Next Frontier in Massive MRR, MSP Automation, the Year in Review

Delay. I'm gonna give it like 10 seconds. And, um, and then other insight Tim gave me was to, um, when, when we sign off that, what is it, Tim? You gotta wait about 10 seconds. Yeah. It's whenever I know that when you, there's a delay obviously between when we speak and YouTube gets it. Mm-hmm. Um, but there's no delay when you close the presentation. So you'll be in the middle of a sentence and it'll just stop. All right. So we need to give it some time to catch up before you turn it off.

Alright, well good. Well, we're about 35 seconds into broadcasting it looks like, uh, people can see us and hear us, so we will get going as people come on in here. Um, so last week, if you didn't catch it, I highly encourage you to go to the YouTube live section. Uh, it was on business planning with Gary. It's arguably one of my favorite topics of the year. Probably his too.

But, um, it's, it's a just really, uh, I think a very important, um, uh, uh, cyber call to watch and really, uh, you know, take kind of a, an take inventory. Right. Gary would just say of where you are, what, what went right and wrong in 2024 and are you doing something about it for 2025? Um, said differently. What would you say, Gary? Yeah, Andrew.

Uh, what I would say is the difference between building a thriving business that creates, you know, passion and enthusiasm and purpose and financial stability for every, an opportunity for everybody involved and not is just really some principles and disciplines that we talked about. And if you put 'em in place, everyone can fulfill more of their potential.

And, um, you know, it's while I'm still hanging around the industry, Andrew, to try to see if we can get a few more people moving in that direction, man. Yeah. Very, really, really cool. And what did you say you'll end the year with in the peer group? How many? About 800 Worldwide. That's incredible. That's incredible. Good for you. Okay. So You know me, Andrew, whenever someone says it can't be done, I'm in. Yeah, that's right.

Well you remember in like 2011, um, you, you know, you could do, you did it back when, you know, managed services was early on. Um, remember that challenge. Absolutely. Yeah. We had a lot of challenges, Andrew, we met along the way. Absolutely. Alright, well one of the things that you mentioned about, um, and I think Phyllis was asking you, uh, last week was, you know, Gary, looking into the future, what should MSPs be focusing on if they're really gonna have some differentiation?

And you mentioned automation, um, you've mentioned it many times. We've talked about it many times on here. But we, you kind of led into not only will we see automation continue to have massive impact on efficiency within the MSP, um, as far as, um, you know, making them more, uh, more profitable, but more secure when you doing, you know, secure onboarding, secure offboarding, um, and, and just, you know, again, again, building better process in the business.

But then you went on to say that you believe that as much of an impact as security was to MRR since the pandemic, you know, taking average seat prices probably in the one 50 range now in the 3, 2 50 to 300 range, you feel automation could be even a bigger opportunity, uh, on the revenue side of, on, On the, yeah, so on the efficiency side, I feel like there it's positive or negative. Like if you don't progress with the industry, you'll be falling behind from a competitive standpoint. Mm-hmm.

So, because I I'm saying to keep up right over time, right. With competitors, um, it's not how you fix your inefficiencies that should be done in other ways. Uh, this is gonna be like, almost like the internet or electricity. It's gonna be just another layer. Mm-hmm. Uh, that we, that that is built in. And then on the other side, yeah, there's a revenue opportunity that someone's gonna get. Either the MSPs are gonna get it or someone else.

And we have such a competitive advantage, Andrew, in terms of owning the customer base. So our cost of sales is so low and there's nobody else in the SMB that that can do it. And when it gets unlocked, you're talking about, I think, you know, adding 50% to the total addressable market for MSPs, that hasn't happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really, it's really fascinating. It's exciting, it's fascinating.

Um, so one of the things I, I wanted to do then I reached out to Tim at, at Roost and, and said, Tim, do you, you know, you, you work, you know, with a lot of MSPs, is anybody on the fairway here? Are, is any, are any of the MSPs starting to generate revenue with their customers, um, uh, when it comes to automation? And he said, uh, absolutely. Um, we, let me see if, uh, Graham from Source Paths will come on. Um, and lo and behold, that's, uh, that's what we're gonna talk about today.

We're gonna talk about both sides of the equation, Gary, so let's get on into it. So quick introductions. Graham, really appreciate you joining us today. Can you share a little about yourself? We'll go over to Tim and then hand it off to Gary. Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Uh, Graham Rosenberg, um, been in the MSP space since about 2016. Um, kind of have Worn when, when you were in grade school. Yeah, yeah. It was my first, uh, real job, uh, non non-restaurant service related industry job.

Even though I quickly learned, MSP space is very service involved. Uh, at the, when I first interviewed, I didn't think that was the case, but, um, started as, you know, help desk technician, worked my way up to service delivery coordinator, um, then Rose, the director of operations, and now I'm over here at Source Pass as director of the Robotic Operations Center. That's awesome. That's awesome, man.

And you guys are just To say that you have that role, like you have a role that didn't exist a few years ago. I love that. Yeah, A hundred percent. Yeah. I, Yeah. Go, go, go, go Greg. Yeah, when I took a, when, uh, so I worked for an MSP that was acquired by Source Pass last year, and, uh, this department did not exist before that acquisition, so we, we built it from the ground up over here. Yeah. That's really cool.

Tim, I know you're gonna introduce yourself, but can you also, before you're done, talk about, you know, we, we've seen vcso, uh, I'm sorry, we've seen VCIO Vcso and talk about what you're starting to see, um, in terms of, you know, so many of the, this eco, this big ecosystem that you're creating, which is really, it's really exciting and fascinating. There's implementation companies, there's new departments, there's new roles.

Um, so Tim, uh, kick it off in terms of who you are and then, and end it if, and end it if you would there. Yeah. So yeah, I've been in it for quite a while now, since the, the mid nineties. Uh, don't let my lack of as much gray as I less gray than I, I had a week ago, uh, fool you. Um, but, uh, about, uh, well, it was about 2005 I started working for a company, um, was not an MSP, it was a consulting company. Uh, but, uh, we became an MSP over time became pretty large.

Uh, they've now, uh, got, uh, rolled into, you know, another, uh, conglomeration of MSPs. Uh, so been in the space for a while, seen it grow from nothing, being just a technician somewhere to, uh, building out a managed services platform and, you know, build voiceover IP systems and everything that MSPs do. Uh, then came over to the dark side, uh, couple years ago to, to come here to roost, uh, be a vendor. Um, but it's been a lot of fun.

Um, so, uh, but, uh, well last week, uh, we were having a kind of a catch up call with Graham, kinda looking through his environment, and I started to see all these integrations that had nothing to do with MSP things, uh, like, uh, done in Bradstreet, some accounting software, some other things. So we started talking about that and, uh, you know, thought he had a really good story to tell about, you know, automating for his, his customers.

Uh, so that kinda leads into, you know, some of the things that we're working on. Yeah.

You know, we've had, uh, the VC IO program at, uh, MSPs for a while, and then when cybersecurity got big, and one thing that I, uh, built at the, the MSPI was at was a virtual ciso, uh, type engagement where really the idea is just to have a set of a seat at the table for those strategic discussions, right, Gary, where we, you know, we need to be that trusted advisor as an MSP to our customers, um, and allow, you know, take off the sales hat and get into the business hat and talk about what is it gonna take to drive your business forward.

Uh, so with that, we, um, we're really starting to talk a lot about now is, uh, the virtual chief automation officer type role, right? Where, um, we see chief automation officers a lot in, uh, upstream, some of the Fortune 500 companies have them now, uh, where we're ready to start having those conversations leading the, the conversation on how to do these things at the SMB level. Very cool. And then Gary o over to you. I mean, this is really what we've seen for years now, right?

It gets, things get adopted in enterprise and roll down, right? I mean, security is probably the biggest one where, you know, someone like Phyllis has been doing it for, you know, years and years and years at the enterprise and at at government agencies. But really the MSPs in 2016 ish was when we started to glom onto, you know, really starting to understand frameworks and the role of security really needed to play. So let me let you take it over from here, guy. Yeah, Yeah, Andrew.

And, and just like that, the, the differe is we're gonna see this move faster than security. And even now, Andrew, I'm going to guesstimate, right? Based on what we see that at least conservatively half of MSPs really haven't seen the impact that they should from security services in terms of growth and profitability, and the other half have seen it, and then the top 15%, it literally has transformed their business. And I think we're gonna see the, like, that seems to be the trend, right?

Because there's a base level of like what we talked about on the last call in terms of, you know, running a good business, understanding principles. And so I wanna make sure we touch on some of those today with Tim and, and, and Graham. So, uh, Graham, I, I'll start with you just to kind of get started. Why did you get involved with RPA and and automation? Like what made you personally decide to go down this path? You know, at the time I didn't realize I was getting into RPA.

Um, I took over kind of running our PSA workflow rules at the time and realized how limited in fashion they were, and it's like, how can we take this to the next level? So we started playing with sending web hooks out of our PSA into Power Automate and Microsoft's ecosystem, and just started building some very basic workflows. Like, if this type of ticket comes in, send a teams message to this channel. Um, and that's really kinda how it began.

Um, from there we dabbled a little bit into, and this is before the days of, you know, the cloud radials and the other client portals out there. We, uh, just started building front end forms for our customers to fill out, um, new user onboarding, user termination is kind of where that started. Uh, originally they were just creating tickets and then we said, wait a second, we're getting this data in a very, you know, easy to understand format, same format every single time.

We can probably use this and start automating some things. And that's kind of how, how it began. Yeah. That's super, uh, interesting, right? Like that's really how things do begin. You start in one direction and then you see what changed, like what other technologies are available, you know, to, to extend it to.

But if you don't, if you haven't done that, if you're not always pushing down those roads of efficiency, you don't discover things like, I don't think you discover 'em in the same, in the same kind of way. So second question I have for you is, outside of RMM, there's a lot of manual process happening with MSPs a lot, right? So talk about how you've seen automation maybe ease or eliminate some of that.