Ep. 94 - Automate to Elevate: Barb Talks with George Smith from Rewst

Hey folks, welcome to No Tech Talk with Barb, tips, advice, and consulting from your business's IT department. I am your host, Barb Plooskowicz. And for those of you taking notes, Paluskowicz is spelled the exact way it sounds, Paluskowicz. Trust and verify on our website, cdntechnologies.

com. We are going to dive into the latest innovations shaping the world of IT and managed services. So today we have George Smith from Roost, a company that's revolutionizing automation for MSPs. Now let's be real for a second.

If you're with an IT provider who's slow to respond, constantly missing deadlines, or fixing the same issues over and over again, have you ever stopped to wonder why? Maybe the problem isn't their workload. Maybe it's their workflow. Because what if their checklist is in their head and they're just simply forgetting things?

Frank Abagnale, famously portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can, once said, Every cyber attack happens because someone did something they shouldn't have done or failed to do something they should have done. And that's where Roost comes in. And George is here to explain how MSPs automate to elevate, giving companies like CDN Technologies the tools to be more organized, more proactive, and efficient so that customers can get the fast, reliable, and IT support that they actually deserve.

So let's jump in. George, welcome to No Tech Talk. Thank you very much for agreeing to do this. I'm excited to have you here.

And you know what, before we dive into the nuts and bolts of automation, well, why don't we start with a quick intro and you can tell everybody who you are. Yeah, thanks so much, Barb. It's great to be on the podcast. Thanks so much for inviting me.

My name is George Smith. I am the Community Engagement Manager at Roost and proud to live not too far away from you in Ontario, Canada. How long have you been in the IT space, George? Gosh, I've been in the IT space now for eight years.

So coming up on a decade and like so many other people I hear whenever they tell their origin stories, I like to use the term, I kind of fell into IT. I went to school for sports science and coaching. I spent a lot of my early 20s doing a variety of sales jobs, working bars, selling phones, being an outdoor instructor. And when I moved to Canada, I kind of lived the sort of summer camp ski bum life for a few years, got fed up of not making any money.

And so when knocking doors, which is at that time, a kind of old fashioned way to go get a job and ended up knocking on the door of maybe not quite an MSP, maybe an accidental MSP is what they might refer to themselves. I think they thought it was really funny, like, who's this 20 something year old coming and trying to hand in a printed out resume and CV to an IT company without any IT experience? And I just said, well, look, you've got a whole room back there full of people with IT experience, you know, and you're looking for someone to help grow the business.

Maybe you should roll the dice on someone from a different background with different ideas and thoughts. And they seemed to like that answer. And we got on really well. And that was kind of my first plunge into IT.

So spent four years there, which was great. And then moved over to the other side of the fence, kind of went to the dark side and started working for some of the vendors that we have in the space. and had the privilege of working over at Augment in Canada as a startup and help getting things off the ground there, which was a lot of fun. And now at Roost.

So, yeah, that's a quick synopsis. So eight years, that's eight human years. So in IT years, it's kind of like dog years. So it's actually like 56 years you've been in the IT space because time just seems to, like, multiply here.

And, you know, I have great respect for the door to door, you know, delivery method of getting people to know who you are. This is my first flyer. You know, from CDN Technologies, fast, affordable on site virus response and cleanup, wireless networks, remote access, data backup, emergency recovery, network installation, upgrades, support, supporting business, Internet security, development and solutions. immediate service, we understand your business.

It was my trifle that I went knocking door to door on that heel toe express looking for business out here in Mississauga Oakville I right on the border of Bristol Circle so it right Yeah funny how that happens And it always works out for the good So I know that Roost is into automation of IT So for those people, let's get a big picture going on here. So if you're not familiar with automation in IT, George, can you break it down? Like what does Roost actually automate? And why should businesses care if their MSP has automation in their service delivery?

Yeah, absolutely. So Roost is an automation platform. It's vendor agnostic. And what it's doing is it's helping you as an MSP connect and integrate your entire stack.

A way to think about it that Charlie, our CRO, described to me once, which I really like, is picture your stack as members of the orchestra. So you've got your woodwind, your brass, your percussion. Roost is like the orchestra. It's helping everything actually play and work together in a way that makes sense and sound good and that actually works.

So in the platform itself, it's all about creating workflows. So a workflow, just think of basically a set of tasks from start to finish. An example could be onboarding, offboarding, password resets, things like that. And Roost allows you to take what is traditionally a very manual process, maybe broken into dozens of steps across multiple platforms and tie them all together so that you can basically set it up.

But then it runs without needing humor interaction. That means it's always going to be error free. And ultimately, one of the main things that people are looking at in Roost is time savings. So for you, particularly as a business owner, Barb, you might want to deep dive into some forensics of tasks that your team is doing today, maybe manually or partially manually and work out like if we're onboarding or offboarding a user, how long does that take us?

Well, Barbara takes us maybe 20 minutes, 30 minutes per user. Okay, so that's a long time if we have to onboard five new users. Whereas if you can use Roost to set up an automation that just automatically does onboarding, regardless of the RMM and PSA and where you get your Microsoft licenses from, it understands all of that. And you can push a button and get someone onboarded in seconds, the same way, the correct way, every time.

it's going to one save you a lot of money as a business owner for efficiency but it's also going to save your techs a lot of mental stress I think that's something that's overlooked as well a real success for automation is you know tech burnout is you know a key thing today right like the the the manual tasks of being a tech um how technology is always changing like it's a lot of work so we can help really make their lives easier I think that's that's a key component of automation as well.

You know what? And that just all translate into making a better service experience for the customer because when they have to hire someone, when someone quits or they get terminated from their employment, it makes it easy for IT to make sure that the environments are secure, They can't access things anymore. It's all shut down when they're terminated or that they have all of the tools that they need when they start their job and they can hit the ground running. So it makes it stress-free.

It gives customers peace of mind that, okay, I don't have to wait two, three months for my IT guy to get it done. I'm not going to have to listen to my employees complaining, oh, I'm waiting on IT. Because once you have a good streamlined process in play, I like to say it's a clickety-click barber trick. And it kind of is.

Like, you know, because, you know, everyone has their role, what to do. Because when you onboard and you offboard, you forget. like for a small business, adding them to payroll, adding them to benefits, you know, giving them insurance, giving them a desk, giving them a phone, giving them a computer, giving them access to like applications, things like that, making sure that they have a pen, making sure that they have a pencil, a notepad and something to write, like all of these things.

But when you have a good checklist in play, that's great. Now, if you want to level up, when you have an automation in place, then that makes it even quicker, better, faster, and stronger. And it gives you the ability to like breathe and be confident and say, Okay, I got this. This has been done.

So any success stories about Roost automation you can share with us? Tons. I think we just had a partner to I kind give the specific name of but just came through to us this week and just mentioned in the past six months they've saved at two hundred thousand dollars so think about what that does for your business in terms of not needing to um hire another technician right um based on on on scalability uh on the money that that can be put towards to whether it advancing your own stack or I mean just profitability right So there huge cost savings there I think the feedback that we get from our community as well is huge.

A lot of the folks that really live in Roost are kind of the builders, like the true technicians who want to get into the weeds of workflows. of creating these integrations, of unpacking creates. Create is basically like an integration, a workflow that we've created. So you just unpack it instantly and there you go.

You can use it right away. But those guys have been blowing up on our Discord channel. So we have a Discord community that's almost a thousand MSPs in there and they are chattering away to each other all day. And it's beautiful to see the collaboration and the shared success there.

As someone who's passionate about the community, whenever I go in and see someone asking a question, hey, I have X problem. I've tried doing it this way. It hasn't really worked. Does anyone else have ideas?

And three or four other people jump on that comment and say, oh yeah, we use the exact same stack. Here's what we did. Here's the code snippet. And just kind of sharing their experience, their success, what to do, what even what not to do to help people have a more streamlined path to success.

Yeah, it's pretty cool to see a lot of unhinged banter in there as well, which always makes a smile on your face during the day too. Yes, that it does. And I think that automation is getting to be quite the norm. And to like, just to go broad here, you know, bank tellers went to bank machines.

You still have a bank teller there, so you can still talk to person. But now at least you can, if you're on the mood and you're hustling, you can hit a bank machine, You can hit a teller and move forward. Even in the grocery stores, I remember when they had the self-checkout. At first, I was like, I hated those machines.

But now when I only have like a few items and things like that, I'm just like, is there anyone in the self-checkout? Great, there isn't. Because I could like hustle. I could get like in and out as opposed to waiting for the line, waiting for the person.

So I think that when a lot of people hear automation, they assume that it might be replacing humans. But in reality, it's about making people's lives easier for the employer. Yes, sometimes it's hard to find good people. So if you can make the job easier for one of your employees, it'll help your team work faster and smarter, not necessarily harder.

Is that making sense? Am I getting a good grip of it here? Yeah, we really like to stress that point, Barb, because I think that is a natural thought that people have is robots are taking our jobs and automation is the fast track to that. And it's just not really accurate.

What we're trying to say is kind of what you've said is I'll go back a step further, even the idea of the industrial revolution. And prior to that, people hand making things one by one and all of a sudden factories pop up. Now you can rapidly create whatever product, you know, physical product you're doing. It's going to be the exact same every time.

And that allowed, you know, factories to scale their businesses. The same is true now in the digital revolution that we're having. There's all these processes. You know, you spoke earlier about someone being onboarded and you've got to make sure they have a pen and, you know, their taxes.

You're so true. And even if you look at setting up someone in Microsoft, right? Okay, what license are we going to give them? Do we have one of those licenses?

If not, we've got to go buy one. Roost can do that all. You can set up that workflow. So it just kind of follows the trail and says, okay, Barb's coming on board.

She needs this license. We don't actually have one of those today. Cool, go buy one. I got the license.

What's next? She needs to be part of these groups. Great. I don't know.

What's next? And it happens in seconds instead of minutes or hours with a human that's doing that manually across different systems. needs to have a coffee break or pop to the washroom, comes back, forgets where they were, maybe misses a step and causes problems or an elongated time to delivery, which then frustrates the client or whoever you're helping. So I believe automation is just something that is going to really rapidly increase the success of MSPs in the next few years.

And to your point about self-checkout, it's going to become a bit of an expectation from clients when it comes to service delivery, both in terms of speed, efficiency, and accuracy. And so I feel like folks that don't start looking at it may get left behind. And that's another thing from working at an MSP with MSPs, time is so valuable, right? You never have enough of it.

And it's like, well, now I've got this new thing to add. That's another key point we stress is, you know, 70% automation, 60% automation is better than 0%. So don't let, you know, perfect, like, don't be afraid to go for good instead of perfect and wait for perfect. Like start today, start with some simple tasks and just see some of the efficiencies that you can uncover and how it's going to help your team.

And then really start working towards building what we refer to as like a culture of automation So I not a developer I not a technical person but I can hand a bar napkin of this is what I do in my day. Here's seven tasks that drive me crazy that are manual. Can you, you know, automate this and roost for me? Yeah, I'm a builder.

I know what I'm doing. I can connect this all. Here's your form. Here's your trigger.

Here's the button that you push to make it happen. done. Cool. Thanks.

You've just saved me five hours a week. I get it. And when an MSP can deliver quickly and on time and on budget, it solves a lot of problems for their customers. Because one of the biggest complaints we hear from businesses is that their IT guy takes forever to respond or my IT guy can't seem to get it right.

He's always coming back to fix the same issue over and over and over again. Because there's lots of, I want to say little nuances, there's lots of things that have to knit well together to make an IT project successful. So if you've outlined the map, The automation, the checklist of how to get it all done, it helps an MSP deliver better, faster, and more reliable service to the customer, which is what they want, because it is all about time and time is money. So on that note, what do you think, since you spent like 56 IT years, what do you think the most important thing is that you've learned being in the IT space, George?

In the IT space, I think it's, honestly, I'll come out swinging here. Nobody knows what they're doing. And that's okay. It's okay to accept that and to admit that and not be intimidated by that.

I have no problem being the dumbest person in the room and asking what may be trivial, simple or dumb questions. But I've always found that there's always at least one, if not two or more other people in the room that are like, I had the exact same thoughts. You know, I didn't really know what that meant either. or particularly in IT, right?

I mean, it is crazy how fast IT is evolving on a monthly basis, let alone a yearly basis. So to be in the channel and be working with or working for an MSP whose business is built on providing IT services and being responsible for IT, it's crazy trying to keep up with what best practices are, what the latest technology is, how you manage and implement that, let alone secure it. So I think it's okay just to understand, nobody really has the full picture, and that's okay. Don't be afraid to ask questions.

Try and make your life simpler where you can. And that's what I personally love about this channel is there's a sense of community and collaboration that I really don't think you find in other industries or verticals. The knowledge sharing, the genuine friendliness and kindness that people exchange, both as vendors, as MSPs, as other community members, I think is unmatched. So it's a great place to be.

But don't be afraid to admit that you don't know what you're doing and ask for help and keep learning. that's that's perfect because that's what it's all about because even when it comes to businesses that use msps lots of times they've diy'd it till they can't diy anymore and then they're just like okay i need to talk to someone about this um so they so they reach out well on that note, thank you for sharing everything about Roost with us and how companies can take advantage of MSPs that automate to elevate so that they can enjoy the benefits of having a great IT provider.

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