Transcript
The infrastructure that they had put in and the systems that they had in place could support a company five times the size that they were. And we were just chatting about the sales and Sir David turned around and said, you should join us as a partner. And I had had a previous partner. It went belly up. I had sworn to myself that I would never get into business with anyone else. Is there just a maturity that every MSP has to go through or has the business actually changed over the last sort of 25, 26 years? Welcome to Now That's It, Stories of MSP Success, where we dive into the journeys of some of the trailblazers in our industry to find out how they used their passion for technology to help turn managed services into the thriving sector it is today. Born into the shadow of success, Craig Fisher was making a name for himself before he was even 20, but that all came to a screeching halt. Then entered David Ensign and a kebab, a few more struggles and a trip to Texas that would turn things around. This should be a very fun conversation. I've been looking forward to this one all week. I'm excited to welcome to the Now That's It podcast, Craig Fisher and David Eisen of Technica Solutions. Welcome. Thank you for having us. Yeah, this is special. I'm glad I've got both of you because I always tend to corner one of you and ask you a question and then when I go and talk to the other one, I get a different answer. So now I've got you both on camera. This is gonna be a truth serum. Streak fight. Yeah, this is gonna be fun. My answers are always the wrong ones. I remember a time it wasn't and you pointed that out in front of the entire group of individuals. So maybe we'll tell that story as well. So let's go on the way back machine as I like to call it with the Now That's It podcast. So that means before you two met, let's start with you, Craig. Your background's not technology and early on you witnessed great success but that led to a lot of pressure and expectations. You talk a little bit about your early career. I was in the fashion industry. I left school at 16, 17. My grandfather had been in it years before and he sold his company in the 70s for 7 million which back then was a lot of money and trying to follow in his footsteps put a lot of pressure on me. Only put that pressure on by me. No one else was putting it on and so I was desperate to try and replicate his success by the time I was like 19 or 20 and it was only years afterwards where people told me that he only made it when he was about 45. So it led to some pretty dark times trying to put that pressure on myself. So it did collapse a little bit. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you were able to make that through that. I know a lot of early successful or at least people that have been identified as maybe prodigies or successful in a certain business feel like they constantly have to be doing more and so I can only imagine what that felt like. I can't imagine it today because I know who you are today and you're a very positive, very outgoing but I'm really glad you've been able to get through those early times. So you find your way into a small marketing agency and then over a kebab with David but let's first catch up. David, what was Technica Solutions like before you met Craig? Certainly very much focused on the technical, not so much focused on the sales side. I think like an awful lot of smaller MSPs, it was just a fun business. You know, it was a number of guys that just enjoyed fixing things and the business grew organically and was just great fun to be in and then there just comes that point where you realize if you want to do more than that, you've kind of got to grow up a bit, which is a little bit sad but a little bit mature as well. Like most MSPs sort of starting out, you only know what you know, right? You're doing things the way that you feel is best. It's not like there's a book on how to build an MSP. You can read all the business books you want in your life but to figure out how do I make this work, that's hard and so you were doing something early that you saw isn't going to scale and maybe you looked at the team and you said, this isn't the team that's going to help us scale. Yeah, no, exactly. Is it? Is that exactly how it happened? There was definitely a piece missing. Whether we identified internally or not, we were certainly aware of it. Whether it took somebody to actually force us to look for that missing piece, yeah, that might've happened. Who were your customers early on, David? Obviously very small SMEs, typically maybe a dozen people. I can still remember plenty of clients who were sort of six people or less and that was absolutely fine. I think when the business starts, even for those first, we're probably talking sort of nine or 10 years, you organically, and again, I think every MSP goes through this, you do just through word of mouth, build more and more clients. Those clients typically can be bigger and bigger and as we were adding staff members to support those additional clients, so naturally the number of end points you're supporting increases as well. What problems were you solving for your early customers? It's an interesting one because it's something I've been looking at recently, trying to work out, is there just a maturity that every MSP has to go through or has the business actually changed over the last sort of 25, 26 years? And I think it's probably a bit of each, but the original problem solving was networking. That was how technical came to be just because we knew how to string computers together and get them talking to one another, how to organize things centrally, which clients didn't seem able to do themselves. Security was a very, very small part of that. The problem solving was your general hardware issues, how to get even 10 or 15% out of the software stack, which was typically just sort of Microsoft Office. Majority of clients might have had some sort of small database or something and it was just making sure that the whole lot hung together and everything allowed them to be productive on a day-to-day basis. I think you're right. I think there's definitely a maturation of your business. You realize we've outgrown what we were doing years ago and we need to do something different, but you're 100% right on the industry itself. I've heard MSPs for years and years and years sell uptime. That's all they were selling uptime. And now it's become more business outcomes, right? You're trying to have different conversations with your clients and solve their problems, right? How they're growing or the direction they're going or the types of service customers. And that takes a different level of thinking. So speaking of a different level of thinking, what brought you to Craig? We were- Destiny. We were introduced by a mutual- I was going to say client. He wasn't actually a client of yours, was he? No, I wouldn't really know how to describe him. A unique individual for sure. We were introduced and we were doing the IT support for Craig's sales organization. And Craig came to visit us at the offices that we were just fitting out at the time and got us to draw, got me to draw an organogram of the business, which I was incredibly proud of because it was so mature for what we were doing. It had a client's onboarding section and it had a new business section. I interrupted you there. New business as in how do you onboard the new clients? Yeah, indeed. Most certainly did not have a new business section. And then Craig pointed out, surely there was one element missing. I was convinced, of course, nothing was missing. This was just my piece of resistance. It was so good. And then he pointed out that actually it had no sales side to it at all. Which isn't uncommon, by the way. He may have made it sound like it was, but it wasn't uncommon. He is just a very confident individual and knew he could transform and so transform what you guys are doing. I have actually, you talk a little bit about organic growth and just like referral based. Like that's 90% of where MSPs get their new business. So to have a real sales engine, I wanna double click on that here in a little bit and dig in. But Craig, let me ask you. So what brought you to Technica? Obviously you meet Dave and I wanna hear the kebab story too. But you meet David. How did that conversation go? And really what came out of that? So as David said, they were doing my IT and we were doing the sales and marketing campaign for Technica. And the IT was going brilliantly, but the sales and marketing campaign was awful. And I couldn't quite work out what was going wrong. We were generating a few leads. We did a rebrand, which David then went into. We'd done the whole rebrand for him. And then he goes into an Apple store in New York and comes out and goes, I want to change the brand totally, which was interesting. David's focus, and I realized this after I joined Technica, was the infrastructure that they had put in and the systems that they had in place that could support a company five times the size that they were. And we were just chatting about the sales and you could see straight away that David was someone that you'd want to partner up with. And I had had a previous partner. It went belly up. I had sworn to myself that I would never get into business with anyone else. And then David and I were chatting. It was a great kebab. It really was. I don't know how they made, they used, but it was good. Lots of garlic and chili, I remember. And you know kebabs. Yeah, I'm a big kebab man. And we were just gelling on everything. Even when Sir David turned around and said, you should join us as a partner. Even as we were discussing it, I remember emails going back and forth. And we're going back to 2009. And I still remember the emails and David going, come on, I don't want you to feel like we've left anything out. There must be more that you want to ask. There must be, you know, what do you want to know? And it was just so open and so honest that it was an obvious route to, I remember meeting up with my dad and having a diet Coke at TGI Fridays going, I'm building this small business here, this sales and marketing agency, but actually this could be really good. And my dad, in his typical way, said, whatever you want. And that was kind of it. We agreed it very quickly. So there was a little bit of sales for you, David, to Craig, to get him on board. What did you see in Craig during that meeting that made you want to fight? So this is interesting. Obviously there was the whole knowledge of the sales side that we were 100% aware we didn't possess. You know, we were, I'd say, kind of good at closing when a potential lead comes to you and says we've been recommended by, you know, you've got to go out of your way to mess that up. So for sure that was an attraction. But I think at that stage, and this is something else I'd say about a lot of smaller MSPs, sometimes it's just the personality that you're looking for. And I don't mean, you know, how outgoing extrovert people are. It's just, are they capable people? Are they people you want to trust with your business to drive it forwards? And honestly, I don't think we've ever actually had this discussion, but that was the critical part. You know, show me somebody who understands that they want to make a business a success, and that's the kind of person you want involved. And it doesn't really matter what their skillset is. The fact that their skillset obviously is something that you're lacking, that just makes the decision even easier. So publicly, it looks like you two have an amazing relationship. I mean, can I just point out, all I've just heard is I had a couple of qualities and a rubbish personality. Yeah. That's literally all I've just heard. That's not what he said, Craig. He said exactly what I've seen in you as well. Like you are, you just have something people want to talk to. They want to have a conversation with you. And that's a hard thing of being sort of a technically led business forever. I think that's why most MSPs struggle from sales is they try to promote within, or they bring somebody from the telco industry over or whatever, they don't understand what you identified very quickly, which is there's an ICP that you are not, that you were not targeting, David, right? Like you had built this amazing background and he isn't even a technical guy, but he understood what foundation you had built there. And that's, I mean, that's a ton of credit to you. Like you had done something amazing. You just weren't taking advantage of that yet. And he saw the opportunity. So how long did you have to simmer on this idea? Not even sure we took a weekend, did we? Yeah. That kebab, was that good? It's so good. Yeah, so good. I think it was the idea of having those on a weekly basis that really. Wow, I didn't know it was a weekly kebab. Every Friday. That sounds like MSPs, if you're listening, that's the secret to success, a weekly kebab. You should start your own kebab company. That could be like a side thing. All right, Craig, so you join and that makes three owners though, right? And I think the thought, right, that you had was, this is going to be good because voting powers, it's not going to be split 50-50, but that didn't turn out to be the case. Why was that? It was really difficult. I think when I joined, David's original partner was also quite outgoing, really quite vocal. And certainly for the first three to six months, I remember saying to David quite a few times, this isn't going to work. And David was like, leave it to me, leave it to me. And we had a good few years together, the three of us, but then a situation arose where we had identified an area that desperately needed some work. We needed, and believe it or not, David wasn't the technical partner at the time. He could always do technical, but he was more operations. And our former partner was the technical partner. And we were desperate for someone to work out how we should be distributing tickets. We knew we hadn't got it right. We had everything in a bucket and people could take what they wanted. And it just wasn't working for us. And it wasn't a route that he wanted to go down. We then, three became two. And we talked a little bit about it. It was as amicable as it could be. We certainly tried for it to be. I'm not sure these things are ever completely amicable, but I also, I don't think it got out of hand at any stage. Yeah, obviously there's a lot of emotion, right? I mean, this is somebody's baby. This was yours, you know, you're two, and you're the new guy that's come in and I'm sure that was quite sort of contentious at times, but you did what you thought was right at the time, which has turned out to be really right, right? I mean, you guys are, there's really a transformation that we're gonna get into here in a minute, but let's talk, I was gonna ask you this a minute ago. Let's talk about your two personalities. Publicly, I see you two as like, you absolutely get along really, really well. Now, there's some fun wisecracks and who's always right and who's always wrong, but how do you two really interact and how do you make decisions well? Do you want to answer this? Yeah, because I think it goes back to the discussion about the third partner as well. And I think we could realistically argue that every decision we've ever taken has always been for the good of the business. And that's what I think we've lost a little bit of. People were taking decisions that weren't necessarily putting the business 100% first. And I'd certainly argue that since then, when it has just been the two of us, it's always just come down to trust, knowing that you're always gonna put the business 100% first, there's no ego involved, there's no outside pressure. It's simply what is the right decision? And that doesn't mean that you can arrive at every decision easily. There's still certain things where Craig will believe one thing, I'll believe something different, but we've always had this system where ultimately one has to convince the other that they're doing it for the right reasons. You know that that's a given and then that you suck it and see. Sometimes it's that simple. And if it's working- You put it out in the decision that you've taken. If it's working, the other partner has to say, that's great, thank goodness that you were right and the business has benefited from this. And when it doesn't work, you've got to find a way of backtracking and saying, okay, now let's try something different. You both are to a point where you know as much as you want it to be the right decision, regardless of whether it was yours or his or whatever. If it's not, you got to quickly pivot. You know you can't sit on something that is going to take you off the road. All right, how do you feel that you, I heard his side, how do you feel you interact? You won't be surprised to hear this. I totally agree with that assessment. You know, sometimes it comes down to passion. Yeah. You know, and we both respect each other enough to be able to look at the other one and say, okay, well, he really wants to try this. I don't agree with it, but he thinks it's going to work and therefore, I'm going to do everything to try and make it work. Luckily, I don't remember too many occasions where we've done, where one of us has done something that the other one has been absolutely against. It just, luckily, it just doesn't happen. Maybe luck, but maybe a little bit about the types of people you both are. I mean, you're very passionate. You focus your passion in different areas of the business and somehow you find a middle ground when you don't agree. That's amazing. That's a great partnership. But also, and I'm convinced you knew I was going to bring this up, EOS has helped. Yeah. You know, where you've got the visionary who can go off and do whatever he wants and you've got the integrator who's got to be the sensible one and tell the visionary, actually, you've come up with 37 ideas and only one of them is any good, that's fine. Great segue. So let's talk about 2023. Rough year for you guys, right? Just over two years ago, you lost three major accounts due to private equity buyouts. So not on your own accord, just happens. We've been there. I've been there. You had to take some immediate action. So what did you guys do? We had an office in Poland where we had four staff and I'd spent a year of my life going backwards and forwards, setting it up. And we just cut that straight away. We had to let one person go from the London office. We looked at every spend. We pulled servers out of data centers when we got the renewal quotes in because electric prices in the UK had gone through the roof and they were putting, I think it was 60, 70% on what we were paying. So we just pulled them out and built our own data center in our offices. And we stopped our natural urge to spend. And as you know, even down to, we were going to Empower in Texas in March 24, two of us were gonna go. And then we thought it wasn't the right look for the company. We had made some redundancies. We'd got rid of some people. So what would have looked like a jolly to the team, as you know, it isn't, only one of us went. And I was the lucky one that went. And you're glad you went. Just a little bit. Let's talk a little bit about that. Again, this is about you guys, but we're at Empower this week. And what was the value? What was the worth that you found in that, just over a year ago that made you want to come back again? It was just mind blowing. I've never been to Glastonbury, but I think Empower is the Glastonbury of the IT world. And sitting back then, you did the owner's cohort last year. And I was sitting at the owner's cohort and everyone's talking about EOS. People are talking about Halo. People are talking about Cove. All of these things I'd never heard of. And I didn't have my trusty partner with me to say, well, is this any good? Instead, I'm like slacking him. We've got to look at this. We've got to look at that. And he's ignoring me, obviously. Probably the middle of the night. Yeah, fair enough. It's a service level agreement I expect from you. And I came away from that. And this is also, I think, testament to our relationship and how we work. He didn't say no to implementing anything. We came back, we did the deal with Halo straight away. Within three weeks, every client had moved on to Cove, which we'd literally never heard of before. But the biggest thing was I ordered what the heck is EOS for David. And then EOS was implemented very quickly afterwards. Talk a little bit about EOS. And for those listeners and viewers, maybe describe it a little bit and how it's helped you guys. I'm going to let David do this. So EOS is the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And it provides a framework, maybe a template for any business to operate by. It insists on weekly meetings. You've divided your business into various teams. Each of those teams has a weekly meeting. Each of those meetings has to run according to a given schedule. There's various rocks that are given out, tasks that every individual has to accomplish within a set time period. You've got your quarterly goals. You've got your one-year goals, three-year goals, a 10-year goal. The amount of almost stipulations, it's almost a contract that everybody has to agree to. You know, if you want to contribute to this team, this is what you have to achieve. And I just think that's typically something that's very lacking in the MSP world, just because there's so many technical people. You know, everybody wants to fix things. That's great. Everybody wants to build stuff. That's great. But nobody wants to go into a meeting where there's no set agenda, no set time limit. You know, everybody just sees that as a terrible waste of time. Nobody wants to communicate necessarily with anybody else. EOS just fills in all of those blanks for us. It's properly game-changing. It helps to ensure that people who wouldn't normally want to take responsibility take responsibility and are accountable for their actions. The other thing that I've heard it does to MSPs that is not typical, a lot of MSPs that I hear, they aren't very transparent. They don't necessarily share, well, this is what's going on on this side, or this is where we were from financials. Things like layoffs are a surprise at the time, but with EOS, you know the course that the ship is on. And when it starts to go astray, you're adapting. You're trying to get the water out of the ship as quickly as possible. You guys agree with that? Yeah, 100%. I mean, we've been accused of that for years and years, just not being transparent. And it's something that properly hurts because you try to be, we've certainly tried to be as transparent as possible, but you can always be accused of, oh, you didn't share this, you didn't share that. People are always looking for what you didn't share rather than what you have shared. EOS does take all of that out of the picture. Can I just add, one of the reasons why EOS takes that out of the picture is because their concept of right people in the right seats. And if you've got the wrong people in the wrong seats, you'll be accused of everything. If you've got the right people in the right seats, they'll get what you're trying to do. And they'll also ask the right questions. Yeah. Step number one, rate people on the bus. Step number two, rate people in the right seats on the bus. Step number three, when the wrong people are in the wrong seat, don't let them sit there for too long. Right? I think that's what I've seen as I listen to MSPs and from my past experience, you can ruin a culture if you don't make some of these decisions quick enough. Right? Yeah, it's pretty powerful. All right, there's one other thing that I know you took from Empower last year that has become a favorite of yours and that's peer groups, right? It was the first time you were, even Empower itself, it was a chance for you to be able to network and engage and industry conferences are amazing for that. The MSP industry has some great ones out there. I think we do a really good job here at Enable because it's big enough that you get exposed to a lot of different types of MSPs, but it's not too big. You can meet everybody before the end of the week. But walking away, you didn't want it to stop there. You don't want to wait another year until you came to Berlin. And so you made a decision to join a peer group. Why was that? Everyone on my owner's cohort table told me I had to. Yeah, well, speaking to people like you, David Weeks, Robert Wilburn, they were saying, there's no competition in the room, right? So you want to be sitting down with these people on a regular basis. You want to be brainstorming with them. And I saw the benefit of just sitting in that owner's cohort table. I saw what it could do. And so got in touch with Vincent, drove him a bit harder than he probably wanted to be driven. And we've got the peer group off the ground and it's brilliant. And we're only a small peer group. There's three of us. We're all here in Berlin. And it's amazing. And also, like the people that we met in, or I met in Texas, that David and I met in Nice with you and then Amsterdam with you as well. And then seeing them all here, it's an amazing feeling. It's really good. Yeah, it's family, it's camaraderie, it's competition. I mean, every peer group sort of evolves at their own pace, but a couple of things, it's accountability just like EOS does. Like you do not want to be the one that comes to the financial call every quarter and hasn't hit your rock or hasn't moved your net profit in the direction that you wanted to. When you have to explain that, that's never a good feeling, right? So you immediately want to make sure you're looking at those numbers on a frequent basis. And I think the other thing too, and you can do this through events like this without a peer group. With a peer group, to your point, it's the same people that you're meeting with once a month. And so you can have those conversations outside of those calls, but at least once a month, you're spending that time to focus on the business, right? That you may have been caught up in the day-to-day for the last month, but now I've got a month to talk about, yeah, why didn't I do what I said I was going to do? Oh, I need to move that up on my priority list. So yeah, it's pretty, pretty powerful. All right, so you're not only both here this week, but you brought two engineers. Why is that? This is one of the things that I am most proud of, of 2024. When I left the hotel in Texas, I mean, so I need to apologize because every sentence since 2024 has started with when I was in Texas. I decided, and again, this is another thing, mad thing to do. And David just goes, yeah, okay, that we were going to do the race to Berlin. And I realized what I got out of it. And I thought a couple of engineers could do really well out of it as well. So we created the race to Berlin. It was a seven or eight month competition. Every staff member was in it. You got points by coming into the office, by finishing your projects on time, by implementing automation, by doing builds, whatever it was, you could win points. And two of our engineers won and they're here. In fact, they are half an hour into the Enable Certification course. Awesome. Well, I wish them luck. That's a tough course. If they pass it, you might have to give them, get them a kebab or something. And if they fail? We'll send them back for a second attempt. We won't let them fail. We'll never leave a man behind. All right, gentlemen. So what's next for Technica? A load of the stuff that obviously Craig brought back from Texas being implemented. We're now with Halo, with IT Glue, using Xero for our accounts. So many things that do integrate nicely. Now we're looking at a tool that will allow us to get the most out of all of those talking to one another. So I think that's the- They're a sponsor here. You can mention who they are, I think. Sure. Okay, so we've just signed up with Roost. They gave a very compelling demonstration. I love the concept of the tool. We've been looking at all of the stack that we were already using, wondering how we got the most out of it, whether there was an intensive API course coming up for a number of us. Roost, I think, will be the conduit that allows that to move forward quickly. The security side, obviously, is still very exciting. And there's a bit of overlap there with trying to get all of our alerting into Sentinel. And then I'm hoping via graph, we can start doing some great things for the 24-7 team and allow the reporting to be really pretty much to the minute. So that's the technical answer. I was just going to say, on the business side. So we've opened up full 24-7. We've opened that up in South Africa. Stephanie would kill me if I didn't mention that we're going to continue with her brilliant EBR strategy. They've been unreal for our business. The deficit that we were faced with at the end of 23 has almost been wiped out entirely by going to clients with Stephanie's EBR documents. We always did status meetings with our clients, but they were never as focused. So we now go regularly have EBRs and that's brought in 24-7 work, security work. It's made sure the clients are using the right licenses. They're using our minimum tech stack that we've got, our baseline. And we're looking at mergers and acquisitions. There's a couple of companies that we're talking to at the moment. And when you say what's next, it's huge growth. That's great. Well, you're definitely going to do that because I think you've both experienced the non-growth times in your past. And you've seen what, obviously, how you can collaborate together and transform a business. And so why not? Why not turn it into 2X, 3X, 4X the size and 10X maybe this time next year? Yeah, well, I won't let David say what figure he's put on the 10-year plan. We'll do a follow-up. We have not done a follow-up podcast. We'll do a follow-up when you guys hit one of those Xs. All right, here's my favorite question that I like to ask you both. And we're going to start with you, David. When did you know, now that's it? This isn't going to be a great answer. I'm not sure that I've ever known. It was a huge risk starting Technica. My daughters were very young. I don't know exactly how old they would have been back then. Minus their current age from 26. Yeah, yeah, so we're talking two and four. It did feel like a risky move, but at the same time, there was a lot of confidence that we could actually pull it off. I think there've been various milestones along the way. Again, I think plenty of MSPs go through just sort of stages of maturity. I think putting down certain foundations. But I don't know, somebody mentioned in the room earlier, one of the talks earlier, that it's a C or an F industry. I can remember the talk now. And it is very much like that. You don't really get a chance to sort of step back, pat yourself on the back and say, wow, what have we done here? It's just constantly thinking, how do we move forward? What's the next thing we have to be aware of? And I'm not sure that I've ever taken the time to say, yeah, that was all worthwhile or good efforts. You should do that. Yeah, maybe. I think you've done some things that most people have never done. And you've had some ups and downs that most people haven't experienced. And you're at a point that I think you should. I get that's your personality. That's not your personality to look back and go pat yourself on the back. But you should. Technic is an amazing MSP. And you made a decision to bring somebody in to help you get it to that point. I think you should definitely look back and be proud of what you've done, for sure. All right, Craig, when did you know now that's it? Obviously, I've got two. One was when we were in Amsterdam and I saw you on the first day and you had this ridiculous thing growing on your upper lip. It was a mustache, it was beautiful. And I said to you, by the time we leave in two days' time, that will be gone. And you were like, no, it won't. And then, of course, I came in on the second day, your mustache had gone and no one else had noticed. So when I realized I could convince you to shave off your mustache that you loved, I realized I could convince people of anything. True. But the real answer, I think, hit me as I was leaving the hotel in Texas. And I was in the cab on the way to the airport just thinking, we've got this. Awesome. I love it. You two are both two of my favorite people. I'm so glad I was able to get you both here in person to tell your story. It's an amazing story. I think for those of our listeners that are struggling with the, am I down the right path, this is just proof that you can redirect and change course and bring some different leaders in and help with that. So I thank you both for being part of this podcast, being colleagues, friends of mine, and I wish you guys both and Technica all the happiness and luck in the future. Thank you very much.
