April 10, 2025 • 54 mins
What happens when the right product meets the right moment—and the right voice? In this episode of Now That’s IT: Stories of MSP Success, we sit down with Tim Barton-Wines, the dynamic force behind Halo PSA’s meteoric rise.
Tim shares his unexpected journey from selling vodka in a wine shop to transforming Halo from a little-known help desk tool into one of the fastest-growing PSA platforms in the MSP space. You’ll hear how Halo earned trust without private equity, how a £10 Reddit campaign helped build a global footprint, and why saying “no” to acquisition has become their boldest strategic move.
Whether you’re an MSP owner looking for the next great tool—or a leader thinking long-term about brand, culture, and independence—this episode is packed with insight on building momentum the right way.
🎧 This one’s for the builders. The believers. And the ones playing the long game.
Let us help you unlock your business's full potential.
N-able Business Transformation is Expert led and Peer informed.These valuable executive programs are tailored to provide effective guidance and a faster path to a scalable and successful business.
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'Now that's it: Stories of MSP Success,' dives into the journeys of some of the trailblazers in our industry to find out how they used their passion for technology to help turn Managed Services into the thriving sector it is today.
Every episode is packed with the valuable insights, practical strategies, and inspiring anecdotes that lead our guests to the transformative moment when they knew….. Now, that's it.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
One, two, three go.
It was a hell of a turnaroundgoing from net help desk to a
Formula One partner.
I had a weird scenario and aweird problem that was presented
to me to go and manage where wehad the right product and no
one knew who we were.
So then, suddenly, extroverted,tim comes out the box and we
have to come in like a tornadoand we have to leverage the
(00:23):
tools.
We have to go and cause as muchnotoriety as we can and
awareness to get people tounderstand who we are, because
as soon as we knew, as soon aspeople saw the product, being a
product-led team with technicalfounders, that is likely going
to be the best fit and they'llbe really excited to use it.
Welcome to Now that's it storiesof MSP success, where we dive
into the journeys of some of thetrailblazers in our industry to
(00:45):
find out how they used theirpassion for technology to help
turn managed services into thethriving sector it is today.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Today's guest wasn't just named the CRN 2025 Channel
Chiefs List.
He didn't just get introducedinto the Channel Partners Circle
of Excellence.
He's doing something far morerare in the world of msp and psa
platforms he's building trustthrough momentum culture and the
power of listening to yourpartners.
(01:13):
I'm really excited todaybecause we have tim barton wines
on the now that's it podcast.
Welcome, tim, nice, nice, greatto be here.
Thanks, ch Chris.
This is going to be a lot offun.
I have been a big fan ofeverything you guys have done.
I can't hear enough from ourpartners and those in the
industry talking about all thegreat stuff, but today I want to
(01:35):
talk a little bit about you.
All right, I want to start withyou a little bit, so I like to
go in the way, way back machinehere.
Your start, while it wasn'tnecessarily off-brand for you,
doesn't typically lead tosoftware development.
Let's talk about your alcoholsales days.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
I've had a weird trajectory into the space where
I was working part-time at likea restaurant and then my gym
buddy's cousin was opening aspirits concession in a wine
shop and he was like, do youknow anyone that can help sell
(02:15):
some alcohol?
And then I got a text messageand I was like, yeah, I'll do
that.
So my first real job was avodka salesperson and I was
selling just premium alcohol ina in a wine shop to start with,
and that really taught me a lotabout, uh, the what it takes to
take a, you know, to go fromnothing into hustle.
I guess it was my first realtaste of hustling.
(02:36):
And then, moving on from there,I uh had I've got a lot of
friends who seem to refer me tojobs, because I had another
friend who had come back fromAustralia after traveling after
university and she was workingat a local sass company in
(02:58):
business continuity and where Ilive very small, like 20 20
person shop and uh, she wasdoing Q&A, it's like a
entry-level role and she uhasked me, uh, if I wanted to
come join her and I said, yeah,sure, because you know the
margin on alcohol is about sevenpercent.
It's you have to, you know, whenyou're 20 years old trying to
(03:19):
make money, that's all.
There's thousands of bottles ofalcohol before you actually
make a wage.
Um, but yeah, my first ever jobwhen I transitioned into the
sas industry was, uh, the sortof the job interview was can you
log into facebook?
Backwards from memory, I guessthat was just some sort of
functions test to make sure Iwas, you know, normal.
(03:41):
Yeah, I uh.
My first job was Excel sheetshundreds of lines.
Go here, click that, does thatwork?
Yes, next line.
And that was just my full-timejob.
That's great.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Now.
So what's interesting is thatpartners that don't know you uh
is probably going to go.
Wow, weird uh starting analcohol sales.
Those that do uh make sense.
Right, they're good Now theyunderstand.
Yeah, and it that's an insidejoke.
So for those that, sure I mean.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
I mean it won't take long from listening to me to
understand that I'm very irish,very extroverted.
Yeah, very much a people person.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Yeah, you're yeah, you're a great host let's I'm a
great host.
Yeah, that's a good way ofputting it awesome.
So how did you discover haloand when did you meet Paul?
Speaker 1 (04:29):
That's a good question.
So how did I meet Paul?
How did it all start?
So, to carry on from that story, doing Q&A at his little SMB
business continuity firm calledVocal Limited way back when, got
promoted into customer support,then into internal IT, then
(04:52):
technical account management andthen I started doing
implementations.
Then that company got acquiredby a large, a much larger US
firm and then he floated on theNASDAQ and I suddenly became
employee number 2000 or whatever.
And then I was.
(05:14):
Then the cubicles came in and itgot very corporate and serious.
I kind of had a moment.
I kind of woke up one day and Ithought is this how I die?
I'm just going to die in thiscubicle.
So I pulled myself out, went touniversity, started a business
degree and then realized thatthe commitment was only like
seven hours a week.
I didn't need to quit my job.
So then I got a bit restless,sitting around all day because
(05:39):
the content was pretty bare, andthen I thought I still had all
the contacts from my alcoholdays.
So I actually started a companycalled Barton's Wines and
Spirits Limited and started likea 20, whatever I was a young,
20 year old something.
I was selling alcohol globallyand limited success.
(06:04):
To my point earlier aboutmargins.
And then I also picked up apart-time role for a Canadian
business continuity firm whospecialized in disaster recovery
software, sort of emergencycommunications and I was doing
implementations and working inthe square mile of London,
(06:25):
working with, I mean, you nameit the Shard.
We worked with Royal Mail, weworked with Michael Kors, some
cool names and, yeah,essentially that part-time, the
side hustle was growing analcohol business.
And then when I finished mydegree, I thought I'd start
(06:45):
applying to graduate roles tosee what where that could land
me, because I tapered off thealcohol business because of the
reasons as a young 20 year old,you need to raise a lot of
capital to be able to do thatscale and make a good living,
and that was not something I wasable to do.
So I went on.
Indeed, you know there was asupply into, like Fujitsu and
(07:08):
others, and there's this littlead that said graduate scheme,
net help desk in Stone MarketApplied to.
It went down.
There.
I was in a three piece suit.
Minds View was with Paul, thefounder of Halo.
Um, this is not where we wereback then.
This was, like you know, we'retalking 2016, where it was, um,
(07:33):
and we had a renovated pub, wasthe office, which is super
english.
Now we reflect on it all theseyears later.
That is a.
It's a funny starting point forwhere we are today.
Um, and then, yeah, paul was inflip-flops, shorts and a
t-shirt.
Um, we sat down and then therewas like a three hour long
(07:53):
interview, like multiple officetours.
Um, and I later found out thatif paul likes you, after the
first sort of 10 minutes he'llstart selling halo to you.
Um, and yeah, uh, from thereoff we went.
That's how I met paul.
That was my first interactionswith halo.
And then I um, even though I hadprevious experience, everyone
(08:13):
in a graduate scheme becausehalo just for clarity, halo only
, uh, employs graduates.
If you go to, you know our jobboard today.
If you go, look at it, there'sone job and it's the halo
graduate scheme and we'regrowing so fast.
You'll come in, you'll um,wherever your strengths lie,
you'll gravitate towards.
So, if you're extroverted sales, if you're uh, if we can, if
(08:33):
you're technical but can happyspeaking to customers, you'll go
into, uh, sort of consultancy,implementations, onboardings,
and if you're just very, verytechnical and introverted,
you'll end up probably in the,in the development team.
Yeah, um, but yeah.
So came in, spent 12 months onsupport and then onwards that
journey went from there sopre-halo, psa, you come in as a
(08:55):
support guy.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Uh, which, again, when we talked about that up
until this point, minus, minusthe wine sales, very, very sort
of introverted jobs, right, yourQ&A support Support.
There's some customerinteraction, but not the Tim
that we know today right.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Yes, I've had to can this up.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Yeah, bottled it up, and so pre-Halo PSA days.
What was Halo like at?
Speaker 1 (09:29):
the time.
Sure, so Halo, like at the time, was actually called NetHelp
Desk, way back when.
It was a Windows applicationand it was not the glamour, the
craziness you see today.
I was employee number 11.
So the entire team on a Fridaycould fit around a table at the
(09:49):
local pub.
It was very, very small, veryfocused.
I mean, where we were wasnothing nice, it was a very how
do I say this?
It was a very different officeand we kind of had to look
around at each other and go.
You know God, we need to putour heads together and get
ourselves out of here, which waskind of the mentality, I guess.
(10:12):
And what happened the transitionfrom their help desk into Halo
was Paul.
I remember just like it was.
Yesterday, paul came into thekitchen in the old office and he
was like, do you like the otherTim?
And I was like, yeah, he's allright, I've not had much
(10:32):
interaction.
And then next thing, I knew Iwas in a room probably half the
size of this where I put up thefirst Halo PSA website, which
we'd only taken down and changedrecently.
And he put up the first HaloPSA website which we'd only
taken down and changed recently.
And he put up the first trialand we probably did about 30% of
what a PSA was meant to do andoff I went.
(10:53):
It was just me and him and oneother guy, ross, who did the
onboardings and that was thegenesis.
And the story is that Halostarted in the ITSM space.
So we started off as a helpdesk, matured into creating a
full service desk, matured intocreating a full ITSM, then ESM,
(11:13):
and along the way, we hadaccumulated probably a few
hundred MSP customers who werejust using it for basic
ticketing and we were kind oflike you know, we took this
decision, so I think it was 2017, 2018.
If we should let this part ofthe customer base just die, or
we just all focus on ITSM or wedo something about it.
And Dan was up for having acrack at it and he took me along
(11:36):
the way.
I guess it's probably the bestway you could put it.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
It's fascinating to see how quickly you guys have
evolved as a major player in themarket.
But where it started fromObviously great foundations, the
ITSM product is very relevantin the Halo PSA side, but those
early days it was a ticketingsystem.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Yeah exactly, it was a ticketing system.
But I guess what created thatplatform?
I guess if you distill down whyHalo has got to the position it
has today, it comes down toprobably the foundation that
Paul the founder has laid.
So if you meet Paul verytechnical Scottish guy, wears
kilts to events and he has afunny story where he grew up in
(12:24):
quite a poor village at the tiptop of Scotland.
When I say tip top of ScotlandI mean he opens the front door,
he looks north and there's thesea.
He got a degree doing computerscience and then got a graduate
job at EY and he absolutelyhated the culture there, where
(12:44):
it was not how good you are, itwas who you knew.
And the catalyst that createdHalo was actually a book called
Maverick by Ricardo Semler andit's this crazy story of how a
Brazilian businessman inheriteda business which had very
(13:06):
traditional corporate values,hierarchies, you know,
meaningless jobs and this sortof journey where he transformed
this into a very profitablebusiness.
And that message sort ofresonated with Paul.
It sort of aligned to all thethings he thought anyway, and
(13:27):
then he felt very emboldened totake those values and just run
with them.
And Paul was a very all ornothing guy and he will.
He will just do it with zerocompromise.
So we ended up using and so,basically, basically, paul, for
example, was a big believer inbeing privately owned.
He thinks he's never going todie.
(13:48):
He figures out where the valueis, he just goes for it.
So, long story short, he spent15 years from a bedroom growing
in.
Well, actually, the story isthat he met the other co-founder
when EY was working with an MSP, and Alan, who's now retired
because he's got about 25 yearson pool and pool's in his
(14:10):
mid-40s.
But Alan had created an onlinespace to store stuff for a local
council back in the 90s and theproject got canned canned.
Alan was just a hardcoredeveloper and he had taken this
(14:31):
um, he had taken this offlineand just started playing
building it as a hobby very much, and then he started an msp.
He left the council and that'show he met paul.
This is about circa 2005, 2006.
And Paul was like Alan, you cancommercialize this.
And then they came to anagreement and off Paul went.
(14:51):
He was the sales team, theonboarding, the account
management, the billing team,and it was just him for about
five years, about 2011.
And then he started hiring morestaff and I came in at number
11.
And then the real moments whereit became halo as we know it
today was we were quite late, ifyou um, to the the web app game
(15:14):
, so we were still.
You know, we're talking 2017,we're still a windows
application, which is unheard of, right, um?
And we had the advantage thatum, meta facebook had released a
, a brand new and open sourced,uh, a webframe technology called
(15:36):
react at the time, way backwhen, and it was a very easy way
, uh, to create modern, sparseapplications over old Angular
web frame tool sets.
So, yeah, basically we wereearly adopters of that, so we
actually leapfrogged thecompetition because we had
(15:56):
waited so long to do it.
And then we were just NetHelpDesk one platform we served
everyone.
We decided to focus down themarketing, so we changed our
name to Halo, because the nameNetHelpDesk doesn't conjure up
lovely, modern software.
And then we'd added acronyms tothe end of the names.
So you knew what you weregetting into when we changed our
(16:19):
brand.
Halo had no equity.
No one knew what it was.
So if you had the word psa atthe end, you knew what you're
getting.
So when we updated the name,updated the front end, it was
still a bit spotty, but it's forthe psa.
It's the psa side of thebusiness and the story there um,
it didn't post covid 21, wejust got billing into the web
(16:41):
app.
So you never, never, needed toleave the web application, uh,
to do your day-to-day operations.
And soon, as soon as that momenthappened and the lockdown
releases came off, it was me onmy own for four years selling
halo globally.
And it was, you know, we'retalking a few hundred msps a
(17:01):
month.
We were moving towards Halo atthat stage and the actual
catalyst of how we became known,the go-to-market strategy was.
We just put Tim Bowers onReddit for a year and said be
friendly, be helpful, but don'tbe confrontational.
And that was it.
(17:22):
A year later, we'd built areputation, people were telling
other people and we were able totake advantage of the community
spirits of the MSP space.
You sure have.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
You guys could write a book on the marketing that you
guys have put together, andwe'll talk more about that in a
minute.
But let's go back to the sales.
So selling Halo PSA this isyour first sort of SaaS sales
role, right?
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Yes, it is First one, and it didn't necessarily start
off great after the first one.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
You want to tell that story, yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
I'll tell that story.
That's a fun bit.
So I had done at this pointevery other role apart from
sales in the software industry,in SaaS, and I was doing
implementations.
I was doing implementations.
I asked Paul if I could do this, because the best software
salespeople are technical andalso extroverted.
(18:11):
When you have thosecharacteristics, you know you'll
gravitate towards that spaceanyway and you'll be probably
pretty good at it.
So I asked Paul to do that.
Paul was very reluctant and heended up asking me to do
outbound phone call SDR rolesand I was calling a hundred
(18:35):
people a day as a target and Idid that for about a month and
then it didn't yield manyresults because that sales cycle
was a bit short and Paul was abit skeptical.
And then he said to me I'llnever be a good salesperson,
which is very funny now we lookback on it, sure, together, and
I then moved into that and thenbasically this is around right
(18:55):
around the time of the, thecarving up from NetHopDesk to
Halo, and it was Tim and Tim, meand the other Tim, and then,
ironically, on the other side,it was Tom and Tom.
So it was Tim and Tim, me andthe other Tim, and then,
ironically, on the other side itwas Tom and Tom.
So it was Tim and Tim and Tomand Tom, itsm, psa, and off we
went.
And then I was.
That was my first sales roleand at the moment, at the time,
(19:15):
I didn't know what to say.
I didn't know what I was doing.
There was no real training.
I had the other Tom to help meout with some written persuasive
content, but that was prettymuch it.
I just sort of unleashed.
I guess that was a moment, toyour point, where I sort of
unbottled Tim and became thestart of who I am today.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Wow, To think back of a different Tim that didn't
know what to say or how to havethat conversation.
Oh, that's amazing.
All right, so let's talk alittle bit about your
go-to-market strategy.
Halo PSA was was different thanHalo uh, itsm.
So why was that?
Why was it different?
(19:55):
How was it different?
Why was that?
You know, why did you go adifferent direction with, with
the go-to-market?
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah, so the well so the so we decided whether or not
we wanted to let that part ofthe customer base die.
So not wanting to do that wasthe motivation.
The use cases between a PSA andan ITSM slash ESM are
relatively similar.
We are serving either internalIT teams or external IT teams,
(20:21):
people who are selling their ITexperience, msps so the core
service engine between theproducts is shared and then the
bits around the outside includeall the commercial bits, so the
CRM, contracts, quotes, billing,the go-to-market strategy was
different because of theaudiences, of course, and the
(20:43):
markets.
So we were able to benefit fromthe community of the MSP space
that was created way back whenwith Arnie Bellini and allowed
us not to have to spend loads ofmoney on marketing.
So we had no money in marketingand we just put Tim Bowers on
Reddit and called it good, andthat yielded massive results.
By the way, that was a huge ROIfor us.
Where on the itsm solid houseit was we spent millions on
(21:07):
white papers, google ads and hadvery limited success.
So I mean at this.
So to give you an example, atthis stage in 2025, I reckon we
have about a 30 brand andproduct awareness, so I reckon
one in three of all ms know whoHalo are or have heard the name,
but in the ITSM space I reckonit's 2% or 3%.
(21:29):
So we've been able toaccelerate through the MSP space
in terms of awareness wayquicker than the ITSM space,
just because of the nature ofthe market and it's basically
due to the community aspects ofthe MSP industry.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
So most of your marketing comes from sort of
that organic communityinteraction.
But you have spent some money.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
So you mentioned the F1 deal was really, really
critical.
That's been your key.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Yeah, that was a funny moment.
So everyone probably now knowsas far as what we are in terms
of how we are related tomotorsport and uh, but if
anything, you know, we had theentire leadership team are
technical.
Uh, we are privately owned, wedevelop in-house and we had
spent no money on marketing for15 years and we were waiting
(22:22):
until the product was right.
And then it was right as in,like it was, we were winning.
You know, the conversion rateon a first interaction was about
70%, so you'd never heard of us.
You tried it.
It was almost likely a greatfit.
And then, um, um, at thatmoment we were like right, now's
the time, what do we do?
(22:43):
And I got a text from paul Ithink it was 23 january 23 and I
got you know, when you get likea horrible task from your boss
and it's like how that, am Igoing to do this?
Yeah, um, so paul would text meand he is uh, there's one
sentence can you connect me tosome F1 teams?
(23:04):
And I was like, right, okay,how do you know?
Because you go on theirwebsites.
There's no contact us.
And after the fact, I found outthat 99% of all inbound leads
that they get are junk.
F1 teams find their sponsors byoutbound reaching and they'll
decide which brands they want towork with and it typically that
(23:25):
works best for them.
So I had to do some funny stuffto figure out the right person
to speak to and then gettingtheir email address, and then I
drafted a script and what I wasgoing to say to each one.
And then me and paul had athing where I would go in the
room, set the scene and would Iwould text Paul and he would
then join.
So I could you know, becausewhen you're talking about eight
(23:48):
figure deals with some of thetop top percent of sales guys on
earth, you're working F1 deals.
They qualify pretty quickly,upfront, whether or not this is
a good fit because the moneyinvolved is horrendous.
So a month later I'd managed tocontact about eight out of the
10 teams on the grid.
If you want an idea or numbersof pretty fun, one Mercedes
(24:10):
wanted, I think it was 25million euros a year on a three
year deal and you didn't get asticker on the car.
I'll probably get in troublefor saying that, but whatever,
and yeah, so the numbers were,yeah crazy.
I mean that was probably about40 of our revenue at the time.
So it was like, right, okay,this is um.
And uh, yeah, we got really faralong the way with mclaren,
(24:33):
ferrari and aston martin.
Then it became a game of who'slying, because they're all
saying I will be winning soon.
So me, me and Paul and the guyshad to put our heads together
to figure out where the best betis.
And it just felt reallyauthentic.
With McLaren, they were 10thout of 10th at the grid all the
time.
Alonso and Aston Martin weregetting podiums suddenly and it
(24:55):
was like you know, but it feltright, the gut was there and it
felt when we were gettingtowards the tail end of that
deal and signing stuff, um, and,by the way, uh, when you're
dealing with those sort of deals, you know you have like
freebies in our world, maybelike a ramp period.
You have a ramp period in thatworld.
It's like, oh, we'll fly you toLas Vegas, come to a trade
(25:17):
track, we track, we'll spend,we'll put you in a paddock club.
Those sort of interactions arejust it's like it's off the
scale.
I've never seen anything likeit.
Um, but yeah, we, you know wewere, we signed that deal, it.
It felt like a bad thing at thetime.
Uh, obviously very exciting.
We have to see through all thethe fluff.
And then me and paul drove up,uh and richard drove up to MTC
(25:42):
McLaren's HQ.
Zach Brown, the CEO of McLarenracing, was there.
Ironically, when you look atthe cars there's like Cisco,
cisco, microsoft, google, veryserious corporate gray companies
and there's a local countryclub next to the MTC where they
normally stay, because me andPaul are not from money and Halo
(26:02):
is privately owned and we're abit scrappy and this is like
we're easily the smallestpartner on that card in terms of
size of employees, number ofemployees.
But we turned up, we booked thetravel lodge which is, just for
everyone's record, is an entrylevel hotel.
(26:23):
The police were outside, uh,knocking on one of the rooms as
we left because of, uh, the sortof place we were staying.
We didn't matter, we actuallyshared a room.
It's very funny, um, and thenthe guys at mclaren were like,
oh, where did you stay?
You know, did you fly in?
Did you stay at the countryclub?
And we were kind of like, oh no, we just put the travel lodge.
And then uh came on down.
I've got some great photos ofPaul signing his F1 deal.
(26:45):
So it was a hell of aturnaround going from net help
desk to a Formula One partner.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
You had to.
So a gut feel is one thingright.
A lot of MSPs they say, oh, weshould spend this money on
marketing or buy this billboardor whatever it is.
I have a partner that has abillboard at one of the MLB
stadiums and I saw what thatcost and I say, how do you
justify that?
(27:10):
So you talked a little bitabout being nervous and you
weren't sure that it was right.
I mean, thinking back,obviously you've spent this
money.
You've got to figure out was itworth it.
I mean it's already been spent.
But there's also the perception.
So, how do you deal with that?
Speaker 1 (27:27):
That's a great question.
Why does any company sponsoranything?
Normally it's not for a goodreason, or it's used for a
peripheral purpose or a target.
It's great.
It's a great question.
Msps should ask that question.
(27:47):
So Halo had no awareness Zeroand that was the most
cost-effective deal to get in onan F1 car and it was more
cost-effective than the others.
And we use it as a veryspecific purpose to gain
(28:11):
notoriety.
We probably won't do it forever.
We're using it to go from zeroto a percentage over our next
couple of years being a partnerwhen that deal lapses, we'll see
what happens use it veryspecifically just to go to come
into a room.
No one's ever seen this before.
We had the idea of wearing therace suits so people could see
(28:33):
us and be aware of us, becausethe likelihood is that if we get
people engaged with us and theysee the software, they'll
realize, oh, the software isreally good.
Um, which was?
Which was the purpose?
So I had a weird.
I had a weird scenario and aweird problem that was presented
to me to go and manage where wehad the right product and no
one knew who we were.
(28:53):
So then suddenly, extroverted,tim comes out the box and we
have to come in like a tornadoand we have to leverage the
tools.
We have to go and cause as muchnotoriety as we can and
awareness to get people tounderstand who we are.
Because as soon as we knew, assoon as people saw the product,
being a product-led team oftechnical founders, that is
likely going to be the best fitand they'll be really excited to
(29:14):
use it.
But yeah, it has a veryspecific purpose.
It was the most cost-effectivedeal and we're not going to be
doing this forever, likely.
But yeah, that's a greatquestion.
That's something I would ask aswell.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
First of all, it's done wonders.
I mean, I've known you for thelast several years.
You come to these events.
You've got your McLaren in thecorner Like you've got people
come into your booth even ifit's just to see the car.
Like you've got people comeinto your booth even if it's
just to see the car, but you'vegot their attention and then he
can say, oh, we have this badasspsa by the way as well.
(29:49):
And so you have that faith, youknow, that confidence in what
you built.
It's just getting awarenessright.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
It was that was, that was the scenario, and it's uh,
you know, if you come to a halobooth, we will likely have a tv
on the stand.
Yeah, so we will.
Literally as soon as you seethe shiny McLaren, you walk
towards the guys in the red racesuits which are probably going
to retire after this eventthey're getting a bit tatty now,
but we have a screen.
We get the product to youstraight away.
We want to show you the product.
It's not book a demo, come downlater.
(30:16):
If you approach a Halo boothand it's off the sides, it will
have tvs that we want to showyou the product as soon as you
come over and we know that itwill be a great fit.
But when you're in a room withhundreds of vendors all doing
similar things, how do you standout?
Speaker 2 (30:30):
and the answer, it turns out, is wear a big race
suit and get an f1 deal so it'sbeen really neat, tim uh, you
guys aren't the new kids on theblock, but you.
There's a buzz about Halo rightnow that hasn't existed for
really any of the vendors in theMSP space.
One of the most interestingthings that happened in the last
(30:51):
year was you guys publicly cameout and said we're not going to
sell right, so no acquisitions,no private equity, entirely
private funded.
And Paul, your founder, he'staken a bold right somewhat
stance by putting this out there.
Why is speaking of Paul like?
Can you add some context tothat positioning?
(31:12):
Where that comes from?
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Yes, that's a funny one.
So Paul is not a big believerin private equity.
Yeah, halo gets approached byevery name you can think of in
our space, and private equityinvestment firms as well, every
single week.
And the answer is always thesame we are officially not for
sale and Halo is.
You know, I think.
I think the best way I candescribe this is Paul took a
(31:36):
real roll of the dice because inthose early days and I couldn't
have done it, you know, it wasdicey and there was not a lot of
money, and then suddenly itwasn't right, it wasn't right,
it wasn't right.
And then it's right and Ireally feel Paul, he feels
vindicated, that he took along-term gamble and a bet and
(31:57):
it's paid off and he's nowriding the journey that he
created for himself and theplatform he's provided us, the
rest of the team, with to go andcreate the world's best
software company is somethingthat's not been done elsewhere.
I can't imagine another firm inour space being like let's just
take a 15-year bet that we'lleventually be a good fit and
(32:19):
most teams will start a company,go, raise some capital and off
they go.
Halo's entirely owned by Pauland a couple of other employees
and, yeah, essentially we got toa size.
I think it was 2022.
And we had just won Microsoft.
So Microsoft, a division ofMicrosoft in Seattle, had moved
from Dynamics to Halo, the cloudresourcing division, and people
(32:42):
were getting worried that wewere going to get acquired, and
I think it was Paul and Tim thatgot together and they were like
, well, we're not going to dothis.
What would it mean if we justpublicly announced that for a
rolling 10-year period we're notgoing to be involved in
anything and that's like sothat's per contract.
So if you sign a contract today, 10 years from that contract
date, it will roll.
(33:03):
So it feels we signed today.
It means at the minimum in 2025, we're not going to do anything
until 2035.
That's how long term we think.
And then, yeah, we announced itand it was probably one of the
most positive PR releases we'veever done yeah because that sort
of said to the rest of theindustry you know, if you
(33:24):
distill it down, halo and theleadership team are a bunch of
technical geeks who were justbuilding their own dream
software company that they'dwant to use themselves is
probably the best way I'd put it.
But that was a wild moment in22 where we took that stance.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
So when I think about where Halo is in the spectrum
of PSAs or ITSM platforms, in myopinion you've sort of caught
ConnectWise, and now you haveyour sights on sort of
ServiceNow.
How has that changed yourday-to-day?
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Yeah, that's a funny one.
So I work with our largestteams globally.
So when I started out Iremember very distinctly
thinking a 10-man team was alarge MSP and ConnectWise felt
like this huge target in thedistance we're not able to reach
.
And I'd probably say in thelast 18 months a point came
where very large teams weremoving from ConnectWise to Halo
(34:18):
more often than not and I thinkat that point I think this is
sort of late 23,.
We had overtaken the maturity,uh, of functionality and connect
wise.
And then I would say most of myday to day now is working with
some of the largest teams onearth as they mostly come up
against service now um and othercustomer spoke platforms.
(34:41):
So I've gone from working withsmaller shops helping them get
more out of their existing PSAsday to day, and I spend a lot
more of my time working withenterprise clients, some of the
largest on earth, which is acrazy moment for me.
I'm having to really change alot of how my talk is.
It's transitioned a lot fromraw functionality into strategic
(35:05):
enterprise service techniques,which has been a fun skill set
to learn and a new challenge forme.
As it's meant it's not got tostay all for me.
But yeah, now you know, in theITSM space it's driven from the
ITSM space.
So Halo was in the ITSMm spacefirst and it means that we are.
We are out of the box, idlealigned, so we're full v4 at the
(35:28):
moment and, uh, it means thatthe maturity of the service
engine on the itsm side hasalways led the way on the psa
side and there's a fewinteresting things.
So, for example, um, it feelslike we are helping msps align
to itil.
So if they're doing co-managedit with larger teams who demand
(35:48):
that of their msps, it's justnative out the box of halo.
Something else would be as wellwould be the service portal,
typically an afterthought inthis space, I feel like from my,
my lens, but in halo it's theit Halo it's because of the
requirements set.
That differs from MSPs.
In the internal IT space.
It means that the portalexperience is second to none.
(36:11):
I mean we go up againstServiceNow and win.
So if you're trying to movefrom an omni-channel service
delivery model and bring itunder a single high-quality
portal experience unbeatable inthe space today.
So there's been cool contrastlike that I would say yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
So I, as a former msp , I always felt that there was a
gap.
We went from connect wise toservice now and I always felt
like service now was a littletoo much, uh, a little too
robust, a little too you couldcustomize everything.
Do you feel like you're fillingthat gap?
Speaker 1 (36:43):
now or are there some other things?
So there's a conversation withservice now versus halo.
Is we'll do probably 90something percent of idle
alignments of service now forabout 20 percent the cost.
That's the, the raw deal, butthe, um, the raw contrast.
But the, the, the but the rawcontrast.
(37:04):
But the detail is the fact thatHalo is so, for example,
servicenow, you need to have anoverhead of developers to help
you manage and build andmaintain this thing.
Halo, because of our Reactframework technology, halo's
setup has standardizedconfigurations, so it means that
(37:25):
, um, you don't need codingability to be able to build out
your halo account, and thematurity of the tool set means
that it will do.
If you're less, you know,unless you're, if you're north
of 90 percent idle alignmentrequired, you have those
requirements.
You're probably bank, and ifyou're not a bank or HSBC or
something else or a very matureorganization, why are you
(37:49):
spending the extra?
But it was an over-option.
So interesting to your point iswe were accelerating through
the marketplace at a certainrate and we were starting to
sort of plateau off.
It felt like, and as we've gotin the last um year or so, um,
for the largest teams on earth,if you had requirements north of
(38:10):
connect wise with the serviceuh model.
Um, it felt like you'd eitherdo uh, I won't mention names,
but you'll do.
You'll either lean on connectwise for custom development.
You'd either use a bit ofConnectWise and then just custom
build your own tools around itto do what you wanted it to do,
or you would go and buyServiceNow and sort of fit a
(38:31):
square peg into a round hole.
And a lot of those teams who areusing ServiceNow are
transitioning to Halo.
Some of the largest teams onEarth are moving from
ConnectWise to Halo.
It just means that the velocityof the onboarding, the codeless
nature, means you don't need tohave a technology team to
manage it and build it day today.
(38:51):
It gives you way more agility.
It's a more modern tool set andwith ServiceNow, when you
bespoke create your ownServiceNow, you then have to
have quite tough supportrequirements.
So because Halo hasstandardized config, it means
that you can pick up the phoneand get someone to support you
on your account tomorrow.
But the teams that move fromServiceNow to Halo, they
(39:14):
typically save north of amillion a year and their service
increases and they have a moremodern product.
So it's a real landslide.
So, to answer your question, atthe top end of the market it's
felt underserved and it meansthat the largest teams on earth
can use Halo over service nowand increase their profitability
(39:36):
and get a better deal at theend of the day.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
So, speaking of these sort of two markets, you've got
these enterprise, this top end,and then you have the MSP
market, which, by the way,there's some MSPs that
definitely fit in thatenterprise but the majority of
the market are smaller teams.
How is Halo going to continueto service both sides?
Speaker 1 (39:57):
Yeah, yeah that's a great question.
So, because of the productsconstantly moving, we have an
internal development team basedin the UK.
We have offices in Seattle, inFlorida, uk and Australia.
Four international offices, orfour offices, 250 staff between
them.
Halo is.
We only sell one product, weuse it ourselves to run our own
(40:20):
business and we do a releaseevery two weeks, but a large,
polished, quarterly, stable.
So over that period we'vematured the product and it means
that as it's growing andgetting more mature, we are
starting to take lowerenterprise use cases.
So we're working with Red Bullright now, which is north of a
(40:44):
thousand technicians, a veryserious use case, very complex
requirements, different world towhat a small MSP would require.
So the engine will handle thosecapabilities and it will be
built out accordingly so it cando.
But we spend a lot of time, um,with the out-of-box trial
(41:05):
experience to make it assimplistic as you need it to be.
So, to your point, there'sprobably a period, you know,
it's probably a point in ajourney of a, an organization,
where they go from needing asingle psa and sort of
transitioning into best of breed.
So you know, at scale, if we'reinterested it's not worth
(41:26):
upsetting hundreds and hundredsof sales staff or HR staff to
cat them into a single PSAsolution.
Because, you know, halo's CRMcapability is not on par with
Salesforce's for an enterpriseuse case, which is not a
dramatic thing to say and itmeans that you would probably.
(41:47):
But Halo's service engine is.
It competes with the world'sbest.
So there's actually atransition point where teams
will go from PSA to ITSM and ina recent you'll see this shortly
that we are dropping theacronyms off of our name.
Now.
We felt talking about exposureearlier.
We feel that we now have thebrand equity, that you just know
(42:08):
who Halo are.
So it's now usehalocom, theHalo platform, and there are use
cases that can be done and it'sa Lego set to build in what you
want it to be.
So that's the background.
How do we keep it relevant forsmall teams?
Yeah, in all honesty, they'llprobably become a point where we
it won't be a good fit for thesmallest teams.
(42:30):
They will.
You know, using like an Atera,synchro or super ops would be a
better fit.
So I had someone tell me, whichis a great way of thinking
about this.
You know you can cross a riverin a battleship, but do you need
to?
So, but some of the work I didlast year because I work quite
(42:50):
hard with this.
But you know, out of the boxtrial, we keep simplistic as we
can to help small teams pick itup and I um, one of the reasons
I won that award you mentionedat the start of this podcast was
, uh, I had worked with ninja tocreate this bundle and offer it
at scale to teams to give themone place to get those tools for
(43:15):
teams who are just gettingstarted, so they can skip the
whole RMNPSA one tool which,once you get past a few people,
you get out of maturity prettyquickly.
So there's loads of initiatives.
It's hard to do to take a, youknow, a mona lisa and make it
(43:35):
out of duplo sometimes so Iwould uh, yeah, we work hard.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
It will be difficult to support a scale over time, I
reckon you've done a a prettydarn good job of it, so I'm
sure'm sure you'll continue foras long as you can.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
Yeah, I agree, there's no plans to do that, but
you need to be ready for a toolset that will be the last PSA
you move to.
So if you're ready for that,it's there waiting for you.
We have a lot of onboardingpartners.
I'm doing a series.
We're actually launching ahundred part series on youtube,
(44:11):
I think later this year or next,where it's just a step-by-step
onboarding onboard it yourself.
So we're we're doing our bestto standardize and help that as
much as we can.
Um, but yeah, it is.
It is definitely a balance soyou have been.
Speaker 2 (44:26):
You personally have had the last five years been an
incredible run.
You've been traveling the worldselling halo psa.
You're growing this incrediblebusiness.
You're the coo now of thisamazing brand.
But what's next for tim bartonwines?
What are your goals?
Speaker 1 (44:42):
uh, what's my goals?
I am probably the travel less.
Um, we feel like we've got tothis point in our journey now
where the exposure is at a pointwe're satisfied with.
I think everyone now mostlyknows who Halo are.
For me, what's up next?
(45:03):
Let's talk about it.
I think there's a few thingsthat are on my mind which I'm
working on right now.
One of them is we want to lookat our contracts again and I
we're discussing internally whatit would mean to create the
fairest contracts on earth, like, for example, slas.
If we breach an sla, you getcompensation automatically
applied.
What would it mean if we justcreated the fairest contracts on
(45:26):
earth?
So that's something we'rediscussing in real time right
now.
Another thing we're looking atis compliance as a service, so
I'm working quite hard to tryand get that into the platform
to allow teams to get into thatspace and facilitate it with
relative ease.
I'm also um announcing somestuff at the show, and you let
(45:48):
me know if I could talk about itnow.
Sure, you can.
Okay, so let's talk about whatsort of craziness I pulled
together for Empower 25, whichI'm hopefully you will enjoy.
This is pretty happy with thisone.
So one of the things we did wasI had a moment because I work
with hundreds of our top teamsevery year contrasting the use
(46:09):
cases and I can spot the gaps.
So one of the things I noticedwas a lot of our customers had
the capability to do new startuprequests but hadn't automated
it.
So I sat down with Alex Golden,one of our top technical guys
at Halo, and I said is there away we could create a script and
(46:33):
ship it in Halo for free thatwould allow teams to pick up
Halo, integrate it into CSP andachieve zero touch news data
requests, which would savehundreds of hours a year for
technicians?
And we figured it out.
We are launching that tomorrow.
It's already in the trials onthe website, so you can just go
to our website and start thetrial, hook up CSP and you've
(46:56):
achieved it.
That's number one.
Number two is leading on fromthat because, like Enable Best
of Three Partners, we're tryingto work with enterprise MSPs and
we're trying to be everythingthey need all in one space for
your entire tech stack, andwe've recognized that's
something we're both really goodat and we work very hard
(47:18):
together to unify thatexperience and integrate it as
much as possible to create avery seamless suite that an MSP
can pick up at scale withenterprise requirements and
deliver effective service betterthan anywhere else.
Create a very seamless suitethat an MSP can pick up at scale
with enterprise requirementsand deliver effective service
better than anywhere else.
So one of those things isthere's two things.
One of them is working with amutual partner, roost, who is an
automation platform.
(47:40):
They've, you know, halo'srunbook capability will do about
30% of what roost does.
Roost is more polished and itgoes way deeper than what we can
do, uh, today.
Um, so I got chatting.
When was it?
I think I had a couple drinkswith the cro charlie, which is
very yeah on brand, yeah, and uh, I said to him what would it
(48:02):
mean if we, you know, broughtthis together and you created
like a Halo automation pack inRoost as a product that a
customer could come along, buyRoost, buy the Halo automation
pack, bolt it into Halo.
And there was sort of almostlike a light bulb moment and we
(48:23):
created we're starting out bydoing off boardings so Roost in
record time, I might add, whichI'm dead impressed with they, um
, were able to create a veryintricate like multiple, like
it's tens of steps withinessential halo and roost to be
able to have a customer fill outa request, a off-boarding
(48:47):
request form, in the portal, inHalo's portal.
It would go off into roost andit would remove everything.
So zero touch off-boarding aswell, and we're going to be
building out a portfolio ofthese automations as a pack and
we are announcing thatpartnership official partnership
and it's live today and it's inthe trial.
So for small msps, people whoare just picking up halo,
(49:13):
there's zero touch news startersand we'll do more with that.
For teams who need more and wantmore and have bigger
requirements, we have thepartnership with roost which
will really cement and make.
I guess what it's doing is it'staking the hardest automations
out there and making it reallyaccessible, which we're.
I think that's the.
The value, and then the biggestone which everyone at enable
(49:38):
and at halo has been workingreally hard for the last six
months on, is halo is becomingthe most integrated partner with
enable.
So we enable from lovingly.
Thank you forever.
You are the first RMM on themarket to create your
integration from your side intoHalo, because when Halo was
(49:59):
small fry, no one wanted to dealwith us, which is fair enough,
so we had to create it from ourside, but there's a lot of stuff
and automation and endpoints inyour API that we can see.
So, long story short, thenCentral integration into Halo
is being revamped.
It has richer device data beingpulled into Halo.
(50:20):
It includes billing and itsyncs more often, which is super
cool.
That's just a free thing that'savailable in about two weeks
from today.
We also have the N-Siteintegration, n-site RMM.
We also have Passportal and thetwo new ones as well Adlumen
integration, so you can takethreats from Adlumen into Halo,
(50:43):
create tickets and automatethreat detection resolution at
scale, and the same with C cove,which is super cool.
So cove, adlumin and centralhave all been redone for this
show.
We're announcing it at thisshow.
Um, most integrated partner.
We are sort of presenting thepartnership two tools that work
really well together at scale.
(51:03):
All we need in one place foryour enterprise requirement.
Speaker 2 (51:08):
MSP.
I'm looking forward to thereaction at this announcement
this week and really, reallyexciting stuff, tim.
I appreciate you sharing thaton the pod and, by the time this
goes out… I hope I don't get introuble.
Speaker 1 (51:21):
I'm sorry in advance if I've told something I'm not
meant to.
Speaker 2 (51:24):
We'll be great.
So you are absolutely crushingit, tim.
My last question, the one Ialways like to ask folks, and I
heard a little bit of thisearlier, but when did you know,
tim?
Now that's it.
Speaker 1 (51:38):
When did I know?
Now, that's it there wasprobably.
When was it?
It was probably.
Do you know when it was?
I think it was.
It was a moment post COVID,because pre COVID, net help this
days, very early halo days.
It was a rough ride, I thinkwhen the first few months came
(52:04):
by after COVID and it started topick up and I was pulling
myself out of the swamp and it'sit felt like the reaction was
good from the msp market.
People were excited to see usand I think we could boil it
down uh, do you know what?
You know what?
(52:25):
I think the, the big, the.
That was probably the initialmoment.
I would say a big moment wasprobably actually at empower
last year when, uh, I came onstage in front of 750 people and
we and we shared with themsomething they'd never seen
before.
Uh, I had old team watching.
I thought do you know what?
(52:47):
This is it?
This is something that I'd behappy spending the rest of my
life doing, and since then it'sbeen more of the same.
But I really think there was ajump in just quality of life and
positive reaction when weactually felt like it locked in.
(53:07):
That was the moment.
It was probably, um, as anextrovert, as a attention seeker
, uh, walking off stage to around of applause and I've since
.
A number of those teams in theaudience I didn't know at the
time, one of those being impactnetworking, one of the joint
customers up in in chicago, erEric Alea, saw me for the first
(53:27):
time on that stage, and there'sother stories like that as well.
That really felt like that wasthe moment, where that was it.
Speaker 2 (53:35):
That's awesome, tim.
Tim, you guys are absolutelycrushing it.
I thank you so much for yourpartnership, your friendship,
over the years.
I wish you and the Halo teamthe absolute best in the future
and thank you so much for beingpart of the podcast.
Speaker 1 (53:49):
No, I appreciate it.
I think it's the first timesomeone's actually sat down and
asked about this story, sohopefully it's a good exclusive
for you.
Speaker 2 (53:56):
It's an interesting story and I'm glad you're able
to share it, buddy.
Thanks so much, jim.
Thank you so much.
One, two, three go.
It was a hell of a turnaroundgoing from net help desk to a
Formula One partner.
I had a weird scenario and aweird problem that was presented
to me to go and manage where wehad the right product and no
one knew who we were.
So then, suddenly, extroverted,tim comes out the box and we
have to come in like a tornadoand we have to leverage the
(00:23):
tools.
We have to go and cause as muchnotoriety as we can and
awareness to get people tounderstand who we are, because
as soon as we knew, as soon aspeople saw the product, being a
product-led team with technicalfounders, that is likely going
to be the best fit and they'llbe really excited to use it.
Welcome to Now that's it storiesof MSP success, where we dive
into the journeys of some of thetrailblazers in our industry to
(00:45):
find out how they used theirpassion for technology to help
turn managed services into thethriving sector it is today.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Today's guest wasn't just named the CRN 2025 Channel
Chiefs List.
He didn't just get introducedinto the Channel Partners Circle
of Excellence.
He's doing something far morerare in the world of msp and psa
platforms he's building trustthrough momentum culture and the
power of listening to yourpartners.
(01:13):
I'm really excited todaybecause we have tim barton wines
on the now that's it podcast.
Welcome, tim, nice, nice, greatto be here.
Thanks, ch Chris.
This is going to be a lot offun.
I have been a big fan ofeverything you guys have done.
I can't hear enough from ourpartners and those in the
industry talking about all thegreat stuff, but today I want to
(01:35):
talk a little bit about you.
All right, I want to start withyou a little bit, so I like to
go in the way, way back machinehere.
Your start, while it wasn'tnecessarily off-brand for you,
doesn't typically lead tosoftware development.
Let's talk about your alcoholsales days.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
I've had a weird trajectory into the space where
I was working part-time at likea restaurant and then my gym
buddy's cousin was opening aspirits concession in a wine
shop and he was like, do youknow anyone that can help sell
(02:15):
some alcohol?
And then I got a text messageand I was like, yeah, I'll do
that.
So my first real job was avodka salesperson and I was
selling just premium alcohol ina in a wine shop to start with,
and that really taught me a lotabout, uh, the what it takes to
take a, you know, to go fromnothing into hustle.
I guess it was my first realtaste of hustling.
(02:36):
And then, moving on from there,I uh had I've got a lot of
friends who seem to refer me tojobs, because I had another
friend who had come back fromAustralia after traveling after
university and she was workingat a local sass company in
(02:58):
business continuity and where Ilive very small, like 20 20
person shop and uh, she wasdoing Q&A, it's like a
entry-level role and she uhasked me, uh, if I wanted to
come join her and I said, yeah,sure, because you know the
margin on alcohol is about sevenpercent.
It's you have to, you know, whenyou're 20 years old trying to
(03:19):
make money, that's all.
There's thousands of bottles ofalcohol before you actually
make a wage.
Um, but yeah, my first ever jobwhen I transitioned into the
sas industry was, uh, the sortof the job interview was can you
log into facebook?
Backwards from memory, I guessthat was just some sort of
functions test to make sure Iwas, you know, normal.
(03:41):
Yeah, I uh.
My first job was Excel sheetshundreds of lines.
Go here, click that, does thatwork?
Yes, next line.
And that was just my full-timejob.
That's great.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Now.
So what's interesting is thatpartners that don't know you uh
is probably going to go.
Wow, weird uh starting analcohol sales.
Those that do uh make sense.
Right, they're good Now theyunderstand.
Yeah, and it that's an insidejoke.
So for those that, sure I mean.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
I mean it won't take long from listening to me to
understand that I'm very irish,very extroverted.
Yeah, very much a people person.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Yeah, you're yeah, you're a great host let's I'm a
great host.
Yeah, that's a good way ofputting it awesome.
So how did you discover haloand when did you meet Paul?
Speaker 1 (04:29):
That's a good question.
So how did I meet Paul?
How did it all start?
So, to carry on from that story, doing Q&A at his little SMB
business continuity firm calledVocal Limited way back when, got
promoted into customer support,then into internal IT, then
(04:52):
technical account management andthen I started doing
implementations.
Then that company got acquiredby a large, a much larger US
firm and then he floated on theNASDAQ and I suddenly became
employee number 2000 or whatever.
And then I was.
(05:14):
Then the cubicles came in and itgot very corporate and serious.
I kind of had a moment.
I kind of woke up one day and Ithought is this how I die?
I'm just going to die in thiscubicle.
So I pulled myself out, went touniversity, started a business
degree and then realized thatthe commitment was only like
seven hours a week.
I didn't need to quit my job.
So then I got a bit restless,sitting around all day because
(05:39):
the content was pretty bare, andthen I thought I still had all
the contacts from my alcoholdays.
So I actually started a companycalled Barton's Wines and
Spirits Limited and started likea 20, whatever I was a young,
20 year old something.
I was selling alcohol globallyand limited success.
(06:04):
To my point earlier aboutmargins.
And then I also picked up apart-time role for a Canadian
business continuity firm whospecialized in disaster recovery
software, sort of emergencycommunications and I was doing
implementations and working inthe square mile of London,
(06:25):
working with, I mean, you nameit the Shard.
We worked with Royal Mail, weworked with Michael Kors, some
cool names and, yeah,essentially that part-time, the
side hustle was growing analcohol business.
And then when I finished mydegree, I thought I'd start
(06:45):
applying to graduate roles tosee what where that could land
me, because I tapered off thealcohol business because of the
reasons as a young 20 year old,you need to raise a lot of
capital to be able to do thatscale and make a good living,
and that was not something I wasable to do.
So I went on.
Indeed, you know there was asupply into, like Fujitsu and
(07:08):
others, and there's this littlead that said graduate scheme,
net help desk in Stone MarketApplied to.
It went down.
There.
I was in a three piece suit.
Minds View was with Paul, thefounder of Halo.
Um, this is not where we wereback then.
This was, like you know, we'retalking 2016, where it was, um,
(07:33):
and we had a renovated pub, wasthe office, which is super
english.
Now we reflect on it all theseyears later.
That is a.
It's a funny starting point forwhere we are today.
Um, and then, yeah, paul was inflip-flops, shorts and a
t-shirt.
Um, we sat down and then therewas like a three hour long
(07:53):
interview, like multiple officetours.
Um, and I later found out thatif paul likes you, after the
first sort of 10 minutes he'llstart selling halo to you.
Um, and yeah, uh, from thereoff we went.
That's how I met paul.
That was my first interactionswith halo.
And then I um, even though I hadprevious experience, everyone
(08:13):
in a graduate scheme becausehalo just for clarity, halo only
, uh, employs graduates.
If you go to, you know our jobboard today.
If you go, look at it, there'sone job and it's the halo
graduate scheme and we'regrowing so fast.
You'll come in, you'll um,wherever your strengths lie,
you'll gravitate towards.
So, if you're extroverted sales, if you're uh, if we can, if
(08:33):
you're technical but can happyspeaking to customers, you'll go
into, uh, sort of consultancy,implementations, onboardings,
and if you're just very, verytechnical and introverted,
you'll end up probably in the,in the development team.
Yeah, um, but yeah.
So came in, spent 12 months onsupport and then onwards that
journey went from there sopre-halo, psa, you come in as a
(08:55):
support guy.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Uh, which, again, when we talked about that up
until this point, minus, minusthe wine sales, very, very sort
of introverted jobs, right, yourQ&A support Support.
There's some customerinteraction, but not the Tim
that we know today right.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Yes, I've had to can this up.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Yeah, bottled it up, and so pre-Halo PSA days.
What was Halo like at?
Speaker 1 (09:29):
the time.
Sure, so Halo, like at the time, was actually called NetHelp
Desk, way back when.
It was a Windows applicationand it was not the glamour, the
craziness you see today.
I was employee number 11.
So the entire team on a Fridaycould fit around a table at the
(09:49):
local pub.
It was very, very small, veryfocused.
I mean, where we were wasnothing nice, it was a very how
do I say this?
It was a very different officeand we kind of had to look
around at each other and go.
You know God, we need to putour heads together and get
ourselves out of here, which waskind of the mentality, I guess.
(10:12):
And what happened the transitionfrom their help desk into Halo
was Paul.
I remember just like it was.
Yesterday, paul came into thekitchen in the old office and he
was like, do you like the otherTim?
And I was like, yeah, he's allright, I've not had much
(10:32):
interaction.
And then next thing, I knew Iwas in a room probably half the
size of this where I put up thefirst Halo PSA website, which
we'd only taken down and changedrecently.
And he put up the first HaloPSA website which we'd only
taken down and changed recently.
And he put up the first trialand we probably did about 30% of
what a PSA was meant to do andoff I went.
(10:53):
It was just me and him and oneother guy, ross, who did the
onboardings and that was thegenesis.
And the story is that Halostarted in the ITSM space.
So we started off as a helpdesk, matured into creating a
full service desk, matured intocreating a full ITSM, then ESM,
(11:13):
and along the way, we hadaccumulated probably a few
hundred MSP customers who werejust using it for basic
ticketing and we were kind oflike you know, we took this
decision, so I think it was 2017, 2018.
If we should let this part ofthe customer base just die, or
we just all focus on ITSM or wedo something about it.
And Dan was up for having acrack at it and he took me along
(11:36):
the way.
I guess it's probably the bestway you could put it.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
It's fascinating to see how quickly you guys have
evolved as a major player in themarket.
But where it started fromObviously great foundations, the
ITSM product is very relevantin the Halo PSA side, but those
early days it was a ticketingsystem.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Yeah exactly, it was a ticketing system.
But I guess what created thatplatform?
I guess if you distill down whyHalo has got to the position it
has today, it comes down toprobably the foundation that
Paul the founder has laid.
So if you meet Paul verytechnical Scottish guy, wears
kilts to events and he has afunny story where he grew up in
(12:24):
quite a poor village at the tiptop of Scotland.
When I say tip top of ScotlandI mean he opens the front door,
he looks north and there's thesea.
He got a degree doing computerscience and then got a graduate
job at EY and he absolutelyhated the culture there, where
(12:44):
it was not how good you are, itwas who you knew.
And the catalyst that createdHalo was actually a book called
Maverick by Ricardo Semler andit's this crazy story of how a
Brazilian businessman inheriteda business which had very
(13:06):
traditional corporate values,hierarchies, you know,
meaningless jobs and this sortof journey where he transformed
this into a very profitablebusiness.
And that message sort ofresonated with Paul.
It sort of aligned to all thethings he thought anyway, and
(13:27):
then he felt very emboldened totake those values and just run
with them.
And Paul was a very all ornothing guy and he will.
He will just do it with zerocompromise.
So we ended up using and so,basically, basically, paul, for
example, was a big believer inbeing privately owned.
He thinks he's never going todie.
(13:48):
He figures out where the valueis, he just goes for it.
So, long story short, he spent15 years from a bedroom growing
in.
Well, actually, the story isthat he met the other co-founder
when EY was working with an MSP, and Alan, who's now retired
because he's got about 25 yearson pool and pool's in his
(14:10):
mid-40s.
But Alan had created an onlinespace to store stuff for a local
council back in the 90s and theproject got canned canned.
Alan was just a hardcoredeveloper and he had taken this
(14:31):
um, he had taken this offlineand just started playing
building it as a hobby very much, and then he started an msp.
He left the council and that'show he met paul.
This is about circa 2005, 2006.
And Paul was like Alan, you cancommercialize this.
And then they came to anagreement and off Paul went.
(14:51):
He was the sales team, theonboarding, the account
management, the billing team,and it was just him for about
five years, about 2011.
And then he started hiring morestaff and I came in at number
11.
And then the real moments whereit became halo as we know it
today was we were quite late, ifyou um, to the the web app game
(15:14):
, so we were still.
You know, we're talking 2017,we're still a windows
application, which is unheard of, right, um?
And we had the advantage thatum, meta facebook had released a
, a brand new and open sourced,uh, a webframe technology called
(15:36):
react at the time, way backwhen, and it was a very easy way
, uh, to create modern, sparseapplications over old Angular
web frame tool sets.
So, yeah, basically we wereearly adopters of that, so we
actually leapfrogged thecompetition because we had
(15:56):
waited so long to do it.
And then we were just NetHelpDesk one platform we served
everyone.
We decided to focus down themarketing, so we changed our
name to Halo, because the nameNetHelpDesk doesn't conjure up
lovely, modern software.
And then we'd added acronyms tothe end of the names.
So you knew what you weregetting into when we changed our
(16:19):
brand.
Halo had no equity.
No one knew what it was.
So if you had the word psa atthe end, you knew what you're
getting.
So when we updated the name,updated the front end, it was
still a bit spotty, but it's forthe psa.
It's the psa side of thebusiness and the story there um,
it didn't post covid 21, wejust got billing into the web
(16:41):
app.
So you never, never, needed toleave the web application, uh,
to do your day-to-day operations.
And soon, as soon as that momenthappened and the lockdown
releases came off, it was me onmy own for four years selling
halo globally.
And it was, you know, we'retalking a few hundred msps a
(17:01):
month.
We were moving towards Halo atthat stage and the actual
catalyst of how we became known,the go-to-market strategy was.
We just put Tim Bowers onReddit for a year and said be
friendly, be helpful, but don'tbe confrontational.
And that was it.
(17:22):
A year later, we'd built areputation, people were telling
other people and we were able totake advantage of the community
spirits of the MSP space.
You sure have.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
You guys could write a book on the marketing that you
guys have put together, andwe'll talk more about that in a
minute.
But let's go back to the sales.
So selling Halo PSA this isyour first sort of SaaS sales
role, right?
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Yes, it is First one, and it didn't necessarily start
off great after the first one.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
You want to tell that story, yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
I'll tell that story.
That's a fun bit.
So I had done at this pointevery other role apart from
sales in the software industry,in SaaS, and I was doing
implementations.
I was doing implementations.
I asked Paul if I could do this, because the best software
salespeople are technical andalso extroverted.
(18:11):
When you have thosecharacteristics, you know you'll
gravitate towards that spaceanyway and you'll be probably
pretty good at it.
So I asked Paul to do that.
Paul was very reluctant and heended up asking me to do
outbound phone call SDR rolesand I was calling a hundred
(18:35):
people a day as a target and Idid that for about a month and
then it didn't yield manyresults because that sales cycle
was a bit short and Paul was abit skeptical.
And then he said to me I'llnever be a good salesperson,
which is very funny now we lookback on it, sure, together, and
I then moved into that and thenbasically this is around right
(18:55):
around the time of the, thecarving up from NetHopDesk to
Halo, and it was Tim and Tim, meand the other Tim, and then,
ironically, on the other side,it was Tom and Tom.
So it was Tim and Tim, me andthe other Tim, and then,
ironically, on the other side itwas Tom and Tom.
So it was Tim and Tim and Tomand Tom, itsm, psa, and off we
went.
And then I was.
That was my first sales roleand at the moment, at the time,
(19:15):
I didn't know what to say.
I didn't know what I was doing.
There was no real training.
I had the other Tom to help meout with some written persuasive
content, but that was prettymuch it.
I just sort of unleashed.
I guess that was a moment, toyour point, where I sort of
unbottled Tim and became thestart of who I am today.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Wow, To think back of a different Tim that didn't
know what to say or how to havethat conversation.
Oh, that's amazing.
All right, so let's talk alittle bit about your
go-to-market strategy.
Halo PSA was was different thanHalo uh, itsm.
So why was that?
Why was it different?
(19:55):
How was it different?
Why was that?
You know, why did you go adifferent direction with, with
the go-to-market?
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah, so the well so the so we decided whether or not
we wanted to let that part ofthe customer base die.
So not wanting to do that wasthe motivation.
The use cases between a PSA andan ITSM slash ESM are
relatively similar.
We are serving either internalIT teams or external IT teams,
(20:21):
people who are selling their ITexperience, msps so the core
service engine between theproducts is shared and then the
bits around the outside includeall the commercial bits, so the
CRM, contracts, quotes, billing,the go-to-market strategy was
different because of theaudiences, of course, and the
(20:43):
markets.
So we were able to benefit fromthe community of the MSP space
that was created way back whenwith Arnie Bellini and allowed
us not to have to spend loads ofmoney on marketing.
So we had no money in marketingand we just put Tim Bowers on
Reddit and called it good, andthat yielded massive results.
By the way, that was a huge ROIfor us.
Where on the itsm solid houseit was we spent millions on
(21:07):
white papers, google ads and hadvery limited success.
So I mean at this.
So to give you an example, atthis stage in 2025, I reckon we
have about a 30 brand andproduct awareness, so I reckon
one in three of all ms know whoHalo are or have heard the name,
but in the ITSM space I reckonit's 2% or 3%.
(21:29):
So we've been able toaccelerate through the MSP space
in terms of awareness wayquicker than the ITSM space,
just because of the nature ofthe market and it's basically
due to the community aspects ofthe MSP industry.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
So most of your marketing comes from sort of
that organic communityinteraction.
But you have spent some money.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
So you mentioned the F1 deal was really, really
critical.
That's been your key.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Yeah, that was a funny moment.
So everyone probably now knowsas far as what we are in terms
of how we are related tomotorsport and uh, but if
anything, you know, we had theentire leadership team are
technical.
Uh, we are privately owned, wedevelop in-house and we had
spent no money on marketing for15 years and we were waiting
(22:22):
until the product was right.
And then it was right as in,like it was, we were winning.
You know, the conversion rateon a first interaction was about
70%, so you'd never heard of us.
You tried it.
It was almost likely a greatfit.
And then, um, um, at thatmoment we were like right, now's
the time, what do we do?
(22:43):
And I got a text from paul Ithink it was 23 january 23 and I
got you know, when you get likea horrible task from your boss
and it's like how that, am Igoing to do this?
Yeah, um, so paul would text meand he is uh, there's one
sentence can you connect me tosome F1 teams?
(23:04):
And I was like, right, okay,how do you know?
Because you go on theirwebsites.
There's no contact us.
And after the fact, I found outthat 99% of all inbound leads
that they get are junk.
F1 teams find their sponsors byoutbound reaching and they'll
decide which brands they want towork with and it typically that
(23:25):
works best for them.
So I had to do some funny stuffto figure out the right person
to speak to and then gettingtheir email address, and then I
drafted a script and what I wasgoing to say to each one.
And then me and paul had athing where I would go in the
room, set the scene and would Iwould text Paul and he would
then join.
So I could you know, becausewhen you're talking about eight
(23:48):
figure deals with some of thetop top percent of sales guys on
earth, you're working F1 deals.
They qualify pretty quickly,upfront, whether or not this is
a good fit because the moneyinvolved is horrendous.
So a month later I'd managed tocontact about eight out of the
10 teams on the grid.
If you want an idea or numbersof pretty fun, one Mercedes
(24:10):
wanted, I think it was 25million euros a year on a three
year deal and you didn't get asticker on the car.
I'll probably get in troublefor saying that, but whatever,
and yeah, so the numbers were,yeah crazy.
I mean that was probably about40 of our revenue at the time.
So it was like, right, okay,this is um.
And uh, yeah, we got really faralong the way with mclaren,
(24:33):
ferrari and aston martin.
Then it became a game of who'slying, because they're all
saying I will be winning soon.
So me, me and Paul and the guyshad to put our heads together
to figure out where the best betis.
And it just felt reallyauthentic.
With McLaren, they were 10thout of 10th at the grid all the
time.
Alonso and Aston Martin weregetting podiums suddenly and it
(24:55):
was like you know, but it feltright, the gut was there and it
felt when we were gettingtowards the tail end of that
deal and signing stuff, um, and,by the way, uh, when you're
dealing with those sort of deals, you know you have like
freebies in our world, maybelike a ramp period.
You have a ramp period in thatworld.
It's like, oh, we'll fly you toLas Vegas, come to a trade
(25:17):
track, we track, we'll spend,we'll put you in a paddock club.
Those sort of interactions arejust it's like it's off the
scale.
I've never seen anything likeit.
Um, but yeah, we, you know wewere, we signed that deal, it.
It felt like a bad thing at thetime.
Uh, obviously very exciting.
We have to see through all thethe fluff.
And then me and paul drove up,uh and richard drove up to MTC
(25:42):
McLaren's HQ.
Zach Brown, the CEO of McLarenracing, was there.
Ironically, when you look atthe cars there's like Cisco,
cisco, microsoft, google, veryserious corporate gray companies
and there's a local countryclub next to the MTC where they
normally stay, because me andPaul are not from money and Halo
(26:02):
is privately owned and we're abit scrappy and this is like
we're easily the smallestpartner on that card in terms of
size of employees, number ofemployees.
But we turned up, we booked thetravel lodge which is, just for
everyone's record, is an entrylevel hotel.
(26:23):
The police were outside, uh,knocking on one of the rooms as
we left because of, uh, the sortof place we were staying.
We didn't matter, we actuallyshared a room.
It's very funny, um, and thenthe guys at mclaren were like,
oh, where did you stay?
You know, did you fly in?
Did you stay at the countryclub?
And we were kind of like, oh no, we just put the travel lodge.
And then uh came on down.
I've got some great photos ofPaul signing his F1 deal.
(26:45):
So it was a hell of aturnaround going from net help
desk to a Formula One partner.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
You had to.
So a gut feel is one thingright.
A lot of MSPs they say, oh, weshould spend this money on
marketing or buy this billboardor whatever it is.
I have a partner that has abillboard at one of the MLB
stadiums and I saw what thatcost and I say, how do you
justify that?
(27:10):
So you talked a little bitabout being nervous and you
weren't sure that it was right.
I mean, thinking back,obviously you've spent this
money.
You've got to figure out was itworth it.
I mean it's already been spent.
But there's also the perception.
So, how do you deal with that?
Speaker 1 (27:27):
That's a great question.
Why does any company sponsoranything?
Normally it's not for a goodreason, or it's used for a
peripheral purpose or a target.
It's great.
It's a great question.
Msps should ask that question.
(27:47):
So Halo had no awareness Zeroand that was the most
cost-effective deal to get in onan F1 car and it was more
cost-effective than the others.
And we use it as a veryspecific purpose to gain
(28:11):
notoriety.
We probably won't do it forever.
We're using it to go from zeroto a percentage over our next
couple of years being a partnerwhen that deal lapses, we'll see
what happens use it veryspecifically just to go to come
into a room.
No one's ever seen this before.
We had the idea of wearing therace suits so people could see
(28:33):
us and be aware of us, becausethe likelihood is that if we get
people engaged with us and theysee the software, they'll
realize, oh, the software isreally good.
Um, which was?
Which was the purpose?
So I had a weird.
I had a weird scenario and aweird problem that was presented
to me to go and manage where wehad the right product and no
one knew who we were.
(28:53):
So then suddenly, extroverted,tim comes out the box and we
have to come in like a tornadoand we have to leverage the
tools.
We have to go and cause as muchnotoriety as we can and
awareness to get people tounderstand who we are.
Because as soon as we knew, assoon as people saw the product,
being a product-led team oftechnical founders, that is
likely going to be the best fitand they'll be really excited to
(29:14):
use it.
But yeah, it has a veryspecific purpose.
It was the most cost-effectivedeal and we're not going to be
doing this forever, likely.
But yeah, that's a greatquestion.
That's something I would ask aswell.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
First of all, it's done wonders.
I mean, I've known you for thelast several years.
You come to these events.
You've got your McLaren in thecorner Like you've got people
come into your booth even ifit's just to see the car.
Like you've got people comeinto your booth even if it's
just to see the car, but you'vegot their attention and then he
can say, oh, we have this badasspsa by the way as well.
(29:49):
And so you have that faith, youknow, that confidence in what
you built.
It's just getting awarenessright.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
It was that was, that was the scenario, and it's uh,
you know, if you come to a halobooth, we will likely have a tv
on the stand.
Yeah, so we will.
Literally as soon as you seethe shiny McLaren, you walk
towards the guys in the red racesuits which are probably going
to retire after this eventthey're getting a bit tatty now,
but we have a screen.
We get the product to youstraight away.
We want to show you the product.
It's not book a demo, come downlater.
(30:16):
If you approach a Halo boothand it's off the sides, it will
have tvs that we want to showyou the product as soon as you
come over and we know that itwill be a great fit.
But when you're in a room withhundreds of vendors all doing
similar things, how do you standout?
Speaker 2 (30:30):
and the answer, it turns out, is wear a big race
suit and get an f1 deal so it'sbeen really neat, tim uh, you
guys aren't the new kids on theblock, but you.
There's a buzz about Halo rightnow that hasn't existed for
really any of the vendors in theMSP space.
One of the most interestingthings that happened in the last
(30:51):
year was you guys publicly cameout and said we're not going to
sell right, so no acquisitions,no private equity, entirely
private funded.
And Paul, your founder, he'staken a bold right somewhat
stance by putting this out there.
Why is speaking of Paul like?
Can you add some context tothat positioning?
(31:12):
Where that comes from?
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Yes, that's a funny one.
So Paul is not a big believerin private equity.
Yeah, halo gets approached byevery name you can think of in
our space, and private equityinvestment firms as well, every
single week.
And the answer is always thesame we are officially not for
sale and Halo is.
You know, I think.
I think the best way I candescribe this is Paul took a
(31:36):
real roll of the dice because inthose early days and I couldn't
have done it, you know, it wasdicey and there was not a lot of
money, and then suddenly itwasn't right, it wasn't right,
it wasn't right.
And then it's right and Ireally feel Paul, he feels
vindicated, that he took along-term gamble and a bet and
(31:57):
it's paid off and he's nowriding the journey that he
created for himself and theplatform he's provided us, the
rest of the team, with to go andcreate the world's best
software company is somethingthat's not been done elsewhere.
I can't imagine another firm inour space being like let's just
take a 15-year bet that we'lleventually be a good fit and
(32:19):
most teams will start a company,go, raise some capital and off
they go.
Halo's entirely owned by Pauland a couple of other employees
and, yeah, essentially we got toa size.
I think it was 2022.
And we had just won Microsoft.
So Microsoft, a division ofMicrosoft in Seattle, had moved
from Dynamics to Halo, the cloudresourcing division, and people
(32:42):
were getting worried that wewere going to get acquired, and
I think it was Paul and Tim thatgot together and they were like
, well, we're not going to dothis.
What would it mean if we justpublicly announced that for a
rolling 10-year period we're notgoing to be involved in
anything and that's like sothat's per contract.
So if you sign a contract today, 10 years from that contract
date, it will roll.
(33:03):
So it feels we signed today.
It means at the minimum in 2025, we're not going to do anything
until 2035.
That's how long term we think.
And then, yeah, we announced itand it was probably one of the
most positive PR releases we'veever done yeah because that sort
of said to the rest of theindustry you know, if you
(33:24):
distill it down, halo and theleadership team are a bunch of
technical geeks who were justbuilding their own dream
software company that they'dwant to use themselves is
probably the best way I'd put it.
But that was a wild moment in22 where we took that stance.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
So when I think about where Halo is in the spectrum
of PSAs or ITSM platforms, in myopinion you've sort of caught
ConnectWise, and now you haveyour sights on sort of
ServiceNow.
How has that changed yourday-to-day?
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Yeah, that's a funny one.
So I work with our largestteams globally.
So when I started out Iremember very distinctly
thinking a 10-man team was alarge MSP and ConnectWise felt
like this huge target in thedistance we're not able to reach
.
And I'd probably say in thelast 18 months a point came
where very large teams weremoving from ConnectWise to Halo
(34:18):
more often than not and I thinkat that point I think this is
sort of late 23,.
We had overtaken the maturity,uh, of functionality and connect
wise.
And then I would say most of myday to day now is working with
some of the largest teams onearth as they mostly come up
against service now um and othercustomer spoke platforms.
(34:41):
So I've gone from working withsmaller shops helping them get
more out of their existing PSAsday to day, and I spend a lot
more of my time working withenterprise clients, some of the
largest on earth, which is acrazy moment for me.
I'm having to really change alot of how my talk is.
It's transitioned a lot fromraw functionality into strategic
(35:05):
enterprise service techniques,which has been a fun skill set
to learn and a new challenge forme.
As it's meant it's not got tostay all for me.
But yeah, now you know, in theITSM space it's driven from the
ITSM space.
So Halo was in the ITSMm spacefirst and it means that we are.
We are out of the box, idlealigned, so we're full v4 at the
(35:28):
moment and, uh, it means thatthe maturity of the service
engine on the itsm side hasalways led the way on the psa
side and there's a fewinteresting things.
So, for example, um, it feelslike we are helping msps align
to itil.
So if they're doing co-managedit with larger teams who demand
(35:48):
that of their msps, it's justnative out the box of halo.
Something else would be as wellwould be the service portal,
typically an afterthought inthis space, I feel like from my,
my lens, but in halo it's theit Halo it's because of the
requirements set.
That differs from MSPs.
In the internal IT space.
It means that the portalexperience is second to none.
(36:11):
I mean we go up againstServiceNow and win.
So if you're trying to movefrom an omni-channel service
delivery model and bring itunder a single high-quality
portal experience unbeatable inthe space today.
So there's been cool contrastlike that I would say yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
So I, as a former msp , I always felt that there was a
gap.
We went from connect wise toservice now and I always felt
like service now was a littletoo much, uh, a little too
robust, a little too you couldcustomize everything.
Do you feel like you're fillingthat gap?
Speaker 1 (36:43):
now or are there some other things?
So there's a conversation withservice now versus halo.
Is we'll do probably 90something percent of idle
alignments of service now forabout 20 percent the cost.
That's the, the raw deal, butthe, um, the raw contrast.
But the, the, the but the rawcontrast.
(37:04):
But the detail is the fact thatHalo is so, for example,
servicenow, you need to have anoverhead of developers to help
you manage and build andmaintain this thing.
Halo, because of our Reactframework technology, halo's
setup has standardizedconfigurations, so it means that
(37:25):
, um, you don't need codingability to be able to build out
your halo account, and thematurity of the tool set means
that it will do.
If you're less, you know,unless you're, if you're north
of 90 percent idle alignmentrequired, you have those
requirements.
You're probably bank, and ifyou're not a bank or HSBC or
something else or a very matureorganization, why are you
(37:49):
spending the extra?
But it was an over-option.
So interesting to your point iswe were accelerating through
the marketplace at a certainrate and we were starting to
sort of plateau off.
It felt like, and as we've gotin the last um year or so, um,
for the largest teams on earth,if you had requirements north of
(38:10):
connect wise with the serviceuh model.
Um, it felt like you'd eitherdo uh, I won't mention names,
but you'll do.
You'll either lean on connectwise for custom development.
You'd either use a bit ofConnectWise and then just custom
build your own tools around itto do what you wanted it to do,
or you would go and buyServiceNow and sort of fit a
(38:31):
square peg into a round hole.
And a lot of those teams who areusing ServiceNow are
transitioning to Halo.
Some of the largest teams onEarth are moving from
ConnectWise to Halo.
It just means that the velocityof the onboarding, the codeless
nature, means you don't need tohave a technology team to
manage it and build it day today.
(38:51):
It gives you way more agility.
It's a more modern tool set andwith ServiceNow, when you
bespoke create your ownServiceNow, you then have to
have quite tough supportrequirements.
So because Halo hasstandardized config, it means
that you can pick up the phoneand get someone to support you
on your account tomorrow.
But the teams that move fromServiceNow to Halo, they
(39:14):
typically save north of amillion a year and their service
increases and they have a moremodern product.
So it's a real landslide.
So, to answer your question, atthe top end of the market it's
felt underserved and it meansthat the largest teams on earth
can use Halo over service nowand increase their profitability
(39:36):
and get a better deal at theend of the day.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
So, speaking of these sort of two markets, you've got
these enterprise, this top end,and then you have the MSP
market, which, by the way,there's some MSPs that
definitely fit in thatenterprise but the majority of
the market are smaller teams.
How is Halo going to continueto service both sides?
Speaker 1 (39:57):
Yeah, yeah that's a great question.
So, because of the productsconstantly moving, we have an
internal development team basedin the UK.
We have offices in Seattle, inFlorida, uk and Australia.
Four international offices, orfour offices, 250 staff between
them.
Halo is.
We only sell one product, weuse it ourselves to run our own
(40:20):
business and we do a releaseevery two weeks, but a large,
polished, quarterly, stable.
So over that period we'vematured the product and it means
that as it's growing andgetting more mature, we are
starting to take lowerenterprise use cases.
So we're working with Red Bullright now, which is north of a
(40:44):
thousand technicians, a veryserious use case, very complex
requirements, different world towhat a small MSP would require.
So the engine will handle thosecapabilities and it will be
built out accordingly so it cando.
But we spend a lot of time, um,with the out-of-box trial
(41:05):
experience to make it assimplistic as you need it to be.
So, to your point, there'sprobably a period, you know,
it's probably a point in ajourney of a, an organization,
where they go from needing asingle psa and sort of
transitioning into best of breed.
So you know, at scale, if we'reinterested it's not worth
(41:26):
upsetting hundreds and hundredsof sales staff or HR staff to
cat them into a single PSAsolution.
Because, you know, halo's CRMcapability is not on par with
Salesforce's for an enterpriseuse case, which is not a
dramatic thing to say and itmeans that you would probably.
(41:47):
But Halo's service engine is.
It competes with the world'sbest.
So there's actually atransition point where teams
will go from PSA to ITSM and ina recent you'll see this shortly
that we are dropping theacronyms off of our name.
Now.
We felt talking about exposureearlier.
We feel that we now have thebrand equity, that you just know
(42:08):
who Halo are.
So it's now usehalocom, theHalo platform, and there are use
cases that can be done and it'sa Lego set to build in what you
want it to be.
So that's the background.
How do we keep it relevant forsmall teams?
Yeah, in all honesty, they'llprobably become a point where we
it won't be a good fit for thesmallest teams.
(42:30):
They will.
You know, using like an Atera,synchro or super ops would be a
better fit.
So I had someone tell me, whichis a great way of thinking
about this.
You know you can cross a riverin a battleship, but do you need
to?
So, but some of the work I didlast year because I work quite
(42:50):
hard with this.
But you know, out of the boxtrial, we keep simplistic as we
can to help small teams pick itup and I um, one of the reasons
I won that award you mentionedat the start of this podcast was
, uh, I had worked with ninja tocreate this bundle and offer it
at scale to teams to give themone place to get those tools for
(43:15):
teams who are just gettingstarted, so they can skip the
whole RMNPSA one tool which,once you get past a few people,
you get out of maturity prettyquickly.
So there's loads of initiatives.
It's hard to do to take a, youknow, a mona lisa and make it
(43:35):
out of duplo sometimes so Iwould uh, yeah, we work hard.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
It will be difficult to support a scale over time, I
reckon you've done a a prettydarn good job of it, so I'm
sure'm sure you'll continue foras long as you can.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
Yeah, I agree, there's no plans to do that, but
you need to be ready for a toolset that will be the last PSA
you move to.
So if you're ready for that,it's there waiting for you.
We have a lot of onboardingpartners.
I'm doing a series.
We're actually launching ahundred part series on youtube,
(44:11):
I think later this year or next,where it's just a step-by-step
onboarding onboard it yourself.
So we're we're doing our bestto standardize and help that as
much as we can.
Um, but yeah, it is.
It is definitely a balance soyou have been.
Speaker 2 (44:26):
You personally have had the last five years been an
incredible run.
You've been traveling the worldselling halo psa.
You're growing this incrediblebusiness.
You're the coo now of thisamazing brand.
But what's next for tim bartonwines?
What are your goals?
Speaker 1 (44:42):
uh, what's my goals?
I am probably the travel less.
Um, we feel like we've got tothis point in our journey now
where the exposure is at a pointwe're satisfied with.
I think everyone now mostlyknows who Halo are.
For me, what's up next?
(45:03):
Let's talk about it.
I think there's a few thingsthat are on my mind which I'm
working on right now.
One of them is we want to lookat our contracts again and I
we're discussing internally whatit would mean to create the
fairest contracts on earth, like, for example, slas.
If we breach an sla, you getcompensation automatically
applied.
What would it mean if we justcreated the fairest contracts on
(45:26):
earth?
So that's something we'rediscussing in real time right
now.
Another thing we're looking atis compliance as a service, so
I'm working quite hard to tryand get that into the platform
to allow teams to get into thatspace and facilitate it with
relative ease.
I'm also um announcing somestuff at the show, and you let
(45:48):
me know if I could talk about itnow.
Sure, you can.
Okay, so let's talk about whatsort of craziness I pulled
together for Empower 25, whichI'm hopefully you will enjoy.
This is pretty happy with thisone.
So one of the things we did wasI had a moment because I work
with hundreds of our top teamsevery year contrasting the use
(46:09):
cases and I can spot the gaps.
So one of the things I noticedwas a lot of our customers had
the capability to do new startuprequests but hadn't automated
it.
So I sat down with Alex Golden,one of our top technical guys
at Halo, and I said is there away we could create a script and
(46:33):
ship it in Halo for free thatwould allow teams to pick up
Halo, integrate it into CSP andachieve zero touch news data
requests, which would savehundreds of hours a year for
technicians?
And we figured it out.
We are launching that tomorrow.
It's already in the trials onthe website, so you can just go
to our website and start thetrial, hook up CSP and you've
(46:56):
achieved it.
That's number one.
Number two is leading on fromthat because, like Enable Best
of Three Partners, we're tryingto work with enterprise MSPs and
we're trying to be everythingthey need all in one space for
your entire tech stack, andwe've recognized that's
something we're both really goodat and we work very hard
(47:18):
together to unify thatexperience and integrate it as
much as possible to create avery seamless suite that an MSP
can pick up at scale withenterprise requirements and
deliver effective service betterthan anywhere else.
Create a very seamless suitethat an MSP can pick up at scale
with enterprise requirementsand deliver effective service
better than anywhere else.
So one of those things isthere's two things.
One of them is working with amutual partner, roost, who is an
automation platform.
(47:40):
They've, you know, halo'srunbook capability will do about
30% of what roost does.
Roost is more polished and itgoes way deeper than what we can
do, uh, today.
Um, so I got chatting.
When was it?
I think I had a couple drinkswith the cro charlie, which is
very yeah on brand, yeah, and uh, I said to him what would it
(48:02):
mean if we, you know, broughtthis together and you created
like a Halo automation pack inRoost as a product that a
customer could come along, buyRoost, buy the Halo automation
pack, bolt it into Halo.
And there was sort of almostlike a light bulb moment and we
(48:23):
created we're starting out bydoing off boardings so Roost in
record time, I might add, whichI'm dead impressed with they, um
, were able to create a veryintricate like multiple, like
it's tens of steps withinessential halo and roost to be
able to have a customer fill outa request, a off-boarding
(48:47):
request form, in the portal, inHalo's portal.
It would go off into roost andit would remove everything.
So zero touch off-boarding aswell, and we're going to be
building out a portfolio ofthese automations as a pack and
we are announcing thatpartnership official partnership
and it's live today and it's inthe trial.
So for small msps, people whoare just picking up halo,
(49:13):
there's zero touch news startersand we'll do more with that.
For teams who need more and wantmore and have bigger
requirements, we have thepartnership with roost which
will really cement and make.
I guess what it's doing is it'staking the hardest automations
out there and making it reallyaccessible, which we're.
I think that's the.
The value, and then the biggestone which everyone at enable
(49:38):
and at halo has been workingreally hard for the last six
months on, is halo is becomingthe most integrated partner with
enable.
So we enable from lovingly.
Thank you forever.
You are the first RMM on themarket to create your
integration from your side intoHalo, because when Halo was
(49:59):
small fry, no one wanted to dealwith us, which is fair enough,
so we had to create it from ourside, but there's a lot of stuff
and automation and endpoints inyour API that we can see.
So, long story short, thenCentral integration into Halo
is being revamped.
It has richer device data beingpulled into Halo.
(50:20):
It includes billing and itsyncs more often, which is super
cool.
That's just a free thing that'savailable in about two weeks
from today.
We also have the N-Siteintegration, n-site RMM.
We also have Passportal and thetwo new ones as well Adlumen
integration, so you can takethreats from Adlumen into Halo,
(50:43):
create tickets and automatethreat detection resolution at
scale, and the same with C cove,which is super cool.
So cove, adlumin and centralhave all been redone for this
show.
We're announcing it at thisshow.
Um, most integrated partner.
We are sort of presenting thepartnership two tools that work
really well together at scale.
(51:03):
All we need in one place foryour enterprise requirement.
Speaker 2 (51:08):
MSP.
I'm looking forward to thereaction at this announcement
this week and really, reallyexciting stuff, tim.
I appreciate you sharing thaton the pod and, by the time this
goes out… I hope I don't get introuble.
Speaker 1 (51:21):
I'm sorry in advance if I've told something I'm not
meant to.
Speaker 2 (51:24):
We'll be great.
So you are absolutely crushingit, tim.
My last question, the one Ialways like to ask folks, and I
heard a little bit of thisearlier, but when did you know,
tim?
Now that's it.
Speaker 1 (51:38):
When did I know?
Now, that's it there wasprobably.
When was it?
It was probably.
Do you know when it was?
I think it was.
It was a moment post COVID,because pre COVID, net help this
days, very early halo days.
It was a rough ride, I thinkwhen the first few months came
(52:04):
by after COVID and it started topick up and I was pulling
myself out of the swamp and it'sit felt like the reaction was
good from the msp market.
People were excited to see usand I think we could boil it
down uh, do you know what?
You know what?
(52:25):
I think the, the big, the.
That was probably the initialmoment.
I would say a big moment wasprobably actually at empower
last year when, uh, I came onstage in front of 750 people and
we and we shared with themsomething they'd never seen
before.
Uh, I had old team watching.
I thought do you know what?
(52:47):
This is it?
This is something that I'd behappy spending the rest of my
life doing, and since then it'sbeen more of the same.
But I really think there was ajump in just quality of life and
positive reaction when weactually felt like it locked in.
(53:07):
That was the moment.
It was probably, um, as anextrovert, as a attention seeker
, uh, walking off stage to around of applause and I've since
.
A number of those teams in theaudience I didn't know at the
time, one of those being impactnetworking, one of the joint
customers up in in chicago, erEric Alea, saw me for the first
(53:27):
time on that stage, and there'sother stories like that as well.
That really felt like that wasthe moment, where that was it.
Speaker 2 (53:35):
That's awesome, tim.
Tim, you guys are absolutelycrushing it.
I thank you so much for yourpartnership, your friendship,
over the years.
I wish you and the Halo teamthe absolute best in the future
and thank you so much for beingpart of the podcast.
Speaker 1 (53:49):
No, I appreciate it.
I think it's the first timesomeone's actually sat down and
asked about this story, sohopefully it's a good exclusive
for you.
Speaker 2 (53:56):
It's an interesting story and I'm glad you're able
to share it, buddy.
Thanks so much, jim.
Thank you so much.
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