October 22, 2024 • 30 mins
Are you looking to optimize your business IT and cybersecurity strategy? In this episode, we sit down with Rick Carpenter and Brian McCarthy of OpenTier Systems, an IT managed service provider that's been transforming businesses since 2006. We discuss their partnership, the unique IT solutions they provide, and how they help small businesses scale and stay secure in an ever-evolving tech landscape. Plus, we dive into trending topics like AI, automation, and cybersecurity. Tune in to learn how OpenTier Systems is empowering companies across the nation to thrive in a digital world!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Dane Shoemaker (00:03):
Alrighty. Well, welcome to the Shoemaker Films
podcast. I'm here today withRick and Brian of OpenTier
Systems. How are you guys doingtoday?
Brian McCarthy (00:10):
Doing alright. Thanks for having us.
Dane Shoemaker (00:12):
Yeah. Thanks for thanks for being a guest on
here. Tell me a little bit aboutOpenTier Systems.
Brian McCarthy (00:19):
Well, I'll I guess I'll take the lead on that
one. Yeah. OpenTier, we've beenaround since 2006.
Dane Shoemaker (00:24):
K.
Brian McCarthy (00:24):
We're an IT managed service provider. We
work with businesses mostly inthis Philadelphia, Delaware
Valley area.
Dane Shoemaker (00:32):
Okay.
Brian McCarthy (00:32):
We have some national clients, and we focus
on IT, networking,cybersecurity, voice over IP.
Okay. Building those solutionsout for small businesses that
are usually too small to, havetheir own internal
Dane Shoemaker (00:48):
We have some fans.
Brian McCarthy (00:48):
Yeah. We have we have fans over there.
Rick Carpenter (00:50):
Josh holding up our mission
Brian McCarthy (00:51):
vision. Nice.
Rick Carpenter (00:52):
He's like, don't forget.
Brian McCarthy (00:53):
Don't forget.
Dane Shoemaker (00:54):
Nice. Right. That's great.
And partners, co owners? Partners, co owners.
Yep.
Brian McCarthy (00:59):
We actually came together about a year and a half
ago, a little over a year and ahalf ago at this point. Okay.
Rick had his own entity at thefor number of years, and I'll
let him talk about that. And
Rick Carpenter (01:10):
Yeah. Same thing.
Dane Shoemaker (01:11):
I was
Rick Carpenter (01:11):
running a company called Beyond
Development since 2004. Brianand I, met through Josh, our
sales manager. We did a coupleprojects together, consulted,
talked, and then as thisindustry is growing and there's
going to be more regulatoryconcerns and the ability need to
scale and have more resourcesbecause you can't do IT just 9
to 5. Yeah. You have to have theability to do 247 resources.
(01:35):
So we combined forces, and it'sbeen great. It's really improved
our product, I think, and givenus the kept the small feel that
our customers liked.
Dane Shoemaker (01:44):
Yeah. Do you guys do you feel like you
brought different skills ordifferent capabilities to the
table? Yeah. Is it more justabout scale?
Brian McCarthy (01:53):
You know, it's about both. It's about scale. I
mean, we both have a a prettysimilar skill set Okay. From
what we're doing, but we figuredwhen we were joining forces that
I I would focus more on thebusiness development, business
aspect and and Rick focusingmore on the technical service
side.
Dane Shoemaker (02:08):
Okay.
Brian McCarthy (02:08):
Yeah. So Got it. The ability to divide and
conquer a little bit.
Rick Carpenter (02:11):
Sure.
Dane Shoemaker (02:11):
And so you're the business. He's the technical
Rick Carpenter (02:13):
Yeah. The ability to Dip
Dane Shoemaker (02:15):
your toes into both a little bit.
Rick Carpenter (02:16):
Stats was great. Yeah. And also having someone
else who trusts as an authoritywhere if you previously, if I
could not find the answer, therewas no other option.
Dane Shoemaker (02:26):
Yeah.
Rick Carpenter (02:26):
And now just having a second person of equal
skill being able to say, hey.Can you take a look at that?
It's been an invaluableresource.
Brian McCarthy (02:33):
Mhmm. That's
Dane Shoemaker (02:34):
great. What about your careers? What you
know, Brian, how about you? Whatdid you start out? Were you
always in IT?
Or
Brian McCarthy (02:39):
Yes. Do you want the long or the short version?
Dane Shoemaker (02:42):
Do you know? The
Brian McCarthy (02:43):
Yeah. Back to being a kid. You know? My dad
was a software developer.
Dane Shoemaker (02:47):
Okay.
Brian McCarthy (02:48):
And I ended up always just fixing his computers
Dane Shoemaker (02:51):
growing up. Really?
Brian McCarthy (02:52):
Yeah. So it was kind of a natural progression.
Worked at CompUSA, worked atMerck, went into consulting
right out of high school, andthen just kinda built this up
organically. So
Dane Shoemaker (03:03):
Nice. Yeah. Okay. Merck, how are you?
Rick Carpenter (03:06):
My dad was in finance, and so growing up, my
mom always made fun ofaccountants for being boring. So
I picked the equally boringprofession to accounting. I
worked for William and Maryright out of college. I grad I I
worked for William and Marywhile I was there as a student
tech.
Dane Shoemaker (03:21):
Yeah.
Rick Carpenter (03:22):
When I graduated, that was the first
big computer worm. So they wereturning off ports 30, 40
computers a day, and they had tobe patched and fixed. That was
my first mass upgrade to that. Istayed there. My cousin had
actually started an IT company.
Said at his wedding, actuallysaid, hey. As soon as you wanna
move to Pennsylvania, we've gotwork for you. And then I moved
(03:43):
up. He and his partner bothsplit their halves of the
business, said we're never gonnaget rich doing IT. I ended up
taking over the whole thing forhim, ran it by myself without a
without a life raft for severalyears and learned on the job
doing it that way.
Dane Shoemaker (03:57):
Yeah. Nice. You mentioned CompUSA. One of my
earliest memories growing up,our family I I'm from Harrisburg
area, and we drove to Philly tobuy our first computer. It was a
Windows Okay.
I think 3 dot 1 or somethinglike that in 94 or 93 or
something like that. Yeah. Andit was like it was like a
magical moment bringing thatthing home and setting it up.
Brian McCarthy (04:18):
I probably didn't sell it to you, but I I I
worked there in high school. Iwas 15. It was, like, one of my
first real jobs. Nice. So kindajust being around computers my
whole life.
Dane Shoemaker (04:28):
Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So you you guys serve the
Greater Philadelphia, DelawareValley areas. Do you have a
typical type of client that youguys serve, company size,
industry?
Brian McCarthy (04:41):
Yeah. That's a good question. So we actually
have national clients.
Dane Shoemaker (04:44):
Oh, you do? Okay.
Brian McCarthy (04:45):
Yep. But the bulk of them are here. And from
a profile, we look atconstruction vertical as as our
primary vertical. Okay. And thenengineering and kind of
supporting professionalservices.
And then, companies thatactually have internal IT
departments, we'd like to workwith them as well. You
Dane Shoemaker (05:01):
do. Okay.
Brian McCarthy (05:02):
Yep. Size wise, anywhere from, like, 10 to 200
employees Okay. Or office staffwho have computer systems. Up
you know, larger if they havefield people who are not
necessarily in front of acomputer all day. Mhmm.
Dane Shoemaker (05:16):
Yeah. So, just what does a typical engagement
look like? I mean, you know, thetypes of services you're
offering, technology you'resupporting, is there a typical
or is it kind of all?
Brian McCarthy (05:27):
Yeah. It's you know, I always tell people, we
try to keep it, like, 75% thesame across our whole client
base, and then there's alwaysthat nuance across clients where
things are a little bitdifferent. Yeah. We're mainly
Microsoft shop. So we focus alot on Windows on the desktop,
Windows servers, Azure 365 typethings.
Mhmm. Why do clients usuallycome to us? I mean, the real
(05:52):
answer is because they'redissatisfied with their current
provider, and they're looking toimprove their their tech, which,
you know, isn't a great greatway to always get them, you
know, but sometimes we get newnew business clients as well.
But, yeah. So, I mean, that thatpart's been great.
You know, it just stinks thatyou have to take it for somebody
(06:12):
else. And so
Rick Carpenter (06:13):
I would say just gonna to back to your question,
there's 2 types of engagements.There's the co managed where
they have internal staff andwhere they're providing the
tools and the level oneresources where they have, like,
a CIO in place or the oppositewhere they have the low level
people doing the printer resetsand we're doing the virtual CIO
versions of them. We're settingthe security plans. We're
creating the disaster recoveryplans, meeting with the
(06:34):
management, and then lettingthem do the day to day hours,
and we're giving them the toolsand the resources they need. So
we have that for the co managedsituations for the larger
companies, and then we are theoutsourced IT for the smaller
companies where we set thegoals.
We say, here's your securitypolicy. Here's your compliances.
We're gonna help you meet themYeah. And let you guys focus on
what you do best to makeyourselves the most money.
Dane Shoemaker (06:54):
Mhmm. Do you have a preferred method, or do
you like either one or they'rejust they're just different?
Rick Carpenter (07:01):
As long as the client views us as a partner,
like a strategic partner and nota cost, I think those are the
best engagements where we wannamake sure that their company has
as much uptime as possible, thatthey can focus on what's
generating them the revenueYeah. Versus IT as a cost. I
always joke there's 3 levels ofIT spending. There's the first
level, which is return oninvestment. Everyone's really
excited about that, better,faster, stronger.
(07:22):
Then there's the second layer,which is, basically insurance
where we're gonna put a bunch ofstuff in. Hopefully, you're
never gonna see why. And thenthere's the 3rd level, which is
compliance. We're gonna setmoney on fire, and hopefully,
it's less fast than thegovernment will set it on fire
for you. So
Dane Shoemaker (07:38):
Yeah. You mentioned you know,
I mean, IT is is often looked at as a as a cost,
like, as
an expense on the on the bottom line. Right?
But how how are you positioningyour company and IT, you know,
technology as a strategic, youknow, kind of revenue driver? Is
that is that a conversation youguys have with with clients?
Brian McCarthy (07:55):
Yeah. It's a it's a conversation, and and we
look at it as either you'reyou're trying to enhance
productivity and efficiencyMhmm. Or cut cost, one way or
the other. And it's an expense.And, you know, they're trying to
find that balance of minimizingthe expense, but also having the
best possible systems to be asproductive as you can.
(08:17):
Yeah. So it's a juggling act.You know, you have clients who
are yeah. Sure. Whatever youwanna do, go ahead and do it.
Yeah. You know? And then alsoclients who are kind of the
opposite. You know? They theyview it as a necessary evil.
Mhmm. You know? So it's it'sYeah. I have to use this
(08:41):
computer. I'd rather do it onpen and paper, but everybody
else is on computers.
So
Dane Shoemaker (08:45):
Right. Yeah. What about, you know, how how
would you say you guys differfrom other, you know, MSPs or IT
providers in the area?
Brian McCarthy (08:54):
It's a good question. There's a lot of MSPs
in
Dane Shoemaker (08:57):
the area.
Brian McCarthy (08:57):
You know, one thing that we constantly hear
from our clients and people whohave come to us from other MSPs,
is the rapid response. You know,we're we're there when they need
us. Things go wrong. You know,we can't predict everything. We
can't get ahead of everything.
And when things happen, youknow, we're there. And very, you
know, quickly is is our goal.Yeah. So it's it. Is that a sexy
(09:20):
differentiator?
Probably not. You know? But it'simportant. You know? Well, just
Dane Shoemaker (09:25):
yeah. Just be in there when people need you is
critical.
Brian McCarthy (09:28):
Yeah. I mean, and I don't think people
realize, like, how reliant theyare on these systems now every
day. Yeah. You know? If youcan't work on your computer
system, you're just not working.
Yeah. You know? And, you wannaget back up and running as
quickly as possible. It's moreabout the owners wanting things
done quickly. Yeah.
And the employees, you know,sometimes say they're okay with
Rick Carpenter (09:50):
it. Yeah. It's funny. We were at an IT
conference. Like, how many ofyou will tell everyone that you
respond faster and you do thingsmore secure?
So there's really no way toprove it other than the
testimonials from your clients.Mhmm. But from the stories we
get when we talk to people, Iknow you had Dave Wyman on your
podcast last year and or lastweek. Sorry. Yeah.
(10:10):
And he was telling when heswitched over to be a client of
ours. He's saying, yes. My ITprovider is here, but sometimes
it takes a week to get back tome or sometimes Yeah. I have to
tell them about a problemwhereas we are have the option
to be more proactive and morepolicy based and say, this is
what's in the market. This iswhat we're seeing.
This is the threat landscape. Goto them and say, this is what we
(10:33):
think you need to do in order toensure your business is up and
running. And the the partnershippart and the combination of the
efficiencies of being a largecompany and having access to the
best tools, but also the smallbusiness field where we know
other small businesses what thepain points are because we are
one too.
Dane Shoemaker (10:49):
Yeah. Yeah. David had good things to
say about open tier also. I don't think he said
it on in the podcast,unfortunately, but he we did
talk about it a little bit, andhe said you guys were were
great. So so where what are youtalking to like, what are
clients asking you about rightnow? What are kind of the hot
topics in IT?
Brian McCarthy (11:09):
A lot of questions around AI Okay. Which,
you know, I think everybody'sbeen talking about for the last
12, 18 months. Sure. The thecybersecurity questions have
kind of tailed off in favor ofthe AI questions. Okay.
A lot of AI. I mean, people justit's so new. People don't quite
understand how it works, how canit benefit them, what are the
(11:32):
risks, things like that. Mhmm.So
Dane Shoemaker (11:35):
What are what are your thoughts on you know, I
know that AI kind of covers alot, you know, but, I mean, are
there specific things thatyou're coaching your clients on?
Is there things that you'readvising around?
Brian McCarthy (11:47):
Yeah. I think we're still trying to figure it
out for ourselves. Yeah. Inaddition to trying to figure it
out for clients. Yeah.
You know, I could give you allmy crazy thoughts. You know? I
Yeah. And I talk about it a lotof, you know, where's where's
this AI thing going? It's notgoing anywhere.
It's gonna it's going to be,more ubiquitous. And and and
really, I look at it as a forcemultiplier for for businesses.
Dane Shoemaker (12:09):
Mhmm. Yeah.
Brian McCarthy (12:11):
You're not gonna replace people with it. You
know, maybe eventually, butreally you're just gonna make
those people that much moreproductive, yeah, and make them
better versions of themselves.
Rick Carpenter (12:21):
Yeah. So The current versions of that AI and
the tools that are accessible tothe small business are more of
the automation tasks. It's a lotof note taking, a lot of
summarization. You can get thoseeasy to use for users, gen
generative AI as far as creatingnew things. If you need to write
a PowerShell script, AI can dothat pretty well.
(12:41):
If you need to write a formletter, at, my wife always goes
brain dumping, she'll say, Ineed these 9 points in my email.
She'll put it in Google Gemini,and it'll give her 3 versions of
it. We use Copilot. I generate alot of the first drafts of our
training slides through that.I'll give it make a slide on
this just to get the backgroundimages, and then I'll put the
(13:02):
I'll adjust the text to say whatI want.
Mhmm. That's where we're seeinga lot of the use now. The so the
marketing of AI versus thepractical use AI that's
successful to the small businessis a little bit different right
now.
Dane Shoemaker (13:14):
Yeah.
Rick Carpenter (13:14):
But eventually, what you're gonna start seeing
is your products are gonna havethe AI back end. But, really,
it's just automation stillbecause your spam filter from 20
years ago was just a smalldataset, and now it's just built
on a large dataset. So it's morelikely the spam that's being
generated is being generated byAI, and the spam that's being
caught is being caught by AI. Soit's just a it's a circular
(13:36):
system that one's one's gonnaget ahead of the other and keep
going that way.
Dane Shoemaker (13:39):
Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, some of the I
mean, we use chat gpt quite abit just for writing out scripts
or, you know, you know, any kindof document we need to write,
you know, email, stuff likethat. The Copilot stuff from
Microsoft, I mean, it's prettycool.
You can just create a PowerPointfrom nothing in a couple of
minutes. I mean, that's amazing.So I definitely think that, you
(14:02):
know, you know, if you leverageit right, you're never gonna
take away human input. Right?You're always gonna have to be
feeding it with with with whatyou need.
So it's interesting landscapethat we're in right now for
sure.
Rick Carpenter (14:17):
It's funny. It is also an interesting threat
landscape it's creating as wellYeah. Because just internal, if
your AI is learning on yourentire internal SharePoint
dataset and you have yourpayroll information in there and
you haven't walled that off oryou have documents that you
haven't put the correct controlson, you can ask the AI. And
because it's learned fromeverything, what did our, CEO
(14:37):
make last year? And it can comeup with a reasonable guess based
on the document has it availableto it.
Or we've discussed our meetingall of our meetings, we have a
bot in there that transcribes,records, and gives action items,
which is incredibly helpful. Butthen legal discovery is
everything you say in thatmeeting all of a sudden legally
discoverable because it's storedon a server and the notes are
(14:58):
accessible so, thus, they couldtheoretically be subpoenaed?
What can you do on the recordversus off the record? All of
those questions about the easeof use versus we always joke
with the Jurassic Park meme, thejust because you could doesn't
mean you should. Right.
Dane Shoemaker (15:12):
Right. What other what other trends are you
guys following in the in the ITworld, tech world?
Brian McCarthy (15:19):
Yeah. Automation is is pretty big. We're trying
to, again, figure out how to tiein AI with automation and
really, again, be a forcemultiplier for our staff. Yeah.
Make them more effective andhaving to, normally say learn
less.
That's not quite right, but beaugmented. Yeah. Automation is
(15:41):
is also gonna be the next, Iwanna say, big thing, but is is
a lot of repetitive tasks,robotic process automation.
Mhmm. You get a client who comeson to our website.
They wanna open a ticket, andthey hit a virtual agent.
Virtual agent can help them out,help them set up a new account,
all in automated fashion wherethey don't actually have to talk
(16:04):
to a person and they can getinstant service as opposed to
having to put the ticket in,wait for a tech to look at it,
ask them a bunch of questions,do a bunch of manual tasks. So
automation, I think, is the nextbig thing for us and then by
extension clients.
Dane Shoemaker (16:19):
Yeah. Okay.
Rick Carpenter (16:21):
Another big thing we're hearing about and
we've been hearing about thelast 4 or 5 years is cyber
insurance because all of youremployees are your top threat
vector. They're the ones whohave access to things. They're
the ones that they're gonna tryand be tricked. The information
that's out about every singleemployee in your company, your
structure, like, your CFO, newhires, it's all on LinkedIn.
(16:44):
LinkedIn's been breached a dozentimes now.
At least 4 known ones. So allthat information's available,
who reports to who, so you'llget the the SMS text, the, hey.
I'm in a meeting. Can you send 5gift cards here? Or we had we're
talking to a church, and theirmember directory got
compromised.
So they were Oh, wow. Solicitingfor a cancer patient via so
(17:06):
that's really that's incrediblyeffective. So they had
Brian McCarthy (17:09):
to send pretty smart. I mean, the way they did
it, there's They
Rick Carpenter (17:12):
just sent out
Brian McCarthy (17:12):
a little bit.
Rick Carpenter (17:13):
Like, hey. Don't do this. And we've had a ton of
clients where the man in themiddle attacked a person in
accounts payable gets theiraccount compromised from our
client's vendor. They'll thenmake a fake domain with a one
instead of an I. So it looks thesame.
Submit say, hey. We didn't getthat check, or can you FedEx it
here? We'll send you the prepaidenvelope. Try and get a check-in
(17:36):
the way. So there's a lot moreschemes and threats and then
making sure your insurancepolicies cover that because a
lot of the times when they fillout their own insurance policy,
they're asking specificquestions.
And if you're just checking yes,then when you try and get paid
on a breach and when you can'tdocument that you had those
processes in place. So a lot ofwhat we're doing with clients is
making sure, like, if you'resaying yes on this, here's how
(17:57):
to document it, here's how toprove it's in place to make sure
you get paid if you do have tohave an insurance claim.
Dane Shoemaker (18:02):
Yeah. Do you do you guys get into, I mean,
offering insurance or or it'sthat's more of an
insurance company. You guys are more on
the IT operation side, security side.
Brian McCarthy (18:12):
It's a good question. We don't actually
offer insurance policies, but alot of the things we do are
insurance for systems, notnecessarily on paper, you know,
getting paid out. But, EDR,antivirus, a lot of the systems
that we put in place areinsurance Yeah. In their own
way. They're very preventative,and I mean, disaster recovery.
(18:35):
Yeah. Exactly. Right. Yeah. And,you know, god forbid something
does happen, you have thatpolicy from a large national
carrier to fall back on.
Yeah. So
Dane Shoemaker (18:45):
Okay. Yeah.
Brian McCarthy (18:46):
No. That's not a world we we wanna be in. Yeah.
Dane Shoemaker (18:49):
Yeah. That sounds like a lot of headaches.
Yeah.
Rick Carpenter (18:51):
It's not a world they wanna be in because
premiums have doubled andtripled the last couple years.
Dane Shoemaker (18:56):
Right.
Brian McCarthy (18:56):
They are getting smarter, though, the the
questions they're asking ontheir their policies. Mhmm. So
it's good.
Dane Shoemaker (19:04):
So do do you guys do implementations or,
like, system integration, or isit mostly just kind of a the
managed services, like, postmanagement side of
Brian McCarthy (19:15):
the house. Good question. So, kind of rolling
back to your original question,I guess, about the typical
engagement. A lot of times we'llcome in. We will take over the
support for an existingenvironment.
We'll do our assessment, andwe'll figure out, okay, you need
to upgrade this. This thing'sfine. This thing needs to go
away. Mhmm. And then we will puta big plan in place and,
(19:39):
implement new servers, new emailsystem, new applications, and
then ultimately support that.
Dane Shoemaker (19:45):
Mhmm.
Brian McCarthy (19:46):
So, yeah, we just did one, this week. We just
wrapped up a big email migrationproject from a for a a large
home builder in the area.
Dane Shoemaker (19:55):
Okay. Nice.
Brian McCarthy (19:57):
Yeah. It's pretty cool. Ricky and his team
did a great job. So I swear.
Rick Carpenter (20:01):
We always joke the every vendor we talk to will
tell you what's wrong, but noone will fix it. So we're we're
always the one stuck fixing it,implementing it, making it
actually work, and being thatlast mile.
Dane Shoemaker (20:12):
Yeah. Let me just double check here.
Rick Carpenter (20:21):
While you're looking at that, I will I'll
throw it back to you. Yeah.
Dane Shoemaker (20:24):
Because
Rick Carpenter (20:24):
I know you've talked about how you're using AI
for your things to schedule, anddo you wanna just highlight that
now since it is your podcast?And I
Dane Shoemaker (20:32):
mean, yeah, I mean, you know, we use project
management software calledClickUp that has something
called ClickUp Brain in it. Ithink it has it might be ChatGPT
on the back end. I have no idea.But that's just a lot of the
like, we'll take this podcast,for instance, it'll take the
transcript, and then we can takethe transcript and kind of
Brian McCarthy (20:55):
repurpose that into emails,
Dane Shoemaker (20:55):
you know, copy for, you know, Twitter or or
thing things like that. So
Brian McCarthy (20:59):
Is that like Clippy?
Dane Shoemaker (21:02):
It's like Clippy 2.0. Yeah. I would say Clippy
2.0 is probably more likeCopilot. Right? Yeah.
Rick Carpenter (21:08):
Microsoft does have new shirts that say, we
used to have Clippy, now we haveCopilot.
Dane Shoemaker (21:11):
I know. Right? Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I think
everyone's just kinda dabblingin, you know, AI and some of the
video generation stuff though,kind of freaks me out a little
bit. It's pretty wild.
Yeah. But, you know, I think,you know, I think what we do is
a lot of podcasts, kind of docustyle, I think like journalism,
(21:33):
like that type of stuff is notgoing to go away per se, right?
I think if you're in thebusiness of creating, you know,
stock footage or, you know,stock images or things like
that, you might be in trouble,but, you know, I think there's
always going to be a place for,you know, business leaders
getting in front of a camera andtalking about their business. I
(21:53):
hope so. You know?
Certainly, there's gonna be Idon't know.
Brian McCarthy (21:56):
I've been trying to figure out how to make a a
virtual avatar of myself. I
Dane Shoemaker (22:01):
think we're not that far from there. I think
we're not that far from there.You know, you can record this,
you get 3 60 camera and, youknow, feed some scripts in
there. And, you know, we'reprobably a couple of years away
from that, if not next year. Andwho knows?
But, yeah, we'll see. You know,we're optimistic. I did one,
Brian McCarthy (22:17):
I think this was 2 or 3 months ago. It's just you
make a video of yourself, kindof like a selfie. You read a
script and then it converts youinto a virtual avatar. Yeah. And
does it in your voice.
It's it's pretty scary.
Dane Shoemaker (22:33):
Yeah. I mean and and, again, in in a year or 2,
you're not even gonna be able totell the difference probably.
And I I look at these all liketools. So, I mean, you know,
we're gonna be able to justscale up, you know, I hope, you
know, rather than just beingreplaced by by AI, but, yeah,
it's a it's an interesting timewe're in right now.
Rick Carpenter (22:53):
Yeah. And it'd probably be nice when you're
looking for, like, what episodewas it that we talked about AI?
And, like, oh, I can just searchthrough all of my previous
podcasts because they're alltranscribed. Pull the 5
segments, make a supercut. Yep.
Then you have all yourinformation there ready at hand.
Dane Shoemaker (23:05):
Yeah. Absolutely. What about what's,
you know, for the future?Anything any plans for the
future, or what does the opentier look like in a couple
years? Growth.
Growth.
Brian McCarthy (23:16):
Lot lot of like, goal the goal's growth. Yep. We
are trying to add add clients,add staff, just grow our foot
footprint so that we can betterserve our clients. We, you know,
we find that there's, like, thishappy medium of being too small,
but also being too large. Andwe're trying to find to get to
that point.
We think that's probably around40 to 50 team members here.
Dane Shoemaker (23:40):
Okay.
Brian McCarthy (23:41):
So that's the 6 year plan.
Dane Shoemaker (23:43):
Okay.
Brian McCarthy (23:44):
After this I haven't really thought past the
6 years. We're just trying toget get to that, and then, you
know, we'll see what happensafter that. Yeah.
Rick Carpenter (23:52):
You know, we're creating some strategic
partnerships. There's some Okay.Types of lines of business that
were very successful 10, 15years ago that are starting to
go away. So we're trying to seeif we can integrate in with
them, pull them in, voice overIP companies or, security data
wiring, trying to add those,strategic partnerships. So that
(24:14):
way we can be kind of our goalis to everyone be everyone's
first call.
So that way we can bring that inand offer these services as
well. And really, there's gonnabe more and more regulation
coming out, whether it'sinsurance driven or whether it's
government driven. Just beingable to have that compliance, be
able to dot the i's, cross thet's for our clients so they can
(24:35):
sleep well at night and knowthat their stuff is under
control.
Dane Shoemaker (24:38):
Yeah. And and how many how many employees do
you have today? 12 right now.12. Okay.
Yep.
Brian McCarthy (24:44):
Hopefully, 14 by the end of the year. So we got
one starting on Monday. So Yeah.
Dane Shoemaker (24:50):
Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Anything anything else you
guys wanna talk about?
Brian McCarthy (24:57):
Jeez. We could go on. We could go on for a
while with stories and thingslike that.
Dane Shoemaker (25:01):
Yeah. Yeah. What's a success, successful
client, you know, story youmight wanna share for the last
year or so?
Brian McCarthy (25:09):
Yeah. You know, a lot of our clients we
Rick Carpenter (25:13):
look
Brian McCarthy (25:13):
at their growth. Their growth is a success for
us. Yeah. Being able to supportthem from when when they come to
us being, like, 3, 4, 5 people.We have some some clients that
started like that, and nowthey're, like, 50, 60, 70.
Dane Shoemaker (25:26):
Okay.
Brian McCarthy (25:27):
And that kinda look at that as a feather in our
cap.
Rick Carpenter (25:30):
Yeah. You
Brian McCarthy (25:30):
know, we've supported them through that and
and helped them get to thatpoint. Yep. So we have a a
number of those. I mean, if youwanna talk about any more
appointed success stories as faras implementations.
Rick Carpenter (25:43):
Yeah. We had a I'm trying to think of my
favorite example. We had oneclient that just sold last year,
2 years ago. They grew from 3partners to 45 employees, then
they all cashed out and retired.Their systems were easy to
integrate with their buyer.
We were able to say, here's allyour documentation. Here's your
information. So they were in agood setup, so we felt pretty
(26:05):
proud. Sad to lose them becausewe like them all.
Dane Shoemaker (26:07):
But Yeah. Yeah.
Rick Carpenter (26:08):
Very excited for them to have achieved their
goals. We have another clientnow. It's completed a national
rollout. We started with them.They were 10 users, and they now
have full infrastructure and afull national setup, so they we
have that down pretty well withthem.
They're creating a lot of theirautomations internally. They're
(26:29):
heavy into, Power Automate,Azure, and a lot of the cutting
edge technologies, so being ableto partner with them as they
kind of figure out thosetechnologies have been have been
really exciting for us. But justgeneral, the the local small
businesses where it's just a,hey. You've been our client for
15 years. Yeah.
Talk to them, they're like Ijoke the, one client we have who
(26:51):
is our direct contact now as apartner is the son of the
original owner.
Dane Shoemaker (26:56):
Okay.
Brian McCarthy (26:56):
And I'm
Rick Carpenter (26:56):
like, I remember when you were getting in trouble
in middle school, and I had totell your dad that,
Dane Shoemaker (27:00):
I don't know why
Rick Carpenter (27:01):
his machine's all messed up. And now he's, now
he's running the company.
Dane Shoemaker (27:05):
So That's pretty cool. Yeah. It's a lot of
clients you've had for a longtime watching them grow.
Brian McCarthy (27:11):
Yeah. You know, I always tell people, you know,
it's kind of our lead salespitch is, like, our first,
second, and third clients arestill clients from 2006. Nice.
Yeah. So that's that's prettyawesome.
Dane Shoemaker (27:24):
Yeah. Testament to your your service and yeah.
That's that's great. Anythingelse?
Rick Carpenter (27:33):
That's it. Appreciate it. We're we're
excited about this the workyou're doing, the podcast and
the
Dane Shoemaker (27:37):
Yeah. Absolutely.
Rick Carpenter (27:38):
So always any opportunities to have more
content, we recommend you.
Dane Shoemaker (27:44):
Yeah. Of course. Yeah. I appreciate that.
Brian McCarthy (27:45):
Sorry I didn't shave today. Same, I mean,
Dane Shoemaker (27:51):
I usually have a little gruff going anyway. So
yeah. Nice. Yeah. How can, howcan people find you?
Brian McCarthy (27:58):
I think the website is is the best avenue,
open tier systems dot com. K.Phone is also easy. We have a
nice easy phone number.48453536100.
You can ask for Josh over therein the in the sales office. And,
yeah, we're looking lookingforward to that. You know, we
always tell people let me justback up real quick. 95% of the
(28:20):
the clients we get are fromreferrals.
Dane Shoemaker (28:22):
Okay.
Brian McCarthy (28:23):
So to get a client from our website kind of
cold, that's always one of ourgoals.
Dane Shoemaker (28:29):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it
Brian McCarthy (28:31):
seems to elude us, but that's fine because we
have a lot of clients and, youknow, they're great and Yeah.
Rick Carpenter (28:36):
They keep coming from the referrals. So, and it's
hard to IT is really a trustindustry. We have the keys to
the kingdom. As I was joking onthat implementation, they're
like, are you gonna read all mymail? Like, I could read all
your mail a week ago.
Like, I've had access toeverything once I got set up.
Yeah. Like, it's a we need theyneed to trust that we are doing
what's in their best interest,and that takes a lot of time and
(28:57):
a lot. So we really enjoyconversations. We enjoy speaking
engagements, chambers ofcommerce.
We're very involved in mainlineChamber of Commerce and the
Monaco Chamber of Commerce,being able to get out to events,
meet people, talk to thembecause people always have
there's always a new technology.The news does a lot of marketing
for us in the sense that Right.You hear the scary stories, and
(29:20):
so a lot of times is saying,like, oh, yes. That's a thing,
but don't worry about that.You're protected because of x y
z.
Being able to have thoseconversations with people, you
know, while we try to avoid homeusers, we're happy to tell you,
like, if you do x y z, you'regonna be
Dane Shoemaker (29:37):
okay. So Yeah. Yeah. I mean, trust is the big
thing. I mean, it's so you know,it's very easy now to go sign up
for, you know, an Office 365account by yourself.
You're a one man shop or 2, youknow, 2 person company or
something like that. But, youknow, you you put a lot of trust
into your in your IT and, youknow, as you grow and having
having a partner like you guysin place is critical. So
Absolutely. And technologytouches everything anymore. So
(30:00):
not just IT.
It's everybody's business. Orworse. Yeah. So Yeah. Cool.
Well, it's great talking withyou guys today. Good talking to
you all soon. Yeah. Wish you allthe success, and
Rick Carpenter (30:09):
yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks, dude.
Dane Shoemaker (30:10):
Yeah. Thank you. Got a little wrapped up there.
Thanks, guys. Thank you.
Thanks for listening today. Shoemaker Lab
is an original production byShoemaker Films LLC. If you
enjoyed today's content, pleaseconsider subscribing on YouTube,
Spotify, Apple Podcasts, andwherever you get your content.
Follow us on Instagram at atshoemaker.films. And if you're a
(30:34):
business that's eitherinterested in our video
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get in touch by using thecontact form on our website,
shoemakerfilms.com.
Alrighty. Well, welcome to the Shoemaker Films
podcast. I'm here today withRick and Brian of OpenTier
Systems. How are you guys doingtoday?
Brian McCarthy (00:10):
Doing alright. Thanks for having us.
Dane Shoemaker (00:12):
Yeah. Thanks for thanks for being a guest on
here. Tell me a little bit aboutOpenTier Systems.
Brian McCarthy (00:19):
Well, I'll I guess I'll take the lead on that
one. Yeah. OpenTier, we've beenaround since 2006.
Dane Shoemaker (00:24):
K.
Brian McCarthy (00:24):
We're an IT managed service provider. We
work with businesses mostly inthis Philadelphia, Delaware
Valley area.
Dane Shoemaker (00:32):
Okay.
Brian McCarthy (00:32):
We have some national clients, and we focus
on IT, networking,cybersecurity, voice over IP.
Okay. Building those solutionsout for small businesses that
are usually too small to, havetheir own internal
Dane Shoemaker (00:48):
We have some fans.
Brian McCarthy (00:48):
Yeah. We have we have fans over there.
Rick Carpenter (00:50):
Josh holding up our mission
Brian McCarthy (00:51):
vision. Nice.
Rick Carpenter (00:52):
He's like, don't forget.
Brian McCarthy (00:53):
Don't forget.
Dane Shoemaker (00:54):
Nice. Right. That's great.
And partners, co owners? Partners, co owners.
Yep.
Brian McCarthy (00:59):
We actually came together about a year and a half
ago, a little over a year and ahalf ago at this point. Okay.
Rick had his own entity at thefor number of years, and I'll
let him talk about that. And
Rick Carpenter (01:10):
Yeah. Same thing.
Dane Shoemaker (01:11):
I was
Rick Carpenter (01:11):
running a company called Beyond
Development since 2004. Brianand I, met through Josh, our
sales manager. We did a coupleprojects together, consulted,
talked, and then as thisindustry is growing and there's
going to be more regulatoryconcerns and the ability need to
scale and have more resourcesbecause you can't do IT just 9
to 5. Yeah. You have to have theability to do 247 resources.
(01:35):
So we combined forces, and it'sbeen great. It's really improved
our product, I think, and givenus the kept the small feel that
our customers liked.
Dane Shoemaker (01:44):
Yeah. Do you guys do you feel like you
brought different skills ordifferent capabilities to the
table? Yeah. Is it more justabout scale?
Brian McCarthy (01:53):
You know, it's about both. It's about scale. I
mean, we both have a a prettysimilar skill set Okay. From
what we're doing, but we figuredwhen we were joining forces that
I I would focus more on thebusiness development, business
aspect and and Rick focusingmore on the technical service
side.
Dane Shoemaker (02:08):
Okay.
Brian McCarthy (02:08):
Yeah. So Got it. The ability to divide and
conquer a little bit.
Rick Carpenter (02:11):
Sure.
Dane Shoemaker (02:11):
And so you're the business. He's the technical
Rick Carpenter (02:13):
Yeah. The ability to Dip
Dane Shoemaker (02:15):
your toes into both a little bit.
Rick Carpenter (02:16):
Stats was great. Yeah. And also having someone
else who trusts as an authoritywhere if you previously, if I
could not find the answer, therewas no other option.
Dane Shoemaker (02:26):
Yeah.
Rick Carpenter (02:26):
And now just having a second person of equal
skill being able to say, hey.Can you take a look at that?
It's been an invaluableresource.
Brian McCarthy (02:33):
Mhmm. That's
Dane Shoemaker (02:34):
great. What about your careers? What you
know, Brian, how about you? Whatdid you start out? Were you
always in IT?
Or
Brian McCarthy (02:39):
Yes. Do you want the long or the short version?
Dane Shoemaker (02:42):
Do you know? The
Brian McCarthy (02:43):
Yeah. Back to being a kid. You know? My dad
was a software developer.
Dane Shoemaker (02:47):
Okay.
Brian McCarthy (02:48):
And I ended up always just fixing his computers
Dane Shoemaker (02:51):
growing up. Really?
Brian McCarthy (02:52):
Yeah. So it was kind of a natural progression.
Worked at CompUSA, worked atMerck, went into consulting
right out of high school, andthen just kinda built this up
organically. So
Dane Shoemaker (03:03):
Nice. Yeah. Okay. Merck, how are you?
Rick Carpenter (03:06):
My dad was in finance, and so growing up, my
mom always made fun ofaccountants for being boring. So
I picked the equally boringprofession to accounting. I
worked for William and Maryright out of college. I grad I I
worked for William and Marywhile I was there as a student
tech.
Dane Shoemaker (03:21):
Yeah.
Rick Carpenter (03:22):
When I graduated, that was the first
big computer worm. So they wereturning off ports 30, 40
computers a day, and they had tobe patched and fixed. That was
my first mass upgrade to that. Istayed there. My cousin had
actually started an IT company.
Said at his wedding, actuallysaid, hey. As soon as you wanna
move to Pennsylvania, we've gotwork for you. And then I moved
(03:43):
up. He and his partner bothsplit their halves of the
business, said we're never gonnaget rich doing IT. I ended up
taking over the whole thing forhim, ran it by myself without a
without a life raft for severalyears and learned on the job
doing it that way.
Dane Shoemaker (03:57):
Yeah. Nice. You mentioned CompUSA. One of my
earliest memories growing up,our family I I'm from Harrisburg
area, and we drove to Philly tobuy our first computer. It was a
Windows Okay.
I think 3 dot 1 or somethinglike that in 94 or 93 or
something like that. Yeah. Andit was like it was like a
magical moment bringing thatthing home and setting it up.
Brian McCarthy (04:18):
I probably didn't sell it to you, but I I I
worked there in high school. Iwas 15. It was, like, one of my
first real jobs. Nice. So kindajust being around computers my
whole life.
Dane Shoemaker (04:28):
Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So you you guys serve the
Greater Philadelphia, DelawareValley areas. Do you have a
typical type of client that youguys serve, company size,
industry?
Brian McCarthy (04:41):
Yeah. That's a good question. So we actually
have national clients.
Dane Shoemaker (04:44):
Oh, you do? Okay.
Brian McCarthy (04:45):
Yep. But the bulk of them are here. And from
a profile, we look atconstruction vertical as as our
primary vertical. Okay. And thenengineering and kind of
supporting professionalservices.
And then, companies thatactually have internal IT
departments, we'd like to workwith them as well. You
Dane Shoemaker (05:01):
do. Okay.
Brian McCarthy (05:02):
Yep. Size wise, anywhere from, like, 10 to 200
employees Okay. Or office staffwho have computer systems. Up
you know, larger if they havefield people who are not
necessarily in front of acomputer all day. Mhmm.
Dane Shoemaker (05:16):
Yeah. So, just what does a typical engagement
look like? I mean, you know, thetypes of services you're
offering, technology you'resupporting, is there a typical
or is it kind of all?
Brian McCarthy (05:27):
Yeah. It's you know, I always tell people, we
try to keep it, like, 75% thesame across our whole client
base, and then there's alwaysthat nuance across clients where
things are a little bitdifferent. Yeah. We're mainly
Microsoft shop. So we focus alot on Windows on the desktop,
Windows servers, Azure 365 typethings.
Mhmm. Why do clients usuallycome to us? I mean, the real
(05:52):
answer is because they'redissatisfied with their current
provider, and they're looking toimprove their their tech, which,
you know, isn't a great greatway to always get them, you
know, but sometimes we get newnew business clients as well.
But, yeah. So, I mean, that thatpart's been great.
You know, it just stinks thatyou have to take it for somebody
(06:12):
else. And so
Rick Carpenter (06:13):
I would say just gonna to back to your question,
there's 2 types of engagements.There's the co managed where
they have internal staff andwhere they're providing the
tools and the level oneresources where they have, like,
a CIO in place or the oppositewhere they have the low level
people doing the printer resetsand we're doing the virtual CIO
versions of them. We're settingthe security plans. We're
creating the disaster recoveryplans, meeting with the
(06:34):
management, and then lettingthem do the day to day hours,
and we're giving them the toolsand the resources they need. So
we have that for the co managedsituations for the larger
companies, and then we are theoutsourced IT for the smaller
companies where we set thegoals.
We say, here's your securitypolicy. Here's your compliances.
We're gonna help you meet themYeah. And let you guys focus on
what you do best to makeyourselves the most money.
Dane Shoemaker (06:54):
Mhmm. Do you have a preferred method, or do
you like either one or they'rejust they're just different?
Rick Carpenter (07:01):
As long as the client views us as a partner,
like a strategic partner and nota cost, I think those are the
best engagements where we wannamake sure that their company has
as much uptime as possible, thatthey can focus on what's
generating them the revenueYeah. Versus IT as a cost. I
always joke there's 3 levels ofIT spending. There's the first
level, which is return oninvestment. Everyone's really
excited about that, better,faster, stronger.
(07:22):
Then there's the second layer,which is, basically insurance
where we're gonna put a bunch ofstuff in. Hopefully, you're
never gonna see why. And thenthere's the 3rd level, which is
compliance. We're gonna setmoney on fire, and hopefully,
it's less fast than thegovernment will set it on fire
for you. So
Dane Shoemaker (07:38):
Yeah. You mentioned you know,
I mean, IT is is often looked at as a as a cost,
like, as
an expense on the on the bottom line. Right?
But how how are you positioningyour company and IT, you know,
technology as a strategic, youknow, kind of revenue driver? Is
that is that a conversation youguys have with with clients?
Brian McCarthy (07:55):
Yeah. It's a it's a conversation, and and we
look at it as either you'reyou're trying to enhance
productivity and efficiencyMhmm. Or cut cost, one way or
the other. And it's an expense.And, you know, they're trying to
find that balance of minimizingthe expense, but also having the
best possible systems to be asproductive as you can.
(08:17):
Yeah. So it's a juggling act.You know, you have clients who
are yeah. Sure. Whatever youwanna do, go ahead and do it.
Yeah. You know? And then alsoclients who are kind of the
opposite. You know? They theyview it as a necessary evil.
Mhmm. You know? So it's it'sYeah. I have to use this
(08:41):
computer. I'd rather do it onpen and paper, but everybody
else is on computers.
So
Dane Shoemaker (08:45):
Right. Yeah. What about, you know, how how
would you say you guys differfrom other, you know, MSPs or IT
providers in the area?
Brian McCarthy (08:54):
It's a good question. There's a lot of MSPs
in
Dane Shoemaker (08:57):
the area.
Brian McCarthy (08:57):
You know, one thing that we constantly hear
from our clients and people whohave come to us from other MSPs,
is the rapid response. You know,we're we're there when they need
us. Things go wrong. You know,we can't predict everything. We
can't get ahead of everything.
And when things happen, youknow, we're there. And very, you
know, quickly is is our goal.Yeah. So it's it. Is that a sexy
(09:20):
differentiator?
Probably not. You know? But it'simportant. You know? Well, just
Dane Shoemaker (09:25):
yeah. Just be in there when people need you is
critical.
Brian McCarthy (09:28):
Yeah. I mean, and I don't think people
realize, like, how reliant theyare on these systems now every
day. Yeah. You know? If youcan't work on your computer
system, you're just not working.
Yeah. You know? And, you wannaget back up and running as
quickly as possible. It's moreabout the owners wanting things
done quickly. Yeah.
And the employees, you know,sometimes say they're okay with
Rick Carpenter (09:50):
it. Yeah. It's funny. We were at an IT
conference. Like, how many ofyou will tell everyone that you
respond faster and you do thingsmore secure?
So there's really no way toprove it other than the
testimonials from your clients.Mhmm. But from the stories we
get when we talk to people, Iknow you had Dave Wyman on your
podcast last year and or lastweek. Sorry. Yeah.
(10:10):
And he was telling when heswitched over to be a client of
ours. He's saying, yes. My ITprovider is here, but sometimes
it takes a week to get back tome or sometimes Yeah. I have to
tell them about a problemwhereas we are have the option
to be more proactive and morepolicy based and say, this is
what's in the market. This iswhat we're seeing.
This is the threat landscape. Goto them and say, this is what we
(10:33):
think you need to do in order toensure your business is up and
running. And the the partnershippart and the combination of the
efficiencies of being a largecompany and having access to the
best tools, but also the smallbusiness field where we know
other small businesses what thepain points are because we are
one too.
Dane Shoemaker (10:49):
Yeah. Yeah. David had good things to
say about open tier also. I don't think he said
it on in the podcast,unfortunately, but he we did
talk about it a little bit, andhe said you guys were were
great. So so where what are youtalking to like, what are
clients asking you about rightnow? What are kind of the hot
topics in IT?
Brian McCarthy (11:09):
A lot of questions around AI Okay. Which,
you know, I think everybody'sbeen talking about for the last
12, 18 months. Sure. The thecybersecurity questions have
kind of tailed off in favor ofthe AI questions. Okay.
A lot of AI. I mean, people justit's so new. People don't quite
understand how it works, how canit benefit them, what are the
(11:32):
risks, things like that. Mhmm.So
Dane Shoemaker (11:35):
What are what are your thoughts on you know, I
know that AI kind of covers alot, you know, but, I mean, are
there specific things thatyou're coaching your clients on?
Is there things that you'readvising around?
Brian McCarthy (11:47):
Yeah. I think we're still trying to figure it
out for ourselves. Yeah. Inaddition to trying to figure it
out for clients. Yeah.
You know, I could give you allmy crazy thoughts. You know? I
Yeah. And I talk about it a lotof, you know, where's where's
this AI thing going? It's notgoing anywhere.
It's gonna it's going to be,more ubiquitous. And and and
really, I look at it as a forcemultiplier for for businesses.
Dane Shoemaker (12:09):
Mhmm. Yeah.
Brian McCarthy (12:11):
You're not gonna replace people with it. You
know, maybe eventually, butreally you're just gonna make
those people that much moreproductive, yeah, and make them
better versions of themselves.
Rick Carpenter (12:21):
Yeah. So The current versions of that AI and
the tools that are accessible tothe small business are more of
the automation tasks. It's a lotof note taking, a lot of
summarization. You can get thoseeasy to use for users, gen
generative AI as far as creatingnew things. If you need to write
a PowerShell script, AI can dothat pretty well.
(12:41):
If you need to write a formletter, at, my wife always goes
brain dumping, she'll say, Ineed these 9 points in my email.
She'll put it in Google Gemini,and it'll give her 3 versions of
it. We use Copilot. I generate alot of the first drafts of our
training slides through that.I'll give it make a slide on
this just to get the backgroundimages, and then I'll put the
(13:02):
I'll adjust the text to say whatI want.
Mhmm. That's where we're seeinga lot of the use now. The so the
marketing of AI versus thepractical use AI that's
successful to the small businessis a little bit different right
now.
Dane Shoemaker (13:14):
Yeah.
Rick Carpenter (13:14):
But eventually, what you're gonna start seeing
is your products are gonna havethe AI back end. But, really,
it's just automation stillbecause your spam filter from 20
years ago was just a smalldataset, and now it's just built
on a large dataset. So it's morelikely the spam that's being
generated is being generated byAI, and the spam that's being
caught is being caught by AI. Soit's just a it's a circular
(13:36):
system that one's one's gonnaget ahead of the other and keep
going that way.
Dane Shoemaker (13:39):
Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, some of the I
mean, we use chat gpt quite abit just for writing out scripts
or, you know, you know, any kindof document we need to write,
you know, email, stuff likethat. The Copilot stuff from
Microsoft, I mean, it's prettycool.
You can just create a PowerPointfrom nothing in a couple of
minutes. I mean, that's amazing.So I definitely think that, you
(14:02):
know, you know, if you leverageit right, you're never gonna
take away human input. Right?You're always gonna have to be
feeding it with with with whatyou need.
So it's interesting landscapethat we're in right now for
sure.
Rick Carpenter (14:17):
It's funny. It is also an interesting threat
landscape it's creating as wellYeah. Because just internal, if
your AI is learning on yourentire internal SharePoint
dataset and you have yourpayroll information in there and
you haven't walled that off oryou have documents that you
haven't put the correct controlson, you can ask the AI. And
because it's learned fromeverything, what did our, CEO
(14:37):
make last year? And it can comeup with a reasonable guess based
on the document has it availableto it.
Or we've discussed our meetingall of our meetings, we have a
bot in there that transcribes,records, and gives action items,
which is incredibly helpful. Butthen legal discovery is
everything you say in thatmeeting all of a sudden legally
discoverable because it's storedon a server and the notes are
(14:58):
accessible so, thus, they couldtheoretically be subpoenaed?
What can you do on the recordversus off the record? All of
those questions about the easeof use versus we always joke
with the Jurassic Park meme, thejust because you could doesn't
mean you should. Right.
Dane Shoemaker (15:12):
Right. What other what other trends are you
guys following in the in the ITworld, tech world?
Brian McCarthy (15:19):
Yeah. Automation is is pretty big. We're trying
to, again, figure out how to tiein AI with automation and
really, again, be a forcemultiplier for our staff. Yeah.
Make them more effective andhaving to, normally say learn
less.
That's not quite right, but beaugmented. Yeah. Automation is
(15:41):
is also gonna be the next, Iwanna say, big thing, but is is
a lot of repetitive tasks,robotic process automation.
Mhmm. You get a client who comeson to our website.
They wanna open a ticket, andthey hit a virtual agent.
Virtual agent can help them out,help them set up a new account,
all in automated fashion wherethey don't actually have to talk
(16:04):
to a person and they can getinstant service as opposed to
having to put the ticket in,wait for a tech to look at it,
ask them a bunch of questions,do a bunch of manual tasks. So
automation, I think, is the nextbig thing for us and then by
extension clients.
Dane Shoemaker (16:19):
Yeah. Okay.
Rick Carpenter (16:21):
Another big thing we're hearing about and
we've been hearing about thelast 4 or 5 years is cyber
insurance because all of youremployees are your top threat
vector. They're the ones whohave access to things. They're
the ones that they're gonna tryand be tricked. The information
that's out about every singleemployee in your company, your
structure, like, your CFO, newhires, it's all on LinkedIn.
(16:44):
LinkedIn's been breached a dozentimes now.
At least 4 known ones. So allthat information's available,
who reports to who, so you'llget the the SMS text, the, hey.
I'm in a meeting. Can you send 5gift cards here? Or we had we're
talking to a church, and theirmember directory got
compromised.
So they were Oh, wow. Solicitingfor a cancer patient via so
(17:06):
that's really that's incrediblyeffective. So they had
Brian McCarthy (17:09):
to send pretty smart. I mean, the way they did
it, there's They
Rick Carpenter (17:12):
just sent out
Brian McCarthy (17:12):
a little bit.
Rick Carpenter (17:13):
Like, hey. Don't do this. And we've had a ton of
clients where the man in themiddle attacked a person in
accounts payable gets theiraccount compromised from our
client's vendor. They'll thenmake a fake domain with a one
instead of an I. So it looks thesame.
Submit say, hey. We didn't getthat check, or can you FedEx it
here? We'll send you the prepaidenvelope. Try and get a check-in
(17:36):
the way. So there's a lot moreschemes and threats and then
making sure your insurancepolicies cover that because a
lot of the times when they fillout their own insurance policy,
they're asking specificquestions.
And if you're just checking yes,then when you try and get paid
on a breach and when you can'tdocument that you had those
processes in place. So a lot ofwhat we're doing with clients is
making sure, like, if you'resaying yes on this, here's how
(17:57):
to document it, here's how toprove it's in place to make sure
you get paid if you do have tohave an insurance claim.
Dane Shoemaker (18:02):
Yeah. Do you do you guys get into, I mean,
offering insurance or or it'sthat's more of an
insurance company. You guys are more on
the IT operation side, security side.
Brian McCarthy (18:12):
It's a good question. We don't actually
offer insurance policies, but alot of the things we do are
insurance for systems, notnecessarily on paper, you know,
getting paid out. But, EDR,antivirus, a lot of the systems
that we put in place areinsurance Yeah. In their own
way. They're very preventative,and I mean, disaster recovery.
(18:35):
Yeah. Exactly. Right. Yeah. And,you know, god forbid something
does happen, you have thatpolicy from a large national
carrier to fall back on.
Yeah. So
Dane Shoemaker (18:45):
Okay. Yeah.
Brian McCarthy (18:46):
No. That's not a world we we wanna be in. Yeah.
Dane Shoemaker (18:49):
Yeah. That sounds like a lot of headaches.
Yeah.
Rick Carpenter (18:51):
It's not a world they wanna be in because
premiums have doubled andtripled the last couple years.
Dane Shoemaker (18:56):
Right.
Brian McCarthy (18:56):
They are getting smarter, though, the the
questions they're asking ontheir their policies. Mhmm. So
it's good.
Dane Shoemaker (19:04):
So do do you guys do implementations or,
like, system integration, or isit mostly just kind of a the
managed services, like, postmanagement side of
Brian McCarthy (19:15):
the house. Good question. So, kind of rolling
back to your original question,I guess, about the typical
engagement. A lot of times we'llcome in. We will take over the
support for an existingenvironment.
We'll do our assessment, andwe'll figure out, okay, you need
to upgrade this. This thing'sfine. This thing needs to go
away. Mhmm. And then we will puta big plan in place and,
(19:39):
implement new servers, new emailsystem, new applications, and
then ultimately support that.
Dane Shoemaker (19:45):
Mhmm.
Brian McCarthy (19:46):
So, yeah, we just did one, this week. We just
wrapped up a big email migrationproject from a for a a large
home builder in the area.
Dane Shoemaker (19:55):
Okay. Nice.
Brian McCarthy (19:57):
Yeah. It's pretty cool. Ricky and his team
did a great job. So I swear.
Rick Carpenter (20:01):
We always joke the every vendor we talk to will
tell you what's wrong, but noone will fix it. So we're we're
always the one stuck fixing it,implementing it, making it
actually work, and being thatlast mile.
Dane Shoemaker (20:12):
Yeah. Let me just double check here.
Rick Carpenter (20:21):
While you're looking at that, I will I'll
throw it back to you. Yeah.
Dane Shoemaker (20:24):
Because
Rick Carpenter (20:24):
I know you've talked about how you're using AI
for your things to schedule, anddo you wanna just highlight that
now since it is your podcast?And I
Dane Shoemaker (20:32):
mean, yeah, I mean, you know, we use project
management software calledClickUp that has something
called ClickUp Brain in it. Ithink it has it might be ChatGPT
on the back end. I have no idea.But that's just a lot of the
like, we'll take this podcast,for instance, it'll take the
transcript, and then we can takethe transcript and kind of
Brian McCarthy (20:55):
repurpose that into emails,
Dane Shoemaker (20:55):
you know, copy for, you know, Twitter or or
thing things like that. So
Brian McCarthy (20:59):
Is that like Clippy?
Dane Shoemaker (21:02):
It's like Clippy 2.0. Yeah. I would say Clippy
2.0 is probably more likeCopilot. Right? Yeah.
Rick Carpenter (21:08):
Microsoft does have new shirts that say, we
used to have Clippy, now we haveCopilot.
Dane Shoemaker (21:11):
I know. Right? Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I think
everyone's just kinda dabblingin, you know, AI and some of the
video generation stuff though,kind of freaks me out a little
bit. It's pretty wild.
Yeah. But, you know, I think,you know, I think what we do is
a lot of podcasts, kind of docustyle, I think like journalism,
(21:33):
like that type of stuff is notgoing to go away per se, right?
I think if you're in thebusiness of creating, you know,
stock footage or, you know,stock images or things like
that, you might be in trouble,but, you know, I think there's
always going to be a place for,you know, business leaders
getting in front of a camera andtalking about their business. I
(21:53):
hope so. You know?
Certainly, there's gonna be Idon't know.
Brian McCarthy (21:56):
I've been trying to figure out how to make a a
virtual avatar of myself. I
Dane Shoemaker (22:01):
think we're not that far from there. I think
we're not that far from there.You know, you can record this,
you get 3 60 camera and, youknow, feed some scripts in
there. And, you know, we'reprobably a couple of years away
from that, if not next year. Andwho knows?
But, yeah, we'll see. You know,we're optimistic. I did one,
Brian McCarthy (22:17):
I think this was 2 or 3 months ago. It's just you
make a video of yourself, kindof like a selfie. You read a
script and then it converts youinto a virtual avatar. Yeah. And
does it in your voice.
It's it's pretty scary.
Dane Shoemaker (22:33):
Yeah. I mean and and, again, in in a year or 2,
you're not even gonna be able totell the difference probably.
And I I look at these all liketools. So, I mean, you know,
we're gonna be able to justscale up, you know, I hope, you
know, rather than just beingreplaced by by AI, but, yeah,
it's a it's an interesting timewe're in right now.
Rick Carpenter (22:53):
Yeah. And it'd probably be nice when you're
looking for, like, what episodewas it that we talked about AI?
And, like, oh, I can just searchthrough all of my previous
podcasts because they're alltranscribed. Pull the 5
segments, make a supercut. Yep.
Then you have all yourinformation there ready at hand.
Dane Shoemaker (23:05):
Yeah. Absolutely. What about what's,
you know, for the future?Anything any plans for the
future, or what does the opentier look like in a couple
years? Growth.
Growth.
Brian McCarthy (23:16):
Lot lot of like, goal the goal's growth. Yep. We
are trying to add add clients,add staff, just grow our foot
footprint so that we can betterserve our clients. We, you know,
we find that there's, like, thishappy medium of being too small,
but also being too large. Andwe're trying to find to get to
that point.
We think that's probably around40 to 50 team members here.
Dane Shoemaker (23:40):
Okay.
Brian McCarthy (23:41):
So that's the 6 year plan.
Dane Shoemaker (23:43):
Okay.
Brian McCarthy (23:44):
After this I haven't really thought past the
6 years. We're just trying toget get to that, and then, you
know, we'll see what happensafter that. Yeah.
Rick Carpenter (23:52):
You know, we're creating some strategic
partnerships. There's some Okay.Types of lines of business that
were very successful 10, 15years ago that are starting to
go away. So we're trying to seeif we can integrate in with
them, pull them in, voice overIP companies or, security data
wiring, trying to add those,strategic partnerships. So that
(24:14):
way we can be kind of our goalis to everyone be everyone's
first call.
So that way we can bring that inand offer these services as
well. And really, there's gonnabe more and more regulation
coming out, whether it'sinsurance driven or whether it's
government driven. Just beingable to have that compliance, be
able to dot the i's, cross thet's for our clients so they can
(24:35):
sleep well at night and knowthat their stuff is under
control.
Dane Shoemaker (24:38):
Yeah. And and how many how many employees do
you have today? 12 right now.12. Okay.
Yep.
Brian McCarthy (24:44):
Hopefully, 14 by the end of the year. So we got
one starting on Monday. So Yeah.
Dane Shoemaker (24:50):
Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Anything anything else you
guys wanna talk about?
Brian McCarthy (24:57):
Jeez. We could go on. We could go on for a
while with stories and thingslike that.
Dane Shoemaker (25:01):
Yeah. Yeah. What's a success, successful
client, you know, story youmight wanna share for the last
year or so?
Brian McCarthy (25:09):
Yeah. You know, a lot of our clients we
Rick Carpenter (25:13):
look
Brian McCarthy (25:13):
at their growth. Their growth is a success for
us. Yeah. Being able to supportthem from when when they come to
us being, like, 3, 4, 5 people.We have some some clients that
started like that, and nowthey're, like, 50, 60, 70.
Dane Shoemaker (25:26):
Okay.
Brian McCarthy (25:27):
And that kinda look at that as a feather in our
cap.
Rick Carpenter (25:30):
Yeah. You
Brian McCarthy (25:30):
know, we've supported them through that and
and helped them get to thatpoint. Yep. So we have a a
number of those. I mean, if youwanna talk about any more
appointed success stories as faras implementations.
Rick Carpenter (25:43):
Yeah. We had a I'm trying to think of my
favorite example. We had oneclient that just sold last year,
2 years ago. They grew from 3partners to 45 employees, then
they all cashed out and retired.Their systems were easy to
integrate with their buyer.
We were able to say, here's allyour documentation. Here's your
information. So they were in agood setup, so we felt pretty
(26:05):
proud. Sad to lose them becausewe like them all.
Dane Shoemaker (26:07):
But Yeah. Yeah.
Rick Carpenter (26:08):
Very excited for them to have achieved their
goals. We have another clientnow. It's completed a national
rollout. We started with them.They were 10 users, and they now
have full infrastructure and afull national setup, so they we
have that down pretty well withthem.
They're creating a lot of theirautomations internally. They're
(26:29):
heavy into, Power Automate,Azure, and a lot of the cutting
edge technologies, so being ableto partner with them as they
kind of figure out thosetechnologies have been have been
really exciting for us. But justgeneral, the the local small
businesses where it's just a,hey. You've been our client for
15 years. Yeah.
Talk to them, they're like Ijoke the, one client we have who
(26:51):
is our direct contact now as apartner is the son of the
original owner.
Dane Shoemaker (26:56):
Okay.
Brian McCarthy (26:56):
And I'm
Rick Carpenter (26:56):
like, I remember when you were getting in trouble
in middle school, and I had totell your dad that,
Dane Shoemaker (27:00):
I don't know why
Rick Carpenter (27:01):
his machine's all messed up. And now he's, now
he's running the company.
Dane Shoemaker (27:05):
So That's pretty cool. Yeah. It's a lot of
clients you've had for a longtime watching them grow.
Brian McCarthy (27:11):
Yeah. You know, I always tell people, you know,
it's kind of our lead salespitch is, like, our first,
second, and third clients arestill clients from 2006. Nice.
Yeah. So that's that's prettyawesome.
Dane Shoemaker (27:24):
Yeah. Testament to your your service and yeah.
That's that's great. Anythingelse?
Rick Carpenter (27:33):
That's it. Appreciate it. We're we're
excited about this the workyou're doing, the podcast and
the
Dane Shoemaker (27:37):
Yeah. Absolutely.
Rick Carpenter (27:38):
So always any opportunities to have more
content, we recommend you.
Dane Shoemaker (27:44):
Yeah. Of course. Yeah. I appreciate that.
Brian McCarthy (27:45):
Sorry I didn't shave today. Same, I mean,
Dane Shoemaker (27:51):
I usually have a little gruff going anyway. So
yeah. Nice. Yeah. How can, howcan people find you?
Brian McCarthy (27:58):
I think the website is is the best avenue,
open tier systems dot com. K.Phone is also easy. We have a
nice easy phone number.48453536100.
You can ask for Josh over therein the in the sales office. And,
yeah, we're looking lookingforward to that. You know, we
always tell people let me justback up real quick. 95% of the
(28:20):
the clients we get are fromreferrals.
Dane Shoemaker (28:22):
Okay.
Brian McCarthy (28:23):
So to get a client from our website kind of
cold, that's always one of ourgoals.
Dane Shoemaker (28:29):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it
Brian McCarthy (28:31):
seems to elude us, but that's fine because we
have a lot of clients and, youknow, they're great and Yeah.
Rick Carpenter (28:36):
They keep coming from the referrals. So, and it's
hard to IT is really a trustindustry. We have the keys to
the kingdom. As I was joking onthat implementation, they're
like, are you gonna read all mymail? Like, I could read all
your mail a week ago.
Like, I've had access toeverything once I got set up.
Yeah. Like, it's a we need theyneed to trust that we are doing
what's in their best interest,and that takes a lot of time and
(28:57):
a lot. So we really enjoyconversations. We enjoy speaking
engagements, chambers ofcommerce.
We're very involved in mainlineChamber of Commerce and the
Monaco Chamber of Commerce,being able to get out to events,
meet people, talk to thembecause people always have
there's always a new technology.The news does a lot of marketing
for us in the sense that Right.You hear the scary stories, and
(29:20):
so a lot of times is saying,like, oh, yes. That's a thing,
but don't worry about that.You're protected because of x y
z.
Being able to have thoseconversations with people, you
know, while we try to avoid homeusers, we're happy to tell you,
like, if you do x y z, you'regonna be
Dane Shoemaker (29:37):
okay. So Yeah. Yeah. I mean, trust is the big
thing. I mean, it's so you know,it's very easy now to go sign up
for, you know, an Office 365account by yourself.
You're a one man shop or 2, youknow, 2 person company or
something like that. But, youknow, you you put a lot of trust
into your in your IT and, youknow, as you grow and having
having a partner like you guysin place is critical. So
Absolutely. And technologytouches everything anymore. So
(30:00):
not just IT.
It's everybody's business. Orworse. Yeah. So Yeah. Cool.
Well, it's great talking withyou guys today. Good talking to
you all soon. Yeah. Wish you allthe success, and
Rick Carpenter (30:09):
yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks, dude.
Dane Shoemaker (30:10):
Yeah. Thank you. Got a little wrapped up there.
Thanks, guys. Thank you.
Thanks for listening today. Shoemaker Lab
is an original production byShoemaker Films LLC. If you
enjoyed today's content, pleaseconsider subscribing on YouTube,
Spotify, Apple Podcasts, andwherever you get your content.
Follow us on Instagram at atshoemaker.films. And if you're a
(30:34):
business that's eitherinterested in our video
production services or wouldlike to be a guest on the show,
get in touch by using thecontact form on our website,
shoemakerfilms.com.
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