How a Fractional CIO Eliminates Business Chaos

00;00;02;16 – 00;00;32;07
Speaker 2
Welcome, everyone. And hopefully welcome back to the fractional operator. If you’ve listened to some of our previous episodes, our new podcast here, brought to you by hourglass SaaS, that is an operations platform built by fractional for fractional. And, you know, one of the big things of why we’re, we’re putting this software out there is just because, like a lot of companies, we’ve got so many pieces of software, so many different browser when there’s windows open and more importantly, so many subscriptions that go along with that.

00;00;32;07 – 00;00;50;09
Speaker 2
And so, you know, the the objective of hourglass SaaS is to bring many of those pieces of software under one pane of glass, not dissimilar to some of the things that our guest does today here in the IT realm. Jared at K techs. Welcome, sir.

00;00;50;11 – 00;00;51;17
Speaker 1
How are we doing?

00;00;51;20 – 00;01;12;08
Speaker 2
You know, we’re hanging in there, man. We’re hanging in there. You know, it’s, it’s just about July. So, you know, everybody’s got that summer vibe rolling right now. So, you know, I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but I have to myself. I have to keep myself out of that summer vibe, because summer vibe means I just want to go sit out of the pool and, you know, certainly not be on my laptop and doing work.

00;01;12;08 – 00;01;15;15
Speaker 1
But the hundred degrees later on this weeks are you’re back inside.

00;01;15;15 – 00;01;34;18
Speaker 2
So, yeah, chase me back inside. Well, we’re going to be up at camp actually later on the, this week. Well, when this comes out, this won’t come out until probably the end of July, but, there you go. Hopefully, you know, be up in the Adirondacks. It’ll be a little bit cooler. Jared. So, yes. But excited, excited to celebrate our 250th anniversary here.

00;01;34;18 – 00;01;43;27
Speaker 2
And, you know, laid off some fireworks. Man. Kids, sparklers. Try not to blow myself up. That’s still,

00;01;43;29 – 00;01;45;02
Speaker 1
Right. Your hands open.

00;01;45;05 – 00;01;57;10
Speaker 2
Yeah. That’s right, that’s right. So, Jared, you know, just to kind of put some context in here, if you don’t mind, just kind of tell us a little bit about you and Apotex and kind of some of the stuff that you guys are doing.

00;01;57;12 – 00;02;20;26
Speaker 1
Well, you know, I think most people in the area are pretty familiar with us. We’ve been around for 21 years. Myanmar’s people, you know, and we’re, you know, started out as kind of, you know, break fix and Mazda. Yeah. You know, as technology and as, you know, industry is involved a lot more into the proactive and don’t call us type things.

00;02;20;26 – 00;02;47;06
Speaker 1
You know, back in the day, I wanted you to call to chew up those block hours, and now we’re turned against you not to call. So the industry is taking kind of, you know, 118 I’ll just go and come around full circle. So, yeah. And that’s been a good thing. You know, if I think for everybody is, you know, keep your, you know, our customers cost down, keep our operating costs down and your businesses running and keep them going at the speed that people are demanding them to be running a day.

00;02;47;06 – 00;03;06;22
Speaker 2
So now I you know, I think I said this before the show, I’m excited to have the conversation with you today because you’re doing MSP work. But you’re and then there’s also a fractional side of your business that you guys do. Can you talk a little bit about because, you know, I’m a big fan of the business pivot, right?

00;03;06;29 – 00;03;25;10
Speaker 2
You know, it 21 years, you you’ve had to have pivoted multiple times throughout that 21 years, I’d imagine. What’s how how’s the industry? Obviously technology has changed and continues to change in an ever faster rate. But for you, like how is your business changed over the years?

00;03;25;13 – 00;03;51;28
Speaker 1
I mean, well, I mean, you’ve had a couple of things in there, right? You had the pandemic, obviously, which is the most, you know, fresh in our memories, right? When you had the big downturn in 2008. So, you know, going over, you know, almost 21 years getting over through, you know, two of the biggest, you know, economic, hurdles, I guess, in the history of our 250 years, you know, kind of gives you, you know, kind of gives you a good education and good things to be looking out for.

00;03;51;28 – 00;04;13;28
Speaker 1
So, you know, like I said, as I was saying earlier, you know, the business started out pretty much very reactive. There was just, you know, you have people on your end of a phone waiting to fix printer issues. Oh, my computer is down. I got this going on with the servers. And, you know, now it’s more of a reactive or a proactive approach to, you know, keep the bad guys out of trying to get your information right.

00;04;13;28 – 00;04;41;23
Speaker 1
So we used to build a private cloud for, for a small business and then manage how they accessed that. And, and you know, their, their cloud existed in, you know, a room in their, and their office that was, you know, access through VPNs, remote desktop. And now we’ve, you know, evolved into apps on your phone, you know, seamlessly go between your PC or your Mac or, you know, all your data has to be accessible all the time.

00;04;41;23 – 00;04;58;16
Speaker 1
It’s always it’s always emotion, always accessible. So, you know, rather than use or just be at rest in an office and only, you know, access for that type of stuff, you know, a much more mobile, geographically diverse, you know, workforces.

00;04;58;18 – 00;05;21;16
Speaker 1
And, you know, to be able to, you know, keep people, you know, access to that data, keep us secure and, you know, readily available for not only themselves but their customers. Now, that’s where it’s kind of change. You all are classifying the data a little bit differently. You know, so it’s it’s changed a lot, but I think it’s changed for the good.

00;05;21;19 – 00;05;43;09
Speaker 1
Because obviously businesses are much better off when you’re proactive, right? And you’re not just waiting for problems to happen. So I would I would say the, the biggest thing that’s changed is, you know, no more late nights technology simplified things, you know, for your IT provider is bragging about working through the weekends. They haven’t really embraced the new technology.

00;05;43;09 – 00;06;10;29
Speaker 1
I’ve been out there, you know. So yeah, it’s it’s been a much calmer industry then than it was 15 years ago when you were constantly putting out fires, restoring stuff, manual, you know, overnight, you know, days and stuff like that. So now the proactive approach has made businesses, you know, up longer term. We’re working loss, you know, but we’re still you also working hard on keeping up with you know I got I knocking on everybody’s door.

00;06;10;29 – 00;06;22;14
Speaker 1
So keeping on top of that. So you’re just you know, you’re doing a lot more proactive approach than than we were, you know, 15, 20 years ago. And that’s really been really a nice.

00;06;22;17 – 00;06;42;10
Speaker 2
Nice. No, I obviously have the benefit of knowing you for all of those 21 years, and longer, actually. But, but also having recently, I mean, I think it was just a couple months ago that we had done buying local, and we were talking around a couple of different subjects. And I wanted to ask you, you know, as far as a pivot goes.

00;06;42;10 – 00;07;06;05
Speaker 2
So I just had Katie Tansey from HR resolved on, just last week. And one of the things that she was talking about was, you know, over the years as her business has changed, that she’s really locked in on the ideal client, right, and who she is best at serving and likes to work with and just, you know, the best fit possible.

00;07;06;07 – 00;07;19;01
Speaker 2
And I know with your story a little bit that’s also changed over the years. Can you kind of walk us through how that ideal client has changed over the years for you, and what it looks like now compared to what it used to look like when you first opened?

00;07;19;04 – 00;07;36;24
Speaker 1
Yeah. I mean, the ideal customer 20 years ago, I used to be at everybody and anybody, you know, it was, whoever had it needs because, like I said, it was just it was reactive. Here’s a here’s a book of ours or here’s a block of ours, and, here’s what the rate is. If you buy more hours, here’s what it is.

00;07;36;24 – 00;08;01;14
Speaker 1
And they just kind of sit there and we wait for you to call. So everybody had that need, right? Hey, my laptop fixed or broke? I need that fixed. My my printers broke my wireless access points. Broke server needs to be upgraded. All that good stuff, right. Same challenges are kind of here today, but with the exception of is what we’re trying to do is is keep you out of those where you do I keep you out of those.

00;08;01;16 – 00;08;27;06
Speaker 1
You know, that makes sense. You really got to value it now, right? Back then. Very measurable. Okay. I bought 25 hours of of, block hours from you. I’m down to 20 or down to five remaining. I need to buy another block. You’ve been using ours. And here’s my balance. Now you’re kind of. Hey, we we only call you three times a month, so you really have to evaluate that.

00;08;27;06 – 00;08;42;19
Speaker 1
Right. So that the CEO, that owner has to look at it and say, gee, you know, why do we need these guys. Like we hardly ever call that like we need them when they say that. Like, why do we even need these guys? We hardly ever call them. That’s why we need them. We don’t have to call them.

00;08;42;21 – 00;09;03;26
Speaker 1
Our team is taking care of customers. Our team is productive there. We don’t have cyber events. We’re not, you know, getting servers restored. We’re not, you know, reacting to problems. And so those business owners are fewer and far between. There still are a lot of people that are like, no, I only want to, you know, I only call 2 or 3 times a month.

00;09;03;28 – 00;09;28;21
Speaker 1
I don’t need to do the cybersecurity stuff. Oh, man. The way we look at it is like, yeah, you know, we we don’t want a part of that. And I’m not saying that like in a, in a bad way, but a cyber incident could cross your 200 hours. Right. And if you’re reacting to that, that’s like 200 hours that you got your team into, that you’re doing all the forensics, you’re restoring data, you’re restoring desktops, you’re you’re doing you know, you’re you’re responding to that stuff.

00;09;28;21 – 00;09;49;13
Speaker 1
And it takes time. And then as what that really does is that takes away time from another customer who values you and says, I wanted to pay you to prevent that incident from happening. Yeah. And so and then that improved our employees life. Right. Because you got to imagine that. Like when that’s going down, they need to get back into business.

00;09;49;13 – 00;10;07;22
Speaker 1
So we got two people, you know, on those restoring, you know, desktops for storing data gathering forensics doing this. You know, the CERT doc that we call. So our security nets the response team document where we got a document. You know who what when where, why, how happen? You know, it’s very involved. Yeah. And we want to prevent that.

00;10;07;22 – 00;10;33;29
Speaker 1
We don’t want to be a part of that. Now that happens that you know, happens with very few, you know, few and far between now. But it’s it’s very time consuming. It’s very stressful, for not only for us but also for the business. And so we really, you know, embrace this, you know, the proactive approach and really looking for that ideal customer that’s like I just like we all have homeowner’s insurance, right?

00;10;34;02 – 00;10;52;25
Speaker 1
The bank knows that physically, it’s not going to be very often that your house burns down or catches on fire. And there’s large damage to it. Right? But if it does, they require you to have that insurance. And that’s essentially what we are for businesses where the their technology insurance like we have, we have to be proactive so that we don’t enter into these big, you know, downtime events.

00;10;52;27 – 00;10;55;13
Speaker 1
And, you don’t have to go through all this chaos. So.

00;10;55;13 – 00;11;16;04
Speaker 2
Yeah. So so let’s jump into the fractional side of things. The, you know, when I first started talking to you, I was thinking, like in my mind because, again, I’m a marketing guy and, not not a technical. Right. So, I was like, oh, CTO that’s probably what Jared’s up to, but you have a different term for it.

00;11;16;04 – 00;11;22;07
Speaker 2
It’s it’s the CEO this or BC and that is what does that stand for one more time.

00;11;22;14 – 00;11;35;09
Speaker 1
The virtual chief information officer. So similar to a, CTO you know, but just more on the information side of things of securing data. What more for your technology strategy and direction.

00;11;35;09 – 00;11;57;15
Speaker 2
So and all right. So from the sounds of things and for what I know, you guys really started as more of the you were you were breaking fixed. So it wasn’t really MSP yet, but you were in that direction. Right. It was really about being an IT company for your clients that at what point did you start looking to add the fractional side with the with the VCO?

00;11;57;17 – 00;12;19;26
Speaker 1
Well, a lot of it, you know, counteracted with, what you were mentioning earlier was, you know, finding the, the right customer, right, with the right value. Because to be proactive, you, you have to be able to be looking ahead. You have to have a strategy of like where you are, where you want to go. And, and then we kind of take like that alignment of your technology with where your business is going.

00;12;19;26 – 00;12;44;07
Speaker 1
So it’s not just like, what do you need to do with laptops. It’s like, okay, what are you what do you see your workforce looking like in the next 3 to 5 years? And do you want to just continue on like brick and mortar buildings that have hard cost to them, or can you, you know, use technologies to have, you know, people working from home, working in a hybrid work environment that might severe, you know, some of those costs, right?

00;12;44;07 – 00;13;10;23
Speaker 1
Costs have been going through the roof for the last, you know, since the pandemic, right, since the pandemic. But, you know, there’s really been a, pretty unstable period of time here over the like the last five, 5 or 6 years. And so is where I follow with many businesses, much as we’ve done with ours. And I’m sure that you would do with errors is, you know, in our discussions that we’ve had over the last 20 years, is you always looking for efficiencies, you know, you can’t keep there’s only so much you keep raising your price before no one wants to do that.

00;13;10;24 – 00;13;34;03
Speaker 1
And I think in this industry that that price is starting to get there. Right. Because and then you’re trying to use some technology to roll those costs back and, you know, can you build more efficiently, you know, can you automate, you know, repairs and, and, you know, fixes a little bit quicker, you know, how do you go through and, and, you know, speed that up so you can do more with less.

00;13;34;05 – 00;13;57;07
Speaker 1
And as we talk with companies, that’s essentially what we’re focusing on. We’re not trying to use technology to eliminate jobs. We’re using them to sustain jobs, enhance jobs that are there. You know, like I said, what their strategy, what do they plan on doing over the next 3 to 5 years and how the how can technology, help their business, you know, maintain a steady cost to their people to give them a competitive advantage?

00;13;57;09 – 00;14;11;29
Speaker 1
Rather than just like, well, I guess we just got to buy more servers and we got to do this. And so we just got to keep adding on more cost, and we really just try to look for the efficiencies. What’s the right way? You should be using technology to implement what you want to do.

00;14;12;01 – 00;14;37;19
Speaker 2
What so how does, you know, when we were talking about target market, it it sounded like really you’re working with companies in owning working companies that are going to allow you to serve them in the best way that you guys know how to do that, which is by having these proactive services that cover them so that they don’t have to call you, you know, and, so where does the CIO link in with all that?

00;14;37;19 – 00;14;45;08
Speaker 2
Is that like a part of that? Like all of our clients are using us as a CIO or do only some of them use you as a v CIO?

00;14;45;12 – 00;15;04;20
Speaker 1
We do it for for all you know, there is a. Yep. So again for that efficiency in business right. So we you know can we can have the process down best possible. So we don’t you know this industry used to be a lot of like ala carte services. Like here’s this level of antivirus and this level of backup then.

00;15;04;20 – 00;15;29;19
Speaker 1
So you’d have like you know your be like your gold silver and bronze packages. Right. And then everybody would either choose a silver package or someone, you know, and then you have like all these different contracts you got to maintain and how you build different things. And, and then you have different level of coverages like, hey, what am I supposed so that we thought created problems in this industry because it was just more of like, well, you only paid for this level of protection.

00;15;29;19 – 00;15;45;21
Speaker 1
So we’re sorry that you got hit with this level of attack. And then this is what it’s going to cost to fix that. Well, why don’t you tell us about this other package? What we did, we didn’t want to pay that, so we took that all out. We just said, hey, here’s just one cost. This is one level of service.

00;15;45;23 – 00;16;07;17
Speaker 1
Your cybersecurity, whether you’re a landscaping company or a dentist, has to be the same, because my team has to be able to be consistent with the way that they’re applying standards. It’s really hard for us to standardize 15 different companies if we have 15 different standards. Yeah. So we’ll take common standards. Like, obviously, if you’re a medical industry, right, you have to be HIPAA compliant.

00;16;07;19 – 00;16;28;28
Speaker 1
Right. But we look for, you know, synergetic compliances like CISO center for center for Information Security, like their seven dot 1 or 8 dot all controls SOC two, those ones that will, you know, encompass a lot of industries, standards. We align them with them. And if there’s any specific, items that we have to do, whether it’s DoD contracting, you know, Mr..

00;16;28;28 – 00;16;50;12
Speaker 1
101, 71 controls or CMC, we’ll we’ll add those on to that. But for the we have the core alignment at the heart of everything that we do. And so we just say that these are standards that we have that we don’t compromise on. Like this was you should have employee training. You should have 24 over seven, 365 security operations center monitoring.

00;16;50;12 – 00;17;17;28
Speaker 1
You should have we should be looking for impossible, travel. So are you logging in and Miami and New York City at the same exact time? That’s impossible. Right. So we look for those things and lock accounts. I’ll take proactive approaches. We’d rather be safe than sorry. And, you know, that’s really, you know, the service that the DCI all kind of brings into, setting that standard and keeping that, standard high.

00;17;18;00 – 00;17;20;25
Speaker 1
Yeah. Compass. All the attractions.

00;17;20;28 – 00;17;45;29
Speaker 2
I gotta say it, number one, the idea of simplifying your business in the fashion that you’re talking about sounds amazing to me. As someone who is running a way over a complicated business right now, as a business owner, it makes me want to pull my hair out with all the different things that we have going on, and almost impossible for us to manage all the many different scopes of work over the many different clients that we have.

00;17;45;29 – 00;18;08;07
Speaker 2
So, like what you’re saying right now sounds like a dream to me. Jared. I’m curious about when you decided to make that shift. Obviously, some of your clients are not going to want that level of service, right? Like, and as a business owner would, sometimes letting go of clients is really a tough pill to swallow for us, right?

00;18;08;07 – 00;18;35;13
Speaker 2
We want that revenue. We want the growth. We you know, we got employees that we’ve got to, make sure that they’ve got ours. Like, what does that look like for you to make the transition from I’m working with everybody and I’ve got all these different kinds of scopes of work depending on the client and what they would like to pay for versus what they need to moving into this realm of a we’ve got this program, and if you want it, we’d love to work with you.

00;18;35;16 – 00;18;48;13
Speaker 2
And for those of you that don’t want it, like we’re going to have to transition you out, like, okay, I just I need to hear about that, Jared. Because it’s a I’m a I’m thinking about like, oh my God, it sounds awful but also amazing at the end of it.

00;18;48;15 – 00;19;06;29
Speaker 1
Yeah. So, I gotta say, our sales staff wasn’t a big, huge fan, but, there’s oh, they were like, we can only do business with these are that’s an that’s still an ongoing thing to this day, you know, but I think it’s, it’s getting to where he is, like, you have to do what you’re best at and you can’t be everything to everybody.

00;19;07;02 – 00;19;26;29
Speaker 1
And when you go to, like an ala carte mark or, you know, type, you know, service offering, there’s just so many variables or so many moving pieces, there’s so many inefficiencies. And, you know, I used to have a full time person that just literally would send invoices, correct them here. Oh, well, this only took two hours when you billed us for two and a quarter, two things rounded up.

00;19;26;29 – 00;19;46;00
Speaker 1
And there was a lot of that going back and forth. And I felt like that business model, pushed us that, you know, at odds with our customers rather than as partners with our customers. Yeah. So we, you know, we were spending so much money just trying to take care of customers on the even on the back end stuff.

00;19;46;00 – 00;20;03;05
Speaker 1
Our, you know, our overhead positions were so much higher than what they are right now. And then we just, you know, and I got looking at this and said, you know, we’re turning over employees return all of our customers back just because there’s just just chaos. And, you know, for me, I used to go, man, how many times we got to train on this?

00;20;03;05 – 00;20;22;08
Speaker 1
And I was like, well, we’re training somewhere new because that’s been two years. We turned over our staff because of the chaos. Right? Of yeah, how do I build this? Wait, I’m supposed to do this for these guys, but not for these guys? Yeah. And so you’re just constantly trying to, you know, just. No no, no, no, no for this type of contract.

00;20;22;08 – 00;20;44;22
Speaker 1
We build it this way not only for these guys. It’s this standard. No, no, for these guys it’s they’re paying for this standard and we’re like them and I it’s like we have so many competing factors here that are outside of doing what we do. We just had to simplify it. And so we were just like, here’s some core compliances that will meet the needs of all of our customers.

00;20;44;25 – 00;20;50;20
Speaker 1
And then here’s a few of the areas that we just have to go above and beyond because of their business type.

00;20;50;23 – 00;21;02;27
Speaker 1
And that really simplified everything. So, do we lose customers? Yeah, we were like 300. And some of my customers, I think like right now we have 56 agreements, you know?

00;21;03;00 – 00;21;03;26
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00;21;03;28 – 00;21;24;19
Speaker 1
We’re a bigger business, but we’re a more efficient business. And our, our team gets 100% health care benefits. Family individual. You know, they get Aflac, they get a little bit of a time off. Our turnover is next to zero. I mean we just turnover 48% of our company a year now. We’re I think we’re under 7%. You know.

00;21;24;22 – 00;21;45;24
Speaker 1
And this is an industry, you know, with manufacturing and and nursing they have some of the highest turnover rates. You know, in any industry, you know, we’re we’re right there and not anymore. And our customers are happy because of it. They’re calling in. They’re getting the same engineers, you know, the three guys against the farm, the three of the three men and women that answer the phone right now.

00;21;45;26 – 00;22;01;22
Speaker 1
I’ve been here for four plus years for two of them and six plus years for the other one. So they know our customers very, very well when they call in. It’s a very familiar voice with familiarity of their setup. That’s been that’s been huge for us.

00;22;01;24 – 00;22;11;19
Speaker 2
So you actually shrink down your customer base considerably, but you’re saying but your larger and so you’re doing more in revenue now than you were before.

00;22;11;22 – 00;22;13;24
Speaker 1
Yeah. My about 4%.

00;22;13;26 – 00;22;20;14
Speaker 2
That’s wild. That makes that makes it much harder job. Yeah.

00;22;20;17 – 00;22;48;20
Speaker 1
We used to have about 80 to 90, service tickets in the queue right now. Right now we’re 15 to 7. You know what I mean? Like 7 or 15 tickets that are active issues going across our customers rather than 80. And the proactive approach has been so much better for everybody. And we’ve converted customers that were skeptical of the, the business model, to say, hey, I’m so happy we don’t call you anymore.

00;22;48;21 – 00;23;08;01
Speaker 1
You know, we’re I’m so happy that, you know, our interactions are, you know, just keeping us going because our business was growing and we don’t have to worry about it. That’s how it’s meant to be, right? Where we want to be silent. Just like, really, we were always silent because we were working through the night where nobody sees us, you know?

00;23;08;01 – 00;23;30;23
Speaker 1
Now we’re just working the same hours everybody else is, and we’re just doing our job better. You know, we’re using that technology, and then we’re taking a lot of the technology improvements that we put into our own business and helping customers put that into their business and reducing their hardware cost, improving their uptime, improving their efficiencies, stopping their their need to invest in, you know, multiple positions where technology can help doing that.

00;23;30;23 – 00;23;36;28
Speaker 1
And they’re growing and keeping their their company at the same size. You know and.

00;23;37;01 – 00;24;03;10
Speaker 2
I it it’s it’s making me think about something that you said earlier as far as the the client relationship you have. Right. Like in previous years before you started going to the proactive approach, clients would call you, something’s broken, you’d fix it. So they obviously we’re seeing the value because they every time something was needed, they had to interact with you.

00;24;03;12 – 00;24;29;19
Speaker 2
Now with the proactive approach, there really isn’t a need to interact with you. However, I know because we suffer the same issue that if you’re not interacting with your clients, they sometimes start losing, the understanding that that you’re actually doing something right, like because they’re the nothing’s breaking. We never hear from these, you know, like, we don’t need to call these guys.

00;24;29;19 – 00;24;46;08
Speaker 2
Like, why are we paying this money? So how do you manage that client relationship? So they continue to see the value in what you’re doing, even though a lot of it is, like you said, it’s quiet. There’s, you know, nothing’s breaking because of the work we’re doing. You know, you don’t have to call us because of the work we’re doing.

00;24;46;08 – 00;24;50;17
Speaker 2
Like, how do you how do you help them see that?

00;24;50;19 – 00;25;10;06
Speaker 1
Yeah. One of the things that we’ve we’ve actually doing for it because of that, because, you know, now you’re you’re missing that human interaction. I think people still really want that, is having our, you know, or alignment guys, you know, prior to we go out on I go over tickets with them, go over, you know, hey, this is a common problem we’ve been seeing.

00;25;10;08 – 00;25;24;09
Speaker 1
How can we, you know, how can we work together with you? But let’s eliminate this problem, right? What are you guys seeing has happened since then? Your partner guy brought in. Has this happened since? You know this as and this. You know, we have customer. We have plasma tables. They have, you know, different equipment they bring in.

00;25;24;12 – 00;25;43;21
Speaker 1
You know, how can we attach that to your network? How can we make that, better. How can we monitor it, manage it, get it up, back up and running quicker. So yeah, we’ve we’ve used a lot of, you know, that approach to say, you know, we had to create some positions that were proactive, right? So I go meet with customers on a quarterly basis.

00;25;43;21 – 00;26;07;13
Speaker 1
We have another guy, you know, gets out there on a monthly basis. We have a professional services guy that just handles professional services. And then we have a support team that just handles support. And so we’ve kind of compartmentalized, you know, our service delivery so that you’re proactively hearing from us rather than like, hey, I had to talk to Jared today because, service manager didn’t get it done.

00;26;07;13 – 00;26;19;10
Speaker 1
Then that went to the project manager, and then that made its way up to the owner of the company. And it’s like, now I’m going to meet with you. I’m a quarterly basis. We’re going to talk about some strategy stuff. Hey, here’s a few things. You got to do it. Cyber. Here’s a few things got to do with this.

00;26;19;13 – 00;26;25;01
Speaker 1
You know, keep them on track, you know? So we’re just making sure that we’re getting out there and talking to them as, as much as.

00;26;25;01 – 00;26;39;01
Speaker 2
Possible, as much as possible. So really, so it’s the so it’s the effort has changed a little bit. Right. Like it’s you have to that you’re essentially you’re also being proactive about your communication and your customer service efforts.

00;26;39;03 – 00;27;04;25
Speaker 1
Being proactive with the relationship. You know, just making sure that we’re hey, we’re still here where we just want to let you know we don’t you don’t talk to us as much as you used to because we’re doing our stuff. We’re doing it behind the scenes. Here’s the tickets, here’s a proactive stuff that we’re doing. And, and yeah, I am still here, you know, and just stand up, you know, keep keep that relationship going and keep that human connection that I think, you know, some of the technology is taken away from us, you know?

00;27;04;28 – 00;27;15;14
Speaker 1
Yeah. I don’t mean just asking to be taken away from society in general. Right. Move. Yeah. Do a little bit more through social media than we used to do. You know, going to, you know, social events. So,

00;27;15;17 – 00;27;17;29
Speaker 2
Yeah. So gotta stay visible, right?

00;27;18;01 – 00;27;19;04
Speaker 1
Yes.

00;27;19;06 – 00;27;46;08
Speaker 2
What? You know, as you’ve been going through the last 21 years and making these shifts and changes and, you know, one of the biggest things, I think and I remember when you started the business, you know, like, and, what are the things that you would suggest that people, you know, for a lot of fractional some of us are, are just doing the lifestyle business where it’s just us and, you know, we’re going to have a handful of clients and it pays the bills and we have a lot of free time and we do it.

00;27;46;08 – 00;28;10;11
Speaker 2
And then there’s others of us that are actively trying to grow and scale and add team members and add clients, what from a fractional standpoint or really from any standpoint, I don’t know, I think it’s probably all the same, regardless if you’re a fractional or if you’re just, some other type of business. But what do you think the biggest lesson learned for scalability and scaling has been for you in 21 years?

00;28;10;11 – 00;28;13;20
Speaker 2
You’ve been doing this?

00;28;13;23 – 00;28;19;10
Speaker 1
What has been the best approach for scalability?

00;28;19;12 – 00;28;41;02
Speaker 1
So there I would say, like I said, just standardizing what you do. We, we even have a limit on how many new customers we can onboard a month. I only allowed two new customers a month, the first and the 15th. And the reason for that is because I don’t want the chaos to return. We have to do a good job from day one.

00;28;41;05 – 00;29;02;19
Speaker 1
And we have to make sure that, you know, the, the very at the very beginning of that relationship, that we have command of their environment. We know everything that there is no about it. We go through it properly, we follow our standards. We don’t we don’t. We’re not robotic. We you know, the process does deviate slightly. But I mean, for the most part, we’re we’re here.

00;29;02;19 – 00;29;30;21
Speaker 1
We might go over here a little bit. And what we’re, we’re steering that back to what our standards are, what that approach us. And we want to make sure that everything gets done correctly. And it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. And we want to make sure that, what we’re doing doesn’t come back to bite us in six months because we heard up and on board of these guys, so we go through it, we go through that process, and we make sure it’s complete before we move on to the next.

00;29;30;23 – 00;29;55;16
Speaker 1
And, you know, that has really helped us scale because it allows us to do a much better job for our customers and properly advise them and, you know, keep them proactive and not reactive. Once we get them into the strategy piece and we get the start becoming part of their budgetary process and, you know, helping them through those, you know, the next steps, they’re getting a new software.

00;29;55;16 – 00;30;12;07
Speaker 1
We can talk with the vendors and help them. I mean, that just takes a load off of their plate. And then also, since we don’t have 300 customers anymore, we’re able to scale of that. Hey, you’re taking on this program, and we, Well, we gotta hurry up and do this. Now. We can let’s let’s have a conversation.

00;30;12;15 – 00;30;24;09
Speaker 1
Well, scope this out. Let’s do this correctly. Let’s make sure that this new software you’re bringing in, you guys maximize every feature of it that you’re paying for, and that makes your business the best.

00;30;24;11 – 00;30;26;22
Speaker 1
Slowly. Additional scaling. Slowly.

00;30;26;24 – 00;30;49;04
Speaker 2
Yeah. So you’ve kind of put a governor on things so that you can move at a sustainable pace. Do you consider running? Yeah. Do you run into a scenario where, like, you have the opportunity to bring on more than two clients in a month, and so you have to push them off for a month, like, does that happen?

00;30;49;06 – 00;31;04;23
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah. So well, well, you know, so let’s say we’re coming up on July. We have an onboarding on July 1st and 15th if we land a deal tomorrow. And they said, hey, we got to be onboarded by August 1st. Or we say, hey, you know, we have to do August 15th. We have these other two that are in here.

00;31;04;25 – 00;31;30;25
Speaker 1
We, you know, this is why, you know, and, we’ve really never had anybody say, wow, you want to do a really good job. Like, now we want you to be about like we. So I mean, most of I mean, everybody’s been pretty understanding. And, you know, we’ve always, you know, we have made some exceptions in the past just because of, you know, either a complicated issue with a provider or something like that where we’ve because maybe they were a little bit smaller.

00;31;30;25 – 00;31;42;11
Speaker 1
We had the flexibility to do that. But for the most part, we just stick to that standard. Like I said, we’re not robots, but we are, you know, hellbent on being, you know, the best that we could be.

00;31;42;14 – 00;32;02;08
Speaker 2
Yeah. Hey, you know, it’s funny, Jared, I everything that you’re saying to me, it sounds like you’re doing everything you can to avoid the chaos that so many small businesses deal with on a day to day basis. Like, that’s. It seems like like that’s your number one enemy is chaos, right?

00;32;02;10 – 00;32;09;03
Speaker 1
You know? Yeah, absolutely. It’s not good for the cross market. Not good for our team.

00;32;09;05 – 00;32;10;07
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00;32;10;09 – 00;32;33;13
Speaker 1
Leads to lower quality, higher stress. And now, I mean, when you’re going through things methodically and you’re just doing everything in a, in a consistent approach, you’re always getting better every day. So the customers network environment improves every, every week. Everything that we do for them, every, you know, every, you know, week, month, quarter puts them in a better spot than they were.

00;32;33;16 – 00;32;49;24
Speaker 1
And over the course of years, you know, that relationship strengthens the trust, strengthens, the way that they operate strengthens, you know, and, we’ve we found that that’s been working out great for us here in the last five years.

00;32;49;26 – 00;33;04;11
Speaker 2
Yeah. It’s again, as you’re talking, I’m just thinking about my business and all the chaos that we have on a day to day basis there, and I’m like, I gotta make some changes, man.

00;33;04;13 – 00;33;30;17
Speaker 2
You know, like, I like, I feel the fractional part of what we do is probably the easiest thing that we do because it’s the most manageable. But the rest of it, the deployment and the, the actual, what’s the word I’m looking for here? The, execution of strategy. And, you know, doing that work. That’s definitely it’s a weak point from a standpoint of it’s chaotic.

00;33;30;17 – 00;33;36;01
Speaker 2
There’s so many moving parts and pieces. So, you know, so many things.

00;33;36;04 – 00;33;37;29
Speaker 1
Absolutely.

00;33;38;01 – 00;33;59;13
Speaker 2
So, you know, I know we’re, we’re getting shorter on time. I, you know, as you look at the fractional part of what you do, which is I think is where you spend a lot of your time on the strategy and, and higher level stuff and meetings. What what do you think the, the single most important change. And maybe it’s going to be in line with everything else you said it probably will be.

00;33;59;13 – 00;34;17;02
Speaker 2
But like if you’re going to give another fractional, operator whether they’re in the information or technology sectors or maybe they’re in operations or HR or marketing or whatever it is, if you were going to give them one piece of advice, what would you tell them?

00;34;17;05 – 00;34;36;24
Speaker 1
I think like one of the biggest, you know, changes that we’ve made in the last five years was and, you know, you’ve been in sales marketing for a long time, right? And you always get a look at like who’s most important, right. It’s the chicken and egg conversation. Right. Is a there’s a customers or employees. And you can make an argument for both that can have, you know, great, you know, customers law great employees.

00;34;36;24 – 00;34;57;00
Speaker 1
Right. And vice versa. You got to have great customers to be able to afford great employees. And, you know, when we started, you know, making these changes, you know, it was always with the sole focus of us, like a photo finish of who’s the most important, like our team and our customer has to be treated, with the utmost, like, respect and importance.

00;34;57;00 – 00;35;13;13
Speaker 1
And and it can’t just be about money. It can’t just be about getting that project done or closing that ticket out. Had to be on focus on the like the quality of, you know, how the team is treated, right and the like, the benefits and making sure that they’re well compensated for the, the, job that they do.

00;35;13;13 – 00;35;32;13
Speaker 1
Right. And this is this is a hard industry, right? People aren’t usually calling you, and saying, hey, how are the kids doing? You know, they’re like, no, I got I got a PowerPoint presentation that they put on for our customer. Gotta be on a webinar and 26 minutes and this isn’t working. I got 100 people that are waiting on this.

00;35;32;15 – 00;35;51;15
Speaker 1
That’s that’s puts pressure on it. That’s tough. But, you know, being able to put those people in those tough situations and take good care of them and take that stress off of them. But they you take that chaos away, they’re able to go, okay, I got you 26 minutes PowerPoint webinar when they start. Okay. That happened. Okay.

00;35;51;15 – 00;36;11;17
Speaker 1
Good. Let’s let me take the computer. Here we go. Okay I see what’s going on here. You’re done. And then they have the customer after that go. Oh thank you. That was one of the biggest deals of what was taking away all that outside noise and focus on what we do it on, that that’s allowed us to give them that.

00;36;11;21 – 00;36;37;01
Speaker 1
You know, that feeling of relief of like, hey, it’s all right, I got it. Okay. Techs here, they’re not bogged down like they used to be. You know, there’s not any tickets in their queue. They’re just there. They’re proactively waiting for me to call, and they got me. And that’s the biggest thing that I would say. You know, I we’ve always I’m taking away the chaos, taking away the, the the fire drill and making sure that everybody is calm.

00;36;37;01 – 00;36;55;09
Speaker 1
We’re able to communicate. We’re a partner with our customers. We’re one in the same. I’ve talked to Olivia, Matt, Chad, myself, Kyle. They’ve, you know, Milford. They’ve talked to these guys for years. They know them. And there’s a comfort there. And so I think that that’s, that’s been our biggest, you know, thing, and that’s that’s all that.

00;36;55;11 – 00;37;13;14
Speaker 1
That’s why I recommend everybody out there, you know, just treat your customers and your in your team like family and keep them around them. You’ll be successful. You know, the longer the the more cohesive you are, the more that everybody is sharing in the same vision. And and and that is tough. That’s not easy. Said and done.

00;37;13;15 – 00;37;21;05
Speaker 1
When we spent a lot of time on gun culture, I had to change and I had to start with me and go all the way down to the bottom, but.

00;37;21;07 – 00;37;43;15
Speaker 2
I agree, it looks like we, we had a little bit of a technology platform problem here. So, listen, if you’re curious about Tech’s Jared Harmston, you can find those guys at ATK tech. Scott, I’m really grateful and appreciative of Jared coming on and spending some time with us. You know, check us out. You can find this episode and all the rest of our episodes at hourglass Nasscom.

00;37;43;21 – 00;38;12;05
Speaker 2
You can see it up in the corner right there. And, yeah, check out the website. You know, there’s, some other blogs information on there built for fractional by fractional. Sign up for our newsletter. Each week we send out a, kind of a too long didn’t read version of a, for fractional operators. It’s a bunch of curated content from around the internet, different post blogs, articles, etc. all designed to be informative and helpful to the fractional computing.

00;38;12;08 – 00;38;14;27
Speaker 2
I’m Mike Nelson, hourglass. Thanks, everybody.