760 Revolutionizing MSP Communications with bvoip

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals and managed service providers, where we talk about all the things we can, product stories and tips, in an effort to help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. And today I have what should be a very interesting and enlightening show. My guest today, George Bardissi from Bvoip.

George, how are you?

[George Bardissi]
Doing great, Marv. Trying to stay warm like the rest of America, but the year has started pretty fast. I know we're just getting here into the end of January, but I feel like there wasn't a drop-off for me in between, you know, the holidays in December going into Jan.

It's just been one contiguous block of flights and car trips and it just hasn't stopped and keep rolling.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, let's start there since you mentioned that, because you, my friend, always seem to be on the go between the conferences, the MSP initiative, and of course, you're following your freaking eagles in the playoffs and stuff. How is it being on the road so much?

[George Bardissi]
Well, Marv, I'll be honest, you know, I've been doing this for a long time. I started my IT company back in 2000 and 2001, Bvoip back in 2014, MSP initiative in 2020. You know, it's like 25 years when you stack all that together, but I have two very young children, three and five, and the other part of that equation is probably not the happiest wife who sees me on the road as often as I am, so I have to balance that conversation, although it's probably imbalanced no matter how I try and do that from her side, but it is definitely exhausting.

Traveling looks good on Instagram and Facebook, but it is tough being on the move all the time and it is not for the faint of heart. I know that cliche is out there, but it is part of this business, this sandbox, this industry, and as much as I love the virtual stuff, nothing replaces the in-person time.

[Uncle Marv]
Absolutely, and I had a conversation with my wife just the other day as we were talking about it because my travel plans in February are going to be a lot, probably double any month that I've had in the past, and we talked about that very thing. In order to do this business, the things that we want to do, not just as an MSP, but you know, you've got additional things on top of your plate. I have the podcast on top of mine that requires me to be out and about, and she understands for the most part.

[George Bardissi]
As all things, there is a limit. It's somewhere.

[Uncle Marv]
Yes.

[George Bardissi]
Just don't find it when it's too late.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, so let me ask you this question. I was going to save it for later, but because we're talking about this whole balance thing, you still actively run your MSP, right?

[George Bardissi]
Actually, Marv, we're getting towards the tail end of that.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay.

[George Bardissi]
I started my MSP in 2000-2001. I was still in school at the time, you know, right circumstances and a little bit of entrepreneurialism got me started. I've told this story a few times, but I rolled into my high school in suburban Philadelphia here on a weekend when it was open.

I ran an access point into the high school cafeteria at a time when they didn't feel wireless was needed to get onto my own personal laptop, and I went to Catholic school, and I should have had a really good handwriting, but I didn't, so I got myself a pretty cheap laptop to take notes, and I just thought, hey, I should be able to get on the internet during lunchtime, and so I ran this. I guess a janitor caught me rolling out of the place to the ladder and came into school the next day, and the principal at the time said, well, you have two options. You can either put wireless for the rest of the school in, or we can expel you.

Which one would you like? I took the door that allowed me to stay in school and run some access points, and later on that year was how I started my IT company. I mean, it literally was a one, two, three.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, that was a great story, and people have heard that before. What I was going to ask you was this. You were for a long time balancing the MSP and being on the dark side, so I was going to ask you, how do you manage that?

Because for the last at least year or two, we have had these rumblings of MSP vendor relations, and I know I'll be talking to some people later this year about that, but it's a weird dynamic, so I wanted to ask you, how are you balancing being an MSP and being a vendor?

[George Bardissi]
So number one, it sucks. It's not easy because, and I've heard you talk, Marv, several times about the day in the life of a boutique MSP. I went from sole man to large team back to small team back to sole man through the journey of my MSP, and the challenges definitely don't get easier.

They just compound themselves with more people in the mix. It was not easy, Marv, and quite frankly, I had to rely on people, and it wasn't always the right person in the right chair. That took a long time to figure out as the people game is not one that just automatically works all of the time.

I argue it doesn't work more than it works, so trying to find the right people to rely on as we were running an MSP, growing an MSP, starting a vendor company for an MSP was not a straight line. It was very roller coaster-ish, and by the way, your cell phone still rings as much as you tell your customers never to call it. Yeah, Marv, I went underneath the desks, and I still do.

I'm finally winding down my MSP now 25 years in, and I'm down to my last handful of customers who I've told, hey, later on this year, we'll finally be shutting down this IT services practice. I'll probably do some consulting still for people that need some advice here or there, but generally speaking, I'm finally, after all this time, shutting down my IT practice. It's bittersweet.

I'll tell you that through the whole thing. One of the things that I struggle with, Marv, and I tell people, and I'm very transparent. I'll be very honest.

A lot of the time while running and building that MSP IT services business, it was not very profitable, and frustratingly so because you want to bend over backwards, deliver great service or even good service to your customers. I feel like for as many home runs as I hit, any time you got into the one day where it wasn't great, that day overshadowed all the good stuff you did, and that bothered me because I took the calls at night. I took the calls at 2 o'clock in the morning, on the weekends, on the holidays.

All the stuff we've heard through the years about burnout and this is what leads to it, I did it all. Not a very heavy load of appreciation in this business, Marv. I still think that's the case to this day.

Had I understood that, now that I'm in a reflective mode, to be honest, but had I understood that part of it earlier in the game, I would have charged a hell of a lot more, Marv. I really would have. I would have said, hey, listen, you want VIP service, then that costs a VIP price.

You can't continue asking me to bend over backwards for you and then I can't even pay for McDonald's. There's a problem here.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, I've had that conversation over the years with a couple of clients. When they get to the point where they're saying, how can we pay you less? It's a problem of, do you let your employees come to you and ask that?

Or should I say, do you say that to your employees? But in a sense, they do that because they are asking their employees to do more without pay increases, to do a second job. If somebody leaves, hey, can you take over these duties?

And the employee's like, can I get a pay raise? Nah, no. It's a weird time.

[George Bardissi]
Yeah. And listen, in my mind, the word fair, I've always tried to be fair. If any relationship's totally imbalanced, it always fails, Marv.

I don't care what it is. So from my aspect, I always wanted to meet everybody somewhere in the middle and then that way everybody's getting something out of it. I think I took the bad end of the rope more than my fair share in an effort to try and make people happy.

I hope they were happy in the end in those situations. I know when I reflect on it, I definitely wasn't as happy as I should have been bending over backwards for people. And so if anybody takes anything away from this session, take this.

Understand your time has a cost. I know you've heard this before. There's the value of your time.

I don't care if you're Elon Musk or the janitor down the street, nobody can buy more time. So understand that and value accordingly.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. I remember one conversation in particular with, at the time, my largest client where I had undercharged them for a couple of years and it was time to right the ship. And I came in with my letter and it was in written form that I could hand to him and say, this is what's happening for this year.

And it wasn't an ask. It wasn't a, hey, we need to charge you more. Are you okay with that?

It was that whole mentality of other companies just tell us they're raising our prices. That's what I did to them. And I remember him looking at the letter, looking up at me and go, Bobby, I got to eat.

And I looked back at him and said, so do I.

[George Bardissi]
Yeah, a hundred percent. That's a great, I mean, and which is funny because Verizon just announced the price increase like next month, like they gave no, they gave like 30 days’ notice. They're adding like another three to $6 per line for most plans.

And, you know, just like our industry, there are the forums and the Reddit’s and the discords and the Facebooks and all these whatever’s. And so I just poked in, I was just wondering what people are saying about this. Of course, they weren't happy.

And I'm just like, so what are you going to do? You're going to pay that or are you going to leave? Right.

It's usually how it works. Of course. Then they complained about, well, I want to leave, but I'm in a contract and I'm like, I understand.

I get it. I understand how that game works. But at the end of the day, like if the first chance, yeah, if you want to leave the first chance you get, you're going to leave.

And like, that's just how the cookie crumbles. Microsoft does it to us with NCE, right? Jacking up the price 20%.

And guess what? We're all still paying it.

[Uncle Marv]
Yep. Because where are you going to go? Now, speaking of the MSP vendor relationships, one of the things that you have done at Bvoip was to, at least as far as I know, try to stay completely channel focused and work with MSPs first, I assume only.

Is that the case?

[George Bardissi]
Yeah, Marv. When we started this company in 2014, which is a little over 10 years ago, we said we wanted to be channel only. We only wanted to work with IT and managed services providers.

We do not have doctors and lawyers and plumbers and municipalities and all the end customers of an MSP would only be able to do anything that we offer through an MSP partner. So we are channel only. There is no direct end customer Bvoip relationship.

I know that that's odd from the category of vendor that we are, with the Teams phones, Zoom phones, Ring Central, 8x8, et cetera, et cetera. Everybody has a direct sales force and a bolt-on channel program on the side that gives everybody mailbox money if they choose to go down that road. We didn't want to do that.

We wanted to do this, the early data blueprint, if you would, where it's like, hey, we're going to make this so good that the MSP is going to want to do this. That was what we drew on the back of the napkin and that's what we're still doing today.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So of course, the question is going to be, somebody comes along, opens up that checkbook and says, write a number down. Is there a chance that'll happen?

[George Bardissi]
Marv, I get emails and phone calls, but it's not just me. Other executives and owners of software companies in the sandbox, I call MSP land the sandbox, get these calls. Probably even more now, right?

Because the market's starting to go back the other way. So I get it all the time. Thank God I spent a lot of time counting pennies in my MSP and we borrowed money from the MSP to start Bvoip.

No outside investors, no bank debt, no money man behind the scenes. And it feels well, I'll tell you what, for a long time, it felt not great because I saw a lot of people go really fast with somebody else's money. So we said, hey, this is going to take us longer and it's going to be harder, but we're okay with that.

I was mentally prepared for that. Today, Marv, feels good that I don't have to answer anyone else other than my partners, my customers, my employees, vendor partners, whatever you want to call it. But yeah, does the day come where we accomplish the goal and decide to do something different?

Maybe, but today's not that day. And I feel good kind of being in this very small club, it feels like almost of bootstrapped, 100% controlled vendor companies in the box.

[Uncle Marv]
Sorry about that. So not, I mean, it's a small group, I think it's a shrinking because even the ones that are coming into the space, they are coming in with that mentality of one day I'm going to sell. And that's where we are.

And that's the reality.

[George Bardissi]
So no, I listen, I'm not a financial guru by any means. I've heard a lot of them talk at the conferences and then the workshops over the years. I mean, a lot of people don't realize the value of their work until they do sell their company.

I get it. I watch Shark Tank like everybody else. You want to call it old school, Marv?

That's cool. I'll take that label. I always was wired, hey, work hard, build something, create something that grows, right?

And I don't know why, I know why it was so easy to get the money that everybody took it, but that money always came with strings, Marv. And I've seen more than I can count on my two hands, companies in the MSP sandbox who took money or started with money, but they were instantly on the clock. Second somebody invests money into you, they want a return on that investment.

And it's not a 10 year, 15 year, 20 year realization time. It's a three year, four year, five year realization time, right? Usually.

And I saw decisions being made that made no sense to somebody who would granularly grow their business like most MSPs do, in my opinion. And I've seen owners and founders and CEOs get displaced from the companies that they started because the money man pulled on a thread in the agreement that said, hey, if you don't hit this metric, you're out. And that's a hard pill to swallow.

I know you read that when you signed the contract, but you just never thought that was going to happen. Oh no, no, it happens. It happens more often than you probably want to think about, actually.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, it does. So the first thing I want to say before we move on, George, is that I don't think I'm going to allow you to use the term old school with me because I'm older than you. So.

It's just a number, Marv. It is a number, but numbers mean stuff. Okay, fair enough.

We should probably do this. We should probably explain who BVOIP is. And I want to ask you a couple of other questions around that.

But in the simplest terms, you're a voice over IP provider. You're sliding into the category now of unified communications. So I want to ask you if you want to enhance that definition a little bit more and tell us what was it that prompted you to start BVOIP for MSPs while being an MSP?

[George Bardissi]
Awesome. Back pre-2014, before we launched BVOIP, and it was not even Jan 1, I think we started the company June 1 and didn't really show up at an industry event until October, but I digress. We set out to solve, I can count them now, these things when we kind of back of the napkin BVOIP.

One, why is it that this sandbox of solutions of technology for the IT services provider built all of these tools that were supposed to interconnect and forgot about the communications part of it? So when we went out and said, hey, I've now made this investment in a PSA, an RMM, a documentation tool, my Microsoft investment, and it just grew and grew and grew. And these are all supposed to be like Legos that all interconnected with each other until it came to the category of communications.

And there was absolutely nothing, zero. And I'm like, it's almost like they didn't think that it existed yet. We all have one, right?

I don't get it. So we said, I need something specifically designed from the MSP's chair that connects into the MSP's investment in systems. One, two, I need something that's designed from the chair of the MSP rather than the chair of the end customer.

All of the tools and the technologies that we adopt as an IT services company is supposed to be multi-tenanted and it's supposed to be granular. And the MSP sits in the chair and decides who gets what. Where in this category, all of the bigger companies that play in this space seem to make the end user the driver's seat and the person who works with the end user secondary, right?

Like they forgot about those people or they didn't plan for them for some reason. So we wanted to build it from the point of view of the MSP. We wanted to integrate it from the view of the MSP.

And then if you do resell, which by the way, our platform that Bvoip created over 10 years is called One Stream, which has a lot of integration to it. And we'll talk about that. So One Stream powered by Bvoip is how we present ourselves now.

58% of our partners, Marv, do not resell to their customers. They only adopt BVoip’s platform inside of their IT services business, believe it or not. But for the group that does, we wanted them to be able to resell a solution that one, they drank the Kool-Aid, they liked the Kool-Aid, they resold the Kool-Aid, so they're confident in it.

Two, it would be as easy for them to make changes as going into an Office 365 portal and making a change, right? So I don't want to have you learn an entirely new technology and a language and something that you're not normally doing. No, if you can manage a 365 portal, you should be able to manage this.

And then three, control the relationship, the experience and the price point. One of the big problems when we get to the conversation of resale, which again, secondary conversation for our company, is there's no meat on the bone. So why bother spending time on it if we can't make money doing it?

And so we wanted the MSP to be able to actually look at this and say, no, there is money here. Instead of a 20% kickback, I want to do a two or three X markup. That changes the entire dialogue.

Instead of somebody dictating a price to me and then me having to just take whatever they give me, I'm setting my profit margin. I'm determining what I'm charging my customer. And it just inverts the entire business model that way.

So big picture, you know, integration, MSP platform with a resale option, should you want to go down that road? That from a business standpoint, and this is where I can feel good 10 years later, because we don't have to make it difficult for you, is a low risk model right? Month to month, 30 day opt out, no long term agreements, no minimums.

This is what you wish all your vendors did or still did do. That's how we've been operating the entire time. Whether it's yourself or your customer, it doesn't matter.

[Uncle Marv]
Before we move on, I'm going to ask a question about the 58%. And I know I have my reasons because I did join the VoIP game a little late.

[George Bardissi]
Mm-hmm.

[Uncle Marv]
Do you ever get a reason why those 58% choose not to resell?

[George Bardissi]
Yeah, I mean, let me just go right down the list. One, I'm an IT guy, not a telecommunications guy. Those are different lanes and I don't want to cross over.

Two, there's no money in it. My time's more valuable selling help desk and security and consulting rather than making the phone ring. And it seems to be a commodity thing.

So why am I even bothering with it? Three, if Microsoft goes down, I can put my hands up in the air and say, well, you got to wait like everybody else. But if I sell them phone service and it goes down, all of a sudden I'm Verizon, I'm Comcast, I'm the guy when that's really not what I'm doing.

So then it puts me into an uncomfortable position with the rest of the services I'm selling on one thing that I don't totally control. Although I argue a lot of the services that you resell from other vendors, you don't totally control, but I digress. And then lastly, these are like my top four.

The last fourth one is I don't think it's worth supporting. It seems too complicated. I'm having a hard time managing the 30, 40, 50 other vendor technologies that I already have to deal with.

I just don't know if the juice is worth the squeeze in order to actually field help desk tickets on it. I can give you the countering points to all this on that last one is my favorite, by the way. When you punt end customer to a big box provider, let's call it RingCentral, Zoom, Teams Phone, Nextiva, whatever.

And you tell them to call the 800 number for that company for support. And it doesn't go well. 50-50 chance that it goes okay, 50-50 chance it doesn't.

Don't think that they're not contacting you because they will. And you're not charging for vendor management and your time has a cost. Remember we said that earlier?

[Uncle Marv]
Oh yeah.

[George Bardissi]
So the second you field that communication and have to deal with it, you're already lost because the mailbox money that you're getting, the 20% or whatever it is that somebody's going to send to you at the end of the month, it didn't even cover that phone call that you got.

[Uncle Marv]
The other downside to that phone call is they may say, oh, it's not our problem. Go talk to your IT guy.

[George Bardissi]
That happens a lot.

[Uncle Marv]
Which is when I got to the point of saying, okay, if you're going to always point it back on me, then I want control. The second part of that is it's on my network. I need to manage it anyway.

And that was around the time that I said, you know what? Anything that touches the network, I want to be involved in. I either want to control it and resell it or have a bigger stake in it.

And that's how I ended up with VoIP because I was in that camp that you said, that's not my lane. I don't want to deal with that. I don't want those phone calls.

But you know what's funny? I hardly ever get those calls from my clients that we are managing on the phone system. I mean, yeah, you got to change an extension when a user leaves or goes, but that's just part of the stack now.

[George Bardissi]
A hundred percent agree, Marvin. Here's the reality. You did what I think most, at some point you get to the realization as somebody in IT services business that if I can do it in a way that prevents the unexpected two o'clock in the morning emergency call, then I'm going to do it in my way rather than having to deal with everybody else's way.

And that's primarily what you end up doing in this business, right? You decide what's working, what you like, what you're confident in, and then you package it and offer it to your end customer, except for this category. Because anytime I've ever seen an industry survey and you look at the pie chart on, hey, what are you using?

In this category, Marv, Zoom, Nextiva, even RingCentral, even Microsoft, whatever, pick your big name provider. Nobody has double digit percentages. It's like a thousand cuts to the pizza.

And it's amazing because again, when I say the word VoIP, you're like, well, there's so many out there. Why are we even talking about this conversation? I'm not going to disagree, other than is the business model set up to fit you properly?

But we didn't set out just to solve that problem. When we started bvoip, we set out to solve the, hey, I want to fix the MSP's internal experience with how they run their business. And if we get to the second part of the conversation, great.

But that's not really where we usually start our conversation.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So beyond the basic VoIP functions that most people know, you know, getting a dial toned, configuring phones and stuff, you mentioned OneStream. Now, when I look back, I got all the information that OneStream was something that was released just this past year, 2024.

Is that the case? Or have you always had OneStream?

[George Bardissi]
We call it OneStream now, right? Just to make it easier to consume from a marketing standpoint. But we've been building this for 10 years, right?

Like this has been a work in progress since day zero. And like we knew from day one, let me give you an example. We've heard the cliche.

I think we can all figure out who said it. Well, if it's not in the system, then it didn't happen. Okay.

There's some truth to that, right? Because if it's not in the system, then you can't bill for it. If it's not in the system, and you have more than one person in your company, then how do you cover the he said, she said situations, right?

And I would argue, fast forward to 2025, the liability CYA part of this is kind of important now in this industry, because if you can't produce information quickly, then you become the problem when there is a problem. Right? So for me, the first thing I wanted to do from somebody who is building an IT services company was, Hey, I can't watch everybody working for me every minute of the day.

And I surely want my customers to have a great experience, but I can't service them individually every time. So I want every single call and chat and text message in my system as close to in real time as possible. Because that way, if somebody comes and raises their hand and says, Hey, this thing went off the rails, I don't have to start from zero, like I'm a private investigator trying to figure out what's going on.

I want to know who said what, when they said it, and what was said, I want it quickly, so I can squash it before it becomes a bigger problem. And so when I started out looking for a solution within my own IT company, and I said, Hey, I was running dynamic CRM for a long time, because to Microsoft partners, they were giving it away. I then in 2010, moved to ConnectWise's original hosted offering, which they've been, you know, relabeled a couple times, but I'm on ConnectWise ticketing in their cloud.

And so, you know, I made that investment and all the ecosystem products came around that. And then my question came up. And I was like, Hey, so what do you have to cover this question?

How come I can't track all of this in the system automatically? And they're like, we never built anything for that. I guess nobody asked for it.

I'm like, what? I don't know about you, Marv, but like, people pick up the phone when they want help. When I went 911, I don't text anybody, I call them.

So why would the MSP think that all of these digital lanes that exist are going to be the primary way that people contact them for help? No, they're going to pick up the phone. So I said that interaction needs to be tracked.

And if it could be automatically tracked, even better, and it didn't exist. And we said we need to solve that problem. That was the first thing we set to fix.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, so unified communications in my mind was just simply anything to do with the phone that, you know, was call in, call out, they've added the video features to do the Zoom meetings or the whatever they called their video platform at the time, and billing and all of that stuff. It never in my mind included CRM management, because that always felt like a separate lane. So I understand what you're saying.

But the question I was going to ask is, you know, do you feel like you're steering out of your lane a little bit? Or should it actually be in the phone system?

[George Bardissi]
I've expanded like, you're right, collaboration tool, right, Zoom teams, whatever meeting, right, like we're doing now, chat and SMS, and then voice, all of that, I guess, fax is still out there. Fine. I feel like that.

We have technology that doesn't die. Fine. Like these all roll into the lane of communications.

Now, here's the thing. Integrated communications is probably what we're talking about more than just communications. Fine.

But like me, you know, we've been going this way for some time, other industries, like, let me give you an example, one that everybody can figure out. Marv, when you call your doctor, your dentist to make an appointment, and that you pick up the phone, you call, and they're like, Oh, hey, Marv, thanks for calling in. You're like, Oh, what do you mean?

They had that integration a long time ago. The phone, electronic health record tie-in, or let me even make it simpler. Marv, you call to the local pizza place, and they're like, Oh, is this Marv?

Your number's da-da-da-da-da. Yeah, it's like, all right, what do you want? They've had this integration forever.

Why didn't our industry pick up on it earlier? I don't know, but it didn't exist. And we felt we needed to fix it.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So you're talking about something where there's that automatic matching of the number that's coming into the name of the person or company that's calling. So, I mean, beyond caller ID, right?

But where does the CRM part come in?

[George Bardissi]
Okay, Marv, do you use a PSA or ticketing system?

[Uncle Marv]
I'm boutique, so no.

[George Bardissi]
Okay. So if you were to say, for the people that you talk to on a regular, what types of names come out when I ask that question in your mind?

[Uncle Marv]
PSA?

[George Bardissi]
Yep. Or ticketing system.

[Uncle Marv]
Datto Connectwise.

[George Bardissi]
Okay. So you're talking about Autotask.

[Uncle Marv]
Autotask, yeah.

[George Bardissi]
Merge with that. Okay. And then we're talking about Connectwise Manage.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah.

[George Bardissi]
And I would throw some other names out there. Let me know if you've heard of them. Halo?

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah.

[George Bardissi]
Syncro?

[Uncle Marv]
Yep.

[George Bardissi]
Super Ops?

[Uncle Marv]
Yep.

[George Bardissi]
Zendesk?

[Uncle Marv]
Yep.

[George Bardissi]
All right, let's stop there. That's a lot of names, right? So what if I told you this use case, this very simple scenario?

If somebody calls into your business, we could also say texts or chats into your business. Let's put that on the side for a second. Somebody calls into your business, they hit the option for support, and the system asked you, is this a new issue or an existing issue?

And you're like, yep, existing issue. You type in a ticket number because it's on your screen, right? Because you've got an email on it.

It's like, all right, no problem, please hold. And it went into your PSA or ticketing system, found out who was the person that was working with you on there, tried to send the call to that person. And if you got them right away, awesome.

But if you didn't, rang everybody else because they didn't answer the phone. And when they picked up that call, your contact information, your ticket information, and any other tools that they thought they wanted to show up on the screen were already in front of them when they answered that call. So immediately, they're picking up the phone saying, hey, Marv, thanks for calling back in.

Are you calling back about this printer issue? Yep, that's the one. I have an error message again.

No problem, Marv. Let me send you a pin code. I just want to validate this call.

You're going to get a text message with this random pin. Just read that back to me. All right, it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

All right, awesome, Marv. You're validated now. Let me work with you.

I see last time we told you to unplug and plug it back in again. But what's the error message? Because this is the one I had from, okay, yep, no problem.

Let me remote in and see if I can figure out what's going on. Immediately, I took the shuffling that occurs at the beginning of every call. And I already picked up where I last left off.

I've validated you are who you say you are. And that's audited against your ticket. I didn't have to create a new ticket, which created duplicate entries in my system.

I'm working back from where I left off. And if somebody else is working on it, I can read what they did. And then a lot of companies, I know we do, record that call.

And so that call recording would end up in the ticket as an internal note and attachment. The transcription of the call recording would end up as an internal note. The pin verification that I validated you showed up as an internal note on the ticket.

And if I turned on these other features, the summary, like a meeting summary, the call summary, I could automatically put into the ticket. And now these kind of new AI-ish features have come in like, hey, was that a good call? Was that a bad call?

Should I notify the owner that you started dropping F-bombs in the middle of the call and it just went down into the tubes, right? You can sentiment score a call using some AI-ish features. And all of that made it into your tool.

And by the way, let's go back to that original thing that we tried to solve for. Well, we know the call started at 12 o'clock and ended at 12.15. So we automatically put a time entry and an activity into the tool that you use to bill out of. So even if the human being never put what they should have put into the system at the time, we at least have an actual start time, end time, time entry in the system.

And I didn't even do anything yet.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. That sounds like a lot. Let's start with the first part.

The caller calls in the end user and they're recognized and they don't have to re-explain all their previous calls. That's the biggest thing.

[George Bardissi]
Huge. Huge.

[Uncle Marv]
Yep.

[George Bardissi]
Nobody likes to call the credit card company and get bounced around 18 times.

[Uncle Marv]
So I had to call... Well, I won't say who it is because I'm going to vent about them later. But it was literally five minutes and 10 seconds before I spoke to a human.

And this was not being on hold waiting for the next available representative. This is going through all the freaking menu prompts.

[George Bardissi]
18 buttons later.

[Uncle Marv]
Which to me was like, this is ridiculous. So that process alone is something that sounds amazing. But then on the back end, one of the things that MSP business owners, IT business owners always get frustrated with is, I know you talked to this person yesterday.

Why isn't there any information in the system? And to have that be able to be done automatically. Now I assume there's obviously certain integrations that you're working with and it's not universal.

So all the big boy players.

[George Bardissi]
All the names I mentioned earlier, Autotask, ConnectWise, Halo, Synchro, SuperOps, Zendesk, all have this integration.

[Uncle Marv]
Right. Sounds nice. Do you think others will follow suit?

Is this a trend in the VoIP industry?

[George Bardissi]
You know, Marv, from the big names, the Wall Street names, let's just use RingCentral as the big guy on the top, Teams phone, Zoom phone. They're 10 miles wide, but paper thin deep. What they call as integration could be as simple as a click to dial, which, I mean, it's not exactly integration in my mind, right?

It's expected. We've been doing this now for a little over 10 years, at least from the MSP sandbox side, right? Have people, you've heard of Weave, for example, they've gone deep into the medical dental industry.

Other companies have gone into specific verticals along the same lines. But the big guys, paper thin integration, it's not really deep. It's just enough to say that they have a logo on the screen and then it stops.

From an MSP centric side conversation, where is it? Because for 10 years, pretty much have gone further than anyone before or after we started. When?

Do other people come behind us? Please, please do it.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah.

[George Bardissi]
It's been waiting for a long time.

[Uncle Marv]
It has. How much of this is available inside of a mobile app?

[George Bardissi]
That's a good question. So if you take and receive calls from the phone system, VoIP app, let's call it, calls in tech and messaging, right? We can automatically take all of that and put it into the system if there's a match and or stage it so that when you do get in front of a computer, and this is an example, Marv, I'm in my car.

I'm driving in between airports all the time, you know. And so if I'm taking a customer call, I probably didn't track anything because I'm driving and I'm talking and I can get a lot done while I drive and I talk, but I can't document it when I drive and I talk. But when I get back to a web browser, everything's ready to be tagged in front of me.

And it's like, hey, this person is from this company. Just need you to tell me which ticket this was or press the button to create a new ticket here. So we auto match it for you.

So it retroactively goes back and puts it all in for me so that I don't have to go and remember, hold on, let me go into my cell phone history. Who did I talk to again? And like, then we're starting from scratch trying to remember what was said.

So if you do that from the mobile app, the phone system, text chat, mobile app, the rest of the data that we want to get in there is ready for you when you get back.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Because that came up for me the other day when a call was transferred to me from my office. I was at a client about 50 minutes away and took the call.

And of course, I wasn't going to stop to write down notes and stuff. Had to do that when I got back to the office. So I get it.

[George Bardissi]
It is a real world and we all live that.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Real quickly before we end out here, you are responsible for the big MSP initiative deal. I have seen the bus when it has rolled through Fort Lauderdale.

I have participated in plus or minus one block party. Tell our listeners what that is, how it got started, and what are your plans going forward?

[George Bardissi]
That's a great question. Marv, we're in a pretty good industry. I love it personally.

But like most cities, there are a lot of neighborhoods that make up the whole of the community. Right. I love that because then you're going to lean into the group that you identify with the most.

Right. If it's smaller shops versus bigger shops, then you want to go to the people that live your day to day. Right.

All good. MSP initiative started. And again, that unique experience where I sat and I sit on the MSP side still, but coming to an end, then the vendor side.

And I felt like there was a disconnect between not just those two sides, but just trying to take those neighborhoods and give back in a different way. Now, we all know the big conferences aren't going to go away. They are what they are.

No problem. We all know we congregate to them because how many times are you going to leave your business to go to an industry event? Probably not as much as me or you, Marv.

But one time, two times a year, three times. I mean, at three times, you're probably doing more than most. Right.

But what we try and do is create, on one side, meaningful experiences. The block parties around the larger conferences were meant to give back to the community. You work hard.

You bust it. So if we can do something special for you as an MSP, that's like not just, hey, here's some tickets, go to a basketball game. No, we're bringing the basketball game to you.

Right. Let's bring the block party to you. Let's bring the networking community to you.

Let's bring Flow Rider and a private concert to you. That's special for you. Right.

And I think that's one thing we wanted to set out and do. Create meaningful experience for our industry. The other thing was, create actual knowledge that's not angled.

What does that mean? We've all been in a breakout session somewhere at some event where I went to go learn something, and it was like a commercial for somebody trying to swipe my credit card. I'm not saying that's not needed in our industry.

You've got to learn one way or another what's out there. But I just felt like there was a more authentic, granular way to bring people together and learn about stuff without that kind of not real layer in between. I'm trying to sell you something layer.

So the educational events that MSP Initiative puts on, which we call MSP Community Minds, is to take MSPs like you, like me, like other people from the trench, put them in the room, give a little bit of their time, put them on panels so that we can talk about what they actually are doing, what's working, what's not. And then we also bring either in the sandbox or sandbox adjacent experts from different parts of the world. Maybe it's somebody that's really good at marketing, but maybe not the traditional marketing.

Maybe it's AI marketing. Maybe we bring somebody in like Mr. Brad Gross, who we all know, who's very good at the legal conversation. But let's talk about the new stuff, about what you need to worry about coming down the pipe so that you can make sure that you're not walking into something unexpectedly.

So we bring a lot of experts in and we bring MSPs and we put them all together. And yes, vendors help fund those events, but they're not giving the education out. They're sitting next to you, learning like you're learning as an entire community.

Just wanted to change the game. The trade show floor has been done and I'm not saying that there's not a benefit to it, but when it's the only thing going on, we're missing the other part, which Marv, I mean, happens in the hallway, happens at the bar, happens on the curb. We just wanted to try and find a way to put that together outside of those three areas.

And so that's a combination. And the bus tour, how did MSP initiative start? Yeah.

Coming right off of 2020, right? Like January, February, we started MSP initiative, pandemic came, we were doing community calls like you were and Ken Patterson from, who's now over a total and other communities. And we were joking because we didn't know if all of the conferences were still on, still off, where they got to cancel, where they weren't.

One of the last ones to cancel that year in 2020, Marv, if you remember was DattoCon.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah.

[George Bardissi]
In Atlanta. So we're on these community calls and we're joking. We're like, well, if the flights don't come back, why don't we just drive?

And everyone's like, well, you're in Philly. So why don't you pick me up on the way? And we're like, okay.

And then all of a sudden it was like, well, my car's not going to fit. Now we need to move to a van. And then the van was going to move into an RV.

And the RV was going to move into a tour bus. And it was a joke at the time, Marv, but we were like, wait a minute. What's the one thing through all of COVID that was totally by the book, by the rules, it was being outside, right?

You still have to socially distance, but being in the fresh air, right? We're like, why don't we do this outside? We bring the tour bus to your backyard.

You meet us at an MSP's parking lot that's willing to let us borrow some space, because I don't know if they're using it at any point anyway. And for three years, Marv, starting in 2020, all the way up until 23, we did thousands of miles by tour bus across America week by week. We do four or five cities a week.

And we would invite MSPs to come and just network. Hey, we're down the street. What are you doing?

You want to get some fresh air, get out of the cave? Come visit us at SOSO's parking lot over here at 123IT. And we did that when nothing else was going on.

And honest to God, it started off as like a joke. And we're like, you know, we should do this. And we did.

And we did. We did it a lot. Actually, during that whole tour, Marv, we had a little over 4,200 people come out.

So that's kind of why we started MSP Initiative.

[Uncle Marv]
Yep. That was a very good time. And like I said, I attended one.

Got my BVOIP glass mug, which broke. And then you got me a new set. So thank you very much.

[George Bardissi]
That was a great mug, by the way. I know that was a rare time when it broke. Those mugs are adorable, man.

When we got them, people were like, how much did you pay for this? I was like, I got it on a really good deal. But it's a nice mug.

[Uncle Marv]
Nice mug. Nice mug. All right.

George Bardissi with BVOIP. And all of his information will be in the show notes. One stream powered by BVOIP.

Integrated communications purposely built for MSPs. George, thank you very much for coming on. And I'm sure that I will see you out on the road soon, right?

[George Bardissi]
Oh, absolutely, Marv. You can bet your bottom dollar on that.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. And you can see him as well. He's at just about every event.

And we'll be out on the road. And for more information, again, check the show notes. For anything related to the IT Business Podcast, head over to our website and check us out.

Click follow. Or watch us on the live streams. We're on all the platforms.

YouTube, LinkedIn, and the Facebook. That's going to do it for this episode, folks. I will see you soon.

And until next time, Holla!