Conquer Project Chaos with Moovila (EP 769)

[Uncle Marv]
Hello, friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, coming at you live from Orlando, Florida. And if you're watching the live stream, you probably noticed that because my background is different. I am here at Zero Trust World and having a great old time.

And first of all, I need to say thank you to ThreatLocker for allowing me to come to this event. I am here as a member of the media and I have a booth inside the Solution Pavilion. So I'm rubbing shoulders with the vendors and watching people as they walk by.

And when I say watching people as they walk by, literally because the food is right in front of my booth. So people walk by, ignore me because they're on a mission to eat. So that's how that is.

It's been a good day. Day one here and got several good interviews and some of them tech related. Some of them are not, you'll be surprised.

So when I post them, don't worry about it. Good conversations with good people. And I will be back for day two.

And again, we'll be in the Solution Pavilions with the other vendors. And I hope to get a couple of interviews with CEO Danny Jenkins and some other high ThreatLocker officials because there's supposed to be some big news. And I hope to ask them about that news once it is delivered.

Now, those of you watching live, of course, you know, I don't have all the usual stuff going on, but I do have the guest that we had talked about. Mike Psenka was on a show previously, and you guys actually sent in some comments and stuff. So that surprised me, but I appreciate it and I'm going to ask him about those.

So let me bring to the stage Mike Psenka with Moovila. Mike, how are you?

[Mike Psenka]
Hey, good. Marvin, how are you? Good to see you again.

Doing good. Thanks for having me.

[Uncle Marv]
Thanks for coming back on.

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah, absolutely.

[Uncle Marv]
And I know that I asked you ahead of time if you got any feedback from anybody, either at Moovila or, you know, that you heard out and about.

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah, certainly. Yeah, for sure. From the folks on our team in that process.

And out in kind of social ecosphere, kind of got some data points back into. So yeah, I was just excited to do it. I really enjoyed doing the show.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, good. I got some feedback too. And I got some clarification questions.

And even when I went back myself, and even though I don't edit, you go back and look over the notes, look over the transcript and try to make sure that I asked a question the right way, or I understood things appropriately. So let's do this first. Let's kind of recap the show for those of you that was episode 766.

And of course, Moovila is the AI project management platform that is supposed to help us do a ton of stuff. And one of the things that I wanted to ask you about is the critical path engine.

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
So I know that I probably sounded like I followed along with you right along the path and everything. And I think the one thing that it got me was when it comes to making shifts, you know, if you're dealing with a project and it's, you know, either going off the rails or a deadline didn't happen. We didn't talk about the mechanisms of what actually happens.

I know that we can go look and see that, oh, something's off, which means everything else will be off. But how are things alerted in the portal there?

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah, that's a good question. So I guess a couple of things are important to note. With the platform, for most of our customers, there's a bidirectional integration with their PSA, right?

So if they're using ConnectWise, Halo, and Autotask recently have come online. So there's sort of a full bidirectional interface. If they've got existing projects in any of those platforms, when they first integrate, all of that data kind of synchronizes between the two systems.

And I think it's sort of well-known in the industry that the project management components of those platforms are just not super robust and lead to maybe inaccurate dates, resourcing, scheduling issues associated with those projects. So I just want to sort of give that context as I talk about what the Critical Path Engine does and the platform does, because at the end of the day, many MSPs want to use their PSA as a single source of truth for dates. They want to check in on that, but they might be managing the projects in our platform, but they're going to want to look at schedules and process and billing maybe back in their PSA.

Inside of Perfect Project, the Movable Platform, the Critical Path Engine, and there are components that run sort of server side in the cloud, and then there's components on the client, right? Kind of in a redundant way. But what the Critical Path Engine is doing is continuously analyzing and observing the entire project portfolio.

So a lot of the Critical Path Engine is discrete math, graph theory, expert system stuff, where it'll observe the vertices and edges, i.e. the tasks and the dependencies, and all of the other components for who it's assigned to, those resources, the resource types, their process, their schedules, the task descriptions. It'll monitor those projects and analyze them and identify where there are risk issues associated with that project. And I think the last time we talked, we sort of said, hey, the best way to think about it is it's a little bit like a debugger, right?

We look at work like a programming language, and you debug programming languages so the code will compile. Well, any project or structured work is sort of the programming of people to do work, right? This system actually can interact with Internet of Things.

We've got some use cases in other industries where we work with construction equipment and process. But when it identifies a risk or an issue, it can alert users around those issues. Or if a user or project manager or program manager is actually in the platform itself, it can tell them and virtualize the project as it should be, right?

So to give you an example, if you pulled a project up and you were refreshing a network or porting someone to the cloud, and you had your project plan and you had the dependencies set up and the tasks, if there were any delays, any blocks, any capacity conflicts that were analyzed in that project plan, it would then virtualize a new set of dates and say, well, your current project plan says you're going to be doing these tasks on these dates. Based on the analysis of resources, personnel, delays in tasks, this is now your critical path and the dates on these tasks are going to change based on the current status of the project.

Now, the user can either say, well, you know, and we always talk about supervised automation in this because the PMs are going to want to kind of evaluate and observe that. But if they accept those delays as real and say, we want to recast this, just sort of with a click of a button, they can recast that entire project. It'll reallocate those tasks and it'll automatically synchronize back to their source PSA system.

So they're not having to sort of update every single little task or process. So that can happen automatically. And the nice part of that is if they're using scheduling or if they're having to schedule engineers for those tasks, it will identify that those schedules are now invalid, right?

Hey, you've got these six appointments set up for these six engineers, or if you're going to schedule engineer time on a task on a project, if that project plan hasn't been updated and it's out of date, it won't let you, it'll say, hey, you shouldn't schedule on those dates. Those are the wrong dates to schedule . These are the real dates you should schedule to avoid schedule churn.

So it's, you know, there's always the ability to override these things if the user wants to, but it's continuously sort of virtualizing the most accurate picture of that project and then giving the opportunity to the user to update that project plan, update those dates and synchronize with their PSA. And same thing with scheduled events, the notes, all the, you know, the notes, the time tracking, the schedule, all that stuff sort of synchronizes bidirectionally between both systems. So when the user's in there looking, they know that they've got sort of up-to-the-minute information.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So between the alerting and the fact that, you know, if they go in and look, it's going to update and do that. So that's good.

Yep. All right. Should at least do a shout out here.

So Eric Anthony with All Things MSP has typed in to say hello. And that's interesting to me because he's out on a ship on a cruise. Oh, wow.

I don't know why, Eric, I don't know why you're on my show, but thanks.

[Mike Psenka]
Where did he say where he is, what cruise and what ship?

[Uncle Marv]
I don't want to oust him like that. Let's do this. So I, you know, I didn't ask you last time is what is the one thing that MSP's techs have all raved about when it comes to Moovila?

I kind of asked you, you know, the technical stuff and everything. Yeah.

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah. Well, the thing that I would say is the actually the by far the best feature of our platform is our people. So the thing that we universally get raves about, I mean, they love the technology and it's cool, but our operations team and our support team and the education and the sort of elevation of skill set around project and program management, I think most of our customers are surprised, right?

They go, oh, you know, we're going to get on boarded onto the software and don't realize that, you know, hey, they're going to kind of get coached towards digital transformation and the availability and I guess our operations team, how much they kind of dive into the customer's business to help them with their templates, their process automating, because, you know, it's a big industry and there's a lot of similarities between industries, but all every MSP has, you know, unique components to it. So that's one of the things that we hear all the time is just, you know, the raves, we come to the conferences and customers come up to the booth and they want to like, hey, where is, you know, where's Jared? Where's Lewis?

Where's Bucky? Where's, you know, where's Becca? So they're looking for the operations folks that they love to work with.

So I’m super grateful to have those guys on our team.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Very nice. One of the things that I also wanted to go back on is a question that actually came in from one of the listeners and they, I rephrase the question because of the way they asked it where, you know, basically said, you stated that your customer base is generally 20 employees and above, but you also mentioned that smaller shops could benefit.

So the question was, what would you say to an MSP with five or less employees to convince them that Moovilla was the right choice?

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah. So there are a couple of things that for a smaller organization, it's going to be helpful. One, if they're scaling and they are project intensive, it can significantly reduce the operational costs and the time it takes to do that.

And so it may reduce the need for an additional hire for some of the administrative component. It'll also reduce the requirement of a skill set for project management. So we've got a lot of customers who are saying, hey, I can have one of my engineers.

They talk about sort of citizen project managers. So there's a lot of AI and automation around guiding best practice for project and program and portfolio management. The software sort of facilitates that.

And so smaller organizations go, look, I can't afford or I don't need a PM. We've got these projects that we have to manage, but I don't know if I necessarily want to hire a PM, but things are starting to get squirrely on us. So the software can do that.

The other thing that I will say that we have heard too is this issue of redundancy, right? So in smaller organizations, there's a lot of organizational knowledge that will live within an individual. Larger organizations have all kinds of redundancies and systems in place because they know that they're going to have transients among those things, but smaller organizations don't.

And so having the platform to act as this repository, this automated repository, it is easier for someone to come in and pick up, so to speak, where somebody else left off. And it creates sort of this layer of redundancy of the work that's in progress in the event someone's unavailable, they're booked on another project, or they have turnover in their business and go, oh my gosh, this person was really kind of running the show and they had their spreadsheets here and their email here and they had everything in their head. What do we have in flight?

I don't know. And so having sort of a centralized, organized, obviously cloud-based secure system can provide some redundancy for those folks as well. And then lastly, some of the stuff that we've got coming up soon in Project Hub is around best practice, having a library and a universe of projects and templates for people to utilize and to share and collaborate around.

Because obviously the large organizations will have bigger product portfolios that they can manage for their projects, but smaller organizations, getting that sort of content, that knowledge can be an important thing for them to understand, hey, this is the best practice on how to execute on this. So that's something we've got coming up too that we're excited about that we know is going to be, and that we've heard they're sort of from the smaller organizations, they've said, well, I may not need everything you're doing, but wow, I really want that when that comes out, when you guys have that live, let me know, because that is something I'm very interested in.

[Uncle Marv]
Right. I didn't ask you, do you guys have a bunch of templates in place for, you know, regular normal tasks, I guess?

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah. So that's a great question. So we do have, so for customers, we have templates in process that when we're doing the onboarding process that we can share with them, but we do have this, you know, coming soon, we've got a new module, a feature called Project Hub, and it's going to allow organizations, communities to share resources, templates together in a process and organizations to publish their content to their customers.

And then of course, we're going to have globally available templates and projects around some compliance issues and common projects and best practice. And we're really excited about Project Hub because it is going to be a really effective ecosystem to sort of share that content. And then as we look forward on that product roadmap towards things like, you know, benchmarking, reporting, and analytics for those templates as well.

So, and the templates and the work won't just be related to delivery of services and practice to the customers, but really how to run their business, you know, things that they can do to help improve their own business, their own process. And as I said earlier, compliance components are something that we're excited to do and help with as well.

[Uncle Marv]
So, is that going to be available like to everybody or are you going to be able to group, you know, projects of this type for this size, MSP or things like that, or is it just an open community hub?

[Mike Psenka]
So, it'll be, so as we're going through the category process right now with some of the content that we've got in place, it'll be categorized fundamentally initially. And like, I'm going to get my hand slapped by our product team by talking about this stuff before it's released. They're going to, they're going to be frustrated at me, but at the highest level category, there's service and product delivery to customer.

And then the other major category is sort of internal operations and process. Those are sort of the two major categories, sort of, as far as delineation, basically, how can I help my customers? How can I help myself, you know, be more profitable?

What can I do for my own business and process? And that's going to be, there'll be stratification in that. And we'll, you know, we've talked about sort of initial filters and process that we'll want to do.

But the other really big part of this is there are so many community groups that exist within this, that want to share within their group. So, this will become a vehicle for them to share that. Initially, it will live within the platform, but ultimately our goal is to make this, and for those partners that want to share their content publicly as well, make this a little more globally accessible.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Now, how is that going to work with your current internal support? Because I know one of the questions is, you know, how much do you help NMSP get up and going?

What type of support, if they're stuck in the middle of a project and they, you know, have those things that go off kilter and they want to try to get it back on track, do you guys help with that? Or is that something that you're hoping the community will help with?

[Mike Psenka]
So, I guess, I guess what I ask everyone when you talk about sort of when things go off kilter, right? So, a big part of it is the software and some of the agents inside of the software are designed to help analyze structural components of the project going off kilter. Now, if the project going off kilter means, hey, the customer's non-responsive, that's obviously something that, you know, we would not have a hand in as much.

But if it's, hey, you've got blockers on these tasks, you've got, you know, these work streams, these capacity conflicts, the software sort of facilitates through that. So, the onboarding and the training that occurs, what our operations team does a lot of times is help organizations, one, in some cases, a lot of MSPs may not fully understand the critical path process, right? And the idea of templatizing their work for repeatability.

And so, they'll, part of the onboarding and the training is to take them into that process of saying, hey, you're repeatable, whether that's customer onboarding, or if you have common practices and surfaces, architecting the right templates for them. So, that can become a very quick automated process to activate those templates as they start those projects and automatically assign those out to the appropriate engineers and individuals. So, you know, a lot of it is enabling, sort of teaching them how to fish, so to speak.

You know, a big part of the onboarding is just to say, kind of, hey, let's make sure that all of our customers understand their critical path process and arm them with the knowledge on how to execute in an ongoing way so they have confidence about their roadmaps and their project plans. And, you know, you said, hey, a lot of projects go sideways because organizationally, they can be a mess if they're in a spreadsheet or they're in another system that doesn't impose integrity on the dates.

[Uncle Marv]
Interesting. All right. So, I know I've asked you some weird questions off the bat.

So, I guess I should also ask, do MSPs act like prima donnas, like, you know, nobody ever does anything the way we do? And how do we compare to your other industries, like construction?

[Mike Psenka]
So, like I said, I've said this a dozen times. I've been in tech for 30-something years, 32, 33 years. You know, the MSP industry, by far, I mean, is the most collaborative with each other, even though people are competitors.

Like that, you don't see where people are really essentially competitors, even if they're not on the same geographic reason. They're still, they can still be competitors. So, we've found that a great market to work in.

You know, you said, we've been in healthcare and finance and all these other markets and areas. There just is a collegiality inside the MSP market that's super, super helpful. And I'll tell you the other thing that I really love, because they're just super technical and smart.

So, that is very helpful for us because we have a technical product, right? I mean, you know, we're saying, hey, we've got this discrete math engine and it's going to do this. And people pick up on it pretty quickly.

You know, in the past, we've been in other industries and you're kind of going, you know, this idea of AI-driven project management and what we're doing sometimes, you know, hey, work should be programmed, not managed. That, you know, can be difficult in some industries, but the MSP industry it's been pretty easy. We haven't, I mean, we've not seen a prima donna sort of concept come across.

I think, you know, there's been an eagerness to learn. I think, especially with what we're doing, I think customers have said, hey, we understand this is something we need to do better for margins. And so, yeah, I love this industry.

Like I said, you know, as we're getting involved, we've got more and more involved in it. I just, like I said, it was over, just shocked how much there is a sort of, let's help each other. Let's help each other.

Rising tide lifts all ships.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. I just didn't want to make it seem like I was asking, you know, specific questions that were, you know, everybody thought were unique to just them.

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah. So I'm curious, do you think the MSP industry can have a bit of a prima donna culture?

[Uncle Marv]
MSPs in general, but some MSPs, yes. Okay.

[Mike Psenka]
I've not met those yet. I'm sure they're out there like any industry, but.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, yeah, because, you know, there's some that are thinking we have found the better way to do this. So we're special.

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah. Well, I, you know, it's a relationship business, I think. And I think at the end of the year, you and I talked about this a little last time is despite everything that's out there and all the technology that's out there, this is just kind of always going to be a relationship business and, you know, efficiencies in process really matter as far as a better way, you know, sort of the secret sauce, but I guess is underpinning a lot of this is always just, you know, culture and personalities and relationships that help build those businesses.

[Uncle Marv]
So in talking about MSPs versus the others, how much overlap is there with, you know, the engineering and the platforms and stuff? I mean, do you have to, you know, customize certain parts of it based on the industry?

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah. You know, I think it's utilization of the tools and which components get leaned into a more heavily. So I'll say that, you know, project, program, project, portfolio management at a sort of generic sense is obviously a very horizontal thing.

MSPs, one of the other, so, you know, if you say retail finance, you know, construction is a very similar kind of industry, heavy civil construction in specific is very similar MSPs because the sizes of the businesses are five, you know, the bulk of those companies are five to 50 employees. They have a lot of projects. Those projects are very dependent on customers.

They're highly variable. They're running and using the same resources across multiple projects. Those projects in construction can get sideways, go over budget.

The owners don't find out about it until too late and they can do nothing about it. They're really trying to get real time. They're a margin sensitive business.

They're trying to get real time expense information so they can make effective decisions, schedule accurately and efficiently. So those parallels between that industry is, you know, in some ways it's, you know, they're eerily similar in certain cases. I will say that the MSP industry also is probably, you know, when you say specific, you know, at a broad level, things like, hey, we got to schedule people down to the minute.

And we really, really want to understand for the efficiency and the utilization of our business. We're not just saying that guy's working Tuesday or Tuesday and Wednesday next week. We're saying that guy's working or gal's working eight to nine 30 on Tuesday.

And then they're going to work from 10 to 1230 and it's for this. And I need, you know, so there's just, there's, it's a really, really very detail specific business. And that's just, there's a lot of moving parts in that.

And that's why, you know, having that automated is so critical because it’s kind of hard to keep tabs on all of that detail. I think also how they bill, how MSPs will bill the work and their projects and what they're doing and managing those costs and trying to avoid, you know, how they deal with variability of those costs, right? Because, hey, can we recapture it?

Is this a fixed fee project? Are we doing time and materials? You have to accommodate all of those, all of those components, because as you know, we talked about before, MSPs have a lot of different relationships with different customers in different ways.

And so you've got to accommodate that kind of variability in the same platform. It's got to be able to be configured. And that's also kind of part of the onboarding processes.

How do you guys bill? How do you set that up? How many rate sheets do you have?

What kinds of projects are you running? All that has to be configured, you know, for the customer so it can get configured to their use. It's not just a sort of simple scheduling app or something that you go, hey, I get it.

I get what we need to do here. Right.

[Uncle Marv]
I think you did say this last time, but I'm going to ask again, because I honestly don't remember. But if you're doing multiple projects, let's say, you know, an MSP has got 20 projects going on. You've got to assign a tech or an engineer to multiple projects.

Does Moovilla have the ability to kind of manage how much time is spent in one project versus another and to be able to say, hey, you can't work 10 hours here because you're already working, you know, 50 here?

[Mike Psenka]
Yep. That's exactly right. So, and that is one of the unique, you know, it's sort of this dog does some unique tricks.

And that is one of the unique tricks this does is it will go across the entire portfolio for capacity conflicts. And even more so, and once again, and this is, you know, Marvin, this is where the sort of the devil is in the details. So, let's say you have, you know, project, you know, A, B, C, and D.

And you go, okay, we've got everything scheduled. Everything looks good. And then project A gets delayed.

And there's a task because the customer doesn't deliver something. And we now know that that delay is six or seven days, whatever it is. That will get virtualized.

And when you show up in project C, it's going to say you have a capacity conflict. And you have a capacity conflict, not with the existing, the dates that you thought A has, but these virtualized dates, which are based on the current status of this project, you now have a capacity conflict. So, do you want to extend this project a couple of days?

Do you want to shift the resource? Because, you know, this person can't be in two places at one time. And once again, this is the just absurd amount of constantly changing calendar math that occurs that no human being could possibly manage.

And that results in scheduled churn, right? That results, like the really bad outcome is when the engineer goes, yeah, I couldn't get that done. I know you had me scheduled for that, but I couldn't do it.

And now you've got dead time on your hands. You just lost an afternoon or half a day with a billable resource that could have been building on something else, but they didn't because people couldn't keep up with the math.

[Uncle Marv]
Right. I'm sorry. I'm going to do a huge shift here.

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
Has anybody ever said that you have a voice like that?

[Mike Psenka]
Uh-oh. Here it comes. I don't know.

[Uncle Marv]
For some reason, it just escaped me. I had it in my head and I was waiting for the right time to ask. Oh.

The motivational speaker. Oh. The Robbins guy.

[Mike Psenka]
Oh. Oh, God.

[Uncle Marv]
Anthony Robbins?

[Mike Psenka]
Is it Anthony Robbins?

[Uncle Marv]
Is it Tony Robbins? Tony Robbins. Yes, Tony Robbins.

[Mike Psenka]
Okay. Maybe.

[Uncle Marv]
There's a couple of times where you're speaking and as your sentence tails off, I'm like, that sounds like Tony Robbins. Has anybody ever said that to you?

[Mike Psenka]
That's funny. That's funny. I guess no.

Yeah. I've heard that. It's been a long time.

It's been a long time since I've heard that. I think you're saying that and that reminds me, but it's been a long time since I've heard that.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. All right. That makes me feel ridiculous now.

No.

[Mike Psenka]
Does he even still do it? I mean, he was doing it like 30 years ago, right?

[Uncle Marv]
You know, I saw him the other day on like a YouTube clip or something. So I think he still does it, but obviously I don't think he is as popular as he was.

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah. Like I remember, like I said, maybe back in the 90s, I thought he was like a big deal or something. Maybe he is still doing it.

I don't know. Maybe he's still very popular.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. Have you ever gone to any of his events? No, I've not.

[Mike Psenka]
Okay. Have you? Yes.

Are they good?

[Uncle Marv]
No.

[Mike Psenka]
No. That's funny.

[Uncle Marv]
Just one of those things where I went. So one of the reasons I went was it was the same type of thing where he brought in multiple people and I forget all who they were, but like three of the seven where people are like, Ooh, I think I'd like to hear that. Yeah.

One was Lou Holtz, you know, coach of Notre Dame. Okay. When I was big in football.

And then there was another very famous person in business. And I thought, okay, I'll go. And I remember feeling like, this is just a hype show.

And it's, I mean, sorry to anybody who listens or watches the show, you know, feels differently. But that's how I thought. I just, it was like, it's just a hype show.

[Mike Psenka]
So you're saying there was no substance. There was no detail in it. It was just.

[Uncle Marv]
Not really. I mean, you know, he had the person walking on the coals and they had, they had some, I think he was 80 years old doing a hundred pushups.

[Mike Psenka]
Okay.

[Uncle Marv]
But I'm looking at the guy. I'm like, okay, the guy's probably a hundred pounds. And of course he can do a hundred pushups.

It doesn't have a ton of weight. I mean, it was weird. It was weird.

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah. There's a lot of, there was a, you know, and it seemed like that was a really big thing to me. Like I remember seeing a lot of that stuff, like I said, in the nineties, two thousands I guess it's probably all over YouTube now.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. I mean, people are still doing it. There's, you know, people trying to recreate those events and stuff.

And there are, there are obviously there's parts of it that work. I mean, or else they wouldn't keep doing it. Right.

There's, there's got to be some stuff that's substance behind it. You probably get it. You probably had to pay to get the real good stuff, which I didn't do.

Yeah.

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah. They give you one or two tools and you go into it and go, well, I was expecting more like that. You're two free things.

And you're going to give me two more things. And then 28 things that are useless.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Sorry to take us off track there.

[Mike Psenka]
No, no, it's all good.

[Uncle Marv]
Um, well, speaking of being on the road and doing shows and stuff. So you're, you're obviously not here at Zero Trust World. You're not out at Boom.

What is the next big event for you guys?

[Mike Psenka]
So GTIA, I guess the, you know, former CompTIA event will be out at that.

[Uncle Marv]
The one in Tennessee or Nashville?

[Mike Psenka]
It's in Chicago, actually, I think.

[Uncle Marv]
Oh, Chicago. Okay.

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah, I think that event in the middle of March is in Chicago. MSP Summit in Vegas, I think, is at the end of March. Kaseya's got an event at the end of April.

And we've got teams going to Evolve and Robin Robbins. And like, so those are just some of the events I was going to. But, um, you know, spring and fall is chock full of, oh my gosh, chock full of events.

It is, it is event season.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. I didn't hear ASCII in there.

[Mike Psenka]
Um, you know, I don't, I think we've had folks go to ASCII. I'm not going to ASCII. I, you know, I know that we've had folks on our marketing team and ops team go to those as well.

Um, and I probably should know them all off the top of my head.

[Uncle Marv]
But that list is growing. What's that? You don't have to know everything.

You're in charge.

[Mike Psenka]
That's what I said. I always, the joke used to be, um, you know, you've made it when you don't know how to operate the phones in your office. Right.

[Uncle Marv]
That's a good one. Uh, let's see. Patsy Beyond and IT Nation are my next big events besides that.

And Florida Man Games. I'll be at that, but no tech will be there.

[Mike Psenka]
Florida Man Games. Is that what you said?

[Uncle Marv]
Florida Man Games.

[Mike Psenka]
What is that?

[Uncle Marv]
Um, have you ever seen a Florida Man story? No. Or looked up a Florida Man where you type in a date in Florida Man and see what crazy tale there is.

[Mike Psenka]
Oh no. Now I'm going to, I'm writing that down though.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. So normally on the live show, I would do a Florida Man story, but because I'm here, I'm not going to do that this week, but, um, I'll have to send you a link to some of the past shows. Actually, you know what I'm going to do.

I'm going to pull up and this will be a terrible thing to do live. Yes. So I get lists of Florida Man stories.

And while I'm doing that, so Florida Man Games is basically built off the concept of if it's crazy, it happens in Florida. So all of the crazy police chase, all of the guys going crazy, getting arrested with, you know, their shirt off, men throwing alligators through Wendy's drive-through windows.

[Mike Psenka]
Always dudes, right? Right. Always dudes.

This is how; this is how for sure women know they're better than men. Like this is.

[Uncle Marv]
So, uh, the Florida Man alerts, uh, for the last 24 to 36 hours. Um, as soon as this comes up, the internet's slow here, but Florida Man Games is built off of a police chase, uh, drunken sumo wrestling. Um, there's ended, uh, a robbery prone obstacle course.

Um, there's all those types of things.

[Mike Psenka]
That's amazing.

[Uncle Marv]
Um, of course the internet's not cooperating. This is why I knew I wasn't going to be able to do Florida Man, but I'll, I'll, I'll share some stories with you. It's pretty funny.

So, all right. Well, uh, Mike, I obviously was out of questions because I started talking about Tony Robbins. Um, was there anything that you’re doing, I mean, I know you didn't really get a ton of feedback, but, uh, was there anything that you or your team thought about that, you know, maybe I didn't ask in depth or something that you normally talk about with people when they come to a booth or anything like that?

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah. You know, one of the things that we'll, we'll commonly talk to folks about when they sort of want to wrap their mind around what we're doing in a project management has been around forever and you know, it's my God, the world didn't need just yet another project management platform. Right.

So people will say, you know, what are you doing differently? Like what is different? And, and, and, you know, what we'll explain to folks is, hey, we're, this is sort of like RMM for your projects.

Right. And so if you can think about this, um, you know, endpoints have a failure rate and you use RMM because you want to increase the span of control for your engineers. You want to identify those problems with those endpoints early to remediate them.

You want to be able to remediate them, you know, kind of remotely to lower costs, improve customer uptime satisfaction. You know, these are all things that sort of RMM came out to do and really did an amazing job of helping and solve sort of the break fix process. Um, well, project tasks have a failure rate too.

And most MSPs have as many tasks active at any time as they do endpoints in some cases for their project portfolio over the course of a year. And so, and those tasks have a higher failure rate than endpoints do. And the jeopardy of a failure on a task endpoint can really create reputational risk, customer problems, and project problems.

And so what we'll, you know, we tell folks is we're like RMM for your projects. We're autonomously monitoring, identifying alerts, risks, letting you know about problems early. And then the math is there.

It's providing that same kind of benefit. We can increase the span of control, your project managers. And so that resonates because it makes sense why, you know, they are, most MSPs were sort of there and in many cases understood what it was like before they had RMMs in that process.

And, you know, I think one of the things that will illuminate for people is to say, Hey, and I would say in general, one of the things we tell people is human beings suck at probability. We're just terrible at it inherently, right? We're good at basic arithmetic, but when it comes to this idea of probability, we just, whatever reason the good Lord didn't give us the genetics to understand and process probability accurately.

And, you know, the example we'll give is the birthday paradox, which says if you have 23 people in a room, there's a 50% chance two people have the same birthday. And that doesn't make sense to most people because they go, well, 23, there's 365 days in a year. That doesn't seem right.

It doesn't matter that it doesn't seem right. It is right. And if you have 60 people, there's a 99% chance two people have the same birthday.

And it's just, like I said, what does that have to do with me? I said, well, you know, if you have a project and you have 40 tasks in the critical path and your engineers and your team get their work done on time, 90% of the time, nine out of 10 times, everybody gets their work done on time. There's only a one and a half percent chance that that project's going to be done on time.

And if you have 20 of those projects in a portfolio, the probability is 3.32 times 10 to the negative 37. And just to give an idea how small that number is, the odds that the sun won't rise tomorrow is 6.03 times 10 to the negative 17. So it's a billion, billion, billion times more likely that the sun won't rise tomorrow than your project portfolio isn't going to have problems.

And that's, you know, because people get frustrated. They're like, oh, you know, we have a people problem. You probably don't have a people problem.

You have a probability problem. You're just not aware of that. And you need to be alerted.

You're going to have problems, right? You're going to have issues. And the bigger you are and the more you grow; you're just going to have more and more issues.

And the best thing that you can do is find out about those problems early and try to remediate them automatically. And so that, like I said, that component resonates well within this industry. And that was one of the things and why we loved getting in it is we said, wow, there's a really strong parallel for what our tech is doing for MSPs.

They sort of understand the inherent value proposition of this idea of, hey, you can automatically monitor a lot of distributed information that changes all the time.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. Well, it sounds like you guys have come up with a product that is certainly going to help us out for many years to come because our projects are going to simply just get more and more complex.

[Mike Psenka]
And more important. And that delivery service will be more important, right? As machines and networks in process become more self-healing and that tech part of that process kind of moves in that direction, they're going to be looking to MSPs to become more advisors, experts, and facilitators in the evolution of those businesses.

And that'll all be in the form of this structured work, also known as a project.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So let me look here. I know that Tim Golden was here today.

Hello Tim. And of course, Eric. And then there's always people that lurk and don't say hello.

So if you're still here, folks, at least say hello and let us know that you're watching. And of course, you could have asked a question, but we're coming up to the end of the show. So you may not get it when we're a little behind.

So just to give you an idea. So a Florida man story. And these are not good because right now, apparently, the biggest Florida man story has taken all the headlines where apparently somebody shot two people that were whatever.

But here's the headline Florida man accused of intentionally setting car on fire with wife inside. Oh, my God. And that happened apparently around 6am today.

[Mike Psenka]
So there's maybe a need for some.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. And also today, somebody that got arrested back in June of 2023 was sentenced today for seven years. And he was sentenced for putting together a dogfighting conspiracy.

[Mike Psenka]
A dogfighting conspiracy.

[Uncle Marv]
Yes. So he conspired with others to purchase, acquire and breed dogs for use in dogfights. And he would stall he would stage dog fights here in Florida, which is in Spring Hill, not far from Orlando here, and would travel between Florida and Massachusetts and Connecticut.

And it was a 10 pit bull type dog ring that he would.

[Mike Psenka]
No one's invoking Michael Vick jokes with this or.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, I think they stay away from that. So that's your Florida man thing. And normally I would like nice, you know, put you on a task to try to find a story in your local area to challenge that.

[Mike Psenka]
Oh, South Carolina has plenty of them. I don't know if it would take too much.

[Uncle Marv]
But all right, well, Mike, thank you very much for hopping on the show. Thanks again for coming back. And I will look for the Moovila booth when I'm out and about and I will try to make that my first stop.

Please do what I used to do when I just walk on by.

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah, yeah, we would love to see it. And we'll have some we'll have some good. We'll have some good swag there for you.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, you guys got a swag award the last year. I don't know if you can top that for 2025.

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah, we're going to make it we're going to do our best for it, though.

[Uncle Marv]
So here was the question. So now your sign behind you looks like it's blue.

[Mike Psenka]
It's so we call it blurple. It's like a blue purple.

[Uncle Marv]
OK, because the original color was purple, but I got a blue mug because you couldn't get purple anymore.

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah, it's that's exactly right. There was sort of a limited edition run that maybe it was Yeti, I think, had. And so we were able to get one that just turned out to be close to our color.

So it's not a standard. Our color is not a standard color. So it just depends on how close we can get something to the color, to the blurple.

[Uncle Marv]
OK. And you know, the reason one of the reasons I, you know, pick that is I love the size. So it is the perfect size to fit underneath the curry without having to take out the tray.

[Mike Psenka]
Oh, nice. Oh, perfect. Did you get the one with the tapered bottom that will fit into your cup holder a little more easily?

Oh, beautiful. Yeah. Yeah.

That's what I love about that one. Yeah. We get very obsessive and compulsive about that.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. So. All right.

So I'll be on the lookout for new swag for twenty five.

[Mike Psenka]
Yeah. Please do. Please come by.

We'd love to. We'd love to make another run at the title.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So those of you that are watching, thank you for joining in. As I said, Eric and Tim let themselves be known.

And I know that it looks like at least six, seven others at least popped in. Thank you for watching and thank you for downloading and subscribing. If you're listening after the fact and be sure to subscribe on whichever platform you're watching.

We're on the three big social medias, LinkedIn, YouTube, and the Facebook. And of course, you can find us on most pod catchers. But if you head over to IT business podcast dot com, you can find your favorite one there.

You can listen to past shows. Maybe if you're watching live and you're you skipped over an audio with Mike for episode seven, six, six, go back to listen to that, where we describe more in detail how Moovila is the A.I. project management platform that you need going forward. And I didn't mention sponsors tonight.

Of course, I'm here at Zero Trust World. Thank you to ThreatLocker and thank you to Net Ally for being my premier partner. And I should probably think rhythms because even though it didn't quite work and it's not their fault, there are some towers down around here for some reason, but they are my Internet on the road.

And I think that's it because nobody else has paid. So I'm not going to mention any of the sponsors. But thank you all for tuning in.

Thank you for paying attention and joining the show. I don't know why my brain just farted right there, but that was a terrible intro outro, but that'll do it. Oh, it's been a long day.

We'll see you soon. Be looking out for all the audio shows from here, from Zero Trust World. And we'll be back with another live show next week.

Mike, thank you for hanging on the show.

[Mike Psenka]
Thanks, Marvin. Thanks, everybody.

[Uncle Marv]
We'll see everybody next time. And until then, holla.