This is the Business Tech Playbook, your source for It help for your business.

Hello there. This is William Putt with Etop. Technology, and we're doing the business tech Playbook. And my co host is hi, I'm Rob Ross Olson. He's the podcast extraordinaire, really helping us up our game here at Etap Technology.

Hey, so are you most podcasts? Was it like 90% of podcasts don't make it past episode eight. So a little applause. You are now a podcast professional.

That's right. Ten podcasts in at this point. And we're going to keep this conversation going for as long as we can. So today we're going to be having a conversation around what should It do for you? We're going to talk through a couple of key topics that we think it should do for your business and then kind of deep dive into each one. And this will ultimately probably turn into several subsequent podcasts that we need to talk through because each of these topics could be multiple, multiple conversations. So we'll keep it as simple as possible, continue the trend of easy to digest technology concepts for executives and business owners.

The real deep dive on top of it that we get questions and that inspired this podcast episode is everybody goes, what does an MSP and what does It do for me? Well, a managed service provider is an external firm that becomes your It representative. They are your It department first and foremost. So that's why we're focused on what It should do for you because that MSP person should be your It department if you don't have one. And if you do, they should cover the same topics. You should expect some of the same results from either in house or an external MSP.

Exactly. Well, and that's it. So often it is seen as only a cost center. And if it's utilized properly, it really can become a huge value driver for the organization. But the three main topics we're going to talk about, and I think the three areas that It should support your business are specifically around, in my mind, mitigating risk. So that's an important aspect of It, supporting the company. So that one's somewhat self explanatory and then adding value. So Robbie, in topic number one, mitigating risk, what are some areas that a good It person or MSP should be helping a company?

If you have something of value, you have a security guard, don't you? I mean, even hospitals have it. If you have any type of asset worth protecting, you spend money to protect it. Whether it's a security system, whether it's a human being working the security system, whether it's a person with a lanyard and flashlight, making sure that no one's doing unsuspecting activity, it should be that. Plus, we should be the ones protecting your data, making sure that it doesn't get out that your trade secrets, your secret sauces are all kept. That information isn't deleted either by accident or intentional. We should be able to mitigate so much risk of your company that it shouldn't even be an argument of why you're paying the It person or managed service provider. That should just be a four one, that we have stuff of value. This is how we take care of it and protect it.

Absolutely. And we talk about this a little bit in episode one where we go into some of the five controls of cyber insurance. But what are some other categories where we can really kind of extrapolate on mitigating risk? What type of It risk does a company have?

Well, I'd love to plan and prepare so we don't have to call the insurance company and say, guess what happened? I'd like some sort of financial help. I would like to not have that phone call altogether. So backups is where things start in my mind. If you have data, you got to make sure that if that data goes away, if the server that it's on the computer that it lives on is broken, something happens or the hard drive fails, that you can get that data. And the question is of how soon? How long does it take to get that data back? Using different security accesses. Whether it's using multifactor authentication that we've talked about, where they can send the code to your phone using stronger password environments where you save things and you can by only using company approved and controlled tools, not just uploading it on that free dropbox you signed up for last week on your own personal account. Those are the easiest low hanging fruits to begin with, but we can certainly dive into a lot more. Also how people aggregate the data that they build. Whether it's let's say you're a law firm and you need to create legal documents, whether you're a sales representative and you need to type in your customer service manager, your opportunities, however it's at the It representative should be there identifying those processes, making sure they're secure, protected and all in a safe environment.

Absolutely. And so much of risk mitigation is very boring, but it is extremely critical to the overall health and resilience of the organization. And that's like you said, backups are important. But it's not just backing up a server. It's not just backing up a computer. It goes into are you backing up your applications? If you have a SaaS application, are you backing that up? Are you backing up your office 365? Do you have a way to get your data out of those applications if you decided to switch to a different provider? There's so many different areas that backups tie into, and then it's 98% of backups. That's a totally made up statistic. But a substantial amount of the backups that we restore have absolutely nothing to do with a disaster and everything to do with somebody just misclicking. So that's one important area of backups is just the ability to get back that one file you spent 6 hours working on.

What you should expect out of your It representative, MSP. Or internal, is a guy that when you're, the person trying to figure out how to make this business work, how to make sure to make it profitable, how to make sure that the customer is delivered to you, are hiring that guy to say, hey, wait a minute. What's the risk of doing this? So you think that you're hiring a negative Nelly? And there's a book that's very famous in the It world called the Phoenix Project. In there they portray each stereotypical type of person in a large business and the security guy is always the guy that looks down upon because he's the guy that seems to be slowing down the work. He's the guy that says, whoa, whoa, whoa, you can't do that because some security book says so. It shouldn't be like that. It should be a guy that has a real conversation saying, if you do this, here's the repercussion, here's what it means to the company. That's what you need to look at is a guy that collaborates not necessarily there just to follow some sort of critique, but instead really take the investment of the company at heart. Because he's the guy that's supposed to protect it in the first place.

There was a really interesting part in that book that's a great thing to reference, where the security guy realized that all of the mitigations he had in place didn't matter because the CFO had a good accounting control and as a result, was able to mitigate every piece of risk that he had been trying to hold up the process on. And it really changed his mindset dramatically in the conversation because he realized that you can mitigate risk in ways other than just it. And it was such a fascinating read. If you haven't read it, I'd totally recommend reading it. It's a great, just easy to read story that talks about operational efficiency, technical debt, security, just a really good read.

It's kind of the go to book for a lot of people that worry about it or business DevOps. If we're trying to get our toes wet in there, that's the go to book of saying, hey, this is a path forward. But yeah, again, they paint that security guy pretty bad and it shouldn't be. It should be a collaborative effort where he's thinking of yes, I want to get it done, but let's do it where we're not going to blow this whole thing up.

Well, security, backups, disaster recovery, mitigating risk, it has to always be balanced with business outcomes. I mean, this is something we've talked about more than a few times. And we will continue talking about it, because if it doesn't support the business and it is keeping the business from doing their job effectively okay, well, then how do we find that balancing point where we provide the most amount of mitigation while providing the most amount of efficiency? And so this is a conversation that you need to be constantly kind of working through, giving feedback. We're tweaking our internal patching processes for our clients, and when clients say, hey, this isn't working for me quite like this, can we do it like this instead? It's so much easier for us to build something that works better for everyone when they just collaborate, like, hey, don't be upset, don't be angry. Just give actual feedback and say, this was really inconvenient, but this would work a lot better. When we get that kind of collaboration, we're able to do so much more for people just because now we know, rather than being irritated and just like, well, this is stupid. Well, no, not patching isn't an option. That's a really basic thing that you need to do for your security and risk mitigation. And so not doing it just if we were told we weren't allowed to do it for a client, we would drop them as a client because it's such a key part of mitigation. But if somebody comes back and says, hey, 730 would be a lot better time for me, great. It's something we can do to make your life better while still providing that equal amounts of security.

Now, another thing of mitigating risk, people think of just protecting the data, making sure that you have backups of stuff that's lost, but also mitigating a risk of a path forward. There's so many times where someone from the sea level, some sort of department manager, they want to go in a direction, and they never looped in it. I've seen it so many times where they're just not part of the meeting because it's just, Guess what? I don't want someone there that's not a part of the normal decision makers. And they'll say, hey, we're going to put this whole new platform forward. We're going to have this whole new process of doing stuff. And the It guy, if he was involved, could have said, guess what? We already pay for it. We have a wonderful license for this. We already handle it this way. I can just give you the tools. Here you go. And I can't tell you how many times thousands of dollars, thousands of hours of effort go into direction when it was already set up and the It guy already did the legwork and thought of it ahead of time.

Well, and I think a lot of this is It's fault for not trying to get a seat at the table and then only being that cybersecurity person who just is like, no, don't do that. Well, if we're constantly naysayers and not problem solvers at our core, typically It people are very problem solving oriented, but we need to be more collaborative on the business side of it. And I think we so often just see ourselves as that same cost center rather than a huge value driver for an organization. And so that's why we get excluded.

There was a customer that I was dealing with, and they didn't contact us at all about the tool that they were trying to purchase. And they wanted to share their company data with another company securely because they couldn't send it through email attachments because of the vulnerability and whatnot and size of the files. So they went out and purchased a multi thousand dollars tool that didn't work correctly and really was an inconvenience and hassle for the business. And the entire time I'm like, guess what? We have office 365. We have this wonderful secure tool that you already pay for. Here's how to use it. Way easier, way faster at that time that had way more size limitation than the tool they purchased. And it could have saved them the money, the time, the hassle, and it was already there if they would have just looped them in, looped us, and that's it.

It's already included. And so now instead of just saying, hey, here's some training for an existing platform. And to be honest, that's a big part of why we're building out our university site, Robbie, because we're trying to show our clients what tools they already have available to them just because they're already a client of ours, or because they use Office 365, or because of insert reason here. But the more you can make people aware of what their tools can do for them, most people use two 3% 5% of a tool. And so it's like we're trying to find ways to explain more fully. And in many ways this sounds funny, that it's using the same tools for different things can help mitigate risk, but the reality is it's not introducing one more point into their organization, so instead of using OneDrive, now they're using Share File. And now we have to make sure Share File is locked down. We have to make sure multifactor is on for Share File. We have to make sure you don't have external links going places. So there's a lot of extra security legwork that has to go into making sure this program is working for you in its intended manner. Whereas we already had everything set up for Office 365 and OneDrive sharing. So every time you add a tool, it adds a risk surface. And so the more you can minimize your tools stay kind of lean, the less risk there is.

Yeah, I can't tell you how many times I've been in a scenario where that lack of communication has just caused the issue. Even when you sign up for a service and you don't know necessarily what it comes with, try to have them paint that out and try to have them for onboarding with even new clients of saying, here's our subset of tools for our clients at Etomp. We have when people onboard and we get them set up with multi factor authentication, I take a couple minutes and go, here's your email, here's how the archive works. Here's a couple tools in your computer that the company use. Here's a wonderful place where you can message us and submit a ticket. Give them the at least initial training wheels and that goes a long way just for those individuals. But even companies that have onboarded don't understand what tools the It person has provided them along the way due to only one person getting the memo and not sharing it with the rest of the company. So yeah, there's a lot of business risk that gets mitigated with proper communication channels.

That's funny how that works. It goes back to just communicate, understand what the business goals are, how can we help you? And at the end of the day, we are all helpers. At our heart, we want to make your business better. So whether that's internal, whether that's MSP, at the end of the day, the outcome is still the same. But we want to help make things better as long as we know, what do you want? And then also it kind of is not my favorite topic, but a lot of where Mitigation comes in is really good policies and procedures that are inside your organization. Some of those policies are It related and some of them are actually most of them are going to be It related at some level. So that's acceptable. Use that's training that there's just so much that goes into helping your company mitigate risk that it's actually pretty valuable. But again, it needs to be in support of helping the company grow and do your business right.

So part one for your three steps that you expect out of the It professional, again, one was mitigate risk. And underneath those, the three categories are the, you could say infrastructure security, which we talked about initially, the communication that you need to be part of the conversation, use that It in your back pocket to say, hey, this is what I want to do, how can we accomplish it? And making sure that Mitigation of Risk policy is written with him. You have a goal of a policy. You don't make a rule just like with your kids, why can't you put a fork into the light socket? Well, it's going to hurt. There's reasons why we have rules in business. There's reasons why they have policies. Express what your goal is for the policy and they can help not only enforce it, but make it understood to others in the company. So have them be that person in the conversation with policy as well.

Absolutely. And then the second topic we were looking at is supporting the company. And so honestly, I'd forgotten about this one for quite a while. And I was like, yeah, there's two main things it should do for you and it's mitigate risk and add value. And then somebody's like, no, you need to support the company. And that's the availability to take care of your day to day problems and keeping your people working. It's not the planning, which is kind of where I see the mitigate risk coming in, but it's very much the help. I'm having a problem with Outlook. My can't print, my laptop hardware decided to fail. What are types of things that we support our clients with?

Robbie really almost anything. There are some stuff that's out of service terms. Like if they come up to us saying, hey, why isn't our washer dryer not working? Maybe we'll do a touch of best effort, but in the end, they're going to have to call a representative that takes care of a washer and dryer and not equipment, but there's a wide range that we do. So we'll help with the email, the computer, the day to day, the specialized software. We're not versed in everything. We're generalists in most things. So if you have this one very specific line of business software that you have, we're going to get good. I promise you that. If you're going to be on the company and that's what you live and breathe, we're going to learn it with you. But we're going to rely on the support of the app vendor to get us good.

Well, and actually to this .1 of the areas that we actually helped a client with in the last week, it's something that we got to project, manage effectively. It wasn't something that we could fix on our own because to your point, we're not a line of business expert on Sage 100 ERP. So we had one client where their credit card processor was like, we need to update the module in Sage 100. So one of our team jumped in with that credit card processing vendor. They ran an update, got everything going, and the next day they couldn't run AR aging reports. And so this was a pretty big problem for the company because they couldn't see what was happening on their aging. And so, as a fact, we don't know how to fix that specific report. But we went back and started pushing each of the vendors. So we went to Sage 100 vendor, we went to the credit card processor. We went to their ERP vendor. So they have three different vendors that we worked with to get this problem solved for them. And the reason it got solved was because we pushed it forward. We were following up, we were available. And it wasn't something we directly fixed, but we facilitated the heck out of it.

We owned that and we worked with the vendor. We got it accomplished. We weren't the experts, but we should be able to support with that. And for those that are watching for the alphabet soup that we hate, AR aging again, accounts receivable aging, you want to know? Thank you. What? Accounts receivable are out of date so you can pressure them, get your money. That's pretty damn important.

And ERP I apologize. Enterprise resource planning. So most types of businesses have software that lines up with that has their own alphabet soup for each industry. So in it we have something called a PSA professional service automation. Lawyers have case management and document management. So CMS DMs attorneys, accountants tend to have practice management. They're dealing know taxes. There's so many different goodness knows there's an alphabet soup for everything.

Insurance keep doing our best to translate for sure.

Agency management. Yeah, sometimes it'll just cause your brain to pop because there's so many different acronyms.

But yeah, the support front of it. What you should expect from an It person for support is having not just emergency support is one thing. If the business is down, people are down, that It person should be able to support you emergently. But if it's not something urgent, you need to be respectful of a person's time and know that they're going to take your request in order of priority. Even if it's in house. If that person is taking care of his whole server, that's down, that's taking down an entire department. He's probably not going to go over and help you with your mouse battery. That doesn't seem to be working. They're going to prioritize accordingly. So that's something that you should expect out of them. And having a documentation library, you can't expect that your It person being one person, two people, a team would not only know what each other are doing, but also remember what they have done. So if you have an issue that needs to be well documented, they need to have a documentation system of some sort or method of documenting so that when they know this is the third time they dealt with, you know, maybe it's probably time know escalate that issue.

Not a problem with whatever the software is.

Kathy's using it's too often that people have an It person and they expect him just to be a churn and burn. They're trying to stop the issues from coming in to make the company more efficient. And that's something you should expect from your It representative. Not just a guy that namelessly plays whack a mole but a guy that stops from the moles from coming up in the first place.

We're trying to get rid of the moles constantly. And to be fair, sometimes we cause our own problems. We do. But it's always done with a mindset of how do we mitigate and minimize and make things more efficient for our customers, our clients. Because if we're not, then we just become irritating and the last thing we want is to be irritating to our clients. So in the last month we've helped with a PCI compliance. We've changed DNS for websites, we've helped fix an aging report. I'm sure we've worked on some printers. I'm pretty sure I heard someone today trying to troubleshoot why a USB to video adapter wasn't working. And my response was because you're using a USB to video adapter. But that was an abnormally snarky response.

Sorry, this is a safe space.

BJ, it's a safe space. Okay, sorry. And forgive us when we say submit a ticket, because that may seem extremely frustrating and irritating and like it's slowing down the process. But the reality is there's a lot of operational efficiency gained by an It person having the ability to triage and understand what's important. And that's why tickets are so important for the support process of supporting your company. So if you have an in house guy or in house person, get them some tools to support your company efficiently. And like you said, Robbie, documentation platforms, ticketing, lifecycle management, there's a lot of different things that can kind of go into being efficient on support, for sure.

Having the, another thing you should expect is having the person being able to adapt. A lot of times you'll get It people that kind of, kind of close up and say, sorry, this is not something I deal with, and they try to push it to someone else. If you have a team of It people, even if it's not their particular set of expertise or they share responsibility, where this person does A, this person does B, they should at least have basic knowledge or at least the care to capture your issue properly and not just push it away. That is so often done, especially internal It people because, I don't know, they just have less customer service skills than someone that needs to win your business every time like an MSP. But that happens so often where it's just not my problem and they don't even escalate it up the chain, just like you said. With the issue that we had with Sage 100, that is not our problem. But we made it our problem. We are not the experts in it, but we captured the issue, we pushed it forward and only let go of the handing off the issue when we knew someone else was going to handle it or it worked well.

And the funny part is that realistically, there was nothing, we didn't even need to be involved for this problem to get fixed. It was all something that could have been done inside of Sage 100 by their Sage admin. But the reality is that's not who we are saying not our problem isn't really in our vocabulary because at some level anything technology related that's keeping the business from functioning is it's problem. And if you consistently just wash your hands of something, then they're not going to report issues to you and then you don't know how to fix it. And again, it should be flexible and engaged in making sure that the problems of the company get solved. And a lot of times it's not directly it related.

And if you It people are listening, this next one's going to hurt. We talked about in the first section of mitigating risk that communication issues really cause a ton of risk. Well, if you're going to be that person that just pushes off, it's not my problem. You said that it's hard enough, and they won't go to us. Let's go. On the other side of this, if you're being too communicative, an It person should be able to handle that. If they get a person that continually relentlessly is the squeaky wheel, an It person shouldn't push that off. You need to expect an It person to be able to handle someone that has continual repeat issues and being able to collect that data and then really go to the core reason why the squeaky wheels, the one that gets greased, encourage squeaky wheels. I would much rather have a Whiny Cathy than Bob that doesn't talk to me and just lets it be broken.

Well and then throws it under the bus because it's been broken for two months. Well, but if we didn't know the end of the day, we can only fix what we know about. And communication has to be two ways. Something that's funny and part of what we've done is we've worked on our operational efficiency, is if somebody's too quiet, we start calling and asking what's going on, if one of our contracts is suddenly too profitable. I know that sounds like a funny thing to say, but if we're tracking how many tickets every single organization puts in, and if, on a three month average, somebody's within a certain range, okay, cool. It sounds funny, but there's enough problems that they're seeing value in what we're doing. But if people don't call us for three months at all, we're checking in with a point of contact and asking, hey, is there something going on? Anything we can help you with? Are there any challenges you're facing? It allows the account management side of support to come in and just start asking questions, because have they literally had no It problems in three months? I find that hard to believe.

I did it for a elementary school. It's a charter school in my area, and most of the teachers were hitting me left and right. Hey, I need this. Hey, the projector is not working. Hey, there's this whiteboard, hey, my Mac needs updating. And it was just it could make an It guy go crazy. I didn't complain about any of those, but after I got caught up with doing some of those, when I look over at fourth grade and see that I haven't even been introduced, nothing's going on. I just go in her classroom, introduce myself, start talking to the person again. I'm an extrovert. Most It people are not extroverts. So this is easier for me than it will be. Very much so. I go in there, introduce myself, saying, hey, if you need anything, I can help you with this. This finding out that she's abandoned most of her technology because of the push off. That she's had from a prior It person, and she loved that communication. She stopped using her digital whiteboard, she stopped using Chromebooks in the classroom, basically abandoned all of it for old school pen and paper tactics because she had to adapt to what she felt she was only left with. I guarantee, especially if your company is large, there are a few people that don't reach out to it because they've, quote, unquote felt burned out because of it. Use that. Your It person should be at least personable enough that if someone like you said, isn't calling in, isn't being a squeaky wheel ever, that it might be just a fact that they don't think you're going to handle it, or they've had a bad experience in the past.

And that's one area and part of why we engage in how we do we do what they call all you can eat type contracts, where we do effectively, an unlimited support for our monthly engagement. And because of that, we really encourage people to call in and get their problems fixed, because then we can start seeing what's going on and how we can engage with the company. Because it's kind of like hiring an in house person, except where you're not being billed for every single communication. And that's part of why what we do, I feel like, is so valuable for most of our customers because they get the support they need when they need it. And part of our job is to then really identify. I feel like it puts us on the same side of the table as the customer, because now we're sitting alongside you, helping you solve the problems rather than just letting them exist.

I explained it to one of the people. They said, well, what are we going to do for support? What's it going to cost me? I'm like, no, this is something that's included, why on earth would you ever do that? That doesn't make any sense to me. What's the motivation for you? I flat out told the customer. I said, we win. When you don't call, that's how our profitability goes up. So if you're working, running, have uptime, that's how we win. And you are calling in requesting support is an opportunity that we get to earn your business. So we go back to having your problem fixed. So I'm sitting there ready to pick up the phone whenever you need, so I can win your business again every month. He was just kind of taken back and floored by that response. But that's what you should expect from support from your It person. Whether it's an MSP internal, they're already on, I'm assuming, a salary hourly, they're already there. They should be earning their job, every opportunity, every project the same way an MSP would.

Exactly. Well, and there's so much that goes into it, and our inner goal is to earn it every single month, which is part of why we look if somebody's not calling us as know what's going on, did we manage to fix all the problems? Well then if that's the case, then we need to move on to the next part of the conversation, which is add value number three. Number three. How do you like that segue? That was a segue to our sponsor. I'm joking. I'm joking actually. Well, I mean, we are the sponsor.

But this podcast sponsored by raycon, I was kidding.

Exactly. This podcast sponsored by Etop Technology.

Anyways, adding value what you should expect an It or MSP person to add value. There's plenty of different ways besides just support and mitigating risk. Adding value. You should be able to have that person help you with projects. You can't expect him to be a project manager, but he should have some of those skill sets he's picked up along the way. It should be there, but more of how to execute the process by helping lower manpower using the tools that it has brought to the table to automate, bring data to the fingertips. There's plenty of ways that that should be a part of strategy and company direction for sure.

Typically It folks are pretty process oriented and not always. There are definitely cowboys out there that just live in the you only live once mindset, which can be unhealthy sometimes. You want somebody who can think on their feet and adapt extremely quick and so a tiny bit of cowboy I think is valuable. But how do you have that process oriented mindset while still being like, I know how to get stuff done. And I think that's adding value is such a really fun part for me because it's something we're trying to learn and teach each of our team every single day because it's the vision part of it, the vision and direction. If I may toot your horn, I need some interrupted.

If I may toot your horn for you, we pick on you. Nickname from Squirtle is because your passion in this industry, if you do something, be passionate about it, and you'll never work a day in your life, your passion every day BJ that you come into is showing what you can do more for the customer and adding that value. That's where I believe an MSP shines above having an internal It guy, an internal ID guy, it's like getting a maintenance guy. They're just expected that these are the systems you're in charge of. Them will reach out to you when you need it. An MSP person, if they want to really succeed and show, has to earn the value of what they're asking for in their commitments and contracts. And every day we'll be like, oh, here's a password reset tool, here's a great tool for documentation for your customers. Here's an add on to your email to make email signatures company wide and automatic to save you guys time, process and business continuity. And you're just sitting there and when you have any free time, any motivation BJ that's what makes Etop so much fun for me and proud that I work at Etop is that we're bringing that value every day. And I guarantee you, 90 days from now, we're going to have new tools, new value add ons for all of our customers, and that will continue growing on as this company goes. And that's what you should expect out of an MSP, is that they're looking out for you for new ways to save time, efficiency, cost, anything along the way. And if you don't, well, you might have a good MSP, but you don't have a great one.

It's one of the areas that I've been trying to figure out how to set us apart, and it's something that I think the CIO type person should be doing for your company. Too many It companies or MSPs do something that they call vCIO virtual CIO. And unfortunately, what it means is like a technical account manager who's trying to sell you something. I would be lying if we aren't trying to sell our clients something right like we are. But at the end of the day, there's a ton of things that we do just because we want to get better and add value that we don't charge for because, I don't know, it's like, how do you provide actual strategic value of somebody at a CIO level for every single customer? Every single client? And I have to remind myself every time a customer is somebody who comes into Taco Bell, a client is somebody that you work with on an ongoing basis. So we only have clients. So that strategy really is where you start having conversations with the other members of the management team, the executive leadership, where it's okay, where's the company going? What are your growth plans, how do we help you get there? How can it be a value add when it comes to budgeting direction, automation, efficiency gains? Is there a technology that we can bring in that replaces the need for hiring three people? Would you rather spend 5000 a month on a piece of software but replace five people and or not need to hire five people? This is, in my mind, where CIO It MSPs should be bringing value to the table because while it may have an expense attached to it, at the end of the day, oftentimes it has such a high value addition. Like, you can pay for a piece of technology and replace some of the human element. And you don't want to get rid of the human element necessarily, but how do you maximize that human element? And I feel like that's always 100% our job.

It feels really good as a technician, as part of the company. When you hear the leader of the company go, hey, Rob, you got to check out this sweet tool. And this is one example that I've gotten since I've been here right seven months at the company so far. This is one example. Hey, look at this cool tool called Cloudflare. It's something that we can use to automate and make the remote connectivity of a client so much easier. Where they don't have a login, they don't have this complicated VPN process, and it's just pushed out to their computers. We'd use this for company A, B, and C, and it would help them so much, make them efficient. Connectivity would be so much faster, blah, blah, blah. And that's what he's excited for. As though he's telling me a story about how he caught a big fish on the weekend. It's that excitement level.

Well, so something we've been tasking one of our team members with doing is we've been on a process automation journey for the last year, and we will be on this journey for the foreseeable future. But one thing we've been learning along this route is unless you have a process, you can't automate it. And so we've been documenting the heck out of our internal processes and then finding out where can we maximize our team? So, as an example, last month, across our entire client base, so we're a team of seven people right now. We've saved almost 500 people hours of time. That is incredible. We don't have 500 people hours in our team. Well, I guess we do. We have a lot more than that. But at the end of the day, how do we do that same thing for our customers? I catch myself again. How do we do that same thing for our clients where literally the very purpose of our being is to go, how do we save you 500 people hours a month? Because that's huge. That's multiple full time, or FTEs. That's multiple full time employees worth of work being done. So one of our team has been engaged with going into clients and saying, hey, show me what your file intake process looks like. Okay, well, maybe we can automate this piece here and that will save you 30 minutes a day per person. Well, on a firm of 55 people. Do the math. 30 minutes a day times 55 people. Some of these people are several hundred thousand dollars a year. It's a big law firm. They're 30 minutes. That's 30, $40 every single time we save them time.

And this step three, this value add component of what you expect from an It person doesn't have to be earth shaking. It doesn't have to be that they have the king of automation or they're looking up R and D left and right. It can be something small. For instance, a conversation I had with one of the customer clients. See what you did right there? I like it. Clients. One of my clients and I've been building a relationship with this particular client. The client went from as he was on board with the company because he was new to the company. As one of the bigger managers at starting off of, we really didn't appreciate him. He was very demanding. Everything was an emergency until he got the swing of things, of how we prioritize and really do make his issue our priority, and we earned trust with him in a relationship. Well, now we're at the point of I'm sitting there chitchatting and back and forth. We're a little bit more candid with each other. And he's like, you know what? You just helped me with this issue, but you got a time for another one. I just want to shoot something by you. And when I hear that word, I want to throw something at you. I want to shoot it by you. That right there tells me that I've built the bond, and I've earned his contract this month. And when he shows me something as simple as, hey, what I'm doing, and this is a real example I'm saving four documents every time I have to do it because I want to save different revisions. Monday, I'll do an edit Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Each one of those get a separate documents because I'm scared of losing my changes in case I want to go back to one of those changes. It's taking me a lot of time. There's a lot of documents there, and do you have any better way of doing this? And I said, absolutely. And I showed him revision history in Word, how it automatically saves documents, how every single change is logged, and he can roll back to those changes whenever he wants. He says, you have no idea. You've saved me countless hours right now. I appreciate you.

Is this somebody at Etop?

This is one of our customers, yes. Sweet. This is one of our customers.

Good job.

It doesn't have to be earth shaking. It's just showing them being there, being trusted, and having them confide in you issues because they know that your priority is making their life easier.

I literally just got a text from the general manager of one of our clients, and this is a client. We're in a really good place with them right now, but we've had some rocky roads to get there. And he's like, hey, I just need to run something by you. We came across something in an audit that we are dealing with right now, and I really want to ask your opinion on it, see if it's something we can solve easily. I love that conversation because I'm helping his business. And we're not just fixing Outlook, we're there to do that too. But how do we it goes back to every single day. Add a little bit of value. Even in our sales and marketing efforts, we're trying to it's part of why we're doing this podcast. Yes, it's part of our ultimate sales effort. But at the end of the day, you can listen to this and get value about your it without ever talking to us. And we're using this to create content? Yes, absolutely. But our goal is to add value to our customers. It's part of why we're building a university site. It's why we talk through our tools. It's why we are constantly reevaluating our tools when software vendors come to us and say, hey, sell my product, I'm like, no, we might, but I don't think they realize so many MSPs, so many people just want to resell a tool. At the end of the day, I sell Etop technology. I sell our solution and how we're going to help you get better. I don't sell you antivirus. Do you get that? Well, yeah, but add value constantly, every single day.

I was sitting at a friend of mine's business the other day, and he is a local mechanic in my hometown in Minnesota, and he was sitting there talking like, how's it going? Oh, it's going pretty well. He's never negative. I mean, the guy could be drowning in work, having terrible issues, and he's always positive. And he's built a trust with his customers where I was literally sitting there, someone comes in and he went just to pay a bill and he says, hey, can I pass something by you? And he has such built and earned trust, just like I had with that one individual I just talked about with the revision history and document. He went to his mechanic because he's earned that trust with that individual and said, hey, what vehicle should I be buying for my daughter? What's a safe vehicle? What's an affordable price point? What's something that's going to last me? Because he trusts in his expertise that he's going to bring the value that he has in the past to this new subject he's bringing in front. And that's the number one thing that you can do for a value add, is earn the trust to the point where they're going to give you the.

Opportunity to add more value always and forever. And hearing that story just makes me so happy because that's the core of what it should do for you. Like, hey, I have a problem. Help me solve it. Okay, cool, let's do that. And so much of it is just listening, hearing communication, and then giving a good answer or being brave enough to.

Say, or being brave enough to say. I don't know, but I'm going to.

Find out that it used to me be pro level Googler and now it's becoming pro level AI question asker person. But I love what we do and how we do it because of the value it brings to our team, our clients, our employees. I'm trying to figure out ways to make it so that way that process automation is saving us thousands of hours a month, and it won't be long. But then how do we do that? Same thing. I want to start seeing that aggregate across clients where we're saving our clients hundreds of hours every month and you just mic dropped me.

I did. I picked up a mic and I mic dropped you right there. It doesn't get better.

Next time, you can just say, Stop talking.

No, it's not stop talking. That was an enunciated moment that needed a mic drop. Well, guys, yeah, if you got questions, we have thebusinesstechpodcast.com that's the website. You'll find our information. Otherwise, it's in the show notes. Join us on discord. It's at the bottom of that very same website. You can come ask us live. We'll be pretty darn responsive and absolutely. If you're looking for an It person, we're here. Give us a call. Etop Technology.

If you shoot an email to [email protected], just ask any questions, we'll be happy to answer them. We're pretty much on all of the socials that I think matter mostly LinkedIn, and we might I'm not on Facebook. I can't handle it. But if you can't find me on LinkedIn, you're not looking very hard. I'm very easy to find. So, yeah, with that said, hey, let me get risk, support the company and add value. That's what it should be doing for you.

Let throw something by you after the podcast. Until next time.

Until next time. Have a great day.