Security Awareness

Harry Brelsford of SMB Nation sits down with Josh Weiss of Logic Technology Consulting Group  to discuss security awareness and the expanding threat landscape. 

Video Transcription

Josh Weiss 

yeah, it was. It was really, really fast. For me, it was really, really exciting. I had kind of decided that I wanted to do this, just that, you know, after about 15 years doing my own business. So I was sort of ready for it for the next adventure and the next challenge in my life. And right around the week that I decided that I wanted to do this, I had dinner with a longtime colleague, who I know that from when I used to work with, with Connect wise and continuum a lot at dinner with a longtime colleague, and though I ended up speaking to 10 or 15 other people, I sort of knew pretty fast that he was going to be the one I was going to work with. Yeah. And, you know, I think it's amazing, you know, certain people, certain people that I speak to, they do a very, very long road, they get a broker, they do a lot of other stuff. But I think sort of, I think due to the Nimble nature and size of my MSP, which was just over the million dollar run rate.

Harry Brelsford 

Oh, well, that's great. You got over the million dollar hurdle, congratulations.

Josh Weiss 

I did get over the hurdle. But I think sort of due to the size, but mostly due, I think, to the trust that was in place between myself and my colleague, Johan, we were able to knock it out faster than a lot, a lot of these deals that I hear about. And I mean, I think something, something that some friends of mine that have worked on a lot of these deals told me and that sort of came up throughout this process was just that it was there was an easiness factor to this process, which a lot of other deals don't have, and which didn't move fast sort of ease, ease and trust. Yeah,

Harry Brelsford 

yeah, exactly. So with the integration, what are your What are your solutions? What are your product stacks, right? Are you still doing digital transformation, you're still doing our RMM. So what's what's a day in the life look like for you and your teams?

Josh Weiss 

Well, I mean, so I'll say the following. So one thing I brought my whole team over in this acquisition, and though my, my VA has eventually left, even she came originally, everyone else came. So that's been really exciting. And I think to answer your question, really, the first thing to say is that we chose to do the integration, not only for the ease and the trust factor, but because we work in the same verticals, which is primarily nonprofit with a strong focus on architecture and engineering. So about 70% of our clients are nonprofits and labor unions. And almost the entire remaining 30 are architecture and engineering with a little bit of professional services thrown in at the end of that. So our solutions is really though I can't say I'm focusing on the term digital transformation as much as I was two years ago, when I was doing a lot with with you, Harry. We are focused on these verticals. And you know, what does that look like? Sure, that looks like RMM. And that looks like back up. And that looks like sort of the basics. But a lot of what we're focusing on really is the sort of helping these two verticals that we know so well. get their work done better and faster and more securely with a huge focus on security awareness, security, awareness, training, security awareness products, and really keeping sort of keeping the employees well trained across the board. And beyond that, putting the right security solutions in place. And we're focusing really heavily on automation right now as well. automation of deployments, automation of updates. It's automation of a lot of the pieces because we've got, especially working with labor unions, people are coming, people are going like crazy amount of onboard and off boards that we're seeing every week is sort of making everyone else making our hair stand on end, shall I say? It's a lot. But so that's really, you know, having us focus a lot on automation.

Harry Brelsford 

Well, what I like and you know, you know, me pretty well is I love people who who have niches, my whole career has been in tight little niches. Even though you know, there's a lot of small businesses in the world and Small Business Server probably grew out of a niche, and, and maybe a little category, but at my heart of hearts, I like niches. They're good and bad, because the world changes and other sudden the niches and therapy, for example, the product went away. So, you know, kind of dealing more with verticals, I don't know if I'd call it so much a niche, but you're dealing with verticals, and they're gonna be here tomorrow. When when you say there was turnover at the labor union. Now, that's not the Ladies and gentlemans, pounding nails out on a construction site. This is the team that is, for lack of a better word, the professional team back in the office.

Josh Weiss 

This is literally Yes, not the members of the Union, but the employees of the labor union itself. Right. So the ones who are sort of running the administration to keep that union alive, completely separate from the members who are, you know, and mostly we support public sector unions for the most part. And so that's nothing to do with the membership. But we have some of the largest labor unions in the country are our clients.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, yeah. No nice, real nice niche. How big is the combined organization? Are you 3040 60? People?

Josh Weiss 

Wani? We are 21 people. Yeah, so we brought over we brought over four from my side, we had about 10, in place. And we've already hired four more in the last couple of weeks. Works. Were supporting, I think, somewhere in the vicinity of about 1500 endpoints now. growing like crazy, and I mean, I think something to say this could maybe be a spiritual comment, or I'm not quite sure how to not quite sure how to frame that question how to phrase this one. But you the amount of people who are signing up to work with us, we're sort of we've put like a 90 day delay in place at this point. Because there's so much business coming in so much growth, so many referrals, it's really wild. And so, you know, I went from running a four person company, or 5555 people, including me, to now being the director of operations for what is like a 2122 person company. And it's sort of, you know, it's a really wild ride. Man, for anyone listening right now, I think, I think some of the interesting stuff that sort of come my way as, as I've worked through this, is, integrations are hard. And integrating to MSPs is hard for anyone who's thinking about it. But it's also really rewarding. I mean, it really gives us a chance to reevaluate, reconsider how my company was doing things, how the new companies doing things sort of, kind of just shine a light on both sides of that, you know, we're looking into right now, how do we do onboarding and offboarding? What does the security stack look like? What's the tool stack look like? And just really, you know, taking a very, very humble approach to the whole thing, right? We do it this way. You do it this way. Either one could be right, or more, more, probably some combination of the two is how we're going to do it going.

Harry Brelsford 

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's always been that way. It's, you know, teams versus slack and zoom, right? It's always been that way. And,

Josh Weiss 

and, and that one is actually really active right now. For we're looking at using, we're looking at using some new tools. And what I'm noticing with a lot of the lot of the communication tools in the NSP industry is they they say no one uses slack, we only support teams. And so you see that with chat support tools, you see that with business intelligence, sort of, you know, there's MSP bots is one of the ones that we're looking into right now, which is sort of interesting. It's a BI platform with a lot of actions that can be taken based on that BI. And so we yeah, we may actually end up switching and no one on the team really wants to see.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, that that hasn't changed. A couple of final questions. In the first one I can appreciate if you're not in a position to comment, but Do you see your new company? Your your new group? They can further acquisitions. Is that on your roadmap to grow strategically?

Josh Weiss 

Probably. Okay. I think we need to get through what we're getting through right now. But I, yeah, I would, I would give that a nice, a nice chance of happening. Okay. So at some point here, and I think, you know, I think we need six months to a year to get through this. Oh, yeah.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, take your time. And who knows what it will look like a year from now. The price of other entities may actually go down. You know, who knows with the economy, but you and I, I don't know if it's how we met. But we certainly enjoyed each other's company and a number of events over the years was the one of them.

Josh Weiss 

Continuing on in Pittsburgh, I got a picture. I got a picture with you in a park somewhere in Pittsburgh.

Harry Brelsford 

Yep, exactly. And so with Datacom coming up next week in Washington, DC, folks, we're, we're having this chat right after Labor Day. Will you be at Datacom? Sort of the successor to all that? You'll see you'll be there.

Josh Weiss 

Yeah, yeah. Because we, you know, we're dumping the whole continuum ConnectWise. Stack and we're in all data company. Okay, it will be a data con. A probably would have been in Orlando if the dates were aligned with the MSP summit, but I'll be a data Wednesday.

Yep. I think that's it for the year, though. Yeah,

Harry Brelsford 

yeah, I used to only see one or two shows because, you know, the shows are back. I mean, we have enable empower. The first full week of October and Vegas, I'll be there. And then early November, you have enabled, you know, aka solar winds will be down in Miami again. So it's, it's back, you know, and it's good. It's good. I know, we all enjoy seeing each other and

Josh Weiss 

I, ya know, they're coming. And I spoke in Vegas a couple of months ago at the MSP summit as well. But yeah, things are things are moving along.

Harry Brelsford 

Is that that lawyer? MSP seven?

Josh Weiss 

No, it's I forget the name. It's associated with channel futures. Oh, channel. Okay. Okay. Check. Futures and form. Correct. It is an instrument conference. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean, there is something that I want to say kind of on the topic of acquisition that I've been speaking about a lot, before, it just says like, yeah, as a closing, is that there's something I went through this, this whole process, as I decided that it was time for a change in my life, where, at first it was like, well, the company needs to be bigger, I need to do it longer, I need to hit some certain point or some magical number, before I can make this change. And there's really that moment of you know, what, it's fine. Like, life is short, it's time to make a change. And sort of coming to that realization. And the way that I did, it all seemed like the universe aligned everything for me to find someone that I had a very good sort of shared set of values with, and to have a pretty easy deal come out of it. And I think for anyone listening, you may think, like, Oh, I'm too small, or I'm not ready, or I have to do this, or I have to do that, or XYZ needs to align before I start doing this. And I would encourage anyone who is at a point of wanting a change in their life, to, you know, be very flexible and reconsider your own metrics for success. Because there's a million options in the world, there's a million things you can do. And for me personally, like, I like to in operations work. And I'm going to do that for two years with this current company. And you know, maybe I stay longer, but that's the original commitment I made. And I'm able to really apply my own creativity in ways that I couldn't, when I was sort of running around dealing with the challenges that I was dealing with. I just, you know, I'm really trying to encourage people to see that you don't have to have a $10 million MSP before you make a change or do a merger or whatever it is. And

Harry Brelsford 

well, not only Yeah, not only that, I get to some of the same places in a different way. And you know, I haven't made a big secret of it when they took away SPS completely in 2014. I went and did the analytics startup for a couple years. So those were all basically side hustles, right, because I needed change. And, Josh, I really like the variety, right? I've done three or four things in the last eight years. So I'm off to do another startup and just exited a data center. in Austin, Texas. It was kind of an unusual fit for me to be helping them out. Part time but Josh, I learned something from every gig. I mean, I really enjoy the variety.

Josh Weiss 

Exactly. Exactly. It's fun and you know, I'm in the same boat. I'm

helping. I'm helping my partner start a business up right now. And it's just, it's like life. Life is too short to stick for one thing for longer than you want to. Yeah.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, that's that's called working at the library. Love library. Hey, man, I got a ball. Hey, congratulations. Let's talk. first of the year. I know we don't completely run in the same circles as much but when Chinni edits this will, we'll check in with you after the first of the year. So

Josh Weiss 

great to see you. All right.