You talk to any MSP on the street today, they'd say, "Yeah, we have unlimited support." Well, they do, but within this little box. As long as you call us- It's unlimited in this limited space. As long as you call us for these things, we'll do as much as you want. Yeah. What we're saying is, we're your technology partner. If you reach out to us and need help, we're going to help you solve the problem. We're going to help you find the right solution. We're not going to charge you extra for that. Welcome to the latest episode of Unraveling IT: Expert Tech Talks. My name is Nate Troyer. I'm an account executive at Corsica Technologies, and I'm here, interviewing Brian Harmison, our CEO. And we're going to discuss today, how the IT managed service landscape has changed, as far as metered, versus unmetered service. So, yeah, with that, Brian, thank you for being on the show today. Yeah. Thanks, Nate. Yeah. No problem. Can you give us maybe a narrative about how, IT services were delivered, you know, pre-COVID? You know, what that structure looked like, as compared to how it's changing now? Yeah. There have been, you know, a couple of different evolutions of what the managed services landscape looks like. You know, going back to well before COVID, you know, it was typically some kind of a multi-tiered approach that had, you know, just like basics. And then you go up one more level, and it would have some more stuff. Mhmm. And then there was, like, the expert level in, you know, expert or premium or, you know, unlimited plan. And what those were meant to be, is it was divided up by really where the work was done. So remote work might be included in one, where on-site work would be included in another. Right before COVID, most managed service providers started to look at their services more by discipline, rather than where it was delivered. So, if you use us as an example, we started talking about, well, you've- you can subscribe to our security services. You can add on top of security, support for the cloud in in your data center, and then you can add on top of that, end-user support typically, which would be, you know, your end users calling us and talking to us. And we all as an industry would say, you know, these are all-in services. As much as you use of those services, is included in one monthly bill. But, really, that wasn't true because there's all these exclusions, all these things that if you called us for this, well, that's not included. If you call us for this, well, that's not included. Well, if you if you need this help, well, that's not included. And so it generates a lot of activity kind of outside of that what's supposed to be that monthly fee. So, what's inherently wrong with that type of a delivery model? Well, in... there's a number of things. The biggest is that if you think of it in its purest form of, what do we do for people, you know, there's proactive work that we do. The problem really isn't in the proactive side. It's more in the reactive, which is, today, we're having an issue with, you know, our accounting system. We're the IT partner, we're going to get that first call. The expectation is, you're helping us with things IT. The traditional managed service provider looks at that and says, well, that's not an application we support. So we can work on it, but you're going to pay extra for that. And what that becomes is not really a technology partnership. It becomes more of a hesitation to, well, if I call this provider, are they going to tell me this is going to cost extra? Or you take that one step further and you have end users who get told, don't call because it might cost us more money. And so even the services that would be included end up not being leveraged because there's this fear of- we're going to get an invoice, we're going to get a charge outside of that contract. So did the leadership at Corsica want to change this, like, overnight? I mean, how did that how did that happen? I mean, was it a slow trickle of different red flags coming in? Was it an industry thing that was already, like, shifting in the industry? No. The industry still hasn't really shifted away from that. If you went to any conference around, our industry and listened to one of the, you know, the experts, they would tell you that's the model to use. You can't afford, as a managed partner, to truly do everything for one monthly bill. What we recognized, is that we miss out on the partnership side. So every- you go look at an MSP's website, they're gonna say, we want to be your trusted partner. Yeah. But it does that doesn't feel like a trusted partner relationship when, at each turn, it's, am I going to get billed for this? Am I not going to get billed for it? And so we started looking at across our client base, you know, what are those things? And what we recognized is that it was actually limiting our ability to to partner in a meaningful way around, we're here to to keep that business running, keep it functional, provide business continuity. And while we might not be experts in every single issue that pops up in every application across hundreds of customers, we know how to solve problems, and we can jump in and we can solve those. And expectation is they fix my issue. Right. Yeah. But what you hear a lot of times is, well, it's not our issue. It's somebody else's. Right. And that's what I don't want to hear. Wanna hear that. Yeah. And I think what we realized is that that was limiting our effectiveness as a partner. And so we started moving away from really two things that are really problematic in the space. One is this "time and materials billing" that pops up and feels like a surprise, ends up being a point of contention. And, you know, a lot of times for the sake of a partnership, you know, we would end up doing something about that anyway. The other is counts. Mhmm. Well, how do we- how do we count- Yeah. -how many devices are part of this? Traditionally, like, that's a great conversation. Is there any magic bullet that anybody found to, like, really, like, pricing this stuff over the course of time? Or is it many different ways of doing it? Well, we've all thought that we found the magic bullet. So maybe it was user count, you know, through, like, mailboxes. Maybe it was workstation devices. And, of course, we have tools that count these things, but even that's imperfect. And, you know, what we realized is that as a business, we wouldn't go hire another IT person because we hired three more, office workers, for example, or because our business grew. We would certainly reach a point where maybe we would do an acquisition. We'd say, okay. Now we need more IT. But that, the part of the predictability of the relationship, needs to be a truly set fee for the time period that we're working together. And if business conditions change, well, then let's sit down and talk about that just like we would in our own business as business conditions change and we talk about, you know, do we have the right resources? Too many, not enough, that kind of thing. The delta in a business that has a hundred workstations, going to a hundred and two? Oh. Doesn't change the financial impact for us. And we can provide them- In no significant way, right? Yeah, and we can provide them with more predictability. Okay. By having that be a set count or a set dollar amount- Okay. That makes a lot of sense. -for the period of the contract. That makes a lot of sense. So how does moving to, what are you actually calling it? What are we calling it? Are we calling it, unmetered? Or unlimited? Yeah, so- Unlimited support? Here's what I would say. If you talk to any MSP on the street today, they'd say, yeah. We have unlimited support. Well, they do, but within this little box of as long as you call us- it's unlimited in this limited space. As long as you call us for these things, we'll do as much as you want. Yeah. In that space. So, and what we're saying is, we're your technology partner. If you reach out to us and need help, we're going to help you solve the problem. We may not be able to be the long-term solution for that depending on our level of expertise. But we're going to help you find the right solution. And we're not going to charge you extra for that. Okay. How does it impact, like, customer experience? Well, it takes away a lot of these pain points that we've seen over the years of, well, we don't call you anymore because we're afraid we might get a bill, or we weren't sure if that's in scope or out of scope. What we're saying is, if you call us, we're going to treat it as in scope, and we're going to we're going to spend the time needed to help you find a solution for that problem. Do you anticipate that the market is going to... the MSP space is going to shift again to doing this? I do. I- we live in a world where we wouldn't tolerate metered service in any other part of our lives. Right. I doubt anyone listening to this podcast pays per, you know, gigabyte of data or per text or per minute. Yep. On their, on their phone. I actually left a provider because they were doing that. to go to another provider that was giving unlimited. Yeah. Same is true for home Internet. It was not uncommon years ago to have limits to how much you could use, and it comes down to predictability. And as providers, we need to be finding ways that we can fit into an organization more like those direct hires would fit in. You know, for you to go and hire an employee, you know, again, that's going to be a fairly consistent dollar amount, month over month. And they're going to- they're going to do the same thing that we are, to some extent, of if you ask them for help, they're not going to say no, that's not my job, which is essentially what MSPs have been saying all this time. Exactly. Is, yeah, you're- That's a really good point. You're paying- that's a really good point. We're paying you. And, you know- It's not a small amount either. No. It's you know, it is a trade off, a lot of times between, do we hire a partner or do we hire an individual? I firmly believe that there's areas where it makes sense to hire somebody that's part of your culture and part of your organization. And not just in technology, but across the board. And there's other areas where it makes sense to hire a professional firm who can fill, you know, that need and do so with different types of expertise. Yeah, there's, there's really- No different than a law firm or an accounting firm that your business might engage. There's really only three, three options. You know, you bring everything in-house, or you give it all to a provider, but what most people do is the third option, which is hybrid. Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, that makes complete sense. Bear with me. And I would argue, by the way, that hybrid's best if you can afford it. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. In my experience working the job, you know, being a help desk support person, it always was better to be on-prem with the person. The only thing that was lacking was knowing the culture really well. And if you go out to some place enough, you know, you're gonna know the culture really well. The only downside to that is, why you're going out there- Yeah. -so much as an MSP, right? So, like, that- Right, the objective is- Yeah, to not- less support need. I mean, that's the other piece of kind of the managed services puzzle, is and I used to tell people this, that- and I still believe it- you know, we're mutually invested in you having fewer problems. Right. Well, that was only kind of true before because depending on the type of problem, you may end up paying us more because you're having that issue. So this truly puts us in a partnership that we're saying, you know, if you continue to have a problem with this third-party application, we're going to make it part of our strategic initiatives with you. Right. To solve the root cause of that. So we really are truly- Because we want to be profitable in this, yeah. -mutually invested in that business not having, not having those issues repeat. Yep. Yeah. I completely agree. What inspired us, like, to go to the unlimited services? Yeah. So we did some testing and, talked to a number of our clients, talked to prospects, and really just stepped back and said, what are the services we would want to buy? If we were approaching this, you know, as a leadership team. That's a good thought experiment. How would we want that experience to be? And what we realized is that we weren't as easy to work with, and we weren't as, and I feel like I keep saying it. We called ourselves a partner, but we didn't act like a partner. Mhmm. And that in the best relationships that we have as a business, they are- they follow the same kind of model, which is a model where what you need, we're going to engage, and we're going to work with you, and we're going to help you solve those. And that that's what most of us are looking for when we think of, what does this ideal relationship look like? And of course, there's give and take. We have to be profitable as a business. We have to help them be profitable. And so that also requires a relationship, where we can talk about those things. And if there is, you know, a part of, you know, like I mentioned, an application or something that is causing, you know, excessive costs on our side, well, we're going to help you fix that because it's in both of our best interest. Any business, you have to be thinking about, how do we reinvent ourselves and learn from maybe the mistakes we've made, the things that worked well, the things that haven't, and chart a new course. And one of the things that I love about our team, and our culture, is that, we're not entrenched in the way it's always been done. And everyone's open to what's the best way to meet the needs of people, because ultimately, that's who we're- that's who we're serving. That's who we're working with, are the individuals at these organizations that we're protecting and supporting. Are there any examples of any success stories that we've had along the way since we've now been doing this for a couple of months? Yeah. I mean, there's lots of good examples. I think this is an area where you don't necessarily notice it right away. I'd say, any kind of new relationship you have, kind of this "get to know you" period, and a little bit of a honeymoon period. And so, you might not notice that, but what we've seen is we've seen increased engagement from our existing customers who we've moved into this this model and from new customers as we brought them in. And that's really where we see the success in, it doesn't just feel better, but the results are better because we're saying we're going to help you solve this. Do you think it makes the customer experience resources more efficient? Yeah. I think it gets back to, you know- we don't have core values here. We have key characteristics, which are the things that we expect people to exhibit. And one of them is being a decision maker and being a problem solver. And, of course, we're in the problem-solving business. That is truly what we do. But from a decision-making perspective, any employee can make a decision to improve, you know, the quality of somebody's day if they're having an issue. And we've talked mostly about, again, these reactive type issues. There's a lot of proactive security work that goes on, that that people don't really see. Those things are not frequently felt or talked about until they're not done. Yeah. But where we've seen the pain points that we feel like we've really been able to address is more in that reactive- I can't do my job today because of this. And we're saying, we're going to get you back to work. So, one of the other things that I thought we could go over right now since we're, at least in my tenure here, we've been, usually the first in a lot of areas to evolve. One of the things we did was we, offered a Corsica Secure Guarantee. Can you talk a little bit about that? And I have one other question for you to end it, to round us out at the end. Yeah. So this is another area where, you know, MSPs tend to talk out of both sides of their mouth. We'll provide your cybersecurity protection. But! Yeah. If you have an incident, you have to pay for it. And it's again, another area where we wouldn't think of any other service that way and be like, oh, yeah. That makes sense. No. It doesn't make sense. Why would you pay someone to protect you from something that then they don't have any responsibility to solve? And so, so our guarantee is really all about that. We care about your business recovering rapidly and having business continuity, not about who pays for what. So that again gets back to, what does true partnership look like? It looks like we've got skin in the game to you. And so we provide that to our clients, where almost every other MSP or MSSP, the moment that incident happens, the clock starts running. There are dollars there. Well, what incentive is there to really prevent that issue? My final question, to end on is, I need you to play Nostradamus a little bit. What do you think if this is, you know, the thing that's, like, on the horizon that's changing, that likely will be adopted. I mean, we're one of the first to have a portal. Now everybody has that. Right? It took about three years. Right? So, what's on the horizon and what's the next iteration, do you think? Yeah. Yeah. So when we're starting, we're starting this now, we're starting to include things like cloud integration services. This is all about how do I fully leverage my M365 licensing that I have, and how do I start to use AI within my business ecosystem to really leverage my technology for growth. Those are becoming the building blocks, the blocking and tackling that MSPs are going to have to be able to provide the expertise on. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense since a lot- we've already gone, I mean, the MSP industry has gone through that evolution of moving people into the cloud. This is just another, you know, evolution of that, which is now you have everything in the cloud. How do you utilize it well? And AI fits the model really well, of- you can't hire security experts? Hire a business that has security experts. Well, the same is true. Most of the businesses we work with, they they can't go hire an AI expert. They need a guide to guide them along the way and to share with them, here's what we see other businesses doing, and here's how we've adopted those technologies, and we'll guide you through that process. Cool! Now now you messed me up with the whole paper thing. Okay. Try to make it so Nikita doesn't have to edit the whole thing. It's okay. Just just don't use the script. Okay. And just talk. Do- just remember the Unraveling IT part, do you need me to? Yeah. I'll do it. Welcome. It took us many times to get through that. I just want everybody to know. Well, really for you to get through it. Intros are hard for me. Yeah. Really for me. I wanna stream my trash TV now, like, again. So what what inspired you guys to start, sorry. What inspired you guys? I don't work here anymore.
