EP215 - How to Optimise Relationship and Revenue So Everyone Wins
with Luis Giraldo & Ian Luckett

IAN: In this episode of the IT experts podcast, we help you work out how to improve that relationship and revenue with your existing clients so that everybody wins.

INTRO: Welcome to the IT Experts podcast, the only podcast to help MSPs scale to 1 million and if already there, get to 5 and go fast. At the end of the day, isn't it all about building a business that works for you rather than you for it? I hope you enjoy the show.

IAN: So good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. Welcome to the IT Experts podcast. Apparently this might be a spicy Monday podcast, according to Luis, who is now on the show, Luis Geraldo, welcome to the show. How are we doing?

LUIS: Ian, it's fantastic to be here. Thanks so much for having me. I'm looking forward to this very spicy discussion, hopefully.

IAN: Yes, exactly. So why are we talking today? So we met up a couple of weeks ago now. And we start a conversation around customer service, MSPs, customer service, yawn, MSPs, I'm the best customer service that I delivered to my clients. They're really great. And yet we know that a great account management process as you do from end to end can really help build great stickiness, build great recurring revenue – the golden goose we talk about every single year. Just go around, redo, you know, update and innovate your stack. So it makes you more spicy and maintain that 97% retention rate we hear about in MSPs, but we've got a different view on that today because. We're going to challenge some of those things. And Louis said, Ian, just let's see where this goes because it could go very interestingly.

But before we get into this and before we get into the real detail about, are you really good at customer service? Are you really good at account management? Could you be doing better? And we're going to answer some of those questions today and help you out with that. Tell everybody who are you, what you do and who do you help?

LUIS: Oh, thanks Ian. My name is Luis. I'm chief evangelist at Skillpad, I've been there for about three years, but I've also had a long career as an MSP owner. I'm a proud former MSP now. And so I've spent a lot of time in the trenches, so to speak, and trying to figure these things out. And now I just get to really have conversations is the best way I can describe a lot of what I'm doing these days. I sit down in peer groups and conferences and even just one on one conversations with MSPs to try and unlock some of the maybe mindset to growth opportunity and challenges that they're going through. I talked to so many folks that I hear a lot of things. And I start to, frameworks and ideas start to form in the back of my mind. And it's always interesting to explore those things with folks as we get into the conversation.

IAN: So let me, we've got a bit of a structure. This is going to be one of these shows where you've heard me say this before the listeners, we've got a structure and there's a pretty good chance we might just delete that structure and just start again. Louise, how, in your opinion, if we were to take a typical MSP and you were to say, and they would say to you, we're very good at customer service. How would you continue that conversation? What would you do to get to the spicy part of, let's just rip the plaster off and say that, MSP say I'm good at customer service we serve in everybody, we're doing really good, great IT support, pick the phone up on time, blah, blah, blah. That's just not enough now, is it in 24, 25, that is just not enough. How would this conversation pan out?

LUIS: I think you've just said it it's table stakes. I think what we thought was special 10 years ago is like turning on the light switch today, people expect things to work more of technology just works straight out of the box. There's less for it companies to quote unquote configure and manage. And I think a lot of what is or used to be productivity management in IT is really just now automatic and people expect their stuff to work. I make this joke from time to time that when I had the MSP, we used to put these monitors on people's internet connections so we could be notified if something went down, and based on the subscription level that we had, we might get like a five minute interval on the pings or the checks, right? It turns out customers call us within three seconds. If their internet goes down, but the tolerance that customers have increasingly deteriorates for, things not working. So these have become table stakes and I think we still have this idea that customer service is super important. Yes it is, but it's not the thing that's going to keep the customer for you because pretty much everybody can promise that today.

IAN: ‘Cause customer service is actually, when we break this down and , this isn't, we're talking around your existing client base here and we're talking largely around account management. So it's account relationship management, or maybe we can use some different words, but customer service is almost what happens when it goes wrong, isn't it? Which is expected, right? Something goes wrong, the ambulance service come out, they fix you, they put you back together again and away you go. And if nothing goes wrong, no one will experience that customer service, will they? And when things do go wrong, they go, actually they were, that was what I was expecting them to do. And you have this expectation exchange, don't you? What's your view on where customer service starts at ends or where is it embedded within, the whole account management piece?

LUIS: Yeah. I think customer service is just the MSPs side of the deal, right? This is what we were literally wrote an SLA or contract with the customer to provide. And so again, even contractually, it's a minimum expectation that they, that exists between the customer and the client. And I think this is. But potentially the reason why a lot of customers question what value they're getting or what am I paying you for is because when there is nothing going wrong they don't get to experience that customer service. I think that's brilliant that you've articulated that way because we don't often think of that now, talking about the account management process. I think there's layers to it, right? Account management. And I just had a great conversation with Joe Burns from reformed it, not too long ago...

He explained this so brilliantly, he said, the difference, there's two kinds of MSPs, that sell a base plan and then end up spending all their account management time and effort trying to fill the white space, meaning trying to standardize a stack and sell everything that they should have sold at the beginning to that customer. And this becomes very transactional where there's the MSPs that come in with a very mature and good understanding of what tech alignment the customer needs to have. And you don't negotiate on this very much. And now they spend more time actually maintaining the relationship and understanding how to help the customer achieve some of those business goals and spend more time I don't know, poking at processes and unearthing issues and challenges between departments or things that we would have not had the chance to ask if we were just running a white space account management process. So I think there's those two things to consider on the account management side, but from the customer service perspective, with those two things are often disconnected as well. So it's interesting to consider that your average account manager tasked with filling the white space of products and services that the MSP offers to the customer is often disconnected from the service side of the house. And so when you come into an account to have a conversation and maybe there was a service issue and you're not aware of it, or you can't really speak to solving that problem because your task and you have a quota is to go and sell these additional products and services that creates a very transactional feeling for the customer. Add to the challenge, the fact that the majority of MSPs, counterintuitively, forgive me will reduce the engagement frequency with smaller customers. Because they think, oh, their stuff is not changing very much. They're just once a year is fine for us to get together with them. Guess what that does to loyalty and trust and relationships. It actually erodes it to not speak on a regular basis. And so there's an interesting trend of actually increasing the touch points. Even if you make them lighter and just, connect with those smaller customers on a more regular basis, because I think you build a relationship more easily this way. And you're top of mind when those questions come up or those issues come up. Man, there's so much stuff to explore here. I think we've already thrown the structure out the window.

IAN: No, yeah. So we, it's currently just off the four o'clock UK time on a Wednesday evening, we're going to run this show ‘till Thursday morning. It's going to be a long one, so go and tell you, go and tell your parents you're going to be late home. Do you know what, the frameworks that we use at the Growth Hub, around account management? Yes. You've got the white space selling in there and you've got then this whole bit of a mental block with most MSPs where they see a new thing and they see a new process and okay now we're going to do some regular meetings and we're going to grade the clients and all of this kind of good stuff and then they freeze because they look in their rear view mirror and they go, nah, he's been with me for 20 years. He's not going to buy this. Nah, they're not going to do that. If I ring them up now and I say to them, hey, Jack, we're going to be doing a business review once a quarter. He's going to go, you're only just going to sell me some stuff, right? So we always say, look, let's just apply the methodology of great account management moving forwards. So when they buy from you, they know what they're getting, they know how it's working. You've got that clear expectation exchange. But how do MSPs reverse engineer a brand new fancy shiny process that's going to just hit the nail running back to a load of the old guard who have done the same thing. They've been quite happy, they're not going to anyone else, cause I don't really know, they know and trust you and things like that. But you also know the amount of value that you can provide to them. We're going to talk about partnering in a minute. So that was a little bit we've got on the show. So we will cover that in a bit. How do they go back into their existing client base and I guess resell the value that you were talking about a minute ago so that I give a toss about them, right?

LUIS: So there's two ideas that I've been exploring in my recent conversations and these seem to be hitting the nail on the head when people realize, yeah, you're right. And it's what the first thing is, once you have been relegated. Because your existing account management or QBR process was purely operational or tactical or just white space selling. There's no chance that you can reelevate this process to be a strategic business value creator for the customer. At this point it's going to be very difficult. And I think we saw this in a couple of different pivots that we've gone through in our space. For example, going from break, fix to manage services, we all agree that it's very difficult to convert a customer that's pretty happily paying for break, fix IT suddenly to pay, a regular monthly fee for what they would not necessarily consider anything more special or, more value or anything of that nature. And I think the same process exists here. You've created, you've made your own bed. You created the situation where these meetings have a very specific focus and they are of no value to the executive level person at that client business. And so one of the things is to try and. actually create a separate engagement to have that true strategic conversation. And there's a couple of ways to do it.

One, you specifically have a cross departmental meeting, especially if the client is growing. And I get that a lot of MSPs have small customers, 10 people, 15 people, and they don't have a ton of departments. There's not a ton of cross departmental collaboration to be had in that situation, but if you do have a 30, 50, 75 person client business, there's a lot of this organic growth that you've missed in the process. You've not been talking to any of the other department heads as they grew. And here's an opportunity to do that in a separate cadence, in a separate meeting engagement. But the other idea here is potentially going to the customer and saying, hey you're growing, I'd like to be a part of at least one of your annual meetings that are strategic in nature with all your executives. And it might be a team of three executives, but I think the engagement of being in that customer's mindset, as opposed to the MSP's mindset is very different. So there's a couple of ideas that I think could help you unearth the opportunity to re-engage executives on a truly strategic business outcome type of business. But I will caution MSPs that I think the focus on standardization and process and all this stuff might actually force you or lead you down trying to do this as a big bang across all your customers at the same time. And I would caution against that if you're going to redefine this process, pilot it, test it with two or three customers that are the most receptive to maybe reengaging at a different level document it. Peter Kujawa talks about 15 customers being the magic number where something, a process inside the MSP is ready for scale, because at this point you've documented well, you have a good understanding of what needs to happen between all the people inside your MSP, but also on the client side. And at this point, it's easier to go and deploy it across the board, but we tend to over rotate on trying to deploy it across the board to all customers. And then we just take on too much. And then it's just, we don't rise to the level of our objectives. We fall to the level of our processes. That's a quote that I really love.

IAN: Love that, there's a mic drop moment. If ever I heard one, I love it. What's in your view, if we, if you and I were going to go and start up an MSP God, no, you don't want to do that. No, that would be the worst thing you could possibly do. Cause we just have all this tech in our own office. And now that, anyway, let's just, if we were to start up an MSP today and we were going to, we said, oh, we've got everything in place. We know our target market is yada. If we were having a conversation about what. The average business, 25, 75 seats, whatever it might be in 2025, really want from an MSP bearing in mind, they don't know what the technicalities and all of that stuff that they don't really care about anyway, needs. If we had a reverse billboard reverse marketing plan, what is it that the end customers would be telling MSPs screaming at them? This is what I actually want. What does that look like?

LUIS: Yeah man I think this is definitely a levels question because your average, under 20 people customer with a limited strategic process of their own, maybe has different ideas of what they want or need today, they haven't paused a moment to understand, where are we going? They're mostly just fighting fires themselves. And so what's interesting about this is, we can come in on our white horse and really save the day, but there's a really obvious separation in maturity levels between the MSP and the customer. And when they're not moving forward or they're just continuously entertaining ideas, but never moving anything forward. The MSP gets really frustrated. And so we stopped paying attention to them. And then that actually perpetuates the issue of a bad relationship with the customer. But what does the customer want? I think, let's try and explore that a bit. I think they want a relationship. And I'm maybe going to try and talk about the timeless things, the things that maybe won't go away. They want to feel like they're being taken care of, that their environment is secure and safe, they want to feel that there's trust that they can there's been maybe a habit of delegation between the client or maybe let me change the word, not delegation abdication. I think clients tend to abdicate their IT to IT Providers and we've let them and so this is really difficult now to turn the tables on the client and come and say, hey, we need you to be part of your own rescue here because it's actually quite difficult to do if they've just been used to handing things over, here's our insurance renewal form, fill it out, let me know when it's done. Like this is complete abdication of IT Responsibilities. And I think we need to hold them accountable. I think, I have a 12 year old and it's interesting that I learn a lot about the psychology of children. And one of the things is that children like and need structure and they perform better when there is a little bit of accountability that is given to them. There's all these studies about when children have chores, they grow up to be more responsible adults. And so it's interesting that I think we let customers do whatever they want. And then we pay for the results of that, of course.

IAN: Do you know what was really interesting in what you just said there that we can either elaborate on, or we could just leave it as a bit of a mic drop was just that, yes, you might have your A, B's and C's clients, ones that you like, want to sack. And you might grade them through profitability or noise or whatever it might look like. But the one thing that I just pulled out of there is understand not only where the customer is at, but where they're at the size of their business. So if you've got a 50 seat solicitors practice for an illegal law firm, for example, that could be a very different business to a 50 seats call center, for example, in terms of revenue, maturity, needs, wants, all of that side of things. So yes, you've got your a B's and C's, but to really get in and understand that customer, just step back and understand their business in terms of their sector and what they're doing, but understand the size of them as well, because they might not be interested in a lot of the security kind of stuff. They might be so big that it's like a given or something like that and it's just interesting we started talking about the small business. Obviously that's going to go to medium and large businesses, but you could have a large, multi-million pound business. It's got 10 people in it, and what do they want compared with a logistics company or anything like that? So it's interesting to pull that one out of there. There's a different, you've got the white space selling and this takes that to another dimension, doesn't it?

LUIS: I think what's interesting too, is with those smaller customers that are maybe going through their own operational challenges dealing with a lot of their own fires day to day. If you're not talking to them regularly, they will assume that you're not responsible or involved or can't be contacted, to address or answer a question about any certain or given thing. But what's interesting about a regular conversation, I think, is that more of the nuanced day to day things come out in just regular discussion, as opposed to a one time yearly thing. It makes me think of anybody that has kids has this frustration. How was school today? What did you do? Oh, I don't remember. And so like business owners are exactly the same way. They're so busy. Imagine a year later, if you had a January meeting they didn't talk to them again until next year. What do you think they would be able to tell you about the nuanced changes or operational shifts that are happening in their business? Absolutely nothing, they might tell you the thing that they did this morning and that's it. And so it's such a missed opportunity. And I think this is the, maybe the engagement methodology and it's not so much about the profitability cause I'd say, people tend to do ABC clients based on profitability, but I think we ought to also, modify a bit of the engagement model based on the size and maturity of the business because we try to apply this broad paint stroke of this is our process. We're going to do the same way for all our clients. And that the reality is it doesn't necessarily fit for everybody.

IAN: Yeah. How, so here's another question that's just popped to my mind. I said, so we hear this a bit, right? So you're the end customer. I'm the MSP, the best thing about our services is that you are never going to have to ring us because everything is all in place, everything's all going to be up and running and, I know you've just said to me, but what value do I get from you, Ian but that's We've got it all set up, so you don't need to hear from us. That's great account management, right?

LUIS: Go. This is terrible. Are you trying to trigger me? Ian, is that's what's happening right now?

IAN: That's what I'm hearing. That's what we hear sometimes. You hear people say it and you do, and we do step back and go, really? And where's the value in that, right?

LUIS: I think this is one of those counterintuitive things because as, maybe accidental technical business owners, we tend to want to be the hero and the hero means we solve the thing once and done forever. We, you don't have to ask me about this, the root cause analysis and proper fix. And I think those things are only interesting to the MSP, like the customer still had to go through the pain of whatever that problem brought in the first place. The fact that you fix it forever is whatever. Sure, that's actually contractually what your job is.

IAN: It's forgotten about the school conversation, right?

LUIS: Yeah, exactly. So I don't know. It's just I try to put myself in the shoes of the customer and those things are just don't seem exciting. And it's interesting. I was just remembering one of my old customers, they were a medical focus practice. They started at about 15 people and by the time, I sold the MSP, they were about 150 people. So they grew quite a bit over the years and it didn't matter what I said at some point the business owner would send me an email because one of their colleagues had just been, hacked or had a security incident or something. It's are we protected? Are we doing these things? I'm like, so I had two ways to answer that question. It's I've been telling you for the last six months that those are the things we've been doing and you're not listening or as I could just go in and use the opportunity to double down on the fact that we are delivering this value and provide a little bit of business centric understanding. I keep talking about this a lot lately, which is we tend to forget to have risk conversations with customers. I think they are all very amenable and understanding of a risk conversation. And we tend to forget to do that. We love the technology aspect of solving problems. But we often forget, to connect it to a risk or a tolerance for risk or an intolerance for risk at the business side. So that's an interesting conversation

IAN: That really is, and it leads me on to the s word that everybody “S” word can be mean two things. It can be many things. And now everyone's thinking, what the hell is he going to say next? “S” word could mean I'm going to, I'm going to make you a bit scared about security. Is it a thing that you care about as a, as an incline? Is it a thing that you worry about until you've been compromised or you've had a breach or you've had a problem like that? A lot of MSPs lead on the security. We're going to keep you safe and secure. Some of the words we use before great relationship, great, you're just going to take care of things. Everything's going to be working when you turn your phone on. Everything's all working well, what you just said there was a different, it just took me back to my kind of corporate days. Maybe, I don't know. Let's, let me rephrase the question. Is it a risk conversation or is it a security conversation? Cause the security is the stack is the tech, isn't it? Whereas the risk will get them interested about what risks have you got in your business, talk to me about that.

LUIS: I find it ironic that we tend to despise, when I say we, I put on the MSP hat, we tend to despise the vendors that come at us with a point security solution and say, we prevent all the breaches, nothing's no, nothing's going to go wrong. We see a hundred percent of issues and we block them all before anything happens to your fleet. And we just scoff at that as MSPs, because we know that it's not about preventing. It's more about resilience. It's more about recoverability. And that is the big shift that's happening in security today. But then we turn around and we go to our customers. We're going to keep you safe and secure. And it's basically the same promise. It's just disguised in a slightly different way, but I would encourage folks to think about whether instead of saying we're going to keep you safe and secure is. We're going to help you understand and manage the risk that exists in the industry today, in your business, in your technology, and this is a continuous thing. I think one of the opportunities to try and encourage or inculcate with customers early on is that managing risk is also not a project. It's a program. It's a mindset shift that this, there is no end date to the managing of the risk inside the business. And I think this is one of those things that creates sort of the need to have a continuous conversation. With customers about, hey, we introduced this new project into your environment. And this is solving all these problems, but it also has a risk profile of its own. Here are a couple of things that, that potentially the downtime is a little more costly because perhaps there's a little bit more dependency on this virtual machine that we've now deployed, things like that, understand putting everything in that mindset of risk management, I think is a very interesting way to get a higher level of engagement from customers.

IAN: And then you can discuss around the risk they've got in their business and then how technology can map and solve and overcome those, and mitigate those risks, essentially is what it's all about. Very interesting. We are just absolutely just scratching the ice top of the iceberg on this. And I know that in a minute, when we get off this, we're just going to book another show because we can go deeper in some of this stuff. Cause this is like super deep. How can MSPs measure. Client success. Yeah. Everyone's okay. They've all stayed. No one's a problem in making money. No one's left. We've got great client retention. Yeah, we're brilliant at this. It's great. Is that good enough?

LUIS: No, I I think this is what's changing, right? And I don't want to sound like everybody should be doing this because I think we, we have to evolve into it over time and, the buyer profile, the buyer ICP is changing. The boomers are bequeathing their businesses to the millennials and millennials bequeathing. buy and engage very differently than we've been used to for the last 10, 20 years. So I think all these things have to be factored into the engagement model and how you measure success, so to speak. But there's obviously categories, you have your operational stuff no doubt. And this is the things that we already know how to understand, like the ticket metrics and SLAs and the proactive resolutions of things that hit the board and you saw before they became an issue. I think all these things have some value but they're ultimately, in hindsight, none of this stuff is trying to solve a future business challenge or business issue. I think if you were to measure. Customer success and I'm separating the terminology here because customer service is one thing and that's what we've known to be the service desk and ticket metrics and SLAs and the stuff we're contractually trying to meet. But there's a very nuanced conversation around the future looking stuff and I think it requires shared goals. I don't think it's ultimately only on the MSP to say these are our KPIs for customer engagement. I think you'd have to have shared goals with the customer to measure these things together. And then it's the engagement of meetings. And this is where you can hold the customers accountable to some of this stuff... Hey, we expect you to attend at least one strategic meeting per year, where we're going to talk about your future plans your roadmap, hopefully these are the things that are happening quarterly and not just the white space account management meeting, but truly, riffing and iterating on the strategic process understanding the technology roadmap, I, there's probably few MSPs that will not admit that they've been called with a two week notice that the customer is opening a new location or a new office in some other part of town. And then as the heroes that we are, we figured out we source all the equipment, we deploy the network as and we stand there waiting for a pat on the back and be like that's what I expected you to do. So thanks, and so this is, I think a challenge for sure.

The cost versus value delivered. I think is an interesting one, very rarely do I hear MSPs actually spending the time to go talk about the thing that they just delivered and what was the value or what was the metric or the data that improved as a result of that project, because project teams are hilarious. They do their thing and they're like, okay, what's next? I got to move on to the next day and the account manager who's bless their souls are just trying to fill the white space are rarely talking about the things that were just delivered. They're just looking to sell the next thing. And so there's a big opportunity to tell a story around the data. Hey, we just did this MFA project and here's an interesting stat before we deployed the conditional access, you were having. A thousand attempted logins, failed logins per month across all your user accounts. And that's now reduced to zero because conditional access prevents all these attempts from, somewhere in the Middle East or in Africa or what have you. So these are interesting things to talk about because there's a clear way to attach the value to the investment that was just made by the customer and justify, what they're spending money on. We rarely do that, that was a big eye opener in conversations recently because people was like, I can't believe we haven't thought of that. I can't believe we're not doing that. So I think that's an interesting way to gauge engagement from a KPI perspective is does the customer agree that you're delivering some value and not just your opinion of whether you think you're delivering value. And then of course there's relationship metrics, or relational metrics, things like, are you actually doing an MPS type of thing, or are you getting CSAT on your tickets? Maybe you spend a little time and you give your customers a customer effort score for all intents and purposes, let them feel a little bit of the pain that this is supposed to be a two way relationship. And it feels like we're just the ones doing all the heavy lifting here. And of course, if you're measuring retention and churn, all these things start to play a role. It's interesting that as MSPs get larger is when they start to have to fill the leaky bucket of churning customers, because we tend to over rotate on process and we lose the nuanced relationship management and the thing that made the MSP special in the first place which was really important, really, ultimately, the relationship, right? And then there's, I think, the intangible things. I don't know, advocacy are customers actually referring you? Are the willingly giving testimonials? And these things happen when conversations are frequent and regular, not when you talk to them once a year to ask them for a favor. And so I think that's It just increases the case for continuing to speak more regularly to customers. Even if you have to just lighten the touch a little bit, just talk to them more regularly.

IAN: Absolutely love it. And you know what you were just saying then about, demonstrating that ROI, giving them before and after stats, telling stories, you've got to be constantly building that relationship with them and embedding that relationship. But that's content, right? So you don't like this sales and marketing thing. Go and build a case study about it. Whack it on your website and tell everybody what great work you're doing with your existing clients and break that into loads of different pieces of content and stories and keep using those stories because that's how you resonate. Sorry, we're just spun off into a bit of sales and marketing them for a minute. No, it's everything that you

LUIS: Before you go on other idea, I just recalled we had I was at Evolve EMEA in Portugal a couple weeks ago and the ConnectWise team brought in this wonderful comedian, Ben Handlin, who actually speaks about engagement and storytelling and he does it through, magic and other stuff, which is really engaging. But he, one of the things that he asked us to do is take out a piece of paper. And at the end of the thing circle, the thing that most sticks out for you of the things that we talked about and the thing that I circled was this idea or concept of telling stories about one person, not about a thousand people. And I thought that was so interesting. And he goes on to explain it. Even when you're going all over to have a meeting with their customers, don't speak about all our customers are doing this, all our 150 clients are doing X, Y, or Z rather tell the story about one customer. It's so much easier for that person to understand and see themselves in the story when it's about one individual or one company than when it's about the whole world. And I thought that was really insightful.

IAN: Yeah that's very true because it's, it's around resonating with that individual and that person saying, I want that, they're not going to send. I think we want that. Because it's too big a thing to think about, right? If you want to be that person, that Jack, that Steve, that Mary, that whoever it might be, you're going to resonate and go, I want what they've got just before we wrap up everything we've spoken about has been absolute gold. Love it. There isn't a, but and there we go. That did it a lot of MSPs talk about partnering with your business. So we understand your business is everything that you've just talked about, the blueprint for partnering, with an MSP to build that relationship and that revenue, or is there more to partner in than some of the elements that we've just scratched the surface on today?

LUIS: I think if you asked customers, partnership looks like to them, it might surprise you because I think we have our own ideas and assumptions of what partnering should feel like or look like. And it's interesting that maybe we do certain things or we assume certain things about the relationship and how to go about it that we never communicate back or we never engage the customer on. And therefore it's, it's a one way street in many cases. I think partnership looks like, a true understanding of the moving parts of the business. I often refer to this as like getting into the first principles of your customers. How does money move inside their business? How do they make money? I think answering, being able to answer some of these questions means that you have a true understanding of their business their vertical, their niche, whatever it is. And I think that puts you on a level to have a conversation that is very different than just trying to fit whatever prepackaged products or services that your account manager is trying to fill white space with into the existing customers. It's just such a different approach altogether that I think that is what true partnering is about. It's really about a customer centric view of the relationship and not an MSP centric view of the relationship.

IAN: Fantastic. Luis, absolutely brilliant show. Thank you very much for your insights. And as we said, we could have, you all thought we were going to be late home tonight. You're not, we're going to let you go early. So that's great. Thank you very much for your insights and time, not only preparing, but you're in your insights today, if an MSP is listening to this and going, yeah, we're good at account management, or I need to get started with account management. What's the playbook on this? What's the top three things that comes to mind for you that we need to do soon as we hit the stop in play button, that's providing you do that and don't just carry on listening to more podcasts. But anyway.

LUIS: Yeah. Fight me in the comments. If you think I'm wrong fight me in the comments. I think this is the thing that's interesting. That I've started to realize is that I'm more and more comfortable in the gray area of life in a little bit of ambiguity, a lot of the stuff I'm reading is suggests, hey, the struggle is actually okay. You don't have to have everything figured out. You just have to embrace and enjoy the struggle. And I think this is one of those areas is, don't let standardization be your enemy. When you think about some of these things, go and test it, pilot it. In fact, this is something I talk about doing with customers a lot. We often want to come in and do these big bank projects. Guess what? The customer is afraid of the impact to their business, of the change when there's too much stuff going on. And we are also afraid when we go and make these big. Process and operational changes inside of our MSPs without understanding how it's going to ultimately change the net effect of it. And so go test it, pilot it, try it in small doses and refine the process. And once you increase that deployment depth, you can start to do more across the board. I think just being iterative is the key piece here. Test it, try it.

IAN: Fantastic. Love it. Thanks again for your time. If anybody wants to get in contact with you and continue the conversation, and I think we mentioned rift in the comments, if they want to do that, test me out, challenge me, fight me, do whatever they need to do. How do they get in contact with you, mate?

LUIS: LinkedIn is a great place. My DMS are open or hit me up by email luisgiraldo@skillpad.com Please put that in the show notes, just any time I'm at an event, feel free to come and say, you said this on Ian's show, and I think you're dead wrong. Bring it, I'll buy you a drink if you tell me I'm wrong.

IAN: Bring it on and take a microphone with you because then we can hear the reply and then we'll get that back on the show. Love it. Loads of value bombs in there as always go back, listen to it again, pick the bits out that are relevant to you.

But I think the mic drop moment is test it. It doesn't always have to be the same as everybody else. Thanks again, all the best in success for 2025 for you in the business. And I really look forward to catching up with you soon.

OUTRO: Oh, but one last thing, just before you shoot off. And if you're curious about how this episode links with the ability to scale your MSP to a million or, or if you're already there, accelerate to five, then we want to invite you to come and take the MSP mastery quiz. And in just three minutes, you're going to get a 360 degree scan of your business where you can identify the one or two tactics that can help you find more time, engage and align your people and help generate more leads in your MSP. It's really simple, just click on the link in the show notes. And if you have enjoyed this episode, we'd love to get some feedback from you by means of a rating, review on Spotify or iTunes or your podcast platform of choice. We really appreciate every single one of them. Now you can go and enjoy the rest of your day and we look forward to catching up and connecting with you soon. All the best now.