682 Solo Tech Success: TorqueNet LLC

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast powered by NetAlly. This is the show where I talk to MSPs, IT business owners, solo techs, vendors in our space, all with the goal of helping you run your business better, smarter and faster. And I have today a special guest in the house, and yes, I say that all the time, but in this case, I think some of you will understand, this is going to be one of those podcasts that I share not just with my professional friends, but actually some of my personal friends.

The person that I have coming on today was a buddy of mine. I was going to say high school, but we go all the way back to junior high?

[William Hibbard]
Middle school, yeah, or junior high.

[Uncle Marv]
So yeah, it was junior high back then, they've changed it. I have with me William Hibbard, I call him Bill, and his company is TorqueNet LLC. Bill, how are you?

[William Hibbard]
I'm doing good, Marv, and you?

[Uncle Marv]
I am doing pretty good, pretty good. So, this is going to be interesting for us.

[William Hibbard]
Yeah, well, we've met a couple of times at Pax8Beyond, but I don't know that we really worked out a long time to get caught up, and yeah, it's good. I know you were one of the first people I called when I moved back to Florida and got some advice on what you were doing.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah.

[William Hibbard]
And you were very gracious with your time.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So, let's start with this. For the tech people that are listening, let's start with your company name, TorqueNet LLC.

So, I just want to start with where did you come up with that name? Okay.

[William Hibbard]
So, originally, back in 2010, when I was coming up with a name and kind of over a weekend decided I needed to take a hobby to a business, I was thinking I was going to do security for small businesses, which now we know as an MSSP, but I don't know that they were around back then. And the first couple of businesses that I talked to didn't want an MSSP. They didn't understand the value in it.

They wanted basically a help desk guy that knew about information assurance and would bring that to the table with the decisions of the support, but they weren't looking for an additional vendor or contractor just to do security. But the intention was to do security.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Now, that goes back to, we're working a little backwards with our timetable here, but that goes back to your time in the Air Force where you were at one point a cyber operations officer.

[William Hibbard]
Correct. So, yeah, the discipline was cyber, and there's a lot of different things you can do with that. There's base level, there's working with Intel units, there's, I mean, last posting was test.

So, we did operational tests on cyber systems coming out and integrated systems coming out. So, yeah, retired at 20 years in the Air Force, almost all of that cyber, various aspects. And there was a lot of information assurance work being done.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. Now, I'm going to go back even further because when we met and hung out between junior high, high school, I don't think I ever saw you as the techie type. So, when did that start?

[William Hibbard]
You know, I can pin it back to eighth grade. I don't remember the math teacher's name, but she had a Pet Commodore computer in the classroom. And I know exactly where the classroom was in Delora, and I know it was a Pet Commodore.

And I spent as much time on that as I could. And then in high school, in addition to all the models that we were running, or I was running, the community college offered adult ed classes that you couldn't take for college credit, but I could take them at night for high school credit. And I took enough of those that I was one half year, so, you know, a half semester, whatever, from graduating at Christmas.

Because, I mean, I was just taking every class that I could through Brevard Community College at the time, doing adult ed classes. And yeah, just, it was programming and basic, but they were throwing concepts at it. And it was, you know, I was the only kid in the class.

And there were a lot of gray-haired folks that were trying to learn what this keyboard and computer connected together were doing for them. So, the instructor was doing a special class for me inside of the other class. And it was a blast.

And like I said, I took up every one of them. And the reason I got in that is I got kicked out of my first class, the daytime class that you had to have Algebra II. And at the time, I didn't have the prereqs.

So, it's like the end of the first week, I get this slip telling me I got to go talk to the counselor. And he's like, oh yeah, you don't meet the reqs, we got to put you in something else. So, I don't know, to chop or something like that.

So, yeah, I got kicked out of my first computer class because I didn't have the prereqs.

[Uncle Marv]
Nice. So, let's give people a little bit more history here. So, the place where Bill and I talk about a lot, where we grew up is Satellite Beach, Florida, which is right next to Patrick Air Force Base.

And that's how I got to Florida. My dad was in the Air Force. We had been in Louisiana, Wichita, Kansas, Berlin, Germany, and moved back to Satellite Beach.

So, I was one of the Air Force brats that showed up in the neighborhood. How did you end up there? Because I don't remember you being a part of the Patrick group.

[William Hibbard]
My father retired in, I believe, 73 as a New York City cop and moved the family down to Satellite Beach. I think it was right after school got out in 74. So, we started the summer.

I started second grade down there.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So, you were there before me. We got there in 76.

[William Hibbard]
Yeah. I didn't change much then. God, you wouldn't recognize it now.

[Uncle Marv]
No.

[William Hibbard]
Yeah. So, we moved down there in 74. And then, somewhere around middle school, I guess you were with the Patrick Flyers track team.

And I was riding a bike. One of those towns you just kids rode bikes everywhere. And so, I track team and I played soccer.

So, I had a little endurance on me and came out like on a Wednesday. And the next thing you know, they told me Saturday, there were time trials. And as we talked a little earlier about it, Coach Jack actually put me in a mild time trial with you.

And I'm like, I've never run four laps around a track. And I hung on your shoulder the whole way trying to get pace from you, figure out what was going on. And you dusted me in the last half lap.

But yeah, that was a fun old days. I wish I could still run. God, I wish I could still run.

[Uncle Marv]
Oh, I'm good. I don't need to run anymore.

[William Hibbard]
I miss it. I miss it.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So, we'll get back to our days at Satellite. So, I want to go back and talk about you in the business.

So, you did the cyber stuff in the Air Force. And then in 2010, you decided to turn this from a hobby into a business. And if I remember correctly, you weren't back in Satellite then.

You were in Colorado Springs?

[William Hibbard]
No, actually. So, I should throw in there that I got a really good piece of advice from one of my brothers who is also retired military. He says, don't wait to retire to start your retirement business or career.

And with that, three years before I retired, I opened the business. So 2010, retired from the Air Force in 2013. And I gave my tech skills away to my co-workers as a wingman.

You know, the wingman mentality within the Air Force, which was really good to hone my craft to figure out. They still got $0 invoices. I ran everything through the process.

So, I knew how much time it was taking to do things. I got my tool set. And I went ahead and pushed invoices and then only a couple of business cards.

But when they went home and they told their next door neighbor, I charged the next door neighbor. And yeah, so it was a lot of residential in the beginning. I don't do a whole lot of residential now.

But to get in and to learn my processes and weed out tools and evolve my tools, I started in residential while I was still active duty. And a few businesses I started with understood that they might be completely down, but I couldn't help them until I was off work or on weekends. And I found a couple that were willing to...

The price was right for them to deal with those constraints.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So, when you did retire and you had the business up and going for three years at that point, about how many customers did you have at that time? Were you set and ready to hit the ground running?

Didn't have to worry about money or did you have to struggle a little bit?

[William Hibbard]
You know, we're probably in a better position. My wife and I are both retired Air Force. So, I very much enjoy the business.

I enjoy the mental floss of fixing things. We wouldn't have as many fun things without the business, but the business doesn't pay the rent. And that's a very fortunate position to be in, to be honest with you.

So, yeah, I mean, we started out small. We were probably, I'm going to say 50 endpoints or less when I retired. And then, yeah, started growing from there.

No one... I retired... Yeah.

Okay. So, I guess that was 13 and we didn't move down back down here until 19. So, it's another six years that I grew the business in Colorado.

And then what a lot of people seem to find unique is that we moved the business and it survived. I don't know a lot of MSPs that have moved from one state to another. And yeah.

And again, that could be the Air Force retirement that's helping. When we moved to Colorado to Florida, we kept about 80% of our customer base and then grew it again here. And like with...

I don't know how you find with your business, but I find that it grows and shrinks and grows and shrinks. There's a cycle to it. I think the economy right now is a few people that are hurting.

I've had last year, 23, I had about three businesses that I support and go out of business. So, it affects the numbers, the endpoints. And I charge per machine, not per user.

So, that's just our model. I know other people have other models.

[Uncle Marv]
Right. So, let me go back and ask this. You say we, so is your wife working with you in the business?

[William Hibbard]
Yeah. Everything is we. I couldn't do what I do without her doing what she does.

She certainly keeps everything going in the house. And I hate to write. I've always hated to write.

So, she takes care of a lot of that correspondence. And she also takes care of the collecting of invoices, collecting of checks. That's her.

That's her main two things that she does. And on top of that, she's a very good soundboard. And then when we travel to Colorado, because we can do it up there, we'll pull cable when we go back to Colorado.

And she's always there holding the ladder and she's done it. She could probably do it herself, but she likes, I think she just likes being a ladder holder and the step and fetch, which makes things go much faster when you don't have as many trips up and down the stupid ladder.

[Uncle Marv]
Right.

[William Hibbard]
Yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So that's good.

[William Hibbard]
She's not the techie side of it, but yeah, I mean, I couldn't do it without her. You gotta have a good partner.

[Uncle Marv]
Yep. All right. So that question's out of the way, because I work with my wife, similar situation.

She handles a lot of the paperwork and smooths out the conversations for me. Yes.

[William Hibbard]
Yes. She's been really good when we go on a sales call or like a sales lunch or something. Nowadays, it gives me a chance to chew on some food instead of carrying the conversation.

But she's a pretty good cheerleader off to the side and, you know, tells our praises and can take the techie stuff and put it in non-techie terms, because let's face it, our clients are not in our space. So they're, you know, you gotta put it in terms that they can understand. And she's real good at that.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So now you mentioned this per-endpoint pricing and the transition from starting out mostly residential to per-endpoint. I know that now you are structured, you know, like an MSP.

You're doing primarily small business network support. So are you running the business truly as an MSP? Do you have a stack that you do?

What's the business like?

[William Hibbard]
Well, hopefully I can answer this right. Yes, we're running it as an MSP. We bring all the security tools.

I have four clients that deviate from our standard security stack. One, it's because it's a corporation and they bring their own and corporate mandates that they use something else that would conflict. So we bow out for there.

And I trust that they're on top of it. We have some of our stack on it. And then I just got one other client that she's retired and someone else has taken over, but we use ThreatLocker as part of our stack.

And she couldn't stand the 10 or 15 minutes it took for ThreatLocker to approve an update on a title that updates monthly. Was it QuickBooks? No, it was an accounting package, but it was not QuickBooks.

It was some other package, I think out of Europe, where she comes from. And yeah, every month they put out an update and she couldn't get her head around the whole trust, zero trust and how that would work. And boy, when she wanted to do an update, she wanted to do an update.

So we've got some other layers in there that are helping. And although she's taken a step back in the business and the new manager that I'm dealing with wants to get the full stack in there. I'm actually going to talk to them this week about it and they might be online.

But the other client is family. And yeah, they have three locations in a chain and the national company mandates their security stack. So we have Huntress going right now, DNS filter, and then ThreatLocker.

But ThreatLocker is not involved in that one franchise.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So you mentioned out of state, so obviously you've got to have remote software to help you do all that stuff. So using a typical RMM?

[William Hibbard]
I am. So the price model with one tech, Synchro MSP hits the nail on the head. It's priced right by the tech.

If we grow to a 10 person shop, we take a look at some of the other ones that were by the endpoint that might have more capabilities. But I'm just now starting to bump into some of the limitations of Synchro. Not thinking about leaving or anything like that, but I'm starting to understand some of the bellyaches that I read about on the Facebook chat groups and that kind of stuff.

It's not perfect, but I think what it does for the price is I can deal with it.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So in terms of what you're doing on a daily basis with your stack, sounds like all is well for the most part. I mean, what would you say is really great or what would be really bad?

[William Hibbard]
So I guess a little bit back to when I was in Colorado, including the first year I moved down to Florida in 19, I literally wrote my own batch scripts and would remote into each machine. And I would keep a folder of all the deltas, all the changed files. So I didn't have to download a huge amount, but I dumped the updates into my folder manually.

I'd log in and I was using TeamViewer at the time and dump in the batch files and then run in one batch file that would call these other ones. And I had to manually log in each one. So going with Synchro, you can actually load up scripts and do safe searches and target the scripts against them, automate the scripts based on policies.

And I mean, that's just huge. So, you know, for example, in Colorado, I was doing it manually. There was a glass ceiling of about 180 endpoints and I touched it twice.

And then I'd get burnt out. A client, you know, I would separate for whatever reason. And it was probably me getting just grouchy.

I mean, let's face it, we're a customer service or a business to a great extent. And when you don't smile enough, sometimes people get like, you know, what's wrong with you? Why are you mad at me?

I'm leaving. I'm not paying you money to growl at me. So I think that was, I think that was part of it.

And I touched that ceiling twice. And I don't know that I found the true ceiling with what I'm at now in this, in the new model, but it was a big trust of, well, what if somebody gets in the RMO? Or, you know, what if, what if somebody breaks into that and, you know, how much damage could they do?

Well, now, you know, now it's layered tools. I've found things like ThreatLocker and Huntress and all that, that would, would help unwind those problems. So I'm a little more comfortable, I'm a lot more comfortable using an RMO PSA, but I didn't, I wasn't comfortable with it for the longest time.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. Yeah. I had some customers that resisted the cloud option.

And I, I remember those days of, you know, putting scripts together. Now I wasn't a PowerShell person, but I, I did my scripts like you and dumped them in. I was using, I think my first remote tool was GoToAssist.

And then I, you know, graduated to LogMeIn Central. So I did that for a while.

[William Hibbard]
I went from LogMeIn and went from LogMeIn to TeamViewer, and then TeamViewer just got nuts with their pricing. And about the same time I had enough of their pricing is when I found Synchro and then included Splashtop. And Synchro also has a, it's an RDP-like remote.

So Splashtop gets wonky. You can go, it's hidden, it's not in one of their main menus, but if you know where to get to it, it's still a backdoor way in that you can remote in, see the screen and, you know, reboot it or see what's going on.

[Uncle Marv]
Right.

[William Hibbard]
So, you know, I considered there'd be two ways in, but yeah. You know, don't get me wrong. TeamViewer is good.

And LogMeIn is good. They're just, they're proud of themselves and they priced themselves out of my market.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, I mean, LogMeIn Central has come a long way and, you know, they've consolidated, you know, with LogMeIn Rescue and their other products. So there are some MSP-like features now. Now, you know, even five years ago, they didn't have them.

It was just basically remote support. And then they added a little bit of patching and some other stuff. And actually one of my law firm clients, they had a tech on site that I co-managed and that's what I gave them when I went to my RMM.

I left them on LogMeIn Central for their remote support until I got comfortable with being able to lock down my RMM. So now they use my tool as opposed to that and took away that, I don't know, I remember $3,000 price tag for LogMeIn Central.

[William Hibbard]
Yeah. I was about the same for where I was at or the number of units or bracket that I was in in TeamViewer. And I didn't have thousands in the budget for that.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. So that's good. So in terms of, now let me go back and ask this, because it sounds like a lot of the work that you're doing now kind of takes you back a little bit to the cyber days in the Air Force.

Are they similar? Did it help prepare you for the business?

[William Hibbard]
Oh, okay. So you've asked a generic question that could go on a thousand different questions. So let me ask what I consider to be the direct one.

Did it prepare me for business? No, because the Air Force is not a for-profit kind of thing. It's actually the opposite.

They have to spend in order to get the same amount of money or more next year. You didn't spend it all this year. You don't need that much next year.

So there's a lot of, well, I'll call it buffoonery that happens in September to make sure that you're at zero when 1 October comes around and you get full on it for next year. So no, that it didn't. I've seen people firing in the Air Force, but it takes a lot.

So there's a lot of strong opinions and you don't have so many strong opinions in the business side. You got to really choose what sword you want to fall on there. But as far as the information assurance side goes, yes, those principles, I mean, don't get me wrong, the first information assurance job I had in the Air Force in Omaha, I wasn't trained for it.

They threw me into it. I knew cyber. I can make a network work, but I was comparable to the kid next door helping somebody with their business.

They can make it work, but that doesn't mean it's secure. And that's kind of, I was thrown in there and yeah, I was grabbing every class I could and trying to learn. And I probably had it by the time I left, but now I was doing it.

So thank God there were other people that were helping. And then yeah, it goes from there. Nobody's going to learn it in one job.

So across the career, yes, I learned quite a bit. And that has helped. And it's why you, I'm going to talk to you.

Well, we're talking to other MSPs. So I mean, why you VLAN and set up rules and don't allow crap, get rid of old software, all that hygiene stuff. People don't learn that.

They load it, didn't work. Let me go on to the next tool, never go back and unload the other stuff or take a look at whether those other tools are breaking out, loading and whatnot. Yeah.

I'm still like I rambled. I'm not sure I answered your question.

[Uncle Marv]
That's a good start. I wanted to start there so that I could ask this next question because for all practical purposes, you're a solo tech, even though your wife works with you. And most of the solo techs that I talk to don't get to the point where they're running a threat locker as part of their stack.

So they may have their RMM, they may have Huntress, they're using Syncro, SuperOps, one of those. But it sounds like you've got a bigger handle on the security part of it. So I wanted to ask, was that something that started earlier or did you kind of slide into that as you grew the business?

[William Hibbard]
That's definitely something that is recent. I've probably only been with ThreatLocker for a year, year and a half. Yeah, it is expensive.

I'm not running AV, I'm running Defender, which I don't have a lot of faith in, but I'm running Defender with ThreatLocker and then Huntress on all of it. The big question is whether I'm going to go all in on ThreatLocker or keep it separate with Huntress. The mentality being there is I like the idea of a second set of eyes looking at it.

I'm afraid of too much groupthink if the EDR, MDR and the Zero Trust, which is solving the antivirus piece on steroids, are all together as that groupthink. I think I'd be using the same, what I call encyclopedia, to look for issues and know what's going on.

[Uncle Marv]
Right.

[William Hibbard]
Where two different companies, bad guys got to get through everybody's eye of the needle.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, I'm going to ask that controversial question. What don't you like about Defender or what don't you trust about Defender?

[William Hibbard]
I've never found Defender to catch anything.

[Uncle Marv]
Really?

[William Hibbard]
Like cellophane trying to stop a freight train. Huntress wants it on, ThreatLocker wants it on, you guys fight over who manages it, I don't care. But the only thing it does is get in the way of file and print sharing for the few clients that need to have that on.

All of a sudden it turns on and I get a call because only one person can print or whatever, on a small basic network.

[Uncle Marv]
So how much of looking at the security part of it, how much of that is coming from what you're learning now versus what you learned during your time at the Air Force?

[William Hibbard]
Wow. That's probably a very good question because I hadn't thought about it. Probably a lot of it came out of the Air Force and the classes that I took.

I got a couple of interesting trips to the Maryland area where they do some interesting cyber stuff and learned what can be done. So a lot of it too is discovery of the new tools. So I know what can be done, how they do it.

It's different. It's a new technique. You've heard about these USB cables that look like an ordinary charging cable or connection cable and next thing you know, it's injecting keystrokes.

[Uncle Marv]
Oh yeah, yeah. Because data goes both ways.

[William Hibbard]
That's a no-brainer, but I never thought about doing that. But I completely understand what they're doing once they showed it to me. It was like, oh my God.

So there's a foundation of knowledge that's there and I'm bumping in. I'm being shown new techniques and then new tools. I mentioned earlier that you and I bumped into each other twice at Beyond out in Colorado.

And the best thing I get out is the vendor hall and the different products. And just listening to what, you know, okay, do I already have that space filled? Is this a better mousetrap?

Is it a cheaper mousetrap that was just as good? But so I would prefer to spend more time in the vendor hall than some of the larger auditoriums that we listen to people talk. Yeah, so it's probably a little of both.

I don't think I'd get as much out of the current without the foundation knowledge that I got in the Air Force. But it wasn't like I retired in 2013 and knew everything I know today. You got to keep learning.

How they're doing it is changing. The end goal is always the same. They're after your data.

They're after your money.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, I mean, listen, the world has changed a couple of times since 2013. You know, 2020, the year of our COVID was, you know, a huge change for all of us. But the concept of security, I mean, it should be the same.

We just have to be more secure now. And I try to explain to people that, you know, it's baby steps, just like when, you know, my wife grew up in a town where nobody locked their doors. You know, Satellite Beach, we locked our doors.

I did. I did.

[William Hibbard]
And you lived on base.

[Uncle Marv]
That's probably why. But over the years, you know, it went to, you know, yeah, you didn't lock your doors. Then you locked your doors.

Then you got the deadbolt. Then you got the chain. Then you got an alarm.

Then you got cameras. I mean, that's kind of where we keep going with the cybersecurity. We've got to add the layers.

[William Hibbard]
So like, you know, an example of it is people spend a lot of money to have their networks protected in their computer and their data. You know, and I've just this past week or the week last added a tool for cell phones. And I don't support cell phones.

But if you don't put some security on cell phones, their clients are going to their email. They're going to their Facebook. They're going to whatever.

And if you don't have some security on that, you're kind of giving them the easy street. You know, they're going to hand their phone to some kid. They're going to download a game.

The game's going to have a payload in it. And you've just unraveled all the stuff because really the computer is a gateway into the cloud. So now the phone has gone around all of it.

And that's just, I mean, it's one of those where you kind of like, I was looking for a tool. And I finally found one that fit with everything else I got going on. But yeah, I'm just now offering a security tool for cell phones.

Do you offer something for cell phones?

[Uncle Marv]
So we don't do a specific tool for cell phones. We have made them all add multi-factor if they have their email on the phone. Most of our clients, we, you know, everything is segmented.

So they can't connect their phones to the network if they bring it in the office. Phones, tablets, kids toys are all on a segmented network. But if they put their email on the phone, it's got to be, you know, with 2FA.

And I had several lawyers fight me on that where they're like, well, I'm not putting that, you know, on there. And it's like, well, then you're not getting email on your phone. And, you know, with Azure AD and everything now where you can simply say, you know, you know, check to make sure this device has these things on it before going forward.

You know, now they're starting to listen, but it's still frustrating.

[William Hibbard]
I've got a client that, yeah, he's frustrated with ThreatLocker because he treats his computer like a toy. So yeah, he goes to QuickBooks and he goes to his service Titan or whatever to do service calls and see what's going on. But then he'll download any game that comes along.

And the tools make it hard for him to treat his computer like a toy. And you can't, I mean, at some point you got to pick. Is it a toy or is it a money-making business machine?

And if it's not a money-making tool, then it's a toy. And we'll put it in its own VLAN and you don't need to support it by me. Just, you know, it's still got to the internet.

But there's, and maybe that's where my business has matured. Because in 2010, when I started, I took anybody with a Pulse and a check that needed a computer looked at. And I didn't have a central, I didn't even mandate what antivirus they use.

They brought their own. They said to have something or they use the free AVG or something like that. And now it's like, yeah, I'm not chasing all these different, you know, you got to meet this.

And that's also where I'm priced. And if you allow too much deviation, then it's at your expense. So you need to raise your price for the different, if you're going to take care of it.

Take care of all these other tools that aren't in your stack. I kind of say that for any of the one-man bands that are out there, maybe somebody who's starting out. You know, know your stack and built that into your price.

And then when people want to deviate from that, you got to deviate the price.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, same as in, I mean, large or small, you know, your standard price is for your standard service. Anything outside of that is extra. And by extra, I mean, I'm going to bill you.

So that's the way that that goes. So speaking of billing, I can't remember if you told me you're billing or if I read it somewhere, but do you bill quarterly?

[William Hibbard]
No, I used to way back when I first started. I asked, I used to do quarterly and I had a couple of clients go, Hey, I can't budget for this. Everything else in my life is monthly.

Let's go monthly. And I decided to go monthly because it makes the cashflow for me even out as well. But yes, I started out doing quarterly because it was less cycles.

It took just as much time to print out. And then, you know, it took, it takes just as much time to print a monthly invoice as it does a quarterly invoice and to process checks for quarterly as it does a monthly. So, you know, I cut that by two thirds, quarter, whatever.

Went to four cycles instead of 12. And, but we have gone to, to monthly. And that's another thing I like about Synchro is it, it does all, it creates the invoices and passes the QuickBooks online.

So it also sends the invoice out, but they're paid through QuickBooks. So I like that. My CPA then can go look at QuickBooks online, but Synchro counts everything.

And when I did the conversion last winter, I found I was leaving like $500 a month on the table, found $500 a month of things on bills for that I was giving away. And in some cases even paying for it, not, not charging my customers for it. And we got that remedied.

A couple of people like, what do you mean my bill's going up? I'm like, be thankful I'm not back charging you, you know, but I can't do this anymore for you.

[Uncle Marv]
Right.

[William Hibbard]
Yeah. So monthly. I don't know where the quarterly came from.

Maybe that's when we first talked and I moved down here.

[Uncle Marv]
That could be.

[William Hibbard]
It might've been.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. We had a couple of conversations. I don't remember them exactly, but I, for some reason that stuck in my head.

[William Hibbard]
So I'll tell you one of the other things that done wonders for my business. And I'm going to throw Bob and Vinny at home. I've got two other MSPs in the areas that I'm friends with.

I mean, we're competitors, but we're friends and they've been a godsend. And we can call each other and bounce technical questions off each other. And when you go out of town and the phone rings, of course you do everything you can remote.

But if somebody has to go lay hands on it, I can call Bob or Vinny and they will go in a non-branded shirt and go get my client back up on their feet. And then when I'm back in town, I go back and do the permanent fix or whatever. But that, and we've loaned each other equipment.

I mean, what IT guy doesn't have a closet full of used equipment? You know, the best of the used stuff kind of gets saved for lab purposes and emergencies. And so we've bailed each other out.

Well, bailed each other out with that. But if there's any other single person MSPs out there, partner with... I made a mistake in Colorado.

It was a guy named Phil who reached out to me and he wanted to go camping and needed that and offered to pay me. And I sent him an invoice for the time. And then we just kind of fell apart.

And I think the right answer was, hey, we'll cover for each other. And I think that relationship would have gone a lot better and would have helped both of us where the other one's out of town, we cover for each other. Now, don't get me wrong.

I've never canceled a trip because the other guy's out of town. And they certainly don't cancel a trip because I'm out of town. But we do let each other know when we're out of town.

So we know whether that resource is there or not.

[Uncle Marv]
Right.

[William Hibbard]
So that's something that a single MSP might want to do is find a frenemy that they can go to coffee with once a month and commiserate and then back each other up.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So Bob and Vinny, they're in the Satellite Beach, Melbourne area. Now, are you beachside or are you...

[William Hibbard]
Okay. So my mother still lives in the same house that I grew up in.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay.

[William Hibbard]
Somebody has to be with her at all times. She's 94. But when we moved down here, we weren't sure where we were going to live.

We actually left Colorado without a house. We were going to stay at Patrick Contemporary Housing. And so I got a P.O. box in Satellite knowing that every time I go to Satellite to see my mom, I would hit the P.O. box. And we've left it down there. And it seems to be working. So our mailing address is Satellite Beach.

But no, we have a house in Merritt Island.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay.

[William Hibbard]
Close to 520.

[Uncle Marv]
Merritt Island.

[William Hibbard]
Yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
Really? Yeah. Our rivals?

[William Hibbard]
What?

[Uncle Marv]
Our rivals?

[William Hibbard]
Yeah, you know, because we lived at Patrick waiting for this house to close, my daughter started at Satellite. And then even though we moved to Merritt Island, she finished her last year and a half at Satellite. So my daughter actually graduated from there as well.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. We're okay there. So the reason I was asking if you guys were actually on the beach still, because a friend of mine, Allie Johnston is also an MSP there and has got her business right on A1A.

[William Hibbard]
I've seen an MSP. She's on the ocean side too, isn't she?

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. Well, not on the ocean side, but she's on A1A. She's on the land side, on the west side.

But she's close to, she's like the South Satellite Beach area, right before you get to Indian Harbor.

[William Hibbard]
Indian Harbor?

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. Okay.

[William Hibbard]
Well, maybe I should look her up. So that's a big difference between Colorado and Florida, is my willingness and openness to talk to other MSPs. And I don't know if it was the imposter syndrome before or what, but I didn't collaborate a lot with other MSPs.

Now I do, and I absolutely see the benefit of it. And it doesn't have to be adversarial. It's more of a cooperation.

We also sometimes talk about clients. So you know, somebody's saying, I'm about ready to let so-and-so go for this reason. Well, I'm going to hold the phone rings and you know what you're getting into, which has helped.

Helped, yeah. So anyway, maybe, we were talking earlier and you said that there's quite a few people from Satellite that ended up in various aspects of IT.

[Uncle Marv]
So yeah, I did not bring the list of names with me, or I should have. But yeah, I hear from time to time, I'm looking up Facebook and I'm seeing people and they're doing tech. I mean, Billy Mercado.

[William Hibbard]
You had Nino Frederico on one night. I saw that one. He's doing something.

And then Dave Hoban, and I've talked to him a couple of times at one of the restaurants and stuff. I don't think he's working for Harris, but he does like mainframe kind of stuff.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, but he does some big stuff there. I've actually tried to reach out to some of these guys, but they're like, oh, I don't want to be on a podcast.

[William Hibbard]
Yeah, well, that was my first impression too. But yeah, there's quite a few. I think there's quite a bit from Satellite that ended up in Cary, North Carolina.

And I don't know what the, if that's turned into a big IT center or something. But I think there's some Satellite folks that ended up there. They don't have names right now.

[Uncle Marv]
We'll have to do some research and go back. I was off the grid for a long time and didn't show back up on the grid until I got on the Facebook in 2013 for one of the reunions. So people kind of popped up then.

So we'll have to do some research. And I'm actually going to post this also on the Satellite feed so that some of our beach buddies can see that I've interviewed you on the show. So I don't know if you got a shout out to anybody you want to give out to the beach but feel free.

[William Hibbard]
Nah, I think those people that want to get ahold of me know how to get ahold of me.

[Uncle Marv]
Ah, so speaking of the beach, let's go back. You had made a comment about us running together.

[William Hibbard]
And most people- We also worked at McDonald's together, if you remember. For the three months that I worked there.

[Uncle Marv]
I was there for two years. Can you believe that?

[William Hibbard]
I already worked there for three months.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, I normally don't get personal on this podcast. So this is one of those episodes where people are going to hear stuff and be like, wow, you did that? So yeah, I did.

I ran track.

[William Hibbard]
Oh, we'll leave the bad stuff out.

[Uncle Marv]
So we did run track. The group was the Patrick Flyers you mentioned. And that was the summer version of track.

So I did run track during the school year. I ran sprints. But in the summer, it was the AAU version.

And I really wasn't fast enough to compete in AAU. So they kept moving me out until I could find an event that I was fast enough. And it was the 880 and the mile were the two that I won.

And now, here's my question. I don't remember, were you there before I won state or after I won state?

[William Hibbard]
In AAU?

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. I don't- I think it was after.

[William Hibbard]
I don't remember. I mean, I know once I started, I was there, gosh, right until like the summer before my senior high school. Yeah, and I- I ran almost every summer.

But I don't remember what you did as far as state and whatnot. Because we had the Sunshine State Games.

[Uncle Marv]
Yep, that was- The AAU.

[William Hibbard]
Funnel up the nationals. So there was a state level that fed in the nationals.

[Uncle Marv]
Yep. I seem to think that I won state. Then you showed up.

And I think something happened where I didn't compete. You won state and you went to nationals. Does that sound about right?

[William Hibbard]
Yeah, I know I went once with Darren Dawson. Darren Dawson did high jump.

[Uncle Marv]
Darren Dawson.

[William Hibbard]
Yeah, and I went for distance. Darren medaled, I didn't. And Shirley Mathis gave up her time and drove us to this nationals.

So shout out to Shirley Mathis if she's still around. Or Jimmy Mathis, if you're listening. Her son that ran with us.

Yeah, I don't- That's probably about right. You probably did that before I got there. I remember chasing you for like a year or two.

While you were still doing distance. And I could never- While you were still doing the mile, I could never beat you. It takes a couple of years for distance to set in.

You're not good at it the first- For anybody else who's starting running, you're not good at it the first year. You just got to keep going.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. So, yep. So that's how I spent my summers, folks.

Working at McDonald's, running track. I did other stuff. I think what happened, I had a conflict.

I think I had just started some student government stuff. And I may have gone up to- I think there was a Bill Nelson program that I did one summer. So that may have interfered.

Because I thought I would go into politics. I thought that would be much better than running track.

[William Hibbard]
I got the camera off. If people could see us now, they'd know we're not distance runners.

[Uncle Marv]
No, we are not. All right. So, Bill, we'll have to catch up some more.

And we'll have to- We've got a reunion coming up.

[William Hibbard]
Yeah, they're doing what? A four or five year together? So- 83, 87, maybe?

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. So they're- And they're doing it twice. So this year, they're doing the 83 to 87.

But it's the class of 84. In October. And then next year, they're doing the class of 85.

But it's years 83 to 87. So it's a little confusing.

[William Hibbard]
Yes. Yes, it is.

[Uncle Marv]
So if you are listening from the beach, you've got two times that we can hang out for the reunion. October 2024 and June 2025. And I will be- I don't know if I'm going to start up my old podcast and do some shows to help out with the reunion.

But we'll figure something out. But we'll see how it goes. But Bill, thank you for hanging out.

And I mean, we obviously could have gone a lot more because a ton of stuff happening in tech. But I want to get you on and have another perspective in our industry that people have not heard. I'd love to get some new IT business owners in the show.

And I'd like to get new MSP perspectives. So it took me a little while. But thanks for giving in and coming on the show.

[William Hibbard]
Thanks for having me, Marv.

[Uncle Marv]
So we will see you soon. And that's going to do it, ladies and gentlemen, for this episode. Thank you for hanging out.

And be sure to check out all of the other shows we have at theitbusinesspodcast.com. We'll see you soon. And until next time, holla!