674 Boost Your MSP's Efficiency with Strety

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast powered by NetAlly. We have another vendor profile with us for the IT Nation Pitch It program. And today I'm talking with Strety.

Strety is a business management tool designed specifically to help small and medium-sized businesses run their operations better. And if you are somebody that wants to do a better business operating system, this is it. Today, talking to me is one of the co-founders and president, Larry Garcia.

Larry, how are you?

[Patrick Clawson]
I'm doing well, Uncle Marv. How are you doing?

[Uncle Marv]
I am doing good. So here you are in the midst of Pitch It. And how are you liking it so far?

[Patrick Clawson]
It's been great. It's been great, you know, connecting with the cohort. It's been great having all the speakers that we meet with week in, week out and all that and also connecting with, you know, people like yourself and going on these, you know, webinars and podcasts.

It's been awesome.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, let's get right to it because we don't have a lot of time. So the first thing I'm going to ask you is to kind of translate what I said earlier about what Strety is and how MSPs can use it.

[Patrick Clawson]
Yeah. So we think of ourselves as the acronym BOSS, right, B-O-S-S, which is a business operating system software. So if you're looking for sort of operational efficiency, you know, this would be the software that you live in day in, day out to get things accomplished at your company and build a great organization, be it that you've already scaled or that you're planning on scaling.

That's essentially what we would be doing.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So are you talking about, you know, operating systems and guidelines? Are you talking about KPIs?

What are we talking about with the system?

[Patrick Clawson]
Yeah. So, yeah, I think the big fundamental components are around KPIs, right? So knowing your numbers and making sure that the business is running well, doing your goals or OKRs or ROCs, there's a couple of different names for it.

It's like, all right, how do you push your business forward, right, by, you know, setting these milestones and goals, meeting cadences and agendas, be it internally with your company, but also with your clients. And then, you know, things around project management, you know, what's your vision for the company and sharing that with the rest of the staff so everybody's on the same page. So those would be kind of like the big components of the software, all kind of interconnected with each other.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So this kind of sounds like a little QBR for the business type deal where you're putting all your stuff together and sharing all of that. What are some of the, I guess, features and components that people would look for when they use this?

[Patrick Clawson]
You know, one important feature is that there is a lot of software out there. There's a lot of software fatigue and people trying to kind of collapse systems together. So, you know, having us, we built inside of Microsoft Teams, though, we are going to come out with a Slack integration soon.

So it lives in there and does single sign on, you know, integration for tasks, not only living in our system for like follow ups from a meeting, but also sending that to a ticket inside of a ConnectWise PSA or a Halo PSA or Autotask. Those are going to be big features of it. It'll integrate anywhere into where you live already for, you know, getting things actually done at the right time.

[Uncle Marv]
OK, now you mentioned tasks, but I'm thinking of this more on the lines of goal setting and performance. Is it does it do all of that?

[Patrick Clawson]
It does. Yeah. So you can definitely make, you know, goal setting for yourself and set a timeline on it.

And it could be a number that you need to reach or one of those binary that you hit the goal or not. And that can be, you know, for personal, for the company, for a department. So you can definitely set that up inside of our system.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So now I'm going to ask you the tough question, because I know a lot of us as MSPs, we all want to have that operational efficiency. We all want to scale.

We all want to be able to have, you know, systems in place that make it easy for us to do that. It sounds like you might be, you know, providing us a way to do it. But what are some of the challenges when you run into an MSP that says, OK, boom, I'm ready to go?

What's the struggle point when you start?

[Patrick Clawson]
You know, I think the struggle point is typically trying to do everything at once. Right. So if you think of like operational efficiency, like you want a goal down the road, right.

You want to set, you know, quarterly goals to attain that bigger goal. That's a year, three years out. You want to do a weekly cadence, kind of concentrating on one is probably better than concentrating on everything, whatever that may be.

So I think that's the tough is you try to do everything at once as far as becoming operationally efficient.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, so I would imagine that there's some sort of step process or agenda that kind of moves people along the process.

[Patrick Clawson]
There is, yeah, we definitely make recommendations around kind of starting at sort of like a weekly meeting cadence of get everybody on the team in various departments or, you know, leadership team meeting every week, discussing things, going through, you know, numbers, things that they're stuck on or issues that they need to solve. So kind of doing that for a quarter, then going into like, all right, let's goal set too. Right.

So you're doing that, but then you're goal setting as well. And then further out. All right.

What does this company look like five years from now, for example? And how do we fill that backwards? So it's definitely we have like a guided sort of PDF that says, all right, this is how we would do it.

And it's actually how we've done it at previous companies.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So this sounds, again, similar to things that people would go to a business coach for to help them. I know that some of the other vendors have programs, but what makes Strety unique in this platform space?

[Patrick Clawson]
Yeah, I think it's the being so integrated, right, it's definitely if you're using a business coach, what I'm 100 percent a fan of, you could do all this stuff in spreadsheets, kind of like anything else. Right. Like you can do tickets inside of spreadsheets if you if you have the time.

But this kind of guides you and it kind of sets the guardrails to make it very easy for you to implement anything a business coach would tell you to do. So I think that's the thing. It's almost like getting in there and actually doing it.

We provide those guardrails of having everything interconnected and a place for everything as far as operations that a business goes.

[Uncle Marv]
Now, I'm sitting here looking at my notes, trying to think, OK, Microsoft Teams, I'll be honest, from my standpoint, is just one of those tools that sits in the toolbar. Sometimes they get used, sometimes it doesn't. So why did you pick Teams as the platform to do this?

[Patrick Clawson]
I think it was around tool fatigue, you know, about another thing to log into. There are a good amount of MSPs, not all of them, but that are in teams, you know, communication wise, day in, day out. So a place to do your single sign on, to live inside their app store, you know, kind of gives it an easy way for us to have a mobile app inside of Microsoft Teams, which is really nice.

And so that's kind of what we bet in, you know, my co-founder's father has been sort of in the Microsoft world since the early 80s, right, kind of doing servers for banks back in the day, probably almost at the brink of a punch card server world. And it's kind of like, you know, bet big on Microsoft back then and still betting on that Microsoft ecosystem today.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. That that does make sense. And yeah, I don't have to get another tool.

But let's talk about now operationally. And I'm going to ask if you can maybe give an example. So, you know, somebody wants to look at Strety, make that next step.

What would be an example of an MSP that has onboarded with you and, you know, kind of, you know, moved along the path?

[Patrick Clawson]
Yeah, so, you know, we have an MSP out of the Charlotte area, you know, fantastic company, 30 employees and, you know, something that we've discussed with the CEO of that company was by implementing this and they were doing everything sort of in spreadsheets, in Microsoft Word, you know, they're having the meeting agendas that are sort of automated in Word as a template. And the way they felt is they were at the brink where they felt like they needed to hire, you know, three more full time employees. And by putting us in place after two quarters, they felt that that wasn't, you know, they felt like they got five to 10 percent more efficient.

And now they only feel like there's one department that need to hire a full time employee. So they kind of didn't have to hire two more people. So if you think of getting really into being operationally efficient, you almost just take your W-2 number, you know, and then multiply it by this isn't going to make you 100 percent more efficient, but it's going to make you 20 to 10 to 5 percent more efficient.

And that's sort of the ROI on here of using our product.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So let me dig deeper there. Is it Strety that made them more efficient or was it using Strety to identify areas in the business that they can make more efficient?

[Patrick Clawson]
It was a little bit of both, right. So what they got really into, one thing that they didn't have any more is what they would call slippage, meaning they would have a meeting once a week, they'd have some takeaways and they'd forget about it until they got to the agenda next week. And the thing that they had to do last week didn't get done.

Right. And finally, it would get done. Right.

So you'd have all that. So that went away. So they said, we get to every meeting.

Basically, almost all of our takeaways are to do from the previous meeting, get done on time, you know, and people felt accountable. It also gave a spot for employees to give like problem areas of the MSP, right. Then give it air and sunshine.

Right. So there was place in the meetings where they would say this is happening and I need help. And so it became less anecdotal.

And it came up every once in a while before in the kind of spreadsheet Microsoft Word era where it's like a talking point in the agenda. All the people from that team see it and there's a discussion around it. And so on that side, they identified parts of the company that they felt they could get more efficient at and they feel like they've executed it with our help.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So the smart agendas, automatic reminders, goal tracking, all of that stuff. Very nice.

Now, let me ask a question. If somebody were to go to your website, so Strety.com and I didn't spell it out, folks, but if you're checking the show notes, the link will be there. S-T-R-E-T-Y.

One of the first things that people see on your website is that from the creators of Bright Gauge. Now, I know I've seen Bright Gauge. I don't really know what it is.

So how does how does that help you guys?

[Patrick Clawson]
Well, so, yeah, so my co-founders and I was the first employee there at Bright Gauge but built out a dashboarding reporting company. So we pulled data from MSP products. We had one hundred and three integrations, anything from Salesforce to ServiceNow to MechWise, you know, Laptop Continuum, you name it, GFI Max, if you can remember that name.

So we integrated all that data. We put it all together and put in these dashboards that refresh every two minutes. Since then, you know, we're not part of the company anymore, but that was always in the KPI world.

What we struggle with, though, Uncle Barb, was that we gave you the data, but then what was the execution after? Right. Like there was no execution.

And this is where Strety solves is, all right, you have data, you've analyzed something. All right, let me go execute on fixing that. Right.

Hey, tickets over SLA are super high or accounts receivable are way above history numbers. Sure, Bright Gauge would do that for you. Any KPI dashboard reporting tool and a PSA tool or a QuickBooks will do that for you.

But how do you fix that? And that's where Strety steps in. You go meet with the person who's the best person to solve this problem, meet with them, get follow ups, build a project, build milestones.

And so it's that operational system that's needed after you kind of uncover the data.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, I was going to ask about that, because, yeah, getting that information means nothing if you don't do anything with it. So having the steps to go forward.

So also on your website, I would say this, folks, go look at their blog page because you guys have a lot of articles that even if you're not on the operational efficiency model, even your latest article, 10 tips to better one on one meetings. I mean, fruitful stuff.

[Patrick Clawson]
A hundred percent. Yeah. You know, for us, we thought kind of the big things for us at our previous company, Bright Gauge, was implementing an operating system, but also one on one meetings with managers and direct reports.

There's so much maturity for performance management inside of the MSP space. And we think it's a very powerful thing. It's another thing that you can do in strategy, by the way, is have that manager direct report relationship and have a recurring meeting with them and have a place to kind of share information between the two.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So everything can be found on their website. I do want to ask one more question in regard to the users.

So, of course, it looks like you can sign up with just one user. But does that mean that you could take a solo tech and have them implement this stuff? Or is this something that, you know, you kind of need to be on the journey and ready to scale to in order to use this?

[Patrick Clawson]
Yeah. You know, I don't think we've seen a lot of one user accounts, but we have seen the number of two user accounts. So you can definitely have one and run things.

You know, the only thing you lack is you can't assign a goal or a rock to them. You can't, you know, have them necessarily adding to an agenda of a meeting. But we're open to having those relationships early on while someone's testing it out.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So this is something where, like, the president would be a one user person and then try to, you know, leverage out, you know, a strategy to all of their team members.

[Patrick Clawson]
Exactly. Yeah. You know, we have a company where that person has essentially started doing EOS, which stands for Entrepreneurs Operating System.

It's a framework from the book Traction. And they're kind of just getting their hands in it right now. They have one license, so they're kind of running the modules themselves and presenting on a screen.

But ultimately, especially doing a framework like EOS, they'll deploy licenses to the rest of the company.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. And rolling back around to PitchIT, you said everything looks good so far. Any goals that you have post-November?

[Patrick Clawson]
You know, post-November is really kind of continue growing, growing the company and trying to innovate and really building into the product. I think a lot of the money that we have is really into development. As opposed to anything else, but also, you know, work for me as far as like marketing and getting out there and getting the word out.

So just keep growing the company, you know, make something else that's of value to the MSP industry and make it something where it's like a value added MSP can go take to their customers. Right. Like they can go present this to their customers and say, hey, financial services firm, you're one of my MSP customers.

Here's something I use for operational excellence at my company. Why don't you use this product as well?

[Uncle Marv]
You know, I didn't even ask about that. We talked about it, you know, using it internally for MSPs. But is it something that you can actually apply to your MSP clients?

[Patrick Clawson]
We do. Yeah, you can. We made a partner portal just about two months ago.

We actually have a number of customers on there that have gone in through the MSP channel. Right. So they sell it to their customers.

And yeah, we've had some people move on. I think it's going to get more popular. Some MSPs are actually even bundling it in with their monthly cost per end point.

[Uncle Marv]
But would this be something that you would obviously have to sell multiple licenses to the clients in order for them to use it?

[Patrick Clawson]
Up to them. So sort of the same story you're talking about. If you had a customer and they said, hey, one person wants to try this out, they could.

[Uncle Marv]
Right.

[Patrick Clawson]
But yeah, we do a revenue share. Right. So the MSP shows them Strety.

And if the customer buys it, then a portion of the revenue into perpetuity goes to the MSP.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Very interesting. Well, Larry, I should have gone back at the very beginning and apologized because I was at IT Nation Secure.

Were you there?

[Patrick Clawson]
I was not there. No.

[Uncle Marv]
OK. Was your company there?

[Patrick Clawson]
We were not there.

[Uncle Marv]
OK, I was going to say, I don't remember the booth. So I was going to apologize.

[Patrick Clawson]
No, no, we weren't. We weren't there. We're not in the security space.

So it didn't make sense for us at the time, though we might be there next year that we heard such great things about the event.

[Uncle Marv]
OK, well, I was going to say I'm apologizing for not going by your booth but wasn't there. So I'm off the hook there. But look forward to seeing you guys out and about.

And good luck on the PitchIT journey. And we'll obviously see you at IT Nation Connect in November, especially if especially if you're one of the final three. Oh, trying to get that money.

[Patrick Clawson]
Your lips. From your lips to God's ears. Yeah, absolutely.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, folks. Larry Garcia from Strety and look for them. Strety dot com and give your insights and feedback for them as they go through the PitchIT program.

And we'll see them in Orlando at IT Nation Connect at the beginning of November. Larry, good to have you on.

[Patrick Clawson]
Thank you for having me on.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. And everybody, we'll see you a little bit later. We'll be back with more vendor profiles as well as other podcast episodes of the IT Business Podcast.

Check us out in your favorite pod catcher or head over to IT Business Podcast dot com. We'll see you soon. Holla.