MSP Voice Episode 24 - "Dental Hygiene" With Daniel De Steno

Guest: Daniel De Steno

Daniel started his MSP practice in 2000 after his employer wanted him to move to Korea for 2 years without his family. Since his wife worked at a dental practice he started looking into it and made the decision that he’d give it a try. 18 years later and his business is going strong. He’s even created a dental office design center where dentists can get an idea of what technology solutions they want for their practice.

Watch on YouTube

Hello and welcome. This is MSP Voice episode number 24. Had a great time at IT Nation last week. I know I saw several people there who listen. I appreciate all the support, but a great time at IT Nation, great show. So today we’ve got another special show for you. It’s called “Dental Hygiene”. We’ve got an MSP, Daniel De Steno, who focuses on dental practices. So it’s a really great episode. He talks really about how he specializes in that area and why he got into it. But before that, a couple of housekeeping items.

First, mspvoice.com – it’s your source for all things MSP Voice, so make sure you check it out and get all the latest episodes there. You can subscribe to be notified when a new episode comes out.

We also have the announcement of our first webinar series coming up with MindMatrix, that’s on November 28 at 1:30 Eastern, so be sure and click the link there to register and we’ll get you in for that.

Best of Reddit

So, with that, let’s jump to some Reddit things here – Best of Reddit.

- - Break/fix to MSP?

https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/9w893i/breakfix_is_dying_msp_is_thriving_i_have_no_idea/

Brief: Can you go from consumer break/fix (laptops, iPhones) to full MSP? What about learning about servers, networking, and software required to run a business?

So first up, we’ve got someone who says, “Break-fix is dying, MSP is thriving. I have no idea what I’m doing.” So, the way I read this – and I think there was an edit that he put later on – is that currently, he’s doing consumer break-fix. He has a computer repair shop, people bring in their iPhones, their laptops, fixes screens, maybe installs some software. And he does it for some small businesses too. But he’s not doing it as a managed service-type thing. He also admits that he doesn’t have a lot of experience in servers and networking and Active Directory and those types of things. So he’s just wondering where he should go to learn, what he should be doing, so he can eventually transition over to an MSP model. Now, as you would expect, there’s a lot of different comments and those types of things. Some people say, “Where are you?” He says he’s in Philadelphia. A typical customer brings his laptop, iPhone and those types of things. And then other people say, “Hey, don’t take it the wrong way, but if you don’t have any technical experience on the business side, servers, networks and those types of things, you really shouldn’t be doing it.” And that’s true in some cases, but in other cases, a lot of MSPs are self-taught themselves. So it is possible to do that.

And he does admit later on in the post that he’s looking to do this over several years. He’s not looking to flip a switch tomorrow and just start doing MSP work. He knows he’s got a lot of stuff to learn. So that’s what he’s asking advice for. Where can he get this experience? How can he get it going? Maybe he can hire someone and those types of things. But he already has a successful business, so that’s a good start. Now he’s just transitioning that over to MSP. He’s got some challenges ahead, but definitely, this is something that I think he can do. Whether or not everybody on Reddit thinks he’s prepared for it, that’s another story.

- - Starting an MSSP

https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/9vxdps/starting_mssp_am_i_crazy/

Brief: Currently working for a vendor, thinking about starting MSSP.

Next up, we have someone who is wanting to start an MSSP – security service provider. Wants to know if he’s crazy. So he’s coming from the corporate world, with Gartner Leader Security Product. He does very well on the sales side, so he already works for a security vendor. He’s doing good in sales. He’s got a lot of relationships because he’s been working with this vendor, but he wants to start an MSSP. He says he’s happy with his job but he wants to create and grow a new company. He wants to focus on sales marketing and hire or partner with someone on the technical. He says he has a monster Rolodex if you remember what a Rolodex is. So he wants to know, can he make good money? Is he overconfident, going from vendor to MSSP? And is focusing on MSSP and not reselling a bad idea?

The situation – he’s in a good situation, no debt, good savings. Recently married, a kid on the way. So, crazy? Any tips? If you’ve got a kid on the way, definitely something you want to think about. Now this one goes in a little bit of a different direction. Obviously, people tell him to check and make sure he doesn’t have a non-compete with his current company, especially if he’s going to some of those contacts. But then others say – because he’s got the sales down pat. He works for a vendor now in sales, and sales and marketing and those types of things are typically one of the things that MSPs and MSSPs struggle with.

So they’re basically saying, “Hey, if you can find someone technical to handle the technical side, then great, then you can handle the sales and marketing. Basically, it’s going to be very difficult for him to learn the technical with just having the sales marketing background. And then it goes back and forth between commenters on, “Hey, you don’t need the sales and marketing, you need to be technical,” and others saying, “Hey, technical is easy. If you’ve got sales and marketing, you’re golden. So, a lot of back and forth.

And some people think that technical people are rarer than salespeople and vice versa. So it’s an interesting discussion but, at the end of the day, I think if he goes into it with a solid business plan, can find a partner that can offer some of the technical guidance that he might need, he might be successful, especially if he’s got good savings built up and he’s got good healthcare and the baby on the way doesn’t take away too much from him, because I know it’s going to be a lot of work starting a new business.

- - What is your favorite industry to work with?

https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/9vwy0f/what_is_your_favorite_industry_to_work_with/

Brief: What industry is it easiest to deliver services for but also has the highest margins?

So next up is another fun one. It’s a little bit about verticals, the poster’s saying, “Hey, what’s your favorite industry to work with?” And then clarifies that “What industry is the easiest to deliver services for, but also has the highest margin?” Ah-ha! There’s the catch. So it may not be the best but – guess what – they got the highest margins. Now there’s a little bit of discussion back and forth here. The first one here, that’s got the most votes, is financial services and legal. They have compliance issues. They have no problems paying the bill. And then he says, “I wish I could make the medical vertical profitable, but none of the practices I’ve approached give a darn about HIPAA. And then that goes into talking about the medical field a little bit and some of the HIPAA stuff. Then it goes into an automation question – and I did have a guest a couple of weeks ago, talking about robotic process automation – but this person was saying, “Hey, you can just make a process out of every customer, make them all the same, then you can increase your margins and do it.” Good luck, if you can do that. That’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do – just try to productize your entire company and service. And then, relevant to today’s guest is someone here. He says, “I’m the odd duck here – I do dental.” Then someone else says, “Me too, for almost 15 years now. I couldn’t be happier.” Someone says, “Why dental?” They say it’s small networks, but enough budget to implement decent technology. Dentists don’t argue with every invoice you send them. Plus, he loves healthcare as a whole – clean environment to work in, and the amount of supporting the technology they use is rapidly advancing. So to be a specialist here is very important.

Lastly, “Dentists know each other very well and tend to advise our services to each other. So we don’t need marketing.” Great advice there on the dental field, and there’s a couple of others that go back and talk about it. And somebody else says, “Why dental?” So it ends up here being a little bit about dental and then, of course, financial and healthcare. And financial services can be big too, especially if you’ve got some high-margin, high-profit people. They typically are smaller offices with very well-paid people and they don’t mind paying for technology. So, some good advice there in terms of industries.

- - 100% Cloud

https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/9vtjf6/100_cloud/

Brief: What’s the best way to share files if a customer is 100% cloud?

Next up is – the title is “100% Cloud”, which you might think, “Hey, can you run a business on a hundred percent cloud? Can you make your customers a hundred percent cloud?” And they’re setting up a test lab with the aim of being able to run a client a hundred percent in the cloud, with no on-prem servers. So that’s the goal, but the specific question is file storage and collaboration. So they’re looking at SharePoint / OneDrive would be the best fit, but they’re struggling on getting it working as a traditional file server with drives automatically mapped, with GPO login, etc. So really, he’s not saying, “Hey, can I do a hundred percent cloud?” He’s saying, “Hey, we’re going to do it. We’re testing this. What’s the best file share and OneDrive sync, and SharePoint, and those types of things?”

So some really good tips and tricks here on how to use SharePoint, how to use OneDrive, how to keep things synchronized, those types of things. And there’s Azure Active Directory and some good links in terms of where to go for resources. So, if you have any comments on this, or you’ve used this and you have clients a hundred percent cloud, feel free to go in and post on this particular Reddit. But if you don’t and if you’re looking at it, there’s a lot of great information here to check out so highly, highly recommend this thread, if you’re looking to go to SharePoint Online, OneDrive, hundred percent cloud with your clients.

- - Backing up data to S3/Azure cost-effective for SMBs?

https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/9vj1o3/backing_up_data_to_s3azure_costeffective_for_a/

Brief: Is it cost effective to use cloud storage for backup for small businesses?

And finally, our last one here is backing up data. Is S3 / Azure cost-effective for a small business? So that’s rather specific in the question but very little in the details because that’s the whole post. It’s just the title. And, as some say, it depends on the client, in terms of if it’s going to be feasible. If you have less than 10 Gb of data, Amazon Glacier is cheap. Then we have some that have over 500 Tb of data and, yeah, not that cheap at all to back up. So the cloud can be costly. It’s not just the storage, you’ve got the egress charges in some and you definitely want to look out there and see what options are available. So there’s someone here who’s got clients that pay 22 cents and 25 cents per month to backup to S3 with Synology NAS. So that works here. Now somebody says it depends on a whole pile of criteria – how much data, how often, how many changes, what’s the expected time to restore. Expected time to restore is very important because if you’re pushing everything right to Glacier, it can take 24 hours to get that data back.

And then others talk about the fact that in some of the lower tiers of storage, if you delete a file, if you delete something within 30, 60, 90 days, they may have an additional charge for that. So you have to keep the data there for a certain period of time before you remove it. And then others talk about the fact that it’s not just S3 and Azure. You have someone here who points out Backblaze. They have a calculator on their site. Someone else talks about Wasabi, with $5 per terabyte. So a whole lot of different options – it’s not all just Amazon and Azure. There’s a lot of different cloud storage services out there, so be sure to shop around and check them out. But definitely keep your data up backed up to the cloud.

So with that, we are now going to talk with Mr. Daniel De Steno from NOVA Computer Solutions. Again, he focuses on the dental side and it’s a great interview. I hope you enjoy it.

MSP Voice Podcast

Doug: Hello and welcome. Today I’m joined by Daniel De Steno. Daniel, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your managed services business?

Daniel: Hey, thanks, Doug, for having me on. As you said, my name’s Dan De Steno, NOVA Computer Solutions. We are primarily a dental-specific technology provider here in the mid-Atlantic region. We have clients from north of Baltimore to south of Richmond, and we really specialize in dental practices, in all technologies that are integrated into those practices.

Doug: OK, cool. So, managed services, IT services. What led you down that career path?

Daniel: Well, I started NOVA back in 2000. In the late 90s, I was working for a large government intelligence agency. I was on a team of just a couple of guys that maintained the servers for that agency in some remote and isolated locations around the DC metro area. And my wife was working for a dental practice and she was having some challenges with her computers. So the natural entrée was, “Hey, will you come in and give us a hand?” I went in and took a look and helped them with a few things and then they said, “Well, you need to reach out and contact Dr So-and-so.” And I reached out and contacted them. And right around the same time, the government wanted to send me to Korea for two years, unaccompanied. And we were trying to start a family at the time. I realized, “Well if I’m in Korea and she’s back in the DC metro area, it’s not necessarily conducive to starting that family.”

So I did a market analysis, took a look at who and how many dental-specific technology providers are there out there. And found there were a couple of folks that were out and working in that vertical, and I left the government and started. That first month, we billed about $462 total. And I’d spent, like, $230 on parts and I got really scared. I mean what did I do? I left a guaranteed paycheck, I left guaranteed healthcare. And we haven’t looked back since. We started in an office, eventually took over the entire basement of the house and now we have a dental-office design center, where you can come, you can sit down on a dental chair, we can pull all the mounts that we may install in an operatory in front of you. You can use the phones, the security system, the camera systems, all of the solutions that we put in place in your practice. You can come and, kind of, feel, touch, taste before you have it implemented in your pre-existing practice or even if you’re building a new office.

Doug: That’s great. I mean, I know companies like Dell and some of the big server companies, they have, like, executive briefing centers, where the executives come in and they show you all the Dell stuff or whatever. So this is kind of like that but it’s with the dentist. So you can bring him in and say, “Hey, here’s what we can do.” And then they can pick and choose, so it’s like a dental briefing center, I guess, something like that.

Daniel: You’re exactly right. It’s just like you and me – if we’re going to buy a car, we’re going to go out there to test drive it. We want to feel it, we want to really see what it’s like, and so, giving them an opportunity to be able to do that with those technologies in our office, they’re able to make a better decision faster on the technologies that they’d like to implement.

Doug: So, it sounds like – because of the way you entered it – would you say you were break-fix at the beginning, before you got into the managed side, or did you just jump into it, then more on the managed side?

Daniel: Well, we were break-fix for the longest time, and getting out of that mindset was a key piece to our growth, realizing that I don’t want to wait for the doctor to call me and say that they have a problem. I want to know ahead of time that the hard drive is almost 100% full, and I want to be proactive, instead of reactive. And a lot of the tools that we’ve implemented and the direction that we went after those first five years of figuring it out, not having any business experience, what am I doing? I realized that taking that proactive approach really was going to be our best course of action going forward.

Doug: Okay, great. So, obviously, you specialize in this vertical. Is there any specific software or anything? I mean, obviously, the dental practices have their own set of software but, for running your business, is there anything you have to do special or different than maybe others would, in relation to the industry?

Daniel: Yes. When you’re in the dental/medical/healthcare vertical, you are beholden to HIPAA compliance, PCI compliance. Pretty much all verticals are PCI compliant, but certainly HIPAA compliance, HITECH Act, Omnibus rules. And so those provide another level of – I don’t want to say challenge – but another level of complexity. When we’re working with a pool-care company, we don’t have the same privacy and you don’t have to worry about security encrypted email and those types of things.

So I feel we have an advantage when we’re dealing with other MSPs that are out there, that are trying to get into the dental vertical. They may not have that experience yet on exactly what they need to do, not only to protect their clients but also to protect their own business. Because, since we work so much in this vertical, we’re bound by the same Omnibus, HITECH Act, HIPAA compliance rules and regulations, because we have access to their data and access to their systems. So there’s certainly an additional level of experience and knowledge that you have to build. But then there’s also an expense associated with that as well.

Doug: Yeah, definitely. So, from a standard MSP side, what kind of tools do you use for RMM, PSA, accounting, those types of things?

Daniel: We were an early adopter of LabTech when it was called LabTech. Now it’s …

Doug: ConnectWise Automate.

Daniel: Yeah, Automate. It’ll always be LabTech to me. We were an early adopter of that and that’s helped out quite a bit. We’re a ConnectWise shop as well. We use IT Glue, which has been an amazing tool for us. It really has resolved some of the challenges that maybe Automate had when it came to real, pertinent information and storing it. It’s really at your fingertips and, now that they integrate so well with IT Glue, it’s a no-brainer.

Doug: I was going to ask if you’re going to the IT Nation.

Daniel: This is the first year out of the last three that I’m not going. In fact, we’ve had a lot of other peer groups and continuing ed that we’ve taken this year. So, no, unfortunately not.

Doug: OK. It sounds like you’ve been using the ConnectWise family of products – LabTech – for a while. Do you re-evaluate the tools on a regular basis, just to see what’s out there?

Daniel: You have to. We did last year. We took a look at Autotask and Kaseya, just to kind of see what’s out there, because I think they are stronger in certain ways than LabTech is in certain ways, and vice versa. So we do, we look at it from, “Are we using it …? Can we be more efficient using something else? Does this work into our budget still?” And just the same way we evaluate any new potential tool, we evaluate our tools on a yearly basis when we go through our annual budget meetings – “Where are we and is this going to work for us in the direction we’re going in the future?”

Doug: So, going back to the business side a little bit, you’ve probably made quite a name for yourself within the dental and oral-care community within your area. So, do you have to do a lot of advertising, in terms of customer acquisition, or is it a lot of word of mouth?

Daniel: It’s both. We did a lot of internal marketing, up until this past year, till this past January, and then we’ve outsourced that to an MSP-specific marketing company. They really know what to look for when it comes to MSPs and they also have an amazing peer group that we’re able to share information and share knowledge, without the worry of competitive natures. So, answering your question – yes, we do.

Doug: Yeah, you still advertise but I’m sure word of mouth is still pretty good.

Daniel: Yes, not only word of mouth but also making relationships with, let’s say, contractors that might meet that prospect prior to a technology company meeting them and having good relationships with financing folks and accountants. Because all of those pieces of the puzzle come into play when either someone’s building a new office or acquiring a practice or even maybe doing a large retrofit of their pre-existing office and making it more digital and more hi-tech. So there’s a lot of those relationships that you need to always foster and nurture, as well, so that everybody can share information and referrals.

Doug: Yeah, technology and dental care. My previous dentist in the city where I used to live didn’t have a lot of technology. He was old-school. No issue, right? He was a great dentist. Then I moved down here to Florida. A dentist opened up a brand new office just down the street and it’s, like, technology everywhere. And it’s really amazing – the differences. He’s got screens, he can pull up the X-rays and show them to you as he’s doing it. It’s really exciting to see the technology and have them embrace it and use it.

Daniel: Absolutely. Not only for your overall better oral care, because you’re able to take a digital X-ray or a cone beam to see if they’re replacing an implant, where the nerve is and make sure that their measurements are correct, but also from a marketing standpoint. We have an orthodontist here that, in order to attach to their Wi-Fi, you have to check in through Facebook.

So, even requiring that is helping their marketing activities to try and drive new business and new patients to their office. So, technology is all over the place when it comes to dental. But we do have our fair share of those doctors that hold on to that paper chart like Linus’s blanket – they won’t give it up. Then you have all the new, younger dentists, for the most part, that are coming out of school, that are used to technology. They don’t want to run an office with paper. They want to implement the latest and greatest for profitability and efficiencies.

Doug: Now, is your wife still in the dental field, like you mentioned earlier?

Daniel: No, she is not. She has a pet-care company now, that she runs and manages. So no, not anymore.

Doug: Right. So, thinking about life in the managed services, what advice do you have for someone who’s just starting out? I know you started off in break-fix and you figured it out along the way but any good advice for someone just starting?

Daniel: I don’t know if it’s going to be good advice but I’ll try to give you some advice. Some of the things that I didn’t do in the beginning, that I wish I would have done. One of them is, I wish I would have run the company against a budget every year – create a budget and run that budget. It took us a handful of years flying by the seat of our pants to realize that, and once we did that, a lot of things aligned. Knowing when to ask questions, knowing at the point that you don’t know what you don’t know. Throughout our journey, we’ve hit a roadblock where what got us to that point wasn’t going to help us break through and get to the next level. And realizing that and bringing on business professionals. I don’t have an MBA but we brought in somebody with an MBA to identify where we’re going wrong and show us. Because again, we just couldn’t realize it and having that realization that you need to bring other people in, get other people’s advice and follow that because you just don’t know.

I started on the tech side. I didn’t start on the business side, like probably most of us. And it was a challenge and, thankfully, I had a lot of good people around me. My father owned a chain of retail jewelry stores and so I was always able to go back and say, “Hey, what would you do in this situation?” And I go back to my very first new-construction project. We were six months old and we won like a $60,000 – new office, all new computers, wiring, the whole nine yards and we had never done it before. And I remember talking to my dad that day and saying, “What am I going to do? What am I going to do?” And he said, “Just one day at a time, one foot in front of you, and you’re to get through it.” And that was excellent advice for my personality, just to be methodical and go down the list. “You know what to do? Just go down the list and make it.” And so those are a few pieces of advice to give. I don’t know if they’re great, but I hope that somebody can glean some good information off there.

Doug: No, no, definitely. It’s all good. So you mentioned a little bit about knowing when to ask and who to ask and those types of things. And I know you mentioned earlier about peer groups. That seems to be something within the managed services business – peer groups seem to be very popular, mostly because you’ve got people who are sole proprietors. They don’t have business experience or advertising experience or they just want to pick the heads of someone else, pick their brains, see what’s doing, right? So, peer groups, community – that’s something that’s been important for you in helping you grow your business?

Daniel: Oh my gosh, yes. We’re part of two peer groups. One is the Dental Integrators Association, a group of about 60, 65 companies across the country that primarily work in the dental vertical, oral-healthcare vertical. We have two meetings a year where we all get together. Some of us are competitors that work in the same neck of the woods. But we all sit down together and we talk about what’s happening in the industry, what software they’re using and what’s working.

We share so much information that I know that my business wouldn’t be the same business as it is today if it wasn’t for that peer group and another peer group that we are involved with. We didn’t – at least I didn’t – know about that 10 years ago. I wasn’t really aware of that and so having that realization that there are other folks out there that are having the same exact challenges, whether they’re challenges that I’m having or that our office administrators are having, or our help desk – “How do we manage these tickets and try and get everything down as quickly as possible?” Just being able to go to your contemporaries and ask these questions. They may say, “Yeah, we had that same problem. And this is what we did.” It’s invaluable. You can grow and move by leaps and bounds when you have that type of information and you’re around people that are willing to share it.

Doug: Yeah, and I think it’s great like you mentioned, there are general peer groups for running a managed service business and, as you mentioned, you’re in a specific peer group for the dental side. I didn’t even know that existed, so that’s great to know if someone out there didn’t know about it either.

Daniel: Yeah, the Dental Integrators Association. If you’re a dental-specific technology provider, really working in that vertical, take a look there. It’s worth its weight in gold for their membership.

Doug: OK, great. So, let’s switch topics a little bit and talk about technology. So, thinking about technology, whether it’s related to your business or not, what are some of the technologies you’re most excited about today?

Daniel: Excited about today. I would say – I don’t know that I’m excited about it but I know that it’s going to come down the pike – and that’s going to be advancements in two-factor authentication. Working in the dental, or the oral-healthcare vertical, being in the medical space, two-factor authentication is going to be here and some of the technologies that will allow you to walk into a room or into a certain proximity of a computer and have it log you into the computer, maybe log you into your practice-management software or your main software, and then when you leave that proximity, it locks you out.

That, to me, as small as that sounds, is exciting because, in our vertical, it’ll really, really create efficiencies for our teams. And it checks every box that they need from a compliance standpoint. A dental assistant or a hygienist can’t walk into a room, with you as a patient sitting in the chair, do some stuff on the computer and leave that computer up and open as they walk out. So, having that, I think that’s pretty interesting. And being able to integrate more IoT devices. That’s something that I’m excited about, whether it’s at the office or at home. We just got some Philips Hue light bulbs and have them hooked up to the TV and when an explosion happens on the TV, the lights change. It’s some of those things that are small, but they’re kind of interesting and fun.

Doug: Yeah, cool. So that’s what you’re excited about. What technology worries you?

Daniel: Cryptocurrency and cybersecurity. I mean, that’s been probably the drum that’s been beaten for years now, but, with the advancements and the new threats every single day, that’s the biggest thing that keeps me up at night when I’m thinking about my clients and thinking about their vulnerabilities or our vulnerabilities. It’s really the security side and having a good person in there that’s continually getting trained to stay up on it. We’re working locally here with the CIP and the FBI trying to become more accredited for them so that we can be on their mailing list when new threats come out.

Doug: Yeah, I know, that’s kind of the common refrain, right? There’s the technology, but then there’s also the people, and it’s not good that there are people that want to do this and exploit. But I guess there’s always a crime, so whether it’s cyber or not, it’s always going to exist.

Daniel: It absolutely is. When we go out and we speak at study clubs, that’s really the biggest thing that we talk about. They want to know what’s happening, even to the point where we will set up a demo where we capture and we break into a laptop in the meeting and turn their camera on for them, just to show how – five or six clicks – we can get into your system and just turn your camera on. That is very, very powerful when you’re dealing with people that may not really, truly understand. They see it on the news but they don’t understand what that vulnerability is that they have or what liabilities that they have when they’re dealing with all of their patient records in their PHR.

Doug: Great. So, it’s time for our rapid-fire round. This is meant to be fun. There’s no right or wrong answer. It’s six questions and just the first answer that comes to your head, and then we’ll wrap it up after that. So, are you ready?

Daniel: Absolutely.

Doug: All right. Apple or Android?

Daniel: Oh, Apple, please. No question.

Doug: Okay. Mac, Linux or Windows?

Daniel: Mac.

Doug: OK. Amazon or Azure or something else?

Daniel: I would say Amazon. We’re slowly getting into a few Azure projects, but so far, that’s where I’m comfortable. Amazon.

Doug: OK. Local backups or cloud or both?

Daniel: Oh, both. Image-based.

Doug: Yeah. Should you always virtualize, yes or no?

Daniel: For redundancy, your critical systems, yes.

Doug: All right. And the last one. Which is worse – printer support or vendor cold calls?

Daniel: Oh, man! Gosh, that’s a hard one! I think I have to say printer support. They’re nightmares. There are nightmares out there with printing. Yes, printer support, having to talk to a vendor. They end up giving me problems.

Doug: That one’s kind of 50/50, you know? Some people are, like, “I don’t mind. I got started doing printer support, so I love it.” Others are, like, they don’t like to talk to vendors and so they feel that’s worse. So before we leave here – we’ve had a really good discussion – anything else that you want to say here before we go?

Daniel: I think there’s a lot of value, especially in today’s competitive market, to really specialize and really focus on one vertical. Learn that vertical and try and become the largest player in that. And I don’t know that we would be the same company today if we didn’t really get into the oral-healthcare vertical, because so many peripheral devices that they need and have how to use them and how to integrate things and create efficiencies where, if you’re just working in general small businesses, you don’t get the opportunity to really do a deep dive in, and then see, “Oh, you know what? I just saw this piece of software. That integrates with that, and that will create efficiencies for your appointment recalls, or you’re filling the empty places on your schedule.” Really, really delving in and becoming strict on a specific vertical made the difference for us. And so I would suggest that for folks that are coming out and starting today.

Doug: Okay, great. Well, Dan, thank you very much, really appreciated the talk. I learned a lot and I hope our listeners learned a lot as well.

Daniel: I thank you for the opportunity. I hope they did, and thank you for your time.

Doug: All right, thanks.