leaders in the industry that would say, if you're not doing QBRs on a on
a quarterly basis, you're failing. Right? And and I never really believed that to
be true because of exactly this. Like, most of us are dealing with, much
smaller businesses that, like, won't even give us sort of the the time to
spend, you know, an hour or 2 in in these in a
(16:14):
QBR. So we've moved to sort of technology business reviews and all the myriad
of other names that we started to name this process. And I think that
that piece of that process is really important to recognize, like, it doesn't
necessarily have to happen quarterly. And in a lot of cases for those smile
small clients, that is a total impracticality and potentially
dangerous to your profitability. If you're gonna spend all this time developing a QBR
(16:37):
for someone that pays you $1500 a month, like that, you can kiss your profit
goodbye for most of those months that you're doing this. It just kinda makes no
sense. So I like this approach. This is something I've suggested in
the past as well. It's just simply reach out to people as a person. Right?
Like, you have no intent in talking to them. You just call them up and
say, like, how are things? How's it going? How's business? Right? More as a peer
(16:58):
and as a as sort of a friendly person. Because a lot
of the clients, they tend to sort of put their armor on whenever you show
up because they feel like you're just coming with a bunch of stuff to sell
them. And that's a pretty understandable position for them because it's
typically what's trying to happen as we're trying to fill this white space. So if
you have these other touch points of just ringing them up, having a 10 minute
(17:18):
conversation to catch up and moving on without expectation, I think that
goes a long way to building a more trusting relationship.
And here's another idea Todd, which I think is is an interesting sort of
pattern interrupt, which is I heard
Simon Sinek on an interview with Trevor Noah. Yeah, he was on Trevor's
(17:39):
podcast And they were talking about trust, and I I think it was interesting how
he kind of flips the script a little bit about around how trust is
built. And he was saying Simon Sinnick was commenting, you know, trust is
actually not built by helping other people. Trust is is
is more quickly built by allowing people to help you and I thought
there was an interesting, pattern interrupt and, and I saw this play
(18:01):
out when one of the MSPs that I know out in the market, they're about
a $20,000,000 MSP, They they started a client
advisory board with some of their customers and so this is squarely that
opportunity for clients to help you, give you the guidance, give you sort of the
insight into what are the the things and challenges or or communication
styles or data that they want to see from the MSP.
(18:23):
And and so imagine, you know, a year, 2 years down the road, these clients
are now invested in that MSP succeeding. And does you
know, if you had to guess whether that increased the level of trust
and loyalty to the MSP or decrease the level of trust or loyalty to the
MSP, what would you say? Of course, it increases it.
Right? So I I thought that was an interesting way to to flip the script
(18:44):
a little bit around trust is that we see it as us being the heroes
coming in and help them and solve all their problems, but we kind of have
to shut up for a minute and let the client figure out how to help
us along the way as well. And this is
proven a bit because every time I go into these boardrooms with MSPs to
talk about this, I asked them, you know, is there a situation where you have
(19:05):
a client that is wildly more mature than you are? You know, if we had
to use Paul Dippel's operational maturity level scale, you
know, are you below the maturity of your clients at any
given point or too high above at any given point? And they're like, no, you
know, it doesn't work, in either direction. You kind of end up kind of
in parallel moving a bit of the maturity up or down together
(19:26):
because, that's kind of where the relationship naturally and
organically kind of finds its place of support is that
you're kind of continuously improving together around some of these issues. The
clients way too mature for you, they're gonna drop you and vice versa. And so
I thought that was interesting is that if they help you in this
process of continually improving our operational maturity, you might
(19:49):
actually have an interesting, creator of trust and loyalty in
the process as well. Yeah. And as, the sort of the adage goes
is, if someone has a hand in creating something, they're less likely
to pooh pooh it. Right? So if you you're getting input from
your clients on what this process looks like and they're providing active
input, they feel a level of engagement in that, and they're more likely to
(20:11):
participate and see value in it. So I I think that makes a ton of
sense. I like the idea of of sort of, couching it in a way that
they feel like they're helping you. That's that's a a really cool way to look
at it. I totally agree. It reminds me of this this great
video I saw this week of somebody says, you know, I feel like I'm
having a moment of deja poo. And the person goes, do you mean
(20:32):
deja vu? It's like, no, deja poo. I've heard this shit before.
I like it. So with that Are you
are you 18 plus on your podcast side? I don't wanna give it to you.
We can say whatever we want. It's it's all adults listening unless they have kids
in the car. So,
with that, should we call VCIO something different
(20:55):
given the fact that what we're doing typically isn't VCIO? Like I
said, this started as something that was a consulting exercise that
was that was often more expensive than the
MSP services we're providing, and then it's just sort of devolved into this
account management. Is it just simply that we should call this account
management, or should we look at this in some other way?
(21:18):
That's an interesting question, man. I I feel like, you know, VC
like, if you think of what a CIO does in the enterprise,
their role is one of risk management squarely,
and I think the the the
outcome of the role is different than the title of the role has sometimes,
maybe if if if the role if the name
(21:42):
VCIO has kind of devolved to be something or mean something
else entirely, then I think we either need to redefine it or just
pause and say, okay, we we all have to agree that the role of a
CIO is to to manage and mitigate and decrease
risk for the business that they're working with, then I I feel like
the the VCIO should be doing that as well. And so the
(22:04):
the problem is that we've used that term now interchangeably with account
management, and and it's creating a bit of a rub, certainly in terms of,
like, what the value that it can deliver to a business actually is.
So I I don't know if I changed it, if we were using it correctly,
if we were doing the the things the CIO actually does,
(22:24):
but, yeah, it's starting to grind, the wrong way for
sure. Well, and I think that's sort of the inherent problem with this is,
like, the water has already gotten muddy with the term, so you can't really
sort of pull it back either. And I don't know that people would love the
idea of just sort of saying we're going to account management, and that's what we're
doing over here because it just you know, it doesn't feel maybe as strategic in
(22:46):
some way. So, you know, maybe what comes to mind we'll have to,
like, we'll put this out there. Like, everyone should start arguing about
this in in Reddit and, in Slack groups
and throw it in the comments. Like, what should we call this process to to
sort of get away from, this icky term that we don't like
called VCIO, and and that to call it something that more
(23:09):
represents what we're doing here. One that comes to mind for me would be just
maybe borrowing from the SaaS world from from you guys is the
client success tends to be the term that this is utilized. And
maybe that is a sophisticated enough term, but I also feel it's
more representative of what we're trying to do here. Like, I'm trying to really help
you with your technology in order to make that spend successful.
(23:31):
How does that resonate with you? How about client success in the MSP side?
Yeah. 100%. I think, I've seen many MSPs
actually they're they're what would be their VCIO team they call it the client
success team and they each of those folks are called the client
success managers or they have
a focus and role squarely trying to drive
(23:53):
outcomes business outcomes with the customers around technology
enablement and and all the things that are you know what we envisioned this
role to be and and I think you're
right because you know client success or customer sex success is a little
bit more comprehensive and holistic I think an approach than what we
tend to think about you know when we put the the veil of risk
(24:15):
management, on the conversation solely, you know, it's kind of
like you send in your security people to have a
conversation around compliance, and they're kind of squarely just trying to put
in, security point solutions into the conversation,
or the account manager, as we talked about before, is kind of squarely trying to
fill in white space, which is primarily focused around the standardization of
(24:37):
the of the tech stack alignment and and this is mostly just
good for the MSP even though you could derive some customer
facing value out of some of those conversations, I think you're you'd be hard pressed
to to squarely connect one thing to the other because we're just not even
having the conversations around business enablement and and business
issues and discussions. And so and then the
(24:59):
other challenge is, you know, the industry has kind of squarely beat us over
the head over the last 20 years to say you got to scale all your
processes in order to do that you got to deliver 80% of as much of
you can with the least expensive people. And so on top of like
just being a white space focused role we've now,
you know, started delivering that with very entry level folks that can't
(25:21):
necessarily hold a c level conversation or the attention
of an executive leader in a meeting because, you know, they're just being
pitched by the person on what next projects need to be done to
check off some boxes in your heat matrix. And so, you know, there's
all these issues around it, but client success,
customer success, I think that's it's a it's a mindset shift
(25:43):
for sure. Yep. I I think that's an interesting point as well that you bring
up that, we're expecting, you know, a tier
2 or, you know, someone who's just graduated into tier 2 to have
executive conversations. Because a lot of what VCIO
should be doing is more business consulting. And if you don't have a
business background and have kinda worked with a p and l and understand
(26:06):
risk, and and process improvement and spend time in
understanding that, Like, a VCIO functionally, I think, should look more like
a business analyst role. So I think it's safer to sort of,
again, I think it comes back to this this suggestion that you made of breaking
the cadence between the more strategic meetings and and functional
meetings. So that tier 2 or that that sort of low end tier
(26:27):
3 that's having more of those standardization and technical discussions is meeting with
someone who's more appropriate at that sort of business level, and maybe
you occasionally need to get some approval from someone higher up for some budgetary
spend. But as far as the sort of the cadence and and the inputs of
those meetings, being more aligned with the skill set of the
person that should be having them in the first place. Again, I think all all
(26:49):
of these sort of ideas of breaking this up and reenvisioning what this
process should look like are actually beneficial to both parties.
There's I I think there's a a layer of, I
I hate that I'm gonna drop this term, but if if you are, quote,
unquote, an accidental business owner and or you're primarily
technical, or you're a solutions architect that is kind of
(27:12):
squarely thinking about, you know, these project
deliverables and that kind of thing, I think there's still the opportunity to
ask a very different type of question that maybe elicits
a bit of the thinking on the customer side about, the
processes, the the multi departmental
communication that we've failed at organizing or facilitating.
(27:34):
That's another big one, by the way, quick tangent on that. I think
overall many of our customers have grown into their
size over time along with us and if you've been an MSP for 10
15 years, you know, there are some customers that started as 10 person shops that
are maybe 50, 60, 70 people today and and
nowhere along the process did you stop to reevaluate should we be talking to
(27:57):
some of the other department heads? How are they talking amongst themselves between the
teams and trying to uncover some of the interesting, you know, cross
departmental challenges that that we just kind of are going with the
flow because it's just grown organically from the beginning.
So so back to the the conversation around how a technical person
can get a little more strategic, I think it's just a matter of asking a
(28:19):
slightly different type of question, And one of the favorite ones that I've been talking
about with everybody from Marissa Maldonado of Produt
Technology to Alex Farling to vendors that that anybody who will
listen, I'll I'll ask them this question and a lot of them will say, just
ask the question, you know, how does your business make money? How does money flow
from one department in your business to another? And I love
(28:42):
that question because it just creates the opportunity to understand the
first principles as I call it of that business the the individual moving
parts, the small pieces that you may have not known to ask about
otherwise, and this is where innovation happens. This is was like, oh, that
sounds like a broken process right there between, you know, getting the the
order from the sales team over to the production team.
(29:04):
You're just, like, somebody's just printing this out and putting it in a folder.
Let's talk about that, right? And so, that that
is the question asking process could be an easy
target to to go and change about a bit of the the outcome of some
of these conversations. I love that because it it definitely aligns with I
what I see as sort of the future of our I would say our
(29:27):
industry in general, but also very much aligned to sort of this
the the role and the the problem that we're talking about today,
is I think more business consulting will be a requirement of
this industry going forward because we've gotten to the space where a lot of the
technical stuff is being commoditized. I think standardization is
easier. I've always been an advocate of a more prescriptive
(29:48):
approach to the techno technology stack and telling people, like, this is what's good for
you or this is what we're gonna implement because this is what we support. I
I think that's a more mature approach to this. So if not spending time on
these standardization discussions, which if you haven't got there, it's an important part
to spend on. But once you've aligned that stack once with this client,
where are you looking for business value? And that's
(30:11):
I think that the way that you position that question gets to where we should
be viewing this is, how do I how do we make money? How do we
save money? Those are the 2 things that you should be digging into. And I
love the idea of this process optimization because there are so many
examples of that in any customer that you actually sort of quiz and
and evaluate how they're doing things. They're emailing each other forms all
(30:32):
the time. Like, maybe they should be looking at, some Power Automate
process or or at least utilizing some SharePoint forms or something
like that. Right? Like, there's so many micro improvements that can be made in the
average SMB business that we know about, but we just
never get to that level of conversation to be able to impact that change. And
I think where this extrapolates to is much more around, you know, do they
(30:54):
have a CRM? Are they implementing an ERP? Like, these are the type of
more strategic discussions that are still technically aligned that
we haven't there are certain organizations that are starting to dip into this
territory, but I think this is much more the future of what our industry
looks like. How does that land with you? Totally, man. I mean,
if you think of, like, what we wanna do, if
(31:16):
if creating value for our clients is the objective and and
most people would agree with that statement is like, yeah, you
know, we're here to to deliver an incredible service,
enable technology for them to to deliver true business outcomes
and ultimately create value and you see this kind of like
there's been a challenge understanding from a client's
(31:38):
perspective of them understanding what value you're creating or delivering
because we get this question all the time it's like how do I show more
of the value that we're creating to our clients? And the simple
answer is well, you got to create more value, first of all
It sounds like a silly answer to give, but the reality is that, you know,
just doing a white space QBR does not necessarily create value
(32:00):
for the client even though you might think it does And so
I think that's an important part of the conversation is, you know, coming to terms
with whether you're actually helping create value ultimately or not and
whether the client perceives it and we don't often ask the question
from a feedback perspective is like, you know, what are the
outcomes you expect from these meetings? We kind of just bring
(32:22):
them in, we talk at them for the 30 minutes or 45 minutes,
if if one of the things we're doing is trying to chase down the users
that haven't completed their security awareness training, then 40 of the 45 minutes
are spent on that. You know, it's a difficult thing to manage too
for sure because, we just kind of, let the process
settle into this very technical conversation. But overall,
(32:44):
like, the the idea of creating value, I think, just has to
come from the conversation of the customer, you know, being able to express a
little bit of what are the challenges that they're having and and you trying to
manage IT to that and creating opportunities to solve some of those
challenges, and I think, ultimately, that's that's what creates and drives value.
I'll tell you, one of the things that came up in many of my conversations
(33:06):
last week is that as MSPs, we're actually particularly
terrible all of stare telling the story around the data, and I'll give you
an example. You know, most of us, maybe have
a process where, technical account manager goes in and says,
hey, we really would like you to implement this solution or this other solution, and
they say yes, and then you send in the the project team to go
(33:28):
deliver that thing and then they're done and then they move on to the next
thing. And does the account manager or the VCIO ever
go back and talk about the results of that project, of that initiative?
Like, almost never. It's so interesting that we never go back and
say, hey, after we implemented MFA or conditional
access, we saw the number of failed logins decrease
(33:50):
by 94% or whatever the story is. There's a a million of those
little stories that a) validate the client's choice to
send to spend money on a project or or initiative and b)
it just helps you very very, easily, show
the value that you're trying to to deliver through some of these projects and
so that's an area that I would say it's it's probably an easy
(34:12):
hit for a lot of MSPs to do is just actually look at the
data of the thing that you deliver, the initiative you drove, and talk about
it, it's already there. Yeah. Versus,
you know, the the just, you know, spending 30 minutes to go through the
laundry list of all of the KPIs that you wanna report to them that really
don't have a narrative around them. So this is I love this idea, Luis,
(34:35):
of, like, what do you actually want to tell them? What's the story
you're trying to convey to that customer? Pick 2 or 3 KPIs
that represent some story and tell that story and support it with some
evidence. Like, you don't need to print out an 80 page report and be like,
hey. Look at all this value. And I think this is part of the thing
that we get wrong, especially about this process. And it goes to, I would think,
(34:56):
a more systemic issue in the industry is that we tend to be technical
people. And one of, one of my favorite expressions is is,
peep is tools don't solve people problems. And account management
and VCIO is inherently a people process because you're trying to
derive and provide value to a person in that organization
for their business. Right? So it is it is very much a a people
(35:19):
centric approach to this if you do it correctly. And I
think where we kinda get this wrong is I see a lot of organizations
that confuse the tool with the process. Right? Like Scalepad, you guys
have great tools that will help to support this process in doing life
cycle management and things like that. But, like, to spend an hour with an
executive to tell them, like, here are all the workstations that you're gonna replace,
(35:42):
that's not value to their business. It's just sort of a
necessary thing. And I think that, like, if you just stick with the the
the the components of the tools and think that that's the process, that's
potentially a problem. The tools should really make that process easier for
you. They're a component of it. So not confusing the tool with the process, I
think, is a really important aspect of this. Not that the
(36:04):
tools aren't helpful. They absolutely are. But they're a supportive component, not
the the process itself. Right? A 100%. And
there's one other area that I feel like we make the mistake
of quite regularly and it depersonalizes
a bit of the ability to tell a story Last week we had
Ben Hanlon, who I would best describe as
(36:27):
a magician who figured out how to use magic as a vehicle to talk
about engagement, with people in whether it's 1 on 1
conversations or presenting or so on. And one of the things that he dropped as
advice that I thought was so salient to me of his entire presentation
this is the thing that I that he made us circle the one thing that
that stuck out, and this is the one thing I circled, is don't talk
(36:48):
about a 1000 people. Talk about 1 person. And we
tend to depersonalize a bit of the story that we do tell if we tell
it at all by talking about, oh, all our customers do this or all our
other customers do this. The customer that you're talking with in that
moment cannot attach to a story when it's like
everybody, But they can talk they can specifically find, you
(37:09):
know, a parallel to 1 individual or one company that you're
giving an example about even if it's sort of anonymous,
much better than if they're talk if you're talking about a 1,000 customers,
potentially in a thousand you know, most of us don't have a 1000 customers, but
you get what I mean. Yeah. That's, I think it's a Stalin quote,
actually. One death is a tragedy. A 1000 deaths is
(37:31):
is a statistic. Right? It goes to that point of, like, we just can't sort
of comprehend that. We don't wrap that around our brain. But I think, your your
point is well excellent thing, like a tangible thing that you can weave into your
your your account management, or if it is a VCIO process, your VCIO process.
The of looking for specific examples and bringing value from
(37:53):
other organizations in your portfolio. Like, if you're dealing with a
construction firm, you probably have another construction firm that you can say,
hey. I saw so and so, you know, x y z company doesn't
necessarily be need to be named, but another construction company in the industry
doing this or they utilize this process or this tool. Like,
that's the type of value that you can bring to them that actually sort of
(38:14):
has a a business value component to it. Right? And just
looking for specific reference points, spend 10 minutes before that meeting
coming up with an idea of some value that you can relay to them based
on the experience that you have in having, been in these
situations of viewing dozens of other companies. Yeah. I
love that. Okay. So we've, we've solved
(38:37):
the world of VCIO and and account management. I think,
we're we're still looking for the broader term client client
success, customer success. I think that that maybe resonates. So as I said,
you know, fight us in in the forums. Luis and I will be there
to take all of your input. But I think at the the the
root level of this, I think the the really important component, I think,
(39:00):
big takeaway from this conversation is just naturally segregate the
technical account management from the business consulting and the the the
true sort of strategic value. I think that's a huge takeaway that is
actually really practical, and potentially allows you to do a
little less work. Right? Maybe you're not doing a quarterly session and just doing a
a strategic session annually. Let someone else do the technical account
(39:22):
management with someone else lower on the total poll on the on the client side.
I think that's a huge value that, people should consider. Anything
else we have With with the cautionary tale of of not letting that be the
only time you talk to that customer is once yearly, if you do
have to sort of break this out into a yearly cadence for a strategic conversation,
You definitely have to be having those light touches every every month
(39:45):
or every couple months or or whatever cadence makes sense, but just
not once a year because I think the the trust and the opportunity for
loyalty is lost over the the 1 year meeting. I think that actually
creates downward pressure commoditization wise is because they have
no relationship to stand on and so if at that point
all the customer can look at is, you know, what they're paying, for what they're
(40:07):
getting, This is exactly the point of comparison with anybody
that's down the street charging a little bit less for the same service. Yep.
People buy from people. Right? So be a person, show up, and and represent
yourself that way. And and like you said, it's not that hard. Just call the
person once a month, be curious, be interested, drop by their office,
bring some swag or some donuts every once in a while, and just be visible
(40:29):
in that capacity. It brings a ton of value, and it's really not that hard.
Right? The the the value that you'll derive from spending a little bit of time
on that, I think, is is absolutely massive. But for me,
being a very process oriented person to this, like, for example,
I'll take this home a little bit because, you know, I I for, I don't
know, weeks, maybe more than a month, probably more than a month, I was
(40:51):
supposed to hang this this hanger in in the garage.
And this this morning, my my wife reminded me about it, and she said, well,
I'll do this thing when you do that. And then, of course, I I pushed,
Siri on my watch and told her to remind me this afternoon to
go and do this thing. And and she sort of chuckled, like, thinking I was
doing it just to make her do the other thing. I was like, no. Like,
(41:13):
I've thought about this a number of times and just forgotten. Right? So
I need these systems and these processes. And I'm sure many people are like this,
not everybody, but, like, build tools and systems around this
process. Like, utilize a CRM, you know, your PSA, if
that's all you have. Great. But actually build recurring tickets or
recurring activities for yourself to just call your clients and build a system
(41:35):
around that. So you're not like, oh, hang on. When was the last time I
talked to that person? And you shouldn't find yourself in that situation. So
if you need a tool or a system to follow, then absolutely do that.
Anything else, that we haven't touched on, Luis, that that you'd love to to get
in here? I don't know, man. Now all that I can think of after this
entire conversation is that I want some donuts, if I'm honest.
(41:58):
And so thanks for dropping that in there because you made me squarely, like, change
my entire prioritization list. Going to find
some donuts now. Have some salad first, then you can reward yourself
with a donut. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Siri. Remind
me to have some salad before I eat donuts. Awesome. I need a I
need a systems, system and a process for this. Yep.
(42:20):
Always great to have you, Luis. Really appreciate it. There it
goes. To you. Siri responded to me. I appreciate, that
opportunity, Todd. Now I'm gonna have a little giggle by myself,
at 4 PM. Siri comes back and says, reminder to
have a salad. Great. Good to
have you, man. Have an awesome week and, and great holidays
(42:43):
through the season, and hopefully see you a little more of you next year as
well. Yes, sir. Thank you, Todd. Always a pleasure, and, good to
see everybody. Ciao. Take care.
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