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In this episode, we interview Jack Mortell who is EVP of Sales and Partners at Stratx IT solutions in New York. Statx has about 60 employees and focuses about 90% on the healthcare market. With Jack’s background in sales, we dive a bit deep in this episode about the types of salespeople, who makes a good salesperson and how to make sure you can align the MSP owner’s vision and passion to the salesforce.
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Best of Reddit
Here are the topics we’ve discussed during the Best of Reddit:
Brief: Is there any median lifespan for this or that hardware?
How often do you recommend your customers to upgrade their hardware? The original poster has a list of lifecycles: firewalls – every five years, wireless – every five years, or when new tech comes out, switch servers and desktops every five years, laptops every three years, battery backup every seven to eight years, batteries every four years. It is a guideline in terms of the lifecycle for their customer hardware.
He’s talked to some others recently who run things until they die. He’s asking for some support from the community in terms what’s the best practice. The top vote-getter here with eleven points recommend replacement after x years all the time. Personally, he thinks that every situation is different. His general rule is sometime after the warranty expires or if the needs have changed and they need something better which can be a good rule to follow. Why replace a component at five years if the warranty is for seven years? There are other things too like if it’s something major like a firewall, it could cost a big office a million dollars a day in lost productivity.
Some HP switches have lifetime warranties. Lifetime isn’t your lifetime; it’s the lifetime of the product support from the manufacturer. So you know everything eventually goes end of life from a manufacturer. So don’t think it’s going to be around for the next 50 years of your lifetime. You have to read the fine print for lifetime guarantees.
Some others recommend you to keep some key components as spares. If you have all your customers standardized on the same networking equipment and same router, then maybe it’s easy to use a spare and get it plugged in in a flash it to their configuration and get it back up and running. You don’t have to keep an inventory of every different type of router you have because you only use one type. In general, people are waiting until the end of the warranty. There is no hard and fast rule. Some others recommend telling their customers they might need to replace things after three years. Then, after five, they become more adamant about what needs to be replaced. Not everyone wants to replace all their hardware based on a particular cycle. Work within the different means you have at your disposal and with your customer requests.
Brief: will it be cheaper to host data in the cloud (AWS) or rent a colo?
Next is the classic public cloud versus collocation. In this case, it’s the Amazon Web Services. This poster is doing some preliminary cost-benefit of hosting their services. AWS use their own equipment at collocation. This is what they currently do. There’s a benefit to moving all of that it up to us and forgetting about collocation and their own equipment. He hasn’t looked at the cost yet so he doesn’t know what that looks like. A lot of people have made comments on this thread. It depends on how much volume you’re looking at. If it’s not a lot of volumes, then AWS and others are more attractive. But once you start having heavy traffic, the arrows point the other way.
AWS is great to start out with because you don’t have any capital outlay. You don’t have to buy any equipment. But at some point, it would become cheaper if you were posting it yourself at it even at a collocation. Maybe even leasing the equipment versus increasing the bill every month from your cloud provider. Workloads have a lot to do with it. If it’s low compute high storage then public cloud might be great but if it’s high compute and low storage, then maybe a collocation. It makes more sense. It always depends on the workload. It depends on what your customers need and that depends on their connection. Someone mentioned they talked into a customer whose previous IT guy had said, “You’re going to need a million dollars in servers. So you know let’s move everything”. So they fired him. They moved everything to the cloud and now they have a six thousand dollars a month bill from AWS and they are not happy with that. Things are slow. Their applications don’t work right. So now he’s thinking about virtualization for $40K and move everything back down and be happy.
Sometimes people hear “cloud” and say let’s just move everything up there. The other thing that’s important about the cloud is it does not just take what’s running in your infrastructure and migrate it to the cloud exactly like a PDA V. What you really want to look at is designing for the cloud. So if you’re developing your own applications, you design it within AWS or Google or Azure as a cloud service that’s very different than lifting a server from an on the prime location in the cloud because things are very different.
Some other posters also point out that even with AWS you’re still going to have a learning curve because you have to now learn everything about other providers. How will the networking work out so that there’s still going to be a learning curve? So it’s there’s not an easy answer in terms of public cloud or Colo. Or even hosting yourself and your own data center. So you have to think about these things but there are some really good suggestions in the comments.
Brief: Yes. Summer
And our last article this week is “Is there a slow season for sales in our industry?”. So this new MSP has noticed that prospects have dropped off considerably during the summer. He thinks maybe it’s expected while part of him is concerned. Just wondering how do sales cycles look during the summer months?
It’s our typical slow month throughout the year and there’s some good insight here. In the United States, it’s summer, even in Europe. People take vacations and take the kids to the beach or whatever. So things typically do slow down a bit in the summer months.
This one has five upvotes and says it centers around your verticals which I thought was a great answer because if you look at budget cycles at companies within industries, they can all be different. So he’s saying nonprofits tend to be out of cash by the end of the fiscal which generally hits on June 1st. If they’re busy with the nonprofits up until the beginning of June and then it dries up because their budgets have dried up. Manufacturers have a typically seasonal type of work. In this case, it was a florist. It might be farmers or whatever – they are busy during the summer running their business and they’re not looking to do new projects or not looking to disrupt things. They just want everything to work for the season. After the season is done, then they start looking at how to improve things for next year. So if there is seasonality in all industries, then a managed service provider is no different. If you’re dealing with CPAs, don’t bother them the first four or five months of the year because they’re busy doing people’s taxes and maybe wait until June or try to hit them up for new business.
Understand your customers; understand their business cycles if it’s a highly seasonal type of work. There are certain times of the year where things are going to dry out and that’s pretty much what everyone says. But the obvious answer is it’s summer vacations and they don’t want to think about it. They just want to go on vacation and do those types of things.
MSP Voice Podcast
As I mentioned earlier we now have Jack Mortell with StratxIT and we will talk about sales and I think you’re really really going to like it. So enjoy the show and I’ll talk to you next week.
Doug: Hello and welcome to the interview today. I am happy to be joined by Jack Mortell from StratxIT. So Jack, why don’t you give us a little bit of information about yourself and your managed services business?
Jack: Great, Doug. Thanks for having me here today to chat with you about this. StratxIT is a combination of two companies that came together two years ago. We were both Mac service providers in the New York metro area. Both companies have been around since 2000 and combined, we were about a 60-person organization servicing the New York area and with a focus in health care.
Doug: That’s great. So that’s actually one of my questions. You specialize in a vertical. That’s right? So what led you down the managed services path? What was the idea behind that?
Jack: For us, it really evolved into something. I was in software sales and what happened was Y2K started sneaking up and there was a lot of hardware work to do. I was dealing with a client base mostly in medical and mostly in software management. There were not electronic medical records at the time. This predates that, but they were practice management systems and billing systems. We had a client base of about 100 practices that were running this practice management system that was on Novell NetWare 3.11. I remember those days and maybe I’m dating myself here, but I remember prior to that we were dealing with a CEO Unix. But there was a lot of hardware work to do. There were a lot of refreshes and a lot of windows networks to put in. And that’s really where our company spun off from and that was the root of the company.
Doug: OK great. So it sounds like you always had an IT career or maybe sales type career, but always in that type of arena.
Jack: Yes. Right out of college, it was either get into this business which was an opportunity for me or go to law school and I made the right decision. Let’s put it that way.
Doug: There are a ton of jokes about the IT service providers just like there are lawyer jokes out there.
Jack: No no no. There might be – we just might not that type.
Doug: Great. And you already said that you specialize in the healthcare industry.
Jack: Yes.
Doug: So it sounds like that’s just how the business evolved or was there a conscious decision to focus on healthcare?
Jack: Correct. Actually, it was the opposite. So we started in healthcare. I originally worked for a value-added reseller of a practice management system. And we dealt with the hardware side and we dealt with the software side. And I was in sales in that job selling service contracts for hardware and software to physician practices in the New York metro area and up through New England. And again when Y2K came, it was really a big boom for us and a springboard in order to give us the ability to start the company. So we broke off and started the company addressing these networks and so healthcare was where we were.
As time evolved, and as we realized it was getting hard to pick up new clients outside, we started delving into other industries – real estate, law firms, you name it, small businesses that require MSP. And we then made a conscious effort to focus on healthcare especially as electronic medical records started to show up and started to become a saint. And over time, we still struggle with this. Do we stay in healthcare as we have an expertise in healthcare and we know the lingo of healthcare? We understand security needs around healthcare. So I would definitely say we’re an expert in healthcare but we still struggle with is it the best market to stay in or should we diversify ourselves? So I would say where 90% healthcare but we certainly have clients outside of the healthcare arena.
Doug: Yeah. You said you have about 60 folks there so yeah that’s a pretty good size. And I know a lot of our listeners are one person shops so it’s good to see an MSP that’s focusing on healthcare and is actually on that larger size.
Jack: Yeah sometimes I miss the days of being a five-man shop. It doesn’t get easier. There are just different steps in stages along the way. Yeah, I can’t say one is better than the other.
Doug: But what’s really interesting to me is that your background is in sales.
Jack: Yes.
Doug: And you essentially run sales over there. And so I thought what a great idea to talk a little bit about sales and how sales and the MSP road works. So because I know if you go to Reddit and you read some of the things, there’s always people asking should I hire a salesperson. How do I compensate? There are all these questions about salespeople because a lot of the people who start an MSP come at IT from the technical angle. They don’t have necessarily the sales/marketing experience. Some do but not a lot of them do. So what makes a great salesperson for an MSP?
Jack: That’s a very difficult question and a very logical one. And I would venture to say and being part of other peer groups and things going on in the MSP community sales and marketing is the trickiest part to pin down the technology. I don’t think it is the hard part. The machines are honest with you. As far as sales go, we’ve had our fair share of salespeople moved through here. We’ve hired many that we thought would be good and it has not worked out.
I will say that, in my experience, we’ll call it wisdom. We need to network; we need to be talking to people and if you ask people, even your friends and family, and other business colleagues if they’re happy with their I.T. service provider. Don’t call it an MSP because not everybody knows what that is. Yes, half the time you’re going to get somebody who says no I’m not happy. And if you peel back the onion a little bit and ask them some more questions, the majority of the time the issues are not technology related; they’re service related. They don’t like people servicing them or they don’t like the response times they get or the completion of projects or just problems or tickets. So in hiring salesperson, it’s critical that those people be able to open up and talk to people and have those conversations.
Again it’s not always easy because there are distinct personality types. And to be able to get them to open up and talk to you as a salesperson sometimes can be a challenge, especially in the New York metro area. People are very guarded.
Doug: Also throughout my career, I know very few introverted salespeople. Most people who are in sales know that they love to talk. Yes, so that typically it isn’t too much of an issue.
Jack: It is a little dichotomy. I agree wholeheartedly that you need outgoing people; they can’t be introverted it won’t work but a lot of times we find the outgoing people also don’t like to be rejected and you’re in sales is very much a numbers game. You need to have a lot of conversations and the vast majority of them are going to tell you in one way or the other or you’re going to tell them over and over and over again. And so those two personalities – the outgoing person typically doesn’t like to be told no don’t actually insult them and sometimes they’re quite sensitive to that.
Doug: That’s very good to know. Last week I was going through some Reddit articles and we talked about it on our opening of last week’s episode. Someone was asking about sales on Reddit. Someone had a very good post talking about the different types of salespeople. And I got into that a little bit. This idea of hunters and farmers – it’s a target’s term that I’m familiar with because I’ve worked with salespeople for many, many years but not necessarily everyone understands what that is in terms of sales terminology. You want only hunters; you want only farmers or you want a combination of both. So what’s your experience? Maybe explain what some farmers are and then delve into what makes a good friend for an IT service provider.
Jack: The hunter is the person who’s out there talking to people. I call it turning over stones. You’re not going to find new business unless you’re turning over stones. And unless you’ve figured out how to mass marketing, which I have not. We’ve spent tremendous amounts of money trying and we won’t stop trying until we figure it out. I’m not so confident we’re going to figure it out at this level. You need to be talking to people and that can be any number of ways. Again I think there are plenty of people out there looking for these services. They’re looking for a service provider to help them with IT. And you have to have conversations with a lot of people. And if you if you’re not doing that, you’re not a hunter in my mind. So the hunter cannot be behind a desk. They need to be out moving.
That’s my personal opinion about it. But I think I’m right. The farmer or the nurturer in our organization typically occupies an account management role. We get a lot of calls. We have a lot of customers and there’s a lot of hardware out there and operating systems and all the stuff we do. Thank God it needs to be refreshed and the technology is always changing, which is a nice thing. Once you have the client, keeping the client is important because we know how hard it is to hunt. So they gather the person on the inside that is the salesperson on the inside is a critical role for the organization as well. There are two different roles. We have them divided that way; we keep our gatherers on the inside on an inside sales capacity, account management entity, and then we put our outside people on for new business and they are much more quota-driven than the inside. Although we want inside sales, we also don’t want to twist our customers’ arms too much so that they feel like we’re just selling them stuff and that can be a difficult balance as well.
Doug: Sometimes when you talk about the inside versus outside sales models, it depends on how the company set up those types of things. Sometimes it’s the inside person who’s supporting the hunter. They’re following up on leads and setting up meetings and then other times as you said, the hunter is out there on the outside doing their work to bring them in. Then once they bring them in, they hand them over to inside and then the inside person becomes the account manager and services that customer’s needs as they need new things and those types of things.
Jack: Correct. Correct.
Doug: Yes. But it’s still an inside-outside model.
Jack: It is, it is! And it can be a tricky balance and it can be played lots of different ways. This is not unlike a sport. Everybody’s personality type and skill set can lend itself to performing certain tasks and that might be to follow-up with clients that may have problems dealing with problems or liaisons back to the service desk. We tend to want to put everything into boxes and shape them the way everybody else does it or the way someone else says it should be done.
I think you have to look at your people and your skill sets and manipulate if you want to get the most out of them as the positions are not always purely defined. And again if you think back, most of the MSPs that I know became MSPs because it was owner-led sales and the owner helped somebody with a problem and somehow one or two or three or four customers later they were referred to them because they solved somebody’s problem. They start to grow and start to define these roles within the organization. It becomes hard to manage that. It’s very tricky. And we want to apply metrics to it and we want to put numbers to it so that we can manage it intelligently. But sometimes we forget what got us there and we have to go back to that. I find that our hunters need to go back to the clients they sold and ask for referrals or just rekindle that relationship and the referrals come right after it.
Doug: OK. That’s great advice. And so in terms of the technical aspects because obviously what you’re selling is technical. You need to be talking to technical people. Typically not always right at the meeting, but at some point, you’ll have to talk to these people about their technology needs. Now, do you rely on your salespeople to do that or do you bring in an engineer for those types of meetings?
Jack: It depends on the sale. I would say more often than not the salesperson is handling the technical conversation with the client. There are instances where it’s a larger deployment and there are other technical people on the other side. So we could talk shop at that point with our clients. I want to understand their problems and make sure that my proposals and/or the pitch are addressing the problems they spoke to me about. Also, I don’t like to go in and talk about what type of firewall and the packet inspection and all of the details. They don’t care. Typically they don’t care. There are organizations that care and want to know the details and specifications. But if you’re at what I’ll call it a visceral level where you’re addressing their problems, they’ll have trust in you. If you don’t have that trust, it’s very hard to maintain that client because everybody is just thinking you’re trying to sell to them. So I try and avoid having the engineer in the presentation unless it is required for that sale.
Doug: Once the sale has been made and you send the engineers out there to do the implementation or maybe onsite once one day or a week or whatever, how important of a role does that engineers play in the sales process moving forward?
Jack: They’re critical if they’re onsite. There are different types of engineers as well. There are engineers that probably should be left in the background and not in front of the client.
A lot of people are attracted to computers and/or computer science or engineering because they don’t like people. There are definitely techs who are dynamic and can handle people and understand the technical jargon or what we’re trying to accomplish, and those are the people that we try and keep in front of the client.
Again, every situation is different and sometimes you’re going to have to shuffle them around. But I think it’s important as an owner in any size organization that you keep an eye on it as well or salesperson has an eye on it during the transition from the initial sale into the time they become a regular customer and not during onboarding. I think the salesperson needs to stay involved during onboarding. I think that the critical thing is to develop their trust with the salesperson. If the salesperson drops out or the sale should drop out, they should go back to hunting because that’s how we’re going to make our quotas and that’s how we’re going to sell more. But if there’s no smooth transition over a period of time due to the transit of the salesperson backing away and they’re just thrust to the engineers and account managers, it will go poorly.
So you need to keep an eye on that and make sure the customer is staying happy and that they’re communicating at the same level they were with the salesperson that they are with account management and or the engineering tech.
Doug: And then the common question is compensation. I think you’ve already touched on it a little bit because you’ve got your hunters outside. They’re typically more commission-based. Yes. And then you’ve got your inside and you’re using them as account managers. They probably have some commission but they’re probably more salary than commission. Is that correct?
Jack: Absolutely. Because, in our opinion, if we just drive the inside people on sales, we’re going to start pushing the existing clients into products that we may all agree that they need but their focus will be on driving that number rather than understanding what the client needs and having and developing that rapport and maintaining that rapport with the client. So we don’t over incentivize on inside sales just definitely some emphasis on it. But it’s not the primary emphasis. The primary emphasis is on maintaining the client.
Again, there is definitely turnover in this business and it’s arguable how much there should be. But I would say it depends on the size of the organization. You can lose 5 to 7 percent of your client base each year and sales would have to maintain that number just to stay even. Then we all know the new client is much harder even though we’re maybe charging for onboarding and maybe we’re not the new client. There’s a learning curve on the technology side; there’s a learning curve on the rapport with the client and understanding who’s who in the organization and how best to serve that client. And so we really want to keep those clients, so driving them just by numbers can be very dangerous.
Doug: Definitely. Thank you so much for some of those sales insights. One question that came up as we were talking though was you guys are established and you’ve got 60 people on the inside/outside model. That’s great for what people should aspire to.
Jack: Right.
Doug: But if you’re just starting out and you’re looking at hiring your first salesperson because you’re an owner-operator, you can’t do this; you want to bring someone in. Is it best to start on the inside or the outside? What is your suggestion on where to start with building a sales organization?
Jack: That’s a tricky question because if you’re just hiring somebody for outside and maybe they have a sales background; maybe you’ve seen them selling technology products; maybe they’ve never sold technology products before, but they have the sales skills. They’re outgoing; they understand sales; they understand different people’s personalities. That’s the real key for me. People that can adapt to different personality types is really a skill and it’s usually fairly natural and not taught. That’s again my opinion. Some people say you can teach it and I don’t know about that. Whether you put them inside first or outside first, I don’t know that there’s a right or wrong way. I would tend to think in a small organization you’re going to need them to wear more than one hat. So I would put them on the inside to get their feet wet and then make sure you allow a certain amount of time to hunt.
Again in my estimation, they need to be out in front of people talking to people. They don’t have to be slick; they just have to be a little fearless and not afraid to ask questions. They don’t have to be slick and good looking. I think that’s a misconception.
Doug: I agree. It’s not about being polished and having the most expensive suit and the things that are just being a normal person. Right. That was a previous company I was at. It was always spoken from the heart; don’t try to make things up; don’t try to over-inflate things. Just speak from the heart and just be yourself.
Jack: There is some validity to being passionate about your business. I think people want to work with companies or individuals that are passionate about what they do and believe in when they do. So if you believe in what you do and this is why a lot of owners have success in sales because they run the company and they believe in what they do and that aura comes out and the client or the prospect feel that you can help them with something and that they want you to help them with something.
Transferring that to an outside salesperson can be difficult but it’s important that they feel it or that the owners are assisting them in helping them get that message out. A lot of technical owners want to back away from sales once they have a certain measure of success and hand it off to other salespeople and just put metrics in place and say, “How many calls did you make? How many events did you attend?” I believe those are important and they should be measured. Clearly, we want to make sure that behaviors are there but they need to be able to carry the message that the company has and the company’s culture outward. In a small company, maybe we don’t have the culture very well defined or written out or plastered all over the walls, but the owner knows what it is and it needs to be the owner’s message.
Doug: I very much agree with that and we had a set of core values. Everyone in the company understood those. It’s just simple things but it was something that everyone understood. These are the core values of what we do. So the sooner you can salvage those, the better. As you said, the owner knows. It just takes time to think about what are the core values. What do we believe in? And then pushing that out to make sure everyone follows suit. It’s not just sales; it’s not just techs; it’s everyone; it’s the entire company.
Jack: I think it’s also important to understand your core values and it doesn’t have to be what you look up on the Internet. When we started our first company and it grew, I can tell you our core value was answering the phone because when people are calling with a problem, they want an answer. They don’t want to wait. They want to talk to somebody and if they talk to them quickly, they feel like they’re being taken care of. If they leave a voice message for somebody to get back to them in an hour or two, they’re going to call back again. So you’re going to drive your call center numbers up and so it can be very simple. It doesn’t have to be complicated or perfectly oiled and organized. I can tell you that as large as we are, we have lots of faults that every organization does. The more stuff we read about MSPs and how to do it and how to do this in different models, we get together with other MSPs and other peers and compare notes. They’re all flawed and they all have tons of problems. So that’s par for the course.
Doug: Nothing’s perfect in this business, I think there’s no there’s no set playbook to follow. It’s just getting out there and do what you can and make happier.
Jack: But again if they’re doing that, the prospect or customer feels like you’re working for them and on their side. Typically don’t forgive the faults as long as the fundamentals are there and the block and tackle are working. You can win and maintain some clients.
Doug: So, you mentioned community. You’ve mentioned that you’re a member of some of the peer groups out there. Obviously, there are peer groups that are geared more towards the technical side and others that are geared more towards the owner-operator or sales side. What ones have you found to be beneficial that you belong to?
Jack: We’re members of HTG and I find it invaluable at many different levels. A lot of it is in my mind as talking to your peers about the problems you’re having and especially as you grow, the hiring becomes very difficult and regulations become very difficult in human resources. Your product stack – what products and services you’re providing to your clients and how you’re doing that. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel if you’re going to deploy new antivirus software or a seam solution, there’s no reason for you to have to figure it all out.
There are other people out there that have done it in these communities and they can tell you what it took to do it, where the pitfalls were, or how much it cost. So I find that those groups are invaluable in lots of different ways. It will also drive you to focus on certain numbers and make sure you’re growing your business or look at maybe you’ve got some clients that are really not helping your bottom line. And you can be blind to it. It’s very easy to get mired in the day-to-day business and not understand what you’re doing-especially as a smaller MSP. I think the peer groups are invaluable for smaller MSPs. We’re not doing anything unique – we’re helping somebody with a problem and it’s really a service business. So talking to others is a smart thing to do. And then not all compete with you. Most of the good peer groups don’t involve talking to your primary competitor on a daily or regular basis.
Doug: The peer groups that I’ve seen and most people I talked to were very happy to be part of them and talk a lot about community whether you’re in Reddit or you’re in space works or whatever. Just having a community of your peers and just getting to be able to put a question out there and get answers from people who’ve been through it is extremely important.
Jack: Absolutely. And there is a lot I can tell you. Our person in charge, our COO who’s also in charge of service delivery, is very active in the online community and asks questions about how others are dealing with it. The people that are there spend a lot of time giving feedback and helping each other. And it can go beyond that. It can turn into phone calls a lot. We’re not alone. There’s a lot of messages out there and there’s a lot of IT service. I would definitely encourage people to go out and talk about it and talk about sales; see what’s working for others. Every market is a little bit different but the ideas are not new and they’re not only in this business. You can ask people in other businesses about how they’re approaching sales as well.
Doug: I’ve not been necessarily a sales person but I’ve been attached to sales teams for a long part of my career. I kind of understand. I would never want to carry a quota myself. I was always more on the technical side. But when you work around a lot of salespeople, you can definitely tell the personality types. You can tell the hunters from the farmers and other types of things. It’s kind of interesting; it’s a different world if you’re coming from a technology background and then look at the sales background. It’s a different world. But like you said it’s nothing new. There’s plenty of ideas out there. There’s plenty of “best practices”. But it’s fairly easy to buy something that’s going to work for you.
Jack: Right. And again, who are we selling to? I talk about this often with colleagues and friends. There is a need for technology advisers at all levels. And if you’re servicing the 50 end-users or less, they’re certainly not going to have in-house people. And so they need us. It’s a matter of getting that out of them and having that conversation; it’s not threatening; we’re not selling whole life insurance here. It’s not that hard. We’re not selling something that’s obscure to them or they won’t see a benefit. They should see a benefit from using our services and then, quite honestly, those are the customers we want – the ones that we can service and make happy. Those are the best customers that will stick around for 10-15 years.
Doug: I agree. Again thanks for all your insight on sales and our listeners can be very very interested in this episode. But I do now have to go to our rapid-fire questions.
Jack: OK.
Doug: So these are easy. It’s not hard. Simple answer. So I’m going to ask and then just blurt out your answer and we’ll go through them relatively quickly. Are you ready?
Jack: I’m ready.
Doug: All right. Apple or Android?
Jack: Android.
Doug: Mac, Linux or Windows?
Jack: Windows.
Doug: Amazon or Azure? Or something else.
Jack: Azure.
Doug: Local backups or cloud or both?
Jack: Both.
Doug: OK. Which is worse — printer support or vendor cold calls?
Jack: Vendor cold calls.
Doug: Great. So that was our rapid fire round…
Jack: And I’m a sales guy. I still don’t like getting cold calls.
Doug: Vendors still call you right?
Jack: Oh sure they do.
Doug: So it doesn’t matter what part of the organization you’re in. It seems like someone’s always trying to sell you something.
Jack: That’s true. That’s true.
Doug: This has been great. I really appreciate you being on here Jack. Any parting words or words of advice for any MSPs out there.
Jack: Be passionate. Be passionate about what you do and talk about it because people want to work with passionate people that like what they do. We can very easily get sucked into our day-to-day and focus on the challenges we have. I can tell you in every business there are challenges and days you don’t want to be at work and it’s just tough and you scratch your head “What am I doing this for?”. But the reality is, we like doing it. And if you don’t like doing it, get out of it. It’s not a good business for you. So be passionate about it. Talk about it and people will be attracted to you and want to want to use you.
Jack: That is great advice I would really appreciate it.
Doug: So Jack, thanks again and hopefully we will get a chance to talk again or meet in person someday.