685 Boost MSP Efficiency with Strategy Overview

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast powered by NetAlly, the show for managed service providers and IT professionals where we help you learn to run your business and grow your business better, smarter, and faster. We are here once again with a vendor spotlight for the IT Nation Pitch It Contest and today I'm going to be looking at Strategy Overview, a comprehensive software platform designed primarily for MSPs to streamline their strategic planning and improve their VCIO and QBR processes. And to help me do that, we are joined by Alex Markov, co-founder and CEO.

So Alex, how are you?

[Alex Markov]
Hey, Marv. Nice to meet you. Nice to talk to you.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So did I explain it properly?

[Alex Markov]
Yes, perfect.

[Uncle Marv]
Now I understand, let me get this out of the way first, I understand that the platform has been described as beautiful by some people.

[Alex Markov]
Yes, absolutely. I mean, we built it for ourselves originally and I have a real high tolerance for kind of clean design. So it's a huge element that we're always pushing with every release.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. Now, from the practical standpoint, this is something to help us with our VCIO and QBR strategies. I guess the first question is, we know that there are a lot of platforms out there that are saying they do that.

So what makes Strategy Overview unique?

[Alex Markov]
What makes us unique is we built a really powerful, flexible template engine. So really any MSP can take their existing process and put it into Strategy Overview and do it in a fraction of the time that they can do in any other platform or manually. And so the template allows you to build any type of report.

And then even the assessment component allows you to standardize your stack in the quickest way that I've seen in the MSP world. So that's, I think, the biggest draw. And then just the UI and the ease of use, I think, is our second thing that sets us apart.

It's very agile. It's the most agile platform out there that I've seen.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So it has all the components that we can think of. You can set up the QBRs, asset management.

[Alex Markov]
Correct. With warranty updating included for HP, HPE, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, and Asus. Office 365 licensing.

Nice. And full road mapping and budget management.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. And I understand you guys have a client portal. And what can the client see, or can we designate or make granular what they can and cannot see?

[Alex Markov]
Yeah, you can. So we built the client portal because we couldn't find any other client portal that was clean to what we wanted. So we had clients that were asking access to it to see the reports live instead of getting them quarterly.

Right. So we basically created an ability to create a fully white-labeled experience where you can change the domain. So it will be app.yourmsp.com.

So it becomes your MSP's app. And the logos change, the wallpapers change, the domain, the clients log in with Office 365 and Google, and then they can see their strategy, their health score, their upcoming plan. They can see their full budget, full roadmap.

If you want to show them, right? If you don't want to show them specific parts, you don't show them. And then they can see all their asset lists live, their user lists live, their Office 365 licenses with MFA status live.

And they can see all their tickets. Tickets are only out for ConnectWise right now because RMSP, when we started this in RMSP, has been a ConnectWise partner for about 15 years, something like that. So features are coming out for ConnectWise first right now.

But you can see tickets as well and reply right in there as well, right into the tickets. And then before IT Nation, we have projects, opportunities, and agreements coming for ConnectWise as well.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. That sounds pretty extensive, especially the ticket portion. What drove you guys to add ticketing into this portal?

[Alex Markov]
So when a VCIO is preparing for a QBR, a lot of times they want to see what open tickets the client has to get a concept of what things are going on. So they would open up ConnectWise separately. We tried other client portals, but nothing didn't display the tickets the right way based on what I would think is the right way because I've been a VCIO in RMSP for 10 years.

A lot of the client portals display it not from what a VCIO would like to see it like. So our tickets are displayed by service board and you can control all the columns and you open it up in a really minimized, streamlined view. So it's very nice for the client to see, very nice for the VCIO to see.

And then also we were using the ConnectWise portal for many years and they don't separate tickets by service board. So if it's a co-managed or really sophisticated client and they have lots of tickets going on, it's hard for them to sort everything and look through everything. So having our ability to control what the client sees and kind of a curated process, that is, I think, another big power of the client portal.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Now, you mentioned this derived out of your MSP, building a tool for you guys. How long before you made this available to others did you guys actually start building the tool?

I mean, was this something you've looked at everybody else and said, that other stuff isn't working and you did your own and then opened up? I mean, what's the timeline there?

[Alex Markov]
Yeah. So we started MSP in 2002 and then we started on ConnectWise probably 2008 or something like that. 2008, 2009, something in that range.

And then we started going to IT Nations and made a commitment to go full managed in 2009. When we went to full managed in 2009, we started consuming content from like Paul Dippel and started going through. We eventually joined HTG.

So we were really trying to become a world class MSP. And we started standardizing our stack on a spreadsheet where it was almost like a checklist. Like you're buying a home, you go to Home Inspector and you get a report of what you're buying.

Right. So when you're acquiring a client, you kind of should be doing the same thing post onboarding. Right.

You put everything into IT Glue or Hoodoo and whatever documentation platform you're using. And then you have a checklist of things that you want to make sure they're in the right spot. Because if you're taking on a client on unlimited support and you're not standardizing or even assessing the risk of their servers, their backups, their firewalls, and the list keeps grew over time.

So it became a spreadsheet that we used to run on clients. We always looked for other apps, but nothing really was as easy to use our spreadsheet. And another big element was our MSP got really big into health care and compliance services.

And our MSP is based in New York City. So we did a lot with health care and HIPAA was coming up the ranks. It was a big point of topic.

So our spreadsheet had a whole health care section, which allowed us to do HIPAA compliance management. So we couldn't find anything that did it. So in 2016, the spreadsheet became really a wild success.

We had like 80 different versions across lots of clients. And each spreadsheet kind of looked a little bit different. No matter how much we tried to standardize it, it became tough.

So we tried using smart sheets to do this. We tried doing Excel macros. We couldn't figure it out.

And so we built a first version. My brother, who comes from big like Fortune 500 software development, big financial services like platforms. And he showed him our spreadsheet.

He said, yeah, we can build this into an app. So we built it for our MSP and it instantly saved us. It standardized all of our QBRs and it saved our it saved me because at that point I was doing a lot of other sales, but I was like the leader of that process and it saved me hours to prepare for clients.

Right. And then we showed it to our ACG group and a bunch of members adopted it. And then we just had a lot of friends in the MSP community.

So we showed them a bunch of them adopted it too. But it wasn't multi-tenant. It wasn't like it was still our beta version.

So then I was selected as a speaker on BCIO and QBRs from our MSP in IT Nation 2017. So we said, you know, let's bring this to as a standalone product. We spun up a separate company, separate team and started building.

So now that's been, what was that? Seven years now.

[Uncle Marv]
Nice.

[Alex Markov]
We've come a long way since then.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, you did a good job there because he answered a few of my questions that I had lined up and ready to go. But we'll keep on.

But, you know, of course, people, the link will be in the show notes, strategyoverview.com. And they've got it nicely laid out in terms of features, integrations. And you guys even show some pricing on there, which looks pretty nice in terms of the tiers and stuff that you can get.

[Alex Markov]
And it's month-to-month. We're very, like, MSP-friendly pricing, very reasonable. We're trying to make it that it's, like, a no-brainer value, just the time that it saves to do this in our app pays for itself.

But it generates a lot of revenue through projects that are necessary for clients. It's not a sales tool. It's, like, just a mutual digital transformation, mutual success tool for an MSP and their clients.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So in the last seven years or so, from the time that you launched it till now, what has been the greatest surprise and the greatest challenge in rolling this out?

[Alex Markov]
Well, so if anyone has been in the MSP world for many years, you realize that there's levels to the game, right? So as you get into the MSP world, you get your PSA and your RMM, and then you think you're an MSP, but then you realize there's peer groups and cybersecurity and compliance and automation, and the list just goes on and on and on, right? So when you get into software, a lot of people will not glamorize software, but they'll say that software is, you can spread fast and build, but you don't realize the nuances that really go into building software.

So it gave me a much better appreciation at the hurdles that ConnectWise has gone through in any of these larger platforms, because evolving a software, like, we now have, I think, nine versions of strategy overview running between, like, three alphas, three betas, staging, you know, like, there's all types of, like, parallel versions, parallel developments, so that the way that the food is made is just as complicated as MSPs, if not more, in the background, right?

So people see this product that just is live every day, and they just go into it, and we have just a lot of people just working strategy overview all day long. It's pretty amazing, actually. But, you know, I don't say they take for granted.

They don't think about all the stuff that goes on in the background to make that live every single day. And same thing goes for any of these larger companies like ConnectWise. It's like an orchestration act of epic proportion.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. So let me ask this. Whether it's in your own MSP or responses that you've gotten back from other MSPs, has anybody ever talked about the fact that when you call to set up a meeting, whether it's a QBR, TBR, whatever the schedule is, do any clients say, why do we need that?

I can go in the portal and see it myself.

[Alex Markov]
No, because you still want that interaction of just touching base, right? And now there are definitely some clients that are so have gone in this process. Like, we've been running this spreadsheet in our MSP on some clients for over 10 years, and they're used to it and they're so mature and they're just in like a just a refresh cycle.

So they'll meet once a year. So our MSP, they send an invitation quarterly to every client just to give them the opportunity to meet and have a strategy conversation. And then at least once a year, they send a PDF with a quick email recap.

And some clients don't want to meet and they're, you know, they're busy running their business. And it also depends on how, what the perspective of each client is. Each client's a little bit different.

Some clients want to be strategic and grow and add and what's next and what's next. And some clients are really just focused on running their business. They don't want infinite scale.

They just want to, they want stability. So strategy overview gives them the ability to see and project what things are coming up. So they're a little bit on the same page.

And then sometimes it's a formal QBR and sometimes it's just the VCIO having a conversation with the client. And we joke now that in our MSP, a lot of times, like we don't even, sometimes we may not generate a QBR, a strategy overview report, but the entire mind frame of how we standardize clients is now in that same kind of format. So it's almost like intuitive at this point.

It's a guider of all stack standardization across the MSP. And I heard that from other MSPs too.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, great. So sounds like a great product. I'm going to ask this question that I don't know if you have an answer for, but what changes if you guys win PitchIT?

[Alex Markov]
What changes if we win PitchIT is we are going to get more capital for our AI initiatives. So we have a lot of AI initiatives internally about, I believe that we can systemize and cut VCIO and QBR prep time by like 80, 90% with AI. By adding AI.

[Uncle Marv]
So you're not using AI at this time inside the product?

[Alex Markov]
There is some elements, but there's not like an AI automation built in. We just launched IT Glue today. So we have an IT Glue integration.

So documentation for an IT Glue will flow into strategy overview. And then the next step to that is to provide auto grading and auto ranking for that with our AI bot. So we have a proof of concept running.

It's not live. So our ability to push out AI. But I was an engineer my whole life, but I was an engineer.

I did tickets. I did projects. I was a VCIO.

So I know a lot of these like hands-on gaps that MSPs are missing. So we have a lot of AI ideas that we're going to pull in that's going to just save people. Not like MSP owners.

I mean, MSP owners are going to save a lot of time. But the engineers and the people in the field that are doing the work, it's going to save them a ton of time.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, glad you said the IT Glue was live because I did look on your integrations page and it still says coming today. So I was looking at that and who do, but I see the ones that are live.

And it looks like you guys have a lot on the plate there for integrations.

[Alex Markov]
Yeah, yeah. We have a lot more coming. And, yeah, so we're building it.

We're doing like a release a month right now. Sometimes it's just a small release that we don't announce, but we're going to announce this one later in the week.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Put me on that press release list and I'll announce that as well. And let's see what else is on here.

Domotz is coming. I'm liking that. Halo is live.

OK.

[Alex Markov]
Yeah, the big PSAs. And, yeah, we're going to be able to aggregate the data from lots of different places and give it to you in a curated, clean, beautiful platform. All right.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, Alex, thank you very much for taking this time and going over strategy overview. I'm sorry.

I had a thing about strategic yesterday, so that still stuck in my mind. But strategy overview, your product, and look forward to seeing you at IT Nation in Orlando this November. And maybe we can chat some more.

I'd like to ask some questions about that MSP you've been building.

[Alex Markov]
Yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
Thanks, Mark. I appreciate the time. You're the man.

Appreciate it. All right. Thank you, sir.

That's it, folks. Thank you very much for downloading and subscribing, listening to this Pitch It vendor profile. Check out more at the ITBusinessPodcast.com website. And that's going to do it. See you next time. Holla!