Want The Cure, Not a Pill

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• What is happening to our economy
• Providing what your clients really want
• Leadership and forging a new trail
• Going places where nobody has gone before
• Take a pulse on what your customers want
• The bubble of IT and CyberSecurity

What shakin’! Hey, we’re here today and today we’re going all in. I’m Rick Jordan, and today you get a treat because I want to explain that this episode is actually being live streamed to my entire company. So I’m gonna be speaking to my company today around, uh, leadership and forging a new trail, uh, just going places where nobody has gone before. This is not a Star Trek reference, although I am a Star Trek fan, I always have been. That’s actually one of my favorite memories with my dad, was watching Star Trek Next Generation in the early nineties when I was a kid, and we would just kind of hang out, you know? And if you listen to the show at all, you know, my dad passed when I was 16. It’s a good memory I have of him. Oh, this is going out to everybody in my company, in ReachOut technology, my cybersecurity company that is currently in an active public roll up, meaning we’re acquiring companies. 

You can look up the press releases and, and everything else about this in the media. You can just Google my name and probably find these things, or Google reach out technology. But today I want to talk to my people and you get the great privilege of listening in because you might be able to relate to a lot of this. And I was reading a lot of things in articles and about how, and even like my own post, one of my own posts the other day on Instagram was about bringing new services and how it’s not gonna work for you unless you bring two new services to market every single year, at least two to try to keep up with the industry that you’re in. You know, and I’m seeing a lot of scenarios right now to where one, I, I was reading through this group that I’m a part of on Facebook and the, the manufacturer, because of the economy right now, the manufacturer of these auto parts, I believe was actually being outsold by this vendor on Amazon. 

So now they’re trying to think, Hey, we’re gonna shift things back. And they’re changing their whole revenue stream mentality to where they’re going to kind of cut these people out because they think that they can do the same things just in-house. There’s a big shake up going around right now and everywhere. Everywhere. And that’s right, I’m talking to all my people right now. There’s a big shake up right now going on in our industry, in the IT space, in the MSP space, in the cybersecurity services space. The small businesses, there’s a big shakeup. And what’s bad, what’s really bad for most in the industry is that they don’t realize it. They don’t understand what’s going on because it’s still business as usual. And this is why I firmly believe along with some industry leaders, that at least a third, at least a third of these companies that are like ReachOut like my, like us, right? Like my company, they are going to be outta business within the next three years because they’re not changing, they’re not evolving, they are not trying to do something new for the industry. They are not actually trying to go out and meet the customers where they’re at and take a pulse on the customers as far as what they want. 

This industry is so much in a bubble and it pisses me off because I wanna do so much for it, right? And I’ve said before that the best thing I’ve ever done, the best thing I’ve ever done was get out of masterminds and coaching groups within the industry and got into masterminds and coaching groups outside of the industry because I got to see what the rest of the world was doing. I grew up in this bubble just like every other s p owner, and it’s so fixated on this thing and it’s run by vendors and it pisses me off because the vendors are setting the tone and saying where the industry is going. But the vendors have an agenda. They have a fucking agenda, and that’s just to sell more of their stuff. They don’t really know what’s going on. Okay, I’ve been to the White House and I’ve seen the stuff that is starting to hit our country. I go on the media all the time and I talk about this stuff that’s hitting our country in small businesses, and yet MSPs are like, oh, it’s business as usual. And they’re just waiting. They’re just waiting for somebody like us to actually go out there and say, this is the way, this is where we’re going. Here’s why our customers need it. They want it, and they’re just waiting for somebody like this. 

This is so intriguing to me because I, I, I’ve used this analogy before, it’s like, I don’t know why. Cuz there’s, there’s different types of rollups, right? And that’s the business model that we have right now. A rollup is nothing more than taking a bunch of smaller companies and making a really big company that’s simplifying it, right? There’s a lot of ways to do that, but that’s what we’re doing because we’re building an army. That’s one of our pillars is we’re building an army to be able to actually meet these needs of our customers and even more so provide them what they actually want. I started even thinking of a new website copy today, right? Because of some of the changes that we’ve been making even within the company. And, and this is just like blowing my mind because it’s like if you put yourself in the shoes of your customer, they don’t care about Jack’s shit about what we talk about inside the company. 

They really don’t, you know? So all the stuff we thought was important for years doesn’t even matter. It does not matter because what matters to them is that they’re safe. What matters to them is that their stuff doesn’t break. What matters to them is that they don’t have to make a phone call once every day because something’s broken. What matters to them is that they have a fair price. Now, that’s one we’ll talk about a lot today. They have a fair price for what they’re receiving. And lastly, they want to know that they have somebody to count on. That’s it, right? They don’t care about ticket accounts, they don’t care about, uh, the systems that we use. They don’t care about whether it’s office or Google for the most part, they don’t care about the EDR tool. You’re right, that’s the next gen antivirus for everybody that’s listening in. 

It’s cool because the audience of the podcast of All In right Now, all my fans, thank you, all my subscribers, thank you for listening in. But it’s like you got like a ringside seat to what we’re talking about here, right? Because your customers don’t care about the inner workings of your company. They don’t care what we think matters and what this community tells us, right? The MSP community tells us what matters. Doesn’t fucking matter. Not one bit because it’s driven by people in the organization. The best thing I’ve ever done was get outside of this space to see what’s going on in the rest of the world and start bringing inside the space what the rest of the world is doing. Because we are here to service the world, right? Specifically the United States, North America right now, of course. But that’s what we’re here for. 

There’s some tolls, there’s some prices that come with this. And this is something that I’ve faced the last two and three years. I’ve gotten questions like, well, why do you wanna do that? Well, that sounds tough. You could just go out and do this instead. Why do you want to go that route? I’ve even had industry leaders, right? And conversations tell me, well, I wouldn’t want your project. That just sounds difficult. It’s like, yeah. So what? That’s my response. It’s like there’s a reason why. I used to wonder why. I used to wonder why, because I, I imagined, right? This, this like this huge lineup cuz there’s 143,000 re remember back in like school days, right? How you would have liked this line of people or you know, you see in the movies how there’s this line of people and they’re always asking for one volunteer or something like that. 

You know, I remember in like, Jim, how you’d be lined up straight across the wall and they’d be waiting for somebody to step forward just to say, I’ll be a captain of this team. I’ll be the captain of that team. Then you’d finally pick your teams and go off in the other direction, right? It was like the first one to jump forward. It’s like the one who had the balls to be a leader was the one that, and just stepping out was the one that actually stepped out. And you see that in like, you know, it, it’s dramatized in movies and I know you get the image that I’m talking about, but that’s, that was me. It’s like, I, same thing. It’s like I’d be looking to the right, see 60,000 MSPs to my right, look to the left, see 60,000 MSPs to the left. 

And they’re like, why is nobody doing nothing about this? I don’t get it. I don’t get it. There’s a lot of people that are thinking about it, which is why, like even within the organizations within the company so far, why we’ve actually joined forces to begin with, right? Because these are people like me, right? Like Doug, like Robin are the ones who actually said, we’re gonna step out. We’re gonna do something about this because we can see where this industry is going and the industry that has been around in the last 10 years is not the same industry that will be around in the next 10 years. We’ve already seen the shift before. We’ve seen a type of the shift before when things move from break fix into the MSP model, right? In the two thousands. That happened tremendously. And guess what? People don’t like paying hourly for their shit. And I say shit because it’s shit service. If it’s just focused on like, like that, it’s like giving you a prescription pill that doesn’t even solve the problem. It just covers a symptom. That’s what a break fix is. It sucks ass. That’s why we don’t do it. That’s why the industry as a whole shouldn’t do it. That’s not what customers want. 

They want something that actually fixes the problem. They want something like, like what you would expect from a doctor, right? Don’t gimme a pill from my symptom. I want you to cure me. And I also want to know that you’re gonna be there all the time in case something else happens, right? I also want you to gimme a checkup so that you can identify things that, I don’t even know what’s going on right now, but you can stop ’em before they get someplace bad. You’re picking up on the analogy. That’s what people want. That’s what our customers want. And that’s not unfortunately what the industry as a whole is prescribing, but we sure as fuck are Gimme a hell. Yeah. That’s what we’re doing. And the last several years I’ve gotten so much opposition and now you’re gonna start to feel this too because what, what’s what’s bad is that customers in this industry, and this is bad of any industry too, customers in this industry have now been conditioned to the shit, they’ve been conditioned to the poor ass service and is created like this animosity thing towards people in this industry because it’s like they need us, but it’s like the the bill they hate to pay because they know it isn’t actually what they’re looking for. 

That’s the problem that we are fixing. That’s why it’s cybersecurity for all. It’s it for all and it’s actually what they want. The second part, the second pillar is creating wealth. I know I talked about this a little bit, but it’s for people within the organization. It’s for people outside of the organization, meaning our customers. Because if we can provide them exactly what they want for the fair price that they’re looking for, now that part does take a little education. Again, remember what I was saying? How they’ve been conditioned to the shit in the industry. It’s because they’ve been conditioned to just getting that generic prescription, right? I can go spend $4 and get a painkiller or $4 and get some kind of diabetes medication when I really don’t even have that. I just need nutrition. Nobody’s looked deep into my problem here to actually figure out what caused this to begin with. They’ve been conditioned to that garbage. And that’s where it has to be in the mindset shift to be like, look, I know the industry tells you this. We are not the industry. We are ReachOut.