Partner Spotlight: BACS Year in Review

Shahin:

So James, we briefly talked about the fact that there's folks out there that look at this and say, it's just a bunch of tools and a bunch of people and a bunch of processes. How hard can it be? And overcoming that “not invented here” approach, how did you get over that hump? It's like you're a technical person. You've been doing this for a lot of years. What helped you cross that line?

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James:

So, you know, I've been in this business since 1997. I spent 95% of my career working in MSPs, various different MSPs. And, you know, very proud to say that I worked from the bottom up. I started off help desk and worked my way up. I didn't take any shortcuts and really prided myself in being the best employee and the best technical person I could be. And, you know, setting my ego aside to say that other people know more than me and I want to be as smart as that guy. What does he know that I don't know? So I'm going to go pick his brain. I've been very fortunate in my career to have people that took me under their wing and really showed me and taught me, and it's really helped me become who I am today.

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So when it came to picking a security solution, you know, I'm going to admit I had a bit of an ego. I said, well, I have all this information in my head and I understand all this stuff; I can build this, right? Like I can do this. And, you know, to say that we're not egotistical in the tech industry, I think would be wrong. I think there's, you know, at the end of the day, we're men. Right? Number one. And there's a lot of bright women in this industry as well. But, you know, there are some egos that come along with it. And you don't want to, at the end of the day, say, "Oh, I couldn't do it, and someone else figured it out," or saying, "Well, I can develop something better."

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You know, if you're really going to focus on your business, you’ve got to set that aside. You've got to set that aside and say, "Hey, it's okay that someone else figured it out. You know, maybe they beat me to the punch” or whatever, but if you take a look at it and say, “they really just saved me a ton of time of having to figure this out on my own, roll it out on my own, continue to figure out a way to maintain it,” if you can set that aside, the time that is given back to you is enormous. And let's face it, right? Time is our most valuable asset for every single person. And the more time you can get back, the better.

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So I think sometimes we have to set our egos aside and sometimes we have to say to ourselves, "Yes, I can do this, but if someone else can do it faster than me, better than me, then so be it. Right? Let's really focus on what we need to focus on and let’s not let that get in the way of providing a valuable service to our clients," because at the end of the day, look, that's what it's about. Right? It's about our clients, and it's about making sure that businesses out there are protected and they're serviced correctly and they're serviced right, and we need to do whatever it takes to make that happen for our clients. And the best way to do that is, yeah, set our egos aside and make sure that we're partnering with people that can do it better.

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Shahin:

I would say, just to provide some insight because it's difficult, there's also, I'm a guy. I'm in the tech industry. I've been doing this just as long as you, and there's always been a chip on my shoulder when somebody says you're not doing this right. Right. It's, we can't help it. It's part of our third unit. Yeah, unfortunately. But I would say it's not that we're doing something better or faster, or I'm talking White Dog specifically. What, you know, during the we, we built our first service in 2018. And if I would have come to you in 2019, you would have said, "You guys don't have your stuff together”

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James:

At that time correct.

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Shahin:

Yeah. You wouldn't, you're not quite mature enough. You don't have, so it took us five years to build what is today White Dog. Before we came out in June of 2018 was when we built our first SOC offering. In June of '23 is when we came out and said, "We're ready to go to market." Right. And that time, that's not fast.

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James:

Yeah.

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Shahin:

That's not cheap. That takes a lot of building. That takes a lot of sales. So it's anybody could have done that. And I usually say to someone who says, "I can do this," I say, "If you’ve got five years, a lot of money, a lot of people, and a lot of patience and energy, you can achieve everything we did. We're not doing magic."

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James:

Well, and that's five years working at it full time.

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Shahin:

Yeah, right.

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Jeremy:

And that’s your core competency as well, right?

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James:

And so when we started it, when we started down that path, this was again about three or four years ago, we hired someone full-time just to start this for us. And when I say you did it full-time, it wasn’t just you; it was you and the team. Right? We had one person, and I had set unrealistic expectations for the individual and said, "Hey, I expect to have a tool set, not even integrated yet, but I expect to have a tool set vetted, tested, and produced to me that says these are the tools we should use as our stack in eight months."

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And then the next step was going to be, then you're going to have, so the timeline I built in my head for this one individual was eight months, develop, pick the tools. In six months, develop a way to get them to all communicate with each other. And then in another six months, build what the process is going to look like. And then the last six months, build out the SOC team. So I was expecting one individual to do this in a little over two years, something that it took you and a team five years to do. And that is money we would have spent in two years and not really have a full offering yet at that point. And that's where I talk about the time and the money.

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Because it would take my time as well to review with him and go over, "Are these the right ones?" And challenge him and things like that.

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Shahin:

And then training the rest of the team on how to use those tools.

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James:

And then training the rest of the team. You know, I mean, we have, you know, I'm not going to say we have a hard time retaining our employees; we have a hard time finding the right employees to come work for us. Right? We're very picky about who comes to work for us. I can only imagine what it would take to hire the right employees for an internal company.

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Shahin:

I am super proud of our team. I hope some of them are watching this and can hear it. But we're equally very picky about who we pick. The recruiting process is months long, and sometimes people get fed up and move on to something else in that process but once they get hired it’s months of deep training  before they can even sit in the SOC.

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James:

Yeah, and we're the same. We hire someone on our support team. It's at least three months before they can even field a ticket. And it's not because they're not technical, but they’ve got to learn all of our processes. They’ve got to learn and understand our clients. They’ve got to learn and understand how we do things before we can allow them to start supporting our clients. Yeah, exactly. If it was just about the technical, you know, it’s easy, and I think we'd have a revolving door. Right?

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Jeremy:

So just adding to that last, I have one thought about the whole ego thing, just kind of returning to that. I didn't have the ego because I had already kind of transitioned out of doing technical many years ago and was just in the business operations. So for me, as soon as James got over his ego thing, and he said, "This is what we need," and I just looked at the business operations part, I was like, "Sign this up. This is a no-brainer." I mean, I could understand the ego, but and I had seen the ego. So once he was beyond it, beautiful.

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Shahin:

Thank you for that. You mentioned earlier that, you know, we got lucky. Both of us got lucky with timing in terms of contracts and all that. Not everybody is lucky. We have partners that have to start steps and pieces and the contractual side of this nature of this relationship. If you had to, like, if we step back for a second and let's say you had signed that contract with Rocket Cyber and that was your SIM, and you are now looking at what tools there's gaps in, if you could put yourself in their shoes, would there be value in moving forward with White Dog, given that you're going to have two to three years before you can take Rocket Cyber out?

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James:

I think, saying this now after having been with White Dog for a little over a year, I think it would have been well worth it to eat the cost of Rocket Cyber, and even if that means the margin, you know, the little margin we made on top of, you know, what we're providing your services for, made us break even with that contract, it would have been worth it. The headache, the time, all of it would have been absolutely worth it.

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Jeremy:

The problem with Rocket Cyber is it didn’t even get us everything we needed. It was just a fraction of what we needed. But the problem we would have had is if we had built an offering based on Rocket Cyber and had published a price list. And we had already done this a few times, by the way, where we said, this is the pricing for our security package. Oh, we need to add another tool. So we got to increase the pricing. So you keep going back to the customer and asking for more. Oh, the price went up two to three bucks or whatever it was. You can only do that a few times before you basically exhaust all goodwill on the customer end.

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Shahin:

Right.

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Jeremy:

But yeah, it would have been the right thing to do because the product was faulty. It was inferior. It would have created so much more additional work for us.

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James:

And there's two problems in that, right? You're constantly going back to the well to say, hey, we need additional money because of this, additional money because of this. And yeah, a couple bucks here, a couple bucks there. It doesn't sound like a lot, right? But even bigger is then if I'm the customer, I'm going to say, well, how come you didn't think of this before, you know, and why, why are you constantly adding? Why don't you just finish figuring out what your stack is and then come to me. Right.

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Jeremy:

And we would be still playing that game by the way, if we hadn't gone with you, but we probably would have lost customers along the way too.

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James:

Could we sit here and say, well, you know, we're going to wait until we have a couple more tools and really vet this out before we go to the customer and say there's additional costs? Yes, we could vet, but what's potentially going to happen in between that, right? Someone's going to figure out that there's some hole and they're going to exploit it. And then it's not something we wanted to take the risk on.

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So yes, we were going back and saying, hey, there's this new tool we need introduced. It's another dollar fifty. You know, you go back one time, two times, no big deal. But then the concept of going back, it no longer is about the increase anymore. It's about, are you competent enough to handle my security? Right. I don't have to worry about that.

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Shahin:

Yeah. The, um, we talked about time to market a little bit in terms of time savings and speed to developing a solution. One of the things I think that's, um, we didn’t really touch on, we talked about the fact that it took four to five months before the teams meshed and merged. At the same time, we talked about the first customer we rolled out for you in less than 30 days. While we didn't have all of our processes together, that customer was secure within those 30 days.

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James:

Absolutely. That's probably something that's important to highlight.

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Shahin:

We may not have our act together 100% as partners yet, but the technologies are protecting that end customer.

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James:

They were protected, and they had eyes. There were eyeballs on it 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

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Shahin:

That's the other thing people don't believe in. You said the same thing to me. I said, we'll onboard your customer in 30 days. You said everybody says that.

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James:

Yeah. I thought to myself, because you had mentioned that you could do it within 30 days. And I said, even with an RMM tool where we can push the agent out, there's still gotta be something that goes wrong, right?

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Look, any IT person, you know, the number one thing you don't say going into a project that you're working on is, oh, it's gonna be a slam dunk, right? Like that is the worst thing you can say because you just jinx yourself for like a lot of sleepless nights that weekend. You always expect the unexpected and you always prepare yourself for the unexpected on any project that you're doing. And so we were preparing ourselves.

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So believe it or not, we had a plan B, right?

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Shahin:

I believe it.

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James:

We had a plan B to back out in case this thing failed. And when the team said, hey, it rolled out and agents are responding and they're reporting. This is working and this is working. And my exact comment to them at that time was just wait for it. Something is about- nothing ever goes as smooth. Something is about to happen. And, you know, a week went by, two weeks went by and I said, it's close. It's coming. Something's coming.

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Three weeks went by. Every agent was deployed. Everything was reporting. Everything was online. Everything was working. There weren't any issues. I remember sitting at my desk and I looked and I said, there's no way. There's no way that just happened.

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Jeremy:

And I kept waiting for that call from you, that kind of like ominous, Jeremy, we got to talk.

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James:

Yeah. White Dog. But it never happened. Yeah, Jeremy would tease me and say, is everything going smooth? I said, too early to tell. Like, that was my answer. Too early to tell. Wait another week. Wait another week. And then it was like, hey, everything works.

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Jeremy:

Like I said, I just kept asking. Could stop asking.

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James:

So that was a huge confidence booster for us. Then it was like, okay, let's hit this thing full speed ahead. Right? Let's get this out to every single client. Let's replace what we currently have. Let's get it out there. Let's go, go, go, go, go, go. And we moved quickly at that point. And that's when we realized, hey, there's some processes here that need to be fixed, right? So that's where everything-

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Shahin:

We had, I would say in the first six months, we had something like 20 of the customers up and running.

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James:

Yeah.

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Jeremy:

Yeah, it moved fast.

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Shahin:

Yeah. You know, here we said a year later, 46 are live and another three, four, five of them are still processing. So exciting.

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Jeremy:

We still have a big one we haven't done.

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James:

We still have the big one. We have a big one of 600 seats.

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Shahin:

Nice. We're looking forward to it. 30 days.

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James:

I believe it now. Believe in them. Well, you know, it's funny we acquired, uh, we acquired a smaller MSP and this was part of the acquisition and I told the team that supported him I said hey, we're gonna get this rolled out in 30 days. They laughed at me I said you guys laugh but just wait and see we're gonna knock this out in 30 days and you're not gonna be laughing. So-

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Shahin:

Yeah, that's that's another one of those things that continuously pops up because we have a 30 day guarantee when we talk about our services. Onboarding guarantee for a customer. And everybody's like, you're just going to give us one month free. I'm like, no, because we're going to get it done. And so, and I'll, you know, to huge credit to my team, we have not given a month away since 2018.

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Jeremy:

That's awesome. That's amazing.

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James:

Well, that's the five years right there. Put to good work, right?

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Jeremy:

Yeah. Yeah.

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Shahin:

Well, thank you both so much, not just for the live stream, but also for the follow-up.

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James:

Sure. Yeah.

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Shahin:

I appreciate you guys hanging out.

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Jeremy:

It was fun. Enjoyed it. Thank you.

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James:

Absolutely.