Join Carrie Richardson, Partner at Richardson & Richardson Consulting and Founder of Croocial as she asks entrepreneurs an important question, "What's Important Now?"
Starting with his founders journey, and ending with his latest WIN, this week's guest is Michael Cervino from Circle Square Consulting in Pennsylvania.
Michael has built a business in three years that is already outperforming 70% of the companies in his industry.
Join me as Michael recounts his voyage from support work with managed service providers to captaining his own ship in the stormy seas of a global pandemic. His story is one of tenacity and evolution, navigating the profound personal and professional metamorphoses that come with trading an operational helm for the crowning challenge of business ownership.
Michael's reflections on the pivotal role of empathy and responsibility shine a light on the human aspect of leadership, underlining the impact of our decisions on employees and their families. This episode peels back the layers of maintaining core values and a customer-centric focus while embracing technological advancements as a beacon for guiding a business to success.
Step into the burgeoning realm of artificial intelligence in managed services, led by Michael's expert navigation through the opportunities and cautionary tales that accompany AI's integration into industries teeming with technical acumen.
We'll dissect the nuanced balance between leveraging tools like ChatGPT for legal contract creation and the imperative for human vigilance amidst data security concerns.
As we investigate the evolving landscape of AI models, like GPT-4, Michael shares insights on the importance of AI education, stringent vendor selection, and the irreplaceable role of MSPs in maintaining security and compliance.
Amidst these discussions, we're left with Michael's optimistic forecast for a year brimming with potential and his unwavering belief in the enduring value and triumphs that Circle Square and the managed services industry stand to offer.
Want to be a guest on WIN? Here's the link to apply! https://randr.consulting/connect
Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?
Carrie helps businesses improve their sales and marketing teams.
Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.
Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com
Book time with them here: https://randr.consulting/connect
Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.
Join Carrie Richardson, Partner at Richardson & Richardson Consulting and Founder of Croocial as she asks entrepreneurs an important question, "What's Important Now?"
Starting with his founders journey, and ending with his latest WIN, this week's guest is Michael Cervino from Circle Square Consulting in Pennsylvania.
Michael has built a business in three years that is already outperforming 70% of the companies in his industry.
Join me as Michael recounts his voyage from support work with managed service providers to captaining his own ship in the stormy seas of a global pandemic. His story is one of tenacity and evolution, navigating the profound personal and professional metamorphoses that come with trading an operational helm for the crowning challenge of business ownership.
Michael's reflections on the pivotal role of empathy and responsibility shine a light on the human aspect of leadership, underlining the impact of our decisions on employees and their families. This episode peels back the layers of maintaining core values and a customer-centric focus while embracing technological advancements as a beacon for guiding a business to success.
Step into the burgeoning realm of artificial intelligence in managed services, led by Michael's expert navigation through the opportunities and cautionary tales that accompany AI's integration into industries teeming with technical acumen.
We'll dissect the nuanced balance between leveraging tools like ChatGPT for legal contract creation and the imperative for human vigilance amidst data security concerns.
As we investigate the evolving landscape of AI models, like GPT-4, Michael shares insights on the importance of AI education, stringent vendor selection, and the irreplaceable role of MSPs in maintaining security and compliance.
Amidst these discussions, we're left with Michael's optimistic forecast for a year brimming with potential and his unwavering belief in the enduring value and triumphs that Circle Square and the managed services industry stand to offer.
Want to be a guest on WIN? Here's the link to apply! https://randr.consulting/connect
Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?
Carrie helps businesses improve their sales and marketing teams.
Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.
Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com
Book time with them here: https://randr.consulting/connect
Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.
Good afternoon everybody. Welcome to Wynn. My name is Carrie Richardson. I am one half of the consulting partnership Richardson and Richardson, and this is Wynn Today. With me is Michael Cervino, the CEO of Circle Square Consulting. Nice to chat with you today, michael. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 2:Thank you, nice to chat with you, carrie.
Speaker 1:And where are you joining us from today?
Speaker 2:Lovely Philadelphia Pennsylvania area. I tell you the actual town but nobody's ever heard of it.
Speaker 1:What's the weather like?
Speaker 2:Cold and I'm not enjoying it. I'm a warm weather person.
Speaker 1:I just got back from Miami myself, so I'm adjusting to the frosty Detroit weather.
Speaker 2:I'm jealous. I followed it on social media.
Speaker 1:It was a good time. I guess if you like art, it's a good time. If you're not an art fan, then I think it would have been a 15 miles a day of walking for very little enjoyment.
Speaker 2:Yes, probably.
Speaker 1:I invited you here on Wynn today to talk about 2023 and some of the things that Circle Square achieved in 2023. For everybody who hasn't met Michael and isn't familiar with Circle Square, we're going to start with a brief intro of the business. Tell us how you started the business and what's happened since.
Speaker 2:Yes, we started Circle Square because my background was helping MSPs identify operationally where their deficiencies were, help build out the sales organization and I've worked with a number of MSPs to help achieve that. And after a certain period of time I realized that, hey, why am I not doing this for myself and gaining all the benefits? So in the middle of a pandemic, I decided, hey, we're going to go ahead and launch Circle Square and really just what we were able to do is tap into a lot of our relationships and say, hey, the same things that we were able to help you with when we talked previously or if areas that we've worked together, if there's any opportunity for us to work together, we'd love the opportunity to reach out, and we were blessed enough to have a number of people that put their faith and trust in us and helped us grow the business and in turn, we've helped secure theirs.
Speaker 1:So you had a managed services background before you launched your MSP. Michael and I worked together closely. How many years ago, 2017? Maybe it's been a while.
Speaker 2:It's been a while. I don't want to date either of us.
Speaker 1:No, I'm using the filters. So you started Circle Square in 2020. It's now 2023. Tell us about the most important thing you've learned as a business owner in the last three years. So how does owning a business differ from working in one in the exact same space?
Speaker 2:So we started in 2021. So I'll say at the tail end of the pandemic, I should have said so. We took on our first clients in October of 2021. And through 2022, we were able to grow and one of the I guess the biggest thing I learned is how hard it is to actually be a business owner. When you've been on the operational side, you have a lot of experience and you have you feel like you have a lot of responsibility. But once the employees are actually being paid by you and you have the responsibility not only to to the employees but also their families, and you've you learn about them. You you go to their kids events and there's a level of responsibility there that I don't take lightly and I think that's probably the biggest thing that I've had to learn and get used to as a business owner.
Speaker 1:It's just the people.
Speaker 2:It's the empathy of having the responsibility of those individuals and their livelihood.
Speaker 1:So you had to make the jump from being operational and I'm sure that you did manage people while you were in those roles. The difference now is being the path to financial security for those employees.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you have the responsibility. They get paid first and I've never had to deal with that. I've had times where I didn't get paid or I was putting money back in so I could make sure people were getting paid. That's a much different experience that you don't really get to understand until you've done it.
Speaker 1:I've been there myself and there weren't a lot of times that I didn't take a paycheck, but there were times and they were scary times and I'm happy to be past them.
Speaker 2:Me too, we haven't had it. Often there have been those times where you do what you got to do.
Speaker 1:So tell me a little bit about the progress that Circle Square has made over the last few years. I know that we've talked privately on a couple of occasions and 2023 was a pretty good year for you guys.
Speaker 2:What are the things that you did right. What we did right was hold to our values and really do what is best for the client. And I say it and it really often sounds cheesy, but I truly believe that for us, as a managed IT vendor, we do this every day and we don't often get held to the same standard as your attorney or your accountant. We have a very specialized set of skills and people don't often question their attorney, they don't often question their accountant, but they always feel like they have to question their IT guy. And really where we want to do things is position ourselves different.
Speaker 2:We're not the day-to-day IT guy. The execution part is easy. Solving the problem is easy. Anybody can do that. It's how you leverage the strategy and how you actually engage with the business to understand their goals and achieve their goals by leveraging technology in the right way. And for us, all of our growth has been through referral and relationships and holding true to our values and making sure that all of our employees, everybody that we interact with, actually understands that and lives and breathes it, I believe, is the key to our success and we'll continue to be.
Speaker 1:There's a real trend, and I was talking about this on a podcast earlier today. There's a huge push towards using AI in all businesses, but especially in businesses where people have some technical know-how. I think we're a little more comfortable going in and playing with the different solutions and services that have AI within them. Are you pursuing any interesting opportunities with AI, either for your clients or for your own business right now?
Speaker 2:Both. For us, one of the things that we're looking at is leveraging some of the AI and robotic process automation to allow our employees and our technical staff to do their jobs better. While we'll still have the full visibility and control over what it's doing, we'll also have the time where we'll essentially be able to work on four or five different things at the same time, while having the AI do some of the redundant tasks that we don't need to do Creating accounts, ordering licenses for us, provisioning services. These are all the things that the technology Realistically can do and has proven effective as far as for our clients. A Really simple and, quite honestly, silly thing, but has actually been pretty beneficial for the client.
Speaker 2:We have one client that is in a compliant industry and we worked with them to develop policies and procedures, and they don't really understand a lot of policies and procedures. So what we did is we uploaded it to a custom chat bot all their policies and procedures and if they have a question about them, they can actually just chat with it. They had a new CFO in and One of the prompts that we tested and trained it on was I'm a brand new CFO and please explain to me what my policies and procedures are, or what should I be concerned with? And it gave them a very detailed explanation that he's wow, this is amazing. What else can we do with this?
Speaker 1:That's great. Happy to see that there are people that are helping people navigate AI, instead of just waiting to see what kind of secrets Lay at the bottom of that pitch.
Speaker 2:And as far as the secrets, one of the things that that is scary and that we're advising a lot of our clients on is the dangers of AI and really understanding when your data is.
Speaker 2:How is it categorized, how are you labeling it? Because, let's say, you have one of my clients has 80 SharePoint sites, and when was the last time they've done a really good audit of what's contained within their SharePoint sites, within their team sites, files that people are uploading that may contain sensitive information that Would may be hard to access if you had to manually find it. But now, if you have a NAI or a large language model ingesting all of that and you accidentally have a document that is publicly available that Contains the CEO salary, all I have to do is say what's the CEO salary and it's gonna go find it and tell me, whereas I would have had to search through reams and reams of documents and pages to maybe find it. It it's gonna make accessibility to data a lot easier, which is a A benefit, but it's also scary if you're not planning it the right way.
Speaker 1:So that's one opportunity that is Especially prevalent in your industry right now. Have clients come to you in the same way that? Yeah, you had mentioned that we don't talk to our lawyers the way that we might talk to an IT provider, but I 100% have tried to build a contract using chat GPT, right, and then I've prompted it to do. Okay, what do I? What clauses are not in this contract that I should consider, for example? And If I went to my lawyer with that, my lawyer would tell me to f off.
Speaker 1:Right, that would be it. He'd be like I'm, what are you doing here, even though I know my lawyer is just taking a contract that he already has and Dropping and dragging some clauses around. At least I know there's human eyes on it and if there's some horrible mistake, for example, he is going to Point that out and we're gonna be able to remove that. So Are there people coming to you the way they would come to a doctor, saying I googled this, or I asked chat GPT how I should set up XYZ, and they said this are you already seeing that?
Speaker 2:Not as much, because people are really coming to us and saying how do I use it, how do I interact with it, how do I leverage this within my business? One of the presidents of one of our companies and when he watches, as he's gonna know exactly who he is is has been asking us very regularly what's the status of Microsoft co-pilot, when are we gonna be able to get it and how do how are we gonna leverage it? So it's an ongoing discussion and what part of it is educating the, the end user and the client on the differences of some of the large language models and and the risks that we're seeing out there where, whereas you got it, you also have to make sure that I don't want to necessarily upload sensitive data to a chat GPT because I don't necessarily know where that or how that is being used and how it's going to be accessible. We've seen incidents out there where data is being inadvertently leaked. I heard in a podcast the other day where they were able to extract the CEO's private phone number because it was ingested from an email that chat GPT got a hold of at some point.
Speaker 2:So we're advising our clients to exercise some caution and Microsoft has been very good at leveraging some of the open AI technology within their Azure suite, where it is self-contained. We're still waiting to see what some of the future is going to hold with Copilot and we're waiting to early next year, where that is going to be available but where we can leverage it and we feel safe. We're going to our clients and our clients are coming to us and saying how do we use it, but once again, we're advising them to use some caution, because this technology is only a year old, as of a couple of days ago, and we've seen how much it's evolved.
Speaker 1:I don't think I think it's devolving if you ask anybody on LinkedIn right now.
Speaker 2:In certain cases it is. Whereas GPT 3.5 was able to do things, GPT 4, some of the new iterations are not as good. Bart is coming out and it's got some other features. A lot of AI is marketing fluff. Quite honestly. It's amazing in what it's going to do for all industries, but, as you said, we still need a human eye on it Because in a lot of cases it's wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've seen that myself. Backchecking is still going to be necessary. Before you outsource your help desk to an AI-driven product, perhaps learn a little bit more about where that product was built and who trained it and why.
Speaker 2:That is actually one of the biggest questions that we've asked of these vendors what is your language model? Where is the data coming from? Who has access to it? I don't think a lot of people really genuinely understand how this technology works to be able to ask those questions. That's part of the education process for us. My job is to not solve every problem for the customer. It is to present options, and well thought out options, and let them make an educated decision. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it's their business. It's my job to advise them the best that I possibly can, or put the right people in front of them to get them the answers so that way they can make an educated decision.
Speaker 1:That was probably the biggest opportunity of 2023. As far as who was going to get there first, who was going to use it and how are they going to use it. Looking at 2024, what opportunities do you see for Circle Square? Where are you going to shine next year? What can you take advantage of?
Speaker 2:For us, it's heavily focusing on the security and compliance side of things. That is the area that most mid-sized businesses that are in a non-compliant industry even the ones that are in compliant industries we see it with manufacturing and the uncertainty around CMMC and what is going to be required and how the auditors are going to interpret things. I'm also convinced that in the next three to five years, managed service providers are going to be regulated in some form or fashion. I think we should. It's probably going to be an unpopular opinion amongst managed service providers, but I fully believe that we should be regulated and held to a higher standard.
Speaker 2:I try to avoid Reddit and some of these Facebook groups, but sometimes I get sucked in the questions that are asked, and there is one this morning. I want to start an MSP on a pay. What you can model. That is 100% not a good option or a sustainable option, because what it does is it devalues our industry. People don't want to pay what is required at the current point with advanced security, some of the threat protection I'm still arguing with certain clients about the need to implement security awareness training for their employees and some of the risks that are out there. That's the scary part is that people don't want to have some of these conversations because they're uncomfortable conversations and they're hard conversations. But ultimately, at the end of the day, we have to be better than we're currently doing as an industry in the managed services world, and I think the only way that we're going to do that is by somebody telling us that we have to be better.
Speaker 1:If you want to have the same level of the word I was looking for. You mentioned before that nobody ever asks their lawyer or their accountant whether or not this is a necessary thing. Right? Is that? Because there was a barrier to entry? To become an accountant, there's a barrier to entry to become a lawyer. You have to go to school for 10 years. There is a certifying body. You have to be called to the bar. There are different laws in different states. There are very specific, regimented qualifiers around being a lawyer and if you make an error or you make a decision that is not in your client's best interest, they can strip that certification from you and you will no longer be able to practice law.
Speaker 1:That is not so for managed services providers. I could start my managed services provider today. I have zero technical abilities. I'd be the one on Reddit asking what RMM should I use. I'd be asking how does an RMM work? Right, I've been selling them for years. But if you asked me to set one up, I'd be completely lost. But I'm great at sales and marketing, so I've been selling managed services for 10 years. What's the stop me from just starting a managed service provider? I can sell, I can market. I can't support anybody, but that doesn't seem to be a hold back in this space. That's a great point.
Speaker 2:I don't think I've ever considered it that way from the barrier to entry, but it's. That's a perfect analogy. Really, most of the people and I'm look, I'm friends with a lot of these people, I love the channel, I love the managed services industry I think a lot of these people, a lot of people, are really well intentioned, but they're not. But they're tech people that run a business and I look at it as I'm a business person that happens to own a tech company. That's really how I look at it. That's the conversation that I want to have. I don't want to have a technical conversation because, quite honestly, most of the people that I talk to, like you, they don't understand and they don't really care. They don't want to know. They just want to know this is what I'm trying to achieve and can you get me there. Oftentimes they don't even know or care how I'm going to get them there. They just want to know that it works.
Speaker 2:Most of our clients, they don't tolerate downtime, they don't tolerate problems, and what we bring to the table for them is look, I don't want you to have a problem. We're going to do everything within our power to use the right technology to make sure that your systems are secure, that if, god forbid, something gets in and it look it will just assume that the client is going to have some type of incident. But how do we contain it and make sure that it doesn't spread? That when something gets through, it only affects one person. We deal with it, we remediate the issue and get that user back to work as fast as humanly possible. That's the conversation that we want to have with a business owner, rather than oh, the Sentinel-1 software is amazing and it's so high on Gartner they don't care. And, quite honestly, those things are all pay to play anyway. So if you understand how it works, you don't really put a whole lot of value in them.
Speaker 2:I care about is the technology going to allow me to achieve the goals for my client and allow me to achieve what I set out and I tell them that I'm going to do? I don't have salespeople. I meet with most of the clients directly when we're presenting to them. I met with a client yesterday or a prospect yesterday and I said look, I'm not a sales guy. What I tell you is what is going to happen and the only person accountable to that is me. So I will make sure that if I tell you it's going to happen, this is exactly how it's going to happen, and I believe that there's a level of value there. I know that. Look, I ran sales teams. I've been just the sales guy. But in this case I am selling. But I'm really just selling what my belief is in the value of what we bring to the table. I can't think of a better place to stop than that.
Speaker 1:So thank you for joining us today. Thank you for sharing a little bit about what you've learned on your journey over the last few years. It'll be exciting to see what happens in the next few years. It sounds like Circle Square has a pretty exciting 2024, if the good lords will end and the creek don't rise. So we wish you much success and thank you for joining us today on Wynn.
Speaker 2:Thank you. I'm going to wait to come back and tell you about my wins.