Episode 201: How many users till your next technician hire?

Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Hello and welcome back to the show. Here’s what we’ve got in store for you this week.

Hi, my name is Manuj Aggarwal, a global thought leader in AI. AI is going to revolutionize the world and create one of the biggest wealth transfers in the human history. If you want to be part of this wealth transfer and take advantage of AI to grow your business, then listen to the podcast episode.

And on top of that fascinating interview about AI later on, I’ve got a trick for you to give to your technicians. It’s kind of an obvious trick, a really simple one, but it’s something that could save your business a ton of time.

Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

We’re talking a lot about technicians in this week’s show because my first question for you today is, how many users away are you from your next hire? What I mean from that is how many more users would it take being added into your business before you need to hire another technician?

I was having this exact debate a couple of weeks ago with an MSP I’m working closely with, and he’s at that point it’s sort of a seven, eight person business and they’re slightly too busy for the resource that they’ve got, but not quite busy enough to justify a new hire. And my client, my MSP, is enjoying the spare cash.

Because you know how it is when it comes to having another hire, don’t you? You want to sweat your assets, sweat your people. You want to get the most out of them, because often that’s where you see the best cash returns. But it is that juggling act, that balance of hiring… Well, do you wait until you’re too busy and then hire, or do you sort of hire before you become too busy so you’ve got the extra resource on tap?

Actually, the answer to that depends on the circumstances. So if it’s you and one other person, that’s where you wait till you’re too busy, then you hire in those kind of early stages of the business. Typically, because cash is more of a problem there.

But if you’re a seven, eight person business, typically you would hire ahead. And often there’s an impact. Well, there’s a cash impact, but there’s a time impact and an opportunity impact, but also it’s a lot slower to recruit people when you’re a seven, eight person business.

So my client is going to use a recruiter so he knows there’s going to be a fees impact. It’s going to take two to three months. And actually, he’s looking ahead and looking at what’s in his prospect pipeline, and the conclusion we reached is actually, yes, unfortunately, you need to spend the cash and he needs to go away and hire that person.

One of the things that we used to help him to come to that conclusion was some stats we had in this here show back in February this year. In fact, it’s Episode 169. If you want to go and dig out the original interview, I had a special guest called Jason Kemsley from Uptime Solutions. So they’re like an outsourced help desk and they work with a lot of MSPs and they’ve got a very data-driven scientific approach to the way that they recruit new techs and the way that they take on new clients.

So Jason told us, for example, and these are typical figures for him, but I think they could be fairly universal figures across the board, and it’s worth you just going back and listening to that interview to double-check them. But he says the average first-line technician will be able to handle 10 to 14 tickets a day, the average second-line will handle 8 to 12 tickets a day, and the average third line will handle 1 to 4 tickets a day. So that’s the number of outputs. In terms of inputs, he said the average user sets up or submits 1.45 tickets per month.

So if you take those stats, you can see, based on the resources you’ve got now, how many tickets you are able to manage. But you can also work out from that, right, if we’ve got three businesses in our pipeline, this is a 20 user business, this is a 40 user business, and this is a five person band. If I win this, I’m going to need this capacity at this stage.

Now, I appreciate that’s a very black and white way of looking at it. And actually, there are other factors to come into consideration, such as projects. If you bring on board that new 40, 50 user client, what’s the project impact on you and how does that affect your technician’s abilities to do other tickets? Because again, smaller businesses, it’s typically the same people doing everything, isn’t it? Bigger businesses, you might have specific people just to do projects.

But there’s also… I think you have to look at the opportunity cost on you personally. So your job is to grow the business. And I’m assuming you own or manage the MSP, but your job is to drive the business, it’s to bring in new clients, it’s to keep your team happy, it’s to be the glue that just holds everything together. That’s your job. Only you can do that. And if onboarding a new 50 user client, which is highly desirable, but if doing that knocks you personally out of action for three to four weeks… And by out of action, I mean you’re so focused on onboarding that new client and of course all your existing other jobs that you have to do. If that means you’re not developing the business, then that’s potentially a problem, based on what your goals are.

If you’ve got a huge growth target and you want to generate more cash to buy a nicer house, a better car, and a gravel driveway to park the car on, then you’re at some point going to have to get yourself away from the doing, away from the technical work. That’s the only way, unfortunately.

What you actually do is you set yourself up the choice. You set yourself up the choice of getting involved in technical work or not. So it may feel a little bit sad to you now, the thought of never having to do technical work, or it might make you feel quite happy. Whichever way. You set it up so that you’ve got a choice. You can jump back in and do technical work if you want want to. But the rest of the time, your real job is driving progress within the business.

So if you’re in that situation where you’re slightly too busy, not quite busy enough for someone else, what would you do? Would you hire someone now or would you wait until the work is absolutely piling up?

Here’s this week’s clever idea.

How’d you fancy a little look behind the scenes of how we make this podcast? So I do a series of interviews. I set up all the interviews myself because I want to make sure that the guests are the kind of people that you would be interested in. So I choose our guests, I vet them, and then I arrange a recording time. And often the guests are in another time zone, so the easiest thing to do is just to send a calendar invite. So far, so simple, right?

Here’s the thing. When I talk to a guest and when I set up an interview, I give them a very specific set of instructions. So I tell them about the podcast, the fact that this isn’t one of those podcasts that’s just the guest interview, because I find those lazy. I think that you could do a lot more work. Well, we do, as you see.

So I tell them that their bit’s going to be around about 10, 12 minutes, that I’ll need about 30 minutes of their time to record it. I give them the recording link, I tell them about the audience, because sometimes we have people on who don’t necessarily know the MSP world very well. So there’s a little bit of texts that I can insert about that. And then there’s just some of the housekeeping things like you know how we do a recommended book? So obviously we record those at the time of interview, and then we just sort of play them out a number of weeks after their initial interview.

So all of that information sits there. And a number of years ago, I invested in a piece of software which allows me to paste all of that in a calendar invite with literally the press of… I think it’s like three buttons. So I type on my keyboard, Z-I-N-T. INT for interview. What that does is that triggers… That code triggers a piece of software called TextExpander, which is some software I use on my Mac, and that pre-fills in that calendar invite, but then it sort of pops up a little field, like a box with some fields that I have to fill in.

So one of the fields is the recording link, because we have a bespoke recording link for each interview for security reasons. And then I have to decide whether or not I need to tell them about the MSP audience. And there’s a couple of other fields as well.

So literally, for me to send a calendar invite is put in their email address, done, and it takes seconds. It takes literally seconds.

Now, this may not be a new thing to you. The concept of software… And I use TextExpander. There are many, many, many alternatives available. So find one you like and stick with it.

But the concept of using short keys, sort of hot keys or shortcuts like this, may not be a new thing to you, but it completely changed everything for me when I discovered that. And I use now TextExpander. I use it on my phone, I use it on everything. If I find myself typing any phrase, even down to my address, right? I know it sounds silly, but you think how many times you pop your address, you populate your address into some kind of eCommerce thing. So I have that now. If my 1Password doesn’t pick it up, then I’ve got it now, put in my TextExpander, and it just saves me seconds. So I must be saving hours across the year, which is worth the $20, $30 or whatever I spend on it. So A, if you’re not already doing that in your life, go get TextExpander or something and try that out.

But what I really wanted to talk about with it is how you can use that to make your business more efficient, and specifically your technicians. You see, it occurred to me the other day that probably, what, 70, 80% of the tickets that you handle are the same kind of problems all the time, right? So you must have password resets, you must have new users. There must be a series of things. I’ve never run an MSP. You tell me what the common things are. For all of those things, what if you used regular templates? What if like TextExpander?

Now, you may already have this built into your PSA, you may be using something like TextExpander, which has a group’s version so you can have one template for all of your team. Maybe you’ve got this functionality, but you’ve never set it up.

To me, that’s an absolute no-brainer. And I think the key to it is to set those templates up in a way which doesn’t remove the personality of your team. It doesn’t seem like a canned response, and yet actually it is.

What would I mean by that? Well, let’s take something like a new password. So let’s say you have a standard template. It doesn’t matter how you do it. I know you’ll figure that bit out. But let’s say you’ve got a technician and they know that the standard template is, I don’t know, Z1 or Zpass for password. So they type that in and it pulls up the current template for password changes.

Now, what you mustn’t do is do some kind of corporate committee speak of, “Dear user, thank you very much for requesting a password reset, which will be commenced in approximately 4.38 seconds.” That’s how corporations talk, and we want to talk like humans, humans to other humans. “Hey, insert name. Thanks for letting me know about your… Sorry that you’re having problems with your password. Good news, I can get that fixed for you in a matter of seconds. I’m going to hit a button now which will send you an email, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Now, the cool thing about using these canned responses is you can write these. So you know how if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you’ll have heard me say that you should be the face of the business, right? You are the face of the business as the owner or manager. Well, you can also be the personality of the business. The way that you do that and the way that you make the business’s communications authentic is by just using your personality and you write everything yourself.

And when you think about it, if it’s a case that you are just doing the template, then that’s easy, right? So your staff can still add in their personality. You might even include a line for them to put their own note on or something like that, or you might decide actually the safe thing is just to use my personality.

And then here’s the key thing on this. Once you’ve set up all of those templates, you review them every three months. So set yourself a recurring task to just go in and look at those templates on a regular basis. We do this, we have a number of automated emails that go out when people do various things within our service, the MSP Marketing Edge. And every three months or so, I’ll just go and check them.

And most of the time, there’s no changes, there’s nothing I’ll change. But sometimes I’ll look at an email and I’ll think, “We changed that. That’s not quite how it works anymore.” We changed it and we forgot there’s an automated email that goes out, because it’s quite easy to forget all the different automations that happen. So I think putting in place a regular check is a key thing.

But if you’re not doing this already, go and have a look at your PSA, see if there are templates involved. If not, get yourself something like TextExpander. It could just save so much of your technicians’ time and be a better way to communicate with your lovely clients.

Paul’s blatant plug.

Lights, camera, action. We have a YouTube channel. If you want to spend more time learning how to grow your MSP and getting some top-notch marketing advice, just go to youtube.com/mspmarketing.

The big interview.

Yeah, hi, my name is Manuj Aggarwal. I’m the founder and chief innovation officer of TetraNoodle Technologies. So I’m a global thought leader in artificial intelligence, and we serve our clients, implement AI, and grow their business using technology.

Yes, and thank you so much for joining me on the show. We are going to be talking about AI in just a few minutes time because I know that you have some amazing ideas of where it can go and how this technology can be used, not just by MSPs, but by ordinary people as well.

Let’s first of all just have a little bit look back at your backstory. So a little bit behind the scenes here. Often before these interviews, I will get to read up on people that I’m going to interview, just find out a little bit about them. And you have the most astonishing story. Give us a brief overview of where you started and how you got to where you are today.

Yeah, it has been quite an interesting journey. Basically, my professional life started at 15, working in a factory in India, and I was making $2 a day there, doing some backbreaking work. That experience taught me a lot, but it also triggered some ambition in me to improve my life and do something better with my life.

And in that quest of improving my life, I wanted to acquire new skills that can help me build more value and earn more money and become better at what I’m doing. That led me to find my passion for technology and software, and I just fell in love with technology. And I was amazed how with simple clicks of a button or some code that I write on the computer, I can help tens of thousands of people. So that was the beginning of my career in technology.

And then my quest to use technology to solve some more complex problems, staying on the cutting edge of technology using anything that is new and exciting, like artificial intelligence or blockchain or cloud computing or mobile apps. Anything of that nature helped me to get into projects which have been globally impactful. The work that we have delivered, it has impacted over 10 million lives and generated over $500 million in value.

So it has been quite an interesting journey coming from where I used to be and now being seen as a thought leader in AI, working with some of the biggest names in the world. So it’s almost surreal. It’s almost unbelievable.

No, I can imagine. I bet there are some days that you… Because we all do sometimes, don’t we? Sit back and look at where we’ve come from and what we’re doing and what potentially is in our future. I mean, that’s quite an astonishing story, so thank you so much for sharing that.

So let’s talk about AI, because that’s the thing that’s-

Absolutely.

… most of interest. Certainly when I talk to MSPs, it’s one of the biggest subjects that they’re interested in. I must start with a caveat, which is that you and I are recording this interview on the 19th of June 2023. Because we work so far ahead, I’m conscious this episode isn’t going out till some point in September. So if there’s anything you hear in this interview and you think, “Well, that’s been superseded,” then that’s just because of the time delay in getting this interview out to you.

So AI obviously to the rest of the world, ChatGPT seemingly came out of nowhere at the beginning of this year. Obviously for MSPs, for experts such as yourself, that ChatGPT is just one element of AI. Give us a little bit of an idea of your credentials about AI. I believe you have some AI patents, don’t you?

Yeah, so my patents are related to two fields majorly. One is education. So there’s a patent. Basically what it does is the invention was about a personalized curriculum. Because today, typically in a classroom, every student gets the same curriculum, and we know as human beings, we are not all equal. Some students may be advanced in a particular topic, some students may be a little bit laggard and they may need additional help. So the invention that we did was to take a particular curriculum and personalize it for each student. So as a student shows more competency in a particular topic, they may be able to skip ahead. And if a student needs more help, they are provided more additional information or curriculum to help them gain proficiency in that topic. So that was one.

Another one is a series of patents in the healthcare domain where the invention was to help people with joint pains. So a lot of people experience joint pains because of the way their feet are constructed, their anatomy of the feet. So we created a computer vision and 3D printing based industrial pipeline, which can take some photos from your mobile phone of your feet, construct a 3D model of your feet, and then print a personalized and custom orthotic device which is 3D printed and it fits into your shoe and then helps you with joint pains.

So these were some of the patents. And then another one, a significant one that I worked on was helping students not drop out of their university programs. Because approximately 30% of the students drop out in the first two years of their degree programs because they find the courses that they have enrolled in, they are of no interest or they are very difficult. So we created algorithms to match the students with the right courses, just like Netflix recommends shows to us based on our interests, based on our past history and things like that. This program was actually mentioned by Obama in his speech and Bill Gates as well, and Bill Gates Foundation invested in that project.

You name dropper you. That’s exactly what I was talking about, that while AI may have seemingly come out of nowhere for the ordinary person, for people such as yourself, for MSPs, AI has been building up and up and up over a number of years. I mean, if you’d said to someone 20 years ago, the turn of the century, “Hey, in just 22, 23 years time, you’ll be able to take a photo of your foot with your phone, send that off somewhere, and a piece of software will intelligently 3D print a personalized thing to help you. Something to go in your shoe to help reduce your pain.” That would’ve genuinely sounded like science fiction 20-odd years ago. And now you hear something like that and you think, “Yeah, I can see how that would be done.”

What other ways have you seen AI change everything? Before we look forward, if you look back, in what other ways have you seen AI start to creep in? We’ve seen it coming into search, we’ve seen it coming into 365. What other things have you seen?

The interesting thing is that AI has been around since the ’70s. And definitely since the year 2000, it has already taken over a majority of the life around us. So if people take out their smartphone, they will realize pretty much everything on that device is running using AI. This recording that we’re doing, we are probably thousands of miles apart, but the traffic between your computer and my computer is being optimized using AI. If we use GPS to find directions to somewhere, that’s AI.

The other aspect that people don’t realize is in the past 20 years, the major advancements, the major wealth that has been created, it is a result of AI. So when people talk about the richest people in the world like Elon Musk. Tesla is actually an AI and data company. It is not a car manufacturing company, just like Amazon is not an online shopping mall, it is an AI company. Facebook is an AI platform. So if you look around you and see what kind of platforms you’re using, what kind of devices you’re using, AI is already everywhere, right?

So now what has happened with ChatGPT is that AI has been democratized and people who are not from the technology field, now they can also leverage AI, they can use it, they can touch it, feel it, and see what kind of impact AI can make on their business or on their life. So this is the first step in sort of the exponential hockey stick growth of AI, because now everybody will be able to use it and the use cases and how we see it manifesting in our life will just exponentially grow. There is no industry or economy or country which will be left untouched by AI.

It’s so funny you talking about Elon Musk because I drive a Tesla and on Friday evenings, every Friday evening, we go to a specific destination for my daughter’s theater school. It’s the only time we go there is a Friday evening. And every Friday evening, I pick her up from school and I tap on the sat nav in the Tesla and it comes up with kind of recommended destinations. And every Friday evening, it’s that destination, but it doesn’t do it any other day. And in fact, it was just last week or the week before, she said to me, “How does it know that we’re going there? Is it reading it in your calendar?” And I said, “No, it’s not in my calendar.” I said, “This is AI.” And it sparked a fantastic conversation about the fact the car has learned that we go there on a Friday evening.

So let’s take where we are now, and I think that’s a really interesting observation that AI is everywhere. We’re all interacting with it right now. It’s just that, as you say, it’s been democratized. That’s a wonder. I’ve not heard that described in that way before, and as a non-tech myself, I love that.

Let’s look forward, and I appreciate… I mean, I have to give a caveat, three months before we broadcast this, that the technology we’re discussing maybe out of date by the time we broadcast it in September. But asking you as an expert to look ahead the next X number of years, where do you see this going? You mentioned the hockey stick. How fast are we going to see things changing?

I mean, the hockey stick is already happening right now. Approximately a thousand new AI startups are coming out every day already today, right? So the impact has been huge. But moving forward, I think every industry will start to see hyper-personalization, because what has happened with Industrial Revolution, we were given the gift of mass manufacturing, so everything became affordable and standardized. But with mass manufacturing, we lost personalization.

So let’s say you are wearing this blue shirt. You can maybe buy that shirt in five sizes and maybe three different colors, and that is a result of mass manufacturing. And with AI and automation and all of these technologies coming together, you will be able to go to a store and say, “Okay, I want this shirt in four different colors all at the same time, and I want it in my specific size,” and AI will be able to scan your body and then source the fabric and stitch the shirt right there and then deliver it to you.

And the evidence of this, you can see. When you go to places like Amazon or other online retailers, they know exactly what you want. As you said, it has studied your life patterns, and then based on that, it already knows exactly what you’re looking for, it has the right recommendations and things of that nature. So this is not going to be limited to only smart cars or smartphones or online malls, it will be everywhere, in brick and mortar stores, in schools and universities, in doctor’s offices and dentist offices. All of these things, you’ll start to see transform using AI and automation.

I want to take that a step further. You see, my phone is connected to my smart scale, so it can see that the pounds are starting to creep back on again. I want my phone to tell the store that makes my shirts for me to make them a size bigger so I don’t have to actually tell them, because that’s less embarrassing for me. When you talk about it that way, what we’re really talking about is AI making people’s lives easier.

So something like that, you’re right. I’m particularly fond of this shirt, can’t remember where I bought it, can’t remember what size it is, but wouldn’t it be great if… I’ve worn this, I don’t know, 30 times. It’s starting to wear a bit thin. Wouldn’t it be great if a new one just turned up at my door and someone or some computer somewhere has made the decision, “Paul loves that shirt because he’s worn it 30 times.”?

I mean, actually, I guess we’re well on the way to that. What was I reading about somewhere? I think it was in one of the books about Amazon and how they developed Alexa and how they were starting to… And I don’t know if this is still a route they’re going down, but for example, having an Amazon-branded microwave which talked to Alexa. And again, it was that whole thing of you don’t need to tell Amazon how many minutes to microwave something. You just throw your meal in, it knows what the meal is because it could detect it through an RFID chip, and it just does it all automatically and then it adds it to your next food order because it knows you’ve eaten it and you like eating these. And to me, that’s common sense, right? That’s just customer service. It’s amazing.

Let’s bring this back to MSPs. So MSPs obviously are the interface between AI geniuses, such as yourself, and the ordinary decision-makers, business owners and managers. And I know that sometimes MSPs feel they have to pull their clients kicking and screaming into technological revolutions like cybersecurity and protecting themselves from themselves. What advice would you give to MSPs to try and make AI a bigger deal for their end clients?

All you need to do is, as I said, look at the evidence, because there’s no better substitute to convince somebody and get buy-in than showing them evidence of what is happening. So as I said, the richest people became richest people in the last 20 years just because of AI.

Walmart was the biggest retailer in the world, and they existed for about a hundred years before Amazon came on the scene. They were so big that in the retail industry, people said there is no way you can beat Walmart at retail. And Amazon became the number one retailer in the world within 20 years. The reason is because they use AI and data everywhere, right?

Tesla. We were talking about Tesla. It is now bigger than GM, Ford, and Chrysler combined as a car company. The reason is, again, they use AI and data heavily.

So this is what has happened in the last 20 years. So if somebody needs evidence why AI is so important, they can look at this evidence.

Now, in the future, what is happening in the future is… The CEO of IBM, he’s a very prominent personality in the world of business and technology. He has said that AI is going to add $10 trillion to the world economy by 2030. So currently, the world economy is $96 trillion. So that means 10% or more than 10% of the world economy will be added to the world GDP in seven years.

One more stat I will share with you is Peter Diamond. He’s a prominent scientist and entrepreneur. He has said by the turn of this decade, there’s going to be two types of businesses, one who are using AI fully and the second who are out of business.

So when we look at this landscape, this evidence, these really smart people talking about how the future is going to unfold, there is no doubt that if we don’t start right now using AI and understanding and incorporating it, it is going to be a very, very big problem because we’ll have to play catch up to other competitors who have started using AI, because their cost will come down, their customer service is going to be awesome, their supply chain is going to be fully integrated. It is going to be very difficult to compete as a non-AI company competing with people who are using AI.

So all of these arguments, all of these stats should be enough to really wake up the business owners and say, “Hey, even if you take baby steps today, start. Start somewhere.”

Yeah. And what a great position for an MSP to be in, to be able to strategically guide them on that and advance them. And I think almost every single MSP listening to this right now, by the very nature that you’ve sat through an interview like this and that you read up on AI, you know more than your clients about this subject. You don’t have to be a complete expert in order to do this.

So Manuj, thank you so much for your time on this and for sharing some insights on AI. Tell us what you do to help MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you.

Well, what we do is we work with business owners and decision-makers to understand what are the first steps they can take to embrace AI, and then we help them implement a complete AI strategy, complete AI systems to automate their business, make it more functional, make it more operationally efficient. That’s what my company does as an AI consulting company. And if anybody’s interested in learning more, connect with me on LinkedIn. Tell us a little bit about your business and how you are thinking about AI and how we can help you accelerate your growth.

Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. This week’s recommended book.

Hi, I’m Nicky Ballou, and the book I recommend is The Power of One More by Ed Mylett. Here is why I recommend it. Ed really is a big proponent of you taking one more action in all the major areas of your life. So for example, if you’re in sales in your business and you’re somebody who quits after five calls, Ed will tell you to make six. If you’re a husband who is wanting to do something wonderful for his wife and he says, “Okay, today I’m going to do five things that I know she’s going to love,” he’s going to tell you to do an extra one, a sixth one. The power of one more is a very powerful attitude to have about life, because it has you step out of your comfort zone and do more and serve more and reach more and impact more.

Coming up next week.

Hi, I’m Jeff Ton. I have spent 40 years in information technology, and I have become an expert in how to relate to chief information officers. And I advise companies all over the world on how to build stronger, more strategic relationships with their clients through these concepts.

Please do subscribe on whichever platform you’re listening to or watching this podcast right now, because on top of that interview next week, we’re going to be talking about prospects who ghost you. They say yes, they’re all keen, and then nothing. You don’t hear from them again. What happens? What’s going through their minds? What are their emotions? And more importantly, what can you do about it? Join me next Tuesday, and have a very profitable week in your MSP.

Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.