617 Help Desk Best Practices with Coach and Brook

00:27 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Hello friends, uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals. We are here with a very special edition of the show and if you are watching the video, you can see behind me there is a big old Channel Pro sign, because I am here in Orlando at Channel Pro Live. We just finished day one. I actually just left the vendor hall where they are next door having food and drink and getting belligerent and all that stuff. I, on the other hand, am here presenting you with a show. We've got our friends from PIA coming up and we're going to have a good time here. 

01:13
Just to tell you a little bit about Channel Pro Live, it is like I said, here in Orlando, it's a two-day event and we just finished up day one, where we had some of the early speakers, finished up day one where we had some of the early speakers. We had a couple of group mixers and I did my swag run, and that's all I'm going to say about that. There are 19 vendors here and I did fill up at least one bag, but next week I will evaluate the swag and give you the swag award winners for Channel Pro Live 2024. This starts off the conference season and I don't plan to do a ton of shows live, but there will be some. And just to give you an idea of where else I will be, here's a little preview. 

02:01 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Are you guys excited? 

02:03 – Pax8Beyond
Are you ready to start Beyond? 

Who's coming to Beyond 24? You want a little more. 

I think folks are really, really excited about what they can do with their customers and how they can help grow their business. 

02:21 - Uncle Marv (Host)
It's a massive opportunity for all of you Cheers to the channel community and that is PAX 8 Beyond 2024. It'll be in Denver, Colorado, once again, June 9th through the 11th, and the godfather of the channel, rob Ray, has said that I can come out and join them once again. So I will be there, I believe the week after that I will be at an IT Nation, then there will be an ASCII event and then there'll be a TechCon event and another ASCII and another IT Nation and some other stuff. But that's what's going to be happening there. So before I bring out my PFOs, let me go ahead and take care of the commercials and sponsors. 

03:05
The IT Business Podcast is brought to you by NetAlly, your number one ally for handheld testers in the system. The live show is presented by Computers Done Right. My good friend over there in Venice, Florida, does managed services IT support. Also, if you don't live there, they can still manage your website and social media stuff. So computersdoneright.com and I don't have a drink tonight, but if you can imagine me holding my mug, super Ops to your all-in-one, future-ready RMM PSA tool to supercharge your operations. They are sponsoring the Florida man segment and my mug for tonight, but I don't have a mug, but just imagine it there. All right let's go ahead and bring back our friends from Pia. We've had a couple of shows with them already. It has been great hanging out with them, and I've got coach and Brook in the house. Guys, how are you doing? 

04:08 - Brook Lee (Guest)
yeah, hey, doing good, doing good. How have you been? 

04:12 - Uncle Marv (Host)
I've been good, the little princess wave right, right, right. 

04:16 - Tim Coach (Guest)
That's what I would like rob ray, the godfather of the channel. 

04:19 - Uncle Marv (Host)
I wonder how him and jay-z compete as the mayor of the channel you know, he's got more power I don't know, but Jay-Z was just in here and I thought he was going to come do a cameo, but he probably went next door to get another drink or something. Who knows? 

04:33 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Oh, he'll Somebody's got to manage that crowd over there. 

04:39 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right. So just to let everybody know that you know, as I said to you guys off air, yes, just to let everybody know that you know, as I said to you guys off air, yes, I'm here live at Channel Pro and I had booked you guys first. I wasn't going to bump into you. So I am here doing the show with you guys and thank you for hanging out with me. 

04:58 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Absolutely Happy to be here. 

05:00 - Tim Coach (Guest)
Thanks for having us. 

05:01 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right. So tonight we're going to talk about the help desk, which is a little interesting subject for some MSPs, isn't it? 

05:10 - Tim Coach (Guest)
It is. It is the bane of existence, Right? I mean it's the most necessary evil there is in the IT world. Yeah. 

05:18 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Dude, it's not evil Stop. 

05:21 - Uncle Marv (Host)
And just to let you know, yes, we have people watching live here. We stream on YouTube, LinkedIn and the Facebook, and somebody's already there. What pia? So yeah, so help desk I told you guys I was having a couple of conversations in the last uh, I think two weeks, three weeks, with some other maps that are at the point where they're trying to figure out what to do in terms of help desks. You know, one of them has a couple of techs but they don't have anybody dedicated. One is a solo tech that they're looking to outsource and one other is looking to basically figure out how to streamline help desk operations and kind of needed a little guidebook, in a sense, to figure that out. So I think what you know, some of what we're going to do tonight, is going to kind of help with that right yeah, I think. 

06:15 - Tim Coach (Guest)
So I think we're going to be all over the place. I mean, it's you know, obviously. You know, uncle Marv, you have your own shop and you've been working at it for a while. You know how that goes. And then, then you know, Miss Brook has had, you know, she was an engineer by education of trade, went on up to the C-suite, obviously, started consulting from there and then me, rebuilding a bunch of MSPs. So I think between the three of us we have a fair bit of knowledge when it comes to help desk. 

06:41 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right, All right. So why don't we start with, I guess, a beginning point, when people, because you know they'll come to you with your software and they'll want to look at the automation and stuff. 

07:01 - Brook Lee (Guest)
But what are some of the starting points that you discuss with? You know organizations, when it's time to formalize the help desk, I would say a lot of it is going to depend on the size and the maturity of the MSP, and I'm also one of those. It's every everything doesn't fit everybody. There's not like sort of a one size fits all. You kind of got to figure out what's going to work for your MSP, for the people that you have that's working there, and also for your clients’ needs as well. A lot of times you're working with MSPs the smaller ones, because they're still sort of teetering between the break-fixed and the full managed services. So you still kind of have some of both clients because in the beginning you know you're going to take a lot of T&M because you got to get the bills paid and then as you mature you try to sort of, you know, scale back on those and scale up more on the MSP side. So for me I think it's just it's not a one size fits all. 

07:45
You can definitely outsource. I'm a proponent of that, especially if the situation you were mentioning earlier, if the text that the person has at the MSP, if they're on the road a lot, I call it their role in the truck. They've got to go on site a lot and you need somebody to be there, sort of hold the fort down, and you don't want to do a full time employee with all that entails, because it's more than just the salary. We know there's lots of other things that go along with hiring an employee. So sometimes outsourcing, even at that point financially, may make more sense as well. Coach. 

08:16 - Tim Coach (Guest)
Yeah, you know it's, it's. I think it's. It gets to the point where it's what's your focus as someone who's building that MSP? Is your focus projects? Is your focus like just taking care of your clients? Then what are your clients demands, right? 

08:30
Because if it's getting to that point, I mean you certainly see the guys go out and I'm you know, we all know a bunch of those guys. They go out on their own and they're running their own show, but then what happens? When they want to take vacation or they get too busy or they got a project, they typically need help. So I think a good way to go about that in a lot of cases is to find another one of, basically you right, that single guy or girl that's out there doing your thing and partner up with them and that provides you a little bit of relief. As far as you know, when you get super busy or you need someone to cover, they need someone to cover. 

09:02
I think it's just a slow progression into that actual having a help desk. As far as outsourcing the help desk, there's a great conversation based around that, but it also becomes a money situation, right, as you are growing when you start looking at outsourcing your help desk. That's not necessarily a cheap thing to do. So you really got to evaluate am I ready to pay another firm to, you know, take over my clients and treat them the way I want to be treated? Or do I not find somebody else that's like me, has the same kind of values, the same thought patterns on business? And then we team up until we're ready for that next step. 

09:40 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Right, one of the things that I think makes sense. Regardless of whether you try to do it in-house or outsources, you've got to have those SO consulted with in Detroit, and it was a single guy by himself, just one person and he had gotten to that point where he was going to try and start doing projects and stuff. 

10:11 - Brook Lee (Guest)
But then he's like you know who's back at the ranch, you know somebody's still got to take the password resets and all that kind of stuff. And so when I started working with him he was like you know, I think I'm going to be ready in about six months to hire somebody, and I was like great. So what we're going to do in the next six months is we are going to document the you know what out of every stinking process and client and everything you could possibly imagine, because if not, you and this kid that we're going to hire are going to be attached like Velcro for two years, and that's not going to give you any relief because you know you're going to literally have to hold his hand on everything. So we spent about six months getting his documentation platform situated, making sure that everything was easy to find, all the stuff that needed to happen. But we ended up, unlike the examples that coached you, we just found some kid fresh out of school. 

10:57
He had aptitude and attitude and we trained that kid up. He was super smart, polite, and wanted to talk on the phone. He wanted to learn stuff and so, because we had spent the time documenting, it was easy to sort of plug that young man in there and he had done some internships and things like that so he wasn't like a complete newbie. I mean, he knew how to remote into a server and go into Active Directory and stuff like that so we were able to train that kid up. But it was because he had put in the work and did all that you know, documentation, heavy lifting prior to hiring that young man. 

11:29 - Tim Coach (Guest)
And that's where it's at right Processes, procedures I'm an old military guy. I mean you got to document everything and the thing is at the base of processes, procedures, and SOPs is where you get ready for that next step. It's one of those things like. We have problems in our world with the stuff that we're using. We can talk about that later on because people aren't mature enough and they're not processed. Procedures, things are not documented, sops are not down, so it makes it easier on them. So without those processes and procedures, you can't plug in somebody else, because all that we call it tribal knowledge, it's all in your head, right, and you're going to spend more time directing someone of what steps they need to take for what client than you would if you would just actually write it down and upkeep that documentation. 

12:16 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Right Now. The other problem that comes along is what happens when it comes time to scale. You know you start growing. You need to add people and things of that nature. At what point do you start thinking about, you know, running a multi-person help desk in terms of do you split them up by teams? Do you just have a big open queue and the first tech available to take the call? How do you guys advise people on that? Available to take the call? 

12:44 - Tim Coach (Guest)
How do? 

12:44 - Uncle Marv (Host)
you guys advise people on that. 

12:46 - Tim Coach (Guest)
I start off with that with really just a one help desk kind of conglomerate, right, because you kind of go from that point where an individual is taking care of a specific customer but I go into a general help desk. 

12:56
At that point I typically for myself and Brook may have a completely different answer on this I find that going into pods or sectioning out specific clients to specific techs, that becomes at a much more mature level and typically a much larger business. So it's certainly one of those things where you know, once you're past 10, 15 people on the help desk and your clients don't know who they're getting when they're calling in or who's calling them, then you start to lose a bit of that relationship. You start to lose a bit of that relationship. You start to lose a bit of that personal touch. So there's just a certain point when you want to go into, I think, a pod or something of that situation. But for the most part I'm a fan of moving into a general help desk of you know between five and 10. And then, after about 15, when you really start looking at podding them out and section them out into specific clients. 

13:44 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Yeah, that one helped us. I call that more of like a flat landscape, so that's where sort of everybody's taking the calls that are coming in as you get bigger. Sometimes I've also used a tiered system because I don't want my tier twos and tier threes that are my expensive resources. I don't want them doing password resets. That's an expensive resource to do the ticky-tack, tier one type of stuff. So I can go from that flat landscape to more of what I call like a pyramid. So I've got a you know five or six tier ones that are taking all the instant calls. Then I've got an escalation which is like your tier twos and then at the top of the pyramid is going to be your tier threes. But again you kind of have to grow into that. And then the teams and the pods. I use the pods. It's like Coach is saying it's some mature MSPs and ones that are bigger. I've seen it work again. Once you get past that I agree about the 10 or 15 mark You've got to kind of split people up because then it's just it's also no matter how well you have things documented. I mean there's just little nuances because as much as we try to follow coaches sort of 80-20,. You know I mean there's just little nuances because as much as we try to follow coaches sort of 80-20, you know you want 80% standard, 20%, one-off. That 20% can eat your lunch pretty quick if you don't have your people set up correctly. 

14:52
I've also used pods too when I've helped at some places where they had some specific verticals Like healthcare has some very kind of tricky nuanced software. So I would maybe have pods and, like my healthcare clients would be assigned to that pod and then you know, just obviously set up the call tree and everything else in the routing to go to them, because you know it's, you know all scripts, it's different things like that. And so then I had my healthcare clients there. Or again, if I had another set of clients like engineering and law, they have some things that are similar. So we would do pods and have those clients go to those pods because they really needed to learn that software better than the rest of us. 

15:27
Because even though a lot of times we're still only doing, you know, preliminary troubleshooting and you're going to escalate it to whatever that software vendor is. Even the preliminary stuff if you're not familiar with it can be really difficult. So that's kind of why I'm a fan of the pod, especially if you have, like I said, some strong verticals where you have a large chunk of clients that are in those verticals or they're paying a good chunk of change. They don't want to get messed around with some guy that doesn't even know what all scripts is. So that's why it just behooves me to have them go there so that they get the service that they want from us and expect, and also I'm making sure that I'm meeting the SLAs for them and what I promised them that I was going to do, you know, on response time and resolution time and things like that. 

16:04 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right. So, similar to what I do with subs, where I have certain subs for certain clients because they know the software, they know the environment and all of that stuff, let me ask you a quick question for clarification. You guys have used the word pods and teams and I need to ask if those are interchangeable words or are they different? 

16:25 - Tim Coach (Guest)
For me, they're. For me, it's the same word. You're sectioning out a group of people to do a specific job. 

16:31 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Same Okay. 

16:32 - Tim Coach (Guest)
So I think what you see where like Brook was talking to, like you see that that's maturing into, I think, a larger or a more mature MSP, right, because if you're like we talk about silos right, we talk about you know the matrix of where, where your charges, you know the cost pyramid and how that works and it's one of those things where if you've got clients that are in the medical industry, that are in the legal industry, that are in engineering and that are in banking, those are all very specific fields and you can charge a great quality price for supporting them charge a great quality price for supporting them. The problem is you become so broad in what you're supporting on the base of that pyramid that you're not doing any one of them really well. You're not really focused on that. So once you break out into the pods or the teams, now you can focus on those people which will actually drive what you're charging your clients up, because you've got a group of people that are an expert in those specific silos. 

17:25 - Brook Lee (Guest)
And you're also going to make your agreements more profitable because I'm going to be able to solve those tickets faster. So I'm going to instantly be more profitable. If I put the time in the investment on the front end, I'm going to get it back on the back end Because, like I said, a ticket that may have taken me an hour before now I've got a team of people that know that software really well, so maybe I can get those tickets knocked out in 15 minutes. So now I've saved a ton of time and now the agreements were profitable. So there's a bunch of different ways to sort of slice and dice that to get it to make sense. 

17:51 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right. Now, from the customer standpoint, the first contact that they have is usually going to be that call in or that ticket before they get to somebody. So obviously the question is, when do you worry about having somebody that takes the call and becomes the ticket dispatcher, versus just allowing the help desk to answer? You know whether it's all tier ones can pick up the first incoming call or grab the first ticket, or is there another philosophy on how those tickets get dispersed? 

18:25 - Tim Coach (Guest)
Yeah, there's a couple of different ways to do that. You can certainly set your systems up, you know, to do a round robin or do a whoever's off the phone and select those kind of ways. I think when you start getting into a dispatch role you really start talking about a more strategic game plan, about how you're handling out tickets right, because you don't want a call to come in and that's automatically a tier two or tier three call and you're handing that off to tier one which may not know the technology. So I think what you're talking about is probably when you're getting up probably half a million, three quarters of a million, where you've got quite a few clients, you've got an active help desk and you really need someone to manage just the flow of the ticket as well as the individuals working the ticket. 

19:13 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Also, too, I like a dispatcher when I have that sort of that flat landscape, because at that point I generally am not going to have anybody that can just answer the phone and work tickets all the time. When you get big enough, then I just have the tier one guys. I mean it's just the calls, go straight to them and they're just going to answer the calls, knock them out, you know, answer, fix, hang up, go to the next, go to the next. But when you have that flat landscape sometimes it's a little more difficult and again you're probably at that price point, revenue wise that Coach is talking about no-transcript trying to get rid of those lower level clients that are just not a fit anymore. They haven't matured with you, they're not a good fit for how you've grown as an MSP. 

20:14
But you got to get to that point and whatever you can do between that and getting to that point a lot of times is that stickiness factor. What can I do to get this client of mine, this business, to know that you know whatever you know, it's my people. They make a difference, they're happy to answer the phone, talk to them, talk about their cat, whatever it is, and then get them transferred over to Marv. That's going to fix the ticket for them. But again it's developing that stickiness that you got to have to kind of keep those people that you want to keep around so as you mature again want to keep around, so as you mature again, you can just kind of keep them moving along with you. 

20:47 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Yeah, I was. So of course I'm thinking about my experience, because when I call into a help desk, my frustration just gets frustrated. If I get a tier one, I'm like, look, I've already done all the tier one stuff. And if you're watching the video live, you saw me wave because walking in the door is, you know, the governor, the mayor, the mayor, the mayor. 

21:07 - Tim Coach (Guest)
The mayor the mayor the mayor the mayor, the mayor, the channel, doing fabulous out there. 

21:13 - Uncle Marv (Host)
I know you're fantastic. Kisses and hugs to all of you love you, man. 

21:19 - Tim Coach (Guest)
Thanks for being here. 

21:20 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Thank you, sir. Of course he can't hear you because I got the headphones on. They said they said love you, love you too, guys. They said they need a bottle of bourbon sent over oh my gosh oh man a long time self-destined to ball of bourbon. 

21:43 - Tim Coach (Guest)
Let's just be honest that is true. 

21:45 - Uncle Marv (Host)
That is true. Um, oh, looky here. Uh, cory Clark in the chat, tier one, have you turned your computer on? 

21:56 - Tim Coach (Guest)
have you rebooted? Yes, I rebooted. You go look at the logs. 

21:59 - Uncle Marv (Host)
I didn't reboot it is amazing, though, how many times that still happens oh, it's, it's non-stop. 

22:07 - Brook Lee (Guest)
It is and it's the three was. 

22:09
We were at an event a couple of weeks ago and we came back up from overnight and, uh, our power was not on at our booth and the girl that was trying to do the support or whatever she came over and she's tracking down the cables or whatever. 

22:24
And so I mean we're checking all this stuff and I was like I said, have you checked it at the source to just make sure that it's like plugged in or whatever? And she walked over there and it was unplugged and what happened was is the people that were cleaning up in the expo area had knocked it with a vacuum or something like that. And she was super embarrassed and I was like I said you literally have no idea how many times I've been on the help desk and somebody calls in and their computer, they're pressing the button, it's not coming on. And I'm like hey, can you check just to make sure that it's plugged in? And the cleaning people or whoever, just accidentally you know, hit it with the vacuum or broom or something and they just wiggled it just enough. And again she was super embarrassed and apologetic and I was like nope, happens all the time, all the time. 

23:01 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Yeah, I just had a situation with a client where between my RMN and my donuts, you know we monitor when machines go up and down and you know, anytime a machine goes down we make a call and they're like how did you know? I'm like that's what we do. 

23:19 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Magic. That's what I tell them’ s like magic. 

23:23 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Oh all right, so, uh. So basically we're going over help desk. Jay-z messed up my mic man, I got buzzing my ear all of a sudden. Uh, so we're going over help desk best practices and we've talked about getting started, pods and teams and single thing and dispatchers and stuff. So another point that you guys kind of mentioned in the prep is boards and queues. Describe that for us. 

23:54 - Tim Coach (Guest)
That's just the technology. Connectwise calls it boards, Autotask calls it queues. Technology ConnectWise calls it boards, Autotask calls it queues. If you would ask an old boss of mine, when you put somebody in the queue, there should be an F before that. So, as in an F, you, because that's what it actually is. Well, that's a different conversation, but all it is. It just refers to the boards that the tickets come into okay. 

24:19 - Brook Lee (Guest)
so it's a way to sort of organize things. And so when you're setting your boards and your queues up, um, a lot of times when we've gone in and we've had to rebuild, um, I either see they only have one or they've gone all the way the other direction. We got about 25 boards and I'm like, okay, we got too many here, what are we doing? Uh, so I would say, uh, when you're setting up your PSA again, less is more in the beginning you got to figure it out. But once you figure it out, it does not mean go all the way to the other side and just go straight to. You know, I've got 25 boards and everything's going here and there, because it's generally a way to sort of organize your tickets and if you have it set up right on the back end, you can organize them like literally out of the jump when they come in via email, have them sort of you know, divided and go to the boards that they're supposed to go to. 

25:06
One of the things that one of the first things I usually fix is on the help desk specifically. I don't have any tickets. Go there that they don't need to see If it's something where somebody's saying hey, I need a new computer sales board. Boys on the help desk are not going to fix that. Boys and girls, they're not ordering a new computer, somebody else's. Um, hey, I want to talk to Corey. Uh, he needs to come over and do my QBR. Fine, go to the VCIO board. We're not doing anything over here with us at the help desk because I really want them to be focused on what it is they need to fix and I only want them to see the things that they need to resolve. So it's, if it's not something that the help desk team is not going to fix, I don't want it showing up on that board. So it's for me it's just a way to really simplify and organize the tickets so that everybody has a really clean view about what they're supposed to be working on. 

25:51 - Tim Coach (Guest)
Yeah, it's like I mean, if you remember back when we all first got access to VMware and we put in these big farms and it was like, oh, I'll spin up a server for this and I'll spin up a server for that, next thing, you know, you got more servers and you got people that work at your company and its. They become really messy because you can detail them out very easily. The reality of it is you don't need a bunch of them, right? You need to be very strategic in how you handle those boards. You need to be very strategic in who's looking at the board. You know if you're getting. You know if you're getting these high-end networking tickets. A tier one should not be looking at those tickets. Right, if you're getting security issues, a tier one more than likely should not be looking at a security issue. That should be somebody you know at a higher level, more experienced within your company. I think you know. 

26:38
But there's also a there's also very much a relationship to strategic boards. So people know that I came from a banking background. In banks you cannot make a permission move, so add or remove without a verbal approval from someone within the bank. So I had a board specific for permission changes, and the reason why I did that was because when one of 50 banks would come to me and say what permission changes have you had or have we made this year Because I got to turn in my auditor it was very easy for me to go to that board strategically and pull a report just for them. So boards should be strategic, not like Skittles or Tic Tacs, and who sees them should be just as strategic. 

27:26 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Okay, have you really truly seen somebody with 25 different boards? 

27:31 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Oh yeah. 

27:32 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Oh yeah, excessive. I mean I'm thinking outside of service and sales, and you know your level ones, level twos, level threes, you know they'll have. 

27:43 - Brook Lee (Guest)
RMM, non-urgent RMM, urgent RMM, critical networking and I'm going to tell you it's a hot mess to undo it, cause that is a lot of work because you've got to reroute all of that stuff and I mean nine times out of 10, you're going to break something when you start taking those boards off. So that's why I say start small, just think about what it is that you need Probably in the beginning one, two, maybe three boards tops, that's it. Let that ride for a minute and you know, see how that plays out. But I've gone places, like I said, they've got four or five different RMM boards. They've got, you know, a tier one board, an escalation board, a tier three board, a networking board, and you'd be surprised how often we see that when we go out there to consult and rebuild because and part of it is they get in over their head and they're just like, and then it just becomes noise. And that's part of the thing when we come in there and we implement different types of tools is we want to reduce the noise that people are seeing and that they're working with as well, because if I can get the noise down to where you're just really focusing on your day-to-day stuff. That's what's going to help. 

28:43
But again, at some point, the too many boards. It's just noisy and messy. And then I always see a ton of tickets that are out there that either they're auto-closing. So I'm like what the heck is the point, because you're not even doing anything with the stinking tickets anymore. You're not even doing anything with the stinking tickets anymore, you're just dumping them on a board, you're auto-closing them and whatever. So you're not even really using it. So what's the point of the board? 

29:03 - Tim Coach (Guest)
I've actually seen it where each individual person so they've had all the boards right, and then each individual tech has had their own specific board. I've seen that Right. So, and then what happens is this is the greatest thing in the world. I love the brilliance of tier threes because sometimes they're just so intelligent that the trees can't come fast enough out right and they create all these boards, and what ends up happening is well, the tier threes are actually over working on projects or they're working on the stuff that's bringing in you know the icing on the cake for you, and there's boards that have literally taken so many tickets you can't even count them. And then when you look at it, no one has even looked at the board for months, Yep. 

29:52
So it's like being very strategic in what you're doing. You know it's also making sure someone's in charge, right? So it's. It's an easy saying, but it but I guarantee it's the truth. If there's more than one person in charge of anything, nobody's in charge, Nobody's looking out. If there's a networking board, then there should be one person in charge of that networking board. That doesn't mean they're doing the work, it just means they're in charge. 

30:16 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Antoine had a question what are our top strategic boards? Slash cues. 

30:22 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Yeah, and you kind of started to answer it, but I'm assuming he was asking more specifically because you mentioned starting simple. 

30:31 - Brook Lee (Guest)
But in some of this answer, Antoine, is going to depend on the maturity of the MSP. So this is, I'm going to say this sort of like with a caveat. So I'm going to say, the answer I'm going to give you is sort of what I consider, you know, a vanilla bean average size MSP. I'm a big fan of triage boards because that's where I can use specific software tools to what I call divvy up the tickets so I can have it come in, hit the triage board, come in from your email connector. It's going to hit the triage board. Maybe I'm going to run some workflows, maybe I'm going to use PIA, maybe I'm going to use something else. I'm going to trigger a status change, change TSI, type, subtype, an item based on that. Then I'm going to kick that ticket somewhere else, to sales, to a help desk, to a tier three, to a, you know, a BCIO board, something like that. So I'm going to trigger that there. 

31:16
So my triage board is kind of where I get stuff to come in and then I can tell it to spider web out from there. Um, I usually have a tier one help desk board, whatever you want to call it. That's where that all that you know vanilla bean, tier one everyday pay to play stuff is what I call it. All the tickets that are coming in from our clients that they need help with, uh, password resets. I need my email forward and I can't remember how to do it. My words broken printers, not printing, just the basic stuff. Um, then I usually keep and this is on service boards, I'm not even talking about projects, so just service boards only. Um, then I usually have an escalation board. Um, that's where anything that doesn't get solved by the tier ones goes to. Uh, and also another reason is I'm having my tier two. 

31:57
Guys, the sort of the second layer, try to see if they can get those knocked out, because nine times out of 10, the guys and girls on that one they're going to be able to get those escalations just done and done, and then after that again, sometimes you have to have a tier three, and I've started the past couple of years, I've started working with something called a root cause board. 

32:18
That's where I'm going to take the ticket. I'm going to close the ticket out because I got to get my SLA done, but I'm going to copy that ticket and dump it on my root cause board. If I've got something that just keeps coming back like somebody's bad mother-in-law or whatever, and we can't get rid of it and I just keep seeing this problem over and over again, I'm going to put it on the root cause board and that's where I'm going to get those tier three boys to dive into it, boys and girls to see what's going on and resolve it Because I need it like gone, gone. So sometimes I've used that, but again that depends on the maturity of the MSP. So that's sort of the service boards that I use. And then I'm not counting RMM as something different, security something different, project, something different. So this is just sort of the service boards that I generally work with. 

32:53 - Tim Coach (Guest)
Yeah, I go, I'm, which is that tier one board. I go an escalation board, I go a permission board, right? So any anything that changes somebody's permission give or take, I have one of those. And then I normally have like a networking board, right, so that's more of your arm in, like just it's just feeding, like alerts and stuff that's actually tracking that stuff. So that's pretty much where I go. I'm typically not more than like five, maybe six boards tops, and those upper level boards tend to be more strategic to individual functions of the company. 

33:41 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Now, with all these boards, I've been in some places where I've seen everything on one big screen, in the main help desk area or whatever. Everybody can see everything on the board. Now is there a scenario where those tier twos and tier threes aren't seen by the levels anymore level ones anymore once they're passed or does everybody see everything on the board? 

33:58 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Yeah, Um, for those dashboards, um, I'm a kind of a three number or less kind of girl. Um, I, I'm a, I'm a less is more on the help desk. I mean, how many tickets are in new, uh? How many tickets are in client responded, uh, and how many tickets are basically still in the queue overall? Um, that we haven't closed out? Like you know, you've dumped it back into waiting on client or something like that. Um, cause those? How many tickets are a new? I like that. Because of those, how many tickets are a new? 

34:22
I want that number zero every single day. I don't want any tickets in new by the time we go home. Did it want client responded tickets? If a client's responded back, somebody needs to call that person back, email them, whatever it is, and I like that one. That one has to be zero at the end of the day and then the other ones is just to try to keep a general handle on how many tickets are on that board that are in an open status. 

34:41
Again, it could be waiting on client schedule, client convenience, something like that, but I try to keep it the numbers as clean as possible. Again, because it's once. Once you get so many numbers then like to coach this thing, nobody's watching it. If everybody's watching it, nobody's managing it. If everybody's in charge, if I've got 70 numbers up there, nobody's looking at 70 numbers. Just give me like the top three things that I know I need to get knocked out as a help desk person and get done, and then that's usually just like the big number on the help desk and I usually have different dashboards for the other teams, cause again, they're managing and monitoring different things. 

35:18 - Tim Coach (Guest)
But we haven't even gotten into the automations that we can set up, right, like we're. Eventually, by the end of this conversation, we'll be talking about automation and AI, but we haven't even talked about that, right? So, like I'm a fan of you, see the board you need to see. Tier threes Don't need to see the help desk board, they need to see the board that's been escalated to them Tier twos, you know, but that's the thing is, that's what we can do in the PSAs. We can say, okay, Brook, you get access to these boards, Tim, you get access to these, uncle, mark, you get access to these. Here's the primary boards, you see. And then, if you have a dispatcher or your help desk manager, whoever it is, you can walk out to the tier twos and threes and say, hey, we're needing some help on the help desk. Everybody switch your boards over, right, right. 

36:00
So we haven't even got into the functionality of software that allows you to become more efficient, to do like what brick was saying, where your tier threes need to be working on tier threes, tier twos, tier twos, and I was always a fail. I got dead. I had I had a lot of my SLAs. I love the word SLA and what SLAs does Cause. Most times it's just a trigger that we've automatically set up within the software. Not giving away any secrets, but I actually put like timers on some of my stuff, like if this ticket is set here for this long it's going to get escalated Right Because it's in the end it needs someone to look at it and if these people are too busy and it needs help, then we've got to use the tools we have to escalate to the proper people in the proper times. 

36:42 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Right, well, I was going to start to ask about that, because that kind of rolls over into KPI, kpis, efficiencies. When do you roll, you know, a tier two down to a tier one if the tickets are stacking up? So you've kind of talked about that in terms of the metrics built into the system. 

37:01 - Tim Coach (Guest)
Right, like we all have metrics right, like I would be hard pressed, and maybe it's changed in. You know the couple of years I've been out of the game. But you know most MSPs when they hand over a contract, in that contract it says you know, we're going to respond to you in 10 minutes. You know, when you submit the ticket well, guess what? It's almost instantly because you've set your system up to do that. And then we're going to respond to you here, here and here. 

37:25
So what you're really looking at is the importance of the ticket and when it's being touched and when it's being looked at and you want to set your SLAs appropriately. Because what we find, if we go to a deeper business conversation about being an MSP with your help desk and what you're doing is have you properly set your client's expectation and when's the last time you did that? Right? Because there's a lot of arguments to be had where they're saying, well, the help desk should be handling this thing and setting this up for us, but what they've forgotten is two years ago, when you signed that contract, that was a specific exclusion in the contract, but no one reminds them of what that expectation is. 

38:04
So when you're doing help desk. It's not just setting up the SLAs and the KPIs in the help desk, but it's also managing your customer's expectations and keeping that at the forefront of with them. So I'm not saying you got to revisit it every three months, but twice a year you should be sitting with your client talking about hey, here's help desk, here's the things that we're doing, here's the things that we've excluded because you've asked us to Are they now a higher priority? And then you start working on those SLA's from there. But you've got to make sure that you're, whatever they are, you're hitting them Right, because as soon as you don't hit that SLA, that gives them, that gives the client an opportunity to start digging in and see what else you're not doing. 

38:41 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Right. There's a couple of numbers that are just big ones for me. If you've got a true help desk whether it's that flight landscape or whether it's you know, the pods, the teams, whatever one-touch ticket resolution is a big one for me. Nothing frustrates a client more than when I have to come back to the ticket over and over and over again. I want to be I call it one and done. I want to get that ticket knocked out. I want to be done with it. Clients, we're good, we've got it fixed, Thank you. I put my time entry in close party on and I'm finished. It raises CSAT. So that's definitely a number that I measure when I do any consulting anywhere. Is that one touch ticket resolution? Obviously resolution time as well, especially on the help desk, because that should be relatively low. I do not need somebody on the help desk camping out on a ticket for two hours, because when that person's on the ticket for two hours there's a bunch of other tickets that are rolling in and getting backed up. So generally I also set some thresholds. 

39:37
That's a tricky one when you show up, because that's sort of where you've. If you're coming to talk to coach or me, I mean you've gotten to a point where you're trying to get over a revenue hump, you're trying to get to some sort of a next operational maturity level, something like that. So you've called us in to sort of help with those things. So help desk you want to go to sort of what I call a live answer help desk, where people are calling in and getting instant help right out of the gate. In order to do that, you've got to keep the amount of time you're going to allow a help desk person to work on a ticket pretty low down, and that's a behavior change as well, because before you showed up again, they'll camp out two hours on a ticket because texts are really bad about. 

40:18
I almost got it, ms Brook. I almost got it. I almost got it. I just need five more minutes, dude, you don't need five more minutes. We are two hours into this and you can't tell me what the problem is yet or what the fix is. So, but they're just again. It's just in the nature. It's not that they're trying to, you know, thwart whatever on purpose, it's just that they have that mentality. I'm right there. I almost got it, dude, we don't almost have it, we got it so. 

40:40
I think changing that is a big thing as well. 

40:42 - Uncle Marv (Host)
But are we talking like a troubleshooting ticket or like an installation ticket, where if somebody's got a piece of software they're trying to help get installed and it takes forever because the customer's internet speed is DSL? I mean they can't help the speed. 

41:00 - Brook Lee (Guest)
If you've got a customer on DSL. We have missed something on the QBR part and we missed something when we onboarded that client. 

41:06 - Tim Coach (Guest)
We can go all the way back to the beginning. 

41:08 - Brook Lee (Guest)
On that one. 

41:09 - Tim Coach (Guest)
You better have a repository on site with all the software, the latest, greatest software on site, where it can be installed on the local network. 

41:17 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Yeah, so if we've got that we've got to go way back to the beginning when we did an onboard and some other stuff. But in general most of the stuff that a help desk is doing should not take more than I mean 30, 45 minutes tops, um, and like anything that's uh, like a new, like a computer setup or anything like that. And generally I will kick that to a different board because setting up a computer that you were just asking for trouble on that one, those can get wildly out of control really quick, um. So I don't generally let them do more than 30 or 45 minutes. And again, it's also frustrating for the client. I understand that the guys and girls want to get that ticket done, but man, I've seen people keep a client on the phone for an hour and I'm just like, and then my thing starts going off as a service manager and I'm getting notifications and I'm like what the what? 

42:09 - Tim Coach (Guest)
And again they want to help. But you've really got to ratchet that one down. But the thing is, too, is like we like as an industry, like when we're at the level that all of us are, when you, when you start configuring, like you start figuring out, putting you know the excel spreadsheet together of how to staff and where to budget next year, when you bring people in, on average we talk 15 minutes as a tier one service desk ticket, so you need to be looking at those things 15, 20 minutes in and you know that five minute knee to death. I've not met a tick yet. That won't do that. Right, like it takes it actually takes a manager to come in and step in and say you're done, I appreciate your help. We've got to move this on. 

42:38 - Brook Lee (Guest)
We've got to tag out. We've got to go somewhere else. 

42:41 - Tim Coach (Guest)
Your pride is not the sole reason that we're keeping this printer issue open. 

42:45 - Brook Lee (Guest)
But you've got to change that behavior. So to me, for me, when I did it, it was basically starting with, kind of I would get an average of how much time they had been spending and then back that up by 15 or 20 minutes. Get them used to that. That behavior change. Hey, this is what we got to try to get done. All the tickets need to be done in this amount of time, and then just kind of keep inching that down a little bit until we get to the point where it's that sweet spot where we're getting the tickets done. We're one and done. They understand what the plan is and then also it's you know if they want to spend more time on those harder tickets. 

43:13
To me that's a super big motivational factor. Great, let's help you with your training plan. So there's a whole bunch of things. I mean the KPIs. Yes, there's something we have to measure and yes, there's things that we have to change, but you can really use that in so many different ways to motivate your help desk. You know, hey, you know we want to get done with this and we want to get somebody else to replace you. Awesome, let's get some other things than just you know measuring the metrics. You can use it to help your employees as well. 

43:47 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Now is time, something that you can put into your documentation and I'll ask this because I used to do that and it would just frustrate the hell out of the techs when I had them that in my mind it should only take half an hour to do this job. I'll give you leeway to 45 minutes, but at 45 minutes my Spidey sense is going off. I mean, have you guys talked about doing that, with some of the people saying that you've got to put some sort of time factor into the documentation so they know, going in. 

44:21 - Tim Coach (Guest)
Yeah, you definitely have to do that. The thing is, though, is when you put that time piece in there, you also have to make sure those people are trained to meet that time piece, right? I mean, as MSPs, what we do is we bring people in, we give them a call. You know here, watch these videos for two days, if they make the full two days, and then we just throw them to the wolves and then, like two weeks later, we like, why aren't you closing 50 tickets a day? It's because we haven't trained them to meet those 15 and 20 minute SLAs that we put on them or those KPIs, right? We? That's part of it, so, but then that's also where, once again, where we got to use the tools. We got to use the tools and the automation built in the tools whether it's the RMM or the PSA or something outlying to really focus and manage these things, to try to help bring the time down on some of this stuff. 

45:12 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right, before we get too far along here, and I don't know if they're going to kick me out of this room or not, so I'm watching the tour. There were some abbreviations brought out earlier, so Corey uh threw one in the chat. F R T, I'm assuming something. Resolution time, full resolution time Is that what that is? 

45:31 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Or Corey's being snarky and saying for real though. 

45:36 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Who knows? 

45:37 - Tim Coach (Guest)
Knowing Corey, it's for real though. 

45:40 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Oh, you know what? That's probably where he made the call. Oh, they were talking about the, the help desk. One big screen depends on if someone coming into the office. 

45:49 - Brook Lee (Guest)
We've I've done that before like at the, in the, the lobby or whatever. I'll put a cool TV up there on the wall and it's got a bunch of flash and stuff or whatever and it's definitely. I mean it's definitely we're showing off for people when they come in. Salespeople love it and again it makes us look slick and whatever. Again, for the guys on the help desk not so much, but like when I'm the service manager, I mean I'll have a bunch of TVs on the wall. You know four, six, seven TVs, whatever. I've got all this stuff that I'm monitoring and we'll put a TV up front Again. It looks cool for when clients are coming in. You know things are dinging. First response time. 

46:24 - Uncle Marv (Host)
First response time. So we qualified that for it's kind of like you, your one touch resolution. I guess Now you also mentioned CSAT. 

46:32 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Customer satisfaction. That's a huge one, because I mean, everybody can think they're doing a great job. But if you're not asking your clients and again, not on every stinking ticket if you're not asking them how you're doing and trying to get some honest feedback, then you don't know until it's too late. 

46:48 - Tim Coach (Guest)
See and I go a level above that Like CSAT is important, don't get me wrong, but there's no more. There's nothing more important than ESAT, which is employee satisfaction. When your employees are satisfied, when they're happy doing what they're doing, when they're trained up, when they're paid correctly, when they feel like they're an active member of the staff, right and in the business, then those CSAT scores will rocket like you've never seen it. But I think ESAT has a great reflection on CSAT. 

47:16 - Brook Lee (Guest)
But you've got to have the right MSP and you've got to have the right leadership. Because I've worked at some places and consulted, because you have to have an open and honest place to work to where the employees can get feedback. You don't know how happy your employees are. 

47:29 - Tim Coach (Guest)
There's nothing I disagree with. 

47:39 - Brook Lee (Guest)
If you don't know how happy your employees are, if they know if they say anything bad in the little, you know, hey, this is the question of the week, the question of the month, and they know if they say something they're going to get like the hammer dropped, then I'm going to be like, yes, everything's great. I love the pizza party last week Versus. If you have an open and honest environment and I can say you know what this really sucks. We have been just like you know what to the wall the last month. We are tired. We've got to get some help here. 

48:01
If owner's like, yeah, my people are happy, they're great, you start peeling back those layers. The boys and girls are not happy at all. You've got some people that are close to quitting. So I do like employee satisfaction as well. I think it's a great number to track, but you've really got to have the right culture to be able to measure that and have it be honest. Otherwise it's just. You know, I'm just clicking on the number seven so that coach doesn't call me and ask me why I gave him a five or something. 

48:27 - Tim Coach (Guest)
That's a whole nother segment. 

48:29 - Brook Lee (Guest)
I'm saying I'm just going to, I'm going to click whatever because I've worked with our next quarter, uncle Mars. I've consulted, where we all figured out what the number was, where we didn't get pinged and it was like a seven, it was like a one out of 10 on the question. So we all just put seven on everything so we wouldn't get questioned about it because we knew that nothing was going to happen with the feedback. 

48:47 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Now, is that your response or is that what you asked your customers after you finished the ticket? Hey, can you put a? Can you put at least a seven on the ticket? 

48:55 - Brook Lee (Guest)
No, this was internal for employee satisfaction. For the customers I generally use the happy face, the straight face, the sad face or whatever, just something quick and easy so that they're not, like you know, bombarded with something. It's not like a big issue for them, it's just something super-fast, just click it and then they just go on about their business and you know I'm good to go. And then you know you can always give them an opportunity as well to make comments, and I think I get. I've noticed that we get more comments when we have that stickiness factor. If I've got people that are going out, either the TAMs or I've got the VCIs going out doing those QBRs, making those visits, and they feel comfortable giving that feedback because they have a really good relationship with either like their account manager, again TAM, vci, whatever, I'll get really good feedback, both good and bad, because again I mean, give me the bad stuff. I can't fix it if we don't know about it. 

49:41 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Yeah, All right. Well, let's see what time we got here. I want to go through one more quick little conversation, and that is putting as much automation into the help desk as we can. Brook, you mentioned earlier you hate the fact of seeing tons and tons of tickets that open and auto close. Yeah, I mean, that's just. I mean it makes for great KPI. 

50:07 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Oh, I mean it looks sexy for sure, but I mean, is it really doing anything? So automation I think there has to be a balance with that. Obviously, I work for PIA. We're an automation company. Part of the stuff that we do automation-wise is specifically for the help desk, because it's those tickets. That is a tier one I don't really want to solve anyway. I mean, the password resets, the new user setups, installing a printer, setting up the out-of-office or whatever. 

50:33
So how can we use automation in any sort of tool to get those things done that need to be done, because that's why I have a job. The clients need me to fix those things for them. So how can I get those things done faster, more efficient, more effectively and get the same result every time? We don't talk about that enough with automation. When you use automation in the right way, you're going to get the exact same results on every single ticket. Coach has a great story about that one. One of the clients that we have use an automation that way because you do the same thing every single time, no matter who it is. And they've got this young lady. That's a. What is she? 

51:06 - Tim Coach (Guest)
a dental, used to be a dental receptionist yes, she was a dental receptionist and for like a few years, and then she jumped over into the MSP world which we can ask about her judgment on that later on but, um, but wanted to be part of the team, right, right, and automation allows her to like, she's closing 42 tickets a day and she has no technical knowledge because of the tools, but, like, let's take this back right, like AI as we get there is just the next version of automation. I mean, I remember 25 years ago setting up macros in an accounting department with specific codes on two screens, that's 30, 40 step macros. Right, I mean, that was a form of automation. It was a very painful automation, right, because as soon as they messed up one click, you had to start the whole thing over, right? 

51:56
Then we got RMM tools and we got various things that we can build in the RMM tools and we see companies out there using the RMMs to even expand that more, right, like, you can automatically, you know, do your C drive cleanups and you know some various things there. And then we got the PSA, which allowed us to do more automation with specific people. So now we've finally gotten to the point of AI. But before we get full AI. We started with companies like Crush Bank that was taking data and then making suggestions to help us be more efficient in our automations. We finally just gotten to the point where we can actually use AI as the next version of automation to really take care of a lot of this tier one stuff, this help desk stuff that we've been talking about for the last hour to help those small companies or the larger companies refocus on more important things for their clients. 

52:47 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Well, we are going to have to table that. I feel like I should allow you a response rebuttal time here. Do you want that? 

52:58 - Brook Lee (Guest)
No, no, not at all, sorry. I was answering questions. Me and Antoine and Corey are chatting over here about the numbers as far as best in class goes, as far as an endpoint to tech ratio Again there's best in class. But that's like there's a giant asterisk with that Because if you're going to get to that number you have to have a ton of work done on the back end. You've got to have a lot of stuff documented, you've got to have already have a lot of things automated through your RMM or another software application to get to those numbers. 

53:30
And again, if you've got a lot of one-offs, then everything can't be a one-off. So if you've got, you know, you've got to have a pretty solid stack. Everybody's got to kind of be on the same stack. So again, I'm going to give you that number because that's what's best in class, based on the last things that came out from both True Methods and from the Evolve groups last year. But again, there's a big asterisk with that because there's a lot of stuff you have to have correct before you're going to be able to get to that point. 

53:54 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Okay. 

53:55 - Tim Coach (Guest)
Antoine's like you got something cooking up between Crush Bank and PIA. The short answer is no. 

54:00 - Brook Lee (Guest)
I don't think so. 

54:01 - Tim Coach (Guest)
I just remember walking into a show and seeing Crush Bank and was like here's a company that actually took all this data and like it did something with it. Right, because we all talked about how we're going to use all these data to make these cool, you know, these resource pools and these things that we can use all the information in our PSAs. Crush bank was just one of the first ones that came out with it many years ago. One of the first ones that came out with it many years ago, right, I think P is, you know, pmb, and AI is quite a bit more advanced because it's actually executing the work is kind of the big difference there. 

54:31
But the point is, is automation on every level. We continue to advance it to really make sure that we're doing this right. I mean Corey's specifically in the security field. That's his life. But there's no way that they could have gotten solutions granted where it was without standardization policies, procedures and using automation to be as proficient as they possibly can. And that's just the way our industry is Standardization policy, procedures, automation as much as you can to be as efficient as you can, to really increase those profitability levels, to be as efficient as you can to really increase those profitability levels. 

55:04 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Yep, and folks, if you're listening to the audio, yeah, the chat is going crazy tonight, so that's what we're responding to some of the comments here. You can, of course, go and see them Now. Remember, we are streaming on LinkedIn, YouTube and the Facebook all at the same time. I am not able to consolidate all of these, so some of this is LinkedIn, Some of these are YouTube, but you can go see that there. And if you hear a little bit of noise, we've got a group coming in. It looks like they're going to have a meeting here. So we're going to have to wrap this up and we'll have to get you guys back on and finish the conversation on help desk. 

55:44 - Tim Coach (Guest)
Like we can have a whole conversation on what Corey just popped up about MSP standardization. 

55:49 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Yes. 

55:50 - Tim Coach (Guest)
I love when I've walked in I'm sure Brook's been the same way you walk into an MSP and you start consulting with them. They got like 50, 60 tools. You're like what are you doing? There's no way at a 20-person MSP, somebody's an expert on all those tools. 

56:04 - Brook Lee (Guest)
It's you owners that y'all go running around to these shows and you see that shiny new stuff and you come back and you're like, oh my gosh, I got the best tool. 

56:13 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Well, here's the thing, though. I mean, if you get that big and you're letting techs pick their tools, that's how you can run into that. You've got to kind of put the kibosh on that as an organization and say here are our tools, this is our stack. And when you get to a certain point. 

56:30 - Brook Lee (Guest)
You've got to have a process too there should be. When you get to a certain size, you should have a group of people that are evaluating the tools. So I've got maybe like a tier three dude, maybe I've got a tier one person, maybe I've got the sales admin. When somebody comes back from a show and they're like, hey, I saw these really cool four tools, you should have some sort of group or committee that is evaluating those tools against your MSP and against your clients to see which ones are going to be a good fit. It should not just be a one person show on figuring that out. 

56:58
And as far as standardizing offerings, again you've also got to have. You have to have a certain type of client and that is a certain maturity that you've got to be as an MSP If you're going to kind of again make everybody sort of get on board with, whether it's AV, security tools, you know, whatever it is, email, all those sorts of things, so a lot of these things. Again, it's a certain maturity level and I put like the giant asterisks on stuff because there's just there's a whole bunch of things that have to be in place in order to get you kind of going in that direction. 

57:24 - Tim Coach (Guest)
And there's a different conversation when you're evaluating those tool stacks. Money is not one of them. When you're talking technical, the technical people should be evaluating the technical ability and how it fits into the stack and what it's going to do, what it's going to remove, what it's going to add, what it's going to get. Then, at the same time, there's another group usually the manager, the owner, whoever it is sells right, trying to figure out financially can this fit? Are we going to charge for it? How are the clients going to take the uptick in charge? And then, if they're going to do that, there's a whole other conversation on are your vendors helping you understand how to upcharge your clients for the product you're giving them and what it's going to bring to them specifically? So we need like four more hours. 

58:11 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Well, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, somehow, and we may have to ask Corey to come and be on the panel and really get into it there. 

58:18 - Brook Lee (Guest)
You bet I haven't seen Corey in a hot minute. 

58:20 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Yeah, it's conference time now. You'll see him soon. 

58:23 - Brook Lee (Guest)
I hope so. 

58:24 - Tim Coach (Guest)
We're headed to good old England right across the pond. We're headed to Wembley for the network group over there. It's their big gala event this here in a couple weeks and we're super excited to see that peer group over there. 

58:39 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Alright, nice, I won't see you there. 

58:42 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Then we're headed to the big Kaseya event, after that the Kaseya Connect in Vegas. That one's a, that's a big one. There's, I mean, several thousand people are going to be at that one. And then after that I've lost track, but those are the two next ones that we've got coming up. 

58:58 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right. 

58:58 - Tim Coach (Guest)
Yeah, it's like listen, but right now the focus is we got to take care of our friends in Europe, and then we got a monster coming up in Vegas that you know we all ramp up for, and then, once we can get about two thirds of the way, maybe three quarters of the way through Vegas, and when our eyes are open or we're hydrated again now we start looking to what's past Vegas. 

59:19 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right. Well, we'll touch base before then and we'll get our schedules intact. We'll find out when we're in the same city and we'll do this live. Maybe Depends on how the drinks go. 

59:31 - Brook Lee (Guest)
If Corey's going to be there, we've got to be careful, because he likes his whiskey. 

59:36 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Yeah, but I don't know if they. You know they're corporate. Now you know they got bought out. 

59:41 - Tim Coach (Guest)
I don't know, We'll find out now. You know they got to. They got bought out. But you know, I don't know. We'll find out. Them boys, don't? They're not at the bar drinking? Well, right, some boys drink good whiskey and they don't get too hammered on it because it's expensive to get a little too far in the bottle. So they drink good and they tend to control themselves very well all right, all right, folks, we're going to have to end off here. 

01:00:01 - Uncle Marv (Host)
We're going to have to skip the Florida man or random question segment, but I will put a link in the show notes that tonight's Florida man story for me would have been because I'm in Orlando. Uh, Florida man has been making Florida. Orlando children roam the streets to collect money for a fake nonprofit. 

01:00:25 - Brook Lee (Guest)
That sounds like Florida, for sure 100%. 

01:00:29 - Uncle Marv (Host)
That's the story I would have come out with tonight. Well, guys, thank you for hanging out with me and we'll definitely be in touch and get you back. We'll finish the conversation on help desk. We'll talk about standardization and KPIs and all sorts of stuff. 

01:00:42 - Brook Lee (Guest)
Thank you for having us. We appreciate it. 

01:00:44 - Uncle Marv (Host)
It's good, this is good. We should do this more often. 

01:00:47 - Brook Lee (Guest)
I know we should what did you say Coach? 

01:00:52 - Tim Coach (Guest)
If you want to do it, we're in Okay. 

01:00:55 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right. Well, you guys have yourself a good night, and I'm going to say good night to the listeners here and sign off. I've got a whole crew looking at me here. I guess I got to get out. So that's going to do it, folks. We'll see you next time. Bye everybody. Holla! See you!