EP278 - How to Properly Stand From the Crowded MSP Marketplace with Mit Patel and Ian Luckett

INTRO: In this week's episode of The IT Experts Podcast, you're going to love it. We're going to teach you how to stand out from the crowded marketplace. This is no fluff, no filler, one man story, going from under a million pound all the way up to 8 million pound and onto bigger and better things to help the community become safer, more secure, and also compliant. You are going to love this one.

 Welcome to The IT Experts Podcast, the only podcast to help MSPs scale to 1 million, and if already there, get to five and go faster. 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: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to The IT Experts Podcast. Today we're going to talk about compliance. How exciting is this going to be today? No, we're not going to talk just about compliance. We're going to help you understand how to become the best MSP you possibly can, and today I'm absolutely honored to have the legendary Mit Patel in the podcast lounge today. Morning, Mit.

MIT: Morning Ian. Thanks for having me on today. Really looking forward to our conversation and working out what we're going to talk about along the way. But I'm sure, like you said, it's going to be an exciting episode and, you know, we'll try and give loads of value to the listeners along the way.

IAN: Absolutely, we will do. And we've got a script. It's a very small script. It's about three words and we're just going to go in for it. So, Mit, we recently connected a couple of weeks ago and had an amazing conversation about how to help MSPs kind of what you are up to now before we get stuck into the meat and the bones of today's episode. If people have been living under a small rock and don't know who you are, who are you, what do you do, who would you help?

MIT: So, my name's MIT Patel. I've been in the MSP space for almost 25 years. I ran an MSP called Netstar for 19 and a half years. I had about 60 plus people in it. I exited in 2020 sold to equity and Air IT stayed on for a year then did not a lot for a few years. And I came up with this idea of Assurix, where I'm now the CEO and founder of, and we'll talk about that later.

IAN: Absolutely fantastic. But one of the things that we want to talk about today is, you know, we are hearing about this regulation. We're hearing about MSPs struggle to stand out from the crowd you know, race to the bottom with their prices and really, you know how do they become the best MSPs they possibly can be? Now, luckily the MSPs who are in that in most, a lot of those fields are not listening to this podcast. So they don't want to better themselves, but you and I are here to help MSPs and to help people become better versions of themselves. What were some of the key things? You know, it's a pretty impressive track record there of MSPs. Most MSPs probably sitting there going, oh my God, I'd love to be that size or that many people mind you don't judge your business on how many people you have, the success on your business, on how many people, how many people you have, but. What's the kind of the secret for success for you? What's, you know, if you were to bottle it up into a couple of three things over the years, if you were going to do it again, what would be the absolute non-negotiables that you are absolutely going to do again?

MIT: Wow. I mean, Ian, you only said we had 30 minutes, so this did, this could, this could be the longest...

IAN: We could speed it up.

MIT: You've ever done. So I think to give you some numbers, context, we were doing just just under 8 million pounds. Revenue, 22% EBITDA, and we were making 52% gross margin. Nice. So, you know, it wasn't that we just had a volume of business, you know, we were delivering the financial results anyway.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: So I think like if I was to do it all again, was that your question? If I was doing it.

IAN: Yeah, yeah.

MIT: What would I do? How would I do it? I think there was loads of different points whilst we were growing where there've been kind of pivotal moments, we'll call them that. First pivotal to moment was like getting to a million pound revenue.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: And I think that point was understanding that actually we need to invest in sales in some way or form. Other than myself. So that's something that we did, we hired our first sales person. And that Mel actually the first sales person wasn't a salesperson, it was a sales support person.

IAN: Right.

MIT: And that person enabled me to be able to effectively account, manage more, to sell more, to go on new meetings. The next stage we got to about, I think two, two and a half million where we started to hire account managers. Because that's where we needed to grow our revenue from that point, that's where stuff started to crumble a bit.

IAN: Okay.

MIT: Because we were growing quite quite aggressively by, I think there was one year we grew by 37% and that almost killed us that 37.

IAN: Wow. Was that organic growth or was there an acquisition in there or what happened?

MIT: Organic. So everything that I've done has been organic, nothing has been acquisition. So yeah, that was all organic growth and yeah, we went through lots of mistakes. Hiring the wrong people because we just had to fill a seat taking on the wrong clients because we thought that would give us, you know, loads of revenue, et cetera, et cetera. So I've learned a lot of lessons along the way. A lot of lessons. Maybe one day I'll write a book. I don't know, maybe that's my five-year goal to write book.

IAN: There you go. Right. I don't think you could sit still long enough.

MIT: I think, I think like 2.5 to 5 million was all about leadership, like making sure that we had the rhythms and structure in place of our organisation that we wouldn't crumble.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: Because that was one of the things that we faced, you know, when we got to the 2 million pound mark was that actually it's hard. An MSP business is a really hard business to run. There's loads of different revenue streams, there's lots of people involved, and we all know how hard it is to manage people and, you know, you really need to set up a structure and almost like an operating system for your business to enable you to grow. So I think hopefully that sums up some of the problems. I've got loads more by working.

IAN: Yeah, it does. It's really interesting because when, uh, you know, when Stuart and I got together, you know, four and a half years ago and put the Growth Hub together, we both had this inherent love for leadership. But, and you know, when I originally left corporate in 2017, I was going to go and sell this leadership thing and pick, but the problem is that people don't buy leadership. It's kind of like, you know, you sell them what they want and give them what they need. And people don't buy leadership particularly, not MSPs, because it's just about sales. I just need the new revenue and everything will be all right because when I've got more revenue, I'll get a bit more profit and then I can buy some, buy the right people and I can buy the right team. And we hear this as we see people oscillating between, you know, the 750 - 1.2 million and they're just kind of like, they either can't get through the barrier profitably. Okay, turnover's one thing, but it's about the profit. Right. And then all of a sudden it dawns on them early, you know, late, late six figures, early seven figures. I can't do this on my own. And although you, you, you guys and girls have come up and you've been great technically and you've supported the business, technically you might need different people who are going to lift you up and help you to then spend time looking at the more strategic things and the height. And I was actually on the phone to a prospect yesterday and all the questions, he was at about two and a half, nearly 3 million. And all the questions were about people. And I remember speaking to him two years ago and all the questions were about sales. So he'd kind of gone through this process of going, you know, hitting your head against the brick wall, come back down, hit your head against brick wall, come back down again. And it, we say it all the time. Right people, right roles. But you've got to define the roles to start with, haven't you?

MIT: Yeah, and I think I was on the call with MSP yesterday and I love hearing about MSP problems because in my head I'm like, I've kind of been there, but I should be able to help this person in some way or other.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: And they were going through people problems, which seems to be the number one thing.

IAN: Yep.

MIT: And I was trying to think of like, how can I explain this to somebody in a way that they understand now? I didn't really nail the explaining, but I'll go through what it was and what I saw in this particular business was, they would, they had people in their company that weren't performing.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: To where they should be performing.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: They were just tolerating that.

IAN: Yeah. Yeah.

MIT: And, and I was like, why are you tolerating this? Like, this would drive me mad. Like, that person's only like 50% of what they should be. And it was down to like, well, there's a role that needs to be done and we just don't know how to hire someone who can do well in that role.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: And the way I framed at Batson was like, look, you are going to give yourselves so much pain trying to grow this business while having the wrong people in the business.

IAN: Mm-hmm.

MIT: And not performing. And culturally you have an issue. And that cultural issue is that you are tolerating someone who's not performing.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: Who's not behaving how they should, and that sends a message to everybody in your organisation. So it was an interesting conversation at the end of it. And they, they were like, right, okay, what do you think I should do?

And I was like, well, you probably need to look hard and faster all the people in your organisation and make sure that they, you know, they are doing what they should be doing at the level that you expected them to do.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: Because otherwise you are going to end up having some real growth trends.

IAN: And it was, what you should have said to admit was go and join the Growth Hub. But anyway, we'll talk about that another day. But that was, you know, we have a lot of conversations like that as well because it's like, well, what do I do next? The tagline that we had originally, which came from Stewart, was scaling with confidence. And it was about building the confidence to have, you know, the number one podcast. You know, I think we're at 275 shows or something like that. The number one podcast was with our leadership coach, Julie, and it was how to have a difficult conversation.

MIT: Mm.

IAN: Because people don't want to have difficult conversations because it's uncomfortable. Yeah. I don't like it. A lot of MSPs, they were accidental business owners, and then they've just got swept up with the tide, haven't they?

MIT: Yeah.

IAN: And then they've just recruited more people because more people will hopefully get all the tickets down and get the noise out my way and on all of kind of this stuff. But what we see the biggest shifts with our clients is when they get out of their own way. And they you know, they realised that, you know what, I need to step up. I need to be a bit vulnerable. I need to be a bit open, but I need to be consistent. So coming back to your journey, which is incredible and I love the way you, you went through the whole journey from a million up to eight because a lot of MSPs will be listening to this going to 8 million and they'll not switch off, but they'll be going, yeah, but that's just ridiculous size business, isn't it? What, you know from your leadership journey, which must have had many, many scars, bruises, dents, and scratches.

MIT: Yeah.

IAN: Can you recall like a, a pivotal moment when you went, God, why didn't I do that like five years ago sort of thing? This would've saved me so much trouble in like your ability as a leader.

MIT: I think when I had a, when I decided to have a leadership team.

IAN: Okay.

MIT: Because before I had a leadership team, everything kind of flowed up to me.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: So I would end up being a bottleneck for a lot of stuff in the organisation, or I would just be involved in so much stuff day to day. And being involved in stuff day to day, you know, makes you feel great that, you know you're involved in today's day and you're busy. But it doesn't allow you to step outside of your business and actually work on your business. I know that's like a big cliche working on your business, but just think of it like this for the listeners, it's like, actually, are you, how much time are you spending planning? You know, how much time are you spending working on the not urgent but important in your business?

And I think that having that leadership team really made a massive difference for me in our business because I was no longer the person that things stopped at.

IAN: Yeah,

MIT: it went to them and it would only escalate to me in our weekly leadership rhythm or monthly leadership meeting. So that was that. That was a big moment and a big change I think for me, in terms of being able to unlock the next level of growth.

IAN: That's interesting. And we talk about it all the time, in actual fact, last, last January, one of our clients says, oh, could you help train my coach, my senior SDMs and account managers and all of this kind of stuff? And we said, yeah, why not? And Stuart sort of looked at me and went. Are we? And I mean, yeah, this is going to be a great thing because we can now coach people at the same, you know, the same frameworks as the owners. 35 people. Now Mit we're coaching going through like an ILM level five as separately to the main Growth Hub, within, which is just like, and you know, you see them turn up day one and they're eyes are all like, you know, rabbit in the headlights. And now like eight, nine months later, they're just becoming confident leaders and having massive transformation. You obviously had some really like many MSPs have some really good senior people who have been with you for a long time and they're dependable. And this is great now because I'm going to whack straight back to an interview that I had yesterday on the podcast, but this is real life. How do you decide which one of those becomes a senior leader rather than a senior person?

MIT: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I think you would need to think about, when you are hiring people, there are. I think I actually put a post up on this yesterday, actually. Funny enough, LinkedIn.

IAN: There you go.

MIT: And it was about hiring for the who, not the what.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: And what I mean by that is, you need to hire for who that person is and what, uh, not what they know because you can actually teach and coach what they know. It's who they are. So when you're hiring for like a leader, for example, or a future leader. One of the thing, the core skills they're going to need to have is to have, be able to be good at communicating, right?

Mm-hmm. So you need someone who can communicate really well. Another thing that you may need in a particular lead is that they need a level of tenacity to get stuff done, so it's really trying to assess what are the key capabilities that you need for that, who in the leader, and making sure you hire for that. Or you may be hiring now thinking that you need a future leader in two, three years. So making sure that you hire for the capabilities now. And I think often people don't map out where they need to be in five years and what their leadership structure needs to look like in five years and their people structure. And that's always a good exercise to do to make sure that you do take the opportunity to hire people that you may need later on.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: And that will cause you a lot less headache. Rather than having to hire, like we've all been there, right? We've hired somebody

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: From outside who, you know, said they're amazing and they're the best manager in the world. You hire them and then you realise that actually, yeah, this isn't, this isn't that great.

IAN: This isn't working out,

MIT: this isn't working out. I was explaining someone yesterday, obviously speak to a lot of MSPs and I was saying, look, I went on holiday to Marrakesh and I wasn't expecting much. I think it was a thousand pounds for four nights. All inclusive.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: I thought this is great. So when I got to the hotel, I wasn't expecting it to be amazing. Amazing.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: But I was really pleasantly surprised that actually it was quite decent. It was quite nice if I'd spent 10,000 pounds on a four night trip and went somewhere, but like, oh my God. This is terrible. If it wasn't good, right? Yeah. Because you'd spend so much money. So there's a value disconnect sometimes when you hire somebody, when you hire somebody in a higher role and they're a manager or they've done being a manager before, when you then have to spend time with that person coaching them on something basic, you start to get annoyed, because you're like, well, why? Why does this person I've hired who's meant to be a manager already not know this stuff? Yeah. So my new ethos is probably the, actually, hire younger, smarter people. Invest time in them to get them where you need to be. because generally they're going to be more cost effective than hiring a more senior expensive person. You don't mind investing the time in them to get them where to where they need to be, but hire for the who, not the what.

IAN: Yeah. And that's a great, key point because what a lot of MSPs do is that, as you know, as the team have grown with you and they develop, kind of like with you, you get to some, some MSPs get to a point where they haven't mapped out that growth strategy and the right, you know, we say right people in the right roles. It starts with the role. If you start bringing in people and then because they're really good at what they're doing, you start getting a bit of scope creep. If you're not careful, you could end up with an account manager who's a little bit technical and a little bit something else, and then they might leave and then you go, well, what do I recruit now? Who do I need to recruit now? Do I need to get three people? Or is it just one person that, kind of does that role? Which is why it's so critical that those roles are defined in that structure, as you kind of said, which is extremely boring thing to, it's actually a really simple thing to do as well.

MIT: Yeah.

IAN: But work around that structure. Yeah.

MIT: I mean, most things are the most simple things doing men, and I think the challenges in your, in anyone's journey as a business person or as a individual. You sometimes have to hear the same thing, like six or seven times. Definitely, in my case, I've heard the same thing seven times and then it's been like, oh, light bulb.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: Maybe I should do that.

IAN: Yeah. Yeah. And you, and you move that forward.

STUART INTERRUPT: Hey, Stuart here. Got a quick message for everyone that's listening. If you've decided that you want to grow your MSP but you're not sure what support you need, then you must check out our ultimate MSP Growth Guide. It's designed to help you compare all of the support that's out there in the channel for you and help you shortcut your decision making so you get the right support to help you get the right results to grow your MSP. But alternatively, if you'd like to come and see us in action, then why not come to one of our events? Simply click on the link in the show notes and we'll see you very soon Now back to the show.

IAN: Cheers.

Now, look, you went from a million all the way up to eight. Okay. That wasn't an accident. Standing out, you know, obviously, through referrals and through the sales and you know, the clients clearly, valued what you were doing. Where do you see MSPs going wrong? At the minute? You know, in this year with regards to trying to stand out from the crowd, you know, you've got all this AI stuff, we've got, you know, the back end of the security. Let's scare everybody with security because that's going to work. You know, we've got the, we haven't got the pandemic anymore, but kind of that made this shift into the technical expert sort of thing. But where are people? Where are people, where do you think people are hunting in the wrong forest sort of thing for clients?

MIT: I think people really need, I mean the ideal world, everyone would verticalise and say, I'm going to go for just this one industry. And you would know it inside out. Yeah I know that's really scary for a lot of MSPs. Yeah. So they're not going to do that, so we won't talk about that. I think the biggest challenge, one of the reasons why I even founded a Assurix in the first place is that there isn't really a huge amount of differentiation in the marketplace. And that's because of a couple of reasons. The first thing is that. Most SMEs, like your customers or SMBs, don't really understand about technology. Don't really understand about all the in-depth E-D-R-M-D-R, all the rest of that stuff. It just goes over their head.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: And what tends to happen is when you are going in and talking to a brand new prospect, for example. Everybody sounds the same. So everyone's saying, I do it support, I do your security, I do this, I do that. Whichever vendor sold you a tool, I do this, et cetera, et cetera, right? For the person on the opposite side of that table, they don't know, they don't even understand what you're talking about half the time, and you eventually end up with a situation of defaulting to price, which I'm seeing a lot of MSPs encounter, where these SMEs are just choosing the lowest cost providers and they're not really understanding. You know, the difference, part of the challenge is there isn't actually a difference that they can prove to that end customer by actually saying, actually, we are doing all these things properly and they are all getting audited by someone else properly all the time. So there's a huge issue around differentiation at the moment. Challenge two, I think this isn't one of my biggest worry, I probably said like the first thing is how do we get new clients? How do we prove that we're actually. Doing what we say we're doing and we're better from, better than Dave down the road. Hopefully. I don't, Dave's are really good with MSPs as well.

IAN: Dave's. Dave's are the best MSPs.

MIT: Dave's are the best MSPs, but they're charging like 10 pound a month or something, and then the customer's like, Dave's charging 10 pound a month. Why are you charging 60 pounds a month? It doesn't make sense. I'm going to go with Dave. Right. Second thing, I think AI, the magic two letter word that everybody loves talking about is moving so fast at the moment. If you're an MSP and you can actually can actually do something with AI that makes a difference for your client, you've got a huge differentiation point.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: And anybody else, right? So if you can actually say, I can build this agent, or do this or do that, or whatever it may be, you can add real value really quickly. So I think that the key to your question is just around differentiation.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: Like, people need to do things differently. When I had an MSP. You know, we did all sorts. You know, we did, we, you know, we had dashboards that we'd log into with people we'd show cameras of our office to, if they didn't want to come to it to see who they were. Those are all old school track ticks from 2019. You know, everyone's got that now.

IAN: Old school, 2019, God.

MIT: Old school.

IAN: That's a really key point. And, you know, the whole AI thing, you just, you just see it now, the events you go to and it's, everyone's trying to sell some AI thing and we just boil it down to, if you want to be successful, fix people's business problems with it. You know, with your technology. But the only way you're going to fix those business problems is by really understanding the business, where it's going, how it operates, and demonstrating that value. And it's that non-technical conversation, isn't it? That's to be had, that is the one that will nail at the end of it. Let's change tactic a little bit because, you know, we're talking about differentiation and all of that kind of great stuff. And there's this, I don't know whether it's a cloud or not, because I think for most MSPs in the space, sub 5 million, I'm not sure. I don't think anybody really knows about this whole regulation thing. You know, the government suddenly realised that these, you know, hot topic for a cyber attack, you know, they've got a lot of data, which is very important and all of that kind of great stuff. But in terms of, you know, that differentiator, you go to, you know, you go to get a builder, he wants a standard, I want to go and buy this. It'll have a British standard or it'll have a an ISO or it'll have something like that. You know, and this is the Assurix conversation, but where, where did you. Where was the light bulb moment when you sort of like thought, hang on a minute, you know this is regulations coming in some way, shape, or form. And I believe there's already a form of it in Scotland right now. And you either get on the bus or you'll get off the bus. And I think if you, or I think if you don't get on the bus, you either get swallowed up or you're just going to, you know, business is just going to die. Are MSPs taking this seriously? Do you hear much chatter about this whole compliance, you know, demonstrating that you can actually operate all of your security systems properly to keep them safe? Where did this all kind of like bubble up from for you?

MIT: So I think for me, like there were kind of, four core reasons. One, having seen that there are some MSPs out there that still aren't doing the basics.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: Like having decent passwords for their client's devices. Like honestly the basics, not doing the basics. And I was shocked by that, thinking how can an MSP not even doing the basics, compete with an MSP that's doing everything properly.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: The second thing was really, I had this situation with ISO 27,001, where someone who used to work for me said you know, can you help me grow past a million? I should have sent them to you. Actually, to be honest, I saved myself two.

IAN: I'll let you off.

MIT: And he, and he basically, we went through lots of stuff and then one of the things we looking at his website and he had ISO 27,001, which I did at Netstar, which costs like 26 grand and 180 hours worth of work or something like that. And he told me he paid 500 pounds for some guy in India to do all his documentation. And then...

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: Got accreditation over here by paying someone to, certificate him. So I was like, the, well, that doesn't really mean a lot anymore.

IAN: Right.

MIT: And then the third thing was this kind of cyber resilience bill where the government are going to try and do something, which we'll come back to in a second. And then the fourth thing, I don't really talk, or I haven't really spoken to anyone about, so this is an exclusive for you. He is, I've got a friend called Bob.

IAN: Bob and Dave.

MIT: Bob and Dave. His name's actually Robert, but I call him Bob. And he owns a company and he was telling me about, his IT support company and obviously I'm not in the game anymore. And he was like, look I was like, what do they do for you? And he was like, well, they do my IT. And actually more importantly, they look after my security stuff. And I was like, oh, great. And I asked him, I was like, do you know there's no like regulation or anything in our industry in MSP industry? He was like, no. And I was like, well, you know, you've got a solicitor, they have, qualifications, you, you know, you have an accountant, they have qualifications. because I didn't know that. And I was like, well, how, how do you actually know that your...

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: IT company's doing what they say they're doing.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: And he was like I don't know. And the next thing I normally like to, you know, wind bob up. So I thought, let me go another deep layer deep. And I was like, well, what? You know, you've got this situation, you've just said you don't know what they're doing. Right? And he is like, yeah. I was like, do you know how most breaches and security incidents happen? He's like, no, I haven't got, I haven't got a clue. I'm in property. I haven't got a clue. And I was like, well actually how they happen is by someone not doing their job in the first place. And that's someone not doing their job could be your IT provider. And that's was like, what do I do? And I was like, well actually I've got an idea.

IAN: Funny you should say that.

MIT: Yeah. Funny you should say that. So, I think, there are four things there. Like with the regulation stuff there's a lot of scare mongering going on, right?

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: Like what we're, trying to do is serious. So we're not about scaremongering, we're about the MSP community. We're not saying to people, Hey, you need to do this right now because you, the regulation's going to come in next week. You know, it's not. It's going to target the largest MSPs, like a thousand, probably a thousand is what they've said it's going to target. It's probably not going to impact MSPs. Definitely not below 50 employees. May, that may even be like 75 or a hundred employees by the time they work it out.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: But one of the challenges we have is that a lot of MSPs look after clients that are deemed to be in the critical national infrastructure.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: So if you have a client that's in the critical national infrastructure and we've done some data collecting because we're working with the NCSC around there, we create intelligence I think it's like 36% or something like that was the latest count of MSPs that are working with these critical national infrastructure type clients. They're going to get dragged into this compliance, because if they want to keep that client.

IAN: Right.

MIT: But then the choice is like, do you want to keep that client or do you want to let someone else deal with that client? Because do you want to actually make yourself up to a standard? Yeah. If you're not already there and most good MSPs are probably already at the standard.

IAN: Okay.

MIT: But they've got no way to actually prove that.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: All the time.

IAN: Yeah. And that's, this is where stage door left opens up,

MIT: stage doors left open up. And I think, um, what we've tried to do is think of, well, what, when we were thinking of this business model is like, what, how can we incentivise MSPs to actually raise the bar in our industry? Like, how can we incentivise? And actually the biggest in sensitisation is around the differentiation piece. So what an MSP has when they have the Assurix trust mark is that they have continuous assurance that they are secure.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: Based on the cyber assessment framework, which is what the government's eventually going to try and get in place, and that they're operationally mature based on our operational maturity framework, which basically means that you're going to give a good outcome to an SME.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: So you know you are, you do patch all their machines. You do deliver on your SLA and what we actually do is we integrate within all the tools that an MSP uses, like PSA, RMM, all the other security platforms they use to prove it live every day.

IAN: Wow.

MIT: So when you are in a customer conversation or a new customer conversation, it's very different. Now. It's like...

IAN: Yeah. Yeah.

MIT: We can prove these 64 things, these controls every day. And it's proven by an external third party. If you're up against someone that can't prove it, you're not going to win.

IAN: No, exactly.

MIT: But there's no way you'll win. And ultimately it doesn't matter what that other person is charging. If they're charging 10 pounds and you are charging 60 pounds, you're still going to win because you can actually provide proof. And back to the story about my friend Bob. He gets it. Like it's clear for him. He is like, oh yeah, that makes complete sense. Like.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: Why is it not like that? So I think the first key thing we're trying to do is to make sure that the good MSPs win. And that's one thing we're doing. Differentiation.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: The second thing is we're getting people ahead of the compliance when they do need to become compliant. And the third thing is that we're kind of providing a level of peace of mind for the MSP business owner. Sometimes you just don't know if you're doing the things that you should be, because it could be an engineer, a level one engineer that's responsible for your patching.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: Now, you might not know if all your clients are getting patched to an adequate level, or if you've got MFA turned on everywhere.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: Or if you're actually delivering the SLAs that you know that you are meant to be doing, because sometimes these numbers can, what's the word? Fudged.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: Somehow.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: Right? And then you don't end up knowing, and that's a bit of a problem. So we've tried to think like, how can we give MSPs the most amount of benefit for getting the trust mark? And one of the things we've done is we've got partnerships with the insurers like Beazley's, Hiscox.

IAN: Okay.

MIT: CFC to basically give them a discount on their cyber insurance and professional indemnity insurance because they actually recognise that if an MSP has our trust mark and is doing all the things on our framework, they're going to be a lower risk and therefore should be a lower premium. And you don't get that for having ISO 27,001, for example, with your insurer.

IAN: No. 'Because that's just the tick in the box, isn't it? And I think that, you know, whenever, you know, we are not technical, but you know, whenever you hear. There's been a breach and then they, there's chatter in the channel or what's kind of going on. It's always been the human, it's been the human who's not patched something.

MIT: Yeah.

IAN: Or someone who has opened up an email or clicked on something. And when you look at it, you go have they had training on how to, how to identify these things and stuff like that. And it's just so important. And I think what you're doing is, I think is absolutely brilliant because it's giving that MSP, that peace of mind, but also it's opening up a very different credibility conversation, isn't it? When they are, you know, in that sales conversation about, well, has everybody else got this trust mark and get some IT support, but you want to get, get the right IT support where we've got it all planned in. So that's really interesting. What's the future? What's the vision for Assurix? What do you, where do you want this to go?

MIT: So it's been quite fun, really. So far, I mean I'm in a complete startup world, which is very different to how I've been used to operating a very mature business. A lot of things apply like in that very mature business to where I'm now.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: So making sure that we have the right culture in our organisation to make sure we can achieve what we want to. Our kind of like mission, like I said, is to help MSPs win, to raise the bar the bar in our industry and to really fix the cybersecurity chain issue that we see. Because I think you touched on this like.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: One MSP on average has 70 clients. If an MSP goes down, that's a big problem. Clients potentially. And the last thing is we want to really give SMEs a clear way to know that an MSP is good or not. So that's our, top level. Where we want to get to this year is we want to like we've got a cohort running at the moment until June. Where we're looking to put a hundred MSPs

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: Through the Assurix platform. We've got 84 people signed up at the moment.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: So, maybe by the, I'm not sure when it's getting released, but it might be full by them. And then we're going to release our second cohort in the second half of the year. We'll start to add more. So ultimately we want to get to about 1500 MSPs.

IAN: Nice.

MIT: In five years.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: There's about, I mean, the people say there's 13,000 MSPs in the UK. There's probably not, there's like 6,000 of, three, four employees plus MSPs in the UK. Yeah. So we want to get to 1500 and we think if we get to 1500, we'll get to enough of a mass to make enough of a difference.

IAN: That'd be massive. That'd be amazing. Well, I absolutely love that. And I know this is our first podcast, mate, and we're talking in a few weeks at the MSP show as well. But we wish you all the very success with that. Any final thoughts for MSPs who are kind of embarking on the journey or kind of struggling a little bit as they've come out into the new year?

MIT: I think what I would suggest all MSPs do is invest in marketing. Like, what are the things that you can actually do to grow your business? And just think about the return you'll get long term by investing now. And I think a lot of people are scared of, obviously you've got to have profits do this, but scared of investing their profits back in their company.

IAN: Getting the time and, and, you know, with marketing, just trust the process. It will happen. But they just get so, not, they don't get the returns quicker than they need to. But you know, this is from someone who's gone from a million to 8 million.

MIT: Yeah.

IAN: Listen.

MIT: And I think one last thing I'm going to add. I know you said any one thing.

IAN: That's all right.

MIT: Is invest in yourself. Like spend time educating and learning yourself. That's the quickest way you are going to grow as a person to enable your business to grow.

IAN: Amazing. Amazing mate. We could, as you said, we could go on for hours and I'm sure we will do in the future. But, thanks very much for your time today. Massive golden nuggets there for all the listeners and, yeah, look forward to catching up with you soon and watching the journey. So, you take care now.

MIT: Great. Thanks Ian. Thanks for having me.

IAN: See you later.

MIT: Take care. Bye.

TEASER NEXT WEEK: In next week's episode of the IT Experts Podcast, we've got an. Leadership Power panel. We have got Zoe Chatley from the Channel Recruiter. We've got Julie Hutchinson from the MSP Growth Hub. We've got Philip Morgan from PAX8 where we are going to be giving you a sneak preview into our hybrid keynote panel discussion at the MSP show on the 14th of May 11 o'clock.

You do not want to miss this. The golden nuggets that we were flying around in the podcast lounge recording this were incredible, so I look forward to seeing you next week.

OUTRO: Hang on a minute. Just before you go, and if you're curious about how this episode links with the ability to scale your MSP to a million or, or if you are 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 degrees scan of your business where you can identify the one or two tactics that can help you find more time, engage in, 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 day.