Terry Hedden (00:00)
I’m excited to welcome today’s podcast guest, Will Daughtrey. He’s a new entrant into the MSP space, but already celebrates something that so many strive for, a 100 % close ratio. So he’s an outsider coming in, brings a different perspective, which he shares with you in today’s podcast with the goal of helping you achieve exactly what he did. And that’s bringing in far more than his fair share.
We are really excited to welcome Will to our podcast today and really explore more about his story, understand what he’s achieved, the success he’s achieved, the lessons he’s learned, and what’s motivated him to ⁓ do what it takes to achieve his dream. So, Will, welcome.
Will Daughtrey (00:47)
Thank you. It’s exciting to be here and exciting to kind of tell the story of how TAC-1 Consulting came to be.
Terry Hedden (00:54)
I love that. I’ve heard wonderful things from our team. You’ve got a great energy about you. Our team has a lot of positive things to say. They’re very optimistic about the future and how you’re embracing the opportunity to learn and grow and develop and achieve. So why don’t you kick us off? Tell us a little bit about you. What led you to become an MSP and tell us a little bit about your MSP journey so far.
Will Daughtrey (01:16)
Yes, I’m going to go a little bit back in time. And I started in the MSP space quite a while ago, actually at a copier company that decided that they needed to go into this space to help with their businesses. You know, we aim to be a paperless society, which may or may not ever come to be. So I got a lot of experience there and ended up working with a different MSP, which brought me to Tennessee, which I didn’t know it, but what I kind of like hurled me into the world of health care.
So I worked at the MSP for a little bit and I ended up working for some large healthcare companies in the IT space. And one of the things that was super helpful is, especially in mergers and acquisitions, you’re essentially managing multiple companies, even if you’re under a single corporate entity. So kind of leveraging my knowledge to build and grow that. And I was fortunate to make a lot of amazing contacts through that journey. And…
Last year, I was at a different healthcare company, which was private equity backed. And ⁓ we had a private equity event. So I said, you know, I think I’m gonna take some time off and figure out what I wanna do. It would be nice to have a little bit of a break. So I started to take a break and through those connections that I’ve made, people started reaching out before I actually even left saying, hey, we’re looking for someone that can help us with this part of IT. And I said, well as fate would have it, if you don’t mind waiting until January, I can probably help you. Thinking that this was maybe a one-off. So I started down that path and during that one-off, somebody else reached out and said, we’re looking for somebody who can help. I’m like, wow, I might have something here. This could be like a consulting gig. And so I started on the consulting path. And then as another person came to me, by the way, I zero marketing at this time. They really didn’t need more of like the higher level help and maybe a mid-sized company, but they needed an MSP. And I was like, well, I know a little bit about the MSP space, so let me go down that path. So that’s kind of what brought me back into the MSP world. And I’m a little bit fortunate in that through my contacts, I’ve word of mouth has done phenomenal. But as I was thinking about it, know, diversity is the key to success. And if you’re only an MSP or if you’re only a consultant or if you’re only reselling you know, or software or something, you can’t give a client the full need that they will have to be successful. And it’s complicated for the client to work with a lot of people. It’s frustrating for their AP team to have 28 invoices that maybe could be two or three or even one. ⁓ So that kind of brought me to Marketopia. I learned through this journey ⁓ that there’s all kinds of different paths that you can choose.
And so I ended up choosing mostly consulting and now some reselling as well. But ⁓ it’s been a fun journey.
Terry Hedden (04:08)
Wow, that’s inspiring Will. When did it start? Tell me when did you decide to leave the copier company? When did, what’s the January? What year?
Will Daughtrey (04:15)
So ⁓ I left the copier company over 10 years ago. It was a long time ago. ⁓ It was January of this year actually that I started consulting. So was June of last year that I left the company that was held by private equity, or I would attend to leave. actually left in January. So I kind of went right from one fire into another, but it’s been a fun adventure. I think the other thing that is super important to success, and I really try and tell as many MSPs as I can. know, back when I was at Ricoh, which was over 10 years ago, the idea of IT was really more of a utility to a point. People didn’t really understand it. People didn’t really care. They just needed it to work. And while that’s somewhat true today, I think the value that MSPs, resellers, anyone in IT can bring is understanding the business. If you can understand the business, and speak the business language to whatever their problems are, you are much more likely to get them to reengage you and have them help you find solutions, as opposed to them thinking you understand the bits and bytes, but you don’t understand how their business works, so they need to go to these vendors. And what happens in that case is people will go to these vendors and not understand the technical pieces behind what they need, but they see this beautiful presentation.
The PowerPoint works 100 % of the time. It’s promising utopia and unicorns, rainbows, all this stuff. But if their foundation isn’t able to support whatever that is, then it’s really kind of not a win-win. And really, everyone ends up losing after they sign the…
Terry Hedden (05:57)
Yeah. That’s amazing Will, so you’re only six months in, not even quite six months into your journey at this point? Is that what I’m, the numbers I’m, wow, okay. You know, I gotta say Will, that’s not normal for an MSP to even be as mature as you are. You know, most MSPs take years to figure out how important sales and marketing is to their long-term growth because like you say, they have the word of mouth, they kind of get some started and primes the pump and all of that. What’s your background? Are you more of a business-educated kind of person or what’s your background? Where you kind of realize the importance of non-referral, non-word-of-mouth type leaves.
Will Daughtrey (06:34)
So I think I thought back to a little bit of the business as I was in. And in any business, no matter what it is, you have a sales team, you have a marketing team, you have an HR team, you have a legal team. And to be a successful business, all those pieces of the puzzle have to exist and they have to work together. So while I’ve been super successful with word of mouth, at some point that’s not going to continue. You have to have a pipeline. I think the other interesting thing is, you know, from a, I’m pretty technical, which is good to a point, but at the same time, I am by no means a marketing or sales expert. I know a lot of sales pains from what I’ve heard in the past, but I just don’t understand how to do that. And I think if you think about legal kind of in the same boat, I don’t pretend to be a lawyer, I’m not a lawyer, but if I have a legal question or a tax question, same thing, I go to those experts because they can solve the problem. And I think one thing that, gets people a little bit in trouble is there’s a cost for that. But 99 % of the time, I think the cost of those professional services way overpay for themselves in either the revenue, the savings, the trouble you might keep yourself out of, whatever the case may be. Understanding that they’re all successful companies have silos, whether we want to think about them that way or not. But you need an expert in the silos that whether it’s full time fractional or ⁓ as a service.
Terry Hedden (08:05)
That’s great. Wow. Um, man, again, well, I talked to a lot of MSPs, worked with hundreds and hundreds of them and, uh, it is, you’re a rare air. I’ll tell you from my perspective, it feels to me like, you know, MSPs are very, retention is important. Taking care of your customers is important and there’s no doubting that obviously nothing replaces. If you, if you get a customer losing three weeks later, nothing else matters. But it usually takes MSP years to realize that⁓ not every customer that comes is going to stay forever and ⁓ that word of mouth is gonna get you to a certain point, but eventually it’s gonna basically be offset by customer losses. Once you get a base of 50 customers, there’s always one leaving every month or something, so you kinda have to replace it with new. And the net result is one of the, I think, travesties of our industry, and that is that great people, I think the average MSP business owner is a great person, ⁓great people end up getting themselves in bad situations where they make less than than they did when they had a job, take on an enormous amount of stress because they can’t hire people to take some of that stress away. It’s basically them as a tech maybe even, or them as the only person that’s not a tech. No leadership, no managers, no senior level people because they can’t afford it because they’re not growing. And they get stuck in that 750k US to 1.25 range and they literally will stay there for sometimes 20 and 30 years. And so the fact that you get it and you’re gonna bust through that really quickly Is really inspiring to me and I’ll say that will will because I is an MSP You know, my first year’s revenue was 466,000 my second year revenue was About almost a million and then my third year revenue was over one and a half million So I got past that 750 to 1.25 in a couple of years and and and honestly, I think it’s a little bit of dumb luck You know, I’m a business person. I have an MBA. I worked at Ernst & management consulting. I have an MBA from the University of Florida. I kind of understand business and I have that sort of natural sales type personality, you know, I’m not as capable of an engineer as any I hired. Frankly, even my most junior level engineers are more technically astute than I was. So I had no choice but to understand the business and to sell because I had to hire techs. I had a two month burn rate when I launched. So I only had enough capital to survive two months when I started my MSP. so I think it’s a little bit of dumb luck, you know. In hindsight, you know, I realize the importance of separating sales and service, but for me, it was required because I wasn’t gonna be able to be a tech. You know, I had to hire those. So I gotta give you some props, Will. It’s not normal and you should be proud of that. And what I will say is it will bode well for you. You’re gonna get, especially where you are now, you’re going to get the word of mouth leads plus more leads, which means your sales should be incredible for a startup. Inc. 500 kind of numbers hopefully here in the coming year. talk to us, so you started, ⁓ talk to me about your sales and lead generation program now. Where are you? How many email leads do you get a month? What are you adding from a word of mouth leads? And then talk to me about other lead sources that you’re getting now as well.
Will Daughtrey (11:29)
Yeah, so I just started with the Marketopia group. So we’re in the final stages of putting that together. ⁓ I’m somewhat optimistic about what time will tell. ⁓ Really, every lead I’ve gotten has either come from a text from someone I knew or from LinkedIn. think LinkedIn, and again, I’m not a social media expert by any means. However, I did leverage a little bit of AI to help rewrite some of the stuff I had on LinkedIn. You know, I think kind of like being an expert in marketing, we all are guilty of writing something that we know exactly what it means, but to somebody else, they read it and they have no idea. Like they weren’t close, we were too close. So we understand exactly what things are. And actually after I did that, you know, changing my LinkedIn headline, changing some of really what I did even in different companies. Now you have to read it to make sure that it doesn’t over promote you or maybe make up stuff that didn’t really happen, but kind of getting chat GPT or Gemini or whoever to realize what people are looking for I think has helped because I’ve gotten some organic leads that I really wasn’t connected to but you know, I always ask when a lead happens like great Well, do we know someone in common or how did you find me in the last couple? I’ve been searching on LinkedIn and in my particular case. I have a lot of experience with multi-site health care and by changing my headline to multi-site healthcare has actually driven traffic that I probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise. So, you there’s a lot of tools out there if you’re creative to think about how to use it.
Terry Hedden (13:11)
That’s awesome Will. Having a great social media profile, what you’re talking about is what we call search engine optimization. Most people think about it on the website, but it actually is just as important on your LinkedIn, maybe your Facebook, if you have a YouTube channel or any other kind of social media, but LinkedIn is a no-brainer. It’s gotta be SEO optimized because you’re right, people, either your friends are searching or on your profile, oh wow, I didn’t know Will did Microsoft support. know, maybe can have him come in for an Office 365 implementation or whatever, to just strangers just typing managed service provider Atlanta and having you pop up. And where are you out of again? know it’s in Tennessee.
Will Daughtrey (13:48)
Nashville.
Terry Hedden (13:49)
Nashville, great town. Yeah, I love it. Okay. Yeah, we’ll be there here in a couple months I’m really looking forward to it. Maybe it’s in July actually That’s great. So your journey so you know continue that story so you made the decision to not solely depend on word-of-mouth leads and And my guess is you probably did a pretty robust process of looking at different options out there whether you’re googling them or a chat GPT or whatever How did you go about figuring out how you were gonna get the non word-of-mouth Legion going and and walk me through that process that led you to I guess market to a Bia plus who else you may be working with.
Will Daughtrey (14:28)
It’s kind of interesting. I had the word of mouth leads. And I think the one thing that you also have to consider, which I’ve learned along the way is the larger your customer, the longer the pipeline time to get them through the door, signed and started. And so I went to the Casseo Connect conference in Vegas a few months ago, maybe. And as I was there, I was kind of getting insight into like bringing myself back up to speed. know, it’s been a while since I’ve been to…Kasei or Ninja or any of those groups. And I ran across Brian and so we were just starting to chat and know, top of my mind at that conference was one marketing because I do know there’s a ton of opportunity out there and again, I wasn’t sure how I was going to capture it. And we really hit it off. Like we had very similar ideas on what to do. He seemed open to trying things. You know, I think it’s good to have a background in something but
I’m also a big fan of the world changes every day. And I think you can find a lot of traditional ways that people try and market, like maybe just calling X number of people so often and hoping something hits. But finding someone like Brian, I could explain the full marketing stack and kind of how we could attack things and a little bit of openness and like, we’ll try this and if it doesn’t work, we’ll try that. Like I think you have to be open to pivot.
And also open to hearing like what’s current today. Cause as I thought about a marketing partner, I wanted to find someone that was both current today, but also always looking ahead. ⁓ you know, what happens today is great, but what you might need in a year, six months is probably different. So you need an expert in that space to keep you where you need to be to your point earlier. You know, I created a webpage. It’s like the second thing I did when I started my LLC.
And I actually use the most basic web page possible because at the time, it wasn’t really ultra important to me because I didn’t think I would get many leads that way. I don’t feel that most people are going to Google and typing in like, IT Nashville and hoping for a spot. And if they are, I would suspect that some people are paying a lot of money to Google to be at the top of the page. So I did create a page. I think you have to have one. But to your point earlier,
I think more things are happening on LinkedIn, more things are probably happening by people watching YouTube ⁓ and looking at topics that they’re interested in. I did, as I was thinking about what to post to LinkedIn to drive some traffic, my feed is always full of IT stuff and what’s coming and it’s super technical generally. Like Google stop accepting email without DMARC records and this is all super technical, but I took that, I made my own post, wordsmithed some to make it into business speak. And they actually got quite a few views. And I think some of those views obviously came from my network. But trying to get them again into that business speak, I think helps people understand if you’re selling to the end user consumer and you’re relying on sending them live.com messages, and you don’t know if this exists, like at least they’re probably asking their IT person about it. But it’s just taking it a level or two or three maybe down from what I read to hopefully get the audience a little more engaged.
Terry Hedden (17:54)
Wow, that’s great. I love that. Even when we send…on your behalf, we definitely recommend you to put your thought leadership out there and get that out there, because you’re the brand at the end of the day. Regardless of how big you are, you’re the figurehead as the CEO, so they’ve got to believe in you, trust you, like you. When someone has a question or a concern about security, we want them to call you. And so by putting that out there, I think it’s a great way to kind of establish that brand and that street credibility. That’s awesome. Okay. And so what’s your marketing and tech stack now?
Who’s doing what what do you what do you have going on when it comes to lead generation and marketing?
Will Daughtrey (18:35)
So, I’m working with marketopia that do it with me plans. So that’s building but we’re really ⁓ I’m in a fortunate spot. I’ve just got another new client. So Balancing ops, I think my my real current challenge is going to be ⁓ Scaling right now. You’re at a point where I got a scale to be able to keep taking in more leads, but ⁓ I’m going full in with marketopia
Terry Hedden (19:01)
That’s great. One thing that you mentioned, we talked a little bit about AI and your website. Let me give you a little bit of an AI tip. There is a very powerful AI technology that we don’t give on the done with you plan because you’re responsible for doing it yourself in that plan. We give you the content and the systems and the support, but at the end of the day, you’re deploying the marketing. One of the things that is a no-brainer is
In the old days, you could track a company that’s on your website. So you knew that Billy’s Auto Shop, if they have a static IP, you could figure out that they are on your website. We have a new AI technology that actually determines the person at Billy’s ⁓ Auto Shop and that Billy was on your website. And we can get Billy’s email address, Billy’s phone number. We can get a lot of good contact information for anyone who visits your website. So I would encourage you to invest in a great website with search engine optimization.
And normally that has a really long tail. Like the value from a great website and great SEO can take six months, nine months, even a year down the road to see because it takes a while for Google to give you the love. But if you employ that AI technology, I have been blown away at what it brings in terms of what we call passive leads. if I’m visiting your website, because I’m interested in opening up an office in Nashville and I happen to stumble on your website, but I don’t see any about don’t know, cabling. So maybe I don’t see anything on cabling so I just jump off or I get distracted or whatever and I never call you. If you can pick up the phone and call that person that was just on your website and either validate that, yeah, I don’t do cabling, I’m not a good fit, thank you for calling or, wow, yeah, we do cabling, I just don’t have it on my website. no kidding, okay, great. here, I’ll get my contractor involved, we’ll do that. You know what I mean? Like, it’s a lead that you don’t even know you lost. But with that AI tool, you’re able to identify not just the but the person and it matters a ton with work from home right now because the old technologies that relied on the static IP address don’t work anymore because so many people are working from home. So this technology is allowing us to figure out that Billy was at home on his home laptop and was on your website. We got the contact information for Billy. We can call Billy and say hey, ⁓ yeah absolutely we do cabling. We can absolutely help you. So I would encourage you to build out that website and you know if you or are doing a good job at executing the done with you plan where you’re sending the campaigns every month and you’re disciplined and you’re religious about it, freaking awesome dude. It’s an incredibly good program for that. Nothing’s gonna beat the price point for what you get. ⁓
But make sure you maintain that discipline because as you get distracted, especially, I know you have lead gen going too, so you can get busy with sales leads. Next thing you know, find yourself saying, ⁓ I won’t send the newsletter, I’ll skip this month, I won’t send the campaign. And you know, it’s just not that expensive to get someone to do it for you anymore. So anyway, just a couple tips as you’re kind of on your journey now. But I really hope that it’s working well for you. Have you started to use the None With You plan? Have you started to deploy the campaigns? Have you seen any good things?
So far I know it’s early.
Will Daughtrey (22:23)
Yeah, it’s a little early, so I haven’t yet, but I am excited about that. I think, you know, thinking through the whole package marketing, again, that’s one of the big things I really wanted something to help with all that stuff, because I knew I was going to be busy and I was right. I was underestimating how busy it would be. So I may need to revisit kind of how that works. It’s your point. You know, if you if you’re in a busy spot, it’s a great time. At the same time, everything gets an updated priority.
And sometimes the priorities that should make it to the top, depending on which angle you’re looking at, might not.
Terry Hedden (23:01)
Right. Will, have you taken any of the sales training? Tell me how that’s affected you and your confidence as a salesperson.
Will Daughtrey (23:09)
Yeah, I think it’s really good training. will say, and I guess I might be a little bit of a unicorn in the fact that I’m somewhat technical. have somewhat business sense and I’m also super relaxed in front of clients. I think that helps a lot. ⁓ But I do think sales is a little bit about psychology and understanding the right things to do at the right time, maybe sometimes counter intuitive to people. So that definitely helps a lot. Now.
I’m very early as you know, but so far I have 100 % closure.
Terry Hedden (23:43)
Wow, that’s huge. Well, let me just tell you this, If you can maintain that, you’re gonna be a billionaire in like six months, you know? So good job. That’s phenomenal, You know, one of the things that we really try to manage expectations on for people that have had a lot of success is first, props to that. Because there’s a lot of people that don’t have good relationships, so they don’t get as many word of mouth leads. And when they do, they’re kind of a…stereotypical person maybe that doesn’t really know how to handle them. So even they struggle to close the word of mouth leads. But the people who are good at those still find that a normal marketing lead is a different animal. So I commend you for watching the training and can tell you that the probability if you know what you’re doing and you’re great with marketing and sales in general when you arrive, your probability of success is well into the 90s. But even if you’re not and you get here and you’re like, wow, I only know how to close a referral, taking the training in the training gets that close ratio back into the 90s either way. you just kind of slow down, follow the system to your point, understand the psychology, when to do, what to do, where to do, why to do, you can literally start to get your close ratio up for people who started off not as a referral, but as a stranger. So I commend you for jumping into that training so quickly. I think that’s gonna be a positive for you for sure going forward.
Will Daughtrey (25:04)
I do know for sure I won’t maintain the 100 % forever. It’s nice when a number exists. I think at the end of the day too, there’s, and it happens in every group, you have an initial conversation, you think you understand what the person wants. And again, they don’t know the technical jargon for things. So there is a point where you probably find yourself in a spot that just really isn’t the right fit. So it’s okay. It’s part of the learning process.
Terry Hedden (25:33)
Yeah, we tell people, you know, there’s different stages of the sales process. There’s four steps before you present your proposal. It’s okay to be at 90 % in each step, you know, because you get into situations where I don’t want you to be the cheapest provider out there. And there’s a fraction of people that at least think they only care about price until it, of course, bites them down the road. You know, and there are some situations where there’s misunderstandings in the sales process. Frankly, you got held up in traffic, we’re late, and they ghosted you. Whatever, things happen you can maintain that 10 % attrition rate as you go through the sales process, at the end of the day, you’ll still close 18 to 36 % of all leads. And if you do that, you’re going to be phenomenally successful, man. It’s just not, in this business, it is just not that hard to be successful because of the magic of recurring revenue. Victory today is a victory for 2020, 10 years down the road, right? So it’s a magical thing to have recurring revenue, especially in this industry, because honestly, a lot of MSPs do a good job at taking care of their customers. So you literally go through all this effort and make all this investment in something that’s a victory for today that you’re going to benefit from for five, 10, maybe even 15 years away. So that’s awesome. Okay. Okay, cool. I know you have lead gen as well. You have an outbound caller, as I understand it? Okay. So there’s really two ways to get leads at Marketopia, the PPC way and then the tele way. go and tele. Great. Talk to me about that so far. Have you met your caller? What do you think so far? ⁓ Have you had any leads yet?
Will Daughtrey (27:10)
So I have met the caller and the calls I believe are about to start. So I haven’t got any leads yet. think one thing that Brian and team did a good job of is kind of helping focus a little bit or maybe even open the focus some. ⁓ know, originally, I think all of us have our golden client standard in mind. And it’s great if you can land the golden client, but sometimes I think opening the focus a little bit to see what else might be out there is probably equally beneficial. So I’m excited to see what comes. ⁓ You know, I have a big history in healthcare and I’m familiar with that. It’s regulated industry, so it’s probably a little bit harder than general business. So maybe that’s opening up for some general business to see what comes. Ironically in Nashville and probably some other cities that are growing quite a bit, construction is a huge industry around here. So we’ll see where that may go. But there’s definitely a lot of construction.
Terry Hedden (28:12)
Yeah, no, it’s a great market and I would commend you for the diversification. Honestly, think even with AI, I think everybody realizes that the future is unknown, right? There are some industries and economic cycles is kind of a similar situation. It’s a boom time now for construction, but if we go into recession, know, that health care is going to look really attractive because people are sick, whether the economy is good or not, right? Baby boomers are aging. So diversification is important to stability in the organization. It’s just no fun to run a business where the revenue is up and down. ⁓ so the dependence on hardware sales is a feast and famine. One particular industry might be a feast and famine. And then of course, AI to me is one of those dark clouds sort of hanging over everything where some industries and positions within industries are going to be affected more than others. So what are you doing if it comes to AI right now? Will, I’m going to ask you a little harder question because this is looking forward. Obviously, a lot of us have started to use it ourselves, what are you doing for AI internally and what are you offering when it comes to AI out there in the market?
Will Daughtrey (29:18)
So I’m doing a lot of experimenting internally. Cochilot I’ve been working a lot with lately and it’s actually pretty powerful. ⁓ In the case of healthcare, which I’m most familiar with, there are some really good vendors and they’ve really come out in the last nine months or so I feel like with proven product to help healthcare specific paths and healthcare if you don’t know is very ⁓ paperwork intensive. There’s a lot of traffic between the insurance companies and the doctors themselves ⁓ and even between like labs and lab groups and providers. So there’s a lot of data that moves back and forth and ⁓ there’s a lot of interesting AI out there that will take some of that physical manual labor off and put it into the flow.
From that point of view, there’s some partners that we’ve engaged with to see kind of where it goes. And I do believe AI is the future. And I think, especially in a small business where you have a limited number of people or hours and you’re trying to do a whole lot of things, it can really expedite what time it takes to do something. I really do believe, however, robotic process automation or just automation in general is something that is…a little bit overlooks and I feel a lot of success for me has come from leveraging those robotic process automation tasks and the easiest one to understand for any business no matter if they’re a roofing company, a hospital or a auto manufacturer is onboarding. We all do our best to make onboarding as simple as possible but the reality is no matter what there’s multiple systems, there’s multiple roles, there’s multiple things that have to happen.
And there’s so many places where that’s still manual task. And what happens is people make mistakes because humans make mistakes and it just creates a bad experience for the new employee, which then creates bad taste for the manager, which then like makes a bad mark against IT. And I think it’s easier said than done. But as an easy example, where people have a lot of different teams groups or distribution groups and things like that, it’s sometimes you can make a dynamic group in Office 365, but if you have to translate that into another system that maybe is a hosted system you don’t have access to, those are really where those robots can shine. And it’s not free, and it’s also not maintenance free. You have to keep it maintained, that things change to keep it up to speed. I really feel like that’s an area that was hot for a little bit and kind of got quickly passed to AI. I think it’s also a great partner to AI because if your AI is doing stuff, it’s got to have a way to get it somewhere else. So it’s a long way of saying I’ve done a whole lot with RPA more internally. ⁓ AI is something that’s definitely a hot topic and it’s definitely something we’re exploring. I think for most clients that are say under a thousand users, It probably makes the most sense to partner with somebody and kind of get in tune with the market to understand here’s the right partner for this type of group. Here’s the right partner for that type of group and make sure that they have a ⁓ compliant with whatever the regulations are in that industry, but also a proven track record. I feel like there’s a lot of groups in the market right now that while they may sound great to the business, really do need a little bit of pushing from the tech to understand like how does it really work?
Is it truly AI or is it really just kind of an automation? Is it really successful or is there a really high rate of errors and failures? Those are the things that people don’t think about, but becoming that trusted partner will help you be the link between them. One, make sure it’s a successful integration and you can build good partnerships that way.
Terry Hedden (33:23)
Yeah. You know, well, think AI is the single greatest opportunity for MSPs in history. I think it’s bigger than cloud. I think it’s bigger than cybersecurity. And frankly, I think it’s bigger than the computer. And the reason I but I said it the personal computer because what I see is MSPs playing a critical role to helping all SMB companies embrace AI, you know, ⁓ including agentic AI and robotics employees are going to be managed by IT, know, at least mostly. Obviously HR will have a role in the virtual employees, but those agents and those robots are going to be managed by somebody and I think the MSPs are uniquely positioned to own that. I had a great meeting yesterday with an AI creator and he’s having a heck of a time getting into small businesses. He has a great product, but it’s really hard to, it’s expensive and difficult to go that last and talk to the small business owners and I explained to him that the MSP is the reason why. They own that relationship. When a small to medium sized business has a technology need, they turn to Will and say, Will, what do you think? So Will’s in position where he’s gonna be the gatekeeper of technology into that customer, as long as he embraces AI that is, and can be in a position to recommend, to make a residual income stream and to wrap managed services around it. So I’m super, super excited about what AI brings the MSP market over the next five or 10 years. After that, God knows, right? Who knows where that’s gonna go. I think we all might be, know, on a, you know, if the fantasy dreamers have their way and it ends up being the case, then obviously we’ll all be drinking Mai Tais and the robots are doing all the work. But ⁓ I think for the next five or 10 years, it’s gonna be a tremendous multi-trillion dollar opportunity and SMBs are uniquely positioned to be the beneficiary of that trend.
And you know, so I encourage you to keep going and go deeper and and do more and and and and marketopia will be there in those they’ll have for the done with you There’s gonna be campaigns in there to send to get AI AI leads there already is but we’re gonna have a ton more of them because we see it as a Ocean of opportunity and we intend to make sure that the Marketopia clients capitalize on that. So so great job embracing it for now.
Will Daughtrey (35:49)
I agree. The one thing I would add is, you know, there was a period of time when people would kind of hide behind the compliance shield for AI and say, we can’t do it because of compliance. I really think those folks that are still hiding behind that shield are going to be the ones left on the dock when the rest of it’s raw.
Terry Hedden (36:06)
Totally agree. It’s natural, right? It’s change. We all kind of want to like not change naturally. I think it’s nice to our little worlds the way we have it. I don’t think AI is something that you can pretend doesn’t exist because I don’t know about you, but I have been blown away by the pace of innovation in AI. Like to your point there in the last nine months, well in the normal system development life cycle, know, of yesteryear before AI, things happened in months and years and now I feel like new solutions are coming out every day, every week, every month, you know, and what’s impossible today might be the de facto standard in six months and it’s just, it’s amazing. So you’ve got to have your head on a swivel a little bit. Never get too compliant with the tech stack that you’re recommending because new stuff’s being invented every and I think that’s only gonna get faster and faster and faster. So I actually think that’s an opportunity for an MSP as well. It’s like, listen Mr. Customer, I understand that you’re happy with Copilot, for example. But did you know about Copilot Pro? What about Chat Cheap PT Teams? Have you looked into maybe this virtual AI tool I telling you about that identifies the people on your website? There’s so much more to be had and to pivot and to listen and learn to. I think it’s an opportunity, Will, or someone like you to make millions in the coming years and have a phenomenal amount of success.
Will Daughtrey (37:28)
I think the one other thought I have is if you, I met not too long ago a doctor who had used AI to create a chat bot where his staff could ask certain things to kind of take the load off of him or his peers where he was an expert in a specific specialty. I think that proves two things. One, the power of the tool, but more importantly, the barrier of entry to doing something in AI sounds because it’s such a powerful tool. The reality is people who aren’t an IT person are figuring it out. And we as MSPs and business IT folks have to figure out how to help enable them, but also make sure they’re in the guardrails of security, but still, you know, do the same thing. I think an end user has an expectation, rightfully so, that their technical folks are equally, if not more technical and whatever the current foundational technologies are. It doesn’t mean that we’ll be an expert in that medical type of specialty, but we should be an expert in how to enable them to use the technology to enhance their business.
Terry Hedden (38:41)
Totally agree. Well, I to close out with pulling some of that wisdom out of your head. To me, you’re a fresh face in the industry. You’re pretty new. You’re six months in, but you seem to have a lot of wisdom from your past before you were an MSP. So I’m going to ask you a hard question. If I’m an MSP new to the industry, or if I’m an MSP who’s struggling to grow, struggling to achieve my goals, and maybe I’ve got to hit a plateau, If I said my goal is to make five or 10 million dollars and I exit my MSP, if that’s my goal, right? Like most of us don’t get in this for the charity, we want to make some money and have a comfortable retirement. What three pieces of advice would you give an MSP that is in one of those two scenarios when it comes to turning their dreams into expectations?
Will Daughtrey (39:30)
I think the very first thing is ⁓ make sure you build the right team and partners around you. You can’t grow by yourself. We all think we’re experts and stuff, but if you can listen and find the right people, they will guide you in the right direction. And sometimes our thoughts, while they sound logical, just don’t really work. So you have to have that. I think the second important thing is you’ve got to, no matter who the customer is, listen to their pain points understand their business so that you can help them solve the business problems No one cares about an update. No one cares about DNS or DHCP. They care about their business problems And I think the third thing is you just have to have fun with it I feel like if you are liking what you’re doing and it you’re It takes a little bit. Well, once you get to a comfortable point the more relaxed you are. I feel like the more people will be relaxed with you and you have the chance to move forward. If you’re overly stressed, you gotta figure out how to get rid of that stress because it will translate to the potential clients or potential ads, whatever the case may be, and you will be running a much tougher hill. It’ll be a much bigger incline than if you’re finding a way to de-stress a little bit and have many people running in the same direction.
Terry Hedden (40:51)
That’s great advice, it really is. Will, I know you’re early on, but I want to get your initial gut right now. Would you recommend Markatopia for someone else at this point? I know it’s early on, no requirement there. ⁓ If so, why and if not why?
Will Daughtrey (41:10)
⁓ Definitely. think Marketopia is great from their communication. They stay on top of things. The process is very easy to understand and set up, which is great. ⁓ I think talking with other people in the Marketopia bubble, there’s not just marketing, but there’s also general thought process in the space. So as you’re hearing about wins from other groups or you’re hearing about challenges,
You know, everyone can grow together. Some people may have faced the challenge before, or again, there’s other perspectives on how to solve the challenge are just invaluable. So I think the community makes it helpful. think the full ⁓ total marketing package makes it also helpful. So you’re not dealing with three or four different people to try and really accomplish the one goal. Having one person in the driver’s seat navigating is always better than having three.
Terry Hedden (42:03)
Absolutely, you’re kind of taking some of your own dog food a little bit there. You recommend that to your customers as you talked about earlier and as well on the marketing side for yourself. Good to know Bill. Well, I haven’t had a lot of time to spend with you but I wanted to say that the time that I have leads me to be very confident in your future. I feel like you’ve got a great head on your shoulders. You’ve got a sound perspective on the world. You’re humble where you need to be humble and you’re confident where you need to be confident. So I wish you the best of luck man. I can’t wait to see you achieve different levels of success, hopefully ending with that $10 million sale that’s going to set you and your family up for very comfortable retirement.
Will Daughtrey (42:41)
You gotta aim for 100 million and maybe you’ll reach somewhere between it too.
Terry Hedden (42:44)
Okay, I’ll make you a deal Will, you maintain that 100% close ratio and I can guarantee you a hundred million dollar exit. that’s awesome man. And I’ll look forward to working with you in future. Alright, take care.
Will Daughtrey (42:56)
That’s good, thanks so much. Have a good one.
