How to Build an MSP Account Management Process (That Doesn't Suck)
Are you losing clients because your MSP account management is purely reactive?
For many Managed Service Providers, "Account Management" is often an afterthought. It usually consists of a technical founder reacting to angry emails or a senior engineer trying to squeeze in a lunch meeting between putting out fires.
But as your MSP scales, the "owner-led" relationship model eventually breaks. You can no longer be the primary point of contact for every client. Without a dedicated process, your client relationships will drift, retention will drop, and you will leave massive amounts of project revenue on the table.
What You Will Learn in This Episode
[05:28] The Transition: Moving from Corporate IT roles into the fast-paced world of an MSP.
[10:26] The "Owner Trap": Why the owner-led sales model fails as you scale and how to fix it.
[22:51] The Traffic Light System: How to track "Client Health" scores (Red/Yellow/Green) to predict cancellations.
[37:57] QBR vs. SBR: Why you should stop doing "Quarterly Business Reviews" and start doing "Strategic Business Reviews".
[44:25] Setting Boundaries: Managing client expectations regarding 24/7 responsiveness.
Resources Mentioned
Guest: Dan Mallard (Iron Edge Group)
Book: Good to Great
Deep Dive: The Death of the QBR (And What to Do Instead)
One of the critical takeaways from this conversation is the distinction between a traditional QBR (Quarterly Business Review) and a Strategic Business Review (SBR).
Most MSPs treat QBRs as a "technical report card." They walk into the client meeting with a stack of reports showing ticket counts, patch statistics, and uptime percentages.
The hard truth? Your clients do not care about ticket counts. They assume you are patching their servers—that’s what they pay you for. When you focus solely on metrics, you are commoditizing your service. You are reminding them that you are an expense, not a partner.
Dan Mallard suggests shifting to an SBR model. This meeting should focus purely on the client's business goals:
Business Impact: How did technology help them drive revenue or cut costs last quarter?
Roadmap: What are their business initiatives for the next 12 months (opening a new office, hiring 10 people, acquiring a competitor)?
Strategy: How does the IT budget need to align to support those initiatives?
By elevating the conversation from "tickets" to "strategy," you move from being a vendor who fixes printers to a trusted advisor who helps grow their business.
Related Reading
Once you have established a strategic roadmap for your clients, you will likely need to staff up to handle the new project work. Check out our guide on Building Scalable Remote Teams and Service Desk "Pods" to ensure your delivery team can handle the growth.
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Dan Mallard (00:08)
And the content of the SBR needs to be controlled in such a way that you have a very methodical way to say, here's the things we're addressing in every SBR that we do. Here's where to get this information. Here's what it means. Here's our goals. The SBR here's what we want prepping. Here's what we want during. Here's what we want afterwards. And all that needs to be formalized, documented and managed to.
Andrew Moore (00:28)
That was Dan Mallard, practice director of strategic solutions for the IronEdge Group. Dan has been a technologist for over 20 years where he's worked in MSP for over a decade. He's been in all parts of MSP where he was once a client. He helped to manage and direct a projects group and he worked as the director of account managers for almost five years moving into private equity space after acquisition.
where he's picked up a few tricks that he's going to talk about with us today.
Andrew Moore (01:00)
All right, welcome to the How to MSP podcast. This is Andrew Moore and my guest today is Dan Mallard of the Iron Edge Group. Good evening, Dan.
Dan Mallard (01:15)
Hello
kind gentlemen, thank you for having me on the inaugural edition. It's exciting for me to see you take this journey. We've known each other a long time.
Andrew Moore (01:23)
I'm excited
about it. I'm excited that you got to be my first guest. So I appreciate it. Where does this, where does the podcast find you today? Where are you at?
Dan Mallard (01:28)
Yeah, absolutely.
Well today, uh, I am good I I'll tell you a little bit of oh Where am I literally?
Andrew Moore (01:39)
Where you at physically? Where are you? are you? Where do you live? Yeah. Yeah.
Cause like this podcast is it's international. Like even though it's the first one, like people are going to listen to this all over the world. So they want to know where you live and, and why. Yeah.
Dan Mallard (01:47)
Fair.
That's totally reasonable.
I live in San Antonio, Texas and I've been here for about 16, 17 years now. Good long time.
Andrew Moore (02:04)
Nice, And so ⁓ what brought you to San Antonio? Why did you decide to put roots down?
Dan Mallard (02:10)
That is a good question. So I grew up in San Marcos, Texas, which is 30 minutes out to Austin and 45 minutes north to San Antonio. grew up there. And then in my kind of first little mini career that I had in my early 20s, I moved from San Marcos. I bounced around a little bit. got married. Once I got married, my wife and I moved to Kansas. We were there for eight years or so. My kids were born in Kansas. So I was kind of this Kansan. And as a little kid, I lived in Kansas a little bit.
So lived in Kansas for a long time and really for employment opportunities. Like we worked for fantastic companies in Kansas, really, really good. It was like the premier employer in the city we lived. But looking five and 10 and 15 years ahead.
for neither my wife or I saw like a lot of career growth that could happen just because the size of the community and stuff like that. since I grew up in San Marcos, my wife and I just made a decision. I moved, we would relocate around San Marcos somewhere. I came down, I lived with my parents for a couple months. I applied for jobs in Austin and San Antonio and San Marcos. Couldn't find any San Marcos though.
Had a good solid job hit in San Antonio and accepted the job and my wife packed up the house and came down with our two kids. Yeah, thanks. Yeah.
Andrew Moore (03:23)
Nice. Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, I've
had the privilege of knowing and working with you both as a client and as a coworker and a good friend for many, many, many years. So it's probably been damn near over 10 years. Yeah. Has it been long? Yeah, for sure. Over. Yeah.
Dan Mallard (03:36)
15 ⁓ yeah. I we work together for 10 and probably a couple years have
happened since that after that. So that's 12 plus another four or five before that. So it's a long long time.
Andrew Moore (03:46)
Yeah, yeah.
So just ⁓ for the people out there, you know, I've already given kind of a brief rundown of who you are, but just kind of, you know, professional highlights like giving, giving in. Let's focus on the MSP space just over the last, you know, 15 years or so. Like what have you done? Where are you at? Like ⁓ what, what, brings you to the, to the pod today?
Dan Mallard (03:50)
Sir.
Sure.
sure.
Yeah, good question. So I've been a technologist and IT guy for the last little short of 25 years. Started as an intern, got IT, you know, corporate based IT positions. About 17 years ago, give or take when I accepted the job in San Antonio, actually, I got a job at this company and I was kind of the IT coordinator and I had an executive above me and the company that I got a job at.
They had an MSP. So it's my first direct experience as an IT guy being augmented by an MSP. the MSP is where I met Andrew. He was running that MSP operationally. And so I was a client. And for four years, five years or so,
Andrew Moore (04:46)
Huh.
Dan Mallard (04:53)
I was a client of an MSP and so it was a really unique perspective to have, of course. And then after four five years, I took sort of a job in between, but then I came and worked for that MSP. So I came to Iron Edge where Andrew was my boss for a long, time. And now I've been with Iron Edge for 12 years, give or take. So I've been affiliated with the same MSP, kind of growing and shrinking and through different journeys for.
Andrew Moore (05:15)
Yeah.
Dan Mallard (05:17)
Gosh, mean, 16, 17 years as a client or a employee.
Andrew Moore (05:22)
I think it's interesting that you had started your career. Well, I wouldn't call it your career, but you had started understanding how MSP worked by being like a client of an MSP. And I wonder, you know, what did you think when there was an opportunity to work with us as an MSP? Like, what were your thoughts there? Like, were you like, this sounds awesome. Like coming out of coming out of corporate IT and moving to an MSP is
It can be a of a shell shock for most people, but you'd already like kind of been there, done that. Like you knew a little bit of what it was like. Like maybe, maybe talk to us a little bit about that.
Dan Mallard (05:50)
Great.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's two things that really stand out to me. So at the time, the job that I had, I had that job for four or five years. It was really high energy, high stakes. Everything was urgent. Everything across the board. Leadership was urgent. Everything was urgent. So for me in particular, to come over to an MSP that MSP, everything's urgent all the time. Everybody needs everything. Super high pay, super high stress. For me, it was pretty natural transition.
Andrew Moore (06:20)
Wait, what did you say? Did you say super
high pay? I thought you said super high pace. okay.
Dan Mallard (06:22)
No stress. Yes, yes. Yes, super fast face, super high stress. ⁓
So a lot of people, though, when they make that transition from corporate to MSP, they have a really tough time adapting because it's I mean, you're working really, really hard. But for me, that was pretty natural. I since I got to know the guys on the desk and I got to know the leadership team and I got to know the owner culturally wise, I knew it was the right fit for me.
just knew it inside and out, so I knew where I was going. But then effort-wise and sort of intensity-wise, I was very, very used to that type of style, and then when I came over, it was very similar.
but I can easily recognize where other people come from, other corporate environments that are really laid back and people have this one little role in IT and they come over and it's just like this waterfall of work all the time. That would be really hard for most people. I just was in a different scenario. And then I can very clearly remember when I started with the MSP, I told our owner at the time who sit a couple of desks away from me basically, I said,
you it's really amazing seeing how the sausage is made now. And I think he took offense to that because he kind of thought, I don't know, maybe it wasn't as good as I thought, right? Like I get there and I'm like, this isn't nearly as good as I thought. You guys are yay, who's whatever, but that absolutely wasn't the case. was the amount of effort and coordination of people and systems that do stuff behind the scenes that the client doesn't even know. I never even knew.
So when I got into it, I was like, this is a lot of work and a lot of stuff and a lot of reporting and a lot of systems that the client has no idea. So I thought that was really, really cool. Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Moore (07:50)
Right. Yeah, it's like an iceberg, right? Like you've got like this
little bit that the client is aware of and a lot of it just has to go really, really perfectly. And all this stuff happens on the back end is this coordinated dance that hopefully works out pretty well.
Dan Mallard (07:57)
Yeah.
That's
exact. that's, know, we're going to talk about account management today. That's one of the one of the sort of I don't want to it's a trick of account management, but it's something you need to focus on as we get into that discussions. How do we ensure that the clients kind of know what the rest of the iceberg is and realize it so they don't become apathetic and say, my environment's totally fine. I don't need these guys anymore. But that's something you have to watch.
Andrew Moore (08:28)
Yeah,
no, it's interesting because like when you came on board, we brought you on board to help us with project management, right? And so trying to figure out like as we were going as an MSP, because I think we were probably, I don't know, five or six million dollars at the time. Yeah. And so we had really started that process of, you know, I believe strongly that an MSP will follow a very specific growth trajectory. Like it's like.
Dan Mallard (08:41)
Yeah, five million or so, yeah.
Andrew Moore (08:54)
It's almost like scientific, like once you get to three million, you're going to look a certain size and you get to five, you're to look a certain size and then seven and then 10. And so kind of when you hit that five to $7 million mark, this separation, this bifurcation of responsibilities will start to happen with the service desk and projects teams, right? Where you're to have to have a certain amount of people working service and you have to have more dedicated people working projects. So we brought you on board to help with that. And
Dan Mallard (08:55)
Yeah.
Andrew Moore (09:21)
You you did a really great job of moving that ball forward with us. And what we found was that as we started to grow more, we needed better account management, right? We had a great account manager out of the Houston market, but we didn't have anybody in the San Antonio market that was helping. I mean, there was Patrick and he did a great job with, you know, the clients that he was going, but we were growing so much in San Antonio. We had a couple of bigger accounts. So we asked you to step in and take over some account management and really focus your efforts there.
Dan Mallard (09:41)
Sure.
Andrew Moore (09:49)
And that was kind of new to you, right? Like, I mean, you had done technical work before, but had never managed accounts. And then as your career began to grow over time, you eventually, after, you know, the private equity acquisition and things that happened, you were kind of managing, not kind of, you were managing a group of account managers across the country, you know, really focused on trying to, to, to maintain client relationships, that sort of thing. you know, from that level of expertise, like having been a client,
Dan Mallard (09:52)
Right, right.
Mm-hmm.
Andrew Moore (10:19)
having
been a technician back way before that, having been in the projects, right? You were now responsible for being able to have conversations with clients about expectations, like what their business was going to do, that sort of thing. I just really want to kind of focus on like, why do MSPs get account management wrong? Like from your perspective, now that you've been doing a lot of these different roles in an MSP, like where do people like, fuck this up?
Dan Mallard (10:30)
Right.
Hehehehehe
Andrew Moore (10:47)
Like for for just to put in a two-fine a point on it like
that because a lot I hear that a lot from folks are like I we don't you know We try to hire an account manager or you know I'm the owner and I'm also the account manager and you know just seems to working out just fine like where do people make mistakes with account management? You know from your perspective
Dan Mallard (10:56)
Yeah. Right.
I could talk about this all day and you hit on some key things that I want to talk about. So I think mistakes happen as you grow your MSP. Oftentimes the account management role is filled by the owner.
right, owner led sales model. They're, they're this senior level consultative strategic guy, the owner is, cause they have all those skills and that person is kind of the de facto account manager as you grow and they have the best relationships and they have sort of the most sway over the client and they understand business and they can communicate pretty well cause they're selling stuff and running their business and they have this operational level of experience. They have all these skills that come together that the owner has a lot of the time as you grow from 1 million to 2 million to a million to 5 million.
Well, those particular skills, you're kind of trying to distill down what those skills are and then, you know, pull that out and put account managers in place with those skills in a perfect world, right? They're kind of mimicking that owner led sales model in a lot of different areas. But the tough part about that is there's a lot of different skills that kind of go into that to make it really successful, to have a really good account manager. So what you have oftentimes is you have these MSPs that grow and they kind of people kind of get put in the
account management role and it's like formerly technical people sometimes that works well and sometimes it doesn't because those people can can or cannot communicate very well they get wrapped up in the details that you know there's all these different problems and saying hey you're a good technical guy but the client likes you you're now the account manager right
Andrew Moore (12:27)
where they
like beat the client to death with acronyms and they try to sound smart.
Dan Mallard (12:30)
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
and like us, mean, we want to sound smart too, right? But you know.
Andrew Moore (12:37)
I have zero desire to sound smart. Like, smarter I sound, the more people expect
of me and I'm like, fuck that. ⁓ I'm not interested.
Dan Mallard (12:43)
Fair enough. ⁓ I learned my lesson. I'm learning my lesson right now.
But so there's this role where you those people having so let me I don't want to discount this having a good base of technical knowledge is is a very large positive. You don't have to have it.
But it's a very large, large positive. If you can then talk about it and you can use that knowledge to create strategy and to provide guidance and to become a trusted partner, right? That's the perfect scenario. Somebody is kind of technical, they're kind of in business and they're kind of strategic and they can do all these things and it comes together and it's an awesome account manager. Well, the downside to all of that, if those are all the traits that you need, the downside is it's really hard to find. And those people that fill that...
that seat the best are these small business owners and people that are COO somewhere else and these these people to kind of come in. So you go. So then the problem becomes well how do we get enough of that that it gives you a really effective account management layer like how do we train people how do we identify people and do all those things right. So that's the trick. So from my perspective I want people that are good communicators like you know that is commonly happen you want somebody that from an account management position as you grow your MSP that can talk to a business owner that can
talk to a board, that can talk to an IT director, maybe a CIO. They have to have the ability to go in those situations and communicate. And oftentimes what you're communicating is either strategy or something's gone wrong. And both of those are very difficult to talk about. So you want somebody that's reasonably well-spoken, that's confident, and can kind of communicate different things to the clients. That's the first thing I look for, is I'm filling positions that are account management positions. Having a skill set
to the commercial side of the business and selling stuff. Well, as an account manager, need to, your client will need things to execute their vision or you will need to sell them things to get them where they need from a security or compliance or whatever perspective. That's fantastic. That's the commercial side of that position.
Going up to say a $10 million MSP, which I'm very comfortable with, even up to, you know, we got much, much bigger than that. You don't need to hire, in my opinion, really higher based on that as a primary skill. Right?
Andrew Moore (14:50)
Right, because
what I found is that, I think to your point, the best account manager, one of our best account managers, and we giggle about Patrick about all the different roles that Patrick's had within the organization, he was fantastic at account management and he got mad when we were like, but you're a salesperson. And he's like, I am absolutely not. You're the best salesperson we have. He sold more projects.
and upsold clients into new solutions that they needed. It wasn't like he was out snake oil sailing. He was literally just having strategic conversations with the clients on a regular basis and brainstorming with them and they were like, yeah, we wanna do that. Let's make our business better. Patrick's like, cool. And he come back, like, you sold something else. He's like, I'm not a salesman. I'm like, you don't have to be a salesman to be good account manager. It just kind of happens, right?
Dan Mallard (15:30)
You
Yeah, you have to be consultative. And I think that's the biggest thing that I take out is there's this capability of being a good strategic consultant. Andrew's heard it a million times. I've heard it a million times. When we take on a new client or every once in a while a client leaves, oftentimes the feedback we get is we weren't getting the strategic consultative voice that we wanted. And that's why.
Andrew Moore (15:54)
we've outgrown our MSP, which is code for you
didn't pay enough attention to me.
Dan Mallard (15:59)
And they weren't being strategic and where they were maybe missing the mark is they had a more commercially minded person that wasn't really affecting the strategy of the business, right? And wasn't tying the things that the client may have needed from a commercial standpoint wasn't tying that into the three year plan or compliance needs or any kind of, you know, reasonable strategy. So, you know, for that reason, you know, having an overly overly commercial account manager can cause problems. It can be fantastic too. And I think as you get bigger,
It flips a little bit to where you want guys with a little bit more of those chops as you grow because you have other positions that are augmenting that strategy. And as you get bigger and bigger and bigger and you're looking at different things on the bottom line.
You want a little bit more of the commercial because you want to be able to execute at a certain level from a sales and revenue and all these different perspectives. And it flips a little bit, which is really, really interesting. So, but speaking to say, $15 million MSPs with these good communicators that understand tragedy, that strategy, that tragedy, that understand tragedy of MSPs that understands strategy, but also have a little bit of technical and you can pull those from all over the place. And if they have those traits, my opinion, they can be awesome account managers.
Andrew Moore (16:59)
Yeah, it's fair.
Yeah, I also would say that too, like the, like you have to know who your audience is, right? As an account manager. And what I would say is, and I think something you and I talked about a lot in your, most MSPs, not all, but a majority of the ones that at least they're probably gonna listen to this podcast are selling into the SMB market. And when you're an account manager having a conversation with a guy that's running a $10 million, you know,
manufacturing company that's been family owned for two generations, having the conversation with him about whether or not to invest in additional software services or security or whatever is the difference between him like, I don't know, buying a boat or putting braces on his kids or hiring, yeah, hiring another employee. Like it's not that it's coming out of a budget.
Dan Mallard (17:49)
Kids going to camp, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Andrew Moore (17:56)
that's coming out of some department somewhere. So I think to your point is that if you're selling into the market properly, those folks often will sniff out somebody who's not looking out for their best interest. They want to trust who they're working with. Does that ring a little bit with what you're still seeing in the market? Because that's how it was, I don't know, two years ago when I was still in an MSP.
Dan Mallard (17:56)
Right. Right.
Yes.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yes. And I'm passionate about this. I've heard other people that I've worked with have different opinions, but here's mine and it's served me really well. And I think it's served our client base really well. It's a relationship driven business and it's a relationship driven positions. Your account manager, not only having these skills to kind of this base level of skill that I talked about a second ago.
but getting them to realize that developing these strong relationships with the owners and the other points of contacts, that's what weathers the storm. That's how you gain trust. So we're going to screw, as an MSP, we're going to screw stuff up. We're going to, you know, sometimes screw stuff up bad. It just is what it is. The thing, a good relationship will create like this savings account of goodwill.
Right over time you're taking them down to providing a good strategy. You go to their parties, you stop by their office, you do all these things, right? You build goodwill and build goodwill and they trust you. And then when you have this big mistake that those things happen, it debits some out of that. But that relationship is what withstands you potentially getting fired. So 10 million percent. It's a trust in relationship position and it's a trust in relationship business, especially before you get up to enterprise grade MSPs. Yeah.
Andrew Moore (19:30)
And then
as far as like what people do, you know, that really isn't going to move the needle the right way for account management. One of the things that I've seen, I'd like for you to kind of dig into this a little bit for our listeners is we talk about, I heard this recently and maybe I'm just coming to the party late, like measurement, management requires measurement, but measurement isn't management.
Dan Mallard (19:51)
Yeah.
Okay, got it.
Andrew Moore (19:59)
Butchered that right. But like
essentially I can measure things but that doesn't mean I'm actually managing them. But I can't manage something unless I measure it. Right. And so so when you're looking at account management like it's take the word out of it but you're just relationship management with the clients or relationships. Like if an MSP is just like hey I need you to go out and just make sure the clients are happy. Like is to me that's that's a mistake. Right. Like you can't just
Dan Mallard (20:07)
It's really well said. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Moore (20:27)
You have to measure stuff, you have to track stuff. What have you seen there that you, from where we started where we didn't actually track anything, to where we got to the point where we were tracking a lot of things to the point where we were tracking, after private equity, a significant amount of things. All in that, what have you seen as far as people are making mistakes because they're not tracking what? What are they not doing?
Dan Mallard (20:30)
Yeah.
Pride.
Yeah,
really good question and I've really seen this in my my knowledge of it changed through the years through the last 10-12 years. So you have to be so if in client success or in account management.
the number one goal to run the business to give the business values retention. You got to retain your clients and when their contracts up for renewal, you want them to come back, right? That's more so than anything else. That's that's what the position should accomplish is keep clients. Now, one way you're going to do that is having a strong relationship with the leadership level, the ownership, the point of contacts and the accounting lady and the receptionist. You know, those are the people you want to have these key relationships with. But you want to put in KPIs and metrics that can best
Andrew Moore (21:25)
Mm-hmm.
Dan Mallard (21:31)
lead to that. In other words, I'll give you one as an example. The account management layer should know when an account is up for renewal. They should know that. They also should know when the client needs to put in their notice to non renew. So say that's 90 days out, right? That's a piece of data you should pull out and track.
because theoretically you want to be doing your best work leading into that when they have to make that decision. So it's a non-issue. So you know they're going to renew if three months before that renewal notice date you're having a really tough time and you're messing up projects and you're not communicating well. Well that's not great because the odds are it's going to get into that renewal date potentially and they make a decision to leave you. So knowing things like that like key dates on the life of the contract super important. Number one when is our contract up when is that renewal notice
So you can you can dedicate enough resources mentally or even you know literal people resources to attend to problems at the right time because if someone's just renewed yeah you want to keep them happy you want to have a fantastic relationship but if you have a choice of solving a big giant problem you have to choose one between a client that's going to renew in the next month and a half and one that just renewed well you're going to choose the one that that that is renewing in a month and a half it just you have to make a decision operationally so there's yeah sure
Andrew Moore (22:47)
So let me, sorry to interrupt. I just
wanna touch on something you said there, but there are some of our listeners that are gonna be in 30 day contracts. They're gonna be in handshake deals, right? Like, cause not everybody's got that ironclad contract. when you talk about tracking, you know, kind of where you're at with the relationship, you talked about something really important, like where are you at with the relationship? How do you, how does Dan,
Dan Mallard (22:50)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Moore (23:10)
How does Dan communicate to his boss or how does somebody underneath Dan communicating to him and his boss in a way that you understand that account has a problem, right? Versus, and that you can see it versus like, you have to go ask about it. Like, how does that work so you actually know what that looks like coming up to contract?
Dan Mallard (23:22)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, often times when you're at these little MSPs, it's kind of, yeah, I think they're doing fine. talked to, I swung by the other day and they were cool and I dropped them off some donuts and it was fine. And then you go about and then all of a sudden they surprise you and don't renew their contract. So what I've tried to do over the last couple of years is, and what we executed on is we put together a,
Basically, it's a spreadsheet or it's a form that says here's all these criteria you need to gauge the account against once a year, once every six months, whatever, and it's for the account managers. And it's all these things that basically you started 100 point score and it deducts points for certain criteria. Like if we've screwed up a project larger than 20 K or something like that, OK, minus 10 points. we if there's been more than.
Three escalations by the point of contact in the last month. OK, minus 10 points. So there's all these things. There's these metrics. There's these things that we go. OK, we know that these things are impactful and could could affect the client. There's some really bad ones or some not as bad. Well, if all of these things get you down below a 70 score. That's red alert, right? And then we we face the coloring to like their green if they're 100 there.
yellow if they're 70 and once they at 60 they're red. And that was a way that we could methodically get the account management team to evaluate every account on a consistent basis and fill this thing out.
So then you take that color score and that's the score and you say, OK, this is ACME. They have a score of yellow. They're renewing on this date. You know, they're they have these other pieces of data. We need to focus on them because you're always trying to figure out where we need to focus and where you need to send resources. So, you know, if you have a green account.
and they have this and they don't have a renewal coming up or whatever you like. Good, they're cool. I don't have to, you know, I don't have to spend this time that I need to spend with the reds and the yellows that if that we've dedicated the system to determine they were red and yellow, that's where we need to spend our time. And that's what we need to focus on from a leadership team and account management team. For example, say somebody turns red, you create a policy where if somebody turns red, that's when the owner's trucking over there. That's when the CEO is trucking over there to build a relationship, figure out what's going on and try to help. So that's one of the ways we did it. But we wanted a trackable, like logical
system where we put it in a form of spit out a color and then we would attend to the client per the color.
Andrew Moore (25:41)
Yeah,
no, think that's fantastic. One of the things that I do wanna get into just to kind of start driving towards ⁓ how do we do this the best way possible in order to build out an account management process is what is the impact that you're gonna see from being good at account management? So there are MSPs that...
You know, again, I've seen them where they're three, $4 million, owner is acting as the account manager. They're also trying to run their business. They're trying to close new business. They're not growing as fast as they want, right? One of the recommendations I make is let's bring in an account manager. Let's offload some of those responsibilities. Let's ladder within the account so that you still have that relationship and you can still reach out to the ownership. But let's make sure that we're on top of that owner to owner, account manager to point of contact.
making sure we're walking through that process. you know, once you start to free up the senior executives time in some of the smaller MSPs, then they can start growing. And then you've got this account management layer. Like what does that do to the business that really drives positive results outside of, let's just say, the revenue retention, which to me, as you brought up.
Dan Mallard (26:50)
Yeah, it's king, yeah.
Andrew Moore (26:50)
the most important thing for
account. like if you're dropping clients off the back end fast and you're bringing them in, you're gonna have a unpleasant experience as an MSP executive, right? Like it sucks. So what are we doing and why are we doing this account management thing? What does good account management get you? Like what does that feel like day to day? What does it feel like to have a great account management team? Yeah.
Dan Mallard (27:00)
Right, right.
Yeah,
it feels fantastic now. Yeah. You're welcome.
Andrew Moore (27:17)
Thanks. That's why we have Dan on the pod, because of his
amazing insights.
Dan Mallard (27:24)
So good account management fills a very similar role than an entire MSP does. So you would bring in an MSP to offload some work and free up some cycles and let you do more executive level things and do these things. That was one of reasons you bring in MSP to do all the stuff, right? Well, a good account manager does the same thing.
for the client and also internally, which is really interesting. A good account manager has taken that work that used to be done by the owner or real, you know, maybe the COO takes that work off of them and spreads it out and lets somebody with a dedicated skill set and dedicated time accomplish different things with the clients. That's one thing it does, but it does the same thing for the client too, which is really cool. So when you have an MSP and you have really strong account management, that those clients then recognize that and they can leverage the MSP for different things.
It
becomes a really, really tight relationship because you may have a CIO that every year for budget, the account manager, the CIO comes to you and says, hey, I'm prepping my budget. I need this, this and this. Can you run this down? And then you're like incredibly important to that company from there on out because they trust you to create their budget. They trust you to respond to, you know, regulatory compliance things like every time the auditor comes over every year, the account manager from the MSP shows up and they begin to really trust you and lean on you. And it makes the relationship basically bulletproof.
So for that for that client of the MSP the account management layer can pull all this different gray matter stuff off of them and own it just the account manager can and sort of get stuff done from a strategic and consulting standpoint But interestingly it also does it for the owner of the MSP or the leaders of MSP You know because they were the ones doing these these these Pre-sales engagements and talking to prospects and and you know
going to conferences and building relationships. So the account manager, a good account management layer is successful in both ways.
Andrew Moore (29:14)
Can I stop you there because I know we're talking about what good comes from account management, so I don't want to backtrack into what mistakes people make. But I will say that there are people that are listening to this episode that are going to hear you and say, that scares the shit out of me. I do not want to relinquish my relationships that I've built in my business to somebody that isn't me.
Dan Mallard (29:21)
sure.
Yeah.
Andrew Moore (29:34)
What's your response to that? What's your response to an owner or an executive who's like, no, I'm good. I don't need anybody messing with my accounts because they could either screw it up or they could take them from me. You know what I mean? What are your thoughts there? What have you seen about that?
Dan Mallard (29:48)
Yeah.
The first thing I would say is it's really hard to scale your business. And at some size of your MSP, you're not gonna have enough cycles to give everybody an appropriate level of attention.
So because of those two things, if your intention is to grow the MSP or for you to back out and run another business or for you to focus on something else, it's really hard to keep those client relationships owned by the owner or some other senior executive because the clients need stuff all the time. There's stuff always coming up that they're like, OK, let me hey, owner, come over to my house and deploy this thing on my kid's computer. know, man. So if that if you want to own that and keep owning that and keep doing that, kind of lock yourself in as an owner,
just to do that, okay, if that's your jam, that's totally fine. But if you want to grow the business, you want to focus on other things that make new streams of money that do any number of things, putting those account managers in place that you trust, that's how you get there. That's how the business grows. And account management is, it's sometimes a hard position to fill because of that reason. So, you you want to get these people in that you really truly trust and
Andrew Moore (30:52)
Yeah, but I'm
also like, think the other part of it too is, beyond, beyond that component, which I agree with you a hundred percent. Like I think you were spot on, but I think the other thing is, um, the, the, the one thing that I think that people need to really understand is as your, as your account manager goes, so goes your relationship with your clients and a lot of respect. So to, to that point of, need to make sure that you're paying them well.
Dan Mallard (30:59)
Right. Right.
Right.
Andrew Moore (31:21)
right, that you're, you know, you're laddering within your accounts, right? Because you can't just like, you can't abdicate your responsibility as an owner and executive with an MSP to the account management team. Because if you do, then you've put yourself in a position where someone can literally like, you know, mess up your relationship or potentially if you don't have the right,
non-compete or non-solicitation in place, right? They could literally go and take your clients and go to another MSP. So I think risk mitigation in that regard is really important when you're putting one of these programs together is to say, listen, we're going to work with our attorneys. We're to have you sign solid documentation that's going to prevent you from being in a position where you can take these accounts with you for any reason. but then also like, in my opinion, like the interview process for
Dan Mallard (31:52)
Yeah.
Andrew Moore (32:10)
these folks is we were lucky enough with you that we had worked with you for years. And so we knew what we were going to get. If you're not in a position to do that, right? You know, we used to have what was like the four hour interview, right? When somebody would remember that, like someone would come in and they would do like a full scenario and they would present to us and they would try to sell us stuff. And like, was like, like it was a thing, right? Yeah.
Dan Mallard (32:14)
Right. Right.
Yeah. ⁓
Yes.
tough. Yeah, it
was tough. The reason we did that is as you're, you know, leading me to is we wanted to find the right people with the right skill set that communicate well, that could operate under pressure, so on and so forth, because it is a key position.
I do like what you said and that's a little different answer than what I had. Fantastic answer because you want to pay those people well. You want to take care of him. You want to hire the right people. That's really, really critical component to the right account manager. And when you get that right person there, I mean, the sky's the limit because they're really the linchpin between your business and this other business that the direct link everything filters up through the account manager. Everything filters out to the account manager and it's just a critical position. 100%.
Andrew Moore (33:10)
Well, and I've also seen too with some of the MSPs that I've been coaching over the last year or so. One of the first questions I ask when we talk about account management, was like, who's already doing it that you don't realize is doing it? And they're like, nobody on my team is acting as an account manager. I'm like, cool, let's start going through this. And we start talking about different people and they're like, we have that tier three guy. Like he's constantly going on site and like, know, clients love him. you know, every time he comes back, he's got a project that we need to get done. And I'm like,
Dan Mallard (33:21)
Right? Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Andrew Moore (33:41)
maybe he's actually kind of your account manager and you didn't realize it and now we just formalize that, right? Like instead of having to go out and I'm gonna do a podcast with my friend James, he runs a staffing firm for MSPs out of Dallas, yeah, James Byer. So we'll talk about that at the time, but like, mean, you can certainly find MSP-centric account managers out there, but like if you find somebody that already knows your system, came up in your company, right?
Dan Mallard (33:42)
right.
Yep. James. Yep.
Andrew Moore (34:09)
Like we've had some really great account managers over the years that have done that, right?
Dan Mallard (34:09)
Yeah.
Yeah,
we have, I think.
There's, just to be transparent with everybody, there can be a downside too, because those people oftentimes come up from technical roles, right? Or they're like the lead tech that goes out and visits this thing. Well, as you start asking for more commercial minded demands, you know, just different things that they need to do with a different skillset. You know, you need to create this quote, send this thing and talk about this out and do this stuff. They, they, you have to identify very quickly whether or not they're going to take to that or not. Right. And if they are good at that, then you've hit home.
run. You got somebody that came up technical that already has a good relationship. The client probably loves them and they can do the other sort of non-technical components of the job. It's super powerful. You're right. There's this ghost account management that happens and you don't even know it's happening. And it could be it could be literally your receptionist is talking to clients and coordinating things and doing different things and running stuff down and they're kind of the defacto account manager. People call them when there's trouble, you know, and they're kind of smoothing things out and they're you never know who's sort of that ghost account manager in the back if you haven't identified it.
Andrew Moore (35:06)
Mm-hmm.
Dan Mallard (35:12)
you
Andrew Moore (35:12)
Yeah,
for sure. Let's talk a little bit about what MSPs need to do to build and or improve on their existing account management. what advice would you give to an organization where they're like, okay, I'm gonna bring in one or two people to help me manage my accounts right now. What do I need to do to start setting the stage for them to be successful and to build out a scalable solution? What does that look like?
Dan Mallard (35:39)
Great question. So there's core operational things you're going to want in place for them to accomplish, such as you're ensuring they're doing SBRs. We haven't talked about SBRs yet, yeah, QBRs, SBRs, yeah.
Andrew Moore (35:48)
Yeah, let's talk about that because I know some people call them QBR, some people just call them, yeah, so
strategic business reviews, quarterly business reviews, and so that the listeners who are coming at this from ground zero, that's where you're going out and you're showing the value of what you're providing to the client. We used to call it doing what we sell, right? We show up in the first few minutes, like.
Dan Mallard (35:55)
Correct. Correct.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Right. Right.
Andrew Moore (36:12)
I am actually showing you that we're patching your computers and managing your backups and like, and then you go into, and now I'm going to show you where you're going to need to go over the next three, six, nine, 12 months. And let's talk about your business and find out what we need to do to make sure that you're ready for what's next. Right? So that's, that's an SBR. It's a QBR scheduled. It's, it's ready to go. Right. So, so talk, talk a little bit about like,
Dan Mallard (36:15)
Yeah. ⁓
Andrew Moore (36:38)
how you execute that, why that's important, what does that look like?
Dan Mallard (36:42)
Yeah,
yeah, they're critical because everybody says they do them, right? And they're critical just running your business and keeping your business afloat because a lot of a lot of ⁓ businesses created like projects are created and things are sort of envisioned or discussed in those in those QBR slash SBR. So that's really important.
It's a good way for you to get in front of people that you don't normally get in front of in a formal meeting and say, we're awesome and we're smart and we've been doing all this stuff and here's proof of it. And here's how we're awesome consultants. And here's what you're going to be doing. We, we suggest you look at this year and next year in the following year, you get in front of some C levels that you may not get in front of otherwise. Maybe your main point of contact is the receptionist at this business and they bring the owner in for that. So it's, it's really good FaceTime. but what's, if you're coming from ground zero or wherever you're at,
SBRs need to be part of your account management cadence.
right? And the content of the SBR needs to be controlled in such a way that you have a very methodical way to say, here's the things we're addressing in every SBR that we do. Here's where to get this information. Here's what it means. Here's our goals. The SBR here's what we want prepping. Here's what we want during. Here's what we want afterwards. And all that needs to be formalized, documented and managed to.
it's that important to the business and it's that important to the position. And I can guarantee you you're not doing SBRs, number one, and you say you're supposed to, and you know, the client thinks
you're gonna be doing them and you're not, they're gonna look somewhere else. They're gonna get that strategy and guidance from somebody else.
Andrew Moore (38:04)
Yeah, and I
want to stress too, because something I've talked to my clients about, does every, so I've seen this before, they call them QBRs, and this was like a thing that came out of the industry 10 or 15 years ago. Does every client based on whatever size they are and whatever they're buying from you get the same attention from your account manager and the same cadence when it comes to their business reviews? Do they all get a quarterly, like in-person, shown up with a PowerPoint deck, like?
you know, for a 15 person office, do they all get the same thing or do you think that there's a difference in the size of the client based on like what sort of a strategic guidance that they do need?
Dan Mallard (38:43)
True.
Yeah, I mean, so you've teed it up really, really well, which is generally speaking, the larger and or more complex a client is, the more they need those strategic reviews, the bigger they get, the more formal guidance and leadership that they have, the more potentially regulations they have, the more people that are involved in these things that scales one to one with the frequency of the SBR who's on your team's doing the SBR, probably the skill set going into the SBR and executing it.
Andrew Moore (39:08)
Mm-hmm.
Dan Mallard (39:11)
your question. Yeah, it scales. Generally, if people pay you more money, they should get more SBRs. Simple as that, right? So, you know, so that being said, you don't want to discount those SBRs for the lower, the smaller clients, the people that aren't paying you as much. It's equally as important. It just may not be as frequent, right?
Andrew Moore (39:29)
Right, because it's a small
business. If you're a 25 person shop and we met last quarter, how much is really gonna change in your business so that you have to have a strategic conversation 60, 90 days later, right? yeah. And then that distracts your account manager from being able to focus, right, in the more important places.
Dan Mallard (39:33)
Correct.
Yeah, that and
it distracts the client to like they'll tell you very quickly. We were good. I don't need to talk to you for another six months. We were good. We're totally fine because people come into it like if you're the client you come in you're not going to sell me stuff or they're to tell me what I need. I don't want hear it. You know, so there's it's not like a. It can be a stressful meeting for the client to.
Andrew Moore (39:59)
Yeah
Dan Mallard (40:06)
especially if they've come from an environment or an MSP that they're just trying to sell during these SBRs. They want to sit you down, get you in a room, and try to sell stuff. That's not fantastic. I don't love that. Nobody loves that. So the client may have expectations of that SBIR that may not be how you want to execute them. So that brings up a good point.
Getting the client to understand what the content of an SBR is before the SBR is really, really important. So the worst thing that happens is when you go into an SBR, you've prepped all your stuff, you have maybe your owner with you and you get in there and you sit down and the client complains about a service ticket that got screwed up and John can't print. They complain about that for the entire hour and you don't accomplish what the SBR intended to accomplish from a showing what we do and proving that we're awesome perspective and providing guidance. So you want to prep that client, say, here's why we're coming. Here's what we'll run over.
Here's who's coming with me and laying this as a foundation so they don't come in. So you can very quickly say, ⁓ hey, yeah, let's have a breakout on this ticket issue. I know that's important. I can schedule that immediately when we're done. But I've got my owner here. We have this schedule. Is it cool we go through that? And I'm yeah. So that's a really key component to making these things successful as well.
Andrew Moore (41:11)
Yeah, it's a really good point. we've now talked about like, so if you're to set something up from scratch, sounds like let's make sure we kind of, we'll call it like stack rank our clients, right? So we know how much attention the account manager needs to give them in order to be successful because that person only has so much time. We know that we need to get SBR scheduled, track that the SPRs were happening, right? Getting done. And then outside of that, like what else do we need to do to make sure that we're doing?
Dan Mallard (41:19)
Yep.
Right.
Andrew Moore (41:36)
well by account management. Is it just client facing stuff or are we dealing with stuff inside the business? Where are you seeing where account successful account managers are spending their time and the companies are building frameworks to make sure that those things are followed consistently?
Dan Mallard (41:37)
Yeah.
I could probably give you 30 different things as I kind of think I'm through, but internally, good account managers interface under the glue between different departments. Your service team, your pro service, your projects people, that account manager has a good understanding of how successful the service desk is executing for that client.
and they're running stuff down and providing, you know, when there's an impediment, they're running it down or the communicating with the client from a service perspective. That's a key part of the roles is they're the there. And I use that analogy that the glue that kind of holds all the departments together and can make these decisions when the service desk needs some direction. Hey, who do we talk to? How do we get this? So the account manager spending them their time doing that is critically important. Same thing with other departments in the business, procurement, pro services, accounting, all of those things. So a good account management function
will successfully sort of have an interplay with all those departments at any given time. So the really good ones kind of have all that stuff under control. But they're also executing in different systems to evaluate, do I need to spend time on this client? That's something that is always hard. You don't want to necessarily be reactionary to everything that comes in. You want to have a plan that with the KPI, some of them that we've already talked about.
In addition to NPS scores, CSAT scores, just different ways you can measure client satisfaction. They need to be reviewing these systems and then finding, I need to action on this thing and that I'm going to do that today. So you need to have systems set up where the account manager looking at CSAT scores or looking at NPS or looking at the client temperature thing that I talked about or looking at whatever saying I need to action on this thing because it directly affects my clients. And of course I want my clients to be retained, right? So having systems in place to do that.
Other things that the account management layer is actively doing is with your existing clients, they're laddering up into different developing different relationships. Like you could have a green client that is fantastic and they love you. Well, their CIO got hit by a bus and he has to leave. You get a new CIO in. The CIO has his own agenda, his own people he trusts. He has the MSP that used to work with him that saved his bacon when he made a big mistake and deleted a bunch of data, whatever. Well, immediately you go from a green relationship with that client that everybody loves him and they love you.
to immediately red. So one of the things that good account managers are doing, figuring out how to ladder around those organizations to develop other relationships. So let me talk to the CIO's boss, let me talk to the director of ops, let me, you know, take cookies to the ladies in accounting or whatever it is. So laddering is something that can always happen all the time. But those just off the top of my head, that some of the things that the account management is doing to strengthen internal support related to the client, but also that client relationship as well. Yeah.
Andrew Moore (44:02)
Mm-hmm.
Right, right.
Well, and I always tell I feel like it's important that from an expectation management to when it comes to, know, what what good account management looks like. Good account management is 24 seven and an MSP, right? Like it means that if something goes sideways on a Saturday and it impacts one of your clients like you expect to get a phone call.
Dan Mallard (44:39)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Andrew Moore (44:47)
Right?
Maybe hopefully from your team first, but you're to get one from a client. So anybody that's interested in becoming an account manager or one that wants to, a company that wants to put a program together, know that this is MSP, so it is a 24-7 kind of world that we live in. so account managers are really the front line of being able to calm people down.
going to be on top of things. I want to make sure that when you're looking at putting a program together, you have the expectation of when you're looking at these people and you're having these interviews and you're trying to explain to them what it looks like on a regular basis, it's like I'm expecting you to go out every week.
with a preset route and you're going to go out and you're going to meet with this client and you're going to bring cookies to this client. And if something terrible happens on a Saturday, as best as you can, I'd like for you to have your cell phone to be available in case we need to talk to you. And like it, it's a, it's a, it's a pretty interactive job, but it's also pretty structured, right?
Dan Mallard (45:51)
Yeah, it is and something I like the picture that you just painted on account management. I'll call that kind of version of account management, the steady state account management, right? But when you have change or disruption to your organization or the client organizations creates all this risk and your clients are, know, according to what I've talked about, they're turning red and turning yellow according to this form you've created. Then the next step is sort of, what do do then?
Right? Because you can have the steady state account management. You're still kind of trucking around and doing your thing and just kind of rolling around and doing your stuff. But as you have clients that are not content and they're not getting a fantastic experience.
You have to have this method or this system to say, okay, what do we do now? Okay, they're yellow. What do I do? don't take them. Like you don't know because it falls outside of this normal sort of route you have and all this stuff. So one of the things that you would consider is you're building a program is like, okay, we generally know whatever method you use to turn them yet red, yellow, green, or to evaluate their health. Well, then you need something on the backside of that to say, okay, if they turn yellow, here's the actions we're taking. Very methodical. We have a four step plan. We're going to send our CEO over there. We're going.
to review open tickets and evaluate everything that's over a week and get it done immediately, whatever it is, right? Toot, toot, toot, toot, toot. So that account management has sort of their steady state kind of watering the garden clients, but then they also have the subset of ones that they're actively.
attacking in the way that they're getting things done that repair their relationship. And so there's this mishmash of them both. And as you're building your account management team, you want to recognize that both of those are super important. You want to grow these, you you want to grow the plants, but also you want to have an actionable plan that you can mark off the things when they're done. And then you reevaluate the color of the client. Say, okay, we did all these things. So was our plan. All right, let's refill out our form, you know, and if they're still yellow, we need another plan. We need to keep attacking, keep going in this method, methodical way.
And then can always go to your owner and go look at all the stuff I did. You know, I did this plan, I did this plan, I did this plan, I did this plan. And there's no sort of like, well, I think they're all right. I swung by, they were all right, you know?
Andrew Moore (47:51)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we're at a point where we need to start wrapping things up here. And so I'm going to ask you for, you know, your kind of last thoughts and then we're gonna get into some questions. like, if you wanna leave everybody with like the best advice that you can give to anybody listening to the How to MSP podcast on what...
it means to be a good account manager or to build a great account management program. Like what would you tell somebody in just a few sentences? Like what would you tell them? Like take this nugget and this is the smartest shit I've ever given you ever. Like use this.
Dan Mallard (48:25)
Yeah.
Yeah, from a from purely like interface standpoint, like the you have your person that is the account manager, I think effective and really being developing the relationship and good communication. That's the key. That's what I want them doing is developing this relationship now from a leadership and management standpoint. How do we sort of ensure that that's happening? The client gets what they need. They're happy and they're going to, you know.
resign their contrary, they just stick around in general. We need systems in place that evaluate that in a standard methodical way over and over and over. Whatever that is, you want to put that thing in place and say, are we tracking our SBRs? No. How do we know if they're even happening? You want to make sure you have trackable, reportable things.
that are KPIs that your department uses or that team uses to evaluate whether or not they're doing good.
Right.
As you get up to enterprise, what you'll find is there's all these really cool sentiment determining AI products and it's stuff that plug into your phone system and can listen to the calls and can evaluate your tickets and go, this client's really mad. can tell, but those are expensive. Those are for enterprise great clients. Most of the time you can do very similar things downstream with way less investment by understanding, Hey, if my client falls in any of these categories, that's a problem and I need to systematically address it. So having systems in place with measurables that you
can use to do that and the number two. The account managers of relationship business MSP's of relationship business. It's a relationship position, so developing that relationship in any number of ways. That's the key.
Andrew Moore (49:53)
All right. Well, I appreciate your insight on account management. So now we're going to get into the part of the podcast where we ask you some questions. So at the end of our podcast, I ask a series of questions or the same questions, but you're going to be the first one to get them. And in all fairness, Dan got up ahead of time because he's been, there's been no podcast for him to hear what the questions are. So, so tell me what's the best book you ever read that helped you in business.
Dan Mallard (50:01)
Yeah. ⁓
Yeah
You know, I'm going to go back and so probably my kids were little, so like 20 years ago I read Good to Great. Actually, I listened to Good to Great. I listened to it on CD, if you can imagine that. Listen. ⁓ It was fantastic. Sally Jane and the Potty Patrol. Fantastic book. ⁓
Andrew Moore (50:27)
I thought you were going be like, go dog go. You were going to be like, my kids were little and I got this really awesome.
Like everybody poops. You're like,
it's the best business book I ever read, right?
Dan Mallard (50:41)
Yeah,
there's a monster. What is it? The Grover book with the monster where he's the monster. Now the good grades. Fantastic. A lot of the stuff I read in that book I was able to identify through the years of really successful things that the businesses I worked for did. One example, you get the right people in the right spots.
Andrew Moore (50:46)
Yeah.
Dan Mallard (50:57)
And this is something in our business over the last 15 years, we would iterate on that annually, almost quarterly. We would talk about it in our leadership off sites. Is everybody in the right seat? And we made changes quite a bit because we found the right people. We felt like we found the right people and we want to put them in the right seats. There's other big concepts in good to great that are really, really good. You know, one of the big takeaways is determine what you do just fantastically well and focus on that.
So for our business, it was really exceptional service and being a client advocate and really focusing on that as Andrew really grew the business over years and years and years. We were just fanatically about service and doing a good job and doing right by the client. And we did a pretty good job. But that's just some of the concepts in the book. I love it. I still use it.
Andrew Moore (51:23)
Yeah, Hedgehog.
Right.
Good
to great. Awesome. Good to great. Awesome. Okay. Next question. What is your, I stole this question. What's your favorite curse word and why?
Dan Mallard (51:54)
thought about this a little bit and I think it's just goddamn it because you can use it most places right you can use it you can use it around kids generally speaking I have a button that just says goddamn it on it made by a previous co-worker because I would say it all the time because he's just you just you know Patrick our guy would say something he just got god damn it you know and it's just that it's the best you know
Andrew Moore (51:59)
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
It's good. It's good. It's multipurpose. I'll give you that. give that.
Love it. So this is my question that I'm really most interested in because it says a lot about somebody. I'm sorry, I'm judgy. I just am when it comes to this question. Who is your favorite band and why?
Dan Mallard (52:21)
Yeah.
Yeah.
like music a lot, you know that. You can't see in the dark back there, there's a bunch of guitars back there and I love music, I love it. I love all different types of music. I think the trick for this question for me is with band, right? Like I love the continuum album by John Mayer, I love it. It's my favorite album, just the guitar work on that album is just out of this world. it's not even the John Mayer Trio, right? It's John Mayer's album, right.
Andrew Moore (52:38)
I know. I know.
Yeah, Pan.
That's, yeah, that's, isn't that the
one where he's got the studio version of Slow Dance in a burning room? Or, yeah, that's a fucking jam. That's a jam,
Dan Mallard (53:03)
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's it's
it's just the best album from a guitar perspective ever in my opinion discounting Steve Ray Vaughan, know, but I'd say band this can sound I mean, we're definitely aging ourselves, right? But this is older than even than us really was was Pink Floyd specifically the Dark Side of the Moon album, Wish You Were Here album, The Wall album is from a band perspective. Fantastic. I love it. I also love
Andrew Moore (53:29)
That's your favorite
band, Pink Floyd, all right? Or you like a...
Dan Mallard (53:31)
God, from a pure
band perspective. Yeah, I think so. It's a really hard question for me to answer. But as far as a band, band albums, band shows, now if we did something maybe more modern, I really like The Hold Steady, which is kind of this blend of alt rock and punk, and it's just really, really good stuff. if you like rock or punk or alt music from the last 10 years, The Hold Steady's really, really good.
Andrew Moore (53:34)
Okay. All right.
That's fair.
Okay, actually I've not heard them so I'd be interested in picking it up. Okay, nice, good to know. right, worst sales call or client meeting that you ever had? Tell me about it. We can't name names, we can't name names, but yeah.
Dan Mallard (53:58)
really good. I've seen them live once. Yeah.
God, you've been in two with me. have one that you were not in. No, we've had two really bad ones.
I can tell you one that you were not in though. Okay, so show up. this client was doing a move in the same building, right? I was like, all right, cool. You're moving in same building. I tell you what, I've got some time. I'm gonna swing over there just kind of get a lay of the land before the move. And I was the account manager of this account. So.
I drove all the way to Houston, had this meeting, know, schedule some other meetings, go in eight, nine o'clock in the morning, whatever, have my notebook. I'm looking around, trying to figure out what's going to move all this other stuff. And the point of contact says, hey, just come on in the conference room. And I was like, all right, cool. Because people have conference technology. It's going to move and stuff. So I go in there and I start writing down what's in there. There's this guy in there. What's this guy doing? He's like, hey, I'm glad you came today. I'm like, all right. Sat down at the table and he's like,
Basically like, hey, I understand we're in a contract, but you're going to you're going to do the right thing and let us out of the contract. We're not happy for these reasons, and it was very mafia style. It really was. And I sat down. didn't. It was like their attorney, like in-house attorney. Yeah. Yes, and he's like, I expect you to just take care of this.
Andrew Moore (55:12)
Who is the guy? He was just some rando.
he's like the conciliary.
Dan Mallard (55:23)
And I was like, I thought you I was here for a move project. I didn't know any of this. I can't speak to any of this. I'm not ready for this. Like, I don't know what to tell you. And it is really weird. It's really a trip and I drove all the way there for that. The guy was super weird about it. You know, it wasn't even somebody I know very well. Like I was like, this is a trip, man. So yeah, getting ambushed and yeah.
Andrew Moore (55:42)
Did
the MSP wind up letting them out of the contract?
Dan Mallard (55:47)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to keep my thumbs. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I didn't have to walk the site anymore, so was like.
Andrew Moore (55:48)
did. Yeah. Yeah, he made you an offer you couldn't refuse. Yeah, you like went into the server room and there was like a dead squirrel or something you're like,
Dan Mallard (56:02)
Yeah, that was a trip man like and the point of contact pull me aside and she says look, I didn't know that was going to happen before this morning. They sprung it on me too. I she was like upset and I was like yeah well. You don't get any of my time now so.
Yeah, that's pretty bad. Yeah.
Andrew Moore (56:17)
Well that's, yeah that sucks dude. Yeah,
getting fired, ambush fired. Ambush fired. All right, and then one of the questions I want to ask and ⁓ maybe you can find somebody, like who is an MSP owner or operator that is awesome enough that you think that they would be great on the pod and why?
Dan Mallard (56:24)
Yep.
Okay. Sure.
So I'm to try to
go outside of the people that I currently work with. That's what I want. That was my my my goal for this question, right? Because otherwise you're going to get just sort of the same stuff, I think. So I'm going to bring. Yeah, right, if we bring in Brian breaking, it'll be. It'll be all the same stuff, but. I'm kind of going against my own rule that I just said. But I propose Mark and so Mark Sounden.
Andrew Moore (56:42)
Okay.
You're like Ryan Lakin. Like, we should bring Ryan on.
It's Brian, Brian Bagan.
Dan Mallard (57:05)
guy that we worked with for a long time. hasn't worked with us for a long time. He's kind of had a new career and he's done some new stuff. So he probably looks at all this in a different way than you and I do because we're still really close to it. So I think, you know, here's why I like Mark. So when I was a client, he started working with Iron Edge, right? So he was like a tech lead type guy when I was a client. So it's a long time ago. And I believe he came from a bartender job. I believe he was a bartender.
Andrew Moore (57:13)
Okay. Yeah.
Yeah.
He did. Yeah,
he was.
Dan Mallard (57:30)
And he started
with no real technology experience, came in and was basically like a tech lead and very quickly was running the help desk. And he did that from what, a decade, something like that. But he was a fantastic leader for a help desk. He did a really, really good job with, because that's a unique set of people. It's normally early in their career. They're technical minded people, they may not be the best communicators.
Andrew Moore (57:39)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dan Mallard (57:56)
You know there people that often there's a high level of turnover, so it's a hard thing to manage. So I think that guy would be cool. It's totally agree and I think he has some really unique natural skills. It would be cool on this that you can maybe get him to talk about and. You know he's been doing stuff since then that may be interesting for.
Andrew Moore (57:59)
Yeah. I mean, if you could manage drunk people at a bar, right?
Well, I mean, I'm aware of the fact that he is now almost to the point where he is going to be a middle school teacher. But interestingly, I always I always think it's funny because he's like, you know, I decided I was going to go teach middle school. Well, there's probably not a huge difference between that managing a service desk, right? Because it's just like constant chaos and people freaking out and screaming all the time, both the clients and the kids. And like you're just like dealing with
Dan Mallard (58:17)
You
love to hear about it.
Andrew Moore (58:38)
18 different personalities at any given time on top of, you know, regulatory oversight and he was just like in it every day. So, yeah.
Dan Mallard (58:47)
Yeah, yeah, and I haven't talked
to him in years and it'd good for me to hear him talk to him that kind of thing.
Andrew Moore (58:51)
All
right, all right. So I will, I will definitely reach out to Mark and see if he will come on the pod with us together. Yeah. And, do it because I don't want to, I don't think it would be fair for me to just talk to Mark because I think Mark would be, I think he would be more apt to talk to both of us. So I would love that. Okay. Well, Dan, this has been enlightening. I appreciate your time on the pod and I wish you all.
Dan Mallard (58:57)
Okay.
You
Yeah, I'm glad to help. Glad to do it.
Andrew Moore (59:19)
the success and hopefully we'll get a chance to talk to you again soon. So thank you very much.
Dan Mallard (59:23)
Thanks for having me. I'm really honored you would put me on the first one. And you know, this is a really tough job for people working in the MSP world building an MSP. So if there's like anything, I know you're your servant's heart person. If there's anything that people can glean out of this discussion and take like that one smart thing I said and apply it and fantastic. I'm glad to do it.
Andrew Moore (59:41)
I'm sure that there's plenty of smart things that you said. I'm serious. You're
like, I'm like, you're super smart. You're like, ha ha ha. But no, it's been a pleasure to have you on and I appreciate your time. Thanks a lot.
Dan Mallard (59:54)
Glad to do it.
Andrew Moore (59:55)
Well, that's all for the How to MSP Podcast. If you listen to us on audio, please make sure that you subscribe to us on your favorite podcast streaming system, whether that's Apple or Spotify. Make sure that you rate and review us so other people can find our content. And if you watched us online on YouTube, please subscribe to our channel for more information on your favorite MSP training and educational videos. Thanks again.