SPEAKER_00 0:01

And welcome to the InfoTech Podcast. I'm your host, Jimmy Huber. And as you know, the InfoTech podcast is about the intersection of technology and business. We have a lot of MSP leaders on here, and today is no exception. My guest today is David Bennett. David is an MSP owner. I've had a good time talking to him here earlier. He's got a great story to share and some specific angles about how to grow your business. So if you're an MSP owner or a leader that's maybe at six figures and trying to figure things out, trying to grow, trying to um get better as we all are, uh this is going to be the episode for you. So, David, uh welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Jimmy. Good to be here. Yeah, you bet. Um, I always want to start with with everyone's origin story, right? We all come from different spots, all come from different angles. We do. Uh so give us your background and kind of how you got here.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

Uh it's okay. I was 12 years old and I was crying. And that's how I got where I was. You go back as far as you want. That's fine. I I was 12 years old and I was crying. My dad um was like, you know, what's wrong? And uh what was wrong was I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. My brother, who was uh when he was five, my brother's six years older than me. When he was five, he told the neighbor girl, the the neighbor lady, that he was going to be an anesthesiologist. And he is. Uh he knew exactly what he wanted to be. So here I am at 12 years old, and I'm thinking I'm probably gonna be under a bridge homeless or something. I don't know why a kid would be thinking this, but I was. My dad must just smirked on the inside. He took me to the office and I just kind of putted around the office. This was um 1980. Wow. So a year before the PC was introduced. Uh my dad was running this business. He's not a computer guy, not an IT guy at all. Uh, but he had about 40 staff, and uh what they were doing was outsourced programming work on many computer systems data point, HP, IBM. And uh so back then, before the internet and everything else, they had these funny things called manuals. Um, you can see by the bookshelf on my back, I read a lot, and as a kid I did as well, and I read all the manuals for all those systems and became self-taught. Um Wow. The next year the PC was introduced and I was in love. Um 15 years old was my first client. I couldn't drive. I was driven there, had a down Novel network and uh fixed it in about 20 minutes. And um that client became my first client the following year when I got my driver's license at 16, and I started seeing them a probably an average of three times a week. I was a uh Realty company down in Coral Gables, and I've never stopped. Um, I now run this business, have 15 staff. Um we've evolved over the years. We had we were doing application development as our roots for a long time, and I finally um got rid of that portion of the business just to be focused on what we do, which is my passion. Um today we call it being an MSP. You know, we didn't have any words to call it um back in the early 2000s. I had a client who said, figure out how to work for me on a fixed amount, like a salary. And I thought, well, that's interesting because back then you did everything hourly in projects. Oh, yeah. All breakfast. And he was like, I'd rather just pay you a salary for you to take care of everything. And I I think I scribbled something on the back of a napkin and looked up some data. You know, we were keeping track of all the data, trying to figure out what would be the right price, you know, to to offer it. And uh, you know, what if he wants me to wash his car and do wallpaper or painting? I mean, you know, if you're if you're on a salary, right? You can get anything. Of course, no one's gonna do that kind of silly stuff, but right, you know how your mind goes. Anyway, we we we uh started making that shift with Jason's company, it was our first company, back in 2005.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

Okay. And uh so you're way ahead of the curve then, because most people, I mean, we started in 2012, and even M MSP, that language, was pretty new then. Yeah. So you were way ahead of the curve, which I would think gave you quite a bit of advantages, even if you didn't know what it was called, or kind of what you were figuring out the market already and what people wanted. I needed it because I was dumb.

SPEAKER_02 4:19

So I needed that, I needed that head, that, that head start. It's kind of like a kid who has to go through third grade three times. So that was me doing the MSP world. Um there's a lot that I didn't get. Um I just made dumb mistake after dumb mistake, but you know, I'm old now.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

Yeah. I think we all we all start there though, right? Um, what have you found as you've kind of gone through to like because we're all dumb in one way or another. I mean, some people say peer groups is it, some people like you avid readers. Uh, what do you do to kind of stay ahead and stay growing?

SPEAKER_02 4:53

Both of those, actually. Um, I I don't watch TV. Um I read. And I don't care whether it's reading fiction or reading business books, I read. I'm always consuming um reading materials. Um I would say probably the most important thing for any business owner, not just an MSP, any business owner anywhere, is a is a good peer group. There's a lot of peer groups that are social clubs, but a good peer group, uh one that that looks into there's there's essentially two two main styles of peer group. One would be an industry peer group. That might be like Taylor Business Group or uh True Methods as an example, um MSP fuel. Uh any of those, those are industry groups. Everyone else is a competitor of yours from a non-competing area. So they're all MSPs, right? And you're coming from non-competing areas. What's great about those is people understand your business. They understand the nuance of your business.

unknown 5:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 5:53

Same struggle.

SPEAKER_02 5:54

The other type of peer group might be like Vistage or any anything about elk. Those are people who you'll never have another IT person in the group, right? And so the advantage there is no one knows your business. That's also really good because you people don't get hung up on preconceived notions, right? They just look at you like, well, why are you so stupid for the most obvious answer in front of you? And we're like, it's not obvious to me or any of my peers. We're like, well, it's obvious to me. I just ran a construction company, and this is what you know how things would go. So there's two type there's two types of peer groups. Um, I've been in both. I actually think both are extremely valuable and they give you a different perspective. So even they're in peer groups, uh, you know, move around. Uh look to be challenged. Um I I prefer to be a small fish in a large pond. I want to be around people who are bigger, better, badder than me. I want to be able to see what they're doing. And if I look at Jimmy's books and I see how Jimmy's accelerating, he's at you know 27% uh net profit, and he's at five, six million a year, ten million a year, whatever it is, and I'm bumbling along at a million and a half or three million or whatever I'm at and bunk book it bucking nine percent profit. I want to say, Jimmy, how do I do what you do? Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

And it's you never want to be the smartest one in the room.

SPEAKER_02 7:09

Right. I just want to start by copying you. I'm just I don't need to innovate. I just need to copy you. Do what you do. I want to figure out what it is. What are you eating? You know, what are you wearing? I mean, I just I want to do exactly what you do. Once I've copied it and I can replicate it, then I want to go ahead and say, now I can innovate it.

SPEAKER_00 7:26

Um yeah. Yeah, we've done a lot of growth during we're in true peer, uh, full disclosure. And yeah, there's an there's um a value to developing the mental chops to be vulnerable, to be willing, to be wrong, and to listen and to learn from others that are ahead of you. I think um that's still pretty rare. Um our industry, I think, is prone to having a lot of egos because we're good at fixing things, right? And people don't really understand what we do. So if we go into a client setting, we're the expert, right? We're the one that's it's always kind of feeding that that that beast. But to get in a room with others that already know all the technical stuff you do and do the same thing, and yet their businesses are twice as big or three times as big, and they're where you want to be, um, I think that's that's super powerful. Um, we may have talked about this earlier, um, but hitting like you know, plateaus. A lot of times, um not just in the our industry, but a lot of businesses, they go, you know, they they hit these these places where you can't keep doing things the same, whether it's a scalability problem, a staffing problem, whatever it is. Um, I think you're big enough. Uh you said you're in the one, two million range, if I can, if I can say that. We're a little over three.

SPEAKER_02 8:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:39

You're a little over four. Okay, you're over three. So you've definitely hit a couple of those plateaus. Um, so speak to that to somebody who's maybe uh you know stuck at one million, like you said. And you're they're maybe they're in a peer group, maybe they're not, but they're spinning their wheels. I think we've all been there. Yeah. What's the advice to get through?

SPEAKER_02 8:56

Well you've got you've got one and two plateaus that are in the million, million and a half and under range, right? The first one is the is the individual, just the one guy, the one, the one man band, right? That's the first one, right? Uh he doesn't know how to hire somebody else, doesn't know how to have another person, you know, he has maybe some um subcontracted help, it could be another friends, could be other one-man bands, and they just kind of band together and help each other out and that kind of stuff. Uh you've got to grow beyond that um to a point where you have a team. Then the next then the next level, and that's usually not million to a million and a half, is when you've got a team, you've got six, seven people, and you can't seem to get beyond that. And what you've got really in that case is you've got an owner with a group of five, let's say, people who are working for them, and that owner is direct managing those five people. And the reason why you can't scale to get better is because the owner can only manage those five to six people. Sure. And so the owner is doing all of it. So sales happens mostly by um referral in all of these cases. Um there's no one actually wearing a sales hat. Um client might say, Hey, you know, I was talking to my friend Jimmy and you should go talk to him. And so now I've got a sales lead, right? Because it came as a client referral or a vendor referral. Um other than that, that person is also the VCIO, if you want to use that term from our industry, or an IT director. Um he's probably also doing design desk, um uh, you know, designing solutions for clients. Uh, and he's oftentimes a senior engineer. And so, you know, he's wearing multiple hats, he can't scale beyond the seven people, he's frustrated. Um, and every single time he tries to hire someone to offload, he doesn't know how to delegate or offload. And so it just never really works. Um the person who gets past that is the person who has discovered how to say, I am not doing these pieces of work anymore. And I'm letting someone else do it. And invariably, as I've watched the people who've gone really successful, usually it's there's two people at the top, whether they're business owners or not, they could be business owners or one of them is a business owner and the other one acts like a business owner. Um and one is handling sales and one's handling operations. Now, as soon as you create that that bifurcation, you can scale right on up to easily five million, ten million on up, because you've you've got a delegation of responsibility that actually works. Yeah. Um you've got someone who's saying, I've got my heads down on, let's say, sales and finance. You know, I'll keep the books and I'll manage the books and do that kind of stuff, and I'm doing all the sales activity. And you've got someone else who's saying, I'm building the process for how we get really good and really sharp at what we do. The concept of process is something that I think all of us grasp. Most of us don't do.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah, we get stuck in the foxhole. I I heard an analogy like this where, you know, like you said, one business owner, maybe five or six people, they don't they're not calling in the airstrikes on the mountain because they're they're in the trenches with their people. They're still doing tickets, they're they're doing everything, right? There's no delegate and elevate, whatever the phrasing is. Yeah. How do you how do you pull somebody out of that? Because they don't know what they don't know. Like, and I think sometimes that's addicting to have it is addicting, and you can't pull somebody out of it.

SPEAKER_02 12:25

They have to recognize it, they have to have the self-awareness to recognize that I don't do that anymore. And as much as I want to, I don't do that anymore. Um I've got a friend of mine, he just sold his MSP practice, and you know, I I kind of cringe because he would get up at six in the morning and he'd spend the first two hours looking at the boards, managing tickets, reallocating stuff before his team even showed up for work. And then he's like, you know, he's still going at it at eight o'clock at night. And he's my age, he's an old cart, right? So I'm like, dude, what are you doing?

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Yeah, it sounds like a prison.

SPEAKER_02 12:57

He he was he was really happy with his profitability, but I'm like, actually, you're doing two jobs. Yeah, you're killing yourself. So if I take the hundred K of the other job you're doing and I allocate it, your your profitability is actually just nominal. I mean, and you're and you're killing yourself to do it. Why would you do that?

SPEAKER_00 13:13

You know, I mean Yeah, I think there's a trust factor, right? Like we're pretty good about getting clients to trust us. Like somebody's scaling and and and selling to get a business where it is, but then when you turn that in internally to trust your team enough to do things, knowing that at least at first they're probably not going to be as good as you, right? Uh that's a that's a huge turning point. Yeah. Um the small business owner that that is struggling to make that switch, and maybe he's not in a peer group with eight other people telling him the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 13:42

Well, it and you know, it it's a small business mentality, and it has nothing to do with being IT. Yeah, it has nothing to do with us being engineers. All small businesses have the same problem. There's plenty of books on that shelf, like Michael Gerber's The E Myth, uh, that will describe the same exact problem. And that was written 30 years ago. Um, it's the same problem, right?

SPEAKER_03 14:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:04

Why do we why do we not let go? Why do we you know all all the all those issues? We should assume that fine, I could do it better. I'll just give you that. B, you'll never be able to do it better if I don't give it to you. C, you are gonna do it differently than me. D, you're gonna take longer than me. But if I give it to you and you take longer to do it, and you grow and everything else, I'm gonna be able to unload it and then I don't have it anymore. Yeah. And if my time is the most valuable, which let's just say it is, that's fine. Then if I've got a person who's a salaried person who is a quarter of my cost from what I take out of the business and everything else, then isn't it make sense that they should be able to have four times as long to accomplish something? Well, of course. I mean, just from a standpoint of evaluation. And so if that's the case, then if they get it done in two hours, haven't I won?

SPEAKER_03 15:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:01

If they get it done in half the time, you know, in two hours, rather than the four hours. You know, if I could do it in an hour, they could do it in two, but they're four times less expensive than me, so that means they could have done it in four, right? I'm I'm ahead. Right? Yeah now they've done it in two. Next time they do it, they get it done in 90 minutes. Next time they do it, they're at an hour. How about if they keep doing it, they get better than me? Why? Because I don't do it all the time. And you know, it's like your your mind starts to blow. And pretty soon you start to realize my people can get this done, and all I need to do is provide a little bit of guidance. And maybe that guidance just needs to be here's the end goal. Here's here's the here's the hill I want to I want to attack. Here's the you know, the end goal. You figure out how we're gonna do it, I trust you, and I walk away.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Yeah, yeah. There seems to be a there's a spiral when you're doing it all yourself, and then people don't grow, which means you can't delegate and like it kind of goes one way. But like you said, there's almost a turning point where you can reverse that. Every single thing that you you give away helps them to grow, and you free up your time then for whatever you were doing with that, and you rinse and repeat that. So, I mean, that's that was a lot of my journey. I mean, heck, I'm on doing hosting a podcast. I'm not in the help desk right now because my team handles 95% of what we're doing, right? So, like you you get to free yourself up, and then I think that well, correct me if I'm wrong, but I would think the trust becomes a little easier once you've done a couple reps of that. Your team realizes oh, like I'm I can own this small piece and be responsible for he's trusting me with this, and then you're freed up to then you know work on the business and not in it, which then creates more of those opportunities, right? So I would think that that's a mental switch that is pretty beneficial.

SPEAKER_02 16:44

Something else that starts to happen too is when your people uh this is from uh Jack Stack, who wrote a book called Um The Great Game of Business. If you've never read it, read it. Um he captured that is uh a magic moment in a business is when people think and act like owners. Remember, I said, you know, when when you saw the two guys and one but I said they didn't have to be an owner, they just had to act like an owner. When you have people who start to think and act like an owner, then what ends up happening is like I went to Italy for a couple weeks uh uh this earlier this month, earlier last month, um with my wife. I never called the office, I never checked in. I was disconnected. I caught up on my email while I was sitting on the boat at night, just you know, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, just so I didn't have all of it when I was back. But I was not engaged in work at all. And I've got a team here who was able to handle all of that for two weeks. They didn't need my input, they didn't need my help, I didn't need to carry them. They were able to handle all that themselves. Why? Because they've grown enough to be able to do that. They know what they're doing. And when there was a question, they said, huh, what would I do? Let's go do it. Because they know I'm not gonna say, Jimmy, you screwed up. You effed up. No. Yeah I at the most I might say, okay, let's look at how we could have improved this. Let let's let's talk about this afterwards and debrief this and figure out how we can improve this. Well, when you do that, people people start to act like an owner. They say, I'm gonna go do something, not just what I'm told to do. Because if I just do what I'm told to do, I can't be faulted if it goes wrong. But I'm gonna do what I think is right.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

Yeah, well, you're you're being a leader and not a manager. That's exactly right. Yeah, for sure. Um, let's switch gears here a little bit. Um, there's a lot of industry trends out there. Everyone wants to talk about AI, everyone wants to talk about cybersecurity. What do you see in your business um that is you know the thing for 2026? Because like there seems to be a market shift towards AI, but from what I've seen, nobody really understands practically how to harness the whiz bang tools to actually affect their business. No, but yet it's too big to ignore, right? Yep. Um, what are you telling your clients in 2026 to get ahead?

SPEAKER_02 19:09

Okay. Now we're talking specifically, not in small business space, but now we're in the IT space, right? So what are we as IT professionals saying to our clients uh and do? And here's what I would say do first. Um sit down with your chief executives at your clients, and I would do this face to face and ask them what their experience is with IT. With with a with with with AI, rather, not with IT, but with a with AI. What are they doing? It will shock you how little they are doing. Um I I sat with one person who was thinking of investing. Um he had heard a speaker, this the speaker would would you know do all this stuff for him for only a thousand dollars a month and and he could buy into a subscription service that would be put AI at his fingertips. And when you really uncover it, really all he's doing is it's uh um he's creating connectivity, API connectivity into some of his accounting and everything else, so now he can start asking some questions. I mean, that's really all he was doing. Right? It's and I'm like, his name is Justin. I'm like, Justin, what do you want to do? And he says, I don't know. And I'm like, well, tell me how you've used it. He doesn't even have an account with anything. So it started with me saying, Let me let me just let's start Chat GPT. Let me show you how to ask a couple questions. The guy's doing construction, so I said, Hey, why don't we do this? Um Why don't you go ahead and have you done a project that you did recently you did estimating for and you you submitted your bid? He said, Yeah. I said, great. Grab all your estimating bid documents from the per from the client. He said, Okay, I got them all. Took him like two minutes to download them all. I said, now just drag all those right into chat GPT and let's start asking it questions like, hey, review this bid and tell me what is uh uh missing or what what is notably that's missing or unusual about these bids. And it started skewing out skewing out stuff and his jaw dropped. I said, now you're starting to get it.

SPEAKER_03 21:06

Right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:07

And I said, So I don't need to sell him anything. I don't need to do anything, I just need to get the owner using a tool. Now, once the owner starts using a tool, his people can start using a tool. He gets a vision for what can happen. What I see most people doing is, oh my gosh, we don't want this AI to pass us by, so let's buy a shiny object. Yeah. And then it fails. Why does it fail? Because there's no vision, there's nothing that's ever been done. My gosh, if people would just start at the basics and just spend a little bit of time, this was not rocket science. This was I spent 45 minutes to an hour in person, face to face, which is the best time you could ever have, by the way, talking about him and his business and how he can make things better, which is the best thing in the world, by the way. And, you know, I'm having constant text chats with him now as he's growing and developing and getting ideas of what he could do with his staff. And he's asking me, can you help me? With the next one, can you help me with the next one? Can you help me with the next one? And really that should be going to you know the VCI or the VCIO role, but I'm prototyping this for our own for our own staff, saying how to have this conversation with people.

SPEAKER_00 22:13

Um you're positioning yourself too as not only the expert, but you're you're helping them connect the dots between the shiny tool and the actual business outcome, right? Right. I think that's a lot of times where people are missing it. Yeah, that's cool, whatever, but how does that actually affect my business, make people more efficient, still be human, maybe, not abdicate to AI, but use it as kind of a thought partner, not a thought, you know.

SPEAKER_02 22:37

If you go back to security, so we don't worry even about anything with our clients or anything else. I'll challenge every MSP out there. Are you 100% deployed? Pick any security tool you have, and is it 100% deployed across all your clients properly? I've never gotten a yes from anybody. No, of course not. No, yeah. Why is it that we have 15 security tools in our portfolio and not one of them is 100% deployed?

SPEAKER_03 23:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:06

Why did I ever get to two tools if I hadn't done the first one? Why did I ever get to five if I hadn't finished the first four? And I'm not saying it's 95% deployed. I'm saying most of these tools are 20, 30%. I mean, they're it's about as half-astered. Shiny object syndrome. Shiny object syndrome. You've got it. The shiny object syndrome. If you think we're unique in that, we're not. Every business owner out there is the same business. That's why this guy was gonna go ahead and pop a thousand dollar subscription to something that he thought would get him AI into his business that would magically just make things work. No. Yeah. You know, really, if you want to sit if you want to sit there and say, I'm gonna go be having have uh agents built for my business and everything else, you actually need an internal champion.

SPEAKER_00 23:47

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 23:48

Someone who's gonna be able to do that. Yeah, you're gonna affect their culture enough to make a meaningful difference. That's right. And to and to think, frankly, I'm sorry, but to think that we are going to do that, yeah. Uh let me give you a hint. That's not the MSP business. That's a whole other business entirely. That's a consulting business. That's more akin to process consulting. That's what it was called 20 years ago. But business process consulting, where you step in and you understand the the steps of the way a business makes money or the way businesses transact it in a company, and then you look for ways to improve the efficiency of that business. That's business process consulting. And really, if you just swap out the name, you say it's AI consulting, then that's what you're doing. And to think that most MSPs could do that is a joke.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Yeah. I think that's the differentiator, though. The market is becoming really saturated with people that, yeah, say they're proactive and trusted advisor, and there's all this stuff it's like 10 years ago. And the people that can connect those dots and actually make business impact, not only does that improve your client relationships, but that makes you really sticky. If you're bringing them that much value, that's not jargon, that's not, you know, no one really cares about the tools we use and how we do our job. They just want to know what it does for me at my business, and they want to be able to see that. Um, so if you're getting into those conversations, I've got to think you've got a competitive advantage because anyone else then that comes in and tries to you know steal your client or or have value, they can say, Well, we already have that with you know our current MSP. And so but that takes an intentionality that's not you have to be uh you have to have a process for that, right? You can't just hope that they're gonna ask the right question. What should it look like?

SPEAKER_02 25:26

What should that process look like?

unknown 25:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:29

Let's explore that for a second. What should it look like? Right? Yeah. Because because it if it's well, I've got a I've got something to go sell them, I've got a product to sell them, I've got another whiz-bang thing. I I'll tell you right now, you're already wrong. It's not a program, it's not anything else. And I'll give you insight. I'm gonna go do it right after this podcast. Nice. And here's what it looks like. Here's what it looks like. I get in my car and I drive to Mitch's office and I meet his team, I meet and greet for about five, ten minutes, and then Mitch and I go over to seasons 52 for lunch. That's what it looks like. So just having a conversation. Yeah, he's a 30-person law firm. While I'm there, I'm talking talking to Mitch, and we're gonna talk about my trip to Italy, we're gonna talk about his trip to Japan, we're gonna talk about what he wants to do in his life, I'm gonna uncover what it is that he wants to accomplish in his life, and I'm gonna find out what is it that about his business that might hold him back from accomplishing what he wants. Yeah. Is that easy?

SPEAKER_00 26:34

Seriously. I mean that is. I th I don't think people are teaching that. Because what you're what you're describing is is not IT at all. It's it's business really it's relationship building.

SPEAKER_02 26:45

It's relationship building, which I'm sorry, we don't we're not in the IT business. Yeah, totally. We're in the relationship building business.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

Yeah, 100%. I I couldn't agree more. I mean, because that you're building rapport, you're building trust. He's not he's got his defenses down. Not that you're trying to you know pull one over on him, but you're actually caring about him as a person and learning what his goals are, what his needs are, because our businesses are vehicles for us, it should be at least a vehicle for us to get what we want out of life, right?

SPEAKER_01 27:12

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 27:13

And you're being able you can help them with that, but you have to understand the goals before you can present solutions. And I think a lot of times people get that backwards.

SPEAKER_02 27:22

I remember I talked to a uh it was a different law firm. I talked to him uh and he was on a an old phone system. I said, you know, why don't you get a VoIP system? And he did not want nothing to do with a VoIP phone system. I just walked away from it. I'm not gonna worry about it, no problem. We're having lunch six months later. And I same thing. His name is Glenn. I said, Glenn, you know, what do you what do you want to do? And he was looking to maybe buy a house in Colorado. I said, You know, my brother lives in Colorado, why don't I connect you? When you go out there, he can tow you around, show you the area. They hooked up, they had a great time, you know. Um he and his wife found a place out there. And I said, you know, how often do you want to be out there? He said, at least every month, probably for a week or two at a time. And I'm like, how does that work, you know, when when calls come in? Yeah, personal injury attorney, and you know, calls come into your front desk. He says, Well, they have to transfer it to my cell phone. I said, So then you're getting calls transferred to your cell phone, but now you're disconnected from the office phone system. And I said, What if you need to forward that over to someone else? He said, It's a pain in the ass. He said, Then I have to bridge a call back to the office and get the other person on the phone. And I said, You know, if we put a VoIP system in place, your office in Colorado, it's written your office wherever you go. And his eyes got really big. That's all I said. I didn't sell him a VoIP phone system. Right. But you see what happened. I talked to him six months ago, not interested at all. Now we're talking about his life, and I'm asking him how is there is this issue of pain point, how phones are handled. And here's a possible solution. And he was like, tell me more, I want it, and he bought it.

SPEAKER_00 28:50

Yeah, you you you can you made that emotional response. You you got him to kind of connect.

SPEAKER_02 28:54

But here's the thing. Yeah, I didn't sell him anything. You see, the whole thing was I truly am caring about them, I truly, I'm just looking for and that's the thing. If I'm just looking for opportunities of how I can help them, that is best done when I'm having a one-on-one conversation and Jimmy and I are grabbing some lunch and we're just talking about your life. Yeah. And whether something comes up right then or somebody that I think of that I, you know, I'm doing this intentionally, thinking, who can I connect you with? How can I help you? I'm just thinking, how can I help Jimmy when I'm having lunch with them? That's it. That's the only thought in my head. I'm having a conversation, finding out what they're doing with their kids, their grandkids, their whatever else is going on, and how can I help them? And something, invariably, every single time, will pop up, and I'll have a recommendation of somebody that they should talk to. Could be a solution. Occasionally it's a solution, occasionally it's something I can offer them. I don't go into it with what can I push down their throat. I look at it as how can I help them?

SPEAKER_03 29:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:52

And if you are if you are just helping people, uh uh Mr. Berg calls this the go-giver mentality, another great book. If you'd ever read it, the go giver. Um it's be there to help people. Focus on helping people. And you'd be the first to the table to help you. Yeah. That'd be the first thing everyone wants to know.

SPEAKER_00 30:14

If you boiled down about every you know, sales book or or seminar, I think you've nailed it because they all have different techniques and maybe wording around it, but it ultimately is yeah, you're talking about the prospect, the other person, and actually gen not fake, but like actually caring. Correct. I think most people in IT already have those pieces, right? They they like serving other people, they they have those those those tendencies. But then actually putting that into action to the point where, yeah, you build some trust, and then people um I think they recognize that that genuineness. And then when you it comes to making some recommendations to actually fix their problems, yeah, it's not selling, it's just a natural progression of a relationship and then those building blocks that you've you've built. So I I think, yeah, if you're a if you're a young owner that that is struggling with some of this stuff, yeah. What I learned today, take them to lunch. Hey David, let's go grab a bite. Like it's it's no pressure. This isn't a sales meeting. I just want to get to know you and your goals and your what you're trying to do. That's simple. And then it kind of goes from there.

SPEAKER_02 31:16

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 31:16

Um, well, I I really appreciate the conversation. I I think this hopefully this resonated with some people out there that are struggling in those areas. Um what where can people contact you, David? Um, I don't know if I even mentioned it. It's it's connections for business as your your company. It's connections.com. I'll put all that in the show notes so that people can reach out, as well as a couple of the books you mentioned. Um, I think in my list of books that I'm going through, I always pull them out of other people, what works. So I'll put a couple links for there too. And if you've got any more, you can send those to me because you're uh you're one of those learned guys that I think gets ahead from from reading, which I think is really important. But how can people get a hold of you if they want to reach out?

SPEAKER_02 31:56

So if you want to reach me, my email is uh first initial, last name, dbennett at connections.com. And yeah, connections.com is our domain. That's what happens when you register one and back in I think it was before Al Gore invented the internet. Uh I was gonna say, I I couldn't believe that you had that one. Yeah, 1994. Back then you can get almost any domain. They were all available. Anyway, um books that we talked about today, real quick for you, would be um The Emith by Michael Gerber. Yep. Um Jack Stack, who wrote The Great Game of Business. And uh The Go Giver, the author's last name is Berg, B-E-R-G, and uh his first name has slipped in my mind. Uh he lives just north of me of West Palm Beach. Uh oh, no kidding.

SPEAKER_00 32:44

Yeah, we'll we'll pull that in the notes so people can click and find those things. Uh yeah, we're not affiliated with these people by any any means.

SPEAKER_02 32:50

But just they got they have some strong truth uh that I think will resonate with people. 100%. You know, a lot of people say, you know, I'm but I'm not I'm not outgoing, I'm not as good as that, I'm not good. Look, every single person is a salesperson.

unknown 33:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:05

If you're married, you're definitely a salesperson. Because you have to sell yourself, okay?

SPEAKER_03 33:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:09

Um everyone's a salesperson. You may not be comfortable in a crowd, you may not be comfortable uh anywhere, but you can still be yourself. And all people are looking for is for you to be the integrity and the truth of you being yourself.

unknown 33:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:23

And the fact is, if you care about other people, that will come across that I want to I care to know you, I care to to to help you. And if your attitude is let me help you, everyone will like you. It will not be a problem.

unknown 33:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:39

You might be weird, you might be different different. It's okay. In a yeah, a world of AI, everything, where I think people are becoming more and more dehumanized. I think that's only going to stand out more to have that human connection and the genuine care that comes with our industry is is huge. So absolutely. Hopefully that resonated with you today. Um, and yeah, David, I really appreciate your time and and being on. Um, there's been a lot of uh tidbits here that hopefully people can can grasp and help them grow. Um, and yeah, thanks so much. Really appreciate it. Jimmy, it's been my pleasure.