Ep.156- Beyond IT- The secret sauce in managed services for cloud and security with Mike Gray of Thrive
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Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech.
Hey everybody, welcome back here to another episode. Here we are, believe it or not, 2025.
We got a good topic for you today. We’re continuing on this track titled Beyond IT, the Secret Sauce in Managed Services for Cloud and Security. So hopefully Mike’s got some secret sauce for us here on today. Mike Gray, CTO at Thrive. Welcome on, buddy.
Hey, thanks for having me. Hey, by the way, you got to get like a celebrity voiceover for the, I mean, you’re really good at it, but I think it’s probably time. Maybe a cameo of, I mean, maybe Morgan Freeman, right? Or the other grass tights and something like that.
I was going to try to do a Shawshank line, but I think I don’t, I don’t think I could do it.
I think you’re right.
I think I could.
I don’t want you to embarrass yourself.
All right. Fair enough. Fine. Morgan, Morgan Freeman, it is. All right. That’d be cool. There are those guys that are cheap on a cameo. That is a cool service. I’ve done that for birthdays. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Well, Mike, let’s, let’s start off with you. Help, help everybody understand, right? Chief technology offer at Thrive, Officer at Thrive. You know, fantastic supplier for ours. I do probably need to give a quick shout out. Powers, Alvaro, Derek Collins, just the broader, we got, you guys got a monster team. So we love the partnership.
This, we’ll get to Thrive in just a second. This is about you. Help us understand your career, your field, where you started, how you got here, any weird turns along the way.
Yeah. Yeah. So not often I do this. I’ve actually gone on 18 years here at Thrive. So quite the journey.
I actually was at a biotech startup before Thrive. And there is a connection to Thrive from that biotech. But my company was acquired by a $4 billion pharma.
And I was there for a while. It was really interesting going from a startup to, you know, this is, we’re talking 2006,
seeing how big, big, big IT worked back then, you know, the amount of money that was being spent on, you know, an EMC array that got you, you know, maybe 100 terabytes, something like that is crazy.
But anyway, when I left there,
Thrive became the MSP for that organization.
And it was, it was really interesting sort of, you know, transitioning through three different roles, actually doing the same job, if you really think about it. But I just tell you one funny thing. When I arrived at Thrive and started seeing a lot of different customers, and I would run into these different problems, you know, hey, this customer has no AC.
Who can we get to fix that? And I was a consultant, I remember telling people telling me like, hey, buddy, you’re a housecat, that you just things get taken care of for you. There’s this whole other world that people need help with. And now that you’re working at a service provider, it’s your job to go tell the customer and talk them through why they need to do these things. And I will say it was like jumping in a cold pool. But I really enjoyed it because I was finally able to talk to to people.
The business leaders, but hey, these are the things you need to be doing. And here’s why. And it was it was great. It was a really great start to working here at Thrive.
You know, I always sort of look back, somebody told me once, it really does matter telling the customer the right thing to do, even if it might be an expensive choice in their eyes,
a little bit more like, hey, this is the right thing for your business. And I, I will say I’ve taken that through every single day of being here. You know, because you want to you want a positive outcome.
Yeah, I love that. And I think the the customers, there’s just a feeling of authenticity when the customer knows somebody that’s helping them make this decision has been in their shoes, because they’re, you know, we talked about this on the show a little more as of late, how many times is the customer that you’re working with going to make some of these technology decisions in their life, it might be once, it might be twice, and how long ago was that, right? So being able to see what you see, consistently, I think, is a good thing. And consistently, I think is such value in their eyes, and then helping the broader organization understand that.
You know, and I look at our engineers,
you know, some of them are just starting out in their career, some have been doing it for 30 years.
When you see so many different environments like we do, we really kind of take for granted that like just seeing all these different environments is so valuable.
And even if they they’re all making different decisions, and they’re in different verticals, you can start to see what’s working for some people and what’s working, you know, not working for others. So that advice, I really feel like goes a long way.
I think the tell our partners in the same boat, right? Like they’re seeing all this stuff and what’s working. It’s really valuable.
Yeah, we do get we do get spoiled a little bit. I think it’s just becomes this, yeah, just go make this decision. And, you know, we have to slow that down. We have to kind of explain the why. And the reality we’re making the why based on, well, this is what the last 15 things that we did that looked exactly like that did and worked out really well. So, but you gotta, you gotta back it up with data, you gotta have ROI, you gotta do all these things to help them. They’ve made investments already. So there’s a lot that that factors into it for sure. All right, let’s see here. So for our partners, you know, some of the folks that listen to the show may have never jumped deep into kind of some of the managed service buckets of cloud and security and beyond that you guys offer. So help everybody understand. How do you go to market? Who are you guys? What do you offer? And how is it different than others out there? I think.
Sure, sure. So, you know, we, we look at ourselves as a next gen managed service provider and say, well, what does that mean next gen?
Well, first and foremost, I would tell you, we really are focused on outcomes. Now we might dig into cloud and security in very different ways than another partner. We’re not really leading with you need to buy this brand name. We really don’t do that. Now we also understand that at some point, the technology underneath is extremely important, right? So I would, you know, we do a lot with security and cloud, but there’s really a lot in the stack that just about everything in the stack that you might possibly need. We can go down those ventures with you. I always tell people there’s very little that we don’t do when it comes to it. We might not do it exactly the way that you were looking or hoping for, but we don’t turn down any conversation. Customer needs help with technology.
Customers comes in all shapes and sizes.
Their problems can be very different.
And then that to me, that’s part of the thing that makes it interesting. But the real different here, it’s safe for us. Obviously, a pretty large organization at this point, global company fully 24 by 7 and multiple geos.
But the real big difference here and, you know, on the product development side, I have a big hand in this is.
No matter what the customer contracts from us, we don’t make the customer play middle person.
What we found is, you know, you’ve got your security provider on one phone and then you’ve got your MSP in another saying they’re telling me somebody’s trying to break in. OK, go put this rule on your firewall.
It really is the integration of our services and the integrated experience is what I’m shooting for on the product development side. And I’d say we’ve achieved that quite a bit.
Can you can you dive? Can we double click on that for a minute? I mean, give us an example. Is it? Hey, I’ve bought Sentinel one. You guys are taking over and managing or whatever. Pick an OEM. Just give us an example.
Yeah, well, one thing we don’t really do on my way or the highway, right? So you perhaps you bought Sentinel one or an MDR service that’s powered by Sentinel one from drive for a thousand workstations to those workstations. We’ll say, hey, do you have a way to deploy this to these two thousand works?
No, I don’t. Just thrive. Well, yes, we do. And that is another service. But if you and we’ll say, hey, we can see you’ve already contracted for this other service. We’re just going to take care of the rollout for you. Now, we don’t do things without permission from the customer. But the way we look at it, I try to look at it from the customer’s perspective. Like, well, if thrives managing my endpoints from an IT perspective and I’ve contracted for a security service that goes on my endpoints.
Well, as a customer, I would expect that thrive is going to take care of these two things. And I don’t have to play project manager between two thrive departments. I think in the industry, especially to get a little bit bigger. That happens a lot. You know, left hand not talking to the right hand. So that’s where I would say to dig a little bit deeper. But then look at all the services you bought DR from us and you bought cloud.
Well, of course you want those two things to be coordinated and talking to you. But I think sometimes these things can get missed. Fair point.
So let’s flashback 18 years plus hard lesson, maybe a great thing from a mentor, just something that’s really helped kind of shape this journey for you.
Yeah, you know, I would tell you, it’s that this is a hard lesson for me as an engineer and someone that gives people advice and I think also hard lesson for the customers in the story. You know, when ransomware was, you know, there was a time where ransomware wasn’t a thing in my career.
And when it started to, you know, you sort of started to see it here and there on a desktop there like, okay, like that happened. You know, we can remove it. And then when ransomware really got big.
And and the bad guys were having a lot of luck, sadly.
I got into a lot and I can remember it was in the fall a couple years ago. And basically every Friday night between October and November, I get a phone call that another prospect had gotten ransomware.
And, you know, we had warned them you’re extremely susceptible to this. And they were calling us because they had nobody else to call.
Right. That was the reason they were talking. And maybe we had done an assessment. They hadn’t followed our recommendations as an IT person. I think a lot of the people as a podcast can understand. I told you so doesn’t help your business and it doesn’t help the customer. Right. And, you know, you sort of identify with this. I told you. Well, I told them this was going to happen. Okay. Well, it happened anyway.
And they’re going to go out of business. We don’t help them. Now, there’s a lot of details that go into this. Right. Like, but it’s Friday night and maybe there’s 200 people that work at this prospect. And none of them are going to have jobs next week.
So that I told you the other thing was really tough for me to swallow over the years because I was right the whole time. But did it matter?
Yeah, it really didn’t. So, you know, and it really, I think, powered our ability to talk about prevention and also to build what we released last year was our incident response and remediation service, which really is a break glass service. It’s really focused on not having to use it. So I don’t I don’t know if on the podcast folks have ever talked about. I’m sure we’ll talk about our services a little bit more.
We’re going to get to service. I love this call out. It’s a it’s a, you know, empathy is we’re not all born with it. You know, I struggle with that a lot early on, you know, and my mom had to kind of drill that into me. Hey, just because someone doesn’t say the answer that you think doesn’t mean that they’re dumb. It means that maybe you figured it out and they haven’t figured it out. But, you know, people don’t like being talked to a certain way. So I can I can definitely I can definitely relate. People want to be treated like people. And at the end of the day, they just want to help. And I think what you called out there is big because I’m convinced that we’re not, you know, we’re defined by certain things. But what people really remember is not always all the things that you say. It’s how did you help them when they were at their worst or how did you help them when they were in the trenches? You went you go through battle with somebody and things are defined. And so I love I love that call out because if you can help them in that moment, you know, you can you can help them in any moment. Yeah.
And it’s not an ideal business scenario for Thrive, but OK, so it’s not ideal. Right. All right. So you’re going to help them or not. Like and I will tell you, I’ll be a little vulnerable with the air a minute. Our CEO used to tell me, hey, Mike, you can you can be right and still be wrong.
Right. It’s like, oh, that’s a dagger. Right. Like, yeah. And so, you know, I’m hoping he’ll listen because I think he’ll appreciate that. But but, you know, that that’s exactly right in that moment. OK, so tell the customer that you told them so and let their business die. Is that the right thing to do? It’s not.
Love it.
All right. So let’s think about this. You guys see a lot. Right. We see a lot. You see a lot.
Let’s talk about we’ll get to a customer challenge. We’ll get some more of your tech stack here right after this. But walk us through what are you seeing? What are you seeing? You know, you’re seeing I know you guys got deep in financial expertise, but there’s just so much you can unpack cloud security, unique needs across these customers, common needs. I mean, help our partners that are out there prospecting help them understand.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the biggest things and it is concerned about the cost of the business. It is concerning is what I would call sort of misguided investments. So you see invested in a piece of technology security or otherwise usually technology.
And it was put in and put in incorrectly or was put in. And, you know, the thing you really needed to do, which was configure.
I somebody called me. I hit accept instead of decline.
So, you know, is configure the alerting configure the logging like you did it. You did everything right except the last piece that was super important. And so that is a very troubling thing. Sorry. This is a
I see over and over again.
And then it’s just a lost investment at that point because they did. They didn’t do what I would consider the easy things.
You know, they bought a firewall that had all the latest and greatest intrusion prevention. They didn’t turn it on.
Nobody even asked the question. Hey, that thing that we bought that for. Are we getting the value out of it? And that’s what I’m really zeroed on is zeroed in on, you know, when it comes to the deployment of our tools.
You think about I mean over these last couple years, we talked a lot when we really started focused in an unsecurity years ago about the lack of resource at the customer level, how expensive it is to try to build a sock on your own. We kind of went through some math on that all of these things, right? It all came back to a talent global domestic whatever you want to look at a talent shortage. So is that I mean, it seems to me that looking at how fun and exciting but yet can be complicated prompt engineering and AI is we’ve layered in more potential talent shortages, right? Here’s security billion, you know, zillion jobs missing.
And now people want prompt engineers where they just haven’t had that experience for years.
Seems like a compounding effect. Are you still seeing that? You know, you talk about they bought the firewall, they didn’t, they didn’t turn it on. They didn’t configure right. What’s your take on the global talent shortage with what you’re seeing now? You know,
what I what I see, and I’ve seen this for a long time is people trying to build service based on superheroes. Okay, so I got the best engineer in the world. Okay, he does it right every time.
He works 70 hours a week.
And I only got one of them. And so we really have to take a step. I look at superhero process and go, hold on a second.
That guy’s not here. How do we make sure that that gets done? And it really comes back to standards and process.
And we talk a lot internally. It’s funny you bring a prompt engineering talk a lot internally about automating the five minutes.
You know, there’s a step of turning on the IPS actually takes five minutes.
But if it’s depending on a human being to make sure they click the buttons just right like, I’ll, you know, we built a lot of automation and someone would go, you know, having a human do it takes about 35 seconds like I know that I don’t want the human to do it because there’s a potential they could do it wrong.
I want a lot of that lower end stuff just out of their minds.
Because, you know, we’ve actually noticed you say it’s five minutes, but I had to train the person to do it correctly.
You know, they got to log on to a VPN, they got an SSO, it’s actually more than a couple of minutes for a lot of these lower end tasks.
And really getting the, you know, these super smart people focusing on the things that only humans can do.
Maybe helping us build an AI model that could answer questions from a more junior, that’s where I need those people, the knowledge in their heads.
So if you take that then, right, I love that.
I take that, translate that to I’m a prospect, I’ve got a basic customers, I’m going to go, I’m going to go talk to them as they kind of learn more about, you know, some of your OEMs, some of your offerings and the products that we’re going to talk about even further. But pause for a second on, you know, what we’re going to get to next and just say, based on that, how do you tweak that, go to the customer? Is it, what’s your IT team like? What’s the depth of that? What happens if that person goes away? What’s the right way to, how do customers want to be asked to that?
You know, I sort of get it, I have this sort of running joke with some of our sales folks that like, I’m not a salesperson, I’ve been involved in a couple of sales. Like maybe one was just me in the history of the guy. I’m one to know. That’s my win-loss.
I, when I do talk to customers in the sales cycle, my question to them is how can I help you? What do you need help with? Because I’m sure I can help you. But, you know, if I’m being prescriptive on a problem that you don’t even have, like, what, why are we even having this conversation? And then, you know, the transparency of they say, well, I have this problem.
And I say, well, here’s in somewhat detail how we’re going to help you with that problem.
Right. And not a lot of, well, we’re going to engage with you on over a second. I’m talking about tactically, this is how we’re going to make that work. And I can tell, you know, I actually speak a lot in the details of our product because I know how they all fit together.
What I’m usually trying to communicate is a tactical level. Well, this other problem is not going to happen anymore because we have this process, which is part of this service, that it’s essentially impossible for that problem to happen again.
You know, and I would really say with our scale globally and the people we have,
just we have to have process internally for things to work. To stay in business, I would even say, like, whereas I think smaller organizations might go, well, I don’t really have the time to build that process or the people. So I’ll just continue with the way it’s going and I’ll put the superhero on it.
And that’s the best it’s going to be. Automation, standardization and processes are requirements of our business. They’re not nice to have.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I never thought I thought these were a bunch of, you know,
fluffy words when we talked about process and, you know, procedures and all those things early on. I was like, nah, you just you turn the knob, you get the right thing and manage is awesome.
The least exciting thing, but probably most of the time, the most convincing thing for a customer to understand is we’ve figured out scale process is key to that. Here’s how we scale and here’s how we help you build the process. Oh yeah. And by the way, there’s some tech associated with it. I think just hearing that going, oh my gosh, we don’t even do that. I didn’t even think.
You’re like, oh my gosh, it’s so basic. You know, we talk a lot about automation, obviously internally and,
you know, when I get asked about it in a variety of forums, I will be very honest with a customer in the fact that, yes, automation is good for my business.
I make more. We as a provider, yes, we are for profit organization. We make more money by automating. And by the way, it’s better for everybody.
You know, and so like, I don’t know if this is even tough to hear what you think, but it really is the truth. Everything that I can automate is better for us as a business and we’re a stronger business providing more value. I don’t feel bad telling people that.
No, it’s consistency. It’s consistency. I just don’t think they always think of it like that. They just think what we have works right now.
And sometimes sometimes scale happens really slow. So it’s a little more manageable. And then other times it hits you upside the face and happens really quick. And you have pain along the way in different varying forms. And so I think just that here’s how I can give you predictability, automation and scalability to the parts of your business that matter. No, I don’t. I don’t. I wouldn’t feel guilty to me. That’s confidence in a great product and a great process.
Yeah. Yeah. And I know, you know, if your core business is not I.T. or security or any of these other things, I would assume you don’t have a lot of great I.T. automation because you’re a manufacturing company.
Well, my business is those things. I have those things because I need to, not because I’d like to.
And that is also another recurring theme in all this is depending on your vertical. It’s unlikely that you have a lot of these pieces that I have because it’s not what you’re focused on.
Fair. All right.
We got to get into some OEM soup here. So you guys, you guys got a lot. You know, first of all, let’s let’s preface with maybe there’s this idea of, hey, maybe we can take over some things that a customer has. Maybe we can sell net new if they need net new. If you think about that frame as we get into cloud, we get into security, help the partners understand. If I hear some of these types of tech stacks, we can go secure and go cloud and kind of go spend some time here. What do you got?
So let’s start with endpoint protection, right? It’s a very common one that comes up. Customer says I’ve got an expiring carbon black. I’ve picked somebody out of the way. I got an expiring carbon black contract and I need a new endpoint tool.
You know, we want to help solve endpoint problems, not pick a new endpoint tool.
So just in that space. And I would say this is the most variety we have. We have three choices for endpoints. And there’s a very specific reason why we have endpoints. Now, Thrive’s a big Fortinet shop.
One of the largest Fortinet managed service providers in the country, probably the globe.
So we have a Fortinet based solution. We have Sentinel one and then we also have Defender for endpoint.
And the Defender for endpoint is, Microsoft changes with their licensing over the last couple of years. There were just so many people that were saying, hey, I already own this. I just want you to manage it, right? And it was pretty straightforward for us to integrate with. And then we have Defender for endpoint.
And the thing we’re doing is, hey, regardless, people have brand name preferences.
Well, we’re not going to have a sushi menu of every endpoint tool out there because I can’t standardize on 17 different endpoint platforms. But we want to make sure we have some, hey, I’m just not really a fan of Fortinet. No problem. We’ll put you on Sentinel one. We’ll also explain the differences between each one.
Some people will say, what’s the cheapest?
Okay, you want to buy based on price? We can have those conversations.
What I would tell you, what we’re focused on is, do you have a strong endpoint tool and an endpoint process regardless of the brand name?
And I would look at that through the whole stack. Hey, I got to get out of Azure and go back on prem. Fantastic. Let’s have that conversation with you.
I want to go to a hybrid private cloud in a data center where I know where my gear is. We can absolutely help you there.
I think one of the biggest things, and this was a change in our history going back seven years. We’re a very engineering focused company in those days.
Our favorite word was no.
And we really did a huge transformation going back seven, eight years of, let’s start with yes.
You know, yes, but I have some more questions or yes, but how can I help you do that?
Because if you’re starting with no, things are never going to grow. And I would say that to everybody in this industry, whether on the sales side or the engineering side.
Hey, you know, don’t let that technology or the brand name be the thing that’s going to stop this whole story in its tracks.
Do you have another endpoint solution? No, we don’t get to have the follow up conversation.
Right. And so we’re talking to customers about their needs. There’s very little we cannot help them with. So they say, hey, can Thrive help with X. Yes, but I’m probably going to need to last you a few more questions. Okay, great. Now we get to have the follow up.
I love I love hearing that the we’ve heard many of the engineering department of knows before, you know, and I think it’s a it’s a transition of no to it depends to. Yeah, let me let me figure that out. But you’re right. Yes, it depends. Give me give me the questions. Give me the answers. Right. We’re we’ve just got these funnels, these these maps in our brain, and we were fixers. We want to map the right thing to it. But we don’t want to let anybody down and we want to make sure that we’ve we’ve looked at as many around as many corners, I think, as we possibly can. I love to hear that transition.
Yeah, and I’ll give you one other example and maybe overstated at this point. But for years, people would ask us to do penetration testing. The answer was no.
We started doing automated pen testing a couple years ago, which I’m a huge fan of personally that works extremely well.
And we tried to, you know, we set our our sales targets on automated pen testing very low. Because, well, we don’t do this. And, you know, for a million different reasons, I didn’t want to say we were going to hit some number that we couldn’t hit.
It was I think it was five times our projections in a year. And I think we hit five times eight months into the first year. I was like, whoa.
And we actually saw a lot of follow on from a follow on revenue from those automated pen tests. And I figured something out. The customer called us up and said, do you do pen testing? No. And the conversation. Well, now it was yes, but we do automated pen testing.
And that little trigger was amazing to me and a huge lesson learned that you when you say no, you don’t get to hear what the next piece of information is.
Right. And there was a lot. There was a very eye opening experience for sure.
Yeah. I learned this or somebody shared this with me somewhere along the way. The Department of No versus how it could be when you’re talking to customers. And if you if you look even at the most basic if you’re into acting and comedy and improv, it’s the one thing they teach you and you’re going back and forth when you’re riffing with somebody. The second they say, you know, oh, hey, Mike, you know, isn’t it funny? And you go, no, there’s right. You just can’t say same theory applies. I love hearing that same theory of it’s a oh, yeah. Oh, man. Did you hear about on the news? Can you believe that? Yeah, yeah. It was the back and forth and it enables the conversation. I love that.
We’re not going to jump into any and prep now, right? This isn’t like a surprise thing that you’re gonna.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that would. No, we’d have to prep for that. Prep improv. No, I love this.
All right. Any you want to maybe walk us through any any cool use cases, customer wins over the years and kind of what we like to hear on this is what was the problem? What was the business problem? Was it all kind of drawn out right away? Did you uncover more and really what did that tech stack look like in the customer environment after just we can keep names hidden. Yeah, yeah.
Might be a little bit detailed and technical, but I but I want to mention it anyway. We had a long time customer, very large organization as far as number of employees go very important. And they had their own IT staff and obviously we provide IT services to them help their services, things like that. We were almost constantly at odds.
And when you’re at odds with a very large customer, got a long time, like, that’s not a fun experience, you know, every every six months or so we got to come back to the table. And this guy’s right. This guy’s wrong. And this data is it was never. Yeah, I just I could never stand. We’re in a rat race. And we developed our service now sort of co-management tooling right around the same time. You know, this is when I say this was a small, not a small organization, they had 40 IT people and we probably have had 40, 50 assigned on our side. There are about 100 people trying to work together. Well, the interesting thing is they were working in one work stream on their side.
And we’re working on another platform on our side service now.
And, you know, we kept pointed all these relationship problems.
And then at one point,
and I got to be honest, I think it was our sales team that said, hey, well, we just developed this new service now product where they work in our service now side by side in a very secure way. And Josh, I’m telling you like magic.
We deployed that technology solution. Now we’re singing off one sheet of music.
And it was amazing to hear the feedback from both sides that now the left hand knows right hand is doing everybody’s in the clear. And more importantly, we started building automated processes because we could see both sides of the equation. And now I’m not saying that we don’t have to continue to nurture that relationship with this customer. But everything has changed for us because, again, we’re working as one hundred person team and not this all day.
And it really it really is cool to hear positive feedback from someone that, you know, there was a lot of pains over the years and our engineers who used to maybe avoid working on that customer.
People do that. They’re like, oh, it’s so easy now you just you can work right together. There’s somebody there. It does feel like one team. You know, so technology is not going to solve every problem out there. Sometimes it could be the catalyst to solve a problem.
And so that’s one I always highlight. We’ve seen this a lot where you’ve got the clients, I.T. team at a large organization and thrive and they’re just not really working together. And when we move them into ServiceNow or integrate our ServiceNow with theirs, it really just make a smooth experience for everybody. It’s not the most common product that we have. I’m super proud of it. We love it. It’s growing like crazy for us. And I do feel it’s unique on the on the co-managed side of the world.
It is. It is. I got to think that that has to be just standardizing on some sort of I.T.S.M. has to be such a game changer for you guys because it isn’t this kind of locked out monolithic thing. I mean, there’s just so many hooks and integrations and things that you can do into ServiceNow. Again, if we’re back on this theme of don’t say no and it’s a yes, I mean, you can just sit there confidently and go, yeah, we could probably do that in ServiceNow. Yeah.
Yeah. And, you know, I didn’t I was not a 20 years with ServiceNow. I mean, there hadn’t been a really been around 20 years. We came into it as part of our growth. And when you know there’s going to be people with some posits. Oh, Mike’s fanboying on ServiceNow. Like, OK, yeah, so I am.
But what you start to realize with a lot of these platforms, ServiceNow, Sales for Azure, AWS, these platforms, the technology is not the hurdle. The technology can do it.
And that’s when someone says, hey, can we do X and service now? Like, there’s very little chance we can’t do that. But what do you want the process to be and what do you want the outcome to be? Right. What’s your objective? Well, I’m not really sure what my objective is. OK, well, that’s a great conversation for anybody to have if you’re technical or not. Yeah. Like, hey, I just want to be able to onboard my new employees effectively.
Fantastic. We can use technology to help you do that. Yeah, there you go. But when you when you’re leading with a piece of technology, it’s like, it’s not going to magically fix problems.
Use technology to get other things done.
Great.
All right. As we get final couple of thoughts here, your your advice, you know, we got partners that maybe they go to a Telarus event, maybe they’ve done the LMS, maybe they’ve spent some time with the amazing Chris Moore. Another shout out. There’s a lot of ways to do it. I mean, what how do you want them to walk away from this? Is there golden questions to ask? I love questions sometimes that just gets the conversation started a little bit. I mean, how would you ask them to walk away positioning what we’ve talked about?
All right. I’m going to I’m going to give the disclaimer that I have my little snarky questions that I use that I used to use. I still use.
And it really comes from a place of trying to get the customer to give me some feedback. So the first example that that used to do this when I would sit down with new customers and do it most often. Hey, is there anybody sit down with a couple couple of contacts for customer? Is there any before we have a conversation about security? Is there anybody in your organization? Mr. Customer, Mr. Customer dedicated to the customer? Dedicated to security.
Do you have an employee whose full time job is security? Well, you know, the CFO spends a little bit of time working with the director of I.T. looking. OK, so you don’t have anybody dedicated. No. Right. That’s a no.
My follow on question.
Usually I know the answer. That’s why. Yeah, yeah. Really, really. We’re leading to the water.
Yeah. And then the other one is out, you know,
separate from your I.T. budget. Do you have a security budget?
And usually the answer to that one’s no as well. Or do you know how much you’re spending on security today?
And the bridge there for me is are you getting the value out of that investment that you’re making?
And again, now I can just it’s kind of easy that the next part of the conversation comes very smoothly to them. Well, we made a big investment in this sim and, you know, no one’s really looking at the alerts and we just had this breach. It’s easier after that because you’re sort of laying the groundwork for the next part of what you want to hear.
You probably won’t be surprised here. I am a huge fan of our assessment services, Dave Sampson. So I’ll do the shout out.
I have I’ve been a part of that team many, many years ago.
You know, I’ll be honest, I think sometimes and I would say this, but any salesperson, they rush to signature of that big contract. Any any salesperson in the world, the assessment, you do slow down a little bit. You know, there is revenue there, but you can get on some really good trusted advisor footing when it comes to an assessment. You’ll learn a lot more about the customer. The customer learns more about you.
And, you know, I really see those customers that do an assessment as people who we’re going to be with for the long term.
Because we slowed down a minute. We talked about what the issues were and we didn’t just rush to signature. And I’m sure everybody on a podcast like this, like signatures, like one
of the most exhilarating things you can get here. Press hard.
Yeah. But but it’s a long term customer for me that I’m interested in. Right. And I think that anybody would say that. Right.
For sure.
One one last thing just on what you said before we kind of close this out.
What’s your what’s your favorite response? Because I just love talking about objection handling. What’s your favorite response when you know, you know, the customer has a need. You’ve you’ve you’ve fleshed out some sort of need and you do ask that question of do you have a budget set aside for security? Right. And if they if they say yes, then you obviously go down that track. But what if they say no, what’s your follow on for that?
Well, my follow on for that is actually learning a little bit about their business. Right. So do you have a budget for hiring? Do you have a budget for real estate, whatever might be. And when you know, depending what they say and I will sort of counter with them, are you telling me that security is not as important as hiring?
Right.
Right. It’s again, it’s Josh, these are easy. Like I’ve been through this. Like, you know, I did the security thrive, something that’s on my radar.
I look at for us, our CSO and I, we calculate dollars spent on security per employee.
And we watch that number very closely. We got to back into it sometimes. Right. Like we take our penetration testing that we do a couple of times a year and we calculate, I guess it was two bucks for a person, whatever it might be.
But it really is a good barometer because sometimes you’re, you know, some of it are going to spend it too much. Like what if you’re spending too little?
Right. And, you know, do you have investors, do you have a board and you go to them and say, we really don’t spend much money on cybersecurity and we’re at risk.
Let them say no.
I love it. All right. Final thoughts.
This can be a just things that you guys have that are coming out. We’re going to talk about the future just a little bit. So is there is there innovations in the industry you’re most looking forward to? Is there innovations that you guys are rolling out that you want the partners to kind of be aware of that you think will change the game? Take this anywhere you want to take it. Anything you want to share here.
Yeah. So I guess I don’t know that this is actually a public thing, but I guess I’m allowed to say it. So we are in the midst of building a really amazing client portal.
Going to show the value of all of our services to the customer,
you know, near frictionless experience for our customers to manage their technology services, not just open a ticket.
We have been on a six month journey with UX consultants, UI consultants.
IT is just a world that’s almost spinning in chaos every day.
And I’m very excited to say, like, you know,
in the summertime, we’ll be able to release something that I would tell you would separate, you know, thrive from everybody else out there. And I don’t even mind, you know, putting myself out there that I said all these things. I know what it looks like. I know the team that’s working on it. And I think the big thing here is that we are solely focused on improving the client experience.
Not what a help desk manager needs. That’s not my interest, right? When you’re interacting with Drive on our portal, I want you to have the best experience on the planet. And so super excited, you know, to release that this summer, hopefully a little bit earlier, but, you know, dev timelines are what they are. So that’s really the big one. The other thing I would tell you is, and, you know, I guess I have to say this, there’s a meeting of all the CTO’s of the world once a month. And these are the things you have to say when you go on a podcast. But AI assistants are, you know, I think everybody’s going to have one. It’s painfully obvious that everybody’s going to have one.
I think organizations are probably going to have 10 to 15 models that are that are tailored to them. The technology is here today. We as human beings got to catch up. So, you know, this is your executive team model that you can ask questions, you know, who’s our most important customer?
That an executive, that a CEO could ask without having to ask five other people to build them a dashboard. That’s the other area that I’m really excited.
We have some things cooking on that front.
But, you know, we don’t want to put a bunch of technology out there that that people aren’t getting the value from because maybe not all the steps are there to deploy it. So I’d say really those two things are the ones I’m most excited about.
That is a good place to wrap it. Definitely lots of good sauce, lots of secret sauce in here. Tons of nuggets, man. Tons of nuggets. Mike, thanks. Thanks so much for coming on, man.
I’d love to do it again sometime if you’ll have me.
So absolutely, absolutely. We’ll get you back on.
All right.
OK, everybody, that wraps us up for today. As always, don’t forget, wherever you’re listening to Apple Music, Spotify, wherever it may be, make sure that you’re following, subscribing. You get these drops every Wednesday and you can go apply some of these great things that our guests are sharing. So awesome stuff. Mike Gray, CTO at Thrive. This has been Beyond IT, the secret sauce in managed services for cloud and security. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP at Sales Engineering at Telarus. Until next time.