621 Transform Your Profitability with StackTracker
621 Transform Your Profitability with StackTracker
Uncle Marv interviews Colin Knox, the co-founder and CEO of Gradient, about their new product called StackTracker. StackTracker is a tool t…
April 22, 2024

621 Transform Your Profitability with StackTracker

Uncle Marv interviews Colin Knox, the co-founder and CEO of Gradient, about their new product called StackTracker. StackTracker is a tool that helps MSPs gain deep visibility into their technology stack, including usage, costs, and profitability.

Introducing Stack Tracker for MSPs

Colin Knox explains that StackTracker goes beyond just mapping an MSP's technology stack. It focuses on the reseller aspect of an MSP's business, providing insights into the usage, costs, and profitability of the solutions they are reselling to clients. By pulling in data directly from vendors, StackTracker can show MSPs their vendor spend, revenue, and profitability across their entire product portfolio. This allows MSPs to identify opportunities for optimization, such as consolidating redundant solutions or upselling underutilized products to clients. 

Empowering MSPs Through Data Analysis

The system also uses AI to analyze the data and provide actionable recommendations to the MSP. This includes identifying anomalies, such as duplicate deployments of the same product, as well as quantifying revenue and profit opportunities across the client base. The AI-driven insights aim to help MSPs make more informed decisions about their technology stack and pricing strategies, ultimately driving greater profitability. Colin emphasizes that the key value proposition of StackTracker is empowering MSPs to grow their businesses smarter and more profitably. 

Key Takeaways: 

  • StackTracker provides deep visibility into MSPs' technology stacks, including usage, costs, and profitability
  • Focuses on the reseller aspect of an MSP's business, not just internal tool usage
  • Uses AI to analyze data and provide actionable recommendations for optimization and growth
  • Helps MSPs identify revenue and profit opportunities across their client base
  • Aims to enable MSPs to make more informed decisions about their technology stack and pricing

=== Show Information

Website: https://www.itbusinesspodcast.com/

Host: Marvin Bee

Uncle Marv’s Amazon Store: https://amzn.to/3EiyKoZ

Become a monthly supporter: https://www.patreon.com/join/itbusinesspodcast?

One-Time Donation: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/unclemarv

=== Music: 

Song: Upbeat & Fun Sports Rock Logo

Author: AlexanderRufire

License Code: 7X9F52DNML - Date: January 1st, 2024

Transcript

00:09 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals everywhere. On this show, you will hear from industry experts, tech entrepreneurs, fellow MSPs, as they share their experience and best practices, all in an effort to help you run your business better, smaller and faster. Now listen, regardless of your size small MSP, big MSP or even an IT manager if you have a curiosity about the intersection of IT and the corporate world providing that support for businesses, this is the place for you. So, before we get started, let me go ahead and say thank you to our sponsor. Are you an IT service provider looking to streamline your operations and boost your productivity? Then check out SuperOps, the all-in-one PSA and RMM platform built for MSPs, with powerful automation, intuitive ticketing and robust remote monitoring. SuperOps will help you work smarter, not harder. Visit SuperOps.com today to learn about the ways that you can transform your IT business. Super Ops. Sponsor of the IT Business Podcast. 

01:32
All right, folks, as you can tell, this is an audio show and this is going to be great. We have a very special guest joining us and, yes, I did say that phrase. You all love to question me about. A very special guest joined us and, yes, I did say that phrase. You all love to question me about a very special guest. This person has been making waves in the industry and he has been a fantastic beacon. Please welcome Colin Knox, the co-founder and CEO of Gradient. Colin, how are you? 

02:01 - Colin Knox (Host)
I'm doing well, Marv, I'm doing well. 

02:03 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right. So you guys have been making some waves. 

02:08 - Colin Knox (Host)
We've been making waves. I mean we started with some ripples, you know, over the last few years doing some things, and now I'd say the waves are starting to come on. And yeah, I mean it's been something in the works for a long, long time with Gradient. So really excited to get the new product out here over the last couple of weeks and very humbled by the amazing response we've had from the industry. 

02:38 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right, and that product that you've teased about is something called Stack Tracker. Is something called Stack Tracker and, let me guess, is it, in its truest and simplest form, a way for MSPs to gain visibility into their stack? 

02:53 - Colin Knox (Host)
Yeah, absolutely, and so much more. But yeah, it starts at the base level of just tracking their stack of tools and resale solutions that they're passing through to their customers. 

03:07 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right. So I know that I've had a couple of other people on the show and we've talked about other stack maps and other types of trackers where people can put in their stack and see how it matches up with others. How is Stack Tracker different with you guys? 

03:25 - Colin Knox (Host)
it matches up with others. How is StackTracker different with you guys? Yeah, so I think it's a great way to put it is how is it different? I'd say, you know, it's a great complement to some of the other things that are out on the market there, which definitely solves the need for MSPs being able to map and just see their stack visualized right what am I using and what categories am I missing? Things of that nature, and I think that's awesome, especially when you're looking at that across the rest of the breadth of the industry of what are other MSPs offering, that I'm not right, or what's missing, and really understanding what's table stakes these days to run an MSP. 

04:04
Where we're different is we're really hyper-focused on the reseller aspect of an MSP's business. So all of those tools and solutions that you're reselling, mixed with a small bridge of what you're using, right, just the RMM, to help us get this opportunity to present to an MSP how their RMM is being leveraged for the various support services that they're doing. But at its most basic and root level, what we're doing is pulling in all of the usage information so you know how many seats, which products, which clients. All of that across your resale stack and being able to present that to an MSP in a way that they can see immediately, you know, not just what solutions they have out there, but knowing how those solutions are performing for them as a business when it comes down to what would arguably be the most important thing for an MSP profitability, right? We hear all of these reports about how half of the industry of MSPs aren't profiting today. Well, a big part of that isn't because they're not super effective in delivering the services that they're delivering. I mean, automation has never been so prevalent and so heavily adopted. 

05:21
I think a lot of it comes down to having a true understanding and a cost-up approach to knowing what your solutions are costing you today and how is what you're selling there leaving enough margin for your business to make money at the end of the day. 

05:35
So by us pulling in all of this information, we're able to see what your vendor spend is across all your vendors or even across your product categories, understanding what your revenue is from that, what the profitability means from that. 

05:48
We're able to trend that performance over time, we're able to make a whole lot of recommendations. So for us, it's about getting that insight, being able to know at a moment's notice, not after days or weeks of going out and collecting all your different usage reports from all your different vendors and everything. Days or weeks of going out and collecting all your different usage reports from all your different vendors and everything but at a moment's notice. Knowing what your earnings are, knowing what your performance has been, you know understanding even what the adoption level is across your clients of those solutions, so that you have an understanding of that saturation point. You know getting some understanding as to the what we would call product radar, of knowing what your coverage is, your client coverage with your solutions and where there may be gaps in your offerings, opportunities for profit tuning in your business and weaving in some of this AI component to what we do to really help power an MSP with a focus towards profitability. 

06:51 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Okay, so I let you go long so I could take a couple of notes here and see if you were going to answer these questions, because obviously this is doing a lot more than just simply seeing what stack units I have, seeing which customers are using my stack and how does that compare to other MSPs. You're talking about digging into utilization, consumption, profitability, so I've got to ask the question how are we doing that? I mean, are you literally grabbing data, not just with you know how many endpoints are using the product, but if you're talking profitability, where are you getting that number from? 

07:37 - Colin Knox (Host)
Yeah, so there's, there's a little bit of input into the system. So all of the usage we're pulling directly from the vendors. So we're not tying into the PSA to pull from your billings and stuff like that. We're going straight to source what's actually deployed, what's actually in use and actually out there in the wild. When it comes down to the cost and what the MSP is paying for the solution and what they're charging for it, we need the MSP to tell us that Right now there's no de facto system that the MSPs all put that in. 

08:11
I mean, there's a fraction of them that put it in their PSA. There's a fraction of them that put part of that information in their accounting package. It's kind of all over right now. So right now it requires us to have that information keyed into us. So when you look at the, you know could be 5, 10, 15, could be 40 different products that you're connecting in and reselling, keying those things in at you know at the start here and being prompted to update that over time, especially as we see changes in volume and consumption and stuff like that. But that's where we're able to get that information from is understanding hey, what's your cost essentially per unit on this? What's your resale price per unit on that? And then we converge all of that with the usage information across their clients. 

08:59 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right, do you I'm trying to ask this gingerly do you have MSPs that are like? I don't want to put that information in there. 

09:08 - Colin Knox (Host)
No, we haven't. I mean, when you look at it, it's impossible to leverage the benefit of a solution that helps key you to profitability if we don't know what your costs and your revenue are on those same products. And that's the key value proposition here is profitability. When you look at what we do, we're able to identify a lot of things. So, by giving that information and plugging that in, this is all about giving feedback to the MSP, right, this is all about supporting that MSP to grow smarter and be more profitable. When we look at that, across the entire spread of solutions that they're reselling and have out in the wild, you know we're quickly identifying things. I mean, we had nearly you know it's massive, but a nearly $20 million MSP where we uncovered $10,000 or $6,000 in profit tuning recommendations monthly $6,000 monthly just on products that they've sold because our system was immediately able to identify that they had five different vendors in one product category that they were selling. Right, Typical thing you have some solutions, you deploy them. You meet a new vendor hey, I'll try these out at these accounts. Hey, I'll try these at these accounts. And go on and on. They had five different vendors that they were reselling the same audit category to, and what our system went and looked at was it immediately saw the volume across all those vendors, it immediately tracked the adoption across all those vendors and that. But then it also tracked what the profit margin was across those vendors, something that the MSP had never even looked at, even at their level of scale. Well, we were able to find right away what their top, most profitable vendor and supplier was in that category, and then it was able to go and calculate the rest of the volume across the other vendors and tell them immediately by consolidating to this one vendor, here's your total profit on it. Right, and that one came in at, you know, I think it was 2,400, 2,500 profit a month. Right. Now you're looking at a solution that's driving mass value for them. 

11:13
There was other things that it starts to find and see where you know it's able to understand hey, you've got really tight margins on these subcategory products that all fall into, let's say, security. We're able to smartly identify. If you bundled these products together as a security offering, you have another 10% margin bump that you can do on that to increase profitability across all of them as well as increase the adoption. So it's all of those types of things. But one of the other big, big benefits that we're able to offer here is MSPs for a long time have tried to create their own you know gaps report or green light or white space or whatever they want to call it, and they've done so with you know we'll call it several grains of salt, not necessarily knowing because of the ever growing dynamic of running their business and clients coming, clients going, shrinking, growing, different products, everything else They've never really been able to have a set at a moment's notice, understanding of what are my best opportunities to sell and cross-sell or upsell my clients, and two, they've never properly been able to quantify those opportunities. 

12:23
They have a best guess. 

12:25
What our system goes and does now is it immediately knows every single product that you're selling on a recurring basis to at least one customer and we know every customer that's buying at least one thing from you on a recurring basis. 

12:40
Now we're able to inverse all of that, we're able to flip that on its head and say here's every customer and all of the different services that they're not buying from you today. 

12:48
And then, now that we know your cost and your resale price on those on average and we're able to determine an approximate size of that business based on other things that they've bought from you. We fully quantify it. So whether we come out and say, hey, here's your total opportunity across your client base for security awareness, training in revenue and profit, and here's all those clients are and what they're all worth, or if it's a client by client to say, hey, Marty's Hoverboard Repair, here we go. You have, you know, $8,000 in revenue opportunity here, but your biggest opportunity within that is backup. Let's say, Right, so we can break it down and carve it any which way. But then our AI also ranks probability of success and the most viable options. So the MSP isn't wasting time trying to pitch something that's not going to be the right thing, or pitch to the wrong person or not have their ducks in a row. Everything is set here ready to set them up for success. 

13:47 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right. So let me go back and ask this. I'll call this a dumb question for people who didn't know what Gradient did before. So you were already helping MSPs track their billing and make sure that it was accurate, you know, are you, you know, forgetting to bill a customer for these licenses over the whatever? So what exactly is the difference? Because the question is going to be well, couldn't we have done that before? Why do we need the new stat tracker to do this? 

14:21 - Colin Knox (Host)
Yeah. So I'd say synthesize has been a great genesis and building block for what StackTracker is capable of doing, and you will see a lot of what StackTracker does flow into synthesize over time. Here as well, there's a few different things. What we learned with what we're doing with synthesize. One is that PSAs are very messy, right? They’re, you know, not a very great source of truth. Air quotes around it. I know this is audio version, but it is a source, so we're doing a lot of that stuff. Here's the challenge that we have was an ability to categorize the data and categorize the information flowing through the system, because of all these wild names that MSPs assign to different services and flip-flops of what and who is supplying what service under the hood, and things of that nature. Now we're getting better at normalizing that data and being better about it. 

15:22
Some of the other challenge here, though, comes into being. You know, I guess it goes a lot further beyond. So, again, a lot of this stuff is going to come in to synthesize and be available. Most MSPs we talk to these days actually aren't billing out of their PSAs. Now, I'm not going to sit here and stand on a soapbox saying one way or another, if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but what we've seen over the last year and a half in particular is the amount of MSPs of varying different maturity levels coming in and seeing what we do with Synthesize and seeing the writing on the wall for a lot of what we can deliver with Stack Tracker and saying I want to be able to leverage this, I want to be able to take this stuff and use this data and get insights and see all the information about it. But I am not billing out of my PSA so we had to kind of separate that and it required us to kind of chop off part of Synthesize with an axe to be able to do that, because Synthesize was so dependent on the PSA and the agreements and contract structures and everything else in there. So that became a big part of it. But it also limited us on how many MSPs we could support and drive value and benefit for. 

16:36
I think you know the other thing too was you know one thing that Synthesize does great is track that usage and compare it and make sure that you're billing the right number of seeds and capture and know if you're not billing a client for a service, and stuff like that Stack Tracker starts to come in on ways that again, with some of that categorization, with some of that broader spread of what it's capable of doing, we're able to understand double deployments of things that again Synthesize just hasn't been able to do, based on its data structure, is you know, we can come across and see, hey, you have two MDR solutions deployed to at least this one client, if not several clients, so we can alert on that and start to tell the MSP hey, chances are, you replaced this vendor with this vendor or vice versa. 

17:29
You're still spending like five grand a month to that vendor, just so you know, because it's all still considered out in the wild and those licenses haven't been decommissioned. So that's some of the stuff that we're able to do with StackTracker, given the breadth and again structure of how it's set up that Synthesize just hasn't been capable to do. 

17:48 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Right Now? Are these kind of hints, reminders, nudges of what you may or may not be doing? Are these kind of like AI things that you've built in, that kind of do this? Or is this going to be an account manager that is also checking in with you to say, hey, just looked at your you know spend here and you've got these things happening. How is that going to work? 

18:39 - Colin Knox (Host)
Yeah, so it's that goes through the system and, yeah, it's all AI driven. So we've got, you know, the AI model takes a look at the data set for the MSP and can pull out the outliers, pull out the anomalies, give them a whole bunch of stuff. So you know, if you take what we call the growth intelligence add-on to StackTracker, you get a monthly report that gives you a full executive summary of things that you would need a full team of data collectors, data scientists, business analysts, your BI tool and someone with a really great tune to be able to pull out some of the things that are being identified here. So, yeah, you get a monthly report completely generated by AI. Yes, our team is still in the interim, and is reviewing all of those reports to make sure this isn't a bunch of you know completely off left field as the system gets tuned. But no, it comes out with all of your recommendations, your executive summary around what's notable of changes in your business that you know. 

19:46
Hey, increased volume in this category, increased volume with this product or this product. You launched and sold your first client three months ago. Here's what it's doing today in the business of running a company and just launching new services and focusing on getting new clients and fighting fires and doing everything. You just don't look, and you, in many cases, even you know from when I was running an MSP I didn't even know where to look. So the big, big idea behind stack tracker isn't about throwing more data at an MSP, throwing more charts at an MSP. I mean we've got almost too many too many dashboards, too many different systems out there, and a friend of mine in the industry said that MSPs are data rich but insight poor, and that's the problem that we're looking to solve is take all of that, digest all of that and output it with an actionable recommendation that's pointed to the best options for an MSP. 

20:45 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Funny. You should mention that I was having one of my peer group meetings last night and the concept of ditching a product or two came up because the use case scenario for that product we just simply weren't doing. It's a lot of work and a lot of input for reports that mean squat to our clients. I mean, I went through and I showed a client I'm like here, you. They're like we don't. That's too much, we don't care. Tell us where you can help us out better. So I like the idea. Now let me ask this, because StackTracker seems to be grabbing a lot of data from a lot of places. I know that you had what was it? 60 product integrations, 300 products, or I forget, 60 vendors, 300 products, something like that. Are these all the same integrations that work with StackTracker, or are there additional products out there that people can bring in? 

21:45 - Colin Knox (Host)
Yeah, so every integration that we have and we've actually just launched some more this week that we haven't announced yet with some more RMMs, but integrations are coming fast and furious for both Synthesize and Stack Tracker, and every integration so far that we're building supports both of those StackTracker and every integration so far that we're building supports both of those. 

22:10
I'd say there will be some types of integrations we'll be able to add for StackTracker that just don't make sense for Synthesize. But yeah, in essence it's a fast growing thing there. We also still have our open API. We've got a fully published SDK for PowerShell and some other languages if an MSP really wants. But we've got partners that are you know they'll build their own integration in one to two hours and be pumping it. And if they don't have the know-how or you know capacity and helps to do it, our team's completely there as the assistants to go and build that for them. As long as we can get access to the API, as long as we can test against their account to make sure that it's actually pulling and rolling the way that it should. But, yeah, we're driving and adding integrations extremely quickly. 

22:59 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right, I want to go back and ask I know that adoption rates is a big portion of this where people can see, let's just say for sanity's sake, that an MSP is selling a product at different rates for different clients. Does StatTracker take that into consideration, and is there kind of a formula that you guys would put into? Hey for you to get better utilization or better profit? Here's what you can do. Am I making too much of that? 

23:49 - Colin Knox (Host)
No, so we need to take a blended average of what your resale price is of any solution, right? So we don't tie into the billing, the street billing or invoicing system to say this is what you charge for this product to this client versus that client. We take a blended, blended average. So there is a little, you know, couple, couple degrees or a couple. You know points of variation on that right and stuff, but in general, it's quite accurate. What it does do, though, you know, is it does look at pricing sensitivity, it does look at and track your margin. It does make recommendations if it thinks the margin is not big enough. 

24:30
But I mean, I'll hint back. You said I can't remember if it was before the show or when we were backstage or when this came on. You know how long have you been working on this? Is this something new? Have you been working on this? Is this something new? I mean, I didn't go and check, but I bet you, if we listen back to the interview that we did in late 2020, if not early 2021, when we first came out with Gradient, we're now doing a lot of the things that we talked about doing before, all about empowering MSPs. 

24:59
So, as you look at it. We've got, you know, call it a thousand MSPs on Synthesize today and we've got a lot of knowledge about those MSPs in our platform and you know, part of being able to leverage that for the greater good is, you know, I think a year ago, a year and a half ago, we did a state of the channel webinar with Jay McBain where we talked through some of the statistics and trends that we were seeing there. As we continue to grow that base, as we continue to grow the base of MSPs on StackTracker, we're able to start making pricing recommendations to an MSP. That actually helps them understand. I remember running an MSP and I still talk to MSPs today that do this is they go and grab a cell phone or something and just start phoning other MSPs in their city and the state, whatever be like. Hey, what do you charge for this? What do you charge? You know, posing as a customer and you know you're nodding your head. Maybe you do it or you've had it done to you, right? Everybody wants to know because I don't know what to charge for it. You go scroll Reddit same thing. Hey, what's everybody charging for? You know, fishing simulation. What's everybody charging for? EDR, all of this kind of stuff right, whether it's bundled, whether it's not. We start to get this information Now. We're never going to give anybody's name or rank or benchmark individual companies on the vendor side and the MSP side, ever. Everything we do is categorical. So what we will be able to do as this continues to grow and flesh out Part of those AI recommendations are going to come back and say hey, Marv, you're selling these services and we know that you're charging X on average for each of those Based on other MSPs in Florida or other MSPs in the United States. 

26:40
You're undercharging by this service by $3. You're overcharging by this service by $7. By $7. Based on our analysis, this is your profit and revenue. Gain opportunity by right setting each of these services, because we could see let's say, it was M365 premium, right, if you got a $3 spread on that, and we can see that you have I'm bad at math and we can see that you have a thousand endpoints out there or a thousand licenses, that's $3,000 in gain for you, 36 grand across your business in a year. By taking that. And you know you have price protection because if any of your clients come back, hey, I can show you that this is what the going rate is for this. So you go anywhere else. That's going to be what you're paying for that, right? We can also come back and say, hey, you're overcharging for this and we see that your adoption rate is only 15%. MSPs that are charging $5 less, $7 less, see an average adoption rate of 48% across their client base. 

27:42
Looking at yours and understanding more about your business if you drop your price, this is how much more you're going to sell. 

27:46
You drop your price. 

27:46
This is how much more you're going to sell. 

27:49
Right, and the longer you use Stack Tracker, the more powerful it becomes, because it learns more about you. 

27:56
And now there's some people in the industry you know whether we want to call them tinfoil hats or not, right it's, do I want it to learn everything about me? Well, the whole concept is that we’re all in technology the whole concept of technology is to make everybody's lives more convenient. Now, we're not watching and telling anybody about Marv's business, but what we're doing is watching Marv's business and saying, hey, you want to look at adding another service to your stack here to offer your clients. Tell us a bit about that and we'll tell you, probably with a fair degree of accuracy, exactly what revenue and profit that will deliver to your business at the end of the year. And on top of that we'll probably recommend alternatives not the vendors, but different subcategories or bundling options that you would maybe be better to go with, or maybe that's the top one, but then we can also tell you what you should be charging for that or what you should bundle with that to have the best success rate. 

28:50 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right, all right. So tinfoil hat I do not wear. But I do fear the fact that somebody calls me up one day and says hey Marv, we know that you're spending X with this vendor. You know we can either do this or we can do that. I certainly don't want that. I, I'll be one of the I'll. I’ll want that. I'll admit personally, when I get a call from a vendor and they're soliciting me and I'm like no, we're good, we're covered. Oh, can you tell us who you use? No, I don't even want you to know that. But I do like the idea of having a place where we have real data of what people are charging, because all the places that we've heard out in, whether it's at a conference or these quote-unquote reports of surveys people lie Well that's the big problem, right is, is everything's based on, you know, a survey at that point, right, and there's no truth or reality to a lot of what's out there. 

30:00 - Colin Knox (Host)
So with us, again, we're never going to share anybody's name or anything else. And, and you know, the same way, when we make a recommendation of a solution maybe that you should be selling, I'm using solution in a way of, like I'm going to frame it as a subcategory, like I have phishing simulation, security awareness, training, dark web monitoring, things of that nature. We're never going to tell you the vendor to choose for that. Right, that would be a very poor idea on our side, because we don't know all the features of those solutions. We don't know all the other bits and bytes of how it works, what it does, if it's the fit for you, if it's the fit for your clients. What we can tell is that, hey, solutions in that category seem to be getting adopted. Well, we can see what they're paying and selling it for on average. That's how we can give that information. Right, and that's the big bit is, you don't need to walk a conference floor and get floated by. Hey, this is what I think this is worth to me. We'll be able to tell you exactly that stuff, right, and what the opportunity is, and, at the same time, vendors would be, you know, not wanting to say like, hey, somebody is saying that I can negotiate a better price with you because other MSPs are paying you X. Well, we're not going to do that, right? All about leveling up the entire industry again at a category and demographic basis. That helps you understand. 

31:21
I think the other thing that we're trying to solve is there's a ton of programs and coaches and systems out there that are amazing and they've done great things to help MSPs grow. The challenge that I hear from MSPs all the time is that those are always a one-size-fits-all approach. You need to bundle all of these things in and you need to charge X. Okay, well, that's great, but it takes reading a few comments on the Facebook posts or Reddit threads or anything else. Right? I can't buy a house in Florida for what I can, or I can't buy a house in New York for what I can buy a house in Florida. 

31:58 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Yeah, absolutely. 

32:00 - Colin Knox (Host)
I cannot right. The economics are different, right, and now there's going to be some things that just they are what they are and some of that stuff goes. But the local economy drives a lot of things. Typical, you know, just makeup of your company is. We can give a plan that's based on that. That's your tailored solution and best recipe for success. 

32:36 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Well, that is what we need to hear more about, because you're right, what works, you know, in Florida, Fort Lauderdale, doesn't work in New York City, doesn't work in Raleigh, North Carolina, doesn't work in Salt Lake City, Utah and being told you know that you need to charge $200 a seat. That works in some places, not all. It might be $150. It might be, I mean. 

33:03 - Colin Knox (Host)
Absolutely, and what I will say is you know, it may be true, maybe you can sell in Florida for $200 a seat, you know, and sell in New York for $200 a seat. Now, the difference is what's under the hood, what all is being included to get to that value point that a customer in Florida is willing to pay $200 for this stack of services, whereas it may be a smaller stack of services to get to that number in New York. Right, that's going to be the difference of what needs to be included to hit those numbers and I think that's the variability that you know. StackTracker, and only solutions like that, will be able to provide All right, so we just took a left turn into that conversation. 

33:50 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right, so we just took a left turn into that conversation. So you mentioned Stack Tracker, so we'll get back to that. I think, at the core, stack Tracker is going to be great from an MSP's perspective. Just to simply see what do I have? How is it adopted across all my clients? What am I spending? Where am I wasting money? Where can I get more profit? I mean that being able to do that because, again I am going to mention, we've seen a lot of products in the last 18 months or so where, hey, you know, you know we can get you your stack value, and how is it stand up versus others? It's not necessarily the product, it's the value, and it looks like Stack Tracker is going to be able to give us that. 

34:36 - Colin Knox (Host)
Well, I think all of those solutions can drive and give value right and I think in some cases a combination of them is phenomenal to have right. Gradient is never going to display the exact vendors that you should be going with or, you know, stack ranking those to say, hey, this one maybe would perform better for you than that one. That's not our mojo, that's not where we want to go right. So I think if we're able to present an opportunity where, hey, you've got a gap here, we see other MSPs doing it. Hey, I've verified that with this other company that's telling me a similar thing, and now that other company is going to be able to say, hey, based on what they see, these are the top three vendors to choose from. Awesome, right, I think there's a lot of that. MSPs grow effectively and grow profitably and you know, again using the data set, that we have to help inform that and give them value on that side of the equation. 

35:37 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right, so this looks great. I saw that when you guys I don't know which announcement. It was number three, four, five. I'm like you know what. I got to reach out and get Colin on the show. Colin, thank you, I appreciate, I appreciate it. Of course people can go uh to meetgradient.com and find it. There is a subpage stack tracker dot. Meetgradient.com and go check them out and listen for the value of everything that you're getting. Folks just know that we're not going to talk price. 

36:08 - Colin Knox (Host)
But it's not free, don't think you're just going to go in there. It's not free, yeah, it's, it's. It's a product that you pay for. 

36:19 - Uncle Marv (Host)
All right, colin, we're going to have to check in a little bit later. I'm going to have to go take a look and see if this is something I need, so we'll, of course I'll probably see you out on the road soon as conference season is heating up Absolutely, so all right, for sure. 

36:35
Well, folks, thank you very much for listening. That was Colin Knox, co-founder and CDO of Gradient, sharing insights on the new AI product, stack Tracker. So a big thank you for joining us. And, folks, this is going to do it. Be sure to tune in next time for another episode of the podcast. Don't know when it'll be, but it'll be soon. Go to itbusinesspodcast.com, select one of the pod catchers so you'll know when it is. So we'll see you soon and until next time, Holla!

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Colin Knox

CEO

Colin Knox is an entrepreneur, an inspiring leader, and a big thinker. Where he sees problems, he’s driven to apply effective, creative solutions. He is a two-time category disrupter turning start-ups into market leaders building a cumulative 9-figures in enterprise value.