693 Owning a Data Center Transformed This MSP Business

[Uncle Marv]
Hello, friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast coming at you live from Boston, Massachusetts. And we are here at ASCII Live, actually it's ASCII Edge Live, but I like to say ASCII Live, it sounds better. But I am joined by a first timer to the podcast, a new ASCII member, but somebody who has known ASCII and been in the industry for a while, Corey Tapper with Tech Evolution.

Corey, how are you?

[Corey Tapper]
I'm doing well. Thank you for having me.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, thank you for stopping by. And I know we're not supposed to say that somebody wrangled you over here, but...

[Corey Tapper]
I wouldn't say wrangled, but a close friend of mine, Josh Lieberman, we've talked about ASCII for a long time, and I've attended other ASCII events in the past, and he would always tell me the benefits of ASCII and what it would do for my business, and after really kind of diving in, it's just kind of a no-brainer.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So how long have you been attending the events?

[Corey Tapper]
I think I attended my first event maybe seven or eight years ago in Danvers, Mass., and then I did an event here in Newton, Mass., maybe five or six years ago, and then when I got the invitation, I'm like, you know, I really want to go and find out more about what this could do for my business, the networking aspect, the peer groups, the vendor relationships, things like that.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, the fact that you came back many times before actually becoming a member meant that you got something out of it, so can you, you know, kind of point to anything that you got early on?

[Corey Tapper]
Yeah, I think one of the most memorable events that I've ever been to was my first ASCII event. From any events that I've gone to with different organizations, seeing Frank Abagnale there from Catch Me If You Can, and it was a very emotional kind of event, so yeah, it's something I remembered, and just kind of seeing how the other members reacted during that was emotional, seeing a room of men cry, which was pretty cool. But you know, I did get a lot out of it, and I wish I'd joined sooner, but you know, life gets in front of you, and sometimes you don't really see the forest from the trees, and coming to this event, this time I was able to really get a grasp, you know, have clarity of what it could do for my business.

You know, just seeing all the different peer groups, seeing how people have become successful, the many little breakup meetings during the event with peers and stuff like that, which is very powerful. All right.

[Uncle Marv]
So let's go ahead and talk about your business. So Tech Evolution, when did you start, and what do you do?

[Corey Tapper]
Sure. We've been in business for 25 years, started out as a break-fix company, which I think most people did, transitioned maybe about eight or ten years ago into the MSP business. We also own a data center, so it's kind of like a Rackspace, go down in Azure, meet the MSP world.

So we really are a full-service solution provider for technology for our customers.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So let's dive into that, because the first question is going to be, what was it that inspired you to actually buy or own a data center?

[Corey Tapper]
It's funny, it started as a bet by a friend of mine who said that I couldn't host email and websites on a dial-up connection. I hate losing bets. So I did that, and I thought it was super cool.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay, that had to be a long time ago.

[Corey Tapper]
It was a long time ago. We're talking, you know, like around 2001-ish. But what I did notice, there was no recurring revenue model in the IT world.

Your computer's broken, come fix it. But you may not get a call from this customer for months, and there's no way to create a budget for salaries and marketing and growth of a business. And I noticed in the hosting arena, where you had recurring revenue every month, that could help augment and grow my business.

So I started building out the server room, augmenting it into the IT company, started buying hosting businesses and growing that into the business. And then slowly built out a full-fledged data center, and then went from break-fix to managed services. And then during that time, I was able to upsell my hosting customers into managed services, managed cloud services, managed servers, and so forth.

So it was kind of a natural progression for us. I know a lot of MSP will just kind of concentrate on their customers doing MSP stuff, utilizing Azure, AWS, people like that. I wanted to have a different play on it, be able to have a little more control and have a better service offering for our customers.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, I mean, from the marketing perspective, from the stickiness of the customer perspective, that was obviously some really good foresight on your part. Now, granted, you did it on a bet, but seeing those opportunities, was it easy once you had them tied to things like the email and stuff to kind of at least introduce them to the other aspects of your business?

[Corey Tapper]
You know, it was one of the plays. So when I first started out doing the IT gig, I was working for Microsoft, and one of my job roles was on the Microsoft mail team before Exchange came out. So I was very familiar with how mail worked with Microsoft.

And I wanted to offer something different. So we offered shared Exchange hosting before Microsoft offered shared Exchange hosting, and before Rackspace and all those guys did it. So we had a very unique product offering back in the day.

Obviously, 365 took away from that, but for many, many years, our MSP customers would be able to have shared Exchange hosting, and they really enjoyed that. So it was a really big upsell for our customers.

[Uncle Marv]
Very nice.

[Corey Tapper]
Very nice.

[Uncle Marv]
Now, let me just ask, demographically, the size of your business and the areas that you cover? Because I have to imagine you get customers from all over the country, right?

[Corey Tapper]
The MSP, most of our clientele is in the New England area, the Boston area. We do have customers speckled throughout the country who have remote offices. On the hosting side, we have customers all over the world.

Sometimes we have customers that open support tickets that are in languages we need to use some kind of Google Translate to help them. So it's really, really cool when you get a call from somebody in a different part of the world looking for help. We do have MSP space up in Canada as well.

So it's pretty broad.

[Uncle Marv]
Very nice. Very nice. Now, I guess, logistically, owning a data center, now, for some, I know in Florida we have similar situations where customers will own a data center, but it's basically part of a room on a floor in a bigger data center.

So are you kind of in that situation, or do you have your own building?

[Corey Tapper]
So I don't own the building. I rent space in the building. I worked with the landlord.

He didn't know what he was getting himself into. We built out about a $3 million space for the data center. So I own all the equipment, the generators, battery backup systems.

Everything there, we own.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay.

[Corey Tapper]
A fire suppression system. So we don't rent space from anybody. In fact, we do a lot of co-locations.

We have a lot of other companies, including MSPs, will rent space from us.

[Uncle Marv]
I was going to ask.

[Corey Tapper]
So we actually work with our competition, but the way it's set up is we can't see anybody's data. So it works really, really well. So we're able to offer, whether it's virtual machines or co-location space to other MSPs as well.

[Uncle Marv]
I was going to ask about the MSPs, because it seems like a natural thing that you could show up at an event like this and be talking to people and be like, yeah, we could host your stuff if you want.

[Corey Tapper]
Yeah. We do quite a bit, and it's cool because we've made a lot of friends doing that over the years. And what a lot of people like is our building is unique.

It's an old hotel, but it was one of the first two fireproof buildings in the country. And so we're prone not to deal with really much for natural disasters. Like in Florida, we had a lot of people from Florida co-locating with us because of hurricanes and so forth and people in Texas and things like that.

So we're kind of really centrally located. We don't really get much for hurricanes, we don't get any floods. So it's really kind of a cool, unique spot.

Nice. Nice.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So let me ask you, now going back to ASCII, you've been showing up for a while. What was it?

And I'm not going to say that Josh should get any credit at all, but what was it that finally made you to take the plunge and become a member?

[Corey Tapper]
You know, going to one of the peer groups yesterday and seeing the level of communication of what people were looking at, how everybody was willing to help each other out like that. I want to be part of something like that. I want to be part of something that when I have a question and I don't know who to talk to, and sometimes it's an MSP or anything, you can be an automotive mechanic.

When you own a business, the world is kind of coming at you and you don't know how to fix something. You don't know who to turn to ask advice. And being able to have a group like that to be able to turn to ask advice was huge for me.

That was a really, it was a big turning point in my decision to join ASCII, was being able to have that support behind you. And I know that there are many peer groups out there. There are many different things and I've been to a ton of them, but the level of like, you're my brother, I don't care that we're in competition, I'm going to help you, was so prevalent in the meeting and I wanted to be part of it.

[Uncle Marv]
Nice. Nice. Well, Corey, it was nice to meet you.

This is my first trip to the Boston area. My wife is actually jealous because she has a lot of friends here. But yeah, it's one of these things where being a part of ASCII, I've been in it now eight years, eight, maybe 10, I don't have to go back and look.

But yeah, the community aspect here is fantastic. Of course, the programs that you can be a part of, some discounts and insurance and stuff like that, grateful. But glad that I was able to come up here and meet you and find another voice in the community.

[Corey Tapper]
Yeah, same here. Thank you for letting me be a part of your podcast. This is really cool.

And thank you for the time as well.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, Corey, thank you much. And that's going to do it, folks. Wrapping up another interview here from Boston at the ASCII EDGE event.

I'll be back with more. We'll see you then. Holla!