Jim Smith from Proper Sky IT WINS by Keeping Clients Secure
Have you ever felt the ground shake beneath your feet, not from an earthquake, but from the tremors of starting a business? Jim Smith of Proper Sky knows this feeling well, and in our latest conversation, he takes us through the peaks and valleys of his entrepreneurial exploits. Starting with his formative Peace Corps days to the daunting task of scaling an MSP, Jim lays bare the emotional rollercoaster of business ownership. He recounts the gut-wrenching realities of downsizing, his unwavering loyalty to his team, and how moments of serendipity and external advice, like his at IT Nation, can pivot the path of a burgeoning enterprise.
Navigating the choppy entrepreneurial seas is no joke—just ask Jim about his "pirate ship of IT" and the brave souls who joined his ranks early on. These pioneers not only remind us of the indispensable value of diversified client portfolios but also demonstrate how resilience begets growth. In this crew's log, we tackle the thorny problem of transferring sales expertise to new mates and the crucial role of risk management in steering clear of treacherous waters. The tales from these voyages are more than just anecdotes; they're lifeboats of wisdom for anyone daring to set sail on their own business adventure.
Lastly, we hoist up the flag of cybersecurity, a beacon of concern and opportunity in the modern age. Through the story of a local company's compromised security, Jim underscores the lurking dangers of cyber threats and the proactive armory required to fend them off. We explore using cybersecurity as a strategic marketing tool and the reassuring power it holds for clients in safeguarding their precious data. The conversation also casts a glance towards the future, pondering the impact of industry regulations and the vanguard role MSPs like Proper Sky play in the constant battle against cyber risks. Join us as we chart the course through these pressing matters, and arm yourself with the knowledge to protect your own enterprise against the digital pirates of the 21st century.
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.
Jim Smith from Proper Sky IT WINS by Keeping Clients Secure
Have you ever felt the ground shake beneath your feet, not from an earthquake, but from the tremors of starting a business? Jim Smith of Proper Sky knows this feeling well, and in our latest conversation, he takes us through the peaks and valleys of his entrepreneurial exploits. Starting with his formative Peace Corps days to the daunting task of scaling an MSP, Jim lays bare the emotional rollercoaster of business ownership. He recounts the gut-wrenching realities of downsizing, his unwavering loyalty to his team, and how moments of serendipity and external advice, like his at IT Nation, can pivot the path of a burgeoning enterprise.
Navigating the choppy entrepreneurial seas is no joke—just ask Jim about his "pirate ship of IT" and the brave souls who joined his ranks early on. These pioneers not only remind us of the indispensable value of diversified client portfolios but also demonstrate how resilience begets growth. In this crew's log, we tackle the thorny problem of transferring sales expertise to new mates and the crucial role of risk management in steering clear of treacherous waters. The tales from these voyages are more than just anecdotes; they're lifeboats of wisdom for anyone daring to set sail on their own business adventure.
Lastly, we hoist up the flag of cybersecurity, a beacon of concern and opportunity in the modern age. Through the story of a local company's compromised security, Jim underscores the lurking dangers of cyber threats and the proactive armory required to fend them off. We explore using cybersecurity as a strategic marketing tool and the reassuring power it holds for clients in safeguarding their precious data. The conversation also casts a glance towards the future, pondering the impact of industry regulations and the vanguard role MSPs like Proper Sky play in the constant battle against cyber risks. Join us as we chart the course through these pressing matters, and arm yourself with the knowledge to protect your own enterprise against the digital pirates of the 21st century.
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.
Jim Smith, CEO Proper Sky Managed IT Services
[00:00:11] Carrie Richardson: Good afternoon, everybody.
[00:00:12] Carrie Richardson: My name is Carrie Richardson. I am a partner at Richardson & Richardson, and I am the host of WIN today. With me today is Jim Smith from Proper Sky in Philadelphia. Jim, how are you doing today?
[00:00:24] Jim Smith: Fantastic. Thanks so much for the invitation today, Carrie.
[00:00:27] Carrie Richardson: Oh, it's a pleasure. How's the weather in Philadelphia today?
[00:00:30] Jim Smith: It was cold this morning , but it's nice today. Sun's warming things up. So looking forward to getting out there and walking around a bit.
[00:00:36] Carrie Richardson: Glad to hear it. We had a little bit of a cold front punch us in the face in Michigan and it's supposed to get nice again by the weekend.
[00:00:43] Carrie Richardson: Tell me a little bit about ProperSky and how you got involved in becoming an entrepreneur.
[00:00:49] Jim Smith: I was always involved in entrepreneurial endeavors. I studied entrepreneurial studies at Drexel University.
[00:00:54] Jim Smith: And I started a little startup when I was 19. [00:01:00] Remote pharmacy was the, that was the concept, which is pretty cool. I worked my way through school. So full time school, part time full time work, part time school. And in 2003, I decided that I wanted to go see the world.
[00:01:11] Jim Smith: So I quit my job, sold everything, joined the Peace Corps. I lived overseas in the South Pacific for two years, and I thought I'd take a break from system administration, and they put me in charge of the largest technical college in the in the entire country. So I went from having, a medium budget, small company to no budget with a huge bunch of kids to take care of.
[00:01:32] Jim Smith: And I loved it. I really enjoyed teaching. I enjoyed educating students and I loved like making things work on the shoestring budget. And so all these other little organizations found out about me. People would invite me over and say, Hey, I got the small business server in my office.
[00:01:48] Jim Smith: That's busted. And I, I can't get on the internet. I like helping out all these NGOs. And when I came back to the United States, I was like, I'm going to start my own company. So I did, I wrote a script, [00:02:00] a Perl script that would read Craigslist and it would text me, which was, the new hotness at the time and it would text me when somebody had the word like Linux or server or anything like that in a computer post.
[00:02:10] Jim Smith: And I made three phone calls, about five three of those guys are still customers to this day. One of them, ended up becoming a dermatology practice that grew from four providers and four offices to 70 providers in 60 offices across 13 states. We built their whole data center, grew up on the backs of those guys.
[00:02:29] Jim Smith: So that's how I got into the MSP game, so to speak.
[00:02:34] Carrie Richardson: Now, is that the customer that you mentioned when we were in the green room that made up 90 percent of your revenue for a while?
[00:02:40] Jim Smith: It is. It is. So it was anything for a buck, right? We picked up a bunch of small doctors, along the way, but we're just charging time and materials, but we had one major provider that we were focused on up until 2014.
[00:02:51] Jim Smith: Two owners had a falling out, ended up suing each other into bankruptcy and the practice fell apart. 2014, 2015 was the [00:03:00] longest most stressful period of my entire life, I think. It sucked. We went from, I think I had 11 or 12 employees at the time down to four. And I think I had about just enough money to buy gas in the bank account by the time things pivoted and switched around again,
[00:03:13] Carrie Richardson: those are hard conversations to have, especially when your employees haven't done anything wrong.
[00:03:20] Jim Smith: That is by far the thing I promised myself moving forward. There's nothing worse than laying off good people that actually are doing the work, right? It's one thing to have a conversation with an employee that's not performing.
[00:03:30] Jim Smith: You've given them a chance to develop or change. It's something else entirely when you have to let go of good people. And I think that was the hardest by far the hardest thing about 2015 for me, my entire, in my life, honestly, one of the biggest things I've ever had to deal with.
[00:03:44] Carrie Richardson: And you mentioned that at that time you went to ITNation and you developed a relationship with a coach?
[00:03:53] Jim Smith: Sort of, yeah. I was sitting by the bar drinking a bourbon and I sat next to this guy, Steve. He wasn't [00:04:00] necessarily a coach per se, but We were just, shooting the breeze. And I told him my story and why I was at IT Nation. I said, look, I I got to find a new way to do business.
[00:04:07] Jim Smith: I'm struggling. I don't really know what to do. And he made an introduction and he wrote this name on the back of a business card. And he said, call this guy when you get back to Philadelphia, call me up if you have any problems. And this guy's going to teach you how to run an MSP. That's what I did.
[00:04:21] Carrie Richardson: A lot of times people don't bring in external help advice coaches, consultants, until it's almost too late,
[00:04:30] Jim Smith: emotionally, it was the longest, most draining period of my entire life, right? And I was just so overwhelmed. One of the other things I was doing during that time is I joined the Goldman Sachs, 10, 000 small businesses program. Hey, yeah. 10 KSB grad. I thought you were 10 KSB. Cohort 8, right?
[00:04:47] Carrie Richardson: Whoa, cohort 8? I was like 24.
[00:04:49] Jim Smith: So while we were in there, that was actually really fantastic. And one of the things I took away from that is you don't know what you don't know, right? Adam Grant showed up to one of our classes.
[00:04:59] Jim Smith: He was a [00:05:00] UPenn guy. Mori Tappenhor, who did this negotiations class, which was fantastic.
[00:05:04] Jim Smith: She's still teaching that .
[00:05:05] Jim Smith: She is fantastic. I love all her content. And so it, it taught me that it is much better to pay for good advice than it is to do it yourself in a lot of circumstances.
[00:05:17] Jim Smith: So it was a huge growing up thing. And that's what made me do it. I just like, look, this guy's running successful on his P's. Obviously, he started this different company. Let me just take his advice. He already knows what he's doing. What did I get to lose?
[00:05:30] Carrie Richardson: So what was the biggest thing that you learned at that time?
[00:05:32] Carrie Richardson: And how long did it take you to pivot and implement those suggestions?
[00:05:38] Jim Smith: The biggest thing I learned during that time is meditation. It sounds like a silly thing but I had a hard time falling asleep. I didn't want to take any medication. And I learned to let the anxiety arrive and then push it out and deal with it as it came in these sorts of waves. And it really taught me self control. I think actually it's a big thing. Like I'm from an Irish [00:06:00] heritage lots of stereotypes there about emotions and things like that. And I think once I understood, That this too shall pass, right?
[00:06:07] Jim Smith: It's just a temporary feeling. It helped me logically address like, okay, if I really want to be successful, what do I need to do? What are the things that I'm missing? What do I execute well at? What am I missing? And connected with the people that I thought could help me get there.
[00:06:22] Carrie Richardson: Tell me about hiring your first team members.
[00:06:27] Jim Smith: My first team member was my best friend. We grew up together in, in Southwest Philadelphia and he was working in a retail shop at the time. And he was looking for something new and I had all the time in the world.
[00:06:37] Jim Smith: I said, look, man, I'm driving around all these doctor's offices. I can't keep doing this. I need somebody that can get a car. And so I hired him and he was, he's been with me. He just left last year. He got a job with the government. He's got a nice pension and eight weeks vacation. But he's with me for 15 years, and we had a great relationship. So he was my first employee. I taught him. And then I found my whatever Michael Gerber calls that guy, the guy that can do everything. This guy [00:07:00] named Jeff and he really helped propel us to the next level. And then we just picked up just a bunch of different people along the way. It's definitely not as defined or scoped as it is now. When I first started, I think just getting anybody that would come into my office and decide to work there was a win,
[00:07:15] Jim Smith: but, I think, you learn a lot about people and characters and personality and that sort of stuff. I, it was a pirate ship of it. , I think probably the best way to describe my first few years. But it worked. We got it working so well.
[00:07:27] Carrie Richardson: We talked a bit, a little bit about that earlier, the things that get you to your first million aren't going to get you to your fifth.
[00:07:34] Carrie Richardson: So you can run like a pirate ship or a clubhouse or whatever you want to describe that as up until a certain point and then you realize that you're doing a lot more work for the same amount of money and that's usually where I see entrepreneurs making choices to do something different like they maybe takes them a couple of years of flatlining or you know their margins dropping and then all of a sudden [00:08:00] they're like Open to the idea that life could be different business could be different.
[00:08:04] Carrie Richardson: I think you had almost a blessing as much as losing that amount of revenue overnight is terrible. You learned early in your business career. What happens. When you make choices like that, right? Most of us are like, whatever, it's going to pay my bills. I'll take that business. But knowing what I know now, I would never take a client that would end up being 50 percent of my revenue.
[00:08:28] Carrie Richardson: Now, that's not true. I'd probably take that client because I'm terrible at saying no, but then I would have to scramble to try and find other clients so that I'd be diversified a little bit. And I wouldn't have known that earlier. So you got this kind of great gift handed to you early on in business.
[00:08:44] If you look at your business now, if all of a sudden 90 percent of your book dropped that's a much different experience and who knows if you're going to have the energy to replace that revenue, 20 years into the game.
[00:08:56] Jim Smith: Exactly. So yeah, I'll tell you a funny story. I did have [00:09:00] another customer that made up almost 40 percent of my revenue. And so this happened in, I picked them up in 2016, 2017, and they grew. They weren't originally that big, but they've, they grew to about a 350 employee company who managed all their IT.
[00:09:14] Jim Smith: It was fantastic. CEO changed ships and I was like, Oh, I saw the writing on the wall. And I was like, okay, this time though, I had money in the bank. I had cashflow. And I was like, okay, if you want to sell today, hire sales guy a year ago. So that's the first thing I did. I was like, okay, let's start finding a salesperson.
[00:09:32] Jim Smith: Let's diversify because I saw the ship slowly sink in and it was just a totally different experience.
[00:09:39] Jim Smith: I slept through the entire thing.
[00:09:40] Jim Smith: I didn't have to let anybody go.
[00:09:41] Jim Smith: I had plenty of gas in the tank and it was just like, let's overcome and get better at it,
[00:09:45] Carrie Richardson: and is that salesperson still with you today?
[00:09:48] Jim Smith: Yeah, he is. He's been crushing it. Which is great. He reached out to me through the web form and I was like, oh man, how to work sales guys. I don't know. And I called around cause Philly's a pretty good town. And I talked to a couple of people that are like, yeah, man, I'll do it.
[00:09:59] Jim Smith: Get them in there, give them a [00:10:00] try. And he's been crushing it since. So he's done a really good job.
[00:10:03] Carrie Richardson: That's nice to hear. I think sometimes we hire sales reps hoping that they'll be able to build a process for us if we don't understand it well.
[00:10:13] Carrie Richardson: You hired a sales rep. You were the sales rep prior to that. How were you able to transfer your institutional knowledge or your, the things that you knew instinctively about going on a sales meeting to that sales rep?
[00:10:28] It's something that I'm still learning. So there's a couple of things that you mentioned. I think are very true sales. People are built differently. If you're expecting your sales guy to come in with a process you are bravely mistaken, right? They're connectors of people they enjoy talking and not necessarily putting in activities and notes and all those other sorts of things that I think drive process.
[00:10:46] Jim Smith: What I did is I invested probably a year putting together a really solid managed services template. I got a bunch of pieces from the guys that were in my Evolve group, and I put together this beautiful template. And then I would have Anthony go ahead and go [00:11:00] through and schedule out all the pieces.
[00:11:01] Jim Smith: Okay. How many workstations, how many servers, how many users, how many licenses, and he would inevitably get it wrong. And so what we started doing is we started building flashcards. We started doing training. I started having him like basically quote every little thing until he could answer and understand what was going on, and now it's not necessarily what are we selling or what are the, Bits and widgets, but now we spend more time. Okay, what is the customers hang up? They don't want to spend 1500 hours a laptop. They want to spend 900 hours a laptop. Why is that not make sense for an engineering?
[00:11:32] Jim Smith: So how do I repute this sort of stuff? And so I guess coaching is probably the answer. And the other thing is I think as an entrepreneur one of the things I still am bad at this is, but I'm better than I was, you get your fingers in everything, right? Gary Pica says, I can order a pizza better than any, which is true.
[00:11:48] Jim Smith: It feels that way. And I think the thing is Anthony really opened up my eyes. He had tons of leads coming in from our marketing system. I just didn't have the time. to pursue them, right? And so when I freed myself [00:12:00] up and I let the vine go and trained him to get improved we really made some traction and really grew.
[00:12:06] Carrie Richardson: So that sounds like the best sales hire you've made. Tell me about the best technical hire that you've made.
[00:12:12] Jim Smith: The best technical hire that I made? That's a good question. There's going to be twofold. I've got one guy with me, Colin. He was a double master's degree from Drexel University. He's been with me 13 years, 12 years, something like that.
[00:12:24] Jim Smith: He is what I would call an engineer's engineer. He's just one of those dudes that can intuitively study a problem and solve it if given enough time and resources, right? So that's my first hire. The second best technical hire I've hired was my service manager, Cliff. He joined us just two or three years ago at this point.
[00:12:42] Jim Smith: I forget exactly because I'm getting old. And what he brought with him was SOP process and standardization, which I'd never really respected but I have a huge and tremendous respect for now. He taught me the art of my ways. And so those were definitely my two best technical.
[00:12:59] Carrie Richardson: Excellent.[00:13:00]
[00:13:00] Carrie Richardson: You've reached kind of an elite spot in your business . We have a database of about 44, 000 managed service providers. Do you want to guess how many of them have reached over 2 million in annual recurring revenue?
[00:13:16] Jim Smith: My service leadership hat, let's see, top quartile, I don't know, let's say 8, 000.
[00:13:23] Carrie Richardson: Yeah, that's actually pretty close.
[00:13:25] Carrie Richardson: So you've crossed that threshold. So what do you see as the biggest opportunity for your business in the next five years?
[00:13:34] Jim Smith: I think we're going to see AI profoundly impact our industry. I think we're going to start to see the weaponization of AI from both an attack perspective and a defensive perspective. I believe there's going to be this re pivot, the humanizing technology and helping organizations prepare for disaster.
[00:13:56] Jim Smith: That's inevitable and less about the sort of [00:14:00] prevention and best practices. Once you put the smartest computers in the world looking at source code, it's going to be pretty hard to stop a lot of what I think we're going to see in the coming future. And I think there's going to be a lot more value in helping organizations recover.
[00:14:16] Jim Smith: And be emotionally ready for the onslaught of what we're going to see the next decade coming decades.
[00:14:22] Carrie Richardson: So for companies that are listening today who aren't technical, what does that look like for, a small law firm or a hotel or a, an engineering firm?
[00:14:36] Jim Smith: Yeah, so we just, we did an incident response.
[00:14:38] Jim Smith: Our first incident response about a year ago for a local company. And I remember walking in, right? So I'm a business owner and I, I saw the look in the owner's face. She had 55 employees. And they were toast. They were absolutely toast. I was talking to the system administrator and it was obvious this guy didn't know what he was doing and that, they were really in a bad [00:15:00] spot.
[00:15:00] Jim Smith: All the backups have been destroyed and all this other stuff was happening and. That is what IT becomes, right? That's what ransomware is. It's not this like technical botnet stuff that you see on LinkedIn. Really what it is it's tears in the eyes of the CEO that knows she has to make payroll and everything that they've relied on to make their systems work just doesn't right.
[00:15:24] Jim Smith: And you need to have stuff in place to prevent that from happening or even more important to recover when it does happen. And I think that's the big value I've taken away this last year.
[00:15:36] Carrie Richardson: I think the numbers I heard, and this was from Goldman Sachs just a couple of years ago when I finished my program, was that 80 percent of small businesses don't believe that a cyber incident will happen to them, and of the 20 percent that do, 50 percent of that 20 percent don't think it's going to be that big of a deal.[00:16:00]
[00:16:00] Jim Smith: Yeah, I've got some people that they could talk to that'll tell them otherwise, right?
[00:16:03]
[00:16:03] Carrie Richardson: We don't want to sell with fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and we can't be too technical because then people don't understand what we're saying, but how do you impart the importance of cybersecurity to someone who like just truly believes that their small business is immune or irrelevant ?
[00:16:20] Jim Smith: It's, it really is tough because I don't like selling fear, right? it's such a small thing that you can do that's going to have such a profound impact of keeping your business running. I'm here to protect you. Trust me,
[00:17:35] Carrie Richardson: How do you impart the importance on, upon them without, I don't know. Having them go home, unplug everything, get underneath their desk, and rock back and forth in the fetal position, which is what I want to do every time I come home from a tech conference.
[00:17:50] Jim Smith: 100%, right? So I feel like there's a lot of chest pounding and beating those things, but a lot of it's very accurate, right?
[00:17:57] Jim Smith: So it's like anything else, right? [00:18:00] It's you could tell me any fire insurance, right? And I may never ever use it. But when the house burns down, God damn, if I'm not happy that I had it. And I think the organizations that take this seriously are going to be the ones that outperform in the long term.
[00:18:13] Jim Smith: Because cybersecurity insurance and cybersecurity risk. It's the one thing that I see actually businesses using. Yeah. And those organizations that don't take heat, they're going to pay the price. And the price is going to outweigh any of the benefits that they could have had if they just done it right the first time, and I think it's sad to say that, but I think that's what's going to happen, especially as we see the weaponization of AI, right?
[00:18:40] Jim Smith: As more and more ways of penetrating networks and getting into things cleverly collected phishing emails, everything else proliferates more and more organizations are going to get owned and then it's really going to be taken seriously, in my opinion.
[00:18:52] Carrie Richardson: I think one an average of 1% of a company's annual revenue is spent on it compared [00:19:00] to eight to 15% on marketing.
[00:19:03] Carrie Richardson: When you think about the remediation planning and the damage control that's going to eat that marketing budget afterwards, to me it seems to make sense that people could look at their marketing budget and say, how can we make security? Differentiate or for our business, because all things being equal, I can work with any law firm I want, right?
[00:19:23] Carrie Richardson: You charge 600 an hour and you charge 600 an hour. What if there was some kind of trust Mark that shows me that this company is protecting me in a way that this company isn't, can we start turning security into, a marketing.
[00:19:40] Jim Smith: The differentiator. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. There's a real good discussion on LinkedIn the other day.
[00:19:44] Jim Smith: Or actually I just hopped on one of the threads. How do you vet the quality of your MSP? So how do you know that they're doing the right stuff, right? Is there organizations out there that will give you like a unfiltered, unbiased view of what your potential risks are? And I think there's a huge market and opportunity [00:20:00] there for that sort of stuff.
[00:20:01] Jim Smith: And I'd love to see. There's a lot of talk in the industry right now about regulation and government oversight and stuff like that. And obviously, there's reasons why people don't want that, but I like it. I can't tell you how many times we still run into these organizations that say they're MSPs that are just running like garbage.
[00:20:17] Jim Smith: Frankly, just garbage. And it's I can't believe the charging people money for this stuff. It's shocking. It really is.
[00:20:24] Carrie Richardson: The person that cuts my hair had to get a certification stating that they were qualified to cut my hair and we can trust our entire computer networks to somebody who just woke up today and said going to become an msp and then they went on reddit and asked what rmm they should use.
[00:20:41] Carrie Richardson: Exactly. And to the consumer, unfortunately, they have no way of knowing the difference between, proper sky, 20 years established, following all best practices, patching stuff, and that guy, like a flashy website. Compared side by side, everybody looks the same. How does a consumer choose?
[00:20:59] Carrie Richardson: [00:21:00] It's
[00:21:01] Jim Smith: true. It's true, especially when you don't understand the nomenclature, right? So that's the other thing, right? And this kind of harkens back to what I was saying about humanizing stuff. I think one of the things I really try to do is I try to explain technical concepts in the non technical way as often as I can.
[00:21:15] Jim Smith: I try to leave the stories, right? It may not matter that you have a shared workstation in your office, but it does matter that if I put my cyber security tool in there and I break her computer, she loses all the photos of her grandchildren, right? That's stuff that like resonates, and yeah, I don't know how we solve this problem easily.
[00:21:29] Jim Smith: That's some sort of oversight. Most big businesses do a pretty good job of vetting. But I do agree that at a certain point, we're going to have some quality control standards and some sort of licensure .
[00:21:39] Carrie Richardson: Now, are you going to be leading the charge for that or are you going to be a late adopter?
[00:21:45] Jim Smith: No, I'm too busy slinging tech, Carrie. So I'll let the regulators tell me what I need to do. Yeah, I've got plenty of flags planted as it is. I don't need another one.
[00:21:56] Carrie Richardson: All right. And what do you see for what do you see as the biggest [00:22:00] opportunity? We talked about AI and how that's going to cause a lot of problems through your industry.
[00:22:06] Carrie Richardson: What's going to save it? What's the big, exciting thing that you can pursue in the next five years?
[00:22:11] Jim Smith: Can I pursue the next 5 years? We're all security companies, right? And the sooner MSPs realize that whether they want to admit it or not, we are all selling security in 1 way or another.
[00:22:20] Jim Smith: And so obviously the pivot to security, I think, is important. For me, I think as AI increases and we get more and more exposure to it like all things, there's gonna be a counterbalance. There's gonna be that human element that really we, we start to really hone in as a culture on what makes humans and what makes robots, right?
[00:22:42] Jim Smith: And I think tying the human aspects. Of a ransomware attack and being prepared for that both from a technical perspective, but also an emotional perspective, right? And being able to combat that piece, I think is going to be, is the way I look at differentiating our organization in the future.[00:23:00]
[00:23:00] Carrie Richardson: So you're saying that empathy is going to be your key differentiator in the future? I
[00:23:05] Jim Smith: don't know if it's going to be different. I just feel there's so many people selling technical widgets that you forget it's people at the end of the day, and I think it's going to help differentiate proper sky anyway, right?
[00:23:18] Jim Smith: I love having honest conversations with business owners and being able to I don't know, just understanding the pain of running a business.
[00:23:29] Carrie Richardson: That owner mentality versus the employee mentality.
[00:23:33] Jim Smith: Yeah, I think so. I think so. Yeah, that's where I see it going anyway. What is art, right? If AI can make abstract art, right? Like I, I just don't know. It's such a nebulous concept, right? I just see all these industries evaporating, like bookkeeping. I see just going away. I see title search going away.
[00:23:49] Jim Smith: Like all these sort of like white collar things that people have perfected as an art and science are just gonna get taken away, right? And then what happens to us[00:24:00] and our value and worth when the things that we've been doing and have built. Just changed so dramatically. I don't know.
[00:24:06] Jim Smith: It's wild stuff to think about.
[00:24:09] Carrie Richardson: If I was 10 years younger, I'd just go mow lawns. My shoulders won't let
[00:24:14] Jim Smith: me. I just paid the electrician. I'm thinking about switching switching careers, right?
[00:24:18] Carrie Richardson: My God, the guy that cleans my fishpond makes 4, 000 a day.
[00:24:23] Jim Smith: Jesus, right? You know what I mean? And he's not worried about standardization of Office 365.
[00:24:28] Jim Smith: He tenants, he's just cleaning scum, right? He's just
[00:24:31] Carrie Richardson: taking those fish in a plastic bag, cleaning everything out and putting them back in.
[00:24:37] Jim Smith: Maybe that's what I need to do, right? Or a pizza shop. Who knows?
[00:24:40] Carrie Richardson: I want to thank you for joining us today and giving us some food for thought about security and how we might need to consider it in the future.
[00:24:53] Carrie Richardson: As MSPs supporting our clients and as, end users who are buying managed IT services, security is going to be at the [00:25:00] forefront of everything we do moving forward. And I don't know I'm not a big AI fan. I'm a late adopter of most things. My phone is just a very big GPS. At this point, it doesn't do very much for me.
[00:25:13] Jim Smith: So that's great. There's always gotta be laggards. So yeah, my, my dad couldn't buy a flip phone and he was pissed, when I click, but now he texts. And so it's funny. So it's it's cool. Everything's got its things. Really appreciate you having me on today.
[00:25:26] Carrie Richardson: Thank you for being with us today. And until we chat again, keep winning.